Liar's Test, by Ambelin Kwaymullina

I haven't read much YA fantasy yet this year, so it was a nice departure to immerse myself into the complicated world of Liar's Test, by Ambelin Kwaymullina (May 2024, Knopf Books for Young Readers).

At first glance, it doesn't seem that groundbreaking--seven girls must compete to be queen, knowing that four are fated to die, and one of these girls, Bell, is special. But this is really only a side note of plot in a much bigger story. And although Bell is indeed a chosen one, the choosing is far from arbitrary.

Bell is a Treesinger, whose people were forcibly removed from their homeland by the Risen, colonizers worshiping gods who are anathema to the Treesinger way of life of deep connection to nature and the ancestors. They are much more than just gentle oppressed tree huggers, and as the book progress, this becomes very clear. (Knowing that the author belongs to the Palyku people of the eastern Pilbara region of Western Australia gives an additional gravitas to the story's portrayal of the Treesinger way of being in the world). When Bell's home, one of the resettled enclaves, falls into a sleeping sickness, with only Bell untouched by it, she's taken to the colonizers main city to be studied like a lab animal (and is cruelly abused by the sadistic high priest of the sun god).

But Bell is good at lying, and good at not giving in. And so when she's told she'll be the first Treesinger to compete for the crown, she's all in--even though being queen isn't her priority.

And so the challenges being, and the story explodes beyond episodic fantastical trials into a tapestry of gods who real (and from outside the world), people who are not at all what the seem, and the complex plans that Bell's maternal ancestors set in motion, with friendships and alliances that bring warmth to the story, a small touch of romance, trees that are more than magical, and more (the more includes a small tree spirit companion who is very charming).

Although it can get a bit confusing at times if you aren't paying attention and step away while reading to deal with domestic disaster (ask me how I know), it all makes sense (I think) in the end, and I appreciated the complexities and twists and fantastical details lots.

One small in the larger scheme of the story that I appreciated was that Bell's personal trauma ends up being directly confronted. After the horrific beginning in which Bell is almost killed by the high priest, and seeing how isolated she has been, I found it hard to accept how apparently unaffected she was. But Bell is an excellent liar, and we are show in a scene toward the end how good she's been at lying to herself when she is forced to confront and release, through the intervention of the ancestors, all her reservoirs of pain.

Bell's relearning the ability to trust is also an important part of the story, without which the big picture of overthrowing tyrannical alien gods and saving her people would have been impossible. And it's more than just trusting others; it's also making herself (habituated as she has become to deceit) trustworthy. So though she is a chosen one, by virtue of her birth to her particular ancestors, and by virtue of not succumbing to the sickness that afflicted her people, it is her character growing and changing that makes her the heroine that is needed.

In short, I can see the target audience enjoying it lots, except for those who really want a Romance, because though Bell does get one bit of passionate kissing, it's far far to the side of the main story.


disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

Anne Frank and Me, by Cherie Bennett and Jeff Gottesfeld, for Timeslip Tuesday

Anne Frank and Me, by Cherie Bennett and Jeff Gottesfeld (1997), is this week's Timeslip Tuesday offering. It tells of a teenaged girl, Nicole, who's mind is full of stereotypical teen stuff, including pining over Jack.  Her diary thoughts of pining will perhaps be familiar to many readers who are, or once were, teenaged girls with their own hopeless crushes.  

At school, her history teacher is trying to explain the horrors of the holocaust, but it seems distant, and even Anne Frank's diary seems, according to the internet searches Nicole does, a possible fake....so she's not really interested in the class trip to the local "Anne Frank in the World" exhibit, except, of course, that Jack is going to, and maybe he'll want to sit with her on the bus...and he does!  but it turns out that he's actually interested in a friend of hers, and everything is horrible, and then there are gunshots, and everyone thinks is the strange goth-type boy shooting, and she falls and hits her head....

And comes to as a Jewish girl in German occupied Paris. 

She still is her American self at first, but very quickly she fades into the place of the girl whose life she is now living.  Things get worse and worse for the Jewish people of Paris, and she and her little sister end up in hiding.  But they are betrayed and sent on a hellish journey to a concentration camp.  Miraculously she actually meets Anne Frank, who tells her which way to go when they arrive, but the little sister goes the wrong way, Nicole follows, and they end up in a gas chamber.  And as she starts dying, she awakens in her own time again.

And it's not a shooting after all, it was a fireworks prank.

So this started off as a play, and I think this is why it doesn't quite work as novel.  Nicole's tone is very flatly matter-of-factly descriptive through all the horror she endures.  There's little emotion or introspection, and in general it's all told without much inner character development, which is possibly due to her not being herself anymore.  But still it's very gripping and impactful, and I stayed up late finishing it, and was moved by the hideous evil tragedy of it all...

,...with an extra coda of discomfort, not intended by the authors--this was written before the era of school shootings began in earnest with Columbine, and the fact that the shooting with which the time travel begins turns out to be a joke is pretty disturbing to a person reading it now.

 

The Lake House, by Sarah Beth Durst

Happy slightly belated book birthday to The Lake House, by Sarah Beth Durst (April 25th, 2023, HarperTeen)!  I am a huge fan of her books in general and was not disappointed.

Three young teenaged girls arrive at a house camp on an island in the middle of the Maine woods; none of them wanted to go, but their parents, who had been there themselves long ago, promised them a wonderful, transformative experience.  

They have doubts, and these doubts are more than realized.  Dropped off by boat and left to make their own way through the woods to house, they are stunned to find the Lake House is a burned shell.  The discovery of a fairly fresh corpse who has been shot is not a comfort.  They have no way to communicate with the outside world, and no food or clean water, and presumably there's a killer on the loose, possibly still on the island. And then things get worse, when they must survive a horrible evil that makes the island its home....

I loved the growing friendship between the girls, and especially how Claire's anxiety and tendency to catastrophize proves incredibly valuable.  The other two girls also emerge as fully three-dimensional characters with much to offer the survival of the group, and the trio works through a lot together, growing in understanding and acceptance of themselves and each other.  Though the horror was not exactly to my own personal taste (I had to take it with lots of grains of salt), it offered nicely high stakes and plenty of twists.  The friendship and survival elements were totally my jam (I am always up for catching fish with a tennis net, starting a fire with a hair dryer battery, etc.) and so I ended up being both gripped and entertained.

