The Dark Between by Sonia Gensler: #tbt review

Plucky, street-wise Kate is an orphan who has just lost her last hope of making an even vaguely respectable living. Frail, dreamy Elsie suffers from fits and can’t admit to anybody what she sees while she has them. Handsome, brooding Asher is just trying to get away from an American father he hates. 

The members of this ragtag group of Victorian teens find their various ways to London’s Summerfield College, where all is not as it seems. There have been mysterious deaths, and the three very different young people are going to have to start trusting each other before they can learn the disturbing truth--and how to deal with their own dark secrets.

This is an entertaining paranormal mystery in the gothic vein with fairly judicious touches of steampunk. It does suffer from a very common fault, that of putting characters with distinctly modern attitudes into a setting that is supposed to be more or less historical. Also, the vast majority of the story's tension revolves around the fact that these characters repeatedly fail to just come out and tell each other what they obviously need to know. 

Nonetheless, the story carries the reader along an amusing roller-coaster of a plot with enough twists and turns to keep you guessing. Refreshingly, the obvious pair-off fails to materialize, and the way the lines between the spirit world and the world of hard-nosed scientific discovery are blurred is interesting in itself. A fun, light read for younger and middle teens.

Against the Fall of Night (or The City and the Stars) by Arthur C. Clarke: #tbt review

This is the book that turned me into a science fiction reader when I was 10 or 11 years old. I was at my godparents' house when I noticed this book cover on the stack of books kept in the half-bathroom off the kitchen. Of course I was completely intrigued and started reading it—and ended up taking it home with me. The rest is, well, history. So many scenes from this book are utterly vivid to me even now. I lived this book.

Against the Fall of Night (also called, in a different and longer edition that I don't actually recommend, The City and the Stars) is the far-future story of a teenager named Alvin. It's humanity's twilight; Alvin is the only child of his generation. He lives in Diaspar, a beautiful, fully self-contained city on an Earth that has become a vast, inhospitable desert. He has everything he could possibly need or want—at least, that's the idea.

But Alvin is a throwback, blessed (or cursed) with a trait that has been nearly bred out of what remains of humanity: curiosity. His curiosity leads him to discover that there’s a lot more out there than he’s been taught, and he becomes caught between forces that have been holding his world in a rigid balance as a defense against a power that threaten’s humanity’s very existence.

This story takes place in a very far future where humanity is long past its bloom and has hunkered down in one city on one planet to slowly, slowly die. What’s left of our species lives in parasitic luxury off the past, while denying itself or its children any knowledge of that past or why things are the way they are now. Basically we are a moribund species and have retreated so far back into our shell that we don't remember anything else when Alvin is born.

Or so it would seem.

Alvin represents both the past and the future of humanity: he’s a type that hasn’t existed in Diaspar for so many millennia that nobody quite knows what to do with him. He’s also the key to any possible future humanity might have. This is an allegory about old age and adolescence, and also a story of an existential threat to our species that’s very much born of the cold war. It's also an adventure. It's quite wonderful.

Do check out the link to The City and the Stars if you're at all interested. It will take you to a nice, long Tor Books review of both books that discusses the differences and interplay between the two versions. But maybe check it out after you've read Against the Fall of Night—because spoilers!

Circe by Madeline Miller

Narrated by Perdita Weeks

When I was about 14 years old, I read Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis and it changed my life. It was the story of Cupid and Psyche, told from the perspective of Psyche’s older sister. I’d always loved Greek mythology, but under Lewis’ skillful hand, this story and the world it’s set in came vividly to life. Suddenly these were real people with real flaws dealing with, yes, problems on a more-than-human scale, but in a very human way. It was like that moment in The Giver when Jonas begins to learn to see in color. If the people in this story were really human, maybe the people in other myths were, too—maybe they were all human stories, about people not so different from me. All a question of perspective, and mine had shifted, permanently.

Then I reread it as an adult with adult critical faculties—and was deeply disappointed by it. The misogyny that runs through it is so deeply ingrained in the plot and the characters that there was no ignoring it, no compartmentalizing it or separating it from an otherwise beautifully-written book. The whole premise of the thing was that Psyche’s older sister was ugly, and the fact that her younger sister was beautiful and got all sorts of goodies for it—adventure, romance, the attention of the gods—twisted her insides up so badly that she became as ugly on the inside as on the outside. And this was just natural: of course any ugly woman would be so twisted with envy and hatred for any attractive woman that her life would be one big bitter pill. Even if it was her baby sister.

