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Cybils Wrap-Up: Stats and the Ones That Got Away

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I read 91 books this year as a panelist for Round 1 YA speculative fiction. Out of those 91, I finished 68 and left 23 unfinished. Of those 68 I finished, 21 were books I had read prior to the start of Cybils season. This means I read 47 books in their entirety (and about 25-50 pages of an additional 23 books) in about three months, which works out to a whole book every two days. That’s quite a lot of reading!

I love our shortlist for YA speculative fiction this year, and I think it’s nearly as perfect as it can get. That said, there were some great reads that I loved but didn’t make the cut. I wish we could have put 15 books on the shortlist! Alas, I will comfort myself by blogging about them and telling you why they are fantastic. I hope you’ll give them a shot and recommend them to the teens in your life.

The Islands at the End of the World by Austin Aslan
I loved this story of survival in a worldwide power blackout featuring a teenage girl with epilepsy set on the islands of Hawaii. Leilani is half Native Hawaiian, half white, about to begin a medical study for an epilepsy treatment when the blackout hits. She and her father must try to make it back to the Big Island from Oahu and reunite with the rest of their family amidst the chaos and danger. The first portion of the novel is pure survival, with a few hints at the source of the global catastrophe. Later on, it becomes clear what’s causing the blackout, and it’s completely unique and very much science fiction. The writing during this portion is particularly lovely and I read it several times over because I loved it so much. There’s also a great portrayal of a positive father/daughter relationship that I don’t see much of in YA fiction.

Not only is this a fast-paced survival story with a really fresh SF twist, it also features a protagonist of color with deep ties to the environment of Hawaii and her Native Hawaiian culture. Being half-white, half-Native, Leilani often feels caught between two worlds, never belonging completely in either. This crisis allows her to explore that tension and eventually determine that she does have a home and a purpose in Hawaii as she’s always wanted. It’s obvious Aslan has a great love for Hawaii as a place and for its people and their culture (he is not Native but lived there for some time). There’s a solid end to this with room for a sequel, which I very much look forward to reading.

Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge
Intense romance, an often-cruel heroine, a unique re-telling of a beloved fairy tale, and lovely writing all combine to make this debut a complete winner. It’s lush and creative and I loved every minute of it. I wrote about it more in February of last year.

Dissonance by Erica O’Rourke
This is a world-building lover’s dream with lots of details about parallel/alternate worlds and how Walkers like protagonist Del travel between them. It’s also partly a thriller featuring a conspiracy and plenty of flawed characters with secret motivations. It’s not a particularly fast read, but it’s creative and deep. More here.

The Kiss of Deception by Mary E. Pearson
Well, you all know this is a book of my heart. It’s terrific high fantasy with a spirited heroine who is determined to claim a life of her own. You can read more about my love for it here.

Divided We Fall by Trent Reedy
This is not normally a book I’d pick up my own, but I’m glad I did for the Cybils. It tells of a near future that seems so plausible it’s scary (a showdown between the federal government and a state government over a federal ID law that blooms into full-scale civil war). National guardsman Travis is caught in the middle after his gun discharges at a protest. Travis has a great voice; I feel like he exists in so many of today’s small-town, semi-rural high schools, and voices like his aren’t heard enough in YA fiction. The audio production is one of the best I’ve ever listened to. More here.

A Few Cybils Reads – Part IX (Time Travel Edition)

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Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future by A. S. King
A. S. King’s books are in a class by themselves, both in terms of genre and writing. Set solidly in our own world, they also use fantastical elements in such clever, creative, and meaningful ways. I’m always amazed by the level of craft in each of her novels. Her latest is no different.

Glory and her friend-by-default Ellie find a dead bat, which eventually disintegrates to something resembling ash. They decide to mix the remains with beer and then drink it (as you do). The next day, whenever they meet another person’s eyes, they see glimpses of that person’s past, present, and future – including ancestors and descendants. Glory’s visions show her a terrible near future, one where women are
denied the right to work and the United States splits into two, spawning
a second Civil War. The people participating in these acts, both the
atrocious and the heroic, are often the descendants of the people she
knows, and possibly of herself as well.

