Starlighter

First in a series, Byron Davis's Starlighter gives us two planets, linked by tales that each has told of the other. Jason, our human hero, is a warrior in training who isn't sure whether to believe the stories his family tells of humans abducted by dragons, and a world beyond his own. On the other planet, children slave in mines and memorize a story that may be their salvation. Storytelling is key to this novel--Keron, the Starlighter of the title, weaves stories of amazing power that hypnotize their listeners and reveal hidden truths, even to her. The story is fast-paced and the characters--especially Jason and Keron, but also Arxad (the "most human" of the dragons)--are compelling. I'll be on the lookout for the next in this series.

[I received a copy of this book from the publicist and then handed it off to Nick and only just rediscovered it. Book 2 in the 48-hour book challenge.]

The Prophecy

Dawn Miller's The Prophecy has a great cast of characters and a complicated plot--probably not the best choice for my first read-as-fast-as-you-can entry in the 48 hour book challenge. But it was at the top of my TBR list and it's YA, so there you go.

So, there's a war between good and evil (um, angels and fallen angels) but there are some humans who are really important to that war. So far, so good--though it did take me some 100 pages to figure that much out, at least with any clarity. The characters, though, make it: Sam, the martial arts instructor/painter, and his younger brother Jonah, the screw-up; J, the criminal; Jenna, who at 19 has a 5-year-old son (as she says at one point, "you do the math"); and red-headed Carly, whose small size belies her ability to get out of a jam, and fast. They are intriguing characters, and the slow pace of the novel (there are nested flashbacks, which keeps a reader on her toes but, again, slows her down) gives us time to try to get to know them.

There's a lot going on here, and I don't want to give it all away. In a quick read, I give it about three out of five stars: the plot points all do work out, and there's a satisfying conclusion (with a hint that the story could continue without making the reader feel cheated). And, as I said, there are some intriguing characters here, though some are better developed than others. Jonah's at the center, which is fine, but I wanted more of Carly and Jenna, myself--Jenna's story, in particular, is tantalizingly hinted out but remains undeveloped. So, all in all, a fine way to start out the 48-hour book challenge. More to come.

[edited to add: I received this book from a publicist some time ago and just got around to reading it...]

another lazy post

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Miranda's getting weird letters, and her mom is practicing to be on the $25,000 Pyramid, and her best friend doesn't seem to want to talk to her anymore. Middle school is bad enough--this all seems much, much worse.

I loved this book. Miranda's connection to A Wrinkle in Time makes her my kind of protagonist--nerdy, emotionally interesting, on the outskirts of popularity (but still fascinated by it and even hopeful that she might find it one day). The book raises some of the same kinds of questions that Miranda's favorite book does without seeming at all imitative or derivative. A keeper.

View all my reviews >>

a very lazy, and belated, review post

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Like everyone else in America, I enjoyed this book--a clever way to introduce kids to Greek myths and a fun adventure as well.

View all my reviews >>

but should we see the movie?

you read it here first!

Nancy Pearl loves E. Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. Of course she does! (I did, too. Last year.)

Dreamdark: Silksinger

I read Laini Taylor's Blackbringer just about two years ago, when my wonderful Penguin rep gave me an ARC and insisted that I'd love it. She was right. I loved Magpie, Taylor's fierce and determined main character, and I loved Talon, the faery prince who can't fly but can knit. I loved Magpie's crow brothers and I loved the central premise of the novel, that humans, a more recent evolutionary development than faeries, were inadvertently releasing demons into the world, and that the faeries--along with their crow friends--had to stop it.

I no longer have that wonderful Penguin rep, but Penguin has not forgotten me. (In fact I recently discovered that the Tim Travaglini, senior editor at Putnam in the Penguin Young Readers Group, is a UR graduate--though he graduated the May before I started there.) So I was delighted to open up a package recently with the new paperback of Blackbringer, and the ARC of Silksinger, the next book in the Dreamdark series (due out in September).

It does not disappoint. (Side note: check out Neil Gaiman on entitlement today, and on what series devotees say about them. He's so right, as always.) I reread Blackbringer before starting Silksinger--I wanted to reimmerse myself in the world of Dreamdark, and it had, after all, been two years. I found myself right back in the world Taylor has created--sometimes it can take me a while to enter an alternate world, but Taylor has a knack for making her landscape legible, her characters real, her concerns vital. I care about Dreamdark because it is our world, after all. We are a small part of its concerns, and for the most part a difficult one, but --well, we invented chocolate, so we're not all bad.

