"Sorrows Springs Are the Same": The Yellow Suitcase by Meera Sriram

Asha rested her head on the taxi window. The city streets bustled in India.

When the taxi pulled over, Asha looked past the palm trees and marigolds.

Grandma wasn't waiting on the front porch.

Asha remembers earlier visits when her yellow suitcase has always been full of presents for Grandma, and how it was always filled with presents from Grandma when she left to fly back home. But this year is different.

Grandma's house is full of strange relatives. But it seems empty.

"Where is Grandma? " Asha asked, although she knew.

"She's not anywhere," said Dad, and Asha saw him cry for the first time.

Asha can't bear the house without Grandma. She can't bear the yellow suitcase, empty. She hides it away.

But when it's time to fly back home, Dad brings her the suitcase and opens it.

There is a quilt inside, made from pieces of Grandma's old saris, smelling of her talcum, stitched together in her last days for Asha.

The yellow suitcase is not empty at all, and Asha knows that it is filled with the gift of love that will always go with her, in Meera Sriram's beautiful true story about loss and lasting love that lives on, in The Yellow Suitcase (Penny Candy Books, 2019. With the meaningful theme that family love lives on in those who receive and pass it on, this universal story of grief is beautifully illustrated in the evocative art of Meera Sethi.

Who's DA MAN? The Crossover: The Graphic Novel by Kwame Alexander

JB AND I
are almost thirteen.

TWINS, two BASKETBALL
GOALS, at opposite ends
of the COURT.

I'm an inch taller with
DREADS to my NECK.

He gets his head SHAVED
once a MONTH.

I want to go to DUKE.
He flaunts
CAROLINA BLUE.

If we didn't LOVE each other
We'd HATE each other.

Basketball and competition run in the Bell Family. Famous locally as an international basketball star, his dad, know as "Da Man," Chuck Bell boasts that he "balled with Magic Johnson." The dreadlocked Josh goes for the flying slam dunk, and Jordan is the cool crossover shooter who makes all the threes. Together Josh and Jordan take their team to the playoffs for the championship game, but their unconcealed rivalry leads to a bet in which Josh forfeits his dreads and like Samson, fears he's lost his mojo.

And as the rivalry proceeds, Josh and Jordan find that they like the same girl, Alexis in the pink sneakers, but she chooses the fast-talking Jordan. Angry, Josh smolders until in the playoff his jealousy reaches the tipping point.

The crowd is screaming,
PASS THE BALL!

I see Jordan.
You want it that BAD?
HERE YA GO!

I pass it so hard it levels him, the BLOOD
from his NOSE still
SHOOTING long after the
shot-clock buzzer goes off.

Josh is suspended from the team, and still angry, he bets his dad, Da Man, that he can beat him in a quick one-on-one. Dad gets competitive, goes for a high-flying dunk, and collapses with a heart attack, foreshadowed by symptoms he's been keeping from the family.

The ball is passed to Josh and Jordan in a way they both didn't quite see coming.

Now who's going to have to be DA MAN?

In his new adaption of his 2015 Newbery Award winner, The Crossover (Graphic Novel) (The Crossover Series) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), Alexander's 2017 Newbery Award winner is a natural for a graphic novel. Author Alexander brilliantly makes the crossover and proves that he can rebound, too, in this powerful reexamination of what it means to have GAME. Alexander's writing in this graphic revisioning of his free-verse best-selling novel is equally powerful in its examination of the bravado up-and-down sides of the winning-is-all mystique, as he reworks his poetry into smart dialogue which heightens the conflict between the twins' competition as mirrored by their on-the-court conflict. The Emmy-winning artist Dawud Anyabwile's dramatic and insightful graphic art gives the story a flow which heightens the conflict inherent in this sports metaphor, making this almost mythic tale of rival fathers and sons accessible to a whole new audience for his earlier The Crossover (The Crossover Series) (see review here)

As I called it the first time--another SLAM DUNK for Kwame Christopher.

Other riveting middle-reader novels by Kwame Alexander include his novel about the twins' father's eighth-grade school days, Rebound (The Crossover Series) and the soccer novel Booked (The Crossover Series).

Going Underground: Hiding by Henry Turner

I'm very good at hiding.

Real hiding happens when everybody can see you, but they don't notice you.

Danny is proud by his ability to disappear in plain sight. Teachers never notice him, even though he's right there in the middle of the class. He knows the answer, he's looking right at the teacher, but he's never called upon. He's the kid nobody quite seems to remember from elementary school. Nobody really sees him except his first girlfriend, Laura. But then she breaks up with him. Wandering the streets, he spots Laura with her family entering a funeral home.

I never meant to go to that funeral at all. My girlfriend Laura had just broken up with me. You get the idea.

Something awful had just happened. Laura had on this very sheer black dress. She looked beautiful, except her face. Her face looked terrible. She felt sad. I could tell.

All I did was dart across the street. Nobody really saw me. When everything was settled inside the funeral home, two men came out, smoking cigarettes. A kid had died. One of the men said he'd ridden his skateboard under a bus. I didn't really want to go to the burial, but I had to see Laura once again. I watched the burial, coming closer and closer. I slid ahead until I was standing two feet behind Laura.

Danny is still obsessed with Laura. Determined to understand why she broke up with him, he hides at night outside her house in her upscale neighborhood, totally unlike his own run-down side of town. Crouching in the shrubbery, he notices an open basement window and slips inside, and hiding in a storage room, he hears Laura's brother come down, close the window, and set the household alarm. Knowing he's trapped inside, Danny chooses to wait until everyone leaves the house in the morning to make a run for it.

But when everyone leaves the next morning, Danny decides to find out everything he can about Laura, to find something that will explain why she broke up with him. He reconnoiters through the lavishly decorated but strangely sterile house until he finds Laura's room. He discovers her hidden diary which reveals Laura's sadness over her inability to please her parents, even facing their disappointment that she didn't make the Olympic trials team.

And then he reads something startling about himself, something incredible but which explains everything, in Henry Turner's psychological thriller, Hiding (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2018). Author Henry Turner spins out the suspense, gradually revealing much about Laura's life, but much more about how his protagonist comes to see his own life. Tightly drawn, this low-key but eerie study of a one boy's personality and his own fate will keep young adult readers wondering until the final revelation--and after.

Now and Later: Rebound by Kwame Alexander

Skinny picks
some other boy
to be on his team,

which is cool with me,
'cause I'd much rather be
at home lying across my bed
reading comics.

See you tomorrow, I yell
but he's already on the court

running a game
and his mouth.

Charlie Bell is taking the sudden death of his father hard. Even basketball is no fun. His dad loved the game and was good at it, but now it makes Charlie sad, and suddenly he's bad at it. His refuge is his superhero comics.

The Fantastic Four, the Black Panther,
use the TIME DILATION EFFECT
to freeze EVERYTHING
and move them back
in time.

I wish I could do
the same thing.

Charlie can't get with the time or get himself together. He's running late for school and decides it's easier to skip school. He heads off for the Quik Mart with Skinny and his troublemaker older cousin Ivan, and they decide to fund the trip by swiping some empty soft drink bottles off Old Lady Wheeler's porch to fund some snacks--Funyons and a box of Now and Later candy. Only that night Charlie's mom finds the wrappers in the trash he forgot to take out. She wakes him up early to hear his story.

Tell me the truth, or else!

Or else what? I say, wondering how that slipped out.
And wishing it hadn't.

