Time Between Us

Title: Time Between Us
Author: Tamara Ireland Stone
Narrator: Amy Rubinate
ISBN: 9780307967862 (hardcover 9781423159568)
Discs/CDs: 8 CDs, 9 hours
Pages: 368 pages
Publisher/Date: Hyperiod, an imprint of Disney Book Group, c2012.

And while the thief is distracted by the contents of the safe, three things happen, so fast and overlapping that they seem to take place simultaneously. Bennet disappears completely, and suddenly he’s kneeling next to me on the floor. He grabs my hands and closes his eyes, and I must follow suit, because when I open them, the store is gone. The robber and his knife are gone. And Bennett and I are in the exact same positions–him kneeling, me sitting, still holding each other’s hands–only now we’re next to a tree in the park around the corner, the wind throwing snow violently around us. (99)

Anna sees a teenage boy she’s never met watching her as she does her morning run. Upon meeting her observer at school and identifying him as new student Bennett, she confronts him and he denies the incident. Against the advice of her friends and her gut instincts she is attracted to Bennett, but Anna can’t shake the feeling that something isn’t right about Bennett. During a robbery attempt, Bennett finally reveals that he is hiding a huge secret and is actually a time traveler from 17 years in the future. Pulled inexplicably to each other, Anna relishes the opportunity to fulfill her life long dreams of travel. But as their relationship prompts them to continually break rules that Bennett has established, Bennett’s prolonged presence might be causing consequences that he cannot fix.

More mild-romance than mind-bender or mystery, if you combine Twilight with The Time Traveler’s Wife, you get this book, but in both cases I would go to those other books first. While this book also has a time traveling couple, The Time Traveler’s Wife had depth and substance and emotional draw that this book seems to lack. However, you still having the brooding teenage girl in a relationship that everyone cautions her against yet she feels that unexplainable and instantaneous attraction/attention towards him. I guess that’s actually the problem, because while we see the relationship in Time Traveler’s Wife grow and evolve, I didn’t get that sense here. It feels like their relationship grows out of intrigue rather than love, with all of the long, lingering looks and none of the emotional sparks that are supposed to materialize.

Anna’s friendships, including her relationship with Bennett, are less than appealing. It seems like she’s using Bennett because of the promise of travel opportunities, which she absolutely is intent on taking advantage of. Bennett himself strikes me and Anna’s friends as slightly creepy, what with his popping in and out of Anna’s life. Anna’s friend Justin, whom she has known since she was five, plays a very minor part in the book, and also seems to be used by Anna for music, whether in the form of personalized mixes she can run to or tickets to the hottest concerts. His possible attraction to her is mentioned ever so slightly and then ignored for most of the rest of the story, only to be thrust in our face suddenly towards the end. Even her friend Emma doesn’t seem fully fleshed out, playing the role of comedic side-kick more than a true friend. When the characters fight, which they do sporadically, they all seem to solve their problems by ignoring each other until one or the other gives in for no reason.

This is especially true when applied to Bennett’s rules regarding time travel, which he broke once with disastrous consequences yet that doesn’t stop him from considering breaking the rules for Anna, a girl he’s just met. The time travel portion of the plot is also marginally explained. While Bennett subconsciously/inexplicably realizes that he can’t travel to a time before he was born or into his future, the ending climatic separation between Bennett and Anna has no explanation. I don’t want to reveal too much here, but I wonder if answers will be more readily available in October with the upcoming sequel, which will be told from Bennett’s perspective. Also, as a reviewer pointed out on Goodreads, at one point in the story there are three Bennett’s in the same time line, which was loosely explained as possible because they weren’t “within range of our other selves” and therefore won’t “disappear”, which seems like a flimsy reason.

And don’t get me started on the ending, which I’m sure to spoil for readers who get that far. Let’s say the problem is solved but with no satisfactory explanation to decipher what caused the problem or how it was solved. I honestly wish it had ended differently. Amy Rubinate did a passible job at narrating the material she was given, but the plot left a lot to be desired in my opinion. Goodreads reviews are full of star-struck readers swooning over what I see is a lackluster love story. Maybe it just wasn’t meant for me.

