Bohjalian One-Two: Nuclear Homelessness

When you have an author you like and then you read too much of him, you can get burned out.  I thought I was burned out on Chris Bohjalian, but either I had a bad run or the burnout has passed, because I just finished his newest book Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, and reading it was a really good experience.  Hooray; we're back in business!

Emily Shepard is a pretty normal girl living in northern Vermont--kind of an underachiever, a bit of a wild child, but mostly in a standard high school parties-with-beer kind of way.  And it's not too surprising--her parents probably drink a little too much themselves, and fight a little too much.  Northern Vermont isn't for everyone, but it's where the job is; Emily's dad runs a nuclear power plant.

Then one day, everything goes figuratively up in smoke (literally it's more of a meltdown).  A stormy autumn flooded part of the plant; the town is evacuated.  Emily finds herself with no parents, no connections, and a last name that is synonymous with "drunken screw-up who destroyed a community."  She walks away from the evacuation center, and keeps on walking.

Bohjalian writes Issue books--each one takes an event around some topic and brings you the points of view of different characters, different aspects.  Midwifery, holistic medicine, interracial adoption, transsexuality, animal rights. Here you might think you were getting the book about nuclear power, but really you're not--that's not what's explored here at all.  This is a book about a homeless teenager--someone who starts out pretty much fine, but a combination of impulsiveness and a bad situation and suddenly she's doing drugs, shoplifting, cutting, and selling sex at the truck stop for cash.  Emily is a smart girl, but she's a teenager who can't always deal with her own feelings, and when her situation falls apart, she follows very quickly.

It's about how those little decisions get made, what friendship and family and safety look like when everyone around you is a mess.  Why do you walk out of a warm apartment full of sad, stoned kids onto a winter street and never go back?  How much of the mess is about the past and how much about the present?

The story is not linear, which I think is a huge strength.  Sometimes you'd get glimpses from multiple points in time on the same page.  The structure of the book is Before Cameron and After Cameron--a young runaway Emily takes under her wing--but you learn hints of everything.  You know someone is going to leave before you even meet them; you know things will fall apart before they even come together. 

The structure just makes sense, not only from an emotional standpoint, but also from a pretty practical one--life on the street is a jumble of events and people and problems.  They happen in order--the order is never lost--but really, they relate to each other in constellations around issues, and around Emily's attempts to come to terms with her past, her present, her parents, and herself.

I'm really glad to enjoy a Chris Bohjalian book so much again.  Someone said I should read Skeletons at the Feast, and I really think I'm going to now.  My streak continues!

Note: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair review.

Dallas vs. Chevalier

I had the absolutely bizarre experience of having 26 hours to myself this weekend, and I suspect no one is surprised that I used it to read a bunch of books.  One of them was Tracy Chevalier's The Last Runaway, which I'd been pretty excited about.

I think part of my excitement was that a mainstream historical novel had caught my eye.  I do read an awful lot of speculative fiction. Another part was the Quakers--love the Quakers!  Love most books about religious people wrestling with real world problems, actually--it's not so much about the spirituality as about how processing the world might be different if you have a firm set of rules that you're starting with, however you feel about them.  Anyway, it's an interesting time period, from a point of view I didn't know much about, and I was excited.

In retrospect, part of the appeal was probably that the description of the book brought Sandra Dallas to mind.  I really should read more Sandra Dallas; I have a whole backlog of them.  (Including one about Mormons!)  But I think that the idea of a Sandra Dallas type book with the literary cachet of Tracy Chevalier (does she have literary cachet?  Or am I just remembering that one big Girl with a Pearl Earring moment?) really got my hopes up. 

In the end, I was wishing it was more like a Sandra Dallas book.  I ended up feeling very disconnected from most of the characters, and not particularly emotionally invested in their fates.  I liked the details of living in 1850 Ohio, especially coming from a bustling city in England--milliners, dairy farmers, crazy liberals in Oberlin.  And I can't say I didn't like Honor Bright, the story's heroine.  I just didn't really connect with her.

When Honor's spunky sister decides to move to America to marry a man she  hasn't seen in years, recently jilted Honor--pretty much the definition of non-spunky--makes the most spontaneous decision of her life to join her.  A month of harrowing seasickness convinces her that she will never be able to return to England and is stuck in America.  Halfway to their new home in Ohio, her sister dies suddenly of a fever.  Now all Honor has to look forward to is a never-to-be brother-in-law in a place she wasn't all that keen on going to in the first place.

