Today in the best-of blog circus, I’ll be covering my top 5 recommended books of 2011! These books weren’t necessarily my favorites, but they’re easily the novels that I talked up more than any others.

5. Divergent by Veronica Roth

Because of The Hunger Games, this was pretty much the year of the dystopian. As a YA author, I get asked about comp titles to big, buzzed books  a lot. If you recall my review of Divergent earlier this year, I didn’t think it was perfect, particularly in the world building department. However, what it was, instead, was solid. It has the same heavy emphasis on action as The Hunger Games, the same potential appeal to a cross-gender audience. And unlike some dystopian titles, it’s grown in esteem for me as time’s gone on. The reason was largely Tris, a strong sympathetic heroine who was very realistically rendered. Despite its flaws, I’d easily recommend Divergent to any dystopian reader–and frequently do!

4. Wither by Lauren DeStefano

Like Divergent, this title was one I frequently recommended to dystopian readers. It’s the beautiful prose and daring concept that distinguishes it from most dystopian titles for me–the story of a girl kidnapped into a plural marriage. Though, like Divergent, the world building wasn’t quite airtight, it nevertheless is a beautiful, lyrical, and absorbing read.

3. Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma

As an MFA grad, I frequently get asked about the literary merit of YA novels. It’s books like Imaginary Girls that prove to me that YA writers deserve literary props. Beautifully written, flawlessly conceived, and incredibly spooky, Imaginary Girls is a title that should work for any reader of adult lit fic in a pinch.

2. The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

This is yet another title I frequently pitch to readers of The Hunger Games–and one that I feel doesn’t get nearly enough press. The Knife of Never Letting Go is a complex science fiction story with incredible concepts underlying the adventure plot. With mysterious aliens, talking animals, and psychic men populating his world, Ness proves that YA readers can handle complexity in science fiction.

1. Across the Universe by Beth Revis

2011 saw quite a bit of whining about how little YA SF is out there. And every single time, I found myself countering: pick up Beth Revis. Across the Universe is classic space opera, and enormously successful space opera, at that. This unsettling, ambitious book is one that should be on every sci-fi reader’s radar.

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Check out what other writers recommended in 2011!

[Caroline Richmond] [Corrine Jackson] [Erin Bowman] [Kaitlin Ward] [Kate Hart] [Kathleen Peacock] [Kirsten Hubbard] [Kristen Halbrook] [Kristin Otts] [Lee Bross] [Lindsey Roth Culli] [Phoebe North] [Sarah Enni] [Stephanie Keuhn] [Sumayyah Doud] [Veronica Roth]

Wanderlove by Kirsten Hubbard
Recommended.

I hate Kirsten Hubbard’s books.

I hate them because they’re so good it humbles me. I hate them because of their complexity and realistic depth. I hate them because they never, ever fail to make me stay up late. Every single book has seen me awake at 4 a.m., desperately telling myself I can squeeze in just one more chapter before I turn out the light.

I’ll admit that, during my reading of the first chapters of Wanderlove, Hubbard’s upcoming (illustrated!) novel from Random House, I suspected my review would be a slightly different beast. Oh, I was enjoying the tale of Bria Sandoval, recent high school grad who has given up her art and decided to impulsively travel Central America instead. Hubbard’s prose was efficient and descriptive, the emotional premise clearly drawn, the voice clear. But it’s such a different book than her first, 2010′s Like Mandarin. Like Mandarin was immediately deeply resonant through both its beautiful prose and high emotional intensity. Wanderlove, on the other hand, fooled me into thinking it was another creature: more commercial, simpler, with a snappier plot but, perhaps, lower emotional stakes.

I was so wrong.

It’s true that Hubbard (and Bria) keeps the reader at arms’ length through the first several chapters. We’re not told a lot about her, or the past that’s led her to join a travel group catering to middle aged “global vagabonds.” It’s not until Bria joins up with Rowan and Starling, a pair of charismatic and mysterious backpackers, that her layers begin to peel away.

Bria is an exceptionally well-drawn character. Like many YA protagonists, she begins the novel a bit sheepish about herself and her own abilities. But as she travels with Rowan and Starling, and later Rowan alone, we begin to understand the reasons behind her reticence. More, we’re witness to a fascinating transformation as Bria is emboldened by her travels and her friendship with Rowan, a nineteen-year-old traveler with his own complicated past.

