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** spoiler alert **

I had a review written for this, but I can’t bring myself to post it. It isn’t constructive, and I try not to pan a book without offering up at least something positive or helpful. I once self-published an ebook (which has been offline for “repairs”/a total overhaul for three years now), so I know firsthand how unbelievably grueling it is to write a book. I struggle with it daily, and am the first to admit that the original version of my story (and possibly even the current one) was, in parts, really bad. I’m still learning. Even Salman Rushdie and Haruki Murakami are still learning. So, keep in mind as you read this that, while I may complain heartily about a book, I’m always respectful of the mind-melting work that went into it.

There are so many things about this story that make me worry for impressionable young women reading it that I held nothing back in my original review. Beyond the numerous Twilight ripoffs and the protagonists’ own abhorrent behavior, this book (like so many others) romanticizes stalking and controlling romantic relationships. It glorifies dishonesty and cheating. It even, at one point, has the “heroine” driving drunk to school, an appalling act for which she suffers no real consequences–and, even worse, something she treats as a big joke.

I will share the lists from my original review and spare you the rest:

Behavior that, according to Ever and Damen, is totally copacetic:
–Using psychic powers to cheat on tests (and then criticizing mortal girls for doing the same, sans psychic powers).
–Using psychic powers to cheat at gambling and win hundreds of thousands of dollars.
–Stalking.
–Breaking and entering.
–Self-medicating with booze.
–Driving drunk.
–Lying, as long as it’s about “unimportant” things.
–Invading your significant other’s thoughts, allowing him/her no privacy.
–Controlling your girlfriend’s clothing, music, thoughts, and dreams.
–Ditching your girlfriend to “go surfing” when she turns you down for lovin’.
–Stealing another woman’s husband over and over, and then killing her for not taking it lying down.
–Flirting with other girls to make your lady love jealous.
–Plying your girlfriend with tulips every time you do something jerky.
–Breaking the code and going after your best friend’s crush.
–Not giving your girlfriend a choice to spend eternity with her family before making her an immortal like you (even Edward gave Bella a choice, which basically involved Bella convincing him for 1500+ pages that she had nothing to live for and just wanted to be like him–but, still, he gave her the choice).

Blatant Twilight ripoffs:
–The sequel is called Blue Moon. (“Come on!!! Are you serious?!” asks Mr. Mere.)
–New girl in new town meets new boy in new town. The two sit next to one another in class.
–Immortal boy thinks bland, somewhat unlikable first-person narrator is more extraordinary than any of the girls he’s met across time and space.
–Ever can read everyone’s thoughts but Damen’s.
–Damen is seventeen, immortal, rich, and drives a fast car.
–Damen never eats and his lips are “icy cold.”
–These characters are centuries-old virgins.
–Damen cuts school a lot, leaving Ever to plotz over his absence.
–Damen shows up randomly and without warning in Ever’s bedroom. Sexless sleepovers ensue.
–Ever has no parental supervision whatsoever. Even when she narrowly dodges expulsion for getting wasted at school, her adoptive aunt (Sabine) half-heartedly hides the booze in an unlocked cabinet rather than pouring it down the sink.
–Ever and Damen share a timeless love but, really, their central conflict is not being able to have sex. Though I’m not sure what’s stopping Ever–it’s never really made clear.
–Key scenes in meadows/fields.
–Damen to Ever/Edward to Bella: “I can’t stay away from you” (258). A blatant, word-for-word dialogue lift.
–Instead of catching a falling apple in the cafeteria, Damen catches Ever’s falling water bottle. Like Edward, he moves so fast that it’s a blur.

