Engine Summer

Via rachelmanija, whose reasons for not finishing this book got it onto my find-and-read list.

Hm.

I really, really wanted to like this book. There are many things I do like about it. But.

If I had to pick a genre for Bleeding Violet, I suppose it is a teen paranormal, although only technically a romance; but one of the many things I do like about it is that it is so different from anything else I've seen in that direction. If it reminds me of anything it's of Clive Barker.

Sixteen-year-old Hanna arrives on her mother's doorstep unexpectedly in the middle of the night, to find that her mother's small town in East Texas is actually full of randomly opening portals to other dimensions, many of which release monsters and oddities into the town at no apparent provocation. Hanna is biracial, bicultural (her father and extended family on his side were Finnish), bright, promiscuous, socially maladjusted, and mentally ill. She mentions several diagnoses she's been given, but the one that seemed obvious to me is schizophrenia. As a result, the intersection of the dangers of the town with her own interior problems and her attempts to build a relationship with a mother she'd never met quickly produces exponentially multiplying badness, which isn't helped in any way by her acquisition of an apprentice-demon-hunter boyfriend.

Some things I liked: the setup in general. The various monsters and dangers, all of which are original, different, unexpectedly timed, and genuinely dangerous: this is a town in which you can lean casually against a picket fence and have a tentacle punch through it and start sucking blood out of your arm, or in which the swirling red lights that live inside windowpanes can lure you into becoming a glass statue. The fact that Hanna is genuinely promiscuous both because she likes sex and because she uses it for social leverage, and the text never punishes her for it-- any bad consequences are entirely due to her actually being a jerk about it. The willingness of the book to have an amount of gore in it that I do not recall previously seeing in YA. The way that no relationship in the book is easy, no trust is ever absolute, and yet no human being in it can ever be totally written off as unwilling to do the right thing. The way that Hanna has to try to reality-test the things she sees, because even though it's obvious that the freaky stuff is real and the town is really magical, she could still, in individual instances, be hallucinating. The way that the book never, ever falls into the trap of thinking that it is automatically okay for her to be off her meds because things she thought were hallucinations turn out to be real, and so bad things happen when she goes off her meds. The Mayor of the town, who is very spoilery to talk about, but extremely awesome. The demon-hunting clan's attitude, which I can only describe as incredibly Texas from my experience of living here-- their reaction to 'something terrible is in my windowpane' is 'well don't touch the windows anymore and call us when you really have a problem, but when you do we will be there with bells on, as long as you aren't being a wimp about it'.

( And some major things I didn't like, which inevitably involves talking about more of the plot than people who would find this interesting might want. )

Ah well. I really wanted to like this book. I do like large chunks of it.

And it's a first novel, and it's a really ambitious high-wire act of a first novel, even if I think it falls off. If Reeves keeps being this ambitious, hopefully some day she'll stick it. She has already attained originality, and that can be difficult enough. I need to stop being annoyed at her for not being Gemma Files, because I only run across writers like Gemma Files every once in a blue moon. Reeves could get there eventually and I devoutly hope she does.

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A book from B.'s childhood, which I read as a) I had never really heard of the series and b) he has all of them.

This is that interesting thing, the first book of a series from which the series could go in any direction. It is the protagonist's childhood and backstory prior to setting off into the world, and as it is limited in scope, there is no way to tell what kind of world he is going to set off into. There could be anything out there and it would not surprise me much.

At any rate, our protagonist is Gom, who is the son of a woodcutter and the strange woman who appeared in his house, married him, bore him ten children and then vanished. Gom, unlike anyone else in his family or surroundings, can talk to animals, the wind, and various other forces, but isn't aware that this is peculiar.

Mostly this is a quiet, domestic sort of book about living in a wild space, and the ways in which a person who lives on the outskirts of society can and can not afford to be different, and about the mountain itself and the turning of the seasons and the animals. It does nothing that I haven't seen before, but it does it very well, and in a kindly and pleasant tone, and the magic is well done. I could wish it were more different from everything else out there, but this is a book that achieves its goals perfectly; that they are modest goals does not detract from that.

And I really do find it impressive that after an entire book I have no idea of the overall direction or plot of the series. I know the protagonist, and a little bit of what he can do, and what the tiny place he grew up in was like. The rest is as conjectural to me as to him, and that is very rare.

So, a pleasant thing, although I would not go to great effort to seek this book out, necessarily; but if you find yourself alone with it for an hour or two, it will not go amiss.

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Via janni.

A YA fantasy romance which reminds me both of Shannon Hale (note: not a positive association for me) and early Robin McKinley (note: very positive association for me).

