Whisper, by Phoebe Kitanidis is a book probably enjoyed by majority of the female middle teens that fill the halls in our junior high schools. The protagonist, Joy is a “normal” teenage girl; the only difference is she can hear whispers – often referred to as wishes. Her main goal in life is to help people; however, her older sister Jessica, do not share the same perspective. Icka claims to hear more than just the innocent small worries that Joy can hear, and this worries Joy. She knows that her hearing has fully matured - but has it really? Her doubts continue to rise until the point that her hearing does develop into something more complex, foreign and perhaps dangerous. She starts to hear things that she had never heard before - the more spiteful nature of thoughts. Joy starts to understand the reason behind Icka withdrawing from society so much. Slowly everything starts to become much more clearer - the headaches, the warnings . . .
Then Joy hears Jessica’s whisper something that blows her mind - “I want to kill my Hearing dead, and kill me too if that's what it takes.”
Joy knows she has to stop Icka from doing whatever she has in mind. So she does something totally out of character for her. She runs away with a boy she barely knows, “steals” a car; all the while, not telling her parents what has been going on in her life. Rescuing Icka is now a goal that no one can stop Joy from completing - not even Icka herself.
The idea for this book was really refreshing since it was fantasy, but it had real life problems. The problems were realistic and well thought out. The negative aspect of this book was that it started out too slow for me. You really didn't get into the essence of the plot until about the middle of the book.
Stork, written by Wendy Delsol
Moving from L.A. to a small town, Katla, the protagonist, struggles to adjust to the way of life in her new setting. The first thing she finds out is that she is part of an ancient society- The Icelandic Stork Society. This entails the power to give expecting mothers the souls of unborn children. The unexpected conflict she experiences is when she receives one of the most respected seats, which doesn’t settle so well with the rest of the society. On top of everything, Katla has some serious ‘parents that just got divorced’ drama going on.
However, after some not so wonderful experiences with Wade, the scary but popular one at school, Katla decides to make real friends, not just a whole bunch of old ladies entrusted with such an important job. Soon she is writing for the fashion column in the school newspaper and is quickly getting familiar with the school body. Life is as normal as it could get considering she can deliver baby souls to moms, except for one big mystery - Katla’s chief editor Jack Snjosson. Regardless of the arguments that they have, for some reason Katla is drawn to him. A feeling of familiarity. . .but why?
Follow Katla as she learns how to handle all these new responsibilities but still find time to figure out the mystery of Jack.
A typical teenager would have difficulty relating to this character simply because of the origin of the conflict. The climax happens at the end of the book, so the rising actions sometimes seems to be too much. There are many sub-plots to this story, that perhaps may confuse the reader. I would give the book two stars.
Letitia
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