The Popularity Papers by Amy Ignatow

Amulet Books, 2010     ISBN: 9780810984219

Lydia Goldblatt and Julie Graham-Chang have been best friends practically forever.    Like most girls, they want to be popular, and they worry about the pressures of junior high. With the idea of recreating themselves over the coming year they embark on a project to figure out how to become popular. They keep a secret notebook, with Julie recording the results of their various experiments in words and pictures, while the braver Lydia will be the subject (or victim) of these attempts to understand what it is that popularity is all about.

They try to bleach Lydia’s hair with laundry bleach; try to be interested in boys that the popular girls seem to think are interesting – or try to be interested in boys at all; they try to convince their parents’ they need cell phones (Julie has two dads, something that is only mentioned in passing, although they do appear in the story periodically); join sports that they aren’t really interested in; try out for the school play; enter the talent show, etc.

They make some new friends, learn that the popular girls have problems of their own, have a falling out, and come back together again.

The characterizations are spot-on, the graphic format appealing for the age group, and preteen girls will recognize themselves in Julie and Lydia, and laugh at, and with them.

Say the Word by Jeannine Garsee

Bloomsbury, 2009     ISBN: 1599903334

Shawna’s mother, Penny, left the family ten years ago to move in with Fran, and neither Shawna, nor her father, has been able to accept her lesbianism. Needless to say, visits to her mother never went well, and finally Shawna tells her mother that she doesn’t want to see her anymore.

When Shawna gets a call from Fran that her mother has had a stroke and isn’t going to make it, Shawna knows she needs to go see her. She is as resentful as ever of Fran, and her two sons, who know and love her mother in a way that she has been unable and unwilling to do.

What follows is the nightmare of any lgbt person estranged from his or her family: Shawna’s father moves in swiftly, wielding a medical power of attorney that her mother created when she was pregnant with her seventeen years before, and never revoked, and has her removed from life support. Ignoring the fact that she was in the process of converting to Judaism, he arranges a Catholic burial. And because Shawna’s mother has never redone her will, everything goes to her father, leaving Fran with so little that she is forced to sell her share of the home they shared and move from New York to Cleveland to live with an aunt.

Shawna’s father is not satisfied to stop there, but gets a court order to have Fran’s youngest son’s DNA checked, and finds out that he is not Fran’s, but his and Penny’s. When he goes to court and gets custody of the boy, with no visitation for Fran, Schmule, or Samuel, as her father insists on calling him, begins to show signs of suicidal intent. Shawna recognizes the seriousness of the situation, finally takes action against her domineering father, and begins to seriously deal with her own homophobia.

If at times it seems as if one more added action of her father’s will move this novel into the realm of melodrama, the writing carries it through, leaving Shawna’s father’s final capitulation as the only flawed note.

Magic and Misery by Peter Marino

Holiday House, 2009     ISBN: 9780823421336

Another stereotypical teen novel in which the girl (Toni Jo), has a crush on the guy (Pan, short for Pansy–yes really), only to find out he is gay. Stuck together in their miserable little town where nothing’s happening, they swear best friendship and loyalty to each other, only to have it shaken when teen jock, Caspar, falls for Toni Jo.

Pan acts like a jealous boyfriend, and Toni Jo lies to both boys, alienating each of them: not telling Pan when she has a date with Caspar, and not telling Caspar that the reason she can’t go to the prom with him is that she already promised to go with Pan.

Meanwhile, Pan is the victim of increasing harassment from two classmates, and refuses to complain to school authorities. Nothing Amy can say will convince him to report the abuse, and ultimately, he and his family decide they need to move out of the area.

While there is nothing glaringly wrong with this book, it isn’t a strong title. None of the characters is well-developed, and the dialogue is occasionally wooden. Caspar is consistently portrayed as somewhat slow on the draw, and it isn’t clear what Toni Jo sees in him beyond the fact that she’s desperate for male attention.  And Pan’s jealous behavior comes close to being the frightening sort which parents ought to be warning their daughters against.

