Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

You can’t blame me for having high expectations for Jay Asher’s debut, Thirteen Reasons Why. Even if it hadn’t been hyped all over the blogosphere, its very pretty* cover tells the story of its accolades: a New York Times bestseller, a Kirkus starred review–why, it even bears a cover blurb by Sherman Alexie! It would have to be a rare book to rise to such lofty expectations. Unfortunately, Thirteen Reasons Why did not prove to be that book. Instead of the “brilliant and mesmerizing” story of the suicide of a teenage girl, it proved to be little more than tragedy porn. While I might not be able to conjure thirteen reasons why Asher’s debut fell flat for me, I can at least offer a solid handful.

Persistent problems with voice. If industry experts–publishers and agents–are to be believed, the most pressing concern for any writer writing for and about contemporary teenagers is voice. We should, they tell us, write honestly and accurately, capturing the speech and thoughts of today’s teens.

Unfortunately, I found the voice Asher uses not only inauthentic, but fairly distracting from what’s a unique concept and should be an enveloping read. Thirteen Reasons Why is, in fact, narrated by two parties–the first narrator, bookish nerd Clay, is mourning the suicide of the second, popular girl Hannah Baker, who narrates via a series of cassette tapes that form a long-form suicide note. But you’ll note that I said that Ashes uses a “voice” here, not “voices.” Because it’s true–save for the fact that Hannah’s narration is set in italics, it’s indistinguishable in style and tone from Clay’s.

It’s a voice that’s far more appropriate than for Clay than Hannah, stilted and overly formal and frankly kind of awkward. Asher’s word choices are odd–once, he refers to a store that has “all the best candies” rather than “all the best candy.” And it’s filled with clunky repetition that doesn’t quite manage to ascend to poetry, stuff like: “It was never a lost poem, Ryan. And you never found it, so it did not belong in your collection. But in your collection is exactly where other people found it. That’s where teachers stumbled across it right before their lectures on poetry. That’s where classrooms full of students cut up my poem.”

In small doses, such repetitions might have been an effective device, but it’s constant here, distracting and not altogether artful. And the conflation of Clay’s and Hannah’s voices have me convinced that this wasn’t entirely intentional on Asher’s part–that it represents a lack of control rather than a deliberate artistic choice.

A bizarre preoccupation with the sexuality of its female lead. Mind, I have no problem with sexual content generally or the sexuality of teenage girls specifically–in fact, I think that all young adult authors have an obligation to talk honestly of the real lives of their target demographic, which includes sex. But in Asher’s case, it’s not only Hannah’s sex life that’s held up to scrutiny but instead her purity. Ten of thirteen of her “reasons” for committing suicide concern either her reputation or the reputations of other teenage girls. And, while my own experiences and the experiences of women I love have taught me that non-consensual sexual exchanges are all too common, the way that Asher discusses forced sexual interactions has a certain flatness–it lacks the guilt, the fear, the confusion, the complexity with which teenage girls actually regarded these experiences.

Bottom line, when Hannah says “I think that’s the reason, in my dreams, my first kiss took place at the rocket ship. It reminded me of innocence. And I wanted my first kiss to be just that. Innocent,” and “I’ve had my butt grabbed before–no big deal–but this time it was grabbed because someone wrote my name on a list,” I just didn’t believe that this was the reaction of a teenage girl. Instead, it sounds like the reaction of an older man–a dad, maybe–and the type of propriety-obsessed reaction he’d like her to have to both her budding sexuality and to complicated and sometimes unsavory sexual encounters. It felt male gazey, a suspicion that only deepened during a scene where Hannah and a female friend mime a porny massage for the benefit of a Peeping Tom, a scene that was a major WTF for me.

