My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Ho boy.

So I mildly enjoyed the first two books in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series–enough that I considered myself somewhat of a Twilight apologist. No, no, I tried to convince the naysayers, she’s really not all bad! Though I found Twilight and New Moon to be deeply flawed, I also thought that Meyer had her finger right on the pulse of adolescent melancholy. What Bella’s story may have lacked in feminist leanings, it made up for in rich setting and earnestness, if nothing else. I didn’t quite like them enough to buy Eclipse, but when a friend offered to lend me the massive tome that is Breaking Dawn, I figured it wouldn’t kill me to give it a try.

Well. Um. Hmm.

I’ll say that, like the series it concludes, Breaking Dawn starts with some promise. Whiny McWhinerston Bella Swann is angsting over her impending shotgun marriage to vampire Edward. It’s an act that’s largely a technicality for her–something she grudgingly plans to endure so she can get laid and get some superpowers. While I found this model of dealmaking-in-the-place-of-compromise in an adult relationship a bit troublesome, I also found most of the sentiment honest. Okay, maybe I wouldn’t raise a stink about my sugar daddy buying me a Mercedes (or is it a Beemer? Whatever), but as a recently-married type, I empathized.

But then Bella gets hitched and the book completely falls apart. And we’re only an eighth of the way in to this door-stopper of a dud.

I don’t really want to rehash all the plot points here, no matter how cringe worthy they are and how easy it would be to play them for laughs (yes, the childbirth scene is the first that pushes this series into horror; yes, Bella sucks at naming children). What I want, instead, is to talk a little about the overarching theme here–how Bella is the best, how her life is the best, and how everything falls into place around her–and why it didn’t resonate with me.

I say this as a woman married to her first serious boyfriend, who she met at eighteen: I think Bella’s story does a disservice to young wives. It certainly does one to young mothers. Not to mention anyone who has ever actually been a corner of a love triangle.

I understand that these books are meant to be wish-fulfillment, but by making Bella’s life so utterly perfect and utterly easy, Meyer fails to acknowledge life’s actual complexities and pains–and so the joy found here is pretty shallow. Nothing is earned. Nothing is lost. The stakes are so low as to be non-existent. We know that nothing bad will happen to anyone because Meyer shows us again and again that Forks is really some sort of fluffy-cloud heaven. And so the final, patched-together plot, building only over the last two hundred pages, has no urgency at all. I’ll admit it: I skimmed. So sue me.

She could have, instead, given us something honest and bittersweet, a story of love and loss and growing older–because really, in not-so-many metaphorical words, that should be what Bella’s marriage, motherhood, and subsequent vampirism represent. Sure, have Bella choose Edward, choose her child–but let’s talk honestly about what these choices usually mean for women like Bella, what they have to sacrifice to make their young families work, what they lose, and what they gain, in becoming fully-fledged women so young.

Instead, Meyer chooses to lock her characters in a hellish fantasy of perpetual childhood–maybe this is what she meant by the Millay line at the front of the book? In the place of genuine tenderness or beauty, she gives us the saccharine (Bella and her daughter’s flawless and unearned perfection), the unbelievable (Charlie’s reaction to . . . everything), and the bizarre (pedophiliac imprinting).

But perhaps worst of all is the writing, the truly terrible writing. And by the end of this novel it really is–truly–terrible. It’s a slow slide into poopy prose; thanks to a middle-eight spent in the narrative clutches of Jacob, whose voice is far less assuming and much more casual, it’s easy to forget even the descriptive potential that Breaking Dawn revealed in the first few hundred pages. Forks is, at a time when it should be completely immersive, suddenly rendered in flat, lifeless terms. Description and narration are all pushed aside for cutesy dialog. Two passages near the end–one slightly hackneyed extended metaphor where Bella’s life is likened to a quilt, and another, where her brand new Thomas-Kinkade-calendar-esque cottage in the woods is described–stand out for not being completely awful.

