In 2012, the comic series Fables (reviewed here and here) did a 6-issue story arc featuring Cinderella (review here). Likely based on its popularity, and (I'd hazard) the increasing number of female comics readers, the women of Fables are going it alone. Well, mostly alone.
The first story arc of Fairest features Briar Rose, with male hero Ali Baba, a bottle imp, the Snow Queen, and a cool collection of powerful women deities. The initial premise was actually established in issue 107 of the Fables series (in trade 16), but you don't need to read it to make sense of the story. After all, most of us know Briar Rose and her story from tales of childhood. If not, here's you chance to catch up now and get in on the ground floor of what promises to be a great new series.
I picked up this advance reader copy of Coda at the NCTE convention in Las Vegas in November, and it intrigued me enough to make me pick it up ahead of the (likely hundred) books ahead of it in my to-be-read pile. For readers interested in technology, music, and/or dystopic literature, it's a great selection.
Anthem lives in a world where music is the basis of socital organization--and control. After a war of undetermined nature, the Corp has established a system of energy development using humans, with music as the driving force and drug of choice. Adults tune in to music--and, indeed, are required to do so lest they have the police call upon them--and "track" for entertainment, mood enhancement, and survival--paying credits for each encoded (brainwashing) song on the basis of strength and need. With the commoditization of music comes its tight control, so Anthem and a group of friends secretly practice on improvised and blackmarket instruments, building up a sound that they hope will start a revolution.
Trevayne's first book is interesting, sort of a teen-targeted early William Gibson novel. While less gritty than that in Gibson's Cyberpunk tomes, Trevayne's alternate world is also one in which technology has changed the shape of society. Whether the change is for better or worse depends on who is ultimately in control.
These are numbers 16 and 17 in the Fables series, so we're far into the plot by this point. I've provided an overview of the premise in my review of trades 14 and 15, so I'd recommend you check it out first (at this link) to get an overview of the series.
Trade sixteen details the efforts of the Fables living in Haven, a temporary escape from enemy Mister Dark, to develop a super team of fighters to battle against evil. Led by the powerful witch Ozma, with advice about Super Hero mythology from Pinocchio, the team begins training for the confrontation, only to have the need cut short by a sacrifice from unexpected corners.The bonus issue in the collection sets up the premise for the first story arc in the new Fairest series--which will focus on the female fables--with the story of Briar Rose. I've recently finished that first trade, so I'll post my review soon.
Trade seventeen focuses on the children of Bigby Wolf and Snow White--the grandchildren of the North Wind. To continue the family tradition of guarding the north, one of the children must be identified as successor, so a series of trials are held to determine which of the young cubs (actually flying children) will prevail. The bonus issue following this story arc involved Beauty, of Beauty and the Beast fame, so I'm guessing that trade two of Fairest will pick the story up as well.
Of all the comics still in process, the Fables series if my favorite, and it's a great one to start off with if you are considering an investigation of modern adult comics.
In my last post, I commented on how impressed I am with the range of subjects written about by author Maggie Stefvieter. Double that for Libba Bray! The first of her books I picked up was Beauty Queens (review here), a hilarious satire wherein an airplane of teen beauty contestants crash lands on an island housing a secret military base--a bit Lord of the Flies with curling irons. Upon finishing that book, I quickly picked up Going Bovine (review here), featuring a teen boy who contracts mad cow disease and sets of on an adventure to save himself and/or the world. After that, I ventured into Bray's early writing, which was set in the past and featured a paranormal theme and cast of characters in an English boarding school (see brief review of A Great and Terrible Beauty here). In The Diviners, she's returned to that paranormal world but has chosen Prohibition-era New York City as the backdrop.
While I still have a preference for her two contemporary books, The Diviners is an interesting and complex story, and it provides insight to 1920s America, the rise of the modern world, and the contrasting fascination that the occult held for people of the time. The female protagonist is sent to live with her bachelor uncle when a party trick turns sour. As we learn, her ability to divine the truth about people by holding one of their possessions was the cause for the uproar; she (accurately) publicly identifies the fact that the son of a wealthy man has impregnated a servant, so her parents send her away to let the uproar--caused by what they try to pass off as an unfortunate wild guess--dies down.
It's a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. Once in NYC, our heroine is quickly embroiled in a series of murders involving the paranormal. Her uncle, as it turns out, is curator for a museum of the odd and supernatural, and he serves as consultant to the police on the murders. And, a range of other diviners--with a slate of unusual abilities--are slowly drawn to each other. Few of them play much of a roll in the final events of this book, which makes it pretty clear that we'll get to see more of this sequence in the future.
I'm impressed with Maggie Stiefvater's range of subjects in her teen novels. She started out with the Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy (review here) depicting a girl in love with a werewolf, which is pretty standard fare in TeenLit these days. However, after that she released Scorpio Races (This appears to be a book I read over the last year or two but forgot to add to my blog. It was excellent, though!) about a world where fierce horses rise from the waters and sometime kill humans and at other times are captured and trained by humans to compete in a deadly race. In Raven Boys she take a different direction again, entering the world of the paranormal.
