Eleanor and Park (Rainbow Rowell)

Eleanor and Park is yet another example of a book party to which I'm too late for a substantive review. I mean, it came out a year ago, and every young-adult-reading-adult I know who's read it has RAVED, quite rightly. And if you, dear reader, are a YA-reading-adult, you've already heard of it. And I've nothing new to add to the accolades: it's wonderful. Beautifully written, heartbreaking, heart-lifting, yes-this-is-exactly-what-it's-like-falling-in-love-ing.

What I have instead of a review, then, is a question, one that makes me wish I'd done more blog promotion and whatnot so that I had an actual community of commenting readers, because I am likely just asking to the ether: Why is this a young adult novel?
Genre, and delineations thereof, are tricky--especially those based on the assumed age of the audience. And the YA Crossover phenomenon is well-documented: Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Book Thief, and so forth. Indeed, these days some "young adult" titles are picked up by publishers specifically to become crossovers. I don't think Eleanor and Park is one of the latter, and it falls under the vague general definition of YA in that the main characters are teenagers. But to me, speaking only to myself, it feels like a retrospective adult novel--that the third-person voice is that of an older person looking back on first love and adolescent trauma, not that of a teenager experiencing it firsthand. This isn't an insult, or even a quibble: I loved this book, I'm so sad I have to give it back to the library at the end of the month. I just want someone to sit me down and explain. Please?

Ella Enchanted (Gail Carson Levine)

Gail Carson Levine's Ella Enchanted, like Karen Cushman's The Midwife's Apprentice, came out when I was in high school--tragic, as seven or eight years earlier both books would've become all-time childhood favorites.

I cut my teeth on fairy tales, and have since been a sucker for retellings of all kinds: Ella is a riff on "Cinderella," but such a sly and oblique one, half the fun is coming across the bits you remember and smiling at how Levine makes them new.

She starts off borrowing a scene from "Sleeping Beauty,": the infant Ella receives a fairy blessing. This particular fairy, Lucinda, has a regrettable knack for idealized "blessings" that are practical "curses," and poor Ella is no exception--she is ensorcelled (awesome, I'm so happy I get to use that word) to be always obedient. Sounds lovely, right? She'll grow up well-behaved and pleasant. Or, helpless before an order from anyone, she'll grow up with no control over her life, in constant danger--tell her to kill the king? She'd have to do it. As she gets older, she learns to delay her obedience a bit, but it's physically painful; Ella would give anything to have the spell undone.

After her mother dies, her distant father ships her off to finishing school, where she gets high marks, of course, having no choice but to obey the teachers' orders perfectly. But when she learns that Lucinda may be at a giant's wedding across the kingdom (fairies love celebrations), she sets off on a perilous journey into ogre territory.

There's more, of course: wicked stepsisters, a fairy godmother, glass slippers, and a budding friendship with Prince Charmont--but as I said, following the familiar tale through Levine's clever twists makes the book just delightful. Plus, plucky heroine! And subtle commentary on the subordinate role of women, too, without being the slightest bit didactic. Oh, for a time machine to pack with books and bring to my little-girl self...

Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls (Mary Downing Hahn)

Mary Downing Hahn has been scaring the crapola out of middle-graders since my youth (Wait Till Helen Comes AUGH), but Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls, she says in her afterword, is "an attempt to exorcise some of my ghosts." It's a fictionalized exploration of a double murder that took place in her Baltimore suburb in 1955; two teenage girls Hahn knew slightly were shot in a park one early June morning, and the boyfriend of one of them hauled in for questioning. The police were unable to build a case against him, and he was released--but town opinion still considered him a killer, and the hatred drove him away. The murders were never officially solved.

She's chosen here to dramatize a similar story from several different perspectives: Nora, a casual friend of the murdered girls, Cheryl and Bobbi Jo; Buddy, Cheryl's ex-boyfriend, blamed for their deaths; excerpts from Cheryl's and Bobbi Jo's diaries; and the murderer himself, called only Mister Death (from the e.e. cummings poem), whose enigmatic menace shadows the whole book. It's marvelously done, raw and honest, exploring grief, suspicion, loss of faith. And it's rare to read a historical YA novel where the era is not the plot; these are 50s teenagers, living the particular lives of their time, but their feelings are timeless.

Fangirl (Rainbow Rowell)

Look, if you pay attention to YA at all, you've heard of Fangirl, probably in the context of that Kermit-arms gif that was the most articulate thing I could summon about Megan Abbott. And it is, indeed, all that and a bag of kale chips (hmm, I haven't had kale chips in ages, I should make Chris get some): read-it-in-one-day-and-oh-look-at-the-time involving, sweet and funny and fun and wise.

(And yes, totally affirming of my ridiculous hobby.)

Cath is starting her freshman year at a Nebraska university, and for the first time in her life, she doesn't have her outgoing twin, Wren, to rely on--her sister didn't want to be roommates, so Cath is stuck with Reagan, who is brusque and confident and absolutely terrifying. Even worse, she's stuck with Levi, Reagan maybe-boyfriend, who hangs out in their room constantly, won't stop talking...and is really, seriously cute. All Cath wants is to be left alone to keep up her real life in the Simon Snow fandom--she's a massively popular writer of fic set in this Harry Potter-esque world, chronicling the romance between Simon and his nemesis/roommate Baz, and she's trying her darnedest to finish her version of the series' denouement before the last book comes out in spring. Meanwhile, she worries about her bipolar dad, unsure whether he can get by without his daughters taking care of him--and as the year wears on, she worries about Wren, who's partying a bit too hard for comfort.

Cath's story is interspersed with excerpts from the Simon Snow books and her own fic, and Rowell does a killer job showing the development of Cath's voice, as well as building a whole fantasy world in these few paragraphs that makes you desperately wish the series was real. There's a lot going on here (sometimes a bit too much, actually) about growing up, detaching and connecting, what it means to be a writer and what it should mean. I'm totally in love with Cath and Levi and Reagan especially (I think she both reminds me of myself and who I really want to be), and the ease of Rowell's writing, which can delineate feeling in a few strokes. Definitely worth staying up too late to finish.

My only real complaint? Coulda used more slash. ;)

Scrambling up-to-date.

I'm not gonna make you listen to my excuses, because snoozers. Let's just get to the good stuff.

First, a handful of comics:

• The second volume of Saga (Brian K. Vaughan/ Fiona Staples) is every bit as marvelous as the first, and I'm just leaving it at that. You should all be reading it.
• Superhero-wise, Chris insisted I'd like Flashpoint (Geoff Johns/ Andy Kubert), and indeed! The Flash is my favorite character in the DC Animated Universe, cause he's such a goofball--this story's quite different, but it's gritty without being too gritty for my taste (*cough Frank Miller cough*), an AU where Barry Allen (The Flash's forensic scientist alter ego) wakes up in a world consumed by the war between the Amazons and the Atlanteans, his old friends scattered and changed, many beyond recognition. There's the parallel-worlds fun of matching up the new characters with the familiar ones; my favorite of these was the reimagining of Captain Marvel as a ragtag bunch of teens, each possessing one of Shazam's powers. And I'm a sucker for time-travel narratives, the more twisty the better.
• And since I've read and loved all of Joe Hill's prose-only fiction, I wanted to add his just-completed comics series, Locke & Key, a try. I didn't dislike it--Hill continues to be my favorite modern horror writer--but I found myself wishing it was a novel; all Gabriel Rodriguez's dudes have really big chins and I found that super distracting. (I know, I'm not very good at reading comics.)

And some books without pictures!

