The moment that Day, street rebel against the Republic, saves June, a young and brilliant soldier of the Republic, from an illegal Skiz fight, we know the two are destined to walk the same path. As they learn Republic secrets they know they will have to fight the regime, possibly with the Patriots (an organized group of dissidents), and unseat the Elector.

Legend takes place in a future Los Angeles, and is narrated alternately by Day (golden-brown ink) and June (black ink). Day is a criminal in that he fights an evil, oppressive government, one which monitors an ongoing plague, but doesn’t allow the poor multitudes to receive expensive vaccinations or cures, both of which exist. Day also scrounges on the streets to provide for his family of two brothers and a mother although his younger brother and mother believe he’s dead. His image is constantly flashed on the city’s many JumboTrons as he is one of country’s most wanted criminals.

Day’s criminal life began when, at age ten, he failed his Trial. “It’s almost always the slum-sector kids who fail. If you’re in this unlucky category, the Republic sends officials to your family’s home. They made your parents sign a contract giving the government full custody over you. They say that you’ve been sent away to the Republic’s labor camps and that your family will not see you again. Your parents have to nod and agree.”

June is from a wealthy family, but her parents are dead. It’s her brother Metias who cares for this prodigy of a girl. That is, until he, too, is killed by a rebel. After he dies, there is nothing that June wants more than revenge. And she’s the perfect person to exact that revenge. She’s the only person in the Republic to ever have gotten a perfect score of 1500 on her Trial. She’s smart, she notices detail, and she’s quite the warrior.

The publishers of Legend want you to connect it to The Hunger Games. Again, as I mentioned with Divergent, the book cover design will cause a subconscious connection with the Mockingjay pin.

Fans of dystopian fiction, particularly The Hunger Games have told me that the romance is equally as important as the fight against the dictatorships. And although I’ve only read stellar reviews of Legend, the romance between Day and June is the one part of the book I find fault with. It seems to happen because it is supposed to. Both teens easily let go of whatever issues they had with the other, especially Day. His forgiveness of June is a tough sell, and the reader should be given more of the process. These two have the hots for one another, but no sparks come off the page, as they do with Katniss and Peta or Trice and Four. Still, this is the first book in a trilogy, and we’ll have the chance to understand the couple’s affection in the next installment. Meanwhile, we get to enjoy a quick, tightly written piece of science fiction full of adventure. Based on my reading, I’m guessing we’ll see some soylent green action, but who knows? I’ll have to get my hands on book two.

“Every faction conditions its members to think and act a certain way. And most people do it. For most people, it’s not hard to learn, to find a pattern of thought that works and stay that way. . . . But our minds move in a dozen different directions. We can’t be contained to one way of thinking. And that terrifies our leaders. It means we can’t be controlled.”

Beatrice Prior is a Divergent. And she’d better keep that a secret. Because in the future, specifically in the future Chicago of the novel, society is broken down into five factions based on the qualities of character that individuals demonstrate. The motto “Faction before blood” means that families are less important than factions. At sixteen, children attend a ceremony in which they choose the faction they will live with from then on. To choose a faction different from that of his parents means that the teen will be separated from his family for life.

Beatrice is from the Abnegation faction, the group of people who are self-sacrificing. They run the government since it is unlikely that they will make selfish grabs for power. The four other factors are: Candor (always tells the truth, no matter how rude or mean); Amity (friendship); Erudite (intelligent and bookish—love learning); and Dauntless (brave, fierce).

Living in the Abnegation faction is hard. Everyone is expected to always give up comforts for others. They are nice, they take turns, they listen to others, they don’t worry about fashion (all clothes are gray), and they don’t speak up before hearing someone else’s issues. Still, despite the lack of individualism in this, as a group, Abnegation plays nice. Not all groups do.