George is the prince of a kingdom in which animal magic-- the ability to communicate with, and sometimes turn oneself into, wild animals-- is punishable by death. Naturally, he has inherited animal magic from his mother, and has to hide it at all costs. He doesn't even have the ability to take comfort from household animals, because animals who live too much with humans lose their own languages and cannot be spoken to.

Since he's perpetually hiding huge chunks of himself and can't get close to anybody, George hopes for civility and nothing more out of his arranged marriage, with the princess, Beatrice, of a neighboring kingdom. Beatrice, however, though she doesn't have the magic, is inseparable from her gigantic hound-- and just as miserable as George is.

You might think, from this description, that this is something of a typical-nowadays YA angst-fest. ... yeah, kind of. But it's quite well done; the reason it reminds me of McKinley is its portrayal of people who have complimentary damage that nonetheless does not make them easy with each other. I approve of books in which even the relationships that are obviously going to work out do not settle down into being simple and straightforward. And it's reasonably well-plotted, in ways which I'm not going to go into, because while I did not find them surprising, I am incredibly difficult to surprise. As in, I think one book has managed it this year. This is probably a book with good plot twists for people who are not perpetually internally trying to hack the plot of all books in advance, but that's a thing about myself I can't actually turn off.

So I'm not saying this is spectacular-- I have about had it up to here with the standard European-cod-medieval fantasy-country setting in which everyone is white and straight and somehow has reasonable teeth-- but it is so much better than it needed to be, and its characters are genuinely good, its darkness dark, its bits of light well-worked for. I will probably read the sequels.

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This is technically the third of the series which began with The Neddiad and The Yggyssey, but as it follows a minor character from the second one into her own story, it can probably be read independently.

Big Audrey, the cat-whiskered girl, has at the start of the book left Los Angeles and all her friends to go in search of her destiny. As was inevitable in the sort of universe Pinkwater writes about, she ends up working at a New Age-UFOlogist bookstore in Poughkeepsie. Then things become odd, in a dimensional travel sort of way, involving possible ghosts, probable aliens, definite flying saucers, and random fairy tales and other novels wandering in and out of the plot. This is a book in which the protagonist and her best friend travel down the Hudson River on a coracle paddled by a miniature giant, in order to meet a werewolf-like thing named Max who lives on a remote island with a bunch of trolls (yes, hello Sendak), and you realize reading it that that was pretty much how you expected things to work.

Which is kind of the problem, really. I don't think this is as good as either of the first two (granted, I think The Neddiad is the best book Pinkwater's written), and I think that the quality issues are because it is both mildly predictable (okay, if you've read a lot of Pinkwater) and very episodic. In general his work has a lot of stuff going on in it, but there's usually an underlying coherency, a plot that comes together in a way that makes emotional if not logical sense. This one has bits that just actually seem to wander through and never become relevant again. There is not, necessarily, anything wrong with that, but it gives the book a very loose feel-- paradoxically, I don't think it's as rich as his more tightly plotted things. Mind you, it's possible it's too early to judge, as while there is a satisfactory ending, this has been left so open for a sequel that it says on the final page that it is being continued in a sequel and gives the title. It may be it will be a better-structured series, or this may even be secretly the first half of a novel. But as a stand-alone, it is while pleasant not brilliant.

But it is pleasant. I like Audrey, who is a smart and canny protagonist who is unwilling to believe in unlikely things even when everyone around her is insisting on them. I like this version of Poughkeepsie, which does not come across to me as clearly as L.A. did in The Neddiad, but which is still a loving and cheerful version of an obviously real place. And the thing I outright love about this book is the way that Audrey's cat-whiskers do and do not make a difference in her environment. I kept thinking of rax's recent class in transsomatechnics, the theories about human and animal bodies and the ways they cross and connect-- Audrey spends the entirety of the book as some kind of catgirl, anything from just the whiskers to points in which she is basically a bipedal cat. It does not affect how anyone treats her, for the most part. People just take the whiskers in stride; her employers assume she's an extraterrestrial but also assume it is none of their business. When she's more catlike, she occasionally has to tell people to change the vocabulary they're using about her ('Could we make it just girl and not cat-resembling girl?') but that's really all, and she herself does not seem remotely bothered or confused about anything related to the way her species fluctuates. And it all comes across as a weird kind of psychologically plausible, despite the fact that in most books people simply do not have this sort of non-reaction to this sort of fluidity. I took a great meta-enjoyment in it, and from identifying the various novels and stories that cameoed, even when the cameos weren't doing much.

In short, I wouldn't start Pinkwater here, or read this if you know you do not like him, but if you do it's a perfectly respectable middle-of-his-quality fun little book. (Note: sequel not out yet.)

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Man, the people who made the movie Cube owe Sleator royalties.

