While this novel doesn’t technically qualify as a work of young adult literature, its likely YA readership, combined with its “privileged YA” plot, makes it a reasonable addition to this blog. Also, when I saw the Kardashian sisters’ novel on the “new books” shelf of my library, I just had to read it. Ostensibly written by all three Kardashians (the authors thank their “collaborator,” a person I presume actually put pen to paper here, in their acknowledgements on the novel’s final pages), Dollhouse follows the exploits of a blended family featuring three gorgeous sisters whose names all start with “K” (here, the girls are called Kamille, Kassidy, and Kyle) and headed by a former sports star patriarch. After Kamille is discovered my a model scout, she quickly ascends the ladder of fame and the trio of sisters must now deal with Kamille’s crazy schedule and accompanying paparazzi. Still angry over her father’s death, Kyle specializes in being a general fuck-up. When her parents mandate tutoring by her stepbrother, sparks begin to fly. Kassidy, meanwhile, struggles to keep up her grades at USC while managing the family restaurant, never mind that she hasn’t had a date in years. A new beau for Kamille, a shocking hookup for Kassidy, a forbidden pregnancy and a wedding follow.

I must say, I don’t believe that this book was actually written by the Kardashians. Whoever did write it is certainly not a poor author, and the book reads like any other mid-range chick lit. Of course, the fun here is in guessing which aspects of the fictional sisters’ lives mirror the lives of the real Kardashians. It goes without saying that Kamille = Kim; Kassidy = Kourtney, and Kyle = Khloe. The major departure from reality seemed to be in the characterization of Kassidy/Kourtney; in the novel, Kassidy is a smart and successful college student, and dowdy to boot. That certainly doesn’t sound like the Kourtney we all know and love! For those looking for an inside scoop on Kardashian life, the novel offers little in the way of celeb secrets. It does, however, offer an in-print depiction of the trio whose lives–as they play out on TV, anyway–pretty much resemble chick lit already. In other words, for chick lit fans and fans of the sisters K, this narrative is not new.

There’s just something about a ballerina story. At its basest level, it’s similar to the gymnast’s story, and it’s similar to any story of a young girl who dedicates not only her mind but her body to a very particular form of perfection. In comparison to the sensational and dramatic Black Swan, Sophie Flack’s first novel is tame; Bunheads is the story of nineteen-year-old Hannah, a member of the Manhattan Ballet Company’s corps. As a dancer with MBC, Hannah trains and performs in eternal competition with her fellow corps members to be chosen for featured or solo roles. When Hannah finds herself attracted to a local college student and their burgeoning romance is threatened by her lack of availability, she begins to wonder if the insular and all-encompassing world of dance is the one in which she wants to remain.

Told from the first person perspective (and authored by a former member of the New York City Ballet), Bunheads neither romanticizes nor sensationalizes its protagonist’s packed schedule of rehearsals and performances, friendly and not-so-friendly competition among dancers, and the ever present pressure to maintain a dancer’s physique. The novel’s matter-of-fact tone is one of its achievements, particularly as we readers are taken on tours of Hannah’s packed days during which the narrator never comments as to the exhaustion these “typical” days must breed. This lack of complaint encourages our own complacency; we are only woken up to the demands of Hannah’s life as a dancer as she, too, begins to question it (and thus allows us to do so, too).

While Flack’s novel is certainly no Best Little Girl in the World, like most books about young women in ballet, it does note the physical and mental demands of the profession. As these demands–in real life–would already be too much for us non-dancers, their depiction in narrative–and even one as un-hystrionic as Flack’s–always seem a bit overwrought. And I think it is the extremity of this life that, when depicted for us regular folk, always boils down to a “dance-and-kick-your-ass-every-day-or-live-among-the-commoners-and-eat-whatever-you-want” conflict. And I love that conflict, as realistically or as hackneyed as it is ever portrayed.

As you can tell, I’m a big reader of dystopian fiction (but really, who isn’t these days?), and so when I saw an advertisement for The Eleventh Plague, I knew what book I was going to check out next. Set in an unspecified future United States that has been destroyed by war and a bio-terror weapon that killed over half of the population, Hirsch’s first novel opens with a burial. Stephen, the novel’s fifteen-year-old narrator, and his father–the last remaining members of their family–are burying Stephen’s grandfather who has finally succumbed after years of living rough. Stephen and his father eke out their existence as salvagers who scrounge for and then trade what raw materials they can find for their meager rations. After Stephen’s father is badly injured in a fight with a pack of slavers, Stephen allies himself with a group of settlers who have turned a walled community into a small town called Settler’s Landing.

