The third and final part of June’s 11 in 11 by 11/11/11 book reviews.

There were two books I read in June that were truly outstanding, both in different ways.

Geraldine McCaughrean is not a well-known author in the United States, which is a shame, because her young adult fiction stretches the boundaries of any genre she chooses to write in. The White Darkness is a contemporary adventure with elements of the supernatural, a journey to the bottom of the world and back. Sym has always been fascinated by Scott’s doomed expedition to reach the South Pole, and particularly by the romantic young Captain Titus Oates–throughout her childhood and teens, he’s been her imagined companion, the voice inside her head she shares all her problems with. When her uncle takes her on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Antarctica, Sym is so excited that she doesn’t pay attention to the signs that this is not an ordinary trip. When catastrophe strikes and the trip turns into a desperate fight for survival, everything Sym has ever believed is put to the test, and her connection to the imaginary Captain Oates becomes her last link to reality.

The most astonishing thing about this book is that despite the blindingly obvious hints that something is fishy about Uncle Victor, the clues that the reader interprets easily but that Sym totally misses, none of that feels annoying, like so many books where the author has heard of dramatic irony but doesn’t realize that it shouldn’t be wielded like a Louisville Slugger. Sym’s innocence is so plausible that it makes perfect sense that she wouldn’t know that Uncle Victor has been lying to her not just about the trip, but about everything, her whole life. If McCaughrean had gone the other route–of making Victor seem honest to the reader as well as to Sym until some dramatic reveal–it would have been just as much a cheat. The reasons for Victor’s behavior have to be obvious to the reader in order for the story to have an impact. I also like that Sym’s almost-total deafness isn’t revealed until several chapters in; it’s a challenge that doesn’t define her, but isn’t trivial either–and it makes possible one of the most moving events in the entire book. Personally, I like the uncertainty of the supernatural elements: is Oates’s presence in Sym’s head imaginary, or is it something more? The story doesn’t hinge on this question, so it’s possible for it to stay uncertain if the reader doesn’t want to resolve it one way or the other.

The other excellent book, of course, is Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings. I groused about this one publicly through Facebook status updates. I used to love giant fantasy epics, and then I didn’t anymore. And there’s something about Sanderson’s novels (barring the Alcatraz books) that makes me antsy and impatient, something I can’t identify. It’s not like they’re bad books; I’ve read all but Warbreaker and I like them very much. And it’s not the length; I read Anathem in almost one sitting and it’s almost as long as The Way of Kings. I don’t hate the prose, I’m interested in the plot both long- and short-term, and I mostly care about the characters. And every hundred or so pages I just had to put the book down and do something else.

In discussing the book with a friend, I realized that part of my problem was probably that I was only truly interested in one of the three plots, in the sense that it was the one I wanted to come back to. The other two, I cared about while I was reading them, but…it’s a military campaign, I’ve read about dozens of military campaigns, and the girl in the other section was an academic, a researcher, and practically a librarian, so give me a break, where did you expect my attention was going to go? So it’s possible that my impatience is a desire to get back to the story I care about, but it shows up only as low-level mental itchiness because the other two plots are at least worth reading. Usually with books like this (multi-plot stories) I either like all the plots, or I’ve got one I love and I’m bored or annoyed by the others, so my reaction is a lot more extreme. It could also be that the density of the material is just overwhelming. It took me a month to read the unabridged Count of Monte Cristo, because I’d read for a couple of days and then have to put it down before my brain exploded. And I love that book with an unseemly passion. Still, I’m sort of leaning toward the first reason.

But as much as I would have enjoyed a book that only had that one plot, The Way of Kings simply wouldn’t have worked without all three intertwined. The Stormlight Archive, of which this is the first volume, is going to be an extraordinary work of fantasy, and Sanderson is either a genius or completely off his nut to even contemplate it. I’m interested in the world, I’m interested in the mystery of what happened to it, I’m interested in where the characters will go next. I want to know what Dalinar got that was worth losing all memory of his wife. I want to know what Jasnah’s research will turn up about the world’s history. I want to know how many hints Kaladin has to have dropped on his head from a great height before he works out what kind of power he has. I’m interested enough that I will stick with the next book despite putting it down at least a dozen times before I’m done. This is a different kind of achievement than Anathem, but if Sanderson can keep it together, I expect it to be marvelous.

Next up: July’s books. More of them, and a higher number of really good ones.

