Nonfiction Monday Review: Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and its Legacy by Albert Marrin

My fascination with the tragedy at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911 has been well documented on this blog, but one thing I've been looking for since reading my first book on the fire is a great, YA-focused nonfiction account of the fire. I love historical fiction as a way to introduce readers in a compelling, creative way to historical events, but eventually I start to hunger for some cold, hard facts. Finally, 100 years after the disaster, Albert Marrin provides me with the book I've been looking for.

Marrin gives a detailed account of late 19th-early 20th century immigrant life, focusing on the Southern Italians and Russian Jews who dominated the workforce in factories like Triangle. Marrin goes back to Italy and Russia to look at the "pushes" that started the huge waves of immigration that brought these people to New York City.

From there we see life in New York's poor immigrant neighborhoods, how the livelihoods of the immigrants back in the home country affected what jobs they took in America, how insulated the neighborhoods were, and how textile factory work became the position of choice for young immigrant women.

And then comes the terrors of factory life, and the nightmare that was March 25th, when the fire broke out just before closing time. Marrin provides plenty of contemporary accounts, from brief quotations from witnesses to longer excerpts of written accounts. When I told my husband I was reading a book about the Triangle Fire his response was "Another one? Don't you know everything?" But there was a lot here I didn't know. For example, I knew the fire escape quickly proved to be useless, tearing away from the building under the weight of the terrified workers. What I didn't know was the fire escape was never truly designed to be useful - it ended directly over a skylight in the roof of the next building, and was surrounded with a fence topped with four-inch spikes. If falling from the fire escape didn't kill someone, landing on those spikes did.

Marrin ties the story of the Triangle factory into today, looking at the governmental corruption that was overcome in order to ensure some basic workplace safety and the right for workers to unionize (a right that is, of course, under attack again today). Marrin also looks overseas to modern sweatshops in Asia, looking at the ethical implications of boycotting sweatshop labor, since the women who work in these factories have so few other options. (For an alternative view, that I don't think will be presented in YA lit anytime soon, no matter how "dark" we're getting, check out this recent Slate article)

I appreciate that Marrin hasn't white-washed history. When explaining the ethnic makeup of the workers at the Triangle factory, he notes right away that African-American women were absent due to racism. And then during the Uprising of 20,000, he brings up the important decisions African American women had to make regarding their own opportunities for job advancement.

The Triangle Factory Fire was such a pivotal moment in American history, it's a shame it isn't taught about more often, and that the names of those associated with it have been generally lost. I'm so thankful that Marrin introduced me to Clara Lemlich through this book - she was a tireless labor organizer during the Uprising of 20,000 (a massive garment worker strike that ended a few months prior to the Triangle Fire), she was blackballed from the industry afterwards, but continued to dedicate her life towards social welfare and became what we now call a community organizer. She was so bad ass, that even when she was in a nursing home in her 80s, she encouraged the orderlies to organize and form a union! What an amazing person.



This week's Nonfiction Monday is hosted by Chapter Book of the Day. Be sure to stop by and check out the other great nonfiction titles highlighted this week!

Nonfiction Monday Review: Amelia Lost by Candace Fleming

Amelia Earhart has always been a legendary woman for me. A larger than life person who defied the odds and the conventions of the day, only to find her life cut tragically short (or was it?!) in pursuit of her dreams. But I have to admit, I've never known much beyond the myth, which is where Amelia Lost comes in, as Fleming does an amazing job of describing not only the myth of Amelia, but bringing to life the human woman as well.

Fleming skillfully uses alternating chapters to explore both the search for Amelia Earhart after she was lost in 1937, and a biography of her life up until that point. The book opens on the coast guard cutter Itasca, which was scheduled to meet up with Amelia and refuel her plane before she made the hop to Honolulu and then back on to the United States. As the crew of the Itasca grows frantic trying to contact the missing pilot, Fleming then brings us back to Amelia's childhood - where she was known early on as a tomboy.

Even though I knew how the story would end, Fleming does an amazing job building up the tension of Amelia's final flight, as she edged closer and closer to the final Pacific leg of the journey. A real nail biter. But what's perhaps most amazing is that Amelia had made it to that point at all. Flying in the 1920s and 1930s wasn't always the safest proposition, and it seems like Amelia may have had more than her fair share of accidents, in part because she was always pushing herself to establish or beat the next record.

If ever there was a book that seems like it's a candidate for the enhanced ebook treatment, Amelia Lost is it. Okay, I don't have an ereader so I have no idea if they're up to the task of handling all of the pictures (these are 99% black and white, so the grayscale e-ink wouldn't be a problem), but Fleming judiciously includes URLs in the text where appropriate - such as learning Morse code - that could easily be incorporated into the ebook version. She also includes links in the bibliography.

This is also a wonderfully designed book. I love the Art Deco-style chapter headings, which really add a historical flair to the story, and then the chapters about the search for Amelia are set apart on gray paper, giving an additional visual cue that this is a different part of the narrative.

If you've ever been at all curious about Amelia Earhart, Amelia Lost is definitely a must read.




This week's Nonfiction Monday is hosted by Writing Nonfiction for Children. Be sure to stop by and check out the other great nonfiction titles highlighted this week!

Sci Fi Friday Double Review: ANIMORPHS #1 & #2, by K.A. Applegate

I've mentioned a few times before, here and in various blogger profiles I've done for other blogs, that I absolutely loved the Animorphs series when I was younger. It's been just about 14 years since I got my first book - Easter Sunday, 1997, I woke up to find a book tucked in amongst the candy in my Easter basket. A red book with a weird picture on the cover of a girl turning into a cat.

I stuck through the whole series for five years, through the ups and (devastatingly terrible) downs that the 62 book series took. I ran a fan website, wrote tons and tons of fan fiction, and made some of the best friends a girl could ever hope to have, all because of these books.

So even though the books didn't go out on the highest note, I was beyond excited when I heard they were getting re-released, with some small updates to correct mistakes and bring the books into the 21st century. And when Cindy asked me if I wanted to check out the galley copies she had, I about had a heart attack from excitement. I still have all of my original books (including that 14 year old copy of The Visitor...as well as a copy of the second print run version and a copy in German) but I wanted to see what had been changed in these new versions. What I was entirely prepared for was a) the huge wave of nostalgia I felt upon reading the opening lines and b) just how awesome these books still are all these years later! Trust me, there's nothing else like Animorphs out there for this age group right now.

The Invasion introduces us to Jake, Rachel, Tobias, Cassie and Marco - five totally ordinary kids who make the fateful decision to walk home one night by cutting through an abandoned construction site. Their leisurely walk home is interrupted by a crashing space ship - and the kids make contact with their first alien, an Andalite called Prince Elfangor-Sirinal-Shamtul. He warns the group, telling them their planet is already being invaded by the Yeerks, slugs that crawl in through a person's ear before wrapping themselves around the brain and taking complete control of the body. Elfangor gives them the only weapon he can to defend their planet: the power to morph, to acquire the DNA of any animal and then change into that animal.

Jake, serious and responsible, quickly slips into the role of the leader of the group. The others all have strongly defined personalities as well: Rachel is fearless, Cassie compassionate, Marco a wiseass with a tragic past, and Tobias is quiet and shy with a good dose of tragedy of his own. Each book is told from a different character's point of view, so these first two give us the deepest looks into Jake and Rachel. If the other characters don't seem the most complex yet, just you wait.

The Visitor is set a short time later. Just long enough for the group to recover after some of the horrors they experienced in the last book before launching into another mission. This time we follow Rachel as she spends most of her time on reconnaissance missions into enemy territory, sneaking into the home of a friend in order to spy on her parents who are Controllers - people who have been taken over by the Yeerks. It's less action packed than The Invasion, but still filled with tension and drama of a different sort.

