Keeping the Moon (by Sarah Dessen)

In light of the upcoming publication of Sarah Dessen’s new novel, The Moon and More, in June of this year, the cat wanted to get another Sarah Dessen fix real quick! There’s nothing better to pick you up after a slew of average books than a Sarah Dessen book! Even when she’s not at the top of her game, her books are always entertaining, immensely readable and like chocolate for my inner girl!

In Keeping the Moon – a Dessen oldie, her 3^rd novel and originally published in 1999 – 15-year-old Colie Sparks is our protagonist. She used to be fat, but once her mom found comfort in exercising and found out that not only was she really good at it, but she also loved it with an unabashed enthusiasm that made her into one of the nation’s most famous fitness gurus, Colie lost 45 pounds. What she didn’t lose, though, was her insecurity. When her mom is off to Europe to tour with her fitness program, Colie is sent to her unconventional aunt Mira in Colby. In Colby she starts working at the Last Chance* diner, where she also meets Morgan and Isabel, who are potentially the first friends she ever has in her life.

Like in many of her other books, Dessen is very good at pointing out similarities and differences in people’s relationships and the reasons why people behave the way they behave. Dessen is a character-writer. She seems to love all of her (female) protagonists a lot (despite and because of their flaws!), which is very infectious! It’s hard not to feel with Colie and her insecurities. Dessen usually takes a lot of time to have her main characters build relationships with the people around her (including the love interests! No insta-loves here!), who all have their own past to deal with,… nothing is ever rushed in a Dessen novel. In Keeping the Moon, she hasn’t yet fully acquired that skill yet (it’s a slender novel, compared to some of her more recent work), but it’s great to see some really believably female friendships so early on in her writing career, and to see her be such a champion of self-esteem! I’m greatly looking forward to The Moon and More (which is apparently also set in Colby!).

* This book can also be found under another title: Last Chance. The 2012 Speak Reissue I read (cf. cover photo), has the original title, though.

Virtuosity (by Jessica Martinez)

Carmen is 17 and one of the best violinists in the world. She’s already landed a Grammy and has a scholarship to Juilliard. She also has the privilege to play on a 1-million-dollar violin (!) – courtesy of her uppity grandparents – and now she’s ready to get into and win the prestigious Guarneri violin competition. Raised by a former opera singer, Carmen was destined to become a great musician. From a young age, her mom sheltered her, homeschooled her, overprotected her and basically molded her into this picture perfect violinist, the star she herself couldn’t be any more after a throat surgery ruined her voice. Now, with the Guarneri competition, Carmen’s talent gets matched by that of British prodigy Jeremy King. It doesn’t take much for Carmen to feel threatened by Jeremy. And yes, the two kids also feel an attraction…

Unfortunately, Virtuosity, though definitely not the worst book the cat’s read, is just so… bland, to be considered a thrilling read and anything more than ‘a filler read’. The romance between the two is sweet-ish , in that instant attraction sort of way (from feeling threatened and severe distrust to butterflies and kisses all in the span of an evening!). The ending felt very deus ex machina, like Martinez didn’t want either of her protagonists to lose out. There were also plenty of elements in the book that just didn’t work to be believable (the pills, what mom did to the competition).

Virtuosity is the book version of an X-Files MOTW-episode… Obviously there are no real monsters here, but it’s a bit of a filler in between really great books. For a book that’s supposedly all about the way something (in this case, music) makes you feel things (both Carmen and Jeremy liken their playing music to flying), the cat felt very little of that. Too plain, too obvious, too … mèh…

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.

Let’s Get Lost (by Sarra Manning)

For some reason, Sarra Manning has been flying under the cat’s radar for years… Her2004sophomore book Diary of a Crush 1: French Kiss has been in our library for a while now, it gets checked out regularly, but for superficial reasons, the cat never felt like reading it (1. Title of the book is off-putting, and 2. The cover doesn’t promise a whole lot of good…).  Then suddenly not one, but 2 Sarra Manning books kept on being recommended, and the cat is starting to get the feeling she’s made a mistake the size of the whole Sarah Dessen debacle…

Let’s Get Lost was published after the Diary of a Crush trilogy. In it we follow 16-year-old Isabel Clark who’s feared at her school for being your typical Mean Girl. She doesn’t have friends either, but she’s got a gang of (not so faithful) minions, who she has to keep in check. It’s a girl eat girl world at high school, and after being bullied when she was younger, Isabel is not going to let herself be the victim again, especially not now that her mother has died. One evening at a party she meets 20-year-old college student Smith – like her also named after a character in a book and attending the Uni where Isabel’s father teaches – and hooks up with him. She convinces him she’s older, a lie which is (of course) going to catch up with her later on.

