The Onion Girl by Charles de Lint

I really liked this fantasy book and would recommend it, as well as Charles de Lint’s books in general, to anyone who likes modern-day fantasy, especially if they like books that are character driven and maybe a little slower-paced than other stuff on the market.

Despite that, though, this particular book comes with a few strings attached. Not to start with a negative, but I’ll just be up front about it and explain what the strings are.

For starters, it would be good to just point out that this book is not YA. I know not everything we review on the blog is YA, but a lot of it is, and de Lint is an author who writes for both teens and adults, so I thought I would make that clear.

Now, this isn't me saying, "Don't read it if you're a teen." This is just me saying what market the publisher wanted to put this in. It does probably have slower pacing and older narrators than YA generally has. It also has graphic and implied depctions of violence and sexual abuse that our characters struggle to overcome, which may deter some readers, depending on their age, experience and comfort level.

The overall tone of the book is optimistic though, without trivializing the difficulty of the characters’ situations. De Lint has a lot of respect for his characters.

Now, there’s still one more string, though totally unrelated to the first. Again, this isn’t something that should necessarily deter you from reading the book, but it might be a turn-off.

I have a feeling that people who are familiar with Charles de Lint will already know what I am going to say.

The Onion Girl is what fans call one of the Newford books; that means it is a work of fiction that takes place in de Lint’s fictional city of Newford, a place that houses many other stories which take place in a variety of his other books. Each book that I have read so far seems like a strong enough book to stand on its own. The Onion Girl is indeed a stand-alone story, but elements and characters from past books will sometimes slip in and out of future books, and that is very much the case here.

I suppose I should have been warned by this part of the book description to go back and read some of the previous books first: “At the center of all the entwined lives of Newford stands a young artist named Jilly Coppercorn, with her tangled hair, her paint-splattered jeans, a smile perpetually on her lips—Jilly, whose paintings capture the hidden beings that dwell in the city’s shadows. Now, at last, de Lint tells Jilly’s own story…”

Yeah, okay that should have been a warning bell to go back and read up on some previous stories before I read this book if I wanted to feel really solidly ingrained in the story. But I had previously read The Blue Girl and Little Grrl Lost, which were also Newford books. Both of those novels (which are YA) seemed pretty self-contained, so I didn’t think I would have a much of a problem with this one, either.

And I didn’t. At least, not a big problem. But this book felt slightly more disorienting than either of the previous titles I mentioned. Evidently, Jilly is friends with nearly everyone in town. As a result, de Lint introduced lots of characters in this book with names and very short descriptions of their character, like summaries almost. The book expects readers to more or less keep track of them all. The author was good at dropping in reminders about how they fit in with the plot, but as a reader previously unfamiliar with their stories, I still found them a little distracting.

It makes sense and fits right in with Jilly’s character for her to know all of these people and for them to visit her in the hospital after her car wreck (this is not a spoiler; it happens right away), though. Maybe these small character moments couldn’t have been avoided. But to be honest, even though de Lint took great care to not make it sound like name-dropping, I still felt slightly alienated as a new reader.

For example, Jilly once or twice mentions the fact that her friend, Isabelle, has the ability to paint beings and have them come to life and cause her trouble. It’s a small, offhand, almost irrelevant comment that Jilly states and then lets go away, but it made my reading process come to a screeching halt, distracted. Whoa! That sounds like a big enough story to be it’s own story!

Well… that’s because it is.

(Apologies for the Amazon link. Someday I promise I will get a Goodreads account and then I will be able to link to books on a website that doesn’t also try to sell you stuff.)

Anyway. After I got used to these things, I sort of just wrote them off as quirks of de Lint's world. This fantastical universe is like that: sometimes the characters (and you as a reader) get to experience whole alternate worlds and magnificent magical experiences, and sometimes they (and you) just get to see snippets here and there, mere hints that there is more to the world than just plain-old reality. So ultimately, even though these odd character moments were jarring, they worked in the novel’s favor for me.

This novel had all of the strengths I have come to associate with Charles de Lint: A well-developed magical world that hasn’t lost its sense of the mysterious or the whimsical. Strong, well-developed characters. A higher value in emotional truth than rationality

In this book in particular, I appreciated the nuanced good-versus-evil themes, with the recognition that not everyone gets the privelege to "fight" the evil in their lives, and instead must learn to grow and heal from it in other ways.

I’ll also say that I liked it enough to go back and start in on the rest of the Newford books.

