Category Archives: Review

You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover

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How to Be Remy Cameron
by Julian Winters,
2019.

I have a confession to make: I totally bought this book because of its cover.

Everyone says not to do that. But folk wisdom isn’t always right. The truth is, a smart publishing house understands that people do buy books by their covers, and that the book better deliver what the cover promises, or else they’re going to have unhappy customers. So a smart publishing house hires talented artists and designers to create a cover that captures the themes and the mood of the book inside.

How can your heart not go out to the kid on the cover of this book, plastered as he is with sticky notes that read ADOPTED, BLACK, and GAY? The whole thing has him knocked sideways, like a bottle of wine. He stares at the reader in bewilderment.

The note BEAGLE on his dog is the crowning touch.

So I bought the book. And now I am here to recommend Remy Cameron to you all. And to affirm that the cover really nails it.

Rembrandt “Remy” Cameron is a clever, handsome, and popular high school student, though he is only dimly aware that he is any of those things. He is also Black, adopted by a white suburban family whom he loves deeply, attending an overwhelmingly white school. He is also gay, and more than that, the first student of his school ever to come out publicly. Others followed, and now he is president of the school Gay-Straight Alliance. As the novel opens, Remy is just coming off a painful breakup with his first boyfriend, a soccer player named Dimi. Now the rest of the soccer team refers to him as “Dimi’s ex-girlfriend.” Ouch.

The folk wisdom that “you can’t judge a book by its cover” is not just shopping advice for book readers. It’s also a metaphor, warning us not to judge our fellow human beings by their superficial traits. Remy Cameron confronts this metaphor head on when his English teacher assigns him a self-description essay and his seemingly comfortable life (the breakup with Dimi notwithstanding) goes right off the rails as Remy experiences the mother of all identity crises.

“Who am I?” is the most important question in an adolescent’s life, but because Remy is so distinctive in so many ways, he feels lost in the very traits that make him stand out. He’s famous at school for being out and proud, but surely there’s more to him than being gay. He’s one of a handful of students of color, but surely there’s more to him than his race. Only, what?

Remy goes out with his seven-year-old sister and gets mistaken for her babysitter because they’re different races, triggering all his adoptive child insecurities that he’ll never really be a Cameron. He studies the arsenal of pastels and neons in his closet and wonders if it’s possible to be too gay. He ponders his taste in indie rock and thinks maybe he’s not Black enough. The less said about Dimi the better, but at least Remy knows one thing: amid all this turmoil in his life, he has no emotional room for another relationship. Then he meets Ian.

A character study like this rises or falls on the strength of the character, so I’m pleased to report that Julian Winters has drawn a powerful character beset by powerful doubts—daunting, yet familiar to us all. The challenge is great, but Remy Cameron rises to it. So does Julian Winters. Pick up this book and, like Remy Cameron, prepare to fall in love, whether you think you’re ready for it or not.

 

Freedom’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

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Powers
by Ursula K. Le Guin,
2007.

Powers was awarded the 2008 Nebula for Best Novel by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, so once again, I am late to the party. Sadly, the author passed away in January of this year. But if you’ve ever wondered if she deserves her reputation, just read Powers and that should settle the matter once and for all.

Powers is billed as the third book in the Annals of the Western Shore, but don’t let that put you off. Apart from being set in the same invented world and with a light crossover of characters, the books are independent stories and can be read in any order.

Gavir is an eleven-year old slave boy at the beginning of the story. He is one of the Marsh People, which means he is darker skinned than the other people in his life, apart from his older sister, Sallo. Sallo and Gavir were taken when they were small children, too small to have any memory of their former lives. Now they are slaves in the household of a wealthy family in the city-state of Etra. Gavir is content with his life. He is not a farm slave, laboring in the fields, but a house slave, living in comfort with an enlightened master and his family. In this house, slaves are not beaten or tortured. Slave children play with and are educated alongside the children of the Family. Gavir himself is a promising little scholar, who is being groomed to take over the job of teacher to the household once the slave who currently holds that post grows too old to carry on.

Gavir also has powers, hence the title, powers he barely understands himself. The first is that he has occasional visions, brief glimpses of the future. Gavir calls this “remembering,” in the sense of remembering things that have not yet taken place, though Gavir spends most of the story puzzling over what use this power might have, if any.

