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A Few Cybils Reads – Part 2 (2019)

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West by Edith Pattou

Edith Pattou’s books are just not for me, I’ve concluded. I know that the first book in this (now) duology, East, made a big splash when it was published in 2003 and won all sorts of awards and critical acclaim. I read it in 2010, as an adult, and thought it was fine, but nothing more than that. Part of the problem stems from the story source: the Norwegian folk tale East of the Sun and West of the Moon. The premise of the enchanted bear forcing a young girl to spend a year with him, and the girl subsequently falling in love with him (as an animal) always rubbed me the wrong way. In most versions of the story, the bear sleeps in the same bed as the girl at night, not just in the same house. The implied assault overtones are too strong. Still, there are definitely ways to take an unsettling fairy tale and reinvent it in unique ways. I just didn’t find a whole lot that I loved in East, and my notes in Goodreads remind me that I listened to it on audio and didn’t care for the narrator.

I felt much the same about this sequel, West, with the added annoyance that it basically retold the same story as in East. The prince is kidnapped again by the Troll Queen, and Rose must travel to the ends of the earth to save him. One of my biggest annoyances in (unplanned) sequels is when the creator simply brings back the villain from the first book and expects it to feel like a new story. It doesn’t. This book in particular meandered a lot, with a lot of different points of view that didn’t contribute much to the story each time they were given page time. It felt overstuffed and slow, and once again, I didn’t care for the performance of the person who narrated Rose. Overall, this felt like an unnecessary book. I’d be interested to see what big fans of East felt about this one.

 

We Rule the Night by Claire Eliza Bartlett

Debut author Bartlett tackles the Night Witches of World War II – the Soviet women pilots who flew nighttime combat missions and were the only women to officially serve in a combat capacity in the war. Bartlett’s world is held together by the Weave, and two types of magic can control it: Spark magic and Weave magic. Spark magic is a way of producing energy and is legal in the Union; Weave magic involves manipulating the fabric of the world itself and is forbidden. Only a few people have any sort of magic at all. When Revna is caught using Weave magic to save herself and others from a bombing, she feels her life may be over. Instead, she’s sent to become a pilot, where she will be paired with a Spark magic user. Together, the two types of magic can power and maneuver war planes that might be able to compete with the magical, terrifying planes of the enemy. Revna’s Spark partner is Linné, a girl who had disguised herself as a boy in order to fight and was caught. The two don’t get along at all, in part due to class differences (Revna is working class and the daughter of a traitor, and Linné upper class and the daughter of an honored general), and in part due to personality differences (Revna is less than patriotic due to her country’s treatment of her and her family and has no experience fighting in a war, whereas Linné is overconfident and has a massive superiority complex). Worst in Linné’s mind, Revna is physically disabled, which Linné regards as a liability.

Still, the two must work together; their lives, and the lives of their compatriots, are on the line each night. They’re also fighting against their own country in other ways: aside from the pervasive sexism any reader should expect, the soldiers have to contend with the Skarov, a secretive government division whose job is to hunt traitors. In Bartlett’s Union, just as in the real-world Soviet Union, no evidence is really needed for conviction. This creates an almost unbearable tension – there is nowhere any of the girls are truly safe.

I read this soon after reading A Thousand Sisters by Elizabeth Wein, a nonfiction account of the real Soviet airwomen during World War II. Having already read the true story added greatly to my appreciation of Bartlett’s twist. I knew which bits of Bartlett’s tale were based directly on the real Night Witches of the Soviet Union and their circumstances. It’s true that Soviet fighters who were shot down in enemy territory and survived would generally be executed as traitors. It’s true that the Night Witches were provided with planes that provided no protection if shot at. Certain characters in Bartlett’s book are stand-ins for real people. I was impressed by Bartlett’s attention to historical detail and how well she integrated her magical system into these real events. I fully believed that if magic existed in World War II Soviet Union, this was how events would have played out. This is a good pick for lovers of historical fantasy and women warriors, and I’d always recommend reading it in conjunction with Wein’s book – the two interact with each other so well.

