Feed

I feel a need to start this review with a warning: this book cusses. It contains naughty words. And while it's a thought-provoking work (I finished it two days ago and I'm still thinking about it), if you really hate cussing, you are really not going to like this book.

In M.T. Anderson's book, Titus and his friends go to the moon for spring break. But their trip to the moon doesn't go well. It seems to be going well for a short while: they play around in zero-gravity for a little while, Titus meets a girl he finds intriguing and she agrees to go with the group of them to a club...and then a hacker messes with their feeds.

Because, you see, Titus and his friends live in a society where a feed is installed in their brain. The feed is tied into essential functions, but it also continuously broadcasts--even when they're sleeping. And the sole purpose of the feed is to sell things to people.

As a result, everyone's language has deteriorated. Vocabulary has diminished. And even the adults in the novel speak in a very eerie parody somewhere between text shorthand and the dude-based lingo I've always associated with surfers.

The interaction with the hacker temporarily lands all of them--including Titus and his newfound friend Violet--in the hospital. After a few days, they're released. But Violet will never be the same. Her feed is different, because she got it later in life.

The core of the novel explores Titus' relationship with Violet, who he likes but doesn't quite understand: she's a product of world like his but unlike his. He's always had the feed, he attends SchoolTM (did I mention that the feeds are monopolized entirely by large corporations?), and his life centers around what he wants to or can buy. Violet, meanwhile, has been trying to find a way to keep her feed from figuring her out.

It's your basic boy-meets-girl, girl doesn't think much about boy, girl decides she likes boy, they date, boy breaks up with girl when she literally starts deteriorating story. And the unnerving about the story is that its eerily prescient in how it mixes in the story with the snippets of advertising coming from the feed...it's not entirely unlike reading certain parts of the Internet expanded into novel form or watching certain types of reality television.

Even at its most over the top, so much else seems to have such parallels...that this becomes a very good book. And a very worrying one.

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

Terry Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, as is the case with everything else Pratchett has written, qualifies as a top-notch comic novel. It's the story of a team of cons composed of a talking cat, many talking rats, and one stupid-looking kid who knows how to play the pipe.

Maurice and the rats have gained intelligence from eating "dangerous" waste that was disposed of behind the wizarding university. (Almost all of Pratchett's works take place in a place called the Discworld, where one of the most important and influential entities is Unseen University--where wizards go to learn.) By eating off the slag heap, they've suddenly figured out how to think and how to reason and even--some of them--how to read and write.

For a while, nobody knows how Maurice too became intelligent--although when he eventually reveals that he became intelligent after eating an intelligent rat...well, you aren't terribly surprised. After all, he's still a cat, and cat do eat rats. (One of his running defenses of himself throughout the book is that he won't eat intelligent life, so he always asks his food to speak before devouring it.)

Anyway, this group has a regular con going on: they stop in at a town, where the rats are generally ratty enough to convince the town they have a plague of rats. The stupid-looking kid comes in and offers to be a rat piper, he plays the rats right out of the town (or so the townies think), and monetary rewards are inevitably involved.

But then these cons come upon a town where another con is being run: a con they find even worse than their own. Some of the rats will die. Some of the rats will live after almost dying. And Maurice might find himself leaving the town with a couple fewer lives than he had when he walked into it.

There's self-discovery, and different types of personalities working together, a tidy little lesson about how to blend the old and the new in together (after a fashion). It's quite the neatly packaged little allegory, but it's never over-the-top with its lessons, and it's appropriately over-the-top with its laughter.

As is ever the case with Pratchett, you should read it at a time you really need a good laugh. (Which, let's face it, is pretty much always.)

My Name is Mary Sutter

Robin Oliveira has created something incredibly and tremendously interesting with My Name is Mary Sutter. Set just before and during the Civil War, our protagonist has one very desperate and well-defined wish: Mary Sutter wants to be a surgeon. But of course, it's Civil War era America and she's female. From the beginning, we as readers know that for Mary Sutter to become a surgeon will be difficult if not nigh impossible.

Mary Sutter, as trained by her mother Amelia, is already a midwife. She's a very capable midwife--better, some think, than her mother--but she doesn't feel that midwifery is enough. Mary Sutter has studied all sorts of anatomy books.

She has grown up in a rich family, but being a surgeon is the one thing she cannot buy her way into. With the onset of the Civil War, Mary Sutter finds she has an opportunity to move to Washington to nurse and then--possibly--to become a surgeon.

Mixed in with the story of becoming a surgeon are personal matters...death and heartbreak...but they are not nearly as interesting--or as bewitchingly appalling--as learning about the state of medicine back then.

It's not a rapid read, and I still couldn't quite tell you whether I like Mary Sutter as a character. She's stubborn and determined and should be a bit likeable, but I can't determine whether I quite liked her. The book is clearly meticulously researched and well-written, and some of the most interesting characters are the real ones we meet only brief--President Lincoln, his secretary John Hay, and Dorothea Dix. In my opinion, good historical fiction does this: makes historical figures into interesting characters I'm learning new things about without being force-fed the information via a history book.

The First Escape

G.P. Taylor's The First Escape is...mixed media. It's part novel, part comic book. Even now, several days after finishing it, I can't quite decide how I feel about its presentation.

Its story, I suppose, is interesting enough. Sadie and Saskia Dopple, twins, live at an orphanage where they spell double trouble. They're mischievous and when Muzz Elliott comes to take one of them--the head of the orphanage jumps at the opportunity. But Muzz Elliott seems to have some secrets within the walls of her house once we arrive there.

