New Books: Novels for Older Kids III

Once again I turn to Elizabeth, my 13-year-old colleague, for some of her favorite new tween and young-adult novels of the last year or so. (None are very new in hardcover at this point, but on the bright side, many are just coming out in paperback!) Without further ado:

Bloodline Rising, by Katy Moran. Written more as a "companion" than a sequel to Moran's earlier British Dark Ages tale Bloodline, this novel tells the story of Cai, a clever young thief in seventh-century Constantinople. With his father away at war, he is betrayed by a rival and sold as a slave to a ship heading north, to Britain—which happens to be where his parents come from. He is taken in by a lord who clearly knew his parents and put to work as a spy amid major political intrigue...but soon finds that the man who took him in may have had something to do with his parents' departure from Britain.
Elizabeth's take: This book was suspenseful and had complex, believable characters. I couldn't put it down and could barely believe the twist in the ending! I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys stories full of danger, tension, and action.

Virals, by Kathy Reich. The first work for young readers by this forensic anthropologist, the novelist behind the TV series Bones, and the initial entry in a new sci-fi/suspense series, Virals is about 14-year-old Tory (she's the niece of Temperance Brennan, the character played by Emily Deschanel on the TV show), who must go live with the marine-biologist father she's never known on a small South Carolina island after her mother is killed in an accident. She soon finds a similarly scientific-minded group of kids to hang out with, and before long they've noticed something strange about the nearby Loggerhead Research Institute. But after they rescue a wolf-dog puppy from the laboratory, they're exposed to a canine virus that changes their DNA, heightening their senses and reflexes—which turns out to come in handy, since they end up with a cold-case murder on their hands.
Elizabeth's take: This sci-fi mystery was amazing! The action and creepy science projects kept me engrossed from beginning to end. I've already recommended this book to several of my friends.

The Eternal Ones, by Kirsten Miller. Tennessee teenager Haven has always had visions of a past life, in which she was a girl named Constance whose doomed love for a boy named Ethan ended in disaster and death. But when she sees tabloid-TV coverage of an infamous celebrity named Iain Morrow, she is certain that she recognizes Ethan, and so when she turns 18 she heads up to New York City to find him. She finds that Iain feels their connection as well, and a love affair soon begins between the two...but soon Haven has doubts: Is Iain really Ethan, or could he be the person behind the deaths of Constance and Ethan in that past existence? Enlisting the help of a secret society with knowledge of reincarnation, Haven determines to find out the truth without reliving every detail of Constance's past.
Elizabeth's take: I loved this book! It was impossible to put down once I'd started. The author keeps you guessing constantly about the characters, their motives, and their intentions. The plot twists and bittersweet ending make it one of my favorite books.

Mockingbird, by Kathryn Erskine. This winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Young Readers is about Caitlin, a 10-year-old girl with Asperger's syndrome whose older brother has been killed in a school shooting. Told with remarkable sensitivity and insight from Caitlin's own perspective, it takes the reader through her attempt to deal with the tragedy herself, and to help her devastated father to weather the grief as well.
Elizabeth's take: This book was really touching, and offered an interesting point of view. It is refreshing to see things from the perspective of a person who doesn't view things the same way as most people.

[Cover images courtesy of Candlewick Press (Bloodline Rising) and Penguin USA (others).]

New Books: Novels for Older Kids II

This is the second in a series of posts I began last fall; once again, I'm relying heavily on my blog's only assistant editor, 13-year-old Elizabeth, the older sister of one of my older son's best friends. Without her, I wouldn't have a prayer of being able to cover these books--so really, this is her post. Without further ado, here's some of Elizabeth's picks of the last six months' best novels for older kids:

The Clockwork Three, by Matthew Kirby. Three separate plotlines involving three children—an orphan street violinist, an apprentice clockmaker, and a hotel maid—are slowly woven together in this adventure mystery (the author's debut). As it turns out, each one has part of the answer to the puzzle one of the others is trying to solve, and they must learn to work together to deal with very real dangers. 

Elizabeth's take: A great mystery, this book has many twists and turns, in addition to interesting characters. Once you start, you can't put it down.


The Queen of Water, by Laura Resau and María Virginia Farinango. This novel, based on a true story, tells of Virginia, a seven-year-old Andean girl in Ecuador who is sent by her desperately poor parents to be the servant in a wealthier mestizo household. It's rather like something out of a Dickens novel—she is beaten, and promises to send her to school are broken—but she educates herself nonetheless in secret, and in the meantime becomes accustomed to a very different way of life from the one she'd known. Then, at age 12, Virginia has the chance to return to her parents...and finds herself ambivalent. This is a powerful caught-between-cultures tale.
Elizabeth's take: This book is touching and inspiring. It's written so well that it's almost hard to believe it's a true story. I really enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone.


