LitBit Speaks

As Corey Whaley notes in his blurb on the cover, Mesrobian's text, much like Sex & Violence is a "memorable story about growing up in an often ridiculous world." And that's really what this book is, a story of growing up, maturing, and making choices that will affect the future. Sean Norwhalt is dumped by Hallie. He was her summer boyfriend, but since she's decided to head off to college, he is feeling pretty crappy about his future. He begins to see all possible futures as disposable. One day, though, Sean decides to make changes, so he signs up for the Marine Corps, exactly where nobody thought he would end up. But then he starts to hang out with Neecie Albertson, a girl he never expected to care about. Perfectly Good White Boy  is very much a character-driven novel. This is not to say there is no plot, but character development is at the heart of Sean's story. Sean is not always sympathetic; readers see the good, the bad, and the terrible. Even w...

Alex was born a girl… or maybe a boy… or… well, her parents ended up choosing boy . When Alex informs mum and dad that he is, in fact, a girl, all hell breaks loose at home. She stops taking her medication—hormones—her father disappears for a few days, and her mother begins rolling around on the floor, calling Alex a pervert, saying that Alex is killing her with this announcement. Melodramatic? Indeed! That being said, I was pleasantly surprised by Alex As Well , a novel that dares to ask larger questions about family that other trans and intersex novels seem to ignore. Brugman examines mental illness, friendship (or lack thereof), becoming an adult, intersexuality, and even emancipation. Alex takes the reigns of her life, befriending a lawyer named Crockett, who aids in Alex’s new life, particularly her attempts to get a new birth certificate so she can properly enroll in her new school, and later help her work on the emancipation process. I said earlier that the book feels...

Theo is feeling better these days. She is eating again, back home from treatment, and is on her way to becoming a professional dancer. But then her best friend Donovan shows up after being gone for four years after being abducted. Theo starts to relive her memories of the abduction, and Donovan's abductor. Theo's life is thrown completely upside down and things just keep going from bad to worse.       I wish I could say the day Donovan came home was extraordinary from the start, that I woke up knowing something special would happen that Thursday evening in October.      But the truth is, it's like any other day of the week.      I go to school, then I get on the train and go to ballet. Colbert's debut novel is beautiful and chock-full of richly developed characters, both primary and secondary. Not only is the cover incredibly indicative of the lightness and darkness that both reside within Theo, but the flame-like colouring of th...

I love A.S. King! Yes, I know, I've been a total fanboy since I first read the beautiful, the brave, the fantastic Ask the Passengers  (2012). After that, I sort of went on a bender of King's novels and have yet to be disappointed. However, I don't want this to turn into a total gushing session where all I talk about is how I want to have King's babies, so I'll move on to my review.      So we drank it—the two of us. Ellie drank it first and acted like it tasted good. I followed. And it wasn't half bad.        When we woke up the next morning, everything was different. We could see the future. We could see the past. We could see everything .              You might say, "Why did you drink a bat?" Or, "Who would do that?"          But we weren't thinking about it at the time. It's like being on a fast train that crashes and someone asking you why you didn't jump before it crashed....

This novel is a challenge, not only because there is nothing easy about it (Almond makes his readers work for their rewards), but also because the writing style is so unique in many ways. If you've ever read Blood Red Road  by Moira Young, you'll be familiar with the phonetic spelling in the narrative voice, though Billy Dean  is much more extreme in this sense. Here's a little taste so you'll know what I'm talking about: This tail is told by 1 that died at birth by 1 that came into the world in days of endles war & at the moment of disaster.   He grew is isolayshon wile the enjins of destrucshon flew & smoke rose over the sitys & wile winderness & waste crept all acros the world.   He grew up with the birds & mise as friends.   So as you can see, it's not just the difficulty of being thrown into the middle of Billy Dean's life that might confuse the average reader, but also the style in which the tale is told. We don't know ...

Dylan Mint battles Tourette's on a daily basis--the swearing, tics, howling, and inescapable desires to run away from stressful situation. When he visits the hospital with his mother one day, however, he hears some news that makes him very, very worried. He thinks he's going to die by the time March rolls around. Upon this rather terrifying discovery, Dylan makes a brief list of three things he wants to do before he dies: 1) Have sex with Michelle Malloy; 2) Get people to stop calling his friend, Amir, names because of the color of his skin; 3) To get his dad back from the war before, well, you know-know-what happens. It doesn't sound like much, but for Dylan Mint, this is a lifetime of work, and adding his outbursts and tics to the mix makes it just that much more difficult. When I first realized I wasn't able to talk too well, it felt as though I'd swallowed an eight ball (not the drug), and as if my windpipe would explode if I tried to say anything. Co...

The Living  recently received an Honor from the Pura Belpré committee. The award recognizes of a work which best portrays the Latino cultural experience in a work of literature for children or youth. As I was at the awards announcements, and having known people who served on the committee in the past, I was intrigued. I had read the winning title and the other honor titles, and was impressed with the choices. So here's my review of The Living : The novel begins with Shy, a young guy working for a snazzy cruise line, offering water to people on the Lido Deck of the ship to combat the heat. Everything is going pretty well until an older gentleman comes out and starts spouting of weird, disconcerting phrases: "You have seen the face of evil."Shy doesn't quite know what to think, so he moves on to a couple of ladies on the other side of the deck. Just as he's handing them their water bottles, he sees movement out of the corner of his eye and realizes the old guy h...

