The Unsettling: When Books Become Bothersome (Part One)

Sweet cover too, I might add

Towards the end of one of my university classes, we read Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The book is something of a classic within the Young Adult literary canon, in as much as the discipline has one. YA is still very young as a distinct category, but if there are "foundation" works, Alexie's is surely one of them. The book is semi-autobiographical and deals with issues of race and poverty in the life of a young boy growing up in the Pacific Northwest on the Spokane Indian Reservation.

I knew from the moment I finished the book that I'd read something powerful and wonderful, but when I got to class, I still couldn't shake the feeling of being deeply rattled by it. I piped into the discussion a few times, but the bulk of my thoughts about the book waited until after class when I was talking to one of my friends.  I asked her one thing in particular that was really bothering me.

"Where's the closest reserve to Pittsburgh?"

She paused and thought for a moment. "You know, I'm not sure," she said at last. "I think probably upstate New York. There aren't any nearby."

At that point it clicked as to why, though I enjoyed the book, it hurt in a more personal way than it seemed to strike my East Coast classmates. I knew where Spokane was. I could point to it on a map. And further to that, I had friends and family who had lived through situations similar to the ones portrayed by the book. Of course I had other friends of First Nations decent who lead very different lives, but those who had experienced similar trials to Alexie's autobiographical main character weighed on my mind that night. It had been, for a moment, too close for comfort.

It wasn't until after talking through the book with my friend that I really came to an opinion on it. I love the book now. It's both profoundly tragic and hopeful. It's funny and serious. It's also deeply unsettling.

I don't think that was an accident. Alexie's story was not only something intensely personal, but also one that a lot of people in North America have the luxury of ignoring. There are very few reserves in the Eastern United States compared to the West, and so - tragically, but understandably - First Nations issues are rarely top of mind for a lot of city slickers (and believe me, I can be guilty of this too).

I certainly don't think I had the market cornered on being unsettled by the book. A number of my classmates were. They expressed how glad they were that the book existed, because even though the story took place in America, it was so beyond their experience.  Perhaps the best thing about it is that it's a book that prompts questions, which I think is exactly what Alexie wanted. It's the kind of book that demands to be talked about. I'm not sure you could read it and then go "aw, ain't that nice?" and move on to make a cup of tea.

There are often two competing horses trying to pull your chariot in art. One is trying to point out what's wrong with the world and the other just wants to have fun. I've seen them characterized as escapism versus realism, but that has never seemed right to me. Cat videos on youtube are highly escapist, but their humor completely depends on their realism. (SEE? Cats really ARE that dumb!) To me, the real dichotomy is whether or not a book is escapism or... unsettlism. (Can that be a thing now? I want to coin a phrase. Let's make that a thing.)

Art can either comfort and entertain you or prod you to DO something. Maybe think or empathize or vote or something! Just something! An unsettling book is one that does not want you to "relax" but to wake up. An escapist one wants to entertain you and make you happy. It doesn't care what you do next. Granted, most art tries to achieve a mixture of both. Something that offers no call to action can seem trifling and unimportant while something that gives us no entertaining escape can become so unpleasant, we want nothing more than to toss it across the room.

Alexie accomplishes a fair degree of balance in his novel. The story falls more on the "unsettling" side of the spectrum, but it's offset by a bunch of funny pictures and a humorous narrative voice. He offers the reader that "spoonful of sugar" to go with the medicine.

Still, I've been thinking lately about a pair of other books that did not walk the line so neatly as the The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian did. (I mean, just look at the title. It screams non-committal!) They're both older books, and they both firmly planted their feet on either side of the dichotomy.

They are:

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

One of these books I love. One of these books I hate. But I'm (grudgingly) starting to admit to myself that both have been incredibly important in my development as both a reader and a writer.

So the next post I put out is going to deal with Jerome and his rampant silliness. Following that, I'll tackle Hardy and the depress-fest that is Tess. Maybe by the time I talk this one through, my opinion of it will improve.

So stay tuned, readers! And in case you were waiting for the final word, yes! Consider The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian heartily recommended.

How "real" is fiction? Or: Why you don't want me to base a character on you

A few weeks ago I spent an evening at the mall. I didn't have much to do there and so, like a lot of bored people at the mall, I people-watched. Since I write primarily for children and young adults, it goes without saying that those two groups tend to entertain me the most. This was thrown in particularly sharp focus when one teenager approached me and asked, "Excuse me Ma'am, do you know what the time is?"

I am not yet in my thirties. By most accounts, I have a long way to go before I truly reach "Ma'am" status, but nonetheless, this really entertained me. It drilled home how differently we see people at sixteen versus ten years later. I posted this online, along with some tongue-in-cheek observations about "teen" fashion, and received some entertaining feedback from friends and family.

One of the people who commented was a close family friend,  one of my mother's very best friends. She jokingly said that if I ever wanted to write a character who showcased the sensible attire of adulthood, I could base that person on her. The question hit perilously close to home because, you see, I don't really base characters on people that I know. It really is true that for those of us who write fiction, the vast majority of what we write about is flat out "made-up." If we were really interested in faithfully reproducing reality, we would write non-fiction.

But of course....

There are exceptions.

But what are they? How does real life influence fiction and how, in particular, do the people we know end up in the books that we write? I'll be speaking primarily for myself here, but given the conversations I've had with a lot of fiction authors, I think these are some common trends. Certainly some authors write their own lives, thinly veiled as fiction, but most of us don't.