Summer turned out to be too busy to keep up with the review-writing schedule, and now that summer’s over, I really don’t want to write individual reviews for all those books. (I just noticed that the last review I wrote was in July, for a book I finished end of May.) I broke this into three sections, because I love the sound of my own voice, even if it’s an imaginary sound because I’m, you know, writing it, and the whole thing got too long.

I got behind on my reading schedule in June, partly because I spent six days wading through The Way of Kings and partly because I read a lot of other things in between. Most of what I’ve read so far I’ve really liked, so if you break it down by month there’d be maybe one or two that were okay (or worse) and the rest would be very good. June’s reading was split more evenly between excellent and meh. (I do have a rating system that I keep track of in my database, but I don’t post those with the reviews because for me, the fine gradations between Super-Fabulous and Poke-My-Eye-Out-With-A-Stick are not consistent. I’ll mark a book as Enjoyable and later realize that it was actually better than that. So I don’t like associating those ratings with a public review.)

Two of the books, Death in Florence by George Alec Effinger and Armor by John Steakley, were on the lower end of the ratings spectrum I don’t post. Death in Florence is one of Effinger’s early novels, a story about a utopian experiment that, like all utopian experiments, is rotten at the core. The premise is interesting as long as you read it as absurdism, but it doesn’t feel like it goes any deeper than that.

Armor, on the other hand, is beautifully characterized, has a well-realized fictional world, and is also a kind of philosophical exploration that I think is more successful than Effinger’s. Where it loses points with me is how hard Steakley hammers on the philosophical point he’s making. This science fiction novel focuses on a soldier in a future war whose main weapon is the armored suit that gives him protection, weaponry, and life support. When his entire unit is wiped out by the enemy, a computer glitch keeps sending him on mission after mission, sometimes while he is seriously injured, simply because none of the human personnel believe that sort of thing could happen. Steakley’s point about humanity and needless war is unfortunately obscured by his unrelenting portrayal of all things military as either stupid or evil. It is a pointless war of aggression, and the high leadership is totally ignorant of the situation on the ground, but–not a single officer who shows humility or understanding? Not one leader who, with boots on the ground, can admit that the strategy is doomed to failure? I recommend reading this book in conjunction with Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which uses the same basic premise but with a completely different attitude. (Armor is one of my husband’s favorites, and our disagreement about how good it was made for great tension because he wouldn’t admit I was right.

Next: the mid-range books, ones that were good but not outstanding.

The Tomorrow Code by Brian Falkner
Random House, 2008
11/11/11 Category: Science Fiction

The Tomorrow Code starts out with an interesting premise: if people invent time travel in the future, why can’t they send the information back in time to certain individuals so they can invent it sooner? Call it paradox, but New Zealander teenagers Tane and Rebecca think it might work—and if their future-selves can do it, who else would they tell about it? Rebecca, a young science whiz, knows about a project that uses theoretical aspects of physics to encode information, and she and Tane tap into the data stream to find a pattern that, when decoded, turns out to be…the winning Powerball number. Their future-selves have made them rich, but surely time-travel/communication could be used for more noble purposes, right? As more and more messages arrive, Tane and Rebecca begin to piece together the parts of a mystery that, if they don’t do something about it, could cause untold destruction to the human race.

Interesting plot hook, right? And Falkner’s writing is good, considering this was his first real YA book. He deals with the complications of sending and receiving information from the future, particularly the circularity of learning something from the future only *because* you learned it from the future and later sent it to your past selves; where would the ideas have come from in the first place? The characterization is serviceable but nothing to write home about—young friendship turning into unrequited love, kids maybe a little too much smarter than the adults around them. Rebecca’s backstory of a dead scientist father and a clinically depressed mother is too large a history for the small role it plays in the story, and I’m not sure I buy how wealthy Tane’s dad is. Overall, not a bad adventure.

Would that that were true.

Rebecca is established early-on as an environmental activist, always participating in rallies and stuff like that. It’s the foundation for the main plot complication: scientists have engineered a kind of retrovirus that attacks and destroys certain complicated life forms. Specifically, humans. Chimps, our nearest biological relatives, are safe; it’s just humans who are affected, leaving the land and lower life forms untouched. Naturally, this virus—more like a living entity; I don’t care enough to go into the details and probably you don’t either—escapes from the lab where it’s being studied and drifts across the New Zealand peninsula, killing every human in its path. It’s very creepy the way Falkner describes it.

