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Truth or Dare by Jacqueline Green

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Caitlin, Tenley, and Sydney are three girls living in the ritzy town of Echo Bay. In past years, teenage girls have drowned in the bay during a popular summer festival, which has just made a comeback after additional safety measures were put in place. A few days before the festival, popular girl Tenley, who has just moved back to town, throws a party and initiates a game of truth or dare. It used to be Tenley’s trademark, back in middle school before she moved away, and she’s eager to re-assert herself as the queen of the town.

Her best friend Caitlin, who serves as the second of three main characters, plays too. Our third main character, loner Sydney, wasn’t at this party, but she gets pulled in to the events that happen afterward.

After the party ends, all three girls start receiving messages: instructions to do increasingly nastier things or risk having the mysterious “darer” reveal all their deepest secrets. At first the girls are skeptical, thinking it’s a friend pulling a joke, but when some of the dares go ignored and people get hurt, they realize this person is not joking around. Tenley and Caitlin, as friends, work together to try and figure out what’s going on, as well as protect each other. For a while, they think it’s Sydney, but we as readers are privy to each of their perspectives, so we know Tenley and Caitlin are on the wrong track.

Truth or Dare is full of secrets, some related to the dares and some not. It’s a thick book, but it’s quick, too, since each page reveals some new twist and presents us with some new suspect. It kept me guessing, and even if I wouldn’t want to befriend any of these girls, I was interested in their plight.

I kind of loved this book. It’s not my usual fare, though I do enjoy mysteries, and this is undoubtedly one. I just normally don’t like reading about the archetypal “popular girls” and their dirty little secrets, and really, that’s what Truth or Dare is about. And yet…I really dug it. I think it’s because the author doesn’t make judgments about her three main characters. She presents them as they are, without leading us to say to ourselves “Wow, she is a horrible person” (particularly with Tenley, who is trying to assert herself as the main popular girl at the school). The story is told in third person past tense, with the perspective shifting from girl to girl, and we get a good feel of what it’s like to be in their heads. None of the girls are a cut and dry case of a “bad girl” or “good girl” and even the social outcast, Sydney, is not presented as the natural protagonist, which I assumed would happen.

I’ve read that this would appeal to readers of Pretty Little Liars, which seems apt, but as I have never read those books, I can’t make that call. It may have some appeal factors in common with Cinders and Sapphires, despite the latter’s historical setting – they’re both quite soapy, with shocking secrets (some easy to spot, some not) revealed every few pages.

I didn’t guess the culprit, though in hindsight, I could pick out the clues Green dropped. I loved that it wasn’t obvious but also that it didn’t come out of nowhere. I was a little disappointed in the very end, since I think it invalidates a lot of what happened before. It was clearly a way to set up a sequel, but it felt forced and inauthentic. Still, this was a completely fun book, and I’m glad I read it.

Review copy received from the publisher. Truth or Dare will be published May 14.

