"The Hate U Give" by Angie Thomas

American black teenager Starr lives in the inner city where drive-by shootings, gang warfare and drug-dealing is rife but goes to a posh school in the suburbs. She is the only witness when her oldest friend Khalil is shot by the police. Should she speak up when raising one's head above the parapet might put her and her family in danger?

The structure of this book is unusual. There are many classic elements. For example, Starr's relationship with her rich white boyfriend is disrupted by the polarisation of her community into black and white. Normally classic plot points such as this are not resolved, one way or the other, until the very end of the book. But in this story there are a number of resolutions by the end of part one which is about two-thirds of the way through the book. This does introduce a degree of tension as one realises that this story is straying from convention and that therefore what might happen in the remaining third of the book might surprise.

The book is also enlivened by the entangled relationships between the members of the black community. Starr's father went to jail for the local drug baron with whose wife he had previously had a child, Starr's half-brother Seven. Starr's father is now a reformed character, a Christian and local store owner whilst still being a militant Black Panther, and there is tension between him and his son's stepfather. Starr's mother's brother, who acted as surrogate father for Starr whilst her real father was in jail, is a cop. This enables the author to extract maximum conflict from relatively few characters.

There are a couple of moments when it gets a bit preachy. Daddy puts Starr through a catechism in Chapter 10 to investigate the reasons for drug dealing in black neighbourhoods. Hailey seems to be a character developed so that the author can develop arguments about racism. But if Victor Hugo can spend page after page of Les Miserables lecturing about the Battle of Waterloo, or the iniquity of monasticism, I guess any author is entitled to disrupt their story with a page or two of preaching.

But the real beauty of this book is the freshness of the prose:

• “There are just some places where it's not enough to be me. Either version of me.” (C 1)
• “Guys in their freshest kicks and sagging pants grind so close to girls they just about need condoms.” (C 1)
• “Spring in Garden Heights doesn't always bring love, but it promises babies in the winter.” (C 1)
• “He always has [the party] on the Friday of spring break because you need Saturday to recover and Sunday to repent.” (C 1)
• “She's the perfect height for modelling ... but a little thicker than those toothpicks on the runway.” (C 1)
• “Hoedom is universal.” (C 1)
• “that's more difficult than buying retro Jordans on release day.” (C 1)
• “He wipes his nose like he always does before a lie.” (C 1)
• “He couldn't carry a tune if it came in a box.” (C 3)
• “How could he sell the very stuff that took his momma from him? Did he realise that he was taking someone somebody else's momma from them?” (C 4)
• “Did he realise that if he does become a hashtag, some people will only see him as a drug dealer?” (C 4)
• “Khalil matters to us, not the stuff he did. Forget everybody else.” (C 4)
• “Good-byes hurt the most when the other person’s already gone.” (C 4)
• “I left his house pissed and horny, the absolute worst way to leave.” (C 5)
• “Sometimes you can do everything right and things will still go wrong. They key is to never stop doing right.” (C 9)
• “If babies can count as humans when they’re little, veggies can count as veggies when they’re little.” (C 12)
• “Brave peoples’ legs don’t shake. Brave people don’t feel like puking. Brave people sure don’t have to remind themselves how to breathe ... If bravery is a medical condition, everybody’s misdiagnosed me.” (C 16)
• "I didn't know a dead person could be charged in his own murder" (C 16)

A very enjoyable read.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"An Abundance of Katherines" by John Green

Child prodigy Colin Singleton only dates Katherines (not even Catherines) and has just been dumped for the nineteenth time. His friend, fat Hassan, persuades him to take a road trip. They end up in Gutshot, a redneck town whose principal employer is a factory making tampon strings, and are hired to research an oral history of the town. Will Hassan get to second base with Katrina, will Colin complete his Theorem to predict the future of any relationship, and can he fall in love with a Lindsey?

Green, also wrote the brilliant The Fault in Our Stars , Turtles All the Way Down, and Paper Towns. What he is so good at is taking normal life and finding in it both humour (I actually laughed out loud in a public mplace and I don't do that) and poignant truths about the human condition. These he expresses tersely and in the words of the characters so they seem part of the story but are actually very profound.

