The Infects

Title: The Infects

Author: Sean Beaudoin

Publisher: Candlewick Press (2012)

Genre(s): Fiction, Science Fiction, Young Adult Fiction

Length: 347 pages

Synopsis:  Nick Sole’s life is not exactly ordinary.  Unfortunately, it’s not-exactly-ordinary in all the wrong ways.  His sister is a whiz with videogames, but since she’s been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, no one but Nick seems to treat her like a person.  His mom walked out when they were young, and his dad lost his job in research and development at Rebozzo’s chicken factory.  Now he’s the Dude instead of a dad, and it’s up to Nick to keep the family together, working nights at the chicken factory just to pay the rent.  When Nick makes a terrible mistake on the factory line, he finds himself shipped off to a juvenile reform camp where everything begins to fall apart.  Everything, and everyone.  Literally. 

My Rating: 3 Stars

My Opinion: I’ll admit, I don’t love zombies.  There seems to be a bit of a zombie glut in pop culture right now, and I’ve had my fill, as it were, of desiccated flesh.  This book seemed to be trying to find its niche within the ranks of the animated dead, but it couldn’t quite decide where it wanted to go.  Did it want to snidely mock horror movies and the zombie genre in general?  Did it want to suggest a dystopian future that picks up where the typical zombie flick leaves off?  Did it want to write a poignant teen story?  Well… yes.  But it wanted to do all those things at once, and in different ways.  There’s a lot about this book that’s not bad.  In fact, it has elements that are quite good.  But to me it really did feel like three or four different books that coexisted alongside one another rather than merging together into a single story.  It’s unique, yes, and I’ll give it points for that, but it felt at times like someone had cut and pasted chapters from Louis Sachar’s Holes alongside pages out of Twilight and the script to some poorly done B horror movie featuring a cast of largely superfluous and utterly unmemorable teens. 

The Name of the Wind

Title: The Name of the Wind

Author: Patrick Rothfuss

Publisher: DAW Hardcover (2007)

Genre(s): Fiction, Fantasy

Length: 672 pages

Synopsis:  Times are grim at the Waystone Inn.  There are few patrons at the bar each evening, and the rooms, though neat and comfortable, are empty.  There are bandits on the road and war looming in the distance.  But for Kote the innkeeper, none of this has much to do with him.  He can only shrug and accept the hardships of current times with the rest of the townsfolk and listen as his few customers spin tales of Kvothe the Bloodless and Taborlin the Great beside the fire.  Chronicler, a man who collects and records the great stories of the world, had heard all these before, and when he arrives at the Waystone, he’s come for a story of a different sort: Kote’s story, a story from a lifetime away that even now is bleeding into the present.

My Rating: 5 Stars

My Opinion: I picked up this book a year ago after catching the tail-end of an NPR interview with the author.  I hadn’t heard of him before, but listening to him describe this book, I added it at the top of my reading list.  He talked about fantasy as a genre, and the kinds of fantasy we read as young people, complex stories that nonetheless follow unspoken rules of archetype and story arc.  He wanted to write books like that, he said, new stories that still have that familiar fantasy scope.  I knew immediately what he meant, particularly when he started listing books in the same vein and I recognized some of my own favorites.  So I downloaded a copy onto my Kindle to read on the long flight from JFK to Dublin and off I went.  I loved this book the first time I read it, and I loved it again when I re-read it this past week.  Or rather, as I listened to it.  Though the Kindle text-to-speech function is nothing like the thrill of an audiobook, it does make for conveniently hands-free reading.  Despite the robotic drone of the e-reader, Rothfuss’ words came to life, weaving a story that is unselfconsciously aware of its status as just that: a story.  It is, in essence, a story about a story, and all the stories that were spun off from a central truth.  It’s a fairy tale that doesn’t feel cute, a mystery that doesn’t dwell on the unknown.  It’s plot rather than character driven, as there is really only one character with any great sense of depth and understanding.  This, of course, makes sense as he is both hero and narrator, literally telling his story to an attentive audience, and, of course, an attentive reader.  I’ve also read the sequel, The Wise Man’s Fear­, which I did enjoy but shall discuss at length in its own review.  For now, content yourself with settling in to listen to a tale that is wonderfully rich, uniquely magical, mildly disconcerting, and, of course, just a little bit tall.

The Other Hand

Title: The Other Hand

Author: Chris Cleave

Publisher: Penguin Group (2008)

Genre(s): Fiction, Realistic Fiction

Length: 374 pages

Synopsis:  Though in general I write a neat little synopsis in my own words for each book I read, I will bow to the request on the back of the book and present the back cover word for word:

           

“We don’t want to tell you what happens in this book.  It is a truly special story and we don’t want to spoil it.

Nevertheless, you need to know enough to buy it so we will just say this:

This is the story of two women.

Their lives collide one fateful day, and one of them has to make a terrible choice.

Two years later, they meet again

-- the story starts there…

Once you have read it, you’ll want to tell your friends about it.  When you do, please don’t tell them what happens either.  The magic is in how it unfolds.”