The Peculiar

Title: The Peculiar
Author: Stefan Bachmann
ISBN: 978006219518
Pages: 376 pages
Publisher/Date: Greenwillow Books, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, c2012.

Then a great many things happened at once. Bartholomew, staring so intently, nodded forward a bit so that the tip of his nose brushed against the windowpane. And the moment it did, there was a quick, sharp movement in the yard below, and the lady reached behind her and jerked apart the coils of hair at the back of her head. Bartholomew’s blood turned to smoke in his veins. There, staring directly up at him, was another face, a tiny, brown, ugly face like a twisted root, all wrinkles and sharp teeth.
With a muffled yelp, he scrabbled away from the window, splinters driving into his palms. It didn’t see me, it didn’t see me. It couldn’t ever have known I was here.
But it had. Those wet black eyes had looked into his. For an instant they had been filled with a terrible anger. And then the creature’s lips had curled back and it had smiled. (23-24)

Bartholomew had been told by his mother time and again to not draw attention to himself. He and his sister are Peculiars, half faery and half human, feared and distrusted and occasionally loathed by both races as oddities. So when he gets spotted while observing a beautiful lady, a lady who whisks away a neighboring Peculiar into a whirlwind of black feathers, Bartholomew is understandably concerned. Peculiars seem to be disappearing at an alarming rate, and the skins of their bodies are being found in the river. His concern for his friend turns to fear for his own family as he and his sister might be marked as the next to be taken.

While this book was billed as “part murder mystery, part gothic fantasy, part steampunk adventure”, I really didn’t get a steampunk feel from it. Certainly not in the way the Sherlock Holmes movies or Westerfeld’s Leviathan series is steampunk. Just because there is a clockwork bird and an automaton doesn’t make it steampunk. I’ll agree however about the murder mystery and gothic fantasy. Bachmann knows how to set the scene for the action that follows:

Fog slunk among the headstones of St. Mary, Queen of Martyrs, that night. It smelled of charcoal and rot, and spread in slow shapes down the sloping graveyard. Above, clouds drifted, snuffing out the moon. Somewhere in the maze of streets beyond the wall a dog barked. (205)

Readers might get a little lost in the culture and interactions of faeries and humans, as Bachmann thrusts you into the world from the beginning and worries about explaining things later. While it makes the story flow more naturally, assuming the reader know what they need to know, it helps that Bartholomew and the other main character we see things through, Arthur Jelliby, are somewhat clueless and trying to figure things out as well. Arthur Jelliby is someone who would rather not be investigating the disappearance of Peculiars, as that isn’t really his job, but finds himself being drawn in by coincidences, natural curiosity, and dare I say a sense of duty. I found myself being very sympathetic to both his and Bartholomew’s plight, as the stories intertwine and they are both just trying to get back to normal lives after they unwillingly became involved in this predicament.

I was not informed that this debut book (which it says in the back jacket Bachmann wrote when he was sixteen) is the first in a series, which proved very frustrating to me. Bachmann has nailed building tension by shifting viewpoints after a suspenseful turn of events or a Hannibal Lecter-esque piece of dialogue, where you know something bad is right around the corner. And that, unfortunately, was how the book ended. I definitely foresee a change of setting for book two as the reason for Bartholomew getting involved as yet to be resolved. (That’s really all I can say without spoiling plot points). The good news is that it appears Arthur Jelliby will be along for the ride as well, and we can only hope that Bartholomew and Jelliby interact a little more in book two.

2 the Point Tuesday — The Seven Tales of Trinket

Each month where I work, the librarians write a maximum 150 word review of a new book that came into the library during the month. I’ll be adding my contribution to the blog in a new feature I’m calling To the Point Tuesdays. If you want to play along, just post a link in the comments and I’ll add them to the post.

Title: The Seven Tales of Trinket
Author: Shelley Moore Thomas
Illustrator: Dan Craig
ISBN: 9780374367459
Pages: 369 pages
Publisher/Date: Farrar Straus Giroux, c2012.

