Tag: Young Adult (YA)

Book Review: This May Go On Your Permanent Record

Erin Penn

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This May Go On Your Permanent Record by Kelly Swails

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Sally Clark is curious about how technology works, which would be fine except her experiments tend to be illegal. She’s also a terrible liar, which lands her in court for stealing groceries with nothing but a hacked smart phone. While the judge isn’t impressed that her alcoholic mother had traded the grocery money for booze, she is intrigued by her hacking skills. Given a choice between juvenile detention and something called The School for Extraordinary Youth, she rolls the dice and chooses the latter. She’s barely unpacked her bags when she discovers that SEY is a prep school for world domination.

 

MY REVIEW

A quick, but full read, which took me about five hours one night, this Young Adult (YA) story follows a fourteen-year-old girl from August to October of her freshman year in high school. Wow that sounds boring, but this book is anything but.

I picked it up thinking it sounded a lot like a superhero academy story, “a school for world domination” is the tag line, and it reads like one too. Only instead of superpowers, the students are all children of world leaders except for a few potentials brought in to shake things up. Sally comes from trailer trash but determined to rise above it – or at least stay out of juvie where the judge says she will go if she flunks out of this school. Thrust into the world of movers and shakers, she proves to be a true shaker. The class president goes after her with blood in her eye; maybe the daughter of leaders should have blinked first to clear the eye so she could see Sally clearly because this girl doesn’t back down from nobody. The two duke it out for class domination in a school teaching them how to take over the world and giving them the tools to do it.

The story follows the present YA formula of two love interests – one helpful and like a buddy – and the other intriguing, strong, and handsome, but not a close friend yet. She doesn’t go for either in this book but knows she has a crush on one and gets flashes of interest in the other.

We don’t see much personal growth of the character in this book as it more concentrates on setting up the world and defining the characters. Plus the overall story arc with the class president. Lots of little things happening keeping the story moving – I didn’t have any interest in taking a break while I read it. 

I do enjoy all the name dropping – the leadership of the school also comes from old, powerful families. If you like history, this book makes you want to break out a “who’s who” to see what Easter eggs the author is writing in the series – names like Custard, Curie, and Bush tease the reader.

This manuscript is a very nice read. Plus I think the series will rock – for example book two, now that we know everyone and the world, should blow this one out of the water. The writing is tight and I expect Ms. Swails to only improve in the future.

Author Spotlight: AJ Hartley

Erin Penn

Amazon Cover

My publisher is ecstatic – we picked up A.J. Hartley for a short series his Big Press didn’t want to keep the rights to because it couldn’t sell the 100,000 copies they need to make money. Mr. Hartness became friends with the NY-times best-selling author on the convention circuit (remember writers, networking is a thing) and when Dr. Hartley mention a pet project of his that was available, John threw himself on that grenade to keep the Shakespearean professor from trunking his Will Hawthorne stories.

For his day job, A.J. Hartley is the Robinson Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare at UNC Charlotte. Which means he doesn’t just like literature, he breathes it.  Working with David Hewson, he recreated prose versions Macbeth and Hamlet. 

Well and truly bitten by the writing bug, he puts pen to paper for a variety of genres: thriller, fantasy, the previous mentioned historical fiction, and even some middle grade and young adult. He goes as far as to write additional works under a pseudonym of Andrew Hart. But nearly everything he does, including his literary non-fiction professor publications, are doen under A.J. Hartley.

His Steeplejack series is the “new thing” and worth a read, as is nearly everything this master of the English language produces.

Book Review: Sanctuary

Erin Penn

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Sanctuary (Shifter Chronicles #1) by Melle Amade

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Shae is sure the icy rage that claws at her is driving away her friends and pulling her closer to the wrong boy. After all, it’s Aiden she has always secretly wanted, not Callum, who has barely spoken to her in the last year.

But, as her protected life unravels, she discovers the violent supernatural world that lurks in her quiet hometown and the ancient feuds that threaten to destroy both her friends and her family. 

To save those she loves, Shae must succumb to her own fury and take on the Ravensgaard, the renegade warriors of the Order, but as the battle approaches her deepest fears are coming true, she’s becoming just like them. Shae’s not sure she can afford the price she’ll have to pay—her own humanity.

 

MY REVIEW

“That Moment When” was an anthology of sample chapters, available for free to encourage people to try new authors, and included the first three chapters of Sanctuary. I was intrigued enough to look at the Amazon sample which went all the way to a portion of chapter 5. And the next thing I knew I had bought the book at around midnight and completed it at 5:30 am. Good thing we just had a wicked snowfall and no work was happening.

