Best of 2013 So Far, Sarah’s Take

Mark,

Obviously, there’s still a lot of reading to do, but here are some thoughts on 2013 books:

I agree with you about 17 & Gone, by Nova Ren Suma, and Pieces, by Chris Lynch. More to come, in a later post, on Pieces.

And, as you noted in that post, we disagree about Midwinterblood, which is still rattling around in my brain, so I think it has to go on my list. I haven’t read Yellowcake yet (though I have a copy now) or Primates, but I look forward to both. I’m reading A Corner of White right now, and if it holds up, it may make my list; so far it’s original and quirky and fun.

Other books that are rising to the top for me:

The Lucy Variations, by Sara Zarr. I talked about this book a few weeks ago. I am not sure that it will hold strong all year long, but for now, it’s up there.

I just finished Winger, by Andrew Smith. I will have more on this in a later post, too. Again, I’m not certain it has the staying power, but it was certainly a great read that surprised me in several ways, and that’s always a good thing.

Here are some books that may be contenders, and may require re-reading down the road to be sure. In all cases, my initial response was less than enthusiastic, but I think they all deserve more consideration:

Black Helicopters, by Blythe Woolston. I discussed it here.

Eleanor and Park, by Rainbow Rowell. Also discussed here.

Uses for Boys, by Erica Lorraine Scheidt. Discussed here.

Reality Boy, by A.S. King. This is a tough one. I found this book so painful to read that I had to keep putting it down. And I mean that in a good way! I wanted to be like the hockey mom, who just gave poor Gerald a big hug–only I also wanted to somehow get him away from his godawful family. But as you said in your Goodreads review, was the family a little over the top? I’ll be interested to hear more discussion on this one, too.

Books that were fun to read, but for which I don’t think there’s enough there there:

The Moon and More, by Sarah Dessen

The 5th Wave, by Rick Yancey

Just One Day, by Gayle Forman

This is What Happy Looks Like, by Jennifer E. Smith.

I haven’t read much nonfiction yet, so that’s something I’ll have to make a point of.

- Mom

Is Chris Lynch a Robot?

Mom,

I just noticed that Chris Lynch has a new book scheduled for publication in January 2014, and another for March 2014, which prompted me to ask: is Chris Lynch secretly a robot? How else to account for this list of his publications from 2010 to the present:

Pieces – 2013

Casulties of War (Vietnam #4) – 2013

Kill Switch – 2012

Free-Fire Zone (Vietnam #3) – 2012

Sharpshooter (Vietnam #2) – 2012

I Pledge Allegiance (Vietnam #1) – 2011

Angry Young Man – 2011

Hothouse – 2010

Prime Evil – 2010

Thoughts?

- Mark

What Should’ve Won: Printz 2001

The Publishing Year: 2000

The Winner: Kit’s Wilderness by David Almond

The Honor Books:

• Many Stones by Carolyn Coman
• The Body of Christopher Creed by Carol Plum-Ucci
• Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison
• Stuck in Neutral by Terry Trueman

Other Books to Consider:

• Fever, 1973 by Laurie Halse Anderson
• Forgotten Fire by Adam Bagdasarian
• Homeless Bird by Gloria Whelan
• Sir Walter Ralegh and the Quest for El Dorado by Marc Aronson
• Cut by Patricia McCormick

What Should Have Won: Stuck in Neutral

Compared to 1999, 2000 was a strange year for YA books, with lots of first-rate books published, but nothing in particular standing out from the pack, or screaming “Printz book.”  On the one hand, that probably accounts for what is, in my opinion, the greatest decision by any Printz Committee: giving an Honor to Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging–a truly delightful book that probably wouldn’t have stood a chance in a richer year.  But, on the other hand, it leaves us without any real obvious choice for a winner–rather than one or more books rising quickly to the top, this year seems more like a process of elimination.

