I
know I've committed the cardinal sin of blogging by not having any new posts
for the last nine months. I apologize most abjectly. I was too busy
reading numerous excellent books, some of which I shall share with you
below. (Same disclaimer as last year: these are the best books I read in
2014, but they weren't necessarily published in 2014.)
(1)
After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, by Nancy Kress
This
dystopian time-travel yarn weaves three storylines together. In one,
after Earth has been ravaged by a series of ecological disasters, a handful of
children and adults are saved by a race of kindly aliens, who build the Shell
for them to live in while the Earth recovers. The Shell is a sealed,
sterile environment that the aliens endowed with the bare necessities for human
survival, and a device that lets one person at a time travel into the past to
collect supplies. Since there are only a dozen or so people in the
Shell—not nearly enough for a breeding population—one of the supplies that the
time travelers try to collect is, to put it baldly, children.
The
second storyline is set in the present day, and describes the efforts of an FBI
consultant who is developing an algorithm to predict the next in a series of
unexplained kidnappings. When her algorithm starts to work, she starts on
a collision course with the time travelers (who, you may have figured out, are
the perpetrators of said kidnappings).
The
third storyline is that of the Earth itself and the changes the planet
undergoes. I can't write too much about this one without major
spoilers.
This
story stuck with me for a long time after reading it. The emotions are
convincing and the characters are realistic. The point-of-view the first
storyline is told from is hard to read - he's a teenage boy who's lived his
entire life circumscribed by the Shell, the few people living in it, and their
needs for survival. Unsurprisingly, he has some anger issues and a limited
understanding of normal relationships. Being a mom of a young child myself,
the kidnappings are fraught with anxiety and ambiguity for me. Reading
them was a weird mix of "Go go go! Humanity has to survive!"
and "GET YOUR HANDS OFF THAT CHILD YOU MONSTER!" But isn’t that
a mark of good storytelling, when you’re uncomfortable reading a book but still
unwilling to put it down? Overall, it's a quick but interesting and
satisfying read.
I
should mention that After The Fall won Nancy Kress a Nebula award.
(2)
Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton
This
is an easy book to summarize: take a Jane Austen novel and replace all
the characters with dragons. And I mean real dragons, who fly and breathe
fire and rip their prey apart with bloody abandon— these dragons haven't been
given the “sparkly vampire” treatment. But at the same time, they’re
civilized dragons with a complex social and political structure. In the
same way that many type of human success are measured in wealth, in this dragon
society success is measured in length—that is, how many feet long a dragon has
grown from nose to tail tip. And the only way for dragons to grow is to eat
other dragons usually after dying of natural causes. (Note the “usually” there and recall I said
these are real dragons.)
This
story starts with the death of the dragon Bon Agornin, and how his body is
divided up among his children for consumption. There's one son in the
clergy, one who works in the city, a married daughter, and in the tradition of
all Victorian novels, two younger daughters who need to make successful matches
of their own. Agornin's son-in-law, who is really quite unpleasant, takes
more than his share of the body on some pretext, which of course then lessens
the other children's shares and subsequent social and career prospects.
If
you like the novels of Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope, I think you'll enjoy
this book. If (like me) you've loved the idea of dragons since reading
Bilbo match wits with Smaug at a tender age, I know you'll like this book.
(3) The Crane Wife, Patrick Ness
The
Crane Wife is a retelling of the Japanese
folktale about an injured crane who, when helped by a human, repays that help
by becoming human and weaving her own feathers into beautiful cloth to sell. In
Patrick Ness's version, George Duncan discovers a great white crane in the
backyard of his house in London. He takes the arrow out of the crane's
wing and watches her fly away. The next day, George's rather humdrum life
is turned upside down by the entrance of the mysterious Kumiko into his print
shop. The story of George and Kumiko's developing relationship is cut with bits
of a fable about the Destroyer and the Forgiver, that try to illustrate bigger
truths about the nature of relationships. Or maybe about the dual sides
of everyone's own psyche - to be 100 percent honest, I'm not sure I quite
grasped the allegory of this book. But I enjoyed trying to figure it
out.
(Disclaimer: Googling to find a cover image
for this book, I've discovered some rather mediocre reviews of it. Hmmm, guess
not everybody liked it. You'll have to decide for yourselves.)
