Invisible by Carla Buckley ****

 Invisible by Carla Buckley  

16-year-old Peyton called Aunt Dana too late to save her mother, Julie. Dana stayed for the funeral and to find out why Julie died. When Dana was 16, she gave up Peyton and left Black Bear, never to return. Black Bear was a city of too many secrets.

When Dana became pregnant in high school, her older sister, Julie, discovered that she couldn’t have children of her own. Adoption was out of the question because Julie’s fiancé could never love a child that wasn’t his biological child. The two young women found the perfect solution. They went away, and Julie returned with Peyton, whom she told Frank was his daughter. In exchange, Dana left Black Bear forever, without saying goodbye or ever contacting anyone. This was the beginning of secrets, assumptions, and bad feelings. All of this unraveled when Julie needed a kidney donor, and Peyton called Dana, the aunt she’d never met.

Zinc-oxide nanoparticles. Julie soon decides that the kidney failure cases are caused by zinc-oxide nanoparticles used by the Gerkey factory to make suntan lotion. The factory is Black Bear’s economic backbone. Many people support the factory. At Dana’s request, the EPA investigates. Even though they find high levels of nanoparticles, they do not act. Dana wants justice for her sister, and protection for Peyton.

Peyton’s parents. Many people have unresolved issues with Dana. Frank’s mother is in the nursing home with Brian Gerkey’s mother. These two old women appear to know something. Perhaps they know Payton’s true parents. Peyton’s father with 16-year-old Dana is a mystery.

Dana’s implosion. Dana is a demolition engineer. She places dynamite and implodes buildings. After the dust settled on her last job, the police found a dead lady in the rubble. The police are investigating, and any legal problems could be the end of her company and her job.

LT. LT has limited intelligence, wears foil hats, and subscribes to conspiracy theories. He supports Dana. He believes that the factory is killing people.

The book weaves all these plots together until the end, where they are resolved suddenly and without emotional satisfaction. Four stars.

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All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker *****

 All the Colors of the Dark byChris Whitaker

Patch rescues a girl from abduction & death. His reward is decades of torment, searching, & incarceration. Good people with strong feelings & attachments despite unimaginable circumstances. “No good deed goes unpunished.” Much Love, no Romance.

Saint is accepted to Dartmouth but becomes an FBI agent. Misty goes to Harvard but doesn’t graduate. Sammy runs the Monta Clare art gallery. Nix is the Monta Clare chief of police. They all love Patch, but his priority is finding Grace and every other missing girl. Eli Aaron is on the lam, and Dr. Tooms is on death row. The lives of all the characters in this novel are intertwined. One might imagine them as a single polycule. This book is possibly the best endorsement for polygamy.

Misty had a child, Charlotte, with Patch. Saint and Sammy raised her. Saint has a child, Theodore, with her husband, Jimmy. Patch murders Jimmy. Unconditional love abounds, with shooting people, bank robbery, murder, jailbreaks, and lying all easily forgiven.

Patch is a painter who searches for families whose daughters have been abducted. He paints portraits of them that seem to bring them back. Sometimes the paintings literally bring the girls back when the girls are recognized and reunited with their families. Patch applies the same skill to the descriptions of buildings and towns.

Plot: At thirteen years old, Patch (a boy with one eye) rescues Misty, but gets abducted himself. While he is imprisoned in a lightless basement, he is visited by Grace, who tells him stories that he later turns into paintings. Saint rescues him, and Grace disappears. People doubt that Grace exists and encourage him to get beyond his trauma. He is obsessed with Grace and searches for her for decades.

In the end, many secrets are revealed, but the love that ties them all together never fails.

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Lia and Beckett's Abracadabra by Amy Noelle Parks ****

 Lia and Beckett's Abracadabra by Amy Noelle Parks

Lia’s grandma sets up a magic contest in Mirror Lake. The winner gets the Starlight Theater. Lia partners with Beckett. All tricks must come from Grandma’s original shows. While preparing, Lia learns the secrets of Grandma’s performances. YA romance.

Since magic has declined in popularity, the Mirror Lake magicians have resorted to using their skills to con tourists, sometimes for thousands of dollars. Even when the stakes were lower, the tourists might lose their bus fare and food money. Elliott took revealing pictures of Lia’s sister Emma and released them on social media. Montgomery girls do not get along with the Blackwell boys. This traces back to when Grandma Montgomery was the assistant for Henry Blackwell’s magic act. Fifty years ago. Lia hopes to address all these issues and win the contest.

Romance: As the book opens, Lia's short romance with her latest boyfriend [we’ve spent most weekends together, and I’ve lost a bobby pin or two—although nothing of importance—in the back seat of his car] ends because he wrote a poem to her mother. She’s had a lot of boyfriends, but when she meets Beckett, she doesn’t kiss him…which is unusual. She does kiss his cousin Chase. This upsets Beckett even though he has told her he only wants to be friends. Against Lia's desires, they agree not to kiss until after the contest. Lia finds this difficult, but she sticks with it.

The author is a math teacher and uses math in her books. In a later book, The Quantum Weirdness of the Almost-Kiss, she explains that she didn’t follow the math rigorously. The compromise was for the purpose of making the book accessible to all readers. She did something similar here, but without an apology. Her De Bruijn sequence trick was only sufficient for 32 cards, not a full deck as suggested. The internet has an easier version of this trick with a 48-card deck. That is easier to perform, but harder to explain.

The book mentions several famous women. Christabel Pankhurst. Matilda Joslyn Gage.

The author’s books deal with kissing and women in STEM.

“Wearing lipstick doesn’t actually interfere with my ability to have a complicated thought.”

“This being-friends-with-someone-you-want-to-kiss thing is still pretty new to me.”