Silksinger picks up where Blackbringer left off, with another djinn to recover and another evil to do battle with. It adds new characters--Whisper, the Silksinger of the title, and Hirik, the would-be champion of the lost djinn Azazel--and reuinites us with the old ones as well. The gifts her characters have are ingenious--Taylor weaves magic out of everyday activities like knitting and singing, and even manages to make insects a vital and necessary part of the interconnected world.

Reading Dreamdark, I feel almost as if I did while first reading the Lord of the Rings series--I love this world. When we were kids, my best friend and I inhabited Middle Earth, acting out the journeys of Frodo and Merry and Pippin, imagining ourselves engaged in the endless battle to save Middle Earth. I can imagine kids like me doing that with Dreamdark--with the significant difference that they won't have to cross-dress to do so. Whisper and Magpie, Hirik and Talon, offer up all their skills and talents to their interlocking quests--boys and girls are equally valued, equally needed, in this brave new world. The quests are real, meaningful, and dangerous. The new villain is particularly pernicious, and attractive (it's always a problem when the bad guy is just bad--you wonder why anyone would join up!--not so with this one). The stakes are high, and the solutions ingenious.

My son Nick took over the Dreamdark books before I got to them this time around. He's already decided to wear the tattoos on the last day of school (they are pretty awesome), and he eagerly awaits the next volume. So do I.*

*but we don't feel entitled; I know Laini Taylor has something else growing right now as well as her books.

Book Review: Liar

I started following Justine Larbalestier's career when Jenny Davidson mentioned the Magic or Madness books on her blog, about three years ago. I loved the Magic or Madness trilogy, which takes place in contemporary New York and Sydney, mostly, but which has a sharp fantastical edge to it. I was hooked by her writing, so I started following her blog, which is one of the must-reads in YA blogging. (And, no, I'm not going to name the rest as I'm sure I'm missing some, but if you start with hers you'll find links to many of the others as well.) I was then able to get my hands on a copy of How to Ditch Your Fairy before it came out, and was equally pleased by it--equally, and in an entirely different way. Where Magic or Madness is, in places, dark and threatening, HTDYF is mostly pretty light; both, though, manage to weave fantasy into what feels a lot like realism. Magic exists in these worlds, but it's not what defines them.

I've just finished Larbalestier's latest, Liar, which is due out from Bloomsbury in October, and all I could say when I put the book down was, "wow." Really.

It's hard to review this book without giving too much away, and while I generally don't care much about spoilers, because I value rereading, I do think it would be unfair to give much away about this novel since it's not even out yet. And since figuring out what's going on in the novel is central to its many pleasures.

So here's what I can say. Micah Wilkins is a liar. And yet she is also the narrator of this novel, and I think in the end she's a pretty reliable one. Except when she isn't--but she always tells us when she isn't. So then again in the end she is. And she lies because she has a secret, a secret that's not hers alone, a secret that she can't reveal. Though eventually she does. Maybe.

But she's got a big problem. Her boyfriend is missing--actually, dead--and the police seem to think that maybe she has something to do with it. She tells them what she can, and she tells us what she can't tell them. And that's where the novel really takes off, for me. Because how does someone who's been lying all her life keep the lies straight from the truth? How could we tell? What does it mean, anyway, to tell the truth if the truth is unbelievable--if, in other hands, it might seem more like a lie? Or if it's--yes, I think this is where we have to go--a fiction?

While I might be making this sound like some kind of postmodern metafiction (and while at some level I think it is), Liar is also a compulsively readable mystery. The fact that the detective may know more than she's telling us keeps us guessing throughout. Set in a recognizably contemporary New York City, in an "alternative" private high school where the teachers go by their first names and the students still don't fully trust them, Liar is about family bonds and family stories, about love and desire and need. I couldn't put it down. Trust me.

Secret Keeper

I so wanted to review Mitali Perkins' Secret Keeper, a copy of which I received thanks to the author herself (I believe) some time ago. I read it over the weekend, when I was sick, and it kept me engaged and occupied (actually, it had me riveted!) as well as keeping my mind off of my increasingly nasty cold. So all is good.

But (you knew there would be a but) I should have reviewed it Monday. The week has intervened, a week full of committee meetings and class meetings and financial aid forms (not to mention tax forms) and recovery, and I just completely lost momentum.

So I'll leave you not with a review but with a question: is it a happy ending if the main character gets one thing she wants by giving up another? I am still struggling with the ending of this novel, which strikes me as more realistic than the endings of many children's and YA novels (but especially children's). There's just not a smidge of wish-fulfillment in it that I can see--tough choices and some significant pain, rather. But, still, (or, maybe, therefore?) it troubled me.

Do read it. I'd love to talk about it further, and maybe then I can write a real review.

