Body image. Two short words that carry so much weight (pun intended). For American women andbecause men like some curves, especially in the baby-feeding area of the body, but certainly not FAT! Being fat means you're lazy. Being fat means you have no self-control. Being fat means you don't care about yourself. Being fat means people can dismiss you without guilt, because being fat is a seen as a character flaw, not a natural subset of human appearance.
girls (and, increasingly, girls anywhere in the world influenced by American beauty standards), the phrases "body image" and "weight problem" go hand in hand. There are certainly other (unrealistic) expectations for things like flawless skin, silky hair, etc..., but even those things won't make a female person "ideal" without also being thin. Not too thin, of course,

Being a curvy girl myself (Godbout hips, am I right aunts and girl cousins?), I have spent almost all of my life, from as far back as I can remember, ashamed of the size of my body. Especially when I was a teenager, which is ridiculous because looking back I was a perfectly average-sized person. But then, teenage girlhood is fraught with messages about the ways we don't measure up to feminine ideals-we're too skinny/too fat/too smart/too air-headed/too prudish/too slutty/etc...Isabel Quintero explores this through the lens of Latinx culture in her novel Gabi, A Girl in Pieces. 

The book follows the protagonist, Gabi, through her senior year in high school. Told through her journal entries, the story takes us through her struggles to maintain her grades, complete college applications, and manage a social life. Gabi's body image is pretty low, so when a cute boy named Eric wants to date her, she begins a relationship with him, despite the fact that they have nothing in common. Luckily, she soon finds Martin, a boy from her English class who shares her love of poetry.

Gabi is also trying to juggle all the stress of senior year with her concern for her father, who has been addicted to meth as long as Gabi can remember. When she comes home one day to find him dead of an overdose, it throws her into a tailspin that threatens to derail her plans to escape her dead-end neighborhood and find the life she has always dreamed of.

Quintaro expertly navigates the space between hope and fear with Gabi, who alternates between being sure her life is over and recommitting herself to the future she wants to have. Gabi's poetry demonstrates how she processes her life experiences, eventually finding her own voice. The novel takes on a lot-body image, first love, teen pregnancy, sexual assault, drug addiction/overdose-but it does a decent enough job addressing them all that the story doesn't feel disjointed. Quintero mixes the darker events with lots of Gabi's own self-deprecating inner life, creating a nice emotional balance. I think a lot of teenage girls would relate to Gabi, especially Latinx girls. This was definitely one of the best YA books I've read this year.

Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens' Agenda, Becky Albertalli

Simon is 16, gay, and in the closet. Afraid of how his friends, classmates, and parents will react when
they find out he likes boys, he lives a double life, pretending to be straight by day, and emailing back and forth with the anonymous and very gay Blue by night. When he accidentally leaves his email open on a school computer, another student, Martin, sees his conversation with Blue. Martin uses this knowledge to blackmail Simon into arranging a date between Martin and Simon's friend Abby Martin's threats and Simon's own increasing difficulty keeping his truth from his friends leads to tension in his usually close knit friend group, and when his relationship with Blue goes from virtual to irl, Simon finds himself struggling to adapt to the changes in his life.

This book is the inspiration for the movie Love Simon that came out last spring, and while I haven't seen the movie yet, if it is half as charming as the book then I know I will love it. Simon is such a likable, relate-able character. He perfectly represents the situation so many of the queer youth I know find themselves in. Society itself has moved so far in terms of LGBTQ+ acceptance it seems like everyone should be able to be out without fear, but the reality is much more complicated. There are still plenty of people out there who think being gay is a sin, and even people who claim to be accepting sometimes have trouble coming to terms with the issue when the person coming out is their own son, daughter, brother, or sister. Simon THINKS he knows that the people closest to him will be accepting, but taking that first step into the light makes a person incredibly vulnerable, and once that news it out there's no taking it back.