The invented world in which the story takes place and Gavir’s visions are the only real fantasy elements in this novel, which otherwise could be taken as an historical tale set in the ancient Mediterranean world. Oh, but wait! Gavir has one other power: a photographic memory, although the book never describes it in those words. It’s a phenomenon we are familiar with in our time, but surely would seem magical to those living in a less advanced culture, and indeed it does to Gavir and the people who know him.

The novel follows Gavir for the next six years of his life, until he’s seventeen. His world seems cozy and secure at first, with his future as a teacher in the household of a kindly master an inviting one. But, alas for Gavir, it is not to be. First, a terrible injustice turns Gavir’s world upside down and compels him to flee his master and Etra, and wander the Western Shore in constant danger. For the relationship between master and slave, as Gavir comes to understand, is based not only on power, but also on trust. A slave must be able to trust the master, and if the master betrays the slave, well, even a slave is capable of betrayal in return.

Gavir’s wanderings take him deep into a forest, where he discovers the legends he has heard are true: hidden deep in the wood is a community of escaped slaves, who live in freedom, as equals. Gavir is welcomed among them. He can recite from memory many of the long poems and tales of old for this band of largely illiterate and isolated ex-slaves, which soon makes him a valued and respected member of the community. But in time, there is another injustice, and Gavir must flee again. He makes his way to the marshes, where he reconnects with his clan and his family among the Marsh People. But the Marsh People are an isolated folk with a very different culture. Gavir finds they do not understand him and he cannot understand them. “The slave takers did not only take me from my people,” he muses. “They took my people from me.”

During his stay with the Marsh People, a vision tells him that his former owners do not believe he is dead, as he had hoped, but in fact a slave catcher is tracking him. Gavir now must leave his people, in the hope he can find a place for himself in this world, before the slave catcher has his vengeance. Perhaps Gavir might even at last find a use for his powers.

You expect elegantly crafted prose from Le Guin, and she does not disappoint here. Powers is largely a character study, as we watch Gavir grow from a naive, hopeful tween forced to become a man all too soon in reaction to the harsh world he lives in. And, led along by Le Guin’s sure hand, we grow right along with him. I had the misfortune of reading the climax of Gavir’s story late at night and found myself forced to keep reading into the small hours of the morning as my heart pounded in fear for Gavir as the slave catcher closes in, and ended the story the same way Gavir did—with tears in my eyes.

Powers is a young adult novel in every sense. It is literally the story of growing up. We can all, like Gavir, recall our sojourn from naive child to disillusioned young adult, wondering all the while what place, if any, this disappointing world holds for us, and so readers of any age can find in him some of our own formative experiences. Gavir’s world is a difficult world, but a textured one. There are no black knights, or white ones, just people making their way through tough circumstances, some more admirably than others. This is a long book, for Gavir has a long journey, but that merely means he has well earned his tears of joy on the final page. Journey by his side, and you will earn yours along with him.

Love’s Labors Lost

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They Both Die at the End
by Adam Silvera.
2017.


“Maybe it’s better to have gotten it right and been happy for one day instead of living a lifetime of wrongs.”

If a book keeps me up past my bedtime, gets me teary, and even after I finish it I still can’t sleep because I need several hours to process how I feel about what I just read, that’s an automatic “highly recommended.” Thanks, Adam. (I think.)

They Both Die at the End is a young adult science fiction novel is set in a world just like ours, with one huge difference. In this world, there exists a service called Death-Cast. Every midnight, Death-Cast phones every person who is going to die on the coming day, to give them a heads-up. To give them one last chance to live to the fullest. To say goodbye. To have a fling. To do whatever they need to do on their Last Day.

Mateo Torrez is eighteen. He is bright and talented and kind. He is also agoraphobic and hardly ever leaves his apartment in New York City. He’s about to begin college (an online university, of course). On September 5, 2017 (the release date of the book!) Mateo gets the call. It’s a shock. How could a healthy young man who is too timid even to leave home possibly die so young?

Rufus Emeterio is seventeen and also a New Yorker. He gets the call in the middle of beating up his ex’s new boyfriend. Rufus is angry and hard edged. But cut him some slack. He lost his parents and his sister in a car accident just four months ago. Now he lives in a foster home and wonders what kind of future awaits him. None at all, it seems.

Mateo and Rufus don’t know each other. Neither of these young men has anyone to spend his Last Day with. Fortunately, there’s an app for that. It’s called Last Friend, and before dawn breaks, Rufus and Mateo are Last Friends. They spend a magical day in New York together, doing their damnedest to live to the utmost. They make their goodbyes. They try new things. They party. They fall in love. Rufus teaches Mateo to be brave. Mateo helps Rufus rediscover his gentle spirit.

