Dumplin' by Julie Murphy

Willowdean Dickson, the protagonist of Dumplin', met her best friend Ellen because of Dolly Parton, back when they were kids. Will's aunt Lucy - a Dolly Parton devotee - bonded with Ellen's mom, Mrs. Dryver - a Dolly Parton impersonator - and now Dolly Parton is like the connective tissue of their friendship. Even Will's car is reflective of this theme: it's a 1998 cherry-red Pontiac Grand Prix named Jolene. The book begins with a Dolly Parton quote and describes Will to a T: "Find out who you are and do it on purpose." Will lives her life confidently and fearlessly.

Will lives with her mom, a health care aide by day who is devoted to running and organizing the Miss Teen Blue Bonnet Pageant every year, which has been running since the 1930s. Will's aunt Lucy - her mom's sister - used to live with them, too, but now her room is being cleaned out and Will feels lost without her favourite person in the house.

Will works at a local fast food restaurant called Harpy's, and her classmates crowd in most weekend nights just before midnight to order fries and burgers. She works with Bo, the incredibly attractive guy in the back kitchen. She reflects, "I've had this hideous crush on Bo since the first time we met. His unsettled brown hair swirls into a perfect mess at the top of his head. And he looks ridiculous in his red and white uniform. Like a bear in a tutu." This summer, Bo kisses her outside of the restaurant one night, and they spend the next few months secretly driving to an abandoned parking lot to make out. But Will is increasingly uncomfortable with the way that Bo is keeping her a secret. And Will, who describes herself as a fat girl, hates the feeling of his hands on her body, afraid that he can feel her skin spilling over the sides of her clothing. She breaks it off, and eventually quits her job at Harpy's to cross the street to get a job at the local chilli place.

Fast forward to the beginning of the school year, and Will finds out that Bo has left his private school and now attends her public school, and this time, Will's not the only person who is interested in him. When she decides to enter into the Miss Teen Blue Bonnet Pageant, her friendship with Ellen begins to change, and she finds herself more alone than she has ever been before.

Enter three other girls who are inspired to enter the pageant alongside Will - Millie ("Millie is that girl, the one I am ashamed to admit that I've spent my whole life looking at and thinking, Things could be worse"); Amanda; and Hannah. They become a group worth rooting for as acclaimed author Julie Murphy weaves an incredibly funny, real, and fabulous story with a heaping scoop of romance.

More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera

Adam Silvera's debut novel More Happy Than Not is billed as a cross between the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz. Protagonist Aaron Soto lives in a one-room apartment in the Bronx with his mom and brother Eric. There's little privacy in the living room that Aaron and Eric share for a bedroom, especially when Eric is up all night playing video games. Aaron spends most of his time in the street with his friends, playing games like Manhunt, which involves chasing each other up and down staircases, through buildings, and down alleys. 

The novel starts when Aaron's painter girlfriend Genevieve decides to go away for a three-week art camp during the summer, leaving him alone. Genevieve has been Aaron's life line, getting him through the period after his father committed suicide, and after he got his own happy-face shaped scar on his wrist. 

Even though Aaron has a group of friends on his block, his sort-of-best-friend, Brendan, is busy with other things this summer. Enter Thomas, a kid who lives nearby, who walks into Aaron's life and causes him to question his happiness, and the in-between state he's been living in. Thomas fills an important gap in Aaron's life when his girlfriend is away, and they're inseparable even when she's back. One of the highlights of the novel is the concept of "Trade Dates." Aaron describes them as something Genevieve came up with: she takes him to a place that she knows he'll like, and he takes her to a place that he knows she'll like. Aaron's place is a local comic book store, Comic Book Asylum, which exists behind a door painted to look like a telephone booth. Aaron and Thomas do something like a "Trade Date," too; but because they don't know each other as well, they each show the other a place that matters to them immensely. 

As Aaron and Thomas grow closer, Aaron discovers things about himself that make it very difficult to continue to date Genevieve, and to be only just-friends with Thomas. Aaron decides that there are two sides to this discovery: Side A is that he likes guys instead of girls and Side B is that he likes one guy in particular - Thomas. 

When things fall apart - first with Genevieve, and then with Thomas - Aaron seriously considers getting a new memory treatment offered by the Leteo Institute. It guarantees erasing certain memories that are too difficult. Aaron even knows someone who has had it done. But is it possible to erase Thomas? And what does Aaron lose by excising those memories and pieces of himself?

