cyphomandra (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cyphomandra) wrote2009-05-17 11:10 pm
cyphomandra) wrote2009-05-17 11:10 pm
Entry tags:
Assorted YA
Three books I had problems with first, and then I'll post the review of the one I really liked.
Parasite Pig, William Sleator. I read an interesting piece about Sleator’s writing (which I have no doubt bookmarked somewhere) that also had some really nice analysis about the sibling relationships that are so often a central part of his stories, and the recent death of Sleator’s sister Vicky. Anyway, what I have taken away from that and my own reading is that after a number of very strong novels (House of Stairs, Green Futures of Tycho, The Boy who reversed himself, etc), Sleator’s output deteriorated, with some books that were just thin and others that were plain nasty, but some of his more recent ones were supposed to be good again. I picked up The Last Universe as well, which is dedicated to Vicky, and which I think may be one of the good ones, but read this first, largely because I spent some of last night playing Cosmic Encounters and it seemed appropriate. It’s a sequel to the (much better) Interstellar Pig, about a board game involving aliens that turns out to be all too real, set in a beach town during a summer holiday.
Barney has started playing the game again with a couple of people he’s met through the library job his parents made him take to pay for repairs to the summer house. This, plus his lack of suspicion when a mysterious blurred guy who won’t shake hands shows up as an interested fourth player, all seems most unlike him, but fortunately it turns out his behaviour is being influenced by a parasite (not an alien one, oddly – Sleator’s gone for toxoplasmosis), whose motive (unfortunately) is to get Barney to go to J’koot, an earth-like planet inhabited by giant crabs who like eating humans, so that the parasite can reproduce inside the crabs. The problem with this is that it means that Barney spends a lot of the book being passive and/or dim, while I spent the intervening time having serious doubts about the viability of a interplanetary reproduction strategy for any organism, let alone one that has a quite effective Earth-based lifecycle that completely omits giant crabs. There are some nice moments, and I did like seeing the game (and the Piggy) again, but really, the first book has much, much more to it.
Everlight, Claudia Gray. I am supposedly on a no-vampires kick, with my last exception being Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (very good), although I will no doubt remember another exception once I post this. I picked Everlight, which starts with a flashforward with our heroes in a burning building surrounded by vampires, and jumps back to first person narrator Bianca starting at creepy private boarding school Evernight Academy, up despite that because I’ve read and enjoyed the author’s fanfic, which includes a number of pieces with interesting complex female leads (the author prefers no direct connections, so I can’t be more specific).
And this was enjoyable, with some nice moments (I am particularly taken with the justification for present-day setting with lack of obvious real world technology) – but just didn’t, in the end, have enough happening for me. The first major reveal is page 144, just under halfway, and the next at 260, and then the story actually kicks into gear – just in time to end. Yes, it’s the first in a trilogy, but there was just too much wandering around developing the atmosphere and not enough action, other than Lucas (bad boy and love interest) having the occasional brawl with a classmate. It’s pitched as a Romeo & Juliet type situation, but in R & J (which I like a lot as a play) there are duels and arguments and ongoing tensions, and time running out, and the characters actually do stuff (all right, so it all goes horribly wrong, but they’re trying). Having said all that this is perfectly competently written and I will probably pick up the sequel from the library just to see if it amps things up a notch.
Dear Julia, Amy Bronwen Zemser. All Elaine Hamilton wants to do is cook, having been obsessed with Julia Child and French cuisine since age 6, but her mother is a US congresswoman who has been fighting for women’s rights most of her professional career and sees Elaine’s fondness for the kitchen as a weakness. Fortunately Elaine is about to meet Lucida Sans (self-named), another girl at her high school who is obsessed with being famous and spends most of her time in costumes but will eventually realise Elaine’s talent and push her into succeeding publically and, finally, confronting her mother.
This didn’t work for me at all, from the bizarre feminists can’t be chefs central conflict through the vast amounts of unconvincing quirkiness flung at the page (Elaine has five brothers, including one who is either cross-dressing or transgender but not all that well developed either way; there is an evil villain called Croton, also at the high school, who has one dead eye and is Lucida’s ex-boyfriend; recurring street festivals all end in chaotic and supposedly charming catastrophes) to the setting. Mainly, the timeline, which I’ve been trying to pin down – Elaine’s mother was at college in 1976, so I thought maybe we were in the early 90s, but when Elaine is 6, her mother says “twenty years since liberation” (and, with another ten years until the time of the story, that would put it close to present day). However, Julia Child, who died in 2004, is still alive but “quite old”. Tech level felt like the eighties - all filming on video tape, no one has mobile phones or the internet, but somehow they all recognise Lucida Sans as a familiar name (and it’s described in the text as “a font on the computer”. The food does sound nice, but it's all very, very rich (I began getting cravings for a ripe sliced tomato), the characters never really come to life, and the plot is extremely basic. Disappointing.
