As a judge for the first round of the Nerds Heart YA tournament, I had the tough task of deciding which of these two books advance to the next round. I’ll start with reviews of each one, but if you can’t bear the suspense any longer feel free to skip to the end of this post for the decision!

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The Latent Powers of Dylan Fontaine

Author: April Lurie
Category: Fiction, Young Adult

Summary: After Dylan’s mom moved out, his dad threw himself into work and his older brother threw himself into pot. Dylan’s the glue holding the household together, but when his best friend Angie doesn’t see him that way and Dylan gets picked up by the cops, how much longer can the glue hold up?

What I Loved: The engrossing story made me immediately care about Dylan and what he was going through. This is how it starts:

I can tell you from experience that a jail cell is not a place you’d like to visit.

I loved the humor throughout. It was funny without trying too hard to be clever, so it felt like I was reading about a real kid and his problems. Here’s one part of a scene with Dylan’s older brother Randy and his stoner friends Headbone, Nick, and Moser. Moser has a bit of a hygiene issue and refuses to shower.

Suddenly Nick says, “Shut up, Headbone! Don’t you see what’s going on here?”

Headbone looks confused. “No…what? Ohhhh.”

Now Moser gets it too. He shakes his head, and I pray to God the white stuff in his hair is dandruff and not larvae.

I also genuinely thought a couple of the subplots could go either way, which made for a fun read.

What I Didn’t Love: As the story lines started to wrap up, that understated humor seemed to drop away when it was most needed. So the emotional scenes sometimes felt overly sentimental to me. Also with the ending, I thought the characters tended to be a little too forthcoming with how they really felt—not necessarily realistic.

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

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Leftovers

Author: Laura Wiess
Category: Fiction, Young Adult

Summary: Best friends Blair and Ardith have done something wrong, something very wrong. After you hear their story, will you understand?

What I Loved: This book takes a chance, and I will always love a gutsy story that pushes the boundaries of what is “right” and acceptable. The main risk in my eyes was the prevalent use of second person voice. (More on that in a bit.)

The book also had a few gems that made me stop and think for a bit, like this one after one of the girls was teased at school:

So you…get busy writing your name in your notebook. Homeroom ends in seven minutes and if you drag it out, you can make your preoccupation with penmanship last just about that long. You stare at the page. Your name is a lone bottle floating on an ocean of blue-lined paper. You frown and erase the small, cramped letters. The words disappear but the impression remains and there’s nothing you can do about that.

What I Didn’t Love: The second person voice was off-putting. I guess it was intended to make you feel like you’re part of the story so you connect to the events and can understand the main characters’ actions. But for me, it was constantly jarring, throwing me out of the story and introducing a distance so I couldn’t fully connect with the main characters.

Here’s another snippet to help you decide if this is the book for you. I’m curious to know what you think after reading it.

When your mother finally makes partner in a prestigious law firm, she decides it’s time to buy one of the big, new McMansions across town. She says you need a new house because you’ve outgrown your current one, a cozy cape in a mostly blue-collar neighborhood, but that’s not really true, because besides you and your parents, the only other living thing in the house is your old golden retriever Wendy Darling, and she doesn’t take up much space. She’s slept in your room for the last fourteen years, first in your bed, but now on her orthopedic mattress next to your bed.

You don’t want to move and say so, but nobody cares.

Probably because of this distance, a little ways in, the girls’ stories started to feel melodramatic and even a bit whiny.

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

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The Decision

The book that will continue to the next round is…

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The Latent Powers of Dylan Fontaine!

If you’re a numbers sort of person, here’s the ratings breakdown:

Dylan: 3.5/5
Leftovers: 3/5

To see how Dylan fares in the next round of the tournament, keep an eye on Stephanie’s Confessions of a Book-a-holic for her decision.

Title: The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile
Author: Noah Lukeman
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: I read a similar book in January and loved it, and Amazon said I might like this one too.

Summary: A literary agent and former editor shares tips on how to make your first 5 pages shine.

Review: I would recommend Self-Editing for Fiction Writers over this book. However, if you’re looking for another slightly different list of issues to look for in your writing, go ahead and read this book.

