1) "One Moment" by Kristina McBride
Heading into summer with her closest friends, Maggie feels like she has it all, including a perfect boyfriend.
She even plans to step up the level of intimacy with Joey. The day after a wild party, they're at one of their favorite hangouts—a gorge where everyone but Maggie has leapt off a cliff into a swimming hole. This time Maggie decides she's ready, if Joey holds her hand. Something about the bracelet on Joey's wrist tugs at the back of her mind as they climb, and in the moment before they leap, she stops. Joey doesn't, twisting in midair as he falls to his death. Adam finds Maggie cowering in the bushes on the trail with no memory of what happened. Maggie's first-person account meanders between comforting flashbacks of Joey and her struggle to confront her fear that she caused his death. Fragments of the incident return, revealing some unwelcome truths about Joey and their friends, some of whom are grieving for very different reasons from those she could have imagined. Like a puzzle, pieces of Joey's life start to fall into place, making Maggie realize that there might have been a reason not to trust him after all.
Good, solid drama about the power of secrets to test the bounds of friendship, with just enough tension to satisfy teen readers. (Fiction. 14-17)
2) "Blind Spot" by Laura Ellen
A girl with macular degeneration finds herself the key witness in a murder mystery set in Alaska.
When AP student Roz discovers she’s in a special ed class because of her visual “disability,” she is furious. Mr. Dellian, who teaches both Life Skills and AP history as well as coaching hockey, seems to take active pleasure in her discomfort. Everything about Life Skills is awful, especially junkie Tricia, who, on the first day of school, somehow manages to get Roz to buy pot for her with the help of hottie Jonathan Webb. This isn’t all bad, as soon Jonathan is calling Roz “Beautiful” and taking her to parties. Meanwhile, Roz makes friends with new-kid-at-school Greg, former crush object of her ex-BFF, and slowly comes to appreciate her fellow Life Skills classmates. And then Tricia goes missing after a calamitous party and is discovered dead months later. Roz is an enormously appealing narrator, her tangled emotions about everything from needing to ask for help to navigating friendships both believable and sympathetic. Secondary characterization is for the most part solid, though Greg is a bit on the saintly side, and Mr. Dellian (who speaks like a boarding school relic) is thoroughly unconvincing as an educator, however good an antagonist he makes. The convoluted end is both hard to believe and emotionally satisfying.
Though there’s entirely too much going on, this is an engaging page turner with a very likable protagonist. (Mystery. 12-18)
3) "The Translator" by Nina Schuyler
A multilingual woman learns life lessons while recovering from a freak accident.
Hanne Schubert, the translator of the title, is a widow and mother of two grown children: a successful son, Tomas, and Brigitte, a prodigal daughter who has yet to return. An accomplished translator, fluent in several languages, Hanne is the product of a peripatetic upbringing and of tough love. As the book opens, Hanne is engaged in an affair with Jiro, the main character of a novel she is translating from Japanese. Her fantasies and dreams focus on Jiro, the complicated creation of the contemporary Japanese novelist Kobayashi, and not on her sometime-lover, David, professor at the fictional Colbert University. (If there was any humor in the book, it might be found in this name, but sadly, it is generic.) Her translation submitted, her expectations high, she falls down a flight of stairs. In the hospital, she becomes a medical curiosity, losing all her languages but Japanese. This prompts her to accept an invitation she initially declined to speak at a conference in Japan. At the conference, Kobayashi confronts her, precipitating a crisis. Hanne decides to seek out Moto, a famous Noh actor and Kobayashi’s inspiration for Jiro. While living with Moto and his brother Renzo, Hanne observes Moto’s prolonged mourning for his ex-wife and takes heart from his example—or so we are expected to believe.
Long on plot but short on story, this is chick lit for sophisticates.
4) "The Asylum" by John Harwood
Creepy doings—certificates of insanity, switched identities, morbid personalities—in and around an asylum in 19th-century England.
While it’s not exactly clear why the Victorian period is so amenable to such sinister and disturbing phenomena, Harwood certainly makes the atmosphere work here. In 1882, a young woman wakes up at Tregannon House, a former mansion in Cornwall, now turned into an insane asylum run by Dr. Straker and his gruesomely unwholesome assistant, Frederic Mordaunt. Although the day before she had introduced herself as Lucy Ashton, later that night she is found unconscious, and when she emerges from a nightmare the following morning, she’s convinced her name is Georgina Ferrars and that she lives with her uncle in London. When Dr. Straker goes to London to sort out the confusion with Ferrars’ (or is it Ashton's?) identity, he comes back to Tregannon House with the disturbing report that she must be an imposter, for he met the “real” Georgina Ferrars at her uncle’s. Disturbingly, the more the Georgina in the asylum tries to assert her identity, the more the authority figures are persuaded she’s delusional, so she’s committed to the involuntary wing of the asylum, where she’s convinced the only way for her to reclaim her identity is to escape. Also upsetting is that she begins to have flashbacks to childhood memories in which she had an imaginary friend/alter ego named Rosina. We’re then taken back to a series of letters from Rosina Wentworth to Emily Ferrars about 20 years previously—and eventually to a journal written by Georgina Ferrars. Rosina breathlessly reports to her cousin all the latest gossip, dwelling especially on her own romantic entanglements with Felix Mordaunt, owner of a mansion in Cornwall. Once again, identities shift.
