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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The Girl Who Became a Beatle by Greg Taylor

This was a very silly book.

I was excited to request The Girl Who Became a Beatle when it came up on swap because it’s the first YA novel I’ve encountered that’s dealt with the Fab Four. As a preteen, I was absolutely obsessed with the Beatles—we’re talking, plastered-my-room-with-drawings-of-them, purchased-shelves-full-of-books-about-them, had-a-shoebox-full-of-newspaper-clippings, wore-out-my-tape-of-Backbeat obsessed. To this day, I still know a remarkable amount of Beatles trivia, love Beatles biopics, and have plans to someday finally make it to Liverpool to visit Mendips.

The protagonist of this novel, Regina Bloomsbury, would have gotten along well with little-me. She calls her basement hang out the Cavern, paints a Magical Mystery Tour rainbow on her ceiling, and starts a Beatles cover band called the Caverns because she loves the Fab Four so. When her band falls apart—because, you know, no one else really cares about playing Beatles covers—she wistfully wishes that she could be as famous as the Beatles.

And the next morning she wakes up to find out that it’s true!

This was pretty much a Beatles-themed version of Freaky Friday. The lightest, silliest of fantasy, Regina has a magical fairy godmother who grants her wish. Only problem is that they’ve become famous by replacing the Beatles in history—in short, they’ve cheated. “She Loves You” is now “He Loves You,” for example, and was “written” by Regina herself, using her extensive knowledge of Beatles jams. Now her band is slated to win a few Grammys, but they’re also falling apart, imploding—as rocket ships to success often do (I know this because I saw That Thing You Do, in the theater and several times, of course).

It was a little weird for me to read all of this because I wrote an exceedingly similar “book” (in a marble composition book) at twelve, in which a girl just like me becomes wildly famous with her Beatles cover band. The truth is, I’m sure that many girls and boys have written similar books. Who hasn’t imagined grappling with insane levels of insane success, just like your heroes? In this way, The Girl Who Became a Beatle isn’t very far off from fanfic, or just simple wish fulfillment.

But therein lies its strength, because it’s pretty fun. The prose isn’t spectacular (it is, in fact, simplistic and a bit wooden; more appropriate for a middle grade reader than a young adult reader), the fantasy cheesy and not really thought-through. But it’s also fluffy, satisfying, and fairly convincing. The Beatles references are light and a bit goofy (someday, maybe, I’ll write that dark young adult novel about the first several months of friendship between John and Paul—oh, the angst!), but this is really about Beatlesesque fame, not the Beatles in particular. I suspect that any thirteen year old with a dream of musical success would love this.

In that way, on its own terms The Girl Who Became a Beatle is a success in its own right. I have to say, though, that I found the last few paragraphs a tremendous cheat. Author Greg Taylor pretty much misappropriates the ending of a famous comic strip as his own (not unlike the Caverns stealing the Beatles’ songs). Cheap! But otherwise, this is fun, fluffy wish fulfillment that should satisfy its target audience immensely. It’s bubblegum, in the best possible way. Or jelly babies, as it were.

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The Near Witch by Victoria Schwab
Recommended

The Near Witch surprised me. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting—perhaps more light young adult paranormal, with maybe a slight nod to its folk-lore roots but without much depth beyond the love story. This seems typical of a lot of YA—it may promise highly literary content, but the pretty covers often obscure little more than typical romance retreads. But instead, author Victoria Schwab delivers a deep, thorny fairy tale about the cloistered nature of small towns in this August debut.

It begins simply enough, with our narrator Lexi telling stories to her little sister Wren about the mythical Near Witch, a specter that has haunted the village of Near for hundreds of years. But then Lexi’s attention is diverted by the presence of a stranger in the yard—an unsettling thing in her town, a place where strangers usually stay away.

I was struck by the strange, timeless nature of the story. It is never entirely clear when the story takes place—though it lacks modern technology, Lexi’s voice is startlingly contemporary and very accessible. In this way, Schwab’s prose always stays firmly on the right side of poetic, never straying into overwriting. Through Lexi’s strong voice, we come to learn about her quaint village home and the characters that inhabit it—the mysterious and threatening Council, her gruff uncle, the witch-sisters who live on the outskirts of down, the dozen or so children who begin to disappear . . .

I noticed certain parallels between The Near Witch and The Hunger Games at the outset, to my surprise, despite their disparate plot and genres. In composition, Lexi’s family is nearly identical. Her father, who was a hunter and a storyteller, has died, though he’s passed his tracking skills and survival instinct on to Lexi. Her mother is a broken woman who works with her hands. Her sweet little sister acts as all children do, sometimes whining, sometimes adorable. And Lexi rejects the values of the other girls in her village—they’re all busy preparing to marry—instead focusing on protecting her town, her people, and her little sister.

In this way, she’s much like Katniss.

But in a surprising twist, I enjoyed this family’s story more than the one found in The Hunger Games. Lexi’s mother and sister are more vivid and complex in their conception. Her mother is more than a shell of grief, and her actions in The Near Witch show a real empathetic understanding of the nature of her daughters. Wren, too, is given greater depth—she’s more than just an inciting incident or a presence meant to pull on our heart strings, but a person whose desires sometimes conflict with Lexi’s. And the presence of Otto, Lexi’s uncle, adds complexity to her home situation. He believes in protecting these women, beloved by his brother—but he doesn’t truly understand them, and probably never will.

