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Mini-Reviews: A few of my recent reads

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A few of my recent reads, mini-review style:

The Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan: No one can deny that Rick Riordan can write. His scenes are humorous, his characters are vivid and flawed, and his research is impeccable. This book even featured the return of Percy Jackson, who finds himself at Camp Jupiter, Camp Half-Blood’s Roman counterpart, strangely without his memory. However, this book just seemed a bit too slow and bloated for me–too long by about 100 pages.

Habibi by Craig Thompson: A gorgeous melding of illustration, story, history, religion, identity, guilt, repentance, and love. Two refugee slaves are separated, then find their way back together, navigating their unique relationship in a world of corruption, desperation, and poverty. Stunning illustrations and a multi-layered tale. I’m looking forward to picking up Thompson’s Blankets soon.

Circle of Fire by Michelle Zink: A lush, beautifully written conclusion to the Prophecy of the Sisters trilogy. Zink has the ability to make both the assumed villains and the supposed heroes multi-layered, and her depiction of the Lia/Alice relationship is brought to a satisfying close. Zink’s prose is gorgeous and her words truly evoke the novel’s Gothic setting.

White Cat by Holly Black (narrated by Jesse Eisenberg): I first picked this up in print last year and couldn’t get into it. Yet Jesse Eisenberg’s narration truly pulled me into this original story of Cassel Sharpe, teenage con-man and the only member of his family who isn’t a curseworker (persecuted and feared members of society who can alter your emotions, luck, or even form with a single touch). Yet he does suffer from the guilt of knowing that he killed his childhood best friend, Lila. He can’t remember anything about the murder, but just recalls looking down at her body, at the blood. But when a white cat shows up, Cassel starts to suspect that he is part of something bigger than himself—that he is the one being conned. Eisenberg’s voice is the perfect mixture of knowing, awkward, and sheepish, and Black’s plot is original and inventive, with plenty of memorable characters, twists, and turns.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

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Wade Watts is eighteen years old, socially awkward, a little overweight, and a whole lot geeky. Like most of humanity, he spends his time logged into the OASIS, a massive virtual world that has practically replaced reality. And why shouldn’t it? It’s the year 2044, and the Earth has gone to seed. After the deaths of his parents, Wade (alliteratively named by his father for the superhero connotations) is forced to live with his aunt, who only uses him for the additional food vouchers he can buy her, and her rotating string of boyfriends. They reside in the stacks, trailer park lots where stacks of mobile homes and RVs are piled onto each another in mountains of rickety steel in order to maximize space in prime locations near cities. Food is scarce and an energy crisis is threatening. No wonder everyone escapes to the OASIS, a land where individuals become avatars and can transform into anyone and anything they could possibly imagine being. A land composed of thousands of planets utilizing details from any number of fictional fantasy and science-fiction universes: “The Firefly universe was anchored in a sector adjacent to the Star Wars galaxy, with a detailed re-creation of the Star Trek universe in the sector adjacent to that. Users could now teleport back and forth between their favorite fictional worlds. Middle Earth. Vulcan. Pern. Arrakis. Magrathea. Disc-world, Mid-World, Riverworld, Ringworld. Worlds upon worlds” (p. 49).

But the OASIS isn’t just a place to play, battle, find magic items, and attend school (yes, Wade is a senior in the OASIS public school system). It’s also the location for the greatest contest ever imagined, the search for James Halliday’s Easter Egg. When Halliday, the creator of the OASIS, died, he set into motion a massive treasure hunt for three keys and three gates. The first avatar to successfully locate these items will win an unimaginable fortune and ultimate control over the OASIS. This contest, composed of riddles based upon Halliday’s obsession with 80’s pop culture and the history of videogames, comes to consume the life of these egg hunters, who eventually come to be known as “gunters.” The 80’s are back, and exhaustive knowledge of that decade will pay off big for someone.