While the Gothicism works well, at times Harwood’s convolutions become as mystifying to the reader as to the characters he depicts.
5) "Identical" by Ellen Hopkins
6) "Where It Began" by Ann Redisch Stampler
A poor little not-quite-so-rich girl tries to keep her privileged boyfriend after a car accident that can get them both into serious legal trouble in this acerbic take on the phoniness of Bel Air, Brentwood and Beverly Hills.
The relentlessly wry and sarcastic tone of this first-person yarn instantly grabs readers’ interest and propels the story forward. Gabby has learned survival skills growing up among the super-wealthy. The story begins with Gabby in the hospital, recovering from a car accident she can’t remember. It seems, judging by the keys found in her hand, that she stole her boyfriend’s BMW and crashed it into a tree. Gabby’s only concern is saving her relationship with Billy, her richer-than-rich boyfriend, against the wishes of his aggressive lawyer mother. Whatever Billy wants, Gabby willingly does, as she shrewdly trims her behavior according to her finely tuned instincts that keep him involved with her. When an actual friend finally proves the truth to her, she still feels trapped in a system that rewards only the power of money. Stampler paints a ruthless portrait of wealthy Los Angeles, but she finds the occasional human being there too. Readers will find much cynicism but also humor and insight into a corrupt system not necessarily confined to the rich.
Clever and constantly interesting, this is as much a winner as Gabby. (Fiction. 14 & up)
7) "The Forgotten Door" by Alexander Key
8) "The Amnesiac" by Sam Taylor
Taylor (The Republic of Trees, 2005, etc.) explores the complexities and meaning of memory in this psychological thriller.
When James Purdew breaks his leg in an accident, he is laid up for weeks—enough down time to begin thinking about his past and reconsidering his present. James is obsessed with three years of his life he cannot remember. Determined to fill these gaps in memory that increasingly disturb him, he breaks up with his Dutch girlfriend and moves back to his college town in England. There, he begins work repairing an old student house for an anonymous landlord and becomes deeply involved in the search for his own past. As he peels paint from the walls, he continually discovers missing links to his past—a discarded manuscript, a song in his head, a disarming roommate—and the mysterious source of his current anguish begins to reveal itself. The story is slow to get going, but it becomes thoroughly engrossing throughout the middle sections. The denouement borrows heavily from the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (the book opens with a Borges quote and references him ad nauseam) and films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and it unfortunately feels rather unoriginal, despite the labyrinthine construction. James is too plodding to be truly engaging, but perhaps this is because he is not meant to be his own character, but rather to represent universal man struggling with existential concerns. Part murder mystery, the story delves into the abyss of human memory and explores heaven and hell, as well as hope and fear, as two sides of the same coin.
An emulous theme wrapped in a lumbering package.
9) "Rosebush" by Michele Jaffe
10) "The Elephant Vanishes" by Haruki Murakami
A seamless melding of Japanese cultural nuances with universal themes--in a virtuoso story collection from rising literary star Murakami (A Wild Sheep Chase, 1989; Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, 1991). These 15 pieces, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and Playboy, are narrated by different characters who nonetheless share similar sensibilities and attitudes. At home within their own urban culture, they happily pick and choose from Western cultural artifacts as varied as Mozart tapes, spaghetti dinners, and Ralph Lauren polo shirts in a terrain not so much surreal as subtly out of kilter, and haunted by the big questions of death, courage, and love. In the title story, the narrator--who does p.r. for a kitchen-appliance maker and who feels that "things around [him] have lost their balance," that a "pragmatic approach" helps avoid complicated problems--is troubled by the inexplicable disappearance of a local elephant and his keeper. In another notable story, "Sleep," a young mother, unable to sleep, begins to question not only her marriage and her affection for her child, but death itself, which may mean "being eternally awake and staring into darkness." Stories like "TV People," in which a man's apartment is taken over by TV characters who "look as if they were reduced by photocopy, everything mechanically calibrated"; "Barn Burning," in which a man confesses to burning barns (it helps him keep his sense of moral balance); and "The Second Bakery Attack," in which a young married couple rob a McDonald's of 30 Big Macs in order to exorcise the sense of a "weird presence" in their lives--all exemplify Murakami's sense of the fragility of the ordinary world. Remarkable evocations of a postmodernist world, superficially indifferent but transformed by Murakami's talent into a place suffused with a yearning for meaning.
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