VVMBookBlog

Ready to read a romance with a little bit more?  Monsoon Summer tells us about 15-year-old Jasmine who has so much going for her.  She is tall, strong and athletic and a star of her track team.  She has a great family, including her bug-loving younger brother.  And she and her best friend Steve have a successful business selling souvenir photo-postcards on the Berkeley campus.  But, she also has a secret crush on her life-long best friend Steve and doesn’t recognize her value to him or to any other part of her life.  And now she’s going to India for the summer!

Why India?  Jazz’s mother was living in an orphanage in India when she was adopted by an American couple.  Now as an adult she has acquired a grant that allows her to go back to set up a clinic at the orphanage for other poor, pregnant women to help ensure more healthy babies.  Jazz and her family will all go to India for the summer to support her mother and her project.

Their family has always observed customs from India, including foods from India and learning to speak Hindi.  Jazz still had trouble taking in the poverty and crowded conditions in India.  And, because it was during the summer months for Jazz, that meant it was monsoon season in India and raining all the time.

Read Monsoon Summer to see how Jazz figures out how she fits into this summer of giving by her family, how she works out her relationship with Steve from thousands of miles away, and learns how to see herself with new eyes.

November Blues by Sharon Draper

November Blues is the sequel to Battle of Jericho although I think the audience is different. Typically I stay away from saying the book is a “boy book” or a “girl book,” but since this book is about a teenage pregnant mother, I think the audience would be mature females.

The first page of November Blues starts with November throwing up in the bathroom stall at school. I find Sharon Draper to be a remarkable author, but I was concerned about the subject matter for middle schoolers. Although the subject is teenage pregnancy, the pregnancy wasn’t glorified. November and her friends have “real” school troubles… teachers, homework, friends, bullying, parents, etc. My suggestion would be to read Battle of Jericho first. Both books are for mature readers because of the topics, but both books are well written. Readers will relate to these characters.

Every once in a while I read a book with a story that I know will stay in my head for a long time.  This is one of those books.

Clay comes home from school one day to find on his doorstep a shoebox wrapped in brown paper, addressed to him, and containing 7 cassette tapes labeled by number and side A or B.  He pops the first tape in a cassette player and realizes they are from a classmate, Hannah Baker, who recently committed suicide.  He realizes that Hannah is using these tapes to tell the events leading up to her suicide.  Each side of a tape describes, in order, what each person did that contributed to her decision.  The box of tapes MUST be sent to ALL of the thirteen people or a second set of tapes will be released to the general public for all to hear. Since the tapes discuss events that lead to actual crimes, such as rape, it’s important to the thirteen people to keep the tapes a secret among themselves.

Hannah’s words spoken on the tapes are written in italics and her words are interspersed with Clay’s thoughts and actions as he spends the next several hours listening to the tapes and going to the locations she mentions.  Clay really liked Hannah and is heartbroken to hear her story and what happened to her, realizing he could have stepped in many times to help.

The power of this book is realizing how “little” things done among students in our classrooms, hallways, at parties, etc., can contribute to situations that, over time, make people desperate enough where suicide might seem to be the only way out.  Bullying, harassment, and students just being mean to each other have real consequences and we need to be aware of those affected. And we need to be aware of the people we interact with every day because we never know what else might be going on in their lives.

Here’s another book from the 2008 Maud Hart Lovelace list and what a great story!

Scott is nervous about going into high school as a freshman.  He and his friends have the usual problems with upperclassmen on those first few days of school.  But even as Scott is adjusting to high school, his world takes on a new dimension when his parents tell him that his mother is having a baby in the spring!  He’s kind of used to being the younger brother and the youngest kid, so what will this new creature do to his comfortable world?

Well, the combination of his school experiences and his still-embryonic sibling causes him to begin writing a survival manual for high school…and many other aspects of life.  In fact, his writing skills lead him to joining the school newspaper, and other school activities in his quest to get the attention of Julia, who suddenly turned beautiful over the summer!  Whatever he does in school has surprising results and usually no one is more surprised than Scott himself.

Very funny, very entertaining!  Lots of life lessons from Scott’s survival manual and journal (NOT a diary), but really funny and reader-friendly!

Emma-Jean Lazarus is different from the other girls in her 7th grade class. She’s very intelligent but not very tuned in about how to be socially with other students. To her fellow students Emma-Jean is just strange.

She still misses her father who was killed in a car accident 2 years ago. He was a professor of mathematics and from him Emma-Jean learned to be very logical and objective about everyday life happenings, which helps her to remain involved and appear not to care. But then one day she overhears her friend Colleen crying in the school bathroom and uses her logic, and some computer skills, to help Colleen with her problem. Her apparent success there leads her to look for creative ways to solve other peoples’ problems. But then her attempt to help Colleen blows up and she ends up with very popular Laura Gilroy very angry at both Colleen and Emma-Jean and out for revenge! What will happen now?

I liked this book because for once the main character, Emma-Jean, while experiencing some difficult social situations in school, has some caring and decent adults in her life to help her along the way. Emma-Jean would be a fun student to have in school, as long as she works on her problem-solving strategies!

Read this book and see how Emma-Jean finds out that getting involved with people her own age can really turn out okay.