A Few Cybils Reads – Part 1 (2019)

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Voyages in the Underworld of Orpheus Black by Marcus and Julian Sedgwick, illustrated by Alexis Deacon

I’m always intrigued by illustrated novels for teenagers, but this one – about a conscientious objector in England during World War II – doesn’t quite hit the mark. It’s a sort-of retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, wherein one brother – the conscientious objector – must travel underground to rescue the other brother, a soldier, after a bomb hits London. At least, that’s what the publisher synopsis says the book is about. In reality, it takes quite a number of pages before this journey actually begins, and when it does, it’s difficult to tell what’s going on. Deacon’s illustrations add atmosphere but don’t really help clarify the story, which is told in two voices: the conscientious objector in prose via his diary and the brother in poems separating each chapter. I found myself often confused by what was reality and what was metaphor, and not in the way the authors intended. The story backtracks on itself and treads water often, lingering over certain parts in the plot that slow it down considerably and make it feel like not much actually happens. I wonder if I would have appreciated this book more as a short story.

It’s clear that the Sedgwicks are trying to make a point about war, but the story they’ve crafted does their message no favors. The very beginning and the very end (including the note from the authors) are the most powerful parts of the book, but they don’t make up for the long and muddling middle.

 

Toxic by Lydia Kang

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this story about a living ship and the group of people that find themselves caught on it as it begins to die. I’ve read and watched a lot of science fiction where living ships are featured, but this is the first story I’ve encountered that focuses on what happens when that ship dies (as living things do). Kang has two protagonists: Hana, a teenage girl whose mother gave birth to her secretly on the ship and has kept her a secret her whole life, and Fenn, a teenage boy who is part of a team sent to study the ship as it dies – and to die along with it, their final payment sent to a family member of their choosing. Hana wakes up one day to find that she’s alone on the ship, ostensibly abandoned by her mother and the rest of the crew, who never knew she existed. Fenn and the rest of the research crew are surprised and disturbed to learn that someone is still on the ship, and they’re even more disturbed when the ship starts dying more and more rapidly, then turning on the remaining people inside it. Kang’s story is surprisingly bloody with a pretty high body count. It’s a mish mash of science fiction, horror, and romance, with Hana and Fenn finding themselves drawn to each other during this crisis.

While there is no big twist that I half-expected by the end of the story, Kang infuses a good amount of suspense into her tale and creates a number of world-building touches that I appreciated, including a creative way for the ship itself to communicate. Hana and Fenn are both human and the other members of the research crew are aliens, and I wish more of the story had focused on them, since they’re pretty fascinating. Hana and Fenn are developed well, and Kang gives Fenn a wrenching motivation for volunteering for this suicide mission that will make readers hurt for him. Give this one to teens who love science fiction set in space.

Fireborne by Rosaria Munda

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Are you familiar with the concept of a book hangover? You read a book so good that after you finish, you have trouble getting through any other book, because nothing can compare. Fireborne gave me just such a book hangover. Since I finished reading it, I’ve read a chapter or two of five other books and have found myself putting them down and instead ruminating on Fireborne some more and wondering when the sequel will be out (sometime in 2020, I suppose). It’s the kind of book that reminds me why I love reading so much. It is that good.

In a previous life, before the revolution that toppled the ruling Triarchs and instituted a more equitable society where anyone – not just the nobility – could be chosen by a dragon and rise in society, Annie was a serf. Her family worked the land for a Triarch, one of the three rulers of the land who commanded great fire-breathing dragons. If serf families didn’t have enough of a harvest to tithe, they were punished. After a famine wipes out Annie’s family’s crops, the Triarch makes an example of them: he has his dragon burn them alive and makes six year old Annie watch.

Lee is the son of a ruling Triarch, a man who was murdered in his palace during the revolution, along with the rest of Lee’s siblings. Like Annie, child Lee watched it happen. He was almost murdered too, but the Protector – the leader of the Revolution – discovered what was happening and stopped it at the last moment. He quickly forgot about Lee, who was taken to an orphanage and from then on kept his true identity secret, for fear he would be executed if discovered.

Both children met at the same orphanage and grew close, having experienced similar traumas. Annie is the only one who knows who Lee really is, though neither has ever said it outright. They are now teenagers, chosen by dragons and in training to serve as Guardians, dragonriders who protect their nascent country of Callipolis. On the horizon are a series of battles that will determine who will be Firstrider – leader of the dragon fleet and likely next Protector. But this is not a book about a flying and fighting competition, though that aspect is certainly thrilling. Or rather, it’s not only about that. War is on the horizon – the ousted Triarchs may be dead, but some of their families made it out alive – and that fact will put strain on the baby country, with its high ideals and their imperfect implementation.

