Recently, I’ve found more tantalizing and interesting books in the office of my frontlist children’s book buyer than in the office of the adult book buyer.  Now this isn’t because of my lack of maturity or low reading ability.  I fault the large amount of quality literature being written there.  Twilight (in all its poorly written melodrama) wasn’t just a fad; there is some seriously good writing here.  Last fall, I devoured Mockingbird by Erskine.  It put its adult contemporary (?)   The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time to shame.

Seriously.

There is a reason all your friends are telling you about The Hunger Games and it isn’t for the gratuitous violence.  Or because you have a freakish obsession with Battle Royale.  It’s solid.  It’s what we remember our writing teachers pushing down our throats:  It’s a good story; not an overpowering narrator (first, second, or third) holding your hand and telling you the story.  Any successful book (adult or juvenile) will show you the story, will give you flawed characters who develop as the pages progress, will offer you up insight into your being for your subconscious to munch on during your REM cycles.  The Hunger Games does that.  Mockingbird won the National Book Award because it did that.  Divergent by Veronica Roth blew the top off the dystopian craze Suzanne Collins started;  Divergent, in my opinion, is the only book that holds a candle to The Hunger Games or vice versa.So I offer for your reading pleasure a short list of books you should be reading.  And while you cruise over my reviews, think about this small quote from W. Bruce Cameron (A Dog’s Purpose):

I look at the popularity of YA novels–Harry Potter, the Hunger Games series, etc.–and wonder why more authors don’t write books that can be read by the whole family, why we have to employ a whole separate category to keep young readers segregated. There’s nothing wrong with adult-themed books–I read them all the time–but often I’ll remember that fourth grader reading The Caine Mutiny, and ruefully reflect that there just aren’t that many novelists confident enough in their work to avoid shoving gratuitous sex, language and violence into a few scenes just to make sure adults are titillated.

Divergent by Veronica Roth

My Divergent Display

Our society has ended.  And from the ashes comes five different factions–each with their own air-tight theory on how society should be run.  Amity believes that through peace society will succeed. Candor believes truth is the only way.  Erudites feel intelligence, research, and science will lead to a perfect society.  Dauntless hold to bravery as the only option.  And Abnegation demonstrate that selflessness is the best choice.  Sounds like a hoot, right?

Born into an Abnegation family, Beatrice just doesn’t seem to fit into the faction’s beliefs.  So when her chance to change her fate arises, she chooses Dauntless, those fun-loving daredevil folks who would never give up their seat on the bus or take the stairs or wear gray the shade of cloudy days.  Beatrice renames and re-brands herself as Tris, first among the Dauntless initiates.  She skates through the different levels of initiation, trying to overcome the nickname “Stiff”, and trying to prove that a member of Dauntless is nothing like a member of Abnegation.

Trouble is…  Bravery isn’t too far from selflessness when one really looks at it.

Written with more weight than most of the YA dystopian novels out there, Divergent isn’t about one girl who can’t choose between boys while her society tumbles down around her.  It’s about a girl who happens to find herself as her society tumbles down around her.  Sure, there is some romance, but Tris stays true to herself and doesn’t falter a bit once she has made up her mind.  Not wimpy or weepy in the slightest.  (If you need an example of wimpy weepy girl, let me know; I’ve got the impression down.)

Wither would spark good discussion.

Wither by Lauren DeStefano

At Winter Institute, I had the pleasure of sitting at a Children’s book buyer table during lunch.  And nearly every publisher had “The Next Twilight”, at least that is what the rep from Simon & Schuster said as she told us about Wither, Book One of the Chemical Garden trilogy.

Imagine a world where we have created a perfect generation of children:  no childhood diseases, no cancer, no illness at all.  Perfect, right?  But as that perfect generation heads healthily toward old age, it is discovered that our meddling has some repercussions; the children of this perfect generation die early.  Very early–females at 20, males at 25.

And because of this, a division in society occurs.  One faction fights to return things to a natural order, let us re-evolve out of this bed we made.  The other faction believes an answer might be found scientifically, so girls are stolen from their homes, sold into marriage, forced (as much as one can be forced) to have children, and then they die.