• “One of his general policies in life was never to do anything standing up that could just as easily be done lying down.” (p 1)
• “Mothers lie. It's in the job description.” (p 2)
• “Colin Singleton could no more stay cool than a blue whale could stay skinny.” (p 4)
• “Girls are very fickle about the business of kissing. Sometimes they want to make out; sometimes they don't. They’re an impenetrable fortress of unknowability.” (p 74)
• “They like their coffee like they like their ex-boyfriends: bitter.” (p 75)
• “Monotony doesn't make for painlessness. In the first century CE, Roman authorities punished St Apollonia by crushing her teeth one by one with pliers. ... After a while, having each tooth individually destroyed probably gets repetitive, even dull. But it never stops hurting.” (p 94) 
• “I think you can do whatever the fug you want to in your life, and that's a pretty sweet gig.” (p 131)
• “See, popularity is complicated, yo. You have to spend a lot of time thinking about liking; you have to really like being liked, and also sorta like being disliked.” (p 136)
• “Getting a gun in Gutshot, Tennessee, is easier than getting chlamydia from a hooker.” (p 137)
• “Katrina's easier than a four-piece jigsaw puzzle.” (p 142)
• “Moonshine can make you blind, and what I've seen of blindness so far hasn't really impressed me.” (p 145) What I’ve seen of blindness, Very good.
• “If people could see me the way I see myself - if they could live in my memories - would anyone, anyone, love me?” (p 147)
• “I'm full of shit. I'm never myself.” (p 148)
• “Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.” (p 212)

Delightful. August 2018; 213 pages

"Wonder" by R J Palacio

August was born with a deformed face; after endless plastic surgery he looks like a cross between the elephant man and a zombie: "I won't describe what I look like. Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse." (p 3) "I feel ordinary. Inside. But I know ordinary kids don't make other ordinary kids run away screaming in playgrounds." (p 3)

And Auggie has a challenge. After years of home schooling he is going to a real school. He has to face all the normal perils and pitfalls of young adolescents growing up and in particular the issue of no one wants to be my friend.

This is a delightful story about growing up, full of the language of young kids and the magic of their on-off relationships and their insecurities. But what makes it even better than the usual is that it is told from multiple perspectives:

• August
• His big sister, Via. She has problems of her own. And they are not helped by being Auggie's sister. "I've gotten used to not complaining, and I've gotten used to not bothering Mom and Dad with little stuff. I've gotten used to figuring things out on my own: how to put toys together, how to organize my life so I don't miss friends' birthday parties, how to stay on top of my schoolwork so I never fall behind in class. I've never asked for help with my homework. Never needed reminding to finish a project or study for a test. If I was having trouble with a subject in school, I'd go home and study it until I figured it out on my own. I taught myself how to convert fractions into decimal points by going online. ... My worst day, worst fall, worst headache, worst bruise, worst cramp, worst mean thing anyone could say has always been nothing compared to what August has gone through." (p 83) 
• The girl who sat at his table at lunch when every other kid avoided him as if he had the plague
• His best friend although the relationship is a bit on and off. Jack has problems too. He is very poor compared to the other kids at school and he desperately wants to be accepted by the cool kids.
• Justin, the boyfriend of the big sister who lives half the time with his mum and half with his dad and neither of them seem to care (he avoids capital letters except for Names): "if it really was all random, the universe would abandon us completely and the universe doesn't. it takes care of its most fragile creations in ways we can't see. like with parents who adore you blindly. and a big sister who feels guilty for being human over you. and a little gravelly-voiced kid whose friends have left him over you. and even a pink-haired girl who carries your picture in her wallet. maybe it is a lottery, but the universe makes it all even out in the end. the universe takes care of all its birds." (p204). If it was a great idea having multiple perspectives on the action it was an even better idea to have a character who is virtually on the fringe of it all and who can therefore observe and pass judgement like the Chorus in a Greek drama. 
• The big sister's best friend who loves Auggie even though she is no longer friends with Via.

In fact the other characters were often even more interesting than the 'main'.

