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.

“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.”

What about mature teens who are asking for books that delve deeply into the difficult subjects they are grappling with? Do we sanitize reading too much for your age group? You are, after all, sprinting on the heels of adulthood.

The problem for those of us adults responsible for teaching you is that you have such a wide range of maturity. A freshman is usually very different from a senior. Some books that take on difficult subjects are welcome—a relief, really—to students who’ve had a tough go and need to have their experience validated. Those same books may upset certain parents who feel that reading about the seedier side of life encourages the reader to participate in it when s/he wouldn’t have otherwise. I’m not that sort of parent myself—my kids have always read widely, on every sort of subject—but I respect that most parents are trying to do the best they can for their kids in a world that’s hard to figure out.

Ultimately, I believe both you and your parents can make the right reading choices for you if you have a pretty good idea what books are about. So, I want to write periodically on books that cover difficult topics including violence and teenage sexuality. I want to show you books that deal explicitly with the subjects, but that have value—that help you do that mature grappling with the difficult world. And if you feel that the content of the book is too explicit, then the review will have helped you make your choice to find something more appropriate.

My first go at this is to reflect on books with violence. And I do intend to look at teen books that address violence, but while thinking about the subject, I couldn’t forget that—while rather a wimp myself—some of the absolutely best contemporary books I’ve read were breathtakingly violent.

All of those great, yet violent, books were by Cormac McCarthy, a man widely regarded as one of the country’s best living authors. I asked some English teachers whether they thought their students could read McCarthy and get something valuable from him or whether those students would just see the novels as endless rounds of murder and mayhem. Based on their answers—they believe teens can benefit from the books as the violence in them is not of the gratuitous sort found in current movies—I am going to start my series with them.

In discussing the use of violence in literature and teen reading, we need a common definition of “gratuitous.” If it the definition means that the violence is ‘unnecessary to tell the story’ rather than meaning ‘a very heavy dose,’ then McCarthy’s violence is not gratuitous. Nevertheless, it’s unrelenting. And his narrative often has a camera-eye quality in the sense that we learn what happens and are left to sort it out for ourselves. Sometimes the camera extends into people’s musing on life and fate (as it does with Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men), but even then, no moral judgment is made for you. You must figure it out on your own.

The question then, at your age, is: Can you read this kind of violence and be able to form your own judgments? If you haven’t had some good practice in critical thinking, then I really don’t think McCarthy’s books are for you. If you have had that practice, a second question to ask yourself is whether you enjoy the qualities of excellent storytelling, the mythic sweep of a great narrative, and some of the best imagery/pictures of landscapes that you will ever read? If so, give McCarty a try.

Blood Meridian: This book is an unflinchingly realistic portrayal of the some of the worst examples of lawlessness in the wild west of the nineteenth century. I grew up in a time when all westerns were of the John Wayne variety with strong, silent men forging a new America. For anyone who knows nothing other than that image, Blood Meridian is an excellent antidote.

The nineteenth century in America was a time of deep culture clash (but then, when isn’t that true?). Blood Meridian is historical fiction in that its subject is the Glanton Gang, scalp hunters who were paid by the Governor of Chihuahua, Mexico in 1849-50 to kill Comanche and Apache Indians. Those two tribes had raided Mexican towns, and Glanton received $200 per scalp, scalps being evidence that the Indians had been murdered. But, as the cliché goes, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to imagine the possibilities. Considering that lots of folks in Mexico had black hair, when the Glanton Gang ran low on Apaches and Comanche to kill, they just started killing anyone they could get their hands on.

Gruesome? Absolutely. The Glanton Boys kill indiscriminately—men, women, children, old people. They pillage. They rape. One of the main characters, Judge Holden, is well educated, always curious, something of a botanist and purveyor of human nature. He is also pure evil, and the banality of his wickedness—the way is it just an ordinary part of his life—will highlight for the thoughtful reader the fact that the west was ‘won’ by groups of men who included demonic characters.

