I should say that I wasn’t going to write this post. I realize that that’s a very ominous statement with which to open a blog post, but I feel like it’s a necessary caveat here. I’ve been busy writing and I wasn’t going to blog, for a variety of reasons that will likely become apparent, but the blogging thoughts are overtaking my mind. So, blog I must.

(It will make my friend Sean happy, in any case.)

The other day, Sean wrote a blog post about dystopian literature. In it, he wrote:

Most of these dystopian novels are written by Americans, in the majority of cases for American readers. A smaller number are written in Britain, which hasn’t exactly been blameless these past ten years either. The teenagers and adults who make up the bulk of these books’ intended audience will never experience the kinds of abuses of power they describe. They will, however, sit idly by while those exact same abuses of power are committed on a daily basis by their governments, for their ostensible benefit, against innocent people whose names they will probably never learn and whose voices they will never hear.

So, why is dystopian fiction so popular? Because it’s a band-aid. It’s a convenient way for readers to vicariously experience the thrill of indignation over injustice from a position of absolute safety.

It’s an interesting argument, though I don’t agree with it. It’s not that I necessarily disagree with the political positions he espouses, though mine are, perhaps, quite a bit more . . . multifaceted? thorny? than his. I think that this thorniness is in part due to the very fact that I’m American, and he’s not (well, he sort of is, but I’d leave it up to Sean to talk about that; mostly, he’s Irish)–I’m both part of the political machine he’s criticizing as well as well as aware of the deeper emotional nuances of what happened during and after 9/11. I’m also highly aware of the way political discourse works in America. Here, you don’t talk about politics or religion at dinner parties.

(Sean tells me that an American dinner party sounds downright boring.)

I think of my blog a bit like a dinner party. I want all sorts of readers to be welcome here. I don’t want to scare you off with my opinions on politics or religion, and so I stay largely quiet about that stuff, although readers may grok a sort of holistic sense of where I stand politically over time (like, if you have a suspicion that I’m a feminist, because I’m always going on about feminism in Doctor Who, well then you’d be right).

I wonder if what Sean perceives to be a failure of American YA authors–particularly authors of dystopian works–to seem adequately politically engaged really comes out of that. Particularly in writing for a young audience, I would imagine that many writers don’t want to come out and say, hey, kids, you’re really the dystopian villains here. It’s off-putting; in Miss Manners parlance, it’s rude. And so we have political arguments buried under metaphorical and subtextual layers.

Those arguments are certainly there, though. My sense after reading the entire Hunger Games series is that Suzanne Collins’ message was very close to what Sean is arguing. We’re the Capitol, not the districts. We distract ourselves with fluffy bloodsports at the expense of those who are hurting. This is what made the whole Hunger Games nail polish thing so absurd. How obviously and blindly do we want to ape the habits of the Capitol when they’re a metaphor meant to comment on the commercial nature of . . . well, us?

If you’re a careful reader of dystopian literature, you see this again and again: arguments and criticisms of our current society buried beneath the surface. In Uglies, for example, our contemporary society led to widespread environmental downfall. The dystopian government acts in a way that encourages young people to get plastic surgery, develop eating disorders, and engage in cutting (everyone in mainstream society is also an idiot). To me, this doesn’t sound solely like it’s a message meant to give young readers an outlet–to let them ” vicariously experience the thrill of indignation over injustice from a position of absolute safety.” I suspect that these aspects of the text are meant by the author as a critique of our own, current society. They’re just couched in sufficient metaphor to make them approachable for a young, politically diverse, largely American audience. And honestly, if an author’s goal is to inspire political change or enlightenment in a young audience, I suspect this is the way to do it. You don’t shout at your audience about how wrong their positions of political privilege is. You persuade them, through use of abundant metaphor and through compelling characters. You let them connect point A (the novel) to point B (their political situation) themselves. I mean, my peers who are out there Occupying Wall Street grew up learning about the evils of war and government, about the importance of fighting back and protesting, through books like Animorphs and The Giver.

I can’t pretend as if all YA dystopian literature functions this way, of course. Some is fairly bubble gum. But some of everything is fairly bubble gum. Which brings me to the topic of insipidness. A few days ago, my agent sis SE Sinkhorn posted a rebuttal to the New York Daily News article which had whinged about insipid YA by authors like Walter Dean Myers (of all authors to pick on, what a weird one, but I digress). It contained the following quote, from Catherine McCredie, senior editor of young adult fiction at Penguin Group Australia:

This is (to my ears) a fresh and welcome attack on contemporary young adult literature. Those of us who produce YA literature are used to hearing that too much of it is too dark, but we don’t usually hear it’s too insipid. And I agree that most of it probably is, just as most contemporary adult novels probably are – especially compared with the ancient classics.

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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Shut Out by Kody Keplinger
Recommended.

