Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 53

Summer isn’t just for dating townies and going to the beach this year.

78. Waiting Spirits – Bruce Colville

A mother’s work is never done. Especially if that work involves wailing and wandering from beyond the grave. Just a note, if you suddenly decide to spend the summer in the house your little sister and mother and several others died in, maybe try teaching your grandkids automatic writing and seance holding at a different location. If you don’t, they might have a really shitty summer and almost get murdered by your dead mother.

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Even when Murderface thought she’d given all the advice she could, Pickles was still following her around, so surely that is also how they’re spending the afterlife.

Soundtrack by Winger

32. Only Child – Jesse Osburn

As an only child myself, I am incredibly pleased that I was not born solely to be taken to a lake on vacation and sacrificed. It makes it seem like more of an achievement to still be alive. And stuff. I didn’t even have to find a hidden cave or anything.

I honestly had some trouble keeping track of who the characters were in this, I guess because they needed a lot of fodder children and so there had to be the many names – no siblings = lots of last names. I also don’t really get the point of bothering to ground your child when you’re about to try and kill her. That’s pretty pointless. Why make the pointless death worse?

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Mortemer will figure out the secrets of the outdoors if he has to circle this laundry basket until his birthday.

Investigation Discovery, Teen Edition

43. Wanted to Rent – Jessica Pierce

Every so often when I’m reading these I wonder if there’s going to be a twist, like the hints dropped heavy as an anvil are going to turn out to be red herrings, the “roomer” as Christy calls him maybe is just a man incapable of contemplating how to bond with a teenager (because he’s evil, but not murdering level evil) and then Christy finds the scrapbook full of polaroids of dead families imported from the non-video enthusiast version of Manhunter (Do you see?). Important note, she finds this scrapbook while wearing her Halloween costume which includes a leather jacket with “tough-looking pockets.”

For the most part I do consider the Scream series to be a tad better written than most YA horror series of this period, they’re also a little bit longer than most YA horror books from this time, but, this one does have one glaring flaw – if Christy’s mom was a head librarian in the 1990s, she would not have had trouble keeping their house on her own. She would have been paid a decent salary. If she was a library assistant, sure, plausible, but, not the head librarian, that’s akin to paying a CEO less than enough to handle his mortgage, which is laughable. And she never, ever would have referred to a library as “the company” as in “the company party.” Libraries are not money-making institutions, not even corporate libraries really bring in money that negates the cost to run them and upgrade technology and continue to preserve things and there are zero librarians who would be confused about whether a library and a company are the same thing. If they were confused, they would have looked it up.

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Danger Crumples and Ozymandias wonder about how to look up “tough-looking pockets” for their Halloween costumes.

“The whole place stinks of sulfur.”

39. Evil in the Attic – Linda Piazza

Sensory experiences and burgeoning psychic powers mix with old school “home for the feeble minded” style child abuse. When your daughter gets possessed by the ghost of the burned to death schizophrenic whose effigy resides in the attic, your first choice should not be to lock her in her room. Perhaps the hospital. Perhaps it will be looked down upon by the upstairs neighbors if one locks his daughter in her room from the outside and doesn’t allow anyone to see her while she’s having a bit of a mental health crisis. Perhaps as a lawyer, Tiffany’s father should’ve freaking known better.

Anyway, as mentioned, sensory experiences…one of which was DUST! DUST EVERYWHERE! In the attic, which did enhance the scariness for me as a person seriously allergic to dust. Summer is the season of hell for me as I usually find out what new outside thing I’m allergic to, but in the winter the main bane of my existence is dust. And when you couple that dust imagery with all the phantom smoke the main character was inhaling during her psychic connection to the effigy time, well, that’s just a whole lot of scary in that attic for sure.

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Thaddeus will be hiding from the dust-enhanced ghost under this pillow.

Not the show

50. Dark Angel – L.J. Smith

How nice of that ghost-angel dude named “Angel” to save Gillian and then give her everything she wants. It’s clear that once you live through something that should have killed you that what happens is that you are rewarded with all of your life’s desires, including your crush. That is totally normal and not at all suspicious. Actually, the normal part is getting asked to do stuff you don’t want to after all that wish fulfillment. Like, you owe the Angel now, Gillian. Also, his real name is Gary and his unfinished ghost business was not changing his name. It wasn’t. She could have learned to etch stone and crossed out his real name and put “Gary” on his headstone, but, that’s not how these stories go. Once you find your soulmate, you lose all ability to gain new useful skills. Once you find your soulmate, you spend all time fighting off all things/imagined threats that might keep you from being together constantly because you don’t know how to maintain a long term relationship, which would have been a useful skill to learn pre-finding soulmate.

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Speaking of useful skills, Horace is the pig who taught my other pigs to jump on the back of the couch and be daring and whatnot. He was the comfort pig and the skills pig. He was the pig soulmate any pig would truly want. And his name was truly Horace, even though when I adopted him he had a different one. It was not Gary. Or Angel.

