The Unexpected Everything by Morgan Matson

The biggest upside of enjoying Morgan Matson's books is that she routinely publishes every year under her name and also under the name Katie Finn. This month, Matson's The Unexpected Everything and Finn's Hearts, Fingers, and Other Things to Cross were published, and while I picked them both up, I read The Unexpected Everything first. 

Teenage Andie has her entire summer already planned out. She's going to attend a prestigious summer program at John Hopkins that will set her up for pre-med and her projected career as a doctor. She's so sure about her own plans, that she feels stressed on behalf of her on-again/off-again Topher, who forgot to secure anything and is going to intern for his father instead. Andie sees the summers between high school as the time to build her resume and the credentials she needs to plan her future. This planning impulse might be an influence of her dad, who is local congressman Alexander Walker. But when a scandal means the congressman has to step down, and the doctor who acted as Andie's referee for the program rescinds his letter, Andie realizes she's going to have to make other plans. She just doesn't expect those plans to be becoming Stanwich, Connecticut's resident dog walker.

Friendship largely shapes the novel, as Andie's tight knit group of friends - Palmer, Toby, and Bri - are together for the entire summer for the very first time. And then there's Clark, named after a superhero and with the same, chunky glasses, who is living in Stanwich for the summer and taking care of Bertie, the dog that comes with the house he's staying in. Clark writes a bestselling series of fantasy novels, and although he's only nineteen, he's achieved a George R. R. Martin level of success, and readers are clamouring for his next novel in much the same way. When Clark and Andie find their lives colliding, they leap into a summer romance, one that is nuanced and exciting.

I flew through The Unexpected Everything. Matson knows how to write YA novels set in the summer, and characters from her other summer novels - Second Chance Summer and Since You've Been Gone - make cameos here. 

Dear Hank Williams by Kimberly Willis Holt

I was lucky enough to hear Kimberly Willis Holt speak at the YA Literature Conference at Louisiana State University last summer. I read her books when I was in elementary and middle school, both Louisiana Sky and When Zachary Beaver Came to Town, so it was fairly exciting to hear her talk about writing and her books during the conference. At a presentation at a Baton Rouge library, Willis Holt read an excerpt from a work in progress, which happened to be Dear Hank Williams. At the time, it was slated for publication in 2015, and it just came out a few months ago. 

Dear Hank Williams is an epistolary novel, although the letters are very one-sided: Tate P. Ellerbee and her classmates have been asked by their teacher to find a pen pal and write to him or her. Tate picks Hank Williams, since she routinely hears him singing on the radio as part of the Louisiana Hay Ride. She doesn't seem bothered that he doesn't write her back, but continues to tell him about her family and her life in Rippling Creek, Louisiana. It's just a few years since WWII ended (the book is set in 1948), and Tate's teacher's suggestion of the class writing to Japanese pen pals is not met favourably by everyone. Tate writes, "Mrs. Kipler's brains must have frizzled from her last perm. We just got out of a war with those folks. I'm not about to share my life with the enemy. I remember when I was four years old, the soldiers from Camp Claiborne marched past our house in the mornings. Aunt Patty Cake would have a pot of coffee ready for them. Before we saw them, we heard the stomp, stomp sounds of their boots pounding the road. When we did, we'd walk outside, Aunt Patty Cake with the coffee, Momma with the cups and cream, and me with the spoons."

She lives with her Aunt Patty Cake and her Uncle Jolly (they are brother and sister), who is consistently bringing home new women to date: "We know Uncle Jolly has had his heart broken when we discover sofa cushions scattered on the floor and Aunt Patty Cake's straight chair pointing legs up. He leaves a trail through the mess where he's staggered to his bedroom. Aunt Patty Cake calls it 'Jolly's Path of Heartbreak Destruction.'"

When Willis Holt spoke about the book, she said it was strongly influenced by her discovery of the Goree Girls, a women's singing group from Goree State Farm, a women's prison in Huntsville, Texas. They were popular, received fan mail, and got radio play. Tate's mother is a Goree Girl, although Tate pretends to Hank Williams that she is an actress in Hollywood. There are many secrets like these; Tate is an incredibly unreliable narrator. 