“What are you going to do with it?” Thomas asked.
“What do you think?” My fingers trailed yet another direction, over the mountains to the forest.
He looked at me with eyes that widened as he understood my purpose.
“You are not going to follow it!” He spit when he yelled, which made it a good thing that Thomas the Pig Boy yelled very little.
“I am.”
“You are only eleven.”
“Almost twelve. A year older than you.”
“What will you do out there?” Thomas asked, flicking the map with his hand.
“Why, find my father, of course.”
And I will leave this place, and all the pain, behind.
But I did not say this aloud.
Thomas thought for a moment.
“If you go, can I come?” (13-14)

After the death of her mother, strong-willed Trinket heads out to find her father, a wandering bard who never made it back home after his last trip. Accompanied by Thomas, the Pig Boy, and an old map, they are called upon to save a Gypsy seer, rescue a baby stolen by selkies, banish a banshee, trick a fairy and escape a deadly highwayman. Realizing that she could follow her father’s footsteps in more ways than one, she starts practicing to become a bard. The story she really wants to find an ending for though is her own, but no one seems to know where her father went. A story about bards and telling stories based on Celtic folklore begs to be read-aloud. Trinket does not walk an easy road and must make some hard decisions about the true meaning of friendship. Fans of the movie Brave will not be disappointed.

Picture book and early reader author Shelley Moore Thomas shows her experience and talent as a professional storyteller in her first middle-grade novel.

Pandemonium

Title: Pandemonium
Series: sequel to Delirium
Author: Lauren Oliver
Narrator: Sarah Drew
ISBN: 9780061978067
Pages: 375 pages
CDs/Discs: 9 CDs; 10 hours, 34 minutes
Publisher/Date:

The next day, the sky is a pale blue, the sun high and amazingly warm, breaking through the trees and turning the ice to rivulets of flowing water. The snow brought silence with it, but now the woods are alive again, full of dripping and twittering and cracking. It is as though the Wilds have been released from a muzzle.
We are all in a good mood–everyone but Raven, who does her daily scan of the sky and only mutters, “It won’t last.”
On my way to the nests, stamping through the snow, I’m so warm I have to take off my jacket and tie it around my waist. The nests will be green today, I can sense it. They’ll be green, and the supplies will come, and the scouts will return, and we’ll all flow south together. [...]
Red. Red. Red.
Dozens of [birds]: black feathers coated thickly with crimson-colored paint, fluttering among the branches.
Red means run. (126-127)

Lena has escaped from the “civilized society,” but has lost her love and savior Alex in the process. Now she’s living with Raven and Tack, two people she met after escaping, trying to portray an obedient life while helping the resistance from the inside. Through flashbacks to “Then”, we see her being rescued from certain death by a company of resistance fighters, hiding in the Wilds, surviving on what little they can scrounge and preparing for the coming winter and move south. But Lena, Raven, and Tack have to push their harrowing journey behind them if they are to stay hidden from prying eyes. In her task to get close to and watch a young man named Julian who serves as figurehead of the movement insisting upon “the Cure” for all, she finds herself kidnapped with Julian and held with nothing but an umbrella and a tube of lipstick at her disposal. Can she turn Julian into an ally without exposing her own secret, or will they be unable to bridge the gap that separates them?

If you remember, I fell in love (pardon the pun) with Delirium upon my first reading. This sequel made me question what I loved about the first one. I started listening to it as an audiobook, and could NOT get into it. It might have been the narrator, but Lena sounded whiney, overly brooding, and just melodramatic. The writing, which I’m sure was trying to be poetic and descriptive, just seemed to languish. Everything seems to take her breath away or amaze her with either its beauty or its horror. She feels everything and internalized the minutest of details, and Oliver takes the time to explain everything. For instance:

Alex is the only boy I’ve ever known or really spoke to. I don’t like to think of all those male strangers, just on the other side of the stone wall, with their baritone voices and their snorts of laughter. Before I met Alex, I lived almost eighteen years believing fully in the system, believing 100 percent that love was a disease, that we must protect ourselves, that girls and boys must stay rigorously separate to prevent contagion. Looks, glances, touches, hugs–all of it carried the risk of contamination. And even though being with Alex changed me, you don’t shake loose the fear all at once. You can’t.
I close my eyes, breathe deeply, again try and force myself down through the layers of consciousness, to let myself be carried away by sleep. (16-17)

Who thinks like this?! Okay, we get it, you can’t sleep. We got that with the previous, unquoted (is that a word?), paragraph where you talk about the noises you hear. We as readers don’t need to have everything spelled out for us so completely.

