Review: The Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Lani Taylor.

What You Need to Know:  This urban fantasy is is an amazing, trope- twisting read, and one of my Best Books of 2011.

Summary:  Karou, a blue haired art student living in Prague, lives a double life. Most of the time, she lives like any other college kid, hanging with friends, dating and learning.  What her friends don't know is that Karou's family is a race of half-human/half-animal chimera, lead by Brimstone, a powerful wizard.  Brimstone grants wishes to humans who visit him, and receives payment in teeth.    She illustrates her family  in her sketchbook, capturing her strangely beautiful family in near lifelike detail.  Karou mostly keeps her two worlds separate, except when she is called to do errands by Brimstone. However, when strange hand-shaped burn marks appear on the portals to Brimstone's world, and angelic creatures appear all over the globe, Karou's life changes forever.

What Worked:  This book is amazing.  Beautiful descriptions of Prague, descriptions of a reasonably normal teenage life, and fantastic creatures and happenings work together beautifully to create a seamless, engaging narrative.

What amazed me most about this book is that it managed to surprise me.  Using familiar ideas -- a human raised by monsters, angels, star crossed lovers, a mystical war -- Taylor spun an unexpected and engrossing tale.  It's not my first time at the rodeo, so a fantasy book that brings something new, that keeps me guessing, gets high marks.  Also, this is one book where the romance felt organic and necessary.

Karou is a wonderful character:  funny, tough, talented.   However, she is not inhumanly perfect -- she makes mistakes, takes stupid risks, acts selfishly.   She's a refreshing change from the doormats and Mary Sues that populate teen fantasy romances.

What Didn't:  Honestly, not much.  Some of the supporting characters may be a little thin, but this book is about Karou, and that's where the focus stays.

However -- that cover is terrible -- yes, it makes sense in context, but it's generic and bland.

Who Would I Give this Book To?  Everybody.  Seriously.  There's enough rich world building here to keep fantasy fans interested, enough romance to captivate a Twihard, and the writing quality is strong enough to win over the most dedicated literary fiction fan.

Chime by Franny Billingsley

What You Need to Know:  This beautifully written steampunkish fairy tale is an antidote to cookie cutter supernatural romances, and one of my best books of 2011. 


Summary:  Briony Larkin is 17 years old and a witch.  She knows that she is evil;  responsible for her sister Rose's mental difficulties.  However, she must care for Rose and that means keeping her ability to hear the Old Ones a secret.  The Old Ones call to Briony, and beg her to tell their stories. 


But the world is changing, and engineers plan to drain the swamp.  This angers the Old Ones, and in retaliation, the children of Swampsea are stricken with a deadly cough.  When Rose takes ill, Briony knows she must do whatever it takes to save her.  Adding to Briony's troubles is Larkin, the charming son of the an engineer, who is determined to puzzle out Briony's secrets.  


What Worked:  Billingsley is one of the most engaging and skillful writers I have ever read.  This book is all about journey -- there are no real surprises here.  However, Billingsley takes familiar tropes and skews them, twisting her story so that plot is secondary to the rich world building and vibrant characterizations.  Swampsea, like Lyra's Jordan, is a world just left of our own, where magic is real and modernity bumps up uncomfortably against the old ways.  The Old Ones of the Swamp, with few exceptions, are dangerous, but not sinister, and Briony's connection to them seems organic and real.  Briony herself is one of the most fully realized characters I've come across.  Unlike many heroines, she is not inhumanly perfect, not a blank Mary Sue, but a real girl, in extraordinary circumstances, trying to do the right thing.  The supporting cast is equally well drawn, from the perplexing Rose to the engaging boy-man Larkin.  Briony and Larkin's romance is sweet and believable, not fairy tale perfect.  


The first word that pops to mind when discussing Chime is beautiful.  Beautiful language, beautiful setting, beautiful story.  


What Didn't:  It's hard for me to find a flaw here.  I do think that the cover of the book fails to do it justice, as the blandly pretty goth-child pictured here comes nowhere close to embodying Briony's spirit and passion.


P.S. -- I read this book in ARC, and then listened to the audiobook with my daughter.   In someways, the audiobook is superior to the novel, as Susan Duerden does a masterful reading, and brings Billingsley's language to life. 

Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly

* Note:  I'm trying a new format for the reviews, so this may look a little different.

What You Need to Know:  Revolution is a historical fiction book with a twist.  This is the story of a very modern, very screwed up girl who finds inspiration and hope in the diary of a girl who lived and died during the French Revolution.  Beautifully written and engrossing, I consider this one of the best books of 2010. 