Like all sixteen year olds, Beatrice goes through a simulation that, based on her reaction to various situations, will indicate to which of the five factions she belongs. But her simulation results are inconclusive. She reacts to the virtual dangers as an Abnegation, a Dauntless, and an Erudite. The woman monitoring the simulation whispers that she is a Divergent. This is dangerous. She is not to tell anyone, but she should choose a faction. Unsure of what she should do, Beatrice (hence forward Tris) chooses Dauntless.

The Dauntless, traditionally brave, have the job of protecting the city. But in recent times, the leaders are more sadistic than courageous and the initiates are treated cruelly and encouraged to be brutal to one another. Only ten initiates will be accepted into the faction. Those who are cut will be factionless for the rest of their lives, impoverished nobodies, living on the street. The vicious, even gruesome, initiation process is heart-stopping. You won’t be able to stop reading through it—and it covers most of the book.

At the same time the initiates are vying for a spot in Dauntless, there is a rumor that Abnegation is misusing its power and that the Erudite want war and hope the Dauntless will cooperate. One of the young trainers of the initiates is Four, who tells Tris, “They don’t want you to act a certain way. They want you to think a certain way.” As a Divergent, her mind isn’t easy for others to control, so she’s a primary target, a girl who may be able to help Abnegation because of her many qualities.

If you’re looking for a good read after finishing The Hunger Games trilogy, this is a great choice. (I think the cover even tries for a subconscious Hunger Games feeling.) Be mindful that it’s for mature readers who aren’t sickened by the violence, which is excessive and somewhat repetitive. And, yes, the romance is there, too, a very sweet one that will have you rooting for Tris and Four. This is obviously the beginning of a trilogy. We don’t even know how the world outside of Chicago functions—whether this is something neglected by the writer as she was swept away with her descriptions of Dauntless sadism or purposeful, something we will learn as society breaks apart and moves outward. But we will certainly check out ‘book two’ because we want to find out.

“I think of all the things he can do—write, carve, paint—and suddenly, watching him stand in the dark at the edge of the empty settlement, something powerful washes over me. There is no place for someone like him in the Society, I think, for someone who can create. He can do so many things of incomparable value, things no one else can do, and the Society doesn’t care about that at all.”

Cassia has gotten her parents permission to seek Ky.They, after all, understand love. Her chance to make her way to the Outer Provinces, where she hopes to find Ky after he’s been arrested by the Society’s Officials, comes just as she is going to be transferred from a labor camp to her final work destination.

But Ky isn’t in the Outer Provinces. He’s being used as a decoy to draw fire from the Enemy, a position that the Society promises will only last six month. And then he will no longer be an Aberration but be admitted to normalcy and back into the Society. The thing is that no decoy has ever lasted six months. They are all killed under enemy fire. So Ky, too, needs to figure out how to escape and seek Cassia.

With both of our protagonists on the run, we readers enter a world far from the Society of the first book in this series (Matched, reviewed here). The center of this trilogy takes us through the Carvings and the Outer Provinces, full both with the stark beauty of nature and danger. Ally Condie, the author, said that she based the wilderness beyond the Society on her Southern Utah environment, and if you’ve ever been to any of Utah’s National Parks, you’ll perfectly picture the setting—caves, canyons, tight passages through sandstone.

A cast of new characters—Eli, Indie, Vick, Hunter—helps draw us into this primitive world. We still have the red, green, and blue pills of the Society’s calming, dying, forgetting, and surviving. But Ky and Cassie are both wondering about the larger questions that being on the run evokes: Is staying in the Society and having a chance at a second life worth it? If someone breaks free and takes her chances with death, will she also have the chance to play a part in the choices that affect her life? How finally, do we sort information and decide?

Crossed is best read after Matched. It’s a nice set up for the final showdown that we expect in the third book. I highly recommend this series to fans of The Hunger Games who are wondering what they can read now. As one student told me yesterday, she liked the dystopian future of The Hunger Games, but it’s one of her favorite books because of the romance. The same can be said of the Matched series. Cassia’s match, Xander, the third member of the love triangle, figures into Crossed.

