Search Results for: Sara Zarr

How To Save a Life by Sara Zarr

Mar7

Originally published at Breakpoint.org, April 3, 2012

Sara Zarr’s 2010 young adult novel, Once Was Lost, features Samara, a PK (preacher’s kid) who thinks she has faith all figured out until her dysfunctional family falls apart and her quiet hometown experiences a tragedy. Then, Samara must learn to love and accept imperfect parents and an imperfect and questioning self. I loved the way the novel dealt with faith questions without over-simplifying or stereotyping the Christian characters.

I wondered if Zarr might continue with the explicitly Christian characters in her latest YA novel, How To Save a Life, but she doesn’t. Two girls, Mandy and Jill, tell the story in alternating chapters, and that first-person/two-narrators technique works well for a story that’s essentially about two people from very different backgrounds coming to trust, love, and understand each other.

Jill is an upper-middle-class, pierced-to-the-hilt child of privilege whose mother is a liberal career woman do-gooder with a heart for giving to others. As the book opens, Jill and her mother, Robin, are grieving the fairly recent death of Jill’s father, Mac, and Robin has made a momentous decision: to participate in an open adoption and give a home to a child in need. Mandy, the unmarried teen mother, will be coming to live at Jill’s house to complete the last few weeks of her pregnancy. Jill thinks her mom is insane, and she really misses her dad’s level-headed, curmudgeonly ways right about now.

When Mandy arrives on the scene, the story continues in Mandy’s voice for a while, and we learn that while Mandy may not fit Jill’s preconceived stereotypes, she certainly has some growing up of her own to do. Jill’s abrasiveness is a function of heredity (taking after her dad) and grief (for her dad), while Mandy has learned the art of passive resistance from interacting with her verbally abusive mother.

The two girls’ personalities mix like oil and water, and there’s also the new baby to think about. Does Jill have the ability to overcome her misgivings about the adoption and become a loving older sister? Does Mandy really want to give up the only thing that has ever been completely hers, her own baby?

The issues the story raises about adoption, trust, differences in socioeconomic backgrounds, parenting, and grieving are all well-integrated into the narrative and thought-provoking. I especially liked the depictions of the differences in Mandy’s and Jill’s economic expectations. Jill tells Mandy at one point in the book, “Money’s never been a problem in this family.” But for Mandy, money has been and is a big problem. It’s a cultural gap that is only partially bridged by the end of the novel, but it was good to see teens working through something that is rarely explored in YA novels.

On the other hand, I hated the fact that Jill and her boyfriend just had to fall into bed together as an expected and natural part of their reconciliation, about a third of the way through the novel. I’m not saying it’s not realistic for them to do so in today’s culture, and the sex scene isn’t explicit nor is it a big part of the story. But I hate giving young adult readers the unspoken message that “everybody does it” and it’s no big deal.

Since I read in a blog interview with Zarr that she is a Christian and that most of what [she writes] does not directly incorporate faith, but all of it is written from [her] Christian worldview, I expected to see that worldview in How To Save a Life. And I did. Although the dual narrators, Jill and Mandy, are explicitly non-religious, each of them comes to a place of change in her life that seems almost impossible apart from the hand of God. It’s as if, similar to the Book of Esther, God is at work in the background even though none of the characters in the book acknowledges Him or overtly calls on Him. Or maybe I’m just reading that sense of divine intervention into the narrative, since I was looking for it all along.

Either way, mature readers, both Christian and non-Christian, should see themselves in both Mandy and Jill as they struggle to change and trust each other across an economic and cultural gap that threatens to overwhelm their tentative and flawed attempts at understanding.

The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr

Aug3

I really liked Sara Zarr’s YA novels Once Was Lost and How to Save a Life. I thought her Sweethearts was O.K. but nothing to write home about. I haven’t read Story of a Girl, a National Book Award finalist in 2007, because I’m wary of the subject matter, a girl who gets a bad reputation and can’t live it down. This latest one from Ms. Zarr (2013), The Lucy Variations, was a good read, but a little odd in some ways.

