Graphic Novel Book Club: The Surrogates, Robert Venditti & Brett Weldele

Our penultimate title for the year-long graphic novel book club experiment actually got turned into a movie with Bruce Willis!  (The movie wasn't very good, unfortunately.)

The Surrogates
Robert Venditti
art by Brett Weldele
ISBN: 9781891830877
Read July 10, 2016

Think Blade Runner, but everyone (well, pretty much everyone) WANTS to be artificial.  Shades of Ready Player One in there also.  Robotics and cosmetics industries have advanced to the point that "surrogates:" (remotely-controlled real-life robotic avatars of a particular person) are more commonly seen than actual flesh-and-blood people, who are all at home, connected to their computers to run the surrogate's actions in real-time.  Surrogates are faster, stronger, prettier, and allow people to be free from worries of actual physical damage to their real human bodies (except for getting fat as shit, getting deep-vein thrombosis, or getting bedsores from sitting in one place all day, none of which is referenced at all.)  Things are great until some mysterious freak starts frying surrogates, and suspicion falls on a modern-day prophet figure who is rabidly anti-surrogate, and has amassed a religious army in a recently-allocated reservation under his own local rule, where surrogates are not allowed.

Interesting questions of social consciousness, of abdicating personal responsibility, and of the line between helping people who need assistance (surrogates were initially medical devices intended for medically "locked-in" people) and making shitloads of money on luxuries that quickly become common or standard.

I would have liked to see a lot more depth in the world building - I think there were some ideas and concepts that weren't very well meshed up with human psychology and the reality of life in the world, but it was also an interesting, if slightly dark and depressing, mystery thriller.

2015 Review Round-Up: Graphic Novel: V for Vendetta, Alan Moore & David Lloyd

V for Vendetta
Alan Moore, illustrated by David Lloyd
ISBN: 9781401208417
The classic english dystopian/anarchist graphic novel.
Read November 2015

When you have a graphic novel book club, and it's November, you sort of have to pick V for Vendetta the first year.  It's only natural.  If you're only familiar with the story from the movie, you really owe it to yourself to check out the much deeper and much more morally complex original.  Moore tapped into serious fears of mid 1980s England, and used them to craft an ambiguous story about a larger-than-life figure that uses government abuses as a moral justification (to himself and to others) for wreaking a very personal vendetta.  It's powerful and unsettling, and very much a product of it's time (and politics).  It's like the English graphic novel version of Fahrenheit 451.

2015 Review Round-Up: Juv Fiction: The Scavengers, Michael Perry

The Scavengers
Michael Perry
ISBN: 9780062026163
Juv dystopia, spunky girl heroine, a bit overexplained at the end.
Read Summer 2015

This was a fun "beginner level" dystopia.  It had elements of zombies a la Walking Dead, it has the scrappy heroine and a grizzled old mentor and his kitchen-witchery wife.  Family in peril, younger sibling needing protection.  Bonus points for random wordplay (sometimes genuinely funny, sometimes seemed a bit effortful) and a demented chicken.

Our girl has named herself Ford Falcon because it sounds really cool.  Please don't look at the actual car, she knows it's a beater.  But it does provide a nice cozy place to sleep, all half-buried in the abandoned rural scrapyard her family now calls home.  There aren't many people out in the country now, what with the government offering everyone free food and protection inside the new domed cities.  But a few holdouts linger, and her family is one - or they were, until someone trashes the family home and they all vanish.  Now Ford is on her own (but not really, there are wily neighbors to help out) and it's up to her to find her family, and try to build a home again.  A pretty good yarn, and a good gentle allegory for the push-pull of adolescent yearning to be safe at home, but also pretty sick of being stuck at home.  Recommended for kids who are ok with pretty intense scenes of abandonment and lots of pages spent with creepy corn zombies.

YA Dystopia: HIT, by Delilah Dawson

Do you ever read the fine print?  Perhaps you should start.

HIT
Delilah Dawson
ISBN: 9781481423397
Read April 26, 2015

On the plus side, the National Debt is gone.  On the downside, Valor National Bank (now just Valor National) is taking out the nation's fiscal dead weight.  Patsy gets caught up in the chaotic first five days of the national takeover, and she's got some hard work ahead of her.  You see, Patsy's mom had a string of bad luck, and a great deal of credit card debt.  

Now either the creepy Matrix-like agent shoots mom and Patsy both and burns down their house, OR Patsy takes his nice little 9mm and goes and offs the next 10 people who owe Valor more than they're worth.  She has 5 days to finish.

Along the way she is going to figure out a lot of things, including what sort of person she is that she could kill and extort strangers so readily.

