Rampant by Diana Peterfreund

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Friend, has this ever happened to you?

You pick up book after book after book, hoping to get pulled into something. Friends lend you volumes. You seek out recommendations online. Yet your interest wanes thirty pages in again, and again, and again?

Maybe you finally slog through something only to find that it’s a mostly terrible experience. Though you have previously believed yourself to love books more than life itself, you begin to doubt yourself and your tastes.

This happened to me recently, and, boy, was it painful. After finishing my MFA, producing two manuscripts and a thesis in a matter of months, and reading more mediocre books than I care to recall, I was starting to feel utterly burnt out on words.

Then I picked up Rampant by Diana Peterfreund.

It was the premise (in four words: “girls hunt killer unicorns”) that initially drew me in, but the fantastic, battle-strewn plotting and frantic pace that kept me there. For the first time in ages, I stayed up late–too late!–to read, consuming the entire book in two big night-time chunks. Though the first two chapters began a bit slow, as Peterfreund introduced us to Astrid, a virgin who is attacked in the woods one night while necking with her boyfriend, it picks up as soon as she ships Astrid off to Rome, to a cloister full of girls with a genetic predisposition for unicorn-killing.

This probably sounds a bit silly–it did to me, too, at first, too. But Peterfreund puts a remarkable deal of care into crafting her urban-fantasy world, particularly the mythology behind the unicorns. We’re given a small handful of bloodthirsty species, and she even manages to make two unicorns into believable characters. Though one unicorn, Bonegrinder, is tame, she certainly isn’t a saccharine-Lisa-Frank-kind-of unicorn, but instead a gritty, feisty, and fiercely loyal killer.

(I must admit, however, to being a little hazy on the specifics of certain aspects of unicorn mythology by the end of the book, though. This is mostly because it’s explained by a non-verbal unicorn character, but I had hoped for things to fall into place a little more neatly than they did.)

Peterfreund’s character development, generally, is nuanced and complex. All of the teenage girls manage to be as thorny and complicated as real girls, and though Astrid, as narrator, has a clear favorite among them in her cousin, Phil, even she behaves in a realistically annoying, short-sighted, and sometimes even selfish manner.

The major exception to this was Astrid’s mother Lilith, whose behavior I found over-the-top. Sure, she’s meant to represent overly militaristic ideals, but her hysterical and frankly creepy behavior at the end of the novel made it difficult to understand Astrid’s affection for her.

But Peterfruend generally manages character creation well, and she matches her complex characters with a voice that’s wholly unique for urban fantasy, and one that, for the first few chapters, I admittedly found a bit off-putting. Astrid’s voice sounds much more like the narrator of a typical chick-lit novel, tinged with sarcasm and a little old for her age. Though I initially hoped for something a bit more fitting with the fantasy premise–something a bit more musical, perhaps–by the novel’s climax, I realized that this was one of Rampant‘s unique strengths: as a hunter, and a warrior, we’re really able to trace Astrid’s growth through the development of her voice. By the novel’s conclusion, she no longer sounds strange and instead sounds truly strong.

Finally, there’s some interesting discussion of sexual politics in Rampant‘s pages. Some reviewers seem to view this as a preoccupation with the characters’ sex lives, but I found that I could draw some pretty fascinating parallels between current cultural stances on virginity–in a culture where girls are simultaneously sexualized and urged to remain pure–and the fictional situation that Peterfreund explored, where only virgins are able to become unicorn hunters. This became especially interesting when one character is date-raped; the sometimes horrifying reactions of those around her are an interesting analog to the real attitudes girls face when they discuss their sexual histories.

By the novel’s conclusion, Peterfreund leaves a few threads hanging, clearly setting us up for a sequel. Though I was frustrated by this in an immediate sense–I wanted to know what happened!–I’m happy that I’ll eventually have another killer unicorn novel to devour.

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For some reason, I started looking back through one of my older online journals–which was, in many ways, embarrassing, and which I won’t be linking here for numerous reasons–and I was struck by a few things. How mean some of Jordan’s friends were to me (Saying that people were “sucking my cock” every time they left a nice comment! Telling me that I should shut up every time I discussed my feelings toward him!) and how I put up with it. How raw I was–about myself, sex, friendship, family, feelings, love–how very, very raw. And how my poetry was, I think, better than it is now. Rough nineteen year old stuff, sure, but good–alive, glittering in a way it doesn’t now (especially now–these days, it all dies after a few lines). Now, with distance, I read it as if someone else wrote it, and I catch my breath for a moment. Who is this poet? What happened to her when she went to poetry school?

The Lives of Insects

sometimes when walking down the stairs
in the dark at night you’re mistaken in
believing you’ve mis-stepped, the sensation
of falling without going anywhere like
toeing the edge of a light house, a steep
stair case, the viewing deck of one of the
world trade centers, a cliffside at night
with your boyfriend and you’re stoned you
have sex believing you’ll fall into the
lights of suburban families sitting down to
vegan dinners or beating their children or
going to separate beds–lights which are really
stars. belief begets sensation but you
don’t tumble or tuck your body into yourself
which you learned in a book will save your
your face and your ribcage but maybe not your
spinal cord but who doesn’t love a para
palegic you just watch as his shoulders move
up and down and up and feel the blood drain from
your fingers.

i’ve built a wall for myself out of intelligent
fiction, books about primate biology, existential
ism, little girls discovering what those-folds-are-
for in chicago apartment complexes, pottery, poetry,
and the real meaning of those flowers in through
the looking glass. my wall is strong. it’s guarded
by insects: mosquitoes smoking exotic cigarettes outside
of concerts without paying the cover charge, fire
flies in coffee shops, dull and dim and drowning on
espresso, and you, a green fly, and me, a mantis, and
i don’t know who we really are any more, apart from
justification for my theories. i think in stanzas,
relate in five paragraph form, a strong thesis and three
supporting arguments and a conclusion but i always lose
myself around the conclusion

and you, you’re still standing on those stairs at night
barefoot and breathless and believing that if you open
your eyes you’ll be bloody on the carpet, banister
buried inside your ribcage. i’m still waiting for you
to take that first step, and hear the old boards shift
beneath your toes. walk past those walls and stop
talking in your journal about it.

there is really only one insect in this story.

Love and War

He wastes time with whiskey on the ancient couch
swallowed in a throw she had composed for him out
of blue and yellow yarn a little jewish ingenuity
the smell of her sex; once they built shelter from
pillows and blankets, lamplight fireworks filtered
through pale threads. She fought her wars with her
fingernails, left rivers of blood along the geography
of his ribcage and he retaliated, bruising her throat,
her pulse scored with napalm burns; they took off a layer
of skin and they starved, the radiation fallout poisoning
of love–

love was a treaty of bodily borderlines, the taut skin she
never let him taste, the tributaries that rushed out from
his navel at night while he waited for something better to come
along well of course he loved those grey grenades she called
eyes, her aK-47 cup. He was a veteran envisioning god
in limbs that were only phantoms, flash backs of bullets
raining like first-kiss passions, wrestling, groping gunless,
streaked with her lipstick and her orgasms, her orgasms,
her orgasms were silent as a solitary shot
glass on a Saturday night.

Something happened after I graduated from college. Part of it was growing up. Part of it was going on birth control that made me less crazy, but muted my emotions, over all. Part of it was loss and fear and fear of my own mortality: my mom got sick, my grandfather and my cat died, I became terrified of the idea of my own death. My journaling, and writing, changed–it was something panicked, preoccupied. Before going into the MFA program, I tried writing fiction which, I recognize now, was just a mass of sad wish-fulfillment. My second livejournal, which I also won’t be linking here, became a record of unhappiness and stress.

I’m happy with my writing these days; the fiction I write feels good, productive. But I miss that nineteen-year-old poet girl. There are days when I’d like to call her back to me, to coax her from the guarded walls of myself. To be brave and bald like she was. But I don’t know if I have it in me to be her, anymore. To put it all out there. To risk pain and censure.

