Reading roundup
21. Seanan McGuire, Rosemary and Rue -- I think this is another case where my expectations for the book were too high (mostly thanks to the extreme devotion of Toby's supporters on chickfight), and so I ended up liking it less than I would have than if I'd come to it "cold". I still liked it, and definitely plan to continue reading the series, but it didn't click with me, I have to say. Which is weird, because I love urban fantasy about Faeries (e.g. War for the Oaks, and Holly Black's Modern Faerie Tale books), and I love fantasy/noir blends (see my devotion to The Dresden Files, and me constantly trying to find another series along those lines), and I love books set in and around San Francisco, so here's three reasons I should've loved this book, and I didn't love it, I just liked it well enough.
I think the root of my problem is, neither the worldbuilding nor the characters gripped me sufficiently. And I suspect the way the novel opens, and Toby's background pre-novel may be responsible for both of those to some degree. Toby is an insider to the world of Faerie -- she grew up there, even if she isn't a full-fledged member, as a changeling -- and so is everybody else she interacts with, and so we don't get a character who can lead us into the world. Similarly, most of the characters Toby interacts with are people she already knows, there's complicated past history there, and it made those characters (and Toby herself) less accessible to me as a reader.
What we got to see of Sylvester, Luna, Tybalt, Lily, et al felt tell more than show for this reason, and didn't strike me as very interesting. The only characters who did not feel like this were the Luidaeg and, to a lesser extent, Dare, who were people Toby had just met. Well, also, Devin was interesting, too, but mainly because Toby had never seen him clearly. (I definitely suspected him of messing with Toby long before she did, but hadn't figured him for the person who'd killed Evening -- actually, I think I might've liked it better if he hadn't been the one central bad guy and had been someone trying to exploit Toby for his own gain but not responsible for everything. And I didn't find the Villain Breakdown at the end particularly believable. Still, he was a neat character. One I kind of wish would be around in the future to create more tension for Toby. But ah, well.)
Toby herself... one of the things that makes the Dresden books so readable -- and this was especially true early on, when the plots were a lot more monster of the week and there was less of a cast of characters to love -- is that Harry is such a snappy, fun narrator, even while his life is crappy and only going to hell further. There was a little bit of that with Toby -- her interacting with her cats in particular was fun -- but not enough to make her a truly engaging narrator. Granted, I don't think it would've been believable if she'd been tossing wisecracks all over the place, considering she lost not just her parents (like Harry) but also, much more recently, her daughter and partner, in effect. Actually, she lost everyone because she is in self-imposed exile from all things Faery when the book begins. But still, it took me a long time to get into the book because of this, and she wasn't a narrator I wanted to spend time with, particularly (although I suspect this might be better in subsequent books, since she is recovering her place, if not her family). I also found it hard to accept her motivation for said self-imposed exile. I can definitely understand that she wouldn't want to face Sylvester and his family after failing them, as she believes, but the way she seems to think they'll be angry at her, as opposed to relieved to see her well, grateful for all she ended up sacrificing, wanting to make it right, etc. -- especially when we see how wrong she turns out to be -- that just feels like Toby's a bad judge of character. There could still be angst if she didn't believe this of them! It would've probably been more interesting to me, actually, if she knew Sylvester and family would welcome her with no recriminations, just gratitude and caring, but she still felt she couldn't face them because she held herself responsible, and their understanding would actually make her internal guilt worse, something like that. Also, I would've liked to know more about what she'd actually done to gain the title/position of Knight Errant and Sylvester's trust -- that's mentioned as a pretty special thing, and I'm curious to see how she could've been effective in a world where she is so underpowered compared to purebloods.
Things I liked: the Luidaeg toying with Toby; the troll cabbie; some quotes from Toby: "I've always made a pretty good somebody." "I've never liked being looked at like I was a hero. I always wind up letting someone down. Sometimes I get lucky. Sometimes the only person who gets hurt is me." (both of these lines kind of crystallized Toby's character for me; unfortunately, this was only in the last quarter of the book...); the ending/last line ("I have time.")
Things I'm intrigued by: the link that now exists between Tybalt and Toby, the relationship between Connor and Toby (although I have to say, I'd have a hard time seeing a selkie as a love interest, if that's the way it's likely to go); whatever happened to Raysel and Luna in captivity; will Toby get to meet her daughter, and what she would be like; whatever is going on with the Queen that's making her act all weird.
Things I'm unsold on: the night-haunts (seem like a convoluted and non-organic way to deal with Faery bodies in a mortal world); the unexplained way Devin doctored Evening's blood to prevent Toby from finding out right away who her killer was (unless this is a hook into a later book -- right now it's just a loose end, and a pretty huge one). Also, this is a nit -- there is no such thing, AFAIK, as "the San Francisco Art Museum", the mortal-side entrance to Goldengreen; I'm guessing what's meant is the Legion of Honor? This is kind of an odd thing for an author who seems to be a NorCal native...
Anyway, as always, when I'm trying to figure out why a book didn't work for me as well as I thought it would, I end up writing things that paint a more negative picture than I actually intend. I liked Rosemary and Rue. I want to read A Local Habitation. I'm glad I found this series (thanks, lodessa!) And Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) sounds like a really cool person! (I, uh... suspect I might enjoy reading things narratate by her more than things narrated by Toby. >.> She has a more frequently deployed sense of humour :)
22. Melissa Marr (melissa_writing), Ink Exchange
24. Melissa Marr, Fragile Eternity -- (sequels to Wicked Lovely) One thing that did happen after I finished Rosemary and Rue is that I was still in the mood for Faerie-based urban fantasy, so I went to these books that had been hanging out on my to-read pile for a while, and they hit the spot. I can't help but compare them to the Holly Black books, and I like Holly's books better, but these are neat in their own way.
One thing I like about them is that there are, essentially, no Faerie good guys or bad guys, Keenan is the main protagonist's friend and partner, but he is still a manipulative and ruthless jerk, for all that he can be sweet and supportive and sympathetic. Niall in Ink Exchange is a woobie, but he's done some terribly things in the past, and he can be a right bastard in Fragile Eternity to Keenan and to a lesser extent Aislinn, because of what they've put him through. Irial is the Dark King and he sets out to do some terrible things, but he is still sympathetic and motivated by the good of the court he is responsible for. Stuff like that -- I like the moral grayness. (I went back and reread my thoughts on the first book, and it looks like my major complaint was that the bad faeries were too cartoon evil and the good ones were too good -- looks like that's been taken care of, then!) I also like Bananach (for her role), who is nicely psycho without being boring.
Ink Exchange was the book I liked better of the two, and it might actually be because I find Leslie a more compelling mortal protagonist than either Aislinn or Seth. She is a rape survivor trying to come to terms with it and reclaim her body. Along the way she gets enmeshed in a Dark Court experiment, addicted in a way much worse than her brother's drug addiction which horrifies and disgusts her, Her relationship with both Irial (the Dark King) and Niall (the Summer Court fairy who tries to protect her) is interesting, although even more interesting is the other side of the love triangle, that between Niall and Irial, who have loads of history and UST/past RST (I mean, it's made clear, not once but twice, that the reason Niall is becoming increasingly obsessed with Leslie is her connection to Irial, and then in Fragile Eternity Sorcha, the High Court queen comes out and says that Irial has been in love with Niall for ages. Interesting! and more up my alley than the other relationships in these books. Considering Irial had used Niall to provide nourishment for his court without Niall realizing the consequences and then turned him over to his court for torture and/or rape, this... probably doesn't say very good things about me. But there you go.) Leslie does get a happy-ish ending of sorts, which is a relief, because it could've easily ended in a very dark place. I hope to see more of her in subsequent books and to know she is doing well. Also, I liked Gabriel a lot -- I have a thing for gruff, deadly warrior types, you know :P But I don't get the best friend / "like a brother" closeness between Seth and Niall -- I didn't really notice that relationship being very strong in the first book, so I kind of went "bzuh?" when I first encountered it in these. Seems more like the author decided they needed to be close so Seth could have the protection of the Dark Court when Niall became king of it, and that Niall would freak out when Seth disappeared in FE. I did think Aislinn's reasons for not wanting to drag Leslie into the Faerie world were decent ("I don't want my friends under my rule"), even if they ended in tragedy for Leslie (although by then it was probably too late to "save" her).
Fragile Eternity dragged for me a bit, but that could be because I started it first (I thought it was book #2 and stuck it in my backpack for the commute, so then I had no choice but to read it, about halfway). But I don't think so -- it's just a slower book, and a lot of it is Aislinn moping after Seth and Seth worrying he is losing Aislinn to Keenan and stuff. It's sort of a standard romance plot, albeit with a bit more justification -- Seth wants to make himself immortal so he can be with Aislinn forever, so he goes off with the only faery that will help him, even though she's totally untrustworthy. Aislinn, meanwhile, thinks Seth has abandoned her because he is trapped in Faerie, where time moves more slowly, so a month there is six months in the outside world (it's a neat sort of gender-swapped Persephone story, actually). I liked the fact that Keenan was happy to move in on the territory when Seth disappeared and also had, all along, every intention of getting together with Aislinn when Seth the mortal finall died. At the same time, Keenan refusing to sleep with Aislinn when she, desperate to get over Seth, throws herself at him felt believable and helped underline that Keenan can be decent -- but sometimes for very selfish reasons (he knows where Seth is all along, and mostly just doesn't want to blow his chance with Aislinn, since they have all of eternity). The whole thing with Sorcha becoming Seth's mother and consequently becoming partly human herself was WAY WTF and the weakest part of the book for me. I mean, really, it just felt like a way to tie the remaining Faerie court in with the rest, and to make Seth special, too. I did like the tiny little aside about why the High Court is fascinated by human art -- because creating art requires a thread of chaos, and thus the Court of Order cannot create.
I don't think Melissa Marr is particularly good at writing "ordinary" teenagers. Seth is older and Aislinn has had a weird life and had to grow up very fast, but there are teens thinking in terms that disrupted my suspension of disbelief, and calling each other "sweetie" non-poisonously, and it just rang false to me a number of times. Note to self: Book #4 is Radiant Shadows (about Ani, Gabriel's daughter) and Devlin), and book #5 (the conclusion) is Dark Mercy
23. Scot Westerfeld, Extras -- I've come to the conclusion that I kind of love Westerfeld's exercises in world-building a lot more than his plots, morals, or even characters. ) No exception here. Aya's city in Extras -- with its reputation economy and everybody having a feed and value being based on a combination of merits and popularity, was really, really neat, especially for someone who is as addicted to LJ as I am. In a way, it was like fandom taken to an extreme, especially in the character of Nana Love (who doesn't talk about anything of substance, apparently, and who everybody feels they know intimately enough to refer to her as Nana-chan). Also, Reputation Bombing, lol! Every criminal since the mind rain winding up confressing, for the fame. Really cool stuff! The (non-worldbuilding) rest of it was OK.
