jodiwilldare's reviews
1523 reviews

Don’t let the bright pink cover and the telephone fool you, How To Say Goodbye In Robot by Natalie Standiford is not the type of YA romance novel you might expect. In fact there were times where I snottily thought “Oh, I know where this is going.” But, I was wrong. I worried for nothing, because Standiford totally pulls it out at the end.

The book follows Beatrice Szabo through her senior year at an exclusive prep school in Baltimore, Maryland. Bea doesn’t have a lot of friends, because she’s never stayed at a school for more than a year. Instead, she and her mom are dragged around the country by her dad who is a hot-shot professor.

When the family arrives in Baltimore, Bea’s mom starts to fall apart. Mom gets hyperemotional, and dresses strangely. Mom calls Bea a robot for not falling to the ground and rending her garments over the death of a neighbor’s hamster. Some of the scenes between Mom and Bea are tough, and I often wanted to hug Bea and tell her being a Robot Girl was just fine.

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“A good voice gets you a long way,” my friend, Steve Brezenoff once said. Though I would never admit this to his face, those are some pretty wise words. A good voice does get you a very long way, which is why I enjoyed Amy Greene’s Bloodroot so much.

Each voice in this novel, and there are six of them, was so genuine and true to the character that I was pulled along through this story about Tennessee hill folk, madness, and magic even though some of the storytelling kind of drove me bonkers.

The book opens with Byrdie, an old woman from Chickweed Holler telling the reader about her childhood and early adulthood growing up in the hills of Appalachia surrounded by a group of women who possess mystical powers. At one point there’s a curse placed on the family. Eventually Byrdie falls in love and moves to Bloodroot Mountain where life does not get much easier. She loses five of her children and ends up raising her bewitching grandaughter, Myra.

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Ivy’s kind of a bitch. She swears in class, she spits in people’s faces, and she seems to be angry about everything. But she’s got some good reasons for being such a bitch. Her bitter, single mom is trying to force Ivy, a high school senior, into business school. Ivy dreams of art school.

Ivy’s friends are the types that do stuff without her, purposely not include her because she’s always so angry and yet can’t see that she’s so angry because they’re always making her feel unwanted. She has problems with a teacher that are partly Ivy’s fault and partly the teacher’s.

Then there’s Josh. A teen photog she meets while checking out art schools. The only problem? Josh lives in Massachusetts, far away from Ivy in Maine. Plus, he has a boatload of his own issues.

Does any of this give Ivy free reign to lash out, sometimes violently? Nah. But who wants to read a book about a character who always does the right thing? Not me. It’s much more interesting to see Ivy act out and then deal with the consequences of her actions.

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First of all, a confession. I got the Little House on the Praire books, a yellow box set, for christmas 1981. I know this because my mother wrote my name, address, phone number, and date in each of the books. I was nine. I still have the books. They sit in their faded yellow box in a bookcase my Grandpa bought at a rummage sale sometime in the 50s. I don’t think I ever finished reading all the books.

I read most of them, and skimmed the rest at some point. The books just weren’t my thing. I found them a little boring. However, I loved the crap out of the TV show. I also loved the crap out of The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure.

Subtitled My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie, the memoir is about McClure’s pilgrimage around the upper midwest (and New York at one point) to many of the places Laura Ingalls Wilder lived. McClure, who had recently lost her mother, was on a journey to re-capture the “Laura World” she imagined in her youth. A simple, more innocent time.

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Vera Dietz is trying to ignore a lot of things: that her mother abandoned her when she was 12; that she’s only 18 and works a full-time job as a pizza delivery technician while still managing As in school; that her neighbor routinely beats his wife; and then there’s Charlie.

Charlie, the neighbor boy (son of the wife beating asshole), was Vera’s best friend for most of her life, until he died at the start of their senior year. Matters aren’t helped that Vera was pretty pissed at Charlie when he died, and she knows more about his death and the situation surrounding it than she’s letting on.

