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The Roar by Emma Clayton Almost five hundred pages of immersive postapocalyptic British fiction, full of luminous sensory stimuli, economical (but not stingy) world-building, and an extra helping of good old-fashioned LANGUAGE. I read it in two days, and I loved it, and I want to do it justice. So I'm going to keep this short.
He paced and watched the sea and for a while he felt like a firecracker with its fuse lit, a bit dangerous - as if when she walked through the door he would erupt and fly around the room breaking the lights, setting fire to things, and taking lumps out of the ceiling. Then he felt all soft and gooey, as if when she walked in he would melt and she would find nothing more than a puddle of love in the middle of the floor. Then he felt both of these things, that he was a firecracker about to explode, but instead of sparks, he was full of love and it was all going to be a bit messy.
Do not take this passage the wrong way. It occurs on page 471, and contains I think the first and the second (and the last) instances of the word "love" in the book. I picked it because it gives you Emma Clayton using a twelve-year-old's casual vocabulary to precisely describe a complex emotional state - some trick! Plus, cute there at the end.
The best science fiction - and, I would argue, the best teen fiction - pulls pieces of the status quo out of context so that the reader has a chance to see some aspect of contemporary life from a new perspective. In the case of The Roar, Ms. Clayton has picked natural resource management, environmental degradation, and (because she is English and name me one English author who doesn't, given the chance) the injustice of class.
Exciting, beautiful, gut-wrenching stuff, fully on par with, say, Jo Walton and other adult sci-fi writers. Cyborg animals, fighter planes, high-stakes video games, diverse characters, mutations, truly dreadful villains, and food made of mold! No wonder it nearly crests the 500 page mark. The ending feels a little rushed perhaps, but by the time I hit it, I was so swept away that I did not mind.
0 Comments on The Roar by Emma Clayton - review as of 8/11/2009 7:05:00 PM
Snow Falling in Spring by Moying Li I have to say, I always found the story of Mao's War on Sparrows to be a little far-fetched. Leader of one of the world's largest countries, and he takes aim at... sparrows? Seems a little petty. On the other hand, commanding every man, woman, and child in China to go outside, 24 hours a day, for weeks, and frighten off millions of tiny birds so that they have nowhere to land and drop dead out of sheer exhaustion? Inconceivably arrogant. Almost an arbitrary exercise of power. Also, I know it was 1958, but surely somebody must have realized that eliminating such a widespread species might have complicated consequences.
All in all, it sounds exactly like the kind of thing some short-sighted, delusional monarch might decree in a fairy tale.
I recently read about it in Sparrow Girl, a picture book set during the Cultural Revolution, written by The Talented Sara Pennypacker (the Clementine books, Pierre In Love) and illustrated by the likewise talented Yoko Tanaka. A little girl rescues a few sparrows from the Sparrow War and keeps them in her family's barn. In spring, when it becomes apparent that the absence of sparrows has caused a proportional increase in the insect population, and crops all across China are being ravaged because of this, she releases the last sparrows in all of China, and there is hope.
It's a lovely book and a sweet story, but it reinforced my "Naw... really? Oh come on," attitude about this event.
But I think Moying Li's memoir (the book I'm actually reviewing), subtitled "Coming of age in China during the Cultural Revolution," finally has me convinced.
And so, day after day we watched the battle unfold as vigilant Beijingers stood their ground. Then, suddenly, sparrows started to fall from the sky, utterly exhausted. Soon there were hardly any left. At dinner one evening, flushed with pride as he waved a copy of the People's Daily, Baba announced that in our city alone we had eradicated over 400,000 sparrows!
Moying Li takes us along as, step by step, her country moves from the excitement and hope that accompanied The Great Leap Forward to the paranoia, zealotry and despair of the Cultural Revolution. Her family goes hungry, is split up, endures denunciation, but ultimately survives and moves forward. The kindness and loyalty that she encountered during these years brought tears to my eyes as I read.
