Astrid Jones is a lot of things. She is a senior in high school. She is a New Yorker whose parents moved her to Small Town Hell. She is the daughter less favored by a perfectionist mother.  She is no longer interested in learning trigonometry, but philosophy lights up something inside of her. She is the best friend to the Homecoming King and Queen, and the only one who knows they are both gay. She is a secret keeper, a sender of love into the universe, and oh, she might be gay.

Maybe. But why lean into a label if she’s not sure? Why not spare herself the consequences of coming out, when labels are bullshit anyway?

I read a lot of very positive reviews for A.S. King’s Ask the Passengers, but sometimes I feel like reviews hone in on one or two choice aspects of a book and hang the rest of the reading experience on those. This was a Coming Out Story, the reviews said. This is a story with King’s trademark Magical Realism.

I devoured this book in two day’s time, and I found it to be so much more than Coming Out and Magical Realism. The story does center on Astrid as she comes to terms with her other-ness in a very insular small town community – getting up the guts to live as herself in the world instead of keeping her identity precious and hidden. But the way King writes Astrid, it seems like sexuality is secondary to Astrid-as-a-Whole; it’s not just her weekly make-out sessions with the hot field hockey player she’s keeping to herself, it’s secrets about her friends and her family, about what she thinks about her mother and sister, her dreams and wishes. Similarly, the Magical Realism isn’t terribly magical. When Astrid sends her love up to airplane passengers overhead, and the narrative follows that love, giving you a glimpse of the life of a plane passenger, I didn’t read that as “magic” – I read it as part of that inner life that Astrid keeps to herself, that inner life that makes Astrid such a dynamic character.

Despite all that, I think you can tell that I liked this book a great deal. I liked it for being sharp and fast to read. I liked how the cast of characters around Astrid’s life in her small town were so richly developed, each one interesting, not a throw-away in sight. I liked how King made the We-Look-Perfect-But-Are-Deeply-Troubled Family trope feel entirely fresh. I liked how Astrid and her girlfriend have mismatched ideas about the pace of their sexual interactions, and instead of submitting Astrid pushes back; instead of fighting or breaking up, they have a rational conversation about it.

This one should have got a little more ALA love this year. Shame, shame. You should read it anyway.

I have mentioned this book about a dozen times in the past year, so now that I have finally read it, I should probably write up a proper review.

Except for the part where I don’t think I can. Call it what you will: unwillingness to approach a book with an analytical, professional perspective, unwillingness to exert the effort, the respiratory virus I am currently hosting in my body, post-vacation-itis, my tendency toward the mush and the gush. I don’t want to. So I won’t.

What I will do is tell you this: in the first chapter, we meet Ari, who is likeable but shy, looking for his people but worried his people won’t like him, a little angry, a little scared. Then we meet Dante, who has a bit firmer grasp on his place in the world, but is used to being an outsider. They are both fifteen, and they become fast friends in a way that neither can quite understand.

By the end of the book Dante moves away and then comes back. We meet Ari’s mother and father, who both suffer from traumas past they don’t talk about. We meet the heavy absence of Ari’s brother who is in prison and no one will tell him why. We know Ari so well that we know something is always wrong, something deep down, is unsettled.

It is settled by the end, don’t worry.

Reading this book felt like a dream. Saenz is does realism right, let me tell you. It felt like I wasn’t reading, but just slipping into someone else’s life.

Just as beautiful and awesome as you’ve heard all this time, and completely deserving of that Printz silver medal (among other honors…) Hurry along and read it.

I am still working on Project Five Romances, if you can call reading five measly books a project. I read the Jennifer Smith, the Sarah Dessen, the Stephanie Perkins, and then hit a bottleneck of Waiting for Library Reserves to Come In. So I charged up my borrowed Nook and started reading my first Netgalley ARC – Eleanor & Park. Call it Project Six Romances.

Eleanor and Park are students at the same high school. Park is a Korean-American living in a white-bread Nebraska town, but he’s known everyone in the neighborhood and school forever so he’s got his own social agenda, even if he doesn’t quite fit in. Eleanor, on the other hand, is the new girl, and nothing about her fits in – her body, her crazy red hair, her thrift-store-because-that’s-all-she-can-afford wardrobe, how she shares a room with her four siblings and how her mom let her new husband kick Eleanor out of the house for a year. She’s “Fat Slut.” She’s “Big Red.” She’s the girl whose street clothes get flushed in the toilet during gym class, who couldn’t blend in no matter how hard she tries. Home sucks. School sucks. The only tolerable portion of the day is when she reads comic books over Park’s shoulder when they sit together on the bus.

