Suite Scarlett by Maureen Johnson

Title: Suite Scarlett
Author: Maureen Johnson
Publisher: Point
Rating: WORTHY!

This novel is adorable, which likely as not means I'll end up hating it by the last page, but until then, I can dream! Suite Scarlett was not only not on my radar, it wasn't even in my universe until happenstance led me to it sitting innocently upon a shelf at the library. On a point of order, I think it’s important to clarify that I wasn't sitting on a shelf at the library, and if I were, I can guarantee you that it would certainly not be with any pretense of innocence. I'm not that good of an actor! (Is this a sly comment on the content of this novel or what?). No, it was the book which sat upon the shelf, as books are wont to do, whether they want to or not; it won’t make a difference….

Ebooks have an amazing number of advantages over traditional format books, but browsing along the shelf until you happen upon a book which jumps out at you for whatever reason, is something you'll never be able to do with an ebook. Nor will you ever be able to buy an ebook at a used book store (unless some entrepreneur out there figures out a method, in which case, said entrepreneur will undoubtedly become a millionaire!). The less well-off amongst us view the ominous oncoming demise of cut-price hard-backs with a depressing degree of barely-disguised panic.

Sooooo, the Martin family live in the hotel which they own - an hotel which at one time was the place to stay, but which is now long past its best: slightly shabby and falling into obsolescence. The family has had to slowly let all of their staff go, which means the young children are press-ganged into servitude in their place. Thus was born the tradition which is child labor disguised as a birthday present, whereby on their fifteenth birthday, each Martin child is 'given' a room of which they must, from that point on, take charge. They have to clean and maintain it and take personal charge of any guest who might stay there. From that perspective alone, it's fortunate that guests are rare.

Spencer is the oldest child and the only boy. He wants to be an actor. His parents want him to go to culinary school so he can sell his life down the river in their service as the hotel cook rather than living it for himself. Lola is the next in line in age, and she seems to have no ties to the hotel. She recently started seriously dating Chip, a kid who isn't bad per se, but in the smarts department, he's a voting block short of a takeover and he's supposed to eventually assume the helm of his father's business empire! Lola seems to be spoiled rotten and I had little respect for her to begin with; however, this was tempered by the fact that she loves her siblings, particularly the youngest girl in the family. OTOH, Lola is seriously trying to get her own life on the rails, and I can’t blame her for that! Her story does turn around in this novel, and it was a real heart-warmer to see how it unfolded. Lola is arguably more intriguing than the title character, but I often fall into that trap!

The youngest child is Marlene, also spoiled rotten and a brat. She has the excuse of being a cancer survivor and gets to do all kinds of things with a group of fellow survivors called 'Powerkids' which, when you look at it, is really just another way of saying that if you're a kid and you don’t have cancer, you’re not going to get a decent shake, and you should probably go screw yourself. I don’t really see how a cancer survivor (or any other type of survivor, for that matter), is a child any more deserving of love and attention than is, for example, a street survivor, but we rarely hear of telethons for those children, do we? I wonder why?

Scarlett is fifteen and the main character in this story which mercifully isn't told from the first person PoV. She's very retiring and easily induced to do things which she might rail against doing were she more assertive. Thus she ends up having to stand in for Lola in taking a very resentful Marlene to a Powerkids event (a morning TV cooking show). She later finds herself with a guest in the room she just inherited with her birthday: the lavishly titled 'Empire Suite' which is a bit too down-at-the-heel to quite merit the name, but the engaging Amy ("Mrs Amberson"), a retired actress, doesn’t seem to mind, and moreover seems to really take to Scarlett almost to the point of adopting her. And this is only the start of the magnificent Amberson's calculated intrusion into the lives of the Martin family. She hands Scarlett five hundred dollars without even asking for a receipt, and tells her to hang onto it, because Scarlett will be required to run errands and will need the money. To her credit, Scarlett handles this maturely and doesn't abuse the 'contract'. Amy deserves her own novel, as does Lola, and probably Spencer, too.

The first thing I didn’t like about his novel was when Eric came into the picture. He's an acting acquaintance of Spencer's and is such a trope YA male that it almost made me vomit to read how "muscular" he is and well well his T-shirts fit him. Here's a description of his eyes: "...misty shifting blue marbled with gray, like smoke rising through an early morning sky." Seriously? Why is it that we’re teaching young women than anything less than a Greek god is totally unacceptable as a partner? Why is it that we’re teaching young girls to look no further than the shallow and the physical?