A more traditional novel would have focused most of its attention on the mystery of the future, and there’s certainly some of that going on. But it focuses an equal amount of attention on how the future informs Glory’s present – her mother’s suicide, her pseudo-friendship with Ellie, her relationship with her father, her plans for her own future. How do you live your life knowing that these things you see will come to pass? It’s also a staunchly feminist novel, the extremism of the future tempered by the everyday sexism Glory experiences. Teens will easily see how one leads to the other. Because this is a King novel, I’ve only scratched the surface of its depth. There’s a lot going on, and it all fits together to tell the complicated, messy story of Glory’s teenage life. This might be my favorite of King’s books. It has a few killer ending lines that legitimately gave me chills and rank right up there with the last lines of The Book Thief.

The Here and Now by Ann Brashares
This is the most traditional time travel story in this grouping. Prenna comes from a future not far off, one where a disease transmitted by mosquitoes has killed off millions of people. Though they haven’t cured the illness, apparently they have figured out time travel, because Prenna, her mother, and a few others travel back to our own time in order to stop the plague from happening in the first place (it’s tied to climate change).

Here’s where the internal logic of the story loses me, because Prenna and the other time-colonists have a lot of rules to follow, and one of the rules is not to interfere with history. Which is kind of the whole point of them being there – to interfere and create a better future. So um, what is their point, after all? And none of the other characters seem to notice or care about this discrepancy. There’s a somewhat engaging romance with a “time native,” and some nifty plotting with a potential paradox and a couple of other surprise time travelers, but this was a mess overall. There are scads of better time travel novels out there, both better written and better-conceived. Recommended for only the most ardent time travel fans.

Subway Love by Nora Raleigh Baskin
I read this a couple weeks ago and already my memory of it is weak. The book focuses on two different characters – Laura in the 70s and Jonas in the present day. They each have problems within their homes. Laura’s mother has gone full hippie, plus she’s married a man just a few years older than Laura. He hits Laura and Laura’s mom doesn’t do anything about it. Jonas is dealing with his parents’ recent divorce. The two teenagers meet each other on the subway, which is the only place where their two time periods overlap. They fall in love.

Baskin’s writing style has always seemed more middle grade than YA to me. The content of this one is more mature, though, making it hard to recommend for a specific age group. It’s a slim novel, easily absorbed in an afternoon, but its impact is equally fleeting. There’s some interesting stuff about graffiti artists on the subway, which will definitely appeal to kids into street art. Ultimately, the book is a rumination on how some relationships can change us, even if those relationships do not – and cannot – last. I wonder if I would have appreciated it more as a short story.

A Few Cybils Reads – Part VIII

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Starbreak by Phoebe North

This is the sequel to North’s debut, Starglass, and picks up right where the first book left off. Terra and a few other humans flee the chaos of the ship and make it to the planet below, which they know by now is already inhabited. Much to Terra’s surprise, they run into Aleksandra, the captain’s murderous daughter, who leads the rebels. They’re all eventually captured by the aliens that live on the planet, and Terra finally gets a chance to meet the alien boy she’s been literally dreaming about for months – it turns out he’s the translator between humans and aliens. The culture clash between the humans and the aliens is as fractious as you’d expect. It’s unclear whether the aliens will allow the humans to live on the planet – or if they’ll exile them to space once more.

I’ve long wanted more alien books where the aliens are less humanoid and more…something else. Starbreak fulfills this desire and tells a fascinating story to boot. While the first book was relegated entirely to the ship of humans, the sequel takes us onto an alien planet peopled with two different species of sentient creatures. They’re somewhat humanoid in that they speak through their mouths and walk on two legs, but they’re plant-based rather than animal-based. The idea of sentient plants is so cool to me, and I loved seeing how North built upon it. For example, one species of alien is carnivorous, like a Venus fly trap, whereas the other subsists on sun and water alone. The two species of aliens also have a unique relationship with each other, unlike anything on Earth (at least among humans). Of course, this story is also about human Terra, and it is in this book that she truly finds her voice and comes into her own. It’s a love story as well, a sweet one and a weird one.

