The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander

So, everyone in the universe has had at least 40 years to get it together and read these books, so I'm not even going to mess.  

I read these books for the first time during my first semester at BYU, when the wonders of the library were just beginning to make themselves known.  I can't even remember what put me onto them--I never heard of them at all when I was a kid or in the real YA target demographic.  Actually, I think it was when I was buying textbooks for the first time and I saw The High King (book 5) as a textbook for a upper level English class, and I thought, a)That book looks pretty epic and has an archetypally epic title, b)How long before I can take that class?  And then away I went to the library (after figuring out how checking books out at the circulation desk worked) and all my wildest dreams came true!

Over the subsequent years they'd faded pretty much completely from my mind--I only vaguely remembered the basic plot, and mostly what stood out was how freaked out I was of the Cauldron Born and Arawn's Huntsmen and how cool I'd thought it was that I was a big kid getting seriously freaked out by the bad guys in some littler-kid books.  The desire for revisitation came when I was in England.  This one night when we were in Cornwall at my very most favorite place in all the world, sitting on these rocks on these cliffs over the ocean watching the sunset, and being a bunch of bookish nerds we started talking about The Dark Is Rising books since they take place in Cornwall (although I only vaguely remembered that--that's the next series I need to revisit when my reading list dwindles) but then we shifted over to Prydain.  With everyone talking about them I remembered that they are sort of faux-Welsh, and I realized that at this point I could probably actually pronounce the character's names, after a year of Welsh classes!  A few days later in our trip we actually were in Wales, staying at this hostel in the middle of a national park, all forest and hills and lake and waterfalls.  At the time I wasn't like consumed with thoughts of Prydain, but it was really amazing this week as I reread them all to think, all the time that they're tramping through forests and hills and lakes and waterfalls (which is like 87% of the books), Holy crap, YES.  THAT WAS ME.  

Really, one of the best parts of the whole England adventure was that I have such revitalized sympathy for all the times in all the epic fantasy novels where the band of heroes have to go traveling miles and miles on foot to take on the dreaded foe--um YES I know what that is like you guys, I am right there with you Taran/Frodo/Whatever, I will no longer just glance over those paragraphs and think they are boring.  Although I guess they've still definitely all one up'd me, since at no time were there dark lords to be defeated before we could get into a hostel every night.  Much to my chagrin.

PS I put up the cover of book 4 because it is my favorite, which is funny because I guess that's the only one not to receive Newberry or ALA recognition.  PSH!

The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Pope

I read this book on the strong recommendation of my friend Lori, who made me a delightfully long list of books to read whilst we were together in England.  There was this one morning when we were walking ten miles from some village into Winchester, and as we walked she told me all about this book because the landscape was bringing it so much to mind and she was so excited to read it very first thing when she got home.  I was worried when I sat down to read it, because the writing style didn't seem to be quite my thing--I was worried it would turn out to be like Megan Whalen Turner or Patricia McKillip, whose stories are fascinating and whose books I always want to love  but then somehow their style of telling them just doesn't quite click with my brain.  This is a thing I struggle with.  But then luckily I turned out to not have that problem at all--I think it was just a bit of a slow start perhaps, but once things got going I was fully invested.

Kate Sutton is a maid of honor to Princess Elizabeth, during the reign of Queen Mary, when things were really dicey.  Kate is mistakenly blamed for some idiot thing her idiot sister did which offended the queen, and thus is sent as like a minimum security prisoner to Perilous Gard, a castle type place in Derbyshire [unfortunately we coached right through Derbyshire, or I'm sure that THAT is where Lori would have been sent into Perilous Gard raptures:)]*.  Almost immediately there are "Hm this place is weird" markers, and sure enough, there are weird things afoot!  "Weird" in this case meaning that there are Fairy Folk tramping around everywhere demanding human tributes, and when the half-wit minstrel starts babbling Tam Lin ballads, you can see pretty clearly where things are headed.  Which was totally great in my opinion, because I doubt I will ever tire of Tam Lin-based novels.  Seriously, Fire and Hemlock by Dianne Wynne Jones?  An Earthly Knight by Janet McNaughton?  These books are good times, and now Perilous Gard can go next to them on the shelf.

*Did you see how I just totally disregarded the rules of "([{" progression?  Do you think that this is an appropriate way of sidestepping the awkwardness of the emoticon-in-parenthesis debacle?  In most situations I simply restrain myself from emoticon usage but in this case I just could not help but express my smile at the idea of Lori being sent into raptures.  She's just not the rapturing sort, you know?

Sorcery & Cecelia by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer

You guys I cannot even tell you how much I loved this book.  DANG, is my active response.  False:  My real response to it as I have been lounging about all morning finishing it has been to giggle (yes GIGGLE) uncontrollably and with unbridled glee.  No hyperbole, serious.  I'm trying to think of when I have been so charmingly delighted with a novel, and I am having a hard time.  

I hate to say too much about actual plot, because it's so much fun to have it all unfold, so instead I'll just explain the basic premise, which really is that the two authoresses started out just playing a game with each other where you write letters back and forth in character.  There's a really nice blurb in the back of the book where they explain, but basically one of them just invented a character and a setting (post-Napoleonic Wars England in a slightly alternate reality in which magic happens!) and wrote a letter to her "cousin." The other woman writes back as the cousin character, and soon they developed this whole wonderful plot full of wonderful good times!  

Seriously, this is the kind of book that almost makes me mad at everyone in the world who has ever read it, because WHY DID THEY NOT TELL ME SOONER?  I mean this thing was published in 1988--I could have been enjoying it for practically my entire life!  But I suppose really I just ought to be grateful that someone finally did, or the rest of my life would be much sadder.  The truly joyful thing is that there are two more books in the series--and the even greater thing about that is that it's just a happy bonus, because the first one absolutely stands alone (the second wasn't published til 2003!); none of this shiz where the first one ends practically mid-sentence, unlike SOME books I have just reviewed* which feature glittery torsos all over the dang place...

*Did anyone else think it was kind of ridiculous to say "reviewed" just then, because um I do not think verbalized giggling or glittery torso hating counts as "reviewing," and let's be honest, that is pretty much all I do up in here.

