Shadow and Bone

Title:  Shadow and Bone

Author: Leigh Bardugo

Publisher:  Square Fish (2012)

Genre(s): Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, Fantasy, Adventure

Length: 356 pages

Synopsis:  Ravka is a country at war.  For the last hundred years, battles have raged at the borders, and even with the help of the Grisha, those with fantastical abilities to manipulate matter through their use of the Small Science, there seems to be no way to bring an end to the fighting.  For Mal and Alina, the war is just another fact of life.  Orphaned by the battles, they had nothing when they came to live among the other war orphans at Duke Keramsov’s estate, but they found in one another the comfort and companionship they needed to survive.  For Alina, childhood friendship has begun to grow into something deeper as the two set out to serve together in the First Army, while Mal seems more interested in the beautiful Grisha girls that attend the charismatic Darkling, leader of the Grisha Second Army.  But when a terrifying encounter in a land of perpetual darkness known as the Shadow Fold reveals powers she’d never imagined she possessed, Alina is sent away from Mal to train among the Grisha.  Alone and afraid, she soon finds herself trapped in a web of political maneuvering orchestrated by the Darkling himself.  Her powers could hold the key to bringing about the end of Ravka’s suffering, but is she willing to pay the price?

My Rating: 4 Stars

My Opinion: There’s a lot about this book that I like.  In fact, most things about this book I enjoyed.  It’s a beautiful departure from the more typical western European underpinnings of most fantasy.  Set against a fantasticized Imperial Russia, the glittering world of the Grisha and the war-torn borders make sense together while still providing a stark juxtaposition for one another.  The world is richly imagined; Bardugo knows everything about this place, from court fashions in dress to the rationing pattern of sugar.  Occasionally, the details feel almost excessive, but usually that serves to highlight the excesses of the royal court.  The characters, on the other hand…  I felt the world Bardugo has created deserved a little better.  I didn’t want Alina to be another YA heroine sucked in by the alluring and apparently immortal tall-dark-and-handsome fellow.  I wanted Mal to be as complex and multilayered as Alina seems to believe.  There are peripheral characters that show the kind of exquisite nebulosity of which Bardugo is capable: Genya, the Queen’s pet Grisha, whose true allegiance is hard to fathom, who buries her real feelings beneath the perfect mask she’s created of her face; David, the Fabrikator who provides weapons both for and against our heroine, whose actions still make sense in the context of his world.  I wanted the main characters to have these same shades-of-grey struggles, to get a sense that there’s more to them than love triangles or conquer-the-world plots.  But the richness of the world and the other characters gives me hope.  I’m going to hunt down the next title in this trilogy, Siege and Storm, as soon as I can!

Shadow and Bone

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 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). 

Beauty (Audiobook)

Title: Beauty

 

Author: Robin McKinley

 

Read by: Charlotte Parry

Publisher: Audible Unabridged (2013)

 

Genre(s): Fiction, Fantasy, Fairy Tales, Young Adult Fiction, Audiobook

Length: N/A

Synopsis: Beauty is a plain, bookish young woman, who feels the irony of her nickname quite keenly.  Always more comfortable with horses and books than people, she was always considered the tomboy of the family.  Her older sisters, Hope and Grace, are both lovely young society women, and all three are the darlings of their father's heart.  When a sudden change in fortune leaves the once-wealthy family impoverished and forced to leave their townhouse for a country cottage, Beauty begins to feel she's found her place at last.  She and her horse, Greatheart, are well known and liked in the little village that huddles at the edge of the great dark forest, a forest that is rumored to house a secret at its heart.  One winter, disaster strikes the family yet again, and Beauty is forced to make a decision that will take her from her family forever.  She's been set a challenge she can't begin to fathom, a challenge that will take all her wits, kindness, and perseverance to overcome: Beauty has been sent to the castle of the Beast.

