The Other Place, by Nancy L. Robison, for Timeslip Tuesday

Today's Timeslip book is The Other Place, by Nancy L. Robison (1978).

Mine, happily picked up at a booksale, turned out to be a review copy (very cool to see the retro promotional info, shown below), but I don't think I'll send in two clippings as requested.

I'm making no effort to hold back on spoilers here with this whacky 1970s sci fi story for kids, so if you are a little kid who's never read any science fiction (which you aren't), go read the book and see if you agree with the two Goodreads readers whose first sci fi it was, and who loved it before I ruin everything.

The Other Place starts with Elena and her dad driving off to the house in the country (USA) where they are now going live, following the death of Elena's mom.  Things get weird, and Elena can't see the road behind them anymore, and her dad's stilted remarks don't do much to sooth her growing sense of wrongness.  The cabin is fine, and seems normal enough, except that Elena is woken up by strange noises, and goes off into the woods to see what's happening, and the townsfolk are dancing around in the middle of nowhere. 

A trip to the store the next day adds to the weirdness, when she sees the storekeeper has eyes filmed over with jelly...as do the kids and the teacher in the one room schoolhouse.  One kid, with mostly non jelly eyes, is friendly, lending her a horse to ride, but when she tries to ride her way out of the valley, she finds she can't.  She's stuck.

Turns out the townsfolk are aliens in a little bubble cut off physically and temporally from the rest of the world, her mom was one of them, and her dad has volunteered to help them fix their space craft so they can go home.  Happily for Elena, the friendly kid helps her get out of the valley, but her dad wants to go off with the aliens because he loves his dead alien wife more than he cares about his living kid (the book does not say it quite like this....).  And when Elena escapes after what felt like weeks away from the city, almost no time has passed, and her aunt is there to meet her....and her aunt has.....JELLY EYES!  The end.

The illustrations add a certain 1970s something to the story.

The paperback cover, if you are so lucky to be reading that one, adds even more.  

Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh, by Rachael Lippincott for Timeslip Tuesday

A YA sapphic love story for this week's Timeslip Tuesday--Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh, by Rachael Lippincott (August 29, 2023, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers).

Audrey is in a depressed holding pattern--dumped by her boyfriend and waitlisted by her dream school, the RI School of Design, she puts in the motions of working at the family corner store in Pittsburgh.  If she can send RISD the additional art they asked of her, maybe she'll get in, but she's not feeling any creative spark at all.  But then a regular customer, a curmudgeonly old man, sends her back to England in 1812.  Which turns out to be just the unsticking adventure she needs!

Back in 1812, wealthy and lovely Lucy is also stuck--her father is planning to marry her off to a much older man who is an awful piece of work.  Then Audrey pops into her life.  Lucy takes Audrey in hand, molding her as much as possible into a proper regency young lady, albeit one who's American upbringing can be used to try to explain all the bits of Audrey that refuse to be molded, and there are lots of these.  

Audrey figures out that she has 24 days in the past, and figures that she needs to find her spark again to get home.  So she casts around at the local eligible young men for love....  And Lucy, talking all this over with her new friend, yearns for a spark of her own.  

And then they realize it is each other that is making sparks fly....

It's a charming enough romance, and there's considerable humor in fish out of water Audrey back in 1812, and considerable sympathy evoked for poor trapped Lucy.  But the story didn't go beyond "charming enough" for me into any sort of moving, gripping reading experience.  It's pretty clear what's going to happen romance-wise, so it was more a waiting for the inevitable to happen than a what will happen next story.  Also the only Pride and Prejudice tie in was the time period, which disappointed me.  If you want a bit of escapism with two girls falling sweetly in love, and if you like your Time Travel to be a diverting bit of plot device, it will do nicely, but if you want more, not so much.

The Named, by Marianne Curley, for Timeslip Tuesday

The Named, by Marianne Curley (YA, Bloomsbury 2002), is a Timeslip Tuesday book that has been sitting on my (very large) main tbr pile for years, and even when I decided that yesterday its time to be read had come, I was kind of doubtful for the first third or so.  Happily, it started zipping along nicely, and I stayed up late finishing it. 

It starts with the horrible murder by monster of four-year old Ethan's beloved big sister, which he sees happen.  And then we jump to high school Ethan, still traumatized, with dysfunctional parents, and learn that Ethan was taken in by a society of guardians, who (with the help of a pantheon of mysterious deities who don't do much in terms of direct action) fight the forces of chaos trying to rip apart the past to make more chaos.  So Ethan is one of the Named, as they are known, and he's doing well in his time travel missions, trained by a purple-eyed 600 quasi-magical dude....and he reaches the next step in guardian advancement--he assigned an apprentice.

(me reading--not yet sure I like the book)

And the new apprentice is his ex-best friends little sister, Isabel.  So there are some real world problems, but Isabel takes to being one of the named like a fish to water, and it's clear to the guardians that Ethan and Isabel are part of an ancient prophecy, which, when we finally get to see what it says, is both confusing and somewhat pointless, and why did they have to make a difficult and dangerous journey to a magical underground chamber to read it when writing things down is a thing  (? I could have missed the point, or possibly several points.)

But Ethan and Isabel also time travel, and I liked their missions (saving Richard II and young Abaigail Adams from the chaos operatives, including the sister killer monster, trying to snuff them).   It's pretty easy time travel, where clothes and language and backstory problems are all taken care of (although I think they should have been sprinkled in grime instead of having new nice pretty clothes every time), but it was satisfying on the whole.

 And then everything gets very existing as new characters from the real world are brought into play and there's a big show down with sister killing monster and his gang, and I was reading very vigorously.

So I guess I like the book (with the exception of the prophecy and Isabel's romantic yearnings for purple eyed, 600 year old dude, which moved me not at all), and I rated it four stars on Goodreads for keeping me up late. And I have the next two in the series, and they may well show up here some Tuesday in the future....But there's a lot of flashy premise and not quite enough careful subtlety of story and character development to make me want to reread it--I'm don't think I'd get more out of it a second time through, which is how I feel with a book I am certain I like.

