Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause: B

October 31, 2010 by 2 Comments

From the back cover:
Vivian Gandillon relishes the change, the sweet, fierce ache that carries her from girl to wolf. At sixteen, she is beautiful and strong, and all the young wolves are on her tail. But Vivian still grieves for her dead father; her pack remains leaderless and in disarray, and she feels lost in the suburbs of Maryland. She longs for a normal life. But what is normal for a werewolf?

Then Vivian falls in love with a human, a meat-boy. Aiden is kind and gentle, a welcome relief from the squabbling pack. He’s fascinated by magic, and Vivian longs to reveal herself to him. Surely he would understand her and delight in the wonder of her dual nature, not fear her as an ordinary human would.

Vivian’s divided loyalties are strained further when a brutal murder threatens to expose the pack. Moving between two worlds, she does not seem to belong in either. What is she really—human or beasts? Which tastes sweeter—blood or chocolate?

Review:
Werewolf Vivian Gandillon can’t understand why the kids at school don’t seem to want to hang out with her. She’s beautiful, isn’t she? Still, the boys seem perfectly able to resist her until she meets Aiden Teague, an occult-loving poet whose piece on werewolves in the school literary magazine catches her eye. Vivian finds herself drawn to the floppy-haired Aiden, and they begin dating, to the consternation of his friends and her pack. At first content with how things are going, Vivian soon wants more, and decides to share her secret. Aiden doesn’t take it well and driven somewhat mad by despair, Vivian begins to suspect that she’s responsible for a string of murders that has the pack on edge.

I haven’t read a huge amount of fiction in which a human is in love with a supernatural being, but until Blood and Chocolate, those that I have read were always told from the human’s point of view. The switch works very well here, as the focus is less on the romance—though that is an exceedingly important part of the story—and more on Vivian’s inner conflict. She wants to fit in with humans and to make friends, and yet clearly feels herself superior to them. (Indeed, some reviewers have found her unlikable because of her repeated praise of her own appearance, but I took this as an animal-like way of measuring her status in a pack.)

On top of her relationship with Aiden, Vivian is also concerned about her pack, which is looking for a permanent place to settle after having fled their previous home the year before when one of their own went out of control and killed a human. At a ritual for determining the new clan leader, she accidently earns her place as the victor’s mate, and faces pressure from her family to take on this role and leave her “meat-boy” behind. I really enjoyed reading about the pack dynamics, and felt that Krause did a good job for establishing why Vivian would prefer a more… primal kind of love than what she and Aiden were presently engaged in. When things go wrong, followed immediately by the discovery of a vicious mauling, Vivian seriously believes she is the culprit. This plot is reasonably well handled, though I found the resolution pretty obvious.

The one real problem with Blood and Chocolate is that one feels at a remove from the characters. Perhaps that is due to the alienness of Vivian’s perspective and way of thinking, which at times turns quite vicious indeed. Aiden, seen solely through Vivian’s eyes, fares no better. In the end, while this is a very interesting book, presenting a fleshed out look at werewolf culture, it’s not a very engaging one.

Filed Under: Books, Supernatural, YA

The Dead and the Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer: C+

February 2, 2010 by 2 Comments

deadandthegoneFrom the back cover:
When life as Alex Morales had known it changed forever, he was working behind the counter at Joey’s Pizza. He was worried about getting elected as senior class president and making the grades to land him in a good college. He never expected that an asteroid would hit the moon, knocking it closer in orbit to the earth and catastrophically altering the earth’s climate. He never expected to be fighting just to stay alive. And when Alex’s parents disappear in the aftermath of the tidal waves, he must care for his two younger sisters, even as Manhattan becomes a deadly wasteland.

Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Life As We Knew It enthralled and devastated readers with its look at an apocalyptic event from a small-town perspective. Now this harrowing companion book examines the same events as they unfold in New York City, revealed through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old Puerto Rican New Yorker.

With haunting themes of family, faith, personal change, and courage, this powerful novel explores how a young man takes on unimaginable responsibilities.

