Cool Reviews (Mostly positive but check out the one for Exile)
Gender Blender: Publishers Weekly (starred review)
When two sixth graders magically change bodies after bumping their heads together, the results are traumatic for them but hilarious for readers-especially those who have wondered what it would feel like to be a member of the opposite sex. After Tom and Emma realize they've undergone a gender switch, it takes them awhile to get used to their new skins. Besides having to adjust to the smaller, lighter frame of a female gymnast, Tom has to learn how to eat a civilized dinner with Emma's straight-laced family, juggle endless activities, deal with backbiting girlfriends, and put on and take off a bra. Emma, now a gangly, big-footed boy, must also conform to a new way of life, pitching baseballs instead of doing flips, coping with a pesky younger brother and rough-housing with guys whose idea of fun is throwing dirt clods and racing downhill in a shopping cart. Throughout the novel, Nelson (Rock Star, Superstar) demonstrates his keen understanding of peer pressure and gender stereotyping. In one exchange, Tom (in Emma's body) says, "If I can't get dirty, then you can't cry," to which Emma (as Tom) replies, "I'll cry if I have to. This isn't exactly easy, you know." Showing equal sensitivity to both sexes, the author provides honest, humorous answers to questions youngsters are often too embarrassed to ask: What does it mean to get a boner? What is it like to get your period? Can boys and girls really be friends? Ages 10-up.
Prom Anonymous: Publishers Weekly
Pre-prom dilemmas have never been so amusing as in Nelson's (Gender Blender, reviewed above) lively novel featuring three main characters with contrasting personalities. The excitement begins in the spring of junior year when romantic-minded Laura decides it might be fun to triple date to prom with two of her oldest friends-even though they have drifted apart and joined different cliques in high school. While simple in theory, Laura's plan leads to some predictable complications-like trying to find a date for artsy Chloe, who is more interested in Sylvia Plath than in boys, and trying to get tomboy Jace to screw up enough courage to ask out newcomer Paul, a good-looking tennis champ. Meanwhile, Laura's own boyfriend isn't so keen on the whole idea of going to the dance with Chloe and Jace, and would rather spend prom evening hanging out with his pals. Told in third-person narrative from the alternate points of view of the three girls, the book contains several priceless moments (such as when Jace discovers her date suffers from a mental illness) and witty confrontations between characters (e.g., when Chloe blurts out to her blind date that she's written 31 poems about him). As might be expected, prom night is filled with crises, but creative resolutions make for a gratifying all's-well-that-ends-well conclusion. Ages 12-up.
Rock Star Superstar: School Library Journal (starred review)
A brilliant, tender, funny, and utterly believable novel about music and relationships. Pete, 16, joins a band possibly headed for stardom. While the three other performers in Tiny Masters dream of fame and fortune, Pete loves the music and relishes the chance to play his bass guitar on stage. As the group's popularity grows, he also stumbles his way through his first romance. The relationship is awkward, sweet, wonderful, and confusing all at the same time. Margaret makes the first move, and at the beginning Pete is ambivalent, but eventually he realizes that he has fallen in love with her. Complications ensue, including Pete's feelings of jealousy, his need to dedicate time to his music, and Margaret's parents' anger when they find out that the teenagers are having sex. Pete's voice is totally convincing, as are his interactions with his widowed father and his male friends. Readers who loved Rachel Cohn's Pop Princess (S & S, 2004) and Sarra Manning's Guitar Girl (Dutton, 2004) will find that this novel takes a more down-to-earth view of the road to stardom, with hard work and disappointment part of the package. Pete is one of the best male protagonists in recent YA fiction and the other characters are equally strong. -Miranda Doyle, San Francisco Public Library
Girl: The Write Stuff (Australian alternative literary review)
It's 43 years since J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye started its almost unchallengeable reign as the definitive American teen coming-of-age novel. Yet every couple of years another ambitious young writer attempts to out-'Catcher' Salinger - and mostly they fail miserably, though sometimes with some honour.
I have been re-reading Catcher every couple of years since 1967 - with undiminished enjoyment - and while Salinger's crown shines ever brighter with every examination, the pretenders to the throne grow ever more presumptuous.
