Heather Seggel

YA FictionYA

A devastating, poignant story of a teen dealing with grief

Review by Heather Seggel

In We Are Okay, author Nina LaCour (Everything Leads to You) tells a story more of absence than presence, looking with calm directness at grief and betrayal and the ways they can multiply outward. It’s a beautiful, devastating piece of art.

Marin is in school in New York, quietly living a new life and trying to leave behind the life she ran from. Her lonely Christmas break is interrupted by a visit from her best friend (and now ex-girlfriend), Mabel. The truth about the event that caused Marin to leave San Francisco with only what she held in her hands comes out slowly, and her grief in the face of it is cavernous. But notice the details LaCour shines a light on: the perfect yellow bowls Marin bought at a pottery shop, the potted plant thriving and in need of a larger container. If her existence now is sparse, it is not without color, or life.

The title hints at a happy ending, but the journey toward it passes through some of the darkest corners of the heart. Be prepared to be gutted—and grateful. We Are Okay is an extraordinary work by an author who keeps redefining and elevating her genre. Readers are lucky to have it.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In We Are Okay, author Nina LaCour (Everything Leads to You) tells a story more of absence than presence, looking with calm directness at grief and betrayal and the ways they can multiply outward. It’s a beautiful, devastating piece of art.
Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Bright stories from diverse voices

Review by Heather Seggel

BookPage Children's Top Pick, January 2017

A young man spends his summer being shut out of basketball games and learns a valuable lesson about persistence. Choctaw storytelling traditions keep a family in stitches, in between eye rolls. A girl’s anger when her father allows an injustice to stand shifts as she realizes he’s gently changing the world on her behalf. These stories and more fill Flying Lessons & Other Stories, and each unique journey reinforces the notion that diversity in publishing is not just welcome but vital.

The anthology, edited by We Need Diverse Books co-founder Ellen Oh, doesn’t limit itself to the here and now. Grace Lin’s fable “The Difficult Path” describes indentured servant Lingsi’s unexpected journey out of servitude in ancient China, a life made possible because she’s a rare commodity: a female who can read. Debut author Kelly J. Baptist sets much of “The Beans and Rice Chronicles of Isaiah Dunn” in a public library, where Isaiah escapes his difficult home life and disappears into the notebook his late father left behind. Stories by Kwame Alexander, Tim Federle, Jacqueline Woodson and the late Walter Dean Myers, to whom the book is dedicated, never let the reader stay in one place too long . . . and that’s the point.

By turns quick and funny, thoughtful and heartbreaking, Flying Lessons & Other Stories will expand your worldview in quick, addictive bites. Prepare for liftoff and enjoy.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Children's Top Pick, January 2017

A young man spends his summer being shut out of basketball games and learns a valuable lesson about persistence. Choctaw storytelling traditions keep a family in stitches, in between eye rolls. A girl’s anger when her father allows an injustice to stand shifts as she realizes he’s gently changing the world on her behalf.

YA FictionYA

Death, friendship and the drama of the stage

Review by Heather Seggel

It’s the second semester of senior year at Janus Academy, an exclusive performing arts school, and five friends are preparing for the rest of their lives while struggling with the demands of the present. Joy’s dream is ballet, but the odds of success are slim—as her parents keep reminding her. Liv is stringing Ethan along by starring in his play (though she really likes her co-star Dave) and has a secret that threatens to be her undoing. Diego has been Joy’s friend forever but is ready for more. By the end of You in Five Acts, one of them will be dead.

Author Una LaMarche beautifully captures street scenes in New York City and breathes life into the school setting. It may be prestigious, but everything is a work in progress, from the cobbled-together theater sets to the students themselves. Each chapter, narrated in turn by one of the five characters, ends with an ominous reminder that someone is going to die. Clues feint one way or another, then lead to an unexpected conclusion. This structure creates the unusual problem of making the reader impatient for the tragedy to strike, and when it does, the reader doesn’t have time to process it.