All books about humans meeting aliens can be read as a metaphor for different human cultures first interacting with each other, and Starbreak is no different. It would take a shallow reader not to note the parallels, but this is not a message-driven book that wants you to Learn a Lesson. It’s a character-driven story imbued with human truth and a lot of creativity, solidly science fiction but always relatable. It would be a great readalike for fans of Beth Revis’ Shades of Earth (the best book in that trilogy, in my opinion) or perhaps Cecil Castellucci’s Tin Star, another book where a human finds herself alone among aliens.

Promise of Shadows by Justina Ireland

Zephyr is a harpy, and she’s been banished to Tartarus (sort of like Hell) for exacting revenge against the god who killed her sister. The thing is, she shouldn’t have been able to kill a god in the first place. This ability indicates that Zephyr may be the long-lost Nyx, able to use dark magic and protect the harpies and other half-god beings from gods like Hera who mean to wipe them out. First Zephyr has to escape Tartarus, which she does with the help of a long-lost (and hot) childhood friend. Then she has to accept this destiny, not an easy thing to do for someone who is a coward (a refreshing character trait. Being brave is hard and doesn’t come easy for most of us).

Ireland’s writing is smooth and easy to read – and I mean that in a good way. I read this book coming off a string of duds and it was so refreshing to finally read something well-written and competently structured. It’s not hugely different in premise or plot from the scads of other mythology-inspired paranormal reads out there, but it’s done quite well and features a black protagonist, helping to diversify a genre that is too often lily white. Zephyr feels like her own person, not an everygirl – she’s not very brave, tends to run from fights, and is pretty bad at school. This makes for a satisfying character arc when she finally does learn how to be the Nyx (because you knew she would, right?). Ireland takes traditional Greek mythology and builds on it, weaving many different elements together into an interesting whole. The story is action-packed with a side of romance (rather than vice versa). Ancillary characters are well-drawn as well. It’s just a good book in every way. I can see it having lots of appeal for readers who can’t get enough of Greek mythology; it would be a natural next read for fans of Percy Jackson who are ready for something a little older.

Talker 25 by Joshua McCune
Melissa lives in a country much changed from the one we know. Dragons have terrorized the people for years, but humans have finally achieved a tenuous peace – they’ve hunted the most violent dragons to their deaths or exile, and have put the rest on reservations. When Melissa and her friends go to one of these reservations as a prank, it sets off a chain of events that will utterly change her life. For starters, she learns she can talk to dragons with her mind. Then a terrible dragon attack destroys Melissa’s town, and she’s rescued by dragon sympathizers, usually called terrorists by everyone else. This encompasses the first part of the book, where Melissa realizes that a lot of what she’s been told about the dragons is wrong. The second part involves Melissa being captured by the government and exploited for her telepathic abilities. She’s forced to trick dragons to their deaths, and sometimes she’s forced to kill them herself.

I wasn’t crazy about this one. I’ve always been a bit tepid toward dragons. I loved Pern, but nothing dragon-related since then has really grabbed me. The premise of Talker 25 – that some humans can communicate with dragons telepathically – is interesting, but the execution was pretty jumbled. I never got a clear idea of what exactly the dragons had done to start such a war, which meant I had no context for the humans’ fight against them. It seems like McCune just assumed that we’d know humans and dragons had been locked in a deadly fight for years, but I never figured out why. There’s some stuff about a reality show thrown in that feels odd and out of place, too. I read the whole thing feeling a little lost. The first part of the book I mostly felt mystified; the second part, where Melissa is in captivity, I mostly felt ill. It’s quite violent, with several scenes of dragon torture, some committed by Melissa herself under duress. There’s one scene in particular where McCune details just how many strokes it takes to decapitate one of Melissa’s old dragon friends (hint: it’s a lot). It felt too drawn out and a little lurid. Recommended for readers who can’t get enough of dragons – and can stomach a lot.

All books borrowed from my library.

A Few Cybils Reads – Part VI

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Dissonance by Erica O’Rourke
Del is a Walker, which means she was born with the ability to travel to parallel worlds, each one formed when a person made a choice. The choice they made belongs to the Key world – the main world. All other possible choices spiral off into infinite echo worlds. When these echoes become unstable, it’s the job of the Walkers to cleave them. Unsurprisingly, the regimented world of the Walkers isn’t as it seems, and Del becomes caught up in a conspiracy that could have ramifications throughout the entire multiverse.

