Running Girl, by Simon Mason

Generally speaking, I don’t normally pick up crime/detective books, but right from the get-go Running Girl seemed like it would be something a little different: its unusual puzzle of a cover, its unusual main character, and its shortlisting for the Costa Children’s Book Award were all big ticks, in addition to which, everything I’ve read from David Fickling Books recently has been really excellent. So I thought, why not?

The ‘running girl’ of the title is Chloe Dow, athletic and beautiful, the girl everyone at school watches. And now: dead. Who killed her, and why? What exactly was she involved in, and what was she doing in the hours that led up to her death?

Garvie Smith, one of Chloe’s ex-boyfriends, doesn’t exactly want to get involved, but he can’t help but try and make sense of things, to add the pieces of the puzzle together, and when he can’t make them fit, he can’t help but try and figure out why. He’s smart but lazy, failing school despite having the highest IQ of anyone there, consistently unmotivated and seemingly unmotivatable, except when it comes to this case, and even as he gets pulled further and further into a world he doesn’t really want to be a part of, and even as both his mother and DI Singh, the inspector in charge of Chloe’s case, get increasingly frustrated with him, he’s unable to leave it alone.

Several reviews of Running Girl that I’ve read have said how unlikeable they found Garvie, but I didn’t have that experience. Frustrating at times, yes; a very different sort of person to me, yes; but at heart he’s a good kid, just bored by pretty much everything except this case. The story is told partly from a mix of Garvie’s perspective, police interviews, and DI Singh’s perspective, which I think gives the book more layers and depth than you’d perhaps get if it was all Garvie’s story (although I will say I think it went on just a little too long for me, Simon Mason adding in an extra level of plot twist that I’m not sure was really needed).

Running Girl also feels very different to a lot of YA that’s currently being produced and definitely stands out from the crowd, not only thanks to the excellent cover, intriguing premise, and characterful protagonist, but because it has a very grown up feel and could sit on an adult fiction shelf just as comfortably as on a YA one. Plus it’s refreshing to have both a lead and a supporting character who don’t fall into the stereotypical white, Christian, middle class (Garvie is black; DI Singh is Sikh) – and, perhaps even more importantly, without the story being anything at all to do with these parts of the characters, these aspects being just one part of who they are, but not determining the plotline nor their personal fates.

Are Garvie and Singh destined to clash or will they find an uneasy compromise? Can Garvie persuade Singh to listen to him, and can Singh find a way to bring his team – and his boss – onto his side? And of all the different things that Chloe was dealing with, which one was responsible for her death?

Some thoughts on YA...

An article was recently published in The Guardian written by a young reader, Hawwa, titled Falling Out of Love with YA, in which Hawwa talks about how she feels that new YA being published is failing where it should excel: in challenging its readers. Is this true? Here are some of my thoughts…

It is terrible that Hawwa is feeling disappointed in YA fiction today, that she is being let down. As a children’s and YA bookseller, reading her article really made me sit up and think – and, mostly, disagree. She raises a number of relevant points about the hype surrounding some YA novels, and the fact that there are a good number of fantasy/dystopian books being written and published that jump off the back of this hype. BUT. But, but, but: if this is all that teenage readers can see on the YA shelves then I honestly believe they are only skimming the surface of a hugely rich and varied selection of books that are available and just begging to be read. Perhaps the question is: why and how are these books being missed?

It’s true that there are YA books that are driven purely by a romance plot. It’s true that there are dystopian genres conforming to popular film ideals (though many of these ideals, I think, have themselves been driven by the books that the first films of this genre were inspired by). It’s true that there are books that skimp on their language. And it’s true that there are books being driven by hype.

Sometimes it’s nice to have a book that is just pure romance – fortunately, there are plenty that aren’t just this, for those times when that’s not what you want. Sometimes it’s nice to have a book that emulates a bestselling novel you’ve enjoyed – fortunately, again, there are plenty that aren’t just this, especially as they’re not always as good as the original. And some of the books that skimp on their language tend to be written for younger teens or ‘tweens’, those eleven and twelve year olds who want to upgrade to the YA section – the teen section, after all, by definition should cater for those aged 13 to 19, and all the different levels of interest and capabilities that a gap this large entails.

