unadulterated.us

The End by Charlie Higson - review

I haven't written a stand-alone book review on unadulterated.us in a while - but for this book, the last in a series that I read start to finish, as soon as each book came out, I must. It has been quite a journey for the kids in these books, who have battled their way through swarms of diseased, cannibalistic adults and formed their own societies, legions, and alliances - and it's been a wild six years for me too.

ABaFT (Adult books for teens): The Martian by Andy Weir

I am going to have a teenager in my house. In - wow - 11 days, I will suddenly have a teenage boy in my house. 

 

Somehow, this person...

...turned into this person.

 

Relax, that's root beer. And that's MY jacket. He looks better in it than I do, the swine. His feet are bigger than mine. His tan is better than mine. God, I think his hair might be better than mine! Sigh.

His taste in reading material is pretty good, though. And he reads faster than I do, so lately I've been relying on him to vet titles for me the way I used to for him (Poison by Bridget Zinn and Mortal Danger by Ann Aguirre both get his seal of approval). So it felt very darn peculiar to recommend The Martian to him.

In which I am unexpectedly won over to the idea of DRAGONS

 

It is the damnedest thing.

In recent years, YA trends have come on about as subtly as a brick tornado. Vampires. Zombie plagues. Fairy tales. Mermaids, oh god the mermaids. Last year it was cancer. And you'd think, if I took a mermaid trend in stride, I would not be surprised by the sudden appearance of dragons in contemporary YA fiction. I'd be like, "Aw come on guys - it's all dragons nowadays!" But there I was, five pages into Talker 25, going "What the...? It's dragons?"

I think it's because they're just so doofy. Right? Giant lizards with wings? What is that - half dinosaur, half... fairy? How are you going to fit that into a world? Literally - how are you going to fit that creature into a world filled with humans?

Then there's the stigma that goes along with being the dragon-obsessed girl. If you're not careful, your dragon novel will make you look like the kind of girl who goes as Daenarys Targaryen for Halloween. (OR TO HER WEDDING OH GOD MY EYES)

 

 

Hee hee hee. I got a little sidetracked. 

Waking The Coldest Girl in Dark Coldtown - two reviews

There's a lot of horror running around loose on the streets these days. It's a trend. Brainless monsters, mad government scientists, possessed townsfolk and crafty killers lurk in the alleys and infest the woods by the side of the highways. Yep, it's a stimulating time to be a teen reader.

Until fairly recently, horror had been in kind of a slump. Horror had a big day back in, hm, the late 70's, early 80's. Throughout the 80's, the Halloween movies were in theaters and Stephen King was putting out two books a year.

 

In 1978, I was pretty sure this cover showed Luke Skywalker battling the black spy from Spy vs. Spy.

 

By the 1990's though, we were out of the funhouse, laughing at the cheesy effects and accusing each other: "You were scared!" "No I wasn't, that was stupid!" By 1990, horror had become so familiar that it had devolved into camp (Tremors), or kid stuff (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), or mere eerieness (Edward Scissorhands). By the mid-90's, Danielle Steel and John Grisham had taken over Stephen King's dominance of the best seller lists. As recently as 2007, none of the major publishing houses had horror imprints.

But, like an oily slime seeping up from the depths of a dark bayou, horror is somehow once again everywhere, a foul slick coating the surface of popular culture. Simon & Schuster just started up a horror imprint. American Horror Story and The Walking Dead are killing it on TV. Danny Torrance is back. And I have more and more kids at the library daring me to scare them. Kids that have blazed through Goosebumps, sampled the Weenies, and are looking for something as scary as Horowitz Horror - but longer.

 

When you get to the bottom you go back to the top of the slide - some recent (mostly YA) reads

...which is my way of saying oh my life - and my reading - has been HELTER-SKELTER for the past couple of months. Here's why - allow me to solicit your interest in some excellent upcoming events and ongoing projects:

1). I'm on YALSA's Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults booklist committee (nominate your favorites today!)

 

2). I'm a facilitator at Enoch Pratt Free Library's biannual teen reading fest Books for the Beast (join us!). It's an all-day event (free lunch!) October 19th with super speakers and small group discussions. This year, we will be joined by RAINA TELGEMEIER! SHARON FLAKE! and ROBIN WASSERMAN!!

I want to read The Waking Dark so badly, but I have so much required reading right now, it's silly.  You however should read that book, and then come to Books for the Beast and tell Robin Wasserman what you thought of it! It's supposed to be scaaaary!

 

3). I'm moderating the Sassy Girls panel at the Baltimore Book Festival September 29 (and this one you better get to, if you are my friend at all). My sassy authors (I wonder if any of them are old enough to remember Sassy? Did you know that some marvelous hipster angel is scanning all of her old Sassys and putting them online? Damn, I still dress like that half the time) anyway my sassy authors are:

• Elisabeth Dahl (Genie Wishes)
• Erica Perl (When Life Gives You O.J. and many others)
• Shawn Stout (the Not So Ordinary Girl and Penelope Crumb books)
• Elissa Brent Weissberg (The Short Seller)
• Tracey West (about a million adaptation and series novels, also co-author of the very sweet Cupcake Diaries books)

 

4). Just announced! I'm a first-round judge for the Picture Books category of the Cybils Awards! Bring it on picture books YEAAAAHHH! Nominations are open to the public, and the online form will be up October 1!

 

 

5). I'm covering the Américas Award, given this year to Sonia Manzano for The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano, for School Library Journal's online newsletter. Sonia Manzano is also Maria from Sesame Street and that fact just fills me with love every time I remember it.

Also recognized this year by CLASP (the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs) are Martin de Porres: The Rose in the Desert by Gary D. Schmidt, the hyper-award-winning Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Drummer Boy of John John, and In Darkness, which has been on my to-read list ever since I saw that weird cover. Any novel that features Toussaint L'Ouverture as a guest character vaults right up my list. Blame Madison Smartt Bell.

 

All this extracurricular activity has led to periods of binge reading during the last few months: graphic novels, funny realistic YA fiction, heartbreaking YA fiction, and rock'em sock'em middle grade/YA speculative fiction. Plus picture books, I'm always reading the picture books, but those I manage to run down in gang posts on Pink Me fairly regularly.

So now I'm going to try to binge-review. GO:

I'm a highway star - Two new YA books that hit the open road

 

Nobody gonna take my car
I'm gonna race it to the ground
Oooh it's a killing machine
It's got everything
Like a driving power big fat tyres
And everything

I love it I need it
I bleed it yeah it's a wild hurricane
Alright hold tight
I'm a highway star!

 

God I love Deep Purple. Am I the only one anymore? To me, Deep Purple is the seminal sound of teenhood. It's music you listen to in stale basement rec rooms - mindless and churning, full of movement but not getting anywhere. The long-haired, cigarette-smoking boys who hung in a greasy cluster outside the bus port door at my junior high school LIVED and DIED by Ritchie Blackmore. Sigh. Those boys smelled so bad.