Chains

I'm just a little bit annoyed with Laurie Halse Anderson. She's one of the most popular authors I teach in my children's/YA lit class; I teach Speak every year and every single time, someone tells me how important it is to her (usually it's a her). I've had students pass it along to their roommates, to younger kids they're mentoring, to groups they're involved with on campus. Students come to my office, close the door, and tell me how grateful they are for the book and our discussion of it.

So why am I annoyed with her? Annoyed might be too strong. Her new book, Chains, is a terrific read--a really engrossing tale of a young slave girl, Isabel, who gets caught up in the Revolutionary War in New York City. Promised her freedom by her mistress, she finds herself instead taken from her home in Rhode Island to a Loyalist stronghold in New York by her mistress's nephew, who won't honor his aunt's wishes. Isabel is a beautifully drawn character--at first relatively ignorant of the political situation, she is disgusted by the hypocrisy of both sides, who are willing to manipulate and even endanger her for their own purposes.

So, again, why am I annoyed? Because the book is the first of a two-volume series, and I didn't know it would leave me hanging. Sometimes a book leaves you hanging and you forget about it, thinking maybe you'll pick up the second one if and when you think of it--but I spent the weekend talking about this one, recommending it and then adding a brief warning. It's how I felt when I finished The Golden Compass--I turned the page and nearly cried out loud at the irresolution of it all.

But, really, I shouldn't be annoyed. I loved the book, and it really does stop in a logical place. And I think it's a terrific book for middle schoolers, especially ones who are interested in historical fiction. I'm passing it on to Nick next--he loved reading about the Revolution two years ago in his social studies class and is eager for more. But I also recommended it to adults I was talking to over the weekend--we had just seen a documentary, Traces of the Trade, about a New England family coming to grips with its own history of slave-trading, and this novel takes us through some of the same scenery, confronting some of the same issues, as the film. The film takes up the modern legacy of slavery; the novel gives us the contemporary reality of it. I recommend both, highly. And I retract my annoyance, though if the next one doesn't come out soon, I may start feeling it again.

Book Review: Paper Towns

We don't really know each other very well. Even in an age of facebook, blogging, twitter, and text-messaging, our efforts to know and be known are still halting, partial, and frequently stymied by prejudice and preconception. And yet, the effort remains a fundamental human impulse--we keep trying, even as we fail again and again, to make connections that are lasting and meaningful.

Quentin Jacobsen (Q) is a teenager like many others, on the outskirts of high school popularity and relatively comfortable there. He doesn't have a girlfriend or a date for prom, much to his parents' consternation, but he has a group of friends--"band geeks," they call themselves (though Q himself is not in band)--and that's pretty much enough. He does, though, have one thing most band geeks don't have--a history with the most popular girl in school, Margo Roth Spiegelman. She and Q are next-door neighbors, and once in elementary school--before the demands of popularity became quite as pressing--they discovered a dead body in a park while out bike-riding. Although Margo Roth Spiegelman (almost always referred to by all three names) no longer rides bikes with Q--or seems, sometimes, even to know he exists--the incident somehow still defines both of them.

John Green has been publishing smart, funny, and poignant novels about teenagers for three years now, and fans of his previous two novels, Looking for Alaska (Printz award winner for 2006) and An Abundance of Katherines, will not be disappointed by Paper Towns. Margo Roth Spiegelman has a certain resemblance, for example, to Alaska Young, in that they are both young women who become objects of both adoration and speculation. Becoming an object, though, turns out to be a problem for both the girls who are adored and the boys who adore them or speculate about them: we are all more complicated, Green's novels remind us, than the stories others tell about us. Adoring someone from afar may give us a sense of purpose or meaning, but in the end it minimizes both the object and the adorer, who can lose sight of himself in his obsession. Margo Roth Spiegelman, unlike Alaska, both embraces and resists her objectification. She's known all over school for her adventures, most of which seem larger than life, and she delights--or so it seems--in her reputation. But when she enlists Q in one last big adventure, then disappears, she leaves in her wake a mystery that teaches Q and his friends as much about themselves as it does about her.

