The Unexpected Everything Review

This week's novel is The Unexpected Everything, contemporary YA by Morgan Matson.

Andie's father is a politician, who lives mostly in Washington, leaving Andie to mostly fend for herself under the lax supervision of distant relatives.  But then a scandal hits her dad's office, losing Andie her competitive and coveted summer internship at Johns Hopkins Medical and causing her dad to move back home.  With no summer plans and awkwardness at home, Andie ends up having a summer she never expected with her friends and a boyfriend and a dog walking job. 

About half way through the book, it felt like the story had been told.  Andie and her dad sat down an had a conversation about their grievances and expectations, and set themselves on a path to heal, and I LOVED IT.  So often I find myself screaming at characters in books to "Just have an honest conversation, damnit!  There wouldn't be a book if you had better communication skills!"  My family's gotten used to it.  I blame it on therapy.  So this was fantastic.  Andie also settles into her dog walking job, which she at first thought was a dozen steps down from the internship she had planned for six months.  And she and Clark, the cute, awkward boy with the grand pyrenees, get over their awkwardness and settle into Andie's first meaningful romantic relationship.

That's at the half way point.  Now, in most rom-coms, this would be the end.  The goals of dating and appreciating what you have and patching up a relationship with family have been met.  

It turns out that Clark is a writer (a bestselling writer even though he's a teenager.  Just roll with it) and he's having trouble writing the next book in his series because he wrapped up the story in the last book.  That problem mirrored my mid-point question of where is this going to go next?  What are they going to do now?

It makes sense that most rom-coms end here, because what comes after is hard work to maintain relationships and--in peace time--fluffly trips to the mall or the waffle house.  And that's what the second half of the book is: vignettes of friendships and relationships and fights and apologies and stumbles and jokes.  There's of course an emotional climax where everything falls apart as they reach the end of summer, but the way the problems compound makes sense, and it's still mostly fun summer times.

I also appreciated the female friendships.  Andie has three best friends and their interactions and relationships are front and center here.  They support each other and complain to each other and bicker and have inside jokes.  Again, they honestly try to work through their problems with each other.  It was great.  And then it was not great.  Because, you see, they are torn apart by a dude.  And the dude is the biggest tool you've ever seen.  I don't get it.  It was disappointing, but at the same time, you could say it wasn't really about the dude, but about how one of the friends is unwilling to talk it out.  

Talk it out, y'all.

***

Next week: Pivot Point, light YA sci-fi by Kasie West.

Dive into the Trade Paperbacks

I won the Goodreads challenge of reading 50 books this year, and I've read enough to post reviews for the rest of the year, so I'm going to spend the next little bit reading comic books. 

Here's what's on the reading list and an honest account of what I know about them going in:

• Saga- Two aliens from different races are in love despite how their people are at war.  They have a biracial baby, who she breastfeeds like it ain't no thing.  I approve!
• All New Wolverine- Hugh Jackman-esque Wolverine was cloned, but his DNA got goofed up.  More specifically, his Y chromosome got goofed up, and the mad scientists responsible said, "Pft.  Whatever," and just duplicated his X chromosome.  All New Wolverine is just like Hugh Jackman Wolverine, only female.  She kicks ass and takes names and hangs out with one of her preteen clone sisters and an actual wolverine named Johnathan.
• Journey into Mystery- Loki was deaged or reincarnated or something.  When Thor finds him, he's a teenager with no memory of his evilness, but everyone else is like, "Loki's evil.  Get rid of him."  And Thor's like, "No!  He's my brother and now he's adorable!"  Loki has a tumblr.
• Sex Criminals- When some people reach orgasm, time stands still.  They use this skill to rob banks.  There's important discussion about the guilt and confusion and fear involved in sexual awakening.  But mostly there are dick jokes.
• Sandman- There's a magic guy who controls dreams.  Hijinks ensue?  We only have the fist volume, so I will need to get more from the library.

Across the Universe Review

This week's novel is Across the Universe by Beth Revis.

A friend of mine has mentioned this book several times, but--thinking she was talking about that movie where they covered a bunch of Beatles tunes and this was the novelization of that or something--I had no interest in it at all.  I apologize to everyone shaking their head at me now, and I admit I was very wrong. 

When her parents volunteer to be cryognically frozen for 300 years and wake up on a new planet, Amy decides to be frozen along with them instead of living without them.  However, someone wakes her up early, and she finds that the people who stayed awake during the voyage and formed a generational ship have also formed a little dystopia full of secrets and lies.  She uncovers the ship's many secrets with Elder, the teenage boy destined to be the ship's next leader.

