A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

After a weird apocalypse called The Storm that seems to have killed most people on Earth, 17-year-old Liz lives alone in the bookshop where she used to work, occasionally trading books for useful items. But when the more hardbitten Maeve shows up, the two girls fall in love. But is the world about to end all over again?

This book sounded so up my alley. Alas, it was not good. In fact it was kind of the bad lesbian version of Erik J. Brown's All That's Left in the World.

Given the title, you'd think the story would involve books and reading and how they matter even after the apocalypse - a kind of bookstore version of Station Eleven. It's not that at all. A lot of books are mentioned in passing, but "books are important" is not a theme, and reading isn't important to the characters. Liz is living in the bookshop out of trauma and inertia, not because it's her passion or a community center or it feels like home.

Liz is so incredibly helpless and useless, it's hard to believe she survived normal life let alone a post-apocalypse setting. When the tap water stops running, she's unsurprised but also has only one day's worth left stored up in bottles - and it's been running for months, with her expecting it would stop running any moment the whole time! She doesn't bother to lock the front door of the bookshop, even when she goes to sleep. There's all sorts of dangerous damage to the shop that she doesn't know how to or doesn't bother to try to repair, AND doesn't ever ask for help with even though a fair number of friendly people come to her shop. I get that she's supposed to be paralyzed by trauma but she also comes off as a passive nitwit.

Even apart from Liz herself, a lot of stuff in the story makes no sense. Liz literally hasn't left the bookstore in months, she only gets a customer every couple days if that, and the customers only give her small items like a couple batteries for a book. How is she getting enough food to stay alive?

When Maeve turns on a small generator and it doesn't come on immediately, Liz leaves it switched on and tries to manually start it by sticking her hand inside it and giving the fan a spin. (Amazingly, she does not precede this by saying, "Hold my beer.") It promptly turns on and starts sucking her entire body into it, like it's a jet engine.

This gives Liz an extremely severe injury - the skin is ripped off her hand, bones and tendons are visible, and she can't move her fingers at all - but she's basically fine two days later after some extremely vaguely described first aid.

Liz realizes Maeve might be dangerous because she has a prized and valuable knife whose blade is caked with blood. If it's that valuable, YOU'D CLEAN IT.

People mostly use knives as weapons instead of guns for no reason. When someone does have a gun, it's not loaded. I guess guns and bullets are super rare in America!

The apocalypse is a one-time rain of acid that melts everyone who was outside at the time. No one ever mentions that this is fucking bizarre, or speculates on why it happened. The set-up in the pre-apocalypse flashbacks is that a climate change catastrophe is ongoing, but that does not include LITERAL ACID RAIN.

Also, the world is way too depopulated for a one-time event that happened at night, when not many people would be outside, and spared everyone who was inside. There's barely anyone left in Liz's entire town, and we meet something like ten survivors max in the entire book.

It also makes no sense that an acid strong enough to completely dissolve a human in 20 minutes did so little apparent damage to anything else. All the structural damage that's described is what you'd expect from a tornado, not a 20 minute downpour of extremely strong acid.

Liz and Maeve's relationship was boring and barely there. Actually, the whole book was boring. I ended up skimming heavily.

There's some interstitial bits where people write one-page first-person accounts of their survival in a notebook Liz keeps. This sort of thing is almost always so much fun, people recall it as their favorite part of the book. All but one of these bits are boring! How do you even do that?! (The one that I liked was a woman whose dogs saved her from the acid rain by refusing to go on their regular night time walk.)

Spoilers for the end. ( Read more... )

A dark fantasy about a group of teenagers who are kidnapped from their homes and forced to participate in wilderness therapy, only to encounter actual monsters in the woods. GREAT premise!

Devin is a lesbian teenager who's been processed through a series of often abusive foster families. After she steals some money from her current foster parents, they have her kidnapped by a wilderness program supposed to straighten her out. She's dragged into the middle of the woods with four other teenagers whose parents have enrolled them because they did drugs, stole money, or were generally rebellious or sad. A pair of guidance counselors lead them on a very long hike through the woods, during which Devin gets in an intense love/hate relationship with one of the other girls. Then their counselors disappear...

For-profit wilderness therapy/survival camp for "troubled teenagers" is a real thing in America, and they really do kidnap teenagers with their parents' permission - and payment. It's abusive and unregulated, and a number of kids have been killed at those camps.

