The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
By Sherman Alexie
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, $16.99 Ages 14 and older
Arnold Spirit Jr. has had many strikes against him. He was born with hydrocephalus, which left him with brain damage, seizures, extra teeth, a speech impediment and poor eyesight. Throw in some zits and, needless to say, at 14 he isn’t a hit among the other kids on his reservation.
Despite getting beaten up at least once a month, he maintains a sharp sense of humor, which shines in his cartoons (cleverly scattered throughout the narrative). He’s also clearly one of the smartest kids to ever plunk himself down in the reservation’s sorry old classroom, where he one day finds his mother’s name written in one of his textbooks. After throwing the 30-year-old book at his teacher, Junior realizes he needs to transfer to a nearby all-white school where he will get a better education. He’s in for a long haul — his only friend thinks he’s a traitor; some of his new classmates are racist — but soon he makes friends and excels in class and on the basketball court. In the meantime, alcoholism, despair and self-destruction are responsible for the deaths of people back home, and Junior finds himself torn in his loyalties.
Sherman Alexie mined his own turbulent youth on a reservation in Washington state for “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” a finalist for a National Book Award that, beneath its wit, is a riveting treatise on American Indian identity and the pain of growing up desperately poor. “That year was actually much more horrible” in real life, Alexie said in an interview. “There weren’t three deaths like in the book, there were nine.” In high school on the reservation, the future award-winning poet and writer really did find his mother’s name in one of his textbooks. “I threw it at the wall in real life,” he said. “But I didn’t smash the teacher in the face.”
Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
By Gabrielle Zevin
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers, $17 Older teens
Figuring out who you are in high school is tough. Naomi Porter has it worse than the average kid: She fell down a flight of stairs and, as a result, doesn’t remember a thing after the age of puberty. She doesn’t know who her friends are, whether she has a boyfriend or what kind of extracurricular activities excite her.
It turns out she’s popular, has a tennis-jock boyfriend and is co-editor of the yearbook. Oh, and her parents have been divorced for years, she is estranged from her mother, and her dad is about to get remarried to a woman she treats poorly.
Forced to observe her surroundings and feel her way through the first few days back at home and school (her “campaign for normalcy”), Naomi discovers something truly frightening: She doesn’t like her old life. Acting purely on instinct, she seeks relationships with people she hadn’t previously noticed or cared about. These include James, the mysterious boy who found her after her fall, and Alice, a funky girl who encourages Naomi to become involved in theater. Yet not everything new fits, and she realizes that her friendship with Will, her co-editor on the yearbook, is far more complicated than she could have imagined.
Gabrielle Zevin does a beautiful job of exploring the psychological terrain of high school in this suspenseful love story that might leave readers wistfully hoping for their own bump on the head. After all, who hasn’t wished for an excuse to reinvent herself?
Spanking Shakespeare
By Jake Wizner
Random House Books for Young Readers, $15.99 Ages 12 and older
This brilliantly lewd novel is hilarious. Shakespeare Shapiro — whose name is just one blemish in his darkly comic life — must write a memoir for class. Knowing his strength for exploiting the weirder aspects of his existence, he eagerly writes of his drunken father, neurotic mother and his “exceedingly violent” younger brother, Gandhi. His stories about how his father regularly blackmails with threats of sex talk and how his grandmother once took him to a pornographic film delight his classmates and give Shakespeare a much-needed boost in the caste system.
The more praise he garners, the more eagerly he lets loose with his tales of endless masturbation, his early love affair with the women in a girlie magazine and why he believes he is responsible for a classmate’s lesbianism. Even his friendships are fair game: “I have only two close friends: Neil Wasserman, whose favorite thing to do is discuss his bowel movements; and Katie Marks, whose favorite thing to do is tell me how pathetic I am.”
As time goes on, Shakespeare becomes infatuated with the mysterious Charlotte, whose own class memoir tells a decidedly different and sobering story. As their friendship grows, Shakespeare starts to examine his need to put a comedic spin on everything. Rest assured, he does nothing to curtail his instincts. This novel is a first for Jake Wizner, a high school English teacher in New York who includes his own amusing bio on his Web page, jakewizner.com.
Powers (Annals of the Western Shore)
By Ursula K. Le Guin
Harcourt Children’s Books, $17 Ages 14 and older
The third in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Annals of the Western Shore” series, this novel easily passes as a stand-alone. In the Western Shore, a faraway fantasy land, slavery is a way of life. Gavir and his sister, Sallo, were stolen away as children and raised as slaves by a family of nobility in the city of Etra.
As a child, Gavir realizes he has a special gift: Snippets of the future come to him like dreams. His sister warns him to never speak of his powers to others, so he lives his life haunted by visions of the city being overrun by soldiers and by flashes of funerals alongside a river.
The children grow into young adults, comfortable with their status as slaves but unable to escape glimpses of cruelty and misogyny rampant in their home. When Sallo is the victim of a vicious attack, Gavir runs away and is soon fighting for his life — and revenge — in a strange world.
Lyrical and bold, Le Guin’s latest novel proves the author of the “Earthsea” series is on top of her game.
Before I Die
By Jenny Downham
David Fickling, $15.99 Older teens
On the wall behind her bed, a dying girl scrawls a last wish: “I want to feel the weight of a boy on top of me.” Tessa is 16 and has fatal leukemia. She decides that, in the time she has remaining, she needs to experience certain thrills, sex being No. 1 on the list. She also wants to commit a crime, say “yes” to everything for a day and, perhaps the toughest yearning of all, fall in love.
As her body begins to fail her, she fights the anger and desperation that come from endless — and ultimately futile — medical treatments. Of course the most agonizing side effects are emotional. She vacillates between crippling fear, reckless abandon and absolute fury with the people around her.
As Tessa checks off her list, she pushes away her weary father, her estranged mother, her bewildered brother and her wary best friend and retreats into a power struggle with herself.
Jenny Downham’s writing is gritty, and she steers clear of the sappiness that can ooze into prose on this subject (think Lurlene McDaniel). In particular, “Before I Die” nails the sense of hopelessness family and friends emit as they orbit around their sick loved one. This elegiac book is haunting.