Vermilion Sunrise, by Lydia P. Brownlow

It was a nice change for me to read an engrossing YA sci fi story that checked lots of my reading boxes--Vermilion Sunrise, by Lydia P. Brownlow (May 2, 2023 by Warren Publishing).  

17-year-old Leigh has no memory of volunteering to be one of the first colonists on a watery world far from Earth, and so it is more than a bit of a shock when she wakes from cyrosleep and is shuttled down to the planet with very little in the way of a briefing.  The cyrosleep technology is flawed--killing adults.  So her new home is inhabited only by teenagers.  Hers is the third shuttle of kids arriving at a small island outpost.  The earlier arrivals, from countries all around the world, have no answers for Leigh's many questions--why does none of the technology that came with these first settlers work?  Why were these kids selected to be colonists, and why do none of them remember volunteering?  Why have none of them been told what to do? And she has her own demons to struggle with, hoping to put her traumatic past behind her and start again, with a new name and identity.

I was worried that it might become a Lord of the Flies scenario, but happily for my reading pleasure, the kids that were already there included some great leaders, who had made their settlement into a functional sort of found family.  And much of the book involves the dynamics of this group as they work together to make their outpost a place to call home.  Another mystery quickly intrudes, though--bits of a broken shuttle are washing ashore.  Could there be survivors beyond this one island?

A perilous voyage through stormy seas is the only way to find answers...but will the answers they find destroy the tenuous peace of their home?

So the pacing won't be for everyone--for much of the book, there are few Exciting Happenings (there are some very exciting ones towards the end though).  You have to be a real lover of character driven survival stories to fully appreciate this one, which I am, so I did! I really enjoyed the group dynamics as they worked through practical and ethical problems together, and the romance was sweet.  The only thing that would have made me like the book more would have been more time spent by the kids trying to figure out the ecology of the world.  One of the things I immediately found disturbing about this already disturbing situation (and the wrongness of it all is clear from the get-go) was that the colonist kids didn't include anyone with biology experience, and so there wasn't much attention paid to the specifics of flora and fauna (and fauna, especially, was given short shrift).  

I will happily read more about these kids and their new world!  The book ends at a good stopping point, but I want more answers (why, as Leigh herself asks, are there no Canadians? Has something bad happened to Canada? And even more pressingly, why the heck weren't the kids briefed and trained?) and more attention paid to the ecology (the ready-made "food" supplies they arrived with won't last forever....).

disclaimer: review copy received from the author.

Whisper Falls, by Elizabeth Langston, for Timeslip Tuesday

 

A YA romance for this week's Timeslip Tuesday--Whisper Falls, by Elizabeth Langston (2013).  Out mountain biking in the North Carolina woods, Mike sees a girl in strange clothes standing behind a waterfall.  Susanna is an indentured servant in 1796, bound to a cruel master.  Susanna and Mike discover they can cross through the waterfall to each other's time, and as Mike learns about Susanna's harsh life and researches what happened to her and the family she serves, he becomes desperate to save her.  And he does, bringing her back to the present, which is where this first book of their story ends.

Most of the story takes place in the past; and basically, it is historical romance, with lots of good details and descriptions of the past.  The time travel adds some additional interest, though Mike has too easy a time passing in the 18th century (language, for instance, isn't a problem, though idioms are different).  I was much more interested in Susanna's reactions to the modern world, which is a story that continues in the next book, A Whisper in Time.  

Short answer--it was fine, but not quite my personal cup of tea--a kind of boring boy saves a more interesting girl from a predictable situation thanks to a magical waterfall and they are in love. I had trouble caring as much as I knew I was supposed to, and the central conflict was so predictable there was no tension.  If I had lost the book halfway through reading it, I wouldn't have cared over much.  

See You Yesterday, by Rachel Lynn Solomon for Timeslip Tuesday

See You Yesterday, by Rachel Lynn Solomon (YA, May 2022, Simon and Schuster) is a very entertaining and rather moving ground-hog day sort of time slip story.  It's Barrett Bloom's first day of college, and she is eager to put the heavy weight of high school behind her, and start afresh.  But she wakes up to find that she has a new room-mate--a girl she was once friends with in high school, who turned into an enemy.  And her day doesn't get any better--humiliated by Miles, a smart aleck boy in Physics class, flubbing her chance to get a position on the college newspaper, and culminating with setting a frat on fire.  Not the first day she wanted....but it isn't her only chance.

When she wakes up the next day, it is the first day all over again.  And Barrett can't do anything about it but try to do better (and successfully avoid the frat fire).  Then Miles seeks her out--he has also been stuck in a repeating first day loop, in his case for weeks already, and he's glad to have a potential ally in figuring out how to get unstuck.  Gradually Barrett and Miles, thrown together day after the same day, start to appreciate and trust each other, taking advantage of their situation to seize the day and do all sorts of fun and whacky stuff (like treating all 15 dogs in the shelter to a grand day out, wildly spending money on adventures and free ice cream for everyone on campus, and more).  And gradually they open up to each other, sharing their secrets and past traumas.  And as day follows the same day, they fall in love....learning each other, delighting in each other, treasuring each other.

But if time starts flowing like it should again, will their love last?

There's lots to like here.  Barrett isn't a standard sexy YA heroine--she's plus sized, abrasive, prickly, and impulsive.  A lot of the prickly and abrasive part comes from the trauma of her high school experience, which includes a really horrible episode in which the guy who asks her to prom, and then has (consensual, though not great) sex with her, turns that into a public humiliation nightmare for her. She wants to be someone different, but it turns out that Miles loves her for who she is, and she is just the right person to pull him out of his reserve into the flow of life and laughter. Barrett is Jewish, and Miles is Japanese Jewish, and their shared Jewish-ness is a part of their growing relationship, and Barret's mom is about to marry her girlfriend, which also makes this story have a nice outside the standard mold taste to it.

But mostly the fun and interest comes from Barrett and Miles making each new/same day different and extraordinarily, days in which they are able to grow and change.

I'm not sure it needed to be over 400 pages long, but I am sure that YA readers who want entertaining cute and introspection-provoking romance will not care.

A nice time travel touch was Barrett and Miles seeking out a physics professor who was basically forced to resign after her high level course on Time Travel outraged parents.  She wasn't able to give them a magic solution, but did nudge them toward the exit point of their loops, and I liked how the time travel was neither entirely fantastical or entirely scientific, but a bit of both.  I also liked the lost sock that was an important key to it all....lost socks are powerful, mysterious entities!