If you thought The Hunger Games was a little too violent...well, Animorphs isn't much better. It's not kids killing kids, but it does involve aliens being eaten alive by other aliens on a semi-regular basis. And Applegate doesn't pull away from these darker scenes - they're not gratuitous, but are certainly well-described.

K.A. Applegate absolutely doesn't condescend to her audience or pull any punches. I know the books end up dealing with some really serious moral issues, including war, murder/killing, the nature of evil and so on, but I'd kind of forgotten how outright violent they start. And I love it. The theme of the whole series is about war and its affects on people (much like the culmination of The Hunger Games), and you can't adequately explore that without getting into some bleak moments. Like I said, the descriptions aren't gratuitous - there isn't a grisly scene just for the sake of being edgy or dark - but they are definitely there, and are part of what really set these books apart (they're intended for ages 8-12...I was 12 when the series started. omg, I'm so old, and always have been in this fandom!).

There are also lots of little bits of awesome commentary that slip into these books. I immediately identified with Rachel back in the day (and she remains one of my favorite literary characters of all time), not only because she was tough and fierce and tall like I wanted to be, but she has lots of feminist moments, taking jabs at the boys when she thinks they are being unreasonably protective. There are also two characters of color - Marco is Hispanic and Cassie African-American. Their races are only mentioned in passing (until time travelling starts happening much later in the series), but it's there. There's also a bit of class consciousness - Marco's dad is extremely messed up after the death of Marco's mother a few years ago, meaning that money is short and they don't live in the greatest of neighborhoods. Meanwhile Rachel is the daughter of divorced parents but has her own credit card. It gets a little bit into Five Token Band territory (warning: TVTropes link), but as their distinct personalities develop it doesn't feel like lazy stereotyping.

For a 15 year old series (I got into the game a year late), it holds up surprisingly well. There's nothing here that screams mid-90s, and as someone who read these books obsessively, I can also tell you that the updating is quite minimal. The biggest update was changing a major continuity error in the first book (well, it wasn't a continuity error then, but they made a big deal out of the opposite thing happening in subsequent books). Otherwise it was like changing the name of a specific game system to just say "system." When I read the new Babysitter's Club prequel last summer, the writing felt like it definitely could have fit in with the original books...which wasn't the greatest thing. Those books were kind of clunky - like the template of the second chapter of every book detailing the characters. Nothing about these books feel dated, other than the fact that they are designed to be a monthly science fiction series - a genre you don't see at the book store too often anymore.

The Invasion and The Visitor will be released in May. Right now I believe the plans are for the first six books to get re-released over the next two years, so this definitely won't be the snappy pace I got used to back in middle school. Old school Animorph fans won't find much terribly new here - if your original books are still in your parents' basement, you're not missing out on anything if you just stick with those. But if tragedy struck so you don't have them anymore, and now you've got a serious craving for some old school Animorphs, you'll be pleased with these. Though I'm sad the corner morphing flipbook is gone :-( On the other hand: lenticular covers! The original cover style never excited me (that's book #4 to the right), and the new cover style isn't translating well into online images - the background patterns are much richer in real life, and the lenticular action is really quite good!

So, to sum up an incredibly long entry, let me just say this: I am so excited to see these books come back so that a whole new generation can get to know these amazing books.

Reviewed from galley copies. The Invasion and The Visitor will be released in May!

Review: Daughter of Xanadu by Dori Jones Yang

Found via: Reading in Color


Considering how much historical fiction out right now is about privileged Western European and American girls in the last 150 years or so falling in love with various bad boys, it's refreshing to find a novel that is so completely different. In Daughter of Xanadu, we're talking 14th century Mongolia, and while there's a certain amount of privilege present (our protagonist is a princess), the romantic story arc is relegated to the back burner. Instead, this is a true coming of age story for a young woman trying to find her place in a world that is simultaneously foreign and totally familiar.

Emmajin is the eldest granddaughter of the great Khan Khubilai. While her sister and other women of the palace are content with the life of luxury being royalty brings, Emmajin has one dream: to become a soldier in her grandfather's army. When foreigners from Christendom come to the palace on a trade mission, the Khan asks Emmajin to work as a spy and befriend the foreign man Marco Polo, and report back on everything she's learned. Emmajin agrees, hoping that her compliance, in addition to her amazing archery and horse riding skills, will ensure her entrance into the army.

Marco is utterly foreign to Emmajin. He cannot shoot an arrow or wield a sword - his only defenses are his wit and his storytelling, less than useless to Emmajin. And yet despite her best defenses, Marco's charm begins to work on Emmajin, and even as her dreams are fulfilled she finds herself questioning if the way of the warrior is truly her destiny.

One thing I absolutely loved about this is that Emmajin becomes a warrior on her own terms, rather than having to masquerade as a man. Yes, being a princess helped, but she also recognizes that in order to be accepted by the men she's going to have to be even better than they are - just as modern women often feel they have to be to compete in male-dominated fields.

Every once in awhile, the relationship between Marco and Emmajin made me a little anxious. Christendom (Europe) and Mongolia are often presented as total opposites - and more often than not Emmajin seems to be coming around to the Western view of how things "should be," so at times I was getting vibes of the Western man civilizing the wild savages of the east. Thankfully, Yang is able to thoroughly describe Emmajin's evolving ideas so it becomes clear it's not just Marco's influence. I'd have liked it if we could have seen Marco adapting a bit more to Mongolian ways so it would be more like a true cultural exchange, but the ending is left open enough that maybe Yang can pull together another book out of that!

Like I said in the introduction, above all else this is Emmajin's coming of age story. She's truly learning what it means to be an adult and have to make tough choices and learn new things about herself. Yang has done an excellent job describing 14th century Mongolia, and by including the familiar character of Marco Polo she has a seamless way to weave all of the amazing facts about this setting into the narrative while rarely dragging down the story. A refreshing change of pace from a lot of the historical fiction/romance out there today! (And a brief aside: a book with a wonderful cover! After the whitewashing controversies of the last few years, 2011 is shaping up to be an amazing year for proudly putting the faces of characters of color on covers!)

Review: Dark Goddess by Sarwat Chadda

Last January I read Devil's Kiss and really liked it - while it glossed over some things I wanted more explanation on, I really enjoyed it as an excellent work of urban fantasy with a kick ass protagonist who just happened to be bi-racial. In Dark Goddess, Billi is back and tougher than ever - this time tackling Amazon werewolves and Baba Yaga.

It's so cool, guys.

While Billi is still mourning the loss of her best friend Kay, the supernatural creatures refuse to take a break to let her properly grieve. Last time Billi faced the Angel of Death - now she's up against the polenitsy, a pack of werewolves descended from the Amazons. They are searching for the Spring Child, an Oracle like Kay was, that they plan to sacrifice to their goddess, the infamous Baba Yaga. It's a mission that will uproot Billi from her familiar home in London and take her and her fellow Templars to Moscow and the wilds of Russia to team up with the Bogatyrs, the Templars' Russian counterparts, led by Ivan, the handsome descendant of the mysterious Anastasia Romanov. As the full moon approaches, Billi and Ivan will have to overcome their instinctive distrust of others to fight together for the common good.

One thing I really like about the supernatural creatures Chadda creates: they are the bad guys. Sure there are some shades of gray, but the polenitsy are not "kissing werewolves." No one is going to fall in love with these creatures because they are lean, mean, fighting machines, who are more likely to eat you than kiss you, if you were dumb enough to get that close. Additionally, Chadda puts some great twists on traditional folklore - there's the Amazon werewolf connection, which is awesome because Amazons are awesome, and then whole mythos of Baba Yaga. This isn't the scary little witch who runs around in a house on chicken legs; she wields unbelievable power as the physical embodiment of Russia herself. Scary. And awesome, like the werewolves that worship her. With a bunch of women in the roles of both adversary and ally, Dark Goddess has no problem passing the Bechdel Test. Yay!