Or else turns out to be summer vacation spent with his grandparents. Grandma's fried chicken could put KFC out of business, but Grandpa means business. As soon as dinner is over, he puts Charlie behind the push mower, following him around the yard, teaching technique and pointing out every sprig Charlies misses. This is just the first quarter. We're just getting started, Chuck, he says.

The newly christened Chuck is in for a bit of shaping up. The only answer Grandpa will take is "Yessir" and to add to Charlie's penance, his girl cousin Roxie, plays basketball way better than he does and is as hard a taskmaster on court as Grandpa is at home. Charlie takes refuge in a stack of his dad's old comic books and in the fact that he's beginning to make his foul shots and snag some rebounds in his games with Roxie. By midsummer, Charlie has become Chuck. He's master of the push mower and is getting close to beating Roxie at H.O.R.S.E.

But then he sneaks off from the family Fourth of July barbecue to meet Skinny at the Roller Skating Rink in town, where again Ivan leaves the two younger boys holding the bag, this one filled with marijuana. Skinny and Charlie are arrested, and Charlie has plenty of time to think about how he got there while he waits at the jail.

If I ever get out of here, I'm gonna do better, I promise, Charlie tells himself as he waits at the police station.

Charlie imagines the Black Panther breaking through the door to rescue him.

But it's Grandpa and his lawyer friend Smitty who come through the door tobail him out and take him home.

"I'll tell you again, Chuck." says Grandpa. "This is a team sport. You can surround yourself with people who don't play by the rules, or you can surround yourself with those who do. If you choose wrong, don't start complaining when the coach takes you out of the game.

We're all suffering, but we still here, Chuck."

Sometimes you win the game with a slam dunk, and sometimes what wins the game is a rebound, in Kwame Alexander's forthcoming Rebound (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), the prequel to the author's 2015 Newbery Award-winning The Crossover. (see review here).  In the summer of 1988 Charlie becomes Chuck Bell, Da Man, college superstar, coach, and father to the rival brothers Josh and Jordan Bell, who in their time will also suffer the sudden loss of their father, Chuck.

Writing in a form of blank verse, the winner of multiple awards, Kwame Alexander, again gets inside his thirteen-year-old character's heart and mind at a crucial time in his life, a time when, as he says, he finds his way out of a black hole and into a life in which in twenty years his twin sons will want to honor his memory. As in his first book, Alexander makes use of basketball as a metaphor for life, with his thirteen-year-old protagonist on the cusp between childhood and maturity, now and later, like his favorite candy, in which Charlie learns that even when you shoot and miss, you always try to rebound your own shot.

"Let Us Probe the Silent Spaces..." Lily's Mountain by Hannah Moderow

"Please tell me you're kidding," Sophie says. A mosquito lands on her forehead and she doesn't bother swatting it away. "It'll take days to get to the mountain."

"No way. It's only twenty miles," I say.

"Twenty miles of danger," Sophie says. "We promised Mom we'd stay in the campground."

"But I have Dad's expert map," I say, "so we can follow his route."

"...To where?" Sophie asks. "To find his grave?"

Their dad had fallen into a sudden crevice in a glacier near the peak of Mount Denali, but Lily persists in her belief that his mountaineering knowledge and skills would have enabled him to survive, sure that if she and her sister Sophie can get to the slope of Denali, they will be able to rescue their father. Convincing her reluctant mother that a camping trip with her sister is the best way to honor their father, Lily uses what she has learned from her dad to prepare for a climb to the glacier where he disappeared.

But nothing could prepare Lily for what she and Sophie encounter. They are attacked by mosquitoes and a grizzly, but the pepper spray her dad always carried saves them this time. But Lily stumbles in crossing an icy river, losing her backpack, her food, and all her gear. Wet and cold, she and Sophie fight off hypothermia as they ascend above the tree line, and even with a broken rib from a fall down a scree-covered slope, Lily resolves to continues toward the glacier, determined to try to find her father alive.

"Soph!" I say. No answer. She's either asleep or just plain ignoring me. She doesn't know I just ate all our food.

I was sure Dad would be here at the base of the glacier.

Now I'm going to have to walk up the glacier alone to find him.

But what Lily finds on Muldrow Glacier is the edge of a new crevasse, hundreds of feet deep. And just before it is a strip of red tape held up by bamboo stakes, with three words written in black marker.

DANGER! Crevasse ahead.

The hole is massive and bottomless, sheet ice on all sides. "Dad," I whisper, one last time. I don't expect an answer.

I know that the silence will be long.

There's a certain peace in knowing the truth for Lily, in Hannah Moderow's, Lily's Mountain (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). Moderow's story-telling is fast-paced, with short chapters and plenty of outdoor action to keep middle school and young adult readers involved to the end, but in this riveting coming-of-age debut novel, the mountain is both metaphor and an all-too-real challenge to find a way to deal with the death of a beloved parent. Learning emotional courage as well as physical courage is an significant journey for Lilly, and although Sophie's journey is different, both sisters find a closeness and a solace in knowing that their father is with them yet.

"It's a miracle we made it," says Sophie.

"No, it's not," I say. "Dad taught us exactly what we needed to know."

The Secret of Harper's Woods: The Unicorn in the Barn by Jacqueline K. Ogburn

There had always been talk of a white deer in Harper's Woods. Eric Harper has always wanted to see it, but when he spots a flash of white through the trees, he discovers something else.

The animal stepped away from the underbrush.

It wasn't a deer.

White and glowing, with slender legs and a long curved neck, it raised its head. and I knew. Ponies don't have coats that shimmer like a pearl. And there's never been a pony born with an ivory horn curling from the center of its forehead.

It was a unicorn. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.

Eleven-year-old Eric is filled with a sense of joy unlike anything he's known. He quietly follows the shimmering figure as it limps toward the old farmhouse and barn where his family had lived always until Eric's dad was forced to sell part of the land to pay for his grandmother's nursing home. As he peers through a dusty window in the barn and sees their new neighbor, the veterinarian, Dr. Brancusi, speaking softly to unicorn as she treats her hoof, he is discovered by the vet's angry daughter Allegra. But when Dr. Brancusi learns that Maggie Harper is Eric's grandmother, she surprisingly accepts him, allowing him to listen through her stethoscope to the heartbeats of the twins the unicorn, Moonpearl, is carrying, and swearing him to secrecy, offers him a job helping care for her animal patients.

In due time Eric meets some of Dr. Brancusi's other mystical creatures, Timothy, a talking white cat with an invisible midsection, Prissy, an irascible goose who happens to lay a golden egg now and then, and the Squonk, a strange brown jelly-like thing that lives in a jar of murky water and sometimes sings exquisitely beautiful songs at night. And when his school friend Jamal brings in his gravely ill dog, Eric gets to see the magical powers of Moonpearl's horn cure the pet. Eric begins to save the long white hairs from Moonpearl's coat for a bracelet to help his grandmother. They seem to cure her arthritic hands and Eric hopes that a necklace he and Allegra make will return Grandmother to health.

But trespassing hunters in Harper's Woods, hoping to bag the white deer. spot something white in the woods.

Gunshots! I caught sight of neon orange, a hunter's vest. I crept closer. There were two of them.

I saw a flash of white near a thicket. There was a shot and a yowling sound. Timothy! Those morons were shooting at Timothy!

I stepped out from behind the tree, yelling. "Aaah!" I screamed. My left leg was on fire. I felt blood soaking through my jeans.

Eric's leg has only a minor wound, but in rapid order things take a significant turn. His dad discovers the magical nature of some of Dr. Brancusi's patients, Moonpearl takes this time to have her babies, and Grandmother has a heart attack and Eric fears he will lose the only one who understands how he feels about the creatures. And when Grandmother Harper dies, Eric feels lost in the swirl of events.