Hubbard doesn’t spell a lot out for you. She weaves her plot in a complex way, withholding just enough information to pique your interest, revealing powerful emotional twists at precisely the right moment. As you read further into the novel, the pages coming alive with Bria’s art (drawn by Hubbard herself), much of the driving tension becomes sexual. Like Like Mandarin, Wanderlove is fundamentally a love story. Like Like Mandarin, it’s not an easy one, but rather one where the very real personalities of the involved characters often stand in the way of easy resolution. Unlike Like Mandarin, this love story is undeniably sexual. And sexy. Rowan has all the thorns of a real teenage boy and twice the appeal—an undeniable sweetheart, he’s a rare YA example of a healthy (but still thrilling, exciting, and mildly bad ass) love interest.

And the art . . . oh, the art. I don’t mean the illustrations alone, though those are lovely (if scarce in the novel’s first half—I can understand Hubbard’s reasoning, but I just wanted more). No, I mean the role art plays in the narrative.

Like Bria (and, I know from conversation, Kirsten Hubbard as well), I fancied myself a bit of an artist during high school—I even went through the rigmarole of applying to art schools. But at the last minute, I chickened out and went to a state college for writing instead. Since then, art’s played a tenuous role in my life. I paint on occasion, draw on occasion, and I even illustrated a children’s book, but it’s not omnipresent like it once was. I no longer go around with a sketchbook tucked under my arm, ready to doodle at a moment’s notice.

It feels sad to say all of that—sadder, still, when I try to draw and realize how rusty I am. But at least I’m content in the fact that I made my own choice for myself. Bria’s story is far sadder. It’s not the story of any sort of unusual abuse or hardship. It’s more typical than that—a bad boyfriend who made her feel worthless and stole her art from her.

And so Bria’s reclamation of both her art, and of love itself, is all-the-more poignant.

In the end, Wanderlove exceeded my initial expectations. It might not be the heavily impressionistic tale that you’ll find in the pages of Like Mandarin, but it’s still complex, realistic, and heart-wrenching. Hubbard covers a lot here, from issues of identity to the class conflicts of foreign travel to the ways that we let romance shape us, for better or for worse. And it’s all done deftly, with a confident hand. It’s an unusual story, the type we don’t often see in YA, but the people and conflicts at its heart rang exceptionally true for me.

Disclosure: A volume of this novel was generously donated by the publisher for review purposes. I am also personally acquainted with the author (hi Kirsten!).

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A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle
Um. Duh. Recommended.

I can’t really claim that this will be a “review,” not really. Reviews require a certain degree of (admittedly sometimes false) objectivity, and I suspect that I’m physically incapable of being objective in regards to A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the third book in Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet and my favorite book ever. I’ve read it at least a dozen times in the past decade and a half. I own multiple copies (all with the same cover, with Charles Wallace in bell bottomed jeans with feathered hair). In middle school, when I played Japanese RPGs on my Super Nintendo, I always named my characters Gaudi and Anand, because Gaudior and Ananda would not fit. In fact, were I to ever have a daughter, I would name her Ananda, except my husband says that you can’t name a girl after a dog, even a fictional dog. Fine then. But, you know, I love this book—it’s an integral part of my internal narrative, my history. So keep in mind that any analysis or criticism you find here is forced. I just really adore it. I keep expecting to reread it and suddenly find it less magical, to finally be totally over unicorns and witch hunts and Chuck, old dear Chuck. But that never happens. I hope it never will.

Last night’s spontaneous rereading—in the face of all these ARCs—was inspired by a conversation with Sean, who asked me yesterday to tell him what my favorite book was at age fourteen. Then I saw this post from Sam at parenthetical.net asking which authors are best remembered for the wrong book. The answer, to me, is one and the same, and had me reaching for my bookshelf, for that old well-worn paperback with the green-edged pages. Madeleine L’Engle is best known for her first volume in the series, A Wrinkle in Time. While I appreciate many things about that book, it’s slight, both in terms of length and concept. Sure, I adore awkward Meg, Fortinbras, spooky little Charles Wallace Murry and redheaded genius hottie Calvin O’Keefe. But that novel only hints at the complexity you’ll find here, the atmospheric depth, the danger and the magic. By the time it all wraps up—too quickly, I think—with a floating, talking brain and the power of love, my interest totally wanes. No matter how many peaceable singing aliens L’Engle crams into the denouement.

In fact, my feelings range from lukewarm to pretty awful about the other three books in the Murry saga. A Wind in the Door has never managed to rouse any emotion in me at all. I’ve never done more than skim Many Waters (I’m really not a fan of the twins). And when I finally got around to reading An Acceptable Time during an independent study in graduate school, both my professor and I agreed that it was entirely too focused on what made the other books in the series bad—stereotyped portrayal of native “pagan” populations, and ham-fisted conversations about the applicability of Christianity in a pre-Christ era.

But this book. Oh, this book.

