Jumping Off Swings by Jo Knowles

Title: Jumping Off Swings
Author: Jo Knowles
Publisher: Candlewick
Reading Level: YA, 14+
Publication Date: August 11, 2009
Pages: 240
My Edition: ARC
Amazon Page

Cover Rating: B+
Book Rating: C

Plot - 15/20
Characters - 16/20
Writing - 17/20
Originality - 15/20
Entertainment - 5/10
Recommendation - 6/10
Total: 74/100

Traveling To Teens Production

Summary:
One pregnancy. Four friends. It all adds up to a profound time of change in this poignant, sensitively written YA novel.

Ellie remembers how the boys kissed her. Touched her. How they
begged for more. And when she gave it to them, she felt loved. For a
while anyway. So when Josh, an eager virgin with a troubled home life, leads her from a party to the backseat of his van, Ellie follows. But their "one-time thing" is far from perfect: Ellie gets pregnant. Josh reacts with shame and heartbreak, while their confidantes, Caleb and Corinne, deal with their own complex swirl of emotions. No matter what Ellie chooses, all four teenagers will be forced to grow up a little faster as a result. Told alternately from each character’s point of view, this deeply insightful novel explores the aftershocks of the biggest decision of one fragile girl’s life — and the realities of leaving innocence behind.

Review:

I read Knowles' first novel, Lessons From a Dead Girl, over a year ago. I liked it, though it was pretty graphic for what it was. My first impression of Knowles' was good writer and a good story-teller who wasn't afraid to go after those disturbing topics. My second impression wasn't as good as the first. Jumping Off Swings was a disappointment compared to her debut, sadly. Not saying it wasn't good, because it was, it was just not as suspenseful, not as spooky as I thought it should have been for a novel on this subject.

The novel started in a good spot. It made we anxious for where the rest of the novel would take me. But as I kept on reading I became more and more disappointed. It was just . . . flat. There was no excitement. The characters were bland. There was no suspense. Knowles' barely highlighted the pregnancy. It was there, but . . . it wasn't there. I think the novel was too short to really do anything for it.

Knowles is a good writer, yes. But she's not a great writer. I was impressed with her debut, but her sophmore novel just fell flat for me. This novel could have definitely been better if it were longer. I felt as if Knowles wrote the wrong things in the novel and she missed critical points. It was very disappointing.

Stephanie Kuehnert Guest Blog

What is your inspiration for your characters?

I write the kind of characters I wanted to read about as a teen. Emily from I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone was the kind of girl I always wished I could be... tough, musically talented. I adored female punk musicians when I was a teenager, but there weren't any fictional stories about them. So I wrote this one. Emily deals with some really tough situations and difficult emotions but she also gets to live out the rock n roll fantasy. She's the kind of character I wanted to escape into as a teen and even now. So her inspiration came from that fantasy, but also my love for musicians like Courtney Love, Brody Dalle, Patti Smith, PJ Harvey, and the ladies in Civet and Sleater-Kinney.

As for Ballads of Suburbia, I guess my inspiration was reality. It's not autobiographical, it's not my life, but Kara and I are very similar emotionally. As a teenager, I escaped my pain with self-injury and substances like she does. I knew a lot of girls like Kara, Cass, and Maya. And I knew a lot of boys like Adrian. I'm sure there are still a lot of girls and boys out there who feel like they do, so I wrote this book for them. My inspiration was to break the silence. I wanted Ballads of Suburbia to be like an unforgettable song. I wanted to create characters that you would feel like you knew and have to talk to your friends about.

In a nutshell, punk rock inspired my first book and speaking out inspired my second. Speaking out is something I learned to do from punk, so it all kinda comes back to that.

There aren't particular people who inspire my characters, I draw more on emotion. Emily from IWBYJR is the emotion I feel when listening to a really good song. Kara from Ballads was synthesized from emotions I felt in high school. The friendships between Emily and Regan, Louisa and Molly, and Kara, Maya, and Cass draw on my relationship with my best friend, again emotionally, not actual situations.

