FIRST REVIEW OF NEW NOVEL ALPHA WAVE BY ANDREW DEMCAK

Alpha Wave picks up where A Little Bit Langston, the first book in the Elusive Spark series, left off. If you bonded with James, Paul, and Lumen in A Little Bit Langston, you’ll be glad to see them all again. I loved both books, but I’m a sucker for a mighty girl hero, and Alpha Wave delivers. And three cheers for a YA book with a totally believable cast full of boy-loving boys and girl-loving girls. 

Keira, the main character, is a Southern California teenager with a troubled family situation and a major attitude. The adventure starts right away when she discovers her supernatural powers through a conflict with her foster father. Keira encounters a caring mentor in the form of a Tibetan monk who has assumed the shape of a talking rat and appears in time to save her from a demon who works for the government—and that’s just the first surprise. Originality is a huge strength in this story, which takes the bones of a classic coming-of-age plot and fleshes it out with all-fresh twisty details. There are plenty of funny and sexy moments, plus a few that will have you biting your nails or putting on your sunglasses on the bus so people can’t see you getting misty. 

Demcak’s writing is infused with a gentle spirituality that reminds me of the best of Madeleine L’Engle. I had the good fortune to be one of Alpha Wave’s beta readers; this is definitely one of those books that holds up nicely to being read twice, and both reads left me with a wonderful sense of trust in his world’s design and his characters’ ability to choose love over fear, no matter how risky. - Skye Alexander, Goodreads.

SKYE ALLEN: Why Is My Queer YA Story Not a Romance Nor a Coming Out Story?

Why Is My Queer YA Story Not a Romance Nor a Coming Out Story? By Skye Allen

There’s a trope about coming out in LGBTQ+ young adult fiction. And there’s another trope about falling in love. Pick up a queer story with a teen protagonist, and I would understand if you expected certain things. Kissing. Maybe sex, depending on your idea of what makes something a YA book versus a book for adults. A story that centers on the big gay reveal to Mom/Dad/Coach.

I get where that came from. The whole concept of queer young adult stories told in a positive light, that genre being a thing at all, that is still fresh and wonderful. Queer literature in general is relatively young as a category, and it’s no surprise that the first few generations of stories had a lot to do with falling in love and coming out. After all, that’s what makes us different. It’s who we are and who we love. And the dangers that can strike when we tell the world the good news. That makes for pretty huge drama, and no matter how enlightened your family or your hometown, the day you come out is always going to be a pretty huge day.

But some of the best queer YA books, lately, have not been love stories. They haven’t even been coming out stories. The audience is ready for that now; they have been for some time. There’s no closet factor in these non-romances, no miserable gay teens who can’t show themselves in all their splendor for fear of violence or being misunderstood by the people they have to live with. It’s just…kids. Kids who already came out before the book started. Some of them have sweethearts. Some are single. Some are fixated on that special diving champion or choir girl, or just on losing their virginity, but some are fixated on their mother’s immigration status or the app they’re creating or any one of a million different real-life things.

In other words, they’re real kids.

In Will Grayson Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan, the central relationship is between two friends, a gay boy and a straight boy. There’s a mention of sex, but not between those two. The story explores the range of complex emotion in a teenage best-friendship. That’s what it’s about. And I love it for that. Andrew Demcak’s beautiful Ghost Songs is similar: the main character is gay, but that’s a given. His story is about bullying, and a deep friendship, and an alcoholic parent, and just plain growing up as a sensitive kid. It’s not a romance. It doesn’t need to be.

I knew when I started writing The Songbird Thief that there was no love story. Or -- there was, but not a romantic one. It’s the story of Lee, a fifteen-year-old girl from rural Marin County who runs away to San Francisco to be near her grownup friend, Sonja. Lee has a crush on Sonja, but it’s not reciprocal. Sonja is like a mother to Lee. Girls Lee’s age come along who could be love interests, and there’s a flirtatious moment or two, but Lee is busy looking for a job and trying to find her real father. Lee’s life is complicated by magic, and her singing voice makes people do things like unconsciously walk into traffic. She’s distracted. She’s a girl who happens to be gay, whose story has nothing to do with kissing.

She’s a real kid. And I’m happy there’s a place on the bookshelf for her.

Read more from Skye Allen at her blog - click here.

THE BEST REVIEW OF *A LITTLE BIT LANGSTON* BY ANDREW DEMCAK

A great review at Amazon of my Teen GLBTQ Sci-Fi Coming-Out novel, A Little Bit Langston:

Holding my breath for the sequel, December 29, 2015

By 

Skye

This review is from: A Little Bit Langston (Kindle Edition)

A Little Bit Langston starts off in your head. No, YOUR head, the head of an LA teenager who has a learning disability and a demanding, self-absorbed mother and a bubbling volcano of feelings for his best friend. Or at least the book starts in the head of someone you love. James, the main character, is so engaging, so immediately present on the page, that I was willing to follow him right down the rabbit hole, no questions asked.

And it is quite a warren down there. I don’t want to spoil too much, but let’s just say if you’re a fan of alien technology, secret government agencies, and gifted young people who can probably kill you with their brains, you won’t be disappointed. Not to mention if you’re a fan of Langston Hughes, the Langston of the title. The author doesn’t use any excerpts of Hughes’ actual work; instead he paraphrases, or in some instances inserts original lines that are clearly intended to remind the reader of famous Hughes poems. But the spirit of the poet is there--in the multifaceted identities of the main characters, in the brave actions of young men who get beaten for being gay, in the expansively hopeful feeling of the story as a whole.

The plot fits into the classic “chosen one” style of tale. James appears at first to have trouble reading at school, but a bizarre talent quickly emerges when he begins to channel the writing of long-dead poet Montgomery Langston (Langston Hughes). At the same time, his electricity-related superpower shows itself. After a period of being persecuted at school, and some harrowing real-world complications involving his best friend/love interest, Paul, James finds himself at a special academy for gifted teens like himself. Which is when the alien + conspiracy questions really kick into gear. I’m glad the author set us up for a sequel, because the busy, scheme-filled underworld he created is way too big for just one book.

I love a YA story where the superpowers appear at adolescence, where they overwhelm the character and then through the arc of the story he masters them. That’s what growing up feels like: channeling electricity with no control, destroying all the lightbulbs in the house, knowing for a fact that no one can understand your side of the story. Even though James’ demanding mother claims she always knew he was special, we see James changing into his true self on the page, as his feelings for Paul blossom and he discovers who he really is. In this case that’s pretty literal; James gets a big surprise when he finds out who his father is. Good YA science fiction stuff.

The love story isn’t center stage here, and that’s a big strength of the book. There’s plenty already going on in this story, and not all YA stories or coming-out stories have to be love stories. Another significant strength is Demcak’s skillful, barely-there handling of race and ethnicity. Way too much science fiction is, historically, way too white. That’s started to shift in recent years, but slowly. In A Little Bit Langston, the love interest, Paul, is Filipino, while James is white. Hardly anything is ever said about that difference between them, but Paul never has that insert-diversity-here feeling as a character. He’s three-dimensional, with a complex family and history of his own, and his journey toward loving James feels very earned. When we meet Lumen, another student at the special school, James expresses curiosity about her Korean heritage, but when the two turn out to be half-siblings, no one misses a beat, because these characters live so easily in a multicultural world.

Don’t miss out on A Little Bit Langston. I will be holding my breath until the sequel comes out.