Fall for Anything

Fall for Anything by Courtney Summers (NY: St. Martin's Griffin, 2010).

There's no summer fun for Eddie Reeve this year. Her senior year is ahead and she's hanging out with her best friend Milo every day, but she's mired in sadness after her father's suicide and obsessed with knowing why. Her mother is nearly catatonic, and her mother's pesky best friend Beth has actually moved into their house. Eddie sneaks out every night and rides her bike to the old warehouse from whose roof her dad leaped to his death. It's where Eddie found him and where Milo found them both. Eddie's fuzzy on some of the details of that horrible day, yet remains sharply focused on discovering why her dad, an acclaimed photographer who fled the art world at the height of his fame, left her and her mother.

Eddie chances to meet Culler Evans on one of her visits to the warehouse. He claims to be a former student of her father's and he does seem to have some inside knowledge. He's a bit older than Eddie and she feels attracted to him, despite Milo's warnings that there's something off about the situation, especially when Culler starts showing Eddie cryptic messages her father allegedly left carved in the walls of the last places he photographed.


Summers is an extraordinary YA author who is highly skilled at interweaving dark realism with bordering-on-hopeful outcomes. Fall for Anything (plus Summer's previous novels, Cracked Up to Be and Some Girls Are) is highly recommended. Sexual situations, language, alcohol. Ages 13 & up.

Pretty Little Liars

Pretty Little Liars by Sara Shepard (NY: Harper Teen, 2006).

Compulsively readable, Pretty Little Liars spins the tale of a clique of rich girls whose Queen Bee, Alison, mysteriously disappears. And that might not be a bad thing since Alison knew all their secrets and used her knowledge to control her friends. Without the dominant Alison, the group fractures, and the girls move on to create better selves, they hope. Three years later, as the girls are entering their junior year at their exclusive prep school, they all start receiving threatening messages, seemingly from Alison. And their carefully constructed lives start unraveling as the threat to reveal their secrets appears more and more real. But who is it? Even after Alison's body is discovered, the messages continue....

Fabulous lightweight fun with a juicy whiff of nastiness. An excellent choice for fans of The Clique and Gossip Girls series. Lots of sex and language, alcohol and drugs. Age 13 & up.

Anything but Normal

Anything but Normal by Melody Carlson (Grand Rapids, MI: Revel, 2010).

17-year-old Sophie Ramsay wishes she'd never seen Dylan Morris, let alone allow herself to be fooled into breaking her purity pledge. And at a summer church camp, of all places. Now she's pregnant and not sure what to do about it. First she ignores it, but eventually she has to fess up and tell her family and friends. As she repairs her relationships, including that with God, she feels her growing not just out but up.

Great teen read that deals realistically with difficult issue. Language, sexual situations. Ages 13 & up.

House of Wacks

House of Wacks by Denise Gwen (Adams Basin, NY: Wild Rose Press, 2008).

Jordan Meadows has led a charmed life in her small Indiana town--she has fabulous friends, shops till she drops, splurges on spa treatments, and drives a brand new car. Then her dad sees her latest spa bill and lays down the law: Jordan has to spend the summer working instead of spending. To avoid flipping burgers, Jordan shows up at a cast and crew call for a horror film that's being filmed in and around Bloomington that summer. Who knew her experience with wax would come in so handy when she ends up helping do the make-up for House of Wax IX! The the world of work isn't all Jordan learns about that summer as she confronts the limitations of cliques and stereotypes. Fun read for grades 7 & up. Language, sexual situations, but nothing too extreme.

Everything You Want

Everything You Want by Barbara Shoup (Woodbury, MN: Flux, 2008).

This novel explores the classic fantasy: what would you do if you won the lottery? That's what happens to Emma Hammond's family, and Emma humorously relates the impact of money on her life. To start, she's a fairly insecure freshman at Indiana University in Bloomington, unsure of what she's really doing in school, unhappy with her appearance, and kind of lost in this new sea of people. (Shout out to Bloomington residents & IU alum--lots of town and campus scenery!) She quickly learns that money is not a panacea, but her journey is worth reading as she learns to deal confidently with the relationships in her life.

Bloggrls

sistrsic92 (Meg) by Cheryl Dellasega. Illustrated by Tyler Beauford (Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish, 2009).