The Mortal Instruments Trilogy by Cassandra Clare

I feel like right off the bat I'm going to come down pretty hard on these books, and I already feel bad about it.  I feel like my issue with them was just of unmet expectations, but you know, whose fault is that?  The silly YA book which never promised to be brilliant literature, or me who looked at this trilogy of which every book is decorated with a headless torso and a lot of glitter and said, "Aha, now THIS is going to be brilliant literature!"?  See, yeah.  My bad, you guys.  Shut it down.

The basic premise is that our world is populated with demons, some of which are gross and oozy and others which can take on human form.  Demons are bad.  There are also vampires and werewolves and mages and witches running around, which are halfbloods--human/demon cocktails, as it were.  And then there are Shadowhunters, who are this whole group of people who were set apart

 by an Angel at some unspecified point in the past who are charged with killing demons and keeping the halfbloods in line, protecting humanity, etc.

The whole story centers on Clary, an unsuspecting regular human girl in New York who

 suddenly finds out that all this demon stuff exists and gets drawn into it through meeting this dreamy Shadowhunter Jace and blah blah blah.  The main players are these two kids and a few of their friends, which is where I find the problem with the whole series.  Of course as the story progresses there are all kinds of big deal things going on threatening the Shadowhunters and humanity and the universe and whatever, but really everything just goes back to 4 or 5 teenagers who I personally found obnoxious as h-face.  The way I'm diagnosing it now is that the author was more invested in the kids and their sordid love-type relationships than in actually backing up her story or making it feel meaningful, so essentially you're reading 541 pages to see if Jace will stop glowering and just freaking kiss her or if the other kid will get a life and stop mooning over lost love or if yet another guy will decide to come out to his parents or not--all of this, rather than thinking, oh wow, cool, demons among us etc. I think that I would have been okay even that far, except that I didn't even find the love complications co

mpelling really at all.  All of the barriers to love working out seem like false dilemmas--most of the time the answers were so freaking obvious that you really couldn't respect or like characters who couldn't see what was riiiiiight in front of them.  And then the one time there was an actually kind of tricky thing to overcome, it was like everyone and their mom would come up to them and say "Oh hey kids, the answer to your problem is,--" at which point the kids would either run away from them or watch them be ravaged by demons.  I don't really think that counts as foreshadowing, is the thing.

See?  That was me being more negative than I should, because regardless of all this, I still sat in my room and read each book in a day, and they are pretty long books is the thing.  So, in the end, you should look at the glittering torsos on the book jackets and just know what you're getting into, and make peace with it.  

Well well well

Well fizellas, I've been home and devouring YA novels for about 2 weeks now, and finally the time is ripe to start blogging the crap out of them.  So get ready.  

Unwind by Neal Shusterman

This is a book I read probably back in January, but for some reason I've been thinking about it lately and how much I liked it.  I think it was the first YA book I recommended to Becca that she actually read!  We must appreciate these small victories.

So the think with this book is that it is just GOOD.  Something most people should know about me is that I like a good sci-fi type book now and then.  Usually I fill that craving with some 1950s Robert Heinlein trash novel, but sometimes YA really pulls through for me, without relying on fantasy elements or being super techno-savvy and too cool for school (yes I'm looking at you, Paul Westerfeld, you know what you did).

Here is the premise, as brief  (or not) as I feel like making it: Some scientist figures out some technology that makes it possible to transplant any sort of body part--so like, ANY physical problem you have, you can pretty much just like switch out your broken arm for a new one, and you're all set.  But then the problem is that people don't want to do cloning or stem cells or any of those current events-y type things to get all these spare parts, so after a big crazy war this law is made that says that people between 13-18 can be "unwound," which basically means they take you apart and give your entire body to be transplants for other people.  They rationalize this as somehow better than cloning etc by saying that the Unwinds are never exactly killed--every part of them stays alive, just in someone else's body.  Did someone say MACABRE?  Yes.  That someone was ME. 

So of course the story line is that some kids get thrown together who have all for various reasons been designated Unwinds (all it takes is a parent signature, so like do your chores or else [don't worry, the book doesn't take it that lightly or make it cartoonish]), but obviously the kids are like "Wait NOT COOL MOM" so they're trying to escape and live in hiding and keep a firm grip on all their organs and limbs and stuff.

Guys I LOVE books like this.  Crazy/sci-fi enough to give you new ideas to think about (wow that makes me sound like a really pathetic geek) but with a nice adventure/suspense/hiding-from-superior-forces twist to keep it interesting.  And the great thing is that it totally delivered.  The ideas were fully explored, and there were no teasers--if an institution or a possibility or whatever were mentioned, our characters went there or did that or came into contact with it--it wasn't just some really interestingly painted set for a backdrop; we got to interact with all of it.  Which frankly was horrifying in some parts.  This is the book that made me decide I could handle reading The Road, because after all this "unwinding" business I figured I could handle post-Apocalyptic cannibals, no sweat (no comment on how correct I was in that assessment).  

Anyway.  I could say more but um I'm not going to.  Just put this one on your list, okay, Mom?

Tamar by Mal Peet

Let's be honest, I checked this book out on the strength of the author's name and how big it was on the cover.  Dude thinks his name is so much more important than the title, he MUST be a class act.*  Just kidding, Mal, turns out you are pretty awesome.

