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A Couple of Good, But Not Great, Dystopias

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If you’ve been following me at STACKED for any amount of time, you know how much I love dystopias. Even the ones that I know will be terrible, I gobble up. Even when they’re written in first person present tense and don’t appear to offer anything new, I will read them.
The two books I talk about briefly here are a far cry from terrible. I went into them thinking I would enjoy them a great deal, and I did, but they fell short of my (admittedly lofty) expectations. I’ll probably read the sequels, but they didn’t blow me away like I wanted them to. Sometimes when a book is within a genre I love, it’s more disappointing that it’s not spectacular than when it’s in a genre I don’t love, if that makes sense. Kelly has actually reviewed both of these books before, and I encourage you to hop on over and read her reviews if you haven’t already.

Bumped by Megan McCafferty
There are so many funny things about Bumped. I think people who outright dislike it take it much too seriously. In a way, I don’t blame them. Most dystopias are so grim they can make the reader depressed, and they’re generally short on laughs. So when that’s what you expect going in to a book, it can be hard to shake it. Luckily, Kelly told me beforehand it was a dystopian satire, although I like to think I would have figured it out on my own soon enough. It’s refreshing to be able to poke fun at a genre you enjoy while still appreciating the aspects that make that genre so alluring in the first place.
My main problem with Bumped was the ending. It suffers from series-itis: there’s no real resolution and it leaves the reader wanting more (and not in a good way). A lot of good dystopias leave big, important questions unanswered at the end of the first book, but they’re good because they still have some sort of climax, falling action, and resolution, however wimpy the resolution may be. With Bumped, I felt like McCafferty just took a pair of scissors and lopped off the book at a random section. It wasn’t satisfying, and I was disappointed after it brought me so many chuckles.
Blood Red Road by Moira Young
Blood Red Road has two primary strengths: voice and setting. It’s narrated by illiterate protagonist Saba, and therefore uses no quotation marks and only a smattering of other punctuation marks. (She does use periods. If she did not, I would have put it down after the first page. Or probably before that.) It’s heavy on dialect and slang. Saba’s very imperfect narration provides good insight into Saba’s very imperfect character. She’s tough but frequently heartless. This was actually what I enjoyed most about Saba. Saba’s younger sister is the main ancillary character, and Saba is pretty upfront with the reader about how she resents her and doesn’t love her like she does her twin brother. It seems harsh, but it also shoots to pieces all those comparisons with Katniss (and those comparisons are legion).
The other strength is the setting. Saba lives in the Dustlands, and the more you read about it, the more parched you feel. It’s a place full of sand and blood and sand and trash heaps and more sand. This is a pretty terrible place to live in, and there’s no magical place where it doesn’t suck.
So, we’ve got great voice and great setting. Where were my expectations not met? The action. Blood Red Road is fast-paced and intense, but it was pretty predictable. I knew Saba would be captured, I knew how her fights would go in the cage matches, I knew how she would…well, to say any more would be spoiling it, but if you’ve read any dystopias (or any action novels, really), it wouldn’t be much of a spoiler. It became kind of a game to see how many of my predictions came true (all of them). I need my books to surprise me, and this one didn’t do it much.

Going Underground by Susan Vaught

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Three years ago, Del made a mistake that changed the entire course of his teen years. Actually, it’ll change the entire course of his life, as he knows that even after he turns 18, what he did will haunt him. It’ll keep him from going to college and it’ll cement the job he has now as a grave digger as his career. It’s the only job he can get.

He’s only 17 now, but everything from here on out looks bleak.

Susan Vaught’s Going Underground starts with what seems like the most dire of stories, one that prepares readers for a journey into a dark world, and twists it completely. Del, who sounds like the kind of guy you’d want to lack sympathy for (because he’s a criminal), is one of the most likable characters I’ve read.