Seriously, the novel’s last third was so poorly written and so unbelievable that I couldn’t help but grope for some sort of explanation. I mean, we weren’t really meant to believe this, were we, much less find it good?

So I’d like to suggest an alternative reading–one that seems quite a bit more palatable to me, and a bit more believable. Bella actually dies permanently in childbirth. The last third is her bardo fantasy before she can move on to the next spiritual plane (thanks for the idea, LOST writers). That’s why it’s so goddamned weird! In the real world, the baby goes on a rampage–killing Rosalie first, then savaging the other vampires. Against all odds Jacob and Edward are able to band together to stop and kill the monstrous being. Of course, once this happens, Edward asks Jacob to end his life. He does, sorrowfully, laying Edward to rest beside his child bride. And he’s about to end his own when Leah Clearwater appears to suggest that maybe they should try to face the future together. He may be mourning; she may be sterile. But they still have free will and can still choose life with an equal, could still choose love.

What can I say? I’m a sucker for a bittersweet ending.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My mother loves many things, but two more than most: books and thrift shopping. Sometimes she combines the two, grabbing unusual hardcovers for a dollar or so from her favorite thrift store.

Because she’s awesome, she sometimes mails them to me. Often wonderful, these are rarely the books I would choose for myself–most of the time, they’re books I haven’t even heard of.

That was the case with Pucker, a 2007 YA novel by Melanie Gideon that I’m quite sure I never would have encountered had my mother not been thoughtful enough to ship it to me (along with a T-shirt that says “I <3 Sparklers"--seriously, mom, you're awesome!). There seems to be very little buzz about this book online, and though I've been reading voraciously in YA genre for the past year or so, I hadn't heard of it.

After reading, I can't help but be surprised; Pucker may be incredibly idiosyncratic and downright strange at times, but it definitely was a compelling read.

It’s the story of Thomas, a high school junior covered in scars; the wrinkled quality of his face earns him the eponymous nickname. Thomas was born in a parallel world called Isaura. On the other side of reality, people don’t have electricity, or computers–but they can work magic and see the future. When he was young, Thomas’ parents wore shimmering second skins and told one another their fortunes over the breakfast table.

But one day his parents are stripped of their skins thanks to an act of rebellion. Thomas’ father perishes; Thomas himself is badly burned. His mother, apparently powerless now, flees to Earth, where she’ll make a living as a fortune teller–and where Thomas will just try to stay afloat in public school.

His mother’s powers eventually return, but she can no longer control them without her “seer skin.” So Thomas journeys back to his home, where his face will be magically healed so he can work as a slave–and steal back his mother’s skin.

Like I said above, this is an exceedingly weird story, and it takes place in a sparse, dreamlike reality. However, Gideon chooses to tell this story in a very straight-forward and direct way. Initially, I feared that this was a little info-dumpy, but soon, I found myself drawn in. I read this book quickly, and eagerly.

Why, then, has Pucker not garnered more positive press?

I can’t help but feel that it has something to do with the quality of voice here. Thomas himself narrates, and while his voice is clear, consistent, and compelling, he’s a generally pompous and unlikeable character. He gives in to his baser instincts repeatedly–this isn’t just sex, but shallow and opportunistic sex with many partners who he doesn’t even like–and he regards more than one endearing secondary character with disdain. This made him very hard to cheer for as a protagonist, and seemed to go deeper than normal personality flaws–Pucker really seemed to be a jerk.

Still, though I couldn’t help but find our narrator to be distasteful, I’m glad I read his story and spent time in his world. It was strange, imaginative, and inventive, and the experience was worth at least $1.99 (and the price of shipping)!

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My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was a big, big fan of Patricia Wrede’s “dragons” series in middle school, though my memories of those books are vague. I remembered them fondly–as slim, plot-driven, funny, and somewhat feminist tales–so I was eager to revisit her writing in Thirteenth Child.

