Looks by Madeleine George
Meghan Ball is obese. She’s three times the size of the average teenager and yet, somehow, most of the time, she’s invisible. Aside from the horrifying abuse heaped on her by the star basketball player, J-Bar, and his cronies, she fades into the proverbial wallpaper, shunned and ignored. This puts Meghan in an interesting position, however, as, since she’s treated like furniture, schoolmates tend to have extremely private conversations within her hearing. Meghan, therefore, is a repository of dirty secrets and gossip to which few of even the most elite at school are privy.
Aimee is tiny. Tall and made almost entirely out of hard angles, she’s
seriously underweight. She’s the new girl and brilliant poet, anorexic, innovative dresser that she is, she’s not like the other students either. As these two unique girls begin to drift towards each other in the storm-tossed ocean of high school, secrets will be revealed and revenge taken for hidden wrongs. George’s poetic writing and painfully authentic story of potential friendship and the abject horrors of high school life are compulsively readable.
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Seldom does a debut novel read so little like one. Davidson has crafted an intriguing tale of love and redemption across the ages. The narrator, once strikingly handsome though drug addled and emotionally stunted, has suffered a violent car accident which left him with catastrophic burns over most of his body. While recovering in the hospital, he wallows in self-pity, contemplating suicide and making sure the medical staff knows just how angry he is until a mysterious woman, Marianne Engel, appears in his room. A psychiatric patient at the same hospital, she has slipped into the unnamed burned man’s room to let him know that they are lovers from 14th century Germany and that she is here to help him. Though he believes her to be mentally ill, the man finds Marianne’s vibrant personality, stories (including the tale of their own past), and her stone carvings of gargoyles and grotesques.
In smoky tones of black, white and gray, Caldecott-winning children’s book artist David Small tells the sparsely-worded story of his life in poignant vignettes, starting at the age six. Small is a sickly, quiet child, more likely to be found drawing with his paper and crayons than playing any sports and spends the larger part of his time attempting to negotiate the minefield of his tense, virtually silent family. Their silence extends to nearly all matters and when, at fourteen, he undergoes an operation to remove a supposed cyst on his neck, he awakens, missing a vocal chord, with almost no voice and is never told that the growth was actually cancer.
Fans of Craig Ferguson’s work as host of CBS’s The Late Late Show may be familiar with elements of his autobiography. The actor/comedian is not shy about using his own life as fodder for his opening monologues, making frequent mention of his alcoholism and even dedicating a show to his late father on the day he died. With humor, humility, and wit, Ferguson describes his childhood in Scotland (he grew up in a city named “the second-worst town in the United Kingdom”) and his fractious adulthood marked by forays into the music world as a drummer, fist fights, failed relationships, his first taste of audience approval as a comedian, an alarming affinity for alcohol, and more failed relationships. After a successful stint in rehab, he saw greater career success, landing a job as a series regular on The Drew Carey Show before being chosen for his current position. Ferguson’s story reveals his belief that true failure comes from not trying and how a second (or fifth) chance can make a difference. A touching, funny memoir.