Fever, 1973 is a really wonderful book, but definitely a lesser effort than many of Anderson’s other novels.  The Body of Christopher Creed is another one, like Angus, that seems like it maybe slipped into the list because of the weak field–don’t get me wrong, I love both books, and love that they have shiny silver stickers on them, but they don’t seem to have quite the same level of literary heft that most later Printz committees went for.  Homeless Bird, which won the National Book Award, and The Forgotten Fire, which made the BBYA Top Ten, both got quite a bit of notice at the time, but 12 years later they seem more notable for their socio-political statements than for their literary quality.  Again, that’s not to take away from them–Homeless Bird, which follows a young Indian girl who is married off for purely mercenary reasons, then quickly widowed, is particularly affecting.  And The Forgotten Fire, while a bit of a mess in terms of plot, is one of the only novels I know of that fully addresses the still sadly neglected Armenian Genocide of 1915.  And Many Stones . . . I dunno.  I guess I see what the committee was impressed by–certainly the narrator’s voice is well-wrought, and the conjunction of the family’s grief over Laura’s death and the political situation in South Africa is intriguing.  But, frankly, the book just doesn’t do much for me.

The one nonfiction book that I thought was worth a look (and which Jonathan recommended in my last post) was Aronson’s Sir Walter Ralegh, which I had not read before.  It’s generally a very fine history of the Elizabethan era, and of Ralegh’s various ventures, and features Aronson’s always fine prose, but it suffers from many of the same flaws you noted in Aronson’s book from last year, Master of Deceit.  There are, for instance, a proliferations of “might have”s and “maybe”s.  A small example (but one that stuck with me) of Aronson’s style: in discussing the Spanish Armada, he weaves an elaborate metaphor in which the huge, centralized structure of the Armada stands for Spain’s Catholic faith (get it? Catholics are monolithic and bureaucratic), and the more guerilla-like tactics of the English fleet stands for Protestantism.  So that somehow the Armada is a representation of the conflicting religions rather than the petty war of aggression that it always was.  I don’t want to make too much of Aronson’s faults, though–as with Master of Deceit, in the end, I found the whole to be well worth reading, just not Printz-worthy.

So that leaves us with a three-way battle for the crown: Kit’s Wilderness, Stuck in Neutral, and Cut.  Personally, my favorite of these is Cut, which I hadn’t realized was McCormick’s debut.  As a debut, it is nothing short of amazing–many at the time compared it to Anderson’s Speak, and I think those comparison’s still hold, in terms of the strength of the voice and characterization, and the delicate handling of a complex and possibly controversial topic, in this case self harm.  What ultimately puts it out of the running in my mind is McCormick’s explanation for her narrator’s cutting, which is essentially pegs to a single incident in which the narrator’s brother developed severe Asthma, which she feels personally responsible for.  Frankly, this is just too neat.  Again, McCormick handles the repercussions of the narrator’s cutting quite well, and she doesn’t imply that recovery will be easy, but this sort of textbook style causation knocks the book down a touch.

So what of the winner, Kit’s Wilderness?  Almond won a Printz Honor in 2000 for Skellig, then the Printz for this book, thus becoming the first of a select group of YA authors with two Printz medals, but since then he has been absent.  I think very highly of both these novels, and I had this to say about Skellig, on Goodreads, which I think applies equally to Kit’s Wilderness:

Almond writes with this eerily strange sense of inevitability – as if he is retelling a well-known folktale from an entirely new perspective. It is haunting and beautiful, and strangely distant at the same time. Utterly unique.

So, certainly a great novel–but a Printz winner? Maybe–if it weren’t for Stuck in Neutral. We’ve discussed this novel on this blog before, in the context of its ambiguous ending, and I continue to think that the ending is one of its great strengths.  But the reason it stands out as the winner for me is that it succeeds precisely where so many of the novels I’ve just discussed stumble: at balancing literary excellence with a complex understanding of a social issue.  Trueman’s delicate handling of cerebral palsy–his ability to imagine the inner life of a character trapped within that disease, while still fully acknowledging the trials and complications for the family (especially the father) who have no access to that inner life–is nothing short of amazing.  And while I wouldn’t put Trueman’s literary style at the same level as Anderson or Myers (or, for that matter, Almond), it is far and above that of Whelan and Bagdasarian, both of whom allow their subject matter to take too much away from their prose. 

So in a year in which several novels fell down for failing the balance between literary excellence and thematic import, Trueman “should have” won for getting that balance exactly right.

Best of 2013 So Far

Mom,

I thought I had a lot to say about your memoirs post, but when I started to try to compose a response, it all boiled down to, “yeah, what you said.”  So, I’m not going to do that.  Instead, with the year almost half over, I thought I’d make a list of my favorite books of the year so far–the ones that may very well be making their way onto our Mock Printz list–in roughly descending order. 