Once I got the printed book from the library, I gave up on the audiobook. It went a lot faster, but now I had the narrator’s voice stuck in my head. And I couldn’t get it out. They really need a new narrator for this series, because I know I would have liked it more if I hadn’t been so focused on all the times that Lena went reflective. Even when she’s getting attacked, about halfway through the book, she’s much more reflective in her descriptions than matter of fact. “I am striking without looking, struggling to breathe, and everything is bodies–hardness and enclosure, no way to run, no way to break free–and the slashing of my knife.” Maybe the book should have been written as a novel in verse.

I also struggled with the jumping back and forth between “Then” and “Now”. The timeline of events got confused in my brain, and readers still don’t witness how Lena, Raven, and Tack actually infiltrated the “real” world, which I was most curious about since it seems like people rarely move between cities in this new society. I would have liked it much better if the story had started and finished with Then, and proceeded to Now chronologically.

I have to admit though that Oliver knows how to write the action sequences, even with the overly descriptive passages. Lana is a warrior similar to Katniss from The Hunger Games and she readily adapts and acquires her survival instincts. She fights with the best of them, and is not about to get taken, captured, or killed, especially after Alex tried so hard to get her out and avoid the cure. The ending is a doozy. On the one hand, it is cliche and predictable and groan-enducing that we now have to wait for book three, but I still wanted to stand up and applaud her for her execution as red-herrings were thrown at us from the beginning and had thoroughly convinced me it wasn’t going to happen, ESPECIALLY not on the last page. And the plot twist regarding the kidnapping was also something I did NOT see coming.

Be prepared to read this as opposed to listening to it, and you’ll be able to avoid the overly dramatic whine that permeates my reading now and you’ll enjoy the action much more.

Ship Breaker

Title: Ship Breaker
Author: Paolo Bacigalupi
ISBN: 9780316056212
Pages: 326 pages
Publisher/Date: Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. c2010.

He called up to her. “Hey, Sloth! I got me a way out. I’m coming for you crewgirl.”
The movement stopped.
“You hear me?” His voice echoed all around. “I’m getting out! And I’m coming for you.”
“Yeah?” Sloth responded. “You want me to go get Pima?” Mockery laced her voice. Nailer again wished he could reach up and yank her down into the oil. Instead, Nailer made his voice reasonable.
“If you go get Pima now, I’ll forget you were going to let me drown.”
A long pause.
Finally Sloth said, “It’s too late, right?” She went on. “I know you, Nailer. You’ll tell Pima no matter what, and then I’m off crew and someone else buys in.” Another pause, then she said, “It’s all Fates now. If you got a way out, I’ll see you on the outside. You get your revenge then.” (33)

Nailer works on the light crew, stripping copper from sunken and grounded rigs and ships in the future’s Gulf Coast region, where oil, gold, and any industrial scrap is even more precious than it is today. Everyone dreams of hitting a Lucky Strike, of hitting an unknown pocket of resources and secretly siphoning and selling it off so they can make their own way instead of crewing up. It’s a hard life, one that gets even more complicated after a big storm strands a rich girl on his tiny island. After his own recent brush with death, it’s impossible for Nailer to kill her and claim her riches. Instead, he finds himself on the run from everyone, including his own father, who are intent on using the girl as their ticket out of Bright Sands Beach. But the girl is hiding secrets of her own, and as she slowly and grudgingly reveals them to Nailer, Nailer’s prospects of getting rescued from his rash actions become bleaker.

I’ve been trying to get to this book for a while now, ever since my coworker finished and raved about it shortly after it was published. My first thought upon finishing is that this book has extraordinary world building. Located in what amounts to a distant future shanty town somewhere in the Gulf, readers are lead to believe that the area finally succumbed to the severe storms that slice through the cities. It’s similar to the movie Water World in that resources are so scarce they are scavenged. What sets it apart though is Nailer. The sheer brutality of this world is both astonishing and frightening, yet completely understandable as it’s every man for himself, and the descriptions bring everything into focus.