 

Deeplight, by Frances Hardinge

Deeplight, by Frances Hardinge (Amulet Books, April 14 2020 in the US: Macmillan, October 2019 in the UK) is a thrilling adventure full of monsters and magic and mystery.  Recommended to those who like plucky protagonists (who take a while to realize they are plucky) facing impossible odds; not recommended to those terrified of deep dark oceans and those who cannot stand reading about toxic friendships.

The waters surrounding the long chain of islands known as the Myriad were once home to gods.  Monstrous gods, horrifying in form, rising periodically from the mysterious Undersea to bring murderous destruction to the islands.  Thirty years ago, the gods turned against each other, and when this story begins, they are only a memory; their body parts valuable and much sought after.

15-year-old Hark relies on his glib tongue to scrounge a living on one of the islands.  But his best mate, Jelt, has bigger ideas for the two of them.  When one of his schemes goes wrong, Hark is caught, and sentenced to being an indentured servant for three years.  His new master is a scientist, studying the remnant bits of the old gods, which are still full of their monstrous puissance.  Her base is an island that's home to the gods' former priests, aging men and women who say little about their past lives as the interface between the gods and the islanders.  Hark's ability to figure out what people want to hear stands him good stead in his new life, but his uncomplicated path back to freedom is blown sky high when Jelt appears back in his life.  As always, Jelt can bend Hark's will to his own, playing him skillfully until he goes along with Jelt's plans.

This particular plan is one of the maddest Jelt has ever come up with--a deep dive in a stolen submersible to look for bits of god, each worth a fortune.  It almost ends with Jelt's death then and there, but instead it ends with the recovery of the most remarkable, magical piece of one of the monsters ever--the heart of a god.

The heart's power begins to change Jelt, slowly, inexorably, and horribly.  Hark wants to save him, but unless he acts quickly, there won't be anything of Jelt left to save.  And as Hark dives deeper and deeper into the truths about the gods, and gets caught in the plots of men and women in the present wanting to use them for their own ends, he is forced to pit himself against all the strange and twisted magical power of the Undersea, power that is rising again to threaten the islands with a return to horror as part of everyday life.

Toxic relationships are everywhere in this story.  Hark is bound to Jelt by loyalty and memory of better times, and struggles to wriggle free to be his own person.  Selphin, a girl his age "seakissed" with deafness after a deep dive gone wrong, who is the daughter of a smuggler queen trying to profit from the heart's power, is likewise both bound to her mother and desperate to be her own self.  Her victory over her personal demons is essential to the success of Hark's desperate efforts to keep the islands safe.  And also playing an essential role is one of the old priests, whose toxic relationship with the gods years ago inadvertently set the current story in motion.  The islanders themselves had a toxic relationship with the gods, dazzled by their power, and feeling a lack when it was gone, and that power was in turn part of a larger geo-political reality, which I appreciated)....As a reader, I wanted the main characters to break free.  But though it was hard to watch them suffering, it certainly made them more interesting.

Pretty early in my reading, I started to be strongly reminded of Six Moon Dance, by Sherri Tepper, and that made me more nimble in figuring out was happening in advance (unusual for me).  This didn't at all diminish my interest in the complicated particulars of this story, and the mad, bad, dangerous magic of its world. Reading one of Hardinge's books is a lot like listening to music--she hits notes that resonate sharply and distinctly which then are woven into dark dreamlike themes (although this perhaps forced metaphor might well be is in my head directly as a result of the ways "god glass" in the story is tuned to notes that reshape it in marvelous ways).  Regardless, it all has very clear sensory impact--vivid, detailed, hallucinogenic in places.

There was one bit that I felt could have been better dealt with; no one in the story seems to be as worried as I am about other lost hearts spawning other new gods, or about how the first lot of gods came to be, and if the same thing could happen again.  The status quo seems very precarious.  But there were many bits I loved, especially the parts in which Hark gets to really live up to his true self (and to his name), listening to stories, and gathering them safely up.

It's not my favorite of Hardinge's books (Cuckoo Song and A Face Like Glass are more to my personal taste), but I am sure that looking back on 2020, this will stand out as one of the most memorable books of the year.  Not just because of the brilliant writing, but because of the message the story left me with--that "powerful" shouldn't be confused with right, or good, or natural, and that placation is a dead end.

Here's the UK cover, which I prefer (I'm not a huge tentacle fan).

disclaimer: review copy received from the book's publicist

Malice, by Pintip Dunn, for Timeslip Tuesday

Malice, by Pintip Dunn (Entangled Teen, February 2020), is an unusual time slip story.  Instead of bodies travelling through time, in this case only a person's consciousness can, and only into the mind of their own past or future self.  It's a sci-fi sort of time travel, though without much hard science backing it up.

Alice knows nothing of this time travel at first.  Her life is kind of ordinary (high school, friends, photography), though harder than some, because her mother abandoned the family, leaving Alice to be the one to look after her genius older brother, Archie.  Her father seems only interested in Archie's academic successes, and neglects the day to day parenting, leaving it on Alice's shoulders. 

But then she is invaded by a mysterious voice, that clamps her mind in agony in order to do something she'd never dream of doing ordinarily--go up to one of the most popular, smartest, best looking boys at school, a Thai kid named Bandit, and tell him she loves him.  This is just the first challenge.  They don't get easier.

 In fact, they become heartbreakinlyg horrible, when Alice learns the whole point of the voice's plan is to use Alice to kill someone.  A boy she knows is going to unleash a virus that wipes out much of humanity, and leaves the rest struggling to survive.  She's told she has to kill him, but must figure out who he is herself.....

The voice in her head is her older self, ten years from now.  Alice believes this, and when she is taken into the future, she sees the devastation the virus has wrought.  But she's not given the full picture of what's happening, and struggles to choose the best path--best for the future, and best for her own heart.

It's an exciting page turner, and trying to figure out who the virus maker is makes for gripping reading!  Alice is believably tormented by her impossible mission, and is a believable character, with a sweet, though fraught, blossoming love story (with Bandit; it was lots of fun watching their relationship develop!).

