Honey Bunches of Books

Hiatus means backlog, and that means mini-reviews!  It's too bad, too, because I had clever titles for these reviews.

Let's start with Moral Ambiguity, Part 3: Not That Ambiguous.  Because I was on a little moral ambiguity roll back there, and Not a Drop to Drink, by Mindy McGinnis, fit right in. 

Lynn lives alone in a world where you guard what you have closely--especially water.  Since her mother's death, she's on her own in protecting the pond that keeps her alive.  She's never exchanged more than a handful of words with anyone but her mother in her life.

But when she encounters a wandering family who can't take care of themselves, she agrees to take in their five year old daughter until they can get back on their feet.  Lynn's growing connections to the people around her--to fierce, fragile Lucy; her very pregnant, very angry mother; her young, helpless uncle; and Lynn's own longtime neighbor whom she barely knows--change how she views everything.

Their world is full of danger, and when the time comes to protect themselves, Lynn's matter-of-fact ability to do what needs to be done is vital.  This is where the post title comes in, and what I think made this story so good.  Lynn was raised by a hard woman, and her values are frontier values.  You care for yourself and your own, you don't let yourself be taken advantage of, and you take action when it's needed.

The other people in the story are more "civilized"--they come from the city, where the rule of law and the structures of society remove a lot of the decision making from life.  I've always thought it was interesting that this invisible thing called civilization--the formal structures like police and roads, and the informal ones like the social contract and neighborhoods--really hold up a lot of our lives.  There are a million things that you hardly think about that go into keeping the world running, and when you remove the automation from those things, the bare machinery of humanity is exposed.  When do you kill a man who is going to come and steal your water?  When he's hurt you?  When you're sure he's coming for you? When you've seen him hurt someone else?

Lynn's internal barometer is solid--she knows right from wrong, and she doesn't argue with herself.  The lines that she will and won't cross are not where ours might be, but they're all the stronger for it, and I think that watching Lynn grow without compromising herself was the most interesting thing about this book.

Next, Is There Life on Maaaaaaars?  Yes, there is--Mark Watney is his name, and he's been left for dead when the third manned mission had to evacuate early in extreme weather.  He's Andy Weir's The Martian, and he's a smart, cheerful, ingenious fellow who can make science fun! And lifesaving!

So Mark's stuck on the planet with all the supplies for six people to spend one month on the planet.  The rest of the crew is en route back to Earth and doesn't know he's alive. The communication equipment's been destroyed, so he's on his own.  His only hope is that the next mission is scheduled to arrive in four years.  Now he's just got to live that long.

This is a science-heavy book.  It's the uber-how-to.  It's a competence fetishist's dream.  Mark's going to run out of water in a few months, so he has to figure out how to turn hydrogen and oxygen into water.  The next mission is going to land on the other side of the planet, so he needs to figure out how to get to the other side of Mars.  Seriously, could you get to the other side of the US if the outdoors was a vacuum?  No?  Me neither. 

This is not a psychological study of a man alone.  This is handbook for survival.  Food, shelter, resource allocation, problem solving.  The positivity was Capraesque, but that's what made it so good--it wasn't about how awful people can be, or how hard it is to be human.  This is man vs. nature in its purest form, and you know who wins?  SCIENCE!  Science proves how freaking awesome it is, and you will wish you knew more about chemistry and engineering when you are done with this book. 

Seriously, this has been a great book year.  I'm totally on a roll.

Moral Ambiguity, Part 1: The Bad News

I've got a really fun and thoughtful and morally complex book that I want to talk about, but I also squeezed in a little something I grabbed from NetGalley that sounded like a Hunger Games knockoff, and I thought it could be fun.

The good news is, I finished it.  I don't think I've ever skimmed a book so skimmily--I caught most of the dialogue, but pretty much any moment that involved standing still, I was reading two or three words per page, and it was more than enough.