But Grandmother leaves him a personal letter which explains everything.

If you are reading this I must be gone. There are other things, wonderful, magical things that appear in our woods. We Harpers have always looked out for them. I always knew that you would be the one.

Jacqueline K. Ogburn's reverent but magical story, The Unicorn in the Barn (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) is gentle and sweet, both a fantasy adventure and a tender coming-of-age story of a young boy who feels a calling for his family's long held a unique relationship with the creatures of their land, ordinary and extraordinary. Eric assumes his role as one of the two Harpers who bear the family responsibility to protect that spirit of goodness that the unicorn represents in this moving magical tale of family and mysteries beyond things seen. Children who are drawn to myths and imaginings just beyond the real will find that this extraordinary novel points to more than a literary brush with the supernatural.

Half in Love With Easeful Death: But Then I Came Back. by Estelle Laure

So I must be dead.

I'm nowhere, in blank space, surrounded by white.

An inky, velvet bud sprouts from the lines in the palm of my pale hand. As it unfurls, its onyx petals undulate and float in front of me, as if there is no gravity.

The Eden Jones of me zips and buckles like a straitjacket as the flower floats from my palm and disappears.

Finally, my Lucille speaks. "Wake up, Eden," she says. "You are going to wake up."

Beeps. Tubes everywhere. I'm pinned by a matrix of machines.

Coming back from a coma is not easy. Since she fell into the river and almost drowned, Eden has been technically unconscious for a month, but even when she wakes up to her life, something of the consciousness of that time between remains. As she learns to speak and walk and eat again, a memory of that time, the In-Between, stays with her, especially the waking dream of those black flowers, their falling petals, stays with her. As she recovers, Eden is drawn to the other coma patient, a girl her age named Jasmine, and a boy named Joe who often sits with her, a boy who sends Eden white roses with a card that says Me and Jaz want you to come back.

Even when Eden goes home and tries to ease back into school and family life, she still feels a sense of unreality in that reality, and the visions of the black flowers follow her wherever she goes. Eden knows no one will believe she sees the flowers, or understand what she experienced in the In-Between, the pull of that calm and peace, and she is drawn to go back to the hospital, to Jasmine's room, where she comes to know Joe and his feelings for Jaz, his hopes for her eventual waking.

Then Eden realizes that she is feeling something new in her new life, strong feelings for Joe. She tries to let him know that Jaz was with her in the In-Between and that she is all right with being there, but she knows that is too much to believe unless you have been there... and she fears that the pull of the In-Between may be too strong for Jaz.

“Something does exist. I saw. It’s a place. Like this but different.”

In Estelle Laure's lyrical But Then I Came Back (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), her heroine Eden has a sort of rebirth, made complex by her glimpse of what is beyond her life and life itself. Joe jokes that she should welcome life because she knows that death is not frightening, but it is not that easy for Eden, and despite the support of her twin Digby and best friend Lucille, it takes a metaphysical baptism in the freezing river to let Jaz go and reach out to those who love her in this world. Normal life means living with the knowledge of death, and Eden chooses to begin that life.

Adolescence is a sort of rebirth in itself, a leaving behind of one life for the next, and the author makes the most of that parallel, in this companion book to her earlier This Raging Light. Part existential quest, part love story, part spiritual rebirth, this is a novel coming-of-age story with a fascinating twist for young adult readers to ponder.

Too Late for Normal: The Inexplicable Logic of My Life by Benjamin Alire Saenz

I have a memory that is almost like a dream; the yellow leaves from Mima's mulberry tree are floating downs like giant snowflakes. Mima is raking, singing something in Spanish. I bathe in waters of those leaves.

I pick up a few leaves and hand them to her with my five-year-old hands. She takes the fragile leaves and kisses them.

I have never been this happy.

Now that golden time seems far away. Sal is seventeen, a senior in high school, and things are changing too fast. His grandmother, Mima, is slowly dying of cancer. Sal is suddenly filled with new, raw emotions and he finds himself on the winning side of two fistfights in the first week of school, the first because a bully calls his stepfather a faggot and the second to rescue Fito, a homeless, always hungry classmate who comes to school when he is between three jobs.

Sal's father gives him a sealed letter from his mother, written a few weeks before she died when he was three, but the courage to open and read it won't come. Sal can't get his thoughts together to finish his college applications. Mima's last Thanksgiving comes and goes, and Sal feels her coming death like an open wound in his heart.

And still, stuff happens.

His best friend Samantha's mother dies in a needless car accident, and she moves in with Sal and his father to finish her senior year. His stepfather's former love, Marcos, returns to town, and finally Fito moves in with them, too.

Sal wishes he could go back in time, or that he could make time stop, take off a year and maybe figure everything out. It's all coming at him too fast.

Sam leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. "Maybe it's not such a bad thing that you're going though a crisis," she said.

Fito's life was complicated, with a capital C. I guess all our lives were complicated. Even mine. Sam's mother was dead. Fito didn't have a place of his own. Mima was dying, and everything was changing.

I felt as if I needed to do something to fix everything that was wrong with all the people I loved. But I couldn't fix anything. Not a damn thing.

"I've decided I'm going for normal," I told Sam.

"Too late for that, Sally," she said.

And then Mima dies.

In Benjamin Alire Saenz' forthcoming The Inexplicable Logic of My Life (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2017), Sal manages to turn that corner in life with a knowledge that the love of family and friends will go with him into his future. Writing in brief, first-person, stream-of-consciousness chapters, the award-winning author sets this universal coming-of-age story in a definite time and place, and, and in the broadest sense, within members an uncommon family, each of whom share changes in their own lives. Saenz writes lyrically, yet colloquially, in the words and text messages of his main characters, with the voice of a particularly thoughtful and compassionate boy on the verge of finding his own manhood. Life is complicated, its logic inexplicable, except that, sometimes, with a little luck, with the love of those around us and those who have gone before, we don't have to face it alone.

Blindsided! A Blind Guide to Normal by Beth Vrabel

"Seriously, though, guys. Try to hold it together without me. Someone will need to keep an eye out the newbies.

"Shall I save the pupil for you?" said Alice, slicing the cake.

"Absolutely," I grinned and passed out slices of my giant farewell eyeball cake.

"I can't help it," I said. "I'm just so... I can't wait for next year, to get back to normal. Be surrounded by normal--" I bit off the stupid thing I was going to say, but it was too late. Alice's face flushed again. Man, I can be such a jerk sometimes.

It should have hit me then--being celebrated like a departing rock star. Because here's the joke for you. Where can a cocky, one-eyed ginger be the coolest cat around?

Punchline: Only at a school for the blind.

And maybe not even there, given the way he's bombed his farewell address to his classmates. With one artificial eye (Artie for short) and partial sight in the other, Richie Ryder Raymond hopes that his talent for the quick quip will see him through his transfer from Addison School for the Blind to a normal, that is, regular eighth grade class at Papuaville Middle, home of the Fighting Guinea Pigs. With a name like that, the comic possibilities seem endless.

But it doesn't begin well, as he squints his way through the halls, trying to see the room numbers and maybe spot the gorgeous girl next door.

Yep. Room 206! I guess I was being too self-congratulatory to notice the love of my life was standing beside me. I ran right into Jocelyn. She fell backward into the boy behind her.

"Hey!" "Watch where you're going!" a guy barked. "I don't think he saw me," said Jocelyn. "Of course, he saw you!" the guy said. He put his arm around her.

"No, man, I didn't!" The guy jerked his chin at me. He had brilliant green eyes and the longest eyelashes I'd ever seen on a boy. I blurted out. "Do you have to brush your eyelashes? Because they are mega, mega long!"

