Starcrossed: Orbiting Jupiter by Gary D. Schmidt

I got on the bus and Joseph got on behind me, and Mr. Haskell looked past me and said, "You're the kid who has a kid, aren't you?" and Joseph stopped dead on the bus steps. "I couldn't believe it when Mr. Canton told us. Aren't you a little young?"

Joseph turned around and got off the bus.

"Hey, If you want to walk, it's no skin off my nose. Two miles that way. And--What do you think you're doing?"

That part was to me, because I got off the bus too.

"You're nuts," said Mr. Haskell. "It's twenty-one degrees out there." He closed the door.

The bus was nothing but rising exhaust down the road.

Joseph took off his backpack. It was pretty much empty, since he hadn't gotten any books yet.

"Give me some of your stuff," he said. We took off, two miles, and it wasn't any twenty-one degrees.

Jack is twelve, an only child, a long, cold bus ride from the local middle school, and his family, committed to sustainable organic farming in rural Maine, only attend the local church twice a year, Christmas Eve and Easter morning. So Jack is quietly glad when Joseph comes to be his foster brother. But Joseph Brooks is damaged goods, obviously horribly abused by his father, and yet a father himself, with his newborn child and her mother taken away by her family. Wracked with grief over the loss of Madeline and baby Jupiter, his only real family, Joseph has tried to choke a juvenile officer and refused to speak in three months of juvenile custody.

For Joseph, school is hard, and the school bus unbearable.

Joseph trusts no one, seemingly unreachable. But when Jack's father gives him the job of milking one of their cows, Rosie, the cow somehow seems to trust him.

The next morning, when the three of us went out to the big barn to milk, Joseph went to Rosie first, and he reached out and rubbed her rump again. And Rosie mooed and swayed her behind, and told Joseph she loved him.

"I don't need the milk," said my father. "But she needs you to milk her."

That was the first time I saw Joseph smile. Sort of.

Jack counts the smiles as he and Joseph slowly begin to become friends and then, in their way, brothers, trudging two miles together to and from school, milking in the barn, gradually feeling free to throw shovelsful of snow at each other, and one day Joseph finally laughs. Joseph finds two teachers--a math teacher who begins to teach him trigonometry, and a gym coach who gives Joseph a group of kids to teach rope-climbing. He even begins to tease Jack, calling him "Jackie" just to get him riled. And Jack defends him against the kids at school who call him "Psycho."

"I had his back and he had mine."

And the day the pond freezes and Jack's parents skate and build a bonfire, Joseph tells his whole story and how he is determined someday to find Maddie and baby Jupiter.

But just as Joseph's precarious trust is beginning to take root, he learns that Madeline died in childbirth and that her parents are determined to have Jupiter adopted. To make his pain worse, Joseph, as the surviving parent, is asked to sign the adoption papers. In an emotional state as cold as outer space, Joseph's connections to his foster family fracture like the new ice on the pond, and he heads for the nearby town where the baby is being fostered, determined to see her. Jack's family set out, again in the snow, to find Joseph and bring him home. They find him in front of the house of the social worker who is keeping Jupiter, and although by court order she cannot let him see her, she gives him a photo of his daughter and promises to tell her about her father someday.

But Joseph's dark past proves not even to be past when his own crazed father shows up and takes him away at gunpoint into a snowstorm.

Two-time Newbery author Gary D. Schmidt's Orbiting Jupiter (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2015) tells the tragic story of a character seemingly born under a bad star. Related by Jack, there is only spare dialogue in this novel, the narration unfolding mostly in Jack's first-person thoughts as he counts up Joseph's smiles, the last one when he sees his daughter Jupiter's picture. Joseph's story--one of his own father, whose love is selfishly twisted, and his own love for his daughter--leads to a conclusion that is not one that readers will welcome or would have wanted. It is what it is, sadly, But there is for Jack's family and Jupiter a foreshadowed and redemptive ending that affirms the power of family love that can be lasting.

No one writes more movingly and honestly about adolescent boys than Schmidt, and he has upheld his standing as a premier writer of young adult fiction in this beautiful, heartbreaking but bravely life-affirming novel.

Schmidt's earlier Newbery Honor-winning novels are Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy and The Wednesday Wars, and he is also the author of Okay for Now, a National Book Award finalist.

Fantasy Island: Alphas by Lisi Harrison

WELCOME TO THE INAUGURAL CLASS OF ALPHA ACADEMY. THOUSANDS OF GIRLS ANSWERED THE ALPHA CALL OVER THE LAST YEAR. ONE HUNDRED HAVE BEEN SELECTED. THE FITTEST SHALL SURVIVE.

WHILE MY LEGACY WILL LIVE FOREVER, I MAY NOT. SHOULD I EVENTUALLY PASS, I WILL LEAVE BEHIND ONE HUNDRED GIRLS FOREVER CHANGED BY ALPHA ACADEMY.

