Dangerous by Shannon Hale

Dangerous by Shannon Hale is a YA science fiction book and the first I've read by the author. I picked it up a while ago (I think it was as part of my "let's read all the books with disabled protagonists" thing in the lead up to Defying Doomsday). I finally got around to reading it, partly because I was in the mood for some YA, and partly because of the recent announcement that she'll be writing Captain Marvel and Squirrel Girl tie in novels. I figured I should make sure her writing was all right before getting too excited.

Maisie ‘Danger’ Brown needs excitement. When she wins a harmless-sounding competition to go to astronaut boot camp, that’s exactly what she gets . . . But she never imagined it would feature stumbling into a terrifying plot that kills her friends and might just kill her too. Now there’s no going back. Maisie has to live by her middle name if she wants to survive – and she’ll need to be equally courageous to untangle the romance in her life too. A clever, suspenseful thriller-adventure by New York Times bestselling author and master storyteller Shannon Hale.

The thing that stood out for me most, reading Dangerous, was how not formulaic it was. For whatever reason, I was expecting a fairly formulaic read set in space about a girl with no arm. It wasn't set in space either, except very briefly. It was about a girl with no hand on one of her arms, so that part was right, although note how it's not mentioned in the blurb while the space bit is. No wonder I was surprised. Actually, the only expected element of this book was the part with the world being saved. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.

Maisie is a smart teenager whose two scientist parents have decided to home-school her. (And hence she has one friend, a fellow home-school-ee.) She enters a competition on the back of a cereal box to go to astronaut boot camp and wins a spot. I always enjoy female protagonists that are into science and Maisie definitely doesn't disappoint on that front.

In terms of plot, I was surprised that the astronaut boot camp was over pretty quickly and was just a set up for the next phase of the novel. Even more surprising was that the next phase was also fairly transient. (I realise these statements are vague, but I'm trying to avoid spoilers.) The story does not take the most direct route to get to the end, which kept me wondering what would happen next until more than half way through (at which point the saving the world part became more obvious).

I liked the romantic story line in Dangerous for a few reasons. First it was absolutely not the main part of the story, second, it wasn't a love triangle, despite how it first may have appeared. Most importantly, Maisie prioritises saving the world and the safety of her family over any boys she may or may not have feelings for. She's also not too blindly trusting, especially once she has reason to be suspicious, which I appreciated.

Oh and I should mention the science. There was only one physics thing the author got wrong that bothered me (the space elevator trip did not take them high enough to be weightless, they would have felt a diminished gravitational pull the entire time). Which did bother me but didn't make me angry, just disappointed. It's at the level of physics knowledge that the characters themselves should've had, which is the most irritating part. But everything else was fine or at least hand-wavingly explained away by alien magic.

I quite enjoyed Dangerous and I am definitely interested in reading more books by Shannon Hale. I'm not sure all her books are for me — for example, I'll stick with the movie of Austenland and probably won't bother with the books for younger readers, but I am definitely up for Captain Marvel and Squirrel Girl. Marvel tie-ins aside, I will definitely be keeping an eye out for any future books from Hale that align with my interests. I definitely recommend Dangerous to all fans of YA science fiction.

4.5 / 5 stars

First published: 2014, Bloomsbury
Series: No.
Format read: ePub
Source: Purchased from iBooks

The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne

The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne is a remarkable book. It's near-future science fiction set in India, Ethiopia and involving two journeys: one across (northern) Africa, the other across the Arabian Sea. The settings alone should tell you that it is not a run of the mill science fiction novel.

Meena, a young woman living in a futuristic Mumbai, wakes up with five snake bites on her chest. She doesn't know how or why, but she must flee India and return to Ethiopia, the place of her birth. Having long heard about The Trail -- an energy-harvesting bridge that spans the Arabian Sea -- she embarks on foot on this forbidden bridge, with its own subculture and rules. What awaits her in Ethiopia is unclear; she's hoping the journey will illuminate it for her.

Mariama, a girl from a different time, is on a quest of her own. After witnessing her mother's rape, she joins up with a caravan of strangers heading across Saharan Africa. She meets Yemaya, a beautiful and enigmatic woman who becomes her protector and confidante. Yemaya tells Mariama of Ethiopia, where revolution is brewing and life will be better. Mariama hopes against hope that it offers much more than Yemaya ever promised.