And then they fall in love.

Oh, they fall in love.

I don’t even want to make this Romance #6 because it’s so different than the kind of romance I was going for when picking the first five. No offense to the contemporary light YA romance, but all five of the selected titles adhere to a rough pattern, a bit of a formula. Reader meets girl. Girl has problems. Girl meets boy. Problems complicate boy. Girl solves problems. Girl gets boy. It’s a formula I like, but it could not be further from Eleanor & Park. Eleanor is a girl with problems, but they are problems too big for any teenager to “solve” on her own, with or without the help of a boy. Park wants to help, but Eleanor won’t let him all the way in, and even when she does he can’t help her either.

They fall in love anyway.

And that it why I liked this book so damn much – because when you are a teenager and you fall in love, it’s rarely easy. You feel victimized by adults with power, by your peers. You can’t say what you want, what you are feeling; communication breaks down suddenly and with consequence. You know in your heart of hearts that you aren’t going to be together forever, even if you want to, really really badly.

But you fall in love anyway.

This book reminded me much of Pete Hautman’s The Big Crunch, but with a closer, more intimate narrative. Like Wes and June, Eleanor and Park get alternating chapters, and while Eleanor is the true protagonist, I believe, it was all about Park for me. He was just the sweetest boy trying to fit in and stand out, to follow the crowd and follow his heart, to find out what it means to him to be a man.

I didn’t cry, I didn’t swoon, I didn’t rush through the last pages in anticipation that The Boy and The Girl would finally end up together. It’s not that kind of romance.

But I loved it anyway.

If you are a human, you should probably read this book.

Once upon a time, some writer-types started a website called The Rumpus. Steve Almond wrote the advice column, Dear Sugar, but handed over the duties to some new blood. That new blood was Cheryl Strayed – you might remember the name, maybe Oprah introduced you last year – and she wrote an advice column like none you’ve ever read before. She wrote the advice column that all other advice columns wish they were, and in turn, her readers came to Sugar with the kinds of problems that are so tricky, so painful, so innately human. How to move on from the death of a loved one, how to decide to stay with your spouse, whether or not to cut of a destructive parent or sibling, how to survive this human condition. Problems we all have but assume there are no answers for, especially answers to be found in an online advice column.

But there are answers to these questions, as most of you probably know, found in music, film, poetry, religion, literature. Strayed’s Sugar takes the last option, weaving advice throughout personal stories with carefully chosen words, either tender or firm, but always artful, never patronizing, and the result is something truly special. It’s a manual on how to survive this human existence, one poor soul’s troubles at at time.

I want to buy a copy for everyone I love who has ever suffered, and bookmark special chapters for them. Everyone. Man, woman, parent, sibling, friend, acquaintance, coworker… Heck, I would like to buy myself a copy and bookmark special chapters for Future Jessica, in case she needs them.

I hope you don’t read this as an oversell – this is not a flashy book, a stay-up-all-night, change your life kind of book. If you are a person who finds life mostly enjoyable, you might not care for it. For the rest of us: required reading for treating the human condition.

After John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars swept through the the winter Best of 2012 Lists, I planned a little post to think about how this particular YA book caught the world’s attention. As a YA “insider,” a fan of John Green since the beginning, a person who watched John and Hank’s videos back when they were Brotherhood 20.0, it’s been a strange book-story to watch.

Of course Green’s latest book is getting heaps of praise and attention! His books are reliably thoughtful, well-crafted, and fun to read, and to top it of, TFiOS will make you cry like a small child. Green, as a speaker, a writer, a human, is uniquely earnest, charming. A perfect spokesperson for YA. I wrote a paper about the power of Green’s author “celebrity” for a class, three years before his fourth novel would be named the book of the year by Time Magazine, before he would sell out Carnegie Hall with his brother and a slew of celebrity guests, before the New York Times would run his feature, telling the story that the rest of us insiders have heard a million times.

But you could also say that The Fault in Our Stars is just a YA book – good, solid, maybe great, but nothing we haven’t seen before, from other novels, from Green himself. Nothing revolutionary. Some of my librarian/children’s lit friends found it to be “emotionally manipulative.” Personally, I still like Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines better.