A story that keeps the reader at arms’ length. Many of Hannah’s “reasons” seem trifling–and it’s not entirely clear whether Asher meant this as intentional or not. More troubling, though, is the implication that there are deeper reasons that go unexplored–more compelling and potentially more emotionally affecting. For example, it’s implied that Hannah’s parents own a failing business, but the impact of this on Hannah’s life is hardly mentioned, and her parents aren’t even described. Further, hazy references to Hannah going on successful dates are made, but we never see these interactions, either. And most importantly, we never get to hear the conversations she has with Clay, either during their tenure as coworkers at a movie theater, or during a party near the novel’s climax. This makes it difficult to believe that these characters have any genuine chemistry with one another. Clay tells us that he loves Hannah, but we’re only told and never shown any evidence for this. Instead, we got cheesy and frankly unbelievable anecdotes about student poetry disseminated by teachers for public ridicule, about Peeping Toms, about car crashes. This distance, on all levels, meant that I just never quite believed that the story could possibly happen as told. Though the premise was innovative, and the hype quite loud, and for all the promise of Asher’s premise, I didn’t buy it.

*Pretty, but like everything about this novel, flawed. I mean, what teenage girl swings in white pumps and ruffled leg warmers. Who does that?

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The Cat Ate My Gymsuit by Paula Danziger

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Warning: this review might make me sound like an old person.

I couldn’t help but read The Cat Ate My Gymsuit with a bit of wistfulness. Though the characters, voice, and situations likely still remain true to life, I suspect that there just isn’t a place for books like Danziger’s in the current world of children’s and young adult writing.

It’s the story of Marcy, a fat middle schooler whose horizons are opened up by her new hippie teacher, Ms. Finney. Ms. Finney encourages her students to be in touch with their feelings–a radical concept for many of these small town kids who grew up in a world without Mister Rogers. When the teacher’s radical politics and teaching style get her fired, Marcy and her friends decide to try some “radical” (for the time) tactics of their own.

But what’s notable about this book isn’t necessarily the central driving plot, which is undeniably dated and is unlikely to resonate with modern teenagers. What’s notable is Marcy, and her family. The misunderstood oldest child of a cowed house wife and verbally abusive father, Marcy relates her home life in a way that feels incredibly true-to-life. Interchanges between Marcy and her younger brother, and Marcy and her mother (particularly conversations about her mother’s budding feminism) are really truly touching.

Unfortunately, I just think that the niche for this sort of book has been supplanted. Marcy and her friends are undeniably teenagers, and deal tangentially with teen issues (peer pressure around drinking, first dates), but the voice–while well-rendered–is incredibly simplistic, as is the plot. The length and development are more akin to a modern low middle grade book than something that teenagers would want to read. For all its strengths, I couldn’t help but close the cover and think “Who would read this?” Sadly, the only answer I could conjure was “nostalgic adults.”

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The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I still can’t believe how well Stephen King does women.

Or in this case, a girl. As someone only a handful of years older than Trisha McFarland, the deliciously spunky, undoubtedly strong heroine of King’s novella The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, I can speak with some degree of confidence about the uncanny quality of her character. And, as this story is utterly character-based, I can only call it a triumph–though I fear that King fans in search of a tightly-plotted volume redolent with King’s usual supernatural shenanigans will have to look elsewhere.

The year is 1998, and Trisha is a nine year old girl whose family–mom, dad, and petulant teenage brother–has been recently shattered by divorce. In an attempt at creating some semblance of togetherness, Trisha’s mom Quilla drags her kids on one family-friendly field trip after another: to the auto museum, on a ski trip, and finally on a fateful summer hike through the Maine wilderness. Trisha only leaves the trail for a moment to pop a squat, but somewhat, she loses sight of her mother and brother–and so begins her nine-day-long harrowing trip through the wilderness.

Trisha is a tomboy, the kind, I admit, I always aspired to be as a little girl. She’s a daddy’s girl–she and her father share a love of baseball and of Red Sox player Tom Gordon–but her mother’s imbibed her with enough just enough wilderness knowledge (which berries are safe, how to pee without getting your jeans wet) to keep her afloat. As Trisha stumbles through the forest, we become increasingly aware of the tensions of her age. She and her girlfriend Pepsi are just beginning to explore pop music, and sexuality (they beg their moms to let them dress up as the Spice Girls for Halloween), but still memorize Double Dutch rhymes. Though Trisha’s speech is peppered with her father’s aphorisms (the kind of King-speech that just barely missed setting my teeth on edge in Lisey’s Story, but is put to much better use here), she’s also been growing increasingly aware lately of his predilection for beer. Though her character arc may be slight, this is a coming-of-age story, and that’s no better evident than when Trisha muses that, after this experience, she’ll quit quoting her father and her grandmother and start penning sayings of her own.

