Sloppy Firsts & Second Helpings

By Megan McCafferty.

Published in 2001 and 2003 (respectively) by Three Rivers Press, New York.

Megan McCafferty's wit is the kind of razor sharp that makes me shudder at the fact that I am calling it razor sharp. It deserves some non-cliched description, and I feel entirely inadequate in trying to come up with one. Let's just say her writing is incredibly smart and incredibly funny.

The Jessica Darling series follows (quel surprise) a character named Jessica Darling. Sloppy Firsts opens as she celebrates her "bitter sixteen." Her best friend has just moved across the country, and she feels completely alone. To make up for the fact that her sole confidante has disappeared, she records her life's ups and downs in a journal. The novel charts her year, which includes an imposter who has arrived to write a tell-all about life in a New Jersey public high school and a strange attraction to her school's burnout druggie.

Second Helpings opens a year after Sloppy Firsts ends. Jessica has started a new journal, this time for a summer arts program where she is studying creative writing. Her relationship with the burnout druggie (Marcus Flutie, who is actually a very smart guy who has put abused substances behind him) is over, and everything in her life is up in the air. She is in the midst of deciding who she is, instead of just going along with who she has been (and who her parents want her to be).

I don't actually have that much in common with Jessica. I am not 16 (or 17, or 18), I was never the smartest girl in school, and I'm definitely not an insomniac track star from New Jersey. Still, Jessica is so insightful, so wry and yet awkward, that I feel a strong connection with her, one that I'm sure many other readers (from all over, of all ages) also feel. Megan McCafferty has created a character whose thoughts are so easy to slip into they feel like my own. I laugh out loud. Often.

The Jessica Darling series doesn't end here. Two other titles have been published, and a final, fifth book (Perfect Fifths - which finds Jessica in her mid-twenties) is due to be released April 14th. I love that young (and older) women have a character like Jessica, who is so perfectly (imperfectly) herself, to guide them (us) into (and through) adulthood.

10/10.
Ages 13+.

Ender's Game

By Orson Scott Card.

Published in 1985 by Tom Doherty Associates, New York.

Winner of the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award.

Ender is six years old when the novel opens, but it is immediately clear that he is not an average six year old. Neither are any of the children surrounding him. The Earth is at war with an alien species, and military forces are testing young children, trying to find the next great military leader. The children are trained and tested through a series of games. As one of the characters says to Ender, "I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children aren't in armies, they aren't commanders, they don't rule over forty other kids, it's more than anybody can take and not get a little crazy" (118). This story is very well told, and moves at an incredible pace. I was swept up in a future reality that seems entirely plausible, and hated to put the book down. This book will appeal to readers of all ages, and while it comes across at first glance as being very boy-centric, the book deals with relationships and emotions in a way that will also resonate with girls. I loved it.

9/10.

Ages 12-100.