I identified with Keri immediately because in the first chapter she explains that she likes to be prepared. She has plans for every possible disaster, keeps emergency supplies in her bedroom, that sort of thing. But of course, she does not have a plan for what to do when her beloved older brother kills himself. Unless it turns out to be murder, as her childhood friend Janna suspects. It turns out that Keri’s brother is part of a pattern of “suicides” that includes Janna’s brother, her friend Sione’s brother, and ten years’ worth of other oldest brothers, all from different parts of New Zealand, who have visited their idyllic resort town for the New Year’s festivities. The three only have a short time until New Year’s comes around again to identify this year’s victim and find the killers.

I loved Healey’s last book, Guardian of the Dead, and I loved this. For many of the same reasons: believable, flawed friendships between fully realized characters; sensitive handling of sex (and the lack thereof); a stunning sense of place. The magic felt a bit less organic here than in Guardian and required more suspension of disbelief for some reason; I kept waiting for a twist, that it wasn’t what the kids thought, but nope — it pretty much was, and was an idea we’ve all seen before, and therefore had something of a “Buffy monster-of-the-week” feel, like with established characters all of this could have happened in 50 minutes on TV.

So while this feels less original than Guardian (with the exception of the New Zealand setting, which is unusual enough to get a bunch of automatic originality points for an American audience), it was no less fun to read. I chewed through it in one day, home sick recovering from BEA. Healey is an outstanding writer with a gift for dialogue, characterization, and foreshadowing. She drops hints along the way that only seem sinister in retrospect, but doesn’t make us wait for the characters to catch up to what we’ve already figured out. And she weaves race, class, and sexuality (and, in this case, temporary disability) into the story in such a way that it feels like she’s creating real people rather than checking character traits off a PC list.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role of fear in my own life, and how to avoid sacrificing long-term sanity for short-term peace of mind. I said at the beginning that I identified with Keri’s need to plan for every eventuality. At the end she says, “I still planned for possibilities, but it was easier to recognize the planning as part of the anxiety and not being about real things that might actually happen,” and it was eerily like reading words from my own head.
…

SPOILERS (which might be interesting if you’re not going to read the book, since (surprise!) I go off on a tangent)

One of my favorite things about Healey’s books is how the magic has lasting consequences — good and bad. At the end of Guardian the earthquakes had still happened and people needed to clean up afterwards. And at the end of this, people do start losing their jobs and leaving Summerton. That is the consequence of putting an end to the spell that demanded the boys as sacrifice. (It’s implied that the town is going to be okay anyway, which is maybe a cop-out considering how similar West Coast towns are described as “ghost towns.”) “Dystopia” is the big buzzword right now, but this is a dystopia in the truest sense — it aims for utopia and misses horribly, and we see that from the inside.

It made me think of Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” (If you’ve never read it, the text is behind that link. It’s very short and I think it’s pretty much required modern reading.) To what lengths are we willing to go to keep the places we love safe and prosperous? Is there any amount of sacrifice that’s worth it? We (and here I’m making some assumptions about my readership) are, of course, all citizens of Omelas or Summerton — enjoying our cheap and plentiful fuel and food and material goods at the expense of the impoverished people who create those things for us. There are ways to walk away from Omelas, to go off the grid, but almost no one does it because the pull of the comfort and safety and community is far too strong. (And because — and this is something not allowed for in the parameters of LeGuin’s story — maybe it’s better to stay and try to change things from the inside?)

I think that’s why it took people who had been damaged by the Summerton spell to finally see the rot at the core of the town. The pain of losing their brothers was enough to intrude on the cocoon. Everyone else chose to look away, and the coven members themselves — who, like the people of Omelas (and us), know and are making a fully conscious choice — find ways to justify it.

Also reviewed by: Pink Me, Wandering Librarians, and Bookshop

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!

In the French fairy tale on which this is based, one sister is kind to a fairy/witch/whathaveyou and is blessed to have jewels and flowers drop from her mouth when she speaks. The second sister goes to demand the same blessing, but because of her rudeness is cursed with toads and snakes. In this twist, the snakes and toads are a blessing of a different sort — toads are lucky and snakes are revered as rat-catching symbols of the goddess Naghali. The setting is a fictionalized polytheistic 17th century India, occupied by fictionalized pseudo-Muslims who call themselves Believers.