Too bad, then, that this book is nothing like the quick, addictive reads I remember. Thirteenth Child is less a novel and more a fictional memoir. It’s the story of Eff, seventh daughter in a large frontier family, whose twin brother Lan (as the seventh son of the seventh son) is magically gifted from birth. Unlike Lan, Eff herself has been told that she’s been cursed as the thirteenth-born in her family, that her magic will eventually come to poison her and those around her.

But weirdly this pronouncement has little impact on the story generally, if there is one. There really isn’t. As Eff grows up, we follow the progress of her family from the east coast to a settlement in the west, where her father is recruited to teach. Eff attends school, makes friends, deals (or doesn’t) with her sisters and her sisters’ marriages, does chores, catalogs wildlife, and occasionally sulks. She’s plenty busy–but a lot of what happens to her just isn’t that exciting or engaging. She’s largely a passive narrator, reporting back to us the events of her world without really taking an active role in them. I often felt like I was plodding through the chapters–and the years–but I was never really captivated by the plot or the voice.

Regarding the voice, I have to say that, incidentally, Eff’s narration never really rang true to me as the voice of an eighteen-year-old. She sounds much, much younger–it’s a voice that reminds me more of Scout Finch than anything you’d encounter in most YA. In fact, generally, I felt that this wasn’t a young adult novel at all. And while I’d be tempted to call it middle grade thanks to a lack of sexual content, it’s not that, either. Eff’s voice, though young, is wistful, detached, and nostalgic. This very much felt to me like a novel meant to appeal to adult fantasy and science fiction readers, who might better appreciate Wrede’s extensive world building and better tolerate Eff’s total lack of compelling romantic relationships.

The world building here certainly is extensive. Wrede’s central premise is that this is an alternate Earth where magic exists and some prehistoric creatures never became extinct, and she goes to great pains to show how that might conceivably impact every aspect of frontier life. The magical systems–and there are multiple ones here–are well-developed and believable, and so intertwined with the daily life of the characters that they don’t even think to info-dump on us, something a less talented writer might resort to. There are backlash movements, philosophical disagreements, vivid ecologies, and several different methods of magical schooling. There are even historical twists–Benjamin Franklin as an unschooled magical genius!

But Wrede seems so wrapped up in her world that she’s really forgotten to give us a worthwhile story. This promises to be a series, but I really can’t imagine where we’d go from here, because, in three hundred and forty pages, we really haven’t gone anywhere.

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A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It took me about eight tries to successfully dive in to Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty. “I’m just not sure if I want to read about a rich, bratty Victorian teen and her privileged experiences,” I told my friend Nicole, when she had shared her own difficulty with the novel. And it’s true; particularly through the first chapters, heroine Gemma Doyle comes across as a brat. Despite her exotic locale (India), she argues with her mother in the first few pages like a stereotype of a petulant teenager. Sustained reading, however, is ultimately rewarded. Following her mother’s supernaturally-induced suicide, Gemma moves from India to the prestigious Spence Academy in London, a sort of posh finishing school for a gaggle of wealthy young ladies–and the book becomes very hard to put down.

At Spence, Gemma finds enduring, if slightly thorny, friendship with Felicity Worthington, queen bee of the school; Pippa Cross, epileptic pretty thing; and Ann Bradshaw, her ugly, poor, and hopelessly romantic roommate. The girls begin an exploration into the occult that will ultimately uncover answers about Gemma’s mother’s true nature–and lead to tragedy.

This journey is tenderly and vividly written, and if at times it edges on the purple, then that’s a wholly appropriate stylistic choice thanks to the era and the writing that Bray is attempting to invoke. The settings–Spence, India, the otherworldly “realms” that the girls are eventually able to enter–are rich and richly described. And there’s a real, admirable honesty in the ways that Bray writes her teenage girls. They’re difficultly sexual, and at times plain difficult; alliances shift easily, and the girls are often petty and ugly to one another. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Gemma’s treatment, as a narrator, of Ann. A more saccharine–and less honest–author might be tempted to whitewash such a character into a secret beauty or a governess-to-be with a heart of gold. But Gemma is more unforgiving than that in her narration, and I found the sometimes harsh depiction much more true-to-life.