The action is absolutely nonstop, which some can see as a good thing, but actually ended up undermining a bit of Chadda's worldbuilding for me. It's established early on that werewolves are bad news. As in, two fully-trained Templars could take on one werewolf and probably win - but their chances of survival decrease exponentially if a second werewolf is added to the equation. Yet Billi repeatedly tackles the werewolves, almost always with the odds against her, and she rarely even gets a full night's sleep, let alone a chance to really heal. Since she keeps coming out on top, it takes away the feeling that she's ever really in danger, thus dramatically decreasing the tension.

If you haven't read Devil's Kiss yet, I highly recommend you read that before Dark Goddess. Chadda throws us right into the action in chapter one and spends little to no time rehashing people or events from Devil's Kiss - so even if you have read the first book, you might want to re-read it as a refresher. These are the sort of fantasy books I want to see more of - women who know how to handle themselves and know what they want primarily, and the action is more important than the romance. And in the case of Billi SanGreal, you get all that, plus a bi-racial  heroine!

Nonfiction Monday Review: The Girl Who Was on Fire ed. by Leah Wilson

When I got the ARC of this from Smart Pop books, it included a bit of info on the editor - including the name of her degree from Duke University: Culture and Modern Fiction. Um, can I go back to school for that? Seriously, if money (both to go to school and in terms of making a living later) were no option, I would love to get an advanced degree in something like that. Which is probably why the Smart Pop books in general appeal to me so much, as they combine my love of all sorts of bits of popular culture with light academic reading. So when I was asked to look at Smart Pop's April 2011 title, all about The Hunger Games trilogy, I was allllllllllll over it!

13 YA authors tackle The Hunger Games trilogy, looking at topics as varied as the roles of fashion and the media, to politics and PTSD. There is some really serious stuff in here, which shouldn't be surprising to anyone who paid attention to more than the (gag) love triangle in the original books.

I'm clearly going to be partial to any essay titled "Team Katniss" - after all, that's the team I officially supported with a t-shirt at the Mockingjay release party - and Jennifer Lynn Barnes offers an excellent analysis on why Katniss herself is who we should be most concerned with - not being preoccupied with her love life. On a more frivolous level, I really enjoyed Terri Clark's look at Katniss' (and Cinna's) many fashion statements throughout the trilogy, and how Cinna was able to use fashion as a rhetorical device. Reading it made me think that Cinna would have loved to design for Madeleine Albright. Sarah Darer Littman, who is a political columnist when she's not writing novels like Life, After, writes a devastating essay comparing the politics of the trilogy to contemporary US politics - especially some of the rhetoric used during the Bush Administration to justify the war on terror (I can see that essay inspiring a LOT of negative criticism. Littman doesn't pull any punches - but it might be my favorite).

All of the essays here are worthwhile - those are merely my favorites, but each of them has something excellent and worthwhile to add to conversations on The Hunger Games. I wouldn't recommend powering through this book in one sitting, however. Unlike a lot of other Smart Pop books, the authors only had three novels to work with, which leads to some repetitive passages - talking about the bombs in the Capitol in Mockingjay or Katniss' use of the berries in Hunger Games. The essays themselves aren't repetitive, and all of them make unique points from the same set of examples, but reading one essay after another really highlighted for me how little material, in a sense, the authors had to work with in comparison to the Smart Pop book on Harry Potter.

I said in the intro that I consider this "light" academic reading and I want to make it clear that I don't intend that as a slight, but on the other hand only a few of these essays rely upon any sources outside of the three novels. Most of those outside sources are excerpts from interviews Suzanne Collins gave while promoting Mockingjay. This isn't hard hitting collegiate-level literary analysis, but would serve as an excellent introduction and as examples of just how many different ways one book (or set of books) can be analyzed.

The Girl Who Was on Fire goes on sale in April, and I consider it a must-read for any fan of The Hunger Games.

Reviewed from an ARC provided by the publisher




This week's Nonfiction Monday is hosted by Great Kid Books. Be sure to stop by and check out the other great nonfiction titles highlighted this week!

Double Review: Rampant and Ascendant by Diana Peterfreund

OMG, you guys. You guys, why didn't anyone tell me that books about killer unicorns are FREAKING AWESOME?!

I don't know exactly why I decided to skip on Rampant the first time around. I think I was focusing more on the "unicorn" rather than the "killer" part of the description, plus I'm just generally prejudiced against fantasy. Then I read Peterfreund's contribution to Zombies vs. Unicorns and was intrigued - I was curious about whether the characters were original and just set in her previously established world (like Carrie Ryan's contribution), or if these characters appeared in the series proper. But then I never made an effort to seek out Rampant. Until I was browsing at the library and Rampant was sitting face out on a shelf. On an impulse, I picked it up.

And I'm so glad I did. And I'm also so glad I didn't get Rampant until Ascendant was already out, so I only had to wait a week rather than a year to get more of Astrid's story.

Astrid Llewelyn has grown up listening to her mother's crazy stories about killer unicorns. When the rest of the world believes unicorns are mythical sparkly creatures, what else can a trying-to-be-normal 16 year old do? So when her boyfriend is attacked by a real live killer unicorn during a late night make out session in a forest, Astrid's concept of reality is turned upside down.

Her mother, however, sees this as an opportunity, and doesn't hesitate to ship Astrid off to a nunnery in Rome that is the 21st century reincarnation of the ancient Order of the Lioness - an order of nuns who dedicated their lives to protecting humanity from the unicorn scourge. And it just so happens that Astrid's family line was historically known to be the biggest, baddest hunters out there. With the financial support of a pharmaceutical company hoping to find the mythical Remedy derived from unicorns and said to be able to cure anything, Astrid and an international crew of hunters band together to learn the truth of the unicorn Reemergence and defend humanity from the long-forgotten threat.

Ascendant picks up shortly after Rampant ends. While the world at large is well aware of the unicorn threat, the Cloisters is still falling short in their funding and recruitment goals. As soon as they find a girl capable of being a hunter, she quickly decides to relinquish her eligibility. And the only organization willing to fund the Cloisters is the Vatican, who want to place some strict rules on the young women who've taken over their nunnery. To add more worry to Astrid's plate, her boyfriend is heading back to the US and one of her best friends and fellow hunters is mysteriously losing her hunting powers.

So when Astrid has the chance to escape the Vatican's strict rules, gain funding for the Cloisters, and re-focus on her scientific passions all in one go, she leaps at the chance. It doesn't hurt that she also gets to hang out in the French countryside, too. But being part of Gordian Pharmaceuticals again opens up a host of new questions for Astrid, making her question her loyalties as a hunter and a scientist.

What excited me the most about these two books is just how darn feminist they are. Seriously, these are some of the most feminist books I've read since The Disreputable History of Frankie-Landau Banks. Throughout both books there are positive depictions of young women's sexuality, and then especially in Ascendant there's discussions about women (even those who weren't unicorn hunters) who defied traditional notions of femininity to follow their passions in science and medicine. And then yes, there's the idea of a secret group of women who are all that stands between humanity and the unicorn scourge. Women with big swords = awesome.

In Ascendant, Peterfreund also excels where Suzanne Collins failed in Mockingjay to give us an injured protagonist who is a little foggy...yet still manages to keep the story going. Whereas Katniss became half-comatose every time a big plot point comes up, Astrid powers through her injury, acknowledging she's weaker and she can't remember some things sometimes while other things are crystal clear (even if they might be hallucinations...?). Yes, it's a bit confusing, but damn if it doesn't work amazingly. I felt Astrid's frustrations right along with her.

