This is a mainstream YA novel centered on three high school girls before and half-way through their senior year. They are known as the "Bermudez Triangle" (Bermudez being last name of Nina, one of the three) who have been friends since grammar school. They are so tight they still use their school yard rituals. Nina, whose parents are comfortably off, is sent west to Stanford for a summer program in academic leadership; the other two girls, short, rebellious Avery (she's taken up smoking just because everyone, including her two friends, hates it) and tiny, fairy-like Mel, take a summer job as servers at a horrible dinner house called P.J. Mortimer's. (Ex-waitresses will wince in sympathy at the demeaning details, right down to the horrible manager, Bob.) Everything is fine because at least Avery and Mel have each other so they can laugh about the horrible job--and they meet a fellow-worker named Parker, whose sense of humor instantly jives with them both. He's attracted to Mel. As usual. (Avery notes wryly that without making the least effort, Mel inspires epic crushes in guys, causing them to listen to slow music and iron their clothes.) But complications ensue when Mel and Avery spend a night after work . . . and Avery idly wonders what it would be like to kiss Mel. Who has been hiding the same urge for quite a long time. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Nina's got the roommate from hell, which drives her out--to meet a crunchy-granola ecowarrior called Steve. At first she's intrigued but put off, but after an all-night study session he becomes human to her--and then the spark of attraction ignites.

Johnson does not make this book a "gay Issue" book. Nor does she get into physical details. What she focuses on with humor, grace, and sympathy, is the emotional fallout of being teen, discovering attraction while still trying to cope with friendship with one's own gender, friendship with the other gender, and don't forget evolving plans for what one is going to do in the future. Those are tough enough, so what happens to friendship, whether old or new, whether between genders of within, when one suddenly finds oneself staring into the blinding sun of attraction? When you stare into the sun, everything else fades to shadow, and you stumble about half blind but it's so powerfully overwhelming, how can you possibly turn away? Add to that the complications of becoming a couple, whether same-gender or not, when you still have to get on with your life--whether at a distance (Nina) or close by (Avery and music school). What if one is, in fact, not gay, it's just . . . this one single person? Then there are the boys. Steve across the country, who messes up . . . and Parker near by, who does everything right--he hits every single note for the Modern Sensitive Male--and still ends up getting badly hurt. I thought it a terrific novel.

One night while walking down a deserted highway in September, the young first-person protagonist sees a handsome boy who is wearing a fifties costume, or is it a costume? We soon discover that he is the ghost of an athlete who met his death years before, and the town has known about this ghost walking the highway since 1957. But for the first time, Josh, the ghost, leaves the highway and follows someone, and even speaks to him. The hero goes to the cemetery to find out more, and is haunted by a whole lot more ghosts. These ghosts are not pleasant Caspar the Friendlies. And Josh's interest in the living boy is . . . well, an obsession. As, in fact, one might expect from a ghost.

The story is vivid with detail, the characters real and appealing: his best friend Trace, the Goth girl who was the first person he met after he ran away from home. His Aunt Jan, who took him in though his own parents, in rejecting him, brought him very close to suicide. Trace's younger brother Second Mike--the first Mike having had a tragic history. There is a lot of grief, angst, anger in this story, but Berman skillfully makes it bearable with his humor, his ability to present interesting and appealing characters. His compassion for the struggles and emotions of teens, and with his eye for telling and interesting details. The horrid side of how gays are treated gets aired through memories, but we're not overwhelmed with Message--these flashbacks are integral to the story.

It's a short book, I'd say for the savvy high schooler and above: as you'd expect with Goth kids, there is rough language, references to drugs, some vividly described intimate encounters. Above all it's a compassionate, even sweet tale, loving in all the right ways. Exciting, too, as the stakes are raised.