As one heads east and the other west, Meena and Mariama's fates will entwine in ways that are profoundly moving and shocking to the core. Vividly imagined and artfully told, written with stunning clarity and deep emotion, The Girl in the Road is a true tour de force.

I need to say up front that I don't know very much about Africa and a little bit more about India, so I am not someone who would notice any small factual/cultural errors. There didn't seem to be anything huge and glaring and the small details felt authentic, but if others disagree, please let me know in the comments. I wasn't actually sure until I got to the end that the author is American (obviously, I could've googled, but didn't), so the level of detail and the amount of research she obviously put in is impressive. But as always, there are potential issues with an outsider writing about any culture. I will note that none of the characters were white, and also that both bisexual and trans identities were also featured. However, the rest of this review won't be dealing with these issues.

The Girl in the Road follows two protagonists, both incredibly unreliable, for different reasons. Meena is a mentally ill Indian woman in her late twenties, living in the late 2060s. After a crisis drives her from her home, she makes her way to Mumbai. In Mumbai she becomes infatuated with the Trail, a string of floating pontoons which collect wave energy from the Arabian sea and stretch from just off the coast of Mumbai to Djibouti, Ethiopia. Still wanting to get away from the forces chasing her, she sets out across the Trail. Since her story is told in first person and partly due to her illness (my guess was that she was bipolar but that wasn't completely clear), Meena's story unravels slowly and not strictly chronologically. One quickly realises that we can't trust everything she tells us and begins to question her decisions as well. It's a fascinating mode of story telling.

Mariama is a young girl (8 or 10 at the start, I think) who suddenly finds she has to fend for herself. She attaches herself to two men transporting oil to Ethiopia, who look after her. Her story is told in first and second person, with Mariama talking to Yemaya, a woman who joins the oil convoy not long after Mariama herself does. Partly because of her age, and partly because of her isolated and unpleasant upbringing (she was a slave), Mariama is also an unreliable narrator, but in a different way. Her point of view was, I think, more decipherable and at times more understandable as well. (There was one scene that I think some people will struggle with. It's a spoiler, but if you're interested, the author blogs about it here.) With Mariama, the reader's interpretation of her situation is, sometiems, more important than her own.

It took me a while to work out how the two storylines were connected. I won't spoil it here, because the slow unravelling of the story is an important part of the journey, but it wasn't obvious at first how they were placed temporally with respect to each other. But eventually it becomes apparent and certain events play out with a terrible inevitability that we, the reader, cannot help to stop. It was a beautifully woven tale.

Not only were the stories beautifully woven together, but similar themes — like the unusual snake in both story lines — intertwined both stories, binding them together as much as actual events do. Byrne has a wonderful turn of phrase, always choosing the best words to convey layers of meaning and always push the narrative forwards. It was a pleasure to read. It was complicated, but not too much so. (Although the Epilogue confused me. I suspect it might make more sense upon re-reading...)

I very strongly recommend this book to everyone. Fans of science fiction should enjoy this very different view of a not-too-distant future. There is also an element of magical realism — and a sort of dream-like quality — for fantasy fans who may not like straight science fiction. But above all, it's an exquisitely written book that I will be recommending to everyone.

5 / 5 stars

First published: May 2014, Crown
Series: No.
Format read: eARC
Source: Publisher via NetGalley

Blogging Against Disablism

Today is Blogging Against Disablism day and I thought I'd join in. I'm going to be mainly talking about the representation of mental illness and neurological conditions in books, partly because that's one of the things the book that inspired this dealt with and partly because, well, it needs to be talked about. Also, there will be miscellaneous spoilers for some of the books I discuss. Thems the breaks.


The book/series that inspired this post was the Assured Destruction trilogy by Michael F Stewart and, particularly, the final volume, With Zombies. The main character's mother has MS and is confined to a wheel chair — another piece of nice representation in this story —and on top of that, she suffers a period of severe depression (like catatonia severe) starting from somewhere in book two. Obviously this has a strong impact on the main character's life (more so since her mother is her sole parent) but what was most incredible was that her mother wasn't stigmatised for suffering from a mental illness, nor for spending time in the psych ward. And quite frankly, the book gets points just for calling it a psych ward (it's concerning how rare that is). Later on, the main character also ends up in a psych ward (a different one, since she's a teenager — love the attention to detail) suffering from plot-induced acute stress disorder. Her friends, while a little confused about what's been going on at first, end up being really supportive and — gasp! — also don't stigmatise her for having mental illness cooties. The terrible thing is how rare this kind of representation is in books and in real life.

