a young adult fiction thread

since finally I'm getting round to looking at the stuff mentioned in the Hunger Games thread.

Yesterday I read Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth, which was at least half-interesting. It combines adolescent striving against a dystopian society (which I believe is the #1 cliche of YA fiction right now) with zombies (which are the #1 cliche of everything in the past decade.) Specifically: there is a village, surrounded by zombies, with a creepy domineering religion, and ancestral memories of electricity and photographs. All of this stuff was sort of well-executed: I can imagine if I were a kid who'd not encountered these individual ideas before I'd find it pretty affecting. Plus zombies. It did feel a bit like the author relied upon the reader to fill in a lot of details from literacy in zombie film, though; this might be the stiltedness of the prose. Tho' one sentence (about, er, screaming turning to moaning as the vocal cords wear down) did definitely make me flinch.

On the other hand: in the Hunger Games thread someone described the interpersonal relationships in that book as "limerence-drenched bullshit": which is way, way worse in this book. The teenagers feel like an nth-generation photocopy of clichéd ideas of how teenagers relate to each other romantically; the book has no problem putting an unconsummated* teenage romance on the same level (LURVE) as a three-year marriage which survives two miscarriages; whenever the characters hold conversations or the narrator expresses her feelings things can be kind of painful.

It also ends on a fairly transparently unresolved note and "turn the page for a sneak preview of the new Carrie Ryan novel", which oy. Also there's a super-zombie called the 'Fast One', which is unfortunate.

*well: there's blank spaces, where I guess it might have been; things are sort of coy, sexless. I don't know to what extent this is a feature of the genre as a whole, though.

Also: don't have a 50-page plot hangup on the fact that no-one can read roman numerals anymore whilst also having your narrator name her dog 'Argos', that's just dumb.

Anyway this is probably going to be my YA blog until I get bored of the idea. Next: Ship-Breaker.

My dog's called Costcutter, what of it?

har

as of p4 ship-breaker is v good

It's very well written; the first half is inventive and compelling. The second half becomes a bit too chase-y, but I think it's ultimately a good book, and an excellent introduction into a certain class of adult lit.

ship-breaker is indeed good, but it's basically bacigalupi-lite. which is both surprising (that he could get away with as much misanthropy as he does in his adult-aimed books) and totally understandable (that it would never be as dark or as complex as windup girl or some of the short stories).

Sorry about Forest. I'd never read it or even SEEN it, it just came up as a search result when someone asked if there were any YA zombie books. I feel responsible....

ha laurel i knew no one recommended it as such, i just felt like reading it

i did not know bacigalupi wrote adult SF too: i almost wonder whether this was pitched as an adult novel and dialed down a little.
i'm not sure what remy means about it being 'an excellent introduction into a certain class of adult lit'; that seems like a weird set of terms on which to justify a novel for almost-adults

is the world of it something he's done before? it's unlike the last couple of kids' books i've read in that the environment presented to the reader -- 'postapocalyptic', but really just 'post-fossil fuel' -- seems genuinely a new and interesting thing. which is something lost a bit in the second half -- when it's the lifestyles of the copper-reclaimers and so forth it seems like the whole shape of the narrative is an attempt to deal with the theme, and then when they spend the second half running from things with occasional pauses to talk about environmental hypocrisy, it feels a bit like the plot is going on and then the themes are going on somewhere else

reminds me a little joan aiken's wolves-of-willoughby-chase-black-hearts-of-battersea-etc. stuff. though i'm not sure i could justify that, other than there is a lot of time spent on ships

bacigalupi's first novel 'the windup girl' is basically 'about' the same stuff although i dont know if its actually supposed to be the same future i havent read shipbreaker lol

i don't THINK it's set in the same world. he did a couple of short stories ("the calorie man," "yellow card man") set in the same world as windup girl, but they read more like ramping-up to the novel than anything else. the concerns of ship breaker and the world of it are pretty similar to windup though not quite so gruesome/hopeless.

my sister pushed shipbreaker on me and bought me a copy for my birthday. starting it tonight.

first half good, second half is just a movie. but i'd like to see shipbreaker: the movie.

i feel like this seems like a common failing of children's / YA fiction i'm seeing at the moment, this movieness. felt either in the description (ship-breaker not guilty of that, mind) or in the plotting; that there's a fairly limited arc which is realised entirely in external events, something drastic happening every 50 pages, no ideas but in things, i don't know. i find it hard to articulate what i mean by that. i mean, i can say stuff feels 'filmic' or there are 'no slow moments' but that's not really saying anything meaningful.

