We had our second Cybils deadline this weekend, asking us to list our top ten favorite books thus far. (You can see my first deadline results here.) I got mine down to a dozen without a huge amount of pain but then got stuck for a while, mulling which final books to cull over others, trying to explain to Rudi why I was cutting books I’d enjoyed quite a bit for one reason or another. It was hard, and I expect it to get even more challenging in short order.

My top ten were, in no particular order:

• The Storyteller, a haunting, harrowing, modern twist on a fairy tale set in contemporary (or maybe recent) Germany focusing on a young woman who, after pursuing a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, suddenly finds herself caught up in a variety of dramas, one of which may threaten her very safety
• Crazy, an epistolary, post-summer-love exchange between two teens, where one of them slowly goes off the rails
• Boy21, in which a teenage basketball star from a poverty-stricken town must come to terms with what is most important to him and to those around him
• The Fault in Our Stars, a contemporary romance between two kids who have cancer
• Come August, Come Freedom: The Bellows, The Gallows, and The Black General Gabriel, historical fiction of a Virginia slave who led an unsuccessful rebellion for freedom
• How to Save a Life, a contemporary coming-of-age novel about two teen girls whose lives intersect when one of them agrees to give up her impending baby to the other’s mother for adoption
• Pinned, the coming-of-age tale of two classmates, both of whom are struggling to overcome a disability
• Gone, Gone, Gone, a teen romance set in the D.C. suburbs in the aftermath of 9/11 and during the sniper attacks
• DJ Rising, in which a teenage boy struggling to make ends meet at home gets the chance of a lifetime to follow his dream
• The Boy on Cinnamon Street, a contemporary romance involving a girl who’s suffering from PTSD

I would say that all of the books on the list at this point would merit at least 3.5 stars out of 5 and at least one would earn 4.5 stars. Of the group, I’d say my favorites so far have been Pinned, How to Save a Life (my review), The Boy on Cinnamon Street, and The Storyteller.

I’ll be back tomorrow with a roundup of what’s next in my Cybils reading and how the rest of my participation in the panel will pan out (to my understanding thus far). And I should have some more reviews for you beginning later in the week.

The Cybils nominees I’m hoping to finish by Saturday:

It’s not quite as bad as it seems. I’ve started seven of them and one is an audio file on our laptop, which, now that I’m home, I can plug into speakers and listen to while cleaning.

And, obviously, whim — and library due dates — will be allowed to play a role as needed.

Love & Haight, by Susan Carlton

From the jacket: “It’s 1971, and seventeen-year-old Chloe and her best friend MJ head to San Francisco to ring in the New Year. But Chloe has an ulterior motive—and a secret. She’s pregnant and has devised a plan not to be. In San Francisco’s flower-power heyday, it was (just about) legal to end her pregnancy. But as soon as the girls cross the Golden Gate, the scheme starts to unravel amid the bellbottoms, love-beads, and bongs…”

My take: Chloe and MJ, 17-year-old best friends, take a road trip from Phoenix to San Francisco in the final days of 1971. They tell their parents it’s to ring in the New Year with Chloe’s hippie aunt Kiki, but there’s a more urgent motive for the trip: Chloe is pregnant and abortions are legal in San Francisco. (They’re legal, that is, if you have parental consent (if you’re a minor) and a psychiatrist’s note certifying your health is at risk if you carry the pregnancy to term.)

While Chloe fulfills her (sometimes nerve-wracking) pre-procedure obligations, she must wrestle with her best friend’s growing doubts about the ethics of abortion, her aunt’s scattered behavior, and the sudden appearance of the boy who broke her heart the previous summer (who just happens to be MJ’s older brother).

Set in San Francisco in the waning days of the city’s hippie heyday, the novel covers the changing politics of abortion, drug use, love, and friendship. With a page count that keeps the novel from delving into any subject too deeply, the book still manages to deal with Chloe’s decision in a reasonably satisfying way, although the secondary storylines are wrapped up in a more simplistic, less emotionally resonant way. A decent book, particularly if you were interested in the time period or the history of women’s rights.

