'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.

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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?

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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.

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 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.  

'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood" by Trevor Noah

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You probably know Trevor Noah from Comedy Central's The Daily Show.  Trevor was a surprise pick to replace the indomitable Jon Stewart, but the South African comedian has slowly come into his own and as you read his new memoir, Born a Crime: Stories From a SouthAfrican Childhood, you might start to think perhaps Jon Stewart had a very good reason to pick Trevor as his successor.

Noah's story doesn't begin with his birth.  It goes back much further than that, when the white South African government imposed the system known as apartheid on its inhabitants, hitting black South Africans the hardest with repercussions that continue to this day. Noah's mother, Patricia, rebelled against apartheid as much as possible, becoming a secretary and then making the momentous decision to have a child.  But not just with anyone.  Patricia turned to a friend, Robert, who also just happened to be a white Swiss expat.  In South Africa at that time, it was not only illegal for Trevor's parents to have a sexual relationship, it was punishable by several years in prison.  Trevor's very existence was, in fact, evidence of a crime.

Trevor describes his childhood in a series of eighteen essays, that cover everything from his mother's insistence they attend three different churches on Sundays to his laughably inept attempts to woo girls in high school to the difficult and often turbulent relationship Trevor had with his abusive stepfather.  The essays are by turns funny, moving, and heartbreaking.  Throughout the essays, Trevor is careful to not only describe the effect apartheid had on his family and other black South Africans, but to multi-racial people labeled as "Colored,"  Trevor also points out the often arbitrary rules of apartheid that sometimes popped up seemingly overnight, with no other purpose than to further divide South Africa's black and Colored peoples.  He even devotes several pages to how apartheid affected his father and other whites who disagreed with apartheid.

If Trevor is the star of the show, his mother, Patricia, often steals the spotlight as his determined supporting actress.  If nothing else in the world, Patricia is often the voice of Trevor's conscience and the force nudging him to reach for something better.

The book is an easy read in terms of readability.  Trevor's voice shines through the page, and he makes it sound like he's sitting at a table in a coffee shop regaling his friends with the most meaningful moments of his childhood.  His language does get a bit salty at times, but it never comes off as gratuitous.  Another thing to keep in mind is the book doesn't move in a straight line from Trevor's birth to his early 20s.  It meanders a bit, based on the theme for that particular section of essays.

I had a really hard time putting it down.  If you like memoirs, this is definitely one to read.