On the other hand, every once in awhile Astrid is a bit...dumb. Even before her catastrophic injury. Her ex-boyfriend disappears right after she tells the pharmaceutical rep that he's the only living person to receive some of the Remedy...and she really believes he just coincidentally ran away? The big biology student can't figure out why a female unicorn may be hugely fat while all of the rest are grotesquely thin? Neither of these require a degree in rocket science to put together a working hypothesis for. Thankfully, Astrid's inability to put two and two together only happens rarely, and doesn't detract from the overall awesomeness of the two stories. My other minor quibble is the lack of description of what's going on in the rest of the world. By Ascendant it's clear that unicorns are known by the general public, but I want to know how on Earth they reacted. Panic in the streets? Mass migrations back into the cities? Inquiring minds want to know! But otherwise, both of these books fall into the "couldn't put it down" category, and they're so richly written that I did find it took me longer to read them than books of similar lengths, because I just didn't want to miss a word.

Peterfreund also does an excellent job in both books of finishing the main story, while leaving a few hooks for the next book to pick up on. This didn't stop me from feeling extremely impatient while waiting to get Ascendant from the library, but that was out of desperately wanting more of Astrid's adventures rather than needing to know how the darn story ends. Of course, there's a big question left unanswered at the end of Ascendant, and I'm certainly desperate to know the answer!

Rampant is actually what really inspired me to put together my What have I missed? personal reading challenge. Technically it doesn't fit into the guidelines I've set for my reading next year, but it got me thinking about all of the similarly awesome books I've missed out on just because I wasn't paying attention to YA when they were published! So please pop into the comments over there and leave more suggestions - and then go pick up Rampant and Ascendant if you haven't already!

Review: Prisoners in the Palace by Michaela Maccoll

Okay, enough slacking off from me! I've had essentially a month's vacation from blogging, and hopefully I've gotten that slacking out of my system. It's the beginning of a new month, the last month of the year, and I'm going to be much better about blogging regularly from here on out!

On to the book at hand: I was already looking forward to reading Prisoners in the Palace: How Princess Victoria became Queen with the Help of Her Maid, a Reporter, and a Scoundrel before Chronicle contacted me and offered me a copy for review (so thanks for that!). If nothing else, I was eager to get my hands on a copy to get a look at the cover up close. The Space Between Trees, reviewed in July, had a beautifully unique cover, with the cutout silhouette revealing a pearlescent paper. This time around the front cover is metallic (I'm like a magpie when it comes to shiny stuff), with the back cover invoking the 19th century equivalent of supermarket tabloid with excerpts of gossipy articles teasing plot points of the book. Underneath the jacket, the book is decorated in a damask design. Chronicle is clearly invested in making their books look just as good on the outside as they are on the inside - and Prisoners in the Palace is quite excellent!


Just as Liza Hastings is preparing for her grand debut into London society in 1836, tragedy strikes - her parents are killed in an accident, leaving Liza penniless and destitute. Through generous family connections, however, Liza is able to apply for a position in the household of Princess Victoria - as a lady's maid. It's a huge step down socially for Liza, but when the other option is to be out on the street, she is determined to make the best of her situation.

A cunning and clever young woman, Liza is drawn into the intrigue of royal life, and the lives of the royal servants. Genuinely fond of the princess, Liza looks out for the naive young woman and does all she can to protect the princess from her predatory guardian, while trying to avoid being fired for impertinence. She is assisted by, as the subtitle says, a reporter and a scoundrel. The newspaper industry was growing rapidly during this era, and Liza teams up with a promising broadsheet entrepreneur to promote Victoria's interests. The scoundrel facilitates Liza's meetings, and even has the chance to be a hero in his own right.

Maccoll has crafted an excellent work of historical fiction. In fact, I think this is even deserving of the title historical thriller, as Laurie Halse Anderson has asked that her historical works be called. Prisoners in the Palace is filled with intrigue and danger, though perhaps on a smaller scale than Chains and Forge. Maccoll truly brings her characters to life through engaging dialog and seamless integration of historical facts into the narrative. History is further brought to life through excerpts of Victoria's journals and other contemporary writings, though Maccoll admits in the author's note that she fudged the date and order of some of these.

This is a novel primarily populated by women, and they are a diverse and engaging group, ranging from disgraced maids to Queens of England. The men don't get as much screen time so they come off flatter in comparison to people like Liza and Victoria, but still support an excellent story.

I enthusiastically recommend Prisoners in the Palace to fans of historical fiction thrillers, and even to those of you who claim you'd rather stick with contemporary or fantasy novels. Maccoll clearly paints the picture of early-19th century England for those of us who know little of the time period, and populates the world with characters who perfectly balance historical and modern sensibilities.

Reviewed from review copy received from publisher.

Sci Fi Friday Review: Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld

It's no secret to long-time readers of this blog that I have a thing for Scott Westerfeld's writing. I wrote my senior thesis on the Uglies series, for goodness' sake! So it's probably no surprise, given my history with Westerfeld's work and my feelings about last year's Leviathan, that I enjoyed Behemoth. Just wanted to get that out of the way in case the curiosity was killing you.

When we last left the crew of the British airship Leviathan, they had just picked up several Austrian passengers, including the son of the recently-assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Alek - not that any of the British crew know that. Alek's lone friend among the crew is a young airman Dylan, who is actually a young woman, Deryn, disguising herself so she can serve in the air force - not that anyone knows about that. The airship is carrying some precious cargo and distinguished guests, including the granddaughter of Charles Darwin, who has some very special eggs she wants delivered to the ruler of the Ottoman Empire before a great war can break out among the European nations in response to the murder of Alek's parents.

The Ottoman Empire is at a crossroads when the Leviathan docks. They are technically neutral in the burgeoning conflict, but are being courted by both German and British forces for an alliance. And all is not well within the Empire, as the current sultan has only been in power for a few years and already militants are planning a coup to replace the monarchy with a democratic government. Alek and Deryn know that technically they are on opposite sides in this war - Clanker and Darwinist, royalty and commoner - but discover they will have to work together, along with an eclectic mix of allies, if they ever hope to achieve their mutual goal: stop a world war from beginning.

If you haven't read Leviathan yet, you absolutely need to read it before reading Behemoth. The story picks up mere days after the end of Leviathan, and the action starts within just a few pages, leaving precious little time to catch the reader up on what happened in the last book. I really liked the fact that Westerfeld just goes with the assumption that the reader already knows the back story, because that means each and every page can be devoted to developing what happens next.

This is one wild ride both similar to and very different from Leviathan. In the last book, we followed Alek wandering in the wilderness towards safety with his body guards, and Deryn spent much of her story alone among the crew out of need to protect her secret. In Behemoth, less physical ground is covered, as the story stays focused on Istanbul, and the story becomes more of a political thriller as Alek and Deryn become involved in the resistance movement - which introduces my favorite character, the feisty revolutionary Lilit, who has dreams of bringing women's liberation to Istanbul. She also has a huge crush on one of our dashing heroes. Lilit is a young woman destined for greatness and could probably support a whole novel of her own!

As expected, there are more great beasties and machines this time around. The Ottoman Empire is a Clanker nation, but they're more in touch with nature than the Germans or Austrians, as their mechanics are based on animals. My favorite was probably the spider-like machine that worked the great library. On the Darwinist side, we finally get to see what was in those eggs that were so carefully guarded in Leviathan and, of course, there's the title beastie, the Behemoth. It's awesome, in every sense of the word.

