Review: Love and Profanity, Edited by Nick Healy

Happy Short Story Month everyone! (These are technically essays, but they read like short stories, so I'm counting it as my short story read for the month)

I picked up my copy of Love and Profanity: True, Tortured, Wild, Hilarious, and Intense Tales of Teenage Life at my local independent book store. Yay! And yeah, that's a ton of adjectives to have in a title, but the stories in this volume really lived up to it.

I'm not really a short story or an essay person, I'll be honest, so I was even more impressed that I really loved the stories here. It was interesting to see the real stories of childhood by some authors I recognized (namely Pete Hautman, who wrote several young adult novels I've enjoyed, and Jon Scieszka, who wrote my favorite picture book ever). Short stories don't fulfill my craving for longterm character growth and development and yet, I felt like I got a little taste of that growth and development in each of these stories in its own way.

The range of the stories was really impressive. This volume had everything from tales of bullying, triumph, sadness, joy and happiness. The order and separation of the stories made sense, which I've found to be a challenge in order short story collections that I've read.

There are forty-three stories in the volume, the longest only a couple of pages. They each offer a moment-long glimpse into the live of another person, another writer, another teen experience. At times the stories seemed to demand my complicity and other times they seemed wrongly voyeuristic, most so in the story "Saying Goodbye to Anna," the tale of a teen overcoming anorexia.

The writing styles also varied quite a bit. Some stories felt incomplete while others filled me with emotion, be it happiness or sadness. Some were eloquent, while others were gritty. They all felt to be a little bit nostalgic and most felt a little dated, but in a good way. The datedness and the fact that I could still relate to these stories made me feel like yes, there are some parts of the teen experience that are indeed universal, carrying across time and space.

I enjoyed seeing perspectives from a variety of types of writers: everything from bloggers to picture book writers to teen writers and everything in between. Finding this in the young adult section of a bookstore, I expected there to be more stories by teen writers I recognized, but I enjoyed looking up some of these authors after I finished the book.

Each story felt like a new experience, a new glimpse. And yet they were all threaded together into four parts and one cohesive volume. I would recommend this collection of diverse, vibrant stories to anyone who enjoys short stories or enjoys reading about teen life. Read for several stories about love, friendship, heartbreak, isolation and ultimately growing up.

4/5 stars

Review: Wildlife by Fiona Wood

Review of Wildlife by Fiona Wood

4/5 stars

Wildlife by Fiona Wood. Image from amazon.com

With the abundance of technology these days, it seems that books embracing the big outdoors and the impact of nature on the mind and body are becoming a rarity. However, every now and then, a story that embraces spending time outside and allowing drama to play out in the elements instead of within a traditional high school or a dystopian society emerges. Fiona Wood’s novel Wildlife does just that, creating a story that is simultaneously quirky, smartly written and wildly entertaining.

One of the novel’s biggest strengths, as well as one of its biggest weaknesses, were the characters. The novel is told from the alternating first person point of views of Lou, a girl trying to get over the tragic death of her boyfriend Fred, and Sibylla, a girl who is suffering the consequences of a perfume photo shoot that resulted in her face being plastered onto a giant billboard. The girls’ lives converge when they are assigned to the same cabin on the outdoor campus of their private high school, where they are required to spend a term in the great outdoors rather than the crowded city of Melbourne.

Lou and Sibylla are endearing, complex and funny characters that the reader will root for. Lou’s dry sense of humor will have readers snickering while some of Sibylla’s actions will have the reader wishing they could reach into the book and give her a shove in the right direction.

The drama and romance wasn’t overdone. Wood succeeded in creating a balance between steamy, outdoor romance and everyday teenage drama in a way that makes this book wildly enjoyable to read. Sibylla and Lou are a major piece of the puzzle leading to that success.

The secondary characters, however, felt flat and one-dimensional. Sibylla’s best friend Holly was the typical toxic best friend that you have to learn to grow away from. Her boyfriend Ben is the typical popular guy that the protagonist of teen novels often seems to end up with. Still, these characters were terrible and they certainly had their own humorous, touching or downright aggravating moments.

