Rose and Roza

Elizabeth Wein set herself a very high bar with Code Name Verity.  This is often a problem with the first book--by an author, in a series, etc.

Rose Under Fire suffers from the comparison, which is sad, because it's a very good book.  It's powerful and tragic and the characters are so brave and sad and human.  And there are such moments of triumph, without lies or glossing over what a concentration camp was.

Verity had two things going for it that Rose didn't: one, there was a twist, a big reversal that I didn't quite see coming but that created in me a love that I suspect will be everlasting for Elizabeth Wein.  She went from being just someone who wrote this book to the Mind behind it, someone who was steps ahead of me and meticulously crafting the story.  I mean, when it was revealed that there was more going on than I realized, every piece was in place, every clue was there, and every detail fit together.  That's craft.

Secondly, Verity was a story I'd never read before.  Female pilots, women captured behind enemy lines, spies in German custody--all fresh to me.  There were parts that were familiar--Maddie's time spent hiding reminded me of the resistance fighters in the book Tamar, for example.  But there was so much that I knew nothing about, and that much was exciting.  Julie felt powerful, even when she was truly powerless. 

But Rose's story is at least close to ones I've read.  I don't want that to sound like a complaint--it's a powerful story and a poignant one.  But there are so many books and movies that have had parts of this story in it that it was not unfamiliar to me--the premise itself didn't surprise me. 

Enough with the complaints, though, because it was really so good.  I didn't know anything about the Rabbits (well, I knew the existence of Nazi medical "experiments," but not much about the victims), and I'd never met Rose, who was worth meeting.  And Lisette, and Karolina, and Roza, and Irena.  Each of them was so different from the others, each completely her own character, and all amazing in their own rights.  I loved Rose's poetry, which kind of surprised me in and of itself. 

Every character was trying to survive, but every one had moments of selflessness.  I won't say it was unbelievable in that--it's very believable, it's what you want to believe about the human spirit--but it was so exciting, so satisfying, to see everyone struggle for each other, keep each other alive, in spite of everything.

I loved Rose.  I loved her best, I think, in the Paris hotel room she inhabited after she left Ravensbruck, alone and frightened and finally safe, unable to figure out where she was or what was supposed to happen next.  I loved her in that moment, and I loved the maid who took care of her and all the lovely people Elizabeth Wein put in the world to make up for the horror.

Let me just follow up this post on Premeditated by saying that yes, I did turn out to be right in the prediction I made VERY early in the book, and it was quite frustrating watching the protagonist blunder around not realizing what I realized, especially since she had ALL the information I had.

Except, I suppose, the fact that she's in a novel.  That's a strong predictor for plot twists that rarely occurs to someone in real life.

Young We Were, And Far From Free

Teen suffering round-up!

(Note: I will not include Rose Under Fire in this post, even though Rose is a teenager and Roza is even younger.  It just wouldn't feel right.)

Ashfall, by Mike Mullin, is a process dystopia book, about how civilization comes to an end via the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano, and how Alex, one boy right on the edge of the disaster zone, survives.  Most of the book is exactly what I want from my post-apocalyptic YA: clever people figuring out how to get food and stay alive.  It's really well done in that respect, and there are some very nice bits of altruism and the acknowledgement of the limits of altruism.

There's a chunk that takes place in a relocation/concentration camp, and that's much less enjoyable.  Not only is it very unpleasant, it's just so ugly--I know there's no reason to think that Americans wouldn't act like that in the months after a devestation, but seriously, it's pretty much Blackwater being hired to deliberately imprison and starve American citizens.  I know it's not implausible, but it doesn't feel like it makes sense.

That part was relatively short, though, and there are some great sections about what community looks like in this world--trade, and good fences, and also small towns being all self-reliant.  There's definitely some love for the Midwestern farming ethos here.  Alex's journey from spoiled teen to self-sufficient young man and across the barren state of Iowa (accompanied by his too-good-to-be-true mechanical genius girlfriend) is gripping and readable.  Yay!

Then you have a very different kind of end of the world: Maggot Moon, by Sally Gardener.  In this oppressive, North Korea-style regime, Standish Treadwell is living with his grandfather, since his parents and best friend's family have been taken away.  They are struggling to survive in a place where there isn't enough food and people inform on each other.

This unnamed nation is about to launch a spaceship to the moon, to prove to the world that they are superior.  Standish finds out secrets about the launch and finds himself facing decisions that are bigger than himself.  The book does an amazing job with the oppressive ignorance and horrible isolation of the world they live in.  And yes, I was crying a little at the end.  But there were some plot holes, and more places where the book has a tone of winning that maybe should be more like triumph of the human spirit in spite of horrible events.

And then you have Stupid Perfect World, which is somewhere between a novella and a short story.  Slight, slim, gauzy, but Scott Westerfeld can write distant future teenage society with flare.  Kieran's taking Scarcity class, for which you have to spend two weeks suffering something that people used to suffer way back in the day.  Someone picks the common cold, someone else gives up teleporting, Maria chooses normal teenage hormones.  Kieran picks sleeping, and he and Maria both find that these individual physiological changes have huge effects. 

I like Scott Westerfeld's books, mostly for his writing and world building.  They're very teenaged, though.  Passions, rebellion--like Maria, there are a lot of teenaged poets in his books. I don't have a lot to say, except not bad.

Prediction

One of the hot new young adult writers this year is Josin McQuein, who wrote Arclight and Premeditated, both of which were published this year.  The sequel to Arclight, Meridian, is coming out next year.  I haven't read that book yet, though I got it as a Kindle Daily Deal last week, so I might eventually. 