Bacigalupi sets up the story so that we have a clear idea of how conflicted Nailer is when he finds his stranded mystery girl. Any other time, he would have had no qualms killing her and taking the Lucky Strike for himself and his good friend Pima, getting them out of the slums. But he is also desperate to distance himself from his father, and he realizes that killing the girl would be the same thing that would have happened to him if he hadn’t been so lucky; killing the girl would be the same thing his father would do, no question, and he hates the idea of becoming his father.

Not knowing who to trust is a common theme running through everyone’s story. Nailer and the girl must trust each other as they flee for their lives. The girl is completely out of her element in this foreign environment and has no one else to rely on. Nailer must trust that she is telling the truth about who she really is, even though time and again that identity changes and her honesty is called into question. Neither one though can turn back once they start, because they know that there’s a better chance of surviving — of keeping each other alive — if they stay together.

I’m not the only one who sees this book as an examination of the humanity, trust and courage. It received a boat load of recognition, including being named a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, winning the 2011 Michael L. Printz Award and the Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book nominated for the 2010 Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy and included on the 2011 Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults list put together by the Young Adult Library Services Association.

I read this as an e-book, where they provided a sample of the companion novel Drowned Cities which features one of the secondary characters who I’d definitely be interested in learning more about, as he seems to be an anomaly all his own. A good industrial strength read (pardon the pun).

Ready Player One

Title: Ready Player One
Author: Ernest Cline
ISBN: 9780307913142
CDs/Discs: 13 CDs, 15.5 hours
Pages: 374 pages
Publisher/Date: Crown Publishers, Random House Audio, c2011.
Awards: 2012 Alex Awards

“You’re first instinct right now might be to log out and make a run for it,” Sorrento said. “I urge you not to make that mistake. Your trailer is currently wired with a large quantity of high explosives.” He pulled something that looked like a remote control out of his pocket and held it up. “And my finger is on the detonator. If you log out of this chatlink session, you will die within a few seconds. Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Mr. Watts?” (142)

In the year 2044, humanity escapes from what is left of the world by plugging int the OASIS, a virtual utopia similar to the Sims where people can be anything and do almost anything. It’s here we meet Wade Watts, a seventeen-year-old who has been competing against millions of other people in the biggest scavenger hunt ever created. The massive fortune of the creator of the OASIS, James Halliday, has been put up for grabs for the first person to complete a series of challenges and puzzles that range throughout the virtual OASIS. Based on aspects of 1980s pop culture, including movies, music, books, and especially video games, the hunt has gone on for five long years, and quite a few players have lost hope. Then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle, and the frenzy of the hunt resumes. Wade must outwit and outplay the entire world in order to win, but he’s especially worried about the Nolan Sorrento, the CEO of a conglomerate company who’s only goal is to monopolize and monetize the free virtual escape.

Full disclosure: I was not a teenager in the 1980s like James Halliday was, but I still throughly enjoyed listening to Ready Player One. I was yelling at my speakers, laughing along at Wade’s exploits, and was pleasantly pleased at how many references to 1980s culture I was already familiar with, including Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Star Wars and Star Trex, Pacman, and Dungeons and Dragons. Some of the more obscure trivia I think would have even people who lived during that era scratching their heads, unless they are well versed in hacking history.

While the start is somewhat slow as Cline takes the time to explain his world building and the background behind the events, it quickly escalates after the first clue is found. Geeks might actually enjoy knowing the ins and outs of the OASIS, although non-geeks might get turned off by the technical talk. The characters are all most certainly grandiose geeks, and while there are some spots where the information is repeated, in my opinion it’s better to have a refresher of the information than not receive it at all. I think the action moved a little too quickly for my tastes towards the end, as clues are deciphered very quickly by multiple players, when the first clue took everyone five years to figure out, but listeners get caught up in the excitement and the hunt and really don’t have time or an inclination to quibble about the breakneck, escalating frenetic pace and epic battle at the end.

Wade is a likeable enough character, participating in the competition as an underdog since he has almost no experience points, financial assistance, or even a secure physical home where he can reside. Sorrento, the head of the commercial conglomerate (the company is nicknamed the Sixers in the book due to their avatars six digit identification numbers) is a stagnant and one-dimensional, stereotypical greedy bad-guy type character. Wade’s four top human competitors are a little more three-dimensional, although still stereotypical in certain ways.