Izzy, Sandra, DeeAnne and Chireen, a few of my "realest" characters

One of the main reasons I think people ask if I've ever based a character on them or someone else we know, is because, instinctively, we know almost all art comes from a place of lived reality. The easiest setting for me to write about is the west coast of Canada. I spend less time second guessing myself when I write from a female perspective than when I write from a male one. I have a deep knowledge of the myriad ways someone can point out to another person that they are short.

But at the same time, I don't want my stories to be populated by no one but short, Canadian women. I don't want my characters to all be white, either. Or cat lovers. Or artsy-fartsy. So where do we turn for inspiration when we want a more diverse cast?

If your answer was "real life" then yes! You are right! But on the whole, writers don't zero in on specific people and decide to rewrite them. Most of what I've learned from my friends, families, coworkers, acquaintances, and random people on the street gets taken in, digested and regurgitated in a less than familiar format. Most of the time, I'm not even aware of any similarities between the characters I've written with the people in my life. On occasion, though, I will look at someone more critically and go, "wow. That reminds me of so-and-so."

The most common place this occurs is with the families I write. When I started my current project, Rift Runners (see the Current Projects tab above if you're curious) I had been living away from my older sister for several years, missed her terribly, but was also rather excited that we now both lived in cities out East, so that meant we'd probably get to see each other at Thanksgiving. This spilled over into the central relationship of the story, which revolves around a pair of sisters, told from the younger one's perspective, though I didn't see the parallels until I was well into the story.

Of all the people who have wormed their way into my manuscripts, probably no one has turned up more than my mother. Little pieces of our relationship are sewn everywhere. Every fierce, protective, loving character I've ever written hearkens back to my Mum. But it isn't all rosy, either. The great thing about parents is that no matter how much you love them and how well you get along, you are guaranteed to have fought with them at some point. And since conflict is absolutely necessary for plot, it's pretty fair to say that my arguments with her turn up. But the stakes change. Instead of the topic being unfinished homework, it becomes a life and death scenario - something I don't think my mum and I would actually argue about. But that's the thing about basing something on real life. Only aspects of real life experience might be useful and, odds are, I'm going to have to push it to a further extreme in order to get something that works for the stories I'm writing.

In fact, if I can think of a reason that people should hope they are NOT in my stories is because of that point I made earlier. Fiction requires drama and conflict. The majority of the characters will not be the protagonist. All the other characters exist to bring either drama or conflict to the plot. So if you were a character in my novel, you would need to be ready to be misunderstood, have your worse qualities showcased or, if you do happen to be a lovely, nice person, you'd end up fulfilling your obligation to cause conflict by getting sick or blowing up or something (I write a lot of sci-fi and fantasy. People blow up. It's true.). Obviously these are not hard and fast rules, and all characters need to be well-rounded, but it's not a pleasant scenario. It's for these reasons that I don't actively look for real life counterparts for my characters. I don't want to make my friends look bad and I don't want to blow them up. I like them too much.

Also, I desperately want to avoid what I imagine would be this conversation:

"Yes, this character is based on you, but NO! Of course I don't think of you like that! No, don't worry. It's just made up.... seriously, don't worry. That's not what I meant by based on you. I meant, like... I took your hair, your birth date and your strained relationship with your aunt and wrote a book about it."

But there are exceptions. In a few instances, I have used real people as a jumping off point for characters I've written. I'll list a few examples below:

1) Nolan Ciora - a plucky, trade caravan leader struggling to hide that he's half-elf in a very pro-human world.
Based on: I spent a summer working in a garden center where I had a coworker whose name was Nolan. I made up "fake" Nolan within a couple days of meeting the real one, largely because I loved the impression I got of my new coworker and didn't want to know him well before writing out my own interpretation. Fake Nolan was never meant to be a faithful retelling of Real Nolan. Instead, all I know for certain is that they share some similar surface details - name, aspects of appearance, general pluckiness. Any of Fake Nolan's inner motives and daemons are entirely made up, because Real Nolan and I only knew each other for a few months and never worked in the same department. It was a pleasant acquaintanceship and no more. I don't even know Real Nolan's last name.

2) Izzy, Sandra, DeeAnne and Chireen - I once wrote a play largely based on my experience of being a young, single lady and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. These girls were the protagonists.
Based on: Because it was a play and I have a lot of friends who love theater, the four main characters were designed not so much to resemble my friends in personality, but to resemble the types of characters I could see them doing a good job of playing. But there were a couple of inside jokes thrown in for good measure. DeeAnne is a girl waiting for her boyfriend to come home from his mission and when I started writing the play, one of my friends had a boy on a mission as well. Their personalities, however, are VERY different. Of course, there were aspects of the various Mormons I know sewn into the whole play, but I don't think any of the characters were a retread of people I knew on any deep level.

3) Kenton Adler - A minor character. The younger brother of one of my protagonists.
Based on: While I was living in Pittsburgh, a friend of mine invited me and some other people over to watch some movies. I arrived late, but underestimated just how late everyone else would be. The host wasn't even home when I got there. I rang the doorbell and my friend's roommate - whom I had never met before - barreled down the stairs to open the door... wearing nothing but a towel. He'd been in the shower, knew his roommate was expecting people and profusely apologized for greeting me nearly nude. I wish I could say there was a deeper story beyond that - that we went on to star in a screwball romantic comedy or something. Life doesn't give you a lot of moments like that. But in truth, we never met again after that awkward encounter that night. But it was so funny and so entertaining to me, that I thought I would honor it by naming a minor character after him. Once again, I don't know Real Kenton's last name. Regrettably, it would not be appropriate for Fake Kenton to show up half naked in a story, as Fake Kenton is a thirteen-year old boy and guys, that would be gross.