Honor (and her family, and her future community) is a Quaker, and in 1850, this often means being in the middle of the slavery question.  I think the political angles of that question were quite interesting, and the fact that all of the Quakers appear to feel differently on the subject was also nicely complicated.  But Honor is so reserved, so distant from everyone, you really don't get to know anyone in this book.  Everything is seen from the outside, and I felt very detached.

Then there's Donovan, the charming slave hunter who crosses Honor's path repeatedly.  This is a Jordan Catalano moment if there ever was one--which might mean something different to you than it does to me.  I never understood the appeal of Jordan Catalano.  I mean, yeah, he's cute.  I get that a high school girl would fall for this.  But everyone--parents, teachers, viewers--seems to think he's deep and smart if only he'd try harder.  He's not.  Jordan Catalano gives every indication of being actually, genuinely dim.

Somehow everyone things there's a good man in Donovan who will do the right thing.  Even though he's a slave hunter.  Even though he's quite cruel to many people.  Honor keeps saying that she thinks there's the potential for a good man in him, but I assumed that was wishful thinking talking, except that the book never contradicted it.

And just as Donovan's unpleasantness is minimized, so is the physical brutality of slavery.  I guess it's just that everything is downplayed here--everything plays out at a very mild-mannered level, when I was really expecting more of a sense of the drama.  I mean, there are deaths and births and marriages and mourning here, but the tone is all very even and understated. 

I guess I just wanted more from this book.  It wasn't bad; there just wasn't much there.  I'm really surprised that I've written so many words about what was missing.  And now, like I said, I really want to go read True Sisters for a fresh Sandra Dallas fix.  Or maybe reread Alice's Tulips, which I think is much closer to what I wanted The Last Runaway to be.

Look; I summed it up in one sentence after all.

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.

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.

If It's Good Enough for Hitchcock

I was never able to get into Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, probably because I saw the movie with Joan Fontaine and therefore a) knew the ending, and b) kind of hated the narrator because Joan Fontaine is kind of whiny.  But I didn't know that du Maurier wrote the short story "The Birds" until this anthology popped up on Netgalley. (I got a free review copy of this book.)

I remembered the short story from a high school English anthology, and I remembered really loving it.  I've thought of it occasionally over the years and wondered who wrote it, and I was so excited to have the opportunity to read it again.

And man, it didn't disappoint.  Reading this again, I recognize it as a part of a genre that I didn't think about at the time; "dystopia" wasn't a YA section word at the library when I was a kid.  But this is process dystopia at its finest--change is coming and you can only hunker down.  

The story is only related to the Hitchcock movie in the broadest strokes--the birds are attacking.  This is a tale of dread and preparation--you know the kind.  There's also a very interesting forward here about du Maurier's relationship with Hollywood, particularly Hitchcock, who said that he read source material only once and then forgot it to make his own story.

Honestly, this is a great example of the book being better.  It's just a short story, but the sense of dread, the eeriness of the setting, and the narrator's practicality and localness make such a difference in the experience here.

The other stories both range wide and have a lot in common.  Mostly, the commonality is tone--the slow build of suspense, the sense of events unfolding toward some inevitable ending--sometimes known, sometimes not--that is mysterious and unnerving.  Some of them have a twinge of the supernatural; in "Monte Verita," the narrator tells of a remote mountain fortress and the people who are drawn there, mysteriously, never to return.  Some might be supernatural or psychological; in "The Apple Tree," the main character finds the tree in his yard reminds him of his deceased wife, and we learn about their marriage and their characters through that recognition.  Some of the characters you have to hate, like the Marquise in "The Little Photographer," who married an older man for money and lives only for admiration.  Others you wish the best for, like the narrator of "Kiss Me Again, Stranger," who is regular chap who falls for a girl and has one fascinating night with her.

Each of these stories is creepy, in its way, or maybe just full of a building tension that carries you through the methodical unfolding of the narration.  You have an idea where each one is going, but by the time it gets there, it's both stirring and inevitable.

So yes, I'm still having a great book year.  Brenda, I recommend this one for you.

Marchetta

I just finished Finnikin of the Rock, by Melina Marchetta.  I owe Sarah a huge, huge than you for the insane gushing she did about this series, because I must have started this book four times, and I would NEVER have finished it if she had not shouted it from the rooftops.  Repeatedly.  In all caps.

I've tried to read other Marchetta books before--I tried Jellicoe Road several times, and I had the same problems that I had at the beginning of Finnikin.  It's not exactly an in medias res beginning, but there is a serious infodump right out of the gate.  In Jellicoe Road, there was the main character's mysterious background and her complicated relationship with her school and with her teacher who is also by the way missing and then there are all these other characters who I think are in flashback but who are they and I don't know--what?