Aya is not dissimilar to Tally in the first book, in that she means well, on the whole, but is also quite selfish and this leads her to make clearly bad decisions, again and again. She does manage to overcome it (I guess?) on her own rather than being reset with brain surgery at the end, like Tally after Uglies, so it's not quite as frustrating. I liked her relationship with her brother Hiro and Ren. It was harder to feel anything for Frizz, because so much of what Frizz did in the book was actually driven by Radical Honesty and his inability not to tell the truth -- I didn't get much feel for his actual personality underneath that, although there are glimpses, such as when he somewhat wistfully observes the mecha battle.
The real Extras... LOL, Quaddies XD is what I've got to say. I'm relieved that their motivation is what it turned out to be, because if it had only taken 3 years to get back to planning for global war I would've been pissed, and if they were shooting metal up into space just so the cities couldn't expand, I would've been pissed, too. Going into space really does seem to be the least annoying of the possible explanations, although I can't say I agree they needed to do it secretively. I did like how, because "extras" had been used as a term by Aya for people who don't matter throughout the book, the idea that extras came from "extraterrestrials" didn't even occur to me until it was revealed. But I might just be slow :)
I liked getting to see Shay and company again, however briefly (Shay and her passion for nanos and blowing stuff up still rock!). So... Tally and David had not gotten together over these three years? That was... unexpected. Or do they just not kiss because Tally is traumatized by that? ...Odd. (Also, sort of related, when Aya tries to figure out who Tally had been talking about when she said the last person she'd kissed ended up dying, she things, "Lots of people had died in the Diego War, of course". I think the actual total was 17. I'm going to guess that this is not a discontinuity but rather Aya's perception from a world without war (or, apparently, murder at all), where 17 people dying in a war is "lots".
The "Japanese!" blinky insertions -- a simile involving cherry blossoms, mentions of sushi and green tea, "sensei" and "chan" felt kind of tacked on, but it's not like after centuries of Prettytime and then the mind rain there would be actual continuity of culture -- I'm not sure there is a non-tacked-on way to mark Aya and company as Japanese. I did think good use was made of language and culture barriers when Aya's gang encounter the Cutters.
Quote:
Some history clique had applied averaging software to the world's great spiritual books, then programmed it to spit out godlike decrees.
For some reason the software had told them not to eat pigs.
"Who would do that in the first place?" Aya asked.
"Aren't pigs extinct?" Ren giggled. "They seriously need to update that code."
25. Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals -- This was sort of a painful read. There were stretches, especially towards the beginning, where I had to keep reminding myself I was reading a Pratchett book (and not, say, decent fanfiction thereof) -- it just didn't feel like one. Even the ones that are not my particular favorites, like the early Rincewind books, even The Last Continent, which was kind of a slog for me, had moments where I was struck by what Pterry was doing and how well, how inimitably well he was doing it. UA didn't have almost any of those. It was still a rather good book, an enjoyable book, but I didn't get that Pterry feeling from it. There were a couple of times I laughed out loud -- I actually cracked up in the middle of a restaurant and couldn't stop laughing until I had tears in my eyes at the full-page monologue of Ponder explaining everything the wizards are doing wrong in their first attempt at football. I chortled at Ridcully and Ponder talking about Bengo's proclivities. But there are jokes and clever lines that feel just a little out of focus -- like you know they'd be crisper and funnier in a different DW book, but they're kind of blurred and smudged here, just a bit. And there's more explicit, drawn-out gross-out humour that stuck out for me (the pee drinking and all the (non-graphic) puke at the end). There was one scene that actually moved me -- Trevor finally agreeing to play and the others giving him a jersey with his father's number on it (and I like the way the whole prodigy at first kick expectation was then subverted, because of course he had never played or trained before, but Trev still got his triumph.)
There was a whole lot of new characters introduced, but only Glenda and Trev felt real. Nutt is an interesting and painful one, but he is so... well, he's a representation of something more than his own character, I felt, so it's almost like the conversation Vetinari and Margolotta have about him is echoed by the burden he bears in the text. And I didn't find him interesting. I appreciate the moral he represents, and, I think, for a pretty moral-driven plot, it's quite well done. I do like the way he offers to take on the city, essnetially, in terms it can understand and is, therefore, accepted (more or less). Trev is a neat character because he is both likeable and frustrating on a lot of levels; he definitely grew on me, in the sense that I didn't think I would be rooting for him when I first met him. Glenda I liked pretty much from the start, but, again, her development and philosophical realizations felt more telegraphed and belabored than I could imagine them in a previous book, not as elegant as, say, Moist's development or the things Vimes comes to realize about himself in... well, just about any of the later Watch novels, or character development in my favorite stand-alones. Oh, and there's also Pepe, I guess, who was sort of entertaining, but fairly forgettable, for me. I was intrigued by Madame Sharn -- specifically, the implication (which I don't think I imagined?) that she is biologically male but chooses to embrace the new option of of presenting as female -- and although she is rather over-the-top in general, I thought this was subtly and respectfully done. Oh year, and there's also Andy Shank, who is kind of a letdown as a villain, to be honest: he is clearly a psycho, but not an interesting psycho like Cox in Nation, let alone someone like Vorbis or Reacher Gilt.
There were all these Vetinari scenes, and I enjoyed them (drunk Vetinari! Vetinari and Lady Margolotta! who calls him "Havelock" while he calls her "madam" :D; I am not sure what I think about his (ostensibly) uncontrolled laughter at Nutt's zinger... that was odd, but also somewhat endearing), but throughout I kept thinking, in the back of my mind, that I wished those scenes had appeared in a book where Pterry was at the top of his form. And I feel terrible thinking things like this. The Alzheimer's is obviously taking a physical toll, from the accounts of fan interaction, and a mental toll, and, no, he probably isn't in top form and it's unlikely that he will be again. Maybe I'm pessimistic and what I think I'm seeing in UA is just a blip. I LOVED Nation, which I thought was as strong as any DW book, barring some personal taste complaints. I thought Thud! and Making Money, while not as delightful as Going Postal, were quite decent and still very Pterry-like. So maybe I'm reading too much into it, looking harder for flaws because I'm afraid to find them, overexamining my own reactions. I hope so, certainly... :/
To return to less depressing musings, this had just about the right percentage of wizards in it. Ponder, being reulctantly in charge of everything, with no hope of finding anyone to disburden him. Ridcully, though a bit cartoonish even for himself, being his generally adorable teddy bear self -- I especially liked his interaction with Glenda. I wish Bengo Macarona had gotten more screentime where he was doing things besides being awesome at football, because he sounds like an intriguing character. I am generally lukewarm about the Librarian, but I liked him in this one because he a) actually had something to do, beyond being an orangutan amusingly and saying OOK, and b) had a legitimate reason to be a kick-ass goalie, what with those arms.
I was disappointed by Margolotta. I liked her a lot in her previous cameo appearances, and had been looking forward to seeing more of her (though there was less of her here than reading spoilers had led me to expect), but she was disappointingly petty and not reading the situation well. I suppose the idea was to show that Vetinari had surpassed the woman who had taught him a lot about governing, but the way it played out didn't work particularly well for me.
I actually wish there'd been more football in the book. It's one of only two, maybe three sports that I have an interest in (the other one(s) being figure skataing and maybe bobsled/luge, though it's been years since I've thought of the latter), and the game, when it wasn't "narrated" by William de Worde (which was a joke that got old pretty fast) was quite exciting and fast-paced. The floating Trev and Juliet was random, but I liked the descriptions of play, the crowd, Dean refereeing, etc.
I liked the Romeo and Juliet aspects there in the beginning with Trev and, well, Juliet, and especially Glenda's reaction to R&J Starcrossed. Liked the Cyrano aspects of Nutt writing Trev's poem, too, and the way it was played with -- that Nutt is utterly uninspired by Juliet, that Juliet needs Glenda to translate the poem for her, and that the translation which she can understand ends up being "Well, basically he is saying that he really fancies you, thinks you're really fit, how about a date, no hanky panky, he promises", which is what Trev had started with in the first place. Also, the parody of "To His Coy Mistress", which is just a lot of fun to parody (have I even mentioned an imitation/parody someone in my school had written of it for an English assignment which went:
Come play with me and be my bud
And we'll be cows and chew our cud.
We'll make fine milk and tasty beef.
Or let's play Indians -- I'll be chief!
[...bunch of equally fun lines I no longer remember...]
If this sounds nice and not like crud,
Come play with me and be my bud.
I thought some of the other extended jokes worked better than others. Like, the whole thing with Doctor Hix was OK, reasonably funny some of the time, only slightly rolly at other points. Bledlow Nobbs (no relation) was OK, too. Wizards being all about food is not new but was cute, as was bickering between Ridcully and Dean Henry. But, like, the "pp" stuff just wasn't that funny. Ponder being inept at sports was OK but didn't bring much new to the genre until the little scenelet that goes beyond the funny and mentions how Ponder, as "the weird kid", was at the bottom of the totem poll because "the fat kid" had clout and ""That had left only the weird kid as the natural target for the other boys, which meant a chronic hell for Ponder until that wonderful day when sparks came out of Ponder's fingers and Martin Sogger's pants caught fire." That was one of the very few moments in the book where I felt Pterry was doing what Pterry does best, showing pathos and humanity while still being funny. The thing with the whistle, though -- yeah, that got old fast.
It was neat to see Ankh-Morpork on a "street" level, I have to say. Most of the A-M books deal with the Watch, which means coppers and criminals and fringe-y sort of people like Foul Ole Ron and stuff. And the "industrialization" ones tend to involve institutions and upper and middle classes. So it was neat to get an inside look at life in the Dolly Sisters, and to hear common folk talking about "the Old Sam" and how they see Vetinari and the wizards and the Watch. (Also, I'm curious about the Medusa in the Watch.)
Oh, also, this book felt kind of movie-y to me, in a way that no other Discworld book has. In fact, with other books, I always have a hard time imagining how the book will make the transition to the screen, even when I hear a film is being made. But this one felt like it would slot very well. (I think that means, maybe, there's less going on under the surface than in other Discworld books...)
After reading fan reactions on discworld and stuff: Yeah, Ridcully and Ponder did feel somewhat different fromt he way they appeared in previous books, but it didn't strike me as an inconsistency. Ponder seems to have grown up quite a bit, and as for Ridcully, I think part of the apparent difference is that we see a more inward view of him in addition to the blustering. There were still things that gave me pause, but not beyond normal. I wondered about the Bursar's whereabouts, too. Lots of people talk about how it the book felt like a good-bye, and I didn't feel that, necessarily, although I do think it would work as a good one. I am intrigued by the wild theory someone advanced about Nutt as a possible successor for Vetinari. Intriguing! Not that I believe this would really happen, but he's got the psychological insight, strategic and tactical thinking, erudition, and personal deadliness that Vetinari has, although not, I'm pretty sure, the ruthlessness or self-confidence (he seems to be learning the latter, but I'm pretty sure he would outright refuse to embrace the former, and would be right to do so.
Quotes:
Glenda, thinking about a "prince" for Juliet: "Technically that meant Lord Vetinari, but he was far too old. Besides, no one was sure which side of the bed he got out of, or even if he went to bed at all." (The Vetinari slash shippers are dancing in the streets, I'm guessing? ;P)
"Glenda enjoyed her job. She didn't have a career; they were for people who could not hold down jobs."
