Review of Once Was Lost by Sara Zarr

This is a book about a young woman questioning her faith --and she has good reason to question it.  Her father is the pastor in a small town with one post office, one hardware store, only one restaurant that’s open on Sundays, but seven churches.  Even though everyone knows pretty much everything about everyone else, something no one seems to know is that Sam’s mother is a drunk.  Then Sam’s mom is in rehab, court-ordered after a drunken-driving accident, and Sam is left alone with her father, who seems to have infinite time for his parishioners’ problems, but no time for his own daughter or to visit his wife in rehab. The author describes Sam’s disillusionment perfectly when giving Sam’s reaction to a poster in the youth group room that shows a bunch of happy, multicultural-looking teens and the slogan: Community Happens! “I stared at that poster and pictured myself in it, smiling, knee-to-knee with the other youth group kids, who would be my best friends…Because, as we’re reminded all the time at church, community happens through sharing…I believed in  the theory, and expected that once I hit high school my life would be filled with all this understanding and friendship and spiritual bonding, and my faith would come alive, just like the poster promised.  It hasn’t really happened that way.”  Then, as if things couldn’t get any worse, a 13-year-old member of the youth group, Jody, disappears.  Sam’s lack of faith intensifies, and it’s clear that part of the problem is her lack of faith in her own father. As he’s getting ready to leave to visit the family of the missing girl, this is how Sam sees him: “He was strangely calm-looking, his tan face smooth, his hair in place, jaw set. It dawned on me that in a way he’s been prepping for a tragedy like this all his life; he’s like an actor getting his ultimate role.  For someone whose career is believing in God and convincing other people to, this is exactly the kind of thing that would give him a chance to really prove that everything he’s been saying is true.”  I absolutely love this book.  It’s a perfect combination of characters, setting and plot.  Review by Stacy Church

Review of Chasing the Bear, a Young Spenser Novel by Robert B. Parker

If you haven’t read any of Robert Parker’s Spenser novels, you might be confused by the chapters of this book that are set in the present day, where Spenser is talking to his girlfriend Susan, and being prodded by her to recall episodes from his childhood.  But you certainly don’t have to have read the Spenser books to appreciate the great stories that he tells.  Spenser grew up in a completely male household.  When his mother died, his father’s two brothers moved in to share the parenting duties, so Spenser grows up being taught to think for himself, to cook, and how to throw a mean right hook.  When Spenser’s best friend, Jeannie, drives by in a car driven by her mean, drunken father, and mouths “Help” at him out the window, he knows he has to go after her.  He’s scared, but he knows that if he goes to get help he’ll lose them, so he follows them to the jetty, and then out onto the river in a rowboat, with only his dog Pearl for help.  It’s an exciting story, and my favorite one.  Throughout the book, Spenser tells Susan that he spent his life looking for his one and only love, and she is it.  The book is truly an adventure book for boys, but it doesn’t hurt to hear such a heartfelt message from so tough a guy.  Review by Stacy Church

Review of Wings by Aprilynne Pike

I have to say that despite what might be the most outlandish concept for a plot in the history of literature (ok, that’s overstating it a bit), this book is actually pretty good. Laurel is just starting to attend the local high school after being homeschooled all her life. She’s not happy, but things haven’t gone too badly on her first day –she’s made some friends, she’s not too far behind the other kids in her classes, and she even gets a cute guy named David to eat his lunch outside with her. But then she feels a strange lump in between her shoulder blades. For some reason, she doesn’t tell her parents, even though every day it gets bigger and bigger. Finally, one day it opens up into a huge….flower. That’s right, flower. She still doesn’t tell her parents. She binds the petals down and wears loose clothes. Wait, it gets even weirder. She goes back to visit her old house with her parents, and when she goes into the woods for a walk, she’s approached by a strange-looking green boy, who tells her that she’s a faerie, and that faeries are not animals/humans, they are plants. So if you’re willing to suspend disbelief long enough to accept that Laurel never noticed she doesn’t have a heart beat, or blood in her veins, and never thought it was that unusual that she doesn’t eat food except for canned peaches, you will enjoy this book. It has an exciting ending that involves trolls, Laurel and David being weighted down and thrown in the river, saving Laurel’s dad (who was poisoned by the trolls), and Laurel telling her parents the truth about her faerieness. Oh, and by the way, one of the pieces of information that the green boy passed on to Laurel is that, for faeries, pollination is for procreation, sex is just for fun. Review by Stacy Church

Review of Eli the Good by Silas House

There is so much sadness in this book. The first paragraph kind of tells it all:

“That was the summer of the bicentennial, when all these things happened: my sister, Josie, began to hate our country and slapped my mother’s face; my wild aunt, Nell, moved in with us, bringing along all five thousand or so of her records and a green record player that ran on batteries; my father started going back to Vietnam in his dreams, and I saw him cry; my mother did the Twist in front of the whole town and nearly lost us all. I was ten years old, and I did something unforgivable.”