As in his previous novels, Green here centers his novel on a compelling group of quasi-misfit characters who nonetheless manage not to seem like outsiders or losers. They're folks who have decided--as so many of us do--that high school social hierarchies are not going to do them any favors, so they (mostly) opt out. Realistically, they are also delighted when, on rare occasion, they find themselves invited in: Q's friends' reactions to their sudden popularity late in the novel is as convincing as it is amusing. I love Q's friend Radar--whose nickname is hilariously inappropriate but sticks, as such things often do--who, despite his relative acceptability in the social hierarchy, fears that he can't quite live down his parents' record-setting collection of black Santas. And his friend Ben, obsessed with girls and videogames but childishly delighted by his own outrageous braggadocio. More than once reading the novel I found myself laughing out loud. But as often as it made me laugh, it made me think, and the persistence of Whitman's Leaves of Grass throughout the novel formed an important part of that thinking. Margo Roth Spiegelman uses Leaves of Grass as part of a clue to her mystery, but Green uses it as well to comment on the process Q goes through in finding Margo Roth Spiegelman:

'I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,' Whitman writes. And then for two pages he's just hearing: hearing a steam whistle, hearing people's voices, hearing an opera. He sits on the grass and lets the sound pour through him. And this is what I was trying to do too, I guess: to listen to all the little sounds of her, because before any of it could make sense, it had to be heard. . . . I tried to hear, inside a song I'd never heard before, the voice I had trouble remembering after twelve days. (ARC, 196)

Like Whitman, like Q, Green tries to make us hear those voices: the voices of those whom we admire as well as those we avoid. In Paper Towns, he makes them come alive, in all their ridiculous adolescent angst as well as their honest and poignant earnestness, in their pleasures and their pains. Margo Roth Spiegelman may remain something of a cipher, but at least Q realizes that she is, and why--and that, in itself, is a big step for the boy who has called her his "miracle."

Reading over this review I find that I make it sound somewhat painfully earnest, which it is decidedly not. Or, at least, not only. I don't object to earnestness in fiction, and Q is an earnest type--as are his predecessors Miles and Colin. But he's also funny. Still, I'm afraid you're going to have to read it to find that out for yourself--what's funny in context often isn't, out of context, and all the quotes I pulled sound a little silly in the middle of my prose. Trust me, they work really well right where they belong.


(I read an ARC of Paper Towns which I received from the publisher after mentioning on the blog that I didn't have one yet. Thanks, Jillian!)

Picturing Politics

I spent most of last week rapt in front of one political speech or another--the Democratic convention offered all kinds of delights for the sometime political junkie. (I don't follow politics as closely as many, but election years do get me going.) As I watched the speeches and the reactions of the crowds, I kept thinking of two picture books I just finished--Big Plans, by Bob Shea (illustrated by Lane Smith), and Madam President, by Lane Smith (also illustrated by the incomparable Lane Smith). In both, we get a child-sized view of the political world.

Madam President offers us a girl moving through her presidential day, from kissing babies to state funerals (a pet frog), photo ops to negotiating treaties (she makes peace between a dog and cat). She selects an admirable cabinet--Mr. Potatohead as Secretary of Agriculture, a sock monkey as Secretary of Naps, and a piggybank as Secretary of the Treasury, for example--and still makes it through a fairly ordinary schoolday (mostly by exercising her veto power, over tuna casserole in the cafeteria and other indignities). Sly visual jokes permeate the pages, from the portrait of Susan B. Anthony on her wall to the books--about Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Teddy Roosevelt, among others--under her bed. And under the Frederick Douglass book is what appears to be a copy of Smith's other political contribution this season, Big Plans.

Big Plans leads with a somewhat scary cover image, at least to me in this political climate: a grinning youngster in what appears to be a skunkskin cap treading purposefully atop the globe. He's got big plans--even though, as the story opens, he's sitting in the corner of the classroom, staring at a map. (The visual jokes continue here: the bookshelf next to him includes a U.S. Atlas, a book about rocketry, a collection of tall tales, and a book about the presidency.) As the boy outlines his plans, he dreams bigger and bigger. Enlisting a mynah bird as his second-in-command (and eventually picking up the president as the mynah bird's assistant), he moves from business to politics, politics to space exploration. In my favorite line, he announces that he will "blast off into uncertainty"--and then returns, back to his corner, free to continue exploring his "Big Plans."

If there were an election pitting these two against each other, I'd vote for Madam President, whose heroine appears to me to have a slightly more realistic grasp of the position of president. The "Big Plans" types make me a bit nervous, frankly--but we've got enough of them around, this year, that we may need both books to keep us grounded throughout the coming months.


(I received both books as pre-publication unbound copies from the publisher. Both books are in bookstores now.)

Watching Me, Watching You

I've got a new column up at Literary Mama; in it I talk about secrecy and surveillance and two books I really liked recently, Little Brother and The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks.

As usual, there's lots of great stuff at Literary Mama, so when you're done with my column, go on and check out the rest of the site.

And then go check out my latest little thing over at the Mama, PhD blog. I hope I'm not the only person who remembers Gilda Radner!

quick update--and potential Breaking Dawn spoilers

So here I am in Chicago at Terminus, where the fans by far outnumber the academics (and, yes, most of the academics are fans, but we're not all dressed up in House robes...), the weather is lovely, and I've already caught up with a couple of friends.