In this young adult novel from 1974, several orphaned sixteen-year-olds are dumped into a seemingly endless space containing flight after flight of interconnected stairways, something of an Escher-scape. There's a toilet, which also provides drinking water, and a machine which dispenses food... if they're willing to follow the rules the machine tries to impose on them.

I honestly don't know whether I should spoiler-cut for this book or not, because it is more than thirty years old and even the book's dedication makes it pretty obvious what is actually going on. But I guess discretion is the better part of valor?

For those of you who don't want to look under the spoiler-cut, the one-sentence summary is: clunky, the opposite of subtle, makes no damn sense in several major ways, but is still very readable, even if you sit there afterwards shaking your head sadly and sighing.

( Spoiler cut. )

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You may recall that I recently read Block's teenage werewolf novel, which was hilariously bad, and found out that she had written a teenage vampire novel. I got the vampire novel out of the library, and...

it's not bad.

I am as surprised as you are.

I mean, it's not, you know, a brilliant work of transcendent art that will last the decades or anything, and it is certainly not a book I would recommend to everybody, for reasons I'll go into below, but I was expecting it to be a train wreck, and it is a perfectly decent little novel.

The thing is, it combines two things that Block is genuinely good at: Los Angeles and prose so lush it's basically indigo. It's playing to her strengths, and what she's done here is used the essential melodrama of the vampire elements to ramp up the prose even further. The reason I don't think everyone would like this book is that it is so far over the top you can't even see the top anymore. Every element, every bit of lace and brand-name perfume, is so precisely more than it ought to be that the effect is one of careful calculation, and the quiet emotional notes underneath everything actually come through the artifice. It reminds me somewhat of Tanith Lee. It's like a painting so supersaturated it turns into chiaroscuro, and this is an approach I hadn't known I wanted somebody to take with a teenage vampire novel.

The protagonist, Charlotte, is a ninety-something teenage vampire who goes to high school because she's bored, of course, and of course there's a girl who was her best friend and committed suicide in mysterious circumstances, and that girl's boyfriend, who rides a motorcycle, and of course Charlotte's controlling maker is sniffing around again, and I don't even need to summarize all this because it's basically Twilight, only, and I would like to emphasize this point, without the terrible. The entire book is one long tightrope-walk of atmosphere and tone and it worked for me. Your mileage may vary, but I do think it is objectively well done.

Except. And this is a huge except, a bookbreaking except, an except of the sort that does actually make me quite reluctant to recommend the thing. There is a page and a half of this novel that is one of the worst mistakes I have seen a writer make in a book, and I can best summarize it this way: you do not put real historical atrocities in lightweight fiction, because the fiction will always break, always. And she didn't do sufficient research or grounding to make it even clear that she was trying not to be offensive, if she was, and it is distressing when a writer who is doing perfectly well at her research on the twenties fucks up 1945. I finished the book, because I was close to the end of it. Your mileage may also vary.

So: very much not what I was expecting; both better and worse, but not mockable.

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So when the big box of books from octopedingenue came some time ago, I went through it looking at things, and started mentally cataloging them into short, long, fantasy, literary fiction, graphic novels, a book I really really wanted to read that Kawy sent because she is psychic (Thief Eyes by Janni Lee Simner, previously reviewed here), etc.. There was a small category, composed mostly of Crazy Beautiful (the HOOKS FOR HANDS book) which I mentally marked as 'books Kawy has sent me because they are incredibly bad'.

When I got to the Francesca Lia Block, I had absolutely no idea whether to put it in that category or not. None whatsoever. Francesca Lia Block has written books I find lovely and memorable and magnificent (Ecstasia, Primavera, the early Weetzie Bat books, The Hanged Man) and books I find utterly neutral and have trouble remembering exist (Girl Goddess #9, that one about teenage fairies) and a couple of the worst frickin' books I've ever read (Blood Roses, Echo, Psyche in a Dress). I tend to like her earlier stuff better, but there is never any guarantee that an author has gone into a permanent decline and indeed one usually hopes otherwise. Her prose usually gets critic-words such as 'lush' and 'purple' and 'adjectival' and her main issue tends to be letting language, style, and a liking for reworked myth and fairytale get in the way of thinking things through or causing them to make sense. When she doesn't run away with herself, it can work very well, and there is usually no telling in advance with any particular book which side of the line it will fall on, which is why I keep picking her stuff up.

Then I saw this was a novel about teenage werewolves.

Whoa-boy. That settled that question. Teenage werewolves are quite popular lately, and there is an entire subgenre of them, and its tropes are such that unless this book were to happen to be completely unlike and unrelated to every other book about teenage werewolves ever written, I knew this book would not just have run away with the author, but plunged off a cliff at full throttle and exploded in a mass of fireworks over the canyon. There is such a thing as a genre playing to someone's strengths, and then there is the opposite. I was holding out vague hope for this being totally unlike everything else in its subgenre, but that particular hope is always vague: never expect a book to be sui generis, especially when the subject is trendy.

