Winger (by Andrew Smith)

Once in a while – like on average 5 times a year, judging from my own Goodreads stats – you come across a book that will make your heart bleed and skip a couple of beats all at the same time. I felt like this year I wouldn’t get to that average. There’s only been Adam Rapp’s 33 Snowfish that made me feel empty and drained and completely exhilarated at the same time, definitely worthy of that 5 star rating. But then, there was Andrew Smith’s Winger. If there’s one book (besides the aforementioned 33 Snowfish) that you have to read this year to get that good-shiver experience then make it Andrew Smith’s Winger. Not only will it have you laughing out loud (balls, dude, seriously, balls!), smirking quietly and nodding in agreement… it will also break your heart and make you stop breathing and staring wide-eyed at that last line, hoping, wishing you could be there with the main character, Winger (Ryan Dean West). Fuck, man, this book is great. *

 

*This book doesn’t need any elaborate summaries (lots of that around on the net already. Plus, the blurb is more than enough to get you started), grand explanations (unbiased, man, read this one unspoiled and unbiased and you’ll get the most out of it), or any other justifying blablablas. Just get the book already!

The 39 Deaths of Adam Strand (by Gregory Galloway)

One of the cat’s very first YA literature discoveries wasn’t really YA at all. Or at least, it hadn’t been marketed as such until it won the 2006 Alex Award. I’m talking about Gregory Galloway’s fantastically brilliant As Simple as Snow, a mystery that is at the same time almost the epitome of coming-of-age, with all the familiar tropes that this subgenre has, yet with a nice dark twist. BTW, check out the website which still/again exists to get to know Anna Cayne a little bit better… Ever since the publication of Galloway’s debut, however, he seemed to have mysteriously disappeared from YA-land just like Anna Cayne in As Simple as Snow. Until now, that is (… OK, so there’s a 2011 short story compilation as well, but this seems to be available to Kindle only) with the publication of the equally mysterious The 39 Deaths of Adam Strand.

Adam Strand is 16 and he has killed himself (and has actually died)… 39 times, but for some reason he never stays dead, which is the only thing he really wants: to not exist. Just like As Simple As Snow has garnered so many different responses (just check out the Goodreads page on the book), the same will be true for this one. And to be honest, the cat feels a bit conflicted about it too. As much as I love whole parts of this book, there are also parts that made me feel indifferent about Adam Strand’s fate. Adam Strand can be such a little shit sometimes, such an unbelievably prime example of the disease that is rampant amongst many contemporary teens – total boredom and lack of engagement, a sort of existential ennui coupled with lots of irrelevant whatevers – that it’s hard to get into the character of Adam at times.

That being said, though, Galloway’s prose is so ever so descriptive, and even when he’s having Adam explain his total and utter boredom for the umpteenth time, there’s a sort of poetic quality that’s hard to overlook here. So the writing is definitely above par, a very learned kind of writing too, erudite, with definite signs of lots and lots of editing!.

The 39 Deaths of Adam Strand is also one of those almost plotless books. There is some plot, of course, but it’s really minimal: Adam dies…like 39 times, and there’s a very significant narrative thread involving a 10-year-old girl as well, Maddy. But I think it’s almost a novel of ideas, an introspective investigation in the concept of suicide. By its very nature, this is obviously something that will alienate some people, and even have some people vehemently hate this. However, whenever Adam describes the feelings he had just before he decides to kill himself again, his whole inner emotional outburst  is so incredibly powerful, so very enlightening too in trying to put the almost incomprehensible into words. And doesn’t everyone love a bit of self- and world-loathing:

“Here’s the thing – the secret of it all: remember one of my father’s favorite lines, the bit about how there are two categories of people, the miserable and horrible. Well, here’s the real truth – we’re all horrible. There is no comfort in the miserable because we’re all horrible, grotesque, immeasurably flawed, impaired, repulsive, revolting freaks wandering around with exaggerated awareness of our own misshapen defects or no awareness at all….I don’t know which one is worse, but make no mistake – Woody Allen and my father were wrong – we’re all horrible. We walk through each day with our gross imperfections, blighted, stained, less human than we want to admit. We lie, cheat, steal, kill – either a little or a lot – or allow it to happen; we are perpetrators or accomplices, predator or prey, or both.” (p.228)

