Anya's Ghost-- Vera Brosgol

So, on the cover of this book there's a quote from Neil Gaiman calling the book "A masterpiece!" Um, who are we to argue with Neil Gaiman, amirirght?

Anya attends a stuffy high school full of annoyingly perfect classmates and a few who are just plain annoying. Her best friend Soibhan kind of sucks, her mom insists that she spends time with Dima, the extra nerdy FOTB (fresh off the boat) guy from Russia, and the love of her life spends his time making out with someone who is distinctly not Anya.

One day, when brooding and traipsing through the woods after school, Anya falls into a dried up well. While down there, she discovers a skeleton (freaky!) and the ghost of Emily, a teenage girl who claims to have been murdered around the time of the first World War. When Anya gets rescued from the bottom of the well, Emily comes with her. At first, Anya and Emily enjoy their ghost-y hi-jinks... but over time Anya learns a little more about her ghost Emily and all of the chaos that comes with her.

I'm happy to include this GN on our Mock Printz reading list this year. It's both well-written and illustrated, and some of the plot subtleties made it feel more fleshed out than some graphic novels have the space to be. I look forward to hearing teens' reactions to this book, and look forward to reading more by this author.

The Everafter-- Amy Huntley

So, I can't help it... I love all those afterlife type books. Maybe it's because we can never actually know what it will be like until it's too late to write a book about it... Anyway, Amy Huntley's The Everafter should have been right up my alley. Yet somehow I just couldn't go there with her.

Maddy doesn't know where she is or how she got there. All she knows is that she is floating in an outerspace-nothingness kind of place and there are random objects, like a baby rattle, a penny, a pinecone, etc floating near her. She starts calling the place IS because that's what it feels like, and is pretty sure that she's dead... but she doesn't know how she died. When Maddy touches the object nearest to her, her boyfriend's sweatshirt, she is immediately transported into a memory related to that object. She can relive the moment, even alter it a bit, and then eventually comes back to IS. Over time, Maddy figures out how to better maneuver in her new location of IS and even meets up with a few kindred souls... but basically, the whole plot of the novel is moved and detailed by these objects and Maddy's memories.

So in concept, I can see how this works... but in practice I think Huntley kindof fails. I do think it would have been fun to write a book based on memories and objects, but I think it's less fun to read it. I realize that I can be a pretty harsh book critic, and it takes a lot to wow me these days, but still, The Everafter felt flat to me. I would give this book to teen girls who liked A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb, If I Stay by Gayle Forman, or Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin, but all of those books are superior in plot and writing to this one (IMHO).

P.S. So here's a bit of randomness for ya: My ARC copy of this book has the title listed as just The After... but upon publishing, it seems this book is now called The Everafter. Which do you prefer?

Andromeda Klein-- Frank Portman

Yes, I've finally done it.

I finally finished reading Andromeda Klein. So, I've kinda had a bad attitude about this book... I wanted it to grab me from the beginning (it didn't). I wanted it to be compelling (it wasn't). I wanted to like the protagonist (I did. YAY. Small victories.)

So, I read the first two hundred pages on breaks, on the elliptical machine, in line at the grocery, you know all those places where you need to distract yourself from reality a little bit. That wasn't the best way to read this book. Last week I needed to drive to a library branch that is over 2 hours away, each direction, so I listened to the book on CD. And that's when I really started to like it.

Andromeda Klein is a teenage occultist. NOT a wicker girl (wiccan) or a bacon (pagan). She works at the the international house of bookcakes (library), sneaks her dead BFF's little brother bagel worm agony (girly mags) in exchange for some of her weegie (spooky and magical) possessions. After some consumption of christmas trees (gin martinis), she meets a boy who's an emogeekian (emo occultist) and at the urging of Huggy, (her holy gaurdien angel otherwise known as alterverse AK) Andromeda agrees to take Byron the emogeekian on as a neophyte as long as he helps her save the library books from the sylvester mouse list (aka extra hours weeding list).

Wha?????

So you can see why this book was a struggle at first. It's told from Andromeda's perspective, so you have to really get used to her special lexicon in order to understand what the heck she's talking about at all. Also, there are hundreds of pages of Andromeda's perspective on all things occult. As a person who has a decent amount of knowledge on such topics, even I was pretty floored by the sheer mass of it all. Still, there was something charmingly compelling about this book, and no matter how much I wanted to toss it out the window, I just kept coming back to it. And, when listening to the audio, the lexicon isn't as much of a struggle and the funny party came shining through. So yay! I've officially read all of the Mock Printz books for this year!