I may go back to it a third time. Maybe I’ve mellowed enough with age to appreciate its virtues as well as its faults. Maybe.

But I don’t have to. Madeline Miller has written Circe, and I so, so wish I could go back in time and hand it to 14-year-old me. It would have blown her mind in exactly the same way as Till We Have Faces, but without the nasty misogynistic-garbage aftertaste.

There’s not much to say about the plot of this book if you’re at all familiar with Greek mythology. Circe is the witch who turns Odysseus’ crew into swine (and well they deserved it); she’s the one who turned the nymph Scylla into the hideous sea-monster to whom we unwittingly refer when we say “between a rock and a hard place” (the original rock being the one Scylla lived in, and Charybdis, another sea monster or maybe a whirlpool nearby, being the hard place—it was apparently not an easy thing to navigate safely between the two); she’s the goddess of magic, or maybe her daughter; she’s a nymph; she’s a misfit; she’s a mother of heroes; she’s the daughter of the mighty titan, Helios.

What’s wonderful about this book is the way it takes all of these disparate identities and scraps of legend and weaves them into one complex but utterly believable being. I mean, aren’t we all a little complicated, and, once we’ve lived enough of life, wouldn’t the people who knew us best at one point in our lives hardly recognize us based on descriptions of us from people we knew in other eras?

Circe is no angel, and this novel isn’t an attempt to reform her. Thank the gods. Nor, however, does it romanticize her dark deeds, and neither does it wallow in them. What it does is create a portrait of an immortal life drawn from many, many strands, setting that life in an ancient Greece where magic is very real and the gods are all too manifest, and this portrait is clear and believable enough to seem like a window we could almost walk right through.

We see the court of Helios with its bickering nymphs, pitch-black and frozen by day while its lord is away and brilliant but brittle when he is in residence, through the eyes of his most neglected daughter. We see her exile to Aeaea, beset by wild beasts and worse sailors, as something she loves and hates in turn, and which in the end facilitates her coming into her own power and protecting her son. We see a person and a life in all of their facets. And maybe, if we’re women of a certain age, we see a little of ourselves.

But you don’t have to be any particular age or gender to be thoroughly ravished by this book. Five out of five stars.

The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson: #tbt review

Can a book change, and maybe save, a girl’s life? What does the life of one little girl matter in a world of abundance and extreme social stratification?

Four-year-old Nell, a member of a dispossessed underclass in a world where abundance should be everybody’s birthright and education has become the scarce commodity that sets the classes apart, is dangerously ignorant. She's growing up with all the dangers and disadvantages of poverty in a world where there’s no reason for poverty to exist.  

Then she comes into possession of a wondrous stolen item. It's a technological marvel: a book that talks to her, changes itself to teach and entertain her, shapes her view of the world, and even cares about her, until she can not only survive her harsh reality, but, as she becomes a young woman, break out of it.

You've heard of smart phones? This is a smart book, and it’s meant to teach critical thinking to educated young ladies of the upper classes. But there's a person behind it; humans are hired as voice actors, and to fill in the gaps where an AI can't figure out how to respond to something. Miranda has a gig being the human voice behind these primers, and she's worried about Nell. Pretty soon her humanity starts to color the responses of Nell's primer, and that changes everything.

There’s a strong ideological statement here; the story aims to show the extent to which poverty, ignorance, and misery create the inability to rise above one’s parents’ station, rather than the other way around.

This book was my first exposure to steampunk, and my second Neal Stephenson, and I was in awe. There are so many ideas zooming around, and the world-building is so impeccable and complex, and yet Stephenson never loses sight of the human beings who make all of it matter.

How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

Read by Mark Meadows

I am a sucker for time travel stories and vampire stories.

What I often love best about vampire novels and movies is the rich, specific melancholy of the very long-lived—the friends and lovers lost in the depths of centuries; the layered memories of cities as they change through their life cycle while you go on, unchanging; the sense of displacement when the culture that formed you no longer exists. What I love about time travel books is being vicariously plopped, with all of my modern sensibilities, into another time.

