In the Shadow of Blackbirds - Cat Winters

A candidate for the William Morris Debut Award, In the Shadow of Blackbirds tells the story of young Mary Shelley Black's dark adventure as she flees Portland, Oregon during the fall of 1918. Her father has been swept up in the anti-German hysteria that reigned during WWI here in America. He has been arrested on treason charges and she is left to flee to San Diego to live with her Aunt Eva until his case can be settled.

This novel is full to brimming with so much historical detail that it makes it hard to believe. It's more a comment on the history of the time all wrapped up in a ghost story. Mary Shelley becomes re-acquainted with a boy she knew as a youngster. Stephen Embers has grown up to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather. He has become an excellent photographer. However, his brother has inherited the photography business, and Julius is trying to cash in on the grief-stricken families of those lost during the trench warfare in Europe. He has branched into the area of spiritualism by photographing family survivors with the 'ghosts ' of their loved ones. Stephen hates this kind of exploitation, so he leaves the family business and enlists in the Army.

Mary Shelley is left to wait for the return of her friend. When news of his death in the trenches arrives, she begins having strange nightmares, visitations, and psychic sensations that hint at a much more complicated death for Stephen. Against her Aunt Eva's instruction, she embarks on a dangerous mission to solve the mystery of Stephen's death and let his soul rest, knowing that she has made things right here in the physical world.

Mixed up in all this mystery is the real-life danger of the Spanish Flu pandemic that was sweeping the world during this time. Death seems to stalk everyone here in the physical world and in the spiritual world of Stephen Embers. Mary Shelley must go out into the chaotic world of flu-stricken San Diego in order to ask questions, research the science of photography and Spiritualism, interview young veterans of the war to try to find the answers to the mystery of just what happened to her first love when he entered the service and found himself deep in the bloody trenches of France.

While a neatly told story, I had trouble with the first person narrative. It's not my favorite type of story exposition, so I struggled with all the "I's". I also found the concept of a 16 year old girl being given the freedom to travel alone, roam the streets of San Diego whenever, go in and out of Red Cross hospitals, not attend school, etc. hard to believe. That's fiction for you, though. What's unbelievable is wrapped and packaged into a good story. This is a good story. It just would have benefited from some more work to make it a better story. As a debut novel, it shows the potential of Cat Winters. I'm hoping that she changes up her POV in her next writing endeavor and focuses her overall story line a bit more. We'll see!

In the meantime, the novel fit well into the R.I.P...X reading challenge, as well as my annual goal of reading more award-winning YA and children's literature. If you hit the above link, you can see what other participants are sharing for their R.I.P...X reading challenge posts. This is a fun annual challenge ... check it out!

The Ocean At The End of The Lane - Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman has an incredible imagination. Let that be said.

In The Ocean At The End Of The Lane, he has given us a story, that at first glance, can be taken as a fantastical adventure in which a young boy faces powers of both good and evil during a painful time in his life. The story seems a sort of fairy tale memory that is told in retrospect when a man returns to his childhood home for a family funeral. As he wanders down the road from his childhood home and comes to the land that belonged to the neighboring family, he returns to a particularly trying time when his parents took in boarders, his mother was forced to return to work, and a strange and evil nanny came to stay. The young boy takes refuge in a friendship with a girl who lives on a neighboring farm. The friendship takes on magical elements that spiral into the mystical and fantastic. In the process, the young boy learns hard truths about adults and their human frailties, faith and trust in friends and family, and courage in facing evil.

Hard lessons are learned that cave in the 'pillars' that have supported his young life. We can't always count on our parents to keep us safe, sometimes trusted adults don't live up to our expectations, learning to trust again is a necessity to surviving psychologically, friends sometimes go away, sometimes we do things when we're afraid that we regret, sometimes it takes great bravery to face our fears.

This is a book that could easily be read as an archetypal take on the fairy tale, but it can also be picked apart and thought about on much deeper levels ... I will admit that it spooked me and made me wonder about the adults that I remember interacting with in my neighborhood when I was very young. My experience of their lives was just so very naive and, while I never experienced true evil or danger, there were some close encounters with sickness and eccentricity in some neighbors that I was reminded of while reading this book.

Neil Gaiman intrigues me. Let that be said.

The Fault In Our Stars

From the moment I began reading this novel, I knew why it became so wildly popular with teen readers. John Green has a wonderful way with inner dialogue. He uses it so well in developing the character of Hazel Grace, the book's protagonist. She is sassy and sarcastic, intelligent and full of emotion - wise beyond her years. At the same time, she has all the typical characteristics of a typical teen, right down to her TV watching habits, her dress, her sometimes 'attitude' toward her parents, and her classic teen attitude toward bureaucracy and authority.  Her observations on life and the vagaries of living with a life-threatening cancer diagnosis are at turns funny and wrenching. She bursts off the page of the book and right into the heart of the reader. I mean, really, who wouldn't feel for a young, smart teenager who is waiting for the shoe of Death to drop, but still manages to yank her O2 tank around and build a romance that will last the ages from an encounter at a cancer support group? Pop in some funny and supportive friends and relations, a 'make-a-wish' trip to Amsterdam, and a turn-about ending that yanks out your heart and squishes it flat on the driveway and I'd say you've got an equation for a teen literary phenomenon.

