STACKED

books

Free to Fall by Lauren Miller

|

I didn’t expect to like Lauren Miller’s Free to Fall as much as I did. I went in with some preconceived notions – that it would  be very heavy-handed with a message, that it would focus on a romance almost exclusively – and I was very happy to be proven wrong. (But you can forgive me about the romance thing, right? I mean, people talk about “falling” in love…)

What I got instead was a very smart, engaging thriller about a number of things: the pitfalls of technology, the danger of ceding any amount of free will, the nature of trust. It’s also a novel very much for teens, covering first love, parental betrayal, and the high school dance. (Did I mention it also has a secret society and some Da Vinci Code-style puzzles? Be still, my heart.)

Here’s the basic idea: Rory lives in the near future (the 2030s or thereabouts) where everyone has a handheld (think smartphone, supercharged). Gnosis manufactures the handhelds everyone has, and they also produce an app called Lux which helps users determine the best choice to make in any situation, right down to “What should I order for dinner?” Rory, along with most of her peers, relies on Lux pretty heavily.

Rory has just been accepted to Theden Academy, an elite boarding school for teens which pretty much guarantees her a ticket to a prestigious college and the good life afterward. But Theden has a lot of secrets, and Rory finds herself personally caught up in it. Her mother attended Theden, but left abruptly, then died giving birth to her. She passed along a cryptic message to Rory, telling her father to give it to her when Rory entered Theden.

This book has a lot in it – parents’ secret past, a mysterious townie boy, a duplicitous roommate, an evil teacher, strange school tests, Paradise Lost, a secret affair, a secret society, math puzzles, future tech, pop science – and it all leads back to Gnosis and Lux in some way. It’s incredibly fun to watch Rory unravel it all. There’s never a dull moment. It’s a true thriller with a new secret at every turn. I won’t say much more since the joy of reading the story is discovering just what Miller throws at you next.

A couple quibbles: some of the foreshadowing is too heavy-handed, and the denouement is too much of a deus ex machina. But I was having so much fun, I didn’t care much. This is a near-perfect near-future thriller. It’s twisty,
surprising, fast-paced, and very timely. The sketchy boarding school aspect may appeal to fans of The Testing or Variant, the dangerous technology aspect may appeal to fans of Feed, and the sci fi mystery may appeal to fans of Unremembered or Starters (though I think Free to Fall is the smartest of them all). Highly recommended.

Finished copy received from the publisher. Free to Fall is available now.

This One Summer by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki

|

Before talking about This One Summer‘s story, I think it’s obvious from the cover alone that the art is what stands out. This isn’t a full-colored graphic novel, nor is it rendered only in black and white. It’s done entirely in blue ink on a cream, rather than stark white, background.

The choices made in color and art set a tone that’s both nostalgic and present. This book feels like it’s happening in the moment, but it also feels slightly removed, slightly different because it’s in a moment between the comforts of the past and the changes coming in the future.

Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki are the cousin team behind This One Summer, a graphic novel that could easily be categorized on the more literary end of graphic novels, if such a designation exists (I think it does). Every summer, Rose and her parents go to a lake house they own on Awago Beach. It’s an opportunity for all of them to unwind after a long, hard year.

Every year, Rose looks forward to the trip, as it’s an opportunity to spend every waking moment doing exactly what it is she wants to do. She loves reuniting with Windy, a girl who is a little younger than her but who seems almost like the little sister that Rose never had. Both girls are young — Rose barely a teenager and Windy even younger than her — but it’s because of their being on the young end of the spectrum that the story unfolds as being about what it means to transition from a place of innocence and naivety to one of knowing that the world isn’t all summer vacations at the beach house.

The relationship between Windy and Rose was easily the most interesting element of the story for me. Rose is much more mature than Windy is, but Windy is much more adventurous. Rose is definitely more self-conscious than Windy is, who has no shame nor reason to be shamed for how she chooses to dress, how she chooses to dance, and how she chooses to express herself. She’s not worried about the impression she leaves; Rose, on the other hand, is definitely more aware of how other people perceive her and is more tucked in because of that.

From the start of the vacation, things aren’t great at Rose’s place. Her mom and dad are constantly fighting. Rose seeks a lot of solace in spending time with Windy to get away from it. The two of them, being on the cusp of huge changes, find themselves intrigued by those who live in Awago Beach year-round and who have lives that look so different than the ones they’re used to.