So as you can see, most of these stories involve people who I either don't know well or I was only grabbing aspects of them. I honestly can only think of one time, where I took a look at my plot and what it needed and said to myself, "you know, what this story needs is a person like..."

4) Patience Lyle - The leader of the Rift Runners, an undercover, anti-government, morally ambiguous group of revolutionaries.
Based on: You might remember I started this post by telling a story about watching teenagers at the mall, and this prompting a joke from one of my mother`s longtime friends. A joke about me basing a character on her. Someone sensible and comfortable with her own age. From anyone else, I would have laughed or shrugged and been done with it. But as luck would have it, this woman was the one and only person I can point to from whom I consciously crafted a character.

Creating Patience was an odd experience for this reason. I certainly took liberties with the character`s personality and, again, didn't try to hem close to anything that actually had happened. But whenever I needed further insight for writing Patience, I thought back to the woman who inspired her. More than anything, there was a certain "feel" to the character I wanted to recapture. Patience is an intense person, with a level of power to her persona that leaves you constantly playing catch-up. And this was just how my Mum's close friend made me feel, especially when I was a teen. She was smart. She spoke French. She taught high-school, which to me seemed to be one of the most terrifying occupations in existence.

She still is all those things, incidentally. But when I was younger and still trying to make sense of how adults fit into this world as people - as fully fledged, flawed human beings - she was one of the few adults beyond my parents I had the freedom to really examine and think about. She didn't engage me as a simple kid, the way some of my friend's parents did, but as a reasonable, near-adult. I think that came from teaching in schools. Kids and teenagers can tell when someone is lying to them or tippy-toeing around the truth, and she never did that. She shot straight. To this day, I love that about her.

And so perhaps it's little wonder she turned up in my writing. In Rift Runners, Patience is one of the first adults the protagonist, a teen-aged girl named Shasta, really has to make sense of outside of her family. A lot is riding on that relationship and, as Patience leads a group of rebels rather than a classroom, the dramatic stakes are considerably higher.

As the years have gone by and I've transitioned from near-adult to actual-adult, the way I relate to my mother's friends has changed. But this woman is one I still feel close to and we now enjoy a camaraderie that grows as the age ratio separating us narrows bit by bit. I've often felt nervous about admitting to her that she's in my work. Patience certainly doesn't escape the pitfalls of being a character who isn't the protagonist. She's misunderstood and misrepresented through Shasta's narrow point of view. Patience's portrayal in Rift Runners is not meant as the be-all-and-end-all version of the character herself. You can only imagine how far that representation is from the person she was based on. I wish I didn't have to give Patience such a raw deal, but the story isn't hers. It's Shasta's.

Regardless, I love Patience. She's one of my favorite characters in the whole story. And since some day I'm sure she'll read one of my books, I might as well fess-up now and say, thank you, Liane Lyle. I can say without reservation that my writing would be less if not for you.

The Hunger Games and the rule of “Show, Don’t tell”

Welcome to my series on speculative fiction! For it, I will be focusing on three different series of books, highlighting three different lessons that readers (and writers) can learn from some of the best science fiction writers in the business. Since whole series are taken into account, I won’t be focusing much on plots, but rather on what unique lesson we can learn from each series as a whole. Also, beware of spoilers, and enjoy the second entry, The Hunger Games.

The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games

To begin with, a disclaimer: I love The Hunger Games. I’ve brought the books up frequently on this blog because I love them so much, especially the first. I love Katniss. I love Peeta. When I first read the series, I was just beginning to come out of a phase where I hardly read anything for pleasure. I’d been too swamped down by school reading and it had sucked the joy out of the written word for me for a time. The Hunger Games was an important part of breaking that cycle and for that, I will always love these books.

I say this because the point of this blog post is basically to give the third book of the series, Mockingjay, a whole lot of crap.

The thing is, whatever I accuse The Hunger Games of, I think Suzanne Collins and her books can take it. They’re good and they’re wildly successful. Nothing I say is going to hurt them, but possibly there are some good pieces of constructive criticism I can offer that might point to where the strengths and weaknesses of the series are, because they definitely speak to common issues that plague most writers and so a great deal of fiction.

To begin, the rule of “show, don’t tell.”

There are a few “writing rules” that get passed around in the community. Some have catchy little names like “murder your darlings.” Others are more to the point like “cut your adverbs.” Both of those rules apply during the editing stage of writing, and so you rarely think about them in a first draft. But if there’s one “rule” that is necessary to think about at every stage of the writing process, it’s “show, don’t tell.”

This “rule” is essentially a reminder that readers don’t want to be “told” something, but rather, “shown” it. What is meant by that? Let’s take the first novel in the Hunger Games series as an example. Katniss spends the first half of the book confused as to what Peeta’s motives are and why he is being kind towards her. Most of his kindness she misinterprets as somehow self interested – he’s only kind to Haymitch because he wants favoritism. He’s only kind to her to weaken her resolve. However, the reader is able to watch his actions and reinterpret them. By the time Katniss realizes his sincerity, Suzanne Collins has already given us pages and pages of compelling evidence that Peeta is kind and good and worth saving.

One of the reasons this is such a powerful example of “showing” rather than “telling” is because Collins is using the shown aspect of the story to undermine what is being said explicitly by her narrator, Katniss. Ultimately, the things that we are “shown” turn out to be truer than what was explicitly stated.

