Review: Diverse Energies by 11 speculative fiction authors

The order in which the stories in Diverse Energies are arranged is smart: the first three show the range of the collection, and the last story, by Ursula K. LeGuin, is so freaking fantastic (hello, it's Ursula K. LeGuin) that everything else pales a little in comparison.  In the middle, there are a lot of dystopias set in future Asia.

Review: The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan

This is a Margo Lanagan novel, so I was pretty sure it was going to make me uncomfortable.  And I was right.

It's the story of an isolated town, a little island fishing community, where something cruel and deviant becomes socially acceptable.  Although the novel reminds me of news stories about Pitcairn Island, the plot's ripped from folktales, not headlines. 

Review: The Chaos by Nalo Hopkinson

What if you worst insecurities were revealed--not just with words but with physical manifestations, like a rash on your skin or an angry monster that followed you around?  That's the nightmare scenario that plays out in Nalo Hopkinson's The Chaos, the freakiest YA novel I've read since Libba Bray's Printz-winning Going Bovine.

Review: Assassin's Curse by Cassandra Rose Clarke

"I ain't never been one to trust beautiful people, and Tarrin of the Hariri was the most beautiful man I ever saw."

I had a good feeling about Annana, the pirate heroine of this novel, when I read that first line.  Sure enough, she was a loveable rascal of a narrator who made the pages fly by.  But when I got to the end of The Assasin's Curse, I didn't feel like I knew Annana or the other characters any better than I did on page one. 

Review: A Confusion of Princes by Garth Nix

Lots of princes in literature lately, right?  The False Prince, A Confusion of Princes, A Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom ... OK, maybe that's it, but since I keep getting these titles confused with each other, it feels like a lot of princes.  And all of them are having their princely authority challenged in one way or another!

But before I talk about A Confusion of Princes, by Garth Nix, I do have to point out one sad thing: whitewashing.  Here's how the main character, Khemri, describes himself in relation to his fellow Princes:

Review: Broxo by Zack Giallongo

I don't often reread books, but Broxo is a title that I enjoyed very much the second time I read it.  It takes place at the top of an icy, barren mountain that reminded me of "The Wall" in The Game of Thrones ... especially when the zombies appeared.

A young barbarian/Viking-looking princess named Zora climbs to the top of the mountain, on a mission to find the Peryton clan.  But all she finds is a boy about her age named Broxo and a giant, shaggy dog with a single horn, like a unicorn.  His name is Migo.

Review: The Wicked and the Just by J. Anderson Coates

I have a special place in my heart for stories of rebellion against the English crown.  Maybe it's my Irish blood.  Maybe it's also the fact that my father read Robin Hood, The Quiet Man, and The Scottish Chiefs* out loud to me when I was 10.

I'd love to write about the odd and profound effect these books had on me, but this is supposed to be a review of The Wicked and the Just.  So just note that I am predisposed to adore books set in the medieval era and focusing on rebellions against England.

Review: Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves

As soon as I realized the main character in Bleeding Violet was an Afro-Viking, I had to read it.  I've also been meaning to read The Girl who Fell from the Sky by Heidi Durrow and Quicksand by Nella Larsen, but those books don't have monsters.

Afro-Viking is a cool word for the child of a Scandinavian parent and an African or African-American parent.  I'm not positive the main character in Bleeding Violet counts, because her mother is African-American and her father is Finnish.  Finland is not always considered part of Scandinavia.  But I rarely get to use the term Afro-Viking, so I'm going to keep using it until someone corrects me.

The good news and the bad news about the Hunger Games

The bad news is that Katniss is played by a white girl, even though the book describes her as olive-skinned and dark-haired.

The good news is that a number of significant characters are played by people of color.

The bad news is that some audience members were so offended that Rue and Thresh were played by black people, even though the book describes both characters as dark-skinned, that they posted predictably but still infuriatingly stupid comments in Twitter. (Lenny Kravitz as Cinna was not as big a deal, apparently, although there was some stuff about him on Twitter when the movie posters first came out.)

