This is the precursor to popular recent books like The Adoration of Jenna Fox and the Skinned trilogy. Attractive, athletic Eva is in a coma after a horrible car accident. To save her, her parents agree to an experimental treatment: re-growing her mind in the body of a chimpanzee.
In Jenna Fox and Skinned, the main characters spend chapter after chapter bemoaning what they’ve lost and how Wrong their new bodies feel. What’s fantastic about Eva is that, while she’s understandably a bit freaked out to see a chimp in the mirror, she realizes that she has to not just accept it, but be happy about it.
Okay, it was better than dying, but that wasn’t enough. You had to awaken and open your eyes and see your new face and like what you saw. You had to make the human greeting and the chimp greeting and mean them.
Her father is a chimp researcher, so she grew up with chimps and feels at home with them; suddenly being one is not such a terrible stretch for her. The book is not so much about Eva coming to terms with her chimp half as it is about the rest of the world doing so.
Apocalypse how? This is one of the few books I can think of that watches a slow apocalypse happen. At the start of the book you know that there are many, many more people on Earth than we have now, packed into every corner. Almost all animals that aren’t adapted to live with people have gone extinct — except for chimps, because of their research value. But the middle-class Western world, at least, is chugging along much like ours does. When the apocalypse comes, it isn’t a bomb or a natural disaster; it’s simply human beings, unable to live in the world we’ve created:
“It’s happening all over. The whole human race is thinking in shorter and shorter terms…. We’re giving up. Packing it in…. Trouble with us humans is we keep forgetting we’re animals. You know what happens when an animal population expands beyond what the setup will bear? Nature finds ways of cutting them back. Usually it’s plain starvation, but even when there’s food to go around something gets triggered inside them. They stop breeding or they eat their own babies or peck one another to death — there’s all sorts of ways. Us too. It’s in us. We can’t escape it.”
By the end of the book, crowds of people are putting rocks in their pockets and walking into the ocean. It’s one of the saddest, most beautiful apocalypses I ever read, and I think it had a heavy hand in shaping my values.
13 vs. 31: This absolutely holds up. Not only is it still a beautifully written book, it doesn’t seem dated at all, and in fact still manages to feel unique twenty years later.
Listen-alikes: I feel compelled to mention that in junior high my friend P and I were obsessed with how Toad the Wet Sprocket’s “Walk on the Ocean” reminded us of this book. More than a decade later when I heard We’re About 9’s “Weight of the Ocean,” I had the same reaction.
Last month I wrote a lot about apocalypses and dystopias, a perennial favorite topic here in Parenthetical-land. Those posts, and Presenting Lenore’s Dystopian February, inspired my own theme month:
Welcome to Old-School Apocalypse April!
I’ve been re-reading some childhood favorites from my YA Apocalypse Bookshelf (yes, I really have such a thing). Some hold up brilliantly, some not so much. Stay tuned for more doom-y goodness!
Magic is most interesting when it works like a physical weapon: the character is given it (or learns she has it), and has to learn how to use it. It behaves according to rules, and she has to learn those rules in order to use it effectively. In a historical novel, you never see a character pick up a sword for the first time and “just know” exactly how to best the powerful enemy. So why does this happen so often with fantasy magic?
Nieve started promisingly. I quite liked Nieve herself — she spends a free afternoon starting her own newspaper, to see if she has an aptitude for journalism. She buys a stylish lime green shirt, not because “she overvalued trendy clothes and name-brand runners and all that, but [because] the odd cool item was useful, even necessary. She could hold her head up in school and not be marked for ridicule….” This shows admirable practicality and social awareness for a young heroine.
But then her town starts to fall into a gothtastic pit of spiderwebs and creepy carnivorous plants and gaunt apothecaries with eyeball candy. (Alexander Griggs-Burr’s illustrations are fantastic, definitely the best part of the book.) Her vaguely magical “Old World” Gran assigns her a mysterious sidekick, Lias, and sends her off to save the world.
Unfortunately, it’s unclear from whom the world needs saving. Or why Nieve is the one to do it. Or what Lias and Gran have to do with anything, or what’s going on with all the other characters who pop in at just the right times to move the plot along. Lias has a lot of these answers from the beginning, but of course he can’t share them with Nieve (and us) along the way; that would be too easy. It’s much more fun to read a couple of chapters of Murder, She Wrote-style wrap-up at the end.
And, most frustratingly, the magic has no logic and no rules. Sometimes Nieve “just knows” what she’s supposed to do. Sometimes another character tells her (though it’s not always clear how they know.) Rarely do we see her work anything out for herself, even though she’s clearly no intellectual slouch. She never learns to use her sword; she just happens to be inherently gifted with sword-wielding.
Coming to a library or independent bookstore near you in April.
(Full disclosure: I really wanted to love this, because it was the first review copy sent to me by a publisher specifically in order to get my opinion. I appreciate the vote of confidence, Biblioasis; I wish I had better things to say about the book.)
Another very complicated story by the author of one of my recent favorites, Jellicoe Road. She’s trying out fantasy this time: when Finnikin, son of the captain of the guard of Lumatere, is a child, the ruling family is murdered and the city occupied. It’s also sealed off, Sleeping Beauty-style, by the dying curse of the powerful leader of a persecuted people.