The book begins with an author's note similar to my paragraph above. But once the teenagers are violently kidnapped, their forced hike through the woods proceeds with surprisingly little abuse beyond the fact that they're forced to be there. There's genuine wilderness training and self-esteem-building activities. I don't want to sound like "just" being kidnapped and held against your will isn't abusive by itself, but these programs are typically very abusive in other ways too. I felt like the awfulness of these programs was inexplicably downplayed despite the author apparently writing the book specifically to expose them!

The beginning part, before the counselors vanish, is fine but feels a bit slow. The two boys in particular are not very differentiated, and I kept mixing them up. Surprisingly, the best part of the book is the monsters themselves. What they turn out to be is unexpected and SO COOL, and I wish there was more of it. The book overall is about 70% teenagers interacting, 30% monsters/teenagers vs monsters. That would be fine if I was more into the teenagers, and it wasn't like I wasn't into the teenagers. They're fine. But for me, not more than fine.

Overall I would say this was a perfectly fine book that I didn't love. Except for the part that really focused on the monsters. That, I loved. But that's only about 10% of the whole.

So what are the monsters? ( SPOILERS! )

A semi-autobiographical YA novel about a teenager whose life changes when she becomes blind. Casey is fourteen and already having problems with failing vision, but doesn't realize that anything is wrong beyond needing new glasses until a doctor with a less than ideal bedside manner informs her that she has glaucoma and will become blind without an operation; the operation is a failure and she becomes completely blind.

She's understandably shocked and upset, but soon realizes that people's reactions to her blindness might be a bigger problem than the blindness itself. Her best friend abruptly dumps her, and she and her parents are contacted by an absolutely horrible woman who runs a school for the blind, who tells her that it will be impossible for her to go back to her regular school, even with support, and she can only survive in a blind boarding school. Cathy, upset at her former friend's reaction and imagining it repeated throughout the school, agrees. But the school is awful and academically unchallenging, designed to funnel the girls into being housewives and the boys into making the cane seats for chairs, and Cathy wants to go to college...

How Cathy fights her way through other people's expectations, adult and teenage bullies, and life that changes out from under her makes for an excellent novel, thoughtful and well-written and just plain enjoyable to read. It reminded me a bit of Mary Stolz. Cathy is a very likable and distinct protagonist, not an everygirl; she has a strong personality, which leads to her dealing with some things with unexpected ease (she has a good visual imagination, so she can picture things well enough that she sometimes forgets that she's not actually seeing them) and others with unexpected struggles (loving her guide dog is easy, but training her is hard.)

The supporting cast is very well-drawn, and the book as a whole is distinctly unsentimental. There's a subplot about a guy with a crush on her who she finds gross but feels like she ought to at least give a chance, since people say romance is great, which made me cringe with its hideous relatability.

Beverly Butler also became blind at the same age, though I don't know if the reason was the same.
The novel was published in 1962, but I suspect that the details of what it's like to be a blind teenager are a bit older, if they're autobiographical; probably closer to the early 50s or even 1940s. Or maybe not. The Americans with Disabilities Act was only passed in 1990. In any event, the book has the detail and messiness of real life, and is additionally an interesting window into what it was like to be a blind teenager in whatever time it was.

Butler wrote a sequel plus a bunch of other books. I'll keep my eye out for them as I really enjoyed this.

Joan, the daughter of an English mother (deceased) and a Malaysian father, learns as a child that her mother's family is unusual. They call themselves monsters, and can do what appears to be genuine magic, if of a minor variety: they can make small objects appear and disappear. Joan can also do this as a child, but the ability fades away as she grows up. By the time she's sixteen, it's gone and she's relegated the whole monster-and-magic thing to the realm of "my eccentric family has weird beliefs."

Needless to say, there's a lot more to it than that.

Only a Monster is a YA fantasy that partakes in some current YA tropes (the love triangle) and does its own thing in other ways. Unusually for a modern YA, the worldbuilding is excellent and original. The monsters have their own society, with families who have different abilities, mostly of a pleasingly eccentric and small-scale variety. Because the powers aren't world-shattering, there's a good amount of figuring out how to use them in clever ways. I LOVE this kind of thing, and it's very well-done.