 

My Rating: 4 Stars

My Opinion:  I love the print version of Beauty.  It's been a favorite for years, and when I had a chance to spend a few hours listening to the audio version, I jumped at it.  I wasn't...disappointed, per se, but the text didn't quite sparkle like it did in my own mind.  The descriptions were as vivid as I remembered them, and Parry reads well, but I found her variation in character voices distracting.  Obviously readers try to put as much of the character into their performances as possible, but I felt that she was, perhaps, trying too hard.  When only one person is presenting an entire cast of characters, the listener accepts that there are limitations to the variety of performances that the narrator can give.  We don't expect that Beauty's sisters sound completely distinct from one another, just as they probably don't in our own internalizations of the story.  It would be difficult to accept that the Beast sounds exactly like Beauty herself, but I believe that rather than overemphasizing the differences, a great deal can be accomplished by a subtle shift in cadence or inflection, a slight lowering of tone or particular emphasis on diction.  Less is more, in my opinion, and though I don't think this performance in any way devalues the text, I think that readers encountering only this audio version may not be able to fully appreciate the way the words can kindle fires all of their own accord.

The Fault in Our Stars

Title: The Fault in Our Stars

Author: John Green

Publisher: Penguin Books (2012)

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

Length: 316 pages

Synopsis:  Hazel Lancaster has a unique outlook on life.  As a teenage terminal cancer patient, she can see what's left of her time laid out before her, filled with guilt, pain, and pity.  She's seen it all before, having sat through support group meetings for other "cancer kids," watching new arrivals and listening to the ever lengthening list of those who've already passed away.  She's seen it in her parents' eyes, the pain and worry of having to devote their time to a daughter whose fate has already been written.  Hazel thought she'd seen it all... until she met Augustus Waters.  Capable of turning her world upside down with his broad proclamations and simple acts of caring, Augustus has given something Hazel thought she'd needn't bother with: someone to live for.

My Rating: 5 Stars

My Opinion:  This was a truly remarkable book.  I knew of Green through the video blog "The Vlog Brothers" (Nerdfighters!  Woo!) and through a good friend who is a fan of his writing as well.  I was excited to finally get the chance to read this book, thought I knew nothing at all about it until page one.  That's all it took.  Green was woven a story that speaks to both cynicism and sentiment, capturing the voice of today's young people exquisitely.  Article after article proclaims that the current generation of young adults is entitled, lazy, and immature.  No wonder we're acrimonious and jaded!  But in the midst of all that harshness, we're still looking for tenderness, connection, even nostalgia in a world of digital distance.  This book lets its characters be both.  It lets them push people away and draw them close.  It lets them text and email and still be real, living, breathing, flesh-and-blood people.  They can be angry and change their minds.  They make mistakes and have poor judgement.  They are so very real, and yet... Green has written them a story.  It's not real life, it's a beautiful, poignant story.  Like the play from which the book's title is taken, Green sets these characters out before the audience and lets the drama unfold.  Half the beauty comes from the characters, and half from the language.  Seldom have I read a best-seller so easily quotable.  In fact, "as [I] read I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once."  I loved this book.  Unabashedly enjoyed it, read through the night to finish it, and yes, cried.  Perhaps it won't speak to every reader, but I certainly think it's worth the time to find out.

Butter

Title: Butter

Author: Erin Jade Lange

Publisher: Bloomsbury (2012)

Genre(s): Fiction, Young Adult Fiction

Length: 294 pages

Synopsis: Butter is defined by food.  Morbidly obese and diabetic, he knows that no one at school is ever able to see beyond his body to the person he truly is.  He finds solace only in two places: music, playing saxophone or listening to the Brass Boys, the band one of his teachers plays in, and online, where he's developed a relationship with the beautiful girl who sits ahead of him in class.  But neither of these can last.  His weight makes playing music more and more difficult, and he knows he can never reveal his true identity to the girl he wishes could be his girlfriend.  Food has gotten him into this situation, he decides at last, and food will get him out of it.  Butter resolves to eat himself to death on New Year's Eve, live online via webcast.  But as soon as the website goes live, a few weeks before Christmas, he finds himself a sudden celebrity.  People seek him out, both online and in person.  For the first time, he has something to live for, and he begins to wonder if he'll have the courage to go through with his plan, but, given the reason for his celebrity, what will happen if he doesn't?

My Rating: 4 Stars

My Opinion: This is a terribly grim book.  With the population growing heavier and heavier, Butter is a character with unique trials to which many will relate.  But he's also very much a believable high school student. struggling with online pressure, parents, and the trials of fitting in and finding his own way.  The characters that surround him are more difficult to understand, as they sometimes seem to have few motives for their cruelty.  Of course, that's also true in the halls of high schools, unfortunately.  This is a book that opens a door for readers, offering up a chance for us to step into the shoes of another person.  It's not a happy picture, but it's one at which we should all take a look.  Butter's story is a quick read, plunging over the edge of a cliff and heading for a seemingly inexorable ending.  Though it's got a lesson to teach, that's never at the forefront of the narrative.  It's a well told story, if not a happy one, and I book I'll not soon forget.

