STACKED

books

A Few Cybils Reads – Part II (2015)

|

Untitled design-5

The Game of Love and Death by Martha Brockenbrough

It’s 1930s America, and Love and Death are playing a game. They each have chosen a player: Love has Henry, a white boy whose parents have died, leaving him in the care of a family who considers him not-quite-a-son; Death has Flora, a black girl who dreams of flying her own airplane across the ocean and sings jazz in a nightclub she partly owns. The rules of the game aren’t quite clear initially, but as readers we do know that these two teenagers will fall in love, and the implication is that their love will be rocky and affect Love and Death – and perhaps the world – in uncertain ways. This is a slow-moving and contemplative story, one that takes a considerable investment of time to appreciate. At first I found it difficult to connect with the story and its characters, which I think is deliberate. The narration is third-person omniscient (mainly), which can often lead to that kind of feel. Some portions are told from the perspective of Love and Death, and they’re both inscrutable entities, though they become a bit clearer as the story goes on. This kind of narration brings inevitable comparisons to The Book Thief, though the two didn’t seem very similar to me. By the time I got over halfway through, though, I felt like I knew the characters on a really deep level – and I felt like I knew Love and Death, too, despite their strangeness. This is a unique sort of book that should appeal to fans of historical fiction and those seeking something different.

A Thousand Pieces of You by Claudia Gray

This is a story about parallel worlds, which is one of my plot kryptonites. Marguerite’s parents are scientists who have been researching the possibility of travel to parallel worlds, and just as it seemed they had finally figured it out, one of their research assistants – Paul – kills Marguerite’s father and steals all of his research, running away to one of these parallel worlds. Marguerite teams up with another research assistant, Theo, and they go after him. Of course, all is not as it seems, and Marguerite begins to suspect that Paul was framed – but by whom, and for what reason? Fleshing out this mystery is a really fun series of adventures. Marguerite and Theo first travel to a world where technology has advanced at a much faster rate, so we get to see what a potential future would be like. Then they find themselves in Russia in a world where neither the Russian Revolution nor the Industrial Revolution happened – though both might be on the cusp of happening, putting Marguerite in exceptional danger. It’s tons of fun to see all of these possibilities play out, like the best combination of a parallel worlds and alternate history story. There’s a love triangle that adds a lot of appeal, and the question of who really killed Marguerite’s father and why propels the story forward. Exciting and well-written.

Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley

Aza Ray Boyle has always been sickly. Since she was a small child, she’s had trouble breathing, and it’s sent her to the hospital many times. She wasn’t expected to live to see her 16th birthday, which is right around the corner. She’s been hearing something calling her name lately, and then something crazy happens with a bird, and Aza dies – maybe. She actually wakes up on a ship in the sky, surrounded by strange bird-people, though her body is being buried on the earth below. It turns out Aza is actually one of these bird-people, kidnapped at a young age, and her mother – a bird person as well – has finally found her and brought her “home.” This is one of the weirder books I’ve read. You’ve really got to buy into the concept of a race of bird-people living up in the sky unbeknownst to all the humans below, plus believe the explanation for how Aza’s body was buried but she isn’t really dead. The narration (I listened to this one on audio) is excellent, infused with all the panic and disbelief that Aza feels when she finds herself in a sky ship. Aza’s voice overall is pretty good, actually, and starts the book off really strong – she’s snarky about her illness and how people treat her because of it, and there’s a lot of dark humor in the early parts. Personally, I never fully connected with the bird-people living in the sky plotline, but I’m sure it’s just the right kind of weird for another reader.

What I’m Reading Now

|

Cybils season is starting up, which means the books I helped pick for the shortlist last year have been on my mind the past couple of weeks. So naturally, I’ve been working my way through the sequels of some of the finalists.

hunted de la penawinner's crime rutkoski

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Hunted by Matt de la Pena

Like its predecessor The Living, The Hunted so far is fast-paced and doesn’t shy away from life-threatening situations. Shy makes it back to the California coast, and it’s completely devastated. He has to survive in the changed landscape as well as avoid the people hunting him thanks to what he discovered at the end of the previous book. Shy’s voice is strong and I expect (hope) I’ll like this one as much as I did the first.

The Winner’s Crime by Marie Rutkoski

I started this one a long time ago and I still haven’t finished it. It’s not because it’s bad; exactly the opposite. It’s so good that it hurts to read it. I haven’t been in the mood for books that give me a lot of feelings, and this series is full of feelings – war, thwarted love, betrayal, and no good choices for anyone. It’s the second book in a trilogy, which means it’s practically guaranteed to end unhappily. I’ve been sticking to a lot of happily-ever-afters in my reading choices lately. Still, I think this long weekend is the time to finish it up. And then sob.

death marked cypess sound duncan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Death Marked by Leah Cypess

This is a duology, not a trilogy, meaning this volume should provide a conclusion to Ileni’s story and hopefully avoid the second-book heartache that often occurs in middle installments. At the beginning of this sequel, Ileni is a captive of the Empire, forced to learn fighting magic with the assistance of lodestones. Of course, she hates it, and she also has to contend with some dangerous fellow students with their own agendas. I’m not far enough into the book to determine if I’ll like it as much as the first, but I’m hoping it will impress me just as much with its clever, intelligent plotting.

