Thought-provoking YA fantasy

Dear Aunt Debbie,

In the excitement of Will's newborn baby state and our busy spring, we skipped right over our third anniversary! That's right, as of last month we've been writing Annie and Aunt for three years.  And there are still so many books to write about....

A couple of years ago, in search of alternatives to the Twilight series (which you know I don't like), you mentioned a couple of YA novels by Kristin Cashore: Graceling and Fire.
(Full disclosure: Kristin Cashore and I both went to Williams College, and have mutual friends, though I didn't know her there.)

I finally picked up Graceling, had a pleasantly obsessive read, and followed it up with Cashore's third book, Bitterblue.  I didn't mean to read them out of order, but was confused by the publisher's choice to put an excerpt from Bitterblue at the end of Graceling. You don't need to read Fire before Bitterblue for it to make sense (and I know you weren't a fan of Fire), but there's a character payoff at the end of Bitterblue that I think would have been more fun if I had read Fire first.

While Fire is a prequel or companion book to Graceling, Bitterblue is more of a sequel: there's a different main character, but many of the characters in Graceling return here. Spoiler alert -- in writing about Bitterblue, I will by necessity reveal some plot points from Graceling.

Queen Bitterblue, who appeared in Graceling as a ten-year-old girl, is now eighteen, and trying to bring her kingdom of Monsea back to some kind of normalcy after the death of her father, King Leck. Leck was Graced with the ability to make people think and feel what he told them to -- to have all his lies believed -- and was an astoundingly manipulative and evil man.  Though Leck's reign of terror ended eight years earlier, Bitterblue is just starting to understand what a mess he's left, and how much she doesn't know about what happened under his rule.

Bitterblue herself is not a Graceling -- she has no special powers, though she does grow in knowledge and strength throughout the book, as a good YA heroine should.  The Gracelings around her are physically recognizable by their eyes, which are two different colors.  Each has an extreme talent, some more fantastic than others: the ability to read minds, or tremendous physical strength, or the ability to know what a person would most like to eat at the present moment. Gracelings have to figure out what their Graces are, which is easier for some than for others.  It's a nice metaphor for different intelligences.

Cashore knows how to move a plot forward and create suspense, and Bitterblue is sprinkled with effective moments of decoding -- ciphers play a large role in the unraveling of the mystery.  What I find most compelling about the book, however, is the way Cashore gets you thinking about culpability.  Many people committed crimes while under Leck's influence.  Is it fair to hold them responsible for their actions?  Is the way forward to silence discussion of the terrors of the past and the lives lost, or to delve into them and talk about the truth?  The people in Bitterblue's castle, who worked closely with her father before serving her, refuse to talk about the past.  Bitterblue seeks out friends in her city who are, as she is, interested in exposing what really happened.  There's a human cost to either way of proceeding, which Cashore renders in realistic ways.  I found myself thinking about South Africa at the end of apartheid, or Rwanda after the genocide -- how do you come to terms with horrors committed by people who now must live together peacefully?

Many of Leck's crimes have a sexual element: under his reign, hundreds of young girls were stolen from their families and disappeared.  Cashore is thoughtful about gender, creating strong female characters in all walks of life, and with different kinds of strength, but placing them in a world where violence against women is a palpable threat.  (I should add that she draws a number of kinds of men as well, and that several of her nicest characters are gay.)  This is a patriarchy familiar to those of us who live in the real world.

I'm left thinking, and looking forward to Cashore's next book.

Love, Annie

Diana Wynne Jones

Dear Annie,

Diana Wynne Jones died last week.  She fits right into our discussion of teen lit books that survive the test of time.

Diana Wynne Jones has a unique record of producing books you can't forget. Her intelligent, imaginative brand of fantasy is, at root, down-to-earth – heroes win humanly, by acknowledging their weaknesses and playing to their strengths, and by behaving nicely to other people and giving them the benefit of the doubt even when they appear to be revolting. The fact that the heroes in question might be nine-lifed enchanters with power over space and time is incidental.

This quote is from an excellent blog entry in The Guardian by Imogen Russell Williams. She wrote it almost two years ago, but it stands as a memorial appreciation.  Jones wrote, among other things,  Howl's Moving Castle, The Dalemark Quartet, Dogsbody, the Chrestomanci series, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, and my favorite:
Dark Lord of Derkholm.