The premise: instead of a death sentence, criminals are sentenced to a short period in the Compass Room.  They're monitored through implants and put through tests to determine whether they're evil.  If they're evil, the Compass Room kills them; if they live, it means they're not evil, and they go free.  Because SCIENCE.

Anyway, Evelyn's been sentenced to the Compass Room, and she's confident that it will kill her.  She was convicted as a terrorist and for the murder of her best friend, and what she's guilty of is left vaguely up in the air.  She's put into the Room--NOT to be confused with the Hunger Games arena, which it is exactly like--with nine other young criminals.  Illusions test their reactions to figure out what kind of people they are--NOT to be confused with the testing in Divergent, which it is exactly like.

Let's start with the petty stuff: the title sounds cool, but "wicked" isn't a noun.  The past tense of "lie down" is "lay down," not "lied down."  The word "tenseness" should probably be "tension," and I'm only saying "probably" to be polite.  Not sure whether I should blame the author or the editor, but this book was packed densely full of these touches--somewhere between little errors and bad writing.

But the real thing that both got me excited and pushed my buttons in the book was the idea of blame, guilt, and goodness. The idea that they might be measurable, malleable, or even just that they're worth wrangling with.  I love when things wrap up neatly in fiction, but I'm also intensely aware that it's a fantasy.  Things in the real world are never simple, or black and white.  The idea that guilt is more complicated than a factual statement of events is such a seller for me in a book.

It's very clear from the beginning that Evelyn didn't kill  her friend, but it's also clear that she considers herself very guilty.  This is a YA trope that is generally pretty weak--I understand survivor guilt and all, but the book that teases you about how guilty the protagonist is and then reveals that--gasp!--they are not what you would consider guilty at all! is old hat.  I'll grant them this--Evelyn is guilty of something.  What she is guilty of and what she feels guilty about are not the same thing, but there you have another interesting seed that isn't explored.

You also have a room full of convicted murderers sentenced to death, all of whose crimes are lurid and horrible, but none of whom are really traditionally "guilty" of much.  I'm as big a believer as anyone in the idea that the bad guy wasn't born that way, but was shaped by the world he lives in and the life he's led, but that does not mean that everyone who commits murder is really a sweet, pure-hearted soul who genuinely did it to save someone else's life.  Seriously, if you took 10 people on death row, I would be willing to grant you that five of them shouldn't die for their crime (probably a few of them are even innocent), but I bet you wouldn't find that five of them DID commit murder, but for genuinely good and pure intentions. 

This sounds political; it's not.  It's just that there is so much moral complexity in the world, and very little of it was on display here.  And I know I was asking for more than I should have from this book, but between that and the rocky use of the English language, the only thing here to recommend the book is that I read it in about two hours. 

Well, skimmed.

Time Travel Done Right

Let's skip over my long absence, and please don't expect a year-end post because not today.  Let me just give a quick shout out to the best book I've read this month, just what a lot more books should be: All Our Yesterdays, by Cristin Terrill.

Time travel narratives can rarely stand close deconstruction, and there's almost always some "wibbly wobbly timey wimey" hand waving to make things go smoothly.  All I ask is that you explain the rules and then stick to them: check.

 You've got all kind of sort of things here that might drive me nuts--there's kind of a sort of love triangle, but oh, it's not like that.  There are so many kinds of love  here, just among the few main characters--siblings and like-siblings, parents and like-parents, crushes and longings and necessary-friendship-has-brought-us-together.  They're all sensitive and complicated.  Marina knows full well her parents are useless as parents, but it still breaks her heart anew whenever they fail to come through for her.  Her best friend's brother and guardian is an amazing guy and knows his brother's friends and has inside jokes with them.  It's so real.

It grabs you at the beginning--Em is trapped in a cell, periodically tortured, thinking about escape, her only companion a voice from the next cell through the vent.  A hidden message, an escape, a time machine, and the story unfolds, in the present and in the past to which she travels.  You get enough information that you're not confused, but there are plenty of secrets.

