Empress of the World – Sara Ryan

Teenage girls falling for each other at a summer program for academically gifted high schoolers. Need I say more?

Well, yes.

Empress of the World has two key factors which make it stand out from the general mass of teenage queer books: the main character and her love interest are bi, and there relationship has issues which are not related to their queerness. Now, we absolutely need books about lesbians, and we need books where issues of sexual orientation cause tension in romantic relationships. And we need books about straight people. Of course! But there are very few bi chicks in fiction – and as a bi chick in nonfiction, I really appreciate the representation.

The relationship in Empress of the World is delightfully realistic. They’re so sweet, they like each other so much, and they are awkward and they miscommunicate and they generally act like teenagers figuring things out as they go along. Their missteps make sense and are well-portrayed, so they never become jokes or embarrassment.

It’s a snapshot of a summer: one girl’s experience of a relationship. And it’s a lovely book.

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Empress of the World ~ Sara Ryan

 

I, Coriander – Sally Gardner

For her first nine years, Coriander Hobie lived a charmed life: daughter of a wealthy merchant father and an herbalist mother, known for her medicinal potions. There are a few oddnesses to her life—the fairy stories her parents tell, the efficacy of her mother’s potions, a mysterious pair of silver shoes—but Coriander’s hardly notices until her life begins to unravel. Then, of course, she begins to realize both the dangers of this world and the existence of another.

Set against the backdrop of Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan rule of London, I, Coriander is in many ways as charming as Coriander’s life. The writing is smooth and fits the story, and everything Coriander experiences in London is vividly described. Experiences and characters in the fairy world are disappointing poorly developed, particularly in comparison to the London scenes.

I also, once I stopped to think about it, was unexpectedly disturbed by such a smooth, gentle book.

If you’re very spoiler-averse, you can stop reading here. I don’t think you need to, though; the fairy tale nature gives the story a sense of inevitability, so I don’t think anything I’m about to tell you will spoil the story. Whether or not it will ruin the book is a different matter entirely.

Time moves differently in fairy as in our world, of course. Coriander’s time there is measured in hours or, at most, days; while those hours or days elapse, she misses months and years in ours, though when she returns her body has aged appropriately. So we have a girl who only has memories and experiences taking her through the age of twelve in a fifteen-year-old’s body, and then a six-months-older-than-that girl in a seventeen-year-old’s body. As far as the book is concerned, this causes absolutely no issues: no freakouts about going from an early-pubescent body to a post-pubescent body, no freakouts about sudden menstruation, and no acting like she’s still twelve. We’re to believe that she is the age she appears and ready for a mature (if terribly developed, narrative-wise) romantic relationship. I’ll grant you that she can have the hormones and brain development of an older girl/young woman—magic, after all— but I can’t completely discount the role experience plays in the process of growing up.

Coriander’s written in a very ageless style—she’s the same at six as she is at twelve, or at the end of the book—but even then, I can’t believe that she’s an adult, even a young one. She’s a twelve- or thirteen-year-old who happens to look like an adult. And when romance gets involved, that gets even creepier.

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I, Coriander (Google Books) ~ I, Coriander (Wikipedia)

 

Peeps – Scott Westerfield

Yes, it is as trashy as it looks.

Vampirism – though you’ll rarely find the v-word in the book – has nothing to do with magic. It’s a parasite. Parasite-positives (peeps) are super-strong (in effect), have excellent night vision, an aversion to carbs, and cravings for protein – the meatier and bloodier, the better. In most peeps, this manifests as cannibalism. In the lucky one in a hundred who are carriers, they just really like the Atkins diet. And are really horny. All the time. And the parasite is viable in just about all bodily fluids, including saliva, and is small enough to slip through latex condoms. So the responsible carriers, like our narrator, must be completely celibate with anyone who isn’t also a carrier. And at 19, Cal’s the youngest carrier by a hundred years or so. So he’s totally celibate.

I call foul on a book narrated by a nineteen year old male who’s horny all the time, does not have a moral stance against premarital sex, and is celibate by necessity, in which masturbation is not mentioned once.

Anyway, Cal infected several woman between being infected himself and when the Night Watch, which deals with peep containment, found him, explained why he suddenly had night vision and such, and trained him as a hunter. And sent him off to track down his now-cannibalistic exes and send them to the containment facility in Montana. So far, so good. Except when he tries to track down the mysterious woman who infected him, things start to get a bit weird – a possible new strain, a possible conspiracy in the Night Watch, possible new infection vector, strange things coming up from deep under New York. Now Cal doesn’t just need to track down the woman who infected him, he also needs to figure out what’s going on and save the world!

It’s really trashy.

That said, it’s also pretty fun. Vampirism-as-STD is pretty hokey, but he uses it to come up with some pretty nifty explanations for various parts of the vampire mythos, like cruciphobia and the mirrors thing. Fighting vampires with Elvis memorabilia, a boombox of Ashlee Simpson, and a Garth Brooks tee-shirt is nicely campy, as, really, vampire things should be. There are chapters on real-world parasitology, which are interesting and short enough to not get boring or detract from the narrative flow. (Though I call foul there, too: a teenage boy explaining the evolution of human head lice and body lice without mentioning human pubic lice? Especially since the evolution of human pubic lice is even more interesting?)

Do not pick up Peeps expecting anything thought-provoking or revelatory. Pick it up if you want some fun trash.

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Peeps ~ Scott Westerfield ~ westerblog
From Unshelved, my favorite description of Peeps

 

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 ~

 

Impossible – Nancy Werlin

Have you ever really listened to the lyrics of Scarborough Fair? Even in the Simon and Garfunkel version, they’re a little bit creepy – asking a woman to do a series of impossible tasks to become a man’s true love. The version Werlin uses (one she crafted for the novel, though there are some recorded versions that are much closer to hers than to S&G) is much creepier – the woman has rejected the man (elfin knight) and must perform these three impossible tasks to avoid becoming his, and her daughters after her. And it’s a curse and a lesson for the Scarborough women, passed from mother to daughter as each gets pregnant at seventeen and goes insane just after her daughter is born. And so it has gone for hundreds of years, dozens of women, and now Lucy finds herself pregnant after being raped at the prom.

I spent most of the book wanting to hug her family – her foster parents and her childhood best friend. They did everything right. They hugged her when she needed hugs, they presented her options – including abortion – and offered their advice, but accepted it when Lucy disagreed. They took an unreal situation and developed a very real plan to solve it, simply because that’s what Lucy needed them to do. The Elfin Knight himself is seriously overdone, but he actually gets fairly little page-time, and otherwise the medieval curse and its resolution are woven seamlessly into Lucy’s twenty-first century issues as she struggles to deal with the rape, her pregnancy, school, etc, etc. The solutions she and her family find are creative but make sense. In the places it really matters, it’s really good.

So the Elfin Prince is over the top. So there are a few passages of ridiculous sap and profundity syndrome. [minor spoiler] So I wanted there to be a Scarborough woman born free of the curse, and am not satisfied to see the name die with the curse [/minor spoiler]. So I can’t not nitpick a little. But it dealt with rape and teen pregnancy well, with a remarkable family. Perhaps most importantly, it presented Lucy’s story as Lucy: it doesn’t moralize and say that the decisions she makes would be right for anyone else, just that they’re the right decisions for her.

It’s a book that makes it worth having Scarborough Fair stuck in your head for three days. And trust me, you will.

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Impossible ~ Nancy Werlin