The only thing that kept me from really loving it was that torward the end there was a rush of new information, that made me feel like the plot could have been tricksier, with the reader getting to see a more fully realized antagonist...The read, and Alice, see only a little bit of the larger chess game that's playing out, and it was disappointing not have been made aware of it earlier.  On the other hand, it would make re-reading it, which I might well do at some point, more interesting....)

As it is, the bulk of the tension comes from future Alice, growing increasingly desperate to figure out what her past self needs to do to stop the virus.  Thirty jumps is all that are possible before mental breakdown, and future Alice is running out of chances....This meddling in the past rasies all sorts of lovely ethical grey areas, that give much good food for thought!

short answer--I enjoyed it lots, though it wasn't quite a five star read for me.

The Last Beginning, by Lauren James, for Timeslip Tuesday

The Last Beginning, by Lauren James (YA, Sky Pony Press, 2018) is a joyful, chaotic romp of a time travel adventure that I devoured in a single sitting.

Clove, a Scottish teenager in 2051, gets hit with two emotional wrenches in one week.  Her best friend Meg, who she has a crush on, has just fallen in love with a boy, Clove's cousin.  On a more earthshaking note, Clove's parents tell her that she is adopted, and that her birth parents, Matt and Kate, are famous for saving the world from a bioterrorist threat developed by England, and then disappearing.  Clove sets the family's AI device, nicknamed Spart, to work trying to track them down (she is a whiz at computer programing).

And in the meantime, her mother has almost finished getting her time machine up and running.

Spart the AI delivers the strange information that  Matt and Kate keep showing up in history, starting in 1745.  So Clove decides that she will use the time machine to go back to find them, to try to figure out what happened to them and why they keep showing up a various crisis points of history.  The time machine works, and Clove becomes friends with Ella, a girl a little older.  She also meets then-Matt and then-Kate, and unfortunately changes the past.  When she returns to her own time, everything is horribly altered, and she starts disapparating...but a bit more time travel shenanigans patches things up.

I don't want to go into any more details about what happens next, but it involves lots more time travel, Ella and Clove falling in love (Ella keeps popping up....and has an interesting story of her own), and Matt and Kate saving the world....

I was very doubtful about how easy a time of it Clove had in 1745, but it turns out there's an explanation for this that made me smile.  And though there are many bifurcations and manipulations of time, I managed not to get overwhelmed with confusion.  Clove and Ella's romance is very sweet, as is the love between all the different Matt and Kates, and the love in Clove's nuclear family.  The story includes on-line exchanges between the characters, some from the future, including Clove's chats with Spart, and some steamy exchanges with Ella, and these lighten the weight of the world saving and time travel confusion very nicely, and made me chuckle.

This is the sequel to The Next Together, but it stands alone just fine, and quite possibly works better if you have never read that one (which is the story of Matt and Kate).  Not knowing the details of their lives makes the reader feel closer to Clove as she figures things out.  Although of course reading about Matt and Kate second might mean their story is less gripping...so really one should probably read both books first!

But in any event, I liked this one lots, and am glad to have an excellent lesbian sci fi time travel with smart girls saving the world to recommend! (we need more!)

The Secret Spring: a Mystery Romance for Young People, by Emma Atkins Jacobs

The past few days have been rather harrowing, and I needed something soothing and mindless to read, that came with no obligation or expectation.  I picked The Secret Spring: a Mystery Romance for Young People, by Emma Atkins Jacobs (1944) off my to-be-read pile; I picked it up from my local used bookstore a few months ago, and thought it looked undemanding.

And indeed, it made no demands (except on my credulity) and actually proved more enjoyable than I thought it would.

The spring in the title isn't the season, but a hardware type spring in an old trunk, that our heroine, 16-year old Laurel, impulsively buys at an auction, and what's in the trunk when the secret spring is secret no more is what sparks the mystery, such as it is (not much--two strangers are much too interested in the trunk).  Indeed, though the book advertises itself as a mystery romance, it's really about a shy girl in a musical family who are on tour for the summer in the Chautauqua circuit, who pushes herself to step past her shyness and work on talking to people.  It's a pleasure to see her succeed, and I felt like I picked up some useful tips. She does get a romance, but (surprise!) not one built on realistic friendship.

What I found most unrealistic though is that Laurel (in, I think, 1905) could find in the old trunk a wedding dress at least thirty years old and wear it to perform in without trying it on first to make sure it fits and it does fit perfectly.  The cover suggests she tries it on, but I really don't think she ever does until the big night....also how could that dress be fit into that trunk along with a bunch of other stuff without being mangled to death?

I really enjoyed the Chautauqua setting--I knew nothing about this going in, and it was pretty interesting, with lots of details about the folks in the audience, and the different lectures and performances.  There were lots of small domestic details too, like all the ironing that had to be done by Laurel and her mother....

I also thought it was appropriate that I was reading this on the D-Day anniversary, because it's a wartime book.  Here's the back of the book:

which then sets my mind wondering if there are any books about high school victory chorus members....I would read those books.

And here's the inside back flap:

Perhaps if the publisher hadn't splurged on including a full page reproduction of the cover opposite the title page, we'd have won the war faster.

as an added bonus, the book came with the January 1945 edition of "Young Wings: the Book Club Magazine for Young Americans."   It was fascinating reading, almost like reading a blog.... Llamas were big in 1945.

Last of Her Name, by Jessica Khoury

Last of Her Name, by Jessica Khoury, is a an excellent sci fi adventure for any fans of the fall of the Romanovs and the possibility that Anastasia survived, and a good one simply for those who enjoy sci-fi adventure featuring strong female leads!

Stasia has spent her sixteen years roaming her father's vineyard with her dear friends Pol and Clio on a peaceful planet, one of a group known as the Belt of Jewels.  These planets were settled by humanity eons ago, and each went its own way until they were united through the communicative power of prisms and the family of scientists who discovered that power and became Emperors.   But sixteen years ago, the ruling family was overthrown, and now the planets are  held in the tight fist of  the Direktor Eminent and his Union henchmen.

