Gender distribution in SFFH Australian authors published in 2011

Tansy put out a request on Twitter for someone to compile states on gender breakdown of Aussie SFF novelists and for some reason I volunteered. Because apparently I was bored this morning (actually, it did take my mind off feeling sick, so yay).

Demonglass by Rachel Hawkins

Demonglass (titled Raising Demons in the UK/Australia) by Rachel Hawkins is the second book in the Hex Hall trilogy. You can read my review of book 1, Hex Hall, here.

The shenanigans and sarcasm from Hex Hall return in full force in Demonglass. Sophie is off to spend summer break in the UK with her absentee father and, luckily, her best friend Jenna is allowed to come with her. Conveniently, from a plot-ish point of view, one of her love interests also goes with them.

Where Hex Hall mostly involved school yard pranks and mischief with only mysterious murders and a bit of life-threatening danger at the end, Demonglass ups the ante. There’s a lot more danger and risk with more adult-involvement (as in, less teenage mischief more serious business).

Happily, Sophie’s sarcasm continues apace.

One thing that bothered me plot-wise was the love interest/triangle. I’m a bit over love triangles and I suspect I’m rooting for the losing side (which seems to often be the case, hmm). The other thing that probably wouldn’t bother most readers that got to me were a couple of misused words (eggcorns, to use New Scientist’s term): brisk instead of brusque, shattering instead of chattering. Not a big deal in the scheme of things, but it was enough to throw me out of the story.

On the other hand, it was interesting to watch Sophie’s relationship with her father develop (although I think elaboration would be spoilery). That and the fact that Jenna got some happies were two of the highlights.

The big finish was definitely big and the last few chapters crammed in a lot of sudden action and excitement and also a cliffhanger. Good thing I already have the concluding volume, Spellbound, lined up and ready to go.

Overall, a must read if you enjoyed Hex Hall. I liked it slightly less but the ending more than made up for it. Oh, and I was still definitely laughing out loud. If you haven’t started the Hex Hall series, definitely do if you like YA with magic and sarcastic, snarky main characters.

4 / 5 stars

In my experience, nothing pleasant slithers.

Demonglass by Rachel Hawkins

Destiny of the Light by Louise Cusack

Destiny of the Light by Louise Cusack is the sort of book that might colloquially be called a BFF: Big Fat Fantasy. I think that’s a good term, because other possible sub-genre descriptors such as “epic fantasy” or “high fantasy” come with different connotations for different people. So BFF it is. (Even though ebooks don’t really have a thickness, shh.)

After her brother’s apparent suicide ten years previously Catherine was left alone to care for her mother during her lingering death from cancer. When she starts hearing a voice in her head, she assumes she’s crazy but the voice insists its her destiny to follow her brother to another world. Crazy or not, who can fight destiny?

And so the long lost White Princess finds her way back from an exile spent in our world to the brown, faunaless world of Ennae. Except while she was gone for three years in Ennae, she lived through fifteen years in our world. And to compound things, Khatrene, the Princess, has no memories of her childhood in Ennae. Luckily, her Guardian Champion was the one who facilitated her transition between worlds and he will do anything to protect her and get her to her brother, now the king.

However, destiny and the voice in her head don’t leave her alone once she’s back in the world she belongs in.

Destiny of the Light is full of interesting characters. There are a lot of them and it took me a few chapters to get them all sorted out in my head, with the exception of the main (-est) character, Khatrene, who stands out by being from our world. While there wasn’t much moral ambiguity among who is on the side of good and who is on the side of evil, there was ambiguity in the sense of “oh, turns out that person is evil/good” as we learn more about them. A lot of what drives the action is characters making assumptions (or listening to lies) about other characters and acting accordingly while, as the reader, we are left shaking our fists at the page screaming, “No, don’t listen to that person!” And  it doesn’t tend to be stupidity or silly miscommunications which lead to problems, which is nice. (Books where everything could be solved if the characters just had a proper conversation annoy me.)

Every time I thought the plot was slowing down, something new and unexpected would happen to keep me turning the page.

The supporting characters were integral to the story. I don’t want to say too much about various enemies for spoilery reasons, but I will say the daughter of the spiritual leader and the young, brash apprentice Guardian were particularly entertaining, especially when they were in the same room. The daughter’s growth as a character between start and end was well done and definitely added depth.

The ending isn’t quite a cliff hanger, but many things are left in the air (eg almost everyone’s fates). This is the sort of trilogy where one long story is divided into three parts, rather than three self-contained stories with an overarching theme.

There is a lot in this book, and I’ve found it difficult to review. Hopefully my review encourages you to give it a shot, especially if you like BFF. Here is a link to the series page on Louise Cusack’s website with links to where you can buy the trilogy.

4 / 5 stars

‘Single Lifers are weird! Fancy seriously considering that you are only meant to have a normal one hundred twenty years or so lifetime and then die completely, no hiving, no relifing, not being uploaded into a chassis, just seeing out your days and then dying forever! Stuff that!’

From Burnt Ice by Steve Wheeler

Shift by Em Bailey

I came across Shift by Em Bailey while browsing some ebook store (I don’t actually remember which one, probably Kobo since that’s where I bought it). It was the blurb that first intrigued me, so allow me to post it here:

Olive is not crazy – although there was that incident last year and that spell in the psych ward, but now she’s taking her meds and staying away from the toxic ‘in’ crowd. But when new girl Miranda turns up, Olive knows that there is something very dangerous about her, even if everyone else doesn’t. But who will believe her, when everyone probably thinks she’s crazy anyway? That is, everyone except her best friend, Ami, whom her mother disapproves of for some strange reason. But all is not what it seems in this page-turning thriller and there are twists and turns that you just cannot predict.

