Can you trust me? Compare our taste!

Title: The Earth, My Butt and Other Big Round Things
Author: Carolyn Mackler
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: One blogger I follow, Jessica, loved this book, while another, Emily, didn’t think it was all that great. I wanted to see where I’d fall.

Summary: 15-year-old Virginia is fat. Her mother judges her, her father judges her, and everyone at her Manhattan private school judges her. Except for a boy named Froggy.

Review: Virginia is a girl whose spunk inspires you to root for her. The story interested me enough to keep reading, but in the end I didn’t love the book.

This is another case where a character’s young voice wasn’t my thing. I’m considering going back to plot all my book ratings against the main character’s age to see if I find a trend. Any excuse for another spreadsheet!

I also want to try another book by this author—one with an older protagonist—and see if I connect with it better. Any suggestions?

Moving onto my writerly education, here are some lessons reinforced while reading this book:

• Show don’t tell—The show/tell see-saw felt a little lopsided. Poor Show got stuck at the top dangling her legs.
• Tone down the drama—The ending tended toward melodrama. Lots of crying. Sometimes, less is more.
• Watch for adult sayings—For as young as the voice felt, there were a few times when I felt like the author’s adult sensibilities leaked through to the main character, such as in the quote below.

I feel awful that I stormed out of her office last week. I know she only wanted to help me, but I guess it struck a raw nerve. As they say, the truth is always the hardest thing to hear.

That last sentence sounded odd to me coming from a 15-year-old.

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

Did You Like This Book? Try:

• Fat Kid Rules the World
• Speak—My rating: 5/5
• Looking for Alaska—My rating: 5/5
• More Recommendations from LibraryThing

Can you trust me? Compare our taste!

Title: Twenty Boy Summer
Author: Sarah Ockler
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: The cover and the title made it look like a light read, which I was in the mood for after a string of not-light books.

Summary: Anna is getting what she’s always wanted—a summer vacation at the beach with her best friend Frankie. Frankie comes up with a game to find summer romance by meeting a new guy every day, and she convinces Anna to play too. But Frankie doesn’t know that Anna already met the guy she wants—Frankie’s older brother Matt, whom Anna can’t let go.

Review: This is what I get for not checking any reviews of this book or even the jacket blurb before I started reading it. Because it’s not exactly a light romance, like I had expected.

But it turns out that fact is what I like best about the book. As I read, my throat was thick with Anna’s grief for Matt and the guilt she felt for wanting to move on—and even worse, for actually moving on.

The ending tended toward melodrama in parts, but overall this one was a good read.

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

Did You Like This Book? Try:

• The Chosen One
• Prada and Prejudice
• Breathing
• More Recommendations from LibraryThing

Can you trust me? Compare our taste!

Audience Pick!

Title: Liar
Author: Justine Larbalestier
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3.5/5
Why I Read It: Because you told me to!

Summary: 17-year-old Micah lies to everyone. First she said she was a boy, then a hermaphrodite, then the daughter of an arms dealer. So when her secret boyfriend Zach disappears and she says she’s innocent, why should anybody believe her?

Review: Woo boy. This story sinks its teeth into your throat and gives you a good shake every few minutes just to make sure the puncture wounds are good and deep.

I couldn’t read it fast enough.

Micah doesn’t want you to root for her, to be on her side. She keeps pushing and pushing and pushing you away. But if you stick by her, if you keep listening, you’re in for quite a story.

Want a taste?

The second day Zach isn’t at school, I wear a mask. I keep it on for three days. I forge a note from my dad to say I have a gruesome rash and the doctor told me to keep it covered. I carry the note with me from class to class. They all buy it.

My dad brought the mask back from Venice. It’s black leather painted with silver and unfurls at each corner like a fern. The silver is real.

Under it, my skin itches.

They tell us Zach is dead during third period on Thursday.

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

Did you like this book? Try:

• Once Was Lost
• Girl in the Arena
• Beautiful Creatures
• More Recommendations from LibraryThing

Can you trust me? Compare our taste!

Title: The Giver
Author: Lois Lowry
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3.5/5
Why I Read It: It’s been on my TBR list for a while (since November 20, 2005, to be exact) but forced its way to the top after I saw it listed as a suggested title for the DystopYA Reading Challenge.

Summary: 12-year-old Jonas lives in a utopian community with no crime, no unemployment, no problems at all. But when he gets chosen as the one and only Receiver of Memories, he starts to learn the dark secrets of his small world.

Review: The world in this book reminded me a bit of the movie Pleasantville.

I loved reading about this creepy world and Jonas’s journey to uncover the truth. I think the only reason I didn’t rate this an all-time favorite is that at 12 years old, Jonas was a little young for my taste. I like my main characters to be solidly in their teens, upper if possible. Or if they’re younger, I like them to be extra sassy (like 15-year-old Daisy).

This is probably because as a teen, I was about as dynamic as a baked potato. I wish I had been cool and self-aware and sarcastic. So I like to read about characters who are all that and more—not like my boring, starchy teen self.

Still, I am glad I read The Giver. I can see now why it’s considered one of the classic YA dystopias.

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

Did You Like This Book? Try:

• Number the Stars
• Walk Two Moons
• Holes—My rating: 4/5
• More Recommendations from LibraryThing

You might have noticed that I like spreadsheets and charts and graphs.

Yesterday’s year-end wrap-up of the top 10 YA hotties was fun, but today the word of the day is…quantitative!

Having a Kid Increased My Need for Escape

This year, I finished 102 books, up 45% from last year.

The breakdown by genre:

• YA Fiction: 74.6%
• Middle-Grade Fiction: 13.7%
• Nonfiction: 7.8%
• Adult Fiction: 3.9%

The breakdown by rating:

But Clearly, Reading Alone Wasn’t Enough

2009 was also the year I started this blog:

• I wrote 118 posts
• On average, each post received 5.6 comments
• The blog has 83 subscribers, according to Feedburner

Top 10 Posts

Taking into account number of comments, feed reader views, and web page views:

• Free Books to Celebrate Nerds Heart YA
• Which YA Series Were Worth Your Time?
• Can You Diagram Your Way to Writing Success?
• 7 Tips for Quitting a Book
• Take the TBR Personality Test
• How to Ban Books the RIGHT Way
• How Great Books Destroy Me
• Review: Along for the Ride
• Review: Bloom
• My Top 10 Kindred Spirits on Goodreads

Top Words

A graphical representation of the top words used on this blog, thanks to Wordle:



Did I really use “slut” and “slutty” that much? Geesh.

Top 10 Commentators

Before starting this blog, I didn’t know any adults who were as crazy about YA as I am. Now that I’ve found a whole slew of you, I don’t feel like such a weirdo anymore. Not only that, you’ve cheered me on when I needed it, commiserated over TBR lists, encouraged me to try new things. You rock.

• Alexa (41, and in her first year as a new mum, too!)
• Heather (29)
• Jessica (15)
• Jodie (15)
• Janssen (12)
• Cathe (11)
• Nicole (11)
• Patti (11)
• Rhiannon (11)
• Lisa (10)

By the way, I just installed a new commenting tool, DISQUS. Check it out at the bottom of this post, and let me know what you think. DISQUS integrates with social networking tools like Twitter so you can see the entire discussion in one place.

Your Turn: Whew. I honestly can’t think of anything else interesting to quantify, but let me know if you can, and I’ll consult the spreadsheets.