"You're a freak!" Lash Boy hissed as everyone laughed. "What the heck is wrong with you?"

A hand clamped down on my shoulder and Lash boy's. Oh, great. Perfect way to meet my homeroom teacher.

"I am ashamed of how you would treat a differently-abled student!" she yelled at Lash Boy.

Ryder is outed as "differently abled," and although he tries to explain what happened, his teacher tells Lash Boy (a.k.a., Jocelyn's boyfriend Max) that she's calling his parents. Ryder's hopes of slipping in under the radar are dashed, and now Max, the class golden boy, will have it in for him forever, which is not good, given that Ryder already has a crush on Jocelyn.

And that's just the beginning of his problem with being "normal." Living for the year with Gramps while his dad is doing research in Alaska is not easy. Gramps seems stuck in the 1970s, still grieving over the death of his wife at the birth of Ryder's dad. Her weird monument, a stone horse, stands in the middle of the front yard, decorated for all seasons and holidays, and his little house is decorated in stereotypical seventies style. Gramps plays disco constantly in his old Oldsmobile, and talks about Ryder's grandmother as if she's still alive. Ryder's mom must find that a bit creepy, too, because she takes to working unusually long hours to avoid being there whenever she can.

But Jocelyn lives next door, and Ryder soon learns that her little brother died in a fire and that she was rescued by Max when they were eight years old. Adding that to the fact that Max is considered a hero, a real Mr. Nice Guy at school, Ryder figures his chances with Jocelyn are dimmer than his vision.

And Ryder’s hopes of getting to normal don’t grow any brighter when he and Gramps walk into an argument outside Home Depot, where Max is fund-raising for a project for grief counseling.

Gramps and I were each downing our second hot dogs when the fight began. I heard “Max, I don’t want to talk about this!” all but screamed by Jocelyn. “I’m so sick of your nonstop gotta-help-everyone-all-the-time crap.”

“Crap?” Max said, pleading. “Come on, Jocelyn. It’s been years. Your brother would want us to keep other kids from going through what we.... His voice went thick with passion. “Just let yourself remember!”

I punched Max Waters in the face.

And then Max gets even by tripping Ryder in the cafeteria. Artie the artificial eye pops out, skitters across the floor, followed by retreating girls screeching and guys kicking it around the room. And for the punchline, at first Ryder finds that he’s got no joke, nothing.

Artie comes to rest in front of his homeroom teacher, Miss Singer, who picks it up, her pity radiating from her, and looks around for Ryder.

I slammed a big old NOPE sign on the pain stew in my gut. I reached for my eye. I climbed on top of a chair. Cupping Artie in my hand, I rubbed it on the hem of my shirt. I slowly, slowly, slowly popped the eye back into place.

Then, arms out, like this was all a huge theatrical joke, I bowed–-three times in fact.

It seems that nobody, not Gramps, or Mom and Dad, or Max and Jocelyn, nobody is really normal. They all have things they don’t want to think about. But sometimes you have to look at those things with both eyes open. In her sequel to A Blind Guide to Stinkville, the forthcoming A Blind Guide to
Normal (Sky Pony Press, 2016), Ryder finds that maybe normal is accepting a new normal that includes anger, sadness, and loss. And they’re all okay. With a moving cathartic conclusion, Vrabel fashions a coming-of-age story that middle readers will never forget.

Ryder's honest first person voice is funny, yet poignant, one that gets the reader right inside him, seeing the world through his eye. Each character has a way to hide, something inside he or she try to cover up and forget. Jocelyn has her scars hidden under long sleeves, the outward reminders of her guilt for her little brother's death, Max has his own secret of starting that fatal fire, and Ryder's parents have their own fears that his cancer might return. Gramps has his grief for his wife and the signs of her existence he can't bear to remove from his life--all things that make them different, yet make them normal human beings. Says School Library Journal, "A sweet, thoughtful, and funny read--a heartfelt tale without the typical saccharine coating."

American Gothic: The May Queen Murders by Sarah Jude

Now, Ivy girl, you gotta know there's bad out in them woods, and the worst kind of bad Rowan's Glen has ever known is Birch Markle. Things weren't ever right with the Markle boy. There was no real reason for the things he done, but sometimes, well, evil's like that.

Like Brigadoon, the legendary Scots village that appears once a century, Rowan's Glen is a place out of sync with time, a late-nineteenth century-type settlement, set back in the Ozarks, with Scots-Irish folks with feet in two centuries. And that's the way Ivy Middleton likes it.

The kids at the consolidated high school roll their eyes and call them "The Cult," or "the hillbillies," or "the hippies," but Ivy loves the long ruffled skirts she and her best friend and cousin Heather make and the Glen's superstitions and spooky folktales her granny used to talk about, that is, before she stopped talking at all.  The Glen is a place where a death in the family means all the clocks in the house must be stopped, where the glimpse of a "shadow self" forewarns of death, and where little kids are warned to stay on the roads, out of the woods, and be home by twilight for fear of Birch Markle, Rowan Glen's own bogeyman who seems to choose one girl in each generation for his own blood sacrifice.

But this spring Heather is different. Ivy is used to their sharing all their secrets, but suddenly Heather has a secret she says she can't share, one that has her slipping out at night, and meeting with someone in the old stable by lanternlight. Ivy, too, realizes that her feelings are now different for her old playmate Rook Meriwether, whose touch is now "like a dandelion scattering inside her, seeds full of possibility." And now Rowan's Glen's leaders have decided it's time to revive the old May Day celebration and crown a May Queen, even though the old ones whisper that two girls, twenty years apart, were found brutally murdered on the day they were were chosen Queen of the May.

"He comes for girls with secrets," Aunt Rue tells Ivey, "you know, Terra McAvoy and my girl. And you. Nothing can stop him."

As the day approaches, favorite dogs go missing and are found mutilated in the woods. And when Heather is chosen to be the new May Queen. Ivy feels that she must protect her friend, her cousin, by following her on her night wanderings, despite the reports that Birch Markle is again heard screaming in the woods, the stench of death about the wild skins he wears. Rook and some of his friends agree to help Ivy protect Heather, but soon Ivy discovers her cousin drowned in the pond in the woods. And then they stumble upon what a cache of old dry bones, a bullet through the skull, crammed in the hollow of a tree.

Whose bones are they? And who is stalking the young girls of Rowan's Glen? And why?

Sarah Jude's forthcoming The May Queen Murders (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) is pure American Gothic, filled with rich symbolism of Light and Dark, Good and Evil, Life and Death. Ivey's granny's self-imposed silence is like the community refusal to speak about the monstrous power among them, and Rook's quiet battle against the alien, poisonous belladonna shrubs that he doggedly roots out each spring.

Readers who like an atmospheric tale will find this one an engrossing read. Jude builds an eerie ambiance which hangs over Rowan's Glen like the spring fog as the story moves inexorably to its hair-raising conclusion, one whose terror is tempered by the almost other-worldly setting and the characters who insist, in true terror-tale typecasting, to go, against all warnings, down that twilight road, into that abandoned stable, or through those mist-shrouded woods to what awaits beyond.

Going Deep: The Art of Not Breathing by Sarah Alexander

Today we are sixteen. Happy birthday, Eddie.

It still doesn't feel real. To me, he's not gone. My twin lives inside my head and is part of me. Sometimes, my hands and feet get extremely cold and I know it's not me feeling cold, it's Eddie, so I wrap myself up in a blanket to make sure he's okay. I suppose I eat for two.