I can’t believe I only discovered this author a few years ago, and I am surprised I don’t hear about him more. He is clearly very prolific and has been writing for a long time. Urban fantasy/magical realism (this work seems to have elements of both) is a favorite of mine. It’s all over the place in fiction nowadays, but de Lint’s work is still better than some newer stuff I have read, and seems pretty timeless regardless.

If you have read this or other of Charles de Lint’s books, I’d love to hear your perspective on them. If not, and if you like urban fantasy, I expect you will probably like this book—unless you have a problem with one of the “strings” attached that I mentioned before. In that case, maybe try checking out his other books first. Start from the beginning, like I didn’t do. Or try one that isn’t so entwined in other stories. I think I would consider The Blue Girl a good introduction; that’s more or less a standalone and I recommend it.

Wicked by Gregory Maguire

This is my second time reading this book and my first time reviewing it. The first time I read it was in high school and didn't really like it that much overall, except the part where all of the witches are in college together. I recently was lucky enough to get to see the musical and it made me want to read the book again. (It was awesome. But that's not what I'm here to talk about.) This time around I liked it a lot more, although I still found it really challenging and kind of get why I didn't like it as a teen. I think the two biggest turnoffs people have about this book can be reduced to:

1. It's a satire, and as a result sometimes comes off as pretty cynical.

This can be kind of wearing on you, and I kind of understand why people don't like it (like me in high school). Also, if you like the musical or movie, and want to dive right into this, you should definitely  read L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz beforehand (which I did not do in high school). It not only helps put the story in context a little better, but you get a sense of the type of humor Baum and Maguire share. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is also a satire, a critique of society at the times, and if you don't read Wicked as a similar critic of our modern day, then you are probably not getting what you should out of the novel anyways. (Or if you are an American you should just read The Wizard of Oz anyways because it is the most famous and possibly most culturally defining American fairy tale).

2. It's kind of a difficult read.

Full disclosure: last spring I graduated with a Bachelors degree in English. (And I will say I would consider myself pretty good at reading because I am one of those kids who did my homework and studied.) I still found this book pretty challenging. Wicked uses words I don't know. Pretty regularly. Also, I felt like I had to pay really close attention and read intuitively or I'd miss nuances in each scene. Many of them I had to go back and reread more carefully. In my opinion, this is a "literary" book and you have to read it like one. I feel I would have got the most out of this book if I had read it for a class, with time to reflect back on pieces of the book as I read them, and discussion with other people in between. Ultimately, it is one of those books that rewards you the more time you spend with it. But if I'm reading on an airplane or whatever, it's not as easy to just go and look up words or historical facts on demand to help myself out with context. As is, I feel like I could've written a forty-whatever page honors thesis about this book, but only after I read it a few more times. I'm still not sure where I'm at with regards to the ending (thoughts welcome!). I mean, there was one of those Reader Discussion guides in the back of my copy, and I only had answers to some of the questions in my mind. Usually I have thoughts on almost all of them. (Yes, I read those things.)

Overall I'd recommend Wicked as long as those two things don't sound like deterrents to you. It is a very complex and well-written book that will reward you the more time you spend reading it, rereading it, and thinking about it. This book is copyrighted in 1995, but it, like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, is still very relevant. Wicked has a lot to apply to the censorship controversies, privacy debates and post-9/11 paranoia I see in the media all the time now.

Also, side note, evidently there's like a whole bunch of sequels! I might read those, but I feel like if I do that then I'd like to read the rest of those Oz books first. Which there are a lot of. So I don't know if I'm going to get to that anytime soon.

Human.4 by Mike A. Lancaster

This book was nothing like I expected it to be from the description on the front flap, but I liked it nonetheless. It was almost a sci-fi thriller. It offers a new look at a somewhat cliché sci-fi story of people from the past being unfamiliar new technology.

I really liked how it was presented. Because it’s a fairly short book, the warning and editor’s note at the beginning helped to get into the story quickly. I also liked the idea that it’s a transcribed version of cassette tapes. It brings depth to the story that it probably wouldn’t have achieved as just a story. Also, I’ve always been a fan of books that know they’re books.

I did think the pacing was a little strange. The plot seemed to switch between slow and sudden events, but that could just be my reaction. The characters also didn’t have a lot of development, but the novel was mostly driven by the plot, so this makes sense. However, the small amount of development that there was very well written and felt very natural, which is a plus.

