Disclosure: I purchased both of these books for my own personal reading. *Purchasing links in this review are connected to my Amazon Affiliates account and will generate a small referral fee for me if they’re used.
Undercover
Beth Kephart
HarperCollins, 2009, paperback (ISBN 9780061238956 / 0061238953)
Fiction (young adult), 304 pages
Opening lines: “One day I saw a vixen and a dog fox dancing. It was on the other side of the cul-de-sac, past the Gunns’ place, through the trees, where the stream draws a wet line in spring.”
Elisa prefers staying in the background, not standing out. Her emerging talent for poetry is expressed in the brief written lines she provides to her male classmates to give to their girlfriends, passed off as their own. She’s distant from her beautiful mother and older sister, who seem to be so many things that the world values more (and that she isn’t), and with her father away on a seemingly endless business trip, she’s spending a lot of her time on her own; her new favorite place is a pond in the nearby woods where, as winter comes, she teaches herself to ice skate. At school, her Honors English class is working on plays and poetry, and Elisa is shaken to realize the similarity between her providing “metaphors” to the boys for their girlfriends and the plot of Cyrano de Bergerac. She is even more shaken to realize her growing feelings for one of those boys, Theo.
I was a bit of an undercover operative in high school myself, and Elisa came across as very real to me. The novel is narrated in Elisa’s first-person voice, and she is the most fully-developed character in the novel; we see the others characters primarily through her eyes. This struck me as particularly appropriate, though, as it did in Goldengrove by Francine Prose, another story told though the voice of a teenage protagonist at a particularly self-referential stage of life. But that limited perspective doesn’t detract from Elisa’s appeal; she’s more eloquent and expressive than the average teen, but her voice sounds true and the connection the reader makes with her is real.
I’ve been reading the blog of Elisa’s creator for nearly a year now, and Elisa’s voice sounds like it was written by Beth Kephart. This is a good thing, and so is Undercover.
Rating: 3.75/5
Nothing but Ghosts
Beth Kephart
HarperTeen, 2009, Hardcover (ISBN 9780061667961 / 006166796X)
288 pages
Opening lines: “There are the things that have been and the things that haven’t happened yet. There is the squiggle of a line between, which is the color of caution, the color of the bird that comes to my window every morning, rattling me awake with the hammer of its beak. You would think that the glass would break, or else that dumb bird’s beak. You would think that I could think myself right on back to sleep, because I am sixteen, a grown-up, and I know things.”
Comments: Since I read two of Beth Kephart’s novels back to back, I couldn’t help doing the old compare-and-contrast with their protagonists. What struck me in that exercise was that Undercover‘s Elisa Cantor is a character who lives in her head; Nothing But Ghosts‘ Katie D’Amore isn’t. That’s not meant to imply that Katie isn’t a thinking girl; she’d have to be, since her creator is Beth Kephart. But Katie is more driven to action, and more focused; she’s got a particular issue she’s trying to sort out.
Katie recently lost her mother to cancer, a loss that seemed to happen so quickly that she can’t make sense out of it. She’s trying to grasp how someone can be there one day and gone forever the next, and in the process, she’s become a bit “gone” herself, withdrawing from her friends and taking a summer job on the work crew of an estate garden, which entails long days of physical labor. The garden belongs to Miss Martine Everlast, a local recluse who hasn’t been seen in town for over fifty years, and Katie grows curious about how she, too, was there one day and gone the next. An excavation project at the garden leads Katie to a research project at the local library, sorting through several boxes of recently donated “local lore” to find clues about who Miss Martine was before she disappeared…and, perhaps, who she’s become since then.
I really liked Katie. I also liked her father, Jimmy, an absent-minded-professor sort whose work is restoring paintings. His current project dovetails with Katie’s own, as he discovers that the painting may have been done by Miss Martine’s father, and the story it tells seems both to support what Katie is learning and suggest other questions to be answered. I liked just about every character in the novel, really, even little Sammy, the annoying kid from across the street. And while Katie’s mother, Claire, has died before the story opens, she’s still present within it. Nothing But Ghosts has nothing to do with anything paranormal; the “ghosts” it’s concerned with are the memories and traces and questions that remain with the living.
Kephart’s writing in Nothing But Ghosts is very descriptive and evocative, and it fully immersed me in Katie’s story. The two novels of hers that I’ve read make a convincing case that “a teenage protagonist” really may be the only thing that defines a book as “young adult.” Beth Kephart is an author that I probably wouldn’t even know of if not for book bloggers, and I’m very glad to have been introduced to her.
Rating: 4/5
Both of these books count for the RYOB 2010 Challenge (5/20 and 6/20) and the Blogging Authors Reading Project.
*Buy Undercover
