The New World by Patrick Ness

Somehow, I missed the memo that Patrick Ness wrote a short story prequel for his Chaos Walking Trilogy. I didn’t hear about it until this week, when a former co-worker mentioned that she’d picked up the books, hoping they’d continue the story about Viola’s life on a generation ship. As you might know, generation ships are a subject near and dear to my heart. I’d also been somewhat frustrated by Viola’s sparse characterization in The Knife of Never Letting Go (admittedly, the only Chaos Walking book I’ve read so far), so I picked up a free copy of “The New World” for my nook, hoping it would give me some insight into her character.

Of course, much of what makes Viola Eade a compelling character in The Knife of Never Letting Go is her inscrutability, the mystery presented by her oblique, female mind in a world where narrator Todd is used to hearing the unfiltered thoughts of those around him. I was a bit worried that when we actually entered Viola’s perspective, there was no way that Ness could live up to that sort of promise.

But I was pleasantly surprised. Viola’s voice and characterization were easily the best part of “The New World.” She’s got a wry sense of humor that is both imminently readable and genuinely, thoroughly, and undoubtedly thirteen. Through this true-to-life voice, Ness builds a narrative of her life through jumbled flashbacks. And it’s in matters of adolescent characterization that he’s most successful here generally. Not only is Viola very precisely and accurately characterized, but her school rival Steff is also cunningly drawn.

“I’ll miss you,” Steff Talor said at our going away party, her voice twisting up high, making it sound even more insincere than it is.

All the caretaker families had gathered in the conference room of the Delta for the party, happy for any excuse to get drunk and say goodbye. Steff swept me up into her arms in a hug angled so that everyone around us would see her face, how sad she was that I was going away for a year. Then she let me go and collapsed into her mother’s arms with a wailing that was louder than anything else in the room.

Unfortunately, the broader premise of “The New World” is not nearly so incisively accurate. The idea is that Viola’s parents are picked to form a landing party, and so Viola, too, is recruited to be part of the first shuttle of explorers on the eponymous planet. But despite another character’s assurances that she’s brilliant and capable, the idea of employing a thirteen year old as a shuttle crew member (and locking her away for months with only her parents) strikes me as a preposterous one—almost surely a recipe for disaster. I had significant trouble believing that the generations who have prepared for this journey would not have anticipated the inevitable disaster we reach by this brief story’s conclusion.

And, worse, the emotional register of that disaster just felt off, loud and a touch cliché. That’s too bad, because Viola is a likeable character. But I found her plight more touching in The Knife of Never Letting Go–and she was a complete cipher there. Ultimately, though this is a nice bonus for Ness fans, it’s really not a necessary (or, as a standalone, even sufficient) read.

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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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Note: I know Thursdays are supposed to be my non-book-related blogging day, but I’m thisclose to finishing Daughter of Earth and my brain is all mushy and useless. Luckily, I’ve been reading a ton (words beget words!), so I have some reviews in the hopper. Of books I’ve enjoyed! I hope I don’t lose my street cred. Ahem.

A Long, Long Sleep by Anna Sheehan
Recommended.

It wasn’t until the halfway point of Anna Sheehan’s upcoming debut A Long, Long Sleep that it won me over. Initially, I feared that this science fictional retelling of Sleeping Beauty was little more than yet another entry in a long list of limp YA sci-fi novels. After all, the writing seemed to be on the wall. As was the case in XVI and Awaken (a book I didn’t even bother finishing), Sheehan includes a liberal sprinkling of FutureWords™; I worried that this would be yet another stand-in for genuine world building. And, as was true for both Delirium and Matched, Sheehan’s heroine, Rose, was quite passive and bland through the first hundred pages of the novel.