The good news is that Rue and Thresh elicited the most powerful emotional reactions of any characters in the film, and that isn't allowed to happen in the mainstream media as often as it should be.

The bad news is that Rue and Thresh were sort of magical negroes.

The good news is that the book is better than the movie, because it spends more time developing Rue and Thresh's characters. Oh yeah, and in the book, we could see Katniss as a woman of color.

At least, that's what I got out of the debate. I also like the New Yorker blog post, which talks about how rarely blackness is equated with innocence and how often white readers just assume everyone's white--at least everyone they find themselves caring about.

I wonder what Suzanne Collins will eventually say, if she says anything.

Review: Cinder by Marissa Meyer

A short review this time, ladies and gentlemen: Hurray for Asian heartthrobs! The End.

Just kidding. But seriously, I'm always on the lookout for leading Asian men in YA lit, because my boyfriend's Asian, and one thing he often points out is how rare it is to see an Asian man paired with a black or white woman in the media. You'll see Asian women with black or white men, but not the other way around. He believes this is related to the long history of stereotyping Asian men as asexual. So that's another fun game to play while watching commercials: tallying the varieties of interracial couples!

While I'm on the subject, shout-out to Jenny Han's North of Beautiful, which features a wonderfully complex Asian love interest.

Now back to Cinder. This book is based on a concept I wish I'd thought of: setting a fairytale in the future. Donna Jo Napoli, Gail Carson Levine, and Shannon Hale have mined the rich vein of fairytale plots for a number of popular and acclaimed novels. But usually, they use historical settings. Cinder is straight-up Sci-Fi. I can see this launching a whole subgenre, the way Pride and Prejudice and Zombies launched a mash-up subgenre including Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, and Android Karenina. Perhaps this book is even related to that adult lit phenomenon.

In this case, our Cinderella character is a cyborg mechanic working in future East Asia, where a strange plague is mowing down citizens. Cinder tries to hide her cyborg status, because cyborgs are considered second class citizens who can be drafted or sold by their legal guardians to undergo plague research--in other words, to be infected with a disease that has no cure and kills within days. Thus, Cinder tries to keep on the good side of her guardian, harvesting parts from the dump to keep her repair service running and handing over all the proceeds.

Shortly after we meet Linh Cinder, her market stall is visited by a surprising customer: Prince Kai. He wants her to repair an outdated robot. Mysterious, eh? Some chapters of the novel are told from the Prince's perspective, and he has problems of his own: his father has just been infected with the plague and he's being pressured to marry the evil ruler of a colony on the moon. Everyone on Earth fears the "Lunars," because they have evolved differently from Earth-bound humans, developing the ability to manipulate the thoughts and emotions of people around them.

Now, this is one aspect of the book that confused me a little. The story is set in future East Asia, and most characters have Asian names. The prince has "copper" eyes and straight dark hair, so I assume he has some Asian physical characteristics, and I assume the other characters with Asian names do, too. The Lunars, on the other hand, are described as almost preternaturally pale (milky white skin, etc.). So wouldn't the Lunars stand out in an Asian community? However, we learn part way through the book that there are a number of Lunars hiding in plain sight. So I guess it's better to assume that future East Asia is a very diverse community.

This is believable, since the story is set 200 years in the future--plenty of time for migration and intermarriage. And I bet the author didn't want readers to put her futuristic characters in census survey categories. But I wish she's been more explicit about the appearance of the characters since the plot hinged on Lunars being able to blend in. Since she wasn't explicit, you can actually read the novel as though everyone in future East Asia is white.

Although I had questions about the future society in which the story is set, I did like the setting: a gritty, high-tech city overlooked by a gleaming castle and research facility. I also found the main characters endearing, although I didn't find their romance entirely believable. But what really kept me reading were the more villainous characters--the doctor who studies Cinder and the Lunar Queen. The doctor was interesting because he was hard to figure out--he did some despicable things but didn't seem cruel. You could sense that he had reasons for conducting his experiments on cyborgs, and I found him interesting precisely because I didn't trust him. And the queen was wonderful because she was just so powerful. With a villain that evil and in control, you really wonder how the characters will defeat her.