I once found some of my favorite dolls in the window of an almost-closed store after dark, so there.

83. Beat the Devil – Scott Siegel

This book has all the essentials of 1980s YA and I have to say, I am impressed with what the Dark Forces series has to offer a reader. The blurb about the series mentions mixing normal teen things like pizza with the occult – like that one scene from Nightmare on Elm Street 4. However, these books scared me a little less than that scene, which was ridiculously gross. Beat the Devil is not gross.

Beat the Devil has video game addiction before graphics were even graphic, not being able to call your girlfriend because she’s at her grandma’s house, bowling and ice skating dates, friends who fight during gym class, Nuclear Fruits, and Satan. It also has a dream set up – dude leaves his girlfriend and best friend to go buy video games to play on his dad’s new computer before the store closes, misses the bus, and suddenly is in the deserted part of town and – oh, gee – a flashing neon sign tells him he can buy video games from this creepy store that apparently just opened up. Not suspicious at all. But, it only has one game and it’s not for the faint of heart.

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Finny running from any moral messages contained within.

No, I have not checked the children.

51. Babysitter’s Nightmare – Kate Daniels

The calls are coming from the posturing rich jerk. Anyway, Alice is dating a posturing rich “not jerk” who drives too fast and keeps trying to get her to cancel babysitting jobs so they can go on dates. But Alice is not cool with that because she wants to get money for college…that drive and motivation leads her to become the lead suspect when the people she regularly babysits for – and there are legion – get burgled. Alice does a terrible job of providing herself alibis by doing things like moping alone, riding her bike around alone, waiting up too long for her rich “not jerk” boyfriend (I can’t help putting that in quotes, I thought he was an entitled jerk regardless of what he was doing.), and not conferring nicely with her ex-boyfriend who has a police radio, Steve the electronics nerd.

The nicest aspect of this book was the detail put into the characters. Alice is technically boring, but driven to go to college and conscientious enough to really pay attention to the families she babysits for. Liz the bitch has a drinking problem. Steve the electronics nerd acts exactly like he should and has a nice relationship with Alice’s parents. Alice’s dad has a passion for jewelry making and takes it to the flea market. It also has what Joe Bob Briggs would call “crystal cat fu” that would not be possible without those little character quirks.

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Peregrine had a collection of Peeps (not fossilized candy or crystal though), she played a babysitter in paintings, but she never saved any money for college or had a rich jerk boyfriend.

These things happen

40. Blood Pact – Debra Franklin

The first book in the Scream series from hip, new imprint Z*Fave (why yes they do have an online forum, or they did) sets kind of a high bar for YA horror. Sure, the whodoneit conclusion was reached quite quickly after Jamie’s loyalty turned on a damn dime and it’s hard for me to believe even miniscule town teens would actually make a joking suicide pact about a depot, but this was a well drawn story overall.

The group of friends was believeable, the borderline Footloose dad was believeable, and the environment in which they existed made sense – Franklin used specific details like that Danica loves Nikki Sixx! Yes she does. Jamie drives a Corsica and her Jordache running shoes are white and teal – because she is upper middle class for this town. Keith drives a truck and ignores Jamie while she’s on a date with the cute, rich dude at the Dairy Queen, Roman has terrible hair, and Alan, like many high school alcoholics, drinks schnapps. It’s sweet, it’s terrible, it’s going to lead to your doom.

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Hen Wen and Salem can’t decide who gets the last cilantro stem, so, there will be no pacts.

Burn it down

57. The Fire – Caroline B. Cooney

The next totally fun thing on the Shevvingtons’ agenda is to set fire to things and blame Christina. They’re already ruining the minds and souls of young women, why not ruin also ruin their own home? No one’s done that for insurance money or anything. It seems implausible that the Shevvingtons get away with so much…and maybe they don’t.

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Pickles can set fires with her mind, she has pyroguinesis.

Game over.

84. Vicious Circle – Imogen Howe

“I’m not saying it’s aliens…” And it’s not. Although little sister Andrea very much wants to see aliens. They’re her thing now. And child abuse is not her thing. You see, there’s something very obvious about the title of this book once the dead family and their brokedown shack of terror and boarded up doors makes its debut. Their backstory screams “break the cycle” so loud I couldn’t be bothered about much else in the plot.

Yes, it’s very nice that Andrea doesn’t get kidnapped and she helps the overdramatic cop get his daughter back, but she has a supportive family and friends. Her sister notices she’s gone and runs after her. Her sister’s boyfriend doesn’t treat her like a complete nuisance. She’s protected even if she isn’t constantly safe. It’s pretty obvious those who grew up in the shack had neither support nor anything else. It’s not really surprising they didn’t break the vicious circle of abuse through generations themselves, especially once they neglect-murdered the deformed and lonely child Jeremy.

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Danger Crumples understands why Andrea wants to see Aliens. It was really good.