Mini-Reviews: Forever & Amy and Roger's Epic Detour

Forever - Maggie Stiefvater:

In Shiver, Grace fell in love with a boy with golden eyes, who was a wolf in winter. The book ended with his cure. In Linger, the werewolf virus that had lain dormant in Grace for so many years kicked into life, and we were left staring after her as she shifted and ran off into the night.

Now Grace and her friend Olivia are, for all intents and purposes, missing. Sam, Cole and Isabel know the truth, but who else would believe it? And when Olivia turns up dead, Isabel's father Tom Culpeper makes plans for the extermination of the Mercy Falls wolves. Even when Grace is in her human form, she can't go home, so this book is much more pack-based than its predecessors. I had a sense of the loneliness of living a life that no one else can be told about. Grace can't even let her friends and family know she's alive, and it seems like survival must be impossible. If Tom Culpeper and his cronies killed her while she was in wolf form, her disappearance would never be explained. Sam, Grace and Cole are faced with the near impossible task of moving the wolves out of the woods to a safe place.

This volume is more of a werewolf race-against-time than the love story of the previous two volumes, and I kept turning the pages with a desperation for everything to turn out all right, but a dread of the more likely outcome. Forever is a beautiful end to a simple but exceptional story.

Amy and Roger's Epic Detour - Morgan Matson


I bought this book after having seen a lot of reviews on other people's blogs, and, I confess, because it has a pretty cover. After her father's death, Amy Curry is charged with bringing the family car from California to their new home in Connecticut, but she won't drive any more. Enter Roger, an old family friend, and the pair decide to make a proper road trip of the journey, taking the scenic route.

I found the plot of Amy and Roger to be fairly standard for a real-issues teenage novel. I'd read too many books with the main character dealing with bereavement and family upheaval (Fixing Delilah, The Sky Is Everywhere, Tiger Eyes, Hold Still, The Truth About Forever to name but a few) for this to really stand out as a story. It was the travel that made this book different. I loved reading about the different places Amy and Roger visited: Yosemite National Park, America's Loneliest Highway, Graceland, Utah and there was a scrapbook effect with photos, ticket stubs, receipts and iPod playlists, which added to the feeling of being a passenger in the car. Along the way, Amy and Roger meet up with some lovely supporting characters, who open their homes and hearts to strangers. When Amy visited Graceland, a trip she'd always been meaning to take with her Elvis-mad father, I found myself close to tears and realised this story had drawn me deeper in than I'd previously thought.

Boys Don't Cry, Malorie Blackman

It must be fourteen or fifteen years ago I first read a Malorie Blackman book. Operation Gadgetman was the first, and Hacker and Thief. One contained all sorts of computing references (almost certainly Hacker) and "modems," which I had no idea what they were. This was a few years before the Internet could be routinely found in homes; our computer was the old Atari with a dot-matrix printer. We didn't even have the Internet in school.

A few years later, when I had moved into the young adult age group, I discovered Noughts and Crosses, a dystopia which was heartbreaking and brilliant, probably the first book I read which ends in a particular way for a main character - to say more would be spoilers galore. Noughts and Crosses found its way onto the shortlist for my A-Level English coursework for comparison with Nineteen Eighty-Four, but I didn't think teen fiction, no matter how good it was, would be considered by teachers. (I now suspect I might have been wrong.)

After three sequels in the world of Noughts and Crosses, Blackman returns to the recogniseable world to tell a powerful story about teenage single parenthood, and is unique in taking the viewpoint of a seventeen-year-old father whose ex-girlfriend shows up with a baby, informs him he is the father, pops out to the shops - and runs. I've read quite a few books about teenage single mums: Mary Hooper's Megan books and Dyan Sheldon's And Baby Makes Two are the ones that stick in my mind from my teen years. Blackman wrote Boys Don't Cry realising that the issue has been covered entirely one-sidedly, and that teenage fathers are just expected to do a runner. Blackman shows another side to the story. When Dante gets up one morning, he's expecting his A-Level results and an acceptance into university. Instead he finds himself the father of little Emma, and in just a few moments he has to rethink his entire life plan.