Just a little side note: Crossed has a lot of good one-liners, quotable quotes. Here’s one that has me thinking about what will happen in the final book: “Because in the end you can’t always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go.”

All right—this really is a book for mature readers, but it’s such wonderful storytelling on so many levels that I want to include a review of it. Add to that the fact that students often ask for good novels about sports, and other that a few short books written for struggling readers and a few more by Walter Dean Myers, I can’t think of any I’ve read that I genuinely like.

So if you want baseball action and you read at grade level or above; if you’re mature enough to read about how crazy and tangled relationships can get for both young adults in college and for older folks facing the end of midlife, you should try The Art of Fielding.

Mike Schwartz, catcher for the Westish College (Wisconsin) Harpooners is at a baseball tournament when he spots high school shortstop Henry Skrimshander. Henry is a natural, pure and simple: graceful, elegant, a joy to watch. Mike knows that Henry can help turn around the fate of the hapless Harpooners. And the Harpooners are Mike’s life blood.WestishCollegeis both his home and his family, as he is an orphan who has had a hard-scrabble life.

Once at Westish, Henry’s talent, before hidden from the public by his obscure beginnings, become evident to all. While the Harpooners succeed (with some extra help from a very good pitcher, Starblind), Mike knows that Henry can be a pro if he works hard enough. Mike is driven, with a singular intensity that borders on nutty, to help Henry make it to the show.

After 50 errorless games, Henry may soon tie the record (51) of a famous (and fictional) retired shortstop and author of a book (also The Art of Fielding) that Henry lives and dies by.

In that 51^st game, Henry lets go of a wild throw that alters the course of the team and the lives of the characters: Henry’s; Mike’s; that of Henry’s roommate, Owen Dunne, a gay man (yes, it matters a lot in the novel) and lover of literature who reads in the dugout while awaiting his turn to bat; the school’s president, Guert Affenlight, lifelong playboy who suddenly, inexplicably finds that he has a crush on Owen; and Affenlight’s daughter, Pella, who ran away from her prestigious high school and married a much older man who had a speaking engagement there.

This novel works on so many levels. You can like it as a great baseball story. You can enjoy the considerable talent of the storyteller/author and the fact that this is just flat-out a good read. And if you love the classics, you get a super-bonus round: you’ll soon realize that the Harpooners are something like the crew of the Pequod, that Mike Schwartz is a more loveable Ahab, and that there are many connections to Moby-Dick. (There are lots of hints to lead you to this, not least of which is the college’s oft-mentioned statue of Melville and Affenlight’s publications on Melville.) Incidentally, if you really love reading, you’ll also see hints of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany in that wild throw of the baseball.

I recommend this book to all adults. To students, some frank talk: the reason this book is for mature readers is that there is some sexual description as pairs and then love triangles form. (These do appear very realistic in the college scene.) Beyond that, there is the issue of a much older man falling for a college student. While the student is an adult, and a relationship between the two is not illegal, it’s still unethical on the part of the college president. I did find it odd that a 60ish-year-old man who’d led a straight life—quite the playboy, in fact—would fall for a young man. However, the relationship and its fallout work in the context of the novel. So—this isn’t a book that you’d ever read for a class, and it’s only for mature readers who understand that just because something is part of the story (and people who are usually pretty good are engaging in it) doesn’t mean that it is being presented as a model for you.

And if you like baseball—Wow.

How difficult is it for the ordinary you or me to do the right thing? Well, if we are middle class and living in the US, usually, it’s not too tough. We are supported by a great safety net and we often have the means to support those around us, as long as we band together and coordinate our efforts.

But small things can make big changes in our lives, and we might have to make decisions we never could have imagined. Self Storage is about those life-altering events, about how to say ‘yes’ to what’s good, even when you really aren’t sure where that ‘yes’ is going to lead you.

