A Review of The Magnolia League by Katie Crouch

If you liked Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, check out the first book in this new series by Katie Crouch, which is even more Southern gothic, if that's possible. Crouch has cleverly transformed the idea of the debutante into an initiation ritual into a secret occult society. Turns out the rich and beautiful women of Savannah, Georgia, owe their success to a pact with a clan of voodoo practitioners, the Buzzards. And now that Alex Lee's hippie mother is dead, Alex has been sent home to live with her grandmother, who is the powerful leader of the Magnolia League.

Of course, Alex doesn't know any of this at first, just as she has no clue about the significance of the necklace her mother left her. No questions about the way her mother died, either...

Alex snoops around, wondering why everyone is acting so strange—why she's not supposed to talk to the charismatic Sam Buzzard and why her grandmother is so determined for Alex to become a deb. Most of all, she wants to get out of town, right back to the hippie commune in Northern California where she thinks she's found true love in the form of a slacker named Reggie.

Crouch has a great time giving her basic premise a twist by making Alex a modern-day hippie child. In fact, Alex's personality is my favorite thing about the book, which begins, "You know what I hate? Sweet tea." And goes on to give us lines like this one from a knowing fellow deb: "'We're the New South,' Hayes says. 'Like Justin Timberlake.'" Take a look at Alex at an outdoor party with her deb "friends":

The guys all wear a uniform: khaki shorts, a polo shirt, and a baseball cap. The girls, on the other hand, look like exotic birds, bright, colorful, dressed to the nines, even though they're out here in this dusty field. The boys bob their heads solemnly to the music and drink seriously out of their red plastic cups; the girls laugh loudly and manage to text nonstop while juggling cigarettes, plastic cups, lighters, and purses and still never missing a beat in their conversations. All of them are slapping at the mosquitoes that swarm their faces. All of them, that is, except Hayes, Madision, and me. I can hear the insects whining in my ears, but for some reason, they aren't biting.

"It's our perfume," Hayes explains, spraying more on me. "Magnolia herbal secret."

"Herbal?"

"The Magnolia League was into herbal medicine way before anyone else was," Madison says. "Why do you think they all look so forever twenty-one?"

"My mom knew a lot about herbs," I say. "Maybe that's where it comes from."

Alex's plans to return to Mendocino don't play out quite the way she thought they would, and meanwhile, she has met a new guy, the troubled and troubling Thaddeus. She has also made friends with a couple of fellow outsiders, to her grandmother's horror.

As a reader, you may find yourself shocked when free spirit Alex is seduced by the joys of being a member of the league, pulling away from her new geek friends as she discovers that voodoo can give her things like shiny, cooperative hair and easy weight loss. (Alex is a bit on the chubby side.) Then again, she is a teenage girl, and she doesn't completely sell her soul, at least not without some trickery on the part of Hayes and Madison and her own grandmother.

But Thaddeus—and the awful truth about the Magnolia League—aren't that easy to avoid, and Alex finds herself more torn than ever as the book comes to a close and she's hit with a huge, nasty plot twist.

First-person present tense narrative, pop culture references, and a cliffhanger ending: This book is trendy, yet manages to avoid being a paranormal clone. The characters are truly intriguing, especially the Buzzards. The premise and plot twists are satisfyingly dark as well as human, and tempered by the author's sly humor. A bit of a beach read, but a good one!

Note for Worried Parents: The California commune is a pot farm, more so after Alex's mother dies, and Alex herself smokes pot rather casually. She is also fairly casual about the idea of sex and has fooled around a bit with her older hippie boyfriend, though she's never gone all the way.

Visit Katie Crouch's website here. She has written adult fiction set in the South, as well.

My thanks to the publisher for providing me with a review copy of this book.

A Review of Legacies by Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill

Yes, it's a bunch of magical kids at a boarding school—again! But this is no Harry Potter. It's a YA series start by a couple of powerhouse adult fantasy writers, so the tone is more Forks than Hogwarts.

Our story begins when Spirit White's entire family is killed in a car accident that might have had an evil magical component. Spirit is told that her parents left her in the guardianship of a mysterious school. And though the White family never had much, the school appears to be made of money. Unseen school administrators buy Spirit clothes and transport her by limo and private plane, till she finally arrives at Oakhurst, a school out in the middle of nowhere, AKA rural Montana.

