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penmage
13. Pay the Piper, by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple
I really wanted to like Pay the Piper. Pied Piper plus Faerie plus rock and roll, written by Jane Yolen = what's not to like, right? Alas. I was really underwhelmed by this book. The writing seems forced. The family and friends situations feel unnatural. The main character, Callie, has no depth whatsoever. She comes to conclusions and figures things out way too fast - making her less a character and more a vehicle for the writers to tell thier idea - with far too little show, and far too much tell. The very ideas are underdeveloped and underexplained.
It felt like something I wrote when I was fourteen. That's really what it reminded me of. I've read a lot of really maturely written teen fiction, with teen protagonists, that read like what it's like to be a teen. This book read like something written very poorly by a teen. I plowed through it because it's not in my nature to not finish a book, but it was difficult. It was just that bad. I expect a lot more from Jane Yolen, and I was really dissapointed in this book.
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14. Shug, by Jenny Han
Shug, by the fabulous Jenny Han, is a book about what it's like to be a twelve year old girl. This book is breathtaking. Reviewers have said it before, and I'll say it again - reading this book feels like being twelve years old again. Noticing boys for the first time, getting your period and seeing your world change when you just want everything to stay the same - these are all the cliches are middle grade fiction, but Jenny Han makes it all fresh again. She makes it all hurt with the same ache that it felt like when it happened to us.
Annemarie Wilcox, known as Shug (short for "Sugar") by her family, is our quiet protagonist. She is twelve years old and growing up in a small town in the south, and she is one of the realest protagonists I've read in a long time. She's observant and smart and eloquent, but immature, too. She deals with a sudden crush on the boy who's been her best friend all her life, a beautiful older sister, and her parents' rocky marriage. But mostly, she is just so wholly, entirely twelve years old. This book is good. It's really, really good. If you have an interest in middle grade fiction at all, you need to read Shug.
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15. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party, by M. T. Anderson
The shocking Octavian Nothing is nothing like I expected it to be. The cover copy made me suspect fantasy of a sort, some sort of fascinating historical fantasy with some mystery and science involved. The true story is nothing like that at all, but is, rather, far more shocking.
Octavian grows up in a house where he and his mother Cassiopeia are the only ones with names. All the other men of the house have numerical denominations instead. Octavian is trained carefully and educated in all of the finest arts and fields. Everything about him is carefully studied, down to the weight of his feces. For Octavian is an African slave, bought in utero along with his mother, to be the prime subject of an experiment to discover whether an African boy, given the same training as a Caucasian boy, is capable of the same intelligence, the same excellence. Oh, and all this is taking place during the Revolutionary War, in a manor-house in Boston. And that's only the very beginning of the story.
Octavian Nothing is not fantasy, and it is not for the light-hearted. This is a treatise on slavery at a time when it had not yet become a contested issue in the states, for there were not even states yet. It is a book about what makes a man, and what it means to be a thinking person. And it is a book about slavery. It is fascinating and compelling and, at times, shocking in its intensity. It's not a book to be taken lightly. But it is definitly a book worth reading.
