By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead

By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead by Julie Anne Peter (NY: Hyperion, 2010).

Daelyn Rice is known as a freak at her latest school, a private girls' academy. She can't talk and she wears a neck brace--she's recovering from reconstructive surgery on her esophagus that she damaged in her latest in a string of botched suicides. Now she's determined to succeed and, with the help of a countdown website for "completers" called through-the-light.com, organizes for her final suicide attempt. She answers questions, selects her method, and even journals about the bullying and abuse she's endured her entire school career that have contributed to her death wish. Her parents blithely believe that monitoring her web access will stop her from visiting suicide boards, but Daelyn enlists the aid of a boy who happens to live next to her school and who persistently sits with her while she waits for her ride after school every day. He loans her a netbook and also becomes something to her, a friend? Daelyn doesn't really know since her life has been devoid of friendship. She's likewise unsure about the one girl among the usual crowd of mean ones at the school who is actually nice to Daelyn.

None of these topics is particularly new, but Peters's matter-of-fact presentation cuts deeply. Daelyn isn't crying for help, yet she elicits sympathy, even as she dispassionately evaluates various suicide methods. Her parents' apparent blindness to their daughter's suffering seems oddly believable. Although the book ends on Daelyn's last day, her ultimate end is left unstated, a fitting conclusion to this sad, sad story.

Recommended for teens, ages 14 & up. Intense situations & disturbing content.

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.

Nobel Genes

Nobel Genes by Rune Michaels (NY: Athenium, 2010).

Told in the first-person from the perspective of a boy who is never named,this novel intriguingly plays on the concept of self-discovery--a common enough theme in YA fiction. The boy is living with his manic-depressive mother who has always told him that he's the product of a sperm donation by a Nobel laureate. She expects he will great scientist, and has had him tested and tutored from an early age. He's a bright boy, but not particularly gifted, and he devotes hours to pondering a book of Nobel Prize-winners, wondering which one he looks like, which one's gifts he has inherited. As his mother's illness, progresses, the boy has to deal with other pressures as well.

Michaels portrays the world of a boy living and dealing with a disturbed individual with a poignancy that evokes empathy. It's a sad story with a sad ending, but the reader is left with the sense that the boy has the strength to overcome his difficult beginnings. Recommended for grades 7 & up. Some mature themes, situations.

13 Reasons

Th1rteen R3asons Why by Jay Asher (NY: Razorbill, 2007).

Some books should come with a warning label: Do not start reading unless you have several free hours. This is one of them. Asher masterfully grabs the reader and does not let go in this compelling tale of teen suicide and its aftermath.

Everyone loves receiving an unexpected package, so Clay Jensen thinks nothing of opening up the box addressed to him that he finds propped up against his front door when he arrives home from school. In it he finds seven audiocassettes that suck him into a vortex of circumstances that have ended in the death of a classmate. Hannah narrates the thirteen reasons she ended her life, each reason being a different person, each person being sent the tapes sequentially to hear his or her role in Hannah's death.

Clay knows Hannah. He thinks he loved her; he even kissed her at a party and assumed something about him made the relationship wither. He does not want to listen to the tapes, afraid of what he might hear, but at the same time, he has to. Using a map that had appeared in his locker a few weeks before Hannah died, Clay revisits the places and events in Hannah's life that led to her decision. We feel his pain and regret, and Hannah's as well, as Asher vividly evokes adolescent intensity--the way rumors and gossip can lead to pain and destruction. It's easy to dismiss it as overdramatization, but the realism of this novel makes it all too plausible.

Sexual situations, language, disturbing theme. Grades 7 & up.