This book is literally killer, and I really loved how Dawson didn't shy away from the emotional and physical repercussions of premeditated murder and physical violence on a person - especially one who never imagined themselves in this sort of situation.  The honesty there really did a lot to balance out the ultra-violent scenes of death and mayhem.

One final note, there is a dog, but you needn't worry - this isn't THAT sort of book.

YA Dystopia: The Glass Arrow, Kristen Simmons

The Glass Arrow
Kristen Simmons
ISBN: 9780765336613
YA Dystopia
Read April 24, 2015

This wasn't a bad book, but I wanted a lot more from it than it gave.  The premise is sketchy, but interesting: women somehow caused an uprising, and now pregnancy uncommon, and male birthrate is very low.  Thus, women are considered property, and young girls are sheltered in "Gardens" before being auctioned off to the highest bidder; unless of course they're willing to hide out in the wilderness and live off the land.  Even those wild folk have to worry about their girls being hunted down - they're generally considered to be more fertile.

That's our info-dump, and that's really all we get through the whole book.  There's a whole society of people who manage to live out in the wilds fairly happily, but they're not the focus so we don't learn much about them.  The actual history of why women were targeted in the first place is presented as mythology, leading me to hope that it wasn't intended to be the real rationale behind the development of this misogynistic society.

That's my biggest gripe with dystopian YA in general - there's just not enough worldbuilding for me to be really engaged in the story.  I want to know the backgrounds, and the history, and the culture, and the development of this crazy world, even if the main characters aren't able to understand or see how it works, I (as a reader) want to know that information is there and being considered.

I don't mean to say that this book is bad, just I really wanted some more depth to the world.  It was a light, enjoyable read, that was straightforward about personhood and autonomy and self-determination, and I really appreciated that.  

Subtweet Review: Tell me ALLL about those feelings.

A certain politically-active gentleman had objections to a certain other political group's endeavors to enact certain policies, and engaged his rather impressive numbers of audience-members in opposing these endeavors.  As a result of this attention, a particular audience-member wrote a dystopian novel based around the premise of the opposed endeavors, and sent it to the original gentleman, who was quite taken with this fictionalized narrative that exploited the worst fears of his audience, and arranged for it to be published under his name.  There is now a sequel, and based on the ending of the sequel, an impending series.  I read the original work when it was first published (morbid curiosity) and have now just finished the sequel.

I will say that (judging from memory) the sequel is more capably written than the first.

First off, as with most near-future dystopian scenarios, the reasoning behind this one is frankly preposterous.  I read the words, and I understand the back-history established, but I have serious issues engaging in any real suspension of disbelief.  Despite the earnest attempts of many an author of a dystopia, the world just doesn't actually work that way.  Now, I repeat, this isn't just a problem with this particular duo of books - it's pretty rampant in the genre.  Even far-future dystopias like Hunger Games have real problems with setting up a realistic, workable, functioning, dystopian world.  I'm not even going to talk about Divergent; it gives me a headache.  So the author is in good company here, but it does still make the rest of the book harder to be charitable towards.  If you've put in decent world-building equity, I'm willing to give a lot of other things some slack (points to Hunger Games here, particularly the movies).  If you can't even be bothered to look at basic economics, medicine, and political processes and history, then I have no extra charity to give - I've burned it all on accepting your ridiculous premise and continuing to read.  Zombie dystopias in particular are really awful about this, but this one gives them a run for the money.  World-building here (in addition to the actual unsupportable premise) is sparse.  Granted, that's a function of the limited POVs that we've had so far, but it's still sparse even so, and worse, it's achingly derivative.


Second off, if one is preaching to the choir (which, arguably, is the stated intention of this narrative) it seems that it might not be entirely necessary to beat the readers over the head with the political point quite so constantly.  I will say this, every opportunity to return to the central theme is taken with gusto, so they do have consistency and persistence going for them.  For a reader, it's like trying to focus on the emotional resonance of a movie while someone is working with a jackhammer outside.

Plot is moving along, characterization is happenin-
BRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTTRTRTRRRTRTRRTRTRTR
-good grief.  Ok, we're getting a little more emotionally connected to the -
BRRRRTTTT
Are you quite finished?  Ok, new characters getting introdu-
BRRRT
-ahem - introduced.  More narrative threads getting tangled up with these new -
BRRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRRTRTRTR
For the love of God, just stop for a bit!