• 17 & Gone by Nova Ren Suma–I continue to think that this is the best YA book I’ve read this year.  Emotionally and psychologically complex, gorgeously written, and haunting.
• Yellowcake by Margo Lanagan–Lanagan returns to short stories. Nuff said.
• Pieces by Chris Lynch
• Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas by Jim Ottiviani, illustrated by Maris Wicks–I haven’t officially posted anything about this book, though I’ve mentioned it here and there. It’s definitely the best graphic novel for teens I’ve read this year, and my five-year-old daughter loves it.  It takes us through the lives of three of the great primatologists of the 20th century, all tied together by the great Louis Leakey.  The art is fantastic–approachable and distinct, with bold, rich colors.  And the text has just the right balance of humor, biography, science, and adventure.
• Corner of White by Jaclyn Moriarty–I have serious doubts as to whether this book will last until the end of the year, but it remains one of my great pleasures of the first half.
• Lincoln’s Grave Robbers by Steve Sheinkin–this one seems to be taking a lot of heat for not being Bomb (as we both assumed it would), but I haven’t read a better nonfiction teen book yet.  Hope to get to more NF in the second half though.

What about . . . ?

I’m taking a pass on such acclaimed titles as Midwinterblood (as you know), Alex Flinn’s Towering, Kiersten White’s Mind Games, and Megan Miranda’s Hysteria.  And I’m still mulling over my reactions to Matthew Quick’s Forgive Me Leonard Peacock, and AS King’s Reality Boy.  I could be convinced that either of those latter two are among the year’s best, but it would take a good argument.

What about you?  Do you have a best of the year so far list?

- Mark

The Art of the Memoir

Mark,

I have been thinking lately about what makes a successful memoir. This came up because I recently read two memoirs, and they made for an interesting contrast. The two new books I read were Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard, by Laura Bates; and Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love and Karaoke, by Rob Sheffield. To test my theories, I also re-read Jack Gantos’s Printz-honor winning memoir, Hole in My Life. 

I have thought for years that memoir is a particularly difficult literary form. For one thing, to be effective, a memoir has to have a structure–it can’t just be “I did this, then I did that.” The best memoirs have a theme, and/or focus on only one relatively small part of the author’s life. All three of these books do that, to some extent.

Gantos tells the story of the years when he was about ages 17-20, in which he finished high school living on his own in a welfare motel, then got a job sailing 2000 pounds of hashish from St. Croix to New York, then got arrested and jailed for it, served his time, and started college and his writing career. Sheffield focuses on karaoke and how his love for it helped bring him out of the funk he was in after his first wife died (when they were both 31), and led him to his second wife. He uses a frame device of a night of karaoke to tell his personal story, as well as the story of karaoke and of some of the music involved. Bates is an English professor who spent more than ten years teaching Shakespeare in prisons, including in super-maximum security facilities and focuses on one particular prison and one particular prisoner.

So far, so good. However, even on this initial criterion, Bates stumbles by failing to keep it tightly focused. She can’t quite seem to decide if the story is about herself and her writing/teaching/volunteering, about prisons, about Shakespeare, or about Larry Newton, the prisoner. In fact, the longer the book goes, the more she veers into the story of Newton, and the less interesting it gets, in many ways. I would have been quite happy to have had the whole book be about just the prisoners and Shakespeare–how they interpreted the plays, their discussions, and so on. Although even there, I was a little irritated by her constant assertions that Newton had come up with brand-new, never-before-heard-of interpretations of Shakespeare. Really? After 500 years and thousands upon thousands of Shakespeare scholars, no one has ever discussed that particular aspect? Well, she’s the one with a PhD in Shakespeare studies, so maybe she’s right, but I somehow doubt it.

I have decided that there is another critical component of the well-written memoir: the author has to be able to tell stories  without coming across as completely full of himself/herself. On that score, Gantos soars, Sheffield does pretty well, and Bates flounders. She can’t seem to tell a story without patting herself on the back. Even the stories about mistakes turn into stories about what a great recovery she made.

Gantos, in contrast, has got self-deprecation down to an artform. He is honest, straightforward, and absolutely hilarious. His story about the days after his arrest, when his face broke out in a massive acne attack, and how he squeezed the zits: “This was very satisfying, this cleansing ritual. I’d punish my face as if I were a cop roughing up a suspect for a confession. . . . I figured my face was the landscape of my attitude.” Brilliant! Gross, but funny and very, very true. 