Since Eddie's hand slipped out of hers in the shallows and a current carried him away to drown, Elsie has felt his presence with her all the time. And although it's her birthday, it's Eddie's, too. And it's not a happy birthday. Her brother Dillon is growing gaunt and distracted, her mother is drinking gin openly, and her father seems not there even when he is present, which is more and more infrequent. Since Eddie was lost in the dark waters of Black Isle, her family seems to have been holding their breath, afraid of what is not known and left unspoken about Eddie's disappearance in the sea.

Overweight and withdrawn, Elsie finds a solitary refuge in a derelict boathouse, where she can see the ocean where Eddie vanished, where she can watch her schoolmates meeting on the beach. But one day she sees the "boat boys" from the new dive shop on the pier, pushing and shoving each other, seemingly daring each other to jump into the still icy waters, and she is oddly compelled to join in.

"Chicken!" Tay calls. "Come on--it's fine. I'll catch you."

I take a step closer to the edge and watch the white foam swilling. I try not to think about the kelp down there--the worst kind, thick and slithery. The others keep calling me into the water, hollering and clucking.

I can't believe I'm doing this. But it's too late. I'm already running to the end of the wall, and then I'm flying, falling. The cold rides up my body as I go down, piercing my bones like a thousand glass splinters. The water looks black in every direction as I fall headfirst into the immense space below. There's a silence in my head, and I let the current take me.

Under the water, Elsie's mind flashes back to the day of Eddie's drowning. It seems Dillon was there and the other boys, but her father was gone from the beach where he had just been. And where was her mother? It's somewhere all there, somewhere in the dark, clear water of her memory, if she can go deep enough.

Strangely, Elsie feels that she must master free diving; she must go into the deep beyond the shore to follow Eddie, to find the answer to the unknowns about that day. After her first jump, Tay and Danny pull her from the water, but Elsie knows she must go back, she must master the art of not breathing to go deep enough, and Tay offers to teach her. Elsie finds that she has a talent for free diving and can stay under water longer and longer as she works at it. As the summer goes by, Elsie and Tay are drawn to each other, as if each is the missing piece, the part of the puzzle that will enable them to understand the meaning, the truth of that day when Eddie was lost, and they find themselves falling in love.

But Elsie's family is falling apart. Dad leaves suddenly one day, stuffing some bags in his car and gone. Dillon's eating disorder progresses to full-blown anorexia, and Mom seems to see and care about none of it. Tay goes away for a while, and Elsie emerges as the strong one, the one who has the will to find out the truth in Eddie's death that drives them apart and yet binds them together--her family, Tay, the other boys, and herself. Who among them let Eddie go, let him be taken by the rip current into the depths? Or did they all? How deep will Elsie have to dive to find the truth, and can she survive when she does?

Sarah Alexander's The Art of Not Breathing (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) ably sustains the metaphor of dark secrets lying beneath the surface in a coming-of-age novel in which romance, danger, a mystery of an unexplained death, and the mystery of what is hidden deep in the mind is plumbed by a compelling main character who risks dying to find freedom in what lies below and above. Among the backwash of dystopic novels in which teen literature is awash, young adult readers will find this deep, realistic, and suspenseful story a challenging but welcome change.

. . . . suddenly longing to be back in the water, to feel the open space around me, to feel the power in my legs and the pressure in my lungs as I kick for the surface.

Both Sides Now: Far From Fair by Elana K. Arnold

"You want to talk, Odette?" asked Dad.

She shook her head into the bedspread. "No," she said to the mattress.

There was a pause. "It's going to be okay, honey, I promise." He sighed and then Odette heard him walk away. He left the door open.

Dad promised it would be okay. As if he had that kind of authority. That kind of pull with the universe.

To Odette it was clear as a glass of water that things were not okay. Not by a mile.

Odette's parents are getting everything wrong.

Something has gone wrong between Mom and Dad. And what do they do? Dad takes a voluntary layoff at work, they sell their perfect house, with Odette's perfect bedroom with the pink ceiling, They have a yard sale and sell practically everything she's ever known. Odette and best friend Mieko sit sadly in the for-sale armchairs and watch her little brother Rex, lost in the excitement of the moment, sell his beloved set of "Cubes," clear boxes with model animals inside. She watches strangers buy her the special cushions she chose for her bed.

As a sorry consolation, Dad gets her a dog--not the big, hug-able, funny Lab of her dreams, but a tiny ratlike mutt with a pointy nose and sharp little claws at the end of its laughably short legs. Her parents buy an ugly brown R-V, drably named "the Coach," declare her and Rex "roadschooled" kids, and take off up the Pacific Coast, supposedly for a long visit with her sick Grandmother Sissy.

From living in a big, two-story house with all its familiar things, Odette finds herself confined with no privacy, the four of them, the dog, and Rex's ferret, thrown together all the time, with only private place a bathroom the size of a broom closet. There are some good stopovers where they have fun, but with long days of monotonous driving, endless boring games of Uno with Rex, a flat tire that sets Mom and Dad to sniping at each other, and a soggy search for Rex's missing ferret on a rainy night, the togetherness is not happening. And then Rex has one of his "Furies."

"Mom! I can't find my Whales, Porpoises, and Dolphins Cube."

"Oh, honey," Mom said. "You sold it at the yard sale, remember?"

"No," wailed Rex. "I wouldn't! I want my Cube! I hate this! I can't believe you made me sell my stuff. You ruined everything!" Rex screamed.

Then Rex started the scream-cry-laugh thing he did. He hit himself, pounding his fists against his thighs. "We can order one online," Mom promised.

"I don't want another one," Rex cried. "I want my One!"

Mom started crying, too. She pulled Rex close. "I know." she said.

Odette's tears dripped down on her dog's black fur.

And when the family arrives at the island where Grandma Sissy lives, she tells them she is dying and that she wants them to be with her when she makes it happen.

Elana K. Arnold's latest, Far from Fair (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) is a book about loss and endings, but more than loss, it is about beginnings, two sides of the same door, as Grandma Sissy said, and Odette and her family are able to see something good ahead through that door.

The good and the bad, all mixed up together."That's life," Grandma Sissy says.

In Arnold's moving, very real story of a family going through loss and into a chance for a new life, Odette's own coming-of-age is an insight that, like her little brother, everyone wants their One. and that family can be that One. Putting twelve-year-old Odette in the center of this story, a character just moving out of childhood, brilliantly points up Arnold's thesis that change, giving up some things as doors close and open, is a part of life, a part of life in which the ties of family are ultimately essential.

". . .an engaging, emotional ride as Odette learns the truth of one of her grandmother’s sayings: 'Even in the bad... there is opportunity for good,'" says Publishers Weekly's starred review.

Going Back: I'll Always Be With You by Violetta Armour

"Mom, you can't be serious. Indiana? What are you thinking? Not about me, obviously."

"Teddy, you've hardly left the house all summer.-A fresh start might be good for us--with not so many memories."

"How can moving to Dad's old house, probably sleeping in his old room, be fresh? Oh, sure, no reminders of him there."

"But those are positive things. It's hard to avoid the negatives here. Like that intersection."

Our dog, Winnie, starts whimpering. "Are you going to get rid of him, too?" I blurt, and then I wish I could take it back.

Then it's like she never heard me and she goes into Mom mode. The cost of living. It's cheaper in Indiana. Need to save the insurance money for college. Like a degree from that Podunk school would get me into a decent college. I walk away.

I killed my dad and now my mom is killing me.