I guess it has its flaws. There’s that embarrassing scene where an American Indian rides a dolphin. L’Engle’s language, though generally beautiful, can be a bit driving and repetitive. And this is the book where Meg starts to suck—she spends most of it beslippered and pregnant, at home while Charles Wallace goes on adventures. In fact, both Murry kids are fairly passive vessels for a more interesting plot, though I’ll discuss why that’s not precisely problematic shortly.

I think the way that this book first won me over as a teen was via its language. I was a sucker for setting even then, and the Murry homestead is an absolutely gorgeous, perfectly realized place, the kind of house I still seek out now (hmm . . . I currently live in a house built in 1780. I wonder if the Murrys have something to do with that). Their warm, ramshackle home is filled with musty smells and dusty descriptions: threadbare curtains in Meg’s attic bedroom, the scents of a Thanksgiving feast cooked over a Bunsen burner.

And the Murry family is really quite perfect—the twins, irritating though they are, are perfectly brotherly, teasing and yammering and brilliant. Charles Wallace and his father sit on the sidelines putting together a model of a tesseract. And Meg frets over the presence of her mother-in-law, who was introduced in the first novel as an abusive, hideous wretch. The woman is silent through most of the meal, right up until Meg’s father receives a phone call from the president, warning him of impending nuclear war.

Suddenly, something changes in Mrs. O’Keefe. She recites a rune, a poetic incantation meant to ward off evil spirits. As the house is wracked by winds, and as the electricity goes out, the scientifically-minded Murry clan regards her with skepticism. But not Charles Wallace.

Charles was mostly a cipher in earlier books, a bit creepy, somewhat otherworldly. His fatal flaw is his pride, and we still see hints of that here, though he’s grown to be a touch more grounded in his adolescence. Still, he’s more open to the forces of the unknown than his siblings. He and Meg share a psychic link, for one thing. And he’s seen so many unusual things in his fifteen years. He hardly seems to blink when, later that night, he goes outside, recites the rune, and a unicorn appears to help him travel through time.

Oh, I know. A unicorn But Gaudior isn’t like that. Though he’s beautiful, and magical, this isn’t a wishy washy Lisa Frank kind of creature. This is a guardian of the light—he’s stoic, sarcastic, wise. Unicorns are serious business in L’Engle’s universe. And this book takes them seriously even when they’re drinking moonlight and hatching out of enormous eggs.

This gravity is there at the outset, clearly transmitted through L’Engle’s stunning prose. Like here, when Charles Wallace first summons the creature:

There was no moon, but starlight touched the winter grasses with silver. The woods behind the rock were a dark shadow. Charles Wallace looked across the valley, across the dark ridge of pines, to the shadows of the hills beyond. Then he threw back his head and called,
“In this fateful hour
I call on all Heaven with its power!”

The book proceeds from there, taking the same epic, mythical, and utterly poetic tone as the premise is established: Charles Wallace and the unicorn Gaudior travel through time. Gaudior helps Charles Wallace go “Within,” jumping into the bodies of various members of one genetic line to help gently nudge the timeline away from nuclear destruction on a global scale.

These stories initially build slowly. The first two really just establish place, and premise. Charles Wallace goes Within, and Meg stays at home, psychically linked with her brother in her attic bedroom. But then Charles Wallace enters the body of Brandon Llawcae, and the story suddenly grows in both scope and depth. Each of the three tales that follow could almost stand on their own—the story of a Pilgrim family and a witch hunt; the tale of Mrs. O’Keefe and her mid-century family broken by poverty; and the saga of Matthew Maddox and his twin brother Bran, whose actions will ultimately decide the fate of the world.

These tales are short, but deep—rich with emotional intensity, darkness, and stirring thematics. None of them are particularly YA, though some feature an adolescent character. Characters are stunningly well-defined, despite their great number and often-similar names. The story of Mrs. O’Keefe—Beezie, as she’s known as a girl—and her brother Chuck is particularly tragic and, despite shades of psychic ability (all of the magic here is obscure in origin and precise detail; for a story with a unicorn, it’s really more of a surreal mix of magical realism and sci-fi than fantasy), it’s really very grounded in real life. And it’s heartbreaking. Whereas in the early books in the Time Quintet, Mrs. O’Keefe is really only present to provide a convenient tragedy to prove Calvin’s depth, A Swiftly Tilting Planet forces us to empathize with her, to see her heroism and tragedy despite the fact that she’s also later an old hag who beats her kids.

And she’s really, truly our hero, as clearly explained by the novel’s conclusion. It would be easy to cite this volume as the beginning of L’Engle’s failure as a feminist writer. This is where Meg buckles down, becomes domesticated. Later, we’ll learn that she’s given up a career entirely for fear of making her daughters jealous as her own beautiful, successful mother did to her. But Meg’s still vital in this book, and, more, the entire thesis of the novel seems to be that no matter the tragedy or pain or ordinariness that defines the bulk of your life, it’s really the small acts of heroism which define you. And in that light, I don’t doubt for a second that L’Engle thought Meg—and even Mrs. O’Keefe—truly heroic.

