YA Review: The White Darkness

McCaughrean, G. (2005). The White Darkness. New York, NY: HarperCollins Pub.

In Geraldine McCaughrean’s The White Darkness we are inside the mind of Sym (Symone), a 14-year-old social outcast at the secondary school she attends in London. Her schoolmates consider her to be “a misfit weirdo” (p. 42) with oddities such as her hearing aides in both ears, that she has never had sex and that she has an unusual and highly opinionated uncle Victor. This uncle, speaking to Sym's geography instructor, says, "You learn your subject, then regurgitate it year after year! Around and around, staler and staler. Like astronauts drinking their own piss" (p. 10). Even worse than all that, Sym lets it slip that she has an imaginary friend. Her imaginary friend is Captain Lawrence Oates, nicknamed Titus, an explorer who died 90 years ago and who was a member of Scott’s doomed trek to the South Pole. The story begins after the death of Sym’s father, when her eccentric uncle whisks her away, first to a weekend in Paris, then to the place the two of them have been dreaming about their whole lives - to the Antarctic.

I thought this book was very strange. The world Sym inhabits is so dreadful, every person in it so appalling and horrid, I don’t blame her for having Titus as an imaginary friend. I found Sym to be a sharp observer and her descriptions of people can be funny and cutting like here when she first gets a glimpse of the other people on their Antarctic tour: “ They were, for the most part, bronzed and polished; their watches showed Pacific time and the phases of the moon. Most seemed to own handheld computers, cameras with lenses as long as my forearm, and tiny mobile phones. (The richer you are, I’ve worked out, the smaller your telephone and the bigger your telephoto lens)….They were rich in years, too: The majority were over sixty” (p. 51). In my opinion, the author gives Sym a gift when she plunks her down in Antarctica. Suddenly Sym doesn’t stick out at all – everyone is clumsy in the Antarctic apparently, “Even when we climbed down from the plane onto the blue ice, and tottered and slithered and clung to each other, helpless, out of our element, I could only laugh: Usually it’s just me falling over my own feet” (p. 76).

It isn’t like Sym is perfect. She isn’t. Sym is sympathetic. And I love Titus as much as she does. Odd as it may sound, he is a true friend. Everything Sym believes to be true – even all the awful things she thinks about herself – are called into question as, little by little, in a very peculiar and unsettling way, the truth about uncle Victor is revealed. “The whole idea creeps up on you like pack ice-pressing in and pressing against your head, then crushing the hull and tumbling inside” (p. 4). That passage perfectly describes the strange sinister creepiness I started feeling when uncle Victor first took her away for the weekend in Paris. I was worried for her – afraid that Nabokov’s Lolita was about to happen. It turns out much worse and much more epic at the same time. And Sym rises to the occasion. All of her detailed knowledge of the Antarctic and of the many expeditions to the South Pole ends up coming in quite handy. I was so afraid for her, but it turned out I didn’t have to be. She isn’t as useless as she thought she was. In fact, she’s amazing. And she’s only 14.

YA Review: If I Stay

Forman, G. (2009). If I stay: A novel. New York: Dutton Books.

A half an inch of snow cancels school one winter day in Oregon, and Mia and her family head out for a drive to visit friends and family. In the midst of the happy and comfortable family outing, a terrible accident occurs and Mia finds herself watching the paramedics as they try to keep her alive. As Mia follows her own body in the ambulance, and later to a hospital in Portland, she is faced with having to make the choice about whether to let go and die or to fight on and live.

Mia narrates this strange story, with its many flashbacks, in an honest teenage voice, sharing every awkward and embarrassing moment she has lived through. She brings us with her back in time as she remembers significant moments with her quirky and loving family. I became so fond of her former punk rocker Dad, who traded in his leather jack for vintage suits, bow ties and a job as a middle school English teacher. As he makes ten-year-old Mia laugh through her tears when she is paralyzed with stage fright, I was laughing and crying too. I wanted to hang out with her hipster mom with her cool, eclectic outfits and her fierce loyalty that often got her into trouble. And then there was Mia’s sweet, much younger brother Teddy who loves Alice Cooper and who needs special magic kisses that only his older sister can give. Even though Mia’s family is already gone by page 15, her vivid, emotional memories of them make them so real that I felt some of the ache of loss she must have felt.