'Glenda did not have the temperament for serving at table. [...] she positively hated having to smile at people who actually merited, instead, a flick around the earhole with a napkin. She hated taking away plates of unfinished food. She always had to suppress a tendency to say things like "Why did you put it on your plate if you didn't intend to finish it?" and "Of course it's cold, but that's because you've been playing footsie with the young lady opposite and haven't been concentrating on your dinner," and when all else failed, "There's little children in Klatch yo know..."'
"Remarkably, a bottle of port had survived with fifty per cent remaining capacity. Any port in a storm, he thought, and drank his breakfast." (about Pepe)
Vetinari: "If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior." (I guess that answers the question about Vetinari and religion :)
"Juliet's version of cleanliness was next to godliness, which was to say it was erratic, past all understanding and was seldom seen."
"An extremely good plan, Mister Stibbons, and I think we should take the senior faculty as well. They will lend some much-needed..." He snapped his fingers. "What's the word?"
"Confusion," said Ponder.
"No, not that," said Ridcully.
"Appetite?" said Ponder. "Weight?"
"Something like that... Ah, gravitas. Oh, yes, lots of gravitas."
26. Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd, edited by Holly Black and Cecil Castelucci -- this was a really fun anthology, non-genre YA (with one genre-ish story). There was one story I very much disliked and two stories I was kind of conflicted about, and I didn't OMGlove any of the stories, but I did really, really enjoy six of them. So, a very nice roundup!
- "Once You're a Jedi, You're a Jedi All The Way", Holly Black and Cecil Castelucci -- a cute little Romeo and Juliet sort of story, set at a convention, with "Romeo" being a "Jedi" and "Juliet" being a Klingon (not really just COSplayers, although they're that, too -- Thomas trains in lightsaber fighting and tries to live by the Jedi code, and Chung Ae really feels empowered when she is being Arizhel). Now, I don't know much about either Star Trek nor Star Wars fandom. The premise sounded every-so-slightly improbable to me, but that's probably because I don't realize how serious people are about these things. But even with that, it worked quite well for me. The story is told in short alternating segments narrated in first person by "Jedi" and "Klingon", and it was cool to get both of their voices. Thomas is pretty adorkable, but it's Arizhel who is quite interesting, because for her the Klingon personality and "culture" is an alternative to her family (and, presumably, society's) expectations of her, and this is made quite explicit but in a fairly elegant and natural way. I also liked how the gender stuff around sex is handled -- Arizhel doesn't remember what happened last night (she blacked out after going with Thomas to his room and coming on to him) and is trying to play it cool, and Thomas didn't take advantage of her but is also a little bit like, "what's wrong with me that I can't even score with a hot Klingon chick throwing herself at me?" It was cute, and pretty mature for a YA story, and it's also the reason this anthology exists, as the foreword explains -- and it's a pretty good reason.
- "One of Us", Tracy Lynn -- Oh god. This has a couple of decent moments -- one during which I actually smiled -- but this story is kind of a mess on the whole, composed pretty much entirely of stereotypes, not even internally consistent, and with a pappy ending. Just, ugh.
The premise is, a cheerleader, whose name is Montgomery, and who gets referred to as "the cheerleader" a whole lot (this might be a set up for the thing that did make me smile, but it's still rather crappy writing), is dating a jock who is interested in geeky things. So, to have more in common with him, she hires four geeks -- of the outcast variety -- to tutor her in geeky things. Between them, they have no fashion sense (all of them bar one, maybe), few social skills, buck teeth, and a tendency to snort while laughing. I can't remember if/how many of them wear glasses. They also each have a geeky "specialty" (TV shows, epic fantasy, manga, video games), although there is at least a little overlap. Ellen the lone girl geek looks slovenly and has a crappy home life, which the cheerleader gets to witness, and starts out hating Montgomery but then becomes friends with her. Ezra, the worst offender in the lack of social intelligence department, keeps coming on to her (Montgomery). David is fat, shy, and part Asian. And Mica is actually more or less "normal", because he ends up being the cheerleader's love interest eventually. Meanwhile, the cheerleader writes with a froofy pen in a pink notebook, and the jock gobbles down burgers getting food all over himself, ogles another girl with his girlfriend standing right there, and ends up cheating on her with her slutty cheerleader friend. Lovely, right? Aaand then there's the line "'Touch me and I'll kick your ass,' Montgomery warned. 'And then I'll have Ryan kick your ass, and then everyone on the football team kick your ass, and then Eddie the towel boy kick your ass.' (Eddie was an enthusiastic nine-year-old with autism who always wore a Steelers football helmet that the cheerleaders had pitched in to get him -- he even wore it to sleep.)" -- it just rubs me the wrong way.
There are a couple of decent-ish "teaching moments". Montgomery tries to set up Ellen and Mica -- only to be told by Ellen that they had already dated and it didn't work out. Montgomery asks David if he liked manga because of his "background", at which point he says, "Um, my grandparents are from Singapore. Not, uh, Japan." Mica calls Montgomery on deriding a thing he loves, and she realizes that he is not denigrating the things *she* loves (which, apparently, are "nighttime soaps to the worst sort of trashy romances" *eyeroll*, but, anyway). Ellen comes to the convention dressed as Batgirl, in yellow Spandex, and looks HOT (Montgomery's boyfriend starts ogling her at this point) but is (rightly) uncomfortable with the attention. And I liked this scene between Ellen and Montgomery:
At the same time, there's a moment with Montgomery observing Ellen dressed crappily and thinking "Oh, Ellen was going to college. She was super-smart. She was just not going to interview well." Uh? Because someone who chooses to dress like this casually can't put on a business suit? (not much fashion sense required, srsly!) Or because interviews (especially at the sort of places a thoroughly geeky girl of Ellen's persuasion may want to study/work at) would judge on appearance over substance? Well, to some degree, but not nearly as much as Montgomery seems to think. Although it is her POV, so this maybe isn't meant to be *objective*, but it's not debunked either.
Then there are the inconsistencies. Why does Ellen, after specifically meeting with Montgomery at school the first time (because, presumably, she doesn't want her to see her crappy home life) actually have her come over to her house (other than because the author wants Montgomery to see Ellen's crappy home life and girl-bond over it). Worse, there's the whole "is Montgomery becoming a geek or isn't she?" thing. She starts out being completely clueless about all things geeky (she's seen Star Wars and LOTR, but she didn't like them, and she knows who Kirk is, but that's about it). Then she becomes pretty well versed in geekiness over the course of the intensive training. Because it's written as a sort of "training montage", but heavy towards the culture-clash front end, we actually don't get to see Montgomery enjoying any of the geeky stuff. Yet, by graduation, she can tell a Legolas miniature from a Haldir one, and gets all excited when Ellen presents her with "Mr.Pointy". Then, when she confronts her cheating boyfriend, she hurls an unspecified geeky insult at him: "What Montgomery said next is unimportant. It could have been a thousand different things. She could have called him a 'tin-plated dictator with delusions of godhood!' She could have gone with the classic 'scruffy-looking nerf-herder!' She might have chosen, appropriate to the situation, 'gods-cursed TOASTER frakker!' But in the end it was unimportant what exactly she said. Because the entire population of Springfield High heard Montgomery K. Bushnell use and insult so geeky, so extreme, that there was no doubt in any other stealth geek's mind what she was. One of them." (which, uh, I have to say I have not even seen pretty hard-core geeks do, beyond like using geeky-origin swearwords like "frell" and "frak", in a moment of true passion rather than as a joke). But then, once she's proved to all the "closet geeks" that she is one of them, she actually requires another epiphany to understand something so basic as "I get it! The spaceships and the quoting lines and memorizing stupid details about High Elvish and arguing over pronunciations! Before I thought you were all weird for the sake of, you know, just being weird. But I GET IT NOW! You just really love it." *headdesk*
Also, I'm annoyed that the TV show curriculum did not include Babylon 5 and Firefly, at least.
So, yeaaah. I didn't like this story. I didn't like this author, who appears to have actual geek cred, but the way the story was written, her geek seemed to be pasted on yey. Plus, the writing was just Not Good. In general, this just reinforces my frustration with how mass media does "geek", which seems to be popular now. It bugged me in the one episode of Big Bang Theory I saw, in 17 Again (yeah, I know :P), and even more so in this story. I think what it comes down to is that, even if you are a geek yourself, if the characters you create are meant to be Geeks first and people second, the result is going to suck. Like here. But I actually love seeing geeky aspects of characters, when there's actual substance to the character beyond it. Like, The Dresden Files -- Butcher is a geek himself, and Harry has believable forays into geekiness, playing D&D with the Alphas, thinking of good vs. evil as the "Jedi vs Sith index", and, of course, Butters is a geek. But that's not the hub of their relationship to the rest of the characters, and it's not the only thing they are. And it works! Unlike here.
- "Definitional Chaos", Scott Westerfeld -- loved this one! It's not the most realistic premise in the world: our first-person POV narrator needs to deliver $84k in cash (in a briefcase, of course) cross-country in order to prevent a convention from being canceled. His imposed companion/escort/chaperone is his ex-girlfriend, whom he still can't forgive for killing his beloved MMRPG character. He is proud of his Neutral Good alignment and his antique gun collecting. She has green hair, packs handcuffs and vodka, and pulls a Westley with the drugged drink in service of a massive mindfuck, for old times' sake. Together they fight crime! Well, no, they don't, though I would totally read that book/watch that show. But together they argue about the relative merits of various alignments and what each would do with the money, swear a lot, and don't get back together, because, as the narrator says, "Lexia's fucking crazy", and so, of course, is he. This was really fun, and funny, and I kind of love Lexia's character (she reminds me a bit of Nicolette the chaos magician from the Marla Mason books, upon reflection). And I actually enjoyed the writing more than in the Uglies books -- it was snappier and felt less contrived, although it probably wasn't. I should check out more of Westerfeld's stuff...
- "I Never", Cassie Clare -- the story was well written, and I enjoyed it, but it sort of made me uneasy for a couple of minor reasons. The premise is that the narrator, Jane, sort of gets dragged by her friend into this multi-fandom journal-based RPG -- known only as the Game, as if there's only one of such beast -- into a sort of online relationship with Ben, who plays Heathcliff to her Cathy, and then there's a meet-up and they go to it, Jane hoping to meet Ben. So she meets Ben, and Ben turns out to be a jerk who is only in it to score with her/someone, and the passionate "letters"/comments she'd fallen for were actually written by his friend Noah, who is a much more decent guy, though not so decent as to come clean with her about it, though he does try to warn her, obliquely, that Ben is not like what he seems. The "Ben is in it to score chicks" explanation didn't strike me as particularly believable, because that's a rather long game and a lot of effort for something that could almost certainly be more easily accomplished. Also, it bugged me that the RPers' meet-up was portrayed as all booze and hooking up, and the hostess is a slovenly crackpot who randomly brings up being poly. It just seemed like a really extremist view, and even though the message was "Jane learns they're actually nice people", the message that came across stronger, to me, was "even though they're all freaks". I did like the description of the awkwardness between the two girls who had been carrying on a torrid RP affair as "Jack" and "Ennis" from Brokeback Mountain when they actually met face to face. *That* seemed quite believable (though I've never been in the situation myself). Also, I approve of the fact that one of the characters represented was G'Kar. B5 has not been getting enough recognition in this anthology, so that was awesome to see.
