the lowercase gimmick

YA reviews, updates every Monday and Friday.

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Man, I love your reviews so much. I rarely get hyped to read (or even re-read) a book, but your reviews do just that! Thanks :)

Thank you!  I’m glad you like them.  Hopefully, this ask will motivate me to start updating this blog again, I’m ridiculously far behind at this point.

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YA Review, 12/5/16: Infinite by Jodi Meadows

If you’ve read my reviews of Incarnate (2012) and Asunder (2013), the previous two books in this series, you’ll know that even though I really like this series, I don’t really have a whole lot to say about it.  Its main appeal is that it’s an exciting, suspenseful series that you don’t really have to think too hard about.  The themes here are a bit more complex than in the last two books, but for the most part, that’s still true here.  I’m going to keep this review short - I do have a little to say, but not that much.  On the whole, I really enjoyed this series, and I definitely plan on reading the stuff Meadows released afterward.

The main thing I want to talk about here is the themes.  Because while they’re not super-complex or anything, they’re actually pretty interesting.  From the first book, Anna has been aware of the possibility that, unlike the other citizens of the Range, she might not be reincarnated once she dies.  Without getting too spoilery, I can say that this book raises the possibility that this might not happen just to Anna, but to everyone in the Range - the 5000 year reincarnation cycle might finally end.  What this essentially means is that all of the characters have to come to terms with their mortality - whereas they’ve always counted on living forever, they must now find a way to accept that they’re going to die relatively soon, and they’ll never come back.  This is a really smart way to write a story about coming to terms with mortality because it mirrors the way it happens for most people in real life.  When we’re kids, we expect to live forever, and as we grow up, we realize that we’ll die someday, and we have to find ways to make it okay.  That’s mirrored in this book, in a really provocative way.  Like I said, it’s not exactly the most complex thing I’ve ever read, but nonetheless, Meadows clearly has a great handle on how fantasy can be used to evoke real-life moral dilemmas.

The other great thing about this book is the worldbuilding, and how the long-running mysteries established by the first two books in the series are resolved here.  Unfortunately, everything that makes those things so good in this book are also ridiculously spoilery, so I can’t really go into them the way I’d like to.  But I will commend Meadows for how well she planned the series, and how the reveals in this book were clearly set up in the previous two without being predictable.  The overall experience of reading this series is incredibly satisfying, in a way that few series ever are, because Meadows managed to hit that balance.  Just look at the overwhelmingly negative response to the end of Lost to see how easily this whole thing could’ve gone terribly wrong.

This book has other strengths - the prose is very atmospheric and well-crafted, the characters are compelling, and the plot is well-paced and suspenseful.  And there are a couple flaws as well, from a slightly rushed resolution to a tedious bit in the middle of the story where Meadows pretends that Anna and Sam might not get together in the end.  But all those are either things I’ve already talked about, or things that would be hard to get into without spoiling the story. On the whole, I can’t recommend this series enough - if you haven’t read it, you should start from Incarnate right away.

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Opinion Piece, 12/2/16: YA and Manga

Over the past year or so, I’ve reviewed a few different manga series, mostly during times when I hadn’t read any YA books in the last couple weeks and I had nothing else to review.  Because of that, I’ve been thinking about the overlap between manga and YA novels.  If I’m going to keep reviewing manga for this blog, I wanted to reflect a little on how well manga works from the perspective of a YA reader, and what ideas manga can add to YA.

Manga is, of course, very broad, but I think it’s kind of noteworthy that the majority of the manga that gets popular in the western world falls into either YA or MG, especially YA.  That might just be a reflection of our western values - something is usually only going to get popular over here if there’s an already-established genre that we can place it into.  And, of course, modern Japanese culture is very influenced by western culture, due to American and British colonial activities in the 19th and 20th centuries.  But still, it’s interesting that manga, a prominent form of entertainment in Japan, occupies such a similar space to American YA.  Series like Death Note, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Sword Art Online explore and understand the world from a teenage perspective, just like YA does.

Given that, you’d think I’d be a bigger fan of manga, but I’m really not.  In fact, readers might remember that I once almost gave up on manga entirely, after running into bad series after bad series.  (For the record, potential YA readers could be forgiven for doing the same thing.)  I’m just not a fan of a lot of the prominent tropes in manga - in particular, I find most of the humor to be very juvenile.  A lot of modern YA, particularly in sci-fi and fantasy, tends to be very self-serious, whereas apart from horror, most manga goes too far in the opposite direction.

But maybe that contrast is where manga can teach YA readers and writers something.  Because sometimes manga does strike a good balance between humor and seriousness in fantasy, and even though that doesn’t happen often, it happens even more rarely in YA.  Fullmetal Alchemist is the first series that comes to mind that hits this balance so well - it’s a generally serious series, but it also has lots of comedy, making it a genuinely fun adventure story in a way that YA really doesn’t have.  YA has fewer tone problems among its contemporary books, but even then, its rare to see a YA book as funny as Kokoro Connect.  It often seems to me like every single YA book I read - even the ones that do incorporate some humor - are trying to be the biggest, most important thing I’ve ever read.  Manga doesn’t have that problem; it’s easier to enjoy the frivolous there.

And I think some really good creativity can come from that frivolousness.  Manga genres and sub-genres are, of course, just as set as YA sub-genres, but I find that even the manga I don’t like usually stands out in my mind as being creative in some way, while rarely being gimmicky.  Take a series like Angel Beats, which isn’t a particularly remarkable manga or anime, but would be off-the-charts weird if it were written as a YA book.  Maybe I only say that because I’m more well-versed in YA, but it seems sometimes like the YA books I read all run together, and I can’t imagine having that problem as a manga reader.

To be honest, I don’t have some big, grand conclusion to come to.  I just wanted to kick around a few thoughts about the differences between manga and YA, and what YA can take away from manga.  Manga tends to be harder to take seriously, and I feel like the base standard of writing quality is lower.  But at its best, manga can be very creative, and can hit a perfect tone that YA has trouble with.

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Short Story Review, 10/31/16: Empire of Dirt by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

Since it’s Halloween, I figured I should talk about a scary story I like.  Er, sort of - this story isn’t actually all that scary, but it’s from a horror anthology, and it’s by an author who’s done some horror-ish stuff before, so I’ll count it.  I reviewed one of Atwater-Rhodes’ books earlier this year, and if that review gave you the impression that I’m a pretty big fan of hers, well, you’d be right.  This story is particularly interesting to me because it features a minor character from Persistence of Memory (2008), another one of Atwater-Rhodes’ books.  Admittedly, that’s not really my favorite book of hers, but the character the two works share is easily the best thing about both that book and this story.  This story is fairly small in scope, mostly taking place over the course of a couple of therapy sessions as a human therapist tries to make sense of a shapeshifter, to no avail.  Therapy sessions as a character development device isn’t exactly the most original thing in the world, but the character in question is interesting enough that it works anyway.  Not to mention that Atwater-Rhodes’ prose is always a joy to read.  This is a very tight, very interesting story.  I guess I’m kind of cheating when it comes to reviewing a horror story, but this is supernatural at least, so it should satisfy a little of your Halloween reading.

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YA Review, 10/28/16: Hostage by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith

Disclaimer: I received this book from the author in exchange for an honest review. This did not change my opinion of the book or the contents of this review.

My opinion of Stranger (2014) was that, despite some issues in the plot, the characters and worldbuilding were strong enough to make for a solid YA story. Here, I'm finding myself with basically the same opinion - Brith have proven that they can write characters and worlds complex enough to carry their story, despite some flaws.

The one major exception to the strong characterization is this book's introduction of Kerry. Felicité, probably the most compelling narrator from Stranger, doesn't narrate here. I wasn't totally clear on why Brith chose to give her such a minor role in this novel. Her arc didn't feel at all complete after Stranger - in fact, the thing I was looking forward to most in this novel was seeing her deal with the ramifications of the big reveal at the end of Stranger regarding her character. But much more problematic was that Kerry was a blatant expy of Felicité - she's basically the same character, with a different role in the story. Both characters do whatever they have to do for power, both of them see the world in a cold and objective light, and both aren't really that evil at heart. This meant that even though Kerry's chapters were the most compelling and complex in the novel (she and Ross largely carried the middle act of the story), it was always slightly dampened whenever I remembered that I was basically reading more of Felicité's narration. This might've worked better if Felicité had narrated in this novel - that way, Brith could've juxtaposed the two personalities. But instead, Brith awkwardly drops Felicité from the story, and hopes that we won't notice.