Thirdly, (and this is a matter of personal opinion - at the very least, JRR Martin disagrees with me strenuously) I believe that a little bit of narrative perspective and a dash of foreshadowing makes for satisfying genre savvy stories that are much more powerful.  There is a slap-dash approach to characters and events that was really frustrating to read through, because everything is given the same intensity.  Everything is downplayed, nothing is emphasized (or at least, emphasized beyond the author using a character to directly tell the reader something is important).

To be specific, there is a character death in this book that frankly made no impact on me because of the way it was presented (with the same flat, affectless recitation of the remainder of the book).  The character themself had no narrative arc.  Nothing to brutally interrupt by death, nothing to ironically fulfill in death.  Nothing even to be simply concluded with death.  There was actually no narrative arc for that character at all, actually, which is a totally different problem, but my point here is this: I can see the bones of the plot in this novel, because it is starved for flesh and skin.  The bones say that this death is supposed to be important.  It's the only death that the heroic characters suffer, and it was at the hands of the major protagonist, right before the final climactic showdown.  But because there was no (or no competent) foreshadowing, no narrative arc, no focus, no narrative intensity, it just - sortof happened.

In fact, because of previous narrative choices, there was an entire section of the rising action where I was unsure if it was even meant to be a death or not.  There was an attempt later (I believe) to make it obvious that the character did in fact die, and to make that moment more dramatic in hindsight.  Or in contrast (unlikely, but possible) it could also be a really inept attempt to make a later twist possible by making it seem that the character is dead when in fact the body that was seen was a totally different person who was unmentioned until their coincidental death in the same way as the character who we saw injured but had no real indication that they are actually dead.  This is not good writing.  This is frustrating to read and think about.  Please, authors.  Just be clear.  If you want to kill someone off (or even to introduce a plot twist) to raise the stakes, make it an Obi-Wan moment, not a random unclear muddle.


Finally, someone ought to introduce this author to the concept of "show, don't tell."  This is actually my main complaint about the sequel I just read (sadly, I don't remember enough of the first novel to comment, other than I felt it was very obviously a first attempt), and by the end of it, I was actually laughing every time a chapter break and resulting viewpoint change came around, because it was so stodgy and clunky.  I will leave you with some relevant quotes from the climax of the book (not to put too fine a point on it, but this would be where one would expect the emotional stakes to be the highest).

"A slim thread of hope now wound around his heart.  For the first time in his life, he felt joy and sorrow at the same time."

"That's when the anger built in her,  Not just anger, but red hot rage.... Emotions pulsed through her faster than she ever thought possible."

"[Character A] and [Character B] were driven by emotion."

"[Character C] felt like his senses were shutting down, because he wanted to disassociate from what he had seen."

"It felt like the whole world should be crying for so many reasons."

(This next one isn't actually an emotional statement, but I had to include it because it actually made me snort my drink up my nose:) "Through the twists and tangles of fate, the hunters would soon become the hunted."



PS - if you're going to create a made-up salute, for the love of everything holy, either give it a proper capitalized name, or just describe it the first few times and then bloody well call it a salute.

Picture Book Haul: Shaun Tan's Rules of Summer

Oh boy.. not really sure about this one.


Rules of Summer
Shaun Tan
ISBN: 9780545639125

In a lot of ways, I think of Shaun Tan as the slightly more graphically-inclined psychological twin of Neil Gaiman.  They both write these amazing, off-kilter stories that manage to be simultaneously totally ominous and cautiously optimistic, and with an edge of mystery and danger.  I think that like Coraline, many adults are going to read this (look at this) and say "Oh My GOD, the CHILDREN WILL FREAK OUT!" because we as adults freak out, while the children reading it just shrug and say "Yep, life is crazy weird and unfair, and basically sucks a whole lot, but it is what it is."

So, what exactly is this?

Not sure.  It will probably be very different for everyone, depending on how optimistic or pessimistic they are, whether they were an older or younger sibling, whether their siblings got along with them, deferred to them, or beat the shit out of them, whether they are confident or worried about being caught faking adulthood, whether they had (and remember) the utterly insane and totally horrific imaginary lives of children...

The outline - and a stark and grim outline it is - is in two parts.  The artwork shows an older boy and a younger boy (the jacket flap identifies them as brothers, but the story (such as it is) doesn't make that obvious or necessary) engaging in various activities in a world of monstrous beings, where the older boy is confident and successful, and the younger is screwing up or being screwed over.  The narration simply recites the Rules of Summer, which infers that the younger boy is violating said rules, thus explaining why his life is sucking so much.

A deeper look at the artwork and the mood of the progressing story shows a much grimmer story, where the two boys seem to live in a world where they are outliers and strangers, and where a hostile force (the black bird) is monitoring them closely every moment of their lives, and eventually breaking them apart.