Overall, I think it’s focused more at people around their mid-teens. I felt a bit too old for it, but still found it enjoyable. It was a bit creepy at times, in a Stepford Wives kind of way, so it might not be something you want to read before bed.

Buy it on Amazon

Ash by Malinda Lo

Apparently we’re doing blog posts again. Nice post from 2 weeks ago by Maddie. Sorry about the lateness here. In any case, I’ll start off with saying something exciting about Ash by Malinda Lo.

THIS IS THE BEST BOOK EVER!

 

Okay, since you’re going to take me with a grain of salt anyway, I’ll elaborate. Calling this The Best Book Ever is maybe a little bit of an exaggeration, because of course there are lots of books out there that I like equally well, for different reasons. But I liked this book so much I felt like it was the best book ever after I finished reading it.

You might watch this video wherin Libba Bray and Maureen Johnson (some other YA authors who this post isn’t about, but they’re cool) discuss the way teens talk about books they like versus adults. (Or you can slide the video timer to 5:44 where the "Libba on Writing for Teens" section starts to see the part I'm talking about.)

Teens tend to exaggerate; adults tend to give calmly explained (“constipated”) opinions about the book. What I am trying to say is, I felt the way about this book the way I did about books I was excited about as a teen.

I actually heard of this book a few years ago but didn’t want to read it until a bunch of librarians recommended it at the Colorado Teen Lit Con in Spring 2012. (I know. Youtube videos from 2008. References to conferences from six months ago. I’m so timely.) It was on a list of recommendations at a panel called The Changing Face of Queer Lit: Moving Beyond the Coming Out Novel led by Shanna Shadoan. There were a few other cool books on her list that I would also like to read, (although I was admittedly late to the panel, snuck in the back, and didn’t get to hear the whole list) but none that looked like they’d fit my personal taste as well as this one (fairy tale).

Anyway, before I got to hear this summary and recommendation, basically all I knew about this book was that it was a YA Cinderella retelling, and I really didn’t think I needed to read yet another one. Since it’s a trend going around anyway, it’s the type of genre that people will read and promote even if it’s not anything special. (But not librarians. They know how to find good stuff.) Ash was quite good, and Malinda Lo is a very skilled writer. I’ve not read a fairytale I liked this much in a long time. Even when I thought I had an idea of where the story was going and noted the typical motifs as they popped up, (sometimes in disguised forms) I genuinely couldn’t figure out how Ash was going to get her Cinderella ending until it actually happened. In the meantime, I enjoyed the lore and fantastic elements of Ash’s world. Because the writing is precise, lush, and at once visual and emotional, it didn’t matter if the plot started out slow, because it was a very rewarding experience overall. It makes me want to read it again and/or discuss it with someone. In general, I’d definitely recommend it. But if you know you’re one of those people who really doesn’t like books with slow plots, regardless of beautiful writing, you might want to wait on this book until you feel like you’re ready for it.

Another strength of this book I should mention, which is part of why it won me over, is that even though this book is primary a fantasy and a love story, and a fantasy, there are also themes of loss, sadness, and difficulty that really brought the fairy tale down to a relatable, human level. Even though it’s quite sad at times, it’s ultimately uplifting, and always very genuine. This is why having a slow plot works: it wouldn’t be fair to readers to see Ash work through all of her problems quickly and without difficulty. Anyway, I quite enjoyed it, I want to read it again, and THERE IS A COMPANION NOVEL called Huntress that I would really like to read. I’d recommend this book for teens or adults, especially if you like fairy tales and/or enjoy the power of different interpretations.

--Jordan

Tales of the Madman Underground by John Barnes

This is a book that I’ve read several times since I came upon it in the library. I enjoy it very much, and somehow manage to undersell it in my memory every time. However, it does contain quite a lot of swearing and a few sexual references, so I’d recommend it for more mature readers.

Things I didn’t like:
There’s not a lot of plot in the book, because it’s primarily character driven. While I had no problem with this, it could be a downside if you prefer more event focused novels. In addition, the narrator, Karl Shoemaker, can be a little strange and hard to relate to at times. A main part of the book is the fact that it’s set in 1973, which could distance it for younger readers.

Things I liked:

The titular group, the Madman Underground, is connected by the members’ abundant issues in their home lives. However, they all seem very human and are amazingly developed. Anyone who has felt overwhelmed by their own problems will find a friend in these long-suffering characters. Although I don’t know what being a teenager in a small town in the 70s would have been like, I find the setting to be very realistic and believable. It’s a surprisingly eloquent book for the amount of profanity it contains, and is very well crafted.

