The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt

I just read this book today, and now I'm wishing that I had spent more time on it, savored it, drawn out the experience longer.  The writing is stunning.  Take this beautiful sentence, for instance, "The air was coloring everything gray, and the fog was coming up from the ground in white shreds and billows, as if the whole campsite had lifted itself up into the clouds overnight."

It's about Holling Hoodhood, a seventh grade boy in 1967, who is the lone Presbyterian in his class, stuck at school with his teacher on Wednesday afternoons while his Jewish and Catholic classmates go to religious studies.  It's not a traditional book where you can say there's one main conflict, solved at one climactic point, and then wrapped up.  It's more like life, where there is a never-ending series of mishaps and adventures, each one having its own climax and resolution, and each one impacting other parts of the story.

Although the story does have some sad and some poignant moments, I'd say, overall, it has a more positive tone than many serious young adult books.  This one's for the people who always complain that YA books are depressing and dark.  This one is touching, inspiring, heart-warming.  And funny.  There are definitely laugh-out-loud parts.

It's told in first person, and Schmidt really does a great job of establishing Holling's voice.  He seemed a little too sophisticated for a seventh grader sometimes, but then I thought about some of the seventh graders I know, and I changed my mind.  Anyway, Holling was so real that I just happily went along for the ride. 

Honestly, I don't want to say too much about the book because I don't want to give anything away or over-hype it.  It did, though, make me feel a little guilty because I spend a lot of time reading, and I'm not always (or, really, very often at all) reading books that I feel are valuable. I read a lot of things just to be entertained.  (And don't get me wrong, I do feel there is value in being entertained!)  But when I read something that's so well done on so many different levels, it does make me realize that I could do better for myself.  Maybe not all the time, but a little more often.

(PG: There is nothing to worry about in this book at all.  Holling self-edits any language, and there are no troublesome references.  I'd give it a G rating, but it's really for a more sophisticated audience--middle school at least.)

Generation Dead by Daniel Waters

Cool cover, huh?  And yet it doesn't quite fit any of the characters in the book.  But that is a small point when you end up with a cover that's attractive, eye-catching, and mysterious.  I understand first time authors don't get much input on the cover, and Mr. Waters certainly  seems pleased, judging by the funny post on his blog.  

This book has one of the most original premises I've seen lately. Some dead teenagers are coming back to life, for no reason the medical establishment has gotten a grip on yet.  In the meantime, their families have to decide what to do with them. Those who have recently come back to life have difficulty speaking, have cold dead skin, no heart beat, but still have the character of their former selves.  The setting is a high school that has a high percentage of dead kids going to school there; prejudice is high.  Phoebe, the main character, becomes intrigued with one of her dead fellow students, and trouble follows. 

This was well written and intriguing enough that I sped through it.  The main characters are engaging and easy to care for.  It is in third person limited point of view, but from multiple chracters.  That is, you're only in one character's head at a time, but you get into quite a few heads.  The only problem I had with this was that sometimes their thoughts don't have a different enough feel to them.  They all think with pretty much the same vocabulary.  At one point, the bully thinks to himself that his former friend has developed a lot of poise over the summer.  "Poise" was so distracting to me that I bounced out of the story and sat there for several minutes wondering if the story wasn't maybe in third person omniscient so that everyone's thoughts were really supposed to be filtered through a god-like narrator.  I'm thinking this is a nit-picky thing only a word-obsessed person like a writer or English teacher might find distracting, though, because clearly when you're in the bully's head there are way more pressing issues than his vocabulary choice.  

Since I'm being annoyingly picky, though . . . there is a lot of skipping in this book.  (Anything more than three is a lot, right?)  Maybe the author means it metaphorically to show his female characters arriving or leaving in a bubbly, enthusiastic manner.  Maybe he has a better acquaintance with high schoolers than I do, and there's more skipping than I think there is.  It was a little distracting.

Anyway, it's different from most of what's out there, and worth a look just for that.  I would think those that have enjoyed Stephenie Meyers would smoke through this while waiting for her next installment and feel lucky to have it.

(PG-13/R: violence, language, sexual thoughts.  The violence that happens in the book is not "R" graphic, but the intention is there in a character's thoughts.  If we saw everything that happened, it would be R.)

The Battle of the Labyrinth by Rick Riordan

It's going to look like I do nothing but read Rick Riordan books, but I'm way behind on my blogging!  So I've decided to blog about the most recently read (and therefore best remembered) backwards.

This is the fourth book in the Percy Jackson series.  I had to read it to keep up with the middle schoolers and keep up my credibility.  Plus it's a pretty entertaining series.  Unfortunately, it's been awhile since I read the other three, and I'm having trouble remembering details.   Still, a vague recollection is good enough.  Though if you haven't read any of them, I'd definitely start with the first one, The Lightning Thief.

The basic premise of this series is that the Greek myths do exist, and Percy Jackson is a half-blood, with one mortal and one immortal parent.  It's entertaining to see how Riordan deals with the old myths.  Almost all of them have a new spin on them that fit in with contemporary American culture.  (The sphinx has its own game show, for instance.) If you know the myths, it's fun to figure out which is which.  If you don't, it's just fun to go along for the adventure.  The characters are well done, and Percy has an authentic, teenage boy voice.

I thought this was originally supposed to be a trilogy, so I was really disappointed with the third book, which created way more questions than it answered.  But this one did a good job of creating action and adventure without leaving you hanging too badly at the end.  There's definitely room for more, though.  Which is good news, because my middle school males who like fantasy really LOVE this series.

PG-13:  fantasy violence, but nothing too graphic; no swearing; no sex

 

Boy Meets Girl by Meg Cabot

This is a light, frothy, summer beach book.  I found out about it from my "book-of-the-day" calendar, and it was a fun, fast read.  It's told completly through e-mails, answering machine messages, IM's, journal entries, and other media (like notes slid under the door). Occasionally, this feels a little contrived, but mostly it's just fun and funny.

It's about Kate (a sweet, innocent girl from Kentucky, whom you could easily see as another Anne Hathaway character) who works in human resources for a T.O.D. (tyrannical office despot).  She's trying to move on from a ten year relationship with Dale, an up-and-coming rock musician who is rather clueless and afraid of commitment.  (He reminds me of the guy who marries Lane on Gilmore Girls.)  The crux of the story is her budding relationship with Mitch, a nice lawyer whose family really puts the "fun" is "dysfunctional" (at least for those of us reading the book, not for Mitch).

The plot wasn't particularly original (very much Working Girl, which it even mentions), but it goes so fast that it's hard to disengage from it.  And the characters are entertaining.

PG-13: a lot of references to sex, but nothing "on scene," some language.  No violence at all.  A lesbian character (addressing more the difficulties of "coming out" rather than sexuality).