Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld is dystopian YA set in a future USA where everyone gets plastic surgery at 16 to make them look a) pretty and b) all very similar. Pre-op teens are called uglies because their, y’know, normal-looking faces and bodies are considered ugly by the very precise beauty standards of the society. Post-ops are known as pretties (with additional qualifiers for age later on). And, of course, uglies and pretties don’t mix. Once children reach age 12, they leave their (pretty) parents’ homes and movie into an dorm with other uglies.

Honestly, when I was reading I couldn’t help picturing pretties as those horrific over-plastic surgeried people. You know, the ones that look alarmingly plastic? So I couldn’t quite see the personal appeal of becoming a pretty, but it was quite plausible that the characters in the book were desperate for it. All the brainwashing at school (“It’s biology! We’re programmed to like pretty people.”) would have helped too. Basically, the society Westerfeld created was plausible and, while I wouldn’t say “only in America” it did seem the sort of thing much more likely to eventuate in the US than, say, Europe or Australia. Just saying.

The main character, Tally, is left alone on the ugly side of the river after her best friend is turned pretty three months before her (since he is three months older). She is desperate to join him. But then she meets Shay, who doesn’t want to become a pretty and who thinks that maybe staying ugly wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Shay knows of a special city/village called the Smoke, where uglies can live happily away from the watching eyes of the city and never have to turn pretty. After they become friends, Shay runs away to the Smoke not long before she’s due to turn pretty. Tally is again left alone but, after an encounter with the scary-looking specials, Tally is forced to follow.

The middle half-ish of Uglies was a bit predictable plot-wise. It wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t in any way surprising for a dystopian YA novel. On the other hand, the writing was good and the characters and world building were good, which made up for it. The real pay off, however, was the ending which took the story in an interesting new direction and set up the next book in the series. (I don’t know if you can see clearly enough in that cover photo, but the book titles go Uglies, Pretties, Specials, Extras.)

The one thing that bothered me was that it wasn’t as anti-beauty standard as I was hoping. The pretties were creepy and similar-looking and had way more surgery than would be considered healthy in our society (although it’s set in the future and medical science has advanced so that surprisingly complicated surgeries don’t take very long and have very little recovery time associated with them). And yes, the book does carry the message that you can be beautiful just the way you are (as you would hope it would!). However, I thought this was undermined a bit when it was revealed that the society was creepier and more controlling than it appeared on the surface. I know this is de rigueur for dystopias, but it still felt like it detracted from the “you don’t need plastic surgery to look normal” message.

I definitely want to read the rest of the series, but it may be some time before I get to it, thanks to a self-imposed book-buying ban. I recommend Uglies to anyone who likes YA, dystopias or science fiction.

4 / 5 stars

Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson

This review was originally posted here on the Legend Awards website. I received a review copy of this book from the folks at the David Gemmell Legend Awards because it was nominated for a Morningstar Award (debut novel). Sadly, it didn’t make the shortlist, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad book.

Fire and Thorns is about Elisa, a sixteen year old second princess who was chosen by God for a higher purpose and who, at the very start of the novel, is married off to a neighbouring king. This is very much a coming of age story in which we watch Elisa grow from a fat and useless princess — in her own eyes — to queen.

When she was a baby, God sent Elisa a Godstone, a gem which is lodged in her bellybutton and which marks her as chosen to perform a divine service. But she has no idea what that service might be, or how she can possibly achieve it.

I liked the setting Carson chose to write. It’s a blend of Middle Eastern location — deserts, adobe houses, dark-skinned people — and Spanish linguistics. At first I was a little geographically confused when Elisa first left her father’s kingdom (I wished the book included a map) but this was resolved as the story wore on and she travelled more. Likewise, I found the Spanish-inspired names a bit confusing in what my brain associated with an Arabic setting, but culturally, I think it worked, especially as we learnt more about the religion and the Godstones.

At the start of the novel, Elisa is has a bit of an inferiority complex. However, she’s been well trained by her tutors and when she arrives in her new kingdom, she discovers that her skills — particularly what she knows of war and strategy — can be put to good use. She is also overweight and, although she never defines herself entirely by her weight, part of her low self-esteem is tied to her thinking everyone sees her as “fat and useless”. When she faces trials throughout the book, it’s really nice to watch her confidence and self-worth grow as she overcomes them. By the end, I found it quite plausible that she could go on to be a great queen.

