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Audio Review: The Tyrant’s Daughter by J. C. Carleson

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Fifteen year old Laila has always been told that her father is the king of their middle Eastern country. When he’s killed in a coup by his own brother, Laila’s uncle, she escapes with her family – her mother and younger brother – to America. There, Laila’s mother keeps up the pretense that Laila’s father was a king, even calling her younger brother a prince. Laila slowly begins to learn the truth: her father was a dictator, a tyrant, a man who kept his power by force.

While Laila struggles to adapt to her new life in America, she also struggles to understand her old life in this new context. Written by a former CIA officer, the book has a strong ring of authenticity. Carleson wisely chose to create a fictional country for her book, but the story is based on an amalgamation of real people and events. Nothing is played for gasps or used to deliberately alarm the reader. Instead, we’re given a chance to see the world from Laila’s point of view. Her voice is authentically teen, but she provides a very different perspective from most other YA books. It’s fascinating and makes for riveting reading.

Carleson’s book tackles multiple topics and themes, juggling them all successfully. Laila’s story begins as an exploration of her experience as an immigrant, including her assimilation into American culture. A white student fascinated with international students quickly “adopts” her as a friend and initiates her into the school’s culture, including how many American girls relate to boys. This portion of the novel is particularly well-done. We see Laila’s judgment of her new American acquaintances quite starkly. At one point she tells the listener that the first word that sprang to her mind when she saw her new friend was “whore.” There’s the flip side to this, too, as Laila experiences the myriad ways in which the other teens judge her.

While Laila is an immigrant, her story is not typical of most immigrants. Her life in her home country was extraordinarily privileged, but it was also sheltered. Laila knew nothing of her father’s actions, not even whispers or rumors, really. Her American friends speak openly about it, though, and for the first time Laila has access to the internet where she can look up whatever she likes. And she does. Watching her grapple with her new knowledge adds another layer to the story, complicating it further.

Added to the mix is some international intrigue. An American man stops by their home frequently, and Laila eventually guesses that he’s an agent for the CIA. He indicates to Laila that their family is in America due to his kindness, and that her mother must hold up her end of the bargain – namely by giving him intelligence. But Laila’s mother has her own motivations, and she only feeds bits and pieces of what’s really going on to Laila. This part of the story could easily have become unrealistic, turning a thoughtful, complex novel into a Tom Clancy book for teens. But Carleson doesn’t fall into this trap. What she has crafted instead is a multi-layered novel with a realistic role for her teen to play. Laila isn’t an action-adventure hero. Instead, she overhears phone calls, draws conclusions, and tries to puzzle out the hidden meaning behind her mother’s words.

There are many more aspects of the book I could discuss, such as how Laila interacts with refugees from her own country, or how the novel’s women have their own kind of power, or how it’s impossible to determine what is right and what is wrong, even after it ends. This is a complex, meaty book. It’s got so many parts, all the parts of a complicated life, and it’s executed nearly perfectly. 

The book is narrated quite well by Meera Simhan, who voices Laila with a light accent, just enough to give her a realistic voice without turning her into a caricature. You can listen to an excerpt here.

The end of the book is devastating. It pulls no punches and provides no easy answers. With this kind of book, there really aren’t answers at all, much less easy ones. Because the ending is open-ended, it also makes Laila’s story seem a bit more real. An author’s note and a some commentary by Dr. Cheryl Benard, a RAND researcher, are must-reads. They provide more context for Laila’s story and also give real-world examples of young people in similar situations and what their ultimate fates were. Fascinating, timely, discussable, and highly recommended.

Audiobook provided by the publisher. The Tyrant’s Daughter is available now.

The Shadow Hero by Gene Luen Yang & Sonny Liew

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I don’t think Gene Yang has written a book yet that I haven’t liked. His latest, The Shadow Hero, is an ambitious project, one that should instantly establish itself as part of the comics canon. He’s taken an obscure character from the 1940s, possibly the first-ever Asian American superhero, and written an origin story for him that is fresh, timely, and fun.

The Green Turtle was a short-lived hero from the Golden Age of comics. His face was almost always obscured, which some argue was done in order to allow the creator to make him an Asian-American hero as opposed to the white American that the publisher wanted. Yang and Liew have pulled this character from the footnotes of comics history and made him into an interesting and fully-formed superhero, the son of Chinese immigrants experiencing his teenage years through the lenses of his heritage as well as his unconventional ability.