Other than that, though, the characterization was just as strong as in Stranger. Ross, Mia, and Jeannie all continued their arcs from Stranger, and it was just as interesting to watch as ever. Yuki's arc didn't progress nearly as much, making its supposed conclusion at the end a little awkward. Still, Brith continue to show that their characterization abilities are mostly impeccable. It's pretty impressive that the five different narrators in the novel - along with a bunch of side characters - are all so distinct from each other. Many authors can't even pull off one, let alone five.

The plot was a lot tighter here than it was in Stranger. My biggest issue with Stranger was that the plot felt thrown together and indistinct - I never knew exactly what it was supposed to be about. That's not the case here: the plot has a much more definite form, around Ross's kidnapping (and the subsequent kidnapping of Kerry). It's not exactly going to keep you on the edge of your seat - it still moves fairly slowly. But while it could've moved a bit faster, the focus was more on the characterization than anything else. I only occasionally wanted Brith to pick things up. It's nice to see them write about a more memorable and coherent story, because this one serves as a more effective vector for the characterization than Stranger's story did.

And, of course, the worldbuilding was strong as ever. We didn't get a whole lot of new perspective on Las Anclas, the setting of Stranger, although we did get a little more depth on its justice system. But the real setting of this novel was Gold Point, Voske's city. It wasn't quite as developed as Las Anclas, but we still got to see a lot of cool perspective on just what Voske's rule is really like. He was largely a Saturday Morning Cartoon villain in Stranger, but he's a lot more fleshed out here, and a lot of that characterization comes in how he runs his city. It was interesting to watch.

Overall, if you liked Stranger, there's absolutely no reason not to read this. But if you didn't like Stranger, you probably won't find much improvement here - Brith continue to use most of the same tropes. But I like how they use and subvert dystopia tropes, and for that reason, I'd recommend that if you haven't read Stranger yet, you should, immediately. This series is one of the stronger YA dystopias, in a genre that mostly leans on cliche and imitation of the classics.

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Book Review, 10/24/16: Stranger by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith

Disclaimer: I received this book from the author in exchange for an honest review. This did not change my opinion of the book or the contents of this review.

The closest comparison I can find to this book is Michael Grant's Gone (2008), only more subtle. It's a bit of an ironic description, since Rachel Manija Brown doesn't like Gone very much. But in my mind, Grant's writing shares a lot of strengths with the writing of Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith (henceforth known as Brith, because that's less of a pain to type). Both Stranger and Gone feature a large and well-developed cast of characters. Both are post-apocalyptic sci-fi stories with people mutating X-Men-like superpowers. Both have action-oriented plots. Both take great effort and care to be diverse. And both are largely successful, even if they trip up here and there.

This novel's most obvious strength is its cast of characters. There are five protagonists, but Brith make the wise decision to write the novel in third-person, sparing them the challenge of writing in five different voices. All five characters have distinct character arcs, and they're all engaging. Jennie was the only one that I wish got more development - her arc seemed a bit shallow compared to the others, and she was the only character that didn't get some hint of growth towards the end of the novel.

But there's plenty to like apart from her. In particular, Felicité is an excellent example of a villain protagonist, or at least, a very manipulative hero. Brith did an excellent job of giving a human touch to her manipulation and ambition. And while the twist involving her character wasn't the most original twist Brith could've chosen, it still worked to add depth to her character. It's here that we see the most apt comparisons to Grant's writing - both authors do an excellent job of showing characters that do manipulative things in a sympathetic light. Another character whose POV I enjoyed was Ross. Brith did a good job of showing how his experiences as a prospector affected him, as well as the effects from another experience that's a bit spoilery. Suffice it to say, it wasn't subtle, but Brith did a good job of writing about characters that were shaped by their experiences.

The other big strength of this novel is its worldbuilding. Refreshingly for a post-apocalyptic book, there are next to no infodumps about the society that our protagonists live in. Brith show instead of tell - we get to know the society gradually. Early on, I wished we'd get to know it just a bit faster, but by the end of the novel, we have a complete and compelling picture of the society. The society was one of the more believable ones I've run into in post-apocalypses. We know the exact power hierarchy - complete with power tensions - how the city gets food, and all sorts of other things that lazier authors would be tempted to skim over or leave out altogether. After lots of incomplete or lazily-written worlds from YA dystopias, this is surprisingly cohesive.

Alas, not all elements of the book were that good. The novel's plot was its biggest weakness. For the first half of the novel, there really is no overarching conflict, and it's not quite clear what the story is supposed to be about. The character arcs, while compelling on their own, seemed only loosely related at first. And while everything does come together towards the end - sort of - it just doesn't feel cohesive. Even towards the end, the character arcs don't quite come together, and there are lots of inadequately explored relationships. Perhaps Brith are saving that for later in the series, but I was still hoping for a little more of the dynamic between, say, Ross and Jennie. We're given glimpses at their interactions, but it's nothing substantial. Moreover, the plot itself just wasn't that interesting to me. It wasn't boring, per se, but it wasn't as engaging as I would've liked an action-oriented plot like this one to be. The action, while well-written, was only engaging because of the character interactions that took place within it. That would've been fine if this were the sort of plot that's there only to serve as a vector for character interaction, but I feel like Brith expects this plot to be engaging in its own right, and it doesn't hold up very well.

The prose was on the mediocre side of passable. It's not bad, but it is pretty bland, and it does the bear minimum in terms of making the story engaging. There's a good bit of telling instead of showing - the characters' emotions are often spelled out for us, instead of being conveyed more subtly. It's not the kind of thing that's going to make you cringe, and it's readable enough. But it could've gone a lot further in terms of making the story engaging.

Still, this is an atypical dystopia, the kind that refuses to stick to the mold that mainstream YA has built for it. It's diverse (three of the protagonists are people of color, and one of them is gay), it isn't romance-oriented, and there's no abstract and ultimately meaningless message about how today's society functions. And that's why I'd recommend it even if you're (rightfully) wary of YA dystopias. This has some excellent worldbuilding and some very meaningful character arcs, and if you're looking for something that breaks the dystopian mold, this is where I'd point you to.

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Book Review, 10/21/16: The Crash of Hennington by Patrick Ness

Patrick Ness is a god among YA writers, and I will hear no word to the contrary.  I’ve spent the last year or so on this blog praising Ness to high heaven, and I think I’ve made my position on most of his books clear.  These days, Ness is known to most as a YA writer first and foremost, but actually, he got his start writing magical realism for adults.  For a writer who's so varied in his style, it's hard to call that strange exactly. But heres the thing: most Patrick Ness books just somehow feel distinctly like Patrick Ness. They all reflect on morality similarly, even when covering wildly different topics. I can always recognize his writing.  But that’s not the case here - if I hadn’t known that Ness wrote this, I never could’ve guessed on my own.  And unfortunately, I don’t mean that in a good way.  This was a painful review to write, because I hate to criticize one of my all-time favorites.  But I can’t lie: this was kind of a train wreck.

Throughout all of the different genres that Ness dabbles in, the one commonality throughout most of his work is his reflections on morality.  If Ness has a distinct thread running through his work, it’s his views on right and wrong, responsibility and emotional catharsis, good and evil.  That, ultimately, is what I read Ness’ books for.  I have enough respect for Patrick Ness that I wouldn’t bat an eye at any genre he decided to write, as long as that moral center remained in place.  And that’s a big part of why this novel doesn’t work - Ness isn’t reflecting on morality here.  In fact, after reading this book, I'm not totally convinced it was about anything in particular.

