The Symptoms of My Insanity by Mindy Raf YP FIC RAF

Izzy is such a hypochondriac she can't stop wanting to self-check for breast cancer in Bio class.  It doesn't help that her mom for real has cancer, her best friend got a major personality transplant, and the most popular guy in school is acting like he likes her which is CLEARLY impossible.  So it's no wonder she's going insane, the only question is which exact psychosis in the DSM IV should she diagnose herself with.

This is a sneaky, sneaky book.  You'll be so busy laughing at Izzy's super snarky and witty POV you'll sort of lose track of how her life in falling apart around her; until BOOM it hits you right in the kidneys (metaphorically). Izzy gets seriously mistreated by almost everyone she cares about it and keeps on soldiering on with her wry sense of humor, so that you want to shake her and yell, "STAND UP FOR YOURSELF!!!" That is all part of the point as she learns to make better choices as she goes, but I still felt like someone that wronged her most gets off way, way, way, and WAY too easily.  Without spoiling anything the person actually breaks a pretty serious law and gets away scot-free even though they get caught.  I think that this is a mistake on Raf's part.  It became a sort of galling distraction for me and did make me enjoy the book somewhat less.  However, individual readers mileage may very.  The wonderful humor and imminently likeable main character and her hilarious POV really make this book a charmer and a winner.  It also has a very likeable romantic plot and a wonderful family story.  Izzy and her mom's relationship gave me a serious case of the heart warms. This is definitely a wonderful summer read that does a really nice job of being breezy and serious in a very smart way.

You can check for The Symptoms of My Insanity here.

In Mozart's Shadow by Carolyn Meyer YP FIC MEYER

Nannerl (try saying that five times fast!) has a bright future ahead of her. As a musical prodigy, she could have something precious few women have in 18th century Salzburg: choice.  Unfortunately, Nannerl is a Mozart (as in THAT Mozart) and when wee Wolfgang starts composing at five her gifts pale next to his blinding genius.  She is all but ignored by her family and stuck at home while her family and future seems to fade away.  Her only hope is in her love of music and of a man she is forbidden to be with. This is her courageous and heartrending story of living and loving in the shadows.

Nannerl is such a fully realized character.  Her resentment and determination is made all the more painful, because she has history against her.  Women in the 18th century simply didn't have the same choices as men and therein lies the drama and tragedy.  however, this isn't just a story of being eclipsed by fame, but also reflects a more universal story of family, love, loss, and acceptance.  Carolyn Meyer excels in making humanity shine in young women from history.  She also excels in capturing period details that transport a reader through time, but making the prose and dialogue accessible and flowing.  She really makes the time and place FEEL lived in and real and the people that live their feel like people of their time.  Sadly, most of her fine novels end with compromises and broken hearts because history is often unkind regardless of sex or station. But Meyer does a stellar job at focusing on moments of joy and brightness and seeing the value in lives that can seem empty from far away. I found myself rooting for Nannerl even though I KNEW what her ending had to be, but when all was said and done Meyer did such a great job at emphasizing the little joys that it both highlighted and undercut the sadness and loneliness in her tale.  

You can check the catalog for In Mozart's Shadow 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.

The Boy Recession by Flynn Meaney YP FIC MEANEY

The recession is just plain bad for business, but now it’s downsizing Whitefish Bay’s chances for love sweet love.  With a faltering economy a mass exodus of people has left the town’s high school with a 4 to 1 female to male ratio.  That means that any ambulatory male can be on the school team and prize relationship material.  Smart slacker Hunter Fahrenbach has made a school career of just getting by without being noticed, now he’s pursued on all sides.  Kelly Robbins has always been Hunter’s friend but just as things MIGHT be happening with them, he’s become a much desired commodity.  Will the forces of supply and demand trump the power of love?