Now for the interpretations:

On a fairly straightforward approach, it tells the story of a younger boy who is constantly trying to be loved and accepted and respected by his older brother.  It tells clearly how powerful that desire can be, and brutally reveals how the people you love can (will?) betray and wound you deeply, and poses the question (to the readers at least - one of the final Rules is "Never ask for a reason" and an even later is "Never wait for an apology") of whether trust and love are enough of a compensation for that inevitable betrayal that appears as the coming of winter.

On a different slightly slanted approach, it tells the story of two young people trying desperately to survive and find enjoyment in a world that seems to be arbitrary and punitive and designed for beings and understandings that are manifestly NOT theirs.  In this approach, the older boy is more of a guide, perhaps passing on these rules because of past negative experiences of his own.  Here the reader wonders about things like parents and society and the history of this world.

In an even different angle, it shows how hard it is to be an older sibling, tasked with caring for (or even raising) a younger one.  The older one tries hard to include the younger, and to instruct him in what he needs to learn to get along in society, but the younger continually screws up and causes trouble that the elder then has to resolve or otherwise mitigate.  In this reading, the black bird becomes a visual representation of frustration and burnout, with the elder brother finally falling prey to temptation to offload his responsibilities for a much shinier alternative, and then trying to atone for his temporary lapse.

Whatever interpretation you bring, it's a gritty, dark story of responsibility and love and the connections between people and their world, where life can flip from being cruel and arbitrary to being wondrous and fulfilling - sometimes even in the same exact moment.

Gemsigns, Stephanie Sautler (Book 1 of REvolution Series)

Gemsigns
Stephanie Saulter
ISBN: 9781623651602
Dystopian near future, post-apocalypse, cloning, gengineering, gene therapy, social order, racial tensions, caste systems, slavery, human rights.

First off, I have to say that the author was very lucky that I did not have anything else I was interested in reading when I read the prologue/chapter zero.  She is also lucky that I did not read that bit while I was still in the library, or it would have gone right the hell back onto the shelf.  That was some pompous self-congratulatory word play and storyline musing going on in there.  (The note on the jacket copy about wanting to write literary fiction didn't help her case with me either.)

However.  I got past that, and the writing from then on was excellent!  I had a great time reading, I enjoyed the story immensely, and I am glad to see that there is a series supposedly in the works.  I have concerns about the worldbuilding and minor nits about characterization and plotting, but then I ALWAYS get snippy about worldbuilding, and characters and plots are difficult.  For a first attempt?  Pretty damn solid writing.  I hope to someday do as well myself.

It's hard to summarize the world without getting into either plot-spoilage or my own worldbuilding gripes, but I'll give it a shot:  (If you want to avoid spoilers of how the world got how it was, and learn about the world through the course of the book, stop reading now.  It's all explained pretty well through in-universe sources over the course of the narrative.)

Seriously.  Spoilers for worldbuilding.

Cool?


The world's population, some years from now, succumbed to a plot-device, er, disease, that necessitated massive advances in genetic engineering to ensure the survival of the species.  Most religious and cultural objections were steamrolled (and subsequently eradicated) in the urgency, and the few outliers (social or religious) were isolated either willingly or unwillingly into ostracized camps of extremely small token minorities, while everyone else got on with the new reality of homogenized religious, cultural, and social mores which have made wars, violence, and "racial" differences largely an unremembered part of pre-disease history.

Due to the massive scale of the disease, the gene therapy for cure and prevention of the disease was scaffolded into further gene manipulation to provide the reduced population of normal humans with additional disease resistance and general health and long life.  After all that work was put in, corporations realized they could encourage further modifications to create genetically-enhanced specimens to perform tasks which were now too hazardous or difficult to risk with precious rescued normal human lives.

Because it's important to know the difference between these creations (who are expensive and useful) and normal humans (who are precious and untouchable) the corporations designed obvious markers into the genetic expressions - glowing unnaturally colored hair becoming the standard.  Adapted gene-lines were also distinguished by the presence of conditions which were negative expressions of useful traits:  Enhanced visual light spectrums often came with synesthesia or migraines.  Data-hacking or enhanced memory could result in autistic-like mentalities.  Enhanced hearing, underwater breathing, or extra organs (for donation) all made obvious physical changes to the body.  These mental or physical handicaps were not of concern to the corporations, as long as they did not too badly impact productivity.  All of this was in stark contrast to normal humans, who by this point are all preternaturally healthy and largely physically homogenized.  This all made identifying genetic property easier for the corporations, and easier for normals to think of them as "other" and to dismiss.
Eventually, these properties (GeneticallyModified, G-M, pronounced "gem") realized they were being used as slaves, rebelled, society was made aware of horrific systemic abuses by major corporate entities who "owned" these genetic profiles (and the resulting Gems), a limited Declaration of general universal human rights was created, and at the beginning of our tale, we're in London, preparing for a convention to decide on the possible avenues for granting limited or modified "human" rights to the recently emancipated populace of Gems.