But Simon isn't a sympathetic character just because he is making this huge, scary change. It's because he reads like any normal (and by normal I mean weird) teenager. He can be selfish and self-absorbed, he can use people, he makes decisions out of fear of rejection and ridicule, and he makes poor choices about school and drinking and how to talk to his friends. But all of those things just make him more endearing, because he reads like a REAL PERSON. I mean, I can think of at least a half dozen teenagers I've known over the years who are basically Simon by another name. And not just gay teenagers, either. Some of the struggles Simon has are universal, though they make look different depending on your identity. How do I know my friends will stand by me? Who am I in relation to who my parents think I am? How can I tell if a person likes likes me? Anyone who's has been, or is currently, a teenager has gone through some form of Simon's journey.

Finally, and this is my favorite, the book is NOT TRAGIC! My wife and I joke that the gays always have to have some tragic end in every movie or TV show, whether that end is a job, a relationship, or their life. This book shows that life for LGBTQ+ folks doesn't have to be full of suffering and sorrow. Figuring out who you are and how to navigate romantic relationships are just part of growing up, and it's refreshing to read a story that treats that process as the normal part of life that it is, rather than focusing on how hard and sad and dangerous it is when the person is gay. Not that there aren't people who experience danger and sadness and anger in their coming out process, but focusing on that fact ALL THE TIME is just one more form of othering.

The Square Root of Summer, Harriet Reuter Hapgood

Summer break should be a time of lazy mornings, afternoons spent outdoors, and long twilights where anything feels possible. For Gottie, the main character of The Square Root of Summer, summer break has become something to dread. After her beloved grandfather's death the year before, Gottie descended into a grief so deep she has yet to discover the bottom. As if that weren't enough, her brother's return from school has also brought the return of his friend Jason, Gottie's first love and first heartbreak. It also brings the return of her childhood best friend Thomas, who emigrated to Canada years ago, and never once in the years he's been away wrote or called.

With so much going on in Gottie's world, when she starts losing time she wonders if she might not be going mad. Each time it happens, she has a vivid flashback to a memory from the summer before. Soon she realizes they are more than just flashbacks-she is actually there, in the past, able to manipulate things and talk to people. Gottie, a scientific genius, develops a theory; she believes she is traveling through wormholes in space-time. In other words, time-travel. But why? What is causing this time displacement? And why does she keep going back to revisit memories she's been trying to avoid?

This book takes a novel approach to both the idea of time travel, and to the exploration of loss and grief. It's not often that I've seen quantum physics used as a major plot device in YA literature. But in the context of the story, it works. Which of us, when faced with painful memories, doesn't shy away? Gottie spends and entire year trying to avoid anything that reminds her of either her first heartbreak or her father's death. This means pushing away everyone-family, best friend, teachers at school. But Hapgood's message-that we must confront painful memories if we hope to learn from them or move past them-is perfectly delivered through the events Gottie relives as she is sucked back in time.

The characters are quirky and charming. Though Gottie's mother died when she was born, her father  a German ex-pat, chose to stay in England to raise his children. He was benignly neglectful of Gottie and her brother Ned even when their grandfather was alive, but he withdrew from the world even more after he died. Throughout the long winter, Gottie longed for him to be more present, but he was dealing with his grief in his own way. Ned, Gottie's brother, is a first year uni student who wants to be a rock star. His exuberance and love for life covers his own grief, which he hides from Gottie, feeling he has to take care of her. And even though Gray, Gottie's grandfather, is not physically present, he looms large over Gottie's entire journey that summer, as she finally faces her most painful memories of him. He was larger than life, the kind and eccentric patriarch of their little family. He was the opposite of Gottie's introspective father, and as such he became the central figure in Gottie's childhood. His loss destabilized her whole world-the whole universe, apparently, if the fabric of space-time was rent as a result.

