Now that the ARCs of Variant are spreading, I’m starting to get a few reviews trickling in. The one that has me all kinds of excited today is from Kirkus, the notoriously difficult-to-please book review magazine. The review:

Wells introduces Benson Fisher, a teen in search of a “real” life instead of a long series of unwanted foster homes—but instead of the utopia he’s searching for, he finds the direct opposite.

Benson thinks he’s found the perfect school in Maxfield Academy, a private school in the wilds of New Mexico. Winning a scholarship with unexpected ease, he looks forward to establishing real friendships and getting a good education at last. What he finds, however, is far from normal. Within minutes of the front doors closing—and locking—behind him, he finds himself in a fight for his life. He joins a gang, the Variants, just to survive. With no adults on campus, classes are taught by fellow students, punishments are passed on by computer and nothing seems to follow a logical path. Benson decides it’s time to make a run for it, until he finds out that no one makes it out of Maxfield…not alive, at any rate. Benson’s account unfolds in a speedy, unadorned first person, doling information out to readers as he learns it himself.

Hard to put down from the very first page, this fast-paced novel with Stepford overtones answers only some of the questions it poses, holding some of the most tantalizing open for the next installment in a series that is anything but ordinary. (Thriller. 12 & up)

Isn’t that awesome?

Another recent quote that both pleases me and makes me giggle is from Michelle Hodkin, author of the upcoming The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer. According to Michelle, Variant is:

Phenomenal, and replete with WTFery.

Several weeks ago I compared two books that were very similar in premise but very different in execution. One was Life as We Knew it, a YA apocalyptic novel about a teenage girl and her family hiding in their home as natural disasters dramatically change the world around them. The other was In a Perfect World, in which a 30-something woman and her family hiding in her home as an epidemic dramatically changes the world around them.  The premises are extremely similar, yet the books are surprisingly different in tone and style. Both are enjoyable, and the fact that they’re similar doesn’t diminish either.

So, after having written about that, it was with great delight that I stumbled upon two more books with similar premises, but with extremely different executions.

The first is Paranormalcy, a YA paranormal romance by Kiersten White. The story follows Evie, a sixteen-year-old girl who works for the International Paranormal Containment Agency (IPCA). Evie has the remarkable ability to see through other paranormals’ glamours: instead of seeing a suave and seductive vampire, she can see the shriveled, skeletal undead creature underneath. Since she’s seemingly the only person on earth with this power, Evie is a highly-prized and powerful monster hunter. She can pick paranormals (vampires, werewolves, hags, etc) out of a crowd easily, and ambush them.

My favorite part of this book, hands-down, is the voice. The first-person narrative is irreverent, sarcastic, and sassy–but also vulnerable and self-conscious. Evie, despite her job, is still a teenage girl. (Her taser is pink, and she names it Tasey.)

The other book is Monster Hunter International, by Larry Correia.  The premise is similar: there’s an international agency tasked with capturing and killing paranormal monsters (including many of the same ones Evie fights: werewolves, vampires, etc), and the main character is a star member of the team.

The difference is that Monster Hunter International is written by a gun nut, for gun nuts. (Larry told me that while he may not be a bestseller in New York, he’s a bestseller in Baghdad.) The main character, Owen, is a former professional (underworld) fighter, a gun aficionado, and he manages to kill a werewolf with his bare hands in the first chapter. Rather than the IPCA’s attempts at capture and containment (in Paranormalcy), Monster Hunter International is more inclined toward machine guns and flame throwers.

Evie’s taser is named Tasey. Owen’s automatic shotgun is named Abomination.

And both books are phenomenally fun. I’m not sure which one I liked more–I loved them both.  It just goes to show–once again–that two authors can take similar ideas and create two entirely different (and fantastic) stories.

This blog is filled with spoilers, from one end to the other, so stop now if you care about that kind of thing.

SPOILERS! SPOILERS!

Well, now that those people are gone, we can talk about things openly. (Man, I hate those guys.)

First, I just need to make a complaint. I like to support bookstores and such, but I ended up trying to buy this book at Walmart (because I work in a cultural wasteland that has no bookstores, and I was buying this on my lunch break). (That cultural wasteland is: West Valley City.) Anyway, Walmart failed me. They didn’t have Mockingjay anywhere–no displays, no shelf space, no anything–and this was the day after the book came out! I had to go next door to the Sears Grand, if you can imagine. They seemed shocked to have a customer (and rightly so, because their shelves were mostly empty). But, they had Mockingjay, and I purchased it, and the fourteen dollars I paid doubled that store’s revenue for the entire week.

But on to the book.

I loved it, and it bugged me. But mostly I loved it.

