Wanderlove by Kirsten Hubbard
Recommended.

I hate Kirsten Hubbard’s books.

I hate them because they’re so good it humbles me. I hate them because of their complexity and realistic depth. I hate them because they never, ever fail to make me stay up late. Every single book has seen me awake at 4 a.m., desperately telling myself I can squeeze in just one more chapter before I turn out the light.

I’ll admit that, during my reading of the first chapters of Wanderlove, Hubbard’s upcoming (illustrated!) novel from Random House, I suspected my review would be a slightly different beast. Oh, I was enjoying the tale of Bria Sandoval, recent high school grad who has given up her art and decided to impulsively travel Central America instead. Hubbard’s prose was efficient and descriptive, the emotional premise clearly drawn, the voice clear. But it’s such a different book than her first, 2010′s Like Mandarin. Like Mandarin was immediately deeply resonant through both its beautiful prose and high emotional intensity. Wanderlove, on the other hand, fooled me into thinking it was another creature: more commercial, simpler, with a snappier plot but, perhaps, lower emotional stakes.

I was so wrong.

It’s true that Hubbard (and Bria) keeps the reader at arms’ length through the first several chapters. We’re not told a lot about her, or the past that’s led her to join a travel group catering to middle aged “global vagabonds.” It’s not until Bria joins up with Rowan and Starling, a pair of charismatic and mysterious backpackers, that her layers begin to peel away.

Bria is an exceptionally well-drawn character. Like many YA protagonists, she begins the novel a bit sheepish about herself and her own abilities. But as she travels with Rowan and Starling, and later Rowan alone, we begin to understand the reasons behind her reticence. More, we’re witness to a fascinating transformation as Bria is emboldened by her travels and her friendship with Rowan, a nineteen-year-old traveler with his own complicated past.

Hubbard doesn’t spell a lot out for you. She weaves her plot in a complex way, withholding just enough information to pique your interest, revealing powerful emotional twists at precisely the right moment. As you read further into the novel, the pages coming alive with Bria’s art (drawn by Hubbard herself), much of the driving tension becomes sexual. Like Like Mandarin, Wanderlove is fundamentally a love story. Like Like Mandarin, it’s not an easy one, but rather one where the very real personalities of the involved characters often stand in the way of easy resolution. Unlike Like Mandarin, this love story is undeniably sexual. And sexy. Rowan has all the thorns of a real teenage boy and twice the appeal—an undeniable sweetheart, he’s a rare YA example of a healthy (but still thrilling, exciting, and mildly bad ass) love interest.

And the art . . . oh, the art. I don’t mean the illustrations alone, though those are lovely (if scarce in the novel’s first half—I can understand Hubbard’s reasoning, but I just wanted more). No, I mean the role art plays in the narrative.

Like Bria (and, I know from conversation, Kirsten Hubbard as well), I fancied myself a bit of an artist during high school—I even went through the rigmarole of applying to art schools. But at the last minute, I chickened out and went to a state college for writing instead. Since then, art’s played a tenuous role in my life. I paint on occasion, draw on occasion, and I even illustrated a children’s book, but it’s not omnipresent like it once was. I no longer go around with a sketchbook tucked under my arm, ready to doodle at a moment’s notice.

It feels sad to say all of that—sadder, still, when I try to draw and realize how rusty I am. But at least I’m content in the fact that I made my own choice for myself. Bria’s story is far sadder. It’s not the story of any sort of unusual abuse or hardship. It’s more typical than that—a bad boyfriend who made her feel worthless and stole her art from her.

And so Bria’s reclamation of both her art, and of love itself, is all-the-more poignant.

In the end, Wanderlove exceeded my initial expectations. It might not be the heavily impressionistic tale that you’ll find in the pages of Like Mandarin, but it’s still complex, realistic, and heart-wrenching. Hubbard covers a lot here, from issues of identity to the class conflicts of foreign travel to the ways that we let romance shape us, for better or for worse. And it’s all done deftly, with a confident hand. It’s an unusual story, the type we don’t often see in YA, but the people and conflicts at its heart rang exceptionally true for me.

Disclosure: A volume of this novel was generously donated by the publisher for review purposes. I am also personally acquainted with the author (hi Kirsten!).