Whew.  That took some telling.  Isn't it an interesting concept?  Don't you want to read about the events leading up to this historic Conference, and the Gems and norms who will play a part in shaping the new social order?



I will mention my niggles, in vague and general terms, just to have them out.

1) The world is largely black&white.  Evil is very evil, good is very good, no one is grey.  In a situation and society such as described in the book, that seems a peculiar narrative choice.

2) Despite evil being very evil, most of the evil happens offstage, and not to main characters.  Evil is also terribly incompetent and fragmentary.

3) There is one plot-point that is very difficult for a southern American to accept the way it was presented.  I understand that things are quite different in other parts of the world, but as an American living in the Bible Belt, I can quite firmly say that particular revelation would not have been possible in any city near me, at any time in the future, regardless of the chaos and death between now and then.  It was unfortunate, because it took me quite out of the story at a time when the climax was just getting rolling, and also because it really wasn't necessary to present it that way.  In fact, it could have been built obviously into the narrative with no real difference in outcome.  It seemed to be a cheap "look how different the future is!" trick, and it just fell flat for me.

4) There is a particular genetic modification that is difficult to rationalize from the explanations given.  (I am prepared for this to be explained or dealt with in further books, but it is bothering me.)

5) One of the characters spends the entire book with hints dropped constantly at as to the nature of their genetic modification, and then the ending doesn't deal with one whole aspect of the hints.  (Again, this could be purposefully kept for another book.)

6) General place-keeping tab for worldbuilding niggles that are too picky to really inflict on everyone else, but still bother me!

Overall, really glad I read it, and a really good debut by a new author.

High Rise, J.G. Ballard

High Rise
J. G. Ballard
ISBN: 9780871404022
Re-read in February 2014 and August 2, 2014

I first read this in high school, when I was on my giant dystopian kick; 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, Utopia, Herland, Handmaid's Tale... For a pretty class-ignorant southern American, it was a real eye-opener to the enduring class consciousness and prejudices in England.

I re-read it again in a happy daze when I first heard that Ben Wheatley was going to be doing a film version of it, and I never finalized my draft review because I realized it was more about my hopes and fears for the movie than it was about my thoughts on the book.  I read it again just this weekend in hopes of clarifying, but I don't know that I much have.

On the one hand, this is a really enjoyable read.  We have three "protagonists" who are from the highest class of society, the middle class, and the lowest class.  We learn in great detail what jobs and heritages compose the three classes, and about the worries, fears, and aspirations of the three specific individuals we follow through the book.  The chaos is well-drawn, the situations are fun and gory and individualized, and the premise of a horde of a thousand citizens reverting to animalism is wildly entertaining.

On the other hand, there are some massive problems with the world of the book.  Firstly, despite the crazed activities, it's part of the narrative that the residents still go out to work regularly until nearly the bitter end, and despite them falling asleep on their desks, and eventually not coming in at all, no one outside seems to care - the police arrive once or twice, tentatively, and are gently rebuffed, seemingly unconcerned at the vanishing of a thousand people from work and life.  The time skips don't make much sense - a week here, a month there; time just vanishes between pages.  The supply situation is likewise a bit peculiar - the food begins to run short after the first week or so, and the water lines and pools are vandalized early on, but no one seems to die from dehydration, and only a few are shown starving.  Dogs only go so far.

Finally, the decline is just odd to consider.  On the one hand, it seems too quick - the slide from polite and civilized citizens and neighbors to cannibalistic speechless pre-humans is a shock.  On the other hand, (given the supply concerns noted above) the process takes too long - the looting and rioting and destruction aren't over in one quick galvanized shudder, but a series of slow protracted military campaigns that advance and retreat the tide of chaos over a few months.

As an adult, I appreciate more the subversion of the three endings, but I do wish that more hints had been dropped throughout the narrative, because before the end, I (even knowing what's coming) get very misandric towards the protagonist characters and their personal views of women.  This is also where I note that I remain confused that Wilder's wife is named Helen, until the end where he thinks she's named Judith.  Now, Judith is a totally appropriate name for that ending, but if she changed her name, or was given that name somewhere, I've missed it each time I read the book.  That makes me a little twitchy.  This is also where I'll note that when considering his own ending, the character of Dr Laing is an interesting one for Mr Hiddleston to choose, given his current rabid girl fanbase.

