Thirteen

13 Minutes by Sarah Pinborough is a memorable read. I say that because I finished it almost two weeks ago and I still remember so much (unusual for me)! Let me try to do this review in 13 sentences:

Natasha is part of the most popular group in school coined the “Barbies.”
Natasha almost drowns and suffers amnesia after the incident.
Natasha questions her two “Barbie” friends; were they involved in her near-death accident?
She reaches out to a former, more trustworthy friend (Becca) for help.
Becca is willing to try being friendly with Natasha to help her.
Becca helps Natasha by hinting to the other girls that Natasha is getting her memory of that night back.
The girls are getting nervous and it seems they are guilty.
Meanwhile, Becca’s current friend is feeling left out.
Suddenly, another terrible accident occurs, and this time there’s a casualty.
Everything twists in an unexpected way!
I didn’t see it coming at all and I am not giving away spoilers on this one!
Becca proves to be a smart, strong person.
The ending is the only part that I just couldn’t figure out; it made no sense to me!!

Fighting for Life

Look for Me by Lisa Gardner is a page turner. It’s a criminal detective mystery to discover who killed a teen girl’s (Roxy) entire family. Roxy is the sole survivor of the attack who happened to be out walking the family dogs during the shooting. She is now missing and a person of interest.

The story offers Roxy’s background through multiple perspectives: excerpts from her 11th grade writing assignment entitled “What is the Perfect Family?”, female detective D.D.’s investigation, and Flora, a vigilante and founder of a survivors’ support group that Roxy had recently connected with. Readers get pieces of Roxy’s difficult past, with its most horrible moments beginning the year she and her younger sister Lola are put in foster care with two manipulative, abusive older teens. Her mother regains custody of her children giving them some reprieve, until she moves in with a new boyfriend in the same town as the foster home. Roxy and her sister are forced to face their horrible pasts all over again.

We get a little background information about D.D. and Flora along the way as well. The book starts with a prologue in which a college student, Sarah, witnesses the brutal murder of all her roommates. Flora seeks out Sarah in the aftermath of this attack to give her tools to stop living as a victim. Sarah becomes the point person between Flora and Roxy. Women in the story have endured horrible incidents, and are attempting to overcome their tragedies in different ways.

The dramatic ending in a community theater (fitting location!) surprised me, while the constant shift in viewpoint kept my attention through this story. I will keep Gardner on my reading lists.

Follow the Clues

Book Scavenger, by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman, was my final read from the Intermediate 2018 Nutmeg book list. This one took me some time to get through. It has been compared to Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library by Chris Grabenstein, which was a Nutmeg nominee last year. Lemoncello was a book I started and never finished last summer! I feel that these titles should be favorites considering their plots centered on love for books. Not the case for me.

Scavenger is told from seventh grader Emily’s point of view. One of the most intriguing elements of the book for me is that her family is on a quest to live in all fifty states, so they move almost yearly. Emily quotes from her dad’s favorite author, Jack Kerouac, “What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?” (234); I like this idea! Anyway, as luck would have it, they move to San Francisco, home of Book Scavenger’s creator Garrison Griswold. This game is like a computer-based hide and go seek that uses books and ciphers that game players must solve in order to hide and locate books. Fun idea.

The opening of the story shows Griswold being accosted and shot, leaving his special copy of Poe’s The Gold Bug in the BART (subway) station. Someone knows that his next game will be valuable and is after its prize. The next day, Emily is out with her upstairs neighbor James when she happens to pick up The Gold Bug. The rest of the story follows their escapades as they discover the clues in the book and begin to follow them to the prize. The men who shot Griswold are in pursuit too, which adds some tension.

Upon finishing the book, I felt that a couple of loose ends remained. The first is the classmate Maddie. I thought for sure she might become friends with James and Emily based on their shared interests of solving puzzles. Instead, they kept the competitive animosity going throughout the book. Second is their odd, meddling teacher, Mr. Quisling, who is also a Book Scavenger player. He is strangely obsessed with getting The Gold Bug back to its rightful owner, and once he takes the book from Emily we don’t really hear anything else about him.

This book has many fun elements (literary allusions, love of books and solving puzzles) and is a nice read. Nice because everything comes together well for everyone (SPOILERS AHEAD): friendships break and mend (Emily and James, Griswold and Hollister), Emily and her brother become close again, Mr. Griswold survives being shot, the bad men don’t hurt anyone else and are caught, even Emily’s parents decide to halt their ambition to live in every state unless their kids are ready for a move.

For me, it’s all a bit too nice and neat, although it is probably just right for its intended age group.

Reality?