There's another power that all the monsters have. It's time travel, of a very unique variety and with a real and disturbing cost. I've never come across this exact variant on time travel before, and the worldbuilding around it and the society than grew around people who can do it is also extremely well-done. The plot is mostly very good, with some excellent twists and surprises.

The flaw in the book is that two of the three main characters are not very interesting. This didn't at all ruin the book for me - I enjoyed it a lot - but it's definitely the sort of book where the supporting cast is enormously more interesting than the leads.

Joan is kind of an everygirl figure and she feels more there as a vehicle to tell the story than a three-dimensional character. She often refuses to listen to people trying to tell her information she really needs to know when that serves the plot, but is very clever and quick-witted when that serves the plot.

The other issue is the love triangle. One of the boys accompanies Joan for almost the whole book, and we see their relationship grow from strangers to enemies to friends to could-be-lovers. This really worked for me. The other one is someone she had a crush on before the book starts, we get a tiny bit of very dramatic interaction at the beginning, and then he's off-page for most of the book, but we're told that their love could move worlds, etc. This didn't work for me.

Bizarrely, there is another love story, between supporting characters, in which the characters are almost never in the same place at the same time, and I was REALLY invested in that one. Maybe it worked better because it was pushed less hard? But it was a very difficult technical feat to pull off, and it was executed beautifully.

This book has a satisfying "settled for now" ending, but the story clearly continues. I'll be following it, because I LOVE the world and the supporting cast is great.

1980s YA about two young ballet dancers, Stephie and Jenny, who have been best friends since they met at a dance academy at ages six and eight, respectively. The two-year gap and personality factors have led to Stephie looking up to Jenny and seeing her as perfect and herself as inferior and needy. When their dance teacher invites them both to audition for his even-more-hardcore semi-professional dance troupe, it forces Stephie to take a serious look at both her own ambitions and her relationship with Jenny.

This book packs a lot into 148 pages, sketching out a complete life for Stephie beyond the academy, complete with brief but deft characterizations of her family, Jenny's family, teachers at Stephie's school which also has performance classes taught by an aging hippie with regrets, the boy she has a crush on, and actual professional theatres that might be hiring. The ending is a bit pat but overall it's well-done and thoughtful.

( Read more... )

In a jewelry booth, I found something I could not identify. It was a tiny jar, the length of my finger, and hardly twice as wide.

I forgot everything as I held this amazing jar. I could see through it. The merchant dropped a shiny red bead into the jar and I could still see the bead. It broke all the rules of a container. It contained, but did not hide.

Anaxandra is a six-year-old girl on a tiny, nameless island in the Aegean Sea when she's kidnapped for the first but not the last time, taking nothing with her but a little stone statue of Medusa carved with octopus tentacles instead of snakes. She ends up on a bigger island as the companion to a princess, and discovers amazing new things like glass, horses, and stairs.

I won't give away much more of the plot, other than that she does eventually get entangled in the Trojan War, because it has a whole lot of twists and turns. It's fantastically readable and does a great job of defamiliarizing all sorts of familiar things, from a glass bottle to the story of Troy to the name "Helen of Troy," making them seem fresh and startling and immediate.

Anaxandra is a great character, wily out of necessity but afraid of offending the gods, prone to talking when she'd be better off keeping her mouth shut but also often able to maneuver into a better spot by fast talking. All the many characters are well-drawn and memorable, particularly the female ones. Andromache and Cassandra are heartbreaking and lovable, and Helen of Troy is terrifying-- part self-satisfied beauty queen, part half-divine eldritch horror in human form.

The atmosphere and historic details are excellent and vivid. Cooney includes an afterword which discusses her sources and the places where she departed from the historic/mythic record and why, and provides a concise update on what became of the characters she didn't invent.

Absolutely fantastic. I can't recommend this too highly.

If you've already read the book, look closely at the cover. It's clever as well as striking.

This is the completion of the trilogy that began with The Belles, which sounds like a standard "Everyone is ugly and beauty is controlled by the government" dystopia, but it really isn't. It feels more like a lost novel by Tanith Lee with lots of fairytale motifs and canon FF. It's decadent, immersive, and I highly recommend it

The second two books are also very good and worth reading, though I do think the first is the best. They don't answer all the questions that were raised by the first book, but they do answer some of them. They also go in some unexpected and interesting directions.