Between these to factions, one finds the main character of the series, Rhine, a 16 year old girl taken from her twin brother in NYC and sold to a boy, Linden (21), to be one of his three wives.  Linden’s father is a member of the First Generation (that perfect crowd), and he has designs on the young women and the children they might yield.

Despite Linden’s true feelings for Rhine, she falls for a servant (adding an interesting finite love triangle) to the story.  The lines of good and bad are seriously smudged in this first book; and it leaves one ready to pick up the next.

Crossed by Ally Condie

Crossed is the sequel to Matched.

It is my literary theory that the second book in any series is about walking.  Just look at “The Two Towers” by Tolkien–it’s ALL walking; it’s actually quite amazing a movie was able to be adapted from that schlepping-fest.

“Crossed” does not deviate from this norm.  The action is quite literally the characters walking from one end of a canyon to the other and then back in again and then out back again, ad nauseum.  However, walking does have a benefit beyond aerobic:  it allows for character development.  Where “Matched” endeared Cassia to the reader and began to create her as a three-dimensional being, “Crossed” completes Cassia’s character and begins to
build up Ky, one of the two sympathetic male characters in Cassia’s world.  The walking also affords time for the reader to understand the world the characters live in.

After being separated at the end of the first novel, Cassia and Ky quickly are reunited after some minor challenges and some personal growth.  The chapters jump back and forth between Cassia and Ky, so the reader is giving an eye on the movements of each character. This narrator flip helps give depth to the characters and also serves the purpose of dialogue for most of the book as Cassia and Ky don’t do much talking.

While the Society is more acutely explained in this novel and the threat of the Society discovering the main characters looms, it truly doesn’t play a large part in most of the story.  Much like an evil Godot–never showing up.  So despite moments of mini-action, there isn’t much going on besides the internal monologue of two teenagers, who believe (for the most part) they are madly in love.

And like any good mid-series book, “Crossed” answers some questions, but leads to more.  I suspect there are enough fans of the first book to read the second, but be warned that it doesn’t have the happy (?) climax of the first book; “Crossed” seriously drops off the narrative right as the action starts.  Don’t take this as a negative review; I’m impatiently waiting for the next serving in this series.

***********

I’ve a couple more reviews in my bag, but I think these three are a good selection of the dystopian young adult wave.

Tune in next week when I finally finish my two cents on e-books, and why owning a kindle is much like being a smoker to this single girl.

Huh.

Have you ever come to after some period of unconsciousness filled with the idea “I’m going to write a blog today”?

Yeah.  Me neither.

Actually, that’s a lie.  I thought “I’m going to write in my blog today” a great many times in the last weeks, months.  I am going to bore my reader(s) with what I do in my daily life…  Because…  Well…  Where I stand on the active sidelines of political and social debate (mostly), I have thoughts, passions, ideas for conversation that I fail to get out in my daily allotment of words.

But then I fall into the next book.  The next jigsaw puzzle.

And I come to and realise not only did I fail to write that damned blog, I also failed to text Andrew back.  Or call my godmother.  Or talk to Mike this week (or last).  Or look at the house my little brother is buying so I might offer him more than a passing congratulations.

I have friends who commit to one day a week to blog, even a daily blurb.  But there’s always this book.  This great new book that you’ll hear about in October when it’s published, but I’m excited about it now and I just spent all morning reading it in bed because I was going to finish it this morning dammit then I’ll go to the library and pick up those books of poems to find square inspiration for the wedding next month.  (Note:  Not my wedding, mind you.)

But back to the book in my bed this morning…

If your life is defined by one conflict, does that conflict by default define you?  Are you constructed by it, for it?  Can you exist without it?

My intention is not to be vague, but I believe the answers matter.  If all we know is one thing (conflict or not), are we inevitably going to have feelings for it?

The Night Circus by Emily Morgenstern begins to open up the answers.

