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This month The Edge of the Forest reviews three new Young
Adult novels, whose protagonists find solace amidst troubling circumstances.
Cupcake
by Rachel Cohn
Reviewed by Allie, Bildungsroman
After graduating from high school and reluctantly breaking things off with her long-term boyfriend, Shrimp, spirited, sassy
Cyd Charisse (call her CC) is ready to move on—or at least pretend that she is. Though she loves her family and her
home in San Francisco, CC can't wait to live it up in New York with her fantastic older half-brother Danny. She just knows
life in the city will be great. After all, what could be better to distract her from Shrimp-missage than the
larger-than-life Big Apple?
Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men...and women named after famous dancers. While walking
down multiple flights of steps, CC breaks her leg in three places. (No one ever said she had the grace of her namesake.)
Being cooped up in Danny's apartment is not exactly what she had in mind. Luckily, her leg heals more quickly than her
heart.
CC knows the value of a good friend, and she stays in touch with her old buds—like Autumn, who is attending college in
New York—as she makes new ones—like Max, a cranky, yet lovable middle-aged neighbor, and his cat. She keeps in
touch with her mother, who both aggravates and oddly inspires her, and her half-sister lisBETH, who tends to simply
aggravate her. Her bio-dad is still less of a presence in her life than her stepfather, but everyone is at least making an
effort to reconnect. Though she continues to wonder what Shrimp is doing in New Zealand, a chance encounter with an old
fling serves as a brief distraction.
What about her career? CC enrolls in a cooking class, but stops going when it isn't what she thought it would be,
preferring to sample Danny's latest batch of cupcakes than make her own. While on the search for the perfect cappuccino,
CC stumbles upon the L U _ C H _ O N E _ T E, an old-fashioned-looking dinner run by a Goth-punk boy. In a matter of
minutes, she has a new job and an unexpected ally.
Just when things are starting to look up, a blast from the past tears open that hole in her heart and makes CC re-evaluate
her priorities and her life.
Author Rachel Cohn has created a unique and memorable character in Cyd Charisse. The girl readers know and love from the
previous books has grown up before their eyes. CC thinks she is more independent than ever, yet becomes aware of her
sometimes co-dependency on Shrimp and others. It is this kind of acknowledgment that shows her maturity, yet lack thereof.
Though CC is constantly searching for freedom from her family, she's not quite ready to be wholly on her own. Young adults
and older teens who have gone through or are currently going through that same awkward period will definitely relate to her
in more ways than one.
Readers first met CC in the book Gingerbread, then reunited with her in the follow-up novel, Shrimp.
Cupcake is the third and final book in the Cyd Charisse cycle. Due to CC's increased introspection and
consideration, it is also the best. CC is older, wiser, and sassier. She's finally become comfortable in her own skin, and
Cohn has given her a delicious send-off. Cupcake is a treat which teens and adults alike should indulge themselves
in immediately!
All of the Above
by Shelley Pearsall
Reviewed by Bruce Black, Wordswimmer
Some authors are blessed with a gift for characterization. They dive so deeply into the lives (and hearts) of their
characters that you feel as if you're diving with them, slipping inside the character's skin so deeply that you can feel the
character's pulse beating beside your own.
In her newest book, All of the Above, Shelley Pearsall, the award-winning author of Trouble Don't Last
and Crooked River, dives into the lives of a handful of teens in an inner city neighborhood in Cleveland, OH.
The story begins with a tour of the neighborhood along Washington Boulevard: "...past the smoky good smells of Willy Q's
Barbecue, past the Style R Us hair salon, where they do nails like nobody's business, past the eye-popping red doors of the
Sanctuary Baptist Church, you'll finally come to a dead end."
At the dead end is a school, and within this school are a handful of students in a Math Club folding small pieces of paper
into the world's largest tetrahedron.
Tetrahedrons are "geometric solids with four faces," according to Mr. Collins, the math teacher in whose math class readers
first meet the story's four main characters—James Harris III, Rhondell, Sharice, and Marcel.
Listen to each character's voice in these early introductions:
James Harris III: I don't listen to nothing in Collins' math class. Only thing I listen for is
the bell. That bell at the end of class is just about the sweetest sound in the world.
The whole class, I sit there waiting on that bell and watching the hands of the clock
jump from one little black mark to the next. You ever notice how school clocks do that?
How they don't move like other clocks do; they jump ahead like bugs?
Rhondell: All the way home on the bus in the rain, I roll the word tetrahedron around in my
mouth. I keep my face turned toward the steamed-up bus windows, and I let my lips try the
word over and over without using my voice. Tetrahedron.