Proxy by Alex London - review, plus didn't you want to know what I thought of Game of Thrones? I thought so.

 

Summer Reading season is just about drawing to a close at the ol' public library. For the past month we've been dredging up copies of Beloved and Animal Farm. We've scurried around looking for Trash, The Book Thief, and The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind for po-faced youngsters who absolutely can't stand the idea of summer homework. I often try to sweeten the visit (thanks teachers for making a visit to the library a chore!) by offering the kid an additional, just-for-fun book.

Summer is the time for kids to remember that reading is an entertaining activity. With my psychic powers, I will beam that into the brain of every English department head in the country. Right now. Ow. Ok, I'll rest up and do it next spring.

So... this young Joe comes in the library last night looking for A Tale of Two Cities. I look at the calendar. "When does school start?" I ask with a wince. "Monday," he grunts. I am sympathetic, but his mom gives me this "Mmm-hmm" look that I treasure. I love being old enough to be complicit with moms. Of course, he is to have it read by the time school starts, and of course, he has been reading The Maze Runner trilogy all summer instead.

This is the perfect moment to mention Proxy.

Adaptation by Malinda Lo - review

 

Crash your car miles from nowhere on Nevada's Route 375, aka Extraterrestrial Highway, after a series of strange events have led to airplane crashes and highway closures, and what do you expect? Recover from life-threatening injuries only to be handed a non-disclosure agreement and be escorted home by two agents in black suits... oh yeah, this can't be good.

What happened to debate partners Reese and David in the month following inexplicable bird attacks that shut down the nation's air traffic? How have they recuperated so quickly from their crash? And what's with the strange vertigo that Reese feels whenever she touches David, or her mom, or even total strangers? Then there's the free-spirited pink-haired girl to whom Reese is irresistibly attracted. Well, ok that part is completely understandable ;)

Malinda Lo sets up an intriguing situation for her appealing, believable characters, and does a particularly nice job communicating Reese's discomfort as the unusual things she experiences and observes after she attempts to resume her normal life in San Francisco grate against everything she knows. The book loses some steam in the last third, as other characters drop away and we are back to just Reese and David, but by then it is too late for the reader - how's it going to end?

Suspenseful, girl-powered, contemporary science fiction full of realistically diverse characters making realistic contemporary use of technology. Plus hot kissing! Hard to resist.

Adapted from a review originally published in VOYA. 

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline - review

Do you know what a lich is? If someone taunts you with, "Answer the question, Claire," who are you being compared to? (Extra points: what's the question?) What will an oscillation overthruster allow you to do? And have you ever found yourself in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike?

A stray facetious comment worked its way into a discussion about the popularity of teen fiction among adult readers a while ago. "What about YA novels that are written just for adults?" I'm paraphrasing, I don't remember the exact wording. Just an offhand jokey comment, right?

But then I read Ready Player One. Ready Player One is a virtual reality adventure with a teen protagonist, a love interest, and a wing man. Our isolated, socially awkward hero must work his way through riddles and duels to win keys, open gates, and sort of save the world; and along the way he will develop leadership skills, learn to work with others, and listen to his instincts. Classic YA plotline.

But this book is not for teens.

BZRK by Michael Grant - review

 

You have got to hand it to Michael Grant - the guy has CHOPS.

I started reading his stuff with the first GONE novel. "Terrific premise," I thought. "Great staging of the classic civilization-reboot-in-the-hands-of-the-children plot." And then, "Jeez that's some STRONG horror. This guy pulls no punches."

Then I read The Call, the first entry in his middle-grade series, The Magnificent 12. I described that book as "Michael Grant popping the top off his can of funny." It's like entry-level Douglas Adams: I hand The Call and The Trap to any kid who answers 'yes' to the questions, "adventure?" and "funny?"

Now for BZRK. This is sci-fi set in the real world: non-dystopian secret-agent-type sci-fi, gritty, dark, and extra-violent. Teenagers are recruited to fight battles so surreptitious that they are invisible to the naked eye.

 

The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler - review

I spent the weekend without Internet access. Yup. No service where we were staying, no bars on the phone, and a 3G indicator that winked in and out when the wind blew through the pines.

As it happens, I needed to get ahold of someone, and so I was a little infuriated by this lack of connectivity. But I was also reading The Future of Us, a sort of post-dated YA sci-fi novel set in 1996, so it was kind of apropos.

The Maze Runner by James Dashner - review

 

I cannot get behind this book. I wanted to, I did - oh, and based on recommendations by other people, I have been recommending it to teens and tweens who like action for a good year now - but I think it is poor science fiction.

Thomas is a teenage boy who wakes up one morning in a windowless metal room, unable to remember much more than his name. When the room opens up, he finds himself in a community of several dozen boys, all of whom arrived in what they call the Glade just as he did, devoid of memory. The Glade is a sizeable square area surrounded by tall stone walls. Behind the walls, on all sides, is a gigantic maze. In the two years since the first boys were delivered to the Glade, they have formed an extremely functional, organized, (mostly) self-sustaining society, and have set themselves the task of solving the giant maze - looking for a way out.

If you liked The Hunger Games - YA for everyone!

"You're listening to Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast on 88.1 WYPR, your NPR news station, good morning! I'm your host, Tom Hall... oh wait a minute, I can't be your host, Tom Hall - I'm only eight!"

That's right. I took my kids with me to the radio station yesterday when I taped a segment on you crazy, stunted adults who read Young Adult fiction. What's wrong with me? Didn't I know they would act like crazed monkeys and pull out all the wires and make fart noises into the microphones? (They were very well behaved, although there were fart noises, I admit.)

 

Milo making fart noises while producer Stephanie Hughes sets up.

More to the point, what's wrong with you? Seriously, you're a full-on adult with a car payment and a job, and when you pick up a book, you're all looking for violence and mayhem, and allegory, and characters you can fall in love with, and dialogue peppered with witty insults and wordplay - what's that about? Why can't you just read your age-appropriate Literature or Fluff like you're supposed to? (This is also me being FACETIOUS.)

As I tried to organize my thoughts about what it is that adults see in YA literature - and it's a huge trend, believe me, you're not the only one - I remembered a recent conversation with a young woman looking for something to read. I asked what she'd enjoyed lately, and she said she'd really liked The Road (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature) and the The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris (winner of the Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original and inspiration for Snoop Dogg's Oh, Sookie).

Now, these two items have more in common than you might initially think, but still, it would be a biiig Venn diagram that managed to include them both. Trying to imagine the sweet spot between Cormac McCarthy and Sookie Stackhouse, my gaze naturally drifted to the Young Adult section.