It’s good that King is so focused on Trisha’s growth and character, because this truly is a character study, and not much besides eating berries and gathering nuts and following streams happens in this slim volume. There are hints of the supernatural, but they’re never explained and could easily be hallucinatory, and the pacing flags a bit by the beginning of the “Bottom of the Seventh.” But the book’s short length and brisk structure saves it from being tiresome, and, like King’s other meditations on claustrophobia (Gerald’s Game, Misery) it’s appropriately focused and realistically rendered. In a way, it recalls a book from my own youth–a story of a pair of snowbound teenagers called Snowbound!. But in that book, the relationship between the characters and nascent hints of romance were the focus. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is truly a story of survival, and Trisha’s success rests squarely on her own shoulders, lending this book a feminist tint. Hell, never before have I felt so elated at the simple account of a girl catching a fish.

There are a few problems here, but they’re slight: a post-script that feels a bit saccharine for all that’s come before it, a bottom-heavy structure. But frankly? Trisha herself is just so awesome that I hardly cared. I wish I’d read this when I was younger–closer to Trisha’s age–and could have more directly drawn inspiration from it. As it is, all I can do is remind myself that sometimes a girl’s moxy and smarts really can save the day.

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Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel by Lisa See

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In a brilliant bit of gender stereotyping, my husband has been heard to observe of my friendships with other women that they’re far more like romantic relationships than the friendships he has with other men. Though I bristle a bit at the embedded assumptions there, I can’t deny that in some ways it’s true; in many ways my female friends really are my girlfriends, for better (our emotional intimacy and the support we provide, the feelings of inclusiveness and love) or worse (the emotional dependency, the arguments, the obligations). These friendships can be thorny, but only because they’re also complex, and I’ve always loved fiction that highlighst these complexities and complications.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See delicately explores just these issues. It’s the story of Lily, a nineteenth century Chinese woman in a rising family, who is matched in sworn sisterhood with the Snow Flower of the title. Their relationship, a “laotong” match made just after both girls have their feet bound at age seven, is privileged among their society as one of the few relationships forged by choice rather than familial obligation. Meant to last the women’s lifetime, the laotong match is valued even above the union that’s made in marriage.

Through the course of the girls’ lifetime, we see Lily and Snow Flower progress from bright young girls optimistically looking forward to a lifetime of friendship into established heads of two very different households. Like wine, their friendship grows more complex as they age, though it’s sometimes tainted by jealousies and competition, and is eventually shattered by the growing gap in their social status. This is where See is most successful: at capturing all the nuances, from the sexual to the social, of close female friendships.

In doing so, she also offers us a fascinating and fairly enveloping look at a historical period very different from our own. Not only do we learn about the horrors of foot binding in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, but also about nu shu, a secret women’s language through which the girls correspond. But it’s not necessarily in these edifying subjects, but in the immersive nature of the setting and the general tone of the novel that Snow Flower and the Secret Fan really succeeds as a period piece.

In fact, it was only during certain passages about foot binding, language, history, and music, that I really felt See faltered. In providing us with needlessly ample background, her tone becomes encyclopedic and pulled me out of the novel’s emotional epicenter. Now, that’s not to say that I didn’t find these topics interesting, but I sometimes felt like she was trying to prove something to the reader, saying: “HEY LOOK! I’VE RESEARCHED THIS LITTLE-KNOWN LANGUAGE! YOU’RE LEARNING! THIS IS A HISTORICAL NOVEL!”

Such insistence doesn’t do her characters or story any favors. Still, this remains a worthwhile read for what it does do well–illuminating a very special and treasured friendship, for all the wonders and dangers such a friendship offers.

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Pucker by Melanie Gideon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My mother loves many things, but two more than most: books and thrift shopping. Sometimes she combines the two, grabbing unusual hardcovers for a dollar or so from her favorite thrift store.

Because she’s awesome, she sometimes mails them to me. Often wonderful, these are rarely the books I would choose for myself–most of the time, they’re books I haven’t even heard of.