- "The King of Pelinesse", M.T.Anderson -- huh. It's a very nicely constructed story, things being revealed in gradual but fairly natural ways, and a bit more open-ended than the others in the collection, but I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Flint the writer is certainly an intriguing, as well as pathetic and repulsive, character.
- "The Wrath of Dawn", Cynthia and Greg Leitich Smith -- I actually was quite enjoying this short story until the very last half page, which turns it into a sort of "awww, let's hug him again" ending. The message is fine. The story is told with humour, and I liked both Dawn the narrator and Eric the potential love interest. The dorky arguments and the narrative voice actually felt the most realistically geeky to me of any story till then. So it's a pity that, a) it was all a set up for a moral, b) the way the whole thing was resolved totally blew my suspension of disbelief. Alas, earwax.
- "Quiz Bowl Antichrist", David Levithan -- I liked this one, even if, in retrospect, it's a little hard to accept... certain apparent statistics, let's say. The narrator, Alec, is a fun one, and he is quite sympathetic while also being a prick, which he is called on. It's narrated from the future, so there's definitely this retrospective view of his prickishness, as well as the personalities and occasionally motivations of the other characters. I think this is an author I want to read more of.
- "The Quiet Knight", Garth Nix -- perfectly adequate story about a LARPed, if a bit reliant on coincidences for my taste and for its length, but I am forced to admit yet again that I just don't care much for anything Garth Nix writes. Like, it's not bad at all, but I do not get gripped by his stories at all, or enjoy them particularly. Oh well.
- "Everyone But You", Lisa Yee -- this is an interesting story in that I think it kind of shows that the geek is in the eye of the beholder. The geekery of the girl in question is baton-twirling, which makes his Miss Pep -- and also Miss Popular -- in her smalltown school. But then she moves to Maui when her mother marries a rich older gentleman from there (who is dying, but it's presented not as a gold-digger thing but a "they really come to care for each other" thing). Felicity's baton, perm, makeup, and preppy clothes are out of place in her new Hawaiian school,and so she suddenly finds herself an outsider, ostracized and teased by the popular kids. But in the middle of her misery, she sticks with baton twirling, on her own, since the school does not have a majorette squad, gets noticed for these skillz and learns how to twirl fire at the local luau attraction. This gives her one place in Hawaii where she feels at home, and eventually the attention of the hot boy who tormented her from the start, whom she rather emphatically rejects, and a nice, studious boyfriend. It's rather tugging at the heartstrings (the kindly old stepfather, Felicity's developmentally disabled brother she visits every day) but told with a light humour and without slathering on sentimentality, and Felicity, for all that she is the protagonist I have the hardest time understanding in this book, is a sympathetic and believable character, so the story still worked for me.
- "Secret Identity", Kelly Link -- I really liked this one, but then, Kelly Link is an awesome short story writer. This is also the one story in the book that is a genre story itself, although the sci-fi/fantasy bit is quite slight -- there are superheroes with apparnetly real superpowers, and the protagonist, Billie, keeps getting mistaken for a sidekick. Like a lot of Link's stories, it's a little nebulous and open-ended, but very nicely done. Billie comes to NYC to meet for the first time the guy she fell in love with while playing a MMORPG game. Only she's been pretending to be her 32-year-old sister rather her 16-year-old self. The story is written as a letter of apology (sort of) to the guy she was going to meet, who stood her up, sort of. Along the way, there's the general weirdness of a superhero convention and a dentist convention sharing the hotel, an unapologetic but quite fascinating douchebag who follows Billie around and may be her future nemesis, a butter sculpture fight, etc. The story is engagingly narrated, and I liked the note on which it ends, which is hopeful if very open.
- "Freak the Geek", John Green -- this is almost a vignette of a friendship between two geeky girls, "meek" Lauren and more outspoken Kayley, their banter and "dorkuments", their temporary frustration with one another. I suppose it might be meant to be a sort of indictment of the persecution of geeks by the "normals", but said "normals" are so faceless and caricature-like, that they don't really register as antagonists, merely as background noise.
- "The Truth About Dino Girl", Barry Lyga -- Huh. I was totally on board with the first part of the story -- a science geek who has been obsessed with dinosaurs forever and wants to be a paleontologist has an artsy friend who humours her dino obsession and a crush on the star baseball player who is dating the girls' soccer team captain. I liked Katie/Katya (her artsy friend Sooz bestowed on her the more exotic nickname) -- her science geek obsession was an aspect of geekiness that was good to see, and she is both clearly a huge dork and also a likeable person. I liked the fact that she is very serious about paleontology -- she is not just constantly talking about dinosaurs, but works on a serious science fair project and is saving money to go on a paleontology dig when she's a junior. And there's this favorite line of mine: "'You're not really a girl' [a boy] said. 'Girls don't like dinosaurs.' I blinked. 'What do you mean? Of course I'm a girl. I'm wearing pink.' I pointed to my headband, just in case he didn't get it," because it's nice to see that an interest in science/dinosaurs and aspects of stereotypical girliness are not mutually exclusive. So, I liked Katie a lot. I also liked the fact that her crush Jamie's girlfriend was someone Katie saw as a good, likeable person, because it's sort of an unusual view for girls who are in romantic competition, let alone when they're also from the different ends of the popularity spectrum. Of course, Katie also wants to be like Andi -- but without, it seems, sacrificing her own interests and personality and stuff. So, cool.
And then Andi bumps into Katie and Katie's notebook falls open, and Andi sees that Katie's been drawing her boyfriend's flaming baseball tattoo over and over again. Katie starts babbling about how she's not trying to steal Jaime from her, and Andi laughs that she is not a threat, steps on her notebook as she brushes past, and... the story turns into a revenge of the nerds sort of thing. Except... I didn't think that what Andi did was in any way proportional to the retribution meted out, and yet the story... well, the story ends a little abruptly and I can't actually tell if it endorses Katie's actions or tries to highlight them as problematic. What turns out to be the final straw for Katie is that Andi apparently told Jamie that Katie had been drawing his tattoo, because he rolls down his sleeves to hide the tattoo in their next biology class. It seems that Jamie is the only person Andi told about Katie's hopeless crush -- she does not appear to be mocking her in public, or even teasing her about it after the initial encounter. So then Katie, brokenhearted, spills to her friend Sooz, and it turns out Sooz has long-standing hatred of Andi, which she's been trying to downplay because Katie seemed to like Andi so much. The hatred dates back to the time Andi "once made so much fun of another girl [who turns out to have been Sooz herself] that she went into the bathroom and cried for, like, an hour." It's not actually explained what Andi said to Sooz that was so horrible, so it's kind of hard to get riled up on account of that. And as for Andi telling Jamie about Katie's crush on him/obsession with his tattoo, that doesn't strike me as a particularly unreasonable thing to do. Like, there's definitely a bitchy way and motivation to do it, but if somebody was, rather stalkereshly, copying and recopying my tattoo and my SO found out about it, I think I'd kind of like to know, even if the "stalker" seemed totally harmless. Yes, Andi was quite bitchy in the original confrontation with Katie, but, again, it's kind of an odd and rather uncomfortable position to be in, confronted with someone who is fantasizing about your boyfriend to a possibly unhealthy degree. So, yes, she was bitchy, but she didn't come across to me as malicious or unreasonable, beyond a regular self-centered, possibly not-as-secure-as-she-appears teenage girl.
So then what Katie and Sooz do to her -- and this is premeditated and staged across several weeks with patience that Katie is very proud of -- is Katie sneaks into the girls' locker room while Andi is changing after a match and takes half-naked pictures of her (bare breasts) with a camera hidden in a compact mirror (because cell phones are confiscated on entering the locker room). And then Sooz photoshops half-naked Andi into a sleazy hotel background and they plaster posters of this, reading "DO YOU LIKE SEX? SHE DOES!!!! CALL ANDI!" and her phone number and address all over town. As a result Jamie breaks up with Annie because everybody is saying she's a slut. And the story ends with Katie, having witnessed this, thinking: "When I got up from the table, something amazing happened. The earth shook with my footsteps. [...] From now on the earth would tremble in my wake. And I knew. I knew what the dinosaurs sounded like. They sounded like me...."
And... it's sort of ambiguous, right? Katie obviously seems happy with how things ended, but I have a harder time figuring out what the author means by this. Is he happy, too, and feels justice has triumphed? Or is the whole deal where Katie turns into a "predator", and a dinosaur, for all that she loves the things, is a kind of monster commentary on how, in lashing out against a social system that persecutes them (to some degree), geeks can become worse than the popular kids they're lashing out at, and not even notice/think of it in those terms because this sort of dog eat dog world is what they've been made accustomed to? I don't know...
After googling around, it looks like this story is set in the same universe as the author's The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl, which I haven't read, obviously, but from reading the summary I'm more inclined to think that the author is not endorsing crime and privacy violation as a valid response to bitchiness, and also that it's possible I'm missing some context with Annie and Jamie. But on its own, it's still a weird story.
- "This is My Audition Monologue", Sara Zarr -- what is says on the tin, pretty much -- the monologue of a girl who wants to act but keeps ending up in techie roles. This is a passion I can't really understand, but it's well written, and there are some philosophical musings that are spot on and hints at relationships outside of what's being explicitly said, which was nice.
- "The Stars at the Finish Line", Wendy Mass -- utter fluff, but fluff that's right up my alley: a geeky boy is in love with a geeky, driven girl with whom he has been competing since 4th grade. She wants to be an astronaut, he has true passion for astronomy; he is adorkable and vulnerable, she is oblivious and kisses him first. All in all, a really cute, funny story, with likeable characters and the narrator's (and author's) clear passion for astronomy transmitting itself to the reader.
- "It's Just a Jump to the Left", Libba Bray -- as fluffy as the previous story was, this one is just the reverse -- it's all things fall apart, changing for the worse, you can't go home again -- but very well done. The geekiness in question is dedication to the Rocky Horror Picture Show, a weekly ritual for Leta and her friend Agnes and lately refuge from Leta's shattered family life -- father who is out of state at a new job, brother suffering from seizures, aphasia, other stuff from an accident, and mother who is at the end of her rope. It's a pretty heartbreaking story, and the only bright spot is that Leta and Agnes's friendship seems posed to endure.
So, for the record:
The story I didn't like at all: "One of Us"
The stories I was conflicted about: "Dino Girl" and "I Never"
The stories I especially liked: "Once You're a Jedi", "Definitional Chaos", "Quiz Bowl Antichrist", "Secret Identity", "Stars at the Finish Line", "It's Just a Jump to the Left" (although this was pretty depressing)
There are also these little one-page comics as spacers between the stories. They are... pretty much on the level of the Bazooka Joe comics you'd get with your gum, only geeky. But, you know, it's a cute idea, and no worse than blank pages.
