The Magnolia League - Katie Crouch
Synopsis: When her free-spirited mother dies in a tragic accident, sixteen-year-old Alexandria Lee is forced to leave her West Coast home and move in with a wealthy grandmother she's never known in Savannah, Georgia. By birth, Alex is a rightful if unwilling member of the Magnolia League-Savannah's long-standing debutante society. But white gloves and silk gowns are a far cry from the vintage t-shirts and torn jeans shorts she's used to.
Alex is the first in decades to question the Magnolia League's intentions, yet even she becomes entangled in their seductive world. The members enjoy youth, beauty and power...but at what cost? As Alex discovers a pact between the Magnolias and the Buzzards, a legendary hoodoo family, she discovers secrets-some deadly-hidden beneath the glossy Southern veneer.
Katie Crouch is a bestselling adult author and this is her first publication in the YA field. Her reputation as a writer for adults, I think, worked both against her and to her advantage. I was very critical while reading, simply because of the article Katie wrote at the beginning of the summer for Slate about switching to writing YA, was in the back of my mind. The voice and writing style was clearly sophisticated, but the best way that I can describe what irked me about the writing style was that it, at times, felt condescending. I wish I could explain that better - and perhaps you could view that as fitting with this exclusive debutant society - but it did make me a little irritated at some points. It felt like an adult author trying to capitalize on YA popularity, rather than writing this because she loved the characters and the audience. This is one of the rare cases where I feel that not knowing anything about the author would make this book so much better.
That said, I actually thoroughly enjoyed this book. The narrator was someone new and fresh and the supporting cast was quite colorful. I love Savannah as well, so it was great to read scenes about the setting - which was absolutely perfect for the story. And of course, the hoodoo part of it was fascinating. It's a form of magic that has been relatively unexplored in literature, and I think it's interesting that she took an existing religion and stemmed from there. Their remedies and magic spells didn't make sense, and these debutants didn't understand how they worked, but they relied on them anyway- which is pretty telling about social convention.
There were some moments that Alex drove me crazy - but that's just because that's who her character was. She's majorly insecure, in a place where she's unique. She has to struggle to hold on to who she was, despite a crazy amount of pressure. It was a little hard to see her give into that pressure, as she does slowly. She's a crazy dreaded, hippie girl, living in this white-gloved world and that was what I loved about her in the beginning. As she lets go of that, she becomes irrational and she did things that made me roll my eyes at the page - I was sitting in the airport reading this and at one point I had to stop myself from exclaiming, "IDIOT!" to the entire terminal....
So I had my issues with this book, and I probably focused on those things too much here - but I do think this book is worth reading. I'm actually really excited for The White Glove War, the sequel, which is set for release on July 3, 2011. I was definitely left wanting more and I'm super curious to see who these characters grow into, because this book left almost all of them off in the middle of some sort of growth or transition.
The Magnolia League - Katie Crouch
Synopsis: When her free-spirited mother dies in a tragic accident, sixteen-year-old Alexandria Lee is forced to leave her West Coast home and move in with a wealthy grandmother she's never known in Savannah, Georgia. By birth, Alex is a rightful if unwilling member of the Magnolia League-Savannah's long-standing debutante society. But white gloves and silk gowns are a far cry from the vintage t-shirts and torn jeans shorts she's used to.
Alex is the first in decades to question the Magnolia League's intentions, yet even she becomes entangled in their seductive world. The members enjoy youth, beauty and power...but at what cost? As Alex discovers a pact between the Magnolias and the Buzzards, a legendary hoodoo family, she discovers secrets-some deadly-hidden beneath the glossy Southern veneer.
Katie Crouch is a bestselling adult author and this is her first publication in the YA field. Her reputation as a writer for adults, I think, worked both against her and to her advantage. I was very critical while reading, simply because of the article Katie wrote at the beginning of the summer for Slate about switching to writing YA, was in the back of my mind. The voice and writing style was clearly sophisticated, but the best way that I can describe what irked me about the writing style was that it, at times, felt condescending. I wish I could explain that better - and perhaps you could view that as fitting with this exclusive debutant society - but it did make me a little irritated at some points. It felt like an adult author trying to capitalize on YA popularity, rather than writing this because she loved the characters and the audience. This is one of the rare cases where I feel that not knowing anything about the author would make this book so much better.
That said, I actually thoroughly enjoyed this book. The narrator was someone new and fresh and the supporting cast was quite colorful. I love Savannah as well, so it was great to read scenes about the setting - which was absolutely perfect for the story. And of course, the hoodoo part of it was fascinating. It's a form of magic that has been relatively unexplored in literature, and I think it's interesting that she took an existing religion and stemmed from there. Their remedies and magic spells didn't make sense, and these debutants didn't understand how they worked, but they relied on them anyway- which is pretty telling about social convention.
There were some moments that Alex drove me crazy - but that's just because that's who her character was. She's majorly insecure, in a place where she's unique. She has to struggle to hold on to who she was, despite a crazy amount of pressure. It was a little hard to see her give into that pressure, as she does slowly. She's a crazy dreaded, hippie girl, living in this white-gloved world and that was what I loved about her in the beginning. As she lets go of that, she becomes irrational and she did things that made me roll my eyes at the page - I was sitting in the airport reading this and at one point I had to stop myself from exclaiming, "IDIOT!" to the entire terminal....
So I had my issues with this book, and I probably focused on those things too much here - but I do think this book is worth reading. I'm actually really excited for The White Glove War, the sequel, which is set for release on July 3, 2011. I was definitely left wanting more and I'm super curious to see who these characters grow into, because this book left almost all of them off in the middle of some sort of growth or transition.