More Happy Than Not pairs a fascinating idea - the existence of the Leteo Institute, whose services are similar to those offered in Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind - with deft character development. The book continues to built towards Aaron's decision before pausing in the narrative, and exploring where Aaron has been before, and the choices he has made. I read More Happy Than Not almost in one sitting - it's incredibly hard to put down. I highly recommend Adam Silvera's debut novel, and appreciated the preview of his next novel, History is All You Left Me, that is added to the back of the paperback edition. 

Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon

Nicola Yoon’s Everything, Everything focuses on eighteen-year-old Madeline Whittier. She has severe combined immunodeficiency (SCIDS, for short. She describes herself as being on SCID row), meaning she is allergic to the outside world. The house she shares with her mother and her nurse is her entire world, and an illustration that depicts her as an astronaut floating above the earth (81) is one of the most affecting in the novel. Everything, Everything is illustrated by Yoon's husband, David Yoon, who creates hand drawn illustrations of various size throughout the novel. The novel also includes graphs that chart her hourly breaths per minute, IM transcripts, website screenshots, and ticket stubs. 

When new neighbours move in next door to Madeline's house, she begins to want more than her small world provides her with. This is specifically influenced by her neighbour Olly, a teenage boy her age who teaches her that life is more than what she can read about in books. Madeline reads often and reads widely. Because she is homeschooled, her reading list is mostly self-selected. Yet, she still chooses to read the types of books that we would define as canonical, including titles such as William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Albert Camus’s The Stranger, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre. She writes short, one-sentence reviews of these books under the caption “Life is Short: Spoiler Reviews by Madeline,” which reviews Invisible Man as “Spoiler Alert: You don’t exist if no one can see you” (246). Like in Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Jon van de Ruit's Spud, the books she reads (and her interpretations of them) mirror events in her life, and provide her with a literary lens through which to interpret her experiences.

The text itself also engages with a different kind of focus on graphics and images, one less explicit that that provided by David Yoon's illustrations. This occurs specifically when Madeline describes the silence between her and Olly in the following way: “We are awkward together for a few moments unsure what to say. The silence would be much less noticeable over IM. We could chalk it up to any number of distractions. But right now, in real life, it feels like we both have blank thought balloons over our heads” (73).

Everything, Everything follows Madeline's self-discovery, and especially her journey to live her life to its fullest .

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld is the author of Prep, the 2005 novel that largely appealed to both teenage and adult readers. I loved Prep, one of the first boarding school books I'd read that actually covered the four years from freshman to senior year in one book. Others, like Jon van de Ruit's Spud, E. Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks, Robyn Schneider's Extraordinary Means, and Stephenie Perkins's Isla and the Happily Ever After take place over just one year of boarding school rather than all four. 

Sittenfeld's Eligible is a much different book from Prep, and is, as the cover suggests, "a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice" and presents a twenty-first century version of the Bennet family, one that circles around cross fit and yoga, social media and reality TV. Liz Bennet is a magazine writer in her late thirties living in New York and she has just returned home after her father's surgery to help her family with his care. Her older sister Jane, a yoga instructor, goes home with Liz to Cincinnati, a city much slower and quieter than the New York that they've called home for the last few years. The dwindling family inheritance previously supported their interests: "Jane and Liz had always held jobs, but even for them, a certain awareness of the safety net below had allowed the prioritizing of their personal interests over remuneration" (11). Meanwhile, middle sister Mary is taking her third Masters degree online, while younger sisters Lydia and Kitty have joined the cross fit culture. 

In this version of the classic story, Chip Bingley and Fitzwilliam Darcy are doctors - Darcy is a neurosurgeon. Bingley is fresh off of a stint on Eligible, a Bachelor-like reality show on which he did not find love, and he is no less eligible than he was when he was on the show. 

Eligible is a fantastic retelling of Pride and Prejudice; it becomes much more than that by stridently commenting on twenty-first century dating culture and values. It's possible that Sittenfeld mined books such as Rebecca Traister's All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Woman and the Rise of an Independent Nation and Kate Bolick's Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own for Liz and Jane's experiences. At one point, Liz insists that she doesn't want children. She tells Darcy,

If you want, I'll give you possible ways to respond and you can choose the one you like best. A) Oh, Liz, you'll change your mind - you just haven't met the right person... B) But who will look after you when you're old?... C) Yeah, I bet you don't want children, you selfish East Coast narcissist...D) Wow, you childhood must have sucked. Or...E) You just have no idea how rich and wonderful parenthood can be. In fact, you haven't really live until you've wrestled a shrieking four-year-old to the ground at Target. Now, keep in mind, Fitzwilliam Darcy, that you can choose all of the above. (262)

Eligible is an incredibly humorous novel, and thoroughly re-invents the source material for a twenty-first century context. 

