Review: Prey

Prey – Lurlene McDaniel

I knew what I was getting into when I picked up this book, knew that it wouldn’t be good by any objective standard.  But female teachers seducing students is a hot topic in the world and in YA books, so I was interested to see what a book handling it poorly would look like.

Narrated in turn by the three major characters, it never rises above a superficial portrayal of any of them.  Lori, the sexy teacher was abused as a child by her father and now sees all grown men as predators.  She also talks about young boys like their youth will somehow be imparted to her, like she can suck it out of them:

Being with Ryan feeds something deep inside me I can’t describe.  Such a beautiful boy.  And so willing and eager to make me happy.  His enthusiasm is an elixir.  Even the way he avoids eye contact with me in the classroom is exciting.  This thing between us is like water simmering on a low, constant fire.  I need him.  He makes me feel alive.  Especially now.

 The occasional chapters told through her eyes make her less sympathetic and more flatly evil.  Ryan, a 16-year-old high school freshman, is handsome and popular with a dead mother and an uninvolved father.  The fact that he’s at least a year older than normal isn’t addressed, and his friends are the same age.  He’s also already taken the SATs and his father is hassling him about getting into college.  As of his first day of high school.  And then there is Honey who has been Ryan’s friend since they were little but is secretly in love with him, she’s pretty boring but necessary to the plot. 

The whole book is ridiculous.  Timeline’s don’t make sense.  Obviously the age thing doesn’t either.  I guess it’s a way of making Ryan seem vulnerable and youngish while making most of the sex they have legal.  The characters use weird slang, ending sentences with “girlfriend” and using the term “gal pal” pretty frequently. 

All of this said, part of the reason I read it was because when I was in middle school, I loved Lurlene McDaniel.  She even came and spoke at my school once.  Her “One Last Wish” books about dying teenagers?  They were probably horrible books, but I loved them.  This is a much younger book than Doing It or Boy Toy, and maybe there’s an 11-year-old who doesn’t really know what high school is actually like and will enjoy this without noticing its flaws.

Review: Story of a Girl

Story of a Girl – Sarah Zarr

When Deanna was 13 her Dad caught her having sex in a car with one of her older brother’s friends.  No charges were brought, but the story got around and Deanna has felt like a punchline ever since.  The kids at school still talk about it, and her father has never forgiven her or gotten past the incident.  It’s been years, but in many people’s minds, she’s still Deanna “the slut.”  She’s seventeen now, and wants to get out of her going-nowhere town, but would settle for finding an apartment with her brother Darren, his girlfriend Stacy and their baby.  The first step is to get a summer job, where she ends up working with Tommy, the boy from the car.

This is the rare YA book that isn’t plot driven.  More stuff happens, but it’s really about Deanna’s emotional journey towards accepting herself and forgiving the people around her who have let her down.  One of Zarr’s strengths is how well she writes about families and how sympathetically she writes about their failures.  But on the other hand, she also lets her happy families and nice adults have interesting stories.  Not even Tommy is treated like a monster. It forces you to reconsider your assumptions about all of its characters.

For me, this book didn’t have the same emotional impact as Sweethearts, but only because it didn’t speak to my personal experience as strongly as that one did.  But I can imagine that it would have that impact on teenage girls who have let themselves be silenced by others’ low expectations.  From what I remember when I saw Zarr speak at a library meeting (when she was in town for the National Book Awards), she grew up poor.  And even if her stories aren’t autiobiographical, those experiences have clearly influenced how richly she writes about under-privileged lives.  Urban poverty is pretty well chronicled in YA books.  But what happens in smaller, dying towns and her characters’ fight to cling to the middle-class is fresh.  This extra layer of realistic background makes her stories very powerful.

Review: Vampire Academy

Vampire Academy – Richelle Mead

Vampire boarding school? Yes, please. Starting off by breaking down the world of the book, there are the Moroi, full-blooded vampires, who study magic at the Montana school, though they (boringly) only use it for the good of humanity. There are the half-vampire Dhampir, who train to be Guardians, the protectors (and consorts) of the Moroi. The Moroi are so busy being good, they don’t bother to protect themselves from the Strigoi, immortal and cannibalistic vampires (which seems as if it will be a theme of the series, not fighting back despite the ability to do so).

Rose, pictured, is a Dhampir who starts out the book in hiding with her best friend and Moroi Princess, Lissa. Their reasons for running away from the Academy are slowly revealed throughout the course of the book, all we know is that when they’re captured and sent back, both girls are terrified, even if just because the machinations of Moroi society rival those of any Court. Rose and Lissa share a psychic bond, one that allows Rose to sense Lissa’s emotions at all times, and to fully enter her consciousness with effort. Lissa’s magical abilities aren’t manifesting in any of the normal ways, but are instead more dangerous and powerful than those of other Moroi.  This leads to rivalries, plotting, and romance.