Hirsch’s novel is divided into sections, each of which describes the “acts” of the story: Act 1: Stephen and his father on the road, Act 2: Stephen and his father in Settler’s Landing, where Stephen’s interest is piqued by a girl who seems to cultivate her outsider status, Act 3: Stephen and the “outsider” play a prank that ends up having larger implications than mere revenge on a rival. Much of the novel consists of Stephen’s own mediations on his situation. Having grown up on the “road,” he has never seen a community like this one and has never had to rely on anyone outside of his own family. The concept of friendship is a difficult one for him, though most of the people of Settler’s Landing attempt to familiarize him with the idea. Following the “prank,” the pace picks up as Stephen finds himself a rogue soldier in a local war.

I wanted to like this book more than I did and I think much of my dislike had to do with the somewhat surface level of the narrative. I found myself wanting the moodiness of the first chapter to be sustained and this wish might have informed my disappointment at what seemed like an abrupt shift in characterization that occurred towards the end of the novel. Hirsch does a fine job of describing the post-apocalyptic landscape and his descriptions of abandoned shopping malls and casinos were some of my favorite parts of the novel. As the novel lingered on these, I was reminded of The World Without Us, and found myself considering the slow destruction the erasure of millions of people could assure in a world built to that enormous scale.

This short novel (the trim size makes it look a bit longer than it is) begins with fourteen-year-old Abi’s attempted escape from the British mansion where she works “in service.” Caught and returned to Greave Hall, Abi must face the harsh discipline meted out by Mrs. Cotton, the Lord Greave’s housekeeper and sister-in-law. Since the death of her mother one year prior and the departure of the Lord’s son for the Crimean War, life at Greave Hall has been painful, if not frightening. Lord Greave appears to be going crazy, Mrs. Cotton is taking liberties and acting, on occasion, as the lady of the house, and Abi is convinced the home is haunted by the spirit of her dead mother.

Set in the 1850s and related in the first person–a note on the first page establishes the conceit that the narrative to follow was found in a collection of papers donated to the Victorian Papers archive of the library–the story moves quickly and is punctuated by scenes of ghostly activity that are mildly affecting. After Abi establishes a hypothesis that her mother was murdered, not taken by cholera, the ghost story becomes a mystery, and Ford establishes an effective red herring to distract readers from the real–and somewhat surprising–culprit.

As a Victorian ghost story/mystery that depends on the mores of its setting to advance its narrative, the novel is effective but not transformative. Greater use of Victorian English in the narrative could have established the period more successfully, enhanced the believability of the archivist’s “note” on the novel’s first page and thus made the book more historically distinct and its ghost story more potentially historically real. That said, the lack of Victorian language makes the novel immensely more readable and, as a ghost story that is a little scary, but not too scary, constructs the book for a younger YA audience.

Much like Beth Revis’s 2011 Across the Universe, this dystopian novel by first-time YA author Anna Sheehan features a protagonist who has been kept for years in suspended animation or, in the terms of A Long, Long Sleep, stasis or “stass.” When sixteen-year-old Rosalinda “Rose” Fitzroy emerges from stasis, she discovers she has been asleep for over sixty years. In her “absence,” the world has suffered what its inter-planetary citizens call the Dark Times, a period of disease and famine during which much of the population was killed and the survivors were left barren. Following a period of Reconstruction, the world has been populated by its first generation of those who recovered; however, Rose’s parents and her first and only love are either dead or presumed dead. Rose’s father’s “monopolic” corporation, UniCorp, would seem to be the society’s most triumphant survivor and, as her parents’ sole heir, the newly awakened Rose discovers that she is now the head of the company. Assigned guardians by the company’s executives, Rose attempts to re-integrate into a society that has changed dramatically since she left; she soon discovers, however, that a robotic assassin known as a Plastine has been assigned to find and terminate her.

While Rose’s attempts to make sense of the new world and the new threat of the Plastine provide the novel with suspense and action, it is her growing awareness of her mistreatment by her parents–who would put her into “stass” at their convenience–and her deepening relationship with an alien raised by the government that provide the novel with its emotional center. Moving backwards and forwards in time as Rose recalls her first love, a boy named Xavier who, due to the preservative nature of her bouts in stasis she was able to know throughout his childhood, the novel pieces together Rose’s backstory and compares it to the controlled and sometimes abusive childhood suffered by her new alien friend.

