Review: 52 Reasons to Hate My Father

By Jessica Brody
Available now from Farrar Straus Giroux (Macmillan)
Review copy

When I stopped by the Macmillan both during TLA, I told the woman working that I was suffering from paranormal fatigue.  Thus, she sold me on two upcoming contemporaries.  The first of those two is 52 REASONS TO HATE MY FATHER, about a rich girl forced to work in menial jobs for a year before she can access her trust fund.  It sounded like fun and I started to read it that very night.

I read a couple of chapters and put it down for more than a month.  Lexington Larrabee is a tough woman to handle in the beginning.  She's captious and spoiled, steamrolling over people without a second thought and throwing tantrums that would embarrass a five-year-old.  You want her to take the fifty-two minimum wage jobs her father lines up for her so that she can see what the real world is like.  Anything to make her more bearable.  But it's hard to side with her father.  He's distant and cold.  Even when changing the course of his daughter's life, he delivers the news through an intermediary.

Soon Lexi is working and learning nothing more than being a maid or a grocery store clerk really sucks.  The story really starts moving as Lexi begins to change her life and become more involved with the world around her.  On top of being a better person, a bunch of subplots kick in.

Luke, the intern who keeps track of Lexi's liaison, is a decent love interest.  He's quite the foil to Lexi - in college on a scholarship, serious and driven, cautious and a bad dresser.  I don't think girls will be running around proclaiming that they're Team Luke, but he had good chemistry with Lexi.  I always love relationships more when they're built up through lots of interaction and conversation.

By the time I got halfway through 52 REASONS TO HATE MY FATHER, I couldn't put it down.  After the rough start it's an infectious summer read.  It lives up to the promise of its cover.  If you're suffering from paranormal fatigue, you could do worse than Jessica Brody's 52 REASONS TO HATE MY FATHER.

Review: Team Human

By Justine Larbalestier and Sarah Rees Brennan
Available now from HarperTeen (HarperCollins)
Review copy

I was pumped for this release long before I got my hands on it.  A book by Justine Larbalestier and the divinely hilarious Sarah Rees Brennan?  And in a world where taglines exist mostly to be made fun of, "Friends don't let friends date vampires" is a winner.

At first I was totally on board with Mel Kuan.  She thinks the vampires are boring.  Most of them don't have jobs, aside from modeling perhaps.  They just sort of go about being vampires.  And that means never enjoying a sunny day . . . or laughing.  Larbalestier and Brennan's twist on the vampire is an inventive and fitting one.  Their emotions are dulled in order to help them survive the centuries.  That means never ever experiencing the extreme of laughter.  It drives some vamps to suicide.  It certainly wouldn't suit Mel, a jokester who thrives on laughter.

Their other twist comes in the transformation to a vampire.  Prospective vamps have an eight in ten chance of it going right.  One in ten flat out dies; another one in ten turns into a zombie.  It's definitely something to consider before crossing over.  If you're average, you get eternity.  If you're unlucky, it's death or worse.  Even more than in other novels, becoming a vampire is not a move one should undertake lightly.  Because TEAM HUMAN has good worldbuilding, there's an entire system devoted to transitioning.  Prospective vamps have to undergo counseling and tour a zombie facility.

Mel's world is shaken when vampiric Francis enrolls in her high school.  Pretty soon he's dating  her best friend Cathy, a dreamer who loves poetry and history.  Francis knows quite a bit about both.  After all, he's had plenty of time to study poetry and he's lived history.  Mel's objections to Francis work best when she focuses on how old he is and that vampires still drink human blood even if they don't swan about murdering people.  It's weird and kind of gross.  Not to mention Cathy has her whole life ahead of her.  As many people say in YA romance reviews, you don't want to be stuck with your first boyfriend for eternity.

But Mel goes too far in expressing her dislike of vamps.  She uses loaded language in order to make Francis uncomfortable.  When she meets Kit, who was raised by vampires, she talks about his family in an uncomplimentary way to his face.  Eventually, Kit does call her out on her behavior.  It was a moment that made me cheer.  And I would wholeheartedly embrace that moment, but the book is TEAM HUMAN.  Why am I cheering for Team Vampire?  Surely Team Human can mount a better defense than this.

But TEAM HUMAN isn't entirely about Mel and Cathy's romantic woes.  Their friend Anna's father ran away with a vampire over summer and her mother is acting extra strange.  She asks Mel to look into the situation.  Cue Mel snooping whenever she isn't trying to drive Francis off.