This is such a fun book. I’m writing about how fun it is first, because I want to emphasize that part of what makes this book so good is because it is a joy to read. It’s almost unbearably suspenseful at times. It had me racing through the pages, reading faster and faster at certain points so I could know what happened, but not wanting to read ahead because I might miss something equally important in the sections I skipped over. Munda is a top-notch plotter, and I was amazed and impressed by how the story twisted and turned but never felt anything less than authentic and genuinely motivated by her characters and their situations.

Munda’s world-building is fascinating and completely immersive. It’s some of the best fantasy world-building I’ve read in years, the kind that makes you sink into it and absorb it without even trying, without the need to backtrack and take notes and look at family trees and maps on endpapers (though don’t get me wrong, I love those kinds of things). I felt like I was living and breathing Callipolis. And despite the surface similarities to other dragon books, most notably in my experience Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern, Munda’s dragons and her dragonriders feel fresh. They have different magical rules and an interesting culture as backdrop. She introduces the concepts of sparking and spilling over, both of which are completely new to me and help define this living, breathing world. (You’ll have to read the book to learn what they mean!)

And then there’s the deep stuff. Munda writes in her author’s note that she was inspired in large part by Plato’s Republic, which I have not read, but also by the concept in general of what happens after a revolution. Teens in young adult fiction often help to start revolutions, but what happens when the revolution is over? What happens when the revolutionaries have won and they have to turn their efforts to building a new, better government? Shades of the French and Russian revolutions and their subsequent aftermaths tinge her book, though there’s no direct parallel (so you can’t really look to history to guess what’s going to happen next). Munda unpacks all the possible problems that could arise, from the seemingly small (leftover prejudice against lower classes), to the potentially huge (family members of slaughtered rulers wanting revenge), to the most earth-shattering of all (what if the new regime isn’t any better than the old?).

Annie and Lee face really hard choices – and they don’t always make the right ones. Lee in particular is torn between loyalty to his family (and the visceral memory of what was done to them) and loyalty to a new way of life that he now mostly believes in. Annie has her own struggles, including an equally vivid memory of an atrocity committed upon her family. The choices these two teenagers must make in the midst of an impossible situation literally made me gasp out loud at a few points. And each choice leads to another, which leads to another, each more heartrending than the last. You will read this book with your heart in your throat.

All of the pieces of a really great fantasy come together in Fireborne: complex characters, interesting plot, vivid world-building, thorny themes, and elegant writing. And Munda makes it all seem effortless. I got lost in this book; I hope you will too.

I received an advance reader copy from the publisher. Fireborne publishes October 15.

Graphic Novel Roundup

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Little Girls by Nicholas Aflleje and Sarah DeLaine

I mentioned looking forward to this one after picking it up at TLA, but it was kind of a mess. The basic storyline is that there is a monster attacking a town in Ethiopia, killing people and animals. Two girls – one white and new to Ethiopia, one black and born there – decide to investigate it on their own. The synopsis promised some Ethiopian folklore, which manifests here in the monster called Kerit, but it was pretty difficult to decipher. I found it hard to follow the story, even on repeated reads. I’m still not entirely sure what happened, and even less sure about why, and it doesn’t seem intentional. It’s definitely not successful in delivering a traditional story (or really, a twist on a traditional story) to readers who are ignorant of it, but it doesn’t seem seem like it would be that interesting to readers who do know something about the monster already, either. This has the kernel of a good story, but the execution is a miss.

 

Fever Year: The Killer Flu of 1918 by Don Brown

Don Brown does a really good job of distilling complicated historical events into the graphic novel format. He includes first-person accounts, adding that level of detail that really personalizes something that may at first seem remote. He manages to keep the length in check, too, so the books never seem intimidating. I’m always impressed by how much information he packs into the slim volumes. His newest, Fever Year, is no different. While his book comes a year after the huge wave of books about the flu pandemic (including Albert Marrin’s excellent prose account Very, Very, Very Dreadful), it shouldn’t be overlooked – his signature artistic style adds a depth of emotion to the tragedy that is difficult to achieve in another non-graphic format. As usual, his facts are on point and he helps readers see how something like this – an event they may not have even heard about before – reverberates today.