But I've been really excited about Premeditated since I read this post on QueryShark (an amazing blog you should read), well before the author had sold the book.  I bought it right away and started it last week.  I'm maybe halfway through, and it's time blog it.

That's because what I really want to read right now is this blog post about the alternate ending to Premeditated.  But I don't want to spoil the actual ending, so I'm about to spring into action and zip through the book.  But I think I've guessed the ending, and I want to talk about that, as well as some other things.

First, when I read the premise (Dinah's cousin/best friend attempts suicide, and when Dinah reads her diary, she realizes that there's a boy behind it and plots revenge), I was intrigued.  Thinking about it, I figured there was no way a story like that could work as a straight revenge story.  I mean, there's always going to be more to a suicide attempt than the high school boy who wronged the girl, even if the wrong is pretty massive.  So I have thought from the beginning that if the book's going to be any good at all, it's going to bring some depth to the idea that you never know what's going on inside someone else's head, or heart, or life.

So far, there's nothing terribly surprising here, in that Dinah's trying to be all single-minded about how evil rich jerks are, but she's finding that their lives are sometimes more complex than she expects.  This is pretty nicely done.  In fact, the sympathy for these different characters is maybe a little too powerful, and Dinah starts losing her focus pretty quickly.

I guess I feel like the whole story could be more pointed, cleaner, tighter.  A lot of the characters have the same sarcastic voice, and sometimes I get completely lost about who's involved in a conversation or what's being discussed.  The revenge part is all pretty vague--Dinah's not playing her "private school" character as tightly as I expected, and really the whole plan thing is pretty loosey goosey.  I think that story--what Dinah intends to be the plot of the story--could be a lot sharper and more driving.

[Warning: if I'm any good at predictions, there are spoilers ahead.]

But the real story is how nothing turns out to be quite what Dinah expects.  And here we get to the ending that I'm pretty sure is coming, and if it is, I think it might have been teased a little too heavily: I'm betting she's after the wrong guy.  The fact that there's no photographic evidence--not even something inconsequential--and that the description is so vague says to me that the non-evil-seeming guy she's stalking is not actually the bad guy.  I actually have a guess about who the bad guy is, but I'm not as worried about committing that to electrons; "ha! knew it" will do in that case.

In fact, it says it to me so clearly that I'm really hoping Dinah starts to doubt it herself.  I think that because the revenge plot is so loose, now that I'm pretty sure I know the twist, I'm impatient for it to come.  It's not like she's actually doing anything much, just kind of lurking and meeting people.  If she was at least busy doing vengeful things with tight efficiency, I'd be willing to watch her hurl herself aggressively up the wrong alley.  But this meandering needs to be in the right direction.

And if I'm NOT right?  Well, I hope there's an even bigger twist waiting.

(I'm writing this ahead and scheduling its post; by the time you read it, I'll probably already have my answer.  But that's another post, I suppose.)

The Sad, Sad Life of a Superstar

I do not read Us magazine, or People, or follow celebrity culture in any way.  But there's a level on which you can't be unaware of lives like those of Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears, and you can't imagine them to be anything but hard and sad and lonely.

Well, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus are here to tell you just how sad and exhausting and horrifying it is in Between You and Me.  These are the writers who brought you The Nanny Diaries, which is essentially about how incredibly awful rich people are and how they mess up their kids with their selfish shenanigans.  That sentence entirely encapsulates this book, too, though it'd be more precise if you put the word "famous" into that sentence somewhere.  It almost doesn't matter where.

Logan Wade's got a decent mid-level job and a decent mid-level twenty-something life in Manhattan when she gets a call out of the blue to visit her long-estranged cousin and childhood best friend, Britney Spea...I mean, Kelsey Wade.  She finds herself embroiled in Kelsey's exhausting life, including controlling parents, aggressive paparazzi, grueling 20-hour workdays, and petty indignities that you have to suffer with a smile on your face.

It's a "normal" person's view inside the insanity of celebrity life, as well as a very sympathetic account of Britney--sorry, I mean Kelsey!--'s public implosion.  Five minute marriages, kids at a young age, messy family relationships, and all in the public eye.  But there's so much the public eye doesn't see, because narrative is always neater than life, and the collective narrative of the media leaves no room for messiness.  That's the big virtue of this book--it's an excellent picture of the answer to the questions we ask ourselves about other people, questions like "how did she end up in such a mess?" or "what was she thinking?"

This is pretty much always what I'm looking for--a book that takes someone who's completely unlike me and makes me truly understand how they can go about being the way they are and feeling like it makes sense.  There are so many factors going into this in Kelsey's life, and the fact that she's actually a talented musician and a pretty savvy marketer are definitely on her side.  But the fact that her parents are and always have been A HOT MESS and are all up in her business (literally; they're her managers) and you can see where every bad decision makes sense, where every eager wish she tries to fulfill is going to fall apart, and just why she can't see it coming.

In the end, there are definitely good guys and bad guys.  But the grey area that I'm always looking for in characterization is right where it needs to be: Kelsey Wade, America's sweetheart.  It really makes you want to take care of her.

(I got this book free for review from Netgalley.)

Book Club, Three Weeks Gone

Book club met on Monday [n.b., I started this post a a full month ago; we met on Monday, September 30. This is my blogging shame.], and then I developed some sort of bottomless pit of an influenza or something[and went on vacation, etc.] and have been off the grid. 

But the book was so seriously good, I want to make sure I talk about it. So: Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  Bloggers who speak much more intelligently than I have already talked about how wonderful this book is; what I can add is mostly just my discussion questions.

