The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger

"Anyone who has read J. D. Salinger's New Yorker stories - particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme - With Love and Squalor, will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is full of children. The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep."


The so called 'teen bible', Catcher in the Rye is often branded as the most important and true-to-youth book ever written, which makes coming to it as an adult potentially the wrong way to do it. It's easy to see why teens love it, it is utterly a teen novel, in the sense that it's meandering, boring and more impressed with itself than it should be.

It is a relentlessly teen read; a book that so thoroughly nails the self-important conceit of being young and certain that you're better than everyone else. Everything from his distaste of the phony's that surround him, to the disinterest in his education and future make Holden's voice uniquely and authentically spot-on.

Unfortunately, you would be better off skipping it, as that same authenticity makes it virtually impossible to like him. He's an unrepentent little dick; the kind of kid whose self-satisfied selfishness is the attitude you hope people will leave behind when they become adults but which, judging by his popularity with killers, some people sadly don't. Like The Great Gatsby, it's a wonderfully constructed portrait of someone you probably want to spend as little time as possible actually in the company of.

To put it into contest; Lord of the Flies is a great book, but would you want to hang out with or emulate the kids from that?

Also Try:
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
Charlie Higson, The Enemy
William Golding, Lord of the Flies

BZRK, Michael Grant

"These are no ordinary soldiers. This is no ordinary war. Welcome to the nano, where the only battle is for sanity. Losing is not an option when a world of madness is at stake. Time is running out for the good guys. But what happens when you don’t know who the good guys really are?

It’s BZRK. Noah and Sadie: newly initiated to an underground cell so covert that they don’t even know each other’s names. Here they will learn what it means to fight on a nano level. Soon they will become the deadliest warriors the world has ever seen. Vincent: feels nothing, cares for no one; fighting his own personal battle with Bug Man, the greatest nano warrior alive.  The Armstrong Twins: wealthy, privileged, fanatical.

Are they the saviours of mankind or authors of the darkest conspiracy the world has ever seen? The nano is uncharted territory. A terrifying world of discovery. And everything is to play for..."

To be honest, it has been so long since I read this that I don't fully remember all of it.

But here's what I have got. BZRK is your standard everyday tale of people who control nanotech to 'hack' the minds of others, carrying out personality (and policy) adjustments as well as assassinations in order to take control of the world. Battles are carried out, by and large, by teens controlling nanotech to take over the world.

So, so, wonderful.

Not to mention the fact that this is written by one half of the pair behind Animorphs. Alongside his wife, K. A. Applegate, Grant wrote my favourite series of all time, a series notable for its brutal realism about conflict, it's willingness to put teenage protagonists in mortal peril and actually follow through on that. All in all, a series in which a global conflict over the literal minds of the leaders of the free world isn't necessarily going to go well.

It's a cracking read, in the vein of the dystopian fiction that so much of teenage fare has become, with a more technological side which is bound to appeal to most teens. Well worth a read, in other words.

Also Try:
K. A. Applegate, Animoprhs
Michael Grant, Gone
Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

Animorphs; The Stranger, K A Applegate

"The fight for the planet continues in this gripping installment -- and the Animorphs must make an exacting choice.

The last time Rachel and her friends entered the giant Yeerk pool beneath their town things went very bad. This time they plan to be careful, and sneak in as roaches, just to spy.

Once they're inside, though, the team gets caught. But right as things are looking their most dire, everything stops. Everything.

Then Rachel and the Animorphs hear a voice. It belongs to a very old, very powerful being, and it says it can save them. But if it does, the Earth will be defenseless."



The Stranger is the seventh Animorphs book, and as I've mentioned before, as a kid I was a little bit obsessed with this series. So when I saw a copy of this book (one of my favourites) for sale at a library clearance I picked it up for JJ's brother. It's actually an updated version of the book I read, re-released last year as part of an unsuccessful relaunch of the line.

The Stranger is Rachael centred and has a couple of plot threads. Kicking off with the discovery of a new entrance to the Yeerk Pool, and the Animorph's decision to infiltrate it with the intention of discovering the whereabouts of the Yeerk's Kandrona (the replica sun that they feed from). Whilst there they encounter the Ellimist (essentially an all powerful alien God) and get given the opportunity to decide the fate of humanity.

The B plot is Rachael being given an out; a chance to leave behind her life as an Animorph and relocate to a different state with her Dad.

The plot then is all about choices, Rachael is given the chance to end her involvement in the war by both her father and the Ellimist, and her personal struggle, as well as the decisions of the Animorphs as a whole are the main focus of the book.

It's a theme that comes up a lot in the books; more notably with Cassie and Ax who both face difficulties in justifying their role against their morality (Cassie) or duty (Ax). But for a series where the decision to fight and keep fighting despite all the horrors they have experienced was notably quick, it's nice to see the ramifications of these choices.

Rachael can sometimes be a very one note character in the books that don't focus on her, but she tends to be far more nuanced in her own stories. Between this and the David arc she shows far more compassion and fear than is normally the case, even going as far as to admit to it to the rest of the Animorphs.

The key thing here is that the heroes are given an explicit opportunity to choose their destiny. The heroes choice is a common trope in fiction, emphasising that these individuals knowingly give up on the things that would make them happy for the greater good (think Bruce Wayne sacrificing his reputation to maintain the Batman secret, or Spider-Mans 'with great power must also come great responsibility').

