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books

New This Spring: Two Snappy Reviews

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The Falconer by Elizabeth May
May brings us
savage, murderous faeries in her debut featuring a teenage girl with the
unique ability to hunt them down. A faery killed Aileana’s mother and
since then, she’s vowed to exact revenge upon it – as well as any other
faeries she can get her hands on, with the exception of a sympathetic
faery who trains her and a tiny pixie who keeps her company and mends
her clothing. The story, set in 1844, is notable for its exploration of
faery lore, which is (according to an author note) based on actual
Scottish mythology. May’s faeries are sometimes beautiful, sometimes
hideous, but always deadly, hearkening back to a time when all
supernatural beings were referred to as faeries by the Scots.

There’s
some romantic tension between Aileana and her trainer, the faery
Kiaran, who sometimes seems human and at other times is definitely,
absolutely not. It kind of works, if you can get past the fact that he’s
thousands of years old and she is a teenager. The writing is mostly
good, though not uniformly so. May is able to communicate quite clearly
how devastated Aileana is by her mother’s death. In many ways, this is a
very dark book, full of violence and despair. I wish the plot had been a
bit more complex – it mostly involves Aileana hunting faeries, then
strategizing with Kiaran once they learn that a whole horde of the most
dangerous kinds of faeries are about to be released upon the world. The
pseudo-twist ending may be the most interesting part of the book – too
bad we couldn’t get there sooner. Nevertheless, this should please fans of fairies and books heavy on action.

Sekret by Lindsay Smith
I was intrigued by the premise of this debut, which is set in Soviet Russia in 1963 and involves teenage psychics recruited (read: blackmailed) by the KGB into serving as spies. Protagonist Yulia is one of these spies. The KGB is threatening her family and coercing her into sabotaging the American space program.

Much of the book focuses on Yulia’s training as she struggles to discover who among the other recruits she can trust (none of them). She learns how to put up mental walls to fend off psychic attacks as well as how best to attack others, gleaning the information her captors require. Above all, she wants to escape and rescue her family.

What this book does well is portray Yulia’s internal struggles – her mind under attack from others, her desperation over her situation, her struggle to hone her skills. I wished the plot were a bit more exciting, though. For a story about spies, it’s pretty slow and the missions they’re sent on aren’t terribly exciting. I have trouble remembering much of them at all. As with The Falconer, there’s some interesting stuff right at the end, but up to that point, there’s just not a lot going on. But psychics and spies are both trendy now, so I expect a book featuring them working for the KGB will go over well.

Review copies provided by the publishers. The Falconer will be available May 6. Sekret is available now.

Salvage by Alexandra Duncan

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I’ve written before about how I’m tired of young adult science fiction that is only capable of imagining a future where women are treated in awful ways (usually explicit or de facto sexual slavery). Often, these sorts of hypothetical societies seem done more for shock value than to serve the story and its characters, and they frequently do not take a hard look at where certain Earth societies are now and postulate a logical future for them. So you can imagine my trepidation going into Salvage by Alexandra Duncan.

The story begins on a space ship where grown men take multiple teenage girls as wives. Women and girls are not allowed to set foot on Earth (though men are), and the culture’s mythology prevents them from doing something as basic as singing, much less making repairs to the ship or anything else besides child-rearing.

Ava was born into this society, aboard a trading ship called the Parastrata. She is sixteen and has been told she is to become a wife to a man aboard the Aether. When it appears that Luck, the captain’s son and her friend and sweetheart of sorts, is to be that man, she is overjoyed. But Ava and Luck make a terrible mistake based on faulty information, and Ava finds herself on the run from her family and the crews of both the Parastrata and the Aether.

What I’ve mentioned above is actually a fairly small portion of the book. Most of Ava’s story takes place on Earth. She initially escapes to the Gyre, a continent-sized trash heap in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. She’s taken in by a scarred (physically and metaphorically) but kind woman and her pre-teen daughter, who teach Ava how to fly a ship. Afterward, Ava finds herself in Mumbai, seeking her mother’s sister. These two settings are wildly different (one completely fabricated), but equally well-realized.

This is a slower-paced book, not as chock-full of action as, say, Beth Revis’ Across the Universe or Amy Kathleen Ryan’s Glow, which it’s been compared to (though it still reads very quickly). Duncan takes time to immerse the reader in each place she creates, whether that place is space, the Pacific Ocean, or India. Everything is told through Ava’s eyes, so the wonder and mystery and strangeness of all these settings is made very clear. That’s one thing I really loved about this book: it highlights just how overwhelming it is to find yourself in a place where no one understands you. And the place where Ava is understood, at least to a degree – the Parastrata – does make sense in the context of the story. Duncan’s writing never makes what happens aboard the ship seem salacious. The fact that the ships are so isolated from Earth, free of any regulation but their own, in a harsh environment, does make it more likely that they’d develop a society that adheres to a very rigid set of rules that benefits those already in power. This is addressed in more depth near the end of the book.

