young adult | The Black Letters

Wringer, by Jerry Spinelli (1997) E

Date read: 10.11.10
Book from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

Adapted from the back cover:

“In Palmer LaRue’s hometown of Waymer, turning ten is the biggest event of a boy’s life. It marks the day when a boy is ready to take his place as a wringer – the boys who wring the necks of wounded pigeons at the annual Pigeon Day shoot. It’s an honor and a tradition. But for Palmer, his tenth birthday is not something to look forward to, but something to dread. Because – although he can’t admit this to anyone – Palmer does not want to be a wringer. But he can’t stop himself from getting older, any more than he can stop tradition. Then one day, a visitor appears on his windowsill, and Palmer knows that this, more than anything else, is a sign that his time is up. Somehow, he must learn how to stop being afraid and stand up for what he believes in.”

Jerry Spinelli, like many otherwise excellent children’s book authors, most often falters when he leans too heavily towards explicit didacticism. Wringer, with its themes of resisting bullying and peer pressure, could easily fall into this category, but I was extremely pleased to find it instead an organic and moving story. Occasionally a character’s behavior might be a little too conveniently suited to the needs of the plot and message to be credible, but overall – I couldn’t put it down, cried twice, and found much of the writing startlingly beautiful. One reviewer observed that Wringer benefits from being less “antic” than Maniac Magee (my longtime favorite Spinelli novel), and as much as I love Maniac’s picaresqueties, I agree that Wringer makes for a quieter, more intimate emotional experience.

Above all, the main characters are written with great psychological acuity. Spinelli evokes Palmer’s half-articulated fears both vividly and believably, and his relationships with his mother and his friend Dorothy are deeply charming and hilarious and true-to-life. In general I appreciated that Palmer’s parents are so gentle and empathetic, especially now that I’m actually old enough to sympathize with the adults in children’s books, and not just regard them opaque and rather less interesting than the protagonists.

Another favorite element: the deep wonder and precision with which Spinelli describes Nipper, Palmer’s pigeon friend, as well as Palmer’s own eagerness to learn about pigeons:

Continue reading Wringer, by Jerry Spinelli (1997) E

The Unicorn Sonata, by Peter S. Beagle (1996) E

Date read: 8.1.10
Book from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

(Photos originally featured in New books for August last year.)

After being left with distinctly mixed feelings for China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun (review), I experienced a bout of paranoia that maybe I was just getting too old for YA books. Cue further wibbling and visions of nostalgically longing but tragically unconsummatable glances at the YA section of the library. Luckily, The Unicorn Sonata came up shortly after on my reading pile. While The Unicorn Sonata is not a great book, it is a quite good one, and – most importantly to me at the time of reading – it encapsulates the joy and sweetness that I associate with so many of the books that were childhood favorites, at the same time that there are flickers of darkness and more adult ambiguity very close to the surface.

Joey Rivera is an unhappy 13-year-old who’s most at peace when visiting her roguish abuelita in her nursing home, or cleaning and singing in the local music shop whose proprietor she’s befriended. One day, a mysterious boy named Indigo enters the shop, offering for sale a spiraled horn that plays haunting music that only he and Joey can hear. Soon after, Joey finds herself walking out of the streets of Los Angeles and into a world called Shei’rah, where she encounters a host of mythological creatures, some friendly and some dangerous – perytons, fauns, unicorns. The unicorns, Joey learns, the land’s Old Ones, are threatened by a mysterious plague of blindness. As her time in Shei’rah nears an end, she begins seeking out answers to the disease’s origins, and to the other mysteries she’s encountered in the land.