 

Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick - review

 

Ok I have like, maybe, THREE things to say about this:

1. Last night at 2AM I was three-quarters of the way through Ashes. I had suffered every holy-crap-what-next moment right alongside sixteen-year-old Alex, and I had to put the thing down because my head hurt from staring into the dinky screen of my Sony Reader. I went to bed. Where, thanks to the good works of Ilsa J. Bick, my dreams were lousy with suicidal deer and ominous empty roads and carrion birds. The worst dream I had last night, however - by far - was that I was still reading Ashes, and that it had turned... lame.
2. It doesn't turn lame. Nooooo. No.
3. Sixteen-year-old orphans are the new eleven-year-old orphans.
4. If you are looking for your "next Hunger Games," I got your "next Hunger Games" right here, BABY. Very tough. Weapons, hot guys, camping. A scrappy kid. Subtle social criticism.

 

The novel begins as an intimate first-person narrative from Alex's point of view - she is worn down by sorrow and pain, and craves isolation. When two other campers appear on the scene, she is annoyed, but the reader is not surprised. When all of a sudden there is blood and pain, the reader is surprised. And then when she figures out...! and then meets up with...! and almost...! Like that. Every corner turned in this book was a surprise and sometimes a shock, but we never lose touch with Alex - she never turns into a superhero. The aches that sent her into the wilderness never go away, she just gets new ones.

Ilsa Bick writes her weapons and outdoor skills and scenic Michigan wilderness with authority. She has a real feel for timing, building tension to the point of crisis, then sometimes breaking off and picking up days later amid the consequences of the crisis. Her characters are convincing when they're being stubborn and whiny, convincing when they're in psychic or physical pain, convincing even when they're not convinced of their own selves at all.

In fact, I have made a folk song about this book. This doesn't happen very often, given that I hate poetry and I don't know how to play even the guitar... so you know this is going to be good. SING IT:

 

Here we are again,
It's the end of the world again,
I lost my gun I found my gun I lost my gun again.

Dontcha hate it when
You're just looking for a little privacy,
Just trying to scatter the ashes of your parents on the shores of Lake Superior and maybe come to terms with the inoperable brain tumor that's turned your life to shit,
I mean you're just out camping.
And whaddaya know...?

Here we are again,
It's the end of the world again,
I lost my gun I found my gun I lost my gun again.

It's a good thing I
Can stand a little physical pain
Cause I get beat up kind of a lot before I fall in love and find a truck and take care of a kid and then lose everything again and smack the crap out of a bunch of teenage cannibals,
And while the cannibals scare me
The Christians scare me worse.

(Which should come as no surprise because...)

Here we are again,
It's the end of the world again,
I lost my gun I found my gun I lost my gun again.
I lost my gun I found my gun I lost my gun I found my gun I lost - somebody give me a Winchester!
I found my gun again.

 

What do you think? Downright anthemic, I'd say. I can't decide whether I sing it like Woody Guthrie or Kurt Cobain or Gang of Four, though.

I'm placing these droids in your care - Star Wars book roundup

Recently, I read a book written for grownups. It happens! Of course, the book I read was Nerd Do Well, the memoir of actor and comedian Simon Pegg, and Simon Pegg (Hot Fuzz, Star Trek) is nothing if not an overgrown eleven-year-old boy, so actually, the book didn't fall that far outside my usual purview.

It was a kind of so-so book, if you want to know. The fanboy confessional can often descend into aching self-importance (see also: Patton Oswalt), but there were some brilliant discussions of pop culture, criticism, and pop culture criticism (also see also: Patton Oswalt). Mostly about Star Wars. Simon Pegg has thought a lot about Star Wars.

As have we all, n'est-ce pas?

In my house, Star Wars is practically a family member. Storm troopers, clone troopers, Jedi, Sith, sand people - their costumes and powers find their way into every mode of imaginative play engaged in by my sons. I have fought my way to a grudging détente over what I still call the second three movies - we own them on DVD, but they cannot be watched while I am in the house.

(I mean, come on. In the second series of Star Wars movies, they named Leia's adoptive father "Bail." If that isn't telegraphing a certain abdication of commitment on the part of the filmmakers, I don't know what.)

Recently, I assembled all the Star Wars gimmick books in our house and got the boys to run 'em down. By 'gimmick books' I mean the engineered books - the DK Readers are not included in this review, nor are the nominally grown-up novels like The Thrawn Trilogy, The X-Wing Series, Jedi Academy Trilogy, The Han Solo Trilogy (I might read that), or The Bounty Hunter Wars.

 

 

Why this ruined Earth? Pure by Julianna Baggott - review

 

Pressia's world is a scary world. Eight years after the bombs went off, food and water are in short supply. Many of the inhabitants are mutated cannibalistic beasts. Infection is prevalent, due to the fact that most people have had objects or creatures blasted into their bodies during the nuclear cataclysm. And if you make it to age sixteen, as Pressia has just done, the militia is going to come in a truck and capture you.

Partridge, who lives inside the spick-and-span Dome that was constructed in advance of such a catastrophe, has his own worries. His brother has committed suicide, his mother is missing, presumed dead, having not made it into the Dome on the day of the bombs; and his autocratic father, one of the architects of the Dome plan, seems to be coming a bit unglued. Partridge comes to believe that his mother is Out There, and resolves to leave the Dome in order to find her in the ruined outside world.

And here we go.

This is Pure by Julianna Baggott, who writes under a number of names. Readers of kidlit will know her as N.E. Bode, author of The Anybodies, a fun, imaginative trilogy for middle grade readers. Grownups who like funny books about relationships (excuse me if I borrow from Netflix's increasingly lowbrow genre labels) may know Ms. Baggott's Bridget Asher books, like The Pretend Wife and The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted.

Pure is Ms. Baggott's first sci-fi novel. It is long. It is weird. Fox 2000 has already bought the film rights. This review will contain a ton of spoilers, because a) I write my reviews for grownups selecting books for children, so I don't shy away from spoilers generally and b) there is no way for me to critique this book without them. Because I have issues with this book.

 

Divergent by Veronica Roth - guest booktalk by Milo

 

Librarian Nancy Pearl, author of Book Lust, NPR personality, action figure and role model, once told me that I don't have to read the books that everyone is going to read anyway, unless I want to. We were talking about Twilight at the time, and it was a big relief to be let off the hook on that one.

Today's big book that it appears everyone is going to read is Divergent by 22-year-old Veronica Roth. Billed as "the next Hunger Games," it has been passed from hand to hand by aficionados of YA sci-fi action fiction with genuine fervor.

So I brought it home, but, as often happens with exciting-looking books, it got snagged off the coffee table by my man Milo* while I was busy reading something else. He read it in a day, which tells me something already, so I figured I'd get him to booktalk it to me, see if it was something I wanted to read.

The Boy at the End of the World by Greg van Eekhout - review

So it has come to this, you say: post-apocalyptic fiction for middle grade readers. Really, you say? We're not going to wait until they're at least twelve or thirteen before giving them main characters who have to make their way by scavenging the wreckage of our world's bad decisions?

Yup. And about frickin time, I say.