Flan Parker’s mom died when Flan was only seven, leaving behind an old copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. This book of poems is Flan’s most precious possession, and just about all she has left of her mother. As an adult, Flan, mother of two small children and wife to a graduate student working (or not—he’s addicted to soap operas) on his Ph.D., has created a small business venture to help support the family. She bids at auction on items left in self-storage lockers. When people don’t pay the rent on these self-storage spaces, the items are auctioned to the highest bidder. However, bidders can only look into the locker for a minute with a flashlight. They are a hopeful sort, imagining treasures in the boxes piled in those lockers. But they are also reaping from others’ misfortune.

Flan wins a box that she opens, finding inside only a beautifully-painted interior and a note that says ‘yes.’ She determines to find the owner of the box and to learn what the yes means. This combined with her love of Walt Whitman, helps Flan decide that she must seek the yes in her own life as well.

This is 2002, the year after the 9/11 attacks. Flan’s role as a seeker is tested when a neighbor, a native of Afghanistan, burqa-clad and something of a hermit, accidentally turns the Parker household upside down. Flan’s efforts to sort out post-9/11 life remind the reader of why civil rights traditionally granted in the US, such as free speech and due process, deeply matter.

Several things that may appeal both to students and teachers are: The novel takes place in Riverside and Mount Baldy and you’ll recognize lots of local character; Brandeis is a local author and reading her works is a great shot in the arm for other locals—it’s an invaluable YES to the belief that things that happen right here in the IE matter; Brandeis, a winner of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction (in support of a literature for social change), will be one of the speakers at our Writers’ Conference on March 28 (more information to follow), so if you’re an aspiring writer, you’ll have a chance to talk to her about the writing life in the IE; it’s a quick read for those who are interested in current politics but aren’t interested in long diatribes and taking a partisan beating. Lastly, if you’re looking for a book with a literary tie-in and enjoy Whitman, you’ll love the connections.

While Self Storage certainly has appeal for teens who are interested in social and political issues, it is an adult novel and much of the book deals with themes of married couples drifting apart and coming together—supporting one another, yet needing to seek self reliance and personal goals—and of the deep value of friendships. For these reasons, teen appeal depends very much on the individual (adult appeal, I think, is wide and general).

Since Brandeis will be coming to speak to our schools’ (CHS and COHS) aspiring writers (teen and adult alike), I will be reviewing her other books. Three that have a lot of teen appeal are The Book of Dead Birds (for which Brandeis won the Bellwether Prize), Delta Girls, and My Life with the Lincolns. A few years back, I reviewed The Book of Dead Birds and you can see that review here. My reason for reviewing Self Storage before the others is that I unexpectedly found myself in the hospital for a few days last week, and asked my husband to bring me something to read during my stay. He grabbed Self Storage from the pile of unread books on my nightstand. So—it’s fresh in my mind and now was the time to write about it. But check back because I’ll get to Delta Girls and My Life with the Lincolns very soon!

And mark March 28, 2012 on your calendar to come after school and participate in the mini writers’ conference. We’re hosting a poet and a non-fiction writer as well.

“The Second Civil War, also known as “The Heartland War,” was a long and bloody conflict fought over a single issue.

“To end the war, a set of constitutional amendments, known as “The Bill of Life” was passed.

“It satisfied both the Pro-life and the Pro-Choice armies.

“The Bill of Life states that human life may not be touched from the moment of conception until a child reaches the age of thirteen.

“However, between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, a parent may choose to retroactively ‘abort’ a child . . .

“. . .on the condition that the child’s life doesn’t ‘technically’ end.

“The process by which a child is both terminated and yet kept alive is called ‘unwinding.’

“Unwinding is now a common and accepted practice in society.”

So opens the YA novel Unwind by Neal Shusterman. I read the first few pages aloud on Saturday at a banned and challenged book event because I figured no one else would have chosen this book to read as it’s fairly new. From the above opening prologue, you can guess that the book is controversial. But it’s a thoughtful piece on the value of the individual in a free society, and on what happens when people just can’t admit that they don’t have all the answers.

