Not to Be Confused with David Bowie

Okay, first: if you're like me, when you think "Goblin King," you think of this guy:

Right?  But don't be confused.  We're talking about a book called The Goblin Emperor, no matter how many times I tried to make Maia the Goblin King in my head.  And Katherine Addison's protagonist, Maia, does not look anything like our pale, lean Mr. Bowie above.

In fact, quite the opposite.  He's the fourth son of the emperor of the elves, by an unloved and set-aside goblin wife who was married for political reasons.  Maia is short, stocky, dark-skinned, and relatively uneducated.  But when his father and three older brothers he's never met all die tragically, he finds himself thrust into a role he's entirely unprepared for, and that not everyone wants to see him fill.

This book has gotten a lot of much-deserved love around the internet.  It's a very specific kind of book, about a mannered society where form is very important and meaningful.  You'd say it was a story of manners, but it's not, exactly, because most books like that stay a bit removed from the let-down, informal internal lives of the characters. The Goblin Emperor is very much about how these social forms are isolating, but also how they are the bones of civilization.  I was reminded of reading Dune, and how the many layers of subtle behavior are parsed instinctively by the politicians.  

Maia has no one, in the world.  His mother died when he was young and he was sent into exile with a distant cousin to raise him.  This cousin was angry, resentful, and cruel to Maia, leaving the boy completely unprepared to live in polite society, never mind rule it.  When he gets to court, he's faced with problems as basic as how to live with constant bodyguards and people needing things from him and as complicated as determining whether his father's death was entirely accidental.

So I will say that I loved this book--loved the world building especially, and loved that Maia was a good character--smart if uneducated, determined to do the right thing, if not without resentments and angry impulses.  Most people, in fact, were good here, which I also liked--pompous did not equate to evil, and everyone was trying to make things work, as far as they could.  There were bad guys, but most of them thought they were doing good, one way or another--if not objectively, capital-G Good, then at least doing the best they could toward whatever end they thought was important.

A couple of things tripped me up in the book--one was the language, which was very cleverly used, but got away from me at times.  I completely lost track of everyone's name, entirely, especially since they all had first and last names and titles, and they were called different combinations of them through the book.  I think Csevet is the only one I was able to keep track of, because he had the fewest syllables.  There were absolutely points where I had no idea who was on stage for pages at a time, till someone would say something military or religious, or you'd get a "she" thrown in and I could place them.

Also, I think the middle sagged just a little.  It's not that I ever got tired of the character development, or that it ever stood still.  But I realized recently that one of the things I like about stories is watching people solve problems.  This was the problem I had with How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia--not a lot of problem solving--and I think that The Goblin Emperor had a lot more information gathering, a lot more passive preparation for problem solving, than I wanted.  I wanted Maia to take some kind of haphazard control of his life earlier than he did.  By the end, everything was where I wanted it to be, but it took Maia a little longer to get into the right headspace than I wanted--I'd rather have seen a few more fumbling efforts on his part, rather than his very slow movement toward true ownership of his life. 

I will say, though, that I'm really disappointed that there probably won't be a sequel to this.  It doesn't need one--we are left at the beginning of a golden age, you can just tell--but I wish I could spend more time with Maia, his bodyguards, his betrothed, Csevet, and the rest.  I wish I could see the great, confident man Maia will become.  That's a pretty great place to leave your feelings about a book.

Wonder Love

R.J. Palacio's Wonder came out a few years ago, and as usual I didn't get to it till long after everyone who told me how great it was.  I do listen to you all--I really do!  There are just so many great books out there.

In a lot of ways, it's a very simple story--a boy with severe facial deformities attends school for the first time.  Auggie has been home schooled through fourth grade, mostly because he's been in and out of the hospital for various surgeries. 

But now, in fifth grade, it's time for him to go to public school.  It's nothing more or less than you would expect--a combination of stares and avoidance until people get used to him, some people being nice, some being polite, some being mean. 

I think the amazing thing that's going on here is the perspective--in a few different ways.  First, the importance of peer relationships at 11 years old is given just the right emphasis.  Some books will get you swept away with how vital your social standing is to your overall quality of life at that age, and it's not untrue, but it's also not untrue that a couple of jerks don't have to ruin your life--or they can, if they put their minds to it--and that a loving family can carry you a long way through rough social waters. 

