Warning, guys: this is going to be long.

It seems I may have touched a nerve in my review of Becca Fitzpatrick’s Hush, Hush. At issue wasn’t my reaction to the book, but rather a fairly flippant comment I made over the research habits of Fitzpatrick’s heroine Nora:

Nora sees scars on Patch’s back, thinks “angel!”, investigates fallen angels on teh Google (and if you’ve read my reviews, you know how much I hate internet research scenes; writers, knowing that kids google shit does not equal being hip to the technology of young people), and decides that Patch must be an angel.

Several writers chimed in to say that they’ve included Google scenes in their books, and that they think it’s okay. One writer, Angie, summed up her feelings thusly: “Anyway, the thing about googling – I do have this in my book, but it’s not about the MC trying to figure out what kind of creature the guy is because she already knows that – she’s just doing basic research to learn as much about him as she can (my paranormal isn’t a vampire or a werewolf either) so I kind of feel like it’s justified. I mean what do you do these days when you want to find out about something quickly? Drive over to the library and start hunting the shelves? No, you go to the internet. So, I guess that I don’t see the problem – it makes sense to me.”

And so I thought I might talk a little bit about why these passages bother me–why using one in your paranormal is both a cliché and potentially a poor storytelling device. And hopefully I can convince at least one writer to think twice before including one and to rely on more convincing and effective mythology-building devices instead.

I think the Google scene has a friend in that old fiction-writing cliché, the mirror description. You probably know what I’m talking about, but in case you don’t, I’m referring to a passage where a fiction writer will have the character stare into a mirror and rattle their physical traits off in a long list (if you want to see a bad example of this, go over to my professional site and read the excerpt of my last project posted there under “fiction.” Yes, I included a prologue mirror scene. Everyone told me to cut it, but I just wouldn’t listen. I was wrong. They were right). New writers often insist that their mirror scenes are different–effective, interesting, somehow not cliché. And I’m not saying that it’s impossible that they’re right–only that they are likely to be wrong more often then not.

The problem with mirror scenes lies largely in the disconnect between real life and effective fiction. New writers might roll their eyes at this rule because, well, they look in the mirror and think about their physical traits. It’s realistic! Therefore it should be okay in fiction, right?

Well, eh, not really.

Readers rely on fiction to be better–more interesting, with a livelier pace and development–than real life. And one easy way to flatten a story is to infodump on your readers, particularly in a cliché way. Mirror scenes are infodumps of a very basic sort–they list facts (in this case, physical appearance). They stop the plot’s development almost entirely, at least for a paragraph or two. They pack information that could be scattered throughout the book into a very small space and force the reader to pay particular attention to it, at the expense of things the reader might find more interesting: character interaction, rising or falling tension, conflict.

And the same could be said for Google scenes.

I should note that I mean something fairly specific here, not the use of Google or computers generally. I’m talking about that scene, almost always present in a paranormal romance, when our main character sits down and Googles whatever she suspects her boyfriend to be. We’ll have a passage of her combing through links (or not–more on this in a bit) and maybe a wikipedia article or two will be quoted verbatim. This isn’t a particularly new trope; I asked about it over on ask.metafilter.com, and one responder told me that the old research cliché used to be characters running to the library and reading microfiche, and that the trope probably originates with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But an established history does not for effective storytelling make.

The problem, I think, like so many others, started with Twilight–when this trope was ironically used to much greater effect than in many of the paranormal romances that followed. About a third into the book, Bella, having been clued in to Edward’s ghoulish identity by Jacob, gets online and starts Googling searching her favorite non-brand name search engine. And here’s what happens:

. . . I turned to my computer. Naturally, the screen was covered in pop-up ads. I sat in my hard folding chair and began closing all the little windows. Eventually I made it to my favorite search engine. I shot down a few more pop-ups and then typed in one word.

Vampire.

It took an infuriatingly long time, of course. When the results came up, there was a lot to sift through–everything from movies and TV shows to role-playing games, underground metal, and gothic cosmetic companies.