Finnikin is the same.  You start out with a happy kingdom and Finnikin and his friends and family.  That lasts about three pages.  Then the five days of the unspeakable happen--the kingdom is invaded, a bunch of awful stuff happens, half the population is ejected and there's a magical barrier around the kingdom and BAM--ten pages in, it's ten years later.

Marchetta doesn't so much do worldbuilding as she dives in with two feet, as though you already knew all this stuff, so there's no point in telling you any of it.  And there's so much of it--so much about the politics of the kingdoms and the family and friends of the main characters and how everyone's spent the past ten years and and and....it's just a jumble.  So I couldn't get a handle on why Finnikin was so cranky, or whether Sir Topher was weak or just wisely measured.

And for a while, it seemed like a bunch of random things happened.  Finnikin had a dream, and then there was this girl at the convent, and then they're going somewhere.  And I'm not sure why, or what they'll do when they get there, and then some random things happen, and characters are introduced.  This is all the part I read several times, because I kept putting it down for ages because it made no sense.

You know, it reminded me of Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter, in that I had very little idea what was going on, and just basically went with the flow.  For a while it's like surfing--you just let the wave take you.  Eventually, though, I find that sort of thing gets old; if I can't connect to the action, I can't care about it enough.

And this is where Finnikin came through for me.  I think the point where I really started to get it was just after Finnikin and Evanjalin became friends, when Finnikin went to the mines.  It's such a huge reversal, but that section is the part that really turns all the Lumaterans into real people for me. 

Because really, this book is about home and family, and what makes your people yours, when all the easy and practical stuff is stripped away.  The Lumaterans have been living in exile for ten years--in refugee camps, integrating into other societies, wandering.  Their passion for their culture, their homeland, their lost families--it's absolutely overwhelming, and the connection that just their nationality and experience of exile creates is so moving.  I won't spoiler, but I love that the last scene takes place in a crowd, because it's not just Finnikin's story--it's everyone's story

The sequel is Froi of the Exiles, and I've already put it on my kindle.  Sarah tells me Finnikin is good, but Froi and the third book, Quintana of Charyn, will KILL ME.  I believe her now, and I'm a little afraid.  But in a good way!

Anticipation Interrupted

There's so much exciting stuff coming out this year, and I've been trying to put this post together forever, but it's a darned moving target out there.  Release dates come and go and then it turns out that the Kindle release date isn't for months, or the date has moved, or something else.  So this is sadly in no particular order, and it might be that some of these aren't even coming soon anymore.

The Girl with All the Gifts, by M. R. Carey, is somewhere between highly anticipated and well-reviewed, depending on which side of the pond you're looking at and what format you're looking for.  But there's an extended free preview for the Kindle, and holy crap, it was good.  Creepy and meticulous and just incredible.  I can't wait.

Terry Pratchett's newest Discworld novel, Raising Steam, will follow my favorite character, Moist von Lipwig, on his next adventure. I don't even have a very clear idea of what's going to happen here--some kind of power plant, presumably?--but I hardly care.  Moist can charm his way out of...into....well, my wit abandons me, but he can do anything and I want to watch him do it.  Maybe you already read this; it is out in print, just not on the Kindle yet.  For some reason, I'm waiting.

Princess Labelmaker to the Rescue is not a promising title, but Tom Angleberger has kind of backed himself into a corner with the structure of the series.  The last book was a cliffhanger, so I am completely hooked and absolutely can't wait to watch the kids of McQuarry elementary take on the awful FUNTIME test review system.  Go Dwight!

Dreams of Gods and Monsters, by Laini Taylor.  Guys, I can't even.  I just cannot.  I lovelovelove this series and cannot wait to follow Karou to the end.  (Akiva I can take or leave.  I'm following Karou and Zuzana to the ends of the earth.)

Two words.  Rainbow Rowell.  She's having a much-deserved moment, having come out with All the Books right in a row.  I'm not sure if they're as great as they feel like they are, but I am all full of the warm fuzzy feelings when I read them.  Cannot wait for the new one, Landline.

They just keep coming and coming: Jo Walton's got a new one coming up, My Real Children.  I know nothing about this except that Jo Walton does amazing things. Different things every time.  Can't wait to see what's up next.

There's more: a new volume of Buffy, the last book in the Paradox trilogy (I'm right in the middle of Honor's Knight, very good stuff), a Veronica Mars spinoff novel.  All this between now and the end of the summer.  I'm salivating.  Unfortunately, I'm having a really hard time keeping track of when all these books are coming out, but luckily, I've got more than enough to keep me busy, both bookwise and otherwise.  It's gonna be a good spring!

