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Title: The Boyfriend List (15 Guys, 11 Shrink Appointments, 4 Ceramic Frogs and Me, Ruby Oliver)
Author: E. Lockhart
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks was my favorite YA read of 2008, so what took me so long to read more by the same author?

Summary: In less than two weeks, 15-year-old Ruby Oliver manages to lose her boyfriend and her best friends, making her the official social pariah of her prep school. Then the anxiety attacks start, and she literally can’t breathe.

Review: I liked this book, but I didn’t love it. Because of how much I loved Frankie, I expected to be blown away again. Not exactly fair, I know.

Of all reviews, this one deserves a list, so here are a couple things that got in the way of me loving this book:

• Footnotes—I liked them in An Abundance of Katherines, but here they distracted me from the flow of the story. I think it’s because these footnotes were too frequent, and they didn’t always add much.
• Timeline—The back-and-forth timeline was hard to follow at times. I would catch myself jumping back a page or two to try to figure out when the scene had really happened.

But Ruby grew on me, and at the end of the book I wanted to read the rest of the series.

Why? Little scenes like this. Ruby’s driving, and her mom is in the passenger seat.

We were only going like five miles an hour in a circle around the parking lot, but Mom kept doing these sharp intakes of breath like she was at a horror movie.

“Roo! That guy is pulling out!”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you see him? There, he’s backing up.”

“Yeah.”

“So stop!”

I stopped.

“Don’t hit the brake so hard, Roo.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did. I jerked forward in my seat. But it’s okay, you’re learning. It’s practice. Oh!” she squealed, as I started around the parking lot again. “Be careful! There’s a squirrel!”

“I wonder where I get my anxiety,” I said.

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Did You Like This Book? Try:

• Prom—My rating: 4.5/5
• An Abundance of Katherines—My rating: 4/5
• Fly on the Wall: How One Girl Saw Everything
• More Recommendations from LibraryThing

Can you trust me? Compare our taste!

Title: Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd
Editor: Holly Black, Cecil Castellucci
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: Self-proclaimed geek, here. So after Abby, Liz, Nymeth, and Lenore talked up this book, how could I resist?

Summary: A collection of stories from YA authors celebrating geekdom in all its many forms—from roleplaying to Buffy to being the smartest kid in school.

Review: I recently told a friend of mine about this collection. She’s been reading some YA lately, she’s a huge Buffy fan, and she’s one smart cookie to boot. So I thought she might be into the whole “celebrate your inner geek” thing. But when I suggested that she might like it, I’m pretty sure I offended her.

Enough. It’s time to reclaim “geek” as a badge of pride. First step? Read this book.

Full disclosure: I didn’t love every story in this collection. I share Nymeth’s disappointment in “The Truth about Dino Girl,” and I flat-out stopped reading one of the stories. But aside from those two disappointments, I enjoyed every story, even if that particular subculture of geek was new to me.

I absolutely adored three of the stories and was sad to reach the last page of each:

• “Secret Identity” by Kelly Link
• “Quiz Bowl Antichrist” by David Levithan
• “The King of Pelinesse” by M.T. Anderson

So check this one out. If you find that you’re not loving one of the stories, you can always skip it and go to the next.

You owe it to your inner geek.

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Did You Like This Book? Try:

• Shiver
• Liar
• Fairy Tale
• More Recommendations from LibraryThing

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.

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Did you like this book? Try:

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

Audience Pick!

Title: The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl
Author: Barry Lyga
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: Because you told me to!

Summary: Fanboy gets picked on at school, he has only one friend who happens to be embarrassed by him, and his mom’s pregnant with his neanderthal stepdad’s kid. The only thing keeping him going is his dream of publishing his graphic novel, but then he meets Kyra, who turns his world upside down.

Review: I had fun reading about a kid who loves comics and graphic novels, since I’m just dipping my toes into that world now. And the climax of the story had me zipping through the pages to find out what would happen.

This part opened my eyes to the process of creating a comic book or graphic novel, which I never really thought about before:

This is actually the toughest part: not the writing or the drawing, but the lettering. Figuring out where to put the word balloons. Trying not to obscure too much art, or too much of anything important, at least. Making sure that the balloons are placed so that the dialogue flows naturally and leads the reader’s eye correctly. Prose writers have it easy: Everything starts in the upper-left-hand corner of the page and goes downhill from there. In a comic book, you start in the upper-left-hand corner, but from there you can go right, down, diagonal, whatever. You can have panel borders, or none. You can have word balloons that are connected, disconnected, broken. You can have characters speak from off-panel, or in voice-over captions. You have to decide if the words are important enough to cover up the artwork that’s telling half the story.

Overall, I enjoyed this story, but it didn’t stand out to me.

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Did You Like This Book? Try:

• An Abundance of Katherines—My rating: 4/5
• Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist—My rating: 3.5/5
• Twisted
• More Recommendations from LibraryThing

Title: The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself
Author: Susan Bell
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: I found this book while browsing the writing section of the library.

Summary: An editor offers advice on how to edit your own writing.

Review: I loved the first half of this book for its practicality, but as it got less practical I lost interest. Example:

• Loved learning about how The Great Gatsby changed during the editing process
• Didn’t love reading about the entire history of book editing

One little gem was the author’s tips for gaining perspective on your work—techniques like editing in a different environment than where you wrote, changing the font when you read it back, hanging it up on a laundry line to look for big picture issues.

Even though I didn’t love the second half, the book was easy to get through, which isn’t always true of writing books. (As my shelf of 20+ unread writing books can attest.)

I’ll leave you with one of the practical tips that stuck with me:

Take care not to indiscriminately repeat a turn of phrase. Avoid, that is, overusing one particular sentence structure, such as, for example, a clause, then a colon, then a list. Single out the structure you unwittingly repeat, enter it in a notebook marked “patterns to break,” and make it the only thing you look for on one or two read-throughs. Hunt down your habit, and train your mind to flinch at it.

Have you ever tried looking for just one thing during a read-through?

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