The Future Of Us – Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler

Review: While this book got high ratings, The Future Of Us has undergone major criticisms from readers and reviewers alike. The common complaint has been that it does not touch enough on love. It doesn’t make you want the main characters to fall in love and get together. And yes, that’s true. But I think that those people are missing the point. It’s not a sappy romance. It’s real. My view on the book is this: it isn’t a LOVE STORY, it’s a love story. And the sad fact is, that the LOVE STORIES we love to hate are the very love stories that have driven so many people to dislike this book.

You could read this to grandma or little sis without much trouble. (teen drinking, very minor sexual elements, language)We can moan on and on again about how a shirtless pirate rescuing a maiden in disgrace is cliche and boring, but those are the love stories we like to hear, because everyone wants to believe it’s that easy. But this story is real; the romance is accurate, and true to emotion, and it portrays a very accurate view of how foolish and self-centered Facebook would look, if the nineties could see it. In fact, that is how we ourselves would see Facebook, if we took a step back.

Both of the writers have written fantastic books in the past, and I think that the concept is well developed and interesting. But Jay Asher wrote Thirteen Reasons Why, which topped the bestseller list, inspired remarkable and much-needed controversy, and remained in hardcover far more than a year after the customary paperback release date. Carolyn Mackler’s The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things was on 2006′s “most challenged books” list, was banned,  won the Michael L. Printz award for honor books, and is an ALA best book for young adults.

The credentials of the authors alone recommend the book. Authors don’t write without a purpose. They write insightfully, having put great detail and thought behind their words, and I think The Future Of Us has a lot to offer.

I enjoyed The Future Of Us. I would give it to my sister, my friends, my aunt, my mother, my grandmother, my brother, nephew, uncle or son. The material was not controversial, and there were almost no elements that could be considered disturbing.

Summary:

Emma and Josh have been next door neighbors for a long time. So when Emma gets a computer, Josh brings her an AOL (America Online CD-ROM) that his family wasn’t going to use.

Emma logs on and hooks up the internet. It’s 1996, but somehow, when she gets on the internet, she’s connected to her Facebook page… 15 years later. Emma thinks, at first, that the page is a practical joke from some not-so-funny guy trying to freak Emma out about her (not-so-perfect) future. But she soon discovers that this is not a joke, and even the slightest change in her daily life affects the one she lives in the future.

Emma tells Josh and they discover that Josh has a Facebook too: he winds up married to the hottest girl in school, Sydney Mills.

The Josh and Emma of the past would have teamed together to change Emma’s future and stay Josh’s, but Josh is in love with Emma. And Emma knows it, but isn’t sure how she feels about Josh, except afraid of losing him. So while Josh makes semi-frantic attempts to “meet” Sydney, Emma panics about her future, trying to change it, and Josh panics about Emma’s changes affecting his future.

Emma and Josh, and their friends Tyson and Kellan go to a bonfire on the beach, where Josh hangs out with Sydney. Emma leaves early and goes home. She hears Josh arriving home, and, realizing that she misses him, does nothing. But Kellan comes roaring up a minute later with Tyson, and plans of kidnapping Emma and Josh for a fun night out on the town, where Emma and Josh discover that they may have feelings for each other after all.

The Magicians – Lev Grossman

Review: The Magicians is Harry Potter and Narnia rolled into one. But it’s more than a children’s book; it’s like Harry Potter for adults. It’s Narnia; but it’s a Narnia where the creatures are ruled by an evil force so much worse than a witch, where things don’t always work out, and there is no overwhelming good to work towards. Depression, violence, drugs, and alcohol are common

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elements, and death is an all too common tragedy. Lev Grossman is audacious; I can think of very few authors who are willing to take an overwhelmingly popular idea (wizard school) and make a darker, deeper, more intense, genuine version that rings true for people everywhere. In The Magicians, magic is hard. And dangerous; make a wrong move, use magic too advanced for you, ask too much of yourself, or not enough, and you will fail, or become a creature you never imagined in your worst nightmares. Lev Grossman has created a world that very few people would choose. It’s a difficult life. It’s not a choice, and failure is inevitable. What you want to happen doesn’t happen. Lev Grossman is brave. He follows his instincts, and he writes what he wants to write, not what people want to hear.

I would give this book to a teenager, to my aunt, my parents. I wouldn’t give this book to a younger child. My grandma could handle it, but I doubt that she would like it.  However, my young, hip aunt is the one who recommended it to me!