On the whole, this was a much stronger anthology than I'd expected, and also less fluffy. I'm also kind of surprised that "fuck" seems to be pretty standard for YA lit now? Almost every other story featured it...
I think the root of my problem is, neither the worldbuilding nor the characters gripped me sufficiently. And I suspect the way the novel opens, and Toby's background pre-novel may be responsible for both of those to some degree. Toby is an insider to the world of Faerie -- she grew up there, even if she isn't a full-fledged member, as a changeling -- and so is everybody else she interacts with, and so we don't get a character who can lead us into the world. Similarly, most of the characters Toby interacts with are people she already knows, there's complicated past history there, and it made those characters (and Toby herself) less accessible to me as a reader.
What we got to see of Sylvester, Luna, Tybalt, Lily, et al felt tell more than show for this reason, and didn't strike me as very interesting. The only characters who did not feel like this were the Luidaeg and, to a lesser extent, Dare, who were people Toby had just met. Well, also, Devin was interesting, too, but mainly because Toby had never seen him clearly. (I definitely suspected him of messing with Toby long before she did, but hadn't figured him for the person who'd killed Evening -- actually, I think I might've liked it better if he hadn't been the one central bad guy and had been someone trying to exploit Toby for his own gain but not responsible for everything. And I didn't find the Villain Breakdown at the end particularly believable. Still, he was a neat character. One I kind of wish would be around in the future to create more tension for Toby. But ah, well.)
Toby herself... one of the things that makes the Dresden books so readable -- and this was especially true early on, when the plots were a lot more monster of the week and there was less of a cast of characters to love -- is that Harry is such a snappy, fun narrator, even while his life is crappy and only going to hell further. There was a little bit of that with Toby -- her interacting with her cats in particular was fun -- but not enough to make her a truly engaging narrator. Granted, I don't think it would've been believable if she'd been tossing wisecracks all over the place, considering she lost not just her parents (like Harry) but also, much more recently, her daughter and partner, in effect. Actually, she lost everyone because she is in self-imposed exile from all things Faery when the book begins. But still, it took me a long time to get into the book because of this, and she wasn't a narrator I wanted to spend time with, particularly (although I suspect this might be better in subsequent books, since she is recovering her place, if not her family). I also found it hard to accept her motivation for said self-imposed exile. I can definitely understand that she wouldn't want to face Sylvester and his family after failing them, as she believes, but the way she seems to think they'll be angry at her, as opposed to relieved to see her well, grateful for all she ended up sacrificing, wanting to make it right, etc. -- especially when we see how wrong she turns out to be -- that just feels like Toby's a bad judge of character. There could still be angst if she didn't believe this of them! It would've probably been more interesting to me, actually, if she knew Sylvester and family would welcome her with no recriminations, just gratitude and caring, but she still felt she couldn't face them because she held herself responsible, and their understanding would actually make her internal guilt worse, something like that. Also, I would've liked to know more about what she'd actually done to gain the title/position of Knight Errant and Sylvester's trust -- that's mentioned as a pretty special thing, and I'm curious to see how she could've been effective in a world where she is so underpowered compared to purebloods.
Things I liked: the Luidaeg toying with Toby; the troll cabbie; some quotes from Toby: "I've always made a pretty good somebody." "I've never liked being looked at like I was a hero. I always wind up letting someone down. Sometimes I get lucky. Sometimes the only person who gets hurt is me." (both of these lines kind of crystallized Toby's character for me; unfortunately, this was only in the last quarter of the book...); the ending/last line ("I have time.")
Things I'm intrigued by: the link that now exists between Tybalt and Toby, the relationship between Connor and Toby (although I have to say, I'd have a hard time seeing a selkie as a love interest, if that's the way it's likely to go); whatever happened to Raysel and Luna in captivity; will Toby get to meet her daughter, and what she would be like; whatever is going on with the Queen that's making her act all weird.
Things I'm unsold on: the night-haunts (seem like a convoluted and non-organic way to deal with Faery bodies in a mortal world); the unexplained way Devin doctored Evening's blood to prevent Toby from finding out right away who her killer was (unless this is a hook into a later book -- right now it's just a loose end, and a pretty huge one). Also, this is a nit -- there is no such thing, AFAIK, as "the San Francisco Art Museum", the mortal-side entrance to Goldengreen; I'm guessing what's meant is the Legion of Honor? This is kind of an odd thing for an author who seems to be a NorCal native...
Anyway, as always, when I'm trying to figure out why a book didn't work for me as well as I thought it would, I end up writing things that paint a more negative picture than I actually intend. I liked Rosemary and Rue. I want to read A Local Habitation. I'm glad I found this series (thanks, lodessa!) And Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) sounds like a really cool person! (I, uh... suspect I might enjoy reading things narratate by her more than things narrated by Toby. >.> She has a more frequently deployed sense of humour :)
22. Melissa Marr (melissa_writing), Ink Exchange
24. Melissa Marr, Fragile Eternity -- (sequels to Wicked Lovely) One thing that did happen after I finished Rosemary and Rue is that I was still in the mood for Faerie-based urban fantasy, so I went to these books that had been hanging out on my to-read pile for a while, and they hit the spot. I can't help but compare them to the Holly Black books, and I like Holly's books better, but these are neat in their own way.
One thing I like about them is that there are, essentially, no Faerie good guys or bad guys, Keenan is the main protagonist's friend and partner, but he is still a manipulative and ruthless jerk, for all that he can be sweet and supportive and sympathetic. Niall in Ink Exchange is a woobie, but he's done some terribly things in the past, and he can be a right bastard in Fragile Eternity to Keenan and to a lesser extent Aislinn, because of what they've put him through. Irial is the Dark King and he sets out to do some terrible things, but he is still sympathetic and motivated by the good of the court he is responsible for. Stuff like that -- I like the moral grayness. (I went back and reread my thoughts on the first book, and it looks like my major complaint was that the bad faeries were too cartoon evil and the good ones were too good -- looks like that's been taken care of, then!) I also like Bananach (for her role), who is nicely psycho without being boring.
Ink Exchange was the book I liked better of the two, and it might actually be because I find Leslie a more compelling mortal protagonist than either Aislinn or Seth. She is a rape survivor trying to come to terms with it and reclaim her body. Along the way she gets enmeshed in a Dark Court experiment, addicted in a way much worse than her brother's drug addiction which horrifies and disgusts her, Her relationship with both Irial (the Dark King) and Niall (the Summer Court fairy who tries to protect her) is interesting, although even more interesting is the other side of the love triangle, that between Niall and Irial, who have loads of history and UST/past RST (I mean, it's made clear, not once but twice, that the reason Niall is becoming increasingly obsessed with Leslie is her connection to Irial, and then in Fragile Eternity Sorcha, the High Court queen comes out and says that Irial has been in love with Niall for ages. Interesting! and more up my alley than the other relationships in these books. Considering Irial had used Niall to provide nourishment for his court without Niall realizing the consequences and then turned him over to his court for torture and/or rape, this... probably doesn't say very good things about me. But there you go.) Leslie does get a happy-ish ending of sorts, which is a relief, because it could've easily ended in a very dark place. I hope to see more of her in subsequent books and to know she is doing well. Also, I liked Gabriel a lot -- I have a thing for gruff, deadly warrior types, you know :P But I don't get the best friend / "like a brother" closeness between Seth and Niall -- I didn't really notice that relationship being very strong in the first book, so I kind of went "bzuh?" when I first encountered it in these. Seems more like the author decided they needed to be close so Seth could have the protection of the Dark Court when Niall became king of it, and that Niall would freak out when Seth disappeared in FE. I did think Aislinn's reasons for not wanting to drag Leslie into the Faerie world were decent ("I don't want my friends under my rule"), even if they ended in tragedy for Leslie (although by then it was probably too late to "save" her).
Fragile Eternity dragged for me a bit, but that could be because I started it first (I thought it was book #2 and stuck it in my backpack for the commute, so then I had no choice but to read it, about halfway). But I don't think so -- it's just a slower book, and a lot of it is Aislinn moping after Seth and Seth worrying he is losing Aislinn to Keenan and stuff. It's sort of a standard romance plot, albeit with a bit more justification -- Seth wants to make himself immortal so he can be with Aislinn forever, so he goes off with the only faery that will help him, even though she's totally untrustworthy. Aislinn, meanwhile, thinks Seth has abandoned her because he is trapped in Faerie, where time moves more slowly, so a month there is six months in the outside world (it's a neat sort of gender-swapped Persephone story, actually). I liked the fact that Keenan was happy to move in on the territory when Seth disappeared and also had, all along, every intention of getting together with Aislinn when Seth the mortal finall died. At the same time, Keenan refusing to sleep with Aislinn when she, desperate to get over Seth, throws herself at him felt believable and helped underline that Keenan can be decent -- but sometimes for very selfish reasons (he knows where Seth is all along, and mostly just doesn't want to blow his chance with Aislinn, since they have all of eternity). The whole thing with Sorcha becoming Seth's mother and consequently becoming partly human herself was WAY WTF and the weakest part of the book for me. I mean, really, it just felt like a way to tie the remaining Faerie court in with the rest, and to make Seth special, too. I did like the tiny little aside about why the High Court is fascinated by human art -- because creating art requires a thread of chaos, and thus the Court of Order cannot create.
I don't think Melissa Marr is particularly good at writing "ordinary" teenagers. Seth is older and Aislinn has had a weird life and had to grow up very fast, but there are teens thinking in terms that disrupted my suspension of disbelief, and calling each other "sweetie" non-poisonously, and it just rang false to me a number of times. Note to self: Book #4 is Radiant Shadows (about Ani, Gabriel's daughter) and Devlin), and book #5 (the conclusion) is Dark Mercy
23. Scot Westerfeld, Extras -- I've come to the conclusion that I kind of love Westerfeld's exercises in world-building a lot more than his plots, morals, or even characters. ) No exception here. Aya's city in Extras -- with its reputation economy and everybody having a feed and value being based on a combination of merits and popularity, was really, really neat, especially for someone who is as addicted to LJ as I am. In a way, it was like fandom taken to an extreme, especially in the character of Nana Love (who doesn't talk about anything of substance, apparently, and who everybody feels they know intimately enough to refer to her as Nana-chan). Also, Reputation Bombing, lol! Every criminal since the mind rain winding up confressing, for the fame. Really cool stuff! The (non-worldbuilding) rest of it was OK.
Aya is not dissimilar to Tally in the first book, in that she means well, on the whole, but is also quite selfish and this leads her to make clearly bad decisions, again and again. She does manage to overcome it (I guess?) on her own rather than being reset with brain surgery at the end, like Tally after Uglies, so it's not quite as frustrating. I liked her relationship with her brother Hiro and Ren. It was harder to feel anything for Frizz, because so much of what Frizz did in the book was actually driven by Radical Honesty and his inability not to tell the truth -- I didn't get much feel for his actual personality underneath that, although there are glimpses, such as when he somewhat wistfully observes the mecha battle.