My loves are many, but the biggest thing that I liked about the book is that it was written honestly. Mockingjay was the natural conclusion to The Hunger Games. Any society that would treat it’s children as is protrayed in the first book, would do equally cruel things elsewhere, and overthrowing that society would reveal the worst elements of it. So, while some people have complained about the gore and the shock, I think they were absolutely necessary, and I really couldn’t imagine the book without them.

But as far as natural conclusions go, I think Suzanne Collins excelled far beyond the requirements of the setting. Elana Johnson and I were recently talking about Hunger Games, and how the dystopian world was created. One worldbuilding technique for dystopia is to take a troublesome aspect of our culture, extend it out to it’s furthest, most dangerous conclusion, and look at the consequences. Using this model, I simplistically said that Hunger Games is an extension of our love for reality TV and voyeurism. Elana looked at it much deeper: it’s not just about reality TV, but it’s about using the media to control people.

Collins took that theme–controlling the populace through propaganda–and took it to its natural conclusions as well. Katniss has been a propaganda puppet in every book, though managed in a different way. In Hunger Games, she’s somewhat independent, but controlled by Haymitch, who teaches her how to perform on camera (and rewarding her when she creates the right TV story). In Catching Fire, she’s controlled by Snow, performing on camera to prove that she’s not a rebel leader–she’s just a girl in love. And in Mockingjay, she’s now controlled by the rebel government (which isn’t so much good, but the lesser of two evils), and she’s followed from photo-op to photo-op by stylists and producers.

(It’s worth noting that every propaganda campaign is foiled when Katniss rejects the control of her puppeteers–attempting suicide, destroying the force field, and killing Coin. She did all of it on camera, taking temporary control of the propaganda message being spread.)

So, to me, all of this kind of thing is what really makes the book work. There are smaller aspects of the plot and characters that I questioned, but it’s this ongoing consistency of the deeper themes and messages that really make Mockingjay a great conclusion.

I’m only going to quickly touch on the characters, since I didn’t really have any issues with them. I think that Katniss is also the natural continuation of Katniss–she’s exactly how we should have expected her to be. I think that there was a feeling among fans and internet forums that this book was going to be the romantic culmination: Team Peeta vs. Team Gale. But, while that is an interesting element of the book, I don’t think anything in the previous two books have led us to expect romantic happy endings. Katniss has been Katniss since the first chapter of the first book, and her actions and motivations have remained very consistent.

(Sidenote: From a storytelling perspective, I’ve never understood the Team Gale crowd. While Katniss liked him, he’s never had enough significant screen time for the readers to get to like him, and a romance where the readers don’t feel emotionally connected is the touch of death. So, I think that most Team Gale people were deluding themselves. They were Team Gale because they didn’t like Peeta; they liked the idea of Gale, not the actual character.) (TAKE THAT, TEAM GALE JERKS.)

(Another sidenote: I thoroughly enjoyed Peeta rediscovering Katniss and learning that she’s kind of a jerk. He’s always put up with her crap, because he’s in love with her, but when he’s no longer in love with her, he realizes that she’s always treated him terribly. I found that phase in his recovery delightful.) (This is not to say that I dislike Katniss. I just think it was a clever turn.)

A few problems:

I have two main complaints with Mockingjay, and they both have to do with the final third. First, it was hard to suspend my disbelief with all the “pods” in the Capitol. To have so many of them, and so creative and wacky, all over the place would have been insanely expensive and logistically impossible. (For example: the Meat Grinder or the street that opens up–when did they build those massive crazy things? How did they keep it a secret from the populace? How did could they afford them all (because, presumably, there are wacky, enormous things like the Meat Grinder all over the Capitol).

Second, and more important, everything that happens in the final third–from the point where Katniss enters the Capitol and heads for Snow–is ultimately a failure that doesn’t accomplish anything and costs a lot of lives. The government would have been overthrown just as effectively if she hadn’t gone (because the rebels get to Snow at the same time Katniss does). I have no problem with her failing; I just didn’t like that her failure didn’t mean anything. Nothing was gained, and the losses were only chalked up to “War sure stinks”, not “Katniss wasted all their lives for nothing”.

But, all of that said, I think this was a phenomenal book, and a really groundbreaking series. It’s always nice to see dystopia do well, but this one brought a whole new audience to the genre, and then kicked the genre’s butt.

Apparently I’m reading much more than I’m blogging, because I’m going to cram three book reviews into one post.

Something I find very interesting/odd about young adult fiction: to outsiders (readers, bookstores, etc) they are all considered one genre. While people talk about YA Fantasy or YA Contemporary, if you go to the bookstore, the shelves are just marked “Teen”, and you’ll find everything there–from Stephenie Meyer to Neil Gaiman to Elie Weisel to J.D. Salinger.