The pace never falters in this gripping memoir. Not too demanding, the book includes some photographs and a helpful glossary (which would have been enhanced by pronunciations - my favorite axe to grind), and would be a spectacular class read, in addition to being a great leisure read.
0 Comments on Snow Falling in Spring by Moying Li - review as of 1/1/1900
The Lindbergh Child (A Treasury of XXth Century Murder) by Rick Geary
It's tough not to love Rick Geary. That fussy, old-fashioned style: all those millions of parallel contour lines, his little crenellated edge lines, the beautiful hand lettering... all of it making everything he illustrates look so elegant and classy and clean. Which is so great, because, by and large, lately, Rick Geary illustrates crime.
This contrast nets the most tee-hees in the truly grisly stories - I think I remember reading The Borden Tragedy when it came out, and I seem to recall he does a nice job with severed limbs - but even absent any gore, The Lindbergh Child is an engrossing read.
I am very pleased to have it as an addition to the True Crime nonfiction shelves, and even more pleased that the lack of nudity or profanity gives me carte blanche to recommend it to anyone who can hack the history. About grade 4 and up.
0 Comments on The Lindbergh Child (A Treasury of XXth Century Murder) by Rick Geary - review as of 10/15/2008 9:02:00 AM
Gone by Michael Grant Postapocalyptic young adult science fiction with a healthy dose of (clean) teen romance. The Stand, minus the cusswords. Left Behind, minus all of the judginess and most (but more about that later) of the sexism.
(And don't look so surprised: I read the first Left Behind book. As hacky postapocalyptic horror goes (think Robert McCammon's Swan Song, a guilty pleasure if there ever was one), it was not bad... but as propaganda, it was mesmerizing. Quite a lot of attention was paid to women: their inherent badness, the ways that they can transcend that badness. (Stay at home, cook regular meals, no smoking. Burqa optional.) This I half-expected, but I was quite surprised at the animosity toward cities. Apparently they're ALL Sodom. Or Gomorrah. And taxi drivers are all thieves.)
That little digression is germane, because Gone is so very like Left Behind in plot. Here's Gone's apocalypse: one afternoon, everyone aged 15 and up disappears from Perdido Beach, California. Upon investigation, the kids discover that their town has been cut off from the rest of the world by a huge, impenetrable bubble - a sphere 20 miles wide centered on the nuclear power plant outside of town.
Luckily for the kids of Perdido Beach, the kids do not leap to the conclusion that everyone else has been Raptured away, and that they have been left behind because they are not worthy of God's love. They spend a fair amount of time just kind of flipping out, before getting down to the business of starting life over after the big Reset button has been pressed, which is always my favorite part of post-apocalyptic fiction. What form of government will be chosen? How will the food supply be rationed? Who will emerge as the natural leaders, engineers, police, child care providers, and doctors after the people who once filled those positions have been done away with?
And, of course, who will emerge as the Bad Guy?
What follows is a fun, not-necessarily-predictable page-turner of a YA novel. There's a fair amount of internal conflict, quite a bit of external conflict, a lot of running around, some of it a little pointless, some supernatural stuff, and, oh yeah, talking coyotes.
Some of the kids develop extra-normal powers: telekinesis, healing touch, superstrength, etc. This is a fine thing for a couple reasons. As anyone who has ever written a comic book knows, superpowers make fight scenes more interesting: they escalate rapidly and end abruptly. Also, that healing touch mitigates some of the not-inconsiderable gore in Gone.
I just wish it wasn't always the girls who make the peanut butter sandwiches, who bail the boat out, take over the day care center and the makeshift hospital. Of the three main female characters, one has the healing touch, one is a strategist, and the third is a "reader": her power is that she can tell how strong another person's power is. And by the end of the book, they all have boyfriends.
Soapbox bonus: I've been thinking about the violence and gore in this book ever since I finished it. These kids lose limbs, live through agonizing pain, die, are burned horribly, and, in one case, turn into gravel. It made me think of movie ratings.