I wanted to like this novel more than I did and, while I did find Rose’s slowly raised consciousness about her own deprived past to be the richest content in the novel, I found the discussion of the ethics of stasis to be a bit overdone and, comparably, the ethics of the new world to be mostly uninterrogated. As a work of dystopian fiction that points strong fingers at genetically modified food (the source of the world’s scourge of barrenness) and dwells on the possibility of true freedom for those under supposedly benevolent watch (Rose, the alien), I expected more obvious social commentary. It’s not that there weren’t opportunities for this: Rose and at least one of her (human) friends made a number of offhand comments about the power wielded by Rose’s father’s company and Rose, herself, observed the stark difference between the wealthy “1%” (of which she is a part) and the rest of the world when she had an opportunity to ride public transportation; however, I expected more from the novel as an artifact of genre. That said, this book will fit neatly between the aforementioned Revis novel (the sequel, A Million Suns, was published in January of this year) as well as Ally Condie’s “Matched” books. Like these novels, A Long, Long Sleep offers some light but carefully delineated critique and (heiress status notwithstanding) an Everygirl heroine.

While Variant does not have the most original premise in the YA light sci-fi world–when a seventeen year old foster kid–Benson–arrives at an exclusive boarding school, he discovers it’s run entirely by its teenage students, who are themselves trapped on the grounds and punished by unseen administrators if too many of the school rules are broken–it does push this conceit beyond the Hunger Games-meets-Maze Runner mashup it would seem to be, most notably when the secret androids make an appearance.

As with the television show, LOST, the biggest question is the one that motivates my reading of Variant, and that motivates some–though not all–of the novel’s characters: why? Each of the students at Benson’s school is alone–orphans, formerly homeless, foster kids like Benson–none of them has a caring contact on the “outside.” While corralling this detached youth population would seem to offer myriad nefarious possibilities–medical or psychological experiments, elite military training–the obvious motives don’t seem to be at play here. With the exception of the regular games of Capture the Flag, which pit groups of students against one another in competition for resources, the favorite explanations of the genre fail to fit into the set up of Variant, which, as I would argue, is primarily what keeps me reading. Unlike LOST, Variant is not a real masterwork of characterization (its more on parr with Maze Runner in that regard) and, as a number of unexpected wrenches are thrown into the mix (did I mention the secret androids?), this aspect of the series will either have to pick up or the literary stunt level will have to elevate to keep people besides series completists besides me reading.

What started out as a not-too-body-hating fat-girl romance takes a sudden and unexpected turn into the fantastic in Balog’s Starstruck. Then again, the novel is set at the Jersey Shore, and we all know that anything can happen there.

When, after four years away, sixteen-year-old Gwendolyn “Dough” Reilly’s oldest friend, Internet penpal and, more recently, first boyfriend (the romance has been carried out entirely online), announces that he will be moving back to her seaside home town, Dough is ironically less than happy. Since the departure of “Wish,” Dough has ballooned to over 200 pounds and has solidified her place at the bottom of the school’s social ladder. With a Facebook page that reveals his growing handsomeness and popularity, Wish is sure to dump Dough as soon as he sees her. Oddly–to Dough’s way of thinking–Wish is uninterested in breaking up with his old (albeit plump) friend and wants to carry on their relationship. This in spite of the fact that the popular crowd has welcomed Wish into their charmed circle! What’s wrong with this picture, Dough wonders.

The perfect set-up for a novel that ends with a well-meaning but still slightly abhorrent “fat-girls-are-loveable-too” moral, Starstruck‘s fictional premise takes a right turn when mysterious and tattooed Christian moves into town, begins working at Dough’s mother’s bakery, and suggests that Wish is not as perfect as he seems to be. There are a number of directions in which this story could have flowed–I certainly didn’t expect the star business (you’ll have to read it to find out)–and it confounded me almost every time it tilted against convention; however, I was a little disappointed that it ended so, well, conventionally. Stories about fat girls that don’t involve weight loss and a makeover are still pretty uncommon in YA fiction, to the point that any novel told from the point of view of a self-identified fat girl is almost always already political. That said, there were a number of moments where the novel could have gone in a more liberating direction and it didn’t, which disappointed me a bit. I mean, if you’re going to throw a pretty crazy secret society of star worshippers in there (whoops!), surely you’re ready to push the envelope a little, right?

