Happy belated Typing Tuesday, Gentle Readers! First thing’s first, news (in an unordered list!):

• I had a short story accepted with Aoife’s Kiss! Yay! The story is “Ageveline,” and it’s a sci-fi retelling of James Joyce’s “Eveline.” It was, in many ways, the source material for Daughter of Earth (though it’s so, so different from it; different girl, different generation ship). I’m psyched to share it with you. It’ll be appearing in the March 2012 issue.
• I’ve accepted an Articles Editor position with Strange Horizons . . . double yay! I’ve been proofreading for SH for over a year now, and I’m so excited to take on a more active role.
• I have a vlog up at the Interroblog! Listen to me babble about Pamela Sargent’s Seed series, and look at my adorable mug!

Now that that’s out of the way . . .

I’ve read some terrific books over the past year, as evidenced by the recommended reads visible over on my sidebar. A lot of them were entertaining, juicy stuff–fun SF like Across the Universe or exciting feminist fantasy like Diana Peterfreund’s Ascendant. But while these books entertained me–while they were fun and enveloping and exciting–four stand out in my mind as challenging me. When I talk to people about my genre, and why young adult is awesome, thankyouverymuch, and why it’s just as exciting, deep and artistic as anything you’ll find on the adult shelves, it’s these books that I recommend, again and again.

These books are Feed by M. T. Anderson, The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness, How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff, and Liar by Justine Larbalestier. These four volumes are as different as they are similar. But they all challenged my own notions of what YA can, and should, be, pushing the boundaries of both kids’ fiction specifically and all fiction, generally.

It’s interesting: the one thing they all share is that they’re voicey YA. I don’t always like voicey stuff. I’m a hard sell when it comes to adults mimicking the voice of kids. Part of this is my own artistic sensibility (and, probably, my tendency to overwrite and go all flowery). But none of these books would work if they weren’t voicey–if they weren’t utterly immersive and framed within the limited world view of the narrators. And it’s fascinating to see how, rather than limiting the creations of these authors, the voicey perspectives allow them instead to do some daring, avant garde, and utterly exciting stuff.

Feed plays with form, and slang, and traps us within the uncomfortable perspective of a teenage boy who makes choices that few readers are likely to agree with. The Knife of Never Letting Go, while in some ways a traditional picaresque or boys’ adventure story, plays with language and font in a way that so utterly submerges you that you practically begin to feel you can read minds (and hear talking dogs) yourself. How I Live Now plays with form, too, and is recounted to us in such an honest adolescent voice that we find ourselves accepting the fantastic, terrible, frightening, and magical things that happen within its pages without even hesitating. And perhaps most impressively, Liar pulls the narrative rug out from beneath us completely. By making us a captive audience for a self-described liar, Larbalestier raises questions about the nature of storytelling itself.

All of these are genre novels. Now, if you know me, you know that that’s no pejorative. I’m a genre girl through-and-through, cut my teeth on McCaffrey and Lackey. I think there’s nothing easily dismissed about either science fiction or fantasy. But these books are so much more than what most people imagine when you say “science fiction” or “dystopian” or “magical realism” or “pseudo-contemporary-maybe-paranormal-I-think.”

By recounting these stories in accurate voices of real-sounding teenagers, these four authors create genre stories that you believe almost instinctively. The voice, grit, detail, and honesty make the unbelievable seem undeniable real.

If I sound slightly fangirlish as I say all of this, it’s because I am. This is the kind of writing that’s made me say that fiction is the closest thing we have to magic. There’s something amazing about an author that can make you believe in telepathy, among other things.

I said at the beginning of this entry that these books challenged me. That’s not to say that they were difficult to read–in fact, all four of these novels were insanely readable. Instead, they pushed the boundaries of what I thought is possible to achieve in either YA or fiction. It’s strange–I’ve read experimental novels before. And I used to write poetry, even dense, playful, speculative prose poetry. But I never really considered writing a novel this way.

And now I really, really want to.

I’m finishing up writing Daughter of Earth right now, editing and tightening and trying to make it the best book it can be. But I have to do that on its own terms, and I know it’s not a sprawling, messy, kooky, challenging, magical novel like one of these. But my next project? I think it’s going to be something special. I think it has to be.

This is why I think it’s important to read widely, to make sure that your reading pushes boundaries, to seek out books that make you feel freakin’ enthusiastic. Challenging writing makes us better. It pushes us to improve. It keeps us from getting complacent.

Time to step up my game.

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I discovered Riddley Walker by attempting, and totally failing, to finish a book that I’d heard rip-roaringly good things about, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.

To be fair, I was only attracted to Cloud Atlas because I’d heard it featured a dystopia. I was fresh out of college, working in a library, and all I’d been interested in reading about was the end of the world. I happily picked my way through wikipedia’s lists of dystopic works,until I got to Cloud Atlas. It became a slog: I only reached the end of the first half-story, then, lip curled, turned again to the internet to find out what happened in the rest.

It turns out that Mitchell, in his novel’s post-apocalyptic center, was inspired by Russell Hoban, whose name I recognized from the Frances picture books from my childhood. I found a copy on the shelves of our library, and dove in.

And it was a dive: Riddley Walker was one of those most immersive reading experiences of my life. Hoban’s invented language–as complex as Burgess’ in A Clockwork Orange, but, perhaps, more poetic–seemed to change the book from a fairly simple story about a boy coming of age in a Bronze-Era-like society after the fall of man to some sort of integral, sacred text. I usually read quickly: Riddley Walker forced me to slow down, and in doing so the landscape around me seemed to transform. I remember standing on the brick track behind the library where I worked as the sun went down and feeling the soggy natural potential in the world around me.