• Jeremias Gotthelf's The Black Spider is nineteenth-century horror in microcosm: come for the deals with the Devil and some frowny-face-earning sexism and class snobbery...stay for the titular evil arachnid literally bursting out of someone's face in gloriously florid detail. So worth it.
• And for my feelings on Catherynne M. Valente's astonishing The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two, I shall refer you to my prior gushing over the series. These are seriously among the best books for children I've ever, ever read. No, scratch that, they are among the best books period I have ever read. This one ends on a cliffhanger, which usually annoys me--but in this case, it just means there's more to come. I am already breathless with anticipation.

(FTC disclaimer: I received free copies of  The Black Spider and The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two from NYRB Classics and Feiwel & Friends/Macmillan Books for Children, in exchange for honest reviews.)

The Waking Dark (Robin Wasserman)

I loved Robin Wasserman's last novel, the occult thriller The Book of Blood and Shadow, so of course I scrambled to pick up The Waking Dark, a harrowing horror story set in small-town Kansas, and read it in a night or two. And while I generally like a soupçon more of the straight-up supernatural chocolate in my horrific peanut butter, Waking Dark is definitely a first-rate novel: heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, thought-provoking, spine-tingling--really a workout for all your internal organs.

To begin with--quite literally--it has one of the best opening chapters I've ever read. It's an account of what Oleander, Kansas, refers to in its aftermath as "the killing day," when five ordinary citizens murder eight others--with shotgun, knife, fire, automobile, pillow--before turning on themselves. Five teenagers (and let me tell you, the age of the protagonists is the only thing making this YA) are at these scenes of sudden carnage: Daniel Ghent, son of the alcoholic, apocalyptic Preacher, who tries to protect his little brother from the worst excesses of their father and the world; Jule Prevette, whose notorious family cooks meth on the decaying outskirts of Oleander; Ellie King, fervently Christian, who witness her reverend crucifying a man before burning the church down with him inside; closeted football player Jeremiah West, whose boyfriend Nick is mowed down by a car; and Cassandra Porter, killer and victim, who smothers the infant boy she's babysitting before jumping out a second-story window. She is the only murderer to survive, incarcerated in what she believes to be a mental hospital, with no explanation to offer.

Oleander buries their dead, as they have done before. In fact, the current town is built on the ruins of the first Oleander, which burned to the ground in 1899, taking 1,123 inhabitants with it--the details of the catastrophe lost to history. A year after the killing day, a tornado sweeps through town, an EF-5 that destroys entire neighborhoods. And a facility on the edge of town, the one Cass has spent a year in, the one which she realizes was never a psych ward at all, as a "doctor" leads her out of the collapsing building and they step over armed and uniformed corpses. After the storm, Oleander finds itself cut off from the outside world--no phones, no internet, tanks and men with guns blocking the roads out. No one tells them why.

But it's clear that things are different: tempers shorten, speculations grow wilder, suspicion and violence creep into the hearts of the townspeople. As their small society begins to spiral out of control, Daniel, Jule, Ellie, West, and Cass, seemingly unaffected by the paranoia and rage flooding Oleander, search for answers. What has happened here? Has the Devil taken over? Or is it simply the darkness in every human heart, brought to the surface and let out to play?

I suppose you could call this a dystopia--Oleander certainly suffers the end of its little world--but like Blood and Shadow before it, Waking Dark is a "kids' book" with serious philosophical consideration behind it. At its core, it grapples with the central questions of human nature: are we, in our most essential selves, good or evil? How are these terms--self, good, evil--even defined? Wasserman doesn't offer answers, and doesn't shield her characters from the consequences of their own actions, giving us a tale that's complex, propulsive, and often genuinely frightening.

P.S. As a native Kansan, I've gotta point out a couple of inaccuracies--there's more than one abortion provider in the state (though not many more); and for Pete's sake, novelists of my acquaintance, the principal crop of this state is WHEAT, not corn. But Wasserman more than makes up for these quibbles with this haunting passage:

Tornadoes, unlike hurricanes, do not get named. A hurricane is an unwelcome houseguest, one you see coming. You can watch it from afar, learning its habits and its nature. The hurricane is the enemy you know well enough to hate, the lover who inevitably betrays. The tornado is the stranger at the door with a knife. It has no features, no habits, no face.

I knooooooow. That second-to-last sentence I will carry with me forever.

(FTC disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from Knopf Books for Young Readers, in exchange for an honest review.)

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making & ...Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (Catherynne M. Valente)

Zounds and wow and holy cow. It is quite possible that Catherynne M. Valente's first two Fairyland books--The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making and The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There--are the best middle-grade (i.e. written for eight-to-twelvers) fantasy books I have ever read. Certainly the best published this century: it ranks easily with E. Nesbit and Edward Eager, with the chronicles of Prydain and Narnia, with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Phantom Tollbooth. Its most modern analogues are Dealing with Dragons and The Tale of Despereaux. And it's simultaneously influenced by all of these and utterly original.

The two books (a third, The Girl Who Soared Above Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Half, is out in October, huzzah!) tell the adventures of September, a little girl from WWII-era Nebraska who's one day Ravished to Fairyland by the Green Wind and his feline steed, the Leopard of Little Breezes. Here is a teeny-weeny handful of the awesome things in these books:

• A wyvern whose father was a library, named A-through-L (he never read the other volumes of the encyclopedia)
• A blue-skinned Marid boy named Saturday, who grants wishes only if you wrestle him into submission
• A sweet-natured soap golem named Lye, whose baths scrub up one's courage and wishes and luck
• A semi-sentient smoking jacket
• Herds of wild velocipedes sweeping across the plains
• Turquoise kangaroos called Järlhopps who mine memories
• A root cellar for world mythology at the bottom of Fairyland, stocked with edibles like Idun's Apple Butter, Kali's Red-Hot Pickled Peppers and Coyote's Extra-Fine Cornmeal Floor
• A narrative barometer with readings like Katabasis, Anabasis, Locked Room Mystery, Treasure Hunt, and Edda
• A sly and compassionate narrator
• And most of all: a heroine who is plucky and brave without being violent

I would quote the whole of both books for you if I could--the writing is consciously Victorian, with lots of Capitalized Nouns, and it's funny and wise and layered, and scary in the right places and in the right ways, and...oof. Just so good. Good to read aloud, good to read as a kid, good to read as an adult. I'll share one passage that my friend Michele (at whose I HAVE TOO MANY BOOKS HELP organizing/giveaway party I obtained my copy of Circumnavigated) underlined, saving me the trouble: "Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble."

I am jealous of and awestruck by and grateful to Ms. Valente for writing these books, and I want everyone to read them. EVERYONE. For an amuse-bouche of the style and the world, there's a prequel short story you can read online, "The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland--For a Little While." I dare you to read it and not want more.

Lola and the Boy Next Door (Stephanie Perkins)

Do I even have to tell you how much I loved Stephanie Perkins's Lola and the Boy Next Door? After gushing about her first novel, Anna and the French Kiss, for 700 words? (And for many more to pretty much anyone who'll listen.) Ain't no sophomore slump here, let me assure you.

Lola (for Dolores) Nolan has just turned 17 and is pretty happy with her life: she lives in a gingerbread Victorian in San Francisco with her dads; she's got a hawt, 22-year-old rock star boyfriend, Max; and she's got big plans to go to her school's winter formal dressed as Marie Antoinette. Fashion plate's an understatement to describe Lola--she's a whole fashion tea service, part Claudia Kishi, part Weetzie Bat, wearer of wigs and vintage weirdness and seamstress extraordinaire. She is so cool, you guys. I wish I had been friends with her in high school, but I think I would've been too shy. Maybe I'd just have blurted "I LIKE YOUR SHOES" in the hall one day and run away?

