Now Reading: Dust Girl by Sarah Zettel

This new trilogy will capture the hearts of readers who adore Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle series. Callie LeRoux lives in Slow Run, Kansas, helping her mother run their small hotel and trying not to think about the father she’s never met. Lately all of her energy is spent battling the constant storms plaguing the Dust Bowl and their effects on her health. Callie is left alone, when her mother goes missing in a dust storm. Her only hope comes from a mysterious man offering a few clues about her destiny and the path she must take to find her parents in “the golden hills of the west” (California). Along the way she meets Jack, a young hobo boy who is happy to keep her company—there are dangerous, desperate people at every turn. And there’s also an otherworldly threat to Callie. Warring fae factions, attached to the creative communities of American society, are very aware of the role this half-mortal, half-fae teenage girl plays in their fate.

Release Date: June 26, 2012 

**Review will be posted within weeks of the publication per request of the publisher**

Review: What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell

When Evie’s father returned home from World War II, the family fell back into its normal life pretty quickly. But Joe Spooner brought more back with him than just good war stories. When movie-star handsome Peter Coleridge, a young ex-GI who served in Joe’s company in postwar Austria, shows up, Evie is suddenly caught in a complicated web of lies that she only slowly recognizes. She finds herself falling for Peter, ignoring the secrets that surround him . . . until a tragedy occurs that shatters her family and breaks her life in two. As she begins to realize that almost everything she believed to be a truth was really a lie, Evie must get to the heart of the deceptions and choose between her loyalty to her parents and her feelings for the man she loves. Someone will have to be betrayed. The question is . . . who?

Set in the years immediately following WWII, Evie is a naive teen who is very self absorbed with her ideas of what being an adult involves and how to interact with the adults around her. This myopic view of her world leads her into several situations where things are morally and ethically wrong, but she can’t see past her own wants and desires until every thing about the life she knows comes falling down around her.

The book begins with an obscure chapter informing the reader that the events in the story have already happened. Evie and her mom are in a hotel room with her mother pretending not to know that Evie is awake. The following chapter jumps back in time to a few months earlier when Evie is adjusting to life after the war and her step father returning home. We learn about her best friend, the boy she likes, her grandmother that she doesn’t like, her mom’s job, all the deep, dark secrets of a fourteen year old girl in 1946.

Then the reader notices that there are secrets as her step dad gets phone calls from a man and refuses to take them and then he plans an impromptu family vacation to Palm Beach right before school starts. Evie, however, notices none of this; she is preoccupied with why she can’t wear makeup. After a grueling drive from New York to Florida, Evie and her mother soon discover that no one goes to Palm Beach in late summer and fall and everything is closed except for one hotel which has only a handful of guests for them to watch through their boring days.

Everything changes quickly. There’s a dance, they meet a couple named the Graysons, Evie meets a man (who is really the person trying to get in touch with her stepfather) and falls in love…well kinda. She is obsessed with growing up and being with Peter, who is a 23 year old, wealthy ex-GI. She goes on dates with Peter AND HER MOTHER, not at all wondering why a man would want to hang out with a newly-turned 15 year old AND HER MOTHER (who is described as “a dish”). There’s a hurricane. Peter dies. There’s a trial for murder. AND THE MOST EXCITING PART (which takes a while to get to) is that Evie finally gets a clue and starts piecing together the events in the book. The reader isn’t really omniscient in the fact that Evie is just slow, and although the book is only 281 pages and I read it in a few hours, it felt much longer.

What I liked about the book: There are fantastic details about post-WWII America and Jewish history in America. I didn’t know that Palm Beach was a restricted town, and Jews were not allowed to own property or vacation there. As someone who supports Holocaust education, these details are paramount for YA readers since often History course do not touch on the Jewish American experience during or post war. The setting, characterization, and dialogue were spot on for the time period.

What I didn’t like: I didn’t like Evie, although her simplistic view of the world around her and her ignorance to her mother’s history, affairs, and behavior in general was believable. With that being said, she wasn’t nearly as annoying as Bella Swan (is there a character more annoying than Bella?).

Awards: 2008 Nationsl Book Award Winner for Young People’s Literature, A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults.

Bardwise, the book is well written, the facts are interesting and accurate (even the annoying narrator) and there is a moral. I was going to go 3 Bards, however I’ll through in an extra one because of the historical nature and the lessons for YA readers.