Perhaps the strongest elements of You in Five Acts are the friendships between these characters and the different ways their dedication to art can be a saving grace or a curse. Book clubs will have a lot to say about the choices made regarding the ending and the references to current events, such as the use of excessive force by police against people of color.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s the second semester of senior year at Janus Academy, an exclusive performing arts school, and five friends are preparing for the rest of their lives while struggling with the demands of the present. Joy’s dream is ballet, but the odds of success are slim—as her parents keep reminding her. Liv is stringing Ethan along by starring in his play (though she really likes her co-star Dave) and has a secret that threatens to be her undoing. Diego has been Joy’s friend forever but is ready for more. By the end of You in Five Acts, one of them will be dead.
NonfictionMemoirArt

The famed performance artist is present in her memoir

Review by Heather Seggel

Marina Abramović is a legend in the world of performance art, but that’s a rarefied world, well outside the mainstream. While her work has always courted attention, a 2010 MoMA retrospective took the concept to a new level; Abramović sat in the gallery all day, six days a week, for three months, and invited the public to sit across from her. More than 750,000 people accepted the invitation. What compels a person to seek connection on a level that is both so grand and so intimate? Walk Through Walls offers many clues, but as with all art, it falls to the recipient to complete the story.

Born in postwar Yugoslavia, Abramović chafed under the restrictions of the Tito regime and her strict, neglectful parents. Access to art supplies proved to be an escape route; painting led to work with sound and then to performance pieces that were often violent and dangerous. Passionate and highly sexual (even now, at 70, as she reminds us here), her work and love lives often intertwined; years of collaboration with fellow artist and lover Ulay culminated in the two walking to meet one another midway on the Great Wall of China only to break up afterward.

From the pain of her upbringing to her tremendous success, it’s clear that Abramović was destined for a life lived on a grand scale. She’s candid about her process and the sources of her ideas, but the discussion never reduces the finished works to something simple. And while Walk Through Walls reads as a frank and straightforward retelling of a life story, it’s impossible to separate the memoir from the author’s milieu. Is this also a performance, confined to the page? Where is the dividing line that separates life and art? That question, and tension, make this an electrifying read.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Marina Abramovi´c is a legend in the world of performance art, but that’s a rarefied world, well outside the mainstream. While her work has always courted attention, a 2010 MoMA retrospective took the concept to a new level; Abramovi´c sat in the gallery all day, six days a week, for three months, and invited the public to sit across from her. More than 750,000 people accepted the invitation. What compels a person to seek connection on a level that is both so grand and so intimate? Walk Through Walls offers many clues, but as with all art, it falls to the recipient to complete the story.
Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Finding your place

Review by Heather Seggel

“Over breakfast, Dad / eyes me like an alien / never seen before. / Sometimes, I could swear that he’s / hoping to make first contact.” In verse form, Garvey’s Choice tells the story of one boy’s journey to discover his own voice.

Being overweight is one thing, but Garvey’s dad wants a son who excels in sports, not a “Star Trek”-watching dreamer. When Garvey tries out for chorus, he finds his true talent, but what will his family think? 

Author Nikki Grimes (Words with Wings) wrote this story in tanka, Japanese short verse that is like pumped-up haiku—five lines with a 5-7-5-7-7 syllable count. While this makes for short chapters of one to three verses, they’re also tightly compacted and hard-hitting. Garvey’s joy when he’s with his friends, or beginning to train his singing voice, sparkles as brightly as his hurt feelings burn when he’s being teased. Readers don’t have to be fans of Luther Vandross to choke up when father and son connect through his music.

It can be hard for parents to learn that letting kids be themselves is beneficial to the whole family. This story empowers kids to do just that while slipping them a dose of poetry in the bargain. It’s a winner.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“Over breakfast, Dad / eyes me like an alien / never seen before. / Sometimes, I could swear that he’s / hoping to make first contact.” In verse form, Garvey’s Choice tells the story of one boy’s journey to discover his own voice.
Nonfiction

Carving a path outside of convention

Review by Heather Seggel

Darling Days opens with a brief letter from iO Tillett Wright to his mother, offering forgiveness and love. It’s well-placed in the story, because reading about Wright’s childhood, and the abuse and neglect he suffered at the hands of both parents, can leave a reader feeling angry and vengeful. Wright’s story is often grim, but it points toward reconciliation and a measure of peace beyond the turmoil.