The characters and their actions and reactions reminded me of Madeleine L’Engle’s young adult fiction. Her young protagonists are usually oddly grown-up and mature and at the same time naive, getting themselves into situations that went too deep, too soon. It’s an atmosphere and characterization that I can identify with:

Lucy Beck-Moreau once had a promising future as a concert pianist. The right people knew her name, her performances were booked months in advance, and her future seemed certain.

That was all before she turned fourteen.

Now, at sixteen, it’s over. A death, and a betrayal, led her to walk away. That leaves her talented ten-year-old brother, Gus, to shoulder the full weight of the Beck-Moreau family expectations. Then Gus gets a newpiano teacher who is young, kind, and interested in helping Lucy rekindle her love of piano—on her own terms. But when you’re used to performing for sold-out audiences and world-famous critics, can you ever learn to play just for yourself?

Not that I was ever a promising concert pianist or any other kind of prodigy, but I was a reader and somewhat mature for my age—in some ways. I knew about “stuff” from books just as Lucy knows about the adult world from being immersed in world of concert piano competitions from an early age. But that narrow, once-removed experience of adulthood doesn’t really prepare one for acting as an adult at age sixteen. Even if people expect maturity from an accomplished concert pianist.

So The Lucy Variations is about growing up when certain people expect you to be all grown up already.

And now that I’ve written all I have to say about this novel, I refer you to Liz Burns’ review at A Chair, a Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy in which she says what I think about this book.

Once Was Lost by Sara Zarr

Jul10

Last year I read Sweethearts by Sara Zarr, but I wasn’t that impressed. Maybe the story of childhood sweethearts who meet again but realize that their lives have changed just didn’t hit any of my buttons.

Once Was Lost certainly did intersect with my fascinations. Samara is a PK (preacher’s kid), and she used to think she had a handle on faith. But now Sam’s mother is in rehab dealing with her alcohol problem. And Sam’s dad is ignoring the problem, and pretty much ignoring Sam. And whatever faith in God Sam used to have is getting shaky.

Then, to compound the problems, an abduction takes place in the small town where Sam and her family live, and everyone is so wrapped up in dealing with that tragedy that Sam’s personal grief and confusion over her mother’s illness is overshadowed. And Sam starts to feel like Job, or doubting Thomas, or maybe Lazarus when he was dead and no one was sure Jesus would or could bring him back to life.

This book was so real. The pressures on a pastor’s family to be perfect and have all the answers lest they let the church down or damage God’s reputation were depicted so well. And Sam’s dad, Pastor Charlie, was exactly like other Christian men I know, not a hypocrite or a bad person but just a regular guy struggling to deal with unexpected tragedy and unfathomable pain and questions about where God is all of the suffering. Sam is just a girl, not a perfect pastor’s daughter or an obedient little girl, but a teenager who misses her mom and wants her dad to talk to her and explain what’s happened to their family.

If you’re interested in Christian faith and young adults, or how God really works in the world, or questions about faith, or just a good story, I would recommend Once Was Lost. I read this book last year for the INSPY awards judging, and it’s still with me. It also won the young adult literature INSPY Award last year.

Careless People by Sarah Churchwell

Feb2


Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell.

Essentially, this book focuses on the autumn of 1922 when F. Scott Fitzgerald was beginning to think about writing The Great Gatsby and when all of the reading public was fixated on the salacious details of the Hall-Mills murder case in New Jersey, a bizarre and celebrity-driven murder and investigation that played out in the newspapers and probably influenced Fitzgerald’s story of murder and infidelity in several aspects. Ms. Chruchwell also includes the before and after stories of how Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda came to be the celebrities that they were and of how Scott Fitzgerald finished writing his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, and even what happened to him and to Zelda after that novel was published.

I learned several facts that I didn’t know while reading this volume of history and literary criticism combined. F. Scott Fitzgerald was only twenty-six years old in 1922 when he began planning his novel, and only twenty-eight when it was published. Zelda was even younger, born in 1900, twenty-two years old in 1922. She was only nineteen when she married Fitzgerald in April, 1920.