Although Wil Wheaton struggles with female voices, most of the narration is first person from Wade’s perspective, which allows him the ability to really develop Wade and delve into his role. It’s an added nod to the 1980s culture to have him narrate, since Wheaton portrayed Wesley Crusher in the Star Trek: The Next Generation television show in the 1980s and 1990s. I can definitely see geeks and gamers of both genders gobbling up this book.

The Probability of Miracles

Title: The Probability of Miracles
Author: Wendy Wunder
ISBN: 9781595143686
Pages: 357 pages
Publisher/Date: Published by Penguin Young Readers Group, Produced by Alloy Entertainment, c2011

In the past month Cam had been to an acupuncturist, a Reiki practitioner, a reflexologist, an herbalist, a hypnotist, a taulasea– a Samoan medicine woman who made her drink breast mile–and had had a phone call with a “distance healer” from New Zealand named Audrey. They had paid eighty-five dollars Australian, plus the cost of a phone call to New Zealand, to hear Audrey hum into the phone for a while and then send Cam an e-mail with the “results” of the healing, which included bar graphs measuring the strength of her aura.
At least they got a good laugh out of it.
Cam had vowed that that was it, though. She was done trying stupid New Agey crap. In fact, if she heard another note of Yanni or Enya or anything on the harp, she was going to lose it. (36-37)

Self-proclaimed hope-resistant Cam has suffered from cancer for years, and they’ve finally received the diagnosis that there is nothing else to be done or tried. Cam’s mother refuses to give up, and packs Cam and her younger sister Perry from her Disney World Florida home to Promise, Maine for the summer. Promise is known for the unexpected, such as flamingos in the Atlantic, purple dandelions, and sunsets that last for hours. Showing no optimism and sulking over a fight with her only friend, Cam keeps receiving help from local boy Asher, who literally keeps popping up when she least expects it. Trying to make the most of her time and with nothing better to do, she starts crossing things off her own version of the bucket list that she’d made years earlier. When surrounded by people who see miracles in the everyday, Cam struggles to maintain her outlook on life and her belief that miracles are coincidences. Will Cam come to believe in miracles so that she can receive one of her own?

I’ll admit that this book has been sitting in my to be read stack for way too long. Personally, I really think it needs a new cover. But by the time you finish the book, you forget how glaring the cover is. The characters are all multi-faceted and developed. Cam’s mother is trying so hard to hold the family together. Although I think she could have been portrayed as a little more of a realist and hands-on, especially regarding her daughter’s illness, I can see she’s struggling with what the “right” thing to do is in this unique situation. Cam’s mood swings are evident, oscillating from “What’s the point” to “Let’s do what I can” to maybe even a little bit of restrained hope. Perry expresses what I think every sibling of a cancer patient must feel, but isn’t supposed to say:

“I make a lot of sacrifices for you.” Perry’s voice quavered. “Like being here. Do you think I want to spend my entire summer away from my friends? No one ever has time to think of what I want or what I need because your needs are so tremendous. You have tremendous needs. And that’s fine. Really, I’m used to being an afterthought. But the least you can do is let us believe that this might work. I do a lot for you, Cam,” said Perry, and one tear finally broke loose and slid down her face. (183)

The only person I wasn’t a huge fan of was Asher. Now, don’t get me wrong, I liked the knight in shining armor allusions and that he was always there for Cam, and the fact that he was afraid of flying added some humanity to his character. But the little we find out about his previous… “relationship” just irritates me. Yes, I guess to each his own, but still. Eh.

However, I loved the ending. I think I need to say again that I loved the ending. I can’t say anything else about the ending, because that would give everything away, but wow. The last 50 pages, and especially that last chapter, packs an emotional punch. I loved how Cam handled events, and although Asher’s actions seemed a little overly climatic, it sort of fit somehow. Cam really redeemed herself in my eyes when she puts other people’s needs ahead of her own for once.