Ifemelu is moving back to Nigeria after many years of living in America.  As she contemplates the move, she also thinks about making contact with her high school

I have some discussion questions based on notes I took (I took notes!) at book club.  Because this was one of the smartest books I've read in a long time, and my book club is, overall, smarter than I am. 

(Warning: general-ish spoilers ahead)

1) Ifemelu is often passive in her relationships.  She keeps her thoughts to herself, she follows the flow of the group she's in, and her life changes significantly as she moves in different social circles.  But the voice in her blog is clear and sure, opinionated and angrier than she ever expresses in her "real" life.  Where do you think this contrast comes from?  What do you think it says about her, or about the world around her?  And do you think that seems to be changing at the end of the book?

2) Look at some of the individuals and groups of people that Ifemu meets.  Do any of them reflect people who seem familiar to you?  (The college roommates, the nanny employer, the grad student social circle, the hairdressers.)  Do they seem realistic, nuanced, representative?  Do your assessments of the realism of characters who are more familiar to you affect your feelings about the characters who feel less familiar? 

(This is one of those questions I have an answer to: I think the parts of the book that felt less familiar to me had an immediate believability because the parts that were familiar were so well-crafted.)

3) Why do you think she had so much trouble finding a job when she first came to the states?  Was it just an unlucky streak of interviews, or do you think there was more going on?

4) What do you think about that one character's suicide attempt?  What was behind it?  How do the issues you think are behind it relate to the central themes and ideas of the book?

5) Do you think this is a love story?  I've heard people say at its heart, the book is a love story.  I'm not sure I agree; I think the idea of how you're shaped by where you're from and where you are, and how being of more than one place is not something the world does a good job of encompassing right now.  How do the different stories--love story, immigration stories, personal stories--serve each other?

6) One of the most amazing things about this book is how broadly and directly it addresses race.  As a white person, I feel like I learned a lot, was given a lot to think about and a lot of new perspectives, without feeling confused or defensive.  What ideas or observations about race stuck out most to you?  Is there anything that you learned or got a new perspective on from this book?

This is probably the objectively best book that I've enjoyed in months, maybe even all year.  It's a human story, a literary story, and I think it was the juxtaposition of the unfamiliar and the very familiar that really made it so irresistible.  This is kind of a lame compliment that says more about me than about the book, but I feel smarter for having enjoyed it.

Through the Weeds

Guys, I'm so backlogged.  I'm sorry.  I was sick, and there were some big, substantial books that I wanted to review, and now here we are.  Let's roll out a Table of Contents for the next few days, with the warning that some of these books will probably get mini-reviews because gosh, there are so many.

Ashfall, by Mike Mullin
Maggot Moon, by Sally Gardener
The Poisoner's Handbook, by Deborah Blum
Boxers & Saints, by Gene Luen Yang
Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Between You and Me, by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus
Rose Under Fire, by Elizabeth Wein

Plus maybe a Stephen King/Joe Hill short story, In the Tall Grass, but maybe not.  How many times can I complain about how much I used to like Stephen King but don't anymore? And I don't know if I have much to say about Scott Westerfeld's Stupid Perfect World, except that he's good at future world building and Kindle singles are addictive.

Okay, so these are my promises.  Reviews, mini-reviews, and other things.  Plus all the other things.  Welcome back from vacation!

Vacated

You're supposed to post the "sorry, I'm going on vacation" message before you go instead of after you get back.  Sorry about that!

So: more soon!

Second Book Syndrome

I mentioned that I really enjoyed The Crown of Embers, but what I really want to talk about is why the second book in a series so often sucks, what can be done to avoid said suckage, and how this book actually fails to avoid most of the traps but doesn't suck anyway.

Some examples?  Crossed, Insurgent, Magic Study. I liked Matched, Divergent, and Poison Study to various extents, but each of the sequels fell down, and I think in very similar ways.  So you're an unknown author (all the ones mentioned so far were), and you're writing your first book.  Trilogies sell.  If the first book is good, people will come back to read more about their favorite characters.  So you write one book, self-contained but with an open enough ending to leave you room to tell more story.

This means that to some extent or another, the first book needs to wrap up at the end and leave some open space, not just for new stories with the same character, but for more of the same story.  Is this a weak point?  Is a totally different adventure about the same characters better?  Maybe that's it, but Catching Fire didn't have that problem; it closed off the occasion of the 74th annual Hunger Games neatly, but left us with the fallout from that experience and the same larger political scenario, then introduced the 75th games and turned things upside down again.  And it did a great job with this. 

So maybe you're ending on a cliffhanger, or a moment of transition, or maybe you have a temporary peace that you know will only be a lull, or maybe you just have more room to explore the problems in your world.  The problem is that you can't build tension in a second book the same way you built it in the first.  The elements that go into the beginning of a story--setting the scene, introducing the characters, introducing the problems, foreshadowing the troubles to come--some of these have been done already, some need to be changed or skipped. The proportions are going to be very different; depending on the strengths of the writer and the reader's relationship with the book, the proportions are likely to be a bit off.

(I'm thinking this through as I write here, by the way; this is not some frequently given, thoughtfully conceived rant.)

So you're building two stories: book one, and the trilogy.  You need two sets of pacing, two arcs, two sets of character development to occur simultaneously.  But as you're writing, you really need to sell the first book.  So even if the first book ends on a cliffhanger, there's got to be some sort of emotional wrap-up, catharsis, payoff. 

