Dean Schneider

In this National Book Award finalist, 13-year-old Lakshmi lives in a hut, perched on a mountainside in the Himalayas. She loves the stunning beauty of the mountain's long purple shadows, the tallow pumpkin blossoms that close in the evening as the white jasmine open. On nights when the moon is full, the hillside is bathed in a magical white light, the glow of the perpetual snows that blanket the mountaintops.

This beauty, however, contrasts with the ugliness of Lakshmi's fate as a young woman in that world. Children's lives are precarious, but girls' lives are expendable. Lakshmi's lazy stepfather does little work and spends his days gambling away money playing cards at the tea shop. The family is unprepared when monsoon rains come and wash away any hope of good crops and a better future. Lakshmi finds herself in Calcutta in the Happiness House, where she is forced into prostitution. At first, she believes she can do this despicable work and pay off her debt and return home, only to realize later that believing is stupidity, hope an affliction.

In Patricia McCormick's beautifully crafted free verse novel, each poem is a hotline to the mind and voice of Lakshmi, and accumulations of detail delineate her circumstances and her inclination toward hope. Readers might see in her the fate of other survivors. When she looks in the mirror and sees a corpse, she might remind readers of Elie Wiesel at the end of Night, witnessing the same reflection after his time in concentration camps. When Lakshmi is told, If they find out you can read and write, they will think you are planning to escape, the story of Frederick Douglass learning to read might come to mind. And when she realizes she will always be in debt, always cheated out of her earnings, hers is a sharecropper's experience, her own body the bartered crop.

When Lakshkmi asks her mother, Why must women suffer so? her mother replies, Simply to endure is to triumph, a resounding reminder of survivors of slavery and genocide in cities all over the world. Lakshmi's story of survival is told in poetry that will reach right into her readers' souls.

Dean Schneider teaches middle school English.

"I guess I always felt even if the world came to an end, McDonald’s would still be open," 16-year-old Miranda says when her life suddenly takes a turn for the worse. The problems begin when a larger-than-expected asteroid hits the moon and sends it out of orbit. Tsunamis ensue, drowning Cape Cod and coastal cities, and washing the Statue of Liberty out to sea. Power goes out, gas prices go up, and food becomes scarce. Within two weeks, it’s hard to remember what normal was clocks with the correct time, lights that work, access to the Internet. The death toll is incalculable along the coasts, and inland, people begin dying when food gets scarce, wells run dry and a flu epidemic hits.

Susan Beth Pfeffer opens this gripping novel with a teenager’s everyday concerns: homework, tests and who’s going out with whom, and darn if a lunar disaster doesn’t ruin everything. Life gets gray and dingy, and even the snow isn’t quite white. As time goes on, families must decide which family member must eat more and stay strong so someone will be able take care of the others as they weaken. So, what do you do when your world is dying? You reinvent the world. Miranda’s mother makes all three of her children study something, even if there is no school anymore. They chop their own wood, melt snow for water, play Scrabble and even sing Christmas carols with their remaining neighbors. Readers will witness the incipient civilization that Miranda’s family creates for itself.

In this dying world, Miranda develops a series of philosophies of life to cope with the harsh times. Early on, it’s Why feel sorry for myself today when tomorrow’s bound to be worse. Later, it’s Don’t let me be the last one to die. But by the end of the novel, having survived so much, Miranda says, [T]oday isn’t a day to worry about the future. Whatever will happen will happen. Today is a day to celebrate. Though this is a powerful story about a freak lunar event and its consequences, it’s the spirit of appreciating day-to-day life that will resonate with readers.

Dean Schneider teaches English at Ensworth School in Nashville.

In the late 21st century in the USSA United Safer States of America safety is paramount. Citizens of the USSA live longer than in any other country, but 24 percent of all adults are in prison, and the economy depends on their labor. McDonald’s Rehabilitation and Manufacturing is the largest employer in the nation, running prison farms, factories and restaurants.

Sixteen-year-old Bo Marsten has been at odds with this society, and now he is in trouble with the three-strikes-and-you’re-out spirit of the times. He threw a pencil in class, called someone a name and shoved a fellow student in the hallway, all very unsafe behaviors. This in a society where a person can be sent away for dropping an apricot if someone slips on it, where everyone must wear walking helmets, where walls are padded and freeways automated. Now Bo has been falsely accused of causing a rash afflicting students at his school. He is arrested and sent to work in a pizza factory in the middle of Canada, now an annexed property of the USSA after the Diplomatic Wars of 2055.

Escape seems impossible, as vicious polar bears roam outside the gates and a sadistic warden rules within. But escape does come with the help of a computer-generated artificial intelligence named Bork, and Bo journeys across 26 miles of no man’s land to return home.

In his latest novel, National Book Award-winning author Pete Hautman has created a fascinating satire of where society’s current trends might lead us. The humor is often coarse, with plenty of farting, faces compared to dog anuses and the like. But there is friendship in the form of an overweight cellmate, incarcerated for eating too much and sentenced to lose 200 pounds, and a family relationship that becomes important, as Bo comes to appreciate his grandfather’s criticism of the modern times and the glory of his beer-drinking, less safe past. This fast-paced, plot-driven satire will appeal to young teenagers who enjoy the what if? speculations of futuristic novels. Dean Schneider teaches middle school English in Nashville.

