Weekend Pick for June 21, 2024
| Do you know what you are going to read this weekend? If you haven't decided yet, check out our Weekend Pick for this Friday. Shelly Shaffer continues to provide suggestions for reading throughout June. To remind our readers, Dr. Shaffer is an Associate Professor of Literacy at Eastern Washington University. She loves sharing books she’s read and her passion for anything Young Adult. She is happiest curled up with a book and her bulldogs. |  |
Beholder by Ryan La Sala (2023)
 Ryan La Sala | In today’s world, our daily activities are often video recorded–by somebody’s cell phone, by CCTV, or by other surveillance. But, imagine a world where your life is recorded by every mirror or reflective surface. In the world that Ryan La Sala creates in Beholder (2023), that is exactly what happens. Mirrors (or any reflective surface– think silverware, glass, stainless steel) record everything that is captured in their reflections. However, not everybody has access to these recordings; only the very powerful can access the images that have been recorded, and La Sala’s newest main character, Athanios (Athan), is one of the few who has the power to view the images. |
Athan can look into mirrors and rewind the reflections to see into the past. For years, Athan has avoided looking in mirrors because his grandmother (Yiayia) warned him not to. Athan is afraid of what he’ll see when he looks into the mirror because when he does look, a monster seems to be lurking behind the reflection. Athan doesn’t understand what the monster wants, but he feels like it is waiting to escape the mirror and attack Athan. Beholder switches back and forth from chapters describing the present, marked by chapter numbers, and excerpts that seem to be written using the inner thoughts of Athan, which are marked by a spider at the top of the page and indicated by a different font style.
Athan has been working for a man named Uhler, who specializes in high-end redesign. Athan is invited to a party in the penthouse of one of Uhler’s clients, when he is in the restroom, he hears strange sounds coming from the party. He opens the door, but is pushed back into the bathroom told to hide: “Don’t open this door. If you don’t open it, they won’t see it. I’ll come back for you when it’s safe” (p. 8). Athan stays hidden in the bathroom as he hears screams echoing throughout the penthouse; the screams continue for hours. When Athan finally opens the door after five hours of waiting for the screams to subside, he finds a massacre. Strangely, the bodies seem to be arranged in a purposeful way and all of the wallpaper is torn off the walls. Athan hears police pounding down the penthouse door and he escapes through a fire escape to the roof. While escaping, he glances into the reflection of the window and it quickly rewinds to the horrors of the night before.
| Athan is suddenly a person of interest in the murders of all of those people in the penthouse, and this sends him on a frantic mission to figure out what’s going on. He rushes home only to discover that his Yiayia is missing. He realizes that he must act quickly before he loses everything he has left. His best bet is to track down the mysterious stranger that pushed him into the bathroom the night before. Athan begins to unravel the mystery, only to discover that his YiaYia and Uhler–and even the mystery boy–are more involved than he imagined. La Sala takes readers in a dark underworld of New York City, where collectors are interested in artifacts used in murders and other mayhem. It is a race against the clock, and only Athan can ultimately save the day. |  Figure 1. Beholder Book Cover |
This novel is beautiful. The cover art on the dust jacket (Mishko, 2023) shows a silvery spider over a bleary, colorful eyeball (Figure 1). The back cover shows an unobstructed view of the same eyeball (Figure 2). The endpapers have been embellished with a pink and black pattern front and back cover (Figure 3) and an enlarged, embossed replica of the same image is on the cardboard cover on the front of the book (Figure 4). Readers will not connect the images they see on the endpapers until partway through the novel, but they are important in the plot. This imagery creates a multimodal experience for readers who make the connection. This cover cannot be ignored and immediately captures your attention as you are browsing the new book section of the local library or bookstore. Readers that pick up the book won’t be disappointed by the story hidden between the pages.
 Figure 2. Beholder Back Cover |  Figure 3. Beholder Endpapers. This image shows the endpapers of the book. When readers begin the book, they don't realize the significance of the endpapers, but by the end of the book, readers can appreciate this embellishment, which adds to the multimodal nature of the text |  Figure 3. Beholder Cardboard Book Cover. This image shows the cardboard book cover inside the dust jacket. The image is a large reproduction of the wallpaper image, a significant part of the novel. |
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