The whole book is like that–an unflinching look at himself at one particular time in his life, when he made a whole series of stupid decisions, but somehow managed to land on his feet. Running throughout is his love of literature and his desire to write. I’m glad I re-read this, because it is wonderful, funny, touching, and beautifully written. I’ll be interested to see how it fares when you get to 2003 in your What Should’ve Won series.

Rob Sheffield is cut much more in the Gantos mode than in the Bates mode. I read and loved his first memoir, Love is a Mix Tape, which was the story of his life with his first wife, told through the lens of the mix tapes they made for one another. Sheffield writes for Rolling Stone, and he obviously loves popular music in all its many variations. To some extent, Sheffield can’t quite decide if this is a book about karaoke, or if it’s a story about his life. There were a couple of chapters that, while delightful, didn’t really fit into the overall arc of the story. But he has a way of pulling you along, especially if you know any of the music he’s talking about.

Like Gantos, he can be absolutely unflinching when talking about his own foibles. His chapter about going to a rock and roll fantasy camp is hilarious: he can’t sing, can’t play and instrument, and even has trouble with the tambourine (including massive bruises on his thighs). He can’t even talk to the  rock musicians who are at the camp without feeling stupid. He says:

“Why am I like this? Is it because I want to show off? Is it because I want extra credit for all my extra listening? Is it an ego thing where I’m trying to impress them with obnoxiously knowledgeable insights? Or is it because I want to reassure them their lifetime of music was spent wisely? I really don’t know. But remembering which dude in which band sang which song, or knowing every dusty nook and cranny of their discography–it’s like an obnoxious party trick I can’t stop doing.”

Later in the same section he says, “The possibility that I’m a dick, not for the first time this week, hovers before me.”

I don’t think a memoir has to be funny in order to be good, but I do think that a memoir writer has to have a sense of humor about himself, and acknowledge his failures as well as his successes.

I know you’re not much of a fan of the memoir/biography/autobiography form, but any thoughts on the subject?

- Mom

What Should’ve Won: Printz 2000

Mom,

Over on The Cockeyed Caravan, Matt Bird had an excellent series (which I hope he continues) called What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won, in which he went through the winners of the first several Academy Award for Best Picture and discussed the movies that had a chance and decided what really should have won.  I like this idea so much that I’m going to steal borrow it for this website, except looking, of course, at YA books.

So for my inaugural piece, I’ll look at the very first Printz award in 2000:

The Publishing Year: 1999

The Winner: Monster by Walter Dean Myers

The Honor Books: Skellig by David Almond; Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson; and Hard Love by Ellen Wittlinger

Other Books to Consider: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky; Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis; When Zachary Beaver Came to Town by Kimberly Willis Holt; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling

What Should Have Won: Speak

I admit that I haven’t read Hard Love or Zachary Beaver (the winner of that year’s National Book Award for Young People’s Literature), but this is really just a two way race between Speak and Monster.  Both books were on the Printz list and the NBA list. Twelve years later, they were in the finals against each other at the 2012 ALA Pre-Conference discussion, which I discussed here. It is incredible that they both came out in that first year of the Printz, as they managed to set a pretty impossible gold standard for YA Literature right out of the gate.

And Monster is, obviously, a tremendous book and a worthy Printz winner. In fact, I might be willing to argue that it is the best book to have won the Printz Award.  Myers’s trenchant examination of American legal system, especially as it functions with respect to poor, young, black, men is (unfortunately) seemingly timeless.  And the way that he intersects the intricacies of legal guilt with the vagaries of moral guilt (while cleverly concealing from the reader key information about Steve’s actions) is nothing short of amazing.  Add to that his formal innovation of having the text consist almost entirely of Steve’s screenplay of his life–a trick which offers an entirely new and interesting take on the unreliable narrator–and you have a really stunning book.

So why shouldn’t Monster have won? Well, mostly just because it happened to be released in the same year as probably the best YA book of all time. But I do have some slight criticisms of the novel as well.  The screenplay style, which is so effective most of the time, does lead to a few pitfalls.  There are two brief flashbacks to Steve’s film class which complement the action in the courtroom–these scenes work perfectly when considered as Myers’s comments on the drama, but when you take them (as the reader is supposed to) as being introduced by Steve himself, they become too cute by half.  The screenplay technique also gives Myers just a little too much of an excuse to load the beginning of the novel with exposition.  Still, these are very minor concerns, and there are very few YA books out there that are better than Monster.

