STACKED

books

A Few Cybils Reads – Part VI

|

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

|

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.

Guest Review: The Silence of Six by E. C. Myers

|

Frequent guest contributor Matthew Jackson – freelance writer, film & book critic, and professional nerd (plus Kimberly’s cohabitator) – is back with a review of E. C. Myers’ latest book, The Silence of Six. In 2012, Jackson reviewed Myers’ Norton-winning Fair Coin for us. He has also written frequently here at Stacked on the subject of horror.

One minute, 17-year-old Max Stein is sitting in his high school auditorium, watching a live presidential debate. The next, he’s watching – along with everyone else in the room – as his friend Evan hacks into the debate’s live video feed and shoots himself after uttering a very cryptic question: “What is the silence of six, and what are you going to do about it?”

That this is how the new novel from E.C. Myers – the Andre Norton Award-winning author of Fair Coin, which I loved – opens is compelling enough. That it happens within the first 15 pages of the novel is something I found outright gripping. Myers rockets the story from establishing scenario to brutal catalyst almost immediately, trusting his readers to take his hand and follow him on what will be a bullet-train of a techno thriller. Handled clumsily, this kind of set up might make the reader skittish. In Myers’ hands, though, it sends a message: All will be revealed if you just hang on for the ride.

Because Evan made contact with him shortly before his death, Max is suddenly at the center of a government manhunt, and a conspiracy that he can’t possibly begin to comprehend. Reeling from his friend’s drastic act, and desperate for answers, he must dive back into his own previously abandoned hacker identity, and navigate a complex online world of aliases, back doors, secrets and lies, before it’s too late to find out what Evan really gave his life for.

I remember all-too-well the emotionally harrowing feeling that everything when you’re a teenager, even the most mundane thing, is a high-stakes moment, so I’m a sucker for stories that take that all-or-nothing rollercoaster of adolescence and morph it into an adventure where the stakes actually are high. In the world of The Silence of Six, the secrets teenagers harbor really are worth dying and killing for. The government really is out to get you. Every keystroke really can be watched over by someone else. This is a world of whispers and codes and masks, both physical and virtual, a world where you sometimes have to lie and steal to survive another day, a world where the truth could mean permanent silence. It’s got all the trappings of a government conspiracy blockbuster, but instead of a renegade cop or a paranoid reporter, a handful of resourceful teenage hackers are in the driver’s seat, and that makes it all the more engaging.

One of the things I found most impressive about Fair Coin was Myers’ ability to simultaneously deliver the goods we’ve come to expect from a story of that kind, and subvert those expectations. He does it again with The Silence of Six. It’s a techno-conspiracy-cyber-thriller, with everything that implies. It’s a search for the truth, a story about making it to the center of this knot of secrets no matter what, and to that end it’s a breathlessly entertaining page-turner that darts artfully forward from page one and never lets up. But that doesn’t mean Myers won’t to stop play with some of the conventions he’s working in. His hero is not an action star or an always technically precise supergenius. He’s a gifted, scared kid determined to find whatever right he can in a world that’s just gone wrong for him in countless ways. What looks like it could be a romantic subplot evolves into something else entirely, as Max forms a connection with another hacker that’s built more on personal stakes and, perhaps, a mutual sense of mischief than something romantic. The hacking done by the characters isn’t a few quick keystrokes of brilliance, but rather a series of clever, yet often imperfect, ploys to get to the next clue. The hacking in this story is both messy and satisfyingly geeky, giving it a realism that nerdier readers will happily get lost in. Perhaps most importantly for a thriller, though, the solution to this puzzle is both satisfying and surprising. Even if you actually do think you see the end of this book from a mile away, how Myers and his characters arrive at it, and what happens when they do, still manages to defy a few of the rules set forth by so many stories of this kind.

With The Silence of Six, Myers has again proven his gifts as a storyteller who both celebrates the tropes of genre fiction and wants to pick them apart and stitch them back together into a new creature. It’s a lightning-fast thriller with other, darker themes lurking beneath, and even if you think you’ve read books like this before, it will find a way to surprise you.