As for the books whose sales are driven by hype: in my ten years’ experience as a bookseller, where YA is concerned, this hype is generated by the readers themselves, and by the movies that the popularity of the book subsequently generates – it’s a word of mouth thing, not a publisher pushing the book thing. The flip side of this is, of course, that not everyone likes the same things (thank goodness – wouldn’t it be boring if we did?), so on occasion, just because five million other people have loved the book isn’t a guarantee that you or I will do too – I really didn’t get on with Michael Grant’s Gone series, for instance, but most readers absolutely rave about it.

Perhaps Hawwa’s argument is that those books that are just jumping on the bandwagon shouldn’t be getting published. And in many ways I’d be inclined to agree with her: books should push boundaries, especially those that are specifically aimed at the new and upcoming generation. They should push all sorts of boundaries: language, plotting, content, characters, diversity, style, approach, the whole shebang. Fortunately, there are plenty of authors writing YA that do just this – and there are plenty of YA books that have been around for a few years that are still doing this. The other side of the coin, though, is that there are readers who want nice, safe, and secure books where they know what to expect – i.e. the bandwagon books. The key to getting it right in any bookshop or library is to have a healthy balance of the two options.

Perhaps where the real problem lies is that some bookshops and/or libraries aren’t making it easy for readers to find those interesting, boundary-pushing books. Perhaps the bookshop where Hawwa likes to browse has only the latest Hunger Games derivative stacked up on their tables. This is where booksellers and librarians need to step in, where they need to create interesting and varied displays, be open and approachable to the teens (and adults) who are visiting their house of words, and recommend, recommend, recommend.

Susan Cooper’s Ghost Hawk, Julie Berry’s All the Truth That’s in Me, anything by David Levithan, Andrew Smith’s Grasshopper Jungle, E. Lockhart’s The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks, Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours, Ryan Graudin’s The Walled City, Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name Verity, anything by Patrick Ness, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Alice Oseman’s Solitaire, Rosemary Sutcliffe’s Eagle of the Ninth, Marcus Sedgewick’s She Is Not Invisible, Ruta Sepetys’s Out of the Easy, Meg Rosoff’s Picture Me Gone, Louis Sachar’s Holes, Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, Sally Gardner’s Maggot Moon, Garth Nix’s Sabriel, Laura Dockrill's Lorali. Look at any Carnegie Medal shortlist and you will find something that challenges and surprises you.

And one final thought: teens absolutely should peruse the adult section. ‘YA’ is simply a label, a categorisation. What goes in it and what doesn’t is largely determined by publishers – talk to any ‘YA’ author and eighty per cent of them will tell you they write the book they want to write, the story they want to tell; that they don’t set out to write YA or adult, sci-fi or romance, that those categorisations are applied afterwards – the publisher reads the book and says, yes, I reckon I can best sell this to such-and-such a group of people.

If The Catcher in the Rye was published for the first time today it would probably be called YA, and there are plenty of books in the adult sections that could easily be displayed in YA and not feel out of place: The Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor, The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne Du Maurier, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Perhaps this comes back to booksellers and librarians: that is up to them to make sure these books also make it into YA sections. Or perhaps I am making your point for you: that publishers chose to call books with more sophisticated language adult and less sophisticated ones YA – but while that might be true in some cases, I really don’t believe it is a hard and fast rule and it certainly isn’t true in the majority of cases – there is more to determining what is and isn’t YA than just the language, after all. Otherwise how would a book like I’ll Give You the Sun have made it into the YA section?

To any reader who feels they’re not being represented in the books they’re reading, speak up, like Hawwa has done. Only this way will we – authors, publishers, booksellers, librarians – know what is missing, what you want and what you need. But don’t forget to look a little deeper on the shelves as well, to ask the bookseller, to ask family and friends – or even the internet – because there are all sorts of gems hiding behind the hype.

Read Me Like A Book by Liz Kessler

There’s a lot going on in Ash’s life. College, boys, friends. Plus there’s her parents, whose constant arguing and complete inability to have a normal conversation without it turning into a bickering match is pretty much at the forefront of her mind. She’s not much of a ‘study’ girl, more of a mess-around-at-the-back-of-the-classroom girl, and her grades know it. But surely her parents will figure things out, and there’s only a year left of college and if she can just get through it then she can move on to whatever comes next. Except there’s one thing different this year: the new English teacher, Miss Murray, who pulls Ash in and makes her want to do better and makes her think maybe she is worth something after all.

