To Be Young Is To Know Solitude

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 121
S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

Ponyboy Curtis never wanted to join a street gang and fight with switchblades, but survival made it necessary. The streets are divided between the working-class Greasers, who pride themselves on their swagger and their lustrous hair, and the Socs, who drive flash cars and wear the slickest clothes money can buy. The groups fight, not because they have personal animosity, but because it’s what they do. Existential boredom leaves them with little besides the fight.

S.E. Hinton’s debut novel, written when she was still in high school, is sometimes credited as the beginning of the young adult genre. Other authors had written for teenaged readers before, but Hinton took an unprecedented tack. She wrote a teenager’s story of conflict and incipient adulthood, not for finger-wagging moralistic purposes, but simply because it’s his story. Hinton refuses to pass judgement, even when Ponyboy, her first-person narrator, spirals into self-recrimination.

The Greasers, by definition, have nothing. Ponyboy is an orphan, raised by his eldest brother, who’s forced to become a parent to teens at only twenty. His middle brother dropped out to get a job, basically because that’s what middle kids do. Other greasers dodge drunken parents, or practice fights in city parks, simply to pass the time. Ponyboy admits he doesn’t like most of them, but calls them his friends, because they can rely only upon one another.

Hinton putatively began writing this novel because a high school friend received a vicious beat-down, simply for walking unaccompanied. This event, and the trauma it caused not only him but everyone who loved him, becomes the inciting incident of the novel. Her feuding gangs hate one another without knowing one another, and fight because it gives their otherwise shapeless lives meaning. Hinton implies the battles would stop if participants simply spoke to one another.

One evening at the drive-in, Ponyboy and his friends encounter some well-scrubbed, middle-class girls. These girls rebuff the more aggressive Greasers, but one of them finds Ponyboy, with his big eyes and poetic soul, interesting. She wants to learn how the other half lives. But since Greasers and Socs never talk, this innocent encounter gets quickly misconstrued. An argument turns into a fight, turns into a knifing. Ponyboy flees a manslaughter accusation.

S.E. Hinton

Hinton never gives specific dates, and few places. Her gang of Greasers prefers Elvis, while the Socs favor the Beatles, which gives an approximate time. And her descriptions of dusty city streets, high-school rodeos, and rolling country hills locate the story in the southern Great Plains. Observant readers will recognize Hinton’s native Tulsa, Oklahoma. Which leads to an important question: is being rich in America’s despised hinterland any better than being poor?

The entire novel asks how an innocent, poetic teenager would handle everything that could go wrong in life, going wrong in quick succession. As the youngest Greaser, at only fourteen, Ponyboy is unprepared for battles against older, larger boys. When one battle leaves a Soc dead, he’s unprepared for the fugitive life. Isolation forces him into soul-searching that most boys don’t face until much later. Even soul-searching uncovers some conclusions he can’t yet handle.

Ponyboy and his friends find themselves in a no-win situation. If they flee their crimes, they’ll live as fugitives forever, with nothing to show for lives that have barely begun. But if they take accountability, they’ll face a criminal justice system that, they already understand, is slanted against poor, long-haired teenagers, and they’ll still lose everything. They find themselves forced into a world where choices lack the moral clarity of children’s stories and simple fables they learned in school.

Perhaps more than the story itself, Hinton’s narrative clarity differs from her contemporaries. Other youth narrators, like Scout Finch and Holden Caulfield, aren’t really children, they’re adults remembering childhood from their Olympus-like perch. Ponyboy is a real kid, struggling to come to grips with the adult responsibilities thrust upon him. He lacks mature guidance, only advice from other kids trapped in these circumstances with him. He survives, not because adults give him easy answers, but because he keeps moving when everything around him collapses.

At only 180 pages, written in a conversational tone, this book isn’t difficult reading. Its intended high-school audience will read it quickly, but they’ll also find themselves confronted with questions they can’t put aside nearly so easily. Adult readers will struggle with many of the novel’s themes of existentialism, purpose, and identity. The deep-seated social dislocation which Hinton identified in post-WWII America haven’t been resolved over sixty years later.

The Only Path Through the Midnight Woods

Sarah Hollowell, A Dark and Starless Forest

Nine children and their teacher live a cloistered life in a secluded house in northern Indiana, practicing their magic and avoiding the outside world. Though these children, mostly girls (and one enby), will eventually grow into awesome powers, they’re currently too young to defend against a hostile world. Until they learn, they live by a few simple rules. Don’t use magic recklessly; don’t go into the forest; and above all, don’t cross Frank.

This novel’s Shirley Jackson-esque premise drew me in without hesitation. Like Jackson, Hollowell places her characters in a setting that physically isolates them from the larger world, forcing them to rely upon one another. Then she makes them, in different ways, unreliable. Throughout the novel, some oppressive presence looms constantly over the characters. But what is that presence and what does it want?

Derry, our first-person narrator, has a deeply conflicted relationship with her surrogate father, Frank. He’s taught her to control her superpowers since her parents unceremoniously dumped her at his doorstep. Frank is gentle, paternal, and patient, as long as Derry and the other students comply. But he punishes the slightest sign of willfulness strictly. And Derry is a restless teenager, learning to chafe at his authority.

Meanwhile, Derry has a secret: she and a few other students have discovered a secret tunnel leading to the forbidden forest. A tunnel only magically gifted students can access. This liberates them from Frank’s often arbitrary dominion, but at a cost: Derry and her sister Jane saw something in the wood. Derry won’t tell us what, but she believes it’s connected when, one summer midnight, Jane apparently disappears into darkness.

Hollowell creates a world defined by narrowness and constriction. Frank collects his students from parents frightened of their children’s nascent powers. Yet as the story develops, and Frank seems no closer to discovering where Jane went, Derry slowly realizes they only know what Frank tells them. What motivates Frank to teach his students, while protecting him from a putatively hostile world? He won’t tell, and Derry can’t guess.

Sarah Hollowell

To find answers, Derry must improve her supernatural abilities, and use them in ways Frank has never taught her. Though Derry describes her fellow students’ powers as magical, and Frank calls his students “alchemists,” the students don’t learn diverse spells from grimoires. Rather, they have unique powers which Frank helps them cultivate. The school thus looks less like Hogwart’s, more like Xavier’s School for Gifted Children.

Outside Frank’s door, the forbidden forest starts calling Derry. Soon enough, she breaks one of Frank’s inviolable rules and ventures in alone. There she finds a mysterious figure who promises to reveal the truth which Frank has spent years concealing. But how can Derry decide who’s telling the truth? And what must she do when the forest begins demanding more from her than she feels prepared to give?

It’s tempting to seek parallels in Hollowell’s narrative. Derry, our narrator, resembles Hollowell herself: bespectacled, fat (her word, not mine), and gender-nonconforming. The symbolism of the isolated childhood, the authoritative father figure, and the desire to see the outside world, are pretty glaring. On a tenth-grade book report level, Hollowell’s themes of young adulthood and the need to break parental chains loom large.

But such one-to-one interpretations place limits on Hollowell’s gripping, fast-paced story. Derry wants answers, while Frank continues treating her and her foster family as permanent children. One after another, Frank’s students vanish, first under darkness, later in broad daylight. They leave no trace, and Frank’s efforts to maintain order become increasingly Spartan. Derry ultimately wants what everyone wants: to see the world with her own eyes.

Hollowell handles the necessary tone shifts to tell an engaging story. Derry describes the house, the forest, and her foster family with the lush detail you’d expect from Frank’s low-tech curriculum. But when she needs more muscular storytelling force, she has it, and key scenes explode with vigor. The book runs over 350 pages without ever feeling long. And she keeps twelve mononymic characters in constant play without cluttering the story landscape.

This book is marketed as a Young Adult novel, which perhaps isn’t surprising, considering its mainly young cast and coming-of-age themes. But like the best children’s literature, it offers plenty for adults: themes of authority versus independence, for instance, and exactly how terrifying the outside world really is. Hollowell writes with nail-biting tension that keeps readers up past their bedtimes, and she tells a story as timely and pertinent as it is scary and fun.

When the Old Gods Join the Army

Deborah Falaye, Blood Scion

Fifteen-year-old Sloane just received her draft notice; she’s now a Recruit in the brutal occupying Lucis army. But it’s worse than just being a child soldier. She’s a Scion, a descendant of the Orisha, the old gods of the conquered Yoruba nation. Sloan faces the double challenge of surviving a particularly brutal boot camp while maintaining her secret, because if the Lucis rulers discover her magic powers, her life would be forfeit.