As if that's not bad enough, this is an unfair and unwarranted assault on young men, to boot (with the emphasis on boot and groin). It’s a detestable trend that needs to stop. Having registered my protest, I'm going to let that slide for the sake of reading the rest of the story which, apart from the disgusting trope, really is well written and very entertaining. However, if Johnson insists on endless repetitions of how perfect Eric is in every way, I will have to start calling him Eric Poppins and puke on the pages of this novel to permanently imprint both the stain and the smell. Try doing that with an ebook...!

So anyway, let's pretend I never said that. Ahem! Scarlett spends more and more time with Amy and almost no time with Eric, so that's all right then isn't it? Amy almost gets her arrested for shoplifting when she deposits three cans of tuna into Scarlett's bag without her noticing, but Amy talks their way out of it and thinks it was great fun as they ride home. Scarlett isn't so sure and demands to be let out of the cab before they get back to the hotel, so she can walk and do some thinking. The next thing Scarlett knows, Amy wants the two of them to write Amberson's biography! Of course, this is just a flash in the pan, because Amy next comes up with an idea which engrosses her far more effectively than a biography could ever hope to do, and this is where the novel gets really interesting. I'm not kidding. It takes off and flies at this point and it's quite stunning to see. In order not to spoil this any more, I shall refrain from divulging further details. Mwahh-ha-ha!

In conclusion, this book is excellent! It's very entertaining, extraordinarily well-written, populated with interesting and diverse characters who behave very much like real people. I recommend it and I'm immediately proceeding on to volume two in this series, or duet, or trilogy or whatever it is! You know there is no equivalent of 'trilogy' for two novels? The Greek word for two is dio, but it's pronounced thee-oh, so to use that would create 'theology', which would be really confusing. I'm going to coin dilogy, so there!

The Catastrophic History of You and Me by Jess Rothenberg

Title: The Catastrophic History of You and Me
Author: Jess Rothenberg
Publisher: Dial Books
Rating: WARTY

Ooookay! This review is a lot longer than I intended (it's close to 4,000 words!), but this is a writing blog as well as a reading one, so there's lots to discuss here. Believe it or not, I was attracted to this novel purely because of the title, and then the blurb got me interested more, so here we are! It didn't turn out, exactly, to be a catastrophic history, but it came frighteningly close. And it's certainly not even in the ballpark of Emily Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks for entertainment value.

Let me begin with a word about covers. A lot of authors love to panegyrize book covers. They get excited by them and the gushing writers have a cover reveal party or event, and the reviewers sycophantically acclaim the artwork. How pathetic is that? I don’t deal with covers for the most part because of this crap and because the cover has nothing to do with the author, and all too-often, nothing to do with the story, either. Do cover artists even read the novel before they illustrate it? Perhaps at best the author might be allowed to choose one cover from a selection offered to them by their publisher, but unless they self-publish, that's the most they can hope for. What the hell is up with that business plan?!

But there's a far more serious angle to this, and so I have to comment on how anorexic the girl on this cover looks. She looks like she needs to be on an IV in intensive care until she grows some meat on that skeletal figure. I sincerely hope our fifteen-year-olds in general are not all like her, and I hope even more that our teens do not wish they looked like her. She doesn’t remotely look like someone who excels in aquatic sports, not even if it’s "just diving", as Brie does. I hope even more passionately that this culture - the one which browbeats young girls into believing that unless they look like this girl on the cover, then they’re nothing but worthless, ugly, obese losers who deserve to go nowhere in life - dies the death it richly deserves.

But my real beef here is with the young adult authors - especially the female ones. My question to them - to the ones who allow their work to be degraded by abusive and/or misleading covers - is: how long are you going to tolerate having girls assaulted and insulted by covers which project an image that cannot do anything other than convey a message to your young female readers that they’re substandard if they don’t conform to the image you're profiting from selling to them?

To all YA writers: your novel is fiction. It doesn’t demand that readers do anything other than enjoy it. The cover is a different business altogether. The cover is nothing but a commercial, and whatever is on that cover is what you're expecting your readers to buy. Think about that. I know you're thrilled to have your first novel published (anyone would be) and in that case, you'll pretty much do anything to please the editor and publisher, and go along with whatever demands they have, but to all those writers who have made it, and are selling, surely you can change this dynamic? Or do you not care what messages you're purveying to impressionable teen girls as long as the profits continue to roll?

