Larkstorm opens like many mainstream dystopian novels. Lark Greene is a young student preparing h...moreFull review at the Intergalactic Academy.
Larkstorm opens like many mainstream dystopian novels. Lark Greene is a young student preparing herself for her job placement. She the daughter of a societal leader in a strictly regimented society where citizens hide away from mysterious, evil “Sensitives”–beings who were once known as witches. Though most of her school mates are also awaiting their marriage contracts, Lark herself has already been bound–at seven, to her best friend, Beck. But then Beck is accused of being a Sensitive himself, and she’s plunged into an adventure that takes her far away from her school, her former life, and her comfort zone.
If all this makes you think that you’re in for a light SF, dystopian read, then think again. It does, in fact, open as a stock dystopian–and the first third is set in a world heavily redolent of novels such as Matched and Delirium. It also opens with many of the flaws inherent in such dystopian novels. There’s the hazy history, the strictures against sex or relationships that seem less sensible and present mostly to provide angst. But Lark is a fairly compelling character, with a strong voice and a lightly wry sense of humor, and her relationship with Beck–innocent, affectionate, charming–better rendered than what you find in most dystopian novels.
Then the book undergoes one of the most bizarre genre shifts I’ve ever seen in a YA novel.
Halfway through, we learn that all these Sensitives really are witches. And both Beck and Lark are actually completely enmeshed in witch politics. Lark enters a palatial summer estate that’s encased from the winter by a magical snowglobe-type barrier, and the witches there start to teach her how to harness her powers. Suddenly we’re in witch school! In the middle of a war between two types of witches!
I found this all very jarring.
I’d heard that Larkstorm was a fantasy. However, the ideas and worldbuilding are communicated in a way far more common to paranormal romance. It’s recounted in breezy conversation, or through training sequences. There are plenty of artificial, magical reasons provided why Lark and Beck cannot be together and a host of magically-driven (rather than, say, character-driven) conflicts. Though Miller does an admirable job in imagining the histories and even family trees of her universe, it never quite came together for me in a way that felt fully-formed and real.
I think this is, in part, because even in light dystopian, a reader has to piece together the rules of the universe slowly over the course of a book. I felt I had really only just begun to get a handle on the rules here when those rules were flatly negated. One-by-one, characters came out of the woodwork to assure Lark that everything she knew about them was a lie. But I simply didn’t understand their relationships to Lark well enough to begin with for such developments to feel shocking or resonant. I spent the middle third of the novel disoriented, putting the pieces back together, trying to locate myself–and Lark–within her universe.
By the end, I did recover–and by Larkstorm‘s end, the primacy of the tender relationship between Lark and Beck is once again asserted. It’s a genuinely sweet, healthy adolescent love (rare for PNR!), and the prose centered upon their relationship is some of the novel’s strongest. Once I accepted that yes, indeed, I was reading a paranormal romance, I found myself enjoying the book quite a bit.
But as a whole, I found the composition frustrating and disorienting. I’m not really sure whether the dystopian opening was necessary, and in some ways, it felt like the author’s heart wasn’t quite as invested in the world there as the one encountered later in the novel. I suspect that paranormal fans will enjoy this–provided they get past the first third, to Larkstorm‘s more fitting and heartfelt witchy world–and it’s certainly as strong as many traditionally published YA romances. But readers looking for a sci-fi flavored fantasy are likely best giving it a pass.(less)
When I first downloaded Stolen Innocence, a memoir of a fundamentalist childhood and adolescence by former FLDS member Elissa Wall, I expected the sto...moreWhen I first downloaded Stolen Innocence, a memoir of a fundamentalist childhood and adolescence by former FLDS member Elissa Wall, I expected the story to be a rehash of what I've read before. I've done a fair amount of reading about fundamental Mormonism in other memoirs, such as in Irene Spencer's Shattered Dreams. I read Shattered Dreams with an almost lascivious glee, fascinated by the polygamist drama of her marriage even I was disgusted by how she was forced to have baby upon baby as both her body and her spirit were almost broken.
In some ways, Wall's book is not as successful as Spencer's, and the differences are immediately clear. The prose is flat. Wall's narration proceeds in an almost droning monotone, as she recounts one event after another in simple chronological order. While this is, perhaps, true to the "stuff" of life--we get to hear about everything, from the toys she coveted to fairly pedestrian friendships she made--it's not always riveting reading, particularly through the memoir's first third. Here, Wall lives a still-recognizable modern life, despite her fundamentalist upbringing. Though her mother is the second of three wives (and though, here, we get to hear about the typical jealous tensions these polygamous arrangements bring), Wall seems to be a fairly happy child, despite frequent illnesses and some discord within her household.