The headmaster is no kindly Dumbledore; he introduces Spirit and her travel companion, a boy named Lachlan (Loch), to the reality of magic by turning them into mice and himself into an owl, then terrifying them, even slashing Spirit's arm with his talons. Later encounters will lead Spirit—and readers—to wonder if Doctor Ambrosius has some kind of Jekyll and Hyde thing going.

The eeriness continues as Spirit meets other students and instructors. In addition to Loch, she makes friends with a boy who has warrior magic named Burke, an illusionist named Muirin, and a water witch named Addie. But she gradually realizes that the administrators and teachers make a point of pitting students against each other, with an "only the strong survive" mentality. So, um, are the people running Oakhurst evil? (Note that this is a thoroughly YA take on the world—the grown-ups are out to get us!)

Of course, Spirit's paranoia seems justified when she and her friends find out that students are disappearing, and only at certain times of the year—say, at summer solstice or Halloween. Together, they try to solve the magical mystery, while keeping their investigation and even their friendships under the radar of the likes of Doctor Ambrosius.

Another mystery is Spirit's magic. When she and Loch are tested, he turns out to have the magical gifts of Kenning, Shadow Walking, and Pathfinding. Spirit seems to have no gifts, which anyone who's read a YA paranormal will correctly interpret to mean that at some point, she will end up having powerful magic.

The book drags in spots, e.g., when the authors go on and on describing the school and later when the kids seem slow to figure out exactly which mythological force is menacing students. Still, it's a pretty good read. There's a little romance, a lot of suspense, and a likable heroine. Legacies is the first book in the new Shadow Grail series, and fans of Kelly Armstrong and Stephenie Meyer will enjoy following the adventures of Spirit White and her friends.

Note for Worried Parents: Teens are snatched and killed by scary supernatural creatures. The deaths are left to the readers' imagination; however, the big climactic battle scene is pretty intense. A minor character smokes, and there's a mention of drugs.

A Review of Hex Hall by Rachel Hawkins

I'm amazed I picked up this book. There are just so many teen books about vampire academies and fairy academies and zombie academies out there that I tend to walk right on by. But Hex Hall, besides having great cover art, gave me the feeling that it wouldn't take itself too seriously, and sure enough, I enjoyed Rachel Hawkins' take on the paranormal school story. Another first-timer, the author is a former high school English teacher, so she does know her teens and can no doubt diagram a mean sentence.

The initial scene in Hex Hall would be the last scene in a different book: young witch Sophie Mercer takes pity on a dateless fellow prom-goer and arranges for the girl's crush to come and dance with her. Only Sophie overdoes the spell and prom goes haywire. (As one boy shouts out, "Carrie prom!") A few days later, Sophie finds herself at a reform school for young Prodigium, meaning witches, faeries, and shapeshifters. All of them have misused their powers, putting the secretive supernatural community at risk.

Oh, and there's just one vampire—who happens to be Sophie's roommate and inspires fear in the other students. One of the funniest moments of the book is when Sophie sees how Jenna has decorated their room:

I don't know what I was expecting a vampire's room to look like. Maybe lots of black, a bunch of books by Camus...oh, and a sensitive portrait of the only human the vamp had ever loved, who had no doubt died of something beautiful and tragic, thus dooming the vamp to an eternity of moping and sighing romantically....
But this room looked like it had been decorated by the unholy lovechild of Barbie and Strawberry Shortcake... The curtains were beige canvas, but Jenna had twined a hot-pink scarf over the drapery rod. Between the two desks was one of those old Chinese screens, but even this bore Jenna's stamp, as the wood had been painted—you guessed it: pink. The top of the screen was draped with pink Christmas lights. Jenna's bed was covered in what appeared to be deep pink Muppet fur.
Jenna caught me staring at it. "Awesome, right?"
"I...I didn't know pink existed in that particular shade."

As you can see, Sophie has a lively narrative voice, which helps counterbalance the darker elements of this story.

Our heroine soon runs afoul of a coven of popular witches, all of whom look like supermodels. When Sophie refuses to join their ranks, they go out of their way to make her life miserable. It doesn't help that the boy Sophie finds herself attracted to, Archer, is dating the coven ringleader, or that Archer insulted Sophie himself when they first met. But a Hex Hall version of detention throws Sophie and Archer together, and they gradually become friends.