An excellent Young Adult (YA) Urban Fantasy (UF) shifter story, with layers of worldbuilding and unique characters leading to a unique story even with the comfortable tropes of YAUF like two love interests for the main female character (MC), who are also loyal to each other as well as interested in the same girl.

If the story wasn’t a shifter story, the heart of it would be about dealing with genetic mental illness. The MC’s mom has rage issue and Shae and the rest of her family (dad and little brother) have spent their lives tip-toeing around the mother – dealing with things thrown at them and mild physical abuse. The mother does try to control her issues and isolates herself from those she loves most. Now Shae (the MC) is starting to have the same problems, destroying her room in her rages. She doesn’t want to be like her mother.

Another part of what made this book amazing is actually obeying the typical Urban Fantasy trope of information about the magical world (in this case shifters) is not shared with those outside the community on pain of death. In most urban fantasies, YA and adult, the new person is told everything flat out within a couple of chapters – a great way for an author to explain the Urban Fantasy world and rules. Some stories I just shake my head level of sharing of information between the teenagers wondering how the world-at-large could possible still be out of the loop. 

In Sanctuary, Shae’s group of friends are all shifters and despite being close friends with her for their teenage years, they have told her nothing. The secret is only revealed during a life and death situation and then her friends try to convince her what she saw isn’t real. They very reluctantly and slowly reveal their world to her, knowing each reveal makes her and their deaths at the hands of the shifter authorities that more likely. In this story I truly believe the secret of shifters is secret. I gave the book an extra star based on this alone, since it is so rare in the genre.

The final worldbuilding bonus beyond no vampires or werewolf shifters (which is explained and really cool and unique – the bat and wolf shifters were part of the good guys – and I love the back story for the (typical trope) shifter war), is the biggest bad shifter no one wants to deal with is a  frog. A FROG! A fight is going down – feather and fur flying. The hundreds-of-year-old wizard shifter, the shifter teenagers have come to, has wiped the floor with them and is about to kill their human friend when the Frog, in human form, just calmly steps between the claw-and-teeth dervish and the human. The dervish immediately stops. That is just bad-a@@. You will have to read to find out why a frog is so dangerous no one will dare touch him in combat. .. And Ms. Amade, I want to to see the frog end up with a love interest or maybe a story centered around him and not just because of “diversity”; the character is a total sweetheart.

I also loved the fact the characters were typical teenagers. They made good choices, they made bad choices. They made choices based off of emotion, what they were taught, and intellect. They obeyed the rules as much as they broke them. They loved their families and hated them. None of them knew where the others stood all the time, because even they didn’t know. They gossiped, lied, exaggerated, told the truth, and were amazingly loyal while also ruled by hormones. Throughout the story, a reader loves the characters and sometimes dislikes them. All the teenagers are strong, unique people.

In conclusion, amazing characters, a cool backstory about the shifter war, and the comfortable tropes and tropes turned on end, make Sanctuary a must-read if you love YA Urban Fantasy of the shifter variety.

Flash: The Sleeper

Erin Penn

Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Panic. Can’t move. I try to control, to calm myself. This has happened before. Too many times before. Each time I wonder if this time my body isn’t going to wake up.

I have sleep paralysis. There’s a fancier term, but it really doesn’t matter. What matters is my body is asleep when my mind wakes up. Unable to move, unable to open my eyes, unable to talk. First time it happened I was thirteen, Happy Birthday to me. Six hours, an eternity.

Second time I had stayed up late studying. Mom tried to wake me. Shook me, yelled at me to stop faking it. She was so scared. I could hear it in her voice. If I had been able to open my eyes, I would have seen the tears streaming down her face. Tears I got splashed with but didn’t feel. Got to ride in an ambulance. Late in the afternoon, my body woke up after I lived through a battery of tests. The MRI hum makes my teeth rattle every time I remember. Locked in my body, locked in that metal coffin.

Doctors explained it. A sleep disorder like sleep walking, only the opposite. Instead of the body walking around with a sleeping mind, I got a sleeping body and a waking mind.

I’ve only just dropped off. After two years, I know my mind never falls asleep again once it wakes up. Going to be a long night. Fighting the panic. Am I going to sleep forever, trapped?

I wish I could use breathing to control the panic, but my sleeping body is reacting to my nightmare. Adrenaline pushing the heart rate higher, breathing in short, but regular bursts. All I can do is imagine breathing slower, rolling the shoulders back to relax, opening my hands and stretching out the fingers.

Mom has put a baby monitor in my room, for all the good it does. It is not like I am going to cry out in my sleep. But it allows her to sleep so I put up with it. Upside, she allows me to hang with Nat in my room behind a closed door because she can listen in. If we are quiet too long, she shoots a question through the monitor. Kept me from reaching second base so far.

