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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Boyfriends with Girlfriends by Alex Sanchez

Anvilicious.

If, unlike me, you don’t allow large portions of your life to be sucked away by the website TVtropes, you might not be familiar with this term. It refers to an aspect of a story so obvious that the writer might as well have hit you over the head with it. As the trope page says:

A portmanteau of anvil and delicious, malicious or vicious, depending on the usage, anvilicious describes a writer’s and/or director’s use of an artistic element, be it line of dialogue, visual motif, or plot point, to so obviously or unsubtly convey a particular message that they may as well etch it onto an anvil and drop it on your head. Frequently, the element becomes anvilicious through unnecessary repetition, but true masters can achieve anviliciousness with a single stroke.

Heavy-handed for the new millennium. Extreme polar opposite of subtle.

Stories that are anvilicious aren’t necessarily bad—for example, I’d say that every single episode of Degrassi Junior High was completely anvilicious, and yet there was some genuine charm in the soap operatic, but complex, plotting. Anvilicious stories are also not necessarily wrong–often the writer has a point, and a very good one! But the problem with a lack of artfulness in conveying a worthy message is that you risk alienating your audience completely, reducing them to eye-rolls and sighs. There’s something fundamentally embarrassing about being lectured.

Sadly, though it was, in many ways, a story with merit, Boyfriends with Girlfriends by Alex Sanchez was utterly anvilicious.

It’s the story of two pairs of male-female best buds—bisexual Sergio and his lesbian friend Kimiko; out-and-proud Lance and his questioning galpal Allie—as they navigate their identities and relationships in suburbia. Between mall dates, Lance grapples with his belief that bisexuality is totally a cop-out even as he’s falling for Lance. Meanwhile, Allie forges a friendship with and wrestles with her blossoming feelings for Kimiko. And all of these characters must deal with the repercussions of being out—or not—to their families.

I’ll come right out and say that I think that Sanchez’s message is a worthy one. Lance’s biphobia was the sort I heard a lot of in high school—”Bi’s a lie!” and all of that. Hell, it’s not like I can even pretend that things “Get Better” for bi kids when we grow up and leave the burbs. Allie’s story—of a hazy awareness of a more complex truth beyond just liking boys—was especially accurate, right down to the creepy, salacious response of her boyfriend when he finds out she’s been dreaming of girls.

But Sanchez does nobody a favor by presenting the issue so anviliciously. He lays it on thick beginning in the first chapter, as Lance hems and haws about how bisexuals are just kidding themselves. And he doesn’t let up for the duration of the book. The last paragraph ends with the image of a rainbow kite soaring through the air above one of our kissing couples. I wish I were kidding. Oh, how I wish I were kidding.

So as much as I strongly empathized with the message he was trying to communicate, I just think he missed the mark here. And hit a big ol’ anvil instead. I’m a grown woman, and reading this book was just a little embarrassing, even for me. I felt like I did in elementary school when they made us watch movies sponsored by Tampax. I can’t imagine that teenagers—the sighing, sarcastic purveyors of cool—would be any more amenable to a book told with such heavy-handedness.

And that’s too bad, because it’s not only Sanchez’s point that has some merit. I’ll admit that I wasn’t overtly fond of his writing style—he used a roving POV that jumped from place to place even within the same conversation—but his characters were ridiculously well-drawn and accurate. Initially I was afraid that he was engaging in some cultural stereotyping, particularly with Kimiko, but by the book’s mid-point she proved to be both very complex and very real, right down to her adorkably adolescent poetry. All of the characters had palpable chemistry in their romantic and platonic relationships. I’d easily call them “charming,” in addition to feeling like real kids I went to high school with. They were the reason I gritted my teeth and kept reading, through all the glurge. I even misted up a little when one character came out of the closet to her family.

But I’m afraid that this book’s charm, and the merit of its message, might miss its primary audience, who really do need it. Even if, perhaps, they don’t need to hear them in a book that’s filled with hand-wringing and interior monologues about why it’s not cool to hate on bisexuals. It’s not that Sanchez is wrong–not at all! But I think teens might be too busy rolling their eyes (and for good reason) to really hear it.

A review copy of this book was generously provided by the publisher for review purposes.

