Lauren Oliver’s Delirium is set in an unidentified American future in which the "disease" of love has been cured. Lena is set to have her cure in a few months, and the book follows her from her evaluation – to determine her future partner and schooling – through the summer to right before her cure. In this time Lena finds out that a number of things she has been taught over her life are lies, and that there are more important things than being cured and being "happy."

We are also introduced to Lena’s family, her friend Hana, and Alex, a worker at the center that cures everyone, who has his own secrets.

There are a number of beautiful moments in the book, the descriptions of the scenery around Portland, Maine, is especially well described. There are also a number of dark scenes surrounding the officials who keep everyone in line until they are cured, and the security the government goes to to keep everyone happy and to keep rebels out of the system.

The book is reminiscent in many ways of 1984 by Orwell and the Uglies books by Westerfeld, but has enough of its own unique story to keep it fresh and new. Oliver’s writing style is different and keeps the pace of the story moving right until the end. Delirium is the first of a series and the ending definitely keeps you wanting more. It would be a good read for anyone high school aged or older.

The Hate List

 

A school shooting novel set from the point of view of the girlfriend of the shooter.  The Hate List is another in an increasingly popular subgenre of young adult novels about school shootings.  Each on explores a different aspect, probes for meaning in different ways, and provides a multitude of vantage points for understanding the incomprehensible.  For teenagers.

The Chocolate War

Over the last few days I have been reading The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier.  This book has been on my radar for a long time, and I had been putting off reading it until I could sit down and thoroughly enjoy it.  It was very much worth the wait.  It wasn't exactly what I thought it was going to be be (although what do you expect with a title like The Chocolate War?), but it was a very engulfing read that was over before I knew it. 

The story has a main character, but the novel does not revolve around him entirely.  It has a shifting point of view, going behind the thoughts of many of the characters.  The two characters that readers follow the most are Jerry, the "hero," and Archie, the "villain."  There are other minor characters that give multiple vantage points, and so the novel has a realistic texture that captures the mind of the young adult male even though the story is fictitious.

Premise
The setting is Trinity school for boys, a private school run by priests.  Father Leon is the acting Head Master, and it is clear from his introduction that he is sadistic.  He thrives on the humiliation of his students, manipulating and punishing them to his own personal gain.

The main narrative of the story picks up with the beginning of the annual chocolate sale.  Out of all the students, only Jerry refuses to sell the chocolates.  This jams a stick in Father Leon's spokes.  Leon can't understand why anyone who refuse to help out the school.  It comes out that Jerry is acting on behalf of an assignment by the school secret society.  However, once the assignment ends and Jerry continues to refuse to sell chocolates, the world is inverted on its axis.

Comments
There are quite a few themes that can be discussed, it is impossible to fit them into one blurb.  One of the most important aspects, however, to keep in mind when reading this novel is the power roles:  Who has the power?  Who wants the power?  Who is the powerless?  How does this change by the end of the novel?

Another aspect that is very interesting and needs to be addressed is the part when Jerry is confronted by Emile, a bully, and is called a homosexual.  There is a line where Jerry expresses that there is nothing worse in the world than being accused of being gay.  The reason this is such an important line is because it sheds light on a juvenile male anxiety of sexuality.  It is perhaps a truism that teenage males, regardless of their sexual orientation are afraid of being humiliated for their emerging sexuality.  This axiom is clearly expressed by many of the characters throughout the novel.

The theme of authority is interestingly presented in this novel.  The teachers of the novel seem to pose and direct opposition to the students, while the parents are all absent.  Jerry's father is in the novel, but only as a means of showing how disconnected Jerry is with his nuclear family as the result of his mother's death.  This is a recurring theme in fiction for young adults.  The idea of the nuclear family is dissolved in one way or another.  Additionally, the parental figures are shown in positions in which they have become powerless, or at least have little power over the actions of the young adult character.