Things Damen can do:
(Note: According to Ever, Damen has a “neverending list of things he’s good at” (55). There are several paragraphs in this book that are just laundry lists of all the things that make Damen awesomesauce.)
–Anything. Everything.
–Painting, diving, surfing, soccer, guitar, piano, violin, saxophone, magic tricks, etc.
–He taught Picasso everything he knows about painting. No joke. Picasso and Van Gogh both painted him, and he was also BFFs with Leonardo da Vinci. His modern-day art teacher realizes “she’s never had [a student:] with such innate, natural ability–until now” (56). This is some serious Gary Stu (thanks, Ashley) characterization. On top of all this, he has signed books from Emily Brontë and William Shakespeare, and he knew Marie Antoinette and all four Beatles.
–He’s ambidextrous and, to quote Bella Swan, “impossibly fast.”
–He regularly cribs passages from various popular New Age texts, which combine to form a confusing mish-mash of manifesting, positive thinking, Transcendental Meditation, chakras, karma, and reincarnation. These concepts are not, as pop American pseudo-philosophy would have you believe, interchangeable.
–In other words, he bastardizes legitimate Eastern religions/philosophies to make them palatable to an American teenage audience. It happens all the time.

Miscellaneous other issues:
–Excessive use of participial phrases and miscellaneous copyediting errors.
–Using “nauseous” instead of “nauseated” multiple times to describe feeling sick to one’s stomach.
–Blatant product/celebrity placement (Sidekick, iPhone, iPod, Orlando Bloom, Johnny Depp, Evanescence, etc.).
–A plot more than vaguely reminiscent of The Twilight Saga, Fallen, Hush, Hush, Numbers, The Lovely Bones, and others.

I’ve heard that the subsequent books improve, so maybe they iron out some of the kinks of this first one. I think that I could have forgiven a lot if the core relationships in this book had been stronger. Sabine is too busy with her job to parent Ever at all. Ever is too self-involved to be a good friend to Miles and Haven. Damen is too controlling to be a healthy choice for Ever. Riley is too derivative of The Lovely Bones for me to take her seriously. I felt no real connection between any of these characters. And, once again, I’m left wondering if physical beauty is the only thing that attracts Ever and Damen to one another.

My spoiler-free, character-based review. It does, however, contain generic quotes from throughout the book, so be warned.

Title: Why Katniss Everdeen is not your typical YA heroine
Subtitle: In other words, why Katniss rocks

I am going to break this down one quote at a time. Indirectly, this book calls a lot of young adult authors onto the carpet for lazy storytelling and limp-as-a-dishrag heroines. It’s hard to say whether or not this was deliberate, but my first quote, exhibit A, makes me think it might have been.

Exhibit A: Haymitch: “‘I want everyone to think of one incident where Katniss Everdeen genuinely moved you. Not where you were jealous of her hairstyle, or her dress went up in flames or she made a halfway decent shot with an arrow. Not where Peeta was making you like her. I want to hear one moment where she made you feel something real.’” (74)

Read this passage. If you have ever so much as fantasized about writing a novel, memorize it. It is glorious. It is an APB to authors everywhere that a character needs to be more than a blank slate. A character needs dimension and clear motivation. She needs to evoke genuine emotion, rather than merely the adrenaline thrill associated with a first kiss or romantic scene. She needs to aspire to something more than boys. Don’t tell us she is awesome without providing the narrative goods to back it up. Don’t reduce your secondary characters to a mere claque that worships everything about her and reminds the audience at every turn that she is the most amazing girl who ever lived. Show us why she is amazing.

Exhibit B: “The very notion that I’m devoting any thought to who I want presented as my lover, given our current circumstances, is demeaning” (40).

Katniss is one self-aware young lady. In key scenes, she is not whining about her romantic melodramas, but actively seeking solutions. She waits for no one to save her–she is perpetually proactive. Moreover, unlike so many young adult heroines I’ve read recently, she does not begrudge others their happiness. Despite her belief that she is “manipulative,” she genuinely cares about others. She asks Prim how she is doing and actually lets her talk. When others are happy, she becomes a lens through which we witness that happiness, never subjecting us to self-indulgent whining about her own troubles. Take that, one-sided friendships (which occur often in poorly written YA narratives).

Exhibit C: Boggs: “‘Well, you’re not perfect by a long shot. But times being what they are, you’ll have to do’” (91).

This snippet of dialogue may not seem significant, but it is a tremendous leap forward for YA literature. A character can become popular without, as I mentioned earlier, a claque of characters giving her a standing ovation every time she so much as smiles. The characters in the Hunger Games trilogy are allowed to dislike Katniss and disagree with her openly, without fear of narrative retribution later for daring to dissent.