So, when a publisher blurbs a debut novel as a 'Catcher in the Rye for the Grunge generation, this instant classic...', my sceptometer hits redline. It's like saying a 'Huckleberry Finn for the New Age'. Some classics - and Salinger surely qualifies - are best left unimitated, or seriously comparisoned by glib blurb writers.
However, I have to admit Blake Nelson's Girl gets much closer to the mark than almost all former claimants. For starters it's first-person subject, Andrea Marr, is extremely funny and sad - often simultaneously. This seeming contradiction echoes Holden Caulfield's bitter-sweet dwelling on the heinous crimes of the hordes of phoneys who both anger and depress him.
Nelson's strength is in his ability to speak directly from within the troubled being of a young girl whose angst and awakening we share from just before her 16th birthday to her departure for college. From the moment that best friend Cybil shaves her head to impress emergent rock star Todd Sparrow, Andrea starts drifting away from the safe but terminally boring mall milieu to the intriguing but unsettling attractions of the alternative rock scene - 'I was here and it was dark and the people were scary and weird and way too cool.'
Indeed, it is coolness that is the reference point for identification, status and self-esteem. Remember? Yes, of course we do, having grown up in earlier coolness-conscious decades - be it the '50s, '60s, '70s or '80s - and it is easy to share the rollercoaster plunge and swoop of Andrea's emotions.
Choice of friends, clothes and music determine how cool you are - superficially, but for Andrea and her mates the Big Questions are about love, sex and drugs.
Almost 16 and still a virgin, she muses: 'I knew he was on this schedule in his mind and pretty soon he would want sex. And I didn't really dislike him and I wouldn't even mind that much if he was the first one because Cybil and Richard were doing it and Rebecca Farnhurst had done it and Wendy Simpson did it with a boy from Bradley Day School when she was drunk. So Mark would be okay. It was inevitable anyway. And it didn't seem like you were really part of things until you did it because that's what everything was about, like jokes and TV, and even the ends of extension cords were either male or female and when you plugged them together, what was that?'
Despite much groping and angst, her first lover is not one of her dates or school mates, but a country boy, a fellow menial at a summer camp where Andrea is sent to work to get her out of her parents' hair. Although it starts out as just a vacation fling, away from the critical eyes of her friends and rivals, the joys of intimacy are so intense that the inevitable parting is more emotionally painful than anticipated. His goodbye gift to her is a bullet, filched from his mother's boyfriend's gun. She arrives back home, '...thinking how incredibly stupid I was if I expected life to be anything else but failed love and mindless sex and crying all night in bus stations.'
Apart from the fact that Nelson's tale ends at a sort of 'here comes a sequel' point - perhaps Andrea Goes to College, her odd- essey is convincingly told, the sort of tale that both today's teenagers and their parents can enjoy - it might even give them something to talk about together.
The New Rules of High School:Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Max, a senior, makes excellent grades and achieves everything he tries. But something is not right-in his relationship with the "perfect" girlfriend and with himself. In a starred review, PW called this "an especially mature and incisive look inside the heart of a teenager who believes that he might already have seen the best that life and love have to offer." Ages 14-up.
Exile:Publishers Weekly (ah, feel the love)
The second-rate doggerel that Mark West, the misogynistic poet who's this novel's protagonist, pens throughout Exile is perhaps the least offensive thing about this sophomoric effort from the author of Girl. A 31-year-old alum of New York City's poetry slam scene, Mark is little more than a front for Nelson's gross generalizations and stereotypes of everything from heroin abuse to the pop media's publicity machine. Even when Mark, the quintessential artiste of the streets, consents to a cushy artist residency at an Oregon university, only the scenery changes. Wherever the poet lands, he's able to find the only thing he enjoys more than his heroin, the luxury of submissive and worshipful women. In fact, there wouldn't be text enough for a novel if it weren't for the myriad B-movie sex scenes interrupting the passages of inane dialogue. What discernible change there is in Mark's character doesn't arrive during the novel's intended crisis. It comes 20 pages earlier, when Mark is visited by an old friend who has risen from the underground to succeed as a magazine journalist, leading to Exile's single narrative epiphany: "Unlike Mark, who always went for the crushing emotional statement in his work, Alex's best stuff was always subtle and funny." It's true no one could rightly accuse Mark or Nelson, for that matter of humor or subtlety.