Blue is the female protagonist in the book, and her mother and aunts are all psychics. Despite the family legacy, Blue doesn't have psychic abilities herself--but she does intensify the abilities of those nearby her. Since she was born it has been foretold that she will kiss her love and he will die. That's quite the story to enter puberty with, and she's stayed away from boys for the most part--especially those from the fancy prep school in town. Enevitably, though, she is swept up by a group of those boys--raven boys because of the school mascot--in their quest to find the ley lines that mark the burial site of an English knight (oddly buried on the east coast of America) and have their wishes come true.
The story involves fortune telling, ghost sighting, card reading, romance, and murder, and it moves along at a pretty quick clip. Steifvater is an excellent storyteller, and while the romance end of things makes it clear that her target audience is teen girls, the characters and story in this book and Scorpio Races make it interesting for adults as well.
This book is the sequel to The Passage, which was published in 2010. I had originally planned to link to my entry for that book and tell you that it would fill in the early story, but as it turns out, I don't have an entry for that book. I must have started the blog after reading it--or simply forgot to write about it afterward. It happens.
So, if you want the details for the first book, you'll have to look elsewhere. Suffice it to say that I enjoyed The Passage enough that I was pretty excited to see The Twelve on the shelve of my local bookstore. It stars PostApocalyptic vampires, so what's not to like? As in most vampire books, there's a special twist here, and in this case a mutated strain of a bat virus infects the human poulation and turns them into horrific killing machines. Even better, the virus was purposely mutated by military scientists and tested on (Twelve) serial killers and likewise stellar citizens. Who could have foreseen that plan going awry?
Based on this premise, the first book explores the world post-virus--cosisting of human enclaves huddled in highly reinforced walled cities shining bright lights out into the desolate surroundings. (Vampires hate light, if you were unaware of this fact.) A small group of people eventually leave one of these enclaves in search of the origin of the problem, and book one follows their journey. In book two, we go both back and forward in time to see more about how these situation developed, increase the cast of characters (necessary when folks keep getting killed off), and build hope that the human race will survive. The ending is appropriately ambiguous to allow for what will surely be the third novel in a trilogy.
While the sequel wasn't quite as riveting as its predecessor, it's worth reading if you liked The Passage. And, I enjoyed it enough that I will keep my eyes peeled for volume three.
This book was published a number of years ago, but it is the 2012 Book of the Year selection at Humboldt State University and College of the Redwoods, our local university and community college. I picked a copy up at Eureka Books in Old Town for five or six dollars, and Eddie and I decided to read it together. It always takes us some time to get through our joint selections, as our read-aloud time is generally restricted to road trips (One of my many talents is that I can read while riding in a car without getting sick) and lazy mornings in bed, of which there have been very few in recent busy months. Our recent Thanksgiving travels to and from Portland allowed us the time needed to conclude the book, though, and we thoroughly enjoyed it.
Gladwell's premise is quite interesting: that success is often partly the result of unrecognized factors such as the month or year of one's birth or country of origin rather than the ones we most give credit to, such as brilliance and hard work. He's not saying that the more traditionally-attributed things aren't also important, but he builds a strong case for the fact that an individual's--or even a group's--success is frequently predicated on circumstances beyond his/her control, and often due to the efforts of others. From Canadian hockey players, to Jewish lawyers in NYC, to Chinese rice farmers, he demonstrates his theory in a compelling manner. It's a thought-provoking take on what it really means to be successful: both effort and luck in combination.
I'm an average Harry Potter fan, so I was interested to read Rowling's first novel written for an adult audience. My friend Laurie--a huge HP fan who teaches a Potter-themed freshman composition course--lent me the book, and I'm glad that I didn't spend my own money on it. The novel, depicting what I must imagine is intended to be a typical small, gossipy British town, fell short of my expectations. The characters were not sympathetic, and I wasn't really invested in the outcome of the novel. Come to think of it, it's been only a few weeks since I read it, and I'm not entirely sure what that outcome was. I'll likely read another Rowling novel (surely her level of fame and fortune will allow her another even after this loser), but if she doesn't convince me with that one, I'll stick to my fond memories of and/or reread HP.
The latest in the series starring Shadowhunter Clary, her Shadowhunter society, nemesis (brother), and love interest (who she once thought was her brother), and her vampire (former love interest) and werewolf friends. Okay, so it sounds a bit cliche, but this is a decent teen series with just enough interesting non-romantic developments to keep me reading. Click on "Clare" in my word cloud to the right to get reviews of the Mortal Instruments books--and the prequel Infernal Devices books that start 100 years before Clary shows up.
This is a prequel to The Maze Runner series, so I'd really recommend that you start there before reading this one. I read books one and two in 2011 and book three earlier this year, and you can check out my reviews at this link and this link. Overall, this was a good addition to the series, and I look forward to what I assume will be a second prequel release--forming an eventual trilogy (pre-trilogy?) of its own--if things go according to the seemingly usual release schedule of TeenLit.