Okay, now that you get the gist of Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A.S. King, let me tell you right off the bat: I loved the crap out of this book. It’s always tough to pinpoint why you love something. The heart wants what it wants and all that, right?

But there was a scene, and it comes later in the book, that sealed the deal for me. It was one of those scenes that gets to the kernel Vera’s problem, her dad’s problem, and shows that A.S. King is damn brilliant.

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When Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later arrived on my doorstep Monday afternoon, I was more than a little excited. It was the first time in my, er 26-year Sweet Valley career that I didn’t have to trudge up to Waldenbooks in the Northtown Mall with the hopes that the latest book was in stock.

Just to be clear, I haven’t been reading Sweet Valley High books for the last two decades. In fact, I don’t think I’ve read one since about 1989. That doesn’t mean I stopped collecting them. I stopped at volume 100. It seemed like a nice, round number. Plus, my money was better spent on beer.

So the moment the book landed in my hot little hands, I flopped into the La-Z-Grrl and dug in. It was very 1985 here at Supergenius HQ in the best way I remember. I was consumed and grinned the entire time I read the book.

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Long about Halloween my twitter pal @winnerbowzer and I had a twitter discussion about scary books. I told her about how Blackbriar scared the crap out of me. She told me that the scariest book she read as a kid was Jane-Emily by Patricia Clapp. Since @winnerbowzer has pretty good taste, I procured a copy post haste.

It’s only now that I’ve finally gotten around to reading it and hoo-boy was it fun! Jane-Emily is billed as a romance and a ghost story. Sweet!

It’s set in 1912, and nineteen-year-old Louisa is sent along with her recently-orphaned niece, nine-year-old Jane, to spend the summer with Jane’s grandmother. Louisa’s not too thrilled with this prospect because she had great plans to spend the summer mooning about with Martin, her poetry-writing beau.

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When you’re an adult a weird and mild form of multiple personality disorder overcomes you when you read Middle Grade Fiction. When you’re reading a really good book, in this case Mamba Point by Kurtis Scaletta, part of your personality is overtaken by the twelve-year-old you once were. You revel in the danger and intrigue of the story. At other points the grown-up part of your personality takes over. You gasp and think “stupid kid, what are you doing?”

I did both while reading about Linus Tuttle, a twelve-year-old boy who moves from Ohio to Monrovia in Liberia, Africa. Linus and his family move to the new country because his dad gets a job at the American Embassy there. On the plane ride to their new home Linus’ older brother, who had been Larry in Ohio, decides he’s going to reinvent himself and asks his family to call him Law.

The idea of reinvention appeals to Linus and he decides that he too is going to reinvent himself. No longer will he be quiet, anxiety-ridden, scared Linus. In Africa he will be brave and bold.

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It’s very weird to say you didn’t particularly care for a novel because most of the story wasn’t “real.” What? You didn’t like a fictional book because it wasn’t real? It sounds like just about the dumbest thing to say ever. Well, besides “it is what it is.” We can all agree that’s the dumbest thing to say ever, right?

But back to this unreal fictional book that I didn’t particularly care for. The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard is, ostensibly, about the disappearance of 16-year-old Nora Lindell. The boys in her town become obsessed with Nora and what could have happened to her, and it’s their narrative of this event and the fallout that provides the voice of the book.

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Tina Fey gets a lot of shit. She’s too much of a feminist, she’s not feminist enough. She’s funny, she’s not funny. The woman cannot win. The latest is that her “memoir” Bossypants isn’t revealing enough.

Here’s the thing though, it’s not a memoir. I don’t know why it’s being dubbed a memoir. I’m not even sure what the definition of memoir is. Oh wait, I have the Internet. Here’s what comes up when you type “definition of memoir” in Google:
1. A historical account or biography written from personal knowledge.
2. An autobiography or a written account of one’s memory of certain events or people.

Okay, using that convenient definition, Bossypants is NOT A MEMOIR. What is it then? It’s a book of humorous, personal essays ala David Sedaris.

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