This is a Jellicoe Road. That’s become my shorthand for a wonderful but difficult book that I want to put down early, but stick with because a reader I trust assures me, “Stick with it; it all comes together in the end.” And so I pass this on to you: You will probably be confused. If you, like me, have limited patience for protagonists whose defining characteristic is emo self-loathing, Briony will start off annoying the crap out of you. You will be suspicious of everyone, and not sure if there’s a single character worth hanging your hat on.

That’s just what they want you to think. Stick with it; it all comes together in the end.

I hesitate to say much else, because the pleasure of this book is so much in the unfolding of secrets. The setting is a small town in Victorian England that is just getting a train station, but has an earlier-century habit of hanging witches; the descriptions are appropriately creepy and claustrophobic. This is dark stuff, on occasion, but with trademark YA uplift at the end. Briony’s language is repetitive and quirky in a way that is trying to be poetic, and will feel that way to many readers, but often the poetry felt too “high school lit mag” to me:

We were to have new clothes.

We were to have new clothes because I tried to bargain with the Boggy Mun and he outwitted me. I should feel guilty, but I don’t. Father shouldn’t feel guilty, but he does. We were to have new clothes because I made Rose sick.

This, to me, is Hell.

On and on ring the lunatic bells.

And the love story? It feels mature (such a relief). It’s not good enough to have a relationship that’s fun for awhile; oh no, in so much YA these days, he needs to be your One True Soulmate Schmoopypants, and I don’t buy it. Most of us are far too un-formed in high school to luck into our dream partner. This is one of the rare young literary relationships that I believe might actually work out.

(This is a conversation for another post, but it occurs to me that a lot of YA romances these days follow the conventions of adult romance, in that the couple needs to get married — or at least imply that they will. Paranormals, of course, often take that to the next level — they’ll get married for all eternity. Why is this? Teen romances used to have their own standards, in which a fun, healthy relationship was plenty — why isn’t that good enough anymore? Or am I wrong? While I read a lot of books with love stories (I read YA at a girls’ school library, after all), I admittedly don’t read a lot of romances. (Ever wonder why this blog is called Parenthetical? Uh-huh.))

Read-alikes: Graceling! In the way it drops you in the middle of the action, in the maturity of the love story, plus in one other way I won’t get into. It also plays with the self-hating unreliable narrator in similar ways to A Long Long Sleep.

Cover: It sucks. I hate to be that blunt, but it is exactly wrong in every way for this book. If the cover makes you go, “Ew, historical paranormal romance; over it,” you will probably like the book because it is in many ways the exact opposite of that.

Also reviewed by: Things Mean A Lot (who has some smart things to say about how this book handles gender), The Book Smugglers, The Spectacle, and Wandering Librarians.

This is one of the first books from Tu Books, the new Lee & Low imprint devoted to YA genre fiction with protagonists of color. I’ve blogged about them quite a bit, and was super excited about Tankborn in particular. It’s not a perfect book, but there was a lot I liked about it. It certainly kept me turning pages, and I’m still thinking about it a couple of weeks after I finished it.

Criticisms first, because that’s how I roll. While of course I understand intellectually that slavery happens and I can see how a group of colonists could theoretically set up that hierarchical society, I never believed the particulars. It felt like a collection of parallels to specific Earth cultures rather than a believable world of its own. (The author mentions her fascination with the Indian caste system; the connections to African-American slavery are also pretty obvious.)

I also didn’t get Kayla as a character, or Mishalla for that matter. A chapter or two at the beginning where we see them as friends, their lives before their Assignments separate them for work, would have added a great deal.

That said, I really wanted to know what was going to happen! I read the last third or so in one go. It was clear that something was off, that there were going to be twists. I guessed some of them, but never too soon, and I was surprised but satisfied by others. There was romance, but it never took too much attention away from the girls’ bravery — their choices were partly based on love, believably for teenage girls, but they never forgot that they had other responsibilities that were more important.