 A great one for 12-14 year olds who like friendship stories mixed with supernatural horror.  This really falls into the sweet spot of upper middle grade/younger YA!

disclaimer: review copy received from the author

Halfway Down Paddy Lane, by Jean Marzollo, for Timeslip Tuesday

Halfway Down Paddy Lane, by Jean Marzollo (1981), is the story of 15-year-old Kate, a girl from the early 1980s, who travels back in time to 1850--same Massachusetts town, same house even, but now she's the oldest girl in a family of Irish immigrant mill workers.  Fortunately she's able to do a convincing Irish accent, and she quickly picks up the ability to work in a textile factory.  Even more quickly, she falls in love with Patrick, who is the oldest son in her new family, and the focus of Kate's thoughts shift from "how do I survive this?" (which is very interesting and well done)  to "how can I marry Patrick?"  (less interesting).

But fate has other plans for Patrick, and Kate finds her self back in the 1980s, broken hearted.

I know this is a favorite time travel story for many, and I would have loved this if I'd read it the year it was published (I was a high school freshman then).  The romance (with enough explicit details about nipples and manly bulges to push this to YA)  would have been just right for young me, and I'd have learned a lot of history (the No-Nothing Party, the Yankee prejudice against the Irish, and what life was like as a mill worker).  

As a much older reader, I appreciated the history (though it wasn't new to me) but found the romance kind of icky and not believable. What bothered me more is that Kate didn't do much with her time in the past, but just passively went with the flow of it all, too obsessed with Patrick to be a real part of her new family, and more and more convinced that she'll just stay in the past forever (she does miss her parents, but Patrick is her bright shinning sun).  Right at the end, she does decide to become involved in the struggles of the mill workers, but doesn't get a chance to do anything before going back to her own time.  

The time travel is never explained directly, but it turns out that Patrick is her great-great-grandfather, and the house Kate's mother has just bought in the present is the same one that Patrick and his family lived in.  So kinship and over-lapping in the same house converged into time travel, which is as good a reason for time travel as any, I guess....though not pushed by the author into anything truly magical.  It felt kind of pointless.  Kate didn't change anything in the past (except souring Patrick's relationship with the girl he ended up marrying), and her return to the present is so brief there's no sense of Kate having changed (she just cries about Patrick).

All in all, a bit disappointing; I felt no particular sense of numinous magic or stirring of emotion, which is what I read timeslip stories for. But at 14, my take on it may well have been very different indeed.  I might even have ended up crushing on Patrick myself....

Black Was the Ink, by Michelle Coles, for Timeslip Tuesday

A sub-genre of time travel books that I quite like (becuase I like learning things) uses the time travelling to frame a history lesson.  Black Was the Ink, by Michelle Coles (November 2nd 2021 by Lee & Low Books) is one of these; it is a brilliant lesson on the Reconstruction-- the years immediately after the Civil War when black men were elected to congress, the first Civil Rights Act was signed into law, and KKK murderers were brought to trial and found guilty.  Not much talked about in school history class, and  tremendously well presented here.  

Malcolm, a black teenager, was almost shot playing basketball with his friends in Washington D.C. in 2015, and then almost arrested by the police who came to investigate.  His mother, scared for him, sends him down to Mississippi to stay with his dad's family for the summer (his dad was killed by the police a while before this story begins).  There he finds the diary of his ancestor, Cedric, who worked for many of the black representatives to Congress, recording the triumphs they achieved, the horrors being inflicted on black people in the south by the KKK, and the ultimate failure of Reconstruction to establish lasting equality.  

But Malcom isn't just reading words on the pages.  Cedric brings him literally back in time, and Malcom lives bits of Cedric's life.  He sees horrible tragedies, that amplify the ongoing horrors of the present day.  And Malcom emerges from the experience galvanized to take up the fight that Cedric had been part of, starting by trying to save the family farm, Cedric's farm, from being lost to a highway expansion project (which turns out to be the main reason Cedric is manifesting himself...) 

The heavy weight of the past is lightened somewhat by time with family and by Malcom's nascent relationship with a neighbor girl, but it is a past that is much too heavy for lifting to be possible.  It is not a fast easy read, but it sure is an important one.  The author doesn't do much in the way of condensing the history, which is makes it thorough and very real, but it does make for hard going at times. I can't help but feel it could have been just as powerful without quite so many long speeches from the politicians, while being appreciative of those speeches as important parts of history. 

That being said, Malcolm is an engaging character, and his believable teen self does a pretty good job carrying the narrative along. It takes him a while to get used to being Cedric, and it requires some suspension of disbelief that he carries that role off as well as he does when back in the past (although this was one of my favorite aspects of the book, time travel fan that I am).  And there are joyous moments of family and friendship, and lots of good food, that cheer the reader on.

Still, as a whole, it's a pretty devastating read (though the ending is hopeful), but so important and timely....

side note: speaking as someone who works for a state historic preservation office-- sadly, even if a property is listed in the National Register of Historic Places (which is a lot more time-consuming and tricky than is the case even for the conditional determination of eligibility which Malcolm achieves through a single afternoon's work) it can be bulldozed.  So I ended the story less optimistically than Malcolm does...there's going to be a struggle ahead.

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

Thirty Talks Weird Love, by Alessandra Narváez Varela, for Timeslip Tuesday

Thirty Talks Weird Love, by Alessandra Narváez Varela (January 1st 2021 by Cinco Puntos Press), is a stunning book, combining a vividly real slice of life story of a girl on the brink of suicide with time travel, set in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico in the 1990s, when girls  are being murdered with horrible, terrifying regularity.

Thirteen-year-old Anamaria is academically driven, and has messed up being a friend.  Lonely and stressed, and scared by the terror stalking her city, she's at a breaking point.  Though her parents love her and care about her well-being, they have no idea how bad things are getting.  There is someone who knows, though--Anamaria's thirty-year-old self, who come back to get her younger self through this bad time.