Boys Don't Cry is also about what it means to be a man, and we see this through Dante, his younger brother Adam and his father. Dante's mother died several years before and the family don't like to talk about their feelings. Adam is openly gay, but that is Not Something They Talk About. Dante feels enormous frustration that no matter what he does, it never seems to be enough for his father to show pride or love. Something terrible has to happen before the three will open up to each other.

In previous works by Blackman, there are a mixture of male and female narrators, and it is interesting to see a female writing from an exclusively male perspective: mostly Dante but with some chapters from Adam's point of view. She captures the boys' voices well, and reading Dante's story I found myself transported back to high school - he could quite easily have been one of my classmates. Adam is a slightly arrogant, obnoxious yet likeable younger brother, and the dynamics between them were of an entirely believable sibling relationship. In the later scenes, when the family start talking to each other about what's on their hearts, I did find myself wondering whether this was really how a family of men would interact or if it was a female writer shaping the world to how she thinks it ought to be.

Boys Don't Cry did not take me very long to read, but I know it will take a long time to forget. There seems to be quite a high teenage pregnancy rate on the Isle of Wight, where I live, and Blackman challenged my thoughts and prejudices about teen parents, and evoked sympathy and compassion. Boys might not cry, but this girl certainly did.

Make Lemonade and True Believer, Virginia Euwer Wolff

These two books

make up a story about LaVaughn

LaVaughn is fourteen at the start of Make Lemonade

and turns sixteen at the end of True Believer.

There is a third book out now,
but I haven't read it yet.

She lives with her Mom,

no Dad,

he was killed when she was a little girl.

LaVaughn and her mom live in a rough neighborhood.

The kids have to go through metal detectors to get into school

and six of her classmates have died since she was in fourth grade.

LaVaughn wants to get out of this place.

She's going to college,
which no one else in her apartment ever did before.

It's not easy for LaVaughn.
She has to earn her way through babysitting for Jolly's two kids.
Jolly is even worse off than LaVaughn,
seventeen, two kids and no husband,

no education and now no job.

While she's working hard, LaVaughn can't let her grades slip

or there's no point in getting the college money

if she can't get herself into college.

She needs to save up her money,
she can't afford to work for free,

but she thinks how unfair it is that she's working

for Jolly so she doesn't end up like Jolly.

And Jolly can't afford to pay LaVaughn
she can't manage on her own.
LaVaughn tries to help Jolly to get herself out of this rut,
get herself back to school so she can get a decent job,

and provide for her family

and learn first aid

which saves her littlest baby's life.

Meanwhile LaVaughn's best friends are growing away from her,
and her childhood friend Jody

whose mom moved him away to give him a better life,

is back and beautiful, and he's going to college too, 

and LaVaughn thinks,

wouldn't it be good if Jody likes her like she likes Jody?

I first read True Believer when it was brand new,
several years after its predecessor,

and Make Lemonade wasn't in the shops any more.

It worked on its own and I didn't really need to have read Make Lemonade.

LaVaughn is a bright girl defying her circumstances

trying to understand about life and love, friendship and faith,

a likeable teenager with whom it is easy to identify.
She tells her story in free verse,
with simplicity and at the same time enough colour
that I realise I have a much fuller picture of her world and her life

than the story states in just the words.

The hints in True Believer of her back story,

are not expanded any more, or much

in Make Lemonade, (which came first.)

I like a book that tells you so much more than it seems to,

where a few words make up an entire world,
and the story seems to exist outside and beyond the pages.

True Believer was one of my favourite books

when I was a teenager.

Perhaps I even wrote my name in it.

I'm waiting for the third book,

This Full House

to be published in paperback so it matches the others in the collection.

I have been waiting for this book for nine years,

since I was sixteen.
Back then it said, "coming soon," but it never was published

and I started to think it would never be finished.

I moved on to other books

and sadly I donated True Believer a couple of years later

to a friend or a charity shop.

I regretted it, and got a second copy

and Make Lemonade at last,

(Thank you to Amazon UK, the books cost me a penny each

plus postage and packaging,)

and the books are every bit as good as I can remember.