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A Few Cybils Reads – Part IX (Time Travel Edition)

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Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future by A. S. King
A. S. King’s books are in a class by themselves, both in terms of genre and writing. Set solidly in our own world, they also use fantastical elements in such clever, creative, and meaningful ways. I’m always amazed by the level of craft in each of her novels. Her latest is no different.

Glory and her friend-by-default Ellie find a dead bat, which eventually disintegrates to something resembling ash. They decide to mix the remains with beer and then drink it (as you do). The next day, whenever they meet another person’s eyes, they see glimpses of that person’s past, present, and future – including ancestors and descendants. Glory’s visions show her a terrible near future, one where women are
denied the right to work and the United States splits into two, spawning
a second Civil War. The people participating in these acts, both the
atrocious and the heroic, are often the descendants of the people she
knows, and possibly of herself as well.

A more traditional novel would have focused most of its attention on the mystery of the future, and there’s certainly some of that going on. But it focuses an equal amount of attention on how the future informs Glory’s present – her mother’s suicide, her pseudo-friendship with Ellie, her relationship with her father, her plans for her own future. How do you live your life knowing that these things you see will come to pass? It’s also a staunchly feminist novel, the extremism of the future tempered by the everyday sexism Glory experiences. Teens will easily see how one leads to the other. Because this is a King novel, I’ve only scratched the surface of its depth. There’s a lot going on, and it all fits together to tell the complicated, messy story of Glory’s teenage life. This might be my favorite of King’s books. It has a few killer ending lines that legitimately gave me chills and rank right up there with the last lines of The Book Thief.

The Here and Now by Ann Brashares
This is the most traditional time travel story in this grouping. Prenna comes from a future not far off, one where a disease transmitted by mosquitoes has killed off millions of people. Though they haven’t cured the illness, apparently they have figured out time travel, because Prenna, her mother, and a few others travel back to our own time in order to stop the plague from happening in the first place (it’s tied to climate change).

Here’s where the internal logic of the story loses me, because Prenna and the other time-colonists have a lot of rules to follow, and one of the rules is not to interfere with history. Which is kind of the whole point of them being there – to interfere and create a better future. So um, what is their point, after all? And none of the other characters seem to notice or care about this discrepancy. There’s a somewhat engaging romance with a “time native,” and some nifty plotting with a potential paradox and a couple of other surprise time travelers, but this was a mess overall. There are scads of better time travel novels out there, both better written and better-conceived. Recommended for only the most ardent time travel fans.

Subway Love by Nora Raleigh Baskin
I read this a couple weeks ago and already my memory of it is weak. The book focuses on two different characters – Laura in the 70s and Jonas in the present day. They each have problems within their homes. Laura’s mother has gone full hippie, plus she’s married a man just a few years older than Laura. He hits Laura and Laura’s mom doesn’t do anything about it. Jonas is dealing with his parents’ recent divorce. The two teenagers meet each other on the subway, which is the only place where their two time periods overlap. They fall in love.

Baskin’s writing style has always seemed more middle grade than YA to me. The content of this one is more mature, though, making it hard to recommend for a specific age group. It’s a slim novel, easily absorbed in an afternoon, but its impact is equally fleeting. There’s some interesting stuff about graffiti artists on the subway, which will definitely appeal to kids into street art. Ultimately, the book is a rumination on how some relationships can change us, even if those relationships do not – and cannot – last. I wonder if I would have appreciated it more as a short story.

A Few Cybils Reads – Part VIII

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Starbreak by Phoebe North

This is the sequel to North’s debut, Starglass, and picks up right where the first book left off. Terra and a few other humans flee the chaos of the ship and make it to the planet below, which they know by now is already inhabited. Much to Terra’s surprise, they run into Aleksandra, the captain’s murderous daughter, who leads the rebels. They’re all eventually captured by the aliens that live on the planet, and Terra finally gets a chance to meet the alien boy she’s been literally dreaming about for months – it turns out he’s the translator between humans and aliens. The culture clash between the humans and the aliens is as fractious as you’d expect. It’s unclear whether the aliens will allow the humans to live on the planet – or if they’ll exile them to space once more.

I’ve long wanted more alien books where the aliens are less humanoid and more…something else. Starbreak fulfills this desire and tells a fascinating story to boot. While the first book was relegated entirely to the ship of humans, the sequel takes us onto an alien planet peopled with two different species of sentient creatures. They’re somewhat humanoid in that they speak through their mouths and walk on two legs, but they’re plant-based rather than animal-based. The idea of sentient plants is so cool to me, and I loved seeing how North built upon it. For example, one species of alien is carnivorous, like a Venus fly trap, whereas the other subsists on sun and water alone. The two species of aliens also have a unique relationship with each other, unlike anything on Earth (at least among humans). Of course, this story is also about human Terra, and it is in this book that she truly finds her voice and comes into her own. It’s a love story as well, a sweet one and a weird one.

All books about humans meeting aliens can be read as a metaphor for different human cultures first interacting with each other, and Starbreak is no different. It would take a shallow reader not to note the parallels, but this is not a message-driven book that wants you to Learn a Lesson. It’s a character-driven story imbued with human truth and a lot of creativity, solidly science fiction but always relatable. It would be a great readalike for fans of Beth Revis’ Shades of Earth (the best book in that trilogy, in my opinion) or perhaps Cecil Castellucci’s Tin Star, another book where a human finds herself alone among aliens.

Promise of Shadows by Justina Ireland

Zephyr is a harpy, and she’s been banished to Tartarus (sort of like Hell) for exacting revenge against the god who killed her sister. The thing is, she shouldn’t have been able to kill a god in the first place. This ability indicates that Zephyr may be the long-lost Nyx, able to use dark magic and protect the harpies and other half-god beings from gods like Hera who mean to wipe them out. First Zephyr has to escape Tartarus, which she does with the help of a long-lost (and hot) childhood friend. Then she has to accept this destiny, not an easy thing to do for someone who is a coward (a refreshing character trait. Being brave is hard and doesn’t come easy for most of us).

Ireland’s writing is smooth and easy to read – and I mean that in a good way. I read this book coming off a string of duds and it was so refreshing to finally read something well-written and competently structured. It’s not hugely different in premise or plot from the scads of other mythology-inspired paranormal reads out there, but it’s done quite well and features a black protagonist, helping to diversify a genre that is too often lily white. Zephyr feels like her own person, not an everygirl – she’s not very brave, tends to run from fights, and is pretty bad at school. This makes for a satisfying character arc when she finally does learn how to be the Nyx (because you knew she would, right?). Ireland takes traditional Greek mythology and builds on it, weaving many different elements together into an interesting whole. The story is action-packed with a side of romance (rather than vice versa). Ancillary characters are well-drawn as well. It’s just a good book in every way. I can see it having lots of appeal for readers who can’t get enough of Greek mythology; it would be a natural next read for fans of Percy Jackson who are ready for something a little older.

Talker 25 by Joshua McCune
Melissa lives in a country much changed from the one we know. Dragons have terrorized the people for years, but humans have finally achieved a tenuous peace – they’ve hunted the most violent dragons to their deaths or exile, and have put the rest on reservations. When Melissa and her friends go to one of these reservations as a prank, it sets off a chain of events that will utterly change her life. For starters, she learns she can talk to dragons with her mind. Then a terrible dragon attack destroys Melissa’s town, and she’s rescued by dragon sympathizers, usually called terrorists by everyone else. This encompasses the first part of the book, where Melissa realizes that a lot of what she’s been told about the dragons is wrong. The second part involves Melissa being captured by the government and exploited for her telepathic abilities. She’s forced to trick dragons to their deaths, and sometimes she’s forced to kill them herself.

I wasn’t crazy about this one. I’ve always been a bit tepid toward dragons. I loved Pern, but nothing dragon-related since then has really grabbed me. The premise of Talker 25 – that some humans can communicate with dragons telepathically – is interesting, but the execution was pretty jumbled. I never got a clear idea of what exactly the dragons had done to start such a war, which meant I had no context for the humans’ fight against them. It seems like McCune just assumed that we’d know humans and dragons had been locked in a deadly fight for years, but I never figured out why. There’s some stuff about a reality show thrown in that feels odd and out of place, too. I read the whole thing feeling a little lost. The first part of the book I mostly felt mystified; the second part, where Melissa is in captivity, I mostly felt ill. It’s quite violent, with several scenes of dragon torture, some committed by Melissa herself under duress. There’s one scene in particular where McCune details just how many strokes it takes to decapitate one of Melissa’s old dragon friends (hint: it’s a lot). It felt too drawn out and a little lurid. Recommended for readers who can’t get enough of dragons – and can stomach a lot.

All books borrowed from my library.

A Few Cybils Reads – Part VII (Audiobook Edition)

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Noggin by John Corey Whaley
Whaley’s follow-up to his Printz-winning Where Things Come Back is a character-driven novel with an SF twist. Travis’ cancer was going to kill him, so he opted to have his head chopped off and put in cold storage, hoping one day science would advance far enough and he’d be revived using a donor body. He figures he’ll wake up in hundred years or so. Except that’s not what happens. It only takes five years. For newly-awakened Travis, it seems like no time has passed at all. But for everyone else, the world has changed. His friends (including his girlfriend) are now adults. His death profoundly affected his parents, and the fact that he’s alive again doesn’t magically fix everything. Not to mention the fact that he’s walking around in (on?) someone else’s body.

Whaley’s writing is very, very good, matched by Kirby Heyborne’s equally good narration. I wouldn’t have enjoyed this nearly as much if Heyborne weren’t narrating. Travis’ growth, the way he comes to terms (or not) with the way his life has changed, the way his family and friends come to terms with it – it’s masterfully done and quite compelling. Travis’ voice is clear; he’s not always likeable, not even at the end, but he’s believable. I can see why it was shortlisted for a National Book Award, and I can easily see this appealing to readers who normally don’t enjoy science fiction. The focus is entirely on Travis’ adjustment, and the medical/scientific procedure that allowed him to wake up five years after his “death” is not explained. That’s not what Whaley considers important in this story. I’ve seen some reviewers describe the premise as absurd or weird, but as far as SF novels go, it’s pretty tame.

Night Sky by Suzanne & Melanie Brockmann
Sasha, the little girl that Skylar babysits, has gone missing, and her father – who has also disappeared – is the prime suspect. The police already think Sasha is dead, but Skylar refuses to believe it. Then a girl named Dana comes into town, and Dana exhibits some of the abilities that Skylar believes she may have – like telekinesis. She learns that she’s a “greater-than,” which basically means she has superpowers. A lot of them. She and Dana, along with wheelchair-bound best friend Calvin and Dana’s sidekick Milo, decide to figure out what happened to Sasha on their own – and they discover it has everything to do with the greater-thans.

I’ve never read an adult Brockmann book and I can’t say this would encourage me to pick one up. The premise certainly has appeal for a certain kind of reader – those who can’t get enough books about teens with superpowers, for instance. It’s fairly diverse, too, though only in its ancillary characters. It’s action-heavy with a good vs. evil plot. But it goes on a little too long and the writing is weak. There’s a certain sentence structure that’s overused, so glaring that each time it happened I winced. (“He did this as I did that” or “I did this as she did that” with a long, drawn out second half. I could hear the narrator run out of air trying to get the whole sentence in without pausing for a breath. Just make it two sentences!) The narration isn’t great. Melanie Brockmann does it herself and she doesn’t voice any of the characters. Her voice is reedy and it sounds like she’s not getting enough air, even when the sentences are short. There are better offerings. (Kirkus gave it a starred review. But what do they know?)

Divided We Fall by Trent Reedy
This is one of those books that may be good in print, but is absolutely fantastic on audio. It’s about a high school kid, Danny, who joins the Idaho National Guard at age 17. He’s sent to help police a protest in Boise. Things get out of control. Someone bumps into his gun and it goes off. Then more people start shooting. Twelve people are killed. Not even Danny knows exactly what happened, but he becomes the face of the state of Idaho’s resistance to the federal government, which started as a refusal to implement a controversial federal ID law. The president wants Danny and the rest of the soldiers arrested, and the governor refuses. Events escalate. Each chapter ends with snippets from television news programs, tweets, radio callers, and the like, and these are all fully voiced by a diverse group of narrators. Some strongly recall Fox News or Rush Limbaugh (the latter of which is particularly painful to listen to), while others are more middle of the road, or simply reactionary. You’ve heard this stuff before, about similar things, things that are happening in real life right now. It’s at times more interesting than the main narrative itself.

Reedy does a good job of balancing each “side” of the story – those who support the state government and those who support the federal government. It’s a really tough tightrope to walk, but he succeeds in not making his book seem like it has an agenda. That’s partly due to Reedy’s protagonist, who is an everyguy – but of the kind we don’t see a lot in YA fiction: he lives in a semi-rural area, participates in rodeos, plays football, doesn’t intend to go to college, enjoys guns and country music. He joined the National Guard because he loved his state and he loved his country. These are all things we tend to associate with conservative kids, but his political views aren’t what’s on display. He never wanted to get caught up in everything that happens and would rather it all go away. This is a tricky, very discussable book that will probably piss some people off. The setting could have been Texas (my home state) and been just as believable. It’s very close to home; that’s what makes it worth the read.

A Few Cybils Reads – Part VI

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Dissonance by Erica O’Rourke
Del is a Walker, which means she was born with the ability to travel to parallel worlds, each one formed when a person made a choice. The choice they made belongs to the Key world – the main world. All other possible choices spiral off into infinite echo worlds. When these echoes become unstable, it’s the job of the Walkers to cleave them. Unsurprisingly, the regimented world of the Walkers isn’t as it seems, and Del becomes caught up in a conspiracy that could have ramifications throughout the entire multiverse.

Longtime readers of this blog may know I have a particular fascination with alternate/parallel worlds. Dissonance is a special treat for readers like me, since it focuses so much of the story on the specifics of the parallel worlds – how they’re created, how they relate to the Key world, how Walkers can travel to them, how they can be destroyed. It’s fascinating. Each chapter opens with an excerpt from what looks like a Walker-in-training textbook, and I wish I could read that textbook in its entirety. What’s more, it all makes sense. If parallel worlds exist, they probably look like the ones from O’Rourke’s imagination.

Sometimes in books where world-building is so comprehensive and so detailed, plot and characterization suffer, but that’s not the case here. The plot is smart, complex, and hinges both on this huge concept as well as the unique characters O’Rourke has created – rule-breaker Del, her strict sister Addy, and their senile-but-maybe-not grandfather Monty. Good speculative fiction is still character-driven, no matter how high the concept, and Dissonance fulfills this requirement. While it wouldn’t interest readers who need something fast-paced to stay engaged, I have no doubt it will more than satisfy those who can’t stop thinking about what it would be like to visit an alternate world themselves.

The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg
This is such an odd little book, one that doesn’t feel much like YA. It’s short and reads more like a novella, with sketchy world-building, a small cast of (rather thin) characters, and a single, focused storyline. Ceony Twill has just graduated at age 19 from the Tagis Praff school for the magically inclined. She wanted to be a Smelter, a magician who works with metal, but she’s been forced into an apprenticeship as a Folder – a paper magician – under magician Emery Thane. One she’s bonded to paper, she can’t work magic with any other material. Ceony is heartbroken, but it’s a career as a Folder or a career without any magic at all. She decides to make the best of a bad situation.

This one drew me in initially with its oddness. I enjoyed reading about the tricks paper magicians could do, such as making stories written on paper come to life for a time by reading them aloud, or animating folded shapes by commanding them to breathe. Thane is suitably strange, obviously hiding some secrets. It lost me about a third of the way through, when Thane is attacked by his ex-wife, who rips his heart out of his chest. Ceony replaces his heart with a paper version, which will sustain him for a time. All this intrigued me; it’s when Ceony sets off to find his real heart and somehow gets caught inside it that made me scratch my head. From that point on, the book is a journey through the different parts of Thane’s heart (metaphor!) and life. We see flashbacks to his time as a child, marrying his wife, becoming estranged from his wife. We see his hopes, his dreams, his doubts, his fears. I’ve never been one for flashbacks and dream sequences, much less prolonged ones that encompass almost an entire novel. Characters should be built from their actions, not their dreams. Give this one to readers who delight in the odd and don’t share my aversion to flashbacks.

A Girl Called Fearless by Catherine Linka
Avie lives in an America where almost all women who consumed a deadly hormone in beef have died of cancer. Only the very old and the very young lived. It is now ten years later, and America has to come to terms with its decimated female population. The Paternalists have taken power, restricting women’s and girls’ freedoms in order to “protect” them. They can’t go to college, and they’re married off at a young age (such as sixteen) to much older men, told they must dedicate themselves to having a lot of children. Avie’s father has always promised she could go to college – even if it has to be in Canada – but in order to save his struggling business, he sells her to a rising Paternalist star. This man is 35 years old and it quickly becomes clear that Avie will be his prisoner. She decides to run.

This is another dystopia by way of The Handmaid’s Tale, albeit a well done one (though with much less nuance). It’s fast-paced and focuses mainly on Avie’s escape and its aftermath, plus a few scenes clearly meant to horrify (such as when Avie’s intended “sticks his tongue down her throat,” always a phrase guaranteed to elicit shudders). The plot crumbles a bit at the end, with the less-than-surprising revelation/twist that the Paternalists aren’t actually trying to protect women and girls, but rather disenfranchise them. (Most readers will be shocked that the characters are shocked; preventing women from going to college and marrying them off to 35 year old men at age 16 was never about protection in the past.) This would be a good pick for readers who aren’t yet burned out on this particular sub-sub-genre (dystopias where women are subjugated) or who perhaps haven’t read much of it before. Readers who enjoyed Kristen Simmons’ Article 5 would probably enjoy this one as well, as the two seem almost identical in execution.

