Dead to the World by Charlaine Harris

I’ll come right out and say it: I’ve been a bit jelly-brained recently. Between revisions of my novel, moving, and a stack of review books several feet tall, I’ve resorted to doing anything mindless to lighten the pressure on myself. Playing video games, watching Degrassi reruns on TeenNick . . . reading Charlaine Harris’s Dead to the World.

If the reviews of my goodreads friends are any indication, it’s typical to begin reviews of Harris’s works with these sorts of apologies. That’s because we all know these books are essentially fluffy wish fulfillment—and Dead to the World seems particularly, self-evidently so. It’s the plot thread under current rotation on True Blood, the tightened-up, television adaptation of Harris’s work, where sexy Viking Eric Northman is cursed by witches to lose his memory, holes up in psychic waitress Sookie Stackhouse’s ancestral abode, and schtups her.

But I don’t really feel like making any apologies for reading this, even if I can’t deny the bubblegum nature of the book, either. Why, wish fulfillment novels aimed at men—dirty little screeds like JP Donleavy’s The Ginger Man are seen as real literature, no matter how many inappropriately-exposed phalluses they contain. So I think that there’s no reason why Dead to the World shouldn’t be evaluated on its own merits, either.

And Harris really nails women’s wish fulfillment. Sookie’s plight—chronically and fundamentally alone, despite her many romantic prospects—renders her a truly sympathetic character. While her actions are sometimes a bit ridiculous when we see them played out on TV, Harris’s strong, first-person narration renders her, instead, empathetic. She’s really a lower-class everywoman; bright, but not brilliant. Her anxieties over money, over the gossipy nature of her small town, over her irascible brother are really needed to understand her sometimes inscrutable romantic behavior. Though Sookie’s been treated as a pariah because of her psychic abilities in her town of Bon Temps, she’s really just looking for the prince charming she was promised as a girl—someone who will step in and take care of her. And, in light of her rather deep and unrelenting solitude, well-reflected in her colloquial, vividly-voiced narration, it’s difficult to fault her in this.

As you might suspect in a book that, just beneath the surface, under a slightly jumbled plot filled with supernatural creatures, is really about solitude, it’s in the scenes were Sookie connects with Eric that the story has the most resonance. Sure, it’s lightly porny wish-fulfillment (Sookie refers to her own anatomy as a “nub”), but it’s also very affecting, as Eric and Sookie find one another despite the significant losses they’ve faced. The rather human scenes at the novel’s conclusion, featuring Sookie and brother Jason, are also fairly strong—the emotional connection between Sookie and these male characters is certainly deep.

Less effective are Sookie’s romantic flirtations with Alcide and bartender Sam, and her hollow reunion with ex-boyfriend vamp Bill Compton. The way the menfolk of Bon Temps are all drawn to Sookie was a little eye roll-worthy even by romance novel standards, and the treatment of romantic rival Debbie Van Pelt felt shrill and ill-justified even in light of attempts on Sookie’s life.

And the larger plot surrounding Sookie’s story with Eric was just a touch too epic for my tastes, featuring weres and witches and panthers and a cast of characters which would easily rival any high fantasy in sheer numbers. There’s a two-pronged mystery at the heart of Harris’s plot—Eric’s memory loss, and the disappearance of Jason Stackhouse—but I didn’t find either prong particularly compelling.

I suspect this is because Harris was really stretching her storytelling abilities here. She’s nowhere more successful than when her story is small—intimate. In scenes were the conversation (or the, ahem, action) is limited to two participants, it was an enormously successful book—believable, despite the fact that one of the characters in question is an ancient Viking vampire.

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Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma
Recommended.

Sinister.

That’s the first word I’d use to describe Nova Ren Suma’s young adult debut Imaginary Girls. It’s the story of two sisters who live in a weedy backwoods area of New York State. One sister, our narrator Chloe, is considered the quieter shadow of big sis Ruby—a girl who somehow manages to bewitch an entire town into doing whatever she wants, no matter how sinister.

