Streams of Babel by Carol Plum-Ucci

Main characters: An ensemble cast, including American teens Cora, Scott, Owen and Rain, Pakistani Shahzad, and Korean immigrant Tyler Ping
Location: mostly New Jersey but also a small village in Pakistan
Time period: Spring 2002
Genre: YA Fiction, Suspense, Thriller, Espionage

I started this book in a "now" mind-set and as such it seemed especially timely given the current swine flu concerns. It took me a little while to pay attention to the date headings on each chapter and realize that it is set in 2002, just a few months after the Towers fell. It is a 2008 release, and I wonder if the author started it in 2002 but it has taken this long to be released or if it was a conscious decision to set it in the recent past, when concerns about terrorism were still fresh and raw.

In a suburban town in New Jersey called Trinity Hills, two women living on the same street die of brain aneurysms within a 24 hour period. Their teen-aged children along with another neighbor display symptoms that seem like the flu and yet are not the flu. Halfway across the world, a teenage computer genius working in his uncle's internet cafe eavesdrops on terrorists in chat rooms and reports to US Intelligence what he learns--that someone has mutated a virus into something undetectable and incurable, and it has been released into the water supply in such a way as to affect only a five-block section of a place code-named Colony One.

The story is told from multiple POVs, through the voices of the six teenagers caught up in events far beyond them. This is a very effective way to tell the story, since no one character has the whole story--something that Shahzad finds increasingly frustrating and causes him to take serious risks. I really liked this narration technique in the first half of the book as you get to know the four neighbors through their own eyes and as others see them. Cora is ashamed of her morphine-addicted mother who abandoned her as a child and only came home a few years ago. Believing herself unloved, she has kept to herself, rigid against any hurt. The others, especially the boys, see her as beautiful but aloof, somehow above them all. Owen thinks of himself as selfish and moody; his mother and brother see him as selfless, giving, and possibly destined for a religious life. Scott, as a paramedic, sees their growing illness and tries to isolate them from the healthy which allows them, the ill, to come together and form the bonds of friendship.

Are teenaged computer geniuses in danger of becoming a cliche? I'm thinking of some recent books I've read--Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, Icecore by Matt Whyman, Rash by Peter Hautman--and they all feature computer geniuses/hackers. This book has two--Shahzad and Tyler. They worked well in this story, and I loved the line (repeated a few times) "Computers have blurred the line between child and adult, because in the land of computers, children are the men, and the men are the children." Who hasn't felt that way sometimes?

Revolution is Not a Dinner Party by Ying Chang Compestine

Main Character: Ling, who ages from 9 years old to 13 years old

Unfinished books

I once read, in a list of dos and don'ts for bloggers, that one should never post a blog entry apologizing for not having posted lately. So this isn't an apology--just wanting to check-in, touch base, and explain why I haven't posted lately. Long story short--I haven't read any books. Well, I haven't finished any books.

Things suddenly got very busy at work in February. We started two new programs--a science club and a Texas Bluebonnet Award book discussion club with accompanying blog--lost a couple of employees, got a booth at the annual Taste and Trade event, and worked on a grant application. With all that going on, I have found myself unable to focus on reading and now have a stack of unfinished books on my bedstand.

So what have I been trying to read but haven't finished? Here are a few examples:

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne. I had been hearing a lot about the book even before the movie came out, but the trailers for the movie are what spurred me to check it out. I thought I would enjoy it, but I found it rather off-putting. The narrator's misunderstanding and mispelling of words ("Out-with" for Auschwitz) made him seem much younger than he was. The word that kept coming to my mind was "twee." I just could not keep reading it and don't think I'll pick it up again.

Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott. This is a good book. This is a very well-written book. This is a heart-wrenching book. This book takes more thought than I can give it right now. If you're not familiar with it, it's told from the point of view of a girl who was abducted several years earlier and has lived with her abusive captor ever since. Now that she is getting too old for him, he wants her to find him his next victim. An episode of Flashpoint on CBS had a similar plotline at about the same time I started reading this but the episode paled in comparison to the book. I fully intend to finish this book, but I need to wait until I have the time and the focus to give it the attention it deserves.