Dissonance and A Girl Called Fearless borrowed from my library; Paper Magician provided by the publisher.

A Few Cybils Reads – Part V

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Welcome to the Dark House by Laurie Faria Stolarz
Horror filmmaker Justin Blake has invited people from all over the country to enter a contest to get an inside look at his latest project – all they have to do is write about their worst nightmare. Seven lucky teenagers, each with their own POV chapters, were selected based on their entries, and they’ve been flown to a creepy hotel staffed by people who are dead ringers for killers from Blake’s many movies. Immediately upon their arrival, strange things start to happen: one of the girls flees the hotel; the others find writing on her closet wall in what appears to be blood warning them to get away. But it’s all part of the fun, right? These horror-lovers (with the notable exception of Ivy, who entered the contest in hopes it would help her face down her real life horror) want to be scared. Then they’re all taken to a carnival and told that in order to meet Blake, they must survive the rides that are their nightmares come to life – and things take a turn for the deadly.

This is a great pick for fans of campy horror films. The book itself is pretty much a version of one of those films anyway, right down to a perspective told mostly in screenplay format. It doesn’t try to do anything new, but rather embraces the tropes that make those films fun for viewers: a creepy carnival, a remote location, no cell phone signals, mostly one-note participants being picked off one by one. Readers will be able to see how it will end, but the ride is fun nonetheless.

Scintillate by Tracy Clark
After an illness where Cora was hospitalized for a high fever, she’s able to see auras around people. They vary from person to person, depending on their personality and their mood, but Cora’s own is always pure silver. She tries to talk to her dad about it (her mother is long out of the picture), but he won’t answer any of her questions. The proprietor of a local bookshop tells her that auras are real, that Cora has a special ability to see them, and that pure silver auras are very rare – right before she’s threatened into silence and refuses to see Cora again. When Cora begins to notice a man following her around, a man with a pure white aura who can somehow suck out the auras of others around him, killing them, she knows she must find out what’s going on. She learns it’s tied somehow to her mother’s disappearance in Ireland, so she travels there hoping to puzzle it out, encountering danger, romance, and long-lost secrets.

I started this one thinking I may not finish it, but it surprised me with how compelling it was. The way Clark wrote about auras was interesting; it’s a topic that I haven’t read much about in fiction. But what really makes this stand out from the sea of other paranormal light fantasies is the way Clark handles the romance. I wasn’t at all surprised to encounter what’s often called “insta-love” between Cora and her school’s exchange student hottie. But there’s a plot and a character reason for it, which is fully revealed near the end of the story and makes such head-over-heels instant attraction an inevitability. Clark knows what she’s doing with her story – she recognizes the cliches inherent in her genre and works with them in a clever way. The writing is solid, with a great voice in Cora and an exciting climax, and the mythology is interesting, too, making this a good pick for paranormal romance fans.

Nearly Gone by Elle Cosimano
There’s a serial killer on the loose at Nearly Boswell’s high school, and it seems that he (or she) is doing everything he can to make it look like Nearly is the culprit. It started with an innocent-seeming personal ad in the Classifieds section of the newspaper, a section Nearly combs through every day hoping to read a message from her father who abandoned her and her mother when she was a little girl. The first victim is merely humiliated; when the second victim dies, Nearly knows the second personal ad referring cryptically to the location where the body was found wasn’t merely strange; it was targeting her specifically. She goes to the police, but they either don’t believe her or think she’s in on it. She feels like she has no choice but to stop the killing on her own – with the help of the school’s bad boy, a former juvenile delinquent who’s now agreed to keep tabs on Nearly for the police in case she’s the killer. 

This is a fantastic, smart mystery/thriller that’s plotted to perfection. The riddles in the Classifieds are really fun to puzzle out, and Cosimano sprinkles a lot of red herrings and potential motives throughout the book. There are subplots galore; any one of them could point to the serial killer. The name “Nearly” is a little too cute for my liking (oh, the puns Cosimano uses!), and Nearly’s ability to sense others’ emotions by touching them seems completely extraneous. Unlike a book like Kim Harrington’s Clarity, where the protagonist’s ability is integral to solving the crime, Nearly’s ability doesn’t do much for her (or against her). There’s one scene where she’s at a rave and is overwhelmed by the emotions present within the drug- and adrenaline-fueled participants, but that’s as much as her ability ever bears on the plot. Aside from these things, though, this is one of the best teen mysteries I’ve read. I especially liked that the riddles focused on math and science, areas where Nearly excels. It’s a fun workout for the reader’s brain and nice to see a girl protagonist who loves those subjects.

All books borrowed from my local library.