But one of those is Speak.  Speak actually shares many of Monster‘s strengths–a subtle look at a difficult social topic (in this case rape), an engaging but somewhat unreliable narrator, the decision to withhold crucial facts from the reader for a time, the contrast between the public and private selves of the protagonist, the theme of art as redemption, and probably more that I’ve missed.  But in my view, Anderson handles these strengths even better than Myers, and adds a few. 

I’ve said many times, that I think the novel’s greatest strength is Melinda’s voice, and I think it is much stronger than Steve’s–most importantly because of her biting humor, which helps to obscure how many pain she is in.  In terms of the “art as redemption” theme, though Myers is more committed to his theme, by allowing Steve’s art to take center stage, I find Anderson’s use of the theme more convincing, for several reasons: 1) because of the flaws in the screenplay technique, described above, 2) because we are able to see Melinda’s growth as an artist and gradual commitment to it, as opposed to Steve’s seemingly already fully formed artistic ambitions, 3) for the much more fully explored relationship between Melinda and her art teacher–as opposed to the underdeveloped character of Steve’s film teacher.

And of course there is Anderson’s prose.  Not to take anything away from Myers, but Anderson is the better stylist. From the well-known first paragraph (“It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache”) on, Anderson loads her text with sentences that are at once witty, well-formed, and freighted with meaning.

There is much more to be said about both of these novels, but I’ll leave it there for now.  There are many many devoted fans of The Perks of Being a Wallflower–I wonder if anyone wants to make a case for it over Monster and Speak?  Or should I have taken another look at the best book in the Hary Potter series? Or either of the highly touted books from that year that I’ve never read?

- Mark

Lucy Variations

Mark,

Finally, a new YA book I can feel genuinely enthusiastic about! I just read Sara Zarr’s new book, The Lucy Variations. It has been getting strong reviews all around, and rightly so. I always am fascinated by books about teenagers who are particularly talented and/or driven.

In this case, Lucy is talented but not so driven–at least not any more. Eight months before the book’s dramatic opening scene (in which Lucy tries, but fails, to resuscitate  her brother’s music teacher, who has had a stroke), Lucy has walked off the stage at a music competition in Prague. Since then, she has not played a note on the piano.

She is now back in high school, in San Francisco, while her younger brother Gus prepares to take up the family mantle of musical prodigy. Lucy is trying to discover who she might be without music in her life, when her mother and grandfather are the sort of people for whom life without music is nothing at all. She has a crush on her English teacher, Mr. Charles–I loved the part where she chooses to write a paper on Alice Munro’s short stories, because a Google search has informed her that he wrote his thesis on Munro. Lucy is used to being around adults, and to getting her own way with them, and it is interesting to watch her as she realizes that Mr. Charles fully understands his role as teacher, not friend.

A lot of the book centers around Lucy’s relationship with Will, her brother’s new music teacher. Will is an interesting character, and I think Zarr does a great job of presenting him–through Lucy’s eyes–as someone who has a genuine interest in Lucy and in her playing, but who also has some very personal issues tied up in it as well. In some ways, he’s the anti-Mr. Charles. He clearly wants to serve as mentor and friend to Lucy, but he isn’t always completely clear about where the lines should be drawn. He wants to help her, but also he feels compelled to use her in the fulfillment of his own career. 

Just as an aside, the San Francisco locale was done very well, and my absolutely favorite part was when Will and his wife Aruna invite Lucy to a party at their home, and Lucy finds out that they live in Daly City: “Lucy couldn’t picture Will and Aruna in a gray place like Daly City. She’d assumed they lived somewhere hip like Cole Valley or the Haight.” Heh!

So, anyway, I think there is a lot going on in this book, and it could definitely bear re-reading. Lucy’s relationships with her mother, her father, her grandfather, her brother, and her best friend are all drawn beautifully and skillfully. As Lucy learns more about who she is and what she wants to do, those relationships all change, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, but in ways that feel very right.

I hope you read this book so we can discuss it more fully later on.