Music is woven into every aspect of this story and each song or classical piece that is referenced adds its history into Mia’s story. Mia’s dedication to the cello is what her boyfriend Adam first notices about her. Their first date is to see Yo-Yo Ma in concert. Music – the right music – is important to Mia’s family. Mia recalls her mother’s rage when she was in labor with Teddy and the midwife offered, “We have some lovely Enya. Very Soothing”(p. 154). For Mia’s mom, it had to be the heavy, heavy sound of Melvins or Earth – no substitutions. Even the car accident is described in musical terms, “A symphony of grinding, a chorus of popping, an aria of exploding, and finally, the sad clapping of hard metal cutting into soft trees” (p. 15). Mia and her mom talk about her relationship with Adam in terms of music, “Just like with music, sometimes you have harmony and other times you have cacophony.” (p. 210). There is only one time in the story that the use of music – well, falls flat, for me. The first time Mia and Adam do more than kiss they go up to her room and Adam tells her, “I want you to play me like a cello.” Sorry, but that just seemed silly to me.

I kept asking myself how a book about so much loss and pain could be so funny, but sometimes there is humor in truth even in truly awful situations. The humor keeps the story from getting too sappy, like when best friend Kim tries to reason with the unconscious Mia: “Please don’t die. I can understand why you’d want to, but think about this: If you die, there’s going to be one of those cheesy Princess Diana memorials at school, where everyone puts flowers and candles and notes next to your locker… I know you’d hate that” (p.67-68). The wisecracking comments of Mia’s parents also helped me to appreciate and love them as Mia remembered them in flashbacks. As Adam and Mia head out on their first date, Mia’s mom calls out the door, “Don’t you kids get too crazy. Bad injuries at the last Yo-Yo Ma mosh pit” (p. 37). By the end of the book, I felt like I’d been up all night in the hospital waiting room, listening to Mia tell this story and laughing and weeping with her along the way.

As a side note, disregard the prominent marketing message on the cover of the paperback: “Will appeal to fans of Stephanie Meyer’s TWILIGHT. – USA Today.” Aside from taking place in the Pacific Northwest and being a story about a teenage girl this book has no vampires and very little in common with the Twilight series.

YA Review: Notes from the Midnight Driver

Sonnenblick, J. (2006). Notes from the Midnight Driver. New York: Scholastic Inc.



This book is a wild and hilarious ride with high school junior Alex Gregory through a minefield of topics such as teen drunk driving, divorce, emphysema and estranged families. “As insane as it looks in retrospect, I was fully convinced on that particular Friday evening last September that stealing my mom’s car and storming my dad’s house was a brilliant plan.” (p. 1). Alex goes on to crash his mom’s car into a neighbor’s lawn gnome, get arrested for drunk driving and ultimately end up having to serve 100 hours of community service at a local nursing home.

What makes this story such a rollicking good time is that Alex is telling us the story – uncensored. The story rolls right along and we are inside Alex’s head and get to hear all of his thoughts and comments about everything and everyone he encounters. Occasionally the story is told through letters that Alex writes to the Judge overseeing his sentence, but mostly it is told straight-up by Alex himself. If you enjoyed Sonnenblick’s “Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie,” you will appreciate the similar style and irreverent humor in this story along with the experience of being inside the mind of an adolescent boy. Alex is not the most popular kid at school, he is no star athlete or musical prodigy, instead he is just a regular guy and the humor and the charm of this story comes from his honesty and his blundering attempts to befriend and assist the curmudgeonly Solomon Lewis, a resident at the nursing home where he is assigned. In the midst of all the regular pressures of high school and the added strains of his parents’ acrimonious divorce, Alex pours a lot of his time and energy into playing the guitar. His interest in and commitment to music becomes an integral part of the story as the book progresses.

Notes from the Midnight Driver is very funny, but it is not merely funny. In an interview recorded at the end of the paperback edition of the book, the author says, "the whole thing popped into my head, pretty much complete.... the idea came to me: What if a really good kid did something bad, and then refused to take responsibility?" To some degree, Sonnenblick is attempting to teach a few lessons with this book which might have put me off if the story wasn't so much fun to read.

YA Review: A Northern Light

Donnelly, J. (2003). A Northern Light. New York: Harcourt Children's Books.

It is 1906 in the rural North Woods of Upstate New York and sixteen-year-old Mattie Gokey has aspirations. She wants to earn a high school diploma, go to Barnard College in New York City and become a writer. But her mother died of cancer and she is desperately needed at home to help her Pa with the farm and her three younger sisters. Before she died, her mother wrested a promise out of Mattie to stay home and take care of her siblings and she wonders if she has to keep that promise.