Of course, you don't find out in this book, because it's the first in a series, which I didn't realize until I got pretty close to the end. In fact, despite what I liked about the book, I wasn't sure I wanted to finish it. I guessed some of the twists way before the author confirmed them, and I wasn't sure there were any surprises left. But as I got closer to the end, I found myself sucked into the action. One thing I can definitely praise this book for is the rollicking good story. There were times when I wondered why Cinder wasn't working a little harder on repairing the prince's android, but I can't complain about the pace at the end. It was action-packed!

So after going back and forth about this first installment, I can promise I'll be reading part two. I think this book had brilliant ideas plus a few problems in execution. It still stands out as a romantic adventure story with plenty of action and a unique concept. Oh, and a sweet Asian hero.

*Edited to add: And there's a prequel called Glitches on the Tor site (via Read Now Sleep Later)! You can also buy a Kindle whatever-you-call-it-one-shot thing. But I remain conflicted about Kindle things. My favorite line from the prequel: "Condensation sprang up on Cinder’s steel hand as she went from the chilled air to the house’s warm entryway." And check out the artwork! The illustrator shows sketches and explains the concept here. Something about the Lunar Chronicles seems to inspire the kind of art I want on my wall.

Review: Everybody Sees the Ants by A. S. King

Everyone treats Lucky Linderman like he's crazy since he proposed this for a social studies project: poll the students in the freshman class to see how they would kill themselves. But Lucky's not suicidal. He's just sick of being bullied by Nader McMillan, whose been torturing him since they were seven. And Lucky's not crazy, either. He just dreams about rescuing his grandfather from a POW camp in Vietnam. And then wakes up with bits of the jungle in his bed.

Lucky explains all of this while he's on an impromptu vacation to his Uncle's house in Arizona. His mom takes him there after Nader attacks him at the town pool and Lucky's father, as usual, shrugs it off.

The pace of the book is unusual. It's never boring but I didn't have a strong sense of where it was going. In fact, that's making it hard to write a summary, because I don't know where to stop. There are so many important things to talk about, but many of them aren't revealed until the novel is pretty well developed. This is compounded by the fact that Lucky doesn't exactly tell the story in order. I also couldn't tell which characters were going to be the good guys and the bad guys (with the exception of Nader who was a total villain). But together, this made it all more real.

Another thing I liked about the book is that the author never cops out. There's no it-was-all-a-dream and no bullies-are-just-misunderstood. The bad stuff is bad. And it's real. Including the things that happen in Lucky's dreams. They may not be real in the strictest sense of the word, but they're not just a delusion either. Without ever explaining it, the author shows that Lucky is truly connecting with his grandfather--who he's never met--in his dreaming life. I liked this so much, I think, partly because I was so burnt by Going Bovine, which didn't seem at all real at the end.

And speaking of real, the characters in this book are so real, that I'm still trying to decide if I like one of them. Maybe that's not so weird, but I can't think of this ever having happened before. Usually I know how I feel about characters, and usually I think I know how the author wants me to feel about a character. But with Ginny, I'm still veeeeeeeery conflicted. And before I explain further, I just have to point out that Ginny doesn't even talk to Lucky until page 131. How often is a significant character introduced halfway through the book? Cool.

Anyway, Ginny is a slightly older, fantastically attractive hair model Lucky meets in Arizona. Her parents treat her like a paycheck, so she sneaks out after dark to practice the Vagina Monologues with her butch friends. Lucky thinks she's fantastic, but I didn't dig the way she dragged him around like a lovesick puppy. I thought she got off on his attention, and I wasn't sure the Vagina Monologues were really about being free: I thought they were about rebelling against her parents.