Wait, Luke is reviewing a book with no zombies, dystopias, death, or horrible bleakness!? I know!  For Valentine’s Day I decided to review a light, funny romance and I’m glad I did.  Told form both Hunter’s and Kelly’s perspectives, this is a laugh filled trifle that goes down easy and doesn’t leave a bitter aftertaste.  Sure, the characters aren’t incredibly nuanced and it has absolutely no action sequences or deep looks at the darkest parts of the human experience, but that doesn’t keep it from being a witty read that I found myself flying through.  Even I found myself rooting for the two kids to find a way to make it work, because I ended up genuinely liking them. The banter is fast and moves at a great clip, which isn’t always realistic, but it sure makes for snappy reading. So, if you want something fun, funny, light-hearted, romantic, and cute then give this one a spin.

You can check our catalog for The Boy Recession here.

Kill Me Softly by Sarah Cross YP FIC CROSS

Mira has lived her whole life with secrets. How did her parents die? Why is she prohibited from returning to her birthplace? `Why does she get the feeling everyone she knows is lying to her?  When she finally breaks away and makes it to her home town of Beau Rivage she discovers that more secrets than ever.  She falls quickly for Blue, a man everyone says is dangerous, but she feels like she can’t pull away from him.  Life in Beau Rivage is strange, just like a fairy tale…literally. She soon finds that all the residents of Beau Rivage are fated, cursed to live out legendary fairy tales, and she is beginning think hers has a Grimm ending.

Reimagined fairy tales are the new dystopias, vampires, fallen angels, whatever the big thing this month is!  They are in loads of movies, TV shows, and books, so it can be tough knowing which of the 3,486,794 fairy tale retellings released a month to give your precious time to. Fortunately, Kill Me Softly is something rather special.  It takes the fairy tales before Disney cleaned them up, finds the odd fascination with love and death and blends it into a modern romance. I think the novels twists work pretty well, but if you are familiar with old fairy tales, you’ll know some of the major ones fairly early on.  However, once the book is all about the strangling hand of inexorable fate, then that actually adds its own level of enjoyment.  The main fun is seeing the skewed fairy tales and trying to guess how everything will turn out. Underneath the romance and mystery is a look at the dark and dangerous side of fairy tale love.  I think Cross does a really good job at looking at te relationship between real life abusive relationships and the fairy tale like logic that people trapped in them often use.  This is a great, twisted, dark romance.  I highly recommend it to anyone looking for something unique. 

You can check our catalog for Kill Me Softly here.

The Last Dragon by Jane Yolen Illustrated by Rebecca Guay YP FIC YOLEN

All the dragons are gone from the island of May.  So when Tansy and her father discover Dragon’s Bane, an herb that only grows where dragons lie, no one will believe that a dragon still lives.  When Tansy’s father disappears she knows it is the dragon that she is partly responsible for awakening.  As the town’s new healer she must find a way to rally her town and find a true hero that can slay a dragon.  When instead all they can find is a con man, braggart named Lancot she realizes she’ll have to improvise. 

This is a truly lovely book.  Beautifully written, gorgeously illustrated, filled with magic and heart, I cannot recommend it highly enough.  It succeeds magnificently as a straightforward fairy tale with excellent touches or romance and adventure, but it also works on deeper levels.  There’s a wonderful subtext about the role of women in society, about the pressure to become the people are parents want us to be, about the power of imagination in confronting fear and evil, and about the necessity of stories in our world.  The art is just perfect for a fairy tale. Each panel is like a mix between a illustration form a children’s book, a painting, and a modern comic.  It all works together seamlessly.  I especially applaud the character designs, far too many comics resort to clothes and hair to differentiate characters, but Rebecca Guay actually draws character’s with faces...that…look…different!!!  Novel concept I know!  I also thought it was great to have a strong female character, while beautiful, that isn’t defined by her beauty or running around in a ridiculously revealing outfit.  In fact, the character of Lancot is the eye candy, and in fitting with notions of beauty in classic times is drawn as attractive.  This is a treasure of a book and I hope people (yes even dudes) give it a chance and discover it’s magic.  It’s one of the rare comics that shows the potential of visuals to tell a deeper (or at least different) story than text alone can.  Hopefully it will also move people to check out Jane Yolen’s novels which are just brilliant as well.  Which you can read in YP FIC YOLEN.

You can check our catalog for The Last Dragon here.

