Shelter

by Harlan Coben
A Mickey Bolitar Novel
Putnam  2011

When his girlfriend goes missing, and no one else seems to notice or care, Mickey begins to dig around and finds himself caught up in a web of... human sex trafficking!

His dad is dead, his mom is in rehab, his girlfriend of three weeks has gone missing, and the neighborhood crazy lady has scared the pants off Mickey... all in the first sentence of this mystery. The details will come in short order, but what is clear from the very beginning is that Coben isn't pulling any punches when it comes to ratcheting up the tension in what looks to be the promising beginning of a new mystery series for YA readers.

Mickey isn't some kid who starts out with aspirations to become a detective or with any particular skill-sets that tip of he's something special, he's just a typical kid who's been forced to bum around the world with his parents while they did their various humanitarian missions. But with his dad killed (under not-so-accidental conditions as Mickey will learn) and his mother in rehab over the loss, Mickey's been foisted onto his uncle in his dad's old home town where the family name draws ire in some quarters. Being the new kid, befriending the heavy goth girl because he's the only one with some decency, finding himself with a nerdy sidekick, and not taking any crap from the bully-jocks sets Mickey up for the reluctant anti-hero mold, but things don't start rolling until his girlfriend of three weeks – also a new kid in town – goes missing without a trace. With a little deviousness, and a lot of chutzpah, Mickey suddenly discovers that no one in the town is who they seem, not even his parents.

That Coben takes us from local to global by making the mystery at the heart of the story about human sex trafficking is, I think, a bold recognition that teen readers looking for mystery stories don't talk down to them while maintaining their human scale. There's real danger involved as kids are dealing with scary gun-toting adults but there are no unbelievable super-heroics and no sense that the story elements are really that far-fetched. It also doesn't hurt that Coben knows how to dump twist after twist into the story, including turns that you had no right to expect out of the middle of nowhere. It reads faster than a lot of adult beach reads and is twice as smart.

In the recent trend of adult writers who dip into writing for middle grade and YA, Coben is the first I've read who really seems to understand the value in creating books that build an audience base. Just because you like Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson books or Lemony Snicket doesn't mean you're going to like those author's adult books. Even Elmore Leonard, who I thought would make a perfect crossover writer, didn't get it, but Coben does. It's a smart move, because any teen who likes this can probably jump to Coben's adult titles pretty quickly.

This is how you do a YA to adult crossover.

Carter FInally Gets It, part two

by Brent Crawford
Hyperion 2009

In a phrase: strangely compelling meets fiercely flawed.

Will Carter, freshman, has Attention Deficit Disorder (or so he says) and the pressing desire to no longer be a virgin. He's got his sights set on Amber Lee, the untouchable hottie, but it appears he's destined to hook up with the previously chubby Abby who's body spent the summer moving all her baby fat to her chest.

Because Carter has ADD he finds himself easily distracted. It doesn't prevent him from joining the football team. Or being one of the area's top swimmers. Or from trying out and landing the lead in the school musical, all because his particular ADD requires Carter to maintain focus.

Along the way Carter and his crew find themselves at parties where houses are routinely destroyed by drink kids, cars are driven wildly by drunk teenage occupants, and are physically menaced by older psychopathic teens among the general population at school.

Oh, did I mention Carter has ADD?

Let me get this off my chest right now. Carter saying he has ADD doesn't make it so. He has problems staying on track, occasionally has to write things down on his hand, makes a lot of unfiltered comments that lead to hurt feelings... but it reads more like average teenage boy to me, not ADD. Additionally, Carter and his friends refer to friends, enemies, and each other as retards and faggots just as often as Carter calls himself ADD. In my experience, kids will adopt an affectation or self-diagnose themselves as a way of communicating to others that, what might seem like unusual behavior is in fact them working out who they are. A kid who refers to himself as psychotic or demented isn't necessarily either of those things, and what we look for in determining whether these characters are truly what they say they are in fiction is through their behavior.