The love story here is pretty predictable, which didn't make it less enjoyable to read. The depth of Gottie's relationship to Thomas, and the struggles they have to go through to repair their friendship before they can be together at all add a tension that improves on the basic plot device of "best-friend-becomes-boyfriend".  Gottie also has to repair her friendship with her bestie Sof, whom she pushed away after Gray's death, not wanting to drag her into her well of grief. What she failed to realize was that Sof was grieving as well, and they could have supported each other, and Gottie not turned inward so drastically. There are some good themes about the meaning of friendship, and about how healthy relationships require commitment and work to keep them going. There was also a good anti-example in Gottie's relationship with Jason, her "first love". Gottie comes to realize that what they had was never what she thought it was.

This is Hapgood's debut novel, and for a first novel it is very good. I'd definitely recommend it for inclusion in a classroom library, or as a book club read for high schoolers. I don't know that it has universal appeal, but I can see many teens connecting with one or the other characters, and with the themes of friendship, loss, and love.

The Sky is Everywhere, Jandy Nelson

Jandy Nelson's book I'll Give You the Sun was one of my favorite books last year. Nelson has a profound ability to name and describe complex emotions, especially those experienced during the turbulence of adolescence. Her characters feel raw and vulnerable, her writing artful and often poetic.

The Sky is Everywhere is not the masterpiece that I'll Give You the Sun is, but it still demonstrates Nelson's ability to create characters who are fully realized and intensely human. Our protagonist, Lennie, is stunned and gutted by the sudden death of her sister Bailey, struggling to keep living with the gaping hole her sister's death has caused. Withdrawing from most of the people closest to her, she finds comfort in spending time with her sister's boyfriend Toby. When they are together, she feels Bailey's presence in a way that she finds compelling and addictive. But then a new boy, Joe, comes to town. Joe is full of exuberance and joy, expressed most keenly through his musical genius. She is caught between her feelings for these two boys, one tying her to a past where her sister still lives, the other calling her to move into a future full of hope and possibility. Does she dare to dream her own dreams, live her own life, knowing her sister never can?

This is a more straightforward narrative than I'll Give You the Sun, but it covers some of the same ground. Both deal with grief and loss, the characters responding to tragedy and loneliness different ways. Both explore what it means to fall in love for the first time while grappling with the feelings of anger, sadness, and loneliness that tragedy can bring. Lennie knows that her compulsion to be with Toby is a way to hold onto a past that can never be regained, but finds it almost impossible to consider what it would mean to move past her loss and continue living. Joe, this boy who never even knew Bailey, represents the future she could create for herself, if she didn't feel as though having a future at all is an act of betrayal to her sister's memory. Nelson's prose is beautifully written, full of imagery and with a lyrical flow that helps to create the emotional impact the story carries. The Sky is Everywhere is a jewel of a book, one that proves that Nelson is no one-hit-wonder. May her career be long, and may her books continue to explore the deep emotional life of youth.

100 Sideways Miles, Andrew Smith

What do you get when you cross a quirky protagonist with a horny best friend, a horse falling out of the sky, and aliens flying on angel wings? You get the very different, very charming, slightly weird 100 Sideways Miles by Andrew Smith.

Finn Easton measures time in miles instead of minutes. The earth rotates at a speed of about 1000 miles per hour, so Finn counts increments of time, based on how far the earth has traveled in that time. He figures the horse that fell from an overpass and killed his mother traveled 100 sideways miles before it struck. That accident has come to define his own life. Himself injured in the crash, he developed epilepsy, and has a very distinctive scar on his back from the many surgeries needed to repair it. Finn's father, a famous author, wrote a well-known sci-fi book that has also come to define his life. It features a boy named Finn, with a distinctive scar on his back, that is fighting a horde of aliens that fly to earth on angel wings. His father swears the boy is not him, but Finn feels trapped by the expectations people have that he will be just like the Finn in the story.

