Nebula reading extravaganza, YA Novel Edition

First, methodology--I read a number of YA novels during the year, but didn't keep explicit track of them. Unfortunately, most of them struck me as pleasant but forgettable--for instance, Suzanne Collins's MOCKINGJAY which was the final, bottom point on a sharp slope moving straight down from the well-done first book in the series, HUNGER GAMES.

I picked up a few extra books to read in the last week or two. I found books by checking the following sources: recommendations from friends and acquaintances; solicitation of authors, editors, and critics; and sifting through the Nebula tally list (which is attached to the SFWA forums and is recording nominated works, but not vote counts, so it functions like a recommendation list; very useful).

I used other techniques to rustle up short stories, novelettes, and novellas, but for reasons of time, I needed to limit the number of novels I read, so I didn't probe as widely. Also, I was pickier about what made it onto my list, favoring books that were recommended more than once and books by authors whose work I had already enjoyed.

This system creates a bias in which I'm more likely to pick up books by authors I've already read, but I hope that the redundant methods (in which I pick up books that are recommended more than once) compensate for that.

I did not read books that were the latest in a series I hadn't read before, such as Tim Pratt's BROKEN MIRRORS. Holly Black's WHITE CAT was on my list of books to read, but ended up getting cut because I didn't have time (it was on the bottom of my list because I disliked the synopsis).

So, to the meat of the thing:

YA NOVEL RECOMMENDATIONS


HEREVILLE by Barry Deutsch -- A graphic novel detailing the adventures of Mirka, a ten-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl who lives in a Yiddish-speaking, Hassidic enclave, and who wants to get a sword and fight monsters. The graphic novel is free and fun and sometimes silly with occasional breaks into emotional depth and the explorations of Mirka's family. It's garnered very good reviews from a number of sources. I mention the reviews because my attachment to this novel is suspect. I think it's just the best thing ever, but the author is a friend of mine, and I've been one of his first readers since it was a self-published chapbook that predated the mass market publication. I love this book, but don't take my word for it.

SHIP BREAKER by Paolo Bacigalupi - I reviewed this recently, so I won't go over the whole thing again, but I really got into the emotional journey of this book, from the intense world building to the well-rendered characters. It's difficult to compare this book to HEREVILLE--apples to oranges, humor to wrenching, a sheltered ten-year-old to an impoverished teenage laborer--both are very good at very different things.

I SHALL WEAR MIDNIGHT by Terry Pratchett - This is the latest in Pratchett's Tiffany Aching series. I enjoyed it a bit more than the others; Tiffany's moral universe is growing more complex. There was a bitter sadness to the subplots about loss that gave some of the imagery a poetic depth beyond its service in the plot. The endnote about Pratchett's childhood also gave me a sense of longing and nostalgia, put in tension with the disappearing origins of the lifestyle on Tiffany's chalk. Of course, these themes stand out more strikingly in all of Pratchett's work since his alzheimer's diagnosis; it's possible I imagine or overemphasize them. But it does seem that there's a bit of the loving, but slightly bitter (on my end as a reader), goodbye in the novels that have come out since his announcement. In a twitter discussion about the book, my friend Sarah said that she thought the plot of this one was a mess... and really, I suppose there may not be a lot of coherence to the big, bad magic threat and its big, bad magic quest to be big, bad, magically destructive. But it seems to me that's true of most (though not all) Pratchett books, and it's really orthogonal to why I read and enjoy them.

WHO FEARS DEATH by Nnedi Okorafor - I didn't totally immerse in this one, and I think that was probably partially arbitrary, and partially for structural reasons--while the novel covered a great breadth of events, it sometimes spent many pages on relatively minor incidents, and few pages on major ones. That's a pet peeve of mine. I was also sort of shocked that the book was YA (I don't know if it was marketed that way or not, but it showed up in the Norton tallies) given some of the discussion of female genital surgeries and war crimes--but once I got over being surprised, I really liked that element. Teenagers aren't fragile flowers. They live in this world, good and bad. Anyway, the way it dealt with the violence was really interesting (though I don't want to analyze it in depth in a short review, partially for spoilery reasons), the magic was fabulously interesting, the landscape and world was transporting, the hints of how it came to be compelling, and Onyseonwu an entertainingly hard-scrabble narrator, sometimes very sympathetic, sometimes very annoying, just like real people. The epic scope of this novel and its magical vision of a world blending science fiction and fantasy were striking and unusual.

GUARDIAN OF THE DEAD by Karen Healey - I didn't like this book as much as the other four, but it was still enjoyable. It tells the story of a teenage girl in New Zealand who discovers she has magic powers and interacts with the local equivalent of the fae. The magic system was cool and it was really neat to see someone bringing in mythology from New Zealand. I liked the characters, and I was entertained by the adventure. But it didn't really break out of that "this is pleasant" zone for me.