As an adult, I finally realize that the names of our three leads give us insight into their characters - Royal, Laing (better perhaps as Lying, or Laying) and Wilder - all show very clearly what drives them, as well as what their ending is to be.  A nice touch that I either totally missed as a younger person, or totally forgot about.
       

Renegade, J. A Souders

Renegade
J. A. Souders
ISBN: 9780765332455
Read January 2014?
YA dystopia, girl power (except not really)

I was really put off by this book.  It started with such a strong premise, and then it all just went pear-shaped.  I'm not going to go into details, but suffice it to say that the worldbuilding and narrative structure did not stand up, even under the insubstantial weight of the cliffhanger story that was set upon them.  Add in cliche relationships, a convenient set of powers, and memory loss that isn't dealt with realistically, and the whole read was just really frustrating to experience.

Listing here because someone had asked about it, and I had a hard time remembering the title.  Mileage may vary, and just because I didn't enjoy it, doesn't mean that you wouldn't.

(Edit: helps to actually include a brief synopsis, doesn't it?)

Heroine is a kept girl chosen at birth and raised essentially in a utopian seraglio because of her "perfect genes" and destined to inherit the leadership of her underwater commune from the current Mother.  Everyone has blonde hair and blue eyes, and Mother is really quite strict about genetic purity, and proper behavior.  People are manipulated through having their memories wiped when they do things wrong, or through simply being "vanished."  Our heroine, not able to be vanished, keeps getting her brains wiped as she's incapable of actually acting in accordance with Mother's wishes for longer than about half a day.  That's perfect genes for you, I suppose.  In addition, there is a brute squad of very young girls who have been trained and mentally conditioned into being ruthless emotionless (or alternatively rage-filled - consistency isn't really great here) assassins.

Our heroine has begun to make the foggy realization that all is not dandy in utopia, aided in her discovery by a boy - an outsider from Above who arrives via a really stupid reason.  After that, everything goes downhill pretty quickly, devolving into long chase scenes through secret districts of the city (remember this is a smallish underwater commune here), hidden lower city levels (again, where?), mutants, fraught history lessons (spoiler, Mother is a liar), and more gory shambling zombie mutants before the inevitable cliff-hanger ending that sets up for the next book.

 

The Limit, Kristen Landon

The Limit
Kristen Landon
ISBN: 9781442402713
Read January 3, 2014

Middle-grade dystopia: 13-year old Matt is the scapegoat for his family's lack of money savvy - he's off to the workhouse to earn enough money to get them back under the federally-mandated family debt limit. Fortunately, Matt is a genius, and assigned to work in the Top Level, a world short school days, even shorter work days, indoor pools, gyms, and unlimited spending accounts.  Unfortunately for Matt, something extra despicable seems to be happening in his workhouse, and his family's money woes are suddenly the least of his problems, while his cushy life up Top may be adding to them.

Not an amazing read, but not shabby either.  It suffered a bit from the juvenile/middle-grade/YA trap that makes adults into imbeciles in order to ease plotting concerns, but not overly so (and to be honest, I know lots of people who are either in denial or incapable regarding their finances).  

The kids in focus are super-genius, but they still act like kids - goofing off, playing around, working out boundaries between teasing and bullying, but all of that stays in the background in service of straightforward furthering of the plot.  That's somewhat to the detriment of the story, actually, especially in the neglect of the female characters, and of the villainess and her motivations and background.

Matt's motivations seem organic and realistic, as do his rebellions.  I'm only left wondering why on earth the villainess didn't seem to have had any experience with any other hormonal and rebellious teens before this, as she seemed totally unable to comprehend the concept of continuing defiance.

The book sorts itself out quickly, the denouement skips effortlessly over some really interesting questions (why and how did a workhouse concept actually come to pass) and moves blithely onward to a slightly-less-dystopic endpoint.  The whole plotline really felt like a stripped-down and much less world-built version of Ready Player One.

Gated, Amy Christine Parker

Gated, Amy Christine Parker.  9780449815977.

YA dystopia/cult thriller:
Read September 27, 2013

Lyla is the "Little Owl" of the community - always watching and observing, staying a bit apart.  She's a gentle soul, who fights against her lingering qualms about the necessity of the sacrifices that the Chosen have made.  Life in the community is peaceful, but they all know that when the End comes, the Unchosen will attack the compound to steal what they need in a desperate attempt to escape their predestined destruction.