Again, none of this may be strikingly original, but all of it is written with easy grace, good humor, and exuberant imagery. The characters are well-developed for the length of the book, and their dialogue sharply written. I found Joey’s relationship with her abuelita sweet, if a little cliché, and also enjoyed the portrayal of her friendship with a lonely brook-jallah, a kind of predatory nymph. All in all, Joey’s time in Shei’rah often reminded me of the uncomplicated joy and peacefulness of scenes from the earlier Narnia books. In fact, I’m not unconvinced that there’s some deliberate referencing going on, since Joey first enters Shei’rah while walking past a streetlamp, and thereafter encounters – what else but a faun. (Though Shei’rah’s fauns are of an earthier, hairier, riper-smelling variety than Mr. Tumnus.)

I was also intrigued that the central crisis is eventually revealed to be metaphysical, rather than external, in origin, relating to the tensions running through Shei’rah’s more discontented inhabitants, but found the reveal a little too abruptly and patly delivered (“oh, and here’s the moral, by the way”) to be entirely convincing. Nonetheless, it adds another layer of complication to an already surprisingly nuanced fantasy.

Art – Robert Rodgriguez’s full-color illustrations were occasionally a little too… baroque for me (the unicorns look a little gnarly), but they certainly contribute to the book’s rich atmosphere and luxurious look, and I enjoyed his referencing of tapestry patterns in the fields and foliage.

Finally, thank you again to Vega of the Athenaeum for picking up a signed copy for me from Comic-Con!

Go to:
Peter S. Beagle: bio and review index
The Last Unicorn comic #1, by Peter S. Beagle, art by Renae de Liz and Ray Dillon (2010) E
The Last Unicorn comic #2, by Peter S. Beagle, art by Renae de Liz and Ray Dillon (2010) E
The Innkeeper’s Song, by Peter S. Beagle (1993) E

Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville (2007) E

Date read: 7.17.10
Book from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

What is Un Lun Dun? It is London through the looking glass, an urban Wonderland of strange delights where all the lost and broken things of London end up… and some of its people, too – including Brokkenbroll, boss of the broken umbrellas; Obaday Fing, a tailor whose head is an enormous pin-cushion; and an empty milk carton called Curdle. Un Lun Dun is a place where words are alive, a jungle lurks behind the door of an ordinary house, carnivorous giraffes stalk the streets, and a dark cloud dreams of burning the world. It is a city awaiting its hero, whose coming was prophesied long ago, set down for all time in the pages of a talking book.

When twelve-year-old Zanna and her friend Deeba find a secret entrance leading out of London and into this strange city, it seems that the ancient prophecy is coming true at last. But then things begin to go shockingly wrong.

Un Lun Dun is basically Neil Gaiman‘s Neverwhere meets The Phantom Tollbooth, and owes debts – some playfully acknowledged in the text itself – to many other classics of children’s and fantasy literature, including A Wrinkle in Time and, of course, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It’s a cleverly crafted and delightful book: Miéville lets loose yet again with his famously phantasmagorical imagination, filling out his alternate London with topsy-turvy architecture (houses constructed of obsolete technology, a ghost town whose buildings constantly flicker through various historical incarnations, a web-cocooned “Webminster Abbey”), a lovingly detailed bestiary, and a vast arsenal of puns (some of my favorites: UnLondon’s sister cities include Parisn’t and Lost Angeles). All of these are complemented by Miéville’s appropriately inky, energetic illustrations. For fans of his adult fiction, there are also plenty of touches of eerie, deeply unsettling dark fantasy, some of which could have come straight out the New Crobuzon books – I couldn’t help feeling that the Black Windows of Webminster Abbey might be lesser cousins of Bas-Lag’s Weavers. With his usual anti-authoritarianism, Miéville also takes a good amount of pleasure in dismantling and inverting the tropes of the fantasy quest, so that we get a very unintended heroine who quite literally refuses to go by the rules of the (talking) book.