Recent and forthcoming graphic novels for kids Part Two: ADAPT OR DIE

So, I was mock-complaining last week about all the graphic novels cluttering up my hallway, so to speak. I can't possibly review each of them, so I'm rounding 'em up and running 'em down in a couple of portmanteau posts. Therefore:

 

 

Graphic Novels, April 2011, Part Deux: This Time it's Historical

This week I've grouped together a number of graphic novels set in the past. Or in an alternate past. Or... in places that people habitually wear hats, in the case of Dapper Men. Oh whatever, they just all go together and you're going to have to take my word.

Many of the items up for review today are adaptations of classic works. And, uh, I have kind of strong feelings about g/n adaptations of classic works. This is going to surprise you. Heck, it surprises me. My strong feelings are mostly along the lines of: why?

Those That Wake by Jesse Karp - review

 

Oh I loved the first hundred pages of this book. Hundred-thirty, maybe. Paranoid and muffled, like a thriller in slow motion, like a ghost story set in the cement landscape of Roosevelt Island, it called to mind the frightened, frightening work of Philip K. Dick . Like Mulder's quieter, more desperate X-Files moments. The characters - and the reader - don't know what's going on, why everything around them keeps breaking and why everyone they encounter seems so hostile. The atmosphere is chilling and hopeless - magnetically written, it seeps into the reader's head like silence and inertia and entropy. Really good.

How I Stole Johnny Depp's Alien Girlfriend by Gary Ghislain - review

 

Aaaand... this is a different type of YA novel. Another type that I like. There are no superheroes coming to terms with their newfound powers in it (except metaphorically), we are not living in a dystopic landscape (except metaphorically - the setting is mostly Paris), and there is no grief (not even metaphorically).

Instead we have an introverted, buttoned-down teenage boy who meets a fierce, wild-eyed girl, falls instantly in love, and is swept along by her insane momentum until he finds himself dog-bit, tattooed, guilty of criminal trespass, and listening to unfamiliar music.

X Isle by Steve Augarde - review

When people express discomfort about the recent spate of dystopian novels for young people - books that feature a grim, brutal, ruined future in which children live by their wits (although often the wits are assisted by some kind of edged weapon) - they are pretty much talking about this book.

After the seas have risen and a series of hurricanes have devastated the planet and drowned the land, people are starving. The people of Baz's London neighborhood rely on a team of divers who trade canned food salvaged from submerged warehouses for items like rabbits, cigarettes, batteries and the like. Once in a while, the divers, who live on an island, accept a small, skinny boy to come to the island to work for them. The island is thought to be a paradise, and parents save up exceptionally rare items to bribe the divers to take their boys.

Songs of innocence and experience - adult weirdness for teens

Well, not just any teen. Teens with a taste for... for the unusual, let's say. Teens who are not satisfied with sports novels and vampire boarding school melodramas. Teens who have read Janne Teller's Nothing, who enjoy truly odd stuff like The Love Curse of the Rumbaughs and Madapple and then wonder why there aren't more books like those.

There are, of course - there are plenty of challenging novels in the YA section, but there's no shame in walking a kid through the adult section, and there's nothing immoral in handing a book about a serial killer to that kid.

Super Human by Michael Carroll - review

This is the time. The time is now. Michael Carroll's Quantum Prophecy series has zipped beneath the radar like a low-flying caped crusader for far too long.

The Quantum Prophecy trilogy describes a world in which superheroes and supervillains were once a natural part of the world order, keeping the peace, trying to take over the world, doing their stuff. But ten years ago, one supervillain's dastardly plan went tragically awry, and all the superhumans disappeared. Now, a few young people are beginning to exhibit unusual abilities - only to discover that a world of peril and plots has been waiting for them. Dun dun DUNNN!

The Enemy by Charlie Higson - review

It happens to just about everyone. Sometime in your early to mid-teen years, you wake up one day and realize that, gradually, every adult you know has become a stranger to you. You have begun to understand the fears, jealousies, and appetites that really motivate grownups, and you are appalled. They in turn suddenly do not recognize you as the child they have harbored lo these many years. And so your life becomes a series of surreptitious forays punctuated by skirmish - if your paths cross, there will be conflict, so you do your best to skirt their presence, to avoid their taint. You forge alliances with your friends or toughen up and go it alone, hoping against hope that you will make it.

Hmm. Maybe I'm overstating it. It's been a while, after all - all I can remember is being truly freaked out when my father threw my Kings of the Wild Frontier LP down the stairs because, I think, he was afraid I was on drugs. And my own kids won't be prompting me to mystifying moments of violence for a good 5 years yet.

Charlie Higson certainly sees adolescence that way, though. In The Enemy, all the grownups have turned into zombie-like cannibals. Some plague or something. The kids live in fortified big box stores and send out foraging parties to look for food and weapons. Yup. It's excellent.

Spaceheadz! by Jon Scieszka, with contributions by Francesco Sedita and illustrations by Shane Prigmore

We are of two minds about this book in my house. I enjoyed the gag-a-minute writing, while my eight-year-old thought it was too much silly, with no non-silly parts to make the silly parts seem sillier. That's almost verbatim. I should give up this book reviewing hobby of mine, when an 8-year-old does it at least as well as I do. Well. We have it out for a third opinion, and I'll be very interested to hear what that kid has to say.

The Search for WondLa by Tony DiTerlizzi - review

Epic science fiction for kids, sumptuously illustrated, as one might expect from the breathtakingly talented Tony DiTerlizzi. Long but somehow a very fast read - I wouldn't have believed it, it's not like the margins are extra-wide or the typeface extra-big, but my 8-year-old read 120 pages between dinner and bedtime one night last week.

The main character, 12-year-old Eva Nine, is seemingly the only human on a strange planet, the indigenous population of which includes large grazing animals, birds, and plant/animal chimeras of varying degrees of intelligence. These species bear some resemblance to animals and plants that exist at the very edge of weird in current zoology - lichen that travel, protists that seem to think, microscopic carnivorous plants. Pretty cool.

boom! by Mark Haddon - review

Mark Haddon gets the best book designers ever, doesn't he? The cover of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was plain red with that little silhouette of a dog upside-down, and that told you that the book was possibly old-fashioned but definitely unexpected on the inside. The cover of boom! is the friendliest orange linen, with big lower-case letters spelling out the title and the author's name, and a cute lil' rocket done in nice thick lines. You just want to pick it up and put it in your pocket. Of course, I said the same thing about Mac Barnett after meeting him at BEA, so maybe I'm just a sucker for a linen jacket. (Parenthetically, does Adam Rex every go anywhere without his bag strapped across his chest? What's he got in there?)

The School of Possibilities by Seita Parkkola - review

I'm staring at the cover of this book and wondering what to say about it. The cover is awfully busy, in its overly geometric way - a giant factory looms over a little red brick schoolhouse, smokestacks rising into the gray clouds, from which descend feathers, like snow. Below the school, stairs descend into a darkness in which half-lidded yellow eyes lurk.

