Young Adult Fiction: The Caller by Juliet Marillier

Summer Gathering, when the rebels of Shadowfell are planning to challenge the evil King Keldec, is approaching rapidly. Caller Neryn, with whom we have made a long journey, still has two Guardians to go before her training is complete. But the White Lady, Guardian of air, is not in the best state. The Master of Shadows(fire) is a trickster who may or may not advise her on how to protect the rebels’ Good Folk allies from cold iron, which makes them sick and can kill them. Worse, Keldec now has his own Caller, who is less scrupulous about what he does to the Good Folk he calls. Neryn’s beloved Flint, the rebels’ double agent, known to his comrades as Owen Swift-Sword, is fed up with his life at court and what he's forced to do as an Enforcer, but has no choice. Can he trust his closest friends in the Enforcers or not? 

The story in Raven Flight (Knopf) has been built up over the last two books in this series. Here it comes to a dramatic climax. Neryn has to make some decisions she doesn’t necessarily like. At the same time, she meets people from the other side whom she can like and respect and even finds herself, at one point, pitying the king and wondering what he might have been like under other circumstances. 

You do tend to forget the heroine is only 16, especially in a world where that’s an age where you might easily be married, but I think that any teens who have read the other two books will be happy with this one. 

Don’t read this without having read the first two books, but if you haven’t, I do recommend this series. ◊

Sue Bursztynski lives in Australia, where she works as a teacher-librarian. She has written several books for children and young adults, including Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly and the YA novel Wolfborn. Her blog The Great Raven can be found at http://suebursztynski.blogspot.com.

Feminism, Optimism and Genuine Creativity Fan Current Dystopia Craze

As fans get ready for the release of Divergent, the first film based on Veronica Roth’s popular novels set in a dystopian Chicago, in a recent piece for Wired, Devon Maloney examines the way dystopic storytelling has morphed and come to rule in recent years.

For one thing, Maloney notes, in a world that has itself become pretty dystopic, the success of the genre becomes easier to understand:

In a post-Harry Potter world where YA fiction is mega-franchise fodder, feminist sci-fi authors descended from the Atwood school—albeit with decidedly less sexual themes—have produced some of the most popular books of the past decade, nearly all primarily geared toward young adult readers. Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy—the harbinger of the dystopian YA craze—has put approximately 65 million copies into circulation in the U.S. alone; the first two movie adaptations have already grossed more than $800 million together domestically (and the third book, Mockingjay, will be adapted into two films over the next few years, making the franchise a multibillion-dollar machine). There’s Lauren Oliver’s Delirium trilogy, and Marie Lu’s Legend, and of course, Veronica Roth’s Divergent. 

But though on the surface it would seem that feminism is one of the ruling factors, there’s more at play here than even that. Perspective is one factor. The current wave of successful “dystopian” books and movies “are being judged by a dystopian standard that hasn’t really evolved to meet an era in which dystopia is all around us. These books succeed largely because, unlike the traditional understanding of the genre … they offer hope to the young living in our real-life dystopia, where there’s rarely optimism to be found.”

And there are other factors, including the fact that the audience this media is aimed at is constantly in flux and, maybe even more importantly, vital, new voices can have something genuinely fresh to say:

But through the cries of market saturation and copy-paste plotting, the people behind this newest vision of young gloom remain (perhaps obligatorily) optimistic. “A lot of people said ‘sword-and-sandal’ was completely dead, but then we did Gladiator,” says Divergent producer Douglas Wick. “People said vampire stories were dead before Twilight. People said you couldn’t revive Batman and then Chris Nolan came along. There’s always some genuinely creative person, not a duplicator, who can make something fresh again.”

Meanwhile the Neil Burger-directed film based on Roth’s first novel is scheduled for to be released this coming Friday.  The cast includes Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Zoë Kravitz, Ansel Elgort and Kate Winslet.

Maloney’s full piece is here.

No Sex for Teenage Boys

Do teenage boys want to read about sex? Author Darren Shan says that publishers don’t think so.

Shan, who has sold 25 million copies of his books worldwide since his debut novel, Cirque du Freak, was published in 2002, claims that while YA publishers are often okay with violence, as he recently told The Independent, “Sex is a no-go.” From the same piece:

"We should be more concerned about violence than exposing teenagers to sex. Teenagers making out is perfectly natural, but killing each other…"

In fact, when Darren Shan was first trying to get his books published in the late 90s, he was told that teenage boys wouldn't read regardless of the content.

"I'll never forget a meeting with one publisher where they said we don't publish books for teenage boys; teenage boys don't read," he said.

Shan says he feels publishers should be paying more attention to what their readers want and less to what they think they want. The author says they should, “publish books they want to read and they will. It's not that [boys] get to a certain age and go, 'I'm not reading any more'.”

Shan’s newest book, Zom-B Baby, the fifth book in his popular Zom-B series, was out september 26th in the UK and will come out October 1st just about everywhere else.

Young Adult Fiction: All Our Yesterdays By Cristin Terrill

Em is in a cell next to Finn, a boy she cares about, but hasn’t seen since they were locked up. The Doctor has been torturing them to get a vital piece of information. And in a hidden place in her cell, there’s a piece of paper from a future self (or is that past?): “You have to kill him.” 