Review:
Seeing as how The Dead and the Gone is a companion book to Life As We Knew It, I expected that they’d have fundamentally the same plot. Apparently, I should’ve anticipated they’d have the same pitfalls, as well.

The story this time focuses on ambitious teenager Alex Morales, whose dreams of a bright academic future are cut short when an asteroid knocks the moon much closer to Earth, sending everyone into panic and claiming the lives of both of Alex’s parents. Forced to care for his two sisters, he does some awful things in order to survive and tries to make the best decisions he can, though sometimes ends up making mistakes. Faith is important to the Morales family, especially to super-pious Briana, who believes that her parents aren’t really dead but just stricken with amnesia from which they will miraculously recover someday.

One of the most annoying things about Life As We Knew It was its whiny protagonist and how she’d seem to improve, only to backslide. The same thing happens in this book with Alex’s younger sister, Julie, though eventually I realized Alex himself is a large part of the problem there. I’ve read three of Pfeffer’s books by now and have noticed that she tends to repeat things. This book is no exception, since a large part of it is taken up by variations on the following scene, repeated at least five or six times:

Alex: *accuses Julie of something*
Julie: I hate you! *runs off, slams door*
Alex: *goes in to talk to Julie and apologize*

After a while, I ended up sympathizing with Julie because Alex kept blaming everything on her! I was also irritated by the open-ended conclusion, predicted something waaaaaay in advance about Briana, and literally laughed out loud at the ridiculous fever dream Alex has while he’s sick with the flu.

That said, I do tend to like these apocalyptic YA books, so at least I enjoyed the basic plot even if the Morales family got on my nerves. I think I’ve learned by now, though, that Pfeffer’s books just aren’t my thing.

Filed Under: Books, Sci-Fi, YA Tagged With:

East by Edith Pattou: B

November 4, 2009 by Leave a Comment

eastFrom the back cover:
Rose is the youngest of seven children, meant to replace her dead sister. Maybe because of that, she’s never really fit in. She’s always felt different, out of place, a restless wanderer in a family of homebodies. So when an enormous white bear mysteriously shows up and asks her to come away with it—in exchange for health and prosperity for her ailing family—she readily agrees.

Rose travels on the bear’s broad back to a distant and empty castle, where she is nightly joined by a mysterious stranger. In discovering his identity, she loses her heart—and finds her purpose—and realizes her journey has only just begun.

As familiar and moving as Beauty and the Beast, yet as fresh and original as only the best fantasy can be, East is a bold retelling of the classic tale “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” a sweeping story of grand proportions.

Review:
Based on the fairy tale “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” (a translation of which can be found here), East is the story of a girl named Rose who agrees to go away with a white bear in exchange for the healing of her sick sister and an improvement to her impoverished family’s circumstances. She is taken to a castle in a mountain where she is well-provided-for, though she’s troubled by a nightly mystery: each evening, after the lamps have been extinguished, a stranger comes and lays down next to her. She has never seen his face, for he’s always gone by morning. When curiosity overcomes her and she uses an enchanted candle to catch a glimpse of the man, she finds she has done him a grievous wrong. He is the white bear and must now travel east of the sun, west of the moon to become the consort of the troll queen. Rose is determined to rescue him.

Pattou adheres pretty closely to the original story—sometimes too closely, as I occasionally found myself waiting impatiently through familiar bits for parts with more action—and nicely captures the magical quality that it possesses. She embellishes many details, like Rose’s large family and the specifics of her journey north, which is far less fantastic here than in the fairy tale. She alternates narrators between Rose, Rose’s father, Rose’s brother, the white bear, and the troll queen, and gradually the full picture of events is revealed. I particularly like Pattou’s interpretation of troll culture; instead of ugly beasts, Pattou depicts them as beautiful and pale, though rough-skinned, and capable of both cruelty and love.

Rose is no passive damsel, which is one of the reasons the original tale is so noteworthy, and makes for a good protagonist, but certain aspects of the story do seem to go on too long. There’s a lot of emphasis on the sewing projects she undertakes, for example, and the description of her journey to rescue the man is extremely dull. I have little patience for long journeys, I admit, but this one had my eyes glazing over; not even the nifty Norwegian setting could save it. Some aspects of the ending are a little irksome, too, but ultimately it wraps up in a satisfying fashion.

