Four-Star Books Read in 2015: Non-Fiction

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou: Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local "powhitetrash." At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors ("I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare") will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.
Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read.

I swear I'm not trying to be controversial or provocative, and in all probability it was just that the hype and the mythic status of this author created an expectation that was impossible to fulfill. I really liked reading this, and I marvel at her journey, her strength and perseverance, but the writing did not blow me away. 

Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell by Charlotte Gray: Award-winning author Charlotte Gray's latest biography,Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell offers an eye-opening account of the famously white-bearded inventor of the telephone. Who knew that he also was a pivotal figure in the development of the airplane, the hydrofoil, genetic engineering, and more? Charlotte Gray does, and she tells us how and why she brought to life the passionate mind and heart of the man behind so many amazing ideas and innovations.

Fascinating. There was so much I didn't know about Bell, and of course Gray is a wonderful biographer. There were a couple of clunky parts - I wish I'd written this one down, but there was one historical figure that wasn't in the book for long, but she was so desperate to get his description in that there was an awkward sentence that went something like "the tall, gawky scientist got in touch in January". But on the whole the flow was as smooth - and the action as engaging - as if the book was fictional. I had no idea Bell was so involved in the life of Helen Keller (almost to a creepy extent, one might say, I'm trying not to dwell on it), or that his mother's deafness played such a big role in his life's work, or that he did so much work with the education of deaf people, or that his wife was deaf.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling: Mindy Kaling has lived many lives: the obedient child of immigrant professionals, a timid chubster afraid of her own bike, a Ben Affleck–impersonating Off-Broadway performer and playwright, and, finally, a comedy writer and actress prone to starting fights with her friends and coworkers with the sentence “Can I just say one last thing about this, and then I swear I’ll shut up about it?”  
Perhaps you want to know what Mindy thinks makes a great best friend (someone who will fill your prescription in the middle of the night), or what makes a great guy (one who is aware of all elderly people in any room at any time and acts accordingly), or what is the perfect amount of fame (so famous you can never get convicted of murder in a court of law), or how to maintain a trim figure (you will not find that information in these pages). If so, you’ve come to the right book, mostly! 
In Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, Mindy invites readers on a tour of her life and her unscientific observations on romance, friendship, and Hollywood, with several conveniently placed stopping points for you to run errands and make phone calls. Mindy Kaling really is just a Girl Next Door—not so much literally anywhere in the continental United States, but definitely if you live in India or Sri Lanka.

I've read a few other reviews and now I feel a bit self-conscious about how much I loved this, which I hate. Whatever. Although this was written before The Mindy Project came out and I realize the character is not the actress, I could clearly hear her voice in this, and most of it was laugh-out-loud hysterical, with a couple of wise and insightful passages. There were a couple of parts that lost me - one is where she admonishes married people to stop saying that marriage is hard work, because her parents made it look easy and it scares off the single people. I've heard this from quite a few single people, and I'm so over it. Marriage IS hard work. I know a very few people who make it look easy, and they've turned out to be really, really lucky, or totally lying. I've lived with my husband for longer than I've lived with any other adult, owned a house with him and raised kids with him, and it's not that I hate the work, but not all of it is a walk in the park with ice cream and balloons wearing pants that magically make your ass look tiny either. If you can't handle that, don't get married. Other than that little blip that clearly touched a nerve, I actually liked the book more than I thought I would - I bought it thinking I would keep it in my purse to read at physio (where I ended up laughing so much that I had to read parts out loud to my physiotherapist and the patients at adjacent tables), then couldn't stop reading it.

The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America by Thomas King: WINNER of the 2014 RBC Taylor Prize 
The Inconvenient Indian is at once a “history” and the complete subversion of a history—in short, a critical and personal meditation that the remarkable Thomas King has conducted over the past 50 years about what it means to be “Indian” in North America.  
Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, this book distills the insights gleaned from that meditation, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first encountered each other. In the process, King refashions old stories about historical events and figures, takes a sideways look at film and pop culture, relates his own complex experiences with activism, and articulates a deep and revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands.  
This is a book both timeless and timely, burnished with anger but tempered by wit, and ultimately a hard-won offering of hope -- a sometimes inconvenient, but nonetheless indispensable account for all of us, Indian and non-Indian alike, seeking to understand how we might tell a new story for the future.

I would periodically find the writing style - irreverent, informal, smart-assish, caustic - a bit irritating, but on the whole I think it was the best style for this subject matter; it highlights the absurdity of much of the behaviour of various governments towards aboriginal people. It also indicates a very understandable anger, but the veneer of amusement makes go down more easily - which should not be necessary, but probably is. This is an Important Book.


The Paris Wife by Paula McLain: A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley.
Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness—until she meets Ernest Hemingway and her life changes forever. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group—the fabled “Lost Generation”—that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. 
Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill-prepared for the hard-drinking and fast-living life of Jazz Age Paris, which hardly values traditional notions of family and monogamy. Surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos, Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history, pouring all the richness and intensity of his life with Hadley and their circle of friends into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises. Hadley, meanwhile, strives to hold on to her sense of self as the demands of life with Ernest grow costly and her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging. Despite their extraordinary bond, they eventually find themselves facing the ultimate crisis of their marriage—a deception that will lead to the unraveling of everything they’ve fought so hard for. 
A heartbreaking portrayal of love and torn loyalty, The Paris Wifeis all the more poignant because we know that, in the end, Hemingway wrote that he would rather have died than fallen in love with anyone but Hadley.

