What I'm Currently Reading
April 2008

City of Ashes, the second of Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments series. In the first book, City of Bone, we saw the story through the eyes of Clary, who seemed to be an ordinary girl living with her mom, a painter. Her best friend (this has become a popular trope) was a glasses-wearing geek named Simon; the two venture out and end up tangled with Shadowhunters, kids who are trained to take out demons. Through the Shadowhunters, especially the angsty, attractive Jace, Clary and the very reluctant Simon discover that there is no such thing as coincidence, that Clary is in fact deeply involved in both the so-called real world, and the shadowy, danger-fraught, glittering world of faerie, demons, and vampires. I thoroughly enjoyed that first book, though there were story-points that seemed familiar. I loved the pace, the intensity of teen emotion, and above all the humor.

This second book I thought made a quantum leap. The main reason would be a spoiler, so let me just say that expectations for characters acting according to the current stereotype can be blown to splinters of glass. In this second book, Clary is not the only POV, and the story is the stronger for it. We see through the main players' eyes, and also from the POV of a nifty young werewolf who is new. Cassandra Clare varies the voices as the Shadowhunters have to chase down Valentine, the evil leader who is threatening both worlds with a kind of armegeddon you just don't survive. There is a fabulous scene in the court of the Faerie Queen that even this jaded reader of lots of faerie found an intense page turner. There are complexities showing up in all the lead characters.

But most of all, though vampires are included in the dramatis personae, there is a prospect of something done all too rarely: an examination of the hard questions about what being a vampire means. Moral questions. Far too many of the current crop of urban fantasies featuring vampire boyfriends sweep the cannibalistic side of vampirism aside in favor of lots of romantic, angsty emoting. Vampires are always pretty, never have death breath, and don't bite your friends and relatives--kind of like the family dog, only twenties on a scale of one to ten in hottness.

It's that possibility of blowing the expectations of genre that strongly engages my adult interest: my inner girl loves these books and I can just see myself as a teen combing them over and over for hints of the world, and filling the margins of my more boring assignments with drawings of the characters as I waited impatiently for the next book.

Elizabeth Wein's The Empty Kingdom. Here's what's said on Amazon, which is succinct and doesn't spoil anything: "in The Lion Hunter, Telemakos—the half-British, half-Aksumite (African) grandson of King Arthur—was sent for his safety to stay with one of Aksum’s former enemies. When Abreha, ruler of Himyar, allegedly the boy’s protector, catches him in the midst of what appears to be treachery, he sentences him to a fate seemingly worse than death. Not only is Telemakos forbidden to see his beloved younger sister, Athena, but he is also commanded to reproduce the maps that Abreha plans to u se in order to invade Aksumite territory. Countries away from his family, lacking any way to tell them what has happened, Telemakos must bring all of his subtle talents to bear in order to regain his freedom. The Empty Kingdom is a stunning conclusion to the Mark of Solomon duology—a triumph of historic suspense."

Oh yes. The prose is exquisite, the characterizations spare and deft, the whole is so beautifully executed. The research is diamond bright, with no hint of "we will pause now and admire all the reading I did!" moments. Anyone who loved Rosemary Sutcliff has got to love these. But you know who I think would be the biggest fans? Those who love Megan Whalen Turner's awesome Attolia series.

Justin Stanchfield's Space Cowboy [# Publisher: Usborne Publishing Ltd (29 Feb 2008) # ISBN-10: 0746087128]. Many of us grew up reading and loving Robert Heinlein's juveniles. Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, they just don't work with most of today's young readers, at least so I've found. Since those days, of course, YA literature has taken off into the treasure trove of riches we have today. Back when I was young, you could read everything YA on the library shelves in very little time. So one would think there's no need for a replacement for that type of story, the strong young male who is self-sufficient and bright and courageous. Yet I think there is still a strong need for such stories--especially for boys. Wow, does this one fit the bill.

The storyline is straightforward: Travis McClure lives with his family on the planet Aletha Three, which is being terraformed. There isn't a huge budget, so the scientists are more like cowboys, following the herds as the animals' daily lives help contribute to the slow change of the planet. But there's something really nasty out there attacking the cattle under cover of dark. Travis has to figure out what it is before it gains a taste for human flesh. With his friend Riane, a smart girl with talents of her own (like piloting) Travis sets out to solve the mystery. It's written in clean, easy to read prose, but here's where this book really stands out. The author is a rancher himself, so all the details about horses, cattle, the smoke off a campfire, the sounds at night just beyond the camp perimeter are so realistic and evocative that you feel you are there. Stanchfield keeps the pace snapping, the adults are not idiots, everyone's motivations make sense--and the science is terrific without the book ever falling into the "Well, son, as you should know [datadumpdatadumpdatadump]" trap. I'd recommend this one to anyone, but especially for reluctant boy readers of twelve and up.

