Can you trust me? Compare our taste!

Title: My Most Excellent Year: A Novel of Love, Mary Poppins, and Fenway Park
Author: Steve Kluger
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3.5/5
Why I Read It: This book won the Nerds Heart YA tournament, where I served as a judge in the earlier rounds.

Summary: T.C. and Augie are not only best friends—after T.C.’s mom passes away, they adopt each other as brothers. Their freshman year brings first love, a Mary Poppins-obsessed 6-year-old boy, and of course lots of baseball.

Review: Y’all know how I feel about alternating points of view. And it was a little difficult to get into this book at first as T.C., Augie, and T.C.’s crush Alejandra took turns telling their stories.

But once I got a feel for the different characters, I found myself wearing a perma-smile as I read.

It was a bit like going to a baseball game. You get settled into your seat, excited for the game to start, but it’s a little slow-going at first. Then your team gets a good hit, and you can’t help but get caught up in the fun.

That’s exactly what this book is—good, clean fun. The romances were sweet and more than enough to satisfy my girly sensibilities. Alejandra was opinionated and saucy—my kinda girl. Augie’s penchant for musicals kept everything light. And T.C. was a good kid who I never got tired of hearing from.

The novel is told in narration, snippets of instant messenger conversations, emails, and diary entries, which was kept it fresh and entertaining.

My only criticism would be that the kids sometimes seemed a little too well-adjusted for being freshmen in high school. (Or maybe I was just an exquisite little mess in high school, and these kids are closer to normal.)

Above all, this is a feel-good book. Chris and Nymeth picked a great winner for the first Nerds Heart YA tournament!

Borrow: Your local library | Swap
Buy: Your local bookstore | Powell’s | Amazon

Did You Like This Book? Try:

• The Last Exit to Normal
• The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks—My rating: 5/5
• Sunrise Over Fallujah
• More Recommendations from LibraryThing

Goodreads has this nifty feature where you can compare how you’ve rated the books you’ve read to the books and ratings from any other user. Because I finally caught up on writing book reviews, I decided to look up every person whose blog I regularly read and compare our taste.

First, a caveat: I couldn’t find everyone, so if you didn’t get a friend request from me, add me so we can compare our taste!

Here are my current top 10 matches:

1. Debbie’s World of Books at 96%
2. Serenehours at 94%
3. Book Lists Life at 93%
4. Rhapsodyinbooks’s Weblog at 93%
5. things mean a lot at 93%
6. what Elisabeth is reading at 93%
7. Gimme More Books at 92%
8. Rhiannon Hart at 92%
9. The Well-Read Child at 92%
10. Everyday Reading at 91%—This spot was actually a 5-way tie but I went with who had the most books in common with me.

Would you make my top 10? Compare and let’s find out!

When I go to the library, I sometimes wander off to the YA area and randomly pick books off the shelf because I like the title or the cover, because I see a recent release, or because I vaguely recognize the book from one of the 472 book reviews I’ve read that week.

Right now, I have 7 of these random picks, and I can’t read them all before they’re due back at the library. Help!

Which of these titles are worth the time? And which should I return without reading?

• Catalyst by Laurie Halse Anderson
• Dear Julia by Amy Bronwen Zemser
• If I Stay by Gayle Forman
• I Know It’s Over by C. K. Kelly Martin
• The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews
• My Heartbeat by Garret Freymann-Weyr
• Say the Word by Jeannine Garsee

So whaddya say? Yeah or nay?

Photo by cpalmieri.

Can you trust me? Compare our taste!

Audience Pick!

Title: Just Listen
Author: Sarah Dessen
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: Because you told me to!

Summary: Annabel has a best friend, a loving family, a modeling career on the side. But after a party one night at the end of her sophomore year, she loses her best friend and puts herself into exile over the summer. Then her family starts to fall apart when her sister refuses to eat, modeling becomes a chore, and the only person who will talk to her at school is an intimidating loner.

Review: This is heavier than This Lullaby and Along for the Ride. Not as much romance, but the handful of romantic scenes were great, as you’d expect from Dessen.

I liked the issues tackled in this story, but one thing kept me from rating this as high as the other Dessen books I’ve read: A chapter or scene would start with a sentence or a paragraph, then there was a flashback, sometimes for several pages, before it got back to the scene I had started. So when I got dumped back into the original scene, I was disoriented and it took me a while to get back into it.

If you like Dessen, I’m sure you’ll like this book. I did. It wasn’t my favorite of hers so far, but I still enjoyed it.

And I like how the book incorporated humor to balance out the heavy themes. Here’s a little snippet for you. It’s a flashback to when Annabel is 12. Her older sister Kirsten is complaining to their mom about how a new girl in town is shadowing Kirsten at the neighborhood pool:

“Kirsten,” my mother said now, “be nice.”

“Mom, I’ve tried that. But if you saw her, you’d understand. It’s strange.”

My mother took a sip of her wine. “Moving to a new place is difficult, you know. Maybe she doesn’t know how to make friends—”

“She obviously doesn’t,” Kirsten told her.

“—which means that it might be your job to meet her halfway,” my mother finished.

“She’s twelve,” Kirsten said, as if this was on par with being diseased, or on fire.

“So is your sister,” my father pointed out.

Kirsten picked up her fork and pointed it at him. “Exactly,” she said.

Borrow: Your local library | Swap
Buy: Your local bookstore | Powell’s | Amazon

Did you like this book? Try:

• That Summer
• Speak—My rating: 5/5
• The Truth about Forever
• More Recommendations from LibraryThing

Can you trust me? Compare our taste!

Title: Jack Tumor
Author: Anthony McGowan
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 4.5/5
Why I Read It: It released in 2009, and I was in the mood for something new.

Summary: Hector’s hearing voices—well, one voice—and that’s never good. And this particular voice happens to be a talking brain tumor. Also not good.

Review: Hey, writers! Are you grappling with how to tackle a heavy topic like mortality without making a total downer of a book? Here’s a little known technique that might do the trick: Add a talking brain tumor!

I know, this book sounds weird. I picked it up at the library without reading the premise, so when I got home and saw what it was, I pawned it off on my partner.

And then he started laughing. Out loud. A lot.

So I had to see for myself. I’m here to report that yes, this book is weird. But it’s also bloody brilliant. Note: I can get away with saying “bloody” because of the aforementioned brain tumor but also because the author is British, which serves as further proof that non-American English-speakers can write a damn good book.

Sometimes, the funny bits turned into tangents that seemed to exist for funny’s sake and not the story’s sake. But they were awfully funny, after all, and it was only a couple times that the tangents interrupted the flow of the story. (I hesitated even saying anything because I loved this book so much, but I wanted to explain why it didn’t get a full 5 stars from me.)

Check it out for yourself:

“Hector?”

A man looking a lot like a doctor was staring at me. …

I nodded.

“I’m Dr. Jones.”

I nodded again. He hadn’t said anything yet that I felt like disagreeing with.

“As you know, this is a teaching hospital. Would you mind if some ah, observers sat in?”

Before I had the chance to mind, a group of gormless-looking students began filing into the room. Not all gormless-looking. There was one exceptionally pretty girl, with the kind of straight black hair I like.

It meant I was going to get an anal probe for sure.

I felt the electric tingle of a blush as the whole scene played out before me: the pink rubberized truncheon they were going to use, the sparking electrodes at the end of the probe, the giggle from the students at the farting noise produced as the probe was extracted, my stuttering efforts to say it wasn’t me but the probe that made the noise.

“So, you’ve been having some problems?” said Doc Jones.

Problems! Where did I start?

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Did you like this book? Try these recommendations from LibraryThing.