While Wood may have met difficulty in the department of secondary characters, her writing style was absolutely the strength of this novel. The way she was able to capture the inner voice of a fifteen-year-old girl, and the fifteen-year-old girl in all of us, was remarkable. First person perspective was used the way it was meant to. Readers will feel themselves experiencing everything that Lou and Sibylla are as they experience it. They will be just as surprised as the girls are at every turn in this twisting and suspenseful tale.

The setting was another fun element of this novel that simply worked well. Camp stories are common, but books that somehow manage to blend camp, the outdoors and high school together are a rarity. The setting of the outdoor campus almost feels like a character itself in this novel, one that manipulates and shapes the characters that the girls and their friends become by the end of the novel. It is also detailed, without being overdone.

Overall, Wildlife is a slightly bizarre mix of strained friendships, first loves, soul mates, the outdoors, and discovering yourself in an unfamiliar place. Yet, it works, and the result is an amazing YA contemporary novel. This book is for anyone who wants to escape to the bush of Australia for an afternoon and relive the way we fall in and out love, friendships and grief.

Review: Heartbeat by Elizabeth Scott

I won this book through a contest at Teenreads.com, so a big thank you to everyone over there! I kind of totally forgot about entering the contest and was pleasantly surprised one night to come home and find this awesome book in my mailbox. Here’s my review of Elizabeth Scott’s novel Heartbeat: :)

Mourning and sadness take many forms, but author Elizabeth Scott’s stunningly honest and emotional portrayal of her narrator Emma’s grief over the death of her mother in her novel Heartbeat is a refreshing new voice in young adult fiction.

However, Emma isn’t only suffering the loss of her mother, she’s also suffering from what she perceives to be her step-dad selfishly keeping her mother alive to potentially save her unborn half-brother. This twist in the story turns Scott’s novel from an average story about loss into an innovative and heart-wrenching tale about a girl fighting to overcome her loss while also struggling to accept the new life that will soon enter her family. Having seen similar stories on the news in the past about women being kept on life support to deliver their children, it’s awesome to see YA authors finding the teen voices in these clips of coverage we see everyday.

Emma’s narration is direct and honest, although it can feel overly simple and redundant at times. She doesn’t waste time with metaphors or indirect ways of expressing how she feels, which amplifies the raw emotion of the story. Readers will be able to feel Emma’s anger, frustration, sadness and loneliness through the pages. They will also be able to see how she progresses through the process of mourning with the help of a complicated relationship with neighborhood bad boy Caleb and her best friend Olivia. By the end, readers will feel satisfied with the outcome of the journey they have seen Emma endure.

Scott creates a cast of characters that are simultaneously relatable and quirky in their own ways. Olivia, Emma’s devoted best friend, is repulsed by modern technology, opting to write school papers on a typewriter and use encyclopedias instead of Internet research. Caleb, haunted by the death of his sister, is driven to commit dangerous crimes. However, Emma sometimes falls into the background of her own story as her life is defined by the loss of her mother, her apathy about her schoolwork, her anger towards her step-dad and little else.

Dialogue, though, is the strength of this novel. The way the characters speak to each other in Heartbeat is remarkably accurate and natural. Through Emma’s conversations with Olivia, Caleb and Dan she changes and learns about herself, her mom, life and death.

Another strong element of Heartbeat was the romance between Caleb and Emma. Scott transforms the classic bad boy stereotype to have Caleb reflect the devastation Emma feels from losing her mother. The result is an endearing romance stemming from mutual loss that readers will root for.

Heartbeat is an emotional and endearing tale about a girl’s journey from grief to hope. It provides an honest portrayal of grief at a young age, of the search for why and how to move on. This beautiful and well-written story also exceptionally demonstrates the importance of friends and family in difficult times. It also shows that, while not everyone should drop concerns about school completely like Emma, in the long run those assignments and papers aren’t worth excessively stressing over. The memories we have with the people we love are far more important.

While Heartbeat is definitely geared towards teen girls, readers of any age and gender will be able to appreciate Emma’s story and will enjoy making the journey alongside her.

4/5