Shannon Hale's REAL FRIENDS

Real Friends is a recently-released graphic novel written by Shannon Hale. I typically enjoy Hale's writing, so I picked it up.

I was a bit surprised to find an autobiographical story that was at times quite hard to read.

Young Shannon becomes attached to one best friend and develops problems when that friend joins a popular group. Shannon's forced to compete for her attention, which is also confusing for her when she befriends the leader of the group and then is constantly under attack from the leader's best friend, who's jealous of anyone she feels is a threat.

Shannon struggles with her relationship with her best friend, who honestly has become kind of an asshole. When she finally moves away, there's never any real resolution of her actions, no apology for being a jerkass.

Shannon also struggles with a very abusive older sister and a mother who is a completely useless bitch in this situation. How you let your older kid beat up one of the younger ones as well as verbally abuse her, I'll never know. I hope the mother has since apologized to Shannon, because that was the hardest part for me. The mother tells Shannon that when Shannon tells her what's going on with Wendy (the sister), Wendy just gets angrier. She tells Shannon to work it out for herself, because she'll have nothing more to do with it. Then the stupid ass parents let abusive Wendy BABYSIT and Shannon spends countless hours hiding in the bushes outside.

Hiding from her older sister. For hours. Outside in the bushes. Because their mother will not lift a fucking finger.

It comes out later in the story that Wendy's had a pretty depressing childhood with no friends and her own bullies, but that does not for one second condone her abuse towards her younger sister, nor is it a reason to let her abuse your damn kid!

Really seriously epically bad parenting.

Shannon eventually ends up in a different class from the popular group and makes new friends, who show her that popularity can come from a good place. These older girls are actually nice to everyone. Shannon learns a lot from them and suddenly, the popular leader of her old group wants to be part of her new one. Shannon accepts her and the other members of the group, but when the girl who's bullied her for years asks to join, Shannon refuses. One of the smartest things she's ever done. It's perfectly okay to distance yourself from your abusers.

So yeah, this is not a feel good story. It's very heavy. Shannon exhibits symptoms of anxiety and OCD, but those aren't treated. She's a few years older than me and those things weren't really treated back then. She experiences abuse after abuse. It's got a nice ending and she becomes a stronger person and even reconciles with the abusive sister, but this is not a happy book that you want to read to younger kids. I think books like these are important for children, so they recognize abuse, but they need to be shared with teaching moments to make up for the things the story is lacking.

It's a good book, but yeah, not a feel good story at all. Consider yourselves warned.

AMERICAN DREAM 1 & 2

This is a new series by a mother and daughter writing team. I do recommend checking them out, although I have my criticisms.

Iris is a Dutch girl whose parents are divorced. She and her older brother want their parents back together, so they're disheartened when their mother accepts a job at Stanford in the United States. Iris moves with her mother, her grandmother, her older brother and her younger sisters who are twins.

Iris fits in fairly quickly and grows to love life in the US. Her main struggle is her older brother's increasingly assholish behavior and his stupid plans to break up their father and his girlfriend, although she also faces being upset when her mother starts to date a colleague. The increased stress causes her grandmother, who is Iris's best friend, to have multiple heart attacks, and most of this occurs while Iris is bedridden from illness. Her father comes over from the Netherlands to help out, which creates hope in Iris and her brother, but that's dashed when he reveals that his girlfriend is pregnant.

Iris's grandmother recovers, her brother finally stops being a douche, and the whole family supports the mother when she's offered a position to stay at the university.

My biggest problem with this book is that the character of the father's girlfriend is presented as a dismissive, selfish twat who has no interest in developing a relationship with her boyfriend's kids. She even calls up while he's helping out while the grandmother is in the hospital recovering and bitches at him for not telling them she's knocked up. I hated her character, which is why the next bit really pissed me off.

You see, one of my most hated tropes is the giving up of a prized possession (typically a toy) for someone else as a cliched sign of maturity.

Iris has a stuffed fox that helped her through her anxiety, which was caused by the divorce. I think it was a childhood toy. This is something with great meaning to her. Yet at the end, she mails it to the father's new kid. I wouldn't have as big an issue with this if they'd ever redeemed the bitchy girlfriend, but you know that toy's just gonna end up in the garbage. Send your new half-sibling a brand new toy and keep your nostalgic one.

You never have to give up a childhood object to be mature.

