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Jessica Day George, Wednesdays in the Tower (Bloomsbury USA 978-1-59990-645-4, $16.99, 233pp, hc) May 2013.
Changeable Castle Glower and its inhabitants return in this charming YA sequel to Tuesdays at the Castle. Tuesdays are when the Castle normally changes itself – adding, removing, or rearranging rooms, and so on – but this time Princess Celie stumbles on a strange tower on a Wednesday. Since she’s trying to map the castle (impossible as that sounds), she explores and finds a huge egg that ends up hatching a griffin – the family symbol, but always believed to be completely mythical. The castle forces her to keep the griffin a secret, a near impossible task; add a visit from a powerful wizard coming to study the castle, and Celie has her hands full. Eventually some fascinating secrets about the history of the castle are revealed, but the ending is an annoying cliffhanger. At least it promises more wonders yet to be discovered in this engaging series.
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Rhiannon Held, Tarnished (Tor 978-0-7653-3038-3, $24.99, 352pp, hc) May 2013.
Werewolves Andrew Dare and his damaged mate Silver face new battles in this urban fantasy novel, sequel to Silver. Andrew’s reputation as a killer makes it hard to find a new pack; some of Andrew’s old friends want him to challenge for leadership of his old pack, Roanoke, and become leader of all the packs on the US East Coast. Silver’s unique damage – she can no longer shift to wolf and she sees things that may or may not exist – adds complications. But one angry alpha’s rage-fueled schemes force some big changes and set Dare up to confront old friends and enemies at a Convocation of North American Were leaders. The pack dynamics are interesting, particularly the roles of females, though often enough it’s the old story of males posturing while the females do what’s needed, but it plays through some interesting variations here, as Silver starts to act like an alpha in her own right and the human mate of Seattle’s alpha takes a more active role. And lots of violence, unexpected reunions, and even the occasional moment of joy keep things fun.
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Nancy Kress, Flash Point (Viking 978-0-670-01247-3, $17.99, 502pp, hc) November 2011.
We managed to miss this young-adult near-future SF novel earlier. It doesn’t quite qualify as either dystopian or postapocalyptic, but has definite elements of both, and a tense, gritty mood that fits well with current trends. The Collapse has left people struggling with hard times. Amy is the sole support for her Gran and sister Kaylie, and her part-time job just isn’t enough, so she takes a chance on a job interview and ends up with a role on reality show Who Knows People, Baby – You? that puts a deliberately varied group of teens in odd situations and gives prizes to viewers who can predict how all of them will act. The scenarios the kids face are supposed to be hologram-augmented, but some turn out to be unexpectedly dangerous, maybe deliberately so, with some of the producers being somewhat less than ethical in their quest for ratings. Meanwhile, the real world is getting dangerous, too, with protests turning into riots as the country reaches a tipping point. It’s a fun mix of elements – Amy has a secret, genetically enhanced ability to size up any situation, which borders on psychic; romance threatens among various characters; and Amy’s wild-child sister Kaylie is deliciously infuriating, adding a welcome touch of unpredictability into a basic ‘‘evil TV producers’’ plot.
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L.E. Modesitt, Jr., Antiagon Fire (Tor 978-0-7653-3457-2, $27.99, 460pp, hc) May 2013.
This seventh book in the Imager Portfolio, and the fourth featuring scholar/imager Quaryt, finds him recovering after almost killing himself in the battle for the Bovarian capital. But there’s no time for rest; he’s promoted to commander and sent off on a new mission with his wife Vaelora. They are co-envoys to Khel, part of the newly conquered land of Bovaria, but run by the Pharsi High Council, which now has aspirations of independence. Quaryt is Pharsi by birth, although orphaned and raised by non-Pharsi; Vaelora has Pharsi blood, is sister to the new ruler Lord Bhayar, and women are more respected in Pharsi culture. Even so, nothing goes easily; the Pharsi remain reluctant and the High Lords elusive, and the neighboring country of Antiago appears to be sheltering them. Quaryt has to decide how far to go against a country known to use imagers – and the legendary Antiagon fire – in battle. Add some sea battles, and this provides a fascinating picture of imagers at war, while continuing to explore different styles of governance in this intriguing world.
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M.J. Scott, Iron Kin (Roc 978-0-451-46505-4, $7.99, 336pp, pb) April 2013.
