This is a weird, amazing, amazingly weird book. The clearest analog I have is Lost. If you loved Lost (never mind the ending), you will probably love this. It’ll probably get classified as middle grade, but there’s a body count, and we aren’t distanced from it (though it’s certainly not on the level of, say, Hunger Games). But mostly it’s just plain creepy, in that way that things can get when kids who don’t have enough context or understanding end up in charge of making very serious decisions for a society.

The ending (while better than Lost’s) doesn’t entirely hold together, I think. Don’t try to fit it together too precisely. But it works well enough, with some wonderful “Ohhh, that’s what that was about!” moments. The world-building — from overall mood to inventive detail — are incredible enough to make up for any, “Wait, but why didn’t they-”s.

It’ll be a love it or hate it book for most kids (this one hated it, on Aaron Starmer’s blog), I think. I predict it’ll be a tough one to find a home for. This is definitely not a book for kids who look for the straightforward or linear, and that is most of them in the 10-14 range that I think is the target audience. But the kids who love Lord of the Flies, or the timeslip parts of When You Reach Me — get those kids to give it a try.

Also reviewed by: Charlotte’s Library, Librarian in the Middle, and Snarky and Sweet.

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!

I found this a tricky book to get a handle on, and I mean that in the best possible way. From the cover and the beginning, I expected fairly straightforward middle grade cyberpunk. And to some extent, that’s what it is: action-packed shoot-outs, a hovercraft scooter held together with duct tape, elderly underworld engineers with a genetically engineered pet, spy hijinks in Unison (which the book calls a “social network,” but it’s really more of a fully immersive virtual reality).

But by the end, things had gotten downright trippy. It ended up reminding me most of an episode of Fringe, or of William Sleator’s The Last Universe. (It felt Sleator-esque overall, which is definitely a compliment.) The close friendship/budding romance between the leads felt a bit shoehorned in, but it’s minor, and otherwise this was a fun mind-bending bit of sci-fi. I can see it appealing to the kids who loved Uglies more for the action and the world creation than for the fantasy-fulfillment of being Pretty.

Also reviewed by: Well… not so many reviews yet, since this comes out in five months. (Don’t worry, I’ll remind you.) So I’ll just link to Andy Marino’s website.

ARC generously provided by the editor, the lovely and talented Noa Wheeler.

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.

Reading the interview I had the unsettling feeling that he stole the kind of thoughts that are churning around in my brain all the time and used them as interview answers, only making them sound smarter than I usually do:

Rig workers work these insane shifts, so there’s a problem with methamphetamine addiction. They can keep going on shifts that run 12 hours, day after day after day. That’s going to break a person. And we live on top of that. The number of injuries and deaths in the natural gas industry are also on us whenever we turn on our gas stoves. I’m really interested in the idea that some of the things we take for granted—things that seem clean and pristine—are connected to long chains of things we don’t see, or don’t want to see.

And it’s this idea that makes his post-apocalyptic worlds seem entirely believable to me, I think, and therefore the stuff of my nightmares:

We tend to think of one story line of collapse, which is essentially the Mad Max version: the world falls apart and everyone is just driving around tearing everybody apart. But that’s just not what poverty looks like. We still are civil creatures, and we do best when we work together. So when I think of societal collapse, I think more in terms of what does it mean if we back off of our wealth and have less of it—but are essentially us in our character.

Thanks, dude.

(But seriously, thank you. You wonder “whether or not kids are experiencing the larger ideas and themes I’m interested in or if they’re only experiencing the thrill ride,” and I wonder the same thing about books like yours or Feed. But I know some of the kids are getting it, because I got it about the books I read when I was a kid and it changed my life. So thank you for telling these stories; we need them more than ever.)

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.

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

I am a huge Hilari Bell fan: the Farsala trilogy and Goblin Wood are some of the smartest, least black-and-white fantasy novels for young readers I know. This… is not that. This is more akin to Songs of Power, another book of hers with which I was less impressed — the same “See, skeptical scientists, mysticism is real!”, the same use of Native mythology, the same girl destined to commune with Nature to save us all. I’m a big old hippie in some ways, but the New Age-y stuff makes me roll my eyes.

That said, I got a kick out of Kelsa and, especially, Raven. He’s a god (a la American Gods), but hasn’t interacted with humans in a loooong time. He doesn’t get why Kelsa needs to hide their crazy cross-country road trip from her mother, why they need IDs to cross the Canadian border, or what money is for. Much of the excitement and the humor of the book come from Kelsa and Raven trying to navigate these mundane restrictions — her with technology and cleverness, him with magic. I love when fantasy novels force their characters to deal with real-world problems like police and money.

Bell’s environmental destruction is a fairly realistic version of hopeful. There’s no apocalypse; in this world we figured out climate change and started making changes soon enough to avert complete disaster. There are several mentions of how the sea levels are falling again and soon people might be able to resettle the old coastlines, that sort of thing. The world is basically recognizable as our own, with some near-future tech and tightened security.

It’s a fairly generic plot-coupon book, but if you want a road-trip novel with some excitement and nature magic, this will keep you busy for a couple of days.

Review copy received from Houghton Mifflin via NetGalley.

Also reviewed by: The Book Girl, GreenBeanTeenQueen, and Between the Covers

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

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.