Ten Things We Shouldn’t Have Done (by Sarah Mlynowski)

Ten Things We Shouldn’t Have Done is the British title for Sarah Mlynowski’s 2011 novel that was published under the title Ten Things We Did (And Probably Shouldn’t Have) in the US. Sometimes titles just get changed from one country to the next, with no real explanation…

April’s world is about to be turned upside down for the 2^nd time! First her parents divorced and her mom moved to Paris with her new husband, taking her little brother with her. Now, her dad is planning on moving to Cleveland right in the middle of April’s junior year. April – who has a complete support network where she is not to mention a boyfriend of 2 years – doesn’t want any of that, and intends to stay behind, on her own if she needs to. But, because obviously her dad wouldn’t go for that option, she’s found the perfect solution: she’ll stay with her friend Vi and her mother, her school year will not be disrupted, and she gets to stay with her boyfriend! Score! Convincing her dad that this is good idea takes all of 2 seconds… seriously, 2 whole seconds…

Now don’t be mistaken… Ten Things is definitely NOT realistic fiction, it would be impossible to find parents as clueless as April’s NOT to check out (i.c. actually MEET them) the responsible adult who’s going to take care of your 16-year-old teenager for a couple of months. Oh, and get this: Vi’s mother won’t even be around because she’s touring! So what do you get? Every teenager’s wet dream: NO parents, NO rules, big fat allowance (enough to buy a hot tub!!),… the works. What oh what in the name of what will they do to keep themselves busy? Right, that’s what…

Ten Things We Shouldn’t Have Done is such a light-weight read… with a premise that is so completely over the top that you just have to accept it or you won’t enjoy a minute of this hilarious little read… And this one, deserves to be read with shedload of suspension of disbelief.  It’s basically mindless entertainment, with a couple of real issues thrown in for good measure (parent-teen relationships; sex and teenage relationships; the value of money: etc.) … up until there’s the almost obligatory (so it seems) backlash at the end of the book… I’m talking about a “punishment” that seems to be there for all the wrong reasons. That’s a bit too bad, because Mlynowski’s style of writing isn’t half bad. Also, the minor characters she created (Vi, weird Lucy, Dean and Hudson) are definitely quirky enough to get me interested in another one of her books. I guess what it comes down to is that Ten Things We Shouldn’t Have Done is a book the cat enjoyed despite being annoyed by how much she seemed to enjoy it… does that make any sense?

Skin Deep (by Laura Jarratt)

Told as a dual narrative, Skin Deep is a cutesy contemporary romance that actually explores more than just first love. Jenna is 14 and is literally scarred for life after having been in a car accident that killed one of her best friends and disfigured a large part of her face. As a result of this, she has withdrawn from life because she can’t live with the way people look at her and be shocked, feel pity, etc… until she meets Ryan, a 16-year-old traveler, with baggage of his own. His mom has bipolar disorder, she’s an old New Age hippie, and travels around with her son on their narrowboat. Ryan not only has to live with his mom’s moods, but also with the intolerance of many town people against travelers (he’s often called gyppo, for instance, or people assume he’s only there to steal, get into fights…).

Jarratt also delves into hot teen topics like prejudice and being judged by appearances, peer pressure and even throws in a bit of a murder mystery in her debut novel. Seems like a lot to pull off all in one book, but Jarratt manages it adequately, turning out an emotional and honest book that the cat definitely sees as a clear winner with the middle-graders.  There’s nothing spectacularly new or exciting about Skin Deep, but a book doesn’t always have to be that way for it to be a solid read. And that’s exactly what Skin Deep is: solid.

Revolution (by Jennifer Donnelly)

Thoroughly enchanted with two of Donnelly’s previous works, the cat expected to love Revolution equally as  much. Alas, there were too many kinks here that prevented her to really like this book and give it anything more than a 3-star rating. The standout element in Revolution is still Donnelly’s lush prose, which admittedly sometimes crosses over into the overly dramatic. For some this is an annoyance they won’t be able to get past, but if you read a Victorian novel once in a while, you’ll see it’s really not that different from those exploits, so this is definitely something the cat can live with. Also, Donnelly can pull off the multiple point of view with pizzazz… Donnelly has given her two protagonists a distinct voice, bringing out the differences in the two girls (even though both are angsty in their own way). However… the characters she came up with in Revolution just don’t hold up.

First there’s Andi – gothic teen angst is my middle name. She’s 17, a senior at the most snobbish Brooklyn high school imaginable (seriously do these school exist besides on Gossip Girl?), but because her father thinks she has to work on her senior thesis rather than mope around and mourn her dead brother Truman and drown her sorrow in her music, he takes her off to Paris, where Andi almost coincidentally discovers the diary of the 18^th century Alex(andrine) who witnessed the French Revolution first hand. This is where Revolution turns into a historical novel linking Andi’s (not so quiet) revolution to that of Alexandrine’s, but Donnelly wouldn’t be Donnelly if she didn’t throw in a romance.