A great read. May 2017; 313 pages

"Dangerous Reality" by Malorie Blackman

Blackman is the author of the stunningly brilliant Noughts and Crosses trilogy; she writes books for children.

Dominic's mum has invented a robot controlled by virtual reality which goes berserk when being demonstrated to potential investors. It has been sabotaged, but by whom? As things develop and the robot becomes more dangerous, can Dominic and his mum and mum's new fiancee Jack find the saboteur and save the project?

A light, easy to read, young-teen novel with some fun characters, a nice take on step-parenting, and some witty dialogue. My favourite was:

'I've changed my mind.'
'Let's hope your new mind works better than the old one.'

March 2017; 192 pages

"The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky

This is a teen novel whose young hero, Charlie, is a strange lad who cries a lot and has had psychiatric problems in the past. It is an epistolary novel in the sense that it is all done in letters that Charlie writes to an unnamed friend.

Charlie should be in senior year but has been kept down a year. He has no real friends. Even his sister (who he sees having sex with her boyfriend) thinks he is a pervert (and his brother leaves home at the start of the novel to go to college where he plays football). Charlie gradually makes friends, particularly Patrick who kisses Brad but Brad doesn't want anyone to know he is gay so Patrick has to keep the relationship secret, and Patrick's sister Sam, on whom Charlie has an enormous crush, and Bob who sells Charlie weed, and Mary Elizabeth who is Charlie's first date. And Charlie does all the normal things that teenage boys do, partying, smoking weed, drinking beer, fooling around, reading book after book after book recommended by his English teacher, dating, dancing, listening to music, learning to drive, accompanying Patrick to a park so that Patrick can have anonymous gay sex with strangers, accompanying his sister to the abortion clinic, acting in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. But all the time this strange narrator has a different take on life. He is so sensitive and so caring that in the end Sam says: "It's great that you can listen and be a shoulder to someone, but what about when someone doesn't need a shoulder. What if they need the arms or something like that?" In short, Charlie is a wallflower.

It starts with the ominous news that Michael, one of Charlie's friends, is dead. "Dave with the awkward glasses told us that Michael killed himself." The counsellors "were afraid that some of us would try to kill ourselves or something because they looked very tense and one of them kept touching his beard." One of the delights about the book is that it is full of little observations like Dave-with-the-awkward-glasses and kept-touching-his-beard. I loved them! One boy, for example "has very nice brown hair, and he wears it long with a ponytail. I think he will regret this when he looks back on his life." Brilliant.

Unlike so many US novels which seem to have perfect families, Charlie's seems real. They have Thanksgiving at his grandfather's who is very fat and makes his wife cry and lock herself in the bathroom so that Charlie's cousins have "to go to the bathroom outside in the bushes" which makes him feel sad for his girl cousins who can't. Charlie can sense that his father doesn't like granddad and it appears that granddad his his daughters, Charlie's mother and Aunt Helen. Aunt Helen is a continual presence for Charlie despite or because of the fact that she was killed in a car accident on Christmas Eve (Charlie's birthday) when she was buying Charlie two presents.

Charlie's sister is on the edges of the action, having her own problems with boys (and getting pregnant). "My sister was the one who told me where babies come from. My sister was the one who laughed when I immediately asked her where babies go to."

Soon Charlie himself is fooling around with Mary Elizabeth although he doesn't really like her (he is really just being polite, trying to be a good friend although he doesn't really understand that he needs to be honest to do that): "All I could do was lie there and think about ... how much my arm was beginning to hurt. Thank God we heard the automatic garage door opening when we did."

There is a lovely moment when Charlie goes to the mall and, wallflower like, observes the people there. "Old men sitting alone. Young girls with blue eye shadow and awkward jaws. Little kids who looked tired. Fathers in nice coats who looked even more tired. Kids working behind the counters of the food places who looked like they hadn't had the will to live for hours. The machines kept opening and closing. The people kept giving their money and getting their change." A little kid gets lost in the mall. "Anyway, this older kid, who was really tough-looking with a leather jacket and long hair and everything, went up to the little boy and asked him what his name was." For a moment you worry about stranger danger but, in a nice if predictable twist, the tough kid is a good Samaritan who takes the little kid to the information desk where he is reunited with a grateful and tearful mum "She thanked the older kid who had helped, and all the older kid said was. 'Next time just watch him a little fucking better'." Now that's a great twist!