That’s the biggest problem with this book, particularly in the first half - the lack of coherency. There is no one story here. The characters are all intertwined, in some ways, but for most of the book, it appears to be several completely unrelated stories. Only in the last fifth of the book do they come together, and when it happens, it's a little sloppy. I suppose all the characters could've been pretty cool, except that the result of the huge cast was that I had no idea what I was supposed to take away from this book. There was no one theme that drives all of them, or even any two of them. There's none of the philosophy and thematic exploration that makes Ness' work so unusual. This book was themeless, as far as I can tell, and for that, it has all the literary value of a grocery list.

I also failed to connect to most of the characters. Part of the problem was that, early on in the novel, the massive cast was too much to keep track of. The only people I really remembered where Mayor Cora, her husband, and her deputy mayor, and only because they had simple titles that I could remember them by in my head. None of the other characters made a large enough impression on me to be memorable, not because they were badly written, but because there was too much to remember anyone. All this kept me from making any sort of meaningful connection to these characters. I was too busy thinking, "Alright, who's this guy again?" to focus on their character arcs. In this way, Ness creates distance between the story and his readers. And I think it's because he was trying so hard to write something broad, something with a huge scope. (It's something he tries again, to much better effect, in Chaos Walking). His efforts to be evocative just left me distant.

Still, here and there, I saw some little bits of what makes Ness' YA so good. There are a lot of chapters that are nothing but dialogue, or with only a little direction. And while it was confusing at first, when I barely had any idea which character was which, it really brought out Ness' strengths later on. Ness' dialogue is excellent. His dialogue is the only thing that made me feel any sort of closeness to the characters - we saw a lot of subtle characterization, and while not every character had separate voices, they certainly had separate personalities. It's the kind of realism and subtlety that I expect from Ness. The other major positive was that the story, while meandering, was also extremely unpredictable. There were a number of twists at the end, and while Ness overused the cheap device of killing characters to avoid resolving their character arcs, there were also a lot of genuinely surprising twists and turns.

I suppose I could recommend this to die-hard Ness fans. Don't get me wrong - it's confusing, frustrating, and boring. But if you love Ness unconditionally, you'll still enjoy it, and even if you don't, it's a little interesting to see where he started. But for the most part, this just doesn’t feel like the author that I and so many others know and love.

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MG Review, 10/17/16: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

When I talk about one of Patrick Ness’ books, it’s almost always one of the Chaos Walking books, or the trilogy as a whole.  There are a lot of reasons for that.  The Chaos Walking trilogy is a stunning achievement of originality, the likes of which YA has only seen one other time, in The Hunger Games trilogy.  Its scope is enormous, encompassing not only a huge world, but a huge array of themes and ideas.  It’s a very memorable book, with extreme emotional highs and lows (mostly lows), and it really sticks with you.

But I think that only discussing Chaos Walking does Ness a disservice.  Patrick Ness isn’t just a good author because he’s capable of Chaos Walking, but because he’s capable of so much else as well.  In fact, the most stunning characteristic Ness possesses might just be his versatility as an author.  He has never written two similar books before, and throughout his career as a YA author, he’s demonstrated that no matter what he attempts to write - from urban fantasy to space opera to post-apocalyptic - he knocks it out of the park.  That’s probably what makes Ness one of my all-time favorite authors.  He feels fluent in a wide array of genres, all with a core of insight and wisdom.

So as you can imagine, it holds a lot of weight when I say that this, not Chaos Walking is the best thing Ness has ever written.

This is a slim book.  It’s only 200 pages long, and a good chunk of those 200 pages are taken up by illustrations - without them, I could easily picture this being only the length of a longer novella.  You wouldn’t think such a little thing would be able to pack this much of a punch.  But that’s part of Ness’ versatility on display - whereas Chaos Walking was sprawling, lush in detail, this is an exercise in brevity, a demonstration of why less really is more.  There’s not an inch of fat here, not a single disposable word.

So what does Patrick Ness do with this tiny package of a novel?  It’s almost impossible to give a short answer.  This is a novel about the power of storytelling, about the perils and simultaneous necessity of anger and catharsis, about the difficulty of being strong and the temptation of an easy way out, about a young kid who feels abused and invisible.  The novel could’ve easily felt overstuffed in less capable hands - hell, even it even took Ness three books of 500 pages each to cover this may ideas in Chaos Walking.  But Ness interweaves these themes masterfully, centering them around the story of Connor losing his mother to cancer.  What does Patrick Ness do with this tiny package of a novel?  He tells a story about dealing with the impending loss of a relative, and how to survive it intact.

This is a very explicitly moral and philosophical novel.  The bulk of it is taken up by Connor talking to the Monster not directly about Connor’s trials, but about the stories the Monster tells Connor.  All of them relate to Connor’s life of course, but the explicit text of the novel is about morality - about when we should judge people, about what to do about those judgements once they’re made.  I imagine some readers might find that overbearing (although given the overwhelmingly positive reception this book has gotten, I probably shouldn’t imagine very many people disliking it for any reason).  But I didn’t find it overbearing simply because of how original the stories are, and the surprising ways in which they connect to Connor’s life.  You hear the premise of this novel and you probably think you know exactly where it’s going - on paper, this is far from the most original use of magical realism elements in literature, especially literature dealing with dying parents.  But the stories never end how you expect them to, and they never relate to Connor’s life the way you’d think they would.  This is, ultimately, a story about strength and overcoming adversity, but in none of the expected or conventional ways.  I think part of that is because of the tendency of discussions of morality and philosophy to feel disconnected from real life, something Ness completely rejects.  Maybe you expect one of Connor’s discussions with the Monster to explore anger and catharsis, but the discussion doesn’t really hit home until it’s very suddenly put into the context of Connor’s real-life, and he’s forced to deal with the consequences of his catharsis in an unexpected way.

I mentioned a few reviews ago that everything is political in literature - whether you want it to be or not.  But now that I think about it, a more accurate statement might be that everything is moral, and morality and politics simply share a lot of territory.  When you look at literature in that way, whether a book is good or bad is a matter of how successfully a book communicates its morals, and how accurate and true to life those morals feel.  By that metric, this book succeeds in the purest way possible.  Sure, it has a lot of interesting fantasy ideas, and the quality of writing is superb, and the illustration is seamlessly blended with the texts to create one of the most immersive reading experiences I’ve ever had, but those don’t tend to be what people remember about this book.  What people do remember is the book’s message - one of the most complex and accurate messages I’ve ever come across.  It’s not the kind of thing you can sum up simply - if I’m being honest, I’m not sure if there’s a more simple or precise way to put it than Ness does through this novel.  But that makes it even better.  This is the perfect medium through which to deliver this message, and Ness is an author skilled enough to use the elements of storytelling to enhance the message to maximum potency.  For that reason, this is one of the best novels I’ve ever read.  I can only think of one or two other books that have so much to say, and that say it nearly so well.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that this novel doesn’t actually belong to Patrick Ness alone.  It’s actually based on an outline by Siobhan Dowd, who tragically passed away before getting to write the novel, and entrusted Ness with completing it after her death.  I guess it’s my own failing as a reviewer that I’ve never read any of Dowd’s novels, and I can only put this in the context of Ness’ career, not hers.  But I hope that, in spite of that lacuna, I’ve summed up what makes this novel so exceptional, what makes it so beloved by so many people. I love Patrick Ness, and this is his finest accomplishment as an author.

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YA Review, 10/14/17: Hawksong by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

You might remember from my review of Graceling (2008) that I don’t tend to like epic fantasy very much.  I’m just not very impressed with scope, with sprawling worlds - I’m just not interested enough to bother keeping track of them, meaning I never really feel like I’m fully enjoying the books.  But that said, there are a few exceptions, and this book - one of the first YA books I ever read - is one of them.  This is the beginning of the Kiesha’Ra series, and it’s one of the only high fantasy series I’ve ever read where I’ve actually been invested enough to keep track of all the complicated names, familial relationships, and kingdoms.  This is an old book, and I don’t know how well-remembered it is, but if you’ve never heard of it, then read on, because we’ve got a real gem on our hands.