Since the whole point of Tu is to bring more people of color into YA fiction, I feel like I need to address how race is handled in the book. There’s a lot of discussion of color, because the castes are more or less stratified that way. The “high-status trueborns” are described as being a “perfect” brown, with straight dark hair; the implication is a sort of South Asian look, which is emphasized by the South Asian feel of many of their names. Lower status people have either much darker skin or much lighter; it’s emphasized that there’s no way someone with red hair and pale skin (like Mishalla) could be high-status. The girl on the cover, for once, actually seems darker than the description of the character (presumably Kayla). I’m mostly okay with that, given the cover-whitewashing Tu is trying to combat, though I do wish the cover had shown Kayla as the more mixed-race girl it’s implied she is.

So okay, class is still tied to color, just differently than we as Americans are used to. The most interesting thing, though, is how class is handled, particularly the cross-class relationship between Kayla and her high-status employer’s great-grandson. He starts off defending the system that puts him on top, with the expected “but you’re safer and happier this way” arguments, but slowly comes to see the great wrongs being done. What I liked was that Kayla doesn’t immediately accept his guilt. She basically says, “Yeah, that’s very nice, but you’re still comfortable in your nice house and your safe life, and I’m still a slave. I’m not going to congratulate you on your epiphany.” I wished that attitude had lasted longer.

Overall, this is the kind of social commentary science fiction I always want more of. I can see Uglies fans getting into this.

Also reviewed by: Wandering Librarians. Uma Krishnaswami talks about being a “cultural consultant” for Tankborn, and interviews the editor Stacy Whitman.

ARC yoinked by Wandering Librarians’ Arianna for me, by request, at ALA. Thanks!

My main complaint is that so many of the narratives involved being saved by the love of small children, and that all but one found True Love with men (and there were intimations of future True Love for that one as well). One of the greatest strengths of the YA series was that the girls were such distinct, three-dimensional people. Each girl got her own story in each book, and while some were about romantic love, they were just as likely to be about family or travel or creative pursuits. At 30, everything was about love and children and self; career was a necessary evil, pushed to the background whenever possible in favor of the more traditionally feminine concerns.

This is very much an adult book, as opposed to YA. Not much happens in the middle; each woman is mostly wandering around feeling lost and musing on her third-life crisis. I spent a lot of time yelling at them to make some damn decisions already! (Personally, I’m a lot more in charge of my life at 30 than I was at 16, but the genres of women’s fiction and YA say differently.) I see no reason why teen fans of the originals shouldn’t read it or wouldn’t enjoy it, but the feel was quite different.

Should Brashares ever feel inclined to return to this world (since she’s apparently in the business of granting my writing requests), I would like to hear the stories of the men. Eric, Brian, and to a somewhat lesser extent Kostos are supporting players in their own lives. Don’t they have families, friends, histories of their own? Don’t they have loved ones besides their girlfriends’ best friends who might want to be part of the raising of their children? Some of the decisions the men make in this book for the love of the Sisterhood seemed verging on preposterous (if of course terribly romantic), and I want to hear their sides of those decisions.

But as much as I gripe as a feminist and a critic and a realist, as a romantic who’s “known” these women for a decade I would have thrown the book across the room if Eric left Bee or if Kostos and Lena didn’t get their “someday.” Read it in the grass with some strawberry sorbet… and then go back and re-read teenage Carmen making up with her dad’s new family or teenage Tibby filming her “suckumentary.” There’s more to these women than their children or their men, whether it shows up in this particular book or not.

Also reviewed by: Elizabeth Willse: Writer for Hire, Forever YA, and Kirkus (with a GIGANTIC SPOILER).

It is, of course, “to be continued.” Sigh.

Cover: The top image is of the final cover. The bottom image is of the cover on the ARC I have, which I vastly prefer. The mask is pretty, but it could be any fantasy with Venetian-inspired masked balls and whatnot. The discarded cover expresses more effectively, I think, the otherworldliness of the story and its characters. Plus, those colors! So striking. Ah, well. I will treasure my ARC, anyway.

Also reviewed by: Reading Rants, ABQ Teen Readers, and Ramblings of a Teenage Novelist.

