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Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver

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Lauren Oliver is a very good writer. I know this because the premise of this series of books is ludicrous, but she is able to make me believe it. She’s made me invested in a story that could never possibly happen, rooting for the characters and feeling their heartaches right alongside them. Part of me wonders if she thought to herself “I wonder what the most ridiculous premise for a dystopia would be, and if I could somehow manage to sell it to my readers anyway,” and boom, Delirium was born.
Anyway, it’s clear that I think the premise is kind of stupid. Enough about that. I read and enjoy the books anyway. Here’s why.
Pandemomium alternates between two time periods: Lena immediately after escaping from the repressive loveless society, taken in by members of the resistance, and Lena as a full-fledged member of the resistance on her first real mission. The “Then” portions don’t really do much plot-wise, but they do a good job of establishing setting, the background of the resistance movement, and a few key characters. I know some readers didn’t care for those parts, but I found them interesting. The “Now” portions are more riveting, and also introduce another teen male character – who (of course) becomes Lena’s new love interest.
Much of what happens in this book will not surprise you. The massive revelation at the very end of the book will most certainly not surprise you (though I was kind of hoping it wouldn’t happen). But there are still a few twists that I didn’t see coming, and it’s all written in such an engaging way that it doesn’t matter as much as it would in another book. I realize that I’m cutting Oliver a lot of slack for what would be a rather lackluster book in another writer’s hand, but good writing matters. It can elevate a middling story into something pretty good.
I didn’t enjoy this one as much as the first. I think it’s too much of a standard middle-book in a dystopian trilogy, in that the hero or heroine joins the underground resistance and starts to fight for a better future, discovering secrets and being betrayed along the way. As an adult, I have less patience for the romance that blossoms between Lena and the new boy, too. They don’t share any common interests, though I suppose they are both good-looking and kept together in a confined space for a period of time. I guess that’s enough. I do know my teen self wouldn’t have minded so much, and again, it’s mostly due to the writing (it always comes back to the writing). The romance doesn’t make sense intellectually, but Lena feels it and so I do, too.
I’m hoping the third book (which I do have) will give me a few more surprises than this one did. I have no doubt that the excellent writing will be there, but that knowledge hasn’t been enough to send me digging into its pages yet. Of course this is a stellar example of what readers crave in their dystopian romances – equal parts dystopia and romance, anchored by good writing. Personally I wanted a little more, but it will certainly satisfy many others.
Review copy provided by the publisher.

Etiquette and Espionage by Gail Carriger

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Etiquette and Espionage is Gail Carriger’s first novel for teens, set in the same world as her much-acclaimed Parasol Protectorate series for adults. I went into this book pretty blind, not having read any of Carriger’s adult titles or knowing much about the world she created in them. What I did know is that they are funny, romantic, historical, and not your usual paranormal fare. That appealed to me, and the premise of her YA book – about a girl sent to a Victorian finishing school that teaches the traditional womanly arts as well as espionage and murder, covertly – was enough for me to want to read it, despite my general avoidance of paranormal stories.
And Etiquette and Espionage is a lot of fun, mostly. It features a fourteen year old girl named Sophronia who loves to get her hands dirty playing about with the various mechanical creations in her steampunk-y world. This is seen as very unladylike and gets her into trouble. Her mother is fed up with her daughter’s behavior and ships her off to Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. There, Sophronia learns that the school is not all that it seems: she’ll learn how to curtsy, but she’ll also learn to kill. 
This information is presented to Sophronia in a very matter of fact way, though she learns a lot of it on her own. The girls and teachers at the school all take it for granted, treating their topics of study as quite natural, and therefore it comes across as quite funny to the reader, who witnesses Sophronia’s bewilderment and dismay. The main plotline, though, involves the theft of a mysterious prototype. Sophronia and her close friend at the school, Dimity, get themselves involved in figuring out just what this prototype is, why it’s so important to so many people, who has stolen it, and where it’s been hidden. 
Etiquette and Espionage is a very funny book. Here’s a line that made me giggle: “A mustache was perched above his upper lip cautiously, as though it were slightly embarrassed to be there and would like to slide away and become a sideburn or something more fashionable.” It’s full of writing like this, so it’s certainly no boring read.
But.
It’s a little uneven. The plot featuring the prototype isn’t terribly exciting (I kept on wanting to go back to Sophronia’s classes and learn more about poisoning people), and the worldbuilding left a lot to be desired.
I think I would have gotten a lot more enjoyment out of the book if I had read the Parasol Protectorate series first, which is concerning, since they target different audiences. I know that the vampires and werewolves play vital roles in the adult series, but here they felt extraneous and not very well-incorporated into the world. Sophronia’s friendship with two other girls at the school, Sidheag and Agatha, is built up pretty late in the book and then dropped. I believe one of those girls has important ties to characters in the adult novels, but again, I wouldn’t know. The prototype, too, remained a mystery to me, though the characters themselves seemed to understand it eventually. Perhaps there is more information about it in the adult novels, too. 
I know many, many YA books are being bought and read by adults now, and maybe some publishers and authors are playing into this, hoping fans of the adult series will buy the YA as well. But it doesn’t sit quite right with me. I want teens to be able to read books targeted for their age group without needing to  read “up” first.
That said, I did have a lot of fun reading Etiquette and Espionage, and I think a lot of teens will too. It’s frequently hilarious, even if the plot and world-building are a bit weak, plus it features a group of girls being taught to spy and kill while also learning the proper way to curtsy. Historical institutions that outwardly teach respectable topics to their female participants while covertly instructing them in violent, dangerous, and/or and illegal pursuits tend to go over well (think of the assassin nuns, Victorian spies, and others that have populated YA books recently).
Review copy received from the publisher.

