Fly on the Wall

Flypaper Boy: Coming of Age by Philip "Norvaljoe" Carroll

What do you do with the world's lamest superpower? For starters, you end your first mission getting kidnapped by the bad guys who are determined to brainwash and blackmail you into becoming their next pet supervillain. They're going to provide you with all the training you need, teach you to fight properly, put you through a strength-building regiment fit for the special forces. Not to mention the company of a beautiful girl who makes you the sole object of her attentions. When you're 16, you figure you can handle it. Nothing they can do will prevent you from being a hero.

When it turns out they want you to kidnap the teenage daughter of an Eastern European communist leader. It's for her own good, and it will help rescue the entire country. When it's put that way, it doesn't seem like the bad guys are quite so bad. 

Flypaper Boy nails the title dead on. This is a coming of age story for Jimmy in many different ways. He's a teenager learning what it means to be an adult. He's an agent in training learning what it costs to enter a world of deception. He's a kid with a superpower learning that power doesn't automatically make him a hero. Most importantly, he's a young man learning that compromise begins with the words "That's not so bad," and ends with a cost that can never be recovered. 

Forbidden Dreams

The Red Door by Rachel Lulich

There is a red door in the middle of town. It is forbidden to look upon it. Those who are cast out of society are cast through the door and they never return. Aster has been dreaming about the red door, which is another problem, because in this community, nobody dreams. Dreams are forbidden.

This close-in view of a world focuses tightly upon Aster. When she is forced to flee and wrestle with the implications of her dreams, the world begins to open up onto a society that is frustratingly self-involved with no desire for exploration or growth. Everything about the system is designed to maintain the status quo, preventing any sort of progress by controlling the very desires of the inhabitants to imagine something more. Those in power will remain in power, and they will twist the truth however they need to in order to stay there. When change comes to the community of Hargrove, it comes riding a wave of destruction.

The story is myopically insular. Everything is so tightly focused on this single community that even the reading experience has an air of oppressive claustrophobia. The more Aster sees and experiences, the more things open up and the deeper the mystery becomes. We are left with a great many questions about the nature of the world and the truth about how the world works. The most important question, though, is that of Aster's responsibility to a community that shut her away, cast her out, and sought to destroy her. It's a significant question, as Aster alone has the ability to stave off the destruction the community of Hargrove has wrought upon itself.