Sound by Alexandra Duncan

I only wish I were reading this one. It publishes September 22 and I will be first in line to get it (metaphorically speaking).

Fuzzy Mud by Louis Sachar

|

I received Louis Sachar’s latest middle grade, Fuzzy Mud, in the mail a couple weeks ago and deliberately read it before I looked up any professional reviews. It’s a given I would purchase it for my library, but I wanted to make up my mind as to its quality without other librarians telling me about it first. This is unusual for me since I normally read (or at least skim) a copious amount of reviews for every book I read before I dive in. But I’m glad I went into this one pretty blind. (In case you’d like to know now, it’s gotten positive reviews from all major trade journals, with a starred review from Booklist.)

My verdict: It’s good, but it’s not great. It’s going to be compared to Holes; of course it is. In comparison to that nearly perfect middle grade book, Fuzzy Mud is not quite as deftly plotted, its characters not as rich. It feels a little thin. Taken separately from Holes, it’s still a worthwhile read with a great middle grade voice, but even then, I wouldn’t call it a great book. It is a very good one, though.

Tamaya Dhilwaddi is in the 5th grade, and her mother forces her to walk to and from school with 7th-grader Marshall Walsh. They’re supposed to avoid the woods, but one day Marshall shoots right for it, telling Tamaya angrily that he knows a shortcut. Unbeknownst to her, Marshall is being bullied by Chad, another 7th grader, who has threatened to beat him up on his way home that day. Marshall hopes to avoid the bully, and he doesn’t particularly want to explain it to Tamaya, who rushes to keep up with him.

It turns out there’s a good reason to avoid the woods. Tamaya stumbles across something she can only call “fuzzy mud,” because that’s exactly what it looks like. And Chad finds them anyway. In their rush to escape the bully, Tamaya throws some of the fuzzy mud into Chad’s face. They go home and try to forget the incident – except Tamaya now has a strange rash that won’t go away.

As Tamaya’s rash worsens, the school notices that Chad hasn’t been seen in a while. Tamaya is stricken, knowing that while she just got some of the fuzzy mud on her hands, Chad got it in his face. Marshall won’t tell anyone that Chad is in the woods, but Tamaya knows she has to go see if he’s still there, if he’s still alive. By now, the school is on lockdown, but Tamaya manages to get away. This time, Marshall follows her.

The story is told from Tamaya’s and Marshall’s alternating points of view, though Tamaya’s is a bit more memorable. Interspersed are transcripts from a national hearing about the fuzzy mud, which takes place sometime after the other events of the book and show how catastrophically things escalated. There are also some ominous mathematical equations whose sums demonstrate the same thing in a different way. Both plot devices are well-used and very Louis Sachar.

Just what exactly the fuzzy mud is unravels over the course of this pretty short (under 200 pages) book. It’s a cool and somewhat unsettling concept having to do with clean energy and more broadly environmentalism and scarcity of resources – plus some animals rights issues, possibly, and the science of mutation. These are absolutely concepts kids can get, and placing them in the context of bullying and an adventure in the woods makes them digestible and interesting. The book has a dash of Wayside School since an understanding of exponents is essential to the story. It’s a slightly weird book (and a funny one), perhaps not as weird as Holes, but it has the same sort of flavor. It’s definitely a Sachar book, with writing that speaks well to a middle graders. He just knows how to write for this audience.

Where I felt a little let down was the overall thinness of the story. Middle grade books definitely don’t have to be (and most shouldn’t be) doorstoppers, but 192 pages feels not quite long enough to tell this story adequately. There are a lot of big ideas presented very quickly, particularly in the sections with the hearing/debriefing of the fuzzy mud incident. And because these sections split up the adventure in the woods at several points, Tamaya and Marshall’s story feels a bit scant, too. I felt that the bullying subplot with Chad was a little underdeveloped as well – its resolution felt too pat and a bit touchy-feely, with Chad’s about-face coming easily and quickly.

These weaknesses aside, this is a unique, fun, and interesting book for kids from a writer who excels at writing middle grade. There will be high demand and the concept should make it an easy sell.

Review copy received from the publisher. Fuzzy Mud publishes today.