Unfortunately, Bray’s modern values sometimes impacted A Great and Terrible Beauty in an ill-fitting way. Bray seems eager to let Gemma be described as a “strong” heroine, and so there’s some awkwardly inserted bratty dialog every so often that I felt wasn’t ultimately reflected in the character’s actions or narration. There’s a bit of lip service about feminism that felt entirely too-modern in tone. Likewise, the awkward insertion of a subplot about cutting.

However, these are the kind of details that only distracted slightly while I read and are quickly forgotten–and forgiven. Bray is, after all, a modern writer even if this is historical fiction–and what lingers about A Great and Terrible Beauty are its successes: the beautiful world, the complex women, the absolutely heart-wrenching ending, and the very strange–and seductive–magic.

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Oh, how I wanted to adore Kelley Armstrong’s The Summoning.

And, to be fair, there’s a lot to like here between just the cover and the first handful of chapters. Armstrong promises us the dark and alluring story of Chloe Saunders, a fifteen-year-old girl who, in one day, both gets her first period and starts seeing ghosts. I was initially won over by what seemed like the depth of Chloe’s character–not only does she suffer from the very real adolescent affliction of menstruation, but she also seems believably complex; she has interests (movies), flaws (she’s a stutterer), and isn’t perfect looking (though the cover accurately reflects her appearance, something that’s unfortunately rare in YA book covers, she’s short and underdeveloped for her age).

But as the story progressed, and Chloe was shipped off to the Lyle House, a residential home for mentally-ill teenagers, my enthusiasm for the story waned. Initially, I thought this had something to do with Chloe’s voice. Armstrong’s sentences are brief and sometimes abrupt–she relies on sentence fragments just a little too much for my liking. She also has an unfortunate tendency to engage in the dreaded infodump. There isn’t a single conversation or passage in here that discusses the characters’ underlying supernatural powers in a way that I’d call artful.

(And a brief aside: I’d die happy if I never read another YA novel where a character researches his or her supernatural predicament via wikipedia. Yes, I realize that this is how modern teenagers get information. But encyclopedia passages repeated verbatim is just never interesting, whether the source is The World Book or google, and protracted descriptions of the minutia of their search–typing in URLs and the like–are just really tiresome. I always get the feeling that the author is trying to say “Hey, I know the technology of kids these days!” but I’m never quite convinced. That Armstrong botched a description of Nintendo’s PictoChat didn’t help much either–I’ve never known anyone who would draw inscrutable hieroglyphs on there when they could just type something out–or even write it. Anyway . . .)

As I read further and further into The Summoning, I found myself struggling in a way that went beyond just finicky problems with voice. I’d describe this in two words: pacing problems.

The bulk of the novel’s problems take a very, very long time to unravel. This would be fine if the tensions built in a gradual and meaningful way. But unfortunately, the chapters here are both very brief and very inconsistent. Characters would be talking to ghosts in one chapter and flirting over breakfast the next. Chloe Saunders, for all of her apparent genre savvy, remains painfully clueless about the very transparent conspiracy that underlies the Lyle House–most of which I’d guessed about a quarter of the way in. Worse, I never really got a sense of the characters during the novel’s first two thirds, either. It wasn’t until about halfway through that I could even reliably tell you which character was which, and that would be in very broad strokes: Victoria’s the bitch, Derek smells, Simon’s a nerd, and Rachelle is . . . uh, black? The lack of concrete characterization and consistent tensions made it very difficult for me to care through most of the book.