But everything in Phoenix reminds Mary Kostoff of her husband Stan and his death, at an intersection by a drunk driver, in a car driven by her teenaged son Teddy out for a lesson. It seems to make sense to move in with Stan's widowed mother, Buba, lonely alone in her big house in a peaceful small town. The two little girls adapt right away to having their affectionate and lively grandmother around, but Teddy is still angry, taken away from his high school where he has just made the varsity basketball team and has many friends.

Now Teddy starts his much-anticipated junior year at Middleburg High School, sharing a locker with Mindy, a quirky, talkative girl with bright orange hair and aquamarine braces on her teeth, and having to be the new kid in a high school where everyone has known each other since toddler days. To make things worse, the varsity coach has plenty of skilled seniors and Teddy has to go back to playing junior varsity basketball. But Mindy's constant fountain of little-known facts keeps him laughing, and his junior varsity coach, Luther Stone, an energetic young black man, sees Teddy's skills and makes him team captain.

Mary, too, misses her old friends, and on a whim applies for a book store job and finds it very satisfying. She offers to start an evening book club, and at her first session meets Rosetta, a striking and stylish African American woman, and the two find themselves drawn to each other. Rosetta is empathetic, telling how her family moved with other black people from Chicago to live in a brand-new subdivision for employees of a new plant in Middleburg. She tells Mary how she made new friends and even became a cheerleader, thanks to her gymnastics classes in Chicago. As they meet for coffee often, Mary discovers that Rosetta was a senior the same year as her husband and is eager to hear what she remembers of Stan in high school. Rosetta brings along her 1968 annual, with pictures of her and Stan and their classmates, and mentions that her grown son Luther is the assistant basketball coach at the high school

With Teddy seeming happier, with a new friend and a job she loves, Mary begins to feel that she is fitting into life in the small Midwestern town--until she goes to Teddy's first basketball game. Looking at Teddy talking with Coach Luther Stone, she sees something she never expected.

She has to talk to Rosetta.

Mary takes a deep breath. "Okay. It's Luther. He reminds me so much of Stan. And when I went to thank him for being so nice to Teddy...up close.... His hazel eyes. The cleft in his chin. It's Stan all over again. And even his mannerisms. That half smile. I know, my counselor said I would keep seeing Stan in so many people....

Rosetta closes her eyes and when she opens them there are tears.

"You're not imagining things, Mary. Luther is Stan's son."

"The past is never dead. In fact, it isn't even past," goes William Faulkner's famous saying, and although at first Mary is angry that Rosetta was drawn to her to learn how Stan's later life went, she realizes that she was doing the same thing with Rosetta, mining her memories for bits and pieces of the young Stan. The two women understand that they were never rivals in their love for the same man at different times in his life and that through him they have the promise of a family connection that offers much more.

In her I'll Always Be with You (iUniverse, 2015), Violetta Armour tells her story through the multiple voices of Teddy, Mary, Rosetta, and with flashback narrations from the seventeen-year-old Stan and Rosetta, and although she populates the novel with other well-drawn characters, her best writing is of the two women who find their lives interwoven by events they could never have expected, of past love and loss, grief, and new life found. Kirkus Reviews sums it up: "The threads of a dead man's life and history converge in Armour's dramatic debut novel about heritage, family, and forgiveness."

'Tis the Blight that Man Was Born For: The Question of Miracles by Elana K. Arnold

Back home in California, no one ever ate lunch indoors--lunchtime was a strictly outdoor activity. It was humane. There was room to breathe.

But that was back home. Here in Oregon, where it had rained literally every day since they'd parked the moving van, school lunch had to be consumed indoors.

It was another reason to hate it here. As if Iris didn't have a long enough list already.

And there was Sarah's ghost.

Iris's best friend Sarah had been killed back in California that summer, leaving the tennis courts, struck by a careening car that just missed Iris and hit Sarah right beside her. Sarah had always been her other half, the person with whom she shared everything, and Iris longs for her friend, who seems, not gone at all, but somehow just beyond her reach. The "fresh start" in Corvallis, with its interminable gray drizzle, the change that her parents hoped would help, wasn't working.

The new life is nothing like her old life, surrounded by friends. People in the middle school cafeteria stare at her standing with her tray in the middle of room alone, so Iris accepts the offer of a strange-looking boy with wild curly hair to sit with him at an empty table. Boris is clearly not one of the popular kids. His social skills reveal no concept of personal space, chewing and at the same time garrulously talking on and on about some game while Iris sits, gaze averted. But Boris is cheerful and invites her over to his house, and Iris reluctantly agrees, mostly from a lack of other options.

But Boris soon tells her his story. He survived to be born by what his parents feel was a real miracle, an internal deformity correcting itself as a group of nuns prayed to Pope John Paul, and he tells her that he'll soon be visited by a team from the Vatican, sent to determine if a miracle had actually occurred with his birth,

Iris is startled. If a doomed baby can be restored to health, perhaps a miracle which will allow her to reach Sarah's ghost could happen for her. Iris somehow comes to believe that Sarah's spirit is in their storage closet with her tennis racket, the one she was holding when she died. Secretly Iris visits the town psychic, and even agrees to search of traces of Sarah's spirit with Boris' audio equipment. On Sarah's birthday, Iris buys a copy of Anne of Green Gables, wraps it lovingly, and hides it in the closet behind the racket for Sarah. Then one night she hears a strange sound from downstairs.

Whatever it was, came from beneath her, not above.

Iris blinked into the hallway's darkness and felt her way to the banister, then down the steep staircase.

On the sixteenth step, Iris stopped. At last she heard the sound--it was a lament, a wail, a beseeching prayer.

It came from the the closet under the stairs.

"Sarah?" she whispered. The hairs on the back of her neck stood straight.

"Sarah, is that you?"

Iris closed her eyes and prayed. Give me a miracle.

Iris does not find the miracle she wants, but as time passes she begins to see that all of life is its own miracle, in Elana K. Arnold's just published The Question of Miracles (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). Dealing with deep grief is a difficult subject, especially for middle readers just beginning to deal with mortality--mortality of friends, parents, and finally everyone around them. Arnold's sensitive narrative builds tension as Iris comes closer to understanding her own loss and finding a way to find joy in life despite her grief. The chilly gray rain brings new life from the garden Iris and her dad plant in early spring, and Iris begins to heal from her loss, even as she struggles with the eternal question of why some live and some die. With its difficult theme, this is perhaps not a book for everyone, but there are few young readers who won't benefit from Arnold's gentle story of the passage through grief to life.

Glimmerings: The Ghost in the Glass House by Carey Wallace

"Hang on," Teddy said as Denby took his first step into the cave. Then Teddy struck a match. A terrible keening wail split the darkness. Denby staggered back into the girls.

Bridget clutched Teddy's arm. Laughter echoed through the cave. Bram emerged from the shadows.

"You sounded just like a ghost!" Bridget said. She touched Bram's arm. "I was so scared."

Not to be outdone, Denby pushed past him into the passage. In the stone gap, Teddy turned back. He held out his hand. "Clare," he said. She took it and followed him.

Bridget gamely picked her way along behind them. Clare tried to pull her hand from Teddy's, but he slid his arm around her waist. His lips found her face just under her eye.

Clare's skin crawled as if a spider has just run over it. She yanked free. But inside she had another feeling, as if warm caramel had just spilled in her rib cage.

Since her father's sudden death, Clare and her mother have lived as wealthy gypsies,  traveling from one rented house or fashionable resort to another through Europe and America. Now past her twelfth birthday, Clare longs to return to their own home, but keeps her feelings from her mother, energetic and sociable, but also somehow too fragile to meet anyone's needs but her own.

