This Girl is Different
J. J. Johnson
“This girl is different” is Evie’s personal mantra. She’s been homeschooled her whole life, opting now – beginning her senior year – to enroll in a public high school. She lives in a sustainable home, complete with chickens, a cow, and solar energy. She doesn’t know who her dad is, but it’s totally fine; her mom is practically every bit as “hippy” now as she was when Evie was conceived. Her real full name is Evensong Sparkling Morningdew. She’s different alright.
She meets and makes friends – her first! – with cousins Jacinda and Rajas just days before school starts, and with their help she tries to navigate her way through the hallways, the social customs, and the political hypocrisy that is their high school. She verbally spars with the teachers, she actively participates in classroom discussion to her classmates’ dismay, and she ultimately can’t find her footing in the peer social structure that is seemingly established from public-school-birth. But she refuses to give up. She wants to make public high school a better place to learn, interact, and build, and she will not back down. Even when the bad starts to outweigh the good. There are a lot of details in this novel — some of which add to, and others that distract from, the whole vibe of the story (including an inappropriate student-teacher relationship) — but everything ties together in the end to offer a clear picture of Evie’s perspective on a world that isn’t too big to come crashing down . . .
Recommended to all ages, mostly, though the student-teacher relationship and some sex talk might limit the audience. Especially recommended to students who might not fit into the stereotypical high school box.
How to Save a Life
Sara Zarr
Mandy has had a pretty rough life, but she’s had enough of feeling powerless, unloved, and unlucky. She’s found a solution – at least a partial one – and is headed across the country by train to meet the woman who she hopes will become the adoptive mother of her unborn child.
Jill thinks that it’s absolutely ridiculous that her fifty-year-old mother is planning to go through with an unofficial (no social worker, no lawyer, no signed forms) open adoption with someone she found on the internet! After Jill’s dad died last year, they’ve both been lost, but Jill doesn’t think that adopting a baby is going to be the answer to their grief.
Jill and Mandy don’t make a very good first impression on each other, but they become part of a very complicated relationship and somehow they must figure out their place in all of this . . . hopefully before a baby becomes part of the mix. Jill has some friends to help her along the way, and through alternating perspectives, the reader begins to rally for both girls to find some happiness It took me some time to really get into this story, but once I did, I found that I really cared about what happened to the characters. In this novel, you’ll find friendship, love, pain, loyalty, and sadness, but most of all, you’ll find family.
The Fault in Our Stars
John Green
Hazel has terminal cancer. She’s basically normal except that her lungs don’t work (hence the oxygen tank perpetually in tow); she was taken out of high school years ago because, really, what’s the point?; and her mom keeps bugging her to get a life, but her social scene mainly consists of a cancer support group of kids who are either dying, hoping to die, dead, or blind. Then Augustus Waters arrives to change everything. Hazel fights falling in love with Gus of the prosthetic leg, the unlit cigarette, and the adorable crooked smile. But he wins her over, and they settle upon a whirlwind romance. And like most whirlwinds, I imagine, this went by too fast, leaving a lot of aftermath. But the bottom line remains: It was worth it.
John Green has this talent for creating characters and exploring settings and storylines like very few authors in the world (not to be dramatic or anything). And though the writing is impeccable and intelligent, his stories speak freely and comfortably, without making you feel stupid because you might not know so much about famous people’s famous last words, anagrams, cartography, or anything else cool. His books make you feel cool just for being in the same room with them.
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Katherine Vasilik, A/YA Librarian
J. F. Kennedy Library
Piscataway, NJ
telephone: 732-463-1633 x6
email: kvasilik@piscatawaylibrary.org or kate_thelibrarian@yahoo.com
blog: http://katethelibrarian.blogspot.com
facebook: http://www.facebook.com/piscatawaylibrary