Book Review: Tease by Amanda Maciel

Holy cow. We all know that there are a lot of YA books out there that deal with teen suicide, and for good reason.  Amanda Maciel has done something a little bit different with her debut novel, Tease. In fact, she has done something daring: she's written a teen suicide book told from the point of view of one of the bullies, not the victim.  What kicks it up a notch is the fact that Sara, our narrator, is not all that sorry about what she did. Whoa. The fact that Maciel also manages to make Sara seem occasionally sympathetic? Double whoa.

In other words, there were times that this book made me feel uncomfortable. Deeply uncomfortable. Since I don't believe that a novel about the bullying and resulting suicide of a sixteen year old girl should be comfortable, I say brava to Ms. Maciel.

The story, told in a call-and-response style, is all told from Sara's first person, present tense POV. I tend to dislike first person narratives, and I actively loathe present tense ones, and while it constantly chafed me while reading Tease, I do acknowledge that they serve the story fairly well. The chapters alternate regularly between January-March (when her bullying of Emma escalates) and July-November (when Sara is dealing with the legal aftermath of Emma's suicide), and each timeline progresses chronologically. The dialogue reads very true-to-life, with lots of "She was all, like, whatevs" and "beyotch" and "OMG" or "what a lame effing party"on every page.  I salute the author for capturing realistic teenspeak, but it drove me nuts.  I will never complain again about reading too-clever-to-be-believed teen dialogue from the likes of John Green again.

It's hard to pin down the real Emma, as we see her exclusively through Sara's eyes, but what we can conclude is that she's a transfer student who is very pretty. Sara is almost as hard to pin down, as she hides as much from the reader as she does from herself, but it's clear that she's troubled, generally unhappy, and completely in thrall to her alleged best friend, Brielle. I say alleged best friend because Brielle is a real piece of work, nasty and popular and beautiful and rich (of course), and they're together all the time, but it's apparent to the reader that there's not actually much love lost between them, even if it's not apparent to Sara just yet.

What's most maddening about Sara is her insistence that Emma's suicide is not her fault, and her resentment towards the dead girl is palpable.  What's more, for most of the novel, Sara seems to believe that she herself is the wronged party: Emma stole her boyfriend, Emma couldn't handle Sara's retaliation, Emma was too weak to understand high school is hard for everybody, and now everybody is blaming Sara for Emma's suicide.

It's a bold stance for the author to take, and as far as I know, an unprecedented one, but in the end it does seem to pay off. Every other book I've read that deals with teen suicide seems a bit too "pat" in comparison to this one. What it does make clear is that bullying is both pervasive and corrosive, and that there's no happy ending for anybody involved, on either side.

NB: This book will be published in May 2014 by Balzer & Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins.  It also happens to be loosely based on an actual instance of bullying and suicide in 2010 in the small town where my bookshop is located, and the whole time I was reading it, I kept imagining what the parents of the girl who killed herself must think after reading this book.  It was one of the many reasons I was deeply uncomfortable during the course of this book. 

Book (P)Review: Two YA Novels for Spring '12

Slide by Jill Hathaway features a largely realistic setting with one aspect of fantasy, or suspend-your-disbelief, for the reader: Vee Bell suffers from narcolepsy, but when these sleeping fits overcome her, she "slides"into another person's mind and sees the world through their eyes for a little while.  Which is how she knows that her sister's friend, Sophie, didn't kill herself--she was occupying the killer's mind and saw the knife.  But of course how can she possibly go to the police with this information?  So instead of blocking these slides she tries to encourage them, hoping to learn more.  When there's another "suicide" at the high school, Vee knows she has to work even faster if she wants to prevent the killer from striking again.  Along the way we get a cast of suspects, a budding relationship with the new boy in town, and new insight both into her father's life and her best friend's life.  A little learned empathy is never a bad thing, right?

This book reminds me largely of a book from earlier this year--Clarity by Kim Harrington--and the denouement in this book is fairly similar.  Although this book is for a slightly older audience, fans of one will enjoy the other.

I was never personally convinced of the "sliding", and I could see the ending coming from a good ways off.  But I think younger teens in particular will respond well to this book. Overall, though, I think this book will find an eager audience, even if it's not my cup of tea.

The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E. Smith is light and sweet and a little something more, and I mean that in a good way, not damning with faint praise.  It's the story of seventeen year old Hadley Sullivan and how four minutes changed everything in her life.  She's supposed to be on a plane to London where her father is getting remarried to a woman she's never met, but instead she gets into a fight with her mom and is running late by just four minutes. She's put on the next flight, seated next to sweetly funny Oliver, and what starts off as the worst day of her life turns out to be, well, surprisingly awesome.  After their plane lands in London, Oliver and Hadley are just smitten enough with each other and know just enough personal information to be able to track each other down later in the day, with surprising results.