This book has all the dystopian tropes.  All of them.  And they are all Plot Twists. 

What happens to the old people who go up the the fourth floor when they get too old and then are never heard from again?  

You're right!  That's what happens.

Several things crop up, where my first response is "that's not how science works."  Like how the engine runs on uranium, and it's all all good because once they use the uranium, they can re-enrich it back into usable uranium.  "That's not how uranium works," I say, and assume that the author is taking liberties with radiation because no one ever bothers to understand radiation.  But then, it turns out I was right.  That's not how uranium works and the engine is losing efficiency*.  What you've been told is a lie!  Plot Twist! 

In retrospect, this is actually a clever use of the genre.  The story used my expectation and my underestimation to hide twists in plain sight.  It made pseudo-plot-twists where I saw them coming but then second guessed myself and then was surprised.

The novel says some pretty uncomfortable things about race and mental illness.  The leader of the ship insists that "The first cause of discord is difference" and therefore everyone on board is "mono-ethnic."**  When Amy shows up, she's simultaneously feared, reviled, and fetishized.  Her differences cause disruption and the leader is proved to be right.  There's of course a lot more to it than that, but it all keeps getting simplified down to how she has different colored hair than everyone else. 

Then there is a perpetuation of the stigma that it's shameful to take drugs for mental illness, then the idea that if you're mentally ill you're inherently different from normal people and will never be like them, and then to top it all off there's the favorite "I'm not crazy, everyone else is crazy, and they're keeping all the not crazy people in a mental hospital."

I did like the description of the freezing process.  It's terrifying and gripping, and it was a great start. The story just didn't maintain that level of excitement.

Let's end this review with this quote, which can give you an idea of what this book is like: cliché and cringe worthy.

"He doesn't like 'disturbances,'" I tell Amy.  "He doesn't like anyone to be different at all.  Difference, he says, is the first cause of discord."
"He sounds like a regular Hitler to me," Amy mutters.  I wonder what she means by that.  Eldest has always taught me that Hitler was a wise, cultured leader for his people.  Maybe that's what she means: Eldest is a strong leader, like Hitler was.  The turn of phrase is unusual, another difference between us, another difference I'm sure Eldest would hate.

*Still wrong about inertia tho
**Really?  That's weird.  How did they manage that?  They say it's because over generations they all melded together into one race, but could that really happen on this time scale?  Did they start out only sending one ethnicity into space?  Did they kill everybody else?  Maybe it's a Plot Twist!



***
Next week: The Unexpected Everything, contemporary YA by Morgan Matson.

NaNo: week ???

It is a complete failure on my part that I've yet to tell you about my exciting National Novel Writing Month project. 

There's a challenge out there called The 30 Day Monster Girl Challenge.  It's an art challenge with a list of thirty kinds of monsters, and the challenge is to draw a different monster girl every day for thirty days.  I'm doing this challenge a bit differently, and I'm writing a short story about a different monster girl every day for thirty days.  I did change the list a little bit because the last handful of days don't specify a particular monster, so I've replaced those with monsters from The 30 Day Monster Girl Challenge 2.  This also means that for the first time (excluding Camp NaNos) I'm going full rebel and not writing part of a first draft of a novel, but rather first drafts of short stories.

I have many reasons for this, and I hope to get a few things out of it:

• Plotting.  Although world building and characterization come easily to me, plotting is and always has been a weak point.  I want to force myself to write stories with a beginning, middle, and end for practice and to make myself feel better about my abilities.
• Back to writing as opposed to editing.  Sometimes I'm in the mood to edit.  Right now is not that time.  It's been so long since I just wrote something new and it's freeing.
• Back to short story beginnings.  The Firebird story was an experiment for me.  It's about six story ideas mushed together and it's not how I usually go about writing a novel.  All but one of my novel length stories have started as short stories that I later expanded into a novel, either making the short story the first chapter or using the structure of the short story as an outline.  I want to go back to this tried and true method in hopes that
• One of the stories will spark something in me and become my next novel length project.
• Back to writing as opposed to editing

Super cool!

However!

You may notice that I am amazingly far behind on this project.  It's embarrassing.  The reason is that the last month has hit me with blow after blow, and I've yet to be able to recover before it smacks me down again.  I started off November in the hospital, where I stayed for a few days when I had big plans to get a tumblr up and running to do a daily blog of my progress and possibly post the stories as I went along.  I also had plans to make myself (for lack of a better term) a NaNo advent calendar: a new, brief, funny thing about writing every day for motivation.  Alas!  There's always next year.