And then there's this really weird scene in which Ginny is letting Lucky "practice" kissing her, while telling him that the first time a girl has sex is "pretty much never romantic." She warns Lucky: "So don't put any high expectations on it. Just try to get through it without hurting anyone ... Guys hate being out of control. And they hate emotions. And they hate feeling let down. So try not to take it out on the girl." She keeps insisting that Lucky has never thought about this stuff and that he needs to think about this stuff so he doesn't end up like "a date rapist or something." This is in between kissing him and telling him it means nothing.

Perhaps now you can see why I don't like Ginny. And I realize it's unfair for me to assume that Ginny is speaking for the author here, but I feel this authorial presence, this message coming through the prose. It's the only moment in the book where I was really aware that a woman had written it. Hmmmmm. I think I don't like it because there's no counterargument. Ginny makes these really negative statements about guys, and Lucky seems to accept them. No one else in the novel speaks up for guys. The only men in the novel are passive (Lucky's dad) or philandering (Lucky's uncle). Lucky himself is pretty wonderful, and maybe that's enough. But Lucky's been through so much crap that Ginny delivering this speech to him, of all people, seems harsh.

But another cool thing is that even though it's becoming clear that I don't like Ginny at all, that in no way diminishes my love of the book. If anything, it increases it. I love books that make me feel something, and this one definitely got to me. There's so much more I could say, but I'm going to stop and return it to the library so someone else can read it instead. I need more people I can talk to about it. It's definitely a conversation-starter.

In which I attack the attack on Walter Dean Meyers

I love a good polemic, and this one is delightfully hair-curling, so I hope everyone will pop over and read Alexander Nazaryan explain why Walter Dean Myers will FAIL as National Ambassador for Young People's Literature.

Of course, I'm a librarian, so maybe my reaction to this opinion piece just shows that it's a good thing I'm not a literature teacher, but I completely disagree with Nazaryan. I mean, I hardly know where to start.

I also don't know much about what the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature is supposed to do exactly, but the title suggests to me that they are supposed to promote young people's literature. And Homer is not young's people's literature.

Also, you can't read Homer all day long. I want my students to become readers, which means to me that reading will be part of their lives in many ways. I want them to read for pleasure as well as enlightenment, and I want them to be able to read the millions of forms and news stories and emails that will fill their lives. And I don't think you have to put down one kind of reading in order to promote another.

Finally, I doubt very much that Walter Dean Myer's mission, as ambassador, is to promote his own literature. I expect he will promote reading and literature in general to many children, and I would argue that he will succeed in an area that Nazaryan and I will undoubtedly fail: in convincing minority kids that reading isn't just for white people. Or old men. Or nerds. Or plucky suburban school girls with adorable quirks who like to read books about butter churns and sleigh rides.

Anyway, the article doesn't even offer an intelligent critique of Dean's writing. It's just an excuse for Nazaryan to talk about his own awesomeness. Way to go, dude. Seriously. He got kids to read and relate to the classics. But why put down other kinds of reading and writing? What I dread much more than the thought that kids will stop reading Homer is that they will assume that all the important books in the world were written hundreds of years ago by dead white men.

* Edited to add: I just went over to the article and posted a comment, and Sarah Flowers, the President of YALSA comments, too! Let the jousting begin!

Review: Half World by Hiromi Goto

There are zillions of books with vaguely medieval fantasy settings, but I love a fantasy world with rough edges and a very specific purpose. Half World is just such a place. It's one of three realms, which were once connected. People passed from the realm of the living to the realm of half-life to the realm of the spirit life and then back to living in a constant cycle.

But somehow the realms were severed, so that living people were reincarnated without passing through the other worlds. Anyone stuck in Half World had to reenact their greatest traumas over and over again without every getting over them. And no one's heard from the Spirit Realm.

Enter a melancholy girl named Melanie Tamaki (Canadian-Chinese, I think?), whose mother is a vague, lifeless woman who lives like a fugitive. One day, Melanie comes home to find the phone lines cut and her mother missing. While she's wondering what to do, she gets an impossible phone call from a man with an icky sticky voice who commands her to go to a highway overpass and look for an emergency door. I bet you can guess what's on the other side.