But conflict arrives, as arrive it must in traditional narrative structure. While Lola's still dealing with her dads' disapproval of Max (being an adult myself, of course, I am squarely in their corner. He is Too Old For You, Young Lady), and the reappearance of her estranged biological mother, the Bell family moves back next door, having spent the past two years traveling for daughter Calliope's figure skating career. Lola's been dreading this day since they left, knowing it will bring Calliope's twin brother, Cricket, back into her life. (Oh, Cricket, tall, lanky, well-dressed, whip-smart, clockwork-thingummy-inventing Cricket. How do you manage to be hotter than Étienne St. Clair, hero of Anna, when I had previously believed such a thing impossible?) And she doesn't know what to do about Cricket. She's known him her whole life, and been half in love with him for most of it. And even though she tells herself she's happy with Max, she's spending more and more time chatting with Cricket through their bedroom windows . . .

I liked pretty much ALL THE THINGS in this book (Oh, Anna and Étienne are in this one too!!! Hip hip!!!!), but one favorite aspect that bears mentioning: I love that Lola makes bad decisions, and that there are consequences, and that she has to take steps to fix things--with her parents, with Cricket, with Max, with her best friend, with herself. It's so honest, and important, and not didactic at all, and I'm just in awe at Perkins's skill with emotional characterization. Cannot wait for her third novel, Isla and the Happily Ever After, publishing in September--I could get an ARC before then, most likely, but this is a lady who deserves my hard-earned ducats for sure. And yours.

A Great and Terrible Beauty (Libba Bray)

Libba Bray's first novel, the excellently titled A Great and Terrible Beauty, is basically a Victorian girls' school version of The Craft. Which is one of those things I didn't know I wanted, until I Really Really Did.

It's the opening installment of a trilogy narrated by Gemma Doyle, whose mother's murder uproots her from her lifelong home in Bombay and lands her, unhappily, at Spence Academy outside London. Gemma makes friends with first her roommate Ann, a meek scholarship student for whom governess will be a step up from her parents' lot, and then, grudgingly, two popular girls--the beautiful Pippa, a merchant's daughter about to be married off to a Mr. Bumble forty years her senior, and Felicity Worthington, whose cruel exterior hides deep loneliness and frustration. All four girls yearn for something they can't have: Felicity for power, Pippa for true love, Ann for beauty, and Gemma, who discovered the day of her mother's death that she possesses frightening and seemingly uncontrollable occult powers, for normalcy. Led by a diary from two decades before, whose authoress bears a mysterious connection to a tragic fire that destroyed Spence's east wing, the girls begin to dabble in magic, finding their way to a fantasy world called the Realms. The freedom they find there is intoxicating; as Gemma says, "It isn't that we do what we want. It's that we're allowed to want at all." Of course, not all is at it seems, in the Realms or the real world, and dark forces slowly begin to reveal themselves. (Will have to read the next two books, Rebel Angels and The Sweet Far Thing, for the full arc.)

I quite enjoyed this novel, but I do have one big quibble--Bray repeats a couple of Oh Those Repressive Victorian tropes that are dubious, if not entirely spurious. For instance, while displaying one's ankles was inappropriate, certainly, it wouldn't have caused a scandal on the life-ruining level--though running naked through the woods, as the girls do in a scene eerily reminiscent of The Secret History, would probably come close. More worrisome to me is that she repeats the almost certainly false advice to marriageable daughters that they should "lie back and think of England" during sex; I'm not an historian, but a moment's research shows that the first written instance of this phrase is in a private journal from 1912, which is Edwardian. Had it been commonly used, wouldn't someone have used it, seriously or in mockery, before then, for instance in some of the Victorian's eras OCEANS of porn? Obviously, I'm not claiming that the Victorian era was not a period of extremely limited options for women, particularly as teenagers. Rather, it's precisely because of this, and the underlying parallels between the plights of these young women and the modern ones who read the book, for whom there are often still "no safe choices....Only other choices," that makes me wish she'd been more rigorous. (Also, must there be corsets on the covers of all three books? I prefer this Czech edition (which remembers Gemma's in mourning), or this awesome Dutch one.)

Navigating Early (Clare Vanderpool)

Navigating Early, Clare Vanderpool’s follow-up to her Newbery-winning debut, Moon Over Manifest, didn’t wow me as much as her first novel—but it’s still sweet and compelling, a worthy addition to historical children’s fiction.

Narrator Jack Baker is thirteen in 1945, freshly mourning his mother, when the naval-captain father he hardly knows uproots him from his Kansas home and enrolls him in boarding school on the coast of Maine. Poor Jack’s so overwhelmed by his first glimpse of the ocean that he throws up on the sandy shore. (As a fellow transplanted plains-dweller, I can relate—though I’ve never had so strong a reaction, I think I’ll always be unsettled by the enormity of the sea.) But even the Atlantic seems shallow compared to Jack’s loneliness (is that a terrible simile? I worry that’s a terrible simile. Ah, well, if so, forgive me). And so he drifts into an unlikely friendship with Early Auden, “the strangest of boys,” who sorts jellybeans to calm himself down, who reads an epic voyage in the digits of pi. The two set off on a voyage of their own along the Appalachian Trail, ostensibly in search of a notorious bear . . . the discoveries they make, of course, are more personal, though perhaps as difficult and dangerous as bringing down such a beast.

Like I said above, I was less amazed by this one as her previous book, but it’s more the greatness of the latter than any fault of the former. And part of it’s definitely my own fault—I found Jack’s and Early’s episodic travels, full of larger-than-life characters, somewhat improbable. That’s thoroughly intentional on Vanderpool’s part, however, an obvious-in-retrospect homage to the Odyssey. (The classical scholar in me hangs her head in shame.) There’s a certain New England Huck Finn-iness to it, too, fun without being frivolous. While Early himself could easily have become a Manic Pixie Dream Autistic Kid, serving only as a means for Jack to work through his own pain, he’s a deeper character than that. Early has losses of his own, and is even less equipped to navigate out from among them than Jack, being daunted and confused by emotions in general. Both boys are broken at the start of the book; by the end, they’ve moved in the right direction.

Etiquette & Espionage (Gail Carriger)

Gail Carriger's YA debut, Etiquette & Espionage, is set in the same steampunk, vampires-n-werewolves-n-ghosts-oh-my Victorian England as her endlessly charming Parasol Protectorate series, cause enough for celebration--this was one of those ARCs I clasped to my bosom in delight before even cracking the cover. Even better, it's set at a girl's school for spies and assassins, and since it takes place 30 years previous to the Parasol novels, a couple of characters appear as little girls! And there is a clockwork sausage dog named Bumbersnoot!!

For anyone who'd like a plot summary in lieu of my jumping up and down waving my hands about in glee (I can't say I'm doing it literally right at this moment, but believe you me it has occurred): 14-year-old Sophronia Angelina Temminnick is a rough-and-tumble, mechanically minded miss, a terrible disappointment to her mother, who packs her off to Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality, much to Sophronia's chagrin. However, she soon learns that elocution and country dances are far from the principal subjects of said school--weapons training, poison, and the judicious use of fainting spells are all required courses, and said "finishing" is less of the young ladies themselves than of "anything and anyone" who needs it.

This winning premise is of course right in Carriger's wheelhouse, juxtaposing mannered, deadpan prose, ingenious tech, and perilous sleuthing. And she slides effortlessly into writing for a younger demographic--heck, I'd give this to a ten-year-old with enough Nancy Drew and middle-grade Gaiman under her (or his) belt. I mean, I'd sell them a copy, cause they ain't getting their grubby little paws on mine.