Ballads of Suburbia

Title: Ballads of Suburbia
Author: Stephanie Kuehnert
Publisher: MTV Books
Reading Level: YA, 14+
Publication Date: July 21, 2009
Pages: 368
My Edition: Paperback
Amazon Page

Cover Rating: A-
Book Rating: A

Plot - 17/20
Characters - 19/20
Writing - 20/20
Originality - 17/10
Entertainment - 9/10
Recommendation - 10/10
Total: 92/100

Summary:
Ballads are the kind of songs that Kara McNaughton likes best. Not the cliched ones where a diva hits her highest note or a rock band tones it down a couple of notches for the ladies, but the true ballads: the punk rocker or the country crooner telling the story of their life in three minutes, the chorus reminding their listeners of the numerous ways to screw things up. In high school, Kara helped maintain the "Stories of Suburbia" notebook, which contained newspaper articles about bizarre and often tragic events from suburbs all over and personal vignettes that Kara dubbed "ballads" written by her friends in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago. Those "ballads" were heartbreakingly honest tales of the moments when life changes and a kid is forced to grow up too soon. But Kara never wrote her own ballad. Before she could figure out what her song was about, she was leaving town after a series of disastrous events at the end of her junior year. Four years later, Kara returns to face the music, and tells the tale of her first three years of high school with her friends' "ballads" interspersed throughout.

Review:

Ballads of Suburbia is an engaging book that you want to put down a few times while reading it, but can't. At least, that's what happened to me. I read Ballads in one sitting. And it was hard. I tried to put it down for a second, but I couldn't! It was begging for me to pick it up again. I had to know what would happen. I had to know, I just had to.

I cried. I laughed. Kara was such a believable character. All of the characters were so amazingly believable. The struggle they all went through was terribly realistic. I think it made it even more hard to read seeing Kara first when she was so young and then seeing her go through her life like that. It was devastating seeing Kara like that, and Liam too.

I don't think I need to say this, but, of course, Stephanie Kuehnert's writing was impeccable. Just brilliant. So realistic, so engaging. I just have to give her kudos for writing such a mortifying novel so excellent. She's really just a exceptional writer.

*Sorry for being so late Yan! Forgive me?*

Traveling To Teens: Kerry Cohen Hoffman Tour -- Stop 2

Kerry Cohen received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon and an MA in counseling psychology from Pacific University. A practicing psychotherapist and the author of the young adult novel Easy, she lives with her husband and two sons in Portland, Oregon.
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Title: It's Not You, It's Me
Author: Kerry Cohen Hoffmann
Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers
Reading Level: Young Adult, 14+
Publication Date: June 9, 2009
Pages: 192
My Edition: Hardcover

Amazon Page

Rating: D
Plot - 13/20
Characters - 14/20
Writing - 16/20
Originality - 14/20
Entertainment - 5/10
Recommendation - 5/10
Total: 67/100

Summary:
Funny and touching—this is a heartfelt breakup story. Zoe loves Henry. Henry dumps Zoe. Zoe wants Henry back—at any cost. Zoe’s two best friends come up with a plan to help Zoe get what she thinks she wants. The plan: make Henry jealous. But the plan takes a surprising turn. . . . Spanning thirty-one days in the cycle of a breakup, Kerry Cohen Hoffmann’s humorous and poignant novel depicts a girl whose single-minded focus on her ex-boyfriend has pulled her far from the person she most needs to win back—herself.

Review:
This book looked like a short, cute and quick read. And it was. But it was also weird, strange, and stalkerish crazy. Let me explain.

Before I started this novel some people have told me that the main character was very much like a stalker, so I went in a little hesitant about it. Well, what they told me was right. She was very much a stalker in my mind, and that just did it for me. The novel went downhill from there.