In the end, the theme of the book can be summarised by a conversation between Sam and Charlie:
"'Charlie, you're so stupid sometimes. Do you know that?'
'Yeah. I really do. Know that. Honest.'"

In some ways this is a bit like Adrian Mole growing up in America. It is a delightful book with some brilliant moments but a feeling of imminent doom (following Michael's suicide) throughout the book. Charlie is, after all, seriously weird. Is he going to come through the ordeals of growing up unscathed? At the almost exact half way point he reads to the assembled throng a poem about a straight A student slashing his wrists, listens to the sounds of Sam, the girl he adores, and her boyfriend Craig having sex and thinks, "for the first time in my life I understood the end of that poem. And I never wanted to. You have to believe me." And that is the end of part 2 and you think (not for the first or the last time, 'Oh shit').

August 2016, 231 pages

Other great teen novels reviewed in this blog are:

• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
• Paper Towns by John Green

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Paper Towns" by John Green

This is a teen novel set in the US. The hero, Q, is in his last year of high school. One night his next door neighbour, Margo Roth Spiegelman, whom he adores from afar, takes him for a whirlwind all-nighter of revenge on her boyfriend who is cheating with her best friend. The next day she has disappeared. Q, with his nerdy friends Radar, obsessed with editing Onmictionary, and Ben, obsessed with losing his virginity, have to solve the clues that Margo has left to find her, or her dead body.

This book has an unusual structure. After a prologue of a few pages when 9-year-olds Q and Margo find a dead guy in the local park, there are 13 pages of setting the scene and introducing the characters during a day at school followed by the revenge night which continues for about 60 pages. We are now a quarter of the way through the book and we have been having fun, even though very little has actually happened. Then Margo disappears although no one really worries about that for another 15 pages. Then the clue hunt starts and goes on for another 36 pages before a clue is found which can move the narrative on and we are now nearly half way through. But the last clue points to a deserted minimall at Q is convinced that all the clues are a way of Margo telling him where to find her dead body after she has committed suicide and so the three friends break into the derelict minimall. At this point I was so excited I had to keep my eyes firmly on the left hand page because I wanted but dreaded what might be written on the right hand page. This was as exciting as the middle of the brilliant Room and again it was more or less bang in the centre of the book. But then we enter a phase where nothing much happens again. We have a very funny bit where Ben gets very drunk at the prom party and Q goes off him a bit but they plan to go to graduation naked underneath their gowns.  But the flatness extends for nearly a quarter of the book before Q finds the vital clue and he and his mates have to drive for twenty four hours in a camper van. The road trip is brilliant. There are some very funny moments and some moments of tension but there is very little contribution to the actual plot. Then comes the final ten per cent of the book which brings the bitter end.

So much for the plot. In many ways it was a stop start sort of book. There was enough to keep me going when the momentum flagged slightly. But it was episodic. The night of revenge did not seem to link up particularly well with 'Where's Margo' theme and the wonderful road trip was, in many ways, a separate event.

The characterisation was neatly done. They were introduced quickly and given more depth as and when they needed it. They had interesting story curves although they were rather dropped at the end of the book when they had served their usefulness.

There was plenty of humour. The way that it alternated with the tension was very clever. The three nerds, Q, Radar and Ben, laughed and joked like three really good mates, even though Q seemed to be the permanent outsider. There are some brilliant wisecracks:

• "It's a penis," Margo said, "in the same sense that Rhode Island is a state: it may have an illustrious history but is sure isn't big."
• When his therapist parents give Q a key for a new car and he goes outside and finds that it is a minivan just like his mum's and he is so disappointed that he thinks 'these people specialise in the analysis and understanding of the human psyche.'
• After Q and Radar have restrained Ben who has attacked someone who called his girlfriend a bitch, Ben shouts: "I have a lot of anger right now! I was enjoying punching the guy! I want to go back to punching him!"