But as they summer in a house on the New England shore, Clare's emotional life seems strangely split, split between  death, always just on the other side of her mind, and glimmerings of romantic love which suddenly fill her consciousness as well. She notices what seems an innocent little flirtation between her mother and her friend Bridget's handsome father, and wonders at her own feelings of an unfamiliar attraction to young teenagers Bram, Denby, and Teddy.

A mysterious glass house on the edge of the woods behind the house draws her attention.  Inside she first feels an inkling of a spirit, one which soon speaks with her and seems to be a boy of her own age who claims his name is Jack. And when Jack touches her at last, his light touch affects her the same way that Teddy and Bram's touch had.

Clare felt a touch, light but undeniable.

"Could you feel that?" Jack asked. Clare nodded. "Don't be scared," Jack said.

She felt a faint pressure as he settled beside her on the divan. Then something like a shawl settled over her bare shoulders.

Another touch guided her head toward Jack's unseen shoulder. At first she held back, not certain it could support her. But it did. The faint weight of his hand covered her own again.

Both death and love seem near, frightening yet with a mysterious magnetism, almost like the mist that separates Jack from the house where he had lived and whatever lies beyond for him, in that summer when Clare was twelve and becoming aware of those things that had before existed outside her child's consciousness. There are changes to come for all of them, even the ghostly Jack, in Carey Wallace's fantasy novel, The Ghost in the Glass House (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).

Although set in the 1920s, the historical setting barely intrudes on this story, which seems to exist almost outside of time.  Wallace uses her settings, especially the deep cave on the edge of the sea and the glass house, furnished with rugs and sofa, yet somehow part of the leafy woods, to extend the atmosphere of this story of inside and outside, seen and unseen, past and future, set on the borderline of childhood and maturity.

Full Circle: The Center of Everything by Linda Urban

This wish has her thinking about things... This wish and being around Nero.

Once, Ruby remembers, Nero even questioned Mr. Cipielewski about a circle being 360 degrees.

Mr. Cipielewski taught them about degrees in math. A triangle had 90 degrees. A circle has 360 degrees.

"What," Nero had asked, "if you only have 359 degrees?"

"Then you do not have a circle," said Mr. Cipieleski.

"What do you have?"

"Nothing," said Mr. Cipielski. "Nothing we have a name for."

Since her Grandmother Gigi's death, Ruby Pepperdine's life has felt as if it is spinning off center, her circle broken, missing that final degree that keeps it turning in balance.

Circles are on Ruby's mind, as the yearly Bunning Day festival approaches, celebrating Captain Bunning's creation of the doughnut-with-a-hole, in which, according to town lore, the skipper had invented, cramming his wife's famous doughnut balls onto the spokes of his helm wheel, sustained for hours by those donuts as he fought a gale that threatened to take them all to the bottom of the sea. Ruby has been selected the Bunning Day speaker, chosen to read her winning essay at the end of the parade, standing in a circle drawn in the center of the street, the center of everyone's attention.

On her birthday Ruby had made a wish, supposedly sure to come true, by tossing a quarter through the hole of the donut held by the heroic-sized bronze statue of the Captain himself, but Ruby cannot see how she can help this wish come true, even if she reads her essay perfectly.

"Listen!" Gigi had said to her just before she died. "Listen..." she had gasped. And then, after a silence, "It's all coming together...."

Her mom had rushed her off to catch the school bus, assuring Ruby that she would take care of her grandmother, before Gigi could tell her what to listen for, what the coming together meant, and Ruby keeps coming back to that, wishing she could go back to that moment, to listen and make it all right.

Everyone else seems to have gone back to their lives, as if Gigi had never lived, as if her dying had not left a hole, a broken circle in their lives. Only her classmate Nero seems to understand why she is Googling the word torus at the library:

"Did you know that a donut is not a circle?" Ruby says quickly. "It's torus. Like an inner tube.

Ruby has read what came up about the torus. She doesn't really understand the physics talk, but she can't escape the feeling that a personal meaning is hiding inside the concept.

"Tori--that's the plural of torus--they're..." What were they? "They are unchanged by homeomorphisms, such as bending or stretching."

"Homeomorphisms...." said Nero.

"Such as bending or stretching.... Would you want to travel back in time? ... back in your own past?" she asked Nero.

Linda Urban's The Center of Everything (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) tackles the questions at the center of life--and death--how to deal with the hole left behind when someone is taken out of our family circle, how the balance is reestablished, and the broken circle rejoined, all in an everyday setting of a small town celebration of donuts and local history.

"In the beginning was the donut. At first the donut was without form..." Urban begins her story. How she makes the humble donut the literary lietmotif of this coming-of-age story, seriously but with humor, allows this novel and the theme it explores to be easily accessible to middle readers. What the takeaway from this story may be will depend on what the reader brings to it in the way of such experiences. Dealing with situations such as a loss which threatens family and personal equilibrium is hard work for us all and for any author, and Ruby Pepperdine is a worthy character who takes on this task for all readers. "A poignant, finely wrought exploration of grief," says Kirkus, giving Urban's novel a starred review.

Out of the Mouths of Dogs: What the Dog Said by Randi Reisfeld

I wished I could grieve like a normal person, instead of feeling abandoned and--and guilty.

"Grace." Regan's voice rose over the chaos in the cages, echoing along the concrete hallway. "I think I found him! He's sooooo cute! He looks like a multi-poo!" she said. "That's what Sheena has!" Sheena Watson, queen of the high school jungle, Regan's cohort in fabulousness.

"No, no, no. Pick me!"

I spun around. In the cage behind me, a dog sat, posing as if for a portrait of canine good humor and fidelity. His shaggy gray muzzle seemed strained into something resembling a smile.

"Did you hear that?" I asked Regan.

"She didn't," the dog assured me. "You're the only one who can."

Since her police officer father's sudden death in a drive-by shooting, Grace has lost her anchor. Grace's grief is mixed with guilt, a relentless feeling that her insistence that her dad make her soccer tryouts that afternoon put him at work early and into the wrong place at the wrong moment. Now she is listeing to a pound dog and suspects she's losing her mind.

Grace, the smart one, the sister with straight As, has stopped turning in homework, stopped learning anything, stopped seeing her friends, lost in grief for the father who seemed to her the only one who understood her. Her mom throws herself into work and her books on grief management, and her sister Regan hasn't missed a beat with her friends and despite lackluster grades, is deep into scheming to get herself admitted to Parson's School of Design.

Enter Rex the rescue dog. Looking to pad her college application, Regan decides that she and Grace will adopt a shelter pooch and enroll it in the local canine companion program, becoming trainers to turn the pound puppy into a service dog for handicapped children. A born manipulator, Regan passes the actual training classes over to Grace, and Mom goes along with her lopsided plan, hoping that the dog and social involvement will draw Grace out of her self-imposed isolation.

But this rescue dog talks so that only Gracie can hear him, and what he says is making sense. Afraid to tell her family that she's having conversations with a goofy-looking mutt, Grace has no choice but to go with Regan's plan. Along the way, Grace is drawn in by Rex's infectious live-in-the-moment doggy wisdom and his amazing ability to psych out human motivations.

Rex's canine sensory equipment also come into play when Grace discovers that one of the teens in the class is JJ, the boy who may have been a witness to her father's unsolved murder, and to add to the mystery, she learns from the instructor that her own father was instrumental in getting JJ, identified as an at-risk kid because of his gang involvement, into the class. At first horrified by being forced together with someone she believes was involved in her dad's death, Grace gradually comes up with a plan, with the help of Rex's amazing abilities, to force JJ to reveal the shooter responsible for her father's shooting to the police.