Then I found a promising site–Vampires A-Z. I waited impatiently for it to load, quickly clicking closed each ad that flashed across the screen. Finally the screen was finished–simple white background with black text, academic-looking. Two quotes greeted me on the home page:

[blah blah blah vampires]

The rest of the site was an alphabetized listing of all the different myths of vampires held throughout the world. [Then S. Meyer goes into some of the myths, showing the depth of her research]

Overall, though, there was little that coincided with Jacob’s stories or my own observances. I’d made a little catalogue in my mind as I’d read and carefully compared it with each myth. Speed, strength, beauty, pale skin, eyes that shift color; and then Jacob’s criteria: blood drinkers, enemies of the werewolf, cold-skinned, and immortal. There were very few myths that matched even one factor.

Now, Meyer does a few things surprisingly well here. For one, the act of searching the web is fairly accurately reflected in the description. Bella finds a lot of links, though those are breezed over, before she hits on something helpful. The depth of Meyer’s research into vampire mythology is shown–and the stuff Bella reads even comes into play in later books.

But this is still an utter infodump. A lot of the information here is extraneous, and this immediately follows another, albeit more effective infodump, where Jacob explains the rivalry between vampires and werewolves. That means we get two solid chapters where the plot all but stops–a palpable break in the rising tensions between Bella and Edward–so that Meyer can illustrate that she knows about Filipino vampire legends. And while some of this is relevant, most of it is not. It really screams to be skipped.

And worse, for all that the web searching is somewhat accurately rendered, some of it makes Bella sound . . . well, really sort of stupid. Because a lot of the traits she lists the Cullens as having–”Speed, strength, beauty, pale skin . . . blood drinkers, enemies of the werewolf, cold-skinned, and immortal”–absolutely are traits that pop culture vampires, from Dracula to Buffy‘s Angel–share. That passage seems weird enough that I’m led to wonder two things: first, if we’re meant to believe that Bella lives in a universe completely different from ours, and, second, if she’s just a poor reader or web researcher. Because I really can’t believe that amidst all those links she found about TV shows, she didn’t encounter something about Buffy.

Since Twilight exploded, quite a few writers seem to be relying on the first book as a sort of blueprint to craft their paranormal romance. Books where girls meet spooky creatures in bio class abound, and so do Google scenes. I can rattle the titles of at least a handful of these books, published in the past few years, that do this (off the top of my head: Wings, Hush, Hush, The Summoning, Deadly Little Secret–I’m sure there are more; feel free to send me more examples). The problem is that I can’t think of one that does this at least as well as Twilight, and as you can tell from above, it wasn’t executed particularly well there, either. Let’s take a look at a few of these.

First up, Wings. Smack dab in the middle of the book, Aprilynne Pike has her heroine, Laurel, start googling fairies at a computer in the local library. Here’s how it goes:

She sat at the computer and logged in. After a quick glance at her watch, she started Googling.

Forty-five minutes later, she had found pictures of faeries living in flowers, wearing clothes made of flowers, and sipping tea out of tiny flower cups. But no mention of faeries actually being flowers. Or plants. Or whatever. Lame, she thought peevishly.

She started reading through a long Wikipedia article, but every two or three sentences, she had to look up a reference she didn’t understand. So far she was only a few paragraphs into the article.

Okay, so at least this passage is very brief. But it’s also completely useless. Nothing that Laurel finds is outside the normal sphere of knowledge for any teenager: they, and we, already know about the stereotypical and prototypical fairy faery myths, so there’s really no need to reiterate those to us. Immediately following this passage is a conversation between Laurel and her friend Chelsea about fairy faery mythology. This conversation is both more informative and more interesting, because it not only informs but also illustrates the tensions between the two girls. And so the passage feels conspicuous, as if the writer is saying to us “I know that teenagers Google, and I use Google, and so it should be included in my book for realism’s sake.”

To which I can only reply, books are not supposed to be real life–they’re supposed to be better. Ever scene should advance the plot or tighten the existing tensions between characters. Don’t give us useless stuff just for the sake of realism! I don’t want to read about your character taking a dump just because you do!

(Clearly, here, I’m not lecturing James Joyce. Again, we’re talking largely about paranormal romance, not key modernist texts.)