Once more, this is the type of book that will raise a lot more questions than it actually answers (to name a really obvious one: does Adam have any ‘physical’ leftovers of his 39 suicides??). That will be yet another reason for a polarized response to it of course: people often just want things neat and with a proper sense of closure, while Galloway doesn’t make any sort of judgment, nor does he have any of the minor characters make any sort of moral judgment about what Adam does. If there’s anything at all, it’s first fascination, which later turns into indifference… which is infinitely worse than the fascination part, of course.

The 39 Deaths of Adam Strand may not be for everyone, but it is definitely compelling and thought-provoking enough for me to give this a solid 3.5 and maybe even 4 stars…

Story of a Girl (by Sara Zarr)

The cat’s been hearing great things about Sara Zarr’s recent novel The Lucy Variations. Because I usually like to read books chronologically, I ordered both The Lucy Variations and Story of a Girl. And man, if Story of a Girl is anything to go by, The Lucy Variations is going to be such a great book! Because I loved Story of a Girl a lot, a lot, a lot! This is a “quick” read (seems almost deceptively easy), but it’s one of the most powerful little novels I’ve read in a while, and one that I will remember for a long time.

It’s about an uncomfortable topic, for sure: a 13-year-old (Deanna) caught in a car of a senior, both with their pants down, by her father… only to be called the school slut forever after. If this were the only thing Story of a Girl were about, it would already be hard to take in, but Zarr throws in a main character who – despite not wanting to be defined by her past – never really becomes an entirely lovable character either (and there’s a thing or two to be said about writing unlikable characters, right?).  Deanna is 16 now, and ever since that event she’s wanted to escape her past and the stamp she was given. That didn’t quite work out for her, though. At school she’s still that girl and her dad hasn’t even so much as looked at her since that evening.

Oh man, this book is such a punch in the face. I really really loved it! Deanna made a mistake when she was still just a kid… 13 she was, and messed up, and yes, taken advantage of… and of course she wasn’t responsible , but she sure as hell thinks she was. And now, 3 years later, she’s in love with the (only) friend who stood by her since then, but who happens to have a girlfriend who happens to be Deanna’s only other friend… Things get ugly and complicated, and Deanna doesn’t know how to respond to it all, and she acts the ways she acts, and… but it’s so incredibly honest and real that it’s hard to see fault in the way Deanna acts now, to me. It’s not that I feel sorry for her, it’s that I get why she is the way she is.

Compassion, selfishness, redemption, loyalty, truth. It’s about all of these things and more. If I love The Lucy Variations half as much as I love this book, it’s going to be one hell of a book!

The 5th Wave (by Rick Yancey)

Rick Yancey’s The 5^th Wave has gotten buzz. Lots of buzz. In fact, so much so, that it’s been likened to The Hunger Games. Now, besides having a 16-ish female protagonist, the two books don’t really have all that much in common in terms of plot. What is obvious, though, is that The 5^th Wave is a book with mass appeal, just like The Hunger Games. I mean, it’s not a revolutionary tale, there’s nothing really innovative about it, but maybe it’s the type of book that comes at the right time, who knows?

I’m not going to give away too much of the plot here. Let it suffice that it’s like Stephen King’s The Stand (love this!!) meets Ilsa J. Bick’s Ashes. The Hunger Games  also didn’t have the most original of plots and much of its success was because Suzanne Collins managed to fuse together some crucial elements to come up with this explosive story at the right time: the Harry Potter and Twilight wave had come and passed and now there is a Hunger Games wave that will eventually also pass. Will the same thing come true for The 5^th Wave? Only time will tell of course, but I can say that it’s really obvious it was written to have that instant (not too critical) mass appeal (also marketing… seriously, I heard numbers like $750,000!!).

