LOBSTER LAND
by Susan Carlton
A day in 16-year-old Charlotte’s life on Bleak, an island of the coast of Maine, contains more chaos than a season of your average TV drama. With her mother both physically and mentally unavailable and her father more interested in his laptop than his kids, it’s up to Charlotte to shuttle siblings Eb and Fern to day care and keep them entertained and fed. On top of her familial responsibilities, she maintains the top GPA in her class and makes time for her boyfriend Noah. In the week leading up to the winter solstice, obnoxious, literate Charlotte races to finish her boarding-school applications, fights with her best friend and questions the viability of her relationship with Noah. Additionally, her mother deserts the family, and her father may be wanted by the FBI. Carlton grasps at intelligence, wit and pathos but fails to reach any of them. Charlotte vacillates between sounding like an embittered hipster and a ten-year-old, and her speech often alienates the reader. Between Charlotte’s delirious thought patterns, her endless attempts at wordplay and some of the unsexiest make-out scenes in teen literature, it is unlikely that readers will develop an attachment to anyone in this story. (Fiction. YA)