The three books that I’ve read recently are all on the YA shelves, but they’re all extremely different, in tone, plot, structure.  And they’re all fascinating.

Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld

No book has ever more strongly inspired to write fan fiction. If I were not already a writer, reading Leviathan would make me want to become one–I want to play in the world Westerfeld created.

While I was reading, I posted the following on Twitter:

“Started reading @ScottWesterfeld’s Leviathan on Saturday. Holy crap, this book was custom-built just for me. Amazingly awesome.”

The setting is essentially World War I steampunk. The Central Powers (Germany, Austro-Hungary, Ottoman Empire) have giant warmachine robots, while the Allies (Russian, France and Britain) have giant living creatures.

The details are fascinating: one of the main characters is a midshipman on a massive floating whale–kind of like a living zeppelin–but the whale is only a part of the “vehicle”. Bees help to maintain the whale’s food supply, scampering talking lizards relay messages like trained parrots, and bats are a weapon, swarming the enemy and dropping flechettes (in a rather undignified fashion).  The airship is an entire ecosystem.

All of this imaginative wackiness is integrated into the real history of the War. One of the main characters is the son of Archduke Ferdinand, and the book, like the war, begins with the Archduke’s assassination.

For what it’s worth, the book reads more like middle-grade than YA; the focus is much more on the action and setting than on internal/character conflict. (There are also pictures, which I was surprised to find in a YA book. But the illustrations are gorgeous and fantastical, complementing Westerfeld’s descriptions beautifully.)

Life As We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Here’s a success story for the marketing department: I picked this book up and bought it solely because of the cover and title (and because it was a cheap paperback). I’d never heard of it before seeing it in the store.  I’m a sucker for apocalypse/post-apocalypse, so the title caught my eye, and the excerpt on the back clinched it:

“December 10

It is a possibility only one of us is going to make it. We have fuel and we have water, but who knows how long our food will last….I don’t want to live two weeks longer or three or four if it means none of us survive.”

Earlier in the year, a massive asteroid hit the moon, bumping it significantly closer to earth. The change in gravity caused massive tides and floods, earthquakes and volcanos, and the aftermath of the devastation led to shortages and plagues.

The scope of the novel reminded me of Shyamalan’s movie “Signs”. Shyamalan’s intent was to take a common movie trope–an alien invasion–but tell it from the point of view of only one family.  Pfeffer does the same thing with Life As We Knew It: we’ve all seen disaster movies before, but this one is from the point of view of Miranda, a 17-year-old girl who is riding out the disaster in her house with her family. We never see the president or the FEMA director or the army; in fact, we only hear snippets of the news here and there, and even that is unreliable. All we know is what Miranda knows, and she only knows what she needs to know: that they have to ration food, that the neighbors are dying, that the cat has gone missing and someone might have stolen it to eat it.

In many ways, this book is the opposite of Leviathan. That one was all grand action and adventure, whereas this one is personal and insular. In fact, the book is written as though you’re reading the main character’s diary; you’re only getting her most intimate thoughts and feelings.

Feathered, by Laura Kasischke

A few weeks ago I reviewed another of Laura Kasischke’s books, Boy Heaven, and I was conflicted. I definitely thought it was a powerful, amazing book, but I wasn’t sure I “liked” it. (I realize that’s not terribly clear.)

However, I recently got my hands on Feathered, Kasischke’s more recent release, (a gift from my awesome editor) and when I finally got around to reading it, I blew through it in one sitting. It was incredible.

Like Boy Heaven, the premise is nothing you’d get overly excited about: three high school seniors head to Cancun for Spring Break and things go horribly wrong. But the way that it’s handled is genius: while it’s panic-inducing and, at times, terrifying, it’d be wrong to just label it as a thriller because it’s so much more than that. It’s poetic and literary and beautiful.

The tension starts almost on the first page:

“Afterward, Terri will tell everyone back at school that, from the beginning, she knew something terrible was going to happen on spring break.

She’ll say she knew it already on the plane as we passed over that long black nothingness between the Midwest and Mexico. She’ll say she looked down and saw headlights creeping along some highway in Nebraska, or Oklahoma, and a had a cold, dead feeling.

Something bad was going to happen.

She knew.”

The three unaccompanied teenage girls then enter a situation already fraught with danger–in a foreign country, surrounded by drunks and strangers–and “tension” is not an adequate word to describe it. It’s paranoia, as everyone they meet can be the villian, and dread, as you know that not only that something bad might happen, but that something will happen.

And the ending… Go read the book so we can talk about it. Of these three YA novels, this is by far my favorite. And, while I was kind of stumped about Boy Heaven and not sure whether to recommend it, I wholeheartedly recommend Feathered. I loved it.