Luckily, the novel takes a sudden turn for the better in the last hundred pages or so. Finally, Chloe catches on with regards to the sinister nature of the Lyle House and, along with several other students, she sets out to finally do something about it. By necessity, the personalities of the characters were suddenly much better defined and more interesting. But then the novel ends abruptly, with absolutely none of the plot threads resolved. I’m all for cliffhangers; I love long series with rich continuity. But I also like to have a small feeling of resolution by a novel’s end. By the last page of The Summoning I had the distinct feeling that the story was just beginning. Which would have been great! Except I just wish I hadn’t had to read through four hundred pages of prose to get there.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Have you ever read a novel and wished you’d found it sooner? It might seem strange, but even though I’m a frequent consumer of YA, I rarely find myself wishing I’d read a book when I was a teenager. Usually, I’m just glad for the experience; many YA writers craft immersive worlds and likable characters so skillfully that their works feel relevant despite the fact that I’m 26 years old. And it’s not quite that I felt I was too old for Holly Black’s Tithe, the story of a New Jersey teenager who learns of her faery nature when she’s used as a pawn in the war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts.

No, instead I simply felt that Tithe would have struck a chord with me as a teenager, that it would have been incredibly relevant had I read it upon its release in 2002, when I was eighteen, rather than eight years later. Reading it now, as a grown-up, I mostly just felt nostalgic.

Black describes the world of sixteen-year-old Kaye with surprising honesty and grit. Kaye lives in a magical land that I haven’t often seen described in books, and certainly not with such accuracy: it’s the world of my youth, New Jersey at the start of the twenty-first century. There are ravers and punk boys and long, emotionally complicated nights in diners. There are gay boys who love anime. There’s the boardwalk of what I was sure must have been Asbury Park, abandoned and creepy and vivid. And, true-to-form, there’s Kaye, an honestly written heroine if I’ve ever seen one. Kaye’s a bit weird–she had fairies as imaginary friends since she was a kid–and definitely imperfect. She can’t help but seduce her best friend’s boyfriend. She gets her other friends into trouble. She’s flawed, but, dammit, she’s honest. As I read Tithe I couldn’t help but feel that I knew Kaye–she’s just about every teenage girl, complicated and conflicted. In short, she was terrific.

As were most of the supporting characters here: Corny, Kaye’s companion, one of the most realistically rendered gay friends I’ve ever seen in fiction. Corny isn’t a magical and perfect gay boy a la Mercedes Lackey, but instead a complex and complete person in his own right. Likewise, Roiben, Kaye’s otherworldly love interest, a sexy stoic with problems and a life beyond Kaye’s.

Unfortunately, the plotting of the novel doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the characters. Black takes us a long time to get us to the central conflict, and Kaye’s episodic explorations through the faery world just weren’t as interesting to me as her adventures in the in the real world. Still, there’s a lot worth exploring here–particularly if you’ve ever found magic in the magical kingdom known as New Jersey.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This second volume in the Books of Magic series (numbered, confusingly, as volume 1) further develops the character of Timothy Hunter and begins to explore his mythic origins. When Tim is drawn away from his world by his birth father Tam Lin, we witness his first true trial–capture by the manticore–and learn of his otherworldly genesis. Unfortunately, the story suffered a bit in some of the same ways that the first did–sometimes I felt as if I had missed large swathes of the story, I suspect because some action took place in some comic book or another that I missed–and Tim, though his characterization is drastically improved here, still felt a little thin.

However, there were a handful of stand-out scenes that made this book memorable: Tim’s experiences in the manticore’s den, his interactions with Death, and the rambling monologue of his surprisingly empathetic one-armed foster father. I’m having trouble evaluating this series so far as I normally do. The bits I like, I like very, very much, but as a whole, the graphic novels seem to leave me scratching my head. They’re wispy and dreamlike, not always to good effect, but the parts that were well done were well done enough to keep me reading. We’ll see if there’s any improvement.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My wonderful husband bought me all of the many volumes of this series for Valentines Day–with a note inside that said that the best things about my writing remind him of The Books of Magic.

Aw.

He did warn me, though, that this first volume is closer to standard Gaiman fare than the rest of the series–where Tim’s story transforms into the sort of YA fantasy that he knows I love.