It’s difficult for me to talk about this book and not sound either sentimental or trite; it’s difficult for me to talk about it in terms of plot, or character. Riddley Walker to me seems to be more of a history, or a mythology. It has the same slippery quality that Homeric works have, the same intangible magic as the Tao Te Ching or the Bible.

And no one’s heard of it.

Oh, that’s not entirely true, I suppose. People have. There are annotated webpages, goodreads reviews. But I’ve never met anyone familiar with the book. Because the experience of reading it was so strange and so affecting, I talk about it whenever I can. I have had more than one person tell me that it sounds like Cloud Atlas; have I read Cloud Atlas? At that, I can’t help but wistfully shake my head. This isn’t a post-modernist nesting doll gimmick of a book. This is something else entirely.

Riddley Walker should be seen as required reading for anyone who is interested in doing something beyond telling a story when they write a book. This is the story of a boy, and a death, and Punch and Judy, and the government, and what happens following the fall of our world. But it’s so much more than that, too–it’s the story of the world, and it’s a world in itself, too.

This review is part of Road Trip Wednesday, YA Highway‘s “Blog Carnival,” of weekly writing- and reading- related questions. This week’s question was “what’s an unheard-of book you love?”

View all my reviews >>

There’s great article by Mary Pearson on tor.com right now on YA literature.

Who writes it?

People like me. People who find the teen years fascinating and the nuances of teen literature a challenge. I am not writing it as “practice” so I can one day write an adult book (I am asked that a lot.) Young adult books are not a lesser, watered-down version of adult books. They are not any easier or harder to read than adult books and they are certainly not any easier to write. They are just different. Just as with adult books, some teen books are easy and breezy and meant to be that way, and others, like Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta, or Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan, are complex and mulit-layered. They can offer social commentary, as with The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, or The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks by E. Lockhart, while being immensely entertaining at the same time. They can examine our flaws and failures and our hopes and dreams in quiet, elegant prose as in Thursday’s Child by Sonya Hartnett, or with fun, quippy prose as in Repossessed by A.M. Jenkins.

I think sometimes there is still this basal reader mentality when it comes to teen books, like it is a stepping stone to the “grown-up stuff.” Basal Reader Year 10. Hm, no. It is simply its own unique type of literature that explores the teen experience.

Recently I’ve heard some discussion about the “responsibility” of YA books and YA authors. Oh, I hate that word when it comes to books. I’ve heard complaints at both ends of the spectrum, far left and far right, wanting books to “guide” readers one way or the other. Their way, I imagine. Or not include sex or language or whatever, and sometimes the whatever is pretty ridiculous, under the guise that we must “protect” young minds. I have to say, I have seen just as much harm come to children who are over-protected as those who are not paid any mind at all. I have seen parents who sequester their children away from the world in order to protect them, but hey, the world is there, and one day the kid will be out in it. Do they really want to spring it on them cold turkey? Often the results aren’t pretty. Or wouldn’t they rather have their child test the waters while they are still under their wings and can come to them with questions?

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit because I’ve been working on a short story that involves a girl, and books. How we come to define ourselves through books, or through what we see in books, through oppositions or identifications:

Something Elsie noticed about her books: the girls—the sassy dragon tamers, the cross-dressing knight errants, the weyrwomen—all changed when true love got involved. They were held down. Stripped of their chain-mail. They’d cast their heads to the side, cry. They never went willingly, even if, up to that moment, everything had been up to them, everything had depended on them. After they were bested, and they were always bested, all that would matter were the men and the babies, the precious, peanut-toed babies. Elsie didn’t like it. She didn’t even care about babies. She never had.

I find the lives of teenagers, especially teenage girls, fascinating, not necessarily because it’s a different experience from the experiences of adults, but because many things are more amplified during adolescence: hormones, the emotional tenor of interpersonal relationships (mean girls are nowhere meaner than in middle school), family interactions, methods of defining personal identity. I enjoy writing from the perspective of teenage girls because everything can be examined in technicolor; I like writing with younger people in mind because I remember how important, how transformative books could be then. Books affect me now, sure, but not like they did then, when I was twelve or thirteen or fourteen. The whole landscape of my life could be changed in a single weekend, with a single paragraph. Maybe that sounds hackneyed. Maybe that sounds immature. Adults, after all, are, we assume, capable of maintaining distance from art. And other adults admire this.

Which is why, I guess, I’m not so excited about writing for them.

Tonaya Thompson, author of the Tin House blog post on genre, posts a rather fair follow-up:

And I don’t care if you have a story about Merlin in a space rodeo lassoing a pretty lady. If it’s good, you’re going to have to trust me that I’ll know it. Even if I don’t like it.

Well, good!

Unfortunately, their blog system is pretty borked. Tonaya says this: “I wish we could have had a civilized conversation about that on this blog, which was the whole point of my post. Instead I’m being quoted all over the blogosphere by people who are gravely disappointed in Tin House. Needless to say, this has me pretty shooken up.” So I went ahead and joined their closed-commenting system–which promptly threw my password into my spam box. Then I found it, and typed a response. This was around 9 p.m. last night. My comment’s been sitting in a moderation queue since.

It seems Tin House is new to the blog thing, but man, conversations are hard to have if your system makes it near-impossible to say anything!