ARC generously provided by the editor.

What I left out is that the Balanchines don’t deal in drugs; they deal in chocolate. This story takes place in 2083, when chocolate and coffee are criminalized as scapegoats for a failing country. Zevin makes 72 years in the future feel entirely believable — no wild flights of technology, just hints at the post-peak oil decay (rationed food and paper; no production of new clothes so everyone wears hand-me-downs; books pulped to make “essentials” like toilet paper because everyone reads electronically anyway).

This is not post-apocalyptic: there’s been no apocalypse, no moment of disaster. Everyone will probably call it dystopian because that’s the buzzword of the moment, but it’s not: there is no attempt at utopia. There’s just the corruption, crime, and poverty we already have, taken up a few notches — barely perceptible when seen through Anya’s eyes, who is well provided for. There is no overall sense, as in Hunger Games, that this world sucks. This is more like Bumped — a world that seems normal to its teenagers, but more than a little off to us.

Anya is one of my favorite heroines in recent memory. She’s tough, snarky, and pragmatic, above all. She falls in love with Win despite her best resistance; he is the romantic in the relationship. She remains a clear-eyed realist with no illusions that love will conquer all. In a field of dreamy romances, that was unbelievably refreshing.

(Less refreshing is that it is, of course, the start of a series. Can’t anybody write stand-alones anymore? But I’m dying to hang out with Anya, Natty, Leo, and Win again, so I can’t complain too much.)

Zevin’s Elsewhere is one of my long-time fall-backs: I have yet to meet an adolescent girl who didn’t love it. And when they get a little older, they love Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, too. This is offbeat enough that it might not have quite the same universal appeal, but I’m sure many of my students will be huge fans.

Also reviewed by: As These Pages Fly, who also has an interview with the author.

ARC generously provided by the publicist.

Man. I don’t remember the last time I have been this disappointed in a book. The first half is awesome. The small Southern town feels cozy, humid, and slightly creepy, like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Thomas is an entirely believable older brother, whom Emerson torments but also trusts with her secrets. Emerson herself is no Bella; she has useful skills and sass. She gets pissed when Michael plays the obnoxious “I can’t tell you yet, for your own good” game and wears her bunny slippers for a late-night rendezvous, “just to be cheeky.”

And then she just… stops. Somewhere halfway through, she (and her brother and sister-in-law, for that matter) drink the Michael Kool-Aid and start believing everything he says without independent verification. Do a really dangerous, crazy thing because these people you’ve just met say it’s important? Sure, okay! I kept waiting for him to have secret powers of hypnosis or something, but nope. Their connection is just electric (as in, there are literal sparks) and so of course she trusts him.

If you’re into paranormal romances, this might not bother you. It seems to be a convention of the genre. There’s even the manufactured temptation of the hot best friend, because you need a love triangle. The book is well-written, and if this is your thing, it’s at least original for the paranormal genre. I could only have been so let down because I was so sucked in at the beginning; I’ll definitely be waiting to see what McEntire does next. I might even read the (sigh, of course there’s a) sequel.

Cover: I actually love this, because it’s so different from so much of what I’ve seen. It is not a Photoshopped image of a girl in a floaty dress looking poutily at the camera. It’s a painting, for starters, and a slightly stylized one at that. It feels a little “Norton’s Guide to Modern Feminist Literature” to me, for some reason — like it’s more Ladies’ Literary than YA — but I’m cool with that.

Also reviewed by: YA Reads, A Reading Nook, and The Book Heist, none of whom had the issues I did. And Prationality, who shared at least some of them.

ARC generously provided by the Brookline Public Library Shelf Respect YA book club.

VAGUE SPOILERS

(The end, by the way, is a total cop-out on just about every level. The grand plan doesn’t really work, from a science fiction standpoint. And the resolution feels like a Murder, She Wrote episode, where the least likely villain waves a gun around and explains everything in detail to the protagonists. But again, if you’re in it for the romance, this won’t bother you, because it is all very romantic. And Michael is a cutie.)

