Marco Impossible

TITLE Marco Impossible
AUTHOR Hannah Moskowitz
PUBLICATION March 19th 2013 by Roaring Brook Press
READ February 25 to 26, 2013
SOURCE From Raincoast Books for review

Thirteen-year-old best friends Stephen and Marco attempt a go-for-broke heist to break into the high school prom and get Marco onstage to confess his love for (and hopefully steal the heart of) Benji, the adorable exchange student and bass player of the prom band. Of course, things don't always go according to plan, and every heist comes with its fair share of hijinks.

Hannah Moskowitz became an author I’m very excited about after I read and loved her YA novel Teeth. Her writing style was a fast favorite of mine and I really enjoy her ability to be gritty and honest while weaving a pretty fantastical tale. Marco Impossible showcased everything I love about her but in a much more innocent way. This story dealt with issues such as bullying and tackled the confusing dynamics of many types of relationships.

Stephen has grown up being Marco’s best friend and detective partner. When there is a mystery going on the two of them always pull out their trusty notebook (full of information on everyone and everything) and hop on the case. I really liked how this habit of theirs showcased them striving to remain young in the face of entering high school and attending different schools. With their final heist of getting Marco into the prom so he could profess his love to his crush of 3 years, Benji, you could feel that they were grasping at straws and trying to live inside the heist rather than face reality. While all of their hijinx is taking place you also have Stephens large family in the background which brings a whole other aspect to the story. His now single mother is tasked with taking care of six children and through that everyone really pulls their weight in the family. I really loved the family dynamic here, all of the siblings would step up to help out the mother and their fellow siblings in any way they could and you really felt a strong family bond from all the characters.

I loved that we got the story from Stephen’s perspective. The novel really revolves in most ways around Marco, but we get a much more well rounded view of what is happening from Stephen. His need to protect Marco in the face of the bullying that’s happening is definitely admirable and you could tell he thought of Marco as another sibling of his. Marco didn’t come across as the nicest, most personable guy on Earth but as the story wears on you see that he kind of always has his guard up and I started feeling bad for him. He was ignoring all of the ugly in his life, only showing the pretty and fabulous, and letting everything build up inside. He was nervous about his new baby sister and feeling down because of how people treated him. All of these feelings were building up and really taking a toll on Stephen and Marco’s relationship and the progression their friendship goes on in the novel is really what kept me reading. They drive each other crazy and are holding so much in so I was dying to see the point where everything would finally come to the surface.

For me this story was really about the great relationships between the characters and I loved how well developed everything was. This is so much more than just your average MG novel and I’m happy to have finally read one that features a gay teen on a mission to profess his love. There needs to be more books like this because there is definitely an audience that needs these types of stories and I am thankful to Moskowitz for putting this out there. Marco Impossible is a quick read that will most definitely leave an impact on any reader.

Teeth Review

TITLE Teeth
AUTHOR Hannah Moskowitz
PUBLICATION January 1st 2013 by Simon Pulse
READ December 09 to 10, 2012
SOURCE Simon & Schuster Canada for review

A gritty, romantic modern fairy tale from the author of Break and Gone, Gone, Gone.

Be careful what you believe in.

Rudy’s life is flipped upside-down when his family moves to a remote island in a last attempt to save his sick younger brother. With nothing to do but worry, Rudy sinks deeper and deeper into loneliness and lies awake at night listening to the screams of the ocean beneath his family’s rickety house.

Then he meets Diana, who makes him wonder what he even knows about love, and Teeth, who makes him question what he knows about anything. Rudy can’t remember the last time he felt so connected to someone, but being friends with Teeth is more than a little bit complicated. He soon learns that Teeth has terrible secrets. Violent secrets. Secrets that will force Rudy to choose between his own happiness and his brother’s life.

Over the last couple of months I have heard lots of raving about Hannah Moskowitz’s writing. Most of my Goodreads friends have read and highly recommend Gone, Gone, Gone as one of their favorite reads of 2012. But my first foray into Mokowitz territory was with Teeth. Now, I went into this novel expecting a gritty, raw contemporary that would punch me in the gut and send me home to cry and it feels weird to sit down after having read it and say that I did get exactly what I wanted, but in a way I could have never imagined.

Rudy and his family move to a remote island for the sake of his little brother who suffers from Cystic Fibrosis. Rumor has it that the Enki fish, which roam the water in plenty, are magic fish that keep even the sickest person alive. Once on the island Rudy becomes incredibly lonely as he is the only person living on this island who is 16, or even close too. He takes to running and doing errands for his mother every week, and one day while out and about he stops an attack on what appears to be a half fish/half boy being. Now, at this point I was pretty shocked (looking back I probably shouldn’t have been, going by the scale riddled cover… oh and the ever predominant fish hooks) but I had no idea there would be a paranormal element at work here. I was completely lost in this tale and I still came out feeling like I had read one of the rawest contemporaries ever. This story didn’t feel fantastical to me at all, and I fully attribute that to how awesome Rudy and Teeth were as characters.

Rudy was a sixteen-year-old boy and he felt like just that. He had dirty thoughts and he cussed… a lot. Not only was his dialogue chalk full of f-bombs but his inner dialogue was riddled with it as well. And that felt incredibly real to me, and it brought him to life in my mind and made him into someone that I felt I could know personally. I know a lot of people aren’t fans of swearing in novels, but to me that’s how teenagers talk and I want realism in the stories I read. Rudy starts off as someone who is lost in his new life on the island; he has thrown himself into his drawing, running and just generally being there for his brother but he really has nothing else going on. After he meets Teeth he really opened up about how he was feeling and he let himself go. Teeth was a strange entity for me. He annoyed the hell out of me and so often I wanted to reach into the novel and shake him as he threw himself in harms way, but by the end I loved him. He had the ultimate shit hand dealt to him and he was doing his best to take the lemons that were thrown at him and make lemonade. His territorial need to protect the Enki fish on the island was admirable and it led to him also feeling incredibly real to me (even though he was a fishboy.)

That was the most surprising thing to me; it had one of the most fantastical characters I have come across and yet it still felt as if I was reading a contemporary novel. It dealt with things that were ugly, painful and scary and it didn’t shy from them at all. It embraced the ugliness, not glossing over the most painful of details, and it came out beautifully. I think Moskowitz’s writing is definitely deserving of the resounding raving it has received and I will be devouring anything by her that I can get my hands on.