Because I feel like it's becoming my trademark, I do have to comment for a moment on the romance element of the book. Deryn is beginning to develop "feelings" for Alek. Maybe this just annoyed me because I read it shortly after The Education of Bet and A Golden Web, two other novels about young women dressing up as men, but I'm getting quite tired of girls putting all of their other goals at risk because of some boy that literally thinks they're just one of the guys. Deryn keeps a handle on herself better than the protagonists of the other two books, and it's really just a small bit of this otherwise giant story, but it still rankled me a bit. I am certain Goliath won't go the way of Mockingjay in terms of focus on relationships, but I can't deny there's a little bit of worry in the back of my head. Hopefully, averting World War I will remain the focus.

Rot & Ruin Giveaway Reminder: I'm going to draw the winner for the Rot & Ruin giveaway at 12 pm Eastern time today! If you still want a chance to win, enter here!

Reviewed from ARC picked up at ALA 2010.

Sci Fi Friday Review: Black Hole Sun by David Macinnis Gill

Found via: Bookends

I feel like I can play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with this book, except instead of Kevin Bacon the goal person is Suzanne Collins. I know Cindy Dobrez. Cindy Dobrez reviewed Black Hole Sun for Booklist and her review is on the back cover. Also on the cover? Suzanne Collins. So that puts me one degree away from celebrity, right? (I'm also one degree away from James Earl Jones, but that's another story).


Durango is eight and a half Mars years old (17 Earth years), and the disgraced leader of a ragtag group of mercenaries hired for a fool's errand - to protect a group of poor miners from the cannibalistic draeu. The draeu are the boogeymen of Mars, unfeeling and terrifying cannibals, while the miners are some of the lowest of the low, originally necessary to procure materials to build Mars and then abandoned when the planet was habitable enough. The only people lower on the totem pole than the miners? Dalit Regulators, like Durango and his second-in-command, Vienne. A man of honor, Durango is determined to protect the miners, even when it's clear they're hiding something from him, and the fight against the draeu is taken to a whole new level when the true extent of their abilities, and their leader, is finally revealed.

I've gotten progressively more excited about this book since page one. This is a perfect blend of science fiction, action-adventure, and humor. I finished it on the subway ride home yesterday (right around the time a possible tornado was in the area - I missed the whole storm while underground!), and was satisfied, even happy with the story. But as the evening wore on I found I had more and more I wanted to talk about - conversation about the book ended up dominating my dinner conversation, overshadowing discussion of the storm and my new promotion (I'm very proud of it, thus sneaking it into conversation - or blog posts - whenever possible!). That has to be one of the best signs of a great book, right?

Easily what sets this book apart from other science fiction novels is the humor. Durango and Mimi, his former commander turned artificial intelligence implanted in his brain, have a constantly running sarcastic repartee throughout the book. And then there's Fuse, the explosions expert. And Leroy Jenkins.

Yes, Leroy Jenkins.



Big thumbs up for that, Mr. Gill. I just burst out laughing the first time I saw his full name (usually he's just Jenkins), and he quickly became my favorite character.

There's also some intricate world building here - we're dropped right in the middle of an incredibly complex and class- and honor-conscious society, and there's no hand holding to explain the finer points of Mars etiquette. We learn the necessary details on the go, with enough questions answered to leave the reader satisfied, but so many open possibilities that Gill could easily extend this into a long running series without running out of juicy material. The ending definitely leaves open the possibility for a sequel, but there's no annoying cliffhangers or gimmicks here. This chapter of the story is over, and while I certainly hope to see more of Durango, Mimi and Vienne (and Jenkins, of course), I can't be too disappointed if this is the last we see of them.

This is exquisite science fiction, folks, in a style that hasn't been too common in YA lit to date. Oh there's plenty of YA sci-fi out there, especially with the current dystopian trend, but like the rest of YA lit, the science fiction has tended to focus on relationships with the science in the background - it's just teenagers on a future Earth that has had all kinds of crazy stuff happen. This is a true action-adventure story, set on an alien world. The closest other recent book in terms of setting would probably be Patrick Ness' Chaos Walking trilogy, but even that is much more about Todd and Viola and their struggles with Mayor Prentiss and Mistress Coyle than presenting a hard science fiction story. In Black Hole Sun, there is absolutely no forgetting that we're not in Kansas anymore.

I already loved Gill's writing in last year's Soul Enchilada. With Black Hole Sun he proves he's definitely not a one hit wonder, and has some range to boot. I can't wait to see what he comes up with next! I'll be sure to pick it up on day one.

Nonfiction Monday Review: The Cowgirl Way by Holly George-Warren

Found via: The Amelia Bloomer Project

In elementary school, I loved stories about Calamity Jane and Annie Oakley. The Wild West was intriguing and exotic, and here were two women who made their own way through a rough and tumble world that was otherwise dominated by men! What wasn't there to like?

Unfortunately, Jane and Annie were my only exposure to cowgirls and western women in general. I think in middle school I learned about Belle Starr, but in a context that implied she probably did little more than run a safe house for male outlaws. Holly George-Warren is here with The Cowgirl Way to correct that bit of misinformation (she may have run a safe house, but she really did get up to all sorts of outlaw trouble on her own!), and show how wide-ranging cowgirl life could (and still can) be.

This is a light biography, with chapters devoted to "Women of the Old West," "Outlaws and Rebels," and several variations on cowgirls in entertainment, from wild west shows (starring the likes of Annie Oakley) and rodeos to singing cowgirls and cowgirls on TV and in film. This organizational set up gives us a great overview of the varieties of cowgirls that have captured the American imagination in the last 100+ years, but doesn't leave room to delve very deep into any one story. Personally, I also would have preferred more focus on what western life was really like, rather than an emphasis on cowgirls as entertainment, but that's a minor complaint.

I mentioned back in my women's history month post that I was disappointed in how often women's stories were relegated to March, and this would be an excellent book to use to illustrate parts of western life from a different perspective. The first chapter, "Women of the Old West" is a perfect illustration of how harsh conditions in the west when America was expanding necessitated women taking on roles that were considered improper back in the east. Clothes, riding sidesaddle, and the eventual right to vote (won in Wyoming, fifty years before the 19th amendment would be passed, granting the right to all women in the country) are all mentioned.

Also, I need to start keeping a list of off-the-beaten-track museums I want to visit some day. Did you know there's a National Cowgirl Museum? It and the attached hall of fame are mentioned in the closing chapter, "Twenty-First-Century Cowgirls." If I ever make it to Fort Worth, I'm definitely hitting it up!

While I'm now hungry for more cowgirl knowledge, this is definitely an excellent book to stoke curiosity and a jumping off point for more in-depth reading on the women of America's west.



Nonfiction Monday is hosted this week by Rasco from RIF. Be sure to stop by to see all the great nonfiction titles being shared this week!

Nonfiction Monday Review: Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone... by Martha Ackmann

Found via: the Amelia Bloomer Project

The full title of this book is Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League. Can you see why I abbreviated it?

Today is Labor Day in the US, the traditional marker of the end of summer. While baseball continues for a few more weeks before the World Series, since it's considered a summer sport I thought a baseball biography would be an excellent way to finish out the season.

I've mentioned my love of the game on here a few times, but I have a confession: I don't know much of the history of baseball. My dad knows a ton, at least when it comes to his favorite team, the Braves (boo!), but I tend to focus on the contemporary game. This is probably because a) while I enjoy baseball, my love of the game doesn't run terribly deep and b) when it comes to history, I tend to stick to women's history. Since women have historically been excluded from baseball, the means most of my baseball history concerns the AAGPBL. When I saw this book nominated for the Amelia Bloomer list, I knew I had to read it, since I knew nothing about Negro League baseball, and especially didn't know they'd had a woman play!