Tana and her mother Hiral are the only family Diribani has left after her father, Hiral’s second wife, dies. Miracle of miracles, they actually love each other; no wicked stepmother and sister here. Newly impoverished, both sisters want to keep the family together, but the goddess’s blessings make that impossible. Diribani wants to share her gift, but nearly starts a riot during a parade for the visiting prince and is taken to his palace far away for her protection. Tana’s gift is feared by the Believers. The prince orders her and Hiral to live in the temple grove outside the village, where her beasties can quietly slither off to the forest. They are sad to be separated, but it seems for the best.

But of course it’s not that simple. Diribani has a hard time fitting in with her new companions, who are Believers and royalty to boot. The wicked, greedy local governor drives Tana out and wants Diribani and her jewels for himself. And of course both girls fall for men they think they can’t have.

I liked the delicate interplay between the two religions. The Believers are an occupying power, yes, but they are only portrayed as evil at the beginning, while they’re still “the other” — as Diribani gets to know them she comes to appreciate their customs. I also liked Diribani’s and Tana’s separate quests to determine what Naghali intends for them to do with her gifts. Both girls have quite believable crises of faith, but the goddess never really forsakes them. This is an unabashedly religious book in a way that modern readers will relate to, I think, even though the religion is made up. There was also a surprising amount of complex political intrigue; I can see this appealing to fans of Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief.

None of the characters ever particularly grabbed me, unfortunately. There’s too much “oh woe, I am a plain/useless/lazy girl; my sister is so much better than me” from both sisters, though that improves some once they start traveling and having adventures. The book struck me as a bit overwritten, with a lot of unnecessary explanation of thoughts and feelings that were obvious. But the descriptions were certainly gorgeous, and Allegra and I both loved the fairy tale “twist.” Most importantly, a lot more happens than in Tall Story, and on that basis we thought it would be more appealing to young readers. I had a blast chatting with Allegra about these books, as she is a young teenager herself and therefore very differently qualified than I am to judge kid appeal!

Also reviewed by: My Library Card Wore Out (my co-judge), Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog (who sent it on to our round of Nerds Heart YA), The Book Smugglers, and Forever Young Adult.

Andi adores basketball, and is devastated to learn that her new London school has no girls’ basketball team. Meanwhile, in a small village in the Philippines, her older half-brother Bernardo’s neighbors believe he is the reincarnation of mythological town savior Bernardo Carpio. Like the legendary giant, Bernardo is tall — like, all his clothes made special, can’t buy shoes, dunks the basketball without jumping tall. And the town believes that, like the giant, Bernardo protects them from the earthquakes that regularly wreak havoc in the country.

Bernardo and Andi’s mother has been waiting 16 years for the British government to allow her to bring Bernardo to live with them. Now that day has finally come. Everyone is thrilled that the family will reunite, but how will Andi get along with the brother she doesn’t know? How will Nardo fit in with a new country, a new language, and a new family? And without their giant protector, will the earthquakes return to San Andres?

This was a bit of a slow start, but it grew on me. Told in alternating chapters by the two teens, Andi’s story is a fairly “typical teen” growth arc — proving herself as a basketball player, getting over her resentment of her new “dorky” brother. I found Nardo’s story more engaging from the beginning. Nardo’s conflict between his responsibility as village “savior” and his desire to be with his mom was compelling. I also liked the window into San Andres with its small-community quirkiness. The San Andres cast are much more memorable characters than Andi’s new basketball buddies. (They were fine, but they can’t compete with a witch named Mad Nena and a short Filipino kid who goes by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.)

I loved hearing the siblings’ stories their own ways for the first third of the book, and then seeing them through each other’s eyes. Bernardo thinks Andi is a boy at first, and Andi is unimpressed by Bernardo’s beloved suit (handmade by the local tailor, who puts Velcro on everything). Their cross-cultural relationship is complex and believable.

Phoebe North wrote a timely (as far as I was concerned) post recently about the appeal of magical realism to teens. As you might have gathered from the whole “giant” bit, there’s more than a little magical realism in this story. Did Bernardo grow into a giant because of a wish made on a wishing stone, or because he has a medical condition? Is he protecting San Andres from earthquakes, or has their absence during his life just been a coincidence? It’s never clear, which places this in the “magical realism” camp for me.