Exhibit D Johanna: “Jealousy is certainly involved. I also think you’re a little hard to swallow. With your tacky drama and your defender-of-the-helpless act. Only it isn’t an act, which makes you more unbearable. Please feel free to take this personally” (220-1).

This should really be Exhibit C2. Again, we have a character who doesn’t particularly like Katniss, and she isn’t a villain. She isn’t vilified to sanctify Katniss. She just is. This scrap of dialogue not only pokes fun at Katniss, but at a host of YA heroines who are, simply put, “unbearable.”

Exhibit E: “Because an angry, independently thinking victor with a layer of psychological scar tissue too thick to penetrate is maybe the last person you want on your squad” (251).

Did you hear that, Bella Swan? In a believable story, if you are cold and detached from your peers while sporting a vague superiority complex, people will not like you. They will not line up to be your friend as the teens of Forks inexplicably did. Katniss knows this. She understands the ramifications of her behavior, and doesn’t expect people to pat her on the back when she is in the wrong.

Exhibit F: “And what was I, really? A poor, unstable girl with a small talent with a bow and arrow. Not a great thinker, not the mastermind of the rebellion, merely a face plucked from the rabble because I had caught the nation’s attention with my antics in the Games” (294).

Katniss has more to recommend her than most YA heroines these days, but she never, ever toots her own horn. Above, she underplays the vital role she plays in the story. Peeta says it best: “‘I think…you still have no idea. The effect you can have’” (325). She doesn’t understand what Peeta, Gale, and the reader do: that she is the rare first-person heroine that has earned her spot as the narrator of the book. No one else can tell this story better. With so many other YA stories, I find myself thinking that other characters would have made more compelling narrators. Not so here. Collins got it right on the first try.

Now, for some headline-worthy quotes:

“‘Covers will be blown. People may die’” (Haymitch, 164).

“‘There will be no survivors’” (Katniss, 99).

“The Mockingjay will not lose her voice” (178).

So, without divulging any plot details, I will say that this book was phenomenal. There are quotes about warfare and society that I would love to share, but they contain vaguely spoilerous material. This series truly got better as it progressed. I gave Hunger Games three stars, Catching Fire four, and Mockingjay five. Congratulations, Suzanne Collins, on writing a trilogy that actually gained momentum as it went.

Books read in 2010:

1. Maxxed Out - David Collins
2. Flying in Place - Susan Palwick
3. Kushiel’s Chosen – Jacqueline Carey
4. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
5. Miles from Nowhere - Nami Mun
6. After Dark - Haruki Murakami
7. Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament – S.G. Browne
   
8. A German Love Story - Rolf Hochhuth
9. Kushiel’s Avatar - Jacqueline Carey
10. World War Z - Max Brooks
11. Kokoro - Natsume Soseki
12. The Woman in the Dunes - Kobo Abe
13. Nightlight: A Parody – The Harvard Lampoon
14. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
15. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
16. The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
17. The Gargoyle – Andrew Davidson
18. Hush, Hush – Becca Fitzpatrick
19. Kushiel’s Scion - Jacqueline Carey
20. Kushiel’s Justice - Jacqueline Carey
21. Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins
22. Kushiel’s Mercy - Jacqueline Carey
23. The History of Love - Nicole Krauss
24. Stargirl - Jerry Spinelli
25. A Great and Terrible Beauty - Libba Bray
26. Shiver - Maggie Stiefvater
27. Love, Stargirl - Jerry Spinelli
28. The Eye of the Sun - Ahdaf Soueif
29. The Golden Compass - Philip Pullman
30. Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons - Kurt Vonnegut
31. The Subtle Knife - Philip Pullman
32. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
33. Get Me Out of Here - Rachel Reiland
34. Passion’s Disguise - Rita Balkey (romance novel snark project)
35. Naomi - Junichiro Tanizaki
36. The Three-Cornered World - Natsume Soseki
37. Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things - Randy Frost & Gail Steketee
38. The Song of the Whales - Uri Orlev
39. The Clearing - Heather Davis
40. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
    
