I sat on this review for a few weeks, because I didn’t want you to forget about it — it is fabulous, and any of you who love Alanna or Jacky Faber (or any fantasy/adventure, really — this book is perfect adult crossover material) should run to your local bookstore or library to make Katsa’s acquaintance as soon as possible.

The Pitch: (any spoilers here are revealed early in the story, or are obvious from the flap copy)

Katsa is the niece of King Randa, who rules Middluns, the central kingdom of the seven in this world. She was born with a rare and feared skill called a Grace. Some people are Graced with cooking or weather prediction; Katsa is Graced with the ability to kick the ass of anyone she meets. Her uncle uses her to bully everyone in his kingdom. Under his nose, though, she started a Council of Robin Hoods bent on protecting the common people tormented by the whims of the kings. The book opens as the Council is rescuing the father of the Lienid king from another king’s dungeon. As Katsa and her new friend Po, a Lienid prince, unravel the mystery of this odd kidnapping, it leads them to the horrible secret behind another king’s rule.

The characters feel real, the plot is perfectly paced, and I figured out the Big Secrets just a page or two before the characters — early enough to make me feel smart, and like the revelations didn’t come out of nowhere; late enough so the characters don’t seem dense. I read almost the whole damn thing in a day, and there is little higher praise than that.

Somewhat Spoilery Pondering:

Thematically, this is a book about power: what does it mean to have it? What does it mean to abuse it? When does it control you, and when do you control it? Katsa’s emotional journey has to do with answering those questions: is she a monster because of the violence she can commit? How can she use her Grace without losing control over it? Can she love someone without giving him more power over her than she can tolerate?

…Ok, enough sounding smart — on to the squeeeing! I haven’t had a crush on a fictional character in forever, but Po is mad hot. This is the sort of romance I can get into — where the romance isn’t contrived to be the center of the story, but grows out of the characters’ other actions and motivations; where there’s drama in the rest of the story that is not in service of the romance; when both characters are fully realized and flawed. (Suck it, Bella and Edward. Pun intended.)

I love how carefully considered their relationship is. Katsa is determined not to marry, nor to have children — she will not tie her freedom to another person. She isn’t the heir to anything, so she has that freedom within the realistic laws of a monarchy (she’s well aware that her friend Raffin, Randa’s son and heir, does not). She keeps her commitment even after she falls in love with Po, distinguishing her from pretty much every other fantasy heroine ever. She will not capitulate to marrying him, even when it appears to be the only way to relieve the sexual tension that has been making me insane for 200 pages. And when Po presents another option (”I’ll give myself to you any way you’ll have me”), it takes her multiple chapters to wind through all the considerations.

The issues modern teenagers have to consider are different, but I love that it’s shown here as a question to be considered. They finally Do It in the heat of the moment, yes (using fantasy birth control, of course), but it’s clear that both Katsa and Po have weighed the options and made a conscious choice.

That little icon over there refers to what I’ve been calling the “Secular Humanist Hippie Stamp of Approval.” As I think you’ll all agree, that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. I’ve developed sort of an obsession with this concept, though, so I decided it needs an icon.

Here’s the deal: I’m tired of fantasies in which the character Has a Destiny. Not that destinies are necessarily boring — Buffy is all about coming to terms with her destiny, and anyone who knows me knows my eternal love for that show. But it’s too easy to make destiny a character’s only motivation: “But you must, sir, for you are the heir to the throne / all seventh sons of seventh sons have great power / when you were born it was prophesied that you would defeat Lord Voldemort.” …Or, you know, whatever.

So as an antidote to the “blood is destiny and prophecies are inescapable” style of fantasy, I give you the Anti-Destiny Icon, for fantasy protagonists who start out ordinary, or who have a destiny and buck it somehow. And I have a couple of reviews to slap it on, coming right up. Wooo!

Now it just needs a name. I called it “Destiny Slash” in the alt-text, but that sounds like Spike and Xander being unable to avoid the prophecy that they will someday consummate their passion. Which, um, isn’t the concept I’m going for. Help me out, guys — name that icon!