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Shut Out by Kody Keplinger
Recommended.

Second books can be tricky. Even when authors produce standalone novels, eschewing the literary world’s current hunger for sequels and series, they have a difficult task ahead of them: producing work that’s more than just a retread of earlier success. In some ways, I know that comparisons between Kody Keplinger’s first novel, The DUFF, and her second, Shut Out, are inevitable. It’s not just their bright, girly covers that tie them together but thematics (a teenage girl’s ownership of her sexuality) and character (the poor family of origin with a complicated past; the control-freak girl; the supportive friends). But, while Shut Out does occasionally falter in much the same way that The DUFF did, it also stands quite capably on its own merits.

First for the bad: I thougt that the opening chapters of Shut Out suffered from the same sometimes-awkward writing that I noticed a year ago when reading The DUFF. The dialog in both begins overly deliberate and sometimes clunky; there are too many awkward physical descriptors and said bookisms. But you’d be wrong to judge either book on these first chapters. As Keplinger warms up, so do her prose stylistics, becoming more natural and confidently voiced. More, I was quickly enveloped in the story.

I suspect quite a bit of what appeals to me about Keplinger’s books is how familiar the lives of her protagonists feel. Shut Out brings us another working class family. Lissa lives at home with her dad, who has been wheelchair-bound since the car accident that also took away her mother, and with her older brother, who has dropped out of graduate school to help out at home. The men of her family are fans of the local high school football team, so when Lissa brings home Randy, a high school football star, he quickly becomes a part of the family. There’s something real, tender, and sad about the way the men in this book bond while Lissa makes them food and mothers them.

This is the first of Lissa’s many foolish and real choices in Shut Out. Like Bella Swan, she falls into a caretaker role that isn’t entirely fair. However, it was clear to me that this domesticity wasn’t necessarily meant to be a positive trait, but rather a realistic reaction to feeling motherless and adrift and to having one’s needs ignored by the grown-ups around her.

People generally ignore Lissa’s needs. Her boyfriend, for example, is so embroiled in a rivalry with the high school soccer team that he abandons their trysts entirely to play pranks with his teammates. Lissa finally gets fed up—she proposes a sex strike against the boys on both teams until they agree to abandon the rivalry entirely.

This sex strike is the central premise of Shut Out, and its selling point (it’s a retread of the Lysistrata). As Lissa unites with the other girls, she begins to struggle against the pressures and stereotypes they all face. I found this message more organic and interesting than the one found in The DUFF. Honestly, I never entirely believed Keplinger’s first book’s message that “we all feel like DUFFs sometimes”—far more convincing to me was the message here that “teenage girls face all sorts of sexual pressures and deserve to be in control of their sexual lives despite the schizophrenic attitudes of our society toward female sexuality.” It’s a messier, and less optimistic theme, maybe, but it rang truer for me. As in our world, in the world of Shut Out some girls do it and some girls don’t. But nearly all of them struggle against their reputations.

But far from being a merely didactic undercurrent, this message actually provides a dramatic reveal about one of the characters—one I didn’t see coming at all, and which spurred me to page back through the book and examine it in this new light. It’s a neat little narrative trick, and one with Keplinger utilizes deftly, clearly illustrating her control over her plot and characters.

As the story progresses, Lissa continues to stumble forward. Again, she’s a protagonist who often makes terrible choices, who is often blind to the truth in front of her, who is sometimes selfish and stubborn if only to cover up her own weaknesses. Like Bianca from The DUFF, she suffers from certain control issues—but they’re more fully fledged here, and realistically problematic. I found Lissa to be a terrifically messy heroine. Her mistakes might not be fun for teenagers to read, if only because they likely hit a little too close to home, but they’re certainly true to life. She’s struggling—with her mother’s death, with her father’s disability, with change and with sex and with growing up.

Her problems aren’t all solved in the end, although Keplinger again concludes on an optimistic note. We’re given the impression that Lissa is a work-in-progress—as we all are, really. And as a reader who craves honesty even from books emblazoned with neons and pinks, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Disclosure: This book was generously provided by the publisher for review purposes. I’m also personally acquainted with the author.