Debut novelist Deborah Falaye clearly means this novel to enter the same YA science fantasy niche as the Hunger Games and Divergent franchises. She has a similar premise, with a bloated state and a protagonist whose life is circumscribed by violence. Falaye’s story really emphasizes the degrading effects of settler colonialism. But the longer her story continues, the more conscious I become of the movies and other sources she’s plundered for her story.

The story starts well. Sloane is an intrepid youth, orphaned early when the Lucis disappeared her parents. By day, she combs the surrounding foothills for evidence of her mother’s whereabouts; by night, she evades the Nightwalkers, a vicious secret police squad. She survives by wits, ingenuity, and judicious application of her Scion magic. But her powers must never be discovered; state propaganda has made turning Scions over a lucrative business.

Almost immediately, though, the story changes. Sloane receives her draft letter and, knowing that escape is impossible, submits. Boot camp is a relentless liturgy of humiliation and loss, a combination of constant speeches and impossible physical tests. Though an accomplished street brawler at home, Sloane’s skills don’t translate into military applications. She struggles to adapt, plagued constantly with shame and self-recrimination.

That’s where Falaye’s movie influences become obvious. The ritual of humiliating the poor recruit is beloved of countless military movies; think Gunny Hartman in Full Metal Jacket. Sloan’s battalion commander is frequently given to passionate speeches reminiscent of George C. Scott’s iconic performance in Patton. Meanwhile, Sloane descends into a semi-delusional fugue reminiscent of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

Deborah Falaye

Moreover, the camp described couldn’t possibly work. Her commanders expect Sloane to perform feats of military precision that nobody could ever do as described. Somehow, Sloane is the only recruit unable to accurately handle and fire an assault rifle the first time they’ve ever touched one, notwithstanding that private firearms are unlawful in the Lucis empire. Likewise, only Sloane fails to scale a rope bridge without a harness the first time.

But even beyond that, the organization wouldn’t work. Sloane’s commanders encourage recruits to fear, distrust, and conspire against one another. Before boot camp, every recruit is required to kill one civilian from their home life; if they refuse, they’ll be killed, and the army will kill their loved ones anyway. On day one, they order her squad to collectively select and kill one recruit, to prove their dedication to the occupying army they were all drafted into.

That’s not how this works. Anybody who’s attended boot camp knows they isolate recruits from home and family. Jody calls and withholding personal mail reinforce the precept that you can only trust your fellow soldiers. But you have to trust your fellow soldiers to have your back, not have you in their crosshairs. And killing loved ones is the recruitment tactic of terrorist organizations like the LRA, not state militaries that have occupied territory for three centuries.

Falaye describes the Nightwalkers using divide-and-conquer tactics familiar from the Stasi, the Tonton Macoutes, and COINTELPRO. But those tactics work against civilian populations. Militaries, including occupying foreign militaries like Falaye describes, have to have operational unity to hold the divided population. Yet Falaye describes Sloane being given an assault rifle and conducting a smash-and-grab raid on the third day of training.

Maybe I’m the problem. Falaye writes for audiences much younger than me, audiences that haven’t watched as many war movies and therefore won’t recognize the stereotypes she recycles. Maybe somebody younger, somebody untainted by experience with popular culture, would receive Falaye’s story with unclouded eyes that I no longer have. But surely anybody would recognize that the military she describes couldn’t possibly work.

Judging by the early pages, I suspect this story might’ve succeeded had Falaye not included the military. Had Sloane remained an outsider, her adversarial position might’ve worked. I wanted to enjoy Falaye’s fable of resurgent old religion versus the bootheel of empire. But around halfway through, I realized I was avoiding the book. It had too many stacked implausibilities. I like Falaye’s premise, but her performance doesn’t work.

The Door That Opened Into Somewhere

Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

Young January Scaller lives a life straight out of a post-Victorian pulp romance: while her archeologist father globetrots for exotic artifacts, she lives with her father’s sponsor, in unparalleled luxury. Sure, she misses her father. But Mr. Locke’s wealth and connections have provided her an education unavailable to most mixed-race children. Then one day January stumbles through an impossible door into a world that shouldn’t exist, and wonders: what other worlds exist behind this one?

It’s possible to find the political metaphors in Alix E. Harrow’s first novel. The teenager’s discovery that her privileged childhood doesn’t reflect how others live; the ways powerful people preserve their power by feeding on others; the influence race has on how Americans interact with one another. But I prefer another reading. Harrow has written an American fairy tale, channeling our better instincts and higher ideals. We become ourselves, Harrow suggests, by rediscovering childhood wonder.

Mr. Locke holds a poorly defined role within The Society, a group of gentleman archeologists who pay actual credentialed academics to crisscross the world looking for trinkets. The Society doesn’t publish scholarship or compile information, however; it supports itself with a thriving black market in antiquities, turning other worlds’ legacies into cheap cash. January, whom Mr. Locke is training as his junior accountant, gets fleeting glimpses of this corrupt world, never enough to understand it.

Meanwhile, January holds onto fleeting memories of her father’s extravagant tales of distant lands and mysterious peoples. She also half-recalls an incident when she was seven, in 1901, when she wrote words on paper, and those words opened a door into an exotic, spice-scented world. Did she really make something magical happen by simply writing it down? Mr. Locke discourages such speculations. He’s a rationalist, and insists that only this world matters enough to study.

January actually occupies a world riddled with Doors. Mr. Locke and his society have another, ruder word for Doors. But whatever name, these Doors open onto strange and mysterious worlds of wonder and possibility, many of them magical. When a puzzling book hidden inside an impossible chest reveals to January that the door of her childhood was very real, she sees new opportunities opening immediately. Mr. Locke, however, sees a threat which must be stopped.

Alix E. Harrow

Harrow’s writing straddles the line between fantasy thriller and social parable. The aptly named Mr. Locke has no patience with doors; he uses money and connections to preserve the Earth he loves, making our world smaller, safer, and more immune to change. January, a half-caste child whose father trades in mystery and exoticism, misses the thrill of wonder she experienced in childhood, the power of believing that, somewhere, magic still happens. The conflict is generational.

This metaphor doesn’t limit Harrow’s writing, however. Her first priority is creating engaging characters in difficult situations. In January’s first-person main narrative, she first challenges powerful institutions from inside; when this proves fruitless, she crosses the boundary to rediscover the outside world she was born in, but doesn’t remember. Meanwhile, between the covers of her puzzling book, she discovers Yule Ian Scholar, whose puzzling memoir might hold the key to January finding her way home.

Themes emerge quickly: what does going home mean? Does it mean returning to the comfortable untruths we learned in childhood? Or does it require passing through painful, harrowing (pun intended) uncertainty in search of truth? Like L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy, or Thomas Wolfe’s George Webber, January’s life is plagued by homesickness; but she has only a vague, half-formed notion of home. She only knows that truth exists, and it doesn’t necessarily correspond with mere reality.

Harrow also emphasizes the ways human words create other realities. The Society uses arcane rituals, influenced by Scottish Rite Masonic traditions, to create a nexus of power which the rest of reality can’t see. (Late in the book, Harrow’s distrust of the Scottish Enlightenment becomes glaring.) Meanwhile, January uses words to reveal hidden truths and actually increase uncertainty. The Society sees uncertainty as chaos, but January sees uncertainty as opportunity. Which set of words prevails?

This novel presents a world seeking resolution. Is trust always better than paranoia, is certitude always better than doubt? Harrow, by day a scholar of American race history, has definite opinions on these questions, though she doesn’t lay them out prescriptively. Instead, she walks readers, youth and adult alike, through the turmoil of finding our own resolution. By the end, maybe we don’t have all the answers. But, like January, we now have better questions.

The Teenage Slam-Master of Manhattan Street Life

Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X

Fifteen-year-old Xiomara Batista doesn’t share her words with anybody. Not her highly religious mother, who wouldn’t understand that she thinks in questions and doubts. Not her brother, who keeps some poorly concealed secrets of her own. Certainly not with the eager hop-heads around her Harlem neighborhood, who’ve noticed how attractive she’s become. No, she keeps her words locked inside a leather-bound journal. But even she is beginning to realize she needs to share with somebody.

It’s tempting to comb through Elizabeth Acevedo’s first novel for clues about exactly how autobiographical this story is. Much certainly jibes with Acevedo’s story: an Afro-Latina teen, raised by Dominican immigrant parents, who moves away from her childhood religion and embraces performance poetry at New York’s legendary Nuyorican Café. But as with most autobiographical fiction, that misses the point. It matters because it’s ultimately about us, and the struggles we and the author face together.