When a union ship unexpectedly lands in Stasia's home town, on a mission to find the one daughter of the last emperor who might have survived, her life is upended.  The Direktor himself has come to stamp out a suspected Loyalist  insurgency and find the missing girl...and Stasia is that girl.  Pol, himself a Loyalist unbeknownst to her helps her escape on a ship the rebels have hidden, to take her to the Loyalist headquarters.  But Clio is left behind, along with her parents, and Clio in particular pulls at Stasia's heart.  That loyalty is more important than the struggle between the two warring factions, and she'll do whatever it take to save her friend.

That's the set up for a wild adventure, taking Stasia and Pol to many strange world, pitting them against many enemies, with new friends, and traitors, along the way.  Stasia must claim her difficult destiny if she is to save not just Clio, but the whole planetary confederacy, which depends on the mysterious prisms for which she is the only remaining point of access.

Stasia is not just a vessel for the larger plot, in large part because she doesn't want to be.  She doesn't want power, just her handy tool belt and things to fix, and her best friends, and this was perfectly believable.  The fervency of her need to save Clio struck me as excessive, but this passed as the story deepened in complexity (so if that bothers you to, don't let it stop you!).

The political conflict was a clear reimagining of the fall of the tsars and the rise of the Soviet Union, and I found it interesting and convincing.  Neither side of the struggle was clearly the "good guys."  The interplanetary travel and prism technology was a layer of sci-fi goodness that gave the story satisfying crunch (or perhaps the chocolate coating that gave a layer of tastiness.  Sorry.  I'm now thinking of kit kats, which has nothing to do with the book....).  

In any event, though I was doubtful for the first quarter or so because of not being intrinsically interested in more stories of lost princesses coming to power, which is where I thought this was going, it turned out to be not where this was going at all, and I liked it more and more as I read. It kind of reminded me of 1980s sci fi/fantasy--the sort of books I grew up on, and possibly explains why after reading this I reread Anne McCafrey's Crystal Singer (though the two books and their heroines are very different....). So yeah, I think teenaged me would have enjoyed this one lots.

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

The Echo Room, by Parker Peevyhouse, for Timeslip Tuesday

So I'm busily reading YA Speculative Fiction for the first round of the Cybils Awards, which is a fun change from my regular middle grade reading, and which, as an added bonus this week, led me too a really cool new YA book for Timeslip Tuesday--The Echo Room, by Parker Peevyhouse (Tor Teen, September 2018).  It is not a spoiler to say that timeslipping happens, because that becomes pretty clear early in the book, but I'm not going into much detail, because the particulars are best discovered alongside the poor, confused characters!

There are two of these confused characters, but it is Rett who is the main pov.  He wakes, inside a room he doesn't recognize, his head strangely scarred and throbbing with pain, wearing a bloodstained jumpsuit.  The blood is not his.  This room leads into others, and in one he meets a girl, Bryn, with a scar matching his own.  They find they are trapped in these rooms, and must puzzle out what has happened to them, and what they should do next.  But can they trust each other?  And what horrors (yes there are horrors) await beyond their strange shared space?

And then there's a reset, and Rett wakes in a strange room....and the day begins again (this is the time-slip part...the details make it clear immediately that he's back at the beginning, and helpfully, the sections are earmarked with the time of day, to keep you, the reader, grounded....)

So basically this is a sci fi/horror-ish Escape Room story...if you liked The Maze Runner, you'll especially appreciate the character with no memory of how he got there trying to figure out what to do and how to survive, and if you enjoy closely following a character searching for answers, with the reader deeply invested in the search, you'll love it!  It's also very much a survival story, where scrounging for supplies is important, and I like that too.

There's a lot more to the story (not just plot-wise, but character-wise, as Bryn and Rett unravel the clues about each other and themselves), but it's best discovered as the clock keeps resetting and the pages keep turning.....

It can be a bit frustrating at times, and some questions remain, but it sure is gripping!

The Black God's Drums, by P. Djèlí Clark

The Black God's Drums, by P. Djèlí Clark (Tor, August 2018), is the story of a 14-year-old girl who calls herself Creeper (her real name is Jacqueline, in case you are doubtful about heroines named Creeper), because she creeps through the night of an alternate New Orleans, surviving as best she can....

It is a few years after the Civil War ground to a stalemate; New Orleans is a free city, but there are still slave states in the south.  One night Creeper hears information that changes her life, information that she can trade, she hopes, for passage on a Haitian airship, the Midnight Robber.  Captain Ann-Marie is appalled to hear the news--a terrible weapon, the Black God's Drum, built a few years back in Haiti, is about to fall into the hands of men who will use it to bring the end they wanted to the Civil War, possibly destroying the whole country (literally) in the process.  Reluctantly, the Captain takes Creeper on the mission to recover the weapon, the scientist who was coerced into handing it over, and his kidnapped daughter....They are outnumbered, and the weapon is being primed for use, but the two women have remarkable allies--each is giving house space to a  powerful West African orisha (goddess), ready to unleash their rage....

I was impressed as all get out.  It is a cracking good story, which was nice, but not a remarkable feat.  What was remarkable is that in only 122 pages the reader gets a detailed alternate history with rich world building, plenty of backstory for the main character, plenty of mythological magic and almost magical spookiness, a soupcon of steampunk, magical tough as nails black nuns (I loved the nuns!), and quite a bit of smart alecky humor tossed in.  The beginning made me a bit doubtful, as it seemed gritty--dark urban decay-ish, with someone named Creeper as the main character--but it turns out not to be gritty in that way at all, and I really liked it and I sure do hope she gets another story!

This isn't marketed as a Young Adult book as far as I can tell, which means it isn't eligible for the Cybils Awards, which is too bad because it absolutely is YA by any measure other than how it was published.

The Clay Lion, by Amalie Jahn, for Timeslip Tuesday

The Clay Lion, by Amalie Jahn (BermLord, YA, 2013) is set in a present day world that is ours but with a twist--time travel is possible, though carefully regulated.  Each person gets one trip back in time, but because of the way time travel works, they can only revisit a point in their own past life, and they are not supposed to change anything in their timeline.