And thank you, Cristin Terrill, for not making your suspense depend on keeping secrets that we all figured out early on.  With an author I've never read, I always worry--once I figure something out, are they going to pretend or assume that I don't know this until it's the big reveal at the end?  No, no--there are plenty of reveals, all along the path.  Yeah, I knew who was what early on (mostly), but there were more surprises.

A lot of the sense of the story relies on awkward emotional truths--basically, on a determined but really unhappy about it assassin.  At first, the whole "can't bring myself to do it" thing worried me, but god, do you remember that really good friend of yours that you once had a crush on--no, loved--who was so wonderful to you, but just so obviously didn't see you that way that you never even said anything?  But you hoped, and you accidentally leaned against them sometimes, and god, if only they'd see?  Yeah, I am so right there with you, Cristin Terrill and Team All Our Yesterdays.

There will be a sequel.  It does not need one.  This book made me really happy.

Update: 12/30: I am editing this post because I left out my favorite thing about the book! So, so many books about big world changers ignore the dark side of this stuff, the moral ambiguity that exists when the world is going to change.  Everyone wants to make the world better, but the stakes are already so high that there's no way for that to happen without something ugly taking place.  That recognition is what makes the bad guy bad AND what makes the good guys good.  I have so much respect for this complexity.  So I wanted to add that.

Moral Ambiguity, Part 2: Kicking Ass and Taking Names

I loved Rachel Bach's Fortune's Pawn with a fiery passion, as I have mentioned previously.  The band of misfits rattling around the galaxy, Devi Morris and her amazing suit of armor, with just enough confusing mystery to keep me tempted, but not so much that I'm bewildered.  It was a fun, Firefly-esque, action-packed charmer of a romp.

And then along comes Honor's Knight and turns it all inside out, pretty much instantly, in the most AWESOME way possible. The charming madcap crew is on a deadly serious mission that involves some VERY morally sketchy behavior.  The gruff-but-respectable captain, it turns out, is pretty much torturing innocent children for the good of the universe.  The Bad Guy (not to be confused with the Dangerous Force of Nature) from the previous book might actually be on the side of the angels.  And the angels may or may not be psychotic.

I am always craving books that don't pretend the answers are easy.  I'm always a little disappointed when the "right" thing to do is easy to determine, and turns out to actually work.  No, we can't sacrifice those civilians to save the world--there's got to be another way!  And then--here's the place where it falls apart--there is. How uplifting! I love a happy ending as much as the next guy--more, depending on who the next guy is.

But reality isn't like that, and the world is full of trade-offs.  You can't Kobayashi Maru your way out of every situation, in spite of what Doctor Who has tried to tell us for the past few years.

There are some good examples of these stories: the episode of Torchwood where they need to sacrifice one child to save the world.  The Cabin in the Woods, where the whole premise is to save the world by killing a bunch of teenagers.  It's wrong to kill a bunch of teenagers...but what if it's the only way to save the world?

E.M. Forster said, "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." (The internet, by the way, usually quotes this as "courage" instead of "guts."  I find the original charming.) But there's a difference between a country--an idea and a political system--and The World, humanity, and life as we know it.  But how can you tell the difference?

I'm deep in the rabbit hole here.  The point is, this book starts out turning things on their heads.  This might be the best second book in a trilogy I've ever read--it makes things more complicated, explains the things you wanted to know from the first one, sets up its own whole set of action, raises the stakes, adds depth to the characters--it was so good, guys.  Just so good.

AND!  And Heaven's Queen is coming out next month.  AND I HAVE MY ARC!  I will get back to you on that very, very soon.  I got an ARC of this book, too, for the record.  I would have bought it the day it came out if I hadn't.