The heroine, Clary Fray, is a petite freckled artistic and totally normal teenage girl with a best friend totally normal music-geek guy named Simon. When they go to a club dance, she witnesses three tattoo-covered teenagers murder another teen--but victim disappears right in front of her eyes. This victim, who exhibited some really creepy behaviors before dying, turns out to be a demon. The killer teens--sarcastic, brilliant, mega-handsome Jace, and the tall, soignee Isabelle--are Shadowhunters (humans who hunt and kill demons), and Clary, a mundie (i.e., mundane human), should not be able to see them any more than the other dancers in the club. But before Clary can deal with these surprises, her mother, a painter named Jocelyn is kidnapped. Jocelyn is the only person who knows the whereabouts of The Mortal Cup, a dangerous magical item that turns humans into Shadowhunters. Clary must find the cup and keep it from a renegade sector of Shadowhunters bent on eliminating all nonhumans, including benevolent werewolves and friendly vampires. And the only help she's got are Jace, Isabella, Alec (Isabella's brother) and Simon. And the first three distrust her to varying degrees, and despise Simon.

Discovery after discover raises the stakes, amid stylish and violent action. Meanwhile, teenage chemistry (straight and gay) is also going on, as the kids, who are fighting for their lives--and to protect the lives of those they love--discover that chemistry does not always provide clear sight. In fact, it can blind you to what's really important, especially when you have been starved of just normal family love most of your life.

The adult characters are interesting, the universe well-thought out and fascinating. Clare's sense of timing and of place are stunning, and the wit and humor she uses to give the reader just the tiniest break from the tension (or to ramp it up) is masterly. I'd say, if you don't mind the question of one or two characters being gay, this one is fine for twelve and up--there's very little bad language, and though there's a lot of violence, with magical aid, it's no worse than that on prime time TV. And though the teens are very emotional, there's very little actual involvement other than a kiss or two. I wish, I wish, I wish the second one would come out soon.

I enjoyed and admired this book. Without any academic snarkiness, Glyer thoroughly dismantles Humphrey Carpenter's assurance in his 1978 work on the Inklings that they had little or no influence on one another. All the odder as he furnishes the book with a fictional Inklings evening, demonstrating that they did. Perhaps the question is in how one defines 'influence.'

Anyway, Glyer's scholarship is vast. She hasn't just read all the Inklings's work (including their small press zines published for fun, like Lewis and Barfield's mock legal "papers" Mark Vs Tristram, after the furor about Mallory's somewhat louche, definitely violent biographical details* came to light, she's read widely about writing process. I saw Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence referenced, and she draws heavily on current process scholarship, specifically Karen Burke LeFevre's Invention as a Social Act. (Which I have not read, but have added to the Gigantic List.)

It's a remarkable achievement that a book so crampacked with rigorous scholarship (20 pages of tiny print for Works Cited alone, and an Index that serves as a model of how Indices should be done) is so clear and even charmingly written. Though I like Lewis and Tolkien's work I am not all that fond of the works of the rest of the Inklings, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I think it's the best on the subject yet, and that by a sizable margin.

The Sharing Knife: Beguilement, by Lois McMaster Bujold, is by a deservedly author popular everywhere. It came out last year, was of course reviewed everywhere, so I don't think I need to run down the plot, just impressions. I enjoy all her work--some more than others, which is generally the case with any author. I do have to say that I love the Miles books better than the fantasies so far, but that doesn't mean I did not enjoy the fantasies. This is a new world, quieter in tone and drive than the Miles books. Again, as in her first fantasy, we've got an older, heart-and-body wounded fellow as yin, but his yang is charming, young, bright in all meanings of the word. The realities of human life and the goshwow layers of world building (and no doubt crises to come) are highlighed with Bujoldian gracenotes: everyday humor thoroughly grounding flights of heroism, angst that never whines, grief that does not overwhelm the story, but reminds you that outside the firelight and the merry dancing, dark things do prowl.

This is the second of Bujold's new fantasy series, which began with The Sharing Knife: Beguilement. I do think that, while readers could probably pick up on the story, it would be far, far better to read Beguilement first. This book picks up hours after the last one ended. (I believe she wrote it to be one story, and the publishers split it to make more bux.) Because it opens from that point, anything I say about the story would be spoilerific, so what I will talk about is my reading experience. I love this story. Bujold has a knack for giving the reader an unlikely pair for hero and heroine--in this case a battle-hardened, grief-scarred man in his fifties, and an eighteen year old girl. But this heroines is no simpering flower: she's smart, capable, full of energy and knows her own mind. She's emotionally balanced--probably more than he is. She also has a vast curiosity about how the world works: she would never have been happy settling down to wifedom on the farm, though she would have done her duty without martyrdom, because she also finds satisfaction in the work of her hands, no matter how humble, and the people around her. But she's capable of more, and Dag seems the one to give her the world.

In this story, Bujold widens the lens on how this fascinating world works. She does not just give us terrifying monsters in order to keep the plot zippy, she hints at layers and depths below, or behind, those monsters, raising more and more questions about the development of history and culture, about how its magic works. About everything. And because it's Bujold, we know that future stories will depend on all these tantalizing hints, as the stakes build, the questions become more important.

Meanwhile the characterization is complex and involving, and overall there is that nifty, hard-to-define humor that I believe springs from a sense of grace. Terrible things can, and do, happen in Bujold's books, but they are never mean books. Compassion, sorrow, hard-won wisdom, infuse the humor with a lingering depth so that I spend days after I finish one of her books thinking it over, then retrieving it to reread passages. Like all her books, this isn't YA--or, could be read by anyone who doesn't mind the introduction of sex into a story--and questions of love, and how attraction can mess up adults' lives.

School of Fortune by Amanda Brown and Janice Weber is a complete change of pace. I am a sucker for funny romances, and have a weakness for rich protagonists. But I like it even bettter when stuck-up rich people get the quill stuck into their supposed superiority--and especially when the whole is done with a charming, witty voice, an exact eye, and a sense of grace and compassion. Mean funny is easier to do than sympathetic funny; these authors achieve the second one as they follow the adventures of Pippa Walker, daughter of the Texas Walker millions, who is slated in the Wedding of the Century to marry Lance Henderson and his family's Texas millions. But, despite the two potential mothers-in-law trying to out-general one another like Patton and Eisenhower, when the two finally get to the altar . . . well, let's just say that Pippa is soon out trying to go to school. She has to prove she can get a degree-any degree. She begins with traffic school, which turns out to be an utter disaster, no fault of her own, and after some rather more half-baked ideas, ends up at the Mountbatten-Savoy School of Household Management. Where, for what seemed perfectly good reasons at the time, she's in drag. Only . . . the guy she noticed on some of her earlier misadventures is there, as a valet. And some of her earlier family disasters show up like ghosts at the banquet...

I just loved this book. It's not a YA, for those who are particular about such issues. Sex is never graphic, but dealt with in (what I find) a charmingly casual way, and so at times is language, so this one might not be to the taste of more conservative readers, but otherwise, it's a delightful, chuckle-making summer read.

Goblin Hero, by Jim C. Hines: Okay, so there's a call out for a great hero to come and do some vastly needed heroic deed-work. What have you got? A runty goblin named Jig . . . A big, bone-headed goblin named Braf . . . A whiny goblin who wants to be a hero, even if she has to kill the runt to take his place . . . A wizened, crabby, nasty old goblin named Grell, who wields a mean crutch. . . and assorted hobgoblins, ogres, dragons, snakes, and other monsters--all of whom share one growing fear: the pixies.

Jig just wants to be left alone. Everyone else has motives for going on this quest that are not even remotely related to Right, Truth, the Path of Peace, or even Rank & Riches. Yet they have to band together, figure out how to cooperate despite their reasonable instincts to run, fight dirty, and betray everyone in sight when faced with danger. Hines crams the narrative with great visual and verbal jokes. If your Inner Kid still likes physical humor and gross stuff, you'll be laughing out loud as frequently as I did. But Hines doesn't confine himself to setting the characters up for bodily fluids splats, pratfalls, and nostril-probing expeditions. Such fantasy tends to run real thin even for hardcore cases (like most of my eighth graders) who never tire of fart jokes. Hines skillfully makes these characters sympathetic by getting inside their heads and then staying true to their paradigm. In their world, they are right, and reasonable. They are quite aware that handsome human adventurers want to kill them on sight, high and puissant types like elves utterly despise them, and everyone else is after their chitlins, and not in a good way. Hines makes us like the characters, so their stakes feel real. They matter to us. The stakes get spidier as the doughty adventurers discover what's behind all the mysterious killings, and the tension ratchets up. That's not easily done in funny fantasy. Hines manages it with skill and panache. Without forgetting his nose pick. Rumor has it there'll be a third Jig adventure. I sure hope so--I closed this book hoping for more visits from Jig and his world.

Alan Garner, arguably, shows the most influence with his first popular book, though he loudly denied it later. I remember reading Weirdstone as a kid, and thinking that it was a rehash of JRRT. But with each succeeding book he left the shape of the Tolkienian quest tale farther behind. Butler gives us a good look at Garner's subsequent work from the inside and outside.

His take on Diana Wynne Jones is excellent. I'm glad when I see discussions of her work other than the witty (and true) Tough Guide to Fantasy. Butler, being a writer himself, has an exacting eye for Jones's qualities. Here's a random quote, which I think enlighting on why Jones isn't more popular with those who need to slot books into neat categories:

. . . Jones has come to cross generic border with increasing frequency. Jones herself has expressed impatience with generic restrictions, and certainly there is no reason why writers need feel constrained by convention from combining genres, but such hybridization is not without consequences. [SF] tends to extrapolate from our current world to a time or place that may be vastly different, but that still belongs to the realm of hypothetical possibility. Its distance from our reality can be measured along what in Jakobsonian terms we might call the syntagmatic axis. Fantasy, by contrast, is related to our world by analogy rather than by extrapolation, and is a fundamentally paradigmatic form. This is, of course, a crude formulation: there are many science fiction worlds that have metaphorical application to our own, and I have argued elsewhere that a purely metaphorical reading of fantasy is unlikely to be satisfactory.

And here's a bit from the opening of the chapter called "Plotting the Map to Logres":

The synthetic and analytic capacities, the abilities to see connections and to make distinctions, are basic tools of perception and of argument. But there are fashions in these as in other things, and I think it fair to say that in the 1960s and early 1970s, when Garner, Cooper, Jones, and Lively began to be published, it was in a climate more hospitable to the synthetic impulse. .[interesting summary of Eliade, Murray, Graves, and Rees] . . As I write we seem to be at the opposite end of the cycle . . .[interesting summation of debunking and reassessment by skeptical academics of subsequent generation] . . .While academics retrench, a portion of the general public seems eager to accept each fashionable New Age idea that comes to its notice, often with little apparent demand, and even some scorn, for hard evidence. With a dogmatically skeptical academic community on one hand, and a credulous popular taste for all things mystical on the other, fantasy writers of the present day can only look back in envy at the relatively-homogeneous climate of thirty years ago, when it seemed much easier to find territory both imaginatively fertile and intellectually defensible

As you can see, this is no gosh-wow fangush, it's a fascinating, witty, well-written, meticulously researched piece of work. (And I might add on the short list for the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for this year.)

Territory by Emma Bull is finally out. And I am sipping it slowly as my downstairs book. Bull has a gift for being at the right place at the right time: her War for the Oaks not only was deservedly popular, but hit the zeitgeist so centrally that the subsequent decade or so was filled with spinoffs in which rock bands use their music magic to fight off the bad Sidhe, or Winter Court of Faerie. At that time (gross generalization here) readers were looking for something besides yet another quest for a magical object through a fantasy landscape, so here was magic and pretty elves brought right to our world, and all tied up with True Thomas, which is still a profoundly effective myth: you don't have to believe in anything, but you can still be sacrificed, or give yourself up for sacrifice, for the greater . . . what?

In Territory Bull has taken the gritty, gunslinging west with its edgy co-existence alongside other cultures (Chinese, Mexican, Native American). She added the legendary Earp and Clanton feud. She infuses both with disturbing possibilities outside everyday experience, as newly widowed newspaperwoman Mrs Benjamin meets a strange gunman who just rode into town, trailing whispered speculation about robbery--and radiating unexplained heat. I haven't gotten very far yet, but the vividness of the setting, the fascinating characters whose tension is underscored by the alienness of that territory that was far from being civilized, the deft use of dry, electric heat and its opposite cool, life-giving (and sometimes threatening) water, are slowly adding up to a powerful book.

The Gospel of the Knife by Will Shetterly is a sequel to Dogland, which I really, really wish was used in classroom reading across the country. It's a subtle, vivid, exciting, and very well-written book about character, family, self, one's place in the world, and clashing ethics . . . in the form of racism. It takes place in southern Florida, at a strange sort of park-zoo where various breeds of dogs are kept. Shetterly makes this book eminently accessible to young readers by taking the time and care to build up the human story (one could call the protagonist, Chris, a puppy!) but don't think the dogs won't be i mportant. Nooooo-hooo!