Pretty Girl-13 by Liz Coley

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Angie disappeared three years ago at age 13 from her Girl Scout camp, but she’s returned to her house with no memory of where she’s been nor that three years have passed. She has to, though, in order to not only put the person who kidnapped her behind bars, as well as to bring peace and comfort to the detective on the case, her parents, her former friends, and most importantly, herself.

It will be anything but easy.

A word of warning from here on out: this review is spoiler heavy. I can’t review Liz Coley’s Pretty Girl-13 without giving away what does and doesn’t work. This is a psychological thriller, so much of the plot depends upon the plot twists and therefore, the spoiler-laden elements.

The book opens with a flashback to Angie, age 13, when she was kidnapped from the woods. It’s from the third-person perspective but the way in which it’s told, it’s clear there is more than one voice telling the story. That’s because Angie suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). The trauma from her captivity forced her mind to compartmentalize the abuse, meaning that now, three years later, she’s unable to piece together a full picture of what happened to her. She can hardly recall what’s happening to her in the present because at any given time, one of the identities may be coming through stronger than another.

Angie’s taken to therapy immediately and receives the diagnosis. While it terrifies her, she comes to realize that if she can channel the other voices through — much as they scare her — she can figure out what happened. There are a number of different voices brought up through Angie’s therapy sessions and outside of therapy, including the Slut (she submitted to the captor sexually to keep him happy and quiet), the Girl Scout (she was the one chained to the small room and who would cook and do the captor’s work for him outside the bedroom), Angel (the male voice who was full of anger and bitterness for being captured and treated as a prisoner against will), and others. There is one voice that breaks through at the very end of the book, which is that of the baby Angie bore for her captor. The same baby which happens to be the child Angie babysits for now in the real world. The coincidence there is, indeed, ridiculous.

As a reader, I knew what was going on by page three of the story. I think I’ve talked about how a lot of psychological thrillers are easy for me to guess the driving force behind the story, but this was one of the most obvious examples in a long time. There’s more than one voice directing Angie when she’s captured. Could it be anything other than compartmentalization? Maybe it’s because I’m an adult and have read a ton of books like this or because I’ve watched so many of these stories play out in the real world. Maybe it’s because my background is in psychology with an emphasis in adolescent development. I can spot the disorder quite easily. I could have accepted it, actually, had the story been stronger and more compelling. Unfortunately, in this case, it’s not.

Following the diagnosis and therapy sessions (including a very experimental one), Angie is still working through adjusting to normal life again. As such, she has to choose where to go to school. She was supposed to be in 8th grade when she disappeared, and when she came back, she’d be in 11th. But because she doesn’t want to reconnect and feel weird around her old friends, she chooses to start in 9th grade. She still connects with her old friends, though, and she learns they’re not the same as they used to be. Did you read that? She went back to the same school she was known at for being the girl who went missing, and no one is any wiser! She doesn’t change her name or anything. There’s a little explanation for why she doesn’t go somewhere new (price of a private school is too high and her parents won’t be moving) and it’s possible to buy into. What is impossible to buy into, though, is how there is absolutely no media attention. No one is trying to sell this story. No one is outing this girl. Why didn’t her parents move? There’s a small moment when Angie finds a scrapbook with news clippings, but beyond that, there is maybe one phone call for a press interview. When Angie returns, it’s absurd to think there’s no news crew, no people trying to make a buck, and no interest in telling the gripping story of a girl who went missing and suddenly appeared back.

