Libby on Wednesday, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Read-a-thon # 5

In this children's book by the author of The Egypt Game, precocious writer Libby was home-schooled by her eccentric, intellectual relatives in their rambling house, until her mostly-absentee mother decided Libby needed to be socialized and enrolled her in school. Libby was bullied and miserable, and matters seemed to get worse when she got stuck in a writer’s workshop with four other kids: Barbie doll Wendy, punk Tierney, weirdo Alex, and bully GG.

But as these stories always go, there’s more to people than the stereotypes and personas that meet the eye, and people who are forced to interact sometimes become friends. This is an excellent version of this particular story, very predictable in plotting but charming in execution.

The kids are likable, their emotions are well-delineated, and the stories they write, and the interactions in their critique group, are the best part of the book: Tierney’s exasperation at her trope-heavy genre stories constantly being mistaken for parodies, Wendy’s tendency to have her stories all turn into Sweet Valley High, even when they’re set on a desert island, and GG’s endless iterations of bloody slaughter on an island, on a ship, in spaaaaace!

Out of print, but many cheap copies are available on Amazon.

Libby on Wednesday

The Witches of Karres, by James Schmitz. Read-a-thon # 6.

Sponsored by chomiji.

"But what makes you think we won't get robbed blind there?"

"They're not crooks that way - at least not often. The Daal goes for the skinning-alive thing," Goth explained. "You get robbed, you squawk. Then somebody gets skinned. It's pretty safe!"

It did sound like the Daal had hit upon a dependable method to give his planet a reputation for solid integrity in business deals.

In this very funny pulp space opera from 1966, down-on-his-luck space Captain Pausert rescues three small psychic slave girls, or more precisely, they maneuver him into providing rescues that they very likely would have engineered themselves if he hadn’t conveniently come along.

Their owners are certainly all too happy to be rid of them, given that Maleen has food-poisoned the customers of one, the Leewit (not Leewit, the Leewit) perches like a small, evil cat atop the shelves of another and uses piercing whistles to break his porcelain wares, and the grumpy teleporter Goth has reduced her own owner to a gibbering wreck by the time Pausert steps in.

Pausert returns the other girls to their home planet and has a series of adventures with Goth (to my regret, the Leewit and Maleen mostly drop out of the story) involving space pirates, space spies, Worm World, Pausert’s own developing psychic powers, time travel, invisible telepathic psi entities, and a robot-wolf-spider-assassin-rug thing. I love this sort of thing, and ate it up with a spoon. I don’t think I have ever before used the word “rollicking,” but this novel distinctly rollicks.

My only caveat is that I was mildly squicked by the several references to Goth (who is about fourteen) marrying Pausert (whom I pictured in his mid-thirties) when she grows up. I don’t know if it was more or less squicky given that all his actual interactions with her and the other girls were completely appropriate to their relative ages. However, that’s about four lines total in a book which was otherwise enormously fun.

I see that Schmitz is also famous for the Telzey Amberdon series, about a psychic girl. I can’t imagine how this has escaped me until now, but I will seek it out.

In print via Amazon: The Witches of Karres

The Demon’s Daughter, by Pingali Suranna. Read-a-thon # 7

In a voice mellifluous as a gentle shower of honey, without faltering, without throwing in filler words, very gracefully, the goose made a highly learned presentation. […] She also demonstrated her proficiency in poetry, dramaturgy, poetics, music, and erotic science.

The goose Sucimukhi was taught by Saraswati, Goddess of Learning and Speech, and given the title “Mother of Similes and Hyperbole.” In this gorgeous, witty, sensual fifteenth-century novel from south India, she helps resolve a war in Heaven by match-making between Pradyumna, Krishna’s son, and Prabhavati, the daughter of a demon king.

If you skim the genealogies at the very beginning, you don’t need to already have a background in Indian myth and religion to appreciate this short novel, which can be enjoyed on many levels: as a love story told in luscious, Song of Solomon-like metaphors; as a love story punctuated by metafictional commentary and sly parodies of the overblown conventions of love stories; as myth; as a small taste of a literary culture that I suspect most of you haven’t encountered before. (I mean fifteenth century Telegu literature, not Indian literature in general.)

Unlike a lot of literature which was clearly hot at the time but not to modern readers’ erotic tastes… this is still hot. At least, I thought so. There are many more explicit passages, but I was particularly taken with this one, in which Prabhvati’s girlfriend helps her arrange her hair for her first meeting with her beloved, and breaks into spontaneous poetry:

If you let your hair down, you look beautiful.
When you let it hang halfway, you look beautiful, too.
If it gets tangled, you’re beautiful in a different way.
If you comb it down, even more so.
You can braid it, roll it into a bun, or better still
tie it into a knot on the side.
You’re beautiful with that hair every which way.

It’s long, black, and so thick
you can’t hold it in one hand.
No matter how you wear it,
you’ll trap your husband with your hair.

Translated and with notes by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman.

The Demon's Daughter: A Love Story from South India (S U N Y Series in Hindu Studies)

Fallen, by Lauren Kate. Read-a-thon # 8.

Sponsored by erinlin.

A while back, I picked up a YA novel called Madapple because, based solely on the title, I thought it might be re-telling the story of the Garden of Eden in a modern American high school. It turned out to be about something else entirely, and I thought I would have liked my imaginary book better. Fallen doesn’t exactly retell Eden, but it does place reincarnations or descendants of Lucifer, etc, in a modern American high school. It is surprisingly boring. I still like my imaginary book better.