The story builds slowly, as the children of the village of Near are plucked out of their beds; as Lexi entreats the village witches, Magda and Dreska Thorne, to help her figure out what’s happening; and as she gets to know the boy she dubs Cole (for his ash-darkened clothing), the newcomer who the village mob decides must be to blame for the disappearances. It was in this middle third of building tensions that I felt the novel made its only misstep, keeping us at arms’ length instead of intensifying the emotional stakes more directly. I suspect this was, in part, an artifact of Schwab’s complex prose—almost entirely made up of long sentences with multiple clauses—though I do wish she’d given us just a touch stronger characterization in Cole’s case, too. I suspect that would have upped the emotional ante sooner, to the novel’s betterment.

But this is a fairly trifling concern, because once Cole and Lexi enter the neighboring woods in search of the Near witch’s bones, both emotional stakes and plotting become quite intense indeed. It becomes clear how Schwab is using witchcraft, not just as a scaffolding on which to hang a romance plot but instead in the same way it’s used in traditional fairy tales, to show how societies implicitly rejects women who refuse to conform to society’s roles. It’s interesting, then, that she makes her stranger, a teenage boy, a witch as well. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was intended as lightly metaphorical for society’s attitudes toward homosexuality; invariably, Cole is wrongly pegged for violence against the children of Near.

But of course, he’s also the love interest, because tenderness slowly grows between him and Lexi. She’s a bit untraditional herself, preferring to wear pants and carry knives and she’s fully capable of fighting physically when the situation demands it. The growing affection between the two—the tough girl and the sensitive stranger—was quite endearing. I loved their pairing, and though it seemed just a touch shallow, it was also realistic for teenagers of their age, situation, and time period. This is tender, young love—not necessarily the epic, earth-shaking sort.

But that was okay, because it’s the horror here, and not the romance, which is the novel’s centerpiece—the earth shatters for other reasons, and they’re much more exciting than all this incipient romance. The woods are filled with a wild, terrifying magic—the book’s climax equals the folk-loric magic of Neil Gaiman, surreal, dreamlike, but still bounded in the naturalistic rules of the book’s world. In fact, it’s for fans of Gaiman that I’d most readily recommend Schwab’s book—this is the first young adult novel I’ve seen whose thematic focus on both magic and storytelling so readily matches his.

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

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Starcrossed by Josephine Angelini

I feel like I should start this review with a caveat: this will not be a positive review.

There’s always some danger in panning a highly-buzzed book, particularly one where the financials are so well known (if you haven’t seen it all over the internet, or the local news, Starcrossed was sold for seven-figures). Critics—especially critics who are members of the great unpublished masses—risk being labeled “haters” (or, worse, “jealous, bitter failures”) for raising complaints with the work in question, as if criticism of a work is intrinsically criticism of the author’s success.

And so I’ll come right out and say that I wish Josephine Angelini no ill will; she seems like a nice person, and I’m glad her book’s sale has been lucrative for her and her husband and helped them to get out of a nasty debt situation. I’m not, in reviewing Starcrossed, insisting that anyone not buy it. I’m not out to ruin any careers.

But I’m an honest person, and my honesty compels me to say this, despite all of the above: Starcrossed is, quite frankly, a mess.

The first problem with this novel, widely touted as “Percy Jackson meets Twilight” is that the prose is painfully amateur. Now, keep in mind that I’ve worked variously as an editor, a proofreader, a grader of undergraduate essays, and an English instructor; I’m highly attuned to issues with prose stylistics and perhaps am more likely to be rankled by clumsy prose.

And rankled I was by Starcrossed, persistently and pervasively. My issues with the writing are not simply matters of taste. I appreciate all sorts of prose, from the sparse and efficient (see my review of Lauren Strasnick’s Nothing Like You) to the florid and poetic (such as Lauren DeStafano’s Wither). Starcrossed occupies neither of these quite different stylistic extremes, though Angelini appears to sometimes overreach for Witheresque poetic stylings. She never quite achieves it for the simple reason that she never seems in control of her writing. Among the rookie, Creative-Writing-101 missteps in Starcrossed are:

-A hatred of the unadorned “said.” Nearly every instance of dialogue is accompanied by an adverb, if not substituted for an awkward Said Bookism. People huff and hiss and whisper and say things in a rush or softly or sweetly or jokingly. The dialogue itself is largely fine, and would convey meaning adequately if Angelini weren’t apparently terrified that it doesn’t.

-Repetitive and unnecessarily detailed action descriptors. Every single instance of movement or psychology is painfully described. People get up, move from one end of the room to the other, cross their arms over their chests, sigh, roll their eyes, look this way, look that way. Simple interactions between characters are therefore unnecessarily drawn out, slowing the pace to a deathly near-halt even during the times when the book should be the most riveting.