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. 

The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan

Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, of fashion blog Go Fug Yourself, wrote two YA novels between 2011 and 2013: Spoiled and Messy. Both focus on teen protagonists and Hollywood culture, and were published to great acclaim. Their newest collaboration is a little less YA and a little more NA (New Adult), and rather than focusing on Hollywood celebrity, they focus instead on royal celebrity. 

The Royal We is a thinly veiled fictionalization of the real-life relationship between Prince William and Kate Middleton. Here, they are Nick and Rebecca Porter (Bex), and the novel begins with their meeting at Oxford and carries them through to their eventual engagement. The engagement is not a surprise. In fact, the novel opens with Bex stating, "If you believe my unauthorized biography, The Bexicon, Nick fell in love with me at a pub on my first night at Oxford, and angels burst into song while rose petals fell from the sky." She is already deeply entrenched in royal celebrity at the beginning of the book, and the focus of the story is instead on building the ups and downs of their relationship, which spans from their auspicious meeting in an Oxford dorm to several years later, when they're in their mid-twenties. Bex has just traveled to Oxford to attend Pembroke College for a term, leaving her family back home in Iowa. Her family has achieved some success through her dad's invention of the Coucherator, a couch with a refrigerator in the bottom. 

While Cocks and Morgan stay fairly close to the real-life material they have to work with - Bex has a sister named Lacey, who is also in the headlines, while Nick's younger brother is Freddie - they do also take opportunities to invent new material and context for the romance narrative. It's also a fascinating look at royal celebrity, both the lifelong scrutiny Nick has received, and new fame Bex experiences by association. For example, Nick tells her, "I feel like I have to be so careful all the time. I have a non-hilarious conversation just once, and then the next day the papers write that I'm 'Nick the Prick,' because I wasn't grinning like a madman. But if I'm having too much fun, I'm a drunken lout." 

Nick and Bex start out as friends; everyone tells Bex that he'll never marry an American. But slowly their romance develops and Bex is whisked into a new world, where she has to worry about paparazzi and gossip blogs. And if Nick really won't marry an American, what happens to the years she's investing into dating him secretly?

The Royal We is an incredibly fun book, not just for the way it mirrors the real-life relationship of Will and Kate, but also as it invents new material and fleshes out secondary characters. But for anyone with any familiarity with the way Will and Kate's relationship tracked from college to the wedding, the novel creates a lot of entertainment by presenting a series of references that do have real-life significance. 

Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

I've passed by the bright red cover of Becky Albertalli's Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda several times while at Canadian bookstore Chapters, but didn't pick it up until now. I really regret not reading it until almost a year after it's April 2015 publication.

Protagonist Simon Spier begins the book by observing, "It's a weirdly subtle conversation. I almost don't notice I'm being blackmailed." The blackmailer in question is Martin Addison "a little bit of a goobery nerd, to be honest," who logs into Gmail after Simon vacates the library computer. Unfortunately, Simon has left himself logged in to his secret email account, the one he is using to email Blue, a gay teenager at his high school. Neither has shared their real identity with the other and the emails provide a place for them both to communicate about their experience. 

Martin takes a screenshot of the emails and threatens to post them to the school's Tumblr, The creeksecrets: "ground zero for Creekwood High School gossip." Simon is not openly gay, and if Martin shares the emails on creek secrets, the school will know immediately. And there's also the fact that Blue will be involved, a relationship Simon doesn't want to jeopardize. 

Simon's narrative voice is so compelling. He's a keen observer. The book bounces back and forth between Simon's narration and the emails he and Blue are sending back and forth to one another, providing readers with "first impression" observations, and also those that are more carefully curated in order to send to Blue. High school drama plays also plays a role, since Simon (and Martin) are involved in the school's production of Oliver! (a play that Jon van de Ruit's Spud also took up). During an early showing of the play to the high school classes, Albertalli's writing becomes so evocative of the high school experience and atmosphere. Her description of a teacher trying to lecture an auditorium filled with high school students took me right back to that experience:

There's this drone of quiet conversation and denim rustling against seats. Someone shrieks with laughter, and someone else yells, "QUIET!" So then a bunch of people start giggling.
"I'll wait," Ms. Albright says. And when the laughter dies down, she holds up the notebook. "Does anyone recognize this?"
"Your diary?" Some asshole sophomore.
Ms. Albright ignores him. "This is the Creekwood handbook, which you should have read and signed at the beginning of the year."
Everyone immediately stops listening. God. It's got to freaking suck to be a teacher. 