This was super fun! It’s not Great Literature or anything, but I zipped through it in a night and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. There’s a relatable protagonist, her sassy best friend, her loveable dad, and of course her douchebag boyfriend (who did have enough positive qualities that I could see why she’d dated him in the first place, thank goodness) and the sensitive hunk she falls for. Who is quite a catch, I will agree. (Sorry, I’m pretty sure that doesn’t really qualify as a spoiler.)

The core of this book is the girls’ discovery that sex is a dangerous and unfair weapon when used by either gender; men don’t have a corner on manipulation. There’s a somewhat heavy-handed feminist/sex-positive message of “there is no ‘normal’,” as well as an introduction to the concepts of slut-shaming and double standards. I say “heavy-handed,” but I’m always amazed at how uncritically my students think about this stuff. So I actually think this book adds something really important to the conversation, and maybe it needs to be a bit unsubtle (in, again, a light and fun read) to get the point across.

If it wasn’t obvious from the premise, this is definitely an older-YA sort of book. It’s all about the sex, plus it’s not shy with the f-bombs. If you’re going to try to tell me that even my relatively sheltered students are not talking this way and thinking about (and doing, some of them) this stuff as sophomores, juniors, and seniors, you have never met teenagers. This has “Top Banned Books of 2011″ written all over it, but it’s an entirely appropriate YA book. Just maybe not for middle schoolers.

Despite the unbelievable amount of buzz, I couldn’t find other reviews yet. But Phoebe North did an awesome interview with Kody Keplinger. (I’m reading all September ARCs right now, so if I don’t post some of my reviews this blog will be pretty quiet. But I’ll remind you when this comes out, promise!)

Review copy provided by the publisher — and signed by the author! — at BEA.

This was such a “right book at the right time” for me. The idea of chucking it all for a solitary cross-country journey of self-discovery sounds so awesome right now I can’t even tell you. This is the sort of book that inspires a soundtrack — she’s biking, not sitting on a train or bus, but you can picture the “staring out a window listening to folk rock as the corn fields fly by” montage anyway. I have a pretty much endless appetite for that montage, in movie or book form. It’s so romantically appealing to believe that a geographical journey can inspire and mirror an internal journey, that we can return changed to a changed life.

(I said this to Deborah, and she reminded me of the Dar Williams song “Road Buddy”:

I thought we’d find each story like a snake-skin or an arrowhead
But we only stop at fast food places
They hate their jobs; I understand

So okay, not every road trip leads to great discovery; some just lead to French fries and indigestion. Grand romantic gestures are often a disappointment. I think I’ll take my cross-country train trip anyway.)

I actually think this has a lot to do with the appeal of YA for me in general. Every YA novel is in some sense a coming-of-age, and therefore every one is about a reinvention of the self (if not necessarily a drastic one). Adult books often seem to be looking backward at choices made in the past and trying to incorporate those choices into the current self; YA books deal with making those choices and evolving. I suppose at some point I might feel like I’ve accumulated enough of a past that I relate to characters dealing with theirs, but for now I’m still more interested in what happens next and who I am becoming. (Disclaimer: I read comparatively few “literary” adult novels, so I might be way off base here. I want to explore this idea more as part of the endless debate about “how to define a YA novel,” so please share your thoughts!)

Wow, I got off track there, didn’t I? Oops. (Heh… “off track”? Get it? Trains?) At some point I was reviewing a book… A more review-like criticism: I found the timeline really confusing at first, since everything’s told in “Then” and “Now” flashback/flashforward, but it isn’t clear when “Then” and “Now” are.

I also had to suspend disbelief about Cass’s deep hatred of Heather at the beginning. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t sparing a thought for my junior high tormentors by the summer before my senior year. Dude, we all sucked in 8th grade; move on. Eventually we saw enough flashbacks to make it clear that this was a serious pattern of abuse rather than “just” the teasing all middle school geeks go through, which made it a bit more understandable, but still… it felt like too long for the feelings to still be so intense.