The other cool thing is that the story is told from various points of view.  Auggie gets more time than anyone else, but two of his friends, his high school-aged sister, and his sister's boyfriend all get chapters to tell their perspectives, and that is absolutely invaluable.  Because being Auggie is hard, and complicated, but knowing Auggie is life changing, too, and not without its own complications.  And the book portrays that beautifully.

Then recently, I had the opportunity to read an advance copy of the new short, The Julian Chapter.  Julian is the "bad guy" of Wonder; he does most of the teasing, and any deliberate meanness pretty much originates with him.  I'm always interested in the book from the mean kid's point of view, but it's not that I expect a lot of new insights.  Mean kids are mostly angry and scared and traumatized, but they've turned that outward.  Lauren Oliver did a great job telling that story in Before I Fall, and it's going to be tough to top that one.

But I can't be surprised that Palacio brought the same humanity and balance to Julian as she did to all her other characters.  Even Julian's mom--who photoshopped Auggie out of the class portrait--is treated with care and respect.  And Julian's combination of denial, panic, and simple selfishness is so...understandable.  All the bad guys here are people I'm just a jot of self-awareness away from being, all the time.  Even Julian's "redemption" is well-earned.

I think what R.J. Palacio brings to this set of stories is the true idea of loving thy neighbor as thyself.  You don't love yourself the same way you love other people.  You love yourself through a deep awareness of your flaws, with your heart always open for the forgiveness that you always need.  A book full of struggling, non-boring, good people is a rare find; I wish I could read this one for the first time again.

Finger on the Trigger

I have no recollection of why I requested the ARC of I Am the Weapon, by Allen Zadoff.  At first glance, it really doesn't seem like my kind of book, does it?  Heavy on the YA, kind of violent, romance-y.  But then, if you make a list of the things I do look for in books, we do hit all those items here: how-tos, problem solving, extreme competence, and characters who find their boundaries tested.

(Also, when I was a teenager I dreamed up a story about juvenile assassins, so I'm kind of attached to the premise.)

I'm generally skeptical about assassin books, because it's one of those things that sounds all dramatic, and sure, it probably leads to some adventures, but really its practitioners are unlikely to be lovely people.  Being a killer has an exciting ring to it, but I don't trust a lot of books to make this as complicated as it needs to be for the premise not to be kind of depressing and offensive.

This book, though, grabbed me tight and didn't let go.  I gulped it down, and it's made for that--the first person narrator addresses the reader in spare, practical prose.  The competence is finely honed, and his humanity is hardly in evidence.  He's a tool, a weapon, and that gives you both the dramatic adventure that you want and the cold heartlessness that you need to convince me to follow along.

The narrator is, I think, 17, and he's been an assassin for several years--ever since his parents were killed by his best friend.  He works for a mysterious organization, and he believes that he's doing good, though that belief has little to do with his day to day life. 

He's highly trained at fitting in as a teenager, and I think that's one of the most entertaining aspects of the book--watching him carefully fake being a normal kid, all the while watching his back, knowing that he could take out everyone in the room before they knew what hit them.

Of course there's a girl, and she gets in the way of the mission--this could have been cheesy, but it's handled really well, because it's not about instalove--it's about interest, fascination, and something that clicks--something about the chain of events has him thinking about his past and his personal history, and he's off his game.  The book did not go where I expected, and for a YA book that mostly takes place in a high school, that's really amazing.

Now I'm waiting for I Am the Mission, the follow-up that comes out in June.  This was a great hidden gem that I really just lucked into--seriously, so far 2014 is a really wonderful reading year for me!

Asia, Rising

Book club last month (my god, I'm behind) read Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, which had a lot of buzz around it this year.  It seemed like an excellent book club pick--an interesting setting, a clever premise, good writing.  But somehow, none of us really had anything to say about it.

The structure of the book is that of a self-help book, and each chapter has a title that is a piece of advice.  Because of this, it's told in the second person, which is an incredibly risky thing to do but is handled quite well here.  It's the story of a boy growing up in poverty who hustles and eventually runs a large, successful bottled water conglomerate in some unnamed, presumably Southeast Asian country. 