At the onset of the story, we meet Del when he’s 17 and making a living digging graves. He’s a loner, and his best friend is a gray parrot named Fred. And while the cards are stacked against him, and while he’s put to bed everything that happened when he was 14, these realities begin to catch up to him when he meets Livia, a girl new to town. She’s been spending time in the cemetery where he works, and Del can’t help but be drawn to her. Yet he knows deep down that making any advances, even so much as reaching out to talk to her, could come back to haunt him. But he takes the chance, and when he does, we’re tossed back into the fateful events that changed his life.

Though this book tackles the heavy issue of sexting, Vaught handles it masterfully by offering us Del. We’re given this sweet and often romantic male character (who, despite being such, has an authentic and believable male voice). As readers, we feel awful for whatever happened to him because it’s obvious he feels bad about it. He wants a future, and I think that’s sort of what spins him into such a likable character. Too often, miscreants don’t desire a lot for themselves; they make trouble so they can feel a part of life. Del, though, has so much he wants to accomplish and it was one mistake that turned his bright future into little more than a ditch.

What I think worked well in the unraveling of the crime is that it’s done carefully. It’s not An Issue, but rather, it was a series of typical events. Del and his former girlfriend were having fun, enjoying one another, and they made a mistake. One that involved what the law sees as child pornography and not innocent curiosity. Throughout it all, Del is left almost entirely out of the equation. He’s in trouble but he has no idea why. The thought never occurred to him. This is the pivotal moment: Del is a good kid. Del knows he’s a good kid. When he’s taken as a criminal, he has no idea why because he has done nothing wrong. As a reader, I not only felt bad for him but I agreed with him, and this is where Vaught turns on her writing skills.

Del committed a crime, but I questioned this the entire time I read. Did he deserve punishment for what he and his girlfriend thought was innocent fun? At what point does that natural human instant cross the line into criminal territory? As a reader, I found myself rationalizing both sides of the argument. Del received a lifetime — LIFETIME — punishment for one activity he didn’t even realize wasn’t legal. This good kid can never have a real job (because he’s a criminal) nor can he go to college (because he’s a criminal) nor can he expect to ever date again or find someone who’ll accept him as he is (because he’s a criminal). While he’s come to terms with the first two things, it’s that third thing that sets the story ablaze for both Del and the reader.

Livia herself has suffered a great loss, and Del senses it immediately. He wants to comfort her and yet he doesn’t know how. I’m not usually a big root-for-the-romance-to-happen reader, but I could not help myself. I wanted something good to happen for Del and subsequently, for Livia. Even as I wrestled with the consequences of his actions, at the core of it all is a kid who made an innocent mistake that not impacts every single aspect of his life. I was never rooting for a bad guy. I was rooting for a good guy, a really good guy who downright deserved to succeed.

Going Underground has a cast of fully-fleshed characters amid the well-drawn legal issues. This is important because one never undermines the other in the story, and by navigating both successfully, there is a lot to dig into. This is not an easy read, but it shouldn’t be. There aren’t any cut-and-dry answers, and even at the story’s (satisfying) conclusion, things don’t wrap themselves up in a pretty little bow. There are more questions to consider and more consequences to ponder. I think this would make a spectacular book discussion title, though it has wide appeal to contemporary fiction fans. There is definite cross-over appeal for adults in this, too, particularly as it explores the ideas of sexting and the life long ramifications therein. Although they tread different territory, I think fans of Matthew Quick’s Sorta Like a Rockstar will find themselves falling for Del in the same way they fell for Amber Appleton and the challenge to the story itself will leave them satisfied. In addition, reading this one in conversation with Sarah Darer Littman’s Want to Go Private? seems natural; fans of that title should pick this one up as well.

Advanced reader copy received from the publisher.