I’ve been looking forward to reading Read Me Like a Book for some time, ever since author Liz Kessler first started to talk about it, over a year ago now. It’s the ultimate coming-of-age story, a book about growing up and figuring out who you are and what your strengths are, and what love is really all about. I’m not sure what I expected, but I knew from its history that it would be interesting. All of Liz Kessler’s previous books are aimed at younger readers, but Read Me Like a Book is a step in a new direction in more than just readership age. She first wrote it over ten years ago, but it was put aside because it was felt that it would be too controversial to publish at the time. Which seems pretty crazy now.

A lot of things start to go wrong for Ash at the start of the story – not only her parents’ relationship, but her relationship with her best friend starts going haywire pretty quickly, and she’s got this new boyfriend, Dylan, who should be perfect in every way, but somehow Ash doesn’t feel right about him. The only person she feels able to connect to is Miss Murray, and as the weeks slip by and she’s struggling to hold all the strands together, the idea of Miss Murray takes greater and greater hold. Ash realises she is in love, and not with Dylan.

I think what stands out for me in this story is the naturalness of it. Being 16, 17, 18, its like boiling point. There are lots of different things going on in Ash’s life and figuring out her sexuality is a major part of that, but everything else is just as real and just as major as well. Who she is in love with is the steering factor in the story, but there are other things too, and this makes the book feel all the more real. It’s not a big showpiece with a dramatic ka-boom moment or a massive reveal; it’s a progression, and that’s what life is really like and I really applaud Liz for writing her story in this way because it works in a way that is different to many other novels that fall within LGBT publishing today.

Ash is a strong young woman who, once she figures out how she feels about things, is able to voice them, with the help of her friends Cat and Robyn. Although she’s understandably nervous and a little anxious about doing so, she isn’t afraid because the environment and the world that she’s coming out to is a more open one than it was twenty years ago, and she knows it’s the right thing for her. What better role model could a young person ask for? The story is full of drama and tension, and this builds over the course of the year in which it takes place, with natural ups and downs along the way, and Ash’s character really grows too. It’s not all roses at the end, but the thing is, it doesn’t feel like an end – it feels like the beginning of a new chapter, in which things can only continue to get better.

If Liz was scared about releasing Read Me Like A Book into the wild, she needn’t be; it’s wonderful. It’s a love story, a growing-up story, a label-free story that should speak to all readers and which says good things about the world and where we are headed. Kudos.

I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson

This is the kind of book that brings all the walls down. From the way thirteen year old Noah sees the world, uncontained, art literally spilling out of him, to the way Jude breaks down the barriers she and her family have put up to try and protect themselves, not to mention the magical writing, the way that it is about everything, not just one thing, and the way that Jandy Nelson and her characters bring you in, tip you upside down, and turn you around, remade, at the end.

Twins Noah and Jude have been dividing up the world since they were little: one of them would take the sun and the flowers, the other the moon and the stars. But it’s not so easy to divide their parents – Noah’s relatively okay for Jude to have their dad, but Jude’s not so happy for Noah to have their mum. And that’s probably where it all starts to go wrong: when they decide to apply for exclusive high school, California School of Arts (CSA), Noah’s work pours off the page, creating an extra bond between him and their mom, while Jude keeps her art close to her chest. And it’s when Noah and new neighbor Brian become inseparable friends and Jude starts to hang out with the surf dudes; when their mother starts to step outside of herself; when love and possession make it impossible to share anything anymore.

Cut to three years ahead and everything is different. But not only different: reversed. Noah seems to have taken on Jude’s former role in the world, and Jude Noah’s. Things are breaking left, right and centre. But what happened? How did things get to be like this? In a last ditch attempt to keep her place at CSA and try to rid herself of her ghosts (yes, literal ghosts, not metaphorical ones) Jude sets out to convince the renowned but reclusive sculptor, Guillermo Garcia, to mentor her and teach her to carve stone. Her mother interviewed him once: “He was the kind of man who walks into a room and all the walls fall down,” she said – and Jude’s about to find out how true this sentiment is.

