YA Guy Reviews... CROSS FIRE by Fonda Lee!

YA Guy's favorite YA science fiction author is Fonda Lee.

There. I said it.

While I like and admire lots of YA science fiction writers--Paolo Bacigalupi, Amie Kaufman, AdriAnne Strickland, Parker Peevyhouse, M. T. Anderson--Lee is at the top of my list. I've loved all of her sci-fi books, starting with ZEROBOXER and moving on to EXO and, now, CROSS FIRE. (I'll confess I didn't get into her fantasy novel JADE CITY, but that's not a reflection on its quality; it just wasn't my type of story.) I love her world-building, character development, eye for action sequences, and--in particular--her willingness to explore moral problems without settling on simple answers. In too much YA sci-fi, the world is neatly divided into nefarious (often adult) villains and virtuous (typically teen) heroes, who might have some superficial character flaws but who always manage to do what's right in the end. In Lee's books, the picture is much more complicated.

Take CROSS FIRE. It's the sequel to EXO, which featured a future Earth colonized by the alien zhree. Unlike most races in alien-invasion narratives, the zhree didn't come to destroy Earth but to colonize it and, to some extent, to share their superior technology with the human race. Thus they've rebuilt Earth's cities, incorporated many of Earth's citizens into their government and trades, and biologically enhanced a select group of human beings, including main character Donovan Reyes, to share the zhree's virtually indestructible battle armor. But there are some people, including the radical group Sapience, who hate the zhree and those humans who work along with them. Sapience wants to take Earth back, and they'll fight and kill to do it.

With this kind of premise, it's hard to draw clean lines between the "good guys" and "bad guys." Sapience is viewed by many in Donovan's world as a terrorist organization, and there's validity to that viewpoint--but at the same time, their admirable desire for human independence complicates the reader's response to them. By the same token, if the zhree seem generally willing to share their technology and their resources with humanity, there's no doubt that humans are second-class citizens in zhree society, and that becomes all the more apparent in CROSS FIRE, where the zhree decide that Earth is too costly to maintain and make plans to evacuate, knowing full well that their departure will leave the planet vulnerable to other alien races bent on the annihilation of humankind. Under that scenario, Donovan is faced with a wrenching choice: to stay behind on a threatened planet in order to defend his own species, or to accept the zhree's offer to take a tiny percentage of the human population, himself included, with them.

It's just at this point in the narrative, though, that I feel Lee adopts a course that reduces some of the moral complexity she's established. I don't want to give anything away, but suffice it to say that the book takes a turn at its approximate midpoint that makes Donovan's choice no less physically demanding but somewhat less ethically challenging. Later in the book, a second turn--one that, like the first, hinges on the sudden appearance of a fresh threat just at the moment of a critical decision on Donovan's part--similarly serves to draw somewhat cleaner lines between heroes and villains. I wonder how Lee would have worked out the issues she set up if these plot twists had not occurred, and whether that resolution would have been more morally murky but intellectually satisfying.

That being said, I loved CROSS FIRE and found it in some ways even better than its predecessor (which is rare for sequels). If you're interested in reading Lee's book, leave a comment on this blog post; I'll be giving the book away to one person chosen at random from the comments.

YA Guy Announces... The ECOSYSTEM Blog Tour!

YA Guy's got a new book coming out: ECOSYSTEM, the first in a YA fantasy trilogy about a future Earth where the physical environment has mutated into a sentient being. The book releases in e-book and paperback on April 22, which just happens to be Earth Day. Here's the back cover blurb:

Seventeen-year-old Sarah is a Sensor, gifted with the ability to survive within the sentient Ecosystem that swept away human civilization centuries ago. While the remnants of humankind huddle in small villages of stone, Sarah uses her psychic connection to the Ecosystem to travel freely in the wild in search of food, water, and fuel. Sarah doesn’t fear the Ecosystem—but she hates it for killing her mother when Sarah was a child. When she hunts, she hunts not only for her people’s sustenance but for revenge.

Then Miriam, an apprentice Sensor, is lost in the Ecosystem, and Sarah sets out to rescue her. Joining Sarah is Miriam’s beloved, Isaac, a boy who claims to possess knowledge of the Ecosystem that will help their people survive. The harrowing journey to find the missing apprentice takes Sarah and Isaac into the Ecosystem’s deadliest places. And it takes Sarah into the unexplored territory of her own heart, where she discovers feelings that threaten to tear her—and her society—apart.