To oversimplify, the novel is about bridging between things.  Mainly between the closing of one and the opening of another. Centuries.  Days.  Lives.  Y’know things…

The plot summary will tell you it is about Celia and Marco, two competitors in a rudely undefined challenge that will cost one of them their lives.  It will also tell you that Celia and Marco are lovers.  And while this is true; it’s a bad oversimplification.  So back to the bridging…

There are two storylines in The Night Circus.  First, the nineteenth century story; second, the twentieth.  In the nineteenth century, the story is started.  Celia and Marco are picked and trained by their teachers for the magical challenge; Le Cirque des Rêves begins its enigmatic display in London before touring the world like The Grateful Dead, even picking up their own Deadheads, called rêveurs.  And the Murray twins are born–Widget born before midnight, his sister born just after–bridging a new day.

The second storyline feels like a break from all the black and white scenes in the rest of the novel.  Bailey is not born into the circus; he exists in the daytime in one location–his family farm, an image that conjures a plethora of color.  But I’m not giving Bailey away.

What am I giving away?  This:  Don’t trust the bit of plot on the book.  This is so much more.  The novel awakens that little bit of you that still believes in magic and in the magic of the circus.  It is about Celia and Marco and their quiet, hesitant, and understated but not unloving relationship.  And while there is magic, this isn’t blanket fantasy.  You don’t often catch an illusionist reconstructing the ink bottle, but it happens.  As the most villainous character says, “This is not magic.  This is the way the world is, only very few people take the time to stop and note it.”  Magic is a blanket word to describe what we cannot; what was once magic is now science, but I expect some magic exists still in the world.

And to leave with one last quote to this amazing novel that I have failed to accurately summarize for you…  Perhaps you might sympathize with Chandresh, the original proprietor of the circus, because “[t]he circus bothers him.  It bothers him most at times like this, in the bottom of the brandy bottle and the quiet of the night.”

The Night Circus

Marriage Relief?

Last Saturday, Sparky’s sister married her long-time beau…

The weather was warm and the sun was out and the only minor inconvenience was the wind.

There were a couple major inconveniences, though…  The big one being that ill-timed health issues kept the groom’s father from attending the wedding.  Happily, the venue had a web cam set up, so he could view and hopefully hear the service.  Score one for modern technology!

Though I thought about the lack of the man (who I haven’t met) a lot during the ceremony and reception.  Having already lost one parent and not being especially close to the remaining, I want everyone to have and do everything with their parents.  I might even push people into closer relationships with their family than they want because I don’t want anyone to have to endure what I do.  (Not that my familial life is completely miserable; I tend to be pretty close to my siblings, and the closer relationship with my godparents and their kids has been soul-saving.)

The other major inconvenience was not easily overcome by handy modern technology.  There was a distinct lack of an officiant during the rehearsal.  And no real wedding service other than the couples’ vows.  Amy, the coordinator at the Dove House, was more than kind to give the couple a quick walk through of an average wedding service.  Take into account that in Colorado, one may perform their own marriage as well as be married by proxy, so the law was on the side of the couple…  Who truly needs an officiant?

You can assume I offered the little help I could.  I’m that kind of girl.  And well…  When/If I get married, I suspect I’ll be a sobbing mess only able to focus on the ground in front of me.  (I’ll need an officiant.)  The bride, being the stoic and classy lady she is, held off on accepting my offer to perform (or more m.c.) the ceremony until I left the rehearsal dinner table to go pee.  Imagine coming into a room after emptying your bladder only to find it refilled from nervousness.

There are a few steps missing in here.  Namely, the frantic rush through the city to find an acceptable long dress that matched my shoes I purchased to match the cute mini-dress I’d planned on wearing and to recover my book of weddings.  In case you were wondering, the dress was found at File-n-Style; I’d had a manicure there earlier in the morning and remembered admiring their dresses while my nails were drying.

After dinner, Sparky and I retired to a mattress on the floor of his mother’s sewing room.  I passed out and was roused only at 5:30 a.m. when a nightmare drove me from sleep.  It was a great nightmare:  it was very early the morning of the wedding and I still had to write the service, but this was to be no regular service; I had to write a full length Broadway musical before the wedding at 11 a.m.  It took a minute to disentangle reality from that dream; I still had a wedding service to write when I woke.

