Book Review: Horizon by Fran Wilde
The Compton Crook award-winning, Nebula-nominated Updraft by Fran Wilde landed her acclaim, accolades and a very fine YA novel to start the novel portion of her writing career. Focusing on a New Weird world above the cloud of flyers, skymouths and towers of bone, Updraft was one of the most memorable books I read in 2015. Cloudbound, which came out in 2016, took the world of the Bone Towers and its characters in new and intriguing directions. Somewhere in there, the series got a reboot of covers, too. Now, with Horizon, Fran Wilde completes the trilogy. After the revelations of Cloudbound, and the instability that the Bone Tower society has undergone after the events of Updraft, Horizon brings us to the ground, literally and figuratively, in this concluding volume. The three novels of the Bone Towers Trilogy have all done different things, and done them well. Updraft is a classic YA coming of age story with a strong central protagonist, unfolding and unfurling the wings of the author’s worldbuilding even as we have a deep dive into the personality, hopes, fears, dreams and struggles of Kirit. It would have been the easier, safer and perhaps more expected path for the author to continue the trilogy from Kirit’s point of view and go for a grand arc of Kirit’s story at the time of great change for her community. Surely, I think, the author must have considered and contemplated that sort of path for her subsequent novels.
SEA Quest: A SG Writer's Thoughts about ASEAN Lit
SFF in ASEAN Writing Who am I? I write science fiction (mostly) and YA. And things in between. What draws me to science fiction and YA? I like the genre. Science fiction is a genre. YA is the target audience, not a genre. I like science fiction because you can imagine worlds. You can write about werewolves in space and fantastic space battles. It’s basically what-ifs and futures and what kind of futures you want to see. Science fiction is visionary; it opens eyes and broadens horizons. It makes you think. It makes you travel through space and time. It has enormous potential for change. YA? I teach and I like teaching. My students happen to fall within this category. It talks about an interesting and not-so-easy time: the teenage years.
Book Review: Buried Heart by Kate Elliott
All good things must come to an end, and with Buried Heart, author Kate Elliott brings to a conclusion the YA Court of Fives trilogy. Talking about plot developments in the third and final volume of a trilogy is difficult and perhaps foolish to try, so I will instead discuss the essential theme of this volume, one that has been slowly surfacing through Court of Fives and Poisoned Blade, but here gets its full fulminating flowering: Revolution. In Buried Heart, Efea’s oppressed status, something that the author has been delineating from the very first chapter of Court of Fives, comes out in full force. Of course within the potential revolution of Efea against the tyranny that holds it is the struggle of powers around it, and the struggles of the current royal occupants to hold the throne against kin and family. The first two novels, which suggested that Jessamy, the Spider, would be subsumed into that dynamic entirely, prove to have been a false flag. In the third volume, Jess finds herself caught between father and mother, her lover and her land, and must make often difficult choices as the people of Efea struggle to reclaim their freedom.
Book Reviews: Martian Girls, Home and Abroad
Martians Abroad by Carrie Vaughn & Mars Girls by Mary Turzillo Two young adult (YA) novels featuring feisty teen heroines from Mars recently landed in my to-be-read pile. Beyond the surface similarity between their protagonists, the two novels diverge completely, each with unique focus and drive, and different kinds of success. Newly out in trade paperback from Tor, Martians Abroad by Carrie Vaughn is the simpler of the two, written with familiar themes (adversity-conquering intellect, exceptionalism) that recall YA science fiction adventures from ‘Golden Age’ writers like Heinlein. The plot of this stand-alone novel from Vaughn is even more broadly recognizable as a typical coming-of-age setup. A teen leaves the familiarity of home to enter an institution populated by antagonistic peers and aloof adults. The ridiculed outcast slowly proves the utility of her or his outsider perspective/experience, showing-up the cliques and saving the day.
A Book By Its Cover: My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix
Picture yourself on a boat or a lakeshore, with pastel balloons and ominous skies; Some monster calls you, you answer quite slowly — the girl with the GLOWING RED EYES! My Best Friend’s Exorcism, by Grady Hendrix, is a work of art. You can tell just by looking at the cover. There is a LOT going on here! It tells a story all by itself, but go on and read the book, too. I can’t promise you’ll be glad you did, since I don’t know you, Gentle Reader, but I’d be amazed if you’re not interested! The first thing to notice — well, no, the first thing I noticed was the girl with the glowing red eyes, but I’ll get back to her in a bit. The first thing to talk about is the cognitive dissonance introduced by the cover. It has a yellow smiley “BE KIND, REWIND” sticker at the top right. (The Young Adult audience of today won’t remember this, but there used to be things called videotapes, sort of like DVDs, but once you watched them, the next viewers couldn’t watch until rewinding to the beginning. But I digress.) Just below and to the left, there’s a green “A NOVEL” sticker. Then at the bottom, it says VHS, which refers to the most common, if not the best, format of videotape. This book/movie disparity is explained by the fact that the story is about the filming of a direct-to-video flick that never even got released, because things went horribly awry during the location shots.
Book Review: Children of the Different by S.C. Flynn
Stories dealing with those often-painful transitions of adolescence dominate mainstream young adult fiction. On the genre side of the fiction divide, post-apocalyptic settings contain characters constantly beset by external dangers, characters that simultaneously must struggle to adapt themselves to their civilization’s collapse. In both cases these tales combine peripheral threats with internal struggles, shaping varying degrees of character growth and/or plot development. Thus, it’s fitting that S.C. Flynn combined aspects from both sides of young adult fiction’s spectrum in his debut novel Children of the Different. Though comprised of many familiar elements, the novel is aptly named. Flynn’s story feels fresh and intriguingly different. With inspirations from analytical philosophy and biological metamorphosis, Children of the Different explores the transformation of his young characters into adulthood within post-apocalyptic settings that merge science fiction and mythical fantasy.