The main criticism I have, and the only thing that made this feel like a first novel, is that the setting was a little bit under-described. Despite being told in first person, I thought a little bit more setting description beyond the character’s immediate surroundings would have been nice. For example, some explanation of the nature of the jungle separating her father’s and husband’s desert kingdoms. Since Elisa is well-educated, I think this could have easily worked. In the same vein, some of the secondary characters could have been fleshed out a little more. Also, the role of women in their societies was never explicitly discussed. I got the feeling that there were few prejudices stopping women from being in power (there were no issues with her sister inheriting her father’s throne, for example), but then why was she married off without consultation? Maybe because she was a princess, but we don’t get a chance to find out how similar arrangements are made among commoners of her father’s kingdom (though there are vague hints about how it works in her husband’s kingdom).

Nevertheless, I enjoyed Fire and Thorns. According to Carson’s website, it’s the first book in a trilogy, but it is quite self-contained and absolutely stands alone. From the ending, I can see where the sequels might take the story, but there is certainly no cliff-hanger and no niggling loose ends. I’ll probably take a look at the next book when it comes out, but it’s not quite at the top of my to read list.

I recommend Fire and Thorns to lovers of fantasy and YA fantasy, especially those who’ve had enough of medieval-style settings.

4 / 5 stars

The early summer sky was the colour of cat vomit.

Of course, Tally thought, you’d have to feed your cat only salmon-flavoured cat food for a while, to get the pinks right.

Opening lines of Uglies by Scott Westerfeld (review)

Skye Object 3270a by Linda Nagata

I received Skye Object 3270a by Linda Nagata from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program a little while ago. It was great and I’m a little annoyed at myself for putting off reading it for so long.

It’s a book that can be classified as middle grade or YA — personally I’d call it YA because a) it’s about teenagers and b) I don’t really understand where the boundaries for middle grade are supposed to be anyway. On the other hand, the main character is 14, a little younger than standard for YA and the romantic story line isn’t super serious as in many YA books.

Skye Object 3270a is set on and above a distant planet in the far distant future. It’s about Skye, who was found in an escape capsule when she was a baby. No one knows where she came from or how long she was in hibernation in the capsule before being discovered. She is named after the astronomical designation for her capsule before they realised it was a capsule (which I thought was a bit mean of the civilisation, but at least no one teases her for it).

Skye and her friends are ados, adolescents in a world where people live for several centuries (perhaps indefinitely, but the planet they live above (up a space elevator) hasn’t been settled for that long and the oldest people were just under 300 I think). People are considered ados and aren’t taken seriously until they’re 100 and become Real people. Interestingly, this sees 14 year olds lumped into the same demographic as 99 year old and they’re all treated more or less the same. Which is to say, sort of taken seriously but also dismissed as a bit silly and reckless.

And reckless is a pretty good description of Skye and her friends. From bungee jumping down the space elevator shaft the maximum allowed distance (4.3 km) to breaking many rules for a variety of reasons, there are lots of entertaining shenanigans in this book. There’s also a more serious underlying mission to find out where Skye really came from.

What really struck me about Skye Object 3270a is the depth of the world building. From the space elevator to the freefall scenes to the nanobots and biological oddities, Nataga’s world was not only physically plausible but rich and detailed. An exemplary example of SF worldbuilding. Apparently, Skye Object 3270a is set in the same world (but different characters) as Nagata’s Deception Well (which is indeed the name of the planet in Skye Object 3270a) and a few other stand alone novels. I bought the Locus Award-winning The Bohr Maker (also in that universe but set earlier in time) a while ago and it has just jumped up a few places in my virtual TBR pile.

I highly recommend Skye Object 3270a to lovers of quality science fiction and adventure. Although it is written for younger readers, I think it can be enjoyed by all (even if older readers, like myself, shake their heads at the dangerous stunts the characters pull).

5 / 5 stars

One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde

One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde is the sixth book in his apparently ongoing Thursday Next saga. This review doesn’t contain spoilers for previous books.

The Thursday Next books are based around the premise that BookWorld, the reality in which all fiction (and non-fiction, come to that) comes to life, is a real place. Thursday Next, in earlier books, has adventures travelling in an out of BookWorld with evil corporation and miscellaneous bad guys doing, er, bad things both in RealWorld and BookWorld. It’s an enjoyable series. The first book is The Eyre Affair, involving shenanigans in Jane Eyre. If you’re a book geek (and especially if you’ve read some of the classics, although I haven’t and was still able to enjoy the books) I recommend them. The first few books should be mandated book geek reading. ;-p

On the other hand, One of Our Thursdays is Missing is not a place to start reading this series. It depends a little too heavily on having a knowledge of earlier books. It’s set mostly in BookWorld just as BookWorld undergoes a restructuring. That part isn’t problematic as new BookWorld is new for all readers. But later RealWorld comes up and Thursday’s RealWorld bears only a passing similarity to ours. I’d actually forgotten about that until it came up but at least I’d read the earlier books and had those memories to fall back on. I think a new reader would have found that section quite confusing.

