Blue Plate Special by Michelle D. Kwasney
Chronicle Books
I haven’t found this one yet.
Others who have read it: Frenetic Reader, Pop Culture Junkie, Sarah’s Random Musings, Amanda at A Patchwork of Books.
Carter Finally Gets It by Brent Crawford
Disney Press
Carter is a typical male, I guess. I also guess I don’t want to read about every thought that goes through a typical male’s rather mundane and typical mind. Locker room humor disguised as reality/comedic fiction. Didn’t finish.
Lots of other people loved, loved, loved it.
Cracked Up to Be by Courtney Summers
Macmillan
With the f-bombs and other crude words dropping at a rate of one or two per paragraph, and the crude, rude, and socially unacceptable “situations” multiplying, I found it difficult to get to the actual story. So I didn’t finish. School Library Journal’s review says it’s “marked by explicit language and frank sexuality.” Yeah. It is–and not much else, at least as far as I got into it.
Again it was quite popular with other reviewers and bloggers.
How To Say Goodbye In Robot by Natalie Standiford
Scholastic
This one was both quirky and fascinating. I loved “listening” in on the late night radio call-in show, Night Lights, in which lonelyhearts and conspiracy theorists and assorted oddballs called to share their thoughts, feelings, and warnings about the apocalypse. The teen protagonists of the novel, Bea and Joshua, aka RobotGirl and Ghost Boy, share an addiction to late night radio, especially Night Lights.
However, even though I enjoyed the book, read it in one afternoon, I’m not sure who I’d recommend it to. I found much of it, plot and characters, quite unbelievable. In fact, the Night Lights callers were some of the more believable characters in the novel. I mistakenly thought Joshua was a liar, making up stories to get attention, for about half of the novel. The truth was a little too fantastic to be believable. Then, Bea’s mother seems at first to be merely eccentric, but she quickly moves into the realm of insanity. However, Bea and her father expect Bea’s mother to function as a sane person, and eventually by the end of the story Mom wanders back to the sane side of the street. Finally, Bea and Joshua come up with a plan so fantastic and so completely unworkable that it’s hard to believe any two halfway intelligent high school seniors could even entertain the notion.
And yet . . . with a high tolerance for strange, odd, and even looney, a reader might really grow to love this novel of two teen in search of an identity.
Becky, and Jen, and Amanda, and Tirzah all liked it.
Into the Wild Nerd Yonder by Julie Halpern.
Feiwel & Friends
I actually read several chapters of this story of Jessie and her friends, Bizza and Char. First of all, Char doesn’t do much of anything except bake a few cookies, so I’m not sure why she’s in the story. Bizza on the other hand is an expletive deleted, and I’m not sure why she and Jessie are friends in the first place, or the second place, or any place. While Bizza proceeds to contract VD from Jessie’s crush, Jessie considers joining the nerd crowd playing Dungeons and Dragons. Blech.
Several bloggers disagree with me and give it a thumbs up.
North of Beautiful by Justina Chen.
Little, Brown. Semicolon review here.
“North of Beautiful transcends the problem-of-the-week genre, and it’s a truly beautiful novel. The strength of the book is in its treatment of relationships and family dynamics. Terra Cooper, the protagonist of the novel, isn’t just a girl with low self esteem because of her facial disfigurement and her controlling dad.” Not my favorite of the year, but it’s a good solid pick.
North of Beautiful got lots of good buzz from everywhere: Teen Book Review, Presenting Lenore, S. Krishan’s Books, Miss Erin, and many others.
Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
Viking. Semicolon review here.
I read this one earlier last year because I usually like Ms. Anderson’s books. However, I really think Wintergirls was just O.K., nothing special, another problem novel, this time about anorexia. And the plot sometimes gets obscured by an attempt to be poetic, or fanciful, or something.
You can find lots of much more enthusiastic reviews of this one by a very talented author.
These are the books that won out and made the finalist list over Marcelo in the Real World and Flygirl and What I Saw and How I Lied and Secret Keeper? I don’t get it. I don’t mean to diss the committee, but can I respectfully disagree? Tell you what, I grant you the right and privilege of reading all of the nominees yourself and forming your own opinion. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you about some of them.
And I almost hate to mention it, but in light of discussions about the dearth of characters and authors who are not white, not one of these books has a protagonist who is anything other than white-bread-white, and only one of the authors could be called a Person of Color. I don’t believe in quotas, but actually many of the YA books I thought were outstanding in 2009 featured persons who were Asian, Hispanic, and African American (see preceding paragraph).
If I were on the committee to pick the Cybils Award winner for YA fiction, and I had to choose from this list, I’d go with North of Beautiful. The Cybils winners will be announced on Valentine’s Day.