Which means that when book two opens, you're starting from a new "beginning."  But you've already got your characters; likely you're going to bring in some more I've never met before.  You've pushed down the bad guy; you'll either need a new one or some renewed threat.  But wait, did you spend your best bad guy stuff in book one?  Or did you leave your main character gasping in the dust, and now you have to spend a bunch of time picking them up out of the dust, brushing them off, and pointing them in the direction of the new adventure, all without character building (which has been done) to fill the time?

In that case, you're going to have to make their situation really horrible.  Things were bad in the first book, but if this is going to be a trilogy, they're going to have to get worse.  Is there anywhere worse to go?  Better be.

I feel like there's some nugget of truth I'm not getting at here, some kernel of what makes a good and exciting book that a second book has a hard time pulling off.  What did Days of Blood and Starlight do that was so good?  I think the two conflicts--book level and series level--were present in the right proportions in the first book.  It helped that it was a big chunk of flashback--the "present day" story dealt with the mystery, and then there were revelations to the mystery that gave you all this other story that was waiting there, that you were already invested in.

Did Crown of Embers do that?  A little; winning a decisive battle leaves you at a turning point in a war that you probably haven't won yet, and also leaves you with a war-ravaged nation. 

There are also, of course, the external truths, which are not the fault of the stories, but of the world they're being read in.  First, finding a new book that you love is always surprising.  A sequel will have a much harder time surprising you than the first book did, putting it at an immediate disadvantage.  Second, a first time author probably spent some time span on the scale of years on that first book.  The second one has been coming along, but now there's a timeline.  Ravenous fans like me are salivating and you have to finish it NOW.  There's no way you're going to have as much time to sharpen book two as you did book one.

This post was not as well-structured as I hoped it would be.  A few days ago I thought I had a grasp on this elusive question, but I feel like maybe it was like one of those understandings that comes to you in a dream and then is gone.  Ah, well; they can't all be life-changing inspirations.  I hope my use of italics and caps lock has made up in conviction what I lack in coherence.  Thank you and good night.

Queen of (Sexy) Hearts

I want to think about what second book syndrome is and why it's a problem, why it's so hard to avoid.  But I also really, really want to talk about the two big problems I had with Rae Carson's Crown of Embers first.

Okay, right off the bat, I really enjoyed reading this book.  It's not fabulous or a stand-out by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a good, fast, engaging YA read, and I like Elisa.  The book actually did a very good job of minimizing the Second Book problems (they were there, but they weren't as problematic as they often are).  But there were two big glaring annoyances that I want to just get out there.

First, Elisa's body.  In the first book, Girl of Fire and Thorns, Elisa starts out as a very fat whiner.  Over the course of the book she becomes strong and thin.  The point is made several times that she'll never be truly thin, of course, but she's not fat anymore, so thank god for that, right?  Yeah, ugh.

But in this book, her awakening to romance is accompanied by discussions of her body, and if this book had a face I would punch it.  She talks about how she can't imagine someone being interested in seeing her body--a very sympathetic concern--and the point she cites about that is how her thighs brush together a bit while she's standing. Seriously, I hate it enough that here's the quote: "Would someone look past...the way my thighs just brush together when I stand?"

Seriously?!?  In what normal place and time is THAT the standard of a good body image?  Only here and now in America, and I am appalled that this is even in here.  The other stuff in the scene--her scars, her soft belly--either make sense or can be read to make sense (a soft belly can mean different things to different people), but that line....ugh.  (Tangentially related: see Rainbow Rowell's blog post on what it means that Eleanor in her amazing book Eleanor & Park is fat.)

The other issue is tied to this: when the romance kicks in (which you can see coming; Elisa loves Hector, I love Hector, this is all very good), but when it really starts to be a thing, it is SO CHEESY.  It is cheesier than the cheesiest romance novel than I've read.  The cliches that are used to describe her feelings, the ways he touches her, the totally macho things he says that are maybe very sexist I haven't decided yet--it's all just boring to the point of being ick.  And I LOVE a good romance.

Geez, this is already huge.  Okay, I'll finish up the review and come back to talk about Second Book Syndrome next time.  I've told you the things that drove me crazy, but seriously, we're talking about two passages of body stuff and then about thirty pages 3/4 of the way in where the romancing gets all brie and Roquefort and you just have to skim. 

Other than that, as I've said, a ripping good read.  I love Elisa's competency and uncertainty, I love that she has different kinds of relationships with all these different people in her life, and that many of those relationships change in both good ways and bad ways over the course of the book. 

I think the other positive stuff will come up soon, when I talk about why this isn't a problematic Second Book.  Stay tuned!

England: Still Classy After All These Years

I have two posts worth of things to say about The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters.  One is about the ghost story and how it's constructed, and is basically a review of the book.  The other is all about the British class system, and involves my thoughts on the book Assassin, as well.  But I've been kind of overwhelmed by all the things I want to say and not quite able to tie them all together.

But you can't put things off forever; perfection is the enemy of completion.  So I'm going with a list format, with apologies for my intellectual laziness.

1. The Little Stranger is an excellent book.  It's a ghost story, technically, but that is almost (not quite) a spoiler, because there is nothing strange going on for almost half the book.  It's about an English country doctor in the years after World War II who enters into an unlikely friendship with the impoverished but genteel family at the local estate. 

I am so against slice-of-life books and intense character studies, but the first half of the book was little more than that, and I found it intensely compelling.  The doctor is--I wouldn't call him an unreliable narrator, but he's very biased, and the more he tries to explain things fairly and with a doctor's clinical distance, the more you become aware of the lenses through which he views things.  This was marvelously executed and kept me reading.

