I got this book from the library immediately after seeing the premise. Dystopian with a neo-Puritan society, living in a colony surrounded by a fence that keeps out the zombie hordes? Sounds awesome to me! But I couldn't get over my intense and all-consuming hatred for the heroine. She seemed to me to be ridiculously selfish, and spent all her inner monologue time whining about her life and how unfair it was, and the cruel tragedies that befell her. Don't get me wrong – being stuck in a burning house with zombies clawing at your door is sucks pretty hard. But there's a fine art to having a character suffer without being really freaking annoying about it. Lots of other people – including those whose taste I trust – loved this book, but I had to force myself to finish it.
Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld
I love Scott Westerfeld. I thought his Leviathan series was fantastic. But I was never able to finish this one, even though a good friend of mine totally loves the series and thinks I'm insane for not loving it. I think there are two reasons why it didn't work for me:
1) The prose and the story felt very simplistic. I don't know if this was supposed to be a middle grade book, but I think I was expecting something more sophisticated. Which is kind of a weird reason to dislike the book (it didn’t measure up to my totally random expectations!), but there it is.
2) I was a little burned out on dystopias by the time I got to this one. Again, not the book's fault, but by the time I picked this up, I was about ready to run screaming from any dystopian premise (I am so there now). I mean, this book was actually published two years before the Hunger Games, so it was a pioneer in its genre*, but alas, I read it too late to appreciate the premise, which has since been copied dozens of times.
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Benjamin Alire Saenz.
This is the most frustrating of the group, because I really can't tell you why I didn't like it. Look at all the awards it won! It's an amazing book about finding your identity and courage and the pain of being a young adult (particularly a child of Mexican immigrant parents). It has the most lovely heartfelt ending… but somehow, the emotion of the ending sailed right over my head (or should I say it sailed right over my heart?). Now, I am a middle class white lady, and I have never been a Hispanic teenage boy, so one could say there's an empathy gap missing. And yet, I think one of the things that distanced me from this book was that there were a couple of moments that were too real for me, the ones that recalled some of the helplessness and frustration that come from being a teenager. Those moments were so perfectly articulated, and so close to what I felt, that I think they might have made me withdraw from the emotions of the story.
In any case, you should all read that book, because I could tell it was beautiful, even if I never quite felt it myself.
*Okay, I started thinking "is it really a pioneer? When did dystopians really become popular?" And so I found this AMAZING infographic**, which credits Uglies as one of the earliest books in this recent resurgence.
**Do you want ALL the YA infographics?? You know you do!
Okay, here is take two on Part 2 of the Dystopian post. I'm writing it in Word this time, and saving every five minutes, because I don't trust fate.
The whole concept for this post started in part because of chance, and in part because of publishing schedules. But either way, I ended up reading the third book in all but one of the following trilogies within a few months of each other. And in every case, it seemed like the third book was the one that floundered or disappointed.
The third book in a trilogy is inherently the hardest.* By that time, readers have developed firm opinions about the characters, and certain expectations about the plot and the outcome. It's very, very difficult to make the majority of your readership happy. And authors often seem to feel the pressure to both meet and defy expectations (aka put in the most shocking emotional twist possible for the sake of emotion rather than what makes sense for the plot).
For these trilogies specifically, I think the formula I discussed in Part 1 – which is inherently character centric – thus can have a lot of trouble when it comes to world building. The trick, with these dystopians, seems to be to balance focusing on the growth and development of the heroine (not to mention her love story) along with the overthrow of the dystopia.
Figuring out how to write this post has been inherently difficult. Because it's impossible to talk about these books and my issues with dystopians without spoiling the endings. So I have gone out and taught myself how to include a spoiler tag, so that the part of this post that contains spoilers will be hidden unless you click on it.
Here are the books I'm going to talk about:
The Chemical Garden Trilogy, Lauren DeStefano The Divergent Trilogy, Veronica Roth The Matched Trilogy, Ally Condie The Legend Trilogy, Marie Lu The Hunger Games Trilogy, Suzanne Collins
Look, I figured out how to make a spoiler button! Click to read the rest of the post, if you've read all the above or don't mind spoilers.
Unsurprisingly, the similarities that started in the concept of each series carry through the third book. In every one of the above books, the heroine has become inextricably linked to a revolution that is looking to overthrow the society.* In other words, she's taken from the more individual setting of the first books where she overcame her battle (e.g. Tris with her fellow Dauntless initiates, Katniss in the arena, June hunting down Day), and placed into the center of a much larger conflict. For me, two of the above succeeded, and three failed, and it was connected to the prominence of the heroine's involvement in the revolution, and the amount of power she wields.