Walkaway by Alden Carter. Andy is fed up with his alcoholic father and his dysfunctional family. He had a psychotic break last year and spent some time in the hospital. This year he just wants to walk away from it all. I was enjoying it, especially since it is set in Wisconsin, where my parents were from, but I put it down somewhere and can't remember where. This is not saying anything about the book's merits--merely showing how scattered my thoughts are.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. I had barely started this book when a patron requested it. When it came back it, I tried again, but another patron requested it. It has come back again, and again I have checked it out. I am so looking forward to reading it this weekend (as long as I don't have to give it up to another patron before then.)

Fortunately, things are calming down now. The grant deadline was met, Taste and Trade was a big success, and the science club has turned out to be one of the more popular programs that I've done. The Bluebonnet Book Club is struggling a bit, but I'm hoping it will start to pick up during the summer. I need to finish these books (well, not the striped pajamas, but the other ones) and then there are so many new books coming in. I need to catch up with the Diversity Rocks! challenge, and my own self-imposed non-fiction challenge. I need a vacation to get this all done!

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

Main character: almost 13-year-old Todd Hewitt
Location: another planet known as New World
Time period: hard to say
Genre: YA Fiction, Science Fiction
Series: Chaos Walking #1

OH. MY. GOD! Seriously, oh my god. Omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod.

I'm having a hard time organizing any coherent thought about this book right now, because I think my brain has exploded. Oh. My. God.

(Takes a deep breath. okay.) Here are the facts as Todd Hewitt knows them and tells them to us. He is the youngest person in Prentisstown. When he is 13 years old he will become a man--that's just one month a way. (BTW, there are 13 months to a year on this world.) Prentisstown is a dying colony on New World. It is dying because there are no women and therefore no chance of repopulating. The colonists left Old World (which was overcrowded and decaying) in search of a simpler, better, purer life. They thought they found the perfect place when they landed on New World twenty years ago. But the native population, the Spackles, began a war. They unleashed a virus which killed all the women. The virus also caused all the men to begin broadcasting their thoughts constantly without any way to silence or filter them. This is called Noise and it is ever-present. But just because everyone can hear everyone else's thoughts doesn't mean that they are all truthful and above-board. Men can still lie in their thoughts, or create louder Noise to hide inconvenient thoughts. Oh, and the Noise includes all the thoughts of all the animals too--though their thoughts are not usually very interesting.

Then one day Todd is sent out to the swamp to pick apples with his dog, Manchee. And while he is there, he comes across silence. It's like a hole in the Noise, and it is overwhelming. Then he comes across a girl where no girl--no females--have been for almost as long as he's been alive. For his own safety and the safety of this girl, whom he insticntively wants to protect, he must leave his home and everything he knows behind. And he discovers along the way that everything he knows is untrue.

With every step, with every discovery that what he knows is wrong, Todd's world shatters a bit more. This was an incredible book and I cannot wait for the second part to come out. (According to the author's blog, it should come out in September 2009.)

Hint of a spoiler coming: Many years ago, I got to hear Jim Trelease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook, tell a story of reading Where the Red Fern Grows to his teenaged son. He made the comment that if you find a book that has a picture of a boy and his dog on the front cover, you will be crying by the end. (Where the Red Fern Grows has two dogs on the cover.) I just want to point out that the cover of The Knife of Never Letting Go has Todd, Viola, and the dog Manchee on the cover, and you will be crying by the end.

Two Miserable Presidents by Steve Sheinkin

Main characters: Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis
Location: United States
Time period: the American Civil War
Genre: J Non-Fiction, History

How has February already started? Where did January go? It just slipped by and I did not get a non-fiction book done--and after I had challenged myself and everything! (At least I started this book in January--does that count?)

In a forward to this book, the author explains that he once wrote textbooks and he knows why they are so boring--they leave all the good stuff out! As far as quotes go, they avoid any "that are at all funny, amazing, surprising, disgusting, confusing, stupid, mean, or anything else interesting." So in this book, he puts in all the stuff that textbooks leave out.

The two miserable presidents of the title are, of course, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, but the book includes many more people than just those two. It is a very readable overview of the Civil War, told in short segments which focus as much on the people on the home front as it does on the soldiers and battles.

There are so many books on the Civil War and--with the Lincoln bicentennial coming up--on Abraham Lincoln that you'd almost imagine that there's nothing new to say. Yet there were incidents in this book that I had not come across before. My favorite was the story John Burns, a seventy-one-year-old War of 1812 veteran who lived in Gettysburg and, when the battle started, went out with his old gun and joined up with the Seventh Wisconsin. Wounded three times, he survived the battle and met with Abraham Lincoln when he came to deliver the Gettysburg Address.