A genderqueer photographer, writer, MTV host and activist, Wright had an unorthodox upbringing. His mother, Rhonna, was a “glamazon,” who exercised obsessively and was always in motion, often with the aid of pharmaceuticals. Moving between apartments in the projects, she and Wright’s father split up not long after his birth, and neither was well-equipped to raise a child. Frequently going hungry and struggling in school, Wright couldn’t even catch a break on the playground. When some kids refused to let Wright join a football game as a girl, he resolved on the spot to live as a boy named Ricky and did so for the next decade.

When his mother’s inexplicable rages became unbearable, Wright summoned the courage to ask for help. Moving from the streets of New York’s roughest neighborhoods to Europe with his dad and finding stability in an English boarding school, he learned that his father, too, was fighting demons that prevented him from being a suitable guardian.

Darling Days is a story of unfortunate self-reliance, but Wright tells it vividly. The thrills and temptations of the art world, and the people that busy whirl leaves behind, are also convincingly captured here.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Darling Days opens with a brief letter from iO Tillett Wright to his mother, offering forgiveness and love. It’s well-placed in the story, because reading about Wright’s childhood, and the abuse and neglect he suffered at the hands of both parents, can leave a reader feeling angry and vengeful. Wright’s story is often grim, but it points toward reconciliation and a measure of peace beyond the turmoil.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Rearrange your priorities

Review by Heather Seggel

It’s interesting that Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life is coming out in the fall instead of May or June. While this book would make a great gift for a recent graduate, it would also be a good read at the beginning of senior year, or any other time of transition. Anyone who practices the lessons put forth here has a lot to look forward to.

Enlarging on a popular class they teach at Stanford, professors and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Bill Burnett and Dave Evans use principles of design, from brainstorming to prototyping, and adapt them into a way of reconsidering and then reshaping your life.

The authors make job-hunting their primary focus but emphasize that this process can be applied to any issue. Sometimes it’s a matter of reframing a problem to open up more potential solutions, while in other situations, a closer look may reveal that you’re tackling a problem that’s not actionable. If that’s the case, fear not: The authors have a simple hack, which is to accept it and move on to the parts you can act on. A series of self-evaluation exercises includes looking closely at four life categories (health, work, play and love) before designing life prototypes and field-testing them.

Some of this may be familiar to fans of What Color Is Your Parachute? or even The Secret, but Burnett and Evans bring a fresh and practical design perspective to their career advice. As the authors note, “[I]t’s impossible to predict the future. And the corollary to that thought is: once you design something, it changes the future that is possible.” This hands-on guide will get you started, but what happens next is entirely up to you.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s interesting that Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life is coming out in the fall instead of May or June. While this book would make a great gift for a recent graduate, it would also be a good read at the beginning of senior year, or any other time of transition. Anyone who practices the lessons put forth here has a lot to look forward to.
Children's & YAPicture Book

From past to present, storytelling that lasts

Review by Heather Seggel

This deceptively simple picture book about stories and storytelling packs a museum’s worth of culture and history into the scenery. I Am a Story shows us all the different ways words have moved us, and it’s an exhilarating trip.

Author-illustrator Dan Yaccarino opens with a scene of primitive people gathered around a fire while one of them points skyward; we can see that he’s describing the signs of the zodiac. The book ends with the same scene, only contemporized—a family on a camping trip, with the dad pointing out the constellations we know by those same signs. There are parallels like this throughout—stone tablets one era, iPads the next—and a red bird that appears in virtually every scene, now perched above the curtain at a Shakespeare play, then a tiny brooch on the lapel of a smiling librarian.

The bright colors and bold, modern style of the illustrations are cheering, and it’s amazing how many visual references Yaccarino pulls into this story: Japanese artist Hokusai’s iconic wave print; bookmobiles and Little Free Libraries, as well as libraries that travel by camel, donkey and elephant; the radio broadcast War of the Worlds; and Georges Méliès’ groundbreaking film A Trip to the Moon.

I Am a Story shows us in spare, elegant visual terms, that something as simple as a story is endlessly variable and everlasting. A powerful two-page spread simply reads, “I was censored, banned, and burned, but did not die.”