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline transported me into another world. The setting is a bleak future in which the majority of the population prefers spending time in the virtual reality world named Oasis. This video game is free to users and is wildly popular, even giving its users the opportunity to shop, dress their avatars, socialize with other players in personally designed chat rooms, AND go to school! Players can either acquire special powers or accessories through experience points. They can teleport to locations within the Oasis universe.

There is SO much to this story. The central plot deals with the main character, Wade, who lives in a towering trailer home with an aunt and other random family members. He uses the Oasis to escape his miserable life. When one of the Oasis’s founders dies, he leaves behind a massive treasure hunt to discover his multi-billion dollar fortune by following clues in his game. Wade and a couple of his on-line friends are eager to win, but less savory characters are also after the prize. These people will stop at nothing, including murder and cheating, to get the money. Enmeshed with this is an unbelievable amount of 80s throwback references, including music, movies and TONS of video games.

Cline’s attention to detail in representing this world was amazing

Three in One

Today was a book fair day, and I took the opportunity to do a quick read of three titles. We all have young kids in our lives, whether our own children, nieces, nephews or a friend’s child. Any one of these three titles would be great gifts!

The first, Love by Matt de la Pena and Loren Long, has been popping up in different library lists that I receive. This is a beautifully written story showing all the many places/people that give and receive love. It shows that love can be found in many places. For me, it’s not just love, but finding beauty in the unexpected. Its illustrations are rich and invite opportunity for talking about multiple situations and cultures.

Next is a random eye-catcher, Unplugged by Steve Antony. A little robot named Blip gets unplugged for the day after a blackout. He is able to escape into nature and make some friends before returning to his computer terminal. He acknowledges that there are very cool things he can do while hooked up to the computer, but that interacting in real life is pretty wonderful. What a great message for all ages! This one reminds me a bit of a much younger kid version of Wild Robot (a great intermediate read).

Finally, there is Good Day, Good Night by Margaret Wise Brown and Loren Long (again!). Wise Brown is the same author of Goodnight Moon, a book that brings me back to reading every night before bed with my babies. This story is just as sweet, with beautiful illustrations and simple text showing animals at wake up and bed time. It’s a perfect book to read aloud and share with a child. I think this one would have been a favorite in my house.

Never Assume

booklist Recently, I came across a list of someone’s top ten or so thriller books. This is probably one of my favorite categories so I jotted down the whole list. My plan is to gradually chip away at all of them. Unfortunately, I have no idea where I found the original so I need to hang on to my handwritten copy!

Since snow was heading our way, I headed to the public library to find any of these possibilities. They only had about four titles from my list, and these were all checked out! I’m hoping this means they’re really good for when I finally get my hands on them. Instead, I used my Kindle to download The Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor. This one grabbed my attention most from all the teasers that I read.

This story has shades of the movies “I Know What you Did Last Summer” and “Stand By Me.” It centers mostly around a boy and his friends’ experience with discovering a dead girl’s body in the woods. But there is a lot more to it than this; there are sub plots that all relate in some way to the main event. The time frame switches back and forth between 1986 and 2016, and is told from the main character’s point of view throughout. The chalk men begin as messages/signals among the group of boys. The chalk men end up being used against them when it seems that someone else gets involved.

There are an abundance of odd characters in the story, making it a constant guessing game as to who might be guilty. Is it the new, albino teacher in town who always seems to be nearby when something intense occurs? Is it the zealot minister who appears to be physically abusive toward his own daughter (among other actions)? Is it his friend Mickey, who was already edgy, but seems to take a turn for the worse when his bully of a brother winds up dead too? Or maybe it’s the dad, who showed both aggressive and forgetful tendencies in the book?

A point is made several times throughout the end of the story: never assume. I won’t spoil it, but the intricacies are mostly all explained in the end. Some with simple explanations and others with more complexity. There were a few actions that I predicted and others that were more of a surprise.

Did this book keep me up at night (as another reviewer stated)? No. Was it a good story? Sure.

All American

A colleague recently shared Trevor Noah’s interview with author Jason Reynolds. His closing lines of the interview, in which he talks about how to make reading matter for teens, resounded with me, “they [students] then build relationships not just with literature but with literacy. Then we start fixing violence, we start fixing gangs, all of that, once you realize that your life is dependent on your relationship with words.” Coincidentally, the timing of watching this interview was the same as I was starting to read All American Boys by Reynolds and co-author Brendan Kiely. This is my first Reynolds novel, but it most definitely won’t be the last.

I can’t help but make the initial comparison to The Hate U Give based on the primary conflict of police brutality and racism. For me, this book added a different element to the table. Point of view and empathy are critical pieces to this novel. The narrative switches back and forth between Rashad and Quinn’s voices. Both are regular high school guys from the same school getting ready to start their weekend with a party. They attend the same high school and have acquaintances in common, but don’t personally know each other.