But the thing about what happens after the walls fall down? You get a chance to remake the world.

This is one of those books where I just know I’m going to feel the urge to collect as many different editions of it as possible – the proof copy Walker kindly sent me, the hardback, the paperback. Some books just demand to be read and treasured and this is one of them. All the things I want to say about it are spinning around in my mind all at once and defy being turned into words. I love the way Noah looks at and sees the world, the way he and Jude think magically, the way he is – mostly – not afraid to love, how he wears his emotions on his sleeve and, conversely, how afraid Jude is to let one drop of hers out into the world. It makes me want to go out and see the world the way Noah sees it.

I also really like that, although I’ll Give You the Sun is told in alternating parts by Noah and Jude, unlike a lot of novels that take this approach, the two viewpoints jump across time. Noah’s words come from his thirteen/fourteen year old self – where things are coming apart – while Jude’s words come from her sixteen year old self – looking at what’s fallen apart and how it can be fixed. I thought this was quite an unusual approach and it works really well. The effect is to highlight the differences between the old Jude and the new Jude, the old Noah and the new Noah – or, at least, that’s how I interpreted it as a reader. But the trick is that when they’re thirteen you pretty much only see Jude through Noah’s eyes, and when they’re sixteen you only see Noah through Jude’s eyes. So who’s to say they really are that different from when they were both thirteen? Because, even though they’re twins, perhaps they don’t show each other everything about themselves, no matter how much they might like to believe that they do. Perhaps the young Noah is still hiding inside older Noah? And perhaps the young Jude that Noah sees isn’t really who she is either. We’re all good at putting up shells for people to see, after all.

This is a book about secrets, the things we say and do to try and protect both ourselves and those around us from getting hurt – except this act usually winds up doing the hurting, constraining our lives and our hearts. This is a book about how love takes many forms and how art takes many forms, and how souls can touch one another but still need to have their own space to grow. Noah and Jude and the other characters that take our hearts in this story – Guillermo, Dianna, Ben, Oscar, Brian – are all living in a form of suspended animation, and each of their intertwining relationships plays a crucial role in the story and the stories they have told one another: Noah and Jude, Noah and Brian, Jude and Brian, Noah and Dianna, Noah and Ben, Jude and Dianna, Dianna and Guillermo, Noah and Guillermo, Jude and Guillermo, Jude and Oscar, Oscar and Guillermo. Which gives just a taster of how many different things are going on in the story.

Wonderful.

There Will Be Lies by Nick Lake

“There will be two lies,” the coyote tells Shelby. “Then there will be the truth. And that will be hardest of all.”

Shelby lives a very sheltered life. Home schooled, the only friends she has are on the internet, and the only place her mother ever allows her to go alone is the library. She lives too much in her own world for her to be safe in the outside one, she is told, and pretty much everything she know about the world, she knows from books and her mom.

The coyote comes to her just after the accident. She is waiting on the curb outside the library for her mom to pick her up when the car hits her, and now everything is different. Now they are on the run – her dad is alive after all, her mom tells her; they’ve been hiding from him all these years and now she’s afraid that he’ll find them from the hospital records after Shelby’s accident.

But the coyote said there would be two lies, so what if this is one of them? And if this is a lie, then what is the truth?

They are running, and her mom is contradicting herself left, right and centre, and Shelby doesn’t know who her mom is anymore, or who she is, either. And when she sleeps, she slips into the Dreaming. But is this real too? The coyote is there in the Dreaming, a shape-shifter who tells her the world is going to end in eight days and the only way to stop it is if she can rescue the child who has been kidnapped by the crone. And so Shelby must navigate these two parallel worlds, figure out how she fits in to both of them and deal with the loss of both everything she knew before and the things she knows now.

There Will Be Lies is a very powerful and intriguing story. I figured out the truth pretty early on, though Nick Lake’s storytelling did make me question my theory through the twists and turns and lies that he threw out. The two worlds is an unusual – though far from unheard of – construct which brought an extra level of surreality and questioning to the book – is it called the Dreaming for a reason, or is it as real as the world we know? Or – what defines whether something is real? Because if something is happening in our heads, surely that still makes it a real experience for us, even if others don’t perceive it to be so?