So, Tamar.  The thing with this book is that I think it is best if you know as little as possible about it.  Which is to say, I knew very little from the cryptic jacket description, and I'm glad.  Basically it's about secret operatives doing resistance stuff in Nazi-occupied Holland, spliced in with one of the operative's granddaughters learning about it.  But not in an annoying, "Grampa, tell me a story!!" kind of way, or even a Princess Bride kind of way where you're always wishing Fred Savage would shut up and stop ruining the kissing parts.  The two story lines are equally good, and the whole time you're sort of looking for clues to link them up or suddenly you'll learn things about the 1940s story/characters and then it'll switch to 1995 and you'll get an ah ha moment where you're putting details together but the chick can't because she's not reading a little narrative of the past...but not all lame and frustrating like that sounds.  I kind of suck at writing tonight guys is the thing.**

The one thing that frustrated me with this book was that I wanted it to be more. I wanted it to be longer and have more details and more plot points and so on--and clocking in at over 400 pages already, that's kind of a big deal for a YA book.  Really, I wanted this to be not a YA book--I wanted it to be like, "Sharon Kay Penman-does-for-WW2-what-she's-done-for-the-Plantagenets: But Actually Written By This Other Dude."  And really now I'm sitting here what made this a YA book instead of general market.  The only things I can think of: (1)the modern story line narrator is like 15, (2)there's no sex, even though there could have been.  So what I'm saying is the granddaughter could have been a couple years older and old Mal could have embellished some parts he artfully skipped over, and this could've been 5th floor material instead of 4th.  To speak in BYU library terms.  Um. 

I really liked the writing.  Honestly that's not something I usually notice unless it's distractingly bad--I'm typically pretty story-centric.  The characterization was really nice--I bought into complex characters, which is difficult to do, because if it's done too heavy handedly or whatever you just hate all the people who screw up, instead of pitying their tortured souls.  But I was definitely engaging in some hard-core tortured soul pitying, so Mal did a good job.  Although again, I wish there had been more.  WE WANT MORE TORTURED SOULS, MAL.  That's not what I meant--I just wished that once I bought into the characters, I had gotten to do more things with them.  In the end it came down more to themes and characters fulfilling specific roles, almost like a drama more than a book.  Does that make sense?  Like, instead of having characters and then just having them do a bunch of random things that sort of works into rising action and so forth, it was set up so that these characters existed to fulfill a few specific actions, to create the situation in the modern day.  So maybe that's just a function of framed narrative.  

Does that make sense?  Now I need someone else to go read this book so that they can either understand and agree or say that I'm wacky and need to get more sleep.  Oh wait what if that is true ANYWAY?  Yikes.

*Further apologies, Mal:  not only do I know that you don't actually have any say over your book covers, I also, in finding this image, found a few other designs that are more democratic, and also a lot prettier?

**Oh man I also read some other reviews of Tamar when getting these images, and it reminded me of how other people are actually good at writing book reviews and don't just talk about Fred Savage ruining the sexual tension all the time.  I think that both I and Fred Savage need to have a quiet moment to think about what we've done.

This one will encompass multitudes, get ready.

I'm in this writing class and I had to do a research paper on some aspect of writing pertaining to the English department.  Since my life this whole year has somehow become inexorably linked to both Shakespeare and young adult lit, I decided to write about... Shakespeare and young adult lit!! I actually tried to write this paper last semester, but something completely different somehow came out, so really this was just doing justice to a long-simmering idea.

For this paper I had to read fishloads of Shakespeare-based YA novels, which was... interesting.  Honestly, if I had a million dollars I would set up a prize for the first person to retell a Shakespeare play without making it either ridiculously

 pompous and self obsessed or ridiculously... ridiculous.  

Okay so here are the categories of Shakespeare novelization, with the novels I read in each, and how lame or awesome they are:

1) Character novel.  These are books that retell the play, straight up, but from the perspective of a character not necessarily typical.  They usually focus on a character who doesn't have much power in the original (so, girls) so that they can wackily turn things around and have a completely new perspective on really well known stories.  The only ones I could find were Ophelia based (which might explain why they are soooo annoooooying).

First, Ophelia, by Lisa Klein.  This one had a lot going for it.  First of all, the jacket art is gorgeous.  That matters.  Seriously.  I would probably have disliked this book a billion times more if the cover had been gross or indifferent.  Anyway.  Okay so it starts with little baby Ophelia, and basically just goes um through the imagined like of Ophelia.  I'll be honest, this is one that I read the first time I considered this topic, so it's been a while. As I recall the writing was nice, so that is more points in its favor.  What I didn't like about it is that by the time I was about half way through I just gave up and started skimming, and I feel like having read maybe 1 sentence out of 10 for the later half of the novel I didn't really miss out on anything.  The plot extends pretty far out from the end of Hamlet, because rule number one of Ophelia character novels is that Ophelia fakes her death and runs away to the continent.  This one, like I said, was a bit annoying because honestly it just dragged on and on with her in some French convent learning all these life lessons, which I guess is good as just some book but I suppose was unexpected when I was looking for Shakespeare--so maybe this book would be better if you were just reading it as an interesting historical novel, which happens to have some Shakespeare names and plot bits in it.  It is SO HARD not to say what happens in the end, because I find it delightfully silly, but I feel like I should refrain so that anyone who goes and reads it gets their unspoiled reward for making it through.

Second: Dating Hamlet, by Lisa Fiedler.  

Okay so...I hardly know what to say.  This is like writing a review of Waterworld.  Objectively you know it's ridiculous, and so part of you hates it, but then the other part revels in the cheap thrills and lighthearted shuffling of everything Shakespeare ever wrote or thought about.  Let's just say that Ophelia is a sassy modern woman, her REAL father is the cheeky gravedigger, she's a REALLY accomplished death-faker, and everyone lives happily ever after.  Oh gosh.  The horror/the delight.  It's like a Hallmark channel movie.  No, that's not quite it--if anything Ophelia was a Hallmark Channel movie, because it took itself so painfully seriously.  Dating Hamlet is more ABC Family Channel, or even Disney Channel--it is garbage and it loves it.

Okay.  Category Two:  Fictionalized Biography

These are books that take place in Elizabethan England and "tell the story" of how the play/plays were written/inspired/acted.  This category actually has two sub-ca

tegories, which I don't have special names for.  The first is the kind of book were a young boy actor type goes and joins the acting troop and hangs out with ol' Will and Burbage and whatnot and has rollicking good times on stage and fighting off plague and whatnot.  A lot of these books are actually really solid, such as...

King of Shadows, by Susan Cooper.  I think that was actually the first book I reviewed up in here, so I guess I don't have to explain it all again.  Suffice it to say, Cooper actually creates real emotion, likable characters, and really it's just a sweet book all around.  High five.