The Cydonian Pyramid by Pete Hautman

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Sometimes, when I read a book and love it, but it hasn’t yet been released in finished form for the general public to purchase and read, I worry. I worry that my love is misplaced, that where I see creative world-building and beautiful language and a unique story, others will see a lack of originality, purple prose, and a meandering plot. And then, of course, I’ll lose all of my book-reviewing credibility. “Oh, her? She thought The Worst Book Ever was a great book. You can’t trust her opinion.”
Which is why, when I opened the most recent issue of Kirkus and saw a starred review for The Cydonian Pyramid, I was joyous. There was a little bit of celebrating. At least one other person thought it was excellent! I am not alone! My opinions are validated! This series hasn’t made a huge splash, but I hope the Kirkus review, and my own here, will convince a few more (established or budding) science fiction fans to give it a whirl. It is truly special.
The Cydonian Pyramid actually covers the same time period that The Obsidian Blade does, but it does so from Lah Lia’s point of view. Since this story involves time travel, I know that statement may be a little confusing. Basically, this sequel tells the same story from Lah Lia’s perspective instead of Tucker’s. I have an inherent mistrust for these kinds of stories (Wisdom’s Kiss is a good example of how they can fail). Since Tucker and Lah Lia are separate for much of the story, though, it works really well here. Lah Lia’s perspective (which is still third person past tense, I should add) doesn’t just fill in some details; it adds completely new events we didn’t get in The Obsidian Blade. 
More importantly, though, it makes a lot of what happened in the first book understandable. The Obsidian Blade is a confusing book. Tucker is thrown into a grand adventure full of some really weird stuff, and for the most part he has no idea what the heck is going on. That’s part of the joy of reading the story. The Cydonian Pyramid clarifies those events, puts them in context, helps explain just what is going on and why. We learn about the origins of the Medicants and the Klaatu and the Lah Sept. We learn more about the diskos and how different cultures at different times use them. We learn just how Tucker’s story is connected to Lah Lia’s, and why they need each other. What may have seemed random in the first book is revealed to be very purposeful in the second.
Part of the reason this excites me so much is because it makes clear that the author had a plan all along. We may not have known how everything was connected initially, but he did, and he makes it apparent here. There are so many great “ah ha!” moments. Making those connections as a reader is thrilling.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that Lah Lia is a great character. She is mostly an enigma in the first book, something otherworldly and not quite understandable. The Cydonian Pyramid fleshes her out, gives her motivations and fears and hopes. She starts out fairly passive and has to learn how to take a more active role in her fate. Watching her transformation is fascinating.
We do get a little bit of Tucker’s perspective, but he serves mainly as a framing device. He ends up on a ship in the Arctic during the Cold War, being interrogated by the Americans on it. His short chapters are sprinkled between Lah Lia’s longer ones. This gives Hautman a chance to recap some of the events of the first book as well as provide a way for Tucker and Lah Lia to eventually reconnect at the end, setting up the third installment.
Hautman’s ideas are so crazy and interesting and just plain cool. I want more books that are as imaginative as this. I want more planned craziness, more books that dare to be wildly different. I want riskier speculative fiction for teens, SF that gets the heart rate up and makes you think at the same time. I want to read more books that make me say “How on Earth did the author think of that?” Luckily for me (and anyone else who finds these books), this is a trilogy. I can’t wait for the third book.
Review copy provided by the publisher. The Cydonian Pyramid will be published May 14.

