New Young Adult Film Series - Divergent

The Hunger Games movie, which has a March 23, 2012 release date, made the cover of Entertainment Weekly last week! In addition to pages and pages about this upcoming film and its sequels, there was an article about all the young adult series that are being adapted for film, in the hope of finding the next hit franchise.  In Find Me a Twilight, Sara Vilkomerson and Stephan Lee take a look at several series the studios are swooning over. Allie Condie's Matched series (see 12/2/10 blog), Maggie Stiefvaters Wolves of Mercy Falls series (see 3/11/10 blog), Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments series, Lauren Oliver's Delirium series, and Catherine Fisher's Incarceron series will soon be making their way to a theater near you. Veronica Roth's Divergent, which came out earlier this month, is also slated for the silver screen.
Set in a dystopian Chicago, Divergent is about a futuristic world where all people are born into one of five factions which have a different strength and focus: Abnegation (service), Amity (friendship), Candor (truth), Dauntless (fearlessness) or Erudite (intellect). On their sixteenth birthday, teens take an aptitude test and can choose to remain with their factions or change allegiances.  The main character Tris chooses to leave behind her gray robes and loving Abnegation family to become one of the tattooed and reckless Dauntless, a choice even she doesn't understand. As she begins the Dauntless training, that is much like a violent military boot camp, Tris discovers that only ten of the trainees will be accepted into the final group. Although she appears small and child like, she succeeds beyond her wildest dreams and begins to make enemies and form alliances; her demanding instructor "Four" takes particular interest in her that evolves from protectiveness to love.  What Tris doesn't know is that much of her success is because she is actually a Divergent, with the strengths of multiple factions. This makes her a target of the merciless autocratic leaders who kill divergents because they are hard to control. As in all dystopian literature, Tris and her friends fight the status quo in hopes of creating a "brave new world," where all inhabitants live in harmony. 
The first of a trilogy, Divergent, has a satisfying ending, but sets up the conflict for the future.  The book is an action packed page turner with descriptions of Tris's initiation process which are as riveting as they are violent. The tender romance between Tris and Four will have readers coming back for more. Due to the graphic violence, I would recommend Divergent for more mature readers

Where She Went

In my "Connecting with Young Adult Novels" workshop at the Teen Literature Conference, I talked about using essential questions to encourage kids to think critically about their reading.  One of the essential questions discussed was "How do people overcome adversity?"  In addition to seeking justice, doing good works for others and getting support from loved ones, we discussed  people pouring themselves into their passions, such as music or art, for solace. No better example can be found to support this idea, than Gale Forman's Where She Went, the sequel to her New York Times best seller If I Stay. Having just finished Where She Went, I am still basking in the euphoria of reading an amazingly powerful and well-written novel. 
For those of you who have not read If I Stay, you are in for a double dose of wonderful. Mia, a talented cellist and her family are in the family car when a truck broadsides them, leaving her parents dead and 17-year-old Mia in critical condition.  After the accident Mia is standing outside her body beside the wreckage of their car and her parents' corpses, watching herself and her little brother being loaded into the ambulance.  As she ponders her state, ("Am I dead?  I actually have to ask myself this.") Mia is transported to a hospital where she lies in a coma and reflects on the past and tries to decide whether to fight to live.  Through flashbacks, flash-forwards and out-of-body reports on what is going on around her, Mia analyzes the situation. Adam, her boyfriend who leaves his punk rock band's concert to be with her, arrives at the hospital.  As he sits by her side, he begs her to stay saying, "If you stay, I'll do whatever you want...I'll even let you go. If you stay."
In Where She Went the story flashes forward three years. Mia is pouring herself into her music career at Julliard, and Adam is a rock star who is close to a nervous breakdown.  After Mia goes to New York, she inexplicably stops communicating with Adam, sending him into a deep depression that results in him writing songs for a new album that sky rockets his band to fame and fortune. The album "Collateral Damage" tells Adam and Mia's story. Adam is in New York, dreading his upcoming world tour to support the band's new album, when he happens upon a poster for her concert at Carnegie Hall. Thinking no one will recognize him, he watches the concert from a balcony seat, only to be asked by an usher at the end of the concert to meet Mia backstage. Their reunion is filled with supressed emotion as they spend the rest of the night wandering New York City.  When she ultimately reveals the reason she left him, it sparks a cathartic reconnection which is expressed through their music.
Where She Went is a first person narrative told from Adam's point of view.  Lyrics from "Collateral Damage" songs that preface many of the chapters are heart breaking, revealing the trajectory of Adam and Mia's relationship. In the band's anthem, "Animate," Adam sings, "First you inspect me, then you dissect me, then you reject me. I wait for the day that you'll resurrect me." Where She Went is the story of that resurrection.