Spoiler: They both die at the end.

They Both Die at the End is a tour de force. A novel in which Death is so near it is practically one of the characters will instantly trigger deep feelings, but this is a two-edged sword. Once you’ve got your readers by the feels, you’d better use the opportunity to show us something worth the pain of the journey, or else your book will feel like cheap manipulation. I am happy to say that Adam Silvera not only passed the test, he aced the extra-credit section.

Silvera’s “Death-Cast” is more than just a gimmick to get the plot moving. He devotes some of his novel to examining the impact Death-Cast has on society, on hospitals and emergency services, on celebrity culture, on the internet. Even “Deckers,” as they are called—I couldn’t suss out why—have to put up with creepy people on the internet. Silvera also devotes some chapters to introducing a cast of minor characters. Some are Deckers wrestling with their own fates, some are not, some are already known to Mateo or Rufus, others are not, but all of them cross paths with our two young protagonists on their fateful day.

For this story belongs to Mateo and Rufus. It isn’t easy spending your Last Day with another Decker. You can’t help wondering whether you have inadvertently sealed your own doom. Maybe the piano destined to land on his head is going to get you too, since you chose to tag along. Hilariously, tragically, the two young men avoid taking elevators. “Two Deckers riding an elevator on their Last Day is either a death wish or the start to a bad joke,” says Rufus.

Over the course of their remarkable day and this amazing book, Mateo and Rufus overcome their initial discomfort, get to know one another, say their goodbyes, have adventures, and narrowly escape several incidents that might have been The End for one or both of them right there. They also open up to one another and heal each other’s hurts until at last their budding friendship blossoms into an honest-to-God love. And Silvera strikes not a single false note along the way.

But as the day passes—noon, 5:00 PM, 7:00 PM—the time allotted to them grows short. The tension mounts as they know, and we know, that it must happen before midnight, yet they and we hope beyond any hope that somehow, some way, they will escape their shared fate. One of the most touching moments in a book chock full of touching moments is when the two young men each try to make the other promise not to die first, because neither wants to be the one left behind, even for a moment. It is a promise neither has the power to make of course, and logically they can’t both make it, but the heart has a logic of its own. At last, death comes for them, deaths that were perfectly predictable, in hindsight.

We would do well, every one of us, to follow the example of Mateo and Rufus. It is not given to most of us to know the day of our own deaths. But we all know that Death will come. We cannot escape it any more than Rufus or Mateo could. Most of us will never live a day as full as theirs, but we can at least strive to live as many of the days that remain to us as fully as we are able.

Because we all die at the end.

The Wearing of the Green

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Jade City
by Fonda Lee.
2017.

I regret that I’m late to this party; by the time I get around to writing a review of this book, it’s already snagged a Nebula nomination for Best Novel and a Locus Award nomination for Best Fantasy Novel, so it’s well past the time I can claim to have “discovered” it. I was sold on Fonda Lee’s writing by Exo, so when Jade City came out, I read it right away, but I had to think about it for a while before I felt ready to write about it. This is a book that invites thought.

Jade City brings to mind classic Bruce Lee martial arts films, but with jade magic substituted for conventional martial arts. It’s set in an imagined world drawn from our East Asia. The island of Kekon won its independence a generation earlier with the help of Green Bones, Kekonese warriors who have mastered the art of magical combat using power drawn from the jade they wear. Today, the same clans that secured Kekon’s freedom act as underworld crime families. They battle for control of the districts of Janloon, the capital (and titular “Jade City”), policing the streets, expanding their own interests, claiming stakes in local businesses, and helping friends of the clan while fighting off attempts by other clans to expand their own influence in the same way. Kekon might be Taiwan. Or Japan. Or the Philippines. Janloon might be Tokyo. Or Hong Kong. Or Singapore. The technology of this world seems to be 1970-ish. There are cars and air conditioning and television, but no sign of computers or mobile phones. Maybe that’s why my mind keeps going to Bruce Lee films.

