DJ's Life in Fiction

Paranormalcy by Kiersten White (NY: HarperTeen, 2010). Like many sixteen-year-old girls, Evie likes the color pink, shopping for clothes, and teen television drama. But unlike most teenagers, Evie has to spend a lot of her time capturing paranormal creatures for the International Paranormal Containment Agency (IPCA) because she has the unique ability to see beneath the glamours paranormals use to deceive humans. She's lived at the agency's headquarters since she was found abandoned on the streets at age 4, and she's fashioned a sort of home for herself with a best friend (who happens to be a mermaid) and a mother-like figure (the head of the agency, Raquel), plus assorted paranormal creatures. Upon returning from a routine bag-and-tag, Evie goes to debrief with Raquel, the head of the agency, but immediately notices that she's not talking to Raquel but some guy glittering beneath the surface. She tases the guy and he gets carted off to a containment cell, but she...

Hex Hall by Rachel Hawkin (NY: Disney Hyperion, 2010). Hecate Hall, aka Hex Hall, is like juvie for delinquent Prodigium--witches, warlocks, werewolves, fairies, and other assorted creatures, or monsters as the pamphlet Sophie Mercer reads refers to them, correctly translating the Latin. She lands there (her twentieth school!) for a prom spell gone awry; honestly, she thought she was helping pitiful Felicia Miller--how was Sophie to know that the boy Felicia wanted would plow his Land Rover into the gym? In addition to confronting all these things she's never encountered before--including a vampire roommate, who turns out to be really nice--Sophie misses her mom. Sure, her mother has kept her isolated from others of her kind all her life, but she's been a constant. Unlike Sophie's father, who left before she was born. He never told Sophie's mother he was a warlock until she was pregnant, and Sophie's mom has been learning as much as she could. But it's n...

Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan (NY: Dutton, 2010). One Will Grayson lives in Evanston, Illinois, has doctor parents, and an exuberant best friend named Tiny (who is anything but). Tiny is always in love, and he's gay. Will is not gay, and he has two main rules for his life: keep quiet and don't care too much. When he doesn't obey these rules, things tend to go wrong for him. Tiny wants to push Will outside of his comfort zone, but Will resists. The other Will Grayson lives in Naperville, which might as well be another state. His parents are divorced, he has to work at a crappy job, he's taking anti-depressants, and he really doesn't care for his one friend Maura. He'd much rather talk online to Isaac, with whom he believes he's in love, though he really doesn't want to admit to anyone that he's gay. Told in alternating perspectives by the two Wills, this novel deals with all the issues teens obsess over--friends,...

Four Seasons by Jane Breskin Zalben (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). Thirteen-year-old Allegra Katz has played the piano as long as she can remember, encouraged by her musician parents. She's enrolled in the Pre-College Division of the famous Julliard School, plus she goes to a select, private school for gifted students. She practices four hours a day--not nearly enough according to her piano teacher, Miss Pringle--and studies for her classes the rest of the time. Her best friend Opal asks her to go shopping, sleep over, and other fun stuff, but Ally just doesn't have the time, with the constant pressure to practice for upcoming competitions and juries. Every season seems to bring its own unique pressures, and this year Ally is wondering if it's too much for her. She can't imagine NOT playing the piano, but the relentless stress is starting to wear on her. Ally is an entirely sympathetic character, and Zalben has crafted her story well. The insular world of music pro...

Prom & Prejudice by Elizabeth Eulberg (NY: Point, 2011). In this re-envisioning of Austen's classic novel, Lizzie Bennett is a scholarship student at a high-end girls' prep school called Longbourn Academy. Jane is her kind-hearted roommate, and Charles Bingley and Will Darcy are boys at Pemberley Academy. Aside from Jane and Charlotte, another scholarship student, Lizzie avoids her mean-spirited classmates who tormented her from the day she started at Longbourn simply because she's not rich. Jane likes Charles and is hoping he'll ask her to prom, which is a hugely important social occasion for juniors at Longbourn. Lizzie and Will clash from the start, with Lizzie assuming Will is as snobby as his classmates, especially when she overhears him remarking to Charles about her scholarship status. Prom & Predudice is a fun, lightweight read, with very little of the social satire of its original, which is fine, since getting a date for prom and finding a husband...

Carrie Pilby by Caren Lissner (2003; NY: Harlequin Teen, 2010). Carrie Pilby is a nineteen-year-old Harvard graduate living alone in New York City and trying to gain the social skills she never learned. She skipped three grades and trusted her father's "Big Lie" that she would finally meet people like herself in college. Instead, she had a brief affair with a pervy English professor and became disgusted with her fellow students' twin obsessions: liquor and sex. So she's left in her current predicament of needing to learn how to connect with people. She has a therapist—her father insisted on this—and he outlines some tasks to help her that include: joining an organization and going on a date. If all of this sounds fairly mundane, it would be if not for Carrie's uniquely hilarious, and naturally introspective, perspective on herself, people around her, and her own issues. For instance, because she feels most people are immoral, she approaches her tasks ...

