'The Perfect Score' by Rob Buyea

from: robbuyea.com

We get evaluated and judged all the time: work reviews, observations, exams, random people eyeing what you've chosen for lunch in the mall food court.  Maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but for many kids in school, the evaluation and judgments based on what you do on a single day is very real.  And terrifying.  So much could go wrong, and it can crush your dreams.  For five students in Mrs. Woods' 6th grade class, these fears are all too real.

Mrs. Woods invests the time to create a caring community in an inclusive classroom.  Her lessons are engaging, and even if she has to deliver a consequence to a student, Mrs. Woods ensures it addresses the behaviour, as opposed to being merely punitive.  Slowly, mostly due to Mrs. Woods' classroom, the five students -- Gavin, Scott, Trevor, Randi, and Natalie -- become friends.  But in time, the school board and principal require that Mrs. Woods do test prep for the upcoming state exam.  Boring worksheets that neither challenge, nor enrich the students.  Eventually, they even lose recess.  Scott manages to get the principal to agree that if they do well on the state exam, Mrs. Woods can do her usual lessons and they can have recess again.  So Scott, who struggles with impulsivity and hyperactivity, and lives and breathes for recess, wants to help his friends just as much as himself. 

Gavin is a talented artist who struggles to read, but if he fails the state exam he won't be able to play football next year.

Trevor hates school and has an abusive home life.  His only hope is playing football next year, so he can stay out of the house as much as possible. 

Randi is top gymnast in her area and has done well in school, but intense pressure to win from "Coach Jane" (a.k.a. Mom) are starting to make her self-confidence crumble.

And Natalie?  Natalie doesn't have much to lose.  She finds the tests so easy she can do it blindfolded.  But is she willing to risk her sense of ethics and propriety to help out her friends?

It's heartbreaking to watch Mrs. Woods' engaging lessons deteriorate into mandated test prep that bores the entire class and turns some students completely off school.  Gavin, Trevor, and Randi are starting to panic, because so much of their future hinges on passing a single test.  Scott has an idea: He comes up with a system to signal the correct answers on the test to the rest of the class without tipping off the monitors. It's going to be flawless!  That is, until Scott's grandfather's house burns down the night before the test, which causes Scott to be absent on test day.  It seems as if all is lost, until Natalie takes a deep breath, and initiates Scott's plan.

It works.  Everyone passes, but not without a cost. The students, Mrs. Woods, and the school will be investigated, leading to some hard truths about what adults expect from children and what the purpose of education is.  Is it to create really good bubble sheet fillers or to create critical thinkers?

The mix of characters in the novel are intriguing.  Buyea writes Mrs. Woods' class as an inclusive classroom, without stating the students' disabilities.  A reader can deduce that Scott probably has ADHD.  Gavin has a reading disability, maybe dyslexia, but as he tells Mrs. Woods, the psycho-educational testing said he, "wasn't dumb enough" to receive help in school. Trevor barely tolerates school, but only because it's better than being at home with his physically and mentally abusive older brother.  Randi can handle the school work, but the pressure from her mother to succeed in school and in the gym is starting to slowly erode her confidence so that she makes epic mistakes in gymnastic routines she's been able to do for months and can't focus in school. Natalie is a miniature adult, who comes to the rescue of her friends in more ways than one, and figures out the best way for the powers-that-be to hear the students.

I found Buyea's choice to not label the students to be a good decision, which allows the reader to get to know the characters as people with valid concerns that a single test isn't going to measure their progress as students. Another intriguing choice by Buyea was to write from the point-of-view of each student, letting us see and feel their insecurities and fears.  We're also privy to their victories, however small, because to someone like Gavin, reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to his baby sister is huge.  I also thought Buyea made a good choice to show how external pressures in cases of Trevor and Randi affect their performance in school.  They don't have learning disabilities, per se, but their stresses affect their ability to learn.  I also liked that the five core characters weren't initially friends, except for Randi and Gavin.  They could be outright hostile to one another.  They only learn to respect one another when they participate in an after-school program.  The sometimes grudging respect eventually turns to friendship.

