What Have I Missed? Review: How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

This is supposed to be my February book...but I ran out of days in February, thanks to my vacation/honeymoon. So here's the anxiously-awaited (if responses to my Goodreads review tweet are any indication!) of 2005 Printz Award winner How I Live Now.

In an attempt to escape her father and her horrible new stepmother, Manhattanite Daisy is spending the summer in rural England with family she hardly knows - her mother's sister and her four children. What is supposed to be a boring and relaxing summer takes a turn for the unexpected when, a day after her aunt has left the country on business, war breaks out in England.

Alone in the countryside, the five kids band together as a family in ways Daisy never imagined possible - from becoming so close they're practically telepathic to the decidedly more than familial love she shares with Edmond. But as the danger moves closer to their secluded outpost, Daisy must draw on reserves of strength she hardly knows she has to try to keep the little family together.

Pretty much every review of this I saw before going in brings up the incest - and now I guess I'm guilty of that too. But all of those reviews made such a big deal out of it I was sure I was going to end up with a romance story with some vaguely dystopian feelings. Let me assure you, that's totally not the case. Really, I'm kind of surprised that cousin-incest really gets people up in arms at this point. Just because you don't want to bang your cousin doesn't mean it's actually the grossest thing in the world. Much grosser: undead boyfriends that watch you sleep and try to control who you can spend time with. Or kidnappers. Abusive relationships of any kind, really. Priorities, people.

What this is, is a survival story. This is about how Daisy finds the strength, through extraordinary circumstances, to stop beating herself up and rediscovering her family and her will to live.

But ultimately, that wasn't quite enough to keep me riveted to the story. I put the book down a couple of times and wandered away to read something else. It may have had something to do with the writing style - it's very postmodern what with its complete absence of quotation marks. Considering the kids are pretty much psychic that makes it very hard to tell what is actually spoken and what is thought. The psychic-abilities were a bit random themselves - the whole of the writing just felt rather unsettling and unjustified.

What I did like was how Rosoff was able to subtly show how Daisy evolves over the course of the novel. There are hardly any moments when these changes are stated outright and instead they're left for the reader to pick up on and contemplate. An excellent example of an author trusting her audience to get it without hitting us over the head with character development or Messages.

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!

Review: Life, After by Sarah Darer Littman

This is an excellent look at how terrorism can effect one family, but with an unexpected angle, at least from this USian's perspective: instead of looking at terrorism in the US or radical Islamic terrorism, this is some homegrown terrorism - in Argentina.

Dani's life changed forever on her 7th birthday. That was the day terrorists loaded a truck with explosives and drove it into the AMIA building in Buenos Aires. Among the victims was Dani's pregnant aunt.

In the following years, political and economic upheaval has rocked Argentina, and Dani's family. Her father has lost his successful business, reducing the family to dinners of wrinkled potatoes - when there's food in the house at all - eaten by candlelight since the electricity has been turned off. As Dani watches her best friends move - one following her family's Jewish heritage to Israel, another to Miami - she is full of both hope and dread when her parents finally announce they, too, will be moving, to New York where her uncle lives.

Dani has to adapt to life in a new country, a new language, and even a new hemisphere where the seasons are the exact opposite of what they should be. To make things harder, her father isn't having an easy time adapting, and has sunk into a shell of his former self, depressed about the move, everything he's lost, and the charity they must now accept. Dani is scared and angry about the person her father has become, and is tired of having to step up to help take care of him, her little sister, and her mom, when all she wants to do is make friends and maybe even go on a date for once. Life After the terrorism and collapse in Argentina is no picnic, but is it even possible to return to the life they had Before?

I loved Dani, as she's genuinely a good kid, but her entire life is falling apart around her and it's all she can do to keep her head up. Her most complex feelings are reserved for her father, who is clearly suffering from deep clinical depression. As a reader, this was totally clear to me, and sometimes I had to stop myself from empathizing too much with Dani's rages against her father. Yes, he should be picking up her little sister from school or helping with the housekeeping, and it was easy to be angry at him for failing miserably at that, but knowing what depression can do to a person I know I shouldn't have those feelings!

