Review: 'Loud Awake and Lost'

Loud Awake and Lost
By Adele Griffin
YA realistic fiction
November 2013
Knopf Books for Younger Readers
ISBN: 0804123675

Ember is returning home after months of rehab, recovering from a car accident in which she was the driver and which claimed the life of the teenage boy who was riding with her.

She’s got a lot going on -- continuing her physical rehabilitation, including giving up the life of a dancer she once might have been; her loving parents trying not to suffocate her with concern; her former boyfriend, a perfect guy who isn’t over her; losing her touch as a foodie with panache in the kitchen; and not remembering anything about Anthony, who was in the car that night. No one else knew Anthony either.

Spending time on her own, lost in her own thoughts, Ember meets a street artist, Kai, who seems to know her better than she knows herself and who lights up her world. She keeps him a secret from everyone else.

Pages and pages later, we find out why.

This is far from a perfect book. The slow pacing will just about kill interest for teens craving action, although Ember’s yearning for the excitement of being with Kai may keep romance readers interested. It’s not hard to figure out the mystery in the story, and it does make sense. But the Ember who is drawn to Kai and the Ember in the real world don’t mesh. Adele Griffin writes lyrical prose but could have written a shorter novel here to attract more readers. For a high school fiction writing workshop, this would make an interesting book to deconstruct.


©2014 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Sunday Sentence: Joshua Ferris

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I've read in the past week, presented without further commentary or context:

Every night was a night of limitless possibility expired, of a life forfeited, of a foreclosed opportunity to expand, explore, risk, hope, and live.

-- Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

Review: 'Disenchanted & Co.'

Disenchanted & Co.
By Lynn Viehl
Paranormal steampunk
January 2014
Pocket Books
ISBN: 978-1476722351

In a steampunk world in which the United States lost the Revolutionary War and people believe in the evil power of magic, Kit stands out.

She is an independent woman, a rarity, who makes her own living. She is more feisty and more spunky than any standard romance heroine, with quick wits, a sharp tongue and a network of friends. She doesn't believe in magic. Kit actually makes her living as an investigator disproving the existence of magic and proving the existence of charlatans and quacks.

But in accepting the case of Lady Diana Walsh, a noblewoman suffering unexplained cruel words carved onto her at night, our intrepid heroine may well have gone too far. Her client's powerful husband is dead-set against the investigation. So is Lucien Dredmore, another powerful man who may present a very personal challenge to Kit. Lucien is wicked and urbane, the complete opposite of Kit's childhood pal, Inspector Tommy Doyle. So it's easy to predict who Kit is drawn to, even as she fights him off.

This is the set-up of the full-length novel of Lynn Viehl's story, which sets up the beginning of a gloriously realized steampunk world in which magic and the Industrial Revolution collide in what is now the western United States. Disenchanted & Co. also sets up Kit's own journey from a female adventurer to a deeper, more feeling character with a backstory she is just discovering for herself as the narrative unfolds.

The only problem with the novel is that Viehl apparently wrote herself into a corner with the plot machinations and pulls a twist near the end that didn't have the same swashbuckling, clever tone as the rest of the novel in which Kit is the mistress of her own destiny and rescues herself. Once that point is passed, however, Viehl sets things up for a series that can appeal to steampunk, mystery and romance fans. It's certainly a series that deserves a look at the second novel, The Clockwork Wolf.

©2014 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'The River and Enoch O'Reilly'

The River and Enoch O'Reilly
By Peter Murphy
Literary fiction
September 2013
Mariner Books
ISBN: 978-0547904771

Like a river, a narrative has its course and wends its own particular course to its end. Like a traveler on a river, a reader may not see the turns coming, the cross-currents underneath or the rocks on the river banks on which the journey may be interrupted, or even abruptly halted. Reading Peter Murphy's The River and Enoch O'Reilly is like undertaking a rocky river journey.

Young Enoch is fascinated by the homemade radio transmission system his father has built in their basement. Not much else goes on in his miserable Irish town. The river rose and kept rising during the last onslaught, so much that it appears God broke his promise to Noah. People are lost, animals killed and property damaged. Enoch, listening to his father's radio, hears a transmisison that changes his life. It's the Holy Ghost Radio with fire and brimestone and the spirit of Elvis. Enoch plays with the settings, trying to keep up with the transmission, but loses it. Enoch's father is furious. The cellar door is locked and further transmission beyond Enoch's listening. He leaves town, heartbroken.