41. Naamah’s Kiss - Jacqueline Carey
42. The Amber Spyglass - Philip Pullman
43. I Kissed a Zombie, And I Liked It - Adam Selzer
44. Being - Kevin Brooks
45. We - Yevgeny Zamyatin
46. Need – Carrie Jones
47. Luna - Julie Anne Peters
48. The Sea and the Silence - Peter Cunningham
49. Numbers - Rachel Ward
50. Adios, Nirvana – Conrad Wesselhoeft
51. Paper Daughter - Jeanette Ingold
52. Crazy – Han Nolan
53. Bite Me – Christopher Moore
54. Uglies - Scott Westerfeld
55. Crank - Ellen Hopkins
56. Glass – Ellen Hopkins
    
57. Pretties - Scott Westerfeld
58. Specials - Scott Westerfeld
59. The Love Market - Carol Mason
60. What Is Left the Daughter - Howard Norman
61. Your Republic Is Calling You - Young-ha Kim
62. Through a Glass Darkly - Karleen Koen
63. Tyger Tyger - Kerstin Hamilton
64. Piers’ Desire - Marianne Ackerman
65. A Long Walk to Water - Linda Sue Park
66. It Started with a Dare - Lindsay Faith Rech
67. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
68. Origin - Diana Abu-Jaber
69. Crescent - Diana Abu-Jaber
70. Sputnik Sweetheart - Haruki Murakami
71. Dance, Dance, Dance - Haruki Murakami
72. Heart of the Matter - Emily Giffin
73. The Bells - Richard Harvell
74. Fallen - Lauren Kate
75. The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors - Michele Young-Stone
76. Wake - Lisa McMann
77. Fade - Lisa McMann
78. Gone - Lisa McMann
79. Seven Types of Ambiguity – Elliot Perlman
80. Burned - Ellen Hopkins
81. Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
82. The Maze Runner - James Dashner
83. Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac – Gabrielle Zevin
84. North of Beautiful – Justina Chen Hadley
85. Tell-All - Chuck Palahniuk
86. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone - J.K. Rowling
87. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - J.K. Rowling
88. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – J.K. Rowling
89. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - J.K. Rowling
90. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – J.K. Rowling
91. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling
92. Vestments - John Reimringer
93. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling
94. Naamah’s Curse - Jacqueline Carey
    
95. The Real Thing - J.J. Murray
96. The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
97. Tithe – Holly Black
98. Split - Swati Avasthi
99. Initiation - Susan Fine
100. Broken Glass Park - Alina Bronsky
101. In Your Arms - Rosemary Rogers (romance novel snark project)
102. My Darling, My Hamburger – Paul Zindel (romance novel snark project)
103. Miss Dalrymple’s Virtue - Margaret Westhaven (romance novel snark project)
104. Remembering Raquel – Vivian Vande Velde
105. Hate List - Jennifer Brown
106. As Simple as Snow - Gregory Galloway
107. Annexed - Sharon Dogar
108. The Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin
109. The Tombs of Atuan - Ursula K. Le Guin
110. The Farthest Shore - Ursula K. Le Guin
     
111. Pirate’s Wild Embrace - Linda Windsor (romance novel snark project)
112. Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz - Olga Lengyel
113. In the Woods - Tana French
114. The Likeness – Tana French
115. This Must Be the Place - Kate Racculian
116. Dune - Frank Herbert
117. The Local News – Miriam Gershow
118. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
119. Annie on My Mind – Nancy Garden
120. Bushwhacked Groom - Eugenia Riley (romance novel snark project)
121. Santa Olivia – Jacqueline Carey
122. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
123. The Glass Slipper and Other Stories – Shotaro Yasuoka
124. Sweet Savage Splendor – Lauren Wilde (romance novel snark project)
125. Blackwood’s Woman – Beverly Barton (romance novel snark project)
126. Just Listen – Sarah Dessen
127. Linger - Maggie Stiefvater
128. Blessing in Disguise – Lorna Michaels (romance novel snark project)
129. The Truth About Forever - Sarah Dessen
130. Howl’s Moving Castle - Dianna Wynne Jones
131. This Lullaby - Sarah Dessen
132. Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins
133. Traitor’s Kiss - Jane Toombs (romance novel snark project)
134. Along for the Ride - Sarah Dessen
135. Evermore – Alyson Noël
136. The Complete Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi
137. Beautiful Creatures – Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
     