I read this when I lifted my self-imposed prohibition on fictionalized history. It's very readable. I hated how Hadley and Hemingway called each other cutesy names and called their kid Bumby but what can you do when it's historical fact? I loved the descriptions of Paris life and Hemingway as a young man - it was so weird that he wasn't always "Hemingway", that people called him Ernest (or, you know, whatever stupid nickname they were using, because apparently that was a thing. *annoyed flounce*.)


What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton: As any reader of Jo Walton's Among Others might guess, Walton is both an inveterate reader of SF and fantasy, and a chronic re-reader of books. In 2008, then-new science-fiction mega-site Tor.com asked Walton to blog regularly about her re-reading—about all kinds of older fantasy and SF, ranging from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. These posts have consistently been among the most popular features of Tor.com. Now this volumes presents a selection of the best of them, ranging from short essays to long reassessments of some of the field's most ambitious series.
Among Walton's many subjects here are the Zones of Thought novels of Vernor Vinge; the question of what genre readers mean by "mainstream"; the underappreciated SF adventures of C. J. Cherryh; the field's many approaches to time travel; the masterful science fiction of Samuel R. Delany; Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children; the early Hainish novels of Ursula K. Le Guin; and a Robert A. Heinlein novel you have most certainly never read. 
Over 130 essays in all, What Makes This Book So Great is an immensely readable, engaging collection of provocative, opinionated thoughts about past and present-day fantasy and science fiction, from one of our best writers. 


This really needed its own post, and would have gotten it if I hadn't read it so close to New Year's. Having all these in one book is a bit of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, yay, they're all together. On the other hand, you start to notice how often she uses the word 'absorbing' and if she gets onto a series that you either already didn't like or don't plan to read, it goes on for several essays/posts. On the other hand, she is a fantastic analytical reader and I loved the window into her reading mind, especially because she largely writes here more as a fan than a critic. She reads more hard-ish science fiction than I do, and she rereads MUCH more than I do, although I've started doing more. She says that over time, the series books she doesn't like become the only ones she can reread, because they're the ones that she doesn't have committed to memory - I just can't get there from where I am. If I don't like it the first time, why would I read it again unless I really feel like I missed something, when there are SO many other books clamouring seductively for my attention? I think she reads more narrowly in genre than I do, so her argument is that there may not, in fact, be enough books to keep her reading until her death. Which is kind of cool, I guess, although completely different from how I feel (all those people that want a pill that can replace sleep so they can work more? I only want it so I can read more.) On the whole, though, this was thoroughly enjoyable - especially the parts about how her son is just as much of a reader, and how they talk about books. 

Four-Star Books Read in 2015: Short Stories

21st Century Dead: A Zombie Anthology edited by Christopher Golden: The Stoker-award winning editor of the acclaimed, eclectic anthology The New Dead returns with 21st Century Dead, and an all-new lineup of authors from all corners of the fiction world, shining a dark light on our fascination with tales of death and resurrection... with ZOMBIES! The stellar stories in this volume includes a tale set in the world of Daniel H. Wilson’sRobopocalypse, the first published fiction by Sons of Anarchycreator Kurt Sutter, and a tale of love, family, and resurrection from the legendary Orson Scott Card. This new volume also includes stories also from other award-winning and New York Times bestselling authors, such as: Simon R. Green, Chelsea Cain, Jonathan Maberry, Duane Swiercyznski, Caitlin Kittredge, Brian Keene, Amber Benson, John Skipp, S. G. Browne, Thomas E. Sniegoski, Hollywood screenwriter Stephen Susco, National Book Award nominee Dan Chaon, and more!

Some really good stuff here, most with a bit of an unusual take on the zombie trope. Biters by Mark Morris and Carousel by Orson Scott Card in particular were remarkable - I have a feeling I will track down Carousel and read it repeatedly -  and Jonathan Maberry's Jack and Jill was more mature than anything else I've read by him. As with the best zombie stories, these are mostly more sad than frightening. 

Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd edited by Holly Black: Acclaimed authors Holly Black (Ironside) and Cecil Castellucci(Boy Proof) have united in geekdom to edit short stories from some of the best selling and most promising geeks in young adult literature: M.T. Anderson, Libba Bray, Cassandra Clare, John Green, Tracy Lynn, Cynthia and Greg Leitich Smith, David Levithan, Kelly Link, Barry Lyga, Wendy Mass, Garth Nix, Scott Westerfield, Lisa Yee, and Sara Zarr.

Overall really enjoyable. Favourite was Quiz Bowl Antichrist - best snapshot of a moment in an adolescent boy's coming of age that I've read in some time. Some stories were really sweet and funny, some used quite a loose interpretation of 'geek', a couple were forgettable and I found the ending of the Dino Girl one repulsive and mystifying; I talked about that in this post.

Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits by Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson: 5 tales set from prehistoric to present, market to dragon academy. 
1 First Flight - a boy and pet unexpectedly ride a dragon
2 Hellhound - stars a mysterious dog in a graveyard showdown
3 Fireworm - a young man must defend his clan from a creature
4 Salamander Man - a slave saves his village with a fiery spell 
5 Phoenix - a girl's new friend is older than he appears

Pretty sure I bought this as a bargain book at Indigo and it sat around until I picked it up randomly on a Saturday. I loved all the stories except Fireworm, which was fine, just didn't grab me as much - it's more a rewritten myth than a proper narrative. They were whimsical, charming, and suffused with a spirit of kindness and wonder. I had read both authors before, liked them, and not realized that they were married, which is neither here nor there but it always does give me a happy fuzzy feeling when two writers I like live together.  The Goodreads reviews were kind of funny - a lot of people loved Dickinson's stories and hated McKinley's, and then the opposite, and seemed to take it for granted that everyone else would feel the same. Phoenix was a beautiful story - quiet and slow-brewing, sweet and melancholy. Some people find that kind of thing boring. Which is fine, everyone is entitled to an opinion, just as I'm entitled to opine that if you find this story boring you very probably have a soul that resembles an onion that's been left much too long in the onion bin - sort of withered and black, melted into the wood a little, and a bit smelly. No offense. Hellhound is great too, especially for lovers of dogs and mythology, and First Flight has dragons!

The Ones That Got Away by Stephen Graham Jones: These thirteen stories are our own lives, inside out. A boy s summer romance doesn't end in that good kind of heartbreak, but in blood. A girl on a fishing trip makes a friend in the woods who s exactly what she needs, except then that friend follows her back to the city. A father hears a voice through his baby monitor that shouldn't be possible, but now he can t stop listening. A woman finds out that the shipwreck wasn't the disaster, but who she s shipwrecked with. A big brother learns just what he will, and won't, trade for one night of sleep. From prison guards making unholy alliances to snake-oil men in the Old West doling out justice, these stories carve down into the body of the mind, into our most base fears and certainties, and there s no anesthetic. Turn the light on if you want, but that just makes for more shadows.

Extremely creepy and disturbing, and very literate. 

Under My Hat: Tales From the Cauldron edited by Jonathan Strahan: It's a juvenile collection, and as always the quality varies, but there are some really charming entries here. Diana Peterfreund's is another magical dog story, which apparently is a genre of which I heartily approve. Garth Nix's is a great story about magic, class division and standing up for yourself. Peter S. Beagle and Ellen Klages are uniformly kick-ass awesome, as usual. And Margo Lanagan's story is great, as I always find her when she's accessible (sometimes she's not). Many reviewers are united in their pissed-offedness at finding that the Neil Gaiman entry is a poem. Not a tale. A poem. I share their disappointment. Poems are fine and all, but not instead of tales.


This End is Now (Apocalypse Triptych #2) edited by John Joseph Adams: Famine. Death. War. Pestilence. These are the harbingers of the biblical apocalypse, of the End of the World. In science fiction, the end is triggered by less figurative means: nuclear holocaust, biological warfare/pandemic, ecological disaster, or cosmological cataclysm. 
But before any catastrophe, there are people who see it coming. During, there are heroes who fight against it. And after, there are the survivors who persevere and try to rebuild. 
THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH will tell their stories. 
Edited by acclaimed anthologist John Joseph Adams and bestselling author Hugh Howey, The Apocalypse Triptych is a series of three anthologies of apocalyptic fiction. THE END IS NIGH focuses on life before the apocalypse. THE END IS NOW turns its attention to life during the apocalypse. And THE END HAS COME explores life after the apocalypse. 
THE END IS NIGH is about the match. THE END HAS COME is about what will rise from the ashes. THE END IS NOW is about the conflagration. 

Loved this so much. I had the first volume (The End is Nigh) on my Kindle with this, and I would flip back and forth rereading the first stories and then reading the second stories in all the story trilogies. I could probably almost recite Spores by Seanan McGuire from memory at this point, and Fruiting Bodies was a kick-ass follow-up. I read Hugh Howey's second story and STILL didn't realize until the third one that these stories fit puzzle-piece-like at different moments in his Silo Saga. Annie Bellet followed up Goodnight Moon (awesome) with, you guessed it, Goodnight Stars. Nancy Kress's Angels of the Apocalypse is a really interesting but sad and frustrating follow-up to Pretty Soon the Four Horsemen Are Going to Come Riding Through - and this just made me realize that I want to say that even though I didn't love the whole third volume of this triptych, the third story in Kress's cycle was amazing, the perfect far-future ending to her story of a single mother's discovery of a DNA mutation that sees a generation of children born with an inability to display violence or aggression, even when threatened or provoked. 

Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams: Wastelands 2 - More Stories of the Apocalypse is a new anthology of post-apocalyptic literature from some of the most renowned science fiction and fantasy authors in the field today including George RR Martin, Hugh Howey, Junot Diaz, David Brin and many more.
Featuring stories from a roster of the most recognized and celebrated names within the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres, Wastelands 2 - More Stories of the Apocalypse is an eclectic mix of tales that explores famine, death, war, pestilence, and harbingers of the biblical apocalypse.