Most of Enoch's next years are the stuff of fable or street gutter. We see only one actual event -- a chance chaste encounter with a young lady -- and are left to decide for ourselves what's under the murkey surface waters. What did Enoch really do all those years? Did he travel the backroads of the American South? Did he wander from pub to pub in Ireland? Does it matter? Would it have made a difference? We don't know and it probably doesn't matter.

Enoch makes his way back to the old hometown and talks his way into a weekly radio show. It catches fire not when he is earnest but when he goes all McCarthy-holy roller preacher on his audience. Each week, they cannot wait for the scandalous rumors. But just when it appears the river of this narrative will take delicious twisty turns and be a dark journey, the story hits some big rocks and flounders.

Murphy shows what can happen when all the elements are in place for a unique work of fiction -- setting, premise, characters that could yield complex motivations and undergo great change, but not this time. The story deflates just when it looks like it's going to inflate and then inflate some more, perhaps bursting, perhaps getting right to the point just before it bursts. It's a great disappointment.

So at least the reader who perseveres can feel empathy for Enoch after hearing the wisps of a truly great narrative that gets lost. Their journeys are similar.

©2014 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Don't Call Me Baby'

Don't Call Me Baby
By Gwen Heasley
YA realistic fiction
April  2014
HarperTeen
ISBN: 978-0062208521

Imogen has had it. She is 15, starting high school, and she would love to have a normal family life. Instead, every moment of her existence is photographed and chronicled by her mother, a famous mommy blogger.

Instead of living a normal private life, Imogen is Baby and she has been on display since before she was born. But she has her best friend, whose mother also is a well-known blogger, and they have an English class in which student blogs are assigned. It's time, Imogen decides, to get her life back.

Gwen Heasley's Don't Call Me Baby starts off as a humorous, breezy story in which daughters square off against moms. She's got the online persona down. She's got the reader right there with their daughters.

And then the author does something even better. She goes for higher stakes than the two teens getting their moms to pay attention to them.

Heasley also weaves into her story how a big blogging commitment affects a family, how a blog can be a hungry monster that must be continually fed and a brand consistently maintained if a blogger is to create an online presence. She shows both sides of what it means as young people come of age in a digital age during which their baby pictures and other embarrassing moments of their lives are stored forever on some server.

She also creates an engaging story of how moms and daughters try to talk to each other but miss each other's point, how family members keep trying to find their way to each other and how friends can be humanly fallible and yet remain totally awesome.

©2014 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Sunday Sentence: 'The Goldfinch'

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further comment or context:

We don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are.

-- Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Review: 'The Here and Now'

The Here and Now
By Ann Brashares
YA science fiction
April 2014
Delacorte Press
ISBN: 978-0385736800

Preena really isn't like most of the other kids in school. Really. She is from the future.

Ethan has something that sets him apart as well. Four years ago, he saw Preena arrive.

She is one of a group of time travelers from the future. Plague has decimated humankind and climate change is ending life on the planet. The time travelers came back to our time because their families wanted them to be saved.

Preena and Ethan are the kind of couple destined -- normally -- to have a romantic comedy after meeting cute. They pair up well and Brashares conveys fresh, light-hearted like-into-love very well. But the pair are soon drawn into an attempt to set things on a different course in time, so the future Preena knows doesn't happen. A mysterious homeless man appears to know more than a crazy old street man should know about Preena and the others like her.

From there until the story's end, The Here and Now weaves together the personal and world conflicts in stunning fashion. The ups and downs that face Preena and Ethan as they race to prevent a cataclysmic event that set the future into motion may affect the possiblity that they have a future together, or not, as well as the future of humanity.

Before the heartfelt conclusion -- an "oh, wow!" ending if ever there was one -- Brashares adds another mindful layer to the novel. What is a solution to some characters is a tragic new problem to others. Even if a reader takes sides, it's still worthwhile to be able to see another perspective.

This is a tremendously thoughtful novel with engaging characters. The biggest fans of Brashares's popular Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and those coming to her writing for the first time will all be glad they have read The Here and Now.

©2014 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission