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books

The Vanishing Stair by Maureen Johnson

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This is the sequel to Truly Devious, which I reviewed last year. My main issue with that particular book is that it introduced two mysteries – a cold case from long ago involving the murder of a student and the kidnapping of the boarding school’s founder’s wife and daughter; and the murder of a student in the present day – and then didn’t solve either of them by the end of the book. It’s like Maureen Johnson took my pet peeve with some mystery series and then doubled down on it. Thankfully, The Vanishing Stair is a bit better when it comes to cliffhangers. There’s still a huge one, but one of the mysteries is mostly solved (albeit primarily via flashbacks, which feels a bit like a cheat) with a few tantalizing threads left dangling. The other mystery is still, well, a mystery. And it’s possible Johnson introduced a third mystery in this book, which also isn’t solved, but really, I should expect that by now. (Plus it’s a great one!) There are enough big revelations to keep readers happy, and the plot moves along quickly, keeping the pages turning. Like in Truly Devious, the title is a reference to a riddle which plays a big part in the story, and the solution to the riddle is quite clever.

Johnson does a good job of deepening her characters’ relationships in this installment, putting Stevie in a tough situation from the outset and expanding upon the rift between her and David, as each of them feels betrayed by the other. Stevie is by no means a stand-in sleuth, either, who could be any teenager reading the book. She’s obsessed with the Ellingham case, yes, but that’s not the only thing that defines her. For one thing, she has strong political opinions, which is refreshing to see, since it seems like so many authors tend to shy away from having their teen characters react in any overt way to what’s currently happening politically (perhaps in order to avoid alienating some readers).

Like the first, I read this one on audio, and narrator Kate Rudd does an admirable job. I haven’t heard her in enough audiobook productions to recognize her voice, so for me, her voice is Stevie’s voice. She’s also pretty good at voicing male characters. She makes it easy to fall completely into the story.

The third book, and I hope the final (simply because I want answers and I want all of them!), is titled The Hand on the Wall and will be published in 2020. This is one series I’d recommend waiting to read until all volumes are out, but if you just can’t wait, Johnson does a really good job of recapping the first book without making it boring for readers who remember it all anyway. This series is a cut above other recent mysteries for teens, particularly with regard to plotting, and it should more than satisfy teen readers looking for their next great whodunnit (provided they don’t mind waiting a year or two for the solutions).

Dare You to Lie by Amber Lynn Natusch

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Teenager Kylene has a lot on her plate. Her father, once a respected FBI agent, is in prison for a crime Ky believes he didn’t commit. Her mother left the family when it all went down and moved cross-country with her new flame. In order to stay close to the prison where her father is incarcerated, Ky moves in with her grandfather instead of following her mother. Unfortunately, this also means returning to the high school she left two years ago after someone took topless photos of her without her permission while she was drunk and shared them with the entire student body. Ky thinks her boyfriend at the time is the guilty party, but she can’t be entirely sure. She’s determined to solve both crimes: the one that put her father away and the one perpetrated against her.

I got a strong Veronica Mars vibe from Natusch’s story. The violation Ky experienced feels similar to what Veronica went through, though Veronica’s rape is certainly much worse. Still, the slut-shaming and lack of action by local law enforcement are issues that Ky and Veronica had in common. And of course, such things happen frequently in real life, too.

Like Veronica, Ky is always ready with a witty comeback, fiercely loyal to her friends, and can’t help but get caught up in other people’s business. She’s the first and only person to take action when she sees local bully Donovan beating up his girlfriend in front of the whole school, which puts her on his shit list. This is a very bad thing, because Donovan is a very scary dude. He’s caught up in other shady things, too, like a doctor writing fraudulent prescriptions for steroids to help the high school football team win. It’s unclear until the very end of the book if and how these various threads – the FBI frame job, the photos, the steroid business – connect to each other, and Natusch does a good job keeping readers guessing. The climax is unsurprising in some ways, but very surprising in others, and it will have readers’ hearts pounding. It’s violent (but not gratuitously so) and terrifying, with Ky coming face to face with a killer and no one around to help but herself.

I loved Ky’s relationship with her friends in this book. Natusch does a great job showing the platonic relationship between Ky and Garrett, her longest friend, as well as Ky’s new and deepening friendship with Tabby. As an unstoppable threesome, they’re a joy to read about. The mysteries themselves are more uneven. The steroid plot feels tired, though Natusch does throw a twist into it at the very end that remains unexplored (not a loose end, but fodder for future books). Ky obtains a few small clues about the case against her father, but this seems like it’s going to be the Big Story that stretches across multiple books and is only fully resolved in the final one. The mystery of who took the photos of Ky without her consent is the only one that is solved completely, and the culprit is not exactly a surprise. Still, Natusch juggles all of these plot threads pretty well and kept me interested the entire way.

I like to read mysteries as audiobooks; it prevents me from skipping to the end to find out whodunit, an unfortunate tendency of mine. Narrator Vanessa Moyen is not my favorite, though. She voices Ky well, but her male voices sound almost comical, and her other female voices are all too high-pitched and whiny. Of course, this is a matter of taste for each individual listener. Hand this title (in any format) to teen mystery fans. They won’t be disappointed.

Rule by Ellen Goodlett

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Goodlett brings teens a fast-paced high fantasy thriller about three girls from very different backgrounds within the fictional country of Kolonya: a Traveler (similar in description to the Romany people), a palace maid with higher aspirations, and a girl from a far-flung and almost forgotten section of the kingdom who is desperate to escape her abusive father. All three are brought to the King’s court in to learn that they are his illegitimate daughters and, now that the king’s only heir has died, must compete to earn the right to inherit the throne.

It’s a tremendous shock for all three, of course. At least one of the girls thought she knew her biological father already. But this is no ordinary story of competition a la The Hunger Games. Each girl has a deep, dark secret, and each begins receiving threatening messages – some in blood – soon after they arrive at the palace. The secrets are dark indeed, involving a copious amount of betrayal, death, and blood magic. The blood magic is an interesting world-building choice: all magic is done by cutting oneself to “tithe” blood, and some of it is done frequently and is a part of everyday life in Kolonya. But some blood magic is forbidden because of its effects, and it’s this blood magic that is most relevant and interesting. Initially a bit confusing, particularly the good magic vs. the bad magic, the magic system grows clearer as the novel progresses.

Rather than fall into the easy trope of having the girls willingly pit themselves against each other, Goodlett refreshingly has her characters do the opposite: join forces and work together to ferret out the blackmailer. Told in alternating close third person points of view, each girl’s voice is distinct and their predicaments sympathetic. Their interactions with each other – one girl’s assumptions of another, for example – illuminate how each is perceived by the public at large, often in a very different light from how we as readers first see them during their own close POVs. It’s a handy writing technique that reinforces the notion that people are, of course, more than what appears on the surface. Once the girls realize this about each other, they become a force to be reckoned with.

I listened to the audiobook version, and it’s a pretty good production with three narrators: Bahni Turpin, Lisa Flanagan, and Soneela Nankani. Turpin’s voice is always a standout, but I did have trouble distinguishing Flanagan’s and Nankani’s from each other. However, Goodlett’s mastery of her characters’ voices is good enough that I could pick up on the POV quickly anyway.

While many readers (including myself) may be frustrated by the ending, which resolves close to nothing, the story is gripping throughout. A planned duology, wise readers may want to wait to pick up this volume until the concluding volume is released in June (less than a year after the first book’s publication, much to my delight). This is a good pick for fans of Kendare Blake’s Three Dark Crowns, which never stays on the shelf for long at my library.

What I’m Reading Now

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Fire and Heist by Sarah Beth Durst

This is a heist novel about humans who can shapeshift into dragons (wyverns), so it’s basically everything I ever wanted in a book. Durst borrows from and builds upon traditional dragon lore by giving her wyvern characters hoards: their goal is to accumulate treasure, and they steal from other wyverns to do so. Stealing isn’t punished; only getting caught is. Sky, determined to prove herself as she approaches adulthood, embarks upon a daring and ambitious heist alongside an interesting crew of sidekicks with their own motivations for helping out.

I’m not yet finished with this one, but it takes an interesting and unexpected turn about halfway through, deepening the dragon lore and expanding the story in scope. Durst’s books are hit or miss for me. I really love some of her work (Vessel), but have found others pretty mediocre. This is shaping up to be one that really resonates with me. It’s a lot of fun and I’m excited to share it with other readers when it publishes in December.

 

Gilded Cage by Vic James

This was originally published on Wattpad and is geared for the adult market, though two of its main characters are teenagers. There’s strong crossover into YA readership here, and it’s got a great hook: in modern England, common people (those without magic) must spend ten years of their lives serving the aristocratic Equals (those with magic). But this is not your everyday servitude that you might think of from Downton Abbey. These ten years are officially referred to as “Slave Days,” and once the ten year term begins, the slaves are the property of the state, no longer considered people. The Hadleys – mom, dad, brother Luke, sister Abi, and youngest sister Daisy – apply for a term at the Kyneston estate in order to complete their years of required service together, but at the last moment, Luke is reassigned to Millmoor, a slave town in Manchester that is widely regarded as the worst place to complete your slave days. From there, the story follows the separated family as Luke learns to live within Millmoor and the other Hadleys get caught up in the machinations of the wealthy Kynestons.