I’m left wondering whether I would’ve liked East more if I hadn’t been familiar with the original story. Ultimately, my final recommendation would be to read this first, and then investigate the tale that was its inspiration.

Filed Under: Books, Fantasy, YA

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray: B-

July 2, 2009 by 2 Comments

greatterribleFrom the back cover:
Gemma Doyle isn’t like other girls. Girls with impeccable manners, who speak when spoken to, who remember their station, who dance with grace, and who will lie back and think of England when it’s required of them.

No, sixteen-year-old Gemma is an island unto herself, sent to the Spence Academy in London after tragedy strikes her family in India. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma finds her reception a chilly one. She’s not completely alone, though… she’s been followed by a mysterious young man, sent to warn her to close her mind against the visions.

For it’s at Spence that Gemma’s power to attract the supernatural unfolds; there she becomes entangled with the school’s most powerful girls and discovers her mother’s connection to a shadowy, timeless group called the Order. It’s there that her destiny waits… if only Gemma can believe in it.

Review:
It’s 1895, and sixteen-year-old Gemma Doyle has finally got her wish and has come to London. It’s not how she’d envisioned achieving this goal, however, as it occurs only after her mother, who’d been steadfastly diverting Gemma’s pleas to leave India and see London for quite some time now, kills herself under mysterious circumstances. With Gemma’s father incapacitated by grief, she is largely left in the charge of her grandmother, who promptly ships her off to Spence, a boarding school where she will be made into a proper (read: obedient) lady.

While all of this is going on, and while Gemma is being bullied by a group of influential girls at school, she’s having disturbing visions and receiving warnings to quit having them from a handsome Indian boy named Kartik. Eventually she both befriends those girls and decides to disregard Kartik’s warnings entirely. The girls learn of a powerful group of women, the Order, and decide to reenact some of their rituals, not realizing at first how very real it all is. Things get out of hand, as magical dabbling often does, and the consequences are rather grim.

I’ve got mixed feelings about A Great and Terrible Beauty. On the negative side, it takes quite a while before the story makes sense. It’s not clear, for example, whether Kartik’s warnings ought to be heeded and Gemma is a fool for disregarding them, or whether he is simply trying to keep her from developing her powers as she should. As a result, I couldn’t tell whether I ought to find Gemma willful and annoying or cheer her on, which was a problem again later when she is shown some magical runes and then promptly told she mustn’t ever use them, yadda yadda. Well, you just know she’s going to, and at least I found her rationale for finally giving in kind of sympathetic, but we’re subjected to all kinds of petulant wheedling before that point. The ending is also rather strange in that I don’t understand how Gemma doing one thing causes another to happen.

On the positive side, I like the atmosphere of the school and its grounds as well as the evocation of the time period. The book is at its most compelling when it focuses on the plight of women in this era: little is expected of them save for placid compliance—no real academics are taught at Spence, for example—and they are often used as bargaining chips in marriages not of their own choosing. Each of the four girls in the new Order is unhappy with her lot in some degree, summed up nicely in a ghost story as told by former bully, Felicity:

Once upon a time, there were four girls. One was pretty, one was smart, one charming and one… one was mysterious. But they were all damaged, you see. Something not right about the lot of them. Bad blood, big dreams… They were all dreamers, these girls. One by one, night after night, the girls came together and they sinned. Do you know what that sin was? No one? Their sin was that they believed, believed they could be different, special. They believed they could change who they were. Not damaged, unloved, cast-off things. They would be alive, adored, needed, necessary.

But it wasn’t true.

I listened to A Great and Terrible Beauty as an unabridged audiobook, and I’d be remiss if I neglected to praise the excellent narrator, Josephine Bailey. She does a truly amazing job in giving each character a distinctive voice—so much so that it’s hard to believe at times that it’s one person behind them all. Her performance is one of the most impressive I’ve ever heard and I’ve heard quite a lot.

