Dean Schneider

In a simply written, swift-moving narrative that won the 2004 National Book Award for Young People's Literature, Pete Hautman's Godless explores the nature of religion, belief, power, obsession and corruption. This is heady stuff for a short, young adult novel, but Hautman uses humor and snappy dialogue to leaven his weighty plot.

Teenager Jason Bock has started a new religion. He and his followers worship the Ten-legged One and call themselves Chutengodians, a word created out of Church of the Ten-legged God. Their god is the local water tower.

Why not worship a water tower? Jason reasons. What's more important to the life of the town? What is a more essential compound than water? Chutengodians have an immediate feeling of power and grace when they climb the tower and look down upon creation the lights of the town, the glow of the horizon, the night sky all around.

What starts as a whacko idea gathers momentum. A new religion calls for a bible, commandments, a High Priest, a Grand Kahuna, a Keeper of the Sacred Text and devotees. But when local bully Henry Stagg is admitted into the inner circle of the Chutengodians, the seeds of dissension are sown and the potential for evil unleashed. Hautman's funny interludes include Jason's fumbling phone conversation with the beautiful Magda, where Jason, leader of the religion, is reduced to Neanderthal grunts and silences. I'm glad I'm not trying to have a conversation with me, he thinks. It must be boring as hell. A late-night swim in the water tower, a near-fatal fall, arrests and a schism within the church shake up the members, and readers are left to wonder at the appeal of such an unlikely organization. What does each member get out of belonging to it? For Jason, it's the chance to be a leader. For Henry, it's an insidious opportunity for power. For Magda, it's an attraction to tough-guy Henry. By novel's end, Jason has changed only in an envy of other people's beliefs. I have a religion, but I have no faith, he says. Maybe one day I'll find a deity I can believe in. Until then, my god is made of steel and rust.

You have to give him credit. Christopher Paul Curtis could have stuck with writing the kind of books that have already brought him much acclaim. The Watsons Go to Birmingham 1963 and Bud, Not Buddy are both historical novels for intermediate readers, and both have been hugely successful. Bucking the Sarge, however, is a contemporary novel for older readers. Its protagonist is 15-year-old Luther T. Farrell, who goes to Whittier Middle School, runs the Happy Neighbor Group Home for Men, has an illegal driver's license and keeps a condom named Chauncey in his wallet. Chauncey and that wallet had been together so long that "Chauncey had worn a circle right in the leather, and a circle ain't nothing but a great big zero, which was just about my chances of ever busting Chauncey loose and using him." And, thus, the comic tone of the novel is established.

If Luther seems older than he is and his voice seems a little worldly and swaggering for a 15-year-old, you just have to figure his mother made him that way for her own purposes; she's a very calculating woman. This is a wholly original, latter-day urban Robin Hood tale, where Luther discredits his reputation as a loser and sets out for revenge against his mother, aka the Sarge. Mrs. Farrell has become fabulously wealthy by creating an empire of slum housing in Flint, Michigan. Luther spends most of his time avoiding the Sarge's coffin smile and Darth Vader voice as she directs him and her hoodlum associates in a web of evil doings.

Luther wants out. He wants to be the world's greatest philosopher, not some spider in his mother's web. So, he sets in motion a plan to redistribute her wealth via a science fair competition. In a brilliant, comic series of events involving his mom's safety deposit boxes and a large-scale distribution of ice cream cones, $200 Air Jordans and Armani suits, Luther takes from the rich and gives to the poor before heading out of Flint in a Buick Riviera that, just minutes before, had belonged to the Sarge's partner. There's not another young adult novel like this one, and readers will cheer the high spirits and good nature of Luther T. Farrell, loser no more.

Dean Schneider teaches middle school English in Nashville.

When this story opens, 15-year-old Ruby says, “My life better not turn out to be like one of those hideous books where the mother dies.” She hates books like that, where the main character’s mother dies, she has to go live with her alcoholic father who beats her, and she turns into a psychopathic ax murderer. Ruby doesn’t want that. But she doesn’t want what she has either. Her mother has just died, and she’s flying off to Hollywood to live with a father she has never even known, the famous actor Whip Logan, who divorced her mother before Ruby was born, or so she thinks. Ruby is miserable in Hollywood, and she is determined never to give her father a break. She lives in a mansion with a front hall twice the size of her old house, an indoor fishpond, a curved marble staircase and a bedroom right out of her dreams. She is committed to detesting it all, including the drives to school in any of her father’s several classic cars, the bizarre array of actors’ sons and daughters at her new school and classes such as Freudian Dream Interpretation. Still, it is kind of cool to have Cameron Diaz as a next-door neighbor.