** Spoiler Alert **

“Once upon a time, there was a girl named Grace Brisbane. There was nothing particularly special about her, except that she was good with numbers, very good at lying, and she made her home in between the pages of books. She loved all the wolves behind her house, but she loved one of them most of all.” (338)

Ladies and gentlemen, your heroine. Like a fine wine reduction, drain all the fluids/blood from her body (literally), and this is what she boils down to. Unlike a fine wine reduction, not exactly awesomesauce.

Four characters narrate this story: Grace, Sam, Isabel, and Cole. One of these things is not like the other. We have Sam, the haunted former wolf who must learn to be human and make peace with what his parents did to him. We have Cole, former frontman of a prominent band, wrestling with suicidal tendencies and a desire to be all wolf, all the time. We have Isabel, still reeling from her brother’s tragic death in Shiver.

And then we have Grace, the blank slate who, ultimately, steers this ship. This is her story, despite the split narrative attention to make us believe otherwise. The problem? She is, by far, the weakest character. It is by the grace (pun totally intended) of the three other characters that I gave this book three stars. They’re all so much more compelling. I would read an Isabel book.

But everyone loves Grace. Cole falls all over himself upon first meeting her, declaring that he “would do anything to be her friend and earn that smile again” (282). Earn that smile? Does it bestow blessings and good health? Does it solve differential equations? Does it cure nebulous werewolf diseases? Let’s not even mention how awful he is to Isabel, who apparently isn’t as amazing as Grace. In fact, he tells us, “She didn’t look disgusted, like Isabel had” (282)–effectively setting up Isabel as the heavy. A few paragraphs earlier, he also tells us exactly what he sees in Grace: “She was pretty in an undramatic way, and she had this great voice: very plain and matter-of-fact and distinctive.” Yikes. The reader needs something more to grab onto than this–Grace being vaguely pretty, having a great voice, and earning high marks in math and lying.

Also, when pondering Grace’s illness, Sam emphasizes that “Grace was the only one of her kind” (336). Of course. Always. Just like Bella (**Twilight spoiler alert**) was the only vampire to skip the painful transition period.

Also, like Bella, Grace contorts herself every which way to be with her supernatural boy wonder. She starts listening to alternative music, which she hates, because Sam likes it. She crosses college off her New Year’s resolution list rather flippantly so that she can shack up with him after high school and have a red coffeepot (I’m not making this up). She runs away from home to be with him after her unfair parents won’t let him sleep in her bed anymore. As much as I hated her parents, let’s get real–there is nothing normal/healthy about these Romeo-and-Juliet nightly sleepovers that have taken the YA romance market by storm.

By the end, I actually thought that Grace was going to die. This would have made sense, strangely. So many of the final scenes between Sam and Grace feel valedictory, as if building toward her death. If this story weren’t trapped in the “trilogy” mindset, maybe it would have gone down that way. Instead, she becomes a wolf in the hospital (thanks to Cole’s saliva–imminent love triangle, anyone?) and takes off for more coniferous pastures.

Not that Grace’s becoming a wolf is without storyline potential. It’s a pretty fitting reversal, and the only logical conclusion given that this is a trilogy. But her becoming a wolf means that she must rely on the men to find a cure. Grace is a good student. She’s smart. If this is her story, which I believe it to be, why couldn’t she be the one to find the cure? Why must she be the one who needs rescuing? Why couldn’t she be a Katniss (Hunger Games Trilogy) instead of a Bella (The Twilight Tetralogy )? Of course, I’m making a lot of assumptions about the third book, but the saga seems to be making a beeline toward Sam and Cole finding a cure so that everyone can live happily ever after. It would be awesomesauce if the third book proved me wrong. What I liked about Shiver was that it was the boy who needed rescuing for once.

