Book Review: Snivel (Circles of Heck Series) by Dale E. Basye

I can't stop reading this series. It's a sickness that has progressed to the point where I pre-order  new installments from the nook store, which isn't something I do very often (the only other authors I do that for are Toni Morrison and Lauren Oliver-- interesting combination, I know), and I'm sure you're all judging me for being this stuck on a children's series. I cant't help it, though: the premise is so creative and the books are really, really funny.

Since this is part of a series, I'll put most of the review behind the jump:

Book Review: Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Setepys

Before commencing this book review, I would like to let it be known that I am talking about Between Shades of Gray, not Fifty Shades of Grey. I quite enjoyed the former, and have absolutely no intention whatsoever of reading the latter because there are very few things I find less appealing than so-called erotic fiction, BDSM culture, and Twilight, and Fifty Shades of Grey is apparently a terribly-written mishmash of all of those things. After reading the excellent two-part review over at Book Riot, I feel that I can go the rest of my life without acknowledging its existence.

Moving right along, Between Shades of Gray is really an excellent book. I saw it while perusing the e-book section on the library website, and decided to download it because I was totally unfamiliar with the subject matter: the plight of the intelligentsia and their families in USSR-occupied countries. Lina, the narrator, and her family, are highly-educated, well-placed Lithuanians. After Stalin-controlled Russia annexed Lithuania, her family is torn apart by Soviet soldiers, who load Lina, her mother, and her brother into wagons and pack them off to Siberia (her father is taken separately).

Lina's tale is eerily reminiscent of Holocaust memoirs in many ways: families are torn asunder, innocent people are taken captive and brutally abused by soldiers, they must endure long rides in cattle cars with no food or water, and are eventually forced to labor in starvation conditions and freezing weather. Many, if not most of them, eventually die. In an effort to stay sane in that environment Lina, who had previously hoped to go to art school, spends much of her time drawing what she sees in hopes that she will be able to escape and tell the truth of what happened to her family.

Highly recommended. 4 out of 5 stars. 

Book Review: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

I heard about this book from a facebook friend, and decided to download it when I came upon it while browsing the North Carolina Digital Library. I figured it would be a fairly quick, uncomplicated read, especially since I enjoy reading YA fantasy when I don't feel like thinking. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children didn't disappoint.

Sixteen-year-old Jacob has grown up listening to his grandfather's stories about his childhood, poring over the pictures he has saved throughout the years. Born into a Jewish family in Europe, Jacob's grandfather was spirited to a lonely island off the Welsh coast, where he resided in a children's home full of unusual children. As Jacob grows older, he comes to believe that his grandfather's stories were fairy tales and the photographs were fake-- until his grandfather dies under mysterious circumstances. Haunted by the memory of his grandfather's death and the mementos he left behind, Jacob travels to Wales to uncover the true nature of his family's history.

This book reads a lot like A Series of Unfortunate Events, so if you liked that, you'll probably enjoy this. Full of weird, old-fashioned photography and intriguing characters, it's a highly entertaining light read. 4 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Matched by Ally Condie

I saw Matched in the library about a year ago and considered picking it up, but decided against it because I already had a gigantic stack of books. I resolved to pick it up later and promptly forgot about it until a friend of mine mentioned having read it. She didn't particularly care for it, but since YA dystopian novels are my quasi-literary crack, I decided to give it a shot.

Like most of the YA dystopian novels floating about, Matched takes place in a world of extreme social control, and the main plot point centers around forbidden love and illicit words. If you think that sounds a lot like the plot to Delirium, you're absolutely right. The two books are very similar; both involve star-crossed teenage lovers whose relationship would undermine the authority of their society, and so they must fight the society in order to be together and blah blah blah.

The world of Matched is really similar to The Giver in a variety of ways: characters are scheduled to be born, attend school, marry, have children, and die, and job functions are assigned based on a series of aptitude tests. The high point of everyone's life is their Match Banquet, in which they are paired off with their future spouse. Cassia, the protagonist, is slated to marry her childhood friend, Xander-- but someone makes a mistake and she is also shown the face of a longtime classmate, Ky. Drawn to Ky, she makes a series of choices that threaten the safety of everyone she knows. It's a pretty standard plot and is enjoyable in a brain candy kind of way.

I much preferred Delirium, but I'm in the queue for the sequel, Crossed, so it's not all bad. 3 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver

I don't buy a lot of books these days. Grad school ate my life and my wallet, after all, and I've therefore been getting the vast majority of my reading materials from the library. Unfortunately, it takes the library a while to get new releases, especially in the kids section, and I didn't want to wait to read Pandemonium, Lauren Oliver's sequel to Delirium, which I really enjoyed and reviewed here.