I have written not a single word about this anywhere. Usually I can fake it by skimming other Goodreads reviews to remind myself about the stories. This time I am drawing a total blank. I apologize. I do remember Patient Zero by Tananarive Due, a writer I almost always find intriguing and satisfying to read - it's a heartbreaking story with a naive narrator, a child who is in isolation as the rest of the world succumbs to some kind of plague. There was also an excerpt of The Postman by David Brin, which I'd say was much better than the movie because, Kevin Costner, but then I remembered that I actually kind of liked the movie, except the unbelievably cheesy, tone-deaf, unnecessary ending. Also, I clearly need some kind of intervention for people with an unhealthy dependence on apocalypse literature. I solemnly swear that I am not preparing for the rapture. 

Other Worlds Than These edited by John Joseph Adams: What if you could not only travel any location in the world, but to any possible world?
We can all imagine such “other worlds”—be they worlds just slightly different than our own or worlds full of magic and wonder—but it is only in fiction that we can travel to them. From The Wizard of Oz to The Dark Tower, from Philip Pullman'sThe Golden Compass to C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, there is a rich tradition of this kind of fiction, but never before have the best parallel world stories and portal fantasies been collected in a single volume—until now.

Time was I would never pass up an anthology edited by Ellen Datlow. This is still true, and if you like genre short stories, never pass up a good Kindle deal or Bargain Book price for a John Joseph Adams-edited anthology either. Between parallel worlds and portal fantasies, I probably generally prefer the latter, because I'm not a really a sword-and-sorcerer-type fantasy fan, but I enjoyed all of these, and I kind of liked the way Adams asks the reader to read them in the order they come, since they were chosen to complement each other. I had read Stephen King's Mrs. Todd's Shortcut before, of course, but not for years, and it was fun reading it again ("if you just kind of fold the map..."). I had also read Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link, but you never really get to the bottom of a Kelly Link story with just one reading, or two, or five or thirteen, and, well, this one's about an otherworldly television show about a magical library, so you do the math. 

Seanan McGuire's Crystal Halloway and the Forgotten Passage WRECKED ME FOREVER. Ana's tag by William Alexander was a great combination of dangerous faerie realms and inner city graffiti and gang activity, with family loyalty thrown in. Moon Six made me all panicky - the getting-stuck-in-an-alternate-world shtick has a stranglehold on my psyche. Maybe I was born somewhere else. And Signal to Noise, where if you lose a loved one you can travel to an alternate world and see an alternate version of them to say goodbye, which, this should surprise no one, IS A TERRIBLE IDEA. 

Defy the Dark edited by Saundra Mitchell: The seventeen original stories in Defy the Dark, an eerie, mind-bending YA anthology, could only take place in darkness. 
Open the pages and discover: A creepy guy who stares too long. The secrets of the core of the earth. Dreams of other people’s lives. A girl who goes mad in the darkness. Monsters in Bavaria. A generational spaceship where night doesn’t exist. And other mysteries and oddities. 
The contributors to the enthralling collection are: Sarah Rees Brennan, Tessa Gratton, Rachel Hawkins, Christine Johnson, Valerie Kemp, Malinda Lo, Myra McEntire, Saundra Mitchell, Sarah Ockler, Jackson Pearce, Aprilynne Pike, Dia Reeves, Beth Revis, Carrie Ryan, Jon Skovron, Courtney Summers, and Kate Espy, winner of the Defy the Dark new author contest.

The biggest disappointment in this collection was Stillwater by Valerie Kemp, because it was SUPER FREAKING AWESOME and when I went to then read everything else she's written I found out that she's actually an indie filmmaker and this super freaking awesome story is the first freaking thing she's published, which is unfair on so. many levels. I Gave You My Love By the Light of the Moon by Sarah Rees Brennan was also wonderful, an original, relatable mash-up of werewolf and vampire stuff, because SRB is magical and can do no wrong. The first story of the anthology, Sleepstalk, is a nice bit of bait-and-switch creep to set the tone. I didn't really like the Beth Revis story, probably because it was set in the universe of the book I didn't like. Over all this was high quality, with very few let-downs.

Slasher Girls and Monster Boys edited by April Genevieve Tucholke: A host of the smartest young adult authors come together in this collection of scary stories and psychological thrillers curated by Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea’s April Genevieve Tucholke.
Each story draws from a classic tale or two—sometimes of the horror genre, sometimes not—to inspire something new and fresh and terrifying. There are no superficial scares here; these are stories that will make you think even as they keep you on the edge of your seat. From bloody horror to supernatural creatures to unsettling, all-too-possible realism, this collection has something for any reader looking for a thrill.
Fans of TV’s The Walking Dead, True Blood, and American Horror Story will tear through tales by these talented authors:

Holy shit this was good! And a little bewildering, because to my way of thinking it's YA only in that a lot of the writers publish YA. Or maybe it's just older YA - because fans of The Walking Dead, True Blood and American Horror Story does not scream fifteen-year-old fan-base to me, unless we're talking about my particular overly-permissive gave-up-a-while-ago whatever-just-don't-wake-me-up-when-you-have-nightmares okay-fine-you-can-sleep-with-me-for-one-more-night household, shut up. 