Why didn't we have much to say?  Why didn't it stick with me very much?  I think because it fits that "literary" category, which is that it's a slice-of-life book.  While that life is very different from mine, making this WAY more interesting than a similar story about a North American bottled water magnate, it's still about the emotional experience of living in the world.  It's about being young, hustling, wanting more than you have, being afraid, growing old, and dying. 

I felt like what was missing here was problem solving.  I wanted the characters to be challenged or tested, but that's not what this book was about.  As Jenny says at Reading the End, "I like books in which principles and values are challenged by a changing reality in interesting ways and the holders of those values have to figure out what to do about it."  I wanted to watch them sort things out, but any real situation-handling or problem solving that they did was offscreen, between sections.  We saw only glimpses, snapshots of the results.

Though we didn't really have a discussion, I'm going to frame this with discussion questions, just because that's what I like to do for the book club books.  I really should start doing this before the meeting; I think it might help a bit.

1) Do you think the self-help conceit added much to the book?  Do you think it affected much of anything outside of the first page or two of each chapter?  Did you enjoy the openings of the chapters?  Find that they fit with the rest of the book?  Oh, let's just say it: these might have been my favorite parts of the whole book.

2) How did you feel about the parts of the book that take on points of view besides "yours?"  Did they seem to be forced into the structure of the book, or purposeful asides from the author? 

3) Did it seem weird that the character's behavior toward his wife was so notable weak?  What does it mean for a second person book when "you" are behaving in ways that you don't approve of?

4) Do you notice that I'm mostly talking about the writing style?  Is there anything to say about the story?  I'm trying to think of questions, but none of them mean anything.  What did you think of the father?  Did you miss the sister when she went off?  Were you embarrassed for the main character when he showed up on the date in his tacky new clothes?  What did you think about....?

Really, this is pretty sad.  I don't have much, even thinking about this months later.  Has anyone else read this book?  If you have, do you have any interesting questions you'd bring to a group discussion?  Please, help me.  I'm fading fast here.

Man, we should have read Harry August for book club.

Yes, I'm Still Into Zombies

So shoot me.  I know, it's past its apex.  And even my fascination has run a bit thinner--I've gotten much more discerning about my zombie media consumption.  But the best zombie stories are really empty world stories; they're about living on the brink of annihilation, in which everything familiar has become a threat, and there's something hypnotic about this notion that I don't know if I'll ever really get all the way past.

And that is all to the good, because along comes M.R. Carey's The Girl with All the Gifts, and after reading the free five chapter preview on Amazon, I sat on the edge of my chair and waited...waited...waited for it to be available in the states.  But then I lucked into an advance copy, and the rest is (or shortly will be) history.

Oh, I hate doing this part of the review, where I try to tell you the premise in a way that's interesting and catchy--I'm not a blurbologist.  Melanie's world is limited to classes and her cell, teachers, other children, and soldiers.  Something's off about it, but you figure out fairly quickly what's going on--civilization has mostly fallen, and we are in a military lab trying to cure the disease that turns people into hungries.

Melanie is crackling smart, and patient with her very restricted world.  She loves learning, and she especially loves her favorite teacher, Miss Justineau.  Her story is the story of a little girl who has nothing, but loves the world anyway, and it's incredibly touching, even after you establish that there is something deeply amiss about this world, and even about Melanie.

This book... this book.  It's about how tragedy hones you down into the essence of yourself. It's about how passions can become obsessions, and how one person's collapsed remains of a world is another's new opportunity. Sure, it's about what it means to be human, but it's also about what it means to see someone as human, which is another thing entirely.

Plot-wise, mostly it's a traditional British Walking Adventure, though, making our way across a destroyed British landscape.  The walking part has been hit or miss for me historically, but it's done well here, and the post-apocalyptic landscape is a very solid example of the genre.  But what makes you--me--love the book is Melanie, Justineau, and Parks, and how you come to root for each of them.  Even Caldswell is intriguing and fascinating and...maybe admirable?  I'm not sure I'd go that far. 

