A Baker's Dozen Is One Too Many...

Published:  February 4th, 2014

Something Real

By: Heather Demetrios

Henry Holt BYR

ISBN-13:  9780805097948

Seventeen-year-old Bonnie™ Baker has grown up on TV -- she and her twelve siblings are the stars of one-time hit reality show Baker's Dozen.  Since the show's cancellation, Bonnie™ has tried to live a normal life, under the radar and out of the spotlight.  But it's about to fall apart....because Baker's Dozen is going back on the air.  Bonnie™'s mom and the show's producers won't let her quit and soon the life she has so carefully built for herself, with real friends (and maybe even a real boyfriend), is in danger of being destroyed by the show.  Bonnie™ needs to do something drastic if her life is ever going to be her own -- even if it means being more exposed than ever before.

Review

     Ever since Bonnie™ Baker was born, her life has been documented on film and watched on TV by millions of strangers.  They got to see her and her many siblings (twelve to be exact) grow up -- and their family fall apart.  The show ended with Bonnie's parents getting divorced and her barely alive after a failed suicide attempt.  Now four years later, Bonnie is just beginning to heal from the anxiety, depression and isolation that being on TV brought to her life.  Going by the name Chloe, she has close friends, a boy she likes and a decent relationship with her siblings.  Then Chloe/Bonnie™'s Mom invites the camera crews back into their lives, rekindling the show after writing a tell-all book.  Of course she doesn't tell any of the kids about it until the crews show up.  Bonnie and her brother Benton are absolutely furious.  The last thing they want is to be back under a microscope.  Can they find a way to take control of their own lives, in the face of total dehumanization, marketing ploys and the unwillingness of their own mother to let them live their lives free?

     When you think of reality TV (or at least when I do), I never consider the children.  I tend to focus on the trashiness and greediness of the adults involved with the shows.  They're exploiting their own personal lives, relationships, privacy and themselves for money and fame.  Not to mention the poor taste they usually exhibit while they do it.  This book shows me what it must be like to be a child on TV, displayed for the entire world to gawk at.  Bonnie's relationships with her parents crumble.  Her Mom never has any time for her after they adopt the rest of the kids, and she hasn't seen her Dad since the divorce four years before.  Her sister Lexie blames her for the loss of the cameras and the fame.  The only one in her family that Bonnie really has a good relationship with is her older brother, Benton.  That's because Benny is of the same opinion she is - fame isn't worth the price of admission.  All the family drama and the complicated relationships were compelling stuff.  

     Probably my main complaints would be the lack of depth to Chloe's friends, Tessa and Mer, who really seem to exist as her connection to normality.  I did like the way Benton's relationship with Matt wasn't portrayed as being a big deal.  They were just two boys who were in love with each other.  There was bit of friction with Matt's religious parents near the end, but overall their relationship is treated as just the normalest thing ever - as it should be in books and real life, always!  Patrick, the love interest for Chloe, was extremely close to Gary Stu territory.  He was entirely too perfect and I could not spot a single flaw.  The only thing that ever caused problems with him and Chloe was when she tried breaking up with him "for his own good."  And honestly, he's loving and supportive, never gets mad at her and is willing to put off his acceptance to Columbia for a year, so he can travel around the world with her (all because she was too chicken-shit to apply to any colleges).  The end is kind of loose, with Chloe and Benton patching things up with Lexie, moving out after they turn eighteen, and hiring a lawyer to sue MetaReel and tank the show the best they can.  But we readers never get to see the resolution to any of these conflicts.  All in all, an intriguing book that really makes you consider the people behind the reality show "characters."  I'd recommend this to someone who enjoys a good character study.

VERDICT:  3.5/5  Stars

**No money or favors were exchanged for this review.  This book is now available in stores, online, or maybe even at your local library.**

Show Me What I'm Looking For

Expected Publication: April 1st, 2014

Love Letters To The Dead

By: Ava Dellaira

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

ISBN-13: 9780374346676

It begins as an assignment for English class: write a letter to a dead person.  Laurel chooses Kurt Cobain because her sister, May, loved him.  And he died young, just like May did.  Soon Laurel has a notebook full of letters to people like Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, Amelia Earhart, Heath Ledger and more; though she never gives a single one of them to her teacher.  She writes about starting high school, navigating new friendships, falling in love for the first time, learning to live with her splintered family.  And finally about the abuse she suffered when May was supposed to be looking out for her.  Only then, once Laurel has written down the truth about what happened to herself, can she truly begin to accept what happened to May.  And only when Laurel has begun to see her sister as the person she was; lovely and amazing and deeply flawed; can she begin to discover her own path.

