Book Review: Panic

Teenagers.  Deadly games.  One winner.  Sound familiar?  Thanks to the wild success of YA mega-hitters The Hunger Games and Divergent, we are at no short supply for teens-and-violence novels. The good news for Panic, the latest by Lauren Oliver, is that she steers clear of the sci-fi, dystopian genre, and grounds this book solely in the realistic, present day.  Panic has more in common with Maggie Stiefvater's The Scorpio Races, minus the magic water horses.  Panic is set in the small town of Carp, New York, a somewhat poor town where many dream of getting out, but few have the resources to do it.  Somewhere along the way, Carp's high school student body created a game called Panic.  Every student has to pay into the pot - or suffer the consequences.  Only graduated seniors are eligible to play.  The last man standing wins the pot.

Of course, the challenges are reckless and illegal.  The local cops have been itching to bust Panic for years.  Given that it kicks off at the same time and place every year, one would think the police would have figured out how to stop it before it starts.

Oliver switches back and forth between two players: Heather and Dodge.  Each has her (or his) own motivations for winning.  Heather lives with her druggie mother and innocent little sister in a trailer park. Winning Panic would pay for a way out of Carp.  Dodge is playing for revenge.  His older sister, Dayna, was injured and paralyzed playing Panic several years earlier.  Dodge wants payback.

My main problem with Panic is that neither Heather nor Dodge are sympathetic enough for me to really care about either one of them winning the game.  Unlike Stiefvater's The Scorpio Races, where I was truly torn between wanting Puck or Sean to win, Oliver didn't get me to fully invest in her main characters.  The other main issue with the book is that the challenges - although dangerous - aren't terrifying or frequent enough.  They come across as something you'd see on Fear Factor, if dreamed up by teens.  (One of the challenges involves running across a busy highway, blindfolded.  I kept hearing the movie Dodgeball in the back of my mind: "If you can dodge traffic, you can dodge a ball!")

Panic was a quick read for me, and I do enjoy Oliver's writing.  This would be a recommended addition for high school libraries where students are devouring Divergent and are asking, "What else do you have?"

Book Review: Fangirl

Confession time: When reviewing YA Lit, I always try to think about the book in terms of its primary audience - i.e., teens.  However, almost from the start, Fangirl hit me right in the gut.  Because it takes place during the college freshman year of its protagonist, the book brought up many memories and emotions for me.  I suppose that's what a good book is supposed to do, but this one in particular was like a trip down memory lane.

Fangirl follows Cath, a Nebraska freshman dreading her first year of college.  She's heading off to school with her twin sister, Wren, but Wren is eager to break free of the twin bond.  She's going to live in a different dorm, have a different roommate, a different major.  Cath is almost cripplingly anti-social, and her early weeks at college are painful.  She eats nothing but protein bars because she doesn't have friends to eat with and is too afraid to ask where the dining hall is.  She doesn't go out, and makes excuses when her roommate, Reagan, tries to invite her.  When she does go out on the rare occasion, she has nothing to wear except jeans, t-shirts, and cardigans.  Mostly, Cath nests in the comfort of her tiny dorm room and works on her online fanfiction novel.

So why did Fangirl get to me?  Because I WAS Cath my freshman year.  I went to school out of state so I knew no one and wasn't particularly outgoing.  I remember plenty of meals in the dining hall (at least I knew where it was), where I pretended to be studying to cover up for the fact that I was eating by myself.  I was afraid of breaking rules and going to parties.  I often turned in at a decent hour on a Friday night because I had nothing else to do.  I once attended a dance wearing jeans and a sweater because it was supposed to be "informal."  I didn't realize that "informal" meant short dresses instead of long ones.

Painful, right?  Yep.  I was a mess.  Luckily, I gained confidence in myself and snapped out of my hermit lifestyle, and so does Cath by the end of Fangirl, thanks in part to her roommate's friend Levi, who shows a genuine interest in Cath and her writing.

Author Rainbow Rowell, who also wrote the bittersweet Eleanor and Park, quite deftly pulls off a remarkable achievement with Fangirl.  She hasn't written just one book, but three.  First, there is the main story of Cath and her journey.  However, Cath is obsessed with a fantasy series called Simon Snow; the similarities to Harry Potter are obvious and intentional.  Between chapters of Fangirl, Rowell also writes excerpts from the fictitious Simon Snow series.  Additionally, she provides excerpts from Cath's fanfiction novel based on Simon Snow.  It shows Rowell's skill as a writer to invent three worlds and subtly manipulate the tone for each.

I enjoyed Fangirl, and can report that even though I thought about my own college experiences at first, I was able to let those go as the novel progressed, and invested in Cath and her struggles.  Rowell excels at creating relatable characters who don't always get endings wrapped up in a neat bow.  This would be a good choice to hand to high school seniors heading off to college, especially those introverted types who need reassurance that "it's going to be o.k."as they take the next step.