Even if the story of Let’s Get Lost isn’t the most original of stories and even though the protagonists are very reminiscent of other protagonists in books of this genre (contemporary YA romance), Sarra Manning’s take on it sounds fresher than e.g. in a book like Kody Keplinger’s The DUFF.  There’s a case to be made for the fact that Isabel is also just escaping the reality of her world (not coping with her mother’s death, dysfunctional relationship with her father) and using Smith in the way that Bianca was using Wesley. But the interactions between Isabel and Smith on the one hand, and Isabel and e.g. Smith’s friends on the other hand, read more like the interactions between Sarah Dessen characters than anything the cat has read in a while. And even though Sarra Manning’s protagonists are sexually a lot bolder than Dessen’s for sure (but clearly not as bold as Keplinger’s!), the similarities lie in the situation the protagonists finds herself in: she’s caught up in a web of her own lies, and has to find a way out of it in order to work through her problems.  And that is something she clearly needs to do before she can move on with her life.

Another reason for the freshness is the very distinct British setting. Sarra Manning is British, and the school setting, the going out scene, etc. all of that is clearly British and this is including the sexual boldness, the drinking and the smoking, which is always just a tad more matter-of-fact than many American contemporary YA romance novels. Teen angst is clearly something universal, but there are obvious (geographical, in this case) variations, and Sarra Manning is a good case in point for readers who like their Sarah Dessen and Caroline Mackler but want to try something more errr… edgy? Also, Sarra Manning’s language feels authentic, unforced (and non-amateurish) and all of this makes for a very enjoyable reading experience.

Once again, here’s a book that’s proof that you should never judge an author by a single book cover. Let’s Get Lost is a fresh take on an almost beaten down YA genre. I know that Sarra Manning has a ton of other books, and who knows, the cat may even give Diary of a Crush 1: French Kiss a try…

Saving lives, tweeting and pushing limits

Tweet Heart (by Elizabeth Rudnick)

Elizabeth Rudnick’s debut Tweet Heart is original in nothing except its ‘format’. Following four friends, Claire, Lottie, Will, and Bennett through their respective Tweets on Twitter, their blog posts and some emails, what we get is a fairly standard teenage romance novel. Much like Lauren Myracle’s TTYL-series the novelty is the set-up, rather than the plot.  There’s only so much you can do with this particular format, of course, and Rudnick explores that to the limits. Characterization is definitely there, but with a maximum of 140 characters per tweet, you can’t really expect the plot to get all Gravity’s Rainbow on you. So instead, we get girl crushes on hot boy. Best male friend crushes on girl, pretends to be said hot boy on Twitter, girl finds out, yadda yadda yadda. I mean, this is not the stuff of grand literary awards. But although this type of book probably doesn’t really have a lot of staying power (such is the nature of The Tweet, I guess), it does have instant appeal at the moment. The first day the cat put it in the library it was checked out. Also, considering it’s just one of those books that reluctant readers might pick up, it gets an additional bonus star.

3 stars

Pushing the Limits (by Katie McGarry)

There are only so many original plotlines. There’s  ‘good girl meets bad boy’; there’s ‘boy with the troubled past’; there’s ‘girl with the troubled past’. Katie McGarry’s debut novel Pushing the Limits combines all of these plotlines promising above all… a love story. Now, telling an unoriginal story is OK. Even Shakespeare wasn’t one to tell original stories, you know? The cat even digs teenage romance* as long as there’s something to convince you that what you are reading is something special, that somehow *this* is the book you’ve been waiting to read forever. Lots of books have come close, but none have ever really gotten *there*. Could be characterization. Could be the style. Could be the format. Pushing the Limits has none of these outstanding features.

But leaving aside that the plot is completely unoriginal and that the characters are flat and uninspired , what actually did make this novel stand out was the horrendous writing. McGarry ticked me off after a couple of pages when there’s this one line that just should have made me stop reading it. I knew this book would become a train wreck but when Noah started calling Echo ‘baby’ or ‘siren’ every five seconds, I knew we’d crossed over to fan fiction land and even trains get out of head-on collisions better than this book. Ugh, double ugh!

1.5 stars

* Anything by Sarah Dessen!

How to Save a Life (by Sara Zarr)

At least bad and melodramatic writing is not something you can accuse Sara Zarr of in How to Save a Life. Quite the opposite, because even though the topics at hand – the loss of a father and teen pregnancy – have melodrama plastered all over themselves, there’s nothing of the sort here. Instead, the writing is much like its main characters realistic, raw even.

The story is told in alternating voices.  First, the voice of Jill, who lost her father a while ago and has to come to terms with his death and the fact that her mother decided to adopt a baby, her own way to cope with losing her husband and a sure way to give the love she still feels for him… That baby will be provided by Mandy, the other voice of the story. Mandy’s is a completely different voice than Jill’s. While Jill comes off as haughty and bitchy – even though she’s more angry and sad than an actual outright bitch! – Mandy’s voice is so heartbreakingly honest, naïve even.. Mandy never knew her father and had an abusive stepfather, who was only the last one in a lost string of boyfriends her mother had. Both girls just don’t understand each other’s way of life and reasoning, but they both provide the necessary insight in each other for both the reader and themselves.

How to Save a Life is nothing sort of a touching and tender story that, yes, ends in the sweetest of ways. For some this ending may ultimately prove to be a bit too sugary, but all in all this is what you hope would happen for these characters.

4 stars