Summary:

The Magicians is comprised of three books.

In book one, Quentin finds out that he has magical powers. He arrives at a interview with a Princeton alumni to find him dead. The pretty young nurse gives him an envelope that leads him into a small, undeveloped garden in New York. As he walks further, he realizes that it’s not possible for him to have walked this far in the middle of New York. He notices that the sun has changed, that it’s in the wrong position in the sky. And he walks into Brakebills. He is the last of his future classmates to arrive, the last to take the exam.

Quentin passes the exam, and enters his first year at Brakebills. It’s difficult. Magic involves the movement of one’s hands in specific positions. One wrong move, and you can become a creature of dark magic. You can separate yourself from you, become a niffin.

Not too long after the first year starts, Quentin, along with two other students, Alice and Penny, are invited to move up to second year. They start spending time together, studying, and Quentin becomes close friends with Alice. Penny, however, pulls farther and farther away.

Alice and Quentin pass. Penny doesn’t.

Alice and Quentin test again to discover what their specialty is. Alice comes up with Physical Magic. Quentin’s results are inconclusive, and the professors decide to put him in with the Physical Kids.

Alice and Quentin get along well with the other Physical Kids; Elliot, Janet and Josh.

In their fourth year, the students are brought up to the roof and transformed into geese. They fly for months, until they reach Brakebills South, another Brakebills, but set this time at the South Pole. Once at Brakebills South, an intensely difficult study program begins. They are not allowed to speak, to interact with others.

At the end of the program, they are offered an opportunity: to make a journey to the middle of the South Pole. To go five hundred miles, using only magic to feed and keep themselves warm. Quentin takes it, making it all the way to the South Pole.

By the time they graduate, Alice and Quentin have fallen deeply in love.

In the second book, life gets rough. The non-magical world is difficult to live in, and relationships become more difficult too, though the Physical Kids have managed to continue to live together, even after leaving Brakebills.

One night, they throw a party. Alice comes late, and by the time she leaves, Quentin, Janet, and Elliot are all very drunk. Quentin and Janet have sex, and when they wake up the next morning, Penny, from school, has arrived in their living room, talking about magic buttons he has discovered that take him to another world. No one believes him, of course, but once Quentin tries it, he figures out where they are: Fillory, (the Brakebills version of the Harry Potter wizard world) and decides that it is their destiny to go to Fillory.

Upon arriving there, however, they discover that the Fillory of the books they all loved so much as a child is nonexistent, and Fillory is now ruled by an unnamed and evil “Beast”.

In the final battle against the beast, Quentin gets left behind in Fillory.

Can he escape Fillory and make it back to the world that is filled with memories of the girl he loves, or will he flounder in Fillory for the rest of his days?

The Probability of Miracles by Wendy Wunder

Review: The Probability of Miracles explores what’s in a life. Who defines it, and, if you only had one summer to live your life, what would you fit into it?

The Probability of Miracles is heartbreakingly sad. And for that I commend Wendy Wunder, because very few authors are brave enough to end a story on a sad note. Many authors feel that a fairy tale ending is the key

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to a good story, but after reading this book, I think that the opposite may be true.

I know a lot of people who are scared of dying. And that fear stems from the scary invisibility of death. It comes from the idea that you may lose yourself, or someone you love. But for many people,  they are not as scared for themselves as they are for other people. And I think that this holds true and is exemplified in The Probability of Miracles.

This book is full of joy, fear, and a tangible ache as Cam makes her way through what she is sure will be a very short life.

I would give this book to my best friend, or my mother. I would give this to my Aunt, or my fifteen year old cousin.

Summary:

SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!

Campbell Cooper is living with a disease that is beyond curing; neuroblastoma. Neuroblastoma is typically identified as a baby cancer, and in babies, it can be fairly harmless. But in adolescents, it is very difficult to treat, and has a very low rate of successful remissions.

She doesn’t believe in Miracles.

Cam finds a list that she had written with her best friend Lily, a fellow cancer patient. They had called it the Flamingo List, because neither of them liked “Bucket List”. Supposedly, just by writing it down, the list was supposed to come true.

The last item on the list, experiment in petty shoplifting, is the one Cam chooses. She calls Lily from the Dollar Store and asks her what she should steal. They decide on a plastic Flamingo. Having safely escaped the store, however, Cam has a seizure in the parking lot. After narrowly avoiding the manager of the store calling an ambulance, Cam goes home to tell her mother the news.