As a reader, I was so invested in finding out Blue's real name alongside Simon, but throughout the process, Simon's sense of finding himself takes precedence. Simon's family is just as interesting, and their balance of being both supportive and also over-interested in Simon's life is a strong addition to the novel. 

Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda was such a fantastic novel, and after finishing it, I found a December news article reporting Fox 2000 acquired the rights for a movie adaptation. Simon's compelling observations and wry narrative voice aren't quite over with the end of the book, and I'm looking forward to seeing this novel adapted into a visual format. 

Bone Gap by Laura Ruby

Laura Ruby's Bone Gap is another recent publication with a blurb from E. Lockhart, whose Ruby Oliver series, Printz Award-winning novel The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, and latest hit We Were Liars make her a trusted voice in YA fiction. I did not know what to expect from Bone Gap. It was a recommended title on Amazon, and I ordered it along with preorders for May publications by Sarah Dessen, Jenny Han, and Robyn Schneider. It was completed unexpected: the gripping narrative, magic realism, and compelling characters. I read it in almost one sitting and wanted to share it with everyone I know who reads YA lit right after. 

Bone Gap is a town full of gaps. Things slip through the cracks, and so it's no surprise to the residents of Bone Gap when Roza disappears. She's not from there after all; she showed up one night, and no one thought she would stay. Teenager Finn O'Sullivan knows Roza well. She's been living with him and his older brother, Sean. Finn feels implicated in Roza's disappearance: he was the last person to see her, and he knows his brother can't forgive him for not trying harder to make her stay. But Finn is convinced Roza was kidnapped by a man who moves like the corn. No one believes him, especially because he can't describe him in any tangible way: "The people of Bone Gap called Finn a lot of things, but none of them was his name. When he was little, they called him Spaceman. Sidetrack. Moonface. You. As he got older, they called him Pretty Boy. Loner. Brother. Dude." He's strange, weird, and a little distracted. Ruby writes, 

Eventually, though, they found out that there was a good reason for Finn's odd expressions, his strange distraction, that annoying way he had of creeping up on a person. A good reason he never looked anyone in the eye.
But by then it was too late, and the girl they loved most - and knew least of all - was gone.

Although the novel starts from Finn's point of view, it shifts slowly over the course of the novel. The reader finds Roza where Finn cannot, in a strange, shifting world that she's been taken to before. The novel unravels slowly, moving back and forth between the real and the unreal, slowly becoming more than a work of YA fiction. It rewrites Greek mythology, especially Persephone and Demeter. 

The characters are extremely compelling, especially a girl named Petey, who Finn falls for. Her mom owns several bee hives and has a honey company. She's the strangest looking girl in Bone Gap, but Finn doesn't know that. Small town America starts out realistic, but then becomes strange, and different, and mythical. Ruby's novel is one of the best I've read in a while, as mythology is layered across contemporary young adult experience.

P.S. I Still Love You by Jenny Han

The follow-up to Jenny Han's To All The Boys I've Loved Before was published at the end of May, and has the same fantastic cover art, design, and story as the first book. P.S. I Still Love You picks up right where To All The Boys I've Loved Before left off, over the Christmas holidays at the Covey household. Protagonist Lara Jean has just decided to try to have a real relationship with Peter Kavinsky, after pretending to date him for months. Lara Jean's younger sister Kitty had sent out five love letters that Lara Jean had written to guys she'd previously crushed on. One of them included her sister's not-so-ex-boyfriend. As a way to convince him she had a crush on him in the past, and not the present, Lara Jean starts a fake relationship with Peter, who has also received one of her love letters. But instead of creating awkwardness between them, Peter sees potential instead. Plus he's just broken up with his girlfriend Gen, Lara Jean's former best friend.

Lara Jean and Peter decide to date for real, but they still come up with a handful of rules and make a contract to guide their relationship:

Peter will not be more than five minutes late.
Lara Jean will not make Peter do crafts of any kind.
Peter doesn't have to call Lara Jean before he goes to bed at night, but he can if he feels like it.
Lara Jean will only go to parties if she feels like it.
Peter will give Lara Jean rides whenever she wants.
Lara Jean and Peter will always tell each other the truth.

The contract mimics the one they made to guide their fake relationship, when Lara Jean was bound to attending a certain number of parties with Peter.

But things don't run as smoothly in their real relationship. Not like in their fake one, when neither was as invested in the other. Now, someone has posted a video to Instagram of them in the hot tub on their school ski trip, and it's much more suggestive than Lara Jean would like it to be. It's become a meme, it's been sped up and slowed down, it's been mashed up with scenes from The Little Mermaid. Lara Jean is mortified, although she has a sneaking suspicion she knows who took the video in the first place. Peter's ex-girlfriend, Gen, who can't let him go.