It also makes me think about the nature of lies – how do we know our own truths? Those things that may take place in our heads may be considered to be real, but by that extension, can they also be considered to be true? We are all capable of lying to ourselves as well – I recently read Belzhar by Meg Wolitzer, which plays on this very same idea; the character in Belzhar has told herself something which feels true and real to her but which turns out to not be true and real in the context of the wider world.

So is the Dreaming real, or is it a metaphor for what’s happening to Shelby in the real world? Perhaps it can be both. Will the world really end if Shelby can’t rescue the child in time? How do we define ‘end’? The Dreaming also pulls on the mythology of the Child, the Maiden and the Crone: the triple goddess of wiccan and pagan beliefs, though I suspect from Lake’s story – with the inclusion of the coyote – that perhaps there is similar mythology in the Native American belief system as well. In There Will Be Lies, Shelby takes on the role of the Maiden in this myth, though my understanding of the original is that the three roles are interlinked and are, essentially one and the same simply at different stages. This makes Shelby as much the Child as the Maiden which, when you read the book, gives away a pretty big clue as to the truth Shelby is searching for. Though the coyote tells her she must kill the crone to rescue the child, here the crone is a metaphor for her mother, I think, rather than the third aspect of herself.

To save herself, Shelby needs to extinguish what she thinks she understands about her mother – or come to terms with the part of her mother that resides in her. If she doesn’t save the child, then she will not be able to accept the new terms of her life – and by accepting the new terms of her life, she is able to save the child. Sometimes, in order to make something new, you have to break apart what came before. So what goes around, comes around, and everything is interlinked.

But, though the metaphor and mythology of the story comes predominantly from the parallel world of the Dreaming, I did find that the compulsion to keep reading was generated by what is taking place in the solid world. There are obstacles and adrenaline and danger in the Dreaming, but all the metaphor weighs quite heavily and reading those parts of the story was more like walking through sand while the ‘solid world’ happenings were easier to engage with, like rushing down a fast river. Nevertheless, they all come together to form an intense, thoughtful and excellently written and excellently constructed book that certainly stands out from the crowd. Nick Lake’s writing swells with intelligence and diversity of characters.

She Is Not Invisible, by Marcus Sedgwick

Laureth’s dad has an obsession: coincidences. He’s been trying to write a novel about coincidences for years, but has gotten stuck in the research phase, bogged down by the questions of whether coincidences really exist, and what they might or might not mean. He’s away in Europe on one of his research trips when Laureth gets a strange email, an email that sends a shiver down her spine: her father’s notebook – full of his irreplaceable research – has been found by someone in New York. If her dad is supposed to be in Europe, what’s his notebook doing in New York? Why isn’t he answering his phone when she tries to call him? And why isn’t her mum more worried?

Anxious that something seriously bad has happened to her dad, Laureth “acquires” her mother’s credit card and heads to New York to track him down. Can she and her little brother get through security and onto the plane without anyone stopping them? Where will they begin when they get to New York? And what will happen when her mother finds out what Laureth has done?

I absolutely loved She Is Not Invisible. I’ve never really read anything by Marcus Sedgwick before, but now I want to read pretty much everything this brilliant British author has written. It’s really quite a remarkable book that at once meets and subverts typical YA criteria: we have a girl and a quest, but nothing works out quite the way you expect it to. Laureth is such a complete character that right from her opening sentence I wanted to know more about her, while her little brother Benjamin has his own very special set of quirks, and I really did not know what the ending would be or how all the threads would come together.

The extra element in the story is Laureth’s physical handicap: she is blind. But She Is Not Invisible is not a story about a blind girl – Laureth, as she herself says, does not (and does not want to) fall into blind superhero cliché. It is a story about coincidences in which the protagonist is a girl who happens to be blind. Nevertheless, this makes for a special kind of storytelling because, by her very nature, Laureth sees and experiences the world around her in a different way. The person that Laureth is – and how Sedgwick’s writing makes her and her world real – raises as many interesting questions and thoughts as the actual storyline:

There are the ways people around her respond to Laureth, and how their responses change once they become aware of her disability. There is the fact that nothing is ever given a physical description, and yet we still get just as strong an idea about surroundings and people and events – perhaps even more so – than we would with a sighted description. And there is the part where Laureth doesn’t make judgments about things in the same way as a person with sight does. Perhaps most striking in this is she doesn’t see colour, and so colour – especially in people – is meaningless to her (which is, of course, exactly how it should be for everyone). And the irony in all this is that it enables her to actually see more than another person might.