Critics compare Blood Meridian to many works of classic literature, some of which you’ve read in high school or will read in college—Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. There’s Huck Finn lighting out for the territory, but not in a way that Mark Twain’s satire makes you smile at our cultural foibles. It’s so straightforward and void of emotion that you may feel physically sick over man’s inhumanity to man. You might think of your sophomore literature, Lord of the Flies, because the gang is outside of the reach of the law for so long. Their instincts for hurting others take over just as the marooned boys’ did after the plane crash.

If you are seeking a book to read for a literary analysis paper, there’s much to go with here—conflicts include man v. man and man v. nature (the deserts of Mexico and the borderland between the US and Mexico are arid, brutal in their lack of food and water). Ultimately, for the mature reader with an iron stomach, Blood Meridian has value in helping him to be able to recognize the ‘heart of darkness’ within us.

No Country for Old Men is another story that takes place along the border between Mexico and Texas, but this one has a contemporary setting—and the lawlessness is also contemporary.

A man named Llewelyn Moss is out hunting and accidentally stumbles upon the carnage that has resulted from a drug deal gone bad. When he realizes that most of the dealers are dead in the cars and all the drugs are still there, he also knows that the drug money couldn’t be far off. Finding the (now dead) man who tried to get away with the suitcase with the millions, Llewelyn takes the case. Once he does so, the novel primarily follows three characters: Llewelyn Moss; Anton Chigurh, a true psychopath without any conscience or remorse, a hit man in pursuit of Moss; and Sheriff Bell, the lawman attempting to sort out the details and catch Chigurh. Bell’s sections of the novel are more monologues about both life in the past and the present and about the crime. He thinks of Chigurh as a sort of ghost because he is impossible to catch—but he’s real, and he’s out there.

In No Country for Old Men the universe is not a benevolent one, and if you think it’s just the bad guys who are killing off one another, or at least bad guys killing off folks whose greed gets them mixed up in the seedy side of life (like Moss), McCarthy wants to show you otherwise. The evil can be purely arbitrary—especially for Moss’s wife (Carla Jean), whose only connection to the madness, for which she pays dearly, is to have fallen in love with and married Moss.

Again, if you are looking for a novel to read for a literary analysis paper, there’s a lot here. You have the same man v. man and man v. nature as in Blood Meridian. You’ve also got the chance to discuss nihilism and morality.

More recently, McCarthy published The Road, and while it’s about a post-apocalyptic United States, surprisingly, I found more hope in it than in the two books above. I reviewed it earlier and you can read the review here.

OK, if you are saying, “Ms. Waddle, I am a mature person, and I know I need a dose of reality in my reading, but this is just way more than I can take at once,” then I recommend you start with McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, the first book of which is All the Pretty Horses. The title, while appropriate, is unfortunate in that teen guys will turn away from it, thinking it’s a sweet little book meant for girls. Ah—no.

I reviewed All the Pretty Horses here. If you are working on literary analysis or asking yourself the bigger questions, the novel makes you think: What’s in a national identity? What does it mean to be Mexican-America? Can someone be multicultural if he stems from European (Anglo) stock but has a Mexican nanny who teachers him Spanish, and later crosses the border to live in Mexico for a period of time?

If you want to read critical analysis of McCarthy’s books, there are some good articles on the library’s database. You can click on these links, but you may need to type in your Ontario City Library card number to view the articles. (They are in the Literature Resource Center database.)

Eaton, Mark A. “Dis(re)membered Bodies: Cormac McCarthy’s Border Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 49.1 (Spring 2003): 155-180. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 260.Detroit: Gale, 2009.Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 Dec. 2011.

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1100085017&v=2.1&u=onta59809&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w

“Blood Meridian.” Contemporary Literary Criticism Select.Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 Dec. 2011.

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1114060000&v=2.1&u=onta59809&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w

Cooper, Lydia R. “‘He’s a psychopathic killer, but so what?’: Folklore and morality in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.” Papers on Language & Literature 45.1 (2009): 37+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 Dec. 2011.