Lara Jean is incredibly insecure about Peter's relationship with Gen, which seems to be ongoing, even though he's with Lara Jean now. He texts her, hangs out at her house, and embraces her in public. It's not until near the end of the novel that Lara Jean realizes, "I want to say, I never cared about your past. But that isn't true. It's only then that I realize: Peter wasn't the one who needed to get over Genevieve. It was me. All this time with Peter, I've been comparing myself to her, all the ways I don't measure up. All the ways our relationship pales next to theirs. I'm the one who couldn't let her go. I'm the one who didn't give us a chance."

In the middle of her turmoil with Peter, in steps John Ambrose McClaren, the last recipient of one of Lara Jean's love letters. He isn't at all like she remembers. She tells him he's changed the most out of all of their childhood friends. There is major potential between Lara Jean and John, and their connection was more interesting than Lara Jean and Peter's in the novel. There is a fantastic party at the retirement home that Lara Jean works at, where her and John come dressed in costume for a USO themed party - by far the highlight of the novel. And back are the generous descriptions of the cakes, cookies, and cherry turnovers that Lara Jean bakes for Peter and her family.

Jenny Han has said there won't be a third book to follow P.S. I Still Love You:

To everyone who's sad there won't be a 3rd Song Girls book, just know that I am working on something new and I think you will love it too!

— Jenny Han (@jennyhan) June 10, 2015

The book ends slightly indecisively, presenting a conclusion for the present and perhaps a difference conclusion for the future. Jenny Han writes an excellent YA romance, and I enjoyed getting to follow Lara Jean's story for an additional book.

Open Road Summer by Emery Lord

Author Emery Lord's debut novel Open Road Summer was published in 2014, and was followed up by The Start of Me and You in 2015. The Start of Me and You was highly recommended by author Robyn Schneider in a video when she raved about the love interest in the YA romance. The book was out of stock at the Lethbridge Chapters, so I picked up Open Road Summer and finished it in almost one sitting. 

Reagan O'Neill is joining her best friend Dee Montgomery on a 24-city-tour for the summer. Dee is a country music superstar who has just used her own breakup with childhood sweetheart Jimmy to fuel enough songs for a new hit album. Think Taylor Swift. Reagan shows up to the beginning of the tour with her broken arm in a cast and her bad-news boyfriend behind her and she's looking forward to a summer away with her best friend. 

But things change when a nude photo scandal lands Dee in hot water, her publicist scrambling for a way out. Enter Matt Finch, singer-songwriter, used-to-be member of the band The Finch Four, "a wholesome teen band that included his sister and two brothers. When we were in middle school, the band was a phenomenon. All three boys were sweet-faced, and they had hordes of screaming preteen fans. All the girls I knew wanted to be Carrie Finch, and they all wanted to marry Matt, the youngest and closest to our age." He's the perfect person for Dee to pretend to have a relationship with while he takes over as the opening act for the entire tour. He's just gone through a break-up of his own.

Lord has written song lyrics throughout the novel, some for Dee and others for Matt, many of which dredge up their previous relationships as writing works as a way to move through the aftermath. Reagan describes the title song from Dee's new album Middle of Nowhere, Tennessee as written for Jimmy:

Middle of nowhere, Tennessee,

Exactly where I want to be.

Our initials carved into the old oak tree,

And every road takes me back home.

Middle of nowhere, Tennessee,

Dancing on the porch, you and me.

This is where I was born to be,

No matter how far I may roam.

The behind-the-scenes of a country music tour include Dee donning a disguise to see Matt play at a bar, stopping at a local county fair, and zipping into gas stations to grab snacks. It's a fantastic romance, a not-quite triangle that combines Dee and Matt's fake relationship and the real relationship developing between Matt and Reagan. Reagan's voice and demeanour makes her one of my favourite characters in the recent YA novels I've read. She's been in trouble, she still gets in trouble, but she's incredibly self-aware about her actions and herself. Lord's writing is pitch perfect. There are so many similes that hang at the end of sentences, never falling into cliche. It's some of the best writing I've read in a YA romance. 

I just picked up The Start of Me and You today, and am looking forward to Lord's third novel, which was recently given a release date for 2016.  Open Road Summer is such an excellent summer read, and Lord is certainly an author I'll be watching for!