Zenn Scarlett by Christian Schoon

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Zenn Scarlett was such a nice surprise. If it hadn’t been pitched to me, I doubt I would have even noticed it. It’s a futuristic science fiction story (not a dystopia!) about a teenage exo-veterinarian in training named – you guessed it – Zenn Scarlett. She lives in a cloister on Mars, treating a few injured Earth animals, but mostly focusing on the care of alien animals from places all over the known universe. She studies under her exovet uncle; her mother was an exovet who died in an accident many years ago, and her father has been offworld for a while on some potentially shady business.
The exovet cloister sits uneasily among a town of human colonists from Earth. For the most part, these people have nothing to do with the cloister. They’re farmers who work the terraformed land, and the relationship between the town and the cloister is an uneasy one. Mars doesn’t have much contact with Earth anymore, due to some tricky political events, and land on Mars is at a premium. It gets used up quickly, and there are many Mars residents who say the land the cloister occupies should be relinquished to the people, to be used for something “useful” rather than the care of dangerous animals.
It’s in this political climate that Zenn finds herself. Most of the people on Mars don’t regard her, her uncle, or the animals they care for positively. To make matters worse, there have been a series of animal escapes, and since many of the animals can indeed be very dangerous, such escapes make the cloister look bad. Zenn must discover how the animals are escaping (and worry if it’s her own neglect or sabotage), plus contend with the town council, a lot of anti-alien hostility, her tests, and a strange ability she’s recently acquired that enables her to almost commune with the animals she cares for.
Zenn Scarlett has some pretty common debut author problems, mostly with the dialogue. Schoon uses the dialogue for a lot of infodumps. It’s interesting information for sure (I loved learning about how Zenn cares for the animals), but it’s not always presented in the best way. He also tends to overuse the non-word “alright,” which is something I hope will be fixed before final publication.
The plot is good, although the mystery of who is sabotaging the cloister and why isn’t much of one. There aren’t really many viable suspects, and the clues dropped are a bit too obvious. That doesn’t stop the book from being fascinating. World-building is where it shines. The politics of the colony on Mars, how the cloister interacts with the town and its council, how people grow crops and make the planet liveable all seemed believable to me.
The animals are the real highlight, though. I’ll be the first to admit that I am not an animal person (I make exceptions for most dogs). But the animals that Zenn works with at the cloister are so creative and fascinating. How the sentient beings (human and alien) live with, use, and treat the animals is equally fascinating. There’s the whalehound, an animal so huge, humans actually go inside of it via a pod to treat its internal injuries. There’s the sandhog, which burrows underneath farmland and secretes chemicals that make the soil fertile. And there’s the sunkiller, a huge animal which uses a combination of gases in its wings to float and hosts cities of sentient aliens in gondolas underneath it and in buildings on top of it. Schoon also weaves a deep sense of respect throughout the novel for all of his living creatures – those that harm people and those that don’t.
The aliens are interesting, too. My favorite is the eight foot tall insectoid alien named Hamish, who is on a sort of exchange program from his home planet, assisting at the cloister. The snippets we get of his culture are quite interesting, as are his interactions with Zenn. He is very polite, always asking for permission before doing anything and taking it in stride when the non-cloister Martian residents poke or spit at him. Making him such a prominent character seems like a huge risk, because who wants to read about a giant sentient cockroach outside of a horror novel? Apparently, I do.
I’m a review-reader. Reading others’ reviews of a book helps me to collect my own thoughts, allowing me to see where I agree and disagree with people. I was a little amazed to see that many Goodreads reviewers felt this book was unoriginal, and their complaints mainly had to do with the animals. Some readers felt the animals were too mammalian, too Earth-like, not different enough from what we see on our own planet. This critique was strange for me to read, because I felt the animals were quite imaginative. They were the main reason I liked the book so much. No two people read the same book.
The end of the book sets up a sequel that delves more into Zenn’s mother’s death and what her father has been doing offworld. It involves Zenn’s ability to commune with the animals she works with, and it promises to be fascinating. I’m really curious to see where Schoon goes with the next book, particularly since it appears to take us off Mars, perhaps onto completely new planets (with new and interesting aliens and animals).
Zenn Scarlett is a Strange Chemistry release. We’ve talked a little bit about Strange Chemistry (an imprint of Angry Robot) before, and judging by how much I liked this book, I’ll be wanting to check out their other releases. It makes me really excited to discover a new press or imprint that publishes creative, edited material. Though it’s not as polished, I would compare this to Pete Hautman’s Klaatu Diskos trilogy – they’re both SF with some very imaginative and just plain different world-building.
Review copy provided by the publisher. Zenn Scarlett will available April 30.

Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy Knisley

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I think I have a thing for graphic novels about food because as I read Lucy Knisley’s Relish, I couldn’t help but remember how much I loved reading Sara Varon’s delightful Bake Sale (which Kimberly and I joint reviewed — with taste testing — here). But where Varon’s book is a fictional tale with a strong narrative arc, Knisley’s is a memoir of foodie told through vignettes.

Lucy was born to two parents who appreciated the finest of foods. They established a fine palate for Lucy at a young age, and throughout Relish, we’re reminded not only of this familial influence, but we’re forced to think about the role that food has for us on a very personal and on a very social level. When Lucy’s parents divorce, and her mother takes her from their apartment in New York City to a home in upstate New York — Rhinebeck, specifically — it impacts Lucy not only because of the shift in her life, but it changes the way she thinks about and eats food.

It’s a little bit challenging to explain what this book is really about, since it’s a series of short moments within Lucy’s life that illustrate a greater point: food is important. And where this is a story of a die hard foodie who grew up around the finest, the freshest, and the best sorts of food possible, it’s not at all the sort of book which reads with an upturned nose at the reader. In fact, this is the sort of book anyone who has an appreciation of food and the art of eating and enjoying it.

