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The Loft Staff of the Evanston Public Library
www.epl.org/loftblog

So he decides to do what his hero Huck Finn did and light out for the territory. For Rico, that’s a farm in rural Wisconsin where his friend Gilberto is living. He leaves a note behind for his parents and convinces his best friend Jimmy, who has been trying to beat a heroin addiction, to go with him.  

In the land of milk, honey and cheese curds, Rico finds that his struggles with identity, race, his relationship with his parents, and random violence are still ever-present. But he also finds romance, a job and a growing sense of purpose. Though the story takes place in the 1960s, Rico’s journey of self discovery resonates very much with teens today. Dark Dude is gritty, funny, heartbreaking and wholly captivating. It unfolds like the musical rhythms of Cuban jazz, smooth and expansive. I listened to Cuban jazz great Chucho Valdes while hitching a ride with Rico and Jimmy in Oscar Hijuelos’ Dark Dude (Christie, The Loft).

If you like Dark Dude, try Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Hinton’s The Outsiders, and Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

 Mr. Abernathy, Samuel’s neighbor of 666 Crowley Avenue, doesn’t quite see it that way. In fact, he thinks Samuel and his little dachshund are rather annoying. Then again, Mr. Abernathy along with his wife and their friends the Renfields, aren’t exactly the greatest of people. Yes, they didn’t mean any harm by their dabbling in Satanism. They were just bored, and Mrs. Abernathy picked up a book in a shop. It was something to do. Next thing they know, the Gates of Hell have opened up and some nasty creatures are getting out.

 Two scientists in Switzerland, at the Large Hadron Collider to be precise, are locked in an epic game of Battleship when they notice a blip. It’s not just any blip though. This one is accompanied by an awful smell of rotten eggs and the machine doing things it shouldn’t.  

 All of these characters become intertwined along with a few more: Nurd, the scourge of five deities, Wormwood his somewhat trusty servant, and let us not forget The Great Malevolence himself. Most all of the character names are references to historical figures, or literary characters, providing an inside joke and another layer for the reader.

 Demons in fast cars, a sixth grader doing battle against floating skulls with a cricket bat, and a creature in a pond: This book has it all.  Smart, hilarious, and with well-crafted characters this book is the perfect read leading up to Halloween, or anytime for that matter. (Bridget, The Loft)

Mitch True wants to be a reporter.  Not just any reporter, but a reporter of consequence, a tried-and-true, sticking-his-nose-where-it-ain’t-supposed-to-be, shoe-leather investigative reporter who relentlessly chips at the truth.  His heroes are Bernstein and Woodward, the guys who broke open the Watergate scandal in the Washington Post in 1972.  He’s worked at his school’s newspaper three years in a row and now that he’s a senior all he needs is a Big Story to get into Columbia’s School of Journalism in New York City, where he’s dreamed of going since forever.  But, then the newspaper meets and he’s assigned as lead reporter on the sports page.  Huh?!?  So much for winning a Pulitzer.

But, anyone who’s followed the steroids-in-baseball controversy knows that sports reporting can bear ripe fruit.  Mitch’s misgivings are swiftly quashed when he notices something seriously amiss on the football team.  Who is the massive kid named Angel with the arm like Drew Brees, the speed and hitting power of a truck, and why does he sit out the majority of every game?  Why does Coach McNulty deny Mitch an interview with Angel?  Why does Angel look like he’s 23? Why does Angel fly into a rage when Mitch writes a special report highlighting Angel’s undeniable effectiveness on the field?  Why does the high school sports editor at the Seattle Times, where Mitch’s stories also run, edit out Angel’s name each week?  What sort of cheat are Coach McNulty and Angel up to?  After tireless digging, Mitch and his partner Kimi discover they just might be sitting on a scandal that would not only rock Washington high school athletics, get Coach McNulty fired, and lose them all sorts of friends, but probably land Mitch on ESPN for his crackerjack reporting.

But, things are not always as they seem.  Not by a long shot.

Like Runner, his pulse-quickening, Seattle-set thriller, Carl Deuker’s excellent latest book, Payback Time, is about a boy unwittingly caught up in a larger plot that is more sinister, lethal, and horrifying than he could have imagined.  He’s manipulated by violent far-off characters he’ll never meet, characters who use him and take advantage of, yeah, his naiveté, but also his innocent intention to do good by others, in this case the readers of his school’s newspaper.  Worse, it seems that his investigative work very well may have set a crime in motion and put the lives of others at serious risk.  Lesson learned: You go looking for a good story and real life tends to smack you in the face hard.

I stayed up way too late finishing this tightly-plotted mystery chiller.  There are several well-crafted football action sequences, intelligent questions about the responsibilities of journalists (and the risks they need to take to do their job right), a murdered heron, and a conclusion rife with tension.  If you liked Change-Up by John Feinstein (or any of Feinstein’s crackling sports mysteries, really), Reality Check by Peter Abrahams, or Peeled by Joan Bauer then definitely check this one out.  (Jarrett, the Loft).

INSTANT HOMEWORK HELP FROM YOUR SMARTPHONE!

Do you have an Android, or tablet computer running the Android operating system? If so, use these top-notch, online resources from the Evanston Public Library straight from your Smartphone or tablet.