“But I’m tired of this—people believing I don’t have a single brain cell in my head because I’m a cheerleader and I paint my nails and I like music people have actually heard of. I get talked over in calculus and asked if I’m in the right place when I show up at math camps and cross-examined about cheating when I ace physics labs.”

Final note: Frozen custard is pretty much the best thing about living in Wisconsin.

Check out https://amazon.com/shop/influencer-20171115075 for Omega Cat Press books and book recommendations. 

I Am Not Jessica Chen by Ann Liang *****

 I Am Not Jessica Chen by Ann Liang

Jenna & her cousin Jessica attended a competitive private school. Rich, beautiful Jessica won all the awards, got accepted to Harvard, & was lauded by everyone. Jenna, the proverbial poor relation, wished she could be Jessica. Her wish was granted.

The differences between the cousins were stark. Jessica Chen’s family was rich. They lived in a big house, and Jessica’s mom gave her hundred-dollar bills for lunch money. Jessica had a closet of expensive clothes. Everyone expected her to pair up with future doctor, Aaron Cai, the boy who matched Jessica’s achievements, poise, and good looks. Jenna Chen said, “I look like the dollar-store version of Jessica Chen.”

One fateful day, Jessica was accepted to Harvard, Jenna was rejected, and Aaron returned from a “fancy medical youth program in Paris.” Jessica’s family hosted a big celebration. Everyone was happy except Jenna. Jenna couldn’t avoid these celebrations because Jessica was her cousin, but they depressed her and reminded her of her unlucky fate. That night, Jenna and Jessica saw a shooting star and made wishes. Jenna’s was, “I wish I were Jessica Chen.”

From that wish, the book follows the expected story arc until (not really a spoiler) Jenna sees the error of her wish and returns home.

Regardless of the cliched story arc, the book offers a fresh look at the “there’s no place like home” theme.

Aaron’s mother died when he was young, and his father was an absentee parent. Jenna’s mother stepped into the vacancy. As a result, Jenna and Aaron grew up together. Like The Quantum Weirdness of the Almost-Kiss by Amy Noelle Parks, this situation produced a strong attraction, an awkwardness from familiarity, and an almost-kiss when puberty and romance approached.

The private school, Havenwood Academy, was divided. “An invisible line runs down the classroom. On one side, you have the legacies, the broad-shouldered boys and sun-kissed girls, the wealthy sons and daughters of law firm owners and university professors and construction magnates. On the other side, you have the Asian kids.”

The book contains a lot of Chinese cuisine and phonetically spelled Chinese with immediate translations.

An easy-to-read YA romance and “there’s no place like home” fable.

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The Quantum Weirdness of the Almost-Kiss by Amy Noelle Parks *****

 The Quantum Weirdness of the Almost-Kiss by Amy Noelle Parks

Caleb loved Evie long before he tried to kiss her at 13. He’s been afraid to try again. Evie is super smart and fearful. Now they are seniors at an elite high school. Evie chooses Leo for her first boyfriend. Is there any hope for Caleb and Evie?

Evie reasons that you can’t be open and comfortable with the same boy (space) friend, BSF, as the boyfriend you kiss. You must be careful what you reveal to the kissing boyfriend. Caleb has been her BSF since kindergarten. He will and has done anything for her. He knows about her phobias (spiders, social anxiety) and mental health issues (panic attacks, periods of silence). He has been there for her during her crises. She trusts and depends on Caleb and doesn’t dare risk that important BSF relationship with a kiss. A high school romance with jealousy, anxiety, and confusion.

Evie was selected for the prestigious Frontier Prize for high school STEM students last year. She won the opportunity to give one of the five presentations, but she had a panic attack. This year, she is entering with Caleb as her co-author so he can be with her if she is selected to present again. Leo is entering the contest on his own. Caleb contrives to meet Evie online as Milo. Evie is torn between boyfriend Leo, BSF Caleb, and BSF #2 Milo.

Caleb has supportive parents, but is on his own to navigate this teen romance. “I am her best friend. And I love her. And I almost kissed her fourteen times. I keep a mental list of almost-kisses.”

Evie is supported by her therapist, her school friend, Bex, and her mother. Her mother studies insanity in mathematicians, uses the DSM-5 as a parenting manual, and believes medication is the best way to deal with mental health problems. Bex’s father is a conservative pastor who “takes the worst parts of the Bible literally” and made her promise not to date while in high school.

This romance is sprinkled with STEM references and jokes:

“Because you know what they call physicists who fail?” No one takes the bait. “Engineers.”

“Do you remember the fine-tuning problem?” I shake my head, thinking she must mean a warm-up we did in physics. “The constants in our universe—the amount of dark matter and dark energy, the strength of electromagnetic and nuclear forces, even the weight of protons—all have to be almost precisely what they are for conscious life to exist. If any of those things were the tiniest bit different, we wouldn’t be here. And yet, here we are, in a universe perfectly suited for us. It’s entirely improbable.”

“Sure. And I want to talk about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.” “Like, why math is so good at describing the world?” “Exactly. Doesn’t it seem a little uncanny that mathematicians keep predicting things that experimental physicists find, sometimes decades before they do?”

Sex? This book about contemporary high school romance is anachronistically chaste. While there is a lot of talk of kissing and actually kissing, the word “tongue” never occurs and “lips” only shows up three times. Hand holding also plays a big role. “As we walk home through the campus, [Leo] takes my hand in his, wrapping his fingers around mine instead of lacing them together the way Caleb does. It’s different, but nice.”

This book is a beautiful view of high school romance. I wonder if it is er like or if it every was like this.

Check out https://amazon.com/shop/influencer-20171115075 for Omega Cat Press books and book recommendations.