In real life, mental illnesses — especially the kind that require time in a psych ward — tend to come with some stigma attached. I shouldn't have to spell out why this is a bad thing. I also believe that the more people know about mental illnesses and the more they understand how they work (and, critically, how they don't work), the better it will be for everyone. A key way of learning about a diverse range of people is by reading about them or by seeing them in other forms of media. I'm obviously biased towards books because I'm a book-blogger, but I do think the way books allow us to get into characters' heads is a particularly powerful tool.

I've already talked about the thinks I think Michael F Stewart does right in the Assured Destruction trilogy, and now I want to talk about some other books that do things both well and poorly. Also, I'm including characters with neurological conditions as well as mental illnesses because, quite frankly, there isn't a huge number of either.

Viral Nation by Shaunta Grimes is a post-apocalyptic novel about an autistic girl with a service dog, her brother, and some other people they befriend. I don't know as much about autism as I do about some other conditions, but to me this was mostly positive representation. For a discussion of some of the things the author didn't quite get right, I recommend this article. One thing I particularly liked about Viral Nation was that the main character needed support from her brother (or a reasonable facsimile) to comfortably survive. So often "non-independent" characters (scare-quotes because no one is truly independent of other people, yet some forms of dependence are normalised while others are stigmatised) are assumed to be killed off as soon as the first disaster strikes, it's refreshing to see one who survives. I would very much like to see more diverse characters appearing post-apocalyptically.

Some other books with good portrayals are Playing Tyler by TL Costa and Pawn by Aimée Carter. Playing Tyler is split between two point of view characters, one of whom is a teenage boy with ADHD. Costa's writing allows us to get into his head and the choppy way she's written some of his thoughts gives us an idea of what it's like for him. Featuring a bit less prominently, the main character in Pawn is dyslexic. In her dystopian world, this means that she has very few opportunities to live a life not hampered by poverty, despite her intelligence and knowledge. The world is set up so that if you can't do well on exams (which she can't because she has difficulty reading them even though she knows all the content), you can't get ahead. Since she's the main character, unusual circumstances take her in an unexpected direction, but even then, not being able to read is an issue. The reader is set up to empathise with the main character and feel the injustice of her not being able to properly convey her talents to a faceless examination board.

Finally, I want to end on a less positive note. The following book was not one I particularly enjoyed and a large part of that was the ableism perpetrated by the main character. It did not help that Cracked by Eliza Crewe opened in an "insane asylum" complete with just about every stereotype you can think of. Part of the problem is that the main character is a terrible person — that's built into the premise of the worldbuilding — but that doesn't mean I had to like it. The book concludes with (among other things) the main character grudgingly accepting that the "crippled" girl (who has a limp from an old injury) is not as much of a waste of space as she'd initially assumed based on her disability. Charming, right? But what's worse, I think, is that while it's clear that the main character's attitude towards the girl with the limp is part of her being a terrible person and evolving from that, her attitude towards the "insane asylum" and it's residents is not explored at all. And that really pissed me off.

There are just some examples from recent YA books that I've read. I feel like mental illness is more likely to be covered in YA books than adult books, but maybe that's just a case of the genres I read in (speculative fiction on all counts). And I have to admit, part of the reason I chose to talk about mental illness and neurological disorders disorders is because I could think of more books that fit into those categories than books that dealt with other disabilities or chronic illnesses. And I've been going out of my way lately to find books with disabled and/or ill characters, so that makes me sad. (It does mean that there are some waiting to be read that I haven't got to yet, but still.)

More books with more diverse casts! Go!

Viral Nation by Shaunta Grimes

Viral Nation by Shaunta Grimes is a post-apocalyptic YA novel about an autistic girl and her brother (and her service dog). I have mentioned in the past that I tend not to read blurbs between deciding to read a book (in this case because it was mentioned on the Diversity in YA blog) and actually reading it. In this case, that meant what I was expecting was a post-apocalyptic story with an autistic girl. What I got was also dystopian and had time travel, which threw me a little at first (because obviously I didn't look closely enough at the cover when I started reading either).