Meanwhile, Sophie plays detective, trying to figure out how a student who used to be in the coven died, especially after another student is attacked. She also learns some surprising news about her long-absent father and has a strange encounter with an apparent ghost. A group of humans determined to wipe out all Prodigium provides a big-picture threat that the author will be clearly be developing in future books. Hex Hall ends with a twist that caught me completely off guard.

Interestingly, Hyperion lists this book's intended audience as "11 and up." By which they mean tweens as well as teens, of course. (Amazon just says 9-12, although the book is too teenagey to be considered middle grade fiction.) I'm beginning to wonder if what I would call "wholesome YAs" will eventually get their own category as publishers try to reach the tween market without going quite as edgy as the more mature YA books.

If you've read Marlene Perez's Dead Is the New Black and sequels, you'll have a ballpark idea of this book's tone, although Hawkins tells a longer, more detailed story. For those who like their witches and vampires with a touch of humor, Hex Hall promises to be the start of a satisfying series.

Note for Worried Parents: Girls die in a gruesome way, and there are scary supernatural threats. Also some romance and kissing.

Update: Here's an interview with Rachel Hawkins at Enchanted Inkpot (September 2010).

A Review of Jack: Secret Circles by F. Paul Wilson

Here's another Book Two, Jack: Secret Circles, which follows Jack: Secret Histories, published in 2008. Both books are essentially prequels to the author's adult series about a man called Repairman Jack. In fact, after I read the first book about a teenage Jack, I went looking for some of the Repairman Jack books. They are quite bleak, a cross between detective fiction and horror. What I like best about them is the idea of the title character. Jack operates off the grid, solving problems that can't be solved by the law. This makes him something of a vigilante, although Wilson gives him a supernatural mythos, defining him as a dark warrior for the Light, AKA an antihero. The most intriguing thing about Repairman Jack is how creatively he solves problems, although his turn-the-tables approach sometimes backfires.

The books about young Jack aren't quite as successful as the adult series, but they still have plenty to recommend them. Jack lives near Jersey's Pine Barrens, where supernatural creatures roam and a secret society steals powerful magical objects. Jack himself is more of a pragmatist in his initial attempts at troubleshooting. His realism balances out the effect of the supernatural components of the story, in fact.

In Secret Circles, Jack tries to help his friend Weezy retrieve a mystical artifact that was taken from her in the first book, clearly by the secretive Lodge, a group led by creepy Mr. Drexler. Weezy is convinced that people like Mr. Drexler also have access to a book she is sure exists, The Secret History of the World. Jack doesn't believe her, but what if she's right?

Meanwhile, the circus is in town, a five-year-old boy is missing, and a monster is roaming the Pine Barrens, where Jack and Weezy discover an ancient stone structure that seems to have been designed as a cage. And when Jack discovers that a respected citizen beats his wife, he tries to make things right, only to find out that some problems aren't easily solved.

Adult writers who switch to writing for teens and children sometimes have trouble with the transition. Wilson's Jack is occasionally too grown-up in his thinking, and the author's pacing reflects the more leisurely adult novel, dragging in spots. Mostly, though, I suspect that Wilson's grand vision of his Secret History of the World books, which he is filling in little by little as outlined in an elaborate chart at the back of this and every book, sometimes lead him to forget to simply settle down and do some storytelling. So the plot's kind of up and down, too.

But I still like these books. F. Paul Wilson has an interesting mind, and Jack is one of speculative fiction's most original characters. For young conspiracy theorists who like some paranormal with their suspense, the YA Jack stories are a creep-worthy read.

Note for Worried Parents: I looked up the target audience on Amazon, and it's ages 9-12. This is another book that I feel has more of a teen/tween sensibility than a middle grade one. The darkest parts of Secret Circles are probably some horror elements (dead bodies) and the wife-beating, though both are presented in a fairly restrained manner. Some parents may be bothered by the author's attempt to show that the wife who is being beaten resents being rescued, but it's really pretty thought-provoking, illuminating Jack's growing awareness that there are a lot of things he doesn't understand about other people's lives. I would recommend a family discussion about this aspect of the plot.