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Gone, Gone, Gone by Hannah Moskowitz
Recommended.

I meant to hold off on starting Hannah Moskowitz’s 2012 release Gone, Gone, Gone until later. After all, I’m in possession of quite a sizable pile of books to review, and Gone, Gone, Gone won’t be released for a year—it seemed prudent to save it for another time. But it called out to me from my eReader on a long bus ride, and once I started this terse, powerful little novel about two boys falling in during the DC sniper shootings, I just couldn’t quit. Moskowitz’s impactful prose, transmitted via the very real voices of Lio and Craig, kept sucking me in over and over again. While I was in New York for BEA, I found myself ignoring my ever-growing stack of free books and hoping instead for subway delays just so I could keep reading—the story was that real, that powerful.

I don’t doubt that part of the reason I found Craig and Lio’s story so enticing was that I could relate to it. At fifteen in 2002, Craig and Lio are just two years younger than me. During the historical period in question, I was just graduating high school, enmeshed in my own first love experiences and grieving my own dramatic/traumatic childhood. I remember getting out of school early on 9/11, wandering around town in a daze with my own punk rock (and largely gay) coterie of friends. I remember, too, the DC sniper shootings—and the strange, tenuous link that there seemed to be between the two events. Though Moskowitz bungles a few minor details (“I’m being emo” was not yet part of high school vocabulary—it was a term reserved almost entirely for the shoe-gazer indie genre that few high schoolers cared about; casual homophobia even in reasonably welcoming suburban schools was all too common at the time, rather than surprising), it’s mostly spot-on for the tensions, anxieties, and emotions of the time.

And Gone, Gone, Gone is a story about emotions, really—of learning to get over your past, of acknowledging your love of the damaged, of reminding yourself that you still live and breathe even as the rest of the world falls apart. The plot itself is simple: Craig, who has been hoarding animals since his exboyfriend went nuts after his dad’s death on 9/11, wakes up one morning to find them all gone following a break-in. He and Lio—one-time cancer patient who lost a twin brother to the disease—work together to recover them even as terror sets in across their Maryland suburb thanks to the DC sniper shootings. They start to fall for each other—but must come to terms with the grief and anxiety of both of their pasts, first.

Their voices were incredibly true-to-life, the driving force of the novel, really. I was fonder of Lio; he’s got a harder edge than Craig, who was a bit twee and woobie-ish for me. Craig’s prone to melodrama, but it’s a realistic sort of hand-wringing, one I recognized from my own adolescence. It’s the tendency to mythologize certain people and events and to blow small tragedies out of proportion despite one’s fairly comfortable existence. Had the book been in Craig’s voice alone, I would have likely found the narration tiresome, but Lio’s voice—reticent, dry—offered a refreshing contrast.

Honestly, it was these voices, as they relayed their tender, burgeoning romance, which truly carried the novel for me. I don’t think I was ever wholly convinced by the voice in Moskowitz’s recent Invincible Summer–I was always very aware that Chase was a construct, a character created by a precocious, opinionated young woman with her own very distinctive voice. I anticipated that the same would be true for Gone, Gone, Gone–that it would also be a novel dominated by my awareness of the author. But instead, I found myself sucked in again and again. Craig and Lio were born fully-armored, it seems, from Moskowitz’s keyboard. They’re the kind of characters that feel more like friends than figments of someone’s imagination, the sort of characters whose non-existence you can’t help but mourn once you reach the novel’s conclusion.

It was the novel’s conclusion, incidentally, that posed my largest stumbling block in whole-heartedly enjoying Gone, Gone, Gone. Unlike some readers, I felt it was adequately paced; the dual ticking-clock of both the sniper shootings and the rescue of Craig’s pets provided mounting tension throughout. Sadly, by the end of the novel both plotlines sort of fizzle. It’s a bit of an “is that it?!” kind of ending, and while I appreciate Moskowitz’s aim to give us a novel that’s not altogether tidy, I would have preferred something that felt at least more conclusive.