Their daughter, Scottie, was about a year old when they decided to move to New York from St. Paul, Minnesota. I’m not sure how the baby survived, although they did hire a nurse to take care of her, since the parents seem to have been constantly and continually drunk throughout the entire time that they lived in New York. I also am not surprised that Fitzgerald didn’t get far beyond the planning stages in writing his Great American Novel; I am surprised that he was able to write a coherent sentence, much less a number of short stories and the seminal beginnings of what would become The Great Gatsby.

“In May 1924 the Fitzgeralds sailed for Europe, to put the temptations of the New World behind them, with the conviction that they had left their old selves behind forever.” The temptations accompanied them; they got drunk in France just as well and just as often as they did in New York; and their marriage began to disintegrate. But Fitzgerald did write his novel, set in 1922 and based on the characters and the adventures that he and Zelda experienced in New York in that memorable fall of 1922. In particular the Hall-Mills murder case became a part of The Great Gatsby, inextricably intertwined in the characters of Daisy and Tom and Nick and Jordan and Gatsby himself and in the ideas of romantic adultery and carelessness and mistaken identity, insoluble crimes and American idealism.

If you’re fascinated by the Jazz Age, Prohibition, flappers, Scott and Zelda, and The Great Gatsby, Careless People has some good factual material as well as speculation and philosophy about the era and the meaning of the history and the novel and their intersection. The author gets a little carried away at times with passages like the following, coming at the end of each section of the purportedly nonfiction prosaic tome:

“Life is always there waiting to be transfigured into a splendid fiction, however sad or sordid its origins. A story of adultery ends in the violent extinction of a woman of tremendous vitality. A dreamer keeps faith with the faithless, an a double shooting draws coder in the cooling twilight, as e writer tires to determine whether what he holds in his hand is the past, or the future.”

However, reading about Scott and Zelda did make me think about sin and its intractable hold on our lives, about how genius can transcend even the tragic and injurious decisions we make, sometimes, and about what the real meaning of The Great Gatsby is. Did Scott Fitzgerald understand the tragedy of his own novel? Did Zelda? Do I?

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy– they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Scott and Zelda were careless, too, and sort of rich, but there came a time, later, when the piper had to be paid, and the party was over, and both their lives ended tragically. I wonder how many “messes” the “golden boy” and his “first American flapper” left in their wake? If sound self-righteous and Pharasaical, I don’t mean to be. I also wonder how many messes I’ve left for others to clean up and how many more I might have run away from if I had been rich and able?

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Two New Middle Grade Fiction Books: 2022

Apr14

In Honor of Broken Things by Paul Acampora.

A Song Called Home by Sara Zarr.

Both of these recently published middle grade realistic fiction books, set in the present day, are about children dealing with broken families and tragic circumstances and about forming new friendships in difficult times. In the book In Honor of Broken Things, Oscar, Ellie, and Noah become “accidental” friends when they end up in the same eighth grade pottery class together in the middle of the school year. Noah, a near genius, has been homeschooled all his life, but since his mom is no longer a dependable teacher, he’s ready for a change–public school. Ellie and her single mom just moved to the small Pennsylvania coal town of West Beacon from Philadelphia, and Ellie can’t get used to living in such a small place. Oscar is returning to school after a family tragedy, his sister’s death, and he’s expected to carry the school football team to victory in spite of his grief and confusion and loss.

A couple of unnecessarily didactic moments were intrusive enough to take me out of the story momentarily in In Honor of Broken Things. ( Apparently, the word “lunatic” is now considered “unkind, hurtful, and meaningless”, and therefore inappropriate even if applied to oneself. And not all Hispanic cultures and countries celebrate the same holidays (duh), so saying that Dia de los Muertos represents Spanish-speaking culture is grounds for an apology since the holiday isn’t really celebrated in the Dominican Republic.) But overall the story was readable and relatable. The author uses the technique of switching point of view from one chapter to the next, so we get to see the events of the story from three different points of view. I didn’t think the voices of the three main characters were different enough for me to distinguish, and I often had to look back to the beginning of the chapter to figure out who was speaking in this particular chapter. Nevertheless, I liked the metaphor of the delicate and sometimes broken and repaired pottery as it resembles relationships and friendships and even life itself. We are all a little broken, and we do need to help each other pick up the pieces when we fall and try again.