I feel like I should be honest early on: a big part of the reason this book works so well for me is that it’s only around 200 pages.  That’s not to say that Atwater-Rhodes doesn’t introduce a lot of complex and interesting ideas here, because she does, but the brevity means that there’s much more immediate payoff for all the ideas she introduces.  In a book this short, there’s absolutely no room for anything unnecessary - Atwater-Rhodes trims all the fat, leaving only the absolute essentials.  So if there’s something difficult to remember, I always know that it’s important, and it’s important in the immediate future.  For that reason, I think this will work for a lot of outsiders to the epic fantasy genre, but it’s not going to disappoint any fans.

In fact, the worldbuilding is probably the strongest and most well-remembered aspect to this series.  In only 200 pages, Atwater-Rhodes manages to build one of the most memorable and vivid settings I’ve ever seen.  The series primarily concerns two warring tribes of shapeshifters - the avians, and the serpiente.  The thing Atwater-Rhodes does so brilliantly is to develop believable and opposing cultures for these shapeshifters.  The novel is narrated by Danica, an avian, and big sections of it focus on her culture shock as she lives in serpiente territory.  The genuine discomfort and fear she feels is just astoundingly well-written.  Perhaps another reason that I didn’t have trouble keeping track of everything, the way I typically do in epic fantasy, is that the cultures come alive so vividly, that they just stick in the brain.  This book’s biggest strength is how evocative it is.  It’s common to see books - fantasy in particular - praised for ‘taking us to another world’, but it’s so rare that books actually seem to do that, for me at least.  This is one of the few that does.  That’s remarkable, and even more remarkable that Atwater-Rhodes did it in a mere 200 pages.  It’s a testament to how much she makes every word count, and her amazing sense of humanity and culture.

So what story does this setting prop up?  Well essentially, it’s a forced marriage story - Princess Danica of the avians and Prince Zane of the serpiente are both determined to stop the war between the two tribes, so they marry each other in order to combine their royal families, in spite of their complete lack of affection for each other.  And of course, there’s a love triangle of sorts, with Danica actually wanting to marry Rei, one of her guards.  But what makes this forced marriage story different is that Danica and Zane aren’t being forced into the marriage by any outside forces - in fact, Danica’s mother is horrified by the idea of it.  The only thing forcing them together is the responsibility they feel to end the war their tribes are in.  Marrying each other, in spite of their lack of love, really is the right thing to do.  The conflict Danica experiences is genuinely compelling - her decision is whether to do the right thing for herself or the right thing for her kingdom.  This book is about her making that decision, and it’s a genuinely difficult one.  As we see Danica struggle with it, we get some excellent character development, for both her and Zane, as they struggle to navigate their new relationship.  The only real downside is that this genuinely compelling conflict is resolved very cheaply.  I don’t want to spoil the ending, but in short, it took away a lot of the sacrifice that needed to be involved in a story like this.  It just wasn’t a satisfying resolution to Danica’s arc.  But until the very end of the novel, the arc works very well.

I would also be remiss not to mention Atwater-Rhodes’ prose.  Atwater-Rhodes was actually only 18 when she wrote this book (she wrote her first published book when she was 13, by the way), which is only a year older than me.  Given that, it’s amazing to me how good her prose is.  It’s a big part of what makes this book so evocative, and what helps the cultures come to life so well.  Her style is very lush and descriptive - in less skilled hands, it could’ve gotten purple, but Atwater-Rhodes pulls it off excellently.  The tone does get a little self-serious at times - the lack of humor and self-awareness is a recurring problem throughout Atwater-Rhodes’ work.  But the upside to this is that the scenes that require intensity or powerful emotion are pulled off beautifully.  This novel opens with Danica losing a relative in a battle, and the scene where she mourns this loss is just astounding, and genuinely poignant.  The novel is filled with scenes like that - Atwater-Rhodes really knows how to bring her world and characters to life.

On the whole, this book does have it’s problems, but I can’t pretend I don’t love it.  I know that Atwater-Rhodes had a cult following back in the day - I’m not sure how much of that following is still keeping up with her now, but I can definitely see why she was popular.  This is generally considered her best novel, and I can definitely see why; Danica is one of the strongest protagonists Atwater-Rhodes has ever written, and her conflict is interesting as hell.  Whether you like epic fantasy or not, this is a very enjoyable book, and even though it’s a little old, I think it deserves to be remembered.

[thelowercasegimmick]

Book Review, 10/10/16: Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle

If you don’t listen to the Mountain Goats, you need to listen to them right now.

That’s not a joke.  Stop reading this review and listen to something by the Mountain Goats.  That goes regardless of who you are, or what genre of music you normally listen to - if you put any value in lyrics, you will like them.  Almost everything they’ve done is good, although their first few albums are a little weaker.  My favorites by them are All Hail West Texas, The Sunset Tree, and Transcendental Youth, and people seem to gravitate towards Sunset Tree the most.  But really, most everything he’s done is great.

The reason I bring this up is that John Darnielle, the author of this book, is the lyricist and lead singer of the Mountain Goats, one of the best indie bands of all time.  100% of the reason I read this book is that I absolutely love the Mountain Goats, and the thing I love most about them is their lyrics.  Each Mountain Goats song is a little vignette, and in only a few lines, Darnielle completely engulfs you in whatever he’s writing about.  I can only think of a few other songwriters who can do so much with so few words - his lyrics put images in your head, paint strong characters, and leave you feeling emotional.

So the challenge Darnielle faced is capturing that in novel form.  I was honestly a little nervous going into a full-length novel of his, and I would’ve been much less nervous about a short story.  In a way, most of his songs already read like short stories.  But a novel?  Darnielle’s songs work partly because of their brevity - they rarely tell full stories, mostly just giving you an impression of a situation and leaving.  How do you make a novel out of that?

Short answer: This novel is mostly a bunch of loosely-connected vignettes, and the overall structure is actually quite weak.  That said, I still kind of loved this book.

It’s clear from the beginning that Darnielle is very good at writing scenes and not very good at connecting them.  I suppose I should’ve seen that coming - when you get down to it, this book really isn’t that different from his album Tallahassee.  Both that album and this book are ostensibly stories, but both of them have chapters (or songs, in the album’s case) that stand very well on their own and only just barely connect with each other.  This story in Wolf in White Van is apparently told backwards, but to be honest, I wouldn’t have noticed if the summary on the book jacket didn’t tell me so.  This feels mostly like a bunch of vignettes about the same character.  And I guess you could say that’s this book’s biggest flaw.  I assume there was some sort of progression I was supposed to pull from this novel, but I completely missed it.  Maybe I’m just an inattentive reader, but I can only speak to my experience.  You compare this to Liar (2009)*, which is another story told mostly in vignettes in non-chronological order.  But the sections in Liar come together to really tell a story, and present a theme - there’s a distinct reason that we’re given every piece of information.  That never really happens in Wolf in White Van - it felt much more random and scattershot to me.

If I had to guess, I would say that what we’re given is less in the service of theme and more in the service of aesthetic and character development.  Really, Tallahassee was the same way - I’m not sure if I would say Tallahassee had a theme, in the sense of a message, but you’ll walk away with a strong image of the house the album’s couple lives in, and a strong sense of their relationship.  It’s the same here - the thing Darnielle does really well is to give the reader a sense of Sean as a character, and the apartment where he lives.  That wouldn’t normally be enough to sustain a novel, but... honestly, I think in this case, it is.  If you read this as a bunch of loosely-connected vignettes, this book is brilliant. John Darnielle is one of the most evocative writers I’ve ever read, and that applies in novel form just as much as it does in songs.  The best comparison I can think of is to Wanderlove (2012), another very subtle contemporary book that leaves you feeling like you know the setting just as well as a place you’ve actually visited.  Darnielle might not have much of an eye for structure, but when it comes to prose, he’s almost as good as he is with lyrics.