Worldbuilding 101

Andrea Höst's Stray is a hard book to explain.  It breaks so many rules of storytelling, with lots of telling instead of showing, character soup, and a few elements I couldn't follow (what are the Ddura again?).  But all that is kind of irrelevant, when I just kept reading and reading because I wanted to know what happened.

Cass, our narrator, is awesome.  She's practical and level-headed.  When she finds herself suddenly in a strange and unfamiliar world after walking through a wormhole on the way home from school, she is as confused as any of us would be.  But she's also got the same theories any of us would come up with, because she's watched enough Star Trek and Doctor Who to make some guesses.  When she's faced with a tough moral dilemma and picks the tough but virtuous course, she blames the Scooby Gang (both the ones with the Mystery Machine and the ones with the stakes) for putting her in a position where she knows she needs to do the hard but right thing.

The book is Cass's journal, and it does a better job of reading like a journal than almost any book I've read.  One could look at this as a weakness, because it's a very direct, matter-of-fact recounting of events.  But it's very much like having someone tell you a story--you don't want flowery descriptions, you want to know what happened next.  And because Cass is learning everything as she goes, she explains it all to us.

So when she's rescued from the uninhabited world she wandered into and taken to a city, there's a lot of infodumping.  But think what an infodump it would be, to learn the history of a world that travels between dimensions.  And honestly, the backstory is complicated enough that I think if I had to learn it gradually, I would never have been able to hold it all.  As it is, plenty of it sailed over my head--I just retained enough to follow the monster fights.

But the main story of the book is how Cass is discovered, in this society of psychic powers, to be able to strengthen the powers of anyone who touches her.  She's recruited to help the Setari (psychic space ninjas, as she calls them) protect the world from the creatures that live between dimensions.  Apparently interdimensional travel has its dangers, which no one realized until it was too late.

What are spaces, and pillars, and Lanterans?  I don't know.  No clue.  But I don't care.  I caught enough to keep reading, and what I know is that Cass is part of this team now, and that she's making friends, slowly but surely, and convincing the bureaucracy that she's intelligent and can be an ally, and that she's looking for a way home and coming to terms with her place in this new society. 

Cass is one of the most mentally and emotionally strong characters I've read in a while.  She's surrounded by people who can kick all kinds of butt, but she keeps her head on her shoulders in a way that just keeps me cheering for her, time and again.  I can't wait to read the next book!

Ballet

Linden, thank you SO much for this recommendation; I fell hard for Meg Howrey's The Cranes Dance. I'm going to run out and get her other books, but I think this one will be hard to beat, because it's full of details from the world of professional ballet.  Insider bits make any story that much more fascinating.

I was completely won over in the first chapter, when the narrator, Kate Crane, takes you through a production of Swan Lake.  Now, this is the one ballet I've ever seen performed (no, I've never even seen The Nutcracker), and I've read a novelization of the story, and I still barely know what happens in it.  Kate has a wonderfully wry voice as she explains, for the vast majority of the world that does not follow ballet, all the comings and goings, and the long dancy bits.

Kate's wry voice is really the core of this story.  Ballet, as I think most people know by now, is hard, physically taxing work in a fiercely competitive environment that is judged by exacting standards.  Kate is near the top of this world, in a very comfortable place within it, but it's consumed her whole life, and her sister's, and she's split between wondering if it's worth it and wondering what that even means.

The competition here is not made melodramatic--there's no catfighting or backstabbing.  But there are only so many excellent roles to go around, and there are more gifted dancers who have given their whole lives for this goal than there are places.  Everyone is good, but everyone wants things that not everyone can have.

Kate is a powerful dancer, but her sister Gwen is in a class by herself,  Gwen's emotional struggles,  her  mental health, and her break from ballet are pivotal to the story, though Gwen herself is mostly not present.  Kate is a sister without a sister, and it leaves her adrift.

I'm not describing this well, but let me say that Kate's day to day life, the sharp, witty view she brings to everything in her life, even as she's questioning it all, is really the driving force of the story.  Kate has everything she's worked for, and somehow it feels both right and wrong to her at the same time.  This dissonance, and her blunt, smart, wry observations about it, make this the most readable book I've read in a long time.  

Book Moments

I had two excellent moments this week that I wanted to share--the kind of thing that just makes your day.

I stopped at the library on my way to work to pick up a reserve I had waiting, and when I got there they were unloading the next batch of reserve deliveries.  While the librarian was pulling my book off the shelf, I was scanning the stacks of books that have just arrived.  Right there on top, my next book!  And when I asked for it, they asked me if I had anything else waiting, and so I walked out with three exciting new arrivals!

