YA Guy Reviews... EXO by Fonda Lee!

Being YA Guy, I read a lot of YA science fiction. I've always loved sci-fi, and my own novels are in the genre. So I'd say one-third to one-half of the YA titles I read every year are billed as science fiction.

But you know, most of them are really bad.

Derivative plots. Weak or nonexistent science. Magic instead of logic. Zero philosophical complexity. Heavy petting and happy endings where I'm looking for ambiguity and enduring questions.

The problem, it seems to me, is that far too many writers of ostensible YA science fiction aren't really interested in sci-fi. They don't know it; they don't care about it; they don't feel it. They write it, I can only speculate, because it's popular in the wake of titles like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and Divergent (which, whatever strengths it might have, is very weak science fiction). Instead of being lifelong lovers and advocates of the genre, they're dabblers. They write romantic fairy tales set in the future and call it science fiction, and those of us who cherish the genre are, I think, rightfully appalled.

All of this is preliminary to announcing that Fonda Lee, author of Zeroboxer (2015) and the brand-new Exo, is an exception to the above. She writes YA, but she's a true science fiction writer: in her heart, in her mind, in her blood. She knows the genre--its history, its traditions--and she pays tribute to it while extending it in exciting ways. That's what makes her so good.

Exo tells the story of Donovan Reyes, a teen soldier on a future Earth that's been colonized by an alien species. After years of war in which humanity suffered greatly at the hands of a technologically superior race, an accommodation has been reached between us and them; though the aliens effectively run the show, they've shared certain aspects of their technology with humankind, incorporated some humans into their kinship networks, and biologically transformed a select group of human beings, including Donovan, to exude an exoskeletal armor covering at will. When Donovan's captured by humans-first terrorists and forced to confront their beliefs head-on, his allegiance to the alien regime is called into question. And when he's required to choose between his father, who's a key figure in the accommodationist government, and an equally important person from his past, who's a central member of the terrorist group, Donovan's conflict comes to a head.

I didn't love everything about Exo; some of the emotional turning-points in the early going felt rushed to me, while the ending felt emotionally but not entirely intellectually satisfying. But what I did love about the book far made up for what I didn't: the imaginative rendering of an alien civilization; the plausible representation of human life under a colonizing power; the probing philosophical questions and moral quandaries; and, quite frankly, the really cool exocel armor system. There's action aplenty in Exo, and some romance too, but I never felt the way I feel about too much YA science fiction: that the futuristic setting is an excuse for lots of poorly executed fighting and smooching scenes. In Exo, the science fiction comes first, and that's the way it should be.

One of these days, I'm going to get around to compiling a list of my favorite YA science fiction books and authors. When I do, I'll share it here. And you can be sure that Fonda Lee and Exo will be on it.

YA Guy Reads... YA Contemporary (plus a giveaway)!

As you know, YA Guy’s mostly into speculative fiction: sci-fi, fantasy, horror, you name it. But from time to time I pick up something outside my comfort zone—not too far, mind you, because I can’t see myself reading a book about kissing or vampires (or kissing vampires). Over the past several weeks, however, I’ve read two YA Contemporary novels, and both were excellent.

First was THE TRUTH by Jeffry W. Johnston. This YA thriller concerns a teenage boy, Chris, who wakes up from a chloroform-induced sleep to find himself duct-taped to a chair in an unidentified location, with the brother of the runaway Chris shot in his kitchen threatening to maim him if Chris doesn’t tell the truth about what happened that night. From there, the novel bounces back and forth between the present and Chris’s memories of the events leading up to the shooting. The son of a police officer who died in the line of duty and the older brother of a ten-year-old he suspects was always his father’s favorite son, Chris tells himself he’s done everything to protect his younger brother—including on the night of the shooting. But how can he tell his abductor the truth when he’s hiding it from himself?

THE TRUTH is an intense, fast-paced read, with incredible tension but, given the set-up, relatively little overt violence (for which I was thankful). The story is really about relationships: between Chris and his father, Chris and his brother, and, ultimately, Chris and his abductor. And though I found some of the revelations late in the book less shocking than they were likely intended to be, I was totally hooked by the story of Chris’s coming to terms with his father, his family, and himself.

After reading THE TRUTH, I turned to Pittsburgh YA writer Siobhan Vivian’s latest, THE LAST BOY AND GIRL IN THE WORLD. Given that title, you might think this is a post-apocalyptic tale, but it’s actually a realistic story about a high school junior, Keeley, whose Pennsylvania town has suffered severe flooding and is fighting to stop a riverfront real estate deal that will submerge the town for good. Meanwhile, the boy of Keeley’s dreams has finally started to show some interest in her, and her father, injured years ago in a work accident, has finally found a cause to rouse him from his passivity. But while Keeley becomes drawn into the excitement of these new romantic and familial developments, her lifetime friendships suffer.

What I liked most about LAST BOY AND GIRL is that it’s not only—or even mostly—a love story. Or it is, but as Keely herself discovers, it’s less about her love for a boy than about her love for her family, her town, and her best friend. Vivian’s pacing is totally unlike Johnston’s; where THE TRUTH grabs you at once and never lets go, LAST BOY AND GIRL lets events unfold gradually, revealing ever deeper layers in Keeley’s personal relationships and in the drama of her failing town. I could wish some of the environmental implications of this scenario had been drawn out more explicitly, but that’s not the story Vivian wants to tell. What she does want to tell is a story of the difficult choices one teenager faces as she tries to keep her life from going under, literally and symbolically, and Vivian tells that story simply and beautifully.

Chances are I’ll return to science fiction soon (in fact, I’ve got a manuscript due on my editor’s desk, so I’ll probably be doing more writing than reading in the next month or so). But I’m glad I took a detour and discovered these two great books!

Bonus! Enter the giveaway below for a chance to win a SIGNED hardcover copy of THE LAST BOY AND GIRL IN THE WORLD! (U.S. only.)

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YA Guy Reviews... THREATENED by Eliot Schrefer

As YA Guy has probably told you, I love apes. So I was thrilled when I heard that Eliot Schrefer, whose novel about bonobos, Endangered, was a National Book Award finalist, plans to write three additional books on each of the three additional great apes: chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas.

And I'm happy to report that the second book in the series, Threatened (which deals with the bonobo's better-known cousin, the chimpanzee), is a small masterpiece, gorgeously written and profoundly moving.