For me, the most notable aspect of the book is Rose’s expansive and bawdy sexuality. She is curvy and sexy and strong with a large appetite for danger and adventure (she’s also witty, and really good at flirting). Though most of all she wants to serve and protect Lissa, she isn’t beyond having some fun in the process. But the politics of Dhampir sexuality are complicated. Dhampir women can only mate with Moroi men. Dhampir men cannot mate at all (though the most sexual and attractive character in the book is an adult Dhampir Guardian). Moroi men only marry Moroi women, but often impregnate Dhampir women in their youth or on their visits to “blood whores,” single Dhampir mothers who live in communes and prostitute themselves, allowing the men to feed on them during sex. Rose is sexual more than she is slutty, though she struggles with her desires and her internalized fear of doing anything “dirty.” In this aspect, it can be hard to separate Rose’s thoughts from those of the authorial voice, but other characters call Rose out on certain things enough that the implied author seems to be a trustworthy one. But trusting in the author means sometimes harshly judging an otherwise sympathetic character. And I don’t know if younger teens will catch those layers. Because of the language and how much about sex and sexuality this book is, I think it’s probably a better fit for high school students.

Review: It Girl

The It Girl – Cecily von Ziegesar

I have little faith that von Ziegesar is actually writing any of these books at this point, but I had hoped that the tone and wit would find a way to continue. Sadly I can’t say they have. Maybe later in the series the characters will develop into more than broad stereotypes and there will be something meaty worth both the mockery and love shown to the Gossip Girl characters.

GG ended when everyone graduated high school, but younger sibling Jenny Humphrey is just a sophomore now. After getting pushed out of fancy Constance Billiard, she’s been accepted at Waverly Academy, an equally fancy boarding school. Starting over is not as easy as she thought and the girls here are just as manipulative as the ones she left behind, and the boys just as attracted to her large boobs.

What this book did well was in showing how a different type of rich kid acts, a more New Englandy type who wears frayed shorts and old flip flops. Whose family has a yacht, but wears the same designer bikini from five years ago. It wasn’t a bad book, just not a sparkling one.

I miss Blair, and even Serena.

Review: The Sixth Form

The Sixth Form by Tom Dolby

Plucked out of boredom and obscurity by wealthy, popular Todd and sexy, free-spirit teacher, Hannah, Ethan is a senior and new student at a prestigous New England boarding school. An intellectual and an artist, Ethan sees in his new life all the glitter and romance that was missing at home with his dying mother in California. But both Todd and Hannah want more from him than he can give, while giving him little of their true selves. Todd, because he’s only beginning to figure it all out himself, but Hannah’s over-reliance on Ethan grows selfish and sinister. Ethan’s journey is more about learning how fundamentally unknowable everyone is than figuring out anything about himself. Which is one of the shortcomings of the book: things happen to Ethan but he never grows or changes. Neither does he get knocked down a peg or two, his artistic pretensions are heralded as amazing by everyone around him.

The language of it was hard to get into and could have used some semicolons (but word on the street recently is that they’re a feminine kind of punctuation and falling out of favor. Well, a comma is a very different thing. Use a period if you must). I was about to put it aside about 50 pages in when I finally got a hang of its rhythms, and when the story got past the first, improbable stages of Ethan’s friendships. Because it’s never really clear what his appeal is. But my biggest problem with the story was that Ethan’s fear over keeping his relationship with Hannah a secret at all costs is never shown to be false: only an affect of her manipulations. Barry Lyga’s Boy Toy did a better job with showing the consequences of teacher/student relationships. Ethan never figures it out. Some of his teachers and administrators know or suspect what’s going on, and they keep it a secret so that he doesn’t get kicked out of school and lose his Yale acceptance. Even if Ethan is 18, that doesn’t seem like the correct response. Especially when the teacher in question is known to be a bit deranged and suspected of having a history of seducing students.

Some of the ambiguity may be because this is a “literary” novel written for adults, but I think it’s also lazy storytelling. It’s a rare, older teenager who would enjoy this book. Maybe Dolby gets a bit of a pass for writing interesting gay characters and I am in the minority of readers looking to heterosexual Ethan for signs of something worthwhile. The Secret History is a better pick for someone attracted to this story for it’s elements of fish-out-of-water in a dangerous and seductive new world, Boy Toy for the pedophile teacher angle, and even Prep, which I wasn’t a huge fan of, for dorky kid bumbling through boarding school awkwardness.