That was the case with Pucker, a 2007 YA novel by Melanie Gideon that I’m quite sure I never would have encountered had my mother not been thoughtful enough to ship it to me (along with a T-shirt that says “I <3 Sparklers"--seriously, mom, you're awesome!). There seems to be very little buzz about this book online, and though I've been reading voraciously in YA genre for the past year or so, I hadn't heard of it.

After reading, I can't help but be surprised; Pucker may be incredibly idiosyncratic and downright strange at times, but it definitely was a compelling read.

It’s the story of Thomas, a high school junior covered in scars; the wrinkled quality of his face earns him the eponymous nickname. Thomas was born in a parallel world called Isaura. On the other side of reality, people don’t have electricity, or computers–but they can work magic and see the future. When he was young, Thomas’ parents wore shimmering second skins and told one another their fortunes over the breakfast table.

But one day his parents are stripped of their skins thanks to an act of rebellion. Thomas’ father perishes; Thomas himself is badly burned. His mother, apparently powerless now, flees to Earth, where she’ll make a living as a fortune teller–and where Thomas will just try to stay afloat in public school.

His mother’s powers eventually return, but she can no longer control them without her “seer skin.” So Thomas journeys back to his home, where his face will be magically healed so he can work as a slave–and steal back his mother’s skin.

Like I said above, this is an exceedingly weird story, and it takes place in a sparse, dreamlike reality. However, Gideon chooses to tell this story in a very straight-forward and direct way. Initially, I feared that this was a little info-dumpy, but soon, I found myself drawn in. I read this book quickly, and eagerly.

Why, then, has Pucker not garnered more positive press?

I can’t help but feel that it has something to do with the quality of voice here. Thomas himself narrates, and while his voice is clear, consistent, and compelling, he’s a generally pompous and unlikeable character. He gives in to his baser instincts repeatedly–this isn’t just sex, but shallow and opportunistic sex with many partners who he doesn’t even like–and he regards more than one endearing secondary character with disdain. This made him very hard to cheer for as a protagonist, and seemed to go deeper than normal personality flaws–Pucker really seemed to be a jerk.

Still, though I couldn’t help but find our narrator to be distasteful, I’m glad I read his story and spent time in his world. It was strange, imaginative, and inventive, and the experience was worth at least $1.99 (and the price of shipping)!

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The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It’s difficult for me to review Carrie Ryan’s first novel, The Forest of Hands and Teeth objectively–because I can’t help but feel like there were two very different books packed into the volume’s three-hundred-some-odd pages.

The first was the delicately story that was clearly and wisely aimed at young adults: that of Mary, who lives in a village isolated from the rest of the world thanks to a zombie plague that rages outside its gates. In this tale, when Mary’s parents become infected, and the man who previously expressed an intention to court her turns her back on her, she is forced to join the mysterious Sisterhood, a religious organization that rules the village and guides its inhabitants through every stage of their carefully controlled lives.

In the second tale, Mary flees the village with a handful of people, including two brothers who both love her. Though ostensibly the more action-packed of the two stories, as Mary and her band struggle to reach the coast, this is largely a meditation on marriage and commitment, and on the sacrifices we are forced to make when we promise ourselves to someone else.

You might be surprised to learn that I found the first story here far more successful than the second.

Within the novel’s first third, I found Ryan’s prose particularly beautiful and captivating. Mary’s story was told with a delicate touch, and the poetic, slightly archaic tone only complimented the rich post-apocalyptic setting. The world within the village reminded me of the similar dystopia found in John Christopher’s Tripod series at least as much as it was redolent of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. Seemingly medieval, seemingly peaceful and simple, this setting only made the horrors that Mary experienced in her life in the Sisterhood that much more terrifying. I read quickly, and was deeply absorbed: I wanted to discover the secrets of Mary’s world just as much as Mary did. Though I was troubled by her dithering affections for two fairly flat men, Travis and Harry, it seemed clear to me that this bland love triangle was subordinate to the drama of Mary’s life in the Cathedral.

I was unfortunately wrong about that.