Review copy received from the publisher. The Silence of Six is available today.

A Few Cybils Reads – Part IV

|

Burn Out by Kristi Helvig
Part of the reason I love SFF so much – and always have – is how fun it can be. Authors can really let their creativity fly and not worry so much about trivial things like “Could this actually happen?” Burn Out is probably the most fun Cybils nominee I’ve read so far. It’s set 300 years in our future, after an asteroid that was heading for Earth was deflected and hit the sun instead, causing it to advance much more rapidly through its life cycle. It’s now a red giant, all the oceans on the planet have dried up, it’s too hot to go outside for more than a minute or two at a time, and most humans live underground or in protected pods, using a machine to drag the last bit of moisture out of the air in order to survive. (You could ask me if this could actually happen and I could honestly say I don’t know, but my first guess would be “probably not.”) Tora lives underground, alone, after her mother and sister were killed by the sun and her father was murdered by the people he worked for after he refused to hand over the powerful weapons he built for them.

Tora has resigned herself to probably ending her own life eventually. The air soon won’t have enough water left in it and she figures it will be less painful to overdose on pain pills than die of dehydration. Then an old family “friend,” Markus, comes knocking on her door. He says the Earth’s leaders have found another planet where humanity can live. He can take her there. The price is her dad’s weapons, left in Tora’s safekeeping. Tora knows they were made to be used on other humans, which is why her father refused to give them up in the end. Tora says no. Markus leaves, but he returns, and he brings friends. Not the nice kind.

This is an action-packed story, told in Tora’s funny, sarcastic voice that kept me flipping through the pages. The plot has a hole big enough to drive a truck through, but that didn’t dampen my enjoyment. The setting is unique and the futuristic concepts are interesting, including a gun that can be keyed to a person’s particular vibrations, allowing only that person to use it. Each of the characters have ulterior motives, and Helvig teases these out over the course of the story, providing the plot with plenty of twists and turns. Some questions are answered by the end, and some aren’t, clearly leaving an opening for a sequel. You can bet I’ll be reading it.

The Truth Against the World by Sarah Jamila Stevenson
Olwen Nia Evans, Wyn for short, is moving with her family for a few weeks to Wales, to a little town called Cwm Tawel. The trip is her great-grandmother’s dying wish. She grew up in Cwm Tawel and wants to die there, among the peaceful scenery and familiar surroundings. Before the move, Wyn starts to have strange dreams of her great-gran and a little girl, which she blogs about. Another boy, an English boy with his own family ties to Cwm Tawel, stumbles across Wyn’s blog after a recent visit to his great-grandfather in Wales, where he found a headstone bearing Olwen’s name – and had his own run-in with a strange little girl. The two eventually meet up in Cwm Tawel and set about solving the mystery of the ghost Olwen Nia Evans, which involves digging up painful family history that some residents of the town would prefer stayed buried.

Stevenson’s book is unique for its setting; Wales doesn’t get a lot of love in the YA world, especially compared to its UK counterparts. I can easily see the descriptions of the country’s natural beauty encouraging readers to seek out more information or dreaming about visiting themselves. This is a gentle story, perhaps too gentle, as the stakes never seem very high. The solution to ghost Olwen’s mystery is too simple and will be easily deciphered by readers familiar with ghost stories. This would be a good pick for younger, patient readers who may not guess the connection between the ghost and Wyn’s great-grandmother from the start. (A pronunciation guide would have also been helpful for the nerdy readers.)

Messenger of Fear by Michael Grant
Grant’s latest is a series opener, though it stands on its own easily. Mara wakes up without any knowledge of who she is, other than her name. (Yes, it’s another amnesia book.) She’s greeted by someone who tells her he is the Messenger of Fear, and that before she lost her memories, she agreed to be his apprentice. Their duty is to confront those who have done wrong and present them with a choice: play a game, win it, and go free; or refuse or lose the game and face their worst fear. Messenger starts by showing Mara a teenage girl’s suicide, then rewinds time and shows her the events leading up to it. None of the events can be changed, but they must learn from what happened in order to present an appropriate game – and mete out the appropriate punishment if the wicked person loses.

