Pete Hautman

It's the late 21st century, and things are different. Bo's father and brother are in prison, like 1/3 of the men in the new USSA. Offenses like road rage and verbal assault carry heavy sentences, and the prisoners do most of the work of running the country. Bo realizes that the old saying "like father, like son" is true when he finds himself in a prison camp/pizza factory on the Canadian tundra for not controlling his temper. Prison life is dangerous, but not as dangerous as the illegal show more football team he's recruited to play on. Should he face the violence of the team, or trust his school AI project, Bork, to get him out? Will he be able to control the violence within him in the real world? show less

First sentence: Annie was swinging by herself when she noticed the curly-haired boy two houses down. She dragged her feet to stop the swing.

Premise/plot: The Rat Queen is one of those books where the less you know about the plot, the more you'll be drawn into the story. Still, I have to give you something.

Annike Klimas [Annie] is about to turn ten. On her birthday, her father gives her initiation of sorts to a [deep, dark] family secret, a ritual of sorts. Every day she's to write her show more "regrets" and "mistakes" onto a piece of paper, roll the paper up, and feed it to a hidey-hole in the floor of the study. This ritual is called "nuodeema burna." Her conscience will remain pleasantly numb and burden free so long as she feeds the "sin eater." Her father has been feeding it for years.....

But Annie begins to slowly but surely doubt the morality of this family secret. It is so very mysterious, weird, odd, strange.

Annie yearns for life....but barely lives. Her father keeps her mostly at home; she's raised by people hand-selected by her father from their home country of Litvania [fictional European country]. She loves stories, but can't help yearning for more, more, more than the fairy tales she's been raised on.

My thoughts: The world-building is excellent. The story-telling is excellent. It's got stories within stories--a handful of original stories that feel like they should be in the fairy tale canon. There are one or two stories that are traditional fairy tales included. The characters are limited--just a handful--but mostly complex. The book oozes atmosphere. It abounds in spookiness. The action--when it happens--is plenty intense. But this isn't action-packed. It's more MYSTERY and suspense than action and adventure. The mystery unfolds like Russian nesting dolls.

Who is it for???? That's what I'm wrestling with. Is it one of those books that adults will absolutely gush about and push on children??? Maybe. Maybe not. I know there are plenty of children's books that adults tend to love way more than the intended audience. But maybe there are middle graders who will love this one too.

I will say this one probably isn't for everyone. It is unevenly paced. It is driven by premise, then character, last of all action. When the action starts, its intense because the build-up has been long in coming. But I could easily see some might call it too slow. show less

Don't read the blurbs or reviews. Yes, there's something going on, but no, not everyone is going to see it right away. Just read the book. It's dark, which I generally avoid, but it's Hautman, so it's pretty much brilliant. And it's short, so if it turns out that you don't like it, you won't have wasted much time (but maybe I will have re-evaluate our friendship...).

This one was a chore. After having read so many well written, honest, appealing, and interesting Young Adult novels, I was beginning to think that it’s impossible for a novelist with adequate writing skills to produce a bad YA novel. *What Boys Really Want* has proven me wrong.

Defying the old adage, in this case, we really can judge a book by its cover. This cover depicts four presumably teenage girls curiously engrossed in a black book (which cleverly shares the novel’s title) show more emblazoned with a giant question mark. The cover image implies that the girls simply cannot suppress their curiosity about the true nature of male desire—and this heteronormative, male-centered premise permeates the novel, along with countless other sexist assumptions and stereotypes that motivate the one-dimensional characters. As for the young women who appear on the cover, three of them are (undoubtedly) upper middle class, suburban, privileged, white icons of the dominant culture. They are interchangeable, and any or all of them could easily represent any one of the three primary white female characters in the novel.

One of the young women who appears on the cover is black—but this is quite misleading, since the only person of color who appears in the novel does so briefly, and she spends no amount of time associating with the three white women. Upon encountering her, the female protagonist (Lita) describes her (Chelsea) as follows: “Chelsea had a reputation for saying whatever was on her mind, which was a little scary, but the main reason she scared me was because she was black” (p. 89). And this is just the most obvious of the offensive stereotypes that appear in this book. There’s also Dennis, the young Asian man who is great at math and science but helpless around girls to whom he is attracted. Then there’s Adam, the male protagonist who isn’t very scholarly but gets by on his charm and his wit—and by plagiarizing his best friend’s website, publishing a book, and being offered a publishing contract. Sounds plausible, right?

But even forgiving the book’s reliance on sexist and racist stereotypes, perhaps the most egregious of the book’s flaws is that it is dull. There is nothing original about this insipid, upper middle class suburban tale of goofy teenagers whose primary obsessions are getting rich, buying expensive accessories, and “figuring out” the opposite sex. The novel might hold a small degree of appeal for teens who resemble these forgettable and uninteresting characters, but adolescents who possess any level of literary sophistication will surely dismiss this as not worth their time or energy. show less