Chomp

Chomp by Carl Hiaasen
Alfred A. Knopf - March 27, 2012
304 pages

Wahoo Cray lives in a zoo. His father is an animal wrangler, so he's grown up with all types of creatures in his backyard. The critters he can handle, but his father is another story.
When his father takes a job for a reality TV show called Expedition Survival!, Wahoo has to do a bit of wrangling to keep his father from killing the star, boneheaded Derek Badger, before the shoot is over. Things keep getting more and more complicated as Derek insists on using wild animals in his stunts. Then there's Wahoo's new shadow Tuna, a girl with an abusive father who needs somewhere to hide out.
It's anyone's guess who will actually survive Expedition Survival!...

I had to cut a paragraph out of that description because it pretty much gives away a chunk of the story due to the type of lousy publicity that Hiaasen has that decides to spill out over half the novel in a 3 1/2 paragraph description.

I love Carl Hiaasen, especially his YA books about the Everglades: Hoot, Flush, and Scat. I've been waiting more than a few years for the next one, and I can tell you that Chomp sufficiently meets my expectations. Instead of being about saving a species, like burrowing owls or Florida panthers, this is about a  broke wildlife wrangler and his son who take a job for a "reality" show to pay off their debt.

In the usual Hiaasen way, Chomp is enough to make you laugh out loud on several occasions and is filled with nearly caricature characters, but it also has elements that I don't remember seeing in previous YA Hiaasen Everglades books: actual suspense and danger where you legitimately worry about the lives of the characters.

Ladies and gentlemen, what can I say? Hail...to...Hiaasen! (If you don't get that reference, brush up on your controversial musicals)

Grade: A

Black Beauty

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
Jarrold & Sons - November 24, 1877
281 pages

"We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words."

When his beloved owners are forced to sell him, Black Beauty leaves his life as a young, carefree colt behind him and embarks on a working life of misery. Cruelly treated by his new masters, Anna Sewell rails against animal mistreatment in this poignant tale of a horse whose spirit can not be broken.

Can I express to you how much I love this novel adequately? I don't think so, but I'm certainly going to try.

You may have noticed, loyal blog readers, that this book has been in my "Currently reading" section for quite a while. It's not because I disliked Black Beauty, as the above paragraph clearly shows, but rather because I got bogged down reading several other books.

As a self-described "3/4 animal-rights activist", I wholeheartedly agree with the particular messages that Sewell is trying to send. While I eat poultry and keep a pet, I am fully against the mistreatment of horses, especially by using a whip to drive a horse past its breaking point. Even though I already felt this way before, Black Beauty is enough to change the majority of people.

Grade: A

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
MTV Books/Pocket Books - February 1, 1999
256/224 pages

This is the story of what it's like to grow up in high school. More intimate than a diary, Charlie's letters are singular and unique, hilarious and devastating. We may not know where he lives. We may not know to whom he is writing. All we know is the world he shares. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it puts him on a strange course through uncharted territory. The world of first dates and mixed tapes, family dramas and new friends. The world of sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when all one requires is that perfect song on that perfect drive to feel infinite.

Through Charlie, Stephen Chbosky has created a deeply affecting coming-of-age story, a powerful novel that will spirit you back to those wild and poignant roller coaster days known as growing up.

(Spoiler level: Minor/moderate)

I cheated. I watched the movie first and then decided to read the book. I tell you right now that they are both awesome and rather close. Of course, it's pretty obvious that they would be close, as Stephen Chbosky wrote and directed the movie version. In this case, it actually helps you move through the book.

This is another epistolary novel that I didn't slug through, joining the ranks of Where'd You Go, Bernadette and, in a distant time, Carrie. Charlie addresses letters to someone he just calls "Friend" about his time at school. He proceeds to make friends with seniors and only seniors and then scares all of his fellow freshmen, as well as the sophomores and juniors. As a result, he will live out the next three years of high school completely and totally miserable, as he has no hope of making friends except with younger kids, but the kids in his class will probably tell them ahead of time to "Watch out for crazy Charlie! He punched a kid in the face and completely blacked out!"