Anamaria is understandably unwelcoming, and doesn't want to hear what this stranger tries to tell her.  But "Thirty" is able to nudge her, changing enough of the time line to make things better for her past self, but failing in the other task she had travelled through time to set right.

Though this is a  hybrid verse/paragarph novel, and there aren't lots and lots of words, Varela manages to convey an astoundingly vivid and rich picture of Anamaria's thoughts, her daily life, and her experiences at school.  I'm not sure I've ever used the word "masterful" in a review before, but I shall do so now--this is a masterful story.  It twists the heart something fierce.

The time travel part is strange, and never explained (which is a tad frustrating), but very interesting.  Thirty is not a dea ex machina, but she is able to push in just the right places to get Anamaria on a healthier path--mostly, and most importantly for young depressed readers, by getting her to tell her parents that she is depressed and needs help.   It was satisfying, as a Time Travel pureist, to read in the epilogue that briefly lays out what happens to Anamaria in the following years, that she doesn't in fact time travel again--her other self had changed enough so this was no longer necessary.

One of the things that made this such a believable book is that Anamaria thinks in both English and Spanish, and so there is considerable untranslated Spanish in the text.  I don't speak Spanish, but context and generic familiarity were enough to understand what was being said.  And, on the subject of this being clearly a Mexican book, one of the things that made it a viscerally appealing reading experience was all the delicious food!  Though Anamaria is prone to unhealthy comfort eating (so relatable), food is still integral to her loving relationship with her parents (who have a small restaurant)  and with the coffee shop owner next door, a loving uncle figure.

The title, "Thirty Talks Weird Love," refers to Thirty's main message that Anamaria must find a way to love herself, but it's not heavy handed or preachy.  I can imagine many 11-14 year-olds really seeing themselves in this one, and quite possibly being not just entertained by a good story, well told, but helped to be more compassionate to themselves and to others.  

The book is being marketed as YA, but I do think it counts as upper middle grade just as much--a 13-year-old with friendship drama is more middle grade to me than a 14-year-old with relationship drama would be.

Highly recommended.

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

The Amber Crane, by Malve von Hassell, for Timeslip Tuesday

 

In The Amber Crane, by Malve von Hassell (YA, Odyssey Books, June 2021), a boy from the 17th century and a girl from the 20th cross paths in a moving story of war and perseverance.  (content warning--there is a rape in the book)

Peter was born in Pomerania (on the Baltic coast, an area now split between Poland and Germany) just a few years into the thirty years war.  Now a teenager, apprenticed to a master amber worker, war is all he's ever known.  The armies of both sides have left a land full of refugees and memories of the dead, including Peter's older brother.  Peter feels he can't compete with the shadow of his dashing brother, and his home, where his merchant father is on the verge of bankruptcy and his younger sister, Effie, is not like other girls--she is nonverbal, and non-neurotypical.  And, soon after the book begins, she is raped and retreats even further away from other people.  Peter is distressed but feels powerless to fix anything, and so he visits home infrequently.  In his master's house, he has a place dreaming of being a journeyman, and working to make beautiful things of amber...the amber that washes ashore on the beaches that the powerful Guildmaster's have closed so that no-one can gather amber for themselves.  

But one day, Peter, discouraged by life, wanders out onto the beach and finds two pieces of amber that call to him.  And in defiance of the laws, he claims them, and starts, in the dark of night, to work them.  One becomes a heart for Effie to wear (the amber is known to have healing properties).  In the other, he sees a crane, and starts to set it free.  

Magically, mysteriously, the amber sends Peter forward in time, where he meets a girl, a bit older than him, caught in her own war, WW II.  Lioba is desperately travelling west ahead of the advancing Russian army, trying to make it back to her parent's home.   His visits don't last long, but they are frequent enough so that he becomes invested in her journey, and all the while he is working on the amber crane....

Lioba's story is, for the first two thirds of the book, much more interesting that Peter's, but when Effie is accosted at a rare outing by the man who raped her, Peter takes action and attacks her assailant.  The amber heart Effie wears is revealed and makes her the object of suspicion.  She's accused of being a witch, and Peter is held for assault, and it is just as interesting as Lioba's increasingly hopeless quest to escape to a place where she can follow her own dreams.

Time travel-wise, this is great.  Peter's reactions to the future ring true, and despite the circumstances, make for diverting reading, and the amber crane is a satisfactory bridge between the two time periods.  Character-wise it is harder to call great, because Peter is not a very charismatic lead; he's not a Doer, and he's rather self-absorbed, so it's hard at first to care much about him.  He gets a romance, but it didn't feel quite earned.  Lioba, seen only in brief vignettes, is appealing, but her story remains secondary.  

Where the book felt weak to me was with regards to the historical setting.  If you go into this book knowing very little about the Thirty Years War, you will leave it not knowing much more.  Yes, it's in character for Peter not to be thinking much about the bigger picture, but I wanted more about the context for what was happening in his world.  The root cause of it was a religious struggle--Catholic vs Protestant, but religion barely registers in Peter's pov.  It made him feel kind of dead to the world.  I also wanted more geography; I knew it was on the Baltic Coast, but it still felt unrooted in place.  There is a glossary at the end that includes some background,  I wish it had been integrated into the story.

By the halfway point, I was absorbed in the story, and closed it with a sense of having read a good book, and as someone who loves reading about the making of things, I very much appreciated the amber-working, but it still fell just a bit short of what I'd hoped it would be.

Ferryman, by Claire McFall

 

I'm always a bit taken aback when I am able to post a review that's appropriate for a Special Day--today (with help from its publisher) I have an enjoyable YA fantasy romance for Valentine's Day--Ferryman, by Claire McFall (October 2021 by Walker Books US, 2013 in the UK) .

Dylan isn't the happiest teenaged girl in England--her best friend moved away, her relationship with her mother is currently prickly, and she has no great passions or interests in her life.  She has, though, just reconnected with her father, who she hasn't seen since she was five, and is going to be going to see him up in Scotland.  Fed up with a miserable day at school, she cuts out to take an earlier train than she'd planned on, and in so doing, changes her life (and death).

