“If I Stay” by Gayle Forman ($16.99)
The crucial question comes from the grandfather of comatose Mia, 17, whose shattered life hangs in the balance in the aftermath of the car wreck that killed her parents and brother: “Do you think she decides?” he asks.
Meaning: Is it Mia’s choice to let go of her life, or hang on? The answer drives the story as Mia, nicknamed Yo Yo Mia for her extraordinary skill with the cello, reflects on the other choices that have confronted her.
Make up after a fistfight with her one-time best friend? Stay in Oregon with the loyal boyfriend/blooming rock star? Or accept an offer from the Juilliard School of music on the opposite coast?
Stay with her parents and brother in that indefinite space divorced from her ruined body? Or stay with that other family — the friends and relatives in the hospital waiting room, and the profound pain, love and strength that decision will require?
Other reviewers have favorably compared “If I Stay” to novelist Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones.” Together, they would make a dynamic, powerful duo for a book group. Ages 14 and up.
“Wintergirls” by Laurie Halse Anderson ($17.99)
Weight, not religion or politics, is the truly taboo topic. There is no way to respond to the question “Does my butt look big in this?” If you say, “Yes,” it’s guaranteed to grate or prompt an outburst. If you say, “No,” you’re accused of patronizing.
For someone battling anorexia or bulimia, another person’s answer doesn’t matter anyway, because the only possible answer is one that requires further self-punishment. (Isn’t it odd that so many young-adult books focus on fragile anorexics when this country’s more pressing problem is the number of young people who already outweigh their parents?)
Lia, the narrator in Laurie Halse Anderson’s exquisite story, is the survivor of an obsessive weight-loss competition with her best friend, who is found dead as the novel begins. But in Cassie’s absence, Lia remains in thrall to her own compulsion to define herself by the canyons between her bones. Ages 12 and up.
“Cashay” by Margaret McMullan ($15)
Her mother uses drugs. She lives in a neighborhood where errant bullets are so common that when children hear gunfire, they reflexively “lie down on the cement the way we’ve been taught.”
Then her sister is fatally shot, and Cashay’s world implodes. Slowly, she reconstructs her life, hitting as many hurdles as she clears in a story that pulls no punches. Age 12 and up.
“The Girls” by Tucker Shaw ($16.95)
This novel, by Denver Post food editor Tucker Shaw, is a lively, slightly guilty romp that ought to come with high-end chocolates and champagne.
It’s a tight, bright update of Clare Booth Luce’s “The Women,” set in a posh Aspen girls’ prep school. Half the girls are cheating on their boyfriends and two-timing their BFFs (sometimes simultaneously), while the other girls are gossiping about the little wenches.
If reading “The Girls” isn’t enough of an indulgence, the author includes a chapter in which making gubana, the luscious Italian dessert, is so lovingly and minutely described that you could probably make it yourself with edible results. Ages 12 and up.
“The Mousewife” by Rumer Godden ($14.95)
The mousy little heroine of this slight but powerful story, first published in 1951, is a female who spends a lot of time thinking. Unresentfully, she pulls more than her share of the mousehold weight as the principle food-forager.
She hits a bonanza when a caged, wild-caught turtle dove is installed near the mouse family’s quarters in a house. The dove, grieving its freedom, doesn’t touch the food left in its cage, so eventually, the mousewife helps herself. The bird and the mouse become friends, with the mouse held rapt by the dove’s descriptions of the world outside the house.
The mousewife’s epiphany — her sudden comprehension of the dove’s yearning for freedom — changes both for good. Ages 4 and up.
