As I mentioned last week, NPR recently polled its audience for their favorite YA books. This week they released their final list. As always when the public is allowed to vote on a list like this, publication proximity tends to bump up a bunch of books that will fade down or off the list in a few years’ time.

I have bolded those novels I’ve read (I’m bolding series, even if I’ve only finished one book of it):

1. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling

2. The Hunger Games (series), by Suzanne Collins

3. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

4. The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green

5. The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien

6. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

7. The Lord of the Rings (series), by J.R.R. Tolkien

8. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

9. Looking for Alaska, by John Green

10. The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
(more…)

The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, by Avi

From the jacket: “The Seahawk looms against a darkening sky, black and sinister. Manned by an angry, motley crew at the mercy of a ruthless captain, the rat-infested ship reeks of squalor, despair … and mutiny! It is no place for the lone passenger, thirteen-year-old Charlotte Doyle, yet for her there is no turning back. At first a trapped and powerless young girl, Charlotte dares to become the center of a daring and deadly voyage that will challenge her courage, her loyalties, and her very will to survive!”

My take: As you might guess from all! the! exclamation points! on the book jacket, this book is aimed at kids. And I suspect that younger readers, particularly those old enough to have watched Pirates of the Caribbean or The Pirates! Band of Misfits, will enjoy the book quite a bit.

It’s the story of 13-year-old Charlotte, who is following her family’s return from England to Providence, Rhode Island, during the summer of 1832. Her parents deemed it best that she not interrupt her school year for the boat crossing, so she was told to remain at school and she would be escorted home on one of her father’s company’s boats by two families of similar stature. Only, when Charlotte arrives at the boat, the other families aren’t there, the very name of the ship’s captain causes porters to disappear, and no one seems particularly eager to see her. In fact, a crew member arrives at her cabin door to suggest she ought to postpone her trip and another, Zachariah, provides her with a knife to defend herself, should it be necessary.

When Charlotte’s sheltered upbringing results in her inadvertently causing the death of a man, she must find a way to atone and to put to right as many of her missteps as possible.

I suggest that a younger audience is probably the right one for this book in part because when you, as an adult, read that a young woman finds herself alone on a boat with rough sailors and that she might be in need of a knife, I suspect your mind might make a leap as to why she might need it. Author Avi does not make that leap with you. Charlotte’s life might be imperiled, but her “virtue” never is.

Younger readers also will have fewer troubles with some of the other plot points that stress the fictional aspect of historical fiction and with the rushed end to the book.

Yet despite all that, Charlotte does have some rollicking adventures. Kids who have enjoyed the Little House books will probably find Charlotte a compelling and empowering heroine. And while I was never a Treasure Island fan, this would seem to be a good companion novel for someone reading that title. Captain Jaggery is no Long John Silver, but he’s no Jack Sparrow either.

All in all a decent, quick read.

Pages: 229

Gold, by Chris Cleave

From the jacket: “Kate and Zoe met at nineteen when they both made the cut for the national training program in track cycling — a sport that demands intense focus, blinding exertion, and unwavering commitment. They are built to exploit the barest physical and psychological edge over equally skilled rivals, all of whom are fighting for the last one tenth of a second that separates triumph from despair. Now at thirty-two, the women are facing their last and biggest race: the 2012 Olympics. Each wants desperately to win gold, and each has more than a medal to lose.”

My take: It only seems appropriate that as I sat down to write this review, NBC began showing the Olympic track cycling heats.

It is spring 2012 and Zoe and Kate, who have known each other for thirteen years, are preparing for the London Olympics. The two women have spent nearly half their lives competing against one another on and off the track, and they expect their careers to culminate on their home turf in one final Olympic event.

Guiding them toward this goal is Tom, the Australian septuagenarian who has coached the pair for more than a decade after recognizing their potential so many years ago. He knows the two women nearly as well as they know themselves.

