Boy Toy...Not What You Think

Based on the cover title, some of you might think Boy Toy lacks substance. I mean, what can you expect with a title like that, not to mention the curvaceous figure of the woman? Well, you’ve got it all wrong because Boy Toy by Barry Lyga is 409 pages of literary YA…yes, “literary.” The boy toy in question is actually a boy (rather than some flirtatious girl who seeks the wrong kind of attention), and the conflict faced by this boy is more of the disturbing kind--the kind you hear about on the news.

At the age of 12, the life of Josh Mendel shatters innocently like a shard of ice pricked into flesh. Josh learns how to please a woman, but to put it that way it seems something pleasantly memorable. And, in a way, this is true. Josh truly is in lust (even though he calls it love) with his 6th grade teacher, Eve Sherman, but his teacher is a pedophile. What she teaches him turns his life upside down when he put her lessons to use on his best friend, Rachel, during a game of spin-the-bottle. Then comes the whole media exposure and lurid details of the teacher-student affair, the numerous failed dates and relationships, and of course the psychological impact.

Josh continually deals with what he calls flickers. These are moments of past meeting the present--the flickers he hears at any given moment, the flickers of sexuality, the flickers of the boyhood adoration of his mother, the flickers that merge his tormentor and his girlfriend, the flickers that distort his reality, and the flickers that externalize his inner conflict, his anguish, and his fear on the page. On top of all this is the aggression he feels towards the world, especially authority figures and the compulsion he has to be perfect in school work and in baseball. He is an unmatched player at both. And, then there are the transcripts of his sessions with the psychologist through which you, as the reader, may also act as the psychoanalyst.

So, what makes it "literary?" The delivery of the flickers, the presentation of Josh's mind, and the non-linearity of the plot. As for the flickers, they come at any moment and distort his reality:

“Just then—it’s really embarrassing—I flicker
-slide my hand up her skirt—
And come back to the present. Weird. That was Rachel, in the flicker.”

(As opposed to the molestor, Eve)

Some of the most effective moments come from the passages relating to baseball, math, and science. This is where you can see a glimpse of his drives and motivations and his need for precision. To Josh, baseball is a mathematical equation but not his true passion as some might think; baseball is more of test of will for him, but math and science have the potential of much more greatness, at least to him. And, in a way, his views of the universe are the same views he needs to move his own life forward:

“I love the stars. Love them for how they are almost as much as for what they are. Stars are just mathematical equations, when you get right down to it. Precise ratios of helium and hydrogen, heated and lit just the right way, all of it balanced and perfect for billions of years as they slowly churn their way toward iron, toward entropy. Space is one big mathematical constuct. It’s just figuring out gravity and electromanetism and thrust and lift and BOOM you’re off the earth…”

Boy Toy is extremely well written and reflects the psychological impact of sexual abuse through its effective non-linearity, meaning that the present is sliced up by his flickers, and the story is told from different points of time, from a moment after his 13th birthday to his present situation as an 18 year old high school senior, back to the beginning of the affair and then back to the presen.t As he puts it, “the ending began and the beginning ended.” And, yes there is a love story. To me…that makes it even better:

“She kisses me again and something happens. Something I never expected to happen. I close my eyes and lean into the kiss and I slide my hands up her arms until I’m surrounding her, holding her, hugging her to me. Her arms slip around me and we’re clenched tightly together, kissing.”

Want to read more of Barry Lyga? Read The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl. (a book I highly recommend--especially if you want to read a novel that deals with the world of graphic novesl)...then read the sequel Goth Girl Rising coming out this fall. I definitely will.

Stay With Me...This Summer

Hello, YA world! I've got two great books for your summer reading list...Stay With Me by Garret Freymann-Weyr and Boy Toy by Barry Lyga. I can't say which is better, but they both have moments of intensity drawn out by poignant characters with strong voices. Stay With Me deals with the intracies of love, but now that I've said this, well, I have to say that the same is true of Boy Toy. You know, I meant to just give you a brief synopsis of each, but now I think I'm about to get on a roll with Stay With Me. It is an awesome book, and I can't just let it to go with a few words. Boy Toy will have to wait a little longer.

Let me ask you some questions. Ok, how do you come to terms with a father who lived a different life with a different family before you were born? How do you come to understand the suicide of a half-sister who forgot to say goodbye? How do you know if love will stay with you when you have evidence of it leaving all around you? For Leila Abrenel, whose life has been shaped by dyslexia, none of these questions are black or white, and the answers become more muddied when she falls in love and begins a relationship many would call scandolous based on a large age gap.

Here is an excerpt in which Leila is speaking of Eamon, the man she loves, and Rebecca, her deceased half sister:

Still, I think about him more than I don't. If I'm not careful, I think about him all the time. What would it take to return to the ease of feeling safe and appreciated? The way I did with him? It would take, I decide being twenty. Better to think of my dead sister than a man whose kiss I will remember forever. Even if he vanishes as completely as Rebecca has.

Great, isn't it? And, here's another where Leila describes her father's great, ruined love:

After all, my father's great love was not with my mother but with theirs. Janie and Julian's marriage didn't just produce my sisters, but a great ruin. When I found him, he was ruined, is exactly how my mother puts it. She means that he missed my sisters and was distracted by being lonely and confused. But I think something else was going on.

Wow, a great ruin. Makes me think of ancient Greece, the Parthenon, the statue of Venus de Milo with a shattered beauty and jagged purity of form. I guess love is sometimes too brilliant to remain; only fragments linger as small glimmers in a photograph.

All I can say now is that Stay With Me is built on a foundation of many layers. All the nuances of love are explored throught a believable, honest narrative voice. Leila is not the kind of girl you'll find in chick-lit novels. She is as real as they come.

