Sarah Dessen

So I've been reading a lot of Sarah Dessen lately. She's fantastic. I read This Lullaby and That Summer several years ago, and just finished Just Listen, Someone Like You, and Lock and Key. They were all great!

Just Listen is about Annabel Greene, who is a model but doesn't want to be. Her two sisters, also models, moved to New York, where one of them developed an eating disorder and the other developed interests outside of modelling. Annabel feels like she has to hold the family together, that they (especially her mom) will fall apart if she doesn't do what they expect of her, even if it's not what she wants. When her friends turn on her because of a terrible misunderstanding, she has nobody to talk to except Owen Armstrong, a big, scary loner. Turns out he's not so scary after she gets to know him, and the interesting thing is that he always tells the truth. Can Annabel be strong and tell the truth too, or will her world really fall apart if she does?

Scarlett and Halley have been friends forever. Halley rushes home from camp when Scarlett's boyfriend Michael is killed in a motorcycle accident. The day before, Scarlett had slept with Michael for the first time, and when she finds out she's pregnant, she doesn't know what to do. She can't go through with the abortion her mom has scheduled for her, and decides to keep the baby. Halley finds herself falling for Michael's best friend, bad boy Macon, and her sneaking around ruins her formerly great relationship with her mom. Halley and Scarlett remain best friends and support each other through their difficult times.

Ruby's been living alone in the old yellow house since her mom disappeared. She was getting by OK, until the landlord came to fix the dryer and called Child Services. Now she's been dumped at her rich sister and brother-in-law's house. Her sister obviously doesn't want anything to do with her - if she did, she wouldn't have run out on them and refused all contact, just like their dad. Ruby's all set to run away, but she gets caught. Luckily, Nate the neighbour boy vouches for her, but then he's everywhere, and Ruby just wishes he'd leave her alone. As the months go by and she gets closer to 18 and freedom, she unexpectedly starts making friends and enjoying her life with her sister. She finds out that things aren't always as they seem, and that sometimes you have to look for the truth.

Wintergirls

How is it possible that 2 years have gone by since my last post? I'll never catch up, but I'll try to post reviews more regularly. Really!

Here goes:

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson. Wow. This book is intense.

Lia and Cassie have been best friends since they were 9, and they vowed to be the skinniest girls in the school. Now they're 15, Lia's anorexic, and Cassie's body was just found in a motel room. Although they hadn't really been friends for a few months, the night she died, Cassie phoned Lia 33 times. Lia didn't answer. Now Lia's trying to stay strong, which for her means get skinnier.

The horror of an eating disorder is clearly portrayed in this book, and it's already been banned by paranoid folk who are convinced it will turn teens into anorexics. LHA consulted with eating disorder specialists, who told her that yes, her book might be a trigger for anorexics, but so could TV, a magazine, a poster, a cereal box, or just about anything else. She certainly doesn't shy away from the tough stuff. I thought Speak was fantastic too, of course.

Catching up on reading

Well, I have actually read quite a few books in the last year, not sure why I didn't get around to posting comments about any of them. Here are a few highlights of my reading in the past year:
The Mountain that Walked by Katherine Holubitsky. The story of an English boy, sent to Canada as part of the Barnardo's Home charity program for orphans. The "family" he's assigned to is awful, and he escapes to work in the mines in Frank, Alberta. Then one day, Turtle Mountain comes crashing down.
Visiting my brother in London, I saw a Barnardo's Home charity shop. I guess in England they never heard about all the awful stuff that often happened to kids that were basically sent here to be slaves. I also visited the Frank Slide Interpretive Centre last summer. I think I learned more from this book than I learned there. But if you're ever in the area, make sure you go on a Bellevue Mine tour. It's fantastic!

So B. It by Sarah Weeks. Heidi’s mother only knows 23 words, and one of them is soof. Heidi goes in search of her mother’s family and for the definition of soof.

Stop Pretending! What happened when my big sister went crazy by Sonya Sones. Based on a true story. Fantastic verse novel, and her others are just as great, including One of those hideous books where the mother dies in which a girl is sent to live with her movie-star father who she hasn’t seen since she was a baby, and What my mother doesn't know, about a pretty typical girl who has crushes on a few guys.

