Book of the Month- June - We Are Still Tornadoes

We Are Still Tornadoes

We Are Still Tornadoes by Michael Kun and Susan Mullen follows the friendship of Catherine and Scott as they move on from high school. 

We learn about the ups and downs of Cath and Scott's lives this first year out of high school through their letters to each other. Cath has gone off to college and Scott has stayed behind in their home town to work in his father's store and to try to get his band up and running.

This tale of growing up takes place in the 1980's so there is no texting or email, just good old fashioned letters on school (Cath) and store (Scott) letterhead.  The letters back and forth make for a fast read, and the occasional urgent page turner (did Scott get that letter?!?!) to make sure the friends are up to date on the latest news from home and college. 

Through their letters to each other we meet their families, old school friends, old boy and girl friends, new friends and roommates. We experience the trials and tribulations of their first year out of the safe high school community with humour, sadness and joy as they support and offer honest guidance to each other. 

Having been best friends forever, it is logical that they are able to share their innermost thoughts about their lives and can fight, and laugh, and cry together and have such an honest relationship. Even though you know how it is going to end, it is a great fast read that I highly recommend.

Strange the Dreamer

 by Laini Taylor 

As a young orphan, Lazlo Strange loved nothing more than listening to a good story.  At the monastery where Lazlo was raised, an old monk would tell him countless stories of a wondrous place far from their war torn land. Two hundred years ago this mysterious land of riches was cut off from the outside world by an unknown force. Memories of the land slowly faded to myth, ultimately becoming but a fairy tale to most people. The monk recounted these fairy tales to young Lazlo, until, one day the name of the land was stricken from their minds and Lazlo and the monk could only call it Weep.  For years, Lazlo obsessed over the name of this place but only the name Weep would come to mind. 

Through a fortunate turn of events, Lazlo became a junior librarian in his capital city, a place that stored all manner of records on anything and everything, including fairy tales of the lost city of Weep.  Seven years pass and Lazlo, now a young man, has amassed a great wealth of knowledge on the city of Weep.

Enter the Godslayer. After 200 years of zero contact, an embassy from Weep has come to Lazlo’s city to offer the greatest minds of the land an opportunity to solve a mysterious problem.  An opportunity of a lifetime has presented itself, now it’s up to Lazlo to make it happen!  His knowledge of the lost city just might be his ticket to getting into the city itself!
  
Beautiful narrative and intriguing characters keep you guessing the whole way through.  Weep was a tantalizing enigma that had me tearing through chapters desperate to find out what happens next.

Book of the Month: May - Dragon Spring Road

by Janie Chang

Dragon Springs Road by B.C. author Janie Chang combines historical fiction and fantasy to present a coming of age story for a Eurasian girl named Jialing. Jialing is abandoned by her mother and taken on as a bond slave by the Yang family. She develops a friendship of sorts with the family’s daughter Anjuin. The story follows Jialing as she grows up and also chronicles the history of China, and in particular Shanghai from 1908-1919. As an ancient imperial dynasty collapses, a new government struggles to life and Jialing and Anjuin are bound together in friendship that will be tested by duty, honour, and love.

Dragon Springs Road is beautifully written and Jialing’s narration always feels honest. Jialing’s struggles and experiences as a Eurasian child are powerful; it’s painful growing up in a world where everyone looks down on a mixed race child. I really enjoyed the magical realism woven throughout  the book in the form of Fox spirit, and the gates. Fox keeps Jialing safe and shows her what is possible in the world. This enthralling story includes gangsters, racism, corruption and more.

The story telling flows in a lovely way, keeping you turning the pages. Dragon Springs Road is a testament to the strength of women shunned by society, who have their destiny tangled up with those who control them. It invites us to re-examine our relationship to place, identity and ancestry. It was both a pleasure and an education to read this sensitive, intelligent novel of our times. 

Note: There is some sexual content in the novel.

For read-alikes try Snow Flower and Secret Fan.

The Girl from Everywhere

by Heidi Heilig

Nix has spent her life sailing aboard her father's ship, the Temptation.  It's not your average boat, though.  As a Navigator, Nix's father can steer the Temptation through space and time.  As long as he has a map, he can take them there - even fantastical, supposedly imaginary places.    

Nix has spent the last 16 years traveling back and forth through time as her father desperately tries to get back to the love of his life, Nix's mother, who died in Hawaii in  the 1860s.  If he succeeds, what will happen to Nix?  Since her mother died in childbirth, what does that mean for her very existence?

Nix's father gets an offer he can't refuse - the promise of a map that is from exactly the place and time he wants to return to.  But can you actually go back and change the past?  At what cost? 

This book is an intriguing combination of fantasy, time-travel and historical fiction with a bit of romance thrown in.     


The sequel, The Ship Beyond Time, was released earlier this year.