I've read this book aloud to eighth graders, to stunning effect. And it kicked off terrific papers, with thirteen year olds trying to deal with subjects they'd previously called boring. The discussion spilled over into history class, and even got other grades involved. I really wish more teachers were hep to it: I think for example, it could be used as a springboard to Huck Finn.

Anyway, I was delighted to discover that there is a sequel to Dogland though I wondered how the heck that story could be followed. Right from the beginning it's clear this is no rehash--Christopher is not the puppy boy of 1963, it's 1969, he's fourteen, and the issues are very different. He seems to be a typical (for some of us at the time) wannabe hippie, living uneasily in an area that seems to be populated by those who want to hold hard onto the old ways, especially the violent methods of seeing that everyone else toes the white, conservative line as well. The story is told in second person present tense, which I usually distrust (it often seems unnecessarily intrusive, a "Lookit me being clever and literary!" wall between reader and text) but here it works because it underscores the bewildering immediacy of being a teen. Christopher does some really stupid things for no reason than emotional turmoil (and by the way, the rating for this one would be "much older teen" unless the young reader is mature enough to handle rough language and a sex scene right up front).

Then Christopher gets a very strange offer: a full ride to an exclusive school. He meets a strange family first, and everything he'd ever believed about life changes with the careless shot of a gun.

The Pirate & The Three Cutters by Captain Frederick Marryat. I put the "captain" there as this one is really for Marryat completists. It's interesting for its being a bridge between the rough and tumble world of Regency age fiction and the refined later Victorian sedate euphemisms; there is Marryat's curious sympathy underneath the thoughtless racism. He obviously knew and worked with and liked persons of color and different ethnic backgrounds, yet he still carelessly uses the opprobrious slang of the time, and mirrors some of the unthinking white Western superiority. The ship detail, though, is so perfect, so clear, one can see O'Brian's footprints all over these stories.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, a funny, friendly guy I met at Worldcon last year. This is the first novel in what seems to be shaping to be a series. In it we meet Kvothe, the main character. He's a tired, stressed, innkeeper with a very strange companion named Bast. After some mysterious events he tells his story to a Chronicler who writes down his exact words. So this book is mainly backstory. Kvothe may seem a bit of a Gary Stu (everything he does is better than anyone else) but Rothfuss offsets that by not stinting with the trouble Kvothe gets into, and by a wry, witty tone. If Rothfuss's voice reminds me of anyone it's Scott Lymch--who is about Rothfuss's age. Anyway, Kvothe is not the least full of himself, gifted as he is--he's got a quest, a dangerous one. Maybe a fatal one. It's a dynamic first novel and I really look forward to the second one.

Juliet Marillier's YA fantasy Wildwood Dancing . This combines several fairy tale tropes with a beautifully realized Eastern European setting. The main character is Jena, a strong, sensible heroine who still long for romance and Otherness. She has to balance her own wishes and desires against what's good for her family and land. It's a wonderful book. The oldest sister is a tad drippy for an adult reader, but I think I would have found her soggy wasting away intensely romantic when I was young. The main fairy tale is also recognizable early on for the adult reader, but I know without a doubt I would have been just thrilled to recognize it gradually as a young reader, and then watch to see how expertly Marillier twisted it to make it exciting and not quite predictable.

I do think that there are a lot of supposedly YA books put out now that appeal more to adults. I am not talking about content. Teens are aware of different aspects of life at different ages, and so I have no quarrel with the more mature subjects. But some books seem to require reading protocols way ahead of the young reader, or have complex issues, or oblique references, that really seem adult. Since I'm not going to slang anyone's book, I guess I should stop there. Anyway, this one I think can be loved by the genuine twelve year old, as well as those of us who still remember being twelve, and loving the same sorts of stories we loved then.

Adam Rex's science fiction story The True Meaning of Smekday, is a total change of pace. It's a delightfully funny near-future, after-the-aliens-come tale. The aliens are funnier than scary, the world wacky, but the characterizations are sharp, full of heart, and the story twists and turns satisfactorily. I think I would have hated the very last page (it hit me as rather flat), but others might disagree, and in any case the epologue isn't enough to spoil a good story preceding it.