The Ring and the Crown by Melissa de la Cruz

It's now about a month into the Audiobook Sync summer reading program. Every week, two free audiobooks are available to download through the website: a YA title paired with a required reading title. Two weeks ago, Melissa de la Cruz's The Ring and the Crown was paired with Margo Lanagan's Sea Hearts. I started with Sea Hearts, not realizing until about fifteen minutes in that I'd already read the book under its alternate title, The Brides of Rollrock Island. So I skipped over to The Ring and the Crown, which was published just last year. It was not what I was expecting at all. The book begins with two epigraphs, one from an Emily Dickinson poem and another from Beyonce's "Run the World (Girls)." The combination of contemporary and historical weaves through the fantasy novel, which is the first in a series. 

The Ring and the Crown presents an alternate history. It's the turn of the century (1900), and war has just ended between the Franco-British Empire and the Prussian Kingdom. The Prussian prince, Leopold, used a very powerful and dangerous piece of magic, The Pandora's Box, to end the war, and now he's betrothed to the Franco-British dauphine, Marie-Victoria, in order to bring peace to both nations. Now, young titled adolescents are flooding London for the Season, each with a different reason for coming to the capital. 

The book trailer for The Ring and the Crown is fantastic at looking quickly at the many characters in the book. Book trailers can really walk the line between cheesy and cinematic, but I like this one for the way that it introduces its main characters:

There's Aelwyn, returning from Avalon to take her place in servitude to the new queen, her childhood friend Marie-Victoria. She's the Merlin's daughter, current magical advisor to the queen. Isabelle is the daughter of a titled French family, and because she was previously promised to Leo, she has come to London to dissolve their relationship so he is free to marry Marie-Victoria instead. Leo's younger brother Wolf fistfights his way across America, kept out of the war against the Franco-British Empire in case something happened to his brother. He comes to London to support Leo, and to determine where his future lies. 

Perhaps the most interesting character (and my favourite) was Ronan Astor, an American girl who comes to London with the intention of securing an engagement with a moneyed lord in order to save her family from bankruptcy. But on the ship to London, she meets an intriguing boy who she whiles away the time with. They never learn each other's true identity, going instead by Cathy and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. 

The introductions to the many primary characters is extensive, made even moreso by the audiobook format. It felt like the story lines would never intersect, because so much time was building backstory for the individual characters. But eventually, everything began to come together: characters met, fell in love, and separated once they were all in London. Everything felt very neatly tied up at the end of the novel, and I'm curious to see where other books in the series will take these characters, or perhaps instead, whether other books will introduce new characters. The Ring and the Crown was an unexpected surprise of a book, and I loved listening to it as an audiobook. The world building is fantastic, and for characters like Ronan, it's so worth the read. 

Extraordinary Means by Robyn Schneider

I've recommended Robyn Schneider's first novel, The Beginning of Everything, to almost everyone I know. It begins with a scene depicting a kid getting accidentally decapitated at Disneyland while riding the Thunder Mountain Railroad (which I used to call "the Runaway Train" when I was little and lived close to Disneyland), but then unravels protagonist Ezra's belief that everyone has a major tragedy in their life, after which, everything changes. 

Extraordinary Means is a different kind of book than The Beginning of Everything, but carries much of the same style, topics, and discussions that were present in Schneider's first novel. 

Extraordinary Means is told from the dual perspectives of Lane and Sadie, who are both living at Latham House, a sanatorium in California for adolescents with tuberculosis. They wear bracelets that monitor the way that their body functions, alerting nurses and doctors when their stats are too low, but otherwise collecting data for a research team trying to find a vaccination that isn't resistant to the new strand of tuberculosis. The benefit of being at a sanatorium such as this is that they will be the first to try the new vaccination when it's available. While the reader is introduced to the sanatorium through Lane, who arrives on the first page of the book, Sadie has already spent months living in one of the small cottages. She's truly made it her home, and she's anxious to think about what exists for her back at home, if she'd ever able to leave.

Lane describes his first night at Latham House as wildly different from what he's used to. For one thing, he has to face the reality that kids his age die at Latham House, and not everyone hangs on waiting for a possible vaccination. He reflects, "My first night at Latham House, I lay awake in my narrow, gabled room in Cottage 6 wondering how many people had died in it. And I didn't just wonder this casually, either. I did the math. I figured the probability. And I came up with a number: eight. But then, I'd always been terrible at math." Lane is ditched by his tour guide on hist first day at Latham House, causing him to "fail" breakfast because he doesn't fill his tray with nutrition-rich foods. But Lane soon learns that he wasn't ditched at all. His tour guide was just another casualty of the disease. He has trouble adjusting to the new environment. He's an over-achiever, used to spending all of his free time studying and preparing for college applications. He's afraid his future is going to slip through his fingers if he actually "rests" like he's expected to do. He's also having trouble adjusting to being away from home. He notes, "I'm an only child, so the prospect of using the communal bathroom was pretty horrifying. Which is why I set my alarm that first morning for six o'clock, tiptoeing down the hall with my Dopp kit and towel while everyone else was still asleep."