[edited to fix insane punctuation...]
========possible spoilers below============
I spent the travel day reading Breaking Dawn. I wasn't thrilled about bringing a big book with me--I even left my copy of HP & the Deathly Hallows, the subject of my talk, behind--but I had to do it. I've been avoiding all discussion of it since last weekend, and I can't keep my head in the sand much longer. And, I have to say, I'm a little disappointed. I was really hoping that the literary allusions of the earlier novels (read the comments), especially to Wuthering Heights and Romeo & Juliet, meant that Meyer had a little more distance on the central couple than, in the end, I think she did. There's just an awful lot of deus ex machina (or, ok, hybrid ex machina) in the working out of the plot. I need to think about it some more, but that's my initial response.

Recent reading

As you can see from the sidebar, I did not complete my assigned reading while on vacation. I did, however, thoroughly enjoy both Out of the Wild* and Little Brother--and I passed the latter on to my brother-in-law, who enjoyed it as well. Part of the pleasure for both of us--more for him, a San Francisco native--was a familiarity with the locations. It's always fun to find a place one knows in fiction. But what I enjoyed even more was the unapologetic political nature of the novel, and the unabashed geekery. I have to confess I couldn't much follow the latter, but I found it compelling anyway--and more than a little paranoid.

The day before we left for France, I field a call from our bank for Mariah. She was out on her scooter, and the bank was concerned that her debit card had been used twice at gas stations in the last hour and a half. That's a pretty typical fraud pattern, they explained, so they just wanted to make sure she really did have the card. I called her and all was well, and we were grateful to the card company for checking. But after reading Little Brother I reflected again on how that information could be used. While I trust our bank (mostly) to keep our data safe, the fact that the information is out there means it could be misused, as it is in the novel. (For those who haven't read it, in the novel government agents use credit card, cell phone, internet, and toll-pass data to track citizens whom they suspect of terrorist involvement.) When do the potential harms outweigh the real benefits of this kind of data gathering? How do we know how our data is being used, and what can we do to protect it? The novel asks these questions in an always-entertaining, fast-paced adventure that explores the role of civil liberties in a civil society.

I can imagine Little Brother as one of the "surprise" YA titles of the sort discussed in Margo Rabb's piece in the New York Times, a book that began life as simply "a novel," that was then picked up and marketed as YA. Or maybe not--I don't know what Doctorow had in mind. But the book seems to me an obvious candidate for crossover, regardless.

Rabb, it seems to me, is saying much more diplomatically what Frank Cottrell Boyce said a month or so ago about YA literature: it's literature, and/but some people find the YA label off-putting. Others don't, of course (read Justine Larbalestier and Little Willow for more on this). But I did find myself defending the book a bit to my brother-in-law before passing it on. Maybe I have to work on my own attitudes...

*More on OOTW in another post. I am still mulling over some of the implications of the series and its attitudes towards fairy tales. I'll come back to it soon, I hope.

Nick reviews Rapunzel's Revenge

I got an ARC of Rapunzel's Revenge along with HTDYF, and I think that's a pretty good pairing. Both are irreverent takes on fantasy; both are smart and funny; both feature kick-ass heroines. Because Nick is a graphic novel fan, I handed Rapunzel's Revenge over to him as soon as I finished it, and he sat almost motionless on the couch until he was done with it. (He did take a break for lunch and for his afternoon day camp, but I had to nudge him a bit.)

When I asked him what he liked about it, here's what he said.

Well, it helps that I like graphic novels. And I like when they take something everyone knows, and it's all boring, and they say, no, that's wrong, it really happened in this awesome way.

He also suggests a sequel in which Rapunzel and Jack team up again and she dispatches the giant for him. What do you think, Hales? Are you up for it?

Details: Rapunzel's Revenge is by Shannon Hale (author of The Goose Girl, Book of a Thousand Days, Princess Academy, Austenland, etc.), Dean Hale (her husband), and Nathan Hale, the illustrator, who is no relation to either other Hale. I received an ARC from the publisher; the book is due out in August.

Also: now available--The Explosionist, by Jenny Davidson. Get it while it's hot!