The “him” is the boy she once loved, when she was Marina, rich and spoiled, living next door to an even wealthier family with two sons, the brilliant young politician-in-waiting and his shy, geeky but gorgeous younger brother. He invented a time machine and the only way to prevent dreadful things happening was to travel into the past with it and stop it being invented by killing him. Of course, this means that she and Finn, too, will cease to exist...

Time travel novels are great fun, even when they’re meant to be serious. You always wonder how the next author will deal with all the paradoxes time travel would cause. In All Our Yesterdays (Disney-Hyperion) you can tell that author Cristin Terill has thought carefully about it and worked on the consequences. In the context of this novel, at least, she convinces me. She has also played with all the cliched tropes -- you mustn’t meet your past or future self or the universe will explode or some such -- and poked her tongue out at them, in the middle of a dramatic scene. 

One cliche Terill does hang on to is the one where the heroine has a choice of two gorgeous boys, but in this case, the reader knows from the beginning which one she will end up with, just not how.

What I particularly liked, as a fan of old-style SF, is that the mad scientist of this genre is given a background, a reason for turning mad and a time when he was a teenage boy and had family and friends who loved him. It’s a nice touch.

If you’ve read all those enthusiastic blurbs saying that this is for fans of The Hunger Games, forget it; it’s not remotely like that book, and I have yet to find a book that is. Those blurbs just cash in on the fame of the other book and don’t do justice to either. It’s a bit like comparing every fat fantasy saga to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings when there’s nothing quite like it.

With that said, All Our Yesterdays is an enjoyable book and well worth reading. ◊

Sue Bursztynski lives in Australia, where she works as a teacher-librarian. She has written several books for children and young adults, including Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly and the YA novel Wolfborn. Her blog The Great Raven can be found at http://suebursztynski.blogspot.com.

Hunger Games Kicks Harry Potter to the Curb

To our knowledge, Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling and Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins have never been in competition. But if they were? The latest word is that Collins would be in the lead. Forbes tells us that The Hunger Games series has passed the Harry Potter series to become the all-time bestselling series of books. From Forbes:

Although author Suzanne Collins only wrote three books, her Hunger Games trilogy has been able to zap the magic out of J.K. Rowling’s seven-part Harry Potter franchise on Amazon.com,. Taking into consideration print and digital Kindle book sales combined, The Hunger Games, which are much shorter reads than the Potter books, have captivated a wider range of fans around the globe. All of the books in the Hunger Games and Harry Potter series are available for Kindle owners with a Prime membership to borrow for free in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

See the full post here.

Young Adult: Black Spring By Alison Croggon

I heard about Black Spring (Walker Books), a work of fantasy inspired by Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, at the Reading Matters Conference, where the author spoke, and decided to give it a go. I read Wuthering Heights for school and was curious to see what this author would make of it, so bought a copy.

First, the language: the author has done a very good job of getting that right. It reads pretty much like a 19th century book, to my eyes at least. The story is very similar to the original, with some changes. For example, Lina, the Cathy character, has no older brother and Damek, the Heathcliff of this novel, is related to the king and is imposed on the family. That makes a big difference to the storyline.

The technology is about the same, but the social structure is somewhat different. The north has its own royal family, which raises money by means of the Vendetta. Only those related to the ruler are exempt. If someone kills a person related to you, you must kill them and, in turn, be killed by someone in that family and, before you go off to commit your murder, you have to drop off some cash at the palace. Entire villages are wiped out because it's compulsory. If the royal coffers are low and nobody has a vendetta going, the king ensures one is started. Oh, and the victim not having a family doesn't prevent vendetta; in this case, the last family who hosted them must avenge the death.

Then there are the wizards, who don’t seem to do a lot apart from terrorizing villagers and issuing orders. On the other hand, if a girl is born with the violet eyes of a witch, she is killed. Presumably the wizards don’t want competition. Lina is a born witch, but the family move south for some years and then are allowed to move back without her destruction.

Interesting as all this is, I’m not sure that the Vendetta, at least, adds anything to the novel. If the author wanted to have a disaster in the village, a plague would surely have done the trick.

Despite all this, I’m sure Black Spring will have a lot of fans. It may do well for fantasy fans who aren’t ready to try the original. Those readers who, like me, have read the Bronte book, will have the fun of following the storyline and seeing how connected it is to the original. And I have to say that Lina is a somewhat more sympathetic character than Cathy: I have long thought that Cathy and Heathcliff are among fiction’s more obnoxious lovers, who thoroughly deserve each other. 

But as a YA novel, it really needs very good readers, the kind who could handle the original, and if they can handle Wuthering Heights, why not give them the original?

Still, it’s well worth a read and hopefully, anyone who discovers and enjoys Black Spring first will check out Wuthering Heights, and that can be no bad thing. ◊


Sue Bursztynski lives in Australia, where she works as a teacher-librarian. She has written several books for children and young adults, including Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly and, most recently, the YA novel Wolfborn. Her blog, The Great Raven, can be found at http://suebursztynski.blogspot.com.