The Ellimist gives the series a chance to explore exactly what it means for these teens to be facing up to a potential lifetime of war, it's the first time they question what the future will look like should the war drag on and on.

The conversation between Rachael and Tobias represents an acceptance that their life can't be normal again;Rachael's decision to stay with the Animorphs and not leave foreshadows the fact that, (spoiler alert), she won't make it through this war. Her chance to get out rejected she will be in it to the end, and won't get to live beyond it. The tragedy is that here is the last point at which she could conceivably have escaped from the path laid out for her - rejecting the warrior she is becoming and returning to normality with her Dad.

By contrast the Ellimist presents a different choice; not a return to the status quo and abandoning the mission, but recognition that their cause it lost and choosing to save those they care about. Abandoning the war for Earth to save their families is a harder choice to make. Unusually, despite initial resistance they eventually make the decisions to do so. The fact that the Ellimist is playing a different game altogether is irrelevant: this is a book in which the heroes do come to the conclusion that abandoning earth to an almost certainly inevitable conquest by the Yeerk's is the best option. It says something about the stakes of the series that this decision is presented as almost certainly the best one; saving a few families and the species from extinction is better than allowing the entire population to succumb to enslavement. 

It absolutely blew my mind as a kid that just a few books into such an epic mega-series the heroes are so shell-shocked and traumatised that giving up and letting the bad guys win to save a few dozen people is not only considered a valid option, but actually gets chosen as the strategy.

There are some parts where it's clear that this is one of the earlier books, and the rules haven't quite been solidified yet; during the escape from the Yeerk Pool the Animorphs demorph to human to avoid being eaten by a Taxxon, something which is unlikely to happen in later books where the paranoia about being discovered to be humans has really crept in. Rachael complaining that a controller pushed her over is especially disconcerting; it would be hard for anyone to mistake a human girl for an andalite,    so if he's knocking her over you would assume he had realised that the guerrilla force the Yeerk's were hunting wasn't just comprised of blue alien centaurs with deadly blade tails. Clearly observational sloll isn't something that Visser 3 prizes.

We do get some great action sequences in the book that made it stand out for me when younger though; the inevitably future scene of Yeerk victory with dead bodies in schools and burnt out cars was one of my first post-apocalyptic scenes. Hands down the highlight however has to be Marco punching a security guard in the face through a reinforced window whilst in gorilla morph. It's up there with his driving the truck as a gorilla (in Megamorphs 1?) as a highlight for the character.

This is a pretty important book in the series introducing the Ellimist, Rachael's Grizzly morph and fleshing out the character so often written off as a gung-ho blood knight. More tha that though it's one of the most entertaining, and features some great moments and character development for almost everyone.

Also Try;

K A Applegate, Animorphs - http://animorphsforum.com/ebooks/

Michael Grant, Gone

R L Stine, Goosebumps

Kate Thompson, Switchers Trilogy

Kung Fu High School; Ryan Gattis

"Fifteen-year-old Jen B is a student at Kung Fu High School, a place where violence is routine and the only goal is survival. But keeping her head down becomes impossible with the arrival of her cousin, Jimmy Chang, a Chinese-trained kung fu master who became notorious after vanishing into thin air during a fight. Ridley, leader of the school's most vicious gang, wants to see what Jimmy can do. The only problem is Jimmy's sworn never to fight again ...Jen struggles to cope with the sudden murder of her brother, an ailing father, and an uncomfortable attraction for Jimmy, while tension at school builds to a dramatic final showdown. Razor-sharp and unexpectedly moving, KUNG FU HIGH SCHOOL stamps on the throat of the American Dream."

If I ever get the opportunity to adapt a book to film, or write a HBO series based on a novel, the first place I will go to is my bookshelf to pick out my copy of Kung Fu High School.

I use superlatives pretty freely on here (because I like almost everything I read), but Kung Fu High School is the kind of book that sticks with you. It's a work of breath taking power. If Tarantino dropped the dialogue and just filmed violence, it might look like this. It's not a pleasant read. It's neither cathartic or comfortable. Make no bones of it, this is a truly horrible book. But it's also incredibly real.

Originally conceived in the wake of the Columbine shootings, Kung Fu High School imagines a school system so desensitized to violence and so throughly corrupted and forgotten about that every day is a (literal) battle for survival. Every pupil belongs to a gang, the most powerful person in the school is the drug dealer who owns the staff, local police, media and politicians, and maiming or death are a routine hazard of daily life.

Through the course of the book main characters die with reckless abandon - bones are snapped, people are shot, stabbed and kicked to death. Unflinching explanations of eye-gouging, flesh rending violence starts on the first page and runs to the end.

Few words are wasted, creating a storyline that rushes towards the inevitable total destruction of every character and the whole system of violence. It's startlingly compelling, and I found that I could remember vividly much of the plot despite not having read it since it was newly published, nearly 8 years ago.

It is, frankly, AMAZING. It's also out of print, and that shouldn't surprise you, because it's incredible that this book was ever published. But you should definitely read it, and I think (I hope) you'll like it.

And maybe, one day, you'll get to see the film.

Also Try:

Melvin Burgess, Bloodtide

Koushun Takami, Battle Royale

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games