This isn’t an SFF book. At most I’d tentatively call it magical realism. It’s full of psychological drama and there is blurring of reality so you’re not always sure what’s real and what isn’t. It’s also a book about mental illness about being weird and about dealing (or not) with those things.

I really loved it.

Honestly, there was only one aspect I disliked about it and it’s not the sort of thing that would bother everyone. The author is Australian (this is her first YA book, but she has written books for younger readers as Meredith Badger) and the book is indisputably set in an Australian coastal town near either Melbourne or Sydney (my theory is Melbourne, but I may be biased). It’s definitely Australia because they have high schools like we do (years 7 to 12) and wear school uniforms in state schools (I only recently learnt this is a bit of an Australian quirk) and, well it all sounded Australian. But. It also felt like the most direct mentions of Australianness had been removed or carefully not mentioned. At one point the main character goes for a run through the forest, not the bush. There’s a scene near a fig tree, which in itself isn’t that strange, but no gum trees were ever mentioned even thought they must have been ever-present. It just bothered me a bit. A setting made slightly generic but not completely. I would have enjoyed seeing more Australia in it.

Mind you, that was a very small component. The rest of the book — the characters, the plot — was top notch. Olive was great. She was a flawed narrator but that was part of the charm. We were so deeply inside her head that we could only guess things she didn’t know herself a little while before they happened. The way some events were foreshadowed, you had to be paying more attention than Olive was to notice.

The other characters were also very believable. Creepy Miranda was particularly well drawn and mysterious to just the right extent. The secondary characters of best friend, ex-best friend and love interest were also well crafted. I’m not sure that I can properly say what I liked about them without spoilers, however.

And the ending was great. A perfect mix of suspense, action and, well, spoilers.

Even though it’s not really fantasy or science fiction, I think this is still the kind of book lovers of SFF YA would enjoy. And lovers of mainstream YA too, particularly of the darker variety. I loved it. One of my top books read this year. (Oh, and isn’t the cover great? It’s particularly apt, too.)

5 / 5 stars

‘You’re a good fighter then, are you?’ she asked, and prepared herself for some major bragging.

Ten minutes later she was still waiting for a break in the conversation to butt in.

Destiny of the Light by Louise Cusack

New Booksies

Slide by Jill Hathaway

Cat Girl's Day Off by Kimberly Pauley

Burnt Ice by Steve Wheeler

Winter Be My Shield by Jo Spurrier

I have been hanging out all week hoping that some books flying their way to my mailbox would arrive so that I could a) read them and b) post pretty pictures of them. Alas, it was not to be. I suspect Easter is to blame. Nevertheless, I haven’t been completely bookless since my last IMM new booksies, even if my mailbox has been. I delayed my post-US book buying ban by buying Slide and I signed up to NetGalley and was lucky enough to receive some eARCs.

In the order in which they arrived in my possession:

• Slide by Jill Hathaway (already reviewed)
• Cat Girl’s Day Off by Kimberly Pauley (ARC, already reviewed)
• Burnt Ice by Steve Wheeler (ARC from HarperVoyager by debut Aussie author. I’m looking forward to getting into some new Aussie science fiction.)
• Winter Be My Shield by Jo Spurrier (ARC by another debut Aussie author. It’s been a while since I read a new Voyager epic fantasy novel — that is, not a sequel — so I’m really looking forward to this too. And, bonus, it will count towards AWW2012.)

Hopefully my mail books will magically appear in my mailbox soon and I can post some more pretty covers ;-p Hey, part of the fun having piles of books is looking at them, even if they only exist as pixels and bytes.

Cat Girl's Day Off by Kimberly Pauley

Cat Girl’s Day Off by Kimberly Pauley is set in a world where people have non-secret superpowers. Chicago schoolgirl, Nat, has a very talented family. Her parents and siblings all have multiple and powerful superpowers. It runs in the family. Except Nat only has one superpower: she can talk to cats. Whoopdidoo.

The excitement starts when her best friends force her to watch a YouTube video of a celebrity blogger who’s come to town to cover the filming of a teen movie. Nat notices the blogger’s pink cat is calling out for help in the clip. Somehow, the blogger’s been replaced by a double and only her pets and Nat no about it. It’s up to Nat and her friends to work out what’s going on.

Cat Girl’s Day Off was an amusing and quirky (in a good way) book. A quick light read that made me laugh out loud a few times (mostly at the snarky cats). The celebrity angle had be a bit doubtful at first since I’m really not the kind of person who gives a crap about celebrities, but then neither does Nat, so that was OK. Her friends were a bit over the top at first, but by the end they had developed into non-clichéd characters. A couple of times Nat’s inner monologue got a bit repetitive, but mostly it was entertaining. And her strictly PG swearing made me smile. (Oh, poodle farts!)

Ultimately, this was partly a coming-of-age story. In the end (not a spoiler) Nat comes to accept her powers as not completely useless and grows up a bit. The other part, the mystery and celebrity impersonation part, was taken a little bit lightly at times. Yes, it was inescapably amusing when the cats helped the humans catch the bad guy, but not quite enough weight was given to all the bad things that were going on.

Cat Girl’s Day Off was a light, fun read. Don’t read it if you’re in the mood for something serious and, as should be obvious by now, don’t read it if you hate cats. I received this as an ARC from NetGalley, but I believe it is generally available from today.

4 / 5 stars

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