& the first half of ship-breaker -- which i guess would be the first 30 minutes of the movie -- sort of luxuriates in one place, & feels like dianna wynne jones or joan aiken or william mayne in some ways -- i don't know, i'm worried about any attempt at criticism descending to 'these american YA writers aren't as good as these british kids' writers from the 70s but i am not going to articulate why'

the knife of letting go has a very entertaining first paragraph, but then i realised i didn't really feel like reading it. i flicked through it and the last section looks like it has some very annoying orthography to cope with.

the knife of letting go makes my fingers twitch spasmodically in the attempt to ctrl-h an already-printed text

idgi

the 'attenshun' 'condishun' 'prevaricashun' tic. this is really annoying to me. like -- people who can't spell don't think in misspelled words, because people don't think in words. it's doubly annoying in a book where everyone can here everyone's thoughts -- at one point the narrator thinks something and the girl calls him out on his grammar. people don't think grammar!

i feel like the thinking-thoughts thing wasn't thought through: no-one can hear the aliens' thoughts as words because they don't have language -- but then there are a bunch of animals that talk and even when they don't their thoughts are words, or are communicated to the reader as being words. like if the thoughts of a horse or a dog are close enough to words that the novel says 'the horse thought SNAKE' and not 'about snakes' or 'picturing a snake to itself', then the alien dudes should be the same

thomp, have you read riddley walker?

that said i liked a lot of it i guess xp

remy i got about forty pages into it once: it didn't bother me as much as all that, though

also (having checked) on like page two walker confirms that he's writing this stuff down

So, is this supposed to be about young adult fiction, or young adult fiction?

i think 'young' is referring to the age of the intended reader and the age of this thread

the monstrumologist (or, to give it its uk title: 'the monstrumologist: terror beneath'. the cover is set up to make it look like the nth book in a series, and when i ordered it and again when it arrived i briefly convinced myself i'd bought a sequel by accident. why the fuck would you do this) is i. successfully atmospheric & compelling ii. either doing some interesting metafictional things or some very rote ones iii. a bit bloody freudian for my liking

the random drops into parody of 19th century sentimental register are weird, too: i can't imagine the kid that those bits are for. the ridiculous levels of gore and grossout, that kid i can imagine

I used monstrumologist as a tutoring book with two seventh graders earlier this summer. They loved it – the gore and symbolism were high points, and the emotional contrivances (lovey dovey stuff) near the end were the low points. I agree with you about the Freud, but the 'drops into 19th c. sentimental register' weren't anything the kids picked up on, for good or for ill. My least favorite part of the book – the finale – was their most enjoyable reading, and Yancey's dropping of the careful, atmospheric narrative in favor of breakneck action really pulled them through to the ending.

Sorry if this is barely coherent - I'm writing it on the run. More thoughts later.

no it's cool! it's v interesting, too, to hear about the reactions of you know actual high school kids

srsly tho who thought it was a good idea to go from this

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41JFMfygEaL._SS500_.jpg

to this

http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/richmedia/images/cover.gif

i mean, er, this

http://www.thephantomzone.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/mon.jpg

now, the green glass sea, on first showings, may be the first of these i love unequivocally

it seems kind of a weird case in that for an adult reader there's a fairly heavy level of dramatic irony involved with all the no-one-can-talk-about-what-your-father-does stuff -- i am going to assume the green glass sea is the fused desert after the test detonation? -- but to a kid who didn't know about the manhattan project this stuff all plays as genuine mystery? otoh i don't know, maybe all american children know about los alamos at age five

Yikes, that cover re-des is so paperbacky.

the notes-for-teachers (!) in the back of my copy of green glass sea note that there are two other YA fiction novels about kids at the manhattan project. i'm not sure what i make of that datum.

this was a weird read, v. old-fashioned in some ways. to some extent devoid of conflict or at least rising action. and yet very enjoyable and compelling. i didn't like the interlude of dewey running away due to a misunderstanding: i feel like that's a cliche i've seen a hundred times, though it's probably more like five or six. i did like how her father's death was completely untelegraphed - well, literally it probably was - but that it was a shocking + realistic intrustion into the narrative. which i think is about the only thing in this that couldn't have been written five years after the event: that and some of the nuance of the handling of race, gender; the references to the end of the war.

i read will grayson and someday this pain will be useful to you too but forgot to say anything about them

thanks to whoever recommended ship breaker, i'm really enjoying it. before that i read the forest of hands and teeth, and initially i was like "okay this is competent enough," but it got worse as it went on and then ended with an awful lot of plot stuff unresolved and unexplained. i see there are two sequels but their summaries don't look very promising.

i have softened on will grayson.

what about 'someday this pain'?