In a way, though, the wooden prose and the bland narration lulls the reader into a certain type of complacency which almost makes the memoir more effective. When Wall relates that her mother was forced to divorce her father not once, but twice--and later reassigned to a new husband--it's in the same plain-spoken voice as everything else, which makes it all the more frightening.
Likewise shocking in its matter-of-fact tone is the revelation halfway into the memoir that Elissa is to be married off at fourteen to her first cousin, a twenty-year-old man she does not remotely like. Like many readers, young Elissa believed such child marriages to be a thing of the past--this renders her account all the more brutal. She repeatedly rejoins church leaders, her mothers, and her sisters to not force her into the marriage. Even prophet Rulon Jeffs admonishes her at one point to "follow her heart"--to no avail. Elissa is married, sobbing and pleading, at the age of fourteen. From there, her life takes a brutal turn: she's regularly beaten and raped by her husband, suffers multiple miscarriages and a still-birth, and pleads repeatedly to be "released" from her marriage, only to be ignored and shamed for her failure to fulfill her role as a submissive woman.
I didn't expect to be shocked by this account--in some ways, Irene Spencer's was no less brutal--but the degree to which this modern girl (younger than I am!) was systematically failed by the adults around her--the way her religion conspired to break down the sisterhood between the women in this community but instead pitted them against one another in the hopes for eternal salvation, and the way the children of Wall's family were consistently failed--was both chilling and fascinating. Those the prose continues to plod forward right up through Wall's trial against Jeffs, the court testimony (obviously lifted verbatim and much stronger than the language used throughout) was both stirring and horrifying. Whereas Spencer's memoir seemed to be an account of how one woman's religious beliefs were used to constrain and narrow her choices, making her unwittingly complicit in the horror of her life, Wall's is the story of what happens to the children of polygamy when they refuse to comply--when they refuse to be broken even when their religion, their culture, and the adults around them all conspire to destroy their spirits in favor of creating submissive, "sweet" girls. It's worth a read, both as a contrasting account of modern FLDS life, and a reminder of the horrors that are still out there today, in modern America, for hundreds of living, breathing, hurting women and girls.(less)
At first glance, Daughter of the Centaurs by Kate Klimo contains all the ingredients for a great Y...moreFull review at the Intergalactic Academy
At first glance, Daughter of the Centaurs by Kate Klimo contains all the ingredients for a great YA novel. It’s got an intriguing premise–it’s the story of Malora, the last human on Earth, and how she comes to join a society of centaurs after the apocalypse destroys human society. The setting is very detailed. While it nominally takes place somewhere on the African continent, the centaur society contained within is very well-developed and, initially, appears to be rigorously thought-through. Malora, twelve at the outset of the novel but fifteen during the bulk of the action, is a practical, hardened survivor, not unlike Katniss Everdeen. She’s the type of heroine many YA readers (myself included) love.
Unfortunately “many promising components” does not a “good book” make. Sadly, I didn’t enjoy Daughter of the Centaurs for all I hoped that it would be a rousing and fresh YA tale. My first problem was with the narration. I was immediately struck by how simplistic it was. Though it makes some sense that the novel is told in present tense–Malora herself is a character who lives very much in the present–the story nevertheless felt as though it was being told at an odd arm’s length. The descriptions of characters felt muffled; their reactions far removed from the novel’s events. Events and worldbuilding, when not imparted through dialogue, were described in a plodding, methodical, almost clinical way.
The first several chapters still held some promise. Malora is part of a tribe of humans who utilize very primitive technology to keep afloat. She learns how to train horses from her father. When her tribe is destroyed, she takes to the plains, raising and breeding a herd of horses. These chapters are the novel’s best, and while not exactly riveting, the relationships between Malora and the “Ironbound Furies,” as the horses come to be called, are quite well-realized.
But I can’t say the same about her relationships with any of the centaur characters.
Klimo’s very evidently done a great deal of work with her centaur society. She’s developed laws, class stratification, a job system, architecture, entertainment. And, as Malora comes to join the Highlander society, we get to learn all about it. For roughly two hundred pages, she’s given a tour of the centaur world, where she asks bland questions about the underpinnings of this world and where Orion, her centaur host, obligatorily answers them. I love rich worldbuilding, but I found this incalculably boring. Eventually (after the novel put me to sleep), I realized why–there is no conflict between the characters here. The stakes are kept very, very low. We never fear for Malora’s safety. We never worry that she’ll be “turned out,” despite vague warnings to that effect. She encounters obstacles, but those sort of . . . roll off her back with little impact on the plot’s development. In truth, when she’s told, at one point, that she cannot choose blacksmithing as her career, I failed to feel even the slightest flame of sympathy for her. In fact, I felt nothing. What did it matter, anyway? I had no idea what Malora liked (beyond horses) or wanted (beyond being with her horses, who she inexplicably left behind with another caretaker for all we’re told she cared).