Luckily, Finn has a best friend, Cade. Cade is a wildcard, prone to doing outrageous things both in and out of school. Finn also meets and falls in love with the new girl, Julia. Julia, who is living with her grandmother while she recovers from a sexual assault, eventually must return home to Chicago. Finn, lonely and restless, takes off on a road trip to Oklahoma with Cade, ostensibly for a college visit, but mostly just to get away from his life. While on the road trip, Cade and Finn become unexpected heroes, and that experience leads the journey to go in a whole new direction.

As strange as the premise sounds, this book is essentially a buddy comedy with a romance thrown in. While it's a buddy comedy, is it a buddy comedy with heart! Think Wedding Crashers, only with depth. Cade is in turns hilarious and horrifying, but all of that actually helps Finn stay grounded somehow. Finn has trouble seeing himself as a real boy-he feels very confined by the character his father created that isn't him, yet is him. Especially since other people have expectations about how he will be based on the book. Cade helps get him out of his head. Finn also feels inferior to the fictional Finn, who is a heroic protagonist, fighting evil aliens. Finn doesn't feel his own agency-he seems to experience life as something that happens to him, rather than as something he creates. Add to this general feeling of being an imposter the certainty of Finn's blankout seizures, and you can understand why Finn doesn't feel in control of his own life. As journeys tend to do, the road trip with Cade provides Finn the opportunity to learn about himself, grow as a person, and come to terms with some of the negative emotions that are holding him back.

While Cade's friendship provides roots for Finn, his relationship with Julia teaches him what it means to have wings. He falls for her almost immediately, and his gentle way and quirky personality is non-threatening enough for her to feel safe with him, despite her past experiences with boyfriends. I understood how lost Finn felt after Julia went back to Chicago. I remember how it feels to be left behind when someone moves on in a different direction, literally or figuratively. The love story, even though it has some darkness present in it, is still the most charming part of the story.

While the story itself is pretty outrageous and unrealistic, the themes are universal; the discovery of self, first love, friendship. Smith handles all of them with a tenderness that is not necessarily the first thing you notice when you read, but as the novel develops you see how deeply the characters feel for each other, and the way in which they support each other, even when they know the other person is making a bad decision. We should all be so lucky, which is something that Finn realizes in the end. Surrounded by people who care about you, life can be what you make it.

Dumplin', Julie Murphy

When I look back at pictures of my teenage self, I wish that I could somehow send her a message
telling her she's not as fat as she thinks she is. I've always been a curvy girl, and as I moved into adulthood and parenthood I went from curvy to firmly plus-size, but when I was in high school, the way I looked didn't match the way I felt. American society has done such a disservice to women and girls. We are constantly bombarded with images of ultra-thin, perfectly made-up women, presented as the ideal. In reality, even the women in those images don't look the way we see them on billboards, music videos, and the pages of fashion magazines.

If only the teenage me had been able to meet Willowdeen Dixon, the main character of Julie Murphy's Dumplin'. Willowdeen lives in a small Texas town, with an aging beauty queen for a mother and a high school full of people who just don't get her. This last fact never really bothered her before, because she had her best friend Ellen, who had never seemed to mind that Will was different than the other girls. She's also dealing with the death of her beloved aunt, who was the only person in Will's life who seemed to see her for who she was. Willowdeen is full of contempt for the pageant culture that interests most of the other girls in town; of course, when you're overweight and have unconventional looks, contempt is a safer feeling than envy. Will's worldview is shaken, though, when she meets Bo, a handsome, brooding private school boy, who actually seems to be interested in her romantically, an experience that is unheard of in her life so far. She might have been able to deal with the feelings this arouses in her if she could have had Ellen to talk to, but Ellen has done something unexpected; she's signed up for the Miss Clover City beauty pageant. Suddenly, it's like Will doesn't even know her anymore. Struggling to deal with her mother's constant harping, Bo's unexpected interest, and Ellen's betrayal, Will decides to do something no one expects. She's going to join the pageant herself.