But the best part of this book is Sean’s characterization.  This is a subtle book, and Sean’s characterization is subtle to match.  He’s not the kind of character whose pain and struggles are going to immediately jump out at you.  But I think Darnielle does a very good job of writing a recluse in a way that doesn’t feel cliched or fake.  A more obvious character would’ve made a character like him - socially isolated, disfigured due to an accident - angsty and brooding.  But Darnielle doesn’t just show his most emotional points; most of this novel concerns itself with Sean’s everyday life, and the challenges and eccentricities that come with it.  The few angsty moments that do come feel like a natural result of the conditions of his life, rather than something forced for the sake of provoking an emotional reaction from the reader.  The result is the one thing that you rarely get from Darnielle’s songs (or indeed, anything as short as a song): a fully-realized, complete protagonist.  the Mountain Goats’ songs have given me sketches of a character before, but this is something complete, and I never would’ve guessed that Darnielle would’ve been good at it.

It’s hard to compare a novel to a song or an album.  That said, I think I’d rather listen to a Mountain Goats album than re-read this book.  Music is where Darnielle’s main talents lie.  That said, if you were worried that this would be some kind of vanity project, I’m happy to say that that’s not even remotely the case.  Darnielle isn’t a great novelist, but he’s more than good enough that I could picture this book being published even if he wasn’t a well-known musician.  And if you like the Mountain Goats, you’ll probably like this novel as well.  As I sort of implied before, the album by them that this book most resembles is Tallahassee - both structurally, and in that this novel is flawed but enjoyable.

And, as a reminder, if you’ve never listened to the Mountain Goats, you need to fix that immediately.

*Have I ever mentioned on this blog that I really love Liar by Justine Larbalestier?  I think it’s probably come up once or twice.

[thelowercasegimmick]

YA Review, 10/7/16: The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth

Sometimes, I think I should talk about politics more on this blog.  It’s not like I don’t have strong political opinions.  I think part of the problem is that, much as I’d like to pretend otherwise, I am on Tumblr, which is not exactly known as a forum for rational discussions.  I guess that’s a way of saying that I’m afraid of getting into an argument I can’t win, or saying something ignorant that ends up hurting people.  But the truth is, everything is political, and YA books aren’t exempt from that.  I do generally believe that a book’s artistry can be evaluated separately from its politics, but that only works to a certain extent, and only with certain books.  When a book’s aims are explicitly political, there’s really no way to evaluate whether the book succeeds or not without talking about its politics.

This book gives me plenty to talk about besides its politics, and I’ll talk about that as well.  But given that this book is about ex-gay therapy, and Danforth was inspired by the Zack Stark controversy, it seems important to me to talk about Danforth’s political agenda, and how that affects the reading experience of this book.  Because part of what made this such a powerful read for me was the fact that yes, this book does speak to my own politics - my experience was strongly affected by the fact that Danforth is writing about something deeply important to me.

I’ll be honest: I don’t generally like books that directly address politics.  Books like The Hunger Games (2008) and The Adoration of Jenna Fox (2011) are very political books, but they use allegory rather than directly addressing their issues.  While this does make it more likely that readers will miss the point (I honestly doubt that most fans of The Hunger Games actually got the allegory), it also lets the authors write with a defter hand, so that the books are rarely preachy or overdone.  The futuristic settings and sci-fi stories force the authors to focus on other things besides the message, and as a result, those books tend to have much stronger characters and plots than books that address politics directly.  Books like Luna (2004) and Wide Awake (2006) that address political issues directly and structure everything around those issues are generally badly-plotted with boring characters.  You get the impression that the authors weren’t actually interested in telling a story - they just wanted to talk about politics, and the plot and characters are just an excuse to do so.  They’re the kind of books that get called ‘preachy’, and there’s a reason people hate preachy works so much.  It’s hard to think of a bigger disappointment than being promised a story and being given a political rant in exchange.

Because of all that, I can’t praise Danforth enough for her restraint in how she wrote this novel.  It would’ve been so easy for her to make this novel nothing but an excuse to show various ways that ex-gay therapy is bad.  But that’s not what this novel does.  This novel is just as much about Cameron as it is about ex-gay therapy - perhaps even more about Cameron, given that she isn’t even institutionalized until halfway through the novel.  This feels like a perfect blend of a political message and a character-oriented one - this is a story about how very personal politics can be.  Cameron’s story couldn’t be told without this political message, and the political message would be very different with a different viewpoint character.  And, as a bisexual person myself, the knowledge that I could have ended up in Cameron’s situation had I been born into a different family made the reading experience all the more visceral for me.  That won’t be everyone’s reading experience, obviously, but I related to Cameron a lot, and that made the character arc all the more powerful for me.  And it helps just how on-point Danforth’s political message is, in relation to that arc.  Danforth clearly knows a lot about corrective therapy, and in the minor characters, she incorporates a lot of different aspects of how the therapy affects people.  Apart from this helping to provide a lot of good development for the side characters, it paints a very complete picture of just why most gay people find this therapy so objectionable.  This could’ve easily been an angry, bitter book, but Danforth is a more subtle author than that.  Instead, the dominant emotion is sorrow - she emphasizes all the loss that occurs, and the lasting consequences of the trauma for these characters.  I couldn’t ask for a better character arc centering around a political issue.

Moving away from politics a bit, I want to expand a bit more on how surprisingly subtle this book is.  Danforth opens the novel when Cameron is twelve and her parents die, and slowly works her way to when Cameron is fifteen or sixteen.  This is an incredibly risky choice - I almost always hate novels that try to incorporate such a large time scale.  But Danforth uses this to excellent effect.  She’s smart enough to leave very little to summary - almost everything we learn comes from a scene.  This extended opening essentially serves to set up (and even begin) Cameron’s character arc, in a way that just wouldn’t work as well in a set of flashbacks.  I might not have even missed this information if it wasn’t there, but I’m so glad that Danforth had the sense to realize that it was necessary - it adds to the character arc in a lot of subtle ways.  This novel is an excellent example of showing rather than telling.  Part of the reason I felt Cameron’s character arc so strongly is that I felt it - Danforth never beats us over the head with it.  This is not an intense book; the emotional high points are few and far between.  But the parts between those high points flow very naturally and always stay interesting, and when the emotional high points do come, they’re all the more poignant as a result.

Unfortunately, the prose was the only thing that prevented this novel from being truly excellent.  This book was written in first-person, which was a huge mistake, because Danforth isn’t even trying to write a convincing voice for a teenager.  Danforth has a PhD in creative writing, and while that’s not usually a bad thing, it’s certainly a problem when your teenager talks like a thirty-something who majored in creative writing in college.  This prose would’ve been fine if it was third-person - Danforth definitely writes with the skill of a creative writing PhD.  But writing a teenager this way was just the wrong artistic choice, and it distanced me from the story quite a bit.  Skilled as Cameron’s character arc is, it’s easy to feel a bit at an arm’s length from her at times, mostly because she doesn’t talk like any teenager I’ve ever known.

But I still highly recommend this novel.  I honestly can’t think of another YA book that directly talks about politics this well.  This is subtle, well-structured, and with a wonderful character arc.  There’s simply nothing like this in YA, and it’s a shame that Danforth doesn’t seem to be releasing another novel.  I’d hate for such a talented author to only release a single book.

[thelowercasegimmick]

Opinion Piece, 10/3/16: Infodumps and YA

If you’ve ever taken a creative writing class, regardless of what level it was, you almost certainly heard the advice ‘show, don’t tell’.  It’s one of the most basic and well-known pieces of writing advice out there, and it’s also one of the hardest to put into practice.  I feel as if I talk about infodumps in every other review, and because of that, I wanted to expand on my thoughts on this subject.  Infdoumps are, in short, a failure of showing - the author has decided to tell the information they want to get across, all at once, rather than showing it in practice.  But why, exactly, is this a bad thing?  What’s the point of showing, rather than telling - isn’t everything just the author telling you things?  Aren’t infodumps necessary to convey information when the worldbuilding or backstories are complicated?  Those are the questions I want to answer.