The only people in Samara’s life are her neglectful mother, her mother’s abusive live-in boyfriend, and her favorite chimpanzee at the zoo… until elderly Mr. Brook subs for her regular English teacher and changes her life with some poetry.

Sound like a cliche? Well, it… pretty much is. The book is only 173 small-format pages, and that is apparently not enough space to make the characters more than two-dimensional stamps of Neglectful Parent, Depressed Teenager, and Inspiring Teacher. Large chunks of time are skipped over, Samara’s internal monologue is truncated… we never get to know any of the characters enough to mourn or cheer for them. Life is in no way fine by the end of the book (though Samara has found some two-dimensional Quirky Friends), but fortunately I didn’t care enough about Samara to be depressed about it.

Skip this one and go read Whittenberg’s first novel, Sweet Thang, instead. Sweet Thang is everything Life Is Fine isn’t: believable, funny, emotional, engaging, touching. Half my middle schoolers have read it by now, and I bet the rest will by the end of the year. (It’s also short, and therefore a good choice for the “OMG I have to do a book report for Friday!” crowd.) I love it lots, and I have faith in Whittenberg as a writer; everybody stumbles once or twice.

How I Paid for College is one of my top 5 funniest books. (Not sure what the others are, honestly. Gordon Korman’s Son of Interflux and I Want to Go Home! are in there, for sure.) It is my standard Beach Reading Recommendation, and if I haven’t pushed it on you, consider it done. The premise: Edward is simply dying to go to Juilliard, so he and his wacky band of misfit theater buddies contrive to extort the money from his tightfisted dad, who wants Edward to go to business school instead. This involves a blackmail, priest impersonation, and other ludicrously elaborate set-ups. Plus lots of sex. As Edward puts it, “Women are my second-favorite people to have sex with.”

The sequel takes place over a year later, in 1986. Edward has been kicked out for being “too jazz hands for Juilliard.” To avoid telling his dad, he supports himself as a “party motivator,” getting bratty kids to dance at bar mitzvahs and schmoozing with businessmen at corporate events… which is how he gets mixed up with an insider trading scheme. The old cast of How I Paid for College, plus a couple of new friends, concocts yet more madcap schemes to keep Edward out of federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison.

Slightly Spoilery Pondering:

Theater People isn’t quite as hilarious as College, maybe only because I knew what to expect (more or less). But it is more touching. I loved the freewheeling sexuality of College, that the book forced no one to make any pesky definitions. But by the mid-80s, being a gay man in New York isn’t a lighthearted romp. Edward is terrified, so he futilely chases straight dudes and scorns guys who clearly identify as gay.

One of the climaxes (heh) of the book comes (har) when Edward’s gay friend convinces him to relax and enjoy himself: “I’ve got two words for you. Con. Dom.” With his initiation into the gay sex he’d wanted to be having all along, he gains the courage to stop hiding from AIDS and start fighting it. He doesn’t just want to be Edward Zanni, goofball and unwitting white-collar criminal; he wants to own his sexuality and stand for something:

“I guess what I’m trying to say is that if all the world’s a stage, I want to play my part, even if it’s in a shiny shirt and tight pants. Years from now, when someone says to me, ‘What did you do in the fight against AIDS?’ I don’t want to answer, ‘I got a cheap apartment.’”

So in that way, it becomes a pretty great gay coming-of-age novel (without deciding bi people don’t actually exist). And that is a thing the world needs more of.

In every fantasy novel that we could think of in which characters have sex and don’t get KID (as my boyfriend so charmingly puts it), they either a) ignore birth control entirely, or b) have some herb or spell that magically eliminates pregnancy as a possibility. 100% effective, easily obtained, no side effects. Wouldn’t we all love to have birth control like that?

As a plot device, it’s invaluable: you can be responsible by bringing up the issue of pregnancy, and then sweep it off the table easily, leaving the characters to grapple with the more emotionally interesting reasons to have sex or not. But I would love to see a fantasy novel deal with the modern (and age-old) fact that sex isn’t just an emotional risk, it’s also a physical risk.