Inside a tunnel there's a terrible accident.  And when Dylan becomes conscious, she's alone in the dark (she can't, mercifully, see what's around her, but there are no other living people....).  She makes it out of the train, and walks down the tunnel, hoping to find help, but instead she finds herself in a wasteland.  There is one other person--Tristan, a strangely unhelpful and uncommunicative boy her own age.  Having no better choice, she follows his lead.  As they walk on with no sign of civilization around them, warning bells start going off in her head, and at last she gets the truth out of Tristan--she is dead, and he is the ferryman tasked with taking her to her final destination.

As they journey from safe house to safe house through the wasteland, beset by ghastly beings that long to rip Dylan's soul from her, they both succumb to the irresistible attraction that is growing up between them.  It is an attraction that stems more from circumstance than from any deep knowledge of each other, and so as a cynical adult I have to admit I rolled my eyes, but given that Dylan has no strong anchors to her past life, and no information about what's next, and given that Tristan has spent uncounted centuries ferrying the dead with no chance to develop close personal relationships, it's understandable.  And so Dylan makes the one choice that she has--to reject what lies beyond, and try, desperately and dangerously, to go back to her old life, and take Tristan with her.

It's a fascinating set-up, and I enjoyed the journey through the wasteland very much.  I read it in one afternoon, with enjoyment.  And even though I had to not think too hard about the growing love between them, it was sweet, and even though there's not all that much character development, it was easy as a reader to fill that in given the bits given.  The ending doesn't resolve everything, but it is satisfying, leaving what comes next to the reader's imagine in a way that that is just fine.  That being said, there are two more books in the series...and those who took pleasure in this unusual love will want to seek them out quickly!

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

Your Life Has Been Delayed, by Michelle I. Mason, for Timeslip Tuesday

Your Life Has Been Delayed, by Michelle I. Mason (September 2021, Bloomsbury YA), is a really entertaining and thought-provoking YA time travel book.

Jenny gets on a plane in 1995, on her way home from visiting New York city, where her grandparents live and where she wants to go to college. But when her plane lands, it's the year 2020* and her family and friends have mourned for her for 25 years. All but one grandmother grew old and died, her little brother is grown-up with a family of her own, and so is her best friend.

Now she must struggle not just with the unfamiliar technology of her new life, but with trying to fit again into a family that has grown older.  And the heart-breaking horror of her best friend (one of those really really close best friends) being forty years old, married with kids.  It is a struggle, but Jenny faces the challenges bravely, and starts school again like she's supposed to, shepherded by her best friends teenaged son (who is very cute....)

Outside of her personal struggle to find a place in her new present, there's a firestorm of media attention, conspiracy theories, intrusions into her personal life, including from governmental agencies.  It's all pretty toxic, and her parents, well-meaning but I think misguided, try to control her access to media (almost like they're still trying to keep her back in the 1990s....).  She does come across as pretty naïve, and young for 17 (possibly because her parents were overprotective back then), and I think more could have been made of her now falling into the company of  Zoomers, who are perhaps the least naïve generation ever.  The other high school kids are fairly generic "high school kids."

There's romance (how weird it is, though, to date your best friend's son...) and high school drama, and real danger from the world of the conspiracy theorists....what I liked best was the whole having to cope with a different time/technology/people.

It's an utterly fascinating premise, both fun and poignant, and though I thought the book could have been a little tighter, I enjoyed it lots.  

*the writing of the book predated the pandemic, and the author decided to leave it out.

Pixels of You, by Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota (writers), and J.R. Doyle (Artist)

Pixels of You, by Ananth Hirsh  and Yuko Ota (writers), and J.R. Doyle (Artist): (February 8th 2022, Amulet Paperbacks) is, I think, the first graphic novel I've read in a year or maybe even longer.  Recognizing that my graphic novel reading skills, always a bit tenuous because of years reading text quickly and ignoring illustrations, were rusty, I was firm with myself and looked at the pictures as I read! (yay me). I was rewarded--sc fi sapphic romance with art students ftw!

This is the story of two girls in a not so far off future in which AI is a part of life, and AIs are a part of society.  Realistically, there are tensions and anger and fear.  Indira and Fawn are both photographers, and both have unpaid student internships at the same art gallery, but when they meet for the first time at Indira's exhibit opening, it's a disaster when Fawn (not knowing who she's talking to) offers an uncomfortably frank critique.  The gallery owner, not wanting the two of them messing up the peace of the gallery, decrees that instead of independent final shows, they must work together. And so they do.

Fawn is an AI in a human facsimile body, unlike her "parents" for whom nothing disguises the fact that they are robots.  Indira is on her own, struggling with chronic pain in her artificial eye, the result of a long-ago car accident, and she has reasons to distrust AIs.   But as the two work together, they start to communicate openly and vulnerably, and from there it leads (fairly obviously, but sweet nonetheless) to romance.

The art does a lot of heavy lifting in the story, and so I'm glad I paid attention! The panels really reward lots of looking. As well as helping the emotional beats of the story along, color, tone and small details all add to the individuality of each girl beautifully.  That being said, the writers do a good job in fairly limited text making each one a distinct person, and by the end of the book I carred for both of them lots!

Very much recommended, especially to younger teens who loved kids graphic novels and are now ready to move on to YA.  

disclaimer: review copy received from its publicist

The Forgotten Memories of Vera Glass, by Anna Priemaza

The Forgotten Memories of Vera Glass, by Anna Priemaza (November,2021 by Harry N. Abrams), is a moving YA real-world fantasy, that is both a mystery and a meditation on loss.

In Vera's version of the real world, everyone is born with a magical knack of some sort--Vera can open locks, her older brother has light magic, and her younger brother can change the colors of anything he wants to.  These are all standard gifts, but others have powers that are beyond ordinary...and don't always use them ethically.

Vera is happy with her family and her tight group of friends, until she's suddenly struck by the sense that's she's lost something important.  There's a sink-hole in her heart, and she's not alone.  At first she tries to shrug it off, going on with her ordinary life--school, hanging out with her friends, getting ready for Halloween, her church's youth-group--but the sense of loss just keeps building, and she realizes she's not alone in feeling this way.