The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie by Jaclyn Moriarty. Like her previous books, Feeling Sorry for Celia and The Year of Secret Assignments, this one is a combination of notes, journal entries, etc. Funny and fabulous!

The Conch Bearer, and The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming

I've enjoyed all of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's books, and these two even got me to read fantasy! Some of her other books could be classified as fantasy too, but they're more like magic realism. The Conch Bearer was one of the nominees for the 2006 Young Readers Choice Award, so I read it a couple of times while promoting those books. It's about a young boy, Anand, whose father went away to make money and never returned. Anand's sister had a terrifying experience from which she has never recovered. Anand's family has become very poor, so he goes to work for a mean tea-seller. One day an old man comes by. Anand is drawn to him, and it turns out the man is a wizard and wants Anand to join him on a quest. Anand befriends a feisty homeless girl named Nisha, and they go off and have exciting adventures, which include restoring a magical conch shell to its rightful home. The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming is the sequel, in which Anand, Nisha, and the old wizard are thrown back in time and have to save the world from an evil wizard. I enjoyed it even more than The Conch Bearer. It looks like this series will continue, so I'm looking forward to the next installment!

The Surya Trilogy

I finally finished The Surya Trilogy by Jamila Gavin this week. I read the first book, The Wheel of Surya, about a year ago, but the library didn't have the other two volumes at the time. In the Wheel of Surya, Marvinder and her little brother Jaspal live with their mother in the little village of Deri in Punjab, India in 1947. Their father has been away for many years, studying in England. War breaks out, and the Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs each take their turn raiding the villages, massacring anyone who is not of their religion. Eventually, having lost everything, Marvi, Jaspal, and their mother try to get to England to find their father. They get separated and the children stow away on a boat. They do find their father, but they also find out why he has stayed away for so long. In the second book, The Eye of the Horse, Marvi learns to play the violin and to love a boy, but Jaspal learns only to hate. They long to go back to India and find their mother. In the conclusion, The Track of the Wind, they do return to India with their father, but their lives do not turn out the way they had imagined. I would definitely recommend this trilogy. Parts of it reminded me of The Other Side of Truth by Beverley Naidoo.

The Long Night of Leo and Bree

It's the fourth anniversary of Leo's sister's murder. His father disappeared not long after the murder, and his mother has become a crazy drunk. For some reason, she has kept the grisly police photos of her dead daughter's naked, bloody body, and shows them to Leo. It's more than he can take, and after fighting with his mom, he goes for a drive. When he sees a scantily clad girl walking down the street alone, he decides that she's the one who should have died, not his smart, good, nice sister. Bree is trying to find a bar to play pool. She's rebelling against her rich, controlling mother and boyfriend by going to a rough part of town. Leo kidnaps Bree, blindfolds her, and takes her to the basement of his apartment building. Bree won't stop talking about herself because she heard that if you become real to your kidnapper, he won't kill you. Leo spends the night trying to figure out whether to kill Bree or not, and Bree tries to get through to Leo and save herself. They come to realize that they have more in common than they first thought. The Long Night of Leo and Bree by Ellen Wittlinger (who also wrote Hard Love) has some weird moments, and it's a little hard to believe at times, but you do end up caring about both Leo and Bree and hoping that things will work out in the end for both of them.

Blue Jasmine

Blue Jasmine by Kashmira Sheth is about a twelve-year-old girl who immigrates to the USA from India. Seema has always lived with her sister, mother, father, aunt, uncle, 2 cousins, grandmother, and grandfather. Seema is especially upset to be leaving her cousin Raju, who is the same age and has always been like a brother to her. One of Seema's schoolmates, Mukta, brings her a going-away present. Kids at school always make fun of Mukta because she smells, and when Seema visits Mukta, she realizes that Mukta is very poor. Seema's family moves to Iowa and starts to fit in there, but a year later they have to return to India to visit her sick grandmother. Seema worries about Mukta and misses Raju and the rest of her family while she is in Iowa, but when she returns to India, she finds that a part of her also misses her new home.