As is my custom, I'll be putting my review of Pandemonium behind a jump so as to not spoil the ending of Delirium for those of you who haven't read it yet.

Book Review: Hana by Lauren Oliver

I pre-ordered copies of Hana and Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver back in January. They were finally ready to download a couple of days ago. I have since finished Hana and am about halfway through Pandemonium. You all know how I get about these dystopian YA novels.

Hana is essentially Delirium from Lena's best friend Hana's perspective; the reader gets to see what was going on with Hana during that tumultuous summer. I can't go into the plot without revealing too much about the end of Delirium, but I can say that it provided an eye-opening look into the world of Delirium and provided the reader with some much-needed context of why things happened the way they did.

You don't have to read it to get the other books, but at only sixty-four pages, it's not a big commitment and is fairly enjoyable (though I found the ending a bit jarring and abrupt). 4 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson

Now that school has started again, I am back to listening to audiobooks on the long trip between Asheville and Cullowhee. I found someone to carpool with on Mondays, but I'll be driving myself on Tuesdays. That's almost two and a half hours of driving a week, plus all the regular driving I do to my job, internship, and bars. I'll probably be able to knock out around two a month. Luckily, the Asheville library system has a pretty good collection of audiobooks, and once I've exhausted them, I can use the digital library to listen to them via my cell phone or tablet.

Technology is so neat. Speaking of which...

It's hard to describe The Adoration of Jenna Fox without spoiling most, if not all, of the major plot twists. Instead of a plot summary, I will ask a series of rhetorical questions:

What would you do if you woke up and weren't you anymore?
What does it mean to be alive?
What does it meant to be human?

and, as the cover asks,

How far would you go to save someone you love?

I really, really liked this book. It's a thought-provoking meditation upon the nature of humanity, technology, and the ethical dilemmas that surround them. Pearson does an excellent job humanizing her characters as she delineates why they have made the choices they made and how they led to the "present" Jenna Fox.

Highly recommended. 5 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Goliath by Scott Westerfeld

I finally got my hands on the third and final installment of the Leviathan series by Scott Westerfeld a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, I can't really describe it or its plot points in detail without spoiling the end of the first book and all of the second, so I'll hit the high points: Siberia, Japan, the United States, hot air balloons, Tesla, espionage, assassination plots, and cute critters. It wraps up the previous two books nicely, and all of the things I said about the series (good and bad) in the previous reviews hold true for this one.

Overall, it's a very entertaining and engaging read. 4 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Fibble, The Fourth Circle of Heck by Dale Basye

I've been following the Circles of Heck series since the first installment came out in 2008. I'm a sucker for both young adult novels and satire (plus Dante), so I've really enjoyed the series thus far.

Fibble begins where the previous installment, Blimpo, has left off. It continues to follow the exploits of Marlo and Milton Fauster, who have switched bodies and been sent to different parts of Heck. Fibble, the circle that is home to children who lie, is a demented circus run by (who else?) P.T. Barnum, with a special appearance made by Richard Nixon. Milton, in Marlo's body, must rescue Marlo, in his body, from Fibble and avert a giant celestial calamity.

Entertaining, as always! I really love the way Basye has adapted Dante. And I'm looking forward to the next book, Snivel, which is due out in May. 4 out of 5 stars.

The Other Books I Read This Year

...That I didn't have time to post individual reviews for. Hold on, folks, this is gonna be a long one.

First up is Sharon Hays' Flat Broke with Children, which I read for a research paper on the 1996 PRWORA legislation, commonly known as "welfare reform" in the US (yes, all of my papers were on similarly cheerful subjects). Overall, I really enjoyed it-- as much as you can enjoy a book about poor single mothers getting screwed over by judgmental, affluent male politicians and their supporters. Hays combines reviews of scholarly literature and her own long-term observations of a cohort of TANF clients in a few cities in her illuminating account of the true motives of the legislation and the effects it has had on AFDC/TANF participants.

Now, whenever I recommend books on poverty in America, I always mention this one along with Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On not Getting By in America. Together, I think they paint a fairly accurate picture of why upward mobility in the US is so difficult.

5 out of 5 stars.

More reviews behind the jump: War is Boring by David Axe, The Card-Turner by Louis Sachar, Shine by Lauren Myracle, Bumped by Megan McCafferty, When You are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris, and The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson.