The Reluctant Heiress...Falls for Guy

I am now a new fan of historical romance thanks to The Reluctant Heiress by Iva Ibbotson. I never thought I'd like historical romance, and when I picked up this novel I wasn't even sure if it fit the category. I had a biased idea that historical romance was something with an exceedingly high amount of historical details surrounding a sordid love affair. I was thinking "Gone with the Wind" or some other grand, romantic epic. But, after googling, well, I've learned this is a sub-genre mixture of romance and historical fiction, and it includes any romance with a real historical setting taking place before WWII. Yes, some of it will have swashbuckling pirates (think I'll stay away from those), but if Ibbotson is an example of some of the better historical romance out there, then I'm in.

As for the historical setting in The Reluctant Heiress, it is the same as Iva Ibbotson's childhood home--Vienna, Austria. However, the time period is the early 1920's, a couple years before Ibottson's birth of 1925. I love how the narrative describes Vienna as a "dismembered empire: a city impovershed by defeat, in the grip of inflation, but still beautiful" where the people celebrated art even through the desolation left by the Great War. I am a social studies teacher, so this type of writing really appeals to me. And, it is in this landscape where a fated love develops between an unlikely match--the diminutive, delicately framed Austrian princess, Theresa-Maria of Pfaffenstein and the dark haired, debonairre Guy Farne of orphaned origin.

But, Guy is a self-made man who graduated at the top of his class and who made millions with his own investment company. He is rich, powerful, and in love with a beautiful, yet vain woman who comes from old, aristocratic money and whose family once rejected Guy as a proper suitor due to his low born status. As for the princess, she is the last in a long line of Pfaffenstein royalty. But WWI left the Austrian aristocracy on shaky ground, and the princess has been forced to sell her castle. But, Tessa has never been the typical princess of excess and indulgence. She calls herself a republican and believes in art as the great equalizer of mankind. And, she is employed for free by a Viennese opera company as a wardrobe mistress.

Well, as you would guess, Guy is buying the castle as a gift for his arrogant fiancee and commissioning the Viennese opera company to perform a special peformance of the opera, "Magic Flutes." Little does he know that the young girl with the shorn hair and love of music he found weeping below a theater corridor is the owner of the castle. At Tessa's arrival to the castle, Guy immediately feels decieved and breaks Tessa's heart with his cold manner. Well, I won't tell you the rest, but the most romantic part of the novel is also the most heartbreaking scene where you will find some very memorable lines...kind of like the famous "you had me at hello" from the movie "Jerry Maguire." Here it's "You can be my star sister. You can at least be that." You'll just have to read it to get the full impact.

Above all, The Reluctant Heiress is beautifully written and suitable for all ages without one sordid detail or excessive fit of passion. About the only thing I would've loved more would have been one final, strong romance scene. But, beyond this, the novel is excellent and that one gut wrenching scene is great for any romantic at heart.

What I've Been Reading

Well, the inevitable has happened…I’ve actually been too busy to blog and I feel terrible about it. The end of the school year, the start of summer school, living room furniture shopping, all kinds of movies on Direct TV. All this in one week with no time to sit down and actually write a good review. You know what really set me back was the filtering system at my school that now blocks any blog. So, I can’t check it or get access to it or post anything.


But I have been reading. Right now it's The Reluctant Heiress by Eva Ibbotson. I have never read anything by this author, and generally I don’t enjoy novels that have non-contemporary settings. But, it’s got romance, and I’m at that part where the two main characters are growing fond of one another without fully understanding what is happening between them.


Before that I read one of my new all time favorite novels (the list is always growing!)…Stay With Me by Garret Freymann Weyr. Wow. This is what I want to write! I must write a full review soon!


I will post a review soon! Hopefully tonight! Unless The Reluctant Heiress gets in the way!

The Hollow...Coming in September

I finally have 4 "Followers"...how exciting! And, one of them, Jessica Verday, is about to have her first published novel released in September--The Hollow. Congratulations, Jessica! I am honored to have you follow my blog.

I just went to her website (beautiful, by the way) and read the first chapter, and now I can't wait to read the entire novel. I mean, the tagline alone will get anybody hooked--A haunting love story lies within.

And, for all those of you who were let down by Breaking Dawn, being that it was the last of the Twilight series or because of all the weird plot elements taking the focus off Edward and Bella...personally, Twilight should have remained a trilogy since Eclipse is a near perfect ending in my opinion...OK. I just had to finally put that out there. I am not a fan of Breaking Dawn. But, back to what I was saying.

And, for all those of you who were left wanting more after the death of Twilight, Jessica Verday's new paranormal romance will definitely call out to you. Just look at the book cover.

If that's not enough, then know that the setting is filled with the fall foliage of maple and cherry trees surrounding the local cemetary and the legendary town of Sleep Hollow. Yes, the Sleepy Hollow from The Legend of Sleep Hollow. Jessica's modern take on an old legend begins with the mysterious death of Kristen, best friend to The Hollow's heroine, Abbey. Fueled by rumor and small town mentality, many in the community believe Kristen committed suicide by the bridge near the cemetary, but Abbey has diffucitly even accepting the fact that her BFF is dead. Abbey sets out to solve this mystery, opening up a web of secrets with the ultimate secret pointing beyond Kristen's death to something and someone that will personally shake up Abbey's world. And, who is this mysterious, brooding, hot anti-hero? Caspian. Caspian must be the same guy described in a handwritten script on Verday's website--the one Abbey fears will fuse with her skin and soul if she touches him. Hmmn...is Caspian the new Edward? And to think I wouldn't have known anything about this book if Jessica had not become a "Follower" on my blog! Thanks, Jessica! I am really looking forward to reading more of your novel and posting a full review in September.

http://www.jessicaverday.com/