A question: Why are all of the parents in this saga so terrible? We have Sam’s parents, who tried to murder him in a bathtub; Isabel’s trigger-happy, wolf-killing father; and Grace’s parents, who have straight-up neglected her for years and suddenly decide to try being parental in this book (with disastrous results). At least in Twilight, we had that paragon of parental win otherwise known as Charlie.

Now, for some quote-specific issues:

“‘This is why you are single’” (65) — Really, Grace? This is how you speak to your best friend? Funnier yet, she says this to Rachel simply because she’s acting a little goofy, a little offbeat–a little, I don’t know, herself? Also, is it a good idea to make teenage girls think that being single is a bad thing?

That said, Rachel can be somewhat over-the-top. A bit obscure, but when she refers to Isabel as “she-of-the-pointy-boots” (313), I was reminded of the annoying Damian Spinelli on General Hospital (yes, I used to watch soaps). He used to use similar nomenclature (and probably still does).

There are some clichés in here, most of which I overlooked, but “dark as pitch” (279) is one of my top 3 simile no-nos. Just don’t do it.

There are things that Maggie Stiefvater does really well. I give her major kudos for making Sam likable when so many other YA paranormal romance authors are cultivating harsh, abusive heroes. As I mentioned earlier, Sam, Cole, and Isabel are quite well-developed. The weak link for me, again, is Grace herself.

This is not your average young adult romance. It has layers. Annabel isn’t always on her best behavior–she has flaws. Owen is edgy without being menacing. Frightening, emotionally abusive “heroes” have become a pervasive problem in young adult romances. It’s nice to see one break free of that formula.

If there is a walking stereotype in this novel, it’s Sophie, the controlling, unpleasant popular girl who dictates Annabel’s life through most of high school. She is the only character undeserving of my empathy. Sure, her parents once dragged her through their ugly divorce. Sure, her boyfriend is a tool of the highest order. But she treats everyone horribly. It is rare, even after the chickens come home to roost for her, that she shows any traces of humanity. Her most honest moment is after being rejected by Kirsten, Annabel’s older sister.

This novel tackles all of the important issues in fiction for teenage girls: self-esteem, body image, honesty, assertiveness, identity, love, family, and independence. It’s about speaking up for yourself. It’s about not letting other people walk all over you. And it’s also about a cute boy. For once, that’s okay–because this particular boy helps Annabel to become a more honest, independent version of herself.

Before you crack open this book, understand something vital: Whatever you think you know about these characters, you’re, at best, only half-right. That doesn’t mean that this is a mind-bender of Murakami proportions, though there are some pretty significant twists. It means that the characters have depth.

This is the warm, sometimes whimsical story of Amy Rook and the people she left behind. There is Arthur, her shattered husband; Mona, her erstwhile best friend, the girl who always cleaned up after her; and Oneida, Mona’s quirky teenage daughter. On their periphery is Eugene/Wendy, boyfriend of Oneida and son of Astor, a security guard with a surprising extracurricular activity.

Mona runs a boarding house populated by quirky side characters and fondant cake creations. She makes a decent living baking wedding cakes, but has a hard time living down her spotty reputation about town (the fictional Ruby Falls, New York). As the story progresses, however, we learn that all is not as it seems, and Mona’s reputation is built upon a foundation of rumor and misunderstanding that she has done nothing to contradict. When a lost and grief-stricken Arthur shows up at her boardinghouse seeking answers about his late wife, she realizes that her days of truth-dodging are over.

The story unfolds from four alternating points of view: Arthur’s, Mona’s, Oneida’s, and Eugene’s. All we have of Amy are the artifacts and people she’s left behind, so all we gain is an incomplete picture of a woman who, for better or worse, was quite complex. It would be easy to dismiss her as a selfish, heartless woman who probably drank too much (several flashbacks feature her in a tipsy or drunken state). But all we have are a handful of memories and revelations that paint a rather fuzzy picture. Did I like Amy? Not particularly. That said, I also recognize that my experience with her was extraordinarily limited.