A Couple Brief Reviews

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Bayou by Jeremy Love
Lee is a young girl living in the American South in the 1930s. As a black girl, she has a lot of prejudice to deal with, and so does her father. One of the first major events of the book involves Lee being sent to retrieve a body from the bayou near her home. The body is that of a young black boy who was lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman, and it’s Lee’s job to get it because she’s the only one small enough to reach into where it’s caught. (This book is not for the very young.) 
Lee has a white friend named Lily. One day, Lily is taken – eaten, really – by a creature that lives in the swamp, and Lee’s father is blamed for it. He’s arrested and taken away, and Lee knows he’s soon to be lynched just like the other black boy was. In order to save him, Lee ventures into the swamp – a sort of horrifyingly magical alternate world – to rescue Lily. Along the way, she meets up with a benevolent giant called Bayou who helps her.
Bayou is one of those rare stories where I enjoyed the realistic aspects more than the fantastical aspects. Once Lee began her journey with Bayou, my interest waned. I think it became a little difficult to follow, and it doesn’t help that this is the first installment and is therefore an incomplete story.
While the story lost me after a while, the art is incredible throughout. I admit that part of the reason I loved it so much is that it’s heavy on the greens, which always makes my heart go pitter patter. The illustrations are detailed and expressive, but also somewhat soft (without being babyish or overly sweet, since this is certainly not a sweet story). Many of the landscapes look like something I’d like to have hanging in my house. I’m obviously not doing the art justice with my words, but you can take a look at some of the images and see what I mean.
I loved Everybody Sees the Ants, so I was really looking forward to King’s previous novel, which garnered a Printz honor and was a finalist for the Edgar. While I enjoyed it, it didn’t live up to my expectations. In a nutshell: Vera’s best friend, Charlie, has died in mysterious circumstances. Vera knows what happened – and all about the events leading up to it – but she’s not sure she should share it with the police. Before Charlie died, he and Vera had a major falling out, and Vera’s still trying to wrap her mind around her feelings for Charlie and how it should impact her actions.
Vera’s dealing with a lot of other major issues aside from the death of her best friend – a mother who abandoned her, bullying, alcoholism, a loving but pushy father, etc etc. While her voice always seems authentically teen and Vera isn’t really a wallower, there just wasn’t enough humor to balance out the darkness of this novel for me. One thing I loved about Everybody Sees the Ants was the dry humor that permeated it – in particular Lucky’s voice and the ants’ antics (PUN). King tries it here with Vera’s father’s flow charts and some random sections narrated by the town pagoda, but it fell flat for me. I was also disappointed that this wasn’t more of a mystery. I’m really surprised it was a finalist for the Edgar, since the circumstances of Charlie’s death are known to the reader and there isn’t really a mystery to it.
All those complaints makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy the book, but I really did. I just had higher expectations.

Do Book Blurbs Say Anything?

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I’ve done a lot of thinking over the last few months about book blurbs. Actually, a lot of the thinking on this topic came up at and following Book Expo America, and it’s something I’ve mulled since.

For those of you who don’t know, a book blurb is what you see on the cover of a book (or sometimes on the back or inside), where a publication or an author’s comments about the book’s contents are summed up in one or two tight sentences. The goal’s to entice a reader to pick up the book. It sells the book based on a publication or author’s reputation — and for the sake of simplicity, I plan on talking about the author book blurb here and not a publication’s blurb.

As the YA market continues to grow, so has the book blurb. At least, these are my observations in the past few years as a librarian. It seems any new author needs a good blurb by a well-respected author in the field; it’s a seal of approval. It’s a well-known phenomenon that people trust the opinions of their friends and people they respect over research, so it makes sense that blurbs exist and that they’re used as a marketing tool. It’s word-of-mouth. It’s trust.

But my question is and remains, who is the blurb for?

If you break down the idea of a blurb, it’s got a few functions: part of it is the writing/publishing field as a whole. It’s one of those things authors do for one another. Those who are established work to help new people establish themselves; it’s almost a system of networking and mentoring. It’s a formality of work, but it’s one (I hope) most authors who choose to do it find pleasure and enjoyment in. They get to discover new voices, just like readers do. For a lot of mid-list authors, I suspect blurbing actually helps them, too. Their names get more exposure the more they blurb. It takes a lot of time away from their own writing, but from the marketing/exposure aspect, it’s probably worthwhile, especially if the book they blurb ends up doing really well. See the name enough attached to good books, and there’s a good reputation to be had.