Second books can be tricky. Even when authors produce standalone novels, eschewing the literary world’s current hunger for sequels and series, they have a difficult task ahead of them: producing work that’s more than just a retread of earlier success. In some ways, I know that comparisons between Kody Keplinger’s first novel, The DUFF, and her second, Shut Out, are inevitable. It’s not just their bright, girly covers that tie them together but thematics (a teenage girl’s ownership of her sexuality) and character (the poor family of origin with a complicated past; the control-freak girl; the supportive friends). But, while Shut Out does occasionally falter in much the same way that The DUFF did, it also stands quite capably on its own merits.

First for the bad: I thougt that the opening chapters of Shut Out suffered from the same sometimes-awkward writing that I noticed a year ago when reading The DUFF. The dialog in both begins overly deliberate and sometimes clunky; there are too many awkward physical descriptors and said bookisms. But you’d be wrong to judge either book on these first chapters. As Keplinger warms up, so do her prose stylistics, becoming more natural and confidently voiced. More, I was quickly enveloped in the story.

I suspect quite a bit of what appeals to me about Keplinger’s books is how familiar the lives of her protagonists feel. Shut Out brings us another working class family. Lissa lives at home with her dad, who has been wheelchair-bound since the car accident that also took away her mother, and with her older brother, who has dropped out of graduate school to help out at home. The men of her family are fans of the local high school football team, so when Lissa brings home Randy, a high school football star, he quickly becomes a part of the family. There’s something real, tender, and sad about the way the men in this book bond while Lissa makes them food and mothers them.

This is the first of Lissa’s many foolish and real choices in Shut Out. Like Bella Swan, she falls into a caretaker role that isn’t entirely fair. However, it was clear to me that this domesticity wasn’t necessarily meant to be a positive trait, but rather a realistic reaction to feeling motherless and adrift and to having one’s needs ignored by the grown-ups around her.

People generally ignore Lissa’s needs. Her boyfriend, for example, is so embroiled in a rivalry with the high school soccer team that he abandons their trysts entirely to play pranks with his teammates. Lissa finally gets fed up—she proposes a sex strike against the boys on both teams until they agree to abandon the rivalry entirely.

This sex strike is the central premise of Shut Out, and its selling point (it’s a retread of the Lysistrata). As Lissa unites with the other girls, she begins to struggle against the pressures and stereotypes they all face. I found this message more organic and interesting than the one found in The DUFF. Honestly, I never entirely believed Keplinger’s first book’s message that “we all feel like DUFFs sometimes”—far more convincing to me was the message here that “teenage girls face all sorts of sexual pressures and deserve to be in control of their sexual lives despite the schizophrenic attitudes of our society toward female sexuality.” It’s a messier, and less optimistic theme, maybe, but it rang truer for me. As in our world, in the world of Shut Out some girls do it and some girls don’t. But nearly all of them struggle against their reputations.

But far from being a merely didactic undercurrent, this message actually provides a dramatic reveal about one of the characters—one I didn’t see coming at all, and which spurred me to page back through the book and examine it in this new light. It’s a neat little narrative trick, and one with Keplinger utilizes deftly, clearly illustrating her control over her plot and characters.

As the story progresses, Lissa continues to stumble forward. Again, she’s a protagonist who often makes terrible choices, who is often blind to the truth in front of her, who is sometimes selfish and stubborn if only to cover up her own weaknesses. Like Bianca from The DUFF, she suffers from certain control issues—but they’re more fully fledged here, and realistically problematic. I found Lissa to be a terrifically messy heroine. Her mistakes might not be fun for teenagers to read, if only because they likely hit a little too close to home, but they’re certainly true to life. She’s struggling—with her mother’s death, with her father’s disability, with change and with sex and with growing up.

Her problems aren’t all solved in the end, although Keplinger again concludes on an optimistic note. We’re given the impression that Lissa is a work-in-progress—as we all are, really. And as a reader who craves honesty even from books emblazoned with neons and pinks, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Disclosure: This book was generously provided by the publisher for review purposes. I’m also personally acquainted with the author.

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The Magician King by Lev Grossman
Recommended.

If you’re a fan of young adult literature, you’ve probably seen Sady Doyle’s In Praise of Joanne Rowling’s Hermione Granger series. Lovingly detailed, this feminist critique cut Harry Potter down to size a little. In Doyle’s reimagining, he’s nothing more than a privileged jock—though certainly even in our own universe charges of privilege could be leveled against him. Harry is the chosen one, special as much for reasons of birth as effort, while hardworking Hermione toils away to earn her rather narrower slice of the pie.

It seems that Lev Grossman is all-too-aware of the pitfalls of writing about a male, white, chosen hero. And why shouldn’t he be? Quentin Coldwater, hero to 2009′s New York Time’s bestselling The Magicians is certainly male, white, and special. He arrives on the scene of magical academy Brakebills in a show of spectacular and unusual magic. Unlike most students, his gifts can’t be easily classified. And, though it’s not his efforts that help him reach Fillory, a Narnia-like land in another universe, he shares a special connection with this country—a country where he eventually becomes king.