(Sorry for the very long leave of absence! Hopefully we'll be able to get ourselves back on track.)

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

It's been awhile since we've posted a review--Sorry, readers! I hope no one has been turned off reading us!

This review is going to be a little different than usual because I would like to talk about Libba Bray’s book from 2003, A Great and Terrible Beauty. The reason it’s different is because I’m coming at it from a different perspective than I usually do when I review books on the blog: not only did this book come out almost ten years ago, but I read it for the first time when I was 16 and now I’m 21. Also, I’ve read this book, and its sequels, many times since then. The reason it has come to my attention is because I recently re-read it.

Also, it’s one of my favorite books ever, to this day. This will present the slight problem (even though it’s a good problem to have) of having my feelings about this book mostly described in terms of things I liked.

Things I Liked (and this is a big one): This book doesn’t talk down to teenage girls. As I mentioned, I read this book when I was sixteen. Well, the heroine of the book, Gemma Doyle, is also sixteen. This is unusual for me, because when I was growing up, I liked to read books with heroines that were a few years older than me, because whenever I tried to read kids’ and teens’ books aimed at my own age, I felt like the characters were acting younger than they were supposed to and that the book would have been better had I been a little younger. Now, the youth book market has changed a LOT since then, but that’s the way it felt to me at the time. Then came Gemma Doyle. I loved it! It was a book that was about girls, and the heroine was just as complex as I was.

This is not to say that Gemma doesn’t act immature or make mistakes, because anyone who has read the book will know that she most certainly does. But her actions are clearly actions of a complicated, confused human being that were very understandable to me at the time, and still hold true to me to this day.

Things I Liked: It did new, successfully interesting things with genre. At the time of this book’s release, it was pretty unusual to find a book set in historical (Victorian) England (at a boarding school), that also had creepy supernatural themes AND contemporary young adult themes, that focused on relationships between girls, that had romance but didn't revolve around it. To top it all off, it’s well written with beautiful and thought-provoking descriptions and narration, and has well-developed and interesting characters outside of the heroine herself. Also, even though it’s a very dark book, it still has quite a few humorous moments. Humor is crucial in fiction to the creation of characters really feel human in many circumstances. If you are a fan of any of these trends in books, then I recommend this book, if you haven’t already discovered it. I have every faith that it will hold up in the current book market, just as it did a near-decade ago.

Things I Liked: This book has sequels! BUT none of the books end on a cliffhanger. In fact, I didn’t even know this first book HAD a sequel until I logged online to read more about the book and found out that the second one was about to be published later that year. I felt the author did a great job of creating continuity among sequels without sacrificing the integrity of each individual volume. Even though I loved the book and wanted more, this first book would have felt complete and made me happy just the way it was, had the author decided not to do a sequel. There are a few minor problems that I have with the sequels that I didn’t have with this book, but that’s a topic for a different review.

Thing I Didn’t Like: This series never grew as strong of an internet following as a lot of its peers did. Gemma Doyle has a small one, but never had one quite as strong as say, Twilight, which came out around the same time. I know that there is a small dedicated fan community, at least among those who read the author’s LiveJournal blog, but I wonder how much of it is still around, especially now that all the books are released.

Conclusion

I would love to hear other people’s opinions about this book. I love it, and I probably always will, but I feel sort of biased since I like it so much. Not that that’s a problem necessarily, but it could mean I’ve inadvertently overlooked weaknesses of the book. Is there anything about this book that really bugged you? Do you know of an awesome online Gemma Doyle fan community that I don’t know about? Are people still talking about this book?

Extra

Here’s the link to Libba Bray’s Livejournal.

http://libba-bray.livejournal.com/

If you like her writing I recommend reading her blog. She is sometimes quite funny and other times quite thoughtful, often both at the same time.

Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce

I was very, very excited to read Sisters Red, by Jackson Pearce. One of my favorite books from growing up was Ella Enchanted, by Gail Carson Levine, and ever since then, I’ve become fond of fairy-tale retellings, which flesh-out and humanize characters in ways more suited to a novel-length.

I was excited to see a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. There are a lot of Cinderella, Snow White, and even mermaid stories out there, but you don’t see this story as much. Plus, it looked like Jackson Pearce had an original take on an old story. Two Red Riding Hoods, who are sisters? Buffy-style fighters against werewolves who prey on young women? The idea alone has a lot going for it. For the most part, the book lived up to my expectations.