So she sets out to solve the mystery....before all that's left is the ache of unremembered loss.  Is the cause of the empty places in her heart supernatural? aliens? science gone askew?  witchcraft? But when you don't know what you've lost, it's hard to find it again...

I won't tell anything more about the details of the story, because that would spoil the fun of following the clues building up to a climax, an ending that presents a very satisfactory, and magically intriguing, moral dilemma. (nb--I read the ending partway through, which I regretted, because of wanting to know if everything worked out all right, and it did, so now you don't have to).

It's YA in that it's about high school kids, with dating moving towards real romance, but it's a fine read for older middle grade kids too.  These are high school kids still on the younger end of things, still dressing up for Halloween, still just starting out.  There's some familiar school drama--some misunderstandings, some strains in friendships--that is not quite the high stakes of books that are firmly young adult.  

One thing that sets this book apart from most magical mg/ya books is that Vera is a committed Christian--her belief in God and her church community are foundations of her life, and this is conveyed in a matter-of fact way that will, I think, ring true to lots of readers with similar, every-day beliefs who don't often see themselves in teen fiction.

The sense of loss that Vera and others around are feeling is, in this case, tied to a very specific set of circumstances, but it feels universal too--so much of growing up involves moving on from people, places, and things that once brought joy, without necessarily realizing this is happening. But the most memorable thing about the book is, hands-down, the very intriguing mystery of the forgotten memories of the title!  It's a good read, of the sort that feels both quick and immersive.

disclaimer-review copy received from its publicist

Yesterday Is History, by Kosoko Jackson, for Timeslip Tuesday

This week's time travel book is Yesterday Is History, by Kosoko Jackson (February 2021, Sourcebooks Fire).  It's a very readable and enjoyable gay YA romance, in which time travel serves to complicate a black teenager's life and loves.

Andre has come through cancer, with a new liver received from a young man who died in a car accident.  He's ready to charge back into his life of academic success, complicated by all the school he missed.  But along with the liver, he got something he couldn't have predicted-- a trip to his childhood home back in the 1960s.  There he meets Michael, a guy a little older, friendly, cute, and insightful as heck.   Andre has no clue how this has happened, until the family of the liver donor reaches out.  

Turns out that young man was a time traveler, from a family of time travelers.  And now Andre is one too.  Blake, the younger son, didn't inherit the gene, but his parents assign him to teach Andre the rules of time travelling.  This is a heck of complicated situation for Blake, for a variety of understandable personal reasons, and it's further complicated when he finds himself falling for Andre..

But Andre has been going back to the past to meet Michael again, and they fall in love.  And even though he could imagine easily falling for Blake, what he shares with Michael can't just be dismissed.

Andre wants to make everything ok for Blake (hurting in the present) and for Michael (hurting in the past), but that's impossible, even with time travel. And after lots of internal struggle and another brush with death, he sets out to live his best life in the present.

So time travel is a mechanism for the romance plot, and that's fine, but it's a bit disappointing that except for one hop back to the Titanic, which we don't even get to experience through Andre's point of view, there's just trips back to see Michael (and it was really frustrating that Andre doesn't get Michael to promise always to use a condom, though mercifully we find that Michael doesn't die of AIDS).  

Andre grows up a lot because of his experience in the past though, realizing that instead of just drifting along with parental expectations (in this case, medical school), it's better to find your own passion.  Believably, he doesn't in fact find his (except romantically), but it's a good message for teens regardless. 

It was really nice to read about a likeable gay boy supported by his family finding love!  So read it for that, not because you like time travel, which exists here primarily in the service of romantic entanglement (that being said, the time travel did a good job making the entanglement interesting!)

All Our Hidden Gifts, by Caroline O'Donoghue

 

All Our Hidden Gifts, by Caroline O'Donoghue (June 8th 2021, Walker Books US, YA), is a story of magic and growing up/friendship/love all twisted together with darkness....It is an excellent read!

Maeve is a rather difficult teenager.  The youngest of a large Irish family, she feels that she's a failure--she's not particularly gifted, and isn't doing well at the small and expensive Catholic girls school she goes to, partly because academic work doesn't come easily, and partly because she's uncooperative.  She's barely part of a medium- grade social level at school, and this she only achieved by cutting off, very cruelly, her best friend from childhood, Lily.  Lily's eccentricities made her unacceptable to the other girls, and by extension, to Maeve as well (and indeed, the "licking strange things" game took weirdness to a level I'd have been uncomfortable with too when Lily, no longer a little kid but a young teenager, licked a boy's neck...).

The story begins with Maeve being punished by the school with the unpleasant task of cleaning out a basement storage room.  There in the junk she finds something that changes her life--a deck of tarot cards.  Maeve, intrigued, studies tarot, and finds she has a gift for seeing the connections and meanings in the cards.  Soon all her classmates are hounding her for tarot readings.  Fiona, a theater girl who Maeve had never given much thought to, takes an interest, and soon is acting as Maeve's booking agent and is becoming a real friend.  

But when the other girls pressure Maeve into doing a reading for Lily, who doesn't actually want anything to do with it, things go terribly wrong.   A truly disturbing card that shouldn't be in the deck, the Housekeeper, shows up.  Lily demands Maeve tell her what it means, and when Maeve can't, the tension builds.  "I wish I had never been friends with you," Maeve snaps.  "Lily, I wish you would disappear."  

And that is just what happens the next day.

Maeve, Fiona, and Lily's non-binary older sibling, Roe, set out to work through the dark magic at work and bring Lily back.   But this isn't the only darkness that's entered their lives--a fundamentalist cult is at work in town, violently preaching a return to "values."  And complicating things still further, Maeve and Roe are falling in love....while Maeve keeps from them all the cruelty she's dealt Lily over the past few years, and her final words.

As they plunge deeper in the the mystery of the Housekeeper card, and her own dark history, the truth of what they must do emerges, and it is terrible....

