T.J. is 1/4 black and 1/4 Japanese in a town of racist rednecks in inland Washington; his single mother, addicted to drugs, abandoned him at two years old. Luckily, she abandoned him to a very nice normal family and he grows up to be probably the happiest character in the book. Take that as a warning sign. He ends up gathering a motley cast of losers and misfits for the swim team, in a quest to get a letter jacket for Chris, the brain-damaged kid who’s been bullied out of wearing his dead brother’s letter jacket.

What’s interesting about this book is that if my suspension of disbelief had snapped for even a second, I would have sighed and rolled my eyes and put the book down, because you could play Problem Novel Bingo with it, and it has an improbable density of awful things that happen, and it’s just too clinical, too therapeutic. And depressing. Did I mention depressing?

But Crutcher has such a firm handle on T.J’s voice - it’s not all snappy and hip in the way of some YA novels, it’s just solid and convincing all the way through. I end up believing all of it. I end up getting sucked into it. I end up getting my heart broken by it even as I get annoyed by the way the plots for coming-of-age novels always seem to need to sacrifice some important character at the end.

T.J. is very believable as a character who feels an idealistic need to rebel against the system and change things, but who also has a chip on his shoulder, and who can’t always neatly draw the line between those two things. This is a guy I knew in high school, definitely. Perhaps no other character in the book is quite as well drawn - I don’t think I really believe in the villainy of the villains - but T.J. manages to hold the whole book together.

Most historical fiction books for young people take as their object to show a Typical Person with a Typical Problem in a particular era; and most historical fiction for young people reflects a sort of bland consensus view of history, something that is acceptable to teach in schools.Octavian Nothing is not most historical fiction.

Picking up where the first book left off, Octavian — a slave raised in luxury with a first-rate education as part of an experiment — enlists with the Royal Ethiopian Regiment, which has promised to free any Rebel-owned slaves that join up. There he encounters war, friendship, heartbreak, betrayal, the difficulty of fitting in when he fits in nowhere. He has spent his childhood learning Latin and violin fugues, where his comrades have spent theirs on plantations. Octavian’s cultural heritage is extremely complex. He has been given music and religion - but has been deprived of the music and religion of his own people. The novel refuses to make an easy calculation of what he has gained and lost.

We see Octavian’s growing maturity as he acquires wisdom — and also cynicism. Is selfishness at the core of human nature, human existence? Can success — or survival — only be achieved at the expense of others? And if so, how do we reconcile ourselves with that?

The issue of historical memory is one I’ve been deeply interested in for some years now. There is probably no nation on earth that has never, somewhere in its history, committed war crimes or genocide, that has no scars on its conscience. It’s easy to say, it’s history, it’s in the past. It’s too easy; the past is never past. Octavian Nothing is willing to confront that, to ask hard questions. To refuse to provide easy answers to them. It asks how we can reconcile ourselves with our past — with our present — and says, maybe we don’t. Maybe we can’t.

What a profoundly troubling and beautiful piece of work.

Octavian Nothing II will be published in October.

Libby is one of the popular kids at school, but she’s dissatisfied, bored of everything including her popular friends and her own popularity. On a whim, she signs up for an internship at the zoo, where she is mortified to be working with an astronomy nerd (who wants to be an exobiologist) and a little person, Tina (”Tiny”), who her group has always mocked.

This book has what I love from Cecil Castellucci: the conviction that teenagers can be awesome people when they have goals and useful things to do, the conviction that creativity and art and science and craftsmanship and hard work are at least as important and interesting as who is kissing who, the sharp observation of human nature and social situations. Libby’s makeover isn’t too fast or too dramatic; she wanders around for much of the book bored and restless and sick of herself, as annoyed with the cool people as the uncool people and with no idea what to do about it. But in comparison with Castellucci’s other books, I thought this one was a little thin and shallow.

A weak(er) Castellucci book is still nothing to sneeze at. Absorbing and enjoyable.

Jane and Ally are the misfits at St. Teresa’s, the local all-girl Catholic high school; Jane is short, brilliant, and rebellious, while Ally has a Thing for vampires and witches (including the book Fondled by Shadows, which I will never stop finding awesome.)

The day after an absolutely magnificent humiliation, Ally comes to school with a new haircut and a new friend. Things are looking just a little too good to be true: she’s sold her soul to the devil, and Jane has to figure out how to get it back by Halloween.