2) Well, listening.  I had the audiobook of this from before I canceled my Audible subscription, and that's why I picked it up.  The performance is amazing.  It's told in the first person from the doctor's point of view, and the narrator, Simon Vance, did an incredible job in capturing the doctor's layers.   The variation in his accents is great, and he does an excellent job with the female characters, which is often very hard. 

What he really captured is how the doctor believes thoroughly that he's being objective, rational, and scientific at every stage, but how quickly and easily swayed he is by his feelings.  He doesn't know it, would never acknowledge it, but the clinical clarity with which he describes how his feelings change over the course of a conversation, or how someone's comments make him angry, or how he does something impulsively, is so complex but so clear. 

3) I've never read Sarah Waters before.  I hear amazing things left, right, and center, and now I believe them and will have to add books like Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet to my reading list. 

4) Now here's where I was really going with all this: class.  I know that this is a thing in English history and society, and I remember a line in Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow about how if they'd had an Englishman with them they might have recognized the complexities of the caste system before it was too late.  And then you have YA books like Assassin (whose author is listed as Lady Grace Cavendish, who is the diarist-narrator, so weirdness there) where ladies in waiting don't understand why they can't be friends with laundresses and jesters, as though she was completely unable to understand the social structure she lives in.  It makes her seem stupid.

But then you have this book, which is so infused with class that it makes up the large part of the tension, especially in the first half.  The Ayers family is aristocracy, with an enormous house, Hundreds Hall.  Dr. Faraday's mother used to be a nursery maid at Hundreds, years ago, and he's very aware that, as a doctor, he's little more than a skilled tradesman in the family's eyes.  But they (an elderly mother and her two adult children) have no money and few friends, and he has a fascination with their house, so an odd friendship develops.

Everyone's awareness of his not quite being of their class glares from every page though it's almost never mentioned.  The house's very slow collapse, the money troubles, and the way things "used to be" all combine into the strange miasma of the place.  Someone I know said that, reading it, you picture everyone at Downton Abbey in that same time period, with no money to keep the house up.  Mrs. Ayers would be just the same age as Mary Crawley, and you can picture her going through photographs, sewing by the fire in the parlor as the ceiling sags toward the floor in the library.

It's so sad, and so poignant, and so rich.  It's delicious.  I'm eager to hear more.  You should really get the audiobook--it's 16 hours long and so worth it.

Romance Quiz the Third!

New format this time for our Romance Title Quiz.  I was feeling inspired this time out, so I came up with three of the options in each item below; one (and only one) of each is real.  I think this will be easier than my other ones, but hopefully still worth a laugh!

1. Scotsmen!
a) His Highland Touch
b) Under the Kilt
c) Sins of a Highland Devil
d) Taken in a Highland Meadow

2. Horses!
a) The Cowboy's Convenient Proposal
b) The Rancher's Revenge
c) A Cowgirl's Cowboy
d) When a Cowboy Calls Your Name

3. Dukedom! 
a) The Duke Wore Dancing Shoes
b) Deflowering the Duke
c) The Duke of Danger
d) A Duke of Her Own

4. Bad boys!
a) Ravished by a Black Sheep
b) The Rogue Steals a Bride
c) Autumn is for Rakes
d) A Pirate's Passion

5. Titled ladies!
a) This Duchess of Mine
b) Count on a Countess
c) The Bare Contessa
d) Mark of the Marquess

Everyday Hiro

"Going out in New York is never easy. It always involves construction on the 2/3 line or a samurai attack."  At least it does for Johnny Hiro, who is just the kind of guy things happen to, whether he likes it or not.

Johnny Hiro: Half Asian, All Hero, by Fred Chao, is the story of Hiro and his girlfriend Mayumi, and the ups and downs of their life in New York City.  Hiro is the busboy and right hand man of a cranky but good-hearted sushi chef and Mayumi works at a publishing house.  Their relationship is loving and supportive, even in the face of their constant struggle to make ends meet and keep from getting kidnapped by giant lizards or platoons of angry sushi chefs.

Each issue is a romp, with an over-the-top adventure, punctuated by great little cameos (Mayor Bloomberg saves the day in more than one story; Judge Judy teams up with the cast of Night Court to bring justice to New York; Alton Brown brings you the finer points of sushi fish; various hip hop artists muse on life and what's really important).

But what really makes this amazing is the depth of the characters, the sadness behind the cheer and the love behind the blustering.  When Mayumi and Hiro fight the drag of being poor in a great city by going to discount night at the opera, it's part of this lovely balance of bitter and sweet that makes this more than a Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

Mayumi is my favorite character, by far.  She's so sweet and charming, and there's so much more to her than you think there is at first.  I can't say anything about her better than Aarti already has, though, so I'll leave my admiration there.  But I'll say that it's not just Mayumi--every single character here, including the mob of angry sushi chefs and the rogue samurai and Mayor Bloomberg--has a rich internal life.  As Neil Gaiman says, "Everybody has a secret world inside of them."  Chao knows this and he shows it off beautifully.

This was a sweet one, though.  If you want a laugh and love New York, and if maybe you struggle sometimes, you should pick up Johnny Hiro.  And the second volume is out in October!

Updates and Notes

Today was the big day!  Of course you realize that I didn't buy most of those books; it would be pointless to get them all at once.  But I was afraid I'd talk myself out of them entirely, and there is no reason on earth that my disposable income shouldn't go toward these authors I like so much.  So I grabbed Rose Under Fire right away, and assuming that book club and library due dates and Netgalley teasers cooperate, I'm going to read it as soon as possible!  I'm afraid that Fangirl and Unthinkable may have to wait a bit, though; I'm spread pretty thin.

