SLOB by Ellen Potter
SLOB is the story of twelve-year-old Owen Birnbaum, the fattest kid in school. The reasons behind Owen’s eating disorder are revealed as Owen: attempts to build Nemesis (a device that will capture the events of the past), suffers through humiliation after humiliation at the hands of a cruel gym teacher, and as Owen tracks down a thief who takes his lunch time Oreo snack.
The prose often struck me as insightful. This passage, on page 29, jolted me:
Everyone thinks they know the fat kid. We’re so obvious. Our embarrassing secret is out there for everyone to see, spilling over our belts, flapping under our chins, stretching the seams of our jeans.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have other secrets that you can’t see.
I also enjoyed the occasional clever metaphor: “She may not be supersmart, but if you stick her in a crowd of people, she just pops, like a zebra-stripped jeep in a shopping mall parking lot” (p 80).
The ending kept me guessing. It’s not often you read about a boy with an eating disorder but this is an exception read. I’m sure it will be in the run for a Printz (though I’m pulling for The Devil’s Paintbox). I believe it also qualifies for the Newbery.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days by Jeff Kinney
Kinney does it again. This time our admittedly lazy hero, Greg, must mend fences with Rowley (his best friend), work off a debt to Rowley’s dad, go above and beyond to attract the attention of the community pool life guard, and become famous by creating a new comic strip for the local newspaper. All this leads to a boring vacation with Rowley’s family, a failed attempt at a V.I.P. Lawn service company, and no girlfriend or fame.
But Greg remains optimistic through it all. Incredulous at the adults around him and baffeled by their misunderstanding of his genius, he holds himself accountable for nothing and is seemingly without empathy. Of course, this results in one seriously funny book.
Greg has been holding on to a library book for a little too long. This is what he imagines will happen if he returns it.
The Vast Fields of Ordinary by Nick Burd
I picked this one up after reading Book Envy’s review. Her summary is spot on and I agree with her assessment so check that out, then continue.
There was a lot of good description:
Let it all out. If only I could. Letting it all out would involve me exploding like a firework, a beautiful riot of rainbow sparks bouncing around the car and lighting up the entire lot. Everyone would look over to see what was going on, and one by one they would understand everything I had inside me (p 132).
But it was occasionally over-written. I often believe YA novels could be better if they were shortened by half.
In addition to BookEnvy’s comments, I found Dade’s relationship with Pablo fascinating. A few years ago, a former high school classmate of mine whom had since come out, said, “I hooked up with a lot of guys from school. In the baseball dugout. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you their names.”
I don’t know if I was satisfied with the ending. Without giving anything away, I would’ve liked to know what could have happened if things ended differently for Pablo.
Those who enjoy Alex Sanchez’s novels will like The Vast Fields of Ordinary. [On a side note, I am totally uninformed when it comes to MySpace music and the newfangled stuff kids are listening to these days to define themselves.]
The Girl Who Threw Butterflies by Mick Cochrane
In the 1960s a guy named J.C. Martin made a living catching the great Hoyt Wilhelm’s knuckleball. Doug Mirabelli always caught Tim Wakefield and his knuckleball for the Red Sox. They were called “personal catchers.” Catching a knuckleball was so difficult and so unpleasant for most regular catchers that if you could do it reasonably well (nobody did it really well), that one skill could keep you on the team. The personal catcher would sit on the bench until the knuckleballer took the mound, and then he and his special floppy mitt would enter the game. It was an odd kind of intimacy, to be joined together like that, a weird baseball marriage (p 74-75).
How can I express how much I enjoyed this book? It blended many of the themes present in several of this year’s best children’s books (see OCL’s Mock Newbery List): death and abandonment, grief and alienation, discrimination and friendship. Yet none of these drowned the story and baseball tied it all together.
[SPOILER ALERT]
Baseball is what helps Molly hold herself together. It helps her come to terms with her father’s death and to discover herself. It is how she codified life:
Molly meanwhile was fantasizing about a scoring system not for baseball but for life. If she said something stupid, if she forgot to bring home her science book – those would be errors. If her mother came through for her and a third of the time – that sounded about right – her batting average would be .333. Back when her locked has been defaces and Lonnie came along and rescued her, he could have been credited with a save” (p 147).
The setting – Buffalo, NY – was a perfect choice. Like Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, whose wintry and bleak Syracuse, NY setting gave the perfect backdrop to Melinda’s troubles, the gloomy Buffalo is “like Siberia, a place you’d go to disappear, or to be punished” (p 115) to this story. It supports Molly’s suspicions that her father’s job was “taking the starch out of him” (p 37) and that her mother was like a flower withering in such grey desolation.
My father, like Molly’s, was a reporter for the local newspaper, covering equally mundane and repetitious stories. While scavenging to salvage some of her father’s memorabilia, Molly stumbles across one of her father’s notepads. At first hopefully it will contain some sort of explanation for his mysterious death, she finds it blank and instead stages a mock interview with her father (p 55). I thought this and all the other little steps Molly took toward forgiving her father was exceptionally well done.
[END SPOILERS]
If you enjoyed this book, I recommend No Cream Puffs by Karen Day and Playing the Field by Phil Bildner.
Love, Aubery by Suzanne LaFleur
“I had everything I needed to run a household: a house, food, and a new family. From now on it would just be me and Sammy–the two of us, and no one else.”
I couldn’t help but compare this book to Ann Dee Ellis’s Everything is Fine.
Both books feature a female protagonist whose physical well being has been abandoned by the adults in her life and her mental well being has been disrupted, both by family tragedy.
Love, Aubrey is an excellent first offering from new author Suzanne LaFleur but Ellis’s story is more concise, literary and ultimately more haunting. Both authors navigate their precious girls through the horror and confusion of one life-altering moment and the aftermath with elegance and poignancy. Both also do an excellent job building suspense.