Things I liked

Jackson Pearce’s fantasy world. Pearce brings the story easily into a contemporary setting: where werewolves stalk cities at night for girls walking alone. Contemporary fantasy is a good fit for Red Riding Hood, and Pearce takes advantage of that. The fact that the girls learn about life through stories that their grandmother told them is a nice touch, too.

Things I Didn’t Like

The point-of-view balance didn’t quite work. (Here be some minor, minor spoilers.) The story opens with a third-person prologue that is written beautifully, bringing in the language of old fairy tales and structured like a short-story. But from then on, the story is told in alternating first-person narratives between Scarlett and Rosie. Then, the epilogue switches back to third person. It isn’t the point-of-view switching around that’s the problem: in fact, it kind of works in a symbolic way, since the story is partially about the sisters discovering their own selves outside of each other, only to become reacquainted with their new, “adult” selves once they’ve grown a bit. The problem is that the author didn’t seem like she was always aware of her reasons for choosing first person. For example, a moment in Scarlett’s opening narration bothered me. A boy who Scarlett knows very well enters the narrative, yet she, in her narration, doesn’t call him by name until after saying his name out loud. She just refers to him as “the boy” and such until that point. I couldn’t figure any narrative purpose, and it kind of just felt like the author forgot she wasn’t still in third person.

Things I Liked

Beautiful moments of prose bloom in many parts of this book, often doing an excellent job of orienting readers in the setting and allowing insight into the character who is speaking. For example Scarlett states on page 108 in her narration:

“They’re adorned in glittery green rhinestones, shimmery turquoise and aquamarine powders streaked across their eyelids. Dragonfly girls. Their hair is all the same, long and streaked, spiraling down their backs to where the tiny strings holding their tops on are knotted tightly. Their skin glows under the neon lights—amber, ebony, cream—like shined metal, flawless and smooth. I press harder against the crumbly brick wall behind me, tugging my crimson cloak closer to my body. The scars on my shoulders show through the fabric when I pull the cloak tight. Bumpy red hills in perfectly spaced lines.”

Don’t you just want to close-read that? Or maybe it’s just me--English major moment!

Still, that kind of writing is a pleasure to read and I'm sure many readers will love it.

Things I Didn’t Like

Excessive dialogue tagging. This might be a personal pet-peeve on my part, but it's a big one. If the dialogue is doing it’s job, then the author shouldn't have to explain the feeling of it in tags. To do so just feels redundant. This is a little bit of a problem in this book. Here are some examples from the text, just a few I found from opening to a random page in the middle:

He says, pointedly.

I grin, relieved.

Silas answers firmly.

I grumble.

Silas says seriously.

It could have just been “I say” or “He says.”

Here’s an example of a redundancy in a dialogue tag: “'You tell the Alpha that, then,’ the second Fenris growls, in a voice hardly human.”

Obviously it’s not human. It’s a growl.

This sounds nitpicky, but it’s distracting from a really creative and cool story, and honestly, it should have been an easy fix. An editor should have caught this stuff and taken it out before the book went to publication.

Unless they WANTED the book to sound redundant because they underestimated their teen readers' ability to recognize subtlety. Personally I think that's a big mistake, since it turns off the smartest and most perceptive of teen readers, the ones who read everything and make recommendations to their friends.

Things I liked (Bonus)

What a beautiful cover! There is so much story in the cover alone, and it makes you really want to read the book. I also appreciated the handwriting-ish chapter titles, and the symbols that began each sister’s chapter: a leaf for Scarlett, and a flower for Rosie.

Conclusion

This book tells a compelling story, with some minor text issues that, unfortunately, might turn some readers away. The plot is only a little predictable, but there are a lot of great moments of story between the beginning and the end that it almost doesn’t matter. If you’re already a fan of YA fantasy, you’ll probably like this one. I’d even go as far as to say it’s better than average. If you’re a fan of fairytale retellings in novel form, then I’d definitely recommend it, since it is such a creative take and LRRH is such a staple. But if you’re not really into either of these things, then I don’t expect this to be the book to turn you onto the genre, especially if excessive dialogue tagging in fiction annoys you.

Extra

I was so excited about the cover of this book that I chose to use it as an example of strategic color use for the tumblog I am currently running for my graphic design class. If you're interested in reading a more detailed analysis of the cover color use, check it out here.