Chopsticks by Jessica Anthony YP FIC ANTHONY

Glory was a piano prodigy that has turned the classical music world on fire with her missing of modern pop into complicated classic pieces.  Francisco was an Argentinian teen trying to make it in America.  When they met, they made beautiful music. Glory went mad, then missing. Through photographs, assorted objects, IMs, and letters, a mystery of love, music, and madness is revealed. 

This is a truly unique work. It’s a mystery told through found objects.  The reader is like a detective sorting through assorted clues and patching together the ‘real’ story of why Glory disappeared, but looks can be deceiving. There are scattered clues throughout the book that Glory is super mega bonkers and everything she imagined EVERYTHING.  Or you can read it as a super sweet mystery love story.  Either way there are loads of many mysteries to unlock.  Why is Glory obsessed with the song Chopsticks? What REALLY happened to her mother? The fun of solving the mysteries and pondering the big mystery of whether Glory is super crazy or just really stressed is grand fun. Not only is this a super great idea, the execution is superb nearly throughout.  The design of this book is absolutely excellent. The use of slowly revealing more and more through photos is really well handled and the layout are superb. For example, the book will show you the outside of a book or pamphlet on one page and the next page the pamphlet is opened, so you feel like you are leafing through these objects yourself.  My one quibble (and it’s a big quibble!) is that the photos of Glory and Francisco seem really stagey and sort of cheesy.  I never bought them as two real people, but maybe that works out since they may not be real at all!  MIND TRIP!

Check our catalog for Chopsticks here.

Library Wars: Love and War Volume 1 by Kiiro Yumi YP FIC YUMI

The government of Japan has set up the Media Betterment Committee to police all forms of media for appropriateness.  In response the Library Defense Force is formed to defend books and freedom of choice for all people.  A war of words soon leads to a battle of arms.  Iku Kasahara was inspired by a chance encounter with an officer of the LDF to join the fight. Now she trains her hardest to make her mystery mentor proud by being the first female member of the LDF, but is undercut at every turn by her hard driving drill instructor Dojo.  But sometimes she sees a softer side of Dojo, what does it mean and where is she supposed to find the Genealogy books?

Of course I had to read a shojo manga about heroic librarians.  And while I may be biased, I think this one has a lot to offer shojo fans.  The characters and romantic plot are somewhat typical, but the setting is fun and very unique.  I love the focus on the devotion to preserve knowledge and art (any librarian’s true calling!).  The passion the character’s feel adds a level of humanity to the book.  These people have a truly noble goal and it made me like them a great deal more than the average shojo cast.  I look forward to further volumes where we can hopefully see more actual conflict between the LDF and the MBC.  Check it out if you love libraries and/or shojo.

P.S.  this is a very realistic account of library life.  We fight wars and fall in love with each other all the time for reals ya’ll.

Will Super Villains be on the Final” Liberty Vocational Volume 1 by Naomi Novik Illustrated by Yishan Li

Leah Taymore is just trying to make it through her first day at college without getting expelled. Liberty Vocational is the premiere college for training super heroes, but Leah isn’t so sure she can hack it. She has an amazing power (the power to manipulate atoms, the very building block of all creation!!!), but hasn’t quite mastered it yet. Meanwhile, there are dastardly deeds afoot as the world’s worst super villain is hiding on campus as the new ethics teacher! And worst of all, she totally has a super crush on an older boy and he doesn’t notice her at all!

This is a nice fun and light manga that will certainly appeal to shojo fans. I don’t think most fans of traditional super hero fare will be interested in this one, because the super heroing is done mainly for humor and there isn’t any ‘action’ in the traditional sense. It’s always weird seeing something like super heroes in shojo, because super heroes are usually bulky and muscular and shojo is filled with rail thin pretty boys with gorgeous hair. In fact the author originally wanted Leah to be drawn tall and muscular and her empathy friend Yuzuna to be plump, but the artist let her know that shojo has certain rules. I have to say that’s a little disappointing. I think the book would stand out more if the creators had been braver and taken risks. However, the jokes play out well, the main character is fun and likeable, a super hero school is a fun idea (if not terribly original by this point), and it should please the shojo die hards.