Which brings me to Hush, Hush, which I found to be one of the worst offenders at relying on google to dump information on the reader. Unlike Meyer and Pike, who included these scenes before the climax, Fitzpatrick includes it at the climax, two thirds of the way through the book. Up until this point, our heroine Nora knows almost nothing about angel mythology–Fitzpatrick relies on the Google scene to tell both the character and the reader what’s going on. This necessitates that Nora make some ridiculous logical leaps to even get to the point of googling, and what follows is not realistic in myriad ways:

. . . I typed “angel wing scars” into the Google search bar. I hovered with my fingers above the enter key, afraid that if I went through with it, I’d have to admit I was actually considering the possibility that Patch was–well, not . . . human.

I hit enter and mouse-clicked the first link before I could talk myself out of it.

Fallen Angels: The Frightening Truth

[blah blah blah article about fallen angels that conveniently spells out the rules of Fitzpatrick's universe, including their biblical origins, how they become human, what happens when they mate with humans, who and what the Nephilim are, et cetera et cetera.]

Guys, I just didn’t buy any of this! It was all so convenient–the first link she clicks explains precisely what’s happening?! But . . . that’s not how the internet works! It seemed so convenient and unrealistic that, when I read it, I actually got up and googled “angel wing scars.” You can see the results for yourself.

But what bothered me the most about this scene was not how unrealistic it was but rather how Fitzpatrick seemed to be sacrificing the opportunity for more organic development of her mythology for the sake of a google scene. Because Nora interacts plenty with fallen angel Patch–but she never seems to ask him the questions that most sensible people would ask, instead bumbling cluelessly through most of the novel until that scene. This means that their interactions ring less-than true, and it damages the tensions between them through the novel’s first two thirds. Because if we’re going to talk realism, if I suspected the guy I liked was a fallen angel, you can bet that I’d ask him, point blank, precisely what the deal was.

In all of the above examples, the google scenes are action-stopping. They thud onto the page, calling attention to themselves in how poorly integrated they are into the text. They’re conspicuous, and often boring–whether they tell readers stuff they’re used to tell the reader about the mythology of the universe, as was the case with Hush, Hush, or if they lecture readers about mythology they should know about already, like in Wings. And when you bore your readers, you risk losing them. And when you lecture them, you risk condescending to them. These scenes are difficult to do well, even for the most skilled writers. They need to be judiciously placed so as not to damage the rising action, and often they can be dispensed with completely.

And they’re all over the place. They’re common, and they sound easy, and sound like a good idea, too. But let’s face it: they’re rapidly becoming cliché.

You might wonder what I’d suggest if not for a google scene. How can you realistically show a character in a technological environment learning organically about her boyfriend’s otherworldly origins? I have a few suggestions for that:

• Dialog. – One thing you might have noticed about all of the aforementioned examples is that there’s often a scene nearby where our hero talks to someone about this mythology. While these conversations can be infodumpy, they often have the benefit of serving a dual purpose: they illustrate the relationships between characters as much as they teach the reader about the universe of the novel. Even in a digital world, conversation remains the most likely means for gathering information. Do your characters conveniently avoid asking important questions of their supernatural boyfriends, or their friends? Do they conspicuously avoid the topics at the forefront of your readers’ minds? If so, you’re missing out on prime opportunities to do organic world-building.
• Judicious placement of research, if you must include it. – Please, if you choose to have your character google something, or go to the library to look at microfiche, or whatever, place these passages carefully. For realism’s sake–most of us would google this stuff immediately, if at all–but also for the sake of your story. Don’t make your reader stop and read encyclopedia/wikipedia articles right at your climax. It’s boring. It’s dry. It’s not what we, as the reader, care about. If you want to give us an academic context for your story, do it early, and make in unobtrusive. Here, I can’t help but think about Buffy. I’ve been watching the first few seasons, and research in the library is, of course, integral to the series. But in nearly ever episode, it happens early. The viewers are clued in, and then allowed to move on to the battles and the romance and the witty banter–the stuff Buffy, and we, really care about.
• Make it realistic. – Let’s face it, nothing sticks out worse than a sore thumb then a scene of characters using technology that runs contrary to the way it’s actually used. Don’t make the internet conveniently small. Make sure your descriptions of net-use and research ring true. (And here, I think of Buffy again–because not only is the research realistic, but the characters’ attitudes toward research is realistic, too. Willow and Giles love doing research, even if it’s wearying. Buffy could care less and just wants to know how to kill stuff.)
• And avoid infodumping whenever possible. – I’m speaking generally here, not just about net-infodumping. Try to develop your universe slowly, over many passages instead of just relegating it to one paragraph. A series of conversations, balanced throughout a book, are much more effective than a single blob of encyclopedic text. Always.

Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ve been mulling over my review for Becca Fitzpatrick’s debut, the paranormal thrillermance Hush, Hush for about a week now. It’s difficult to talk about a book as controversial as this one without at least touching on the politics. But there’s little I can say about the politics that hasn’t already been said before, and probably better.

Yes, Nora, our heroine, is little more than the traditional victim/cheerleader in a slasher movie. She’s both bubble-headed and paranoid, and she alternately cowers and stumbles through our ramshackle plot–a story about how, after she gets a new lab partner in bio (yes, this is a new YA cliche that’s already becoming old hat), her life is repeatedly threatened by not only her hot, but creepy, partner Patch but also a bevy of other parties in her small Maine town. And though, yes, Nora has plenty of justification for resisting Patch–he’s condescending and smarmy, he threatens her repeatedly, he doesn’t even seem to like her most of the time–it does indeed seem like Nora resists Patch only so that she can later relent to him, illustrating once again (ick) how when a teenage girl says no, she really means yes.

The truth is, though, that after about a hundred pages of this sort of thing, I fear I started to become immune to it. Because, while my jaw literally dropped during an early scene where Nora is sexually harassed during her biology class by both her classmates and teacher, and while a few flies probably swarmed in after Nora goes to her teacher and protests, but is rebuffed, by the novel’s middle I just didn’t care any more what happened to Nora, good or bad. I was really just that bored.

Hush, Hush‘s biggest problem, I would say, isn’t in its quaintly outdated abhorrent sexual politics but rather in its pacing. There’s a vague cloud of “suspense” that hangs over the novel’s first two thirds, and Nora is, apparently, threatened by almost every one she encounters. But nothing happens–really, nothing. For two hundred and fifty pages–and though the reader is clued in to Patch’s supernatural origins through the cover and the prologue and the blurb, there’s really no logical connection between the nebulous dangers she faces and Patch’s identity as an angel. This means that the revelations about the book’s angelic mythology fall into place with as much grace as a sack of wet laundry. Nora sees scars on Patch’s back, thinks “angel!”, investigates fallen angels on teh Google (and if you’ve read my reviews, you know how much I hate internet research scenes; writers, knowing that kids google shit does not equal being hip to the technology of young people), and decides that Patch must be an angel. This requires some logical leaps that would never work this neatly in real life.

And then we get about fifty pages of really muddled angel mythology. It’s incredibly convoluted and all wedged into such a small space that there’s no time for the reader to digest the “rules” of angeldom. I’ll put it this way: I have a terminal graduate degree, and I won’t pretend for a second that I understood what was happening at the end of this book.

The worst bit of this, for me, was the revelation that our anti-hero Patch couldn’t feel anything, in a tactile sense. Because I’ll say this for Hush, Hush: for all that I thought Patch and Nora’s relationship was fucked up, I believed their sexual chemistry. Now I know that quite a few objections to this book have centered upon the adage that sex does not equal love, and that young adult writers shouldn’t imply that it does. And I sort of agree with this, but I think it’s an attitude that’s not entirely tied to reality. Because sex–for teens and adults–very much makes up the foundation of most romantic relationships. And it can certainly draw people together who would–or should–otherwise despise one another. So I bought that Patch lusted after Nora, and vice versa, even if it wasn’t necessarily a good match. But when Patch tells us that his feelings for Nora are chaste and entirely pure and all about love, my belief in the relationship flew right out the window. What do they have, if not sex? Not even biology class–because their sexual attraction to one another was all that was ever discussed there.

Anyway, I really consider all of this a shame because, despite the above, Becca Fitzpatrick’s stylistics are fairly solid. Her writing is readable, even if occasionally silly, even if the content is sometimes squicky. And she does setting extremely well. This foggy little Maine town is the perfect place for a thriller like this . . . if only it was a bit more, well, thrilling.