I liked Johnson’s Thirteen Little Blue Envelopes but didn’t love it; it was competent, well-executed, but lacked a certain spark. Devilish has that spark. It’s fun and hard to put down, and Jane has a sense of humor about St. Teresa’s that’s never as bitter and angry as her reputation would suggest. I love how it puts a friendship between girls at the center of the story and shunts the romance bits off to the side, and the way that friendship is depicted rings really true to me.

I still felt like Johnson could’ve taken this just a little bit darker, a little bit sharper — and that might have made it a book I jumped all up and down over, but I still enjoyed it greatly.

A generation ship, disabled, limps in orbit around an unstable binary star that could self-immolate at any moment. For five hundred years, Engine and Rule have established quasi-medieval fiefdoms with the Exalt - whose bodies are augmented by a nanotech symbiont - ruling over the Mean. And the artificial intelligence that once controlled the ship’s systems has splintered into ‘angels’ - chief among them Samael, the angel of death (or life support, at any rate) and Jacob Dust, the angel of memory.

Knight-errant Perceval loses a duel - and her wings. She’s taken prisoner by Ariane of Rule. But the Mean servant girl assigned to take care of her is Rien - her long-lost sister. (This book had me at ‘maimed wingless girl knight-errant,’ and never let go). Before long they’ve escaped from Rule on a quest to find their father and prevent the coming war between Engine and Rule.

This is a book stuffed with Cool Bits, especially if you’re me, but even if you’re not. I think it’s terribly neat that there’s medieval window-dressing and a fantasy quest plot, all packaged - with perfect rationality - in a rigorous science fictional universe. There’s a basilisk! There’s a hermaphroditic necromancer! There are peaches that contain the memories of the dead! And at the same time, all of these Cool Bits are pointed at heavy, intense themes and heartbreaking storytelling. Bear is interrogating power and privilege and love and submission and domination and - as always - what it takes to face terrible choices with honor, dignity, and integrity.

This is also the first Elizabeth Bear novel I understood all the way through without having to read anything twice over. I like the opaqueness in some of her work, but I also like the clarity in this one.

Nine short stories of magical realism, stories that shift effortlessly from fairy-tale mode to a much more naturalistic mode to surreal absurdity.

The thing about these stories–the frustrating, beautiful thing–is that they are not merely hard to understand. They resist all efforts to understand them. They hint at the feeling that, oh, if only you were smart enough, if only you spent enough time decoding the symbolism and the turns of phrase, everything would suddenly become bright-clear and revelatory, and then they dismiss that idea–directly or more subtly. These are stories about the ways in which stories satisfy or don’t satisfy, make you comfortable or uncomfortable, and it’s no surprise that the stories themselves are unsatisfactory and uncomfortable. And it’s not even a bad thing.

I don’t know any other writer who evokes so well the way I feel about stories, a mix of absurd devotion and intense suspicion of that devotion. Kurt Vonnegut, perhaps. And they evoke, too, the absurdity and magic and meaningfulness and meaninglessness of contemporary life, in a way that doesn’t feel bleak or depressing–Link makes me feel like both her stories, and the world, are complicated, weird, and incomprehensible, but they aren’t things that need to be understood.

Dewey Kerrigan, raised by her grandmother until she has a stroke and goes into a nursing home, is sent to live with her father is New Mexico. Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1943: the place where chemists, physicists, and other scientists are working on creating the atomic bomb. All of this is shrouded in secrecy, and Dewey herself knows nothing of it. Her life is concerned with smaller things: having conversations with Enrico Fermi and Richard Feynman, bonding with a loving but overworked father, working on projects with scrap metal and electronics. Then her father is sent away, to Washington, and Dewey is left with family friends and their daughter Suze. Deeply awkward around each other at first, Suze and Dewey slowly form a friendship.

Klages really gets what it’s like growing up as a nerd girl: the way adults can be easier to talk to than people your own age, the way one’s projects can be so fascinating that you don’t even care (that much…) when you’re unpopular, how Popular Mechanics is the most exciting magazine in existence, how great it is when you can share obscure knowledge with a friend like a secret code. I don’t know if I really believe the ending–it has one of those Big Misunderstandings I’m thoroughly sick of–but it’s such a warm and knowing picture of friendship and growing up, with the historical information woven in unobtrusively.