The set up for One of Our Thursdays is Missing is that RealWorld Thursday has (surprise!) gone missing. BookWorld Thursday, the one playing Thursday in the novelisations of Thursday’s adventures (which aren’t quite identical to the earlier books in the series but are closely related… it’s all very meta) has to work out what happened. And why Real Thursday is missing. And so forth. Also there are peace talks that Real Thursday was supposed to attend which may or may not have something to do with her disappearance but by golly it’s all a bit of a problem.

I didn’t hate the book. I quite enjoyed the first third or so of it. (Whether or not this was because I was suffering delusions due to prolonged lack of sleep is debatable.) But I felt it lagged from them onwards. It was amusing — the humour wasn’t the problem — but it just left me a little cold. I read three other books while still in the middle of this one, which doesn’t say much for it’s ability to keep my attention.

Overall, I’d recommend it to fans of Fforde’s other work who have read the previous books. (Actually, having read all previous books isn’t strictly necessary. The plot is self-contained, it’s just the world-building that isn’t. However, as I remember enjoying the rest of the Thursday Next books, I do recommend reading them before getting to this one, lest One of Our Thursdays is Missing put you off the others.)

3.5 / 5 stars

Slide by Jill Hathaway

Slide by Jill Hathaway was a book I almost bought at Heathrow during my stupidly long layover. I was able to talk myself out of it at the time because a) I’d just bought a pile of books in the US and and b) I opened it to a random page in the middle and it seemed a little bit shallow. Then later c) I bought a Kobo.

But now I seem to be on some sort of YA binge and ran out of pre-purchased YA so I downloaded the sample/preview of Slide and one thing led to another, I bought it and kept flipping those iPhone pages until I got to the end. Needless to say, I enjoyed it.

Slide is about Vee, a teenage girl (I think aged 17), who has a magical form of narcolepsy. When she passes out, she slides into someone else’s head for a few minutes. She can’t read their mind, but does see and experience life from their point of view. The choice of who she slides into is determined by what she was touching at the time; if she touches something which had some sort of emotional significance to another person, she’ll probably slide into their heads. Because she can’t read minds, she often doesn’t know who she’s slid into unless there’s a clue in the new environment or unless she knows what object brought on the episode.

Things aren’t exactly going well for Vee with mild injuries brought on by the narcolepsy interspersed and night-time insomnia to top it all off. But then she slides into the head of a murderer just after they’ve committed the crime. A cheerleader is dead and because the killer made it look like suicide, Vee is the only one who knows it’s murder.

And so, between boys being confusing, girls being bitchy and her sister (friends with the dead girl) falling apart, Vee realises it’s up to her to work out who the killer is. She can’t tell anyone else about it, because they’ll just think she’s crazy.

This book had be guessing at whodunit until the end. I was wondering “oh, could it be that person? Surely not, but that does look very suspicious” right along with Vee and I couldn’t stop reading until I got to the end. Far from being shallow, as per my first impression, the book works much better in context. It’s written in a fairly straight-forward style but from the (first person) point of view of a teenager, this is quite appropriate.

There were some parallels between Vee and Veronica Mars. Both outcasts, both have male BFFs and pasts that aren’t all sunshine and roses. Vee is slightly less awesome (and less immediately proactive at trying to solve all the mysteries) but that’s not an entirely fair comparison since Veronica Mars is my favourite teenage girl character ever. What I did enjoy about Vee was watching her take control of her life by deciding to find the killer. Throughout the book she gains agency and becomes less of a victim of her condition. Which was nice to read about.

In short, this was an enjoyable read. If you’re after some YA mystery and murder, this is a good place to start.

4 / 5 stars

Mercy by Rebecca Lim

Mercy by Rebecca Lim, is a YA book about Mercy, an angel (or something like that, it’s not entirely articulated, despite what the blurb says). She is forcibly thrust into random girls bodies and forced to take over their lives. She never knows where she’ll wake up, who she’ll have to be or why. This time, she wakes up as Carmen, a star soprano singer in a high school choir. The choir is visiting the town of Paradise for a concert and preparations and Mercy/Carmen finds herself billeted with the family of a girl who disappeared two years previously.

Although everyone else assumes the missing girl is dead, her twin brother believes she is alive and hasn’t given up searching for her. Mercy realised that he’s probably right and joins him in his search and attempts to work out who the culprit is.