When I got out of the hospital, my family ganged up on me to make me nap instead of write.  This is a real thing that happened.  The month continued on, being rude to me, until finally (and I've had it, so it is finally, or so help me God) Lennard Cohen died, and as well as I'd been holding it together, that was the last straw and I turned into a blubbering ball of tears. 

Come on, life.  I'm already down.  Stop kicking me.

In terms of NaNo, I'm likening it to a marathon.  Let's say I trained for a marathon and I was in great shape, then suddenly broke my leg.  The cast came off the day before the race and I was technically all healed up, but when I went to go run, I mostly hobbled along, winded and sweaty, chanting, "No, no, I got this.  I got this.  I got this."

I've also let the blog get away from me, if you hadn't noticed.  I've eaten up all the book reviews that I'd written ahead of time and scheduled to go up.  So I have a plan now to every day do some work on the blog and write 500 words of my NaNo project until I build up my endurance and get the blog under control and can write 1,000 words a day of my NaNo project.  Then when December starts, I'm going to pretend it's my own personal NaNo (Solitary Novel Writing Month, or SoNo) and buckle down and fly.

It's a bummer missing out on all the community and enthusiasm of real NaNo, but on the scale of things that have been bummers this month, it's pretty low.

The Paper Magician Review

This week's novel is The Paper Magician, YA fantasy by Charlie N. Holmberg.

Upon graduating top of her class from magic school, instead of going on to bewitch metal to make firearms as she'd dreamed, Ceony is ordered to become a magician who bewitches paper, because the country only has a handful of Folders left.  Ceony moves in with Thane, her new teacher and master Folder, and learns that paper magic is more than just decorative.  She can animate paper craft an origami animals, make ghost images of stories written on paper, and make cold confetti snow.  When Thane is attacked by someone who bewitches human flesh, Ceony goes on an adventure to save him, taking her on a dreamlike trip through his heart.

Honesty hour: I read this because the animated paper craft sounded similar to something in the Firebird story and I wanted to check it out.  It turns out that there's a moment where the two stories both have a paper craft dog.  I went "Well, crap," and added it to evidence that I should abandon my story.  But while visually, the dogs may be similar, the magic works differently and the dogs emphasize such different things and function so differently that I decided it wasn't so bad.  Everything under the sun has already been done, and I'm sure that there are at least a dozen other magic paper dogs out there, so I'm not going to let it get me down.

As for the book itself, I found the whimsy charming.  The imagery was delightful, especially the origami fish that swam through the air or the paper airplane that can carry a passenger while not looking any more complicated than a standard paper airplane. 

The journey through the heart is strange, especially since the book starts slow, gets moving abruptly, and then bends what's real and what's figurative.  I was reminded of the dream logic in Inception, complete with malevolent ex-wife and "we need to keep going!" attitude.  I may have made several foghorn noises while reading.  But under this drama, there's still something sweet about traveling through someone's heart and seeing their hopes and fears.


I did not buy the romance, and I'm a bit skeeved out by it.  Teacher/student romantic relationships generally make me uncomfortable, especially in this case were the power dynamics are so horribly lopsided.  In addition to that, they scarcely interact outside their teacher/student relationship, except for when Ceony tromps about in Thane's heart and learns all his deep, dark secrets.  Her deciding that she loves him comes out of nowhere, and Thane just seems kind of amused by her obvious crush on him.   I feel like if she ever addressed it directly, he would not be down with it and would try to let her down easy, but as long as she keeps her crush to herself and acts like a grownup he can ignore her so she can save face.

I know I'm wrong about that extrapolation.  And I know there are two more books in this series that probably prove me wrong in ways that cannot be disputed, but I'm going to pretend.

***

Next week: Across the Universe, YA sci-fi with all the dystopia tropes in space, by Beth Revis.

The Magician King Review

This week's novel is The Magician King, the sequel to The Magicians by Lev Grossman.  Maybe I should have stuck with The Magicians.

Quentin, now a king of Fillory just like he's always dreamed of, is bored with having everything he's always dreamed of and is itching for a quest.  He sets sail to find the golden keys and save all magic, but it still doesn't satisfy his need for adventure.  Meanwhile, we learn about Julia's struggles after she was denied entrance at Breakbills.  Her life falls apart under her obsession with magic until she finds an underground magical society.

I have two issues with this book, and when they're juxtaposed, they make each other worse.