So basically, Scott Westerfeld decided to trick me. He made me read two novels at the same time! Which is difficult not  to do, since Afterworlds  is essentially a two-for-one special.  ___________________________________________ The most important email that Darcy Patel every wrote was three paragraphs long. . . . This email was not a perfect query letter. But it did its job. Seventeen days after pressing Send, Darcy was signed to Underbridge, a flourishing and respected literary agency, and not long after that she had a two-book deal for an astonishing amount of money. Afterworlds  (the novel): Darcy is a young author who managed to score a massive advance from the fictional "Paradox Publishing."She moves to New York to start her career as a writer, blowing off college, and trying to figure out how to navigate the world of publishing, and the complexities of first love.  It's called the flipside . . . . It's where the dead walk, and I'm going to t...

Olivia and Zoey are not great friends. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Olivia and Joey, on the other hand, are not only the best of friends, but are also twins. When Joey starts dating Zoey, however, Olivia’s relationship with both of them begins to change. She begins to wonder if she will ever be best friends with her brother again, and suddenly begins to warm up to Zoey. But when the two girls eventually fall for each other, Olivia doesn’t know what to do anymore, and has to make some tough decisions to make everyone happy… hopefully. Grace’s novel is not overly complex, relying on a rather well-used plot wherein two people fall for the same love interest, but with a queer flair. The brother-sister dynamic is successful in heightening tensions throughout the book, and Zoey’s lower-class existence in relation to the upper-crust status of the siblings gives the narrative an overarching intricacy. Zoey’s sister and mother are secondary to Zoey’s portion of the tale, and I ...

Jack has just lost his father to war, and more recently, his mother, to suspected suicide. Her car went off a cliff at high speed and her body was never found. And if that's not bad enough, he has been "claimed" by his Aunt Edith, a corpulent and bad-tempered woman living in residence at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. She keeps asking Jack about a mysterious series of seven numbers, but Jack doesn't know what any of that is about. Eventually Jack settles into a routine, riding the elevator up and down to get his aunt boxes of chocolates, and constantly finding himself in trouble with the bellman. But when he returns to the room one day, his aunt is missing and a mysterious message is written on the bedsheets in melted chocolate. As he tries to find her and scour the hotel, he runs into the one and only Alfred Hitchcock, who happens to be staying in the suite next door. The two work together to unravel a convoluted mystery before time runs out, discovering new ...

I originally bought this book solely because of the cover art and the title, but was also intrigued by the overall premise. I have read a few books over the last year or so in which teens take back their lives, fighting the powers that be, and becoming radical movers and shakers within the realms of schools, churches, and homes. What I love about these is the hearkening back to earlier radical movements that sought to free people from the control of governments and corporations that were only out to gain power and fortune at the expense of the general public. Looking around at some of the social and political forces at work in Canada and the US these days, I am glad to see these works of fiction wriggling their wonderfully subversive selves into the hands of young readers who will become the hope of the next generation(s). That being said, the book is awesome on its own, too! Ethan, Luke, Jackson, and Elizabeth are all getting sick and tired of the way that For Art's Sake —a tras...

THIS COVER, YOU GUYS!! THIS COVER!! *swoon* Okay, now that I've had a chance to calm down a bit, let me take the time to tell you what I think of everything that comes after that beautiful cover. So, here we go!     There are some dreams you can't wake up from. These are the dreams that try and trick you. The ones that lull you into believing you're awake, that your eyes are open and your mind knows what it's doing. But it's a lie. In reality, you're paralyzed. And when something terrible comes for you, you can't move.     No matter how hard you try.     The story my sister tells me is not a nice one.     It is not a dream I want to be having.     But it's mine .     I can't escape it.     No matter what you do. Jamie Henry wakes up one morning to the unnerving pronouncement that his sister has been released from prison—two years earlier she was sent away to juvenile detention for burning down a barn full of ho...

Let me begin this post by saying how glad I am that more on bisexuality is finally showing up in YA literature (and literature and studies in general, for that matter) since it used to be so often pushed to the side, marginalized. Only a few short years ago any mention of bisexuality would lead to a comment such as, "bisexuality is just half way down the road to gay," or "bi people are just confused." But that's not the case. Well, in some cases people are  confused, but that's usually more in early teen years when hormones are going crazy and sexual feelings are in their early stages, leading to arousal at, well, anything! But I digress... The subject matter of Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel  is a dramatic departure from Sara Farizan's first novel, If You Could Be Mine , though the sensitivity, anxiety, and sexual frustration is still very much at the forefront of this new novel. Farizan is a fabulous contributor to the field of queer YA lite...

Also Known as Elvis  is the fourth instalment of the Misfits  series* that has captured the hearts and minds of many a middle-grade reader. Each book focuses on one of the four members of the Group of Five, which consists of Bobby, Addie, Joe, and Skeezie, also known as Elvis. My dad left a little over two years ago, when I was in fifth grade. Megan was in the second grade and Jessie was just three. I guess you could say I saw it coming, but it's kind of like hurricane warnings. You think, "Yeah, rain's getting kind of heavy, but a hurricane? Not going to happen here." And then it hits. Skeezie is having a difficult summer. His mom seems to be going crazy, his sisters are driving him nuts, he has to find a job, and all of his friends are going away on family vacations! Oh, and just to put the cherry on the sundae, his dad has decided to show up and throw the whole family into chaos. Skeezie is delightfully constructed and feels very realistic as an early teen. ...

"Imagination isn't only about things that don't really exist. Imagination is exactly what you need to make real things." [Mister Orange] gave Linus a big smile. "New things. Things that don't exist and then suddenly do, all because someone sees a possibility and invents them. It all starts with imagination. It's the first step in everything that human beings have ever made."   He waved his hand around him. "Everything that you see here in the city, inside and outside, everything that you can touch and point to and hold on to, everything that you call 'real'—all of it started in somebody's head, as an idea. Without imagination, none of this would exist." Mister Orange received the 2014 Batchelder Medal for "the most outstanding children’s book originally published in a language other than English in a country other than the United States, and subsequently translated into English for publication in the United States....