But I can't put the book down, which is everything I wanted it to be.  I highly recommend grabbing the Extended Free Preview (which is listed as the Kindle edition on Amazon right now).  I think that's all you need to get how I feel about this book.

If I'd Known Then What I Know Now

The life relived is a thing these days, I think, like vampires or zombies.  Kate Atkinson's Life After Life did it in a literary fashion; Claire North's The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August has a different spin that is both more compelling and more explicitly philosophical.

Harry August lives his life through, and when he dies he is born again--in the same year, the same place, to live the same life over.  He is a kalachakra, and after going through the usual first-few-lives rough spots--thinking you're crazy, getting all philosophical, wondering if you're the only one--he learns of the Cronos Club, a group of people with the same gift/affliction.

Each of them lives their life in a loop, and they meet repeatedly during the overlaps.  They're libertines, researchers, adventurers, and philosophers.  But something else is happening--the future is changing, and Harry needs to figure out why.

This book sounded intriguing, which is why I picked it up (disclosure: I got an advance copy from the publisher for review).  Then I read the Book Smugglers' review at Kirkus, which was kind of mediocre, so I put off reading it for a bit.  But when I did pick it up, it drew me along almost seamlessly, and I couldn't put it down.  

Groundhog Day is an apt comparison.  Lauren Oliver's Before I Fall also came to mind.  But unlike so many other books structured around this premise, this one was really an adventure/mystery type of story.  Most of these other repeated life books are about trying to get it right, trying to be a good person, or trying to find the meaning of life.  But when that comes up in this novel, it's somewhere between a sideline and a McGuffin. 

Of course, these long-lived people who are so different from the rest of us wonder why they live and what it means.  They mostly don't wonder, though, what they should be doing with their lives.  Each of them sorts that out for themselves, to whatever extent it's possible.  Some pursue knowledge as the source of understanding, some pursue pleasure, since they can.  Some work to do good for us normals, while others work to help other kalachakra.  The answer to the book is not the answer to the great mysteries.

The Book Smugglers review speaks of August's detachment, and they're not wrong.  That didn't bother me, though--it seemed like a scientist's account of the events.  The first half of the book is mostly given over to learning about how it works to live this kind of life--how you manage childhood with adult memories, how the Chronos Club communicates, the risks and rewards of living multiple lives.  I love this kind of detailed layout of a complicated system, and it's done very deftly here. 

The adventure picks up in the second  half of the book, where Harry has discovered the problem and is trying to sort it out and solve it, and I won't spoil that, but I will tell you that it trots along and keeps you rolling.  There's a bit of a slow spot in the middle between the two sections, where we've learned all about kalachakra life but we're only just starting to suspect the danger, but that lag passes pretty quickly. 

Okay, my ONE big complaint here?  There's a framing element to the story, a premise that it's being written as a letter to someone.  That only comes up in a very few places, but when it's revealed at the end, it doesn't make sense.  I just feel that if you're going to use a framing story like that, it has to make sense, and this doesn't.  To hide the identity of the letter's recipient, the author has structured a letter whose writing makes no sense.  It doesn't come up enough to be a big problem, but it's kind of annoyingly careless for such a tight, controlled writer.

I think this could be a very interesting book club book, if you wanted to do something lighter and really engaging.  There are a lot of good things to discuss--the relation between science and morality, the perils of immortality, the value of an immortal life vs. a mortal one, what you'd do if a loved one told you he was immortal and had lived the same life over and over again, the role of fatherhood in the story, the notion of forgetting as death.  Not really the direction my book club would usually go, but I kind of wish I had them to discuss it with.

Also, now I'm going to look up who Claire North is (I believe it's a pseudonym) and find her other books!

Swooning with Pleasure

Okay, now we're starting in on the backlog of books from my hiatus.  Unfortunately, just limiting myself to the ones I really want to talk about, that's still an awful lot of books, and as you all know, I'm much worse at writing about books I read a while ago.  Still, I have so very many things to say here!

Guys?  Guys.  Have you read Fortune's Pawn yet?  Have you read Honor's Knight?  If not, you should go out and do that, because I can now definitively say that the trilogy delivers from top to bottom.  Rachel Bach's Heaven's Queen gave me everything I wanted from Devi Morris, the phantoms, the Eyes, Caldswell, Rupert, and even the Lady Gray.  My only complaint is that there wasn't nearly enough of the secondary characters from the first book--I wanted more Nova and Basil and Hyrek.