Derkholm is a very funny send-up of a lot of fantasy cliches.  It's set in a world in a universe parallel to our own.  The world has magic in it, but is basically a fairly quiet agrarian society.  Mr. Chesney, from our world, has found a way to get to it, and to coerce residents to follow his bidding.  He runs a high-priced tour business for people from our world who want to see a dramatic magical world.  He forces the residents to stage battles, enchant farmhouses into complex castles, and generally make the place feel like a medieval fantasy world to entertain the tourists.  When Derk, a likable slightly muddled sorcerer who specializes in animal husbandry, is told he has to be the Dark Lord and run this year's Disney-esque production for Mr. Chesney, he sets out to figure out how to break Chesney's magical hold on the world.  It leads to riotously funny plot twists

Jones does families so well.  Derk's children are both humans and griffins.  He and his wife have some tension between them which leads him to worry constantly that she's bored with him, and the siblings all bicker with each other.  Everyone bumbles through many situations.  Jones studied at Oxford during the 50s, attending lectures by both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien (this according to wikipedia).  So at one point a minor character -- a very scruffy dwarf -- shows up, named Galadriel. "Derk had been wondering, ever since he discovered this, what Galadriel's parents had been thinking of."  And there are elves: elongated, elegant, aristocratic.  In one scene, a battered Derk arrives back home to be enthusiastically greeted by his flying pigs (he engineers a lot of flying animals), when he realizes a delegation of elves is waiting for him:

The effect on the elves was peculiar. The one with the circlet gaped and stood like a statue. His right hand was out, with its long, long index finger pointing stiffly at Ringlet [flying pig]. Derk would have been afraid he was trying to turn Ringlet to stone or something, except that the other five elves were falling about with laughter, crowing joyfully, slapping their elongated thighs, and hugging one another, as pleased as the pigs were. Finally, the laughing five swung the elf with the circlet around and hugged him, too, at which he joined in their laughter and began slapping the others on their backs. Old George, coming in hot pursuit of the pigs, skidded to a stop in the doorway and stared. Elves just did not behave like this normally.

   "Forgive us, oh my lord!" gasped one of the five lesser elves. "Talithan, my prince, has this moment seen his prophecy come true, and we are witness to it."

   "Yes, truly, my lord," said Prince Talithan. He was panting with emotion, and tears were running from his great greenish eyes. "Pray forgive me. I must tell you that my brother long ago went adventuring to our neighbor world, where Mr. Chesney has him a prisoner, thus forcing all elves to do his will. And when my father lately was sorrowing at this and saying that surely one day my brother must escape and come home to us, I answered him bitterly and scoffingly, saying, 'Yea, that day will come when pigs do fly!' for which reason my father grew angry and sent me to you, to become the Dark Lord's minion. And here, where I come, behold! Pigs fly!" He pointed again at Ringlet, who was still on the table.

"Well, I've been breeding them with wings for years now," Derk said. "Perhaps you shouldn't build your hopes on it."

This isn't a pivotal scene in the book, but it has a lot of the spirit of the whole thing.

Jones created complex worlds with a light touch.  And she did it with an affection for her characters that transfers well to the reader.

One last quote, this from Neil Gaiman, who was a close friend of hers:

She's a wonderful author to read aloud, by the way, as I discovered when reading her books to my kids. Not only does she read aloud beautifully, but denouments which seemed baffling read alone are obvious and elegantly set up and constructed when read aloud. "Children are much more careful readers than adults," she'd say. "You don't have to repeat everything for children. You do with adults, because they aren't paying full attention."

Love,

Deborah

Chaos Walking

Dear Annie,

Reading with Isabel sounds so delightful -- such a great stage.

I though I'd fast-forward about 15 years to a great YA trilogy which I've just finished.  There are two excellent just-completed YA trilogies floating around these days, both of which I wrote about back in May.  The one which has been getting all the attention these days is the Hunger Games trilogy, of which
Mockingjay is the newly-released conclusion.  That one's still on my bedside table -- I haven't read it yet but would love to hear from our YA fantasy fan readers what they think of it.

The series that's been keeping me from reading Mockingjay is called Chaos Walking; the three books of the trilogy are The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer and Monsters of Men,  to be released at the end of this month.  The author, Patrick Ness, grew up mostly on the U.S. west coast, but has been living in London for the past decade.  Like the Hunger Games series, it pits teenage protagonists against manipulative controlling political leaders in a dystopian future.  In Chaos Walking, the future is on another planet where people from our planet have gone to create a new society.  The settlers discovered two unexpected facts about the new world: it was inhabited already, by a populace they name The Spackle, and a native virus has made all men's thoughts constantly audible -- but not women's.  The first two books explore how the inequality of privacy -- which is how the humans experience "the Noise" -- affects the society.  The third book brings in both new human settlers unfamiliar with what's been happening among the local humans, and two fascinating Spackle characters.  It turns out that audible thoughts are the Spackle's only -- and very effective -- means of communication, both one-to-one and across the entire planet.