Like much of Yang’s other work, this is a story about growing up as a Chinese-American, but it also feels very much like a classic superhero story. Hank’s parents were both born in China and came to America separately, for different reasons. Hank’s mother felt like she settled for Hank’s father, and she doesn’t have the life she always dreamed of. This contributes to her desire to make something of her son, and she sets about trying to figure out a way for Hank to get real superpowers, much like the Anchor of Justice, a real superhero in this book’s world (set just before the second world war). Hank isn’t into it at first, but as you might expect, something eventually does happen and Hank becomes the Green Turtle.

Yang takes a lot of tropes (a nicer word for cliches in this case) from 40s comics and incorporates them into Hank’s story. The book includes things like a detective named Lawful, gangsters as villains, freak accidents that imbue people with powers, and so on. Rather than feeling lazy or derivative, these choices feel deliberate, especially when accompanied by a hero protagonist who is pointedly Chinese-American as his inspiration was never allowed to be. The book feels like a homage to Chu Hing (the creator of the Green Turtle from the 40s) as well as a corrective – in a small way – to decades of comics history that never allowed stories like these featuring characters like Hank and his family to be told.

The book also functions really well as a straight-up superhero comic, no context needed to enjoy it. The story is interesting, the art is crisp and expressive, the characters are nicely rounded. The plot also has some unique mythology behind it, tying it back to Hank’s heritage, lending Hank and his nemesis extra depth and adding some much-needed layers to the story.

I love superhero origin stories featuring teenagers; they’re such perfect metaphors for the teenage experience. I see this as a great readalike for fans of the new Ms. Marvel, someone who is also struggling to grow up as part of a cultural minority in America while simultaneously grappling with new abilities that are both amazing and terrifying.

The author’s note at the end gives context on the original comic and reproduces an issue in full. It’s a must-read, enhancing the significance of Yang and Liew’s own work. Highly recommended.

Finished copy provided by the publisher. The Shadow Hero is available now (so no excuses).

Conversion by Katherine Howe

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I loved Conversion, Katherine Howe’s first foray into young adult territory, more than most of what I’ve read so far this year. The parallels she draws are insightful without hitting the reader over the head with them. She’s also done a fine job of getting at what it’s like to be under the kind of extraordinary pressure that might cause conversion disorder in these teenage girls.

Colleen Rowley is a senior at an elite all-girls private Catholic school in Danvers, Massachusetts, the site of the former Salem Village. She’s in competition with another classmate for valedictorian, is interviewing for admittance to Harvard, and has just started a flirtation-maybe-something-more with a boy who goes to a nearby school. She’s under a lot of pressure, but she feels like she can handle it.

Then her classmates start getting sick. One of them exhibits strange verbal tics. Another loses all of her hair. Another – one of Colleen’s close friends – coughs up pins. There doesn’t seem to be a common thread among their symptoms. More and more girls begin getting sick, and the situation quickly snowballs. Different diagnoses are given, some girls go on television to share their stories, and the media is a constant presence at the school. In her author’s note, Howe explains that the succession of hypotheses she describes in her book for the illnesses (from Tourette’s to PANDAS to environmental causes) very closely mirrors the case of Le Roy, NY from 2011.

Scattered throughout the book are chapters set in early 1700s Salem, narrated by Ann Putnam as she gives her confession for her part in the Salem witch trials several years earlier. (Putnam was the only person involved to confess.) It’s clear that the bulk of the story belongs to Colleen, but these sections set in the past are made more powerful for their brevity. Ann describes her initial reticence to go along with the girls who first started making accusations, but slowly, slowly, she gets caught up and becomes a primary accuser, even legitimately experiencing some of the physical symptoms she only pretended to have before. It’s easy for the reader, too, to become caught up. We read about the heady feeling Ann gets when she realizes that this time, the adults – the men, mostly, but the women too – are listening to her, really listening. That this time, her words have power.
             
And this is where the story holds its real power, too: what will teenage girls do when faced with the pressure they experience? When they’re pressured to excel academically, spiritually, and socially, but also told to be “good” and “pure” and given no power to act on their own or be heard with their own voices? It’s easy to say that we’ve come a long way since the 17th/18th centuries in the way teen girls are treated, but that type of pressure? Girls – and particularly girls – in the here and now experience it just as Howe’s version of Ann Putnam did 300 years ago. When written in this way, the parallel is obvious.