Some reviewers felt that Buyea wrapped everything up too neatly, but as a teacher, I felt it was only the end of that particular year in their lives.  What will happen to kids like Scott and Gavin when they go to high school?  Will they have teachers who will be able to take the time to help them with their learning disabilities?  What happens if Randi suffers a catastrophic injury and cannot compete in gymnastics?  What if the friendships Scott has made this year don't survive high school?  Also, the school itself is under extra scrutiny due to the testing "scandal."  What happens next school year?  Will they double down on test prep?  So while I do agree that Buyea did wrap up this story line with a nice bow, I don't think it lessens the impact of the story.  In the end, it ably demonstrates that children are more than their disability (or ability), and have something meaningful to contribute to their classmates.

I would recommend this book to any middle grade student and their teachers.

Other middle grade books that feature characters with disabilities and/or mental illness include: Rules by Cynthia Lord, Mockingbird: (mok'ing-burd) by Katheryn Erskine, the Joey Pigza series by Jack Gantos, The War That Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, From Anna by Jean Little, The Storm Runner by Jennifer Cervantes, Rick Riordian's Percy Jackson series, and A Mango-Shaped Space by Wendy Maas.  Some notable YA titles are: Saving Red by Sonya Sones, Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman, Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork.

A resource to find other books that feature characters with a disability is the Schneider Family Book Award.

'The Miseducation of Cameron Post' by emily m. danforth

Cover image from:
www.harpercollins.com

The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a difficult novel to summarize.  So much happens between its covers: Cameron's recognition of her attraction (both emotional and physical) to other girls; a car accident that kills both of her parents when she's only 12 years old; the inevitable changes her life undergoes when her aunt Ruth becomes her legal guardian; the short, but intense, love affair with Coley Taylor, the town's golden girl; and Ruth sending Cameron to an evangelical boarding school that promises to change Cameron's sexuality.  In emily m. danforth's hands, it's a quiet, multi-layered novel where a young woman looks back over her teenaged years with the eye of someone who's not only older, but much, much wiser.  

If the idea that a teenaged girl coming out as a lesbian would be shocking, danforth set The Miseducation of Cameron Post in the early 1990s, before Friends featured Ross' lesbian ex-wife and her wife as something so normal, it bordered on the mundane.  That was a rarity on prime time television then.  So for Cameron Post to identify as a lesbian in 1991 in small-town Montana, it constitutes an earth-shattering event.

The novel is quiet in its tone, so when the big moments arrive, they land with the force of a thunderclap on a quiet evening.  Appropriately, those moments are also act as catalysts that force Cameron onto a path that isn't always of her choosing.  

The first two-thirds of the book outline Cameron's exploration of her sexuality from the first chaste kisses with her friend Irene to the furtive explorations with Lindsay, a fellow competitive swimmer to the explosive relationship with Coley that pulls the novel into the final third, which takes place at Promises, the evangelical gay-conversion therapy boarding school where Ruth ultimately sends Cameron to "cure" her, in an increasingly painful year as the leaders of the school take everything about their students and attempt to turn it into something evil and dirty.

It's the last third of the novel where the complexity matures.  One one hand, it's impossible not to feel indignant rage at the treatment of the students at Promises.  And yet...  To Lydia and Rick, the leaders, as well as the students' parents and guardians, Promises is what will save their children from eternal damnation.  That's what gives this part of the novel an underlying bitterness: they're doing it from a place of love, albeit a love that ultimately proves destructive.  It's not a love I recognize

The spare, wistful tone of the novel makes it difficult to even categorize The Miseducation of Cameron Post as a YA novel.  It doesn't feel like a YA novel.  It has more in common with so-called literary fiction (aka "adult fiction").  This isn't a bildungsroman, where Cameron is in search of herself. Cameron knows who she is, thank you.  She really just needs to find a place that will allow her to be.

