The Lonely by Ainslie Hogarth

A darkly humorous and imaginative story

After she discovers The Terrible Thing, Easter Deetz goes looking for her sister, Julia, but ends up pinned under a giant boulder with her legs crushed into tomato paste. Bored, disappointed, and thoroughly dismembered, Easter slowly bleeds to death in The Woods with only sinister squirrels to keep her company. As The Something Coming draws closer, memories of Easter's family surface like hallucinations: a mumbling father who lives alone in the basement; a terrifying grandmother who sits in her enclosed porch all day; an overly loving mother who plays dead in the bathtub on Sunday nights.

As the story of her life unspools, Easter realizes she's being stalked, making it very difficult for her to bleed to death in peace. Will The Something Coming save her? Or will it do her in entirely?

--Publisher’s summary

Rhoda’s review; I… I… I’m not sure how to describe this book. Perhaps, “odd” and “disturbing” best describes my initial reaction. It took most of the book for me to understand what, I believe, the author was trying to convey. I guess we could have probably guessed that Easter and her family have severe psychological issues by the bizarre summary (It’s what lead me to read the book in the first place)  Author, Ainslie Hogarth, gives us a fascinating glimpse into Easter’s idea of reality.  Readers of the book "To Kill a Mockingbird" may remember a quote from the character, Scout, who said, "Atticus said you never really knew a man until you stood in his shoes and walked around in them." “The Lonely” left me, if accurately portrayed, with a better understanding of the world Easter lives in. I can’t say I found the book humorous or entertaining but I did find it intriguing.

Full Disclosure; ebook received through Netgalley.com

Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaira

        For all the teen contemporary realistic fiction fans out there... this is a fascinating book! 

Lauren is given an assignment at the beginning of the school year to write a letter to someone who has passed away. Of course the events that recently occurred in her life, the sudden death of her older sister, make this task all the more poignant. Lauren writes the assignment but doesn’t turn it in. Instead she continues on a yearlong journey of writing as a way of dealing with the traumatic events in her life.  She writes to a number of famous people who died before their time such as Kurt Cobain, Heath Ledger, Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin and Amelia Earhart. 

This is a wonderfully written, yet horribly tragic story about loss… Author, Ava Dellaira has either experienced the loss of a sibling or done excellent research. Young survivors often feel profound loss when an older sibling is suddenly not there to provide a path; feeling abandoned by the grieving parents, they often flounder to find a sense of purpose in life. In addition, “Love Letters to the Dead” includes the divorce of Lauren and May’s parents. This seems to be the catalyst for May’s destructive behavior. The girls are left feeling frustrated, guilty and abandoned; could they have kept the parents together? Were they the reason their parent’s broke up? Lauren idolizes her sister but May, with no one to go to, turns to alcohol and men to escape the desperately need to feel loved. Now Lauren is repeating the actions of May as her life begins to spiral out of control. Lauren holds the secret to what really happened to May the night she died which is slowly revealed at the end of the story.

The book was wonderfully written and will be an excellent addition to a young adult library collection. The journal format will appeal to teens as will the interesting biographical information about the famous musicians and actors within the letters Lauren writes. My only negative is that the plot felt like a checklist of every traumatizing event that can occur in a teen’s life. There was so much added, in fact, that I felt it took away from the realism of the story. That being said, the sequence of events may be like watching a car accident; we don’t want to look but are shocked into doing it. If you’ve loved, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky, you’ll love "Love Letters to the Dead"!

This is Not a Test

This is Not a Test 
by Courtney Summers

Book Description:
It’s the end of the world. Six students have taken cover in Cortege High but shelter is little comfort when the dead outside won’t stop pounding on the doors. One bite is all it takes to kill a person and bring them back as a monstrous version of their former self. To Sloane Price, that doesn’t sound so bad. Six months ago, her world collapsed and since then, she’s failed to find a reason to keep going. Now seems like the perfect time to give up. As Sloane eagerly waits for the barricades to fall, she’s forced to witness the apocalypse through the eyes of five people who actually want to live. But as the days crawl by, the motivations for survival change in startling ways and soon the group’s fate is determined less and less by what’s happening outside and more and more by the unpredictable and violent bids for life—and death—inside. When everything is gone, what do you hold on to?