We start out right where we left off last time--Devi and Rupert on the run.  They spend a little bit of time scrambling around, which is much more about being in love than getting anything else done, and I have to say it's the weakest part of the whole series. 

I just don't have strong feelings for Rupert.  There's a lot of telling instead of showing abut how attractive he is and how connected she feels to him.  Especially considering that I'm fully capable of falling hard for a literary character--hell, I'm half in love with Devi--Rupert just doesn't give me much to work with, and consequently the little period of sweet tranquility they experience just kind of drags, and everything that's supposed to feel all teamwork-romance-bliss is just kind of boring.

But, you know, it's not that bad.  The story moves forward, there are some complications, and when they come up with a plan and start to execute it, things take off.  Then you get what you want from the rest of this series--you find out about the phantoms, and Devi figures out her infection, and everyone is taken captive and the lelgis want to kill them and so do the Eyes but Devi outfights and outclevers them until she brings the whole system DOWN and saves the world and everything. 

Wait, were those spoilers?  Come on, you never though it wasn't going to end well, did you? 

This was a romp--if the love had had me convinced, it would have been the perfect book.  As it stands, it is merely an incredibly satisfying and ass kicking book that makes me want to read everything else Rachel Bach has ever written and also possibly to meet and be BFFs with Devi Morris. 

Highly recommended.

Buffy vs. Angel: What Am I Doing Here?

Okay, I'm so far behind with these posts, the guilt is overwhelming me.  I need to just write something, so we'll start with an easy one and just kind of blather about Buffy, because I can always do that.

For example, I was listening to the soundtrack of Once More with Feeling on the ride to work today, and I STILL have to fast forward through Giles's song, "Standing in Your Way," because I will never be not enraged about him leaving.  There are so many things wrong with that.  I think I've come the conclusion that it's a writing problem--there's just no way it's a realistic thing for a person to do.

But even knowing it's the fault of Joss Whedon or whoever was writing the show at that time, I still blame Giles.  Because yes, a 20 year old who's just been through a hugely traumatic experience right after losing her mother should totally be standing on her own two feet.  What the hell kind of a person does that?

Okay, but I'm here to talk about the most recent updates to the Buffyverse, namely the conclusion to Season 9, The Core, and the last volume of Angel & Faith, Death and Consequences.  (There's actually a more recent volume just out, but I haven't read it yet.  Waiting for it from the library!)

Death and Consequences comes first chronologically, so we'll start there.  Here's the thing--this run of A&F is better than Buffy is right now.  It's well-written, neatly balances the bigger story arc (Angel tries to bring Giles back to life!) with the individual stories (Faith has it out with the London slayers who hate Angel! Drusilla's around! Family issues!), the character work is great, the writing is funny.  The stakes are worth it, the struggle is hard, but I don't know how it's going to turn out.

But I still hate Angel.  Hate him.  Christos Gage (writer) is trying to make me not hate him, but I wasn't a huge fan at any point in the story, and after Twilight, I just can't.  I can't tell how much the story is retconning and how much I just missed the first time around.  Supposedly ameliorating tidbits--like Angel was planning to bring everyone to the new universe when the old one perished, or he was possessed by Twilight, not under his own power--are dropped throughout.  But they're a way of dodging what seems to me like the most interesting thing about the whole Angel situation, which is that he made a choice to let there be destruction in the name of what he considered a greater good, and he was wrong.

By taking that back, by making him a victim instead of a perpetrator, it seems like an easy out.  It's too hand-wavy.  But at least the Giles part is real--he was clearly possessed when he killed Giles, but he clearly blames himself for it (because he let it get that far--which implies that he WAS acting of his own volition!).

This is a screed already.  I apologize.

Anyway, The Core was a great ending for Season 9 of Buffy.  The Scoobies in action together, a resolution to the exhausting, drudgy problem of the season, a big bang for a couple of important characters, some sisterhood stuff, good people making bad choices and having to live with them--everything you want.