Outside the writing world, the blurb serves as a selling point to gatekeepers. First, the biggest gatekeeper of all: booksellers. I mean beyond the indies, too. We’re talking your box store (singular). There’s only so much room on the physical shelf, and that means decision making. Imagine staring at your catalogs and hearing reps trying to sell you on a particular book to add to your store to sell, knowing your goal line is the bottom line and that’s it. You’ve already purchased your front list titles and your best-selling authors, and now you’re choosing one book among three. You’ve never heard of any of these authors and you’ve checked your database and see you’ve never held those authors titles in your store before, so you have no prior sales figures to reference. Reading the descriptions of the books only tells you so much, as do the reviews from your typical sources. But, one of the three books has a blurb from, say, Suzanne Collins. She calls the book suspenseful, praising it as one of her favorites of the year. The other two books don’t have a blurb or they come from authors you’ve never heard of. Take a guess which book has a higher chance of being selected?

Selection for librarians isn’t all that different from how book sellers do it, except, of course, their end goal is much different. They’re not looking at selling a book and making a buck; they’re looking at how they can sell a book to a reader based on content, appeal, and a host of factors, including filling holes in a collection so that it’s balanced and meets a community’s needs and wants. There’s also a budget to watch, and sometimes that means making similarly tough decisions as a book seller (though the issue of balance within a library’s collection reigns supreme over a store’s). I realize I talk from a bit of a place of privilege since I feel like I have a good command of what’s out there in the young adult market, and for the titles I’m not aware of — usually those outside of my favorite genres — I pick up enough in the review journals to feel I’m meeting the needs of my library. For me, the blurb never even plays into a purchase decision, and I tend to believe this is the case for most librarians. Those who don’t go to trade shows or see advance reader copies of books often have no idea there are even blurbs involved. Review journals don’t show enough cover images to even make this a factor.

But blurbs come into play in the library in a different way: they’re shelf talkers. Face a book out on a display and there’s a Cassandra Clare blurb on the cover, chances are it’ll catch the attention of one of her fans. Or maybe one of her fans will remember Clare mentioning reading and loving the book. That one sentence cover blurb? The book’s gone from the display into their hands and out the door. For the library, it’s almost easy reader’s advisory. It’s a tool.

In the book seller’s case, that’s meeting a bottom line.

I looked through a ton of blurbs after BEA out of curiosity, and I noticed two interesting trends. The first was that James Dashner and Lauren Kate both blurbed a LOT of books this year. The second, and maybe the more interesting one, was how blurbs are placed on a book. Scroll back to the top of this post and look at the very first cover for Elevent Plague. Is it just me, or is Suzanne Collins’s name as big as Jeff Hirsch’s? With the blurb in a big black panel, it almost looks like she’s actually the author of the book. Same with the Marion book — his name looks buried, but Stephenie Meyer’s name? It stands out.

One of the things book blurbs helps with, at least from the librarian’s perspective, is something I touched on a second ago, and that’s reader’s advisory. We cannot possibly read everything or know everything, and sometimes, these book blurbs can be helpful. James Dashner blurbs a book? Well, his fans will probably enjoy it. Cassandra Clare blurbs a book? Likely going to work well for fans of paranormal or supernatural books. And the new John Green book? That is a book with CROSSOVER APPEAL. I mean, Jodi Picoult blurbed it, and while she certainly has her teen readers (usually already Green fans, in my experience), she’s huge among a certain demographic of adult female readers. If Picoult calls Green’s book “electric,” well. Seems like it’s one her readers should pick up, too.

If you thought I wouldn’t say it, well, here it is. This is a marketing game, and publishers are playing it really well. The right blurb sells a book, whether for reading pleasure or for cash. The right blurb can launch a career and a reputation. The right blurb can get an unexpected book into the hands of the right people. Marketing is influential.

Here’s the thing: do readers care?