The book is frequently cited as being on various banned or controversial book lists because of the content that it deals with, and trust me on this case, it certainly does deal with a lot. Suicide, abortion, abuse, homophobia, the list goes on and on. Some complaints have revolved around how the book deals with all of these, but I think that it handles them pretty well.

The only complaint that I have about the book is what Charlie knows and doesn't know. He appears to be relatively clueless about sex, but he knows much more about drugs, smoking, alcohol, etc. (For those of you who read the book, I'm choosing to ignore the pot brownie part, where it's obvious that he doesn't know what he's eating; other times he knows about marijuana, acid, etc.) He has also read an otherworldly amount of books, but yet, once again, clueless about sex. I'm guessing he hasn't read Lolita.

Grade: A-

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux - October 2, 2012
304 pages

Clay Jannon worked at the technological bagel store NewBagel for a few months. Then the recession hit and NewBagel drastically changed its style and became Old Jerusalem Bagels. Now Clay is unemployed and roams the streets of San Francisco when all of a sudden he sees a "Help Wanted" sign for Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. He gets the job and works the night shift. But the store is odd. The books Penumbra carries are arbitrary, although it's nothing popular. And then there's the Waybacklist, full of books printed in a cryptic code. These books are "borrowed" by a variety of strange customers. Clay has to get to the bottom of what is happening here.

This is possibly the geekiest, most hipster-y book that I have ever read. Not that it's a bad thing. In fact, it is very much a good thing for this reviewer. Anything with smart female geeks and bookstores is off to a good start, but when you throw in Swiss typography from the 1500s and a book series within a book about singing dragons, and that excels it to further levels of glee. My one major problem with the novel was of Clay's roommates, Mat and Ashley. Mat's greatest importance is forging one of the logbooks of the bookstore, and Ashley exists for no other purpose than to act like a robot when not making out with Mat. Throw that blonde bimbo out on her head, give Mat something else to do, and this book would have been among the best.

Grade: B+

Mockingbird

Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine

Philomel Books - April 15, 2010
224 pages

I'm not going to try to attempt to make this a good synopsis, so I'll just copy from what the inside cover tells you. I repeat, this is what they actually marketed to people.

In Caitlin's world, everything is black and white. Anything in between is confusing. That's the stuff her brother, Devon, always explained. But now Devon is dead, and her father cries a lot. She wants to help her dad--and herself!--but as a ten-year-old girl with Asperger's syndrome, she doesn't know how.
     She turns to textbooks and dictionaries, easy for Caitlin because they're full of facts in black and white. After reading the definition of Closure, Caitlin knows this is just what she and her father need. And she is determined to find it. In her search, she discovers that not everything is really black and white--the world is full of colors, messy and beautiful. Caitlin and her father can have Closure and Empathy, too.
     A warm and loving book that gives young readers a rare glimpse of a very special world and a brave and very special girl.

The synopsis should have been enough to deter you from the start. If you can tell by the cover, this book actually won an award. Several comments have been raised, and I'll bring to light two of them. First, the book is attempting too much at once. This is beyond true; it's trying to be how a community deals with a school shooting, how a girl copes with Asperger's, and how a family copes with loss of a family member all at once. Now, this would have been perfectly fine if it weren't for the fact that for the first one hundred and fifty pages or so, Caitlin does nothing important. She spends all of her time refusing to talk to people, crying about her dead brother, and crawling in a "hidey-hole" that her dead brother made for her. Also, the book's language appears cutesy and inauthentic. The author tries to make the voice sound like a child, but talks down to them instead. In addition, the narrator claims to have an adult reading level at age ten and is the best artist in the state of Virginia; nobody can compete with this, and youth especially are going to be deterred from how far above the protagonist is. One especially annoying thing I found about this was the fact that the language characters used were not in quotation marks, but rather in italics. Another irritating thing about the writing was the fact that words Caitlin was interested in were capitalized (Heart, Closure, and Empathy I remember right off the bat). All in all, there is little good in this book.

Grade: F