This review appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction in April, 2011. The original much longer essay appears on my Goodreads blog under the title Notes on the 2010 Sunburst Award. It includes discussions of several other 2009 speculative titles published by Canadians.

Raven

Chairing the Sunburst jury for the 2010 awards coincided with leaving behind a lifelong cigarette habit. I contented myself with bits of teaching and editing and this and that. I had to prioritize it, everyone said, or the whole project would nosedive. If I didn’t write while I quit, so be it. What’s the rest of your life worth? So, in a way, the timing of the jury was a blessing. Unable to write, I could read all I wanted. Unable to really write, I drafted voluminous notes for books on my personal shortlist, especially for the YA category. I like to get more than one use out of a piece of writing when I can, and hence include below some of these notes, on occasion slightly revised. I think I drove my fellow jurors crazy. These favourites of my own all ended up not as finalists but as Honourable Mentions except for Half World, which won the Sunburst for YA, and Dragon Seer, which didn’t appear on any of our final lists.


Raven by Allison van Diepen

Raven stands out for its sensuality; protagonist Nicole/Raven’s love of break dancing and the physicality of her doomed crush on Zin suffuse the book. The dance club Evermore and accompanying cultural milieu are interesting and unusual; the descriptions of lower Manhattan feel real enough to this reviewer who lived there for a while back in the day; van Diepen too taught and wrote in Brooklyn for a time. However, without knowledge of hip hop dance the terminology peppered throughout leaves us in the dark. Another flaw is the sketchy description of the history and provenance of the esoteric lineage of vampiric soul eaters or whatever the Jiang Shi even are; van Diepen’s version seems to stray from the traditional Chinese zombie folklore. What pulses here is the relationship between Zin and Nic/Raven. Their concern for one another is aptly drawn and refreshing; the last thing Zin wants is for Raven to give herself away, even when it’s what she thinks she wants, mainly to escape from the difficulties at home, which include an addict brother. Zin and Raven’s conversations move from dance talk to philosophical discussions and this combination seems as accurate a portrayal as any of the passions of the young. What is evidenced by their subtle and shifting friendship is that both Nic and Zin are connected to the eternal, in spite of their age differences. A book for Stephanie Meyer fans only better, some say.