For months I have patiently waited for Hilary McKay's latest, Forever Rose to come out in this country. Imagine my surprise this last week, just while I was under the gun to finish three projects back to back, to have the book arive! I meant to let it sit and wait as my reward, but I couldn't help sipping a few pages. . . and then a few more. . . and suddenly I was done! But it was so good that when last night I finished my last due project, I simply turned back to page one and read it all the way through with even more pleasure.

American readers unfamiliar with McKay's work, the basic premise is the story of a family of creative types, centering around Rose, the youngest. The parents are painters, and they don't live together through most of the books. Their children are named after colors--Cadmium, Indigo, Rose. The family is unusual in many of the ways creative families are, their interactions with others are as orthogonal as such can frequently be, and their relations with one another are also often orthogonal to what they mean, what they understand, and what they intend. McKay is writing for a young audience, but I wonder if at least some of the Cassons are synesthetes; whether they are or are not really doesn't matter. What does is how wonderful I feel when I read one of these books. They leave me with that sense of how fine relations between human beings can be with a little respect and a lot of good will, and always some laughter. I know, I know if I had read these as a child I would have cried hard just because I couldn't contain or even express that intense and hopeful swoop of joy that the reading experience would have given me. How sharply drawn the characters' emotions are while never sacrificing that generous spirit and sense of mercy breathing through the whole! C.S. Lewis once said that Myths are truth breathed through silver. I think books like these McKays, and Antonia Forest's books, and also D.E. Stevenson's (very hard to find these days, but Miss Buncle's Book is one of my all-time favorites) are emotional and creative truth breathed through silver. They are about human potential in all its variation.

If you want to try McKay, you could pick up the storyline here (these are aimed at maybe sixth through eighth grades in reading level, with some uncompromisingly sophisticated words here and there) but for the best experience, do begin with Saffy's Angel.

Those are my current Young Adult reads. For my adult reading, I am always on the watch for space opera that has excellent characterization, humor, sense of wonder, and all the good stuff along with nifty space details and the complicated physics of space battle. My favorites are Doyle and Macdonald's Mageworlds and Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan stories. So I was thrilled to pieces to discover another writer--R.M. Meluch. Right now she has three out in the Tour of the Merrimack series, The Myriad, Wolf Star, and The Sagittarius Command.

These stories follow not just the captain and crew of the U.S.S. Merrimack, but some of their esteemed enemies, the Romans, or Palatines--this being a future when at some point all the Roman Catholics up and left Earth in a stream, establishing their own planet and colonies, a thousands-year plot of positively Jesuitical dimension. So the old Earth, under the United Nations (which does not always back up America) and the Romans are at one another's throats until a far bigger threat comes along, the Hive. These aliens are nasty. They are not secretly just wanting to communicate--or if they are, the frantic science guys can't discover how. They just want to eat, people preferably, but they'll go for your clothes, food, and pretty much anything else except for teeth and the metals space ships are made of. But they don't simply function as convenient targets for our marines to shoot without compunction, because there is still the question of war between Rome and Earth, and all its painful, heartbreaking consequences. Meluch doesn't flinch at the results of a violent lifestyle and yet she's still amazingly good at the hoo ra, high-adrenaline, lets-go-for-broke all out adventure that is the essence of good space opera.

Try the first one. If you don't get hooked during the first conversation all alone between Captain Farragut and the Roman patterner Augustus, then maybe these aren't for you. I liked the first book until then; when I got to the end of that chapter, I was hooked, and when I got to the end of the first book, in which time and space and everything aren't so easy to define any more, I couldn't eat or sleep until I'd gotten my hands onto the next in the series.

Finally, I just started this one, but already I'm loving it. Selina Rosen's Sword Masters, a sword and sorcery adventure story with her signature humor, crisp pacing, and stylish character gender bending. Tarius is really a girl, not a boy, but joins the Jarthik academy in order to be trained to fight the Amalites, who just go around killing to be killing. Don't assume it's a standard "britches" story, because it isn't--I'm not far in, and already there are all kinds of surprises, the characters are interesting and complex, the world intruiguing. And Rosen, who is an accomplished swordswoman in real life, writers with nifty detail about just what the life would be like. Her book is published by a small press, and I hope people will give it a try. These days especially, small presses deserve all the word of mouth we can give them.

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