The Liars' Club

Reviews have been quite mixed about E. Lockhart's We Were Liars, and weirdly, I agree with all of them.  I agree that it's kind of hard to sympathize with the poor little rich girl narrator, and also that the story is poignant and heartbreaking.  I agree that the writing is gorgeous, and that the narrator's unreliability is done with a deft touch.  I agree that the "twist" is made too much The Thing about the book..

Actually, no.  I'm going to break entirely with the word on this book and say that there is no twist.  There's a reveal--a couple of reveals, actually, but the one that everyone's been calling the twist is, I would argue, quite clear from the narrative.  I definitely figured it out right away, and my feeling is that Lockhart intended me to, or at least wasn't hiding it.  (And I apologize to anyone who didn't see it coming.)

Because I'm not sure that I have coherent things to say about this, some points.

• I read this book while on vacation at an arrive-by-boat getaway spot with an old friend, whose family has been coming to this retreat for years (and sometimes sniping at each other while there).  This element was kind of surreal, and I honestly couldn't tell you if my experience/understanding/visualizations about Big Generational Family Retreats colored how I saw Cady's life on the island.


• Why were they the Liars?  There is NO indication why they were called that--she says that they always had that nickname, and it's crystal clear that the Sinclairs are all liars, that this is their family legacy.  But how did this group of teenagers get the name?  There is no hint, and that felt like a big hole to me, especially in a story where the persistence of images, of roles in a family, and of memory in shaping the present are all strong themes.


• Johnny and Mirrin kind of get short shrift compared to Gat.  I sometimes felt like they were there to flesh out the quantity, the magnitude of the group, and to explain Gat's presence, and to keep this from being Just About Love.  But Gat is the most powerful presence in the group, by far.

And this next one is super-spoilery, but I think it's the thing most worth talking about here, and it's the reason it's a tough book to blog about.

• I think the most interesting thing about the Tragedy is that it was entirely preventable.  So often, when overwhelming guilt is the narrator's problem, we have this long build up of why they feel guilty, and it ends up being that they didn't stop someone else from doing something, or that they contributed in a tiny way to something.  Essentially, it's the kind of guilt that a third party doesn't feel was justified, and we as the audience forgive our hero right away. 
  
  But this ISN'T.  Cady came up with an awful idea, got too drunk to do it properly, and then screwed it up in a horrifying way.  And while there's a little guilt to go around, it's mostly her fault.  I think the question of how someone lives with the fact that they are at fault in something terrible is so rarely addressed in fiction--probably because there's no good answer.  It's just a big ugliness that's nearly impossible to face.  It fits in with our moral ambiguity theme of earlier this year: how do you deal with these impossible questions?  

So, We Were Liars.  In the end, we're left with ugliness cleaning up after ugliness, and maybe finding some humanity underneath?  I think in the end, I could go back and forth about whether I liked the characters, or thought their growth was worth my time, or whether the reveals made sense or were kind of sloppy.  But I don't actually care about any of that, because this book was just beautiful--gorgeously written and full of so much love.  I don't mind that it's not perfect, because it's worth reading, just as it is.

Metadinner

Interestingly, at no point during book club--over dinner, in a restaurant--was my mind drawn to any parallels between our meal and that of the characters in The Dinner, our selection this month.  It's an obvious parallel, even without the obsequious maitre d' or the tiny but overpriced portions.  (I am seriously, deeply in love that pecan chicken salad.)

But of course, we're not a bunch of hateful sociopaths, so OF COURSE it didn't feel anything like that horrible dinner. We're good human beings, many of whom are trained in helping young people with serious psychological problems.  Our conversation was amusing and interesting--and the book made for great conversation; it's really an object lesson in picking a book club book.  Moral ambiguity, unfolding layers of information and character, excellent writing, a quick read, and a few "what just happened there?" moments. 