For another example, look at the way Collins describes the action in the first book. Every horror Katniss experiences, the reader follows along in step. She doesn’t say things like “I hallucinated because of the trackerjacker venom” but rather, we get to watch her hallucinations in real time. We watch her lose her hearing in her ear. We watch a fire ball explode onto her jacket. Over and over again, the reader is right next to her as horrible things happen to her.

And this is incredibly important to the story. Katniss is not a particularly “likable” person. She’s prickly and short tempered. She holds people at a distance. She’s bad at expressing feelings other than annoyance. But she is resilient. That resilience is incredibly compelling, and as a reader, we feel it every time she pulls herself through another horrific tragedy. Despite her sour disposition, it’s so hard not to empathize with her and root for her. Because haven’t we all felt that way? Put upon and beaten down, but determined to still keep going? It’s a situation we yearn to identify with, because at those moments, we are our best selves. And for all Katniss’s weaknesses, she is someone who keeps fighting no matter the cost.

But something unfortunate happens in the third and final book in the series, and I think it’s one of the biggest weaknesses the entire trilogy has. I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the final book. I’ll list a few potential problems:

1) The pacing felt so slow. It took forever for anything to actually happen.

2) The story felt kind of dark and pointless. Too many people died.

3) Katniss seemed like she’d just kind of given up. This isn’t the Katniss I loved.

These were all things I complained about too in one form or another, but I don’t think any of them is the problem. As I reread the book this past semester, I realized something. First, the pacing isn’t that bad. There actually is quite a lot going on in the book. It just doesn’t make an impact. Second, most of the deaths do make sense from a story telling perspective. They just don’t resonate. Third, Katniss is still fighting the capitol. She has her moments of doubt, but they aren’t that extreme, when you consider everything she’s going through. But for some reason, she just feels whiney.

In fact, all of these issues have the same root cause: Collins, who so excelled in showing rather than telling in the first book, forgot to SHOW us what everything was like any more.

Think again about the scene with the trackerjackers in the first book. The reader spends a long time with Katniss after the wasps sting her. She stumbles around, grabs arrows, sees a strange vision of Peeta, starts hallucinating out of control and, by the time she finally collapses, is convinced ants are digging through her eyes and she’s landed in a pile of bubbles. It is trippy as Pink Elephants on Parade. Similarly, when Rue dies, we watch her sing, decorate the body, pay tribute to District Eleven, go through the motions of staying alive and then snap in shock when she realizes she also killed Marvel that day.

Now let’s look at some transitions from the third book.

1) Katniss finds out District 12 has been bombed! Her reaction is – never mind, fade to black. We’ll start the third book a month later when she’s had time to process.

2) Katniss is terrible in front of the camera! We can tell because... because... because Collins says she is.

3) Peeta lunges at Katniss! Her reaction is – hey look! She’s waking up in the hospital a while later! We’ll talk about the strangulation with distance now.

4) Katniss is shot in Disctrict 2! Her reaction is – whoops, nope! We’re back at the hospital. Glad that’s over.

5) PRIM BLEW UP IN FRONT OF KATNISS! This must merit an intense reaction! This must mean – wait? We’re fading to black again? You mean we aren’t going to be with Katniss in the first minutes, then hours after Prim’s death?

Does this look at all like a pattern? In some books, this might not have been a problem. Some books thrive on emotional distance and making the horrific seem trivial by making it seem small. But that was never the angle of The Hunger Games. Our empathy for Katniss is largely derived by how real and immediate her danger feels. But over and over again in the third book, the audience is being kept out of her most traumatic moments.

Remember how in the first book, you wanted to cry for poor Katniss when they said she won the games, but at the sight of Peeta being taken away in a hovercraft she beat against the doors trying to get to him? Remember how she almost passed out from dehydration? For every emotional and physical trauma she suffered, we were there right with her.

The trauma is still there. Collins is still telling us that Katniss has been strangled and shot and devastated. But we’re not there with her through crucial points in those events. One or two “fade to black” moments wouldn’t have been so bad, but there are several. Any time the story got messy, Suzanne Collins backed us up out of the deep, immersed perspective of Katniss’s immediate reactions to her surroundings.

Now, you’ll notice that one of my observations was that the third book seemed dark, and my suggestions are, on some level, to actually make it darker. To show the pain. But I do think it would have helped, because it would have made it so the darker parts of the story didn’t seem needless. If we had been made to feel the pins Katniss walked on, we would have been glad to walk with her. We would have never told her she was complaining too much. We would have reached out to comfort her when her sister died. And at the end, when she finally finds the will to move past that grief, the relief would have been all the sweeter.

Again, I think the whole series is wonderful. There’s so much I could point to that Collins did well. And the ending is dark. I think perhaps she wanted to spare us from it. But ultimately, the honesty she showed before about Katniss’s pain was what we needed then. We needed to be there with her and feel the weight of just what she lost.

Writerly News: Why you wish you were taking Seriated Speculative Fiction

It's been a bit longer than I'd hoped between blog posts, mostly due to technical difficulties.

I own a laptop, (I call it Critter) that is mighty in soul but not in body. Critter's actual computer-y components work fine. It's just exceptionally fragile and prone to crumbling. When I first received Critter, it got so excited it's hinges started bursting apart. With some creativity and a few coats of glue, we've managed to weather a few years without any major incidents, but the end of this summer proved to be the time when Critter threw in the towel. Once again, the inner computer worked fine, but the metal that joins the power cord and the inner computer decided to break and pop out after I did a whole lot of nothing to it.