When Parzival (the name of Wade’s avatar), discovers the location of the first key, he shoots to the top of the virtual scoreboard, instantly becoming an instant celebrity and the object of media attention, death threats, and adulation. He must carefully navigate the web of clues he is faced with, evade the attention of Innovative Online Industries, a corrupt corporation looking to purchase and take control of the OASIS, and figure out how to manage his virtual relationships with the other gunters in contention for the top prize: his best friend Aech, the brotherly team of Daito and Shoto, and Art3mis, the female avatar he is slowly falling in love with. All this while keeping his gaming and pop-culture skills honed to perfection.

Ready Player One was a rollicking, fast-paced, absolutely engrossing read. I was born in 1982, so I probably fall at the early end of this book’s target audience. Regardless, I picked up on most of the pop culture references in the novel and was fascinated by the reverence with which Parzival, Halliday, and by extension the author, feel for this decade. Mastering videogames, movie references, and song lyrics is a way of life for the people of Ready Player One, and, in fact, this way of life mirrors the way many obsessive fans feel for the objects of their obsessions nowadays. Who hasn’t encountered someone who has scoured every screencap of Lost for hidden clues? Or who watches and rewatches the entire series of Doctor Who, new and old? Or who spends hours updating a spreadsheet of weapons and their capabilities for their favorite video game? We know them all, and they are brought to vivid and extreme life in Ready Player One. However, here, this is their entire world. Glory and fortune depend upon this knowledge, and the stakes are high.

Although the dystopian aspects aren’t dwelled upon in Ready Player One, the novel is clearly rooted in a society gone wrong. Wade’s home environment is proof enough of that, along with the unemployment rate that has multiplied over the years. If she wins, Art3mis want to use the prize money to feed the world, while Parzival just wants to pack up, buy a spaceship and flee Earth forever. But these horrific aspects aren’t pounded into the reader’s head. They’re just background noise for the OASIS, the great escape, where humans transform into avatars, able to escape their bleak lives. And that’s the creepy part. All of this is way too familiar. The unemployment, the overcrowding of cities, the energy crisis. The alienation and the obsession with technology to the neglect of everything else. The world of the OASIS seems so foreign to us on the surface. Who could imagine spending every waking moment inside a virtual world? But then we remember that this is possible. This could happen, and is closer and more real than many of the post-apocalyptic novels that haunt us.

The pace of this book was absolutely perfect, and it rarely dragged. Even when Parzival was in the middle of a quest, Cline made sure not to dwell on each and every action his avatar took, something that could have made the key scenes laborious. Many people might find joy in reading about every sword thrust or feint, but I am not one of them. The action moved, and things happened. One quibble I did have with this book (after having this pointed out to me by a friend), was how long it took for the first key to be found. In this world of crowd-sourced knowledge and with the amount of obsession over Halliday’s interests, it seems a bit of a stretch that solving the first riddle would take years. I’ve participated in the MIT Mystery Hunt and know how quickly an obscure puzzle can be solved when there are ten heads crowded over the laptop. However, this complaint of mine could be explained by the highly secretive nature of the contest. When a prize that big is on the line, who wants to share knowledge? Also, some of the major scenes, along with the ending, seemed to be wrapped up a bit too neatly. I almost expected more twists and turns at some points.

However, as a whole, Ready Player One was fantastic. Fun, informative, geeky, and utterly compelling, appealing to young adults as well as adults, its intended audience. The effort and passion author Ernest Cline put into his debut novel shows on every page. I fully expect to see this show up on YALSA’s Alex Awards list this coming year.