well, i enjoyed it a lot? i was surprised, actually, that i found the 'realistic' stuff i've been reading more compelling + readable in general than i have the genre stuff. both that and grayson i was reading at all spare moments until they were done, whereas the monstrumologist i picked up and put down for a week. although i guess the sample size here isn't big enough to conclude anything about whether YA fantasy is in general flabbier

i found it odd trying to picture who would be switched-on enough to the cultural environment of someday this pain will be useful to you to fully engage with & get it as an actual adolescent, tho? tho' i dunno, i guess holden caulfield went to prep school

i've been using this thread and the hunger games one as a reading list -- so far i've chewed through 10 out of the 13 lemony snicket books and someday this pain will be useful to you. the lemony snicket books are great: i love the writing style, the sense of humor, the nerdy lit references, and the even the whole "lemony snicket" conceit, with the outlandish asides about his life on the run and his dedications to poor dead beatrice. i expected them to be formulaic, given how many of them there are, but i thought it did a good job of unfolding a larger story arc as the series wore on. and i found it legit affecting when sunny started to grow up and walk and talk over the course of a few books.

someday this pain was beautifully written and i came away with a positive impression of it, but the journey was a bit bumpy. the main character's lack of class-consciousness was kind of startling given how well-read, self-conscious, and wary of cliche he was. i know he had odd areas of denial or self-blindness that might indicate this was intentionally meant, but it also wasn't something he learned from or addressed in the end. i was also disappointed when he made a series of references to fat women that portrayed them as kind of grotesque. i know, as far as the character was concerned, EVERYONE is kind of grotesque, but these references felt particularly detailed -- the male guards who kick him out of the museum are just described as "guards," but he explicitly mentions seeing a fat female guard eating a disgusting lunch of taco bell. or his seatmate on the bus trip who is fat, smells, dresses poorly, and has no personal boundaries -- this kind of character would have alienated me as a younger (fat, girl) reader, because up until that point the main character's sense of alienation resonated strongly with me, and then the triteness of this character felt like a swift careless Othering that didn't have much to do with anything. i realize that's a bit of a specific grievance, but it tripped me up and hindered my enjoyment.

moving on to will grayson, will grayson next.

finished all the books in a series of unfortunate events, was surprised to find that lemony snicket wrote the lost finale four years before it aired.

three chapters into will grayson and i don't really like either narrator. the emotions are relatable but the voices are getting on my nerves.

just finished dreamhunter by elizabeth knox. her book the vintner's luck has been a favorite of mine for years, and this was apparently her first YA-aimed book? it was terrific. she has a lovely prose style, and i found the plot/world-building here really compelling. it's set in an early-1900's alt-universe new zealand where certain people can "capture" pre-formed dreams and perform them to others. shades of inception without the suits, heists, and video game sequences.

the book ends on something of a cliffhanger, so now i have to wait for the library to open so i can get the second one.

!!! Knox is one of my favorite writers, vintner's luck a long-time fav too! I read hunter a while ago, and always keep my eye out for the second one in used bookstores. Have you read catherine chidgey?

*dream

i haven't, but if she's anything like knox, i'm definitely interested! any specific titles you'd recommend? i'm also unfamiliar with/interested in margaret mahy, who i've seen mentioned in a few places as being one of knox's influences. i get the impression she might be aimed at younger audiences, though.

i think chidgey has a similar voice to knox - i really liked all 3 of her novels, but you might want to start with 'the transformation'.

i haven't read margaret mahy since i was a little kid, but she's an icon in NZ. on the YA front, i would also recommend 'the conjuror' by jack lasenby.

I've just enjoyed reading Stephanie Burgis' 'A Tangle of Magicks', not sure if it's YA or children's (the protag is 12). One of a series I haven't been reading, but it stood alone. Very dependent on caricatures, but fun. What happens if you throw magic and a 12 year old girl who enthusiastically thumps people into an Austen novel? Something enough like this to tickle me.

has anyone read 'uglies' and sequels thereof, i can't decide if they sound amazing or repulsive

http://www.stackedbooks.org/2013/11/a-closer-look-at-new-york-times-ya.html

i found it odd trying to picture who would be switched-on enough to the cultural environment of someday this pain will be useful to you to fully engage with & get it as an actual adolescent, tho? tho' i dunno, i guess holden caulfield went to prep school

― thomp, Thursday, 29 September 2011 07:32 (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol like a week after that post i met someone who had gotten involved in the ~ny art scene~ as an ~alienated gay teen~ and when some months later i mentioned that book he was like ~my god that book~

A friend of mine tricked me into reading YA by buying me two M.T. Anderson books, 'The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing' and 'Feed.' They are...really good so far!

Octavian Nothing is the shit.

'the scorpion rules' by erin bow is fantastic. great psychological horror set in realistic future earth. lots to recommend but particularly interested in how much the ya genre in particular is invested in dealing w/coming ecosystem collapse. curious how absent it is from contemp adult fiction of all types

i feel like it's in ... franzen

scorpion rules looks like smth i will read