He was right–which isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy this first volume regardless. Tim Hunter’s first excursion through time and space was well-written and lovingly illustrated. Although I have little familiarity with the DC canon, characters like John Constantine and Doctor Occult still seemed likable, or at the very least intriguing. And the section most redolent of Gaiman’s later work–for me, Tim’s foray into Faerie–taps the same deep sense of myth and awe that he later exploits to haunting effect in Stardust.

But Tim himself remains an enigma. We know nothing of him–not his personality or background–from the outset, and even by the volume’s conclusion are left mostly in the dark. This was problematic for me, and I think it may have been what my husband was talking about when he said this Book of Magic was not YA.

I’ve been thinking lately, thanks to some comments by teen writer Steph Bowe on Catcher in the Rye, about what makes a given work YA. I’ve come to believe that a work needs to have two things in order for the YA label to really fit comfortably: first, the author needs to intentionally be writing for an adolescent audience, taking the entertainment and educational needs into account (or at least consideration) during the process of drafting a work. Secondly, the author needs to create a protagonist with which the reader can identify. This is sometimes done by drafting a blank-slate or Everyman teen character (think: Bella from Twilight or Harry Potter), which is, in broad strokes, what Gaiman was doing here. Unfortunately, Tim Hunter is, so far, so blank as to be inscrutable. There is a brief sequence near the end of the final book in this volume where we’re given a glimpse of Tim’s home life. For me, this was also the most resonant and effective sequence–and it occupied all of three pages! Concluding, rather than beginning, with Tim’s real life, was an unorthodox choice for Gaiman, and I’m not sure it was an entirely effective one–particularly if you evaluate this against other YA works, an almost inevitable comparison thanks to Tim’s surface similarities to Harry Potter.

But I’m not sure this is a fair comparison, for this volume, at least, because it’s also clear that Gaiman wasn’t writing specifically for teenagers here–he doesn’t intend the Books of Magic to be a series primarily for teenagers. It fails my YA litmus test, even if it largely succeeds on its own.

Still, I’m excited to read the rest of the series, where (I’ve read) later author John Rey Nieber made turning Tim into an identifiable and well-actualized teenager one of his primary goals.

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The Passion is the final entry in L.J. Smith’s Dark Visions trilogy, and easily the most memorable in the series. The novel begins with the core group of teenage psychics fractured by the departure of psychic vampire Gabriel, but through quick pacing and the inclusion of several strikingly memorable scenes, Smith is able to weather the plot changes to bring the series to its riveting (if tidy) conclusion.

After Gabriel deflects to the other side, choosing to leave his do-gooder friends for Dr. Zetes’ coven of psychic Hot Topic patrons, heroine Kaitlyn Fairchild is left with a choice: to stay with golden boy Rob and hope for some sort of passive resolution to the conflict between these groups; or to chase after Gabriel, infiltrate the Zetes Institute, and destroy the evil crystal that gives them their power herself.

She chooses the latter, of course. One thing I’ve admired about Smith’s young adult novels as a feminist reader is the strength of her heroines. Her girls are never demure damsels-in-distress, but rather women of action. Kaitlyn, for all her beauty (and for all the boys fawn over her), is no exception. In fact, this becomes a plot point, and is a factor in her ultimate romantic choice: she realizes that Rob sees are as someone to be saved, while Gabriel respects her as an individual.

Which isn’t to say that Gabriel, or Smith, make this an easy choice for Kaitlyn. Upon her return to the institute, she faces many challenges–she is surrounded by a bunch of sociopaths who resent her sudden intrusion, and one of the evil psychic girls has designs on Gabriel, herself. But Smith is smart enough to let the social conflicts take a backseat to Kaitlyn’s two core problems: destroying the crystal (and Zetes, in the process), and finally uniting with Gabriel.