Although this is a YA book, it reminded me a bit of serial killer books I’ve read in the past (Michael Marshal [Smith] springs to mind), but that’s possibly more a reflection of the dearth of crime novels I’ve read. Nevertheless, I found something appealing about Mercy’s attempts to work out who did it and try to get inside the criminal’s mind. That aspect of the novel was dark in a different way to, for example, YA dystopias. It was about the darkness inside one person than the darkness of an oppressive society or a war.

Lim has a more poetic writing style than most other YA books I can think of. Also, written in first person, Mercy spends more time philosophising than other YA characters that spring to mind (possibly because she’s not really a teenage girl). She also spends time wondering who and why she really is, who the mysterious probably-angels that she dreams about are and so forth. I didn’t find those parts as exciting as the who kidnapped the girl parts and at times they got a bit tedious.

On the other hand, I enjoyed the parts where she didn’t care what the bitchy girls thought of her/Carmen and didn’t respond as insecurely as Carmen would have. There was pleasure to be derived from watching the bitchy popular girl squirm. Oh, and Mercy isn’t a terribly kind person, which, if anything, added to her character, in my opinion.

Overall, Mercy is a well-written book. I’ll be picking up the sequel although my impression is that almost all the supporting characters will have changed. Hopefully Mercy’s character will be enough to carry off the dramatic change (according to the blurb and Shaheen’s review).

4 / 5 stars

Short Stories

I bought a Kobo Touch ereader on my way home from a distant trip. Partly because it’s hard to have an 8 hour layover without buyingsomethingother than necessary food (I also bought a giant box of Jelly Belly jelly beans at half the price of duty free, whoo), and partly because carrying paper books to read on long-haul flights is tedious. For one thing, they weigh more and take up more room and, for another, being shoved in my bag leads to more damaged covers (sacrilege!) than leaving them at home. Also, I have a terrible tendency to choose the wrong sort of books to take on flights, but I’m not blaming that on the dead trees.

Usually I read ebooks on my iPhone or iPad (on the go vs at home when hubby isn’t using it) and that’s not going to change. I have absolutely no problem reading on backlit screens and, hey, my iPhone still has more pixels than the Kobo making it smoother on the eyes. So why did I buy a Kobo? Battery life. It takes 24+ hours to fly from Europe to Australia and neither iThing can survive that many hours of near constant use (even in airplane aeroplane mode) and still have juice for emergencies upon arrival. Sure, I could bet on not reading the whole way — perhaps trying to sleep or availing myself of inflight entertainment — but sleep doesn’t always happen and not all flights have TVs in seats, especially overnight flights (and out of 24+ hourssome of that has to be overnight). So I bought a Kobo, which I just spent too many words justifying.

I wanted to test out my new Kobo but didn’t want to commit to reading an entire novel on it. After loading all my books on it (well, most of them; I discovered I don’t have the best ebook backup/filing system) I thought why not read some short stories that I’ve downloaded or bought and not got around to? The covers above are the stories I’ve read in the past couple of days.

“Grandeur” by Jo Anderton

This is a prequel teaser for Debris(see my review here). It gives a bit of a taste of the world and the characters, particularly the main character, Tanyana. Of course it contains no information crucial to the story in Debris, but I found it an interesting backstory. You can download it free as a PDF from the author’s website.

“Marine Biology” by Gail Carriger

This is a great story with adorable characters. Alec, the main character, is an in-the-closet werewolf who really doesn’t fit in with his pack. There are also merpeople and selkies. It’s similar in sensibilities to Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate books, but set in the modern world and with marine supernaturals included. (Side note: the cover works particularly well on the black and white Kobo e-ink screen.) You can buy it for 99 US cents on Smashwords.

“Party, With Echoes” by Patty Jansen

This is a science fictional deep-sea adventure set on Europa. It has weird alien bacterial colonies and an ice cave. Fun, quick read. You can download it free (for now?) on Smashwords.

“How Astrid Found Her Passion” by Nichole Murphy

A fantasy story about an Australian woman who gets mysteriously transported to a magical kingdom and inadvertently tangled up in a local dispute between mages and a lord. Another fun, quick read. You can also download this story free (for now?) on Smashwords.

Hex Hall by Rachel Hawkins

I admit part of the reason I picked up Hex Hall by Rachel Hawkins was because of the smashing cover. This is one of the few times I’ve preferred the US cover to the Aus/UK one (see small Aus/UK cover below on the left). The other reason was — thanks to jet lag — I felt like an easy/fun YA read.

And what a fun read it was. I wasn’t expecting Hex Hall to be quite as laugh-out-loud funny as it was. From the prologue, in which we learn just why Sophie is sentenced to the supernatural reform school, to a plethora of sarcastic comments, I was sniggering or laughing every few pages.

