I expected this book to be far lighter than it was, and for a rather younger audience. There’s a lot of drinking, and more “mature themes” than I expected from the pink, glittery cover. Not so much for my 6th graders after all.

Bad things first, because they’re always more entertaining (and because they largely outweighed the good):

Sometimes the prose sounds like emo poetry from a high school lit mag:

And it’s in that final moment, as the snow settles back down to the bottom of the globe and the last few flakes drift lazily down, that you can really see everything clearly. Can see what has become of the figures inside. The ones locked in their dance, unable to change anything. It’s then that you realize that’s all there is, just the flip and the shake and the settle. And there’s nothing beautiful in that at all.

I started groaning out loud every time a character “cuts his/her eyes” at another character. It’s an unusual enough expression to be noticeable, and it happens every other page.

The strike is just a plot device to get all the characters together at Disney, which in turn is just a metaphorical device so they can talk about “making dreams come true” a lot. None of the characters — including intelligent, thoughtful main characters Ella and Luke — ever consider even for a minute whether it’s ok to cross a picket line. Am I ridiculously old-fashioned to be bothered by that?

And of course, Ella and Luke are clever, funny people who are clearly good together. So why the hell does it take them the whole book to figure that out??

Good things:

Other times (usually when the characters are talking instead of ruminating), the prose is hilarious. And there’s some real, fairly original discussion of how we should construct our future, and how we might deviate from the path laid out for us. I like seeing success-bound teens choose options other than the standard success choices of college or family business.

Overall, I found it entertaining, but skippable.

The riddles are a version of the song “Scarborough Fair,” popularized by Simon & Garfunkel. I absolutely love that Lucy and her family go about solving them with logic rather then magic. There are no accidental discoveries or “I just knew it was right” b.s. here; they research and think and experiment and use the interwebs and solve every riddle their own damn selves. (MINOR SPOILER ALERT: the solution to “no seams or needlework” is, of course, felting. I hope when I’m under a faerie curse the answer to the riddle is homemade jam.)

Unfortunately a lot of this book makes less sense than the riddle solutions, and I often found the characters (with the exception of Lucy’s parents, who kick ass) eye-rollingly foolish, or sweet, or evil, or whatever template they drew from. It’s a hell of a page-turning supernatural romance, though, I’ll give it that. Definitely worth a few hours of your life if that’s your thing.

Also reviewed at: Harmony Book Reviews, The Book Smugglers, and Angieville (who took the words right out of my brain with the similarity to Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin).

Basically, Prentisstown is a human settlement on an alien planet. There was a war with the natives, who were wiped out — but not before they released some nasty biological warfare in the form of Noise. Noise killed all the women in Prentisstown and left the men able to hear each others’ thoughts, all the time, whether they want to or not. (Noise also makes animals talk, so if talking dogs are your thing, well, here you go. Just remember that this came out before Up whenever Manchee barks, “Squirrel!”)

Todd is the last boy in Prentisstown, about to become a man when he turns thirteen in a month. But shit is going ill, and even though he doesn’t understand any of it, he and his dog need to run, now, into the rest of New World beyond the swamp. He’d always been taught there was nothing beyond Prentisstown, but it turns out that a lot of what he thought he knew is a lie…

“Everything he thought he knew was a lie” books are some of my favorites. I love tragic misunderstandings and deep secrets that slowly unfold. Books that take place on other planets are ideal for this (think Speaker for the Dead and The Sparrow), and I realized it had been way too long since any of my SF had been other-world rather than Earth’s-future.

Knife is an outstanding book. I gobbled it up in two days and will be reading the sequel as soon as I can get my grubby paws on it. My only gripes (because criticisms are more interesting to write about than kvells):

• It’s actually too fast-paced. Riding a roller-coaster for two days straight started to make me sick, rather than exhilarated.
• I figured out the secrets long before the book laid them out. Which was doubly annoying because the characters figured them out long before the book saw fit to share with the rest of the class. Ness seemed to think he needed to hold on to them for the bang-up conclusion, but there was enough interesting stuff going on that it would have been fine if he’d paid them out earlier, after he’d given enough clues that they were pretty obvious anyway. For a book that’s about what an overabundance of information does to people, Ness’s characters are infuriatingly stingy with theirs.