A Review of Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

Beautiful Creatures is another YA that seems to be have been inspired by Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, but Garcia and Stohl do some interesting things with the concept of star-crossed paranormal soulmates.

Here the Bella character and narrator is played by a boy, Ethan Wate, who lives in a tiny Southern town called Gatlin. Ethan is drawn to the new girl, Lena Duchannes, though the rest of the kids at school and indeed the entire town quickly deems her socially unacceptable. Aside from her artsy goth-punk style of dressing, Lena is the niece of the sinister Old Man Ravenwood, a recluse who lives on a large plantation-turned-estate on the edge of town. Lena is also very beautiful, dark-haired and green-eyed. She's the Edward character in this novel, of course.

And even before she moves to town, Ethan is dreaming of her. In his dreams, he is saving Lena from falling.

So, despite the warnings of both his peers and his elders and even the girl herself, Ethan seeks Lena out. Together, they begin to investigate the history of an earlier pair of ill-fated lovers, a couple who lived during Civil War days. Ethan learns that while he is merely a Mortal, Lena and her family are Casters, a type of witch or wizard. And when Lena turns sixteen, she will either turn light or dark. It seems she won't have much choice in the matter. Even so, her cousin Ridley and her estranged mother are making trouble, hoping to pull Lena toward the evil side of the equation. But Lena's unusual connection to Ethan surprises everyone, and might even confound her fate.

This series start contains predictable elements such as the gorgeous mean girl at school, dark talismans, ancient books full of secrets, and what has recently become a trope: the human-friendly family of witches/vampires/werewolves (AKA Cullens) who are trying to defeat their evil, human-hating counterparts. But what kind of YA paranormal would it be without some of those elements, I ask you?

Lena makes a good doomed-or-is-she-really love interest, and Ethan is a likable narrator. Here he tells what happens when he tries to bring Lena to sit with his friends at lunch:

If this was a movie, we would've sat down at the table with the guys, and they would've learned some kind of valuable lesson, like not to judge people by the way they look, or that being different was okay. And Lena would've learned that all jocks weren't stupid and shallow. It always seemed to work in movies, but this wasn't a movie. This was Gatlin, which severely limited what could happen. Link caught my eye as I turned toward the table, and started shaking his head, as in, no way, man. Lena was a few steps behind me, ready to bolt. I was beginning to see how this was going to play out, and let's just say no one was going to be learning any valuable lessons.

The teens act and talk like teens, and the story flows nicely. I especially liked how these authors used nasty small-town gossip to fuel plot twists, later tying that destroy-by-grapevine campaign to another subplot in surprising ways. The town's secret paranormal library and its librarian are another fun touch. YA readers looking for a follow-up to the Twilight books might just find themselves hooked by Beautiful Creatures.

Note: I requested this book from the Amazon Vine program.

Scary YA Extravaganza

In case you haven't noticed, the post-Potter fantasy wave has been replaced by the post-Twilight paranormal wave, only the emphasis is much more Young Adult this time around. So I've saved up the most recent batch of teen paranormal books I've read in an attempt to look at some of the kinds of things people are doing. Happily, writers are branching out: only two of these books contain vampires, and they're barely mentioned in one of the two.


PARANORMAL GETS CUTE

Dead Is So Last Year by Marlene Perez

This is the author's third book about Daisy Giordano, a psychic teen living in the town of Nightshade. The place has such a large supernatural population that there's a semi-secret city council to represent them. Daisy herself is one of three psychic sisters, and her boyfriend Ryan isn't exactly normal, either. Of the three books, the first one, Dead Is the New Black, is my favorite so far—I love how a maybe-vampire cheerleader set a new style trend by dressing in black and hauling around a miniature coffin on wheels as a fashion accessory. Book Two, Dead Is a State of Mind, focused on werewolves plus Daisy's prom date problems, and now Book Three gives us doppelgangers, mad scientists, witches, and howlingly steroidal football players. In particular, Dead Is So Last Year brings up the matter of Daisy's missing father, who disappeared before the series began and is suspected to have been the victim of paranormal foul play.