Aubrie (Brie) Eagan is dead - died, quite literally, of a broken heart (broken into two equal halves when her boyfriend told her he didn’t love her). So you know from the off that this is a flashback book. The question is, can Rothenberg provide three hundred and twenty five pages of good flashbacks to supplement the reasonably decent first fifty pages? The answer to that was 'No', in brief, and this appalling weakness on Brie's heart's part was indeed portentous of her character in the rest of the novel, I'm sorry to report.

Brie is soon portrayed as a ghost watching her autopsy, memorial service and funeral, and having occasional thoughts about her life or her family or friends, or her boyfriend who supposedly precipitated her death. I liked the concept. The execution? Not so much. Which writer hasn’t thought of starting a story at the end? I know I have. The weird thing was that in this novel I couldn’t escape the intense feeling that those memories to which we're party in those first fifty pages aren't Brie's flashbacks, but Jess Rothenberg's. That felt a bit creepy to me. I know they say write what you know, but there's such a thing as being too knowledgeable in fiction!

This novel was published 2012 when Brie was fifteen, which means she wasn't even born in the 80's, yet she likes 80's music. The chapter titles are lines from assorted old songs. She also apparently liked the TV show Friends (which I detest, and) which quit transmission when Brie was a bit too young to be able to properly get into the show. But I liked Rothenberg's writing in general. She writes technically well, and there's some mild humor tossed in, but the writing didn't make up for the plotting, and the humor went sour pretty quickly. Brie's perfection is a bit cloying; then we got to the 'heaven is a pizza place' portion of the text, and I started to realize that I probably going to like this novel after all, especially if it insisted on traveling the road less forsaken.

I am definitely not a fan of these movies where 'Heaven' is shown to be this every-day place where everyone is friendly and familiar - and god is a good ol' boy - you know like George Burns or Morgan Freeman making wise-ass remarks served up as folk wisdom. I'm sorry but that's not the heaven/hell we read of in the Bible. Not even close! That’s a heaven which Christians are forced to cook-up because the reality of their belief system is, in the end, completely unpalatable to them in this day and age. But all religions are cooked-up anyway, so this really isn’t any different from the other inventions.

Rothenberg has Brie finding herself, immediately after the funeral, on a bus heading to a place she knows. She's not far from her house but the driver won't let her out until the stop, which is in a parking lot where her favorite pizza parlor happens to be. Rather than go home (her stomach is rumbling), she goes into the pizza place. Inside is a bunch of other youngsters all around her age or younger, no older folk except for the Asian woman behind the counter who insists that Brie fills out a form before she can get pizza. Seriously? This made my stomach start to turn. Rothenberg had some credit with me for a decently written first fifty, but I had sincerely hoped that she had better material than this in store, if she wanted to stay in my good graces, and she failed dismally on the final lap.

Brie ends up waiting a week in the pizza parlor for the paperwork to go through. Any teen who could sit in one place for that long without wanting to explore or investigate or ask questions is a complete loser in my book, to say nothing of being totally unrealistic. Brie is rendered worse than this by Rothenberg's attaching her to a cocky, smart-mouthed guy, who animates Brie like a puppeteer, so yes, I'm a tad bit pissed off to discover another female YA author who abuses her female characters by creates an interesting (if rather whiny) female teen, and then sells her down the river by making her an adjunct of some dude who is far too fictional for his own believability.

This guy, Patrick in a bomber jacket, takes over Brie's afterlife. He has an immense secret which would definitely have benefited her, but he denies her this knowledge, keeping her dangling on a string, playing with her, and all the while calling her the most abysmal cheese names (based on Brie, duhh). That motif is way-the-hell overdone and made me sick whenever Rothenberg trotted it out yet again like an aging and decrepit sports figure who didn't know when to retire. It was like Rocky IV, Roquefort, you know? Anyway, I'm getting side-tracked. Patrick at one point writes down the supposed five stages of grieving, checking them off as Brie purportedly passes through them. Wrong!

Rothenberg evidently doesn’t fully comprehend Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's position on grieving! It was only put forward by her as a model (five stages of grief when confronting one's own death) so not only was it not intended for anyone in Brie's position (since her grief isn’t over her own impending death but over her loss of Jacob). The stages were originally listed as: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, but this isn’t a complete list, and these "stages" can occur in any order and may arrive simultaneously or not at all, which makes Patrick's list look a bit moronic, but that's Patrick all over, isn't it?

