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Queen Kat, Carmel and St. Jude Get a Life, by Maureen McCarthy
Kat, Carmel and Jude are three girls from the same small town in Australia, heading to the city to go to school. The daughter of wealthy parents, Kat's dad buys a house for her to live in, and when her sister's plans change, Carmel and Jude end up moving in. Carmel's the daughter of farmers, with a voice to die for. Jude's the daughter of a dead Chilean revolutionary and a mother who moved her to Australia to escape all that.
And this is the veeeeeeery looooooooong story of how Kat, Carmel and Jude do in their first year at university, and not to give horrible spoilers, but Kat ends up on drugs, Carmel drops out and Jude becomes a radical. The book is in basically three parts, one told from the POV of each of the girls, and the POV shifting every 150 pages or so bugged the shit out of me. Just when I started liking one of these girls, I had to jump to another one.
This book made me wonder two things. 1) How much college lit is out there? (Shhhhh, I know Lauren Conrad just wrote one; she doesn't count.) There's a ton of teen lit about under-18s and a ton of adult lit about, more or less, over-25s, but I don't know that I've read much in between. 2) Where are the EDITORS lately? Why do all these books have so many words? I want to take their words away.
Summary: I will give Maureen McCarthy one more try, since kaymbee recommends her highly, but this next book should have fewer words. :P
Pretty Monsters, by Kelly Link
Marbles has been telling me I need to read Kelly Link for years, ever since she encountered "The Faery Handbag" in Datlow and Windling's The Faery Reel. And for good reason, though to be honest, this was a strange read for me. I really dislike horror, and perhaps unsurprisingly, a book called "Pretty Monsters" veers sort of close to horror. At the end of the day, I don't know how much I like this book, but that's not going to stop me from telling you it's a fucking great book and you should all go read it.
Pretty Monsters is a collection of stories about things that might be monsters, or might not be monsters, or might be this or might be that, or don't look like monsters, but definitely are. It's complicated. It doesn't explain itself. (Thank God, it doesn't explain itself.) It comes at things from weird angles and with unusual insights. (And thank God for that, too.) It's sometimes a tough read, but well worth it, especially for the faery handbag story and the story about Ozma and the "Pretty Monsters" story itself. It cuts things off right when you think you're going to get an explanation.
It's totally different from anything I've read lately, and I think it was outstanding.
And I'm 110 pages from the end of Perry Moore's Hero, about a gay teen superhero, which started out very awesomely (I'm particularly excited about a text-only superhero book because graphic novels and I have frequent and vehement differences of opinion), and has slowed down a bit in the last 100 pages with the coming out on national TV and the reappearing mother explaining why everyone hates his dad and now I kind of just want this book to be 100 pages shorter.
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