It’s clear that future Earth is wildly different from present-day Earth, but we don’t get an infodump that explains how it got that way. Instead, we discover on our own. Duncan lets the reader infer from what Ava sees: the trash in the middle of the ocean, the difference in living conditions between different classes of people in Mumbai, and so on. When done right, world-building is a discovery, and I feel like Duncan nailed it.

There’s a lot that Duncan packs into her novel, theme-wise: the meaning of family, the ethics of objectively studying another human culture, class privilege, gender and sexuality. Furthermore, the cast is multi-racial and multi-cultural, so important and so rare in mainstream YA SF. And if that weren’t enough to entice you to pick this one up, Ava is also good at math and mechanical repairs – in fact, she taught herself how to do sums! I’ll be the first to say I dislike math, but it is so very nice to read about a girl who loves it and excels at it.

Readers who aren’t big fans of science fiction may initially shy away from Ava’s narration, as her speech patterns are a bit odd. She uses some words in different ways than we do; it takes some getting used to. I really appreciate when an author does this. Again, there’s no explanation for the oddness in speech – we figure out what it means along the way. It’s just another way Duncan brings us into Ava’s world.

YA books set in space are trendy right now. This one is more thoughtful and less plot-driven than the others, more like a classic coming-of-age story, different but no worse than thrillers like Glow or Across the Universe. Salvage is a good book for more patient teens who will appreciate reading about a sheltered girl who comes into her own as a young woman in a wild, sometimes-scary, often-beautiful world.

Review copy provided by my librarian book twin and Angie (@misskubelik). Salvage is available now.

Revisiting YA Verse Novels: A 2014 Guide to the Format

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April is poetry month, and while we didn’t write a lengthy genre guide to verse novels that month to celebrate, we did write one in May. If you’re curious about the format of YA novels in verse, that should get you set on what it is, why it’s so appealing, and it offers a pretty extensive reading list to titles published in the last few years.

Since I didn’t want to replicate work and write another guide to the genre, I thought it would be worthwhile to talk about the books in 2014 that are verse novels. Some of the titles are out already, while others will be publishing before the end of the year. This list is for titles published by traditional publishers, and it’s very possible that I’ll overlook some, so feel free to jump in with additional titles in the comments. A couple of titles below could easily be middle grade, as they fall into that strange category of being good for readers from age 10 to 14. I’m including them anyway. 

All descriptions are from WorldCat, and I’ve included publication dates for titles not yet available. Of course, if you’re a fanatic of verse novels, make sure you check out Verse Novels and that you stay tuned for the third annual verse novels series over at Clear Eyes, Full Shelves, which will take place the last week of April. 

Of note: a nice percentage of these titles are diverse. 

And We Stay by Jenny Hubbard: Sent to an Amherst, Massachusetts, boarding school after her ex-boyfriend shoots himself, seventeen-year-old Emily expresses herself through poetry as she relives their relationship, copes with her guilt, and begins to heal. **This book is partially in verse and partially in traditional prose. 

The Sound of Letting Go by Stasia Ward Kehoe: At seventeen, Daisy feels imprisoned by her brother Steven’s autism and its effects and her only escape is through her trumpet into the world of jazz, but when her parents decide to send Steven to an institution she is not ready to let him go.



Kiss of Broken Glass by Madeline Kuderick (September 9): After she’s caught in the school bathroom cutting herself with the blade from a pencil sharpener, fifteen-year-old Kenna is put under mandatory psychiatric watch. She has seventy-two hours to face her addiction, deal with rejection, and find a shred of hope. Description via Goodreads. 

Two Girls Staring At The Ceiling by Lucy Frank (August 5): Chess, the narrator, is sick, but with what exactly, she isn’t sure. And to make matters worse, she must share a hospital room with Shannon, her polar opposite. Where Chess is polite, Shannon is rude. Where Chess tolerates pain silently, Shannon screams bloody murder. Where Chess seems to be getting slowly better, Shannon seems to be getting worse. How these teenagers become friends, helping each other come to terms with their illness, makes for a dramatic and deeply moving read. Description via Goodreads. 

A Time To Dance by Padma Venkatraman (May 1): In India, a girl who excels at Bharatanatyam dance refuses to give up after losing a leg in an accident.

Rumble by Ellen Hopkins (August 26): Eighteen-year-old Matt’s atheism is tested when, after a horrific accident of his own making that plunges him into a dark, quiet place, he hears a voice that calls everything he has ever disbelieved into question.

Like Water on Stone by Dana Walrath (November 11): Inspired by a true story, this relates the tale of siblings Sosi, Shahen, and Mariam who survive the Armenian genocide of 1915 by escaping from Turkey alone over the mountains.

