12 Days of Teen Lit: 10 Brooding Loners!

Another day, Another 12 Days of Teen Lit post.

Today we are happy to bring you

10 Brooding Loners!

Arisotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe.

Fifteen-year-old Ari Mendoza is an angry loner with a brother in prison, but when he meets Dante and they become friends, Ari starts to ask questions about himself, his parents, and his family that he has never asked before.

Crazy. Fifteen-year-old loner Jason struggles to hide father's declining mental condition after his mother's death, but when his father disappears he must confide in the other members of a therapy group he has been forced to join at school

Gemini Bites. When their parents announce they are taking in a fellow student for a month, 16-year-old twins Kyle and Judy sit up and take notice. Kyle has just come out of the closet to his family and fears he'll never know what it is like to date a guy. Judy is pretending to be born-again to attract a boy who heads a Bible study group. And Garret Johnson is new in town-- a mysterious loner who claims to be a vampire. Both twins are intrigued.

How to Say Goodbye in Robot.  After moving to Baltimore and enrolling in a private school, high school senior Beatrice befriends a quiet loner with a troubled family history.

 Invisible.  Doug and Andy are unlikely best friends--one a loner obsessed by his model trains, the other a popular student involved in football and theater--who grew up together and share a bond that nothing can sever.

The Knife that Killed Me. Paul Varderman, a secondary student in an English Catholic School, is a loner until, just as he is becoming friends with "the freaks," the school bully encourages Paul to join his gang and gives him a knife to carry as an incentive

My Sister's Stalker. When fifteen-year-old Rig, a loner, discovers that his popular older sister is being stalked while away at college, he sets out to save her, with unexpected help from his divorced parents.

The Night Road.  Battling his own memories and fears, Cole, an extraordinarily conscientious vampire, and Sandor, a more impulsive acquaintance, spend a few months on the road, trying to train a young man who recently joined their ranks.

Narc. When his little sister is caught with a bag of weed, seventeen-year-old Aaron Foster takes the fall. To keep the cops from tearing his family apart, Aaron agrees to go undercover and help bust the dealer who's funneling drugs into his Miami high school. But making friends with the school's biggest players isn't easy for a waste-case loner from the wrong part of town.

TWOC: Taken Without Owner's Concent.  Ever since the joyriding accident that killed his brother Jake and left Jake’s girlfriend Jools hideously scarred, Matt has been tortured by his inability to remember exactly what happened. He decides to reconstruct the events of that tragic day—but can he survive the accident a second time?

Riding Invisible by Sandra Alonzo, illustrated by Nathan Huang

Yancy has lived his whole life in fear of his older brother.  Diagnosed with a conduct disorder, his older brother Will's extreme behavior - violence, threats, etc - has created an atmosphere that feels as if he's holding the family hostage.  In order to escape, Yancy has been spending time at a local horse boarding facility, adopting a recuperating horse named Shy, but when Will threatens Shy, cutting off his tail and slashing at his side with a scissors, Yancy, fearing for his horse despite telling his parents what happened, runs away.

Sandra Alonzo's Riding Invisible is Yancy's journal, and this journal includes Yancy's illustrations, as he's a budding artist.  (Nathan Huang does the illustrations for the book, which is done like Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian).  While on the run, Yancy meets a kind Mexican immigrant who takes him in, giving him a place to stay and to board Shy, while Yancy helps out on the ranch where the man is employed.  Yancy begins to see his family's situation from his parents' point of view - how difficult must it be for them to struggle with such an out of control child, both wanting to help him, to fix him, while also trying to protect Yancy and themselves - and when they find him, he tries to come to terms with the whole situation.

I was skeptical of this story from the moment I realized how similar the format was to Alexie's National Book Award winner, and my skepticism increased through the first couple of chapters.  Yancy's voice is very young for a 14/15-yr-old at the beginning (especially one who's faced a troubled sibling, who it is later revealed is into drugs, etc.).  Alonzo throws in some curse words, but it feels forced.  However, she seems to hit her stride at about the middle, and the descriptions of his family's troubles are both scary and sad.  I also felt that Yancy's feeling that as the 'good' son, he's become invisible to his parents, as they're forced more and more to cope with their oldest son was realistic and handled well.

I read this as a consideration for the Maricopa County Mock Printz awards, and while I think Riding Invisible is worth reading, I don't think it's the best teen book of the year.

Recommended.