Never ever fucking EVER.

There is nothing wrong with keeping a nostalgic toy. Giving it up does not make you mature.

Thankfully, the second book in the series doesn't have any of those problems. All the characters are likeable, except the two bullies, who don't get redemption, but bullies really don't need it. I mean, the bitchy girlfriend didn't need it either, but it would have helped Iris giving up the fox at least be halfway believable.

Mai lost her arm to bone cancer and when her father loses his job in Tokyo, she relocates with her family to Oahu, Hawaii. They live with her uncle, aunt and a female cousin who's Mai's age. Mai quickly makes friends through her cousin, but still struggles with bullying from two girls in her gym class. She struggles with gym class itself, because the instructor, who's very nice, takes a little while to figure out something she can do.

This is actually my biggest problem with the book. I mean, I know the bullies in gym are a major part of the plot, but what kind of sadistic school forces a one-armed girl to take gym? Like really.

One of Mai's new friends is Iekeka, whose parents own a surf shop. She's obsessed with surfing and tells Mai about a famous one-armed female surfer. Mai slowly learns to surf and then learns the famous woman is coming to Oahu for a competition for young surfers. After a fun sequence where the girls earn the $100 entry fee for Mai, she competes and while she doesn't win, she forms such a bond with the famous surfer that she's invited to the woman's weekend surf camp.

The other main plotline in the book, aside from the surfing and bullying, is the family's struggling restaurant. It ends up succeeding, of course, thanks to the sushi cuisine from Mai's dad, but it takes a bit for the success to come.

Mai's book felt much better-written than Iris's and is definitely a more enjoyable read.

These are both on Amazon in paperback and ebook form.

BRAVE

Awkward, the first book about these middle school characters, released almost two years ago, and I have been eagerly anticipating this second installment.

It does not disappoint. Well, much, anyway.

Brave follows Jensen, who thinks of his life at school as a video game with multiple enemies to hopefully escape the notice of. Only when he's pulled into a project done by the newspaper staff does he slowly...very slowly...come to realize he's being bullied, even by those he thinks of as his friends.

He also comes to the sad realization that he really has no friends.

He tries to fit in with the art club, but they all get involved in a project that one obnoxious girl leaves him out of, so he helps the newspaper club, but doesn't realize they're mostly just using him for busy work. He reads a couple popular books because the authors are visiting the school arts festival, but ends up missing the festival due to illness. He tries his best to fit in, although I admit that his minor failings sometimes frustrate me. The newspaper club asks him to read a small document before they interview him for their project and he just never does it, even though he knows he should. I'm a bit anal, like Jenny the newspaper girl but less batshit, so I found this trait of his putting off his work to be annoying. And he keeps daydreaming and drawing in his math class, even though he's not doing well and the teacher is intimidating.

Jensen though is mostly a likeable character. He's just got some minor moments when he's frustrating.

I think the only real downfall of this story is that it lacks the backstory of Awkward. There are no scenes outside the school. You don't learn about Jensen's home life or Jenny's or either of the two bullies who plague Jensen. Awkward went more into depth that way and the story was deeper for it.

It does end on a nice cliffhanger, so I hope to see how that went in the next volume...and there'd better be a next volume!

DEAR CANADA: North West Resistance

I have to admit that I just could not get into this one. I remember reading it when I got it and it being okay, but it's got several problems. The story is very slow-paced and extremely sad, but there's also the usual struggle I find with books written by Trottier. She provides a glossary, but that doesn't cover all the words used, and there's no pronunciation guide. It always bothers me when I have to read words over and over in the story and I have no idea how to say them. As this book involves multiple languages, this was very distracting to me, and the combination of all these problems made me just skim it, then set it aside.

DEAR AMERICA: It's another trail.

I thought I had escaped trails. I forgot about this one. It starts out more interestingly with some stuck on a train travel, but then nope, it's wagon fun time again.

Except it's not really fun.

The story at least is a bit different, because the diary bounces from Teresa to her younger and rather obnoxious sister, so you get two different points of view and two different types of trail experience, because Teresa's saddled to the chores while the spoiled younger one doesn't do much.

There's a budding romance between Teresa and one of the boys on the trail that's more annoying than anything, because he's never presented as a very likeable character.