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA194974981&v=2.1&u=onta59809&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w

Students have asked for the next books in these two trilogies, so I wanted to announce that I have them now and they’ll be available at Colony in a few days. The third book in The Maze Runner series–The Death Cure–and the second book in the Matched series–Crossed.  I’m impatient to read Crossed, but I will give you the first crack at checking it out!

Marisa’s dad is a Mexican immigrant. He’s had a hard life in the shadow of his stepmother and as an adult always reminds his kids that: family is everything; hard work is what matters; and you’d better never embarrass him. He’s tough and the best thing we can say about his relationship to Marisa is that he’s disapproving.

Of course, lots of parents disapprove of their teens. After all, if teens didn’t try to find their own way, away from their parents, what would the point of adolescence be? The problem with Marisa’s father’s disapproval is that it isn’t the kind that will help her improve her life. Just the opposite. If she’s a really good girl, it’s going to hold her back.

Marisa is very bright, is taking AP Calculus and getting good grades. But what matters most to her dad is that she work her shifts at Kroger’s (a grocery store—I don’t think there are any in California, but it’s a major chain), turn over half of her paycheck to her parents, watch her niece (the child of a sister who got pregnant in high school), cook meals and help keep up the house. With such a schedule, Marisa is having a hard time concentrating on her schoolwork. When she starts dating the boy she’s always liked, she starts to wonder if she can make it out of her Houston, Texas barrio. Though her mother is nice, she has a way of laying the guilt on pretty thick. If Marisa goes away to college, what will her mother do? How will she get by?

Marisa’ AP Calc teacher reminds her of her considerable gifts as a student. She encourages her to push on. But there’s a cultural divide, and the teacher doesn’t quite get what is holding Marisa back.

On this Thanksgiving weekend, I’m grateful that I picked up this book. I know I often tell you that great books will help you understand people whose lives are very different from your own. But it’s also good to read a book in which the protagonist is just like you. And Marisa is a girl a lot of students will recognize in themselves. Have fun reading this quick book, full of hope and realism.

I wanted a good book—realistic, but one in which characters could work out their problems. Some good writing. So I picked up Sarah Dessen because I knew she’d deliver.

In What Happened to Goodbye, McLean, now in her senior year, has been on the move with her dad for a couple of years. This following a really ugly divorce after her mother admitted that she was having an affair and in fact, was pregnant, as it ends up, with twins. To make matters worse, her mom’s new husband (and father of the twins) is the coach of the Defriese University basketball team. McLean is named after the previous coach and her dad is a rabid fan. Or was, until his wife left him for the new coach and for the scandal that ensued.

McLean’s dad is a restaurant consultant. He works for a company that buys restaurants and reinvents them, creating profitable businesses. He has to move after each restaurant is fixed. McLean moves with him, reinventing herself at each new school—she changes her name and becomes a cheerleader in one place, a goth girl in another. Yet when the two arrive in Lakeview, McLean makes friends and realizes that she cares about others, especially her super-smart nerdy next-door neighbor, Dave.

Though as a child McLean always had great times with her mom when her dad was working night and day trying to make his own restaurant profitable, and though she is told that her parents’ breakup was both their faults, she can’t forgive her mom and doesn’t want to be around her or her new family. By not complying with the legal terms of custody, she frustrates her mom, who consistently tries to reconnect with her and is willing to involve lawyers to get what she wants.

Though Dessen makes some weird writing choices in the last quarter of the book, giving outcomes of scenes and then giving the details of the scene (thus foregoing some of the suspense), I loved the characters and how they interact with one another. I love how McLean has to come to terms with her new life, with her mother, and with her new friends.

It was fun watching a character work out serious problems in a way that’s not perfect—things can’t be perfect—but in a way that’s positive. Because I liked McLean and wanted a good future for her. I think you will, too.