Plus, Rothenberg has Brie so whiny about wanting to visit her own home where her parents are, and then she blows that off completely to go riding around with Bomber-jacket Boi on his Bike. That lost believability too, for me. Fortunately for both myself and Rothenberg's self, she kinda turned it around and put in sufficient twists to keep me interested, even while I chafed at the poor plotting - such as allowing her to physically contact her supposedly mean old ex-boyfriend, Jacob, but unable to pull that same stunt when she finally gets to visit with her parents and her kid brother. So yeah, there's a lot of unexplained inconsistency which did nothing endear this tale to me, either. Since Jacob turned out to be gay, if she'd trotted out someone called Edward as his boyfriend, that would have put some leavening into the mix, but it wasn't to be. It was more like 4F.

It was at this point, when Brie visits her family and her three best friends, that Rothenberg starts tossing in the twists, which was appreciated, otherwise I might have had a DNF on my hands by this point, but while I had to say that the story held some twists that kept my interest stirred somewhat, at the same time it was really annoying me with inconsistent writing - or more accurately, inconsistent world-building. But this isn’t confined to Rothenberg's writing. I see it all the time in this kind of story: for example, in the movie Ghost which I reviewed elsewhere in this blog. There is a massive inconsistency, to which writers seem blind (or are only too well aware but are too lazy to tackle it), in a story which has a ghost walking around making solid contact with the ground, or sitting and making ready contact with a seat, but then they can’t open a door, or touch a person, or lift an object! This is pure, unadulterated bullshit! What's up with that trope? Where did that mindlessness come from?

We find the same thing in this novel. Brie has the hardest time picking up a rock, but she can climb a tree without even thinking about it, and she has no problem interacting with the family dog as though she were completely corporeal. Thinking is evidently something in which Rothenberg didn’t indulge herself sufficiently when building this world, but in that she was no different from a score of other writers who share this disability in this kind of story, and if that's an insult, then I'm sorry, but I call it like I see it.

Rothenberg is inconsistent in other regards, too, as I've mentioned before. In one part of the story she has Brie experience no problem in directly influencing Jacob, and in directly damaging Sadie's car, but later, when Brie is highly motivated to influence Jacob for a good purpose rather than to harm him, Rothenberg has her character inexplicably fail and then completely give-up because she can't 'make a difference'. This is really bad writing. It makes no sense for her to simply abandon Jacob without even trying (worse, she gets completely distracted from her cause - again!), and then to fret about it insanely later. I have to wonder what went on in Rothenberg's mind when she made heaven (or purgatory, or a way-station - whatever this place is) so remarkably life-like without offering any explanation as to why, but then adorned the ghosts with a spotty lack of life-like ability.

Why, for example, does she have Brie constantly in fear of falling even after ghost Brie has deliberately jumped from the top of the Golden Gate bridge and come to no harm? Another mystery. This is inconsistent and poor writing. On this topic, how does the falling work exactly? Why does gravity work on ghosts, all the way to the ground, but not right through to the actual impact with the ground?! Why does her dress get soaked? Why do they need to eat and drink, but never need the bathroom? Why do they not feel heat and cold? If they're really ghosts, why are they pretty much indistinguishable from living people except in some key ways which benefit the story but for which we’re given no intelligent explanation? A lot of this makes no sense, and it saddens me that Rothenberg doesn't appear to care that it makes no sense.

Brie is annoying, and is such a gadfly, too. I know that teens can be disturbingly flighty, especially the younger ones, but I find it hard to believe that someone as decent and disciplined as Brie was in life, could be such a capricious Will o' the Wisp in the afterlife when everything else about her seems to remain pretty much the same. She has the big ideas and urges, but then she seems to immediately forget it all and go off at a tangent. If Rothenberg had written this into the story - explained why she was like this, or revealed that she had been this way when alive - it would have made this behavior believable, but she doesn’t give us that; she just has Brie going in all directions for no good reason - indeed, for bad reasons.

Worse than this though: she has this Patrick character - the Bomber jacket dude - show up without the character offering any explanation for who he is or what he wants or what he thinks he's doing. Why is he with her and why does she blithely accept his presence twenty-four seven without question or introspection? The fact that Brie never pursues this until the pell-mell mess of an ending renders her a sorry-assed and unmotivated Mary Sue. You seriously do not want to do that to the protagonist of your story unless you have a really good explanation for it in hand!