First is the story's portrayal of women.  This didn't bother me in the first book, because it was all from Quentin's point of view and therefore Quentin was sexist rather than the narrative or the author being sexist.  In this book, the perspectives are split between Quentin in the present, and Julia in the past.  Also, in the first book, the three female characters fit into the tropes of "demure and will sleep with Quentin," "screechy and will sleep with Quentin," and "aloof and won't sleep with Quentin,"  but it wasn't obvious that those were the only categories of female characters we were going to get.  When new female characters in this book started slotting into those roles, and when the "will/won't sleep with Quentin" issue became a bigger, more direct focus, this became more obvious.

I was nearing the end of the novel, thinking about how I would have to write the previous paragraph of this blog post when WHAM!  Sexual assault!  Until that point the violence and sex had been pretty tame, especially in comparison to the first book.  This was out of nowhere.  It was graphic.

"But Julia can't be a strong character unless she has overcome sexual assault!  It makes her stronger!  Right?  Right?"  Ugg.  This is such a dude-bro trope and I hate it hate it hate it.

And this horror show happens right along side my second complaint: that Quentin's journey, his problem that he needs to overcome is his perpetual angsting that his quest isn't questy enough.  His life is so hard. 

In a way I can see it, because as a reader his quest doesn't do it for me.  It's random and anticlimactic.  The search for the golden keys is more along the lines of wandering around until they stumble on them through luck or fate or what have you.  The stakes--that magic will disappear from the multiverse--never feel dire or urgent, and the exciting part of the endeavor to save magic happens elsewhere.  In fact, finding most of the keys happens off screen.  And in the end, when Quinten uses the keys to unlock the door, he has to ask if it worked because he can't tell, and an omnipotent side character has to tell him yes, it worked.

Was that a spoiler?  I don't care.

It's purposefully reminiscent of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but the whimsy of the Narnia books preserved in Fillory and the structure of the quest doesn't work with the tone of Quentin's woeful superiority complex or Julia's dark and edgy flashbacks.

I do like Julia's online depression support group, which requires prospective members to follow a long series of clues and puzzles before they can join.  I also like the underground magicians, how they have day jobs and can focus their studies as much or as little as they want.

The various strands of the story do click together in the end, but not nearly as neatly or intricately as in the first book.  In fact this makes the first book look all the more impressive.


It was a disappointment with moments of rage.

***

Weight of Feathers Review

This week's novel is The Weight of Feathers, fantasy with traveling circus acts and rival families, by Anna-Marie McLemore.

The Palomas are a Hispanic family of traveling performers, where the girls dress like mermaids and swim for an audience.  The Corbeaus are a French-Romani family of traveling performers, who wear giant wings and do acrobatic stunts in tree branches for an audience.  They hate each other.  When they end up preforming in the same town, Lace Paloma ends up being unknowingly rushed to the hospital by Cluck Corbeau, and when her family finds out that a Corbeau touched her (to bring her to the hospital), she's banished from the family.  Lace sets out to remove the curse she thinks Cluck cast over her so that she can return to her family.


The two cultures presented here are rich and deep.  Not only does McLemore show cultural traditions that feel authentic and respectful, but she also shows generational differences within the families and cultural differences between those born into the families and those that married in.  It gives both families a sense of place in a larger world.

I enjoyed the performances much more than I thought I would.  I've talked before about how much atmospheric magic leaves me unfulfilled, but this framed the atmospheric aspect in a way I really liked.  Yeah, people come and watch mermaids swim around and there's no big finale or show stopper or rising tension or anything, but this story describes it like watching fireworks.  The applause comes and goes in bursts.  This is relatable and understandable, and I buy it completely.


The love story was also nice and refreshing.  It's a star-crossed lovers scenario with the addition that she knows they're from feuding families while he doesn't, so I was waiting for them to have a falling out when he inevitably discovered the truth or for her to back out at a crucial moment because what would her family think??  But that didn't happen.  They weren't overly enraged or biased against each other, and at the same time they weren't ready to throw everything away for a fling.  They were both reasonable, listening to each other and putting things in perspective.  This is remarkable considering the feuding families trope and how unreasonable the other characters act. 

Speaking of which, the families in this blow my mind with how unreasonable they are.  The Paloma matriarch engages in what can only be described as gross victim blaming when she banishes Lace, and the rest of the family just goes along with it.  Meanwhile, Cluck's mother treats him like dirt because he's left handed and has red feathers growing out of his head instead of normal black feathers growing out of his head like the rest of the family.  It's cruel and insane.  Love your children unconditionally, you jerks!  I think this was supposed to emphasize how superstitious the families were, but it pushed it past the realm of believability, which says something when the characters have feathers and scales.

***

Next week: The Magician King, the sequel to The Magicians by Lev Grossman.