I’m reading this one on audio, and the narrator does a fantastic job with the accents: Manchester for the Hadleys and the stereotypical upper-crust for the Equals. Even though I’m not very far in, I I have a good feel for the world James has created and my heart has already broken once for Luke. I’m curious to see how the premise holds up and where James takes it, since it has so many possibilities.

 

The Salt Line by Holly Goddard Jones

In the near future, the United States has been nearly overrun by Shreve’s Disease, which is carried by ticks that burrow into the skin. Once bitten by a tick, you have thirty seconds to burn it off with a device called a Stamp. After those thirty seconds, they’ve laid their eggs inside your body, and you have about a 50% chance that they will be carriers of the disease, which is fatal. The country has coped by creating something called the Salt Line, which cuts off the majority of the landmass, leaving it to the ticks, while the rest of the country is divided into strictly-regulated zones that are tick-free. Wealthy daredevils who live in the Atlantic Zone will sometimes pay vast sums of money to go on special excursions past the Salt Line, and Jones’ book follows a group of these people. Each person in the group has their own motivations for taking such a risky journey, which takes a very fast turn into even greater danger soon after they cross the Salt Line. This book is a combination dystopia, survival story, and crime novel, and it mostly melds all three together well.

Ever since I read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, I’ve been on the hunt for a great literary sci-fi novel that matches it. While The Salt Line doesn’t quite measure up, it comes close. Jones is a master of the ensemble novel format. She gives multiple characters their own third-person points of view, engendering sympathy on the part of the reader even for those characters who are hard to like or commit detestable acts. She’s interested in the themes of parenthood or the lack thereof (motherhood most strongly, but fatherhood as well), as most of the characters’ motivations involve their children or their desire to not have children, as well as surrogate parent-child bonds. As someone who isn’t particularly interested in having children myself, I liked the focus Jones placed on one character’s decision to not have kids. This character’s reasons go beyond the stereotypical and dig into themes of sacrifice and how a person claims ownership of her life. It’s rare to find a book that treats lack of motherhood as an equally fulfilling avenue for its female characters.

 

 

What I’m Reading Now

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Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow

I read a lot of short pieces online about various political and governmental topics, but I generally stay away from the full-length books. I’m actively trying to change that by seeking out books on interesting topics written by people I already know and trust. Maddow’s central thesis is that over the years, the American military has transformed from a small force engaged in war only when absolutely necessary into a bloated, inefficient machine with a muddled mission and ineffective tactics, a military that is now perpetually at war. That’s no denigration of the soldiers; rather, she takes issue with the power of the executive to send soldiers into war without calling it such, with the increased privatization of military action, with the military’s obsession with nuclear weapons and its myopic focus on counterterrorism, with the CIA’s de facto status as a branch of the military unsupervised in any meaningful way, with the public’s apathy toward the fact that we’re always at war somewhere, and more. She documents just how far we’ve strayed from Thomas Jefferson’s proclamation to “never keep an unnecessary soldier,” from the idea that war is to be avoided at all costs and if the nation must enter into it, it must deeply affect the general populace of the United States – so that it hurts us at home just as much as it hurts the soldiers fighting it. It’s well-argued, clearly-written, and mostly non-partisan. Maddow reads the audiobook version, which is of course the perfect choice.

Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson

For almost a decade of my life, adult fantasy novels made up 90% of my reading diet. It’s been a long time since that was the case; now I read mostly YA science fiction and fantasy, adult romance, and adult mysteries and thrillers. But I haven’t forgotten my longtime love, and I’m hoping to rekindle our romance with this doorstopper of a novel that’s universally beloved by pretty much all my fantasy-loving friends. It’s got a traditional fantasy plotline – an oppressed people fights back against their evil overlords with the help of a magically gifted, inspiring revolutionary – with an interesting magic system and detailed, well-realized world-building. At 541 pages, I’m hoping I can finish it before it needs to be returned to the library.

When Light Left Us by Leah Thomas

This is a weird one (I’m hoping in a good way!). The three Vasquez siblings’ father left their family without an explanation, and soon after, a strange being named Luz joins them. Incorporeal Luz lives inside the kids for a brief time, experimenting with each of their most valued physical features in order to explore the world around it: Hank’s hands, Ana’s eyes, and Milo’s ears. In return, the siblings’ abilities with these particular features, already sharp (Hank plays basketball; Ana makes movies), are heightened. But Luz doesn’t stay long either, and when it leaves, it cripples the very things the kids valued most. Written a certain way, this premise might come across as silly, but Thomas’ writing is dense and dreamlike, layered with emotion, and so far, it’s working.