As I put it in my Amazon review of Book Two, "I've been trying to imagine what paranormal cotton candy would look like. I think it would be gray. So if Twilight is a big haunch of beef roast, gleaming slightly with blood, Dead Is a State of Mind is gray cotton candy." Perez's books are cheery, tongue-in-cheek, and so fast-paced that some scenes feel sketchy. But the series is a lot of fun, and it's a good pick for middle school readers who aren't ready for some of the darker paranormal offerings. I especially like Daisy as a character, and the author's portrayal of life in Nightshade is contagiously gleeful. For example, Daisy gets a job at a diner run by an invisible man, plus the place has a magic jukebox. I am reminded that not every book in my life has to be 700 angst-filled pages. What Marlene Perez's series lacks in gore and detail, it makes up for in humor.


Demon Princess: Reign or Shine by Michelle Rowen

Michelle Rowen's new book, due out in late September, envisions a teenage girl who learns that the father she's never met is a demon. He is also king of a place called the Shadowlands, a kind of protective border between our world and the Underworld. Messenger Michael, who looks like a cute boy, comes to fetch Nikki with the news that her father is dying. Naturally, she is reluctant to believe his wild tale, at least not until she is attacked by an assassin and her own powers start to manifest.

This book is on the light side, but I'm not sure it should be. The oddest thing, in my opinion, is that Rowen seems not to have had a big enough budget to hire characters. This is especially evident in the Shadowlands, which would have been wonderful with a castle full of intriguing people, but instead gives us a mere two or three bodies, one of them insubstantial. Unfortunately, we are left with a glaringly predictable plot due to what Roger Ebert has called The Law of Conservation of Characters. That is, since Michael is obviously a good guy, and Nikki's father is, too, despite being a demon king, then the only other people around are probably the bad guys.

Nikki spends most of the book dealing with unexpectedly meeting her father for the first time and then trying to save him from his enemies, also getting used to the idea that she's not entirely human. Further subplots revolve around Nikki's prom date, who seems a little too smooth, and Nikki's growing attraction to Michael. Not many surprises here, but I was pleased to come across a clever plot twist that's barely touched on in Reign or Shine and will clearly be addressed in the next book.


ADULT PARANORMAL CROSSING OVER

Once Dead, Twice Shy by Kim Harrison

Best known for her adult paranormal series, The Hollows, Kim Harrison joins the crowd turning to Young Adult fiction, AKA the lucrative crossover market. Once Dead, Twice Shy features a character first introduced in a novella called "Madison Avery and the Dim Reaper" in a YA collection titled Prom Nights from Hell. That story acts as a prologue to this one—in it, Madison managed to defeat her own death, who came for her in the form of a devious replacement for her prom date. Now Madison must deal with the aftermath, since she's technically dead, and only the amulet she swiped from the failed reaper is keeping her "alive."

Harrison does give Madison an Edward and a Jacob, Edward being Barnabas, a sort of trainer/guardian, and Jacob a boy named Josh, the arrogant initial prom date, who gets a chance to redeem himself here.

Problems with Once Dead, Twice Shy? There's an awful lot of explaining of the rules of the afterlife, or semi-afterlife, in Madison's case. Then late in the book, Harrison waxes philosophical about the great fate vs. free will debate, creating a certain amount of drag. Not to mention she goes all deus ex machina, or rather seraphim ex machina, at a crucial point. Still, in between, the author offers up a nice dollop of adventure together with hints of romance. Madison is a likable narrator, which bodes well for the future. The final scene brings things together in a way that puts our somewhat-dead heroine and her friends in position to feature in a very solid second book.


The Awakening by Kelley Armstrong

Kelley Armstrong is the writer of another best-selling paranormal series, Women of the Otherworld. The Awakening is the second book in her new series for teens, Darkest Powers, which began with The Summoning. In the first book, Chloe Saunders found herself in an unusual group home. Each of the other teens in the home turned out to have some kind of paranormal ability or identity, and Chloe was shocked to find out that she could both raise the dead and talk to ghosts. When it became clear that the teens were considered a science experiment by their sinister guardians, they escaped from the institution. Unfortunately, Chloe and two other girls were recaptured.

The Awakening starts off with the leaders of the Edison Group trying to force Chloe and the other two prisoners to help capture the missing boys—sorcerer Simon and werewolf Derek. Cranky Tori, a frenemy with telekinetic powers, proves to be somewhat helpful, to everyone's surprise. Eventually Chloe and her friends get away a second time, and the book turns into a kind of road trip. But will they stay free, and will they find help? We get a few of the answers here, with more to come in Book Three.

