Someday this Pain Will Be Useful to You

by Peter Cameron

Once upon a time I wrote a short story. It started from an idea that didn't include an ending, and I stalled out after a few weeks of working on it. Seven years later, I had a sudden insight about how to end the story, and I finally wrote the ending. Several people to whom I showed it said I should keep going, that they wanted to know what happens to the character next. I didn't think I could, and I never have — in part because it took me so long to find the ending, but also because the story is about emotional paralysis, so the tension and impetus is lost (and the story ends) when the character finally breaks his paralysis (or so I intended).

Point is, I never understood until now how frustrating it can be to read a book whose protagonist is emotionally paralyzed. I can't recall reading any other gay teen novels in which the character isn't either traumatized by being gay and coming out or so totally okay and confident that other people can't help but accept him. This book's anti(?)-hero is disengaged and distant from everyone, alienated even from himself. Sort of reminds me of me at that age.

Although it was frustrating in many ways, I ultimately liked this book. It's easy to see, however, the reasons it won't appeal to many readers. Being a young adult book, it's pretty short, so there's that at least.

Feed

by M.T. Anderson

The fourth book I picked up because of the teen dystopian fiction article in the New Yorker, and the least like the others. Set in a future of near-earth space travel and the intertubes — complete, even replete with context-sensitive advertising — piped directly into the brain, related viruses and diseases, plus a hint of disaffected youth and potential resistance, it has all the right ingredients. The ending, however, was rather anti-climactic and left me feeling as if the story, and the experience of reading it, had no point. Which is, in a way, an accurate adolescent feeling, but still disappointing.

Twelfth Grade Kills

by Heather Brewer

Finally! The last installment in the Chronicles of Vladimir Tod is out, so I can at last be released from this terrible writer's clutches.

Reading this book was very frustrating and resulted in much moaning aloud, even at one point a powerful urge to throw the book out the window. I really wasn't prepared for this one being even more poorly written than the first four books, but there are major continuity problems, excessive melodrama, sheer stupidity, irritating cuteness, predictable plot, unsurprising (and poorly executed) surprise ending, and many more pulp fiction horrors. But I had to read it, you know?

None of this series is well-written, but somehow it was easier to overlook in the first two or three books. The depth of badness to which the fifth book has sunk is making me question my enjoyment of the earlier volumes. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure I was on heavy duty, post-wisdom-teeth-extraction painkillers when I read the first book. Oh, well, it's over now, and I survived.

The Maze Runner

by James Dashner

Oh, damn bloody hell! This excellent young adult book is the first of a planned trilogy; the second book might be out in October, but my library doesn't appear to have it on order yet. I dare say it's very close to almost as good as The Hunger Games, and finishing it certainly gave me similar feelings of elation laced with frustration, despair and impatience.

I heard about it in a short article about teen dystopian fiction in the June 14, 2010, issue of the New Yorker. It's an interesting article comparing/contrasting adult and young adult literary dystopias (dystopiae?), and it mentions The Hunger Games, of course, and several other books I decided to read based on what it said about them. This is the first of those that I've read. It's exciting, filled with danger and death, combining elements of Hunger Games, Ender's Game, 13 Monkeys, in a wrapping of fresh mystery and cruel unknowing: memory wiped, a young man wakes in the center of huge maze that changes every night, as yet unsolved by the 40-some young men already trapped there. Oh, and there's scary mechanized creatures that mostly come at night, mostly.

Just as a side note, I think the author might be Mormon. A page on the website for the book has a link to a profile of him in the Deseret News, a Mormon newspaper. Interesting, since Orson Scott Card (author of Ender's Game) is Mormon, as is Stephenie Meyer (Twilight series). Wonder if Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games) is too?