The Apps are FREE and very easy to download. AccessMyLibrary uses GPS to find libraries within a 10-mile radius of your location, and then gives you free, unlimited access to their high-quality Gale online resources! What better way to get instant, authoritative, homework help without even having to log on! You can also bookmark the Evanston Public Library, and you will have access from anywhere in the world where you have access to the Internet, and you don’t even have to type in your library card barcode or any other password!

I have this app on my phone (if you have an iPhone, see this post about downloading this app onto your iPhone), and I can’t recommend it highly enough! Some of the resources available are:

• Historical Primary Sources
• Arts
• Government and Law
• History Resource Center: U.S.
• Gale Virtual Reference Library
• Literature Criticism Online
• Science
• Biography
• Historical Eras
• War

And more!!

Danny’s an 18-year old guy looking for a little female companionship…but he has his doubts he’s going find her while he’s washing dishes at Dishes—a gay bar in a Maine tourist town known for its gay and lesbian summer vacationers.  As one of the only two straight guys working at Dishes, Danny experiences a straight “alternate universe” where guys are always hitting on him, but he can’t reciprocate their advances, and where straight young ladies in town are few and far between.  When he finally meets a pretty, athletic straight gal and they hit it off, he has to convince her that—just because he works at a gay bar—he’s not gay. And then he has to deal with the jealousy of his co-worker, Hector, who’s been pining for Danny’s affections…  (Russ K., Reference)

Are you ready for some football?!?!

This fall and winter you can sate your appetite for football stories with the Loft’s hefty collection of fiction and non-fiction books about the power of the pigskin. Payback Time, Knights of the Hill Country, Million-Dollar Throw, Crackback, and Pop!, and , as well as reference and true-story narratives like Chicago Bears: the Complete Illustrated History, Friday Night Lights, and Next Man Up are all thrillingly realistic and dramatic stories about teens, pros, and fans living their lives between the uprights. They would make excellent companions to your love of the hard-hitting game.

There’s more.

Fans of overcoming the odds should check out Chris Crutcher’s Deadline and Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side for football stories that show courage and hope rising up to change lives in the midst of extreme situations. And Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s The Off Season (sequel to Dairy Queen) is a winning, hopeful book about the first girl linebacker in northern Wisconsin (Go Packers) trapped in a season and family gone awry.

Speaking of worlds gone wrong, Pete Hautmann’s Rash is a football story set in the late 21st century when fears of personal injury and sickness are so extreme that society has become completely risk-averse, (“Rather be safe than free”). This chilling story centers on Bo, a teen sent to prison in the Arctic tundra when his anger problems spin out of control. While locked up, he learns to play (and excel at) the “highly-illegal” game of football in a rogue, underground league and is threatened when a being of artificial intelligence named Bork tracks him down and infiltrates the prison.

Or maybe you don’t like football at all. Maybe you view it as an over-hyped sport for people with deeply embedded rage issues, a microcosmic portrait of America the exhibitionist, America the aggressive, America the demented. If so, it’s quite possible that Chris Lynch’s Inexcusable is the book for you. This deeply unsettling first-person volume is narrated by a boy so lacking in self-awareness, so convinced of his champion goodness that he detaches himself from his own viciousness on and off the football field, sloughing off with excuses any personal responsibility for his actions. Lynch’s prose acts as a sort of carbon monoxide – it’s hard to clear your head of the narrator’s convincing point of view – and when the truth begins to emerge, and you suspect just how amiss things are with this young man, he commits an act of violation against his childhood best friend resulting in his own psychic and moral death.

Whether you love the game, hate it, or feel indifferent, the action within those hundred yards makes for great drama. For the books mentioned here and more, rush into the Loft and visit our “Football Stories” display on the lounge wall just one yard beyond computer #3.

Of late, it seems every news story we hear about the gay community is tinged with tragedy, ignorance, and hatred. Popular columnist Dan Savage, along with his partner Terry, has started the It Gets Better Campaign. The aim is to let GLBTQ youth know that, in fact, things do get better. Their message is directed to middle and high school students.

What can we do now though? What can we do to make things better in this moment? A video?  Volunteer? If you have thoughts and ideas please email bpetrites@cityofevanston.org

It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini. 2006.

Craig Gilner studied for a year to get into the school of his choice—the Executive Pre-Professional High School. Then, almost as soon as the new school year begins, Craig has a nervous breakdown of sorts:  he can’t concentrate, his grades fall, and the girl he has the hots for…well, she’s way into Craig’s cooler, sexually-experienced friend, Aaron.  Feeling like a miserable failure, and more depressed than usual, Craig decides to end it all on the Brooklyn Bridge.  But when he calls the suicide hotline, the concerned (if not somewhat clumsy) adults convince him to the go to the local hospital where, due to the teen-wing renovation, he’s admitted with the 6th Floor adults–that is, to a whole floor of mental patients!  Far from feeling uncomfortable, Craig quickly relates to his 6th Floor friends, including a bi-polar transvestite, two meth-addicts, a paranoid university professor, and a lovely young woman who’s scarred her face with scissor cuts.

Here Craig learns about his own biological depression, the importance of taking medication, and the roots of his depressive episode. It’s Kind of a Funny Story, written by Ned Vizzini nearly a year after he himself spent five days in a mental hospital, is now a newly-released motion picture. (Russ K., Reference)