It’s interesting to see the lives of the year round residents contrasted against the girls there for the summer. One of the biggest emerging themes in the story is that of sexuality — both Windy and Rose are on the verge of discovering their own sexuality, and Windy in particular finds herself fascinated with other people’s choices when it comes to expressing their desire (she mentions, as seen in the page on the right, that her aunt is a lesbian, and this is a theme that comes up more than once in the story). The summer is representative of the girls discovering what it is that the year round teens have found to be both exciting and hugely complicated and troublesome: sex.

Roe and Windy are at the point where it’s easiest to make judgments and comments about sex than to really understand the complexity of it. Girls can be put into categories — slutty or not — without much thought as to what that sort of labeling may mean nor how those labels became so easy to use. They’re not aware of how much they’ve picked up and absorbed from the world around them, and they’re unaware of their own voices or points of view.

What’s “in the moment” for Rose and Windy is the reality of the year round teens. They’re on the verge of discovery, and it’s exciting. Their curiosity is piqued and they pursue it, to the point of meddling perhaps a little too much into the lives of the teens who they don’t know. Those teens, on the other hand, are well into their adolescence and are grappling now not with the excitement nor point of discovery; they’re working through the consequences of the decisions they’ve made.

I haven’t touched too much on the story of Rose’s family, but it parallels the changes going on in Rose’s life well. The dynamics of their family are shifting because Rose’s mother is facing serious questions about what she’s doing with her own life and what is to come for her. Rather than adulthood being depicted as an endpoint in This One Summer, it’s instead a continuum that’s regularly shifting. While adolescence is a tumultuous period of time, so, too, is adulthood. Even when everything seems like it’s stable and people have everything figured out, that’s not the truth. There are always hurdles that pop up, and there are changes which pop up that are positive and that are terrifying, even for the most “together” adults.

At times, the book felt a little too conscious of what it was doing. Perhaps because I’m reading it as an adult who gets what strings are being pulled — this is a book about having one’s illusions and beliefs and security rattled and shattered — I didn’t feel like Rose nor Windy got to do enough of the doing in the story, as much as the story did more of the doing for them. Fortunately, because I enjoyed the story and the art especially, this didn’t kill the book for me. I saw the hand, but I was able to ignore it enough to still enjoy.

This One Summer is about growing up and about all of the variations of “growing up” exist. It’s about being on the verge of discovery and having the safety and comfort of childhood rattled by the reality of a world beyond the bubble. It’s about coming to understand that what you thought you knew and understood aren’t the things you might actually know or understand. This is a book that has appeal for teen readers, but I think this is a graphic novel that adult readers might walk away from with more, simply because there’s a level of appreciating that moment teens may or may not have yet experienced.

Review copy received from the publisher. This One Summer is available now. 

Cress by Marissa Meyer

|

Meyer knows so well how to write a good series. Focusing on a different character for each book is such a brilliant way to tell a larger story. I feel like we get all the benefits of a series without sacrificing the good things about a standalone. Each volume provides a satisfying beginning, middle, and end with a unique storyline. Then we also get a larger, overreaching plot that brings things to a more epic level – plus the chance to revisit and follow characters we grew to love from the prior volumes. I know Meyer isn’t the first to do this, but it works really well for her.

While I enjoyed Scarlet, I think Cress is even better. It uses Rapunzel as its springboard, focusing on a girl named Cress who lives in a satellite and spies on the Earthens for Queen Levana. Her hair grows long because she has no need to cut it. She has connections to Cinder, as you’d expect, which are teased out over the course of the story. As in Cinder, some of the major plot revelations are expected – but not all.

Cress as a character is different from both Cinder and Scarlet. She’s incredibly naive due to her situation – she’s never been out in the world and has no clue how to interact with anyone other than her captors. With no one around to keep her company, she’s taken to fantasizing about the people she spies on, namely Carswell Thorne. It’s easy to admire someone from afar, to create elaborate stories about them in your head. It can be very difficult to then reconcile the person as they are with the person you imagined them to be. Such is Cress’ dilemma. Cress and Thorne’s interactions are often funny but also quite painful (secondhand embarrassment is a killer for me). Cress herself is socially awkward, and not really in a “I’m a special snowflake” sort of way. She’s awkward in a way that makes you cringe. She’s awkward in a way that I know teen girls can relate to.

Cress is full of action and excitement. These books are long but never feel long. The major plot is furthered nicely. Nothing feels extraneous or makes you think “Wow, I can really tell this is a middle book in a series.” And the end of this volume has a fantastic tease for Winter, due out in 2015. So far, this series hasn’t disappointed.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Cress is available now.

