Claire Hennessy's Blog, page 17

Book Reviews: YA in verse

I have a great fondness for novels and memoirs in verse, which is not often indulged by the UK YA market (Sarah Crossan aside) but certainly catered to by the US one. And as soon as I read one I remember how much I love them and want to read more. So here are three I’ve read very recently:

Christine Heppermann’s Ask Me How I Got Here, which I had my eye on because I adored, adored her Poisoned Apples collection a couple of years back. This is the story of Addie, who has an abortion as a teenager and it changes her life – not that she regrets it, but that it shifts her view of the world and her own sense of identity. Her boyfriend seems much further away, while an old running friend offers the kind of understanding – and experience with sadness – that she needs. I particularly loved seeing Addie in her all-girls’ Catholic school – an environment I am very, very familiar with.
Samantha Schutz’s You Are Not Here is her follow-up to her memoir in verse, I Don’t Want To Be Crazy, and explores the grief of a seventeen-year-old who loses a boyfriend who wasn’t quite a boyfriend. It’s a thought-provoking deconstruction of teen relationships, and very readable.

Eireann Corrigan’s You Remind Me Of You is a memoir in verse about eating disorders and recovery from a suicide attempt, which was published more than a decade ago and has been on my to-read list for almost as long. The poetry is longer and a bit more intense than what we often see in these kind of books, but it’s still accessible and a way of softening – while also heightening – some of the intense topics covered here.

Next up in verse-land I will be delving into Lisa Schroeder’s work, and maybe revisiting Ellen Hopkins (I find her a bit hit-and-miss). Any other suggestions would be more than welcome…

Book Review: About A Girl

Sarah McCarry, aka The Rejectionist, writes what is ostensibly YA but feels a little too intensely mythic and magic-realist to appeal to many readers of that age group. While it starts off realistic – Tally has just graduated high school, lives with an unusual family in Brooklyn, and is agonising over her feelings for her best friend Shane (bonus points for a trans guy as part of the plot just because) – it moves into the realm of fantastical as Tally discovers where her possible-father may be living, and embarks on a quest to find him and learn more about her mother. There she meets another quirky cast of characters, including the beautiful Maddy, who seduces her, all siren-like…

The writing is gorgeous, if at times a bit too dense, and at times it’s not clear how much of this to take seriously and how much should be read as a giant metaphor for adolescence. Or life. Or something. I want to hand this book to teenagers who live and breath classics and mythology, is what I want to do. I wasn’t one of them, but I know there are readers for whom this is the perfect book. If you love Francesca Lia Block (I am fond of maybe half her stuff), this is one to look out for.

Tasty things

So this book is out shortly (end of this month in Ireland, mid-July in the UK) and I had a spare proof copy going, so asked the twitterverse to complete the phrase Nothing tastes as good as… to be in with a chance of winning. Here are some of my favourites…

@clairehennessy #NothingTastesAsGood as that feeling when the grumpy bit of your brain lets you have a break.

— Leonore (@TheLeoKitty) May 6, 2016

@clairehennessy #NothingTastesAsGood as food shared with people you love.

— Ian Power (@IHPower) May 6, 2016

@clairehennessy @UncoverAllure #NothingTastesAsGood as a glass of wine after a long, long day

Book Review: Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future

Glory O’Brien: seventeen, recent high school graduate, haunted by her mother’s suicide and her father’s inability to use a real oven so that everything tastes of radiation and death. Her best friend Ellie lives in a possibly-cultish commune across the road, and one day they drink the remains of a mummified bat mixed with beer and receive transmissions from the past and future every time they look at someone. For Glory, this means flashes of a world where new restrictive laws are passed against women, where a new civil war splits America apart, and where something terrible will happen in a tunnel years from now.

All this makes this novel sound like an action-packed sci-fi thriller, maybe a little too zany for its own good, but it is mostly a gorgeously-observed, thoughtful coming-of-age story about a girl on the brink of her future, a girl who’s never been entirely sure if she even has one. As she pieces together her ‘history of the future’ and discovers her mother’s darkroom and photographic secrets, that uncertainty of almost-adulthood comes through beautifully, and while there’s weird stuff happening it still feels incredibly real.

I loved A S King’s Ask The Passengers and this one is even better – a novel about feminism that never lectures, a story about a girl dealing with grief without getting sentimental. Highly recommended to readers both teen and adult.

Nothing tastes as good as shiny covers feel

Ireland: May 26.
UK: July 14.