A Song Called Home was more problematic. I’ve read several of Sara Zarr’s young adult novels, and although I enjoyed some better than others, I thought overall that she was a pretty good writer. I believe that A Song Called Home is Ms. Zarr’s first middle grade novel, and it just didn’t work–for several reasons. Lou/Louisa/Belle/Lulu/Lu/El (yes, she goes through that many names, maybe a few more) is the main character in this book about a family dealing with change. Lou’s mom is getting remarried to Steve, and Lou and her older sister Casey are not happy. The family is moving from the city to Steve’s house in the suburbs, and Lou’s alcoholic dad who left them two years ago is also not happy about the new marriage, the move, and all the other changes that ensue.

I get it that all of the names are a picture of Lou trying to figure out who she is and who she is in relation to all of the people in her life. I just thought it was excessive. And there was a lot of crying, and talking about crying, and thinking about not crying, and almost crying, and hidden tears, and open tears—almost every other page someone is crying or trying not to cry. Again, I get it. They’re a family who has learned, especially Lou, to hide their emotions, to tread carefully, because of living with an explosive and unpredictable alcoholic dad. But really, edit it down a bit.

I thought it was lovely to read a book about a family that goes to church and prays. Lou spends time trying to figure out how to pray for her dad and how to understand her faith, and those parts of the book are natural and well written, obviously by someone who is familiar with evangelical Christian culture and thought. But suddenly about halfway through the book, a minor character, one of Lou’s new classmates, shows up with “their” own pronouns, “they” and “them”. And Lou is asked to choose her pronouns when she starts out in a new fifth grade classroom. Really? Do ten and eleven year olds have to choose genders and pronouns now? Is this a California thing? (The story takes place in and near San Francisco.)

I almost put the book down when the gender pronoun-choosing began, but I decided to finish. And the story does end well. But sneaking gender confusion propaganda into a middle grade fiction book is not O.K. And it all felt way too preachy and mostly sad to me. Lou says her favorite books are “sad books” (example: Where the Red Fern Grows). But there’s a difference between sad books and books that are preaching about how it’s OK to be sad. I prefer the former.

September: National Piano Month

Sep5

All eight of my children have attempted to play the piano, taken piano lessons, or at least tried out piano lessons, and although I can’t say that any of them are concert piano material, they do enjoy playing and composing and generally messing about with music, some more than others. I, on the other hand, can’t play a note. Well, maybe one note.

Pianos are wonderful instruments.

“The piano keys are black and white, but they sound like a million colors in your mind.” ~Maria Cristina Mena, The Collected Stories of Maria Cristina Mena.

Nonfiction about pianos and pianists:
Forever Music: A Tribute to the Gift of Creativity by Edith Schaeffer. Mrs. Schaeffer tells the history of her Steinway grand piano, and she also weaves a story about the fallenness of man and the creativity that God built into each of us. This book would be a lovely gift for any musician in your life or for anyone who cares about music.
Piano Lessons: A Memoir by Anna Goldsworthy. This story of a girl and her piano teacher sounds really good. Has anyone read it?
Piano Lessons: Music, Love and True Adventure by Noah Adams. Another memoir, this time about a middle-aged man who decides to pursue his life-long dream of learning to play the piano. I am drawn to the premise.
The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier by Thad Carhart. Yet another memoirist returns to the piano and the company of musicians as an adult and an amateur.
Note by Note: A Celebration of the Piano Lesson by Tricia Tunstall. I might give this one to my favorite piano teacher.
Mr. Langshaw’s Square Piano: The Story of the First Pianos and How They Caused a Cultural Revolution by Madeline Gould. Pianos and history combined. I can’t resist. Reviewed at 5 Minutes for Books.
Piano Starts Here: The Young Art Tatum by Robert Andrew Parker. Reviewed at Becky’s Book Reviews A children’s picture bio of a jazz great.
Duke Ellington: The Piano Prince and His Orchestra by Brian Pinkney. Another picture book biography.
Giants of the Keyboard by Victor Chapin. Includes chapter length biographies of Johann Christian Bach, Muzio Clementi, Jan Dussek, Johann Cramer, Johann Hummel, John FIeld, Karl Czerny, Ignaz Moscheles, Franz Liszt, Clara Schumann, Louis Gottschalk, Anton Rubinstein, Teresa Carreno, Paderewski, Ferruccio Busoni, and Artur Schnabel.

