Katie Lewis

YA FictionYA

Basic instincts of high school freshmen

Review by Katie Lewis

As Andie prepares for her freshman year of high school, her superstar sister Claire is gearing up for her first year at Yale. Since she’ll be away from home and unable to offer sisterly advice (i.e., bug her little sister), Claire has put together a how-to map of high school from orientation to graduation in the form of a field guide. The nature-based topics include Subtropical Shrubs (Breaks), Gilled Mushrooms Causing Sweating, Tears, and Salivation (Social Life) and Fruits or Seeds, Bright Red/Orange (School Spirit).

Andie devours Claire’s book cover-to-cover with her best friend Bess, who will be going to a different high school. The girls wonder if they’ll be able to remain friends despite all of the drama, hierarchy, pranks and rules of high school. And more importantly: Will they be able to survive these crucial four years without ruining their GPAs and reputations? Claire’s greatest advice comes at the end of the reading: She tells Andie to disregard everything she has just said because there is no definite route to take, and you learn the most by figuring it out on your own. But, she warns, you are bound to do best if you don’t talk about people behind their backs, as it always seems to lead to trouble.

Interspersed with pop culture references and the commentary of Andie and Bess as they read Claire’s guide, A Field Guide to High School cleverly relates the high school experience to the hierarchy found in nature and the animal kingdom. Andie’s nerves are slowly calmed as she realizes that she’ll fit into the order of things somehow and that if Claire could make it through, then so can she.

Marissa Walsh, a former children’s book editor, completes her funny and frank look at these complicated years by suggesting a summer reading list that includes Louise Rennison and Curtis Sittenfeld; movies and TV shows to pay close attention to, such as Freaks and Geeks ; and a back-to-school soundtrack featuring the White Stripes, Belle &andamp; Sebastian and Stevie Wonder. This is a book for anyone who is nervous about beginning high school and those who are relieved to have completed it. Katie Lewis survived high school in Nashville.

As Andie prepares for her freshman year of high school, her superstar sister Claire is gearing up for her first year at Yale. Since she'll be away from home and unable to offer sisterly advice (i.e., bug her little sister), Claire has put together a…
Nonfiction

Swimmer’s paradise

Review by Katie Lewis

Not only are mermaids real to the visitors of Weeki Wachee, they eat watermelon, swing on swing sets and smoke pipes all under water. This kitschy Florida fantasyland, in which merpeople carry on their natural lives in a natural spring, is captured in the colorful Weeki Wachee, City of Mermaids, a well-researched scrapbook written by Lu Vickers with photos compiled by Sara Dionne.

Newt Perry opened Weeki Wachee Spring in the fall of 1947, and over time counted Elvis Presley, Arthur Godfrey and Bob Hope as guests. Under Perry's direction, Weeki Wachee served as a highway detour, Florida landmark and movie location. Seeing a billboard for the park gave Vickers the idea to write about it and its mermaids, who also inspired Betsy Carter's new novel Swim to Me (featured at left).

Staged shows such as Alice in Waterland and The Wizard of Oz are viewed from Weeki Wachee's indoor theater that seats as many as 500 guests. The merpeople community performs 18 to 25 feet under water without weights for the audience, occasionally breathing through air hoses and encountering catfish and eels. Photos from each decade of the spring's operation show mermaids enjoying soft drinks, munching on apples and even playing the ukulele while under water. Despite being threatened with closure since the arrival of Disney World more than 30 years ago, the park remains alive and swimming today.

Weeki Wachee, City of Mermaids is a labor of love: a love of water, a love of fantasy and especially a love of a natural spring in Hernando Valley and all of the mystical and remarkable creatures that inhabit it.

Not only are mermaids real to the visitors of Weeki Wachee, they eat watermelon, swing on swing sets and smoke pipes all under water. This kitschy Florida fantasyland, in which merpeople carry on their natural lives in a natural spring, is captured in the colorful…

Fiction

Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking

Review by Katie Lewis

Part The Shipping News, part The Awakening but mostly something uniquely its own, Aoibheann Sweeney's literary debut Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking is a textured story of a girl's life in limbo. Miranda lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her widower father and his fisherman friend Mr. Blackwell. On the lonely days when she doesn't make it to school, she spends her time typing her father's translated Metamorphoses manuscripts or sketching flowers in the garden. She drifts along through graduation existing more than living until her father sends her to work at the Manhattan institute he was formerly involved with. While living at the institute and learning about her father's mysterious past, Miranda downs coffee, explores her sexuality, flees a wedding and finally owns her choices.