At this point, I am unsure whether I wish to continue with the series. In its favor is the fact that I already own the other two books in the trilogy, but since I find the plot rather muddled and the protagonist quite irritating at times that’s about all it has going for it at the moment. Besides my completist nature, that is.

Filed Under: Books, Historical Fantasy, Supernatural, YA Tagged With:

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer: D

March 24, 2009 by 16 Comments

twilightcoverFrom the back cover:
About three things I was absolutely positive.

First, Edward was a vampire.

Second, there was a part of him—and I didn’t know how dominant that part might be—that thirsted for my blood.

And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

Review:
I can’t say I wasn’t warned. Often and at length, as a matter of fact. Still, I wanted to make up my own mind about the series, and felt that I couldn’t legitimately mock something if I had no basis for my comments. So I read it. And let me be clear about one thing: all of those warnings were absolutely right.

If you don’t know by now, Twilight is the story of Bella Swan, our klutzy and apparently delicious-smelling heroine, who moves to the perpetually overcast town of Forks to live with her father. There, she encounters Edward Cullen, who, we are told many times, is the personification of physical perfection. He also happens to be a vampire, and does things like save Bella from getting hit by a car, follow her when she and her friends go shopping in another town, and break into her house to watch her sleep. Which isn’t creepy at all.

For the first 80% of the book or so, there’s really no plot. There’s just Bella and Edward encountering each other, him aloof at first (but only because he’s trying to resist her extra-tasty aroma) and her growing increasingly more infatuated with him. Edward’s fond of sending mixed messages, too, like saying, “You need to stay away from me” and then promptly inviting her on a jaunt to Seattle. Maybe this is supposed to be the plot, because it happens several times—Edward threatening to go away or angsting that she’s better off without him, but in the end, not going anywhere.

He eventually opens up and shares more vampire facts—culminating in the unintentionally hilarious scene where he reveals his ability to sparkle in the sunlight. Yes, really. Towards the end, Meyer realizes she needs some conflict or something, so a vampire with tracking abilities is introduced and sets his sights on Bella, forcing all of Edward’s vampy brethren to take her into hiding to protect her. Bella asks Edward to make her a vampire so she can be safe and stay with him forever and ever, but he claims to know what’s best for her and refuses to comply. Then they go to prom.

Besides being almost unbearably dull, Twilight sometimes cracked me up with its lame writing. I snickered every time Bella, when pondering Edward’s latest directive to keep her distance, claimed that she was “gripped in a sudden agony of despair.” There are lots of lines about how Edward is her whole life now, and how “his liquid topaz eyes were penetrating” and his breath makes her mouth water, et cetera, but here’s my favorite:

His expression slowly folded into a mask of ancient sadness.

Seriously, that is making me giggle even now.

Neither Bella nor Edward is particularly likable. There’s one scene where a friend of Bella’s father tries to warn her away from dating Edward, and I’m sure I was supposed to sympathize with her because of this meddling adult but all I could think of was how bratty and rude she was being. One could argue I’m simply too old to appreciate this book, but there’s at least one person at work around my age who’s quite vocal about her love for the series.

About the only marginally interesting apsects of the book are the backstories of Edward’s family and how they became vampires. Even so, I find that a single sentence is the limit of the praise I can summon.

Lastly, I leave you with this comic I drew for my coworker’s eleven-year-old daughter, whose bedroom is a Twilight museum but whom I also successfully hooked on Buffy. Tremble before my leet artistic skills.

Filed Under: Books, Supernatural, YA

Forever Princess by Meg Cabot: C+

February 11, 2009 by 2 Comments

From the front flap:
It’s Mia’s senior year, and things seem great. She aced her senior project, got accepted to her dream college(s), and has her birthday gala coming up… not to mention prom, graduation, and Genovia’s first-ever elections.

What’s not to love about her life? Well…
* Her senior project? It’s a romance novel she secretly wrote, and no one wants to publish it.
* Prince Phillipe’s campaign in the Genovian elections isn’t going well, thanks to her totally loathsome cousin René, who decided to run against him.
* Her boyfriend, J.P., is so sweet and seemingly perfect. But is he the one?
* And her first love, Michael, is back from Japan… and back in her life.