There's a host of front-and-centre kick-ass female protagonists, strong and confident and much smarter than they're given credit for - I wanted Dahlia from Jonathan Maberry's Fat Girl With a Knife to be my new BFF and not just to keep me alive for more than four days when the zombie apocalypse comes. In the Forest Dark and Deep by Carrie Ryan OMG, who knew Alice in Wonderland could get even more creepy and disturbing? And in Hide and Seek by Megan Shepherd, Annie, no big deal, just takes on Death, doesn't even break a nail. I really liked this one. I might buy a copy. Just so much good.

The Anatomy of Curiosity (The Curiosities #2) by Maggie Stiefvater, Brenna Yovanoff and Tessa Gratton: The follow-up to the acclaimed title The Curiosities: A Collection of Stories by Maggie Stiefvater, Tessa Gratton, and Brenna Yovanoff.
In an unassuming corner of Brooklyn, a young woman learns to be ladylike, to love context, and to speak her mind from a very curious sort of tutor. 
In a faraway land convulsed by war, a young soldier hears the desert’s curious hum as he disarms bombs with the person he doesn’t know how to love. 
In a place so shriveled by drought that any drowning is a curiosity, a young writer tries again and again to tread water beneath the surface of a vast and unusual sea. 
Three new stories—complete with commentary on the creative process—from three acclaimed young adult authors working at the height of their powers. 
Curious?

I didn't adore this quite as much as the previous Curiosities book (so dreamy. So perfect. So like being in the room while the cool chicks talk about cool stuff and don't make you leave to get them mojitos), but the process of writing along with self-criticism is very interesting. I think I enjoyed it more when they talked about each other's writing than when they talked about their own, because basically it's really hard to talk about your own writing and not sound like a bit of a prat, plus if it seemed like they hadn't exactly done what they said they wanted to, I felt horribly embarrassed and over-sympathetic. The Brenna Yovanoff piece was my favourite - the right story was so completely the right story after seeing the wrong story.

Four Star Books Read in 2015: Children and Young Adult

Children/Newbery:

Holes by Louis Sachar: Stanley Yelnats is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather and has since followed generations of Yelnatses. Now Stanley has been unjustly sent to a boys’ detention center, Camp Green Lake, where the boys build character by spending all day, every day digging holes exactly five feet wide and five feet deep. There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. But there are an awful lot of holes.
It doesn’t take long for Stanley to realize there’s more than character improvement going on at Camp Green Lake. The boys are digging holes because the warden is looking for something. But what could be buried under a dried-up lake? Stanley tries to dig up the truth in this inventive and darkly humorous tale of crime and punishment—and redemption.

Reviewed on blog in September 2015. 

The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder: The first time Melanie Ross meets April Hall, she's not sure they'll have anything in common. But she soon discovers that they both love anything to do with ancient Egypt. When they stumble upon a deserted storage yard behind the A-Z Antiques and Curio Shop, Melanie and April decide it's the perfect sport for the Egypt Game.
Before long there are six Egyptians instead of two. After school and on weekends they all meet to wear costumes, hold ceremonies, and work on their secret code.
Everyone thinks it's just a game, until strange things begin happening to the players. Has the Egypt Game gone too far?

I'd been aware of this book since I was a child, but had never picked it up. I was looking for a Newbery Medal book and found this on my shelf. It's incredibly charming and quirky and very readable. There are times when the children seem wise and articulate beyond their years, but there are also times when they are normal, extremely geeky children, and it all kind of balances out. There are also horrific things that, at first glance, don't seem to belong in a children's book, until you think more carefully about, oh, almost every children's book ever. I felt like Snyder gave her prospective child audience a lot of credit, and I like that. 

Young Adult:

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky: Charlie is a freshman.
And while he's not the biggest geek in the school, he is by no means popular. Shy, introspective, intelligent beyond his years yet socially awkward, he is a wallflower, caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it.
Charlie is attempting to navigate his way through uncharted territory: the world of first dates and mix tapes, family dramas and new friends; the world of sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when all one requires is that perfect song on that perfect drive to feel infinite. But he can't stay on the sideline forever. Standing on the fringes of life offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a deeply affecting coming-of-age story that will spirit you back to those wild and poignant roller-coaster days known as growing up.

I borrowed this from my niece - still haven't seen the movie. I really liked it. I can't tell if I only think this because I already know it's been made into a movie, but the whole thing felt very cinematic. All of the relationship dynamics were very well-drawn and affecting in different ways. I have a fondness for epistolary novels anyway, and I thought the device was very effective here. 


I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson: A brilliant, luminous story of first love, family, loss, and betrayal for fans of John Green, David Levithan, and Rainbow Rowell.

Jude and her twin brother, Noah, are incredibly close. At thirteen, isolated Noah draws constantly and is falling in love with the charismatic boy next door, while daredevil Jude cliff-dives and wears red-red lipstick and does the talking for both of them. But three years later, Jude and Noah are barely speaking. Something has happened to wreck the twins in different and dramatic ways . . . until Jude meets a cocky, broken, beautiful boy, as well as someone else—an even more unpredictable new force in her life. The early years are Noah's story to tell. The later years are Jude's. What the twins don't realize is that they each have only half the story, and if they could just find their way back to one another, they’d have a chance to remake their world.
This radiant novel from the acclaimed, award-winning author ofThe Sky Is Everywhere will leave you breathless and teary and laughing—often all at once.