You can see where this is going, right? Yeah. According to Rebecca, the moral voice of the novel, humans DESERVE TO BE KILLED. We’re a cancer on the Earth, a virus the planet’s trying to get rid of, because we pollute and kill animals and torture fluffy bunnies for medical research and have technology and basically have lost our pure and unsullied connection to Mother Gaia. There’s no counter-perspective; the adults fighting the outbreak are Wrong (we know this because they’re willing to kill poor defenseless research animals to, I don’t know, SAVE THE HUMAN RACE), people who don’t believe in environmental causes are Wrong, all humans are ultimately Wrong because they don’t live in small towns and grow their own food. At one point Rebecca not only voices the opinion—whoops! See what I did there? Not really an opinion, coming from her—that the mysterious life form should be left to sweep the Earth clean of the human plague, but is willing to take action to let that happen.

How self-loathing. How arrogant. How stupid.

Notice that this attitude is a long way from the desire not to pollute our shared resources, not to kill unnecessarily, not to waste the wonderful richness of the natural world. This attitude says that humans, of all creatures on the earth, are somehow not natural—that our intelligence damns us, that we are the only creatures who despoil the environment or kill our own kind (neither true), or that human development equals human culpability. It also suggests the bizarre notion that any environmental damage humans do is somehow equivalent to “destroying the earth,” which is itself an arrogant notion because the so-called “destruction” amounts to making Earth unlivable for humans. In this novel, love of the environment means believing humans are pollution—and I don’t believe that’s a requirement of environmentalism in general.

What really gets me is that people who think this way (and they exist) seem to have forgotten that their leisure to agonize about philosophical pap like this depends entirely on the technological advancements of humankind, all of which have come at an environmental cost. In the book, Rebecca is a computer genius; she uses powerful tools to receive and decode this message from the future; she and Tane spend most of their lottery winnings on an advanced submarine that will let them survive the oncoming disaster. Humans may be a disease, but that doesn’t stop her taking advantage of their technologies. This also accounts for one of the flaws in the plot, because future-Rebecca sends those warning messages back in time to PREVENT the disaster…so how does that explain present-Rebecca whingeing about evil humanity?

There’s plenty of room for disagreement about the role of humans vis-à-vis the earth. My attitude is that humans are stewards of the earth who should use its resources wisely—a perspective that some would deride for being too soft and others would criticize for being too anthropocentric. But even the most hard-core moral relativist can care about environmental issues without turning to self-loathing. Rebecca’s attitude in this book represents an extreme point of view that I can’t respect—and it’s a pity that an otherwise interesting book had to hinge on such a suspect moral question.

The Christopher Killer by Alane Ferguson
Book one of the Forensic Mysteries
Viking, 2006
11/11/11 Category: Young Adult

I was really getting into this book when I ran into a roadblock. A huge, frustrating, book-killing roadblock. Right around page 155, a printer’s error had inserted the wrong pages: it went 154, 155, 154 again, 157, 155, and then to 159, or something like that. So basically two non-consecutive pages were missing and a couple of pages had been printed twice, right at a point where the information on the missing pages was crucial to the mystery. I was willing to put up with it once, but it happened two more times in the exact same pattern. This is not something you want to discover in an exciting book two hours after the library has closed. Fortunately, the nearest branch had a copy without errors, and I finished it the next day. It still irked me, mostly because I wondered if the entire print run (3rd printing) had the same problem, and hundreds of other readers around the country had also screamed in frustration. (Also, I had to destroy the book so no unsuspecting reader would fall into the trap, and I hate doing that.)

The Christopher Killer really is that gripping a mystery—a forensic mystery, as the series title says, meaning that it’s the literary kin of CSI:All Those Cities. The main character is Cameryn Mahoney, whose father is the coroner for the small town of Silverton, Colorado, that’s not so small that he doesn’t need help.  When the sheriff hires a new deputy, but refuses to hire Mr. Mahoney an assistant, Cammie asks for the job. She’s fascinated by forensics and wants to become a forensic pathologist when she grows up, she’s smart and intuitive, and best of all, she works cheap. Cammie’s being hired for such a responsible and gruesome job when she’s barely 17 is a bit of a stretch, but once you’ve accepted the premise, the story works very well.

Most of the deaths Mr. Mahoney handles are ordinary, but things heat up when a young woman Cammie worked with at the local (and only) hotel is found murdered with a St. Christopher medallion tucked into her bra. The murder method, and the medallion, are the mark of the so-called Christopher Killer, who has killed three other girls in places all across the country. Suspicion lands on a young man named Adam, a Goth-type who’s just plain weird and therefore suspect by the locals, but Cammie wonders if it might not be the mysterious and handsome young deputy, who’s also new to the town. Cammie’s friend whose name I’ve forgotten, Haven or something like that, is convinced that a talk-show psychic named Dr. Jewel can contact the dead girl’s ghost and learn her murderer’s name, and when Dr. Jewel comes to town for that purpose, Cammie’s skepticism about psychics is tested to the limit.