What a sad, yet sweet, book. Littman has taken on several complicated issues, yet distilled them into a clean novel. I loved that Dani's family is not only Argentinian, but Jewish as well, a combination I don't think I've ever seen before. However, this isn't a book about being Argentinian Jews - it just adds a little depth to the family's background and gives them a reason to search out help from Jewish aid organizations. On the flip side, I know there are religious reasons for it, but it was a little jarring to see references to a deity written as "G-d" or "D-os." And there's a lot of praying in this book, so it happens rather often.

Like the kids in Dani's school, most of my knowledge of Argentina comes from Evita, so I loved the insight into the political and economic upheaval that has been rocking the country. The focus of the book is definitely on Dani and her family, so there perhaps aren't as many descriptions of life in Argentina as I would have liked, but Littman does a good job of giving peeks at how life has changed drastically while not distracting from the story she wants to tell.

Nonfiction Monday Review: They Called Themselves the K.K.K. by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

I knew I had to read this book as soon as I saw the cover. It's striking and even a little bit scary with the hood in stark contrast to the black background and the empty eye holes. It's definitely reminiscent of a ghost, which is of course exactly what the Klan was going for when they created these costumes.

They Called Themselves the K.K.K. takes a hard look at Reconstruction-era America, examining the social and political unrest that gave birth to, as the subtitle says, an American terrorist group. Bartoletti traces the KKK's origins to a group of former Confederate soldiers who suggested "Boys, let us get up a club" in Tennessee. From humble beginnings rose a movement that spread like wildfire across the South, resulting in the murders of countless men, women and children in the years after the end of the Civil War.

Bartoletti covers the decade or so of Reconstruction in detail, then skips ahead to the early 20th century when the Klan rose to prominence again with the publication of the book The Clansmen and Griffith's epic silent film The Birth of a Nation - it's these fictional narratives that gave us the symbol of the burning cross, as the original Klan never used that particular threat. This is also when the Klan modified its objectives and became a hate group targeting far more than just Black Americans. I believe this is also when the iconic white robe was introduced, as illustrations show that the original Klansmen wore a variety of elaborate costumes. From there Bartoletti briefly covers other important 20th century Civil Rights events, and includes a Civil Rights timeline, from the Emancipation Proclamation to the election of Barack Obama.

Hidden at the very end, in the bibliography and source notes section, are some of Bartoletti's most interesting modern observations, from her visit to the birthplace of the Klan to attending a modern day "Klan congress." I really wish this section were highlighted, rather than hidden between the quote attributions and the index. It's almost like when a movie has an extra scene at the end of the credits; this book rewards those who read literally from cover to cover.

The excellent design work exhibited on the cover continues onto the pages. Roughly every other page includes some sort of illustration, mostly woodcuts and Reconstruction political cartoons, but the occasional photograph as well, mostly included with excerpts from the Slave Narratives collected in the early 20th century. A different font is also used to contemporary block quotes, so the words of the Klansmen and their victims stand out in start relief to the narrative. It makes for a beautiful and compelling text.

One other note about the text: Bartoletti uses lots of primary sources from 19th century Americans, and includes the language of the time in the book. That means crude and vulgar words show up often, as well as passages written phonetically as they were taken down by interviewers for the Slave Narratives. I think the inclusion of such language was absolutely necessary to illustrate just how publicly acceptable racist language was at one point in our history. It makes this book even more difficult to read in some ways, but also highlights its importance.



This week's Nonfiction Monday is hosted by Mother Reader. Be sure to stop by and check out all the other great nonfiction this week!

Sci Fi Friday Review: Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness

Back when I went to ALA, I knew I was going to meet up with Lynn & Cindy at some point, but probably not until Saturday or Sunday. Yet when I got to the convention hall on Friday evening to register, I saw them across the lobby and snuck up on them like the sneaky person I am. And good thing too - while they were off to do important committee stuff, they clued me in that Candlewick had a few ARCs left of Monsters of Men and I should make that my first stop if I wanted to get my hands on this book before September. I then impressed them when we met up again on Sunday to report that I'd already finished the book!