(4)
A Corner of White, Jaclyn Moriarty
This is the first book in a series called the Colors
of Madeline. It tells a story of
two worlds; the real Cambridge, England, and the imaginary kingdom of
Cello. In Cambridge, the main character
is Madeline Tully; in Cello, it’s Elliot Baranski. Both Madeline and Elliot have missing
fathers, Madeline because her mother left her husband, and Elliot because his
father is believed to have run off with another woman. (Whether or not he really did is a bit of a
mystery.) Madeline and Elliot start
history’s longest-distance penpal relationship, trading letters through a crack
in reality. They’re both likable
characters (Elliot a little more so than Madeline); basically good kids, trying
to negotiate the perils of adolescence and their feelings about their broken families.
What made this book stand out to me was Cello; it’s
a charming little fantasy land, full of details that give it life and
character. Cello’s political issues are
sketched out in a series of newspaper dispatches written by the kingdom’s two rather
silly princesses, who are on a tour of the region. The color storms are an original idea; storms
of certain colors can cause everyone in the area to feel a specific emotion
intensely. Red causes people to be angry,
for instance, which as you can imagine, is a bit dangerous. Elliot believes that his father was abducted
by a rogue Purple, rather than running off as everyone else believes (it’s
never quite explained what a rogue Purple actually looks like). The people of Cello are fairly realistic
characters, with strengths and weaknesses, virtues and faults (not often found
in fantasy, which I admit can tend toward black and white thinking). It’s a fun, easy read and I’m looking forward
to the publication of the next book in the series.
(5)
The Rithmatist, by Brandon Sanderson
The start of a new series by the excellent Brandon
Sanderson, The Rithmatist is the
story of Joel and his thwarted desire to be a Rithmatist, a magician who can
draw chalk pictures and make them come to life.
Joel is the son of the now-deceased chalk-maker at Armedius Academy; he
and his mom are allowed to continue living at the school on a kind of
sufferance, and Joel is allowed to attend classes with the Rithmantic students. More than anything, Joel wants to be a
Rithmatist and defend the American Isles from the wild Chalkings on the
frontier in Nebrask. He knows everything
there is to know about Rithmancy, and would be one of the best….if he only had
the inborn talent that would let him do the magic. Alas, there’s not a hint of it in him.
One day, students at Armedius start disappearing,
and through series of coincidences that persist despite all the adults’ efforts
to keep him out of it, Joel is drawn into the investigations. He forms a friendship with Melody, another
Rithmantic student who has the talent Joel lacks, but zero desire to do
anything with it. As you might guess,
they form an unlikely team and mysterious events ensue.
I know what you’d say to me at this point: “Hedgie, this is clearly derivative of every
other YA quest story ever published! Can
you say ‘riff on Harry Potter?’” And my answer would be: “Yup! Who cares?
It’s still a good story; it has some original, clever details and an
engaging mystery; and you’ll have fun reading it.”
Also, let me digress a bit on the subject of Brandon
Sanderson. His big talent, the thing
that I think makes him stand out in the field of current fantasy writers, is
that he comes up with these fantastic systems of magic. I’ve read probably a dozen or so of his
novels, and in only of those did I find the magic to be a bit weak (Warbreaker; it’s still a good read even
with this fault). If you like your
irrational, impossible magic to operate by clearly defined rules (like me), hop
over to Brandon Sanderson.com and poke around his bibliography. And then come back here and finish reading!
(6)
Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde
There are two authors I’ll admit to being a fangirl
of: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
(naturally) and Jasper Fforde. Fforde’s most
popular series, about Thursday Next, has so many things to love: time travel,
characters from Jane Eyre and Great Expectations, absurdly complex
plots, villians so evil not even their own mothers could love them. They’re books for people who love books; go
find The Eyre Affair to start the
series. I’ll be waiting here when you
come back to thank me.
But here I’m supposed to be talking about Mr.
Fforde’s new series, which starts with Shades
of Grey. (Please do not confuse this
with that horrible slice of misogyny Fifty
Shades of Grey; they’re not the same thing at all.) In Chromatacia, social order is defined by
how high you can see on the color spectrum.