But it’s a slow-growing power, made all-the-more creepy by Chloe’s obsessive, oftentimes fawning regard for Ruby. While the other denizens of their town are sometimes able to shake Ruby’s spell—even a girl who Ruby may or may not have brought back from the dead seems to find her demand for whimsy and worship tiresome—Chloe’s unable to differentiate herself from her sister even when it’s in her own best interest. This creates a claustrophobic, uncomfortable read. The reader knows that Ruby is bad news, and bad news for Chloe. But Chloe refuses to listen, insisting again and again that Ruby knows best. “Sisters told each other every last thing; especially the younger sister,” Chloe tells us, in a matter-of-fact manner that perhaps belies how insanely fucked up such an attitude is while neatly failing to acknowledge it, “The youngest sister couldn’t have secrets. She was who she was because of who came first” (237, ARC edition).

In this way, Imaginary Girls is a treatise on abuse and control, but of course this isn’t the type of psychological abuse one is accustomed to reading about in young adult literature. Usually we read about boys hurting girls, or parents hurting children. That this is a story about an older sister who has her little sister wrapped around her little finger makes it all the more sinister. Weird. Creepy. Ruby is the kind of woman that’s only hinted about in books like Kirsten Hubbard’s Like Mandarin or Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride–a manic pixie dream girl gone horribly wrong. A witch who uses her seduction and charm to bend the world around her to her whims.

But she’s not quite as simple as all of that, either.

Because Imaginary Girls is not a fantasy story, not exactly. Instead, it sits squarely in the slippery, unsettling realm of magical realism. I recently had a conversation with the ladies over at YA Highway where we struggled to define that genre. I cautiously submitted that a magical realist text is different from other types of contemporary fantasy. It’s not enough to have fantastical elements in the real world. Instead, a book within the genre needs to have the boundaries of the fantastical elements shift constantly. An effective fantasy novel will give you some sort of framework for understanding it. Magical realism refuses that framework. As in a dream, the boundaries of the possible must always be moving, though the logic should still seem intuitive within the novel itself. It’s a precarious balance—and the effect is quite often unsettling, bordering on horrifying.

For this reason, I’m not entirely sure that Imaginary Girls will appeal to its target audience. I’ll come right out and say that I didn’t appreciate (or even really understand) magical realism as a teen. In fact, even two years ago I was criticizing Kelly Link’s masterful Magic for Beginners as being too unsettling. Of the title story in that collection, I said, “when she casually mentions that the characters in ‘Magic for Beginners’ are fictional television characters, despite the fact that they otherwise seems completely grounded in our reality, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why? To what end? How is the story enhanced by this?”

I reread that story recently, and was pleased to find that I’d grown as a reader. I could see how perfectly Link utilizes the fantastic elements to underscore the poignant family story—and how the vertigo-inducing nature of that story enhanced the protagonist’s uncertain family and romantic situation. In fact, it was a story that could not be told any other way. I would say that the same is true for Imaginary Girls. It needs to be a book that encompasses the supernatural but is not about the supernatural. I’m just not positive that teens will enjoy being unsettled in this way, but perhaps I was unique in my adolescent literal-mindedness.

I’m uncertain, too, if the language will appeal to that age group. It’s both beautiful and repetitive. For example, Suma writes, “There was the tattoo shop where Ruby got her eyebrow pierced, then decided she didn’t want her eyebrow pierced and instead got her nose pierced, then decided she really didn’t want anything pierced, not even her ears” (60), and most of the story is told this way, with negations, repetitions, clarifications. The pace isn’t slow, not precisely. It is, instead, droning and hypnotic. Imaginary Girls could be considered more than a book but also a book of spells. It’s perfectly conceived in this way, the language underscoring the thematics and story. It could be told in another way, but it wouldn’t be nearly as effective. I’m just not entirely certain that today’s young generation of Hunger Games-loving teens will fall so deeply for it.

But I would not for a moment hesitate to suggest it for adult readers, particularly those who enjoy lovely, well-conceived language that enshrouds a haunting story about women and magic and control. It might sound silly, but I’d say that I was ensorcelled by Suma’s story—captivated in the most literal sense of the term. Though my journey with Ruby wasn’t always a comfortable one, I’m quite eager to see where Suma takes us next.

A review copy of this volume was generously provided by the publisher.

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Wither by Lauren DeStefano
Recommended.