The real Extras... LOL, Quaddies XD is what I've got to say. I'm relieved that their motivation is what it turned out to be, because if it had only taken 3 years to get back to planning for global war I would've been pissed, and if they were shooting metal up into space just so the cities couldn't expand, I would've been pissed, too. Going into space really does seem to be the least annoying of the possible explanations, although I can't say I agree they needed to do it secretively. I did like how, because "extras" had been used as a term by Aya for people who don't matter throughout the book, the idea that extras came from "extraterrestrials" didn't even occur to me until it was revealed. But I might just be slow :)
I liked getting to see Shay and company again, however briefly (Shay and her passion for nanos and blowing stuff up still rock!). So... Tally and David had not gotten together over these three years? That was... unexpected. Or do they just not kiss because Tally is traumatized by that? ...Odd. (Also, sort of related, when Aya tries to figure out who Tally had been talking about when she said the last person she'd kissed ended up dying, she things, "Lots of people had died in the Diego War, of course". I think the actual total was 17. I'm going to guess that this is not a discontinuity but rather Aya's perception from a world without war (or, apparently, murder at all), where 17 people dying in a war is "lots".
The "Japanese!" blinky insertions -- a simile involving cherry blossoms, mentions of sushi and green tea, "sensei" and "chan" felt kind of tacked on, but it's not like after centuries of Prettytime and then the mind rain there would be actual continuity of culture -- I'm not sure there is a non-tacked-on way to mark Aya and company as Japanese. I did think good use was made of language and culture barriers when Aya's gang encounter the Cutters.
Quote:
Some history clique had applied averaging software to the world's great spiritual books, then programmed it to spit out godlike decrees.
For some reason the software had told them not to eat pigs.
"Who would do that in the first place?" Aya asked.
"Aren't pigs extinct?" Ren giggled. "They seriously need to update that code."
25. Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals -- This was sort of a painful read. There were stretches, especially towards the beginning, where I had to keep reminding myself I was reading a Pratchett book (and not, say, decent fanfiction thereof) -- it just didn't feel like one. Even the ones that are not my particular favorites, like the early Rincewind books, even The Last Continent, which was kind of a slog for me, had moments where I was struck by what Pterry was doing and how well, how inimitably well he was doing it. UA didn't have almost any of those. It was still a rather good book, an enjoyable book, but I didn't get that Pterry feeling from it. There were a couple of times I laughed out loud -- I actually cracked up in the middle of a restaurant and couldn't stop laughing until I had tears in my eyes at the full-page monologue of Ponder explaining everything the wizards are doing wrong in their first attempt at football. I chortled at Ridcully and Ponder talking about Bengo's proclivities. But there are jokes and clever lines that feel just a little out of focus -- like you know they'd be crisper and funnier in a different DW book, but they're kind of blurred and smudged here, just a bit. And there's more explicit, drawn-out gross-out humour that stuck out for me (the pee drinking and all the (non-graphic) puke at the end). There was one scene that actually moved me -- Trevor finally agreeing to play and the others giving him a jersey with his father's number on it (and I like the way the whole prodigy at first kick expectation was then subverted, because of course he had never played or trained before, but Trev still got his triumph.)
There was a whole lot of new characters introduced, but only Glenda and Trev felt real. Nutt is an interesting and painful one, but he is so... well, he's a representation of something more than his own character, I felt, so it's almost like the conversation Vetinari and Margolotta have about him is echoed by the burden he bears in the text. And I didn't find him interesting. I appreciate the moral he represents, and, I think, for a pretty moral-driven plot, it's quite well done. I do like the way he offers to take on the city, essnetially, in terms it can understand and is, therefore, accepted (more or less). Trev is a neat character because he is both likeable and frustrating on a lot of levels; he definitely grew on me, in the sense that I didn't think I would be rooting for him when I first met him. Glenda I liked pretty much from the start, but, again, her development and philosophical realizations felt more telegraphed and belabored than I could imagine them in a previous book, not as elegant as, say, Moist's development or the things Vimes comes to realize about himself in... well, just about any of the later Watch novels, or character development in my favorite stand-alones. Oh, and there's also Pepe, I guess, who was sort of entertaining, but fairly forgettable, for me. I was intrigued by Madame Sharn -- specifically, the implication (which I don't think I imagined?) that she is biologically male but chooses to embrace the new option of of presenting as female -- and although she is rather over-the-top in general, I thought this was subtly and respectfully done. Oh year, and there's also Andy Shank, who is kind of a letdown as a villain, to be honest: he is clearly a psycho, but not an interesting psycho like Cox in Nation, let alone someone like Vorbis or Reacher Gilt.
There were all these Vetinari scenes, and I enjoyed them (drunk Vetinari! Vetinari and Lady Margolotta! who calls him "Havelock" while he calls her "madam" :D; I am not sure what I think about his (ostensibly) uncontrolled laughter at Nutt's zinger... that was odd, but also somewhat endearing), but throughout I kept thinking, in the back of my mind, that I wished those scenes had appeared in a book where Pterry was at the top of his form. And I feel terrible thinking things like this. The Alzheimer's is obviously taking a physical toll, from the accounts of fan interaction, and a mental toll, and, no, he probably isn't in top form and it's unlikely that he will be again. Maybe I'm pessimistic and what I think I'm seeing in UA is just a blip. I LOVED Nation, which I thought was as strong as any DW book, barring some personal taste complaints. I thought Thud! and Making Money, while not as delightful as Going Postal, were quite decent and still very Pterry-like. So maybe I'm reading too much into it, looking harder for flaws because I'm afraid to find them, overexamining my own reactions. I hope so, certainly... :/
To return to less depressing musings, this had just about the right percentage of wizards in it. Ponder, being reulctantly in charge of everything, with no hope of finding anyone to disburden him. Ridcully, though a bit cartoonish even for himself, being his generally adorable teddy bear self -- I especially liked his interaction with Glenda. I wish Bengo Macarona had gotten more screentime where he was doing things besides being awesome at football, because he sounds like an intriguing character. I am generally lukewarm about the Librarian, but I liked him in this one because he a) actually had something to do, beyond being an orangutan amusingly and saying OOK, and b) had a legitimate reason to be a kick-ass goalie, what with those arms.
I was disappointed by Margolotta. I liked her a lot in her previous cameo appearances, and had been looking forward to seeing more of her (though there was less of her here than reading spoilers had led me to expect), but she was disappointingly petty and not reading the situation well. I suppose the idea was to show that Vetinari had surpassed the woman who had taught him a lot about governing, but the way it played out didn't work particularly well for me.
I actually wish there'd been more football in the book. It's one of only two, maybe three sports that I have an interest in (the other one(s) being figure skataing and maybe bobsled/luge, though it's been years since I've thought of the latter), and the game, when it wasn't "narrated" by William de Worde (which was a joke that got old pretty fast) was quite exciting and fast-paced. The floating Trev and Juliet was random, but I liked the descriptions of play, the crowd, Dean refereeing, etc.
I liked the Romeo and Juliet aspects there in the beginning with Trev and, well, Juliet, and especially Glenda's reaction to R&J Starcrossed. Liked the Cyrano aspects of Nutt writing Trev's poem, too, and the way it was played with -- that Nutt is utterly uninspired by Juliet, that Juliet needs Glenda to translate the poem for her, and that the translation which she can understand ends up being "Well, basically he is saying that he really fancies you, thinks you're really fit, how about a date, no hanky panky, he promises", which is what Trev had started with in the first place. Also, the parody of "To His Coy Mistress", which is just a lot of fun to parody (have I even mentioned an imitation/parody someone in my school had written of it for an English assignment which went:
Come play with me and be my bud
And we'll be cows and chew our cud.
We'll make fine milk and tasty beef.
Or let's play Indians -- I'll be chief!
[...bunch of equally fun lines I no longer remember...]
If this sounds nice and not like crud,
Come play with me and be my bud.
I thought some of the other extended jokes worked better than others. Like, the whole thing with Doctor Hix was OK, reasonably funny some of the time, only slightly rolly at other points. Bledlow Nobbs (no relation) was OK, too. Wizards being all about food is not new but was cute, as was bickering between Ridcully and Dean Henry. But, like, the "pp" stuff just wasn't that funny. Ponder being inept at sports was OK but didn't bring much new to the genre until the little scenelet that goes beyond the funny and mentions how Ponder, as "the weird kid", was at the bottom of the totem poll because "the fat kid" had clout and ""That had left only the weird kid as the natural target for the other boys, which meant a chronic hell for Ponder until that wonderful day when sparks came out of Ponder's fingers and Martin Sogger's pants caught fire." That was one of the very few moments in the book where I felt Pterry was doing what Pterry does best, showing pathos and humanity while still being funny. The thing with the whistle, though -- yeah, that got old fast.
It was neat to see Ankh-Morpork on a "street" level, I have to say. Most of the A-M books deal with the Watch, which means coppers and criminals and fringe-y sort of people like Foul Ole Ron and stuff. And the "industrialization" ones tend to involve institutions and upper and middle classes. So it was neat to get an inside look at life in the Dolly Sisters, and to hear common folk talking about "the Old Sam" and how they see Vetinari and the wizards and the Watch. (Also, I'm curious about the Medusa in the Watch.)
Oh, also, this book felt kind of movie-y to me, in a way that no other Discworld book has. In fact, with other books, I always have a hard time imagining how the book will make the transition to the screen, even when I hear a film is being made. But this one felt like it would slot very well. (I think that means, maybe, there's less going on under the surface than in other Discworld books...)
After reading fan reactions on discworld and stuff: Yeah, Ridcully and Ponder did feel somewhat different fromt he way they appeared in previous books, but it didn't strike me as an inconsistency. Ponder seems to have grown up quite a bit, and as for Ridcully, I think part of the apparent difference is that we see a more inward view of him in addition to the blustering. There were still things that gave me pause, but not beyond normal. I wondered about the Bursar's whereabouts, too. Lots of people talk about how it the book felt like a good-bye, and I didn't feel that, necessarily, although I do think it would work as a good one. I am intrigued by the wild theory someone advanced about Nutt as a possible successor for Vetinari. Intriguing! Not that I believe this would really happen, but he's got the psychological insight, strategic and tactical thinking, erudition, and personal deadliness that Vetinari has, although not, I'm pretty sure, the ruthlessness or self-confidence (he seems to be learning the latter, but I'm pretty sure he would outright refuse to embrace the former, and would be right to do so.
Quotes:
Glenda, thinking about a "prince" for Juliet: "Technically that meant Lord Vetinari, but he was far too old. Besides, no one was sure which side of the bed he got out of, or even if he went to bed at all." (The Vetinari slash shippers are dancing in the streets, I'm guessing? ;P)
"Glenda enjoyed her job. She didn't have a career; they were for people who could not hold down jobs."