Marcenia Lyle Stone, aka Tomboy aka Toni, grew up in Minneapolis in the 20s and 30s and loved nothing more than baseball. She worked hard to prove her stuff and with a bit of persistence and cajoling, she played throughout her childhood on neighborhood boys teams - even going so far once as to knock a decade off of her age in order to qualify for a baseball camp taught by a former pro player!

The odds were stacked against Toni, and she knew it. Not only was she a woman who wanted to play a man's game, but when she was first trying to break into just the minor leagues, baseball was a white man's game - it would be a few years before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. But Toni didn't let her race or her gender hold her back, and she made it on to some of the top ranked teams in the Negro League, just as the league was beginning to die out as segregation was eliminated in Major League Baseball and their minor league farm teams.

This is an amazing biography - as I tweeted after finishing the book, Toni Stone is my new hero. Gutsy might be the best adjective for her. Determined. Tenacious. She is an excellent example of what you can accomplish if you follow your dreams, but her story also emphasizes that those accomplishments only came after years of hard work and dedication. Nothing was easy for Toni Stone.

This is also an excellent history of baseball and Jim Crow laws in the mid-century South. There's lots of anecdotes about the history of the Negro Leagues as well as stories from some of the first black Major League players like Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron that are sure to appeal to any hardcore baseball fan. I had no idea that much of the Negro League play was in the form of Barnstorming matches, where a team would travel all across the country playing exhibition games, making their season stretch from April to November. It makes modern baseball look like a luxury cruise!

Toni spent a lot of her professional time in the South, first as part of her time as a Barnstormer travelling through the region and then playing semi-pro with the Louisiana Creole team. As such we get a first hand view of the terrible and ridiculous Jim Crow laws that were in place. Legal action was threatened in some states if a Negro League team played a white team - or even an integrated team (Jackie Robinson led a touring all star team, made up of white and black players). I have to admit, I never realized how much Jim Crow laws could affect whites as well. I don't say this as some sort of derailing, "racism hurts white people too!" comment, but rather as someone who is realizing in a new way just how much those laws were rooted in fear and hatred. I thought the laws were simply to keep Black people "in their place" while whites had free reign and could go anywhere and do whatever they wanted, but at least when it came to baseball, even if they wanted to play together, the law said they had to be kept strictly separate.

What a scary and terrifying time it must have been.

This is definitely a must-read for any baseball fan or sports history buff. It's an adult title but relatively short (less than 300 pages with a hefty bibliography/notes section in the back) and perfectly appropriate for high school or middle school student suddenly stuck inside for school when she'd rather be playing ball!


This week Nonfiction Monday is hosted by The Miss Rumphius Effect. Be sure to stop by and check out all the other great nonfiction posts this week!

Nonfiction Monday Review: Cleopatra Rules! by Vicky Alvear Shecter

While wandering through the exhibits at ALA, I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw this cover staring out at me from a backdrop:

I just had to stop and look around and ask about that book! Luckily, the ladies staffing the Boyds Mill Press booth were more than happy to talk about it and other books they carry featuring strong women and unique takes on history with an excited blogger. Advanced copies weren't available at ALA, but they made sure to mail me a copy as soon as they were available!

I have always loved Cleopatra - when other girls had a princess phase, I went straight to the top and loved the Queen (okay, I enjoyed my share of Disney princesses too, I suppose). One of my favorite Shakespeare plays? Antony and Cleopatra. So to say I was excited about a teen-oriented biography of this much-maligned royal is an understatement.

Shecter takes the haters to task. She hammers home the point that the victors get to write history, so it's likely that much of the Roman-oriented biography that's been handed down through the generations is unflattering at best. In truth, Cleopatra was as loved by her subjects as a Greek Pharaoh could be. Where others in the line of Ptolemy ruled apart from their Egyptian subjects, Cleopatra learned their language (as well as 20+ others!) and their rites and rituals, making her well loved by her subjects.

Cleopatra wasn't a seductress - she gained her power the old fashioned way, through cunning and shows of strength. She allied herself with the most powerful men in the world - Julius Caesar and Mark Antony - to make sure Egypt could remain a sovereign nation. She built up Egypt's armies so they had a chance of defending themselves. And she was something of a book worm, ensuring that she had the strategic knowledge to use her forces in the best way possible.

This is a beautiful book, both in content and presentation. Lots of full-color photographs of Egyptian antiquities are included and there are colorful sidebars and in-sets to highlight important information. The one turn off for me as an adult reader, was that I couldn't get past the writing style. Shecter uses a very slangy voice for the book, going so far as to refer to Octavian as "O-man" at one point. Perhaps this is just what a teen or tween needs in order to pick up a book about someone who's been dead for thousands of years, but it made it a little hard for me to take the book seriously sometimes. I kept hoping I'd get used to it, but I never did.

However, my hang ups wouldn't prevent me from strongly recommending this to someone desperate for a positive look at one of the most powerful women who ever lived. Cleopatra Rules! certainly rocks as a biography.

Nonfiction Monday is hosted by Playing by the Book this week. Be sure to stop by and check out all the other great nonfiction finds this week!
Also, final reminder for NYC-area readers, Books of Wonder's Mockingjay release party is tonight! I had some uploading fail yesterday, so be sure to check out my post yesterday to see what I'll be wearing so you can introduce yourself at the party!
Review copy was sent to me by the publisher, Boyds Mill Press.

Review: Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce

After a failed attempt to read the werewolf romance of the moment, Shiver, I shrugged off the burgeoning werewolf genre as not-for-me. Then along comes Sisters Red which is pretty much a bad ass book all around. Yay, werewolf hunters!

Scarlett March has two missions in life: hunt werewolves and protect her little sister, Rosie. Luckily for Scarlett, fulfilling one mission usually involves fulfilling the other, as the Fenris hunt pretty young women like Rosie. Ever since a werewolf attacked and killed their grandmother when they were little, an attack which also took Scarlett's eye as she was even then protecting her little sister, Scarlett has been determined to exterminate the Fenris, and she has the scars, both literal and figurative, to prove it.

Rosie knows she owes her sister her life. Scarlett has sacrificed so much, even her own eye, that Rosie feels becoming a hunter like her sister is a small price to repay her debt. It isn't that Rosie dislikes hunting, in fact she's quite good at it and knows that without her many more girls would be horrifically murdered every month, but Rosie has never had the chance to discover if she even likes to do anything else. And now, back on the scene after a year away from hunting in order to visit relatives, Silas Reynolds is stirring up all sorts of complicated feelings in her young heart. Silas is Scarlett's hunting partner, or was until he left and Rosie took over, but does that mean he can never mean something to Rosie?

Silas is back just in time, as the Fenris packs seem to be congregating, concentrating their hunting efforts in a way the March sisters have never seen before. And there's whispers that they're looking for the Potential - the one man they can bite and turn into another werewolf, so long as they an find him before the next full moon. Silas and the March sisters know this is an unprecedented chance to hunt lots of Fenris at once, and maybe even learn more about how they increase their numbers - but that's about all they know. Hunting and killing werewolves is one thing, but learning how they tick might just be beyond even their formidable capabilities.

This is a book that uses the alternating POV chapters method really, really well. Rosie and Scarlett are so different that even though they're telling the same story, it's almost like we get two different genres. Scarlett's narration gives me the action and adventure story I love, while Rosie gives us a sort of paranormal-romance look at the same basic plot. I LOVE IT SO MUCH.

I also love that these sisters have a real love and affection for each other, even when they don't understand each other. Even when Silas is in the picture, and the story threatens to go into love-triangle territory, the girls stay focused on their primary mission and the importance of their relationship with eachother.