Patrick was nothing but an annoyance to me, even moreso than Brie, because he brought nothing to the story. The only thing he contributed was to highlight how lame and helpless Brie was, and how much she desperately needed a man to make her complete - or in this case to make her even functional. What an insult to women!

Later Rothenberg brings in another character, this one from Brie's past, with the unlikely name of Larkin. Honestly? But despite her idiotic name, I dearly wish she had shown up earlier because she's the most interesting character in the entire novel. Maybe that's why Rothenberg kills her off? Yep - the dead can die. Until then they're very much alive for all practical purposes in this dumb-ass world!

Larkin also offers things (which seem much more honest and decent than those which Patrick brought to the table), but Rothenberg snatches both characters away from Brie, leaving her all alone. Larkin (who is tragically unexplored in this novel) may have been misrepresenting things to Brie, but she was doing neither more nor less than Patrick was. He was lying when he told Brie that this was her afterlife and the choices were hers, because right after that, he spends his time luring her into doing pretty much whatever he wants without regard to her wishes or even her best interests, including leading her down an unpleasant path at one point, and then trying to talk her out of following that path as though she had made a mistake, not him! Worse than this, he keeps key facts from her in an unbelievably cruel, even brutal, way.

So Patrick is a major jerk, and the more I think about bad characters, and poor plotting, and inconsistency, and lame world-building, the more I realize that I'm now in a position where I have to try to find a good reason to rate this novel as a worthy read! In that, I failed! That's rather ironic given that I actually like the story in very broad and general terms! What’s a guy to do?! I found that reading some positive and some negative reviews helped to clarify my position for me!

I do not seek out reviews for a novel before I read it, but sometimes reading the perspective of others once I already have my own largely in place really helps to clarify some issues about which I haven’t completely made up my own mind yet. This wouldn’t work before I read the novel because other reviewers can be so inconsistent for this purpose. I might find myself agreeing with them on novel A, and then in complete opposition on novel B even if it’s by the same author. That's why I don’t have a 'blogroll' over there, because I don’t have any blog which I know I can go to and get a take on a novel which is meaningful to me personally.

I choose the novels I will read based on things I've read, including some review references, not so much to novel content, but to authors they thought wrote like this or not like that. Reviews in general tell me nothing useful because they're not really reviews. That's why I started this blog: to offer people something more than "Hey I loved this, you gotta read it!", because unless I know that reviewer intimately, their recommendation (and that's exactly what it is, a recommendation, not a review), tells me nothing of value. Even when I do know them intimately, a recommendation or a comment can be completely useless, as I discovered with the fourth Sookie Stackhouse novel, may it rest in hell!

So when I'm going out there to familiarize myself with the buzz, I'll read some one-star reviews and some five-star and see how I feel about what the extremes have said in comparison with my own feelings. It’s because of this that I noted that some people have described what a great character the dog was! I disagree. The dog was entirely in keeping with the Disney theme with which Rothenberg inextricably and inexplicably imbued this novel, but that merely served to provide a theme which nauseated me. I'm guessing here that Rothenberg once knew an animal like this when she was a child, because it seems to me that only such an experience could make a person write that way about the freak of nature and genetic disaster that Basset hounds actually are. If she'd employed a border collie in this role, or even a beagle, it would have made it slightly more palatable for me, but I still would have had a problem with how the dog seems to completely understand everything Brie says including her references to third parties. Puleeze! Disney-fy much?

Brie seems to be entirely too old for such an addiction to Disney as she exhibits, too. Indeed, she behaves throughout more like a pre-teen than someone who is almost sixteen. She's not a good person, which betrays everything Rothenberg tells us about her from her previous life. It’s all about her, and I don’t care if she's supposed to be grieving because she doesn't remotely behave as though she is, especially given that there is a much bigger context to this story than her own personal pity-party, and this behavior in which Rothenberg indulges her character completely undermines that bigger picture.