Eventually, he gets taken in by Sadie and her friends, a close-knit group who sneak into the woods, turn off their health monitors, and seem like the right in-group to be a part of. While I loved Sadie's voice and always anticipated returning to her perspective, Lane seemed more developed over the course  of the novel, and I liked his transformation and what he had to say about his life before Latham House and his life after. Lane's realization largely has to do with the way he was working constantly towards a future without living his life day by day.  Latham House, where he's on doctor's orders to stop studying late (it's making him sick), changes all of that. Lane says, "Before I even knew what high school was, I'd already let my fear of not begin the best at it make me miserable. And I was starting to think that if I hadn't gotten sick, I would have done the same thing with college, rushing toward internships and grad school and a job. Somehow, without realizing, I'd made high school into a race toward the best college, as opposed to its own destination. It was only now that I hadn't done the same thing at Latham that I could see it, and I realized how unhappy it made me."

I really enjoyed Schneider's new novel, and what Lane came to understand about himself while he was at Latham House. I also liked the way the title was worked into the novel, and what the "extraordinary means" of this novel are. Schneider also includes an extensive author's note that describes her choice to make tuberculosis important to her novel. I'm looking forward to passing around my copy of Extraordinary Means, just like I did with The Beginning of Everything. 

Rebel Belle by Rachel Hawkins

I've been eyeing Rebel Belle at the bookstore since it came out in hardcover last year, but didn't pick it up until last week when I saw it shelved next to its sequel, Miss Mayhem. It was a fantastic contemporary fantasy novel set in the Southern US, and was a hugely fun read. 

Harper Price is a high school junior at Grove Academy in Pine Grove, Alabama. She's SGA president and leads most of the committees at her high school (including the Academic Dishonesty Committee), causing her arch nemesis David Stark to mockingly call her "Pres." The year before, her sister was killed in a drunk driving accident, but Harper has managed to keep spinning the complicated plates of her life, despite her own personal tragedy. But on the night of the Homecoming Dance, Harper's perfect life suddenly changes, even though she's attending with her boyfriend Ryan, her best friend Bee Franklin, and Bee's boyfriend Brandon. Everything seems like it's going according to plan. She arrives late, giving herself just enough just enough time to arrive in style and collect her Homecoming Queen crown. Ryan's there with her: "He lowered his head and kissed me, albeit pretty chastely. PDA is vile, and Ryan, being my Perfect Boyfriend, knows how I feel about it." But when she goes into the girls' bathroom to apply Bee's "Salmon Fantasy" lipgloss (instead of her regular, "Coral Shimmer"), janitor Mr. Hall passes on to Harper magical powers that turn her into a Paladin: a mythical warrior charged with protecting one person. Soon after, she's nearly killed by the school's history teacher, Dr. DuPont, who attacks her in the bathroom. She narrowly escapes by stabbing him with the point of her four-inch heels. 

It's not until few days later that she figures out who she's sworn to protect. The aforementioned David Stark, who Harper happens to hate. She tries to avoid him, and when she can't, she can't keep her feelings to herself: "Then I realized who I'd bumped into , and immediately regretted my apologetic tone. If I'd known it was David Stark, I would have tried to hit him harder, or maybe stepped on his foot with the spiky heel of my new shoes for good measure." David is the ultimate hipster, with thick-framed black glasses, tight jeans, and oversized sweaters. The only reason she tries to stay on his almost-good side is because of his aunt, Saylor Stark,

And you especially needed to be polite to said douchebag when he happened to be the nephew of Saylor Stark, president of the Pine Grove Junior League; head of the Pine Grove Betterment Society; chairwoman of the Grove Academy School Board; and, more importantly, organizer of Pine Grove's Annual Cotillion.

Cotillion is next on Harper's calendar, and she doesn't have time in her schedule to pencil in training for how to be a Paladin, and how to save David's life if it comes down to that. Which it will. The final battle goes down during Cotillion, with Harper in her perfect dress, shoes, and makeup. 

Rebel Belle was such a fun, Southern novel. I love Cotillion and Homecoming, and Harper was right at the center of both. I flew through the book on the elliptical at the gym, and couldn't put it down. Harper is an excellent character; Hawkins draws out the voice of the well-liked over-achiever perfectly. I'm looking forward to picking up the sequel soon!