In a richly realized future society, where every member of the younger generation faces death before age thirty, sixteen-year-old Rhine is kidnapped, stolen away from her home and wedded against her will to Linden Ashby, the wealthy son of a governor. Captive in his Floridian mansion, she (and two other young women) must find a way to cope with this new marriage. For Rhine’s sisterwife Janna, coping means shutting down emotionally, barring her new husband access to all of the most intimate parts of herself. For thirteen-year-old sisterwife Cecily, coping is becoming a model bride, and conceiving a son for her husband almost immediately. But for Rhine, there’s only one way to stay afloat: escape.

Lauren DeStefano’s debut is atmospheric, beautifully written soft-science-fiction, which seems to owe more than a little to Wuthering Heights (and, if I’m guessing right, the Mountain Goats album Tallahassee). Set in a sprawling, vividly-rendered estate, the prose is lit by splashes of horrific color: brown and orange lumpy citrus fruits litter the ground in the orange grove; the women swim through bright blue, holographic oceans in the pool; later, they dress in hot pink dresses described as looking like tinfoil. Through these colorful touches, DeStafano does a good job of making it clear that we’re in another world, despite the compelling human emotions of her characters.

These emotions, centered on processing grief, on captivity, and on finding balance in a forced, unwanted marriage, are fundamentally more adult than adolescent. The expectations placed on the women, and the situations they find themselves in, are, likewise, adult situations. For example, I suspect few teenagers will truly appreciate Cecliy’s sadness at her inability to breastfeed her child. Ultimately, the ways in which Wither fails seem to arise more out of the novel’s positioning than anything inherent to its prose or story.

Because this is a very slow, character-driven novel, and the motivations of the characters are fundamentally grown-up despite their youth. There is little black-or-white morality here. Characters who initially appear villainous—Rose, Cecily, even Linden himself—turn out to be victims of their circumstances, and their motivations (particularly the fact that Linden never forces himself sexually on Rhine, something many reviewers have noted) only make sense if viewed through this lens. When it comes down to it, I struggled a bit against the novel’s slow pacing and heavy, grown-up introspection at first. Then I put the book down, thought about it for a while, and decided to try approaching it as I would an adult novel, rather than YA, and found it much more rewarding.

This is the second novel to which I very strongly had this reaction—the first was Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth, another book which heavily featured plotlines about marriage, and which languished in pretty prose and a dark tone. But I enjoyed Wither much more than I did The Forest of Hands and Teeth. It’s a more unified story, and the characters (all of the characters, really, but particularly the wives), are better drawn and more interesting.

Is this science fiction perfect? Well, no—the rules of the “virus” (that boys die at 25 and girls at 20) make no sense, nor does the idea that the other nations of the world are submerged while the east coast of the United States remains intact. But Wither shares more in common with Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go or McCarthy’s The Road than an Octavia Butler novel; science fiction is just an atmospheric conceit, present to create tension or to make the emotional situation of our characters that much more dire. I suspect that DeStafano started with the emotional plight of her characters, and let the setting grow from there, rather than crafting a dystopian situation and then creating characters as a means to explore it.

In the end, I very much enjoyed Wither—something about its prose, its thoughtfulness, and its beautiful ending (lovely and open-ended, but we know how these things go in YA—we’ll undoubtedly get an unnecessary sequel) felt absolutely classic. However, I suspect that this crossover title will much more strongly appeal to adult audiences, especially women who enjoy thoughtful and poignant soft-SF a la The Time Traveler’s Wife, than teens seeking out the next Hunger Games.

A review copy of this volume was generously provided by the publisher.

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Note: I know Thursdays are supposed to be my non-book-related blogging day, but I’m thisclose to finishing Daughter of Earth and my brain is all mushy and useless. Luckily, I’ve been reading a ton (words beget words!), so I have some reviews in the hopper. Of books I’ve enjoyed! I hope I don’t lose my street cred. Ahem.

A Long, Long Sleep by Anna Sheehan
Recommended.

It wasn’t until the halfway point of Anna Sheehan’s upcoming debut A Long, Long Sleep that it won me over. Initially, I feared that this science fictional retelling of Sleeping Beauty was little more than yet another entry in a long list of limp YA sci-fi novels. After all, the writing seemed to be on the wall. As was the case in XVI and Awaken (a book I didn’t even bother finishing), Sheehan includes a liberal sprinkling of FutureWords™; I worried that this would be yet another stand-in for genuine world building. And, as was true for both Delirium and Matched, Sheehan’s heroine, Rose, was quite passive and bland through the first hundred pages of the novel.

