Dead to the World by Charlaine Harris

I’ll come right out and say it: I’ve been a bit jelly-brained recently. Between revisions of my novel, moving, and a stack of review books several feet tall, I’ve resorted to doing anything mindless to lighten the pressure on myself. Playing video games, watching Degrassi reruns on TeenNick . . . reading Charlaine Harris’s Dead to the World.

If the reviews of my goodreads friends are any indication, it’s typical to begin reviews of Harris’s works with these sorts of apologies. That’s because we all know these books are essentially fluffy wish fulfillment—and Dead to the World seems particularly, self-evidently so. It’s the plot thread under current rotation on True Blood, the tightened-up, television adaptation of Harris’s work, where sexy Viking Eric Northman is cursed by witches to lose his memory, holes up in psychic waitress Sookie Stackhouse’s ancestral abode, and schtups her.

But I don’t really feel like making any apologies for reading this, even if I can’t deny the bubblegum nature of the book, either. Why, wish fulfillment novels aimed at men—dirty little screeds like JP Donleavy’s The Ginger Man are seen as real literature, no matter how many inappropriately-exposed phalluses they contain. So I think that there’s no reason why Dead to the World shouldn’t be evaluated on its own merits, either.

And Harris really nails women’s wish fulfillment. Sookie’s plight—chronically and fundamentally alone, despite her many romantic prospects—renders her a truly sympathetic character. While her actions are sometimes a bit ridiculous when we see them played out on TV, Harris’s strong, first-person narration renders her, instead, empathetic. She’s really a lower-class everywoman; bright, but not brilliant. Her anxieties over money, over the gossipy nature of her small town, over her irascible brother are really needed to understand her sometimes inscrutable romantic behavior. Though Sookie’s been treated as a pariah because of her psychic abilities in her town of Bon Temps, she’s really just looking for the prince charming she was promised as a girl—someone who will step in and take care of her. And, in light of her rather deep and unrelenting solitude, well-reflected in her colloquial, vividly-voiced narration, it’s difficult to fault her in this.

As you might suspect in a book that, just beneath the surface, under a slightly jumbled plot filled with supernatural creatures, is really about solitude, it’s in the scenes were Sookie connects with Eric that the story has the most resonance. Sure, it’s lightly porny wish-fulfillment (Sookie refers to her own anatomy as a “nub”), but it’s also very affecting, as Eric and Sookie find one another despite the significant losses they’ve faced. The rather human scenes at the novel’s conclusion, featuring Sookie and brother Jason, are also fairly strong—the emotional connection between Sookie and these male characters is certainly deep.

Less effective are Sookie’s romantic flirtations with Alcide and bartender Sam, and her hollow reunion with ex-boyfriend vamp Bill Compton. The way the menfolk of Bon Temps are all drawn to Sookie was a little eye roll-worthy even by romance novel standards, and the treatment of romantic rival Debbie Van Pelt felt shrill and ill-justified even in light of attempts on Sookie’s life.

And the larger plot surrounding Sookie’s story with Eric was just a touch too epic for my tastes, featuring weres and witches and panthers and a cast of characters which would easily rival any high fantasy in sheer numbers. There’s a two-pronged mystery at the heart of Harris’s plot—Eric’s memory loss, and the disappearance of Jason Stackhouse—but I didn’t find either prong particularly compelling.

I suspect this is because Harris was really stretching her storytelling abilities here. She’s nowhere more successful than when her story is small—intimate. In scenes were the conversation (or the, ahem, action) is limited to two participants, it was an enormously successful book—believable, despite the fact that one of the characters in question is an ancient Viking vampire.

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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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Gone, Gone, Gone by Hannah Moskowitz
Recommended.

I meant to hold off on starting Hannah Moskowitz’s 2012 release Gone, Gone, Gone until later. After all, I’m in possession of quite a sizable pile of books to review, and Gone, Gone, Gone won’t be released for a year—it seemed prudent to save it for another time. But it called out to me from my eReader on a long bus ride, and once I started this terse, powerful little novel about two boys falling in during the DC sniper shootings, I just couldn’t quit. Moskowitz’s impactful prose, transmitted via the very real voices of Lio and Craig, kept sucking me in over and over again. While I was in New York for BEA, I found myself ignoring my ever-growing stack of free books and hoping instead for subway delays just so I could keep reading—the story was that real, that powerful.

