YA reading marathon

I've been swamped with end of semester paperwriting, revising and insomnia, but in between that fun i've been running a marathon of YA novel reading. Titles I've zipped through in the last two weeks include:

Boy Meets Boy - David Levithan
How to Disappear Completely & Never Be Found - Sara Nickerson
Lizzie Bright & the Buckminster Boy - Gary Schmidt
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Steven Chbosky
how i live now - meg rosoff
The Homeward Bounders - Diana Wynne Jones (a re-read)
Running Loose - Chris Crutcher
Multiple Choice - Janet Tashjian

I will write more about some of them - how i live now and Perks in particular - when i've had a chance to re-read, and think more deeply about them.
stay tuned - same bat time, same bat station.

Bucking the Sarge - brilliant!

Yesterday I finished reading Christopher Paul Curtis's latest novel - Bucking the Sarge. It's a departure from his earlier historical fiction in a couple of ways: it's definitely, definitely a contemporary setting, and it's also more of a YA novel (Luther, the narrator and Hero, is 15).

Curtis is, in my opinion, a master of first-person narrative voice. In each of his three novels, the protagonist/narrators have utterly convincing, compelling voices and personalities, each different from one another. I LOVE Curtis's use of language in Bucking the Sarge - both in capturing Luther's teenage slang, and in some clever playing around with language (a pun on "Luther" and "Loser" made me laugh out loud). Luther is a wonderful mix of brains, street smarts and naivete, but I *never* felt the urge to laugh at him. Curtis manages to avoid winking over the heads of his characters, instead allowing them to be supremely human, good, bad, sad and funny.

It's a cleverly constructed book as well - flashback sequences interwoven with present-day sections, all leading up to the most subtly crafted climax.

I laughed out loud more than once while reading the novel - in particular, a scene with a very special character named Chauncey toward the end had me almost in laughing tears.

My only regret is that the book ended at all - although I have to wonder about the possibility of a sequel? I would be delighted to read more of the philosophical wisdom of Luther T. Farrell.