Xiomara collects her thoughts about Harlem life and adolescence in the journal her brother bought her. She never intended to create literature; her thoughts just coalesce into poetry. She desperately wants to live peacefully and be normal. But such desires don’t gel when she’s pulled between two poles: the working-class Manhattan which measures success in outcomes, even for teens, and her mother’s devout Catholicism, which manifests in an urgent desire to see Xiomara finish confirmation.

An English teacher at Xiomara’s high school is organizing a performance poetry club. Xiomara feels vaguely tempted. But meetings happen on Tuesday afternoons, directly opposite Confirmation Class, which Mamí explains is not optional. Poetry gives Xiomara some level of control which her working-class home life doesn’t allow. Still, throughout the fall semester of her sophomore year, she prefers to avoid conflict, and attends Confirmation with her BFF, even as she feels tension building up inside.

Acevedo, in creating Xiomara’s poetic voice, avoids the most common mistakes teenage poets make: the deliberate obscurantism of Shakespeareanism, or way-cool fake Beatnik patter. Xiomara instead has a natural, easy voice, one clearly designed for stage performance. Some of the poems which comprise this novel-in-verse have a hip-hop rhythm, and others resemble more a free-verse tide. But we never feel, as with some apprentice poets, like we’re reading a crossword puzzle clue that needs decoded.

Elizabeth Acevedo

Instead, as slam poets do, Xiomara simply invites audiences into her experience, which she’s heightened through poetry. Slam, if you’ve never participated, tends to reward personal confession and the tentative investigation of personal struggle. It also discourages pat answers, which this novel does too, never reaching for the simple moral often favored in schoolbook poetry. Like slam poets everywhere, Xiomara exposes personal struggles, baring her heart. She wouldn’t dare shut that book after opening it.

Her struggles will seem familiar to Acevedo’s teenage audience, or adults who’ve been teenagers. Xiomara’s parents have visions for her: her aggressive Mamí has scripted a religious homemaker life, while her more passive Papí wants… something, nobody knows what, since he never speaks up. Xiomara herself has the first glimmerings of interest in boys, an interest piqued when her biology lab partner, Aman (the symbolism is unsubtle), becomes the first non-relative to encourage her poetry.

So Xiomara performs her first and second acts of teenage rebellion: she starts seeing Aman on the sly, while ditching Confirmation Class to attend poetry club. That’s two activities which violate her mother’s tightly written script. We know trouble is brewing, but Xiomara starts discovering some components of her own identity. As anybody who’s ever passed through teenage rebellion already knows, Mamí will eventually discover Xiomara’s hastily organized ruses. It’s only a matter of time.

By writing in poetry, Acevedo permits Xiomara to speak from the heart. No time spent describing physical environment or other characters’ facial expressions, unless she wants to; instead, Xiomara cuts directly to the emotional freight of each moment and each encounter. That’s what poetry does, or anyway should do: it strips off everything except what matters, here and now, turning every experience into the purest form of language to convey what’s happening, inside, right now.

Sadly, this verse novel probably deals too directly with controversial topics for actual classroom use: public schools are notoriously conflict-averse. It also has some intermittent PG-13-rated language and mild adolescent sexuality. But for home study and for ambitious readers, Acevedo has created a story that teenagers, and their parents, will find wholly relatable. I’d recommend pairing it with Walter Dean Myers’ Monster, which deals with similar themes and settings. Strongly recommended for bold, independent-minded teens.

The Rain Demons, Part III

This review is a follow-up to The Rain Demons and The Rain, Demons Part II

Paige McKenzie with Nancy Ohlin, The Sacrifice of Sunshine Girl

Volume Two of this trilogy ended with our protagonist, Sunshine Griffith, literally plunging into Hell. She made the decision to relinquish herself to save all reality, then realized, falling headlong into the abyss, that this false offering would actually make things worse. So the conclusion of the trilogy begins with Sunshine and her mentors battling her way back out again. She escapes Hell, only to find herself trapped in an even worse inferno, High School.

I read the first two volumes of Paige McKenzie’s dark fantasy illuminated by Joseph Campbell, whose heroic journey has permeated our consciousness of storytelling so thoroughly that it’s become instinctive. But I read the third volume just after reading Sady Doyle, which changes my attitudes. Because McKenzie is a woman, writing about an adolescent girl’s adulthood rites, there’s something innately different here, something Campbell, with his Jungian certainties, would never have considered. And it’s terrifying.

At its most basic, this novel completes Sunshine’s transition. She has to accept her human nature, which in this case is superhuman. She literally controls the power of life and death, a decision made for her by birth. But her adulthood rites are colored by forces that preceded her: a father who cannot accept his daughter is growing up, the battle between the true and false mothers, and the ordinary teenage desire to be normal.

Sunshine’s father is a moralistic force looming over her choices. He’s eager to train her in responsibilities necessary to fulfill her supernatural inheritance. But he also repeatedly denies her information necessary to make responsible decisions. It’s never the right time, in his mind. Like fathers throughout history, he desperately wants to preserve her childlike innocence, because in his mind, she’s permanently adolescent, never a grown-up. Even when, in the clinch, she demonstrates her superpowered adulthood.

Campbell divided fathers into good and evil. McKenzie does that instead for mothers. Sunshine has her biological mother, Helena, an angry force of nature that wants to “destroy” the little girl to preserve her adult illusions. Initially this means literally destroying her. Later she metaphorically destroys the child by divulging the information her father isn’t ready to share. Helena is literally queen among her supernatural race, and thus represents the social forces arrayed against adolescence.

Paige McKenzie

Against Helena, Sunshine has her “real” mother, Kat, who actually raised Sunshine. Like Sunshine’s father, Kat sometimes has difficulty with her daughter’s imminent adulthood, but instead of squelching it, she offers guidance. She’s the only parent who never withholds either information of support, though she’s often the parent with the least information to share. Rather than facts, she offers Sunshine courage, permitting her to act, even in the absence of facts, which are painfully rare.

These three parental forces enact, between them, a war to define Sunshine’s adult identity. This conflict unfolds against a more transcendent battle, where forces older than humanity struggle to control Earth’s future. Sunshine’s parents have told her that she’s the child of prophecy, the unique being with power to resolve this battle quickly. Imagine Sunshine’s shock when she meets an impossible boy, one of her own kind, who could take this burden off her completely.

Sady Doyle divides women in horror fiction into three categories: daughters, wives, and mothers. But Doyle reviews women through men’s eyes. Because McKenzie writes, as a young woman, for women, there’s a fourth and category: “best friend” and “mean girl.” The conflicting peer forces influence how Sunshine approaches adulthood. Growing up means, to some extent, conforming; will Sunshine choose conformity from loyalty and encouragement, or fear and humiliation? Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference.

This is obviously the conclusion of a trilogy, and the final volume is often a disappointment. Even George Lucas lacked the courage to embrace the bittersweet conclusion he first wrote himself. Audiences who’ve stuck with the trilogy thus far will notice some places where McKenzie flinches from the hurdles she’s set herself (and they’d better stick with the trilogy, because you can’t read these books out of sequence). This novel could’ve been a bit stronger.

But it also completes Sunshine’s character arc thoroughly and with a taut pace. Like anyone’s adulthood rites, Sunshine is immensely powerful, but also shapeless, and must decide whose advice she can trust. Sometimes she chooses wrong; sometimes she chooses right, for the wrong reason. Others pay for her mistakes. But in the clinch, she steps up and embraces her destiny, vanquishing the enemy herself. To our relief, she becomes the adult she needs to be.

The Streets and Courtrooms of Modern Harlem

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Died, Part 102
Walter Dean Myers, Monster

Steve Harmon, sixteen years old and Black, is on trial for felony murder. That’s a technical term for the charge when someone dies during another felony—in this case, armed robbery. His co-conspirators say he was their lookout man, while he… remains strangely noncommittal. Locked up amidst convicts two and three times his age, he keeps a journal describing his Dante-like journey through the hell of the New York State penal system.

Walter Dean Myers was a remarkably prolific author. In a career stretching half a century, he wrote over a hundred books, both fiction and nonfiction, about the African American relationship with power. His histories of Civil Rights pioneers are frequently required reading in public school history courses, while many English classes assign his novels. This novel remains probably his most widely assigned, because it’s so universally accessible.