Then, last week, I accidentally got sucked into watching the livestream of An Evening of Awesome. It was one part John and Hank Video Standards, two parts Two Genuine, Excited Brothers standing in front of their fans for doing the things they love to do, and one part random nerd-celebrity cameos. I was about to turn it off, and then Neil Gaiman walked on the stage… about to turn it off then Kimya Dawson appeared.

I am not sure how to qualify what John and Hank have done with their lives’ work and their online behaviors, but it is hard not to get behind people – young and old alike – coming together and celebrating  books, celebrating music, celebrating science, celebrating a life where you think about things. Somewhere along the way, their little online zeitgeist and John’s books, in particular, have caught the attention of some key pop culture fans and critics, thus propelling the popularity of both forward,  and  culminating in TFiOS.

It’s just another John Green book – smart, funny, clever, not perfect – but this one got adults reading YA. Reading YA that wasn’t Twilight, that can stand up against other Best Books of the Year that are written for adults. I don’t know if the YA-o-sphere at large appreciates this as much as they should – I know that while I was surrounded by other YA-o-philes online and in grad school, I would roll my eyes at this. But it is pretty true the world at large thinks that YA is rubbish. They are wrong obviously, but sometimes it takes a cultural phenomenon of a book to open the eyes of the masses.

To John: write on. To the rest of you: welcome to the fold – I hope you like what you find.

As discussed, I am in hold jail because I have an uncontrollably itchy-reserve finger. I request more books than I can physically read; this is the ultimate problem. Things get worse when, oh, I have-to-read-100-non-fiction books. I renew madly, holding out this bit of hope that I’ll be able to read everything before due dates, but when my bookshelves physically runneth over, I am obviously just kidding myself. It hurts my spirit to have to admit defeat and return unread books. It hurts my spine to think about lugging books to and from the library if I’m not even going to read them.

On New Year’s Day, I had all the reading options in the world and I decided to start one of those Itchy-Reserve-Finger, Renewed-Five-Times, Almost-Overdue books so that sense of self-righteous achievement could propel me into 2013. Bonus points of it is

That book was Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones, and while I may have begun this book with all sorts of righteous intentions, about a quarter of the way through I was just plain enjoying myself. And when the point of view did a sudden switch, halfway through? I forgot all of my good intentions and just sped through.

Dana knows her father, but he lives with his other family – his real wife and daughter. Dana and her mother keep the secret, finding an uneasy satisfaction in their position as the Ones Who Know, able to “surveil” their counterparts, observing and judging, while the favored family is none the wiser. But while Dana can watch with her mother, from a distance, as soon as daddy’s real daughter – Chaurisse – shows up at a school, a program, a job, then Dana must defer to avoid any unsupervised interactions. Once Dana is at the end of high school, the small injustices of being the second-class family, the obvious  daddy issues, the instability of her future start to pile up, leaving Dana unsure of her family, her future, and herself.

Like I said – I was totally into Dana’s story, woven with family history, her mother’s courtship, her first loves, her friendships, and then I turned a page and BAM there was Chaurisse – privileged, unknowing Chaurisse who has a mother and a father and a secret family. It would have been interesting enough just to hear her side of the story, the flip side of the coin, but it doesn’t take too long to realize that these two families are heading towards each other much more quickly than anyone – character or reader – would expect.

With two teen narrators, this qualifies as one of my favorite invented adult lit sub-genres – The Secretly YA Novel. Add to that  a satisfying, generation-spanning family drama with a bit of literary heft, and oh, it reads like a dream? A nice choice for a new year.

Since moving to Boston I have spent a decent amount of time hanging out in airports, alone. An airport is a strange space – everyone sitting close together, everyone paying a few hundred dollars for the privilege, everyone on a little personal mission to get home or get away.

I flew to and from Columbus, Ohio a few weeks ago; my first experience with Christmas travel. The planes were packed, the terminals busy, and everyone was talking. I talked to Dorothy on her way to Pennsylvania to celebrate Christmas with her niece even though she hates traveling in the winter and would have stayed home, but her son insisted, said that he would carry her the whole way there if he had to. At BWI, I listened to two men talk for a half hour, about their jobs, about Michigan and traveling for work and their families at home. Three college students from different Big Football-type schools sat in front of me on my final leg, and talked about Big Football-type things for the entire flight.