For all its delights, though, Un Lun Dun somehow failed to really surprise and engage me. It felt a bit like a themepark ride: there’s plenty to see, but it all goes by rather quickly, and you’re not sure how much it really meant to you at the end of it all. The characters are all likable enough, including the quick-thinking, occasionally snarky heroine, but few are really memorable enough to be lovable, and I had about the same feeling about the book as a whole. Its pleasures lie more in its ingenuity and dazzling wordplay than in any real emotional connection. I also had a little difficulty with the writing style, which is heavy on short, bluntly declarative sentences. And though I appreciated the plot’s pro-environmental, pro-literacy bent, the messages were shoehorned in a little awkwardly and obviously.

So, like Kakaner, I’m going to have to make a conditional recommendation for this one: try it out if you’re a big Miéville fan, are looking for pure entertainment, or have a younger reader of strong constitution to share it with. I would have loved this so much more had I read it when I was about twelve – too much younger and I think certain scenes might have kept me from sleeping at night, though I would have read them with relish anyway.

Go to:
China Miéville
Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville (2007) K

The Woman Who Loved Reindeer, by Meredith Ann Pierce (1985) E

Date Read: 6.10.09 (fourth[?] reread)
Book From: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

Caribou is a dreamer of dreams, a solitary figure isolated from her tribe ever since the death of her father. One day her sister-in-law comes to her, bearing a strange golden child whom she begs Cari to conceal and raise. At first unwilling, Cari is nevertheless struck by the child’s beauty and takes him in, naming him Reindeer – for as she reluctantly comes to realize, he is a trangl, one who can take the form of both human and stag. Though she longs to keep him by her side, his blood will always call him to run with the wild deer that course the land. As the years pass, stirring spirits and strange upheavals in the mountains and hot springs send the tribespeople to Cari’s door for advice. From Reindeer, she learns that the world is being remade, and that if she is to save her people, she and Reindeer must guide them over the Burning Plains to the safety of the lands that lie beyond the Pole, where only the wild deer have run before.

Of all the authors I’ve read, I’ve most deeply identified with the work of Meredith Ann Pierce, for the longest period of time. I first read her books when I was eight or nine, and though there were many literary loves before then, and have been many, many more since, I always think of Pierce’s books – particularly her Darkangel Trilogy – as The Milestones. She’s most often written tales about strange, wise girls who become strange, wise women, fall in love with transfigured or supernatural lovers, and have adventures in worlds of beautifully realized mythology. Mythology, because her books often read to me like myths from alien planets: her images and language have a timeless, jewel-like purity to them, coupled with deliciously archaic diction and – this might be the part that most gets me – a deep, deep sense of yearning that encompasses both human and immortal desires.

This was the first time I’ve re-read one of her books in about eight years, and since a lot has changed in that time, this doesn’t have quite as immediate an emotional impact on me as it used to. I used to get a lot of vicarious rage and anguish on Cari’s behalf. The older me is both slightly more phlegmatic (though really not that much less romantic), and slightly savvier: this time around, I was a little squicked at Cari having a relationship with her foster child, despite Pierce’s care in emphasizing his inhuman nature and unfamilial relationship with Cari.

Regardless, I was still deeply affected by the wondrous and joyful imagery: gambling trollwives, rivers of silver caribou running, a sledge with belled harness and golden runners, firelords with lava-seamed palms… And while the younger me fumed (again on Cari’s behalf) when she read the inconclusive ending, the older me was pleasantly surprised to recognize its maturity and realism. This will continue to be a story, and a world, that I treasure, and that I suspect will still surprise me every time I re-enter it.

Meredith Ann Pierce’s works will very likely appeal to fans of Patricia McKillip and Robin McKinley; I’ve never entirely understood why she hasn’t become more well-known and widely read. Not that I’m biased or anything.

Go to:
Meredith Ann Pierce

Guess that children’s book!

One of my roommates and I work part-time for a children’s library, and one of the activities this past fall was teaching kids how to interpret stained-glass windows – so in between midterm cramming, we ended up painting eight huge faux-stained-glass windows of popular children’s (and a couple YA) books for the kids to guess. Anyone else like to have a go?

