For those of you who are new to my blog, it's probably important to know that I am a literacy coach at a high school in the south suburbs of Chicago. As a result, I find myself reading A LOT of young adult novels in an attempt to stay current on trends in YA, and to identify books we could add to the curriculum to supplement what we already offer. If you are a lover of YA fiction, you will definitely find inspiration for your to-read list here at Book Addict Reviews.

One of my favorite YA novels I read over my recent winter break was When We Collided by Emery year old should have to shoulder. Viv helps bring Jonah and his family out of their gray despair, and Jonah provides a stabilizing influence for Viv, at least for a while. Their love story spins out over the course of a summer, one that brings big changes to both of them.
Lord. It tells the story of two teens, Viv and Jonah, who unexpectedly find each other at exactly the right time. Jonah's family is dealing with the death of his father and his mother's subsequent depression. Viv arrives in the small seaside town where Jonah lives with her mother and a brand-new mental health diagnosis. Viv has a zest for life that is infectious and often reckless. Jonah is a rock for his family, taking on responsibilities that no 16

This novel explores themes of family, love, loss and mental illness with tender yet ultimately hopeful care. The brokenness of both Jonah and Viv actually makes them more, rather than less, beautiful as human beings. While mental illness has been a more frequent theme of YA books of late, Lord really focuses less on diagnosis or treatment and more on the kind of strength and perseverance it takes to live day in and day out with depression or bipolar disorder. She seems to really understand that rather than being a sign of weakness, living with a mental illness and having the quality of life that you want is a sign of incredible endurance.

I think this novel would be great to use for high school literature circles, or as part of a unit on mental health or coping with loss. Both Jonah and Viv experience the loss of a father, though in very different ways. Jonah knew and loved his father, and is constantly being struck by things that remind him of his father's exuberance, wisdom, and humor. Viv feels deeply the loss of a father she never had, the man who provided the genetic material for her existence but who has never been a part of her life. There are many youth who would be able to relate to the type of loss Jonah and Viv feel, and that could lead to some interesting discussions in a classroom setting. I'd definitely recommend this book for inclusion in any high school classroom library!

The Silent Wife

The description for The Silent Wife makes it sound a lot like your average women's fiction.  Boy meets girl, boy cheats on girl, girl pines and pines for boy, girl eventually finds a way to move on.  What makes The Silent Wife different is that the moving on is more hitman and less gallon-of-ice-
cream-on-the-couch.

Jodi and her common law husband Todd live a charmed life.  Todd, a successful developer, and Jodi, a part-time therapist, live in a luxury condominium right on Lake Michigan in the Chicago Gold Coast.  While from the outside their marriage looks charmed, within the relationship there is nothing but coldness and a lack of true connection.  Todd is a serial philanderer, and in order to keep their lives from completely falling apart, Jodi chooses to live in the state of denial.  But soon, Jodi realizes that Todd is not content to play the part of loving husband.  He is looking for a way to leave her, and as he slips away, so too does her sanity, until finally she makes her way inexorably towards a decision she can never take back.

The story is told from alternating perspectives, first Jodi's, the Todd's.  The voices change chapter to chapter, so unlike Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (to which this book has often been compared), you are reading about all of the events in real time in the story.  This book is defintely no Gone Girl.  It does not rise to the leve of dark and twisty that Flynn's book portrayed.  Honestly, the female character in that book was just evil.  Jodi is not evil, nor is she a sociopath, but she is someone who has been deeply scarred in the past, so deeply that she doesn't even remember what happened to her that created this ability to compartmentalize to such an extreme.  Once her inner boundaries start to fall, however, she begins to realize just how big a lie she has really been living.   The Silent Wife starts out slowly, and the writing style and plot stay rather understated.  But despite the sometimes clinical feeling of the writing, especially the parts narrated by Jodi, the ending has a satisfying emotional jolt that made the effort to read it worth it.

Red Hook Road

For most people, their wedding day is one of the most joyful days of their lives.  For me, even though my first marriage ended in divorce, I still have fond memories of the wedding that brought us together as a family for the short time we lasted.  But for Becca and John, the young couple who get married at the beginning of Red Hook Road, their happy day becomes a nightmare when they are killed in a car crash on the way to their reception.

For a marriage that only lasted an hour, Becca and John's union had a lot of power over the other people in their lives, which becomes evident as the story follows Iris (Becca's mom), Daniel (her dad), Jane (John's mother), Matt (his brother) and Ruthie (Becca's sister) in the years following their deaths.  Set during four summers in the small coastal Maine Town of Red Hook, the book details the way that each person struggles to deal with their loss.  Iris is an East Coast intellectual a professor of English literature who lives in New York most of the year, but who strongly identifies with her family's connection to the old beach house where they have summered for three generations.  She is like a force of nature, strong and willful, and her sometimes overwhelming personality causes her children, her husband, and the other people she loves to be at once awed and intimidated by her.  Daniel, who has always found it easy to let Iris plot the course of their lives, suddenly finds himself frustrated and resentful at her attempts to control everything that happens in the aftermath of the tragedy.  Jane, John's mother, is a local woman who was never comfortable with her son's relationship with a privileged daughter "from away", and resists any attempt my Iris to continue their families' connection after the young people are killed.  Ruthie and Matt each try to live up to their older siblings' examples in their own ways, but find following in the footsteps of those who have passed on before their time more difficult than they anticipated.

The book examines issues of death and loss, dealing with grief, and privilege.  John was a shipbuilder, and the old boat that John was restoring at the time of his death, which Matt takes over afterward, becomes a symbol of the group's collective experience-mainly, that of being stuck, unable to move on with the task of living their own lives, so mired are they in trying to honor and remember the dead.  Each character must go off the the trail a bit to eventually find their footing-Iris, through a young musical prodigy; Daniel through revisiting his young adult self; Ruthie by re-examining her assumptions about what her own path should be; and Matt through coming to grips with his feelings of guilt and inadequacy.  The relationship between Iris and Jane highlights the differences between two very different kinds of mother, but in the end their strong love for their children brings them together, if not into an easy friendship, at least into mutual respect.  Red Hook Road is not the best family drama I've read, but it does have an easy readability about it that makes is accessible to even the casual reader.