cahn

2/5. So the terrible thing is, I actually liked this book. Rozzlynn has the bones of a good, if shallow, story in here, the outline of a YA-dystopian Revenge-type deliciously catty backstabbing sort of story that I quite enjoyed from time to time. (And teen angst OH WOE IS ME! which I didn't enjoy, but whatever.) Unfortunately, it differs from Revenge in the execution, which in the case of Revenge is polished and pretty, and in the case of this book... really isn't. Rozzlynn self-publishes, and this book is a walking advertisement for WHY EDITORS ARE NEEDED FOR SOME PEOPLE. (Note: I do not mean to imply this is necessary for everyone who self-publishes, e.g., see below.)

I mean... I suppose it could be a lot worse, but the grammar just destroys my story immersion. Every time she says something like "with Avery and I," bam, my head goes against the wall (I don't mind nearly as much in speaking, and have been known to do it myself on occasion, but in writing that should have gone through beta it really bugs me), and she has severe, severe comma problems at least once a page. And quite a lot of telling-not-showing when she gets tired of writing conversations and needs to transition to another plot point; this is especially bad in the interminable first few chapters (the book doesn't really pick up until you get into the fast-tracked society).

It was interesting to read this about the same time as Graceling (YA hitting the same target audience) and Timepiece (not the same target audience, but also YA-ish and self-published), because while Graceling and Timepiece are also first novels and it's easy to tell this is the case, at least for Graceling (Graceling is a bit simplistic, has its own structural issues, and a bit unsure of itself from time to time; Timepiece is much more consistent throughout, but also has fairly simple arcs), and all three books have somewhat compelling storylines with spunky heroines, Graceling and Timepiece are just so much better in terms of craft and skill.

3-/5. This is the second book in a Hunger Games Lite series. Teen romantic angst like whoa, eeeeevil dystopia, love triangle, but without the trenchant reality-show commentary that made Hunger Games worth reading. Whee. It was better than the first book in the series, Matched, in that we didn't get any horrible villain speeches that made no sense, and even some tentative arguments pointing out the dystopia has some points about it, but really, only recommended if you are into teen romantic angst. (It might just have been that I read this book right after reading Timepiece, which is refreshingly free of teen romantic angst, but Crossed drove me crazy with the constant angsting. Or maybe I'm just getting old and curmudgeonly.)

Predictions for the third book, which I'm required to read when it comes out: Ky (primary love interest) will die heroically; Cassia (heroine) will tearfully get together with Xander (secondary love interest and all-around Nice Guy); we may get a handwaving explanation of the nebulous Enemy and the War that is a topic in this book; we will never have it explained why exactly the dystopia does all the stupid things it does.

4/5. Mystery. (Male) cop and (female) priest, and together, they fight crime! Okay, that's a very simplified summary, but this is what D got out of my slightly hysterical summary of it late at night after finishing it.

I... really liked this book. Part of it was how it pushed all my buttons; the story of an abandoned baby that gets hung up in Department-of-Human-Services land, and the drama involving the would-be adoptive parents (possibly singled out by the birth mom, but was she coerced?) who also become suspects once some murders get added into the mix -- well, I have two friends who recently adopted out of foster care in what was (in both cases) a long-drawn-out custody battle with the clearly-unfit bio-relatives, and not to mention my friend L. who made the decision not to adopt out of foster care (possibly because of our mutual friends' experiences) and who is still hung up in the whole adoption system (though happily she is now pregnant), and so I was going to get drawn into the story anyway.

But the central emotional core of this book is of two people that are thrown together, and get to know each other, and spark off each other's minds and souls, and learn more about themselves from each other. And this is a story that gets me every time. It's the way relationships (romantic, friendship, whatever) work, at their best. It's what I like to read about, whether it be through friendship, family, romance, whatever. (For extra bonus points, friendship-turning-to-romance-to-family!)