TEAM HUMAN had me in stitches.  I enjoyed both of the central relationships.  I loved how firm the characters were about who they were and how resistant they were to peer pressure.  I feared for Mel as her investigation took a turn for the sinister.  But Team Vampire still seems pretty darn spiffy.

Movie Monday: Brave

My younger cousins are in town and thus I've been spending a lot of time with them.  That includes taking them to Brave on Friday, because I knew they'd want to see that one.  (Okay, okay, I wanted to see it to.)  So how did Pixar do with their first movie featuring a female protagonist?

I've seen a great deal of criticism praising the movie and quibbling with it.  Brave is perhaps the most political children's movie to come out in years.  Everybody has an opinion on whether it is properly feminist or not.  (And I can certainly make some noises of disapproval there - four named female characters to eleven male?)  But I loved how well it displayed two different aspects of femininity without dismissing either one.

Screencap from http://deathbydisney.tumblr.com

Queen Elinor is a force of nature.  She can walk through a fight and quell it with a single look.  She's not just wearing the pants in the family - she lays down the law for the entire land.  But Merida doesn't want to be her mother.  Marrying, raising children, and maintaining peace are all worthy pursuits, but all too domestic for Merida.  She's more like her father, the great warrior king of DunBroch.  (Although she isn't entirely opposed to marriage - she complains to her horse Angus that it's too soon and she's not ready, implying she may be more open to it in the future.)  Merida attempts to use a spell to thwart Elinor's efforts to marry her to one of the firstborn sons of the other three clans, but the magic puts her mother's life at risk.  Merida and Elinor must work together to end the spell.

I loved the action-adventure take on the mother-daughter relationship.  Brave was funny, beautiful, and moving.  My favorite moment was when Merida parallels an act of her mother's earlier in the film, but not copying Elinor exactly because she's a very different person.  They see the value in each other's world view.  Brave doesn't make Merida or Elinor right.  They both had something to learn on their journey.  I thought it was a lovely message.

Brave is not Pixar's best, sadly.  But Pixar's best is astronomical and Brave is certainly no Cars 2.  It's a wonderful movie that will appeal younger and older viewers.  And even if you think you won't like the mother-daughter story, see it for the soundtrack and the awesome bear fights.

Review: Capture the Flag

By Kate Messner
Available now from Scholastic Press
Review copy

I set this review to post on the release date, but I read it during the Seventh Annual 48 Hour Book Challenge.  I also wrote it during that challenge, starting at about 2:20 in the morning.  If this gets posted with serious errors, please forgive me. I went to sleep midway through writing the review because I kept misspelling things.

I choose to read CAPTURE THE FLAG because I needed a quick, easy read.  During a gala at the Smithsonian, the newly restored Star-Spangled Banner is stolen.  A blizzard shuts down the airport for a day, leaving the thieves stranded as well as holiday travelers.  Three children decide that they're going to discover the identity of the thieves.

Anna Revere-Hobbs, the ringleader, wants to be a reporter like her mother.  Henry Thorn wants to play his video games and not go home since his dad is remarrying and moving.  José McGilligan loves reading Harry Potter and collecting quotes.  All three of them, coincidentally, turn out to be children of a secret society protecting art.  CAPTURE THE FLAG ends with the possibility of more adventures for these three.

Not billed on the cover or flap and likely not returning is the even younger Sinan, an eight-year-old Pakistani boy accompanying his parents in the Sounds for the Small Planet symphony.  The three befriend him and become personally dedicated to finding the cause when the symphony is accused of stealing the flag.

The thieves are pretty obvious, but younger readers might fall for the red herring.  I expected CAPTURE THE FLAG to contain some history, which it does, but I was not expecting the subtle exploration of racism.  For example, it is not coincidental that a group of dark-skinned foreigners are used as the fall guys.

There are some fun set pieces where the kids crawl around the baggage area, but I don't think there's much in CAPTURE THE FLAG to interest older readers.  It's a good, timely read for young readers but too simple for a crossover audience.

Reading Partners

Reading Partners is a program that matches children to tutors in order to transform struggling readers into avid readers.  There are locations in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Dallas, Baltimore, New York, and Washington DC with plans to expand.

They have a lovely FAQ that explains who can volunteer, who volunteers will work with, and more.  Supporters can donate or buy gear.  Reading Partners has a four-star rating from Charity Navigator.