The middle grade readers at whom this book seems most targeted can be quite literal, so I’m not sure how they’ll take the ambiguity. And, as I said, the book is a bit slow. It doesn’t scream “instant kid appeal” to me, but it’s original and intriguing and I’m sure it will appeal very much to certain kids. Allegra of My Library Card Wore Out, my co-judge, is a young teen herself, and agreed with me about the pace:

This book was nominated for the CARNEGIE MEDAL. The Sunday Times voted it one of the 100 Best Summer Titles. The Times voted it the Most Recommended Children’s Book for Christmas. It is a YA book but the reviews are by adults. They read differently. I think that might be why they enjoyed it. Since I am YA, I like books that have something happening, like many teen readers. It was a little too slow for my taste and not enough happened to keep my interest. I have never read a book like it. I like reading faster paced books and if there is nothing interesting in a book I am instantly turned off. I guess this is something I have to work on.

I loved getting her perspective; she’s right that most reviewers and award-givers are adults, and one of my favorite things about the internet is how people of all ages can participate at equal levels.

Also reviewed by: My Library Card Wore Out, Pineapples and Pyjamas (who moved this on to our round in Nerds Heart YA), Charlotte’s Library, and Wondrous Reads.

I can’t believe it took me so long to read this after how much I loved the author’s Dairy Queen trilogy. Unsurprisingly, I really enjoyed this too, though it is a quite different book. Ben’s voice couldn’t be more different from DJ’s: where DJ is plainspoken and even sometimes inarticulate, Ben writes like Oscar Wilde. I was reminded of M. T. Anderson’s Octavian Nothing, written in old-fashioned language with the kind of humor that grows naturally out of such a style. It’s challenging, but entertaining enough that I think a lot of fantasy fans will push through it.

My favorite thing about the book is Ben’s growth as a character. Most of the time, the YA fantasy heroine’s arc is one of discovering self-confidence: the confidence to make her way in the world, to believe in her own competence, etc. This is, of course, a pretty common arc of real-life YAs. And it’s part of Ben’s story, but the other part is that she actually is pretty incompetent at first. She’s likeable enough, and you sympathize with her harsh treatment by the Queen… but you can also see that while the Queen maybe isn’t using the kindest methods, she does legitimately need to whip her stubborn, uneducated heir into shape. Montagne needs a Queen, and like it or not, that’s Ben’s job. Watching Ben realize that and come to take pride in her role was so satisfying. I love a heroine who screws up a lot.

My only serious objection to Princess Ben is from a fat acceptance standpoint. She’s fat, she doesn’t particularly care, she doesn’t lose weight despite the Queen’s best efforts (because dieting doesn’t necessarily work), I’m all set up for a positive fat character without a weight-loss arc… and then she returns from a climactic mid-book adventure having lost weight. Which might not have bothered me — she’s an underfed prisoner, after all — but it coincides, of course, with her maturation into a responsible future Queen. So close, Ms. Murdock, so close.

Overall, slightly offbeat castles-and-magic fantasy for fans of Shannon Hale, the Farsala trilogy, and Flora Segunda.

Also reviewed by: Abby (the) Librarian, Em’s Bookshelf, and Feminist Review.

Wisdom’s Kiss is a companion book, though you don’t really need to have read Princess Ben first. Ben is the grandmother of one of the two main characters: Queen Temperance and her younger sister Wisdom (known as Dizzy, a far more accurate description of her nature). Hoo boy, are there a lot of characters in this book! And they all get voices via letters or memoirs, plus there’s a play and an Encyclopedia of Exposition and probably some other things I’m forgetting. The plot, more or less, is that Dizzy is engaged to marry Roger, Duke of Farina. On their way to the wedding, Dizzy and Ben pick up Trudy, a bar wench who can sense the future. She’s excited to be reunited with her long-lost childhood sweetheart, Tips, who she thinks is a soldier in the capitol. It turns out that Tips has actually joined the circus, and at a performance in Dizzy’s honor, he and Dizzy fall in love at first sight. Dizzy wants out of her engagement, which is of course politically problematic, but even more so when it turns out that her wedding to Roger is all part of Roger’s ambitious mother’s plan to take over Montagne, which threatens Temperance at home.

Whew! You got all that? Yeah, me neither, a lot of the time. I commend the author for her ambition, but there’s kind of too much going on in this book. It would be fun to teach in an English class; you could do exercises on unreliable narrators, exposition, point of view, and on and on. It was a little overwhelming to read, though, and distracted me from actually getting to know any of the characters. Maybe I’m boring, but I found the more straightforward Princess Ben a much more enjoyable read.

Spoiler alert:

Trudy doesn’t end up with Tips, which I liked. That’s believable — they haven’t seen each other in 6 years, and it’s realistic that he’d move on to Dizzy. But it’s so set up that Temperance and Trudy will end up together. Trudy is pulled to Montagne by a sense of unfathomable future joy; when they meet, the narration goes on and on about how important they will become in each other’s lives; there’s even an offhand remark about how Roger’s older brother married a dude, so gay marriage is accepted in this world (though maybe not for queens who need blood heirs?). And again, Murdock gets so close and then pulls back! Trudy, we’re told, eventually marries some random guy; Temperance must marry — she has a son — though we don’t even find out to whom. Cop. Out. In my head, their marriages are shams and they love only each other.

E-galley of Wisdom’s Kiss generously provided via NetGalley.

Also reviewed by: Night Reader and The Novel Gnome.

In many ways, this is fairly standard dystopian fiction: the closed society, the despotic leader, the mind control. There’s some typical preachy Big Brother talk (“religion is the opiate” etc., “difference sows discord,” yadda). It is a quite successful example of the genre; I felt trapped in the claustrophobia of the ship under Eldest’s restrictions, and by being kept as in the dark as the characters are. Of course there has to be a romance, but it takes an appropriate back seat.

As in the best dystopias, there are some big revelations that make the original Eldest’s seizure of power seem possibly sensible. Unfortunately, the resolution of these issues is way too easy. It’s a YA SF convention to have the teenagers resolve not just their personal problems but the world’s problems. Sometimes that’s plausible, but in this case… I have my doubts. The reason we don’t actually put teenagers in charge of everything is that they don’t have the experience to think through all the implications, or to temper idealism with a touch of healthy misanthropy. Overall, though, this is pretty solid science fiction.

It is also one of the most crushing tragedies I’ve read in a long time, to the point where I’m not really able to be objective about the rest of it. Amy left her entire life behind, the adult she would grow up to be on Earth, so that she could be with her parents as they fulfilled their lifelong dream of starting a new colony. But she’s awakened 50 years too soon; by the time she sees them again (not to mention land and sky), she’ll be an old woman.

How do you reframe your life after a devastating loss? How do you get to a place where your life has meaning and joy again? How do you come to believe that what will happen next is worth waiting to see? This book is very much about waiting, and different characters have very different responses to it — Amy, Elder, Eldest, the still-frozen colonists, the whole ship. A lot of time has to pass between now and the goal that means the world to you (in this case literally); how do you cross that bridge of time?

(I’ve been thinking about all of these questions a lot lately because of some stuff going on in my own life, so when I finished the book a few weeks ago it was either the perfect time or the wrong time. Either way, it completely wrecked me.)

Also reviewed by: Phoebe North, The Book Smugglers, and Steph Su Reads

Old Shep is, of course, a Dog Death Book, of exactly the sort I couldn’t stand either when I was Wallace’s age. So the premise was promising. Plus a theater production provides the perfect opportunity for the best sort of Gordon Korman wacky hijinks. And overall, I was entertained. I particularly enjoyed Wallace’s teammate Rick, whose trademark is combining expressions: “You’re going to be on detention until the cows freeze over.” (Is there a word for this, like spoonerism?)

Unfortunately, just like in Schooled, Korman decides to let many of the characters narrate in alternating chapters. Some of the characters are three-dimensional enough to support this; some (especially Trudi, the central-casting ditz who’s after Wallace) are decidedly not.

When I get a free moment, I want to re-read childhood Korman favorites Son of Interflux and I Want to Go Home! to see if they’re still as hilarious as I thought at the time. It’s possible I’ve just outgrown the guy.

Also reviewed by: The Reading Zone and Spill

This is told in all five alternating voices, which was distracting. I kept having to check which was Brianna and which was Renee. With so many characters and only 120 pages, Koss relies on a certain amount of stereotyping shorthand, especially with the secondary characters.

(Brianna’s parents are scientists, and we get this description:

My parents’ idea of fun was to lug the telescope and microscope out to the godforsaken desert — poke in the dirt all day, peer at the stars at night. It was as if they were at work twenty-four hours a day. …But isn’t it possible to be a scientist by day, then play slide trombone in a Dixie band or drums in a rock band at night? Watch TV? Be in plays?