Lucky, Gorgeous, Brilliant

I am looking forward to the Colorado Teen Literature Conference at the Tivoli on Saturday, April 2nd. http://www.coteenlitconf.org/ In addition to Pete Hautman, the other guest author is Rachel Vail, whose latest books include her critically acclaimed Avery Sisters Trilogy. Lucky, Gorgeous and Brilliant are interconnected sister stories about three girls whose mother, a financial wizard, loses her job. Although their Dad still has his teaching job, the family must adjust to vastly reduced financial circumstances.

The first book, Lucky, introduces 14-year-old Phoebe Avery who has always taken for granted her family wealth and her popularity. When her executive mom loses her job, Phoebe must contemplate giving up her fabulous graduation party and the Vera Wang dress that she plans to wear. Phoebe's older sisters, Allison and Quinn, warn her to keep the family's crisis totally secret. However, her best friend and boyfriend are getting suspicious. Phoebe tries hard to act like nothing is wrong, but when her mother's credit cards are denied while buying Phoebe the Vera Wang dress and her father threatens to cancel her party, she freaks out. What will she do to keep up her reputation as a lucky girl?


Gorgeous, the second book in the trilogy, tells the story of the family’s financial crisis from the perspective of the middle sister Allison, who has always considered herself too plain to notice. One night she dreams she sells her cell phone to the devil in exchange for being gorgeous. She enters the next top teen modeling contest with surprising results. Her parents are not happy with the new Allison, and she also begins to wonder whether her hot new boyfriend and new friends like her only for her looks. To what lengths will she go to be on the cover of a magazine?

The final book in the Avery Sisters Trilogy is told from Quinn’s point of view. The oldest sister, a piano virtuoso who has always been the intelligent responsible one, decides if her mom isn’t perfect, she doesn’t have to be either. She begins to experiment with wild partying and drinking, but will it make her feel better? When she kisses Allison's boyfriend and then her piano teacher, she begins to wonder if she's gone too far. The book is the perfect ending to this inventive trilogy, which tells an addictive family saga from three points of view.

The Big Crunch

The Colorado Teen Literature Conference takes place on April 2, 2011. In addition to preparing a workshop I'm presenting called "Connecting with Young Adult Literature - Using Essential Questions in the Classroom," I have also been reading books by Pete Hautman, who is a guest author. I loved No Limit (2005)and its sequel All In (2007), his poker series about a teenage boy who is a Texas Hole 'Em whiz kid. The main character Denn Doyle is sympathetic and well drawn, and I learned a lot about poker. Reading Pete's blog, I frequently laugh out loud and am looking forward to seeing him in person. His latest book The Big Crunch, which he characterizes as a vampire-free tale of two teens who fall in love, is another winner.

The Big Crunch chronicles a year-long romance between Wes and June, two ordinary teenage lovers, who struggle to maintain their relationship after June moves away. June has gone to 6 high schools in 4 years, so when she arrives in Minnesota she decides to avoid getting attached to anyone, because she knows her consultant dad will move them again soon. Then she literally runs into Wes at a convenience store, and a black eye later, they are in love. The story alternates between the two teens' point of view. June says their relationship was inevitable. "Some things just had to happen, like two trains heading toward each other on the same track. It wasn't like you could swerve to avoid the collision. It wasn't like you could stop." Wes, who has just extricated himself from a two year relationship, does not wanted to get involved with June but he can't help himself. When his best friend Jerry starts dating June, Wes finds himself jealous and picking fights with him. The Big Crunch, a scientific theory that suggests the universe will stop expanding one day and start to contract, is a great metaphor for Wes and June's developing relationship. After a series of encounters that are filled with sexual tension, they try to avoid each other but find their mutual attraction has "all the force of a black hole." They give into their feelings only to find that June's father is moving the family to Omaha.

June's parents usually demand that she cut all ties when they move, to the point of erasing her former friends' phone numbers from her cell phone. Wes and June surreptitiously try to maintain their relationship with texts and calls, but inevitably it becomes difficult. Wes, however, will not give up on their relationship and "borrows" a friend's parents' car to go see her. The few hours they spend together, before the police show up at her door, is enough to refuel their passion. What the two teens do to keep their love alive is heart warming. Hautman does a great job of creating characters we care about with dialogue that is clever and filled with humor. The book follows their relationship through the four seasons and I predict you will want to follow it, too.

The Maze Runner and The Scorch Trials

In additon to presenting at the CCIRA convention in February, I attended several terrific workshops, one of which was the Colorado Blue Spruce YA Book Award Session. The Colorado Blue Spruce Young Adult Book Award recognizes the most popular books among middle and high school students in the State of Colorado. Teens nominate their favorite titles and select the winner - adults do not vote. At the workshop the 2011 winner of the Blue Spruce Award, Rick Riordan's The Last Olympian, was announced, as well as the list of 2012 nominees. I am now on the Blue Spruce Award Committee and will be writing book talks for the nominees which can be found on their website at http://www.cal-webs.org/bluespruce/ later this spring. One of the nominees is The Maze Runner by James Dasher. Coincidentally, I have just finished its sequel The Scorch Trials.