Review

     This book was a bit of an odd duck for me as a reader.  I loved the premise: letters to famous dead people, to help work through her personal pain?  It was an interesting concept and I loved seeing who Laurel would choose to write to next!  Probably my largest issue with the book was the style of the narrative.  A lot of books can do well as epistolary style novels.  I have a series by Jaclyn Moriarty that I truly love and find almost perfect.  This one did something that is against one of my cardinal rules though: it did a lot of telling, in place of showing.  I found myself disconnected from the book, even though we spend most of the narrative inside Laurel's head, because it has a dreamy and odd quality to it.  The majority of my time was spent reading about Laurel's interactions with people and I didn't get to see a lot of them.  There was enough dialogue and interaction to keep me reading, but it was still kind of scarce.

     We spend this book getting to know Laurel, whose sister May has just died recently.  She is now being shuffled between her Aunt Amy and her Dad, because her Mom has gone to California and left her behind.  So Laurel spends her Mom's weeks of custody with her Aunt, who is extremely religious and really has no clue how to handle a teenager.  Starting her first year of high school, Laurel decides to go to another school, so she won't just be the girl whose sister died.  She makes a couple new friends, Hannah and Natalie, who are just as confused as she is.  They are falling in love with each other, but hiding it and Hannah is going from boy to boy in an effort to be "normal."  Also, there is the mysterious older boy Sky who seems to be interested in Laurel but has serious issues of his own.  There is a secret Laurel is keeping and it's eating her up inside.  Can she learn to let the past go and share her problems with someone who can help her move past them?  Or will she go on a downward spiral like May, unable to get back up again?

     I did enjoy the letters in and of themselves, but I agree with another read about some things that bothered them in regards to the letters.  The fact that they were all written to different people did take away from how personal the letters felt to me.  To know all that stuff about all those people and choose to write letters to all of them just felt fake.  Plus the comparisons drawn between them and Laurel didn't ring true for me either.  They turn into Laurel questioning the celebrity's choices for the majority of the letter, rather than examining her own life all that closely.  It was a little disruptive to the flow of the novel.  Overall, I can't say I really enjoyed it necessarily, but I did appreciate the things it accomplished in terms of character development.  It was really all about Laurel learning to become her own person and step out of May's shadow - also to forgive May, their parents and herself for the issues of the past.  I just don't think it was really the book for me, as it read a little too young, naieve and disconnected.

VERDICT:  3/5  Stars

*I received an Advanced Reading E-book Copy from the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), via NetGalley.  No money or favors were exchanged for this review.  This book's expected publication date is April 1st, 2014.*

In That Moment We Were Infinite

Published: August 14th, 2012 (First published February 1st, 1999)

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

By: Stephen Chbosky

MTV Books

ISBN-13: 9781451696196

Charlie is a freshman.

And while he's not the biggest geek in the school, he is by no means popular. Shy, introspective, intelligent beyond his year yet socially awkward, he is a wallflower, caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it.

Charlie is attempting to navigate his way through uncharted territory: the world of first dates and mix tapes, family dramas and new friends; the world of sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when all one requires is that perfect song on that perfect drive to feel infinite. But he can't stay on the sidelines forever. Standing on the fringes of life offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor.

Review

     Charlie is looking forward to his Freshman year of high school.  He wants things to be different, for big things to happen in his life for a change.  But he just can't stop observing life instead of living it - until he meets Patrick and Sam.  They lead him into a world of parties, Rocky Horror Picture Show re-enactments, new music, drugs, first love and Charlie begins to live for the first time.  Also throughout the year he has an interesting English teacher who gives him extra book assignments, that make him think about life in ways he never has before.  With family issues coming up from the past and and old trauma haunting him, can Charlie get past it and learn to make it on his own?  Or will he always just be waiting for the downturn of his happy ending?  This was a coming of age book, in the tradition of Catcher In the Rye, and Ordinary People.  It has the same melancholy, anxiousness as the latter and the honesty of the former.  I liked the story enough that I kept reading, though Charlie annoyed me quite a bit in the beginning.  No one cries that much unless they are mentally unstable and have serious issues.  And no one is that naive by the time they're a teenager (although a revelation at the end of the book kind of makes it more believable to me).  The relationships with Sam and Patrick respectively are interesting and full of great moments.   I mean, who hasn't felt this way at some point or another: 

       “So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still   

       trying to figure out how that could be.”