There is also an entire series starting with The Shakespeare Stealer by Gary Blackwood.  I actually only read the second one in the sequence, called Shakespeare's Scribe.  I actually read an article by Blackwood and used it a bit in writing my paper, so I feel like we're old chums.  The story was pretty simple; there's some poor Yorkshire lad who I suppose in book one joined the troop and had some stealing shenanigans, but by book 2 everything's cool, except the plague has s

truck London so they have to tour the countryside to earn their living.  The article I read was about trying to approximate Elizabethan English while still being comprehensible to modern audiences, and looking back it's true--Blackwood spends a lot of time making his dialogue sound period appropriate, without making it too noticeable or jarring to the reader.  These books are for a slightly younger audience than the Ophelia books (oh yeah I should note, there was definitely a hint of raciness in the Ophelia novels, although I don't think there was anything too overt or inappropriate... but don't quote me on it)--so the stories and themes are simple, but they're still rather nice.  

Part 2 of this category is comprised of books about Shakespeare's daughter Susanna.  It's actually kind of funny; I have no idea why this is even a thing, but apparently people think it's cool to write about old Susanna Shakespeare.  I guess it's because it's a good way to get the girl-power angle into an otherwise pretty boy-oriented time period.  

Anyway, I only read one of these: Swan Town, by Michael Ortiz.  I can't really say I loved it.  I get annoyed when people get locked into the whole "Uh-oh I want to write this novel for modern audiences but that requires a modern heroine so I'd better modernize this historical figure real quick, let's see, she is frustrated with the restrictions of her time period and secretly wants a life of writing and playing JUST LIKE DAD" debacle.  I mean, I get it, I get why they do it, that makes all kinds of sense... but um still I just don't get into it.  It jsut seems like once you go down that road there is only one way for it to go-- 

--But I want to do this literary type thing that is inappropriate for a woman to do in this time period!

--TOO BAD we will MARRY YOU OFF or something, get back in your hole! 

 --But MOOOOOOM

--I MEAN IT

--Okay I guess I will just go behind your back and express myself and be FREE

--Hey idiot child remember how there are social norms and LAWS and LACKS OF BASIC FREEDOMS in this time period and so now we are all screwed because of you?

 --Oh um right

--Well okay don't worry somehow we will just retreat into a quieter life and...trail off into somehow reconciling your unique world view with the clearly opposing world view of the society which has been created in this novel.

Well that is what I call getting carried away.  Will this post ever end?  NOPE. We haven't even gotten around to...

Category Three:  Retellings in Modern Context!!  Woo!!

These books can go all kinds of ways.  I kind of like this genre just because it seems like the wackiest, and a place where the wackiness is more legitimate than others, because it's not like you're pretending to be honestly retelling a play and you're certainly not pretending to be at all historically based--you're just talking about some kid in Australia who freaks out when his parents get divorced, and if all your character names happen to have a vague similarity to Hamlet-type analogues, that is just how it goes.  And that is a little something I like to call Joker, by Ranulfo.  Yes.  One name.  That is why I checked out the book, no lie.  

My absolute FAVORITE book in this genre is The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt.  It's about a kid in middle school in the 70s, and he is assigned to read some Shakespeare plays outside of class sort of, and the whole book is just about this year in school and all the great awesome things that happen and how the couple plays he reads sort of correspond.  I think the real reason I love it is because even though there are problems and jerks and hard things associated with teenagerdom, this book also has nice things and really great people and shows them figuring out and getting over the crappy stuff and sticking up for each other and being decent.  Which is nice, because we all need to be reminded that all the good stuff can exist when we get bogged down in the crappiness, yeah?

ANYdangWAY, there is my dissertation on the state of current Shakespeare Adaptations for Young Adults.  There are approximately a billion more novels out there, these are just my favorites/ones I read most recently/the once I already got cover art for to use in my class presentation.  Ahem.

Heir Apparent by Vivian Vande Velde

Sometimes you are in the mood for something that is quick and easy and fantasy-esque, and a little bit embarrassing, but fun-times.  Those are the times when you should go read something by Vivian Vande Velde.  The first book of hers I read was--wait for it--Companions of the Night.  Yes, I only read it for its hilariously semi-scandalous title.  Also, vampires.  You know how I roll.  Anyway, the great thing about Vivian's books is that they're just the type of thing to get check out after class on Friday, go home, make some noodles, grab a Citrus Drop, and read cover to cover in like 3 hours.  They're well written enough that you don't have to hate yourself afterwards, but lack any pretensions of being anything beyond what they are, which is popcorn.  

To business.  Heir Apparent...wow, it's really a pretty wacky book.  Let's see if I can sum up.

Okay, so it's a little bit in the future, and the cool thing for all the kids to go is go play virtual reality role-playing games.  So this girl (I forget her name, it's not really important!) gets a gift certificate (it's expensive) and goes to the VR game arcade type place, and decides to do this game called Heir Apparent, in which you're the dead king's long lost daughter (or I guess son, depending) who has to go join the court and do strategic political power play types to avoid being killed long enough to be crowned.  You're allowed like 3 lives or something, in the allotted time of game play.  So she's just hanging out playing it through a couple times, and dying really early on, when all of the sudden there's a glitch.  It turns out a protest group has wreaked some kind of havoc on the VR arcade, and now our young heroine is trapped in the game!  The only way to be extracted from the VR is to win the game, but then the catch is that after a certain period of time her brain will like fry under the pressure or something! Oh no!  Will she be able to solve the intricate puzzle in time?  Let's find out!!

So I guess I was attracted to this in the first place because of the hours of my early life I spent watching Dad play Warcraft and Doom--video games are just fun to watch, when there is no pressure to do anything yourself.  And Vivian (may I call you Vivian, Vivian?) has really great pacing and dramatic timing, and manages to keep everything fresh and interesting and exciting, even when the heroine is on her like 17th try, redoing the same scenario again and again.  And, I don't know, sometimes it seems like fantasy writers have either decided to blow their brains out being as literary and high brow as possible, or they swing to the opposite end and play to the twelve year olds (in a bad way).  Vivian's great because she's just doing her thing, not changing people's lives, and not putting glitter all over the cover (well not much anyway, and that's not really the author's call anyway, is it?), just writing fun popcorn to help us forget our mundane woes.