- Mom

Bad Covers

Mom,

Yeah, expectations can be a tricky thing, and are the subject of what I was planning on writing about yesterday morning when I saw your post.  So I’ll just keep to it: bad covers.  We’ve talked about covers before: how to judge a book by its cover and why NBA Winner Goblin Secrets changed its cover while still in hardcover.  But today I want to talk about the truly terrible covers of a couple of books I read over the weekend–terrible both because I think the artwork is atrocious and because I think they give entirely misleading expectations to the prospective reader.

The first is a “new” story collection by Janet Frame called Between My Father and the King. I put new in quotations marks because, of course, she’s been dead for a decade, but it is new in the sense that these stories have never been collected before (and many of them never published).  First, take a look at the cover to the right and think about what it might be about.  If you’ve never read Frame before, her writing can be bitingly sarcastic, heartbreakingly moving, and formally inventive.  She writes sharply about her childhood, her time in a mental institution, the hypocricies of small-town life and much, much more.  None of that is even vaguely hinted at by this dreadfully boring photograph of the New Zealand countryside (or at least, I hope it is New Zealand, since Frame is New Zealand’s preeminent writer). 

The other book I read over the weekend was Jaclyn Moriarty’s A Corner of White, which was suggested by our friend Beth Fama, though she hasn’t read it yet.  I read the Janet Frame collection because I know she is great and I’ve read one of her novels.  In the case of the Moriarty novel, if I hadn’t been stuck on a plane for five hours on Friday, I wouldn’t have read it at all.  Honestly, I was embarrassed to be reading it.  The novel itself is funny, with a distinct hint of Pratchett, with a nice metafictional conceit–Elliott, who lives in the magical Kingdom of Cello, and Madeleine, who lives in The World (that is, the “real” world) begin to communicate by letter through a crack between the worlds.  But Madeleine is convinced that she is communicating with a fellow real-world teen with an overactive imagination, and quickly begins critiquinig the more cliched aspects of Cello’s fantasy world.  There’s much more to the book, and I quite recommend taking a look at it.  But the point is: that cover!  It looks like it’s advertising a direct-to-DVD Disney movie or something.  The sparklering stars! The flying umbrella! The red rain boots!  None of that has anything to do with the novel, by the way. 

As I was looking for a jpg of the cover for the novel, I noticed that there’s another cover out there.  Moriarty is Australian, so presumably this is the original cover.  I’m not terribly crazy about this cover either, but at least 1) the rainbow has something to do with the plot (too complicated to explain), and 2) the photograph is mildly aesthetically pleasing.

Anyway, I don’t particularly want to get into a discussion of the worst covers ever, or anything, but the connection between these books gave me a good excuse to let you know what I’ve been reading, and, as I said, I think it ties into questions of expectations, since in both cases, the intended target audience of the cover art is a very different group from the intended audience of the book.

Mark

Expectations

Mark,

I recently read and reviewed (for VOYA) a debut YA novel called The Color of Rain, by Cori McCarthy. It was decently-written (“a not-bad book”) but there was something about it that kept bugging me, and it wasn’t until I finished it and started writing the review that I realized what it was. It had to do with expectations, and that got me thinking about that in a larger context.

First, about the book: it’s a science fiction book, set in some unknown future time in which space travel exists. Rain and her brother Walker live in Earth City (which may or may not be actually on planet Earth). Walker, like many other residents of Earth City, including their dead parents, is “Touched”; that is, his mind is going. It appears to be something like a very early-onset Alzheimer’s. The Touched are, well, untouchables. They are rounded up and taken away, and Rain wants to protect Walker from that at all costs. In fact, Rain wants to get Walker away from Earth City and to the Edge, where there is hope for a cure.

In order to accomplish this, Rain makes a deal with a spaceship runner named Johnny: “whatever you have for whatever you need.” What Rain needs is to get off-planet with Walker. What she has is her body. So that’s the deal she makes with Johnny. She becomes one of Johnny’s girls, bound to him by an electronic bracelet. The girl whose bracelet glows red is Johnny’s favorite; green means elite–they’re offered to Johnny’s hand-picked clients; blue girls trade themselves to the passengers for money; yellow girls are relegated to the crew deck.

Yes, it’s “Prostitutes in Space.” There is, of course, lots more going on. Rain, with the help of one of Johnny’s bodyguards, a sweet “Mec” (mechanically enhanced human) named Ben, discovers that the hold is loaded with Touched that are to be sold, lobotomized, and used as disposable labor units, and she conspires with Ben to release them. Meanwhile, she tries to keep on Johnny’s good side in order to keep Walker alive and healthy. There’s action, intrigue, and some romance. There are some interesting moral questions about how we make decisions. All in all, as I said, a not-bad book.