For Cameron, "miseducation" applies to so many things.  One of the notable instances of Cameron's miseducation is Lindsay's insistence there is a narrow definition of a "real" lesbian.  Lindsay only spends summers in Miles City, and lives in Seattle the rest of the year.  Her sense of security (namely that she won't be sent to a gay-conversion school) allows her to freely express her sexuality with all the certainty that her way is "right."  The other, of course, is Promises and their assertions that everything about Cameron, from her "masculine" name to the way her parents raised her, are the external nudges that have made her a lesbian.

Give The Miseducation of Cameron Post a try.  This lovely, lyrical novel shouldn't be missed.

Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

I usually post book reviews here, but this is somewhat book related.

At which point do you tell yourself, "I really don't like this book, and I don't think I want to finish it?"

It's taken me most of my life to this point to realize it's actually okay to put a book down if it's not holding my interest and not feel incredibly guilty that I didn't just keep swimming, er, reading.

I can remember books I've started, put down after a chapter, and picked up again several years later only to find the book is actually delightful.  The one that sticks out the most happens to be Pride and Prejudice, by the way.  My next exposure to Jane Austen was in an English class in my undergrad program, and we read Emma.  I loved it so much, that I made a vow to revist Pride and Prejudice at some point.  I did.  I devoured it, as well as Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion over the course of a summer break during my third and fourth years of my undergrad degree.  Persuasion is my one of my favorite novels of all time.  I read it every couple of years or so.

I can also recall books I've read, disliked from the first chapter, but kept reading.  Not because I loved the book, but there was the expectation that it would get better.  I've read books that friends raved about.  Me?  Not so much.  It's not just pop fiction, either.  I've picked up award-winning novels that just didn't grab my attention from page one.  Why?  Who knows?  It could be any number of reasons.  Maybe that book isn't for me.  Maybe I'm in the wrong headspace to appreciate the book.  Or perhaps I've merely grown weary of the author's formulaic writing.  (Remember Chandler's mom describing her writing process on Friends?  Yeah, like that...)

Sometimes, I think  it's a holdover from high school, when you were assigned a novel that you found dreadfully boring and slog to just read a single chapter (I'm looking at you, Heart of Darkness!), and you just had to finish it because there would be a quiz during your first period English class tomorrow.    It was only when I started my library degree a couple of years ago, that I felt like I had been given permission to stop reading a book if I didn't like it.  Because really, if you don't like a book that you're reading for your own pleasure, why continue to read it if you dislike it?  Oddly enough, I find that since I've given myself permission to stop reading a book, that it's much easier to for me to tell my students, "Hey, try this novel.  If you don't like it, it's okay.  We can pick out another one!"

In the end, it doesn't matter if you're reading graphic novels, tarty romance novels, mysteries, heavy literature, making your way through the new YA shelf in the library, or weighty biographies of American Founding Fathers.  Read what you enjoy.  And if you don't like it, put it down.  Make a note of the title in your Goodreads account.  Maybe later it might be a different story.

Cheers and happy reading!

'The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

The opening lines of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina go something like this: Happy families are all

Image from:
www.goodreads.com

alike, but unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.  Salvador Silva and his adoptive father, Vicente, seem like a stereotypical happy family.  Salvador is a fairly content and well-adjusted teenager, about to start his final year of high school.  He has college applications waiting to fill out.  But lurking beneath the surface are the unhappy moments that afflict all families, each with their own unique pattern.

As much as Salvador loves and adores his father, he can't help but wonder about his biological father, and feels incredibly guilty for doing so.  Vicente's mother -- Salvador's beloved Mima --  is ill, which upends Salvador's previously well-ordered life.  But at least Salvador's life is more-or-less on an even keel, thanks to Vicente's patient and loving parenting style.  His best friend, Samatha, has a difficult relationship with her mother and as for her father, he might as well be a stranger on the street.  Salvador's friend, Fito, has a nonexistent relationship with his mother, because according to Fito, she abandoned him for the siren song of addiction, and his father left El Paso for California to look for work, and Fito hasn't heard from him since.