Longtime readers of this blog may know I have a particular fascination with alternate/parallel worlds. Dissonance is a special treat for readers like me, since it focuses so much of the story on the specifics of the parallel worlds – how they’re created, how they relate to the Key world, how Walkers can travel to them, how they can be destroyed. It’s fascinating. Each chapter opens with an excerpt from what looks like a Walker-in-training textbook, and I wish I could read that textbook in its entirety. What’s more, it all makes sense. If parallel worlds exist, they probably look like the ones from O’Rourke’s imagination.

Sometimes in books where world-building is so comprehensive and so detailed, plot and characterization suffer, but that’s not the case here. The plot is smart, complex, and hinges both on this huge concept as well as the unique characters O’Rourke has created – rule-breaker Del, her strict sister Addy, and their senile-but-maybe-not grandfather Monty. Good speculative fiction is still character-driven, no matter how high the concept, and Dissonance fulfills this requirement. While it wouldn’t interest readers who need something fast-paced to stay engaged, I have no doubt it will more than satisfy those who can’t stop thinking about what it would be like to visit an alternate world themselves.

The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg
This is such an odd little book, one that doesn’t feel much like YA. It’s short and reads more like a novella, with sketchy world-building, a small cast of (rather thin) characters, and a single, focused storyline. Ceony Twill has just graduated at age 19 from the Tagis Praff school for the magically inclined. She wanted to be a Smelter, a magician who works with metal, but she’s been forced into an apprenticeship as a Folder – a paper magician – under magician Emery Thane. One she’s bonded to paper, she can’t work magic with any other material. Ceony is heartbroken, but it’s a career as a Folder or a career without any magic at all. She decides to make the best of a bad situation.

This one drew me in initially with its oddness. I enjoyed reading about the tricks paper magicians could do, such as making stories written on paper come to life for a time by reading them aloud, or animating folded shapes by commanding them to breathe. Thane is suitably strange, obviously hiding some secrets. It lost me about a third of the way through, when Thane is attacked by his ex-wife, who rips his heart out of his chest. Ceony replaces his heart with a paper version, which will sustain him for a time. All this intrigued me; it’s when Ceony sets off to find his real heart and somehow gets caught inside it that made me scratch my head. From that point on, the book is a journey through the different parts of Thane’s heart (metaphor!) and life. We see flashbacks to his time as a child, marrying his wife, becoming estranged from his wife. We see his hopes, his dreams, his doubts, his fears. I’ve never been one for flashbacks and dream sequences, much less prolonged ones that encompass almost an entire novel. Characters should be built from their actions, not their dreams. Give this one to readers who delight in the odd and don’t share my aversion to flashbacks.

A Girl Called Fearless by Catherine Linka
Avie lives in an America where almost all women who consumed a deadly hormone in beef have died of cancer. Only the very old and the very young lived. It is now ten years later, and America has to come to terms with its decimated female population. The Paternalists have taken power, restricting women’s and girls’ freedoms in order to “protect” them. They can’t go to college, and they’re married off at a young age (such as sixteen) to much older men, told they must dedicate themselves to having a lot of children. Avie’s father has always promised she could go to college – even if it has to be in Canada – but in order to save his struggling business, he sells her to a rising Paternalist star. This man is 35 years old and it quickly becomes clear that Avie will be his prisoner. She decides to run.

This is another dystopia by way of The Handmaid’s Tale, albeit a well done one (though with much less nuance). It’s fast-paced and focuses mainly on Avie’s escape and its aftermath, plus a few scenes clearly meant to horrify (such as when Avie’s intended “sticks his tongue down her throat,” always a phrase guaranteed to elicit shudders). The plot crumbles a bit at the end, with the less-than-surprising revelation/twist that the Paternalists aren’t actually trying to protect women and girls, but rather disenfranchise them. (Most readers will be shocked that the characters are shocked; preventing women from going to college and marrying them off to 35 year old men at age 16 was never about protection in the past.) This would be a good pick for readers who aren’t yet burned out on this particular sub-sub-genre (dystopias where women are subjugated) or who perhaps haven’t read much of it before. Readers who enjoyed Kristen Simmons’ Article 5 would probably enjoy this one as well, as the two seem almost identical in execution.