And... maybe they're falling for each other. And he's married. And, ow. And I am pondering whether I can last the week before I can get back to the library to get the rest of the series, or whether I am going to have to buy them so I can read them Right Now. (this is all lightreads fault!!)

4/5. I thought this was a very good book, and I had an extremely hard time with it. I read the first several chapters, set it down, and it languished around the house for eight weeks. The library, you see, will let one renew books for nine weeks as long as there's no one else who wants it, and on week nine I finally sat down and dug into it.

The thing is, T. H. White is exactly the sort of person you would expect from reading The Once and Future King. He's kind of every character in that book rolled up in one: you can see that he must have been ferociously intelligent, quirky, compassionate, and unhappy, because that's what the characters in TOFK are like. And that really comes through in this biography. And at the same time, I almost didn't want to know the details of how he was that way. I'm glad I read it, now, but there were definitely times going through when I wasn't sure if I would be glad I'd read it, even though I was sure all the way going through that it was a very good book. If that makes any sense.

Anyway, go read skygiants's review, which convinced me to read this, because she says it all a lot better than I do, and she talks about White's grand passionate love affair with his dog. (No, really, the one great love in his life was his dog Brownie. Go read it.)

-Why did no-one tell me that the voice of Quasimodo in Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame is Tom Hulce, who played Mozart in Amadeus? Did everyone else know this but me? It's... a weird mental image in my mind, now.

-The Murder at the Vicarage (Agatha Christie) is, I think, not one of the better Christies, but the one thing that made it hilarious to me was that one of the characters is a mysterious "Mrs. Lestrange." I spent the entire book, whenever she showed up, inventing ways to reconcile the character with Bellatrix Lestrange. (Alas, she did not, in fact, turn out to be a sociopath Death Eater. But that would have been awesome!)

-Tangled is a much more entertaining movie if you watch it thinking of a sort-of alternate Eugenides (from the Megan Whalen Turner books) as the main male character. (I know i'm not the first to think this. Still.)

-I was rereading Tam Lin, which I adore (I blame it for leading me to believe everyone in college spouted random Greek and Shakespeare -- turns out, not so much for physics majors), for various nefarious reasons. I think when I first read it, in high school, I might have found the college sex hijinks vaguely titillating. This time around, I was all "OMG ARE YOU PEOPLE SERIOUSLY NOT USING CONDOMS AND USING HERBAL TEA BIRTH CONTROL WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?" Okay, yes, it's set in the 1970's when people didn't worry about HIV, but still! I was rather amused by my change in reaction over the last twenty years (as well as slightly appalled that it wasn't my reaction as a teenager :) )

4/5. julianyap got me to read The Magician King, and I'm glad I did. It was... an interesting experience, however. I almost felt like Grossman had read my review of The Magicians and was all "I'll show her! I'll write another book and this one will have all the things she complained about in the last one! It will have a reasonable fascimile of a fantasy world, complete with a Quest for Plot Coupons and some random archetypes thrown in, and a redemption arc, and Characters Realizing that the Real World is Cool Like the Fantasy World, and magician scientists who actually care about the way the world works, no, I'll throw in TWO groups of those!"

...So I shouldn't complain, right? Except I am going to, a little. Had I not first read The Magicians, I might have been convinced by it. As it was, it rang a little... hollow to me; the technical execution is quite good (even if every so often one of the characters thinks she knows more science than she does) but I'm not sure I'm convinced by the emotional core of most of it (the exception is below)... the whole thing with Benedict seems sort of shoehorned in, for example. Whereas the ending of Magicians had this savage emotional core of personal responsibility and lack of same that did convince me. That is to say, I think the ending of Magicians was what Grossman really thinks, and I think the (first) ending of Magician King was Grossman saying, "Look, you didn't think I could do the sort of fantasy where there is an inevitable but sweet confrontation between Our Hero and His Baser Impulses, and usually aided by some sort of Wise Talking Animal, in which Our Hero Grows Up and Does the Right Thing and Reaps The Quest Reward thereby -- but I totally can, watch me."