I think I'm giving up pretty quickly on another one that's been on my list.  As much as I still think Susan Beth Pfeffer's Life As We Knew It was one of the best end-of-the-world books I've ever read, none of the sequels quite lived up to it.  The newest, the fourth in the series, has already turned me off just a few pages in.  It's called The Shade of the Moon, and it focuses on Miranda's youngest brother, Jon.

The premise here is very different from the other three; instead of trying to survive in a world with no society, we now get an enclave, a society where there's plenty of food, but a major line between haves and have-nots.  Instead of being about physical and interpersonal survival in a world where society is just gone, you get an overly repressive society, complete with bad-guy haves who not only mock the have-nots, but consider them disgusting.

Aside from everything else--how much more often this story has been told, how little personality the "oppressor" types seem to have in the first few pages--there's a scene near the beginning where a bunch of the rich fancy clavers (enclave kids) are warning Jon away from the new girl.  I know this is a whole new world and all, but it's only been three years since the old world.  There is not enough distance between the old and the new for some of the prejudices these kids have to make sense.  I mean, this kid talks about his grandfather was sent out of the enclave in the same sentence that he's calling the non-clavers "disgusting."  Most of these kids probably have relatives, or at least acquaintances, who are out there. 

I do understand the whole mentality of looking down on the less fortunate to make your own position seem safe and all.  And it's not fair to judge after just the 10 or 20 pages I've read.  But the truth is, this book shone brightest where it was a family against nature.  A boy against society is not a book I need to read again.

Woman of the Wild West

I never got on the very well-populated Catherynne Valente bandwagon.  I picked up The Girl Who Navigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, but didn't get beyond the first chapter; I can see why they love it, but it was definitely not for me.

I can't say that Six Gun Snow White is so very different, and I would call this a middling review that I'm about to give.  I finished it, because it was short and I wanted to understand a bit more of what the author was doing.  And I can't say it wasn't good--I think it was beautiful, and I think it might even be important.  This book is a poem--that's not quite a metaphor, I'm pretty sure there are definitions in which this book is a poem--and I struggled with it in the same way that I often struggle with poetry.

Snow White is the daughter of a rich white man, a very successful miner, and the Crow woman he coveted and bought/stole/took.  She's raised as his ward and maybe pet, until he marries again and her new stepmother tries...well, it's hard to explain.  It's the Old West, and there is magic, and a magic mirror.  The fairy tale is told in its setting, and things fit in lovely images into their places--the huntsman is a Pinkerton who is sent after Snow White; there are seven outlaw women who take her in and save her; there are apples and hearts aplenty.

Is there any place, any time, that is more intensely masculine than the Old West?  Anyplace with less space for women?  Knights had their ladies, and soldier are tended by nurses, write home to their girlfriends.  There is no place here for a woman, and certainly no place to see what a woman could be, what the good, healthy life that other folks are living looks like. There is  no sense of what is real and what is not, because everything is real and unreal at the same time here.  It's strange and like a fairy tale.

But this creates so much distance, I can't get close to the characters.  Snow White is in pain, but I can't tell you what choices she's making, what options she has.  If you think of it as the story of a half breed, with all the ugly exclusion and loneliness implied by that, you get a glimpse of it.  But this is about Snow White as a legend, as Coyote.

It's a poem, is what it is.  It might even be a good poem.  I hate it when people say "I don't really get that kind of book, so I'm not going to talk about it."  But I read this book, and I didn't get it.  I saw the feminism and the ideas of mothers and daughters, of whiteness and otherness, of womanhood crowded out by manhood.  I saw those ideas, those themes, couched in beautiful imagery.  But I don't know what the book was saying about these things.  I didn't get it.

I think it was a lovely poem.

Not Your Mom's Escaping-a-Cult Novel

If you put a cult in your book, I'll give it a shot.  Netgalley gave me Escape from Eden, by Elisa Nader, and hey, cult book!  Let's roll with it.

And roll we did, on a freaking coaster.  This was NOT what you expect from a book about a cult.  And while I can only give it a 2 for plausibility, I'll give it a 5 for avoiding cliches, and a solid 4 around the teenaged lust/romance (which is EXCELLENT; I'm hard to impress with teenaged romance).  In the afterword, first-time author Nader refers to writing the afterword to your own novel as "crazypants crazy."  I have only to add: yes, that pretty much sums it up.

Mia lives on a compound in the South American jungle where the Flock has followed their leader, the Reverend.  From page one, Mia knows this place is messed up and wants out--right away we're off script from my experience with cult books.  You've got the Leaving Fishers variety that shows you how someone gets sucked in, and you've got the Gated variety (very good book, by the way) that shows you how someone realizes that their bucolic community is really a mess.  Right away, though, you have to throw those paradigms out the window; Mia seems to be the only one who notices that the Reverend is a disgusting, self-righteous creature, but she wants out.

It's not that easy, of course.  She's lived here for six years, since she was 10, and her only family, her mother and brother, live here and are determined to stay.  Plus, they're in the middle of the jungle on a guarded compound.  So mostly Mia looks for opportunities, makes plans, works in the kitchen, sneaks time with her drawing pad, waits to get called to the elite Prayer Circle, and considers how she feels about courting with Octavio, her friend Juanita's brother.  You know, business as usual for your modern cult teen.