Luckily, the laptop doctors managed to fix Critter up and Critter has since returned home, slathered in a fresh coat of glue (seriously. There is additional glue on my computer. Along with replacing the part that broke, they generously squirted more glue on Critter) and humming away happy as ever.

This all happened just in time for my Twitter account to malfunction and lock itself up for several weeks. So while I could finally write again, I had limited options for alerting people of blog updates. Mercifully, the account is back to normal again. So I now have a healthy computer and a healthy connection to the my interwebs "presence" (such as it is).

At the same time, the usual September business engulfed me as I moved to a new job and, even more importantly, into the final semester of course work for my Masters degree! It feels very exciting and I've worked towards this for a long time. So hurray. :)

As my writing life is once again being dictated by course work, I thought it might be fun to switch up some of my posts to reflect what I'm working on, especially since my final classes are SO COOL!!!

Due to the fact that I am currently working with my school by distance, my final course is something of a self-directed study. It's half literature/readings course and half writing/workshop seminar and since I'm the only student, its somewhat tailored to my interests.

So what is this mystery class? (Other than fabulous, of course)

I have proudly and pretentiously titled it: Seriated Speculative Fiction

But what does that MEAN?? Well, to those uninitiated in the jargon of University Creative Writing, "seriated" means "something that comes in a series" and "speculative fiction" is basically code for "science-fiction and fantasy, but we're calling it something else because SERIOUS writers keep making fun of us for writing science-fiction and fantasy."

This is a pretty special kind of course to do. Most of the time in English literature courses, there are a lot of confines on what you do and don't have time for. I took a class in my first semester on English novels that prominently feature manor houses and use them as a thematic element. Yes, that sounds really specific, but there was still plenty that was being left out by the course. The novels were dense and we only had time for five. Also, it turns out a LOT of people have written novels about crumbling English manors. When you think about it in those terms, it's easy to see that I could have done a whole course on just Charles Dickens featuring manor houses as a strong thematic element. But of course, in order to do the topic justice, our teacher chose breadth and we read five different authors, just one book by each.

Last year I studied Young Adult literature, which was a fantastic course, but there the subject matter was even broader. We plowed through over a dozen novels for this course, but again, there was only time for one book by each author. This meant, for instance, that when we were covering the topic of science fiction and dystopia, our professor had us read The Hunger Games but neither of the books that followed. Frankly, it's difficult to make time for a series within a class, unless you're studying the work of a single, specific author. (Example: I took a course on August Wilson, one of Pittsburgh's favorite sons, and we read his entire Pittsburgh Century Cycle. But unless you're a two time Pulitzer winning playwrite, like Wilson, it's unlikely you'll get to read every work by a single author.)

But as a science fiction and fantasy writer, the topic of the "series" is a highly relevant topic for someone like me. Certainly there are stand alone novels within these genres, but a large number of the most "important" works within sci-fi and fantasy are series. With authors creating whole new worlds, isn't it natural to use those worlds for as many stories as possible? The pattern is obvious as early as The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia and not much has changed since.

On top of that, in my first year in my program, I wrote a sci-fi/fantasy novel, which I then had to put on the back burner so that I could finish my thesis the following year. But I'd confided to my thesis director that I did have ideas for a second book in the same series and she's been looking for an excuse to teach a course like this - one that focuses on how a series builds over time rather than as stand alone novels.

And so here I am! Studying the coolest thing ever and writing some of my own *ahem* seriated speculative fiction on the side. I'll be reading three full series for the course, each published relatively recently and each aimed at a different age group. And as I finish each, I plan on posting a few of my thoughts about the series as a whole and what can be learned from them. So for those reading along, the series are as follows!

As my middle grade series, I will be studying The Giver Quartet by Lois Lowry

Because reading it for YA lit clearly wasn't enough, my YA series will be The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins

And ending the year, I will tackle the adulty adultness of The MaddAddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood

I just finished up The Giver, so expect a follow up post to this one coming soon! Until then, happy seriated speculative fiction to all!

Book Reviews - The Night Gardener

The Night Gardener

With the potato famine in full, terrible glory, a pair of Irish siblings are destitute and looking for work. The jobs they finally secure at a crumbling English manor, deep in the ominously named Sourwoods, are their only way of staying out of an orphanage.

But the longer they stay in the house, the clearer it becomes that every bystander who warned them to avoid the road into the Sourwoods might have been right to be superstitious. Illness lurks inside the house and a stranger prowls the grounds at night.

And then there is the tree. The great, terrible, black tree, growing beside the manor house...

What makes it so good:

So I have a bit of a history with this book! This review is probably going to be part review, part self-indulgent reveling in the past. You have been warned!

I had just started attending classes at Chatham University. I was living the dream, studying what I'd wanted to since grade school. Creative writing. Better than that, creative writing, with my primary genre focus being writing for children and young adults.

One of my foundation classes was therefor in Children's Literature, taught by Jonathan Auxier. You might recognize him as the gent whose name is directly below the night gardener's feet on the  book's cover. At the time, this book was a year and a half away from release and Jonathan was knee-deep in revisions. And that, friends, is very deep. He's a tall man.

As a result, The Night Gardener was one of the first books I've ever had any insight into the "journey" of. As one of his students, we certainly weren't the ones giving critique and feedback on it in its infancy. We heard little snippets. What it was like working with an editor on a novel-in-progress, what writing a duel point-of-view novel meant. How important it was to start your second book as soon as possible after the release of your first.