Everything Leads to You by Nina LaCour

|

It’s nearing the end of high school and big changes are brewing in Emi’s life. Her brother’s gone overseas, leaving his apartment to her and her best friend for the summer. Her best friend will be moving to Michigan come fall to go to school, and Emi’s brother’s single expectation for his sister is to “do something epic” in the apartment that summer. To make a memory that will stay with her forever.

She will, but it won’t be in the way she expects.

A little about Emi: she works in film, but she’s not an actress nor a director. Her role is working on the design and arrangement of the set. When the story opens, she’s in the midst of acquiring a couch she thinks will be perfect for a scene in the film she’s working on. She haunts estate sales and flea markets and thrift stores in order to find those pieces that will make a set sing.

And it’s while she’s doing this that bigger things unravel for her. She’s found herself at the estate sale of a former western actor who was well known in his day for his work. While procuring possible items for a set, Emi and best friend Charlotte discover a letter addressed to a woman who lives not too far away. The two of them decide it’s their duty to deliver the letter.

Of course, it’s not going to be that easy. When they arrive at the addressee’s home, they discover that she is no longer alive, either. So they choose to open the letter, and upon further research, Emi and Charlotte realize there’s a lot more to this letter than they thought — and they choose to pursue any and all leads possible to get the letter (and subsequent information about a bank account) to the person it most belongs to: the granddaughter of the deceased western star, Ava.

While it sounds like a mystery, Nina LaCour’s Everything Leads to You is not. It’s a love story. Ava, the girl who the letter eventually gets to, becomes a romantic interest for Emi early on. Emi, who is nursing the wounds of an on again off again relationship with Morgan, wonders whether she’ll ever fall in love with someone who cares about her as much as she cares about them. And it’s something she’ll continue to wonder as she becomes closer to Ava, even as she allows herself to have the feelings she does for Ava without pursuing them.

The world LaCour creates in her novel is worth noting. There’s an appearance of privilege and freedom, but it’s done in a way that feels real and authentic to the story. Emi and Charlotte live in an apartment by themselves, but now that they’re done with high school, it makes sense that they have that freedom. Both girls have a lot of freedom to move around and do what they want to, but both girls also work. Work is a big part of their lives, in a really positive way. They have jobs which seem strange for teenagers to have — especially when Emi manages to land a new gig being the director of design — but for two girls living in Los Angeles, it’s also not a piece of the plot that feels impossible. It’s just the lives they lead.

Ava, on the other hand, lives a very different life than Emi and Charlotte. She comes from a different world, where her life has been a series of chaoses and instability. But what makes her so standout is she not only recognizes and owns that part of her, but she is who she is because she’s able to live her own life in spite of those things. Her best friend Jamal she met because the two of them had to take the same bus to get to work everyday, and that lengthy bus trip allowed them to talk and get to know one another. And while Jamal looks like he plays a minor role in the story, I enjoyed his presence and would have loved even more. Jamal wasn’t easy. He didn’t play around. And he was willing to call people out and force them to dig deeper into who they were.

It’s because of Jamal that we learn Emi is not entirely white. That despite her skin looking white, she’s one-fourth black. This scene, dropped into the book nearly two-thirds of the way through, isn’t splashy nor some kind of big reveal. It’s a fact-laying scene, but it’s woven and incorporated so well that it made me want more from Jamal because clearly, he had a way of getting people to give of themselves. While Ava had made it clear he was a great person, it’s in this scene we see Emi discover it herself.

We know Emi and Ava find one another through this letter, but it’s when Emi is offered a part as a design director in a small, low-budget film that their relationship becomes something more. Ava had always wanted to act, and Emi tells her about the film’s need for a female to play one of the parts. After an audition, the part becomes Ava’s, and the two of them work together closely as Ava learns her lines and as Emi works on designing the look of the scenes — which leads her to offering the apartment she’s living in as one of the apartments for the film.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book was how Emi’s need to solve the mysteries of Ava’s life tied into her role in putting together films. Emi, as a person who assists in designing sets, was reluctant to listen to those who told her some of her ideas wouldn’t work well in the particular scenes being filmed. She thought her ideas were perfect, and she becomes upset when those around her prove their vision to be more correct than hers. She’s less happy being a spectator than she is being the person who gets to direct the entire look and feel. So when Emi realizes she can’t solve the issues of Ava’s life, that she has to accept the fact that Ava’s challenges and means of resolving her problems fall squarely into the hands of Ava and not her, she has a hard time accepting this role. It’s not that she’s a control freak; it’s that it comes hard for her to accept that not every problem and not every puzzle is one she can nor should attempt to solve all on her own. Despite the independence and freedom she has in her life, she can’t expect the same from those around her. Things do and will come up that force her to see that not everything can nor should be handed to her. She sometimes has to step back from directing and sit back to be a spectator in order to to see an entire scene come alive.