It’s also a great read.

Connor, who can’t control his anger, is sixteen and his parents have had it. He discovers that they secretly plan to unwind him, and he heads out on the run. Risa is a ward of the state, who, having failed at becoming a top-tier classical pianist, will be unwound because there just isn’t money for the state to keep useless teens. Lev is a ‘tithe’—because of his parents’ religious fervor, they will unwind him—their tenth child–as an offering to God.

All three are on the run. If they can make it to age eighteen, they might go to jail for awhile, but they are safe from being unwound.

The novel presents a sort of future ‘underground railroad,’ through which dedicated folks help unwinds escape to freedom. But generally speaking, teens who are about to be unwound have criminal records or anger issues—so hiding them in bunches can lead to an explosive situation. The actual unwinding process (at ‘harvest camp’) is bone chilling. (Note: If you are a sophomore on up, you can’t help but notice the nod to The Lord of the Flies—including a boy others call ‘the Mouth Breather’ because he has asthma. If you need to write a paper connecting LoTF with contemporary literature, this would be great fun.)

Action-packed, full of suspense, posing some deeper questions—this is another book for varied readers looking for very different things. I think just about everyone will like it. And that includes guys who usually don’t read. Check it out!

   Perfect Chemistry

Perfect Chemistry is neither new nor unknown to students—and even though those are the two reasons I usually review books, I wanted to find out about this novel because it’s wildly popular at Chaffey High. I thought I might ‘sell’ it at Colony. Since it’s not on my summer reading list, I tried to get my son to have a go at it and then tell me about it, but he just said, “Is this a parody?” and that was it for him.

Now that I’ve read it, I know exactly why he made that comment. The characters are pretty one-dimensional. Super popular pom-pom girl Brittany Ellis dates the super popular star football player. Alex Fuentes, a Mexican gang member can’t find his way out of his life—one he’s only chosen into order to protect his family from the Latino Bloods. Brittany’s mom is utterly superficial, wants Brittany to be perfect in order to make up for the fact that Brittany’s sister, Shelley, has cerebral palsy and is also mentally slow. Her dad is pretty much absent, always at work, making lots of money. Alex’s mom is a loving, overprotective stereotype of the Hispanic mama. Brittany’s friends are pretty much shallow, and Alex’s friends are pretty much gang bangers.

Brittany and Alex fall for one another when they are forced to be partners in chemistry class—a subject they are both good at when they aren’t too busy dealing with personal issues. Should Brit break up with her hot boyfriend—also in the same chem class—and go for Alex? Should Alex try to straighten out his life for Brit? Well, of course they should! If they do, they can strive for those things that really matter to them. Alex secretly wants to go to college. Brit is sick of being seen as half of the ‘golden couple’ on campus. She can become ‘real.’

So, yeah—it’s an old story, not told very well. BUT, let’s face it—if you like stories about star-crossed lovers, if you’d like to read a modern, suburban version of the Romeo and Juliet story, you are going to love this book. And it does deal with the choices teens have to make when life isn’t offering them what they want. Romance fans, this is your novel.

“It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”
—William Carlos Williams

Yes, Matched is another future dystopia, but like Hunger Games, this one is a great read. And yet the story itself isn’t similar to Hunger Games. So—enjoy it on its own terms.

Matched takes its title from the important milestone in teens’ lives—at age seventeen—when they are formally matched to their life’s partner. This person is someone they don’t know, living in another area of the country, perhaps. Yet matches succeed because the society has all the data necessary to pick the two people who are most perfect for one another. The two will get to know one another over the next four years, and, at twenty-one, will be united. They will have until they are thirty-one to produce children (maximum two); after that, childbearing isn’t allowed because, statistically, it can produce kids that aren’t perfect. Some members of society are ‘singles’ and don’t receive matches.