P.S. BUMBERSNOOT FAN ART OMG

Anna and the French Kiss (Stephanie Perkins)

Oh my gosh. Guys. I loved Stephanie Perkins' Paris-set YA romance Anna and the French Kiss. I loved it so much that I am going to violate my most cardinal rule, the one about not talking about books as if they are romantic partners, because I've noticed a lot of lady bloggers do that and I think it is gross . . . but.

I kind of wanna marry this book.

I mean, I waited two full days before I started reading something else, and I usually put my next book in my purse when I'm 30 or so pages from the end of something so I don't have to spend even one minute not reading. I was so melancholy when it was over, not cause it doesn't end happily AT LONG LAST GEEZ, but because I wasn't reading it anymore. Really, I haven't been so captivated by a book in a while. (Maybe NW was the last one? Ha. I'll lay euros to eclairs I'm the only reviewer to compare Perkins to Zadie Smith.)

Obviously, my experience with YA is different from that of a for-realsies young adult, for whom I imagine this would read as aspiration--for me it's nostalgia, and a sort of sweet contentment with where I've ended up. (I was trying to find a single word for the latter feeling, cause I'm sure some language has it, but instead I'm going to quote Eudora Welty: "Content like a little white kitty in a basket.")

Our heroine, Anna (such a good name for a heroine, right? And she's dyed a blond streak in her hair, which I totally did at her age), is packed off to the School of America in Paris for her senior year by her hilariously Nick-Sparksian father, author of books with one-word titles where people fall in love and then contract terminal diseases. She's furious, and scared, and she doesn't even speak French. Luckily, her next-door neighbor, Meredith, is sweet and welcoming, with a ready-made group of friends for Anna to fall into . . . including half-French, half-American, London-raised Étienne St. Clair, who's funny and smart and impossibly gorgeous. The only problem is his longtime girlfriend, in college across town.

This may be the best book I've ever read about falling in love. There's wild attraction, of course--and it's YA, so it's allllllll tension, all unspoken longings and impassioned glances and OMG his leg is touching mine in the movie theater is that on purpose? and . . . excuse me, I'll be on Holodeck Four.

BUT. Attraction is easy, and easy to write about. What amazes me about Anna is that it's just as much about the process of falling in love with a person, a whole one, an individual. So we learn with Anna not just that St. Clair is the hottest thing on four wheels, but that he's short, and scared of heights, and hates his father, and afraid of change. And Perkins doesn't rely overmuch on the "we talked for hours" narrative dodge--no, they talk and talk, and their dialogue is natural and funny and awesome. Though it's not all sweetness and light, either--they hurt and are hurt, and yell and bicker, and carry around stresses of their own. It's a real relationship, and it's a joy to read about.

Now I'm getting melancholy again, as this post comes to an end, because it's another step away from the book. But I know I'll have scenes and characters replaying in my head for a long time. I snapped up her follow-up, Lola and the Boy Next Door, right away, hardcover schmardcover, and I'm SO MAD I'll have left NYC by September when the last of the trio, Isla and the Happily Ever After, comes out, because I won't be able to squee about it in person with the co-worker who'd been after me to read Anna for like a year. We'll just be monopolizing each other's Twitter feeds, I suspect.

And to my husband, who is no doubt faux-belligerent over me saying I want to marry something else: it's because, sweetie, it reminds me of falling in love with you. Which I still do, every day.

The Giver (Lois Lowry)

I think I'm supposed to remember Lois Lowry for Number the Stars, an Important Holocaust Novel--and I'm sure I read that one in my youth--but as an awkward smartypants little girl with glasses, I'm most indebted to her for writing Anastasia Krupnik and its sequels. Kept Love and Hate lists for years. (Oh, and looking at her bibliography, I also loved Taking Care of Terrific and The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline, which both look to be out of print, boo.) Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that I hadn't read The Giver,, which won 1994's Newbery; now that I have, I wish it had been published ten years earlier, because I would've loved it as a kid. Beginner's dystopia, so much better and more complicated than The Hunger Games!

It's written from the point of view of almost-teenaged Jonah, though his community doesn't reckon ages like we do--every December, all children born that year become Ones, the next year Twos, and so forth. Each advancement is celebrated in a ceremony attended by all, and each new "age" brings with it a new set of responsibilities: Sixes receive the bikes everyone uses to get around, Eights give up their "comfort object," a stuffed animal of species none of them recognize, like elephants and bears. Jonah is about to become a Twelve, the last numbered ceremony, when all the children are told what position they'll hold in the adult community--Nurturer (like Jonah's father), Pilot, Law, Birthmother, and so forth. Jonah is assigned to train with the Receiver, who holds the collective memory of what mankind was like before it adopted the strict ranks and rules of their community . . . pleasures, pains, colors, music.

The Giver's not didactic--too well-written for that--but it raises questions not usually put before middle-grade readers (and they should be, they should!): what are peace, safety, security worth giving up? Can we gain from unhappiness and injury? How should we treat the very young, the very old? And (as Jonah struggles with his knowledge of the world before Sameness) when we begin to feel that authority is wrong, what can--or should--we do to change things?

Lowry wrote two other middle-grade dystopias related to The Giver--2000's Gathering Blue and 2004's The Messenger--before bringing the storylines together in this fall's Son. I'm not gonna lie, I'm a little disappointed in this giving in to the series fever endemic to kids' books these days; I also really liked that The Giver has an ambiguous ending, and it's too bad that now there's a canonical continuation for the characters. But you know what? I'll bet they're good.

Guest post! by Immortal Lycanthropes author Hal Johnson

Since I'm sticking by my "don't review friends' books" code, I can't just tell you Hal Johnson's Immortal Lycanthropes is great--though it is! But I've spent most Tuesday nights over the past couple of years immersed in a Hal-created world, playing a literally epic game of Dungeons & Dragons, based in an alternate tenth-century where all the legends of every country are true. (Turns out Albania has the craziest folktales. Seriously, look 'em up!)

And Lycanthropes, his first YA novel, is similarly wide-ranging, ambitious, and wryly funny--and exactly what it says on the tin. It's the story of Myron Horowitz, a horribly scarred, friendless thirteen-year-old who learns he's part of an underworld of were-mammals--not humans who can turn into animals, but animals who can turn into humans--and that the mystery of who he really is means a lot of people want him dead.

One of my favorite things about the book is the debt it owes to 19th-century "boys' adventure" books, a largely forgotten genre whose patterns and tropes nevertheless echo throughout modern fiction. Hal, who's probably the most well-read person I've ever met, graciously agreed to write up an arbitrarily-numbered list of Five Boys' Adventure Books We Should All Read--so without further ado . . . 

Hi! I’m Hal Johnson, Anna’s Dungeon Master, and she was kind enough to offer me a guest spot here. I wrote an adventure novel coming out tomorrow, Immortal Lycanthropes, that was in part inspired by the boys’ adventure novels I read as a kid. Because I tended to get my books from garage sales and my grandparents’ attics, a lot of them were older, and I ended up with a real affection for nineteenth-century boys’ adventure fiction. So I thought I’d introduce a couple of interesting books of the genre.

The problem with boys’ adventure books is that a lot of them are not very good. G.A. Henty wrote over a hundred books for boys; four of them were adapted into comic books in Classics Illustrated, and they may be better in that form.  So any interested reader may have to suffer through leaden prose and wooden characters; but it’s not a real adventure unless you suffer for it, is it? The books I picked are not necessarily the best boys’ adventure novels of the period (The Coral Island, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Howard Pyle are notable for their absence), but they’re all pretty awesome. They’re pretty awesome even if you’re not (as we probably all should be) a twelve-year-old boy.

