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.