I knew I could predict the future!

Perfect Chemistry won the RITA in the YA category, just as I predicted! I still haven't read it, because it's chronically on hold. So technically, the prediction was based on nothing. Well, it was based on the book's popularity. (Memo to RI librarians: there are 12 holds on only 10 copies!) But I'm still taking credit.

I did read three of the other nominations and ended up buying all of them for the library, despite their boring, grown-up covers. Seriously, do these look like teen books?



No. OK, maybe the middle one does. But the one on the left screams "Where's my poodle skirt? I want to go to the sock hop!"

Anyway, short reviews after the jump.

Trends in teen lit: Swindlers are the new vampires

So obviously, the beginning of summer reading has completely bowled me over. But I'm back on my feet and in a fighting stance, so hello again! I'm here to announce a new trend: classy, old fashioned criminality. Actually, I'm not sure "young criminals" is as popular a theme as I would like it to be, but just today Cat Burglar Black, White Cat, and Heist Society all passed across my desk, putting me in mind of the ragtimey soundtrack to The Sting with Robert Redford.

Cat Burglar Black, by Richard Sala, is arguably part of a genre-within-a-genre: the education of young criminals. It's a graphic novel in which a sticky-fingered, white-blond orphan is rescued from a Dickensian orphanage by a strange relative. Then she's promptly deposited in a mysterious school for girls that only has 4 pupils, where it seems she is expected to play an important role using the extralegal skills she developed at the orphanage.

It has an odd sense of humor to it. It's sort of a parody of all those novels about con artist orphans (Do those novels really exist, or am I just thinking of the movie Candleshoe?), but it's more awkward than funny. I had to keep checking to make sure it wasn't by Joann Sfar. It also reminded me of the movie St. Trinians, which is also about an English girls school where the girls learn the criminal arts. Sidenote: St. Trinians is based on a series of drawings by cartoonist Robert Searle. Obviously, Robert Searle isn't part of the current trend in YA books that I am attempting to posit, but the movie based on his work is evidence. So is Catherine Jink's Evil Genius.

White Cat, but Holly Black, imagines a world like ours, except with "curse workers," or people who can have a magical affect on you by touching you with their hands. In this world, everyone wears gloves and those with magical abilities are called "curse workers." Because curse work--all kinds, even nice kinds, like luck work--are illegal, most curse workers are associated with organized crime. Cassel's family is no exception, although he's an exception in the sense that, unlike the rest of his kin, he has no magical abilities. What he does have is a crush on the heiress to a crime family throne, a guilty conscience, and a sleep disorder that might just get him killed--or at least kicked out of boarding school. Cassel is also a bit of a con artist, and the book teaches you a few tricks of the trade. At the end, Black references books like Games Criminals Play and The Big Con, which was also reviewed on Guys Lit Wire, and which is cataloged under the subject heading "Swindlers and Swindling," which is adorable.

Rape Scenes

I was talking with my sister on the phone last night about rape scenes in books and whether or not they're exploitative. I had a friend in grad school who actually shut the book every time she came across a rape scene. I'm not that hard core, but I definitely sympathize with her stance. For one thing, I read for pleasure, mostly, so why read something so unsettling? Of course, we can't always look away from unsettling things. But there has to be a good reason to look, like a lesson learned or a better understanding of other people, or ourselves.

And then there's the more disturbing issue of rape scenes that aren't unsettling enough. I was reading a graphic novel yesterday that included two rape scenes. While they weren't graphic, something about the art was so pulpy--the woman's clothing clinging to her breasts in artistic shreds, her mouth a perfect "o"--that I couldn't get the images out of my head. They were sexy rape scenes. The more I thought about it, the more angry I was.

