Book of the Week - Solstice by P.J. Hoover

Hoover, P.J.
Solstice
Tor Teen

Not too far into the future, global warming has accelerated, the coastal cities are gone, air conditioning is strictly limited, and students deal with heat drills and emergencies. The city of Austin mists everything with a yucky green gel when temperatures get too high even though one in ten people are allergic to the substance. The city has also been building domes for when heat bubbles threaten the city. Piper, a high school senior, lives with her mother outside the domes in a greenhouse complex where they raise all kinds of plants. The environment has become so bad that cut flowers are illegal. For her 18th birthday, Piper's best friend Chloe takes her to get a tattoo. Chloe has dreamed the tattoo and it turns out to be Greek letters spelling out sacrifice. Shayne a new guy at school goes for Piper right away even though Piper's overprotective mom has kept her our of the dating scene. Then, another new guy shows up, Reese who claims his father knows her mother. Suddenly she has two very hot guys vying for her. When her mother goes away for a weekend, Piper goes on her first date and discovers there is much more to these two new boys in her life than meets the eye.

What could be better than a dystopian future combined with Greek mythology?

This enticing combination of an all too scary near future and classical mythology is impossible to put down.

fantasy, romance, science-fiction, speculative-fiction, teen

Synchronicity

I think it is amazing how what I read so often relates to something else. Yesterday I finished Jodi Picoult's The Storyteller then I went online to read the news and ran across this article, "Alleged Nazi SS Commander Found Living in Minnesota".  Earlier this week or maybe last week I listened to Tracy Chevalier's The Last Runaway and last night I started reading Rebecca York's Bad Nights (after seeing the Nazi thing in the news) and both mentioned the underground railroad. I think I run across mentions of the underground railroad five or six times a year. Rare to run into them in two books within days of each other. The interconnectedness of everything I read always makes me think.

Does this happen to you?

In Response to "What Kids Are Reading: In School and Out"

This story has me so riled up I could spit. There are four points that are so wrong on so many levels. For one, kids and teens are reading more now than I’ve ever seen in my life. Forty years ago when I was a teenager I rarely ever met anyone who liked to read but now I regularly hear from lots of kids and teens who are reading and talking about books. Two, leveling books is a flawed system and contributes to turning some students off reading. Three, the classics, books from a different age that used longer syllables, words, and sentences may not be the same classics students read in high school decades ago. They may have the same titles and character names but as I understand it, bowdlerized classics were the norm rather than the exception. Four, last but not least – genre is not a bad thing. The gratuitous bashing of genre, a way of classifying story by type, does not speak to the worthiness of books.

My mission in life is to put people together with the stories that will teach, inspire, incite active thought, and last but not least, entertain. People do not become fluent avid readers by decoding and analyzing text. They become readers by reading. Reading is like golf. You can learn the vocabulary and see, hear, or read how golf is played. But, no one becomes a competent golfer without actually golfing and spending a substantial amount of time to master the sport. If it were not enjoyable, very few people would ever stick with it long enough to become accomplished. The same thing is true of reading. One becomes a competent reader by reading. The hours and pages it takes to become a good reader are fun and easy if the reading material is enjoyable.

So many times it takes just the right book to introduce an individual to the joys of reading. My father-in-law didn’t enjoy reading until he was 75 and read Harris and Me by Gary Paulson. My husband was in his 40s when Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child turned him into someone who reads for pleasure rather than someone who only reads work related material. My son as an emerging reader at age 3 became an ardent reader when he fell in love with headlines on Weekly World News at the market check-out. It is a tragedy to not allow our children to be hooked by a book while in school.

The way reading is taught in this country seems to be a diabolical plan to keep people from being readers. Too many schools using AR keep students from reading anything they are interested in by only allowing students to “read” at their level. AR takes the intrinsic value of reading away and replaces it with points and prizes. Struggling students and gifted students are both hurt by this. Students are forced to read material that may have the requisite number of syllables, words, and sentences for their “level” but have no appeal, no life, no joy. Students, whether above or below level, are hurt by not being allowed to read the books that are popular with their peers and removing them from the conversation that circulates between readers of the same books. If something is important to the reader, he or she will be more able to read it and make sense of it than an advanced reader who has no interest in it. I think it was Kelly Gallagher in Readicide who used an anecdote about low reading level baseball playing students who were able to read and understand an article about the intricacies of baseball better than a group of students with high reading scores but no interest in baseball.

Where I really have issues with the story is the disparagement of genre. Great literature can appear in any genre just as much mediocre fiction is published in the literary fiction genre. Genre should not be a barrier to finding terrific books, it should be a window into new worlds, new ideas, and other's lives.

If you want to hear or read the NPR story it is "What Kids Are Reading."

Living With Jackie Chan by Jo Knowles

Over the years there have been many teen pregnancy books. Most of them focus on the girl who becomes pregnant. The very first novel I ever read that dealt with teen pregnancy was Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones by Ann Head. I borrowed it from a friend my freshman year of high school and read it only at school because I was afraid my strict parents would confiscate it for its racy subject. There are books about girls who decide on adoption, abortion, or keeping their baby. Some teen books dealing with teen pregnancy and parenting are even about boys -- Angela Johnson’s multi-award winning classic The First Part Last but up until now, all the novels with a male protagonist  I’ve found have been about the boy stepping up and being a read dad. Living With Jackie Chan is about Josh, a character from Jumping off Swings. Even though it takes place after Jumping Off Swings it isn’t really a sequel. The style is very different and focuses completely on Josh who did not escape unscathed when he impregnated a girl with whom he had no relationship beyond the few minutes of sex when he lost his virginity. Feeling guilty, Josh decides to move a few hours away from home to live with his uncle and finish high school. His uncle teaches karate and is a huge fan of Jackie Chan. Josh’s life is complicated by the crying baby who lives upstairs who wakes him at 2 am every morning and leaves him thinking about the child for whom he
never accepted any responsibility. He also finds a friend in a girl who lives upstairs who also takes karate with him but has a very controlling and perhaps abusive boyfriend. This thoughtful, sensitive book does break new ground. It will be in bookstores and libraries in September.

High School (gr.9-12). Teen. Contemporary. Issues.

Diversity in Speculative Fiction

Tor.com is a great resource for finding interesting things relating to science fiction and fantasy (speculative fiction). Today's link to an article "Beyond 'Game of Thrones': Exploring Diversity in Speculative Fiction" in Los Angeles Times Hero Complex made me think of Diverse Energies, edited by Tobias S. Buckell and Joe Monti, published by Tu Books.


Diverse Energies is a terrific collection of short stories set in bleak futures. Like all anthologies, some of the stories are all out amazing while others are good but don't really connect with me. I love the concept of this anthology but what it was missing was a story from Toby Buckell who did a great job, along with Joe Monti, of putting this together. It will resonate with lots of teen readers. This anthology spoke directly to me because like the editors and some of the writers, I am of multiple ethnicities.

Strangely enough I never thought of SF characters as all being white. I just always in my mind saw the characters as being of indeterminate ethnicities, believing the world would have moved on from pigeonholing people. I always thought that in the future everyone would be mixed, like in Ursula K. LeGuin's Lathe of Heaven.

As an aside and the reason I so connected with this book is that both editors, in the preface and afterword, address an issue that more and more teens see every year, that of looking like a white person but being from a mixed cultural background.