(For the curious: Fairest: In All the Land, Angel & Faith vol. 4, and Season 2 of Veronica Mars)

Anecdote 2. Warning: ARC bragging ahead.

So I told you recently how much I loved loved loved Fortune's Pawn, by Rachel Bach. The day I finished it, I also got the ARC to the sequel from Netgalley.  Honor's Knight is waiting for me on my Kindle, and I'm so incredibly excited I can't even tell you. 

Space Opera!

I'm probably misusing the term, but this book is awesome in an old-fashioned sci-fi way, and it reminds me (unreasonably) of the Vorkosigan Saga, which brings the term to mind.  But space opera is sweeping and epic--so far, Devi's story only hints at the Big Politics out there.

Backing up: Fortune's Pawn, by Rachel Bach is so great I want to squee.  I swallowed the thing in just a couple of bites.  Like I said, there aren't a lot of ways in which it is actually like the Miles books, except for that feeling I get when I'm reading them.  That sort of awesomely competent character in over their head but about to come out on top.

Devi Morris is a mercenary from the world Paradox, and a damned good one.  In fact, she's risen about as high as she can go in her outfit, and has her eyes on the elite Devestator squad.  But they don't take you without years of experience--or a few months on a crazy, high-risk ship like The Glorious Fool.  So Devi packs her Iron Man-style armor and saddles up to make  her name.

There she meets Rupert, the mysterious and sexy cook; Cotter, her meatheaded fellow security officer; Basil, the snooty navigator from an avian race; Nova, a sweet, dreamy girl whose kooky religion may actually give her powers; Hyrek, the ship's doctor, whose lizard-like alien race literally eats humans for breakfast; and Ren, the captain's strange, blank-faced daughter.  This ensemble cast is why you will love this book--Hyrek has a wicked sense of humor, even though Devi's first instinct is to kill him.  Basil is a complete snob, but he is paternally protective of Nova, who becomes a good friend to Devi.

And then there's Rupert.  After an initial urge to bed him, Devi realizes there's more to him than meets the eye, and she can't figure out if that's a good thing or a bad thing.  As they get closer and Devi fights off the first of a really remarkable number of attacks on the ship, she realizes that there's more going on here than meets the eye. 

I will admit that this book is mostly setup.  There's a lot of mystery, and a good deal of it gets explained at the end, but you wouldn't call the end of this book "closure."  I mean, it ends--it's not a cliffhanger--but if the sequel wasn't out there waiting for you, you might be annoyed.

I don't know if I can explain what I liked about this.  I loved the world building.  I loved Devi.  I loved that she started right out trying to get Rupert into bed, but then backed off when she realized he was something more than a simple cook.  I loved the ragtag crew (and yes, the Firefly comparisons others have made are apt--loveable!  I love them!).  I loved the immediate sense of trust I felt--again, Vorkosigan-like, I knew that my protagonist was good at her job, and I would not have to rely on her doing anything stupid (or at least not the kind of stupid that people do just to move the plot of a novel along). 

I can't explain it.  It's just really, really, REALLY good.  Thumbs all the way up.

All the Whimsy

More comics!  Two ARCs I received ages ago, then lost in the Great Laptop Crash.  But these books were irresistible--I went out and got my hands on them anyway, and my week has been full of whimsy.

The Monster on the Hill, by Rob Harrell, is a dream and a chuckle.  I'm seeing bits of my life in everything I read and watch and see these days, and this mopey monster is no exception.  Low grade depression has rarely been so charming.

Every village has a monster--to keep them on their toes, wreak a little havoc, show any invaders who's boss.  But the town of Stoker-on-Avon has a problem: their monster, Rayburn, is not much of a monster.  He mopes, never rampages, and can't seem to get up a good roar.  The village elders send a discredited gentleman scientist to sort him out, and he and his saucy newsboy sidekick attempt to show Rayburn that he really is a very good monster.

I don't know if I can really explain how much I enjoyed this book.  The newsboy's extras are more up to date than my news feed, the monsters have trading cards and souvenir stuffed animals, and everyone's just rather jolly.  Even poor depressed Rayburn is polite an apologetic about his shortcomings.  I loved the warmheartedness of everyone in this book--it's about friends taking care of each other, and all the new and old friends who rally around Rayburn just made my heart swell up.  It's really a very sweet book about mild depression.  Who knew?