This is the 2nd book in the Bloggrls series that features girls (obviously) using popular abbreviated texting language to chronicle their angst in a weblog to a few select VBFs (very best friends).

Meg is a classic younger sister who feels dwarfed by her older sister Cara's beauty, intelligence, and popularity. With great humor, she contrasts herself to T2P2 (The Totally Perfect Person)--including a side-by-side features list. Yes, Cara seems to have it all, and Meg (also known as Eggy to her family and friends) is struggling with everything--friends, appearance, school. Meg is a good artist, though, and "her" drawings complement the story nicely.

The story takes a serious turn when Cara develops an eating disorder that destabilizes Meg's family and her prior assumptions about her sister's perfection.

Enjoyable teen read with excellent information about eating disorders. Sexual content. Grades 7 & up.

Teen Sexuality

Giving up the V by Serena Robar (NY: Simon Pulse, 2009).

Spencer Davis's sixteenth birthday means a mom-sponsored trip to the GYNE to get birth control pills. Yikes! Sure, Spencer is interested in sex, but not until she meets the right guy, and that seems unlikely to happen. She's happy with her group of friends and her virgin status. Then a new boy moves into town, and Spencer is tempted. Read what happens in this funny page-turner that taps into teen concerns.

Newbery Winner

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (NY: Wendy Lamb, 2009).

Sometimes I don't like the Newbery winners at all--like Criss Cross a couple of years ago. I like this one, When You Reach Me, but I wonder if it will just be another one of those books used to torture kids during the unit on "award winning books."

This novel has all the elements you would expect in an award winner--literary aspirations, deeper meaning, symbolism, good plotting, believable characters--but no action and nothing gross, so limited kid appeal. I would probably not recommend it to an energetic 3rd or 4th grader, but it will appeal to all the frequent visitors--male and female-- to the school or public library who read everything and enjoy science fiction or fantasy. I particularly like the allusions to Madeleine L'Engle's classic Wrinkle in Time, which happens to be the favorite book of this novel's main character, twelve-year-old Miranda. And it's a good thing since she'll use her in-depth knowledge of the book to digest the odd events that she narrates here.

This one is fine for 3rd grade & up, though younger readers may not understand some of the time travel discussion.

Girlfriend Material

Girlfriend Material by Melissa Kantor (NY: Hyperion, 2009)

This novel explores many different types of relationships, not just romantic ones, as the title might imply. Sixteen-year-old Kate's summer plans change dramatically when her mom and dad decide to spend some time apart, which ends up meaning that Kate and her mom fly to Cape Cod from their Salt Lake City home to spend the summer with some old friends of her mom's. Kate remembers having a great time ten years earlier with their daughter, so she agrees to go, albeit reluctantly. Many struggles await Kate as she tries to make sense of emotional complexities she's never had to deal with before--her best friend dating a jock, her mother flirting with an old friend, the daughter treating Kate like an old sock, her own attempts to find a comfort zone in a completely different environment where she has to adjust her expectations--about herself and everyone else--regularly. High school readers will enjoy this coming-of-age novel. Language, mature themes.

Ghostgirl #2

Homecoming by Tonya Hurley (2009)

Charlotte Usher is having the same kind of luck in the afterlife as she had when she was alive--no one will pay any attention to her! Her Dead Ed friends are so wrapped up in their reunions with dead family members and their internship activities they seem to stop noticing Charlotte. That's a familiar place for Charlotte, who died trying to become popular. She ends up hanging around with Maddy, another loner who actually seems to be nurturing Charlotte's insecurities. Then Charlotte's best friend (from the real world), Scarlett, needs help only a dead friend like Charlotte can give her. Petula, Scarlett's petulent, self-obsessed older sister, is in a coma after developing a virulent staph infection from a botched pedicure. While Petula waits for death, literally, in a ghost version of a hospital intake office, Scarlett manages to cross over to the dead world, make contact with Charlotte, and then, ultimately snag her sister right before the nurse calls Petula's name! And just in time for Homecoming! Hurray!

This second installment in the Ghostgirl series moves more smoothly than the first and explains some of the information missing from the first, such as Charlotte's lack of family. Homecoming also has more blatantly comic moments than the first volume, perhaps because Petula is such an obvious target for ridicule.