(The only counter-example I can think of is Pamela Dean’s Tam-Lin. I read it a decade ago and don’t remember the details, but as I recall, Janet’s magical birth control fails (does Thomas make it fail on purpose? I forget). In the end, though, she’s happy about the pregnancy, despite being in college. Correct me if I’m wrong here, people who are more into this book than I am.)

Most fantasy (and historical) novels, of course, eventually get around this by having the heroine decide that she wants kids after all. She meets the right man and decides to slow down from her adventuring days. Alanna does it, Sabriel does it, Catherine-called-Birdy does it. In Sean Stewart’s Nobody’s Son, Gail’s decision to have a child is the happy ending on the very last page (and in that world, there is no magical birth control, so Gail has been denying poor Mark not just sons, but booty). These are all totally reasonable decisions for the characters to make. Often the woman is heir to something and has little choice, so you’re just glad she’s found a way to be happy with her destiny. As a woman who doesn’t want kids and (at almost-30) has yet to change her mind, though, I’m invested in seeing more characters choose to remain childless. Even if that does limit the possibility for multi-generational sequels.

This one’s easy to sum up: Jacobs (who gets paid for his OCD, basically — he lets weird projects take over his life and then writes books about them; his last was about reading the entire encyclopedia cover-to-cover) spent a year living by the Bible’s rules as literally as possible. Everything from “though shalt honor thy father and thy mother” to obscure stuff about not wearing clothes with mixed fibers and tithing your fruit. He has two goals here: to show that even the most fundamental of religious fundamentalism is by necessity selective, and to explore his own uneasy relationship with religion.

I loved reading this book. At first, I was annoyed with Jacobs’ flip tone (his day job is as a writer for Esquire, as he reminds you every three pages, so I guess flip is his home turf) — I wanted more in-depth consideration of some of these weighty issues. But I found I couldn’t get away from Jacobs’ life, even when I wasn’t actually reading. And by halfway through, the book — mirroring Jacobs’ own journey — had gone from jokey to irreverently reverent.

He does a creditable, if not particularly scholarly, job throughout of separating the actual words of the Bible from the layers of interpretation built up over centuries. Despite having never read much of the Bible besides my bat mitzvah Torah portion and the Yom Kippur portion every year, I’ve been cynical about it my whole life, thanks to the many nutjobs who use it as an excuse for fucking up my country — which was pretty much the position Jacobs started from. I came away from the book with Jacobs’ newfound appreciation for some of the Bible’s wisdom and beauty, and a desire to read Ecclesiastes, at least.

One of Jacobs’ most profound insights comes on his pilgrimage to Israel:

My quest is a paradoxical one. I’m trying to fly solo on a route that was specifically designed for a crowd. As one of my spiritual advisors, David Bossman, a religion professor at Seton Hall University, told me: “The people of the Bible were ‘groupies.’ You did what the group did, you observed the customs of your group. Only the crazy Europeans came up with the idea of individualism. So what you’re doing is a modern phenomenon.”

I’ve loved that crazy European individualism all my life…. This year I’ve tried to worship alone and find meaning alone. The solitary approach has its advantages — I like trying to figure it out myself. I like reading the holy words unfiltered by layers of interpretation. But going it alone also has limits, and big ones. I miss out on the feeling of belonging, which is a key part of religion…. I tried to do [Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah] alone. I fasted. I ate sweets. I sent portions to the poor. But I was doing it cluelessly and by myself, and it felt empty.

Yes. I still consider myself Jewish because of the connection to my grandparents and great-grandparents and on down the line to Moses. I visited my aunt and uncle last week and saw old pictures of my grandmother’s family at a Passover seder, and I was struck by the similarity to my friends and I laughing over our own seder meal (with, I bet, fewer jokes about Battlestar Galactica and Dr. Who). But if I didn’t have those Jewish friends to build a Passover tradition with, if our vegetarian seder with its homemade haggadah weren’t the “custom of our group,” would I still celebrate Passover? Heck, no.

But other customs of my groups include quoting Buffy at the drop of a hat and apple-picking in October and snowffle ball after midnight on New Year’s and celebrating Pi Day as a college-friends reunion. The Bible is nowhere in there, and no matter how much respect I may come to have for its words and its wisdom, ultimately it’s tradition (Tradition!) and society that make believers.