I think I like the book’s approach to the atomic bomb best of all. It’s not foregrounded at all. It’s top secret, and up until almost the end of the book, you only get vague rumors of a gadget that could end the war. But when it does show up, Klages doesn’t spend a lot of time arguing for and agaist the use of the atomic bomb. Dewey certainly doesn’t get to decide that. The scientists working on the bomb can argue about whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but ultimately, it’s out of their hands. Instead, Klage approaches it from three different perspectives–there’s the scientific perspective, and given Dewey’s fascination with science and engineering throughout the book, it’s easy to get caught up in this idea of– Wow! Science did this! And then there’s the political perspective, pro-ending the war as quickly as possible, with as little loss of (American) life as possible. Dewey is a child of her time, casual about using slurs against the Japanese. And finally, you just have to be floored with fear and trembling at the idea that human beings can obliterate each other on such a massive scale. The last chapter is wonderful when it comes to bringing all of these things together without hitting you over the head with them. 

It’s taken me a very long time to write up this book because it’s a bit hard to get my head around it. I wasn’t a huge fan of the other Lynch I’ve read, Inexcusable, because it tried hard to leave a lot of blank spots–but they were obvious blank spots, that drew a great deal of attention to themselves, and it ended up being obvious in all the wrong ways. At the same time, I do appreciate what Lynch was trying to do and I admire the book for its ambition.

Freewill is way more obscure. Even the most straightforward aspects of the plot unfold very slowly, reluctantly: Will is in a woodworking class at a vocational high school. It’s not where he’s supposed to be; it’s not what he’s supposed to be doing. A student commits suicide by drowning. Other students build a memorial, with one of Will’s structures as the centerpiece…

It’s told in second person, and is probably the only YA novel I’ve ever read in second person (I could be wrong on that count). The second person perspective feels very natural as the voice of someone mired in grief and depression, though - a voice that is often self-accusatory, always second-guessing. Alternately trying to do the right thing, or at least find a right thing, and not caring.

I admire all of that, and yet, I admire it more than I like it. It seems like too much work to get through a novel that still remains cryptic, impenetrable.

17-year-old hacker, tinkerer, and gamer Marcus finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time when he skips school and gets caught in the worst incident of terrorism in the U.S. He gets separated from his friends, detained by Homeland Security.

As the government starts encroaching more and more on civil liberties, Marcus is determined to get back at DHS, stop the questioning and detainment of innocent civilians, and generally take back the government from the law-and-order-at-all-costs brigade. Tall order for a junior in high school.

This is not a far-future dystopia. It is about the world now. (Based on Marcus having a Sega Dreamcast when he was seven, and discussions of the upcoming midterm elections, I’d put the date at 2010. I’m not sure if the technology is there yet, but certainly Doctorow would know more about that than I would!) It is, specifically, about the situation in the U.S. in the present day, not some handwavy analogy of a dystopia. It is also a manual to do exactly what Marcus does. Mind you, it’s not filled with lines of code and technical detail. (You can look up all that stuff on Wikipedia). It’s just enough to make you go, “Oh, cool!” - or else, “Oh, no!”… and to inspire you to take a few pages from Marcus’s playbook.

Which makes it a really important book.

But it’s something else again that makes it a whole lot of fun. Doctorow - well, he named his daughter Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus. That just about says it all. It’s a fast-paced technothriller packed with offhand nifty ideas and references and in-jokes. If you’re at all familiar with Scrotumgate from last year, you’ll know why this was my favorite:

“Did she use the scrotum line on you? I hate it when she does that. She just loves the word ’scrotum,’ you know. It’s nothing personal.”

I’m thrilled when I read a boy book that’s filled with information and technology and the things that guys will voluntarily read about if they won’t voluntarily read about things like feelings, and is also plenty good on its own literary merits. It’s icing on the cake when that book is also politically conscious, socially relevant, and smart as all get-out. (Of course, that’s not to say that girls shouldn’t read it too!)

In short: it’s made of awesome.

Leonard Pelkey is almost fourteen years old, an orphan, and flamboyantly effete in a way that suggests he will grow up to be gay, if he isn’t there yet. He comes to live with his cousins, Deirdre and Phoebe, and to work in their mother’s beauty parlor. He loves the work, the customers love him; his cousins and classmates feel differently.

And then he disappears.

This book reads like a first novel - it’s so uneven. It’s the martyry adolescent fantasy of “People dislike me because I’m different, but I’m just special and unique, and they’ll all miss me when I’m gone!” — and Leonard is also a complicated and interesting character. It’s too long, and too diffuse, but also beautifully written and a pleasure to read. It has moments of moralizing and Social Messages, and also moments of great subtlety and complexity.

I didn’t exactly like it, but it’s far too good a book to dismiss.