I have to say that I’m probably not the ideal person to comment on this book. I was never able to get into martial arts films. (Even though my family is part Asian, and it’s not like no one’s ever tried!) So I approached Jade City with some doubts about whether someone like me could enjoy this book. I’m happy to report that those doubts were groundless. Fonda Lee has built a living, breathing world populated with a cast of varied characters struggling to maintain their positions as the ultimate conflict—between Janloon’s two most powerful clans—threatens to tear their world apart. There are young people learning to become adults, adults learning how to lead, and elders struggling to let go. Here you will find warriors wielding jade magic to defend their way of life, lovers finding, or rediscovering, their passions, and secrets everywhere, waiting to be unraveled. There is Lan, the leader of the clan, an able administrator, but perhaps not the right person to lead his clan into war. There is his brother Hilo, skilled in jade combat but hot-headed and too easily provoked. And their sister Shae, who walked away from the clan but now finds herself returning in her family’s time of need.

I particularly liked Lee’s use of linked points of view to introduce the large cast of characters she’s created. We meet a teenage criminal in the first chapter, he meets the character who becomes the POV character in the second chapter, who meets another POV character, and so on. It’s an effective way to ease the reader into this world without overwhelming. Jade City tells a sprawling story with many engaging characters, each trying to make her or his way through a world suddenly off balance and changing in unpredictable and dangerous ways. That’s a circumstance we call all identify with.

Jade City isn’t like anything you’ve read before, and even if you’re like me, and martial arts films aren’t your thing, its characters and world will keep you reading and will stay with you a long time after you’ve finished.

Boy Meets World

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My Side of the Mountain
by Jean Craighead George.
1959.

My Side of the Mountain was a very special book for me. I read it when I was eleven years old, and I suppose that was the perfect age. A few months afterward, Paramount Pictures released a film adaptation, and I begged my dad to take me to see it. I have thoughts about the film version, but I will save them for a separate post. Here I want to talk about the book. I recently re-read it, 49 years later, to see how it held up. I’m pleased to report that I think it holds up very well.

From what I can tell, noodling around on the internet, the book is still well regarded in many quarters. It has won many awards. It’s the sort of book that teachers and librarians are apt to recommend to young people. It’s the story of Sam Gribley, an adolescent boy, perhaps fourteen years old, give or take a year, and the novel opens with Sam living on his own in the Catskill Mountains in December, hunkered down against a big snowstorm as he tells his story. He lived in what must have been a very crowded New York City apartment with his parents and eight (!) brothers and sisters. You won’t be surprised that Sam finds it stifling. He dreams of the outdoors, a dream shared by no one else in his family. When he hears from his father that his Gribley forefathers once owned a farm somewhere near Delhi, New York, Sam resolves to run off and live on his own at the old Gribley farm. His father indulges his fantasy, expecting Sam to return home chastened after a day or two on his own.

Surprise! Sam not only survives in the Catskills wilderness, he thrives, after a rocky start. December blizzard Sam recounts (with some embarrassment) how May tenderfoot Sam struggled to survive his first night in the wild. He whittled a fishhook out of twigs and cried after a trout broke it. He finally succeeded in catching a few fish, but utterly failed to start a fire and spent the night hungry, cold, frightened, and miserable.

But Sam learns and from this inauspicious beginning builds a life for himself alone in the forest. Most of the story is Sam solving the problems of keeping himself fed, clothed, and sheltered and storing up food for the coming winter and his occasional interactions with other people who stumble across him. Among his accomplishments, two stand out. First, he burns out the inside of a huge hemlock tree to build himself a shelter, complete with storage niches for his provender and a clay fireplace so he can keep himself warm. (He is inspired by stories of Native Americans using this technique to make dugout canoes.) Second, he steals a falcon chick, which he names Frightful after the experience of capturing her, and raises her as a hunting bird, with guidance from the local library.

It’s a charming story of a smart, kindly, persistent boy taking on the challenge of living in the wilderness and not only surviving, but doing it in style. Some of this may seem implausible, and that’s the biggest rap the book’s detractors have against it. Sam not only copes in the wilderness, he begins to make it look easy. Do not mistake this story for a gritty, realistic portrayal of what it would mean to be alone in the forest, surviving on your own wits. Still, Sam does dispense good advice, even if it is doubtful he could have learned all this reading in the New York Public Library, as he claims.

Even harder to swallow is the idea that Sam’s parents would let him run away, then not search for him frantically. Not when he doesn’t return home in a day or two; not even after he’s gone for months and winter sets into the Catskills. This was only marginally plausible in 1959; today, these parents should expect a visit from a social worker with some hard and awkward questions.

I could understand if these difficulties are too much for some modern readers, though I found the book as delightful at the age of sixty as I did at eleven, and would counsel 21st century readers to overlook the plausibility issues—think of My Side of the Mountain as an historical novel, or a fantasy, if you must—and focus instead on the deeper emotional truth at the heart of the book.