If you know me, you know the series of vomiting noises and whining that came from being willingly forced to write about love.  And on top of that, I made sure that Sparky knew I wasn’t to reuse another wedding, so I couldn’t cheat.  Luckily, I had the bride and groom email me their vows, so I wouldn’t be caught flat-footed at their love-filled words.  Honestly, writing the ceremony was easy.  Granted, I didn’t write much, but I looked up my favorite Elizabeth Barrett Browning quote and went from there:

I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out.

I had/have no doubt of the depth of love between Rachael and Mike, the bride and groom.  And I believe this quote paralleled what their vows said.

There were a couple good giggles during the service because where’s the fun in a completely serious service?  One highlight being when Mike said, “I, Rachael, take you, Mike…. *groan*”  (He recovered well.)

My personal highlight is also my personal shame.  And please take into account that I was writing at 5:30 a.m.–an hour I like to think only comes once in a day.  After asking the audience to take their seats, I looked at my book and promptly read, “We are hear today…”  It took everything in my power not to stop the service there and then audibly lecture myself on the bad grammar I employed.  Because I would do that and then completely go off-track and leave the wedding in my dust while I ranted about how easy it is to shut off that part of my brain now that our cultural standards for grammar seem to have fallen to levels that barely make the English language look like a language and not a near vowel-less grunting and pointing.

I mean…  English is an amazing language.  Like our nation, it is made up of the words of other languages and words that never existed before.  It is a live and evolving thing.  Language is not cemented into a finite set of rules.  Look at how many times we’ve adapted “cool” and made verbs out of nouns…  Just think about “google”.  The word, not the armless bird Webkinz thing…

A Fish-eyed Manhattan

So… New York…

My last entry might have been a bit quick and vague and lacking any sort of story, but in my defense, I was only thinking about posting something and not about its quality…

I’ll admit that was a bad plan. So bad that I didn’t even post the link to Twitter or facebook; only those who read my blog with regularity will have known it was there… And for those who didn’t, I leave it up, so you can see what I’m talking about.

In all honesty, I never wanted to go to Los Angeles. That destination always existed pretty low on my Places to Visit list. My mother had carefully placed that fear in me as a child; and when we drove through California in 1990, she took a detour that cast us several leagues from the unnavigable L.A. A little over ten years later, my sister moved to L.A. and the city started to gain some allure for me. (Granted, my sister is about half my size and twice as adorable as me, so I’m sure her L.A. experience will always differ from mine.)

New York has always had that allure. I’ll blame The Muppets Take Manhattan for romanticizing the city for me. And also my godfather’s stories of sailing into the harbor and seeing the Statue of Liberty as an immigrant. New York was closer. New York was doable. New York was a place my nearly absent father had been. New York was undeniably magical. New York had more character than my Northern Michigan small town.

Since childhood, I’ve planned on growing old in a small town. But my parents impressed upon me the importance of travel and culture. They also gave me their itchy feet—the impairing madness that comes from not traveling every six months or so. Road trips are always good and there’s something rejuvenating about sleeping in one’s car (not that I have one anymore), but travel centers me. Like in a hospital, I feel at home in an airport or train station.

Though, I wouldn’t like to live in one; I’ve a penchant for beds.

So why after visiting both of America’s “Capitals on the Coasts”, do I prefer Los Angeles? Perhaps I had too many expectations of New York? New York was supposed to be approachable, but even though I made my own schedule (for the most part), I felt like I was walking the same paths a million and one tourists had walked the day before. At Rockefeller Center, I was shuffled along a predetermined path until I was pretty much exiting through the gift shop.

Los Angeles didn’t have the same predetermined feel. But I’m having a hard time nailing down the rest of the differences.

In both cases, I was lucky enough to travel with a local. And in both cases, I was enough of a mooch to weasel my way into a private residence to sleep. And the majority of the meals in both locations were awesome. (I say majority because I might’ve stopped for Taco Bell in L.A.)

New York just seemed more claustrophobic. Or like she was clinging onto an idea of what she once was in the light of 9/11 and the role she is supposed to play in our continuing war on terror while maintaining a liberated and open-minded tossed salad of cultures feel. New York didn’t stand up and yell, “I’m here! This is me!”, while I was there; she sort of whimpered at my feet and asked me not to point out the fissures in her facade.

