12. After Obsession - Carrie Jones & Steven E. Wedel

Bloomsbury, 2011
HC $17.99
308 pgs.
for young adults
Liked it a lot (4)

Setting:  a small community on the Union River, near Ellsworth, Maine
OSS:  Two voices alternate as this story unfolds - Aimee and Alan - who know that an evil force (the River Man) is trying to possess a friend, the same evil force that took the life of Aimee's mother and countless others through the past centuries.
1st sentence/s:  You are mine.  You are all mine.  These are the words I hear every single freaking morning since my friend Courtney's dad died. They slither around inside my brain all day until I think I'm going crazy, and today is no exception.

I enjoy reading Carrie Jones' novels....the setting is where I lived for so many year.  This time, in her acknowledgements, she mentions Amilie Bacon, one of my past students at MDES.  That was pretty exciting.

43. Eclipse - Stephenie Meyer

Twilight Series Book #3
Audio read by Ilyana Kadushin
Random House Listening Library, 2007
13 unabridged cds
16 hrs, 23 mins.
640 pages
Rating: 2

The movie's about to come out, and there's no way I'm going to miss it; I really wanted to read the book first. I listened instead. Blech. On and on and on - there are about 400 pages too many to tell the story of this incredibly self-centered girl and the two powerful young men that love her. And for heaven's sake, what is it they love about her? I don't get it. She whines and mopes and makes demands and tells half truths and doesn't really have very much interesting going on in her head....

Victoria, the partner to James, who was killed at the end of book #1, is still tracking Bella and wants her dead. So she creates a mob of "new" very blood-thirsty vampires to help her attack the Cullens. The werewolves align themselves with their hated foes, the Cullens, to help save Bella. Give me a break. In the meantime, Jacob has tried and tried to convince Bella that she loves him and that he would be much better for her than Edward. Finally Bella realizes this, but knows that as much as she loves Jacob, she must be with Edward. Blah blah blah.

Let's see how the movie-makers portray this very boring story. And I've got to admit I'm interested to discover how Meyer will wrap this up - how can she make Bella become a vampire when for the first year after she's "turned" she'll be a bloodthirsty killer? I doubt if I'll read the next book until just before the final movie, but I imagine I'll do it. Can't stop now.

49. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Sherman Alexie

Illustrator: Ellen Forney
For: Young Adults
Published: 2007
National Book Award
230 pgs.
Rating: 5/5
Finished Sept. 22, 2008

The first time I ever heard of Sherman Alexie was when I traveled cross-country in 2002 and stopped in a cool little bookshop on the southwestern coast of Washington, just before hitting Oregon. I'll have to try to figure out where that was. I purchased a really cool Alaskan painting in that little town. That's where I picked up Alexie's The Toughest Indian in the World, and I'd never heard of him before. In May, at the BEA convention, I heard him speak. I am now a fan.

This is Sherman Alexie's first YA book, and it's a doozy. It's autobiographical, seriously funny and incredibly sad. 14-year old Arnold "Junior" Spirit, born and raised on the Spokane Indian Reservation, just outside Spokane, Washington, decides to leave the rez school and attend the all-white school over 20 miles away in Reardan. He loves to read and he's very smart, and he knows this will be the only way to make something of himself. He becomes ostracized by the entire tribe other than his immediate family. However, he perserveres, transforming from the geeky Indian kid that everyone ignores to a well-liked basketball hero and smart student. During this year, many of the people he loves and admires die...his father's best friend, Eugene, who is always good to him, his grandmother, the smartest, kindest person he's ever know, and his older sister, who hid out in the basement of their house for years until she fled to Montana to get married and live in a trailer that looked like a TV dinner. His best friend, Rowdy, totally abandons him, his father is frequently drunk, he has little to eat and sometimes no way to get to school other than walk.

Junior is a budding cartoonist, and Ellen Forney's cartoons throughouot the book compliment the text well.

There are probably a hundred or more quotes that really hit me in this book. "I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats." "I wish I were magical, but I am really just a poor-ass reservation kid living with his poor-ass family on the poor-ass Spokane Indian Reservaton." "Like the coffin was settling down for a long, long nap, for a forever nap." And "Gordy gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote: 'Happy famiies are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn't know Indians. And he didn't know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reasons: the fricking booze. Yep, so let me pour a drink for Tolstoy and let him think hard about the true definition of unhappy families."

Sherman Alexie is now an extremely successful author, husband, and father of two. A success story. Big lump in the throat. Real big lump. Real.

Impressive.