Adolescent kids—especially boys—feel the call to separate from their parents and make their own way in the world. It’s a scary moment, torn as they are between the child’s yearning for familial security and the budding adult desire to stand on one’s own two feet and find a place in the world. The message of My Side of the Mountain is this: the world may sometimes be cold, or lonely, or frightening, but you are capable of more than you realize. You have it in you not only to survive, but to thrive.

That is reason enough to love this book, and to recommend it to today’s crop of young readers, who need its message as much as kids ever did.

 

You Only Live Twice

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Waypoint Kangaroo
by Curtis C. Chen
2016.

Waypoint Kangaroo is the debut novel of Curtis C. Chen. It’s a science fiction spy thriller, and it’s quite a lot of fun. The title may puzzle, but it begins to make sense once you learn that the protagonist is a US spy codenamed “Kangaroo.” In classic Bondian fashion, the first chapter of Waypoint shows us Kangaroo just winding up a mission in Kazakhstan, trying to slip out of that country without attracting attention. He fails rather badly at this and winds up on the wrong end of a chase, though to his credit, he puts himself at risk to save the life of one of his pursuers. So he’s an ethical spy.

Kangaroo returns to Washington to get chewed out for sparking a diplomatic incident, and his superiors send him on an enforced vacation until the ruckus he’s created has a chance to settle down.

This being about two centuries in the future, “vacation” means an all-expenses-paid-by-the-agency holiday trip to Mars, aboard Dejah Thoris, the flagship of the Princess of Mars Cruise Line (Get it?), a Disney-esque company that has brought interplanetary travel to the middle class masses. That includes stuffing the ship full of food, drink, entertainment, and hundreds of ways to separate the passengers from their money. This would be the vacation of a lifetime for your average working stiff, but for Kangaroo, it’s hell on earth. Hell in space, I should say. He paces the ship, as restless and miserable as a tiger in a cage, and it’s hilarious.

You see, Kangaroo is deeply embedded in this spy business. His real name is so secret he won’t even tell you, the reader. He has all kinds of cool spy tech surgically embedded in his body. He can do things like scan a person or a piece of equipment with his eyeball or communicate with his superiors by blinking in the right pattern. If that isn’t enough to wow you yet, Kangaroo also has a unique psychic power: he can access another universe, which he uses for storage. He calls it his “pocket.” (His code name is “Kangaroo.” Get it?) He’s got a ton of gear in there, gear no one else can detect, but he can access at will.

But none of this is helping Kangaroo relax. His job is literally a part of him. It’s in the nature of his career that the quotidian pleasures of his fellow tourists—family, relationships, sightseeing—are like a foreign language to him. Hence his difficulty getting into the spirit of life aboard Dejah Thoris as he travels toward Mars in a ship stuffed with people he can’t relate to. How to relax and have a good time just isn’t part of a spy’s skill set. All Kangaroo can manage to do is eat too much and drink too much until boredom finally drives him back into espionage. He begins to play spy aboard the ship, scanning and studying the other passengers, trying to work out who they are and what they’re up to, because that’s the only real pleasure he knows.

His job is also his hobby, it seems. Still, it’s harmless enough. Until he discovers that something really is going on….

I’m not going to spoil the plot. It’s a well thought-out adventure taking place in a future solar system still recovering from a terrible war, where some people just can’t let go of the past. Plot twists abound as Kangaroo traces out a conspiracy that starts with murder and graduates into crimes far more horrifying, a plot that keeps Kangaroo (and the reader) guessing until the last chapter.

So instead of spoiling the plot, let me say a word about Kangaroo’s interestingly limited psychic power. I keep thinking of Larry Niven, who used to love to play around with this stuff in his early works. Gil Hamilton, for instance, who had the power of telekinesis, but in his mind it was a “third arm,” so he could only do with it what a hypothetical third arm could do. Or Matt Keller of A Gift from Earth, who had the ability to force other people’s pupils to dilate or contract, and thereby induce an increase or decrease of interest in whatever they were looking at. Early Larry Niven would have loved Kangaroo.

That’s all well and good, but I have a protest to make.