The truth is that Brie is a selfish, whiny, and vindictive stalker, bordering on psychotic in her behavior and then it all suddenly turns around for no good reason (at least not that we’re party to!). It’s after this point that she discovers the truth she was too blind to see about Jacob (and by extension about his relationship with Sadie), but even this part of the novel is badly done. Given how Jacob was when Brie was alive (from her frequent flashback mileage), I simply cannot believe that he would have behaved the way he did towards her. The way he behaved was to dump Brie and tell her he didn’t love her. The true reason for his breaking things off with her is that he is gay. Given how decently he treated her prior to this, I just cannot buy at all that he would cut her off like that, or that he would not have told her this fact about himself, especially with what we’re told about how long they'd known each other.

The other side of this coin is that I cannot buy that he even started dating her and became so attached to and so enamored of her when he knew he was gay. Nor can I believe that not a single one of the four girls (Brie and her three close friends) had any inkling whatsoever of his real nature given how long at least two of them had known him. His character makes no sense and this cheapens the story as well as Brie's mental state.

So then we fall into the dénouement of this novel, which is that Patrick's raison d'être is that he's Brie's boyfriend from a previous life when her name was Lily. Patrick was a moron then, too, and Lily died when he crashed his motorbike because he wouldn’t listen to Lily telling him to slow down in the approaching bad weather. He proved himself to be an even greater loser when he killed himself. Now why Lily evidently became immediately reincarnated as Brie, and Patrick sat on his ass for seventeen years in a pizza shop I guess we’ll never know, but Patrick is now forty five, and Brie is still sixteen, or at best, 2 times 16, which I'm sorry, but in this case doesn’t make 32. How this is going to work or even why it should is also a mystery.

Mysteries seem to abound at the end of this novel. I don’t know what happened, but the sedate, some might say sluggish, pace is sped up dramatically, yet with sadly little drama. It wasn't until this point that I fully resolved that I was going to rate this as a 'warty'. Had the ending not been such a godawful mess, I might not have done so despite the large number of issues I took with this.

Brie becomes reincarnated in her own body on the night that Jacob broke up with her (where is the original Brie?!), and now of course, she's able to comfort him instead of going psycho on him. She learns that he discussed his sexual orientation with Sadie, but Sadie never had the decency to be a real friend to Brie and at the very least hint at this. Immediately following this, Brie is reincarnated as Lily on that fateful night, too. In the first instance, she has some significant time before she dies, but not in the second instance which was really the first instance chronologically. Are you following this? Again, randomness pervades the story for no good reason.

In the end, the story simply fell apart. The ending made very little sense given the context, but everyone lived happily ever after. I'm sorry but no. This is drivel. It started out with so much potential, but then went into the toilet and liked it there. I have no choice but to call this WARTY!

The Perpetual Motion Club by Sue Lange

Title: The Perpetual Motion Club
Author: Sue Lange
Publisher: Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing
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 of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is less detailed so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more in-depth than you'll typically find elsewhere!

This novel is a real oddity, or maybe this oddity is a real novelty, but it entertained me. Elsa Webb is a sophomore in high school where students sport sponsorship logos on their clothing and backpacks, from assorted corporations. Elsa carries no such sponsorship; she's quiet and reserved and very smart, as indeed is her best friend May. But neither of them could be remotely described as popular. Elsa doesn’t seem to know where she's going in life, and becomes completely derailed at times even from the routine life she does have, such as when the new basketball player bumps into her in the hallway, knocking her flat on her ass, and doesn’t even stop to say sorry or help her up. She falls hopelessly for him such that he figures powerfully in her fantasy life and in her plans.

She even attends a meeting of the Science Society, dragging poor May along with her in forlorn hope of seeing him there. This society is supposed to be a feather in the cap of those who want to get along successfully in this high-tech futuristic society, where the sink, closet, garbage chute, and microwave speak back to you, and most everyone has an RFID chip in their head. But although Elsa is offered membership in the society, Jason, the basketball player, was not at the meeting and she decides against joining, coming off the rails yet again, but in a different direction this time.

Elsa develops a fascination with perpetual motion after the meeting and decides to create her own club - The Perpetual Motion club - of which she and May are the only two members and in the first few months hold only one meeting. The name of the club is ironic because it's precisely at that moment that life seems to come to a screeching halt for Elsa, who can't seem to get close to anything she wants. How she deals with this and in the end triumphs, although not quite in the way she anticipated, is the subject of this novel.