Pioneer is the leader of this community, and he's been watching Lyla carefully.  As the end grows ever closer (3 months and counting) he's begun to realize that this one questioning girl could unravel his entire plan.

Cody is the son of the local town sheriff, and he's determined that Lyla realize that she and the community have all been had by Pioneer's careful indoctrination over the years.

Lyla's mom is the true tragic figure of this story, broken and defeated after the unsolved abduction of Lyla's young sister, just days before the Towers fell.  Even now, years later, she yearns for the destruction of the world, and even the dissolution of her own being, to be with the Brethren and experience eternal life with her missing daughter again.  

Excellent story, well-crafted plot, and believable people.  Overall suitable for younger teens, except for the death and violence at the end.  (very graphic in two instances, and many other deaths alluded to)

The end is left a bit unfinished, not in a "to be continued" sense, but in the real-world sense that life goes on but stays connected to the past, and nothing is ever entirely tied up in a nice pat bow.  

Off the Road, Nina Bawden

Off the Road, Nina Bawden

Read September 19, 2013

Juv/YA post-apocalyptic England.  

12 year-old Tom lives in an Urb, secure in the knowlege that he and all other children are the most important people in the world.  Malcontents and "bad people" were exiled from the Inside in his grandparents' days, and everyone here is happy, well-adjusted, and safe in their highly regulated lives.  His information is incomplete, as he'll discover when his grandfather makes a run for the Outside instead of passively relocating to a "Memory Theme Park" for old people.  Gandy has lost his wits due to age, Tom's sure.  Despite this, Tom still loves him, and he follows the old man of 65 into the frightening woods of Outside, to save him from the dragons and wild men that lurk there.

Very similar in themes and world concept to Shyamalan's The Village, and Haddix's first book Running out of Time.  Similar likewise in that too much deep thought after the book ends will bring headaches and irritation, despite an innocuous and forgettable plotline involving the messy nature of family, the balance of convenience and safety against freedom, and who the true movers and shakers of policy are, both In and Outside.  I know I read too much, and am often too demanding of the genre, especially for books aimed at younger readers, but I really do wish writers would apply behavioral science or simple economics to their dystopias and alternate histories.

For one example: Inside, a draconian one-child law is such the absolute reality that the very words "sibling" or "brother/sister" are considered foul language.  So how does that mesh with a child from Outside "visiting" the interior for the summer break, with the gloss from the book that "The Trusties don't run checks on children during the school holidays."  Right.

Paradox, A.J. Paquette

Paradox, AJ Paquette.  ISBN:  9780375869624
August 1, 2013

YA.  Dystopian planetary exploration.  Ana has amnesia, and she's on a different planet than Earth - that much is completely obvious, what with the rocketship, the two suns, the pink and peach sky, and the notes in her strangely limited mission briefing.  WHY she is on another planet, and without her memories, that's the real question.   

I really liked this.  Of course it was pretty obvious where things were headed, and I would like to say that if this wasn't a direct homage to Invitation to the Game, it bloody well should be.  I think that the two of them would go very well together as a reading assignment, actually.

Normally I'm all about very deep and indepth treatments of background and history and the world of the story, but with this set-up, I was very happy to have things just trundle along as mysteries, knowing that the pay-off would come at the end.  I think that the setup very much contributed to Paquette's ability to craft a tight little short YA read, and I have to give props for that.  

The only quibble I have is with the mechanism of the ending - there is a lot of damage to deal with, and the optimistic tone there seems to be just a little bit unwarranted.  Perhaps I'm simply a cynic. 

Raiders' Ransom, Emily Diamand

This is the beginning of a series.

Set in post-apocalyptic flooded England (similar idea to Ship Breaker, but very different feel) there are 10 remaining counties of England, ruled by an idiotic Prime Minister - everything else has been lost to the sea or to Greater Scotland.  (Imagine this set in America, with everything north of the Mason-Dixon Line suddenly part of Expanded Canada.  What shock!  What horror!) 

Anyway - the poor suckers stuck in those last Ten Counties suffer mostly in silence, working fishing boats and trying to keep up with their taxes.  Technology is forbidden.  Up north, the sinful Scots use all sorts of tech, but they're in league with the devil, so that's why. 

Lilly and her seacat only want a nice peaceful fisher life - her, her seacat, and her sweetheart Andy (who will hopefully marry her and still let her go fishing!) living together until the far future.  Yeah right.

Raiders attack, stealing the PM's daughter (who was stowed at the fishing village with her exiled aunt), and Lilly sets off on a quest to retrieve the girl and save her village from impression or hanging from the asanine PM himself.  (Getting the impression throughout this book that the author isn't too fond of politicians.) 