Like Endangered, which I reviewed here, Threatened focuses on a young person's relationship with a great ape family--in this case, young Luc's relationship with the chimpanzees of his home country, Gabon. An orphan whose mother and younger sister died of AIDS and whose father abandoned his surviving child, Luc slaves away for a vicious debt collector to pay his mother's medical bill. But then salvation arrives in the form of a mysterious Muslim who calls himself Prof, a researcher intent on becoming Africa's answer to Jane Goodall. Though Luc joins Prof merely to escape his troubles, he forms a stronger connection to the man once they reach the jungles of Gabon and encounter a small and fragile family of chimpanzees. There Luc must decide which bonds to honor: his allegiance to Prof, or his commitment to the non-human subjects of Prof's research.

Threatened is a character-driven novel, with wonderful portraits not only of the frightened Luc and the shady, haunted Prof but of the chimpanzees whom Luc names Drummer and Mango. One of the fascinating aspects of the book is that while Prof tends to romanticize the chimpanzees, seeing them as virtuous alternatives to human depravity, Luc--and through him the author--offers a much more complex, balanced portrayal of creatures that are at once sensitive, caring, violent, and volatile. These chimps are capable of great tenderness, and also of great destruction. In other words, they're pretty much like us--as one would expect of humanity's nearest genetic relative.

The campaign for diversity in YA hasn't touched much (or at all) on inter-species diversity. But maybe it should. After all, non-human animals are among the most under-represented (and poorly represented) of populations in YA literature--and unlike human populations, they have no opportunity to tell their own stories. If the movement for diversity in YA ever does expand beyond human beings, Schrefer's wonderful novels will surely be included on any list of essential reading.

YA Guy Reviews… Two Books from 2013!

Though I’m itching to start reading the books on my 2014 list, there are a bunch of novels from 2013 I didn’t get to last year. Chances are I’ll never get to all of them, but I’ve just finished up two that seemed to have a lot in common: Matthew Quick’s FORGIVE ME, LEONARD PEACOCK and Meg Medina’s YAQUI DELGADO WANTS TO KICK YOUR ASS. Both are contemporary stories of troubled teens whose lives are affected by bullying, violence, and perceived difference. So before turning to my 2014 reviews, I thought I’d officially wrap up 2013 with a dual review of these two fine novels.

At the start of Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock, the narrator brings a WWII-era Nazi handgun to school, planning to kill his former best friend and then himself. At the start of Yaqui Delgado, the narrator learns that a classmate at her new school harbors a grudge against her and plans to, well, kick her ass.

From there, both books develop into sensitive, often painful, sometimes funny examinations of contemporary teen life.

Of the two, I slightly favored Quick’s novel. I loved the angry, world-weary voice of Leonard himself, and I loved the narrative device whereby Leonard’s big day is broken up by imagined letters from his future friends and family. I loved Leonard’s strangely poignant (or poignantly strange) habit of following random grownups to work, hoping to find someone whose adult life isn’t as miserable as he feels his teen life is. I loved the language of the text, as in this snippet from one of the future letters:

I know that you really just want everything to end--that you can’t see anything good in your future, that the world looks dark and terrible, and maybe you’re right--the world can definitely be a dreadful place.

I know you’re just barely holding it together. But please hold on a little longer. For us. For yourself. You are going to absolutely love Outpost 37. You’re going to be the keeper of the light.

I wasn't crazy about the story’s resolution, which seemed both overly neat and overly ambiguous. As my wife, a social worker who’s worked with suicidal teens, pointed out, there’s a lot more to teen suicide than this book managed to capture, and maybe the impossibility of capturing it all led to the semi-collapse at the end. Nonetheless, I found Quick’s novel daring, affecting, and ultimately life-affirming.

I didn't connect quite so strongly with Yaqui Delgado, perhaps simply because the dynamics of female bullying aren't as close to my own experience. But I loved the novel's narrator, Piddy, whose entire life begins to collapse around her when the bullying begins. Coupled with her burgeoning sexuality and her contentious relationship with her mother, the targeting by Yaqui and her gang quickly erodes Piddy's sense of self, as the following passage so beautifully illustrates:

Last year? I can barely remember it. That was when I could sleep at night, dreaming of my elephants and the Sahara. I could feel the rhythm of old salsa records in my bones. I could laugh with Mitzi and plan what we would wear. Augustin Sanchez was my mystery father, someone I wanted to know about. Now I can't lift my eyes or walk the way I want. I have no friends. Not even my own father wanted to get to know me. If there is a way to get that smiling girl back, I don't see it.

Bullying is particularly vicious and destructive among teens because their identities are in such a state of fragility and flux to begin with, and Medina's book captures the experience with compassion and unsparing detail.

The year always ends with me wishing I could read more books than I possibly can. But I'm happy I ended 2013 with these two terrific novels.

Now, on to 2014!

YA Guy Reviews... THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG

YA Guy wouldn't be YA Guy if not for J.R.R. Tolkien.

I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when I was twelve and thirteen, respectively. (It was right around the time Star Wars came out, which created a perfect storm of science fiction and fantasy.) What I loved most about The Hobbit was its essential YA-ness: it's the story of a small, seemingly insignificant person who grows up, finds his courage, and discovers his place in the larger world.

Which is why I so thoroughly despise what Peter Jackson has done to Tolkien's story in his three-part Hobbit extravaganza.

Now, look, I'm not dumb. I know movies are inherently different from the books on which they're based. I've taught both literature and film classes, published a book about film. I loved The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, different though it was from its source material. I thought Jackson and his crew made excellent decisions in those films.

I think they've made horrible decisions in The Hobbit.

I hated the first movie. (If you want to know why, see this post.) I didn't think I could hate the second one any more. But I did.

The reasons are many, but here's a start.

CGI madness. Jackson used to be a director who liked to work with actual actors and physical effects. For all the lavish CGI of The Lord of the Rings, he never forgot the humanity of his story--which started with relying to a great extent on actual people and actual places. But ever since King Kong, he's decided he doesn't want to direct movies anymore; he wants to direct video games. So we get computer-generated orcs, computer-generated actors, computer-generated settings, computer-generated action, computer-generated everything, all of it looking weightless and implausible and unreal (as when the dwarfs' barrels careen upright down raging rapids without tipping over once), all of it making a hash of Tolkien's lovingly crafted fantasy world.

Tone deaf. Jackson used to know his way around a scene. Watch the arming of Theoden in The Two Towers, or Pippin's song in The Return of the King. Both of them contain brilliant combinations of poetry, arresting visuals, cross-cutting, lighting effects, and (yes, indeed) human emotion. But lately, Jackson doesn't seem to know how to film a scene with lyricism, restraint, humanity: all he knows is loud, louder, and louder still. It's less like watching a movie than listening to your next-door neighbor scream at his wife for three straight hours.