For all of her acute and humorous observations of the high school scene and her self-righteous attacks on her father, there are things Ruby doesn’t know or understand, and there are surprises in store for her and the reader. Sonya Sones is one of the leading practitioners of the novel in verse for young adult readers, and readers will enjoy this new book every bit as much as her previous novel, What My Mother Doesn’t Know, a huge hit with teens. Ruby’s voice is pitch-perfect, with all of the humor, high spirits, melodrama and wisecracking typical of a smart teenager plopped down in an unwanted situation.

By the end, Ruby is beginning to find her way in this bizarre new life, and she finds pieces of the puzzle of her life that begin to make her seem whole. She likes that, and her life no longer seems destined to be a hideous book. Dean Schneider teaches middle school English in Nashville.

Back in the heyday of circuses, tents were waterproofed, believe it or not, with a mixture of paraffin and gasoline. This substance turned the big top into a deadly inferno at a circus in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1944. In his new novel in verse, Worlds Afire, poet Paul Janeczko tells the story of the tragedy that left 167 people dead and 500 more hurt. This is Janeczko's first novel, and in it, he gives voice to 29 eyewitnesses, including a circus buff, a gorilla attendant, a firefighter and a nurse, all of whom share their experiences in spare, lyrical lines. There are poems about the setting up of the circus and the excitement it engenders in the community. Then, circus-goers and circus workers talk about what they like and what they do. When the fire breaks out, the rush of voices matches the roar of the flames, as the horror of the spectacle becomes evident. State troopers come to the scene, children fail to show up at home, a little girl later known as Little Miss 1565 is never claimed from the makeshift morgue. A fire expert estimates the fire took six, maybe 10, minutes to wreak its havoc and exact its toll when "flames shot up the side of the tent like a dragon roaring to life."

The story is grim, and the author provides no resolution, no reflection nor philosophy to make sense of the tragedy. What hope there is resides in the mix of voices themselves. It's the voice of the father who saves his child then stops to save others, of the nurse who works stoically amidst the suffering, of the camera operator who captures the tragedy on his 8mm movie camera. Janeczko, who is known for his many fine anthologies of poetry, delivers the two sides of life here both the joy and the sorrow. His characters represent life and death, lyrically evoking both in a book that is a perfect match of literary style and subject matter.

Dean Schneider teaches middle school English in Nashville.

Cassie, Emily and Lydia could be Siamese triplets, if there were such a thing. Friends forever, they look out for each other as they weave their ways through high school life. In The Year of Secret Assignments, their English teacher, Mr. Botherit, proposes a pen pal project between their school, Ashbury High, and Brookfield High, the scary school across town. The girls are skeptical but eager to dash off letters, wondering about the possibilities of a workable project between the "Ashbury snobs" and the "lowlife Brooker kids."

As it turns out, their new pen pals are boys Sebastian, Charlie and Matthew. Moriarty uses the difference in tone in the early exchanges between the girls and boys to establish character and set up events to come. Told through notes, letters, diary entries and e-mails, the novel moves along briskly, and the variety of formats is effective in delineating characters. Em's first letter is a four-page missive all about herself and her interests. Lydia's is an off-the-wall explanation of family history and an offer to do a bit of drug trafficking. And Cassie tells all about her counseling. In response, Lydia gets a rude letter with some sexual innuendo, and Cassie receives an offensive one-liner from the decidedly unusual Matthew Dunlop.

Readers who accept the premise and format will find much fun and humor in the madcap series of events that ensues, including the spraying of graffiti on walls, the spreading of computer viruses and other pranks and missions. Some occasional lewd comments and swear words make The Year of Secret Assignments a work for older readers, eighth grade and up. The tone of the story is spirited and upbeat, and the enthusiasm and self-absorption of the three female protagonists is always amusing. "Like I can change things, punish people, fall in love, and find myself, all by writing the right words," Lydia says. Through this onslaught of words, presented in various forms, Moriarty's characters find themselves and define themselves. The novel is a story of self-discovery, of girls and boys who come out from behind their words and realize they have been transformed.