Finnikin escapes and spends his adolescence traveling with his mentor, doing what they can to alleviate the suffering of the scattered Lumateran refugee camps and find their people a new home. As the book opens, he has been called to a distant monastery to take on a new traveling companion: Evanjalin, a traumatized Lumateran refugee who claims to have seen their kingdom’s lost heir in her prophetic dreams.
I love me some complicated stories (5th season of Lost, what now?), but this is a bit “kitchen sink.” There are too many Important Messages, too many characters with Painful Pasts, and too many Big Reveals. The stuff about the two goddesses and their religious conflict, in particular, seemed tacked-on.
I also have no problem with violence or sex or challenging subjects in YA lit, per se. That sort of book is not for everyone, which is why it’s part of my job to be familiar with what might be difficult about the books in my collection, but they can be powerful for a lot of kids. That said, I do have a problem with gratuity. If it isn’t key to the story or the characters, gloss on over that sex scene or graphic torture. I’m no prude, but despite the themes of growing up and finding oneself, I’d be hard-pressed not to put this in the adult section.
All that aside, I think I would have been more into this when I was younger. I was going to be a martyr to activism; the strong woman tying herself to trees, no doubt about the rightness of her cause. I admired no end characters in books who walk miles with no shoes and torn and bloody feet, as Evanjalin does, sheltered by their single-minded purpose.
Turns out I have no single-minded purpose. Turns out I prefer nesting in a safe city with my friends around me and working at a job that is meaningful but not overly exhausting (er, usually). No one’s going to write any epic biographies about me, and I am a-ok with that. Now that I’m an adult, Evanjalin and Finnikin’s single-mindedness just seems naive. I recognize that they are refugees, that their lives are challenged in ways that mine never has been and hopefully never will be. But I still found it hard to connect with them. I want a spin-off about Lady Abian and her household full of displaced villagers, keeping her community alive with low-key good humor (and randomly having really loud sex with her husband, because for some reason Marchetta felt the need to share these moments with us). She’s much more my speed.
But this seems to be in the Megan Whalen Turner category of “stuff I should love, that everyone else loved, but I couldn’t get into.” So your mileage may definitely vary.
Chanda Phelan wrote this article based on her thesis, for which she looked at a ton of apocalyptic literature from 1826 to 2007 and charted the nature of the apocalypse. Click the image at the top of the article for a full-size version of her amazing chart.
See the spike in natural apocalypses right around the publication of Silent Spring (1962)! Note all the divine apocalypses when the first Left Behind book came out (1996)! I’m dying to get a look at her raw data, but just the graph is fun enough.
(All this discussion of doom books has inspired me to re-read some gems from my YA post-apocalyptic bookshelf. Old-skool apocalypse theme month coming in April!)
Ah, vampires. Sexy, powerful, immortal vampires. What if you achieved immortality at your dorkiest? Would you be stuck an awkward high school boy forever?
While we’re asking questions, what if you were sick to death of vampires, but the author of The True Meaning of Smekday, one of the most brilliant pieces of children’s fiction in recent years, wrote a vampire novel? You’d read it. And the bar would be set way too high, and you’d be disappointed.
Adam Rex is a funny guy, no doubt. He captures the sweaty awkwardness of the high school male perfectly, and if I taught at a school with boys in it, I would buy this right away and make them all read it. (As it is, there are a few too many boner jokes for my clientele.)
It did not, however, transcend my expectations for “high school boy vampire.” There are touches of metaphoric theme: “vampirism = unhealthy relationship” and “immortality is static; growing up means changing.” There are intriguing ideas: one character posits that what it means to be a vampire shifts based on societal expectations; another character has “the google,” a mental illness that comes of too much self-referential internet use. None of these are explored nearly enough; the story is a mishmash of dropped threads that aren’t integral to the conclusion.
Oh, and can we talk about the title? The fact that Doug is fat really has nothing to do with anything. The point is that he’s dorky and unpopular; the title uses “fat” as lazy and offensive shorthand for that. The first chapter is called “My Dork Embrace,” which is the cleverest thing in the whole book and would have made an excellent title.
Post-apocalyptic and/or dystopian fiction! It’s: a) pretty much all I read as an adolescent, b) what made the hippie I am today, c) ridiculously popular all of a sudden in YA lit, or d) all of the above?
D, obviously. The YA lit world is exploding with talk of dystopias. This article from Publishers Weekly gives a good overview of what’s coming out, and theorizes about its current popularity:
“In the late ’80s, the government was seemingly more in control of terrorist things, and the financial system seemed more in control,” says Regina Griffin, executive editor at Egmont USA…. “People didn’t feel that same sense of perpetual unease that is invading books now.” In other words, the time is ripe. “The dystopic novel reflects the current mood of the new generation of young people who see that their future isn’t as rosy,” says child psychiatrist Elizabeth Berger, author of Raising Kids with Character.
