The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin
Recommended.

Do you ever wish you could unlearn something?

Ever since learning about Pick-Up Artist culture (“PUA”) on metafilter, I’ve been unable to regard a whole swathe of media in quite the same way. Cheesy sitcom Casanovas and “sexy” YA literature boys now seem vaguely threatening. On the bright side, I can now recognize exactly what’s going on when random waiters insult me for apparently no reason (“Oh! He thinks he’s flirting!”). But unfortunately, I can no longer view suave guys teasing women in consumable media as doing anything but trying to “penetrate” a girl’s “bitch shield.”

And so I initially reacted pretty strongly to Noah Shaw, the supposedly swoon-worthy love interest in Michelle Hodkin’s September debut, The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer. His behavior made this tense, chilling story of a teenager’s near unraveling following the death of several friends all the more unsettling—and not always in a good way. After Mara’s family moves her from Rhode Island to Florida in the hope that it will help her heal after a building collapses on her, her exboyfriend, and her two best friends, she meets Noah in her new, swank private school. He’s a rakish, handsome player—and he negs Mara over and over again:

Noah caught up to me in two long strides. “I didn’t ask you to marry me. I asked you for dinner. What, are you afraid I’ll ruin the image you’re cultivating here?”

“What image,” I said flatly.

“Angsty, solitary, introspective emoteen, staring off into the distance as she sketches withered leaves falling from bare branches and . . . ” Noah’s voice trailed off, but the look of cool amusement on his face didn’t. (117 – 118; ARC version)

I couldn’t help but read these passages and wince—who did this Shaw guy think he is?! Who is he to bring Mara “down off her self-imposed pedestal”?!

Of course, Noah Shaw isn’t the first smarmy, negging bad boy in YA. They’re all over the place—see also, Edward Cullen; see also, Patch Cipriano. The difference here—the important difference, the one that makes Noah and Mara’s relationship engaging and interesting despite the instinctive revulsion I felt toward Noah at the outset—is in Mara.

Because Mara is awesome.

In the standard PUA script, girls who are negged proceed through various stages of processing these back-handed compliments—first they become confused, then intrigued, then, they might meekly neg back (only to be shot down by the strong “alpha male” man), but of course, they ultimately end up a slave to the guy. And this is how the script often goes in YA, too—see, Nora’s confusion and bumbling low self-esteem in Hush, Hush which, of course, ends with her desperately crazy about Patch.

But Mara is different. Sure, she ultimately ends up bagging Noah, but only after she lowers his bitch shield. Even before we meet the illustrious Mr. Shaw, we get to know Mara’s strong, sassy, opinionated voice through Michelle Hodkin’s very readable prose. Mara’s narration is peppered with interjections and communicated in a wonderfully potty-mouthed style. She’s dealing with her own shit–psychological trauma, post-traumatic stress, people dying all around her—so although she’s drawn to Noah physically, she makes it clear, on no uncertain terms, that he’d better check himself before he wrecks himself. His negs don’t work on her (a revolutionary idea in this kind of YA), and it’s only when he begins to show her the tender caretaker beneath his suave exterior that they really begin to fall for one another.

In this way, their relationship is revolutionary—one ultimately built on equality and respect. And by the novel’s conclusion, it’s very hot. Hodkin even includes the first supernatural strictures against kissing that I’ve read in YA that I both believed and found genuinely increased tension.

There’s a lot more to like here, too: genuine diversity (characters who are Indian, Jewish, black, British, bisexual) and teenagers who feel like honest reflections of adolescence. The teens in Mara Dyer’s world fuck, talk about fucking, curse, talk back to their parents, resist mean teachers, worry about college, fret about their love lives. But it’s never boring—all of this reality is projected against a strong supernatural backdrop that reminded me of to L.J. Smith’s Dark Visions trilogy—a world of realistic, but also skin-crawly creepiness. This isn’t quite Stephen-King level horror, but it feels as if it’s building toward that, and I’m curious to see what’s to come in the second book.

The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer isn’t quite perfect—one of the two big “twists” is telegraphed too obviously from the first page, making the slow reveal frustrating; Mara is, at times, a little too melodramatic, to the point where her references to “abused” t-shirts and candlewax falling like lone tears gets a bit tiresome. But this is promising, solid psychological/supernatural horror. This is “paranormal” in the traditional sense of the term—referring not to vampires or werewolves but to untapped, uncontrollable psychological and psychic potential. Despite my initial resistance, my own bitch shield has been lowered, and I’m eager to see what’s to come for Mara and Noah.

(Now excuse me while I go shower; reading that PUA stuff just makes me feel so gross!)

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

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Linger by Maggie Stiefvater

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ll admit–my biggest problem with Linger is likely irreparable. Because I truly believe, from the bottom of my heart, that this book, sequel to the phenomenal paranormal love story Shiver, should not exist.

Shiver told a complete story. And though it had its flaws–slight, largely inconsequential and hardly detracting from its poetic style and heartfelt romance–the concluding reunion of its two narrative characters, Grace and Sam, was an emotionally satisfying conclusion if I ever read one. There were few ends left loose there, and if any lingering (heh) questions remained, they were really immaterial.

But for whatever reason, Stiefvater chose to continue the story. And that’s a shame, really, because while what’s strong in Shiver remains strong in Linger, the weaknesses seem amplified in this second volume.

Though the narration is now expanded to encompass two new characters, mourning “ice queen” Isabel and new wolf Cole, the growing relationship between Grace and a now-permanently human Sam remains the centerpiece of this story. The mounting intensity of their feelings for one another–often bordering on obsession, and sometimes a smidge tiresome to read–is realistic and appropriate considering their characters. Also appropriate are the conflicts they face when Grace’s parents suddenly decide to intervene and, you know, be parents, after spending a book and a half as shadowy background characters interested only in themselves and one another.

Grace and Sam’s story still feels very true to adolescent experience. They have a searing desire to be together at any cost, bemoan even very short absences, and are exceedingly short-sighted to the point of practically living in a bubble together. Again, this sometimes wears thin, particularly as they conveniently ignore Grace’s clear illness through most of the narrative in favor of dates and cuddles. But it’s emotionally true and resonant, even to me, an old married lady.

I can’t say the same for the budding “romance” (really, it’s just sex) between Cole and Isabel. I suspect this is because Stiefvater still doesn’t really like Isabel. Though she’s been elevated above her stereotyped portral of the first book, she’s still little more than eye-rolling and prettiness and sarcasm, like, totally.

Cole’s a bit better–but I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at how he’s a famous musician. Do we really need two male love interests who are swoon-worthy, supposedly-brilliant musicians? And was this really the best choice for the narrative Stiefvater builds about Cole’s life? We’re told that Cole sought to escape the future as a child prodigy that his father built for him. He does so by . . . becoming a musical prodigy, a famous musician by the age of seventeen. Couldn’t the boy just have easily been a townie drug user? Wouldn’t have the story have built just as logically from there–if not more so? I suspect that Stiefvater might have a bit of a soft spot for musicmakers, honestly.

The four narrators muddle the story here, and strain it. Cole’s story is an interesting counterpoint to Sam’s, but his romance with Isabel is never developed enough, and Grace’s illness builds entirely too slowly. We then get another slapped-on, pseudoscientific conclusion, something that wasn’t executed perfectly in the first book and is no better here.

Finally, the prose here only sometimes shines through with the delicacy and the beauty of the writing in Shiver. The dialog, particularly, feels rough around the edges. It’s not always believable and, sadly, sometimes not even pretty. There’s some beauty here, but the effect is rough, and not quite as finely polished.

I’ll likely read the third volume, because I remain invested in Grace and Sam and now Cole as characters. But I still would have been satisfied with only one book, much less three.

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Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ve been mulling over my review for Becca Fitzpatrick’s debut, the paranormal thrillermance Hush, Hush for about a week now. It’s difficult to talk about a book as controversial as this one without at least touching on the politics. But there’s little I can say about the politics that hasn’t already been said before, and probably better.

Yes, Nora, our heroine, is little more than the traditional victim/cheerleader in a slasher movie. She’s both bubble-headed and paranoid, and she alternately cowers and stumbles through our ramshackle plot–a story about how, after she gets a new lab partner in bio (yes, this is a new YA cliche that’s already becoming old hat), her life is repeatedly threatened by not only her hot, but creepy, partner Patch but also a bevy of other parties in her small Maine town. And though, yes, Nora has plenty of justification for resisting Patch–he’s condescending and smarmy, he threatens her repeatedly, he doesn’t even seem to like her most of the time–it does indeed seem like Nora resists Patch only so that she can later relent to him, illustrating once again (ick) how when a teenage girl says no, she really means yes.

The truth is, though, that after about a hundred pages of this sort of thing, I fear I started to become immune to it. Because, while my jaw literally dropped during an early scene where Nora is sexually harassed during her biology class by both her classmates and teacher, and while a few flies probably swarmed in after Nora goes to her teacher and protests, but is rebuffed, by the novel’s middle I just didn’t care any more what happened to Nora, good or bad. I was really just that bored.

Hush, Hush‘s biggest problem, I would say, isn’t in its quaintly outdated abhorrent sexual politics but rather in its pacing. There’s a vague cloud of “suspense” that hangs over the novel’s first two thirds, and Nora is, apparently, threatened by almost every one she encounters. But nothing happens–really, nothing. For two hundred and fifty pages–and though the reader is clued in to Patch’s supernatural origins through the cover and the prologue and the blurb, there’s really no logical connection between the nebulous dangers she faces and Patch’s identity as an angel. This means that the revelations about the book’s angelic mythology fall into place with as much grace as a sack of wet laundry. Nora sees scars on Patch’s back, thinks “angel!”, investigates fallen angels on teh Google (and if you’ve read my reviews, you know how much I hate internet research scenes; writers, knowing that kids google shit does not equal being hip to the technology of young people), and decides that Patch must be an angel. This requires some logical leaps that would never work this neatly in real life.