How to Stop Time isn’t a vampire book or a time-travel book. It’s about a bloke named Tom Hazard. He’s not a blood-sucking monster and doesn’t have access to any technology that lets him mess with the fabric of space-time. He’s actually a pretty average guy, apart from one thing—due to a rare genetic condition, he doesn’t age at the same rate as the rest of us. He’s been alive for centuries, but doesn’t look a day over 41.

As we read we learn about his childhood, and how he became aware of his condition, and what a danger it was to those around him. Tom’s mother was killed as a witch when people started to notice that he had been 13 years old for an awfully long time, for example. And of course he himself is in danger of being torn apart by mobs or vivisected for science or, at best, thrown in a loony bin, depending on the era and area he’s in. He gradually learns to lie low and never, ever fall in love.

Except he did fall in love, once, when he was a young man. His beloved is long dead as the novel opens, but the daughter they had together, who inherited his longevity, has disappeared. Tom has been searching for her for centuries, with the help of the Albatross Society, a shadowy group of people who share Tom’s condition. They’re a helpful bunch, helping their members acquire new lives and new identities every eight years so that they can live unmolested. All the Albatross Society asks in exchange is the occasional favor.

Tom isn’t actually crazy about performing these favors, but whenever he thinks about backing out of the society, he thinks about his beloved daughter and how they are helping him locate her, and he sticks around. Fingering his many memories like beads on a rosary, avoiding falling in love, and meanwhile rubbing elbows with the likes of William Shakespeare and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

This is a book that held a lot of charms for me. Tom isn’t some superguy; he’s just this bloke who happens to have this genetic condition which has been, yes, a blessing to him, but also, at times, a curse. There’s an extent to which all that elbow-rubbing with famous people starts to feel a little Forrest-Gumpish, but really, if you were writing a time travel book--okay, a book in which your protagonist travels through a lot of time—would you really be able to resist putting them in intriguing historical situations or having them meet intriguing historical personages? And the author doesn’t overdo it.

My main beef with this book is that Tom seems a trifle naive for somebody with plural centuries under his belt. But I love the way his personality develops, over time, into a modern one, and the flashbacks to previous eras are so skillfully written that I felt I’d been whisked right there.

A fun piece of speculative fiction; file under Ripping Yarns for Melancholy Temperaments.

Protector of the Small: First Test by Tamora Pierce: #tbt review

This is another book that my kid fell in love with when I would have thought they were too young for it, because I was listening to it in the car. With hindsight, I can see that they loved the heroine's strong sense of justice and her refusal to fit into prescribed gender roles.

Plus Tamora Pierce has done a great job of world-building here. If you're a fan of fantasy but you haven't read any of her books yet, you should—and this one would be a great place to start. It comes after the Song of the Lioness series and makes numerous references to storylines and characters from it, but someone who hasn't read that first (as I hadn't!) won't be at all lost.

As this novel begins, because of the pioneering work of the great Lady Knight, Alanna the Lioness, girls have won the right to go into service as pages and become knights. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Keladry of Mindelan is the first one to attempt it, and she learns very quickly just how stacked against her the deck is.

Not only is the system itself unfair, but on top of that, she immediately ends up on probation because of the actions of a bully. She has to work so much harder and overcome so many more obstacles than any boy… it would be so easy to give up. 

But she’s always wanted this, and it seems at least one person in the world believes she can really do it: a mysterious benefactor keeps sending her expensive gifts that are exactly what a page needs. Plus, Kel has never been able to abide a bully. Something has to be done about this one, or he’ll be able to get away with hurting her friends, too.

This is basically the story of the first girl going to a West Point-type military academy, only in a fantasy setting. Keladry lives out the maxim that a woman has to be twice as good as a man to be considered half as good. It’s a good introduction for middle-grade kids and younger teens to this sort of story, and Kel is a compelling character—she makes mistakes and has bad days but her determination and her unwavering protectiveness of those who are taken advantage of by others who are stronger keep her going.

The author, Tamora Pierce, originally studied psychology with an eye toward doing social work with teenagers. But she became a full-time writer instead in 1992, and I'm glad—I'm sure she has reached a lot more teens with her writing than she could have as a social worker.