After learning about how Lucy’s upbringing in upstate New York and about how much she learned about the way food is grown and produced, it would be easy for this to be the sort of book that judges the types of foods we eat. But, Lucy chooses instead to offer us up a vignette about how much she loves fast food, despite the feelings her parents have toward it. Rather than judge it or judge people who eat it, Lucy instead notes that the reason people eat fast food is because it tastes good and there is nothing wrong with that. It’s this vignette, in fact, that made me laugh out loud and made me realize how down to earth this graphic novel is, as well as how accessible it is to not only adult readers, but teen readers, too.

My favorite vignette, though, takes place in Mexico, when Lucy is twelve years old. Her mother and her mother’s best friend decided to take a trip there, bringing Lucy and her mother’s friend’s son, Drew, along with them. Lucy’s mom and mom’s friend became quite ill early on in the trip, and as a result, the kids were left to their own devices to explore the small interior arts community they were vacationing in. Both kids were given cash, and that cash was then used by them to buy all kinds of sweets at the local market. It wasn’t long, though, before Drew discovered how much easier it was to purchase pornographic magazines in Mexico than in the states, and as a result, his petty cash was being spent accumulating plenty of dirty magazines. In the midst of this, Lucy gets her first period, and now she has to figure out how to purchase feminine products in Mexico without speaking the language. This entire series was laugh out loud funny, and at the same time, it was an incredibly authentic and sweet exploration of the tricky things that come with emerging adolescence. More, the way that this foreign experience of growing up tangled with the experience of trying foreign foods in a foreign place just worked well without ever coming off as trying too hard.

Interspersed with the stories are actual recipes. There’s one for sushi, one for huevos rancheros, one for sangria, pasta carbonara, and many more. But rather than lay out the recipes in a manner that’s step-by-step, what Knisley chooses to do instead is illustrate the ingredients and then give a very loose set of instructions for assembly. As someone who cooks regularly, I loved this approach not only because that’s precisely how I cook, but I think it tied into the greater message of the book which is that food is an experience, that it’s individual, and it’s something that you mold to make your own. The image below is from the publisher’s website, and it’s her recipe for the perfect chocolate chip cookie (which I have to take some issue with since it includes coconut, but you get the idea of how the recipes look from this one):

Relish is a sensory experience. Aside from the food itself, the way that Knisley describes and illustrates the book grabs every aspect of the reader’s senses. There’s a scene in the book where Lucy is riding her bike in Chicago, and she passes the Blommer Chocolate Company. I could smell the semi-sweet chocolate through the pages. When Lucy describes the way that her grandmother made the perfect mushrooms — a food that I have always found repulsive (despite how much I really want to try them) — I could not only smell them, but I could taste them. I could hear the way they whistled on the pan, too. In addition to the sensory experience and the recipes are the small insights on food straight from someone who has clearly dedicated much of her life to learning about it on a very intimate level. There’s an entire section, for example, on different types of cheeses that I absolutely loved. It’s not presented in a pretentious way, either: Knisley offers it up with plenty of humor, making it accessible even for people who simply like to eat cheese.

One of the pages from “Europe/Croissants.”

There’s a real love and passion for food of all types pouring from the pages of this book. I was invested in this from the first page, and even long after closing the book, I’m thinking about it. This is much more than simply a memoir of Lucy’s life in food. It’s a story about the way food impacts us on every level and how much we forget to step back and think about and appreciate the role it plays to us in both a social and personal level. Food nourishes us for a reason, and it’s not simply because of nutrients. It connects us to other people, to other cultures, and to ourselves. Food and life are about experimentation, about being imperfect, about savoring, about exploring and returning to things that are comforting when it’s most needed. Over on Knisley’s blog, you can read a perfect example of how these ideas intertwine in the vignette titled “The Craver.” And after reading that, if you aren’t craving spinach with garlic and olive oil, I’m sorry!