The Truth Commission by Susan Juby

I have been a huge fan of Susan Juby since her Alice Macleod series, Alice, I Think; Miss Smithers; and Alice Macleod, Realist at Last. Juby is a Canadian author who writes YA and adult novels (and a memoir), and her books are some of my favourites. 

The Truth Commission was released this year and takes place at the fictional Green Pastures Academy of Art and Applied Design in Nanaimo, BC. It focuses on high school student Normandy Pale, whose sister is acclaimed graphic novelist Keira Pale. Keira has effectively fictionalized the family life of the Pales, turning her sister Normandy into a cruel representation, and rewriting family events and stories.

The story starts when Keira comes back to live at home, and begins telling Normandy strange half-stories at night, all of which allude to why she mysteriously left art college to move back in with her family. Meanwhile, at school, Normandy and her friends Dusk and Neil decide to form "The Truth Commission," which requires them to ask questions of other students at their school that get to the bottom of gossip and rumour. Their first truth telling: finding out if student Aimee Danes got a boob job over the summer. They're surprised by how easily the truth comes when they ask. School truths get mixed up with home truths, and Normandy finds herself wading through both. 

As well, Normandy is writing her account of "The Truth Commission" as part of her creative nonfiction class at school; the manuscript is the final project that she's going to turn in for credit. She uses extensive footnotes as a tool for explaining how she uses elements like backstory, exposition, dialogue, and transition in her manuscript, proving to her teacher that she knows the rhetoric of creative nonfiction. There are also some illustrations added throughout the novel, all helpful for adding veracity to her account.

There are a lot of laugh-out-loud moments in The Truth Commission. Juby's wry and quirky humour is on display, and this was the first of Juby's recent writing that really reminded me of the Alice Macleod series. On a recent episode of This Creative Life with Sara Zarr, YA novelist Gayle Forman (If I Stay) highly recommended The Truth Commission, and Jaclyn Moriarty has championed the novel as well. It's an excellent read, highlighting Juby's humour and offering a thoughtful examination of truth and storytelling. 

Revenge, Ice Cream, and Other Things Best Served Cold by Katie Finn

Katie Finn continues her trilogy of novels about Gemma Tucker in Revenge, Ice Cream, and Other Things Best Served Cold (a fantastic title). It's the sequel to Broken Hearts, Fences, and Other Things to Mend which was released last year. Katie Finn is the alias of acclaimed YA novelist Morgan Matson, whose books I've talked about here already. The planned trilogy takes place in the Hamptons, where Gemma is staying for the summer with her dad. She's moved into a huge mansion that belongs to her dad's writing partner, Bruce, as they both get underway on an adaptation of the successful erotic vampire novel that is referenced frequently in the book. 

In Broken Hearts, Fences, and Other Things to Mend, a case of mistaken identity led to Gemma's summer getting off to a disastrous start. For the first few weeks of her holidays, she fell head-first into a revenge plan orchestrated by her childhood friend Hallie. Gemma purposefully broke up her father and Hallie's mother when they dated years ago, worried that their relationship would get in the way of her parents getting back together. This included spreading a horrible rumour about Hallie's mother, ruining her career as a novelist. Unbeknownst to Gemma, Hallie has been planning for years to get her back. 

Revenge, Ice Cream, and Other Things Best Served Cold picks up right where the first book left off: after Gemma's real identity is revealed, and her relationship with Hallie's brother Josh is put to an end. Finn does an excellent job summarizing the first book without taking too many pages away from the second book. There are so many books - particularly fantasy series - where there is little or no reminder about what happened in the previous instalment, which is sometimes necessary when there's a gap of 3-5 years between books. Finn summarizes in narrative form, rehashing scenes from the previous book to remind readers of where they will pick up with Gemma.

A few new characters have been added to the story. Gemma's best friend Sophie Curtis (who Gemma pretended to be in the previous book, after Sophie's name was written on her coffee cup) comes to stay for the rest of the summer, and so do Bruce's children, Gwyneth and Ford. Ford, who is suddenly more attractive than Gemma remembers him being. He's lost his braces, and is now a nationally ranked surfer. 

At first Gemma decides not to retaliate, but then thinks better of it. She gets a job behind an ice cream counter (in Morgan Matson's Since You've Been Gone, protagonist Emily scoops ice cream as a summer job, too), and enlists Sophie and Gwyneth in her plans. My sister said she had a huge amount of secondhand embarrassment reading about Gemma's plans for revenge, and I completely agree. The events escalate the night of Hallie's birthday party, setting up a perfect cliffhanger that the third and final instalment will work on resolving. It's a fun, quick read, and I'm looking forward to the resolution of the series next year.