Then I reached what amounted to an extended IM conversation between Rose and a half-alien hybrid, and I realized how utterly charming I found her characters—and how much I was genuinely enjoying her book.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. A Long, Long Sleep is the story of Rosalinda Fitzroy, the daughter of a power-couple who own a massive, multinational corporation at some distant point in the future (our era is, at one point, referred to as “the Gates era,” a conceit I found pretty cute). Because Mommy and Daddy frequently jet-set around the solar system, they decide to stow Rose away in a stasis chamber, saving her from the horror of being a latch-key kid. Of course, this has the unfortunate side effect of prolonging her childhood exponentially. On those rare occasions when she’s let out, she slowly comes to befriend, and then fall in love with, a neighbor-boy in a time-shifted romance that somewhat resembles Audrey Niffenger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife.

Unfortunately, her parents kick the bucket, and she gets left frozen for more than sixty years, neatly ending their nascent romance.

Most of this is told in flashback. The narrative begins when Rose is awakened by a strange boy who stumbles across her in a basement. She’s emaciated, her body ravaged by the effects of stasis. But the doctors cobble her back together well enough that she’s able to go to school, in the hopes that she’ll one day be able to take over the massive conglomerate she’s inherited.

Of course, the current stakeholders aren’t so pleased with this new development. While Rose is distracted with several boys (including one really awesome kinda alien named Otto; more on him below), someone is plotting to kill her . . .

In recounting this basic synopsis, I can’t help but be pleased by how fundamentally SFnal Sheehan’s premise is. This is definitely soft-SF, and the romance and love squares (love rhombuses?) are unlikely to appeal to hard SF readers or, frankly, boys. Still, the science fiction conceits are absolutely central to the premise, and the way Sheehan explores both stasis technology and genetic engineering shows real consideration for the complexities of both. While a lot of softer SF for teens these days is utterly hand wavy, Sheehan’s world is, instead, largely thoughtfully crafted. There’s some silly stuff here (an apocalypse caused by genetically modified corn; telepathy), but these are forgivable world-building sins when viewed in light of all the things that Sheehan gets right.

And she gets nothing righter than her characters. Rose herself is a somewhat difficult narrator. She starts the story as a bit of a poor little rich girl, and initially I hesitated over her strangely elevated diction. But this, as well as her passivity at the outset, are both well-explained given her background. After all, she’s a fabulously wealthy artiste (a trait that’s actually relevant, and not just an informed ability), and so I can forgive her, or at least understand, when she describes someone’s voice as “warm as a brown leather sofa.” And unlike all of the Bella Swan clones out there, the blander notes of her personality are, in fact, seen as flaws—the result of an abusive childhood. Unusual for the genre, Rose must display actual growth in order to thrive in her new environment.

More, Sheehan gives us not only a relatable narrator and main character, but also a host of well-developed, believable, and well-rounded male characters. Her romance with Xavier is described lovingly and touchingly; the crush she develops on her rescuer, Bren, is understandable and interesting and thorny. For once, a boy doesn’t just fall at our heroine’s feet!

But my favorite was easily Otto, a genetically engineered mutant owned by Rosalinda’s corporation. I must admit that I’m a sucker for alien romances (weird, I know), but Otto was so well-rendered that I suspect I’d feel this way regardless. His presence enables Sheehan to explore the ramifications of Rose’s wealth in an interesting way—the girl learns that she actually owns this mute, telepathic boy, and that she might someday be able to grant him his freedom. But, more, the friendship that grows between them is one of the more interesting ones I’ve seen in recent YA. I groaned a bit internally when I first saw that Sheehan was going to subject us to their IM conversations. Then I realized that these two characters interacted with such vitality and chemistry that I’d gladly read a whole book of their chat logs. Seriously (and I never say this sort of thing), Team Otto, all the way.

In the end, A Long, Long Sleep is the sort of lighter sci-fi fare that I think we need in YA right now. Though it might not be the most artistically daring novel I’ve read in ages, it’s solid, treats its characters respectfully, rather than as simple tools at the mercy of the plot, and it explores the logical ramifications of its central premises. It’s a thoughtful book, with a strong emotional undercurrent about loss and abuse. We’re set up for a second volume (though this one also gives us a satisfying conclusion), and I’m curious to see where Sheehan takes us next.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book for review purposes from the publisher and netgalley.com.

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