Up Up Up!

On the Come Up is the second book by Angie Thomas who wrote the amazing Hate U Give.  I loved HUG a LOT but I loved OTCU even more.  What a great, honest, original book.

Personally...

I found The Last Time We Say Goodbye to be really well done.  There were some (just a few, reviews for this book from users have been really positive overall) that felt it was predictable and that the main character, Lex, was very unlikable.  I didn't feel this way at all.  I didn't think it was predictable and I liked the element of faith in there, albeit very small, but it was very realistic.  It seems like sometimes authors have an ax to grind when it comes to faith, either way, positive or negative, but the approach to faith and love and science in this was, I thought, very realistic and appropriate to Lex's experiences and age.  I really liked this. 

Pudgy

Lot of remarks about pudginess!  Oh David Levithan, we are all trying to be the right size!
This was terrible.  Not just because of that but I found the characters to be so uninteresting or awful.  Just really, really bad.  Sam and Ilsa's Las Hurrah might be my last hurrah for Karl Lagerf- I mean, David Levithan.  I have enjoyed Rachel Cohn's books so much in the past it is hard for me to believe she had anything to do with this book.

Dear Martin, You would love this book.

Dear Martin was just so excellent.  I bought it when I saw that it had made the list of finalists for the Morris Award.  May I also admit that the Morris Award was completely unknown to me before I saw the email from YALSA announcing the finalists?  I am embarrassed, but I am transparent!  Relevant, real, amazing writing. I didn't know until I looked at her web page that Nic Stone is female.  Not a big deal or even a deal, but I am always impressed when an author can just really speak in the voice of someone different from they.  So good.  This one should be a Printz Honor for sure.  Only Auma's Long Run is higher in my opinion.  But man, this is close!

Even Better

Jeffery Self's A Very Very Bad Thing was a Very Very Great Book.  I liked Drag Teen a lot.  But this was even better.  It was probably because of the church part of it.  I admit that at first I didn't want to read it because I feared it would be a lot of Christian bashing- which I completely understand, as I have said before, the "Christian" church hasn't always been kind to the BLT community.  And some "Christian" churches, those that choose to follow humans instead of Christ, still aren't.  Still, I wasn't really up for it, you know?  But no.  This was just real and honest and had a broader POV and just was so really, really well done!  This was a heartbreaking but really, really excellent book. 

Yeah...

Eliza and Her Monsters....this was really, really good.  It had to be, I mean, it isn't out on audio and yet I had an easy time of reading it.  Which is so rare to me.  Fandoms are something of which I have little personal experience, but I know about, and shipping and things like that, but I think that it was all well explained, but for the teen audience, I am sure they all know what those things are, it's just oldsters like me who might not!  I didn't know that there were so many fandoms!  There is a Golden Girls one!  There is even fan fiction written about Judy!
There are many things I loved about this book.  The parents and their humanness and the reality of Eliza's feelings about what she might want to do at the turn in the road and the humanness of Wallace, even though he did make me mad.
Navigating the world of online and "face to face" is hard at any age, and I would think especially for teens.  I thought this was just very real.  I also loved Eliza's brothers.  Again, very real.
It is on my top three, along with The Hate U Give and Bang.

Excellent

Conviction was simply amazing.  VERY powerful.  And shows what bad religion can do to alienate people and promote completely anti-Jesus, anti-God thoughts and feelings.  Simply fantastic.

What if you could spend one last day with someone you lost? Spoilers maybe?

That's the tagline for the book Goodbye Days by Jeff Zentner.  The book is about a young man who texts his friend while his friend is driving a car filled with his other friends and his friend texts back, resulting in an accident that kills everyone in the car.  Carver Briggs is left with the grief of losing all of best friends and the guilt of being responsible.  Was he responsible?  At first I thought, "no way, not at all!" but then the book goes on to reveal that Carver did think that his friend was driving and purposely texted that friend anyway because he was the friend most likely to return his text right away.  So he did know that his friend would text him while driving.  So does that make him guilty of involuntary manslaughter?  Judges in real life have ruled that if the person texting the driver who was involved in an accident knew that the recipient of their texts was driving, they are responsible.   I am ashamedly guilty of doing this.  And I am going to stop.  I know people who put an auto block on their texts when they are driving and I get a "Driving now, will text back later," message in response.  This is a good thing!  I was trying for a while to figure out how to make my iPhone do that, but I never figured it out.  The friends I have who do this have droids.
Zentner's book is really good.  It isn't preachy.  It is diverse and inter-generational, too.  I really, really liked this book and look forward to reading more from him.

Good Old Fashioned Teen Mystery

One of Us is Lying was just a good old fashioned Whodunnit, I think.  Not old-old school, but more like a Lois Duncan without the paranormal.  I cared about the characters, even though they weren't all nice.  I mean, after all one of them WAS lying, right?  And I can't say that I had an easy time figuring it out.  I was surprised by the result.  But not to the point where it was not believable.  Good stuff.

Very Timely

and so it was upsetting and hard given the attitude that some have toward immigration today.  Something in Between by Melissa de la Cruz, who became a US citizen at the age of thirty and has her own story to tell, tells the story of a high school senior who discovers that she and her family are undocumented.  Set mostly in LA, well, in the richie-rich boyfriend's neighborhood of Bel Air and the Valley, where our main character, Jasmine lives and also in DC, this book is so real!  Jasmine is luckier than most undocumented kids though.  She does have connections.  Great, great book with a lot of think and talk about in here.