The Night Circus

Title: The Night Circus
Author: Erin Morgenstern
Narrator: Jim Dale
ISBN: 9780307938909
Pages: 387 pages
Dics/Cds: 13.5 hours, 11 CDs
Publisher/Date: Doubleday, c2011.
Publication Date: Sept. 13, 2011

The circus arrives without warning.
No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.
The towering tents are striped in white and black, no golds and crimsons to be seen. No color at all, save for the neighboring trees and the grass of the surrounding fields. Black-and-white stripes on grey sky; countless tents of varying shapes and sizes, with an elaborate wrought-iron fence encasing them in a colorless world. Even what little ground is visible from outside is black or white, painted or powdered, or treated with some other circus trick.
But it is not open for business. Not just yet.(3)

Celia Bowen is apprenticed to her magician father. Marco has been adopted from an orphanage by a competing magician. While they both are separately aware that they are being prepared for a “game”, neither one of them are knowledgable about the rules. When they finally meet through their roles in the formation of a circus, Le Cirque des Reves, Marco realizes instantly that this is the woman he’s been training to beat. But as the years pass with no clear winner or end in sight, both Celia and Marco become tired and press for more information from their mentors. When the rules of the game finally become clear, they realize that they and the circus might have more to lose than they originally thought.

You just can’t go wrong with Jim Dale as a narrator! His voice is seductive when describing the love that two of the characters share. The scenes where he takes on the voice of the reader visiting the circus is also perfectly pitched, making the writing sound like a Choose Your Own Adventure Novel rather than a regular book. Picking up the printed copy and reading those opening lines months later, I still hear his voice and narration, drawing readers into the mystery and magic that make up the circus.

It helps that he has amazing writing to fall back on. It’s no wonder that everyone is clamoring to claim a copy of this debut novel by Erin Morgenstern. The descriptions of the circus include not just the sights and sounds but the tastes and textures. Circus tents and their contents play a massive role in the tale, and Morgenstern intersperses the tale with second person point of view narration detailing their make and design, which range from the more conventional fortune-teller, magician, and suspended acrobats to a fantastical library of memories triggered by smells and a wishing tree lit by candles. The magic and amazement are palatable, and I was left wishing that such a circus truly existed just so that I could see it for myself.

The publishers tip the author’s hat a little too early in my opinion, because based on the jacket copy readers go into the book knowing that Marco and Celia are going to fall in love. How the competition plays out is a series of interrelated and complicated actions that leave not one person responsible, but also prevents everyone from being wholly knowledgeable about what exactly happened. The mystery, intrigue, and romance dance around each other, until they draw to a climatic yet satisfying conclusion.

One of ten books chosen for the Alex Award, which is given to an adult book that has special appeal to young adults, this is a fascinating read for teens, and a patron I recommended it to raves about it months after the fact. You can contribute to the experience by listening to Erin Morgenstern’s playlist, which she lists in an interview with Largehearted Boy and makes available on her own website.

The Memory Bank

Title: The Memory Bank
Author: Carolyn Coman and Rob Shepperson
Illustrator: Rob Shepperson
ISBN: 9780545210669
Pages: 379 pages
Publisher/Date: Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., c2010.

“Forget her.”
Hope’s father wasn’t kidding. He never kidded.
Moments before, he had ordered Honey–Hope’s little sister, a skim coat of bubble gum covering most of her small face — out of the car.
“I’ve told you a thousand times,” he said. “No laughing.”
Now, as he stepped on the gas and the car lurched back onto the highway, the first words out of his mouth were, “Forget her.”
A cyclone of dust rose up in their wake.
Dumbfounded, Hope stared out the rearview window at her sister. For a few seconds she couldn’t even make out Honey’s little body in the swirl of debris their car wheels had kicked up. By the time she could, Honey had already receded. [...]
Hope begged her parents to turn around, to go back.
Onward they sped. (13-15, 24)

Hope’s life is turned upside down when her uncaring parents leave her little sister on the side of the road and get rid of all her things. Told never to mention Honey again, Hope spends her days crying and sleeping in the garage, dreaming of Honey. She receives a summons to the World Wide Memory Bank, where her memory deposits have shrunk to almost nothing but her vivid dreams have caught the attention of Violette, whose in charge of the Dream Vault. Reluctantly allowed to stay until her accounts balance out, Hope begins to suspect that the sabotage taking place at the Bank might have some connection to her sister’s whereabouts. Will the sisters reunite, or will the war and the mischief spread and split them apart?