...But I think that was on purpose, and it made me appreciate the first book a lot more. There are a lot of choices Grossman made in the first book that enraged me, a lot, because I thought they were unconscious and made out of a disdain and misunderstanding of fantasy and fantasy readers. This book made me realize that Grossman really does understand fantasy and fantasy readers, and what he did in the first book are all conscious choices, which retroactively makes me more willing to accept his criticisms of fantasy in the first book.

And I did very much like the (second half of the) ending. The thing I really, really liked, actually, was this passage (which comes before the first half of the ending but informs Quentin's response to the second half of the ending and informs my response to his response):

By now [Quentin] had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn't doing it.

This is the real climax of the book. The whole quest thing, the whole Doing the Right Thing, the whole Talking Animal Wisdom, is, I think, Grossman adding intentionally cliched fantasy fluff to it. Because I think what he wants to say, what his actual belief is, is that the fantasy is just window dressing. The characters like to quote the Narnian maxim (adapted for Fillory) of "Once a king in Fillory, always a king in Fillory," but Quentin points out eventually, "That's bullshit and you know it," and I think what Grossman would say is rather different: maturity is something internal and not dependent on whether you're in Fillory or not, and not dependent on whether you have talking animals to help you out with it. No one helps Quentin with this realization. No one even realizes this is the particular realization he needs to have (as opposed to the Real World Rocks Almost As Much As Fantasy So You Should Enjoy It realization, which he is sort of beaten over the head with). None of his adventures really speak directly to that particular realization. It's simply something that comes to him as an integrated response to life -- the way a lot of these kinds of realizations come to most of us.

My conclusion is that this book is much more subtle than the first in its approach to The Problem of Fantasy: the first book just flat-out said, "Hey, have you noticed, fantasy sux!" and this one says, "Look closely and you may see that the heart of fantasy can be hollow and echoing." And I agree with that. I might, at this juncture, prefer the first book, but I think what he did with the second is more interesting.

(Now for some random responses I had: it is totally weird to me that Harry Potter exists in this book and not (to the best of my remembrance?) in the first book. Although wouldn't it be cool if there were some sort of meta-meta where the same kind of amnesia/alternate-universe Julia is subjected to is actually the fate of all of them, where one universe has Harry and the other doesn't?)

(Another random response for those of you who have read it: when I talked to julianyap about this book, he mentioned that he was interested in what a feminist reading would have to say about the spoilery thing that happens to Julia at the climax of her arc that you can totally guess if you have read this far because it is totally the thing that would happen in a grimdark fantasy. My personal reaction was something along the lines of rolling my eyes at the book and saying "okay, Grossman, we get that you are flinging all the cliches in the world at us, thanks.")

I also was very, very pleased to find Eliot stayed redeemed in this book. I don't even remember Eliot from the previous book, just that I remember he had a nice arc and I'm glad Grossman stuck to it.

3+/5 - This is about the only DWJ I have a memory of not liking. (There's The Homeward Bounders, which I find excruciating to read, but mostly because it's really good, in a painful sort of way.) And then, you know, I was reading bookelfe's reviews, and of the things we've both read, it seems like we totally agree on 95% of it. To the extent where she would say something and I would think to myself, "I thought that exact thing when I read it!"

Except for this book, which she loves and I remembered disliking. So I thought I'd give it another try.

...Okay, I see the problem. There's a highly problematic age-and-power-differential romance between a pair that, at the beginning of the book, are ages 10 and at-least-19 [hm, although there is a case to be made that he's only 17] respectively. And I have a strong kneejerk response to that. And usually I can keep my romance kneejerk response (of which I have a good deal, this isn't the only one, although it's perhaps the one I most often complain about) apart from my response to the book as a whole, but the problematic-romance is woven into this book and plot and relationships to such an extent that here it's impossible.