I didn't like Dear Hank Williams as much as Holt's other novels, mostly because there seemed to be so many surprised reveals that clashed with the truth as Tate told it. But the Louisiana setting, the epistolary format, and Tate's nuanced voice makes this book well worth the read. 

No One Else Can Have You by Kathleen Hale

Aside from Wendelin Van Draanen's Sammy Keyes mystery series, which is aimed at slightly younger readers (middle grade rather than high school) I can't think of too many YA mystery novels of the whodunnit variety. Kathleen Hale's No One Else Can Have You is a fantastic YA mystery, and Hale gained notoriety in 2014 for more than just her first novel. In an article for The Guardian, Hale admitted to tracking down and stalking a critic, who gave her book one star on GoodReads. The fallout led to the creation of the Twitter hashtag #HaleNo, as other authors, bloggers, and readers responded to Hale's article. Hale is originally from Wisconsin, and is engaged to the hilarious writer Simon Rich. 

No One Else Can Have You is firmly in the same category as Fargo, the 1996 film directed by the Coen brothers, and the 2014 reboot, a TV show on FX. Even the cover art bears similarity to both the movie and TV posters, knit detail of the title and the implication of murder. The novel is set in Friendship, Wisconsin, and the dialogue is peppered with "you betchas" and "doncha knows."



Kippy Bushman is the sixteen-year-old detective in the novel, and her quirky and abrasive personality means that she is probably not the best person to investigate the murder of Ruth Fried. Ruth was found in a corn field behind Kippy's house, murdered in a gruesome and horrific way. She was on her way to Kippy's house for a sleepover - the two were best friends. 

After Ruth's death, Kippy is given her diary with the job of censoring it for Ruth's mother. Basically, this means taking a Sharpie marker to any parts that allude to Ruth's sexual history. After transcribing a few messily- written entries, Kippy finds that she'd have to Sharpie through most of the diary in order to do a sufficient job. 

But Kippy also finds out that maybe Ruth didn't like her as much as she always thought she did. Many of the diary entries focus on Kippy as Ruth writes, "Kippy is so pathetic it makes me nauseous…If we lived anywhere else, like any place remotely interesting, I'd have way more options, and she and I wouldn't even know each other." Police sheriff Staake (pronounced "Steakey") immediately pins the murder on Ruth's boyfriend Colt, but Kippy thinks that's mostly because of the fact that Colt slept with the sheriff's daughter. Kippy ends up teaming up with Ruth's brother Davey, who is just back from fighting in Afghanistan, to find the real murderer. 

There are tons of laugh-out-loud lines in No One Else Can Have You. Kippy is a truly fantastic narrator and even the secondary characters add something great to the story. For instance, Kippy's dad Dom, a middle school counsellor who lounges around the house in bathrobes, even when Kippy has company. When Kippy requests a salad for supper, Dom's at a loss for how to make one (Friendship is a hunting town, and everyone has freezers full of meat). He throws a bunch of almost-veggies into a bowl: "First bacon bits, which we usually use on our baked potatoes, then cheese - lots of shredded cheese. He rips open a bag of frozen peas with his teeth, then goes to the pantry and gets canned tomatoes, and dumps those in, too. Before you can say 'Gross,' he puts the whole thing in the microwave, beeps in five minutes, then turns around with his arms crossed, looking proud." Even the Fried's dogs are characters, "some kind of Great Dane/Saint Bernard/werewolf hybrid." Kippy remembers, "the first time I came over, we pulled up in Mrs. Fried's truck, and my first thought upon seeing them was 'We might not be able to kill those things with the car.' I envisioned them bouncing off the fender, getting up, cracking their knuckles, and then diving through the windshield to eat our necks." Their names are Pasta Batman and Marco Baseball, causing Ruth to quietly explain to Kippy, "Davey and I named them when we were so young we were still a little bit retarded."

There was only one place where the novels lost me, when Kippy is placed in a mental institution with a third of the novel left. It seemed like a placeholder to press pause on the narrative, delaying the reveal of the murderer. But overall, No One Else Can Have You is a great YA mystery, with an unforgettable narrator in Kippy Bushman. 