So, I recommend this to everyone, but especially to teen-aged boys 13-17.

Paul Zindel, changing times, and Young Adult Drama

Paul Zindel lived during the later half of the 20th century.  This was a period of change in America.  With the end of the second world war, American culure reorganized itself in many ways to become both fully modernized and primarily consumer based.  One aspect that became increasingly popular with the end of the second world war was the effect of radiation on various things.  Before it was discovered that radioactivity was poisonous, Radium and other radioactive elements were used in consumer products (one example is a story I heard in Chemistry of wristwatches that had radium paint on the dials so would glow in the dark.  The workers who painted these watches ended up with severe problems as a result, including some with forked tongues from where they would lick the point of the paint brush to make the brush pointy).  Today Americium is commonly used in smoke detectors, but apparently hasn't any serious risks of radiation poisoning. 

The premise of The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds follows a mother and her two daughters as the go about their daily lives.  The mother, however, does not think the girls should be going to school.  She believes that they should be attending to their domestic duties.  One daughter, Tillie (short for Matilda) is an intelligent student who is enthusiastic about science.  The other daughter, Tillie has been kept home for so long that the school is calling on account of her truency.  The mother, Beatrice, displays typical anti-intellectual attitudes, especially towards the daughters' schooling.

This play occurs during a period of time when America was shifting into post-modernity.  To that extent, there is a disconnect between the parent, who belongs to an era before mass education and the children who are living in a time of intellectual freedom as well as an approaching civil equality between the sexes.  Zindel has done an affective job at characterizing the post-nuclear family: the father is absent, dead since the beginning of the story, the daughters each come to represent a different attitude of their generation, and the mother is clinging to conventional ideas about the sexes and what women should and should not be doing.  This is a theme to watch out for in YA literature. 

Younger readers should sympathize to some degree with the daughters and the conflicting authority figures between home and school.  The genre of young adult literature arose out of the desire to portray those young people who are both caught between the margin of child and adult, but also for those who might still be children if not for adult circumstances forcing them into maturity.  This is one of the touchstones of YA literature, showing young people, too old to be children or too mature to be thought of as children, caught in a difficult situation that they must learn to handle like adults.  The situations are not realistic in all cases, but they present a kind of life that may be true for some, but all will empathize with.  In the case with The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds perhaps creates a caricature of anachronistic attitudes post-WWII, but it vividly expresses some of the dangers of those attitudes when they are allowed to play out.

Monster and the Justice System

Yesterday I had the pleasure of reading a book that has been sitting on my to-read list for over a year now.  Had I known it was only a 2 hour read, I probably would have gotten to it much sooner.  At any rate, I read Walter Dean Myers's Monster which is split between a first person prison journal and a screen play for the teenaged prisoner the story revolves around.

Steve Harmon was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He was fingered by a neighborhood acquaintance as a look-out man for a stickup heist that ended with the death of a drugstore owner.  The screenplay is based on the trial that followed after one of the two people involved in the stickup implicated Steve in order to spread the blame around and lessen his own sentence. 

*SPOILER ALERT*

The books is transparent as to Steve's innocence.  Whether or not he will be acquitted is up in the air until the end of the novel.  The novel's suspense exists in this aspect; the judgment of the jury and the rhetoric of the prosecuting attorney left me as the reader anxious.  Would the DA be able to convince the jury that Steve was in fact innocent?  Would the Prosecutor's closing argument smear the lucidity of the defenses argument?  You'll have to read it yourself to find out.

For more information, check out Barnes & Noble and Amazon for reviews, awards, and ordering.

Coming up... Paul Zindel's The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds and Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion. 

The End is Near

Today I read a young adult novel that came up in class, but that I had really wanted to re-read.  It's called Armageddon Summer by Jane Yolen and Bruce Coville. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has ever encountered any kind of fundamentalist religion.  The book revolves around two characters, male and female, who have a parent who has become swept up in a sect of Christianity that emphasizes the end of days coming with the Millennium.