This is not as much of a horror novel as the title or the cover would have you believe, despite a scene where a person is burned alive (described in detail). Fear is not really its goal. Instead, it’s more of an exploration of guilt and atonement, of the choices we make and how – if – we can make reparations. The idea behind the Messenger is to restore balance to the universe. Those who have not been punished by a human court must suffer a visit from the Messenger of Fear, in hopes of preventing the wicked from committing the same actions in the future. The situations Mara and Messenger view are realistic and presented with shades of grey. More often than not, multiple people are at fault rather than a single individual. It is left up to the reader to determine if the wrongdoer’s interactions with Mara and Messenger have set the balance right – if such punishment is justice or if it’s merely cruelty.

There’s a twist to the story that sharp readers will see coming, though the hints sprinkled throughout start light and grow heavier as the story progresses. It will take a truly eagle-eyed reader to spot the truth from the beginning, keeping tension high through most of the novel. Picking out the twist before the end isn’t always a bad thing, provided it doesn’t happen too soon (as I think it would in the book above). There’s a certain satisfaction in putting the pieces together yourself over several chapters and then learning you were right in the end. At times gruesome, the book is also thought-provoking and smoothly written, easily absorbed in an afternoon.

Review & Giveaway: Loop by Karen Akins

|

Bree Bennis attends a school for Shifters, those who were born with the ability to travel backwards in time. Her goal at the book’s opening is to travel to the 21st century, complete her midterm, and carry out a little side project that will earn her the money to ensure her sick mother is able to get the care she needs. It should be doable, except that Bree runs into a bratty kid named Finn and accidentally takes him hostage while trying to complete her tasks. Oops.

She eventually escapes the 21st century and goes back to her home time, the 23rd century, knowing she’ll have to return to the 21st to somehow convince Finn not to talk about her little visit. Only when she does return, she lands three years later, and Finn is no longer a bratty kid. He’s her age, he’s pretty hot, and he claims to have been in a relationship with her for some time. It doesn’t take long to figure out he means a future version of Bree. Of course, he can’t tell her about her own future, for fear of disrupting the timeline. (Picture River Song saying “Spoilers” to the Doctor here.) In true Bree fashion, in trying to extricate herself from this situation, she accidentally brings Finn along with her to the 23rd century, something that shouldn’t even be possible. Oops again.

Now Bree must unravel not only how to return Finn to his own time without anyone the wiser, but also how exactly he came to know future Bree so well, and what it all has to do with the strange things going on in her boarding school.

Karen Akins’ debut Loop really embraces how fun time travel can be. This is a time travel book for readers who love time travel. Do you have certain websites bookmarked whose sole purpose is to speculate on the possibility of time travel? This book is for you. This is a true speculative novel, one that continuously asks what if. What if we could time travel? What would the rules be? What would the consequences be? For readers who love those kinds of questions, this is a gem. For readers who get headaches thinking about it, it might be best to pick up a different book.

It’s not just the time travel that makes this book so much fun. Bree and Finn have great snarky chemistry, and there’s a slew of futuristic 23rd century technology that is fascinating to read about. The 23rd century feels real, chock full of fun little details and new slang terms. The plot itself is fast-paced and complicated, but makes sense in the end, as good time travel books should. Often when I read a book with multiple moving plot parts, I’m a little hesitant to reach the end; I’ve been burned with unresolved subplots and details left dangling before (seemingly unintentionally). This is especially true for time travel stories, which can be more complicated than most. Trust in Akins – it all comes together in a satisfying way.

St. Martin’s Press is giving away a finished copy of Loop to one lucky reader (US residents only). Enter using the form below. The giveaway closes November 14.