This is a fun thriller, yes. Complex mystery? Check. Pulse pounding denouement? Check. Fun and startling technology? Check. Every reviewer gives Curtis Chen credit for these things, and justly so. But I want to talk about character. Kangaroo is an intriguing and complex character, a fact which gets less attention than it deserves, because of all the fireworks going off around him. He lives his life so deep undercover that even he can’t seem to keep track of where his cover story leaves off and the truth begins. How do you get close to other people when you can’t even tell them your real name? It’s a question Kangaroo finds himself wrestling with. He is an orphan, and the brief flashes we get of his childhood are more chilling than heartwarming. He has no relationships. He doesn’t know how to enjoy himself. The only thing Kangaroo has in his life is his very special job. And when your work becomes your pastime, when your identity is something assigned to you by your boss, do you actually have a life at all? Even his face isn’t his own; it’s been surgically altered to be nondescript. Not too handsome; not too ugly.

There’s hardly anything left of Kangaroo (whoever he is) underneath the accoutrements of his career. And the thing is, it sometimes seems as if he’s not even very good at that. But you have to be careful here. Waypoint Kangaroo is told in the first person, which means the narrative is filtered through Kangaroo’s own insecurities, which appear to be many. So maybe he’s just being hard on himself. He covers his insecurity as many people do, with a nonstop patter of jokes. These range from clever to cringeworthy. (He actually considers using the old “If I could walk that way…” chestnut, which must be 300 years old by Kangaroo’s time, but thankfully, he thinks better of it.)

In other words, Kangaroo is just like your conversation partner at your last party. You forgive the clunkers because the next one will be better, just as you forgive Kangaroo when he screws up a mission, because you know the next time, he’ll do better. And that’s what makes Kangaroo so endearing. He has no identity, apart from his work. He tries hard, even though he’s not sure he knows what he’s doing, and if he fails, he tries harder, all the while wondering who he is and how he wound up in this mess. (Sound like anyone you know?)

But you can’t help but wonder what drove him to give up a shot at a normal life for this. Was he running away from his awful upbringing? If so, he has exchanged a stunted childhood for a stunted adulthood. How long can he keep mingling with happy vacationers, pretending to be one of them while silently acknowledging theirs is a life beyond his reach? How long can he keep lying to everyone? How long can he keep covering up the contradictions of his existence with one-liners?

Waypoint Kangaroo ends without answering these questions, but this is the first book of a series, so happily there will be plenty of room to explore these questions in future books. Thrilling plot, exciting twists, and imaginative gadgets are always fun, of course, but I’m looking forward to learning more about Kangaroo, because underneath the plot fireworks, there’s one very intriguing character here. Let’s not forget to give Curtis Chen credit for that as well.

 

Kangaroo Too
by Curtis C. Chen
2017.

And while I was writing the review for Waypoint Kangaroo, I went ahead and read Kangaroo Too, which continues the adventures of Curtis Chen’s marsupially-codenamed spy. I’m not going to write at length about the plot, as that would only spoil the adventure. I’ll just say that this book is a worthy follow-up to its predecessor, and it probes more deeply into Kangaroo’s character and background, which is what I was hoping for after I finished the first book. This character examination comes in a surprising way; I don’t want to spoil the surprise, so I’ll just note that it is hinted at in the title. Read Waypoint Kangaroo first, of course, but after you do, you’ll surely want to pick this one up as well.

A Hard Man Is Good to Find

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Exo
by Fonda Lee
2017.

Exo, a young adult SF novel by Fonda Lee, is a great illustration of three of the things a science fiction story can do really well.

One is fantasy fulfillment. Exo is set 150 years in our future, and its protagonist, 17-year old Donovan Reyes is a soldier with a difference. He is an “exo,” meaning that his body has been modified so that he can exude at will a hard exoskeleton, tough enough to stand up to bullets. Don’t even try to hit him with your bare hand. In the time it takes you to swing, his armor will go up and you will hurt yourself worse than him.

It’s high concept, and a great metaphor for a young adult novel. What adolescent wouldn’t want emotional armor that snaps into place when things get tough and lets all the hurt just bounce off you? But this is science fiction, so there’s a catch. Earth of the mid-22nd century is a complicated place. A hundred years earlier, humans were defeated in a terrible war by a non-humanoid alien race called the zhree. Now zhree colonists rule the planet, in cooperation with human governments. Their rule seems benevolent, or at least gentle, but then we are seeing it through Donovan’s eyes, and Donovan is one of the elite humans whom the zhree have admitted into their complex caste system. What life is like for the majority of humans who are not among the chosen is left largely for the reader to speculate upon. Donovan himself isn’t much interested; he seems pretty divorced from the concerns of ordinary humans. His father is a high-ranking official in the collaborationist government; his exo armor is zhree technology. Donovan’s role as a soldier-cop seems mostly to hunt down Sapience, a well-organized anti-zhree resistance movement. Is it that most humans who are not among the elite support Sapience, as the novel makes it appear? Or is this a consequence of seeing his world through Donovan’s eyes, where most of the humans he meets are either the elite or Sapience troublemakers?