Murphy has created a character in Willowdeen that reminded me so much of my younger self. She's smart and funny, but also deeply insecure. That insecurity is something that I suspect almost all female-identified people in our society feel. I like to think it's getting better, as body positivity and more diversity in representation change the national conversation on what is beautiful, but for women of my generation and older, I bet there's not a day that goes by that we don't listen, just for a moment, to that voice in our head that says we should be skinnier, or have bigger breasts, or perfectly toned abs. If we're lucky, we can tell that voice to shut up, but I can't think of one day of my life since puberty when I haven't had negative thoughts about some aspect of my body and appearance. Ultimately, Will gets some self-acceptance through her relationship with Bo and her participation in the pageant, but that struggle is one that resonated strongly with me.

Some of the most emotional parts of the novel are the sections where Will is remembering her aunt. Lucy. Lucy was her rock, the adult in her life who accepted her exactly as she was. They shared a love of Dolly Parton, and of good southern cooking. Lucy was, in fact morbidly obese, unable to leave the house. Will's mother, who ran the Miss Clover City pageant, lived in constant fear that Will's connection to Lucy was going to take her down the same path to obesity and early death, which explained the nagging about what Will ate and how much (or little) she exercised. Will's relationship with her mother continues to be rocky when she signs up for the pageant. Her mother, rightly so, thinks that Will and the other unusual contestants that join with her are mocking something that is very important to her, and while I think pageant culture is creepy and weird, I do understand where her mother would be hurt by her actions. It is this family dynamic that makes this more than just a novel about a fat girl who finds love. Though the fact of Lucy's death, explained as a result of her weight, sort-of undermines the point that size doesn't matter. In the end, though, that is a small criticism. The book is full of humor and heart, and would be a great read for teen girls and female-identified folks.

The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth GIrl, Barry Lyga

I first discovered Barry Lyga at the Illinois Reading Council Conference. My best friend and I were I Hunt Killers. As a lover of mysteries and thrillers, how could I not bring it home with me?
browsing the booksellers' stalls (and let me tell you, the exhibit hall at the IRC Conference is children's/YA book heaven), when I was stopped in my tracks by a book with the provocative title of

That book, and the two that followed it completing the trilogy, gave me a lot of respect for Lyga's storytelling and character writing. Imagine my excitement at discovering that the I Hunt Killers books were only a few of the many books he's published. Diving into his body of work, I decided to go back to the beginning, and start with his debut novel, The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl. 

The book's narrator is Donnie, a nerdy sophomore who loves comics more than anything else. While his school years have never been easy for him, this year is becoming especially challenging. His parents are divorced, and his mother remarried a man who could not be more different than Donnie. She is currently awaiting the birth of her first child with the man Donnie calls "step-fascist". His best and only friend, Cam, has started loving lacrosse and his new-found popularity more than the Donnie and the comics obsession they used to share. The icing on the cake is the bully in his gym class who has taken to punching Donnie so hard in arm or shoulder every day that he's developing a permanent bruise. Donnie's only salvation is the graphic novel he's been working on, called Schemata. But even that starts to suffer, when the drama going on in his life interferes with his time and creativity. Into this dismal existence comes Kyra, aka Goth Girl, a loner with an "eff you" attitude about anyone or anything that she disdains-which is pretty much everyone and everything. She challenges Donnie to stand up for himself, and thus begins a friendship/relationship that allows Donnie to grow and become more assertive. Over time, Donnie begins to realize that Kyra's rough exterior is protecting a vulnerable girl working to be tough, and his ability to help her makes gives him more agency in his own life, and to change his general attitude towards certain things in his life.

Lyga has done an admirable job in this novel creating characters that feel real, with problems that I think a lot of young people can relate to. Certainly issues like divorce, exclusion, isolation, and mental illness are common enough. Even the "popular" kids in high school can feel as though they are not enough; that if someone uncovered the "real" them they would reject them, much as Donnie feels rejected for his love of comics.

