Maybe a Fox by Kathi Appelt and Alison McGhee

I am always on the look-out for a new middle grade novel by Kathi Appelt. Her Newbery Award-winning The Underneath told the story of a dog named Ranger and a small cat family who inhabit "the underneath," the space beneath the porch of an angry man named Gar Face. Keeper is a whimsical book about a blue moon, mermaids, and a seagull called Captain. The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp follows Bingo and J'miah, two raccoons who are trying to save their swamp. 

Maybe a Fox is a collaboration between Appelt and author Alison McGhee. YA expert Teri Lesesne posted about her tear-stained copy of Maybe of Fox a few weeks ago, and it was a reminder for me to pick up the newest Appelt novel. 

Appelt and McGhee write about two sisters named Sylvie and Jules who live with their father in a wooded area of Vermont. Their mother died of a heart defect before the book begins, and now Sylvie and Jules have a more active role in taking care of themselves. This involves a new arrangement, where they are responsible for catching the school bus alone, and after their dad leaves for work at the lumber mill. They also live by their dad's four rules: "Do not get of earshot of the house. Do not mess with wild animals. Do not miss the bus. Do not, under any circumstances, go near the Slip." The Slip lies in the woods that border their house, and, 

According to Sam's dad, who was a forest ranger, it was a freak of geology, the result of a seismic shift, a small earthquake that forced the river's bed to disappear into a large cavern that was hiding there all along, opened up by the shifting earth.

But they do go near the Slip sometimes, a place where both girls - and their best friend Sam - cast wishing stones. Sam, for instance, wishes for his brother Elk to come home from Afghanistan, where he is serving with his best friend Zeke. 

One morning, instead of running to catch the bus like they usually do, older sister Sylvie takes a wishing stone into the woods and doesn't come back. But on the day she disappears, a new fox kit is about to be born, a Kennen fox named Senna. The paths of Senna and Jules continue to cross throughout the novel, winding a path towards its conclusion. 

Maybe a Fox is a beautiful book, best read in a single read. Appelt and McGhee's collaboration is seamless, and their voices merge into one authorial voice. I absolutely loved this book. 

Winger by Andrew Smith

When I saw Andrew Smith’s Winger at Chapters a few weeks ago – just for the cover alone – I really wanted to read it. Winger is about Ryan Dean West (Ryan Dean is his first name; he is more hesitant to share his middle name) and follows him over the fall of his junior year at Pine Mountain, a boarding school for rich kids. Before I read the book, it seemed very similar to Jon van de Ruit’s Spud books, about a boarding school in South Africa that focuses on the character of Spud in particular. But I didn’t pick up the book right away, mostly because Andrew Smith is also the author of The Marbury Lens, a book I absolutely loved for its story and writing, but didn’t like for its portrayal of female characters. But I picked up the book a week later, and read it in two sittings, which was more than enough time to completely forget about the comparison to Spud.

Ryan Dean West starts his junior year with the goal of reinventing himself from the “bitch-ass” 14-year-old he is, two years younger than anyone else in his year. He is at the top of his class and admits to always making sure he gets a few questions wrong on a test in order to keep the bell curve from being set too high for his classmates. When the book starts, Ryan Dean is submerged face first into the toilet of his dormitory bathrooms, already watching his goal of reinvention slide out of sight. This is the first year that he’ll be living in O-Hall (Opportunity Hall), the dormitory that students are sent to when they break the rules (Ryan Dean notes that almost everyone is in there for fighting). Instead of rooming with his best friends Seanie and JP in the normal dorms, he’s stuck with Chas Becker, big, mean, and an asshole.

Ryan Dean also plays rugby for his school, and I really appreciated Smith’s inclusion of the sport in this book, because it’s not often that it’s at the heart of a YA novel (football and basketball are the two that usually take precedence!). The games and practices provide a nice break in pace from Ryan Dean’s narration, and also provide much of the conflict between Ryan Dean and his friends. As one of the only openly gay students at Pine Mountain, their captain, Joey, routinely gets in fights with the football team, and Ryan Dean is one of the few who stand up for him.

Sam Bosma provides illustrations for the book, as Ryan Dean describes his own experience with a mix of text and comic images. The story is routinely funny and serious, and bounces back and forth between the two of them in a way that is incredibly realistic for a high school experience.

But the problem of Smith’s female characters really took away from the story, almost more than it did in The Marbury Lens. Ryan Dean is himself a sexist character, and while this isn’t usually a problem in YA literature (because characters have some awareness of their behavior and end up making a change by the end of the novel), it is with Ryan Dean. For the first few hundred pages of the book, he does not describe any female character without noting how hot or not hot she is. But Smith’s female characters don’t ever get more than that “hot” adjective; he doesn’t spend any more time on making them into dynamic characters. This is completely opposite to how he describes male characters; even Chas Becker has more depth than any female character.