Steve, a regular at his high school film club, keeps his journal in the form of a first-draft movie script. In it, he describes his trial, before an apparently mixed-race jury, from his untempered teenage viewpoint. He attempts to communicate with his White attorney in plain English; she responds in legal terminology, while warning him to prepare for the worst. If convicted, he faces twenty-five to life, if the jury feels lenient. Steve, who again is just 16, could get life.

Interspersed with these scenes, Steve includes flashbacks to his pre-arrest life. Raised in Harlem, he spent plenty of time sitting on front stoops needing to prove his manfulness credentials to petty criminals who burned out before turning twenty. But he and his brother long to emulate Batman and Robin. And he argues with his film teacher about whether a story’s resolution should be predictable or abrupt, a clear nod to him not knowing how his trial will resolve.

Perhaps Steve’s most striking characteristic is his complete lack of introspection. Though an aspiring artist with, his film teacher assures us, a remarkable eye for telling detail, he never turns that eye toward himself. His proposed movie describes everyone around him: the Harlem street toughs whose respect he longs to earn, the overwhelmingly White criminal justice system, and his mother, brother, and favorite teacher. Steve himself remains beyond our reach.

Walter Dean Myers

Because of this, we never discover whether Steve actually did what he’s accused of. He tells his attorney he isn’t guilty; she reminds him that’s a far cry from innocent. Unlike, say, Harper Lee’s character Tom Robinson, Steve’s culpability remains murky, even as we sympathize with him. Regardless of his guilt, he fronts bravely, telling the jury he scarcely knows his accused co-conspirators… even though we know, having read his prior journal, that that’s a lie.

The screenplay format permits Steve, as Myers’ stand-in narrator, to keep things external. He describes his life and trial in terms of camera angles and cross-fades, not thoughts and memories. His friendships and family relationships come across in telling moments, but Steve never lets them touch him personally, admitting, in his copious handwritten notes, that he must remain detached and aloof, lest he weep in prison, the worst place to appear weak.

Intermittently between blocks of text, we get photographs, drawings, and handwritten thoughts. This book is illustrated by Christopher Myers, Walter Dean Myers’ son, and between them they create a multimedia text that’s potentially more accessible to today’s school-age readers, who weren’t raised on the printed word like prior generations were. They establish Steven as someone who thinks in images, and communicate with an audience who probably thinks likewise.

When this book appeared in the late 1990s, the highest-rated television drama was a courtroom procedural called Law and Order. Black Americans have long recognized this phrase as dog-whistle language for institutional racism, especially back then: Steve Harmon name-checks Mayor Giuliani among the forces steering him into a foreordained outcome. One hears echoes of that whitewashed vision of “the criminal justice system” in Steve’s plaintive story.

This novel, like most of Myers’ corpus, is considered a young-adult book. That’s because it features a teenage protagonist, plain English storytelling, and no vulgarities you couldn’t repeat in school. But like most young-adult literature, it offers copious rewards for adults reading, too, on issues of race, crime, and at what point our society considers a man “grown.” It’s published with a readers’ guide. Share this volume with your students, church youth, or your own kids.

Because I hate to say it, but many things about American justice have only gotten worse in the twenty years since this book appeared.

Gunslingin' Queen of the Dystopian Frontier

Lyndsay Ely, Gunslinger Girl: A Novel

Serendipity “Pity” Jones has nothing to live for on the Commune. Days are filled with work and patriotism, then she comes home at night to an all-male family that despises her. Rather than face encroaching adulthood on those terms, she and her best friend pull a runner into the technological wasteland of the new American West. But she quickly discovers that, on the outside, a woman’s value matters only by her product in the moment.

Debut author Lindsay Ely combines Pat Frank’s apocalyptic classic Alas, Babylon with Owen Wister’s The Virginian for a product readers will find familiar, if they’ve ever watched Firefly. This is both good and bad. Over the last two decades, frontier sci-fi has become so commonplace, readers can slip into this book like a favorite pair of jammies. It requires little effort to immerse oneself in Ely’s world. But like those jammies, the comfort may be sleep-inducing.

The Second Civil War left the American East controlled by the Confederation of North America. CONA believes in hard work, stability, and order, so it built the Communes. But wartime bioterror left a paucity of fertile women, and Pity’s father sees dollar signs in her uterus. Pity wants more from life. Her late mother, a former Patriot (think “Browncoat”), taught her marksmanship, so she steals Mommy’s guns and heads for the frontier seeking her fortune.

Out there, she quickly loses everything: scroungers loot her goods, murder her friend, and torch her truck. Left with only her guns, Pity falls in with mysterious strangers from Cessation, the last free outpost in America. With nowhere left to go, she follows their lead. Her impeccable aim and recognized beauty make her a desirable commodity in Cessation, where she becomes a star of the Theatre, half Annie Oakley, half circus freak.

Ely’s futuristic setting has high-tech gewgaws, but they aren’t much expounded upon. Audiences will recognize her world from Tatooine, the Eavesdown Docks, or Deep Space Nine: it’s Dodge City with shinier chrome. Cessation’s street violence (which is mostly just mentioned; Pity doesn’t much go outdoors) contrasts with the glamorous but morally odious order enforced by Casimir, the casino/whorehouse/sideshow that rules town. Some science fiction happens, but at heart, this story is a western.

Lyndsay Ely

Frontier myth looms large in American science fiction. Han Solo can get goods into the home territories without Imperial entanglements; Commander Adama plots a course “beyond the red line.” Americans see space as territory ripe for conquest, and even NASA press releases are often redolent of Manifest Destiny. Even YA dystopias from major publishing conglomerates pit suffocating civilization against the pioneering spirit. We’ll all become free, if we leave home, and become willing to kill.

This trend has problems, certainly. HBO’s Westworld used Indians as set dressing; not one Native American character had lines. We see something similar here: the boundary between CONA and Cessation is populated by Dissidents and Scroungers, landless and chased pillar to post by CONA military and paid mercenaries. But like Indians, other characters mostly speak for these oppressed groups; they seldom speak for themselves. Even when it’s their own story they need to tell.

Readers could make a drinking game of recognizing the prior stories which influence Ely’s narrative. Though I’ve mentioned mass-media science fiction franchises, the two stories I see harvested most liberally are Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage and Louis L’Amour’s The Quick and the Dead. Both novels, considered classics, feature Easterners needing to quickly unlearn civilized ways to survive beyond the frontier line. That theme, of counter-conformity and bare-knuckle survival, resonates strongly in Ely’s novel.

Ely presents us, essentially, a story of subjugation. Pity could accept her father’s iron-fisted dominion, but she requires autonomy CONA’s patriarchal structure won’t allow. So she flees, only to find the frontier has its own requirements. Cessation offers decadent luxuries (in both the popular and Marxist senses), but Pity quickly learns that, to embrace these luxuries, she must—well, spoilers. Let’s say, whether it’s the comforts of civilization, frontier lawlessness, or whatever, she must conform.

Rereading what I’ve just written, I realize it could sound like I hated this book. Not so. I devoured it in one frenetic weekend, and I can offer the best compliment available from a blue-collar worker: it kept me up past my bedtime. It’s a good story, well-written, with engaging characters and humane plot. Just don’t expect it to change your life, or upend your genre expectations. Take it for a fun story, and it won’t disappoint.

The Struggles of 2017 (As Seen From 1968)

Alain Badiou, The True Life

Western traditions and moral foundations are withering, says Alain Badiou. Religion and politics are vestiges of an older time, while capitalism reduces us alternately to children and instruments. In this series of talks, originally directed at adolescents, Badiou questions where youth culture could head in an era when we distrust the past and cannot count upon the future. Answers aren’t much forthcoming, but in philosophy, sometimes the questions matter more.

As a sometime academic and recent convert to contemporary French philosophers, I had high expectations from this book. But even I found Badiou’s prose dense, his reasoning tangential, and his conclusions unsupported by evidence. He presents an opaque philosophy, putatively for teenagers and young adults, that even grey-haired scholars may find confusing and impractical. And it verges, at times, on messianism. I can’t imagine whom Badiou is actually writing for.

Much of Badiou’s philosophy comes straight from his foundations in Paris 1968. He is both agnostic (he says atheist, but fudges), and an unreconstructed Leninist. He draws on an ecumenical selection of sources: Plato and Lacan, Rimbaud and Marx. But he doesn’t feel merely beholden to his influences; he goes beyond them, comments on their thoughts, and attempts to weave his Situationist-era roots with the smartphone age.