Her mother can’t accept it. Cam refuses to be treated. One of Cam’s mother’s friends suggests the town of Promise, Maine, as a miracle cure. Without telling Cam, her mother packs them up, and forces Cam to move to Promise, where fields of electric purple dandelions grow on the hills, and flamingos come to nest in February.

On the way, Cam insists on stopping to visit Lily, who has gotten a boyfriend. While she’s there, they get into a fight, and Cam leaves in a huff.

When Cam, her mother Alicia, and her younger sister, Perry, arrive in Promise, they discover that the hotel they had been planning to stay in is closed.

They stop at the lobster pound for dinner, and there they meet Asher, who offers to let them stay at his house. Cam insists that this is a terrible idea, but Alicia decides that this is a town of miracles, and it’s a very kind offer.

They stay at Asher’s. His “house” turns out to be a mansion, called Avalon by the Sea. In her first couple days, Cam manages to cross dabble in some innocent stalking behavior, lose my virginity at a keg party, have my heart broken by an asshole, and crush my little sisters dreams off her Flamingo list.

She gets a job at the vet’s office. The vet, who turns out to be a relative of Asher’s, tells Cam the story of Asher’s family. Cam, who is a hula dancer, improvises a dance as the vet talks.

Cam decides that she has to make miracles for her sister and her mother, who deserve to believe. (what Cam doesn’t see is that the miracles are happening right before her eyes; her
“blueberry spots” (dark spots across the inner side of her arms) have disappeared. She’s living in a house offered to her by a cute boy. She’s got more energy than ever.) Cam’s mother plants a garden. Cam goes out and gets full grown tomato plants and replaces the dying ones with those. Cam’s sister believes in unicorns. Cam convinces Asher to help her steal a donkey from the vet, and ties a unicorn horn to it. Unfortunately, her plan unravels when the “unicorn” runs into the sea and almost drowns.

Cam falls in love with Asher. Asher falls in love with Cam. Cam gets a letter from Lily. It’s Lily’s Flamingo list. Cam calls Lily’s parents. Lily has died.

Cam takes the “Make a Wish” Lily got for her, and kidnaps her little sister in order to take her with her to the wish; Disney Land. She takes Asher and a few friends, and brings her mothers boyfriend home to Promise, where he proposes to Alicia, who accepts.

Cam gets a high fever. She convinces Asher to help her finish Lily’s Flamingo List. They do it. They have a fight. Asher goes out on his boat, and is caught in the perfect storm. Cam’s mother discovers that she’s dying and rushes her to the hospital. The doctor tells them that she’s too far gone. Cam’s mother falls asleep. Asher arrives.

Cam looks out the window.

Bossypants – Tina Fey

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Review: Bossypants was a surprising book, in that you wouldn’t guess in advance what was going to happen. Though, after all, that is the way of autobiographies. The events were logical, and each transition from one piece of her life to the next was clear. What happened made sense, for the most part, and it was fairly sequential, but you wouldn’t have anticipated it.

There were patches of the book that made me laugh out loud, and some so utterly sweet and sincere that it was almost surreal. Which makes sense, in the terms of what the book is: an autobiography. It’s a book in which you step into another persons life. I guess, in a sense that all books are that way. But at the same time, this is much more personal. You’re living a life that has already been lived, that exists in more than the author’s head and your imagination. Every time I read an autobiography, I am amazed at the skill that puts the book together. How do you write a life? How do you choose the most important things, the things that make you who you are, and patch them together in a way that others will understand? How can you let yourself let people in that much, into your innermost thoughts and feelings, your successes and failures?

Tina Fey’s autobiography is full of feminism, political view, unsolicited advice and witty remarks, all artfully delivered through her self deprecating humor.

Summary:

Bossypants is almost like a collection of essays. It’s comprised of 25 sections, each one about a different phase or an influential event or person in Tina’s life. (I’m not going to talk about each one, but I’ll talk about a few favorites.)

In the first section, Origin Story, Tina explains that she has old parents, which she first discovered when they went to meet her kindergarten teacher and found out that children didn’t have “nap time” anymore. She also talks about her scar, which she got when she was “slashed” in a back alley as a young child. As she was growing up, it eventually dawned on her that the special treatment she was receiving was not simply because she was fabulous, but was compensation for having been slashes. She decided to simply proceed through life as though she really were extraordinary. She explains that really, all of her success has been a wonderful mistake, but she will keep her Golden Globes, nonetheless.