Monsters of Men is the conclusion to the Chaos Walking trilogy, all of which have had slightly unwieldy names (The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and the Answer). When we last left Todd and Viola, they were facing the prospect of all out war, with Mayor President Prentiss' army of men and Mistress Coyle's resistance/terrorist cell of women and cast off men ready to kill each other, if the massive army of rebelling Spackle don't kill all of the humans first. Oh, and Viola's people, her fellow colonists, have reached the planet. Monsters of Men drops us right back into the action, with the adults and the Spackle known as 1017 all itching for war. Todd and Viola are once again caught in the middle, and now 1017 is added to the narrative mix, struggling with many of the same issues as the humans - he wants revenge, and is even willing to go against the nominal leader of his people, The Sky, in his quest. Will cooler heads ever prevail?

First of all, I love how Ness writes the animals in these books. There's Manchee, of course, and his lovable enthusiasm, but Angarath was tugging at my heartstrings throughout the entire book. It's great because these animals retain their essential animal-ness, just now it's easier for them to communicate with the humans around them. It's totally a dream come true for someone like me who would love to know what her cat is thinking (I just gave my cats some catnip, so I'm pretty sure their thoughts right now are I'M SO HIGH, but that's just a guess).

I have to say, I was on the edge of my seat for most of the book, but it was written in such a way that I felt a little manipulated. Every few chapters a new emergency arises or someone blows something up, which is pretty much the sole way the plot moves forward for much of the book. Around page 350 I found myself sighing with each new emergency - and at Mistress Coyle and Mayor Prentiss as they constantly bickered, backstabbed, and manipulated their proteges to get Viola and Todd to follow in their footsteps. After reading Mockingjay, I found myself comparing the two books - Ness moves the plot forward by blowing something up, Collins moves Mockingjay forward by having Katniss suffer a traumatic injury. Both are effective in small doses, but repeatedly in one novel is just...repetitive. The pace picked up again in the last 100 pages or so, but part of that may have been me realizing I was so close to the end and desperate to find out what the payoff would be for the series.

Writing the conclusion to a trilogy has to be super stressful for an author. Undoubtedly, it will be impossible to please everybody (as we saw with Mockingjay last month). While I had a few minor problems with Monsters of Men, it is overall a very satisfying conclusion to this story.

Reviewed from ARC picked up at ALA.


BTW: Last night I attended the awesome Zombies Vs. Unicorns debate! Check back here after 1 PM Eastern to see my re-cap of the event!

Double Review: Shine, Coconut Moon by Neesha Meminger and Love is the Higher Law by David Levithan

Found via: BBYA 2010 nominations

Oh man, it's been a crazy week out here. The weekend before Thanksgiving I was in Chicago with my mom, and then I spent Thanksgiving weekend with my in-laws in Florida, meaning there was lots of traveling, and LOTS of reading, but little time to blog! Thankfully, my reading list made my blogging a little easier for me by happening to have thematically similar books, like these two stories of how 9/11 affected high school students.

In Shine, Coconut Moon, Sam is an Indian-American teenager living in a relatively diverse community in New Jersey. For most of her life, she's put the emphasis on the "American" in her heritage, as her mother has kept her away from her very traditional Sikh grandparents. Instead, Sam spends most of her time with her best friend, Molly, and wondering when she'll lose her virginity to her boyfriend, Mike.

The weekend after 9/11, Sam is surprised to find a man in a turban at her front door. He says he's her uncle Sandeep, her mother's brother, and after his tumultuous divorce he wants to be part of Sam's and her mother's lives again. Sam is eager to get to know her uncle, and pressures him to teach her everything about her Sikh heritage, despite her mother's reservations and outright objections to Sam having anything to do with Sikh culture. As she grows more aware of her cultural heritage, she realizes just how different she is in some ways from her friends and community - but also learns to recognize what is truly important in life.

Love is the Higher Law takes place in New York City in the immediate after math of 9/11. The narrative jumps between three characters - Claire and Peter, who attend high school together, and Jaspar, the college guy Peter had scheduled a date with for the evening of 9/11. Alternating chapters explore the three characters and what it's like for them to live in post-9/11 New York City: Jaspar was sleeping late and actually missed the early TV coverage - and his parents were temporarily stranded in South Korea, where they'd been visiting Jaspar's grandmother; Claire spent 9/11 in her brother's elementary school, keeping him and his classmates calm while waiting for their mother to find them; Peter was skipping school to buy a new CD when an employee tells him the news. In the days, weeks and months after, each of them tries to understand how they fit into this new world they've been thrust in to.