I would recommend this book to... um...well... that precocious teen who won't stray from the 133s who is obsessed with all things occult and doesn't mind dense reading. I'm sure there's one or two out there, right?

Distant Waves--Suzanne Weyn

Suzanne Weyn's Distant Waves is being marketed as a story of the Titanic. And, I guess it loosely is... however, to me, it reads more like a story of the paranormal.

The story is told by Jane, one of the 5 Taylor sisters who live in Spirit Vale, a famous clairvoyant community. After a chance meeting with Nikola Tesla, Jane becomes intrigued with all things science and follows his career closely. Her sisters Blythe and Mimi are obsessed with the finer things in life and strive to escape the strangle-hold Spirit Vale has on them. Twins Emma and Amelie are more like their mother who became famous by communicating with the dead. Amelie doesn't speak, but communicates to Emma telepathically, and both girls have some type of true clairvoyance skills. Throughout the book we meet interesting historical characters, like Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Houdini and more.

It isn't until the end that we see why the subtitle of this book is: A Novel of the Titanic. It was an interesting and well-written piece of historical fiction. But is it really a novel of the Titanic? What do you think?

I would recommend this book to teen girls who liked How it Happened in Peach Hill by Martha Jocelyn, the Luxe series. Oh, and it's on our Mock Printz list.

Wintergirls-- Laurie Halse Anderson

I have always loved it when poets use seasons as a way to describe an emotion or a feeling... one of my favorite examples, historically, is "In the Springtime of his Voodoo" (Tori Amos). When I first heard that Laurie Halse Anderson was writing a book called Wintergirls, I was picturing girls in fluffy coats and woolly hats frolicking in the snow not unlike Let it Snow by John Green, Lauren Myracle, and Maureen Johnson. And boy was I wrong.

Wintergirls isn't about snowbunnies. It's about girls who are trapped in the winter of their lives. They are encased in giant bricks of ice that just won't thaw. Wintergirls are tenaciously weak, stubborn starving survivors. Wintergirls are poets, obsessors, emotional/less. Wintergirls are anorexics, bulimics, and addicts.

Lia is a wintergirl. She is also anorexic, though I don't remember her ever referring to herself in that way. When her fellow wintergirl, her recently former BFF Cassie dies in a grotesquely tragic way, Lia tumbles from her precarious point of stability and falls deeply into the throws of her eating disorder. Laurie Halse Anderson gets it right; she manages to communicate both the physical and emotional causes and repercussions of a severe eating disorder while maintaining a very believable first person narrative. She uses such lyrical, poetic language, and while sometimes it's hard to tell what is actual fact and what's a product of Lia's jumbled brain, the smudging of the lines of reality add to the overall tone and atmosphere of the book.

Can you tell I loved it?

I would recommend this book for girls who want to read about eating disorders, death of a friend, and relationships with other teens in general. I would also pass this on to teens who like verse-novels, even though this isn't one.

This book will be published in March of 2009.

**UPDATE** LHA just posted a link to this review on her blog!! I am freaking out with joy over here!

If I Stay-- Gayle Forman

Ooooohhhh, a ghost story! But not just any ghost story... If I Stay is a novel of love, family, music, and the most important decision a girl could ever make: should Mia stay in her body and in the earthly realm, or should she go to the ethers and beyond?

Mia is a teenage cello prodigy. Her boyfriend is a punkrocker whose band is just starting to get national attention. Her parents are so cool, they almost seem fake (her mother wore pleather to her own wedding and her father is one of those retro-chic dudes). Although Mia has some tough decisions to make, and she has to work extremely hard for all the successes she's had, her life is pretty darn amazing... And she knows it. But then the unthinkable happens: while cruising down the road in a freak Oregon snowstorm, her dad crashes the car she and her entire immediate family are riding in... and in that moment, everything for Mia changes forever.

It seems like I just spoiled the plot for you a little, by telling you that Mia gets in this big car crash, doesn't it? Well, perk up, I didn't spoil anything! That happens in, like, the first chapter. This book instantly sucks you in; it's compelling, haunting, achingly beautiful, and well written. I also appreciated that Mia had a good relationship with her parents (I think parents and adults in general get a little demonized in teen fiction). Overall, this was a very enjoyable book, and I expect to see it receive many positive reviews (it will be published on 4/2/09).

I would recommend this book to teen girls who liked Whitcomb's A Certain Slant of Light, Zevin's Elsewhere, or to teens who enjoy books that focus on relationships between people in general.