Book Review: Where She Went by Gayle Forman

I wasn't a huge fan of If I Stay (you can read my review here), but I guess I cared enough about the characters to see how their story ended. I had to wait a few weeks since there were a few people ahead of me in the library's holds queue, but it wound up being worth the wait. Most of the things I complained about with If I Stay weren't present in Where She Went. I think that's mostly because Where She Went is 1) told from Adam's perspective (so the Mia whininess is kept to a minimum) 2) three years after the accident (so they're not teenagers anymore, so there's that, too). Meanwhile, the things that made If I Stay great continued to shine, namely, Forman's ability to balance past and present narratives in a cohesive manner and her delicate crafting of characters and their relationships.

The ending was still sort of cheesy, but you can't win 'em all. 4 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: The Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney

I'd heard good things about The Mockingbirds, and decided to check it out when I randomly came across it at the library. I'm very glad I did; it made for excellent reading.

The story opens to find Alex in an unfamiliar bedroom in the dormitories of her boarding school, Themis. As the room spins around her while she's collecting her clothing, her eyes light upon two ripped-open, empty condom wrappers. From that moment on, her world is upended. In the ensuing weeks, she pieces together what happened that night through conversations with friends who witnessed some of it and flashbacks that appear out of nowhere. She comes to realize that she's been raped by a popular water polo player. Rather than go to the school or the police (out of a fear that it would disrupt her life even more), Alex enlists the aid of the Mockingbirds, a secret society that administers justice to wronged students.

Overall, I was very impressed by this book. Date rape is a tough subject for a writer to address in the first place, but especially within the context of a Young Adult novel. Whitney handles the subject very well; Alex's experiences are not only realistic, she's a very sympathetic character. Whitney also does an excellent job addressing false notions about date rape (mainly, that sleeping with unconscious people is okay and/or that silence equals consent) while promoting the idea of affirmative consent. All of the characters are very well-rendered and believable, and the writing is excellent.

I wish this had been around when I was in high school. As it is, I think it should be included in curricula everywhere. 5 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Bad Girls Don't Die by Katie Alender

I wanted to like this book. I really, really did. It had a fairly interesting premise, after all: two teenaged sisters are stalked by a ghostly former inhabitant of their house (I'm a sucker for stories about haunted houses. My favorite book is House of Leaves, after all). While it was mostly well-written, it fell flat in a number of places. Cliches and hackneyed plot devices (and characters!) abounded, and character development was minimal and often nonsensical. In addition to that, Alender is juggling so many (unnecessary) sub-plots that the narrative often felt disjointed and underdeveloped. In other words, it was a pretty great idea that was very poorly-executed. In order for this book to have worked, it would have needed at least another hundred or two pages of exposition.

Needless to say, it was pretty obvious that the author primarily writes for television series: this book has all the hallmarks of teen-oriented movies on the Lifetime channel. It's a shame, because the book had a lot of potential.

Blah. 2 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Flight by Sherman Alexie

Flight is the second Sherman Alexie novel I've read this year, and I'm probably going to read several more. I've found that I really enjoy his writing style. Flight, the story of Zits, a sixteen-year-old half-Indian in foster care, is no exception. Zits is in a rough spot: he's been in and out of foster care and juvenile detention centers for most of his life. Since his Indian father never claimed him, he wasn't protected by ICWA (Indian Child Welfare Act, which would have required him to be placed within a racially appropriate foster family) and bounces from home to institution to kiddie jail and back again.

Everything changes when he meets Justice, a white kid, in a temporary holding cell. They move in together, and over a period of months, Justice convinces Zits to take his revenge on society by shooting up a bank. During the shooting, Zits gets shot in the head. Instead of dying, though, he is rocketed backwards in time, experiencing life as both and Indian and a white person at various times in the Old West. all throughout, he struggles to reconcile his identity as a doubly-alienated, green-eyed Indian. Alexie's gift for characterization shines throughout the novel, and the philosophical implications of Zits' journey are thought-provoking.

Great, but I wish it was longer (a lot of parts felt pretty rushed) and the historical flashbacks were more fleshed out. 4 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams

Speaking of books that hit uncomfortably close to home, The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams had a much stronger effect on me than I had anticipated. I didn't think that I would have much in common with a thirteen-year-old character who is born into a repressive polygamous sect in the middle of nowhere, but it seems that some aspects of being indoctrinated into the notion that women are inferior to men because god said so are universal. The Chosen One left me shaken, moved, and very, very thankful that books were there to set me free, as well.