The result is, shall we say, chaotic. Badiou caroms from the necrotizing consequences of late capitalism; through the imposed roles of young and old, whom he believes should ally in rebellion against the middle-aged system; through importance and absence of unifying adulthood rites in a post-religious society; to gender roles and, honestly, I’ve forgotten what all else. His underlying thesis is, apparently, that modernity is confusing. Anyone could’ve written that.

Not that I’d call Badiou wrong. He says plenty I find appealing. For instance, he writes how a secularized society without clear adulthood rites, traps citizens in perpetual adolescence. “The adult,” he writes, in one of my favorite quotes, “becomes someone who’s a little better able than the young person to afford to buy big toys.” Capitalism, in Badiou’s analysis, turns functioning grown-ups into vehicles of juvenile appetite.

Alain Badiou and friend

He flinches on this later. Not people, but boys specifically, occupy a permanent teenaged wilderness. Capitalism stunts boys well into senescence, but turns girls into women from the cradle. So, tacitly, he accepts males as “normal” and females as “exceptional.” This becomes most apparent when he says if you look at a woman, “really look at her,” atheism is proved. He doesn’t say how. I know female pastors who’d disagree.

So, okay, Badiou makes weird statements and assumes his readers’ preferential agreement. That doesn’t make him wrong. Indeed, he’s a veritable assembly line of meaningful quotes about modernism’s essential vacuity. “The career is the hole-plugger of meaninglessness,” he says of how men’s adulthood is purely instrumental to capitalism. Or of women’s roles, “There are some women who are laboring oxen and some who are Persian cats.”

These statements make perfect sense to anybody who’s witnessed how society values men according to their remunerative value, and how it forces women into pre-written scripts that, feminism notwithstanding, have changed little. Readers who find modernist capitalism disappointing, like this ex-libertarian, may find themselves pumping their fists in exultation to see a scholar learnedly attesting what we’ve already thought, in terms concise enough for a t-shirt.

Yet reading his reasoning, I keep thinking: your conclusion doesn’t follow from your evidence. In one key moment, Badiou defends lengthy arguments by citing Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo, an attempted psychoanalytic explanation of rudimentary religion, which I couldn’t finish because it requires more leaps of faith than the Bible. Freud’s corpus of work is mainly regarded as pseudoscience now anyway, so citing Freud doesn’t strengthen your claims.

That’s just an example, but it’s realistically representative of Badiou’s reasoning process. One suspects he starts with certain premises, like perhaps, that the financial collapse of 2008 and the rise of reactionary nationalism in industrialized nations go hand-in-hand, a premise so bipartisan that Bernie Sanders and Marine le Pen could probably agree upon that. Then he ransacks his personal papers, unchanged since 1968, to craft a justifying explanation.

Basically, I expected better from someone of Badiou’s standing. I want to say, take what you need and leave the rest; but a right conclusion from wrong reasoning is still wrong. Badiou crafts just enough useful slogans that I suspect he understands the core of the common situation. Then he lards it with weird source citations and intellectual cow paths. I just can’t figure where he’s coming from.

Murder at the Time Lord Academy

Sally Gardner, The Door That Led To Where

Young AJ Flynn has flunked almost all his GCSE exams. In a British meritocracy that values official credentials, that renders him functionally unemployable—before he’s even turned 17. Post-industrial Britain doesn’t value his love of solitude and contemplation, his fondness for Victorian literature and pre-modern history. But a fluke job interview leads AJ to his long-denied inheritance, including a mysterious door into pre-Victorian London. He also finally discovers his name.

On first face, award-winning British YA novelist Sally Gardner’s latest novel pinches elements of Harry Potter, Doctor Who, and Sherlock Holmes into a fantasy thriller for older youth and young adults. But themes slowly emerge subtly criticizing Britain’s meritocracy, and “skills drillz”-based education everywhere. Young AJ occupies a Britain where he’s unqualified for adulthood, but childhood diversions are costly when you’re poor in one of Earth’s most expensive cities.

Britain’s exam system pigeonholes students into career paths and avocational opportunities at an absurdly young age. The demand that AJ know his desires and calling at age 16 is anachronistically quaint. Maybe that’s why AJ stumbles accidentally into smoggy, cobblestoned historic London, because it’s important he views an era where he’s already considered a man. AJ flits between eras, seeking a time and place where he feels a sense of belonging.

In that pre-modern time, AJ witnesses a culture where science is rudimentary, technology is unreliable, and “madness” is a cultural disease more feared than cholera. He meets a winsome lass as dissatisfied with her own time as he is with his. But the vagaries of pre-Victorian inheritance law, and a long history of conveniently mysterious deaths, threatens Miss Esme’s sanity and freedom. AJ brings modern skills to defend his anachronistic love.

But in his present, AJ also struggles with 21st Century problems: London’s pervasive poverty, and his mates’ mutual lack of skills, lead to Trainspotting-like struggles with nihilism and identity. AJ’s friends Slim and Leon have run-ins with rotten, disreputable characters, and both need to hide. Regency London seems convenient, but that world proves even better than useful. The low-tech city gives two boys with simple manual trade skills a world where they can flourish.

Sally Gardner

Seriously. Slim quickly ingratiates himself with lucrative trading partners because he has a skill both rare and valuable: he can boil tea. The social criticism is blatant. Modern London de-values simple skills, giving unaccountable wealth to bankers, barristers, and other brainpower workers. Young adults who simply make stuff belong to another time. One simple fluke, politely unexplained because “why” doesn’t matter, shows them a world where their lives mean something.

Is this therefore an innate criticism of Britain’s education system? And by extension a rote memorization school system, regardless of nation? Gardner tacitly rejects Common Core and STEM movements, just in how the characters relate to their work and skills. Simply knowing how to filter water makes unemployable teens suddenly valuable. In a time when simple mechanical skills matter, being young isn’t a disadvantage.

How old is a 17-year-old boy? Is age based on anything internal, or does it derive from culture? At that age, teens seek their adult roles, and in a time defined by manual trades and other limitations, maybe 17 really is mature and grown. We’re at our peak physical ability. But in an age defined by mental skills, when accumulated knowledge and skills matters more, 17 is too young to know ourselves, much less our place in the world.

But there’s a trade-off. Like many teens, AJ considers himself as a man out of time, but when he encounters the time with which he feels most comfortable, it doesn’t value the mental skills he brings. The constant evolution of labor markets has trended away from manual trades: what Slim knows how to do, and revolutionizes London doing, is done today by machines. Slim can’t survive in a brain economy. Notwithstanding his scores, AJ hypothetically can.

The very exams that circumscribe AJ, and define his combative relationship with his very angry mother, supposedly channel people into brain jobs. But the attitudes reflect a pre-Victorian, mechanically skilled attitude of what it means to be adult. What constitutes “merit” is decided by bureaucrats structurally out of touch with modernity and its needs. Modern and pre-modern circumstances which metaphorically co-exist within the exam system, literally co-exist in AJ himself.

This book was warmly received when first released in Britain nearly two years ago. Advance responses to its American release, however, have been merely lukewarm. Maybe AJ’s culture clash is too inherently British to travel internationally. Maybe this book mainly attracts Anglophiles like me. But I think there’s something universal happening here. I believe, with time, this book will find its audience, and its message will resonate, regardless of nationality.

Living As a Ghost Of Yourself

1001Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part Nine
Terry Zwigoff (director) and Daniel Clowes (writer), Ghost World

Enid and Rebecca, classic high school malcontents, have finally graduated. They're ready for  adult life to start—but, like teenagers throughout time, they don't know what that means for them. They go halves on an apartment, and Rebecca gets a job, throwing herself into middle-class normality. But Enid isn't done being free-spirited and young. She attaches herself onto a nebbishy older fella who encourages her dangerous side. This hastens the rebellious teen's worst nightmare: change.

Director Terry Zwigoff collaborated with writer Daniel Clowes in adapting Clowes' Nineties-era "comix" novel into film form. Fans of the graphic novel took exception to the intrusion of a linear plot into Clowes' semi-autobiographical meandering: Enid's full name, never given onscreen, is "Enid Coleslaw," an anagram of "Daniel Clowes." But non-purists will enjoy the rich characters, dark humor, and saturated, hyperreal screen images. I've seldom seen a more realistic depiction of how teenagers really talk.