On (Not) Reading Science Fiction as a Teenage Girl

|

About ten years ago, I was at the local Barnes and Noble, browsing the science fiction and fantasy aisle for a good book (or two or three). I was back in Texas, on break from college where I was studying English, and looking forward to diving into a book that was far from my assigned reading at UNC. Even if I didn’t end up buying anything (rare), simply being there next to all those books that promised so many terrific adventures felt like home.

Usually I browsed alone, sometimes camping out on the floor to read the first few pages of a likely candidate. This time, there was a man browsing the same aisle. He was about my age. He had brown hair and a beard. He made eye contact with me and I saw a surprised, but pleased, look overtake his face. I regretted making the eye contact (the absolute worst for a shy person) and wanted to just ignore him, but he must have felt the need for some sort of comment, because he told me he was surprised to see me browsing that aisle.

I was confused by the comment. We didn’t know each other. This was the aisle I always browsed when I shopped for books. I didn’t make any reply, just smiled thinly and continued shopping. I thought about telling him that I was looking for fantasy novels, which may have cleared up his confusion, but opted to just stay silent.

This is a small moment, but it’s one that’s stuck with me (and I have a notoriously sieve-like memory). I don’t remember when I first learned that science fiction was a boys’ arena, but it was something I had internalized from an early age, reinforced by small incidents like the one with the man at the bookstore who was surprised to see me shopping for SF.

This moment, and so many others, is why Alexandra Duncan’s guest post resonated so strongly for me, and it’s why I wanted to write my own piece for our About the Girls series this year.

We all know that representation matters for readers. In my experience, this is especially true for teenagers. When I was a teen, I craved seeing myself in the books I read. I wanted to see girls on the covers, and I wanted them to be the focus. I wanted to put myself in their shoes and imagine that I was saving worlds, falling in love, and finding my power. I wanted to pilot a space ship and meet aliens. I wanted to get away from a life I often hated and pretend I could do incredible things. Furthermore, as someone who dreamed of being a writer when I grew up, I wanted to see books written by women. I wanted to know that there were other women out there writing the kind of stuff that I wanted to write.

With a few exceptions (Anne McCaffrey, basically), I didn’t find books like this in science fiction.

That’s not to say they weren’t there, as Maureen accurately points out. As an adult, this is easy for me to recognize. But the existence of women in SF – both as creators and as subjects – doesn’t necessarily make these books accessible, especially to teens who have limited resources to do research on their own. When I was a teenager, I found my books by browsing my library’s shelves and my bookstore’s shelves (usually a Barnes and Noble or a Half Price Books). I’ve always been interested in stories that are out of this world, that are heavy on the fantastic and the impossible. In both my library and the bookstores, these kinds of stories were found in the combined Science Fiction and Fantasy section. The science fiction authors I found there were overwhelmingly male: Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card, Piers Anthony, Ben Bova, Frank Herbert. Their covers and their stories featured men and the synopses on the back had little relevance to my life. When women were on the covers, they were often not wearing much or kneeling at the foot of a man or dead. I found the women in the fantasy novels: Juliet Marillier, J. V. Jones, Anne Bishop, Elizabeth Haydon, Sara Douglass. I began to recognize a science fiction novel by its cover, which usually had a black background and blocky lettering. Those I would quickly bypass in search of something more likely to include someone like myself.

Getting past the easy reach is, well, not easy. For most people, myself included at that age, it’s not even something that would cross their minds. What is on the shelf is what exists. If it’s not there? It functionally does not exist for the reader looking for it. Thus I came to believe that science fiction was not for me. Science fiction was for boys, and they knew it, too. Of course, books by and about men are also for women, and I read a lot of them, but when I realized over and over again that I would never see myself in these books, that the girls and women who were in these books were always portrayed via the male gaze, I mostly gave up on them. I would tell people I preferred fantasy over science fiction. It became my primary love and the genre in which almost all of my own fictional scribblings at this time belonged.

What I came to realize much later is that I preferred fantasy to the science fiction I could find, not necessarily the science fiction that existed. While I don’t absolutely love The Hunger Games, I am so glad for its stratospheric popularity, for much the same reason Duncan mentions. It, and its legions of dystopian and post-apocalyptic readalikes, made science fiction by and about women much more visible to people like teen me, who only saw what the booksellers and the librarians chose to buy. YA science fiction helped bring me to the genre I had always wanted to love, if only it would love me back.