Very glad I decided to read this before my self-imposed ban on YA lit (which never really came to anything, partly because I have no willpower, partly because it was kind of a stupid, arbitrary decision). For once the comparisons to other writers I love (John Green, Rainbow Rowell) seem warranted. I have a completely goofy, uncritical, moon-eyed crush on this book. I loved the exuberant writing style, the slightly implausibly witty and polished dialogue, the flawless rendering of adolescent (and adult) yearning and rage and sorrow and terror. The plot is contrived, but it's all so well done that it feels more like fate than clumsy artifice. I really, really liked it.

The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson: Seventeen-year-old Lennie Walker, bookworm and band geek, plays second clarinet and spends her time tucked safely and happily in the shadow of her fiery older sister, Bailey. But when Bailey dies abruptly, Lennie is catapulted to center stage of her own life - and, despite her nonexistent history with boys, suddenly finds herself struggling to balance two. Toby was Bailey's boyfriend; his grief mirrors Lennie's own. Joe is the new boy in town, a transplant from Paris whose nearly magical grin is matched only by his musical talent. For Lennie, they're the sun and the moon; one boy takes her out of her sorrow, the other comforts her in it. But just like their celestial counterparts, they can't collide without the whole wide world exploding.
This remarkable debut is perfect for fans of Sarah Dessen, Deb Caletti, and Francesca Lia Block. Just as much a celebration of love as it is a portrait of loss, Lennie's struggle to sort her own melody out of the noise around her is always honest, often hilarious, and ultimately unforgettable.

Not quite as transporting as I'll Give You the Sky, but on the whole I've become a fairly ardent Jandy Nelson fan this year. A lot of readers have commented that Lennie is not a very likable character, which I'll grant. Grief can make people unlikable, and prone to making questionable decisions, and really frustrating to be friends or family members with, and I feel like that's the kind of 'unlikable' Lennie is. I heard the same thing from people about Quentin Coldwater in the Magicians trilogy, and when I asked the author about a question on Goodreads, he said that Quentin is depressed, and in that light it's understandable that people wouldn't find him likable. Some people have to have a sympathetic character in order to feel connected to a book, which is fair. It's usually not a problem for me if a character isn't uniformly likable, particularly if the character's history, context or underpinnings make their objectionable behaviour or demeanour understandable, which I feel is the case here. There's a little of the John Green syndrome here - all the characters are just so FABULOUS and eccentric and colourful, and teen-agers are fairly uniformly witty and articulate. Sometimes it all becomes a bit much. But Nelson writes with such energy and zest that this is eminently forgivable.

Dearly, Departed by Lia Habel: Love can never die.
Love conquers all, so they say. But can Cupid’s arrow pierce the hearts of the living and the dead - or rather, the undead? Can a proper young Victorian lady find true love in the arms of a dashing zombie? 
The year is 2195. The place is New Victoria - a high-tech nation modeled on the manners, mores, and fashions of an antique era. A teenager in high society, Nora Dearly is far more interested in military history and her country’s political unrest than in tea parties and debutante balls. But after her beloved parents die, Nora is left at the mercy of her domineering aunt, a social-climbing spendthrift who has squandered the family fortune and now plans to marry her niece off for money. For Nora, no fate could be more horrible - until she’s nearly kidnapped by an army of walking corpses. 
But fate is just getting started with Nora. Catapulted from her world of drawing-room civility, she’s suddenly gunning down ravenous zombies alongside mysterious black-clad commandos and confronting “The Laz,” a fatal virus that raises the dead - and hell along with them. Hardly ideal circumstances. Then Nora meets Bram Griswold, a young soldier who is brave, handsome, noble . . . and dead. But as is the case with the rest of his special undead unit, luck and modern science have enabled Bram to hold on to his mind, his manners, and his body parts. And when his bond of trust with Nora turns to tenderness, there’s no turning back. Eventually, they know, the disease will win, separating the star-crossed lovers forever. But until then, beating or not, their hearts will have what they desire.
In Dearly, Departed, romance meets walking-dead thriller, spawning a madly imaginative novel of rip-roaring adventure, spine-tingling suspense, and macabre comedy that forever redefines the concept of undying love.

I've tried a couple of steampunk novels and I usually find they don't work for me. But hey, steampunk zombies, I gave it a shot. The high-tech society paired with Victorian sensibilities is really interesting - they have these parasols that have gas-powered lamps in them and I totally want one. The zombie part works well too, and the romance is surprisingly believable, considering the circumstances. It's sort of a big, fun, gothic, event-packed adventure with satisfyingly cartoony villains and witty banter. Great fun.

Sorrow's Knot by Erin Bow: In the world of Sorrow’s Knot, the dead do not rest easy. Every patch of shadow might be home to something hungry and nearly invisible, something deadly. The dead can only be repelled or destroyed with magically knotted cords and yarns. The women who tie these knots are called binders.
Otter is the daughter of Willow, a binder of great power. She’s a proud and privileged girl who takes it for granted that she will be a binder some day herself. But when Willow’s power begins to turn inward and tear her apart, Otter finds herself trapped with a responsibility she’s not ready for, and a power she no longer wants.