And even though I read the book in no time (Yancey of course is a gifted writer, so that should come as no surprise.), I can’t say, that I was wowed by this book the way I was after reading the Monstrumologist series. Monstrumologist had that something more, that indefinable thing in a book that you instantly recognize when you come across it, but that’s so hard to pinpoint. It had horror and humor, and there was Dr. Warthrop and Will Henry, character depth, great adventurous plots, and it was so refreshing, and there was a definite and clear mark of a very gifted author at work. And I knew that The 5thWave wouldn’t be The Monstrumologist, but I’d hoped to see that spark as well: maybe in the characters, or maybe in the writing, or maybe in the setting… but I can’t really say that it was there.

Again, don’t get me wrong, I liked reading it, but there were definitely a couple of instances where I went…ouch…  For one, I wasn’t really sold on the multiple point of view narration. I thought it sort of took away the attention from Cassie’s story, who I was definitely interested in. Second, and probably more disturbing than the multiple POV thing was the love story setup… First of all, Evan: just no, he’s creepy, the way Edward Cullen is creepy, so: stalkerish. So that’s a definite no.  But, second, there’s a whole love triangle being set up and I swear to god, WTF, get done with the love triangles already.

Anyway, I love a good Science Fiction story once in a while, and if you throw in deadly virus thingies, well, that’s fine too. I think Yancey did a fine job mixing together some classic (or cliché…po-ta-to, po-tah-to) SF tropes, ready to be adapted to the big screen in no time (seriously, that’s how it reads), but I think I’m more impatient to read The Final Descent than I am to read the next installment of The 5^th Wave… (which I will also read, of course!).

A very interesting question, indeed.

“So, why is the tissue on this side in his left nostril, and on the other side in his right nostril?”

The Spectacular Now (by Tim Tharp)

Hollywood has more than definitely discovered YA literature. One of the things that (especially) the adaptation of The Perks of Being a Wallflower has done, is make everyone a YA expert all of a sudden too. The Hunger Games movie set the YA dystopian genre on the map for many laymen and with film buzz about recent (bestseller) novels such as Divergent or The Maze Runner, fans of that genre will hopefully be more than spoilt. In the contemporary realistic genre the most anticipated adaptation is probably The Fault in our Stars, which will most likely also make your grandmother, neighbor and dentist who hadn’t heard about YA yet, a connoisseur… we still have a whilst to wait for that to happen, though (IMDB has it in pre-production), but fans of Perks and other contemporary stuff can already go out and see The Spectacular Now this summer (it was a hit at Sundance apparently). A weird tidbit: the female lead in TFIOS, Divergent and The Spectacular Now is played by the same actress, Shailene Woodley.

Back to the book, which was a 2008 National Book Award finalist. Sutter Keely is a high school senior who goes where the party is, and if there is no party, he’ll make one himself: he’s well-liked, makes everyone laugh… lives in the now, the spectacular now. He doesn’t care for long term plans or committed relationships, so when his girlfriend Cassidy dumps him he doesn’t mind too much, as long as he has a drink in his hand, he’s happy… and since he’s drunk most of the time, he’s also happy most of the time.

Tim Tharp has done a marvelous job in characterizing Sutter as – here it goes – the most obnoxious  and hateful character ever! The cat completely and utterly hated the way Sutter behaved around most of the other characters in the book, his sister, his (ex-)girlfriend, Cassidy, Aimee… especially the way he thinks and speaks about women is so incredibly sexist it made me want to slap him, ugh! If I knew a Sutter Keely in real life, I would hate him with a vengeance, the shallowness, the wannabe star mentality… so incredibly hollow! Yuck!  I’d hope he got into his car, in his drunken stupor, and hit the nearest tree. Seriously. I wouldn’t want to know that guy up close.

But… I have to give Tim Tharp props. A teenager’s brain is inherently “set for action” and has poor brakes, and Tharp has done characterization brilliantly here. Because obviously the heavy drinking and the living in the now, being the party animal 24/7, is a way for Sutter Keely to hide who he is… and he thinks he’s nobody, a whole lot of emptiness, trying to fill that void with partying and lots of whisky. At first Sutter doesn’t seem to see any problems in the ways that he is handling his life and his future (or lack thereof), and he doesn’t see how he’s a bad influence on the girl “he wants to save” (Aimee Finnicky) because he thinks she’s such a total social disaster. Luckily, there are a few people in Sutter’s life who do see that something is wrong with the way Sutter is behaving, and that when people laugh when Sutter’s around it’s not just because they laugh with Sutter, but they laugh at him.