Best of all, they’re all public domain and available for free on the internets!

1. The Story of a Bad Boy by Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1870)

Thomas Bailey Aldrich is one of those writers who used to be everywhere and is now almost totally forgotten. The books he edited, especially The Young Folks’ Library series, or his poetry or travel writing, are always turning up in used bookstores. But his finest work may be the pseudo-autobiographical boys’ book The Story of a Bad Boy, often cited as the first American book to depict boyhood realistically (in this way it’s exactly analogous to the British Tom Brown’s School Days). I say pseudo-autobiographical because some parts of the book are clearly fictional—one reunion in particular would have seemed hoary and implausible even decades earlier in a Dickens novel—but others ring so true that they must have happened, or been remembered, that way.

The plot is episodic, which is to say nonexistent, just a series of events in the life of a boy newly come to coastal New Hampshire. But Bailey establishes, even more than Tom Brown, what would become an axiom of boy’s literature through most of the next century: that the true adventure is not imperialistic warfare (ala Henty) but childhood itself, and that what must first be explored are the woods at the edge of town. Bailey’s account of Fort Slatter—a snow fort, of course—and its heroic defense is written like an Iliad, and all the literature of sea voyages can offer little as harrowing as the voyage of the little rowboat Dolphin. Eliade remarked a hundred years later that children live in a mythical time, and Bailey was among the first to remember this fact into adulthood, and record it. Robert Newton Peck, John D. Fitzgerald, Bertrand Brinley, et al., (not to mention, on a different vector, Jean Shepherd or Robert Paul Smith) would be unthinkable without this innovation.

Although it’s sometimes clunky, sometimes embarrassingly melodramatic, and sometimes, especially near the beginning, unnecessarily racist in the way only old “humorous” passages can be, The Story of a Bad Boy is well worth reexamination, both as a historical record of American boyhood and for its passages of mythic grandeur.

2. In Search of Treasure by Horatio Alger (1894)

Horatio Alger is more known than read nowadays, known for the rags-to-riches archetype, the poor boy rising through “luck and pluck” (his terms) to the middle-class.

In a lot of ways, Alger exemplifies all the worst in nineteenth-century boy’s books, or in fact in nineteenth-century popular literature in general. He’s smug and moralistic, his characters are priggish, coincidence favors the hero so heavily that it can be easy to feel sympathy for the villain. All his plots are more or less the same, so much so that his biography of James A. Garfield can be distinguished only insofar as here the hard-working poor boy grows up to be respectable and then [SPOILER] becomes president and gets assassinated; the assassination of the protagonist doesn’t recur in other Alger books. As he aged, Alger became fonder and fonder of that C19 boogeyman, the unexpected inheritance, so much so that one wag (whose name I’ve forgotten) suggested Alger proves that in America any young man can, through hard work and enterprise, grow up to be the grandson of a billionaire. His books are filled with accidental sexual innuendo, and not only is a minor character in Struggling Upward named Fanny Pratt (ha!), but a major character in several books who searches for orphan boys to adopt as his wards is named Dick Hunter (ha ha!).

Alger’s unflagging faith in America and the middle class are easy to parody (Nathanael West did the best job, in the still-hilarious A Cool Million), but at the same time, his vision of the middle class is the warmest in all of literature, and a breath of fresh air for anyone used to the contempt of a Flaubert or a Stendahl. Alger’s middle class is unpretentious, generous, hardworking, and tolerant of anything except alcohol and billiards. Above all they are not snobs. Snobs (along with kidnappers, of course) are Alger’s true villains. You can almost always pick out the bad guy in town in an Alger book because he’s the one insisting on being called “squire.” Time and again, the good guys stress (in the face of an upturned nose) that any honest work is honorable. Bankers (always good guys here) nod in hearty approval at ditch diggers and street peddlers, while the idle squires are busy tsking. Above all there is the belief that wealth must be used to benefit others, and virtuous tycoons are always willing to give an opportunity to any ”frank-faced” boy; when these boys make it good, they become the benefactors, in later books, to other “frank” urchins. (“Frankness,” along with “pluckiness” and perhaps industriousness are the cardinal Alger virtues.)

But we’re not here to talk about the middle class, we’re here to talk about AWESOME ADVENTURE! Because for all their problems, Alger books are always home to awesome adventure. Often they take place in the streets of New York, but they may well involve a trip to the wild west; and they always involve a boy hero leaving home (if he has one!) and striking off on his own and braving the unknown. Whether he’s facing grizzly bears or grifters depends on where he is, but he’s got to be facing one or the other.

It’s somewhat arbitrary, therefore, which Alger book to feature. I picked In Search of Treasure, just because it’s one of the more adventuresome.  It’s the story of young Guy Fenwick, whose uncle left him clues to a pirate treasure buried on an island in the Indian Ocean. By odd chance, Guy gets a job on a ship sailing to India soon after. Guy learns that the Indian Ocean is really big, though, and instead of going anywhere near his treasure, he finds in Bombay a patron and a job, and has to speed over to England to overthrow the reign of a tyrannical schoolmaster (!).

Alger characters have a tendency to go on a long journey two-thirds of the way through a book, a structural habit few authors have chosen to imitate. In In Search of Treasure, this means that the final third of the book starts with Guy actually setting off on his treasure hunt. There will be betrayal and marooning and benevolent older wealthy men, and of course, back home the town swell, who thought money made him a big shot, needs to get a look at all that treasure.

This is all perfectly ridiculous, I’ll admit, but Alger tells it all with such a straight face that it is irresistible. It’s pure kitsch, but anyone with any kind of fondness for kitsch plus adventure will find a real-life treasure chest in Alger’s oeuvre.

3. The Boy Hunters by Captain Mayne Reid (1853)

Captain Mayne Reid’s The Boy Hunters is in some ways not a very good book, either, but parts are crazy enough to be capital-G Great. The adventure portion, which features three brothers trekking through the western frontier in order to bag a white buffalo to impress some relative of Napoleon’s (!), is fine, when it’s actually happening, but that’s only about a third of the books. Another third is taken up with tedious lectures (often delivered by the brainy middle brother for the amusement and edification of the others) on the life cycles of animals and the industrial uses of plants—as well as strange rants against scientific naturalists and theoreticians in general. Fortunately another third of the book is taken up with NATURE SPECTACLE, and it’s pretty phenomenal. There are quite a few fight scenes, as nature red in tooth and claw grimly acts out a blood-soaked drama for our heroes to watch. This is the real meat of the book.

In one chapter, awesomely titled “Chain of Destruction,” the lads watch a fly get eaten by a hummingbird, which in turn is eaten by a tarantula, which in turn is eaten by a chameleon that is maimed by a skink that is eaten by a snake that is eaten by a kite that is killed by an eagle that is shot by our heroes. “This was the last link in the chain of destruction!” Although the moralistic middle brother helpfully points out that a bear could come along at any moment and form another link in this chain.

There are few chapters in literature that can compare to this one for a combination of pure action, bloodshed, awe in the face of nature, and philosophical extrapolation. Reid wrote over two dozen books, but if he'd written nothing but this one chapter, he deserves to be remembered in the canon.

4. Stalky & Co. by Rudyard Kipling (1899)

All right-thinking people hate Stalky & Co. Wells hated it enough that in his Outline of History he spends more space complaining about Stalky & Co. than on the life and career of Abraham Lincoln; and it was this condemnation of Stalky that I absorbed long before I read the book.

