Sharon Verbeten

Short novels, especially books in verse, often belie their important and insightful contents. So is the case with award-winning poet / author Marilyn Nelson’s American Ace, which peels back the layers of a family, its history and its identity.

The story is told in short verse through the eyes of Connor Bianchini, grandson to Nona Lucia. When Nona Lucia dies, she leaves her son a letter that will potentially change his strong, proud Italian family’s (as well as outsiders’) view of what they believed to be true. The letter reveals that the man who raised Connor's father was not his birth father. Connor investigates the clues left behind, in the letter and in the birth father’s class ring, that reveal that the unknown birth father was not only black but likely a member of the famed Tuskegee Airmen.

The discovery is a shock. As Connor’s father posits, “Odd, that black blood should be invisible?” Connor’s research leads him to many facts about the Airmen and, in turn, to realizations about personal identity and belonging. In one of the more telling phrases in the book, Connor notes about the Airmen: “The way they were treated makes me ashamed. But the way they treated others makes me proud.”

American Ace is a quick and absorbing read, great for introducing readers to both novels in verse and an important historic topic. As Connor notes, “I feel like there’s a blackness beyond skin, beyond race, beyond outward appearance. A blackness that has more to do with how you see than how you’re seen.”

This is a bright spot in historical fiction.

Determining what's real and what's imagined is just part of 17-year-old Calvin’s everyday life. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Calvin believes his world is intrinsically linked with that of Bill Watterson’s iconic comic strip Calvin and Hobbes—he was, after all, born on the last day the strip was published. As he communicates daily with tiger Hobbes—knowing he must be a delusion—Calvin feels the only way he’ll ever be normal is to travel to meet Watterson and have him draw just one more comic.

So Calvin, Hobbes and Calvin’s best friend, Susie (he wonders at times if, she, too, is a delusion), set out on an ill-advised and perilous quest across frozen Lake Erie, all the way from Canada to Ohio, to meet Watterson. Along the way, the trio tries to sort out life, love and reality, while braving the elements, challenging their own demons and meeting some characters along the way.

National Book Award finalist Martine Leavitt has created a cleverly framed story about living with mental illness from a first-person point of view. The book is written in dialogue among Calvin, Susie and Hobbes and as a letter to Watterson. Everyone may question his identity and his reality from time to time; Leavitt poignantly and wrenchingly shows what it’s like to struggle with that all the time. Although intended for an older audience, it bears similarities to the insightful look at disability from the eyes of the beholder in Sharon Draper’s award-winning Out of My Mind.

Amber, Vee and Orianna aren’t necessarily the girls next door. Well, they might have been at one time, but now these teens find their lives inextricably linked through the common denominator of Aurora Hills Secure Juvenile Detention Center.

Amber’s doing time for killing her stepfather; Vee is an aspiring, yet tormented, ballet dancer; and Orianna is the curious link that binds them. As Amber notes, “Each of us had our own monster, distinct to us.” And indeed, the girls must deal with their own demons as well as those of the other inmates who share their dismal fate. Author Nova Ren Suma uses highly refined and eloquent prose to unveil—slowly—how these tragic lives intersect, as each girl's alternating story dips back and forth through time.

Unexplained phenomena, dark back stories, bloody flashbacks, creepy characters and a shocking denouement are enough to keep the sinister suspense going, much to the thrill of today’s YA readers. The female characters are well drawn, compelling and complex, and things aren’t always as they seem, but sharp readers will want to unravel their complicated connections.

Suma shares in the book’s publicity materials that “this book haunted me like one of the ghosts found in its pages.” The Walls Around Us will certainly haunt readers as well, but the journey will be well worth the scares. This is an intense, hypnotic and absorbing read. A movie can’t be far behind.

A smell of cologne wafts through the air. A frame inexplicably falls from the wall. All these unexplained events, including seeing her dead brother, are beginning to haunt Lex. Is she going crazy? Or is she just trying to reconnect with Tyler, her younger brother who recently took his own life?

The guarded Lex has been meeting with a therapist, who is trying to convince her to write down her thoughts. It doesn’t help that Lex’s mother believes her own life is over, or that Lex’s absentee father may be, in part anyway, responsible for Tyler’s suicide. Grief is tricky business, especially in the wake of an unexpected tragedy and especially for a teenager from an already dysfunctional family. But facing her grief is the only way Lex can go on—and to convince her mother to go on as well.

This well-plotted novel includes some masterful plot turns and mysterious happenings that impact Lex’s breakthroughs and road to recovery. Alternating between Lex’s cathartic journal entries, her all-too-real dreams of Tyler and her day-to-day dealings with her friends and boyfriend, this is an authentic look at the struggles a teen might face when life comes at her from all angles. But it also shows triumph when Lex is able to face her demons, connect the dots of her brother’s tragic last days and help her mom in the process.

It may be nothing like her previous teen novels in the Unearthly trilogy, but The Last Time We Say Goodbye shows Cynthia Hand's impressive skill at connecting with a teen audience.