But unlike Harry, Quentin is truly a young adult—emphasis on the adult. Because he’s meandering toward his twenties over the course of the novel rather than through his teens, he’s lost a little bit of Harry’s heroic, intrinsic appeal. Quentin is harder, more aware of the tensions that exist between his rich fantasy life and the slightly less fantastic (though undeniably magical) world around him. He’s mourning the magic that was lost to him as a teen. And this renders him quite insufferable. In fact, that’s the biggest criticism I’ve encountered of The Magicians–that Quentin is unlikeable, privileged, whiny. Why should he be so special, readers seem to ask, that I should have to spend time with him?

Grossman neatly answers this question in two ways in The Magician King, next month’s highly anticipated sequel to The Magicians. The first way is the simpler: he lets Quentin grow. If Quentin of The Magicians was a heartbroken high school boy who has begun to fear that magic does not exist, then Quentin of The Magician King is one who has accepted that it does, and now must begin to carve out a meaningful life of his own in spite of this. There’s still a lot of introspection in this volume as Quentin travels across the oceans of Fillory, between the outer islands, and all around the coastal areas of Earth. But Quentin’s grown in self-awareness. Though some of his romantic choices are a bit eye roll-worthy, they’re easily understood within the context of Quentin’s internal life. And, having faced loss, he’s kinder now, too. It’s hard to hate someone who is so good with children.

The language during Quentin’s portion of the novel is captivating, nearly hypnotic. Rich setting is abundantly described—Fillory is still beautiful, and Grossman manages to weave allusion so seamlessly into his text that you’re never quite sure if he’s trying to create something original or to simply conjure images from the collective unconscious. That might sound like a slight, but it’s not meant to be; this is a book for genre lovers, and it’s perfectly evocative of all those books you read over and over again as a kid until the spines cracked and the glue dried and the pages fell out. There’s an adult sensibility to his approach, but not a cynical one. It’s as if Grossman is trying to keep his tongue firmly in cheek, but can’t because he’s smiling too hard—I suspect he loves Fillory just as much as Quentin does.

(And just as much as I do. I must confess that in reading both The Magician King and its predecessor, I had a distinct feeling that I was reading a book written just for me. I understand why Quentin might seem unpalatable to many readers—I understand how his problems are the problems of the privileged, the blessed, the bored. Like Quentin, I was a bright, imaginative kid whose dreams nudged her increasingly toward lands that should have been out of her reach—not only nonexistent fantasy lands, but academia, too. In a way, I would have been happy forever there, but it’s intrinsically a transient space. And you can’t go back to the world of the lower middle class after living in the Ivory Tower and not see it through changed eyes—you can try to be happy in your desk job, but you won’t. What’s left for you? Making your own worlds, your own adventures. But what does that even mean? Quentin is happier in Fillory; I’m happier working from home and writing books. But are we happy? Can we ever be? Does our unhappiness arise out of our situations, or our natures?

But I digress, severely.)

The other way that Grossman tackles the problem of Quentin’s fundamental privilege is by shifting the focus through half of the book to someone who has not been so lucky—to Julia, the Hermione of this universe, a hard working hedge witch who was denied access to Brakebills. Her storyline parallels Quentin’s life through most of the first book—depression and unhappiness grow within her like a dark pearl after she fails her entrance exams. But she refuses to tolerate not being chosen. She works. Eventually a world of magical flophouses and three-ringed binders full of spells open to her. The references here are perfect–of course there would be magical chatrooms and computer BBSes—and of course these lands would be filled with characters much like Penny of the first novel. Punk, scruffy, and terribly earnest.

If Quentin had everything handed to him—if he’s a little bit of a Harry—then Julia’s story is one of sacrifice and pain. She labors. And Grossman is keen enough to reward her for that. Within The Magician King is a nearly self-contained novel about a magician queen who earns her title. It’s wholly satisfying, and a nice counterpoint to Quentin’s perpetual lack of fulfillment.

(Speaking of, the novel ends perhaps predictably on an open-ended note. It seems we’ve yet to be promised a third volume. This upsets me. This should be—no, needs to be—a trilogy. I understand that Quentin is a fundamentally unhappy sort, that he won’t ever attain nirvana. But I want resolution, if not for my own life, then for Quentin’s.)

There’s a lot here—in fact, my biggest problem with The Magician King was that there is sometimes too much. The journey twists and turns and then turns again. The result is breathless and exhausting. I’d be loath to suggest Grossman tame his sprawling story, but I do wish he’d let himself luxuriate in it. A bit more time spent in any of these lands (Fillory, Venice, Connecticut) would have been fine; it’s a rare thing when a fantasy novel could be almost double its length and not feel bloated. This one could. But really, I loved the journey—the characters, the setting, the details, the themes. And so I’d be remiss if I did anything but whole-heartedly recommend it.

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

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