When I start reading a novel, I sometimes imagine that there’s an implied interaction between me and the author.  The author (along with their editor and publishing company) has essentially said to me, “This book will entertain you.  I’m asking you to give up several hours of your life to dedicate to my words, and in exchange, I promise not to waste any of that time.”  Essentially, I think that every part of a novel should hold some interest for me.  I’m not saying every word has to be enthralling, but I am saying that not one word should be boring.  That’s obviously an unattainable ideal, but an author should strive to get as close to it as they can.  I do understand that, to some degree, sacrifices have to be made, and that some bits of the novel will be boring in the moment but will play off in an interesting way later.  But as I said above, reading a novel is a time commitment, and if too much of my time is wasted, I’m going to quickly grow frustrated with a book.

To me, that’s the point of showing rather than telling.  Nearly every novel has some sort of backstory that the reader needs to understand before the book will make sense or be any good.  But, almost without fail, telling is the least interesting possible way of getting across this information - it’s the method that wastes my time the most.  If the telling is brief, it’ll usually be unmemorable, and there’s a good chance I won’t be able to recall it later.  For example, simply saying, “Jane was easily excited,” just doesn’t stick in my head.  I read dozens of books every year - I’ve probably read about hundreds of easily-excited characters.  But if you actually show Jane being easily excited - if you write a scene where she’s gets excited over minor events - that sticks in my head.  If you show her in a scene like that, you don’t have to state directly that she’s easily excited, because I’ll intuit the information - I’ll remember the scene, and the information will stick in my head.  Not only that, but the scene is (or at least, has the potential to be) interesting to read.  After all, getting a feel for a character is one of the joys of reading, and the scene could be funny, or move the plot of your book forward in some way.  This is why writers are advised to show rather than tell.  It makes the information more interesting, and memorable.

So, that’s why showing is better when the information you’re trying to get across is short.  But when you have to get a large chunk of information across at once, that’s when things get a lot more difficult.  See, in the example above, while the reader probably won’t remember the information, you haven’t really stopped the momentum of your story for very long.  You should try to avoid stopping the story’s momentum at all, of course, but it’s not going to ruin your book to do it for a sentence or two.  But there’s an extra problem with trying to tell a lot of information at once: you have an infodump.  An infodump is when a story stops entirely to tell an entire paragraph or more of information or backstory.  This is by far the easiest way to impart large chunks of information, which is probably why you see infodumps so often.  But they’re low-effort, low-reward - infodumps aren’t just the least interesting possible way of imparting a lot of information, they actively hurt the momentum of your novel.  For a paragraph or two, you’ve stopped the story entirely.  An infodump doesn’t move the novel forward at all, and a novel that’s standing still is wasting my time.  Every good novel has to be moving forward at all times.  Forward momentum will obviously look different in an action-packed space opera compared to a slow-burning romance, but in both, the situation needs to be changing, or else the novel will inevitably get boring.

The way to avoid infodumps is essentially the same as how to avoid briefer bits of telling - demonstrate the information in a scene.  A very good example of this is in the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness, one of the few things I talk about more than infodumping on this blog.  The Chaos Walking trilogy is written in first-person present-tense, and as such, we see Todd and Viola’s thoughts in real-time.  It wouldn’t make sense for the characters to explain to the reader their backstories or how the world works, because we’re seeing their thoughts as they think them.  People aren’t exactly in the habit of internally explaining their thoughts to outsiders.  And to be clear, Ness does have a lot to explain to the reader - Chaos Walking is set on an alien planet where everybody can hear each other’s thoughts, and at the start of the series, Todd has never seen a woman before.  Ness has said that he saw the first-person present-tense as a challenge: how could he impart all that information without breaking the story’s internal logic?  And to be fair, Ness doesn’t do it perfectly - there are one or two small infodumps where Todd thinks about basic things that he has no reason to think about.  But mostly, Ness incorporates the information into scenes, in little bits at a time, and he trusts that the readers are smart enough to piece together the information.  And this completely worked - I’ve seen plenty of readers who weren’t into the series (which is understandable - the series is kinda out there, extremely dark, and definitely not for everybody), but I’ve never seen a single reader complain that they didn’t understand the world.

That’s the first book I’d recommend in order to see how one can avoid infodumps.  The second is, of course, Liar (2009) by Justine Larbalestier, another book that I just can’t stop talking about on this blog.  (The other major one is The Hunger Games (2008), which I’m not going to talk about in this essay, although it’s another example of a book that gets across a lot of complex worldbuilding without infodumps).  Liar is actually a contemporary story, but it’s one with a lot of backstory it needs to get across.  (In a lot of cases, backstory is to characters as worldbuilding is to fictional universes.)  So how do you insert that backstory naturally into a story?  Larbalestier’s answer is one of the most creative I’ve ever seen.  Larbalestier’s solution is to essentially use infodumps as character building exercises, to the extent that they don’t feel like character development anymore.  Liar spends a lot of time in Micah’s head and not a lot of time on action, and a huge proportion of the time we spend in Micah’s head gets across backstory of some sort.  This backstory is important set-up for the theme, but Larbalestier masks this fact by showing us something new and interesting about Micah’s psyche along with that necessary information.  Part of the fun of the book is seeing this for yourself, so I won’t spoil it too much, but essentially, Larbalestier uses fourth-wall breaks, humor, and lots of other fun devices during Micah’s internal monologues, and each one tells us something new about her.  Whereas in the hands of a lesser author, this might’ve turned the novel into little more than a bunch of writing exercises put into a random order, there is in fact something tying everything together - each internal monologue does in fact tell you information, and it does all build up to something, both thematically and in a sort of dramatic structure.  But Larbalestier masks this so well that it’s almost impossible to be aware of what she’s doing until the novel is finished.  She delivers the information in a memorable way, without you even realize that she’s getting you to remember setup for a potential payoff.  It’s essentially the same thing that Patrick Ness did, but it uses very interesting internal monologues instead of Ness’ equally interesting scenes.

Setup and payoff is one of the most important concepts in fiction, and I think a mistake that a lot of authors make is to prioritize the payoff over the setup.  The prevalence of infodumps in YA is a reflection of that - the author decides to make the setup boring, and the consequence is that the reader often stops paying attention before the payoff arrives.  But some of the best books I’ve ever read are so great specifically because they find creative ways to set up their payoffs.  It makes the payoff more satisfying, and the opening third of their novels less boring.  There is no formula to successful setup, but I guess I would call infodumps an anti-formula.  There’s nothing that guarantees success, but an infodump almost completely guarantees failure.  So, in short, that’s why I complain about infodumps so much - not only are they boring, but I think writers can do so much better.

[thelowercasegimmick]

YA Review, 9/30/16: Curses and Smoke by Vicky Alvear Shecter

One of my biggest failings on this blog is how little historical fiction I review.  My favorite YA books tend to be either contemporary or dystopias, probably because those are the genres that feel the most relevant to me.  Whereas contemporary and dystopias explore things that I deal with in my own life - contemporary stories literally, dystopias metaphorically - both fantasy and historical fiction (the latter in particular) tend to be more backwards-looking.  But even though that’s less immediately appealing to me, there is something to be said for their approach, because they force me to get outside myself more than other books do.  It’s sort of a shared exercise in empathy with the author, where we both try to relate to a character with a life completely different from our own.  So, when I’m going into this book, about a woman and a slave in Pompeii right before the eruption, I’m hoping for something that really takes me outside of myself, and helps me see the world in a new way as a result.

So how did Shecter do?

Short answer: she did okay, I guess.  In fact, pretty much everything about this book was fine, without being particularly great or memorable.  Shecter uses a lot of cliches, but she manages to string them into a decent dramatic structure, with mildly engaging characters.  To be honest, the plot really doesn’t interest me very much, apart from the ending - we all know how a story about Pompeii is going to go, and the buildup is structurally effective but ultimately kind of limp.  We know what’s going to happen, and Shecter doesn’t have too many tricks other than that, meaning that the buildup to the climax feels kind of slow. That’s the main thing that makes this book so forgettable - because we know what the climax will be, there’s kind of a pervasive sense that a lot of what we’re seeing doesn’t matter.  That said, the ending - by far the most memorable thing that happens in this book - was genuinely surprising to me.  I won’t say it was totally different from how I was expecting the book to end, but it was a much more effective climax than I was anticipating, and it almost made up for the lackluster buildup.  Shecter does a very good job of resolving the thematic threads, in an ending that really sticks with you.  It could’ve felt cheap in other hands, but Shecter clearly thought through the implications of this ending, and the more I think about the ending, the less I could imagine the book concluding any other way.

