Books and Sensibility

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3.5

Only Daughter by Anna Snoekstra

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  • Release Date: September 20th 2016
  • Pages: 288
  • Genre: Psychological Thriller/Grip-lit
  • Publisher: Mira (Harlequin)

After going missing for 12 years the Winters’ family only daughter, Rebecca, is back. Rebecca doesn’t remember where she’s been and her memories are fleeting mostly because the girl who returned isn’t Rebecca Winters. She’s an impostor simply looking to hide out. But somebody from the shadows is on to the deception and before this impostor is found out she will discover that Rebecca’s perfect suburban life was lie.

This  Aussie thriller moves between time, following the exploits of the impostor in 2014 and the uneasy life of the real teenage Rebecca Winters a decade previous. Snoekstra sets the scene of an idyllic life with a disturbing underbelly and while the novel doesn’t have the same eerie pathos of a Gillian Flynn novel, you will find yourself flipping the pages to find out how this ends.

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Spontaneous by Aaron Starmer

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  • Release Date: August 23, 2016
  • Pages:368
  • Genre: Contemporary-ish
  • Publisher: Dutton Books for Young Readers (Penguin)

This book probably had the easiest elevator pitch ever; students at a New Jersey high school start spontaneously combusting. The entire town, and eventually the entire world starts looking for answers including senior class member Mara Carlyle, the snarky, foul-mouthed, irreverent narrator who takes us through this story.

I have read a lot of weird YA. I’m talking giant man-eating grasshopper YAand girls-drink-bat-and-sees-future-anti-feminist hellscape weird. But this book takes the Kafkaesque cake.

I was so morbidly curious about this book after hearing about it a BEA because I wanted to see how they handled the combustion. Do the students go poof gone or it is something more gruesome? Well, let me put it this way, when it first happens people assume it was a suicide bomb. So, it mentions blood but it never gets too gross. Starmer focuses more on how students react to what is…leftover.

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Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters

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With all the discussion surrounding #ownvoices and representation in publishing I know some readers will be turned off this book because Ben Winters is White and judging by his Twitter feed is like all of this writer’s woke ex-boyfriends. That said, I saw Attica Locke praising this book and I thought I’d give it a try.

 Spike Lee has this mockumentary C. S. A , about an alternate future where slavery never ended. Well, Underground Airlines is in that kind of world. It’s the 2010’s and there are still 4 Southern states where enslaving Black people is legal. We meet Victor, a runaway slave living in the North who has been conscripted by the US Marshall Service to locate and return runaway slaves to their owners. His latest mission takes him to Indianapolis, but he soon discovers this case isn’t all it seems.

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For The Record by Charlotte Huang

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Release Date: November 10, 2015

Pages: 320 pages

Genre: Contemporary YA

Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers 

Chelsea Ford gets the opportunity of her dreams, when she is asked to step in as the lead singer of the rock band Melbourne for their summer tour. While she has chemistry with the band onstage the same can’t be said for offstage. Chelsea’s struggles to be accepted by her three male band members and it doesn’t help when teen heartthrob actor, Lucas Rivers, takes a liking to Chelsea.

Teen drama ensues as the band travels from city to city.  The deeper into the summer they go the less sure the band is that it will still be together by the end.

The heart of this story is in the details. I saw on Huang’s website that her husband has connections to the music industry , so she has probably seen so much of what she is writing about. Huang brings to life the landmarks and eclectic venues where the band performs.

 Her female characters are allowed to have sexual agency without slut shaming. Huang swiftly subverts the asexual Asian trope by having the band’s Chinese member, Malcolm Ho, be the biggest ladies man.

Soapy, flirty and fun this story of life in the spotlight will have readers ready to rock.

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Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

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  • Release Date: October 2, 2012
  • Pages: 336
  • Genre: Fantasy
  • Publisher: Tor Books

Well, it’s time for to me fill my “Reading Outside of My Usual Genre” quota for the year.

I came across this book on NPR books where Amal El-Mohtar discussed how awesome the diverse covers for this book were and how Max Gladstone became one of his favorite authors. I had a Fantasy space in my Summer Book Bingo, so when I saw this was available on Scribd I started reading.


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I’ll Meet You There by Heather Demetrios

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  • Release Date: February 3, 2015
  • Pages: 400
  • Genre: Contemporary
  • Publisher: Henry Holt & Co (Macmillan)

Skylar Evans has one goal; get out of her small backwoods hometown of Creek View, California. With her acceptance letter to San Francisco State in hand the only thing standing between Skylar and the next step in her life is the summer. But when her mom loses her job and sobriety she’s not sure the summer is going to end how she planned.

 Right away this book reminded me of one of my favorite chapters from Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Thingscalled How To Get Unstuckabout Strayed’s time as a counselor to girls whose success was measured by two things; not getting pregnant and getting a job at Taco Bell.  This sort of mentality is evident in Skylar’s story, her best friend is a teen mom and her mom worked at Taco Bell for 18 years. Skylar herself is trying to get “unstuck” from this life cycle. Creek View is a place where future plans are very short sided and people drink and party to forget about their problems.

I feel like the setting of this book is very important to understanding the story. Creek View is this lower income area with a mix of lower income white people and Mexican migrant worker families. Creek View represents a town we don’t see a lot of in contemporary YA; most YAs tend take place in nondescript suburban bubbles.

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