This is quite a debut. It’s difficult to categorize This Must Be the Place, with its mixed bag of young adult, chick lit, and romance elements. Racculia’s writing is simultaneously smart and warm, and her characters are remarkably well-developed. And the banter snaps, crackles, and pops, as all good banter should.

(Disclaimer: Henry Holt and Company sent me a review copy of this book.)

Annexed was a bold undertaking. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl is a pretty sacred Holocaust memoir. To explore Peter’s point of view in a novel constitutes a huge literary risk. On some levels, it paid off. But, as you’ll notice throughout this review, this book raised a lot of questions for me.

The novel introduces Liese, Peter’s fictional first girlfriend and a personification of his sexual awakening. He longs for her while trapped in the annex, and the narrative does not shy away from some of his more “vivid” dreams of her. Was she necessary? It’s hard to say. In all likelihood, Peter would have had to grapple with teenage hormones while confined in close quarters with so many other people. Is it fair to put words in his mouth and thoughts in his head, to take creative license with a real person’s private thoughts, though? I’ll leave that one to the biographical literary critics. The fictional Liese was effective in her role here, driving home just how much Peter was missing while cooped up in the annex.

It was the interactions between Peter and Anne that felt a bit off to me. Anne came off as rather daft when seen through his eyes. I never got that impression of her from the diary, but I also read it twice when I was a teenager, when I was around her age. We know from the diaries that Anne saw the beauty in many things, but Peter’s point of view made her appear annoyingly optimistic. In this regard, I felt that the book sometimes missed the mark when it came to characterizing Anne. She was a teenager, yes, but was she really that spoiled, careless, flirtatious, annoyingly optimistic, etc.? Would she and Peter really have been that frank with one another about sex? I feel like I need to reread the diary now to make a fair evaluation of this book.

In some scenes, Peter asks Anne not to write about something in her diary. This feels like a cop-out, a way to introduce fictional conversations and events into a true story chronicled quite closely in a daily diary.

The most poignant part of the book was, for the most part, pure fiction. In Part II, which doesn’t begin until close to the end, we experience the concentration camp through Peter’s eyes. Dogar tells us in the epilogue that she has constructed this section from secondhand accounts and pure imagination. Again, this proves effective. Part II does a good job (arguably, too good a job) of depicting the concentration camp experience. Dogar also provides a nice reading list at the back of the book for further study (I’ve already put the Five Chimneys memoir on hold at the library).

A side note: I wasn’t a huge fan of the chapter headings in this book. They were rather dry (e.g., “Peter feels hope,” “Peter wants Anne, Anne wants to write,” “Anne and Peter are in his bedroom,” etc.). Because they are so straightforward (essentially one-line chapter summaries), they don’t add much to the narrative.

I’m the rare reader who actually enjoys present-tense narratives, and I understood why it was necessary here. Because the novel merges Peter’s present-tense life in the annex with his past-tense reminiscences while in the concentration camp, uniformity of verb tense isn’t really possible. My only stylistic complaint was that the writing felt a bit staccato. Lots of sentence fragments. One-sentence paragraphs. A disproportionate number of simple sentences. This was effective in times of suspense, but sometimes made it difficult to connect with Peter during more contemplative moments in the story.

Overall, I give this book points for bravery. It does read somewhat like fan fiction at points (an inevitable danger in any creative nonfiction/historical fiction novel) and sometimes stumbles in the execution. But it is also a nice attempt to lend voice to a figure who, across the decades, has remained secondary to the story. And there can never be too many novels to remind us of what people are capable of doing to one another.

(Disclaimer: I received the galley proofs of this title from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for review.)

Wow. Let me begin by saying that this book, quite relentlessly, ripped my heart out.

The jacket of Hate List asks some tough questions: “What if you wished someone would die and then it happened? What if the killer was someone you loved?” This book sets out to answer those questions, using the aftermath of a school shooting as the narrative vehicle.