Moreover, Charles Wallace finally truly grows in A Swiftly Tilting Planet. His character and flaws are fairly static in the earlier books in this series. He’s spooky, prescient, precocious, and entirely too proud. He begins the novel this way, too, but his relationship with Gaudior, and the trials they face, teach him to be humble. It’s a very Taoist book in this way—Charles Wallace’s journey is all about learning to be passive, to accept the whims of the forces of good, to resist acting out of pride. I can understand how this message might frustrate modern readers of YA, who are more accustomed to heroes spurred to action, but I can’t deny that I feel there’s a valuable lesson about a different type of heroism here—or deny that I pretty much adore Charles Wallace as a character.

Which is one of the reasons I’ll never forgive Madeleine L’Engle. Charles is absent from subsequent novels. He’s gone off to work for the government, as his father once did—by An Acceptable Time, he seems to be gone for good, which once seemed true for her father, too. Before her death, L’Engle implied that he was alive somewhere–she just didn’t know where. I’m not surprised in that. One of the features I most love about the Time Quintet generally is that they’re from disparate points in the family’s narrative. This makes them feel a little bit more like slices out of someone’s real life than preconceived stories. But that makes me worried, in a very real, childish way. L’Engle didn’t write about Charles Wallace’s fate before she died. Does that mean he was lost the the Echthroi? I sure hope not. Instead, I’d like to imagine—and hope—that he’s still out there somewhere, fighting the darkness.

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Very Far Away from Anywhere Else by Ursula K. Le Guin
Recommended.

I stumbled across Ursula Le Guin’s 1976 realistic young adult novel Very Far Away from Anywhere Else while searching for cheap ebooks. Amidst a sea of self-pubbed young adult paranormal, this quiet title stood out—and stood out even more because I’d never heard of it. I’m a fan of Le Guin, as both a writer and a human being, but I never knew that she dabbled in realist YA.

But dabble she did, and Very Far Away . . . , while more a novella than a novel-proper by modern YA standards, is an insightful, painful, and spot-on look at growing up smart in the suburbs. Our narrator is Owen, a lonely senior in high school who dreams of heading off to MIT. But those dreams are nearly derailed by his friendship and subsequent romance with a girl named Natalie, a talented, driven, and career-minded musician.

It’s a bit difficult to talk about the plot here, because, in a way, there isn’t one: this is simply Owen’s account of his last year in high school, stretching from his birthday (when, to his horror, his father buys him a car he doesn’t want) to his departure from his hometown. The narration here isn’t a standard one. Instead, Le Guin utilizes a frame story where Owen is speaking straight into a tape recorder. This means that large chunks of time are glossed over, and many events (including conversations I might have liked to see up-close) are repeated via breezy summary.

All that’s fine, though, because there are really two reasons to read Very Far Away from Anywhere Else, and neither of them are plot-related.

The first is because of the voice. Le Guin does an effective job of capturing the voice a sensitive, intelligent, but still clearly male character. Owen is undoubtedly adolescent (such as when he recounts his decision to fall in love with Natalie), but also empathetic and astute. Even when he’s subtly contrasting the life of Natalie—a girl driven to succeed in a male-dominated field no matter the cost—with the traditional, family-oriented life of his mother, it’s easy to forget that he’s being written by a woman, and, worse, written by such a well-known one. Owen isn’t Ursula; Owen is Owen, and he seems to come to us fully-realized, born in armor out of the head of a god, so to speak.

The second reason to read Very Far Away from Anywhere Else is because of the details. Owen and Natalie live in a sharply-rendered California suburb, a world of foggy beaches and torrential downpours. They discuss their dreams in Natalie’s sparsely decorated, echoing upper-class home, and, though the story takes place in a time contemporary with its writing, Owen’s quest for college financial aid and the off-hand mentions of college applications still ring very true today.

But my favorite detail was that of Thorn, a paracosm that Owen developed as a child and shares with Natalie. This is as close as Le Guin gets to genre writing here, but it’s never indulgent. In fact, Owen recounts his imaginary world with more than a little sheepishness. He knows he’s sharing something that makes him vulnerable, different—but Natalie’s sensitive reaction reveals how strong their connection really is.

This is a slim book, one which would otherwise be a nice palette cleanser between weightier reads if it weren’t for the fact that it has a very melancholy tone itself. Still, it’s a worthwhile endeavor. Though it was written a long time ago, I suspect it will still ring true for modern teens, particularly those who have never felt quite at home in their home towns.

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