Beginning To See Pandemic Books

 I stumbled upon Hello (From Here) by Chandler Baker and Wesley King at a library. As my legion of followers know, a romance has to have something going on besides the romance if I'm going to read it. This one does, because it's set during the early months of our pandemic. While I've read, and written, pandemic humor, I haven't read any other kind of fiction that deals with it. 

I have to say, I found a lot of Hello (From Here) stereotypical YA. You've got your dead parent and your absent parent and your financially strapped parent and your illnesses (though they were interesting ones) and your magical old person and your dog. However, the pandemic setting made everything, if not actually new again, at least more interesting. 

Now that dealing with the pandemic (and I am one of those who still deals with it) has become somewhat boring and less restricting, it's already easy to forget the stress and fear of the early days. We're talking about something that happened only two and a half years ago and is still going on to some degree. And, yet,  Baker and King's book almost seems like a historical novel. That's not a complaint. Their book, I think, reflects the incredible speed of what has been happening. 

This is a case of a unique setting and two lead characters who are realistic and intelligent about what's going on around them giving new life to an old situation.

Goal-Driven Characters Are Very Readable

Copy provided by NetGalley

Publication date: June 7. 2022

I am embarrassed to say that June being Pride Month really hasn't been on my radar the way, say, Black History Month and Women's History Month are. I have been noticing references to it the last week or so, though, and as random luck would have it, I just finished reading a book that marks the occasion

I wasn't attracted to Home Field Advantage by Dahlia Adler by the romance. I don't care for romance by itself. Person meets person stories end with our leads getting together, so I feel I know the ending before I even begin. I need a surrounding story for my romance reading. And I wasn't attracted by the football, because I am only a sports fan during the Olympics, and pretty picky even then. What did lead me to ask for the galley was the knowledge that both the cheerleader in Home Field Advantage and the quarterback are girls. I haven't read a lot of those. To date.

Amber McCloud is a popular cheer leader who is shooting for cheer captain, because it will help her chances for college. Jack Walsh is a gifted football player who has been brought in to replace Amber's high school's late lamented QB who was nowhere near as good as Jack is. In fact, the whole team is not on Jack's level. But they are grieving their dead teammate who died unexpectedly, and Jack, being Jacklyn, becomes a target for both misogyny and homophobia.

Goals, Goals, Goals

Amber is a somewhat closeted lesbian--what happens at cheer camp stays at cheer camp--dating a somewhat closeted gay football player, Miguel. One of the particularly interesting aspects of this book, I thought, was that neither Amber nor Miguel have any problems with their sexuality. Nor is family acceptance a major issue for them. They are not out, because coming out will hinder them reaching goals. Amber sees making cheer captain as a stepping stone to college and getting out of town and she doesn't see the cheer team embracing a lesbian no matter how good she is. Miguel wants to play football. His one experience with another player knowing his reality did not go well for him.

Jack, too, is very goal-oriented. A high-achieving female football player has few options. Playing with this loser team may be the only opportunity she will ever have to play football. It may be a stepping stone to some kind of sports-related career.

What these characters want to achieve makes their behavior make sense. Giving characters something to want is cliched writer advice. Give them a goal! 

Oh. Wait. Football has goals, doesn't it?

I am not fond of alternating points of view, and sometimes I felt Amber and Jack got too introspective for my taste. But this was a narrative with drive and some unique characters for this reader. I was even up for a football scene. I've only been vaguely aware that LGBTQ books are a thing in YA. Home Field Advantage definitely encourages me to read more.

An End To "The Lunar Chronicles"

I enjoyed The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer so much that I bought several of the books for my niece. I even liked Fairest: Levana's Story. And nobody likes Levana.

The last book in the series, Winter, is not my favorite. That would be Cinder, followed by Cress. Winter reminded me of Dreams of Gods & Monsters by Laini Taylor. Both books were the finales of fantasy war romances. Or war romance fantasies. Or... you get my drift. Both of those final books ended up dwelling on getting those romances resolved. And in Winter there were a number of romances to resolve. There was lots about whether A has told B he loves her. Will C get back together with D. You get my drift. All that will be a treat for big F fans. I am a little f fan. I'm not that keen on stopping to talk about feelings.  (Yikes. I sound like a family member who used to complain that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was the "feelings Star Trek." "More battles! More explosions!")

Oh, my gosh! We're not really done with The Lunar Chronicles! Stars Above is a collection of short story prequels to the Lunar Chronicle books. If you are what's known in book collecting and reading circles as a completist, you will probably have trouble resisting that.

Environmental Book Club

Well, I have done it. I've found a YA novel with an environmental setting and secondary story line that is not climate fiction or post-apocalyptic or dystopian.

What Kissing Frogs by Alisha Sevigny is, is a YA romance. That is a genre I do not embrace. But main character Jessica is sharper than the romance main characters I've encountered in the past. Seriously. She is smart. She's maintained an A-average across the board while using her brain power to make herself a member of a popular-girl group and snatch one of those shallow, good-looking guys who are never up to any good.

