Bookcase Bizarro: MG/YA Book Reviews, March 2024

MG/YA Book Reviews by a MG/YA Writer

Table of Contents

Middle Grade Review

The Doug and Sheila Browne Upper MG/YA Book Review

The News

Welcome to the March edition of Bookcase Bizarro: MG/YA Book Reviews!

Shadow Apprentice officially launched on Wattpad on March 18th as a web serial. I’ve started the last revision before sending my reader magnet off for a full manuscript assessment. Rogue Wizard (working title) is a novella set in the same world as Shadow Apprentice. I’m going all out on this one. I’ve budgeted for the assessment, copyediting, proofreading and a professional eBook cover, too. Although this book’s destined to be a freebie for new sign-ups (and current subscribers), I may decide to offer it for sale alongside my other books. This will be easier to do once it’s professionally edited and formatted. But that’s in the future.

This month has been all about Wattpad. Several of you have expressed curiosity about my journey with this social publisher so far. As of March 30th, I’ve had 32 reads, 2 votes and 1 comment. I even managed to rank in a few categories. (#9 out of 5.13 K #creepystories, although this fluctuates.) As an unknown author who’s only completed the first book in a series, these results are right in line with my expectations. I know it will take time to build an audience and I’m okay with that.

I’m probably going to leave my story up on Wattpad after the free period expires and put it behind a paywall. I’ve chosen Patreon (not the subscription model, but their new digital store option) to facilitate this. I can upload my eBook to my store page, set a price, and post a payment link on Wattpad. Patreon takes a cut out of every sale, but the listing is free.

A great feature of Wattpad is that you can schedule your posts ahead of time for automatic release. I took a day to set this up, dividing up my manuscript into parts and scheduling them. I also switched to a business Instagram account so I could schedule social media posts ahead of time. I needn’t have bothered. Meta Business Suite is so buggy that I’ll be trying out Canva’s Instagram scheduler instead. It was a lot of work to create and schedule 24 separate posts, but doing everything on that one day definitely saved me a lot of time and worry.

The focus of Wattpad for me has always been about cultivating readers (MG readers in particular) more than sales conversions. I know that MG readers hang out on Wattpad from my research, and from some impromptu questions my friend Laura posed to a group of teenagers hanging out at Indigo Books. (Thank you, Laura!) The teenagers said that they’d used Wattpad to discover new writers when they were younger, and when they found one they liked, they immediately checked out the author’s website. So here’s hoping that some of them will eventually find my story!

Of course, my Wattpad launch didn’t entirely come up smelling of roses. I forgot to send out a reminder to my non-Wordpress followers on the day of the release, and didn’t realize it until a week later. I also blocked two supposed Wattpad followers with no profiles to identify them, one for sending me a creepy message and another for exuding bot-ish vibes. Such is the life of a published writer (and I’m not complaining)! I’m thrilled that Shadow Apprentice is out in the world.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled reviews.

The Books

This month, we meet the world’s first time traveller, who drops intriguing clues about the future that make us want to steal the code book he carries. We also plumb the terrifying depths of an old country house used as a recording studio by an alt rock band, and ride across the American southwest with a posse of queer outlaw librarians.

Let it rain! Who cares when we’ve got books?

A quick note to new readers: books that are available from the Toronto Public Library are marked #TPL, because books don’t have to be new or owned in order to be loved.

Middle Grade Book Review

The First State of Being, by Erin Entrada Kelly. (Greenwillow, 2024)

Synopsis

12-year-old Michael Rosario has enough to worry about. Between his mother losing one of her three jobs, his hopeless crush on his fifteen-year-old babysitter Gibby, and the looming Y2K crisis, the last thing on Michael’s mind is time travel. That is, until a mysterious boy named Ridge materializes at the Fox Run apartment complex where Michael lives. Claiming to be the world’s first time scientist, Ridge can hardly wait to explore life in 1999, especially the malls. All Michael wants is to get his hands on Ridge’s book of codes. Ridge says it can predict the future. With that book, Michael won’t have to worry about anything anymore. The power of the future will be his. The only question is, how far is he willing to go to get it?

Review

I wish that marketing departments would stop comparing every single time travel book to Rebecca Stead’s When you Reach Me. It’s making me quite grumpy. To be fair, Harper Collins only says that Kelly Entrada’s book is for fans of Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me, but it still irks. The two books are totally different.

According to Wikipedia, going back in time for Stead is fulfilling the future rather than changing it. Multiple versions of a person can co-exist at the same time, suggesting that a person’s alternate self can completely reinvent their timeline. In fact, this is exactly what happens in When You Reach Me, when the Laughing Man sacrifices himself to save another person and allows a different version of himself to emerge—the ultimate second chance. Stead also uses notes from an unknown writer to plant clues inside the story, so readers become just as intricately entangled in the mystery as the narrator, discovering the truth along with her.

In The First State of Being, there are no co-existing versions of a person, so each person’s timeline is very much affected by their actions. Entrada Kelly uses friendship as a point of intersectionality, where human unpredictability—particularly the hormone-driven unpredictability of teenagers—is a main driver of future events. Both thoughtful and thoughtless actions can have unpredictable results, so no future outcome can ever be fully predicted. I loved this concept. Unfortunately, Entrada Kelly dilutes its impact by using snippets of news from the future (and a whole story involving Ridge’s family) as a plot device to plant and reveal clues for the readers.

If I was Entrada Kelly’s editor, I would have challenged her to work out the time travel mechanics in Michael’s timeline only. Why? Because most of it’s already there, from Gibby encouraging a love-struck Michael to take up a new hobby by entering a Lego robotics giveaway; to a hurt and angry Michael entering Gibby’s name into the giveaway instead; Michael’s constant worries about the future and his realization about what that’s done to him; and Michael’s choice when he faces the ultimate decision to spy or not to spy on future events.

The future snippets and stories also pulled me out of Michael’s POV to an annoying extent. I often felt as if I was skating along the surface of the story, unable to experience the full emotional impact of what was happening. The only place where the future wasn’t a distraction was the ending. Like Michael, Entrada Kelly allows us to be tempted by a glimpse of life beyond the present in a scene so emotionally resonant that it brought tears to my eyes. If the ending was the only part of the story that was set in the future, and if an adult Ridge had written it, the effect would have been epic. (My humble apologies to Entrada Kelly for re-writing her book.)

The First State of Being is nothing like When You Reach Me. And it doesn’t need to be. Entrada Kelly is a fine wordsmith in her own right. She excels at capturing voice and we get plenty of satisfying and relatable character complexity with main protag Michael, who also presents as neurodiverse. He is compelling enough to carry the story alone, which is exactly why Entrada Kelly should have trusted him to do just that. So can we please just stop with all the WYRM comparisons and simply enjoy time travel novels in all their diversity? (Marketing departments and blurb writers, I’m looking at you.)

For 8-12-year-old readers, who enjoy complex ideas along with their fiction. (#TPL)

The Doug and Sheila Browne Upper MG/YA Book Review

Each month, I pick an upper MG or YA book to review in honour of my parents, Doug and Sheila Browne, who always made sure that I had challenging books to reach for on my shelf—books to grow into.

DSB will return next month. I was too busy with the book launch to write more than one review. However, I can recommend 2 novellas that YA and adult readers alike will enjoy:

Thanks for being a Bookcase Bizarro reader! I’ll be back next month with more author news, and more MG and YA book reviews. See you then!

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