And the thing is, it is problematic, and DWJ admits that, and even uses it as a plot point (which I was too blinded by kneejerk flail to see the first time around). And there is a huge amount going on here... the book, especially the ending, is beautifully subtle and weird and strange, and I'm still thinking about it. So I do think it's very good. But man, would I have loved it more if they weren't written in a way that strongly implies they will end up together (although, to do her credit, she did not have them end up together quite, and one is free, even encouraged, to imagine that these issues will drive them apart) or if any of Tom's otherwise awesome friends had called him out for what he was doing (at least Polly's grandmother does). Because, still creepy.

(And yes, okay, D is eight years older than I am. But I didn't meet him when I was ten, nor did I spend the next eight years having a mad crush on him while he taught me stuff and functioned as a basic (though mostly absent) parental figure. Ugh.)

4/5. Romance. I hadn't been expecting to like this -- I'd tried a couple other Heyers with no success. And after the first chapter, which admittedly was pretty funny, I was sure it was going to be a straightforward reform-the-rake story, which I don't especially like, probably the specific subvariant No-Reform-Is-Actually-Necessary-Because-I'm-Just-A-Misunderstood-Nice-Guy, or possibly the extremely overdone and pretentious Once-I-Confront-My-Tortured-Past-I-Shall-Be-Reformed subvariant.

...I wasn't expecting Jane Austen Lite. Oh, it doesn't have the incisiveness of Austen (and there are a couple of major flaws; in particular I was unconvinced by half of the love story) -- it's a fluff piece -- but as a fluff piece it's pretty awesome. I was giggling the entire time. There's even a Mr. Bennett character, only he's more awesome than Mr. Bennett. (D's hero is Mr. Bennett. Who is this Darcy guy you speak of? he says.) I shall not say any more for fear of spoilers (though comments are fair game) -- this was definitely one where I appreciated coming in with no foreknowledge but what I already knew of romance tropes.

Got it free on kindle. It's not free right now, but amazon has a habit of frequently re-running their specials.

3/5. I really wanted to like this book -- it is about the experience of a young Hong Kong immigrant girl, which is a subject that interests me for obvious reasons, and it was touted as an Asian version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which is one of my favorite comfort reads.

And Girl was an entertaining read, and full of all sorts of interesting details about what it's like to be a really poor Asian immigrant in a predominantly white milieu. The kinds of details made it clear that the author had gone through many of these things (confirmed by an interview with the author). And I got to the end, and I felt quite disappointed.

It took me a while to work out why. The biggest obvious potential reason was the romance, which is quite unrealistic and clearly tacked on for Young Adult Interest Woo. Also, I hate saying this (because I think of it as a meta-spoiler) but there is a Surprise Twist Ending. I bring it up here because a) I don't think enough of the book to mind meta-spoiling it, and b) usually I like Surprise Twist Endings, but here I thought it was a flaw, because it hindered development of what could have become some deep and interesting conversations. What was her life like after the Surprise Twist Ending? How did she feel about it? And so on. Oh, and c) this kind of book (fictionalized memoir) really depends on a sort of honesty between the reader and writer, and it's broken by the sudden revelation that, oh yes, there is a Surprise Twist. Although that honesty has already been broken by the dishonest romance (dishonest in the sense that it isn't thought through, it doesn't belong, it just doesn't fit), so maybe I shouldn't give it extra dings for that.

But those are just symptoms. (And honestly, Tree has a pretty weird romance with the Lee character -- who is apparently based on someone Smith knew later in life -- but that was a correspondingly smaller part of the book as well.) The real problem is that there is no character arc and no deeper understanding of the characters -- these things are related, and they're crucial to this kind of book. Kim is spunky and good at school and A Good Person and brave and stuff, I guess, and she's all those things at the end. The aunt is jealous and petty and small-minded, and she's all those things at the end.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn has empathy and understanding of all the characters, from the deadbeat dad to the pretty-turned-harsh mother to the promiscuous and totally awesome aunt. (Seriously... this may be the only book I read during my childhood where the woman with the most lovers was also the most awesome woman in the book.) Francie herself, while she doesn't have the sort of arc that can be said to have a definite beginning or end, grows and changes through the book; her experiences do things to her. She, you know, grows up.