I also wasn’t entirely sure about Moskowitz’s approach to identity, but I knew that might have been a sticking point for me going in. A few months ago, she and I (and several other posters) debated issues of queer identity in YA on Absolute Write. We were discussing the pervasiveness of “issue books”—and whether or not we’ve reached a time period when it’s appropriate (or honest) to write characters who “just happen” to be gay. Ironically, I really liked Moskowitz’s approach to sexual identity here. This isn’t a coming out story, but it’s still a story written with awareness of queer identity and the difficulties that identity might pose for modern teens. Though most parents in the book are accepting, for example, Lio’s dad seems to be holding out somewhat naively for a change of heart in his son.

But I wasn’t quite as convinced by her approach to racial identity. Craig is black, but other than a throwaway line or two (stating his racial identity explicitly), this has no impact on his character. It’s not that I think that all books about black kids should be issue books, either—in fact, I feel quite the opposite. Nor should all black characters be, say, treated as racial stereotypes, of course. But Craig is a black, gay, rich kid living in a largely white suburb, and on the edge of a city with striking racial and socioeconomic tensions. It would have added some interesting complexity to both his character and the wider novel had Moskowitz brought her deft, subtle hand to issues of Craig’s racial identity, the way she did to both Craig and Lio’s sexual identities.

Still, this is, broadly speaking, a sensitively-written and enveloping book. Despite my (admittedly slight) reservations, I couldn’t help but feel as if Craig and Lio had become dear friends by Gone, Gone, Gone‘s conclusion—and can’t help but feel that you’d be a fool not to read it, too.

A review copy of this book was generously provided by the publisher.

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Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma

Sigh. It seems I’m always having to load my negative reviews with caveats these days. This one will be an especially strange one, one I never thought I’d utter: I, Phoebe North, have no intellectual problem with incest per se. My frustration with Tabitha Suzuma’s novel didn’t arise because I felt some instinctive revulsion at the pairing of the two central characters, a brother and a sister. In fact, in the past I’ve very much enjoyed other novels featuring incestuous relationships: Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex; Francesca Lia Block’s gorgeous, painfully pretty Wasteland; even, of course, Flowers in the Attic. Hell, my great-grandparents were first cousins. I’m not one to judge, and I’m definitely not squeamish. Well, at least not about the sex lives of consenting parties, no matter how taboo.

What I am squeamish about are highly unsympathetic protagonists, particularly when we’re clearly meant to sympathize with them. I’m squeamish about people with poor boundaries and jealous inclinations. I’m squeamish about pretension when it’s paired with misanthropy and a not-particularly incisive view of the world around you. I’m squeamish about being inserted into the head of a jerk with clunky justifications about his morally abhorrent actions, which I have every reason to believe we were supposed to buy. And above all, I’m squeamish about melodrama.

Forbidden was melodramatic. And I don’t mean the melodrama of a typical adolescent, but rather Lifetime-movie melodrama. Alcoholism and abandonment and abuse and medical maladies that go untreated (not to mention the incest). Alas, Maya, my love! And so on.

Now, that’s not to say that Forbidden was valueless. Even Lifetime movies are a good way to spend a rainy afternoon. In Forbidden, Suzuma creates a claustrophobic and richly detailed universe, described in a way I can only call “eminently readable” in clichéd reviewer parlance. It’s a thick book, but immersive, well-paced despite the long stretches between both action and sex scenes. And the sex scenes are particularly steamy, some of the hottest I’ve read in recent memory—far more graphic than what one usually finds in YA, complete with hardness, panting, knickers, wrists being held down, and orgasms that burn with the fury of a thousand suns. No joke—they’re described in roughly those terms.

Forbidden is the story of the Whitely family. Eldest brother Lochan has been holding things together (despite crippling social anxiety and the fact that he pretty much hates everyone he’s not related to) for six years now, since his father left and his mother became an alcoholic mess. He’s got a huge gaggle of siblings, all with very strange names: Tiffen, Willa, Kit. But it’s Maya, only thirteen months his junior, who he loves the best. Lochan decided at twelve that he’d never let his family be broken apart—probably because he hates everyone he’s not related to—and so he and Maya have been acting as a make-shift parents to the little kids while his mom goes out and boozes it up.

All of this—told in Maya and Lochan’s alternating perspectives—is meant to make us understand their Epic Love, how they can’t trust anyone who is not a Whitely, why they have to stay together at all costs, why, if anything, it’s the parents who have forced them into these roles who are evil. This background information is meant to make us understand how, damn it, they’re so self-sacrificing that they deserve love, too.