Everything but the kitchen sink. I could hardly keep track of all the stuff going on in this unholy mess of a movie. We've got orcs attacking Lake Town! Gandalf storming Dol Guldur! A romance between an elf and a dwarf! Political intrigue between Bard and the Master! A dwarf dying of a poisoned arrow wound! Thorin and company relighting their forges to fight Smaug with a giant golden statue! (Huh?) Orlando Bloom looking old and fat and tired and ticked-off that ten years after his career was supposed to blossom, he's back fighting cartoon ape-orcs while his CGI figure leaps from head to head of barrel-riding dwarfs (who, I hasten to remind, magically remain upright while their barrels fly over waterfalls)! The only thing we didn't see much of--in fact barely saw anything of--was Bilbo's development as unlikely hero. I guess that wasn't exciting enough for Jackson.

In short, everything in The Desecration of Smaug (did I say that?) cuts against what I love about Tolkien's story: its intimate scale, its humanity, its quirkiness, its heart. Jackson decided to tell yet another big, loud, scream-at-the-audience-for-attention amusement park ride of a movie, and in so doing he killed everything that makes his source material great.

God only knows what the final installment will be like. All I know is it won't be anything like The Hobbit.

YA Guy Reviews... WHERE THE MOON ISN'T by Nathan Filer

YA Guy's got to be completely honest: I'm not sure Nathan Filer's debut Where the Moon Isn't (first published in England as The Shock of the Fall) actually counts as YA.

But it should. It's got a teen protagonist, a host of teen issues--parents, friends, siblings, school--and a perfectly captured teen voice: angry, apologetic, hopeful, despairing, sarcastic, shy, confident, confused.

I'm reluctant to classify it as YA only because it has such a literary feel to it, not only in terms of the quality of its language but in terms of its mind-bending structure. Narrated by a young man who's been hospitalized after suffering a schizophrenic break, it might be somewhat off-putting to a YA audience.

But then again, it might not be. It might be that it's time for YA/adult hybrids or crossovers that don't include characters named Katniss Everdeen.

I really loved Where the Moon Isn't. The story is poignant: narrator Matthew tries to pull his life together years after the death of his older brother Simon, whose presence or absence plays a key role in his delusions. The characters are well-rendered (with the possible exception of Matthew's mother, about whom I'll say more later). And the writing is absolutely lovely, in the loopy, intense, not-quite-lucid discourse of a man struggling with mental illness:

I have an illness, a disease with the shape and sound of a snake. Whenever I learn something new, it learns it too.

If you have HIV or Cancer, or Athlete's Foot, you can't teach them anything. When Ashley Stone was dying of Meningitis, he might have known that he was dying, but his Meningitis didn't know. Meningitis doesn't know anything. But my illness knows everything that I know. This was a difficult thing to get my head around, but the moment I understood it, my illness understood it too.

Through the character of Matthew, Filer does an excellent job of letting us into the mind of a person who "no longer owned [his] words, but [was] possessed by them." Recently, I read a post calling for more realistic representations of mental illness in YA, and I think Filer's novel provides just that.

If I have one reservation about the novel, it's in Filer's representation of the mother, an odd, somewhat caricatured portrait of the hot-and-cold caregiver 50s-era psychiatrists referred to as the "schizophrenogenic mother." Nowhere does Filer (or Matthew) directly blame the mother for his condition, but the suggestion is that, at best, she didn't help. Given the novel's otherwise realistic and sympathetic depiction of mental illness, I was somewhat disappointed by the appearance of this hoary cliche.

But in all other respects, I was impressed by Filer's portrayal of a character trying desperately to rebuild the fractured world around him, the fractured world within.

YA Guy Reviews... ENDANGERED by Eliot Schrefer

YA Guy loves apes.

It's true. My favorite animal since childhood is the gorilla. My favorite movie is King Kong (the '33 original). When I was a child, maybe five years old, I held a baby chimpanzee named Geraldine at the local zoo. She wrapped her furry arms around me and put her head on my shoulder. I was in heaven.

So I was very excited to read Eliot Schrefer's book Endangered, which concerns a teenage girl's effort to save a young bonobo (a relative of the chimpanzee) and herself during an armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Not surprisingly, given its subject matter, I loved it.

The story is as straightforward as I've described it above. The prose is luminous. The main character, Sophie, is sympathetic--part action hero, but mostly thoughtful, caring, vulnerable teen. And her bonobo companion, Otto, is every bit as vivid a character as Sophie. All the bonobos in the story are like that: distinct, lively personalities who are nearly human not only in the literal sense (bonobos share 99% of our genetic material) but in the literary and, dare I say, spiritual sense.

And that's the key conflict in the book: a conflict between those who treat life with reverence and care and those who treat other living beings, whether fellow humans or apes, as mere things to be exploited. There are powerful themes operating in the book's deceptively simple storyline, and powerful moments as Sophie has to decide whether the life of a single non-human creature holds any weight in a world plunged into chaos and death:

I thought not only about [the bonobos] but of the stream of homeless refugees, of my dead friends in the sanctuary, of the larger and yet-unknown tragedies elsewhere in the country, in the world. The creature in my arms wasn't an answer, but it did somehow make the question of how to keep going irrelevant. The weight of him, the prevention of his misery, was the answer that defied all logic.

I might quibble that these thoughts and sentences are overly sophisticated for a teen (the book's concluding chapter suggests that the entire narrative is told from the point of view of Sophie's adult self). But in a world such as ours, where not only apes but humans are endangered by our own violent ways, I found Schrefer's fictional treatment of these themes timely and welcome.

And as someone who's held a baby chimpanzee in his arms, I know exactly how Sophie feels.

YA Guy Reviews... TWO BOYS KISSING by David Levithan

YA Guy found David Levithan’s Two Boys Kissing both inspired and a bit tiresome.

Here’s the inspired part. Narrating the story of two gay teens who try to break the world record for longest kiss is a chorus of gay men who died of AIDS. Their disembodied voices speak to the characters (and the readers) of the joys and sorrows they knew, the discoveries they made, the pain they suffered, the excitement, hope, and fear they feel for the younger generation. It’s a daring narrative choice, and at its best it yields passages of transcendent loveliness and sadness like this one:

Harry, of course, knows he is being looked at. But what he looks like is the farthest thing from his mind. When your body starts to turn against you--when the surface value of the skin is nothing compared to the fireworks of pain in your muscles and your bones--the supposed truth of beauty falls away, because there are more important concerns to attend to.

Believe us. We know this.

At the same time, however, it’s this narrative choice that can make the book tiresome. When the chorus rails against the injustices they suffered--the indifference of governments quite happy to let a “gay disease” run its course; the hatred of fellow citizens; the apathy or antipathy of their own families--or the injustices gay youth still suffer, the book feels less like narrative and more like polemic, or even screed. Here’s an example:

There is power in saying, I am not wrong. Society is wrong. Because there is no reason that men and women should have separate bathrooms. There is no reason that we should ever be ashamed of our bodies or ashamed of our love. We are told to cover ourselves up, hide ourselves away, so that other people can have control over us, can make us follow their rules. It is a bastardization of the concept of morality, this rule of shame.