(Totally unrelated side note: the barista at 1369 in Inman looks exactly like a hipper alterna-chick version of Brenda from Adventures in Babysitting. I hope she didn’t spike my Tab with Drain-o.)

Question: Talk to me about your experience with the Bible. Have you read it? Do you follow any of its teachings, consciously or unconsciously? Do you have a prejudicial eye-rolling reaction when you hear the word “Bible,” or do you feel like you need to keep your faith hidden among us secular urban heathens? We talk about sex and money all the time, but religion is still somewhat taboo — let’s get uncomfortable!

Fanboy (we never learn his real name) is a fifteen-year-old loner. His only friend is Cal, who shares his love of superhero comics and intellectual conversation, but since Cal’s also an athlete, they move in different social universes. His mother has remarried “the step-fascist” and they’re having a baby, so Fanboy feels like he’s been pushed out of his family. All his dreams are tied to Schemata, the graphic novel he’s writing and drawing. He plans to show his Schemata portfolio to his hero, comics writer Brian Michael Bendis, at an upcoming con — at which point Bendis will immediately faint in awe, call his publisher, and sweep Fanboy away from small-minded South Brook forever.

The thing I loved about this book is the same thing that bugged me about it: its lack of easy solutions to the characters’ problems. On the one hand, Fanboy’s steps toward self-determination are realistically small, yet totally satisfying. On the other hand, there aren’t any explanations — easy or otherwise — for some things that really should have been explained. (His mother’s pathological insistence that he must never invite anyone over, for instance, which I kept expecting to be a big deal because it seemed so unavoidably odd.) A gun is — literally — shown in the first act that never goes off in the third. These strike me as newbie mistakes, so I look forward to reading Lyga’s next book.

Also, notice how I wrote that whole premise without mentioning one of the two title characters? Goth Girl is interesting, to be sure, and such a whackjob that (as my friend Perich wrote about Heath Ledger’s Joker) “you never sit easy when she’s on screen.” But to me (and I suspect this is just me) she felt ancillary to Fanboy’s growing-up process at the center of the story.

I loved all the real-world comics name-dropping — Barry Lyga worked in the industry for years, according to his bio, and he knows his stuff. (If you’re not a comics fan, you might find that a sticking point, the way I always do with the descriptions of games in sports novels.) Everything felt believable (except the parents — why are parents always the hardest part of a YA novel?), even if it didn’t always hang together novelistically.

Ultimately, I think what kept me from falling in love with the book is my lack of misanthropy, or even memory of high school misanthropy. I was a geek in school (oh, who am I kidding with the past tense there?), and there were phases where I had no friends. But the truth is that those phases passed by 5th grade, after which, despite my insecurity about it all, I always, always had someone (usually a bunch of someones) to hang out with. That’s right: I’m a geek poseur.

I kind of hate to say this, because it conflicts so much with my image of my younger self, but the truth is that I find it dreary and incomprehensible to read about kids who are this miserably lonely. It breaks my heart, but I want to roll my eyes at the same time and say, “Get over yourself.” (Which is pretty much what Cal does at the end of the book, so yay for Cal!) I guess I have officially grown up too much to empathize with my inner lonely teenager.

Oh, and confidential to Barry Lyga: Schemata sounds AWESOME. Y is over, Ex Machina is wrapping up, Speed only publishes a new Finder like once every five years, and even the guy at the Picnic yesterday couldn’t come up with anything he thought I’d like that I’m not already reading. Please, please write it! It’ll be like a whole lit-verite viral marketing thing. Love, me

A Grown-Up Table diversion into comics… Y is over. (Well, it’s been over for awhile, but I wait for the trade paperback compilations of the issues, and I just recently picked up the last one.) It’s one of the first series I fell in love with, and the end did not disappoint — I was bawling like a slightly manipulated baby.

The premise: Yorick Brown, twentysomething slacker everyman, and his pet monkey Ampersand are the only survivors of a mysterious plague that instantly wipes out all male mammals on earth. Yorick’s only thought is to find Beth, his girlfriend, who is studying abroad in Australia. But as the last man on earth, he’s too important to be allowed to follow his own agenda. He hooks up with Dr. Alison Mann, a geneticist, and Agent 355 of the mysterious Culper Ring, who is assigned to protect him until Dr. Mann can figure out what allowed him to survive. The trio travel across continents, pursued by (among others) politicians, the armies of several countries, and radical feminists known as Amazons, while the world falls apart and is rebuilt again by women.