The club was started almost as a knee-jerk response to her mother's nagging about the science club. Lainie Webb is another entertaining character and Elsa has a difficult but loving relationship with her. She tries to lure Jason out on a trip to a perpetual motion meeting hosted by larger than life people who really believe such a thing is possible, but she's devastated when Jason appears to agree to go, but then stands her up without a word of warning or apology.

This rejection triggers an obsession with perpetual motion, and Elsa starts missing sleep as she lies awake pondering possibilities. Her school work suffers in all classes save geometry, which is again ironic because Elsa can't seem to work out the geometry of her life! Her relationships and a piece of work, and if this novel were only about that it would have been a worthy read, but it has much more to serve up that just relationships. Elsa's thought processes are a journey in and of themselves. This novel flouts the YA tropes and runs along it's own path, not one which is beaten, but one which is triumphant. This is a warm, fascinating and engrossing novel which I could not stop reading. Until I came to my own screeching halt at the end, that is. I wanted more! Highly recommended, but only if you're tired of trope and want something new, original, and well put together.

The Sea of Tranquility by Katja Millay

Title: The Sea of Tranquility
Author: Katja Millay
Publisher: Harcourt
Rating: WORTHY!

This is the kind of novel which ought to be banned, because it makes other writers feel like giving up in despair in the fear that we will not be able to write anything of this quality! It's a YA novel, but it's a YA at the grown-up end of the scale, and by that I mean not only that it contains language and sexual situations, but it also isn't afraid or shy of telling a mature and life-like story. The Sea of Tranquility is coming at you ready or not, and I almost wasn't ready!

The only real problem with a novel like this is that you either end up loathing the author for seemingly effortlessly putting together a magical tale which you wish you'd thought of first, or you end up adoring the author for putting together a magical tale even though it was seemingly effortless, and even though you wish you'd thought of first!

A couple of minor observations (note that this is a galley copy ebook I'm reading):
On p91 the conversation is a bit hard to follow - who is speaking?!! A bit more clarity would have been nice!
On P93 "you're lack of faith" should be "your lack of faith".
P367 conversation "who's speaking now?! confusion again
P381 "stepped foot" sounds clunky to me

Millay's effort wins this year's award for most obscurely mysterious novel! It also wins the award for best kick-ass phraseology, including gems like: "puddles of dumbass", "panty-combusting", and (please forgive me for this one, but I did say these were gems) "fuckuppance". And Millay knows 'interrobang', so she gets props for that, too. Maybe I'll like her! Or more accurately, maybe I’ll like her story-telling.

Once again my vow to avoid first person narratives is thwarted. Yes, thwarted. Millay also wins that award, too, since she has no less than two first person perspectives, fully integrated. Although I found this a bit confusing initially, because I’d thought the name of the narrator was merely a chapter title, I did develop a working relationship with it pretty quickly. By fully-integrated I mean that the names are not confined to chapter titles - they randomly appear in the narrative within the same chapter which actually works better for me.

Millay likes to flirt evilly with tropes, including your standard two guys and one girl triangle, but (and maintaining the trigonometry metaphor) she has an interesting angle on everything she writes, so I'm not nauseated by it. Her main characters are Nastya Kashnikov (was she named like that because it sounds similar to Kalashnikov?! I suspect it's not her real name), Josh Bennet, and Drew (as in drew a blank because I can’t recall what his last name is...ah, here it is: it's Leighton). This story starts out with a major YA trope of Standard Disaffected Girl meets Standard Ineffectual Boy, but there are twists galore, so let's start with those. I blew through ninety-nine pages without any effort at all, which is a really good sign. Can I be so lucky as to finally be reading both a hardback and an ebook that I like, and in tandem, too?! We'll see!

Nastya is a mute, but don’t read that as dumb. She's smart and has a really amusing view of her fellow students, but she has some serious issues, the major one of which seems to be that she's dead! That's what she says - she died, and apparently was resurrected, and having started thinking that this was a paranormal novel, I've been teasingly and skilfully led away from that misperception by Millay, so I think that this death is metaphorical: I think it's the death of a dream. Nastya was a really good classical pianist, but a hand injury has killed that. She was evidently assaulted, perhaps raped and now lives in fear of assault, but she refuses to be trapped by her fear and fights it at every turn.