Red is outclassed by yellow, followed by green, blue, and purple. Those unfortunate souls who can see only
shades of grey are at the bottom, as sort of an untouchables class. Everyone in Chromatacia knows that there was
some terrible event in the recent past that caused people to have limited color
vision and that resulted in the current extremely regimented social order and
authoritarian government. But nobody
seems to know what actually happened. In
Shades of Grey, Eddie Russet is
hoping to start his career in the Color Control Agency. Eddie’s first mission is a courier job to the
remote village of High Saffron. Little
does Eddie know, he’s embarking not only on a journey, but on an investigation
into the aforementioned mysterious event, and possible government conspiracy
and cover-up. Oh, and he meets an
Interesting But Unsuitable Girl along the way.
I’m waiting impatiently for the next book in the
series, Painting by Numbers, to be
published. (June 2016?!? I’ll never make it.)
(7) The Curiosity, by Stephen Kiernan
Fans of the TV show Sleepy Hollow would enjoy this book; it starts from a similar,
albeit less mystical, premise. Judge
Jeremiah Rice has been frozen in the Artic shelf ice since 1906, until Dr. Kate
Philo and her team carve him out of a glacier.
It happens that Dr. Philo is in the Artic looking for samples of
flash-frozen small sea life; she’s part of a research team developing
cryogenics techniques. Dr. Philo takes
Jeremiah back to their lab and revives him (of course). I know the science here is probably a little
dubious; just suspend your disbelief and enjoy the story, ok? Inevitable questions about the ethics of
using humans as research subjects and claims of scientific hoaxing rise as
Jeremiah’s fame grows.
There are a lot of things to like about this
book. I like that one of the two main
characters is a successful female scientist, and that she takes her career
seriously – she doesn’t immediately sacrifice her reputation or scientific
ethics for the chance at fame or love. I
like the ethical questions that come up – when someone’s life is saved by
experimental science, what is that person’s obligation back to the science that
saved them? At what point does research
become exploitation? But the thing I
like best about this book is Jeremiah.
He’s a realistically drawn gentleman of the early 20th
century (at least he is to me; I admit I don’t have first-hand knowledge). There are just enough humorous,
fish-out-of-water moments as he encounters the wonders of the 21rst century to
be pleasant. And that element isn’t
overdone; he’s able to grasp that computers and cell phones are applications of
the same science that people were working out in his own time, not magic. (I
always find it insulting to the people who came before us when time travel
stories make them out to be cretinous rubes.)
The primary story, about Jeremiah’s revival and what happens to him, is
interesting and well-paced. The
secondary story, about the gentle romance between Jeremiah and Kate, is also
really well done. The author doesn’t
dismiss the fact that while Jeremiah’s wife has been gone for decades, from
Jeremiah’s perspective he just left her on the docks a few weeks ago. The
Curiosity is part The Time Traveler’s
Wife and part Jurassic Park (or
maybe Encino Man is a closer
parallel), and wholly enjoyable.
(8) N0S4A2, by Joe Hill
I don’t usually read horror novels; I’m as surprised
as anybody that N0S4A2 is in this
list. At the beginning of the story, Victoria (Vic) McQueen is a young girl –
maybe 10 or 12—who’s just discovered she has an unusual ability. She can find missing things by riding her
bicycle to a rickety covered bridge, and when she crosses that bridge she ends
up where the missing thing is. Of
course, for the rest of the world the bridge was torn down years ago. Obviously, riding a bicycle across a nonexistent
bridge to magically find missing things is not a thing that normal, sane people
can do. And dealing with her unusual
talent takes a toll on Vic and her family, finally tearing her parents apart
and landing Vic in a mental health facility as a teenager.
The villain of the piece is Charles Talent Manx, a
kind of vampiric creature who can transport children in his 1938 Rolls-Royce
Wraith to Christmasland, where he absorbs their youth or life or whatever you
want to call it to keep himself eternally alive. Manx is definitely a Thing That Should Not
Be; allow me to give you this mental image:
fishhook teeth. Shudder. Anyway, Manx and Vic clash on one of her
trips across the bridge. Being the
butt-kicking kind of lady she is, Vic manages to take Manx out, putting him in
a kind of coma for a decade or so. She
goes on to live an unhappy sort of life, partnering up with a good man called
Lou and having a son with him, whose name I’m sorry to tell you I cannot remember. But the kid is right in Manx’s age range when
the story picks up again, and of course he manages to come back from the dead
and target Vic’s son.