The Chosen One revolves around Kyra, the thirteen-year-old almost-eldest (her older sister appears to have Down's Syndrome) daughter in a polygamist family. Her father has three wives, and since the sect doesn't believe in birth control, Kyra has over twenty siblings (with a few more on the way). She manages to stay sane through playing the piano, carrying on a secret, forbidden relationship with Joshua, a boy her own age, and covertly visiting the Bookmobile and reading secular books. Her secret world begins to collapse when Kyra learns that she has been Chosen to wed her sixty-year-old uncle, who already has six wives. She is thoroughly disgusted by the idea, and begins to break away from her family and community. As her rebellious acts escalate, the abuse that the Prophet and the all-male Elders inflict upon the community becomes increasingly clear. Kyra finds herself torn between her loyalty to and her need to protect her family and her desperate desire to flee her repugnant uncle and everything that a life with him would entail.

Williams deftly explores the psychology of someone who has been raised in a truly dysfunctional environment; Kyra's struggles are both realistic and deeply compelling, inspiring both frustration and compassion in the reader. It's clear that Williams has done a lot of research to explore the nuances of fundamentalist polygamist groups, and it shows throughout the narrative. As someone who was raised in a conservative christian environment (I thank my lucky stars most days that it wasn't worse), the way that the leaders used religion and the threat of eternal damnation to browbeat their followers into obedience rang true, as did the multitude of things they did to repress and control the women of the community. Needless to say, I found myself with a glass of wine and some knitting not long after I finished it.

Outstanding. 5 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

After waiting two months to get my hands on The Hunger Games, I added Mockingjay to my queue at the library once I made it to the top five in the queue to read Catching Fire. I still had to wait another month to read Catching Fire, but my wait to read Mockingjay was only a week after that. I am the master of the library holds system!

I was initially sort of nervous about reading Mockingjay, as it seemed like a lot of people liked it less than the previous two books in the series. Fortunately, my nervousness was unfounded; Mockingjay is probably my favorite installment of the three. A lot of people who have reviewed it positively noted both its psychological realness as well as the strong similarities between Katniss and Ender from Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (which, incidentally, was one of my favorite books when I was younger). I'll stop here to avoid unintentionally spoiling things for those who haven't read the first two books in the series.

As usual, later books in a series will be discussed behind a pagebreak. If you haven't read The Hunger Games and Catching Fire and don't want to be spoiled, don't click it! I won't be spoiling the end of Mockingjay, though, so if you haven't read it yet, you can still read my review.

Book Review: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

I finally got a chance to read this book yesterday/today, after over a month of waiting my turn in the library's hold queue! It nearly killed me.

As usual, later books in a series will be discussed behind a pagebreak. If you haven't read The Hunger Games and don't want to be spoiled, don't click it! I won't be spoiling the end of Catching Fire, though, so if you haven't read it yet, you can still read my review.

Book Review: Delirium by Lauren Oliver

I've been looking forward to reading Delirium ever since I read Before I Fall, which is written by the same author. The two books turned out to be very different; Delirium is a dystopian novel set in the possibly-distant, possibly-sooner-than-we-realize future, while Before I Fall takes place in the present day. While both feature teenage girls as protagonists, the characters and their struggles are dramatically different, as are the love stories that figure prominently in the respective novels' plots. Both books, however, are about freedom. Before I Fall is about the freedom to be who you are and the importance of treating others well, while Delirium is about having the freedom to feel.

Imagine a world in which there is no love or hate, and love has been pathologized into a disease: Amor deliria nervosa, symptoms of which include the expected fevers and sweaty palms as well as delusions, fits, and even death. The United States, in an effort to rid its population of the disease, has closed its borders, ordered citizens into cities, and either killed or imprisoned those who refused to undergo the mysterious Cure (as well as those for whom the Cure does not "take," and continue to experience the deliria anyway).

Lena, the seventeen-year-old protagonist, is only a few months away from her Cure, which is to take place on her eighteenth birthday, at the outset of the novel, and she eagerly looks forward to it. Her entire life, she has been emotionally and socially haunted by her mother's suicide, and believes that the Cure will ensure that she will be safe-- safe from her mother's untimely fate, and safe from the judgment of those who believe that her mother's actions have contaminated her. The Cure, as it turns out, (when it works, which isn't always) renders those who have had it immune to passion: they are incapable of love and hate, and drift through life in a contented haze. Lena desperately wants this, believing it will fix her conflicted feelings regarding her mother and enable her to lead a happy, normal life.