We saw The Dark Knight the day it opened, and I came away very impressed, but also astonished that it was rated PG-13. The physical and emotional violence and the depictions of pain in that movie were profound and disturbing. But there was no sex and very little cussing, which, I guess, puts it at the same level as Transformers if you're the MPAA. It's the same with Gone and many other kid's books. The authors may keep the sex and language extremely muted, but seem to have no such reservations about pain and violence.
Just a thought.
3 Comments on Gone by Michael Grant - review, last added: 8/9/2008
Interesting points all, and true as far as they go, though I'd contend a few points.
It's not only the females who are caretakers: Albert runs the McDonalds and feeds everyone. (He's basically a cook.) And there are also female characters who emerge in other ways in the second book (which I was lucky enough to read in manuscript). To be made more of: Dekka, who is black and gay; as well as Brianna, who is egotistical and foolhardy and not a cook; as well as a few others. But that's a privileged take and so probably not kosher here.
But the violence in the book, while present, isn't actually described very much. So I find the term "gore" to be a bit misleading. The novel is very intense, and there is a lot of violence (death, dismemberment, other horrors), but the writing is careful not to dwell on the descriptions of these things. Intense and disturbing? Hell, yes. Gory? I don't know that I agree.
Love your blog, by the bye. Just great fair-handed reviews of everything.
As the work-at-home father of two young children I want first to say that Mary's child care work may seem like a typically female role, but it isn't in my house.
That aside, you make some interesting points, and I agree with a lot of what you wrote.
I suppose one of the drawbacks to writing a series -- and GONE is slated for more books -- is that I'm seeing, and planning for, what happens over the horizon. So I know what I'm doing with characters long-term. Of course the readers -- lacking psychic powers, sadly -- can only judge what I've actually written.
Which is a long-winded way of admitting that yes, in this book the female characters are often cast in "girl" roles. I start with the world as it is. But that's not where I'm going, not where I'll end up.
In addition to writing as Michael Grant, I am, with my wife, Katherine Applegate, co-author of 150 or so books, the majority of which had female leads or very strong female characters. In ANIMORPHS, for example, the character Rachel started out as the classic pretty girl and ended up as the perfect warrior.
You're mostly right about female characters in GONE. But I doubt you'll feel the same way as the series progresses.
Thanks for reading and reviewing the book. Great site.
Thanks, Michaels, for your insight and your comments.
I had a feeling that Dekka was being set up to play a more central role in the second book - I'll look forward to that!
If I tend to be a bit rigorous in my examination of female characters in juvenile fiction, it's because I have a lot of girl readers teetering at the edge of reading all It Girl, all the time, and I need to chuck something else at them, something that has eye-opening girls in it.
While I have your ear? Didn't put this in the review because it's not germane, but that cover? Yowch. Astrid looks like a Mormon wearing the wrong lipstick. I ran it by the other librarians, and most thought it was Christian fiction, which, you know, is a pretty hard sell in YA. The book deserves better representation.
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow Marcus is the kind of kid whose best friend gets him a biography of Alan Turing for his fourteenth birthday. A boy who spoofs gait-recognition software by putting gravel in his shoes. He's the kid who hacked the spyware-infested and adware-infested laptops the school system provides. Smart and sneaky, Marcus might as well have been born with a Question Authority bumper sticker slapped across his butt. Not the kind of kid to take five days of detention and questioning (aka imprisonment and browbeating) by the Department of Homeland Security lying down.
Cory Doctorow weaves a lot of interesting set pieces, e-culture references, and technical explanations into this tale of cyber disobedience and the power of ideas. I guarantee that any reader will learn something new. You may know what a Sailor Moon outfit looks like, and you may understand how public keys work and how to make them. You may have read about how to make a video camera sniffer using a toilet paper tube on Instructables (and in fact, that Instructable may have been written by Marcus), but... how's your Bayesian analysis? Did you know that your digital camera "signs" each shot with unique metadata - meaning your every capture can be traced back to your machine? And did you know that Kerouac wrote On the Road on a big long scroll of paper?