What's interesting about The Awakening is that it takes place over the course of only a few days. Granted, the book covers a suspenseful handful of events, and it also includes Chloe's growing experience with her powers. But when I got to the end of the book, I sort of felt like more stuff should have happened. (I didn't get that feeling with the first book.)

On the other hand, Armstrong is a good writer, and her teen characters are well drawn. Their bickering and worries ring true, with Tori making a particularly good foil for just about everyone. Some of the author's best writing is about Chloe and her necromancy. For example, Chloe attempts to punish a pesky ghost by raising it from the dead briefly and then sending it back to show her control. She succeeds, but she is unaware of her own lack of focus. Soon afterward she realizes the hard way that she's created a couple of extra zombies by mistake:

The cloud cover shifted, the light streaming into the room, and I realized I wasn't looking at fangs but at white patches of skull. The bat was decomposing, one eye shriveled, the other a black pit. Most of the flesh was gone; only hanging bits remaining. The bat had no ears, no nose, just a bony snout. The snout opened. Rows of tiny jagged teeth flashed, and it started to shriek, a horrible garbled squeaking.

My shrieks joined it as I scrambled back. The thing pulled itself along on one crumpled wing. It was definitely a bat—and I'd raised it from the dead.

Since Chloe is a zombie master, the bats are drawn to her. The irony being, of course, that Chloe has created her very own nightmares. I really like the way Armstrong depicts how a teenage girl would react to having this particular power, including fiddling around with it without considering possible outcomes. The Darkest Powers series is off to a strong start.


TAN CÓMICO COMO EL INFIERNO (FUNNY AS HELL)

Highway to Hell by Rosemary Clement-Moore

The series title is Maggie Quinn: Girl vs. Evil, and the first two books were Prom Dates from Hell and Hell Week. Now author Rosemary Clement-Moore has moved on from the prom and sorority house settings to another time-honored young adult context: the road trip. Except that psychic Maggie and her friend D&D Lisa (a socially challenged young sorceress) don't drive very far—they get stuck in a little town in the middle of Texas. Their jeep breaks down when they hit a dead cow, but it's obvious the cow hasn't died naturally, and wait, are those taillights Maggie just saw, or glowing red eyes?

Sí, readers, we're in chupacabra territory this time! Along with Maggie, we learn that the entire town is owned by a ranch family, the Velasquezes. Zeke Velasquez starts flirting with Lisa, but he is unwilling to acknowledge the possibility that anything supernatural might be out there slaughtering livestock. Maggie's psychic dreams give her clues, and really, she's just as much Nancy Drew here as she is Buffy, trying to solve the mystery of the monster. What's more, she is determined to uncover the secrets of the Velasquez Ranch and its implacable matriarch, Doña Isabel.

Maggie calls up her paladin boyfriend, Justin, to help her. His would-be monk buddy comes along for the ride, joining Team Scooby with a certain amount of religious reluctance. The cows are dropping like flies (which begs a joke about flies and cow droppings), and Maggie and her friends are soon in danger themselves. But she's figured out she's meant to solve this one: Maggie's not leaving town until she's set things right.

I get a kick out of the Maggie Quinn series. It has the humor of some of the other series I've mentioned, yet the writing is richer. Maggie is another fiesty narrator-heroine, and the books are just scary enough to be fun rather than darkly horrifying, giving them across-the-board appeal.


Soul Enchilada by David Macinnis Gill

Sometimes you read a lot of books that just kind of blur together. Other times you read something like Soul Enchilada. I have to tell you, even when the plot showed traces of strain in spots, I didn't care. Bug Smoot is quite simply one of the most real, funny, gutsy, and poignant characters I've met in a long time. And the other characters are dimensional, amusing, and colorful in their own right.

The plot of Soul Enchilada reaches out and grabs you by the lapels, too. Here's a nice hypothetical: What do you do when the repo man comes, and he's a devil? Oh, and he tells you that your recently deceased grandfather traded his soul for the Caddy that's your only inheritance, the one you're driving to deliver pizzas and barely make your rent? But since your grandfather managed to evade the repo man when he died, you're left holding the hell bag. And senior demon Mr. Beals is not just after the car.