I realized with a start about half way through Love is the Higher Law that for the first time in several years, I was reading a book about my peers. As an adult reading YA lit, I'm used to reading about characters who are about 10 years younger than I am, and in both of these books the protagonists are in the 17-19 years old age range - but back on September 11th, 2001, I was just a couple of months shy of my 17th birthday myself. I kind of found myself wondering what the characters were doing "now," in their mid-twenties, almost a decade later. It also made me wonder how today's crop of teenagers react to these books, since they were in elementary school in 2001.

Shine, Coconut Moon also had moments of familiarity for me - I remember reading this article in my hometown paper shortly after 9/11, about a Sikh family posting signs explaining their religion in the windows of their store, in order to prevent any attacks against them.

Shine, Coconut Moon and Love is the Higher Law are both excellent titles showing the wide variety of ways teenagers reacted after 9/11.

Review: The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness

In middle and high school, as I became painfully aware of the fact that my school-assigned readings were dominated by male authors and male characters, I unofficially set out to read books that revolved around female characters. I never said "Oh, I won't read that book, it's about guys," but given a choice between two books, I would always choose the one about a girl. Back in May of this year I first read The Knife of Never Letting Go, and I remember being a little hesitant; why would I want to read a book set on a world where there were no women?!

Thank goodness I got over that hesitation, because The Knife of Never Letting Go is an amazing book, and Viola's awesomeness, combined with the terrible secrets of Prentisstown, make up for the lack of women.

The Ask and the Answer was high on my "Most anticipated books of 2009" list (right up there with Catching Fire). The Knife of Never Letting Go ends on a cliff hanger, and The Ask and the Answer picks up shortly after we were left hanging.

Haven, where Todd and Viola were sure they were going to be able to find refuge from Mayor Prentiss' relentless army, and find a way to contact the settler ships Viola had come from, has been transformed into New Prentisstown. Haven's mayor has been deposed and is held as a political prisoner, while Mayor Prentiss has installed himself as President Prentiss and is intent on reinstating order in New Prentisstown - there are curfews, men and women are separated...and the Mayor begins to limit who can have Haven's famed Cure for the Noise that plagues the men of the New World.

As Viola is recuperating from the wounds she sustained at the end of The Knife of Never Letting Go, she is sent to a house of healing - Haven has always had female Healers versus male Doctors, ostensibly so patients could choose whether they wanted to hear their doctors thoughts, but since men and women must now be kept separate female patients go to the Healers and male patients go to the Doctors. Surrounded by women - women who aren't too keen on Mayor Prentiss' new isolating policies - Viola learns some important history lessons about the New World, about the early days of colonization and the devastating Spackle War. Among those who fought in the Spackle War were a group of guerrilla warriors, mostly women who called themselves the Answer, who took up arms when they felt the male-led army wasn't doing a good enough job. Now that a new male threat has appeared, it looks like the Answer is going to have to return.

Todd is kept as far from Viola as possible - Mayor Prentiss will neither confirm nor deny that she is alive. Todd begins to fear the worst - that even if she isn't dead, she doesn't want to be with him anymore. Todd initially resists the Mayor's new rules - but as the terrorists of the Answer begin to make themselves known (and he wonders whether Viola is among them), some of the Mayor's policies make sense. He is just trying to protect them from the terrorists, isn't he?

The Ask and the Answer has some absolutely heart wrenching moments, as Todd and Viola are forced to choose sides in the conflict over New Prentisstown. As the Mayor tightens his grip on the women of New Prentisstown, I found myself comparing it to The Handmaid's Tale: In The Handmaid's Tale, we only get brief flashbacks to the events that led up to the total oppression of women; here in The Ask and the Answer, we actually get to see some of those steps taken: women and men separated, women only allowed out at certain times of the day and then only in small, tightly controlled groups - and even worse, grotesque measures that I won't spoil because you really need to read it for yourself to feel how TERRIBLE it is. Women are kept apart "for their own safety," yet it's widely known that the soldiers assigned to guard the women sneak into the women's homes and dormitories at night.

Todd and Viola do a lot of growing up in this book - it's wonderful and heartbreaking at the same time to see them forced into the frontlines of the Mayor's war. And my stomach dropped when it came to this book's cliffhanger ending - how long do I have to wait until book 3?!