Then there’s a boy. Angie is, of course, falling in love with a boy at school. And it’s through him she finds the security and comfort to tell the truth in the last part of the book. This is done through a tremendously underwhelming infodump, wherein we learn that Angie not only suffers from DID, but she also suffers from Stockholm Syndrome. That was the final straw for me as a reader in terms of believability. I hadn’t even gotten to the surprise baby plot line. I haven’t delved into the fact that Angie’s mom is also pregnant, so there’s a whole series of issues complicating Angie’s return there. I also haven’t mentioned the subplot with Angie’s uncle — he’d been making sexual advances on her for years prior to her being captured and taken, and it’s when her DID is in deep treatment Angie can finally speak up about it. While there’s something to be said about the uncle’s role in her initial descent into compartmentalization, it was more of the One Thing Too Many trend that further made the story ridiculous. It’s hard to develop a sense of character when they are little more than tools of syndroms and tools of their situations. What Angie experiences is horrific, and yet, as a reader I never once felt that because what was going on ranged from ridiculous to far-too-coincidental.

Pretty Girl-13 doesn’t bring anything new to the table. It takes elements of a number of well-written novels on these issues and doesn’t marry them successfully. The story of a girl taken and abused by a captor but who eventually makes her way out to tell the story? It was done well in Elizabeth Scott’s Living Dead Girl. The issue of DID was done in Brian James’s Life is But a Dream to the extent that the main character’s mental illness makes the reader question the entire story itself and all she experiences. Stockholm Syndrome is done expertly in Lucy Christopher’s Stolen. And Nova Ren Suma manages to tell a tale of mental illness (not DID but a similar illness) in 17 & Gone and even more successfully uses the metaphor of fire to actually enhance the story and character, rather than simply using it as an exit from the story, as Coley does here. As far as familial sexual abuse, there’s Mindi Scott’s Living Dead Girl. In short: any of these titles tackle the subjects of Pretty Girl-13 in much more depth, honesty, and immediacy than Coley’s title does.

One aspect of the book that did work quite well and I applaud Coley for was how Angie ultimately comes to work through her DID and make herself one complete Angie. This means that she accepts being Angie involves being part “slut,” being part “girl scout,” being part “Angel,” and being part mother. She’s a female who has the agency to express herself sexually if she wants, and she has the agency to be angry and violent if need be. The therapeutic technique used in the book doesn’t require that Angie forget those other voices inside her. Instead, it forces Angie to embrace these voices as part of who she is. They’re pieces of a whole. Her wholeness means she is a little bit of all those things.

Will this book find a readership? Absolutely. It’s a sexy subject. It’s unfortunate that rather than offering readers a full character and a full arc, we’re given a list of challenges and info dumps meant to suffice for strong development. This is a debut, and it feels like one because it’s sloppy, a little overindulgent, and misses the mark on crucial elements of story development. I felt cheated because I’d figured out the story from the start, but I felt further cheated the more I read. In concept, Pretty Girl-13 sounds appealing. It lacks in execution and for that, it’s a disappointing and unsatisfying read.

Pretty Girl-13 is available now from Harper Collins. Review copy received from the publisher. 

Dark Triumph by Robin LaFevers

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So, you all know that I loved Grave Mercy. A lot. It was so fun and exciting and well-written and romantic and basically everything I wanted in a book at that moment. Its sequel, Dark Triumph, is no different. If anything, I enjoyed it more.

Where Grave Mercy focused on Ismae, Dark Triumph focuses on Sybella, another assassin nun who’s been sent on an assignment to the home of D’Albret, the sinister noble who conspired to kill Anne, the Duchess of Brittany, after she refused his offer of marriage. At the end of Grave Mercy, it’s Sybella’s warning that saves Anne’s life. But her mission at D’Albret’s home is not over.