History Is All You Left Me

by Adam Silvera

Griffin is a sixteen-year-old boy suffering in the aftermath of the loss of his ex-boyfriend Theo, who has just died in a drowning accident in California. On top of grieving the death of his first love, Griffin is also struggling with worsening symptoms of his OCD, the deterioration of his friendship with another boy, Wade, and an inevitable confrontation with Jackson -  the boy who stole Theo away from him.

Chapters alternating between present day and "history" weave together beautifully to tell the story of Griffin and Theo's beginning and end, and everything in between. Equal parts funny, romantic, heart-breaking and profound, you'll be thinking about this book long after you've finished reading.

Book of the Month: April - Killer Instinct

Killer Instinct

By S.E. Green

What would you do if you had urges to kill? How would you feel if a local serial killer was sending you morbid messages? Most of us would be horrified, not Lane, the protagonist of Killer Instinct, book one of the Killer Instinct series by S.E. Green.

Lane spends her days keeping up her good grades, her afternoons working at the local animal hospital and her evenings hunting local criminals. Using her skills in Aikido and special knowledge of what makes a killer tick Lane is trying to bring justice to her town. The local news has nicknamed her the "Masked Savior" for all of the "good deeds" she has been doing.

Lane is trying her best to quell her own dark urges since she herself might just be a serial killer as well. Are we born a killer or is it something we become? This question is something Lane asks herself regularly.

I listened to this book through my RPL Hoopla account as a streaming audio book. It is read by Emily Woo Zeller, I really like the tone and production of this audio book. Zeller is a well established audio book narrator and has interpreted teenager Lane well. It is also available in print, you can place a hold by clicking here: Killer Instinct.

Please note that this book contains strong language and sexual content.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear

by E. K. Johnston

Exit, Pursued by a Bear is a worthy successor to Laurie Halse Anderson's seminal novel Speak.  In Speak, Melinda Sordino was so traumatised by her assault that she was unable to even say the words "I was raped," to herself, much less out loud for months afterwards.  Hermione Winters, the protagonist of Exit, Pursued by a Bear, is everything Melinda was not: popular, confident, unwilling to cower in the aftermath of her rape, with the bonus of super-supportive parents and a steadfast best friend.

Hermione is the co-captain of the award-winning cheerleading team at Palermo Heights High School in the small town of Palermo Heights, Ontario.  On the first night of an annual summer cheer camp, every school talks about their inner collective demons: fear of heights, plagues of self-doubt.  Hermione, though, describes PHHS as a cursed school where, "every single class... since 2006 has lost a student to a drunk driver... [and] every year one of the girls in PHHS gets pregnant."  The cheerleading squad's challenge is to break the curse.  Hermione's class may have lost a student years ago to a drunk driver, but they are determined that there will not be a pregnant girl at PHHS this year.

The cheerleading team is no laughing matter, and in fact they are the pride of Palermo Heights.  In Palermo Heights, the sports teams play second fiddle to the cheerleaders. PHHS's cheerleading team is also unusually tightly-knit, which is a factor in their ongoing success.  This camaraderie is threatened during cheer camp.  One minute Hermione is dancing at the end-of-camp dance, and the next thing she remembers is waking up in a hospital, where her best friend, Polly, informs Hermione she's been raped.

Hermione refuses to let one single event define her, but it proves difficult in a small town with a small high school.  The whispers, stares, and rumours follow Hermione as she tries to move on from the rape, enlisting the help of once-a-week sessions with a psychologist, and throwing herself back into cheerleading.

Johnston handles several sensitive issues -- rape, pregnancy, abortion, sexuality --  in Hermione's matter-of-fact voice.  It serves to put things into perspective.  Yes, Hermione's rape is traumatic, and she experiences flashbacks, often at inopportune times, but to Hermione the actual event matters less than how she decides to handle it.  I think that is what makes this book stand out in a crowded YA shelf: Hermione decides who is going to tell her story.  It's on her terms and no one else's.  It also passes the infamous "Bechdel test," in which two women discuss anything other than a boy.

If the title rings a bell, congratulations!  You are officially a Shakespeare nerd.  "Exit, pursued by a bear..." is one of the more bewildering stage directions in Shakespeare, from his play A Winter's Tale.  To this day nobody knows if Shakespeare intended to use a real bear or an actor in a bear costume.  The novel, though, is much less circumspect.  The bear that pursues Hermione are the myriad slings and arrows from the aftermath of the rape.  The novel is a cleverly drawn parallel between Shakespeare's play of a falsely accused queen named Hermione.  So, Exit, Pursued by a Bear, is in fact, a Winters' tale, because it is the tale of Hermione Winters.  In the play, King Leontes accuses Queen Hermione of having an affair.  In the novel, Hermione's boyfriend Leo, doesn't really believe she was raped.  The play has a character called Polixenes who proclaims Hermione's innocence, and the novel has Hermione's bestie Polly, who will defend Hermione until she no longer has breath.

If you enjoy books with strong female leads, and read a realistic story where girls can talk about more than their respective love lives, you'll enjoy this book.  I know I did.

For read-alikes, try Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock by Matthew Quick; The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, and of course, Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson.