Review #9: Thorn, by Inistar Khanani

Thorn arrived in my mailbox for the Kid for her birthday from my friend who lives in Alaska. Her wife went to college with Intisar Khanani, and so they sent her a signed copy and a note that maybe I should read it first. And since I was in a slump, and she had a book report due on something else, I snagged it, not expecting a whole lot, which just goes to show you about expectations, because this book blew me away.

Thorn is the retelling of Grimm's Goose Girl fairy tale, with which I was unfamiliar (and still am, actually), with a slight fantasy angle. My taste in fairy tales runs to the decidedly unfeminist Disney versions of the stories and fantasy is most definitely not my genre, so again, I wasn't expecting a whole lot. But it turns out that when the story is good, none of that matters. And this story is SO VERY GOOD.

Princess Alyrra stars as the unhappy princess who is forced to marry a foreign prince, but on her way to his kingdom, she is the victim of an attack, and her identity is switched with that of Valka, her lady-in-waiting, and suddenly, Alyrra realizes that she can control her destiny for the first time in her life. Making a life for herself as the castle's goose girl and living with the horse handlers near the barn, she befriends a beautiful white horse. The horse is not as he seems, for he can communicate with Alyrra, and warns her that not only is she in mortal danger, but Prince Kestrin is as well, and suddenly, Alyrra must choose between her freedom and Prince Kestrin's life. And whatever she chooses will certainly have a ripple effect throughout the kingdom.

Note: SPOILERS AHEAD but there's no way to talk about how great this book is without a few spoilers.

Alyrra starts out as a pretty shy and meek character, very unsure of herself and kind of just going along with what she is told to do. I found myself quite frustrated with her in the opening pages, in fact, and wasn't quite sold on the story because of that. And then somewhere along the line, her inner strength comes out, and she becomes a force to be reckoned with. But there's no badass version of a She's All That makeover where she magically slays the dragon and gets her prince at the same time; instead, there is heartbreak and fear and mistakes made, but there is also some of the best character development I've ever read. In fact, you know who Alyrra becomes? She's a more developed The Paper Bag Princess for teenagers. (Although luckily, Prince Kestrin is way better than that bum Prince Ronald.)

There's no happy ending here. Alyrra and Kestrin don't kiss at midnight and live happily ever after. Instead, they come together at the end of the novel and talk about how maybe they'll be willing to trust one another a bit. And maybe, down the road, they might even like each other. And maybe even further down the road, they'll fall in love. But for now, it's enough that they've survived, and they know the other one has their back. There's no happy ever after at the end here, but what there is - a possibility of a happy ever after - felt more genuine and real to me than any wedding montage in any rom-com I've ever seen. 

There are some very dark themes, and despite how much I loved the story, those themes made me decide to hold this back a year or so before giving it to the Kid. (For reference, she's twelve (and a half. She'd want you to know that, the part about being "and a half". In fact, she says I only have six more "good months" before she's a teenager, because thirteen is apparently when all hell breaks loose. I don't have the heart to tell her that all hell has already broken loose and she's sort of been invaded by aliens. I'll save that for when she's older. Maybe after her boarding school stint.)) Anyway, the dark themes here include some not-so-veiled allusions to some abuse by Alyrra's brother, beheadings and killings with pretty graphic descriptions, a few allusions to rape and violence, and Alyrra's mother, the Queen, is not exactly Mrs. Brady. In fact, she makes all those evil stepmothers we know and love to hate look like a walk in the park. But none of the darkness or violence felt gratuitous; this is just a dark book, with a dark setting and dark themes, and I think that the Goose Girl is a dark story to begin with.

Having said all that, this is the perfect book for a more mature YA reader who wants something a little bit (a LOT) better than vampires or insipid stories about prep school boys, and while it's not exactly a kissing book, there are enough romantic overtones that young hearts will be satisfied. Older readers will appreciate a new and interesting take on an old story, and Khanani is an excellent writer (and I'm not just saying that because I kind of sort of know her). 

And it's not just me, you guys. Thorn has a 4.6 rating on Amazon (67% five star rating) and a 4.05 on Goodreads and it's won a Badge of Approval from Awesome Indies.

Go buy this book. Read it. Give it to every young girl you know. Tell her to believe in herself. Tell her that she can slay her own dragons.

Edited to add:

Khanani is also working on a trilogy. Sunbolt is already out, and she tells me that Memories of Ash will be out in May. She's also one of these amazing people who donates part of her proceeds to Heifer International, so if you buy her book, you're also doing a good deed, and if you buy it through the Cannonball buy hole, you're also fighting cancer, so what I'm saying is, BUY HER BOOK, BUY IT RIGHT NOW. You'll be supporting a fantastic author, fighting cancer, and helping to build sustainable communities. It's not often you can help save the world in three ways all at once and read an awesome book at the same time.

Review #23: Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card

Ender's Game arrived in my inbox from JB with this note: "Read this now...better than whatever you are currently reading." Since I was reading Every Day, I can't agree with that statement, but I can say that once I finished Every Day, I blew through Ender's Game in just a couple of days and loved it. 

Ender's Game is the first book in what eventually became a quintet about Andrew "Ender" Wiggins, the youngest of three brilliant children, who is chosen for Battle School, an elite military academy that trains young boys and girls to defend Earth against the threat of a species from another planet. Ender is young - only six when he is first sent to Battle School - but according to some shadowy conversations between some military higher-ups the reader is privy to, he's pretty much humanity's last great hope. It's up to the brass to train him to quite literally save the world. 

If I had read that summary (and/or not trusted JB's taste), I would have put this book back down and moved along to another section of the bookshop. Fantasy isn't my deal, and sci fi even less so, but even though this was largely set in outer space with rockets and zero gravity and all the other trappings of a futuristic story, it was so very human that all of that fell away as I became engrossed in the story of Ender's destiny.

It's hard to talk about the story without giving away the ending, and I really don't want to do that, so I'm going to stop my summary there. The climax and conclusion was so well executed that I truly didn't see it coming, not even a hint of it. And even though the book is part of a series, it works quite well all on its own.

I know much has been made of Card's personal politics both here and on Pajiba, and I didn't connect the dots until after I finished the book. Reading about Card's beliefs is disappointing, and honestly, quite surprising, given the way his characters are constructed. That said, Ender's Game is one of the best YA books I've ever read, and in a sea of books about vampires and uninspiring characters and poorly written stories with weak and uninteresting protagonists, it's a stand out. 

Review #11: Feed, by M.T. Anderson

Earlier this week, I looked at Target's website to see if they carried shoe repair glue. I didn't want to make a trip if they didn't have it (they didn't, by the way), so I did a brief thirty-second search online rather than drive to the store and be seduced in to buying things I don't need. Now, each time I log on to the interwebs, I'm inundated by ads for shoe glue, shoe inserts, and cobblers. I rarely pay attention to those ads - after all, my music station has been trying to get me to buy Kate Hudson's yoga pants for months now and I've successfully avoided ordering them, mostly because I know my ass won't look the way hers does. Ever. No matter what pants I'm wearing.

But in the future, I may not be so successful. Feed takes our Facebook/Twitter/Instagram feed and puts it on crack, implanting it directly in to human brains, most often at birth. Virtual reality becomes actual reality. School has been turned over to advertisers. All babies are test-tube babies, made in the conceptionarium, created with Mom's eyes, Dad's nose, and your favorite celebrity's smile. People instant message with each other by thinking their thoughts and directing them in to another person's feed. Music isn't played over the speakers at bars; you just hook your feed up to it. (Imagine how weird that must be - the bar is silent, everyone nodding and dancing to some unheard beat, talking to each other without talking. People-watching at its finest.) And seventeen-year-old Titus never questions any of this until he meets Violet, a home-schooled teenaged girl who turns his head during a Spring Break trip to the moon.

Violet is unlike any girl Titus has ever met. She questions things, tries to beat the system by confusing the algorithms of the feed. She can write, and not only that, she does write, like with pen and paper, something that surprises Titus and embarrasses Violet. And the big difference: Violet didn't get her feed until she turned seven. When Titus and his friends, including Violet, are hit by a hacker while out at a club one night, their feeds are taken down and need to be reset. But because Violet didn't get her feed until later, her reset doesn't work as well, and as a result, Violet is dying. The feed is too central to her body and its functions; without it, she can't move, can't talk, can't survive. The help desk is no help, and anyone who has ever called an automated answering service will understand her frustration at not being able to talk to an actual human, only when we can't talk to a human, the only thing it affects is not being able to pay our phone bill. When Violet can't get a person on the phone, it's quite literally a matter of life and death. 

Anderson's writing is difficult to handle at times. Because the novel is written in the first person, it reads much like I imagine a half-stoned teenaged boy would speak, with lots of "likes" and "units" thrown in for good measure, kind of a Cher Horowitz version of the future. Much of the conversation between Titus and his friends is mind-numbingly inane, but it serves as a good counterpoint to Violet and her father. Violet's father, a professor, speaks in a "dead" language that sounds an awful lot like the English we all know and love. I was concerned about Violet's potential to succumb to Manic Pixie Dream Girl-itis, but Anderson infuses her with just enough imperfections to keep her grounded and real.

What I liked most about this book was that, at its heart, it's a simple boy-meets-girl story and Titus and Violet are both flawed heroes. It just happens to be set against a crazy futuristic backdrop, but Titus and Violet have the same issues that teenagers have today in 2015, that they had when I was a teenager, that they had when my parents were teenagers. The environment changes, but the emotions are still the same. It's good to know that when my daughter is melting down over what someone said on Instagram or whatever its iteration will be five years from now, I'll still be able to identify with her. And hopefully I'll be able to do it verbally, instead of over the Feed.

"Yuh," said Loga. "It's Riot Gear. It's retro. It's beat up to look like one of the big twentieth-century riots. It's been big since earlier this week."   ... When we went inside, Marty and Quendy were also wearing Riot Gear. "Hey," said Loga to Quendy, pointing. "Kent State collection, right? Great skirt!"

If you think Feed can't happen, you haven't been paying attention. Urban Outfitters is already making the sweatshirts.

Review #10: The Talisman, by Stephen King & Peter Straub

The last Stephen King book I read was the one about the car, Christine, and it scared sixteen-year-old me enough that I haven't picked him up since, with the exception of the collection of short stories that has The Body and Shawshank Redemption in it. What can I say? I'm a weenie when it comes to scary things, and since quite a lot of my reading is done at night, after the house is quiet, I don't need the book I'm reading to add to my already vivid imagination about what's outside my windows. The trees scraping against the awnings do quite a nice job of that all on their own. So when The Talisman arrived in my Kindle inbox, I accepted it with more than a smidge of trepidation. But I was assured that it was "not scary", and so I embarked on the fantastical journey of twelve year old Jack Sawyer, a young boy intent on crossing the United States in search of a mythical talisman in the hopes of curing his mother of the mysterious illness that is eating her alive.

Jack's mother, the once beautiful Lily Cavanaugh, former B-movie actress, mysteriously moves Jack and herself to the Alhambra Hotel on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. In season, the hotel is a resort destination, but when Jack and Lily arrive, it's past Labor Day, and everything is shuttered, the shops closed, the ocean grey and angry. Bored, Jack meets Speedy Parker, the old man who takes care of the local amusement park. Speedy, it seems, knows Jack, appears to have been waiting for him, actually, and through Speedy, Jack learns that he must strike out west to find the cure - the Talisman - that will save his mom.

What follows is an epic adventure of a young boy hitch hiking across the United States, flipping in to an alternate universe every so often. This other world, the Territories, is an amalgamation of a medieval world and a horrific one, where queens lay dying, werewolves protect the herd, and the Blasted Lands have been laid waste by the action of humans in this world. Jack flips back and forth from our world to the Territories, moving ever westward, surviving on his wits and a handful of well placed strangers and friends. It's two of those friends - Richard and Wolf - who made the story come alive for me. Wolf, a boy-werewolf from the Territories, tasked with keeping the herd safe, a gentle giant whose unflinching devotion to Jack leads him in to this world with its confusing smells and loud noises, ultimately sacrificing his life for Jack. And Jack's childhood friend Richard, picked up at boarding school in the midwest halfway through the journey, steadfastly refusing to believe that this whole thing isn't a dream, might just be my favorite character in the story. Richard, with his brave, trembling lip, with his insistence that he is just feverish and hallucinating the bugs crawling from the walls, with his unspoiled heart full of love and loyalty for Jack, so much so that he willingly gets on a train and rides through the desert night armed only with an AK-47 and Jack's determination that they must continue west. 

There's a reason Stephen King has sold eleventy billion books, and it's not just because people like scary stories. The man can write.  One of his greatest strengths is that he can create whole worlds with boy-werewolves, religious fanatics, empty suits of armor, enormous sea creatures, barren deserts, time travel, and alternate universe travel, and at no time do you ever question him. You wholeheartedly believe everything he tells you. King sweeps the reader along in his story, and it all makes sense. He paints the story with such vivid detail that more than once, I dreamt of the Territories and the mutilated humans and animals of the Blasted Lands, of Richard's boarding school and Jack and Wolf's time at the hellish Home for Wayward Boys in Indiana, and of Jack's mother, waiting for death in the grey and abandoned squalor of the Alhambra Hotel. I could see the empty amusement park, its carousel quiet for the winter, I could feel the cold of the unheated hotel rooms, and I could smell the clean scent of the ocean as Jack and Richard made their way west. 

If you haven't visited with Mr. King in a while, pick something up. He's long, but he's worth it.