Piano fiction:
Anatole and the Piano by Eve Titus. Anatole, the conductor of the Mouse Symphony Orchestra, goes down inside a grand piano. Picture book.
Nate the Great and the Musical Note by Marjorie Sharmat. Nate the Great, junior detective, solves a musical mystery.
Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Practicing the Piano by Peggy Gifford. Easy chapter book.
A Crooked Kind of Perfect by Linda Urban. Zoe dreams of playing the piano at Carnegie Hall—if she can just get her parents to spring for lessons. however, the tricot the music store doesn’t turn out exactly the way Zoe had envisioned. Can she become a star with her new Perfectone D-60 organ?
Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis. Bud Caldwell sets out for Grand Rapids, Michigan to find his long-lost father, the great jazz musician Herman Calloway and his band, the Dusky Devastators of the Depression. Newbery Award book.
The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr. YA fiction about a teen piano prodigy who confounds her family and the concert world by suddenly quitting piano.
A Small Rain and A Severed Wasp by Madeleine L’Engle. Two of my favorite novels by Ms. L’Engle, about concert pianist Katherine Forrester, first as a teenager, then as an elderly, and quite famous, grande dame. Adult fiction.

Too Many Stories, Too Much Drama

Oct20

Dear Teen Me: Authors Write Letters to Their Teen Selves edited by E. Kristin Anderson and Miranda Kenneally.

Bullying Under Attack: True Stories Written by Teen Victims, Bullies & Bystanders by Stephanie Meyer, John Meyer, Emily Sperber, and Heather Alexander.

These are two similar collections of teen angst. In the first book, Dear Teen Me, YA authors write letters to themselves as they were when they were teens and in the process they tell some of their own back-story and give advice they wish they had taken when they were teens. It would have helped me to know how old the author who was writing any given letter is now. I would have been able to evaluate the advice in the letters better had I known the length of time elapsed since the events occurred. On the other hand, most of the advice was of the “hang-in-there” and watch out for hairstyles that you will later regret variety, so I guess it was all valid as far as it goes.

The second book, Bullying Under Attack, is a collection of stories of contemporary teens who have experienced bullying in some way. Some of the teens who contributed essays, poems, and photographs to the book were harassed and tormented by bullies, others were themselves the bullies, and others recount stories of standing by and being called upon to help. Again, the advice is fairly standard. Hang in there. Survive. Stand up for yourself. Show compassion for the bully. Change schools. It’s all good advice, if perhaps a bit inadequate in some situations. Generally, the adults are fairly useless in most of the teens’ experiences, which may sadly be the the way it really is on the ground in our schools and families and on the internet (some of the stories involved cyber-bullying).

Maybe my compassion fatigue while reading these two collections of teen drama shows a lack in me, but I must be honest. After a while the stories in these two books and the advice given by the authors and the teen victims and the teen bullies and the teen bystanders all started to blur together and convert itself into one big cliche. I wanted to feel for the kids who told horrendous stories of abuse, tragedy, cruelty, and bad hair-dos, but it was all too, too much. First of all, I shouldn’t have read both books back-to-back. In addition, I would even suggest to anyone who is interested in reading either book that they take it in a little at a time, perhaps one story per night. Although since Dear Teen Me has letters from seventy different YA authors, including Lauren Oliver, Ellen Hopkins, Sara Zarr, and Tom Angleberger, to name the ones I recognize most readily, reading one story per day would stretch the book out over two or three months. That’s a lot of angst in daily doses.