Everyone has a little story when they fly, and you feel alright asking a stranger what that story is, because they are in the airport with you so they must have one. Jennifer E. Smith takes this concept to its most romantic possibilities in The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight. Having missed her scheduled flight, Hadley meets Oliver, a fantasy seat-mate for a long flight: cute, chatty, and British. They share their little stories that end up being big ones: Hadley is on her way to London to see her dad for the first time in a year… as he marries her new step-mom, Oliver is returning home from Yale even though he likes it better in the States. Flirtation rises, then the plane lands and they are hustled apart – Hadley has to attend the wedding she is dreading… but will she see Oliver again? Will life ever feel as carefree as when she was with him, in the air?

I am making this book sound much more schmaltzy than it is. The timeline is short, but Smith doesn’t overshoot the Love at First Sight-yness of it all (despite the title); it’s a reasonable amount of attraction. Hadley and Oliver fall in love the way that I love characters in books to fall in love -gradually, with good sense, maybe without realizing. And the third person narration keeps the book from feeling like a drama-fest, full of Hadley’s over-the-top emotions; we, the readers, have just enough distance to allow us to observe when she overreacts without having to roll our eyes too much.

I do wish that the ending had been a bit less frantic, less full of fortuitous Dickens quotes, but hey, when in London, read Dickens, right? Quick, fresh, and fun.

I remember the summer after my high school graduation as one gigantic downward spiral of anxiety. It started with weird job hours, then add in play rehearsals, then add in a break-up, then add in your boyfriend hooking up with someone else in your play, and then the light at the end of the tunnel? Move away from every person you’ve ever known or loved and live with strangers and yay, college!

So I harbored all of the usual college-related angst – would I have enough money, would my roommates like me, how would I get to the bank/pharmacy/Target without a car – but some of my worries were more irrational. Example: I became fixated on what would happen if I fell down a flight of stairs and broke my leg. Who would help me? How would I get to the hospital? How would I get home from the hospital? I would probably just die in the stairwell, right?

I hope you don’t think this is a spoiler – Susannah Cahalan does not die in a stairwell at the end of her memoir, Brain on Fire. However, the rest of her story follows my fear down a path so awful that even my wildest anxieties couldn’t have imagined this was a human possibility.

Susannah is a young professional started a journalism career in New York City when she starts feeling tired, getting distracted, and suffering mood swings. Now, please imagine yourself bringing those symptoms to a medical professional – if you even decided to go in the first place, you would be sent home with a prescription of “You are a young professional in New York so calm yourself down and call me once you’ve magically eliminated all of your stressors. Deep breathing. Yoga. Get some sleep, sweetie.” Par for the medical course. But Susannah’s behavior becomes stranger and stranger – blowing work assignments, crying at the drop of a hat and forgetting why in the next moment; and then one night she has a terrifying seizure and her boyfriend takes her to the hospital. For a month, Susannah is shuttled from hospital wing to hospital wing as doctors alternately struggle to figure out what has happened to her, or try to force her into any number of condemning diagnoses – alcoholism, severe manic-depression, sudden onset schizophrena, and more. And what’s more – once the ordeal is over, Susannah can’t remember anything.

This is a medical thriller, like reading an episode of House MD from the patient’s perspective, but it’s also an interesting piece of self-directed journalism. Susannah’s doctors and family try to make sense of her seemingly unexplained symptoms, eventually finding a rare diagnosis (an autoimmune brain disorder that causes sudden psychosis, is largely undiagnosed and misunderstood, and might look to the outside observer like, oh, demon possession). But the work itself is a way that Susannah makes sense of what happened to her, what her life was like before, and what it is like afterwards. The story is devoid of melodrama, there are breaks for medical research (including diagrams), and without a saccharine “and we all lived happy ever after” – Susannah’s journalism training definitely shows. But there’s also the sensitivity of memoir, a certain sense of contemplation in the prose that reminds you that this is autobiographical, a girl’s life, and now she has to deal with the repercussions of what happened. It was a trauma. It might have changed her brain processing forever. Things have changed.

All in all, a quickly moving, sensitive medical memoir that is also completely horrifying. At least if you fall down the stairs and break your leg in public, passersby won’t lock you up in the mental ward. Just sayin’, 18-year-old Jessica. Just sayin’.