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart

After reading We Were Liars, I ordered E. Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. I'm a little late to reading the book; it was published in 2008, when it was also recognized as a Printz Honor Book and a National Book Award Finalist. I'd seen the cover at bookstores numerous times before - the original, baby blue cover with an envelope in the middle - so many times that I was actually sort of confident that I'd read it already. But when E. Lockhart's books dominated much of the discussion between teachers and librarians at the YA Lit Conference at Louisiana State University, especially The Disreputable History, I realized I had not, in fact, read it at all, and so I ordered it from the University of Lethbridge Bookstore about a week ago. 

Frankie Landau-Banks is a sophomore at the prestigious boarding school Alabaster, located on the east coast of the United States. Her older sister Zada graduated from the school the year before, and now she's headed to California to attend Berkeley. Zada was the key to Frankie feeling like she belonged at Alabaster in her freshman year: she sat with her sister at lunch, met some of the junior and senior students, and felt like she belonged at the school from the start. So by the time Zada leaves, Frankie is well established at the school and has friends of her own. And over the summer, she's transformed physically, as Lockhart describes, "Between May and September, she gained four inches and twenty pounds, all in the right places. Went from being a scrawny, awkward child with hands too big for her arms, a frizz of unruly brown fluff on her head, and a jaw so sharp it made Grandma Evelyn cluck about how 'When it comes to plastic surgery, it never hurts to do these things before college,' to being a curvaceous young woman with an offbeat look that boys found distinctly appealing" (5). At the end of the summer, she has a clue to how her new looks get her attention when she meets a boy on the beach who notices her in her string bikini and takes interest in the fact that she goes to Alabaster.

So when Frankie starts her sophomore year, she's getting the kind of attention that she has never gotten before, namely from senior Matthew Livingston. Frankie knows exactly what to say to him even though "Last year she had been unable to say two words when he was around" (34). They start dating and Frankie has high hopes for this year at Alabaster. That is, until she meets Matthew's best friend Alpha (nicknamed because he's the "Alpha Wolf" of their group, even though he's been away for a year attending public school), who just so happens to be the same boy who flirted with her on the beach at the end of the summer. He pretends not to know who she is, although Frankie knows he recognizes her. 

Frankie soon discovers that Matthew and Alpha are part of a secret Alabaster society called the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds. It's an all-male group, and Frankie hates the feeling of being excluded. She begins to involve herself in the group without any of the members knowing, orchestrating pranks that the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds could never even dream up. 

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks is an incredible book, and Frankie is a character worth reading about. I loved reading about her infiltrating the all-male society, frustrated about traditional gender roles and the stringent rules imposed on males and females. There are some lovely paragraphs about Frankie navigating the space between how she wants to react and how she should react. For example, when her boyfriend Matthew gives her a compliment and she accepts it without feeling self-conscious, Matthew tells her he's glad she's not the kind of girl who can't take a compliment. Frankie doesn't think much about it at the time, but after Matthew leaves she reflects, "A tiny part of her wanted to go over to him and shout, 'I can feel like a hag some days if I want! And I can tell everybody about how insecure I am if I want! Or I can be pretty and pretend to think I'm a hag out of fake modesty - I can do that if I want, too. Because you, Livingston, are not the boss of me and what kind of girl I become" (79-80). 

E. Lockhart has quickly become one of my favorite authors writing YA lit, and I'm looking forward to reading some of her earlier publications over the summer. 

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

There is nothing better for book recommendations than a conference on YA literature. While I was in Baton Rouge, LA last week, I kept a running list of book titles and authors on my phone, adding five or six books to it every day. The YA lit conference at LSU was composed of two keynotes each day presented by an author and an academic, a selection of workshops in the mornings, and breakout sessions in the afternoon. All of these options for learning about and engaging with YA lit were compounded by author readings and receptions in the evenings. My list grew, and on the penultimate day of the conference I put together a sizable Amazon order, timing it right so I'd get home to a big box of books.

E. Lockhart's We Were Liars was by far the most talked about book at the conference. It was cheer-leaded most enthusiastically by conference organizer and professor Dr. Steve Bickmore, and it was one of the first books that made the shift from Amazon Wishlist to Amazon Order when I had a chance to act on all of the recommendations. I read We Were Liars in one sitting, and finished it late last night. 