Worldbuilding spoilers: ( Read more... )

What Clayton is interested in, particularly in the second two books, is how the Bells are exploited, forms of enslavement and resistance, and how people deal with an unjust society. There are still plenty of gorgeous dress descriptions and teacup pets, don't worry.

The second book has an author's note at the end that is pretty jaw-dropping. Don't miss it. The third book has a new narrator, which is fun, and is a bit of a mythic take on the Hunger Games. The end felt a little rushed and oddly paced but the final outcome is satisfying.

Clayton is now on my "buy anything she writes" list. She has an interesting, original voice and set of concerns, and her books are compulsively page-turny and just a pleasure to read.

he has a new book out, a middle grade fantasy, which I will read shortly.

The fire had miles of uninhabited acres to play with, where it could leap across bare spots and jump feet first into the fuel. It didn't need roads. It could make its own highway.

A disaster novel with a large cast in a smallish space over a very short span of time - 3:15 to 4:55 - as a brush fire engulfs a Los Angeles neighborhood on a weekday, when most of the adults are away.

Flash Fire functions as a mini-epic - Arthur Hailey in 169 pages. Most of the characters are children or teenagers plus a firefighter in his early 20s who used to live in the area, plus brief appearances by their parents, miscellaneous fire victims and firefighters, a disgruntled gate guard, and a family of tourists turned opportunistic looters.

The tight time-frame emphasizes how terrifyingly fast a fire spreads, and sections showing its progress make it feel like a character in its own right. So does the neighborhood: Pinch Canyon, a small and wealthy area in a firetrap canyon with houses clinging precariously to the sides. The main focus is on three houses that share a driveway and the people in them.

The Press House contains a teenage brother and sister plus seven rescue kittens. Danna, the younger sister, longs for excitement and makes fire contingency plans to rescue the kittens and a neighbor's two horses. This isn't random, as fires are currently engulfing other parts of LA.

Hall, the older brother, secretly wants to work with children with disabilities; this is a secret because his wealthy entertainment industry parents want their kids to be financially successful. Hall is one of exactly two people in the neighborhood who actually cares about Geoffrey, the adopted child next door.

Geoffrey lives in the Aszling House. He's a Romanian orphan with an attachment disorder whom his asshole parents adopted, regretted adopting when he wasn't sufficiently rewarding, and has dumped on poorly-paid babysitters ever since. He rarely speaks. The other current inhabitants of the house are Chiffon (not her real name), the teenage nanny who couldn't care less about Geoffrey, and Elony, the cleaner, a 17-year-old refugee who escaped horrors and is desperately trying to learn to speak and read English with no help or resources whatsoever.

The Severyn House contains Beau, a practically perfect teenage boy; Elisabeth, his eight-year-old sister who can't do anything right as far as her parents are concerned; and a box of ashes on the mantelpiece. The ashes are all that's left of their much-older half-brother Michael, who was disowned by their father for being gay and died of AIDS. They never met him, but their father ended up with his ashes, which he put in the living room and then never discussed. Beau has gotten a little obsessed with Michael, the brother he never knew. Would his father abandon him too if he stepped out of line? Does anyone but Beau care about Michael now?

This juicy cast of characters gets run through the wringer when the fire leaps to the canyon. Relationships are forged and broken, people rise to the occasion or very much don't, and not all of them survive. The looters are weird caricatures but the main cast is sharply sketched and believable. Hall loves Geoffrey when no one else does, but he barely registers that Elony exists; Beau cares about Elisabeth when no one else does, but he expresses it by trying to fix her so their parents will like it more, so she perceives him as yet another person constantly trying to mold her into someone she's not. I particularly liked Elony, who's coming from an entirely different world than the rest of them and is no stranger to death, danger, and having her life turned upside down in an instant.

While the kids are generally sympathetic, the view of the adults is bleak. Two out of three of the sets of parents are privileged, blinkered, and uncaring; one of them gets shaken out of their narcissistic pattern but there's no telling how long that will last. The one set of loving parents is so engrossed in work that they rather hilariously don't even realize their kids are in danger until it's all over.

( Read more... )

Cooney's brief was probably to be educational about wildfires, how they're fought, and how to survive them, which she absolutely is, and to tell an exciting story, which she absolutely does. I could not put this book down. It's not as good as Flight #116 is Down! but it's much better than Emergency Room. Once again: much better than it needed to be.