Though I don’t disagree with anything stated in such passages, I nonetheless found them problematic. In ancient Greek tragedy, the chorus plays a dual role: they are both the collective voice of social wisdom and the befuddled dupes of events beyond their comprehension. They are at once in the story--as characters--and beyond the story--as commentators. As such, there’s a delicate irony in their addresses: they don’t always know what they think they know.

In Levithan’s book, by contrast, the chorus, being dead, cannot participate in the events unfolding before their eyes. They’re not characters; they’re only commentators. And what they’ve earned through their unmerited deaths is an absolute moral authority, an ability to speak the Truth. I struggle to find an ironic undercurrent in this ghostly chorus: they seem to voice the author’s convictions without the slightest trace of distance. They are the author’s stand-ins, a contrivance that allows the author to speak directly to the reader.

This makes them powerful agents of social commentary. But it also makes them rather dull agents of fictional narrative.

Levithan’s experiment was a risky one, and he’s to be applauded for pulling it off as successfully as he did. But for me, the narrative voice ultimately did a disservice to the story it was meant to sustain.

YA Guy Reviews... DEAR LIFE, YOU SUCK by Scott Blagden

It's DEAR LIFE, YOU SUCK week on YA Guy! Today, I've got a review of Scott Blagden's great debut novel. On Friday, I'll have an interview with Scott and a great giveaway! So read the review now, keep an eye out for the interview in a couple days, and make sure to enter the giveaway when it comes!

Scott Blagden’s Dear Life, You Suck hit YA Guy like a punch to the gut.

In a good way.

Blagden’s debut novel is not for the faint of heart (or stomach). The title delivers a fair warning. But it’s not until you enter the warped mind of narrator Cricket Cherpin, a sarcastic, pugilistic, foul-mouthed, drug-doing, suicidal seventeen-year-old living in a nun-run orphanage in small-town Maine, that you get the full picture.

Here’s a tiny sample of Cricket’s utterly unique voice, chosen more or less at random:

Cheesecake LaChance is a physiological dichotomy. He’s Beauty and the Beast incarnate. From the neck up, he’s as pretty as a transvestite prom queen. Ice-blue eyes, impeccably groomed butt-bandit beard, and perfect teeth like LEGO pieces. From the neck down, he’s as pretty as an Amazon jungle queen. Tree-trunk thighs, an ass the size of Brazil, and a belly that looks like he swallowed a Galapagos sea turtle. It’s hard to look at him without imagining his Grand Canyon ass-crack bent over a log-clogged toilet, a monkey wrench in his one hand and a plunger in the other.

That’s Cricket: irreverent, tongue-twisting, given to outrageous similes and egregious wordplay.

I won’t lie to you: it takes a few chapters to get accustomed to that voice. And it takes just as long to muster sympathy for the guy, who initially seems like the kind of teenager grownups like me are praying they’ll never have to spend any time with.

But once you’ve made the transition, Blagden’s book is little short of genius. Indeed, the mere fact that he manages to recruit readers to the side of his misanthropic anti-hero is a triumph in itself. But once you understand what makes Cricket tick, once you plumb the depths of his anger at the hand life has dealt him, you find yourself unable to stop reading and rooting for him.

I mean, how could you not root for a character who describes his confusion as follows: “Damn, life sure is carving crop circles in my ass tonight.”

And how could you not be moved by a passage like this, wherein Cricket apostrophizes the eternal:

Me and Art have a problem. The same way me and God have a problem. I mean, this scene is so out of this world, so inhuman and infinite, so boundless, so worthy and eternal. And human life is just so not. Yet I can’t deny a connection. An intermingling. A gravity. A pull. I mean, it sucks at my soul. Probably so it can digest me and shit me out when it’s done. That’s how the infinite makes me feel. Like a hunk of beef it’s gonna process and return to the dirt as fertilizer.

If you think that’s good, wait until you watch Cricket deconstruct the Immaculate Conception.

There’s not enough good I can say about Dear Life, You Suck. It’s hilarious, poignant, wrenching, profound, sad. It’s at once a twisted simulacrum of life and a transcendent celebration of it. It’s like Cricket himself: so surreal it’s all too real.

It’s a book I wish I wrote. About a guy I wish I knew.

YA Guy Reviews... DR. BIRD'S ADVICE FOR SAD POETS by Evan Roskos

When YA Guy was agent-hunting, it drove me mad when I’d get the form rejection saying something like: “Please understand that this business is very subjective….” Or “I don’t feel strongly enough about your work….” Or sometimes: “This just isn’t for me.”

Though I knew these sentiments were truthful, and kindly meant, they weren’t helpful. Any kind of rejection hurts. As a writer, you want everyone to like your book, and it’s a rude wake-up call when you realize not everyone will.

The same goes for reviews.

The same goes for this review.

Evan Roskos’s debut YA novel, Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets, has so much going for it. It’s literary. It’s beautifully written. It’s poignant. It’s funny. It’s true to life. It’s hopeful without being schmaltzy or unrealistic. In short, it’s a terrific book.

But I didn’t especially care for it.

Let’s review the book’s positive qualities.

1.)   It’s literary. The narrator, James Whitman, a teenager living with his brutal father and melodramatic mother (but not his older sister, whom his parents threw out of the house before the story starts), quotes his poetic namesake all the time. Plus, he likes to yawp.

2.)   It’s beautifully written. Here’s a small sample: “Beth looks like she wants to tell me more great things about me. Or maybe I’m just projecting. I’m probably projecting. I’m a projector. For example: The world is not terrible. I just keep thinking it is.”

3.)   It’s poignant. James’s deepening depression is sensitively handled.

4.)   It’s funny. As when James runs into the street to save a Tastykake wrapper, thinking it’s a broken-winged bird.

5.)   It’s true to life. See all of the above.

6.)   It’s hopeful without being schmaltzy or unrealistic. Though James finds some closure in his quest to rescue his sister and resolve his own emotional and romantic troubles, there’s no fairy-tale ending to this book.

So, in sum, Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets is well worth reading. That I didn’t particularly respond to it says only what agents, editors, publishers, writers, and readers have known all along: this business is very subjective.

And this particular book just wasn’t for me.

YA Guy Reviews... GATED by Amy Christine Parker

Amy Christine Parker’s novel Gated was not at all what YA Guy expected.

But that’s not a bad thing.

From the pre-publication notices, I somehow got the idea that Gated was science fiction, a post-apocalyptic novel about a cult that turned out to be right about the end of the world. I don’t know why I got that idea. Probably just because I like sci-fi.