But the thing that really interests me is the characters - that’s the part of the book I was really anticipating being engaged with.  And, as with this book as a whole, Shecter did okay, I guess.  The characters are instantly likable and relatable, which is both their biggest strength and their biggest weakness.  I didn’t have to work at all to get invested in these characters and understand them, which sounds like a compliment, but it isn’t necessarily.  These characters ‘lived’ over two thousand years before me, and given that, they feel too contemporary.  Lucia in particular talks too much like a second-wave feminist at times - this didn’t strike me as particularly authentic to how a woman from Ancient Rome would’ve expressed her dissatisfaction with her oppression.  I know that part of what Shecter is doing is exploring modern problems through metaphor, but this particular metaphor clashes with the logistics of writing historical fiction, as well as what was (for me) the potential appeal of a story like this.  The characters are well-developed, and their arcs make for a good story, don’t get me wrong.  They just lack that special something that would’ve made them stand out in my memory.  The star-crossed lover story is well-trod, and Shecter doesn’t really do much new with it.  And the way they think is just too familiar to me - I feel like I’ve seen this dozens of times before.

I don’t have a whole lot to say about this book.  Apart from the ending, this book is very technically good, in the writing characterization, and storytelling.  This is a highly functional book.  But it’s also pretty cliched and forgettable.  I would recommend this to fans of historical fiction - Ancient Rome fanatics in particular - but there are probably plenty of other books just like it.

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Manga Review, 9/26/16: Attack on Titan Volume 1 by Hajime Isayama

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this in the manga reviews I’ve done, but I'm not a fan of most anime and manga. Most mainstream anime and manga doesn't take itself very seriously, and I don't find the jokes funny. They always seem to come from exaggeration and slapstick, rather than anything genuine - it quickly gets old. The feel is always childish, and the plots meandering. There are exceptions - Death Note and Bakuman are both flawed but strong, and Kokoro Connect is excellent - but they’re few and far between.  I think that’s why it was such a relief to me when I discovered this manga.  Not only is it far, far better than I was expecting, but it also feels like exactly what I’ve been looking for ever since I started reading manga.  It's dark, it's filled with action, the characters are well-developed, the worldbuilding is excellent, and the artwork is pretty good. It's one of the best mangas I've read.

The thing that stands out most is how this manga builds its premise. Isayama takes the risky choice of opening with an extended flashback (it takes up the entire first chapter). Normally, this kind of thing would be vastly unnecessary, but that's far from the case here. We needed that glimpse at Eren's life before the Titans broke the outer wall - it gives a lot of perspective on what happens next. It also serves as an introduction to the world that Eren lives in, one that would've been difficult to establish otherwise. Most importantly, it wasn't boring - I didn't feel like I was waiting for the plot to start the entire time. Books that open with extended flashbacks are almost universally dull, but this is a rare exception. The worldbuilding manages to still be subtle, tight, and logical. Sure, we don't quite see everything here, but it didn't feel necessary to see everything yet.

The characterization, I suspect, is going to be one of this series' biggest strengths later on. The characters we see here are pretty well-developed. Eren could've turned out to be a cliche - he's a relatively young and inexperienced guy, but he's determined to become stronger because he's fighting to avenge a family member. But he doesn't read quite like these cliches. Unlike the typical archetype, he's actually focused and determined - there's none of the laziness that these characters usually posses. I find Eren a lot easier to take seriously than these characters, making him a more relatable protagonist. Misaka more directly averts a cliche - rather than the cutesy-yet-badass girl that most mangas have as a sidekick to the male hero, Misaka is quiet, kind of depressed, and not showy about her badassness. (She definitely is badass - she graduated at the top of her class - but we don't see it very often.) These characters, unlike most manga characters, feel like real people to me.

Attack on Titan is pretty much the best manga series I’ve ever read.  I’m not exactly an expert on the genre, so don’t take my opinion as the end-all-be-all, but, having gone a little further in the series, I can say that it does stay at this quality level as it goes on.  The artwork is the weak link here - it’s not bad, but it can be a little stiff at times.  But the storytelling is among the most masterful I’ve ever seen, and I can’t wait to read further.

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YA Review, 9/23/16: Graceling by Kristin Cashore

I mentioned in my last review, of Seraphina (2012), that I’m not usually a big fan of high fantasy.  There are a couple of exceptions, but in general, the tropes associated with the genre just don’t speak to me.  You might think Graceling would be an exception, since its sensibility is much more YA than something like Game of Thrones.  And yet, I found this book to be an almost textbook example of everything I don’t like about the genre.  The one thing it doesn’t posses is the type of misogyny typically found in Tolkein-inspired fantasy.  I’m going to stay far away from the discourse surrounding this book’s feminism, except to say that the book doesn’t lack for well-developed female characters with agency over their story.  Other than that, however, I disliked this book for pretty much the same reason I dislike most high fantasies.

My dislike for high fantasy and this book ultimately stem from something that a lot of fans of the genre like best about it: the scope.  If I was a more casual reader, who re-read my favorite books again and again and dedicated myself to learning every detail about them, I could picture liking the very broad scope that most of these books take.  But I very rarely re-read books, and in a typical year, I might read over a hundred new books.  I just don’t have the patience to keep track of a dozen kingdom names, or the names of tertiary characters who aren’t central to the story, but are central to a few conversations.  And that’s what most high fantasy, including this book, asks me to do.  This particular book doesn’t even bother to have a map or a list of characters, meaning that if I didn’t remember why a character or kingdom was important, I had to either flip through the early chapters to find when it was introduced, or just hope that it wasn’t too important.  This didn’t end up preventing me from understanding the broad story, but it did lead to a lot of confusing moments, and it left me with the impression that I was supposed to get more from this book than I did.

The other major element that ruined this book for me - and that’s ruined a fair number of other high fantasy books for me - was the pacing.  It alternates between too slow and too fast, generally being dictated by the demands of establishing worldbuilding. I think Cashore was torn between wanting an exciting story and wanting an immersive world, and the pacing suffered hugely as a result.  I might’ve been more forgiving if the worldbuilding worked better, but to be honest, even when I understood it, it was fairly standard for a high fantasy book - if I was being uncharitable, I would even call it bland.  So the pacing suffers, and there’s nothing really gained in exchange.  The pacing is the absolute worst at the very end of the story, which has to be one of the biggest anti-climaxes I’ve ever read.  Cashore sets up a dramatic battle with the villain, and completely fails to follow through.  And unlike a lot of the other odd pacing choices, this doesn’t even benefit the worldbuilding in any way - it’s as if Cashore just couldn’t be bothered to write a decent climax.

Even if the pacing had worked, I’m not sure if this plot would’ve.  There is some potential in the basic premise - it’s not exactly stunningly original, but Katsa is a well-developed character with a strong motivation, and I could’ve been interested in how she reaches her goals.  But as the book goes on, the stakes feel more and more forced, because Cashore never puts the same attention into developing the villain as she does Katsa.  We never even see his motivations - he’s just evil for the sake of evil, as far as the story is concerned.  It feels like he was just written for the sake of giving Katsa an obstacle, and it doesn’t make for a very interesting story.  It doesn’t help that most of the action was just monotonous.  Most of the book consists of Katsa traveling from place to place - the obstacles placed in her way just aren’t interesting enough.  The result of all this is a very weak story, one that betrays the promise found in Katsa’s characterization.

I know a lot of people like this book, but I have trouble finding much nice to say about it, except for the fact that Katsa and Prince Po are both well-developed characters.  Even the prose isn’t that great - it isn’t awful or anything, but it tends toward repetition and monotony.  And the story and worldbuilding are both very weak.  There’s just not much here that stands out to me as unique, and most of the basic, foundational elements don’t work.  If this story looks interesting to you, I’d recommend Incarnate (2011) by Jodi Meadows instead - it’s another high fantasy story, but with a far more inventive and well-executed story.