Then a new family shows up, and the hot 17-year-old son, Gabriel, refuses to bend to the ways of the Flock.  He's vocal and angry and very sexy, and Mia's drawn to him.  Right here is where the book could have lost me, but didn't.  I mean, Mia's 16 and there's a  hot boy who's an outsider like she feels, and she does appropriate things with that.  But her mother, her brother, her friends, and hey, the whole escaping the cult thing are much more real than the buzz she gets from talking to Gabriel.  SO glad to hear that.

Now, I can't tell you too much about the plot, because like I said, it gets all CRAZYPANTS.  And yeah, it's implausible, but so are all those TV shows I watch.  There's way more than meets the eye going on in the cult, and Mia's task becomes not to escape, but to save the whole Flock--her family, her community--who don't want to be saved.  (If I was a gif sort of person there would be a gif of a roller coaster here.  I've never used one and I'm afraid of the intellectual property implications.  Use your imaginations, kids.)

So there's so many twists, and a car chase in the jungle, and drugs that modern pharmacology has yet to imagine, and just enough pauses for breathing room, and my GOD it's hot in the jungle--absolutely oppressive.  I won't promise you that this book will move you, or change your life.  But I will say that I didn't see it coming, and I didn't know where it would go.  As close as I will ever come to actually riding on a roller coaster.

(Also?  I pictured Gabe looking like Logan Echolls from Veronica Mars, which I am currently gulping down (the show, not Logan Echolls.  Get your mind out of the gutter).  But yeah, that was nice.  Now, go watch Veronica Mars.  Go on, right now.  Go.)

Been Doing It Wrong

Apparently I've been doing something wrong for the past couple of weeks, because after a month in which I managed to squeeze out only about five non-comics, I suddenly find myself sweeping briskly through the one I picked up this morning.

Then again, it may be the fact that Lady Drusilla's Road to Ruin is a Harlequin Historical romance.  I love these.  I love knowing that the couple will have sex for the first time between pages 170 and 190 (the book will be between 280 and 320 pages long in total, which means somewhere around 60% on the Kindle).  I love how much time they spend admiring each other's calves and the convenient ways the author finds to force them to cuddle (she doesn't have a sidesaddle, so she has no choice but to sit in front of him on his saddle).  And I love that the sex is neither risky nor chaste.  There are places for both; Harlequin Historicals are neither.

I'm not done the book, not by a long shot.  But I can already tell you that I'm going to read both the one before it and the one after it in Christine Merrill's Ladies in Disgrace series. In this one, John is running from his unrequited love for the heroine of the first book in the series.  Drusilla is chasing her sister (heroine of the third book) to prevent an elopement that would ruin the reputation of the family.  The two fall in together and go on a long hunt for the eloping couple, gradually falling for each other, etc. etc. 

I doubt that I'm going to end up reviewing this when I'm done; unless the end is really bizarre, I can tell you that this is a story about two smart, charming people who are attracted to each other but take a little while to admit it because of misunderstandings and maybe the need to be told that they're not second best.  I can tell you already that I love it.

Coming Soon to a Bookstore Near You!

September is going to be a very exciting month for new books!  Especially books that I learned about through Netgalley but couldn't get my hands on there.

First, foremost, and up front, we have Rose Under Fire, by Elizabeth Wein, a companion book to the absolutely lovely Code Name Verity.  It's another story of a woman pilot in World War II, with, I gather, some more being captured by the Germans in there.  Verity was so different, so wonderful--still able to bring tears to my eyes when I think of that one line that Verity shouts at the end--I'm not going to be able to wait a minute for this one.  This is one I'll buy when it hits the market, immediately.

 Usually, Netgalley won't give you any preview of the book--you're going in blind.  For All Our Yesterdays, by Cristin Terrill, though, they gave us a teaser of about 30 pages.  Which I read.  Which was AWESOME.  And now, even though they didn't give me a galley, I want to read the darned book so bad--so bad!  I'm not sure what's going on--there's time travel and a prison and a lot of death defying.  It's time travel where you can change the future, I guess, or something--I'm sort of reminded of Ruby Red only much less teen angst and more trapped in prison and might die at any moment angst, which is in my opinion better angst.

Fangirl, by Rainbow Rowell.  I've told you what I think of the Rainbow Rowell books that I've already read, and I cannot wait to read this one.  I have no idea what it's about (besides the basic idea of the story that's implied in the title), but Rowell's ability to charm me is pretty well proven by now, and her ability to put some meat on those bones is also well established.  And if, yeah, there was a creepy element to Attachments, the fact that the book was so charming AROUND that element speaks volumes to me.

After Impossible, which took the strange and supernatural and made it warm and practical, comes Unthinkable, by Nancy Werlin.  This is a sequel, but promises to be very different, as it takes place in the land of faerie and the title character is the enchanted several-greats-grandmother of the previous book's heroine.  I won't say I love every Nancy Werlin book, but she does things differently, and I can't wait to see what she's going to do here.

From Gene Luen Yang, author of the excellent American Born Chinese (which, how did I not review that?) come Boxers and Saints, two graphic novels about the Boxer Rebellion.  I don't know nearly enough about this part of history, and the structure intrigues me. Both books tell the stories of Chinese youth caught up in the Boxer Rebellion; one is a converted Christian, the other has joined the rebels.  I love the idea of the author taking on both sides of the story like this; it's so easy, when we look at a conflict like this from the distance of time and neutrality, to feel like everyone should just get along, and I can't wait to see what he does with the fear and turmoil that are involved in living through an event like this.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, by Holly Black.  I know nearly nothing about this one, except what one of my Goodreads friends said: "Keep hearing that vampires are over but this is how they should have been done all along."  Must read now.