One thing: when you learn what she deals with, you might love the blind girl who knows that it’s never been her sight that she needs - that it’s trust, love, and faith also. Laureth is not flawless, though; she still makes judgments, it’s just that those judgments are, in large part, based on different criteria; she makes mistakes and assumptions, and perhaps puts more faith in her father’s notebook than she should.

I recently met Marcus Sedgwick at YALC and he told me that he left one deliberate coincidence in the book. I’ll be honest and say that I’m not sure exactly which coincidence it is that he means. It’s not that this is a book that is peppered with coincidences, but there a series of apparent coincidences within it, most of which I assumed were engineered – but perhaps one of them wasn’t. One question is, which one? Although another question is, does it matter? Like both Marcus and his characters say, coincidences are weird and striking to those whom they happen to, but for everyone else they tend to just bounce off without much impact.

And he plays with this in the story too: several events that you – or Laureth – think are going to be terribly important and meaningful just bounce away without having the effect you thought they were going to have. And in this way, perhaps Marcus Sedgwick has actually done what he thought wasn’t really possible: written a book about coincidence. There is also a boy who short circuits anything electrical, a raven named Stan, a rather creepy hotel, a brief scattered history of the study of coincidence, and a pair of men who I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want to meet down a darkened alley at night. And there is also a number: 354. Laureth’s dad has been followed around by this number his whole life (or perhaps it is the other way around: he has followed the number), and it’s a number that crops up in the book here and there, and there again, not just in the story, but from the page count to the paragraph breaks, adding a beautiful little twist.

So, do you believe in coincidence? Do you believe that weird coincidences really just are coincidences, just chance happenings? If you don’t believe in coincidences, is this because you know the mathematical probability of a particular ‘coincidence’ means it isn’t by chance – or that the chance of this event is higher than you might at first think? Or is it because you believe that ‘coincidences’ means something? That they’re guided by fate or some greater force, some greater mystery? Will reading She Is Not Invisible change your position?

And at the end of our story, as Laureth exits stage right, she issues her readers with a final challenge. Is this challenge the result of the ‘true’ coincidence Sedgwick alluded to? I’m still not sure, and I’m going to tell you what it is either; you’ll have to read the book to find out. And yes, I did take Laureth up on it.

Winger, by Andrew Smith

Ryan Dean West doesn’t have the greatest self-confidence. But despite being a junior at just fourteen years old, on the scrawny side, and with, in his opinion, the highest degree of “loserosity” imaginable, he is determined that this year is going to be the year he gets his s**t together: mostly by surviving rooming with Pine Mountain Academy’s biggest bully, Chas Becker, and winning the girl of his dreams, best friend Annie Altman.

But Ryan Dean – or Winger, the nickname earned by his position on the school’s rugby team – has a talent for getting into trouble, even when he doesn’t mean to. As term progresses he is seduced by the smoking hot Megan Renshaw (girlfriend of, incidentally, the room-mate he’s quietly terrified of), becomes the multiple receiver of curse-spells from the distinctly un-hot Mrs. Singer, and is quickly hemorrhaging friends. Can he find a way to get out of this mess?

Winger is a small piece of genius. It is funny and heart-breaking and truthful.

Admittedly, Ryan Dean’s “year of change” doesn’t have the most auspicious start – upside down in toilet – but what, though, is the worst that he thinks can happen? Beaten to death by Chas for (a) making out with Megan and (b) being a general loser? Losing Annie? Suffering a catastrophic penis injury? Ryan Dean might think he’s a terrible loser, but I rather suspect that every teenage boy probably feels the way that he does about himself and about the world. If only I’d known when I was teenager what (I believe) I know now about the mind of a teenage boy…

Winger, though, starts off as one kind of story but gradually becomes something else altogether – like real life, there are twists and turns and corners you can’t see around; events lurking out of sight that no matter how good and brave and full of love Ryan Dean is, he will be powerless to change.