The second half of the novel, which follows Mary’s progress through the eponymous forest along with her band of relatives and suitors, was almost entirely about this love triangle. The mysteries of the Sisterhood are unsummarily dismissed in favor of questions which I frankly found less compelling: Why is Gabrielle different from the other zombies? Will Mary ever learn to read Roman numerals? Will she choose Harry or Travis? Concerning the last “mystery,” Mary waffles between the brothers several times, even if through most of the novel both men are bland ciphers, totally lacking in personality.

We finally do get a conversation–just one–with Travis around page 220 of the book where we start learning why he’s drawn to Mary and what might, conceivably, make him a sympathetic and compelling love interest. This is during a long stretch of the novel where we’re plunged into a domestic setting. Mary seems to have chosen Travis, and they’re trying to make a life together despite the fact that they were both betrothed to others, and despite the fact that Mary’s true passions will always lie elsewhere. The idea of this theme interested me, even if I didn’t find it quite as juicy as the book’s first half. Unfortunately, I found the execution a bit shallow and cursory.

I think this may be the nature of the beast, when you make marriage and commitment and the choices we make when promising ourselves to others the centerpiece of a novel aimed at teenagers. That’s not to say that I think that teenagers are incapable of understanding these themes, but more to say that many just aren’t interested in them–I know I wasn’t back then. And the brevity of this plot line does these themes a fundamental disservice. Had Ryan been writing a longer book, one aimed (say) at adult women, rather than at teenage girls, she would have had more room to explore the issues surrounding Mary’s commitments in-depth. The men in question could have been rendered more vividly and completely. And I would have felt more engaged with the issue of her choice.

But as it stood, I never really cared that deeply at all. Certainly not the way I did during the beginning of the novel, when our primary question was What’s going on here? rather than Who will she choose?

In the end, I can’t help but wish that this had been two books: the first, a riveting YA novel exploring an oppressive religious organization that took advantage of man’s vulnerability during the zombie apocalypse, featuring Mary, our curious and determined heroine. And a second book–longer, quieter even when the zombies intruded, which focused on Mary-the-woman, rather than Mary-the-girl, and explored the sacrifices, romantic or not, that adults make during desperate times.

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Paper Towns by John Green

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I was seventeen, I read Fight Club for the first time and fell in love.

It was one of the first truly clever books I’d ever encountered. I was a suburban kid with a mohawk who hadn’t yet been kissed, and yet Palahniuk’s story of adult quarter-life-era disaffectedness spoke to me–thanks in no small part to its gimmicks: the clever haikus, the I-am-Jack’s-whatevers, the twist. But strangely, what I remember best now about the book (eight years since my last reading) is the scene where the narrator first encounters Tyler Durden on a beach. Dreamlike and quiet, the scene emotionally resonates for me even in memory in a way that much of Palahniuk didn’t.

And I should know–I inhaled all the Palahniuk I could find after I finished Fight Club. But by the time I hit Lullaby, it was all becoming very well-worn. The flat characters were starting to seem more like caricatures. The verbal tics started to grate where they’d once delighted me. After that, I tried to read Eggers but he annoyed me, too. A Dutch kid I knew (who charmed me when he described the McDonalds’ arches as “the golden tits of capitalism”) recommended Douglas Coupland to me and I read Generation X and Microserfs and for a moment, the magic seemed to have returned: here were books that were even more beautifully and touchingly written than Palahniuk’s, but whose cleverness didn’t impede the emotional impact; the words hellojed still give me shivers. But I read further into his catalog and found a pattern distressingly similar to Palahniuk’s: characters who quickly become copies of copies of themselves, themes which become flatter and deader with each passing novel, buried under the gimmicks and the man-boyish cuteness.

I say all this to warn you that I’ve generally avoided patently clever novels since then. These days, I find that I’m more interested in emotionally affecting stories than fact-dropping, quirkiness, or cuteness. I prefer plots with some degree of grit and books that feel emotionally real even when they involve werewolves or dragons. This goes doubly true for the YA I enjoy. Give me real, breathing, vital teen characters and the tenderness and rawness of that time period over cute, coy, coolness any day.

I’d seen a few of John Green’s youtube videos before I picked up Paper Towns in an airport book store and felt wary. His arguments and content are sharp and entertaining, but something about the delivery struck me as overly contrived in the very same way that the stapler in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius did. Still, I’d read glowing reviews about how his books made writers I respect very much cry, so I gave Paper Towns a shot, despite my reluctance.