Continue reading Guess that children’s book!

The City of Ember, by Jeanne DuPrau (2003) E

Date read: 1.26.10
Book from: Borrowed from Kakaner
Reviewer: Emera

“The city of Ember was made for us long ago by the Builders. It is the only light in the dark world. Beyond Ember, the darkness goes on forever in all directions.”

At the age of twelve, every child in Ember is assigned a job. Curious, bright-spirited Lina Mayfleet longs to be a messenger, but is instead assigned to dreary, dirty work in the underground Pipeworks. Doon Harrow, her classmate, is convinced that the sporadic blackouts of the great lamps of Ember – the only lights in a world of immeasurable darkness – forebode worse troubles for the city. He longs to investigate the enormous generator in the Pipeworks that provides the city with all of its power, so when he receives the job of messenger, he and Lina eagerly swap their assignments. As the blackouts increase in frequency and fear spreads among Ember’s citizens, Lina soon comes to share Doon’s suspicions that Ember is a dying city. Together the two embark on a search to uncover Ember’s origins, and to find a way to lead their people to the bright city that Lina is sure exists somewhere in the Unknown Regions beyond Ember.

I didn’t enjoy The City of Ember nearly as much as I thought I would, for all that it’s a rather endearing book. The characters and setting are warmly evoked, with detailed and frequently beautiful descriptions, and of course the concept is fantastic to begin with – Ember is one of those fictional realms you wish you could visit, and more often than not end up carrying around with you in your head after reading. (I imagined it looking like a less anarchic version of the city in the film La Cité des Enfants Perdus/The City of Lost Children, and would pay a large amount of imaginary money to run along its streets and peer into its shops.)

Continue reading The City of Ember, by Jeanne DuPrau (2003) E

The Woman in the Wall, by Patrice Kindl (1998) E

Date read: 3.22.06
Book from: Borrowed from Kakaner
Reviewer: Emera

book-kindl-woman

Rendered nearly invisible by her painful shyness, Anna is the middle girl of three sisters living with their mother in a rambling Victorian home. At seven years old, terrified by the impending threat of school, she retreats into passageways and secret rooms of her own construction, and lives within the walls of her home for the next seven and a half years. Anna is content to hide away as a sort of household ghost, nearly forgotten by even her family, until her own growth as a woman renders her “invisibility” no longer possible. A stray love note pushed through the walls of her refuge appeals to her developing emotions, and the time approaches for Anna to once more venture into the outside world.

I randomly spotted The Woman in the Wall on Kakaner’s bookshelf at some point around when we first began exchanging reading material on a regular basis, and the premise deeply appealed to me since I’m a. sorta shy and b. obsessed with secret nooks and passageways, to the point that a home-within-a-home sounds right up my alley. Even outside of my particular quirks, the concept is an emotionally powerful and imaginatively appealing one.

Unfortunately, Kindl’s writing isn’t up to the task. Although the book aims for a wistful, playful mix of Gothic fairy tale and magical realism, it increasingly dissolves into a weepy, unconvincing pastiche, with the narration lurching between “artsy,” “quirky” whimsy and banal adolescent histrionics. Too much pretension (or, more charitably, ambition), not enough substance. Though Anna’s story could have been a moving modern fairy tale about escapism and self-isolation, The Woman in the Wall more often seems clumsy, superficial, and implausible.

Go to:
Patrice Kindl

Nurk, by Ursula Vernon (2008) E

Date read: 2.18.09
Book from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

Nurk, a timid but sensible shrew, one day receives an urgent letter addressed to his famous grandmother Surka, the warrior, pirate queen, and general adventurer. Unfortunately, no one has seen Surka for seasons, and so Nurk packs Surka’s diary and some clean socks into his trusty snailboat, and heads off in search of adventure for the first time in his life. Dragonfly royalty in distress, perilous climes, and strange beasts aplenty await him.