Also, the O's in the word "School" are eyes. And there's a... you know what? I'll quit with the cover. Except to point out the one enticing element of it, the one element that you should pay attention to and use as your barometer when you consider whether you need it for your kids, or your library.

"SEITA PARKKOLA"

Dark Life by Kat Falls - review

Oh my heavenly biscuits, I haven't been grabbed by a book the way Dark Life grabbed me in I don't know how long. I am going to give you an excerpt and let see for yourself:

I slammed the entry button. Like a dilating eye, the hatch opened and seawater filled the small chamber. Plunging into the air lock, I whirled to see sharks streaking toward me from all sides. I hit the interior button whole-handed. As the hatch clinched shut, the sharks plowed into it like mini torpedoes. From inside, they sounded like Death pounding at the door. I slumped against the chamber wall and grinned. Nothing put a buzz in my blood like escaping predators.

What do you say? Exciting enough for you? For your child aged 8 to 13? Heck, just those verbs would make me a brand-new fan of author Kat Falls - Slamming! Dilating! Plunging! Whirling! Whew!

BEA (no longer so) brief recap

 

Your Neighborhood Librarian with some of the guys of Guys Read: Jon Scieszka, Adam Rex, and Mac Barnett. David Lubar is lurking off to the right.

Wow. Was this a great show or what! I am still a little breathless, not least from hauling the giant bag of great books away from the Javits Center. And I swear, I only took the great ones, or the ones I expect to be great, or the ones I really want to know about. I didn't take any random stuff, and still there's got to be 30 books in there.

Everything from Charlie Higson's new book The Enemy, which I find especially intriguing because it intrigues my 15 year old friend N, who usually restricts his reading to game guides... to David Ezra Stein's Interrupting Chicken. The title alone tells you that this book is going to be a mega hit at storytimes for preschoolers on up. My son Zhou read it to us this morning - it's a star!

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest - review

Oh, screw Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -- give me airships and gasmasks and zombies! (Seriously, is anyone but me getting sick of that stuff? Classic literature - Now Enriched with Humorous Gore! - it was funny once, maybe twice. I've never seen a better argument for maintaining the copyright on great-granddad's novels than The Undead World of Oz: L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Complete with Zombies and Monsters. Ooo, cranky on a Friday, aren't we?)

So, here is the thing about steampunk - for such a teeny little genre, it is over-defined to the point of suffocation. People who say they like it seem to know EXACTLY what it is, and what it is has more to do with its material culture - its brass, leather and rubber artifacts - than the usual elements that define a genre. Steampunk can be written in any style or mood: but it seems there really must be goggles.

Incarceron by Catherine Fisher - review

What is it about Incarceron? Oh, there's all this hype about it, it's the big new series, gonna be (((""THE NEXT HARRY POTTER"" ARG I can't even bring myself to TYPE that phrase without air quotes and a vicious eyeroll and some sort of intricate rude gesture))) according to numerous sources. That kind of guff generally makes me run run run away. Makes most of my friends - grownup and kid - run run run away too.

 

But. I liked a few of the phrases I read on the flap. "Eagle tattoo." "Crystal key." "Dystopic future." Most of all, I was hooked by "Vast metal prison." Just a little darker than many YA fantasy novel settings. I sensed that here there would not be dragons.

Meanwhile by Jason Shiga - review

My tiny little mind just done got blown.

And Choose Your Own Adventure just got handed their papers.

And when I get this thing home I'm not going to see my eight-year-old for a month, or until he explores each of the 3,856 possible outcomes of this book.

And that number? 3,856? Not an exaggeration. So I think maybe Jason Shiga is a little bit mental.

 

That's Jason Shiga right there, with a five-foot-by-five-foot poster of the giant flow chart that is this book. He claims, in the front matter, that it took various computers and multiple algorithms and excessive jargon to get it into book form, with decision paths running from page to page back and forth in the book and at least one page that is JUST paths with no panels or dialogue, but I don't buy it. I think he gave up the floor of his living room to obsessively arranging and rearranging panels until it all fit, and the reason I think that is because he uses the word "heuristic" in his explanation, and my experience is that anyone who uses that word is, either in a minor baffle-em-with-bs way or in a large-scale baldfaced Vegas PowerPoint black-turtleneck kind of way - lying.

But I don't hang out much in Silicon Valley, which is I think where Jason Shiga lives. Maybe they know what "heuristic" means in Berkeley. Ok I just looked at his resume and Jason Shiga knows what "heuristic" means. He's my new hero.

This is what a page layout looks like. (Most are easier to follow) The color palette is one I especially enjoy - sophisticated midtones and earth tones. Lots of color but not screaming-in-your-face color. The panels and dialogue can get pretty small for those of us wearing bifocals but let's face it - this book is not aimed at those of us wearing bifocals. The pages are a heavily coated rip-resistant material, which is good. All that flipping back and forth could cause a lot of wear and tear.

The plot involves a time machine, a doomsday machine, slapstick, probability, and ice cream. I have to go melt into a puddle of joy right now. Get the book.

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi - review

You want my one-line recommendation? This is the most exciting book I have read since Emma Clayton's Roar.

Action, plot, an interesting world... deeper questions of what makes family and what constitutes loyalty... oh man. I am totally hoping there is a second book.

But let's take a step back for a moment. What is this book? It is the first YA book from up-and-coming SF writer Bacigalupi, who has previously won praise for his short stories written for adults. It's about Nailer, a teenage boy who works stripping beached cargo ships of their precious metals: copper, aluminum, stainless steel. Although Nailer's world is desperately poor, it is strictly organized, rather in the image of a mill town - there's a heirarchy of breakers, runners, overseers, and management, and then there's support personnel (hookers and drug suppliers) for those who can't physically cope with the rigors of ship breaking.

We are living in a warmer future, one with higher sea levels and a giant divide between rich and poor. I believe we're somewhere on the Gulf of Mexico (although a two-day high-speed train ride to New Orleans would seem to indicate we started further away). Nailer encounters a rich girl, shipwrecked on a boat whose opulence represents a wealth he can barely comprehend, and he decides to help her - in part because he hopes she can pull him out of his bleak and brutal life, but, even from the start, because his humanity - something in short supply on his beach - will not let him abandon her.

One of the things I like about the book is that we don't get an overview of this world, not at first, and, really, not at the end. The author leaves it to us to flesh out some of the details that he lets drop. Carbon limits. Drowned cities. A seeming absence of government. An emphasis on trade agreements, even at the very tiny level of who gets to strip which part of which dead ship. Hmm. Hm, I say.