Kate has loads of natural talent and is willing to force her legs to do the work necessary to win. But her home life is complicated, as she and her husband, Jack, a fellow Olympic track cyclist are nursing their eight-year-old, Star Wars-obsessed daughter, Sophie, through a relapse of leukemia. Their lives are dictated by her treatment and needs and filled in with training schedules for the two of them.

Zoe, on the other hand, has no such complications in her personal life. Besides a handful of modeling gigs and more than a handful of one-night stands, her life is as empty as the sparse new luxury flat she just rented. For her it has always been about the cycling and about winning at all costs. She might not have Kate’s natural talent, but her head is always in the game and she’s willing to leverage any psychological advantage she can find or create. But with the natural course of her racing career starting to wind down, Zoe is starting to feel the emptiness in her life catching up at last.

When a new rule change jeopardizes their chance of a face-off during the Games, it throws both women into a panic. Will the strength of their relationship carry them through this challenge, too? Or will the stress of it all cause each of them them to tear away at her favorite opponent’s best known weaknesses? Can their friendship and their lives survive their quest for gold?

A book about the 2012 Olympics to read during the 2012 Olympics? What could be better, right? Well, take the author of the much lauded Little Bee and offer him track cycling as a vehicle for his novel.

Track cycling, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, takes place indoors in a velodrome, where competitors face off in a variety of situations. The race that Kate and Zoe are competing in is the sprint, which should operate exactly as you’d think it would. However, there are two things that make it a little different: One, the track is uneven, which means that the outside lane is tilted up. And, two, the rider in the front of a group creates a slipstream. This means that a following rider can conserve energy and surge past the leader with mere yards to go to win the race. And it means that a rider who opts to ride up the side of a race track can use the speed caused by the descent to their advantage. So what this means is that sprint track cycling involves a lot of head games. You’ll see riders barely moving their bikes, propelling them only as much as is necessary to remain upright. The rider in the front spends as much time looking back at their pursuer as they do surveying the course before them.

It’s a fascinating event and Cleave created two drastically different women to race it on the pages of his novel. Each of them is a little too one-dimensional (Kate is too self-sacrificing and Zoe is too manipulative) for my tastes, yet I found it really didn’t matter. Cleave is deft with his prose:

“It was a patient business, talking comets down to the speed of life.”

Or “… sometimes — in the rare moments when she wasn’t causing quite serious mental discomfort — being friends with Zoe was like being knocked dizzy by grace.”

And he neatly avoids the obvious plot traps that he lays and that a lazier writer might opt to fall into.

So despite your best intentions, you find yourself up at 3 a.m. compulsively turning page after page, desperate to find out how the story — and the characters’ lives — will turn out. Just like you get sucked into watching judo between two countries you might be hard-pressed to find on a globe in less than a minute, finding yourself glued to an event you don’t fully understand. Sometimes it’s just exquisitely compelling.

Pages: 325

NPR has a poll up on their website asking folks to vote on the best young adult fiction.

The poll isn’t perfect. Some books I’d consider a series (such as Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown) are listed separately, while others are lumped together as a whole (The Princess Diary books, for instance). Some books they left out because they’re aimed too young, but that seems inconsistent (I assume that’s why Little Women isn’t included, but Anne of Green Gables is). The same is true with adult books that have become YA staples.

However, for all its flaws, how often are we asked, rather than told, what the best of the best is? Regardless of whether you prefer stand-alones or series, modern or classic, I guarantee you will find some of your favorites on the list. I had to force myself to pass over books I like quite a bit in order to pick only the creme de la creme — the very best of the books I’ve read and re-read and hand-carry with me when I move, the ones that I routinely give as gifts, the titles that create a bond between me and another person just because we both love them.

(Just to alleviate a concern I had when I started: You don’t have to worry about keeping track; the rest of the list will gray out once you’ve hit 10 and you’ll have to uncheck selections to add any additional ones. Also, I don’t know when the poll closes, but it’s been up several days, so I probably wouldn’t tarry over your choices.)