'Glenda did not have the temperament for serving at table. [...] she positively hated having to smile at people who actually merited, instead, a flick around the earhole with a napkin. She hated taking away plates of unfinished food. She always had to suppress a tendency to say things like "Why did you put it on your plate if you didn't intend to finish it?" and "Of course it's cold, but that's because you've been playing footsie with the young lady opposite and haven't been concentrating on your dinner," and when all else failed, "There's little children in Klatch yo know..."'
"Remarkably, a bottle of port had survived with fifty per cent remaining capacity. Any port in a storm, he thought, and drank his breakfast." (about Pepe)
Vetinari: "If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior." (I guess that answers the question about Vetinari and religion :)
"Juliet's version of cleanliness was next to godliness, which was to say it was erratic, past all understanding and was seldom seen."
"An extremely good plan, Mister Stibbons, and I think we should take the senior faculty as well. They will lend some much-needed..." He snapped his fingers. "What's the word?"
"Confusion," said Ponder.
"No, not that," said Ridcully.
"Appetite?" said Ponder. "Weight?"
"Something like that... Ah, gravitas. Oh, yes, lots of gravitas."
26. Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd, edited by Holly Black and Cecil Castelucci -- this was a really fun anthology, non-genre YA (with one genre-ish story). There was one story I very much disliked and two stories I was kind of conflicted about, and I didn't OMGlove any of the stories, but I did really, really enjoy six of them. So, a very nice roundup!
- "Once You're a Jedi, You're a Jedi All The Way", Holly Black and Cecil Castelucci -- a cute little Romeo and Juliet sort of story, set at a convention, with "Romeo" being a "Jedi" and "Juliet" being a Klingon (not really just COSplayers, although they're that, too -- Thomas trains in lightsaber fighting and tries to live by the Jedi code, and Chung Ae really feels empowered when she is being Arizhel). Now, I don't know much about either Star Trek nor Star Wars fandom. The premise sounded every-so-slightly improbable to me, but that's probably because I don't realize how serious people are about these things. But even with that, it worked quite well for me. The story is told in short alternating segments narrated in first person by "Jedi" and "Klingon", and it was cool to get both of their voices. Thomas is pretty adorkable, but it's Arizhel who is quite interesting, because for her the Klingon personality and "culture" is an alternative to her family (and, presumably, society's) expectations of her, and this is made quite explicit but in a fairly elegant and natural way. I also liked how the gender stuff around sex is handled -- Arizhel doesn't remember what happened last night (she blacked out after going with Thomas to his room and coming on to him) and is trying to play it cool, and Thomas didn't take advantage of her but is also a little bit like, "what's wrong with me that I can't even score with a hot Klingon chick throwing herself at me?" It was cute, and pretty mature for a YA story, and it's also the reason this anthology exists, as the foreword explains -- and it's a pretty good reason.
- "One of Us", Tracy Lynn -- Oh god. This has a couple of decent moments -- one during which I actually smiled -- but this story is kind of a mess on the whole, composed pretty much entirely of stereotypes, not even internally consistent, and with a pappy ending. Just, ugh.
The premise is, a cheerleader, whose name is Montgomery, and who gets referred to as "the cheerleader" a whole lot (this might be a set up for the thing that did make me smile, but it's still rather crappy writing), is dating a jock who is interested in geeky things. So, to have more in common with him, she hires four geeks -- of the outcast variety -- to tutor her in geeky things. Between them, they have no fashion sense (all of them bar one, maybe), few social skills, buck teeth, and a tendency to snort while laughing. I can't remember if/how many of them wear glasses. They also each have a geeky "specialty" (TV shows, epic fantasy, manga, video games), although there is at least a little overlap. Ellen the lone girl geek looks slovenly and has a crappy home life, which the cheerleader gets to witness, and starts out hating Montgomery but then becomes friends with her. Ezra, the worst offender in the lack of social intelligence department, keeps coming on to her (Montgomery). David is fat, shy, and part Asian. And Mica is actually more or less "normal", because he ends up being the cheerleader's love interest eventually. Meanwhile, the cheerleader writes with a froofy pen in a pink notebook, and the jock gobbles down burgers getting food all over himself, ogles another girl with his girlfriend standing right there, and ends up cheating on her with her slutty cheerleader friend. Lovely, right? Aaand then there's the line "'Touch me and I'll kick your ass,' Montgomery warned. 'And then I'll have Ryan kick your ass, and then everyone on the football team kick your ass, and then Eddie the towel boy kick your ass.' (Eddie was an enthusiastic nine-year-old with autism who always wore a Steelers football helmet that the cheerleaders had pitched in to get him -- he even wore it to sleep.)" -- it just rubs me the wrong way.
There are a couple of decent-ish "teaching moments". Montgomery tries to set up Ellen and Mica -- only to be told by Ellen that they had already dated and it didn't work out. Montgomery asks David if he liked manga because of his "background", at which point he says, "Um, my grandparents are from Singapore. Not, uh, Japan." Mica calls Montgomery on deriding a thing he loves, and she realizes that he is not denigrating the things *she* loves (which, apparently, are "nighttime soaps to the worst sort of trashy romances" *eyeroll*, but, anyway). Ellen comes to the convention dressed as Batgirl, in yellow Spandex, and looks HOT (Montgomery's boyfriend starts ogling her at this point) but is (rightly) uncomfortable with the attention. And I liked this scene between Ellen and Montgomery:
At the same time, there's a moment with Montgomery observing Ellen dressed crappily and thinking "Oh, Ellen was going to college. She was super-smart. She was just not going to interview well." Uh? Because someone who chooses to dress like this casually can't put on a business suit? (not much fashion sense required, srsly!) Or because interviews (especially at the sort of places a thoroughly geeky girl of Ellen's persuasion may want to study/work at) would judge on appearance over substance? Well, to some degree, but not nearly as much as Montgomery seems to think. Although it is her POV, so this maybe isn't meant to be *objective*, but it's not debunked either.
Then there are the inconsistencies. Why does Ellen, after specifically meeting with Montgomery at school the first time (because, presumably, she doesn't want her to see her crappy home life) actually have her come over to her house (other than because the author wants Montgomery to see Ellen's crappy home life and girl-bond over it). Worse, there's the whole "is Montgomery becoming a geek or isn't she?" thing. She starts out being completely clueless about all things geeky (she's seen Star Wars and LOTR, but she didn't like them, and she knows who Kirk is, but that's about it). Then she becomes pretty well versed in geekiness over the course of the intensive training. Because it's written as a sort of "training montage", but heavy towards the culture-clash front end, we actually don't get to see Montgomery enjoying any of the geeky stuff. Yet, by graduation, she can tell a Legolas miniature from a Haldir one, and gets all excited when Ellen presents her with "Mr.Pointy". Then, when she confronts her cheating boyfriend, she hurls an unspecified geeky insult at him: "What Montgomery said next is unimportant. It could have been a thousand different things. She could have called him a 'tin-plated dictator with delusions of godhood!' She could have gone with the classic 'scruffy-looking nerf-herder!' She might have chosen, appropriate to the situation, 'gods-cursed TOASTER frakker!' But in the end it was unimportant what exactly she said. Because the entire population of Springfield High heard Montgomery K. Bushnell use and insult so geeky, so extreme, that there was no doubt in any other stealth geek's mind what she was. One of them." (which, uh, I have to say I have not even seen pretty hard-core geeks do, beyond like using geeky-origin swearwords like "frell" and "frak", in a moment of true passion rather than as a joke). But then, once she's proved to all the "closet geeks" that she is one of them, she actually requires another epiphany to understand something so basic as "I get it! The spaceships and the quoting lines and memorizing stupid details about High Elvish and arguing over pronunciations! Before I thought you were all weird for the sake of, you know, just being weird. But I GET IT NOW! You just really love it." *headdesk*
Also, I'm annoyed that the TV show curriculum did not include Babylon 5 and Firefly, at least.
So, yeaaah. I didn't like this story. I didn't like this author, who appears to have actual geek cred, but the way the story was written, her geek seemed to be pasted on yey. Plus, the writing was just Not Good. In general, this just reinforces my frustration with how mass media does "geek", which seems to be popular now. It bugged me in the one episode of Big Bang Theory I saw, in 17 Again (yeah, I know :P), and even more so in this story. I think what it comes down to is that, even if you are a geek yourself, if the characters you create are meant to be Geeks first and people second, the result is going to suck. Like here. But I actually love seeing geeky aspects of characters, when there's actual substance to the character beyond it. Like, The Dresden Files -- Butcher is a geek himself, and Harry has believable forays into geekiness, playing D&D with the Alphas, thinking of good vs. evil as the "Jedi vs Sith index", and, of course, Butters is a geek. But that's not the hub of their relationship to the rest of the characters, and it's not the only thing they are. And it works! Unlike here.
- "Definitional Chaos", Scott Westerfeld -- loved this one! It's not the most realistic premise in the world: our first-person POV narrator needs to deliver $84k in cash (in a briefcase, of course) cross-country in order to prevent a convention from being canceled. His imposed companion/escort/chaperone is his ex-girlfriend, whom he still can't forgive for killing his beloved MMRPG character. He is proud of his Neutral Good alignment and his antique gun collecting. She has green hair, packs handcuffs and vodka, and pulls a Westley with the drugged drink in service of a massive mindfuck, for old times' sake. Together they fight crime! Well, no, they don't, though I would totally read that book/watch that show. But together they argue about the relative merits of various alignments and what each would do with the money, swear a lot, and don't get back together, because, as the narrator says, "Lexia's fucking crazy", and so, of course, is he. This was really fun, and funny, and I kind of love Lexia's character (she reminds me a bit of Nicolette the chaos magician from the Marla Mason books, upon reflection). And I actually enjoyed the writing more than in the Uglies books -- it was snappier and felt less contrived, although it probably wasn't. I should check out more of Westerfeld's stuff...
- "I Never", Cassie Clare -- the story was well written, and I enjoyed it, but it sort of made me uneasy for a couple of minor reasons. The premise is that the narrator, Jane, sort of gets dragged by her friend into this multi-fandom journal-based RPG -- known only as the Game, as if there's only one of such beast -- into a sort of online relationship with Ben, who plays Heathcliff to her Cathy, and then there's a meet-up and they go to it, Jane hoping to meet Ben. So she meets Ben, and Ben turns out to be a jerk who is only in it to score with her/someone, and the passionate "letters"/comments she'd fallen for were actually written by his friend Noah, who is a much more decent guy, though not so decent as to come clean with her about it, though he does try to warn her, obliquely, that Ben is not like what he seems. The "Ben is in it to score chicks" explanation didn't strike me as particularly believable, because that's a rather long game and a lot of effort for something that could almost certainly be more easily accomplished. Also, it bugged me that the RPers' meet-up was portrayed as all booze and hooking up, and the hostess is a slovenly crackpot who randomly brings up being poly. It just seemed like a really extremist view, and even though the message was "Jane learns they're actually nice people", the message that came across stronger, to me, was "even though they're all freaks". I did like the description of the awkwardness between the two girls who had been carrying on a torrid RP affair as "Jack" and "Ennis" from Brokeback Mountain when they actually met face to face. *That* seemed quite believable (though I've never been in the situation myself). Also, I approve of the fact that one of the characters represented was G'Kar. B5 has not been getting enough recognition in this anthology, so that was awesome to see.