With Genovia’s and her own future hanging in the balance, Mia’s got some decisions to make. Which college? Which guy? How can she choose? Especially when what she decides might determine not just the next four years, but… forever!

Review:
Nearly two years have passed since the events of Princess Mia, and now it’s just a week until graduation. Mia has spent the intervening time working on a steamy romance novel for her senior project, but has lied to her friends, telling them it’s about Genovian olive oil processing. She’s also lied about various other things, as well, including hiding the fact that she got accepted into quite a few prestigious colleges.

I found the first half of the book to be very annoying, as Mia’s constant justifications of why she can’t just come out and tell people things are quite frustrating. She says stuff like, “I course I couldn’t tell Tina the truth—that my senior project is not a history of Genovian olive oil processing but in reality a romance novel, because it has sex scenes, and she’ll wonder how I researched them.” Both K and I were confused as to why this was a problem, since Tina is a big romance novel fan. My theory was that Mia thought Tina would realize she had broken their “let’s lose our virginity on prom night” deal and had already had sex with J.P., thus providing insights for her novel. It turns out, though, that the big mystery of how she researched them is… by reading copious amounts of romance novels. She and J.P. have evidently not gotten beyond first base in two years of dating. (!)

The second half is a bit better, though. Michael returns and J.P. finally shows his true colors. Both Mia and Lilly have grown up, too, so are able to patch things up. Does Mia realize how much she is to blame for all that went wrong, like I’d hoped? Not really, but she does at least have a decent conversation with Michael about how she screwed everything up. Mostly, her failings are attributed to her immaturity at the time rather than to any lingering personality issues, like chronic indecision.

I also like that she’s very responsible about sex and subsequently firm in her convictions that she could say no if she wasn’t ready. I just wish she weren’t prone to declaring “I suck!” when being equally firm and reasonable about the nature of the publishing contract for her romance novel (the excerpts of which are laughably bad, by the way). She’s well within her rights to want the book to be considered on its own merits, but still feels bad for refusing a lucrative offer J.P. wrangles purely on the basis of her celebrity status.

Anyway, the ending is satisfying, with various important conversations finally transpiring and loose ends wrapped up. It even gets a little amusing: my favorite line is, “Hey, quit sniffing me a minute.” Ultimately, however, my primary emotion is relief that I can now go a very long time without reading anything by Meg Cabot.

Filed Under: Books, YA Tagged With:

The Year Without Michael by Susan Beth Pfeffer: C

February 8, 2009 by Leave a Comment

From the back cover:
Bad things aren’t supposed to happen to good people. But somewhere between home and the softball field, 16-year-old Jody Chapman’s younger brother disappeared, and now the family is falling apart. Her parents hardly speak to each other, her younger sister is angry and bitter, and Jody’s friends, always so important to her, are slowly slipping away. It seems that all anyone can do is wait. Wait—for Michael to walk in the door. Wait—to stop missing him. Wait—to stop waiting. When a private detective can’t uncover a single clue about Michael’s disappearance, Jody’s urgent need to find him drives her to make a last desperate attempt to hold her family together.

Review:
Having mostly enjoyed Life As We Knew It, I decided to check out something else by Pfeffer. The subject matter is different but the general idea of a family in crisis still remains. I don’t think Pfeffer handled it as well in this earlier book, however.

The major issue is the terrible dialogue. Though the back cover promises “honest dialogue,” in reality it is anything but. I think the problem is that there is seldom any indication of tone or delivery. It’s just ____ said, ____ replied, ____ declared. Even when a character is supposed to be having an outburst, the text doesn’t bring the idea across. Here’s an example:

“I hate all of you. You’re all crazy and I hate you all, and I wish you’d all just leave me alone and die.”

Not even one exclamation mark in all of that? I can’t help but read it in the blandest possible monotone.

The dialogue problems really undercut anything else that Pfeffer might’ve achieved. For all I know, this is an accurate portrayal of the kind of upheaval a family goes through after a child goes missing—oft-repeated hopeful speculation and empty promises giving way to tantrums and irrational blame games—but it just doesn’t seem genuine.