The first problem—really, the big problem, the flashing-lights-and-sirens problem—is Lochan. We spend half of the book looking at the world through his perspective. And it’s a perspective warped by an inflated sense of self-importance and a disdain for those around him, a perspective transmitted via overwrought, painfully melodramatic prose. The rain is described as looking like tears. Malaise dissipates and then stormily solidifies once again. Everything is very terrible and very tragic, except for sweet, perfect, beautiful, sexy Maya—until, of course, she goes on a date with another boy.

Suzama distinguishes between the POV characters by writing a bit less pretentiously from Maya’s perspective, and for the most part, it’s a believable shift. Maya herself, unkissed at sixteen, is so painfully naïve to be rendered an innocent, despite her own protestations to the contrary. She seems to genuinely believe that all this playing-house makes her and her brother as good as married. More, she truly believes that they’re fated to be together and have the best love ever and God, why don’t people see that and God, why life is so unfair?!

Of course, all of this is fairly typical first-love stuff. Maya is generally fairly typical. Unlike Lochan, she has friends and romantic prospects, isn’t afraid to speak in school. She’s normal, and I quite liked her, at first, but the way she worships curmudgeonly, misanthropic Lochan as the best, kindest, handsomest, most wonderful person she’s ever known did quite a bit to degrade her as a sympathetic character.

And this was in a large part because Lochan is a rubbish parent, and while it’s not exactly his fault that he’s been forced into a parental role, he digs in his heels in order to keep his fortress of solitude up around him, forging straight into disaster with disastrous consequences. The children go around teased and harassed by teachers because they’re dressed in clothing that’s filled with holes. Twice in the narrative, members of his family should be taken to the hospital, but aren’t, because Lochan believes this will attract the eye of social services. Until the illicit romance begins (at which point Maya and Lochan are all-too-eager to push the little birds from the nest), interest in friends seems to be viewed as an abhorrent threat. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of Kit, their thirteen-year-old brother, who is treated like a petulant jerk, mostly because he sees straight through Lochan’s daddy-act, and calls him on it, too.

Nowhere is Lochan’s failure as a nascent adult more clear than in his attitude toward Maya. If the other GR reviews are to be believed, he’s a sensitive, sweetly-woobie-ish boy. I thought he was closer to a jealous creep. When Maya goes on a date with another boy, he stays up all night fuming and stewing. When she returns home, he jealously interrogates her (while sobbing. Because, you know, he’s sensitive) and the only way that Maya is able to prove that she didn’t actually sleep with this other boy is by kissing Lochan.

Their relationship then progresses in passionate fits-and-starts. One moment, the pair are frantically groping one another; the next, they’re bemoaning (through some excruciatingly talky narration) the fact that they’re siblings and, oh noes, can never be together. It’s very, very dramatic. I suspect the inflated self-importance, and the hot and heavy boner-grabbing and premature ejaculations will highly appeal to young teens. The title accurately plays up the appeal of this book—the taboo and the melodrama and all of that. But deep down, I couldn’t move past my suspicion that it was really just a hearty mix of tragedy and incest porn.

Or the fact that Lochan is really, really creepy. I mean, the first scene you could possibly consider a “sex scene” happens while Maya has a concussion. This, combined with his jealous nature, his propensity toward violence (he strangles one sibling, and dislocates the shoulder of another) and his selfish refusal to do the right thing right up to the conclusion of the novel deeply disturbed me. In the latter half of the book, we’re given dozens of pages of narration that justifies their relationship. It’s subtly compared to other relationships once seen as taboo (Maya bemoans that she’ll have to stay “closeted”) and the pair produces a host of arguments meant to provide intellectual justification for their actions.

But really, they’re just selfish, squandering money on gifts for one another while their siblings go around injured and in hole-ridden clothing; disdainfully viewing the other teen romances around them as shallow, superficial, and damaging; decrying the selfishness of their parents or siblings even as they’re busy screwing like bunnies. Overall, I had no problem with the incest. It’s the characters I’m hung up on.

(But at least they used condoms.)

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