The plot was terrible in the way that there wasn't very much to it and that it was very unoriginal and cliche, so it was boring. The characters were very undescriptive and were two-dimensional blah characters. They didn't feel like real human beings in their reactions.

The writing was some-what okay. Everything flowed nicely together. But it was too fast paced for the good of the novel and the emotions and feelings were there, but not taken from the character well.

Overall this novel was short, quick, and not that great. I would not recommend buying this.
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I feel terrible, but sadly I don't have an interview for you right now!

The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams T2T Tours

Welcome to the first Traveling to Teens tour! Due to some circumstances, the first month, May, will be iffy and filled with many bumps. Right now time is the main issue. First up we have Carol Lynch Williams.
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CAROL LYNCH WILLIAMS, a four-time winner of the Utah Original Writing Competition and winner of Nebraska’s Golden Sower Award, grew up in Florida but now lives in Utah with her husband and seven children. She has an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults, and helped develop the conference on Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers at Brigham Young University.
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Title: The Chosen One
Author: Carol Lynch Williams
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Reading Level: Young Adult, 12+
Publication Date: May 12, 2009
Pages: 224
My Edition: ARC
Amazon Page

Rating: B+
Plot - 17/20
Characters - 17/20
Writing - 18/20
Originality - 17/20
Entertainment - 9/10
Recommendation - 10/10
Total: 88/100

Summary:
Thirteen-year-old Kyra has grown up in an isolated polygamous community without questioning her father’s three wives and her twenty brothers and sisters. Or at least without questioning them much—if you don’t count her secret visits to the Mobile Library on Wheels to read forbidden books, or her meetings with the boy she hopes to choose for herself instead of having a man chosen for her. But when the Prophet decrees that Kyra must marry her 60-year-old uncle—who already has six wives—Kyra must make a desperate choice in the face of violence and her own fears of losing her family.

Review:
I really didn't know what to expect from this book. I hadn't heard of it before. But it sounded interesting enough. The only thing that I was unsure about from it was the age of Kyra. From what I've read, I had never read a single book where an author illustrates a thirteen year old like they really are. Carol Lynch Williams is the only author I know to be able to illustrate a thirteen year old correctly. So that automatically made it good in my book.

Kyra was a wonderful character. I loved seeing everything through her eyes. I felt what she felt. I felt her struggle with the need to runaway but also the need to want to stay with her family. She was a great character. The other characters didn't really feel alive to be. They were there, but they didn't feel there.

Williams writing was fantastic. She's a great writer.The novel was original and entertaining. The book was good. But, I don't know, it just didn't give me any 'wow' factor. I enjoy it, yes. But I still felt it wasn't anything spectacular. But nonetheless, I highly recommend it for a quick and easy read.
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1. Do you see yourself writing from a teen male perspective at any point?

I did once before (in my novel My Angelica), but I am better at girls because I am a girl, had a sister (no brothers), mostly female cousins, two aunts that I associated with, great aunts (seven or eight of them), and then I birthed five daughters from my body (one pregnancy at a time). I’m all about girls!

2.You're a writer, so it's only natural that you will get ideas for potential novels, where do you store these thoughts? Do you use little pieces of them in your novels?

When I’m working on an idea and another pops in my head I will sometimes start that new idea, get the emotion part of it on the page (the spark that made me want to write that particular piece) and then I’ll just save it in a file till I can get to it. Sometimes I do think I have two different novel ideas and it turns out that the two actually do go together.

3.How do you pick your characters names?

I use people I know. My girls names are in my books, or derivatives of their names. I use my good friends. I’ve used my enemies names (for the bad guys!). If you know a writer, watch out! You might end up in their book. I also look through the phone book. Or when I meet people, if I like their names, I borrow them for a acahracter.

4.What three words would you use to describe The Chosen One?

Family, love, choice.

5.What challenges, if any, did you face writing for young adults?

I feel pretty young in my head. Maybe my challenge is that most my readers are probably a good deal smarter than I am.