dot dot dash.

The Decoding of Lana Morris by Laura & Tom McNeal

The ADD review bit: Lana Morris is one of those heartwarming characters that reminds me why I read YA. The plot is there in whispers and fits, but what turns the pages here is watching a character discover her backbone and start to understand her reason to be.

Interested? Nice. Keep on keeping on: I really mean what I said up there - characters like Lana are why I read YA. They are so in touch with the base emotions - love, envy, anger, fear, sadness, grief that the disaffected tone of most modern literature is missing, and I'm never sad to see it go. Things happen, the character reacts, and usually makes the most plot-drivingly interesting decision available because a) everything when you're 12-19 is life or death and b) those mistakes and triumphs need to be made as soon as possible, because there is probably homework to get to. And Lana is a shining example of this teen trope, because her situation is already so dire. A missing father, absent mother, in a house full of children with special needs, in love with her foster father, trying to be in with the lowest common denominator of teenage thieves and lowlifes... she has a mixed bag. So of course a bit of magic realism would sock her right in the stomach and then take hold.

Plot: Lana Morris lives in a house with five special needs kids (SNKs) affectionately called "Snicks." Her foster mother is an ice queen, her foster father is dreamy. When she is mysteriously given a "Ladies Drawing Kit," she finds out that what she draws comes true. So... with so many things she wants to be true in her life, she needs to figure out: what does she want to wish for?

More: I think my favorite part about this particular novel, Lana aside, is the "be careful what you wish for" plot is thrown out the window pretty quickly. She figures out her wishes are kind of difficult to put on paper, and the magic realism takes the form of mildly freakish coincidences that could (for the cynical) remain coincidences. Instead, the wish fulfillment serves as a neat little metaphor for being able to take control of your life as much as you possibly can. And with that power in hand, she starts using it, drawing on her wish paper or just making decisions for herself, results and consequences be darned.

Also, the way the Snicks are portrayed seemed perfect. They are not glossed over and reduced to quirks. They are much more than that, and Lana's relationship with Tilly is heart warming to say the least.

Should you read it? I liked it, I know that much. But here's the thing, and it's a shame I'm only getting to this here: the Mcneals write amazing books. This is the fourth I've read, and they are all fantastic examples of why YA is more than YA. And if you are going to read only one of their books, I'd choose Crooked or Zipped. But if everything I typed above here has made you open an amazon.com window to find out what this little number is going for these days, then... rock it out. Lana's good company.

some kind of thunder inside.

Liar by Justine Larbalestier

Review for the readers with ADD: It says there right on the cover: this book is about a liar. That liar is a girl named Micah. Deciding what is a lie and what isn't is half of the fun, and the other half of the fun is going back through and re-reading the bits that she says are "true" after you just assumed it was true anyway. And then questioning that. Because she is, after all, a liar.

Still here? Cool. Let's dig a little deeper: So I found Justine Larbalestier by proxy - she is married to Scott Westerfeld, another YA author who has all of my respect and is lavished with lots of praise. I saw she wrote How to Ditch Your Fairy, which didn't really interest me too much, so I chose this book off of the Mission Library Branch instead, remembering the controversy over the cover. After reading Liar, I put my BART-first-impression on the line and added How to Ditch Your Fairy to my hold shelf. How's that for a recommendation.

I liked Liar especially because of the camera obscura that is the first person narrator, and it makes me wonder, in the best way, about the nature of story telling at all. Reading first person is a strange thing - here we are, on a journey in someone's head. Why did they write it? Is it a journal, or do we just get their typed out thoughts on the page? Or is it like we went over to their house for a cup of coffee and they just had 300 pages worth of junk to fill us in on? First person isn't the only perspective that begs these questions, but it is certainly puts the most at stake: why is Micah telling us her story?

Plot: I can't say much here, actually. I don't want to ruin this one for you. But the bare minimum should suffice: Micah is a liar. Her boyfriend disappears and then is suspiciously murdered. And everything that happens before or after is narrated and shadowed by Micah's meticulous, destructive lies/truth.

More: Micah is a surprising and ultimately chilling narrator because of this obscured viewpoint. When we find out her reasons for telling us the story - basically, to keep her lies straight for herself, while starting to tell some truth, we have to stop and take stock of what's happening. The best thing this book has going for it is not only the constant question of what Micah is lying about, but the why - why does she have to lie.

And the further you read, or maybe it's just me - I started to question why I lie too. And when a book gets you to do that - well, you're reading something sort of different. In a good way.

However, when all is said and done I didn't love Liar. The second half of the book made it hard to love. I won't go into it because I don't want to spoil anything - but I'm not surprised that I don't love it. It's hard to love a liar.

Should you read it? Oh yeah. 100 percent. Be sure to flip back and forth too, when more of the layers get pulled away, and see if you think that she's actually telling the truth, or just putting more layers on.

P.S. the title of this post are lyrics from a song by Dragonette called "Liar. It's a great companion piece to the book. Listen to it here.

all about the real.

Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork

review for those with ADD: The book wears its fellows (if not its influences) right on its jacket sleeve: Told in the first person, it's narrated by a 17-year-old with an Asperger's-like syndrome. As it proclaims proudly in its summary on the left flap, it's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime but a bit different. It's well-written with some pretty wonderful moments, but the uneven pace might put off some of the younger set who this novel seems to be aimed at.

still here? okay, good: I found this book while trying to see if I could find the sequel to Catcher in the Rye that J.D. Salinger stopped from being published. Powell's books said that they had it, but they didn't really have it.

One of their employees did have four books on her top 5 of 2009 list that I also enjoyed, and the fifth one was Marcelo, so it follows that I got this next. On Saturday, which was apparently St. Patrick's Day for those who wanted a whole day to drink in San Francisco, a guy and his girlfriend drunkenly asked if the book I was reading was good. I told them I had no idea, and that's how I felt even when I finished - I'm still unsure whether or not I liked it.

Plot: The titular character strikes a deal with his lawyer father: If he can be successfully helpful at his father's law firm over the summer, he will not have to go to public school in the fall. Instead he can stay at Paterson, a school meant for kids with disabilities less or more severe than Marcelo's - the school he had been at for for most of his life. At the law firm, he finds all those things the real world has to offer. Friends that aren't friends, understanding but aloof females, decisions that affect more than himself. And so, and so, and so.

More: My inability to decide whether or not I enjoyed it stems from a seeming disinterest to follow through on some of the details that fascinated me the most: The book opens with Marcelo describing this "internal music" that he has trouble describing, and isn't really music anyway, it's just the feeling you get from listening to music. But by the end of the book, he has stopped hearing it. He can no longer return to it, he can't call it up like he used to. This loss of this ability is referred to only twice that I can remember, and although it was from Marcelo's viewpoint, I do not know, still, how he feels about losing it.

In other words, after 100 pages of what feels like a character study, the Stork seems to think he needed a detective-like plot, and I feel a bit like he left some of Marcelo's more interesting quirks on the road to the conclusion. And really, that's what confuses me the most about the jacket sleeve referencing Curious Incident - that novel had both plot and character development at the same time, while Marcelo jumps back and forth between the two.

Should you read it? Probably. Especially if you've gotten this far down this review and you're still interested in what I think. It's 300 easy pages in a nice typeset (I really like when publishers tell you the font the book was set in. I do not understand why this isn't more common.) Marcelo's struggle to understand the world is touching, and his matter-of-fact narration manages endearing nearly 100 percent of the time.