I’d sure love, at least, like to write poems like she did, though. Because she really was a lovely little prophet-girl:

ideally, yes, i’d watch the sunlight spill over his pale back every morning; the green sheets would come to memorize our indentations. we would sweat together in august with no air conditioning and take showers just to cool off and sit on the fire escape with hard cider and popsicles and sing into the sunset.

ideally, yes, in winter my nose would turn blue when i’d dig my car out of the banks in February; at night after long dark hours deprived of vitamin e under fluorescent light we’d leave our boots trailing mud across the foyer and our socks over the radiator and our fingerprints on each other’s flesh as we rediscovered fire and the meaning of the words “body heat.”

ideally, yes, the cat’s name would be shroedinger and would curl in siamese curves against his belly as he read, one finger to his lips, the other poised between the creature’s ears; i would play music and dance by myself and take photos of my feet standing in the bathtub and draw pictures of him in green marker on the backs of napkins when he wasn’t looking.

ideally, yes, we would be true to one another, pen dry erase poetry on the refrigerator door, make love and only sleep on the couch because of insomnia; naively, yes, ideally, yes.

and i don’t care about the spaces in between but I want you to be the last thing I see when I sleep and the first thing I’m sure of when I rise. i want i want i want

to belong
to you.

title time!

If you know me, you know how much trouble I have titling bigger works. Poems and stories I’m fine with. Novels and theses break my brain–in fact, I had my only grad school melt-down while trying to title my thesis.

Editing on my NaNoWriMo is going surprisingly well: I’m plowing forward, whittling, rearranging, refining. But I’m not happy with the working title–Convocation. I want something jazzier. Something right.

So far, I have tried:

• A wordle cloud, which shows me, once again, that I over-rely on visual cues, but little else.

  title=”Wordle: convocation”>

• Word 2007′s auto-summarize tool, which gave me this:
  

  If ever. Molls narrowed her eyes. Molls grinned. Close your eyes.” Mikhail and Annie both laughed. Mikhail flushed. Mikhail didn’t answer. “Yeah Molls?” Annie still sat besides Mikhail. Mikhail and Annie seemed different. Love Mikhail and Annie.”
  Mikhail looked at Annie, narrowing his eyes.
  Mikhail glanced up. Mikhail nodded. Annie cast black eyes to Mikhail, who shook his head.
  “Chuck!” Mikhail nodded. Mikhail asked.
  “Mikhail?” Annie rolled her eyes. “Annie!” Annie?”
  Hair. Mikhail’s pupils had flooded his eyes. Mikhail! “Mikhail . . .” It was Annie. “Chuck?” My eyes widened. Annie exclaimed. Mikhail didn’t answer. Mikhail watched her. Annie. “No, Mikhail.”

  Thanks a lot, Bill Gates.

• Combing wikipedia for anything that’s possibly relevant.

I’ve come up with a few options that are okay, but I’m not entirely convinced by any of them. The Stone Sorter. Under Foreign Stars. Meh.

So I turn to you, Gentle Readers, for advice.

Here’s a brief summary of the story, which I’ve copied and pasted from my NaNoWriMo profile, and which is more-or-less accurate:

At first glance, fifteen-year-old Miranda Cohen seems to lead a golden life: she has wealthy parents, a beautiful home, and a boyfriend who adores her. But she’s not happy. In truth, her successful parents rarely have time for her, her house is well-fashioned, but cold, and her boyfriend Tim, though sweet, doesn’t challenge her. One night, while up late surfing the internet, she impulsively applies to the Sacred Grove Academy, a residential free school for gifted students. However, it’s not until she arrives at Sacred Grove that she realizes exactly how gifted she is.

Miranda is the long-lost descendant of a changeling, or fairy child, and mysterious powers course through her. She and her classmates have been selected to attend Sacred Grove in the hope that they will learn to tame these powers. Miranda discovers that she is a diviner, whose abilities seem to draw on the ordered life her parents have built for her. But by coming to Sacred Grove, Miranda has sought to escape the asceticism of her parents. Rather than honing her skills, she becomes involved with an older student, Mikhail, whose own powers and passions threaten to tear her to pieces. When he pressures her to take part in a strange and unsavory ceremony, Miranda must learn to embrace her powers, and her real inner strength, before it’s too late.

Other (possibly) relevant details: Miranda goes by the name “Randy” for most of the book. Things at the school creep her out. She has to sort stones at one point, hence The Stone Sorter as a title. It’s the first of a possible series, but at this point I need it to be able to stand alone, too.

Ideas? Suggestions? Help me, Internet Masses, you’re my only hope!