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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 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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Good morning, internet. Please excuse the fact that I have had no coffee yet, but I had to post this post haste: the amazing writers over at the amazing YA Highway gave me the opportunity to write a guest post about critical reviewing. The blog post, called “In Praise of Harsh Words went live this morning. I’m excited! And nervous! And other emotions that can only be expressed with the addendum of exclamation points!

Because I have a tendency to be long winded, there were a few bullet points that didn’t make the cut. Since they’re relevant, I figured I’d post them here (in no particular, and in particularly scattered, order):

• Peer reviewing is all over the place in other disciplines–and even other genres. If you’re a scientist, your work won’t even be published if it doesn’t pass muster with other scientists. In this case, your peers aren’t only your critics but also your publishers. Scary! But it’s understandable. Who can better speak to the quality of work in a discipline but those also working in a discipline? As for other genres, when I proofread reviews over at Strange Horizons, I always give the authors’ notes a once-over. These reviews, sometimes critical, always somehow qualified, are often written by other writers. “So-and-so has short fiction appearing in many magazines” or “So-and-so is working on a novel.” It’s incredibly common, but, for whatever reason (probably warm fuzziness), that same critical exchange doesn’t happen in YA–and I think that’s a bit of a shame.
• James Joyce is just one of many examples of writers who have been given near-immortality through criticism. I’ve seen people object even to quasi-academic analysis of YA works. This ignores the fact that academic critics are our friends. When scholars raise objections, perhaps, to its failures as a feminist text, or talk about what is, or isn’t Marxist about a book, they look at it exceedingly closely. They buy copies of it. They give it depth that may or may not have been present previously, and invite others to look at a work deeply, too. I keep thinking back to my Joyce & Cultural Studies class in graduate school, where the professor told us that the big issue at that moment in Joyce studies was the interpretation of a single metaphor in Ulysses. I think that we should all be as lucky as Joyce to have scholars so engaged in our work! And a century after writing it, too. Zombie Joyce, you know?
• Something along the lines of: “Critics aren’t our enemies, boy. You know who we should fear? Censors.” Poorly paraphrased. I first read a line something like that in Katie Waitman’s phenomenal The Merro Tree when I was about 15, and it’s stuck in my mind ever since. Don’t be scared of critics who want to talk about your book–be scared of the people who want to keep it off the shelves.
• With all that said, I know that some writers will always hate critics. I’ve seen it first-hand: Franz Wright has paid my blog a visit because of a mere mention of my former teacher, William Logan. Logan’s known as “the most hated man in American poetry” thanks to his reviews, and has received death threats. So there’s that. But I still think William is genuine about his opinions–his reviews are fair assessments of his tastes (even if mine are wildly different from his). For me, these risks feel worth it (though I’m not as big or as important as Logan, and I’m just starting out in my career so maybe I’m wrong so who the heck knows?) in exchange for being honest, for being fair and balanced in my reviews, for the sake of being able to talk as both a reader and a writer.

So there you go. Thanks again to the wonderful Kirsten Hubbard (who I “met” through reviews, donchaknow? See, they’re already good for something!) and all of the ladies over at YAHighway for the opportunity.

Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Ho boy.

So I mildly enjoyed the first two books in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series–enough that I considered myself somewhat of a Twilight apologist. No, no, I tried to convince the naysayers, she’s really not all bad! Though I found Twilight and New Moon to be deeply flawed, I also thought that Meyer had her finger right on the pulse of adolescent melancholy. What Bella’s story may have lacked in feminist leanings, it made up for in rich setting and earnestness, if nothing else. I didn’t quite like them enough to buy Eclipse, but when a friend offered to lend me the massive tome that is Breaking Dawn, I figured it wouldn’t kill me to give it a try.

Well. Um. Hmm.

I’ll say that, like the series it concludes, Breaking Dawn starts with some promise. Whiny McWhinerston Bella Swann is angsting over her impending shotgun marriage to vampire Edward. It’s an act that’s largely a technicality for her–something she grudgingly plans to endure so she can get laid and get some superpowers. While I found this model of dealmaking-in-the-place-of-compromise in an adult relationship a bit troublesome, I also found most of the sentiment honest. Okay, maybe I wouldn’t raise a stink about my sugar daddy buying me a Mercedes (or is it a Beemer? Whatever), but as a recently-married type, I empathized.