While I didn’t love the way that everything relating to Ava’s discovery came as easily as it did — even the dead ends were resolved a little too quickly and cleanly for me — I loved the way that she and Emi became girlfriends. Ava offered Emi more than one opportunity to act upon her feelings, but it wasn’t immediate. Emi was more reluctant, more put off because of her own past relationships, than Ava was, but it was ultimately Ava who showed her it was okay to pursue those feelings.

That epic summer adventure in Emi’s brother’s apartment was, of course, Emi falling in love.

LaCour weaves in the set design metaphor quite nicely. The actors in any film are important, but as Emi explains early on, what people tend to overlook when watching a film, are the ways that the spaces the actors play in are created, designed, and used to enhance their story lines. Those interiors are things that are present, that are thought about, that are developed and redeveloped, in a way that’s not always seen on the screen, despite how hugely important they are in the film and to the characters playing in those spaces.

The interior, of course, is love and how it’s created and recreated, how it’s fashioned and refashioned, how it’s carefully constructed and then reconstructed. The actors matter, but they only matter as much as the thing holding them together. In this case, it doesn’t matter at all that it’s one girl falling in love with another girl. What matters is that it’s something holding them together.

Everything Leads to You is a love story, with a full cast of well-rendered characters and a setting that comes alive. This one will especially appeal to older YA readers and those who never saw — or don’t see right now — high school as the kind of thing they’re invested in too deeply. Readers who want a story with heart will want to pick this up, as will those readers who are seeking lesbian romance stories and finding that the bulk of them are less focused on the love and more focused on what that love might look like to others. Here, those cameras aren’t even part of the story.

Everything Leads to You will be available May 15. Review copy received from the publisher.

Plus One by Elizabeth Fama

|

I dug Fama’s part-historical fiction, part-ghost story Monstrous Beauty. Plus One is a major departure from it, though it’s still within the SFF genre. It postulates an alternate history where the Spanish flu separated American society into two groups of people. The Rays live during the day and sleep at night. The Smudges live during the night and sleep during the day. It’s an interesting premise that isn’t fully explained until pretty far into the novel, requiring a rather hefty suspension of disbelief.

Sol is a Smudge. She may have had potential at some point in her young life, but she occupies a dead end job in a factory now. She hatches a stupid and desperate plan to go steal her brother’s child – the brother who had been born a Smudge but was transferred to day – from the hospital during the daytime so that her dying grandfather – also a Smudge – can hold it before he passes. Things take off from there and don’t really ever slow down. It seemed to me that the entire novel takes place within the span of a few days.

Her kissing partner from the book’s cover is a day boy named D’Arcy whom she meets at the hospital while undertaking her foolish plan. He’s privileged, studying to be a doctor, and has powerful parents. He initially tries to foil Sol’s plan, but then becomes caught up in it, and the two fall in love (bet you didn’t see that coming).

There are a lot of little details that I liked. The society has a French flavor, which is not something I’ve seen before. I thought the setup of the day/night divide was an interesting way to explore privilege and class, though it strained my credulity and I didn’t ever really buy it. The explanation came too late for me. (Yet I didn’t care about Delirium‘s farfetched-ness. Go figure.) The love story is nice and features a pretty empowering (non-explicit) sex scene that I think will resonate with many teenagers. There’s some nice emotional moments between Sol and her grandfather and a complicated, thorny history between Sol and her brother as well.

Fama’s writing is good – she has a way with words. But all in all I just don’t think this story felt as polished as Monstrous Beauty, which juggled two time periods expertly. There are frequent flashbacks in Plus One that slow the pace considerably, though they’re interesting and provide necessary backstory. (I’m a tough reader for flashbacks; they’re too easily skimmed. I dislike them almost as much as I dislike dream sequences and visions.) The world-building wasn’t as strong as I wanted it to be. I liked the book; I didn’t love it. It’s a solid entry in what seems to be the moderately popular subgenre of alternate histories, though, and if you have readers who dig that sort of thing, this should interest them.

(P. S. – This book is not a dystopia.)

Review copy provided by the publisher. Plus One is available now.