In the alternate viewpoint, Zeph is the younger son of the boss of the Angel Isling gang of raiders.  They fled London in the great flooding, and now they prowl around, stealing from the Scots and the fishing villages alike ("no one helped us escape, so we don't owe them any loyalty" is the idea here).  Family is everything, and life is brutal, with slaves and captives galore, and turf-wars over status and position.  His dad just stole the PM's daughter!  The Boss is actually looking forward to starting a war with the PM - he can't wait to fight it out and prove once and for all that the Raiders are the true Englishmen!

By some miracle, Lilly and Zeph, along with the seacat and an intriguing "jewel," meet up with each other and have to figure out how to survive the chaos wrought by one small theft of one small girl.

Not a world-stopping read - there were some technical difficulties.  There were some really interesting characters picked up and then dropped nearly instantly (Lilly's "uncle" comes to mind) but with a series, I'm willing to give that a chance to repair itself over time (still, for a single installment, it was a bit abrupt).  The plot was strangely herky-jerky, and more than a tad unrealistic in all of the chance meetings and lucky breaks - but so is most juvenile fiction.  Even the world was strangely ad hoc - the PM and bureaucrats were described as well off, but if all they have is a tiny collection of fishing villages, where does that come from?  Likewise, despite religious protestations and enforced borders, technology from Scotland wouldn't be entirely unknown to desperate natives just a few miles down the pike.  Similarly, London itself is totally flooded - or maybe just a muddy mess, or maybe only flooded at high tide.  Lots of questions unanswered about how things work in this world. 

I did appreciate that the dual narratives were very clear and demonstrably different.  I really like knowing who is "speaking" from the very first, and clear character concepts are absolutely necessary for that sort of writing convention.  Also - seacats.  Great idea.  I love cats, and the idea of strange little grey kittens latching on to someone and helping them navigate over undersea obstacles and by forcasting weather changes - really neat concept!

Overall, pretty good - Not an amazing read, but I am looking forward to the sequel.

Previously Published Review: This Time of Darkness, H.M. Hoover

I'll begin by stating that I was unfortunate as a child to never run across this particular author. As an adult, I have so far read Children/Treasures of Morrow, Orvis, and This Time of Darkness. I have to say, all of them are fun reads, and if I HAD read them as a child, would unreservedly have rated them all as 5s, and been quite enthusiastic about the ideas, characters, and plots presented.

Coming to them as an adult, I notice a lot of little things that I wouldn't have noticed or cared about as a child. (There will be spoilers below, but nothing directly concerning the plot - simply to give examples.)

Several of these little things are contradictions in the maturity level of the intended readers. On the low-maturity end, there is very little exposition or explanation for the state of reality as it is presented. Every physical area gone through is accepted as-is, with no questions or commentary on their history, future, or relatedness to the other areas. While it is appropriate for the characters to not know, as a reader, I wanted to have a bit more background information on what they were seeing and experiencing. Limiting the information by simply hinting at past conflicts makes those places seem more juvenile and safe. In addition to that blandness, the relationship between the leads is strictly platonic, placing it securely into lower-middle-school range.

Contrast that with high-maturity flashes such as the following: Amy's mother wants her gone so that she can have a live-in-boyfriend, people who break even minor rules are straightforwardly assigned to torture in the form of 'treatments' which leave them mentally handicapped, a fellow-student is described as so bright that he was bored in school and spent his time "playing with himself until he was fixed." Now, perhaps I have too many pets, but there's only one thing I see that particular phrase referring to, and it's a little jarring to come across in the middle of an ostensibly middle-school read.

Other slight hangups are in the suspension of disbelief. Several times, events unfold in statistically unlikely ways to pave an easier way for the leads, or to present events and/or concepts for them to ponder. While pondering is well and good, I would have preferred a less heavy-handed method to allow the children to arrive at the same ideas. In a similar vein, having the children put a bit more of their own effort and ingenuity into the actual attempt would have made their adventures a bit more dramatic and purposeful.

Now, despite the above nitpicks, overall this was a highly enjoyable read, and I'm holding on to it to offer as a recommended read for any budding sci-fi, futurist, or dystopian literature fans.

Brief Plot Description: Amy lives in the sealed world with everyone else, including crazies who live on the sidewalks.  Space is tight, food and water are scarce and bad, and people are controlled through drugs, media overload, and conditioning.  When a boy appears who claims that there is a world outside, everyone thinks he's crazy.  Amy gives him a chance, and they make their way up and out: first into a domed pleasure world for the elite, and eventually into the agrarian post-apocalyptic world of the unprotected outdoors where the boy is from.