I think there was a big missed opportunity here, too, because the families on this trip are mostly the...let's say less popular immigrants, the ones who faced more bullshit treatment back in New York or wherever. Yet the author never takes the time to really explore the different types of cultural experiences Teresa would have had on the trip, surrounded by all these families different from her own very Italian one.

It's an all right trail book, but it's another trail book and I'm so tired of those.

I AM CANADA: Railroad

This was one of the first three I Am Canada books. The majority of the series is about various battles and wars, so I love ones like this that not only aren't about fighting, but are also about people who aren't white.

Heen is an easy character to like, although his father is another story completely. The flurry of nicknames is a bit hard to keep track of, simply because there are so many of them and only a shred of characterization is assigned to most.

As you can guess, most of the story is either people getting hurt or the Chinese workers being taken advantage of by the railroad system. It's still a good read, but appalling to see how much Heen earned versus how much he actually took home. The last page of the journal is a chart detailing just that.

One of the things I liked best about this is that at least two incidents overlapped with the previous Dear Canada book.

DEAR CANADA: Railroad

Not much to say about this one. It's more slice of life than historical, but not in a particularly engaging fashion. The other DC by the same author that I've reread was the similar, what with not much happening, but different in that at least the story was engaging. 

Kate has a habit of capitalizing random things that she must think are Important, which I find Distracting. 

Her diary is filled with kid drama. Older brother's kind of a dick, especially when he reads her diary out loud at school. I despise that trope. Her best friend had to move away, so she hardly sees her and after the friend goes off to finishing school, she turns into a useless, ungrateful twat and is never called on it. The local friend that thinks of Kate as her best friend is a bit thin-skinned. Kate does slight her sometimes, but the girl acts like a hateful spoiled brat in return, so I don't even really like it when they finally made up at the end. 

The only things that really happen with the railroad are a bunch of people getting hurt or killed, and Kate's constant bad dreams about things happening to her father, who works for the railroad. 

The holiday story in A Season for Miracles actually was more enjoyable than the entire book. I liked the budding romance between Kate and Rusty, although after reading the epilogue in the main book, you know that never goes anywhere. On one hand, it's frustrating because they're cute. On the other, it's also nice to see a historical piece where the girl does not end up hitched to her first love. 

So anyway, decent book, not the best, a bit too much kiddie drama for me. On to...another railroad book. Is it the last one? Maybe.

DEAR AMERICA: Prairie Teacher

This one is a very fast read. Obviously, because I just did my last review not that long ago tonight.

It's a good story, but the buildup is far too long. Her father's just died a couple months ago and it takes her so many pages to realize he's telling her in her dreams to take his place as the town's teacher. Yeah, it's got a smidge of a supernatural element, too. No real ghosts though.

I found the resistance to Sarah Jane teaching to be a bit ridiculous, because she's got, like, a dozen pupils and no one else is lining up for the job.

The story's rather boring. First, it's her not knowing what to do to earn money, then it's teaching stories and issues between the other boarders at the house she's staying in.

Historical teaching stories are never that interesting to me, because of all the different age groups crammed into one building and the older kids aren't so much always learning as they are helping teach the younger ones.

It's not a horrible book in the series, but it's just kinda there.

DEAR AMERICA: Bodie, California

While I haven't tackled them all yet, I think this may have been my favorite of the new additions to the Dear America series that accompanied the reissues.

As fitting a town like Bodie, this book is one hell of a wild ride. It's a murder mystery, a romance, a ghost story, a tale of discrimination from multiple points of view, and it's also got a lot of typical Western elements.

A surprising number of the characters are real people, including Angeline's parents, although in real life, the couple had no children.

The ghost story part is interesting, because most DAs stick with historical stuff and stay away with things more fanciful. I can't remember if any of the others I've read so far have any ghostly elements, except for Elizabeth's Royal Diary and her experiences with the ghost of Katherine Howard.

I think this is a very well-written and engaging addition to the line. It's more fiction-focused than historical, but I'm okay with that in this case.

DEAR AMERICA: The Controversial One

This book used to be one of my favorite Dear America stories. Ann Rinaldi's written dozens of books, most of which I've read over the past few years and most of which I haven't cared for much. I haven't read any critical reviews of her other books, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were problems there, too, although not as many as are in this book.

I don't remember where I first saw this book criticized, but after I read a scathing review of it, I never opened the cover again, nor will I now. It sits with my others, only because if I ever sell these, I want a complete set. 