So as Carter claims his disorder his behavior does not support this. His school has culled some of the more violent kids and placed them in special classes where their violence can be modified, and you would suspect the school would have learning specialists as well for kids with disabilities, but Carter has regular classes and goes about his life with everyone treating him normally. That isn't a bad thing, except that very little of Carter's issues are specific to ADD. He has difficulty with behaving or saying appropriate things, but hormones and dietary issues could just as easily be the cause. At one point later in the book, Carter is instructing his best friend EJ on how to pick up girls, a lesson his older sister has given him out of a shred of kindness and perhaps a recognition that her kid brother is a little different. When he tells EJ to ask questions and act disinterested, his best friend takes this instruction literally and combines the two to ask insulting questions of a girl who runs away in tears. Isolated from the rest of the book, a reader would assume EJ was the kid with problems, not Carter.

Putting that aside, I nearly gave up on this book a half dozen times. What starts as a series of vignettes about freshman life eventually begins to coalesce around a hundred pages in. It's around this time that I realized that Carter Finally Gets It is a boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl story trapped beneath all the excess baggage of a modern YA novel. The problem is, the story only works because of these excesses. If Carter and his nemesis Andre weren't both on the football team and the swim team, if Andre didn't steal Abby away from Carter, if Carter and Abby didn't wind up as leads opposite one another in the school play... man, that's a lot of 'ifs' piled up there.

Additionally, I'd hate to assume so calculated a move, but this and a few other books I've seen this season seem to rely on horny, raunchy boys to appeal to its audience. The argument that "this is how kids talk today" doesn't work here. Hanging around and listening to a bunch of teens talking at a pizza joint may be authentic, but it doesn't actually provide us any insight into their personalities. Aside from verite reportage, steeping a story in the language of teens without making each voice equally unique smacks of a certain level of pandering. Also, don't we have enough problems with boys objectifying and badmouthing girls based on looks? Do we really need books to be so "authentic" that they continue to perpetrate and reinforce chauvinistic behavior?

You would think after all this that I would hate Carter Finally Gets It, but I don't. There is a level of bumbling boy comedy here that I really enjoyed, that haplessness that is the providence of teen boys who just haven't yet figured out how clueless they are. Scenes of Carter riding everywhere on his bike because he's too young to drive slayed me for a variety of personal reasons, not the least of which was because of how close to home they hit. And the cruelty of girls who use the unwitting Carter as a foil for getting around watchful parents is a priceless bit of chicanery that Carter, unfortunately, deserves.

Like I said, I could have dumped this anywhere along the way in the first hundred pages – and that's an awful lot to ask of a reader to go along with – but following that I had a hard time stopping. As flawed as it is compelling, the book should neutralize itself but somehow manages to tip the scales toward readability.

Others have found this LMAO funny and don't seem to have the same problems I have with the book, so proceed accordingly.

Carter Finally Gets It, part one

by Brent Crawford
Hyperion 2009

It depends on what the meaning of the words 'it' is.

Tomorrow, part two: A more in-depth look.

Destroy All Cars

by Blake Nelson
Scholastic 2009

There's a lot about this book I really, really like, and a lot of stuff that bugs me.

James Hoff is a self-righteous, pessimistic seventeen year old who believes Americans consume too much. Cars, in particular, make him angry, but the entirety of consumer culture sends him ranting. Being a hormonal seventeen year old boy, vain outsider or not, he's still interested in girls. In particular there's his obsession with Sadie, his ex-girlfriend of the previous year, a do-gooder who is politically active where James is all talk. James' bile-filled tirades against Sadie ring false because they are, and when he's finally finished floundering around manages to rekindle their affair briefly before they both decide to move on with their new "adult" lives.

Throughout the book, James includes journal entries and essays for his English teacher that cover his views on the world as well as his personal life. When he isn't ranting about the destruction of the planet, he's talking about nature, about what it means to be a teen, about friends and family, about the superiority of Oslo, all from the same ill-informed place that most of his adolescent brooding comes from. A classic smart-mouthed dumb ass.