Apparently she's written a vampire one, too. I-- the mind boggles. I have to read that book.

( Because this? This was delightfully, enjoyably, compulsively readably terrible. )

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I expected the Percy Jackson books to be terrible, back when I picked the first one up. One of my majors was Greek religion, so I figured my reaction would be 'kill it with fire'. I was so amazed that that turned out not to be the case that the momentum carried me through the entire series.

They're not great books-- they have some major pacing issues, a couple of which serve to make the author look as though he is being stupid for fairly long stretches of time (he isn't, but one shouldn't have to spend a book and a half thinking he is), and they read very much as the work of a writer who has not, as yet, quite figured out exactly the tone and voice he is aiming for and who consequently wavers back and forth a bit. But they hold together much, much better than I had thought possible and I think they do pretty much what they were setting out to do, so I picked up the first book of the sequel series.

The first thing I noticed is that Riordan has definitely found himself. This is just simply better writing. It is also, and I do not think this is coincidental, one age group notch up from the previous. I think it suits him better, as I suspect that part of the tonal wavering was an inability to figure out the exact sophistication level of the group he was first aiming at. This is now solidly older teen: good call.

The second thing I noticed is that he has turned something which could have been a major structural problem for this series into a significant asset-- has used the introduction of a whole bunch of new characters in a very clever way to establish the series as something that can be read independently of the previous. He actually hit that rare sweet spot between 'the previous characters are cameos' and 'you can't read this without knowing who these people are'.

Also, he's using the opportunity to complexify his worldbuilding immensely. He's got the first book out of yet a third series, about Egyptian mythology, and it's fairly obvious it takes place in the same world as these two; the structure he's building here is internally self-consistent and, while really pretty obvious, fun.

He has not as yet fucked up anything mythological in this series but he has gotten to things about which I care even more and is consequently on probation until the dismount. (seishonagon? Have you bought this yet? This series is clearly For You.)

There are still major pacing issues, he's still heavily into tell-not-show, and I can still predict every major plot twist from more than two hundred pages in advance blindfolded while thinking about something else. But it's quite superior beach reading, and if he keeps improving like this, it may eventually have the potential to be something more than that.

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I knew, when octopedingenue sent it to me, that I was saving this book for a special occasion.

Happy birthday, rachelmanija! I hope it was a wonderful day, and I hope it leads into a wonderful year. As it is difficult to send an iced cake through the mail and not have it turn into a mass of crumbs and goo, I have read this impressively terrible book in your honor-- a book which honestly, in my opinion, also turns into a mass of crumbs and goo, but at least an entertaining one, although with less chocolate.

( Yes, it's the terrible teenage problem novel about the boy who has hooks for hands! )

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A fast-paced fantasy set in a magical equivalent of early China, with a whole lot of extremely delectable descriptions of food and a prose style that escapes clunky by the bare skin of its teeth. I enjoyed this quite a lot, partly because it is enjoyable and partly because I have been reading these Laurence Yeps that feel like outlines for longer novels, so it is nice to have a book with Chinese mythology that does not have this issue.

The atmosphere is good, genuinely eerie at times; the plot works, though there are several important characters I would have liked more backstory on. The characterization does well for the sort of book this is, namely an adventure story with a dash of romance, and the worldbuilding is solid. On a sentence-by-sentence level, the language never sounds good to my internal ear, which would usually be a book-killer for me, and I was surprised that it wasn't; there are a few writers whose subject matter is interesting enough to me, or whose pacing and quality of I-want-to-read-this are sufficiently gripping, that I can handle language I don't find euphonious, and they are always a surprise when I run into them. (The principle other one I can think of is Randa Abdel-Fattah, who has written these two violently interesting young adult novels about being a teenage girl and a Muslim in Australia, and who actively makes me wince on a sentence-by-sentence level and I don't care.)

I'd say this is for a slightly older age group than those Laurence Yeps and a slightly younger one than, oh, Megan Whalen Turner. Twelve or thirteen, maybe? And enjoyable to an adult reader because of things like the three-headed four-armed goddess whom you actually get to see talk and interact with things, which is logistically interesting and unusual, and the valley of the three-eyed people (which I principally know of otherwise from Osamu Tezuka, now there's a compare/contrast), and the beats of the story not being exactly as expected or exactly where you expect them. So yeah, despite this being a book I'd been eying with some trepidation after skimming a couple of pages, I would very much read a sequel. I always appreciate it when I enjoy a book despite its having an attribute I do not or cannot usually enjoy.

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