Reviews

I must have read Nancy Drew stories as a kid, but I have no memory of it. Isn't it funny that you can spend hours of your life doing something and not remember it? Anyway, for whatever reason I decided I needed to read a Nancy Drew and like any good book junkie, I wanted to start with the first of the series. Originally published in 1930, The Secret of the Old Clock is terribly quaint, but Nancy is no delicate flower. In this installment she changes a flat tire nearly rescues herself by force from a locked closet. The whole time I was reading it, I was seeing it as found theater. I am half tempted to stage a reader's theater version starring members of Radical Reference, including one person narrating.

There are cyclons in Victorian England. Other dangers include emotionally unavailable hottie demon slayers, wayward brothers, and the usual supernatural suspects (vampires, warlocks, werewolves). 16-year-old shapeshifting Tessa Gray is a likable protagonist, and the other characters, both naughty and nice, are both naughty and nice, meaning that the good guys have their flaws, and you have some understanding or respect for the bad guys. This is the first installment in what the annoying (how do you turn off the sound?!?) website indicates will be a trilogy. It does read like exposition and denouements, but doesn't end.

I'm not sure whether to class this book as memoir or essays. It's a series of essays about the author's family and about herself. It's person-focused, rather than linear. Normally I'm wary of that sort of thing, but I didn't mind it here. Njeri is a journalist, so each piece could appear by itself in a magazine. With the context of all of the other pieces, though, you get a more complete picture of the author than you would otherwise. Her family is huge, and she has a lot of facets to her own personality to explore. Still, there are some commonalities. Njeri is full of heart, also moxie. She is not uncritical of her family and herself, but she also shows a lot of love and understanding, even for the broken parts of her family and herself.

Helga Crane, the protagonist of Quicksand is never happy in one place for long. Through her eyes the reader gets to experience life as a light-skinned African-American in the south, Chicago, Harlem during the Renaissance, Europe, and then the south again. Although the book takes place mostly in Crane's 20s, I see it as something of a coming-of-age novel.

A 12-year-old is ashamed of her trauma onset epilepsy and is aided in coming to terms with it by a fugly one-eyed prizefighter. I wanted to like this book about a pre-teen Mexican-American girl named Chula more than I did. It's an award winning book, so I blame my lack of enthusiasm on my documented difficulty with the tween genre. This was a book club selection, so maybe I'll understand what I missed when I discuss it with La Celiacita. She'll be able to school me, I'm sure because getting some extra education in children's lit.

Zinester turned school librarian turned novelist Julie Halpern tells what seems like a very accurate depiction of life inside a teen mental health facility, complete with check out date determined by your insurance coverage. When I say "turned" that's misleading. Halpern manages to be all three at once, not giving up her ziney roots or her librarianship while publishing her books. Her protagonist Anna Bloom is likable and believable, but not too perfect; same goes for the rest of the characters. While she doesn't portray the hospital as a beacon of healing, she doesn't slam it too hard, and in fact at the end you feel that Anna's mental health has improved. However, you don't know for sure if that's because or in spite of the therapy. The main thing that Anna learns is how to be mad and be bad--two things that are vitally important for a young lady.

This meticulously researched book was perhaps too meticulously researched. It felt like Sarah Dunant needed to include every salacious tidbit she gleaned about 16th century Italian nuns. That's not to say it's a bad book. I liked it okay; I just thought it tried to tell too many stories and was about 100 pages too long. First there's the noble woman sent off to the nunnery against her will story (happened all the time at the time), then the anorexic nun story, both with subplots about the strict yet fanciful novice mistress, the political abbess, and the dispensary nun who herself had been resistant to her "calling."

Zine World is awesome. That is all for now because this review is severely overdue.

This time the lesbian teen is a different type of orthodox: Cuban-American from Miami. Laura gets busted with a love note from her girlfriend the last day of junior year and gets kicked out of her house for being a degenerada. Luckily she's got a best friend with and understanding mima who take her in. The book is Laura's journey out of the closet. I found it a little too much, like the author was trying to hard to pack everything in, and the cover reminds me of what they did to Leilaina's film in Reality Bites, turning it from a thoughtful documentary about lost youth into an MTV high concept/low content pre-reality show reality show. That's just the cover and crazy fontage I'm vilifying. The story is fine, but one of those YA novels that is better left to its intended audience instead of middle-aged ladies like me. It has plenty going for it: transgender and genderqueer characters, Cuban Spanish idioms, sexy round chicks, and standing up to homophobic bullies.