Content notes: Outdated information on autism/attachment disorders. Depictions of ableism and racism. Death by fire. Animals and children in danger. (The kittens survive and the horses are implied to survive.)

Only $1.99 on Kindle, and well worth it.

Gabe Rogers is a 16-year-old Texan boy who goes to boarding school in Yellowknife, Canada, so he can be closer to his father, who works at an offshore or oil rig. At boarding school, he befriends Raymond Providence, a Dene boy from a tiny, remote village.

When Raymond decides to drop out and go home, along with his great uncle, Johnny Raven, who had been in a hospital in Yellowknife, the bush pilot offers to take Gabe along for some sightseeing. Things go wrong, mostly because the pilot exemplifies the saying "there are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old bold pilots" and there are particularly no old stupid and careless pilots. Raymond, Johnny Raven, and Gabe end up alone in the absolute middle of nowhere, Northwest Territories, with winter about to come down like a hammer.

This is an extremely enjoyable and pretty epic wilderness survival story in which every possible wilderness survival incident happens, but in a plausible manner.

The most unexpected part for me was the prominence of Johnny Raven. I had assumed that he would die almost immediately, so the boys could do everything themselves, but that's not what happens. He's an elder and knows a whole lot about wilderness survival, because when he was young, he actually lived it. There is a significant language barrier between him and the boys, as Johnny Raven speaks very little English and Raymond speaks very little Slavey. But we do learn that while Johnny Raven preferred life as he knew it when he was younger, that life was neither easy nor perfect, and in fact his own father starved to death. So while he can help and provide to a large degree, that's no guarantee that any of them will make it out of the wilderness alive.

So there's three major stories going on in this book, though in plot terms, there's only one. There's the wilderness survival part. There's Johnny Raven's own story, in which he gets to have a last hurrah, bond with his nephew, and teach Raymond a lot of the old ways that Raymond never would have learned in the ordinary course of things. And there's the story of the friendship between Gabe and Raymond, which was real but somewhat superficial at the start, and ends up ride or die by the end of the book.

Surprisingly, my favorite character was Johnny Raven, and his story was actually my favorite part of the book. There's a scene in which, of all things, he teaches Raymond and Gabe how to hunt beaver, which was unexpectedly beautiful and moving. I didn't know when I started this book that he would be a character at all, and it turned out that in this book about two teenage boys lost in the wilderness, there's also this great story about an old man who gets an unexpected chance to do what he loves and pass on what's meaningful to him at the end of his life.

It was definitely an excellent book to read during the snowpocalypse. At least I haven't crawled across an ice bridge over a frigid river, fallen into freezing water fully clothed, almost starved to death, gotten chased by bears and wolverines, and almost gotten killed by a reckless pilot.

Thank you very much to mildred_of_midgard for recommending this book! Has anyone else read anything by Will Hobbs? Is there anything else you would recommend?

The sun was going down like a circle of construction paper falling off a bulletin board. No longer the yellow bulb of daytime, it was a sinking orange half circle. Meghan yearned to run toward the sun and catch it before it vanished.

An unusual YA dark fantasy/understated horror novel, best read without knowing anything about it beyond the premise, which is that a creepy neglected girl in the neighborhood, Lannie, has a strange power.

Following Cooney's usual MO, this book is much better than it needs to be. Some of the writing is very beautiful, some is quite funny, and it's unexpectedly observant in unexpected ways. It shifts between various tight-third person POVs and an omniscient POV which points out truths about teenagers that only an adult would know. The worlds of the teenagers can be extremely petty and small, but they're simultaneously dealing with very big emotional issues and also life-or-death situations.

There's a remarkably well-done and delicate balance between very mundane daily life, unsettling horror, real moral dilemmas, and fantasy metaphors for real-life concerns. This book looks like throwaway horror, but it's much much more than that.

I went in knowing nothing but the premise, and that was a very good way to read it. I recommend it.

( Spoilers for the entire book. )

Content notes: There's nothing explicit or graphic, but the book is centrally about consent and violating consent, abuse in various forms (control, neglect, lack of love), and other emotionally difficult/complex topics. A dog probably dies.

I now feel like reading more Cooney. Any suggestions?