Where Things Come Back

Title: Where Things Come Back

Author: John Corey Whaley
 

Publisher: Atheneum Books (2011)

Genre(s): Fiction, Young Adult Fiction

Length:  228 pages

Synopsis: Cullen Witter lives in Lily, Arkansas, a small town where nothing ever happens.  The highlights of his high school career include mooning over the beautiful girl of his dreams and spending time with his oddly enigmatic younger brother, Gabriel.  Until, of course, the summer the supposedly extinct Lazarus Woodpecker reappears.  Across the globe, Benton, a young missionary sets out for Africa, hoping to make a difference and earn his family's respect.  As these two stories unwind, they spiral closer together until inextricably linked.  Tiny actions lead to unimaginable consequences, and an even more tenuous force, hope, proves to be the strongest of all.

My Rating: 5 Stars

My Opinion:  This was an unexpectedly delightful book.  I'm not sure why the delight was unexpected, as this is a Printz award winner, but it took a few pages to get into, particularly when the story began shifting between Arkansas and Africa.  The slow drawing together of these disparate plot lines was elegant.  The voices of the characters were almost achingly compelling, with moments of bright humor and happiness alternating with grim disappointment and loss.  This is not a plot driven book; as in Lily, Arkansas, not much happens.  This is not a flaw, but I imagine that despite the critical acclaim, some young readers will find this book requires a major adjustment from the typical high-octane plots of other YA fiction.  But for readers willing to put a little extra thought into the stories that unfold in this book, they'll find a poignant commentary on the world around us, a transient world wherein the actions of one person can have lasting effects on others, and where what we give to the world almost always comes back to us, in one form or another. 

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

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. 

Wintergirls

Title: Wintergirls

 

Author: Laurie Halse Anderson

Publisher: Penguin Group (2009)

 

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

Length: 278 pages

Synopsis:  Lia is frozen, caught on a path she can't escape and can't control.  Her family seems to have fallen apart: her parents are divorced and preoccupied with their own lives and her stepmother is too busy shuttling her own daughter from violin lessons to soccer practice to see what is happening.  Lia finds a brittle strength in watching the numbers of her bathroom scale tick downward.  One hundred and ten pounds.  One hundred.  Ninety.  Her bones stretch out from pale skin, but the number is never low enough.  One night, her one-time best friend, Cassie, is found dead in a local motel after calling Lia more than thirty times.  Lia never picked up, but Cassie isn't willing to let it rest.  Now Lia sees her everywhere, stretching out icy wintergirl fingers so thin the light shines through.  Cassie stands at the end of the path Lia is walking.  How far will she go?

 

My Rating: 5 Stars

My Opinion: Having previously read Anderson's Speak, my initial reaction to another book about the plight of a teen girl in a desperate situation was "Really?  Again?"  Could she really tell another story in that vein with the same kind of impact?  Could she do it without being trite?  Then I opened the book and never questioned her again.  This book is a horrifying window into the world of disordered eating.  It's not about beauty.  It's about strength and control.  I've worked with kids with eating disorders.  I've seen some of the ways they try to trick the scales.  I've seen their matchstick arms and hollow ribs and straw-like hair.  I understand the need for control, the power that comes with self-denial, the triumph over pain.  Anderson captured it all.  Lia and Cassie were dancers, yes, but they weren't driven to be thin by their need for the spotlight.  Cassie was interested in theatre, but she didn't purge to get the lead in a play.  For these girls, it's not about getting attention.  It's not about being beautiful.  It's about being strong.  It's about having power in a world that has conspired to rob them of it.  The public health professional in me cringes when Lia logs onto a support blog for anorexics-- not a blog to support recovery, but about how to hide one's symptoms, how to cut calories and burn more.  These exist.  They're not hard to find and they're hard to remove, and every time someone logs on, it gets harder to change the mindset about disordered eating.  Life for Lia gets harder and harder and worse and worse.  As the book draws to a close, she hits rock bottom.  In a way, I'm glad to see this.  For people struggling with problems like these-- addiction, disordered eating, domestic violence-- it's not easy to make a change.  This book isn't about Lia's recovery.  It's about making the decision that she wants to.