In the books where the structure worked – Champion and Mockingjay – the authors managed to set their heroines fairly high up in the rebellion. June had been set up from the beginning of the series as the revolution's prodigy, and Day, of course, was the symbol of the people. By their positions of power within the rebellion, their influence in altering the course of the rebellion felt real. And though Katniss has less power, and is misused as a symbol, she manages to take action to reclaim her power and not let herself be a tool of the rebellion anymore. I was satisfied with both of these endings, even if the Shocking Moments in both irritated me.
As for the Divergent trilogy, one could argue that Tris is very high up in her rebellion, but it kind of depends which rebellion you're talking about. The one in the city? The genetics one that she and Tobias stumble into? To be honest, I really don’t recall the plot of the book that well. It was jumbled and had too many ideas shoved into one book. So maybe it's not fair for me to say this is a worldbuilding misstep; it's more of a plotting/pacing issue. Maybe I would have been more convinced of the success of the ending if the plot had been given some space to breathe. In any case, Tris, like Katniss, changes the course of the rebellion through her actions… but in her case, it's not so much a reclaiming of power, more a fulfillment of the ultimate bravery she'd been searching for throughout the series.
And no, in case you're wondering, I didn't like the ending. But it had been spoiled for me that someone died, so I went into it prepared, and thus didn't have as negative a reaction as some. I really only liked the first book in the series, in any case.
In Reached, the third book of the Matched trilogy, the three main characters, but particularly Cassia, have very menial roles in the rebellion, even though they're called to help find a cure for the plague ravaging Society. I think Cassia's role in discovering the cure (through her magic sorting ability!) felt awkward because it didn't really require much growth on her part to beat the plague; it was due to an innate skill. And I think the ending also felt less satisfying to me because it wasn't the evils of the Society she was overcoming, it was a plague. The Society had already fallen by the time the book ended, and so the conflict that was set up in the first two books kind of fizzled out. So even though Cassia had an important role in the disease, she had no power or influence in the revolution itself.
Sever, the third book in the Chemical Garden trilogy, also has a failure of tension. Rhine doesn't do anything to cure the disease or save the world, except to exist and have unique DNA. Granted, she has to allow Vaughn to experiment on her, and that wasn't easy, but by having evil Vaughn be the one to cure the disease, it takes power and influence away from Rhine. As such, the cure of the disease occurs entirely off-screen. Oh, there's a revolution that her twin is involved in too, but it vanishes before the end of the book.
So in a way, Sever was the biggest failure in my measure of heroines and revolutions. But it was also my favorite third book of the above series, despite its flaws. It brings the series back to the more claustrophobic settings of book 1 and away from the more expanded series of book 2, which wasn't as captivating. And it gets back to its other strength, the fascinating and disturbing view of the relationships between Rhine, Linden, and Cecily. Even this book's Shocking Moment didn't bother me as much as some of the other ones, because the way the characters responded was original and interesting.
In writing this post, I've found another similarity between these series: all of them contain a Shocking Moment that has little to do with the rest of the plot. Well, except The Matched Trilogy. Cookie for Ally Condie! But the existence of all those Shocking Moments is, perhaps, a discussion for another time. (Part 3?)
What makes the third book in a trilogy work for you?
*I say as we get closer to working on Book 3 of the Prophecy Breakers... O.O
I've
been meaning for a while now to write a post about dystopian YA fiction. I finished several dystopian series at once near the end of last year, right around the time the second Hunger Games movie came out. And now, with the Divergent movie having done so well, it seems like the first time to finally get to finishing this post.
Dystopians have been popular for a while, but it really kicked off with the Hunger Games. Theories as to why they're so popular range from high school is like a rigid, dystopian society, to dystopians hold a mirror to society, to my personal favorite - recent dystopian fiction tends to follow the Hero's Journey. Oh, and apparently Edward Snowden is a lot like Katniss. Anyway, the Hero's Journey theory actually makes a lot of sense - I don't think the Hero(ine?)'s journey is ever going to go out of style.
Speaking of style issues, let's look at the series I'm going to be discussing:
In
a distant, dark future, a sudden event changes a young woman's life, pulling
her away from everything she knows. The society as she's known it has always
been bad, but it turns out its worse than she thought, and she finds herself at
the center of a revolution, and a race to save what's left of society. But is
the revolution everything it seems? Who are the good guys? And in fighting the
revolution, will she has to sacrifice the boy she loves?