This is a beautiful, ambitious, strange and incredibly sad book, weighty with archetype and metaphor. The characters, young and old, are complicated and flawed and sometimes frightening. I had to reread a few sections to figure out exactly what was being said. Bow's previous book, Plain Kate, was a really tough act to follow, and I still prefer it slightly. She really doesn't sugarcoat any of the big ideas or shrink from sorrow and sacrifice, despite writing for  young readers, which is admirable. I'm really curious to see what she does next.

The Archived (The Archived #1) by Victoria Schwab: Imagine a place where the dead rest on shelves like books.
Each body has a story to tell, a life seen in pictures only Librarians can read. The dead are called Histories, and the vast realm in which they rest is the Archive.
Da first brought Mackenzie Bishop here four years ago, when she was twelve years old, frightened but determined to prove herself. Now Da is dead, and Mac has grown into what he once was: a ruthless Keeper, tasked with stopping often violent Histories from waking up and getting out. Because of her job, she lies to the people she loves, and she knows fear for what it is: a useful tool for staying alive.
Being a Keeper isn't just dangerous—it's a constant reminder of those Mac has lost, Da's death was hard enough, but now that her little brother is gone too, Mac starts to wonder about the boundary between living and dying, sleeping and waking. In the Archive, the dead must never be disturbed. And yet, someone is deliberately altering Histories, erasing essential chapters. Unless Mac can piece together what remains, the Archive itself may crumble and fall.
In this haunting, richly imagined novel, Victoria Schwab reveals the thin lines between past and present, love and pain, trust and deceit, unbearable loss and hard-won redemption. 

Welp, let's see... a massive ghostly library where the entries are dead people, things that are sort of like zombies, really great writing and witty banter between a kick-ass female lead and a love interest who wears guyliner. Could this be any MORE in my wheelhouse? I've been intrigued by V.E. Schwab's writing since I read Vicious - she takes familiar tropes and puts incredibly original twists on them, so I always feel like I'm reading something really refreshingly different, and on top of that she tells a really great story.

Teeth by Hannah Moskowitz: A gritty, romantic modern fairy tale from the author of Breakand Gone, Gone, Gone.
Be careful what you believe in.
Rudy’s life is flipped upside-down when his family moves to a remote island in a last attempt to save his sick younger brother. With nothing to do but worry, Rudy sinks deeper and deeper into loneliness and lies awake at night listening to the screams of the ocean beneath his family’s rickety house.
Then he meets Diana, who makes him wonder what he even knows about love, and Teeth, who makes him question what he knows about anything. Rudy can’t remember the last time he felt so connected to someone, but being friends with Teeth is more than a little bit complicated. He soon learns that Teeth has terrible secrets. Violent secrets. Secrets that will force Rudy to choose between his own happiness and his brother’s life.

Pretty fantastic, on the whole. Surprising and different, at times violently repulsive. Hits you in the face with some unflinching questions about what you're willing to do with your ethics when someone you love is on the line. Every so often gets a little too glib and quippy and hilariously profane and slips into manic-pixie-dream-guy territory, but gets back on track. No Hollywood ending.

Liar and Spy by Rebecca Stead: When seventh grader Georges (the S is silent) moves into a Brooklyn apartment building, he meets Safer, a twelve-year-old coffee-drinking loner and self-appointed spy. Georges becomes Safer's first spy recruit. His assignment? Tracking the mysterious Mr. X, who lives in the apartment upstairs. But as Safer becomes more demanding, Georges starts to wonder: how far is too far to go for your only friend?

Oh look, another author whose book I really liked and yet I liked her previous book slightly better; I'll bet that's REALLY ANNOYING for authors. When You Reach Me was an instant classic, in my opinion, riffing as it did on another instant classic while being just a really striking, romantic, melancholy, beautiful work in its own right. Liar and Spy is a lovely little book, and I don't mean that pejoratively. It takes talent to make a quiet, small story this charming and important.




Beware the Wild by Natalie C. Parker: It's an oppressively hot and sticky morning in June when Sterling and her brother, Phin, have an argument that compels him to run into the town swamp—the one that strikes fear in all the residents of Sticks, Louisiana. Phin doesn't return. Instead, a girl named Lenora May climbs out, and now Sterling is the only person in Sticks who remembers her brother ever existed.
Sterling needs to figure out what the swamp's done with her beloved brother and how Lenora May is connected to his disappearance—and loner boy Heath Durham might be the only one who can help her. 
This debut novel is full of atmosphere, twists and turns, and a swoon-worthy romance.

I have a soft spot for this kind of thing anyway, and this was done really well. The main character is sympathetic but not simpering, and she has a solid group of good friends so when the romance happens with the "only one who understands what she's going through" it doesn't happen in isolation, which is refreshing. The plot hook and world-building are  extremely engaging and the steamy southern atmosphere of the town and the swamp are cinematically vivid. It's magical - the twisted, dark kind.