The art in Relish never outshines the prose, as the prose never drowns out the illustrations. In fact, I think that they work together in a way that the tangling story lines of adolescence and food do: they work together to give a whole and complete story. Without one, there wouldn’t be the other. I loved the full-color illustrations. This is the kind of graphic novel that will appeal to those who regularly read the format, but I think, too, it’s the kind of graphic novel that’s extremely accessible for those who may be reluctant to give the format a try. Hand this book off to readers who are diehard food lovers, as well as those who love graphic novel memoirs. It’s got easy appeal to both teenagers who will get everything Lucy is going through, and it has mega appeal to adults who can reflect upon the foods and meals that, too, remind them of both the significant and less significant moments of their lives. This reminded me a bit of a cross between Julia Wertz in terms of humor and Sara Varon in terms of style (and Varon, too, has a bit of that humor to her writing, too, even when her characters aren’t human). Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, blurbs this book, and I think that readers who have read and appreciated Bechdel will find plenty to like in this book, too.


Relish is a real winner. Just don’t read it on an empty stomach.

Relish is available from :01/First Second. Review copy received from the publisher. If you want to sample the book, make sure you check out the galleries over on Knisley’s website. 

When We Wake by Karen Healey

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It’s 2027, and Tegan Oglietti is a happy, relatively angst-free teenager. She’s just made her crush her boyfriend, and she and her group of friends spend their time doing parkour, playing guitar, and protesting the various ills of the world: environmental degradation, social injustice, and more. Her world is a little different from our own in 2013, but not so much to be unbelievable. 
Then, on the way to a protest, Tegan dies. But it’s not the end of her life. She wakes up 100 years in the future, having agreed to donate her body to science and therefore unwittingly also agreed to be a part of the government’s experimental cryonics program. She’s the first to be successfully frozen and revived, and she’s told that this procedure will be used to help other people living in the year 2127.
Anyone who has read a futuristic story like this will know that Tegan is being lied to. There’s clearly something else going on with the cryonics experiment. Tegan herself is kept on a very short leash, given just enough freedom to keep her from outright rebellion. As Tegan makes her way in this new world, learning how its changed for the better and how its changed for the worse, making a few friends along the way, she starts to unravel the truth.
Tegan is a terrific character. She’s a budding activist in her “home” time, but a bit unsure about it. She wants so desperately to make things better, and when she wakes up in the future to discover that yes, some things are better, but some are much, much worse, it’s a little heartbreaking. One of the most moving moments for me was when Tegan finally breaks down and shouts at those around her who have helped make this world the way it is, telling them to “Be better!” Her disappointment is palpable and devastating.
When We Wake is, in some ways, a bit of a throwback for a dystopia, and I mean that in a good way. It seems most of the dystopias churned out recently envision future worlds full of the most lurid, shocking, and frankly ridiculous social systems the author could think up. Healey brings us back to Earth – her future is very different from our present, but it’s also believable. For example, there’s less racial prejudice but a good deal more environmental crisis. She extrapolates a set of realistic issues for her future society to deal with from the same issues that we tackle today. More importantly, though, When We Wake brings back some actual commentary – social, political, environmental. She shows that the actions we – as humans – are taking now matter, that they impact the future, our children and grandchildren and beyond. What we do now makes a difference – both good and bad. Healey doesn’t hit you over the head with it, but it’s there, and thank goodness.
The writing is excellent, which is what I’ve come to expect from a Karen Healey book. Tegan has a great voice, and the first person perspective is completely warranted: by the end of the book, it’s clear she’s telling her story to a specific audience for a specific reason. It is, perhaps, not as emotionally resonant as The Shattering, but not much is. It packs a punch nonetheless.
Next week, we’ll be sharing a Twitterview with Healey, who gives us a little more insight into Tegan and her future world(s). We’ll also be giving away a finished copy of the book, courtesy of Little, Brown, and this is a giveaway you’ll want to enter.
Review copy provided by the publisher. When We Wake is available now.