 

Are You Listening? by Tillie Walden

This is Tillie Walden’s third graphic novel, but it’s the first one of hers I’ve read. Set in West Texas, it’s a story grounded in realism that slowly turns more and more fantasy as it goes on – much like a drive through the wide open spaces and mountains of West Texas itself. I have a soft spot for that part of the world, having driven through it alone a few times myself. It’s got a unique kind of beauty that I haven’t seen anywhere else, and it’s the perfect setting for Walden’s novel about two lost souls – a teenage girl running away from something terrible that happened at home, and a slightly older woman running from her own different demons. They fall in together for a while, eventually deciding to head to the (fictional) town of West to bring home a cat they rescued on the side of the road. But strange things start happening: the landscape seems to shift the closer they get, and dangerous people seem to be following them, looking for the cat. Walden’s art is great at showing the disruption of the landscape, which serves as a metaphor for the two young women’s respective traumas and how they’ve disrupted their lives. It’s an artistic and storytelling choice that feels perfect for West Texas. Walden treats her subjects with care. Her characters are prickly (understandably so), hurting, and in need of the friendship each can offer. The dash of magic is a great hook and deepens the story. This is an introspective novel for thoughtful teens. Plus, Walden gets bonus points for one of the two female leads being a car mechanic.

 

 

Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful by Arwen Elys Dayton

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Arwen Elys Dayton’s Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful is one of the most interesting books I’ve read in a while. It’s a cross between a novel and a short story collection, consisting of six interconnected stories, each subsequent story set further in the future than the last. The characters in the stories never meet each other and aren’t related, but they share a common thread: all stories deal with physical manipulation of the body, including organ transplants, robotic implants, and gene editing.

The first story begins in the near future, where a pair of teenage twins are struggling to survive. One is soon to succumb to her illness, and the other is pressured to try a radical new experimental medical procedure that just might save his life. The catch is that it requires using the body of his sister – after she has died – to work. Further in the future, a teenage girl who survived a horrific car accident thanks to robotic implants must endure the bullying of other teens who mistrust this still-new kind of technology, who wonder if she is even human anymore.

As Dayton moves her readers further and further forward in time, the ways humans change themselves – right down to the DNA – become more and more extreme. Factions develop on each side of the debate: those who think these advances are a net good versus those who believe humans have gone too far. Spurring the debate on is a religious man who initially urges his followers to eschew any kind of advanced (to us in 2019, at least) medical or physical transformation, including those that would save someone’s life. He pops up for a time in most stories, often as a throwaway reference, but he serves only as a tenuous connecting thread – the stories belong to the characters, not to this representation of the eternal argument over what makes us human.

I am in love with Dayton’s concept of using a series of interrelated short stories to examine a timeless science fiction topic that feels more immediate (and perhaps less science fiction) than ever. It will thrill science fiction fans new and old, who will be treated to not just one vision of the future, but six of them. Dayton’s imagination is on full display, and it’s clear she’s thought through each of her premises and rooted her ideas deeply in human experiences and human relationships. Her characters propel the stories; this is not just a sketchy concept of the way humans might use advanced technology, but a fully realized exploration of human behavior, feelings, and perceptions when building, using, fighting, and simply existing with such technology. Each character is memorable and each story is unique.

I listened to the audiobook version, which uses six different narrators, one for each of the stories. Christopher Gebauer does a particularly good job in the fourth story, about a teenage boy whose own body modifications were thrust upon him before he was even born – and who was then discarded when they didn’t produce the desired results. It might be the most creative of the stories with the most memorable protagonist, and it doesn’t end in quite the place I thought it would (a good thing).

This is a great entry point for science fiction newbies, as the stories are handily divided into easily digestible bites and start out pretty familiar, only growing exceptionally weird at the end, when the reader has had a chance to warm up a bit. It also provides some good food for thought for more seasoned readers, who should be intrigued by the format and the exploration of how the tech we’re just getting used to today will impact humanity centuries from now.