Gatekeepers — and in here I lump book bloggers, authors, librarians, teachers, book sellers, and anyone beyond a casual reader — are privileged in their knowledge of a market. Part of it is because we need to be to do our jobs well, but the bigger part of it is because we care about it a lot. Emphasis is important. We choose to be knowledgeable. We care a lot about the field, and we care a lot about who is talking up what books.

Taking gatekeepers out of the equation, do blurbs mean much? Are readers really influenced by them? I mentioned above that hypothetically, seeing a blurb by Cassie Clare could snatch the interest of a reader. But I put that in the context of the reader being familiar with Clare and her reputation and perhaps having read Clare talk about the book via her social media presence (marketing and promotion, mostly because Clare wants to talk about good books with other people who want to know about good books, not because she’s in it for any financial gain). A casual reader, though, who isn’t engaging with Clare on any basis or maybe who hasn’t read any of her books — would that person even notice the blurb? Does it mean anything to them or is it simply more noise on a cover? We’ve all read those blurbs on movie trailers or restaurant reviews and product reviews and mostly ignored them because, well, they don’t mean anything if we have no connection to the source.

I took my questions to the source: my teens. Granted, my teens are a small group of dedicated readers in one semi-rural community. But I asked them what they thought of book blurbs and what value they place in them.

The truth? They didn’t pay attention. They told me I thought too much about them because I was a librarian. They just liked to read a good book, period.

Did the book blurbs matter to them? They didn’t notice them unless it was an author they really knew and loved.

I mulled these two simple questions and sets of answers for a long time. My teens didn’t notice book blurbs because they said they preferred to notice the cover image and titles. A good cover or interesting title catches them. Once they’re hooked at that point, they don’t care about the other jacket text.

And then I asked what authors they paid attention to. I waited, but they could really only give me one response:

Ellen Hopkins. Which isn’t to say they don’t trust other authors, of course, but it was the only one that rolled off their tongues. And I don’t know if it’s because they had any sort of interaction with Hopkins outside the library (she’s hugely active on social media) or because they like Ellen’s books a lot and want to read more books like them. The assumption then becomes are they reading books because she blurbed them or because they want to read more books like hers? If it’s because they want more books like hers, well, maybe they’re heading down the path we want them to.

Here’s the humor in it all, though: they couldn’t recall any books she had blurbed.

During a later book club discussion, when I showed them Reed’s book, it wasn’t the blurb they noticed at all. It was the girl on the cover. When I book talked it and said it would appeal to them if they liked Hopkin’s edgy, raw writing style, they were sold. It wasn’t the blurb that sold it. It was the content within the book.

Twitter-style Reviews

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It’s probably misleading to call these reviews Twitter-style, but they’re inspired by Twitter since they’re short and to the point. I love writing a good, in-depth review, but doing that for the amount of reading I’ve been doing is impossible. Yet, I want to talk about so many of these books. Here’s a handful of titles I’ve read lately. I call this sample the “strong willed girl” sampler.

This Girl is Different by JJ Johnson follows Evie, a former homeschooled student who decides she wants to spend her last year of education in a formal high school. As sort of a social experience. The thing is, it turns out high school isn’t as coddling as her homeschool education has been and she finds herself in a heap of trouble as she tries to buck authority.

For me, this book was one homeschool stereotype upon another. Evie is less a character than she is a medley of beliefs and social justice convictions, and throughout the story she doesn’t once stop and consider that her ideas might be the problem. Instead, it’s everyone else around her who is wrong and ignorant. She sips yerba mate tea and does yoga and drives a 70s hippie mobile, loves nature and the environment and she doesn’t get why she should be told how to behave within her environment. Mom isn’t much better, either, as she chooses to work at Walmart (big corporation!) as sort of a social experiment, too. Or, really, because she can’t hold a job elsewhere since she is too quick to start espousing her beliefs.