Summary: Following the death of her little brother, Andi's life has fallen apart.  Her dad has split, her mom's gone crazy and Andi only survives due to medication and her music.  When Andi's mom is hospitalized, Andi is forced to go to Paris with her dad.  There she finds the diary of Alexandrine, a girl who lived during the French Revolution.  Alexandrine was a performer, who was a special companion of the Dauphin, the heir to the throne of France.  When the Revolution comes, and Louis-Charles is imprisoned, Alexandrine risks everything to give him what comfort she can.  As Andi becomes more engrossed in Alexandrine's story, the two girls' lives begin to converge in surprising ways.

What Worked:  Donnelly has a special gift, for instructing her reader with out lecturing them.  Although I had a pretty good background in the French Revolution, I learned without realizing it, as the information is seamlessly integrated into the story, not dumped in big chunks of exposition.   Donnelly also humanizes her historical characters, so that they are just as flawed and sympathetic as the characters she creates, not dusty cardboard cutouts.  Those two things -- history lessons disguised as narrative and stock characters  -- are two of my biggest beefs with historical fiction, and both are avoided here.

The amount of craft in this book is truly amazing, so many different threads -- the fate of Alexandrine, the implosion of Andi's family, the causes of the Revolution, musical DNA, the Paris catacombs, depression, survivor's guilt, art, The Divine Comedy -- all come together to weave a compelling and engrossing story.  Yes, at 500 pages, there is a lot of book here, but it doesn't feel overlong or padded.  The length is necessary for the complex tale.

What Didn't:  Personally, I could have lived without the love story angle.  I know from interviews that Donnelly took a lot of inspiration from The Divine Comedy and wanted to show an artist traveling through their version of hell with a guide.  Andi's Virgil is so smoking hot and wonderful, how could she not fall in love with him?  However, I'm not sure it worked.  I also felt like Donnelly was trying to make some paralells between the climate during the Revolution and the treatment of refugees in modern Paris that never really came off.  

However: These are quibbles, overall there wasn't much wrong here.

Who I Would Give this Book to:  Kids who share Andi's love of music.  Girls who like historical fiction.  Boys who would be intersted in the bloody Revolution.

Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver

Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver.

Sam Kingston didn't expect to die.  Not on the way home from a party, in a car accident, slightly buzzed from the vodka she and her girls have been shooting.  But die she does.

And then she wakes up, on the morning of the day of her death, to live it all over again.  And again. And again.  Seven times in all, till she learns to put things right.

I'll be honest, I put this book off.  Nothing about the premise appealed to me, however, it was considered a Printz contender and was named on the 2011 Best Fiction for Young Adults list.  More importantly, some of my co-workers read it, and liked it.  So, I dove in.

This book represents an interesting conundrum for me -- how to acknowledge the craft of a book, and  talk about it, without liking it.  Because, while I admire Oliver's writing and the skill she brought to her story, I had a strong visceral dislike for the book.  Mostly because of the main character.

To put it bluntly, Sam is a bitch.  The worst kind of mean girl, in my opinion.  She's not the instigator of any of the myriad cruelties and taunts that she and her crew hand out, but she always goes along.  She's not vile or despicable, just weak.  What makes her worse than the alpha girl she slavishly follows, is that she knows what they do is wrong.  She occasionally has twinges of remorse, but she manages to drown them in sea of consumerism and alcohol.

I'll freely admit, my perspective is skewed by my experience.  Girls like Sam made my life miserable.  Girl on girl social aggression gets me all steamed up, and it seems to begin earlier and earlier.  While reading Before I Fall I wasn't concerned with if Sam would find redemption, but with how I could keep my daughter from turning into a girl like her, or becoming one of her victims*.

Putting that aside is difficult, and I have to say, my dislike for Sam made it hard for me to engage with the story.  However, I can say that Oliver writes beautifully.  She manages to take you inside Sam's life, to help you understand how she became what she is.  For me, that understanding didn't engender sympathy, but, I can see how it could.  The poetic turns of phrase and the small, quiet moments that pepper Sam's struggle are what kept me engaged.  Oliver also has a keen understanding of teens, their relationships and how small, random things are what bind friends together.

Since I didn't like Sam, I didn't want to spend much time with her, so for me, this book is overlong.  About midway through, I wanted to scream "It's not about YOU!"  I'm also not sure that Sam evolved that much through the course of the book; in the end, I still felt like Sam was seeking for herself, not for others as she had claimed.  However, with a character like this, you can only expect so much growth.

One of my benchmarks for a successful teen book is: can I imagine the teen I would hand this book too?  With Before I Fall this is an easy task.  I can totally see teen girls with a taste for romance and melodrama devouring this one.  The length might put some readers off, but girls like Sam, or who wish they were, will eat it up.