While all the while being a tremendously gripping read!  There was much I enjoyed and appreciated.  Maeve isn't exactly likeable, but she grew on me, and she and her friends are vividly real and engaging.  The tarot cards and Maeve's readings were fascinating.  The bigotry (Fiona is half Filipina, and this has presented challenges) and violent homophobia (not only impacting Roe, but also Maeve's lesbian older sister), though magically fueled, heighten the tension of their quest beautifully (and I appreciated that this realistic part of the story isn't magically fixed at the end).  The hidden gifts referenced in the title didn't quite work for me, because they seemed unearned and to inexplicable, but they do set the stage for more about these four kids, and that's a good thing.

If you are a fan of teenaged girls in the real world acquiring magical powers and having to learn quickly how to use them in desperate circumstances, or a fan of girls who have been really, deeply unkind to people during dark young teen times and then work hard to make up for it, or a fan of kids who don't follow the neat path of parental/societal norms, and find each other, or a fan of love stories between difficult girls and beautiful non-binary musicians, or tarot cards, or all of the above, this is one for you!

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

The Electric Kingdom, by David Arnold, for Timeslip Tuesday

The Electric Kingdom, by David Arnold (YA, February 2021 by Viking Books for Young Readers), is my time travel book this week, and this is one of my Timeslip Tuesday posts where the fact that the book has time travel is something of a spoiler, so sorry about that.  On the other hand, the reason I checked it out of the library was that it came up in my catalogue search for new time travel, so I went into it knowing...and I don't think it materially affected my reading (there are lots of hints).

So the world has been overtaken by swarms of hideous flying insects, who leave only the bones of their victims.  Humanity didn't stand much chance; there are only scattered survivors, living in the ruins of civilization, always fearful that a swarm might come their way.  One small family (father, mother, daughter Nico) survived holed up in a New Hampshire cabin, relying on mysterious deliveries of supplies dropped off at their door.  Nico grew up with her father's stories, and his favorite books.  When she was 18, her mother died, and her father sent her on a quest straight from the stories--to find the Waters of Kairos in the city of Manchester.  With her faithful dog, she sets out to find the river that will take her to the city.

Her journey takes her into dangers, not just from the swarms, but from people too.  And also, for the first time in her life, she meets people who aren't her family; not many, but enough so that she is no longer alone.  She is loved, and loves in return, but there is no place in this nightmarish world to stop and live.  And when she reaches the Waters of Kairos, she must leave her old life behind.

Ok,  before I get really spoilery, so I'll quickly share my overall thoughts.  I'd give this two stars for personal reading pleasure--the first two thirds are not only grim and horrible, but didn't seem to be moving toward a place of hope.  It was a slog of discomfort, punctuated by horrible things.  I'd give it four stars, though, as a complete, tricksy and twisty and weird has heck whole.  Once a key turning point was reached, I found it much more interesting, though still not cheerful.  The last 100 pages were quick reading, all absorbed flash bang immersion, and the things that are revealed spilled over to the early parts of the story, illuminating certain things in hindsight (making the reading experience itself a kind of brilliant time travel as one went back and considered things).  

But there is real, honest a goodness, time twisting happening here.

"Kairos" might have rung bells for you; it did me mainly because of Kate Milford's Kairos Mechanism. It is a time twisting sort of thing.  And when Nico goes through the water, she finds herself, still embodied as her 19 year old self, at the time and place of her own birth.

Waiting for her are detailed books left by previous Nico's, over a hundred of them, who had done the same thing.  So she sets to work again, knowing what didn't work, and knowing that her best chance of using her once again new opportunity is to make small changes that can nudge things (attempts to keep the fly apocalypse from happening, for instance, didn't work).  And so it's not a happy ending, but not a desperately sad one, although to call it an "ending" is a bit of a stretch....

In short, it's a ground-hog day sort of time travel, but every rerun there's a grown up Nico, who knows she has 19 years of life, and a new baby Nico, so always two of them at once, both of them with free will.  Every one else she knows is also set back to 19 years ago, which sucks for her.  

So not one I enjoyed exactly, but one that gradually hooked me, which will stay bright and clear in mind for a long while.  In part this is because I have lots of questions--the Kairos phenomena isn't unique to Manchester, New Hampshire, and one wonders what the heck is really going on and if it will ever end...I wonder if one day old Nico will find a way to keep young Nico from passing through the water, letting her grow up and live...

Time Travel for Love and Profit, by Sarah Lariviere, for Timelip Tuesday

Time Travel for Love and Profit, by Sarah Lariviere (YA, Penguin Random House, January 2021) is a ground-hog day sort of time travel, but with an interesting twist that makes it unique.

Nephele is starting her freshman year of high school with her best friend, and so isn't worried that she's a social awkward math prodigy with no other social network, taunted by other kids for her hairy arms.   But then her friend dumps her, and she takes a nose dive into self pity.  When she finds a book called "Time Travel for Love and Profit" in her parents' used bookstore, she's inspired.  Clearly what she needs to do is restart freshman year, and this time do it as a cool kid.

So she invents a time travelling machine, and sure enough, there she is starting freshman year again, this time with cool clothes and shaved arms, determined to crack the popularity code.  It doesn't work.  So for the next ten years, she keeps on trying.  

But there's a terrible twist to it--although she herself stays fourteen, everyone else is growing older, and though she herself remembers everything, the time travel works by messing with the minds of those around her.  Her parents have blurred out her date of birth, for instance, and even worse, they start to freeze when she presses them on this and other issues.  Solving the time travel problem doesn't leave her much time for friends, and she's still just as obsessed and social awkward as ever, so nothing is any better.

Then in the tenth try (after the first few tries, the rest are just referenced in passing...), two new kids show up at school, and for reasons that escape her, they are determined to make friends with her.  And they succeed, and Jazz, a great kid with a sad past of his own, becomes more than just a friend.  So Nephele is faced with a choice--keep redoing her life to try to fix the mistake that's snarled her parents minds, watching them age, loosing friends, and seeing people she cares about die, or accept that this is now the life she's going to live....

Nephele still has lots to learn about life, but her story ends on a hopeful note.