And there were moments when the images were wonderful: Radar, naked underneath his graduation gown, persuades Q to buy him a tee shirt in a fuel stop on the road trip. There are two problems with this: L means extra extra large in this state (Georgia) and it has a confederate flag on the front. Radar is black.

Flicking through it again I find that there are so many funny moments. When Ben has just kissed his girlfriend and asks Q for advice as to whether he did it right, Q tells him that "The human tongue is like wasabi: it's very powerful and should be used sparingly." He then discovers that Ben's girlfriend is standing behind him. She tells him that "Ben's tongue is like sunscreen ... It's good for your health and should be applied liberally." Wow. And wow and wow and wow.

This is a very funny comic novel with some very exciting moments and some tragic teenage angst. A great read.

September 2015; 306 pages

Other teen fiction books by the brilliant John Green include An Abundance of Katherines , Turtles All the Way Down, and the stupendous  The Fault in Our Stars
You might also enjoy teen fiction The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chobsky

"Throne of glass" by Sarah J Maas

Celaena Sardothien is an 18 year old girl who is a slave in the salt mines because she has been convicted for being Ardarlan's most notorious assassin. Then Dorian, the gorgeous Crown Prince makes her an offer she cannpt refuse: to go with him to Riftholm's glass castle to compete with 23 other assorted cut-throats to see who will become the King's Champion. But in the castle the other competitors are meeting horrible deaths and Celaena becomes involved in the magic of the wyrd.

It's fantasy. It is so unreal. Not only is Celaena a brilliant archer, knife-thrower, swords-woman, climber and martial artist, not only is she impossibly beautiful, but also she is expert at playing the pianoforte, she loves reading and she is a chess grand master. And puppies love her. The only thing she can't do is play billiards. I knew it would be too good to have any chance of suspending disbelief when I discovered that she had killed, in an attempt to escape from the salt mines, her overseer and twenty-three guards. Not two, not three, but twenty three. Whatever.

It wasn't even written well. The plot rambled, introducing new elements to keep up some sort of momentum. There was very little difficulty in guessing the identity of the killer and the only real suspense was whether Celaena would finally fall for the Crown Prince or the Captain of the Guard. And the words. I can tolerate 'dove' and 'gotten'; they are American usages and I suppose I have to accept 'obligate' in the same context. But I was disappointed by the incorrect use of 'hopefully' and I was appalled when I encountered 'It'd'.

Dreadful stuff. It has spawned sequels. I shudder. December 2013; 406 pages

"The Guardian" by Nicholas Sparks

Newly widowed Julie has to choose between sophisticated engineer Richard and late husband's best friend, grease monkey Mike. Singer, the dog bequeathed by the late husband, obviously prefers Mike to Richard and we all know dogs can't be wrong about things like that because they have instinct. Then on page 16 Julie thinks of Mike while showering: "Now there was a guy who would make some woman happy one day."

If you are going to use a cliché to signal your happy ending you might as well do it before too many pages have gone. You wouldn't want your readers to suffer suspense, would you?

Singer keeps growling at Richard and Julie begins to worry why she doesn't feel anything for him, despite his charm. Obviously he is bad news. Then on page 93 Richard asks Julie why she is not wearing a locket he has given her. He has a "plastic expression" but he suddenly "seemed to snap out of the spell he'd been under". He is clearly a classic weirdo.

Many authors would now play with your beliefs. They would offer alternative villains. They would suggest alternative reasons for Richard's behaviour. Richard might do something truly altruistic. Not Sparks. By page 140 Julie is in love with Mike (no surprises there), by page 177 we suspect Richard killed his father, on page 206 he beats up two kids with a baseball bat and then pretends they stabbed him so they go to jail instead of him.

The book then turns into a thriller powered by the fact that the police can't imagine that Richard might be using a false name or that he might have stolen a car.  One male police officer is so small town and stupid that he makes Amos from the Dukes of Hazard look like a Nobel Laureate.

To be fair, Sparks writes some great one liners and he has a nice turn with dialogue (when he skips the clichés). But the plot was unbelievably predictable and the characters either goodies or baddies with absolutely no shades of grey.

A light read. August 2013; 431 pages