We Were Liars takes place on a private island off the coast of Massachusetts, anchored by four family estates: Clairmont, Red Gate, Cuddledown, and Windemere. The island belongs to the Sinclairs, an old and moneyed family that summers together, traveling in from New York, Burlington, VT, and Cambridge, MA. Harris Sinclair oversees his family: his three daughters and their collection of dogs and children. Cadence (Cady for short) is Harris's oldest granddaughter, and she recounts the summers from when she was fourteen to seventeen on the island. The summer provides the only opportunity for her to reconnect with her two cousins Johnny and Mirren, and Gat, an almost cousin (his father is in a new relationship with Johnny's mother). Together, the four of them are the Liars.

Their lives are opulent, their summer lives even more so. Lockhart details the rich food and drink served by nameless staff, the endless games of tennis, access to private beaches and long stretches of ocean, and huge houses filled with expensive and beautiful things. Cady's descriptions of life on the island are engrossing and poetic: "That first night, I cried and bit my fingers and drank wine I snuck from the Clairmont pantry. I spun violently into the sky, raging and banging stars from their moorings, swirling and vomiting" (16). She captures the untouchable mythology of the Sinclair family, the stories that are told and retold and whispered about them, the Sinclairs, and the summer of her fifteenth year when everything changed. 

We Were Liars often feels timeless, even though there are technological markers - iPhones and iPads - that set it firmly in the present. Lockhart communicates a sense of out-of-place and out-of-time, using the mythology of the Sinclairs and fairy tale structures to make the island a place removed. And then there is another device that reminds readers of the contemporaneity of the book. So often YA books have references to the classics in them: books like Perks of Being a Wallflower, where Charlie's English teachers passes him titles such as The Great Gatsby, Naked Lunch, and Catcher in the Rye. The references validate canonical texts, and acknowledge that teens reading YA books could also read the classics. But something different happens in We Were Liars. The books that are referenced throughout - those that Cady and her cousins are reading - are not only classics, although Tom Sawyer, Being and Nothingness, and others are there. They are contemporary, they are YA, they are popular titles for teenage readers. While Diana Wynne Jones makes an appearance - Cady gives away her copy of Charmed Life - I was more interested in the presence of Australian author Jaclyn Moriarty. Gat gives Cady a Jaclyn Moriarty book ("I'd been reading her all summer") and inscribes it with "For Cady with everything, everything. Gat" (116). References like these validate YA literature, and acknowledge that teens reading We Were Liars may also have read Jaclyn Moriarty. 

I loved We Were Liars. It reminded me of Daniel Handler's The Basic Eight, which I haven't written about yet but I'm planning to, and The Bell Jar, a strange mix of reality and non-reality barely distinguished from one another.  

The Beginning of Everything by Robyn Schneider

I had been hearing about Robyn Schneider's The Beginning of Everything since January - it was appearing on all of the "best of" YA book lists from 2013, its bright yellow cover page with a winding orange roller coaster always standing out as a visual synopsis of what was between the covers. I bought it just a few days before leaving for Louisiana and the YA lit conference at Louisiana State University. I was thinking that there was no better book to read in anticipation on a conference that was all about books for teenagers than something like The Beginning of Everything. But my sister beat me to it. She started reading it a day before I left, and she insisted that there was no way to put it down after starting it. She said, "A kid gets decapitated a Disneyland, and you can't really leave it on that kind of cliffhanger." True. So I waited a week, and then read it almost in one sitting. 

There's definitely a reason that the book has the alternate UK title of Severed Heads, Broken Hearts...