I had read and enjoyed Healey’s first novel for young adults, Guardian of the Dead, a fantasy-themed mystery set in New Zealand that incorporated elements of Maori myth and legend to inform its fantastic premise, and I have to say I liked this one even better. The Shattering is a bit more of a mystery than it is a fantasy, though it certainly has tinges of that as well. Told from the first person point of view of seventeen-year-old Keri and the third person points of view of her sometimes friend Janna and acquaintance Sione, the novel–and its characters–operate under the premise that the deaths by suicide of each of Keri’s, Janna’s, and Sione’s brothers are not only connected to each other, but also to what may be an enchantment that hangs over the friends’ coastal town.

While the novel would seem to be a recipe for some Nancy Drew type sleuthing by its teen protagonists, The Shattering avoids playing up the characters’ chumminess in favor of focusing on the mystery. In fact, although Keri, Janna and Sione do prove a motley crew, their differences are never played for obvious laughs and the frustration each feels with the others seems genuine in the context of the story and not a narrative contrivance. Although–and this is not really a spoiler–the mystery of the brothers’ deaths ends up involving some supernatural machinations, here, in contrast to The Guardian of the Dead, these supernatural elements are less tied to ethnic identity. Healey does address ethnic–and, very briefly, sexual–identity issues here, namely in the person of Sione, a Samoan who fears he is a “potato”–Samoan on the outside and white on the inside. Reading these novels makes me imagine New Zealand as a much more welcomingly diverse country, with recognized and authorized influences of Maori, East Asian, Samoan and island clearly visible and enfolded into the common culture. If this is not the way New Zealand really is, Healey does a good job of making it seem this way, inserting Maori and Samoan words within the text (the American version includes a glossary for us Yankees) and generally writing what would seem to be a culturally sensitive couple of novels (I’m counting Guardian among these).

Told from the likeably breezy first person perspective of Carlos, the novel moves quickly, focusing less on Carlos’ school life and after-school job, and more on his pursuit of cosmetologic excellence. Though Carlos’ homosexuality is no secret, it is not established at the beginning of the novel as is typical in YA novels with gay characters. This is an interesting challenge to the compulsory heterosexuality that pervades YA fiction and requires that every non-straight character immediately identify him/herself as such; however, the characterization that is intended to establish Carlos’ character sometimes veers in the direction of stereotype. That Carlos is identified first is an aspiring (male) makeup artist seems to ask or even expect the audience to attach a gay identity to him as a default measure, a move that–however reflective of the regular judgments of identity we issue every day–seems a bit reductive and even stereotypical (e.g. no reader has to be told that the male makeup artist protagonist is gay; of COURSE he is!). While I don’t demand that YA literature, in an effort to avoid the bias confirmation and hate-mongering that can result from stereotypical portrayals, provide only positive and non-queer models of homosexual performance, I’m intrigued by the use of standard idioms of “gayness” in this novel. Then again, in mainstream literature, do any other idioms even exist?

A noted writer in Britain, Marcus Sedgwick is one of those YA authors that deserves more attention across the pond. Although the first American edition of his novel, Revolver (2010, Roaring Brook), was a Printz award nominee, this–and his latest, White Crow–are not Sedgwick’s only works for young people. After reading White Crow, I find myself compelled to search out these lesser-known (over here, at least) titles.

Told from the first person perspective of Ferelith, a quirky orphan living in Winterfold, a small British seaside town; the third person perspective of Rebecca, a Londoner reluctantly installed in Winterfold following her chief of detectives father’s public procedural error; and through the historic journals of a priest who lived in Winterfold at least two centuries prior; the novel is surprisingly short. When a lonely Rebecca meets the oddball Ferelith, the two form a fledgling friendship. With little to do in Winterfold, the girls take to exploring the ruins of their town, a formerly thriving medieval village. As they explore the crumbling church and a boarded up mansion, the historical parallel narrative describes the slow descent of the priest into spiritual doubt and madness.

Not a traditional mystery, the novel’s progression nonetheless involves the resolution of a number of mysterious questions: what plans does the priest have to “prove” the existence of heaven and hell? what happened to Ferelith’s mother? what did Rebecca’s father do? Naturally, all of these questions are somewhat intertwined, particularly as the answers to each involve the characters’ exploration of belief. Now this probably sounds a bit too didactic; however, the novel doesn’t hit you over the head with spiritual journeying. Instead, Sedgwick seems to cast the pursuit of esoterica dire terms; those brave (or foolish) enough to attempt to find answers to extra-terrestrial questions must be prepared for the maddening results. In this way, Sedgwick’s novel is not unlike an H.P. Lovecraft story, only without all the italics and racism.