Review: 

Gritty and real, this zombie apocalypse survival story gripped me from start to finish.  Definitely for high school readers, as opposed to middle schoolers, there's a lot of very real mature things happening as these teens try to survive.  As a reader that prefers realism to a perfect happy ending, I very much enjoyed the fact that Sloane's story does not shy away from the horrors of a zombie "infestation." It would not have felt as authentic to me if Sloane suddenly became a perky rah-rah kind of girl and everyone survived. 

Happy ending hunters may not like what they find here...but, readers looking for a more true-to-(fictional)life experience will appreciate this compelling tale.  

Review: Wonder Show

Wonder Show
by Hannah Barnaby

Book Description:
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, step inside Mosco’s Traveling Wonder Show, a menagerie of human curiosities and misfits guaranteed to astound and amaze! But perhaps the strangest act of Mosco’s display is Portia Remini, a normal among the freaks, on the run from McGreavy’s Home for Wayward Girls, where Mister watches and waits. He said he would always find Portia, that she could never leave. Free at last, Portia begins a new life on the bally, seeking answers about her father’s disappearance. Will she find him before Mister finds her? It’s a story for the ages, and like everyone who enters the Wonder Show, Portia will never be the same.

Review: 

I really enjoyed this one! I liked the historical setting and the gentle way that the "freaks" are part of the story. They each have their own issues, both physical and emotional, but they are not as blatantly "freaky," I guess you would say, as they would be in an adult book. I loved seeing how while Portia was at first overwhelmed and intimidated by their presence, she came to appreciate them all and be folded into part of their family. In fact, I loved Portia's determination to create her own fate and to find a family, even if eventually it's not her birth family. 

I thought this book had a great tone. Historical, yet completely relatable in theme, with a strong main character. I can't wait to see what Barnaby writes next...

Review: Absent

Absent

by Katie Williams

 

Publication date: May 21, 2013

 

Book Description:

When seventeen-year-old Paige dies in a freak fall from the roof during Physics class, her spirit is bound to the grounds of her high school. At least she has company: her fellow ghosts Evan and Brooke, who also died there. But when Paige hears the rumor that her death wasn't an accident—that she supposedly jumped on purpose—she can't bear it. Then Paige discovers something amazing. She can possess living people when they think of her, and she can make them do almost anything. Maybe, just maybe, she can get to the most popular girl in school and stop the rumors once and for all.

 

Review:

This book is short, but very good.  It doesn't flinch away from the harsh truth of death and how other people perceive you...or how you perceive them.  This story feels really genuine.  The teen ghosts' despondency, Paige's quest for justice, vengeance, and the way that she yearns for acknowledgment from beyond the grave will definitely pull in most readers. As each student, both the living and the dead, finally find what they need to move on, you will not be able to put the book down until the very end. I know I couldn't!

Due to some drug related content and other mature themes, I would really recommend this book for high school or college age readers.

Review: It's Kind of a Funny Story

It's Kind of a Funny Story

by Ned Vizzini

 

Book Description:

Like many ambitious New York City teenagers, Craig Gilner sees entry into Manhattan’s Executive Pre-Professional High School as the ticket to his future. Determined to succeed at life—which means getting into the right high school to get into the right college to get the right job—Craig studies night and day to ace the entrance exam, and does. That’s when things start to get crazy.

At his new school, Craig realizes that he isn't brilliant compared to the other kids; he’s just average, and maybe not even that. He soon sees his once-perfect future crumbling away. The stress becomes unbearable and Craig stops eating and sleeping—until, one night, he nearly kills himself.

Craig’s suicidal episode gets him checked into a mental hospital, where his new neighbors include a transsexual sex addict, a girl who has scarred her own face with scissors, and the self-elected President Armelio. There, isolated from the crushing pressures of school and friends, Craig is finally able to confront the sources of his anxiety.

 

Review:

I really need to listen to my teen readers at the library more often. The trouble is I usually have such a huge stack of books that I'm dying to read any way that when a teen suggests a book I tell them, "oh yeah, I'd like to read that...it's going on my list" and then it takes ages for me to get to it...

 

 

I had three different teens recommend this book to me. I'm so glad I finally picked this one up. It was indeed a great story! Others have said this, but it bears repeating...for a book about a suicidal teenager, this was actually a surprisingly funny book. Vizzini manages to make this book feel achingly "real" precisely because it covers such a huge range of emotions. There are NO one dimensional characters and the plot is utterly realistic. What a well done book.

 

 

I highly recommend this one (and I'm going to check out the movie...I want to compare it to the book...)