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Tankborn by Karen Sandler

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Kayla and Mishalla are GENs, genetically engineered non-humans. Unlike other people who were born to mothers naturally, Kayla and Mishalla were gestated in a tank. Not even considered human by the trueborns (upper-class natural-borns) and lowborns (lower-class natural-borns), GENs are created for a specific Assignment, which they take at age 15 and from then on are treated as slaves. All GENs are marked with a tattoo on the side of their face upon creation, which serves a dual purpose of making them recognizable to non-GENs as well as being used as a sort of electrical conduit to upload information to their brains.
Kayla and Mishalla are close friends and almost sisters. They were raised together and turned 15 at around the same time, with Mishalla leaving to take her Assignment a little before Kayla. Mishalla serves as a caretaker for trueborn children in a sort of nursery and Kayla serves as the attendant to Zul Manel, the bed-ridden patriarch of a very wealthy and influential trueborn family.
The book alternates between their perspectives, but most attention is given to Kayla. Kayla has been told her entire life that she is worthless, good only for the one thing she has been Assigned, so much of the book is necessarily Kayla’s path to realizing her own self-worth. She’s an interesting character who experiences a lot of growth, and her story (involving the secrets kept by the trueborn family she serves and by extension secrets kept by her world at large) is fascinating. Mishalla is a bit flatter, but I liked her story as well – the children she cares for are disappearing in the middle of the night, spirited away by her trueborn keeper and never seen again. About halfway through the book, Kayla’s and Mishalla’s stories intertwine.
I loved so much about Tankborn. Sandler has created a unique society (set on an entirely new planet called Loka) ruled by a strict caste system: trueborns at the top, lowborns at the bottom, and GENs beneath even them. What’s more, the trueborns themselves are divided into castes. The ideal skin color is what most would consider medium-brown. The farther away from this color a person’s skin deviates (darker AND lighter), the lower they are on the totem pole. (Kayla’s skin is light brown and Mishalla’s is pale white, so even if they were trueborn, they would both be low trueborns.) It’s a unique take on the caste systems in our own past and present worlds, and Sandler makes it believable.
I loved the plot of Tankborn. That’s a fairly simplistic statement to make, but it’s a true one. As a seasoned SF reader, I thought I knew where Sandler was heading with the story, but she surprised me multiple times. The biggest twist was something I never saw coming, but it wasn’t a cheat since I could look back and see the groundwork Sandler had laid for it the entire book. There are a couple of love interests for our two lead females, but they’re among the weaker aspects, although they are sweet.
Tankborn is a science fiction story for readers who like science fiction. What I mean by that is Tankborn most likely won’t hold the interest of casual science fiction readers. Sandler’s world-building is complex, involving a string of new vocabulary, complicated social structures, a completely new religion, and a giant backstory that unfolds over the course of the book. It’s necessary for the reader to understand all of this world-building to comprehend the story, and it’s too easy for casual SF readers to give up when they stumble across yet another unfamiliar element. Readers who enjoy SF naturally, though, will relish this aspect.
I think the length of my review is a good indication of how complicated this story can be, but that makes it wonderful for readers who want to get lost in another world. There are so few YA books out there that are wholly, unabashedly science fiction. Most YA SF books I come across are set in our world with a twist, and while I enjoy those, they’re not my original love.
I hope to see this one on the Cybils finalist list. Tankborn is one of the first books published by Lee and Low’s new Tu Books imprint, which aims to publish YA SFF with diverse protagonists. But make no mistake, it’s not only a great science fiction story with a person of color in the lead role, it’s a great science fiction story period.

Sidenote: I initially believed Kayla’s skin was a fairly dark brown, since that’s how she is portrayed on the cover of the book, but a helpful Amazon reader pointed out that she is, in fact, much lighter-skinned. In the first few pages, her skin is described as “pale mud” and lighter than the “medium brown” of a trueborn she encounters. I was snookered by the cover and didn’t read carefully enough. I think it’s interesting that the cover made her darker, since it’s usually the other way around.

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

Without Tess by Marcella Pixley

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At conferences, I always like to ask the publicists what their favorite book of the upcoming season is. I always feel like I get a peak at something I may not have otherwise gotten just wandering the floor. This year at ALA, Without Tess by Marcella Pixley was the title recommended highly at the Macmillan booth and touted as an in-house favorite.