The Chaos, by Rachel Ward. You didn't think we were going to get out of a teen-novel roundup in 2011 without an dystopic novel, did you? The second book in Ward's (and no, she's not that one, though she is also British) Numbers series is set 10 years after the first one, in 2026, and follows young Adam, who has inherited his mother's curse from the first book: When he looks into someone's eyes, he can see the date of their eventual death. When he notices that an awful lot of the strangers' deaths he can't help but encounter are on the same date in the future—New Year's Day 2027—he realizes that he has to try to find out what this apocalyptic event is and try to stop it. Even on just her second book, Ward writes crackling suspense and dialogue, making for a real page-turner.
Elizabeth's take: This book is told from an interesting perspective: a boy who doesn't use proper grammar. And you can follow the plot without having read the first novel, Numbers. I'd recommend it to those who enjoy science fiction or apocalyptic stories.

When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead. This is cheating a little—it's the paperback edition of this winner of the Newbery Medal and many other awards, and even it came out several months ago—but we missed it in hardcover, and Elizabeth was so enthusiastic that I couldn't leave it out. It's a tightly written (and fairly short, as these novels go) story about Miranda, a 1979 New York City sixth-grader whose world starts to unravel after she has a falling out with her best friend, Sal, and then starts getting mysterious anonymous notes about an upcoming tragedy she must try to prevent. Presented in Miranda's pitch-perfect first-person voice, and referring directly and indirectly to many of the classic novels sixth-graders of the 1970s and '80s would have been reading (A Wrinkle in Time, Harriet the Spy), it's pretty much an instant classic in its own right.

Elizabeth's take: I could not put this short but eventful novel down! It has that quality that makes you think, "Well, maybe just another few pages...or chapters...." The characters are believable and easy to relate to. All in all, worthy of the Newbery on its cover.

[Cover images courtesy of Scholastic (The Clockwork Three, The Chaos) and Random House (The Queen of Water, When You Reach Me)]

New Books: Akata Witch

There are tons of tween and YA books out there nowadays that intertwine childhood rebellion and the supernatural. (I was going to suggest this was the legacy of the Twilight books, but come to think of it, there always have been.) Nnedi Okorafor's Akata Witch stands apart from the rest, and not just because it's set in Nigeria.

Akata is a derogatory term for black Americans in the Igbo language, and its use in the title is a hint that our heroine, twelve-year-old Sunny, is a girl who feels out of place everywhere. Her parents are Nigerian, but she was born in New York, where her family lived until she was nine; the family then returned to their native land. As if that weren't enough to make her the "different" one at school, Sunny is also albino. She stands apart, she excels in school but has few friends, and the popular kids bully her. So far, the usual stuff of YA novels since time immemorial, right?

Except Sunny has these weird premonitions sometimes, warnings from the shadows in the Nigerian darkness that something bad is going to happen. And her mother, a doctor, is extremely circumspect when telling her daughter anything about her own mother, who died long before Sunny was born; Sunny has only a vague impression that she was very odd, perhaps crazy.

The pieces begin to come together when she is befriended by Orlu, a quiet boy in her class who defends her from the bullying, and his friend Chichi, a free-spirited home-schooled girl. Seeing something special in Sunny, Chichi reveals that she and Orlu and their families are practitioners of juju, known as Leopard People. They explain that while the special abilities they have are generally inherited from one's parents directly, they suspect Sunny may be what they call a "free agent," with natural talents of her own.

They're right, of course, and Sunny is soon initiated into a spectacular alternate universe of magic and danger and wonder. Soon afterward, she’s informed that she has a part to play: Along with Orlu and Chichi and a rebellious African-American boy from Chicago named Sasha, she is expected to stop a local serial killer known as Black Hat Otokoto, who has been kidnapping and killing young children locally for months.

Some elements are reminiscent of classics of magically inclined children's fiction; the divide between the magical and nonmagical worlds and people is similar to that in the Harry Potter books, for instance. But I was most put in mind of a favorite series of my own childhood: Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books. (Clearly I'm not alone; I noticed after having this thought that Le Guin provided once of the book's cover quotes.)