But then Bella gets hitched and the book completely falls apart. And we’re only an eighth of the way in to this door-stopper of a dud.

I don’t really want to rehash all the plot points here, no matter how cringe worthy they are and how easy it would be to play them for laughs (yes, the childbirth scene is the first that pushes this series into horror; yes, Bella sucks at naming children). What I want, instead, is to talk a little about the overarching theme here–how Bella is the best, how her life is the best, and how everything falls into place around her–and why it didn’t resonate with me.

I say this as a woman married to her first serious boyfriend, who she met at eighteen: I think Bella’s story does a disservice to young wives. It certainly does one to young mothers. Not to mention anyone who has ever actually been a corner of a love triangle.

I understand that these books are meant to be wish-fulfillment, but by making Bella’s life so utterly perfect and utterly easy, Meyer fails to acknowledge life’s actual complexities and pains–and so the joy found here is pretty shallow. Nothing is earned. Nothing is lost. The stakes are so low as to be non-existent. We know that nothing bad will happen to anyone because Meyer shows us again and again that Forks is really some sort of fluffy-cloud heaven. And so the final, patched-together plot, building only over the last two hundred pages, has no urgency at all. I’ll admit it: I skimmed. So sue me.

She could have, instead, given us something honest and bittersweet, a story of love and loss and growing older–because really, in not-so-many metaphorical words, that should be what Bella’s marriage, motherhood, and subsequent vampirism represent. Sure, have Bella choose Edward, choose her child–but let’s talk honestly about what these choices usually mean for women like Bella, what they have to sacrifice to make their young families work, what they lose, and what they gain, in becoming fully-fledged women so young.

Instead, Meyer chooses to lock her characters in a hellish fantasy of perpetual childhood–maybe this is what she meant by the Millay line at the front of the book? In the place of genuine tenderness or beauty, she gives us the saccharine (Bella and her daughter’s flawless and unearned perfection), the unbelievable (Charlie’s reaction to . . . everything), and the bizarre (pedophiliac imprinting).

But perhaps worst of all is the writing, the truly terrible writing. And by the end of this novel it really is–truly–terrible. It’s a slow slide into poopy prose; thanks to a middle-eight spent in the narrative clutches of Jacob, whose voice is far less assuming and much more casual, it’s easy to forget even the descriptive potential that Breaking Dawn revealed in the first few hundred pages. Forks is, at a time when it should be completely immersive, suddenly rendered in flat, lifeless terms. Description and narration are all pushed aside for cutesy dialog. Two passages near the end–one slightly hackneyed extended metaphor where Bella’s life is likened to a quilt, and another, where her brand new Thomas-Kinkade-calendar-esque cottage in the woods is described–stand out for not being completely awful.

Seriously, the novel’s last third was so poorly written and so unbelievable that I couldn’t help but grope for some sort of explanation. I mean, we weren’t really meant to believe this, were we, much less find it good?

So I’d like to suggest an alternative reading–one that seems quite a bit more palatable to me, and a bit more believable. Bella actually dies permanently in childbirth. The last third is her bardo fantasy before she can move on to the next spiritual plane (thanks for the idea, LOST writers). That’s why it’s so goddamned weird! In the real world, the baby goes on a rampage–killing Rosalie first, then savaging the other vampires. Against all odds Jacob and Edward are able to band together to stop and kill the monstrous being. Of course, once this happens, Edward asks Jacob to end his life. He does, sorrowfully, laying Edward to rest beside his child bride. And he’s about to end his own when Leah Clearwater appears to suggest that maybe they should try to face the future together. He may be mourning; she may be sterile. But they still have free will and can still choose life with an equal, could still choose love.

What can I say? I’m a sucker for a bittersweet ending.

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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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My teaser today, which draws inspiration from the infamous Tillie of Asbury Park (pictured above), comes from Loril (merman extraordinaire) and Irene’s first date. Irene’s been drinking, but Loril doesn’t know that yet. He’s more concerned with how her younger sister, Evie, just stomped off in a huff:

(Teaser removed)