All Girls Must Be Everything is the epitome of feminism.

Tina talks about our expectations of women to look a certain way. She talks about how, when she was growing up, if  you weren’t “hot” you moved on, and didn’t really worry about it. She explains that in our society, if you’re not hot, you’re expected to work on it until you are. Through whatever means necessary. She goes on to say that in our society, every girl is expected to have “Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a Californian tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll boobs.” She poses the questions (and the answer): “How do we survive this? How do we teach our daughters and our gay sons that they are good enough the way they are? We have to lead by example.”

She lists the personal attributes she is grateful for, which I recommend doing. Maybe not on paper. But in your head, anyways, because everyone has at least one thing to be grateful for.

I Don’t Care If You Like It is about how to deal with sexism (or age-ism or look-ism or really aggressive Buddhism) in the workplace. She starts off with an example of her friend Amy, who, while during a brainstorm at SNL did something “vulgar” and “unladylike” as a joke. Jimmy Fallon said to Amy, “That’s not cute! I don’t like it.” Amy responded by saying, dead-serious, “I don’t ****ing care if you like it.”

The first piece of advice is this: do your thing and don’t care if they like it.

According to Tina, you should ask yourself the question: “is this person between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. If the answer is yes, find something else to focus on. In other words: you don’t care if they like it.

Dear Internet talks about comments made to Tina over the internet. She responds to them with a humorous and artful grace that I only wish I could master.

The Mother’s Prayer for It’s Daughter is a short monologue Tina wrote for her daughter. It details the list of all the things she wants and does not want for her daughter. I highly recommend reading at least this section. Click the picture for a link to an excerpt.

I would give this book to a teenage girl or an eighty year old woman. I think it has merit. I think it offers solid views on life in general, and on, especially, how women should be treated.

Before I Fall – Lauren Oliver

Review:

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Before I Fall gives a remarkable sense of the transience of human life, and how precious and unappreciated it is. As much as the main character, Sam, can make you want to slap her, she also makes you want to understand her. But it’s a double edged sword; some people will empathize with Sam. Some will find it hard to feel for her. But Lauren Oliver, master of character development, lets you see through her eyes as much as your own.

Summary:

Sam Kingston and her three best friends rule the school. And I do mean rule (think Mean Girls). The night Sam dies, she and her best friends had been at a party. Drinking. And being cruel to a girl from school, Juliet. They hit something on the road and Sam feels herself dying, and simultaneously waking up again, to the same morning of the day of the accident. At first, she is reckless. She lives with the kind of abandonment that you might have too, if you thought nothing worse could happen to you. But eventually, she decides that she wants to make the world better, and therein is the drive of the plot.

She is determined to save herself. But as she repeats the day of her death six times, she discovers things she never knew before: Juliet is going to commit suicide that night. Anna Cartullo, who is having sex with another girls boyfriend, is a really kind, funny person. That her best friend, Lindsay, is hiding dark secrets and a past with Juliet. That she herself doesn’t really like the person she is. That she’s falling in love, over and over, with a childhood friend, Kent.

And on the seventh day, Sam finds a way to change everything- for better or worse.

If You Liked: If I Stay, Thirteen Reasons Why, Mean Girls (movie), The Running Dream, Uglies, Something Like Fate, Hunger Games

Ten Things We Did and Probably Shouldn’t Have – Sarah Mylnowski

Review:

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This book proved to provide a pretty detailed list of ten things you could do but probably shouldn’t, such as underage drinking, and having unsupervised parties. It’s a personal choice, of course, and April hasn’t really had the ability to make those choices for a long time. So another thing that you could do but probably shouldn’t is anything that has the potential to limit your freedom or your choices. Teenagers make poor choices- that’s probably the understatement of the century. But most of the teenagers I know understand fairly well the consequences behind their decisions. So I guess that even if you’re doing things you probably shouldn’t, you know pretty well what’s behind the doors you’ve chosen to open. It’s almost an inevitability that eventually, somehow, someone will find out, or alternatively, you’ll wish you never had in the first place.