I don’t doubt that part of the reason I found Craig and Lio’s story so enticing was that I could relate to it. At fifteen in 2002, Craig and Lio are just two years younger than me. During the historical period in question, I was just graduating high school, enmeshed in my own first love experiences and grieving my own dramatic/traumatic childhood. I remember getting out of school early on 9/11, wandering around town in a daze with my own punk rock (and largely gay) coterie of friends. I remember, too, the DC sniper shootings—and the strange, tenuous link that there seemed to be between the two events. Though Moskowitz bungles a few minor details (“I’m being emo” was not yet part of high school vocabulary—it was a term reserved almost entirely for the shoe-gazer indie genre that few high schoolers cared about; casual homophobia even in reasonably welcoming suburban schools was all too common at the time, rather than surprising), it’s mostly spot-on for the tensions, anxieties, and emotions of the time.

And Gone, Gone, Gone is a story about emotions, really—of learning to get over your past, of acknowledging your love of the damaged, of reminding yourself that you still live and breathe even as the rest of the world falls apart. The plot itself is simple: Craig, who has been hoarding animals since his exboyfriend went nuts after his dad’s death on 9/11, wakes up one morning to find them all gone following a break-in. He and Lio—one-time cancer patient who lost a twin brother to the disease—work together to recover them even as terror sets in across their Maryland suburb thanks to the DC sniper shootings. They start to fall for each other—but must come to terms with the grief and anxiety of both of their pasts, first.

Their voices were incredibly true-to-life, the driving force of the novel, really. I was fonder of Lio; he’s got a harder edge than Craig, who was a bit twee and woobie-ish for me. Craig’s prone to melodrama, but it’s a realistic sort of hand-wringing, one I recognized from my own adolescence. It’s the tendency to mythologize certain people and events and to blow small tragedies out of proportion despite one’s fairly comfortable existence. Had the book been in Craig’s voice alone, I would have likely found the narration tiresome, but Lio’s voice—reticent, dry—offered a refreshing contrast.

Honestly, it was these voices, as they relayed their tender, burgeoning romance, which truly carried the novel for me. I don’t think I was ever wholly convinced by the voice in Moskowitz’s recent Invincible Summer–I was always very aware that Chase was a construct, a character created by a precocious, opinionated young woman with her own very distinctive voice. I anticipated that the same would be true for Gone, Gone, Gone–that it would also be a novel dominated by my awareness of the author. But instead, I found myself sucked in again and again. Craig and Lio were born fully-armored, it seems, from Moskowitz’s keyboard. They’re the kind of characters that feel more like friends than figments of someone’s imagination, the sort of characters whose non-existence you can’t help but mourn once you reach the novel’s conclusion.

It was the novel’s conclusion, incidentally, that posed my largest stumbling block in whole-heartedly enjoying Gone, Gone, Gone. Unlike some readers, I felt it was adequately paced; the dual ticking-clock of both the sniper shootings and the rescue of Craig’s pets provided mounting tension throughout. Sadly, by the end of the novel both plotlines sort of fizzle. It’s a bit of an “is that it?!” kind of ending, and while I appreciate Moskowitz’s aim to give us a novel that’s not altogether tidy, I would have preferred something that felt at least more conclusive.

I also wasn’t entirely sure about Moskowitz’s approach to identity, but I knew that might have been a sticking point for me going in. A few months ago, she and I (and several other posters) debated issues of queer identity in YA on Absolute Write. We were discussing the pervasiveness of “issue books”—and whether or not we’ve reached a time period when it’s appropriate (or honest) to write characters who “just happen” to be gay. Ironically, I really liked Moskowitz’s approach to sexual identity here. This isn’t a coming out story, but it’s still a story written with awareness of queer identity and the difficulties that identity might pose for modern teens. Though most parents in the book are accepting, for example, Lio’s dad seems to be holding out somewhat naively for a change of heart in his son.

But I wasn’t quite as convinced by her approach to racial identity. Craig is black, but other than a throwaway line or two (stating his racial identity explicitly), this has no impact on his character. It’s not that I think that all books about black kids should be issue books, either—in fact, I feel quite the opposite. Nor should all black characters be, say, treated as racial stereotypes, of course. But Craig is a black, gay, rich kid living in a largely white suburb, and on the edge of a city with striking racial and socioeconomic tensions. It would have added some interesting complexity to both his character and the wider novel had Moskowitz brought her deft, subtle hand to issues of Craig’s racial identity, the way she did to both Craig and Lio’s sexual identities.

Still, this is, broadly speaking, a sensitively-written and enveloping book. Despite my (admittedly slight) reservations, I couldn’t help but feel as if Craig and Lio had become dear friends by Gone, Gone, Gone‘s conclusion—and can’t help but feel that you’d be a fool not to read it, too.

A review copy of this book 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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