At first the two plotlines are woven together quite believably, but the whole books takes a turn for the supernatural towards the last quarter, which completely killed all previous (mild) enjoyment. Talk about a twist in the tale! Buzzkill! Revolution felt like a book by an author who lost herself in her own story and just didn’t find an out… Maybe Donnelly needed Andi’s precious key here? Donnelly has also never been a very sparse writer, which means that the flaws are just so blatant,… something the cat could definitely overlook in The Tea Rose, but not so much in Revolution, unfortunately…

Something Like Normal (by Trish Doller)

Trish Doller’s 2012 debut Something Like Normal deals with a pretty sensitive issue: a young Marine (19 years old) who’s just got back from his first tour of duty in Afghanistan. Travis may have left Afghanistan physically in one piece, he’s definitely suffering mentally – from PTSD – after he witnessed his best friend getting killed. Coming back home, though, has never felt so alien to Travis: his ex-girlfriend has hooked up with his brother Ryan who’s pretty much also confiscated his car; his father still thinks he’s worthless and it seems that his parents’ marriage is going the way of the dinosaur too. Mixed in with dealing with the effects that Charlie’s death has on him – Travis sees Charlie all through the book – and his changing family dynamics, is a romance, that of Travis and Harper, the girl he pretty much humiliated when they were both 14.

Something Like Normal is well written, and Doller definitely has the voice of Travis down. It sounds honest, a little raw, but always realistic. So no qualms about Doller’s ability to write a decent character. There’s nothing really wrong with Something Like Normal. The only pity is that it’s not really a book that sticks… The romance is not exactly a necessary aspect of the novel, to be honest. It’s also the weakest element of this book, with Harper being a fairly unbelievable love interest (what girl would hook up with a guy who pretty much ruined her reputation, resulting in her being called a slut by everyone in town since she was 14?). In fact it sort of distracts of the real highlight of this book : the way a young soldier like Travis deals with PTSD, the guilt and the grief he feels.

The fact that lots of elements are sort of touched upon but not really explored to the full is due to the brevity of this novel. Although Something like Normal is a decent enough debut, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that with a bit more attention and fleshing out, it could have been so much more.

Andromeda Klein (by Frank Portman)

Frank Portman was the cat’s literary discovery of 2012. King Dork had so much going for it, one of those absurdly delicious books any 16-year-old with a knack for rebellion should read. Needless to say, when Andromeda Klein landed on the cat’s desk, she was giddy with anticipatory excitement. Little did she realize this would be the only book this year that she’d repeatedly put down, and wonder whether to continue at all…

But then guilt snuck in, this is Frank Portman, dudes! Inventor of characters nicknamed Chi-Mo! OK, so page 138, one more effort…another 100 pages, but if the dense writing about magick and occult swords and 93s and St. Steves and what have you, keeps on obscuring the plot (I’m sure it’s there somewhere!) and more importantly, the cat’s reading enjoyment, the cat is totally calling it quits… Frank Portman or no Frank Portman!

Enter page 415… OK, so there’s a Lexicon??? Dude, you might have said that in the beginning! OK, so I totally got that Andromeda’s hearing impairment took over at some parts of the book and those ‘misunderstandings’ are just another feature of her being one weird cookie, but still, all that occult babble, just sounded like “Bla Bla Bla, Bla Bla, Bla, Blab la blade blaba …“ after a night of insomnia to the cat. I mean, what to think of it when you get something like: “The other cards in the spread were mostly small cards, bristling with swords, though the King of Pentacles in the “hopes and fears” space might allude to – had always seemed to allude to – St. Steve, who was certainly a hope and a regret, if not exactly a fear. There he was, staring at her with A.E.’s sad eyes as Pixie had drawn them. It was hard to decide how to relate A.E.’s court cards to the Golden Dawn’s Book T attributions, but if A.E. Kings corresponded to the Golden Dawn’s Princes rather than to the Knights, then he was also, apparently, Emperor of the Gnomes.” (p.34) Huh??

So … Andromeda is one seriously weird chick. Not weird as in your average YA teen character “I’m a different geeky sort of outsider” weird but  “seriously alienated and nothing in common with the rest of the human population whatsoever in this universe or the next” weird. She doesn’t like any of the music her contemporaries listen to, but instead she’s into medieval troubadours and composers like Guillaume de Machaut. She is the kind of person who’d rather take “inventory of the room and imagining all the possible ways in which these objects could be used to commit suicide” (p.158), than strike up a meaningful conversation with you. She’s obsessed with occultism and now that her best friend – who wasn’t really her best friend – Daisy has died of leukemia, she struggles with her magick and sees weird omens everywhere (swords, dreams…) . Also, her tarot reading is just giving her all sorts of weedgie vibes.  To be honest, the story only starts to get interesting once Andromeda meets Byron who she more or less takes on as an apprentice. The problem here is that we’re almost on page 200 or so before the two of them meet, so it’s a whole ordeal to actually get to the good parts…

But once you’re there you can see that beneath that weird exterior Andromeda is … well, still weird, but in essence a very insecure little girl who doesn’t quite know how to get into contact with her peers, even though she would like to very much. She has formed these very tentative “friendships” with people like Rosalie van Genuchten (I seriously wonder how you’d pronounce that in English!), who – for all intents and purposes – is just a manipulative bitch.

Anyway, am I glad I did stick it out until the end… Mèh, I guess so. Didn’t want to be called weak or anything. Will Andromeda Klein make the best of 2012 list like King Dork? Never! Andromeda Klein is definitely different from any YA (or other) book you’re likely to read any time soon. It has one of the most bizarre main characters the cat’s encountered in a long time. Also, the writing is likely to be off-putting for a lot of readers. It’s almost impenetrable, which doesn’t really do all that much for the plot, which now gets even more obscured – as if the subject matter itself wasn’t enough already! A for effort for sure, but still… after King Dork, saying the cat was disappointed is the understatement of the year!