Valerie and Nick were once inseparable. Both damaged and a bit angry at the world, they found refuge in one another. But Valerie didn’t know Nick as well as she thought she did. She never saw his final act of outrage coming, and the book makes it pretty clear that she will never stop paying for it. On a May morning, he came to school armed with a gun and began to target people from their “hate list.”

There isn’t a one-dimensional character to be found in this book. Everyone is flawed. Everyone is in unspeakable pain. Valerie must trudge through her senior year at a school that blames her for the shooting. And you can’t entirely blame the people who blame her. It was, after all, her list that Nick used when plotting his final act. But, as popular girl Jessica tells the police and her clique, Valerie “didn’t shoot anybody.” In fact, despite a long-standing feud between them, Valerie saved Jessica’s life during the shooting. She took a bullet in the leg, the last bullet Nick shot before turning the gun on himself.

The shooting itself, recapped throughout the book, was harrowing. But it was the ostracization of Valerie that actually got me choked up while reading. Her own parents believe the worst of her, and her father treats her like something scraped from the bottom of his shoe. (Quite frankly, I loathed her selfish jackass of a father from beginning to end.) She is invited to a party by Jessica, with whom she has forged a fragile friendship, where she is threatened at gunpoint by a classmate. Her lifelong best friend, Stacey, abandons her and is all too ready to believe the worst about her.

But there are characters who are supportive of Valerie, who are just as quick to believe the best about her as others are to believe the worst. There is Jessica, the girl who once made regular appearances on her hate list, the girl she saved. There is Bea, the artist who takes her under her wing and gives her a safe place for artistic expression. There is Dr. Hieler, her therapist, who is more of a father to her than her own father has ever been or will ever be. Even Briley, her father’s secretary-turned-lover, is supportive of Valerie when her own father is not.

There’s not much else I can say about this book, except the following: This is how you characterize. Make your characters something more than caricatures. It’s okay to let your protagonist be a little (or a lot) imperfect, or even sometimes unlikable. It’s okay to make a villain a little likable, to add layers rather than present some lazy, black-and-white cardboard cutout. It’s okay to try a little harder and give your story some depth.

In fact, it’s advisable.

I love stories like this. A tragic event happens, and we are left with conflicting accounts of what really happened. Truth becomes subjective, if not completely unattainable. It’s what I loved so much about Akutagawa’s Rashomon (perhaps better known in its Akira Kurosawa adaptation).

Before her tragic death, Raquel was a virtual non-entity in her school. Shy and overweight, she flew under most students’ radar. After her death, her classmates try to make sense of their own mortality by latching onto their fallen peer posthumously. Classmates who never gave her the time of day show up to shed tears at her wake. Her best friend and father agonize over what they might have done differently to prevent the accident. Miscellaneous other characters (including a school janitor and eyewitnesses to the accident) provide insight into what may have actually happened the night of her death.

Remembering Raquel is a quick read (weighing in at a light 137 pages), but not a fluffy one. There are important details to absorb and characters/events to understand. After reading, we have a fairly good idea of what may have caused Raquel’s accident, but enough evidence lingers to cast reasonable doubt. Did she step in front of the car on purpose? Did she stumble while goofing around on the sidewalk? Odds favor the latter, but there is also enough evidence to suggest the former. We’ll never know for certain.

And that’s the point.

When Jace Witherspoon shows up on his brother’s doorstep, he doesn’t need to say a word. His bruised face and fat lip speak for themselves. Christian, his older brother, is all too familiar with their father’s wrath–for years, he took punches for his mother and brother, until the beatings landed him in the hospital and a friend’s family helped him escape. This left Jace as the human buffer zone between his abusive father and downtrodden mother.

The problem is, Jace’s and Christian’s father is no ordinary abuser. He is a judge, one of the most respected in Chicago. He knows the system better than anyone. He is diabolical enough to have devised a defense in the event his beatings ever kill his wife.

But Jace, bruised and broken as he is, isn’t entirely innocent himself. He carries with him a dark secret from his past life, one that the story reveals to us gradually. Living with Christian presents an opportunity to start over, but he realizes quickly that he can only run so far from the life he has left behind. Can he break the cycle his father set in motion years ago?