The Beginning of Everything really does start off with a decapitation at Disneyland. Ezra Faulkner goes to Disneyland with his best friend Toby Ellicott, Toby's mother's attempt at rocketing her misfit son into middle school popularity by sending a group of his "friends" there for his birthday party. When they get there, they go on the Thunder Mountain Railroad, a runaway-train-style roller coaster. Toby and Ezra sit in the back of the car, while the rest of the group sits in the front, and so when a 14-year-old boy from Japan stands up in his seat just before the train careens through a "low-ceilinged tunnel" and he is instantly decapitated, it affects Toby and Ezra differently than their other friends, 

What the news reports didn't say was how the kid's head sailed backward in its mouse-ear hat like some sort of grotesque helicopter, and how Toby Ellicott, on his twelfth birthday, caught the severed head and held on to it in shock for the duration of the ride. (3)

Ezra's point in rehashing this story is that he believes that everyone has a moment in his/her life that changes everything. A personal tragedy, and after which, everything that is going to happen is going to happen. Disneyland was Toby's tragedy - after it happened, he became an outcast; Ezra became popular and the two drifted apart. But The Beginning of Everything focuses on Toby's tragedy. After catching his girlfriend cheating on him at a party in his junior year of high school, Ezra leaves abruptly and is hit by a car that has blasted through a stop sign. He ends up in the hospital, his knee completely shattered, necessitating his use of a cane throughout his senior year at high school. Most importantly, the accident destroys his tennis career: its the reason he's popular at high school, the reason he has the friends that he does, and the way he's convinced he'll get into a good college. His life is changed utterly, and he starts his last year of school in a very different place from where he ended his junior year. The accident, he's convinced, is his personal tragedy.

What it does, however, is unwittingly bring him and Toby back together as friends. He ends up joining the debate team, the one that Toby heads, and joining Toby's group of friends at lunch instead of sitting with his own - athletes, jocks, and the popular girls (including his ex-girlfriend). And in joining the debate team, he meets Cassidy Thorpe, a new girl at school who has an unclear past. Cassidy used to debate, although she insists she won't do it anymore. Instead, she wants to help Ezra get better at it, and so the two become friends as Cassidy tries to teach Toby just how, exactly, to drop in quotations from canonical novels and poetry into his debates:

"There's this poem," Cassidy finally said, "by Mary Oliver. And I used to write a line from it in all of my school notebooks to remind myself that I didn't have to be embarrassed of the past and afraid of the future. And it helped. So I'm giving it to you. The line is, 'Tell me, what is it you plan to do/With your one wild and precious life?'" (114)

Ezra finds out who he is in the aftermath of his own personal tragedy, and begins to navigate the space between his past and future - two very different sides of a coin. He goes on overnight debate trips; flashes Morse code out his window to Cassidy, who lives across the park; avoids his ex-girlfriend; and ultimately learns what it means to recover and move on. As Ezra describes near the end of the book, "I wondered what things became when  you no longer needed them, and I wondered what the future would hold once we'd gotten past our personal tragedies and proven them ultimately survivable" (333). There's no question of why this book was considered a "best of 2013" on so many lists. An interesting and surprising premise (I can't think of any book ever that has started out with a Disneyland decapitation) evolves into the meaning of tragedy, change, and moving on, as Ezra Faulkner leads readers through his truly transformative senior year of high school.

Sorta Like a Rock Star by Matthew Quick

I was introduced to author Matthew Quick through the movie adaptation of his adult novel, The Silver Linings Playbook. I still haven't read that book, although I've slowly been making my way through his other publications since January: Boy 21; The Good Luck of Right Now; Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock; and now Sorta Like a Rock Star. I was lucky enough to see Quick speak at the NCTE Conference in Boston last fall, and while two of his new YA book were on sale at the conference, it's taken me a bit longer to get a hold of Sorta Like a Rock Star (only one Chapters bookstore in all of Alberta has ever had a copy show up as being in stock - in Edmonton - and I finally just ordered it in from Amazon this week). 

Sorta Like a Rock Star is about seventeen-year-old Amber Appleton, a high school student living with her mom in a big yellow school bus nicknamed Hello Yellow. Their belongings are stuffed into garbage bags and stowed in the space under the bus. Amber's mother is a school bus driver, working four hours a day on the school bus route, and then going out to the bars at night. Her mission? To meet a man who will take in her and her daughter, since her last boyfriend ("A-hole Oliver") kicked them both out of his apartment months ago. Luckily, Amber can take some refuge at Donna and Ricky's house - Donna is a high-power lawyer that Amber emulates (she wants to go to Bryn Mawr like Donna did), and Ricky is her son, who is autistic. Ricky is one of Amber's friends, and together (with three other high school boys), they form "Franks Freak Force Federation," named after Mr. Franks, whose marketing classroom at the high school is a refuge for them.

