Fanny Berk Strikes Back by Avi Luxenberg

 Fanny Strikes Back by Avi Luxenburg is a fast-based, exciting read for YA readers who like adventure. Obsessed with karate, Fanny Berk is a complex character that readers will cheer for. Dressed in drab colors and hiding behind her hair, Fanny is a teen who wants to go unnoticed. As fate would have it, though, she does something that surprises even herself. She finds herself in the Flow and acts on her impulses—sending a set of actions in motion that will change her life.

Tired of school bullies, she uses her karate skills to take down two of the school’s worst bullies. Her actions cause some to call her a hero and a ninja, but she is mostly embarrassed by what she has done. Even worse, her actions could cost her the only passion she has—her beloved karate class. Young adults will relate to this all or nothing scenario, “Karate was everything, and I might lose it all.”

Set in British Columbia, Luxenburg includes a wide cast of characters from different backgrounds. Fanny’s family is Jewish who have experienced prejudice and persecution from a group called The Movement. Despite having to move and lose her only friend, Fanny overcomes her isolation with grit and moral courage.

Fanny's character arc is impressively steep. She goes from talking to herself, disliking dogs, to becoming a “dog” person with actual friends, a group of gifted kids who call themselves the Motley Crew. Using their varied talents, the crew investigates crimes happening inconspicuously in their own neighborhood.

Luxenburg, who was an educator, gets the school setting exactly right. He compares the halls to teeming schools of fish and the bullies as sharks. Even more dangerous than the bullies, an underground protection racket, comprised of immoral adults, is recruiting students. Unless Fanny and her crew can stop them, there are ruffians who pose more danger than the school's worst bullies.

Young adults will love Fanny and her crew who show initiative, self-sufficiency, and creative problem solving in the trickiest of situations.

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There Will Come Soft Rains

Ray Bradbury issued two versions of this short story. The first was published in Collier's and the second version was published in The Martian Chronicles. 

In the second version he includes a new metaphor: 

"The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly." 

This change is an important one. The house is now characterized as an altar while the technology are the choirs or servants in attendance. The house or "altar" is a place where rituals continue long after they are necessary. 

The stove continues to make breakfast even when there are no people left to eat it. In fact, immediately before the house is ruined, the house's technology goes into a frenzy. The stove makes breakfasts "at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips." 

Not only does the stove misidentify the time--its well after 10 PM--the stove produces an enormous quantity of food. The stove would not need to cook ten dozen eggs for the four people living in the house--Mr. and Mrs. McClellan and their two children.  

The "gods" he spoke of in the altar metaphor are clearly the family who no longer need to eat breakfast. He said "the gods had gone away," a sly reference to the fact that the family are now silhouettes on a charred exterior wall of the house.

Though computers had not been invented in Bradbury's time, he gives the house a CPU--an "attic brain" that fails to correctly direct the pumps to put out the fire. 

The "choirs" that so obediently did the work of the humans fail all at once. The lawn mower begins cutting the grass, the front door opens and closes, the umbrella in the lawn opens and closes. Bradbury writes that there were "a thousand things happening" and that there was "maniac confusion" when the smart technology fails.  

He calls the end, when the house is in its death throes, a "rain of fire and timber."

The attic or brain has been overthrown causing all of the technology to malfunction. The technology continues to operate haphazardly, a voice continues to announce the day of the week. This ritual, like the poetry ritual, is no longer necessary since, unfortunately, there is no one left on earth.