Hadley starts off as a typical teen, self-absorbed and unable (or maybe just unwilling) to see her parents as anything other than their relationship to her, but by the end of the novel (which takes place in just 24 hours) she's able to see them as adults who have lives and interests and priorities beyond being her Mom and Dad.  And she realizes that while she may not have a say in their life choices (much less like them), she *can* choose how to react to their decisions, and that maybe forgiveness is a good place to start, both with herself and her new family.

So no, this isn't an exciting do-or-die adventure, nor is it a romance for the ages, or full of angsty vampires.  It's simply a good story, well-told, replete with first love and second chances.  Teens who like Maureen Johnson's novels or who are looking for realistic fiction that's not Gossip Girls/The Clique will enjoy this book a good bit and I wouldn't be surprised if there were a movie in the works soon. 


NB: I read both of these books in ARC form, courtesy of our publishers' sales reps.  The former releases from Harper in 4/12 and the latter releases from Hachette in 2/12. 

Book Review: Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

I just started and finished my first book for this month.  And if you exclude the moments I took to make myself some mint tea, and later to eliminate it, I read this book through in one sitting.  Or more precisely, one lounging.  Th1rteen R3asons Why is told in almost a call and response style (if you know gospel music or have heard any traditional Congolese songs, or if you've ever participated in a Roman Catholic or Anglican mass, you've experienced this), with Hannah Baker initiating the call and Clay Jensen picking up the response.  Hannah is the new girl at school who has just committed suicide.  But she is still very much a presence in the lives of at least 14 of her surviving classmates. You see, Hannah has left behind a collection of audio tapes in which she lists the thirteen reasons why she killed herself, each reason connected to a name.  One day Clay receives a mysterious box in the mail with said cassette tapes tucked inside, with the instructions to listen to them and pass them along to the person named after him on the tapes--and that's, of course, where the story takes off. 

Interesting conceit, no?  And Asher pulls it off remarkably well.  The story moves along at a brisk pace, and each time he turns over a cassette and pushes play, Clay both dreads and anticipates hearing his own name and the role he unwittingly played in her downward spiral towards suicide.  I probably would have responded a tad more positively to this book if I hadn't read all of the accolades it has received since being published last year in cloth, but I felt there were times when the book fell a little flat--where the teen dialogue and interactions didn't quite ring true.  Or at least not as true as other books I've recently read, such as Will Grayson, Will Grayson or Big Girl Small.  And it was less affecting to me personally than Julie Anne Peters' fine novel, By the Time You Read This I'll Be Dead. 

Still, I did essentially read it in one sitting, and since the reader knows at the beginning that poor Hannah kills herself, there is none of that angsty will-she-or-won't-she feeling as you're reading, so one can concentrate more on the story and less on anticipating the ending.  This book is far more about the effect of Hannah's death on Clay, and to a lesser extent Tony, the poor boy who has been entrusted with a second set of tapes, instructed to go public with them if the 13 people Hannah names on the tapes don't follow through with her last request.  One fervently hopes that the remaining 12 classmates come away from their listening experience changed, but Asher doesn't go there, and it is unrealistic to hold too dearly to that hope. It is, of course, a book about unintended consequences and repercussions and being careless with other people's sense of self.  And I think that it fill an important gap in the literature of bullying and suicide--an action doesn't have to be immediately recognizable as cruel to make somebody's life miserable. It is, in short, a book worth reading. 

This book is published by Razorbill, a division of Penguin, and I ostensibly purchased the copy for some of my granddaughters to read on their summer vacation, but I wanted first crack at it. 

I turn to fiction when I want to understand...

I work in the nearby town of South Hadley, MA, which made national news recently with the sad, sad story of a young high school girl from the local high school who committed suicide. It later came out that she had been bullied relentlessly by her peers, both physically & verbally, and even online. Allegedly a number of the bullies even bragged about how miserable they made the poor girl's life. I'm a good 20 years removed from high school myself, and while I never experienced the cruelty that Ms. Phoebe Prince suffered, I recently read a young adult novel that enabled me to relive every taunt, every nasty aside, even the few (minor) physical assaults that accompanied me through middle school and high school:

BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS, I’LL BE DEAD by Julie Anne Peters. Daelyn Rice is a girl bullied by her peers and misunderstood by her parents when she discovers a website called Through-the-Light. There she meets other teens who are assigned a “Date of Determination,” a date by which, if their lives do not improve, they plan to commit suicide. Follow Daelyn as the website counts down to her D.O.D and she recalls the endless stream of abuse from her school peers and her "Fat Camp" counselors--abuse that the perpetrators intimidated her not to reveal. This raw, horrifying and tragic book couldn’t come at a more pertinent time to our community, mourning a similar loss. If you think bullying is no big deal, read this book and think again. It's corrosive, damaging and pervasive.