It’s not that Stalky isn’t a hateful book. It’s just that it’s an honest one, and if you were in a nineteenth-century boarding school you’d probably be hateful too.  Stalky and his “co.” of M’Turk and Beetle (modeled, apparently, on Kipling’s school-age friends, with Beetle being Kipling himself) get themselves into scrapes and outwit teachers the way modern analogues such as Bruno and Boots, or Harry Potter, do—but everything seems more violent, sordid, and terrifying than you would expect from a book about school. Except that violent, terrifying, and sordid should be the watchwords for any book about school. Stalky may be willing to go further than other schoolboys of literature, but it’s because his world is a darker and more horrible one. It’s easy to forget the boys Stalky ties up and tortures (in the scene that so upset Wells) are being paid back precisely the tortures they have inflicted on other, smaller children. Stalky doesn’t do this to make the innocent world of childhood a fallen world; presented with a fallen world, he leads his co. in an attempt to make it right. (Or sometimes to prank his enemies.)

This is all made explicit in the final chapter, where Kipling (no longer in his Beetle disguise) comes right out and explains how the skills the boys developed fighting against their school have made them expert at imperialistic adventure in their adulthoods. It goes without saying that any nineteenth-century British writer (let alone Kipling) will be more excited about imperialism than we’ll be today, but if you take it for what it’s supposed to stand for here (duty, patriotism, progress, helping society at large) you’ll find one of the most radically audacious proclamations about childhood any major writer has managed to slip through to a mass audience. Childhood is here painted as a Bizarro-world where the same actions that make you a bad boy (as Stalky certainly is) make you a good adult. The very morality of the schoolroom is backwards. No wonder Stalky’s vigilantism was needed to clean it up.

This is admittedly interpretive, and I’m not sure any other reader has ever taken the same message from the book—but I think it goes a long way to explaining why so many people hate Stalky and his Co. H. G. Wells could take or leave bourgeois civilization, and he may even be willing to assert that its values were the opposite if an innocent child’s—but he could scarcely play along with Kipling’s dialectic.

Two cautions on Stalky: Although Kipling is obviously a much better stylist than the three authors above, this book is at times almost unreadable because it is drenched in period slang (“Fids! Fids! Oh, fids! I gloat!”), and assumes a knowledge of “forms” and “fags” the lack of which can make a labyrinth of a simple tale. Also, it is often published, with extra stories added, as The Complete Stalky & Co., but the new stories are mostly unnecessary.

Kipling wrote other boys’ adventure books, varying in quality from Kim (snooze!) to The Jungle Books (awesome!), but none of them hold a candle to Stalky & Co. Very few books can.

5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)

This is the big one, probably the greatest American novel and certainly the greatest boy’s adventure story. It’s also a book everyone knows, and almost everyone’s read. There’s no point “introducing” such a well-known book; but what I want to say about it is that it’s possible to read and love Huck Finn without understanding anything about the larger import or meaning that so often get discussed. I first read it in first grade, and it changed my life; of course a great deal went right over my head, and racial politics and ethical debates were completely beyond my ken, but I understood the idea of floating down a river, completely removed from society, and that was enough for me. It wasn’t something I was ever going to do—I assume rafting on the Mississippi is now illegal, and I assume if I tried it anyway, I’d just end up drowning—but the idea that theoretically one could pack up and run away from it all, was enough to get me through much of childhood, and good chunks of adulthood. Toby Tyler and to a lesser extent The Cruise of the Dazzler offered a similar opportunity, but Huck Finn offered it best.

(Another confusing thing it took me a long time to understand was that “pison” meant “poison.” Through several readings I honestly though that Huck was planning to piss on a dog.)

I’ve read a lot of criticism—the good and the bad kind—of Huck Finn over the years, and I’m glad the book can garner the kind of critical attention it does. But this is the rare book that you can strip most meaning from without crippling it. The spine of the book is a boy (and, paradoxically, a slave) who momentarily are free. I’ve never been free, but I tasted it vicariously, and that was enough. Everything else in the book, and every other analysis of the book, is superfluous.

YAP Break!; or, fun with connecting titles

The Young Adult Paranormal Break is a time-honored tradition for me, an occasional rebellion against Grown-Up Books, a respite from the worst excesses of literary fiction. This time around, I couldn't resist reading three novels I'd already been interested in which happened to have transitive-property titles: to wit, Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Leah Bardugo's Shadow and Bone, and Robin Wasserman's The Book of Blood and Shadow.

I loved Taylor's Lips Touch: Three Times (despite being mildly embarrassed by the title, and oof, that paperback cover is rough), and Daughter bewitched me on the first dang page, with the phrase "the occasional cheek-chew of bitterness." Yes, thank you! Perfect image, taking the sounds of language into account! It's like she's a writer!!! Oh, all the hearts.

But my girl-crush on this book goes beyond prose, of course. The fantasy world Taylor creates is both wildly detailed and deep and totally original, qualities in woefully short supply. The story centers on Karou, a blue-haired art student living in Prague, known among her classmates for her elaborate stories and sketches of a family of imaginary beasts: serpent-woman, giraffe-man, parrot-lady, and ram-horned Brimstone, the Wishmonger who deals in teeth, with his raven/bat messenger Kishmish on his shoulder.

Except it's all true--the beasts, who call themselves chimaera, raised Karou from a baby. And her blue hair? A wish, a small one, for they come in denominations corresponding to their power. Brimstone (who I inescapably picture as Urkonn from Joss Whedon's Fray comic. She's even got the right color hair!) only ever gives Karou small wishes to spend, scuppies and shings, never a lucknow or a gavriel. (And she's not willing to pull out her own teeth to earn a bruxis, like the sad, demon-haunted Moroccan graverobber, Izîl, part of Brimstone's sketchy global network of dealers.)

Then Karou's double life is shattered, thanks to an angelically beautiful being called Akiva (super-gorgeous people are a YA/romance trope I sorta roll my eyes at, but I heart Taylor too much to really complain), and she finds herself plunged into the middle of a never-ending war in another world entirely, a world to which she's somehow connected. Her unraveling of her true identity, and her search for a way Elsewhere to reunite with her monstrous family, intertwine with one o' them Delirious Scorching All-Encompassing love stories that would be tiresome if it wasn't awesome because, to repeat: Taylor is a dang writer. Liked this book so much I don't even care that it's part one of a trilogy like everything else in YA these days--instead, I'm giddy with anticipation.

Mixed feelings about Shadow and Bone. On the positive side, the setting was amazing! And unique: fantasy Russia, like Tolstoy with magic! The stand-in kingdom, Ravka, is cut off from its ports by the Shadow Fold, a positively Miévillesque rift of darkness teeming with carnivorous winged beasts. Orphaned Alina (hey, that's my mother-in-law's name!) is crossing with her regiment when they are attacked, and in a moment of panic discovers she can channel sunlight. She's whisked away to the headquarters of the Grisha, orders of robed mages with power over everything from metal to storms, led by the mysterious (and alluring) Darkling. The system of magic (is there a technical term for this? Thaumaturgy?) is unique and fun, with the Grisha classified into Materialki (makers and engineers), Etherealki (summoners of weather and winds), and Corporalki (healers and the terrifying Heartrenders), with their own cliques and uniforms. And it's a kick to have onion domes and kvas instead of turrets and mead.

However, I'm not crazy about Alina herself, and since she narrates in first person, she's inescapable. A lot of it's the comes-with-the-territory of fantastic protagonists thinking and talking like modern American teenagers (well, modern American teenagers who don't curse), but she's also kinda whiny about being So Special and it's So Hard. (Yes, this also comes with the territory.) She doesn't ruin the book (see: Setting, amazing); still, I would have enjoyed it more in third person.