The story opens with Liz talking about feeling guilt for the death of her sister Tess. We’re in the present but we’re taken to the past near immediately, to a time when both girls were younger. The girls, who were three years apart in age, were close. Liz idolized her bigger sister, who was a believer in all things magic. She believed in werewolves and selkies and magic passionately — all her games revolved around these ideas. It was these beliefs that ultimately caused Tess’s death, and it’s Liz who feels responsible for it.

While Without Tess sounds like a fairly cut-and-dry story of grief and loss, it’s a lot more complex as it delves into a few big issues that a number of other books looking at these issues don’t. There’s an interesting play of religion here, as Liz and Tess are Jewish. They practice, and their beliefs are challenged repeatedly by their neighbors and friends Niccolo and Isabelle. They are practicing Catholics, and Pixley smartly juxtaposes the ideas of formal religion with the fantastical beliefs held by Tess.

It’s those fantastical beliefs that offers readers another layer to the story, and that’s mental wellness. The second half of the book opens the doors to this storyline, as Liz expounds upon her sister’s diminishing stability. Her sister talked of turning into a water princess with earnestness, and she goes as far as to attack Liz when she believes she has werewolf abilities. Although it sounds somewhat funny, in the context of the story it’s quite scary. As readers, we’re on to the fact something isn’t quite right with Liz, but we aren’t able to put our finger on it exactly. I’ve read a number of books broaching the issue of mental health this year, but I didn’t quite find the storyline here compelling enough to be believable, especially since Liz focuses so little on it. She’s too self-absorbed, honestly, and eager to make sure she’s the center of attention when it comes to the downfall of her sister. But it’s worth noting — Pixley offers an interesting question to readers about whether Tess’s beliefs are child’s play, since she’s only 12, or whether they really are signs of deeper mental issues.

I didn’t care for Liz as a narrator in this story, and I don’t know if I bought the greater premise of the story because of her. She’s depressed, even years later, by the loss of her sister, and over the course of time she has to heal from this wound, she’s made it become a part of who she is. She wears dark clothes and acts as though she carries the weight of the world on her; she makes herself out to be a stereotype, and while I could picture this to be true, I thought it worked more as a way to make herself feel self-important. Liz is obsessed with the idea of her sister and more so with the idea that she was responsible for her sister’s death. She strings together these flashbacks during counseling sessions, and in doing so, there is a lot of build up to finding out what exactly happened to Tess (there’s no surprise Tess is dead, since that’s known upfront). The problem is that these build ups ultimately lead to a disappointing conclusion, furthering the fact that Liz is more interested in telling a story about herself than about her sister. For me, this didn’t settle well, as I hoped for something greater and something that would give me a reason to sympathize more with Liz. I couldn’t even say I’d necessarily sympathized with Tess, except for the fact no one helped her when she needed it — though perhaps they did. Again, getting the story from Liz’s perspective means only getting part of the story.

One of the other elements of this story worth mentioning is the poetry. One of the things Tess left behind in her death was her Pegasus Journal. It was where she drew her fantastical pictures and wrote poems that talked about other worlds and this world, to good readers. Liz actually stole it from her sister’s coffin at her funeral (need I mention her selfishness again?) and used it for class assignments. It’s this little plot point that brings the book full circle, though I’m not sure how necessary it is. It feels like a thin string to hold the story together, given the time passage between Tess’s death and the revelations Liz makes in therapy. But more than that, I found the poetry didn’t quite work well to further the story. Many of the poems preceded chapters that explained them further, and I felt like the chapters would have been enough. Although it was meant to give Tess a voice in the story, I felt it did more to take away from her voice. This is a technique that was used more effectively in Jandy Nelson’s The Sky is Everywhere, which was also a story of sister grief.

Although I found a lot of this book to be kind of a let down, one of the things that made me keep reading with interest was how interesting a mirror this book was for one of my favorite books this year, Nova Ren Suma’s Imaginary Girls. This book features an interesting sister relationship, much of it based in the supernatural, and I thought that what Liz and Tess went through was quite reminiscent of Chloe and Ruby’s story. Where Ruby had a magical vibe to her throughout Suma’s book, build through the observations and idolization of Chloe, Tess earns her magical vibe through Liz’s determination to react against the diagnosis of instability others gave Tess. The parallels didn’t end there, either: water plays a huge role in this book, much as it does in Suma’s. I think these two books could be read as a conversation with one another, and despite the fact they don’t have a relationship to one another, reading Pixley’s book gave more insight into what may have been going on in Suma’s, and vice versa.