Marino is a playwright and has published a previous novel that was well-received.

How Beautiful the Ordinary, edited by Michael Cart

Bowen Press / Harper Teen, 2009      ISBN: 9780061154980

Editor Michael Cart has collected twelve stories about LGBT youth identity in the form of short stories, graphic fiction, and verse, by well-known young-adult, and adult authors including Francesca Lia Block, Gregory Maguire, Jacqueline Woodson, Ariel Schrag, Emma Donoghue, and others.

There is something for everyone in this collection: stories of ghosts and girls trapped in walls serving as metaphors for transgendered teens trapped in the wrong body; handsome highway men and soldiers for a stable boy to lust after; stories of first love; and of first making love. One graphic short story is about two teens who make conflicting wishes when they meet a genie, leaving all three of them tortured; the other is about the San Francisco Dyke March.

While there is some sex, most of it is left to the imagination, good as in Julie Anne Peter’s “First Time,” and unsettling, as in William Sleator’s “Fingernail,” a disturbing story about the sex trade between older western men, and young boys in Thailand. In this particular story, the Thai “boy” is already a young man of twenty and thus technically legal, unlike much of the sex trade that actually takes place there between men and underage boys. But the abusive relationship that he finds himself in is almost equally disturbing.

Some of the stories may actually be of more interest to older readers than to teens: in particular, David Levithan’s “A Word from the Nearly Distant Past,” in which Levithan recounts the experiences of generations past as they dealt with being in the closet, dealing with the AIDS crisis, etc., and exhorts the younger generation to make sure that they live for future generations, as much as for themselves. Emma Donoghue’s “Dear Lang,” is a letter from a lesbian mother who has been denied access to her now sixteen-year-old son by his biological mother, in which she tells the story of how she came to be barred from his life, and how she is just now taking the chance of having another child with a new partner.

One of the best stories is Jacqueline Woodson’s insightful “Trev,” about a transgendered child, and the struggles he has with his family and at school to be who he really is. Trev’s mother both reassures him that he isn’t the reason his father left, and yet whispers her wish to him every night at bedtime, that Trev will wake up “my sugar and spice, and everything nice.”

Recommended for all teens.

Water Seekers by Michelle Rode

Prizm Books, 2008     ISBN: 9781603703581

Set thirty some years after a nuclear apocalypse, the unnamed narrator, a young loner who travels from camp to camp in the Southwest desert looking for work in exchange for food, and especially water, has been listening carefully to discussions and rumors of a place in the North called the Great Lakes where water is supposed to be easy to come by. He plans to travel alone to check these rumors out, but is convinced by Zara, an “old one” (someone who remembers life before the disaster) that traveling in a group would be safer. Ultimately a group ranging in age from the very young to Zara’s crazy mother, with varying survival skills, set forth. They encounter storms, bandits, hostile camps, quicksand, illness, and arguments, as they search for something no one is sure exists.

There are a couple of secondary characters who are lesbians.

Ash by Malinda Lo

This is a dark retelling of the Cinderella story. Instead of featuring a kindly fairy-godmother, and a coach made from a pumpkin, and footmen who are mice, there is the kind of fairy usually featured in fairy tales: one who demands a high price for granting wishes.

Ash, the Cinderella figure, has known a fairy, Sidhean, since the time that her mother died. He has refused to grant her wishes to return her mother to life, or take her to fairy land, where she believes she will find her mother living.

As she grows older, and accepts the death of her mother, she has other wishes, and Sidhean agrees to grant two of them: that she can participate in the King’s hunt, to which she has been invited by the King’s huntress, Kaisa, who she has become friends with when they have met in the woods a number of times; and the traditional Cinderella wish that she can attend the King’s ball.