Finding a place where they can find a level of balance that approaches happiness is what drives this novel.  It's more of a character study than one with an easily described plot.  Saenz shows his readers how each character reacts to a given situation, such as when Fito's mother throws him out of the house, or Salvador punches a classmate for insulting Vicente.  The threads that bind this novel together are the ties of friends and family -- both the families they're born into and the families they create.  Family seems to be an ongoing theme for Saenz, from his earlier work He Forgot to Say Goodbye to his award-winning Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe.  And in The Inexplicable Logic of My Life, it looms over the whole book.

Another compelling theme of the novel is the nature vs. nurture argument, something Salvador grapples with on a daily basis, as he tries to answer the question of whether nature or nurture has more power over who Salvador will be when he grows up.  Fito struggles with it as well, albeit in a quieter way.

Saenz is capable of some truly gorgeous writing that lifts your heart into your throat, which at times borders on poetry (even though it's not technically poetry).  Like this quote: "...she burned her hand when some hot oil splattered.  The F word went flying through the kitchen and landed in the living room, where it hit my dad right in the heart."  Saenz is a master of figurative language.

Most of the novel takes place within Salvador's head, as his internal monologues and observations of what goes on around him.  Due to the subject matter, there's a lot of poignancy to Salvador's thoughts, including one about the different types of silences between people or ruminations on love.  I'll admit to needing more than one tissue.

There is a bit of salty language in the book.  Salvador even makes note of the fact that Samantha has had a love affair with the F word, as she chastises him for his swearing.  It never feels gratuitous and absolutely feels organic in the mouths and minds of Salvador, Samantha, and Fito.

Other books like The Inexplicable Logic of My Life are: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, the new Ms. Marvel series of graphic novels, featuring Kamala Khan, Jenny Han's To All the Boys I've Loved Before, and Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor and Park.  They all have themes of family dynamics running through them.

'Exit, Pursued by a Bear' by E.K. Johnston

Exit, Pursued by a Bear is a worthy successor to Laurie Halse Anderson's seminal novel Speak.  In Speak, Melinda Sordino was so traumatised by her assault that she was unable to even say the words "I was raped," to herself, much less out loud for months afterwards.  Hermione Winters, the protagonist of Exit, Pursued by a Bear, is everything Melinda was not: popular, confident, unwilling to cower in the aftermath of her rape, with the bonus of super-supportive parents and a steadfast best friend.

Image from:
www.penguinrandomhouse.com

Hermione is the co-captain of the award-winning cheerleading team at Palermo Heights High School in the small town of Palermo Heights, Ontario.  On the first night of an annual summer cheer camp, every school talks about their inner collective demons: fear of heights, plagues of self-doubt.  Hermione, though, describes PHHS as a cursed school where, "every single class... since 2006 has lost a student to a drunk driver... [and] every year one of the girls in PHHS gets pregnant."  The cheerleading squad's challenge is to break the curse.  Hermione's class may have lost a student years ago to a drunk driver, but they are determined that there will not be a pregnant girl at PHHS this year.

The cheerleading team is no laughing matter, and in fact they are the pride of Palermo Heights.  In Palermo Heights, the sports teams play second fiddle to the cheerleaders. PHHS's cheerleading team is also unusually tightly-knit, which is a factor in their ongoing success.  This camaraderie is threatened during cheer camp.  One minute Hermione is dancing at the end-of-camp dance, and the next thing she remembers is waking up in a hospital, where her best friend, Polly, informs Hermione she's been raped.

Hermione refuses to let one single event define her, but it proves difficult in a small town with a small high school.  The whispers, stares, and rumours follow Hermione as she tries to move on from the rape, enlisting the help of once-a-week sessions with a psychologist, and throwing herself back into cheerleading.

Johnston handles several sensitive issues -- rape, pregnancy, abortion, sexuality --  in Hermione's matter-of-fact voice.  It serves to put things into perspective.  Yes, Hermione's rape is traumatic, and she experiences flashbacks, often at inopportune times, but to Hermione the actual event matters less than how she decides to handle it.  I think that is what makes this book stand out in a crowded YA shelf: Hermione decides who is going to tell her story.  It's on her terms and no one else's.  It also passes the infamous "Bechdel test," in which two women discuss anything other than a boy.