Then I reached what amounted to an extended IM conversation between Rose and a half-alien hybrid, and I realized how utterly charming I found her characters—and how much I was genuinely enjoying her book.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. A Long, Long Sleep is the story of Rosalinda Fitzroy, the daughter of a power-couple who own a massive, multinational corporation at some distant point in the future (our era is, at one point, referred to as “the Gates era,” a conceit I found pretty cute). Because Mommy and Daddy frequently jet-set around the solar system, they decide to stow Rose away in a stasis chamber, saving her from the horror of being a latch-key kid. Of course, this has the unfortunate side effect of prolonging her childhood exponentially. On those rare occasions when she’s let out, she slowly comes to befriend, and then fall in love with, a neighbor-boy in a time-shifted romance that somewhat resembles Audrey Niffenger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife.

Unfortunately, her parents kick the bucket, and she gets left frozen for more than sixty years, neatly ending their nascent romance.

Most of this is told in flashback. The narrative begins when Rose is awakened by a strange boy who stumbles across her in a basement. She’s emaciated, her body ravaged by the effects of stasis. But the doctors cobble her back together well enough that she’s able to go to school, in the hopes that she’ll one day be able to take over the massive conglomerate she’s inherited.

Of course, the current stakeholders aren’t so pleased with this new development. While Rose is distracted with several boys (including one really awesome kinda alien named Otto; more on him below), someone is plotting to kill her . . .

In recounting this basic synopsis, I can’t help but be pleased by how fundamentally SFnal Sheehan’s premise is. This is definitely soft-SF, and the romance and love squares (love rhombuses?) are unlikely to appeal to hard SF readers or, frankly, boys. Still, the science fiction conceits are absolutely central to the premise, and the way Sheehan explores both stasis technology and genetic engineering shows real consideration for the complexities of both. While a lot of softer SF for teens these days is utterly hand wavy, Sheehan’s world is, instead, largely thoughtfully crafted. There’s some silly stuff here (an apocalypse caused by genetically modified corn; telepathy), but these are forgivable world-building sins when viewed in light of all the things that Sheehan gets right.

And she gets nothing righter than her characters. Rose herself is a somewhat difficult narrator. She starts the story as a bit of a poor little rich girl, and initially I hesitated over her strangely elevated diction. But this, as well as her passivity at the outset, are both well-explained given her background. After all, she’s a fabulously wealthy artiste (a trait that’s actually relevant, and not just an informed ability), and so I can forgive her, or at least understand, when she describes someone’s voice as “warm as a brown leather sofa.” And unlike all of the Bella Swan clones out there, the blander notes of her personality are, in fact, seen as flaws—the result of an abusive childhood. Unusual for the genre, Rose must display actual growth in order to thrive in her new environment.

More, Sheehan gives us not only a relatable narrator and main character, but also a host of well-developed, believable, and well-rounded male characters. Her romance with Xavier is described lovingly and touchingly; the crush she develops on her rescuer, Bren, is understandable and interesting and thorny. For once, a boy doesn’t just fall at our heroine’s feet!

But my favorite was easily Otto, a genetically engineered mutant owned by Rosalinda’s corporation. I must admit that I’m a sucker for alien romances (weird, I know), but Otto was so well-rendered that I suspect I’d feel this way regardless. His presence enables Sheehan to explore the ramifications of Rose’s wealth in an interesting way—the girl learns that she actually owns this mute, telepathic boy, and that she might someday be able to grant him his freedom. But, more, the friendship that grows between them is one of the more interesting ones I’ve seen in recent YA. I groaned a bit internally when I first saw that Sheehan was going to subject us to their IM conversations. Then I realized that these two characters interacted with such vitality and chemistry that I’d gladly read a whole book of their chat logs. Seriously (and I never say this sort of thing), Team Otto, all the way.

In the end, A Long, Long Sleep is the sort of lighter sci-fi fare that I think we need in YA right now. Though it might not be the most artistically daring novel I’ve read in ages, it’s solid, treats its characters respectfully, rather than as simple tools at the mercy of the plot, and it explores the logical ramifications of its central premises. It’s a thoughtful book, with a strong emotional undercurrent about loss and abuse. We’re set up for a second volume (though this one also gives us a satisfying conclusion), and I’m curious to see where Sheehan takes us next.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book for review purposes from the publisher and netgalley.com.

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