Part fantasy pet tale, part mystery story, Randi Reisfeld's and H. B. Gilmour's What the Dog Said (Bloomsbury, 2012) is above all a story of one girl's grief. Grace slowly finds her way back to her own life, and with Rex's help, finds that bittersweet resolution that keeps her father a living part of that life. This funny-sad story rises above the humorous device of the talking dog story to become an insightful coming-of-age novel with appeal to a variety of young adult readers.

The End of Innocence: Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls by Mary Downing Hahn

Without turning on the light, he...glances at his dim reflection in the mirror. A pale oval in the shadows, expressionless. The kind of face nobody remembers.

He smiles at himself. The man you meet at the top of the stairs, that's who he is: the man who isn't there.

The man you should pay attention to, the man you shouldn't offend. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the man who isn't there.

It is June of 1956. The last day of Nora's junior year is dawning. "Tutti Frutti" is on the radio, and Nora has high hopes. This summer she will do something exciting--get a tan, lose her nickname as "Long Tall Sally," and meet a tall boyfriend at the beach. The party the night before fuels her hopes: with her best friend Ellie, she has her first beer and gets a quick kiss from Charlie, a boy too short for her but who seems to like her more than a little. The whole gang, friends who had known each other since grade school days, laugh, dance, flirt, and neck a little. Her schoolmate Cheryl dances the dirty boogie with her new boyfriend Ralph, freshman Bobbie Jo flirts with all the boys, and Nora feels like she's a real teenager now.

Then Cheryl's ex-steady, Buddy, crashes the party and confronts her, and when Cheryl rejects him in front of everyone, he curses and grimly shouts that he'd like to see her dead. Suddenly there is a dark shadow over the carefree night.

It's a world right out of "Happy Days," girls in full crinolined skirts, boys in plaid shirts and crewcuts, moms who make dinners of meatloaf and mac and cheese, dancing to Bill Haley and Chuck Berry, and looking forward to a summer of days at the beach and twilight parties in the community center dancing to stacks of 45s.

That sunlit summer ends the next morning when Cheryl and Bobbie Jo are found shot, hidden in the bushes in that same woods, on their walk to school for report card day. On their bodies is a chilling note:

"and how do you like your blue-eyed girls
Mister Death?"

Nora and Ellie realize that if they hadn't overslept, they too would have joined Bobbie Jo and Cheryl on that walk to school, that they, too, would have been among Mr. Death''s blue-eyed girls.

Buddy is the obvious suspect and is immediately arrested, but his gun proves not to be the murder weapon, and he is finally released. Most of the town believes that he is the murderer, but one look at his face at Cheryl's burial tells Nora that he is not. Her doubts drive a wedge between herself and her friends, leaving Nora frightened and friendless for the first time since she and Ellie became inseparable. If Buddy is not the killer, she knows, someone else is, someone that no one suspects, but someone who surely knows who she is.

For the first time in her life, Nora confronts the question of evil--how the God she has known from her parochial school days can allow the murder of two young girls, girls she believes had never hurt anyone. She tries to deal with her doubts, but finds no answers in going to confession, no answers from the adults who recite the same lines that you can't know the purposes of God. Nora feels her world shifting beneath her.

I want to go back to last summer. I want Cheryl and Bobbie Jo to be here. I wish I were still a Catholic and believed in God and thought the world was a safe place and nothing bad happened to people you know.

That Nora is as dead as Cheryl and Bobbie Jo. The bullets hit her, too. They hit Ellie. They hit Charlie. The bullets hit all the kids in Ellie's neighborhood, they hit mothers and fathers and little sisters and brothers. They hit Buddy, too, maybe hardest of all, but nobody cared.

"Never send to ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee," said John Donne, and in her new coming-of-age novel, noted author Mary Downing Hahn's Nora grows into a deeper and darker understanding of the ways of the world. Hahn, author of such lauded books as Wait Till Helen Comes: A Ghost Story, Promises to the Dead, Deep and Dark and Dangerous, and All the Lovely Bad Onesand The Old Willis Place: A Ghost Story, is a master of the sunshine and shadow novel, books part mystery, part thriller, part deep-themed works which deal with the unknowns of life, a writer who knows how to get beyond the mystery to the meaning beneath. Page turners which haunt the reader's mind long after the last page is done, Hahn's books are sometimes spooky, always haunting, and yet somehow uplifting.

Based on a real episode in her own otherwise halcyon high school days, Hahn's Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2012) tells the familiar story of how a thoughtless remark between classmates can turn into a life-shattering experience not merely for the victims themselves, but all who are involved, even the guilty. This one is not to be missed.

Down to Earth: Grounded by Kate Klise

I knew I should've cried, but I couldn't. I didn't feel sad. That's the other thing about funerals: sometimes you don't feel sad. You don't feel anything at all other than a sense of floating above yourself, and looking down on the scene, thinking: That's not really me; that's not really them.

Daralynn knows she should be dead, would've been dead, if her mom had not grounded her for fishing at Doc Lake without permission. Her pilot dad, big brother, and little sister went off for a fun flight around the countryside while she sulked on the porch, and they all died in an meaningless crash.

Now there's just Daralyn, her angry, dry-eyed mother, and her increasingly senile grandmother Mamaw, who adopts and cares for all the dolls kindly neighbors gave Dara after the funeral, the care that her mother is now incapable of offering her.

I began to think of my life as a time line. Before the Crash was B.C.. After the Deaths was A.D.

In my B.C. life my mother didn't have a job. Now in the A.D. era, Mother was going to be a hair stylist for dead people.

For most of my life B.C., I'd been part of a family of five. Now we were a family of two--Mother and me, plus Mamaw next door.

In the tiny town of Digginsville, Missouri, population 402, there aren't many jobs for a young widow, and although taking a job styling client's hair for the local undertaker seems a strange job for the recently bereaved, in her matter-of-fact way Daralyn accepts her mom's new job and even goes along to learn the hairdressing trade, setting up her own styling chair for the kids in town and inadvertently creating "La Frenchie," a local haircut sensation. when she mistakes a little girl for a boy and gives her a Marlon Brando do.

Despite her mother's disapproval, Daralynn finds support from her flamboyant Aunt Josie, and things are beginning to look up in Digginsville. Dara is even heartened when she learns that what she takes to be a fancy ice-cream parlor is soon to open there Then she discovers to her mortification that a crematorium is not a sweet shop, but major competition for her mother's employer. To make matters even more complicated, the proposed proprietor of Clem's Crematorium turns out to be a devastatingly handsome fast talker who sweet-talks Aunt Josie out of her nest egg as backing and sweeps her off her feet with a proposal of marriage.

But Daralynn, a girl with both feet on the ground, intuits that there's something underhanded about Clem and throws all her eleven-year-old detective skills into sleuthing out the truth behind the new venture. What she discovers sets even the sensible Dara back on her heels, and when she learns that the much-touted cremation equipment which Josie paid for has never been delivered to Clem's enterprise, she realizes that she has to find out what the shyster is actually doing with those bodies he's being paid to cremate.

In a midnight confrontation at Doc Lake, Dara nails the murderous malefactor and proves herself a worthy heroine in Kate Klise's latest novel, appropriately titled Grounded (Feiwel & Friends, 2010). Klise is known for her quirky, yet poignant characters, and the aptly named Digginsville denizens are no exception, as salty as tears and as grounded in the realities of life as a cemetery marker. Klise brings her characters to a realization of the beauty of living life and valuing each other while they can in a story that is both an absorbing mystery adventure and a lesson for the soul.