Reverend Beelson, a charismatic and convincing minister, and his Believers are convinced that the end of the world will occur on July 27, 2000.  Two teenagers get caught up in the middle, and they are forced to evaluate and re-evaluate what they believe as the End Day approaches.  Coville and Yolen portray authentic teenagers in fictional, yet realistic situations.

I like YA novels that can serve dually as a good story and a cautionary tale.  (Here is where it gets slightly political--quit reading now if that's not your thing.)  Armageddon Summer is a fictitious account of one exegesis* to Christianity, or any faith that preaches an "End of the World."  One of the things I find that this book expresses is how people take their interpretations of materials like the Bible, and reify** metaphors and figurative speech.  It doesn't matter if God is orchestrating existence if people are acting on their own convictions, causing real consequences via misunderstanding or reducing what is meant to be complicated.  People may desire simplicity, but it is nothing more than a desire.  Simplicity for the sake of making things simple can remove one by varying degrees of what is true.  These are the dangers that seem to be put forward by Armageddon Summer, which is why I recommend it so highly.  And for the record, I don't believe we are living anywhere near the "End of Days."  I think things will continue to get worse and worse regardless of what people do on behalf of their belief.

 
For more information, check out the amazon page

*exegesis is a fancy word for "how it plays out"
** reify is another fancy word, it basically means "to treat as real," or to make what is abstract concrete.

Coming Soon in 2011: The Undertaken - Book 1

I'm really excited about this new book coming out this fall: The Undertaken: Death Watch.  The first chapter and select scenes were read by the author, Ari Berk, at the Imagining the Fantastic conference at CMU this past April.  This is not your typical ghost story: it's a Ghost Story.  The story follows Silas Umber, a teenager drawn into a journey to find his missing father, Amos.  Readers follow Silas on this adventure into a realm of mystery as he learns the truth about his father's profession, his family and the town of Lichtport.


Coming out in November.  Published by Simon & Schuster. 

For more information on this title, visit the authors web site: www.ariberk.com
 or http://www.ariberk.com/theundertaken.html
or check out the amazon site for reviews and information: The Undertaken Trilogy: Death Watch

Don't miss this release on Hardcover 15 November 2011!!!!

Next: Armageddon Summer

Book by Local Author Spotted in new THOR movie!

For those of you who are comic fans and fans of faerie and the fantastic, it was confirmed last night that THE SECRET HISTORIES OF GIANTS by the very talented Professor Ari Berk was shown in the new marvel movie THOR.  In the scene where Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård) is in the library using the public internet, there is a close-up shot of a book shelf full of books on mythology.  In the middle is the GIANTS book, written by Ari Berk, clear as day.  How exciting for the local professor of mythology and folklore.  To celebrate, the book has been placed on the features display at the Cutler Memorial Library in St. Louis, MI so people have a chance to read this excellent book of lore. 

 

For more information on the works of Ari Berk, including samples and ordering info, see www.ariberk.com.

 

English Matters (or does it?)

Welcome to a new blog that features book reviews on new and upcoming releases.   We are librarians excited about reading, and we enjoy getting people excited about reading by making available helpful reading ideas for the wayward readers.  Since things are still being set up, the recommendation is a little older, but was released within the last 10 years, Feed by M.T. Anderson.

Released in 2002, and winner of the 2003 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Fiction  and 2003 Golden Duck Awards' Hal Clement Award for Young Adults, Feed is an eerie tale of science fiction that could serve as a cautionary tale of a future in which humanity is entirely dependent on interface technology (i.e. smart phones, facebook, etc) except instead of having hand-held devices or tablets, the hardware in installed directly into a persons brain.  Fans of dystopian science fiction and young adult fiction will find this novel a quick and exciting read.

Next on the list to review: Death Watch: Book 1 in The Undertaken Trilogy

Stay tuned, and keep reading!!