2008 NBA Finalist reviews

Judy Blundell  What I Saw and How I Lied
     Scholastic
     Reviewed 4/09
Evie is dazzled by her stepfather’s young, charismatic WWII army buddy. Naturally, she’s thrilled when he starts showing up everywhere the family goes. This nouveau noir features deft phrasing, complicated characterizations, first love, and impending doom. It’s a period piece that reads like a backwards mystery: something bad will happen, but the truth will never be fully revealed. A gripping story. T.B.

Laurie Halse Anderson  Chains
     Simon
     Reviewed 11/08
Despite protests that her former owner’s will had freed them, Isabel Finch and her five-year-old sister Ruth are sold and shipped from Newport, Rhode Island, to New York City in May 1776. Their new owners are fierce Loyalists, and one young African American rebel sees Isabel as a potential spy: “You are a slave, not a person. They’ll say things in front of you they won’t say in front of the white servants. ’Cause you don’t count.” At first, Isabel isn’t keen to help: “I’m just fighting for me and Ruth. You can keep your rebellion.” But when she overhears her master’s scheme to kill George Washington, Isabel reports it to a Patriot colonel. The rebels foil the plot; Isabel, however, is forgotten. Finally, Isabel realizes that it’s up to her — and her alone — to find freedom. Anderson’s novel is remarkable for its strong sense of time and place and for its nuanced portrait of slavery and of New York City during the Revolutionary War. A detailed author’s note separates fact from historical fiction. TANYA D. AUGER

Kathi Appelt  The Underneath; illus. by David Small
     Atheneum
     Reviewed 5/08
Deep among the Texan bayous, underneath a ramshackle cabin, an abandoned cat seeks refuge. Above lives Gar Face — the scarred, embittered, unredeemable product of a loveless, abusive childhood. Gar Face embodies cruelty and hate; yet his battered, ill-fed old bloodhound, Ranger, welcomes the cat; soon, with newborn kittens Sabine and Puck, they’ve made a loving, loyal family. Counterpointing the animals’ present-day story is another that reaches back centuries. Aspects of nature itself are personified as ancient beings: poisonously wicked old Grandmother Moccasin, a lamia (snake-woman) trapped under a loblolly pine for a thousand years, plotting revenge for the loss of her shape-changing daughter; the mammoth alligator that Gar Face, ignorant of its venerable power, hopes to kill. Watching over all are the birds and the sentient trees; making a litany of the trees’ multitudinous names, Appelt spins a lyrical, circling narrative, Homeric in its cadenced repetitions. Gar Face’s discovery of the family “Underneath” is a catastrophe. Puck is set adrift, desperately seeking a way home. Meanwhile, the lamia’s long past unfolds, reaching its denouement in the same moment that the animals’ ordeal comes to its swift-paced end. Easily read, with many brief chapters and full of incident, its endearing characters (and scary ones, too) well realized in Small’s excellent full-page drawings, this fine book is most of all distinguished by the originality of the story and the fresh beauty of its author’s voice — a natural for reading aloud. J.R.L.

E. Lockhart  The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
     Hyperion
     Reviewed 5/08
Alabaster Preparatory Academy sophomore Frankie Landau-Banks is cute, clever, and dating one of the most popular boys in school — who also happens to be the co-leader of an all-male secret society on campus called the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds. At first Frankie is content just to be Matthew Livingston’s arm candy, but the more he keeps secrets from her — seriously underestimating her intelligence — the more restless she becomes. By impersonating Matthew’s co-leader over e-mail, Frankie takes control of the Bassets, secretly engineering campus-wide pranks such as fastening bras on paintings of the school’s founding fathers. Over the course of the story, Frankie transforms from being her family's “Bunny Rabbit” into “a person who liked to be notorious” — a change that comes as a shock to her friends, family, school administration, and, most of all, to Frankie herself. Throughout the story, a clinical-sounding narrator addresses readers directly, giving the book a case-study vibe and presenting Frankie’s struggles in a dispassionate way (“How does a person become the person she is?”; “she might, in fact, go crazy, as has happened to a lot of people who break rules”). Readers are left to make up their own minds about this unique, multifaceted individual while giving her the space — and the attention — she so craves. ELISSA GERSHOWITZ

Tim Thorp  The Spectacular Now
     Knopf
     Reviewed 4/09
Sutter Keely is a charming, unrepentant teenage alcoholic living for the moment. While his friends are busy planning their post-graduation lives, Sutter can’t see beyond his current buzz. New girlfriend Aimee might set him straight if he doesn’t drag her down his own dead-end path first. Tharp’s characterizations of self-destructive teens are spot-on, and his realistic ending is painful, but satisfying. D.E.

List of all reviews on this site