Unfortunately, it was pretty much what I feared it was.

The story of a Floridian high school senior named Quentin who obsesses over Margo, a stock manic pixie dreamgirl, Paper Towns is in many ways a mystery. After Margo disappears, Quentin and his classmates chase a trail of clues she’s left behind, traveling through abandon buildings, reading Walt Whitman, and listening to covers of Woody Guthrie. Though it made for quick reading, I never felt all that engaged in the mystery aspects of the novel; they felt contrived, self-consciously hip, and logically disjointed. In the end, the mystery is largely solved via a deus-ex-machina computer program, which felt like a bit of a cop out.

That didn’t trouble me as much as the characters, though. Quentin himself is flat and bland. His obsession with Margo made him less likable for me, not more, and though he bemoans his psychologist parents’ constant psycho-analysis, in the end, it’s only because they urge him to see his peers as more than one-dimensional figures that he’s supposedly able to experience any growth. This didn’t ring true for me, though; Q tells us he’s revised his view of Margo, but their ultimate reunion (where they promise to visit one another over the ensuing months, and share kisses) didn’t seem to acknowledge her complexities any better than his interactions with her at the beginning of the novel.

Margo herself largely wasn’t worth commenting on. Call her Marla Singer. Call her Clementine. Call her Holly Golightly. Call her whatever you want–because I’m sure you’ve seen this girl before.

The rest of the characters here were largely one-note, too: there’s Ben, the cheesy perv, and Radar, who obsessively edits an online encyclopedia. The novel’s overarching message is supposed to be to avoid characterizing others in a reductive way, but Green relies more on “quirks” than “personality” to define his cast. Perhaps this is meant to show the shallow nature of Quentin, who narrates, but with little more than lip-service to growth, the message here really wasn’t resonant. Certain things about the cast at-large struck me as anachronistic for modern teens, too, notably their musical tastes; the music mentioned here is much more to the tastes of my thirty-two year old husband than any eighteen-year-olds I know.

Finally, and while I’m on the topic of music, as someone who was once a cooler-than-thou Mountain Goats fan myself, I can’t help but think the epigraph quote from Tallahassee, and the inclusion of the Mountain Goats in a scene where the teenagers are driving around adventuring, was a bit off-base. The lyric in question refers to a married couple fighting and drinking themselves to death after moving to a Southern plantation in the hopes of escape their marital problems. The inevitability of one’s problems, and the foolishness of changing ones’ scenery in hopes of outrunning them, is a major theme in Darnielle’s songs (see: not only the Alpha couple, but also the entirety of the far-reaching “Going to . . .” series). And yet Margo is supposedly doing just that–running away from who she was, and apparently mostly successfully. I can’t help but wish, like the English teacher in Paper Towns that Green had looked a little holistically at the lyrics in question rather than cherry picking a line that seemed to meet his needs.

All that being said, I didn’t hate Paper Towns. It’s well-written, if rough around the edges stylistically, and might have been as life-changing as Fight Club was if I read it at seventeen. But, like many clever books written by clever men, it just didn’t hit me hard enough, or deep enough. The only scene that began to resonate with me in a way that felt really meaningful was the last, and it ended far too abruptly, and there was just too much cheekiness before it for it really to be worth it. The book I would have liked to read would have started there, with Quentin and Margo actually discovering who one another were–this mystery, not the one that Margo left behind, was the one that, for me, has the potential to endure.

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Nick and the Glimmung by Philip K. Dick


My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I don’t like David Lynch.

I know, I know. This probably makes me a bad person.

(And, I know, too, that you’re probably shaking your head, asking how this could possibly be relevant to this review, but I promise you that I’ll get to that.)

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the artfulness of what he does, or how difficult it must be to produce narratives that are creative in plotting or form. It’s not that I don’t think that he’s probably an admirable iconoclast in some ways. It’s not that I don’t think he’s talented, or smart.

It’s that I don’t enjoy watching his work. And I’ve watched a bit of it. Yes, even Twin Peaks. No, I didn’t even like that. Really. I didn’t. Please don’t ask me to watch it again.