The Friday night takes a terrible turn for Rashad. He stops at a convenience store for some snacks, and he’s thought to be stealing because of a silly accident by someone near him. An officer is in the store, and he is pulled out and horribly beaten while handcuffed. Quinn (and other bystanders – there’s a tape made) witnesses this event, and it turns out that the officer is the older brother of Quinn’s good friend. It turns out that this officer is also the same man who has been a stand-in father figure for Quinn. The intense internal and external conflict that this creates for the main characters and their families, friends, and the school community as a whole is compelling.

I was caught up in even the most minor character and the emotions of everyone involved from the very beginning. Even the ways that different teachers tried to handle the aftermath was representative of how people deal with the reality of harsh situations. From the basketball coach who wants the team to “leave it at the door,” to the teacher who breaks down in tears in front of her class, to the teacher who helps organize their march. So many lines stood out to me, including this one on page 296, “Had our hearts really become so numb that we needed dead bodies in order to feel the beat of compassion in our chests?”

Every word of this book matters.

Body or Mind?

My next selection was oddly disturbing, but in a good way. Unwind by Neal Shusterman tells the tale of the strange compromise reached from a futuristic war between pro-life and pro-choice factions. The agreement states that parents must raise kids until age 13, at which time if things aren’t working out for various reasons, they can decide to have them unwound. Unwound kids are basically disassembled and all their body parts go on to help others in need. The premise is that they aren’t being killed because their entire body is being recycled. Readers are in the mind of one unwound character toward the end of the book, and it really creeped me out as he was mentally aware through the whole procedure!

The book focuses on a few runaway Unwinds whose paths intersect. The story centers on their travels to escape being sent to harvest camp. They eventually find a refuge for kids like themselves. In the process of reading, I couldn’t help but connect to story lines like The Walking Dead (tv series) or books such as Lord of the Flies as a commentary about human nature and how people might deal with lack of order/civilization. Natural leaders arise, some with evil intentions, and they shape and twist what happens throughout the story.

The story kept my interest but was a bit slow going in parts. There was an entire section about one of the character’s rescuing a storked baby (“Storked” refers to undesired babies left on someone’s doorstep. The law is that if you get storked, then you must raise the baby until at least 13). This part was an entire early subsection of the book which I’m guessing was to build some character background.

I felt the author had a lot of thoughts about this surreal idea, and it brought up many existential points to grapple with.

Puppy Love

My young reader category has been neglected so I have to throw one in. This category is tough because I skim through SO many picture books throughout the week in each of my buildings. Then I forget to jot down titles to transfer here later. But this time I remembered! Even though I will categorize this as Young Reader, it can really be for anyone.

I am a sucker for books based on true animal stories. I have to list a few favorites from before starting this blog project: Stay: The True Story of Ten Dogs by Michaela Muntean, Nubs: The True Story of a Mutt, a Marine & a Miracle by Brian Dennis, Mary Nethery, and and Kirby Larson, and an undeniable favorite (probably in my top ten) was The One and Only Ivan (and its picture book counterpart) by Katherine Applegate.

Now, on to this recent book- Little Dog Lost: The True Story of a Brave Dog Named Baltic by Monica Carnesi is a sweet read. It is based on the tale of a little dog that somehow became trapped on a sheet of floating ice, and after two days gets rescued. The real photograph of the dog along with the true narrative in the Afterword was the best part for me. Even when he was falling into the water repeatedly everyone worked together to save him. It’s a story of survival and the will to keep going, for both the dog and the people who worked to rescue him.

Villain and Princess Reunion

My reading hit a dry spell, but I was feeling that urge to read something! The closest book to grab was one of my daughter’s most recent library books.

If you love Disney princesses and villainesses (the latter is not coming up as a correct word, but using it anyway), then Mistress of All Evil: A Tale of the Dark Fairy by Serena Valentino is the book for you. This book makes mention of just about all of them: Snow White and her mother, Ursula, Aurora, Cinderella, Belle, Circe… So many names and scenarios in the beginning that a reader may feel a bit lost.

The main story, though, is Maleficent’s. We flashback to her abandonment in the fairy woods as a baby; even the kindly Fairy Godmother left her for dead. Luckily, the Godmother’s sister, Nanny, decided to take Maleficent in and raised her. Life turned sour when she became sixteen, and unleashed her horrible rage in the form of a dragon that destroyed the fairy land. She became reclusive until a temptation pulled her from her lair.

SPOILER AHEAD- The temptation is the big twist: finding out that Aurora is Maleficent’s daughter. And this is where the story just gets away from me. I can’t wrap my head around Maleficent’s intention of killing Aurora to “keep her safe from herself.” The story has some cool moments and twists, but some of the attempts to connect the tales feel a bit forced.

Those who love the combination of all these tales will be enchanted.