You can read the review, too, and see just how awful a job Ann Rinaldi did:

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/13_04/review.shtml

MY NAME IS AMERICA: Whaling Ship

This one is quite interesting, because I know nothing of whaling, so while I'm not that into sailing stories, at least there are some aspects that do interest me.

The characters are all decent, if a bit frustrating with the constant fighting.

DEAR AMERICA: Minnesota

This Dear America is quite different from the typical ones. The author based the story on real people, who were even real ancestors of hers. The meat of the story is fictionalized, but the bones are truth.

I basically sum this up as English people come to America, thinking they're moving into a ready-made town in Minnesota, but instead there's nothing there except blizzards and mud and locusts. It's like they played a Little House on the Prairie reality show and failed miserably.

The main character is somewhat likeable, but I quickly became frustrated with her and her stepmother's complete inability to make the father see that pretty much everything he was doing was wrong. They let the servant girl get away with doing nothing and eventually even paid to send her crying ass back to England. Stupid. The stepmother grows into a decent character, but the father's complete failure to do anything you actually need to be able to do to survive as a settler is mindblowing, considering he'd been in Minnesota once before and should have known he couldn't do this. It's like he expected everyone to do his work for him, just because he was the preacher they all followed there. But that never happened, because everyone got pissed at him for not telling the truth about...well, most everything. The bratty little sister isn't punished for ruining the main's paints and last paper, which she's been using as therapy.

And then the author decided to invent a best friend character for the main, who lost her little brother on the sea voyage over and her mother to suicide shortly after they arrive, then had to endure beatings from her drunken father. She ends up running away with a local Ojibwe man and actually got the only decent happy ending in the whole book, because they love each other. But who looks at their family history and thinks "Hey, needs more child abuse" and sticks that into this story for kids?

Definitely one of the skippable Dear Americas. You're not learning anything about prairie living here that you couldn't get from Laura Ingalls Wilder.

MY NAME IS AMERICA: Black Cowboy

A good entry into the series, but not one of the most interesting. There's only so much you can tell about cowboys. I think it's one of those things that needs to be seen rather than read about to fully grasp it.

It's also tough to write about a town like Abilene, Kansas when you're writing for a kids' series. 

It is nice to see a black character treated almost the same as the white and Mexican cowboys right off the bat. Almost. But that shortly after the Civil War, it's a lot more than you'd expect.

Not gonna lie though, I did tear up when he had to put his horse out of its misery. Animal death always gets me, so consider yourself warned about that.

Walter Dean Myers was a celebrated and prolific author and contributed three books to the My Name Is America series, of which this one is the first. 

Vintage Horror Anthologies

 

I don't remember where I got this book, but in 1991 when it was published, I was 13 and into all the young adult horror out at the time. It was possibly a book fair or the bookstore. 

Vampires is an anthology of short stories geared towards an age group slightly younger than, say, Christopher Pike's readers. Tweens probably, even though we didn't have that word back then. But that doesn't make the stories any less effective. I have read a LOT of horror in my years and this book is always with my favorites where I can get to it easily for a quick reread. 

On the back cover, it mentioned they did a similar book called Werewolves, but even though I search the local libraries and bookstores, I never found it. I came to believe it didn't exist. I know I thought of it a few times over my internet-accessible years, but only recently did I decide to finally look it up. I found a used library copy for about eight bucks on ebay and it arrived today. 

I'll always prefer vampires to werewolves, but the stories are still excellent. Even though I just got some library books today (not that I need them, but I learned about a newer Lauren Myracle series and wanted to read them without spending money), I opened this and read it cover to cover without even thinking about the books from the library. 

If you like a good horror anthology, check these out. Yolen and Greenberg did other anthologies, too, and I'm going to try to find cheap copies of a couple of the ghost story ones. Vampires is pretty easy to find and cheap, but you'll pay a little more for Werewolves. It came out in 1988 and doesn't appear to have gotten as big a circulation as Vampires. 

Another favorite anthology from my youth is Raymond Van Over's Monsters You Never Heard Of. This one's for a little older readers, though still not quite to the teen level of the most popular YA horror books of the time. It's very well-written though and a lot of the stories have stuck with me over the decades. This was published in 1989 and it popped right up on Amazon. 

If you prefer a variety of creatures, definitely get the monster book, although I give my highest recommendation to all three of these.