If the title rings a bell, congratulations!  You are officially a Shakespeare nerd.  "Exit, pursued by a bear..." is one of the more bewildering stage directions in Shakespeare, from his play A Winter's Tale.  To this day nobody knows if Shakespeare intended to use a real bear or an actor in a bear costume.  The novel, though, is much less circumspect.  The bear that pursues Hermione are the myriad slings and arrows from the aftermath of the rape.  The novel is a cleverly drawn parallel between Shakespeare's play of a falsely accused queen named Hermione.  So, Exit, Pursued by a Bear, is in fact, a Winters' tale, because it is the tale of Hermione Winters.  In the play, King Leontes accuses Queen Hermione of having an affair.  In the novel, Hermione's boyfriend Leo, doesn't really believe she was raped.  The play has a character called Polixenes who proclaims Hermione's innocence, and the novel has Hermione's bestie Polly, who will defend Hermione until she no longer has breath.

If you enjoy books with strong female leads, and read a realistic story where girls can talk about more than their respective love lives, you'll enjoy this book.  I know I did.

For read-alikes, try Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock by Matthew Quick; The Perks ofBeing a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, and of course, Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson.

  

'Scythe' by Neal Shusterman

Imagine a world where humanity has conquered death.  There's no more disease, hunger, poverty, ageing, or death by accident.  Sounds really neat, right?

Image from:
simonandschuster.ca

Until you consider there's also no pain.  Or joy.  Or any intense feelings.  People sort of drift along in life, "turning the corner" (resetting to a younger physical age) every so often, marrying and remarrying.  Just living their lives.  The only possible wrinkle in someone's life is when a Scythe drops by.

If a Scythe shows up in your home, school, or office, it usually means someone is going to die. You see,  a Scythe is tasked with "gleaning" -- killing -- people, in order to keep the population under control.

Every so often, a Scythe takes on an apprentice, in order to teach them the ways of being a Scythe and how to glean according to their moral codes.  One just doesn't take a life indiscriminately.  There's a method to the madness.  Honorable Scythe Faraday raises more than a few eyebrows when he takes in two apprentices.  Usually a Scythe only takes one apprentice.  For the next year, Citra Terranova and Rowan Damisch will endure training in the physically and mentally demanding art, science, and philosophy of ending another person's life.   Whichever one of the two succeeds in passing a test at the end of the year will become a new Scythe.  The other will go home.

At least that's the way it's supposed to work.  Until Scythe Goddard  proposes a resolution at one of the Scythes' conclaves that the successful apprentice must glean the unsuccessful one.  This sets the rest of the book careening toward it's suspenseful conclusion.

Neal Shusterman never ceases to impress me with his world building.  At first glance, this is a perfect world, until Shusterman reveals, the levels of corruption roiling under the perfect surface. Everything Shusterman creates -- from nanites that heal every injury and cure diseases to the Thunderhead, which has evolved from the Cloud (thanks, Apple!) into a benign, omniscient presence that governs society -- are just within the realm of possible, so you aren't grappling with the science of science fiction and are able to dive into the knotty philosophical questions that come with being a Scythe: is there room for compassion; why can't a Scythe feel that being a Scythe is a calling; and is it possible to enjoy one's job as a Scythe?

Even though the laws of Scythedom are presented as a absolute, the laws and rules of Scythes, like everything, are open to interpretation, which is where a lot of the conflict arises.  And to throw another wrench into the plot, Scythes aren't subject to the laws that govern the rest of society and only live by ten ironclad commandments.  They even live outside the realm of the all-knowing and all-seeing Thunderhead.

