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Book: The Quick Fix
Author: Jack Ferraiolo
Published: October 1, 2012
Source: Review copy from publisher via NetGalley

After the last time, you'd think middle-school private detective Matt Stevens would know better than to do any jobs for juvenile crimelord Vinny Biggs again. And he's not, really. Sure, he's looking into the case of a missing "decorative piece of wood," but only because beautiful cheerleader Melissa Scott asked him first. And the Thompson twins, infamous purveyors of addictive Pixy Stix, are after it too. Vinny was merely the last in a long line.

But as usual with Matt's cases, things go south in a hurry. Melissa is publicly humiliated and sent to the Outs, a social Dante's Inferno. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. She's unexpectedly followed by the chief hall monitor, and then Matt knows somebody's deadly serious. Combined with blackmail, Pixy Stix, a lot of money, and more questions than one seventh-grader can reasonably answer, it seems like business as usual for Matt.

Then he discovers the "piece of wood" is really a box, and what it contains could mean nothing to anyone but himself. Right?

I reviewed the first Matt Stevens book last year, The Big Splash, and enjoyed it enough to request this book when it popped up on NetGalley. The middle-school experience painted with a wash of tweaked noir conventions wouldn't have been enough for a second go-round, but I really liked Matt and I was curious about the larger mysteries that had been set up.

In general, I enjoyed myself again. Matt is as snarky, thoughtful, and clever as he was the first time. The series-level mystery of his dad's disappearance advances apace. The book-level mystery was somewhat thinner this time, often lost in all the winks at mystery types. And that brings me to the main reason I'm writing this review, which is to work out my own ambivalence toward the hyper reality of this setting.

In my first review, I mentioned: "The Big Splash can't really decide whether it wants to be funny or serious about its own tone." Is it meant to be totally tongue-in-cheek? Perfectly serious? A tongue-in-cheek lens for the always-gruesome middle-school experience? I honestly couldn't say, and I still can't.

The same thing came up for me again, particularly in the substitution of Pixy Stix as an addictive substance. I think it's because I work on a daily basis with kids whose lives are affected by the real thing that this analogue doesn't quite sit right. Imagining their reactions to the notions of mere sugar being as destructive a force as what they see in their neighborhoods and homes rattled my willing suspension of disbelief, and this is a book that really requires a lot of that.

So . . . what's the verdict here? I'm still not sure. Was it well-written? Yes. Matt is a fully fleshed character, as are most of his compatriots, though it often seemed to me that characters' reactions are much more adult in nature than a typical middle-schooler's. Will kids like it and relate to it? I really don't know. I think they'll like Matt, and read on for the mystery and the relationships. But as to how realistic the details of the setting will feel to kids not familiar with the conventions of adult mystery novels and noir storytelling, I have my doubts. If you've read it and think otherwise, please share.

Warning: this is going be very long and somewhat spoilery. Sorry to do this to you guys, but I really needed to write all this out as a way of working it out in my head.

Book: The Inquisitor's Apprentice
Author: Chris Moriarty
Published: 2011
Source: Review copy from the publisher via NetGalley

Sasha Kessler lives in the ghettos of the Lower East Side, where everyone practices magic, at least until the police come around, and then they all pretend that such a thing has never occurred. Because magic is real, and outlawed, in this alternate late-19th-century New York City.

Poor Sasha makes the mistake of identifying magic, and compounds that by doing it in front of the police. Terrified that he'll be taken away, he's astonished to get something even more horrifying: a job. Specifically, a job with the very department that sniffs out and punishes magic-doers. As much as he struggles with the idea, it pays more than his parents make in a month at the Pentacle Shirtwaist Factory, and there's the family to take care of.

Sasha swallows his misgivings and accepts. He's assigned to the mysterious Inquisitor Wolf, along with annoying fellow apprentice Lily Astral, and thus starts a tour through the highs and lows of New York City in the late 1800's, with the quirky and fascinating twist that magic always adds. But Sasha still has to take care of his family, and that means never, never letting on to Wolf and Lily that he comes from the very neighborhood where they hunt the most magic-workers.

So, this was a vastly entertaining and thought-provoking book. There was all this great stuff that wove magic and prejudice and immigration and class together, and I was going, “Awesome! Love it!”

Then I got to a certain point and went, “Oh, this . . . this is the climax. Isn’t it.” And I read on, and bad guys were defeated and good guys won and I kept having to remind myself, “This is the climax.” Because I just didn’t feel it, y’all. I couldn’t work out why I had such a lackluster reaction to the high point of a heretofore whizbang book, until I slept on it. Then I realized why it didn’t feel climactic, and that was because, for me, the climax didn’t address the central question of the novel.

Oh, sure, it wrapped up the mystery that had been building up. Who wants to kill Thomas Edison? (Answer: the villain. Duh.) And for that it was plenty exciting. But while that got taken care of it, the climax did nothing about the most interesting question of Sacha’s identity.

See, for me, one of the core tensions was between the main character’s two identities. On the one hand, he’s a nice Jewish boy from the Lower East Side tenements whose parents had escaped the pograms and come to America for the marvelous opportunity do backbreaking work in factories and on the docks. Magic is intimately woven into his faith, and his whole family uses or can use magic. On the other hand, he’s the apprentice to the best Inquisitor in the city, who could imprison everyone he cares about with one report.

Working for Wolf brings Sacha into the high-powered world of industrialists such as J.P. Morgaunt and the Astrals, who all make use of magic but look down on the people who actually do it, illustrating the class and immigration questions that seethed in the real era. Thus the setup. Pretty nifty, no? Then we got to the climax.

Throughout the novel, he’s been lying just as hard as he can about his origins, going to ridiculous lengths to hide them from Inquisitor Wo

Back in August, the blog MiG Writers assembled a number of opinions about YA, MG, and what makes them different. They discuss such distinctions as the age of the protagonist, the wordcount of the novel, and the focus of the story itself. There are a lot of differing opinions gathered in one place. For instance, the definitive wordcount of YA novels is given as anywhere from 40k to "oh, heck, these days anything goes." Check out the post for more thought-provoking contradictions. There is a wind-up at the end of the article that seeks to distill and resolve it all.

The article is aimed at writers, but I think it's also interesting for librarians, teachers, and kidlit lovers in general.

It is a blurry line, as anyone who's ever had to decide where to put that could-be-MG, could-be-YA novel. Some libraries have even gone to an additional "tween" distinction--stuff too YA for the MGs but too MG for the YAs. And of course, kids themselves rarely stick to one section. It's Harriet the Spy one day, then maybe some Princess Diaries tomorrow.

As regular readers know, I'm on the Round 2 SFF panel for the Cybils. Now this one's unusual in that we'll be judging both MG and YA novels, and giving the Cybil to one in each category. It's not our job to decide which is which--that's already been hashed out by the most excellent adminstrators. But I'm keeping this discussion in mind as I look forward to judging after the first of the year.

How do you decide if the book in your hands is YA or MG?

Twittered by Greg Pincus of The Happy Accident.