I wonder if this is one of those words that might get me into college someday. It sounds as
if it could. Inside my mind, I keep a whole collection of college words for someday. Words
like epiphany, quiescent, metamorphosis...
Sharice: Six people are already in the math room when I get there on Monday. This kinda
surprises me a little. I take a look around the doorway first 'cause if it's only me and Mr.
Collins, I don't plan on sticking around. But then I see Ashlee and Deandra from math class.
They are hanging all over Terrell (how desperate can you be?) And passing a bag of chips back
and forth.
Marcel: Marcel the Magnificent, that's me. After our math club meeting, I head on over to the
Barbecue. Slap a big slab of ribs on a plate. Take fifteen orders at the same time.
"How you want your ribs done, ma'am, heat or no heat? Hot sauce or mild?"
At the core of each character is a pulsing, beating heart, and each heartbeat breathes life into this story about what
people are truly made of and how courage and perseverance can be found on Cleveland's inner-city streets.
In diving deeply into each character's inner world, Pearsall tells a story that's true to life. Some characters reach for
dreams and get them, while others never get the chance to reach...yet remain standing, nonetheless. Together, their voices
serve as a rich tapestry of lives linked in mysterious ways.
In the end, it's hard to leave Washington Boulevard. That's because Pearsall has taken us deep-diving into the hearts of
characters who we end up loving as much as our own friends and neighbors, their hopes and dreams mingling with our own.
Raiders Night
by Robert Lipsyte
Reviewed by Bruce Black, Wordswimmer
You know how you can feel lost at sea when the fog rolls in and the sky is closed off and there's no sense of water or
land or distance, nothing except fog all around you—dense and gray and smothering—and you can't tell where you're
heading?
That's a little how it feels reading Robert Lipsyte's newest novel, Raiders Night, a brutal, hard-hitting portrait
of high school athletics and the desensitization that occurs among varsity football players in a world where victory is all
that matters.
Lipsyte, the author of such classic YA novels as One Fat Summer, The Contender, The Brave, and
The Chief, is a master of nuance and dramatic tension, and in Raiders Night he portrays in frank, crisp,
unadorned prose the moral ambiguities of a high school football star's life in chilling detail.
Take a look at this passage from early in the book when Matt Rydek, co-captain of Nearmont High's football team and the
focal point of the story, arrives at a party held as the season is about to begin:
"Matt floated into the party a step behind Brody, who opened holes in the crowd
with his smile. Brody reached out for guys to tap fists and girls to feel up. Ever
since he was in PeeWee, All-Brody had acted like he was walking on a red carpet,
but nobody ever seemed to mind. He could say anything to anybody. Guys trusted him
in the huddle and girls couldn't keep their hands off him. He had left the football
in the car. He was looking to score tonight."
That sense of floating comes not only from Matt's sense of himself as above the crowd—the victorious football hero
carried on the shoulders of adoring fans—but from the pain pills (Vicodin) that he takes, along with steroids, to
maintain his place in the stratosphere of high-school "gods."
On some level that he's not yet aware of...but which he gradually becomes aware of over the course of the story...Matt
knows that attaining and holding onto power through corrupt means may cost him and his friends their souls. But it's only
after one of his teammates, Chris, is abused during a team pre-season training camp ritual, and Matt does nothing to stop it before
the ritual gets out of hand, that his growth as a character begins.
Again and again, Matt turns away from helping Chris until the plot reaches its climax, and Chris seeks revenge for the act
of abuse that the team members forced upon him. No longer can Matt stand idly by, a passive observer, waiting for someone
else to act. Yet even this act (which others perceive as heroic) fails to cleanse his soul...because he knows that he
could—and should—have done something sooner to prevent Chris from seeking revenge.
In the final thirty pages of the novel, the fog lifts, and the boundaries of land and water become clear again as Matt
must choose between the team's present needs and his own future.
His compass, numb for so long, begins to point north, and the reader, nearly overwhelmed with grief and sadness for all
that's happened in this story, can't help but root for Matt, hoping he will choose to do the right thing...and finally
emerge from the fog.
Books Reviewed:
Cupcake. Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, 2007. ISBN: 1-4169-1217-7.
All of the Above, by Shelley Pearsall. Little, Brown Young Readers, 2006. ISBN: 0-3161-1524-X.
Raiders Night, by Robert Lipsyte. HarperTeen, 2006. ISBN: 0-0605-9946-4.
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