The sparse dialogue, nearly absent inner monologue and detailed natural and nautical descriptions reflect Miranda's lack of social interaction as well as her inability to connect, even with herself. Sweeney's novel is a coming-of-age story, replete with her main character's quiet misadventures, yet it sets itself apart from other bildungsromans by not dwelling on or lamenting Miranda's slip-ups. It is honest and unapologetic, and the novel's promising sincerity steers it away from the snares of melancholia. The gradual awakening that Miranda cautiously opens herself up to in New York by discovering or discarding secrets is personal, disconcerting and ultimately liberating. Sweeney has extensive experience writing book reviews for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Village Voice Literary Supplement. Here she has constructed a hopeful tale that complies with the waves like a dory. Miranda's surprise at discovering herself in this foreign city doesn't shake her; she dives right in without ever getting too close much like Sweeney's approach to her characters.

Ultimately, Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking is a story of characters holding on to something or someone that keeps them from developing on their own. Whether it's fear or routine that restricts their movement, love is able to move them to interact with others, and finally be able to blossom.

Part The Shipping News, part The Awakening but mostly something uniquely its own, Aoibheann Sweeney's literary debut Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking is a textured story of a girl's life in limbo. Miranda lives on an island off the coast of Maine…

Fiction

Living two different lives

Review by Katie Lewis
Quinn Braverman doesn’t have to wonder “what if?”; as a girl, she found a portal to an alternate reality in which she had made opposite decisions, and could see them play out. As an adult struggling with a difficult pregnancy, she makes the choice to cross over into her parallel life for the first time, away from her loving husband and 6-year-old son Isaac to a life in which she isn’t pregnant and is living glamorously with her needy, semi-famous ex-boyfriend. What she finds there, outside of a trip to the Fiji Islands and the eventual proposal she hadn’t expected, is her bipolar artist mother, whom she’d lost to suicide in her real life.
 
The Other Life by Ellen Meister (The Smart One, Secret Confessions of the Applewood PTA) becomes a resonant story about the importance of mothers, both having one and being one. As the portal to her other life closes, Quinn has to decide whether to live as a mother to Isaac and her unborn daughter, who may have a risky birth defect, or live a life in which her mother, for whom she has several unanswered questions, still lives.
 
Quinn’s shattering decision about whether to keep or abort her pregnancy is the first life-or-death choice she’ll have made, and already she’s noticed that a tiny portal has begun to open to an alternate life for her unborn child. Meister treats Quinn and her husband’s realistic abortion discussions with practicality and respect, rendering it difficult even for the reader to choose a side.
 
The choices in this novel are heartbreaking, and thoughtfully show the value of a mother’s support, guidance, steadfast love and sacrifices. How Quinn decides she’ll live at the novel’s close and with whom is never obvious, making for a riveting tale of love and choices.
 
Meister’s provocative novel asks the question: What impossible decision would you make, with the knowledge that choosing one life meant the other would die?

 

Quinn Braverman doesn’t have to wonder “what if?”; as a girl, she found a portal to an alternate reality in which she had made opposite decisions, and could see them play out. As an adult struggling with a difficult pregnancy, she makes the choice to…
FictionWomen's Fiction

The secrets among women

Review by Katie Lewis

The women of Rae Meadows’ Mothers and Daughters are stronger than they think. Over three generations, they tell stories of abortion, assisted suicide, cancer and a journey on an orphan train. The love they’ve felt for their mothers has flattened and reformed them, whether that love was warranted or not.

Sam has difficulty returning to work after having her daughter and losing her mother in the same year. After she receives a box of her mother’s that contains photographs, a worn Bible with “Children’s Aid Society” stamped in the corner, recipes in her grandmother’s handwriting and a coaster from a Chicago restaurant, Sam investigates these ciphers and wonders how they will change what she knows of herself and her family.

In another story, her mother, Iris, decides it's time for a move to tranquil Sanibel after a difficult divorce, where she has a grand affair with a married man while slowly deteriorating from cancer. Iris’ mother, Violet, had a hard-knock life on New York streets with an opium-addicted mother, who sent her on a train to find a new life in the Midwest. Her mother later tries to track her down, but there’s no record of Violet—demonstrating that some secrets are shared between mothers and daughters while others die with the woman herself.

Family history is either handed down through stories and letters or it’s locked away—for safekeeping or to be forgotten. Mothers and Daughters, a book you’ll want to sit and read straight through, isn’t light. It confronts real fights of love and bouts of loneliness. It shows poverty of the pocket and of the soul. The choices these mothers make and the things they ask of their daughters have effects that touch generations to follow. It will have you considering your own choices and those of your mother: What has she chosen not to tell you? What happened before you? What do you want to know?

The women of Rae Meadows’ Mothers and Daughters are stronger than they think. Over three generations, they tell stories of abortion, assisted suicide, cancer and a journey on an orphan train. The love they’ve felt for their mothers has flattened and reformed them, whether that…

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