A Wonderful Book

One of my all-time favorite adult authors is Alice Hoffman (she also has some young adult titles). She has a way of making ordinary characters extraordinary. This one in particular touched me, The Probable Future.

The women of the Sparrow family are blessed/burdened with unusual gifts on their thirteenth birthday. Elinor can detect when someone is not telling the truth. Her daughter, Jenny, can see people's dreams as they sleep. Granddaughter Stella has a mental window to the future. The Probable Future is set in New England. Young Stella has to deal with her new burden of clairvoyance when one of her premonitions puts her father in jail, wrongly accused of homicide. She is led to a grandmother she was forbidden to meet and a house that resembles an elaborate wedding cake full of talismans from her ancestors.

It was possible to break chains, regardless of how old or how rusted, of that Jenny was certain. It was possible to forge an entirely new life. But chains made out of blood and memory were a thousand times more difficult to sever than those made of steel, and the past could overtake a person if she wasn't careful.--excerpt from The Probable Future.

Alice Hoffman has an eloquent, graceful way of bringing characters to life in my mind. Reading one of her books is like a hot bath after a long day, relaxing and luxurious. I can only hope that one day my characters are as haunting and enchanting.

http://www.alicehoffman.com/

Trish

Twisted, by Laurie Halse Anderson

TWISTED, by Laurie Halse Anderson, tracks the unravelling of former geek Tyler Miller, as he faces senior year as the school pariah. Tyler had performed the "Foul Deed" the spring before, landing him on probation for the summer. The Foul Deed, the mispelled spray-painting of school property, was a misguided attempt to gain popularity after years of invisibility in the realm of nerddom. Along with a few inches of height, Tyler gains muscle mass at his forced labor job over the summer and re-enters the fray a new man—and catches the eye of the school's Queen Bea, the woman of his dreams, Bethany. Through a series of painful misadventures, public humiliations, academic free-fall and a beating, Tyler is forced to confront the truth; his poor self image has nothing to do with what he looks like or what he's done and has everything to do with the emotional knot he's in because of his twisted relationship with his volatile father. Ultimately Tyler confronts his Dad in an emotional and carthatic scene.

Ms. Anderson, noted for her ground-breaking YA novel, SPEAK, has covered familiar territory for her, but loses none of her biting wit and awkwardly painful moments. The book is heart-breaking, humorous and hopeful, all at the same time. I will probably read this again to absorb the masterful way Ms. Anderson builds a story based on characters who in less competent hands might be unsympathetic.

As a parent and former teen the book touched me on many levels and kept me turning the pages until I finished it, sadly, way too fast.

A book we NEED to read ...

Maybe, Tears, OC, Maggot, Jewel, Rainbow, and 2Moro are a cast of homeless teens and young adults trying to survive life on the streets in New York's bitter winter. Maybe, Mr. Strasser's MC, has left home to join "an asphalt tribe." Over the course of the book and through telling scenes and snippets, Maybe's character emerges as well as her feelings about this dead-end life on the streets.
What I loved most about the book was the humanity of the kids trying to survive. And how they are so VISIBLE, though we perhaps choose not to see them. The book is filled with heartbreaking scenes of abuse, drug abuse, prostitution, prejudice and death. One particularly poignant scene is when a woman from PETA is horrified these kids are feeding a puppy fast food hamburgers. She's indignant and tells them they're not fit to raise a dog.
Tears asks, "How comes she cares so much about a dog? .. What about us?"
"Nobody cares about us," Maybe responds.
I had to stop after reading that line and put the book down. How often have I just passed a homeless person without actually seeing him or her? I'm embarrassed to say too often.
Todd Strasser takes on the tough social issue of homelessness in this bleak YA novel in which there are few happy endings. Strasser, though, without being cheesy or making it an easy novel weaves a thread of hope in the novel and the strength of love that friends find.

http://www.toddstrasser.com/

Heidi Ayarbe