Read it, and then keep reading: Stories are all around you!

This deceptively simple picture book about stories and storytelling packs a museum’s worth of culture and history into the scenery. I Am a Story shows us all the different ways words have moved us, and it’s an exhilarating trip.

NonfictionHistory

Smashing stereotypes, solving equations

Review by Heather Seggel

The “hidden figures” in the title of Margot Lee Shetterly’s new book will not be hidden much longer. This story of African-American female mathematicians who made a significant impact on the Space Race has already been optioned for a film due out in January. It’s a surprising story, even more so for how long it took to be told.

Shetterly profiles several of the women who, upon realizing that their math skills qualified them for a better living than they could make doing virtually anything else, pulled up stakes and decamped for Hampton, Virginia, in some cases leaving husbands and children behind. Once there, they attempted to make their way into the middle class even as they chafed at the restrictions placed on them by segregation. One of the “Colored Computers,” as they were called, drew the line at a cafeteria sign designating one table as theirs. Sick of the reminder, she pulled down the sign and shoved it in her purse. 

Working for the NACA, as it was then known, to design the bombers flown during World War II led to employment with NASA as the Cold War generated frantic U.S. efforts to surpass Russia. If Shetterly’s prose is sometimes dry, the material it covers is fascinating and loaded with victories large and small for these highly skilled and tenacious workers. 

Shetterly writes about Katherine Johnson, one of the “computers” described in near-mythic terms by a growing fan club, as representative of the America we aspire to be. Her description could apply to any of the women profiled in Hidden Figures: “She has been standing in the future for years, waiting for the rest of us to catch up.”

 

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The “hidden figures” in the title of Margot Lee Shetterly’s new book will not be hidden much longer. This story of African-American female mathematicians who made a significant impact on the Space Race has already been optioned for a film due out in January. It’s a surprising story, even more so for how long it took to be told.
Children's & YAMiddle Grade

A real life escape-the-room adventure

Review by Heather Seggel

Ted Gerson has honed his skills at online escape-the-room games to extreme sharpness—nothing gets past him. When his great uncle dies and leaves him the contents of his apartment, Ted has high hopes; although it looks like a hoarder’s paradise, he thinks there might be some actual treasure from his great uncle’s service in World War II. His mother is more concerned that this was a practical joke intended to get the place cleaned out for free. But as Ted, his best friend, Caleb, and new-girl-in-town Isabel get to work, they find that the apartment itself is eerily similar to an escape-the-room game.

Debut author Denis Markell keeps the mystery interesting by introducing bad guys who might actually be good, and there are many nods to history and classical literature mixed in with the puzzle-solving fun. Information about Japanese internment camps is introduced gently enough that some readers will be inspired to learn more on their own. 

Click Here to Start combines history, mystery and friendship, and fans of Ellen Raskin or Blue Balliett will find it irresistible.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Ted Gerson has honed his skills at online escape-the-room games to extreme sharpness—nothing gets past him. When his great uncle dies and leaves him the contents of his apartment, Ted has high hopes; although it looks like a hoarder’s paradise, he thinks there might be some actual treasure from his great uncle’s service in World War II. His mother is more concerned that this was a practical joke intended to get the place cleaned out for free. But as Ted, his best friend, Caleb, and new-girl-in-town Isabel get to work, they find that the apartment itself is eerily similar to an escape-the-room game.
YA FictionYA

At the festie with your bestie

Review by Heather Seggel

Kaz and Ruby are road-tripping to a music festival with friends, a summer blowout to shake off some ghosts and renew their friendship. Kaz is smarting from a breakup with a guy she thought had forever potential. Ruby is academically adrift, and with her beloved brother heading out into the world, she needs to get a plan in place—after some quality time in the mosh pit. Remix celebrates female friendships while being brutally honest about how they can fall apart.

Author Non Pratt includes hilariously on-point details about the grunginess of field camping, from trashed Port-O-Lets to strangers making out in your tent at odd hours. Kaz and Ruby’s alternating points of view can be difficult to tell apart, but this speaks to the ways they overlap as friends. There are some funny supporting players sharing their campsite who enhance the festie vibe. 