Criticisms aside, though, obviously I loved it. It is part of the recent Will Grayson, Will Grayson/My Most Excellent Year/Suite Scarlett genre of Behind the Scenes of the Offbeat Yet Heartwarming Play. But you know, I’m never going to say that we have too many books about smart kids doing what they’re passionate about. We can never have too many kids doing that, so how could we have too many books about it? If you have recommendations in this genre (that I just invented), I’d love to hear them!

Also reviewed by: Bitch Magazine, Abby (the) Librarian, and Dreaming in Books

But then Rose went into stasis again. She wakes up 62 years later, having slept through the Dark Times that killed millions and changed Earth completely. Now everyone she knew is dead and she’s the heir to her parents’ corporate empire, with enemies she doesn’t understand and no emotional connection to her new life.

This was definitely one of the most interesting books I’ve read in a long time. It is deeply flawed, so let’s get my criticisms out of the way first. The prose is amateurish (lots of descriptions of dreams to convey emotion; so much “telling” that at times I groaned out loud, “You miss Xavier, we get it“). Rose struck me as a tiresome Mary Sue; her endless self-pity was hard to take and I couldn’t understand what Xavier and her new friends saw in her. (I was more okay with this by the end, for reasons I’ll explain if you read past the spoiler space.)

The villains weren’t engaging, either: Guillory, head of UniCorp until Rose came along, is a smarmy straw man for all the worst Evil Corporate arguments imaginable. And the scary robot sent after Rose isn’t so scary — far more original-series Cylon than T-1000. The characters are ethnically diverse, which is nice, but the book is weirdly self-conscious about that; it never lets you forget any character’s genetic heritage. (I bet somebody could write pages about race & ethnicity in this book, but I’m not going to be that person.)

There is a lot of interesting stuff going on in the world — what does the loss of a huge percentage of the world’s population do to poverty? What are the implications of an interplanetary corporation being the most powerful entity in the world? We do get some of the history of Otto (Rose’s new friend, a telepathic alien-human hybrid bred by UniCorp with questionable civil rights), and that is quite intriguing. But all of this is mostly in the background. (As it probably should be in YA, of course; you know I’m just a sucker for all that sociopolitical sci-fi.)

For awhile, the only reasons I kept reading were because I loved Otto, and because I wanted to find out what was up with Rose’s stasis-studded childhood. And that is where the book gets truly fascinating. The premise — person skips large chunks of history and needs to figure out how to fit into her new world — is solid sci-fi. It lined up nicely with my recent reading of Across the Universe, in fact. But this book does some deeply strange things with it. This is Sheehan’s first book, and my problems with the writing strike me as first-book mistakes. She has a crazy original mind for plot, though, and does some nice world-building as well, so I look forward to seeing what she does next.

I really really want another sci-fi lit crit nerd to read this so we can discuss. I have the ARC, so I can lend it to you. If you are that person, don’t read the spoilers; it’ll ruin everything. If you aren’t going to read it, though, read on…

Cover: I really hope this isn’t the final version. It makes it look much more like a retelling of Sleeping Beauty than it is, and gives no indication whatsoever that it’s science fiction.

ARC provided by the awesome Shelf Respect Teen Book Club at the Brookline Public Library.

BIG-TIME, MAJOR SPOILERS

I had been guessing that Rose was in stasis so often to elongate her life and thereby extend family control of UniCorp past normal lifespans. She talks a lot about how stupid she is; maybe repeated stasis affects your brain? I theorized. Or maybe her parents wanted her to stay a child because she knew some sort of horrible secret about them that would destroy the company if she attained majority.

It turns out, though, that Rose’s parents were just controlling, abusive monsters. They kept her a child because her mother wanted a dress-up doll and her father wanted absolute obedience. When it became clear that she was a teenager with a mind of her own, they put her in stasis and left her there on purpose. They died nearly a decade after the Dark Times; they could have come to release her, but they never did. In fact, her dad was the one who sicced the robot on her — it was programmed to return her to him if she ever ran away, and if it couldn’t do that, to kill her. (Because at that point, of course, she would know a horrible secret about her parents.) But wait, it gets even worse! Rose had two older siblings, both of whom ended up the same way she did, in endless stasis. Only they were never found and released. That is some creepy shit. And it explains Rose’s weak, self-loathing nature throughout much of the book; her parents deliberately raised her to be that way.