More brief reviews

It's been a great summer so far for catching up on reading and movie-viewing. I can't remember the last time I've seen so many movies in a week (three!)--probably last summer. I've also been making my way through a pile of ARCs and other books that have turned up in my mailbox, one way and another, and it's been a pleasure to do so. Here are two books to look for:

• The Proof that Ghosts Exist, by Carol Matas and Perry Nodelman. I know Perry Nodelman as a very fine scholar of children's literature. I use his co-authored (with Mavis Reimer) book, The Pleasures of Children's Literature, to teach my introduction to children's literature course, and it is that rare thing in a textbook, a pleasure to read. So when I read that he had a new novel coming out (he's already published several others), I jumped at the chance to get an ARC. And I'm glad I did. The Proof that Ghosts Exist introduces us to a pair of siblings, Molly and Adam, who are as different as two siblings can be. She's orderly, reasonable, and rational; he's imaginative and a bit off-kilter. (Hmm, Dorothy and William Wordsworth?) The novel begins as they head off to a summer house with their father, whose own father and grandfather both dropped dead the day before their 35th birthdays. And, yes, it is the day before their father's 35th birthday, so they're a little concerned. This is a funny, imaginative excursion into the world of ghost-hunting--highly recommended for middle-grade readers. (Received from the publisher; the book is out in Canada but not yet available in the US, according to Amazon.)
  
• The Seems: The Split Second, by John Hulme and Michael Wexler. This is the second "Seems" book--the first, The Glitch in Sleep, came out last year, but somehow I missed it. The Seems is a world behind our world, where The Powers that Be arrange things so that our world...works, sort of. Only sometimes it doesn't, so there are Fixers to try to get things back on track, and Becker Drane, at age 13, is the youngest Fixer. And right now, someone's split a second, time is out of time, and Becker needs to get to work. The novel reminded me a lot of Jasper Fforde's books, with the clever wordplay and antic movement between different levels of reality, but without the reliance on classic literature that might slow down a middle-grade reader. This book isn't due out until the fall, but you can start with the first one--I plan to go back and read it myself. (Received in ARC from the publisher along with How to Ditch Your Fairy and two graphic novels I haven't gotten to yet.)
  

OK, this one's not a book, and you can read about it anywhere, really, but I just have to put in a plug for Wall-E as well. As you probably already know, one of the triumphs of the movie is how well it conveys emotion with very few (and, for the first few minutes, no) words. In its emphasis on the visual it reminded me a bit of The Arrival, and I was delighted to learn from the smart people on the child_lit listserv that Shaun Tan did some work on it. It's also the bitingest satire I've seen in a while: the movie really doesn't pull its punches in depicting environmental degradation, and the huge corporation (Buy-N-Large) that controls, seemingly, everything, has clear connections to Wal-Mart. The irony of the movie is that it takes two robots to restore people's humanity--and Pixar manages to convey this in a completely believable, almost inevitable, way. You'll walk out of the movie saying "Wall-E" in the robot's creaky little voice, just as you walked out of E.T. saying "phone home." I promise. (You may also find yourself adding Hello, Dolly! to your netflix queue...)

Disreputable

I requested E. Lockhart's YA novel, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks from the library after I read the discussion of it over at 7-Imp (make sure you read the comments, too). It's gotten good reviews everywhere, of course (I especially liked Little Willow's), but the discussion at 7-Imp, which focused on Frankie as a feminist heroine (an ambiguous one, at that), was what really grabbed me. I'm really glad it did--what a fun book! I'm starting to compile a list of contemporary boarding school novels, too--having loved Looking for Alaska* (and then of course there's that long series of books that mostly take place in a boarding school, albeit a slightly strange one), I am wondering if there's a little mini-renaissance of the form going on. It's in many ways a perfect setting for a novel--after all, you've got lots of adolescents, few adults, rules, traditions, and the intense relationships that develop when adolescents live together. And yet the boarding school novels that I've read are all quite different. In this one, our heroine is a sophomore, and the novel begins when she is "chosen" by one of the coolest boys in school to be his girlfriend after she develops over the summer. What I love about Frankie is that she both 1) knows and 2) resents the reasons for his interest, but also 3) really likes him so goes along anyway. That is, she's smart, but realistic. And the novel keeps getting better as she analyzes and questions the traditions she's a part of, while also finding them intriguing and maybe even worth perpetuating. Can I just say how cool it is that she is inspired by a teacher who cites Foucault in class, and that the panopticon becomes a governing metaphor for her? Yes, she's a geek, but she's a geek in the popular kids' world, and that generates the conflict that motivates the novel. I can't say any more without giving too much away--so I'll stop. But read it.**

*so why didn't I review it? Doh!
**Second, more gratuitous John Green reference: Frankie would make a great girlfriend for Colin, of An Abundance of Katherines. Or maybe their shared geekiness would just be too much. But between her wordplay and his pleasure in anagrams, I thought they'd be a good match.