These books start with personal violence, and move on to repression and war -- lots of blowing things up and death, especially in Monsters of Men.  But that's kind of like saying that the Hunger Games books are about a TV reality show where teenagers are forced to kill each other.  Yes, those are the plots.  But the authors use those plots to explore the complexities of human nature in very teenage-friendly ways.  Patrick Ness has an incredible ear for language.  He creates different voices for each of his main characters that submerge the reader in their experience.  Todd, the male protagonist, in battle for the first time:

Is this what war is?
Is this what men want so much?
Is this supposed to make them men?
Death coming at you with a roar and a scream so fast you can't do nothing about it --

and later in the same day, when reinforcements arrive:

"Come!" [the mayor] says to me. "See what it's like to be on the winning side."
And he rides off after the new soldiers.
I ride after him, gun up, but not shooting, just watching and feeling --
Feeling the thrill of it --
Cuz that's it --
That's the nasty, nasty secret of war --
When yer winning --
When yer winning, it's effing thrilling --

I don't feel like I'm doing this excellent series justice.  Suffice it to say that I had to stop reading anything for a few days after I'd finished it because anything I picked up was too much of a disappointing contrast with what I'd just read. So much to talk about in this one..

Love,

Deborah

YA Fantasy: Beyond Vampires

Dear Annie,

What an excellent post! Reinforces all my initial negatives about the Twilight series.

Okay, so you ask about whether there's any such thing as "really good fantasy/fairy/faerie/vampire YA lit being written out there." I suspect that as far as faeries and vampires are concerned, that's an oxymoron. But that could just be my prejudice. There is one riotously funny vampire satire, The Reformed Vampire Support Group. It's about a group of slightly sickly vampires who have banded together in an AA-like group to keep each other from attacking humans. They do, of course, still need blood -- you'll never think the same way about guinea pigs again.

For those folks who actually take Twilight seriously, I tend to recommend Libba Bray's Gemma Doyle Trilogy (first book: A Great and Terrible Beauty). My Lizzie got fond of these books toward the end of high school. It's a combination 19th-century British boarding school tale, crossed with magic and mysterious dark men (probably magical) hanging out in poorly lit places. But the writing's okay, and the author is definitely thinking more about women's place in society.

Two good recent YA fantasy books:

Graceling, by Kristin Cashore creates a really interesting medieval-style world where some people are born with "graces": extraordinary talents. Katsa, the heroine, believes her "grace" is killing people: she's excellent at combat and has been forced into the role of enforcer for an evil king. Turns out her talent is more complex than that. Takes a sympathetic guy (who's also a great fighter) to help her figure out what's going on. Has a satisfyingly unpredictable ending. The sequel/companion book, called Fire, is pretty dismal: Cashore creates a different main character who is so beautiful that everyone goes nuts around her because they're consumed by desire. Kind of the ultimate cheesy fantasy.

Then there's a very interesting trilogy-in-progress called Chaos Walking. First book is
The Knife of Never Letting Go. It's set on a planet which has been colonized by earthlings who came as fundamentalist settlers. Shortly after arrival, a virus infects all the men, making their thoughts audible to others. Women are unaffected. The first book involves an odyssey through many settlements, each of which has dealt with the issue differently, from extreme repression of women to hippie matriarchy. The bad guys are really bad, setting out to take over all the settlements, using extreme coercion and torture in the process. They have also enslaved what remains of the native population. I've read the first two books wondering when the action was going to veer into awful sexual violence, but so far that hasn't happened. A lot of adults try to manipulate the teenage protagonists, and there are some fuzzy lines between resistance and collaboration. It's one of those series that gives a teenager a lot to think about. Also a good read -- I really want the last book to come out, already.

And then, aimed at the sixth grade and up crowd, one more trilogy which is great and impossible to sell. Just mentioning the premise in the presence of a parent is the kiss of death: dystopian future in an America divided into 12 states, each of which must send two teenagers a year to a reality television show which involves the contestants killing each other until there's one winner. Two books are out:
The Hunger Games and

Catching Fire, the third is coming in August. They're psychologically and politically fascinating books. Katniss, the main character and Hunger Games contestant in the first book, is horrified by the games and improvises her way into resistance, initially simply to save herself, and ultimately because her acts on television have helped fuel an underground movement. It sounds grim, but the core of this series is anger mixed with hope.

Time to get back to cheerier stuff --

Love,

Deborah