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Bumped by Megan McCafferty
Recommended.

Talk about going in with preconceived notions of a book’s quality. 40 pages deep, and I was completely ready to pan Bumped.

Megan McCafferty’s long-awaited follow-up to the Sloppy Firsts series is a tongue-in-cheek satire about a future where only teenagers are capable of reproduction. At the outset, the science fiction is hammy and laid on thick, full of FutureWords™ and sketchy world building. As I neared the end of the first part, I already had the bulk of my review worked out in my head.

I’d talk about how McCafferty’s earlier books were the most effective when she was illuminating character relationships or composing poignant scenes about adolescent love—not being clever. I’d write about how the conceits in Sloppy Firsts that left me coldest—the slangy cafeteria-table run-downs, the ridiculous teen-author-undercover subplot—where McCafferty aimed for inventiveness, but always fell short, utterly failed to ever ring true for me. I’d talk about how this novel hinged on such conceits, a belief in a world so alien in terms of human psychology that the human story fell apart. It would be a great, cutting, thoughtful negative review. It would get me lots of votes on GoodReads (the only reward for reading a bad book). It would be awesome.

But then (oh crap), I began to really, really enjoy the book.

So much for all those GoodReads votes! Because when it comes down to it, McCafferty’s “first young adult novel” (in her foreword and acknowledgements, she refers to it in quotes, as though she doesn’t quite believe it, either) is a biting comedy with a tender heart. As the story unfolds, we follow Harmony, a girl raised by religious extremists who see it as their duty to repopulate the Earth, and so marry their girls off young; and her twin sister, Melody, who has been raised by a pair of insane economists whose ideas about commodifying reproduction have spurred countless girls to sell off their reproductive fruits to the highest bidder; as they navigate their own relationship as well as sexual relationships with the boys around them.

We meet these long-lost twins at sixteen, just after their reunion. Harmony, on the run from a bad marriage, journeys to secular America with plans to proselytize to her non-believer sister. Melody, meanwhile, is grappling with her identity as one of the few non-pregnant members of her social group, and is, all the while, resisting an obvious crush on her (too short to procreate with) childhood best friend.

Their story is told in alternating voices. Harmony’s voice is sweet, but sharply observant. Her religious devotion and questioning are recounted by McCafferty in a way that can only be called tender. In fact, Melody’s voice was the one that I initially struggled with. It’s peppered liberally with FutureSlang, to the point of sometimes losing clarity (I’d recommend that you just roll with it, as I did; everything will be explained by the novel’s conclusion). Adding to my difficultly was the fact that much of this slang and terminology was icky, from muthahumping to Preggerz to FunBump to bumping.

But about halfway through the novel, I began to realize that the instinctive revulsion that I felt at this book’s obsession with sexualized stretch marks and its unwavering commitment to talk about things like mucus plugs was really the point. This is not a shy, demurring book. It is, instead, a critique of the reproductive underpinnings of both modern religion’s focus on purity and secular society’s focus on sexuality. Through its intertwining narratives, McCafferty weaves a subtle message about the similarities of these two drastically different cultures, and illuminates their biggest commonality: the way they devalue women beyond their reproductive capacity.

However, and to my delight, she still managed to create a story that was utterly sex-positive. In light of her premise, I feared that we might get a lot of handwringing about how young girls should abstain, a la XVI. Instead, Bumped is refreshingly pro-lovemaking (though the society she depicts is not). The sexual experiences of our dual narrators are diverse, but always well-justified and easy to understand. Even as I was cheering Melody’s choice to step away from her babymakin’ business, I was also cheering Harmony’s growing (and clearly sexual) romance with pro-babymaker Jondoe. Honestly, I never thought I’d be celebrating the sexual and spiritual love of a pair of evangelical, verse-spouting Christians, but there I was.

So, sure, there’s some hammyness here. The mistaken-identity plot with the twins is one you’ve seen a million times before, and, yeah, all this talk about negging and pregging did make me feel kinda strange. But nevertheless, Megan McCafferty has schooled me about counting my, uh, eggs before they’re hatched. This isn’t Sloppy Firsts but it’s still a damned good read.

A copy of this book was generously provided by the publisher for review purposes.

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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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