Because watching it makes me feel deeply uncomfortable. There’s something about David Lynch that stirs in me a unabating sense of terror. A sort of Cyclopean horror. I don’t mean the fun kind of scared–thrilled and edgy but still alive–that I get when reading a good, juicy Stephen King novel. I mean that feeling when you’re trapped in a nightmare and can’t wake up. That kind of fundamentally nauseating sensation of being really, really afraid, and really, really unhappy and just wanting it to stop.

That’s how David Lynch makes me feel.

And, were I a child, I imagine that’s how Nick and the Glimmung would make me feel, too. Hell, I felt a little bit of it already, at twenty-six, reading Philip K. Dick’s only kid’s novel for the first time.

You might not think Nick and the Glimmung would be nightmarish at all, if you were to judge it by the synopsis alone: Nick lives in a future where pets aren’t allowed, but his family has managed to keep a black and white cat named Horace hidden for awhile. When Horace escapes, rather than relinquish the animal to the Anti-pet Man, the entire family decides to leave Earth for the Plowman’s Planet where cats are allowed.

I would say that that’s where it gets weird, only Nick’s story isn’t really very normal to start with. From the outset, Dick does little to modulate his tone or themes to be more appropriate for children. Usually, I would view this as a sign of respect for young readers. However, this is Philip K. Dick we’re talking about. While I enjoyed Nick’s father’s lengthy monologue on the desperation of meaningless desk jobs, I suspect it would be lost on most children.

So I’ll say, instead, that the weirdness is compounded once the Graham family leaves the planet. The narrative becomes suddenly dreamlike–Nick moves from one bizarre situation to another with little sense of continuity or unity of plot. Plowman’s Planet is a richly terrifying setting, and every creature Nick encounters is eerie and strange. There’s the Wug, who communicates only via index cards; and the formles Printer, who produces depressingly inferior copies of existing items; and the creepy, soulless “Nick thing,” an exact duplicate of Nick who wants to kill him and take his place; not to mention the Wrejes, who give Nick a book that tells many different versions of the future, including one that details the eventual death of his cat. There’s even the Glimmung who, as far as I can tell from this book (I haven’t read Galactic Pot Healer, set in the same universe) might just be the devil–or at least, from the illustrations, resembles him.

Sure, Dick’s prose is strong here, as always. It’s firm and sparse and clear, and the story is certainly creative. But it was spooky. It creeped me out. I didn’t enjoy reading it. And I definitely can’t imagine that a kid would, either.

Just a note–I was thrilled when I found a new edition of this, released by Subterranean Press, at the local library. It certainly looked handsome, and was nicely illustrated, to boot. Unfortunately, it’s riddled with a distracting number of typos. I’m not sure I’d recommend this edition–if you really want to try, despite the book’s inherent ickiness–for this reason.

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The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I first encountered Philippa Gregory while working in a library. I was desperate for a juicy read, and a co-worker suggested The Other Bolelyn Girl. It definitely pulled me in, and, though I loved it enough to get my mother hooked on Gregory’s Tudor series and race through all of them myself, I never quite managed to feel less-than self-conscious about reading them. All the perfect, lily-white and lovable heroines always struck me as a bit Mary Sueish, and though the history was fascinating, at times her interpretation of it felt overly modern and lacking in grit.

Gregory’s certainly come into her own, stylistically and in terms of characterization, in The White Queen

The White Queen is the first of a new series–having exhaustively chronicled the lives of the Tudor women (which, by The Boleyn Inheritance had exhausted me)–she takes us back a generation and introduces us to the Plantagenets and the War of the Roses. This first book is narrated by Elizabeth of Woodville, who certainly seems to have been a worthy subject. A widow, whose secret marriage to King Edward IV raised rancor between he and the man who helped him ascend to the crown, she was also frequently rumored to be a witch.