-An abundance of telling, not showing. Angelini appears not to trust her readers to intuit character emotions through either (overdescribed) actions or (ham-fistedly written) dialogue; we have to be told, as well, what every character thinks. This is exacerbated through the clumsily-executed third-person POV, which is usually quite close to our main character Helen but has a tendency to abruptly jump to other characters for no apparent rhyme or reason other than to reiterate the already-apparent thought processes behind their dialogue.

-A tendency to use overly complex sentence structure which both slows down pacing and needlessly complicates meaning. Rather than vary her sentence structure, Angelini riddles nearly every sentence with dependent clauses and conjunctions. This wouldn’t be a crime against prose in-and-of-itself, but used so constantly, it slows the already bogged-down prose even more, causes lapses in clarity, and is sometimes just grammatically incorrect.

All of this is unfortunate, mostly because this sort of problematic prose can be edited quite easily (even if doing so is a time-consuming process); these are issues addressed all over the Internet and in every college creative writing workshop. This kind of prose works against any story, and a book needs to be stellar indeed to overcome it.

Unfortunately, Starcrossed‘s characters and story are not strong enough to overcome the writing. At first, I hoped it would be—it’s got a promising setting (Nantucket) and a fairly interesting premise. Helen Hamilton, raised by her single dad on an isolated New England island, meets a new-comer from a large family and instantly wants to kill him.

The problem is that Angelini has appropriated Greek mythology here in a particularly clumsy way. As executed in Starcrossed, this mythology is beyond convoluted, and Angelini no sooner establishes some mythological detail than to directly contradict it. For example, our main characters are Scions, the descendants of Greek gods, who don’t look like their parents but rather have faces recycled from other Scions. Except for one notable exception, who looks just like her mother. Some of these mythological appropriations are just-plain cheesy (the Scions need to kill everyone not descended from the same Greek god so they can raise Atlantis and . . . become immortal?), others are awkwardly inconsistent or cast weird aspersions on mythological characters (the Trojan War happened just like it says in The Iliad, except for the Trojan horse—which, er, wasn’t even in The Iliad; rather, Helen just slutted it up so that the Greeks could invade. More on Helen’s sluttery in a bit).

But perhaps most troubling, as applied here the bits of prophesy and Greek mythology remove every single instance of organic character conflict in favor of characters being conveniently compelled to do things against their will. Repeatedly, characters will attack others only because they’ve been prophesized or fated to do so. Characters love one another, likewise, not because they have chemistry or anything in common but because they’re caught in some sort of quasi-Buddhist cycle of reincarnation/repetition. They resist one another’s advances because terrible things will happen if they get together, not because they actually don’t want to sleep with each other, or whatever. And because the mythology is so inconsistently applied, these prophesies and decrees are immediately magically lifted, and everything is rosy again, until the characters are again conveniently fated to do something when the plot demands it.

Angelini’s talked again and again about the origin story behind her writing of Starcrossed: she saw Romeo and Juliet sitting beside The Iliad on her bookshelf. The problem with reinvisionings like this one is that they often miss the mark on what made the source material so powerful. Here, she tries to create a blood feud like Romeo and Juliet, but she gets so caught up in making our couple fated and star-crossed that she misses exploring the more dynamic and compelling aspects of Romeo and Juliet’s love. Namely, the other doomed pair were raised with the blood feud and were inculcated to hate one another; therefore, their love represents something genuinely transcendent.

But Helen doesn’t know anything about this “blood feud” which she is apparently involved in until she meets Lucas. She never really understands the source of it (and no wonder, because it doesn’t really make sense) and so the ultimate resolution lacks emotional impact.

There’s also a persistent and weird concern here with female sexuality as a weapon. Helen is often criminally underdressed (including, once, in a short, see-through nighty) and is subsequently gawked at by the male characters. She lusts after Lucas, but is repeatedly rebuffed (not because he doesn’t want to—of course he “growls” at her that he does—but because of a prophesy. Naturally) and essentially asked to control herself because all sorts of horrid things will happen if they gave in to their natural desires. Though we’re told that Lucas’s lust is powerful and very, very dangerous, he is able to control himself and hence dictate the terms of their relationship. And this control extends beyond just their sex life; the pair gets into a very scary argument about Helen maybe flirting with other guys, where Helen is told that Lucas is not normally a jealous person but instead just rendered as such because Helen’s so beautiful that he can’t control himself.

In fact, men here generally have problems controlling themselves around women, and this is always the woman’s fault, or, at the very least, the fault of that evil temptress Aphrodite, who is at fault for the Trojan War, for making women like Helen slutty, for making men lose their tempers around women and murder one another, and so on, and so forth.

This even extends to Lucas adorably threatening to kill any man who would “take” Helen’s virginity when she proposes to take her sexuality in her own hands. How romantic!

Call me a feminist prude if you want, but I found this all exactly as troubling as the implied sexual violence of Twilight (and if you haven’t, you should really read Vinaya’s review of Starcrossed, which more thoroughly explores the similarities between the two books), if not more so.

All of this is really a shame. I love Greek mythology and have been eager to read a well-written, thoughtful YA retelling of the Greek myths. Unfortunately, Starcrossed is neither.

A review copy was generously provided by the publisher and NetGalley.

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