One aspect of this book that I liked is that Cammie is both scientific-minded and a faithful Catholic. Her thoughts about how she reconciles the conflicts between science and faith, and her questions about how psychic ability might fit with both of them, make this story unusual. The focus of the story is not on “proving” one way of thinking correct over the other, but it adds depth to Cammie’s character and gives her a good reason to start believing that Dr. Jewel may have extrasensory powers. The mystery is well-played, and the secret of the murderer’s real identity stays secret right up to the end.

It’s a new series, and for all its intensity, the book feels a little undeveloped, but that’s something that should develop over time. I’m interested to find out more about Cammie’s wayward mother, who left the family when Cammie was very young and in this book is reaching out to reconnect with her daughter; I also like the accuracy of the forensic aspects of the story, which may be too gory for some readers. My biggest problem is with Cammie’s unofficial nemesis, the forensic pathologist who believes (reasonably) that she is too young to have this job, and who (unreasonably) belittles and ignores her input right up until the point where he doesn’t, which coincidentally saves her life. Cammie’s also a little too much cleverer than the adults in the story, which is something YA authors have to balance carefully; teen readers want teen characters who are competent and able to cope in the adult world, but when teen characters are surrounded by stupid adults it’s either parody or one of those awful Disney Channel sitcoms.

I liked The Christopher Killer enough that I’m planning to read the rest of the series—just as soon as I buy a replacement copy for the horribly mangled book.

Ghost Boy by Iain Lawrence
Delacorte, 2000
11/11/11 Category: Young Adult

Ghost Boy is a beautifully written historical fiction about being different, set in a time when old-fashioned circuses were dying out but hadn’t yet completely vanished from the American scene.  The titular character is an albino boy named Harold Kline, mocked and despised by the other kids in his small town for looking different, emotionally isolated from his family after his father and brother’s deaths in World War II and his mother’s remarriage to a man who doesn’t know how to deal with a damaged teenager. When the circus comes to town, Harold encounters the freaks—the diminutive Tina, the ogreish “Fossil Man,” and the enigmatic Gypsy Magda. More importantly, he learns of the Cannibal King, supposedly a barbarian from darkest Africa who happens to be an albino like Harold. Harold leaves home to follow the circus, always hoping to meet the Cannibal King who is always just ahead, scouting for the circus. But he finds his real talent is with the elephants, three sad creatures who are all that is left of the once-great menagerie. His idea to teach the elephants to play baseball as a gambit to draw audiences wins him the affections of Flip, a beautiful young horse trainer who doesn’t seem to care that Harold is different. But when he is torn between the genuine affection of the freaks and the lure of being treated as a normal person, Harold’s life is turned upside down, and he’s forced to grow up fast.

Iain Lawrence writes a beautiful book. You can’t help but be drawn in to the world he depicts, this post-war era in which the economy is recovering, but these little circuses that used to attract huge crowds are disappearing. Lawrence’s characterization is excellent, if a little too obvious. Unlike Harold, we know that Harold’s desperate love for Flip isn’t fully returned; we know that his choice to abandon his real friends when he’s teased about being a freak is going to end badly; we can see that the circus owner cares more about survival than he does about Harold. It all comes across, barely, as dramatic irony, but from a different perspective, it just makes you want to slap Harold so he’ll see the truth. If Lawrence’s skill as a writer weren’t so great, you could pass this book off as just another after-school special about believing in yourself and The True Meaning of Diversity.

That said, there’s still a lot to enjoy about this book. Harold’s sessions with the elephants are funny and intriguing, the more so when you realize that Lawrence based the idea of elephants playing baseball on a true story of English circus elephants who learned to play cricket. The melancholy mood of the story is a perfect fit for the growing despair of everyone in the circus, which will have to be disbanded if they can’t pull off a hit show in Salem, Oregon. Harold’s wild idea is what they all hitch their hopes to, so that the difficulties the elephants have in, for example, learning to throw the ball increase the tension of the story. The ending is tragic in some ways, redemptive in others, and while I knew all along that something really bad had to happen (one of the other sources of tension is the hostility Harold faces from Flip’s large, strong boyfriend), I could never have predicted what finally did happen, despite its being hinted at almost from the beginning.

Ghost Boy is an excellent story, maybe not the most polished young adult novel ever, but definitely worth reading if you’re in the mood for something sad and a little bit terrible.