Stories like this told in first person – where the reader has to read a little between the lines to get what the main character is really saying – require a deft use of character voice. The tone and pitch have to be perfect, otherwise the spell is broken and the reader becomes frustrated or disillusioned or just plain bored. I don't really like this character of James up front, then just as I start to see what his game is and like him a little I begin to feel a little bored with him. It takes a little too long for the love stories to fall into place, and James' essays tend to belabor their point beyond their intended humor. It feels like if it could just be tightened up a wee bit it would be perfect. Maybe about forty pages too long. And a few more teeth in its bite.

Another thing that sort of ruins it for me is the environmental angle being played for humor without any conviction. The kids in the story who are attempting to make a difference or finding effective ways to protest "larger issues" are derided by James and shown to be less deserving success than our disingenuous cynical narrator. Teens probably know the types, and laugh, but what are they laughing at exactly? The shallow big mouth loner kid gets the girl (a few, actually), and he eventually has a last-chapter awakening that lends his previous posturing credence, which seems to suggest that the kids doing things in earnest somehow don't deserve the same thing.

Almost a little like a conservative writing a farce about liberals that liberals laugh at without realizing they're being skewered. Only it's teens and their causes and their sex lives being lampooned, and they're probably laughing at themselves without realizing it.

For those who care, there's sex involved. Talked about, engaged in, and I don't really have a problem with it... except here I do. I know James and his friends are seventeen, and that real seventeen year olds are engaged in sex, but the characters involved here all feel too young. And by young I mean immature. It's the opposite of the problem TV shows and movies have where they use 25 year olds to play teens; here these characters read, talk and behave like they're years younger then they are. The dialog is genuine, it reads authentically, but it reads like smart seventh graders and not average eleventh graders.

Destroy All Cars is a teen romance aimed at boys that deftly uses a pro-environment message as a delivery device. The heart on the cover should be the giveaway, but for boys that don't catch that they might find themselves enjoying the little slice of romantic confusion that Nelson has put together.

The Many Riders of Paul Revere

Pretty risque title for children's non-fiction title, but that's what it said on the outside of the box of galleys from Scholastic. Sadly, the galley's correct title appeared on the cover: The Many Rides of Paul Revere.

The cover says it's illustrated with archival art and new illustrations but when you look at the title page and it says "Illustrated with Archival Photographs." Hmm. That almost sounds as if they were using photos taken during Paul Revere's day, a pretty nifty trick given that he died about 150 years before photography became popular. Ah, I get it, the photos are archival, meaning they came from archives. Which would explain the contemporary photos of the liberty bell complete with it's acrylic plaque.

Couldn't it have said "Profusely Illustrated"? Or just not pointed out what is completely obvious, that it's at least 40% illustrated? After all, if illustrations are important to a reader (and for non-fiction it is important to a young reader) all they're going to do is flip through the pages before they start to read it anyway, why bother stating the obvious? It's not like they need to know that information for their book report.

Look for The Many Rides of Paul Revere in October.

How To Get Suspended and Influence People

by Adam Selzer
Delacorte Press/Random House 2007

I really didn't want to like this. Actually, I didn't think I would like it first and that eventually led to me thinking that I didn't want to like it, because I was sure that I would hate it.

But I tell you what, I did like it. And probably for the same sort of reasons that it will appeal to smartass middle school boys if they ever get their hands on it: it has a delicate subversive streak in it that doesn't hit you over the head as you read it so much as it sidles up to you, asks you what you're reading, and then womps you before you can answer.

It starts lamely enough with Leon Noside Harris explaining his crazy middle name (Edison spelled backward), his crazy dad (inventing useless things) and his crazy mom (cooking and delighting in meals from cookbooks that use weird ingredients). It skitters like a crab into the beginning of the school where the usual assortment of misfits is settling into their various roles while Leon grows impatient for everyone to start acting up.

Then there's this shift, Leon and some of the other misfits are part of the gifted set, kids who get special treatment because while school recognizes their abilities they are at a true loss for ways to address them. It is decided that these eighth graders should utilize their talents and the school's multimedia equipment to update the various educational films to be shown to the sixth and seventh graders. If that doesn't sound like the ingredients for misguided thinking and elevated hi-jinx then you haven't been around eighth graders for a while.