This general lack of conflict was very strange considering the social stratification, sexism, and racism inherent in Klimo’s centaur society. The centaurs are broken up into two groups, the noble Highlanders, and the peasant Lowlanders, but the peasants seem to accept their poverty with nary a neigh of protest. The women are all subjugated, forced to cover up in fear of “inflaming” the passions of the male centaurs–but other than some vague mumblings about how sad it would be if Malora had to cover her long red hair, this is summarily accepted, as well. Worst of all were the race of cat people willingly indentured for life to the centaurs. The Twani were one of the worst examples of a “happy slave” race I’ve ever seen in either sci-fi or fantasy. While there is ample opportunity for someone to comment on how messed up it is that these half-cat creatures very literally work themselves to death–and that the centaurs have plentiful chances to liberate them, but instead choose to take advantage of them–it never happens. Instead, we’re asked to just accept the fact that these plucky catmen wish to live in service of the centaurs because of some memory of racial debt. Dated and offensive, tropes like these really need to go.
Because of all of the above, I had quite a bit of trouble with my time spent in centaur society. I suppose that I was supposed to find it all rich and captivating, but instead I was unsettled and disquieted. There was opportunity here to eventually reveal the society as dystopic–and Klimo almost does, near the novel’s end. But instead we’re suddenly plunged back into truly trifling matters. The conclusion concerns not, say, societal overhaul, or Malora’s rejection of the centaur who has made her his (ugh) “pet,” but instead a horse race. Really. And, while I’m fond of horses myself, I did not much care whether Malora won, or lost, at this juncture. I’d gone cold to her, and her concerns–and the novel did little to convince me to feel otherwise.
Daughter of the Centaurs could conceivably appeal to readers who really, really like horse books, and those who don’t mind dated societal metaphor without any accompanying social commentary in their fantastic fiction.(less)
Reading John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars was not the sobbing, revelatory experience that it seems to have been for so many other readers. Much of t...moreReading John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars was not the sobbing, revelatory experience that it seems to have been for so many other readers. Much of this difference is likely biographical. I’m familiar with death, for one thing—dad died when I was 8, grandmother at 12, other grandmother at 18, grandfather at 22, and my mother has struggled off and on with thyroid cancer for the past six years. But it’s not only these death experiences that have changed me. At the age of 21, I was overtaken by a sudden and startling awareness of my mortality and it took me years to shake off (if I have even shaken it off—it’s a process, always). At 21, I was watching too much Six Feet Under and my mother was sick and I was too often sottish, staring up at the ceiling droning into the darkness “I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
I guess you could say I have a Death Thing. Maybe it’s in my blood—my father, before he died, was hung up on drawing buzzards. “He was always whining about it,” my mother said.
My attitude about death is pretty close to Hazel’s (or at least, Hazel’s in the beginning of the book), in that I now acknowledge my death and its inevitability but having acknowledged that, then, thanks, no, I really don’t want to talk about it. I recognize that Real Life isn’t the peaceful moments between crises but rather those long nights in the emergency room, or the hospital room, or listening to someone’s life wheeze out or whatever. I can tell you that I spend a not-insignificant number of nights holding my husband and contemplating how one day this living flesh will be indistinguishable from meat. I also recognize that I might seem avoidant. No, I don’t want to kiss my grandfather’s waxy-faced corpse. No, I don’t want to sit here and eulogize in a way that seems like a betrayal of my memory of the dead. I honestly think society’s attitudes toward death are fucked up and I know from experience that when someone dies, the rest of us get wild-eyed and childish and grubby, panicking about our own mortality, and about stuff (“When you die,” my father said, “the buzzards come”). We say that there are many ways to grieve, but that’s not reflected in the narrative given to us by the media or our families, which is that you must put on a good public face, because funerals are for the living, and if you do not grieve in a neat, easily compartmentalized way, then you might as well be alive because we really don’t want your grief or your apparent lack of grief messing up our funeral.
So, feelings. So, context.
For me, for a book to be an anti-cancer-book book, it would have to refuse to give in to this narrative. It would have to be better, more personalized, messier, real. It would have to be like this funeral, in book form. Some novels skirt close to it for me (Speaker for the Dead, A Monsters Calls), but I don’t think that The Fault in Our Stars quite achieves what it set out to do, at least according to my standards, which are admittedly unrealistically high. Here’s why:
The biggest problem here is voice. Other reviewers have said that this is a Dawson’s novel in which every preternaturally intelligent and educated adolescent character sounds like John Green. I think this is mostly only true in the beginning, where unfortunately it’s the most important. Funny thing is, I bought Hazel and Hazel’s voice. She’s an avoidant, over-educated, under-socialized kid whose parents treat her brilliance as precious and who reads a metric shit-ton of books. I believed her vocabulary, her sphere of reference.