There are more twists and turns along the way in this remarkable Tex-Mex debut, but suffice it to say that Bug (who is half black, half Latino) gets some help from a demon-hunting Latino boy named Pesto who wields a mean can of hair spray. She is also assisted by a mysterious coyote, some nerdy Men in Black types, a lawyer with a secret agenda, Pesto's bruja mother, and her own mad driving and basketball skills. Numerous crosses and double crosses later—including a diablo ex machina—Bug wins the day. In terms of plotting, I found the climactic scenes a little off, but this author's "off" still beats most writers' "on" any time.

I haven't even talked about Gill's style, especially the way he writes narrator Bug's voice. Here are a few of my favorite bits:

"Stop tea-bagging my body," said the first guy, who had long, stringy blond hair and a head shaped like the center branch of a saguaro cactus.

"I so owned you. In fact, I pawned you." The second guy had a gut like a pregnant woman and a black, lower-lip beard.

The only time I ever messed around with a séance was when me and Papa C were staying in this falling-down rental house in Chihuahiuta, and these skanky girls next door said they could do voodoo. There wasn't nothing in the Bible about suffering voodoo, so I snuck out at night to a shed in the back of their house.

They brought a candle, a Monopoly set, and a parakeet. The candle was for light so spirits could find their way, and the Monopoly board was our Ouija board because their mama wouldn't let them buy one at the SuperStore. They had a parakeet because you needed a chicken's foot to do voodoo, and they didn't have a chicken. The parakeet was their mama's, and she'd get mad if its foot went missing, so they brought the whole bird, chirping and pecking them whenever it could. I was glad they didn't chop off the foot because I didn't like the idea of hurting a living thing, even to do voodoo.

"I wish you was an alarm clock so I could slap your snooze bar."

My tongue was all sticky, too, like the floor of a dollar movie theatre.

I hope I've convinced you to spend some time with Bug Smoot. Her flaws are just as delightful as her strengths, and I think you'll find that you're cheering her on and booing Mr. Beals far more than the hero/villain/reader triangle traditionally calls for.


KEEP THE LIGHTS ON ALL NIGHT

Strange Angels by Lili St. Crow

Please understand that I'm a Buffy fan, but not a Stephen King fan. (Except for his book about writing. That I liked!) Normally I try to avoid full-scale horror, with all of the terror and dripping blood and even displays of intestinal loops that it entails. But I will admit to having dabbled in adult paranormal fiction, so somewhere along the way I read something by Lili St. Crow. She's the third author on this list to cross over into YA, and she does it with a vengeance. I mean, YIKES! I was shaking in my flip-flops for at least ten chapters before I caught my breath.

So be warned, Strange Angels is at the dark end of the spectrum; it's not for any but the most bloodthirsty middle schoolers, the ones whose parents think King's books are a good pick for twelve-year-olds. (Oh, and while the hero's a girl, I'm guessing boy readers will get sucked into the action if they give the book a chance.)

You know that TV show, Supernatural, the one about two brothers who travel around working in the family business of monster killing? And it's not cute or easy, ever? Well, Strange Angels is like that. Dru Anderson has been traveling with her father, a monster killer, for years. She's psychic, and she's trained in combat, but even so, she hasn't really been participating in her dad's nocturnal activities. He has tried to keep her safe.

Then one night when Dru is home alone, something comes through her kitchen door, and it's not just a hungry zombie. It's far worse. Dru has to fight back, and then she has to run, and pretty soon she's getting some help from a guy she thinks of as Cool Goth Boy until he tells her his name is Graves. Have I mentioned Jacob and Edward yet? In this book, Graves is Jacob. Edward shows up really late in the book, and his name is Christophe. In the meantime, hang on for dear life, because that's what Dru and Graves are doing.

The greatest strength of Strange Angels is how very real and intimate and terrible Dru's experience feels to the reader. Many paranormal YA books out there seem safe in a certain sense. This book does not. St. Crow's first novel for teens leads readers away from the twilit street of the paranormal, between the crooked trees and up the cracked sidewalk into the door of that dark house known as horror.

So there you have it—a creepy little tour of some of the latest in paranormal YA. My top pick? Definitely Soul Enchilada. David MacInnis Gill is a newcomer to watch. But you can't go wrong with any of these books, whether you want to laugh, or shiver, or both.