But boy, was I wrong. And I’m glad I was.

Gated could certainly be classified as a dystopia. But far from being set in some distant time or place, Parker’s novel tells the all-too-real story of a contemporary doomsday cult. Convinced by their leader, a man who calls himself Pioneer, that the world’s rotation will soon reverse and kill all but the faithful, the cult has constructed a gated community and an underground silo where they plan to wait out the world’s destruction. But Parker’s narrator, seventeen-year-old Lyla Hamilton, has doubts about the community she joined as a child: doubts about her ability to kill non-believers as Pioneer instructs, doubts about the boy Pioneer has chosen as her future husband, doubts about giving up on the world and retreating underground. When she meets a boy from outside the community, her doubts escalate and bring her into direct conflict with her family, her community, and its messianic leader.

Reviews I’ve read of Gated tend to focus on the personality of Pioneer, and Parker has indeed drawn a masterful portrait of a modern-day Jim Jones or David Koresh: a man who preys on the vulnerable to fulfill his own need for mastery. But to me, the psychology of Pioneer’s followers was every bit as interesting. In particular, I found myself drawn to the depiction of Lyla’s mother, whose other daughter was snatched as a child and who longs for the safety she believes Pioneer’s community provides. I can understand megalomaniacs like Jones, Koresh, and countless other preachers and politicians, but I sometimes have a hard time understanding those who blindly follow them. By exploring the motivations of Pioneer’s disciples, Parker renders a powerful image of human frailty and despair.

And then there’s Lyla herself, who simultaneously loves and fears Pioneer and his community, who embraces his apocalyptic visions but loathes the sacrifices they entail, who finds herself battling her mother’s desire for security if it comes at the cost of truly living. It’s a complex characterization, and one that could easily have become exaggerated and unbelievable--but Parker makes Lyla’s conflicts utterly convincing. Trapped outside the community’s gates when she and her friends decide to break curfew, Lyla reflects: “it’s this realization--that we are all one panicked moment away from cutting the bonds that tie us--that chills me to the bone.” The power of those bonds--bonds of family, bonds of faith, bonds of fear--to inspire, to protect, and at the same time to cripple is the true subject of Gated, and Parker’s unsparing portrait of her teen heroine’s awakening to this reality makes Gated as chilling as any fantasized dystopia.

YA Guy Reviews... IN THE AFTER by Demitria Lunetta

YA Guy’s reaction to the first five pages of Demitria Lunetta’s In the After: little green men? Really?

YA Guy’s reaction to the remaining four hundred and fifty pages of Demitria Lunetta’s In the After: little green men! Really!

Yeah, I was a bit concerned at the start that this overused sci-fi trope might sink Lunetta’s highly-touted debut novel. But she works such wonders with the idea, creating a taut, gripping novel with an instantly likable main character and an expertly built sense of horror, I was won over in a flash.

The plot of In the After is easily summarized: when alien creatures overrun the planet and decimate the human population in a matter of days, the main character, teenager Amy, is one of the few survivors. She quickly develops the skills to keep herself alive in an utterly changed world: moving silently so the creatures can’t hear her, raiding homes and stores for supplies, trusting no one she meets. But then she finds the orphaned toddler she names Baby, and the two form an instant bond. As Amy puts it: “Baby didn’t just become my family, she became my entire world.” Until, that is, Amy learns that something else has survived the alien assault--something that may be even more deadly than the creatures themselves.

Lunetta writes with confidence, constructing tight, spare sentences that move the reader quickly through the action. Her characters are wonderful singly, and the relationships between them--especially between Amy and Baby, who develop a private sign language so they can communicate without the creatures hearing them--are touchingly rendered. If there’s any misstep in In the After, it’s the revelation of the creatures’ origin, which did seem to me a bit on the overused side. (I also found the ending a touch inconclusive, though I know it sets up a sequel.) But neither of these minor quibbles interfered significantly with my enjoyment of the whole.

So the next time you see a little green man, my advice would be to run and hide. Quietly. If it’s anything like the monsters from In the After, you don’t want it to find you.

YA Guy Reviews... WHAT'S LEFT OF ME by Kat Zhang

With the start of the fall semester, YA Guy's going to have to scale back the frequency of my book reviews--from one every Wednesday to one every other Wednesday (or even one a month if things get really dicey!). For now, though, enjoy this review of Kat Zhang's WHAT'S LEFT OF ME!

Kat Zhang was nineteen when she sold The Hybrid Chronicles to HarperCollins.

Let me repeat that.

Nineteen.

To put this in perspective, when YA Guy was nineteen, my main accomplishment was sneaking into a classmate’s dorm room and moving all his furniture onto his balcony. I’d written novels, sure--I insulted my freshman philosophy professor by finishing a novel for a young writer’s competition rather than writing a paper for his class--but I was certainly not selling them to HarperCollins.

Zhang’s accomplishment would be noteworthy even if the first book in the series, What’s Left of Me, were no better than average. I mean, come on. I teach freshman composition these days. I’m not looking for miracles.

But What’s Left of Me is much, much better than average. It’s excellent. The concept, the writing, the plotting, the pacing, the characters: all excellent.

Now that’s something.

In Zhang’s book, we’re taken to a not-far-future world where people are born with two souls (or personae, if you prefer) cohabiting a single body. The recessive persona typically “dies” before the teen years, leaving the dominant persona in complete control. But in the case of protagonist Addie/Eva, the supposedly recessive soul, Eva, remains: locked within a shared mind, able to communicate with Addie and experience everything she does, but unable to communicate with the rest of the world or move a muscle of their body. The two are what their society terms a hybrid: a feared and shunned being believed to be the cause of earlier wars of destruction. If ever their hybrid nature is discovered, Addie and Eva will be subject to incarceration, experimentation… or worse.

There’s so much to like about What’s Left of Me, but I want to focus on the strengths my fourteen-year-old daughter (herself an aspiring writer who met Zhang at a young authors event) succinctly described: “It’s really well-written!” It was a brilliant decision to have Eva, the recessive soul, narrate What’s Left of Me: her desire to return to full life, to re-experience the autonomy she knew as a child, provides the book a compelling narrative drive. And the lyrical language of the book brilliantly expresses the strange condition of being two-in-one, both intimate and separate, as in the opening words of the prologue:

Addie and I were born into the same body, our souls’ ghostly fingers entwined before we gasped our very first breath. Our earliest years together were also our happiest. Then came the worries--the tightness around our parents’ mouths, the frowns lining our kindergarten teacher’s forehead, the question everyone whispered when they thought we couldn’t hear.

Why aren’t they settling?

Settling.

We tried to form the word in our five-year-old mouth, tasting it on our tongue.