Eleventh Grade Burns

by Heather Brewer

I've never read any of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, and I think the movies so far are pretty hilarious (though unintentionally so), but I'm glad I haven't invested a lot of energy in mocking Twi-hards. Because this series is my Twilight. Having read the third book, I'm no longer capable of objectively assessing the writing. I'm too wrapped up in the story and blindly loyal to the protagonist, young half-vampire-half-human Vladimir Tod.

The next book is supposed to come out in September, but as far as I can see my library doesn't have it on-order yet. I'll just die if they don't get it!

The Night of Your Life

by Jesse Reklaw

A dazzling collection of Jesse Reklaw's "Slow Wave" comics, retelling real dreams in four panels. With endless possibilities and the natural bizarreness of dreams, they run the gamut from funny to eerie and you-name-it. This is a really great book to read while drifting off to sleep, although I must sadly report not remembering any interesting dreams of my own on the nights I fell asleep with this book in my hands.

Catching Fire

by Suzanne Collins

Gaaaaaah!!! This book is sooo good, it almost hurts to read it, but you'll read it really quickly anyway. It hurts even more to tear oneself away or — quelle horreur — to finish it.

This sequel absolutely lives up to the promise of its predecessor, The Hunger Games. The best plot twist comes at the beginning; once you get half to three-quarters through, the ending won't come as a complete surprise, but that just makes the anticipation all the sweeter. Even so, I don't want to give away even one bit of the story.

My only complaint is that the protagonist, Katniss, is acting like a typical 16-year-old. But that's as it needs to be; as in the Harry Potter series, if she actually listened to the few trustworthy adults and stopped being so self-centered, it would be a pretty short story.

Submarine

by Joe Dunthorne

I was going to start this post by listing all the other great books about teenage boys that I've read, but instead here's a link to all the ones on this blog labelled "boys".

A more precise comparison could be made to Black Swan Green or Vernon God Little, both of which, like Submarine, are not cataloged as young adult fiction at my library. In terms of books marketed to young adults, the color and charm of the protagonist's voice bring to mind The Black Book and Spud. It also made me think of a book I haven't written up yet, Hard Cash (first in a trilogy by Kate Cann, which got me totally turned on to British YA books).

Anyway... this is one of those books that makes you totally fall for the narrator, to the point where you don't know if you actually want to be him or just want to date him and/or be his best friend. (I sometimes feel as if I want to eat them, or hug them so tightly their bodies become fused with mine — but that's a different, troublesome, and probably Freudian story.) In Submarine, Oliver falls sort-of in love, loses his virginity, sort of saves his parents' marriage, probably learns some lessons, and basically just lives the tumultuous life of a precocious Welsh 15-year-old boy, and is utterly charming and funny about it.

Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List

by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

Rachel and David are the writing duo behind Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, now a major motion picture. A friend recently recommended the movie to me, since I heart one of the actors and I have soft spot for romantic comedies, but I'd always planned on reading Naomi and Ely because of the gay angle: Ely is Naomi's GBF (gay best friend) and vice versa, since they were in, like, kindergarten.

Well, in typical gay-YA fashion, romantic problems ensue, despite the no-kiss list that's meant to keep them out of exactly this situation. I don't know, overall it was kinda crap. Ely is not a complete cad, but he does pull the typical gay-guy "hooking up is more important than any friend" bullshit. Naomi, meanwhile, I found completely unsympathetic — both in the sense that I didn't like her at all, and also in the sense that she's completely narcissistic and in fact probably has borderline personality disorder. The book isn't a complete disaster, I suppose, but I did find myself grateful for its brevity.

One interesting side note, the characters are college sophomores rather than high schoolers.

Lost Boys

by Kaname Itsuki

This book is from one of my favorite yaoi publishers, but it's a bit of a disappointment. (Having a lot of those lately!) It has a promising premise — Air (basically Peter Pan by another name) kidnaps a young man and takes him to Neverland to be a father to the Lost Boys; turns out the kidnapee is an orphan of sorts himself, with a deceased mother and an estranged father; Air's innocence is seductive and reminds him of his own lost childhood — but the romantic and sexual tension typical of good yaoi never really develops.