Since reading The Hunger Games, I’ve become much more cognizant of what SF is actually out there, how certain books are marketed, and the inherent biases in people’s reading choices. That’s due to my professional life as a librarian, which has led to an effort on my part to get beyond the easy reach – for the benefit of myself as well as my patrons. It’s easier for me to find both hard and soft SF about girls when I want it because I have the tools to do so. But if my professional life hadn’t given me those tools? It would be a lot harder. I wouldn’t have known that so many great books even existed.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had as a teen with a black girl around my age who was volunteering at the library alongside me. We were talking books and reading and I mentioned that I loved historical fiction. She told me she didn’t really care for it, and I was so surprised. I loved historical fiction so much I just figured its appeal was universal. I told my mom later on that my friend said she didn’t like historical fiction, and my mom’s reply was that it might be due to the fact that there’s not much historical fiction about black girls. I was dumbstruck, having never thought about that before. I have no idea if this is the real reason she didn’t care for it. I’ve since learned that quite a lot of people don’t like historical fiction simply because they think it’s boring (sacrilege!). But I wouldn’t be surprised if it were.

Visibility matters. You can talk about books by women writers and writers of color and LGBTQ writers until you’re blue in the face, but if none of their books make it to library or bookstore shelves, most people – especially teens – aren’t going to read them. The mega success of books like The Hunger Games, their ubiquity, tells girls they belong in science fiction – reading it, writing it, imagining it.

So let’s continue to remind people that women have always been a part of science fiction – all kinds of it. But let’s also remember how privileged it is to know this history and be aware of these books when they’re not on endcaps at bookstores. And let’s continue to work to fix that.

A Couple of Quick Reviews

|

Stray by Elissa Sussman
Elissa Sussman’s debut novel reworks the Cinderella story in a pretty unique way. Rather than focus on the orphan girl or her stepsisters, Stray focuses on the fairy godmother. In Sussman’s world, young ladies are to keep to The Path – a strict set of rules for behavior – and if they don’t, they’re exiled. All girls have some level of magic within them, but The Path mandates that they exercise tremendous control over it and basically never use it. Aislynn, unfortunately, can’t keep her magic contained, and at the ball where she hopes to meet a prince and fall in love, she loses control. She’s sent a school to learn how to be a Fairy Godmother to some other princess, a school where The Path is enforced even more strictly. It’s Aislynn’s last chance. If she fails at this task, she’ll be exiled – she’ll be a stray.

I really liked the premise of the book, and thought the main idea behind The Path – that girls must always restrain what makes them unique, what makes them magical – was an interesting one that rings true even in our own non-magical world. Magic is a fantastic metaphor for so many things: girls’ voices or bodies or talents or smarts or humor or anything else that might make men uncomfortable, and therefore must be locked away. I also liked the twist on the fairy godmother, which was quite creative and not something I’d seen before.

There were also some pretty major problems: sketchy world-building (I never quite understood how the magic system worked), a lot of loose ends that just seem dropped rather than deliberately unresolved, and rough, unpolished writing. Stray has some great ideas, but I don’t think anyone would be surprised it’s a debut. Still, the faults don’t completely outweigh the good stuff; this is a worthwhile read. Recommended for readers looking for feminist fantasy or fairy tale re-tellings.

Review copy provided by a friend.

Starlight’s Edge by Susan Waggoner
I am such a sucker for alien books, so I was immediately drawn to Susan Waggoner’s first novel in this series, Neptune’s Tears. Though it had a terrific concept, the book as a whole was pretty mediocre. And yet, there I found myself several months later, reading the sequel, eager to find out what happened next to the characters. That’s the problem (can you call it a problem?) with books with great ideas – even when they’re executed poorly, the ideas are still great.

This is a big spoiler for those of you who haven’t read the first book – it turns out the “aliens” that landed on Earth in the 23rd century were not aliens at all. They’re humans from 1,500 years in the future, sent back to rescue Earth’s literature and art before it’s mostly destroyed in a series of imminent meteor strikes. I was a bit bummed that there weren’t any aliens, but I didn’t care that much because instead I had time travel, and that’s nearly as awesome. In this sequel, Zee travels to David’s home time, leaving everything behind that she’s ever known.

There are a fair number of time travel books around in the YA world, but not many that take it as far as 1500+ years in the future. The opportunities for futuristic technology are really exciting to think about, and Waggoner does provide some cool stuff. Reading about Zee’s acclimation to this unfamiliar time is intriguing. There are other time travelers from the past and they form a sort of support group, giving the reader a window into lots of different time periods, not just Zee’s and David’s. The story takes a turn in the later part of the book, where David travels back in time to Pompeii – another idea that I loved.

The problem with this book, and with its predecessor, is that not much is fleshed out. The books are very short and there’s a lot of plot. They feel more like an outline than a novel. I never got a great feel for the characters and what made them tick. There are interesting details in both time periods, but neither feels fully-formed and alive. There’s just too much shoved into not enough pages. Still, I enjoyed the read, and it wasn’t a bad way to spend a couple of hours. Readers who can’t get enough of time travel may find this worth their time.

Book borrowed from my library.