The problem was really Augustus. There’s an undercurrent in the novel that Augustus isn’t as brilliant as he appears, and that both he and Hazel know this. He’s no writer. He doesn’t know Howl. He reads crap books. Hazel tells us again and again that she likes him because he’s hot. I suspect most readers see this more as cute sarcasm than anything else, but Hazel really isn’t all that cute, is she? I think she’s being honest here, showing her true feelings. But at the outset of the novel—less so as we become more deeply enmeshed in the narrative—Augustus comes off like the contemporary nerd version of the paranormal romance hero. With his implausibly large vocabulary, he seems like wish fulfillment tailor made for Hazel, but his metaphorical acts and manner of speech contradict what we later come to know about him. Namely, he’s really not so smart, not so sensitive or brilliant.
Significant, I think, is the novel in this book—not An Imperial Affliction but a bad SF novel called The Blood Approves. If you missed it, the title is a reference to a Cummings poem:
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
While that might all sound, at first glance, to be whoa romantic, it’s actually kind of terrible. Cumming’s lady is worried that she’s too dumb for him. He agrees that yeah, she’s dumb, but it doesn’t matter, because she’s hot—and that counts way more than brains. And some day we're going to die and it's for good, so let's make with the kissing, baby.
At first I thought that this might have been meant as a reveal of Augustus’s feelings toward Hazel—but as I read, I realized that, in truth, it’s how Hazel feels about Augustus. She knows that he’s pretentious and ridiculous and dumb. But she doesn’t care, because he’s cute, because having already come to terms with her death, she’s living in the present and taking what experiences that she can, and that means making out and sexytimes.
What happens, then, through Hazel’s arc feels almost like a betrayal of this. It’s not that Hazel falls more deeply for Augustus—that I can believe. She’s sixteen and it’s hard not to fall for a cute boy who is dying and who takes you on a trip to Europe to visit your favorite author. Instead, as the plot plays out, Hazel begins to become a character in a cancer book. There are promises that the dying party will fight to live, the very attitudes that she herself has previously rejected. She learns to play her part in the Western narrative of grief, becoming a puppet for acceptable attitudes at funerals even as she’s rejecting the falsity of facebook wall posts. She opens up to her parents, but in a way, it feels more like a surrender than a conscious choice. We have no other narrative about death. Hazel is not allowed to build her own, despite everything she’s seen and knows that contradicts this, and so she buys into it.
How depressing. And not in an ugly tears way, but in a sigh-of-resignation sort of way.
Some parts of this novel were pitch perfect for me: Van Houten is a great send-up of a broken literary writer. The plot felt fully formed in a way that no other Green books have—it’s mature and while there are areas of tiresome excess (the 300 play-by-play, the way the story stops so that Green can explain Maslow’s hierarchy of needs), it tells a story and it tells it cohesively and well. But I wanted more complexity, and depth. I think this would have been easy to achieve: had Augustus not been so unrealistically perfect a match for Hazel at the outset—had he seemed more true to life as a video game playing, crap-media consuming boy--then the layer of the narrative that suggests that this pair was not truly “for each other” would have been stronger. The line at the end about their love not being “puppy love” would have been complicated and bittersweet, rather than pat affirmation. Are Green and Hazel guilty of doing exactly what they disparage others for? Were they afraid to make Augustus more obviously complex because he’s a cancer kid and you can’t really make cancer kids pretentious horn-dogs in books without suggesting that they have some deep insight to the universe under their sickly surfaces? I understand that Green wanted to give us a real ending here—he tells us that he believes endings are part of the contract between reader and writer, and he pays out on that promise. But real endings can have complexity and nuance, too. This had the potential to develop those nuances, but it ultimately shied away from that for a conclusion that we’ve seen before.
(Augustus becomes, in this simplified narrative, a rare male subversion of the MPDG trope—less a person and more a quirky plot device meant to bring hardened Hazel into the realm of the living, no matter how briefly. It bothers me less here than in Green’s other books, because our society objectifies girls all the time and boys, not so much, so, sure, render him an object, not a character; I’m cool with that.)
Still, this is an eminently readable book, and I found myself reflected here even if I didn’t agree with the ultimate conclusions that Green seemed to bring us to. It’s a thoughtful novel, and reflects more complex feelings about death than what we typically find in media for teens. If it wasn’t a revelation for me, well then, that’s okay. I have my own feelings, books that speak to me, personal experiences that have made me who I am.
And no, I really don’t want to talk about them.(less)
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