She's an interesting protagonist, not immediately appealing, but as the reader gets to know her better, increasingly sympathetic.  And when her social world starts opening up, the two new kids and the progress of their friendship make it a much warmer story.  There are lots of little humorous bits, and lots of though-provoking bits, that helped keep my reading momentum up even when I was wondering if I would loose patience with Nephele's continued do-overs.  

It's very odd time travel, in that Nephele is the only one caught in the quantum entanglement she's created.  She is resetting herself, but not the outside world, which is marching on.  Places she knew aren't there any more, smart phone technology is evolving, and of course there's the discomfiting fact of seeing others get older.   

It's a YA book, but one I think kids in 7th and 8th grade would especially enjoy--they're still at the beginning stage of figuring out who they are, and will probably find Nephele more relatable than older readers.  It's a blatant affirmation that being a weird kid is ok, and if you look for other weird kids you can find your people, which can be a useful message.  

Recommended for those who like "high school coming of age from friendless geek to more confident friended person who is still weird" stories, who have a tolerance for high level theoretical math painted with broad brushstrokes....Not recommended so much for those who like everything to make sense and who need firm closure.

Mary: the Adventures of Mary Shelley's Great-Great-Great-Great-Granddaughter, by Breat Grant and Yishan Li

Mary: the Adventures of Mary Shelley's Great-Great-Great-Great-Granddaughter, by Breat Grant and Yishan Li (YA, Six Foot Press, October 2020), is a fun graphic novel, great for Halloween reading, or any time, really.

16 year old Mary Shelley has no interest in carrying on the family tradition of being a writer; living with a mother who's a famous author who puts her writing ahead of everything else has soured her on it.  But she can't escape her Shelly heritage.

The first sign of strangeness comes when the frog she's dissecting in biology class jerks to life.  Mary tries to explain it away.  But when a rather cute (though strangely pale) boy shows up, asking her to sew his foot back on,  Mary can't pretend things are normal.  When more monsters start showing up at her house, asking for medical care, she fights against her new calling as their doctor, though slowly she finds herself accepting and using her gift.  Then things get even more complicated when demons begin to object to her work, and come after her...(her mother's objections are a lot easier to dismiss).

Though I found the story telling a bit choppy at times, and even had check to make sure I hadn't missed anything, I enjoyed this (I'm not a great graphic novel reader, so I think experienced fans of the form might find it smoother sailing).  The plot was gripping, and I laughed out loud at some of the snappy dialogue and some of the especially amusing illustrations of the monsters (for instance, the ghost of Shirly Jackson is inhabiting a stuffed bunny rabbit).

Teens feeling pressured by familial expectations, trying to figure out what to do with their own lives, will relate strongly to Mary. Goth girls, especially, will love her.  The artwork was an intriguing mix of dark and bright scenes, adding nicely to the rhythm of the story.  

A strong start to the series, and the revel toward the end about Mary's real world best friend, Rhonda (who is black) makes me think it will get even better!

disclaimer: review copy received from its publicist

Displacement, by Kiki Hughes, for Timeslip Tuesday

Displacement, by Kiki Hughes (First Second, August 2020), is a stunning graphic novel that tells of a girl travelling back to the internment camp where her Japanese great grandparents and their daughter, her grandmother, were imprisoned during WW II.  

The book opens in 2016, with sixteen-year-old Kiku being dragged around San Francisco by her mom, looking for the house where her family had lived before all people of Japanese descent on the West Coast were rounded-up and incarcerated during WW II.  Standing where the house had once stood, Kiku finds herself inside a sudden fog, and when it clears she's in the audience of a violin concert.  Her own grandmother, Ernestina, is the violinist. 

A second "displacement," as Kiku thinks of them, happens soon after.  This time she finds herself in a nightmarish line of Japanese people, herded along while Caucasian men with guns watch them. Meanwhile, on the tv in their hotel room, Kiku and her mother hear Donald Trump railing against Muslims entering the US.

Home again in Seattle, Kiku displaces once more, and this time she's gone so long in the past she thinks she might never get home again.   As Number 19106, she's one of many shunted first to a temporary internment camp, and then sent to the Utah desert where she spends the next year.  Many things are horrible.  The fear and uncertainty weigh heavily on all the Japanese Americans in the camp, and the living conditions are grim. Kiku find comfort in good freinds, which keeps her going.  And she can hear her grandmother's violin, traveling through the thin walls, though their paths don't cross, and Kiku feels reluctant to force a meeting.

When she finally tries to do so, the fog comes back, and she is home again, in time to see more xenophoic poison on tv. Her experience is too vivid to keep to herself, so she tells her mother, and it turns out she, too, had travelled back to the camp.  And the story wraps up with a bit more time slipping, with her mother, to see Ernestina as a grown-up, and finally closes with real world activism by Kiku and her mother, protesting the new versions of internment camps in Trump's America.

Her mother's theory is that the trauma of the experience has left a generational echo, but the time travel is much more physically real than an echo suggest--Kiku comes back from her second slip with a knee grazed by a fall in the past, and her life in the internment camp, a very real, very lived life, is much more than can be easily dismissed as unreal.  The months she spends in the camp, bored, and frightened, making friends (including one girl who I got the impression might, if things had been otherwise, been more than a friend) might be low on action and adventure, but it's tremendously evocative, and Kiku is a very real and believable teenager.  It was bleak, sad, and scary, but not depressing.

In any event, the time travel is a satisfying mechanism for Kiku, and the reader, to visit a dark piece of American's past.  In my own way of thinking about time travel books, I'd classify this as "time travel as educational experience for character and reader,", but it's also, just as much so, the story of a girl in horrible circumstances, making it though as best she can.  

Even though I'm graphic novel challenged (I have trouble making my eyes move from the words to the pictures when I read them), I had no problem following what was happening even though I wanted to read rather than look!  I was helped, I think, by Kiku's hair being lighter in color than everyone else's (her dad is white); it helped my eyes find her quickly in the pictures without focusing (everyone else looked distinct too, but not as immediately so).

I liked it lots!