The Silenced by James DeVita

This is the kind of book that I usually don't check out, because though I'm as attracted to the whole futuristic dystopian totalitarian state thing, they generally tend to not live up to my expectations. I guess I just expect a lot from my futuristic dystopias?  Also, I have a prejudice against male authors, which I know is ridiculous because at least half of my favorite YA novels were written by men, but for some reason I consider them to be the exception, rather than the rule.  My feeling is that generally when men write YA novels it is with a specific idea in mind:  they're either writing THIS story, or for THIS audience, or to get THIS final idea across, and they don't let their books be anything other than exactly what they meant them to be.  Does that make any kind of sense?  It just seems like say a fantasy novel written by a man for a 12 year old audience is going to be A Fantasy Novel For 12 Year Olds, whereas when, say, Shannon Hale writes a fantasy for 12 year olds, she does it in such a way that really it works for all audiences and I end up sending it to my 12 year old cousins and my 75 year old grandma.  

Anyway, I'm sure that someday I will see the light and get over my little sexist prejudice.  But, for now, it stands!

So, The Silenced.  Marena is a teenager in a futuristic vision of the United States which is all totalitarian and awful.  Her mom was a journalist when the regime took over and got' disappeared,' so Marena's got some civil disobedience simmering.  She and her two friends from the prison/school eventually form an anti-establishment little gang and sort of vandalize and spread leaflets.  

So, yeah, pretty good book.  I ended up skimming a lot of it especially toward the end, because my friend DeVita is a bit of a slow, wordy guy, and when it's supposed to be intense and heart pumping, let's be intense and heart pumping!  The interesting thing though was the afterword, in which the author explained that he wrote this book as a tribute to Sophie Scholl and her gang of anti-Nazi leafleteers from like 1942 in...Munich?  I think?  Anyway, this is what I'm talking about:  Sophie Scholl= awesome, great story, great idea, but I feel like in the end this book was limited by it.  DeVita wanted to retell Sophie Scholl, so he did.  Bam.  There you go. Suddenly it made sense why all of these relationships between characters that I felt like should go somewhere or develop somehow, didn't.  Because that was not the point the author was going for.  So, too bad.   And really, it is too bad, because with a little more heart and humanity, and maybe some room for spontaneity,  this book would have been pretty fantastic.

Evernight by Claudia Gray

You know me.  You know I once spent a whole spring term watching every vampire movie I could find at CleanFlicks.  You know that I'm often ashamed of the books I enjoy the most.  Let's just be honest:  this is a vampire book, and I loved it.  Okay actually I can do better than that:  I loved READING it.  I know that it, in itself, is just a ridiculous Twilight knock-off, of very little actual merit.  I get that.  But I also had the time of my freaking life sitting around reading it, and that has to count for something.

Seriously, there is nothing to summarize:  a girl goes to boarding school, oh, it is so creepy, oh, that Lucas guy is so attractive and mysterious, oh, I guess I will start off with a ridiculously Stephanie Meyers-esque little prologue, about how I am in danger but Lucas will save me, and also there are going to be VAMPIRES.  Seriously.  Seriously.  I'm not saying that this is a good book.  But, to give silliness its due, I will say that it is decently written silliness, and it doesn't blindly follow every formulaic plot point that you think it will.  In a pre-Twilight world, the idea would have been a lot more exciting (much as how in a pre-Harry Potter world I might be more willing to give this never-ending, endlessly-promoted-on-BYU-campus Leven Thumps series a break), but, things being what they are, Evernight just doesn't have much to offer except for a guiltily enjoyed 4-5 hours of reading funtimes.

Lush by Natasha Friend

This book has the rare distinction of being one of those books about 'all the troubles facing the youth of today' that isn't annoying, isn't preachy, and is quite nice and entertaining to older youths of today who aren't currently experiencing all of those troubles.  

I think part of the trick is that the heroine is only 13, so her problems aren't "Oh gosh all of the boys like me it is SO HARD" and she doesn't make the basic romantic-comedy mistakes of freaking out at surprises and rejecting the friends she should be keeping close, etc.  Well, okay, I guess she does sort of do those things, but in a more sincere, believable, willing-to-change-her-mind-and-not-waste-time-being-an-idiot way.  Frankly, this book reminded me quite a bit of Sarah Dessen's novels, but without taking itself quite so seriously, because hey, how seriously can you take a 13 year old, no matter what kind of crazy junk is going down?

To the story:  13-year-old Samantha has an alcoholic father.  He holds down a regular job and all, but every night comes home and gets sloshed and is mildly abusive (mostly just verbal--nothing gross).  She has several close friends, but she doesn't want to talk to them about it, because then they'll think she's weird and it will be awkward, and her mom is just an enabler, and her little brother is great but he's 4, so, you know. No help.  So, she writes a letter explaining all her problems and hides it in the library, hoping that an older girl will find it and help.  The book follows her anonymous-library-note correspondence and the random events of her life, as she juggles through school and boys and puberty and all that stuff that makes you glad you're not 13 anymore.  Some pretty crazy teenage-type stuff goes down, but in the end it all comes down to friendship and forgiveness and giving people second chances while still being strong and not being a victim.  

I feel like this would have been a useful book when I was in high school, because it shows pretty realistically how kids/teens react to problems at home and elsewhere.  I appreciated its honesty.

The Fetch by Laura Whitcomb

Okay so I've been putting this one off because I don't really know how to handle it.  But actually it doesn't really matter so let's just dive on in.

My problem with this book is that it isn't A Certain Slant of Light.  That was Whitcomb's first novel, and ladies and gentlemen, it is at the very top of my list.  The TOP I say.  Becca and I sometimes get into fights about this, because nothing in the universe will ever surpass Hunger Games for her, but for me, there is one young adult book that can, and it is A Certain Slant of Light.  Oh man.  I don't even know what to say about that book except that it is perfect.  I'm afraid that summarizing it will make it sound silly, because summaries always do; suffice it to say, it has ghosts and a love story and redemption and the writing is beautiful in a way that you don't often see in YA.  Just go read it.  Seriously.  