It was easy for me to relate to Colleen, which is unusual for me to write. There are many reasons I tend not to read contemporary realistic YA, but one of the primary ones is that I don’t find many that are authentic to my experience. Not that they need to be – I certainly want to read about people different from me. But there’s something to be said for reading about an experience similar to yours, and I could easily relate to Colleen’s, even though I didn’t attend a Catholic high school and never interviewed at Harvard. I felt the same kind of intense academic pressure to succeed, even finding myself in competition for a top ranking. These things matter very little now, but at the time, they held paramount importance. I felt tremendous academic pressure while at the same time worrying about my hair, my skin, my weight, and yes, my inability to speak and be heard about any of it, my feelings that my words were lesser and my concerns were lesser.

The full impact of the story is weakened slightly by a detail at the very end, involving the yellow bird from the cover. I feel like it undermines the parallels Howe draws between the two events and adds a hint of manufactured creepiness that isn’t necessary. I’m being deliberately vague since I know most of you won’t have read the book yet, but I’d be interested to hear if those of who have read it agree with me in this respect. Events wrap up fairly quickly near the end, too – Colleen tells us which college she’s going to, who made valedictorian, and so on. It feels rushed, almost like Howe was checking things off her list.

Those things aren’t huge problems, though, and they don’t prevent the book from being a standout. Howe’s author’s note is a must-read, if only for the reason that she explains she used some of Ann Putnam’s own words in the story. It adds historical authenticity and drives home the point that the girls then and the girls now aren’t that different – and that we don’t treat them all that differently.


Review copy picked up at TLA. Conversion is available now.

Dirty Wings by Sarah McCarry

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Maia and Cass’s friendship happens by chance. Their worlds should have never collided, but they did, and now that they have, the girls are inseparable.

Maia’s adopted, “lucky” to be living in a home where everything she ever needs is handed to her — as long as she’s proper, behaves, doesn’t get out of line, and pursues that talent she has playing piano. She’s Vietnamese, and has no knowledge of her birth lineage or how she ended up in this home, with this strict, powerful mother and a father who is more absent, more hung over, than he is present.

Cass is a street girl. She lives in a squat house, wears the kinds of things you’d expect of a girl who doesn’t have a home to go back to. It wasn’t her choice, after the abusive step fathers and the mother who couldn’t offer any most stability than she thought she could make for herself. Hers is a tough life, a brutal contrast to Maia’s, but it’s when their paths collide and when Cass gives Maia a taste of the wild freedom she has, that Maia can’t get enough. That Maia wants to experience for and by herself.

Dirty Wings is the second book in Sarah McCarry’s trilogy that begins with All Our Pretty Songs. It can be read alone, as a stand alone, since the events within the first book don’t have any bearing on the events of the second. This is a book about the teen lives of the mothers of the girls in book one, and while it informs All Our Pretty Songs, you could read these books out of order (though I will say that one of the revelations that comes at the end of Dirty Wings was so powerful, it made me go back and reread the first book because I put together some of the pieces of mistruth betrayed by the unnamed narrator in that story).

In Dirty Wings, an intense, life-changing friendship unravels, but it’s not a pretty, glossy kind of friendship. It’s rough and it’s dirty, and it’s transformative for both girls.

The narrative in this story moves back and forth between the present “Now” and the past “Then.” We begin in the now, as one girl stands on the edge of a cliff, ready to throw herself down and end her life. The other girl pulls her back. It is here we see the immediacy — the necessity — of their friendship. We flash back, then, to the moment they met, and then further back to the moments where they realized how much they needed one another even then. Maia needed Cass to help her come to her own, and Cass, despite later insistency that she never changed, needed Maia to help show her what a fulfilling, loving friendship could be.

Because what Maia and Cass have for one another is love. It’s a phrase they’ll open themselves up to saying. A phrase that, for neither of them, had been empty before they found one another. A phrase that didn’t have the heart behind it. A phrase that comes with actual tender feelings that neither had allowed themselves to have.

It’s about intimacy that’s not physical and not romantic.