So go read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn if you're looking for a kiddie-lit comfort read (think House on the Prairie or Anne of Green Gables, only with dirt-poor Irish ghetto dwellers in the early 1900's, and less shy with respect to sex and death -- it's all PG, but Tree is conscious that sex and death exist, it's not swept under the rug as it is in Wilder or Montgomery), and I'll keep waiting for the Asian equivalent.

College books, boarding-school books -- I have a great and abiding love for them. The first one I can remember offhand is The Great Brain at the Academy, and Tom Fitzgerald's hijinks as he struggled to make money and not get kicked out, often at the same time. At the time I was really small, and this idea of going away for school was, well, only something Older And Glamorous people did. Perhaps something of that has stayed with me all this time, because I still love the things. Let's see... there was Tam Lin, which raised my expectations of college to way too high a level (turns out, if you major in physics, you don't get people quoting Greek at you as often), and And Both Were Young, a slight L'Engle and not one of her best works, but lovely all the same, and I'm sure many others I'm forgetting.

One of the things I love most about boarding-school books is that the basic idea is that you get all these unrelated kids together, and they have to gel into some sort of community. (Community and partnership, of course, being one of my button-presses.) The best example I know of this (thanks to sarahtales) is Autumn Term (Antonia Forest), where the main characters form individual friendships, but then the class as a whole comes together for a triumph: a very successful class alternative to having a really inferior booth at the school fundraiser. One of the arcs I really like is that of one of the girls who has a not-ideal personality-- she's spoiled rotten and is very passive -- but it turns out she has some talents, and becomes part of the group in the end; the great thing about this is that it's done not by making her oh-just-kidding-she's-actually-fantastic -- she still has all the traits that caused the girls to dislike her, though admittedly has grown out of them a year's worth -- but simply by her decision to be part of the community project, and do it well.

I like fantastical boarding-school books even better, because the tropes seem to work together really well. The boarding-school trope already incorporates the idea of everything being new and fresh and exciting, which turns out to be a great way to showcase exciting magical things (a la Harry Potter, or even Mercedes Lackey's Arrows of the Queen -- I think I liked both these books (which were problematic in a lot of ways) much better than I would have in the absence of the boarding-school motif). Fantasy tends to benefit a lot from being able to do fantastic things within a known structure and known character-community-development arcs; for example, Diana Wynne Jones' Year of the Griffin is my all-time favorite DWJ novel because of the friendships and community (and plot!) that naturally grow up within the boarding-school structure.

This is all to say that I really, really, really wanted to like Ally Carter's I'd Tell You I Love You But Then I'd Have to Kill You -- boarding spy school for girls! What's not to love? And for the first several chapters, I did love it. Lots of interesting things about the school... a new teacher... female friendships... a new student who doesn't fit in... exciting classes... all the good, familiar tropes.

But what I wanted was a book that was about school-and-character-development first, some sort of external plot second, and maybe a romance third. Or the external plot could have been ditched, seems a shame in a book about spies, but okay. But what I actually got was a YA romance with the school-and-character-development relegated to second place, or maybe third. No external plot. And the romance was the worst kind: being a spy, she treats the relationship as an espionage mission, and lies to the boy. A lot. We know how this story ends; I didn't have to skim to the end to find out. Grr.

Anyway... any boarding-school books (don't have to be fantastical in any way) that you would recommend? There is, of course, Stevemer's College of Magics, which I've just never got around to reading, but which I'm kind of interested to read. I hear Jo Walton's most recent book is a boarding-school book; is it any good? I'll probably pick up the later books in the Ally Carter series as well to see if it gets better -- seems like there are some external plots in the later ones.