And our reading list, it turns out, consisted of numerous titles that eventually made it into the author's note at the end of The Night Gardener - books like Something Wicked this way Comes and The Secret Garden. *coughI think someone might have had ulterior motives for making us read and discuss those bookscough*

But that's actually one of the reasons I wanted to cover this book now! On the heels of the earlier discussion of books that are "derived" from earlier sources rather than "derivative" of them, I thought it would be fun to discuss books that are very upfront about their literary influences and which can only be described as reveling in those connections.  The Night Gardener is among them.

I recently discussed with someone whether or not Gardener could be considered historical fiction. Certainly the history and the setting play into the richness of the story. And even the more fantastical, horror elements harken back to the Victoria era. As Auxier says in his own author's note, the era was one of rapid scientific discovery, but also fascination with the spiritual and occult, something The Night Gardener plays with.

But overall, I couldn't conclude that it was historical fiction. Usually the genre is interested in teaching something about the past as one of it's primary goals, and I never got the sense The Night Gardener held this as its motive. This book isn't trying to teach the reader something about the "facts" of the Victorian era - it's aiming to teach you about it's stories.

Among the characters are two story-tellers. First, the old Hester Kettle, a vagabond story teller who always seems to know more than she should, and second, one of novel's heroes, Molly. Only fourteen, Molly is still learning the difference between a story and a lie. 

That a story this steeped in literature and the history of children's books also comes with a satisfying element of horror meant that I loved the book. And this isn't bias speaking, either! This isn't Jonathan's first book, but in my humble opinion, it is his best. All the elements just came together beautifully - the horror, the old fashioned prose, the characters. It's all there. It's funny, touching and terrifying. I highly recommend it.

What might make it better:

This is a very, very long and very, very verbose children's book.

For me, it works. The reading level isn't easy, and while it's a quick read, it isn't as quick as some comparable books. To give an idea, Neil Gaiman is well known for his children's scary stories. Coraline, definitely a Middle Grade book, is only 30,000 words. The Graveyard Book sort of straddles the line between Middle Grade and Young Adult, and is around 67,000. Definitely on the longer end of Middle Grade, but okay for the anticipated audience. The Night Gardener clocks in at over 79,000 words. It also straddles the line between YA and MG, but I think it's pretty clear that for some kids, that's a lot of reading.

Tonally, it still reads like a Middle Grade book rather than YA, but with it's dark subject matter and hefty sentences, it's not going to be a breeze for all children. Still, I think it does fill a niche that a lot of people worry about in children's literature. I hear plenty of people who love books bemoan that we no longer get books for children like The Hobbit. They usually say something like this:

"When I was eleven, I read all of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books! I wanted to be challenged. These kids books today, they just aren't challenging. Have you read Twilight? Way too easy! Such bad writing."

First, I'm not saying that The Night Gardener necessarily bares a lot in common with The Hobbit or Twilight. It's just that most of my friends are sci-fi/fantasy nerds and they all somehow think it makes sense to compare epic fantasy to paranormal romance (it doesn't). I thought it had more in common with older books - ones like those by Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens which, again, people wished children read. Or were prepared to read. This is exactly the type of book that introduces the wonder and creepiness of the Victorian era to young readers.

Second, I don't personally believe that a book being an "easy" read or not is the same as whether or not it's good or bad. Charlotte's Web is a very easy book and its completely brilliant. But there is something to be said for a book that gets its beauty from its use of complex language. To give you an idea of what The Night Gardener challenges its reader with, I spent a lot of the book trying to remember what a dumbwaiter is.

Behold the dumbwaiter!

If you know what a dumbwaiter is, or if you know a child who would like to learn that sort of thing, then don't worry about the length or the words. I do feel the need to add  that the book IS creepy, scary and at times, down right violent. Nothing Auxier included felt gratuitous to me. Any horror story has to include some actual horror, but take that into account. It is shelved among the children's books and while it belongs there, and I'm glad of its presence, its scares are not to be taken lightly. Again, think Coraline and The Graveyard Book and Something Wicked this way Comes.

And in general, do read it. And think of the wonderful tradition of stories that it places itself a part of. Think of the history of books we draw from, and how we all derive something from that history.

Derived VS Derivative: In Defense of Divergent

Try saying that title ten times fast.

I went for the movie poster rather than book cover because THEO JAMES!!!

Today, I'm talking about Divergent by Veronica Roth. I'm also talking about story and influence and what makes an idea "new" vs "tired and done." This won't be the last time either, so stay tuned! Today, I'm focusing on a book that catches a lot of flack for bearing similarities to others on the market and making an argument for why it deserves the love it gets anyway.

For those who don't know Divergent, here's the quick rundown:

Beatrice Prior is a sixteen-year-old girl living in a futuristic, dystopian Chicago. She's been raised in a society where people are segregated based on what virtue they most strongly identify with, whether that virtue is courage, truthfulness, kindness etc. These segregated groups are called factions and Beatrice belongs to Abnegation, the faction that bases its identity around service. While she admires those she lives among, she also feels stifled by the high level of self-denial the Abnegation insist on.

She hopes her faction test will help her make some sense of these feelings, as her choosing ceremony is coming up and she'll have to decide whether she remains in her own faction or transfers to another one. But when her test results come up inconclusive and she is forced to confront the possibility that she doesn't belong to any one faction, her understanding of her world begins to unravel...

Okay, so there's my version of the dust-jacket blurb. It gives a decent idea of what the book is about, but there is a much shorter version of the Divergent blurb that could also be given:

Divergent is Harry Potter's Hogwarts houses recast in a gritty, Hunger Games-esque environment.