The third book of the Half-Light City series focuses on an appealing pair: mixed-breed seer Fen and Saskia DuCaine, apprentice metal mage and sister to Fen’s Templar friends Guy and Simon. Fen is tormented by visions of approaching disaster, and has taken to wearing painful iron and drinking a lot to control the visions – but with the approaching Treaty Season, he needs to know what’s coming. Meanwhile, Saskia wants to participate in the treaty talks between the City’s four races (Fae, Beast Kind, Human, and Blood – vampire) and Fen may be her ticket in. There’s a powerful attraction between the two, and an unexpected magical connection as well, but their class differences are huge – and tension builds quickly as the treaty negotiations start to go very, very wrong. I hadn’t read the first two books in the series, and there’s clearly lots of backstory here, but this novel is quite accessible on its own. More frustrating was the conclusion, which left things looking bad indeed.
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Carrie Vaughn, Kitty Rocks the House (Tor 978-0-7653-6867-6, $7.99, 324pp, pb) April 2013.
Kitty’s back in Denver after all the fuss in London, trying to take care of more domestic matters while still working to block the ancient vampire Roman and his Long Game. So in between talking to ancient vampires who are potential allies, she also has to deal with finding a new house, a new werewolf who wants to join her pack, a strange new vampire in town with a special offer for Rick, a family funeral, and her sister’s plans for a party. It takes a while to sort the crises from the minor details, and the plot develops surprisingly slowly. This feels more like a middle book than most novels in the series; by the end there are major new developments, but it takes too long to get there, and much more still remains to be done.
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Carol Wolf, Binding (Night Shade Books 978-1-59780-465-3, $14.99, 276pp, tp) April 2013. Cover by Tony Mauro. [Order from Night Shade Books, 1661 Tennessee Street, #3H, San Francisco CA 94107;
No one believes that Amber and her demon saved the world in Summoning, the first urban fantasy novel in the Moon Wolf Saga. Amber, a runaway teen wolf shapeshifter, now ends up kidnapped and threatened by various groups in the magical community, who want to force her to use her demon, Richard, to save the world from the World Snake. But Richard’s gone, released once the World Snake was defeated – but how can Amber convince anyone? Her family now has a lead on where she is… and she had good reasons to run away. Plenty of action, humor, abusive family angst, a bit of romance, and some counterculture satire combine for fun adventure as Amber deals with the different groups, and maybe starts to build a life for herself in the Los Angeles area.
–Carolyn Cushman
Return to In This Issue listing.
LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: DIVERS HANDS
When We Wake, Karen Healey
September Girls, Bennett Madison
Speculative Japan 3: Silver Bullet and Other Tales of Japanese Science Fiction and Fantasy, Edward Lipsett, ed.
The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, John Langan
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, Laird Barron
GWENDA BOND
When We Wake, Karen Healey (Little, Brown 978-0316200769, $17.99, 304pp, hc) March 2013.
Let it never be said that authors from Australia and New Zealand don’t have a huge influence on American YA. From Margo Lanagan to Justine Larbalestier to Garth Nix to Elizabeth Knox, they are widely represented on best-of lists and have earned legions of devoted fans on the othe
r side of the world. Karen Healey, whose first two books were set in her native New Zealand, is a relative newcomer to that list, but she’s already established a reputation for novels that are as thoughtful as they are enjoyable. Now, with her third YA novel When We Wake, she makes two departures from her previous work – the first from fantasy to science fiction, and the second from New Zealand to a future Australia. Heroine Tegan Oglietti is a 16-year-old girl who’s not particularly unusual. We’re introduced to her through her own vibrant, engaging voice. She loves the Beatles and freerunning, is newly in love and, if not as inherently political as her longtime friend turned new boyfriend, enough of a believer to attend a protest with him – oh, and the year’s 2027. Except that’s the day Tegan dies, cut down by a stray sniper bullet meant for a dignitary, not for a normal teenage girl, but for someone important, as it were.
