Across the Universe

Title: Across the Universe

Author: Beth Revis

Publisher: Penguin Group (2012)

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

Length: 417

Synopsis: Amy is about to leave everything behind.  Her parents have signed on to help develop a colony on a far distant planet, a colony so far away that they will have to spend 300 years cryogenically frozen aboard their starship in order to survive the journey.  While they and the other "essential" personnel travel in blocks of ice, the ship is crewed by generation after generation as they hurtle through space.  But somewhere along the line, something has gone wrong.  The power structure of the waking crew has changed; now they're led by Eldest, the most senior member of the population, and his teenage successor, Elder, is being groomed to take his place.  But Elder feels that something is not quite right within the ship; Eldest is keeping secrets, and when Elder stumbles across one of the biggest, a room full of frozen people, he'll do whatever it takes to get answers, even if it means asking the girl in the block of ice.

My Rating: 4 Stars

 
My Opinion:This, put most simply, is a good book.  The opening scene was enough to leave me a bit shell-shocked, in the best possible way.  From there, the story launches into a disconcertingly dystopian society that continues to reveal hidden depths of distortion as the book progresses.  It's a quick read with an engaging plot and moderately intriguing characters, though they did seem a bit flat at times.  The story is driven not by character development or growth, but by the swiftly unraveling though delightfully tangled plot.  I did find that I was occasionally confused about the age of the characters.  There was no change in vocabulary between Eldest and his teenage protege, leaving Eldest with turns of phrase that seemed out of character, particularly in a society that's been artificially stratified by age.  Given the chance to continue in this series, however, I certainly will!

The Rook (Audiobook)

Title: The Rook

Author: Daniel O'Malley

Read by: Susan Duerden

Publisher: Dreamscape Media (2012)

Genre(s): Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Crime Thriller, Mystery

Length: 17 hours and 51 minutes

Synopsis: When Myfanwy Thomas awakes in a park, surrounded by corpses wearing latex gloves, she has no idea who she is or how she came to be in such a situation.  Her only clues are several letters in her pocket, addressed to her by the woman who had previously inhabited her body, the personality she'd been born with and which was mysteriously erased.  This is only the beginning of Myfanwy's trip down the rabbit hole.  Soon she begins to realize that there is far, far more to her life-- or rather, the life she's inherited-- than she could ever have guessed.  Her prior self has left her a road-map in letters and documents, but when one awakens to find oneself an administrator in the government's secret supernatural department, there are bound to be some adjustments to make.

My Rating: 3 Stars

My Opinion:  This book started well, but lost momentum before long.  I've read other reviews comparing The Rook with the film The Bourne Identity, but I really think it's really much closer to Ghostbusters.  It may have been Duerden's performance, but instead of playing as an actual thriller, this audiobook came across as a parody of one.  In truth, I can't tell which was the actual intent.  Duerden has Myfanwy sounding like a little girl rather than the competent administrator she is (repeatedly) purported to be, and the voices she adopted for some of her other characters crossed the border into ridiculous.  O'Malley has an interesting concept here, and some really unique ideas, but I did not enjoy this audiobook as much as I had hoped.

The Farm

Title: The Farm

Author: Emily McKay

Publisher: Berkley Books (2012)

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

Length: 420

Synopsis: Lily can still remember the Before.  Not so long ago, there were no raging, bloodthirsty creatures that used to be human, until a virus turned them into the Ticks.  Teens weren't kept on Farms to serve as blood donors, keeping the Ticks fed and pacified.  And Mel, her autistic twin sister, wasn't communicating only in cryptic phrases of nursery rhymes.  But that was all Before, and now, Lily can only think about how she can get herself and her sister off the Farm and across the desolate United States to the safety of Canada.  The night she plans to escape, however, she runs into Carter, a classmate from the Before who seems to have all the answers.  With so much at stake, can she really afford to trust him?  Or, perhaps more importantly, can she really afford not to?

My Rating: 3 Stars

 
My Opinion: I just don't know what to make of this one.  It seems to be good conceptually, but there were a few wrenches in the works that made it less than a favorite.  I love the idea of the Ticks, and the Farms are suitably grim and dystopian, but there are a couple fantastical twists thrown into the plot that I had a hard time swallowing in McKay's scientifically based world.  I liked the struggle Lily faced in trying to care for her sister in a whole new world, but I found most of the other characters one-dimensional and hard to believe.  There's a lot of dystopian lit for young adults hitting the market right now, particularly with the popularity of books like The Hunger Games and Divergent trilogies.  Some of it is good, and others not so much.  I would recommend many other books over this one.