Design: Nick Stearn

Illustrator: Leo Nickolls

Some early yay-ness for Nothing Tastes As Good

So the proofs are out in the world and there are a few nice (but non-spoiler-y, hurray!) thoughts up on the twitters and Goodreads. In the meantime, a save-the-date for Dubliners: Ireland is getting an early launch, on Thursday May 26th, 6.30pm, Dept 51, Eason’s O’Connell St (eeep!).

Just finished Nothing Tastes As Good by @clairehennessy – absolutely phenomenal. Look out for it in July if you like hard-hitting, real YA.

— Cat Clarke (@cat_clarke) April 3, 2016

Can't believe I have to wait till May to thrust @clairehennessy's new book "Nothing Tastes As Good" at people while squealing unintelligibly

— Aoife Harrison (@tiemystring) April 9, 2016

Read #nothingtastesasgood in one sitting. Literally could not put it down. It's inspired! @clairehennessy #yalit pic.twitter.com/te0q0uVeoq

— Jen Breslin (@JenLovesReading) April 12, 2016

Book Review: The Way I Used To Be

“You’re drunk, Edy. You’re really drunk and that guy was trying to take advantage of you! You’re lucky I came in when I did,” he says, dead serious, as if getting taken advantage of would be the worst thing that could happen, as if that wasn’t something that happens to girls on a daily basis.

This debut from Amber Smith begins in the immediate aftermath of fourteen-year-old Eden’s rape by her brother’s best friend. From the very start, Smith will break your heart – there are so many gorgeous, tiny details and insights that are spot on, like Eden’s mother seeing her daughter with blood on her sheets and assuming it’s her period, instead of really seeing what’s just happened. As we follow Eden through all four years of high school, we see her slide from ‘good girl’ into ‘troubled’ – not just as a result of being assaulted, but as someone who hasn’t been able to tell her parents, her friends or her beloved brother about what happened. Friendships splinter, relationships rise and fall, and we witness not just Eden but her friends as they change over the four years – I really loved that the time span let us see how the awkward kids develop as they edge closer to adulthood. Eden is sad, angry and some might say unlikeable – but she’s a very real character whose behaviour, even at its most self-destructive, is also very relatable. One of my favourite YA books of 2016 so far.

Banshee & other things

Here’s some advice on editing, and here’s a shiny literary journal open for submissions all this month. Issue #2 is also available to purchase now.

The new term of creative writing workshops starts at the Big Smoke Writing Factory next week, including my Commit To Your First Draft workshop for people working on novels and a new round of Dublin Young Authors (for talented teen writers).

Here’s a piece I wrote about eating disorder narratives in memoir and YA fiction, which probably explains a lot about where Nothing Tastes As Good came from. Speaking of which, people are actually starting to read it (early review/proof copies) and it’s just a tad nerve-wracking. I really hope people like it, and Annabel, and Julia. I also know I have no control over it now, the book’s done, etc etc, but still. Still. Writerly neuroses forever!

Book Review: Radio Silence

There’s this moment in the first episode of Girls where Lena Dunham’s character says she could be the voice of her generation – or at least a voice . . . of a generation . . . before sliding off her chair. Alice Oseman, 21 and just about to finish an English degree at Durham that she publicly regrets starting, isn’t necessarily the ultimate voice of young people everywhere, the definitive authority on the Tumblr generation, but she’s an important one. No matter how much empathy you have, there are certain key details about growing up at a particular time that can only be understood by people who’ve lived through it.

Frances, the narrator of Oseman’s second novel, Radio Silence, has grown up with podcast-love and tumblr fanart and the accessibility of creators on twitter. Despite being Head Girl of her school, on track for Cambridge, her true love is creating fanart for her favourite podcast, Universe City. When she discovers that the creator – The Creator, in fandom-parlance – is someone she actually knows (and whose sister she used to be friends with before she ran away), it kicks off a series of events that leads to her reconsidering everything she thought she knew and wanted.

And no, they don’t end up happily together – this we learn early on. This is a friendship between two queer teenagers that doesn’t end with kisses and heteronormativity – between people who know the difference between bisexuality and asexuality and demisexuality. It’s also a story about academic pressure and finding what makes you happy – which sounds a lot cheesier than is fair to this novel. The one thing I was sceptical about was the ease in which one character found decently-paid work in London without any qualifications – the anti-university vibe of the novel felt a little naïve at times. And even saying that makes me feel old, which is maybe the point: this is a YA novel that doesn’t need to please adults, after all.

Proofs! (In the pudding?)

Have I mentioned my Snarky Anorexic Ghost Book is being published in July by the very shiny Hot Key Books? Proof copies are available now – not the final cover or back copy at all, mostly for reviewers and booksellers etc, but just as a lovely update… lookit!