The plot is described in many places: two couples meet for dinner to discuss an Issue with their teenaged sons.  You know this from the cover.  You learn early on that the two men are brothers, one a big name politician and the other more of an average joe who's kind of resentful of the fancy restaurant his brother chose.  His brother's a snob and a fake, you see.  And the first third of the book is mostly about that--about the absolutely disgusting pretension of really fancy restaurants that are just stealing your money, and about how much we hate phonies and hypocrites. 

Honestly, at the halfway point I called the book slow; if you're going to rely on hiding the real point of the book from me for that long, you have to give me an artificial point of the book to hang my hat on, and "I wish the waiter would stop telling me what country the ingredients come from" is not enough.  When the revelations start to come--the narrator found a troubling video on his son's phone; there's a story in the news recently; there's this incident from a few years ago--none of them are really surprising.  Guess the plot based on the cover blurb; these scenarios probably crossed your mind.  But about halfway through, as the revelations of fact begin, so do the revelations of character.

And THAT is where the book really kind of blows up in your face.  Because you spend time with each of these characters, feeling embarrassed for or scornful of or frightened for or frightened of each of them, and then you get an inch, and then an inch more, and you wonder how reliable your narrator is, and then you wonder if maybe he's totally reliable and your judgement is off, and then wait a minute, really!?

I've heard that this is the new Gone Girl.  (Well, someone at book club had heard it; I heard it for the first time last night.)  It's not Gone Girl, and I wouldn't ever draw that parallel of the experience of reading the book.  But when you get to the end and you look back on it, you might think: yeah, you know, the place you end up in this book is not too distant from the place you end up after Gone Girl.  You just took a completely, totally unrelated route to get there. 

And then, if you're me, you go read a nice book about nuns to try to leave that place behind you.

Awesome, awesome book club, by the way.  On which subject, I really want to watch Pride and Prejudice again.  This will happen; there will be a Viewing.  Count on it.

I Am Waiting for More

I don't know what's going on with Allen Zadoff's I Am the Weapon series.  The first one was published under Boy Nobody a while ago, and now maybe it's being republished under The Hit, I guess?  Or maybe that's overseas; I'm unclear.  Anyway, I read I Am the Weapon and got really into it--slam, bang, boom.

So now we have I Am the Mission, and again, lucky enough to get an ARC.  In fact, I was sitting there on Netgalley waiting for it to come out, and I almost peed myself with joy when I saw it, requested it, and got it, right away.  And then I gulped it down, and now all I want to know is what the next one will be called and when it will come out.

I'll admit, Mission isn't as good as Weapon.  The second in a series rarely is, and my theory is that, even when the book is great, it can never surprise you like the first one did--finding a new author/character/series to love is a big part of the thrill, and that New Series Energy is not going to be there for books two through &c.

So Mission didn't get to surprise me as much.  Also, the author challenged himself here--this time our narrator is up against a paramilitary organization, which means he's not the only guy with training in the game.  There's also some internal strife at the Program, which, given the fact that things already operate on a Really, Really Need to Know basis, means he's pretty confused and adrift, support-wise.

This time, his name is Daniel, and he's being sent in to kill the leader of a militia-style camp/cult of young people.  It's a short term job; he's to strike at a recruiting event, not to go inside the compound.  These people have already taken out one Program kid, and they're not risking Daniel.

But a plan never survives first contact, and Daniel finds himself inside, cut off, and trying to fulfill his mission and navigate the fraught politics of a paranoid military organization.  On  the way, he finds and figures out more about his own organization, and maybe even his own past.

I'm usually not one for the broader story arc, preferring the mission on the table for the day.  But honestly, the camp parts dragged--it was a lot more waiting for an opportunity than acting, and the real drama of the story wasn't there.

It was with Daniel, cut off from the Program, examining his own motivations.  I'll admit that I guessed some of the twists and turns early, but it didn't take away from them.  This is a solid middle book, and I am completely set up for the third one.  We're going to find out about Daniel's father, and the moral ambiguity of being an assassin for the good guys is going to wash out in the end.  Allen Zadoff, get writing!