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…

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!).

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…

Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd (Edited by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci)

If you’re a nerd or a geek (self-proclaimed or not!), go all out an celebrate your geektastic nerdiness! “You’ve got the heart and soul of a geek or you don’t”, Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci must have thought and they knew they had friends who’d think just the same… so never too shy to try something completely out of this world, they asked some of their YA writer friends to contribute a story of their own (whether they be Klingon, Quiz Bowl, LARP or band-inspired). Sara Zarr, John Green, David Levithan, Garth Nix, Barry Lyga and a bunch of other secret or not so secret geeks jumped at the occasion et voilà…Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd was born.

There are definitely a couple of standout stories in this collection. The first highlight for the cat came with David Levithan’s “Quiz Bowl Antichrist” (in the middle of the book), about a boy’s own reasons for joining the quiz bowl team and secret admirations. Levithan is a master at characterization and proves that here as well. Barry Lyga’s “The Truth about Dino Girl” is at first almost “typically” geeky (the geek as outcast and victim), but then gets a very dark twist at the end – we don’t need to over-glorify “the geek”, you know, lots of them have mean streaks, just like those meanies out there… Plus you get the added bonus that it’s set in Brookdale! Wendy Mass’s “The Stars at the Finish Line” is a very sweet story about stars and love! There is a great dynamic between the two protagonists here. What more do you need? And then the collection ends with an absolute bang… Libba Bray’s “It’s Just a Jump to the Left”! You knew there had to be a story about Rocky right? And Libba does it right and manages to write a whole coming of age novel in the span of a short story!

There’s a story for every type of geek here, and obviously not all the stories will work for everyone (the cat admits to not feeling much for a couple of the stories here!). But I don’t think that was the point of the editors. I think they wanted to come up with a book full of stories of being passionate about something, and sometimes that passion can get out of control and become an obsession, and sometimes that passion is what defines you, but sometimes it’s not.  Sometimes you grow out of your passion or obsession, sometimes it’s the thing that will comfort you forever. Geeks, nerds, freaks… they’re not all the same, you know.  It just happens that it’s the geeks who end up being picked on all the time, or made fun of. But that’s alright because at the very least, they don’t forget to be awesome. And if you keep an open mind, and look past what exactly it is “the geeks” are passionate about (instruments, books, sci fi, The Rocky Horror Picture Show…), you’ll see that these stories are what a lot of stories for teens are about: finding love and acceptance, finding yourself, staying true to yourself. Isn’t that the most natural and universal thing in the world?

Tell the Wolves I’m Home (by Carol Rifka Brunt)

Along with 9 other novels, Carol Rifka Brunt’s Tell the Wolves I’m home is a 2013 Alex Award winner. For those not in the know, the Alex Awards are given to “ten books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18.” Last year, for instance, Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus was one of the winners and the year before Steve Hamilton’s The Lock Artist also made the list.

It’s 1986 and 14-year-old June Elbus grows up in New York with her older sister Greta – who she’s slowly drifted apart from – and her accountant parents. Not having inherited her parent’s love for numbers, or her sister’s acting talent or outgoing personality, June has always found solace in her Uncle and godfather Finn, a talented and well-renowned artist. Now, however, Finn is dying of AIDS. One of his last wishes is to paint his two nieces and his sister in a painting he will call “Tell the wolves I’m home”. When the inevitable happens, June is overwhelmed with both grief and the memory of her strong feelings for her Uncle. When she meets Toby, Finn’s boyfriend who the rest of her family blames for Finn’s death, they soon form a friendship. Together they mourn Finn and provide each other with the support they can’t get anywhere else.

Set in New York in the 1980s, with the AIDS epidemic at its frightening peak pivotal to a clear understanding of the novel, Tell the Wolves I’m Home might at first glance not be an easy sell to young adults looking for a quick fix. However, the combination of an enchanting and memorable main character (June tells the story retrospectively) and a heart-breaking family (and love) story will win over many of them.

Brunt has created a complex family history here, and obviously the story is tragic and will have many a reader reach out for that box of Kleenex on the bedside table. Is this the best book the cat’s read this year so far? No, not by a long shot. However, the book is suitably tearjerky and Carol Rifka Brunt clearly has talent setting mood and developing character. The book’s pacing, on the other hand, could have been better and clocking in at 400 pages (paperback edition), it’s just meandering along a whole while to its inevitable conclusion and when a book starts to drag and becomes repetitive, you know it’s really just too long. That being said, Tell the Wolves I’m Home is a solid debut novel by a very promising author!