A related problem which she has is that she can’t stand too much noise around her, and she's rather anti-social to boot - more than likely because she can't stand bustle, and the reason for that appears to be that it's harder for her to tell when someone might be approaching her threateningly with so much distraction around her. She hates to be touched, as one guy learns to his amazement when she puts him on the floor just because he idly grabbed her arm. She loves to run, and she isn't afraid to run late at night, but she carries what amounts to a kosh, and she carries pepper spray, and she's taken self-defense classes, and she will not listen to music while jogging because it would prevent her from hearing someone approach. So yes, she refuses to be crippled by her experience, but she is hobbled by it. For exmaple, she will never play the piano again! I'm not joking, but how she can feel that that part of her life is over when this girl seems to be doing just fine is a bit of a puzzler.

Her plan on entering her new school was to repel everyone by projecting herself as some sort of bad-ass goth, which she does rather well. She lives with an aunt, although her parents are still in the picture. She's small and pale and often runs until she makes herself physically sick. One time, very late at night, she ran so far that she got lost, but she arrived at Josh's house where he was woodworking in the garage. Nastya seemed to recognize this house without ever having been there before (there's a story behind that!). Josh drove her home even though it actually wasn't very far away.

Josh is a loner. His back-story is that his Mom and sister died in a traffic accident on a day when he would normally have been traveling with his mom, but he had switched that particular day to be with his dad. At lunch, he sits on a bench seat outdoors, but no one seems to want to come anywhere near him which fascinates Nastya the first time she sees him because she wishes she had that same power of repulsion. Josh (did I tell you how much I detest that name in YA novels?!) is taciturn and feared because of anger issues resulting from that tragedy. One time when Nastya gets a heel stuck in a crack between the pavers in the outdoor lunch area, and Sarah & co (Sarah is Drew's sister) start to make fun of her, Josh silences them with one short sentence, and later he tells Nastya that he won’t do that for her again. This annoys her because she didn’t ask for help, but it also further intrigues her. Of course, she's seated next to him in carpentry shop, a skill at which Josh excels. So is he Yeshua, and she's Miriam of Magdala?! Think about it!

Drew is intriguing because, ostensibly, he's your ladies man, who can charm his way into and out of anything. He's apparently often borrowing money from his sister. Nastya takes a liking to him but is not attracted to him other than that he amuses her, so when he invites her to a party one weekend she inexplicably accepts; then she gets nauseously drunk, whereupon Drew, who is friends with Josh, deposits her in Josh's care rather than take her home. Drew didn't take advantage of her apparently, and he left her with Josh because he knew Josh wouldn't do so either. Interesting. Fortunately for Nastya, her aunt works night shift so she's just able to get home in time, and her aunt learns nothing of her nocturnal shenanigans.

So yes, a gazillion issues, an amazing set of characters, and answers that come out and tease you unexpectedly. You bet I'm going to keep reading this. This is the most interesting and complex triangle I think I've ever read about, and it keeps evolving. Hipparchus himself wouldn't have been able to tabulate what's going on here. The dynamic between Josh and Nastya changes on a daily basis, and it seems like it's as much on shifting sand as it is on solid rock. The one thing which doesn't change is the quality of the writing, and the fascination I have with these two main characters. I'm now over halfway through this novel and I don't see the quality slipping by as much as an emdash.

The real joy of this novel is to see real characters; characters who are damaged, but coping, who feel like life has kicked them while they're down, and yet still they get up and find a way to move forward, if not move on, and in this motion, blind and blundering as it often is, they're somehow steadily stumbling towards, not away from each other. They're hurting, scared, and skeptical, but they're drawn not by some asinine YA cluelessness about what a real relationship is, but by believable motives and credible needs. And for a YA novel, these characters are so refreshing that it's like a cool glass of sparkling water after too many warm, sugary, and artifically colored sodas.

And it isn't just the two main protagonists. The third member of the triangle, Drew, is just as intriguing and complex as the other two, and there is a host of others minor characters who are anything but minor in the way they're portrayed. The resolution is good, but the ending is a bit too drawn out for me, with Josh and Nastya wasting time with non-issues or with artificially manufactured issues, but I'm willing to let Millay get away with that because the rest of the story is so masterful. Chapter 52 one of the most kick-ass chapters ever written. This is a solid recommendation for this novel and if you don’t read it I promise you that your favorite pet will die of heartbreak!

Including this one, I've recently read three novels featuring physically and emotionally damaged women. Lingerie Wars was simply thrown directly into the landfill by its author. Blind Date was good, but this one, The Sea of Tranquility is better. This one excels at what it attempts and was a true pleasure to read.