I’ve been a huge fan of Ursula Vernon for years now, both of her vibrant, wildly imaginative artwork – she created the cover and interior illustrations for Nurk, of course – and of her equally weird and hilarious life and writing, as seen in her blog.

Nurk is her first mainstream published book, and is par for the Vernon course, combining a deeply practical, deeply likable hero (à la the protagonist of her long-running webcomic Digger, in which grandmother Surka is a character) with earthy wit, tooth-shattering cuteness, quick pacing, and occasional jolts of very enjoyable, very deeply creepy imagery. As a sampler: unripe salmon growing on trees; silent, voracious, cow-sized caterpillars…

Though for an adult reader, the plot is rather unmemorable (predictable twists, there-and-back-again structure), the individual elements are sufficiently weird and entertaining to make it worth the read. I do wish I knew some young persons of an age to be suitably gifted with it. Well, in a couple of years some of my cousins will be thereabouts, and in the meantime, it’s a quick, fun, slightly twisted adventure for readers of any age.

Go to:
Ursula Vernon

“New Envoy’s Old Advice for Children: Read More”

Katherine Paterson has been appointed the Library of Congress’s National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature:

“New Envoy’s Old Advice for Children: Read More” (via the New York Times)

Hooray! And a lovely, Matilda-ish quotation from Paterson:

As the daughter of missionary parents in China, she read her way through her parents’ library of children’s classics by A. A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame and Frances Hodgson Burnett. “That is where the friends were,” she said, evoking her lonely childhood.

Also, raise your hand if you cried when you read The Bridge to Terabithia. (On a side note, I’ve heard that the 2007 movie was actually quite good – it was simply very poorly marketed, as its trailers appeared to have confused both fans and those unfamiliar with it.) I also cried A Lot when I read The Great Gilly Hopkins and Jacob Have I Loved, and I’m pretty sure also during Of Nightingales that Weep.

– E

Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville (2007) K

Date Read: 3.31.07
Book From: Personal Collection
Reviewer: Kakaner

Summary

Deeba and Zanna begin to experience strange phenomena until suddenly, one day, they find themselves in the alternate universe of Unlondon. Here they find that Unlondon has been waiting for a long time for Zanna, the “Shwazzy,” to fight the evil Smog, an evil cloud of pollution. However, things are not what they seem when events contradict the prophecies and Deeba is forced to fight the Smog on her own.

Review

I MISS BEING 12.

I have a feeling that if I read this while in middle school, I would have deemed Un Lun Dun The Best Book Evar. The book is incredibly reminiscent of Phantom Tollbooth, chock full of strange realizations of imagination, each a quirky interpretation of something we find in our reality. There’s not much to say plot-wise… the bulk of content was simply the adventure and development of Unlondon and numerous characters, a delightful afternoon romp for the appreciative reader.

As I organized my thoughts for this review, I remembered the China Miéville event I attended at which I saw him speak about Un Lun Dun and the entire YA genre with vivid boyish excitement, and the memory is coloring my opinions of Un Lun Dun with much fondness. I crushed hard on the fact that so much of the humor and wit in Un Lun Dun was derived from references and puns concerning books. Some pun examples, though not necessarily book-related, are the Black Window, Unbrellas, and Bookaneers! But most of the circumstantial humor was centered around books, and made me suspect that Un Lun Dun was really a huge elaborate scheme to write a book to promote the message: “BOOKS ARE TEH SH*T!” and it made me extremely happy.

Unfortunately, I actually don’t consider Un Lun Dun a must-read. But if you’re a die hard Miéville fan, definitely check it out. The main character is very likeable, and it is an insanely easy read with maximum 4-page chapters. To top it all off, you get to see Miéville‘s very own original illustrations. There’s nothing better (or sometimes worse) than observing an author treading new ground, and Mieville does so quite expertly. There is indeed a deep understanding of the YA psyche and which elements excite the imagination.

Go to:
China Miéville
Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville (2007) E