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

 

Starclimber – Kenneth Oppel

Following Airborn and Skybreaker,¹ Starclimber begins with our hero, Matt Cruse, piloting a construction airship² working on the Celestial Tower—the French’s attempt to build a tower to outer space—and trying to sneak as much time as possible with his ill-chaperoned Object of Affection, Kate de Vries. Soon enough, however, Matt and Kate are offered a chance to go to space themselves—in Matt’s case, he can go if he passes a rigorous training progam; in Kate’s case, she can go if she first becomes engaged to a wealthy upper-class eligible bachelor.

Now, if one is to write a steampunk novel about the first expedition to space, dealing heavily with the mechanics of this expedition, one must get one’s physics right. By and large, Oppel does an admirable job. The spaceship has every right to work, the difficulties maneuvering while weightless, all that works. Which makes it all the more jarring when he gets it wrong. One such moment: “Speed was virtually impossible to discern up here. With only the distant earth as a reference point it always seemed we were motionless.” So far, okay; at constant speed in a frictionless environment, that’s true. But then, “Only the pitch of the chip’s rollers told me we were moving at all—and right now, that we were decelerating from a hundred twenty auroknots.”³ Not so much; acceleration and deceleration produce an effect akin to gravity. If they’re decelerating (from downward motion), he should be pressed against the floor. Much more noticeable than something you see by looking out the window. In another case, one of the major crises does not make sense because the physics is not right. This makes me sad.

But if I only read sci-fi in which the science was impeccable, I would not read much sci-fi,⁴ and this one has a lot going for it. The first two books are lighter on the steampunk/sci-fi; this one flawlessly integrates those elements with the well-built alternate history and maintains their sense of whimsy and discovery. The writing is excellent, moving along at a fast pace through much adventure without losing sight of the emotional lives of his characters. And those characters? Fully human and fleshed-out. Kate is particularly well-done; she is discomfitingly ruthless—this girl would be a Slytherin—but she’s also sympathetic. As an aristocratic woman, she’s privileged but hemmed-in. She freely states her disdain for class distinctions, but demonstrates a thoughtless belief that people will—and ought to—do what she asks them to without question. A suffragette, she believes in fighting for women’s rights, but relies on Daddy to bail her out when she gets in trouble. She has had to fight for her right to go to university and is still fighting to be accepted by the scientific community, but she doesn’t always appreciate the struggles working-class Matt has had to go through to get where he is. She’s a complex, flawed character, and she’s in good company.

All that’s not going to make me forgive the bad physics, per se; but it will make me recommend the book in spite of the bad physics.

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¹ Both of which I read before I started this blog, so I haven’t reviewed them properly. That said, they’re excellent.
² Airship, not airplane; zeppelins are the default air transport in this alternate-history.
³ p. 335.
⁴Though I prefer it when it’s unapologetically, blatantly wrong to when it tries to be right and fails.

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Starclimber ~ Kenneth Oppel

 

Firestorm – David Klass

Jack Danielson has lived an ordinary life – pointedly so, in fact; his father reins him in every time he risks getting grades too good, winning sports too much, or otherwise calling attention to himself. When he ignores his father’s well-meant advice and breaks a league record in football, he’s suddenly on the run, with a telepathic dog for company. A few mysterious and dangerous women pop in from time to time, plus some monsters and visions, as Jack slowly learns that he has to save the Earth from humans before we completely destroy the environment.

It begins: “Halloween week in Hadley-by-Hudson. Senior year of high school. Nine in the evening. Had enough sentence fragments? My English teacher said they are a weakness of mine.”¹

I’ve got to agree with his English teacher: they are annoying. As is his habit of saying “Look that one up in the dictionary, my friend”² every time he uses a word of four syllables of more. He clearly thinks this highlights his vocabulary and extensive SAT prep; really, it would be more impressive if he wasn’t saying, basically, “I learned this word special!” Plus, it makes him come off as a pompous asshole. Which is pretty accurate, but did create some extra distance between me and the book. I cared about Jack’s mission; I neither liked nor cared about Jack.

Obnoxious narrator aside, it’s a pretty good book. A lot happens, but everything gets enough time. Similarly, it’s the first in a planned trilogy; the ending leaves no doubt that there’s more to come, but it isn’t a jarring stop. The environmentalism is dealt with well; it shows the damage we’re doing to the Earth, rather than preaching. It also recognizes that most people are not willfully contributing to the damage, but do accept the status quo without asking difficult questions. Personally, between Firestorm and Mark Bittman’s recent article on finding fish one can buy ethically,³ I’m rather glad to be vegetarian. Makes life simpler.

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¹p. 3
²p. 4; variations abound throughout the text.
³conveniently published the day after I finished Firestorm. Clearly, the universe really wants me to get this point.

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Firestorm ~ David Klass (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

 

Mortal Engines – Philip Reeve

Futuristic steampunk.

We screwed the world up so badly that not only were half the cities destroyed in wars, the rest were being threatened by earthquakes, floods, and other natural disasters caused by global warming, too many nuclear bombs disrupting the Earth’s crust, etc. So they put the cities on giant tracks/wheels/rafts. The cities consume a lot of fuel and raw materials, but the Earth’s pretty well tapped out. So the big cities prey on the little cities which prey on the towns. The Earth has settled down since then, but most of the cities are still moving and exist in a fragile stalemate with the Anti-Traction League of cities that stopped moving.

Tom grew up on a rather pseudo-Victorian London, wanting nothing more than to become a member of the Guild of Historians, and just maybe have an adventure and rescue a beautiful girl. Instead, he’s pushed off the city with a very ugly, scarred girl and learns that adventures are rarely so fun as they’re made out to be.

I’d prefer the premise if they just let it be steampunk, but the futuristic/post-apocalyptic setting made it harder for me to suspend disbelief. The adults are, by and large, fairly shallow, and one of them has a final redemptive moment that’s awfully unbelievable. But the setting is nifty, and it actually takes some pretty big risks.

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Mortal Engines