Bumped by Megan McCafferty (NY: Balzer & Bray, 2011). Bumped plunges the reader into an odd dystopian world where a virus affects everyone at age 18 and renders them infertile. This means that teen pregnancy is not only required, but glorified—and aggressively pursued by parents! Yes, parents push their girls to get pregnant and even turn it to their financial advantage. Girls do not dream of marriage but rather bumping (i.e., having sex and getting pregnant) with "reproaesthetical" sex partners, generally arranged by conception contractors for surrogate parents. The narrative switches between the perspectives of Melody and Harmony, identical twin girls who were separated at birth and grew up in very different environments. Melody's parents, wealthy New Jersey college professors, have spared no expense to make her into a desirable match who will produce an ideal baby, or preferably multiple babies, for some lucky parents who will pay top dollar for her progeny. ...

What Happened to Goodbye by Sarah Dessen (NY: Viking, 2011). Mclean Sweet welcomes the change that a new town and new school bring her, and this is her fourth town and school in two years! She enjoys trying on different personality types--cheerleader, prep, drama junkie--using a different variation of her middle name in every town. Ever since her parents' divorce, Mclean has felt disrupted, so the moves help her avoid her own feelings and assume those of whoever she's reinvented herself as. She particularly wants to avoid her mother, whom she not only blames for the divorce, but sort of envies for having reinvented herself. Now, though, in Lakeview, Mclean's kind of been trapped into being herself. Maybe it's the guy next door, Dave, who is himself so genuine and trusting, or maybe it's that she likes the people she's been meeting. Whatever it is, she finds herself not only making friends but getting involved in ways she hasn't in her previous towns. ...

Wither , Book One of The Chemical Garden Trilogy, by Lauren Destefano (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2011). Sixteen-year-old Rhine Ellery has only four years left to live. A virus activated by the genetic engineering that produced one generation of superior adults has doomed subsequent generations to an early death--at age 20 for females, and 25 for males. Scientists in Manhattan racing to find an antidote have been destroyed by a faction that believes the human race should be allowed to die out, though other researchers continue to seek a solution. Meanwhile, orphans are increasingly left to fend for themselves, and girls are often snatched off the street by Gatherers who take them to the homes of rich men to dwell in polygamous marriages and reproduce in case a cure is found. Kidnapped Rhine finds herself far away from her twin brother and forced to marry Linden in a group ceremony with two other girls, who become her sister wives. Although Rhine becomes his favorite, once his first ...

Spellbound by Cara Lynn Shultz (NY: Harlequin Teen, 2011). [Reviewed from Kindle ARC provided by publisher via netgalley.com ] Sixteen-year-old Emma Connor is hoping New York's Vincent Academy will give her a fresh start since she knows no one except her cute cousin Ashley, who's promised not to tell anyone that Emma's kind of a tragedy magnet. First her twin brother died, then her mother, and then her abusive, alcoholic stepfather nearly killed her in a car accident that has left her with physical scars on her arm and emotional scars that make her want to remain anonymous. But Emma feels compelled to respond in kind to the scornful comments of a mean girl, Kristin, who feels threatened when the boy she wants (who is a total player and whom Emma immediately loathes) hits on Emma--so she's not exactly anonymous for long. Luckily, a green-eyed hottie named Brendan snorts at her comeback and then backs up her fake story about a fictitious Philly school she had to leave...

Intertwined by Gena Showalter (NY: Harlequin Teen, 2009). Sixteen-year-old Aden Stone has always heard voices in his head. He's not schizophrenic, though he's been in and out of institutions all his life. The voices are real, and they belong to four distinct souls who have been trapped in his body as long as he can remember. Not only do they talk to him, but they all have special talents: raising the dead, predicting the future, traveling through time, and possessing another person's body. Now he's landed on the D and M Ranch in Crossroads, Oklahoma, a last chance facility for troubled teens, and he's determined to act as normally as possible. But lately he's been having visions of a beautiful, dark-haired girl, who he's sure somehow can save him from the endless tumult of his life. In fact, the first dark-hair girl he meets, Mary Ann Gray, miraculously acts as a buffer between himself and the four souls, and he enjoys the peace he finds whenever he...

Abandon by Meg Cabot (NY: Point, 2011). Meg Cabot reimagines the Persephone story in this modern rendering about a girl, Pierce, who dies at age 15 and then returns to life. The first chapter explicitly retells the Persephone myth and Pierce insinuates that she has had a similar experience. Nonetheless, her tale is confusing, largely because the plot is pointlessly convoluted. Instead of starting with the story of her near death and proceeding from there, the story begins with Pierce complaining about being forced to move with her mother to an island off the coast of Florida and how much she hates being asked about her near-death experience (NDE, as she helpfully abbreviates it) and then weaves back and forth between her actual NDE and the immediate aftermath to events further in her past when she visited the island and then to events during the two years leading to the move to the island. The oddest part of the story is not that she doesn't realize that the hunky guy she mee...

Stolen by Lucy Christopher (NY: Chicken House, 2010). 16-year-old Gemma narrates this novel that is in the form of a letter to the man who abducted her, telling the story of her kidnapping from her point-of-view. It is an amazingly compelling story, fraught with contradictions, the most obvious ones being her feelings of hate--and love--for her captor, Ty. As Gemma tells it, she gets annoyed at her parents at the Bangkok airport and dashes off to get coffee on her own, but she doesn't have the right kind of money, and Ty ends up buying her the coffee--and slipping some drugs into it. Gemma ends up in the middle of nowhere--the hot, wild Australian outback desert--alone with Ty. And it turns out that he has planned the whole thing, indeed, has been planning it for years. He first saw her when she was a kid playing in the park, and he's been watching her ever since, till at one point he starts believing that taking her away from her well-to-do London life to live with him wi...