So, you can see the difficulty here.  The Fetch is Whitcomb's second novel, and for me it just didn't measure up.  I don't know how anything really could, but still, the comparison is still there, however unfair it is.  It deals with some of the same general ideas as Light. . . which I guess is a good time to segue into summery:

So, Calder is a Fetch, which is to say, a person who has died and, instead of going straight to heaven himself, has been chosen to lead other souls from their deaths and into heaven.  The thing is that as he visits this series of death scenes, he starts to be fascinated with a living woman who is always there, and eventually  decides to take on a human body to pursue her and make her his fetchin' apprentice.  Things get kind of weird when it turns out that the body he's taken is Grigori Rasputin's (hence the multiple assassinations not working, which okay was kind of clever), and he gets all caught up with Romanov children post-Revolution, and things get all out of control. 

I think the thing that made me less in love with this book to begin with is its scope.  The thing with Certain Slant of Light is that sure, it involves these people's spirits who have been wandering around for centuries, and that is not exactly a comfortable spectrum, but the book itself takes place in the space of like a week, and it only involves a few people, and they all relate to one another intimately and in a way that is relatable and makes sense.  In The Fetch, I struggled to really feel grounded in anything--being all other-worldly, Calder passes through like 20 years of human time in fewer pages.  Once he (and the story) become grounded in regular time, they're at first all up in the Russian Revolution (not a recipe for anyone's comfort) and then they're off on a world tour for various reasons, and it was hard to ever really get a feel for where they were or what their time period was supposed to feel like or what they were actually doing.  Okay, really, that's more a personal problem--something I know about myself is that I get uncomfortable if I don't have a plan for what is going on.  Not that everything has to be obvious or heavy handed, I just like having some kind of framework in my mind to give everything context.  I guess that in the end that's the real problem I had with this book--there were no clues as to how or where or when anything was going to happen, and so when things did happen it was difficult to really determine their significance.  Every time the 'bad guys' came around, I was thinking, okay, so is THIS the climax?  Um, maybe?  Wait, okay, I guess not...and then when the final showdown actually came, there was really nothing to make it the Final Showdown except that then the book ended, so you know, okay.  

Okay so I'm being really harsh here and it's a shame, because if this were just some book I'd picked up off the shelf I'd probably have been thrilled with it. I was just expecting so much after the beautiful craftsmanship of her first book, I suppose it made me a rather difficult reader to please.

Climbing the Stairs by Padma Venkatraman

I always pause and investigate when I see book jackets that look remotely Indian-- I blame it on my Bollywood obsession. The thing about YA books from/about India is that you can, in my experience, count on them having the same basic plot:  young teen girl, everything starts out nice but then, uh-oh, you are getting old, you should put away your girlish dreams of education/ independence/whatever, instead we should probably arrange a marriage for you, but hey, maybe by the end something will happen that will make us think that you should get to do what you want.  The only real difference is that with those Shabanu books it took a trilogy and a lot of depressingness to get there, whereas here it all happened in a couple hundred pages.  Of course, it makes sense--the melodramatic Bollywood style of storytelling wouldn't really work in book format, and this remainder is, I am forced to assume, a realistic picture of typical Indian teenage life?  It was a pretty good book, all things considered.  It takes place in the early 1940s, mid- WW2, pre-Indian-independence, so there's a layer of "Jai Hind, down with the British oppressors, way-to-go-Gandhiji" freedom fighting to set against the main character(I already forgot her name, I am awful)'s personal struggle for independence.  As far as these books go, it was a good one.  No Huger Games of course, but then, what really is?  Thank you, Suzanne Collins, for ruining my life.  Everything else will just be okay.  

Looking for Alaska by John Green

So, the story on why I am reading all these John Green novels is that over the summer my library at home had An Abundance of Katherines, which I picked up because of the nice looking cover art and because my name is Katharine.  You understand.  Anyway, it was pretty good, and the style was fun and funny, and so I thought, "Huh, John Green, his picture on the flap looks kind of like Bryce Lowder, that is weird,  he's a pretty funny guy though."  And then lo and behold months later I'm browsing around the return shelves and I find all kinds of his other books, and so I snagged them.  I'm sad that it's been such a while since I read Katherines, because it would be interesting to compare with these two that I've just read.  These two were really similar, but I don't remember Katherines having an alluring but mysterious and unattainable girl who then disappeared and led to the main character's long soul-and-world-view-searching-and-revising internal journey.  But perhaps my memory is just faulty.  

Anyway, the quirk of Alaska is that the main character (still a smart, skinny, lovable nerd) is just starting off at a boarding school in Alabama, so we get to watch as he makes friends with really cool funny people in an enviably short amount of time.  But I'm not bitter.  Ahem.  Anyway, one of his cool funny friends is an alluring but mysterious and unattainable girl named Alaska, who disappears half way through and leads to the main character's long soul-and-world-view-searching-and-revising internal journey.  I realize that I'm sounding really snippy and snarky and all other adverbs beginning with "sn-", but I don't really mean to be--I'm the one who read these books overnight and will continue to read anything Green ever writes. Honestly, I think that these books are a testament to the magical power of fun, quirky writing to make even the same basic plot lines seem fun and refreshing and new, no matter how many times they're told.  

Paper Towns by John Green

Okay so here is the thing about John Green:  I both love and am frustrated with him.  Love:  He writes teen banter that is actually funny.  Seriously, I chuckle, and sometimes laugh aloud.  He makes me wish I had had friends in high school, because apparently there were good times to be had!  Also, though this is where we get into the frustration, I like how his characters are the almost-misfits who are comfortable with themselves--they're happy being band geeks, or loners, or nerds.  Huh, I'm struggling with myself here, because the frustration happens here because part of me sits here and thinks "Yeah I was a nerd and an orch dork (yes, I know, we all make mistakes), and I never had half the good times these fellas are having, so what gives?" but then I remember, yeah, since when has ANYTHING written about high school been realistic?  There's just no way to capture it, and anyway since when is realism the best thing since sliced bread? So, okay, I won't lay all my bitterness about life at John Green's door.  The remaining actual frustration I have is his tendency towards swearing and teen sex etc, which I'm sure IS very realistic, but that doesn't mean I want to read all about it.  And it's really just a shame because he's a smart guy, and his characters are smart, and so much of his books work on a really fun, inventive, cerebral plane, and then he puts in teen boys being teen boys and it all crashes down.  But anyway.  Enough.