How to Ditch Your Fairy

Isn't that a great title? I took a break from the wizards yesterday to read Justine Larbalestier's new book, How to Ditch Your Fairy (due out in October--thank you, Bloomsbury, for the advance copy!), which I remember reading about in her blog as The Ultimate Fairy Book and, before that, as "the great Australian feminist young adult Elvis mangosteen monkey knife-fighting cricket fairy novel." Although, sadly, Elvis seems to have dropped out of the book somewhere in the revision process (or there's a subtle association that I completely missed--also quite possible), it's still a really fun book. I fell in love with Larbalestier's* previous heroine, Reason, in the Magic or Madness series, and I fell in love with her very different, but equally compelling, heroine Charlie in this book, too. I also fell in love with the premise: in this world, people (but not all of them) have personal fairies. The fairies are sort of like fairy godmothers, invisible presences who look out for you, but with a twist: they specialize. So Charlie's best friend has a clothes-shopping fairy (think: fabulous vintage dresses for five bucks); her mother has a knowing-what-your-kids-are-doing fairy (which could be a problem for a fourteen-year-old); and she has...a parking fairy. Yes, if she's in a car with you, you will find a fabulous parking spot. Not, of course, that she can drive.

The girl she likes least in school has a fairy that makes all the boys her age** find her irresistible. Not surprisingly, Charlie wants to ditch her fairy for a better one. How she goes about doing that, however, might be a bit of a surprise, so I won't spoil it. Let's just say that complications ensue.

But of course there's more. I really found this world fascinating. The slang was fun ("doos" for "cool" or "good" was one of my favorites), the mild bi-coastal tension was intriguing, and the imaginary sports academy that Charlie and her friends attend was nightmarishly on-target. These teenagers live in a world I don't inhabit, but they're still recognizably teenagers, with all the trivial and serious concerns (clothes, romance, sports, and school) that the teenagers I know share. The "new kid" has Charlie questioning some of her assumptions, but so do the other changes she's going through; life is realistically complicated, in other words, for these characters.

I've seen (on her blog) Larbalestier's comments on how hard it is to write a trilogy, so I won't wish that on her--but I really, really hope there are more books set in New Avalon with Charlie and Steffi and the rest. Satisfying as I found this book, I have a lot more questions about them.


*I really want to call her "Justine," because I read her blog, but when I write reviews I generally refer to authors by their last names, and I don't want to fall in the trap of calling women writers by their first names and men by their last. (You know, like "Hillary" vs. "Obama." What was up with that?) So she's "Larbalestier," which is, after all, a pretty cool name.

**Even the ones who like boys. One of the pleasures of the novel was that there are boys who like boys as part of the landscape, but they go relatively uncommented-upon. That struck me as pretty much like teenage life now--nice.

Lonely Werewolf Girl

Martin Millar's new novel, Lonely Werewolf Girl, is a puzzlement to me. A puzzlement because I kept being annoyed with it, and came close to shutting it and giving up more than once, and yet I keep thinking about it now that I'm done reading it. I got my copy from Colleen Mondor (thanks, Colleen!) at Chasing Ray, whose opinion I trust, and she liked it a lot; Gail Gauthier, over at Original Content, who's also pretty sharp, liked it as well. I'm no expert on werewolf novels, or urban fantasy, and I've never read anything by Millar before, and somehow I felt that maybe if I had that background I'd be in on something that otherwise kept eluding me.

So why did I keep being annoyed with it? Well, for starters, it's a novel that does a whole lot more telling than showing. All kinds of back story--told. All kinds of details about the characters--told. So we hear, for example, that Kalix (our heroine) hates her brothers, and later we even get a few details of a fight she had with one of them, but we see so little of them together that I never felt as if I understood their hatred. (It's true, later they both try to kill her, one way or another, but she hates them long before that.) We hear at least three times in the first hundred pages that Sarapen and Dominil have some sort of history--and later we learn that she wants to kill him--but again, this is all simply told, not shown, so we don't feel fully involved. Or I didn't.

I was also put off by the names, though this may be a genre thing for me. There are way too many female characters with Xs in their names, for example: Thrix, Kalix, Butix, Delix, Talixia--they're just a little too similar, and though I was able to keep the characters straight I still found their names annoying. This seems petty, maybe, but if you're going to spend over 500 pages with a group of characters I think you want to believe in their names, and understand their naming conventions. I never quite did. (The werewolves are Scottish--are there lots of Xs in Scottish names?)

I also found the book badly copyedited, with more typos and repeated or missing words than I like to see in a published book. But if I'd been less annoyed with the foregoing I don't think that would have bothered me as much.