But Tegan does not stay dead forever. When she’s revived, it’s 100 hundred years later, and the mere fact of her waking has made her the exact opposite of the typical teenage girl – in every way except on the inside, of course, where that’s precisely what she still is: a teenage girl who finds out she was cryogenically frozen and is the first person considered a successful revival. She’s at the center of a military project, Operation New Beginning, and she believes in the good in that, in helping bring back soldiers, because her father was one. So she’s not just left to deal with the circumstances of her awakening, but to grieve for a past she never got to experience. Everyone she knew and loved is dead. The world has undergone vast changes. And Tegan’s new celebrity status puts her in the crosshairs of religious fundamentalists who believe she’s a soulless abomination, and of people who believe Australia’s zero tolerance immigration policy should be enforced for ‘‘revivals’’ like Tegan as well. In a time of overpopulation and catastrophic environmental changes, there’s no room for the past’s dead to come back to life, they argue.
Healey here does something rare in YA science fiction (which we are thankfully beginning to see more of lately). This is not a dystopia, though the world has its problems, but it’s not a utopia either. What it is instead of those perhaps simpler and definitely more extreme options is a convincing, compelling future. From computer tech to the global political environment to changes in music, Healey has meticulously constructed a world that feels like it could happen. And yet it is different enough from our own to be a constantly entrancing ‘‘what if.’’ What if this happens? What if that does? What if eating meat was not only expensive but socially disapproved of? What if tiny mobile video cameras made the paparazzi even more omnipresent?
Tegan’s allies in this new world are not as powerful as her keepers, and it becomes quickly clear that the military has a bunker’s worth of dark secrets and a serious agenda where she’s concerned. But, to keep her happy, she’s allowed to live with the doctor who revived her, Marie (who she very much likes). Healey shows off her effortlessly integrated talent for building worlds that feel truly diverse, in a way that’s never forced. At school, Tegan makes fast friends with budding journalist Bethari and her ex, pharmaceutical whiz Joph, and meets a dreamy boy on a third world talent visa, Abdi. Some of the other kids taunt and torment her, but Tegan is not willing to play their games. And, as she learns more, she may not be a willing participant in those of the military’s or the radicals’ either. All this results in several high stakes showdowns, related to us in Tegan’s unmistakable voice, the last of which isn’t resolved. But, that’s okay, because there’s another volume on the way. And I, for one, can’t wait to see what Healey’s political, intelligent teens are going to do in When We Wake’s follow-up installment.
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September Girls, Bennett Madison (HarperTeen 978-0-06-220129-4, $17.99, 352pp, hc) May 2013.
Bennett Madison is a writer who deserves more attention (I say this selfishly, because as a reader I want to see new novels from him with greater frequency). His last book, 2009’s The Blonde of the Joke, was a magical realist fable set in gritty New Jersey, in which two girls shoplift their way through the mall, looking for the Holy Grail. It was odd and beautiful, with teenage characters as excellent and maddening as any you’ll find in real life. And, I’m happy to report, his new novel, September Girls is even better.
Teenage Sam’s Mom has left the family for ‘‘Women’s Land,’’ sending his father into a crisis that escalates from yoga to deciding that the next day he, Sam, and Sam’s older brother Jeff should head to the Outer Banks for the summer, because ‘‘A boy should go to the beach at least once in his life.’’ Vacations to Maine earlier didn’t count, it seems.
This novel will be called magical realism by some people, purely based on Madison’s ability to make the real parts feel so very, well, real. If you ask me, this is YA fantasy at its best, slipping the boundaries of what we expect YA fantasy to be. Narrator Sam is sardonically appealing. A case in point: when he describes the part of the Outer Banks where his dad has schlepped him and his brother for a summer of male bonding. Sam’s description of the drive in is a perfect example of his tone:
…strings of vacation developments full of stilted pastel ‘‘cottages’’ that looked large enough to house armies, or at least – judging by the Lexus SUVs in the driveways – shitloads of rich shitheads and their horrible shithead children.
Madison’s descriptions of the some of the tonier, more touristy areas of the Banks are always convincing, as filtered through Sam’s own tourist eyes. Beside those polished-vacation-home parts of the setting, Sam also captures the feeling of a lingering wildness that makes the Outer Banks such a great place to set a story about the unlikely and unsettling.
The unlikely and unsettling here are mermaids, and while classically inspired, these are definitely not mermaids as we usually see them. These are beautiful blondes tossed from the ocean onto land. We learn about them mainly through brief interstitial chapters told in a lovely, communal omniscient voice. They do not swim, but sometimes, at night, they might be caught lying on the sand, the waves lapping at their bare bodies. In fact, Sam and Jeff see one the very first night, but she crawls away faster than they can reach her. And then it feels like maybe it was a dream, like maybe they didn’t really see her at all.