Empire State by Jason Shiga

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Jason Shiga’s graphic novel for kids, Meanwhile, is a genius piece of comic wizardry. If you haven’t taken a look at it yet, you really should. The best way to describe it is a “choose your own adventure” comic, but it’s so cleverly done that it eclipses all of those cheesy stories you read as a kid yourself. 
But this post isn’t about Meanwhile. It’s about Empire State, Shiga’s graphic novel for adults, which I picked up solely due to my love for Meanwhile.
Jimmy is a twenty-five year old library assistant living in Oakland. He lives with his mom, signs over all of his paychecks to her, and has aspirations to being a web designer. The bright spot in his life is his best friend Sara. She’s forthright, sarcastic, funny, and has dreams of her own. Namely, she wants to be a part of the publishing world in New York City.
Sara decides to follow her dream, haring off to the Big Apple and leaving Jimmy behind. Jimmy, who has harbored a not so secret crush on Sara for ages, writes her a letter describing his feelings and suggesting a rendezvous at the top of the Empire State Building. Without waiting for a reply, he tells his mother he’s going to apply for a job at Google and buys a bus ticket to NYC.
The highlight of Empire State for me was the dialogue between Jimmy and Sara. This is a witty book, but it’s subtle. Jimmy and Sara talk about how she finds boyfriends on JDate and makes out with the fat ones out of pity, how ridiculous hipsters are, how Jimmy has no idea what all the different words mean when ordering coffee. In order to pick up on all of the nuances of the dialogue, re-reading is necessary, because some things can be missed in the course of a normal conversation between the two. 
When Jimmy gets to New York and meets up with Sara, things don’t happen as he hoped – but they don’t happen as I expected, either. It’s all very understated and much quieter than comics normally are. It works.
Empire State alternates between the present (Jimmy’s trip to NYC and the meeting that ensues) and the past (Jimmy and Sara’s friendship in Oakland and his decision to pursue her when she leaves). Shiga uses blue shades for the present and pinks for the past. It gives the book kind of a dreamy quality. If you don’t know this right off the bat, the story can be a bit confusing at first, but perseverance pays off.
Empire State is semi-autobiographical, inspired by a by a cross-country bus trip Shiga himself took from California to New York. The bus trip is actually a very small part of the story (it is pretty funny, though, since it involves a couple of newly-released prison inmates as Jimmy’s co-riders). The emphasis is on the relationship – romance? friendship? something else? – between Jimmy and Sara, and the story shines most when both occupy the page together.
Copy borrowed from my local library.

Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raybourn

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Silent in the Grave, Deanna Raybourn’s debut effort, opens with the death of Lady Julia (née March) Grey’s husband, Edward. Edward had been sickly since a child, so his death was expected. What was not expected, however, was a private investigator named Nicholas Brisbane telling Lady Julia that her husband did not, in fact, die of natural causes. He was murdered.

Before his death, Edward had been receiving threatening notes using quotations from the Bible, including the one from which the novel gets its title: Psalm 31:17 – Let the wicked be ashamed, and let them be silent in the grave. Edward had hired Brisbane to determine the source of the notes and hopefully prevent the violence they implied. Julia is at first disbelieving, but when confronted with one of the notes, she chooses to keep Brisbane in her hire in order to determine if Edward was indeed murdered and if so, who the culprit is.

As Julia and Brisbane dive headlong into the mystery, they uncover all sorts of secrets – about Edward, about Julia’s household servants, and about Brisbane himself. This being a book from MIRA, an imprint of Harlequin, there’s a fair amount of romantic tension between the two leads, but this is a mystery first and foremost.

And it’s a great one. Julia is a terrific protagonist – a little snobby, but broad-minded enough to be relatable to a modern audience. She’s plucky, headstrong, smart, and funny, and Brisbane is wonderful as her enigmatic partner in sleuthing. Raybourn pours on the historical details, but it never becomes tedious. Instead, it makes the period come alive, elegance and decay alike. And the plots and subplots and sub-subplots are twisty and surprising and always interesting to read about.

There are some hitches. At times, characters’ actions or words will contradict. For example, Julia tells the reader how much she preferred the late Edward’s blonde good looks, and a few pages later remarks that her teenage fantasies always involved dark, brooding men – exactly the opposite of Edward. I understand that this helps develop Julia’s character and her budding romance with Brisbane, who is very much a dark, brooding man, but it seems clunky.