Amber makes the most of her life, following a daily routine that takes her first to Donna's house to shower and make breakfast, and then to school, and then to either visit the Korean Divas for Christ, to battle Joan of Old at the Methodist Retirement Home, or to take her dog, BBB, to visit Ms. Jenny, the small Italian Greyhound that belongs to Vietnam war vet Private Jackson. 

Amber expresses missing her absent father - Bob - who disappeared from her and her mother's life when she was still a baby. And despite her relentless hope and optimism, she is never far from understanding the devastation of her situation:

I cry a lot when I am alone, probably because I am a chick and all, but maybe because I'm not strong like Donna, and I think about stuff too much - like, for example, sometimes I get this idea that my dad has really been watching over me the past seventeen years sorta like a guardian angel or something, only he's really alive and waiting for me to earn the right to have a dad. and once he sees me doing enough good, he's going to run up behind me and surprise me with a big old fatherly hug, picking me up off the ground and spinning me around like in the damn movies. Sometimes, after I have done something pretty kick-ass, I turn around really quickly, because I sorta believe that he might be there ready to hug me. But he never is. (87)

When Amber's tentative hold on her rocky life flails - her life changed utterly one night - she has to rediscover what hope is, and find a way back to her radical optimism. Quick's book bounces back and forth between funny and sad, placing Amber at the center of this story to conduct readers' emotions as they react to her life, her homelessness, her hope.

Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill details the haunting of aging musician Judas Coyne in a truly terrifying ghost story. Until I started reading Joe Hill’s books and comics series, it had been a really long time since I had been actually scared by a book. Growing up, I was always able to read anything in books, it didn’t matter how gross or gory or scary it was. Conversely, I totally could not see gross, gory, or scary on TV or in movies, and at the movie theatre would be the worst thing ever. There were even a handful of book covers that I did not even want to hold onto while I read the story itself, because they were actually too terrifying. I remember when I was nineteen, my boyfriend at the time covered my copy of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in wrapping paper to mask the stitched together smile on the front, possibly the worst book cover ever. I was absolutely terrified by some parts of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, a Jack the Ripper book by Gregory Maguire (who wrote Wicked) called Lost, and Celia Rees’s young adult novel Witch Child, but a lot of time passed between reading those books and finding another book that actually scared me.

Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box did that for me. Main character Judas Coyne used to tour with his death-metal band, and collected a following of fans that continue to send him packages in the mail, filled with the gothic, the gory, and the macabre. He adds these items to his growing collection in his sprawling farmhouse that he shares with his girlfriend, his two dogs Angus and Bon, and his personal assistant Danny. One day, a package arrives at his house looking like any other: a gothic parcel with a collector’s item to add to his strange household museum. He receives a black heart-shaped box with a man’s suit folded inside. Thinking nothing of it, Judas doesn’t pay too much attention to the package, not until he realizes that something else has traveled along with the clothing: the ghost of the dead man who it belonged to.

Opening the heart-shaped box sets off the most horrifying chain of events. Hill’s depiction of Judas’s haunting is so terrifying, drawing together elements of violence, horror, hypnotism, Judas’s past relationships, and death. The supporting characters in this book were actually the highlight for me. Judas’s current girlfriend Georgia (he eschews all of his girlfriends’ names for the state that they’re from) is an amazing character, and I loved that there was such a great female perspective alongside Judas’s. Even Judas’s two dogs are central to the story itself, and how Judas steps in and out of relationships – between his assistant, his girlfriend, his dogs, his fans – is consistently on display in this novel.

Even though I just read Heart-Shaped Box a few months ago, if there was any book that I’d want to read for Halloween, this would be it, and I might even give it a re-read just for the holiday.