She accomplishes this in one fell swoop. In the novel’s (and probably the series’) most memorable sequence, Kaitlyn gets her first glimpse of what ultimately becomes of Zetes’ pupils–they are transformed into disgusting, incapacitated, slug-like idiots–and she is locked away in a sensory deprivation chamber. The goal is to make Kaitlyn like one of these creatures, a pliant psychic pawn, but her psychic connection to Gabriel saves her.

The passages here, where Gabriel feeds her his own memories to keep her afloat, are reminiscent of Smith’s vampire series. But they’re far more artfully accomplished, with a darkness underscoring them. Kaitlyn and Gabriel might be soulmates, but there’s more than just the “silver thread” of Smith’s other couples connecting them–there’s genuine pain, both shared and individual, present in their connection, too.

All of this creates a real page-turner, and one not easily forgotten. Unfortunately, the ending that follows is a little too neat. There are innumerable ways in which Smith could have disposed of her villain, but I’m not sure if one that avoids all legal and emotional ramifications for the characters was the best one. And I didn’t quite buy all the new couples that were hastily forged by the conclusion so that no one was left out of the love fest. But it’s a satisfying ending even if it’s not a realistic one, and helps make The Passion a great read.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve written before about my adolescent love for L. J. Smith’s writing, particularly the Night World series. But, even at thirteen, I was never much for vampires. I was always a more fervent fan of her Dark Visions universe, described in a trilogy of novels about beautiful–and psychic–Kaitlyn Fairchild, who, in her senior year of high school, is shipped off to a mysterious research institute for truly gifted teenagers.

Revisiting The Strange Power as an adult, I can see why these appealed to me more than Smith’s more-traditional horror/supernatural fare. As a kid, I devoured non-fiction (and I use that term loosely, of course) about ESP and psychic powers; the Dark Visions trilogy is like a fictional realization of all those volumes I found under Dewey Decimal heading number 130. Smith somehow manages to make things like psychokinesis, precognition, and energy crystals fairly believable, without resorting to the infodumping that she relies on in her horror books. Kaitlyn’s universe felt impressively real to me, even as a skeptical adult reader.

This is thanks, in part, to the strong third-person narration here. Smith’s Night World books use first-person point of view, which sometimes results in cringe-worthy sentimentality. The prose here, though sometimes slightly edging on purple, is much, much stronger, thanks in part to the distance from the adolescent characters. The writing is clear, functional, but appropriately dark in tone, a nice complement to the quick pace of the plot.

As Kaitlyn settles in to her new life in California, she learns that the institution dedicated to exploring her psychic powers is not all that it seems. She also becomes involved with two of her dreamy adolescent housemates, the golden-boy healer Rob, and Gabriel, a pale-as-Johnny-Depp psychic “vampire” and former criminal. The love triangle here is much stronger, and more interesting, than those we’ve seen in certain other recent books. Smith doesn’t give us an obvious victor here: both Gabriel and Rob are appealing, though in completely different ways, and they’re well-developed, too.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Lewis and Anna, the other two psychics at the Zetes Institute. Here, in what is probably the most problematic feature of these books, Smith relies on dated racial stereotyping to create her characters. Lewis Chao, Chinese, controls technology, likes gadgets, and is essentially neuter; while white boys Gabriel and Rob are immediately cast in Kaitlyn’s mind as romantic interests, Lewis becomes a sexless younger brother archetype. Anna Whiteraven, meanwhile, is Native American, has a “totem animal” and can communicate with wildlife. She is described as “serene” and “peaceful” and doesn’t have much of a personality beyond this–though these are positive stereotypes, they’re no less, well, stereotypical. Of course, Smith wrote these books in the early nineties; her gestures towards inclusion of non-white characters may have seemed like a positive effort then, but I do think that it’s a shame this book is still a story of a white girl, torn between two white boys, with characters of color as no more than window dressing.

Still, this is a quickly paced and enjoyable read. It’s a slender volume, reflecting the YA market of its time, but nevertheless both well-realized and consistently exciting. While much newer YA often suffers from saggy-baggyness, The Strange Power feels tight and tightly edited. I look forward to revisiting the rest of the series.

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