Enid (Thora Birch, American Beauty) and Rebecca (former child star Scarlett Johansson, in an early grown-up role) roam around town, glibly mocking popular culture and appreciating each other's shared superiority. Their playful cynicism carried them through high school mostly unscarred, and they see no reason it shouldn't continue forever. They use humor to keep reality at arm's length. But money, as it does, changes things. Hunger and past-due bills prove to motivate the girls differently.

On a whim, the girls answer a "missed connection" personal that leads them to a lonely man, Seymour (Steve Buscemi), who shares the girls' outlook. He collects old 78-RPM records, pre-WWII toys, and other artifacts. Seymour idolizes the world he believes existed before his birth, and Enid considers him a fellow traveler. Rebecca, however, recognizes Seymour's quirks as attempts to flee the present, and contrives to separate them. Cracks begin surfacing in the girls' relationship.

While Enid tries to find Seymour a date, she receives notice that she's one credit short of her diploma. To completely graduate, she must take a summer art course. Enid is a talented artist (with original drawings by Clowes), but her teacher demands art have contemporary political messages. Enid would rather flunk than compromise her vision. But a discovery among Seymour's menagerie might bridge the gap between her art and her teacher's weird, faddish demands.

Thora Birch (left) and Scarlett Johansson
in Ghost World

Clowes and Zwigoff create, on one level, a nostalgic paean to adolescence, the kind familiar to generations of film buffs, from American Graffiti to Empire Records. Enid and Rebecca represent the dueling impulses common to many young people newly approved to adulthood, staying true to youthful dreams versus embracing adult responsibility. Adulthood requires compromise, but how much? Anyone watching their struggle will remember the day they got hungry enough to accept employment beneath their ambitions.

At another level, though, this film addresses the crushing disappointment of modernity. Work proves a trap that, rather than empowering Rebecca's dreams, squashes them. Enid is horrified to see her friend's ambitions start turning around savings and boys, but finds Rebecca doesn't want rescue. Seymour appears to escape modernity with his antiques, but at the price of awful loneliness. When intimacy does appear, it proves just as disappointing, and laden with conformity, as Rebecca's job.

Art looms large in this story. Enid creates art which her teacher belittles, despite its technical prowess. Seymour immerses himself in art, mainly music, and stands fast even when selecting the slicker, more commercial options would net him friends and women. In the end, compromise proves more costly than fighting through. This clash between artistic integrity and mass appeal gets investigated further in Clowes and Zwigoff's second collaboration, Art School Confidential, an altogether inferior film.

Zwigoff's camera work recreates the experience of a Clinton-era graphic novel, without being slavish to the picture. He saturates some environments with color, like the bright primary colors of Enid's bedroom, or Seymour's metallic-toned antiques. Other images look washed out. The job Enid briefly attempts looks overexposed, like it's as damaging to the camera as to the beleaguered souls working there. And the apartment Rebecca selects for them is painfully bland, Fifty Shades of Beige.

Altogether, this movie delivers a twisted comic nightmare. It backs Enid, and to lesser degrees Rebecca and Seymour, into corners where they must decide which form of disappointment they consider acceptable. As that looming monster, adulthood, takes characters one by one, we realize, for all its realism and humor, we're watching a horror movie, where only the unfortunate survive. When Enid escapes, we applaud, and wonder: is it too late for me to try again?

The Rain Demons, Part II

Paige McKenzie, The Awakening of Sunshine Girl

This review follows the previous review The Rain Demons

Sunshine Griffith sees dead people. Since her sixteenth birthday, the constant press of souls demanding her ministrations has become downright massive. As a luiseach, a Celtic healing being tasked with guiding souls into the afterlife, her newly manifested abilities risk becoming a full-time job. But she’s still untutored. A new mentor offers her guidance, but his motivations appear mixed. She soon realizes, she’s less his student than his experimental subject.

Writer-actress Paige McKenzie (with ghostwriter Alyssa Sheinmel), with her second Sunshine Girl novel, takes her story in a surprising new direction. The first volume was a contemporary spin on classic haunted house stories, combining vintage Shirley Jackson-ish horror with coming-of-age urgency. This second volume pushes on themes of identity and calling the first book only implied. It’s truly a sequel, not a retread of the prior book.

Newly minted in her supernatural abilities, the previously orphaned Sunshine meets her stone-faced, purposeful father. Within pages, she’s whisked away to study her powers, only to discover a crumbling, mostly abandoned campus. Think Hogwarts if everyone just left. While Sunshine studies with the only luiseach she’s ever met near her own age, her father conducts strange lab experiments. His discoveries may save humanity, but may cost Sunshine her life.

Reading this book, it’s impossible to avoid acknowledging the debts McKenzie owes to older authors. Sunshine is both the lastborn of her kind and the most powerful, a recurrent theme in Orson Scott Card’s novels. Her apprenticeship in a distant, sultry land, coupled with the “No, I’m Your Father” leitmotif (is her father heroic or villainous? I’m still unsure) will inevitably draw comparisons to The Empire Strikes Back.

But McKenzie redeems this transparent borrowing by astutely incorporating Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth structure, which Card and Lucas also liberally appropriated. Volume One, I can say in retrospect, represented Campbell’s “Departure” pattern, with the Call, Refusal, and Threshold clearly signposted. This book explores the Initiation aspect, with Sunshine’s Trials, Atonement, and Apotheosis. Seasoned readers know what Volume Three brings—and Volume Three will happen, as the abrupt ending here demands.

Paige McKenzie, in a promotional still from
The Haunting of Sunshine Girl on YouTube

Sunshine’s father, Aidan, spirits her from cold, rain-drenched Washington, to his university in central Mexico. This represents both opportunity and threat for Sunshine, since he quickly admits she’s hunted. Seems Aidan’s first experiment blew up, creating massive unintended consequences, for with fellow luiseach hold Sunshine culpable. He leaves her two choices: study her powers and become mature, or let the predators among her own kind destroy her.

In parallel, Sunshine’s platonic boyfriend back home, Nolan, continues researching to discover whatever knowledge will unlock Sunshine’s abilities. A strange new woman enters Nolan’s life: youthful but possessed of uncanny knowledge, Helena steers Nolan’s researches in directions she admits serve her own ends. Helena serves the two roles Campbell reserves for “Woman”: Goddess and Temptress. But her connection to Sunshine pushes Nolan into corners he cannot possibly escape.

Some of McKenzie’s storytelling techniques will seem familiar to veteran YA audiences. Sunshine, as our first-person narrator, feels compelled to describe her awkwardness. Apparently her hair goes wild, and she considers herself clumsy. Her adorkable self-figuration stands at odds with her great confidence, poise, and having multiple young men wholly devoted to her. Apparently a tendency to drop things makes her more approachable to her intended teenage readers.

Like most “urban fantasy” novelists, McKenzie makes the most of the collision between her heroine’s ancient heritage and modern setting. The terrible cell phone reception at quasi-Hogwarts looms large in this story. The campus provides fortress-like protection for Sunshine during her adolescent vulnerability, like Dagobah. So the villains must threaten those she loves to draw her out voluntarily. The only question remains: will she, like Luke Skywalker, fall for it?

Of course she will. Like the Buddha or Ulysses, Sunshine is living out a primordial journey, a literal expression of the metaphorical transition we must all make into adulthood. (That’s why I like science fiction and fantasy, because they can address vast themes without being yoked to “realism.”) We don’t read books like this to be surprised or derailed, but to witness something classic re-enacted for a living generation.

Neither McKenzie nor her publisher make any bones about this being a bridge volume. She doesn’t dither introducing new readers to events from Volume One; there’s a brief refresher, then she jumps in with both feet. This energy continues throughout the entire novel. The story ends in motion, promising something even bigger. And I’ll be there. McKenzie pulls readers along with courage, grace, and aplomb.

The Teenage Spy Guild of the Mediterranean Coast

Ally Carter, Embassy Row #1: All Fall Down

Young Grace insists she witnessed her mother’s murder. Daughter of a Special Forces veteran and granddaughter of America’s esteemed ambassador to Adria, Grace knows something about keeping secrets; but her willful streak won’t let her keep quiet. When she moves into her grandfather’s embassy, she expects a life of diplomatic glad-handing and general boredom. Then, across a crowded palace, she spots the man who murdered her mother.

Grace insists she knows her mother’s murderer with such dedicated assurance, we know that by book’s end, she’ll either be spectacularly vindicated or have her entire universe turned upside down. Ally Carter, a generous author, attempts both. Having written two prior series featuring teenaged spy heroines, Carter turns her seasoned aplomb to true world affairs. Unfortunately, even part-time news followers will quickly spot serious problems with Carter’s universe.