Additionally, characters often act in what seems to be an anachronistic way. The March family speaks rather freely about sexual affairs, homosexuality, prostitution, and other topics we modern readers tend to believe just weren’t discussed openly in prim and proper Victorian times. Julia’s elder sister Portia is, for all intents and purposes, a fully out lesbian and lives with her lover Jane, and the family doesn’t seem to suffer much socially for it. Of course these things did go on then as they do now, but the way the characters react to it strains credulity. Their sensibilities are a bit too modern to be believable.

These are minor quibbles in an otherwise fantastic story. Silent in the Grave has everything required for a nearly perfect romantic historical mystery: lots of witty banter, a solid (and wonderfully salacious) central mystery, a large and colorful cast of characters, plenty of period detail, and several subplots to keep you interested in case you solve the main mystery before the sleuth does. Plus, Raybourn resolves mostly everything but leaves one small thread purposefully dangling so you’ll be eager to pick up the sequel once you’ve finished. Which I promptly did.

Borrowed from my local library.

Love Lies Bleeding by Jess McConkey

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Jess McConkey’s novel Love Lies Bleeding is only the second adult book I’ve read this year (not including audiobooks and comics). The first one was Jennifer McMahon’s Don’t Breathe a Word, a book I received from Harper Paperbacks that impressed me quite a lot. Based on Don’t Breathe a Word, Harper does quite well with female-driven thrillers and mysteries, so I was pleased to receive another book in the same vein – Jess McConkey’s debut (this one from William Morrow, another paperback imprint of Harper Collins).
The books share some similarities – both involve 30-something female protagonists who become caught up in a mystery that may or may not have otherworldly explanations. Beyond that, though, the similarities end. While McMahon’s novel was well-written with compelling characters and a nicely spooky tone, I found McConkey’s writing sub-par. The suspenseful plot was there, but it lacked almost everything else required for a great read.
The first problem is the characters. Our protagonist is Samantha Moore, a thirty-five year old woman who was brutally attacked in a parking lot one night and has been sent by her overbearing father and fiance to recuperate in a cabin in rural Minnesota. Her father hires a nurse, Anne Weaver, to care for her, which includes monitoring her medication and administering physical therapy. Sam has a few neighbors in the town, and it quickly becomes apparent that these neighbors have a lot to hide – and the secrets all seem to involve a woman named Blanche who used to live at the cabin Sam now inhabits.
Sam’s situation should have created automatic sympathy for her on the part of the reader. Instead, she’s almost unbearable. It’s understandable that she should be experiencing a fair amount of self-pity after what happened to her, but it’s taken to extremes here. What really bothered me was her relationship with her father and her fiance, Jackson. Sam allows them to micromanage her life and her recovery and then acts like she has no power over the situation, which is completely false. She’s not a minor with no legal way of taking control of her own life – she’s an adult with a fair amount of money and the ability to take care of herself. But she doesn’t. She prefers to whine. I understand that characters must begin somewhere small so they can grow over the course of the novel, but Sam is just unbelievable as a grown-up. When teenagers act like teenagers, it’s good writing. When thirty-five year old women act like teenagers, it’s just annoying.
Sam was the biggest problem, but not the only one. The level of the writing overall was poor. Characters say things that contradict their earlier actions, sentences feel awkward or too simplistic, and McConkey inserts clumsy chapters told from the unnamed bad guy’s point of view that muddle things up and make the red herring glaringly obvious. It felt like the work of an amateur. When writing is great, it’s easy to tell. The writing here is not great.
I had a few other minor complaints (subplots are left unresolved and some characters are hard to distinguish from one another), but poor writing and an unlikable protagonist (whom the author wants so badly to be likable) are enough to damn any novel. That said, I did find the overall plot compelling enough to make me finish the book. I wanted to know whodunnit, and in making me want that, McConkey accomplished at least one thing that she set out to do. I’ll look for more suspense novels from William Morrow, but I’ll probably pass on anything else by McConkey.
Copy received from the publisher. Love Lies Bleeding will be on shelves July 26.