I wonder how much of Donnie is modeled on Lyga's own experiences. Lyga spent many years working in the comics industry, and before the last decade or so, comic shops were essentially seen as the natural habitat for nerds, geeks, and weirdos. Lyga's love of and knowledge about comics is clear in the book, and it helps give the story authenticity. The story itself is a fairly common YA trope-two misfits find each other and fall in love while thumbing their noses at conventional popularity-but it is written with such compelling characters and enough nuance as to not feel formulaic. I'm not sure I can say I loved it as much as I loved the I Hunt Killers series, but I can say I loved it differently, since The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl and I Hunt Killers are so different in theme, mood, and tone they could almost be written by two different authors. But I did love it.

Extraordinary Means, Robyn Schneider

I don't know about you, but when I think of tuberculosis patients, I think of pale, waifish invalids lying on fainting couches wanly coughing up blood until they waste away in Victorian politeness. Truth is, tuberculosis is far from being eradicated worldwide. In fact, it is estimated that up to one-third of the world's population is infected with TB. While most tuberculosis cases can be cured with antibiotics (something those Victorian sanitarium patients could only dream of), for people with impaired immune systems, such as those with HIV, tuberculosis is still a killer. And, of course, overuse of antibiotics has led to new, tougher strains of lots of bacterial infections, including TB.

Why do I need to give you a primer on the prevalence of tuberculosis in the modern world to review a YA love story, you ask? Because Robyn Schneider used a drug-resistant strain of TB as the context of her novel, Extraordinary Means. In some near-future time, a strain of TB has developed that does not respond to any conventional treatment. It is so infectious that anyone found to have the disease is sent to live in quarantine conditions. For Lane Rosen, that means a private boarding school, Latham House, that is now a sanitarium for teenagers with the dreaded Total Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis. Before TB, Lane was an AP student, preparing to apply to the Ivy League. He is used to working hard, compulsively so, and plans to continue his studies at Latham House. However, his doctor soon informs him that things will be different-his day will be filled with yoga, health walks, and rest time instead of study sessions. Lane does his best to stick with his self-imposed study schedule, but soon finds that in the struggle between his illness and his determination, his illness always wins.

As he is getting acclimated to Latham House, he notices a group of students (patients) who don't seem to follow the rules. Granted, students are left to wander around pretty much on their own most of the time, and if you miss class, everyone assumes you were too sick to make it. But this group, including a girl named Sadie that he happens to know from summer camp, sneaks off into the woods, dresses provocatively, and generally seems to thumb its nose at the rest of the students (patients). Sadie, for her part, has accepted that she is probably going to die, and so lives each day with reckless (in this case, literally reckless) abandon. Lane ends up a part of the group, and he and Sadie fall in love. Sadie teaches Lane that there is more to life than AP classes and Ivy League collges. Because of Lane, Sadie decides she does have something to live for after all. When news of a possible cure makes its way to Latham House, both Lane and Sadie begin to think about what a future for them outside of the sanitarium might look like. But will the cure come in time?

As epidemic stories go, this one is pretty low on action. No brave doctors risking their lives in disease-ravaged countries to track down the elusive plant/chemical/scientific whatsit needed to find a cure. No rampaging infected to contend with ("28 Days" is my favorite zombie movie). It is, indeed, a story of first love, with all of the conventional elements: meet-cute, miscommunications, obsession, late night phone calls. But in the background, for the characters and for the reader, is the knowledge that unless a cure is found, this particular love story is doomed. Schneider keeps reminding the reader of that fact throughout, with students who were there one day, and quietly gone the next. Finally, the reality of the "death" part of tuberculosis hits their little group, which really brings it home to the reader.

What the novel isn't low on, however, if good characterization and emotional impact. Lane and Sadie are both well-rounded, realistic characters. The rest of their merry band of misfits are also well-written, and each provides a necessary aspect to their little group. Charlie, especially, is endearing, as a gay teen trying to write as much music as possible before the inevitable end of his music writing career. If you are a fan of John Green novels, you will definitely enjoy Extraordinary Means.