A second thing science fiction can do well is illustrate for the reader the experience of being othered. Sapience extremists believe soldiers like Donovan are traitors to their species, and that exos are not merely modified physically by the zhree but also mentally, and have been made into mindless slaves. Killing an exo is to them no crime. It may even be an act of mercy. The zhree colonists on Earth like humans well enough, but we also meet zhree from other worlds who find human appearance repulsive and question whether humans are worth all the trouble they cause. Donovan believes in himself and his work, yet as his story unfolds, he must endure abuse—both emotional and physical—from both zhree and human extremists.

Yet conflicts come in shades of gray, another lesson science fiction, and Exo, present effectively. Not all Sapience members are cold blooded; some see Donovan as a likable young man led astray by the aliens. Some zhree fully embrace humans as their equals; one of the zhree characters even covers for Donovan when he goes rogue. It helps that Lee has given us a cast of well-drawn characters to illuminate the full spectrum of views in this complicated world she’s created.

This world is big. It’s no surprise that a sequel is in the works, as there’s plenty of room left for more stories. Though the canvas is broad, Exo is a personal story. It is Donovan’s story. At first he seems pretty confident in his understanding of the world and his place in it. I might even call him “hard bitten”; surprisingly so in such a young man. But then when you follow him from the warrens of Sapience to the highest levels of zhree government, you discover along with him that there is much more to his world, and to Donovan himself, than either of you suspected.

Exo is just the kind of story that got a lot of us started reading science fiction. It would make a good gift for a young person interested in science fiction. It might also be just the gift for that young person you’re trying to get interested in science fiction.

Barbarian at the Gate

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Arslan
by M. J. Engh
1976.

(Warning: This review contains spoilers for a forty-year old book.)

Arslan was written in the late 1960s and was first published in paperback in 1976. It must have come and gone with little notice: I certainly didn’t notice it. But some important people did, because in 1987 it was reissued in a hardcover edition by Arbor House. Algis Budrys, who did a book review column for Fantasy & Science Fiction at that time, wrote an extensive and enthusiastic review that motivated me to buy and read Arslan. I only read it once, thirty years ago, but I never stopped thinking about it. Once Arslan gets into your head, he’ll never leave. This is an amazing and horrifying work. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that those important people who read it in 1976 were agitating for a reprint eleven years later.

From time to time I’ve wondered what became of Arslan. Recently I got an email plugging the book and learned that yes, Arslan lives on. It’s still drawing reviews; there are some good ones here and here and here. And so, I decided to read it again after thirty years, and see how it stacks up after all this time.

Engh is a scholar of ancient history. If you know even a little ancient history, you probably heard stories of peaceful, prosperous civilizations suddenly confronted by an irresistible barbarian army led by a charismatic commander. Think Attila. Think Genghis Khan. Think Tamerlane. Think, an army of people who respect nothing but raw power. And they have all the power. We think of this sort of confrontation as something belonging to the ancient past. Arslan asks a simple but hard question: What would it look like if middle America of the 1960s encountered a modern Genghis Khan and his horde?

I can’t honestly “recommend” this book. It is powerful and memorable. It is also deeply disturbing. Whether you ought to read it depends on how you feel about a deeply disturbing book that will haunt your thoughts for the rest of your life. Some people rave about this book; others report throwing it against the wall after the first chapter. I should give a trigger warning here, because this book contains, well, just about every awful thing you can imagine one human being doing to another. To paraphrase Nietzsche, beware of looking too deeply into Arslan, lest you find Arslan looking deeply into you. Follow me to the other side, if you dare, but don’t say I didn’t warn you….

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Narrator, Unreliable

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character, driven hc.indd

Character, Driven
by David Lubar
Tor. 2016.

 

DISCLAIMER: I am going to say some mildly spoilery things about this book farther down in the review. If that bothers you, you should bail before you get there. Don’t worry; I’ll warn you.

I was not previously acquainted with the work of David Lubar. Now I’m going to have to correct that oversight. Character, Driven is a masterful coming-of-age story that, incidentally, is also something of a catalog of literary devices, as the title implies.