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Princess Mia by Meg Cabot: B

January 8, 2009 by Leave a Comment

From the back cover:
It’s so typical: Mia can’t even attend a performance of Beauty and the Beast with her best friend’s boyfriend without it ending up in the New York Post. And that’s the last thing she needs after her dramatic breakup with Michael.

But that’s the life of a princess. And to make matters worse, Mia’s been asked to deliver a speech for the Domina Rei women’s society—and she has absolutely no idea what to say! Still, being down is no reason for her parents to force her to see a therapist. And just when things couldn’t get any worse, Mia discovers the long-hidden diary of a teen princess and stumbles upon revelations that will make everything else seem like a walk in the park.

Review:
My first inclination is to complain that “nothing much really happens in this book,” but that’s really not true. A good deal happens, but it’s just mostly inner stuff. Mia is still reeling from her breakup with Michael, and stupidly agrees with his suggestion to be just friends, rather than voicing any objections to this plan. She spends a week in bed, and eventually begins parent-mandated therapy sessions that ultimately help her realize that she’s waiting for other people to solve her problems for her. This leads to some good things and some bad things.

I’ve long wondered why on earth Mia likes Lily, when Lily often engages in really crappy behavior. In Princess Mia, Lily is giving Mia the silent treatment for various angsty reasons, and I was happy that this prompts Mia to wonder whether she even wants Lily’s friendship back. Mia’s not portrayed as entirely in the right, though, as Lily’s complaints about Mia aren’t invalid. Mia may not have intended to do various things that hurt Lily, but that doesn’t stop the fact that they happened anyway because of her wishy-washyness. I like that their relationship is not mended by the end of the book, and hope that, in the next and final installment, Mia will realize how she is actually at fault in some measure.

I also liked that, when Mia receives a love confession from J.P., she responds by saying that she needs to take some time to figure out who she is without Michael before she starts going out with someone else. Unfortunately, this doesn’t last long, and by the end of the book, maybe a day or two after her stated need for time, she is seeing him as acceptable “moving on” material and snogging him in a freak September snow flurry. It’s not that I think teen romance needs to last FOREVER AND EVER OMG, but J.P. is just so boring. I can’t imagine that anyone reading this series really wants her to end up with him and not Michael.

While seeing growth from Mia is nice, she’s also incredibly annoying sometimes, like when a week of missing school results in heaps of make-up work and she whines a lot about how unfair it is. She also continues to be oblivious to obvious things, like J.P.’s feelings and the fact that Boris has been in communication with Michael. I guess I just didn’t find her very likable this volume, even though she definitely made progress.

Cabot’s writing style also continues to be annoying. Here’s an example:
1. Mia goes on a shopping trip with two popular girls from her school, Lana and Trisha.
2. Then she goes to hang out with Tina fewer than ten pages later.
3. Mia does not tell Tina about the outing “You know, with Lana and Trisha.”

Um, yes, I do happen to recall that! It was fewer than ten pages ago! I am not a moron. I seriously think Cabot has a word count that she’s contractually obligated to meet, so she just sticks those kinds of needless reiterations in as padding.

Princess Mia is not bad, and I appreciated the emphasis on inner growth. The challenge ahead for Forever Princess is an interesting one—it should be atypical and feature Mia realizing that she is responsible for allowing certain things to happen but be typical and satisfying by having her back with Michael at the end (or, at least, not dating the dull J.P.). At least, that’s what I want to see.

Filed Under: Books, YA Tagged With:

Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer: B-

December 31, 2008 by 3 Comments

From the back cover:
When Miranda first hears the warnings that a meteor is headed on a collision path with the moon, they just sound like an excuse for extra homework assignments. But her disbelief turns to fear in a split second as the entire world witnesses a lunar impact that knocks the moon closer in orbit, catastrophically altering the earth’s climate.

Everything else in Miranda’s life fades away as supermarkets run out of food, gas goes up to more than ten dollars a gallon, and school is closed indefinitely. But what Miranda and her family don’t realize is that the worst is yet to come.

Told in Miranda’s diary entries, this is a heart-pounding account of her struggle to hold on to the most important resource of all—hope—in an increasingly desperate and unfamiliar time.