Whenever I read a YA book set in an alternate reality - future, alternate past, whatever - I look for the element that seems similar to our current time, and in this book, it's the gulf between rich and poor. Nailer's life could look a lot like the life of the scavengers that I've seen on the beaches in southern India. Nita, the rich girl, who is, I think not coincidentally, South Asian, is an Upper East Sider to the core. Educated and spoiled, strong of body through good nutrition and Phys Ed classes, she manages to keep pace with Nailer purely through strength of will and advantageous upbringing. By the end of the book, both teenagers see each other as real people, but it is debatable whether their worlds can merge.

There is a lot of violence in this book. It's completely consonant with the difficult world that Bacigalupi has conjured. I can't decide whether it is made more shocking by the bright sunlight and tropical setting, or if that setting mitigates it somewhat. It certainly is an interesting contrast, and reinforces the "Third World" feel of the book.

The Sheriff of Yrnameer by Michael Rubens - review

Put Douglas Adams and Joss Whedon into a blender and you get... no, yeesh, you'd get gritty red-headed paste that couldn't carry a tune.

Let's try that again. Put The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Firefly into that blender, push Pulse, and you might end up with something salty and sharp and entirely without nutritional value - the kind of cocktail that makes you feel like you're maybe going to sneeze and giggle at the same time. If that sounds good to you, you'll like The Sheriff of Yrnameer. If not, definitely you won't.

This is one of those books that I kept casting in my head as I read. Nathan Fillion as Cole, the small-time criminal who finds himself on the run in a stolen ship full of freeze-dried orphans? No, too obvious. Bruce Willis? Too old. Matt Damon too handsome.

But the cheerful Cthulhu-like loan shark chasing Cole? Definitely Donald Sutherland. And the unimpressed missionary smuggling the children to safety, who in the past I think would have been played by Shirley MacLaine... I could see Salma Hayek.

Rubens wiggles a lot of fun stuff in here - cannibals, a friendly sentient computer that freaks everyone right the hell out, tumbling tumbleweeds, characters with antennae or purple fur, and a whole bunch of could-be shout-outs to books and movies in the hipster geek pantheon.

Or maybe I just liked it because he makes fun of a line I love to use.

"Where'd you learn to do all this?" she asked.
When he opened his mouth to answer, she quickly added, "Don't say prison."
He shut his mouth.

This is an adult book that appeals to the teenager in all of us. Ergo, it's a fine book to recommend to teens. There are a few off-color jokes, but no hot and sweaty scenes, and the swearing is all future swearing:

"What is it?" asked Nora.
"A Dynaco Mark IV StarStation Success!Sat, probably the Apria B model," said Bacchi.
They all turned to look at him.
"And that gip is farged UP," he added.

"Thank you!" yodels the librarian in service to young adults.

Bonus: awesome cover.

Bonus II: Colbert endorsement.

Gregor the Overlander by Suzanne Collins - review

I am revisiting the first in the The Underland Chronicles because my kids are finally old enough for it, and, rabid Percy Jackson fans that they are, they are SOOOO hungry for funny adventure. So far, listening to the audio version in the car, they are alternately spellbound and laughing like something is actually tickling them.

It's good. It's beyond good.

I think one of the keys to writing funny adventure is dialogue, and Suzanne Collins has such a gift for it. She develops speech patterns for each of her underground races and for two-year-old Boots, and leaves Gregor all the cute sarcastic lines every kid wishes he had the wit to say.

Further, Gregor assumes all the worry and responsibility of an older brother, but without getting mired in it. He's a man of action, trusting his instincts and abilities and dogged in his persistence - all good traits, but ones that he will learn should be tempered with planning and advance knowledge. It's a good journey to undertake, and proceeds so organically.

We paused the audio after the first disc (after Gregor has met the human Underlanders and has resolved to get back to the surface before his mom gets too wigged out by their absence) for me to ask the kids if they had any predictions about the plot.

They did not think Gregor and Boots were going to get back in a timely fashion. Check.

They anticipate that Gregor and Boots will meet with peril on their journey. Check.

They wanted me to put the story back on NOW. Ok, ok!

I think my library should re-order new shiny copies of these books, and I think it's time to give 'em a new push to our young friends hungry for adventure.

Ten-four, ready for more! Tentacles by Roland Smith - review

In some kind of odd convergence, I have been reading second books this week. Usually, I read the first book in a series, and if it's good, I lazily allow myself to recommend the series without following up with the later volumes. Man, come on! There are SO many books! And totally not enough time, what with working, and shoveling snow, and US Magazine coming every Friday. And now the Olympics? Luckily, I can read and watch the Olympics at the same time - nice job, NBC. Or Canada. It's tempting to blame Canada for these snoozy late-nite Olympics, after all, "snoozy" and "Canada" go together like "Julia Mancuso" and "the Kim Kardashian of the slopes" (told you I've been reading US Magazine), but it's probably NBC's fault.

Good thing I have the books.

Roland Smith finally followed up Cryptid Hunters with Tentacles.

Regular readers of Pink Me may remember that my 8-year-old read Cryptid Hunters during the blizzard - well, that's because I couldn't wait to bring home Tentacles, but I knew he'd slurp it up before I could get my hands on it if I didn't supply him the first book first. That cover is irresistable!

Since Cryptid Hunters, I've read kind of a lot of Roland Smith. Enjoyed Peak, but I quibbled with its insufficiency of female characters. Loved I,Q unreservedly (Review here). Can't figure out why it's cataloged as Young Adult. In fact, my library splits Smith's books between the children's section and Young Adult, seemingly arbitrarily. I always question the placement.

For example: the two main characters in the cryptid books, Marty and Grace, not only face life-threatening environmental and interpersonal peril, but the emotional underpinnings of their lives are entirely swept out from under them. Their parents are missing in the Amazon. They turn out to not be siblings. They learn that the dreadful villain is in fact a family member. Jeez. It's like a Scarsdale funeral up in there.

In Tentacles, luckily, the family revelations more or less pause. Which is good, because at this point, either we're going to find out that Marty was born a girl, or that Grace's grandmother was the smoke monster on LOST. Nothing else pauses, though. The plot is still rocketing along, despite most of the action taking place aboard a ship - always a challenging setting. Unvarying scenery, static cast of characters, not too many secret caves.

But Smith gets past all that, mostly with miracle technology and a vast ship, although the zippy writing doesn't hurt! This second installment features miniature flying spy robots, disguises, betrayal, murder and accidental death, a glowing gold bathysphere, and, at long last, giant squid. In 1998, I took my young friend Will, his mom and little sister up to see a giant squid in a tank on the 5th floor of the American Museum of Natural History, and let me tell you, it was dead and bleached white by the preserving fluid, its dinner-plate eyes destroyed by marine scavengers, but it still took my breath away.

I very much question the age level for this book. My kid is a voracious and somewhat jaded reader, and Cryptid Hunters bothered him not at all, but I know plenty of more sensitive children who would be very troubled by the sudden unmooring of the main characters. I think I just pitch it older. I've given it to middle school kids by the score, and if a high schooler can get past the label on the spine, I'd hand it to a teen too.