Then, one could move on to Bullying Under Attack, but that’s a lot more sadness, and I’m just not sure it would accomplish the stated goal of the latter book, which is to end bullying and the culture of bullying. To end bullying, kids (and adults) need a change of heart, and I’m not sure that reading a book about the sources and effects of bullying will really make anyone stop being a cruel, abusive person or will help anyone to escape the bullies. But maybe I’m wrong.

From Amazon’s book description: “Stories of regret, promises, and encouragement that will help readers find solace during their teen years and show them how—as adults—their words and actions can provide strength and reassurance to others experiencing all aspects of bullying. Ultimately, they will learn to find their voices in order to break the cycle for good.”

Many of the reviewers at Amazon say that the bullying book in particular should be “required reading.” I think a more radical prescription is called for: conversion to the ethic of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit for bullies and for their victims.

As for adults who are wondering what their role should be in regard to bullying, this piece and others like it by Dr. James Dobson speak directly to the point and instruct adults who are too often “bystanders” in the face of teen bullying. My weariness in reading these books does not mean that I believe that bullying is OK or not a real problem or that adults should become weary in confronting and stopping it when it happens.

Sunday Salon: Coming this Fall to a Bookstore Near You

Aug18

These are some of the books set for publication in fall 2013 that I would really, really like to read:

The Song of the Quarkbeast by Jasper Fforde. 09/03/2013 The Chronicles of Kazam, Book Two, sequel to The Last Dragonslayer.

Silence: A Christian History by Diarmaid MacCulloch. 09/12/2013

United We Spy by Ally Carter. 09/17/2013

The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography by Alan Jacobs. 09/30/2013

One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson. 10/01/2013

Allegiant by Veronica Roth. 10/22/2013

Sycamore Row by John Grisham: Grisham’s latest is a sequel to A Time to Kill, his first book. 10/22/2013

We Are Water by Wally Lamb. 10/29/2013. I just finished Lamb’s The Hour I First Believed, and although I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, I found it quite absorbing and insightful.

The Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan. Read about three generations of women from Shanghai, a remote Chinese village and San Francisco. 11/05/2013

The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon by Alexander McCall Smith. 11/05/2013

Roomies by Sara Zarr and Tara Altebrando. 12/24/2013

And the one I’ve already read, thanks to Net Galley, due out September 10th, is Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein, a companion novel to Wein’s Code Name Verity. I can tell now that Rose Under Fire is an excellent read. Look for my review in September.

Sunday Salon: Books Read in July, 2013

Aug11

I’m a little late here, but I didn’t keep a list last month. So I had to go back and “round up” my memory of what I read, the books on my Kindle, the ones I returned to the library, and the ones I didn’t return, and the reviews I completed, to make up this list of July books.

Children’s and Young Adult Fiction:
The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr, reviewed at Semicolon.
Being Henry David by Cal Armistead, reviewed at Semicolon.
Double Crossed by Ally Carter and Uncommon Criminals by Ally Carter, both reviewed at Semicolon.
Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein. ARC. My review will be published here at Semicolon in September, but I can say now that I thought it was just as good as the first “companion book” to this one, Code Name Verity.

Adult Fiction:
Buried in a Bog by Sheila Connolly, reviewed at Semicolon.
No Dark Valley by Jamie Langston Turner, reviewed at Semicolon.
Heirs and Spares by JL. Spohr. I had mixed feelings about this ARC of a debut novel set in a fictional kingdom in (Elizabethan) 1569. Review coming soon.

Nonfiction:
Running the Books by Avi Steinberg, reviewed at Semicolon.
Joni and Ken by Kena and Joni Eareckson Tada, reviewed at Semicolon.
Seeing Through the Fog by Ed Dobson, reviewed at Semicolon.
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright, reviewed at Semicolon.
Jesus in the Present Tense by Warren Wiersbe. I’m studying the “I AM” statements of Jesus in the book of John (I AM The Good Shepherd, IAM the Light of the World, etc.) for a women’s retreat that our church will sponsor next spring. I’m helping to write some of the Bible study material for the retreat. I think this book by Wiersbe will be the backbone of the study, along with the book of John itself, of course.