Brooke was a senior in high school when her brother died of lung disease.  A bit over a year later, stuck in a fog of depression, she decides that she will use her time travel ticket to go back and save him by keeping him from whatever it was that triggered his immune system to go haywire.   It doesn't work, so she tries a second time, with her mother's trip.  That doesn't work either, so she gets a black-market trip for a third try....which also fails to save her brother.

But in the process of visiting her past and her brother's life, and death, Brooke comes to terms with the fact that some things just have to happen, and the only thing to do is make her own life something her brother would approve of.   She has in fact made changes to her life and the relationships she retouched that will help her, and her family, move forward instead of being trapped in their sadness.

One such relationship was with a cute boy, Charlie, who she loved and who loved her back in life number 2.  But this love was bent out of kilter by the time travelling, and she thought she could never get it back.  Though this was a loss, she gained immensely from having travelled back in time, and was able to shape a present for herself that wasn't overshadowed by depression...in a world, of course, where Charlie still existed, even if they hadn't in fact met yet....

It wasn't until about two thirds of the way through the book that I started actively enjoying it.  If I hadn't needed a book for Timeslip Tuesday, I would have put it down after Past Visit 1 for two reasons.  The first is that the author's prose is often stilted; she has a habit of filling Brooke's narration with latinate vocabulary that seemed unnatural and contrived to me, like using "departed" instead of "left."  The other thing that made feel uninvested in the story was that I never shared Brooke's obsession with saving her brother. Of course I sympathized and felt bad, but it ruled her life (except for her love affair in Visit 2) and made her pretty one dimensional.  However, once she started accepting that she couldn't be her brother's savior, I warmed to her and was interested to watch her began to heal from a death that hadn't even happened yet in the timeline of Visit 3.

And now I'm a bit surprised to find that that I want to read the next three books in the series, to see other folks from this story using their own time travel experiences.  Will Brooke's experiences of having almost made things even worse have taught them anything?  Probably not....

Nb: most other readers found this a beautiful tear-jerker, and loved it.  It didn't make me teary at all, even though I usually sob with the best of them...

Chainbreaker, by Tara Sim, for Timeslip Tuesday

Chainbreaker, by Tara Sim (Sky Pony Press, Jan. 2 2018), is the sequel to 2016's Timekeeper (my review), which was also a Timeslip Tuesday book.  These aren't time-slip stories of a traditional sort, with people slipping between different times, but instead are set in a Victorian world where time itself can literally slip out of whack, causing repercussions ranging from the trivial to the profound for the people in the vicinity.  To keep time under control, clock towers were built, each with a resident clock spirit, which are maintained by skilled workers.  17 year old Danny is one such mechanic, and in the first book he fell in love with the spirit of the clock he was maintaining, a boy named Colton (very forbidden both for the same sex part and the spirit/human part).  He also helped solve a crime against the smooth running of time,  surviving exploding clockwork in the process.

Because of his experience with clocks going wrong, Danny is sent to India when clock towers there start being attacked and destroyed.  With him goes a former rival from his days an apprentice, Daphne.  Both are perturbed by the mystery of what's happening to the clock towers in India (where Victoria is about to be proclaimed Empress);  Danny's perturbed to be leaving Colton, and Daphne's perturbed about going to her father's country; he was half Indian, half English.  Their level of mutual perturbation is naturally deepened when their airship is attacked en route, and nothing that happens in India ends up calming them one little bit.

There are plots, both related to the clock towers and their control of time, and related to growing rebellion against the English.  There are romantic involvements and transgressions against the norms of British society during the Raj.  There's the arrival in India of Colton, totally at sea away from his clock tower (which has itself been attacked), desperately looking for Danny.  There are several more attacks and kidnappings, along with spying steampunk spiders.  And all of this has a busy, vivid portrayal of India at a tumultuous time in its history for a backdrop.  But memorable though these things are, what's most memorable of all is the backstory of how the clock towers came to be in the first place.  Part of the book is from Colton's point of view, and he has begun to dream about his past...and what happened is horrifying and sad, and arguably a parallel metaphor to the British Raj....

So there's more action and more steampunk in this second book than there was in the first, so if that was something you found wanting in the first book, you'll enjoy this one more!  I did not find it wanting in the first book, which I enjoyed very much indeed, but I enjoyed this one too because though more Happens, the characters are still the central driving force of the story.  Also Chainbreaker is historical fiction (though of course with a fantastical overlay), and I like historical fiction (though I don't know enough about this particular part of history to be a critical reader of it).

As the number of pages left to turn decreased, I wondered how on earth Tara Sim would manage to get everything wrapped up.....and lo.  She doesn't.  It's a killer of a cliff hanger.  If you wait to read this one till the third book is published, you'll definitely want to keep on going, but it's also fun in a tense, strained way to not yet know, and have the pleasure of resolution to look forward to!  As well as having the expected concern for the characters, who I have come to care about; here's what I am now especially curious about--having seen clock towers in the UK and in India, I want to know what is time up to in the rest of the world.

I also of course want Danny and Colton to get a happily ever after.  They are both so sweet!

This is an own voices story, Tara Sims is both biracial (her mother's family is from India) and bisexual (here's an interview with her at Reading (As)(I)an  (Am)Erica  for more on the writing of Chainbreaker).

Short answer:  These book are really good reading!

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

Rebel Seoul, by Axie Oh

If you  like near-future-earth science fiction (if not quite 200 years counts as near future), with military robots and conflicting visions of  what the government should be, and teens caught up in the push of forces (maybe) beyond their control and struggling to find peace to love each other and come to terms with both past and present, and want a page-turner of a book that will keep you engrossed and absorbed even if those things aren't tops on your reading list, do go get your hands on Rebel Seoul, by Axie Oh (Tu Books, YA, September 2017).

I really enjoyed the book, and I don't, in fact, like futuristic urban grit and inequality, such as this future Seoul offers, and which the main character, Lee Jaewon, deals with on a daily basis (economic inequality, gangs).  My want to read list includes almost no books featuring robots of war, or high tech war in general, yet I was gripped and fascinated by Jaewon's military training, and his relationship with a girl his own age, Tera, who is herself a crafted weapon of war.  I don't particularly like totalitarian governments suffering massive casualties while suppressing Nationalist rebellions, but here the war did not drive the plot, but rather gave the main characters a stage on which to change, and grow, and become real to me. It was also interesting that Totalitarian did not equal Nationalist, as it so often does.