Bluefish by Pat Schmatz

I love reading “first day of school” books at the beginning of September, and found Bluefish by Pat Schmatz just in time. Bluefish begins with Travis’s first day at a new school navigating his locker combination: “slowly spinning the dial. Seventeen…back to the left…” Over the summer, Travis has had to abruptly relocate from the small farmhouse that he shared with his grandfather and their dog Roscoe to a new town, a new house, and a new school. And the biggest change of all is that Roscoe isn’t with them any more; Travis couldn’t find him before they had to move, and he holds onto the hope that Roscoe is like one of those dogs he’s read about in the newspaper, those dogs who wander hundreds of miles from an old house to a new one to find their owners. Travis even attempts to speed up the process by leaving school early and walking in the direction of the old farmhouse to resume his search.

Travis’s story is interwoven with Velveeta’s. Velveeta (her real name is Vida) is in Travis’s class, and her journal entries give a first-person account of how she’s dealing with starting a new year of school after a tumultuous summer. She spends most of her time in an abandoned trailer in the trailer park she lives in that once belonged to an older man named Calvin, a place that is “the safest and best place I know.” Velveeta takes refuge from her absent mom and drug dealer brother, and writes, “Everything’s exactly the same except for how much you’re not here. The empty air in this trailer weighs eighty trillion tons, and it’s jumping up and down on my lungs like an elephant on a trampoline. But that beats my creepy brother’s wide-alive air any day. I’m going to stay here until he leaves.”

Both Travis and Velveeta have a secret, and both are trying to come to terms with important events that happened to each of them the summer before. They become unlikely friends at school, and start to ask the right questions of one another. Velveeta learns that Travis can’t read, and with the help of a teacher named Mr. McQueen and Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, they begin to change this. Travis takes much longer to get at the heart of Velveeta’s story, and it isn’t until near the end of the book that he gets a clearer picture of the reality of her life, which he has only seen glimpses of.

Travis and Velveeta are exceptional characters, and both points of view are equally entertaining and interesting. I really enjoyed Bluefish for the way that it explored reading, and especially Travis’s experience with learning how to read as an adolescent. 

Calling Dr. Laura by Nicole J. Georges

Calling Dr. Laura by Nicole J. Georges is a graphic memoir that explores the author learning, from a psychic no less, that her father has not passed away from colon cancer like her mother and sisters have always told her, and follows the subsequent reordering of her understanding of her family. It yokes together the aspects of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and David Small’s Stitches that made them so notable – a careful detailing of the author’s childhood and resulting affect on their future lives as relayed by a loose frame narrative set in a sort-of-present.

The title – Calling Dr. Laura – comes from Georges calling Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s conservative radio advice show (and one of the most hilarious images in the entire book is Georges representation of Schlessinger as the sister in Dinosaurs) as she tries to come to terms with the fact that her mother and sisters lied to her. She includes the transcript of the phone call, having recorded it as it took place. As a character in her memoir, Georges illustrates herself tucking the tape recording of the phone call away and hiding it from her girlfriend Radar.

Georges begins the book in Portland, OR, where she lives with a handful of dogs, chickens, and a new rescue chicken named Mabel. Her artistic style changes as the book jumps back and forth from past to present, and her depiction of her childhood is rendered in a less descriptive and more iconic way, which suits her younger age and the material presented. Georges depicts a series of boyfriends and husbands that her mother was attached to while she grew up, many of them distant and one abusive. Each of these men gives the young Georges a present – a stuffed animal by at least two and a dog from another – and her mother insists that Georges name the gift after the boyfriend/husband who gave it to her. I thought it was hilarious to see Georges’ collection of animals growing, each one named after a man who had quickly been inched out of her mother’s life.

Relationships are at the heart of Georges’ memoir: with her mother, her two half-sisters who are ten and twelve years older than she is, her girlfriend Radar, her close friends, her dogs, and her amorphous, unknowable father. Georges is stuck up in the middle, trying to make sense of how she stands in relation to the people she loves, and how she can carve out her own identity when there are so many different ones that others want her to subscribe to.

It is an intriguing story and beautifully illustrated book. I really loved Georges’ artistic style and the times that she illustrates scenes set in Portland were some of my favorite. Although Dr. Laura is integral to the title, she only occupies a small series of pages near the end of the book (where the transcript of their phone call conversation is included), but her importance to Georges as an outlet for advice at a difficult time is notable. Likewise, the psychic who gets so much wrong about Georges gets one very important thing right – her father is still alive. The ending is almost heartbreaking, and the story as a whole is well worth the read.