The book is heavy on intrigue, but (thankfully!) light on romance.  Which makes sense, because Scythes, rather like Jedi, aren't supposed to have emotional attachments to other people.  Shusterman also throws in bits of subtle humor to keep the book from being weighed down by all the intrigue, training, and philosophy.  For example, when one new Scythe chooses their Patron Historic -- the name they will use as a Scythe taken from significant people in history that have special meaning to the new Scythe -- he chooses to be known as Scythe Colbert.  I snorted with laughter, and I'm sure Stephen Colbert appreciates the shout-out.  That being said, the humor is more likely to make the corner of your mouth curl up, rather than laugh out loud.

Structurally, the book goes back and forth between  Citra, Rowan, Faraday, Scythe Curie, and other characters.  Each chapter opens with an excerpt from the diary of a Scythe, usually Scythe Curie, known as the Grand Dame of Death.  It's fascinating to see the different points-of-view of Scythdom and how different Scythes interpret their moral codes.

Given that most of the book's narration comes from Rowan or Citra, I found Rowan to be much more multi-layered than Citra.  Perhaps that comes from how Shusterman portrays Rowan as both repelled by the idea of gleaning, and yet, his sense of compassion inexplicably draws him to it.  Citra, on the other hand, despises the idea of becoming a Scythe.  Her struggles have less to do with becoming a Scythe, and more from her determination to do it "right." 

This book drew me in so subtly and cleverly, that I didn't even realize I hadn't been able to put it down until I finished it.

Scythe so impressed the Printz committee, that they gave it an honor, even though their habit is to not award the first book in a series.  It more than deserves its 2017 Printz Honor.

If you're looking for something that draws you in and doesn't let go, this is a book for you.

Scythe is the first of Shusterman's Arc of the Scythe series.  Mark your calendars, y'all: the second book in the planned trilogy, Thunderhead, is set to release on March 6, 2018. (Edit: Amazon says February 6, 2018!)

If you want to explore other books by Shusterman, read his National Book Award winning Challenger Deep, or the Unwind series.

'Saving Red' by Sonya Sones

Fourteen-year-old Molly has to finish her volunteer community service hours.  Now.

Image from:
www.harpercollins.ca

 Really.  The assignment is due tomorrow morning.  Which is how she finds herself in the company of Feather and Eden, doing Santa Monica's annual count of homeless people.  When Molly finds a teenage girl in the grip of a nightmare sleeping on a park bench, she can't forget the girl with the blazing red hair.  After a couple of chance encounters with Red, Molly vows to reunite Red with her family for Christmas.

It turns out to be a lot more difficult than Molly imagines.

Molly's dealing with her own problems at home.  Something tragic happened, but Molly won't say it aloud, and neither will her parents.  So her mother copes by smoking pot and buying one of everything from the Home Shopping Network, and her father deals with it all by working so much he's hardly ever home.  Molly's so traumatized by this event, that she's prone to panic attacks, and has a preternaturally wise service dog named Pixel.  

And Red?

Red hears voices.  Sometimes they tell her to do helpful things.  Other times, their instructions are destructive to both Red and her family.  Plus, Red isn't the slightest bit interested in getting help.

Throw in Cristo, the boy Molly meets on the Ferris wheel at the Pacific Park pier, and she has quite the jam-packed winter break from school.

Technically, Saving Red is a "verse novel," or a novel written entirely in poetry.  But this isn't your grandmother's poetry, or even your mother's poetry.  Sones writes stunning, moving inner monologues, where the placement of a single word can pack more of a visceral emotional punch than pages of text.  You also still get the experience of reading a novel, but without the edge-to-edge text of a traditional novel.  Don't let the size of the book intimidate you!  It's a quick read.  I found myself eagerly turning the page to find out what happened next.  Sones also doesn't trivialize mental illness.  She delves into the impact it can have on the person struggling with an illness and their families.  Even though Sones manages to neatly wrap up the novel at the end, it's obvious that there are still lots of unanswered questions.

Sones also wrote What My Mother Doesn't Know and What My Girlfriend Doesn't Know.  Other verse novels you might want to try are Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhhai Lai or the Crank series by Ellen Hopkins.

There are several novels that also deal with mental illness, but you might want to read Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork or ChallengerDeep by Neal Shusterman.