Midsummer Printz Roundup
20/7/13 10:03![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomySomeday My Printz Will Come and Crossreferencing are letting me down on the Printz predictions/ literary YA book-chat circuit!
So, if I have no one else's opinions to rail against, I may be forced to provide you with some of my own.
A Corner of White, Jaclyn Moriarty
An unusual portal fantasy/coming of age/epistolary novel about two worlds connected by very narrow cracks, too narrow for a person to slip through but wide enough for letters to be exchanged between Madeleine Tully (who lives in the Cambridge of our world, and is having a hard time coping with the fact that her mother has left her very wealthy father and now they have to eat canned beans) and Elliot Baranski, who lives in a fantasy world where people are sometimes attacked by hostile Colors -- and he's not definitively sure whether his father was attacked by a Purple or ran off with another woman.
The worldbuilding is not the most developed or consistent, but it's not quite as twee as it initially seems (it's still pretty twee) and there's some nice character development and moral complexity. I'm not quite sure if the sudden shifts of tone when we find out that Madeleine's mother has incurable brain cancer, which then gets cured are a feature or a bug.
Yellowcake, Margo Lanagan
I love everything that Margo Lanagan writes. These are very densely, lushly written short stories; her calling card is to drop you off in a world completely different from this one -- or just different enough that you can tie yourself in knots trying to figure it out -- and then not explain anything at all, which can be frustrating. I won't argue about whether these are "really" YA stories or not; I think they're too sophisticated for a lot of teens, but the people who get them will really, really get them. That said, I don't love this as much as I've loved Lanagan's other collections, maybe because what might be the best story ("Catastrophic Disruption of the Head") is very dark and also a story I've read before.
(TW for rape; possibly other things I've forgotten; it's a pretty dark book.)
17 & Gone, Nova Ren Suma
A girl becomes haunted by the ghosts of girls who have disappeared from around the East Coast at the age of seventeen; or, a girl learns about the disappearance of a seventeen-year-old girl from a summer camp near her house, and starts obsessing about her and having hallucinations. Yes, it's one of those books where there's a lot of ambiguity about how much of the supernatural happenings are in the character's head and how much are objectively real, but it's actually really well done, with sharp prose and a wonderfully depicted relationship between Lauren and her mother, and the complexities of being at that phase of your life where you desperately want and need to be independent, and desperately want and need to be protected, at the same time.
It is straight-up scary both as a ghost story and a mental illness story, and also, trigger warning for self-harm or attempted suicide or accidental self-harm caused by ghost possession.
Could be an interesting read-alike to Caitlin Kiernan's "The Drowning Girl" (but only if you can do without sleep for a while); in both, I'm a little uneasy about how they deal with mental illness, not from a standpoint of "I think you got it wrong" but a standpoint of "I would want to be really sure that you got it right." (Suma seems to have really done her research, and I have no reason to doubt her on that point.)
Black Helicopters, Blythe Woolston
The story of Valkyrie's life from her childhood as the daughter of an extreme right-wing off-the-grid survivalist in Montana to her adolescence when she decides to become a suicide bomber. This book is strongest for being so entirely non-ideological -- there are no great pronouncements about What Drives People To Terrorism or How Do We Really Know The Difference Between A Freedom Fighter And A Terrorist. There's just the moment-to-moment experience of Valley's eyes and ears. You don't have to ask yourself whether the narrative approves or disapproves of Valley; you're so deep inside her viewpoint that it becomes irrelevant. Woolston is excellent at the telling detail, the moment that focuses your attention on a single vivid image. Valley herself is an extremely complex character, scared and brave and smart and ruthless, resourceful enough that you can never just see her as a pawn or a victim. I think this is one that's going to stay with me.
TW for rape, suicide
Previously read books that make my longlist:
Eleanor & Park, The Summer Prince, Yacqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, Midwinterblood, Rose Under Fire
So, if I have no one else's opinions to rail against, I may be forced to provide you with some of my own.
A Corner of White, Jaclyn Moriarty
An unusual portal fantasy/coming of age/epistolary novel about two worlds connected by very narrow cracks, too narrow for a person to slip through but wide enough for letters to be exchanged between Madeleine Tully (who lives in the Cambridge of our world, and is having a hard time coping with the fact that her mother has left her very wealthy father and now they have to eat canned beans) and Elliot Baranski, who lives in a fantasy world where people are sometimes attacked by hostile Colors -- and he's not definitively sure whether his father was attacked by a Purple or ran off with another woman.
The worldbuilding is not the most developed or consistent, but it's not quite as twee as it initially seems (it's still pretty twee) and there's some nice character development and moral complexity. I'm not quite sure if the sudden shifts of tone when we find out that Madeleine's mother has incurable brain cancer, which then gets cured are a feature or a bug.
Yellowcake, Margo Lanagan
I love everything that Margo Lanagan writes. These are very densely, lushly written short stories; her calling card is to drop you off in a world completely different from this one -- or just different enough that you can tie yourself in knots trying to figure it out -- and then not explain anything at all, which can be frustrating. I won't argue about whether these are "really" YA stories or not; I think they're too sophisticated for a lot of teens, but the people who get them will really, really get them. That said, I don't love this as much as I've loved Lanagan's other collections, maybe because what might be the best story ("Catastrophic Disruption of the Head") is very dark and also a story I've read before.
(TW for rape; possibly other things I've forgotten; it's a pretty dark book.)
17 & Gone, Nova Ren Suma
A girl becomes haunted by the ghosts of girls who have disappeared from around the East Coast at the age of seventeen; or, a girl learns about the disappearance of a seventeen-year-old girl from a summer camp near her house, and starts obsessing about her and having hallucinations. Yes, it's one of those books where there's a lot of ambiguity about how much of the supernatural happenings are in the character's head and how much are objectively real, but it's actually really well done, with sharp prose and a wonderfully depicted relationship between Lauren and her mother, and the complexities of being at that phase of your life where you desperately want and need to be independent, and desperately want and need to be protected, at the same time.
It is straight-up scary both as a ghost story and a mental illness story, and also, trigger warning for self-harm or attempted suicide or accidental self-harm caused by ghost possession.
Could be an interesting read-alike to Caitlin Kiernan's "The Drowning Girl" (but only if you can do without sleep for a while); in both, I'm a little uneasy about how they deal with mental illness, not from a standpoint of "I think you got it wrong" but a standpoint of "I would want to be really sure that you got it right." (Suma seems to have really done her research, and I have no reason to doubt her on that point.)
Black Helicopters, Blythe Woolston
The story of Valkyrie's life from her childhood as the daughter of an extreme right-wing off-the-grid survivalist in Montana to her adolescence when she decides to become a suicide bomber. This book is strongest for being so entirely non-ideological -- there are no great pronouncements about What Drives People To Terrorism or How Do We Really Know The Difference Between A Freedom Fighter And A Terrorist. There's just the moment-to-moment experience of Valley's eyes and ears. You don't have to ask yourself whether the narrative approves or disapproves of Valley; you're so deep inside her viewpoint that it becomes irrelevant. Woolston is excellent at the telling detail, the moment that focuses your attention on a single vivid image. Valley herself is an extremely complex character, scared and brave and smart and ruthless, resourceful enough that you can never just see her as a pawn or a victim. I think this is one that's going to stay with me.
TW for rape, suicide
Previously read books that make my longlist:
Eleanor & Park, The Summer Prince, Yacqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, Midwinterblood, Rose Under Fire
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20/7/13 15:50 (UTC)