Because children everywhere must continue to see New York as a fairytale locale. Eloise will always live at the Plaza, adjusting thermometers. Even adults have their New York fairytales to comfort them; think of An Affair to Remember and its revivals by Warren Beatty, Annette Benning, Tom Hanks, and Meg Ryan.

Edward Abbey wrote in Desert Solitaire that we need wilderness… Even if we never go to the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, to function as full human beings, we need to know that such a place exists. It provides the idea of escape, of a change of scenery; it reminds us that there is always some place else to be.

I might argue that cities provide the same sort of comfort. We don’t have to go there to know they exist and it might be best that we don’t, in order to keep our childish visions of such places whole and undamaged. But we, who love and live in the woods, need to know and appreciate the other places people choose to live in.

Every year for my birthday, I try to take a trip.  For no reason other than I like to get away from my birthday.  Bad things have consistently happened to me on my birthday to make me a bit wary of being where Santa can find me on that day.

For the last couple years, I traveled to Kalamazoo, Michigan.  And spent the weekend with a group of middle-aged computer nerds.  They were friends of my last serious boyfriend and even for the year after our break-up, I took an overnight train to Kalamazoo to hang with the boys.  They allowed me to enjoy my birthday for the first time in a long time.

This year, I splurged and flew out to New York to Teresa Jusino and Adam Hunault and Ruth Koelewyn and a couple other friends who don’t have fancy websites I can link…  And after breathing deeply once I saw water, the plane landed; I was overwhelmed by the city.  The vastness of it.  My inability to navigate more than a few blocks away from the house my friends live in.  The many layers of people packed on top of each other.  The lack of the parks I have come to see as “normal” in Denver.

I had never been to New York City before.  It was a place I dreamed about, thought maybe I could live there…  But any city that makes Denver look quaint isn’t for me.  Honestly, I found Los Angeles to be more my speed than New York.  I’ll blame a relaxed nature, a Midwestern small town upbringing, and the being that is Denver (and how, despite my distaste, she has come to lay on top of me).

I believe I can sum up the entire experience in one short story:  Saturday, we went to Central Park.  It was nice out and I was remarking on all the different movies I remembered having scenes in the infamous location.  And then I realised I had to go to the bathroom.  We wandered to the gift shop.  Closed.  Then we walked (me a little faster than the rest) by the baseball fields being showered in pollen and seeds in the late afternoon sunshine–a pretty picture if I wasn’t doing the pee-pee dance like a two year old.  When we made it to the bathroom, we were greeted with this: The people on the far side of the columns were waiting for the loos on the other side.  This was amazing.  My entire trip to Central Park was waiting in this line.

Other than that…  There was the food…  Oh…  God…  The food…  We waited 90 minutes for a table at Risotteria.  And it was totally worth it…  Until one of the waiters (not ours) rushed us to pay our bill while we were chatting over our dessert.  I must learn how to make risotto.  Banana pudding from Magnolia Bakery is the best thing I’ve put in my mouth in a long time while their cake was “Meh.”  I spent the entire weekend full.  And Buddha-belly happy.

I saw FAO Schwartz, Washington Square, the MoMA (for Tim Burton), the subway, the Natural History Museum (where I took a great nap), and Astoria.  One might say what I didn’t see what more important, but I have no problem leaving the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and Times Square for some next visit.  I sang karaoke ’til 3am at The Albatross Bar for Pete’s sake!  I wasn’t on the tourist’s itinerary this weekend.  I was on my own.

When I returned from the city, I was happy for this altitude, for this city, for the chance to curl up with Sparky.

What I wasn’t happy for was the complete and utter mess that was my friendship with my best friend, Alex Mehn.  I had to move out of our apartment on my birthday…  And there wasn’t even cake.  But that’s more story for another time…

The moral of this story:  New York City isn’t for me.  If life arranged for me to land there, I’d last six months…  Water view or not…  Carrie Bradshaw, I am not.  I like not having to wait 30 minutes for a loo.