And honestly, it's not a bad description of the book either.

This is where Divergent has hit some snags and criticism. Hot on the heels of Hunger Games and featuring a story mechanic reminiscent of another recent kidlit sensation, many critics are dismissing Roth's series as derivative and phoned in. The premise isn't unique enough and the books are just copycats.

Roth clearly did derive a number of her novel's elements from Hunger Games and Harry Potter. She's been very public about the fact that Harry Potter is one of her favorite books and dystopia is greatly overshadowed by Suzanne Collins's trilogy right now. But books are more than the sum of their parts, and this is especially the case with Divergent. Just because some of her novel's landscape can be traced back to other books doesn't mean that there isn't something unique on offer in Dystopian Chicago. So here are those two most common criticisms and some arguments for why they aren't quite fair.

#1: The factions are just Hogwarts houses but darker.
This, I would argue, is one of the strengths of the books. I'm a huge Harry Potter fan, but even as a child, something about the Hogwarts houses bothered me. For instance, pretty much every villain the story saw came from one house - Slytherin. During the final battle for Hogwarts, Rowling states very clearly how many of each particular house stick around to defend the school. Courageous Gryffindors make up the largest amount, followed by hardworking Hufflepuffs. A smaller fraction of intelligent Ravenclaws stay and then, of course, ambitious Slytherin is absent because they're all evil.

If Roth did base her factions on the Hogwarts houses, she recognized that there were some problems with this clear-cut way of looking at virtue. The Dauntless Faction, for instance, value courage just like Gryffindor, but Roth's version points out that courage is only useful if it is placed in correct principles. And being gumptious and willing to jump into action when it is demanded is not a guarantee that someone is going to always know WHAT the right thing is. Dauntless is largely divided between those who value the power that comes from bravery and those that value the heroism.

Similarly, the ambition of Slytherin is in many ways at it's most dangerous when it's combined with the intelligence of Ravenclaw. Erudite Faction represents a more complicated fear - one of logic overwhelming principle. I'm not sure I entirely agree with her version of these virtues, but she does devote a lot of time to arguing her views, something I do value.

Roth's books engage the notion of a society organized by cardinal virtues more deeply than the Harry Potter books, sometimes with directly opposing points. In other words, she adds to the discussion. Whether you agree with her or Rowling, she does at least force some questions about just what drives someone to evil and what weaknesses are inherent in what we call our strengths.

#2: The plot is just another Hunger Games knock-off.
This criticism has a bit more bearing, and I can definitely see some similarities. There's something familiar about the pacing of the books and the dark, grittiness. It is a dystopia and there is a "stop the evil empire" plot and there are children put through recklessly dangerous tasks that our heroine, Tris, must "win" in a matter of speaking.

But there are some important differences, most of them coming down to a character level. Tris and Katniss are very different from each other and they confront their problems in very different ways. Katniss is constantly worried about the damage she might cause in someone's life, and so holds people at a distance, more comfortable using them for survival than receiving affection. Tris, on the other hand, actively pursues acceptance and new friendships. She wants a normal life, and incidentally, lives in a world where she's got a better chance at one.

Yes, the worlds are different too. Chicago's system might be broken, but it's no punitive dictatorship like Panem. As the novels go on, she's not even sure the answer is to end the faction system, since she can see the good and the structure that have come from it. Really, there IS no hope for Katniss within the status quo, so resisting the Capitol is an easy decision... or would be if Katniss was good at making moral decisions. Another key Katniss/Tris difference. Tris is much more idealistic and much more in control of her own destiny.

In fact, if you're looking for the king of Hunger Games knock-offs, I would say you don't need to look any further than Catching Fire, the second book in Collins' trilogy, which is almost identical in plot to the first one. One of Divergent's greatest strengths is its second book, Insurgent, which steps away from the plot line of the first by developing the encroaching war in an interesting, detailed way. The same issues are not rehashed and Tris's relationships with other characters grow and change in ways not seen in the first book. As the story goes on, the more Divergent and the Hunger Games - ahem - diverge. And that is very satisfying. Once again, it might have started in a similar place, but Divergent adds something to the conversation of YA fiction.

Divergent isn't the only YA book that gets accused of being derivative. As paranormal romance and dystopian sci-fi have ran their course, numerous books have come and gone that bare resemblance to one another. Now, we're even starting to see editors and lit agents mention not wanting another "sick child" or "cancer" novel because John Green's The Fault in Our Stars is too ubiquitous.

But all of these books owe their lineage to earlier stories. It's one of the outcomes of living in the world we do. There are thousands of years of stories preceding the ones currently bought and sold in your local Barnes and Noble. Hunger Games has been accused of being derivative of an earlier Japanese film, Battle Royale, but its origins can be traced to an even earlier time. Collins has stated explicitly that she was inspired by the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, in which youths where abandoned inside a maze with a monster and only one made it out alive. With her use of Greek and Roman names and imagery, its clear that Collins did derive much from these books, just as Divergent derives much from earlier stories. But they aren't derivative.

For me, the bench mark is the one I've stated a couple of times already - does the work of art bring something new to the conversation? Is it using the literary tropes already common in fiction in a new way? Is it reminding us of another way of thinking about a topic, one relevant to the way the world is today? If you can answer "yes" to any of these questions, then I would argue the book is derived, not derivative.

So what then if you can't? What if a book adds nothing to the discussion? Or what if an element of the story adds nothing to where it is borrowed from? Well, stay tuned, folks. As mentioned, there's more to come.