I found it hard to believe Evie would be able to so quickly befriend two people when it was clear she had no socialization prior to beginning formal schooling. Her relationships were quite one-dimensional. She got along with these people because she could throw her beliefs upon them and the second they challenged her ideas, the relationships ended. Maybe the most challenging part of the book for me, though, was despite how much of a thorn in everyone’s side Evie is throughout the novel, in the end, she’s a hero. The message of sticking to your beliefs is fine, but I disagree with how it’s presented here. Here it’s wrapped under the guise of almost bullying people to believing what you believe. And the stereotypes!

The Girl is Different was well-paced and an easy enough read, despite the problems. It tries too hard to be Stargirl but I can see those who liked Spinelli’s successful tale of an off-beat girl finding this a worthwhile read.

Julie Chibbaro’s Deadly is a historical novel, set during one of my favorite time periods: the early 1900s, pre-war, right when technology and science and women’s rights sort of forged ahead in social consciousness. This novel explores all of those things.

Prudence Galewski takes a job in a science lab as an assistant. Her job was to be mostly secretarial (as women’s jobs were then) but her interest in science and learning it from the men she worked drew her to explore that side of the table. When typhoid begins to strike the city, she’s invested in figuring out just what the culprit is, and lucky for her, her boss allows her to travel on their investigations. That’s when things really amp up, as all fingers point to a housekeeper named Mary. She’s been present in home after home where the disease has wiped out families and now she’s been sent away to avoid spreading the disease further.

Where the plot to the story worked well and the writing advanced it well enough, I needed more passion from Pru as a character. She talks of her passion for science, but I wanted to see it more. I would have really loved to know more about what she was thinking about herself: she talks about women and the strange place women had in the world at this period in time, and yet, she herself, as a woman being allowed to participate in a huge disease case (one which science men pit the spread of typhoid on A WOMAN) doesn’t talk enough about it. She was almost there, but she wasn’t there enough for me on the topic. I found myself getting angry reading the book because of these issues and they left me wanting to talk about them, but the thing was, Pru didn’t feel the same way I did. Maybe she did, but I couldn’t tell from the story. Given it’s written in diary form, she had such opportunity to tap into those thoughts but she didn’t. And I knew she could because she’d tread close but then retreat. I feel like a little bit more of Pru’s internal processing would have taken this from a good read to a knock out for me.

She Loves You, She Loves You Not by Julie Anne Peters begins right where Alyssa’s life starts over. She’s been kicked out of her house by her father in Virginia and sent to live with her floozy mother in Colorado because he found out she was a lesbian and that was Not Okay. Alyssa works on picking up the pieces by finding herself in a part-time job and…finding Finn, a girl a few years older than her who makes her believe it’s possible to overcome the breakup she’d had with Sarah back in Virginia.

Alyssa’s a hard-headed character and she’s confident in who she is. I liked her more than I thought I would, even if she is a bit overbearing in it. The story is engaging as Alyssa moves from being ostracized for being who she is to embracing it and making it her way of life. She battles, too, the fact that her mom left her hanging when she was younger and now she lives with the same woman. Her mom is a complete stranger to her and she’s determined to learn who she is, though when the chips fall and she figures it out, the conclusions are too convenient and contrived. There were a lot of issues in this novel, and while they’re handled fairly well, they become repetitive. I found myself paying attention to these patterns in a way I shouldn’t have. The abundance of car wrecks and showers mentioned weakened those story moments for me because I fixated on how repetitive it felt.

Perhaps the weakest part of this book for me were the second person interludes. These flashbacks addressed a “you” that, for the first two instances, didn’t make sense to me. Were they letters to Sarah? They were actually addressing Alyssa, but that was not evident enough, and I felt that this took me out of the story instead of adding any sort of immediacy or intimacy to it. More than being jarring, though, it never felt resolved. While the tactic revealed the back story of why Alyssa was kicked out of her house, it left open a lot of questions about Alyssa’s relationship with Sarah that are never resolved. At the end of the book, I wanted to know more about Sarah, given she ties up many other loose ends (uncomfortably and satisfyingly for me as a reader).

This Girl is Different picked up from the library; Deadly purchased; She Loves You, She Loves You Not received from the publisher for Cybils review.