Meet Me in the Strange

February 1, 2018

Gr 10 Up-A pair of teens escape their troubled homes and follow a rock star on tour. Davi has grown up in a hotel his grandfather owns. He has his own suite of rooms and spends his time doing whatever he wants. He meets Anna at a concert and, when she tells him of her difficult life at home, helps her to escape. Together they follow the tour of Django, their favorite musician. This book touts a setting of a "retro-futuristic city," which explains some of the odd phrases used throughout: Apollonauts instead of astronauts; glister-boy, stupido. Music is listened to on record albums. The frequent mentions of the Apollo moon landing set this novel in the early 1970s, and little-to-none of the story is "futuristic" enough to change that apparent setting. Teens may lose interest or have difficulty relating to the obsolete technology and the characters' odd manner of speaking. Each chapter consists of four or five paragraphs, but rather than a fast-paced, page-turning action plot, this story plods. There isn't enough world-building for readers to differentiate this world from the one we live in, nor is there enough detail about each character for teens to sympathize with any of them. VERDICT Purchase A.S. King's Still Life with Tornado instead for elements of magical realism or Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor & Park for historical fiction with characters escaping difficult life situations.-Jenni Frencham, Columbus Public Library, WI

Copyright 2018 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2018
Two teenagers find salvation in each other in this music-tinged YA sci-fi novel.Teen Davi is struck by a girl he sees at a glam and glitter rock concert. She isn't exactly beautiful, but there is something that draws him to her. When he sees her leaving the Angelus--the once-great hotel founded by his great-grandfather and where Davi and his sister still live--he follows her and eventually introduces himself. She is Anna Z., and she's a girl of a million interests and theories. The two quickly bond over their love of glam god Django Conn, whom Anna sees as the next stage in human evolution: "We're homo lux. Humans made out of light just like in the movies and the late show on TV. That's Django--and that's us too." Anna opens Davi's eyes to ideas that he's never before considered. Davi thinks he's found a new best friend even though he receives warnings that Anna is not what she appears to be. Nevertheless, he is strongly tempted to join Anna on a pilgrimage to follow Django's tour across the continent and to discover the secret of "Alien Drift," a mysterious force that might have great implications for the future of humanity. Watts (Stonecutter, 2006, etc.) writes in an inventive, energetic prose that synthesizes slang and youthful earnestness to capture the personality of narrator Davi: "One half of me was zapped by seeing this girl, like a knife juiced with electricity cutting into my brain. She was gone, vanished, disappeared inside herself." The world of the novel, from its language and geography to its layers of popular culture, is drawn with intricacy and vitality. Some of the plot points may feel a bit contrived, but the colorful verisimilitude of Davi and his infatuation with Anna should propel readers forward. Django is perhaps a bit too obviously a David Bowie analog, but Watts successfully captures not only the gravity of a teenage subculture, but also the more mercurial feeling of an axial generation on the cusp of something completely new.A bighearted and imaginative tale about a glam god's fans.

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