The price she agrees to pay for these wishes is to belong to Sidhean, to whom she has felt personally drawn. He tells her he will collect his payment at a later date. But it is at the ball that she realizes that she the price to which she has agreed is too high: she finally realizes that it is Kaisa with whom she is in love. Whether or not she can renegotiate a price with Sidhean is questionable, and it is not only her future with Kaisa that hangs in the balance, but her warm friendship with Sidhean.

This book is highly recommended for teens who enjoy fantasy, and for all readers who enjoy reading fairy tale variations.

Ash by Malinda Lo named as finalist for book award

Ash by Malinda Lo has been named by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) as one of five contenders for the 2010 William C. Morris Award, which honors a book written for young adults by a previously unpublished author. YALSA will name the 2010 winner at the Youth Media Awards on Jan. 18, during the American Library Association’s  Midwinter Meeting in Boston.

“Mommy, Mama and Me,” and “Daddy, Papa and Me” by Leslea Newman

Tricycle Press, 2009

ISBNS: 9781582462639 and 9781582462622

Written by the well-known author of  “Heather has Two Mommies,” these two titles are the first board books to focus specifically on same-sex parents. Illustrated by Carol Thompson, they depict loving families in warm, inviting colors, with the brief story about a day in each family told in easy rhyme.

These books will be welcomed by the thousands of same-sex parents looking for books reflective of their families, but all children will enjoy the familiar stories of a day spent with loving parents.

The books have won an Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Gold Seal Best Book Award.

My Invented Life by Lauren Bjorkman

Henry Holt, 2009     ISBN: 9780805089509

Sisters Roz and Eva, a year apart, have always been best friends and confidantes, but suddenly Eva is shutting out Roz, their parents, and her best friend Carmen. Roz is hurt and is looking for reasons for this sudden change in her sister.

Both sisters participate in theatre at school, with Eva always winning the main roles. When Roz wins the role of Rosalind in “As You Like It,” she worries that this is the reason Eva is mad.

When she discovers Eva has a lesbian novel hidden under her covers, she guesses that Eva is a lesbian and is afraid of coming out. Always the more gregarious and impetuous, Roz, whose (male) crush is dating Eva, decides that girls could be a possibility in her future, and decides to come out to pave the way for Eva.

Encountering some unexpected homophobia in the form of name-calling and pranks, even from her sister, Roz plows bravely forward with her new “lifestyle,” and strikes back with pranks and attacks of her own.

Mirroring “As You Like It,” Roz and Carmen, and the members of the drama club all seem to be in love with, or have crushes on the wrong people. And as in the play, all is sorted out in the end, with the “real” lesbian(s) standing up, the sisters reunited, and Roz with a surprising new love interest of her own.

Overlooking the annoying cover photo, this was actually an entertaining light read that teens will enjoy.

The Blonde of the Joke by Bennett Madison

Val is one of those students at high school who just blends in. She doesn’t have any particular friends, she skates by with a B+ average though she could do better; her physics teacher can’t even remember her name.

Then Francie joins her class and everything changes. Francie is flamboyant, defiant, she smokes, she’s always late to class, her clothing pushes the dress code: she’s nowhere in Val’s league. But for some reason, she latches onto Val, who is astonished and grateful, and willingly learns to smoke, cut class, and learn the skills of shoplifting from Francie.

Val is even a little bit in love with Francie, although “not in a lesbo way.” Homophobia rears its ugly head in this book, with Val, and her brother’s ex-girlfriend referring to him as a fag, and their mother unable to fully accept him. Fourteen year old Francie sets out to “cure” him by dressing particularly provocatively, and then can’t handle it when she gets attention from a group of construction workers.

Fissures start to edge into the friendship, and it all comes crumbling down one day at the mall as Val and Francie realize that their vows to be there for each other can’t address the real issues each of them is facing. An interesting psychological story of a friendship built on the shaky structure of two girls each needing something that the other ultimately can’t give.

This would be a much better book without the homophobia–or if it was something that the characters worked through.