The Diviners

Title: The Diviners

Author: Libba Bray

Publisher: Little Brown Books (2012)

Genre(s): Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Young Adult Fiction, Steampunk

Length: 578 pages

Synopsis:  It's an age of jazz and glitter, movie stars and bootleg liquor. Evie O'Neill of Zenith, Ohio, is determined to make the most of it, but at seventeen, she's long outgrown Zenith's nightlife.  She craves the rush and excitement of the big city and when her parents decide to send her to New York City to stay with her uncle, Evie jumps at the chance.  Soon she's whirled into the kind of life she's always dreamed about: nights spent dancing in exclusive speakeasies, days shopping and sightseeing with friends.  But not everything is as it seems.  Everyone has a secret to keep, even Evie herself, but when a string of gruesome murders with ties to the occult rocks the city, she, and her secret, may be the only way to save them all.

My Rating: 4 Stars

My Opinion:  Hats off to Libba Bray!  She's managed to put together a massively complex book that's clearly only the tip of her creative iceberg.    This book is a pop culture collision of everything the self-proclaimed "nerd" demographic will love (and I say that as a self-identified nerd and without an ounce of condescension): magic, monsters, ghosts, demons, cults, mutants, superpowers, con men, showgirls, even a nod at steampunk.  With the new film adaptation of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby renewing interest in the Roaring 20's, I think this book has hit the right audience at the right time.  The stars are aligned for the next big hit, but I think that something is just the slightest bit amiss.  

 For me, books seem to come most alive when they are more than the sum of their parts, rather than the sum of more parts.  True, this book has everything, but I think that everything was, in this case, a bit too much.  The main characters are often driven by the central plot, which is excellent...until the plot finishes before the book does.  Many of the characters are merely being set up for the sequel, and though I don't mind loose ends at the end of a book, I am perplexed when characters who seem important never quite interface with the aspects of the text I had thought most important.  This is particularly concerning given the plot-based drive of the book's action.  I tried re-framing the text under a character-driven lens, but it just doesn't work.  There are too many characters so focused on doing so many things that there wasn't space for their development to be the story's central anchor.  

Overall, the book works.  It's a quick read, cleverly written, well thought out, and meticulously researched, but for me, there's too much material for this one thick tome.  There's enough in Bray's imagining to have written series following each of her intriguing characters.  Of course, there's always the sequel, Lair of Dreams, which I plan to pick up as soon as it's released (supposedly spring of 2014). 

The Windup Girl

Title: The Windup Girl

Author: Paolo Bacigalupi

Publisher: Night Shade Books (2009)

Genre(s): Fiction, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Length: 359 pages

Synopsis:  Life is uncertain in Bangkok.  Everyone's got a secret to hide.  Anderson is working with the hated AgriGen company, out to steal the genetic biodiversity the company needs to keep its seed stocks one step ahead of mutating diseases.  Emiko is a wind-up girl, one of the New People genetically engineered for perfection and now discarded as last year's model.  Hock Seng is a refugee; once the master of a great trading empire, he was forced to the fringes of society when he fled.  As tensions in the city grow between the Environment Ministry's "white-shirts" and the powerful forces of Trade, whose secrets will be profitable?  And whose will lead to disaster?

My Rating: 3 Stars

My Opinion:  I really, truly, desperately wanted to like this book.  With a great premise and so much potential (not to mention multiple awards and rave endorsements from great authors), I was really prepared to love this book.  I didn't.  I'm not certain what it was that didn't click.  Perhaps it's the jumble of characters, all with unclear motives and mixed loyalties, or maybe the slow, steady pacing that's less of a roller-coaster and more of a stroll in the park...albeit a grim, impoverished, dangerous, gritty park.  The characters seem realistic, the world Bacigalupi's created is so plausible it's terrifying, and yet I never really felt a part of it.  It honestly pains me to say that I didn't enjoy something so well written and thought out, as this clearly is, but I could not relate to the characters and could not find a flow to the story.  It took me ages to get through as I waited for the other shoe to drop, and now here I sit with the shoe still dangling.  I don't love books that wrap all the loose ends into a nice neat bow, but here I felt that the story never really got started.  The characters appear only at the fringes of one another's lives, with a few notable exceptions.  Their narratives feel disjointed, and while they permit the reader a bird's eye view of this Bangkok of the future, I found myself wanting to be more than impartial observer.  The world of the story is so deeply envisioned that I wanted to feel it myself.  Unfortunately, I never found my way through that fourth wall into the story, and though I watched until the very end, I walked away from it unmoved.

Books for Boys

Supposedly, boys are pickier readers than girls are... I'm not sure where that assumption came from, nor do I have any statistics to back it up.  I do, however, have quite a few friends and family members who are English and Language Arts teachers, and they report a certain luke-warm attitude toward reading among their male students.  I, of course, believe that everyone is a reader, and if someone claims not to be, he (or she!) just hasn't found the right book yet.  That being said, here are a few suggestions that might appeal to the gentlemen:


Historical Fiction:
       The King Raven Trilogy by Stephen Lawhead
       Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold
       The Song of Albion Trilogy by Stephen Lawhead
    