It’s 1978, and life is good for high school senior Eva Lott. She is on the varsity swim team, she’s dating the best-looking guy in the class, and she’s comfortable in her daily existence as a cute, popular girl about to graduate. Life in her Chicago suburb is comfortable, and since her mother’s death from cancer, Eva has learned to play it safe, living in the here and now. But when her father, Professor Lott, tells her they are moving to Poland to be part of the underground movement there, Eva is stunned. How can he do this to her? You can finish high school through correspondence and still make Northwestern next fall, he says, but that’s awfully far into the future for Eva.

The novel then alternates between the stories of Eva and her new friend, Tomek. Eva wants the security of her comfortable life in America. She is horrified not to have seen meat, popcorn or ice cream in any stores during her first days in Poland. She is trapped in this place with no friends, no phone, no TV, and nothing to eat. Eva understands little in Poland; in fact, she thinks Polish words sound more like sneezes than real words.

Tomek, a tall, handsome Polish boy, is impatient to study poetry and pass his exams at the university, but he is involved with the underground and now has to baby-sit this spoiled American girl with too many possessions. Between the two stands Professor Lott, with his determination to do something worthwhile with his life, to make a difference. One day you’ll be proud to say you played a part in Polish independence, he tells Eva. The alternating chapters format is effective in differentiating the points of view and showing the developing relationship between Eva and Tomek. Readers get to watch as a teenaged American girl is yanked out of her comfort zone and put in an utterly foreign place where she must learn to survive; they will be cheered to see her come into her own and thrive. Eva Underground is a fine coming-of-age novel. Dean Schneider is an English teacher in Nashville.

Drugstore owner Frank Robinson wants to bring Dayton, Tennessee, back to life. Since Cumberland Coal and Iron shut down its blast furnace, business is hurting and the population is declining. Robinson’s solution? Publicity! Let the outside world know the town’s charms. So, when the ACLU seeks a teacher willing to test a law that bans the teaching of evolution, Robinson thinks of John Scopes, a young football and basketball coach who taught the chapter on evolution when he was a substitute teacher in science class. Complicating matters is 15-year-old Frances Robinson, who has a crush on Scopes and finds herself torn between loyalty to her father and her love for Johnny. She is forced to grow up and see the world in new ways that summer.

As the 1925 trial of the century shapes up, Dayton does, indeed, attract publicity. It becomes the laughingstock of the entire nation. Readers who know the story through Inherit the Wind will enjoy Ronald Kidd’s retelling in Monkey Town: The Summer of the Scopes Trial. Kidd does a fabulous job of recreating the sense of a small Tennessee town taking on more than it can handle. When William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow hash out evolution versus science, with H.L. Mencken reporting for the national papers, Judge Raulston decides to limit the case to a simple matter of whether Scopes did indeed teach evolution. All of the fiery rhetoric comes to naught when Scopes is found guilty after nine minutes of jury deliberation and fined $100.

In the chaos of a little town inundated by the outside world and a young girl in love with a man on trial, all lives are changed.

Readers will find inevitable similarities to To Kill A Mockingbird in this superb historical novel, which has a strong sense of place, well-developed characters and clearly related ideas. Dean Schneider is a teacher in Nashville.

Once upon a time there was a girl who served pizza in a rat costume. That was me. So begins the fairy tale of Ashley Hannigan, keen observer of her kingdom. No, it’s not Cinderella and her stepsisters, and it’s not wretched work doing chores while stepsisters go to the ball. Ashley’s real-world torments include a lousy job at EZ-CHEEZ-E, a home life where noise tied the house together like duct tape around a busted water heater, and the road to the ball the prom is paved with a series of unfortunate events, related with such humor and good spirits that readers will attend her all the way to her fateful appearance.

Not that Ashley ever wanted to go to the prom, and not that she could go even if she wanted to; she has too many detentions, and the principal is on her case. But her best friend Natalia Shulmensky wants to go; she’s been waiting for this all of her life. And Ashley’s organizing abilities and expertise at bossing people around pull her into helping Nat plan the big night. Stolen prom money, a broken leg, an injured foot, a ruined dress, a missing grandmother and police at the castle gates make the best laid plans a challenge for the most earnest of planners. But Nat’s pink notebook contains a vision of grandeur brought to life, and Ashley is determined to pull it off.

Perhaps the girls puking in the bathroom or performing oral sex behind the bleachers detract from the aura, but overall it is a magical night for Ashley. Even if the underwear model is lured away by a girl whose dress was cut so low she was showing nipple, it is a night to remember, a celebration of the normal kids. As Anderson says in her acknowledgments, this books serves as a rowdy shout-out to all the Ônormal’ kids . . . nobody ever writes about. Laurie Halse Anderson’s Prom is laugh-out-loud funny, and older teenagers will find themselves passing this book around and reading the funniest scenes to each other. This novel is sure to be a big hit, though language and subject matter aim it at older readers.