Scarlett is far and away my favorite character, reminding me so much of Rachel in my beloved Animorphs books as she struggles with her warrior identity, but Rosie is no slouch and in fact had two of my favorite moments in the book. I don't want to give too much away, but when Rosie was trying to outsmart a whole pack of werewolves, she had me on the edge of my seat and cheering for her solution. And if this ever becomes a movie, I cannot wait to see her tango scene -it's such a small moment in the book, but the visuals and the soundtrack could make it awesome.

In some ways this is a very sexual book, but without actually ever showing any sex. Pearce has taken the Little Red Ridinghood story, with its warning about girls wandering alone and implications about male sexuality, and seamlessly put it in a modern setting. The methods Scarlett and Rosie use to attract the werewolves - perfume, fancy shampoo, flowing hair and the infamous red cape - could be the jumping off point for a long thesis for a lit or women's studies major. I have to admit, after writing my review for Flow, this is one of the books I was thinking of when wondering why we don't see more periods in YA lit. It seems like when you're dealing so blatantly with sexuality, a woman's period would affect how a werewolf sees her. And the girls are so short on cash you'd think someone would bitch about the price of tampons (because I always cringe to think of how much I'm spending on something that is made to be thrown away, and I don't have to pawn off my grandmother's valuables to make rent). The book covers a whole month, so surely one of them would have had a period!

But seriously, awesome book, and I can't recommend it highly enough! Two companion books are on their way, riffing off of different stories (Hansel & Gretel and the Little Mermaid). I hope to see more of Rosie and Scarlett (ESPECIALLY SCARLETT), but I'll take what I can get!

Sci-Fi Friday Review: Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

Found via: Publisher's Weekly 4/19




You all know that I'm a sucker for science fiction, especially when it falls into the dystopian camp. I'm also a huge fan of books that bring in strong and interesting non-white characters (okay, I prefer my white characters to be interesting as well, but characters of color are harder to find!). Ship Breaker is one of the few books that combines both of those passions into an awesome story.

17 year old Nailer has spent his whole life living on the Gulf coast, working on the crews that break down the ancient oil rigs and shipwrecked boats that were abandoned as fossil fuels were exhausted and the climate changed so radically the coast began suffering through Category 6 hurricanes - aka City Killers. It's a rough and tumble life for everyone, but perhaps a little more so for Nailer who lives with his alcoholic father who isn't afraid to re-live his glory days as a wrestler by taking out his frustrations on his son.

Everyone on the crews dreams of making like Lucky Strike, the former crew member who found a secret oil deposit and was able to smuggle enough out to buy his way off the crew and set up a comfortable life for himself. Nailer thinks he's found his shot with the discovery of a modern and swanky clipper ship wrecked on the shore, filled with silver and gold and copper and, unexpectedly, a survivor - a young woman. Nailer and his friends are tempted to kill the girl and claim the boat as salvage, but ultimately Nailer decides to spare Nita after she promises there'll be a handsome reward for her safe return.

What Nita failed to mention is her rich father isn't the only one looking for her. Trouble is brewing in her father's industry, and a former colleague has pursued Nita across the Gulf, hoping to use her as a hostage. Without Nailer's help, she'll never reach safety. With the promise of adventure and a better life for himself and his friends, Nailer agrees to help, setting in motion an adventure that takes him from the ravaged Gulf to the ruins of New Orleans and out onto the ocean as he's always dreamed.

Bacigalupi is a rising star in science fiction right now, having just won the 2010 Nebula Award for his 2009 adult novel. So Ship Breaker continues the trend of adult writers turning towards the YA market, but after reading this one I'm happy to welcome Bacigalupi into the YA field. This is a tightly crafted adventure story, with a setting that feels all the more timely in the aftermath of the Gulf oil spill (boo, hiss). I also found an interview with Bacigalupi that's interesting to read in light of the New Yorker article on YA dystopias. The New Yorker notes that a lot of YA dystopias don't truly work as social commentary like 1984 and Brave New World do because teenagers can't do anything to change their place. Bacigalupi, however, takes a different tack, saying "Adult readers nod their heads like a Chihuahua (bobble head) on a dashboard and say, 'Wow, that's really deep.' Then they get in their car and drive to work again. But with young people, they actually still have a chance to make better decisions than we made." Hopefully that means he plans on writing more YA!


The diverse cast is definitely one of the strengths of this novel. Not only are most of the characters not-white (specifically Nailer is Latino and Nita is Indian), but both men and women, boys and girls are part of the action. Nita starts off physically frail, but she's clearly clever and is a fast learner so she can earn the respect of Nailer and his crew who've known nothing but hard labor. Sadna, the leader of Nailer's crew, is a strong and imposing woman who has clawed her way up the ranks. At least in the shanty town, there's no difference between races or gender, it's all about how you can contribute and earn your keep.


When Nita arrives on the scene, class also comes to the forefront of the story as it becomes apparent that the entire world isn't in shambles like the Gulf coast is. Farther inland there are working cities with industries and infrastructure going strong. The only way those cities continue to thrive, however, is by exploiting people like Nailer to salvage every last resource from the wreckage people like us left behind.

Review: Borrowed Names by Jeannine Atkins

Found via: Read Roger

More poetry! But I'm not too bothered I couldn't fit this in to National Poetry Month, as this collection is all about mothers and daughters. Well, three specific pairs of mothers & daughters: Laura Ingalls Wilder and daughter Rose Wilder Lane, Madame C.J. Walker and daughter A'Lelia Walker and Marie Curie and daughter Irene Joiliot-Curie. A perfect post-mother's-day book!

1867 was apparently a banner year, as that is the year the three mothers highlighted in this collection were born. The book is divided into three sections, each focusing on one mother/daughter pair, chronicling the daughter's life as she grows up, watching her mother, learning from her mistakes, and gaining inspiration for her own life. For the daughters are no slouches either: Rose Wilder Lane was a journalist and a biographer before helping her mother turn stories of her childhood into the Little House series; A'Lelia Walker used the fortune she earned as part of her mother's company to support the Harlem Renaissance; and Irene Joliot-Curie joined her mother as a WWI X-Ray technician, saving countless lives, before earning her own Nobel Prize, following in her mother's footsteps by studying radioactivity.

The poetry is well done, as is the biographical content. While I'm no expert on any of these women, Atkins doesn't pull any punches and shows both the ups and downs in these women's lives, including a troubled marriage for Rose and the sexism of the Nobel committee. This bit stuck out for me:

She remembers them taking a train to Sweden
where a woman might earn the Nobel Prize
but would be kept from speaking on the stage

Borrowed Names page 149
It's subtle but spot on, in the way that only poetry can be.

This is the sort of book I would have loved to have available for Ada Lovelace Day. Maybe someone else will pick it up for review next year. While I don't think this would be a replacement for a full biography on any of these women, it's certainly an interesting supplement, and really breathes life into these families in a way a standard biography never can.


Nonfiction Monday is hosted this week by Picture Book of the Day. Check out other great non-fiction posts going up today!

Review: Guardian of the Dead by Karen Healey

This book pretty much has everything I love in it: a culturally diverse cast, myths and legends (with major bonus points because they are Māori myths, which I knew nothing about prior to reading this), casual talk of feminism, passes the Bechdel test, and no creepy co-dependent/stalker-y romance. Karen Healey may be my new hero.

When her mom's cancer goes into remission, Ellie's parents go on an around-the-world vacation, leaving Ellie in a strict private boarding school. Ellie is slow to make friends, but quickly bonds with Kevin - who she develops a crush on despite his asexual identity. After Kevin convinces her to put her tae kwon do skills to work choreographing epic fights for the local college's Māori-tinged production of Midsummer Night's Dream (there I go, reading another book with Midsummer in it), she quickly starts making friends inside and out of the play: Iris the underclassman director (no senior wanted to take on a play close to exams) and Mark, a quiet day student at her boarding school who is dreamy and handsome - and seems to be able to literally hypnotize her. Kevin also makes new friends - namely the mysterious Reka, playing the fairy queen Titania, who freaks Ellie out. Probably because her pupils have a habit of disappearing.