We are introduced to Cliff, the first-person narrator of the story. Cliff (as in “on the edge”) is a clever, witty, charming young man who comes to life on the first page, and makes you feel sorry to say goodbye on the last. I speak from personal experience when I say that creating an adolescent character who is charming and authentic at the same time is no small feat, but Lubar makes it look easy.

Cliff has the usual sort of teenager problems. He’s a high school senior who doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life. There’s a new girl in the school that Cliff is interested in, but he’s afraid to ask her out. He is not popular (odd, considering how likable he is, but we’ll get back to that), although he has the usual circle of offbeat friends. He’s working two part-time jobs and having trouble staying awake in class. And he is brutally honest with the reader, sharing his deepest, most shameful thoughts and bravely recounting his life’s greatest embarrassments.

His honesty aside, Cliff has a playful streak, and he lets it run loose with you, the reader. He indulges in word play that ranges from sophisticated to eye-rolling. He gives the characters in his story Dickensian names that reflect their natures. (A teacher with a drinking problem is Mr. Tippler. A super-competitive classmate is Abby Striver. A classmate who has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is Jimby Fasborne.) And he plays with every literary device you can think of, often in the context of denying he’s doing it:

I was almost at the door at the rear of the gym when something smacked the back of my head. I could try to craft a clever literary device to convey disorientation total my but that thing of sort is half too clever by. So, it with on get let’s.

Speaking of literary devices, let’s not overlook the Unreliable Narrator. I suppose that’s slightly spoilery, but before you condemn me, consider that Cliff opens the book by describing himself being beaten within an inch of his life by a stepfather in an alcoholic rage, then picks himself up, dusts himself off (metaphorically speaking), and asks you, the reader, “Do I have your attention? Good. That’s crucial. Grab the reader with the first sentence.” It turns out he doesn’t even have a stepfather; he lives with both his biological parents. His dad is an accountant.

If the self-conscious literary devices and the made-up names and the fanciful opening scene aren’t enough to drive home the point that Cliff isn’t quite as honest as he seems, he concludes the opening chapter by proclaiming that his story better have a good plot, because he is not strong enough of a character to drive the novel himself. Apart from the meta-fictional novelty of watching a character draw his own conclusions about how strong a character he is, in truth Cliff couldn’t be more wrong. This is absolutely a character-driven story, as, um, Lubar told you in the title. So that Cliff is not a 100% trustworthy narrator is obvious early on.

I suspect any teenage boy who likes to read will see a lot of himself in Cliff, and I would recommend the book highly to any and all of them. As well as to any teenage girl who might be wondering what makes boys tick. I also recommend it to older people, like me, who enjoy a good young adult story. This novel made me feel like a teenager again, and at my age, that’s quite a feat. A greater one, even, than creating a likable and authentic teenager.

Also, though I can hardly imagine a worse thing an old person like me might say to a young person to induce them to read a book than, “It will be good for you. You’ll learn something,” it is nevertheless true. The self-conscious style makes Character, Driven a good choice for young people (even not-so-young people) with an interest in writing, or interested in examining the craft of writing.

Okay, it’s time for you spoiler-averse people to bail now. I have one more thing to say. A mild spoiler follows.

I read this book twice in the first week. Why twice? Because there is a revelation on page 277 (out of 290) that made me blurt out “Oh, my God!” to the empty room I was sitting in when I read it. Because, though Cliff has been brutally frank with the reader up to that moment, he has one secret he shares with no one, not even you. As Character, Driven progresses, the reader will begin to pick up that there is an inexplicable sadness in Cliff’s core that comes through in spite of his attempts to laugh it off. Sure, he’s got the usual teenager problems, but when he spends a chapter toying with the idea of suicide, we know something is way wrong.

Cliff eventually comes clean. Not only is there something important in his life that he has been keeping from the reader, he’s even gone so far as to make tweaks to the story, in order to distract you from the one thing Cliff can’t face up to. When he finally finds the courage to tell you (and everyone else), his life changes dramatically.

And so does the book. Most of what’s already happened is now revealed in a new light. And now you have to read it all over again, in that new light. The only other work I can think of to compare this to is The Sixth Sense, the 1999 film by M. Night Shyamalan. Not because Character, Driven has any supernatural elements (it doesn’t), but because, like the film, once you know the reveal at the end, it becomes an entirely different story. And that is David Lubar’s greatest feat of all.