Rebel McKenzie by Candice Ransom

Title: Rebel McKenzie
Author: Candice Ransom
Publisher: Disney
Rating: WORTHY!

Rebel McKenzie is a kick-ass female character. Candice Ransom is a writer who gets that a strong female character doesn't have to be muscular and kick everyone's ass to be strong. She just has to be 'not weak', even if 'not weak' is defined as someone who is strong enough to overcome whatever weaknesses she has. It's that simple. So why is it that more authors simply don't get it?

Rebel is a twelve-year-old who wants to be a paleontologist specializing in extinct mammalian mega-fauna. Candice Ransom puts a girl with science - the first strong move, and one that's neglected far too often in middle-grade literature, and almost exclusively in YA lit. Unfortunately, her parents aren't well-off, and they can't afford to send her to paleontology camp - which is why this novel begins with an angry and frustrated Rebel living up to her name and running away from home! First page - conflict. Candice Ransom gets it right.

Rebel runs into the local jail clean-up crew - and one old lag advises her to turn around and go home. Again - a character acting out of stereotypical character territory. Candice Ransom gets it. There are no clichéd tropes here, which is how Rebel ends up making a bet with the lag and paying-up when she loses!

More conflict: for her crime of running-away, Rebel is 'sentenced' to spend the summer babysitting Rudy, her much older sister's young child, while her sister attends beauty college. Her sister lives in a trailer park which she insists is actually a mobile home community. She rents the trailer and part of the rental agreement insists that she take care of the significantly overweight cat known as Doublewide, who lives there, and who uses the toilet and rings the doorbell. Again: different. It's hardly surprising that I was captivated by the first page and held captive by every page that followed.

The writing is brilliant. The activities and events normal and realistic, but fascinating and highly entertaining. Amusement lies in wait in every paragraph. When Rebel finds Lacy (the girl-next-door, who is Rebel's own age), bullying young Rudy, there isn't a cat-fight, but a brief conflict, followed by a discussion, followed by a budding friendship, followed by a plan!

It's through Lacy that Rebel meets the antagonist - a prissy professional beauty queen named Bambi, and the battle liens are drawn! Bambi is the same age as the other two and so full of herself that she cannot accommodate anyone else. Once she antagonizes Rebel, and Rebel discovers she can get $250 and fund her week at the paleontology dig herself, she's all on-board to enter a beauty contest, and therein lies a tale.

I adored this novel and I highly recommend it. It's an easy and fast read, and every page has something to engross the reader.

An Etiquette Guide to the End Times by Maia Sepp

Title: An Etiquette Guide to the End Times
Author: Maia Sepp
Publisher: Maia Sepp through Draft 2 Digital
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

This is a charming, witty, and engaging novella. Seriously, how can you not like a story with a title like that? (Note in passing that - according to wikipedia - a novel is something using over 40,000 words, a novella uses 17,500 to 40,000, a novelette 7,500 to 17,500, and a short story under 7,500). This one has 82 pages, but page one is the cover and there is some advertising in the back, meaning that the actual story occupies only 77 pages or so.

It's set in Canada at a point in the future where even the morons who claim global warming is fiction can no longer deny it. It begins with Olive O'Malley baking under the sun in the front yard with her neighbor and enjoying some fresh water - with ice no less - when some woman, obviously a member of The Core, visits asking if she would be interested in migrating her etiquette blog to radio. Olive is disinclined to acquiesce to her request, so to say, and the woman departs, whereupon Olive discovers that the Internet has finally failed. It's yet another step in the obsolescence of technology in a disintegrating world.

Of what use is her blog if she can't blog? Why didn't the Core woman tell her that the Internet was finally going down? Judged by the veiled threats she got, and gets again from another member of the Core, Olive isn't going to be granted much choice about joining them, but her priority is recovering her grandfather, Fred. Even though she had a thorny relationship with him, he's important to her and she misses him and agonizes over his fate; then comes a risky opportunity for Olive to turn things around, to side-step the Core, bring Fred home, and garner for herself a little bit of self-determination. But what is the real cost of this going to be?

I liked this story very much, although it felt a bit too short and left things a bit loose at the end. That's not always a bad thing and I'd rather have that, than have a novel which doesn't know when to say goodnight and leave. I loved the easy relationship Olive had with her neighbor - a woman with whom a relationship would probably never have developed had it not been for the impoverished and rationed circumstances under which they're both now forced to live. I could stand to read a lot more about these two.

A remarkable story, an easy read, and an engaging tale. Some YA writers could stand to learn a bit about how women should be portrayed from reading Maia Sepp's writing. I recommend this novella unreservedly.