I try to go to sleep on time every night. Yep, I am a fifteen-year-old who obeys a nine pm bedtime religiously. Only way to make certain my body will wake in time for school. Even so about once a month, I “sleep” in and miss the first couple of classes.

I hear my breathing return to normal, my fists unfurl, the lub-dub regularly pushes against my oversized Adam’s apple. Dad’s is buried under his triple chin; he showed me photos when I visited this summer. He grew into it before he got fat, so I have some hope. Nat is threatening to leave hickies on it come turtleneck season; she loves kissing my neck and the deep voice that finally steadied the end of freshman year.

The grief I got last year. Bad enough being a freshman. Braces didn’t help. Orchestra geek too good for marching band. Too uncoordinated for sports, tripping over my feet hence the no marching band. Teacher’s pet in Spanish, English and Math, and transferring to the AP science track the second week should have sealed my fate as wedgie and swirly central. Only having Natalie around, going from pal to girlfriend kept me from being a total loser.

Nat, my savior, my heart, and my torment. We met when mom moved after the divorce. She push me into a mud puddle during recess my first day. I returned by punching her. None of the other boys had tried that, even in elementary school where she ruled the playground. We became best buds after my two days in-school suspension was served. The only black mark on my record.

I decide to visit her. Yeah, I know it will only be in my head, but right now that is all I got. For nearly eight lonely hours of pushing back panic, it is all I got.

I pretend I can feel my hands respond to pushing down on the bed and I sit up. I open my eyes and look around the darken room. Color blooms from my superhero posters, painted by memory. This year’s biology book is open to the genetics section for Friday’s test. My backpack leans against the desk filled with everything else, ready to grab and run tomorrow morning.

I’ve memorized my room so I can do this let’s-pretend game that I can wake and walk around even though I am actually locked in my sleeping body. I look in the mirror and annoyingly my reflection does not look back. For some reason I can’t put myself in it when I do these pretend walks. I look down to make sure I am decent. My favorite jeans and sneakers, but missing a shirt. I pretend grab the T-shirt I discarded before laying down and pull the illusion over my head. The shirt never moved from the back of the chair, but I am now dressed.

Walking through the door, I really wish I could figure out a way to feel like I opened it properly because walking through it is weird and feels like someone pushed soggy corn chips through my chest. I shake once I am through, then turn left and take the stairs two at a time. Mom is watching the news while folding clothes. I stop to watch when the weather comes up to see what will be happening for the weekend game.

I started watching the news with her this year. I figure I am hearing it upstairs since my room is directly over the television. Mom had started the laundry during dinner. Amazing how the mind fills in details. Karen, my younger sister, is studying at the dining room table for some middle school test. Douglas, our older brother, stayed with Dad since he was from Dad’s first marriage. Summer is nice because we can all get together again, though this year was a little tough since Doug had his first job flipping burgers. Be interesting to see how college is treating him. Maybe I will visit him next time.

And there will be a next time. Initially the episodes, as the docs like to call them, were about once a month, but they kept getting closer together. Now they are like every other night. After three nights in a row at Dad’s this summer, I decided to start the pretend walking for my own sanity. Books on tape only go so far.

I go through the front door. This time the soggy corn chips had some crunchy bits. Those hurt, like dry swallowing. Weird. I rest against the front porch pole. Turning around, I try to press through the wall beside the door and that is solid. I press on the door and my hand starts going through. WTF?

Mind games. Things your brain does to you. I’ve been thinking of getting a book or two on lucid dreaming.

I know doors can be gone through and walls can’t. Guess that is what is happening now. Never tried to leave the house before.

I remember in lucid dreaming sometime people can fly. Nat’s house is nearly a mile away. Wonder if I can fly there. I was going to try to pretend bike. I jump in the air like The Impressive, and fall flat on my face. Biking it is.

The nighttime ride went quick, faster than normal. I was able to pick up speed going down Hilltop, but didn’t loose it going up the other side of the ravine. Gravity may rule, but my brain seems willing to break some of the rules. Maybe I can learn how to fly after all.

I lean my pretend bike against the garage and it fades away. Frowning, I go around to the back door which is typically open to allow the night air in, saving on air conditioning. How am I going to get home? Popping through the screen door is easy even though I feel the corn chips on my shoulder where the latch is.

Nat’s parents are watching the late-night news, different channel from Mom. I watch a few seconds as Revenger dukes it out with a new supervillian before The Impressive comes to help. Then the typical public announcement reminding people with superpowers to register with the government. Whatever.