I guess it's like that squid at the museum - Will was thrilled and excited to see a cryptid abruptly switch teams before his very eyes, while his sister Laura held her nose and winced.

Reading as a reasonable substitute for hibernation

I live in Baltimore. See above. I am too sore from shoveling to do much of a post today, but I thought I'd share what my sons have been reading through our blizzard.

First, a little perspective. The children in Baltimore City have been excused from school since noon last Friday. We have had two snowstorms, depositing a total of about 173.4" of snow, all of which we have had to shovel, since this street hasn't seen a snowplow since... well, Baltimore City has never plowed this street. It's not even considered a secondary road, which I guess makes it a tertiary road, which is I guess one step up from a deer trail.

I had to work Monday and Tuesday during our brief respite between storms, during which time my husband beat a strategic retreat, jetting off to exotic Wichita, Kansas. He can't get back home, of course, because our airport closed, then re-opened, then became swamped with passengers.

Took the kids to work with me Tuesday, and they were angels. The little one helped me find books for customers, and the big one helped out with reader advisory. I was trying to help one little girl find something to read, when my 8 year old son piped up with, "What kind of books do you like to read?" This can be a hard question to answer, especially when you're in 2nd grade, and the girl was clearly stymied trying to answer. So my boy says, "Put it this way - what's the best book you've read recently?" The little girl said "Babymouse," and my son said, "Babymouse! Well then you'll love Amelia Rules!"

I might as well quit. That kid just did my job at least as well as I've ever done it. So I'm going to let them review books today.

My first grader, Zhou (not his real name):

I like Secret Agent Jack Stalwart. I like how the pages are arranged, because it says, "I quickly peeked around the corner and then I saw..." and then you have to turn the page before you can see what he actually saw! And I would give it 5 stars because I like the story too. It seems really fictional. It's not funny so far, and not scary, and I like the picture on the front, because it tells you you're in New York and there's a dinosaur inside.

I used to be reading The Lightning Thief, but now I'm stuck on Jack Stalwart. Lightning Thief was a little hard, I think I'll practice on some more Jack Stalwart, and then I'll go back to Lightning Thief and see if my practice has paid off. Now I'm out of words. Words are buzzing through my head, I don't know which ones to use.

My third grader, Mao (not his real name either):

I've been reading Cryptid Hunters. It's about two twins, um Marty and Grace O'Hara. I like that the O'Hara twins end up getting themselves dropped into the middle of the Congo, because it makes you know there's going to be excitement in this book. The run into alligators, green mambas, and bad guys.

They are hunting for a dinosaur, mokele mbembe, and they go to this like treehouse and while Marty is off getting supplies from where they dropped it the night before, Grace is kidnapped! And Marty goes and tries to save her, and basically that's how they end up discovering the mokele mbembe nest. They're funny the way the talk to each other, and when Marty chops off the head of the big snake with a machete, that's a little scary, and their uncle getting his leg bit off, that was a little scary. But not too scary, because it's a book. 

I've also been reading The Hardy Boys. Let's just say that the Hardy Boys are, well, great, and they start off as two kids of a famous detective. Usually he's away on other cases that somehow get connected to their case. There's always something new, something extra thrown in to the adventure.

I like Joe the best mostly because he isn't as good as his brother Frank, but he always is the one who figures out the big picture, and then Frank gets all the details pinned. I like the old Hardy Boys, because in the newer ones they're part of an organization, which takes all the fun out of it, and in the older ones they have their friends helping them out, which makes me happy.

I got into Hardy Boys because I read The Brixton Brothers. Can you bring me the next Brixton Brothers home from work?

Sadly, I cannot. It's not due til October, which seems like forever away. And at this point, given the head-high piles of snow outside and the six-foot icicles plunging like deadly spears of celestial bronze from the eaves, I'm not sure I even believe in March.

And another thing... by Eoin Colfer - review

 

And another thing... by Eoin Colfer, part 6 of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy

 

I've always thought that the Hitchhiker's books were not so much written as doodled. Maybe while Douglas Adams was on hold with the insurance company, or, since he was British and they have the National Health there (THANKS MASSACHUSETTS. GOD, YOU GUYS.), on hold with the Queen. I bet she puts people on hold incessantly, and then goes and rides out to the hounds or whatever, giggling her ass off because in England, if you hang up on the Queen, even if she's put you on hold and gone to Scotland, you get beheaded.

I'm on hold with Blue Cross. As if you couldn't tell.

Given that postulate, it is not too far-fetched to think that somebody else might be able to write Hitchhiker's. After all, the Rough Guides routinely cycle through writers, say, when the Tanzania stringer gets fed up with feeding his carefully crafted prose into a gnash-y machine made up of copyeditors and lawyers, and decides that, rather than spending his days grilling tour operators and counting bedbugs, he'll buy a set of vibes and spend his evenings as a jazz musician on the beach at the north end of Dar es Salaam.

It works. I'm not saying it's AS good, but it works. One suspects all Eoin Colfer really had to do was get good and bored, read the first seventy books (what? how many?), and set up a little sim in his mind. A little tank with a virtual Arthur, a virtual Ford Prefect, a tiny Trillian and Zaphod. Nudge them into motion, and then drop random toys into the tank. You could do it in a bathtub with action figures, come to think of it. A plastic chicken becomes Buff Orpington, corpulent second-in-command of a colony of rich expatriate Earthlings in the Magrathean system. The LEGO Viking turns into Thor. "Hm..." Colfer wonders, idly piloting a toy boat under the arch of his leg. "What would be Zaphod's relationship to Thor? Friends? Lovers? Or is Zaphod the hamburger to Thor's David Hasselhoff?"

 

 
  
Simon Jones reads the audio. Ably. More than ably. He manages fussy Arthur best - after all, to many of us he is Arthur, but he does Vogon very well too, and all of the more blustery characters. Perhaps the most satisfying part of this book is merely hearing the names aloud again. My children have been calling just about everything a Pan-galactic Gargle Blaster lately. Could be much worse - they could have latched onto (no pun intended) Eccentrica Gallumbits, The Triple-Breasted Whore of Eroticon Six.

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld - review

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

Maybe I sabotaged this book for myself. I don't usually get worked up anticipating a new work of children's or young adult fiction - usually, they show up, and I go, "Wow, look at this!" I'm consistently surprised that chapter books written for younger folks actually engage me. You'd think I'd know better. Like, you'd REALLY think I'd know better.

But when I heard that Scott Westerfeld - believable social economies, interesting ideas, nervy plots - was taking on the satisfying contrasts and textures of steampunk, I have to admit, I got excited.

And then, when I finally got my hands on it, the book, for me, fell a little bit flat. We follow Alek, only child of the archduke Ferdinand and his commoner wife Sophie, after his parents' assassination; and Deryn, a lower-class girl masquerading as a boy so that she can join the British air force. World War I is breaking out, and the German weapons - walking kerosene-burning tanks - are pitted against the genetically engineered organic fighting machines created by the British. Deryn serves aboard The Leviathan, a zeppelin-like airbeast that is mostly whale, while Alek escapes his ancestral castle in a two-legged armored walker, accompanied by his armorer and fencing instructor.