Silver People: Voices From the Panama Canal by Margarita Engle: Fourteen-year-old Mateo and other Caribbean islanders face discrimination, segregation, and harsh working conditions when American recruiters lure them to the Panamanian rain forest in 1906 to build the great canal.

Dust of Eden by Mariko Nagai: Thirteen-year-old Mina Tagawa and her Japanese-American family are forced to evacuate their Seattle home and are relocated to an internment camp in Idaho, where they live for three years. 

Caminar by Skila Brown: Carlos knows that when the soldiers arrive with warnings about the Communist rebels, it is time to be a man and defend the village, keep everyone safe. But Mama tells him not yet — he’s still her quiet moonfaced boy. The soldiers laugh at the villagers, and before they move on, a neighbor is found dangling from a tree, a sign on his neck: Communist. Mama tells Carlos to run and hide, then try to find her … Numb and alone, he must join a band of guerillas as they trek to the top of the mountain where Carlos’s abuela lives. Will he be in time, and brave enough, to warn them about the soldiers? What will he do then? A novel in verse inspired by actual events during Guatemala’s civil war, Caminar is the moving story of a boy who loses nearly everything before discovering who he really is.

Poisoned Apples by Christina Heppermann (September 23): Christine Heppermann’s powerful collection of free verse poems explore how girls are taught to think about themselves, their bodies, their friends–as consumers, as objects, as competitors. Based on classic fairy tale characters and fairy tale tropes, the poems range from contemporary retellings to first person accounts set within the original stories. From Snow White cottage and Rapunzel’s tower to health class and the prom, these poems are a moving depiction of young women, society, and our expectations. Poisoned Apples is a dark, clever, witty, beautiful, and important book for teenage girls, their sisters, their mothers, and their best friends. **While not a traditional novel in verse, I’m including this title since verse lovers will definitely be interested. 

Links of Note: April 5, 2014

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from postsecret
Since I put together a link roundup last weekend, this roundup is a bit shorter than usual. With that, let’s dive right in:
  • Rita Meade rounded up a series of tweets by librarian Gretchen Caserotti who sat in on a local school board’s discussion about pulling Sherman Alexie’s Diary of a Part-Time Indian off their supplemental high school reading list. She also included some context for the challenge and the disappointing results for the book. Here’s what censorship looks like. 
  • Daniel Ehrenhaft wrote a really interesting piece for the CBC Diversity blog about trying to sell foreign rights of US novels abroad at the Bologna Book Fair. More specifically, he talks about how realistic fiction featuring diverse characters aren’t easy sells overseas and he digs into that a bit. 
  • This week, Laurie Halse Anderson did an AMA over at Reddit that is well worth reading. After she did, she sent me a message on Tumblr alerting me she’d linked to a post I wrote and she was curious what I thought about her answer about the “John Greenification” of YA. So I responded. Perhaps it’s teasing to say this conversation between us will be continued in the (very) near future. 

A Pair of Cybils Reviews

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Since I can’t discuss Cybils finalists before the winner is announced, I like to revisit the titles a little while later and give some brief thoughts. Today I’m discussing a couple of titles that I didn’t personally love, but will no doubt speak to others.

William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, a New Hope by Ian Doescher
This book is a fun little literary exercise by Doescher – the first Star Wars movie re-imagined as Shakespeare would have told it. Doescher really committed, writing it all in full iambic pentameter, five acts, the whole shebang. (Even R2D2’s speech is written in iambic pentameter.) He also slips in a lot of in-jokes for Shakespeare fans – references to Hamlet, that sort of thing.

This would be a treat for mega fans of Star Wars and Shakespeare, though that audience is probably quite narrow, as those readers would also have to want to see two of their favorite things mashed together (and not everyone likes that). Still, this is a fun novelty item. It’s interesting to see how Doescher makes it all work.

Shadows by Robin McKinley
I really wanted to love this one, but it was not to be. McKinley’s latest is a combination of fantasy and science fiction, set in a world where magic has been outlawed and strange shadows cling to Maggie’s new stepfather. Maggie knows that something is off about Val, and not just because of his shadows.

Most of my dislike of this book stems from the writing style. Maggie narrates her own story, and her narration is circuitous and tangent-prone and not very organized. It’s not quite stream of consciousness, but nearly. I’m not opposed to this technique in general, but Maggie’s constant asides just aren’t particularly interesting, and by the time she returns us to her original point, we’ve forgotten what it was in the first place. They also don’t do much to help the reader understand her world, which is one of many. She lives in Newworld, and Val is from Oldworld. Plus, there’s Midworld and Southworld and Farworld. I’m all for world-building that develops via discovery instead of infodumps, but we’ve got to understand what the heck is going on before half the book is up. I didn’t. I was confused and bored for much of it.