Final analysis: not so good, but the ending leaves open the possibility of a sequel, and I'd be willing to give it a chance.

Tales from Outer Suburbia

by Shaun Tan

I've been trying to think of a word to describe this amazing graphic novel-y book; it's unusual in both form and content. It's a collection of short stories (some very short) accompanied by illustrations. The stories are surreal without being spooky, while the illustrations are beautiful and detailed but also sort of soft-focus. I guess the best word is "dreamy," although I'm tempted to use "plush" (rich and smooth, as in "lush," but — despite the weirdness and unreality — gentle and comforting, like a stuffed animal), but that sounds weak and/or twee and doesn't really work without explanation.

What else? It's effing fantastic! Top 10 even! I would recommend this to anyone: adult, teen, tween; you could totally read it to little kids like a picture book. Anyone who likes GNs/comics or short stories and people who make/appreciate art will be especially pleased.

And it's totally cute that his name is spelled like Shaun Cassidy.

Girl in Landscape

by Jonathan Lethem

I guess this is speculative fiction, since it isn't cataloged as science fiction. Future, space travel, extrasolar colonization, aliens... but somehow not sci-fi. The story doesn't have to be set on another planet, it could easily be re-worked as a western or in any kind of frontier/colonization situation. Except for that one thing, which I can't really tell you about.

In my experience, a lot of sci-fi and fantasy books are coming-of-age stories, whether it's a character growing up or a civilization maturing (or declining). There's a convergence in the liminal aspects of both the transformation narrative and the imaginative effort of writing or reading without reference to conventional reality. Girl in Landscape inhabits the same territory.

It's a fairly breezy read that I think would appeal to teens (the protagonist is a psychologically mature 13-year-old girl), but there's a barely contained complexity that keeps a multitude of themes and potential conclusions afloat. (I'm trying to think of an expressive image, but all I can come up with is a pillowcase full of kittens.) The ending is kind of abrupt, but I suppose it has to be, since it's also the collapse of all those possibilities into a single eventuality.

I don't want to get into the plot too much, but here's the set up: abandoned by both parents (one dead, one abdicated), Pella Marsh moves with her father and younger brothers to a very small human settlement on a planet whose inhabitants are strange remnants of a once-great culture that left their home and took to the stars; transplanted into this environment, she faces the tyranny and the disappointment of adults, while becoming one herself.

Burndive
    and
Cagebird

by Karin Lowachee

The first book in this sort-of-series is Warchild, which I wrote about here. It's not exactly a series, because the stories aren't sequential; instead they're the same basic story told from the points of view of three different characters (another echo of Orson Scott Card's "Enderverse"). I don't know why I didn't just check the publication dates, but I somehow managed to read them out of order. It didn't really matter for these two, but reading either of these before Warchild would have ruined that book's ending, so I'm glad I at least got that part right.

These books are definitely of the military sci-fi subgenre, but there's also the heavy focus on character and emotion typical of the soft/social sci-fi subgenre. Each of the main characters experiences physical and psychological trauma, and ultimately finds the inner strength to endure, first, and then to free themselves from their pasts. The way the protagonists evolve sort of reminded me of some of Octavia Butler's heroines, too.

All three characters are young men, ranging in age from 14 to 20 during the main action of the books, with some flashbacks or introductory parts about their earlier childhoods. (At my library, they're classified as young adult books, but I've seen them catalogued as regular SF on other libraries' websites.) Partly as a function of their ages, and also because of a major plot element — war, piracy, kidnapping, forced prostitution — sexual themes arise. It's mostly innuendo of the gay-vague and gay-chicken* variety; only Cagebird has actual gay characters and actual sex happening, which is slightly more explicit than a romance novel but far from the language of erotica.