After a virus claimed nearly the entire global population, the world changed. The United States splintered into fifty walled cities where the surviving citizens clustered to start over. The Company, which ended the plague by bringing a life-saving vaccine back from the future, controls everything. They ration the scant food and supplies through a lottery system, mandate daily doses of virus suppressant, and even monitor future timelines to stop crimes before they can be committed.

Brilliant but autistic, sixteen-year-old Clover Donovan has always dreamed of studying at the Waverly-Stead Academy. Her brother and caretaker, West, has done everything in his power to make her dream a reality. But Clover’s refusal to part with her beloved service dog denies her entry into the school. Instead, she is drafted into the Time Mariners, a team of Company operatives who travel through time to gather news about the future.

When one of Clover’s missions reveals that West’s life is in danger, the Donovans are shattered. To change West’s fate, they’ll have to take on the mysterious Company. But as its secrets are revealed, they realize that the Company’s rule may not be as benevolent as it seems. In saving her brother, Clover will face a more powerful force than she ever imagined… and will team up with a band of fellow misfits and outsiders to incite a revolution that will change their destinies forever.

Despite the shift between my expectations and what I got, I loved this book. At first I thought the time travel aspect was rather strange — and honestly I still do, but not in a bad way — but it contributed to a complex and full world. One of my pet peeves with a lot of dystopian YA is poorly thought-through (or lazy) world-building, but Viral Nation certainly doesn't contain that flaw. Although the world is revealed slowly as the characters learn more about it, so I admit I was a little sceptical at first. (Side note: I think the blurb is slightly wrong because I remember the text mentioning 48 cities, not 50, which makes more sense since who knows what happened to distant Alaska and Hawaii after civilisation collapsed?) But as the conspiracy is revealed, it becomes increasingly interesting, especially since by the end we still don't know everything, partly thanks to the time travel aspect, but mostly because the author hasn't revealed it yet.

That aside, Viral Nation hooked me in from the very beginning. From the prologue, in which we glimpse the pandemic that wreaked havoc across the US (little word from the rest of the world, but less obnoxiously than most), to the teenage protagonists in chapter one, I was sucked in. Clover is completely a sympathetic character and I found myself cheering her on almost immediately, and cringing when social situations went badly for her. I also grew rather fond of her dog, despite being more of a cat person. ;-)

West, Clover's older brother, is also a point of view character. Again, I was a little sceptical at first when his point of view popped up before Clover's, but I'm pleased to report he was not there to steal Clover's limelight. He was an important character in his own right, but not at the expense of Clover's character, which made me happy. I picked up Viral Nation because I was keen to read about a non-typical protagonist — an autistic one in this case — coping in a post-apocalyptic world. I'm glad I did and I was pleased that there wasn't anything poorly done (as far as I could determine, but I am by no means an expert on autism). It added an extra dimension to the book (although for a YA book of this nature it already had rather a lot of dimensions to be getting on with) and although Clover's autism ended up being integral to the plot, I didn't find that was done objectionably. Also, it was nice to see an autistic girl for a change.

The only disappointment with Viral Nation is that it's the first in the series. It's not that I don't want to keep reading about Clover and friends — I do — it's that I can't keep reading now and I want to know what happens. The second book doesn't come out until next Northern summer. Sigh. On the one hand, if it was a standalone, I'd already know how everything turned out but there's no way Grimes could have fit as much worldbuilding depth into a single volume (y'know, unless it was a very loooong single volume).

I highly recommend Viral Nation to fans of YA post-apocalyptic dystopias. Adult fans will also enjoy it, as I did, although like me they may find themselves sceptical of it at first. Fans of intelligent characters who do not make incredibly stupid decisions to further a weak plot, should also find something to like here. Readers looking for a minority main character, especially an autistic one, will hopefully be very pleased with Viral Nation. Possibly also dog lovers.

5 / 5 stars

First published: July 2013, The Berkley Publishing Group / Penguin US
Series: Viral Nation book 1 of ? (my guess is trilogy)
Format read: eARC
Source: Publisher via NetGalley