Well, ok, everyone knows that last one.
Little Brother is a terrific adventure. Its protagonist is resourceful and brilliant but also thoughtful and real. But what really distinguishes this book is the voice of Cory Doctorow, patiently and passionately explaining why privacy is important, why dissent is crucial to democracy, and what can happen when we forget that. Oh, and he also slags Microsoft without hesitation every chance he gets - giving the book that whiff of honesty that teens crave.
Like Halting State for teens. Like So Yesterday for geeks. Like 1984 for today (and with a happier ending). And when they're finished with this one, start 'em on Gibson and Philip K. Dick.
1 Comments on Little Brother by Cory Doctorow - review, last added: 7/10/2008
Peak by Roland Smith I really enjoyed Smith's Cryptid Hunters, a page-turning, funny adventure story of two siblings and their globe-trotting uncle (father). Featuring nefarious villains and their henchmen, resourceful young people who confront their fears, and guest appearances by mokele-mbembe and Sasquatch, Cryptid Hunters pretty much hit all my buttons.
Reading the jacket copy for Peak, I expected much of the same. Peak is a teenager in New York City who is a born mountain climber. The city is not his natural habitat, and he gets into big trouble. In swoops his estranged father, Josh, a world-famous climber, who trundles Peak off to Asia, buys him a bunch of climbing gear, and leaves him in the care of a Sherpa monk in Kathmandu. From there, we're off to Mount Everest at a breakneck pace. So far, so good: globe-trotting parent, exotic locale, physical challenges, extremely rapid pace.
And there's no doubt, Peak is another page-turner. There's an interesting supporting cast, and the climb itself is described so vividly that I felt compelled to pull out our DVD of Everest: The Death Zone for accompanying visuals. Loyalties are called into question as Peak confronts his limitations, and eventually, after Learning Something About Himself, he resolves his moral dilemma and gains perspective on his life.
Given this book's strengths, do I have to quibble with it? Well, apparently so. In the first place, I think the story suffers somewhat for the lack of a female contemporary for Peak. Also, Smith misses an opportunity to give even a brief overview of China's history with Tibet, especially since the bad guy in this show is a Chinese military man, and the border between Tibet and Nepal drives much of the plot. But it's a fine book.
0 Comments on Peak by Roland Smith - review as of 1/1/1990
“That’s straight up Amy Lee from Evanescence, playing the guitar and singing about cartoons! What? Who? Where? What portal did we walk through this time?”
“It’s a LadyStar Video Alert! I got Talitha-chan to find us a fun video to put up so we could have a video alert like Acey-san!”
“Yeah it’s a LadyStar video alert. You savvy?”
“Ha! We’ve gone officially out of our own tree!”
“Heheheeee… see? We can do videos just like Gamepowa ’cause we got Talitha-chan and she’s super-smart about computers just like Acey-san!”
“That is just too cool for words. Rock on, Amy! Rock on, Professor! Rock on, LadyStar Video Alerts! We are OUT!”
, a picture book set during the Cultural Revolution, written by The Talented Sara Pennypacker (the 
books, 
) and illustrated by the likewise talented 
when it came out, and I seem to recall he does a nice job with severed limbs - but even absent any gore, 
, minus the cusswords. 
, minus all of the judginess and most (but more about that later) of the sexism.