  SPOILER

• I’ve never bought into the “Come to the Dark Side, Luke” school of boss battles. It strikes me as an artificial valorizing of innocence. Not that I know what I’m talking about — I’ve never killed anyone — but it seems to me that a nuanced, mature person ought to be able to make a moral distinction between Being a Killer and killing that one evil dude who has been chasing you without mercy for the whole damn book. (Sure, Todd’s thirteen, but the whole book is about his journey to manhood, so I think he counts as “mature” by the end.)

  I get that in this case, it was more not wanting to give in to Prentisstown’s crazy worldview than real belief that Todd would be a horrible person if he killed Aaron. I felt much better about it all after Viola killed him herself. But there was far too much discussion of Todd’s Boy Who Wouldn’t Kill purity for my taste — like, when did he become Harry Potter? Why is he special? You know I hate destiny books anyway, and here the destiny felt tacked-on. He’s a more interesting character if he’s just a victim of circumstance.

  Also reviewed at: Allow me to introduce you to Asking the Wrong Question, my new favorite blog about smart stories (books and TV). Her posts are long — really, really long — but worth it.

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On one level, this is a rocking adventure, complete with shark attacks, cannibals, and a duel. On another level, it’s a gorgeously philosophical exploration of religion, science, and colonialism:

“Hah, you fall silent,” said the priest. “You are a good child, the women say, and you do good things, but the difference between the trousermen and the Raiders is that sooner or later the cannibals go away!”
“That’s a terrible thing to say!” said Daphne hotly. “We don’t eat people!”
“There are different ways to eat people, girl, and you are clever, oh yes, clever enough to know it. And sometimes the people don’t realize it’s happened until they hear the belch!”

It has some touches of Pratchett’s trademark nonsense, just enough to keep things light, but this is not a silly book. It is a brilliant book that I’m going to be thinking about for awhile, and you should all go read it so you can think about it with me.

It doesn’t hurt that it speaks to one of my literary kinks. You know I have a thing about fantasies in which people defy their destinies, and this is the ultimate anti-destiny book. Mau’s entire character arc has to do with discovering who he is when he can’t be what the culture of his people expected. He left his boy’s soul behind, but he never had the ceremony to give him a man’s soul. So who is he? His people’s gods and revered Grandfathers are always speaking in his head, ordering him to recreate the Nation as it was. Much of the book is about Mau learning to ignore those voices and think for himself, while still appreciating the value of ritual and tradition.

Read-alikes: Honestly, this reminds me of nothing so much as The Princess Bride. The His Dark Materials trilogy and Kenneth Oppel’s Airborne have a similar feel as well (self-reliant girls bucking society’s expectations; a magical touch of new science), and of course you can’t beat Bloody Jack for 18th century high seas adventure.

Also reviewed at: the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Teen Reads.

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Hey, everybody, it’s post-apocalyptic YA from the ’80s! Home, sweet home. It even has a watercolory cover and a fresh-faced, all-American heroine named “Janie Johnson”! This book was brought to my attention recently [and by "recently," I mean about six months ago, when I actually read it -- Ed.] by an old friend, who presented me with this name-that-book challenge over the phone: “It’s a book I read when I was a kid. Some kids are hiding underground when aliens attack and destroy the whole world.”

At first I was shamed, because how is it possible that there’s a book I haven’t read fitting that description? But when my friend figured out the title and emailed it to me, I realized that it’s set in the same universe as The Turning Place, one of my favorite childhood books! The Turning Place tells the story of humanity after the Clordian Sweep (the aforementioned alien apocalypse) in a series of short stories, skipping hundreds of years or more between each tale. I’m a sucker for sci-fi that leaps centuries in a single bound; it’s comforting somehow. If things suck now, shall we try 300 years in the future?

Strange Tomorrow is only two stories, but it uses the same trick. The first half is about the first Janie, who is alone with her military father and younger brother in the President’s Cold War bunker when the Sweep destroys (almost) every living thing on earth. Janie is able to convince her family to want to survive and make the best of their worst possible situation.

The second half follows Janie #2, named for that first Janie a couple of generations later. It turns out that some life survived in valleys and caves, so the handful of survivors were able to grow food and live outside the bunker. Janie is part of a small group ordered to start a new village in a different valley a few days’ walk away. She fears the isolation, and is convinced that it must be better to stay in contact, but that is not The Way Things Are Done.

If you need more 80s post-apocalyptic YA in your life (and who doesn’t?), give this a go. I can’t imagine a much more complete devastation than the Clordian Sweep, but the charmingly resilient heroines will make you feel hopeful, even though the only animals left in the world are the bees, rabbits, and chickens whose eggs were frozen in the bunker. And probably some cockroaches.

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