Summary:

When April gets the chance to live with her friend Vi, unsupervised, she jumps at the chance, especially since she has had a ten o’clock curfew since 10th grade. The only problem? April’s dad will never agree to it. So Vi makes a fake email account for both April’s father and Vi’s mother, giving her mother April’s dad’s fake email, and April’s dad gets Vi’s mother’s fake email.

Not too long later, April’s moved in with Vi. She gets money every month, for gas, groceries and rent. April discovers that she does not enjoy grocery shopping, but does enjoy the products, and that she loves cats when she is given a new kitten. They also purchase a hot tub (they call it the Hula).

April and her boyfriend Noah had been planning to have sex for a long time, but when April gets scared of getting pregnant, she goes to Planned Parenthood and gets birth control, forcing Noah to wait until it kicks in. They decide to do it on Valentine’s day, and Vi loses her virginity the night before – Friday the thirteenth.

April’s cat gets run over and she borrows three thousand dollars from a potential drug dealer in order to pay for his surgery.

April’s best friend Marissa comes to stay with them when her parents tell her she can’t go to Israel that summer with her boyfriend (Marissa goes to Jewish Camp).

The night of April’s birthday, Vi decides to throw a wild party and charge admission and snack costs in order to help pay back said drug dealer for the cat.

The drug dealer turns out not to be a drug dealer (he’s a babysitter), April gets an STD, breaks up with Noah, moves out of Vi’s, and goes to live with her mother and brother in France.

If You Liked: Amy and Roger’s Epic Detour, Suzanne Colasanti(author), Jenny Han’s summer series, The Lying Game

Never Sit Down in a Hoopskirt and Other Things I Learned in Southern Belle Hell – Crickett Rumley

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Review:                                                                          In Never Sit Down in a Hoopskirt, I found that both humor and sadness were a common element found in every chapter. They were intermingled together in a way that way satisfying and amusing both, and the main character, Jane, is just the sort of person everyone envies for their witty remarks and clever comebacks. Jane makes you wish that she was a real person, that she was your best friend, sitting next to you and saying things like “Great thorn on a thornbush!”, as many great characters do.The whole book comes across with a very genuine, sarcastic tone that sets the stage for Jane and the Magnolias.

Summary:

When Jane gets kicked out of her thirteenth boarding school, her grandmother convinces Jane’s father, who she calls Cosmo, to let her come back to Bienville and finish senior year with a tutor. When Jane arrives, she is harangued into competing to be one of the “Magnolias” – a group of five girls and an alternate who dress up in “antebellum dresses” (think Scarlett O’Hara), and talk to people about the “rich history of Bienville”.

To her horror, Jane is selected to be a Magnolia, and begins the rigorous process of Magnolia training. She soon finds that her un-southern-belle-like attitude will get her in trouble, and when she and another girl, Brandi Lyn, who cannot afford to buy the Magnolia dress are given the suggestion that they quit the Magnolias, Jane refuses for both of them and decides to find a way for them to stay in the Magnolias. And she does- in the form of an old friend, Teddy Mac, whose mother is the richest woman in Bienville. Teddy, who Jane determines is gay, agrees to help both Jane and Brandi Lyn find a more Magnolia appropriate style.

Jane and Brandi Lyn discover that the change of style and attitude are somewhat interesting changes. They make quick work of the snobby Magnolia girls and even discover that most of them are not so snobby. Brandi Lyn and another Magnolia named Mallory become fast friends, and Jane finds a kindred spirit and ally in Zara, the first African  American girl to make Magnolia Court.

The Magnolia’s decide that their fundraiser should be to help clean up the Bienville coastline from the oil spill that happened a couple days ago. After their first session, the Magnolia’s go to a party and one of them, Ashley, discovers that her boyfriend has been cheating on her.

A couple weeks later, the Magnolia’s have a Mizz Upton (leader of the organization) imposed sleepover, and get drunk. They decide to go give their boyfriends and boy friends a piece of their minds, and Zara, the least intoxicated, drives. However, they go in Magnolia dress, and when a hoopskirt turns on Zara and they get pulled over (driving blind) and arrested (Jane’s big mouth), they have a big fight.

But a couple days later, when Jane and Ashley, the most estranged of the Magnolia’s, become friends, Jane decides it’s time to repare the friendships of the Magnolia court, after which it’s time for the first Magnolia event. Jane pulls a few strings… and saves that too.

If You Like: Beauty Queens, Libba Bray(author), Lauren Myracle(author), E. Lockhart(author)