Bookami

Burn by Suzanne Phillips

Cameron Grady is a loner, and with good reason.  His freshman year has just been one misery after another ever since he went to the school's sports orientation night and the coach thought he was a girl.  Now he's known as Cameron Diaz and forced to "map out his day with survival being the only objective." But there's physical and mental survival, and after an incident in the boys' locker room, Cameron's psyche doesn't survive, and he commits an unspeakable act against the boy who witnessed his shame.

This is a hard novel to write about.  Not because it isn't powerful and challenging, but because it is so utterly terrifying.  It's a middle of the night, one-sitting sort of book.  It's completely realistic, but you  wish it weren't.  I want to feel great compassion for Cameron Grady, but I'm not sure he deserves my compassion.  How can a character be both the hero and the villain?  This is the balance beam that Suzanne Phillips has her readers walk.  Burn, along with Living Dead Girl, will probably be amongst the most talked about literature of the season.

 

Identical by Ellen Hopkins

Reading copious amounts of YA as I do, I often find myself thinking that teens are just so shallow and clueless.  With all of the information and resources available today, how can so many of them choose to have unsafe sex, do drugs, drink while driving?  Then I read an Ellen Hopkins' novel, and I feel over-whelming amounts of sympathy for today's young adults.  Yes, I suppose many of them do make unwise choices when it comes to their well-being, but I can't help but wonder if this is because so many decisions are not yet left to them.  When you're 16 or 17, adults still decide what it is best for you, and often it's an adult's harmful actions that lead a teen down the wrong path.

Before the accident, Kaeleigh and Raeanne were the identical twin daughters in an all-American family.  Kaeleigh and Raeanne took care of each other, and their loving parents took care of them. 

After the accident, each sister finds herself having to live with a terrible, dark secret.  Secrets too horrible to be shared even with your mirror image.  For Kaeleigh, she's her mother's substitute.  Politician Mom is always on the campaign trail, and Daddy is lonely.  For Raeanne, she is the forgotten daughter and left to herself, she chooses pot, alcohol and sex to dull her pain.  The girls can't hold these secrets inside forever.  One sister will have to save the other, and in the process, hope she saves herself.

In gritty, engrossing, elegant verse, in Identical Ellen Hopkins has given readers another mesmerizing tale about a life out of control and the long path back to redemption. 

Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott

I had just started buying YA for Borders when The Lovely Bones was published.  The main character in Sebold's novel is just 14, and as the story is told from her point of view, I had quite a few people ask me why the novel was shelved in adult and not YA.  My response to this question was that The Lovely Bones was without hope, and that I believed that children's literature for all ages had to have a  hopeful component.  This doesn't mean that I believe all children's novels should have happy endings, but it does mean that I think kids' books should at least provide some sort of lesson.  For instance Ellen Hopkins' Crank is as dark a novel as any I've read, but the reader certainly grasps at the end of this cautionary tale that drugs are bad and will ruin your life.   This is not the case with Living Dead Girl. There is no lesson to be learned from this novel.  The main character's only crime is that she  fights with her friends over her new cream soda lip gloss.  

Alice is just 10-years-old when she is abducted by Ray during a school field trip.  Now 15, she has spent the last 5 years being physically and mentally abused.  As Alice becomes less and less the little girl that Ray desires to have as his own, he dictates that she find him a new, younger, more perfect girl.   Could this be the release that Alice has prayed for, or is it the last step to losing her soul?

I wanted to blame Alice for her abduction.  Shouldn't she know better than to go off with strangers?  Then I would remember that Alice at 15 would know this, but Alice at 10 thought Ray worked at the aquarium, and she had been hurt by her friends.  She was vulnerable, and that's exactly how I felt after reading this novel.  I felt tense and vulnerable, like it would be easy to become a shut-in and never trust another person again. Yet, there is a glimpse of redemption in this novel.  Alice has suffered irreparable damage, but when the opportunity arises for her to pass on the pain to another young girl, she doesn't do it.  There is no happy ending for Alice, but she does allow another little girl to have the possibility of one.  So while I'm not sure that this book should be shelved in YA, Alice still has her humanity at the end of the novel, making her an acutely moving and hopeful character.

Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines by Nic Sheff

Synopsis: Nic Sheff was drunk for the first time at age eleven, and since then his life has been one drug and one rehab center after another.

Review: Tweak is an authentic, to use Nic's own word, memoir about his life on pot, meth, crack and heroin. It's not an easy book to read.  Much like Nic's highs and lows, it sometimes spirals out of control.  It's hard to keep the cast of characters straight, but I can also appreciate how this makes the reader understand better what it is to be addicted to drugs.  Even when Nic is shooting himself up, he's often telling himself that he doesn't want to do drugs anymore.  His thought process is completely rational.  That kind of blew my mind.  I would think the cravings would block all coherent thought from an addict's head, but Nic knows that drugs make his life disgustingly pathetic and lonely.  Still, he does them.  Even after he gets clean for 18 months, he still goes back to them.  He learned from a woman in Sober Living that "addiction is a disease of amnesia."  I think that's a pretty cool and accurate statement.  It also made me think of childbirth.  You truly do forget the pain of labor so it's completely understandable to me that you might forget all the bad crap that happens while you're on drugs and detoxing afterward.  Yes, Nic's life on drugs sucks, but having to live with himself sober is also pretty daunting and disheartening.  He has to remember how much he hurt his family and friends and himself.  That's a major guilt trip to face every day.  At the end of the book, Nic is again on the path to clean living, and I certainly hope he stays there. 

I also hope that Tweak isn't overshadowed by Nic's father's book, Beautiful Boy, which also details Nic's addiction.  I can already see that David Sheff's book is getting more media attention.  It's even the Starbucks' book right now.  Having said this and even though it's not a children's book, I will likely review it next for the site.  It will certainly be interesting to read a different perspective on Nic's story, and hopefully by reviewing both books, more people will be encouraged to read both accounts.

If you appreciated this memoir, you might also enjoy The Burn Journals by Brent Runyon.