When all this becomes clear, the book turns into a sort of A Child Called “It” abuse recovery narrative. I’m not sure I’ve seen science fiction do that before. Our slow discovery of this — and Rose’s denial, as she continues to insist that it’s totally reasonable to use stasis as a sort of calming time-out from the world — is chilling and well-done. I have often thought during times of grief that I’d love a fast-forward button: just zip ahead to when the problem is solved and/or you don’t hurt anymore. Rose has that fast-forward button, and the book does an excellent job of showing why that is both seductive and a terrible idea.

And then there’s the love story. In some ways, this is a typical YA coming-of-age: Rose escapes her parents and learns to grow beyond their (in this case, literally stunting) influence. She loses her first love, and YA convention would have her find a new relationship in her new, emotionally healthier life. There is some indication at the very end that she and Otto will have that.

But she and Xavier are not done with each other. He turns out not to be dead after all. He’s in his seventies, the grandfather of her friend Bren — the boy who found her in stasis, and on whom she has a crush. It’s a sort of Time Traveller’s Wife story, in a way, except even sadder because except for one year in their teens they are always out of phase with each other. He tried to let her out of stasis but couldn’t find her, and now he’s lived an entire lifetime beyond her. I would expect them to mourn this tragedy and move on, recognizing that they are in different places now; probably Xavier would die shortly thereafter to wrap up everything nice and easy. Nope. He becomes her guardian. The last paragraph is:

I jumped up and hugged him. He smelled old, and of that cologne I noticed in his office, and he didn’t feel like my Xavier when I held him anymore. And I loved him as much as I ever had. Brother. Best friend. Grandfather. What did it matter? He was my Xavier.

This will probably trip some people’s incest squick. But I kind of love the book for according this teenage relationship the respect of true soulmates. That’s so unusual.

Man, I wrote a book here, didn’t I? I’m sorry the writing wasn’t good enough for me to recommend it whole-heartedly, but like I said, I think this author is going to do some really interesting things.

Also reviewed by: Phoebe North, Books, Sweets, and Other Treats, and Stories From My Bookshelf.

I really wanted to love this book. Someone (I forget who) recommended it to me as similar to my beloved H. M. Hoover. (The link is to an older review of Hoover’s work by Dani Zweig.) I see where that person was coming from, and I think if I’d read this at the same age I first encountered Hoover, I might have loved it as much.

As an adult, though, it grated. Academy 7 features clunky exposition, limited character development, and overly simplistic politics. (There is a gesture near the end towards saying something slightly more challenging. The Alliance golden boy who leaves to play an insufferably self-righteous Che Guevara to the impoverished citizens of a monarchy sees his rebellion get out of control in exactly the way he should have expected if he weren’t so naive; it could have been powerfully tragic if it weren’t presented more as “how dare those uppity peasants stab his gift of leadership in the back.”)

The romance is sweet; Aerin and Dane’s relationship was my favorite part of the book. But much of the plot feels like an excuse to set up the romance, rather than the romance naturally growing from the characters and their story. It hits all its YA fantasy/sci-fi romance marks: the school punishment that throws the unlikely couple together, the tough girl who is suddenly beautiful when she puts on a fancy dress for a party, the tortured characters who are forced to reveal their innermost pain to each other so they can be healed. (Damn, if only healing emotional pain were as easy as telling the right person about it once!)

Ultimately, I think the kids who like this type of book are just as used to more complex fare as I am at this point. (Three cheers for the wealth of YA lit I didn’t have 20 years ago!) Reasonably entertaining, but a disappointment.

BTW, what’s going on with the cover? This is effectively a military academy; they wear uniforms, not Ren Faire henleys. And Aerin would never wear big dangly earrings like that — they’d get in the way of kicking Dane’s ass in combat class.

Also reviewed by: Phoebe North, Bookshelves of Doom, and Karin’s Book Nook