Oddly, when Cassia goes to her matching banquet (the only time she is allowed to wear something beautiful and colorful), she is matched with her best friend, Xander. Everyone is envious because she already knows and loves this boy. But later, when she goes home and places his data card into her reader, he disappears momentarily and a different match shows on the screen, another boy she knows—Ky, who is from the outer regions, whose parents are dead, and who was adopted by his aunt and uncle.

Right after Cassia’s ‘match banquet,’ her grandfather has his 80^th birthday banquet, which is really the last celebration before death, as the society requires everyone to die on the 80^th birthday (data shows it’s the best time to die). On this night, Grandfather lets Cassia know of poems he had hidden, poems not belonging to the 100 preserved by the Society—and therefore illegal to have. One of the poems is Dylan Thomas’s “Go Not Gentle into that Good Night,” and Cassia realizes this isn’t just about death but also about not obeying (gently) the Society when it doesn’t allow individuality.

Cassia says that she, like others, has always believed, “Following the rules. Staying safe. These are the things that matter.” But once she finds Ky in the data port, everything is open to question. She realizes that her father breaks simple rules and laws out of love for the family—and that her mother follows all the rules for the same reason. Cassia needs to find out if ‘falling in love with someone’s story is the same thing as falling in love with the person.’ She needs to know if danger and uncertainty are worth the opportunity to make choices about life and love.

YA dystopian novels are taking a hit right now. The Wall Street Journal (a conservative business newspaper) just published an opinion piece about this. (If you’d like to read it, click here.) This surprises me as the new YA novels are very much like George Orwell’s books (Animal Farm and 1984), which is generally loved by conservatives. I think a discussion of this social issue would be a great topic for a research paper or a literary analysis paper. Another great topic would be to compare Matched to the literary and art works it discusses (and which are outlawed by its Society), particularly the Dylan Thomas poem. By the way—the quote from the poet William Carlos Williams isn’t in the novel, but it was so much of what the book is about, I had to mention it.

If you’re just looking for a good read and nothing more, this is still your novel. The characters are complex and no one is a ‘bad guy’ in the love triangle that evolves. As a bonus, its star-crossed lovers, just like Romeo and Juliet, are bound for trouble.

Unscrew the locks from the doors!

Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

–Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

I admit it. I just love John Green’s books. I started with Will Grayson, Will Grayson, which I guess is sort of backwards because it was his most recent work. But I loved it so much that I stepped back into Looking for Alaska and now Paper Towns. Once again, Green has done a great job of showing teen relationships—the group of guys at the center of this story (our protagonist and his two best friends) is hilarious. Q (for Quentin), Ben, and Radar (who edits Omnictionary, a fictional Wikipedia, and whose parents own the world’s largest collection of Black Santas) are spot-on in their conversations, their ‘dissing’ one another, their geekiness, and in the way they ultimately have one another’s backs. But while we do have a bit of ‘bromance’ here, the deeper story is about Q’s relationship with Margo Roth Spiegelman.

The story grabs the reader in the prologue when Q and Margo, living in Orlando, Florida, are only 10 years old. On a trip to a local park, they find a dead man under an oak tree. Later they learn that he’s killed himself. While Q is very much afraid, Margo is curious and steps ever closer. This tells us a lot about their personalities. Later a character will say of her, “’She’s the kind of person who either dies tragically at twenty-seven like Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin, or else grows up to win, like, the first-ever Nobel Prize for Awesome.’”

The story itself takes place just weeks before Q, Ben, Radar and Margo are to graduate. Q and Margo live next door from one another, but over the years, they have separated as friends because Margo is beautiful and hangs with a cooler crowd than the band geeks. Q has always had a crush on Margo, and so when she appears at his bedroom window and tells him they are going to pull an all-nighter in which she plans revenge on her not-true friends (including one who is sleeping with Margo’s boyfriend and that boyfriend himself), Q ditches his safety/comfort-first personality for the chance to hang out with Margo. Their adventures are wacky—the kinds of things you wish you could really do to the people who betray you, but never can. (So live that fantasy through this book—it’s entertaining! Just to whet your appetite—they use 3 whole catfishes, Veet, Vaseline, Mountain Dew, tulips, water, tissues, blue spray paint.)