Set-Tull-Ling.

We knew what it meant. Kind of. It meant one of us was supposed to take control. It meant the other was supposed to fade away.

That’s really good stuff. And it gets even better.

What’s Left of Me isn’t perfect. I found parts of the book, particularly the extended sequence in a psychiatric institution, not wholly convincing; so totalitarian a society, I felt, could not have run one of its premier institutions so tentatively, indeed ineptly. And I was never entirely sure what the origin or significance of hybridity was; there seemed no rational explanation for why people in this society are born double, which made me fear the book was using the condition as allegory. Perhaps the second book in the series will help resolve this question.

But whether it does or not, What’s Left of Me proves beyond doubt that Zhang is for real. And that being the case, we can all be thankful she got started so early sharing her words with the world.

YA Guy Reviews... SNAKEHEAD by Ann Halam

YA Guy has always been fascinated by literary retellings, particularly retellings of stories deeply rooted in a culture’s consciousness.

Some of the greatest works of Western literature, from Homer’s epics to Shakespeare’s plays, are retellings of stories that circulated in the popular culture of their time. Likewise, some of the most interesting stories being told today, from Gregory Maguire’s expansion of the Oz canon to Rick Riordan’s reimagining of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian mythology, are retellings of popular lore. One of my own stories, “Scarecrow” (which you can pick up from Untreed Reads Publishing, if you’re interested), reimagines the Oz tale from the straw man’s point of view.

When we encounter such stories, we experience both a return to the familiar and a journeying into uncharted territory. These stories don’t just teach us something we didn’t know; they enable us to re-see something we thought we did.

Snakehead, Ann Halam’s 2009 YA novel, is one of my favorite literary retellings. The book didn’t make that big of a splash when it came out, and that’s a shame: it’s a masterfully conceived and rendered novel by one of the finest YA fantasy/sci-fi writers around. I found it recently on my local library’s clearance rack, and I just had to review it here.

In Snakehead, Halam retells the Perseus myth, but not in the manner of Clash of the Titans or The Lightning Thief: she keeps action to a minimum, choosing instead to explore the culture of ancient Greece and the relationships between characters (particularly Perseus and Andromeda, who in this retelling is a refugee seeking to escape her sentence). It’s a tribute to this book’s brilliance that the archaic society seems at once astonishingly modern and utterly alien--or to put this another way, Halam succeeds in showing that what appears bizarre and otherworldly to the people of one time and place (human sacrifice, conversations with immortals, divine curses) may have appeared routine and commonplace to others. One of Halam’s more inspired contrivances is to have Andromeda, the child of Africa, bring phonetic script to the Greek isles, where this new form of artistry is described in language befitting its mystery and majesty:

She saw a Greek city, rich in marble buildings, with vivid-columned temples. Rivers of light were springing from it and flying across the lands, weaving a fabric richer than her eyes could follow, vanishing north, east, west, south, to the ends of the earth. And she was part of the dazzling, world-spanning pattern that sprang from that shining city, because she had made the flying marks, because she had made the leap of power.

In Snakehead there’s a sense in which the monstrous is defeated (or at least held at bay) not so much by muscle as by art: celebrating the invention of literature, Halam’s story is a myth about how myth came to be written. This is YA fiction not only for teens but for all of us: a book that reimagines one of the oldest and most enduring of Western stories in language as beautiful as myth itself.

Retellings like Snakehead remind us that no story is complete, that stories hold stories within stories within stories. They persuade us that new worlds are possible. At their best, they renew not only literature but the act of reading itself.

[P.S. The artwork at the head of this post is mine!]

YA Guy Reviews... MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN by Ransom Riggs

YA Guy’s wife picked up Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children from a display rack in Barnes & Noble.

Which was a bit peculiar in itself, since she tends to shy away from fantasy.

When she set the book aside to move on to her more favored historical fiction, I grabbed Miss Peregrine and plunged in. I was intrigued by the concept, the way in which debut novelist Ransom Riggs weaves oddball period photos into the story of marooned sideshow children, and I’d heard good things about the book. Plus, as you all know, YA fantasy is right up my alley!

But the thing is, it took me a really long time to get into the story. For the first hundred pages or so, I found the pace uneven (at times too rushed, at others too protracted), the narrative (which involves time travel, never one of my favorite subjects) too convoluted, the dialogue too labored. A writer-friend of mine confessed she’d had the same problems with the book, and wondered whether it had originally been a stand-alone chopped up into a series. Whatever the case, I seriously considered setting the book aside.

But I’m glad I didn’t.

For in the end, Riggs’s strange story won me over. Once fifteen-year-old narrator Jacob Portman stopped shuttling between his own world and the world of the peculiar children and became firmly committed to their struggle against the monstrous antagonists Riggs names the hollowgast--scary-as-hell fiends with tentacles for tongues and a voracious appetite for children’s flesh--I let my reservations slide. A good monster can often do that for me.

More importantly, though, I too became more committed to Miss Peregrine’s world as it unfolded. During the novel’s first third, I got so distracted by its unconventional presentation that every little flaw loomed unusually large. By two-thirds of the way through the book, I’d become comfortable enough with the concept to ignore it and simply enjoy the story. When I did, I found some real pleasures in the reading, as in this lovely passage where Jacob considers revealing his hidden life to his clueless father:

I wanted to tell him. I wanted to explain everything, and for him to tell me he understood and offer some tidbit of parental advice. I wanted, in that moment, for everything to go back to the way it had been before we came here; before I ever found that letter from Miss Peregrine, back when I was just a sort-of-normal messed-up rich kid in the suburbs. Instead, I sat next to my dad for awhile and talked about nothing, and I tried to remember what my life had been like in that unfathomably distant era that was four weeks ago, or imagine what it might be like four weeks from now--but I couldn’t. Eventually we ran out of nothing to talk about, and I excused myself and went upstairs to be alone.

As this passage shows, folded into Riggs’s tale of peculiar children is the feeling all young people have of being peculiar: misunderstood, unloved, unlovable. In that respect, the concept that I’d found so nettlesome in the early going started to make perfect sense: just like the orphan photos rescued by Riggs from oblivion, his tale is about a teen’s discovery of how brutal the world can be to those deemed different.

We grown-ups have typically become so complacent about our own normality that we forget the time when it mattered profoundly, for better and for worse, to be odd. Riggs’s odd story reminds us of that time, and celebrates, in today’s sadly conventional world, the saving power of strangeness.

YA Guy Reviews... SHIP BREAKER by Paolo Bacigalupi

YA Guy's taking a break from online activities for 10 days starting tomorrow. (True confession: it's one of the presents I promised my wife for our 20-year anniversary! Less time online = more time together!) I'll be back in August to regale you with more reviews, interviews, giveaways, guest posts, and commentaries--but not wanting to leave you hanging, I'm posting a review of Paolo Bacigalupi's YA science fiction novel SHIP BREAKER.