Paper Towns was pretty good, but perhaps my least favorite of his books so far?  It's about this boy Q who is wild about his next door neighbor Margo, but she is literally too cool for school and they haven't spoken for years until one night out of the blue she makes him come with her on this pranking rampage, and then the next day she disappears (see, I was not using 'literally' just as an intensifier back there!).  So then Q spends the rest of the book trying follow these clues she left behind and trying to figure out what the deal is with this girl he loved from afar for so long.  

It's really funny and intense and it does make you think about how well you know people, and how far you can ever trust your perceptions of others.  Q and his merry band of band geeks are likable and hilarious, and Johnny really does excel at creative these captivating femme fatales like Margo--every boy wants her, every girl wants to be her.  Having also just read Green's first book, Looking for Alaska, Margo seems like just the next avatar of the character he created in Alaska--in fact, a lot of things about these books are similar, to the point that I almost wonder how Green got away with writing this second one.  BUT, that is for another post.

Oh man, I read so many books this week

So this is the first time I can remember when I was sick, and instead of working through it and being tough and what not I let myself stay in bed for three days and be sick. It was WONDERFUL. All my professors were cool with turning in homework next week, so I got to just chill and finally work my way through my stack of library books, all of which were going to start collecting fines.  Anyway, it may take me a minute to get through the whole list of them, and I hope I don't forget any... but you won't mind, eh Becca?  Cool.

Curse as Dark as Gold by Elizabeth C. Bunce

This book was a really interesting take on the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale.  Huh.  I'm still sort of digesting it.

It starts when Charlotte Miller's father dies, and she is left in charge of running the mill with her younger sister.  Of course, the mill/ family is cursed, and have been victim to awful luck for the past billion generations.  Most of the book is taken up with Charlotte trying to keep things together and horrible accidents and whatnot getting in the way and almost ruining things.  Of course, right when they're on the brink of ruin (which happens a couple different times) a mysterious stranger comes and saves the day in return for random jewelry and whatnot.  Eventually it comes down to "Holy crap he wants my baby in exchange for saving the mill now um what?" and so they finally look into the history of the curse and get things sorted out.  Oh, and midway through there's a nice little romance (hence having a baby for the Rumpel-type to get all grabby with).  

So, I will say in its favor: I never really had any idea of what was going to happen next in this book, which is a)rare and b) especially rare in a YA fairy tale retelling, when you generally assume you know how it's going to go.  However, I can't really say I loved this book.  I know it was intentional and so forth, but the constant stress of "holy crap nothing will ever go right and financial shenanigans oh my gosh what are we going to do oh this dude will help but that will clearly only screw us over in the end, this really sucks I wish I were dead" kind of got to me, and made it hard to really have a good time whilst reading.  

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Okay so I remember when this book came out, sometime mid-high school, and it got all popular and famous and everyone read it, so then even though I was somewhat interested I was like NO I will not read it it is for PLEBES.  Then when I started going on a reading rampage a couple weeks ago I thought Um okay why not, also since Liz Lemon mentioned it somewhere last season of 30 Rock (when she's interviewing with the board of that condo place and she's apologizing for saying she read it when she really didn't. . . anyway it's funny).  OKAY so: Turns out I think I was right to begin with?

So, okay, it's about this young teen girl in the 70s who gets raped and killed by this creepy neighborhood guy and then goes to heaven and watches her family and friends dealing with it for the next ten years.  So um, okay, knowing, going into it, that that was the premise, I was skeptical, but then you know hey if the rest of the universe loves it there must be something that makes it okay, right?  Um. . . nope.  Not in my book at least.  First of all, way too much detail about the gross murder-ness.  Okay not like GROSS detail of anything, but still.  Ugh.  And then it's all just depressing because it's her family grieving and falling apart and then yeah eventually coming together again, but still.  Still.  Nothing fabulously enlightening enough to make up for the basic premise being bleak and awful.

BUT that being said, I hear they're making a movie with Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg, and okay I will totally see it.  Probably in the dollar theater though.  

Underworld by Catherine Macphail

Guys I have been reading some duds lately.

I checked this book out after finishing Hunger Games, because after reading that little piece of delight I did a library search for books about survival (this was also after The Road, so you know, yikes) and this is the first one that came up.  Turns out books about teens and surviving and whatnot are not all created equal.  Duh, I guess.

Anyway it's about these 5 kids in the UK who go on this class trip and end up getting trapped in this underground cave system, and they're all very different (cue Breakfast Club soundtrack) but then somehow none of them are at all sympathetic or likable, until the very VERY end where they're all like "Oh yeah probably this experience should be teaching me how to relate well to others, I guess I had better go do that real quick; also, I guess there is a mythical beast down here, and sometimes there are excerpts from a German soldier's memoirs talking about this one time he got trapped down here as well?  Um?"

So yeah, meh.  It got better when I started skipping pages and skimming.  That's never a good sign.

Beating Heart by A.M. Jenkins

Guys, this book was not that good.  That's all there really is to say.  I was disappointed.  But I suppose my expectations were somewhat high--this purports to be a ghost story with some sort of romantic element, and the last book I read with that basic idea turned out to be one of my top ten YA books of ALL TIME (A Certain Slant of Light, by Laura Whitcomb--I hear she's working on/about to publish another book, I could basically die with excitement and anticipation)--SO I was going into it assuming it would be somewhat similar in awesomeness.  And then it was just some book.  Meh.