Without Tess was worth the time, but I think in the end, this book might be forgettable. It’s not that it’s bad — it’s not — but there are other books that feature a lot of these elements and do it just a little more strongly. The writing itself is fine, but it’s not sparkling; it felt like the poetry was meant to aid in giving it a stronger literary quality, though I didn’t buy the poetry nor think it was that strong (and thinking about it now, it seemed like pretty mature poetry for a 12-year-old to write). That said, I think this book could work for a younger teen readership, as it’s fairly clean, and it is less creepy and eerie than Suma’s book. It also offers more answers than questions, which is something many readers prefer in a story. I’d classify this as a contemporary read, and it’s one that those who like to think about issues of mental health, belief, grief and loss, or even family relationships.

Book received from the publisher. Without Tess will be published October 11.

Ashes by Ilsa Bick

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Alex’s life is kind of terrible. Her parents are dead and she has an inoperable brain tumor she calls the Monster. She’s run away from her aunt’s house, where she’s been living, to spend some time hiking and camping in the wilderness. She plans to eventually make it up to Lake Superior where she’ll sprinkle her parents’ ashes. Then a massive electromagnetic pulse hits, knocking out almost all electricity, killing most people, and turning everyone else – except a few – into zombies. Alex is one of the few who survives without turning zombie, as is Ellie, a bratty eight year old girl who was hiking under duress with her (now dead) grandfather.
The first section of the book is an extended action sequence wherein Alex must use all of her wits to survive in the newly zombified world. She’s stuck in the wilderness with no car, no electricity, plenty of zombies, and an annoying and unhelpful little girl in tow, but she does pretty well for herself (something I really appreciated – Alex is incredibly smart and capable). When she meets up with Tom, a young military man, they have an even better chance of survival. This first section, which takes up a little more than half the book, is full of action and page-turning suspense. I’m normally not one for a story that is almost non-stop action, but Bick writes it very well.
Then things go downhill very fast (as if the zombie apocalypse weren’t bad enough already), and Alex finds herself taking sanctuary in the city of Rule – without her two companions. There are some seriously creepy things going on in Rule that aren’t apparent at first. These creepy things involve the council of five men that rule Rule, why the young girls who are taken in by Rule are called the “Chosen,” and what the city of Rule’s relationship really is with the zombies they keep at bay.
I’ve seen a lot of negative feedback toward this second part, but I actually liked it just as much as the first. The dynamics between the different inhabitants of Rule are fascinating, and watching Alex assess the situation and attempt to make conclusions about what she experiences is equally fascinating. Plus, I love reading about sinister societies whose secrets are slowly revealed over time.
It’s got a lot of elements in common with the Chaos Walking series: the end of the world/human civilization, a frenetically paced first section, the protagonist’s affinity with a dog/dogs, and a creepy post-apocalyptic society masquerading as a good society that has some serious problems with women. It’s not terrible that Ashes has so much in common with those books, but because of my deep and unending love for them, Ashes inevitably pales in comparison – and comparisons are unavoidable here.
Still, that makes it a good readalike for people who enjoyed Chaos Walking. It’s also a bit more straightforwardly-told, so readers who disliked Todd’s somewhat disjointed narration needn’t worry about that in Ashes. In a subgenre so full of mediocre offerings, Ashes is a very good one. It’s even written in – gasp – third person past tense! No wonder I liked it so much.
Review copy received from the publisher. Ashes is available now.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

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Wade Watts is eighteen years old, socially awkward, a little overweight, and a whole lot geeky. Like most of humanity, he spends his time logged into the OASIS, a massive virtual world that has practically replaced reality. And why shouldn’t it? It’s the year 2044, and the Earth has gone to seed. After the deaths of his parents, Wade (alliteratively named by his father for the superhero connotations) is forced to live with his aunt, who only uses him for the additional food vouchers he can buy her, and her rotating string of boyfriends. They reside in the stacks, trailer park lots where stacks of mobile homes and RVs are piled onto each another in mountains of rickety steel in order to maximize space in prime locations near cities. Food is scarce and an energy crisis is threatening. No wonder everyone escapes to the OASIS, a land where individuals become avatars and can transform into anyone and anything they could possibly imagine being. A land composed of thousands of planets utilizing details from any number of fictional fantasy and science-fiction universes: “The Firefly universe was anchored in a sector adjacent to the Star Wars galaxy, with a detailed re-creation of the Star Trek universe in the sector adjacent to that. Users could now teleport back and forth between their favorite fictional worlds. Middle Earth. Vulcan. Pern. Arrakis. Magrathea. Disc-world, Mid-World, Riverworld, Ringworld. Worlds upon worlds” (p. 49).