Sutter’s voice is the main pull and drive of the novel  and at first the story just meanders on. There’s no real direction it seems, just like Sutter gets by day by day without any fixed plans for tomorrow except for finding the next 7up & whisky. As a reader, though, you clearly feel that Sutter’s in a downward spiral, behavior-wise.  There is one plotline, that as a result of that very slow beginning, felt sort of forced and that is the father plotline. I get why it is important to Sutter at the end, but it might have been better, structurally speaking, if the reader had been made aware of it earlier on.

The Spectacular Now is contemporary coming-of-age and the insight that Sutter is getting to…well, let’s say that it’s just inevitable and that a lot of people probably won’t like it. Although there’s no explicit moral here (luckily) Tharp does manage to make you think about hope vs. hopelessness. Given the fact that Sutter Keely is so clearly a teenage addict…well, I don’t have to tell you which way is up, right? Tharp delivered a completely honest view of a guy like Sutter Keely and what it means to want to save and be saved at the same time.  This is a book with a very powerful ending, that invites the reader to draw his/her own conclusion, and some will still see a flicker of hope here, whilst others will find the ending either too depressing or just depressing enough to be realistic… if that makes any sense at all…

Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes (by Chris Crutcher)

Chris Crutcher is a giant in American YA literature, having won the Margaret A. Edwards Award already in 1997. By that time he already had 8 publications under his belt (not counting individual short stories), but much of the Award was probably because of the vital Staying Fat for Sarah Burnes (1993), in which everything that makes Crutcher into..err Crutcher is present: a focus on sport, the supporting role of the coach/teacher in a teen’s life, the responsibility of the parents as the teen grows into adulthood and of course, the friendship between teens. Also, he does not shy away from what one would call “issues”: abuse, abortion, intellectual freedom… it’s all there in Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes.

Initially connected through their common outcast status, Eric (who was fat) and Sarah Byrnes (who has horrible burn scars in her face because of an accident that occurred when she was 3) have been friends since forever.  Once Eric – or ‘Moby’ as he came to be called – discovered swimming, he started to slim down. He stayed fat for an entire year because he feared he’d lose Sarah Byrnes’ friendship, if he suddenly wasn’t anymore, but Sarah Byrnes is a tough kid, who doesn’t care about that at all! That’s why it’s so painful for Eric to see how this tough person who didn’t let her ugly face (his and her own words) get the better of her, just stopped speaking one day and is now in a hospital, where she just sits and stares catatonically… Eric knows something else is going on and wants to find out before it’s too late.

Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes shows the personal growth of not one (main) character (Eric), but of several. Obviously there is Eric, but Crutcher includes an important storyline of Mark Brittain whose insistence on what is right(eous) and moral, and what isn’t, has landed him in big troubles. Now he has to take responsibility for his actions, actions which may have been instigated by the pressure he’s been under since he was born! It’s not hard to see why a topic like religion – always a hotbed of controversy USA! – is not often tackled in a YA novel, but to his own credit, Crutcher does it, and even has the decency to show us the different sides of the argument (although the “liberal” point of view is clearly the implied better option!). If you don’t agree with the implied message, you might take offense here (and judging from the many challenges this book has received, I’m guessing a lot of people have!), but the cat didn’t one bit. Chris Crutcher totally Judy Blumed his way into the cat’s favor!

And another poignant question, though, might be: given the fact that this was published in 1993, when today’s teens weren’t even born, does it pass the test of time? And, yes, it’s true, the kids today may not get all the references in the book. They might know about Rocky Balboa and The Far Side, but I don’t see them getting the winks to Raymond Burr, Leave it to Beaver or even Scarface. That being said, the book surpasses its temporal allusions and is definitely worth being called “a classic”. It’s the type of story that sticks. It’s about being more than what people would usually call “your shortcomings”, or “your handicap”. It’s about getting challenged and true friendship and loyalty and looking beyond the obvious, the apparent, the superficial… If that’s not contemporary, I don’t know what is!