The story is told in first person from the point of view of Sohpie, a witch who did one too many spells in front of humans. But she was raised by her human mother after her parents broke up and didn’t get to speak to her father until she came into her powers. Before arriving at school, she had never met any other supernaturals (the school has witches, shapeshifters (including werewolves), faeries and vampires) and knows very little about their society. She quickly manages to antagonise the three bitchy witches, but at least she’s room-mates with the only vampire student so they can be outcasts together.

Then things start to go wrong. A student is attacked and Sophie’s new vampire friend is the prime suspect. Sophie doesn’t believe her friend did it, but everyone else does. No one will listen when Sophie starts looking for the real culprit.

As I said at the start, this was a really fun book. Without getting overly gloomy, it touches on racial tension (faeries and shapeshifters don’t really get along, hopefully something that will be explored more in the sequels) and fear of the unknown (humans who find out about supernaturals tend to get homicidal on them). And of course, there’s the whole being an outcast element. Actually, it was nice that the vampire girl was more of an outcast than Sophie started off being. Too many books have the Chosen One also being a complete outcast. At least while Sophie has elements of Chosen One-ness, it’s mainly the bitchy coven that hates her straight away, not the whole school.

Did I mention funny? I’ve ordered the second book, Demonglass, from Book Depository and look forward to reading it.

4.5 / 5 stars

Ember and Ash by Pamela Freeman

Ember and Ash by Pamela Freeman is a set twenty years after the events at the end of the Castings Trilogy (Blood Ties, Deep Water and Full Circle). It is technically a sequel, and some of the characters from Castings do pop up again, but it very much stands alone. I think the main thing one would miss from not reading Castings, is a deeper exploration of the past colonial racism and oppression. Oh, and there are some spoilers for who survives the world almost ending in Castings, although not all the prominent Castings characters rate a mention.

A few words on comparisons with the Castings Trilogy first. Castings is a story about colonial invasion, ongoing racial oppression and revenge. It’s much more violent than Ember and Ash and found some aspects (there was a lot of — realistic — sexual violence) very haunting. In terms of social world building, parallels between the Travellers, the oppressed original inhabitants of the Domains, can be drawn to just about any displaced indigenous peoples. However, in Ember and Ash there is less overt racism and, while still relevant, race plays a less life-defining role.

Ember and Ash is more a story about places and the powers that reside in different landscapes. The Ice King, who made some background appearances in Castings, is much more prominent, ditto the Power of Fire. It’s also a story about how tenuous the status quo can be and how legal equality does not necessarily translate to social equality, especially when things start to go wrong.

This is the kind of book you can’t read too quickly lest you don’t absorb all of it. (By corollary, I probably shouldn’t have read it on long-haul flights and while travelling, but I have an unfortunate tendency to pick the wrong books to take on aeroplanes.) Freeman’s writing style is somewhat literary, dwelling on magical symbolism as much, if not more, than action. In some ways, it reminds me of Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels, but in style more than content. There was also a lot of lovely imagery, some of it bordering on metaphorical.

The story opens with Ember’s marriage ceremony going awry when the Power (spirit/god) of Fire makes an appearance and takes back the gift of fire until such time as Ember makes the long journey to Fire Mountain. And incidentally, he incinerates her husband. And so begins the quest. Aided by Ash, her sort-of-cousin-but-technically-nephew-and-not-by-blood-anyway, and a few other friends, relatives and guards, she sets off. Meanwhile, the people left behind — her father the Warlord, her mother the seer — are left to organise some means of surviving the not-as-distant-as-it-previously-seemed winter without any fire.

I very much liked Ember as a character. Raised to be a Warlord’s wife by her father and skilled in negotiation, her Traveller mother makes sure Ember knows other practical skills as well. Ash starts off thinking of Ember as his silly highborn cousin who cares only for a good marriage. As the story progresses and Ember is given the chance to prove herself on their journey, he comes to respect her intelligence and character. It was very well done and an interesting transition to watch.

I enjoyed Ember and Ash, but I think I liked Castings more. In the end, despite a similar style, they are structured very differently with different aspects of world-building as story foci. On the other hand, Ember and Ash was more consistently enjoyable since, unlike Castings, it didn’t have interludes of miscellaneous cameo characters between PoV character chapters. In Castings those broke up the flow a bit, despite it all coming together at the end. The romantic plot line in Ember and Ash is unconventional (I don’t think I can explain how without spoilers) but more prominent than any in Castings.

Ultimately, I think more nuance will come through in Ember and Ash if you’ve read Castings before it, but Castings is not for the faint of heart and not necessary to enjoy Ember and Ash.

4.5 / 5 stars