- "The King of Pelinesse", M.T.Anderson -- huh. It's a very nicely constructed story, things being revealed in gradual but fairly natural ways, and a bit more open-ended than the others in the collection, but I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Flint the writer is certainly an intriguing, as well as pathetic and repulsive, character.
- "The Wrath of Dawn", Cynthia and Greg Leitich Smith -- I actually was quite enjoying this short story until the very last half page, which turns it into a sort of "awww, let's hug him again" ending. The message is fine. The story is told with humour, and I liked both Dawn the narrator and Eric the potential love interest. The dorky arguments and the narrative voice actually felt the most realistically geeky to me of any story till then. So it's a pity that, a) it was all a set up for a moral, b) the way the whole thing was resolved totally blew my suspension of disbelief. Alas, earwax.
- "Quiz Bowl Antichrist", David Levithan -- I liked this one, even if, in retrospect, it's a little hard to accept... certain apparent statistics, let's say. The narrator, Alec, is a fun one, and he is quite sympathetic while also being a prick, which he is called on. It's narrated from the future, so there's definitely this retrospective view of his prickishness, as well as the personalities and occasionally motivations of the other characters. I think this is an author I want to read more of.
- "The Quiet Knight", Garth Nix -- perfectly adequate story about a LARPed, if a bit reliant on coincidences for my taste and for its length, but I am forced to admit yet again that I just don't care much for anything Garth Nix writes. Like, it's not bad at all, but I do not get gripped by his stories at all, or enjoy them particularly. Oh well.
- "Everyone But You", Lisa Yee -- this is an interesting story in that I think it kind of shows that the geek is in the eye of the beholder. The geekery of the girl in question is baton-twirling, which makes his Miss Pep -- and also Miss Popular -- in her smalltown school. But then she moves to Maui when her mother marries a rich older gentleman from there (who is dying, but it's presented not as a gold-digger thing but a "they really come to care for each other" thing). Felicity's baton, perm, makeup, and preppy clothes are out of place in her new Hawaiian school,and so she suddenly finds herself an outsider, ostracized and teased by the popular kids. But in the middle of her misery, she sticks with baton twirling, on her own, since the school does not have a majorette squad, gets noticed for these skillz and learns how to twirl fire at the local luau attraction. This gives her one place in Hawaii where she feels at home, and eventually the attention of the hot boy who tormented her from the start, whom she rather emphatically rejects, and a nice, studious boyfriend. It's rather tugging at the heartstrings (the kindly old stepfather, Felicity's developmentally disabled brother she visits every day) but told with a light humour and without slathering on sentimentality, and Felicity, for all that she is the protagonist I have the hardest time understanding in this book, is a sympathetic and believable character, so the story still worked for me.
- "Secret Identity", Kelly Link -- I really liked this one, but then, Kelly Link is an awesome short story writer. This is also the one story in the book that is a genre story itself, although the sci-fi/fantasy bit is quite slight -- there are superheroes with apparnetly real superpowers, and the protagonist, Billie, keeps getting mistaken for a sidekick. Like a lot of Link's stories, it's a little nebulous and open-ended, but very nicely done. Billie comes to NYC to meet for the first time the guy she fell in love with while playing a MMORPG game. Only she's been pretending to be her 32-year-old sister rather her 16-year-old self. The story is written as a letter of apology (sort of) to the guy she was going to meet, who stood her up, sort of. Along the way, there's the general weirdness of a superhero convention and a dentist convention sharing the hotel, an unapologetic but quite fascinating douchebag who follows Billie around and may be her future nemesis, a butter sculpture fight, etc. The story is engagingly narrated, and I liked the note on which it ends, which is hopeful if very open.
- "Freak the Geek", John Green -- this is almost a vignette of a friendship between two geeky girls, "meek" Lauren and more outspoken Kayley, their banter and "dorkuments", their temporary frustration with one another. I suppose it might be meant to be a sort of indictment of the persecution of geeks by the "normals", but said "normals" are so faceless and caricature-like, that they don't really register as antagonists, merely as background noise.
- "The Truth About Dino Girl", Barry Lyga -- Huh. I was totally on board with the first part of the story -- a science geek who has been obsessed with dinosaurs forever and wants to be a paleontologist has an artsy friend who humours her dino obsession and a crush on the star baseball player who is dating the girls' soccer team captain. I liked Katie/Katya (her artsy friend Sooz bestowed on her the more exotic nickname) -- her science geek obsession was an aspect of geekiness that was good to see, and she is both clearly a huge dork and also a likeable person. I liked the fact that she is very serious about paleontology -- she is not just constantly talking about dinosaurs, but works on a serious science fair project and is saving money to go on a paleontology dig when she's a junior. And there's this favorite line of mine: "'You're not really a girl' [a boy] said. 'Girls don't like dinosaurs.' I blinked. 'What do you mean? Of course I'm a girl. I'm wearing pink.' I pointed to my headband, just in case he didn't get it," because it's nice to see that an interest in science/dinosaurs and aspects of stereotypical girliness are not mutually exclusive. So, I liked Katie a lot. I also liked the fact that her crush Jamie's girlfriend was someone Katie saw as a good, likeable person, because it's sort of an unusual view for girls who are in romantic competition, let alone when they're also from the different ends of the popularity spectrum. Of course, Katie also wants to be like Andi -- but without, it seems, sacrificing her own interests and personality and stuff. So, cool.
And then Andi bumps into Katie and Katie's notebook falls open, and Andi sees that Katie's been drawing her boyfriend's flaming baseball tattoo over and over again. Katie starts babbling about how she's not trying to steal Jaime from her, and Andi laughs that she is not a threat, steps on her notebook as she brushes past, and... the story turns into a revenge of the nerds sort of thing. Except... I didn't think that what Andi did was in any way proportional to the retribution meted out, and yet the story... well, the story ends a little abruptly and I can't actually tell if it endorses Katie's actions or tries to highlight them as problematic. What turns out to be the final straw for Katie is that Andi apparently told Jamie that Katie had been drawing his tattoo, because he rolls down his sleeves to hide the tattoo in their next biology class. It seems that Jamie is the only person Andi told about Katie's hopeless crush -- she does not appear to be mocking her in public, or even teasing her about it after the initial encounter. So then Katie, brokenhearted, spills to her friend Sooz, and it turns out Sooz has long-standing hatred of Andi, which she's been trying to downplay because Katie seemed to like Andi so much. The hatred dates back to the time Andi "once made so much fun of another girl [who turns out to have been Sooz herself] that she went into the bathroom and cried for, like, an hour." It's not actually explained what Andi said to Sooz that was so horrible, so it's kind of hard to get riled up on account of that. And as for Andi telling Jamie about Katie's crush on him/obsession with his tattoo, that doesn't strike me as a particularly unreasonable thing to do. Like, there's definitely a bitchy way and motivation to do it, but if somebody was, rather stalkereshly, copying and recopying my tattoo and my SO found out about it, I think I'd kind of like to know, even if the "stalker" seemed totally harmless. Yes, Andi was quite bitchy in the original confrontation with Katie, but, again, it's kind of an odd and rather uncomfortable position to be in, confronted with someone who is fantasizing about your boyfriend to a possibly unhealthy degree. So, yes, she was bitchy, but she didn't come across to me as malicious or unreasonable, beyond a regular self-centered, possibly not-as-secure-as-she-appears teenage girl.
So then what Katie and Sooz do to her -- and this is premeditated and staged across several weeks with patience that Katie is very proud of -- is Katie sneaks into the girls' locker room while Andi is changing after a match and takes half-naked pictures of her (bare breasts) with a camera hidden in a compact mirror (because cell phones are confiscated on entering the locker room). And then Sooz photoshops half-naked Andi into a sleazy hotel background and they plaster posters of this, reading "DO YOU LIKE SEX? SHE DOES!!!! CALL ANDI!" and her phone number and address all over town. As a result Jamie breaks up with Annie because everybody is saying she's a slut. And the story ends with Katie, having witnessed this, thinking: "When I got up from the table, something amazing happened. The earth shook with my footsteps. [...] From now on the earth would tremble in my wake. And I knew. I knew what the dinosaurs sounded like. They sounded like me...."
And... it's sort of ambiguous, right? Katie obviously seems happy with how things ended, but I have a harder time figuring out what the author means by this. Is he happy, too, and feels justice has triumphed? Or is the whole deal where Katie turns into a "predator", and a dinosaur, for all that she loves the things, is a kind of monster commentary on how, in lashing out against a social system that persecutes them (to some degree), geeks can become worse than the popular kids they're lashing out at, and not even notice/think of it in those terms because this sort of dog eat dog world is what they've been made accustomed to? I don't know...
After googling around, it looks like this story is set in the same universe as the author's The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl, which I haven't read, obviously, but from reading the summary I'm more inclined to think that the author is not endorsing crime and privacy violation as a valid response to bitchiness, and also that it's possible I'm missing some context with Annie and Jamie. But on its own, it's still a weird story.
- "This is My Audition Monologue", Sara Zarr -- what is says on the tin, pretty much -- the monologue of a girl who wants to act but keeps ending up in techie roles. This is a passion I can't really understand, but it's well written, and there are some philosophical musings that are spot on and hints at relationships outside of what's being explicitly said, which was nice.
- "The Stars at the Finish Line", Wendy Mass -- utter fluff, but fluff that's right up my alley: a geeky boy is in love with a geeky, driven girl with whom he has been competing since 4th grade. She wants to be an astronaut, he has true passion for astronomy; he is adorkable and vulnerable, she is oblivious and kisses him first. All in all, a really cute, funny story, with likeable characters and the narrator's (and author's) clear passion for astronomy transmitting itself to the reader.
- "It's Just a Jump to the Left", Libba Bray -- as fluffy as the previous story was, this one is just the reverse -- it's all things fall apart, changing for the worse, you can't go home again -- but very well done. The geekiness in question is dedication to the Rocky Horror Picture Show, a weekly ritual for Leta and her friend Agnes and lately refuge from Leta's shattered family life -- father who is out of state at a new job, brother suffering from seizures, aphasia, other stuff from an accident, and mother who is at the end of her rope. It's a pretty heartbreaking story, and the only bright spot is that Leta and Agnes's friendship seems posed to endure.
So, for the record:
The story I didn't like at all: "One of Us"
The stories I was conflicted about: "Dino Girl" and "I Never"
The stories I especially liked: "Once You're a Jedi", "Definitional Chaos", "Quiz Bowl Antichrist", "Secret Identity", "Stars at the Finish Line", "It's Just a Jump to the Left" (although this was pretty depressing)
There are also these little one-page comics as spacers between the stories. They are... pretty much on the level of the Bazooka Joe comics you'd get with your gum, only geeky. But, you know, it's a cute idea, and no worse than blank pages.
On the whole, this was a much stronger anthology than I'd expected, and also less fluffy. I'm also kind of surprised that "fuck" seems to be pretty standard for YA lit now? Almost every other story featured it...