As that series did, Okorafor keenly portrays the convoluted mix of rebellion and growing responsibility that make the ages between childhood and adulthood so complicated. She also creates one of those fully fleshed-out alternate worlds that have long been the hallmark of the best children's series, from Lewis Carroll to Le Guin to Philip Pullman. And she is as unafraid as LeGuin was to explore grim and dark realities, which makes the climax of Akata Witch—in which the four child witches face off against Black Hat Otokoto and the even worse evil he's trying to bring into the world—truly thrilling.

But make no mistake: Okorafor marks out new territory of her own, too, with her magnificent use of Nigerian folklore; the magical realm Sunny is entering glitters with fascination. Most American readers will be completely unfamiliar with this world, but the author makes use of that fact, too, engaging our curiosity with the excitement of discovery.

It's a triumph of a novel, one that teens (and many tweens, too, I think) will devour. And happily, Okorafor seems to leave the door open for a sequel, so this may not be the last we see of Sunny and her coven. I hope it isn't—there's plenty of fuel here for what could soon be a serious classic series of its own.

[Cover image courtesy of Viking Books]

New Books: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation

Not for the first time, I’m stretching the definition of new here a bit. The first entry in this two-book series by M. T. Anderson came out in hardcover way back in 2006, and the only "new" aspect about either now is their debut in a lovely updated paperback format last month.

But, despite the National Book Award won by volume one, The Pox Party, both of these books were entirely new to me. And while that honor, stamped atop the covers of the new paperback editions, lifted my expectations of their quality, well...I had no idea. This is the best young-adult fiction I've read since I began covering children's books, and the first I'd recommend to adult friends as well since Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Anderson's tale truly is astonishing.

It's about (and largely narrated by) the title character, the Boston-born son of an enslaved African woman in mid-eighteenth-century Boston. He is thus a slave himself, of course, but he doesn't know it for many years, as his "owner" is a the leader of a philosophical society that has decided, among its many other Enlightenment-inspired projects, to see what happens when you raise an African boy in European fashion. So Octavian and his mother (who develops a kind of salon of her own of infatuated society intellectuals and artists) wear fine clothes and eat well alongside their "masters," and perform no labor beyond that of Octavian's education, which matches the best available to white children—Latin, Greek, "modern" science, etc.

Eventually, however, Octavian discovers the truth—that he's not merely a slave, but one who's been the subject of a lifelong scientific experiment. Worse yet, circumstances eventually require the society to seek a new benefactor for its funding; the source of its continued operation is a group of southern plantation owners. They require that Octavian's "equality" experiment be rigged so that he will fail it, thus justifying their continued use of slavery to amount their riches, all of which has a predictably dire effect on the lives of both Octavian and his mother.

Meanwhile, amid all this, the hostilities between the American colonies and the English government are growing until the Revolutionary War finally breaks out. The bitter irony of the slave-owning colonists' fight for liberty is not lost on Octavian, as the New England patriots start to fear that English promises of liberation will cause their slaves to rise up against them. (A real-life regiment of ex-slaves that was created by Lord Dunmore, the colonial governor of Virginia, in response to Patrick Henry's uprising in that state, plays a central role in the second book, The Kingdom on the Waves.)

The real history, and Anderson's remarkable treatment of it—the American Revolution in these pages is neither as pure of motive nor as sure of success as it's generally portrayed, especially in books for children—would be enough on its own to make these books engrossing. But as vividly described as it is, it's really just the backdrop for the story, and the voice, of Octavian himself, as he discovers the devastating truth about his true place in his world, then questions that truth and finally refuses to let it define him. He's an unforgettably powerful character, rich and deep and real, the kind you start to see cinematically, hearing the voice of name actors (I settled on Larry Gilliard Jr. of The Wire) as you read Octavian’s words.

I should warn that these are among the most adult of young-adult books I’ve ever read. The text itself is dense, written as it is in true-to-era colonial language and sentence structure. And then there’s the subject matter: Not surprisingly given his situation, as well as the war he's living amidst, some extremely upsetting things happen to and around Octavian, and the reader is not spared their full force. That impact is part of what makes the work as strong as it is, in my opinion, but you’ll want to be sure your young adult is prepared. In other words, these are not the YA books with which most smart 10-year-olds will want to be stretching their boundaries.

But high-school kids who are strong readers looking for challenging adult-level material will be blown away by the Octavian Nothing books, I think. Heck, most parents will be blown away by them, as I certainly was.

