Winger by Andrew Smith YP FIC SMITH

Meet Ryan Dean West, Ryan Dean is his first name. This is the least of his worries You can just call him Winger like everyone else that doesn't care what his name is and just knows he's a winger on the rugby team. not the least of his worries? Being in O-Hall the wing for miscreants and screw ups at prestigious Pin Mountain Boarding School. Worse, yet?  He's only 14 and a Junior. He reasons it could be worse he could be 15 and a Senior.  Either way every single person he knows is a minimum of two years older than him and considers him "a kid." Especially, and heartbreakingly Annie, the girl of Ryan Dean's heart (and other body parts we won't mention). Though the scrums, the blood, the puke, and the other body fluids of the year he'll learn more about life than he ever wanted to know and that there way more than one way to break your heart. 

Winger  is So! Darn! Great!  Stop what you are doing RIGHT NOW and read Winger. Don't even finish this review.  It's a waste of Winger reading time.  For those of you doubters out there that are still reading this and not Winger, a) ouch, where's the trust and b) I guess I'll have to convince you. For starters, this book is utterly hilarious.  Like busting guts and snorting milk funny. It will speak to the 14 year old boy inside of everyone!  Even if laughing uproariously at brilliantly stupid humor isn't your thing, it has genuine human emotion to spare!  The book is bursting with great supporting characters that are awesome enough to be the protagonists of their own book. even the total jerks are really well written total jerks and some (SPOILER ALERT) turn out not to be jerks at all! It has a great central love story!  Heck it has two!  Ryan Dean and Annie and Ryan Dean and his best friend Joey.  it is able to look at first friendship and first love in a way that is bracingly unsentimental.  You'll find yourself rooting for and against Ryan Dean throughout the book as he goes big and goes stupid in equal measure (again he's 14), but in a way that feels human and all too familiar for anyone that ever felt 'small' and hated it. The book also has a wonderful flow.  It's got Ryan Dean's cartoons, loads of weird asides from our narrator, and loads of seemingly inconsequential but clearly monumental important (when you're a teen) stuff actually happens.  It feels like Smith had such great material, dialogue, characters, and jokes that he could have easily doubled the book, but cut down to keep only the best of the best. The book feels really tight, like every scene serves a real purpose to further show character or move the story forward.  It makes for a really hard to put down book.  So for all of you out there that still aren't reading Winger and are actually reading this review, I apologize.  Clearly I am not a good enough persuasive writer to get you to read what might the best YA book of the year yet.  For everyone else enjoy reading what is DEFINITELY my favorite YA book of this year*.

You can find Winger in our catalog here. 

*Even if the ending was a total gut-punch/face-punch/kick-in-the-ribs of sadness!

 

manicpixiedreamgirl by Tom Leveen YP FIC LEVEEN

GOOD NEWS: Tyler Darcy has just been published! And he's just a teenager!  BAD NEWS: It's complicated.

Tyler Darcy has loved Rebecca Webb since the moment he first saw her, separating her animal crackers into broken pieces and whole pieces. She only ate the broken ones. ever since then she has been the Unattainable One, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl that shakes up your life and teaches you how to really LIVE, man. He tried to find out more about her with Sydney, but just ended up sort of dating her...for two years.  He finally managed to make friends with Rebecca, but never got the courage up to tell her how he feels.  Which brings us back to GOOD NEWS/ BAD NEWS. BAD NEWS: Tyler went and wrote a beautiful story all about Rebecca (well the one that lives inside his head at least) so Sidney has dumped him, his friends think he's at least a little psycho, and he has to finally tell his dream girl all his squishiest feelings.  Unfortunately, dreams don't always come true and when a girl is on a pedestal she has an awfully long way to fall.

DISCLAIMER: I should admit that I hate the fiction trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (a girlish, whimsical young woman that brings troubled moody men out of their doldrums by teaching them to let go and live life to the fullest).  Fortunately, Rebecca isn't really a MPDG at all and this book is a very intelligent look at the dangers of idealization. Really, this book is almost TOO well written. that seems like a pretty unfair complaint, but Tyler is often too witty to read as a real teenager, BUT he is a (newly) published author so it ends up working.  In fact the whole book ends up working really exceptionally well.  It has pitch perfect dialogue, a likeable, relatable, and infuriatingly real (read that as totally blind) protagonist, and a really well developed supporting cast. The book takes place over one night with frequent flashbacks to show how the story got to this point. Leveen is quite good at picking the best moment to jump back and forward to keep us hooked and to highlight his themes and illuminate character.  By only getting flashes of Rebecca we have to first rely on Tyler's (faulty) view of her and his friend's (faulty in a completely different way) view of her.  This keeps the reader as seeing her as mysterious and alluring as Tyler does, and makes her slowly revealed reality more compelling as well. It takes pretty much the whole dang book, but you eventually get to really know both Rebecca and Tyler and they get to know more about themselves.  It's a great book about how stupid love, lust, and impossible ideals make us all.  It's equal parts fast, funny, cool, smart, and memorable. I highly recommend it to anyone that wants a great book about love that isn't always lovely.

You can check our catalog for manicpixiedreamgirl here.

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell YP FIC ROWELL

1986. Eleanor: new kid, big, awkward, crazy-curly super-bright red hair.  Wants everything to just stop. Park: virtually the only Asian in school. Nerdy without being officially classified as a nerd. Wants to drown out the world.  There was no reason they should be together, except for an empty bus seat and a love of X-Men.  Now they’re finding about the power of first love and the powerlessness of love to overcome some obstacles.

This is smart, fun, funny, sweet, genuine, sexy (sta-sta-sta-steamy in parts!), and sad love story that will ABSOLUTELY win over anyone that believes in first love.  You have to love a book where a guy tells a girl, “You can be Han Solo and I’ll be Boba Fett. I’ll cross the sky for you.”  You simply have no choice. I think it could almost function as a human test.  If this book doesn’t make you happy and sad all at the same time you may have to turn in your human card and join the Robot Registry. It takes two very real characters and puts you in both their heads.  The book alternates between both their points of view so you see how both of them view the same situations.  This really makes you feel for and root for this couple, which makes it all the more heartrending when their young love is threatened.  It was also super smart to set the book in the near past.  It brings in obsolete technologies like mix tapes and landline telephones that made connecting with people harder, but perhaps more personal (but that could just be my oldness showing!) Like The Big Crunch by Pete Hautman (which I LOVED as well), this book is realistic about how rare it is for teenage love to work out. So fair warning: this is a definite have a hanky handy read.  Without giving TOO MUCH away, I will say that I loved the ending and it melted by cold dark heart.  It is sweet sad and totally open-ended, so you can write your own ending for these kooky kiddos. 

You can check our catalog for Eleanor & Park here.