Penny Blubaugh

A drumbeat wakes me. Ba-Boom. Ba-Boom. It is bearing a funeral dirge.

When I was my little sister Zi's age, we rarely heard those drums. Now they wake me so many Saturdays. It seems somebody is dying all the time.

From This Thing Called the Future by J. L. Powers

KIRKUS REVIEW

Set in an impoverished South African shantytown where post-Apartheid freedom is overshadowed by rampant AIDS and intractable poverty, this novel takes a loving, clear-eyed look at the clash of old and new through the experience of one appealing teenager. Khosi, 14, lives in an all-female household with her sister, Zi, and frail grandmother, Gogo, subsisting on Gogo’s pension and Mama’s salary as a teacher in the city (she comes home on weekends). Everyone in Khosi’s world is poor. Where the struggle to survive is all-consuming, family loyalty trumps community. Clashes between Zulu customs and contemporary values further erode cultural ties and divide families. A scholarship student, Khosi loves science, but getting to school means dodging gangs and rapists hunting AIDS-free virgins. After a witch curses Khosi’s family and Mama falls ill, Khosi and Gogo seek aid from a traditional Zulu healer, which Mama dismisses as superstition while fear and poverty keep her from accessing modern medicine. As stresses mount, Khosi’s ancestors speak, offering her guidance. Supported by them, her family and classmate Little Man, Khosi vows to create a better future by synthesizing old and new ways, yet the obstacles she faces—some inherited, others newly acquired—are staggering. A compassionate and moving window on a harsh world. Read More 

When the train stopped in Tucson, everybody else got their stuff together and jammed the aisles, but I ducked into the bathroom and put Sunblock 15 on every inch of exposed skin I owned.

From The Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge

INDIEBOUND.ORG


From the moment sixteen-year-old Billy steps off the train in Tucson, he knows this will be a summer unlike any he's seen in small-town Bradleyville, Missouri. For starters, he's staying with his cool gay uncle, who has managed to get him a job at the racetrack caring for horses. Still, Billy doesn't expect the horseracing world to be quite as rough and tumble as this — toiling side by side with a macho survivalist and falling hard for the feisty, romance-shy "exercise girl" Cara Mae. With his trademark fast-paced dialogue filled with wit and compassion, Ron Koertge tells the tale of an insecure teen who discovers that gaining stature involves more than Stetsons and boots — and that lessons on love and manhood come from the places you least expect.  Read More 

When Portia Blake and her brother Foster set out for Creston that summer, it was different from all the other summers. It was different because it was the first time they had ever made the trip all by themselves.

From Gone-Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright

INDIEBOUND.ORG

Summer has a magic all its own in Elizabeth Enright's beloved stories about two children and their discovery of a ghostly lakeside resort.

"[Has] a brilliance and a humor that make it seem as if it were happening right this minute."—The New York Times Book Review Read More 

The prisoner in the photograph is me. It ID number is mine. The photo was taken in 1972at the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution in Ashland, Kentucky. I was twenty-one years old and had been locked up for a year already -- the bleakest year of my life -- and I had more time ahead of me.

From Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos:

KIRKUS REVIEW

“We didn’t so much arrive at our destinations as aim and crash into them like kamikaze yachtsmen.” So Gantos describes himself as a 20-year-old about to be arrested and imprisoned for smuggling two thousand pounds of hashish from St. Croix to New York City. Young Jack seems to share with his fictional characters—Joey Pigza and Jack Henry—a blithe disregard for the consequences of wild behavior. Readers follow him from a seedy motel run by the great-great-granddaughter of Davy Crockett to a Keystone Kops adventure on the sea, from a madcap escape from FBI and Treasury agents to his arrest and trial, represented by his lawyer, Al E. Newman. This true tale of the worst year in the author’s life will be a big surprise for his many fans. Gantos has the storyteller’s gift of a spare prose style and a flair for the vivid simile: Davy has “brown wrinkled skin like a well-used pirate map”; a prisoner he met was “nervous as a dragonfly”; another strutted “like a bowlegged bulldog.” This is a story of mistakes, dues, redemption, and finally success at what he always wanted to do: write books. The explicit descriptions of drug use and prison violence make this a work for older readers. Not the usual “How I Became A Writer” treatise, it is an honest, utterly compelling, and life-affirming chronicle of a personal journey for older teens and adults. Read More 

The year Janet started at Blackstock College, the Office of Residential Life had spent the summer removing from all the dormitories the old wooden bookcases that, once filled with books, fell over unless wedged.

From Tam Lin by Pamela Dean:

KIRKUS REVIEW

 Despite their titles, the novels in the Fairy Tales series (Patricia C. Wrede's Snow White and Rose Red, 1989) are not simple retellings of familiar stories. This latest is not even based on a fairy tale; instead, Dean has taken her inspiration from one of the famous Child ballads, and removed it entirely from its native land and time to a small Minnesota college in the early 1970's. Dean reads the ballad of Tam Lin as a tale of adolescent love, and most of her novel concerns itself with the attempts of Janet Carter and her fellow students at Blackstock College to balance course loads with youthful angst and the bittersweet fruits of clumsy romance. But not very much happens. There is much lively conversation, and Janet and the others attend classes, plays, and films. Apart from legends of a dorm-haunting ghost and a Halloween riding of the Wild Hunt, led by the sinister Professor Medeous, there is nothing of Faerie to be seen. Only at the very end does the original ballad take over, and the faeries show themselves. Dean's characters have an irritating habit of cryptically quoting works of literature in place of direct answers, and the first half of the story is filled with repetitive descriptions of the campus from every angle. But the energetic prose carries the dithering plot along comfortably, and when the Otherworld does intrude, it is as creepy, seductive, and threatening as it is in the ancient tales themselves. Read More