The other twin, left at the orphanage with Erik Morrissey Ganger, finds herself in enough trouble that she's faced with a choice to run away or to go to jail: naturally, she opts to run away; Erik helps her.

We encounter many different types of characters with the twins: a dodgy chauffeur, a fake medium, a super-scary magician, a woman who is a ghost/companion/tutor.

It's the first in a series, and I'm intrigued to see where the rest of the stories go. It was a fast read, and it was entertaining. The art wasn't my favorite, but the art very comic strippy...and after reading things like The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck...it seemed very amateurish.

Still: Sadie, Saskia, and Erik have spunk. I wouldn't mind reading more of their adventures.

Knight Life

There are particular stories that I've always loved. When it comes right down to it, I can't always tell you why. I just...love them. And I've always loved the Arthurian legends: Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot. Knights. Chivalry. Duels. Honor. Well, I suppose I just listed a few of the reasons I love them although I don't know that they're the fundamental reasons. Likewise, I'm always interested in people who move these familiar stories and legends into different times and places. But with similar casts of characters. Similar, but not completely the same.

In Knight Life, Arthur awakes from a long slumber to find himself in New York. The world has changed, although he still manages to find a reincarnation of Guenevere to help him along. She more or less falls in love with him at first sight. New York isn't a place run by kings anymore, so a young Merlin who has significantly aged backward (who, of course, was the one who both caused Arthur to slumber and awaken) helps Arthur to run for mayor.

Arthur fashions himself as Arthur Penn, and all of his foes--and Merlin's--are still around. Morgan and Modred are still alive, and they still oppose Arthur and Merlin. (Modred, who goes by Mo, is actually publicity chair for one of the other candidates Arthur runs against.)

The situation, while amusing, is a bit...dated. Even with updates that Peter David made to a later edition, the technology still feels a little off. And the fact that everyone keeps mocking Arthur for being out-of-date ends up feeling more than a little bit ironic. That said, it's still an amusing read for anyone familiar with the basic framework of the legends.

It's silly and over-the-top in an almost charming way, but I would have enjoyed it more if the characters were more developed and it was generally less cheeky. It would've been much more charming if it weren't trying so hard to comprise an entire plot line of in-jokes. (Some of them are funny, some of them fall flat.)

David wrote two sequels, which are a little bit more modern--and so would be less dated--but I have yet to decide if I endeavor to read them.

Wonderstruck

I thought it after reading The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and I think it even more so now after reading Wonderstruck: Brian Selznick is pretty much a genius. Like its predecessor, this novel has also created buzz within awards committees (last I heard, it was under consideration for both a Newbery and a Caldecott). I liked it better than I liked its predecessor, but as is the case with book reviews, that's a matter of my own opinion.

This novel follows two parallel stories: one story takes place in the 192os, as movies are making a transition from silent film to talking. The other takes place in the 1970s. The 1920s-era story features a young deaf girl in New York who is essentially kept under lock and key, because her family feels it too dangerous for someone deaf to venture into the noisy, noisy world without a guide. She makes building models with the sign language books her teacher provides. She escapes and ventures into the city to seek something bigger--and also, to seek out her brother.

In 1970, a young boy whose mother has just died returns to their cabin, and loses his hearing due to a lightning strike. While he was in the cabin, he had found information for the man he thinks is his father. In spite of his deafness, he too ventures to New York City--where the information shows his father lived and worked.

As is always the case with parallel stories, the two inevitably intertwine. As always, Selznick's drawings are immensely detailed and tell a story all their own. And I find this book so much more phenomenal because of the way Selznick uses his graphic novel medium to show what type of experience a deaf person may have had. You can't help but notice how much attention you are paying to both the text and the pictures, and you can't help but realize as you read that this is to a large extent how someone deaf would interact with their world--through text and picture.

But it doesn't call attention to this emphasis in any kind of distracting way. If anything, it adds to the experience of novel and allows a reader to empathize--if even for a couple of hours--with what a deaf experience might be like. And that's what good books do. They help illustrate experience.

The Wee Free Men

If there is any such thing as a fantasy author with a sense of humor that is superior to Terry Pratchett's, I have not yet encountered him (or her). If you pick up a Terry Pratchett novel, you are guaranteed to be treated to funny. And funny. And lots of funny. With a little bit of social commentary mixed in with the funny. (Which really, makes him so brilliant, in my opinion. You don't stop to think most of the time about what he's satirizing because you're far too busy laughing at everything.)

The protagonist of Wee Free Men is actually a young girl, Tiffany Aching, who lives on a farm in The Chalk. But trouble has start happening in and near her farm: fairy tale monsters have been coming to life. And to top everything off, the Fairy Queen decides to steal away Tiffany's younger brother.

As the boundaries between reality and fairy tales monsters fade, Tiffany Aching learns that she is a witch and learns that she has some very small, very male, somewhat drunk, very fighting-oriented small allies known as the Wee Free Men. They are pictsies, not pixies. Pictsies fight and steal and drink. Pixies fly around and glow.

With the their help, Tiffany sets off on an adventure to recover her younger brother. And in the process, she will learn how to be a witch. (Incidentally, being a witch involves quite a lot of hilarious-yet-logical thinking that surprisingly, nobody else seems to be doing.)

It's a relatively quick read, and it's out-loud-laughing funny. I highly recommend it. It's the first in a series, and I look forward to reading more of Tiffany's adventures with her small, blue compatriots.