Whew. The story lives up to all of that, too. In fact, there’s even more sadness. Eli’s best friend, Edie, is abandoned by her mother, and has to live with her alcoholic father. Eli finds out (by eavesdropping, which he indulges in whenever possible) that the reason his Aunt Nell moved in with them is because she has cancer. His mother and Nell are very close, but Eli's father and Nell --not so much. While Eli’s father was off fighting in Vietnam, Nell was protesting the war, and because of one very famous photograph, everyone in the country knows her, which Eli's father takes as a personal affront. Eli watches everything, and, despite the closeness of Eli’s family, he doesn’t really feel taken care of by anyone. He’s never forgiven his mother for something he overheard her say to his father once, “I love you too much. More than anything. More than anybody.” Eli’s great sadness is that he feels his mother doesn’t love him or his sister as much as she loves their father. The writing in the book is so beautiful, and it really captures the essence of the time (1976). Review by Stacy Church

Review of After Ever After by Jordan Sonnenblick

I couldn’t wait to read this new book by one of my favorite authors, Jordan Sonnenblick, who also wrote Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie (see review on Book Bits June 1, 2006) , and Zen and the Art of Faking It (see review September 16, 2008).  After Ever After tells the story of Jeffrey Alper, the main character from Drums, Girls…, when he’s in 8th grade.  If you read Drums, Girls…you know that in 4th grade Jeffrey was being treated for cancer.  That book was mainly the story of his older brother, Steven, and how Jeffrey’s cancer affected Steven’s life.  Sonnenblick’s books are funny, even though the things the characters are dealing with are not funny at all.  Jeffrey as an 8th grader has some physical and mental problems that are after-effects of his illness and treatment.  His right foot kind of drags due to nerve damage, and he has some learning and attention problems from the powerful drugs he was given in chemotherapy.  All right, enough with the bad stuff.  Jeffrey’s best friend, Tad, is a somewhat bitter, angry person, maybe because of the cancer that he has survived twice, but maybe just because that’s the way he is.  Jeffrey has terrible trouble with math, and the school district has just enacted a rule that says if you fail the new standardized test, you can’t pass 8th grade, even if your grades have always been good.  Jeffrey knows there’s no way he’s going to pass, and after getting busted for hiding the letter from the school to his parents, he accepts Tad’s offer of tutoring.  In exchange, he challenges Tad, who’s in a wheelchair, to work out enough to be able to walk across the stage at graduation.  Jeffrey also gets his first girlfriend.  She is sort-of a little too perfect to believe, but you have to feel happy for Jeffrey.  Lindsey and Tad hatch up a plan to protest the standardized testing, and since Jeffrey is grounded for months, they are able to hide it from him right up until the last minute.  This book is a quick but fun read.  Review by Stacy Church

Review of The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin by Josh Berk

This is the funniest book I have read in quite a while, and I just couldn’t put it down.  Will Halpin is deaf.  He has finagled his way out of the “deaf school” and into the local high school, even though he will have to completely rely on his lip-reading skills.  The public high school doesn’t have a closed-captioning system, or interpreters like the fancy private schools.  He bumbled his way through a hearing test by guessing, lip-reading and promising to wear his hearing aids, which he usually just carries in his pocket.  On the bus, he learns that if he sits in the seat behind the bus driver, he can watch the other kids in the bus driver’s mirror and read their lips to see what they’re talking about.  People mostly ignore him, even though in every class he gets seated in the front corner of the room so that he can read the teacher’s lips, if they keep facing him, that is.  His math teacher, the sexy Miss Prefontaine, turns her back on him so she can make snide comments about him when she catches him reading his history textbook in math class (other bad things come out about her later in the story).  There’s the usual pecking order, and the only kid who befriends Will is the second-least-popular student, Devon, who knows very basic sign language.  Later in the book, he gives Will a PDA so they can text each other, even when they’re together, which I thought was brilliant.  During a class field trip to a coal mine, the most popular kid disappears, and then is found dead at the bottom of a mine shaft.  Is it murder?  Will and Devon decide to team up like the Hardy Boys to try and solve the murder, but when they break into the school to look at the footage of the police interrogations, Devon has them fast-forward through his.  Is he somehow involved?  Some funny things from the book: Will calls the school bell a sound-impairment discriminator; instead of et cetera, Will says et crapera; when his mom signs to him during dinner, he tells her not to talk with her hands full; once when his mom asks him, “What’s that noise?” he says, “You’re asking the wrong guy.”  Review by Stacy Church

Review of Watching Jimmy by Nancy Hartry

I love Carolyn, the main character of Watching Jimmy. She feels a lot of regret about what happened to her best friend Jimmy. She thinks she should have yelled at her Aunt Jean not to leave them alone with her brother, Uncle Ted, or that she could have run faster when Uncle Ted went zooming off down the street with Jimmy sprawled out across the trunk of his fancy car, or maybe if she had screamed, someone would have come and stopped the awful thing that happened next. The worst thing is that Uncle Ted told everyone Jimmy fell off a swing at the park and that he tried to wake him up and then carried him to his car to get help. Carolyn knows it won’t do any good to tell, so she tries to protect Jimmy as best she can after he comes home from the hospital. She never leaves him alone with Uncle Ted, and she coerces Uncle Ted into helping Aunt Jean by threatening him in a way that only he will understand. Carolyn has her own troubles, but she knows they’re nothing compared to Aunt Jean’s: Ted claims ownership of her house and says she’ll have to move out; Jimmy could have surgery to help with his brain injury but there’s no money to pay for it; and she has the great sadness of having lost her older son in the war. Carolyn has a couple of talents. She has a beautiful singing voice (but she’s careful not to let anyone hear her), and she’s a moving public speaker (which she’s not shy about showing off at all). This is a story where good triumphs in the end, even though things can never go back to the way they used to be. Review by Stacy Church