There You’ll Find Me by Jenny B. Jones

Apr6

The INSPY Awards are blogger-initiated book awards for fictional literature that grapples with expressions of the Christian faith. The awards were given in several categories in 2011, including the category of “literature for young people”, and I got to be judge in that category. The INSPY Awards took a break in 2012, but they’re back this year. And the list below is the “long list” of nominated books in the Literature for Young People category for this time around:

Wreath by Judy Christie
With a Name Like Love by Tess Hilmo. Semicolon review here.
Thundersnow by Sheila Hollinghead
Dead Man’s Hand by Eddie Jones
There You’ll Find Me by Jenny B. Jones
Crazy Dangerous by Andrew Klavan. Semicolon review here.
Cake – Love, Chickens and a Taste of Peculiar by Joyce Magnin
Right Where I Belong by Krista McGee
The Embittered Ruby by Nicole O’Dell
The Shadowed Onyx by Nicole O’Dell
Code of Silence by Tim Shoemaker
Addison Blakely: Confessions of a PK by Betsy St. Amant
Temptation: Solitary Tales No. 3 by Travis Thrasher
How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr

Three of the books on the list I’ve already read and reviewed, as indicated. Actually, I read How To Save a Life by Sara Zarr, and I thought I reviewed it but can’t find the review anywhere. I liked all three very much. I read a couple more of the books on this long list this past week: There You’ll Find Me by Jenny B. Jones and Code of Silence by Tim Shoemaker (review coming soon).

Ms. Jones is a rather prolific author of teen romances for Christian girls. Her books were all over Lifeway last time I was there. I rad one of her other books a year or two ago and thought it was just “meh.” This one was fairly low on the scale, too, and would have received a complete pan, were it not for the setting: Ireland.

Finley Sinclair, daughter of a wealthy hotel magnate, and sister to Will whose death in a terrorist incident has put Finley’s life in a tailspin of grief, is headed for Ireland to spend a year studying and trying to reconnect with God. Will came to love and know God when he studied in Ireland, and Finley hopes to follow in his footsteps, literally by visiting all of the places Will wrote about in his travel journal. Color Finley grey: grief-stricken, questioning, recovering from a mental breakdown, and lost.

Enter Beckett Rush, teen heart-throb, Hollywood player and bad boy, and star of a series of vampire movies. He’s in Ireland to film the latest movie in the Steel Markov vampire franchise. Beckett and Finley meet on the plane, clash, and hope never to see one another again. Alas, predictably, they are destined to meet again, clash again, and eventually fall in love and live happily ever after.

OK, it’s not quite that cliche. Take away the “live happily ever after.” Beckett and especially Finley are dealing with way too many issues to have a traditional happy ending. Beckett has a pushy dad who doubles as his greedy manager. Finley has mental health issues, a grouchy school assignment, and the loss of her faith, as well as the afore-mentioned grief and Beckett to keep her busy and confused.

As I think about it, this book would have made a good K-drama: Finley falls asleep on Beckett’s shoulder and drools, the two feud but are thrown together in spite of themselves, there’s a group of nasty, jealous girls at school, Finley has a sidekick, Erin, whom she mentors, lots of K-drama tropes. An awkward kiss or two, change the nationalities and the setting of the novel, take out the God-talk, and it would work on Korean TV just fine. In fact, it would work better on screen and with some editing.

I probably wouldn’t have made it through this one, though, if it hadn’t been set in Ireland. Give me a vivid setting, and I’ll follow you anywhere. And I got to read parts of the dialogue with an Irish lilt inside my head. A good plot and some engaging characters would have helped the journey, however.

Other reviews in which the blogger thought it was just peachy (I may be in the minority on this one): Edgy Inspirational Romance, YA Books Central, Christian Novels, Tree Swing Reading, etc.