*Not to be confused with the older gay slang "chicken," referring to a very young gay boy/man usually in the context of a relationship with an older gay man, "gay chicken" is when (supposedly) straight guys say and/or do "gay" things to each other, turning up the intensity and pushing boundaries until one of them "chickens" out. It's related to frat-boy/athlete/military sexual bravado and gay-baiting, and it depends on the paradox that the more secure you are in your masculinity, the farther you can push the gay boundary. In these books, there's also an implied feeling that there's much less social stigma attached to being gay and that gender and sexuality categories are... not exactly fluid, but maybe more mix-and-match.

Final analysis: the action and intrigue of Ender's Game or a Heinliein book, with the added attraction of teen angst and sexiness. I loved this series, and I'd recommend it to teens and adults alike. I'm very sad that my library no longer has Warchild and is down to one copy each of Burndive and Cagebird. I'm even considering putting them in my Top 10.

Blue Pills: a positive love story

by Frederick Peeters

As much as this book is deserving of a dignified review, I won't be able to go on until I say this: "Peter" and "Peters" are funny enough, but the extra E in this author's name is just icing on the cake!

Now. Ahem. This is another straggler, one I read a long time ago and I'm just now catching up. It's probably one of, if not the first proper Graphic Novels — emphasis on the "novel" — I ever read. It's a comics memoir about the author's relationship with an HIV-positive partner. The description I initially read did not specify genders, so I suppose I must have been thinking or hoping it was about gay guys. Turns out he dated an HIV-positive woman, who had a son who also is poz.

It's a good book, but I don't remember being amazed by it or anything. It's certainly interesting — especially if you've ever been in, or have the potential to be in a sero-discordant couple — and it's not a huge time commitment either. Would definitely add something to a sex-ed lesson about HIV/AIDS, and I don't recall anything that would make it inappropriate for teens.

The Graveyard Book

by Neil Gaiman

Meh.



I'd really like to just leave it at that, but duty (hee-hee) compels me to let you know that this book just won the Newberry, pretty much the ultimate award for children's literature. Personally, I think it should be a young adult book, first of all; second, if not for Gaiman's already creepy oeuvre, I'd accuse the author of trying to cash in on the trendiness of all things occult by cramming as many stock spectres as possible into one book. It's not that it's bad, it's just... maybe the problem is that I went to see the movie Coraline in the middle of reading this book, and I was reminded how much more original Coraline is. Also, it should be noted that recent Newberry winners have been books that adults think have literary merit but that aren't necessarily popular with kids, and this, apparently, is what they've come up with in reaction to that criticism.

Manga, Yaoi, and Sequels — oh my!

Here's one of the things I love about manga: last night I read three books! (Even a really, really good nonfiction book takes a couple of days at least.) Since all three are parts of series-es, two of which I've already written up, I'm going to combine them into one post.

Il Gatto Sul G., vol. 2
by Tooko Miyagi
I wrote about the first volume (here) just a few months ago, even though I'd read it quite some time before. I didn't remember it that well, although I had a vague sense of not liking it too much. But O!M!G! am I glad I decided to read the second one. The story's getting more interesting, a new character has entered the picture, the romantic-erotic tension has been taken up a notch, and the overall tone is a little more serious. Only problem is, now I want to read the third installment, but my library doesn't have it yet, and there's only one library in the UK that has it in the interlibrary loan database. Grrrr.

Boys Be, second season, vol. 14
by Masahiro Itabashi
I've already read several in this series (very short post here) and even watched a couple of DVDs. I enjoyed them, because they're cute and funny, but I wasn't invested in trying to read the whole series. After having volume 14 checked out for a long time, I finally got around to reading it — and what a nice surprise! These mini-stories of teen boy lust and longing are still funny, charming, and mostly innocent, but it may be that the series has gotten more risque as the volume numbers have climbed. Still PG-13, but closer to NC-17 than any of the others I've read.