Slightly spoilery

By the end, the “scientific” “explanations” get a little hand-wavy, and there is a Joss Whedon Moment (that actually made me shout, “Fuck you, Joss!” before I remembered that he didn’t write it this time). But the characters and their emotions are true, and the brilliant world-building remains solid.

I could say a lot about the gender, race, and sexuality commentary throughout the series (which I think is pretty genius, most of the time), but others already have.* So I’ll just say that I loved it, and I’m so sad it ended, in the same way I was sad when Buffy ended. RIP Y: they saved the world a lot, in spite of themselves.

During the school year, I mostly read for work: how will I know what to give my kids if I don’t tear through as many YA novels as possible? Consequently, I almost never read sequels; I got enough of a taste with the first book, so I feel guilty if I linger. This summer’s reading project is to catch up on the sequels to some books I loved.

TOS is the sequel to Dairy Queen, another book in the “I adored it and so did my kids” category. In DQ, DJ Schwenk is annoyed when well-off Brian Nelson, star quarterback on the rival town’s football team, starts hanging around her family’s struggling dairy farm. His coach decided that spending some time with the Schwenks would give Brian a “work ethic,” but DJ already has plenty of ethic and the work to match. She reluctantly agrees to train Brian, and discovers that she loves football even more than she thought she did. Not only that, she’s a pretty good player… good enough to play for her school’s team.

In DQ, the problems are mostly DJ’s own: she’s overloaded with work, she’s not sure how she feels about Brian, and of course, she’s the only female football player in the state of Wisconsin. Her family’s problems are hinted at, but never fully explored. In TOS, those problems take center stage: DJ’s best friend Amber is tormented at school for dating a woman, DJ’s mom throws her back out and can’t work, and the farm is losing a frightening amount of money. Then there are DJ’s own problems: Brian might be her boyfriend, except that he doesn’t seem to want to be seen with her in public, and she has an accident that forces her to choose between playing football and the possibility of a basketball scholarship.

One of DJ’s defining character traits is her ineloquence. She’s a great athlete, but when she has to talk her way through a difficult situation, she gets stuck. It’s unusual, I think, to find a realistic YA character like this (probably because most authors are eloquent, by definition), but both DQ and TOS manage to be written in DJ’s not-a-strong-student tone without making her seem stupid or weighing the book down. I love this passage, on the subject of Doing Something Stupid (as her mom calls it) with Brian:

I hadn’t really been alone with Brian — not counting the barn, which I don’t because Dad’s there all the time and also the straw is super itchy — since the Mall of America, and while I hadn’t Done Anything Stupid, I wasn’t sure where exactly I stood on the whole subject. I mean, it’s not that I wanted to do anything Really Stupid, but I wouldn’t be so against doing something Kind of Stupid — something A Little Silly, maybe. Not that I had any clear ideas, but I couldn’t help but wonder. So it was awfully hard to work on algebra, and when I took out my A&P book, I looked through the chapter on reproduction, the pages all grimy from kids before me, and that didn’t help much either.

DJ finding her voice and her strength is a theme of this book, even more so than it was in DQ. And she does, in ways that will make you cheer — even if (like me) you wanted the happy ending that wouldn’t actually be best for the character.

(Sidebar about the farm: if you know me, you know that sustainable food is one of my favorite subjects. A book with a small farm struggling to stay afloat in the days of Big Agribusiness? Bring on the Positive Messages! But Murdock doesn’t, exactly. She walks a careful tightrope between ignoring the troubles of small farms entirely, and beating us over the head with Thou Shalt Buy Local. As evangelistic as I am, I have to respect that. This is as much as DJ ever says on the subject, when she’s considering her dad’s ideas about going organic:

On the other hand, what good had not using chemicals done us so far? It’s not like people come by our place because Schwenk milk tastes so great, or that we have any way of even telling them how great it tastes. People I know wouldn’t pay more for that, not one penny, not for just milk. Maybe city folks would… But it still didn’t make sense to me, a bunch of city people who couldn’t identify the front end of a cow paying more for milk that came from sunshine and grass instead of chemicals. That’s not how people think.