At school the next day, Q is wondering if he’ll be able to connect with Margo once again. But she’s not there. In fact, she’s disappeared, something that’s happened a few times before as she has careless parents and seeks attention. But this time, she doesn’t return. And now Q has a mission—to find her, to figure out if she’s committed suicide—certainly a possibility judging from the clues she’s left. He begins to follow her path starting with a volume of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and using passages she’s highlighted. Q seeks Margo in ‘paper towns,’ neighborhoods/subdivisions that were built and then abandoned.

“’I can hear Margo that night as we drove around Orlando. I can hear her saying to me, “I don’t want some kids to find me swarmed with flies on a Saturday morning in Jefferson Park.” Not wanting to be found by some kids in Jefferson Park isn’t the same thing as not wanting to die.’”

In seeking Margo, the guys and one of Margo’s friends (now also girlfriend of Ben) take a 24-hour road trip. It’s life-changing, just the way a graduation should be.

Just a note here: If you need to write a literary analysis, comparing the action/characters in this book to the characters/authors in the classic literature they are reading (Walt Whitman, Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick) would be a lot of fun. It’d be creative, too, and your teacher would think you were wonderful for bridging the literary canon and YA literature. )

A note on the book jacket tells us that this is the first teen series endorsed by the Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes) Estate. I’m happy to see a Sherlock Holmes book for teens that incorporates details from the life of the original character.

It’s 1868 and Sherlock Holmes is fourteen years old. His mother is ill, his father is on a military expedition and his older brother is working in London; so rather than having the summer holidays he’d hoped for, Sherlock has to go to Hampshire and live with an eccentric aunt and uncle while being tutored by an American, Amyus Crowe. But the summer doesn’t turn out as deadly dull as he thought it would—that is, it’s not dull, just deadly.

While staying true to Doyle’s character—there are even incidents that hint of Sherlock’s adult drug problems—this teen Sherlock is also updated. The poor guy is falsely accused and tortured while he tries to solve the mysterious death of local men. They appear to have died of a plague, as they have swollen boil-like pustules all over their bodies. But Sherlock is on to a ring of evil-doers and these deaths have something to do with the weird ‘death cloud’ that rises above the bodies.

Thankfully, Sherlock has the help of Matty, a self-reliant street urchin, who, while he can’t read or write and hasn’t been taught anything about logic or induction, knows a lot about human behavior at its worst—and about how to survive. Virginia, Crowe’s independent daughter, eventually joins in the fray.

The descriptions of the evil Baron Maupertuis are positively macabre. What he is able to do through the help of his minions is so creepy, it will stick with you for a long time. But even if you are reading for your senior project (Chaffey), and want some details of life in England (and a bit of France) in the mid-nineteenth century, there’s much to note. (The descriptions of what happens at a country fair are an interesting. Dog fighting—ugh! Bobbing for eels, anyone? Sherlock being forced into a boxing match?)

Sometimes YA books have quotable quotes that jump out at me, and the following fits the bill. I imagine many teens find themselves in the middle of a bizarre situation with just such thoughts.

 “’It would be nice if one person could always make a difference,’ Crowe replied . . . ‘but in this complicated world of ours you sometimes need friends, and you sometimes need an organization to back you up.’

“’You think we should go to the peelers?’ Matty asked, obviously nervous.

“‘The police?’ Crowe shook his head. ‘I doubt they’d believe you, and even if they did there’s little they could do. Whoever lives in this big house of yours will deny everythin’. They’ve got the power and the authority, not you. And you’ve got to admit, it’s a preposterous story on the face of it.’

“’Do you believe us?’ Sherlock challenged.”