Basically, this is a book that, in clear and vivid prose, asks interesting questions of interesting people caught in an interesting setting and plot.  And really, who could ask for more?  (well, I guess I could have asked for a peaceful bit where Jaewon and Tara spend several weeks exploring an abandoned temple in the mountains, appreciating the antiques, foraging for food, and perhaps taming a small woodland creature, but I enjoyed it lots without this.  They did get a day in the ruined temple, but they were too beat up/and about to be attacked again to enjoy it....).

So the Kirkus review calls this a "plot-heavy" story as if that's a bad thing, and I'm not sure what they mean.  I was certainly aware that there was a plot, but I thought I was reading a book about two lonely teenagers caught in a war they didn't want to fight, trying to make peace with their lives and their ghosts and keep from getting killed while falling in love with other, so heavier on the character side of things than the Big Plot side of things.  I think of "plot-heavy" books as being ones I start to skim because too much is Happening and I Don't Care, but I did not skim any of Rebel Seoul.  Kirkus also says some of the dialogue was stilted; I did not notice this, and it's pretty easy to throw me out of a story with clunky dialogue. I am also willing in general to let characters talk in stiff, even awkward, language if they are expressing difficult emotional thoughts while people are trying to kill them or such like.

Short answer--I read it with great pleasure in a few hours that flew by, and can see why it won the 2014 New Visions Award from Tu Books.

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

Spill Zone, by Scott Westerfeld

If you are a fan of scary sci fi graphic novels for teens, leap to get your hands on Spill Zone, by Scott Westerfeld and Alex Puvilland (FirstSecond, May, 2017).  That being said, I am not such a fan in general, yet I found Westerfeld's first foray into graphic novels utterly gripping.

Three years Addison's home town of Poughkeepsie was the site of an unexplained disaster of cataclysmic proportions.  Though the buildings remain standing, the town is now a spill zone of horribly uncanny manifestations and dangers--those who died in the initial even are now reanimated "meat puppets" (though not flesh-eating zombies) and deadly snares and weirdness can trap the unwary.  Addison's parents were trapped in the Spill Zone, and presumably are dead; her little sister was one of a handful of kids who escaped.  Lexa hasn't spoken since.  Now, three years later, Addison lives on the edge of the zone, making a living by sneaking past the military barriers to take pictures of the bizarre horrors inside (though she draws the line at photographing the former inhabitants). So far her rules have kept her safe...

When a collector of her work makes her a million-dollar offer to recover something from inside the hospital, Addison decides to break her own rules to do the job, and things get even more hellish.  And in the meantime, the Spill Zone has crept into Addison's own home.  Warning--if creepy dolls possessed by demons (?) are not your thing, do not read this book! Vespertine, Lexa's doll, is a creepy character in her own right, with the text bubbles of the graphic novel format perfect for conveying her disturbing thoughts that only Lexa can hear.

The jaggedy flashy-colored art work is beautifully hallucinogenic, and conveys the distortions of reality perfectly.  Addison is a compelling character, and the mystery of the whole disaster is even more compelling!  So if you like nightmares, it should be right up your alley.  A reason I myself liked it is that I'm always a fan of stories about sisters, and the relationship between the two here was a good one.

The only thing I objected to about the book was that it is very much a first book.  There are lots of mysterious plot threads introduced but by no means resolved, and having now been thoroughly hooked, I am anticipatory as heck about the next book!

Here's an interview with Scott Westerfeld at NPR that elaborates a bit more.

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

Learning to Swear in America, by Katie Kennedy

Learning to Swear in America, by Katie Kennedy (Bloomsbury July 2016), is one of my favorite books of the year so far, even though it has none of my usual favorite fictional accoutrements (no orphans, big old houses, English gardens, or magical cats...). What it does have is a cool story of Science Danger, and a protagonist I found very loveable (although from a somewhat maternal slant, so not applicable to the YA target audience who presumably aren't in my position of having teenaged sons learning to navigate a difficult world).

Yuri's world is more than a bit difficult.  He is a 17-year-old Russian math genius, raised primarily by Russian math professors (dead father, preoccupied and distant cardiologist mother).  His math genius is such that he is called in by NASA to help them math their way out of disaster--an asteroid is headed toward earth, and Yuri's mathematical brilliance will perhaps tilt the balance toward success, and perhaps his work with antimatter, though unpublished, will be useful.

So there is Yuri, whisked to California at the drop of a hat to do math with NASA's best and brightest, with the fate of the planet hanging over his head.  It's a difficult situation--he's a kid, and so it's hard for the others to take him as seriously as they should be doing, he's a foreigner, and so the social nuances of American life are tricksy (although lord knows cafeteria skills rank right up there with insurmountable in terms of challenge), and he's an odd duck because of not having a normal childhood.  (NB--what he's not is a mathematical savant on the autism spectrum.  I am rather glad that the author didn't automatically equate genius and no social skills with Asbergers, which would have been easy for her to do, because that would have been a different book, and I liked this one just fine as it was, and because Asperger's doesn't automatically equal genius, and is a whole nother issue with it's own trajectory, not just a handy label for the socially challenged).

So anyway, there is Yuri, and there is the asteroid, and there is all his work on antimatter, and then there is Dovie, the daughter of a NASA janitor. Yuri and Dovie meet when she sneaks into the break room on a doughnut pilfering mission (which of course made me sympathetic to her from the get go), and suddenly Yuri must shake himself into the awareness that there is an American girl who Likes him.  Dovie is great; she's an artist and rebel and her parents are ex (ish) hippies, and she is altogether a New Thing for Yuri.  And so Yuri finds that he's on his way to Prom, when he should be at NASA saving the world....and sexy thoughts intrude on the pure math that he's used to having in his head.  Yuri's awakening as a sexual person was very nicely done...he doesn't objectify Dovie, or de-person her, but she is a catalyst who makes him a different person.  And her family are great too--her parents and older brother, Lennon, who uses a wheelchair, all recognize that Yuri never had a childhood as part of a family, and in their own ways encourage him to be a person who can think outside of the math, without trying to change the fact that math is his native language.  Though Dovie also introduces him to color, and Lennon give him a lesson in swearing.