The details are, as expected, splendid, especially the delicate ecosystem that comprises the giant airbeast. There are castles and there are uniforms, scientists in bowler hats and a Tasmanian wolf (mysteriously called a Tasmanian tiger). Yummy.

But why, reading this, did I find myself wishing that I were instead reading Airborn again? There are a lot of similarities between the two books, and I kept remembering details of Airborn fondly as I read Leviathan. It's not a contest - obviously - and they're both exciting books, worth reading, and anyone who likes the one will likely enjoy the other. It's just that, if I had to recommend just one, I'd pick Airborn. Kenneth Oppel's descriptions of sensory experiences - running barefoot, moonlight and cold air - edge out Westerfeld's more hard-edged details.

Recently I've heard that Adam Rex is taking on the YA vampire novel, and I'm excited to see that. I expect that he'll punch a few holes in the "beautiful but doomed" vamp trope, a la The Reformed Vampire Support Group by Catherine Jinks. If I find I am disappointed in that book, I'll know - it's just me.

If you liked the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer - book list

If. You Liked. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. There. I said it.

I have put together this list I don't know how many times in the past couple of years, and I guess I just have to bite the bully (get it? like Twilight shoves all the other books around?) and admit that: 1) People want to read Twilight and 2) People LIKE Twilight.

I mean, why am I such a snob about these books anyway? What was I reading when I was eleven? I'll tell you what I was reading when I was eleven. No wait, read this book - Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading by Lizzie Skurnick - and you will know what I was reading when I was eleven. And I turned out ok. Reasonably ok. Ok shut up - am I exploring my nascent sexuality with my twin brother or luring my arch-enemy into a leech-infested pool? No. I am not. That was a rhetorical question by the way.

And maybe that's setting the bar kind of low, but I think it is some kind of proof that young readers of Twilight are not going to grow up and fall in love with pale, stalker-y older men. Pale, stalker-y older men are in fact CREEPY in real life, and almost all young women are viscerally and instinctively aware of this. We can trust our girls. (Hi, Olivia! We can trust you, right?)

There's still the issue, recently pointed out by someone at the Princeton Romance Writers Conference (and I am too lazy to go looking for it so I am going to paraphrase), that these paranormal romance novels represent something of a throwback to the old doctor/nurse kind of power differential that turned so many of us against romance novels to begin with (think Mr. Rochester and his employee - Jane - in Jane Eyre). Nowadays, romance novels feature women who are just as strong as, and on equal social footing with, the men, but in Twilight et al, the male character is by definition more powerful than the girl - he's immortal! he can change into an animal! or, uh, sparkle!

But that I don't know what to do about. EXCEPT. To recommend the following pretty good books as follow up reads for people who enjoyed the romance, the drama, the imaginative world of Twilight. Some of these books feature characters with supernatural powers or are set in alternate or future worlds, but some do not. There's at least one cute boy in each, but none of them has a female protagonist as wimpy as Bella.

The Luxe by Anna Godberson. Soapy and irresistably fancy, dripping with drama. Look at that dress!

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I reviewed it here earlier. Catching Fire, the next book in the series, has just been published.

Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception by Maggie Stiefvater. An extremely cute boy, some psychic torment, a well-written, lovely setting, and a harp. It's all good.

Prom Nights from Hell. Stories by Stephenie Meyer, Meg Cabot, Lauren Myracle, and other writers who are all about what it is to be a girl.

Prom Dates from Hell (Maggie Quinn: Girl vs Evil, Book 1) by Rosemary Clements-Moore. Good-looking teens, more dramatic than it looks, snappy dialogue. I reviewed the third book in this series a couple weeks ago.

Tithe by Holly Black. Anything by Holly Black, in fact.

Margo Lanagan's Black, White, and Red books. Dark, with a side of strange, drizzled with a stylish-sexy port wine reduction.

The somewhat overlooked Troll Bridge by Jane Yolen and her son, Adam Stempel. Music, magic, peril, attitude.

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray. The first in the Gemma Doyle Trilogy, about drama and magic in a Victorian boarding school.

Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause. Ms. Klause has been writing about the allure of the supernatural boy for longer than anyone, and in this one, the boy's a werewolf. Grrr!

Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr

Tantalize by Cynthia Leitich Smith

Peeps by Scott Westerfeld

Graceling by Kristin Cashore. Horses, swords, special powers, a fiery heroine, and a gorgeous guy. The sequel, Fire, will be out in early October.

and what the heck... you know what else any red-blooded reader of the Twilight books will like?

Flowers in the Attic, by V.C. Andrews. It's wrong. It's hot. It's so hot that it's wrong and it's so wrong that it's hot. And you just know "V.C. Andrews" is a pseudonym. Who do you think it is really? Wonder if that's what Salinger's been up to all this time.

The Roar by Emma Clayton - review

The Roar by Emma Clayton
Almost five hundred pages of brilliantly unpredictable fully-immersive postapocalyptic British fiction, set in a thriftily-constructed half-drowned London, shot through with luminous sensory stimuli and an extra helping of good old-fashioned LANGUAGE. I read it in two days, and I loved it, and I want to do it justice. So I'm going to keep this short.

He paced and watched the sea and for a while he felt like a firecracker with its fuse lit, a bit dangerous - as if when she walked through the door he would erupt and fly around the room breaking the lights, setting fire to things, and taking lumps out of the ceiling. Then he felt all soft and gooey, as if when she walked in he would melt and she would find nothing more than a puddle of love in the middle of the floor. Then he felt both of these things, that he was a firecracker about to explode, but instead of sparks, he was full of love and it was all going to be a bit messy.

Do not take this passage the wrong way. It occurs on page 471, and contains I think the first and the second (and the last) instances of the word "love" in the book. I picked it because it gives you Emma Clayton using a twelve-year-old's casual vocabulary to precisely describe a complex emotional state - some trick! Plus, cute there at the end.

The best science fiction - and, I would argue, the best teen fiction - pulls pieces of the status quo out of context so that the reader has a chance to see some aspect of contemporary life from a new perspective. In the case of The Roar, Ms. Clayton has picked natural resource management, environmental degradation, and (because she is English and name me one English author who doesn't, given the chance) the injustice of class.

Exciting, beautiful, gut-wrenching stuff, fully on par with, say, Jo Walton or Charles Stross. Cyborg animals, fighter planes, high-stakes arcade games, diverse characters, mutations, truly dreadful villains, and food made of mold! No wonder it nearly crests the 500 page mark. The ending feels a little rushed perhaps, but by the time I hit it, I was so swept away that I did not mind.

Labels: age: Grade5 and up, fiction, science fiction, superstar books