Believe it or not, I actually hadn't noticed this pattern (clearly modeled after the Hunger Games) until I started writing tonight. I'd mentally grouped these books together to compare them more for the plot structure, but apparently they stuck together in my mind for others as well. In case you're wondering, the series are:
The Chemical Garden Trilogy, Lauren DeStefano
The Divergent Trilogy, Veronica Roth
The Matched Trilogy, Allie Condie
The Hunger Games Trilogy, Suzanne Collins (of course)
From what I've read so far, the Crewel, Delirium, and Under the Never Sky series (and possibly Shatter Me**) should probably be in this group, but I haven't finished them yet, and I'm far too lazy to do so by the next post. In any case, for this first post, I'm going to talk about patterns and shared ideas and fiction.
I don't think similarities are necessarily a bad thing. It's a little startling to me how similar these dystopian novels are on that basic level, now that I'm aware of it. But they're certainly not the first time an idea has been recycled. For one, there's the hilarious comparison
of Pocahontas and James Cameron's Avatar that's been around for a while. And it's not like I'm going around saying, "Oh darn, too many awesome strong female characters who save the world!"
And in Fantasy, we have the whole Tolkien subgenre. And Arthurian stories, which I've never liked. I mean, it's a never ending pattern of "everyone betrays each other and then they die." In most stories, you have hope that something good will happen at the end, but with Arthurian retellings, it's pretty much set that everyone dies tragically.
Then, of course, there's urban fantasy. I'm pretty sure Laurell K. Hamilton and Anita Blake
are solely responsible for the current trends, though I'm too lazy to Google it to see if I'm right. And yes, I know Emma Bull's War of the Oaks is the real first urban fantasy. But Hamilton is responsible for the vampire/witch/shapeshifter/half (or full) faerie/necromancer/wizard, who lives in a city and hunts the local vampire/witch/shapeshifter/half (or full) faerie/necromancer/wizards, all while fending off her attraction for a darkly mysterious vampire/witch/shapeshifter/half (or full) faerie/necromancer/wizard. Oh, Anita
Blake. I remember how awesome you were before you gathered your male harem. All
those interesting moral thoughts you had about religion and intimacy? Whatever!
Forget those!Though I think I'd probably hate those books if I started reading
them now. But at the time, I loved them, and Anita was in a class of her own.
So why do we keep seeing so much of the same? I think some of it is comfort - my comfort reads are historical romance. Not sure why, because they're some of the most formulaic of all genres, but there's something soothing about pretty dresses and a guaranteed squishy happy ending.
But I think there's another aspect at work: publishers will sell what is likely to be successful. That's not necessarily a critique. Their job is to publish books they know people will buy. It can go deeper than that though. Here is an excellent and thoughtful post (WARNING: contains adult language). from the review site Dear Author (they have a ton of amazing and insightful articles there on publishing, self-publishing, authors behaving badly, and more... apart from all the book reviews).
For those not in the mood to read a post with adult language, or who don't want to click on one more freaking link for this post, here is the conclusion to the article:
Assumptions about what readers want not only reinforce the sexist status quo, but they create homogenized books. Books in which we know what’s going to happen before it happens.... And as the comments from self-policing authors attest, these established norms are self-perpetuating. They’re writing what they’ve read, what they expect to read. What do readers want? Perhaps we won’t truly know ourselves, until we get to experience all the possibilities.
What do you think? What would you like to see more of in your traditionally published fiction?***
Maybe it will be urban science fiction, with the android/cyborg/alien/space pirate/three-headed space lobster who hunts android/cyborg/alien/space pirate/three-headed space lobsters and fights off her attraction to a android/cyborg/alien/space pirate/three-headed space lobster.
One can only hope not.
Coming up next week: the second half of the dystopian post, where I talk about what does and does not work in this particular brand of dystopian fiction.
*Blogger flags dystopian as misspelled - and offers 'utopia' as the only correction. STOP TRYING TO WHITEWASH EVERYTHING, GOOGLE! I will not bow to your evil empire!
**A large part of the reason I haven't read this one yet is because the heroine's name is Juliette. I think that would confuse me too much right now.
***Yes, self-publishing is its own thing that might be the solution, but I'm not going to talk about it in this post, because it's late and I'm lazy.
It's been a while since I talked about great length about books. Perish the thought! I haven't read anything earth-shattering in the past few months, so here are some short thoughts and notes.