Bandette, Volume One: Presto, by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover, is one of the Frenchest things I've ever read.  The watercolor-style painting is lovely and reminds me to those reproductions of French posters that everyone had in the kitchen of their second apartment after college.  The book is populated by detective inspectors, ballet students, and a criminals wearing masks and zipping around on mopeds.  It's like a dream of what a heist movie should be, starring Audrey Hepburn as Bandette.

The absolute charm of it mostly makes up for the fact that it's a fairly thin confection--there is plenty of conflict, but our heroine and all of her friends are brave, smart, sassy, talented, loyal, and good.  The police officer who both chases her and enlists her help is curmudgeonly but warm-hearted.  The bad guys are all absolutely wicked, but most of the thieves here are full of honor.  So there isn't much character development, no depths or angles here.  Just a delightful bite of cotton candy.

If it was a 300 page novel, I might not think this charm was worth it.  But in the a slim comic with winsome art, I'll be reading the next one, and rewatching How to Steal a Million very soon.

All the Comics

Been reading comics lately, lots of 'em.  Saga.  Locke & Key.  Angel & Faith.  Bone.  So many great comics so far this year.

I'm sure you've heard of Saga, which is all over the place with buzz.  It's by Brian Vaughn, who brought us Y: The Last Man.  I enjoyed a lot of things about that series, but I found the story to be kind of flawed on a couple of levels.  It's hard to tell at this point what's going to happen with Saga, but the characters are so, so wonderful. The teenage ghost half-nanny, the troubled bounty hunter and his truth-scenting cat, the romance novel-reading soldier.

I almost didn't give it a shot, because the first issue contained a rather off-putting sex scene (really, the idea of characters with TVs for faces is kind of heavy-handed to begin with), but that was fortunately not indicative of the overall tone of the series.  I am SO on board for this ride.

Locke & Key has sold me on Joe Hill.  I don't know why I haven't read Joe Hill yet--everyone tells me how great he is. The first volume of Locke & Key is one of the creepiest things I've ever read, and now I have to read a bunch more.  I'm only on number two, but I'm already getting twitchy for the point at which our protagonists realize that there's something going on.  Because right now they're just wandering around having their strings pulled left right and center and not even realizing, and this is going to get really depressing until they start fighting back.

I'm going to skip Angel & Faith; my relationship with that series is incredibly complicated and based on a long and weirdly passionate emotional history with the Buffy franchise.  I hate Angel; I like Faith; I hate Eliza Dushku; I like David Boreanaz; I'm trying to follow the Buffy comics and I need to keep the dream alive.  But I can only watch the same characters learn the same lessons so many times over before I despair of them.  So that's all I'll say about that.

Bone, though!  Let's talk about Bone. Adam and Mike have almost finished it, but I'm still on volume 5.  It's just so charming.  It's got all the elements of epic fantasy, with the adorableness of a Sunday comic strip.  And you're reading about this aw-shucks little non-human character having a crush on the gorgeous girl, and it's like Opus the Penguin all over again, but then there are all these hints of backstory, all these echoes of incredibly rich world-building that you're just getting these tastes of but that point to something rich and wonderful.

I'm really glad to be reading the recently published color versions.  I've tried to read them before in black and white, but I found that the art was a little too complex to take in easily that way.  Mike tells me that ex post facto coloring is usually bad, but this is really excellent work; you would never know it wasn't meant to be this way.

More comics coming up!

First Impressions

Starting a bunch of new books.  Here's a rundown of my opinions based on the first 3-10% of each one (depending how long it is--I'm probably 40 pages into The Goldfinch and I just hit 3%.  Kindle tells me I won't be done for 17 hours, and every time I turn a page that estimate gets longer.  That cannot be a good thing).

The Cranes Dance, by Meg Howrey.  This one was a recommendation from Linden, and when the library had the ebook available I picked it up idly.  It starts with a ballerina's rundown of Swan Lake for the uninitiated and from the backstage point of view, and I was hooked.

Kate has an amazing voice. she is everything you believe hard-core ballet dancers to be--edgy, competitive, passionate, anxious--and you want more than anything to listen to her dish.  But it's not a fluffy book--it's about how ambition and intensity affect relationships and personality.

The Well of Ascension, by Brandon Sanderson.  Well, you know, meh.  The problem with a second book is always (or at least often) that you have to start fresh with a new plot.  So you start out with either no tension or unearned tension.  Plus, all the progress we made in the last book just seems to have fallen away.

There are other things that annoy me, though.  Kelsier as a charismatic character was not just holding the characters together, he was kind of holding me in the story last time.  Vin's being a jerk to the chandra.  And oh jeez, too much political meandering.  And not in a complicated Dune/Vorkosigan way, but in a boring The Phantom Menace kind of way.