That being said, this book that John Green has written deals with some age-old issues that everyone will grapple with before their time on Earth is done. Wondering if we will ever be truly and deeply loved, whether we will be remembered when we're gone, and just what meaning our life has had will creep into all our brains at some point. Hazel and her friend Gus are forced to deal with these questions sooner than normal. Having teen characters face them with such honesty and angst is what makes this book so powerful. Of course, when a loved one is lost, there is no happy ending, but when deep life issues are confronted and dealt with effectively, there is a satisfaction that comes with the ending of one's life and the moving on that comes afterward by one's loved ones.

There is an equally popular movie adaptation to the book that I will see at some point, but I find it hard to think that it will equal the book. There were so many well-written passages that were thought-provoking and 'quotable', passages that a reader will find sticking in the back of the mind; for me, it was the following  quote. I have pondered it at different points since reading the book - when I contemplate God, when I see some knock-down beautiful view out there in the world, when I felt the unborn kittens in my cat's belly squirm, when I watched friends marry over the weekend and saw that look pass between them while they danced. Yes, the universe demands to be noticed in so many ways.

“I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?” 
                                                                                                                               - John Green

Good book. Not surprised that it has stuck so long on the best-seller lists. 

Ordinary Grace - William Kent Krueger

There is an old expression - 'little jugs have big ears'. It's meant to admonish adults about speaking too freely around youngsters. Children listen and hear, watch and see, and yes, they can be surprisingly astute in their assessment of what's going on in their worlds.

This tale that William Kent Krueger has written takes that expression and plays it well. The year is 1961. It's summertime in the small town of New Bremen, Minnesota. Frank Drum, the middle child of the local minister, is set for a summertime of following baseball, playing outside in the woods and along the rail line that runs through New Bremen, swimming in the local quarry, and fishing alongside the Minnesota River. His wanderings will bring him into contact with a cast of characters that display the width and breadth of the human condition - love-starved, loving, misunderstood, twisted, cruel, damaged, wise, innocent, intuitive, bitter, haunted, passionate, and questing. All these characters become embroiled in a patchwork of death and mystery that Frank will witness and ponder for the rest of his life.

In fact, the story is told by Frank at a time much later. He looks back on that summer and unravels the events with a mature sense of God's grace bestowed. No spoilers here ... the only thing I will say is that I loved the relationship that Frank had with his younger brother and the growth and understanding that Frank displays toward Jake. In contemplating that relationship, I came to think that it is Jake who is the central character of the story, the conduit of a display of God's grace that is so humbling and so pure ... that's all I have to say other than I liked this book tremendously.

Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children

Once Upon a Time there was a magical island with a strange mysterious portal to the past ...

Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children got a lot of press back when it was first published in 2011. A new spine-tingling young adult read, it relies on an old equation - misunderstood young man with unusual ability is drawn to an isolated haven for children with equally unusual abilities that is looked over by a matronly and well-meaning mother figure. Yes, the Harry Potter syndrome strikes again. Once again, age-old themes work with a new author's imagination to give us a whiz-bang adventure fantasy that promises to be ripe for subsequent novels.

The Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem's book about young Dylan Ebdus and his life-long friendship with Mingus Rude made be cringe, shudder, shake my head in wonder, and finally, sigh in resignation. The book is touted to be a 'fictionalized autobiography' of Lethem's years growing up in Brooklyn during the first throes of 'gentrification'. It is a relentless slog through a childhood lived from the apartment door through the gauntlet of the streets to  'P.S. # Whatever' by a nerdy little white boy with a half-cocked mother and a nerdy little white boy artist of a father ... poor kid. He gets a world class introduction to the art and music of the era, but lacks any real family connections that extend beyond the apartment walls. To boot, his mother abandons the family while Dylan is still a young kid, leaving his detached father to raise him ... or let him survive among the other detached souls in Gowanus. Dylan builds his fortress of solitude year after year, developing a keen mind and an alleycat's instinct for survival. He becomes a social chameleon.

Consequently, young Dylan observes the goings-on in his neighborhood - the young kids making their way on the sidewalks and in the alleys, playing ball, learning the fine art of tagging, forming alliances that will translate into neighborhood gangs when they are older, dodging the drunks and the druggies, and surviving until they can escape the neighborhood or carve their own turf within its boundaries. Dylan meets Mingus and together, they form an alliance of sorts based on comic book heroes, music, and the basic prurient interests of young boys. Their teen years become a laboratory of artistic experimentation in the development of their 'tag identities', sexual and drug experimentation, and slowly negotiating their future tracks.

I know this is a 'smart book'. It's well-written. It's edgy with its constant referral to the art and music and atmosphere of NYC and its environs during the emergence of soul, disco, punk, and the alternative art scene. It is heavy with local color, the various political initiatives of New York politicos, and name-dropping, the story moves along and my heart aches for Dylan and Mingus and their crony, Arthur. It's everything that a young urban writer might want to put down on paper, but it left me sad and lonely and bereft and thinking of that old spiritual called 'Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child' ... perhaps that was Lethem's point?

Guess I'll go back to a light read after this one ...