Pages: 177

October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard, by Lesléa Newman

My take: The author of Heather Has Two Mommies had been due to deliver the keynote speech at the University of Wyoming’s Gay Awareness Week just days after gay student Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered in 1998. She ultimately delivered her talk, but understandably felt the incident at her core. Since then, she has completed this collection of poems about Matthew, his attack, and its aftermath in which she writes imagined responses from assorted perspectives — the attackers, Matthew’s family, a police officer, the fence upon which Matthew was strung up, a nearby deer, the road.

It was beautiful and stark and painful to read, and ultimately I felt I needed to keep it at arm’s length in order to get through it. I can see this being a good addition to a resource room or school library. I also think it would pair well with recordings or performances of modern slam poetry to explore verse as a tool for recording and understanding current and historic events.

Pages: 112

Thank you for calling. Due to her late night Cybils reading, sprite is unable to come to the blog. Please feel free to leave a message or try her blog again at a later time. Thank you.

I’m totally cheating in the interest of being in bed in seven minutes. Here is the summary I gave of a novel I did not shortlist for the Cybils:

The Difference between You and Me, by Madeleine George

From the jacket: “Jesse cuts her hair with a Swiss Army knife. She wears massive green fisherman’s boots every day. She’s the founding (and only) member of NOLAW, the National Organization to Liberate All Weirdos. Emily is th evice president of student council. She has an niternship with a local big business. She loves her boyfriend. At least she thinks she does. But there’s no denying her feeling sfor Jesse. When they meet up every Tuesday in the bathroom of the local library, the physical connection they share is undeniable.”

My take: Oh, how I wanted to love this book. It’s firmly in my wheelhouse of politically progressive teen novels.

And I liked it. It had a few really great lines (including one comparing a boy’s kisses to cantaloupe), a (perhaps cheesily so) happy ending, an endearing main protagonist, and several positive messages.

But I had some huge problems with it (most of which I feel could have been sorted out by a strong editor), too.

First, it had way too many issues it was tackling. We covered sexuality (questioning of, discriminating against because of, and parental dismissal of), breast cancer (parental survival of and parental death due to), sprawl (in a thinly veiled attack of WalMart), corporate involvement in education, and hoarding. And those were just the major ones.

Second, it’s written from three perspectives. One character (Jesse, told in third person) is clearly the protagonist we are meant to identify with. The second (Emily, told in first person) is her love interest. And the third (Esther, also in first person) is a new and quirky friend.

Sometimes books told from multiple perspectives can really work for me (as I wrote last night), but other times I feel like it’s an author not wanting to have to figure out how to get across a second person’s perspectives/motivations/important plot point. This book, I feel, falls into the latter category.

Jesse’s sections are strong and could have carried the novel with some revisions.

Emily’s seem to exist merely to explain how StarMart (really, it’s that thin a veil) and the other sources of tension in the novel arise. Unfortunately, Emily is written essentially as a caricature. At face value, she’s an idealized teen girl — pretty, popular, involved, ambitious, nice. Also, egotistical, shallow, and not very smart. The most interesting thing about her is that she likes kissing Jesse. And I would be fine with all of that, but she’s one of the narrators of the story. We’re meant to identify with her in some way, but the author can’t be bothered to round her out.

And Esther gets only two chapters, mostly so she can talk about her mother’s death and Joan of Arc, her role model of tough chicks taking charge and getting stuff done.

Oh, and there was the editing snafu where the room where Emily and Jesse would meet for their trysts moved around the building. That should have been caught in proofing, but is merely a minor quibble in light of the other, more egregious problems I had with the book.

All in all, I felt like I was reading a draft version of the novel I wanted to be reading. But of all books I’ve ever wanted to throw across the room, I liked this one the best.

Pages: 263