Sam notices quickly that these blondes are different. Waitresses and surf shop workers, smokers of Gauloises who live in communal flophouse apartments together and throw endless, epic parties. Who seem to blend one into another, until they don’t, until one, two, three of them are only themselves. These are not the tourist girls. They’re something else. And all of them, to a one, are attracted to Sam, for what reason we’re not sure. But we know he’s this summer’s one, a special boy, and that there’s a reason to all this if we could only understand what it is.
As the summer progresses, Jeff falls for one of the girls, this one named Kristle, who still seems to be attracted to Sam – unpredictably. Sometimes she is, sometimes it seems like she just wants to devour him. And Sam falls for a girl named DeeDee, who is more disenchanted even than the rest of her sisters. More like Sam, an observer, a commenter, someone who sees more than many others do. DeeDee knows the score.
The sinister truth at the heart of this mermaid mythology is revealed slowly and builds to a suitably affecting ending. It turns out a summer at the beach just might change your life. It might change who you are later. Or it might not. Madison’s not one to answer every question, and not one to force an easy conclusion when a somewhat ambiguous one is much more interesting. In the end, September Girls is a meditation on what it means to be a man – or to be both a boy and a man – but also on something even larger. It’s examining what people can mean to each other, and maybe even what it means to be a person. The answer is an odd and beautiful and risky novel. From Madison, I wouldn’t expect any other kind.
–Gwenda Bond
KAREN BURNHAM
Speculative Japan 3: Silver Bullet and Other Tales of Japanese Science Fiction and Fantasy, Edward Lipsett, ed. (Kurodahan Press 978-49
02-07530-4, $16.00, 292pp, tp) December 2012.
Edward Lipsett, the editor of the Speculative Japan series, emphasizes that he’d like to introduce readers worldwide to some of the excellent Japanese genre fiction that’s out there. The third volume in the series fulfills that goal admirably. Through weird and wonderful stories with excellent translations, we find a wide variety of styles, themes, and tropes within its pages.
I’ve heard anthology editors say that each volume in a series takes on its own flavor. While I haven’t been lucky enough to read the previous entries in this run, the singular impression I received from this selection of stories is New Weird. Many of the stories here would fit neatly in a theme anthology such as Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s The Weird. The VanderMeers have been particularly active in promoting international fiction and its appeal to lovers of the odd and unusual in genre fiction, and here we have plenty of evidence substantiating their argument.
The very first story in this volume tells the tale of a historical warrior who has spent his later years in contemplation of a single white camellia flower. When a visitor comes to interview the man, the camellia proves to be much more than a simple object of beauty. I’m afraid that I can’t really explain just how creepy and weird ‘‘A White Camellia in a Vase’’ by Asamatsu Ken (translated by Joe Earle) is without completely spoiling the ending. Likewise, the concluding story, ‘‘Silver Bullet’’ by Yamada Masaki (translated by Stephen Carter): while it starts out as a noir/Lovecraft mash-up pastiche, it concludes by putting a completely different spin on the Cthulhu mythos.
There’s some contrast within the volume between small, intimate stories and stories written on a larger canvas. Many of the quieter stories, like ‘‘White Camellia’’, are creepy and intense. This is true of ‘‘Heart of Darkness’’ by Ayatsuji Yukito (trans. Daniel Jackson), where a man has a shadow on his soul surgically removed, and then gets to take the shadow home with him. ‘‘A Piece of Butterfly’s Wing’’ by Kamon Nanami (award-winning translation by Angus Turvill) tells of a woman visiting her estranged sister, who is no longer who or what she once was. ‘‘Sunset’’ by Minagawa Hiroko (trans. Karen Sandness) goes straight for the surreal, with severed fingers swimming around fashionable aquariums, among other oddities. ‘‘The Warning’’ by Onda Riku (trans. Mikhail S. Ignatov) is a piece of flash fiction where a dog warns his master about a threat – cute and creepy as it goes. ‘‘Invisible’’ by Tachihara Toya (trans. Nancy H. Ross) has a growing intensity as an insecure teacher must deal with an invisible student in her class that all the other students can see. That was one that I couldn’t put down.
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