So why did I finish reading it? Because it's hilarious. The lonely werewolf girl herself, Kalix, is a laudanum-swilling, tranquilizer-popping, self-mutilating, bulimic werewolf who is nonetheless irresistible to almost everyone who meets her (outside her own family). OK, maybe that doesn't sound hilarious, but trust me: it is. Her great physical strength combined with her emotional weakness makes her an interesting character, especially when she ensnares two human college students, Daniel and Moonglow, into her troubles. The Fire Queen, Malveria, enters the novel with an over-the-top flourish--"Prepare to die, cursed Enchantress!"--but we find out that she's anguished over her shoes, and she fails to follow through on this threat (or many others). Kalix's older sister is a fashion designer, and one of her brothers wears his girlfriend's blouses. The machinations of the werewolf clan, and particularly the ways in which they interact (or don't) with the human world, make for a great story.

I think what works best about the novel is the way it mixes things up: most of the characters are werewolves, and others have interesting magical powers, but they are all very human in their rivalries, their passions, their weaknesses. Millar mixes up fashion design with ancient myth, low-rent rock bands with high fashion, an obsession with Sabrina the Teenage Witch with battles to the death. The various alliances and allegiances are convoluted but fascinating. And for me, at least, the central trio--Kalix, Daniel, and Moonglow--anchor the book. They're who I cared about, their connection energized the novel, and when they were offstage my attention occasionally flagged.

In the end, I wanted to know what happened to everyone, I just wasn't sure I wanted to read it all--I kept feeling as if I were reading a great treatment for a screenplay rather than a novel. Would I recommend it? To a diehard Buffy fan, maybe, or to a fan of gritty urban fantasy for whom narrative tug is more important than literary technique. But I'm still puzzled about it, so maybe its fans can enlighten me further.

Books in Brief

I've just read three great books in advanced reading copies (ARCs), and, while I want to review each more fully, I have to record my initial impressions before I forget. (And, to be honest, I may not get to write fuller reviews any time soon... or ever.)

The Explosionist, by Jenny Davidson, is a terrifically engrossing YA novel. Sophie Hunter, a boarding school student in 1930s Edinburgh, finds herself enmeshed in geo-political intrigues brought on by rationalist science run amuk. Oh, did I mention that this is Edinburgh in an alternate history, where Wellington lost at Waterloo and Oscar Wilde became an obstetrician? (That latter point doesn't really matter much as far as I can tell, but it's the kind of funny detail that animates the book in places.) While, as Becca said, its intended audience may not really "get" the ways in which Sophie's history has deviated from our own, the plot and characters are so engrossing as to keep them reading anyway, and maybe learning some intellectual history along the way. Science and spiritualism are allied in this world, making for some intriguing new technologies and some dangerously powerful people. Fair warning: the novel is the first in a two-book series, and several threads are left hanging for the next book. (Due out in July; I got the book from Becca, who got it from Jenny.)

Steinbeck's Ghost, by Lewis Buzbee, is a middle-grade novel that should appeal to all kinds of readerly kids. Travis Williams is 13 and living in Camazotz. Well, it's really a new development in the Salinas Valley, Santa Lucia (Bella Linda Terrace, to be exact), but Travis finds the "perfection" of his new development, his new house, and his parents' new jobs, mind-numbing and soul-destroying. Going back to his old neighborhood he learns that the John Steinbeck Public Library is slated for closure, and is energized by the librarian to do something about it. With a great cast of characters--including his best friend Hilario, the librarian Miss Babb, and a reclusive author--Travis discovers some secrets about his neighborhood and about Steinbeck that can--maybe--save the library. This book really gets the pleasures of reading and rereading; it had me wanting to spend more time in my library, too. (Due out in September; I received this book from the author.)

Moribito, Guardian of the Spirit, by Nahoko Uehashi, tells a fantastic story set in an imaginary version of medieval Japan. The woman warrior, Balsa, rescues the Mikado's second son from a near-fatal accident, and finds herself caught up in adventure in which it's not quite clear which side she should be on. Along with a healer and an elderly magic-weaver, she protects the boy, Chagum, from an invisible monster--and, perhaps, from his father. While in places the translation feels a bit pedestrian, the characters and the action in this book are so engrossing as to pull the reader along. (Due out in translation in June, this is the first book in an already popular Japanese series. I received the book from Cheryl Klein at Scholastic.)

While these three books are all very different, aimed at different audiences, with different styles and entirely different plots, I'm intrigued as I write this to realize that all three take the notion of a spirit world very seriously, and all are centrally concerned with the power of story--of books, oral tales, and mythic narratives--to shape reality. Their delights are many and varied--keep an eye out for them!