[Images courtesy of Candlewick Press]

New Books: Novels for (Older) Kids

To a parent of infants or toddlers, reviewing picture books comes pretty naturally. They’re short, often illustration-driven, and precisely what you spend your evenings reading to your own kids at bedtime. While you do need to be careful not to violate the old rule about books and their covers, it’s not difficult to identify standouts in short order. Early chapter books are slightly more challenging, but even there, the well-written and especially imaginative ones make themselves known as such within a few pages; also, there aren’t all that many of them on the market, comparatively speaking, so a high proportion of those published are at the very least worth a look.

Novels aimed at older children—basically the categories known as “tween” and “YA”—are another matter entirely. Thanks to the immense success of books like Twilight, dozens of them come out each season from each major publishing house. They’re for the most part far longer than chapter books for very young kids, and more complex, so finding out whether a given one is any good requires a decent time investment. And if, like me, you don’t have a kid at home who’s old enough to be interested in and ready for books of this length, on these subjects, you can end up feeling a bit at sea; it’s hard to trust your adult critical instincts entirely. (There’s nothing like a moody tween novel to make a relatively new parent realize that his or her own childhood is even more distant than the years would imply.)

For all these reasons, I’ve rarely ventured into books for this age range, both back when I was at Cookie and in this blog. But I’ve always felt a pang of guilt about that, too—isn’t this, for all the same reasons I just listed, the very category of children’s books with which parents and gift-givers need the most help?

To solve the problem, I finally got wise and enlisted an expert: a 12-year-old, naturally. Elizabeth, the older sister of one of my older son’s best friends and a voracious reader, graciously agreed to be my test reader for the ever-growing stack of tween and YA novels piling up on my shelves. With remarkable speed and insight, she separated out the best of the lot for me, and I’m going to gratefully pass along her thoughts, along with quick summaries of my own. (As long as she’s interested in continuing, I’ll make this a recurring column.)

Here, then, are some of Elizabeth’s favorites from my stack of books that have come out in the last several months:

Shiver and Linger, by Maggie Stiefvater. It’s tempting to take the Hollywood-pitch approach and describe this series (the first just out in paperback, the second a new hardcover) as “Twilight with werewolves.” That may be broadly accurate, plotwise, but it’s glibly unfair to the author, who’s written a pair (so far) of evocative, atmospheric page turners, adroitly alternating between the first-person points of view of both of the main characters.
Elizabeth’s take: Shiver is an amazing book! It has the perfect blend of romance and action. I even bought the sequel in hardcover!

Extraordinary, by Nancy Werlin. An engaging (and well-researched) story of a teenage girl from the famous Rothschild family. We learn right off that Phoebe's closest friend is not who she appears to be, but a fairy with an ominous agenda that’s compounded when her irresistibly gorgeous older brother appears on the scene. Werlin, the author of several YA best sellers, expertly doles out pieces of the puzzle to readers, always leaving them just enough steps ahead of Phoebe to keep the suspense taut.
Elizabeth’s take: A great fantasy! I really liked it. It has a great plot, and the intermittent “Conversations with the Faerie Queen” really add to the story.

The Red Pyramid, by Rick Riordan. The debut entry in a new series by the author of the mega-successful Percy Jackson books turns from Greek mythology to Egyptian. In it, a brother and sister who’ve been raised separately try to rescue their father from an ancient, evil being he has released into our world. As always, Riordan fills the pages with great historical and mythological detail while maintaining a blisteringly fast pace of action.
Elizabeth’s take: I did not find this book to be as good as the author’s previous series [Percy Jackson], but it is still a worthwhile read. Anyone who enjoys mythology and fantasy will love it!

Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins. The final book in the dark three-part Hunger Games series (plunges the reader directly back into its dystopic-future version of the U.S. In it, a repressive government forces each district to send two children to battle to the death, gladiator-style, against one another. Katniss, our heroine, has managed improbably to survive two rounds of the Hunger Games now, and the rebellion is looking to her to be the public face of their revolution. But even as she agrees to this, she has growing concerns that the potential new boss may be, as ever, no better than the old. Collins has created one of those great immersive worlds here, so fully fleshed out that you feel the author has given consideration even to unmentioned details. (I knew this series had to be good when I saw fellow parents eagerly anticipating this book’s release in their Facebook status updates!)
Elizabeth’s take: Very well-written plot and characters—but you really have to read the whole series to understand it. I own all three books in hardcover, and I enjoy reading them over and over again. I highly recommend the entire trilogy to anyone who enjoys action, romance, or sci-fi.

[Cover images courtesy of Penguin USA (Extraordinary), Hyperion (The Red Pyramid) and Scholastic (others)]