, a guilty pleasure if there ever was one), it was not bad... but as propaganda, it was mesmerizing. Quite a lot of attention was paid to women: their inherent badness, the ways that they can transcend that badness. (Stay at home, cook regular meals, no smoking. Burqa optional.) This I half-expected, but I was quite surprised at the animosity toward cities. Apparently they're ALL Sodom. Or Gomorrah. And taxi drivers are all thieves.)
is so very like Left Behind in plot. Here's Gone's apocalypse: one afternoon, everyone aged 15 and up disappears from Perdido Beach, California. Upon investigation, the kids discover that their town has been cut off from the rest of the world by a huge, impenetrable bubble - a sphere 20 miles wide centered on the nuclear power plant outside of town.
for his fourteenth birthday. A boy who spoofs gait-recognition software by putting gravel in his shoes. He's the kid who hacked the spyware-infested and adware-infested laptops the school system provides. Smart and sneaky, Marcus might as well have been born with a 
is a terrific adventure. Its protagonist is resourceful and brilliant but also thoughtful and real. But what really distinguishes this book is the voice of Cory Doctorow, patiently and passionately explaining why privacy is important, why dissent is crucial to democracy, and what can happen when we forget that. Oh, and he also slags Microsoft without hesitation every chance he gets - giving the book that whiff of honesty that teens crave.
for teens. Like 
for geeks. Like 
for today (and with a happier ending). And when they're finished with this one, start 'em on Gibson and Philip K. Dick.
, a page-turning, funny adventure story of two siblings and their globe-trotting uncle (father). Featuring nefarious villains and their henchmen, resourceful young people who confront their fears, and guest appearances by mokele-mbembe and Sasquatch, 
for accompanying visuals. Loyalties are called into question as Peak confronts his limitations, and eventually, after Learning Something About Himself, he resolves his moral dilemma and gains perspective on his life.
Interesting points all, and true as far as they go, though I'd contend a few points.
It's not only the females who are caretakers: Albert runs the McDonalds and feeds everyone. (He's basically a cook.) And there are also female characters who emerge in other ways in the second book (which I was lucky enough to read in manuscript). To be made more of: Dekka, who is black and gay; as well as Brianna, who is egotistical and foolhardy and not a cook; as well as a few others. But that's a privileged take and so probably not kosher here.
But the violence in the book, while present, isn't actually described very much. So I find the term "gore" to be a bit misleading. The novel is very intense, and there is a lot of violence (death, dismemberment, other horrors), but the writing is careful not to dwell on the descriptions of these things. Intense and disturbing? Hell, yes. Gory? I don't know that I agree.
Love your blog, by the bye. Just great fair-handed reviews of everything.
As the work-at-home father of two young children I want first to say that Mary's child care work may seem like a typically female role, but it isn't in my house.
That aside, you make some interesting points, and I agree with a lot of what you wrote.
I suppose one of the drawbacks to writing a series -- and GONE is slated for more books -- is that I'm seeing, and planning for, what happens over the horizon. So I know what I'm doing with characters long-term. Of course the readers -- lacking psychic powers, sadly -- can only judge what I've actually written.
Which is a long-winded way of admitting that yes, in this book the female characters are often cast in "girl" roles. I start with the world as it is. But that's not where I'm going, not where I'll end up.
In addition to writing as Michael Grant, I am, with my wife, Katherine Applegate, co-author of 150 or so books, the majority of which had female leads or very strong female characters. In ANIMORPHS, for example, the character Rachel started out as the classic pretty girl and ended up as the perfect warrior.
You're mostly right about female characters in GONE. But I doubt you'll feel the same way as the series progresses.
Thanks for reading and reviewing the book. Great site.
-- Michael Grant
Thanks, Michaels, for your insight and your comments.
I had a feeling that Dekka was being set up to play a more central role in the second book - I'll look forward to that!
If I tend to be a bit rigorous in my examination of female characters in juvenile fiction, it's because I have a lot of girl readers teetering at the edge of reading all It Girl, all the time, and I need to chuck something else at them, something that has eye-opening girls in it.
While I have your ear? Didn't put this in the review because it's not germane, but that cover? Yowch. Astrid looks like a Mormon wearing the wrong lipstick. I ran it by the other librarians, and most thought it was Christian fiction, which, you know, is a pretty hard sell in YA. The book deserves better representation.