Review: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Finally, a novel about the not-too-distant-future that rings frighteningly true! So many stories that take our current attitudes to their "logical" conclusion, really seem to focus on only one small part of our attitudes, ignoring how other parts of our national psyche might affect each other (I'm looking at you, Rash). In Little Brother, Cory Doctorow doesn't take our ideas about security to their logical conclusion, but rather to the logical next step, examining what happens in the aftermath of the next big terrorist attack in the United States.

Marcus is a 17 year old hacker living in the Bay Area of California. He's not one of those evil hackers one hears about, sending out viruses and stealing sensitive information; rather he hacks in order to make his overly-observed life more bearable. He hacks the school computers so he can IM during class, he knows how to disable tracking software in library books, and can avoid detection by the gait sensing software used by the school (it's charmingly low tech: put gravel in your shoe and you're untraceable by this "high tech" security).

Marcus has just used his hacking skills to break himself and his best friend, Darryl, out of school in order to participate in their favorite Alternate Reality Game with two of their friends Jolu and Van, students at other local schools, when the ground begins to slip out from under them like an earthquake, and air raid sirens begin to sound. In their panic to find safety, Darryl is injured, and Marcus steps out in front of the next vehicle he sees in order to get someone to stop and help his friend. "Help," however, is now in the guise of the Department of Homeland Security, who now view Marcus and his friends as potential enemy combatants and suspects in the bombing of the Bay Bridge.

After days of detainment and interrogation, Marcus, Jolu and Van are released into a new world with new security everywhere: video cameras are at the front of classrooms, passes for the subway and toll booths have RFID tags that are traced constantly (even when the user isn't near a subway or toll booth) to detect suspicious movements, and even Marcus' personal laptop has been bugged with a keylogger to track his every digital movement. So Marcus begins his own personal crusade to evade the all seeing eyes of the DHS. It starts by hacking an Xbox to run Linux, but grows to jamming the RFID chips, fighting with his parents, gaining a better understanding of the bill of rights and hippies, and finding an awesome girlfriend (who is all the more awesome because her name is Ange).

The book got a little talky at times, with paragraphs, or even pages, dedicated to explaining everything from the yippies to LARPing (note to Marcus: people who play in the basement are infinitely cooler than LARPers ;-) Though I agree people who are painting miniatures take nerdiness to a new level. I say this with all the love in the world, people!). However, a lot of the technical explanation was necessary - all of the technology Marcus experiences and hacks is readily available (and used) today, but unfortunately too many people don't understand what it means (or could mean) to have a Radio Frequency Identification tag broadcasting you whereabouts to anyone who inquires. Rarely does the exposition stop the action, however, and overall I felt it added a lot of credibility to the book. Additionally there are two afterwards to the book that added to the credibility: one from a security technologist and another from Andrew "bunnie" Huang, the first to hack the original Xbox, and on top of that a bibliography that covers practically every topic brought up in the book for further reading.

Ultimately this book works because it's not hard to imagine ending up here. Various organizations are constantly fighting to add more surveillance/security equipment into public places in order to protect us. But are we actually any safer for it? When cameras are placed in the front of classrooms, Marcus openly asks how on earth that is going to protect the students from terrorists - if a terrorist came in with a bomb, the camera certainly wasn't going to stop him.

I absolutely loved Marcus' interactions with his parents following his return home from his interrogation. After being threatened by the DHS if he tells anyone where he was for five days, Marcus concocts a story about his friends and himself being trapped while out camping - an experience many people did have. His father, meanwhile, is a different person upon Marcus' return. He had spent five days convinced his son was dead, perhaps buried at the bottom for the bay under the rubble of the bombed bridge. He seems to be pretty okay with the increased surveillance - even after he is stopped twice on the way home from work one day to be questioned by police about his movements. He truly believes that if the security will prevent another attack, if the security will keep his son safe, then his privacy is a small price to pay. Marcus, obviously, feels completely differently and makes impassioned arguments to his dad. These arguments reminded me of many a conversation with my own parents, both as a teenager and today, since on most issues we are miles apart in our views. The idea that a teenager is just too young to understand, and their opinion will change (to the correct view of her or his parents) in time will be familiar to many readers.