I really liked The Book of Blood and Shadow, howevs! It's more of an occult historical thriller than a straight-up paranormal, with dueling, ancient secret societies, and a Renaissance machine for talking to God, and the freakin' Voynich manuscript! Shades of Foucault's Pendulum! (And my friend Hal Johnson's upcoming, awesome Immortal Lycanthropes.) Well-researched, well-paced, whip-smart. Also, when was the last time you read a YA novel with serious discussion of the existence of God?

In one night, Nora Kane's life goes to pieces: one best friend killed, the other (his girlfriend) catatonic, her own boyfriend missing and the prime suspect. Unwilling to believe Max would ever harm Chris and Adriane, Nora suspects a connection to the research project they'd been working on with eccentric professor Anton Hoffpauer (himself the victim of a stroke shortly before the murder): translating a cache of letters related to the Voynich manuscript, an absolutely real and crazy mysterious 15th-century document written in an unknown language and script, full of bizarre astronomical and botanical illustrations that don't seem to correspond to anything concrete. Nora was tasked with the letters of Elizabeth Weston, stepdaughter of alchemist Edward Kelley--both real people; Kelley talked to angels, and hung out in the court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II until his imprisonment and death. Puzzles in Elizabeth's correspondence set Nora and Adriane on a quest to Prague to clear Max's name, find Chris's real killer, and possibly reconstruct an apparatus known as the Lumen Dei, a four-hundred-year-old direct line to the Lord. Their path is full of danger and classical scholarship, betrayal and secrets and leaps of faith. Oh, and the golem of Prague! And Kepler! And Latin ciphers!

Not to mention: extra cool that Blood blends right back into the Prague setting of Daughter . . . and extra, extra cool that these three word-shifting titles manage to feed right into the sequel to Daughter (NOVEMBER 6TH SO FAR AWAY AUGH), Days of Blood and Starlight! Waiting with bated breath.

Liar & Spy (Rebecca Stead)

Rebecca Stead won a richly-deserved Newbery Medal in 2010 for the brilliant time-travel tale When You Reach Me. Her follow-up, Liar & Spy, may be less structurally ambitious, but is every bit as delightful. I read it in one go last Friday! Like slipping back decades to the read-while-walking little kid I used to be. (Yes, I did in fact walk into things, on a fairly regular basis. IT WAS WORTH IT)

Georges ("Here's a piece of advice that you'll probably never use: If you want to name your son after Georges Seurat, you could call him George, without the S. Just to make his life easier") is a twelve-year-old Brooklynite who's just moved out of his childhood house (including the best room ever, where his dad bolted the bottom of an old fire escape to the wall as a totally badass bunk bed) into an apartment with his recently laid-off architect dad and ICU nurse mom, who's constantly pulling double shifts to shore up the family income, meaning she leaves before he awakes and gets home after he's asleep. The two communicate by leaving each other notes in Scrabble tiles. He's lonesome at school--former BFF Jason sits with the cool kids now, and a pair of jerks in his science class have loudly decided he's a freak--but at home, he strikes up a friendship with a kid who lives upstairs, Safer.

Safer's oddities aren't limited to his name. (His parents, it turns out, let their kids name themselves; his older brother is bird-lover Pigeon, his sweet-toothed little sister Candy.) He doesn't go to school; instead, he fills his time walking dogs, observing a nest of wild parrots on a nearby roof, and spying on the mysterious and sinister Mr. X, a mission on which he enlists Georges' help. At first it seems like harmless fun--but Safer keeps pushing, and Georges starts worrying they'll find themselves in real danger.

Stead is fantastic at creating quirky characters with heart--even minor ones, like Georges's lab partner, Bob English Who Draws, so called because he doodles through class, turn out to have layers and interests of their own (in Bob's case, spelling reform, leading to notes like "Smial no madder whut"). And the book's often hilarious--my favorite part is Pigeon relating the story of how he realized with horror as a child that "Chicken is chickens?" Co-worker @salseraBeauty seconds Candy's aspiration to grow up and marry Mr. Orange--"It's the only flavor I don't like, actually. . . . That way we can always share the pack. . . . Starbursts. Lifesavers. Jolly Ranchers. Whatever." I think I've found mine. ;)

There's also the Science Unit of Destiny, the mistaken map of the tongue, a neighborhood Chinese place with fortunes like "It's a cookie, Sherlock," several repetitions of the awesome "interrupting cow" knock-knock joke . . . and a few lies, and a few secrets, a few bittersweet memories, and a few moments of triumph.

Sunday picture book extravaganza!!!!!

I really intended to do these quarterly, but oh, look, 196 days later. So this'll be a long one, at least visually.

Hippopposites, Janik Coat: Not only is this title super fun to say, it breaks out of the usual batch of opposite concepts (small/large, light/heavy) to feature fun pairs like opaque/transparent or clear/blurry, with textural elements to make the dichotomies easier to grasp--full/empty, for instance, removes layers of the board-book cardboard to create a dent in the latter!


Cats' Night Out, Caroline Stutson and Jon Klassen: Totes in love with Klassen 4 EVA for the brilliant I Want My Hat Back; he's also great when he works with other authors. Here, Stutson provides a sweet counting-by-twos rhyme pairing off dancing cats in all sorts of styles, from waltz to jitterbug to conga.




 
Little Owl Lost, Chris Haughton: Love Haughton's blocky, graphic character design for this story of a baby looking for its momma.



And Then It's Spring, Julie Fogliano and Erin Stead: Stead and her husband Philip won the 2011 Caldecott Medal for A Sick Day for Amos McGee. Her delicate pencil-and-woodblock prints are the perfect setting for Fogliano's slow story of winter brown giving way to hopeful green.

Oh No, George!, Chris Haughton: Haughton again! An adorable tale about the title dog, who really wants to be good but doesn't always hold firm against temptation.



Where's Walrus?, Stephen Savage: Hilarious wordless faux-puzzle book--kids will love finding the escaped walrus on every page, especially since the pursuing zookeeper remains clueless!




Petunia Goes Wild, Paul Schmid: Being a human is totally boring and full of rules, thinks Petunia! So she's just gonna be an animal instead. But are there advantages she's overlooked?




Otto the Book Bear, Kate Cleminson: Gentle tale of a storybook bear who likes to adventure outside his pages. When his book disappears while he's off on a jaunt, he sets off to find a new place to share.




Cat Heaven, Cynthia Rylant: Oh, man, I can't even think about this without getting sniffly. A wonderful friend sent it to me when I lost a feline friend in February. Right up there with The Tenth Good Thing About Barney in terms of sweetness and solace.



Extra Yarn, Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen: Loved this for the illustrations, obvy, but also it's a story about magical knitting brightening up the world. Hooray!




Dragons Love Tacos, Adam Rubin and Daniel Salmieri: It's true, they do! But while you might think adding spicy salsa is the perfect finishing touch, that way lies disaster.


Squid and Octopus, Friends for Always, Tao Nyeu: A new book by Nyeu, author/illustrator of Wonder Bear and Bunny Days, is something to celebrate. This one follows the best friends through four mini-stories, full of warm fuzzies, imagination, and undersea antics.


Chloe, Instead, Micah Player: Crazy-bright rainbow colors splash up this story of an older sister who wonders if little Chloe will ever be the sister she really wanted.



Zorro Gets an Outfit, Carter Goodrich: Oh, gosh, I love this. Poor little pug Zorro is so embarrassed when his owner makes him wear a superhero costume to the park. But then he meets a really cool dog with an outfit too, and decides maybe it's not so bad. Goodrich perfectly captures the why-me expression of a humiliated canine!





Mommies and Their Babies, Guido van Genechten: Adorable black-and-white board book of animal moms and kids. Sometimes the simplest books are still great.