I
finally read Delirium, and I was kind of underwhelmed. Part of the problem was that the dystopian setting is all too familiar at this point, and another was that I couldn't get how society would make such a drastic and radical change. A lot of people hate prologues, but I think this is one book where a view of the tipping point would have served the story well. But the real issue for me about sympathy with the main character. For the first half of the novel, Lena has thoughts about love that are, in her world, completely understandable. But we as the readers know her reasoning is completely flawed and incorrect. Even though Lauren Oliver does a good job of showing why Lena would think this way, I was missing a connection to Lena and her views that would allow me to sympathize with her more completely. I'm not explaining it well, but there you go.
Should I read the
other two books in the series, or just look up the plot on Wikipedia?
E.
Lockhart is my new favorite teen contemporary author. I loved The Disreputable
History of Frankie Landau-Banks and The Boyfriend List. Her characters feel
more like real teenagers than most books (painfully and hilariously so), and her plots are far from ordinary. See? Frankie Landau-Banks was nominated for the National Book Award AND the Printz Award. (I've done very well reading books recommended by those awards; it's how I discovered E. Lockhart (and John Green said she was one of his favorites)).
Frankie Landau-Banks at age 14: Debate Club. Her father’s “bunny rabbit.” A mildly geeky girl attending a highly competitive boarding school.
Frankie Landau-Banks at age 15: A knockout figure. A sharp tongue. A chip on her shoulder. And a gorgeous new senior boyfriend: the supremely goofy, word-obsessed Matthew Livingston. Frankie Laundau-Banks. No longer the kind of girl to take “no” for an answer. Especially when “no” means she’s excluded from her boyfriend’s all-male secret society. Not when her ex boyfriend shows up in the strangest of places. Not when she knows she’s smarter than any of them. When she knows Matthew’s lying to her. And when there are so many, many pranks to be done.
Frankie Landau-Banks, at age 16: Possibly a criminal mastermind.
Speaking of John Green, I just noticed that The Fault in Our Stars has 11,000 reviews. With an average of 4.8 stars. Wow. I mean, if you're looking for any evidence that you should read a book, there you go.
\
Did
you know that advanced mathematics could make the basis for an awesome, creepy
middle grade/YA novel? Me neither. But it worked. And now I know what vampire numbers are.
Another recent read. The
characters and the concept wasn't particularly new. But this book served as a
reminder to me that just making your book fun can carry you far. This won't
make my top ten list at the end of the year, I'm so in for the sequel. And the inevitable movie adaptation.
Speaking of movies, there
were two big YA trailers released this week: Maze Runner and The Giver. Both
trailers look amazing, though I'm not 100 percent sure about the free bonus
romance they've added into The Giver. I'll probably still go see both, because
Dylan O'Brien and Meryl Streep, respectively.
I
am not, however, planning to go see Divergent. Mostly because I'm still bitter
about the third book (all of it, not just the ending), but also because it only
has a 35 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. What a shame that the filmmakers
apparently screwed it up so much. It had such great potential for a movie, my
personal bitterness aside. Blargh.
Ack, I almost forgot about this book!
Despite the fact that it slipped my mind (which I blame on my long, long work day today), this was one of my favorite recent reads. Anyone here who loves romantic YA definitely needs to read this (looking at you, Melanie and Sheena). I wish I'd known when I read it that it was a one-off rather than the start of a trilogy (there are two other books the authors are planning, but they're going to be about different characters).
Upcoming
reads:
Because I keep hearing good things Because Sheena loved it.
about Bacigalupi.
Because that cover. Wow. Also, the Book Smugglers gave it a 9, which is super rare, so I'm sold.
This book looks at Frankie Landau- Won a paltry one award, but it
Banks' two awards and scoffs. was the Nebula. Also, it happened
The Book Smugglers gave it a 10, to be sitting visibly on the shelf
which I think they've done to a grand at the library, so I decided to
total of a dozen or so books in the give it a try.
history of their blog.
In closing, I would like you to know that this is a real thing.
Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks; and when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one. It’s not as if she had much choice. Her parents were trying to eat her.
Now it is 1894. In the wake of her trial, Lizzie has changed her name to “Lizbeth Andrew,” and she’s bought a house on the other side of her oceanfront hometown—a sprawling Victorian mansion called Maplecroft. Her inherited fortune has been invested in a terrific library and laboratory, installed in Maplecroft’s basement; and from this center of operations she observes and researches the supernatural foe that so hideously transformed her parents. Someone has to. And no one else even suspects what’s truly happening. No one knows that just offshore lurks an ancient god, starved for blood. Its agents are masked, and eager to kill. They are ready to invade. But one woman stands guard on the shore between the ocean and Fall River. She has seen the dark forces of the Atlantic firsthand, and she has no illusions. Every night she hears the tide bring messages of madness, apocalypse, and monsters. And she is ready to meet them all. With an axe.