But the OASIS isn’t just a place to play, battle, find magic items, and attend school (yes, Wade is a senior in the OASIS public school system). It’s also the location for the greatest contest ever imagined, the search for James Halliday’s Easter Egg. When Halliday, the creator of the OASIS, died, he set into motion a massive treasure hunt for three keys and three gates. The first avatar to successfully locate these items will win an unimaginable fortune and ultimate control over the OASIS. This contest, composed of riddles based upon Halliday’s obsession with 80’s pop culture and the history of videogames, comes to consume the life of these egg hunters, who eventually come to be known as “gunters.” The 80’s are back, and exhaustive knowledge of that decade will pay off big for someone.

When Parzival (the name of Wade’s avatar), discovers the location of the first key, he shoots to the top of the virtual scoreboard, instantly becoming an instant celebrity and the object of media attention, death threats, and adulation. He must carefully navigate the web of clues he is faced with, evade the attention of Innovative Online Industries, a corrupt corporation looking to purchase and take control of the OASIS, and figure out how to manage his virtual relationships with the other gunters in contention for the top prize: his best friend Aech, the brotherly team of Daito and Shoto, and Art3mis, the female avatar he is slowly falling in love with. All this while keeping his gaming and pop-culture skills honed to perfection.

Ready Player One was a rollicking, fast-paced, absolutely engrossing read. I was born in 1982, so I probably fall at the early end of this book’s target audience. Regardless, I picked up on most of the pop culture references in the novel and was fascinated by the reverence with which Parzival, Halliday, and by extension the author, feel for this decade. Mastering videogames, movie references, and song lyrics is a way of life for the people of Ready Player One, and, in fact, this way of life mirrors the way many obsessive fans feel for the objects of their obsessions nowadays. Who hasn’t encountered someone who has scoured every screencap of Lost for hidden clues? Or who watches and rewatches the entire series of Doctor Who, new and old? Or who spends hours updating a spreadsheet of weapons and their capabilities for their favorite video game? We know them all, and they are brought to vivid and extreme life in Ready Player One. However, here, this is their entire world. Glory and fortune depend upon this knowledge, and the stakes are high.

Although the dystopian aspects aren’t dwelled upon in Ready Player One, the novel is clearly rooted in a society gone wrong. Wade’s home environment is proof enough of that, along with the unemployment rate that has multiplied over the years. If she wins, Art3mis want to use the prize money to feed the world, while Parzival just wants to pack up, buy a spaceship and flee Earth forever. But these horrific aspects aren’t pounded into the reader’s head. They’re just background noise for the OASIS, the great escape, where humans transform into avatars, able to escape their bleak lives. And that’s the creepy part. All of this is way too familiar. The unemployment, the overcrowding of cities, the energy crisis. The alienation and the obsession with technology to the neglect of everything else. The world of the OASIS seems so foreign to us on the surface. Who could imagine spending every waking moment inside a virtual world? But then we remember that this is possible. This could happen, and is closer and more real than many of the post-apocalyptic novels that haunt us.

The pace of this book was absolutely perfect, and it rarely dragged. Even when Parzival was in the middle of a quest, Cline made sure not to dwell on each and every action his avatar took, something that could have made the key scenes laborious. Many people might find joy in reading about every sword thrust or feint, but I am not one of them. The action moved, and things happened. One quibble I did have with this book (after having this pointed out to me by a friend), was how long it took for the first key to be found. In this world of crowd-sourced knowledge and with the amount of obsession over Halliday’s interests, it seems a bit of a stretch that solving the first riddle would take years. I’ve participated in the MIT Mystery Hunt and know how quickly an obscure puzzle can be solved when there are ten heads crowded over the laptop. However, this complaint of mine could be explained by the highly secretive nature of the contest. When a prize that big is on the line, who wants to share knowledge? Also, some of the major scenes, along with the ending, seemed to be wrapped up a bit too neatly. I almost expected more twists and turns at some points.