She blows her biology grade, though, which is how she ends up in Panama with a science club from her school that is volunteering to work with an endangered frog species. Her biology teacher is their faculty adviser and offers her the opportunity to take the trip and write a paper to save her average and her chances of getting into UCLA. Some may find that a bit of a stretch, but I find a lot of things that happen in romances a bit of a stretch.

Kissing Frogs is a fish-out-of-water story. Jessica is the outsider with this group, though she's smart enough to be one of them. With this crowd, she becomes the victim of science mean girls, mean girls who had been victims of members of Jessica's posse back at school. That's a neat little twist. There is a bit of a torn-between-two-lovers thing going on, something I always dislike. In this case, though, one of our potential lovers is clearly a player, and Jessica knows it...because, remember, she's smart. She's also no damsel in distress.

The environmental story-line involves the Panamanian golden frog. The Final Wave of the Panamanian Golden Frog at The Guardian suggests Sevigny did a fine job with her factual material. She also does one of the best jobs of integrating environmental information into a main story that I can recall seeing. I won't say there was never a moment when I felt the characters were being just a little over informative. But there was also never a moment when I felt a character was saying the equivalent of "Let's save a species!" either.

Environmental material is going to get out to a lot more people when it can be packaged in main stream books like Kissing Frogs and not just be isolated in disaster stories.

Another interesting thing about Kissing Frogs--it's published by Swoon Romance, which is a "digital-first" imprint. Kissing Frogs exists in an eBook edition only. That might limit its audience, which would be too bad. I don't know how popular eBooks are with teen readers.

On the other hand, if you have a Kindle, Kissing Frogs is only 99 cents.

A Mystery With Romance

I definitely liked All The Truth That's In Me by Julie Berry, which I'm going to describe as a literary mystery. (Though, wait, it's also a romance.) I liked it enough that I tried to find time during the day to sneak in some reading. I liked it even though there were some odd little quirks that would normally bother me.

• It took me a few pages to grasp the book's episodic nature, even though the episodes, often quite short, were clearly defined by Roman numerals. The episodes were usually in the main character, Judith's, present, when she is living in a socially rigid village where she has returned after having been kidnapped around the same time that one of her friends was murdered. But sometimes the episodes were in her past when she was kept captive by a dangerous man who released her after maiming her so she couldn't speak.
• I was a little put off by the lack of definition as far as the setting was concerned. It seemed to be a Puritan world to me, but the text never makes that clear and an attack from the homeland is not consistent with the Puritan era, at least to my knowledge.
• On a superficial level, Judith seems to be like Belle in the Twilight series. Men are mysteriously attracted to her. However, though the author doesn't clearly state it, I was able to see the logic of what was happening. In one case, Judith was not actually an object of desire, she was merely available. In another she is being pursued by someone hoping to take advantage of her. Only with the third man is there a real relationship. I can believe one.

Among the many things I liked about this book:

• It doesn't scream "I'm a mystery!" Though the book is supposed to have received a lot of attention last year when it was published, I didn't know anything about it. The fact that this is a mystery was sort of slowly revealed as I was reading it.
• There's a big battle scene early in the book. It was what would have been THE big climactic scene for many writers, but it came early. I definitely was wondering what was going to follow that.
• A secondary young woman character could have been a stereotypical twenty-first century teen bitch placed in a Puritan village. But she's not.
• Judith's slow understanding of what happened to friend Lottie, as well as of things she saw while a captive, and her slow reveal of what she knows, make sense.

I think an argument could be made that some scenes border on melodrama, what with one character throwing herself upon her injured beloved, another throwing himself off a cliff, and still another stripping naked to ford a river. Evidently I like a little melodrama.

Maybe We've Had Enough Of Talking About Guys?

"Where are all the kickbutt girls in YA without the romance?" a kickbutt girl asked Sarah of GreenBeanTeenQueen.

Well, a few years ago, a literary agent got a lot of attention on-line after she did a blog post stating that YA must have romance. I don't know how much influence she had, but it does seem as if love is overly represented in YA books about girls.

But YA fiction isn't the only place where the search for love rules. Sarah's questioner in search of something to read is not the only female who has grown weary with boy-meets-girl. Last Wednesday, Gina Barreca's column, Movies Centering On Women Rare But Welcome, was published in The Hartford Courant.

It turns out that what both women of different generations are looking for are stories in which "The lives of the women on which they're centered are not obsessed by romance..." Because, you know, love isn't all there is to life.

Barreca thinks that the movie industry would create more movies centering on women who have something more going on in their lives than looking for a man if there were more women script writers and directors. If what's happening in YA is any indication, I don't know if bringing more women in would bring about the shift Barreca hopes for. A lot of the YA books about girls and romance are written by women, and women are well represented in the business side of children's/YA publishing.

Barreca concludes her essay with a description of the Bechdel Test, created by comic strip author and artist Alison Bechdel. The Bechdel Test is applied to movies and TV shows, but let's consider applying it to YA fiction as well. To pass the test, a YA book would:

1. Have to have at least two women (we'll say girls) in it

2. Who talk to each other

3. About something other then men (boys)

Seriously, how hard can that be?