The Wall–by Peter Sis

Sis, Peter.  The Wall.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

Peter is a regular guy.  He’s into rock music, forms a band with his friends, and gets a job as a DJ on a radio show.

(excerpts from Peter’s journal)

February 1967: I form a rock group with my friends, but we have no instrument and we haven’t settled on a name yet.  My father makes me get a haircut.  I paint people with long hair.
May 1967: We start making instruments.  It’s hard to make an electric guitar.  You plug it into the radio and it blows a fuse.
August 1967: Hop-picking time again—a good way to meet girls.  After working all day, we get together and sing Beatles songs.

Everything’s great, except for the wrench in the works: he lives in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War.

(more excerpts)

January-February 1969: Jan Palach and Jan Zajic, students, set themselves on fire to “wake up the nation from lethargy.”
1970: Vetvicka, a fun guy and bass player, died of head injuries after the police beat him in the melee following the Beach Boys concert.
1976: The Plastic People of the Universe rock band are in prison.  I used to argue with them, and do not care for their music—but prison?

Peter is a regular guy, but he lives in a world full of lies and brutality.  For his story of resistance, you’ll need to read on…

The Golden Compass–by Philip Pullman

Pullman, Philip.  The Golden Compass.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

Picture this.  Like everyone else, you have a creature, called a daemon, that follows you around all the time, as your constant companion.  While you’re young, it can change into any kind of animal, and as you become an adult, it settles on a permanent form.  It is, as nearly as we have words for in this universe, your soul.  When someone comes between you and your soul…well, you get the picture.  It isn’t pretty.

Children are disappearing.  Your uncle is being held captive for some mysterious, and no doubt dangerous, cause.  Just when you’ve found a job in your dream home, you receive a rare magical object and instructions to keep it a secret.

Are you brave enough to jump into the void?

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time–by Mark Haddon

Haddon, Mark.  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.  New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Christopher loves animals, is better at understanding them than people.  So when he’s walking through his neighborhood and sees a neighborhood dog dead in its yard, stabbed through the middle with a garden fork, he wants to investigate.

What makes this different from the usual boy-and-dog mystery story, though, is that Christopher is autistic. He has a brilliantly logical brain, but he cannot understand human emotion, is overwhelmed by the amount of information streaming in from the world, and depends entirely on structure and order to get himself through the day. Just functioning in the everyday activities of his life can be challenging, let alone finding the culprit in a murder.  Here’s what happens when the police arrive at the scene and find Christopher with the murdered dog:

“He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly.  They were stacking up in my head like loaves in the factory where Uncle Terry works.  The factory is a bakery and he operates the slicing machines.  And sometimes a slicer is not working fast enough but the bread keeps coming and there is a blockage.  I sometimes think of my mind as a machine, but not always as a bread-slicing machine.  It makes it easier to explain to other people what is going on inside it.
“The policeman said, ‘I am going to ask you once again…’
“I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that father calls groaning.  I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world.  It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all you can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else.
“The policeman took hold of my arm and lifted me onto my feet.
“I didn’t like him touching me like this.
“And this is when I hit him.” (p. 7-8)

To find out more about what happens when Christopher meets the police, the conclusion of the murder mystery, and the even more compelling mystery of his parents’ marriage, which turns his life completely upside down and makes him wonder who if anyone he can trust, read on.

An Abundance of Katherines–by John Green

Green, John.  An Abundance of Katherines.  New York: Dutton Books, 2006

“When it comes to girls (and in Colin’s case, it so often did), everyone has a type.  Colin Singleton’s type was not physical but linguistic: he liked Katherines.  And not Katies or Kats or Kitties or Cathys or Rynns or Trinas or Kays or Kates or, God forbid, Catherines.  K-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E.  He had dated nineteen girls.  All of them had been named Katherine.  And all of them—every single solitary one—had dumped him.” (p. 15)

When his heart is broken by Katherine XIX right after he graduates from high school, Colin’s friend Hassan convinces him to go on a road trip to cheer him up.  The pair land summer jobs in Gutshot, Tennessee, a middle-of-nowhere town with boring tours to the grave of European Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a former reputation for illegal prize fighting, and Lindsey Lee Wells—a beautiful, funny, intelligent girl.  Who already has a boyfriend.

But Colin’s problems are not limited to his…shall we say, unique…love life.  He is also a former child prodigy who doesn’t understand why it’s not cool to talk about his pupillary sphincter.  (I’ll let you all read to find out about that one.)  Like many former child stars and prodigies, he is finding out exactly how painful that “former”-ness is.  And he is determined to leave his mark on the world by inventing a mathematical theorem to predict the success or failure of romantic relationships.  Care to find out how successful he is?

Story of a Girl–by Sara Zarr

Zarr, Sara.  Story of a Girl.  New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007.

“I was thirteen when my dad caught me with Tommy Webber in the back of Tommy’s Buick, parked next to the old Chart House down in Montara at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night.  Tommy was seventeen and the supposed friend of my brother, Darren.  I didn’t love him.  I’m not sure I even liked him…My dad dragged him out of the car, then me.  He threw Tommy to the ground and pushed me into our old Tercel.  Right before we pulled out of the lot, I stole a look at my dad.  There might have been tears slipping down his cheek, or it might have been a trick of the headlights bouncing off the night fog.  I started to say something.  I don’t remember what.  ‘Don’t,’ he said.  That was almost three years ago.  My dad hasn’t looked me in the eye or talked to me, really talked to me, since.” (p. 1-2)

So now Deanna’s sixteen and the school slut…except she’s not.  She’s a girl who made a mistake three years ago, but once Tommy has spread it around their small town, she’ll never hear the end of it no matter what she does.  To make matters worse, her family is completely screwed up; her dad still won’t talk to her, her brother went and got his girlfriend pregnant, and her mother is way out of touch with reality.  Her only two friends have started dating, leaving her as a serious third wheel; and to top it all off, when she walks into her summer job, there stands her co-worker—Tommy.  That Tommy.

And you thought you had problems.