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YA Review, 9/19/16: Seraphina by Rachel Hartman

Speculative fiction is often divided into two sub-categories: fantasy and science fiction.  Ostensibly, the difference between the two is that fantasy is completely impossible, whereas science fiction is at least a little grounded in reality and what could be possible in the future.  But in terms of what gets categorized as one or the other, that distinction is basically meaningless.  Star Wars, under that definition, would be unambiguously fantastical - the force is nothing but magic, with no reality-based explanation, and it’s set in a fictional galaxy, far in the past.  Yet it’s almost always called science fiction, or at most science fantasy.  The real difference between fantasy and science fiction - the one that publishers and bookstores care about when they decide if a book is one or the other - is aesthetic.  Star Wars may have magic, but it also has spaceships, robots, and gunfights, all of which match the generic conventions of science fiction more than fantasy.

I bring this up because this is a book about dragons, and I read it at the recommendation of a sci-fi blog that called it one of the best science fiction novels of 2012.  Having read it, I might not go quite that far, but I see why they say that.  This book has a lot of strengths, and one of the biggest and most interesting to me is its use of genre in its worldbuilding.

At first glance, this appears to be a traditional fantasy setting.  Fantasy tends to be backward-looking and mythology-oriented, and that’s the case here: this is a book about dragons, with the standard quasi-mideival setting, complete with princesses and knights.  But as Hartman develops the world and the dragons within it, you start to question whether it’s that simple.  I wish I could link you to the review that inspired me to read this book, but unfortunately, it’s from a now-defunct blog.  But anyway, the central insight from Sean Wills, co-author of that review, was that if you replaced the dragons here with aliens, you’d have a fairly standard sci-fi premise.  The dragons are sort of outside invaders to the humans, and the focus of this book is on the culture class between humans and dragons.  Apart from hoarding, the dragons here don’t follow much of the mythology associated with dragons - Hartman downplays the fantastical elements that would make them players in an epic fantasy story.  Instead of being enemies faced in open combat, the humans force the dragons to ‘pass’ as humans, hiding who they really are so that they make the humans more comfortable.  This is something that is sometimes explored in fantasy, but is far more common in sci-fi.  Most non-human fantasy cultures are shown to be ‘barbaric’ somehow (usually racially coded), whereas aliens are shown in this light far more often.

So basically, Hartman takes an allegory familiar to sci-fi (aliens representing a culture different from ‘our’ culture that isn’t devalued by the narrative), and applies it to fantasy.  What results is some of the most original epic fantasy worldbuilding I’ve ever seen.  Admittedly, I’m not a big fan of epic fantasy, mostly because so much of it seems to recycle the same tropes and ideas, with only minor variations.  What Hartman does here feels new, in a way that little else does.

Of course, this wouldn’t mean much without a good protagonist to see the world from.  And Hartman more than provides that, with Phina.  So many authors would write a human protagonist, just by default, but I’m glad Hartman chose to write about a dragon, even though a human protagonist likely would’ve been more relatable.  Hartman pulls you into Phina’s world and conflict effortlessly.  There are some scenes that feel viscerally real, particularly in Phina’s self-hatred and desire to be more human, in her efforts to fit into the human world.  It’s the kind of thing that works better if you experience Phina’s arc with her, but suffice it to say, Hartman takes an allegory that could’ve felt tired or perfunctory, and invigorates it with such a compelling character.  In some ways, the worldbuilding and allegory resembled the Kiesha’Ra series by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, and while Atwater-Rhodes nearly matches Hartman in originality and quality of prose, Atwater-Rhodes’ characters have never come to life in quite the same way.

Speaking of prose, Hartman’s prose is simply beautiful.  Epic fantasy writing can get purple and a little ridiculous to me sometimes, but Hartman’s prose manages to feel elegant without ever falling into that territory.  I guess the prose is the most fantasy-ish thing about the novel, but that’s certainly not a problem - it recalls the best of the genre.  And it fits perfectly with what I think is the crux of this novel - using fantasy language (both in the prose and the ideas) to tell a sci-fi story.

My only real problem with this book was the slow pacing - the plot is potentially exciting, but Hartman often fails to really deliver on any sense of urgency.  I normally like books with a focus on character interactions and exploring cultures, but here, it undermines the tension, rather than adding to it.  And that’s a shame, because the effect is to take away from the allegory - it’s harder to understand the weight of the situations Hartman writes about when the ticking clock feels a bit too slow, the stakes too distant too far into the novel.  With some plot tightening, this could easily be one of the best fantasy books I’ve ever read.

As it stands, though, it’s still damn good.  Hartman is an incredibly talented writer, and she has lots of great ideas to explore.  I look forward to reading the sequel to this book (it came out a while ago, I just haven’t gotten to it yet), and I look forward to whatever Hartman decides to do next.

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Teen Movie Review, 9/16/16: Mean Girls

This is a bit of a weird movie to review, because odds are, you’ve already seen it and you love it.  I mean, who doesn’t love this movie?  I’m including myself in that - this was my absolute favorite movie for my first half of high school, and even though it does have its flaws, I can’t help but enjoy every second of it.  It’s the one big exception to my general dislike of teen movies, and my favorite project of Tina Fey’s.  But because everybody loves it, it’s almost like there’s nothing for me to say about this movie.  I mean, everybody loves The Hunger Games (2008) as well, but I like that book for a pretty different reason than most people do.  This movie?  Nah.  Just like everybody else, I like this movie because it’s hilarious.

Much as people like to talk about the movie’s brand of feminism and its insight into girl culture, I think 95% of the reason it’s famous is that it’s just ridiculously funny.  Fey has a knack for dialogue that feels realistic, even when it isn’t, so that the jokes here come from more than just snark and puns.  They don’t normally come from character, per se, but they do come from recognizable situations.  And more than that, they’re quotable - even if you haven’t seen this movie, you probably know half the dialogue from memes and reaction gifs alone.  It’s like Fey has hit on a formula to write things that stick in your head.  There’s really not much I can do to describe it.

So what about the other aspects of this movie?  Because it is more than just a vehicle for one-liners.  I’ve seen people talk a lot about how insightful this movie is about teenage girls and their friendships and interactions.  So I’m going to say something kind of controversial: This movie is not actually that realistic.  Like, I’m in high school, I’ve seen high school drama, but... yeah, it’s never looked anything like this.  I guess it starts out pretty realistic, but around the time Cady decides to ruin Regina’s life by tricking her into gaining weight and seducing her boyfriend, I realized that realism just isn’t what this movie is going for.  And in all fairness, comedy doesn’t really have to be realistic, especially not an all-out farce like this.  Just look at 30 Rock, Fey’s other master work (for the first few seasons anyway).  But the difference is, 30 Rock is never seen as anything more than a really smart comedy.  Mean Girls is, from what I’ve been told, actually supposed to be insightful, and it’s always bothered me a little that something this unrealistic is characterized that way.

So the question is, does the movie’s lack of realism detract from its insight into high school drama?  There are a lot of ways you could answer that question, but in all honesty, I have no idea.  It’s not like I don’t see how it could be insightful - I think there’s sort of an emotional truth to how the girls feel about each other, even if their actions don’t have that same truth.  But really, I don’t know how much or little the emotions feel real, because I’m just not the target audience of this movie.  I’ve never been involved in drama, or at all cared about popularity.  I mostly just stick to a small friend group, and I don’t really care about the social lives about people around me.  (I’ve been told that this is because I’m not on SnapChat, which I don’t see as a disadvantage in any way). This is why I say that I don’t have much to say about this movie other than ‘it’s funny’ - the comedy is the part that’s really meant for me.  The question of this movie’s other strengths and weaknesses just isn’t for me.

So yeah, this is a pretty short review, because there’s only one thing that needs to be said about this movie: it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen, and on the off-chance you’ve never seen it, you need to remedy that right now.  The only other things I have to say are 1.) The only big problem is the structure, which climaxes too early and results in the resolution feeling dragged out and 2.) There are a lot of good performances, especially Lizzy Caplan as Janis, who I really wish got more work.  Other than that, I got nothin’.