Enjoy, and I'll see you in a few days!

YA Guy had heard great things about science-fiction writer Paolo Bacigalupi’s debut YA novel, Ship Breaker.

Word on the street was that his novel is lyrical, intelligent, thrilling, inventive, and powerful. A must-read. One of the finest literary YAs around.

So I read it. And guess what?

All the hype is true.

Ship Breaker tells the story of Nailer, a teenage boy in a post-global-warming world who works along the Gulf Coast disassembling oil tankers from the fossil-fuel era. It’s dangerous work, where kids like the unlucky Jackson Boy get lost forever in the tankers’ guts and failure to meet the daily quota can result in expulsion from the crew and, like the unfortunate Sloth, a life without work or hope. For Nailer, what makes his life even worse is his father, an abusive drunk and drug addict who holds his son in a grip of fear. The only thing that keeps Nailer going is his dream of salvaging something truly valuable so he can follow in the footsteps of the man known as Lucky Strike, who bought his way off the ship-breaking crews when he discovered a hidden cache of oil. With a score that big, Nailer thinks, he’ll be able to leave his dad and sail away on one of the sleek clipper ships that have replaced the cumbersome tankers in this new era.

And then, one day, Nailer finds the wreck of a clipper ship, with a survivor inside: the daughter of one of the biggest shipping barons in the world. Should Nailer join forces with his dad, who plans to barter her life for gold, or help her in her fight for freedom?

Ship Breaker kept me riveted for a number of reasons. To begin with, its teen protagonist, Nailer, captured my imagination: a boy whom life has given every reason to be brutal, yet who struggles to remain decent and true. Then, too, I was drawn by the book’s examination of power and privilege, its exposure of the extremes of wealth and poverty that mar our own world. In such a world, Nailer and the other ship-breakers rely on nothing more than luck to see them through, as the following beautifully written passage illustrates:

Life was like that. There were Lucky Strikes and there were Sloths; there were Jackson Boys and there were lucky bastards like him. Different sides of the same coin. You tossed your luck in the air and it rattled down on the gambling boards and you either lived or died.

Nailer’s discovery that there’s more to life than luck--that there are things like loyalty and family, whether biological or not--gives Ship Breaker a satisfyingly human quality to complement its fantastically well-rendered future world.

I’ve been warned that the companion volume to Ship Breaker, titled The Drowned Cities, is a tough read, a book that delves in graphic detail into the horrors of war and human cruelty. I don’t doubt this; Bacigalupi doesn’t shy from ugly truths. But I’m looking forward to reading it, if only because it fleshes out one of the most intriguing characters in Ship Breaker: the hybrid warrior Tool, a being created to be an utterly faithful servant who nonetheless develops a will and a desire of his own. The question of Tool’s humanity is hinted at in Ship Breaker; I expect it to be explored more fully in The Drowned Cities.

And I expect that, in the process, the question of our own humanity will be explored as well.

YA Guy Reviews... BUMPED by Megan McCafferty

YA Guy had great expectations for Megan McCafferty’s Bumped.

It came highly recommended, as a sort of YA partner to The Handmaid’s Tale. Its premise--a future world in which a virus has caused adult sterility in the industrialized West, necessitating teen pregnancy to sustain the population--sounded intriguing. And its first few pages crackled with wordplay, energy, and vicious wit.

Yet I’m forced to admit that, in the end, my reaction to the book was decidedly mixed.

There was much I loved. The narrators--twin sisters separated at birth, one raised to be a paid breeder, the other reared in a strict religious community--were engaging, and their voices easily distinguishable. The wordplay could be incredibly clever: girls who produce babies for infertile couples are known as “Surrogettes” (a devastating play on “suffragettes”), the talent agency that recruits such girls is titled “UGenXX,” the stud-for-hire who couples with one of the twins goes by the stage name “Jondoe.” On almost every page, there’s a neologism to attest to the warped reality of McCafferty’s fictional world.

But that ended up being one of my principal reservations about the book as a whole. After a hundred pages or so, the verbal pyrotechnics became so aggressive and omnipresent, they opened up a rift between word and world. Jondoe performs “pro boner” work for those unable to afford his services. A girl posing as a Surrogette is a “doppelbanger.” Teens look stuff up on the “quikiwiki,” and carp about peers who are “starcissistic.” I began to wonder if any society could be so steeped in puns and sexual innuendo, and as I began to wonder that, a key element of any successful dystopia--its relationship to our own world--began to dissipate. I wasn’t sure if I was reading satire or slapstick, and for me, that was a real problem.

The issues this book addresses--everything from the sexualization of young girls to human trafficking to religious fundamentalism--are deadly serious. Satire (in the manner of Swift’s “Modest Proposal”) subjects serious issues to mocking humor in the interest of provoking dialogue, discussion, and debate. Slapstick does no such thing: it reduces all subjects to the same level of absurdity for no better reason than to provoke a laugh. I don’t believe that’s what McCafferty was trying to do. But the more I read, the more the book seemed like a screwball comedy rather than a “frighteningly believable” take on our own sick society (as one of the book-jacket reviewers put it).

I have a teenage daughter. I hate that she’s growing up in a society where, as McCafferty aptly writes, girls “are valued far more for what’s between their legs than what’s between their ears.” I’m glad books like Bumped offer girls like my daughter (and boys like her younger brother) a chance to see the real world through the distorting lens of fiction.

But to me at least, the distortion in Bumped became so extreme I could no longer tell what I was looking at. I'd be interested to hear if other readers--particularly female readers--had a similar reaction, or if perhaps my inability to get into this particular book was a "guy thing."

YA Guy Hosts... Jimena Novaro!

Today on the blog, YA Guy's taking a break from reviewing.  But that's okay, because the talented Jimena Novaro has stepped in with a review of The Underland Chronicles by Suzanne Collins! If you don't know these books, you should--they're every bit as good as The Hunger Games, though aimed primarily at a younger audience. And if you don't know Jimena, you definitely should--she's a great writer, Twitter pal, and  (as you'll see in a moment) lover of good books!

So take it away, Jimena....

Thank you for hosting me, Josh! I’m so excited to be here!

I first picked up Gregor the Overlander, the first book in The Underland Chronicles, at the age of ten. I’d put it at the bottom of my to-read pile, but by the time I got around to it, it only took a few paragraphs before it had me hooked. Suzanne Collins uses simple prose, humor, and a skillful buildup to introduce us to the main character, eleven-year-old Gregor, a New York City kid stuck taking care of his two-year-old sister Boots and ailing grandmother over the summer while his mom works full-time. His father’s disappearance two years prior to the start of the book has forced him to take on a lot more responsibilities than most kids his age.