Leon's got his eyes set on the sex ed films. He wants the younger kids to know, yeah, puberty gets weird, and things happen, and thoughts cannot be controlled, and it's all good. Naturally he's not going to be allowed to show any real nudity, and eventually the morality police (in the guise of one truly repressed teacher) will want to have final say over what Leon produces, but he's undaunted.

Hanging out with misfit kids means that eventually his girlcrush Anna is going to have to take him gently by the hand and give him some influence. He sees Fellini's La Dolce Vita. He sees the surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou. His sex ed film becomes the attempt to cross Italian neorealism with a sense of the absurd, something he calls Avant Garde but is really more akin to the experimental collage works that appeared in the 1960, something he titles La Dolce Pubert. I could mention the works of Bruce Conner, but that's probably going a bit too deep here. Besides, Leon never mentions other influences.

His big idea is to show nudity as portrayed in classic works of literature while a friend with a gift for satire turns Byronic odes into fell-good permissives about the joys of wanking off. An early idea to include an explosion of some sort -- never mind how or why it connects, Leon hasn't really figured it out himself -- is scotched due to a fear that Leon might harm himself. And when the big scene regarding the popular "it" couple of his band refuses to participate in his climactic kissing scene (something about it not being Marxist enough for the girl) Leon and Anna must stand in and then all heck breaks loose.

The rough edit of the film is seen and Leon is given in-house suspension. The film is seized and word travels that Leon is being censored. Teachers and students protest in support and even Leon's dad doesn't see the harm in it all. But Leon has the master print. A little final tweaking, plus some friends who are willing to post the film on the internet and burn hard copies to be shared, and Leon becomes a cause celebre. The principal backs down, the morality police elect to leave the sodomites to their sins, and future gifted classes are kept from making sex ed films. Leon and Anna plot a future of films where plots serve as excuses for more kissing.

I lived this story.

Okay, so I got suspended for cussing out a teacher who had wrongly punished me (by his own admission) to set an example, and the films we made were newscasts in the future full of sex and violence and sex. And a friend of mine and I wrote an update of Romeo and Juliet so that one of us (*ahem*) could have some kissing scenes with a secret crush. It would be another ten years before I'd see Fellini or know what surrealism really was but if I'd been shown them in junior high I'd have grokked my future a bit earlier. No matter.

What Selzer does is set you up with a typical smartass outsiders story that at its base has some real criticisms of the way "gifted" kids are treated and how anything outside the norm really isn't accepted no matter how much it's encouraged. He hints that a number of gifted kids may have been placed in the program because they were disciplinary problems and the extra attention would remove their disruptive influence from the classrooms, and I have to say I've seen plenty of proof to support that. As for encouraging gifted kids to push at the edges, but being afraid of the results and finally coming down on the conservative side of control, well, that's just the history of the Western World writ miniature to fit the little dioramas of educational fiefdoms.

There are elements of How to Get Suspended... that I could see keeping it from the grasp of its target audience -- specifically in the way of censorship from various adults. First, the title is a more a reference to Lenny Bruce's autobiographical How to Talk Dirty and Influence People than it is to Bruce's reference, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. Woe to the unwary who don't heed the cover illustration of a nude with a black bar across her breast! It isn't that there's anything too graphic or untoward, but Selzer appears to want to be frank with the readers in a way he knows would make some adults uncomfortable. Leon doesn't seem to have it bad but at least one of friends seems to intimate matter-of-factly daily masturbation. Let's also not ignore when one of the school coaches checks in with the suspended Leon and commiserates, explaining how when he was in college he was part of a free-speech group called freedom Under Charles Kerr.

"Think about the initials," the coach suggests. Indeed.

It's these little things that won me over, that pulled the book slowly from the mire of other, similar middle school-based books that try to get the kids to side with them. It suggests that the awkwardness of puberty is not only normal but makes for entertaining reading.