Gregory’s inclusion of witchcraft here, along with the integration of the medieval myth of Melusina, from whom Elizabeth Woodville’s family believed themselves to be descended, was one of my favorite things about The White Queen. The myth itself is included within the text and is a beautifully written compliment to Woodville’s story. And the acts of witchcraft shine as an almost feminist, but still believably-period trope. Through their spills and charms the Woodville women attempt to maintain some semblance of influence over their lives, lives which are very much largely decided by the political whims of the men around them. This is a welcome change from Gregory’s murkier use of witchcraft in her Tudor books. There, the title of “witch” is only ever used as a weapon against women. Here, while witchcraft isn’t without its risks, it’s a risk that Woodville gladly takes in order to express her desires and hopefully help them come to fruition.

Woodville’s motivations generally were varied; she’s a refreshingly believable character and remains so as we watch her grow into middle age. But the speed of this growth sometimes frustrated me. The White Queen has an interesting hook and some killer foreshadowing that make the first hundred pages an addictive read, but much of that is lost in the repetition of Woodville’s life. That she had child upon child while her husband engaged in war upon war might be historically accurate, but it doesn’t always make for riveting reading. There were a solid hundred and fifty pages that could have been excised here without damage to the narrative. And, because I was quite eager to see how Gregory worked the legend of the Princes in the Tower into the story, many of the more mundane plot lines failed to pique my interest.

Still, though, even during the book’s saggy middle there were some moments of beautiful writing: the scene describing the death of Woodville’s mother and daughter is executed in a particularly artful and tender way. I have high hopes for this new series–perhaps The White Queen represents a new stage in Gregory’s writing, one filled with gorgeous writing, nuanced characters and (let’s hope) enough new material to sustain the interest of her readers.

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Thirteenth Child by Patricia C. Wrede

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was a big, big fan of Patricia Wrede’s “dragons” series in middle school, though my memories of those books are vague. I remembered them fondly–as slim, plot-driven, funny, and somewhat feminist tales–so I was eager to revisit her writing in Thirteenth Child.

Too bad, then, that this book is nothing like the quick, addictive reads I remember. Thirteenth Child is less a novel and more a fictional memoir. It’s the story of Eff, seventh daughter in a large frontier family, whose twin brother Lan (as the seventh son of the seventh son) is magically gifted from birth. Unlike Lan, Eff herself has been told that she’s been cursed as the thirteenth-born in her family, that her magic will eventually come to poison her and those around her.

But weirdly this pronouncement has little impact on the story generally, if there is one. There really isn’t. As Eff grows up, we follow the progress of her family from the east coast to a settlement in the west, where her father is recruited to teach. Eff attends school, makes friends, deals (or doesn’t) with her sisters and her sisters’ marriages, does chores, catalogs wildlife, and occasionally sulks. She’s plenty busy–but a lot of what happens to her just isn’t that exciting or engaging. She’s largely a passive narrator, reporting back to us the events of her world without really taking an active role in them. I often felt like I was plodding through the chapters–and the years–but I was never really captivated by the plot or the voice.

Regarding the voice, I have to say that, incidentally, Eff’s narration never really rang true to me as the voice of an eighteen-year-old. She sounds much, much younger–it’s a voice that reminds me more of Scout Finch than anything you’d encounter in most YA. In fact, generally, I felt that this wasn’t a young adult novel at all. And while I’d be tempted to call it middle grade thanks to a lack of sexual content, it’s not that, either. Eff’s voice, though young, is wistful, detached, and nostalgic. This very much felt to me like a novel meant to appeal to adult fantasy and science fiction readers, who might better appreciate Wrede’s extensive world building and better tolerate Eff’s total lack of compelling romantic relationships.

The world building here certainly is extensive. Wrede’s central premise is that this is an alternate Earth where magic exists and some prehistoric creatures never became extinct, and she goes to great pains to show how that might conceivably impact every aspect of frontier life. The magical systems–and there are multiple ones here–are well-developed and believable, and so intertwined with the daily life of the characters that they don’t even think to info-dump on us, something a less talented writer might resort to. There are backlash movements, philosophical disagreements, vivid ecologies, and several different methods of magical schooling. There are even historical twists–Benjamin Franklin as an unschooled magical genius!

But Wrede seems so wrapped up in her world that she’s really forgotten to give us a worthwhile story. This promises to be a series, but I really can’t imagine where we’d go from here, because, in three hundred and forty pages, we really haven’t gone anywhere.

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