That said, it's a LONG book and I'm just a little way in.  Eventually, he'll get me invested.  This reaction, though, is why I tend to avoid epics.

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt.  The first few pages set up a delightful tease--our narrator is holed up in a hotel room, clearly on the run, but in a banal kind of way (it's unlikely that anyone at this hotel will recognize him, but he doesn't have any underwear).  This had promise.  Then we flash back to what is explicitly the afternoon of his mother's death and spend a while with them at an art museum.

It's not that it's not good.  It's well written.  But I don't yet know why I'm reading it.  The thing about Donna Tartt is that she wrote The Secret History--a wild, chilling, almost surreal ride through an upper class that almost doesn't exist--and she also wrote The Little Friend--a dull-as-dishwater story that promises to be about an unsolved murder in a small town, but which is really a slice of life in the '70s in the South.  It might have been okay, but it was nowhere near as satisfying.  Southern Gothic a few decades ago is just much less interesting and fresh than New England Gothic hiding in plain sight at a college that is practically where I went.

So far, we see hints of a New York Gothic, and I'm kind of digging them--the family that lives in a doorman building and takes cabs everywhere, but has to scrounge for change in the couch cushions to tip the deliveryman from Gristedes.  There are hints of what made The Secret History great, of this odd world positioned right behind the one I'm in.  But I'm just not sure Tartt has enough trust left from me to make it work.

She'd better--that puppy is 800 pages long and I'm reading it for book club, so no quitting.

Finnikin of the Rock, by Melina Marchetta.  I'm not sure I can deliver even a first impression verdict on this one yet.  I've started but not finished several Marchetta books, and I find myself put off by the fact that she always seems to skip the exposition I want and start kind of in the middle of the story.  Not just in medias res, but with kind of an infodump that leaves you feeling stranded.

Finnikin, for example, is currently working with refugees from the destroyed kingdom of Lumatere.  But the story doesn't exactly start with him, and then give us back story.  It starts with a weird, confusing account of the end of Lumatere--full of a bunch of drama based around characters we don't know anything about and who are dead now anyway.  It's dense and confusing, and even the characters are unclear about some of it.  It's the predominant fact in the lives of all the characters, but I have no feel for it, no texture.

So Finnikin seems to be acting like a jerk when he's impatient to be kept from doing things that he's passionate about but I don't quite get.  They are traveling through all these places whose impressions I'm given, but don't quite get.

Sarah believes in this series--she read the last book several times in a row--and I'm going to read it.  But I'm not sure about it yet.

Endless Rue

I have discussed Madeleine Robins.  I love Madeleine Robins.  She wrote the Sarah Tolerance mysteries, but I hadn't read anything else by her yet--not till now, when I have fallen in love with Sold for Endless Rue. 

Okay, I'm out of practice here, and it's late and I need to get to bed, so this is going to be complicated.  The structure of the book isn't hard to explain, but it's hard to explain why the book is so wonderful.  Basically, the book is divided into three parts.  In the first, Laura is taken in and trained by a midwife.  In the second, Agnesa is a bride who is expecting a child.  In the third, Bieta is the daughter of an acclaimed female doctor and in training herself.

So, we've got midwives and medical students in 13th century Salerno.  If you read Mistress of the Art of Death, you know that female doctors were not unheard of at the time, and this is fascinating to me.  How different did Salerno need to be from the rest of Medieval Europe?  All of those Mediterranean places where Africa and Europe and the Middle East came together at that time are just amazing, and the details of Salerno are just wonderful.

But really, this book is about how every choice we make is influenced by all the other choices that came before--our own and everyone else's.  The character and historical details of Laura training as a midwife and medica in the first part would have been more than enough to keep me reading, but the weight of her history and the surprising ways it affects her are what make this more than just interesting. 

Laura has been kept as a slave by a man who murdered her family and destroyed her home.  When she escapes, she's hidden by Crescia, a midwife, and stays with her to learn her craft.  Most of the story is just about Laura growing up, but at every turn, we see how her personality was shaped by her life--by her family, her captor, her teacher, her understanding of danger, her fear and defiance.  And as we see how Laura is shaped by, say, Crescia, we learn a little of how Crescia was shaped by her own life. 

Then these observations are tied into how each person's understanding of the others is imperfect, and how even in agreement, they have differences.  And all these observations ricochet, explicitly and implicitly, through the different parts of the story.  And now I'm going to stop talking because I don't want to spoil it, but wow.  We can't really know each other, and sometimes the decisions we think are correct are damaging--sometimes while still being right.