But Ellie has a few tricks up her sleeve as well, even if she doesn't know it at first. As Mark repeatedly tries to use his mystical powers to keep Ellie safe, she finds ways to break, or at least weaken, his spells - proving that she has some latent magical ability herself. And once this latent ability is revealed, she suddenly becomes a much more inviting target for the Eyeslasher Killer - a serial killer targeting those who have connections to magic and mysticism and takes their eyes as trophies.

Ellie is skeptical of her newfound abilities, but can't deny the evidence right in front of her. And after she and Mark learn of a plot to magically inspire an epic disaster, Ellie knows she has to at least try to stop it - or die trying.

Okay, there's so much to love here that I'm going to resort to bullet points, because otherwise this post will never be finished:

• Diverse cast: Ellie is pretty much the only white, European-descendant character in the whole book. Kevin and Mark have Māori ancestry (though descriptions of them do read as more "white" than anything else), Ellie's favorite teacher is Eritrean (and has lived all around the world), Iris is Asian, and even descriptions of random people in crowd scenes are written to ensure we know that Ellie's world is incredibly diverse. No token ethnic folks here.
  
• Māori myths: I knew nothing of Māori mythology before picking up this book. An authors note at the end explains what is based on true mythology and what Healey made up or adapted for dramatic purposes, which just piques my interest more!
  
• Casual feminism: Feminism pops up all over the place here. Myths are called out as sexist for lack of female participants or blatant female subjugation. And here is something that just shocked me: a relationship is described as rape because one party wasn't fully aware of the identity of the other party. Magical person seduces human person without revealing the magical identity and Iris flat out calls that rape, since the human didn't consent to having sex with a magical person. This is the sort of conversation I never see outside of hardcore feminist arenas, so I was shocked that it just appeared in the middle of my urban fantasy YA book. Thus officially making Karen Healey my hero.
  
• Passes the Bechdel Test: Ellie does spend most of her time hanging out with dudes, but there are two important female supporting characters: Iris and Professor Garibaldi, the Eritrean teacher. Ellie has numerous conversations with them that are not about boys (and it should be noted that neither character is white!)
  
• Non-creepy romance: Well, okay, there is creepy romance in this book, but Ellie isn't part of it. When Mark starts using his magical skills on her, Ellie instantly forgets whatever conversation they had had, but because of her latent abilities she has a lingering sensation that despite how handsome and nice he seems, there's something weird about Mark, and rather than continuing to moon over him, she gets pissed until she gets some answers. The creepy relationship is between Reka and Kevin, where for once it's the woman who is the creepy stalker type and the boy who is going along with it (not that I'm condoning creepy relationships of any kind). However, everyone aside from Kevin recognizes there's something wrong and work to get to the bottom of it.
  
• One more that I forgot at the top of this post: not just heterosexuals here! As mentioned above, before Reka shows up, Kevin identifies as asexual. Which is kind of awesome, because when was the last time you saw an asexual character in any book? It's one of the ways Ellie and Iris are sure that something weird is going on with Reka, because even though they both have a crush on Kevin they recognize that he is serious about his asexual identity - they don't think it's a phase or a lie so that he could get close to hot girls. Ellie's sister off in Australia is gay, which is part of the reason she's at boarding school while her parents are away - the implication is they were worried about Ellie catching "the gay" if she stayed with her sister for a year.
  

There's only one downside here: despite the feminism, Ellie has some major body image issues going on. Did we really need to be constantly reminded that she hates her body? Any time she has to change clothes she starts going off on how much she hates the rolls of fat around her belly. Considering how physically active she is in other parts of the book, it seems unlikely that she's actually significantly overweight. It was really disappointing to see that brought up multiple times for absolutely no purpose.

Okay, I'm putting an end to my list-making here. I think I've covered all of the main awesome points. To summarize: this is an awesome fantasy book with excellent progressive elements and I highly recommend it!

Review: Marie Curie by Janice Borzendowski

Today is Ada Lovelace Day! Who was Ada Lovelace? Well, she was the world's first computer programmer. In the 19th century. That's right, she was so awesome she figured out how to program a computer before computers actually existed.

I first learned about Ada Lovelace in Scott Westerfeld's Midnighters trilogy where she is an inspiration to one of the characters. I didn't learn about Ada Lovelace Day until it was too late for me to properly celebrate, but I marked my calendar and made sure I'd be ready this year!

The purpose of Ada Lovelace Day is to celebrate women in technology and science. Since this is a book blog, I figured it would be most fitting for me to look at biographies. Unfortunately, that's easier said than done. I like to focus on two things here: recent books (in the last year or so) and young adult/middle grade titles. Searching my library for books on women in science or women in technology yielded almost nothing for MG/YA readers (everything was either picture books or long adult texts). So I had to dig into my limited knowledge of women in science/technology to find a biography on a specific woman - and it was still hard to find one that had been published in the last decade, let alone the last two years. I finally found this Marie Curie biography, from the Sterling Biographies series.

Before I read this, I certainly knew of Marie Curie - she's one of the few historical women that was studied outside of women's history month for me. I knew she lived in France (okay, I actually thought she was French - she was actually born in Poland) and discovered radiation (which really isn't true, either). So, actually, I apparently knew nothing of Marie Curie nee Maria Sklodowska.

Borzendowski's biography does an excellent job of introducing us non-science types to the basics of Curie's research (which didn't involve discovering radiation, but she did coin the term radioactivity) and includes helpful sidebars on defining concepts like "radiation" and "elements and compounds" as well as histories of Poland (when Curie was born, the country was controlled by Russia) and bits on women's rights at the time (Curie achieved lots of firsts - first woman to win a Nobel prize, first person to win one in two separate categories, first woman to graduate from the Sorbonne, etc. etc.). The extra information means this biography is useful outside of a science classroom, and can be easily understood by anyone.

Awhile ago, I saw this slideshow at Slate that looked at how presidents are presented in children's biographies and found that in the biographies meant for children, the presidents were all great people well before they took office. Curious, I wondered if the same thing might hold true in Borzendowski's book. Not having time to check out a stack of adult biographies of Curie from the library, I settled with her Wikipedia page. The only major difference I found was the Wiki claims that Curie definitely had an affair with Paul Langevin while he was married and after she was widowed. The biography says that Curie always denied the affair, which I suppose is true and doesn't actually conflict with what the Wiki says. On the other hand, Langevin's Wikipedia page merely says he "reportedly" had an affair with Curie - and, in an example of how Wikipedia can end up playing a little loose with the facts, all of the citations in the entire article are reportedly to back up that fact.

One thing I absolutely loved reading about is how the presentation of Curie's work has changed in the last century. I was aware that Curie had worked with her husband, though until I read this I didn't know how deep that relationship ran. When the Curies won half of the Nobel prize in physics in 1903, only Pierre Curie was allowed to give a lecture. That happened repeatedly in their relationship, where Marie wouldn't be allowed to present her own research. Luckily, Pierre was always sure to give her proper credit for her hard work and discoveries. In the last hundred years, however, I'd argue that Marie Curie is the better known scientist, while her husband is usually thought of as secondary.

While the feminist label is never directly applied to Marie Curie in Brozendowski's book, it's clear that she held feminist values close. She often worked as a teacher of female students, and when she had her own laboratories, many of her lab assistants were women. The world needs more women like Marie Curie even today, as the New York Times reported this week that there are still persistent biases against women in science and mathematics.

In the comments, please leave links to your Ada Lovelace Day posts, tell me about your favorite woman in science/technology, or just give me some pointers towards some great YA nonfiction on the subject!