Parasite Pig, William Sleator. I read an interesting piece about Sleator’s writing (which I have no doubt bookmarked somewhere) that also had some really nice analysis about the sibling relationships that are so often a central part of his stories, and the recent death of Sleator’s sister Vicky. Anyway, what I have taken away from that and my own reading is that after a number of very strong novels (House of Stairs, Green Futures of Tycho, The Boy who reversed himself, etc), Sleator’s output deteriorated, with some books that were just thin and others that were plain nasty, but some of his more recent ones were supposed to be good again. I picked up The Last Universe as well, which is dedicated to Vicky, and which I think may be one of the good ones, but read this first, largely because I spent some of last night playing Cosmic Encounters and it seemed appropriate. It’s a sequel to the (much better) Interstellar Pig, about a board game involving aliens that turns out to be all too real, set in a beach town during a summer holiday.
Barney has started playing the game again with a couple of people he’s met through the library job his parents made him take to pay for repairs to the summer house. This, plus his lack of suspicion when a mysterious blurred guy who won’t shake hands shows up as an interested fourth player, all seems most unlike him, but fortunately it turns out his behaviour is being influenced by a parasite (not an alien one, oddly – Sleator’s gone for toxoplasmosis), whose motive (unfortunately) is to get Barney to go to J’koot, an earth-like planet inhabited by giant crabs who like eating humans, so that the parasite can reproduce inside the crabs. The problem with this is that it means that Barney spends a lot of the book being passive and/or dim, while I spent the intervening time having serious doubts about the viability of a interplanetary reproduction strategy for any organism, let alone one that has a quite effective Earth-based lifecycle that completely omits giant crabs. There are some nice moments, and I did like seeing the game (and the Piggy) again, but really, the first book has much, much more to it.
Everlight, Claudia Gray. I am supposedly on a no-vampires kick, with my last exception being Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (very good), although I will no doubt remember another exception once I post this. I picked Everlight, which starts with a flashforward with our heroes in a burning building surrounded by vampires, and jumps back to first person narrator Bianca starting at creepy private boarding school Evernight Academy, up despite that because I’ve read and enjoyed the author’s fanfic, which includes a number of pieces with interesting complex female leads (the author prefers no direct connections, so I can’t be more specific).
And this was enjoyable, with some nice moments (I am particularly taken with the justification for present-day setting with lack of obvious real world technology) – but just didn’t, in the end, have enough happening for me. The first major reveal is page 144, just under halfway, and the next at 260, and then the story actually kicks into gear – just in time to end. Yes, it’s the first in a trilogy, but there was just too much wandering around developing the atmosphere and not enough action, other than Lucas (bad boy and love interest) having the occasional brawl with a classmate. It’s pitched as a Romeo & Juliet type situation, but in R & J (which I like a lot as a play) there are duels and arguments and ongoing tensions, and time running out, and the characters actually do stuff (all right, so it all goes horribly wrong, but they’re trying). Having said all that this is perfectly competently written and I will probably pick up the sequel from the library just to see if it amps things up a notch.
Dear Julia, Amy Bronwen Zemser. All Elaine Hamilton wants to do is cook, having been obsessed with Julia Child and French cuisine since age 6, but her mother is a US congresswoman who has been fighting for women’s rights most of her professional career and sees Elaine’s fondness for the kitchen as a weakness. Fortunately Elaine is about to meet Lucida Sans (self-named), another girl at her high school who is obsessed with being famous and spends most of her time in costumes but will eventually realise Elaine’s talent and push her into succeeding publically and, finally, confronting her mother.
This didn’t work for me at all, from the bizarre feminists can’t be chefs central conflict through the vast amounts of unconvincing quirkiness flung at the page (Elaine has five brothers, including one who is either cross-dressing or transgender but not all that well developed either way; there is an evil villain called Croton, also at the high school, who has one dead eye and is Lucida’s ex-boyfriend; recurring street festivals all end in chaotic and supposedly charming catastrophes) to the setting. Mainly, the timeline, which I’ve been trying to pin down – Elaine’s mother was at college in 1976, so I thought maybe we were in the early 90s, but when Elaine is 6, her mother says “twenty years since liberation” (and, with another ten years until the time of the story, that would put it close to present day). However, Julia Child, who died in 2004, is still alive but “quite old”. Tech level felt like the eighties - all filming on video tape, no one has mobile phones or the internet, but somehow they all recognise Lucida Sans as a familiar name (and it’s described in the text as “a font on the computer”. The food does sound nice, but it's all very, very rich (I began getting cravings for a ripe sliced tomato), the characters never really come to life, and the plot is extremely basic. Disappointing.