If you're not someone who thinks "wow, a domestic novel with character studies of medieval midwives!  Sign me up!" then this might not be the book for you.  But lordy, it was the book for me.

Neither Ghosts Nor Zombies Nor Vampires

The dead are everywhere in this world; any shadow might contain them. Binders keep the villages safe, but something is wrong in Westmost.  Their binder is not well, her daughter, Otter, is untrained, and the most dangerous of the dead, the White Hands, stalk the village.  Sorrow's Knot, by Erin Bow: there's your setup.

There's some scary stuff here, and a good story, but what makes this book shine is the what it's about.  It's about chosen family, and about the ties that (forgive me) bind people together.  It's about mistakes--mistakes you don't realize you made, mistakes that have horrible results that could have been prevented if only you knew more.  It's about how life is incredibly messy, both in its strengths and its points of pain. 

There's so much that's cool and interesting and unusual here that are appealing.  The setting is based on a non-specific Native North American idea, but it's not derivative.  The specific trappings are all fantasy, though--the characters have dark hair and brown skin, wear deer hides and make arrowheads from flint, but there's nothing that feels stolen or condescending. 

Also, Westmost is not exactly a matriarchy, but it's a society of women, with only a few men.  Only women have power to bind the dead, so most boys born in the forest villages end up journeying to the plains, which are safer.  This is simply a world of women.

The friendships, though.  That's what really tore my heart out.  Otter, Kestrel, and Cricket are the main characters of the story, and the three are a family, more than anyone else.  And they have each other's backs, always--it's not even a doubt.  The friendships have facets and change, but they are never in doubt, at all.  There is no question of where any of their loyalties lie.  And in the end, really, those friendships are what save the world.

It's not a perfect book--there's a weak point in the middle, where the first crisis has past and the parts of the story that need to align for the second crisis are plopped together a bit heavy-handedly.  And, in a book about how messy life is, the writing style is somewhat stiff, in the manner of formal storytelling (which is a big factor in the story).  But I couldn't stop reading.

I said in a recent review that one of the things I loved about All Our Yesterdays was that it was so honest about how sometimes good and evil are so interdependent that you just can't untwine them; so many books shy away from that.  Well, this book is about how so often, enormous evil happens because someone makes a bad decision that looks innocuous at the time--or a decision that goes unnoticed.  Too often, everyone is able to undo their bad decisions, and the high stakes of the story are edged down because, essentially, everything turns out okay.

But not here.  The bad things that happen, they don't almost happen.  They do happen.  Some tragedies are prevented, but many are not.  There is real loss here, and not everyone gets the happy ending.  I think that's important.  It's definitely authentic.

That Great Moment

When everybody's raving about how great that brand new book is, you can be pretty much guaranteed that you'll have to wait for months for the library to acquire it, and then another few months on a waiting list.

BUT!  There is nothing like the feeling of looking for a new release idly, no hopes or expectations, and then finding it! There! With a SHORT wait!  And it'll be a couple of weeks at most before I'm reading Ancillary Justice, by Anne Leckie.\, about which I know very little, except that it's supposed to be really good.

And--bonus!--this one I've already got in my back pocket.  Another one from a few top-ten lists that I picked up to read a while back and thought I lost in the Computer Crash  of '13.  But no, just when everyone's telling me how great Rachel Bach's Fortune's Pawn is, here it is on my backup drive (shout out to Mike for setting up automatic backup software before it was needed!).

I can tell already, 2014 is going to be a great book year. 

End of the Year Thingie

Everyone's doing a wrap-up post, with statistics and analyses and best-of lists.  Do you all think more coherently than I do?

Anyway, since Goodreads crunches the numbers for you, I figured I might as well throw this out there.  So here are my stats.

Total titles for the year (according to Goodreads): 132

But wait, some of those are books that I gave up on but logged anyway: 17



Okay, now how many were comics?: 38





(Slightly embarrassing aside: how many of those comics were from the Buffy franchise?: 18)

What about kids' books--like, chapter books from the children's section?: 11



And sometimes you put in a short story or novella: 8



So how many "actual" books does that leave?--YA, nonfiction, novels: 59



So much good stuff.  Above were a few of my favorites--not necessarily my most-most favorite, but the ones that I am not seeing on everyone else's top 10 lists.  Fangirl, Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Saga, Eleanor & Park, Americanah--a lot of my favorite bloggers are raving about these, so I'll just add some to the mix.

I'm back in a groove with some great reads in process now, so hopefully there will be more posts to come.  And I am already making a list of 2014 releases I can't wait for. In the meantime, happy new year, everyone!

(And, once again, I edited this because I left out a book!)