Two New Series 

I’m always on the lookout for books that appeal to teens who are English learners. Unfortunately, they aren’t always easy to find. Most books written at a reading level that challenges you and pushes your reading skills are boring—they don’t discuss teen issues.

I found two new book series that I think may work for English learners. The first is called Night Fall. It’s horror fiction. The second is called Surviving Southside. It’s about urban (inner-city) teens at Southside High School. We now have some of the titles in our library and others are on the way. Come on over to the library and check one out—if you like it, check back for new titles. Let me know what you think!

Check out the Hunger Games movie poster. Click here to see and hear it in action. Give it a chance to upload–it may take a minute. What a cool riff on the theme of Katniss, the girl on fire.

I can hardly wait: March 23, 2012.

Meanwhile, I’ve bought more copies of The Hunger Games for our library. You’ve got to read all three books before the movie comes out!

I want to give After the Moment its own space and its own quick review because when I discussed it in the review of Uglies, I only commented that it wasn’t a book I’d recommend to reluctant readers. And that’s still true.

But what if you already like reading? Then After the Moment could become one of your favorite books. Freymann-Weyr sets up the characters as though she’s showing you, the reader, how to play a new board game. She names the pieces, shows you how powerful they are—or if they lack empowerment, and sets them into their designated squares. Once everyone is in position, you hope for a sweet romance between Leigh and Maia.

Leigh is such a great guy; any girl would want him. He’s considerate, decent, and spends a lot of time caring for and about others in his life. Maia has a lot of problems from the beginning—she’s anorexic and self-abusing. She’s nothing like Leigh’s girlfriend, Astra. Yet, she has her own beauty and sweetness, and it’s easy to see why Leigh’s younger step-sister is crazy about Maia.

But when other students, including some not-too-nice guys from Leigh and Maia’s exclusive private school, enter the mix, the couple’s destiny somehow spins out of their control. All Leigh’s thoughts on violence and the war in Iraq take on a connection to his own life. All Maia’s past problems work against her as she seeks to understand her own actions as well as those of her classmates.

I read this book because I was looking for a love story that didn’t have a perfect (and perfectly phony) ending. And I got that. But there’s also a lot of good writing, mostly in the second half of the book (and that’s one reason why I think reading it requires patience). And there’s the thing that YA books almost never talk about—what happens after things go wrong? Where do the lovers end up both physically and emotionally? Reading about that made the entire experience worthwhile.

    Waves

I bought this book when I was looking for a novel with a surfing connection. (I get requests for those periodically, and they aren’t that easy to find.) Waves is a beautiful book on more than one level, and I think our regular readers, surfers or not, will like it, especially if they enjoy characters with extrasensory perception.

Hal, his older sister Charley, his little sister Sarah and their parents go to Cornwall, on the west coast of England, every summer. That is until this summer, when the family finally makes the difficult decision to go without Charley. Charley is in a hospital in a coma. She’s been there since the previous summer when she had a strange accident in the water. Hal found her washed up on the rocks. She has never spoken since. She has a breathing machine to help her, and Hal thinks of her as more dead than alive. He is angry at his parents, who talk to Charley as though she can hear them; yet he also understands how difficult it must be let go of a beloved child.

So Hal is surprised when, after going to the beach and meeting Jackie, the sister of Charley’s boyfriend Pete, Charley comes very much alive for him. He can hear her voice in his head—and in fact, Charley can hear Hal’s voice and see through his eyes as she lies motionless in her hospital bed. As the two inhabit one another, Hal slowly pulls together the pieces of what happened to Charley, alone on the water in the middle of the night. He learns about Pete’s past, about his old girlfriend Am and her crazy dad, and about Charley falling in love, Charley’s fears. (Yes, this does happen slowly. If you can’t read unless something is exploding on each page, you may not be able to get into this one. But if you like tracing the psychology of young love—the excitement and the jealousy–I think you’re going to like it.)

A bonus of Waves is that it’s well-written—so you not only have a good story, but you’ll enjoy the beautiful language, which pulls you into that seaside rhythm.