Good News, Bad News, Jeff Mack: Repetitions of the title are the only words in this rollercoaster story of an optimistic rabbit and a grumpy rat.




It's a Tiger!, David LaRochelle and Jeremy Tankard: This one breaks the fourth wall as the narrator keeps trying to flee the title cat, only to find him again in increasingly silly circumstances. The tiger's design is the real winner here--reminds me of when Hobbes would draw pictures of himself.





This Is Not My Hat, Jon Klassen: You know what? I haven't even read this one. It's not out till October. But if Klassen doesn't continue his hat-based domination of picture-book awesome, well . . . I'll eat my hat.

Angsty teens, Japanese and Nautical-American.

Two great comics, linked by high-schooler protagonists (but not much else).

First, Shuzo Oshimi's The Flowers of Evil, and Angsty Teen #1, Takao Kasuga, who spends his time reading Baudelaire and Having So Many Feelings No One Understands UGH . . . and then one day he succumbs to temptation and steals his crush Saeki's dirty gym uniform. Too late, he learns his crime was witnessed by Nakamura, the weirdest, angriest girl in his class. She's willing to keep her silence, for a price--but she prefers mind games to money. She thinks she's found a kindred spirit in perversion and contempt--and though, in this first volume, Takao vehemently denies they've anything in common, I can't wait to see whether he decides to embrace his inner Baudelaire.

This side of the Pacific--and possibly floating on it--there's Dave Roman's and John Green's Teen Boat! The comic's tagline sums it up neatly: "The angst of being a teen! The thrill of being a boat!" and takes it from there . . . our eponymous hero can, in fact, transform into a yacht. It's a great premise, done to giddy perfection, as in the first arc, where Teen Boat tries to get in good with the jocks by letting them have a party on his nautical form. Manages both to skewer superhero and teen-fiction tropes and play 'em straight. Recommended for pretty much everyone, except maybe my friend Greg, who's terrified of open water.

Paper Towns (John Green)

I wanted Mystery May to include a YA example, and I've been meaning to read John Green for a while, as he's both consistently well-reviewed and bestselling, a rarity for any author, but particularly one who writes books narrated by teenage boys (and he's got a wonderful ear for their dialogue, a rapid-fire mix of vulgarity and in-jokes). Paper Towns won an Edgar (the award named for Mr. Poe), so it was the natural choice.

The mystery here is the disappearance of Margo Roth Spiegelman, who's lived next door to Quentin Jacobsen their whole lives. When they were nine, they found a dead body together. Now that they're high school seniors, their paths rarely cross--he's a band nerd, she's a living legend, hatcher of schemes and haver of unbelievable-but-true adventures like joining the circus or hanging out with rock stars. But one night she shows up at his window, like she used to when they were kids, and talks him into "borrowing" his mom's minivan for an all-nighter of elaborate revenge (capped off by breaking into Sea World in the wee hours). The next Monday, she doesn't show up at school. And when she keeps not showing up, Quentin discovers a series of clues she's left, seemingly only for him, and decides he's the one meant to find her.

I'll admit I spent the first chunk of the book a little miffed by Margo, because boy is she ever a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, all wild and quirky and bringing timid Quentin out of his shell . . . and yeah, there are implausibilities to her character. Really, she ran away to Mississippi one summer and left behind an M, an I, an S, and a P in a bowl of alphabet soup? Ugh. But it's this very convention Green is playing with, it turns out. The more Quentin delves into Margo's life, the hazier she becomes, until he understands that not only is his conception of her flawed, it's only one of several layers of persona she's built up around her, wrapping herself defensively in audacity and riddles. The real mystery Paper Towns considers, then, is subjective existence--how well can we ever, even with the best of intentions, know another human being? Margo's true self, Quentin realizes, is both simpler and more complex than he'd thought: "[t]he fundamental mistake I had always made," he says, "and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make--was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl."

Railsea (China Miéville)

You know, Voltaire famously mocked Leibniz for calling this "the best of all possible worlds." But this is the third spring in a row there's been a new China Miéville novel--Kraken in 2009, Embassytown last year, now Railsea--so HEY VOLTAIRE YOU LOOK PRETTY STUPID. High five, GWL!

So many wonderful things are afoot in Railsea. Part Moby-Dick, part Robert Louis Stevenson, part Miéville's own Iron Council . . . and perhaps most wonderfully, it's a young adult novel (like his previous Alice in Wonderland-y Un Lun Dun) which dials down the body horror and apocalyptic shadings of his adult work without sacrificing depth of writing at all, trusting that, yes, teenagers (and sensitive adults--hi Mom!) can indeed deal with complex sentences (instead of only using commas, even when they're wrong), fourth-wall breaking narrative structure, and ten-pound words like "eruchthonous."

He defines the latter as "that which digs up from underneath & emerges." It's a vital word for the setting he creates, that of the railsea: an endless, twisting system of train tracks that make up the known world. Between lies the dangerous earth, rife with burrowing, carnivorous creatures, beetles and burrowing owls and blood rabbits--and the great southern moldywarpe, a mole as big as an engine. Young Shamus Yes ap Soorap is a doctor's aide on a moletrain, which pursues these behemoths for their meat, fat, and fur--and one mole in particular, Mocker-Jack, nemesis of his one-armed captain, Abacat Naphi.

This storyline--not the only one by any means!--is both awestruck homage to Melville and a sly, loving send-up of same. Since, like any right-thinking individual, my favorite M-D chapter is "The Whiteness of the Whale," how I giggled at Naphi's insistence that the mole is not simply yellow, but "[o]ld-tooth coloured. . . . [T]he hue of ancient parchment. Ivory-reminiscent. Lymphlike. A white stained like the old eyes of frantically ruminating scholars." And he has similar twinkle-in-the-eye fun with academia's incessant analysis of the Great White Whale and its meaning. Most moler captains have a "philosophy," a given animal which they pursue as both beast and symbol, "a principle of knowing or unknowing, humility, enlightenment, obsession, modernity, nostalgia or something." So we have "Captain Genn's Ferret of Unrequitedness; Zhorbal & the Too-Much-Knowledge Mole Rats," Captain Vajpaz's greatstoat as an avatar of speed and acceleration . . . and Naphi, whose prey "hate[s] to be parsed"--he is the "Mole of Many Meanings. . . . Mocker-Jack means everything."

And that's more or less the B plot! Sham himself is mostly uninterested in Naphi's quest; he doesn't care to be a moler at all, wishing he could hunt salvage, the bits and bobs and mysterious circuitry of the innumerable wrecks spread out over the railsea. In the debris of one of these he finds a camera's memory card that ends on an impossible photograph: a single track. The end of the world. His own search for this unknown and unimaginable place is full of danger and epiphany.

Augh, there's so much more I want to mention. His use of the ampersand, which not only makes the pages look all baroque and lovely but serves as visual reminder of how "the lines of the railsea go everywhere but from one place straight to another. It is always switchback, junction, coils around & over our own train-trails." His occasional break from the story to address Story itself, the extended metaphor of "[e]very rail demand[ing] consideration of every other, & all the branches onto which that other rail might switch." This line, which I am seriously considering as a tattoo: "Our minds we salvage from history's rubbish, & they are machines to make chaos into story."

And for my money, it's a sign of true talent for a gritty, dark writer to also convincingly write cuteness. In Un Lun Dun, an animate milk carton named Curdle was the protagonist's loyal and adorable pet; here, Sham adopts a daybat, named Daybe in a moment of on-the-spot panic, who is just the cutie-wutiest wittle critter.

And oh! There's a "landfall shanty" called "We're Going to Get Unbelievably Drunk (in a Pub)." And cultures and religions and animals only glimpsed . . .