The Maze Runner is the first book in a new dystopian trilogy. It introduces Thomas, who is an amnesiac thrust into the center of an enormous maze name the Glade where other teenage boys are struggling to survive. The boys arrive at the Glade through an empty freight elevator and have no memory of who they are or how they got there. Outside the Glade technological monsters called Grievers are lurking. Each day the boys send out Runners who are looking for a way out through the maze that surrounds their oasis of safety. Each night they must lock themselves into the Glade so that the marauding Grievers can’t kill them. As Thomas, who becomes a maze runner, struggles to adjust to this foreign world, the group’s leader tells him, "Old life's over, new life's begun. Learn the rules quick.” Then the elevator delivers Teresa, a comatose girl who triggers something in Thomas’s memory. Attached to her is a message which says no more food or supplies will be delivered and she will be the last teen sent. The boys realize that it’s now or never. The Maze must be solved before supplies run out and the Grievers attack. When readers finish this exciting dystopian thriller, they can dive right into the sequel, The Scorch Trials.

In The Scorch Trials Thomas and Teresa find their problems are not over. After one day of rest, they are tasked to cross an expanse of earth, which was scorched by sun flares. The Scorch is teeming with Cranks, people inflected with an insanity inducing disease known as the Flare. The teens are told that they are infected with the Flare, but if they make it across the desert, they will receive a cure and their problems will be over. This action packed adventure tests the teens surival skills as well as their loyalty to each other. Readers will be clamoring for the final book in the triology.

Annexed

Annexed, a new Holocaust novel by Sharon Dogar, tells the Anne Frank story from the point of view of Peter Van Pels, the sixteen-year-old boy whose family moved into the annex on July 13, 1942 and lived there for two years, before discovery. Alternating with reports of his last days in the death camps, Peter reflects back upon his days spent with Anne from the perspective of one who is marching to his death from Auschwitz to the Mauthausen concentration camp.

When he first meets Anne, he thinks she is an annoying know-it-all. He struggles with the lack of privacy and the thought that he is missing out on so much of the teenage boy experience. He pouts, fights with his parents and questions God and religion. He confides in Anne and she accuses him of deserting the Jewish people. To this he replies, "I want so many things, but what I need is to know who I am. Because if I don't know that, I can only ever be what they say I am. A Jew." As Peter struggles to become a man in unthinkable circumstances, the reader witnesses through his first-person, present-tense narration, the day to day highs and lows in the Annex. Interspersed with his thoughts in the Mauthausen concentration camp, the days with Anne begin to seem idyllic and he wonders what happened to his parents and the Franks. The italicized death camp passages become more frequent as Peter's experiences in the Annex and at Mauthausen converge in death.

In an interview Sharon Dogar said she wanted to reimagine what it was like to live with Anne Frank. She laments that most of the people who lived through the Holocaust are dead and their stories are dying with them. She says that stories help to keep history alive. She is very careful to distinguish between fact and fiction and deals with lack of details in the diary to corroborate her story by having Peter ask Anne to keep their relationship out of her diary. While a prior reading of The Diary of a Young Girl is not necessary to reading Annexed, an understanding of that book will give readers the opportunity to see Anne Frank's story with Peter's hindsight. The story begins and ends with Peter asking, "Are you there? Are you listening?" I hope readers are.

Across the Universe

Across the Universe by Beth Revis has just been named Amazon's January Best Book for Young Adults. The first book in a new trilogy is an imaginative spin on the recognizable tale of a problem plagued starship sent to colonize a new planet. The riveting first chapter chronicles the details of Amy and her parents being cryogenically frozen before being sent on a 300 year journey into outer space. Flash forward 250 years and Amy's cryogenic chamber has been unplugged and she is awakened 50 years too early. The first person she meets is Elder, the rebellious young teen who is being groomed to take over as dictator of the spaceship, when the current leader dies. The story is told in alternating chapters by Amy and Elder.
At first Amy is furious, then intrigued by the spaceship Godspeed, which has three different levels corresponding to the three castes of passengers: the feeders, who are farmers, the shippers, who maintain the technology and the keepers, who rule. As she acclimates to her new environment, she realizes that most of the inhabitants seem to be drugged automatons. When Amy begins questioning Elder about the spaceship society, he realizes that the current leader has been hiding the truth from him with secrets and lies.
Elder, who was in the dark for years about the frozen inhabitants of the lower level, is captivated by Amy and sympathizes with her fears about the future. When other cryogenically frozens are unplugged and left for dead, Elder must help Amy locate the culprit before her parents are lost forever. As they methodically discover the truth about the horrors which have taken place aboard the Godspeed in the last 250 years, Elder and Amy look for a way to thwart the evil dictator and save the day.
The Across the Universe website currently includes a schematic drawing of the Godspeed, a trailer, reviews and downloads. There is also a Facebook fan site. The murder mystery and romantic aspect of the plot will widen the fan base beyond sci fi readers. Although the sexual content in the book is not particularly graphic, there is a mating season element that leads me to recommend the book for more mature readers.