Fantasy/Science Fiction/Horror:
       Abarat by Clive Barker
       Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
       American Gods by Neil Gaiman
       The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer
       The Myth Hunters by Christopher Golden
       The Magicians by Lev Grossman
       A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin
       The Road by Cormac McCarthy
       The Abhorsen Trilogy by Garth Nix
       The Matt Cruse Trilogy by Kenneth Oppel
       The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud
       Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson
       Dragon and Thief by Timothy Zahn
       Fire Bringer by David Clement-Davies
       Peeps by Scott Westerfeld
       Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
       The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
       Unwind by Neal Schusterman
       The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
       Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding
       Feed by M. T. Anderson
       The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
       From a Buick 8 by Stephen King


Mysteries/Thrillers:
       The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown
       Thr3e by Ted Dekker
       The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larson
       The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
       Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind
       Acceleration by Graham McNamee
       The Knife and the Butterfly by Ashley Hope Perez
      

Nonfiction/Memoir/Biography:
       Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
       The Hot Zone by Richard Preston
       The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston
       A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
       Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
       Puppies, Dogs, and Blue Northerners by Gary Paulsen

From a Buick 8

Title: From a Buick 8

Author: Stephen King

Publisher: Pocket Books (2002)

Genre(s): Fiction, Science Fiction, Horror

Length: 356 pages

Synopsis:  At a quiet Pennsylvania State Police post, there’s a secret in Shed B.  Under a tarp rests a midnight blue ’54 Buick that’s a good deal more than it seems.  For Ned Wilcox, the post has become a home away from home, the one place where he can cling to the memory of his father, Trooper Curt Wilcox, who was killed by a drunk driver.  He fits in amongst the men and women of the post, but now that he’s discovered the Buick in Shed B, he’s about to be taken into a new circle of trust.  From the points of view of those who were there, Ned will learn the story of the Buick and its impact on the troopers, his father, and now himself.

My Rating: 4 Stars

My Opinion: I’ve read some horror before, though it’s not generally my go-to genre.  Clive Barker’s got some wild stuff, but I actually hadn’t read a Stephen King book before.  Shocking, I know, but I just hadn’t gotten around to it.  Several of my coworkers were putting together an impromptu book club, and the text of choice was this one.  Of course, being a reader, I wanted in.  I didn’t actually own the book, though, so I had to wait to start until someone else had finished it, but I caught up soon enough.  It’s a quick read with an interesting cast of characters and a central mystery that’s both unspeakably weird and startlingly mundane.  As much about story-telling as it is about the horror of the Buick, it’s not as grim as I expected.  There was only one scene, actually, that really left me nightmare prone, but perhaps that’s because I’m a softy in some respects.  It’s good, though, not too complex for a quick summer read, and not so surface-skimming that I fail to care about the characters.  It’s also oddly thought-provoking, discussing the difficulties of believing what one cannot see and of conveying the truth of something with words alone.  It’s the perfect book for summer, I think, especially a summer like mine, spent in a cabin in the middle of the woods.  Who wouldn’t want a little scary story at bedtime?

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 Ask and the Answer

Title: The Ask and the Answer

Author: Patrick Ness

Publisher: Candlewick (2010)

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

Length: 519 pages

Synopsis:  New World was settled by space-faring refugees a generation ago, though when the settlers arrived, they had no idea that the planets unique environment would soon cause men and animals to uncontrollably broadcast their thoughts telepathically.  Women, though able to hear the Noise, are themselves silent.  It is against this backdrop that the story of Todd and Viola, begun in The Knife of Never Letting Go, continues.  Now they find themselves captives of the former Mayor of Prentisstown, the leader of the army they fled across New World to escape.  The Mayor has overthrown the town of Haven by intimidation alone and set himself up as the President of New Prentisstown.  Though some residents are hopeful that the bloodless coup will result in a better life for all of them, the President's new policies have the women of New Prentisstown nervous.  Separated, Todd and Viola will have to make their own decisions about where their loyalties lie.  Will they ever be reunited?  And if they do find each another, will the person they find be the one they lost?

My Rating: 5 Stars

My Opinion: For such a lengthy book, this is an amazingly fast read.  Ness has a unique ability to write good people into bad situations and to let the reader watch humanity twist under pressure.  The prequel to this book, The Knife of Never Letting Go, was something I stumbled into quite by accident, but, just like this one, it had me staying up to all hours just to read a little more.  And a little more after that.  The characters range from sweet to horrifying, but all of them have a motivation and their actions make sense.  Watching these conflicting motivations clash in all out war is both intriguing and horrifying, and the parallels to both historical and current events are eerie.  It's one thing to write an allegory about past genocides or current revolutions, but to see the very same scenarios develop out of an entirely foreign series of events... it makes for serious food for thought.  Though this is a book geared toward young adults, I think that the lessons it holds are important for all ages.  Moreover, I think that its method of teaching is important.  Rather than laying out a clear cut path of right and wrong, Ness has characters on both sides of an ideological divide.  Who are the revolutionaries and who are the terrorists?  When is violence necessary?  Who is right?  What is the answer?  Ness doesn't have it, and neither do his characters, but in posing the question, he makes the first step for all of us.