Remix reminds us that boyfriends are hardly worth fighting over, but female friendships are absolutely worth fighting for.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kaz and Ruby are road-tripping to a music festival with friends, a summer blowout to shake off some ghosts and renew their friendship. Kaz is smarting from a breakup with a guy she thought had forever potential. Ruby is academically adrift, and with her beloved brother heading out into the world, she needs to get a plan in place—after some quality time in the mosh pit. Remix celebrates female friendships while being brutally honest about how they can fall apart.
NonfictionTrue Crime

The gritty side of Greenwich Village

Review by Heather Seggel

Greenwich Village in the 1970s did not have a shortage of local eccentrics, but one was particularly notorious. Wandering at random, clad in a dirty bathrobe and slippers and adorned with several days’ stubble, Vincent “the Chin” Gigante certainly appeared to be unwell. Yet even when he was on one of many stays in mental hospitals, Gigante was a shot-caller of the first order, the head of the Mafia’s Genovese family. Chin is the story of his mob career and the ruse that kept him out of prison for four decades.

With material this juicy, author Larry McShane could stand to ease off the hard-boiled hyperbole a bit: He describes John Gotti as landing in Chin’s lap “like a frothing pit bull and linger(ing) like a chronic disease,” and a lawyer who “preened like a peacock, but stung like a scorpion,” without elaborating on these qualities. Several chapters are titled after songs in an apparent nod to Martin Scorsese’s films, but the facts alone are sufficient in this jaw-dropping tale.

Gigante managed to feign mental illness so effectively other mafiosi tried to copy him, but he warned them off, laying claim to his hustle. When the feds began to circle, he simply checked himself into the hospital for a “tune-up,” and came home when the coast was clear. When police came to question him his wife let them in (eventually), where they found him standing naked in the shower, holding an umbrella.

During one court appearance, someone pointed out that the tremor in Gigante’s leg was on the wrong side; he switched them without missing a beat. Considering he had two families to support, with a wife and mistress both named Olympia, perhaps the oversight can be forgiven. The Chin was a killer, but like many of his peers in the mafia he was also a larger than life character, successfully feigning dementia while his inner circle knew he was crazy like a fox.

Greenwich Village in the 1970s did not have a shortage of local eccentrics, but one was particularly notorious. Wandering at random, clad in a dirty bathrobe and slippers and adorned with several days’ stubble, Vincent “the Chin” Gigante certainly appeared to be unwell. Yet even when he was on one of many stays in mental hospitals, Gigante was a shot-caller of the first order, the head of the Mafia’s Genovese family. Chin is the story of his mob career and the ruse that kept him out of prison for four decades.
Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Lessons learned from a fish wish

Review by Heather Seggel

Charlie’s got a case of second-fiddle-itis. With her parents busy in their careers and her older sister away at college, she’s barely on anyone’s radar. One day she’s ice fishing with some neighbors and pulls in a small fry, which promises her one wish in exchange for being released. The Seventh Wish starts out with the trappings of a fairy tale, but things get real very quickly.

Author Kate Messner (All the Answers) packs this book with points of interest, from Charlie’s passion for Irish dance to the world of ice fishing in upstate New York to, surprisingly, drug addiction and recovery. It never bogs down in heavy issues—there’s a very funny running gag about a student who keeps misplacing her flour “baby” from home ec class—but manages to communicate a lot about family dynamics, trust and the point at which wishing loses its power. Despite feeling like she barely casts a shadow, Charlie has a network of friends who support her once she’s able to be open with them.

The Seventh Wish would be a great pick for young book club readers, with its frank discussion of how we perceive drug use and addiction versus the reality that many experience. It’s also a new take on a classic fairy tale that reminds us to be careful what we wish for . . . and prepare to deal with whatever life gives us in return.

Charlie’s got a case of second-fiddle-itis. With her parents busy in their careers and her older sister away at college, she’s barely on anyone’s radar. One day she’s ice fishing with some neighbors and pulls in a small fry, which promises her one wish in exchange for being released. The Seventh Wish starts out with the trappings of a fairy tale, but things get real very quickly.

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