And then there’s Ryan Dean’s love interest, Annie, who still sees him as a young 14-year-old boy (and truthfully, that’s what he is, at two years younger than her, and what 16-year-old girl would actually date a 14-year-old boy?). Yet when the unlikely romance does play out between them (even though Annie says “I can’t be in love with you” constantly), and Ryan Dean goes home to Seattle with Annie for the weekend, it becomes even more pained. Annie, for instance, makes sure Ryan Dean brings a couple of pairs of his too-short pants back to her house with him so that she and her mom can fix the hem. Smith writes, “That afternoon, Annie kept her promise to fix my school pants, but her mom helped. So I stood there in the ‘sewing room’ in my socks and underwear doing the on-off routine with my pants while hot Annie pinned and her hot mother worked the sewing machine.”

I usually love YA books with male protagonists. They usually provide authentic, refreshing, and interesting points of view. And they can be as crude as they need to be because there is still something genuine about their male protagonists, something important and validating. Ryan Dean didn’t ever change from being a 14-year-old junior who thought he deserved perfection in every area of his life, who objectified the girls at his school while still expecting them to fall in love with him and make all his sexual fantasies come true. He doesn’t reinvent himself. He doesn’t change even a little bit.

I wanted to really, really love this book, but I just couldn’t ever invest enough in the story, because when I did, all I ended up with was another sexist, objectifying comment that took me right out of it again. For Joey and Seanie and Chas, the boarding school setting, and ending, Winger is a really good book. But without a single well-rounded female character, it was a miss for me. 

The Sea of Tranquility by Katja Millay

The Sea of Tranquility by Katja Millay has been on my radar since 2012, when it was published as an e-book. My aunt recommended the book to me, and it sounded like an amazing read, but I don’t read e-books very often. I have absolutely no memory retention for a story when I read on an e-reader, and I also have a tendency to flip back and forth throughout a physical book a lot, which isn’t as easy on an e-reader. But I wish-listed Millay’s novel on Amazon (probably sometime around last Christmas), and didn’t think it’s early June deadline was too long to wait. Now that I’ve read the book, I’m sort of torn on the entire waiting-for-the-published-book thing. The Sea of Tranquility is one of the best YA books I’ve read so far this year, and I almost wish I hadn’t waited as long as I had for it to come out in its printed form. But I did flip back and forth so often while I was reading, and I’m really happy to have it in printed form to pass on (my sister is reading it now!).

Nastya (“NAH-stee-ya”) Kashnikov hasn’t spoken to anyone in over a year. She has just moved in with her aunt Margot in a Florida suburb, and is happy for Margot’s shift work as a nurse, as it means they aren’t often in the same place for long. When she has to, Nastya communicates with a pen and notepad, but for the most part, she doesn’t have any desire to talk to anyone, not even to answer her mom’s brief, but worried text messages. She begins her last year of high school at Mill Creek Community High School, and she has a plan for making sure everyone avoids her and no one talks to her. Dressing in tight, skimpy clothes and stilettos, and with makeup caked on, Nastya tries to make herself unapproachable, and for the most part, it works.

As for why Nastya has decided to leave her family behind in Brighton and move two hours away to the town that Margot lives in, it remains a mystery throughout most of the book. However, the clues that Nastya gives about her past are cryptic enough to keep the reader engaged right through to the end. For instance, the first few lines that we hear from Nastya at the beginning of the book are:

I hate my left hand. I hate to look at it. I hate it when it stutters and trembles and reminds me that my identity is gone. But I look at it anyway, because it also reminds me that I’m going to find the boy who took everything from me. I’m going to kill the boy who killed me, and when I kill him, I’m going to do it with my left hand.

Nastya doesn’t provide any easy answers for the reader; the truth about her past – although hinted at throughout the book – does not come in full until near the end. One of my favorite parts of the book comes early on, when Nastya is suffering through the icebreakers in her seven high school classes on the first day back. In her Intro to Music class, the teacher has the students play two truths and a lie, where “Everyone has to say three things about themselves and one of those things has to be a lie. Then the class tries to figure out which one is the lie.” Nastya admits that it’s too bad she’s not going to participate in the game, because she has the best combination of facts about herself, and the lie isn’t exactly straightforward:

My name is Nastya Kashnikov.

I was a piano-playing prodigy who doesn’t belong anywhere near an Intro to Music class.

I was murdered two and a half years ago.

Discuss.

But as much as she tries to stick to herself, Nastya is slowly pulled into the new community by more than a few unlikely candidates. One of these is Josh, and he alternates his point of view with Nastya’s to tell the story. He has a past that is similarly as haunted as Nastya’s, and his classmates treat him to the same arms-length that they give to her.

I loved The Sea of Tranquility. Nastya and Josh’s narration actually sounds the way teenagers speak and incorporates shorthand phrases like SOL and WTF in the most effective way that I think I’ve seen in a YA book. The characters are so real, and what they have to reveal about themselves speaks a lot to teenage experience. Millay handles the large issues that Nastya and Josh have faced in the most authentic way possible, and they never become sensationalized in the telling of the story. I was so invested in every single thing that happened to these characters, and it was a hard book to end. I will look so forward to see what Millay takes on next, knowing that her respect and affection for her own characters will make anything she works on worth reading.