In a prologue in 1854, an emo guy mopes around and woefully tells a girl that they can never ever be together, apparently because every time they reincarnate and kiss, he or she or both of them explode or something, it’s not made clear. They kiss. Then they explode. Or something.

Cut to modern USA. Teenage Luce (short for Lucifer Lucinda) has been diagnosed as psychotic because she sees menacing shadows. Then she kisses a guy. He bursts into flames and dies, and she’s sent to Hell a reform boarding school, Sword & Cross, where many people have names like Gabbe (Gabriel, I assume) and Diante (Dante.) There she sees a hot guy, Daniel Grigori, to whom she is instantly drawn and who seems strangely familiar.

Over the next 100 pages, he flips her off, ignores her, tells her to go away, and tells her to stop stalking him. Then a statue of an angel almost falls on both of them. Meanwhile, another boy, Cam, actually interacts a bit with her, and gives her the highly symbolic gift of a bit of serpent snake skin. At this point I am rooting for Cam, insofar as I’m rooting for anyone, on the basis that Cam and Luce have had an actual conversation.

For the next 100 pages, Luce stares at Daniel, who ignores her, and flirts with Cam, who gives her a guitar pick. She is still menaced by shadows no one else can see. Then the school bursts into flames, and shadows apparently rescue Luce but kill the boy she was with. This apparently prompts Daniel to start flirting with her, or possibly that was coincidental. I’m still rooting for Cam, though clearly he is not The One and is possibly Sat-am, again because there has been actual interaction.

For the next 100 pages, Cam and Daniel flirt with Luce. Cam displays superhuman strength, and Daniel the ability to scare off the shadows which he denies that he can see. Then a girl, Gabbe, superhumanly beats up Cam, and Daniel FINALLY decides to tell Luce what’s going on. Sort of. He informs her that he is immortal, and every seventeen years, he meets Luce, and they fall in love, and somehow that kills her, whether or not they kiss. But this time, they kissed and she did not drop dead. Woo-hoo! Not sure why he doesn’t think it just hasn’t happened YET. Inexplicably, Luce does not question him further.

The school librarian (Sophia, wisdom) confirms that they’re both damned. Inexplicably, Luce does not question her further.

Then Luce remembers! ”You’re an angel,” she repeated slowly, surprised to see Daniel close his eyes and moan in pleasure, almost as if they were kissing. “I’m in love with an angel.”

In the last twenty pages, stuff finally starts to happen. There is a revelation I wasn’t expecting. Unfortunately, it’s a supremely stupid one. The climax and ending tip over from slow and dull into hilariously ridiculous, but it’s too little, too late. Though I did like the random introduction of a helpful Vietnam vet with a private plane with which to ferry around a winged angel.

Fallen

Battle Dress, by Amy Efaw. Read-a-thon # 9.

A semi-autobiographical YA novel based on Efaw’s own experience attending West Point. For teenage runner Andi Davis, military academy is an escape from the unrelenting brutality of her family’s emotional abuse. There she faces institutional sexism and her own tendency to judge women more harshly than men, and, like any cadet, struggles to survive in a deliberately harsh environment. But she also finds, for the first time in her life, a sense of belonging and people who value her strength.

The novel covers only basic training (“the Beast,”) and so is catnip to anyone who enjoys training sequence – except for the very first chapter, the entire thing is a training sequence. It’s very well-written, well-characterized, and realistic.

Though it’s much more about the day-to-day experience of military training than rah-rah patriotism, don’t expect any critique of war, America, America’s military policies, the military-industrial complex, because you will not find it here. It’s an intense, in-the-moment book about a young woman taking the first steps toward becoming a soldier, and how that changes her. I liked it a lot.

Battle Dress

Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint, by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin. Read-a-thon # 10

The Danny Dunn books were sf adventures written in the 1950s and 1960s for children, about the adventures of impulsive Danny Dunn, whose mother was the housekeeper for the all-purpose scientist professor Bullfinch, gloomy Joe, and sensible Irene. (Irene was my favorite.)

Though dated now, they worked as fun adventures that featured accurate science – that is, while they had anti-gravity paint and smallifying machines, the information about subjects like gravity and surface tension would be correct and presented in a clear, easy-to-grasp form. In fact, I learned about surface tension from the part of Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine in which the shrunken kids had to break the surface of a water droplet in order to drink.

In this one, Danny keeps daydreaming about space flight in class, prompting his teacher to assign him the task of writing, “Space flight is a hundred years away” a hundred times. But when his homework gets accidentally taken aboard the top secret spaceship painted with the anti-gravity paint Professor Bullfinch recently discovered, and so happens to be in Danny’s backyard, he goes to retrieve it and accidentally launches himself, Joe, and two professors into spaaaaace!

This is technically a re-read, but I think the last time I read this one, I was nine. The only reason I know that I read it at all was that I remember Danny presenting his teacher with the hundreds of sentences at the end. This is # 2 in the series and Irene isn’t in it; I missed her. It’s kind of wobbly and uncertain in tone and pacing, unlike the more assured later entries. My favorites are the ones that have more of a sense of awe and wonder, not to mention Irene: The Smallifying Machine and The Ocean Floor.