Ancient, dynamic Valancia, capital of Adria, overlooks the Mediterranean shoreline, hosting many glamorous embassies in Renaissance-era manors. Carter’s description combines elements of Monaco, Dubrovnik, and Istanbul with fanciful imaginings of European splendor. This includes, apparently, remarkably modest land values, since embassies, not jet-setting millionaires, control Valancia’s prestigious waterfront properties. Also, nobody apparently pushes mops or waits tables. Carter creates a world of relentless, polished spy movie spectacle, and nothing else.

Into this world, Grace inserts herself, among children of Earth’s most influential embassies. Youth from the local International School flit among social circles with apparent abandon; ambassadors’ children apparently wed and start families, while functionally stateless teenagers weave continual soap-operatic social webs. This suggests a remarkably settled diplomatic corps. Grace’s grandfather says he’s spent twenty-five years in Adria. I don’t buy it; I’ve read In the Garden of Beasts.

But Grace remains undaunted, both by diplomatic prestige and monied splendor. She vaults walls into neighboring embassies, functionally invading other countries. She pulls James Bond surveillance in crowded Byzantine-era streets. She moves from begowned diplomatic receptions to arguments in rain-soaked streets with ease that makes Kate Beckinsale look flustered. One starts to suspect somebody’s keeping things both feasible and dramatic for her.

Ally Carter

Then there’s Grace’s absolute certainty. She knows, undeniably knows, she witnessed the Scarred Man assassinate her mother, the ambassador’s daughter. The complete lack of physical evidence—the absence of the bullet wound, the lack of accelerant from the bomb—does nothing to persuade Grace that this assassination couldn’t possibly have happened. Her dogged persistence, admirable in early chapters, gets wearing. But YA readers know, adult uselessness is a foregone conclusion.

This theme, admittedly, has become my Achilles’ heel recently. Adult uselessness has become so ubiquitous, it’s become the marketing segment’s signature move. Most recent YA novels commence with the understanding that children, unburdened by knowledge or predisposition, see truths adults willingly ignore. Sometimes this works: Katniss Everdeen challenges corrupt demagogues because she has no insider standing, no bills to pay. But sometimes, age and experience know things.

Surrounded by more embassies than any city outside the Hague, Grace nevertheless kicks doors, conducts espionage, and gathers guerilla evidence. Her grandfather attempts to teach her diplomacy; she defies him, in ways subtle and coarse. She clearly believes, and convinces fellow ambassadors’ kids, that world problems get better if diplomats stop acting diplomatically and practice teenagers’ unbridled honesty. Anyone who’s argued politics with college freshmen knows how that works.

Instead, Grace rampages through Valancia, aided by a cadre of fellows too young to drive. Sometimes she’s stymied and learns to behave discreetly; more often, her headstrong ways yield bountiful rewards. Grace resembles the kind of teenager who breaks others’ things because she doesn’t know what stuff costs. She yells, screams, threatens, engages in psychological blackmail, and by such degrees ekes out victory. That, frustratingly, seems to be our moral.

Carter assembles this novel from stereotypes salvaged from John le Carré novels, Pretty Little Liars episodes, and James Bond movies. Everything happens because it’s supposed to. Heroines like Grace deserve a sidekick, so Carter gives her one. Carter gives Grace a chaste but adversarial romance with the Russian ambassador’s son. Carter gives Grace friends willing to risk sedition and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to get in with the in crowd.

In early chapters, Grace had my sympathy. I believed her conspiracy theory, because I’ve read YA, and I accept the genre’s premises. But as she shows profound inability to learn her world’s ways—and Carter shows profound unfamiliarity with America’s foreign service apparatus—my patience wore thin. Okay, the conclusion isn’t a complete rout; Carter saves something for the next novel. But by then, I’d already stopped caring.

Before There Was Harry Potter, There Was...

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 58
Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

Sparrowhawk, an arrogant young wizardry student, wanted to impress his classmates by conjuring a beautiful spirit from myth. Instead, a shadow, a nameless thing black with destruction, answered Sparrowhawk’s call, and escaped his dominion. Now scarred and barely made a journeyman wizard, Sparrowhawk has one quest, spanning the vast archipelago of Éa and beyond: find his shadow, before it absorbs his power and destroys the world.

Ursula Le Guin was already somewhat famous in 1968 when this novel debuted, targeted at the then-nascent Young Adult market. She envisioned a tale of wizards not grizzled and grey, but young, untempered, and hopeful. In some ways, Sparrowhawk presages characters like Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, but with one notable difference: Le Guin posits no external villains, no Voldemort, no Sauron. Evil emerges, seeping and destructive, from within.

Born gifted on an island famous for its wizards, Sparrowhawk grew up hearing successive mentors predicting his eventual greatness. So many teachers prophesied he’d become the grandest wizard of his age, that Sparrowhawk eventually believed them. He thought himself immune to consequences. Once he learns otherwise, he spends the remaining chapters attempting to restore the balance he disturbed, learning self-control on the way.

Le Guin’s story shows clear influence from writers like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein, writers whose conscious mythmaking had, by her time, made fantasy into a mainstream, if disrespected, genre. However, where the authors who colored her visions were Christian, Le Guin’s story reflects humanist, existential values. Good and evil are man-made categories, not eternal verities; we’re defined, Le Guin implies, not by our beliefs, but by our actions.

This places Sparrowhawk in an unusual position. He knows the myths of gods who raised the islands from the sea, but cannot rely upon them for salvation. He controls magic, and has inadvertently glimpsed the hereafter, but this offers him little comfort. Sparrowhawk’s world isn’t truly atheistic, Nature has its spirit and volition, but humans save or damn themselves. Perhaps even the gods wait upon humans for their salvation.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Proceeding episodically, Le Guin recounts the processes that nurtured Sparrowhawk’s arrogance, then the counterforces which urged him to rediscover humility. Sparrowhawk is no Harry Potter, no prophesied child of deliverance; his ethics aren’t innate. Though he first attracts mentors through deeds of bravery and self-sacrifice, he increasingly believes himself separate from humanity. He becomes more interested in burnishing his image. He proves painfully good at attracting powerful new enemies.

If one word describes young Sparrowhawk, it’d be: willful. He defies his first patient master because he desires to rush headlong into deeds of power. He studies tomes beyond his capability, perilously inviting evil into his house, to impress a pretty girl. He argues with teachers, disregards caution, and attempts to outshine more experienced students. His willfulness only increases, until it nearly costs him and his friends their lives.

Then he reverses himself. Only through suffering does he discover the far-reaching ripples his actions started, and he spends years attempting to mend what he once broke. Piece by piece, Sparrowhawk finds the wounds his shadow once opened, and strives to heal them. He knows, though, he’s approaching a catastrophic confrontation, since only blood makes true recompense for sin—"So at least his death would put an end to the evil he had loosed by living."

Nobody would mistake this novel for new. Besides Le Guin’s episodic storytelling, now frowned upon by professional writing texts and market-savvy editors, her constructed, Homeric narrative voice seems markedly dated. Nobody would write this story today, certainly not in this way, which covers nine years of Sparrowhawk’s life in ten fairly long chapters. Considering J.K. Rowling needed twice this many pages for one school year, times have certainly changed.

Yet arguably, this dated quality reflects what dedicated readers want. Publishers mass-produce paperback fantasy today, carefully designed to offer audiences minimal challenge, to pass lightly under their gaze with virtually no friction. Le Guin’s classical style, like Tolkein’s Saxon bardic voice or Homer’s long, spun rhythms force readers outside themselves. We cannot read this book lightly. She casts a spell and, using nothing more than words, we find ourselves transported, transformed.

This story of a wizard learning power first, and wisdom only latterly, arguably has greater significance now, amid our nigh-magical technological do-funnies, than when Le Guin first wrote. To understand our present, and ourselves, we sometimes must travel outside reality and glimpse ourselves only slantwise. This book offers important lessons, but it also offers engaging characters having adventures. That’s why both youth and adults can enjoy this masterpiece equally.

The Warrior Queen of Seattle

Cherie Priest, I Am Princess X

May Harper and Libby Deaton overcame their fifth-grade outcast status by creating Princess X, a katana-wielding superheroine whose exploits gave suburban life meaning. Then, in a tragic accident, Libby’s mother drove off a Seattle bridge, killing Libby and herself. Now sixteen, May drifts through life rudderless and alone… until she sees it. An image of Princess X on an abandoned storefront. A message meant only for her.