I enjoyed that this was no simple linear tale. In fact, because A Northern Light jumps back and forth in time it creates a feeling of suspense, especially around the mysterious death of Grace Brown. I enjoyed how gritty and raucous a story this is, filled with the overlapping voices of each character. There are so many wild and crazy characters that come and go throughout A Northern Light and flesh out the story. Mattie cares about all of these unique characters in this rural North Woods community and through her eyes we come to care deeply about them too. Told in Mattie’s truthful, young storyteller’s voice, this is a no-holds-barred sometimes beautiful, sometimes brutal look at life in the back woods at the turn of the 20th century.

For me, one of Mattie's most endearing traits is her profound affection for words and language. In her own storytelling, Mattie is careful to capture the rhythm of the vernacular. Mattie has strong opinions about how writing should reveal truths and not paint what she considers silly, fairytale dream worlds. Everyday Mattie chooses a word from her dictionary as the word of the day – a device the author uses to signal when a chapter is a flashback. Mattie reveals so much of herself in this daily ritual, her passions and her joys and her tenacious love of the written word. “’Isn’t that just perfect?’ I said. ‘Fractious. I repeated, relishing the bite of the f, teeth against lip. A new word. Bright with possibilities. A flawless pearl to turn over and over in my hand, then put away for safekeeping.’” (p.15)

I was particularly struck by how many depictions of women at every stage of life there are in this book. Each woman included in the story is making a choice about how she is going to live her life. Mattie lets us into her head as she studies each one of these women; as she notices the joy and the heartbreak that their choices have brought them. Even though her days are filled with hard physical labor from dawn to dusk, Mattie is always thinking and grappling with the choices set before her. There are no happy endings, no neatly tied up plots and “happily ever after” in the stories Mattie writes. Likewise, there are no simple solutions in the lives Mattie witnesses in her rural community. So many people in her life have plans for Mattie, her Pa, her handsome boyfriend Royal, her best friend Weaver and her brilliant teacher Miss Wilcox; so many people pushing and pulling her in every direction. In the end Mattie is the only one who can make the choice about how she should live her own life.

YA Review: Z for Zachariah

O’Brien, R. C. (1974). Z for Zacariah. New York, NY: Atheneum.

“I am afraid. Someone is coming.” (p.1)

And so begins a haunting story that unfolds slowly as entries in the journal of 15 year old Ann Burden over the course of one spring and summer. Ann has been living alone in her sheltered valley for over a year since “the War” and the end of civilization. One spring morning she writes in the old composition book she uses for a diary, “I was wrong. I am not the only person left in the world. I am both excited and afraid.” (p.5). She is wary and cautious about another person, uncertain if he will be friendly and safe or a new danger.

Science Fiction of the 1970s variety, harking back to visions of post-nuclear apocalypse, Z for Zacariah has been carefully set into a generic 20th century time frame. Although the story avoids specific references to an exact era, it still manages to feel dated, perhaps because the story is so simple and plausible without the Twenty-first century trappings of horror and fantasy. The world outside Ann’s valley, a wasteland where everything is dead and levels of radioactivity are not survivable, is not unlike the similar waste in Jonathan Maberry’s Rot and Ruin, but here there are no zombies. Instead, the dangers Ann and the stranger face are invisible, but just as deadly – radioactivity and the inherent weakness of the human character.

On the one hand, Z for Zacariah is old fashioned and slow paced, with languid descriptions of the natural world, often reminding me of the historical fiction novel, The Island of the Blue Dolphins because of the similar isolated situation of the female protagonists and the extensive descriptions of their plans and day-to-day work - indeed, the valley is not far from being an island that Ann is castaway on. On the other hand, as the story develops, there is an ever-increasing sense of menace and dread as Ann begins to realize the extent of the stranger’s paranoia and delusion. In the face of this threat to herself and her home, I found it difficult to appreciate Ann’s gentleness and passivity. Perhaps especially after having grown accustomed to the current batch of popular post-apocalyptic novels for young adults which have introduced me to some “super-empowered” female heroines like Katniss from The Hunger Games or Katsa from Graceling. Ann may not be a superhero, but she shows remarkable shrewdness throughout her ordeal and her voice rings true as she writes her story, revealing her secret hopes and plans and her struggle to stay true to her own inner moral compass.