When You Reach Me – Rebecca Stead

The 1978-1979 school year is perfectly normal for Miranda. Except that her best friend stopped speaking to her, there’s an apparently crazy man who sleeps with his head under the mailbox on her corner, a naked man is seen running by her school on several occasions, and weird things keep happening. Like her spare house key goes missing and three days later she finds a note asking her to write a letter in which she mentions the location of her spare house key.

When You Reach Me is very good. The writing is excellent and the eye for detail is amazing. The mystery aspects, mysterious and mundane—what’s the deal with the strange notes Mira gets? Why did Marcus punch Sal? What’s up with Annemarie and Julia?—are dealt with well, with excellent pacing and delicacy. It doesn’t just balance the ordinary life and the time travel elements; it melds them. I found the discourse on time-travel a bit tedious, especially as Mira was stubbornly not getting it, though it did serve to establish how time travel works in this narrative.

This was almost a one-sitting book for me. It wasn’t, partly because airplane turbulence plus fasting (it was Yom Kippur) does not equal happy reading time, and partly because I was enjoying it so much I didn’t want to be done with it. That said, had there not been jostling to disrupt my reading, I probably wouldn’t have been able to pull myself out of the book and pace myself.

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When You Reach Me ~ Rebecca Stead ~ Rebecca Stead’s Blog

 

Baby Be-Bop – Francesca Lia Block

Background information: Baby Bebop is a prequel to Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat books, now only in print in the compilation Dangerous Angels. A group in Wisconsin is currently suing for the right to publicly burn their local public library’s copy of Baby Be-Bop. Let’s read it instead, shall we?

Dirk has always known that he’s gay, but he’s never told anyone: not his loving grandmother, nor her gay best friends, nor the young man he falls in love with when they’re teenagers. Full of self-loathing and afraid of anyone guessing, he defends himself with leather, punk music, and black hair-dye. He still gets himself beat up, and in the resulting semi-conscious state he gets a visit from some of his ancestors, telling their stories of love and life.

Francesca Lia Block specializes in an odd sort of Los Angeles flowers-and-fairies dreamy quasi-fantasy, and this is no exception. Plot-wise, there isn’t much to it, but it’s a beautiful book. It does tiptoe into sappiness, but in many ways its more of a love letter to gay teenagers than it is a novel; and love letters are allowed to be sappy.

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Baby Be-Bop ~ Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books ~ Francesca Lia Block

 

Wings – Aprilynne Pike

Adopted daughter of hippies, super-vegan (anything but fruits and vegetables make her sick), homeschooled for years, looks like a supermodel Laurel is starting at public high school in a new town. It’s not as bad as she expected; though she hates being inside all day and finds it odd to learn at someone else’s pace, she quickly makes friends- even a romantic prospect. Then a strange bump begins to grow on her back, eventually growing into a flower – loosely resembling a pair of wings.¹ A hot young man she meets on a visit back to her family’s old property tells her that she, like he, is a faerie; and science geek romantic prospect helps her figure out what that means.

The characters and, actually, the science are well done. Laurel’s confusion and fear are palpable but not overblown, as is her tentative reaction to possible romance, from more than one direction. David, the science geek, is perhaps unusually mature for a sixteen year old, but he’s so sweet and supportive and earnest that it’s hard not to like him. Tamani, the faerie, is also well-drawn, with his debonair manner only partially covering his doubts and insecurities. The writing is quite strong, with pacing that’s even while still maintaining tension and danger. It doesn’t forget that strange, worrisome things wreak havoc with our everyday lives and schoolwork, or that the start of a romance, especially a first romance, is scary and confusing – and can be made all the more so by strange, worrisome things.

Of course, I also have issues. When do I not?

The focus on Laurel in our world means we don’t get much about faerie culture or society; I wish we got more, so I could decide how strongly I object. The little bit we get makes me nervous:

“Winter faeries are the most powerful of all faeries, and the most rare. Only two or three are produced in an entire generation, often less. Our rulers are always Winter faeries.”²

Tamani hesitated. “I’m just a Spring faerie.”
“Why ‘just’?”
Tamani shrugged. “Spring faeries are the least powerful of all the faeries. That’s why I’m a sentry. Manual labor. I don’t need much magic for that.”³

Either it hints of discrimination, or I’m oversensitive.⁴ I don’t have a problem with different faeries having different magical abilities, but the implied level to which it determines their role in society and the valuation is less comfortable. I’m also not against showing prejudice and discrimination in books; I just want it acknowledged, dammit.

And then there’s the dramatic conflict. There are trolls! They want to mess up everything for the faeries! They are mean, ugly, and stupid because of evolution, and the faeries are beautiful and intelligent because of evolution. Congratulations, you just fell into the all-too-common sci-fi/fantasy “orcs are bad! elves are good!” trope. This trope has race/racism issues, especially when there’s such blatant blanket statements of physical attractiveness; it’s also just a really boring excuse for a conflict.