BUT A TRUE ALPHA IS MORE THAN HER RESUME. SHE IS MORE THAN PERFECT PITCH, A PERFECT TURNOUT, A PERFECT TEN, OR EVEN A PERFECT IQ. SHE IS A MACHINE WITH HEART. SHE IS THE FUTURE.

SHE IS YOU.

Skye Hamilton, the former queen of the eighth-grade DSL Daters at Octavian Country Day School, is more than thrilled when she receives her acceptance to Alpha Academy, the exclusive prep school designed by Shira Brazille (femme mega-magnate who is bigger than Oprah). Skye, first introduced in the best-selling The Clique series, has few doubts that she is meant to be the alpha of alphas, and with a wardrobe of her signature dance sleeves and her mom's old ballet shoe as a lucky talisman, she leaves her old world behind without a tear, knowing she will be the best dancer there and that her #1 HAD (hope and dream), "make her mother proud," will be fulfilled.

But as her PAP (Personal Alpha Plane) approaches the womanmade "a" shaped Alpha Island carved out of the desert that is her new world, even Skye is a bit intimidated. Alpha is itself a futuristic world, with automated private baths and spas for each alpha and Draconian electronic surveillance that makes Hogwarts look like Girl Scout camp. The other alphas, which Shira terms "hypenates"--an environmentalist-poetess, a dance-model-actress, a junior Wimbleton winner-inventor, a Bollywood film star-cell phone novelist--are also intimidating in their abilities and self confidence, and as Skye struggles to keep up the pace, even in dance class, she suddenly realizes that she feels like an alpha minus. It doesn't help that Alpha Academy's competition is sharpened by Shira's reality-show structure--one slip and you're expelled, demoted to lifelong LBR status--until only one girl, the alpha of alphas, is left standing at the end of the year.

But Skye soon learns that she, the sophisticate of OCDS, has a long way to go to qualify for the last girl standing. Alpha's social structure doesn't encourage friendship and trust, and among Skye's roommates in the Jackie O residence hall she finds herself contending with "Triple Threat," dancer-model-actress who seems the favorite of dance master Mimi, Allie J., the barefoot environmentalist-poetess-recording artist, Renee, a.k.a Rayne Storm, nee Rachel Martin, soap star, and Charlie Deery, a pretty but not obviously talented late entry into their dorm who seems to know much more than she admits.

Allie J. and Charlie have their own reasons to fear the competition. Allie J. is actually Allie A. Abbott, main talent mall model, who, having received the acceptance letter for her neighbor, folksinger-poet Allie J. Abbott, has dyed her hair black, acquired green contact lenses and a flower-child wardrobe of thrift store white dresses, and faked Allie J.'s trademark mole, to transform herself into a virtual doppelganger in order to assume a place at Alpha.

Charlie has a different story. A technical designer of genius-level ability, Charlie, the only child of Shira's indispensable personal assistant Bee Deery, is the clandestine inventor of most of Alpha Island's technology. The daughter of an employee, Charlie is ineligible for Alpha Academy until a vacancy occurs at the last moment and her mother selflessly agrees to give up her plum position to enable her to join the class. A place at Alpha for Charlie comes with another sacrifice--Charlie must promise Shira she will give up her romance with Darwin, one of Shira's five HAWT teen sons, and, as she soon learns, to act as Shira's spy in keeping the rest of the alphas--residents of Jacki O, Beyonce, Hilary Clinton, Oprah dorms--away from her boys.

As Skye, Triple Threat, and Renee vie for top dog status, especially in fashioning ways to get around the no-romance-with-Shira's-sons prohibition, Allie is a reluctant follower, who surprisingly finds herself catching the eye of Darwin Brazille, Charlie's now ex, and is thus drawn into secret meetings by night with the others. Charlie is heartsick as Allie also falls just as hard for Darwin, and is torn between her need for friends and the necessity for tattling on them in order to stay at Alpha. When an opportunity to steal Shira's electronic key which will grant herself and her roommates an underground access to the five boys, Charlie has to decide what that choice really means for her future.

As usual, Lisi Harrison's new Alphas #1, the first in a proposed series, sets up her characters as intrinsic rivals and inevitably a Byzantine conflict results. As in her best-selling series, the power-seeking machinations of her alpha girls are glossed over with a bit of redemptive self-understanding gleaned from their conflict and satisfying equal-opportunity comeuppances for the worst of the social climbers in the group. This new series will indisputably strike a nerve with early teen girls who will recognize the types Harrison portrays so fluently in both series and enjoy watching their conniving work itself out at a vicariously safe distance.

The second book in this series, Alphas #2, is set for publication in April of 2010.