Book Reviews: Ship Breaker

Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi

Whew! So time for another book review. Despite the quiet on the blog, I've been reading a lot and doing a ton of writing lately. Actually, the silence on the blog is probably RELATED. More on that some other time.

For now, let's take a look at Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi.

Nailer works in the cesspool that is Bright Sands Beach, a ship breaking yard where old oil rigs are broken down for spare parts and whatever scavenge is left on them. The polar ice caps have melted and most major cities lie drowned, leaving the world in a panicked, resource deficient state. 

Nailer himself is little more than a statistic - a skinny kid who can still just fit inside the ducts of old ships where he cuts off lengths of copper wiring in order to make quota. But when a luxury clipper washes up on Bright Sands Beach during a storm, opportunity arrives, both in the wealth on board and in the swank girl who owns the boat. Opportunity that could prove to be just as deadly as it is lucrative.

What Makes it So Good: 

Ship Breaker has been on my radar for a long time, as it's one of the few Science Fiction Novels to win the Printz Award. For those who haven't heard of the Printz, it's kind of like the Carnegie or Newbery Awards, only for Young Adult literature as opposed to the Middle Grade books that the other awards tend to focus on. 

Like a lot of award committees, those in charge of the Printz tends to favor fiction placed in a contemporary setting, but luckily, that favoritism is't as rigid in children's literature, of which YA is still considered a part, as it is in Adult Lit where book genres are kept separated and in different sections of your local bookstore. So sci-fi and fantasy get a slightly better shot at being recognized for their contribution to the wider scope of literature. Naturally, I was curious about this post-apocalyptic tale (a genre often portrayed as tired and over done in YA today) that got the Printz voters all a titter. It seemed like a book that would have to fight one heck of an uphill battle in order to get recognition.

Really, I think what it boils down to is that that the text is beautiful and lyrical. The world Nailer inhabits is grim and potentially overwhelming with its violence and despair, but Bacigalupi has a tremendous command of language, which he uses to shape the mood of the book. Executed poorly, this book could have been a slogging, muddy wallow, but even at its darkest moments, something about the way the landscape and Nailer's emotions are described keeps a rim of hope surrounding the story.

The pacing is also quick and satisfying. There's a good balance between Nailer's reflections and the high stakes adventure the book sells itself on. The world is also interesting and well executed. Many of the post-apocalypse tropes one might expect from knowing the genre are in play, but they're well done and have twists that make them interesting. For example, Ship Breaker's take on humans mixed with dog DNA made me wish The Hunger Games could have been so successful when they used the same idea at the end of the first book in the trilogy. I was much more afraid of Tool the Half-Man than I ever was of the dogs chasing Katniss and Tool isn't even a villain. The characters were enjoyable too, Nailer in particular. He's the right blend of sweet and tough, something a story like this needed in order to stay balanced.

What Might Make it Better: 

"Sounds like your basic D.I.D. Damsel in Distress." - Phil, from Disney's Hercules

This is a rescue the damsel book, 100% plain and simple. While the book has great characters, atmosphere and world building, it could have used a more interesting plot. 

Nothing really complicates this rescue story either. From the moment Nita arrives, you know she can't be responsible for her own salvation, because THAT would impact Nailer's ability to prove himself. All you're left guessing at is whether or not Nailer will be successful in saving Nita, because Rule-of-Fiction dictates that she can't do it on her own. Nita herself isn't a bad character, she just isn't able to be interesting because that would interfere with Nailer's growth. Her use to the story as a plot-trinket is too great to let her be a character that controls her own fate.

Now let me be clear that I am not opposed to all "rescue the damsel" scenarios, but I think many of the ones that do that story well complicate it some way. Take Princess Leia, for example. At the beginning of the first Star Wars film, Leia transfers the plans to the Death Star into R2-D2 and effectively turns R2 into the plot-trinket necessary for advancing the rebel cause. R2 becomes the target of numerous "save the droid" moments in the movie and the object of pursuit by the empire. Leia's rescue is a reckless after thought, and for Han, the decision to save her is entirely driven by greed. She also plays a more formative role in their escape, blasting open a path into the trash compactor and alerting them that the empire must be following them when their escape is easy because, once again, it is R2 and the plans on him that are the empire's target, not her. Once at the rebel base, she takes a leadership role independent of Han and Luke and for the rest of the series, she's never rendered totally helpless again.

Star Wars  is not often a good example of how to tell stories with compelling female characters. Ship Breaker is certainly miles ahead as far as its diversity of well-rounded female characters, so I'm not criticizing the book on it's ability to portray an interesting female character. The issue is that standard issue "rescue the princess" scenarios don't make for interesting plots. They're too well known and force other characters to perform predictable, specific actions within the narrative. 

Comparing to The Hunger Games again, here would be the place where Hunger Games edges out Ship Breaker. Peeta certainly gets his chances to be a man-sel in distress, but the plot is about other things too. It's about winning the games. It's about sticking it to the Capital. It's about putting on a good show so that they can get sponsors. And those other goals, coincidentally, often conflict with each other. Ship Breaker's side plots are never at such compelling odds with each other. True, Nailer's choices aren't easy, but they're not as suicidally hard as Katniss's either. 

Despite these critiques, however, Ship Breaker is a fantastic, lovely book, and a reminder that plot isn't often about originality, but about execution. The book is beautifully executed and well worth a read. I wouldn't review it if I didn't like it. Just... ya know... don't expect too many surprises in the plotting department.