I head down the hall where music is throbbing. Nat will listen to anything that requires head-banging, whether the Black Sabbath’s Iron Man or Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. If she can crank it to 12 on the 10 scale, she is a happy metalhead. I’ve tried to introduce her to quieter music and discovered that even classic can be headbanging if you crank it enough. She loved the 1812 Overture.

Her door is closed, but only a few soggy corn chips push through me as I walk in. The music takes on physical impact on the other side. She is bopping around in a crop top and boy’s shorts and I slid to the ground.

Yay imagination! No bra, the crop top was one she wore during the summers when I am not around and should no longer be worn in public since the boob fairy, as she put it, visited her this year. Her legs sprouted out of the pink lacy underwear I had only seen in my mom’s catalogs and reached the ground after a very long trip. Her stomach, which I used to give raspberries to in fifth grade was perfect caramel from the bikini I had only got to see her wear once before going to my dad’s. She bounced over to the pile of paper on her bed; I recognized the English assignment. Working last minute again, my Nat. I had that assignment done two days ago.

She turns to go back to the pile on the floor, near the door, and shrieks.

(words 1688; first published 6/8/2015; republished new blog format 4/29/2018)

Book Review: Salvage

Erin Penn

Amazon Cover - Salvage

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Salvage by Alexandra Duncan

 

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Ava, a teenage girl living aboard the male-dominated deep space merchant ship Parastrata, faces betrayal, banishment, and death. Taking her fate into her own hands, she flees to the Gyre, a floating continent of garbage and scrap in the Pacific Ocean, in this thrilling, surprising, and thought-provoking debut novel that will appeal to fans of Across the Universe, by Beth Revis, and The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. Internationally bestselling author Stephanie Perkins called it “brilliant, feminist science fiction.”

Ava is the captain’s daughter. This allows her limited freedom and a certain status in the Parastrata’s rigid society—but it doesn’t mean she can read or write or even withstand the forces of gravity. When Ava learns she is to be traded in marriage to another merchant ship, she hopes for the best. After all, she is the captain’s daughter. But instead, betrayal, banishment, and a brush with love and death are her destiny, and Ava stows away on a mail sloop bound for Earth in order to escape both her past and her future. The gravity almost kills her. Gradually recuperating in a stranger’s floating cabin on the Gyre, a huge mass of scrap and garbage in the Pacific Ocean, Ava begins to learn the true meaning of family and home and trust—and she begins to nourish her own strength and soul. This sweeping and harrowing novel explores themes of choice, agency, rebellion, and family, and after a tidal wave destroys the Gyre and all those who live there, ultimately sends its main character on a thrilling journey to Mumbai, the beating heart of Alexandra Duncan’s post–climate change Earth. An Andre Norton Award nominee.

 

MY REVIEW

A young adult (YA) science-fiction coming-of-age story. Several different venues touched from a broken down post-apocalyptic-feeling spaceship, to a bustling aging space station, to a plastic-trash-mining town in the middle of the ocean, and finally a city in India. 

Some of the readers complained about the unique dialect the isolated spaceship community developed as being hard to follow. Also that the tech language was a bit unapproachable. As a long-time reader of science fiction/fantasy I did not feel either of these fell outside the typical troupe level for the genre; in fact most of the technical language fell solidly within modern science. The only thing I found bad scientifically was Ava’s grandfather sociological study of the spaceship-community; but then he broke nearly every rule of studying an isolated community (which is accurately noted in Salvage).

Ms. Duncan does an excellent job of creating a multi-layer universe. From the unique dialect to the boy’s home and the cultural drift of the spaceship community, everything holds together well. I found Ava’s slow development from a semi-privileged daughter-of-the-captain to a more powerful grown woman believable, especially her long time strength building while residing in Gyre and her frustration as a non-reader in a reading society. The coming-of-age character development has both leaps forward and the back-slides a sixteen year old displays constantly as they go from being a child to an adult both in society and with their body (and the related hormone swings and mental changes).

A couple of things kept this from being perfect. (1) Yet another time when a teenager having sex is immediately punished (at least this time both the girl and boy get about equal bad things happen); (2) Ava is not a Mary-Jane (several times you just want to shake her for being a jerk teenager – this could also be a plus); (3) the instant love between the main character and her first love interest (yes, there are two, but it is not a love triangle except in that comparing new people to the people you lost) – the instant love is believable because Ava first ran into the first-love years earlier (he was the only non-relative male she had every interacted with – so, of course, she crushed on him forever once she reached the age when crushes happen). … I am just tired of the YA instant-love punishment cycle at this point of my life.

Plus side Ava runs into people during her exile who help her because they just do, people who are indifferent, and people that take advantage of her. And, just like real life, there are actually more people who help than harm even if sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.

A really good science fiction YA coming-of-age which I think both genders would enjoy.