Being sent to infiltrate D’Albret’s home as a spy is horrifying enough (D’Albret is a special kind of evil), but for Sybella, it’s torture. You see, soon into the story we learn that she is, in fact, D’Albret’s daughter, and she’s been privy to his violent proclivities since childhood. He’s had at least half a dozen wives, and they all met untimely ends when they ceased to please him. If D’Albret were to find out that she was fathered by Mortain, then she would no longer be off-limits to him.

Sybella has been biding her time, watching D’Albret constantly, hoping to see the marque on him that would give her permission to kill him. Before she is able to see anything, she’s given her official assignment: rescue an ally of the duchess who’s been imprisoned in D’Albret’s dungeon. That her mission is a rescue one, not a killing one, doesn’t sit well with Sybella, who truly enjoys killing (this is something I love about her character). But the man she rescues interests her, and he throws her off-kilter by liking her even more when he learns what she is.

Ever since I was introduced to Sybella in the convent in Grave Mercy, I wanted to know her story. She was presented as quite unhinged initially, but able to heal slowly thanks to the friendships she eventually developed with Ismae and Annith. Having D’Albret as a father explains much of her psyche, and LaFevers writes her so well that I really felt Sybella’s horror at being forced to live once more with the man who killed her mother and made her life a living hell.

A little of the mythology behind Mortain and his marques was revealed in Grave Mercy, and it’s built upon here – and if you’ve read Grave Mercy, you won’t be surprised to learn that the convent doesn’t have it exactly right. A lot of the story involves Sybella grappling with what it means to be sired by Mortain, what it means to be a killer and not only be good at it, but enjoy it. I mentioned in my review of Grave Mercy that I loved that LaFevers made Ismae do the “bad thing” – killing people on order with little thought to the reason behind it. Here, she takes it a step further – Sybella not only does the “bad thing,” she relishes it.

While I loved Ismae as a character, I’m much more intrigued by Sybella. Her sanity is a bit fragile, and she’s sad and angry and overwhelmingly depressed, betrayed over and over by the people who should have loved her. She’s had it rough, but she’s still fighting to find a way to be happy. She’s fascinating and I loved reading about her.

The other things that distinguished Grave Mercy are here, too: political intrigue, action, murder, romance, secrets, bad people who turn out to be good, good people who turn out to be bad. It advances the overall storyline involving Duchess Anne and also creates some intriguing possibilities for the future of the convent and its assassin nuns. It’s just completely well-done, a worthy sequel (or “companion book,” if you like), and will more than satisfy fans of the first. I can’t wait for the third.

Review copy received from the publisher (via Kelly). Dark Triumph will be available April 2.

17 & Gone by Nova Ren Suma

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It all starts when Lauren sees the missing poster for Abby. When she knows she can find her, when she knows that Abby is talking to her.

Lauren never knew Abby before seeing the poster.

Then it’s Fiona. Fiona, the girl whose parents owned the carriage house she and her mother lived in. Fiona, who used to babysit Lauren periodically, and who decided one night she’d had enough and she was leaving. Running away. Locking Lauren in the closet so she could get away. Causing Lauren emotional trauma and not to mention physical discomfort and embarrassment.

It was always Fiona, from the start. It wasn’t Abby who was the first girl who went missing that Lauren knew she saw. Who haunted her.

But it’s not just Fiona and Abby. It’s Natalie. Then it’s Shyann. And Isabeth. And Madison. And Yoon-Mi. Maura. Kendra. All of these girls — all of these missing girls — Lauren can talk to. She knows their stories. She knows where they are.

The thing they all have in common, all of the girls, is that they’re 17.

And they’re gone.

There’s also the dream. The one which takes place in the same house Lauren grew up in, that she knows so well. Except now it’s filled with these girls — each of them has space in there. Each of them can talk to her. The house is warm. Smoky. Almost burning. Fiona always seemed to have a bit of control there. Even if it was Lauren’s dream, even if she was the one walking and talking and experiencing, somehow she was still under Fiona’s direction. As if Fiona was the person in charge of the house. As if Fiona was the person in charge of Lauren’s thoughts.

What could go wrong when Lauren chooses, then, to reach out to the families of these missing girls? When she is herself turning 17 and worried that her fate is just like that of those girls she knows are missing. The girls she knows and sees.

Nova Ren Suma’s 17 & Gone is a masterful exploration of the lines of madness. Paired with pitch-perfect prose that simultaneously propels the reader forward because of its fluidity and yet begs the reader to slow down and appreciate the singular choices in word and syntax, 17 & Gone is the kind of book you want to read at least twice. First, for the story. Second (and third and fourth) to see what parts of the story you missed the time before. What parts of the language, the turns of phrase, the evocative prose make those multiple readings and interpretations possible.