Not until near the end of the story do we understand how the “Then” and the “Now” intersect. Because in the now, Cass and Maia are on the road. They’re in California, then Mexico, then heading toward Seattle. In the “Then,” both girls are deeply in Seattle and in their respective lives — Cass in the squat home and Maia in her pristine home, her hours split between her piano teacher Oscar’s home practicing and her own home practicing even more. Cass’s future is never talked about because her future is the day-by-day. Maia’s, on the other hand, is clear. She’s going to an audition at a major, prestigious school in New York City and if she gets in (when she gets in), her life will be on the exact right path. Or will it be? Is this her path or the path her parents and Oscar so desperately want for her?

When Maia and Cass are out together in the “Then,” talking about the future, about their lives, about how they do and don’t have the capacity to mold it to their liking, they decide it’s time to get on the road. Maia steals her father’s car, and that’s when they enter the “Now.”

Before they get to that point, it becomes clear there’s something going on in the “Now” that doesn’t make Cass all that happy. His name is Jason, and he’s the leader in a band the girls went to see on one of their stops. He’s nothing special, according to Cass, but the moment Maia sees him she falls desperately, hopelessly In Love, and the girls decide to follow him down to Mexico. It’s an all-or-nothing romance Maia flings herself into, and Jason does nothing to stop her from falling for him. He encourages it even because he, too, enjoys what attention Maia puts upon him. It is no time before the two announce their engagement, and Cass is left to feel lost and alone in a way she never felt before. In a way that made her question her own future, now that she’s lost her best friend to a boy who won her with pretty songs and pretty promises of a rock and roll future.

There is so much to dig into here. This is a rich, layered story with characters who are so deeply flawed and yet incredibly fascinating and compelling because of these very flaws. Cass and Maia’s love for one another is palpable, and because McCarry’s story is written from a third person point of view, it’s clear that even when Jason enters the picture, Maia’s love for her best friend doesn’t go away. It’s influenced and strained because of Jason and because of the excitement there is in chasing something new, but the feelings she has for Cass don’t change because she recognizes that it’s with Cass she was best able to think about who she is. Even if how she pursues it — how she chases it — how she names it — is wrong. At the end of the book, there’s a great line where Cass talks about how much she’s seen Maia change and grow over the course of their friendship but that she herself will always be the kind of girl she is. This line, seemingly simple, tells us as readers just how much Cass herself has changed, too.

We do end the story knowing Maia’s pregnant.

We end the story knowing Jason’s not going to be around much.

And we also end the story knowing something happened between Cass and Jason that unlocks a million answers to All Our Pretty Songs. Or at least, perhaps it unlocks a million answers — Cass’s reliability is always up for question.

Woven into the story is the fantastical element. Dirty Wings takes from the myth of Persephone, but in no way is it a retelling nor is knowledge of the myth necessary to appreciate the story. Readers who do know it will get it and those who do not will see those elements as wholly part of the story itself. Both Maia and Cass are haunted by images of a man in a dark robe, and both of the girls have their own interpretations and expectations of this vision, and how each of them chooses to interact with it not only illuminates who they are as individuals, but also gives depth to what their relationship becomes at the end. This is fantasy light: there’s not a world being built, and even with the interweaving of the Persephone myth, the question remains up in the air of whether what happened “actually” happened in the story or whether both girls suffer from something more internal. For me, it was a little bit of both, especially because of how Cass chose to pursue and compartmentalize these visions. Perhaps, too, it was symbolic of what could come between two girls who are best friends.

Dirty Wings will appeal to readers who want a challenging, literary story about friendship that pulses with music and gorgeous prose. It’s not for the faint of heart readers — drugs, alcohol, partying, and sex are all part of this world, but by virtue of the way the girls are written and characterized, it’s clear none of what they do or engage in is glamorized. Their choices impact them greatly. This is the kind of book perfect for those who identify as goth or alternative or who believe they don’t ever see themselves present in books. They are here in this book and in a way that’s authentic, thoughtful, and full of depth.

If you want to know a bit more about Dirty Wings or Sarah McCarry’s writing, as well as enter to win copies of her books, check out this great interview.

Dirty Wings will be available next Tuesday, July 15  from St. Martin’s Press. Review copy received from the publisher. In full disclosure, Sarah and I both write for Book Riot. 