It's hardly worth summarizing, but okay:  This teenage boy moves into this old house with his recently divorced mom and little sister.  There is a teenage girl ghost in the house.  She died a tragic and mysterious early death, which becomes less mysterious because she basically tells it to you in these weird 5-words-on-a-page stream-of-consciousness whimsicalities, and it all happens to mirror this stuff going on with the boy and his girlfriend.  And um everyone learns a lesson, and the ghost decides to accept death and move on to the light, and the boy decides to be nicer to his little sister.  Um.  Yeah.  

Seriously.  The only good thing about this book is that it is small enough that I was able to unobtrusively sit and read it in linguistics class, and ANYthing is better than paying attention to linguistics class.

Hawksong, by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

I don't know why they decided to have pictures of ugly people on the cover of this book--the only reason it is worth reading at all (and I'm not really saying it is...) is for teen romance value, which is only interesting at all if you have really attractive mental pictures.  This is scientific fact.  Anyway, this book is basically what would happen if instead of vampires Twilight were about the teenage queen of the bird shape shifting folks and how she had to stop a never-ending war with the snake shape shifters by marrying their teenage king, and they were all distrustful at first and it was kind of awkward but then in a couple hundred pages they realized that they were in love.  Which is to say, the story is pretty thin, but you keep reading for the kissing parts.  Which aren't even that good. Is that okay to say?  Oh gosh.

Anyway, the internet just informed me that this might be the first of a series, which I would actually think about pursuing, because the only real problem I had with this book is that it was so obviously just about the romance that though she spent a lot of time talking about these random societies of shape shifters she invented, none of it was interesting or deep--it was clearly just the afterthought to the tense glances and you know, whatever other things typify angsty teen romance.  BUT if it continues into a series maybe that means that she'll expand more on some actually solid story-building things that will make it seem like something worth while and recommendable.  As it is, Becca, it's pretty okay fun, and a kind of interesting romance, but not really worth going out of your way to find.  

The Lady in the Hat by Uri Orlev

Something funny about my experience with this book is that I read the whole thing thinking it had been written by a woman, and then at the end actually looked at the authors name and saw that it was a man!  For some reason the gender of the author frequently affects my reading of a book (or a whatever) so it kind of threw me off.  Anyway.  Fun fact.

Okay so this book is about this teenage boy who is a Polish Jew who is the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.  It follows two parallel story lines-- (1) the boy, Yulek,  joins a refugee group and makes his way to Israel, and forms relationships with different folks, the most important being with this other Jewish girl Theresa who was saved from Nazis by joining a convent, which makes it all weird because she's going to go live in a Jewish nation but she has serious Catholic tendencies, having spent the formative years of her life basically training to be a nun.  Anyway, they have a nice little understated romance which is sweet.  So they all work and train and dodge the British government and whatnot who try to keep Jewish refugees out of Palestine (since Israel hasn't been formed/recognized as a nation yet).  Very exciting. then there's story (2) about Yulek's long lost aunt who was disinherited by her family years before the war because she went to study in London and married a Gentile.  She figures out that Yulek is alive, and spends the whole book trying to track him down since they are the only family members each other has left.  Her story is sweet because it's a big journey of self discovery as she travels to Jerusalem and deals with balancing her developed Britishness with her ancestral Jewishness.  

All in all, it kind of felt like Exodus for beginners, but that was okay.  It's like Exodus if there were no Paul Newman character and most people didn't die at the end.  Hooray!

King of Shadows by Susan Cooper

Usually I don't like the whole genre of kids traveling in time and hanging out with famous people.  I like that it teaches kids abut famous historical people--dude I thought I knew everything there was to know about Paul Revere from that one book I had when I was a kid, the name of which I cannot recall.....Anyway, I get that there are benefits, but in general I don't like it when historical figures get involved (no matter what era the kid hero comes from!) because it's always mildly offensive to me how arbitrary the characterization is--I mean, maybe Paul Revere was a total jerkface in real life, but by gum we're going to make him a kindly gent in order to let these kids interact with him and have a grand old time.  I just don't like messing with the lives and personalities of real people.

HOWEVER, all bets are off when the author is Susan Cooper, it turns out.  

King of Shadows is about this American kid who gets to go to England with a youth acting troupe and perform some Shakespeare plays in the reconstructed Globe theater.  He's recently been orphaned, so he has serious parent/especially father issues.  He falls ill (whilst rehearsing in England) and wakes up to find himself in Elizabethan times!!  He is very coincidentally somehow being mistaken for some kid with his same name who is playing the same role in Midsummer Night's Dream as he has been practicing, and also oh my gosh "Will Shakespeare" is there and will be playing Oberon to our young hero's Puck.  Anyway, he finds acceptance and happiness in olden times and Shakespeare is his new father figure (put your tiny hand in mine) and everything is great, but then of course Oh no sometime he will probably have to return to modern times, dun dun DUN.

So anyway the whole premise is vaguely ridiculous, but somehow I found myself being inexplicably emotionally moved!  It was just really sweet to see the kid finally have a mentor-male-role-model type, and even though I hate it when they do this, it really was kind of awesome to have the basic point of the novel be  "Oh my gosh, Shakespeare has the kindest eyes!  What a tender caring intuitive soul!  Will you be my father figure if I put my tiny hand in yours?"   It's cheesy, it's ridiculous, it has no historical proof--but I was okay with it.  

I was also okay with the fact that she never really even attempted to explain how the time travel/place switching stuff happened--it was almost nice not having to read through some made up rationale for it. Especially because in the end all of that was peripheral-- the main point was a pretty messed-over kid getting some guidance and camaraderie from the most famous writer of the English language.  And that is something we can all get behind.

Statement of Intent

So, lately Becca has been in a reading mood, and has gone to all kinds of extreme lengths to feed her craving for fun-time, low impact books.  In the pursuit of such she found some girls' website which was full of young adult book reviews and such, and upon perusing it myself I became jealous.  The thing is, I read boatloads of YA lit, and I have some opinions on what is good, and what is not good but still fun, and what is total garbage, and I want a place where I can proclaim these opinions to the world!  And thanks to the Internet, the world will suffer.