Infandous by Elana K. Arnold: Sephora Golding lives in the shadow of her unbelievably beautiful mother. Even though they scrape by in the seedier part of Venice Beach, she's always felt lucky. As a child, she imagined she was a minor but beloved character in her mother's fairy tale. But now, at sixteen, the fairy tale is less Disney and more Grimm. And she wants the story to be her own. Then she meets Felix, and the fairy tale takes a turn she never imagined. Sometimes, a story is just a way to hide the unspeakable in plain sight.

Very mature and extreme for YA - you couldn't put this in a high school library without risking some extremely pissed-off parents. The weaving in of the myths with the story adds immensely to the work without detracting from the gritty realism. I'm not sure the twist was absolutely necessary, but I believe it wasn't used purely for shock value.

The Cracks in the Kingdom (The Colours of Madeleine #2) by Jaclyn Moriarty: The second in Jaclyn Moriarty's brilliant, acclaimed fantasy trilogy, THE COLORS OF MADELEINE!
Princess Ko's been bluffing about the mysterious absence of her father, desperately trying to keep the government running on her own. But if she can't get him back in a matter of weeks, the consequence may be a devastating war. So under the guise of a publicity stunt she gathers a group of teens -- each with a special ability -- from across the kingdom to crack the unsolvable case of the missing royals of Cello.
Chief among these is farm-boy heartthrob Elliot Baranski, more determined than ever to find his own father. And with the royal family trapped in the World with no memory of their former lives, Elliot's value to the Alliance is clear: He's the only one with a connection to the World, through his forbidden communications with Madeleine.
Through notes, letters, and late nights, Elliot and Madeleine must find a way to travel across worlds and bring missing loved ones home. The stakes are high, and the writing by turns hilarious and suspenseful, as only Jaclyn Moriarty can be.

I LOVE this wonderfully imagined series. I love the kingdom of Cello, I love the wonky magic that can kill you or make you crazy, I love the characters and the story and the people missing people and people finding people and the intrigue and the letters passed through the parking meter and everything, everything. Transports of delight, I'm telling you - transports. 

The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall by Katie Alender: In this asylum, your mind plays tricks on you all the time…

Delia’s new house isn’t just a house. Long ago, it was the Piven Institute for the Care and Correction of Troubled Females—an insane asylum nicknamed “Hysteria Hall.” However, many of the inmates were not insane, just defiant and strong willed. Kind of like Delia herself.
But the house still wants to keep “troubled” girls locked away. So, in the most horrifying way, Delia gets trapped.
And that’s when she learns that the house is also haunted.
Ghost girls wander the halls in their old-fashioned nightgowns. A handsome ghost boy named Theo roams the grounds. Delia finds that all the spirits are unsettled and full of dark secrets. The house, as well, harbors shocking truths within its walls—truths that only Delia can uncover, and that may set her free.
But she’ll need to act quickly, before the house’s power overtakes everything she loves.
From master of suspense Katie Alender comes a riveting tale of twisted memories and betrayals, and the meaning of madness.

Nice. Original story, compelling character, nice skewed take on the ghost story. The Dogs by Allan Stratton: Cameron and his mom have been on the run for five years. His father is hunting them. At least, that’s what Cameron’s been told. When they settle in an isolated farmhouse, Cameron starts to see and hear things that aren’t possible. Soon he’s questioning everything he thought he knew and even his sanity. What's hiding in the night? Buried in the past? Cameron must uncover the dark secrets before they tear him apart. This wasn't precisely what I was expecting - there was a little more reality than spooky story - but it was frightening and affecting.

A Path Begins (The Thickety #1) by J.A. White: Hand in hand, the witch's children walked down the empty road.
When Kara Westfall was six years old, her mother was convicted of the worst of all crimes: witchcraft. Years later, Kara and her little brother, Taff, are still shunned by the people of their village, who believe that nothing is more evil than magic . . . except, perhaps, the mysterious forest that covers nearly the entire island. It has many names, this place. Sometimes it is called the Dark Wood, or Sordyr's Realm. But mostly it's called the Thickety.
The black-leaved trees swayed toward Kara and then away, as though beckoning her.
The villagers live in fear of the Thickety and the terrible creatures that live there. But when an unusual bird lures Kara into the forbidden forest, she discovers a strange book with unspeakable powers. A book that might have belonged to her mother.
And that is just the beginning of the story.
The Thickety: A Path Begins is the start of a thrilling and spellbinding tale about a girl, the Thickety, and the power of magic.

After a weird period of not being able to settle down and finish anything, I finished a bunch of books in the space of a couple of weeks. I then went through a period of wondering if reading at this age is just a matter of nothing new under the sun. After reading extensively for thirty-plus years, it's understandable that not much seems completely original and surprising. That said, the echoes in this book of The Crucible, every Disney movie where the protagonist grows up motherless, every YA novel where there is a dangerous forest and/or magic is thought to be evil but revealed to just be misunderstood and dangerous in the wrong hands, are built on admirably, so it isn't just derivative. Kara is a good character. I did have some problems with people who take pleasure in cruelty being let off with the explanation that they're just poor simple folk who fear what they don't understand. I don't have a really strong sense of where the next book will go, but I will probably read it.