But here’s the thing: I realized that I was having trouble with the fact that this was a science fiction book in which every single woman character was a sex object, and only a sex object. “Wait a minute,” my brain kept whispering to me, “this is supposed to be the future. Men and women are supposed to be equal in the future. Spaceships are supposed to have female officers and crew, along with the men.”

Yes, I know there’s Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, and I’m sure there are other books set in the future in which women are objectified and demeaned. But I think there has been a long-standing trend in science fiction to show a different kind of future and a different kind of relationship between men and women. Even Robert Heinlein, who was pretty much a sexist pig (at least in his writing; I know nothing about his personal life) had female sex objects who were smart and clever and had positions of power.

So reading The Color of Rain got me thinking about the expectations we bring to certain genres and types of stories, and what happens when those expectations aren’t met. I know there are people who simply won’t read a book if it thwarts their expectations. I’m kind of inclined to admire McCarthy here for turning a convention on its head, and I’m curious about how and why she came up with this idea.

I may have more to say on this topic, but I’m still mulling it over. How about you? Any examples of books that defied your expectations in a good (or bad) way?

- Mom

Underwhelmed

Mark,

I’m not really sulking because you disagreed with me about Midwinterblood (more on which in a moment), I’ve just been both really busy and somewhat underwhelmed by what I’ve been reading.

So, about Midwinterblood: okay, I see your point about the lack of cohesiveness in the stories, but it didn’t bother me until you pointed it out. I was happy to spot the small connections and to revel in the wonderful writing. I would have to re-read it to come up with a stronger  argument, and I’ll probably do that later in the year, if others are still talking about it. It does have five starred reviews–although, as we’ve discussed before, stars aren’t everything.

So, on to a few other books that have been getting starred reviews but that haven’t completely done it for me. Eleanor and Park, by Rainbow Rowell has been getting raves from many quarters, and I can see why, but I didn’t finish it with any urge to discuss it or share it. I’ve been trying to think why, and I don’t really have an answer. The 80′s setting never quite felt right to me. The back-and-forth between the “Park” sections and the “Eleanor” sections was sometimes awkward, and I didn’t think the voices were clearly different enough. It was kind of an odd structure, to have the two different points of view, but to have them both told in third-person narration. There were many things I liked about the book, but at the moment it doesn’t feel like a book that is going to stick with me.

I also read Teeth, by Hannah Moskowitz. This is an odd little book that the publisher refers to as a “gritty, romantic modern fairy tale.” Um, okay. It’s really hard to describe. It does have a bit of the Midwinterblood/Brides of Rollrock Island realistic fantasy thing going on: there’s a mysterious substance, in this case, the fish that apparently can only be found on this island and that save the lives of desperately ill people. Rudy’s relationship with Teeth, aka Fishboy, was problematic for me. What was in it for Rudy? I had to pretty much make myself pick up the book and read it, and there was nothing particularly fun about it. But on the other hand, this one really is rolling around in my brain several weeks after I read it, so there’s that. I’ll have to give it some more thought.

I also read Black Helicopters, by Blythe Woolston. I actually feel kind of funny talking about it on the day after the Boston Marathon bombings, because it feels just a bit too close to home. I can easily imagine Valley (short for Valkyrie) deciding that the finish line of the Boston Marathon was just exactly the right place to detonate her bomb. This is a book that I turned back to the first page as soon as I finished the last page. It definitely benefits from a re-read, as you begin to see how the various elements fit together, and who these people really are. I was expecting a different kind of story–more of a standard thriller, I think–but reading this book, told from the perspective of a girl who is just trying to do what she has been taught all of her life to do, was absolutely chilling. So why was I underwhelmed? Again, I’m not sure. Woolston’s writing, I think, holds the reader at a distance. But this is another one that I may want to go back to at a later date.

So I don’t know. These are all good books, but none of them grabbed me and didn’t want to let go. Maybe I’m just in a reading slump. (This may actually be true; I was looking at my list of e-galleys from Edelweiss and Netgalley, and couldn’t get up much enthusiasm for any of them.) Perhaps it’s time to re-read an old favorite, or find an entirely new genre or something. It’s just as well I’m not on any book selection committees this year!

What have you been reading?

- Mom