I was intrigued by the concept and enthralled by the story until the very end. The open ending migh encourage discussion, but readers like myself might also be a little disappointed by the ending which doesn’t explain very well the source of the problem and glazes over the almost sappy happy ending. That being said, I think for librarians looking for a summer reading themed read (dreams? really?), it might make a really cool choice for book discussions around the Summer Reading Theme this Year of “Dream Big–Read”.

The Memory Bank is a place where memories are sorted and catalogued, awaiting the time to be returned to the people they originated from. The Dream Vault is the same for dreams, and there’s an innate tension between the woman in charge of the Dream Vault and the man in charge of the Memory Bank, since memories can’t be made while someone is asleep and dreaming, and vice versa. That’s nothing compared to the tension caused by the Clean Slate Gang, who is sabotaging the Bank.

Fans of Brian Selznick’s books will almost certainly enjoy the alternating narrations, as Honey’s is told almost entirely in pictures while Hope’s story is told in words with accompanying illustrations. That’s probably why illustrator Rob Shepperson shares the author credit on the cover as his impressive artwork really conveys emotions and moves the story along. I hesitate to say that he does a better job than Coman, whose tasks it is to explain everything. When Coman finally takes over Honey’s story things become just slightly clearer, but I loved the pictures of the Clean Slate Gang and their dump truck of lollipops.

Along for the Ride

Title: Along for the Ride
Author: Sarah Dessen
ISBN: 978067001940
Pages: 383 pages
Publisher/Date: Viking, a member of Penguin Group Inc., c2009.

Hollis’s picture frame was on the bedside table, and I picked it up, looking over the tacky blue stones. THE BEST OF TIMES. Something in these words, and his easy, smiling face, reminded me of the chatter of my old friends as they traded stories from the school year. Not about classes, or GPAs, but other stuff things that were as foreign to me as the Taj Mahal itself, gossip and boys and getting your hearts broken. They probably had a million pictures that belonged in this frame, but I didn’t have a single one.
I looked at my brother again, backpack over his shoulder. Travel certainly did provide some kind of opportunity, as well as a change of scenery. Maybe I couldn’t take off to Greece or India. But I could still go somewhere. (18)

Auden has just graduated from college and realized that she has nothing to show for her high school years except for an impeccable GPA and giving the speech at her graduation. So when the opportunity arises to spend the summer with her father, step-mother, and brand new step-sister, she impulsively accepts. She’s hoping to find something – and become someone— different before she must immerse herself in college life as the over-achieving book-obsessed shy girl. But after a rocky start with the girls at her step-mother’s store and witnessing her father travel the same distancing path with his new wife that he did with Auden’s mother, Auden starts to believe her mother’s saying that people don’t change. Will Eli, the boy who catches her eye and is hiding from the world in his own way, change her mind and herself in ways she never expected?

I’ll admit it: This is the first Sarah Dessen novel I’ve read. I know she’s been writing books for years now and has over a half-dozen books to her name. She’s been described to me as the Nicholas Sparks for teens and college women, and I guess I can see the resemblance. And I found myself enjoying it much more than I thought I would. This book is not just fluff, and it does have teen drama without being overly dramatic. Auden has a split family where neither parent is very attentive, and yes there is some drinking, but I was surprised to reflect back and not be able to pinpoint excessive swearing or violence or drug use or anything that parents find so objectionable about the “dark” young adult novels that are being published and publicized so frequently.

I think what I like best about Auden and Eli, and even the girls that Auden ends up working with is that they are so normal and yet still very multifaceted. In comparison to some of the relationships in fiction, Auden and Eli have a relatively tame but unique courtship, but that’s not to say that it’s instant connection. It’s actually a very rocky start and Auden almost gets pounded to a pulp at a party. Eli sets out to expose Auden to all the normal teenager things, like bowling, she missed out on while pushing herself so hard with her school work. In a similar way, Auden forces Eli out of his comfort zone, and they seem to be well matched as they join each other on nocturnal outings around town away from the prying eyes of their peers. It’s a refreshing spin and a great first impression to an author I’ve had no previous experience. I’ll be sure to recommend her to teen girls from now on. Although by the looks of the well-worn library copy, they probably already know about her.