Earlier in the year, Andrew Smith wrote an article about our tendency to put people (and books) into boxes, to create labels about what a person should or shouldn’t be, or make assumptions about what a particular label means. Right from the beginning of Winger, it is clear that Ryan Dean understands the power of words and labels. Despite his rather unfortunate and hypocritical habit of putting girls into certain boxes, he’s none-the-less well aware that that one word can make you feel different, that one word can make people view you in a wholly different way. “Adorable” is the word that Ryan Dean has a complicated relationship with. For his friend Joey, it’s another word: gay. Before the end of his story, it will be brought home to Ryan Dean in the worst way imaginable how easily words can turn your life upside down.

This book is so slickly told, so tightly plotted, the scenarios so well laid out, you see things happening just that micro-second before they do – just enough of a head start to create that plunge of the stomach, flutter of the heart and a reverberating “oh, no…” to echo through your head. There are hints of the quirky style and sense of humour so evident in Andrew Smith’s Grasshopper Jungle, but tamed down a little, and the text is interwoven with Venn diagrams, pie charts, block charts, cartoons, imaginary conversations and letters that add a certain je ne sais quoi to Ryan Dean’s thoughts and emotions. This is The Great American Novel, the YA generation. Looking for Alaska meets The Art of Fielding, with the Andrew Smith magic thrown in.

Can Ryan Dean tame his inner Wild Boy and, against all the odds, win the girl?

Amy & Matthew, by Cammie McGovern

Amy & Matthew was a bit of a surprise. I hadn’t intended to read it when I did, but when it arrived (care of Macmillan books), I picked it up to just read the back and peek at the first page. Three hours later I was still reading.

This is a love story. In many ways it’s a conventional love story, but in many ways it’s very unconventional. And it’s not just a love story: this is a book about being different, about not letting others define who you are or who they think you should be; its about allowing yourself to be challenged in a positive way, and it’s about doing things your own way, even if that includes making mistakes.

Amy has cerebral palsy, which essentially means her body is not hers to do with as she will. She needs help with her fine motor skills, has difficulty walking and difficulty speaking. She’s always had adult aides to help her at school, but now, the year before she’s going to start college, she’s realized something crucial: she has no friends and limited social skills. If she wants to be able to go to college, to live an independent life, that needs to change, and so she persuades her (unwilling) mother to hire other students to help her out during her senior year.

When Matthew finds out he’s been accepted as one of Amy’s aides, he starts to balk. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. What will he say to her? What if he does something wrong? He’s supposed to introduce her to new people, but he doesn’t really know anyone either. But he sticks it out and finds that spending time with Amy is better and easier than anything he’d ever imagined. And as Amy gets to know Matthew, she discovers he has a different kind of disability - one that is (currently) as restrictive as her own – can she help him?

Amy and Matthew’s relationship is by nature a complicated one; as the months go by they bounce off one another as they challenge each other and are challenged by each other. Matthew is just about the only person who’ll tell it to Amy like it is, while Amy is always aiming for the stars, a distance too far for Matthew to comprehend. I really like that Cammie McGovern writes the story this way: she doesn’t force these characters together; doesn’t seem to write a situation for them that’ll create the perfect happily ever after scenario. Rather, they bounce away and come back, bounce away and come back in the most natural and realistic way possible.

This is a wonderful book. It’s a very engaging read as well as thought provoking. It is not about people with disabilities, it is about people who just happen to have disabilities. Those disabilities do, naturally, have an influence on some parts of the story, but it was mostly an important reminder for me that the mind and the body are separate entities and that we shouldn’t judge a person’s central being based on their physical abilities. Everyone has the same thoughts and fears and dreams and it’s not up to someone else to decide how far another person should be able to go in pursuing them, or in what direction. We can only decide for ourselves.

As far as Amy and Matthew are concerned, I just wanted them to work out how to be happy, whether that was together or apart. Which they did – but I’m not telling you how… Amy & Matthew has everything a good love story needs, but with a double plus because it doesn’t define how we should love, only that we should.


(NB. Amy & Matthew is published under the title Say What You Will in the US)