Tag Archives: unusual fiction

Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaria

26 Thursday May 2016

Posted by in Young Adult

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love letters

Dellaria tells the story of Laurel’s journey from the death of her sister and the breakup of her family to emotional healing in a most unusual way.  Laurel writes letters to famous dead people in her journal. This began as an English class writing assignment.  The point was to have the students write to a famous dead person about what effect their lives had had on them.  Laurel begins writing but never turns in the assignment.  She, instead, begins to write more and more letters to her “pen pals.”  She feels she cannot share the letters even though not doing so affects her grade in the class.

The people to whom she writes are very diverse: Kurt Cobain, Amelia Earhart, Jim Morrison, and John Keats.  Each of these people had died a very tragic death or had suffered from some tragic events in their lives.  Laurel’s letters to the dead gradually reveals to the reader what really happened the night her sister died.

This is a fantastic story told in a most unusual manner. I think teen readers will enjoy it, and I know they will learn more about the people to whom Laurel writes.  I recommend this for libraries that service middle school to high school readers.

Marked by Laura Williams McCaffery

16 Monday May 2016

Posted by in Political fiction, Young Adult

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This book is not at all what I expected when I picked it up. I had thought that it might be about tattoos and people’s reactions to them. While it IS about tattoos, it is more about a dystopian society that touts education as a way to move up in society while, at the same time, making it nearly impossible for that to happen.

In this society, if a person is caught in a misdemeanor crime such as buying food or medicine in a “shadow market” – an unsanctioned market where items are available that are not normally available in the regular stores, they immediately receive a tattoo around their wrist. Three tattoos, and they go to prison. Tattoos are given immediately without any sort of trial – only that the police had caught them doing something “illegal.”

Lyla Northstrom is one such girl who has received a mark when she went to a shadow market to buy medicine for her ailing mother because her mother is not able to get medical care from any acceptable medical facility.  A police officer, who she has known since a child, offers her a way to redeem herself and to get her mark removed.  He wants her to spy on one of her best friends who has also been marked for participating in underground activity. She must decide if her freedom from condemnation and a chance to get an education is worth betraying her friend. As she gets further into the underworld and into the world of the government that is controlling her world, she learns that many things are not as they seem.

This book is also a sort of commentary on the control that government can get over people’s lives and the results of that control. I watched a documentary on freedom just yesterday, and I was hit with the comment that one can either have economic freedom OR government regulations – not both.  This books is a good example of what MIGHT happen if the government reigns supreme in all aspects of one’s life.  It is too frighteningly possible for such a society too exist is freedoms are eroded one by one.

This story is told as a combination standard novel and graphic novel, an unusual approach but may help get the graphic novel people reading something a little more challenging.  I could not list it as a graphic novel, but it does have elements of that genre in it.  And, one of the characters does write a type of graphic novels.

 

the strange and beautiful sorrows of ava lavender

06 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by in Fantasy, Young Adult

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I did not make a mistake typing the title!  This is exactly how the title appears on the book.  Strange, isn’t it? But, it fits the story because this book is weird from the get-go.

This is a story of love, life and death.  It begins with Ava’s great-grandparents who emigrate from France to the U.S.  The family has strange things that happen to them both in France and in the U.S. The father is a big hard-working man with a very over-active imagination.  One day he goes to work and never is seen again. The mother is very quiet, and she finally disappears into a small pile of blue ashes. Emilienne is thought by many to be a witch. Pierette, the youngest, falls in love with an ornithologist and turns herself into a canary to make him happy.  When she dies, Emilienne carries her body around in a lozenge box.  René, the only boy, has girls swooning over him, but he prefers boys and gets himself killed because of it.  Margaux becomes pregnant, and Emilienne discovers that her fiancé is the father of her sister’s baby, but both Margaux and the baby die, and Emilienne throws her former fiancé out a window. (He lives and runs away.)

After the death of all of her loved ones, Emilienne marries Connor Lavender, a man she doesn’t love, because she wants to be a good wife to him BUt mostly it is because she wants to leave her past behind. Still, she feels she can’t give her heart to anyone because she will only lose that person.  Connor Lavendar and Emilienne move to Seattle where they live into a house with a very unusual past. No one in Seattle wants to live there so the couple has no problem obtaining it.  Emilienne gives birth to one child, Vivianne. Connor is very devoted to Emilienne, but he dies on night of a heart attack. Emilienne takes her baby to the bakery shop Connor had started and continues to his work.

Then the story really gets strange. A young man from town takes advantage of Vivienne and impregnates her with twins.  Vivienne’s son is strange – today we would call him autistic, – and the girl, Ava, is born with wings.  No one seems to know why she has wings.  She can’t fly with them, but the doctors say they can’t remove them.  Vivianne isolates the children at home to keep the people in Seattle from making fun of them, but as all teenagers are wont to do, Ava sneaks out with a neighbor girl she had become friends with and joins up with some teens at the reservoir.

The teens accept Ava with her wings, and life goes on. A young man even falls in love with her, but another man in their community becomes obsessed with her.  This man attacks Ava, rapes her, and cuts off her wings one night as she is coming home from the reservoir. The entire book is about these strange people, but nothing is explained about what caused Ava’s wings – or anything else for that matter. There seems to be very little plot.  There are characters that seem very real and draw the reader into their personalities. These characters are multidimensional and their lives are intertwined, but there is no real resolution to any situation.

The book reminds me, for some reason of As I Lay Dying.  (I couldn’t figure out the purpose for that book either.)  Even the end of this book is difficult to explain.  Ava’s wings regrow, and she soars off into the night. But is she really alive? or is she soaring off to death? I honestly can’t find any reason to recommend it for purchase by school libraries.  Perhaps another reviewer might feel differently, but that is my opinion.