I’ve seen this on some mock Newbery lists but decided to pass on it for our Library’s final list.
Bobby vs. Girls (Accidentally) by Lisa Yee
Holly still sounded mad. A couple of years ago, all he had to do was stick a crayon up his nose and Holly would crack up and forget why she was angry. Bobby wished he had a crayon in his pocket now (p 121).
Holly and Bobby are entering that time in their lives when it is uncool to befriend the opposite gender. So they keep their friendship hidden but solid, until Jillian Zarr, alpha female, enters the scene. Soon, Holly has straightened her hair, painted her fingernails and started wearing dresses to school. Bobby warns her, “If you’re not careful, you’ll turn into a girl!” (p 55).
When the two find themselves running against each other for Student Council Representative, Bobby wants to win badly. With depth and humor, Yee tackles a classic boys versus girl plot line with more depth and humor than the usual. I like that Yee doesn’t sell out, turning Holly away from Jillian nor having her blow Bobby off in the end. It takes a strong-minded, centered girl to navigate both sexes and I believe Holly Harper can. And it won’t be long before Bobby appreciates that Holly is, indeed, a girl.
L.A. Candy: A Novel by Lauren Conrad
A story of two friends: Jane, the sweet blond, and Scarlett, gorgeous, smart and sexy with a distrusting nature.
I had no idea who Lauren Conrad was when I picked up this book. It was on the best seller list and plastered all over the chain bookstores so I put it on hold at the Library. As I read, I was questioned by a gawking teenager in disbelief, “You’re reading that book?” When she filled me in (Conrad was a ‘reality’ TV star, The Hills, etc.), I suddenly understood how such a poorly written, barely interesting book could have been published.
When our two beauties are tapped to star in a ‘reality’ TV show (a la Sex in the City in LA and for teens), their friendship and their lives change forever. IN the passage below, Scarlett has just escaped from the cameras:
“She had also started going to the gym every day – it was a good way of releasing her pent up whatever – and re-reading all of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels, in the original Spanish. Just for fun” (p 253).
Now, Scarlett is supposed to be oh-so-brillant, which to Conrad equates to speaking multiple languages but being unable to define feelings. A vague ‘whatever’ apparently suffices.
Every dim-wit thought that crossed our heroine’s minds was laid bare. Nothing was left to the imagination.
To those untouched by the Hollywood machine, some of the details about that world were interesting but this isn’t a book I’d recommend.
Anything but Typical by Nora Raleigh Baskin
Jason Blake is anything but typical. Mocked as retarded by his second grade classmates, diagnosed with ASD, Autistic Spectrum Disorder, by doctors in the third grade, and defined by his mother as NLD, nonverbal learning disordered, Jason is just Jason.
It surprised me that this book was just as much an exploration of the writing process (very post-modern) as it was a story about an autistic child who makes a friend online.
While reading, I found myself often wondering why Baskin didn’t apply the lessons her characters were learning to her own writing. More show, less tell (p 44). While School Library Journal called Jason “believable and empathetic,” I thought our narrator was rather dry and over explanatory, though his situation is pitiable and realistic. I couldn’t connect with Jason, while Stork’s Marcello is still milling about in my head.
School Library Journal also praised, “Baskin also does a superb job of developing his parents and younger brother as real people with real problems, bravely traversing their lives with a differently abled child without a road map, but with a great deal of love.” I can agree to this wholeheartedly.
It is clear that Jason’s mother has trouble understanding him as illustrated on page 68:
“Remember, Jason?” she is saying. “Remember those leggings?”
We were both remembering the same thing.
“Those leggings?” I repeat what she has said, so that she will know this.
“No?” my mother is saying. “You don’t? It’s okay. It was a long time ago.
And yet, his father gets him.
“It’s not meaningless to Jason,” my dad said. … “The words. And the letters. Just because you don’t understand their meaning doesn’t mean the don’t have one” (p 47).
This one has also been mentioned on mock Printz lists but it doesn’t top the likes of The Devil’s Paintbox or Along for the Ride in terms of writing excellence.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing (March 24, 2009)
Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork
“The closest description of what I have is probably Asperger’s syndrome. It falls on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum.” It is as good an answer as I can give (p 186).
Though many have commented on the slow-paced beginning, I was immediately hooked. Marcelo’s thought process is fascinating, as are people’s reactions to him. I am envious of many of his perceived faults: he thinks carefully before speaking, is guided by a clear sense of right and wrong, has an affinity for animals.
There is an element of mystery in the style of “Erin Brockovich.”
There is romance but nothing like the sappy, love-struck or overwhelming romance saturating contemporary YA literature.
The supporting characters ellicit many emotional reactions from readers: anger, frustration, disgust, compassion.
It is a well structured, intricate story that I hope is a front runner for the Printz!
Read more at: TeenReads, Crazy Quilts
Publisher: Arthur A. Levine Books (March 1, 2009) Read comments by the editor at Brooklyn Arden.
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart
Witty, smart, mischievous, highly addictive and well written. Lockhart employs all the right narrative techniques, hooking the reader immediately and then taking her time in introducing Frankie. Things really pick up as Frankie is driven to further scheming and mayhem to prove… what? That she can be one of the good Old Boys. That she is better. And yet, when she finds it impossible, she must accept it.
There is an element of fight club in here and I believe this will also appeal to fans of John Green’s Looking for Alaska. Definitely a read of the high school and up audience. This has been one of the most enjoyable reads of the year. I’m only sorry it took me so long to get to it! A National Book Award Finalist and a 2009 Printz Honor Book.
Publisher: Hyperion Book CH (March 25, 2008)