I had been considering the graphic novel for my YA section. I do include some books with sex and violence, as long as they are generally worthy and pass the no-false-advertising test. In other words, I'll put books with "graphic" material on the shelves as long as the description and packaging of the book warn readers that it's going to be that kind of book. And frankly, the book I was considering focused on a historical figure who was known for violence, so no false advertising, but ... still. No way can I do it. I didn't know I had this particular criteria for evaluating books, but there it is: no glorification of sexual violence.

RILA Conference reflections: Fat Lit

I didn't get to attend as much of the RILA conference as I wanted to, because my car got sick. But I did get to attend the Fat Lit workshop Thursday AM, and I've been thinking about it ever since. Lisa Pazer is going to present a complete version of her "Fat Lit" research at the Young Adult Literature Symposium, so I'm not going to steal her thunder (or her intellectual property). However, I do have some thoughts of my own.

Pazer, co-author of forthcoming Teenage Waistland, analyzed the plots of a number of books with overweight protagonists, from Precious to The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, and measured how "fat-accepting" the narratives were. But then she took it in a direction I hadn't expected. She asked whether librarians had an obligation to seek out books that model healthy habits, as well as books that encourage a positive body image no matter what your weight. This is in light of the disturbing trend in obesity.

It was obvious she'd hit on a hot topic, and the discussion following her powerpoint ranged from rewarding children with cookies to hiding a body-image obsession behind a commitment to whole foods. Which brings me to revisit a book I reviewed on Good Reads a little while ago: Fat Cat by Robin Brande.

Books for Breakups

I have created another book list! This one is just a, um, what does wikipedia call it? A stub? A schlub? A stem? It's just a beginning. It has only 8 titles, and I'm sure there are more, but here's the "disclaimer" at the top:

WARNING: The endings of these books are unpredictable!!! If I made a list of books in which everyone ended up as miserable as you are right now (sorry), then you’d know how all the books ended, and you wouldn’t be motivated to finish them, right? So instead, I’m offering you a mix of happy and sad endings, books about people who move on, people who get back together with their ex’s, people who break up with the love-of-their-lives because they just can’t get their crap together (I’m still bitter about that one), people who learn to love being single, and people who never, ever, ever give up hope. So I hope these books make you feel better, but it’s possible they will make you feel a lot worse. However, I promise they will make you feel something. And that’s better than listening to people tell you there are plenty of fish in the sea, whatever that means.

Teasers after the jump.

Review: You Don't Even Know Me: Stories and Poems About Boys by Sharon Flake

This is one of those books that I wasn't even planning on reading because I knew it would be good. I try to spend my time reading the books I'm not sure about or that I think I'll have to sell to kids. But I figured Sharon Flake didn't need my help getting kids to read her book, so I just put it on the shelf.

But I'm visiting a high school on Monday and I was thinking of reading a few excerpts from new books, so I took You Don't Even Know Me back off the shelf and proceeded to read it cover to cover. I figured I might as well write about it, too.

Now, Sharon Flake has great narrative voice. No question. But what makes her books so significant is the subject matter. She's just plain writing about stuff no one else is writing about. Like wanting to hook up with an older woman or trying to help out a 9-year-old who knows more about the streets than you do.

Sharon Flake definitely writes about issues--AIDS, suicide, sex abuse, and gangs in this volume alone. But she's never preachy, and I'm trying to figure out how she does it. But there's no one way. For example, in one story, she shows us what it's like to have a caretaker who's obese. It takes an hour and a half to walk a few blocks to the shoe store. You live on disability checks. You think everyone's staring even when they're not. I'm thinking the story is about how hard it is to live in a situation like that, but it turns out the story is about how good the boy has it--and he knows it.

Behold the beauty of my Twilight Readalike Booklist!

I've been meaning to make a booklist like this for ages. In fact, I meant to make it, and then I figured the Twilight thing was over, so I gave up the idea, and then people kept asking for vampire books, so then I went back to meaning to make it.

But now I have a color printer! I am unstoppable! And the blurbs are on the back! My dream is to print it on an 11x17 paper and make it foldable. But perhaps I should actually make it smaller? Anyway, blurbs after the jump.