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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.

YA Review Round-up: 100 Sideways Miles, Tell Me Again How A Crush Should Feel, and Press Play

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I’ve come to realize that I can either write lengthy reviews and read fewer books or I can read more books and post fewer reviews. I don’t think I have to choose one over the other. I’ve found there’s a need to just strike some good balance between the two, meaning that when I’m in the mood to just read, then I need to do that and when I’m in the mood to really dig into the books I’m reading, then I need to just do that.

I’m putting together a couple of review round-up posts for recent reads to talk up some of the things I have been reading. There’s nothing thematically similar about these books, other than they’re all titles I’ve read recently and are worth talking at least a little bit about.

My experience with Andrew Smith’s books are a mixed bag. Sometimes, I love them and sometimes, they’re really not my thing at all. I found Grasshopper Jungle to fall into the “not my thing at all” category this year, especially as I felt that the way females were depicted in the story was problematic. I don’t expect a book that’s through the eyes of a teen boy to always be perfectly respectful to female characters — that’s unrealistic — but when every female in the story has some kind of problem or is depicted as merely there as a side item, it starts to grate on me.

Enter 100 Sideways Miles.

The story centers on Finn and his experience as an epileptic. Or, well, it’s less about his experience as an epileptic as his experience being a teen boy trying to figure out what’s next in his life. It so happens he has epilepsy, due to a bizarre accident involving a horse that subsequently killed his mother. Finn’s goal at the end of this school year is to travel outside California with his best friend Cade. They want to check out a potential college in Oklahoma together.

In the interim, a new girl moves to town and quite literally meets Finn as he’s in the midst of a seizure. It’s completely embarrassing to him to have the new girl — who he can’t help but have his eyes on out of curiosity, if not more — walk in on him like that. But Julia isn’t fazed by it. In fact, it’s that event that brings them together and forges a satisfying relationship between the two of them. Smith offers up a solid female character in Julia, but more than that, he shows a really great romantic relationship between the two that feels real and more, feels real to who Finn is.

But this isn’t really about the romance. This is a book about guy friendship and about figuring out the questions of “what’s next” in life. I’d call this a straight up adventure story, especially in the second half, and it’s the kind of adventure story that seems to be lacking in YA. It’s two guys, on the road, figuring out not just who they are, but how they can solve big problems outside themselves while they’re on the road. 100 Sideways Miles also features what readers have come to expect out of Smith’s writing: it’s not necessarily straightforward and there are plenty of straight-up weird and bizarre plot elements. But those are part of the story and make sense within it. This is a much more accessible and, I think, enjoyable read than Grasshopper Jungle was this year. It features a diverse cast and a really authentic look at male friendship.

Tell Me Again How A Crush Should Feel is Sara Farizan’s sophomore novel, and it repeats some of the same writing-related things that I found didn’t work for me in her first book, If You Could Be Mine. In Tell Me Again, main character Leila — who is Iranian — has never had a crush before. It’s something she is almost a little proud of, or at least it’s something she’d be more proud of if it weren’t for the fact this is because she’s a lesbian. Her parents, who are strict and religious, can’t know about this, as they have very high expectations of her to follow the straight-and-narrow in the same way her older sister is. Leila feels the pressure, even if she doesn’t necessarily pursue it.

When new girl Saskia comes to Leila’s school, though, suddenly, she finds herself falling. Saskia is gorgeous and she appears to be very open and honest about her feelings. Leila can’t believe that someone as attractive and cool as Saskia could be the kind of girl she’d be able to call a girlfriend. Between their getting together after school, their intimate moments in a dressing room, and their shared kisses, it feels all but certain Leila now has her first real girlfriend. How will she tell her friends? Can she tell them? And what about her parents?

It’s not what it seems though, and Saskia isn’t the cool girl or girlfriend Leila thought her to be. She’s taken huge advantage of Leila and her naivety, leaving her hurt and confused. But when a long-time friend reenters the picture, perhaps things aren’t as bad as Leila thinks they are. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll be able to come out to her parents.

The writing in this one drags a bit and there are times where info dumps not only slow the pacing but they also sometimes seem to contradict themselves. We don’t get a super clear picture of any of the characters — including Leila — though Farizan does an outstanding job rendering Saskia as a toxic, manipulative girl who uses others for her own gain. At times, little to nothing happens in the story, and I felt like this moments deserved some higher stakes, both for the plot and for the characters so they could be more rounded and clearly depicted. I also wish there’d been a little more economic diversity within the story; this was a book featuring a lot of privileged characters and after a while, reading that got to be a little too much.


Tell Me Again reads younger than a lot of YA out there, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. While there’s talk of sex and there’s drinking, I think this would be an okay book to hand to more mature middle school readers, as well as younger high schoolers.

If you’re looking for a book that’s a hard look at “dude culture” — something perhaps not explored as much as it should be in YA — then Eric Devine’s Press Play should fit pretty well.

Greg Dunsmore has earned the nickname “Dun the Ton” because he’s a big guy. A very big guy. But he’s using this as an opportunity to develop a film to gain him admission into a top film school. His plan is to film himself through intense weight-loss workouts, as well as the sort of bullying and teasing he gets for his body.

When he’s doing his workout in the weight room after school, he accidentally overhears and oversees something going on with the lacrosse team. It looks and sounds like bullying and hazing on a level he can’t stomach. He doesn’t have quite the solid proof that he’d like to to turn this into something bigger, but Greg knows now he has to pursue what it is he thinks is going on in order to shed light into the brutal hazing culture at his school. It’s not easy, and he’s not above seeing further bullying for what he’s trying to do, but Greg understands this is beyond him . . . even if he is also aware this could be an opportunity for his own future, too.

Devine’s book is a fast-paced, adrenaline-fueled book along the lines of Joshua Cohen’s Leverage. While there’s not a lot new offered to the fat kid being bullied angle in the story, Greg is authentic and honest in a way that many of these kinds of stories don’t allow their main characters to be. He’s not a perfect character, and his flaws are what make him a character worth following. Because he’s sometimes unlikable, stubborn, and frustrating to readers and to those who care about him, he’s almost the exact right person to be attempting to out the hazing going on with the lacrosse team. He doesn’t start out with an agenda, and when he decides he does have to pursue this, his dedication to it becomes something that both impresses and annoys those around him.

At times, Press Play went a little long and it could have maintained its intensity with a little tighter editing, but this is the kind of realistic YA that should appeal to both teen boys and teen girls who are interested in unflinching, stomach-twisting looks at the underbelly of high school and high school athletic culture. It’s a story that’s exceptionally timely and, unfortunately, exceptionally timeless.

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

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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.