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¹It really is a flower, not wings; in this mythology, faeries can’t fly. Which, of course, begs the question: if there are no wings involved, why is the title Wings?
²P. 147.
³Pp. 148-9.
⁴Or both!

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Wings ~ Aprilynne Pike

 

Eon: Dragoneye Reborn – Alison Goodman

There are two ways a book can make one miss, or nearly miss, one’s subway/train/bus stop. Most commonly, the book absorbs you such that you stop paying attention to your surrounds. Eventually you look up and realize that you’ve traveled much further than you thought. Alternately, a book grips you but allows you to see your surroundings; you see the stop before yours come and go, you see your stop approach — and you still can barely slam shut the book and get out of the train. Eon does the latter. I read it in three train rides, one lunch, and an evening of ignoring the clock as it got closer and closer to my bed time.

I first heard of Eon when I was reading the starred review it got in Publisher’s Weekly. I looked at the title¹ and cover and thought, “Ugh, that looks like standard overwrought fantasy, why are they giving it a starred review?” I read the summary part of the review and thought, “Ugh, that sounds like standard overwrought fantasy, why are they giving it a starred review?” I read the part of the review where it talked about the gender issues, and thought “Oh!” and wrote it down on my to-read list. Many months later I got around to reading it, and am now refraining from beginning my review with a summary, for fear of making you think its standard overwrought fantasy.

So what is going on? In a vaguely imperial China-esque society, Eon is in the midst of a reverse-meteoric rise from slave to crippled, inauspicious trainee, to a rank just shy of the imperial family. Eon is thrust into the midst of court intrigue and desperate power struggles, in which Eon is as much pawn as player. Oh, and Eon was born Eona and is physically female. After four years dressing as a boy, speaking as a boy, behaving as a boy, and taking part in training and studies only boys are allowed, Eona has been reduced to a tiny presence in the back of Eon’s mind; a little harder to ignore around menstruation, but pushed back and, in many ways, seen by Eon as an enemy.

To this, we add two other central characters: Lady Dela, the court lady assigned to teach Eon courtly ways, and Ryko, Lady Dela’s bodyguard. Lady Dela is a Contraire – male-to-female transgender. The Empire is vast; where Dela is from, Contraires are admired because they combine male sun power and female moon power. Sent to court as a gift, she has had to pave her own way in a setting where she is looked on as more unnatural than a force of nature. Ryko is a eunuch.

This means that many of the conversations in the book take place, ostensibly, between a woman, a man, and a boy. And the woman’s the only one with a penis. And that’s where the power of the book is found. These three characters each have complex relationships with their bodies, their self-perception, and their sexuality, and they all have different complexities. It respects the diversity in gender identity and expression while painting a disturbing but honest picture of the discrimination and violence, often sexualized violence, perpetrated against both a lesser-valued gender and against those whose gender expression breaks societal norms.

It’s a complex, powerful, at times painful book. Beware reading it on trains.

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¹ In Australia, the title is The Two Pearls of Wisdom. We always seem to get the worst titles. And in this case it’s particularly egregious, since Eon: Dragoneye Reborn in conjunction with the title of the sequel gives away something fairly major.

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Eon: Dragoneye Reborn ~

 

The Unnameables – Ellen Booraem

Medford has grown up on an island where everything Useful is Named – Herding Animals, Tanning Bark Trees, bowls, spoons. People are Carpenters, Carvers, Weavers. Anything Useless is Nameless and ignored – seabirds, shells, weeds. And then there’s Medford Runyuin, foundling, with a name that doesn’t mean anything. Apprenticed to a Carver, Medford wants nothing more than to become a Carver himself, respected on the Island. He doesn’t want to keep secretly carving things with no Use – a bowl with a squirrel curled up inside, a walking stick with a bird for a handle. Except, he kind of does want to keep carving them, Useless and Nameless though they are – and possibly even Unnameable and dangerous, capable of getting him banished from the Island.

The Unnameables is quite charming. It’s Medford’s coming of age story, it’s the story of a community adjusting and shifting, and it’s a story about art. It’s so gentle that it’s easy to see it as a happy story of acceptance, but it’s not quite. This model of community risks the tyranny of the majority, and is so isolated that the minority have no other options – there aren’t sub-communities and even their knowledge of the outside world is minimal. This threat is realized in the novel; Medford needs to fight for his right to carve what he wants and still be part of the only community he’s known. The novel presents its resolution as a happy ending, but I’m not satisfied; there will be dissent in the future, it will be as hidden as the carvings under Medford’s bed and make someone just as miserable as his secret carvings Medford, and even if it does come into the light, next time the community may not have the flexibility to find an accommodation. They deal with Medford’s situation, but they don’t think about the broader ramifications for their society.

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The Unnameables
Ellen Booraem ~ Ellen Booraem’s Blog, Freelance Ne’er-do-well