High and Dry by Sarah Skilton

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Sarah Skilton’s sophomore novel High and Dry, a follow-up to her acclaimed debut Bruised, takes her writing in a new direction. It’s a noir-ish mystery set in high school; I’ve discovered that people will give me confused looks when I state this. Apparently the words “noir” and “high school” don’t tend to go together in most people’s minds. Skilton makes it work, though – for the most part.

Charlie Dixon is a senior in high school, a star (of sorts) of his school’s soccer team, and hopelessly in love with Ellie Chen, who dumped him last week. When the book starts off, we find Charlie feeling very depressed, drinking his sadness away. He’s determined to get Ellie back, though she rebuffs him and won’t tell him exactly why she decided they shouldn’t see each other anymore.

Charlie decides to go to a party where he knows Ellie will be. He gets drunk while there, and after being rejected again, his other ex-girlfriend Bridget gives him a ride home. The next day, Charlie is shocked to learn that a girl from his school is critically ill. She got sick while at the party, and someone driving Charlie’s car is the one who dropped her off at the hospital – and then left the scene. It appears Charlie is being framed.

Bridget complicates the situation. She says she left a flash drive in one of the computers at the school library and needs Charlie to help find out who took it, since Charlie sometimes works there. If he doesn’t help her, she’ll reveal incriminating texts that she set up the night she drove him home while he was passed out. She claims the flash drive has a scholarship essay on it, but Charlie knows there’s more to the story.

This book is probably a horror novel for parents who don’t realize all the nasty and unsafe stuff their teenagers get up to. It opens with Charlie drinking heavily. There’s a big subplot about drug manufacture, use, and sale by teens. There’s a cheating scandal and lots of bullying, with some violence. Charlie also gets involved in a soccer match-throwing scheme. There’s a lot of dirty stuff going on, which contributes to the noir-ish feel of the story. Charlie’s voice, which is the standout of the story, carries the reader through it. He’s depressed and hopeful at the same time. He thinks little things are huge deals and reduces important stuff to trivia. He walks a fine line between being likeable and unlikeable, often falling on the wrong side of that line. He’s smart about handling the mystery but stupid about handling his relationships with his ex-girlfriends and his friends. His voice is pure teen. It makes him an interesting character, even if as a reader I couldn’t root for him to succeed in all his endeavors. This is a fairly short book, but Skilton has created a fully-formed, unique character in Charlie.

As a mystery, the novel is very, very good. It’s one of the more complex and interesting mysteries aimed at teens I’ve read in years. Skilton juggles multiple moving parts successfully, transforming what seems at first to be a simple Encyclopedia Brown-style mystery about a stolen flash drive into an absorbing, multi-faceted mystery that touches on teen alcohol and drug use, mandated standardized testing, fixing soccer matches, friendship, bullying, and even a few problems of teachers and parents. Ultimately, there’s not just one thing Charlie needs to figure out – there are several, including what his former best friend is hiding. Skilton skillfully places clues throughout the novel, giving us multiple suspects and a fair few twists and turns. The ultimate payoff is quite satisfying. 

As a snapshot of high school life, I think it’s less successful. As a way of avoiding the rampant bullying that plagued the high school, all students willingly choose a formal group to be a part of, and their fellow group-mates then protect each other. I don’t mean they align themselves with the so-called jocks or nerds; I mean they join an extracurricular sport or club and call themselves a slang term that describes it. The soccer players are the beckhams, for example. There are rules associated with this set-up, too: upperclassmen can’t even talk to lowerclassmen without a formal introduction by another upperclassman who knows them both.

I think Skilton is probably making a comment on how we pigeonhole ourselves and others (in high school and beyond), but she didn’t sell it well enough for me to buy it. I guess I just found it very difficult to believe that everyone would willingly join something extracurricular. A lot of kids I went to high school with just wanted to go home at the end of the day. It seems like casual gangs would have been more realistic. This is a relatively unimportant thing for most of the story, but a big part of the plot hinges on this aspect of social organization near the end. My inability to suspend my disbelief in this regard lessens the impact of an otherwise very successful story.

Hand this one to your readers who like their mysteries a little hard-boiled. While not nearly as horrifying as Barry Lyga’s I Hunt Killers, it’s a bit more intense than Todd Strasser’s thrillogy (beginning with Wish You Were Dead), despite the fact that there’s no real murder here. It’s the lifestyle of the teens and Charlie’s voice that gives it that edge.

Review copy received from the publisher at TLA. High and Dry is available now.