Oh, yeah, and Spike!  And not angsty Spike--the Spike who was Dawn's unlikely protector in Season 5.  I have an enormous soft spot for Spike--soft isn't even the word--but he's a hero, and it's nice to see him acting on that a bit.

He was actually in Death and Consequences, too, and while he still gets played for some laughs, he also gets to be a hero, which just seems right to me.  I mean, he's the only known case of someone UNVAMPIRING himself, specifically so he could be a good guy.  Yes, he's snarky and not all that bright, but he's a doer, perceptive and loyal to an almost unhealthy point.

Oh, god, this has gone beyond screed.  I'm just ranting.  I'm going to quit now before I start linking to fanfiction.  But I want to throw in a link to this review from the Nerdist of the beginning of Season 10, which, first, has me really excited, and second, captures my feelings about the progression of the comics really well (along with my desire to see what a 30-something Scooby gang is up to).  Buffy 4 Ever.

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.

High School Highs & Lows

I read a lot of YA, but I read very, very little that takes place in high school.  Most of it is fantasy (magic school?  assassin school? I'm in), and some of it is sci fi, and some is realistic, yes, but it's not about the small, fishbowl universe of high school that seems so incredibly important when you're in the middle of it. 

But I picked up Philip Siegel's The Break-Up Artist from NetGalley anyway.  The premise was intriguing--Becca thinks high school relationships are a tool of the social hierarchy ever since her best friend ditched her for a hot boyfriend and a huge jump up the social ladder.  She's developed a lucrative business as the anonymous "Break-Up Artist," and will split up any couple in school for $100.

I was hoping for some sharp snark and cynicism, but what I got wasn't that--it was much more rich and complicated.  Getting ditched by her best friend, Huxley, three years ago threw Becca off and made her seriously cynical.  When her older sister's fiance left her at the altar more recently, it became perfectly clear that love is a joke, and that it's all about social climbing, securing the boring suburban life, "winning" the game.  The fact that Becca's current best friend, Val, is desperate for a boyfriend and that her parents seem to be disinterested roommates just seal the deal.  So when jilted best friends and jealous exes offer her money to end relationships, Becca feels like she's doing the world a favor.

But when her toughest job offer comes in--break up the school's sweethearts, her former BFF Huxley and captain of the football team Steve--Becca starts to find herself looking at the difference between lies and illusions, including her own.

I have no idea if everyone is going to react to this book the same way I did, but I imagine I'm not the only one out there who was pretty much entirely out of the social scene in high school--dating was not something that had anything to do with me.  But more than that, I related to Becca's experience with Huxley.  I got ditched by a best friend at the end of middle school (not for a guy, but for more popular friends), and it messed up my sense of friendship and of self-worth for at least a decade after that.  Not, like destroyed me--it destroyed me for a few weeks.  But I definitely believed that I was not really a good catch as a friend, and that you couldn't really trust your friends to stick around, for a long time after that.  I believed that I was someone who cranked through friends and couldn't have long-lasting relationships.

So the fact that Becca has this very messed up view of the world because of what happened to her just really touched me.  And the funny thing is, there's a level on which she's not entirely wrong--I mean, high school relationships are for the most part, not about true love forever.  They're about learning yourself and making adult connections,  hormones and romance and social roles.  Sure, there are real people involved, and some people marry their high school sweethearts, but it's not so common that a little cynicism isn't a valid approach to the issue.

But in the crazy swirl of gossip and true love always and PDAs in the hall, can you blame Becca for taking the grain of truth that is "most of this stuff that all these kids are so worried about is bull" and following it way to far to "all these people are deluded and romance is the opiate of the masses?"  It's such a natural progression, and such a sensible conclusion reached so wrongly, and such a lot of tough stuff that she's going through that watching her untangle the mess--and watching her own high school hormones lead her into some bad decisions herself--is really, really satisfying.

It's amazing to me that this book exists--a book about teenagers who act like teenagers and make a lot of stupid and cruel decisions, but which makes sense to me as an adult, and is really satisfying on that level.  Also, it's a Harlequin Teen book written by a guy, with a female narrator that I find totally believable.  This book is a freaking unicorn, people.  Thumbs up.

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.