Then again I spent most of my teenage years as an introvert, a wallflower like Charlie.  I was a serious observer of life and not much of a liver (but then I also went through some of the same childhood issues as him, so I can maybe see the correlation in some individuals between the two).  This book was told in letter form, to someone that is never given a name, but obviously means something important to Charlie for him to be so unflinchingly honest about his feelings and experiences.  The advent of drugs into Charlie's life was sort of surreal in the way he treated it so naturally.  Like, "Oh, do I want some LSD?  Sure!  Why wouldn't I?"  The closeness of his family, yet their emotional estrangement from each other is something I am familiar with on a personal level.  Maybe the reason why this book was hard for me to read and know what I felt about it at the end, was because Charlie's life was like a photograph of my own teenage years on an extremely personal level.  The only thing I can say for myself is that I am NOT such a crybaby, am not that naive and have never gone over the cuckoo's nest so to speak.  Overall a good read, with some high emotions.  But those high emotions level out leaving the reader feeling blank at the end - probably due to Charlie's emotional blankness in his letters.  That was the only true insincerity to me.

VERDICT:  3.5/5  Stars

* *No money or favors were exchanged for this review. This book is now available in stores, online, or maybe even at your local library.**

The Better Half of the Equation

Expected Publication: September 18th, 2012
Andy Squared
By: Jennifer Lavoie
Bold Strokes Books
ISBN-13: 9781602827431

Seventeen-year-old twins, Andrew and Andrea Morris, have always been close. They share everything—from their friends to a room—and they both enjoy star positions on their high school’s soccer teams. All’s right with the twins...or is it?

When new student Ryder Coltrane moves from Texas to their small New York town, he spins Andrew’s world upside down. All of Andrew’s past relationship troubles begin to make sense and his true feelings start to click into place after Ryder comes out to him. His friendship with Ryder turns secretively romantic, but secrets, they soon find out, are hard to keep. Once rumors start to fly, so-called friends turn on them, and the boys’ relationship turns into a bomb about to explode. But Andrew never expected it would be his own twin, Andrea, holding a lighter to ignite it.

Review

   Andrew Morris has a pretty good life in his small town.  He gets along almost perfectly with his twin sister Andrea, has some great friends, awesome parents and never lacks a girlfriend.  But he's beginning to question whether he wants the same things in life anymore.  Than Ryder Coltrane comes to town from Texas to live with his Aunt and Uncle.  Andy doesn't understand why he feels so drawn to Ryder at first, but then he finally acknowledges the attraction between them.  Once they start a relationship everything finally feels right for once in Andy's life.  But he is still hesitant to be open, especially seeing the harrasment that the only openly gay guy at their school deals with every day.  But will he have a choice when the one person he always thought had his back, twists the knife into it after finding out?  I was a bit hesitant to read this book, but I figured that I would give it a shot since I had a copy from Netgalley.  After I got a little bit into it, I was completely glued to my Kindle!  I related a lot to Andrew trying to break away from family expectations, Andrea's controlling ones in particular.  And the confusion of who he really was kept me reading and sympathizing all the way to the end.  I also want a Ryder of my very own - someone who really cares, but is also willing to wait and understands that Andy was not quite going at the same pace as him.  The only thing that really grinded on me was how easily Andrea turned on her brother.  Her so called twin sensibilities were erased in two seconds flate when she found out about Andy and Ryder.  She refused to listen to reason and totally sold them out to the assholes at school.  She was a dick and outed Andy to their parents before he was ready.  She was also totally homophobic, when it was obvious that the twins' parents HAD NOT raised them to be that way and were apalled by their behavior.  I was disgusted that when Andrea and Andrew were making up from their fight, she was still asking him if  he could try not to be gay.  WTF!!!  Other than that big, gaping rage inducer of a characterization this was a very sweet and wonderfully written book.  I would recommend this to teens struggling with their sexuality, but maybe not to their family members...

VERDICT:  3.5/5 Stars

*I received an Advanced Reading E-book Copy from the publisher, via NetGalley. No money or favors were exchanged for this review. This book's expected publication date is September 18th, 2012.*