Review:
This book is like a cross between The Princess Diaries and Parable of the Sower, only the average likability factor of Mia and Lauren (the protagonists of those books) far exceeds that of Life As We Knew It‘s Miranda. Mix in a generous dollop of a whiny and grating teen (I must admit that Dawn from Buffy the Vampire Slayer would fit the bill) and it’ll be about right.

The plot involves an asteroid that is due to impact the moon. Astronomers encourage folks to go outside and watch this rare phenomenon, but nobody realizes there was an error in the calculations. The moon ends up knocked scarily close to earth, and causes all kinds of environmental repercussions, like tsunamis and volcanic explosions. Millions die. Conditions for the survivors worsen and, like Parable of the Sower, folks figure off “anywhere is better than here,” and so head off to supposedly better places, never to be heard from again.

Miranda’s world gradually shrinks throughout this ordeal until she and her family are living huddled up in the one room of their house with a wood stove. She begins the book (told in a series of journal entries) by complaining about tests and drama with her friends, passes through a period where she inanely prattles on about kissing, and finally, with agonizing slowness, (mostly) stops being so self-pitying and resolves to be more appreciative of what she has, since her family is better off than most. I figured such character growth would be occurring, but was annoyed that at several points she appeared to be on the verge of improvement, only to lapse and instigate petty and annoying arguments with her mother. I suppose this cycle of progress and regression is normal, but that doesn’t make it fun to read about.

While I might not have liked Miranda for the majority of the book, I still really liked hearing about the creepy and disturbing deterioration of civilization that the lunar disaster caused. Part of me is a little unnerved that I seem to enjoy details like that, but when I hear a newscaster announce that the Statue of Liberty has been washed out to sea, I think, “Cool!” Pfeffer also does a good job at conveying the family’s sense of isolation as well as the monotony of having canned tuna and string beans day after day. I like the ending, too.

There’s a not-quite sequel to this book, The Dead and the Gone, which recounts the same events from a different character’s perspective. I plan to check it out.

Filed Under: Books, Sci-Fi, YA Tagged With:

The House of Dies Drear by Virginia Hamilton: B

October 6, 2008 by Leave a Comment

From the back cover:
One hundred years ago, Dies Drear and two runaway slaves hiding in his house, an important station on the Underground Railroad, were murdered. Legend has it that the ghost of Mr. Drear still haunts the lonely old house. But Thomas Small’s father, a Civil War history professor, doesn’t believe the legend and buys the house.

The house is fascinating, thinks Thomas, and it is filled with hidden doorways and secret passages that he can’t wait to explore. But funny things keep happening—frightening things that no one, not even Thomas’ father, can explain. Is someone playing a prank? Or is the ghost of Dies Drear trying to warn the Smalls of danger?

Review:
Perhaps the biggest compliment I can give The House of Dies Drear, set in the early 1960s, is that it managed to incorporate historical details about the underground railroad as well as Thomas’ first experiences living somewhere without segregation (having grown up in North Carolina, he experienced wonder when his family ate at the same establishment as white families) without such things dominating the story.

Because I am a house buff, I also enjoyed hearing about spooky passages and secret rooms, though there wasn’t as much exploration of same as I was expecting. Instead, the focus was on the house’s mysterious caretaker, Mr. Pluto, and some incidents intended to drive the Smalls from the house. I thought the resolution to this was kind of simplistic for a book billed for “older readers,” unfortunately.

I liked that Thomas had both his parents on hand; the lack of parents, or at least one, is a popular trope with books for this age group. He’d call on his father in times of peril, and it was refreshing not to have a reckless, Gryffindor-type protagonist. Thomas, alas, had a tendency to be wildly superstitious and would work himself into a panic based on his foolish beliefs. This made him a little annoying sometimes.

I think I’d recommend this to a younger audience than YA, but it certainly wasn’t bad. There is also a sequel, written 19 years later, which I’m a little wary of. Such things often don’t live up to the original, but I suppose it’ll gnaw at me if I don’t read it.

Filed Under: Books, Mystery, YA
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