And then we get about fifty pages of really muddled angel mythology. It’s incredibly convoluted and all wedged into such a small space that there’s no time for the reader to digest the “rules” of angeldom. I’ll put it this way: I have a terminal graduate degree, and I won’t pretend for a second that I understood what was happening at the end of this book.

The worst bit of this, for me, was the revelation that our anti-hero Patch couldn’t feel anything, in a tactile sense. Because I’ll say this for Hush, Hush: for all that I thought Patch and Nora’s relationship was fucked up, I believed their sexual chemistry. Now I know that quite a few objections to this book have centered upon the adage that sex does not equal love, and that young adult writers shouldn’t imply that it does. And I sort of agree with this, but I think it’s an attitude that’s not entirely tied to reality. Because sex–for teens and adults–very much makes up the foundation of most romantic relationships. And it can certainly draw people together who would–or should–otherwise despise one another. So I bought that Patch lusted after Nora, and vice versa, even if it wasn’t necessarily a good match. But when Patch tells us that his feelings for Nora are chaste and entirely pure and all about love, my belief in the relationship flew right out the window. What do they have, if not sex? Not even biology class–because their sexual attraction to one another was all that was ever discussed there.

Anyway, I really consider all of this a shame because, despite the above, Becca Fitzpatrick’s stylistics are fairly solid. Her writing is readable, even if occasionally silly, even if the content is sometimes squicky. And she does setting extremely well. This foggy little Maine town is the perfect place for a thriller like this . . . if only it was a bit more, well, thrilling.

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The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I still can’t believe how well Stephen King does women.

Or in this case, a girl. As someone only a handful of years older than Trisha McFarland, the deliciously spunky, undoubtedly strong heroine of King’s novella The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, I can speak with some degree of confidence about the uncanny quality of her character. And, as this story is utterly character-based, I can only call it a triumph–though I fear that King fans in search of a tightly-plotted volume redolent with King’s usual supernatural shenanigans will have to look elsewhere.

The year is 1998, and Trisha is a nine year old girl whose family–mom, dad, and petulant teenage brother–has been recently shattered by divorce. In an attempt at creating some semblance of togetherness, Trisha’s mom Quilla drags her kids on one family-friendly field trip after another: to the auto museum, on a ski trip, and finally on a fateful summer hike through the Maine wilderness. Trisha only leaves the trail for a moment to pop a squat, but somewhat, she loses sight of her mother and brother–and so begins her nine-day-long harrowing trip through the wilderness.

Trisha is a tomboy, the kind, I admit, I always aspired to be as a little girl. She’s a daddy’s girl–she and her father share a love of baseball and of Red Sox player Tom Gordon–but her mother’s imbibed her with enough just enough wilderness knowledge (which berries are safe, how to pee without getting your jeans wet) to keep her afloat. As Trisha stumbles through the forest, we become increasingly aware of the tensions of her age. She and her girlfriend Pepsi are just beginning to explore pop music, and sexuality (they beg their moms to let them dress up as the Spice Girls for Halloween), but still memorize Double Dutch rhymes. Though Trisha’s speech is peppered with her father’s aphorisms (the kind of King-speech that just barely missed setting my teeth on edge in Lisey’s Story, but is put to much better use here), she’s also been growing increasingly aware lately of his predilection for beer. Though her character arc may be slight, this is a coming-of-age story, and that’s no better evident than when Trisha muses that, after this experience, she’ll quit quoting her father and her grandmother and start penning sayings of her own.

It’s good that King is so focused on Trisha’s growth and character, because this truly is a character study, and not much besides eating berries and gathering nuts and following streams happens in this slim volume. There are hints of the supernatural, but they’re never explained and could easily be hallucinatory, and the pacing flags a bit by the beginning of the “Bottom of the Seventh.” But the book’s short length and brisk structure saves it from being tiresome, and, like King’s other meditations on claustrophobia (Gerald’s Game, Misery) it’s appropriately focused and realistically rendered. In a way, it recalls a book from my own youth–a story of a pair of snowbound teenagers called Snowbound!. But in that book, the relationship between the characters and nascent hints of romance were the focus. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is truly a story of survival, and Trisha’s success rests squarely on her own shoulders, lending this book a feminist tint. Hell, never before have I felt so elated at the simple account of a girl catching a fish.

There are a few problems here, but they’re slight: a post-script that feels a bit saccharine for all that’s come before it, a bottom-heavy structure. But frankly? Trisha herself is just so awesome that I hardly cared. I wish I’d read this when I was younger–closer to Trisha’s age–and could have more directly drawn inspiration from it. As it is, all I can do is remind myself that sometimes a girl’s moxy and smarts really can save the day.

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