And guys, that's just September!  In fact, that's pretty much all September 10!  I CANNOT WAIT.  I will not get into what's coming in October (at least until a future post). 

I do think it's interesting that almost every one of these (except the Yang) is something I wanted from Netgalley but didn't get, presumably mostly because of my small (but dedicated! and brilliant!) readership.  All I'm saying is that if nothing else, Netgalley is an effective way to market books to me. Well played, Netgalley, well played.

Bernadette at Book Club

Get it?  'Cause the title of the book is Where'd You Go, Bernadette?  (By Maria Semple, just to sneak that useful information in there.)

Poor Bee; her mother has disappeared.  The novel is composed of a collection of documents--mostly emails and letters from Bee's school, from Bernadette to her new personal assistant in India, from her neighbor to the blackberry abatement specialist.  The portrait that emerges is an unflattering one of a brittle and neurotic Bernadette.  The other players don't fare much better, from the overearnest parents at the school to the absolutely nutballs neighbor/parent who hates her.

The first time I picked the book up, I put it down after 30 pages.  I hated pretty much all the characters, and I was pretty sure the author hated them, too, and wanted me to laugh at them with her.  They were all just so sad, though, I stopped reading.

But when I read it for book club, my opinion changed.  I loved this book, and Maria Semple loved her characters.  She saw how they screwed up, but she also saw how much screwing up doesn't make you a bad person, even when you do it repeatedly and over a long period of time.  You could say the big message here is that it's never too late, and my word do I like hearing that sometimes.

Unfortunately, this book being so all-around enjoyable meant that our discussion at book club was not as spirited as usual.  It's also not as rich in questions for future book clubbers in need of a reader's guide.  (By the way, there was a reader's guide in the back of my copy.  I was not terribly impressed.)

Anyway,  here's what we thought was worth talking about.

1) Answer the title question.  At the point in the middle of the narrative where (is this a spoiler?) an actual disappearance takes place, what zany ideas did you come up with?  I had a whole bunch, and they're really cool, but they're very spoiley, and I'm not sure how to keep spoilers from showing up in an RSS reader, so I will put those theories in a paragraph at the very end of the review.  That's where the spoilers live.

2) Talk to me about religion.  How did religion fit in with Audrey's character arc?  With Bee's?  Were there undercurrents besides the obvious "religious" things, or did the religion thing seem tacked on?  By the characters (tacked onto their lives) or by the author (tacked onto the story)?

3) What do you see going on with gender relations in this book?  There are some really interesting subquestions and ways to look at things here--Elgie's vs. Bernadette's roles in their marriage vs. the expectations of those roles; Elgie as kind of the token man in the story overall; Bernadette's career and subsequent collapse are all very "feminine" in both cool and not-cool ways.

4) Talk about mothers.  Bernadette's relationship with Bee, Bernadette's history with trying to get pregnant, the other mothers at the school and their relations to each other, other kids' reactions to Bernadette, Audrey as a mom, Soo-Lin as a parent.  Is Bernadette a good mother?  Is she a better mother than she might appear to be?  Appear to whom?  And hey, what about Elgie--is he a good father?

5) There's a really cool conversation to be had if anyone reading this book knows anything about: Seattle; intense, participatory schools for crunchy, high-achieving families; working at big, exciting, cult-like organizations.  5b) If you read this and Mr. Penumbra, compare the latter's depictions of Google with Bernadette's depictions of Microsoft.

Okay, that's all the questions.  Now the next paragraph has my spoilers of Theories I Had In the Middle of the Book about Were Bernadette Actually Was.  Don't read it if you haven't read the book!

I thought she might be: hiding out in the desert with Audrey; trading identities with Audrey and hiding out in the desert answering Soo-Lin's emails; down in Los Angeles wreaking vengeance on the reality TV dude who ruined her house; building a new house somewhere weirdly under their noses in Seattle; building a house in Antarctica.

Was I right?  Well, read the book!

Einstein Tensor Tattoo

I've read way too many YA books that all look the same; there are a ton of red flags that stop me in my tracks (instalove, hot guy who changes the main character in the first five minutes, boring teenagers).  Relativity, by Cristin Bishara, dodged pretty much all of them; it started out fresh and smart and kept it up pretty much all the way through.

Start with Ruby, who kicks butt. She's smart, independent, well-read, and rational.  She has a tattoo on her neck and  a crush on her best friend, and is incredibly frustrated that she's had to move from LA to Nowhere, Ohio, because her dad got married in a whirlwind romance.  And her new stepsister, Kandy, is pretty awful.

Through one thing and another, she finds herself wandering through different universes--places where history has gone very differently than it has for her.  Her new family, the loss of her mother when she was young--what does life look like with these factors changed?  Or if Thomas Edison didn't invent the light bulb?

I won't say that the science was unassailable; there's definitely some fate stuff happening here.  But there's some good science discussion, some nice handwaving bits about how the multiverse might work.  More importantly, though, when Ruby has a phenomenon to investigate, she grabs a notebook and a digital camera, goes to the library to do background research, and works hard to figure things out.  The girl is THINKING. When she does make less-than-stellar decisions, it's in situations where I don't blame her--stress, panic, and the sheer bewilderment of what she's learning--heck, I wouldn't have done as well as she did.

Anyway, I had a blast with this book.  Definitely among the best straight YA I've read in a while.

(Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley for a review.  If you think this is why I'm giving it four stars, you should check out my other ARC reviews.  I am not that easy.)