I think the thing I love about this book is Vic –
she’s so broken but at the same time, so brave and determined to do what’s
right. Despite her faults and
weaknesses, Vic is nobody’s victim; she’s determined to be a good mom and as
good a partner to Lou as she can. At
times this was a hard book for me to read – I sometimes have to put books down
if the plots feature children in danger.
(I read big chunks of this one with “It’s only a story, it’s only a
story” on an endless loop in my head.)
But it’s a fast-paced read (hard to achieve with over 700 pages) and
obviously I found it compelling enough to finish. If you’re in the mood for a scary story,
screw up your courage and give N0S4A2
a try.
(9) The Queen of the Tearling, by Erika Johansen
Kelsea Raleigh Glynn has lived all of her 18 years
in a cottage in the forest, with just her two foster parents for company. Until the day some royal guards arrive,
saying it’s time for her to go be Queen of the Tearling. Kelsea knew this day would come eventually;
she wears an enormous sapphire pendant that marks her as the heir, and has
received a royal education from her foster mother. Kelsea did not know that she
would also be stepping into a mystery surrounding her mother’s life and death,
an unsuitable love interest, threats from the conquering kingdom next door, and
assassination attempts.
This is an excellent, classic coming of age/quest
story. The best thing about it, I think,
is Kelsea herself. Despite her
uncertainties and inexperience, she has a natural gift for leadership. It’s interesting to read her internal
thoughts and worries about what the hell she’s gotten herself into, and then
watch that talent lead her through various events. Another thing I love about Kelsea is that
she’s plain. And I don’t mean “I think
I’m plain because I have no self-confidence but really I’m GOOOORGEOUS” (I’m
looking at you, Bella Swan). She’s too
tall and too broad to fit the usual parameters of femininity; her eyes and hair
are of average brown, neither sultry or sleek; she has no cheekbones to speak
of. And naturally, she’s kind of
insecure about her plainness; Kelsea wishes she were beautiful and worries
about who is going to be interested in a girl who looks she does. It was a refreshing change of pace from the
parade of beautiful, sloe-eyed, slender waifs that populate a lot of fantasy
worlds. Kelsea is an ordinary girl,
doing extraordinary things by dint of wits and courage. And I like that.
10) The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden, by Catherynne Valente
The absolute BEST thing I read in 2014 was the fabulous
Catherynne Valente’s first Orphan Tales book.
For those of us who remember the vocabulary from high school lit class,
it’s a frame tale, a story within which the characters tell their own stories. Think The
Canterbury Tales, or Hyperion by
Dan Simmons for a 20th century example. (Hyperion
is one of the best books I’ve read that I totally didn’t get, at all. You guys go read it too and come back and
explain to me, ok?) Anyway, in this
garden outside the Sultan’s palace there’s an orphan girl. She has to live to live out in the garden,
because the people who live in the palace think she’s a demon. They think she’s a demon because she has
thousands of tiny words tattooed on her eyelids; nobody knows how they got
there. One night the Sultan’s heir dares
to come out the garden and start talking with the orphan girl. They strike up an unlikely friendship and she
starts telling him the stories tattooed on her eyes, which are, of course, the
stories that make up the bulk of the book.
The sheer number and originality of the stories in
this book are stunning. (I’m currently
reading the sequel and it rises to the same level.) There are some completely original elements –
dog monks, the Leucrotta (I’m still not sure what it is), the Papess, living
Stars as incarnated demigods. And there
are some familiar elements – witches, princesses, sea monsters and their ilk-
but done in original ways. As you read
farther in the book, you start to realize that the stories are interwoven –
character A from this story is character B from the next, but recognized from
another perspective. I wanted to draw an
organizational chart to illustrate the relationships among the stories, but
restrained myself. (I Must! Keep!
Nerdiness! To-A-Minimum!) Valente has created a complex, complete
mythology, with a definite style and atmosphere of it’s own. It’s as distinct and recognizable as say, the
Wheel of Time universe, or Middle Earth.
There appear to be only two books in this series, which is a pity; I
could keep reading them forever.
Go forth and read, my friends.