However, as a whole, Ready Player One was fantastic. Fun, informative, geeky, and utterly compelling, appealing to young adults as well as adults, its intended audience. The effort and passion author Ernest Cline put into his debut novel shows on every page. I fully expect to see this show up on YALSA’s Alex Awards list this coming year.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

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Writing a review about a book I really loved is hard for me sometimes. I want to express, very clearly and precisely, just what made me love it so, and I want to convince the person reading the review that (s)he will love it too. I don’t want to appear as if I’m sucking up, but I also don’t want to be too restrained – how will the reader know how amazing the book is if I hold back?

And then there’s the problem of disagreements. If someone who read my review rushes out, gets the book, reads it, and doesn’t enjoy it, I’m a little bit crushed. Maybe that person will think my taste in fiction is too silly or juvenile or “girly,” or that what I see as beautiful writing is just overwriting. When I review a book I dislike and a person tells me that they, in fact, liked it a lot, I’m good with that. Different books for different readers. But it doesn’t work as well the other way around for me.

Anyway, all of that is to say that I loved Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone – loved it so much I knew when I read it in June it would be my favorite book of the year – and I hope you will too. But if you don’t, you can tell me, and I’ll try not to feel like you’re judging me.

I went into the book not knowing much about it at all, having chosen to read it based on my enjoyment of Taylor’s previous book Lips Touch: Three Times. The blurb on the ARC is not particularly descriptive. I’m glad it wasn’t – if I had known more about the plot, I may have chosen not to read it. I still believe the best way to go into the book is in ignorance, but if you want to know more, read on.

Folks, this is a paranormal romance. I’m going to be straight up about that. (Sidenote: The last paranormal romance I enjoyed I probably read as an actual teen.) But it’s a paranormal romance that deliberately eschews the traditions of the genre that is still so popular. It can’t be called a knock-off of anything else you’ve read, and trying to describe it as “a cross between Super Popular Book and Even More Popular Book” (as so many marketing teams do) doesn’t work. It doesn’t coast on the success of its forebears – it succeeds due to the quality of its writing, the careful development of its characters, and the richness of its setting.

In modern Prague, we are introduced to seventeen year old Karou. Karou has blue hair, studies art, and tries to get over her jerky ex-boyfriend (there’s a particularly funny line about this that made me laugh out loud in public). She has a good friend named Zuzana, also studying art at the same school, and seems to be doing well. But she has a secret – she’s an orphan raised from birth by four creatures called chimaera – strange-looking animal/human hybrids. The father figure among these creatures, Brimstone, sends Karou on errands to collect teeth (human and animal) for reasons he won’t reveal. Despite its oddness and subtle creepiness, Karou is mostly content with the situation, and she loves her strange little family.

While out on a teeth-collecting errand, Karou runs into Akiva, a beautiful angelic-looking creature who sees the tattoos on her hands – tattoos she’s had since birth – and promptly tries to kill her. (Later, Akiva will be Karou’s love interest. It works, I promise.) After making a narrow escape, Karou learns about a centuries-old war, still ongoing, between the demonic-looking chimaera and the universally beautiful angels. She becomes caught up in this war and learns more about her past and her part in the war than she could have dreamed.

There are so many ways Daughter of Smoke and Bone could have stumbled. The angel love interest is impossibly beautiful and initially tries to kill Karou – both elements that would have made me stamp a big imaginary “NO THANKS” on the book if I had learned about it from an outside source instead of by reading the book itself. Taylor could have taken the book down its predictable path, but her plotting decisions are always surprising. She could have stuck with the commonly-accepted angel/demon lore and only added a minor twist or two, as so many authors do, but she’s thrown it all out the window and created something entirely unique.

Once I started reading, there was no way I could stop. I cannot emphasize this fact enough: Taylor’s writing sucks you in. When people talk about a book being “captivating,” this is what they mean. In most books I read, the writing is merely serviceable. It’s sufficient to communicate the story and usually makes me care at least a little about the characters. Taylor’s writing makes that kind of writing look just plain bad. It’s beautiful, lush, detailed and descriptive, but never once brings the reader out of the story. All words are carefully chosen and transport the reader’s mind to this other place Taylor has created – whether that place is Prague, New York City, or the other-world where the angels and chimaera live. 

I hope I’ve done the book justice here, although I’m not sure that’s possible. Lovers of fantasy absolutely need to put this one at the top of their to-read pile. Casual readers of fantasy need to do so as well. And if you normally avoid fantasy but are a sucker for anything with really great writing, you should pick this one up too.
Review copy received from the publisher. Daughter of Smoke and Bone hits shelves September 27 (tomorrow!).