Hero-Heel, vol. 2
by Makoto Tateno
I haven't actually written up the first one yet — it's among the 50-plus titles on which I'm behind (tee-hee! I typed "behind") — so consider this my review for both. The protagonist is a talented but inexperienced actor on a TV action show sort of in the vein of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. Tormented by an unrequited lust for his co-star, he manipulates and blackmails his way into the older man's bed, only to suffer an even more crushing rejection. Thus ends act one. Still obsessed in the next installment, our "hero" begins a tortured, torrid affair with a different actor on the show; meanwhile, his on- and off-screen nemesis seems to be reuniting with an old flame. Just when it looks as if everyone is going to be mature and considerate for once, a sucker-punch ending sets the reader to wondering once again: "who is the hero and who is the heel?"

The author of this series is a manga super-star whose other series include Yellow (which I'm about to start), Ka Shin Fu, and Steal Moon. And, BTW, the Hero-Heel series is not quite pornographic, but it is as explicit as it gets without actually showing genitalia.

Falling Boy

by Alison McGhee

I don't know why this isn't a young adult novel. It's the right length, and it's the right kind of story. The protagonist is a teen who uses a wheelchair ever since the accident — you know, the accident he refuses to talk about. He's somewhat estranged from his father and weirdly obsessed with his absent mother, he has a wise-cracking slightly older buddy, and there's even a preternaturally wise and observant little girl who thinks he's a superhero using the wheelchair as a disguise.

Overall rating: meh.

Spud, the Madness Continues...

by John van de Ruit

(See my post about the previous book in the series here.)

Man, I freakin' loved the first book in this series. The second one is also quite good, but with some fairly major drawbacks.

I still really love the protagonist, young John "Spud" Milton, but I also found myself getting annoyed with him for not realizing that one of his friends is actually a complete tool whom I, as of the middle of this second book, cannot stand. I don't want to dwell on the why's and what-for's, but I really hope Spud will eventually recognize that this guy is a spoiled-rich-kid narcissistic bully and heroically stand up to him, in the manner of Tom Brown's Schooldays (for the record, I've only seen the movie and haven't read the book).

There are some hopeful signs that Spud himself is maturing, and I'm optimistic that the slight increase in homophobic behavior and post-apartheid racist backlash in the book is more reflective of Spud's growing sensitivity to such things, and of the time period in which the book is set, than it is indicative of what's to come.

On a related note, a friend of mine, who doesn't normally read anything like this at all, stumbled across the first book and really enjoyed it. The third one isn't published yet, and I'll probably have to interlibrary loan it, but I certainly will.

The Thirteenth Tale

by Diane Setterfield

If you want the excitement and suspense of a "thriller" without the spies, terrorists, viruses, or serial killers, this might be the book for you. It's a gothic Victorian-ish story with ghosts, twins, probably incest, bastards, foundlings, cats, skeletons, a governess, scars, a fire, a blizzard on the moors. It's very gripping and exciting, and I got really into it and had a hard time putting it down. (Unfortunately, I got interrupted really close to the end and couldn't get back to it for several days, which deflated the ending a bit for me — so make sure you plan enough time to read through to the end once it gets going.)

It feels as if a certain kind of teenage girl would really like this book. What comes to mind as a comparison, aside from Jane Eyre, is Gentlemen and Players, which caused me to get sunburned because I was so engrossed I forgot to turn over.

Addendum: I just realized it could also be compared to Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which I've previously compared to The Secret History.

Same-cell Organism

by Sumomo Yumeka

Argh! I can't believe I'm still so far behind. This is another one that I read long enough ago to have forgotten. It's from the same publisher as some other high-quality yaoi I've read, but I recall this one being a bit dull, even though the artwork is beautiful. I read a review just now that jogged my memory a bit, reminding me that the "main" story about two young men in love is interrupted by chapters that seemed totally disconnected to me (other than being about boys love) but, according to the reviewer, are sort of allegorical representations of different aspects of the main characters' relationship. Ultimately, there's better out there, so I wouldn't recommend this unless you've already read all the really good ones.