Why yes! In fact it is! So why not show characters who do that? They’d be far more interesting and believable, and even less stereotypical parents can set up plenty of “don’t have a loud party tonight, Bree” conflict.)

It’s rare to get the Mean Girls’ point of view portrayed sensitively. Which makes sense for the victimized target readership — I think most kids feel victimized at some point in middle school. But as a teacher, even as I hate what the bullies are doing, they’re still 12-year-old girls and my heart goes out to them. They’re behaving that way for a reason, and I wonder if it might help to recognize themselves in a book where they can also see their victims’ perspective?

That’s the type of question this book is designed for. Nothing much “happens”; it’s a psychological case study as much as anything. For all that this is not a richly built world (again, 120 pages), the friendship drama is entirely believable. My kids deal with this crap every day, poor things, and I can imagine this book meaning a lot to a girl who goes to school with cramps in her stomach thinking about how her “friends” will subtly torment her today.

The girls on the cover, incidentally, are all white, which disappoints me since that wasn’t specified at all in the book. (Maya is the daughter of Russian immigrants; the others are given a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds but no clear ethnicities.)

Also reviewed by: Books on the Brain, Reading Nook, and Bookshelves of Doom

This is a fairly light story, compared with, say, the similarly premised Children of Men. There’s never any question that the human race will survive, provided we’re a-ok with lots of teenage pregnancies. The world seems to be rolling on much the same as now, in fact — no post-apocalyptic tendencies at all.

When I say “now,” of course, I mean a United States in which the House of Representatives votes to defund Planned Parenthood, one of the most important providers of contraception and STD testing in the country, especially for lower-income women; a Florida court orders a pregnant woman confined to the hospital against her will; a state Senator thinks it’s totally reasonable to compare pregnant women to pregnant cows and the monetary value thereof. Just to name a few recent news items that pissed me off.

So we’ve got some stuff to talk about in this country, in terms of how we treat women and our wombs, “pre-pregnant” or otherwise. Bumped reads light and entertaining, full of zippy slang like Feed, and much like Feed it also asks the tough questions: Why do we have sex? To whom do our bodies belong? How are sex and love and making babies connected, and what is the impact of disconnecting them? How can people of faith interpret sexuality differently? What are our obligations to society vs. our obligations to ourselves? (Unlike Feed it did not make me want to jump off a bridge.)

My only real complaint about this book is the ending, which struck me as so abrupt I thought I’d missed something. It’s clearly heading for a sequel, which I will happily read, but I think this story would have been better told in a longer single volume. Both girls rushed their realizations at the end to give the book some sort of stopping place; it felt off.

Other than that, though, this is sharp, inventive science fiction that will give teenagers and adults a lot to chew on. I want to start a book club at school just so we can read this book.

(Advance copy received from NetGalley, my favorite new toy. Publication date Apr. 26, 2011.)

Also reviewed by: Presenting Lenore, Forever Young Adult, and Beyond Words.

No point in reading this review if you haven’t read the first book and are planning to, so SPOILERS AHEAD for both books!

I wanted to love this. I really did. And there were many things I did love — it’s tense and thrilling in many places, and I was happy to see more of both Incarceron and the Realm (especially the peasants’ lives). But I am a world-building nut, and the plot holes were bigger than the hole in the Warden’s floor after the Realm’s illusions disappear.

So let’s talk about that: how did the illusions work, anyway? They must have been matter, or people couldn’t have stepped on the stairs or been warm under the clothes. So why did everything crumble as soon as Incarceron sucked up all the power, causing the illusions to fail? I could see everything getting faded and crappier, but it would have had to be there and functional, right? Unless the illusions stopped time somehow? The book never said that, and I’m not sure how it would work anyway.

And then there’s the power issue. There’s limited power left and Incarceron used it all to create its body, such that the Prison’s systems fall apart and the Realm’s illusions disappear. So how can everyone come and go from the Prison willy-nilly at the end? Wasn’t that supposed to take more power than was left?

I’d probably still read a final book in the trilogy, if there were to be one, because I was so drawn in by the end of Sapphique — looking out over the huts of the peasants who’ve known how to live without energy and luxury for years, getting ready to build a new world with them. I said I was a world-building nut, and I mean this kind of world-building, too: I love stories of people and countries starting over. Let’s keep our fingers crossed for fewer inconsistencies to this new world.

Also reviewed by: The Book Smugglers, Steph Su Reads, and Presenting Lenore