Maniac Magee, by Jerry Spinelli

From the jacket: “Jeffrey Lionel ‘Maniac’ Magee might have lived a normal life if a trolley accident hadn’t made him an orphan. After living with his unhappy and uptight aunt and uncle for eight years, he decides to run — and not just run away, but run. And this is where the myth of Maniac Magee begins, as he change the lives of a racially divided small town with his amazing and legendary feats.”

My take: This is one of those books where if you judge it by its cover, you will miss out on a gem. Its cover makes it look like a typical sports novel, but it is so much more than that. (And, yes, I recognize that sneakily trying to get adolescent boys to pick it up may be part of the marketing plan.)

Jeffrey’s parents died in a trolley accident when he was a baby, so he was sent to live with his aunt and uncle, who, unfortunately, couldn’t stand each other. They refused to speak to one another and found they could make that work by dividing the house into two and splitting Jeffrey’s time between them. But such an environment is not one for raising a healthy, happy boy, and eventually Jeffrey cracks and literally runs away.

He turns up a year later in the town of Two Mills, skinny and hungry and in shoes that are falling apart. The first person he encounters is Amanda, who is lugging her complete collection of books to school. After much convincing, she agrees to lend him a book to read. He also runs into a couple of other kids, including John McNab, who is striking out kid after kid until Jeffrey shows up. When the encounter turns sour, Jeffrey takes off running — and runs right across the tracks and straight into more trouble — this time with a boy called Mars Bar Thompson. The two sides of the town may not agree on much, but they share a belief that Jeffrey is a little nuts, dubbing him “Maniac” Magee.

Jeffrey does a great many things with grace and elegance — from running to knot detangling to child minding — but interacting with his peers (with the exception of Amanda) is a challenge for him, as is picking up clues about how his disregard for color barriers puts a great many people on edge. When the message finally does hit home, Jeffrey takes off running yet again. Will Amanda Beale and her family, two rival teenage boys, and a groundskeeper named Grayson be able to convince him to stop?

Set in what I’d guess to be the late 1970s, Maniac Magee gives us the story behind the folklore of a boy who helped to unite a town. It is sweet and more than a little bittersweet and I highly recommend it.

Pages: 184

The Witches, by Roald Dahl

From the jacket: “This is not a fairy tale. This is about real witches. Grandmamma loves to tell about witches. Real witches are the most dangerous of all living creatures on earth. There’s nothing they hate so much as children, and they work all kinds of terrifying spells to get rid of them. Her grandson listens closely to Grandmamma’s stories — but nothing can prepare him for the day he comes face to face with The Grand High Witch herself!”

My take: Our eight-year-old orphaned narrator is left in the care of his Norwegian grandmother, who instructs him in a variety of life skills, but most importantly how to spot a witch. A witch is a woman who is bald, lacks toes, and has claws instead of fingernails, a powerful sense of smell, pupils filled with fire and ice, and blue spit. Oh, and she hates children and wants nothing more than to eliminate them from the face of the earth. So when our narrator accidentally finds himself trapped in a ballroom full of witches in Bournemouth, we know he’s in for some trouble. But, it turns out, so are those witches.

For a long time, I thought I didn’t like Roald Dahl books. I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and (I believe) Charlie and the Glass Elevator when I was in sixth grade and I was unimpressed. But then, as an adult, I read The BFG and realized I was wrong. Subsequent readings of Matilda, Boy, and James and the Giant Peach reinforced this conclusion.

So I was excited to read The Witches when I realized it was still on my top 100 unread list.

I’m glad I had that stretch of Dahl books I found charming, because this decidedly went on the so-so list. I mean, it was fine. I can see why lots of people like it. But I didn’t (even with the knitterly addition of using a half-knit sock as a mode of transportation). I think the characters, with the exception of Grandmamma, all felt a little one-dimensional. Dahl villains always are, but for some reason, this protagonist felt less developed than did James or Matilda. Perhaps it’s the lack of a name for our protagonist. Or the dark ending. Or some other reason. But, regardless, The Witches falls a cut below Matilda and The BFG in my book.

Pages: 208