A Grab Bag of Summer Reading
Joyce Adams Burner, Curriculum Connections -- School Library Journal, 6/12/2008
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Suspense, family, romance, the future—teens savor summer reading that offers new friends, places, and experiences. For entertaining reads with fresh insights into life, recommend these recent fiction titles, full of authentic characters and captivating plots, to your high school students and young adult patrons.
Drew Lawson’s so-so grades mean a basketball scholarship is his shot at a college education, in Walter Dean Myers’s Game (HarperTeen, 2008). When Tomas, a white player from Prague, enrolls at the teen’s Harlem high school and joins the team, the coach benches Drew for his self-serving attitude and Tomas steals the spotlight, threatening Drew’s plans. Myers works themes of racial and personal identity into this fast-paced story.
In Steve Kluger’s exuberant My Most Excellent Year: A Novel of Love, Mary Poppins, and Fenway Park (Dial, 2008), three engaging characters recount their ninth grade adventures in love and musical theater through diaries, letters, emails, and instant messages. T. C. Keller loves baseball and Alejandra Perez, daughter of diplomats. T. C.’s best friend Augie Hwong loves stage, screen, and Andrew Wexler. T. C., Alé, and Augie adopt Hucky, a 6-year-old foster child who is deaf and who longs to meet Mary Poppins, in a delightfully warm tale of true friendship and wise parenting.
Indie Konkipuddi longs for a career in fashion journalism in Kavita Daswani’s Indie Girl (S & S, 2007). When the 15 year old lands a job babysitting for tyrannical fashion editor, Aaralyn Taylor, she hopes it will help her gain an internship at financially troubled Celebrity Style. Then Indie stumbles across the scoop Aaralyn needs to save her magazine. Woven through Indie Girl are deft treatments of racial stereotyping, body image, and personal integrity, with a glimpse into life in the Indian-American community.
“I wanted Emil. I wanted him from the very beginning, before Avra even saw him.” Seniors Dana, Emil, and Avra are inseparable in Kathe Koja’s Kissing the Bee 
(Farrar, 2007), although Dana hides her true feelings for Avra’s boyfriend. Studying bees for biology, Dana identifies Avra as the queen bee in their three-member hive. Avra plans to run away after graduation, taking Emil with her. When Dana discovers that Emil returns her affection, she realizes who the true queen bee is in this short, eloquent novel honeycombed in metaphor.
In another quiet story exquisitely told, Peter Gould’s Write Naked (Farrar, 2008), pensive Victor, 16, buys an old Royal typewriter at a yard sale, lugs it to his family’s isolated Vermont cabin and begins to write—in the buff, testing the idea that "you have to be naked to write." Rose Anna, a homeschooled free spirit tracking wildlife through the forest, spies on him through the window, and they begin to write together, clothed. Victor is intrigued by Rose Anna's passion for nature and Wicca. Powerful character development and simmering romantic tension build to an emotionally charged yet controlled conclusion.
Echo, 15, and her overprotective parents are reeling from the murder of older sister Zoë, in Alyson Noël’s Saving Zoë (St. Martin’s, 2007). Zoë’s diary reveals a sister more rebellious than Echo imagined, and leads her into a dangerous world of sexual predators stalking the Internet. The suspense builds as Echo searches for the truth about Zoë, and uses the diary’s clues to bring resolution for her parents and herself.
When Ben Campbell was 14, his dad came out as gay and his mother walked out, in Michael Harmon’s The Last Exit to Normal (Knopf, 2008). Three years later, rebellious punk skater Ben, his father, and his father’s partner Edward abruptly leave Spokane for Rough Butte, Montana, where they move in with Edward’s mother, the hard-as-rocks Miss Mae. Struggling with unwelcome change in his own life, Ben realizes that something is very wrong with the young boy next door, and sets out to save him from an abusive father. Laced with dark humor and complex characters, Last Exit takes a hard look at stereotypes and assumptions in a gritty, hardscrabble town.
Nearly 16, Mira Kent has never known the father who left when she was 3. Her mother and grandmother brush off her curiosity, but Mira snoops around until she finds his contact information, and calls and emails him. Before she can meet him, someone kills her dog, tries to break into her house, and attacks her mother and grandmother. Louise Plummer’s psychological thriller, Finding Daddy (Delacorte, 2007), mixes parental care, budding romance, and some graphic violence into a fast-paced story about learning the truth.
Colm’s mother, in Las Vegas on yet another honeymoon, wants to sell their New England family home and make the move permanent, in Joan Ackermann’s wacky In the Space Left Behind (HarperCollins, 2007). Colm, a 15-year-old handyman savvy beyond his years, is desperately considering ways to buy the house out from under her when his gambler father shows up, offering Colm the chance to collect a $70,000 reward by driving him across the country and turning him in. The road trip that follows is marked with kooky encounters and a growing understanding of forgiveness and family in a most satisfying read.
Edward Bloor’s suspenseful Taken (Knopf, 2007) is set in 2035, when kidnapping children of privilege is an organized business in the United States. When the security at her gated compound is breached and Charity Meyers is abducted, she expects to be released unharmed in 24 hours after her wealthy father pays the ransom, but things do not proceed as she expects. Charity struggles to find someone she can trust in this dark story laced with social commentary on the distribution of wealth.
“I used to be someone. Someone named Jenna Fox.” Waking from an 18-month coma following a horrible car accident, Jenna has little memory of her family or herself, but can rattle off great chunks of Walden verbatim, in Mary E. Pearson’s The Adoration of Jenna Fox (Holt, 2008). Jenna and her mother have abruptly moved to southern California, where they live with her antagonistic grandmother, leaving her father to direct his biotechnology company in Boston. As Jenna begins to piece her story together, she realizes her parents are keeping a terrible secret from her about her identity. A thought-provoking medical thriller set in the near future, this story considers complex ethics of science and identity, tautly woven around multifaceted characters.
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