And then, of course, Boots falls through a grate in the basement laundry room. And Gregor follows her down.

But at the end of the fall, instead of Alice-in-Wonderland-style dreamscapes, Gregor and Boots find the Underland, a world of giant creatures (bloodthirsty, six-foot rats; bats big enough to ride on; etc.) and sword-wielding humans, miles beneath New York City.

At surface level, The Underland Chronicles gives you one heck of an adventure--battles against huge rats and carnivorous plants, journeys through jungles and across treacherous seas and through volcanic caverns--all of it injected with a healthy sense of humor and plenty of fun and excitement. Collins rocks those action scenes and cliffhangers.

But though aimed at the lower end of YA, bordering with Middle Grade fiction, the series never babies its readers. It deconstructs the pretty lies it constructs in the beginning and drives everything to a breaking point. It tackles difficult themes: war, the grey areas of morality, the depths of human nature.

What really makes it work, however, are its characters. I fell in love with Gregor, Ripred, Ares, Luxa, Boots, Lizzie, Vikus and the rest. Throughout the series, Gregor grapples with the way war and violence transforms his life and the darkness in his own heart. Luxa starts out as a haughty, rebellious young queen; it’s a joy to see her mature and evolve. Ripred is the most awesome badass you will ever meet, always ready with a snarky retort, and his mentor/pupil relationship with Gregor really shines. And he’s a giant rat. These characters still prowl my thoughts and dreams years after closing the last book, and they’re the main reason I keep coming back to this world.

This series was a huge part of my childhood and teen years, and it’s stayed with me ever since.

You can find me on Twitter as @JimenaNovaro; on Facebook as JimenaNovaroWriter; or on my website, www.jimenanovaro.com.

Josh, thank you again for having me over!

YA Guy Reviews... THE 5TH WAVE by Rick Yancey

YA Guy loves alien-invasion narratives.

I even thought of writing a book about them. Maybe I will one of these days.

The best of these narratives hinge on an elegant paradox: the aliens are both foreign and familiar, different and the same.

They are them, and they are us.

One of the granddaddies of the genre, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, played on that paradox. The aliens are ruthless monsters, the very antithesis of the British Empire (they are them). The aliens are ruthless monsters, the very image of the British Empire (they are us).

Flash-forward to the fifties, the heyday of alien-invasion narratives in the U.S. From Invasion of the Body Snatchers to The Thing to The Blob, the alien invaders were both soulless Communists (they are them) and soulless conformity (they are us).

One way to spot a bad alien-invasion narrative is if it ignores or denies this paradox. If the aliens are pure monsters and those fighting them pure heroes, you’re better off closing the book or turning off the TV.

You know what I mean. Anything directed by Roland Emmerich.

Rick Yancey’s The 5^th Wave has the paradox down cold. As one of the characters, an alien whose soul has been implanted within a human body, puts it: “I am Other and I am you.”

I enjoyed Yancey’s book. The writing is top-notch, the young adult characters believable, the world-building superior; he really thought out how humanity would respond if an overwhelming force were to obliterate 97% of our species in a few short months. One of the book’s multiple narrators even makes fun of alien-invasion movies where human beings, with our stone-age technology, miraculously fight off a race of conquerors who have mastered intergalactic space travel.

You know, anything directed by Roland Emmerich.

The only thing I didn’t like about the book--and this is more a critique of the genre than of Yancey's novel alone--was the aliens’ motivation. It seems these days, the only reason aliens come to our planet is to kill us all off so they can have the whole earth to themselves. That’s the stuff of great drama, I suppose, but it does make me wonder. If aliens are not only them but us, might not their motivations be more complex than that? Might they not have an interest in studying us, interacting with us, living among us, learning from us? Might not their motivations (like ours) be multiple and conflicted?

Not trying to be touchy-feely here, folks. Not suggesting the aliens come down to earth and sing Kumbaya. Just looking for them to be a bit less sociopathic--creatures that can kill, sure, but also creatures that can feel the pangs of conscience.

YA Guy’s waiting….

YA Guy Reviews... THE GREATEST THING THAT ALMOST HAPPENED by Don Robertson

When YA Guy was a YA Guy....

That doesn't sound right.

What I mean is, when YA Guy was a young guy reading YA and dreaming about writing it, instead of a somewhat older guy reading it and living the dream, my favorite book was Don Robertson's 1970 The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened.

I think it was the first true YA I'd ever read.

Sure, I'd read a lot of Judy Blume books. But they'd be classified more as MG these days: their protagonists were middle school students whose family lives were their main concern and whose romantic entanglements were mostly day-dreamed, not experienced.

Robertson's book was a family drama, sure. It was about a kid growing up in 1950s Cleveland, Morris Bird III, who was diagnosed with leukemia and had a very short time to patch things up with his distant father.

But it was also a book about high school. About romantic love. About the absurdity of life (and death). And about sex.

And it was written in a sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek third person that felt perfect to me as the voice of a teenage boy. Here's how the novel begins:

The boy's name was, ahem, Morris Bird III, which was ridiculous, and you didn't have to tell him it was ridiculous. He was seventeen, and his complexion was awful. He was a Democrat, and so he did not like Richard M. Nixon's dog, the sainted Checkers. For that matter, he did not care a hell of a lot about Richard M. Nixon either. He was very skillful at galloping up the DOWN escalator in the Higbee department store on the Public Square, located smack in the heart of gorgeous Cleveland. He also was very skilled at galloping down the UP escalator. This all embarrassed Julie Sutton a great deal. Julie Sutton was his girl, and she thought her feet were too big, and in December of 1952 she had a Christmas job at Higbee's. She wrapped presents. She was as skillful at wrapping presents as he was at defeating the escalators.

Through my teen years, I read this book over and over and over. It's in tatters now, but I still have it on my bookshelf. Every so often I'll open it again and read a few pages, just to rediscover what spoke so strongly to me when I was a teen.

I don't know if anyone is still reading Robertson's book. It was made into a TV movie with Jimmy (J. J.) Walker at the height of his popularity (hence the cover image you see above), and that probably was not a good thing, since the Good Times star was utterly incapable of conveying either the gravity or the hilarity of Robertson's fictional creation. For all I know, that made-for-TV movie might have killed its far superior inspiration.

I do find on Amazon, however, that a 2009 reprint is available.

So here's what YA Guy would advise: run, don't walk, to your nearest indie bookstore and/or mega-chain and/or computer terminal and get yourself a copy.

Me, I'll keep my original on the bookshelf.

And I'll open it again and again and again, and rediscover each time what my younger self already knew.