Sure, Dad was trying. But it would end up being another one of his harebrained ideas…. And the farm would keep losing money, and eventually he’d have to sell to a developer and give up all his cows and farming ways, which would just about destroy him, and me too, I have to say, and that would be the end of the Schwenks. All because people don’t really care what goes in their mouths as long as it doesn’t come out of their wallets.

By the end of the book, the problem — realistically, and along with most of DJ’s larger problems — goes unsolved.)

Read-alikes: Definitely read DQ first, though in some ways this is an even better book. But my main read-alike recommendation is actually a watch-alike: the TV show Friday Night Lights, whose second season E and I are in the middle of on DVD. It and Murdock’s books made me care (just a tiny bit, mind you) about football, and if that isn’t high praise, I don’t know what is.

During the school year, I mostly read for work: how will I know what to give my kids if I don’t tear through as many YA novels as possible? Consequently, I almost never read sequels; I got enough of a taste with the first book, so I feel guilty if I linger. This summer’s reading project is to catch up on the sequels to some books I loved.

Julie lives a relatively normal middle school life in Northboro, MA (ooh, setting-I-recognize alert!)… except for the tangle of magical vines trapped under her bed. The vines are what’s left of the Wild, the fairy-tale forest that traps everyone it touches inside a story, stripping them of their free will and forcing them to reenact their story over and over. Julie’s parents, Rapunzel and her prince, led the charge to defeat the Wild five hundred years ago. Zel and a host of other fairy tale characters escaped, but the prince was left behind. In Into the Wild, the Wild escapes from under Julie’s bed and takes over Northboro.

At the beginning of Out of the Wild, everything is back to normal: the Wild is safely under Julie’s bed, Zel runs a hair salon, Julie’s “brother” (Puss in) Boots chases the Three Blind Mice… but then the Wild unexpectedly spits out Zel’s prince. The family is thrilled to be reunited, but Prince (as they decide to call him, “like the rock star”) can’t handle the modern world. He doesn’t understand why they have to keep their identities secret, so he immediately charges off to rescue damsels in distress, brandishing his sword and generally impersonating Prince Edward in Enchanted.

Unfortunately, “fairy-tale events” (like, say, rescuing poor still-sleeping Sleeping Beauty) feed the Wild. Someone is setting up Prince to complete as many fairy-tale events as possible, because it turns out that some fairy-tale characters prefer their happily-ever-afters to the modern world with its free will and heartbreak.

I adore Into the Wild. It was an easy sell for my kids, too — I put it on the middle school summer reading list, and I think half the seventh grade will have read it by September. It’s particularly appropriate for a girls’ school because of the clever way it turns the tired damsel-in-distress pattern of fairy tales on its head: Zel and Julie save the world by refusing to be saved by their princes, by refusing to be trapped by their destiny. (Secular humanist hippie stamp of approval!)

Spoilery for ITW and OOTW

Out of the Wild, I’m sorry to say, didn’t have much to add to the themes of its predecessor. It even detracted from Into the Wild’s message that you can’t expect happily ever after: at the end of ITW, Julie foils the Wild by wishing not for a perfect happy ending for her family (which would only have fueled the Wild), but for everything to go back to normal, troubles and all. At the end of OOTW, she transforms the Wild by a different wish — one that creates a fairy-tale utopia for world and Wild alike. Ta-da, you can have perfectly neat little endings if you have a Wishing Well! Duh. So much for tough choices.

Also, Prince never comes off as very bright. He fought the Wild; he knows that fairy-tale events fuel it. So when he sails off chasing his princely destiny with no thought for the consequences, it’s hard not to conclude that he left more than a few brain cells back in the Wild. I never figured out what Zel sees in him.

All that said, I like perfectly happy endings as much as the next person, and OOTW sure has a glorious one! If you enjoyed the formula of ITW and need more of the same, OOTW obliges.