Dissonance and A Girl Called Fearless borrowed from my library; Paper Magician provided by the publisher.

Guest Review: The Silence of Six by E. C. Myers

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Frequent guest contributor Matthew Jackson – freelance writer, film & book critic, and professional nerd (plus Kimberly’s cohabitator) – is back with a review of E. C. Myers’ latest book, The Silence of Six. In 2012, Jackson reviewed Myers’ Norton-winning Fair Coin for us. He has also written frequently here at Stacked on the subject of horror.

One minute, 17-year-old Max Stein is sitting in his high school auditorium, watching a live presidential debate. The next, he’s watching – along with everyone else in the room – as his friend Evan hacks into the debate’s live video feed and shoots himself after uttering a very cryptic question: “What is the silence of six, and what are you going to do about it?”

That this is how the new novel from E.C. Myers – the Andre Norton Award-winning author of Fair Coin, which I loved – opens is compelling enough. That it happens within the first 15 pages of the novel is something I found outright gripping. Myers rockets the story from establishing scenario to brutal catalyst almost immediately, trusting his readers to take his hand and follow him on what will be a bullet-train of a techno thriller. Handled clumsily, this kind of set up might make the reader skittish. In Myers’ hands, though, it sends a message: All will be revealed if you just hang on for the ride.

Because Evan made contact with him shortly before his death, Max is suddenly at the center of a government manhunt, and a conspiracy that he can’t possibly begin to comprehend. Reeling from his friend’s drastic act, and desperate for answers, he must dive back into his own previously abandoned hacker identity, and navigate a complex online world of aliases, back doors, secrets and lies, before it’s too late to find out what Evan really gave his life for.

I remember all-too-well the emotionally harrowing feeling that everything when you’re a teenager, even the most mundane thing, is a high-stakes moment, so I’m a sucker for stories that take that all-or-nothing rollercoaster of adolescence and morph it into an adventure where the stakes actually are high. In the world of The Silence of Six, the secrets teenagers harbor really are worth dying and killing for. The government really is out to get you. Every keystroke really can be watched over by someone else. This is a world of whispers and codes and masks, both physical and virtual, a world where you sometimes have to lie and steal to survive another day, a world where the truth could mean permanent silence. It’s got all the trappings of a government conspiracy blockbuster, but instead of a renegade cop or a paranoid reporter, a handful of resourceful teenage hackers are in the driver’s seat, and that makes it all the more engaging.

One of the things I found most impressive about Fair Coin was Myers’ ability to simultaneously deliver the goods we’ve come to expect from a story of that kind, and subvert those expectations. He does it again with The Silence of Six. It’s a techno-conspiracy-cyber-thriller, with everything that implies. It’s a search for the truth, a story about making it to the center of this knot of secrets no matter what, and to that end it’s a breathlessly entertaining page-turner that darts artfully forward from page one and never lets up. But that doesn’t mean Myers won’t to stop play with some of the conventions he’s working in. His hero is not an action star or an always technically precise supergenius. He’s a gifted, scared kid determined to find whatever right he can in a world that’s just gone wrong for him in countless ways. What looks like it could be a romantic subplot evolves into something else entirely, as Max forms a connection with another hacker that’s built more on personal stakes and, perhaps, a mutual sense of mischief than something romantic. The hacking done by the characters isn’t a few quick keystrokes of brilliance, but rather a series of clever, yet often imperfect, ploys to get to the next clue. The hacking in this story is both messy and satisfyingly geeky, giving it a realism that nerdier readers will happily get lost in. Perhaps most importantly for a thriller, though, the solution to this puzzle is both satisfying and surprising. Even if you actually do think you see the end of this book from a mile away, how Myers and his characters arrive at it, and what happens when they do, still manages to defy a few of the rules set forth by so many stories of this kind.

With The Silence of Six, Myers has again proven his gifts as a storyteller who both celebrates the tropes of genre fiction and wants to pick them apart and stitch them back together into a new creature. It’s a lightning-fast thriller with other, darker themes lurking beneath, and even if you think you’ve read books like this before, it will find a way to surprise you.

Review copy received from the publisher. The Silence of Six is available today.