Locus Award-winning science fiction novelist Cherie Priest returns to her former adopted hometown of Seattle, the setting of her breakout novel Boneshaker. But that novel involved a carefully realized steampunk universe, where the contrast between real Seattle and Priest’s Seattle brimmed with satiric potential. This novel takes a more realistic tack, turning urbane, high-rise Seattle into a domain as complicated as any medieval dungeon.

That first Princess X image leads May to a thriving internet subculture dedicated to the Princess X webcomic. But that webcomic can’t possibly exist. Libby’s father discarded all their notebooks after her death, and these images tell an entirely new story. Aided by an affably harmless hacker from her building, May begins tracking subtle clues laced throughout Princess X’s story, an excruciating process that undermines everything she thinks she knows.

Priest offers the skeleton of an engaging story. The contrast between May’s unglamorous Seattle life and Princess X’s allegorical world, a network of complicated overlaps and correspondences, drives the story with urgency and panache. Priest gets good mileage from the theme of a complicated hidden reality, popular in multiple genres today. Coupling it with the complexities of Internet-based underground cultures and an urban quest feels like so much fun.

As May gradually unpacks clues laced throughout Princess X’s story, she realizes the webcomic creator couldn't have intended these complicated clues for general consumption. They refer to places from her own life, memories she never spoke of, experiences she shared with nobody else. Nobody but Libby. But that could only make sense of somebody is lying to her right now… or everybody has lied to her for at least three years.

Cherie Priest

Seattle, in Priest’s understated telling, resembles less an American city than a catacomb of forgotten rooms and unseen tunnels. Princess X leads May and her sidekick, Patrick, into half-demolished coffee shops, mausoleums, and the rain-slick underbelly of various tourist attractions. May winds up discovering parts of her city that the tourist board would probably prefer remain hidden. But a complicated parallel society dwells beneath polite Seattle, bearing secrets.

This novel aims for a conventional “young adult” audience. It has many familiar tropes from that marketing niche, including teenaged protagonists who don’t necessarily start out precocious, but must quickly teach themselves resilience; an adult enemy whose own damages boil over into wrath at innocence; and a supporting cast of adults who blinded by conformity. Though telling a good story, Priest doesn’t really break any new ground in her genre.

Priests’s story mixes her prose with original comic art by Kali Ciesemier. Though much of this art wasn’t complete in time for the pre-release reviewers’ edition, what did is remarkable. Ciesemier’s two-tone line drawings resemble the underground “comix” I remember reading in the 1990s. Back then, comix tended toward autobiography. This has more heroic overtones, but retains symbolic resonance with Sonic Youth-era confessionalism.

Some of Priest’s choices feel like low-hanging fruit. The homogeneously young, white, middle-class ensemble, for one. Unreliable, generally clueless adults feel overused, especially when coupled with elaborate excursions into Seattle’s forgotten underbelly. A pretty teenage girl wandering into that environment would need legitimate guidance to avoid getting trapped in a Russ Meyer film. Most youth I know would appreciate a story coupling resourceful young protagonists with actual stand-up adult counsel.

Also, why’s this book so short? Bestselling YA fiction, from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games, indicates teens’ willingness to engage with epic-scale literature. Priest herself has been pretty voluble in her literature for grown-ups. At barely 200 pages, this book feels like a scanty pamphlet compared to many titles currently available on YA shelves. Especially with the compressed-feeling resolution, Priest probably could’ve afforded a little more description.

Still, that problem notwithstanding, Priest’s story will probably reach her intended audience with haste and concision. Though they, like me, may wish for a longer story with more characters, most readers will probably appreciate this novel for what it is. Accustomed to writing for a seasoned genre audience, Priest is clearly out of her element here. Yet she demonstrates wherewithal enough to burst in and make YA fiction her own.

The Rain Demons

Paige McKenzie, The Haunting of Sunshine Girl

An awkward, introverted teenager thinks her life is over when she relocates to a rainy Washington town. No, seriously, stick with me. Sunshine Griffith doesn’t need much in life, just her quirky antique wardrobe, her best friend, and her youthful, high-spirited mother. But when Mom’s job uproots them to gloomy Ridgemont, Washington, she feels adrift and useless. This feeling only grows when Sunshine realizes a ghost lives upstairs.

Paige McKenzie starred in, and apparently co-created, the Sunshine Girl YouTube channel, producing fifty-seven episodes of Sunshine’s haunted house story between 2010 and 2012. This book, and an upcoming second volume, apparently presage an anticipated big-screen reboot, as McKenzie fleshes out details omitted from the original performance. The result isn’t particularly original, but remains nonetheless engaging.

That first night, a little girl’s laughing voice and prancing footsteps echo throughout Sunshine’s house. But things quickly turn grim. Her ghost has bizarre, almost bipolar swings, wanting to play games and becoming suddenly destructive when Sunshine can’t oblige. A mournful pall hangs over Sunshine’s strangely large and well-appointed high school. Then, one stormy night, the haunting spills over, and dark forces turn her only ally, her mother, against her.

McKenzie gives her young adult audience many traits they’ve come to expect from these stories—then turns them on their heads. She gives Sunshine a handsome suitor whose clever insights penetrate her crushing mysteries, but the young man’s touch makes Sunshine physically nauseous. She gives Sunshine a dark, morally ambiguous mentor, only to reveal that this mentor has ambitions that don’t necessarily require Sunshine to survive.

This means the story feels both very familiar and strangely new. McKenzie evidently cherry-picks her favorite tropes from recent teen horror romances, then reassembles them in a funhouse mirror. Everything looks familiar, yet distorted: we recognize increments of Bella Swann, Clary Fray, and the Halliwell Sisters from TV’s Charmed. Yet McKenzie revitalizes them with her personal touches, and doesn’t just replay what we’ve already seen elsewhere.

Paige McKenzie, in a promotional still from
The Haunting of Sunshine Girl on YouTube

Despite mounting evidence, Sunshine’s mother refuses to accept the ghostly third tenant in their rain-soaked rental. Her Agent Scully-ish reliance on empirical science precludes the possibility of lingering spirits. So Sunshine, aided by her crush Nolan (I love you, don’t touch me!), begins collecting evidence. But they quickly discover that doesn’t refuse to see ghosts, she’s unable. Seems Sunshine’s strange, long-buried heritage might make her insights unique.

I must acknowledge one trait I distinctly appreciate. McKenzie doesn’t force Sunshine into melodramatic “boo” moments or contrived chapter-ending cliffhangers. Despite this story’s filmic origins, McKenzie (with ghostwriter Alyssa Sheinmel) translates events into book parameters without leaving a huge scar. Novelizing a web series could’ve created a disappointing hybrid book, neither fish nor fowl. Instead, McKenzie emphasizes the creeping dread and psychological horror which print does so well.

Dark spirits transfer from Sunshine’s house, into her mother. Their formerly warm relationship quickly sours. Several times, Sunshine, our first-person narrator, reports that this is the first time she’s ever lied to her mother, the first time they’ve ever had a knock-down-drag-out fight, the first time she’s ever cut class. Simultaneously, the intervening miles prove too much for another relationship: her best friend since second grade grows bored with Sunshine’s dramas. Only Sunshine has the power to exorcise the spirits severing her human bonds.

Paging Dr. Freud, stat!

Recently, I read some online hipster grumbling about the number of YA novels featuring sixteen-year-old girls, which present incipient adulthood metaphorically as supernatural or science fictional. Admittedly, the theme is common; yet I have no problem with it. Because many youth in today’s atomized, hyper-individualistic world hit adulthood unprepared, it must surely seem as horrific for them as it did for us.

For generations, authors have used metaphors to describe adulthood. From the X-Men to Ender Wiggin to Bella Swann, artists have described young adulthood as war, dawning superpowers, monsters, and beyond. And while not everybody likes Ender’s Game or Twilight equally, these books’ youthful, struggling audiences have never needed your approval. They see themselves in their heroes, because they know what it means to be a stranger in their own bodies.

How audiences receive this book probably depends on what they hope to find. McKenzie doesn’t tell an original, groundbreaking story, no; it’s difficult to cover two pages without recognizing some familiar trope from today’s busy YA publishing market. But McKenzie owns them, and more than once, she managed to twist something familiar into surprising pretzels, upending my jaded stoicism. No, this book isn’t original. But it sure is good.