Lena's careful, safe world begins to fall apart on the day of her evaluation, in which she was to be interviewed by the scientists and bureaucrats responsible for both administering the Cure, assigning her to her higher educational path, and selecting her husband. Needless to say, they are all too aware of Lena's familial background, and the pressure both her family and Lena herself place on her is extreme. Her aunt drills her for hours, so that Lena will answer the questions as normally and inoffensively as possible. During the evaluation (which Lena is in the process of flubbing), a herd of painted cows stampedes through the facility. In the chaos, Lena sees a young man on a walkway above, laughing at the spectacle. She later encounters him while on a run with her best friend, Hana, and he confirms that the incident was the work of Invalids, un-Cured people who live outside of the electrical walls of the city and its laws. Soon, Lena has to decide between learning the dangerous truth and living out the rest of her life in a sanitized, safe lie, and must deal with the ramifications of her choice.

Delirium was really, really good. Oliver's knack for characterization is evident here as well as in Before I Fall. Even though I initially found Lena to be an irritating fraidy-cat, I grew to sympathize and love her over the course of the narrative, and enjoyed the way in which her character and her relationships with her family, Hana, and Alex played out. Beyond that, I found the idea of a world in which love is considered a serious disease to be intriguing, and especially appreciated Alex's take on things: that love and hate are not the most dangerous feelings: indifference is, as that is what causes people to lose their humanity and to treat one another terribly. Oliver does an excellent job depicting the callous brutality that underpins the safety of Lena's world.

Obviously, I'm looking forward to the sequel. 4 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Naughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman

I picked up Naughts and Crosses at the library a few weeks ago after reading positive reviews of it on amazon.com. I think it's safe to say the 2011, in addition to being the year in which I read a bunch of Victorian literature and classic feminist works, is the year where I read a whole bunch of dystopian young adult novels. So far, I'm enjoying the trend, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I tire of them and seek out something a touch more "serious."

Naughts and Crosses is typical of the genre in many respects. It tells of a friendship that blossoms into love between two members of opposing castes: Sephy (short for Persephone) is a Cross, while Callum is a Naught. Brought together by happenstance (Callum is the son of Sephy's nanny), their friendship endures after Callum's mother is unfairly fired by Sephy's family. As a member of the uppercrust of Crosses, Sephy isn't supposed to associate with Callum, but she can't seem to stop herself. Callum faces similar social pressures; his father and older brother have joined a militant group of Naughts who engage in domestic terrorism against the oppressive Cross regime, and they dislike his desire to attend a Cross school and remain friends with Sephy. Sephy and Callum find themselves caught in the middle of a violent social struggle.

The interesting thing about Naughts and Crosses is that its dystopia is racially inversed: Crosses, who rule the world, are black, while Naughts, who are only fifty years out from being slaves, are white. Visualizing the characters was sort of weirdly difficult for me; I had to keep reminding myself that Sephy was black and Callum was white, not the other way around. It's a sad commentary on the pervasiveness of racism in the human consciousness (and literary mind): no matter how progressive my politics may be, the idea of black people oppressing white people, even in a fictional context, kind of breaks my brain.

It was disorienting, but in a good way: band-aids are "flesh-colored"-- darkly, and stand out in stark contrast against the Naughts' skin, fashion magazines feature only black women, and Naughts are considered soulless because of their lack of color, or skin pigmentation. Religious texts and history books downplay the significance of Noughts and their contributions to society, and they are continually subjected to economic and social oppression. It was really interesting to see what a racist society in which whiteness is discriminated against might look like, and what being on the receiving end of it might be like. In light of the brain-twistiness that reading this book caused me (and, apparently, a lot of other people), I think it would make a really good movie.

3.5 out of 5 stars. There are apparently a few sequels, but I don't think I'm going to read them. I liked the way Noughts and Crosses ended so much that I'll pretend like it's a stand-alone novel.

Book Review: Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld

I'm sort of annoyed with myself for checking the second installment of Scott Westerfeld's new series, Behemoth, out of the library so quickly. I had other stuff to read (mainly from certain neglected challenges) and the final novel, Goliath, won't be published until October, and depending on how long it takes the library to obtain a copy, I may or may not be reading it until November or December. Meanwhile, I'm sort of dying to know how it ends.

I was torn on how to review this book, as the series is relatively new and I can't talk about the second book without spoiling the ending of the first (and I don't like doing that). So, in the interest of not being That Jackass who posts spoilers of new-ish books in their review, I'm going to use blogger's handy page-break feature to hide the rest of this review. Spoilers behind it, click at your own risk.

(I intend on doing this when I review the next installments in The Hunger Games series and for any other books in a series.)