The advice in this one was solid, but other elements of it weren’t:

• Silly, obvious examples—Showing examples of what you’re talking about: Awesome. Showing examples that were obviously constructed just for the purpose of this book and were so ridiculous that only a complete idiot could have written them: Not so awesome. The examples didn’t really help me at all.
• Exercises for the sake of exercises—A few times, the writing exercises at the end of each chapter seemed arbitrary, like someone just thought them up and stuck them in the book without stopping to test whether they were actually helpful. I’d rather have a couple tried-and-true exercises than a bucket of this-seems-like-it-might-work exercises.

This book took me a couple months to read, whereas I devoured Self-Editing for Fiction Writers in about a week.

Do you typically take a while to get through a writing how-to book? Or does it depend on how good it is?

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Audience Pick!

Title: American Born Chinese
Author: Gene Luen Yang
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: Because you told me to!

Summary: Jin Wang moves to a new school where he’s the only other Asian kid. He eats lunch alone and has no real friends. Will he ever be like the other kids?

Review: This is the first graphic novel I’ve ever read. I liked it, but I didn’t love it. I think that’s more to do with me getting used to a new story medium than with this specific story.

The message of this book—to accept yourself—is universal, and the artwork is crisp and vibrant. And I enjoyed how the three different storylines come together in the end.

I’d like to try reading more graphic novels to see if I can get into the format. Which titles would you recommend to a graphic novel neophyte? Leave a comment or add your recommendation to the Pick My Next Book section in the sidebar!

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Title: Perfect Fifths
Author: Megan McCafferty
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: I read the rest of the Jessica Darling series in 2007, so I wanted to see how the last book wrapped it all up.

Summary: Three years after he proposed to her and she said no, Jessica Darling runs into Marcus Flutie—literally.

Review: I’m glad I read the final book in this series not just for the closure but because the book offers up some truly enjoyable moments. And even though it had been almost 2 years since I last read about Jessica, this book brought it all back immediately.

But this wasn’t my favorite book in the series. A few reasons why:

• Transcript in the middle—The 2nd third of the book is a conversation between two characters, but nothing else happens. You don’t even get to see what the characters are doing except when they talk about it. It’s like reading a transcript. Interested technique, but it got old for me after a few pages.
• Clever bordering on pretentious—I like smart humor, I do. But a few times, the extreme cleverness of the characters induced eye-rolling.
• Short wrap-up—This is probably just me, but I wanted more of a conclusion. Or at least more time in the conclusion. After such a long series with a back-and-forth, steamy relationship, I was looking forward to more of a payoff. But then, I’m in the camp that liked the conclusion of the last Harry Potter, which I know isn’t universal.

With that said, if you’ve read the rest of the Jessica Darling series, I think you’ll enjoy this one.

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Title: Tender Morsels
Author: Margo Lanagan
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3/5
Summary: Liga Longfield has been through hell. So when she stumbles upon her own personal heaven, she doesn’t ask questions. But her heaven isn’t as isolated as she thought. Will she have to face her hell again?

Review: This Printz Honor Book is not for the squeamish. I didn’t read much about the book before starting it, and the cover led me to believe it was going to be fairy tale-ish.

It does contain magic, but this book also deals with some pretty heavy topics. Incest, rape—happy little things like that. Don’t get me wrong—my top 10 list of YA books is not all rainbows and fluffy bunnies. I was just a little taken aback at the start of this book, and I thought I should give you a heads up in case you’re really not into that sort of thing.

Things I loved about this book:

• The language. Unique, gorgeous. When I saw that the author is a poet, I was not surprised.
• The world. (Or I guess I should say worlds.) A seamless combination of magic and reality.

Things I didn’t love about this book:

• Point of view changes. Too many for my taste. I found it distracting, especially later on as more characters come into play. And I’m not sure I get the decision to use first person for the male characters, even the not-so-great ones. Why would you want to foster intimacy between those nasties and the reader?
• Too long. After about halfway through, I got impatient for where the plot was headed. I just wanted to get there, already.
• Adverbs, adverbs everywhere. Petty, I know, but they’re really getting on my nerves lately!

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