As someone who read boatloads of these books in the late ’80s, I don’t know that I agree with this. I remember my 3-2-1 Contacts being full of acid rain and pollution, and anyone who grew up in a liberal household like mine was unsettled by the “traditional values” of the Reagan/H.W. Bush era. Maybe the government was “more in control of terrorist things,” but that just means that didn’t happen to be our Number One Fear at the time. Or maybe I was just a downer kid.
Diana Peterfreund, author of Rampant, tries to untangle “post-apocalyptic” from “dystopian.” (This is slightly easier than defining “fantasy” vs. “science fiction,” but only slightly.) It’s getting more common to lump the terms together, but Diana seems to prefer thinking of a dystopia as “a utopia gone horribly wrong” or “aiming for utopia and missing.”
I’m inclined to agree. Dystopias often follow apocalypses (cue Buffy line about “the plural of apocalypse”), but the beauty of the English language is specificity. We have two words for a reason. Uglies and The Ask and the Answer are both post-apoc and dystopian, The Forest of Hands and Teeth is just plain post-apoc, and Little Brother is just plain dystopian (assuming you would argue, considering the book takes place years later on the other side of the country, that Sept. 11th was not an apocalypse).
As Diana says, “Like a scientist, the author of a dystopian work of fiction creates a set of very particular conditions within which he runs his human experiment.” I love this; that’s exactly what appeals to me about dystopias. Whereas while post-apocalyptics can be this specific, they often boil down to the same themes, with the restrictive governments and/or warlord anarchy.
It does make me wish that we had a word that would lump the two sub-genres together, though, since as Diana points out, they appeal to the same readers. I usually say “speculative fiction,” but that’s not specific enough. Thoughts, clever readers?
Nine months after effectively banning most fund-raising food sales in city schools, a city panel will vote Wednesday on an amended regulation that will allow student groups to sell items like Pop-Tarts and Doritos during the school day, but not brownies, zucchini bread or anything else homemade.
Ostensibly this is about “health”: they have a whole list of proposed regulations about percentage of calories from fat and allowable ingredients. It could also be about allergies. (My theory, based on the sort of things I’ve heard people say at my school, is that it’s at least partly about sanitation: who knows what could be going on at those other parents’ houses? At least if it’s pre-packaged I know it’s safe!)
Shall we count the things that piss me off here? “Childhood obesity” is a bogus bogeyman. Let’s teach our kids to make healthy choices about their diets rather than micromanaging everything. A list of ingredients and a portion size doesn’t make something healthy — in fact, I would argue that, whatever the fat content, brownies made from scratch are healthier than Pop-Tarts because they’re made out of actual food ingredients pronounceable by human beings. Baking together at home is an educational family bonding activity; stopping by Costco is not so much. And for crying out loud, can schools stop [insert gross metaphor here that I won't use because this is a family site] huge corporations already?
That’s five things, and I didn’t even include my made-up sanitation theory!
While the wall-mounted “anti-fridges” are pretty cool, I’m not sure they’re so practical for large quantities. My current eating lifestyle involves very little refrigeration in production or transportation, but lots in my home. Turns out you have to chill a lot of produce if you a) live in New England, b) don’t buy produce except from the farmer’s market, and c) want to eat something other than root veggies all winter. But it does concern me to be so dependent on refrigeration… clearly I’ve found my next Crazy Hippie Food Project!
The best thing about this link, though, is that it introduced me to You Are What You Eat by Mark Menjivar, “a series of portraits made by examining the interiors of refrigerators in homes across the United States.” It’s not quite as amazing as Material World: A Global Family Portrait, but darn close.
This is the next book by the author of Marcelo in the Real World. I wanted to adore this as much as I adored Marcelo, but it didn’t quite come together for me.
Pancho is a troubled young man with one goal: to avenge the mysterious death of his sister. She was his legal guardian, so after her death, he’s taken to St. Anthony’s, a home for boys. His summer job at St. Tony’s? Taking care of D.J., another boy his age who’s dying of cancer. Before D.J. dies, he’s working to complete his masterpiece, the Death Warrior Manifesto — and Pancho is suddenly key to his plan.
A lot of this is pretty standard Dying Kid Yoda stuff. D.J. spends a lot of time, especially in the first half of the book, sounding holy; I wanted him to sound more like a kid. Assuming you’ve read a book before, you know from the beginning that hanging out with D.J. will “save” Pancho from his anger — though I did believe Pancho’s journey, and it was nice that the emotional saving went both ways by the end.
I found the dialogue forced at times, and the first half of the book dragged. When they get to Albuquerque things picked up, but if I hadn’t had the “Marcelo was so awesome” motivation, it would have already lost me by then.
It’s entirely possible that this is just me, though. My guess is that this will appeal to the kids who love Chris Crutcher (though maybe slightly older versions of those kids, since this is a slower book).
Coming to a bookstore near you in March 2010. I picked up my copy at ALA.
The opinions here are mine, and do not necessarily reflect those of my school. Also, even when I review books for younger kids, these posts are written for older teens and adults. In other words, I swear sometimes. Don't get upset.
This is the next book by the author of Marcelo in the Real World. I wanted to adore this as much as I adored Marcelo, but it didn’t quite come together for me.