My Rating: 5 Stars

My Opinion: My very first thought about this book was that it must be either something really special, or the product of an extraordinarily conceited author and editing staff.  Without any back-cover synopsis, and with a letter from the editor to the reader on the first page of the book cryptically extolling its virtues, I wondered if they were really that desperate for readers, or if maybe, just maybe, this actually is that book.  By this, I mean a once-in-a-lifetime, eye-opening sort of read that is every bit worthy of such praise.  I’m still not sure if this is that book… but it’s as close as any I’ve ever read.  It is remarkable.  The voices of this book’s two protagonists are ringingly clear and beautiful in their sincerity and imperfection.  They take up residence in your thoughts even when you set the book aside, as living and breathing as the people you pass on the street or sit beside in the theatre.  It’s clear how these women’s different worlds have shaped their words and their thoughts and their actions, like trees bent by the prevailing wind.  Horrible and funny and cruel and sweet and painfully relevant, Cleave has managed to tell a story of the sort we seldom hear, but often feel.  I won’t say much more, because really, no matter what your reading preference, you’ll find something in this story that speaks to you, and Cleave and his characters can tell you about it far better than I could.

What I read

In some of these other rather editorial posts, I've talked about where I get my books and why I read in the first place.  I've been thinking lately about why I read what I read.  As I write reviews, I tag each post with genre labels, which pop up in the label cloud over on the right there.  Go ahead, take a look.  The size of each word corresponds to how many posts I've tagged with that particular label, so it's become abundantly clear where my reading has taken me of late: young adult fiction.

Part of the reason so many of these books are for young adults relates to why I began this project in the first place.  This has a bit of back-story, so bear with me for a sentence or four.  My mother is a high school English teacher, and a rather spectacular one at that.  You don't even have to take my word for it; she was voted Best English Teacher of 2012-13 by the Michigan Council of Teachers of English, an award also recognized by the National Council of Teachers of English (you can read all about it over here).  Ah, but I digress.  As part of her inventive English teaching methodology, she wrote and received a very large grant to build a classroom library full of high interest books for young adults.  Soon, Amazon.com was receiving thousands of dollars in orders from her and the library began to grow.  But here's the catch, which is also where I come in.  She doesn't put books into her classroom library that she hasn't read or knows nothing about.  This isn't to censor the content; she feels, as I do, that students should read what they like to read as often as possible, regardless of her own opinion on the book.  Rather, she likes to know what's in the library so that when a student comes to her and says, "I just finished Peeps by Scott Westerfeld and thought it was terrific.  Have you got anything else like it?" she can reply, "Well, if you'd like another take on vampires, try Robin McKinley's Sunshine, or maybe some nonfiction about disease, like The Great Influenza by John M. Barry."  It's not quite feasible to ask one person to read an entire library, however.  Though it was indeed a terrible burden to be asked to dive into boxes of books, brimming like treasure chests filled with jewel-like paperbacks and glossy new hardcovers, and to read whatever I wanted, as much as I wanted...well, I figured I could grit my teeth and deal with it.  You know, for the good of the cause.  The guest room in my parents house became a bibliophile's dream: stacks of books knee high, teetering in towers across the floor because the wall of shelves simply couldn't hold them all, books waiting for their sign-out cards, books in heaps labeled Read and Unread, books in no particular order at all.  It smelled like a book shop, dry and papery with a sharp undercurrent of ink.  I started reading, and then I started writing.

So there's a long-winded explanation as to why I've read so much young adult fiction, though in truth there's a shorter one.  Here it is.  I like it.  The market for YA Fiction is huge and growing, despite claims that "kids these days" don't read.  Authors in this genre are wildly inventive and delightfully subversive, and while books geared toward older readers can certainly have these qualities as well, I find they often don't push the boundaries in quite the same way.  Young adult readers are considered more willing to suspend their disbelief at fantastical scenarios, so whether it's taking a flying car to Hogwarts or the actions of a teenage sleuth, nothing seems to go too far for these readers.  Psychologically speaking, teens and young adults feel things a little more vividly.  There's more black and white and less grey; the stakes are always a little higher.  This translates in both the writing and the actions of the characters in this genre.

Frankly, this is what I like about reading.  I like to find stories that take me to places I will never be able to see, and that paint these places in vivid technicolor.  I'd like to live dangerously, but as I'm far too timid, I'll settle for the vicarious experience of reading about daring characters.  I want to see characters who will risk it all and who struggle with good and evil without the shades of grey that cloud reality.  Maybe it's a search for simpler answers, even if they aren't easy answers.  Maybe it's because I never gave up on fairy tales or finding hidden worlds behind everyday doors.  Maybe it's just the way my brain works, but I find a lot of what I'm looking for in young adult fiction, and I know I'm not alone.

I don't think there's any shame in reading.  Not at all.  Not "guilty pleasure" romance novels.  Not slick-fiction sci-fi.  Not fan fiction.  Not made from television serial books.  There's no shame in "jumping on the bandwagon" and reading a runaway bestseller.  There's no shame in finding solace in Shakespeare.  And there's certainly no shame in 30-somethings, 40-somethings, or any-somethings reading young adult fiction.  Readers should never feel as if they have to justify their taste in stories.  Will others disagree?  Of course.  But that doesn't make any of what we read less right for us.  And with any luck, the disagreement will spark interesting conversation and still more stories.

In short, I read what I like, and I think you should to, whatever it is.  Hopefully whatever it is includes this blog.  Happy reading!