So there are Yuri and Dovie and the asteroid, and back in Russia Yuri's unpublished work is being stolen (and he can't do anything about it from America, which is killing him) and he finds out he might never be allowed back to Russia again (state secrets).   And there are the NASA scientists, not believing his antimatter approach will work, when he knows it is the only chance... and so the weight of the world rests heavily on him. 

And I found it all rather tense and very moving. And funny--even though English is a foreign language, Yuri uses the words he has to excellent effect, both as the point of view character and in dialogue.  His style of humor minded me of Russians I know, which made him seem particularly convincing.

So then I check the Kirkus review....(me checking).....and no, Kirkus, you are wrong.  What do you mean "Though the relationship between Dovie and Yuri is ostensibly a romantic one, the chemistry between them never quite gains momentum or achieves maximum impact...."?  Maybe there is no passionate sex scene, but heck, they are teenagers who have known each other only a few days, and so we get things like Yuri's toes fizzing when Dovie's dress brushes over them and I found it believable as all get out, and nicely sex-positive.  And nice too that Dovie gets to make the first move, deciding that kissing is what she wants.  And then Kirkus goes on to say "...much like the threat of the asteroid threatening to lay waste to the region" and I thought the asteroid did just fine on impact and Yuri sweated blood about the decisions he made and it was very tense. So.

Anyway, I'm keeping this one on my own shelves because I can imaging re-reading it, which is getting to be a higher and higher compliment every year as I run out of shelf space.  The SLJ is correct--"This work is thought provoking, heartwarming, and unforgettable and is recommended for readers who enjoy science-based fiction. A superb addition to any library collection serving teens."

Other thoughts--

There are hero programmers, who take Yuri's pure math and make it functional.  You don't often see hero programmers at work.  This was very nicely geeky. 

The NASA folks and the programmers are mostly male, but I don't think Katie Kennedy can be held responsible for this.  There are enough women playing important roles to make it clear that they are possible.

Lennon's difficulties with handicapped accessibility and his frustrations felt realistic without making him an object of pity, and the fact of his wheelchair use ended up being relevant to the plot and so not just window-dressing.  He also works in a library, making him naturally appealing, and a bit of a gender-stereotype breaker.

Teenagers will appreciate that one of Yuri's superpowers (math being the first) is that he can stay up several nights in a row doing frantic math and still function.  Unlike the NASA grown-ups.

Final thought--this didn't feel like "Science Fiction."  But in the course of my thinking, I decided that using antimatter technology that doesn't exist to destroy an asteroid that doesn't exist is pretty speculative, so I am comfy labeling it Sci Fi.

Final final thought--I thought about giving this one to my 13 year old, who enjoyed The Martian lots (geek hero-ness), but he's not yet at the point of appreciating toes having zingy feelings of lust. Maybe next year.  Or maybe like ten years from now.

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

The Temple of Doubt, by Anne Boles Levy

The Temple of Doubt, by Anne Boles Levy (Sky Pony Press, August 2015), introduces one of the most believable speculative fiction teenage protagonists I've read in a long time, a girl named Hadara, who finds herself unwillingly placed at the center of events that not only shatter the pattern of her own life, but will probably change her whole world.

It starts with a shooting star, falling into the swampy heart of her island home.  Soon after, two high priests of the god Nihil and their military retinue arrive from overseas, taking over the place, and demanding help in finding what has fallen from the heavens, suspecting that instead of a harmless meteorite it is the vessel of a demon.  Hadara and her mother are the only locals familiar with the swamps; they've ventured there often, gathering plants to make forbidden medicine--magic from Nihil, not natural cures, are all that their religion permits.  And so Hadara and their mother find themselves guiding the preists and their guards into the dangerous realm of the nonhuman people, the lizard-like Gek, whose make the swamp their home. 

And there Hadara confronts the mystery of the fallen star, and the threat it might hold...

And in the meantime, Hadara is very much a teenage girl!  Even before the star fell, she was chafing against the strictures of her society; unlike her pious sister, she had no patience for learning religious dogma by route, but would rather be out and doing, held back by a society that gave little room for girls to do so.   She's a direct sort of person, saying what she thinks even when she shouldn't, and that doesn't exactly go over so well with the priests and their soldiers.   Basically, she's in a situation way over her head, that's she's not tremendously equipped to deal with.  And to add to the complications of her situation, she's fallen hard for one of the foreign soldiers in a very believable teenage crush sort of way (with indications that it might turn into more).

We see the events of the story unfolding as Hadara does, and this both strengthens the story and limits it.  The material details of her world are clear and vivid, and the religion is well-developed, but her somewhat insular upbringing and limited point of view can be frustrating  The presence of two non-human races in her world is something she takes for granted, for instance, but it takes the reader by surprise, and the nuances and backstory of this part of the world is never, in this first book, fully explored.  And perhaps because (at least this is my impression of her) Hadara doesn't have the character or education to understand religious/political machinations and manipulations, there was a frustrating sense that lots was happening that the reader wasn't getting told.  And the focus on Hadara's day by day experiences, though it did bring her vividly to life, meant that the pacing was somewhat slow--the action and tension are at times overshadowed by her introspection and mundane reality.  So it won't be to everyone's taste.

That being said, since I enjoy tight character focus, and since I was fascinated by the religion that shapes Hadara's world, and since I was hooked on the mystery of the space thing, I myself was not slowed down in my reading, but turned the pages briskly and with enjoyment.  Even though I wanted to shake Hadara occasionally, or draw her attention to things I wanted her to be thinking more about, I enjoyed spending time with her and look forward to her continued adventures! (and I think readers who are themselves teenage girls will not have the wanting to shake her thing but will simply be able to relate very strongly with her).

And now comes the part where I have to stick a label on this post--part of me says science fiction, because this feels like a "planet with alien races" such as one finds in sci fi, but another part says it has to be fantasy, because the magic of the god Nihil actually is real.   So I guess I have to go with both...

disclaimer: not only did I receive a review copy from the publisher, but I consider Anne a friend, having met her in real life and worked with her for several years on the Cybils Awards (which she founded), and I tried hard  not to let this affect my review of her book.