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.