When the Lyrebird Calls, by Kim Kane, for Timeslip Tuesday

When the Lyrebird Calls, by Kim Kane (Allen and Unwin, 2016) is an Australian time travel novel (marketed as Young Adult, but with crossover appeal to both older middle grade readers (11-12 year olds) and no longer young Adults (over 20).  It won the 2016 Aurealis Award for best Children's Fiction in 2016, and has been sitting in my tbr list since about that time.  One of the ways I comforted myself this past spring was ordering lots of books from overseas I'd been meaning to read, and this was one of them.

Madeline was planning to spend her school holiday having fun with her best friend, an equally sporty sort of girl.  Instead, she's backed off to her eccentric grandmother.  Instead of cricket, she'll be put to home renovation work, and served stomach-turning health food.   But when Madeline is given the task of refinishing an old cupboard, she finds a hidden compartment, in which someone long ago hid a pair of beautiful party shoes.

With the shoes on her feet, Madeleine is transported back in time to 1900, arriving in the garden of the wealthy Williamson family.  Fortunately, the first people she meets are the three younger Williamson sisters, and one of them Gert, becomes her ally and confidant.  A story is concocted to explain who she is, more appropriate clothes are found for her, and before she can really get a handle on what's happened, she's part of the household.

What follows is time-travel tourism--Madeleine is a spectator on the doings of the family--the aunt who's fighting for Women Rights, the father who's caught up campaigning for federation for Australia, the duplicitous shenanigans of the beautiful German cousin, and the more mundane concerns of the girls.  She also is repeatedly struck by the constraints of the time, and by the casual racism.  But she's essentially an onlooker, and so reading the book felt like flipping through pages of sepia photographs.

There was no visceral Wanting in Madeleine's story and no achingly real emotional bonds formed in the past. Though she and Gert are friends, Madeleine sees Gert the way the grown-ups do--the plain, awkward one, who's never as bright and sparkling as her sisters, and never gets past that to what seemed like any actual appreciation or acknowledgement of Gert's finer qualities.  This left the closest relationship Madeleine has in the past feeling a bit like a shrug.  There were no moments of tragedy to tear at the reader, or ringing moments of triumph and personal realization that will change the course of her life.  She comes back to her own time with more interest in the past, and more appreciative that she and other girls can lead an active life in the present, but it all felt a little flat.

I think fans of  historical fiction about unhappy families will appreciate it more than I did.  The writing is fine, the descriptions vivid, and the historical information delivered pleasantly,  but it just didn't work for me.

The Last Lie, by Patricia Forde

The Last Lie, by Patricia Forde (August 1, 2020, Sourcebooks Young Readers), is the sequel to The List,* the story of the girl who's the keeper of words in a dystopian future society where language for the majority of the people living in  the city of Ark is limited to 600 words.  Letta loves words, and takes her job as keeper of them seriously.   In the first book, she escapes Ark; now she lives with people who call themselves the rebel Creators, trying to keep culture alive.

When Letta learns that the leader of Ark wants to limit language even further, and when the soldiers of the city move against the rebels, capturing her friends, she is compelled to act to free her friends in particular, and her people more generally from a wordless subjugation to tyranny.  She has her good friend Marlo on her society, and together they make a dangerous journey outside of their familiar world, finding dangers and allies.  But the rebels are outnumbered, and in the end it's up to Letta to use her words to tip the balance in favor of freedom.

Letta's a great character, full of understandable doubt as to what she is able to accomplish.  She doesn't see herself as a leader, and often her heart rules her head, causing her to make choices that are not always the safest.  But she's able to step into the role required of her with great bravery, and she's always true to her personal commitment to keeping words from being lost.

It's a gradual build up to the excitement of the end, when introspection and journeying becomes direct action, so a bit of patience is needed.  And it certainly is a book that will work much better for those who have read The List; lots of things won't really make sense otherwise.

The List was solidly a middle grade book; here Letta is preoccupied by her feelings for Marlo in a way that's pushing more YA-ward, making this a great pick for readers of 12 or so, moving from mg into YA.  More generally, anyone who's interested in how controlling language can control people will be fascinated.  That would be me, and my favorite part of this book was Letta's preoccupation with words--collecting them, taking comfort from them, and being determined to pass them on.

*The List was first published in Ireland as The Wordsmith, and The Last Lie was originally Mother Tongue.

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher.

The Map of Stars (York #3), by Laura Ruby, for Timeslip Tuesday

If you are new to Laura Ruby's York series, it's a bit of a spoiler to see this third volume labeled a time travel book. If, however, you've reached the end of the second, you'll recall that in the course of following the mysterious clues of the Morningstar Cipher, that has sent them diving into New York's past, and into danger, twins Tess and Theo found a picture of their older selves from the 19th century....and have no clue how that happened.

This is where The Map of Stars begins (Walden Pond Press, May 2020). Tess, Theo, and their good friend Jaime have made considerable progress unravelling the cipher, and have "borrowed" the many tangible bits and pieces of strange and interesting stuff they've found along the way. The path ends with a set of plans, and all the things they need to build it...All along the way, greedy and powerful men and women have been working against them, and strange and unexpected allies, both living and dead, human and not, have come to their aid.

This third book has just as much tension as the first two, but ratcheted up a notch. As well as the physical dangers of their antagonists, there are glimpses into another timeline, in which the twins, now older, live in our own world a few years in the future, and is a sad and scary place....So yes, there is time travel, in this case as a fixing mechanism that creates a new timeline. I was able to make sense of it all, once I figured out what was happening. It's more time travel in the function of plot than time travel that shows the past, or shows the characters coping with it, but that's fine. The plot and the great characters and wonders of the alternate New York are plenty!

The books are long (this one is 514 pages), and very detailed, and having read them over the course of several years as they came out, I found my memory spotty, which was a nuisance, though Ruby does a solid job making sure the important events/clues/characters, etc. are reintroduced. Not all middle grade kids will have the reading stamina to make it to the end. But for strong readers (of all ages) who love books with smart kids and treasure hunts, this series is a treat! There's humor and lots of bright and sparkly stuff, entertaining interactions between characters, and strong messages of social justice that make the pages turn quickly.