If you don’t want to be spoiled, I suggest skipping down to the final paragraph. But before doing that, it’s worth noting that I don’t necessarily think this is the kind of book that can be spoiled because it is so rich in possibilities and in interpretations that one person’s take isn’t the singular means of understanding it.

17 & Gone is, at heart, an exploration of mental illness. Lauren suffers from schizophrenia. Or at least, that’s what the psych ward wants to label her as, but they can’t quite put that diagnosis on her. Because schizophrenia requires more than a series of episodes; it’s the kind of illness that doesn’t manifest the same way in every individual. In this case, Lauren’s symptoms involve a few things. First, she fixates. These missing girls, the ones she believes she can see and talk to, are the product of her own research and fascination with the idea of missing girls. In other words, she’s spent a long time looking around the internet for girls who have been labeled as endangered missings. She’s learned their stories and absorbed them into her mind. They’ve become part of her. That she meets them in the house, the one she knows, is indicative of her letting them into her space. Into the world that is intimately hers.

But if only it were that simple. Suma doesn’t make it easy, and that is why this book — why her story telling more broadly — is so stand out.

Fiona, the second girl who enters Lauren’s mind, is actually someone Lauren knew in real life. She left an impression on Lauren. When Fiona chose to leave home, to run away with strange men, she caused trauma to Lauren that was long-standing. It happened in her own home. It happened in that intimate, safe space. That is why Fiona has control in the dreams, why it is she is the one running the operation. She’s the one who contributed to the rift in Lauren’s mind.

But if only it were that simple.

Fiona may not be one of those girls. One of the ones Lauren fixates on. What Suma forces the reader to do in this story is wonder: what’s real and what’s imaginary? What are the lines between the moments of mental insanity and the supernatural? The surreal? Is there maybe something to consider that people who suffer from such debilitating mental illnesses are themselves experiencing some kind of othering? Are they seeing and experiencing a world through an entirely different way than those who don’t? Can they interact with ghosts? The specters? How is it we can know what is and isn’t normal, what is and isn’t stable anyway?

Because what happens when Lauren gets out of the psych ward is that she sets fire to the place where Abby was last seen. And she finds a relic belonging to Abby. Abby is still alive.

Lauren solves the mystery in the real world and found the missing girl. So. What about the others?

One of the biggest challenges with reading this book — and it’s a challenge that’s not a criticism but a challenge of the story in and of itself — is that Lauren is very hard to know. Because things aren’t all right in her world and in her mind, readers are outside her thinking. They’re in the position that her boyfriend and her mother are. Readers are, in a sense, powerless to figuring out what is really going on because Lauren is, too. Because she can’t make sense of her world in the way that we do. At times, this is frustrating to the reader. You want to shake her and tell her to wake up. That what she’s doing isn’t okay. That meddling in the lives of people who are grieving isn’t good. But the thing is, we don’t even know the extent to which Lauren has done this. She shares the story of going and seeing Abby’s grandparents. That is the only way we know she’s done this. We don’t know about the letters she’s sent to other families.

She doesn’t tell the reader because she cannot tell the reader. She cannot lead us through because she cannot lead herself through.

Suma’s 17 & Gone could best be called magical realism, as it’s grounded in our world and the experiences present in our world, but our world looks, tastes, smells, and works with a question of whether or not it is our world at all. This is a novel about being on the precipice of becoming an adult and moving toward that great unknown. To the world where girls are missing and ghost shaped and malleable and yet so fully formed, real, and there. There’s then the question of whether it’s a world where Fiona gets to direct or Lauren gets to be the one in charge. What of our histories can define us or mold us or ultimately offer insight into our deepest, darkest, toughest-to-access selves?

17 & Gone is a marvelous, sumptuous, literary novel that is not easy to forget. Readers who loved Suma’s Imaginary Girls will see many similarities in story telling and be satisfied. It’s a knock out of a book. This is a novel about what it means to be lost and what it might mean to be found. Suma leaves readers with more questions than answers, but that makes this book so damn special. That’s what makes a reader want to go back, to experience again, and to reconsider the first thoughts they had. 17 & Gone is a book you want to talk about.

17 & Gone is available today. In full disclosure, Nova and I have a professional relationship — she and I presented together at Kid Lit Con.