A thrilling fantasy adventure from the author of FREEFALL and the Survival Colony series, ECOSYSTEM is the first book in a YA trilogy that includes THE DEVOURING LAND (2019) and HOUSE OF EARTH, HOUSE OF STONE (2020).

To launch my latest venture, I've lined up a group of amazing YA bloggers, who've got exclusive interviews, excerpts, reviews, and other goodies including a giveaway of signed copies of ECOSYSTEM! The tour starts on April 17 and concludes on April 30, and here's the lineup:

April 17: Yvonne Ventresca's Word Pop

                The YA Gal

April 18: Kristi Helvig

April 19: Jean BookNerd

April 20: Christa Yelich-Koth

                Katie L. Carroll's Observation Desk

April 21: Work in Progress

April 22: RELEASE DAY!

April 23: Margo Kelly

               Darlene Beck-Jacobson

April 24: We're taking a mid-tour break!

April 25: Strands of Thought

April 26: The Indestructibles

April 27: Erin's Rhewsings

April 28: Sarah J. Schmitt

April 29: Christina Farley

April 30: Larry Ivkovich

You can also check out the cover reveal that's running right now on YA Books Central, which includes a giveaway. Or, if you simply can't wait to see the cover, you can check it out right here!

Finally, you can enter the giveaway I'm running during the blog tour, with a chance to win one of two signed copies of ECOSYSTEM! The giveaway starts right now and runs through April 30, when the tour ends.

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I'm very excited about ECOSYSTEM, and I hope you are too! Drop me a line to let me know how you like the cover, how you're enjoying the tour, what you think about the book, or anything else!

YA Guy Says... ARGH!!! to ARCS

ARCs. Advance reader (or review) copies. You know 'em. You love 'em. You need 'em.

YA Guy hates 'em.

Well, let's clarify that. I don't have a problem with ARCs as such. In fact, it's kind of thrilling to see your book in physical form for the first time, even if it's a flimsy paperback and the text will probably undergo changes ranging from minor to ginormous before the actual book is published. I understand, too, why others like ARCs: a chance to read and review a book before it's on the shelves. Some people collect ARCs. And publishers keep churning them out in hopes of generating buzz and early reviews.

But I've got to tell you, my personal experience with ARCs has been an exercise in frustration.

With FREEFALL, I received about 20 ARCs (not to mention the digital ARCs on NetGalley). Being a good boy, I sent out emails to various reviewers in my genre, asking if they'd like a physical or digital ARC. Many reviewers responded enthusiastically, so I sent them the ARC of their choice. Then I sat back and waited for the reviews to roll in.

Which they didn't.

I got a few reviews, sure. Some were very positive, some weren't. That's life. The not-so-positive reviews aren't what I'm annoyed about.

It's the people who don't review the book at all. Ever.

I sent follow-up emails to those who'd requested an ARC. Several responded with firm or tentative review dates. Most, however--if they responded at all--told me that they were too busy to review, or something had come up, or they'd changed their minds. No review for you, kid. Sorry, better luck next time!

This bothers me. And not because it signifies that I'm not a big enough name to merit instant reviews. For all I know, this happens to everyone. But it shouldn't happen to anyone.

Look, I'm busy too. Things come up for me. And I have been known to change my mind from time to time.

But when someone asks me if I'll review their ARC and I agree to do so, I review the darn thing. I recognize that it costs the author (or somebody) money to mail me that ARC, and I also recognize that if I take it, someone else who might have reviewed it doesn't get it. If I'm honestly too busy or foresee that the book's not quite up my alley and I might change my mind about reviewing it, I tell the author or publisher not to send it to me.

We all know of the dishonest things that happen with ARCs. Some people request them only to sell them online. Others, even worse, digitize them and then give them away on free download sites. I can't do anything about those people, who are either outright crooks or just plain jerks.

But to the people who are less criminal than inconsiderate, I'd ask that you remember the investment the author makes in her or his writing, along with the expectation that's attached to the ARC she or he sent to you. It's not a formal contract, of course. You're not REQUIRED to read and review it. If the author was the one who made the initial overture, you might think you have no real obligation to review it. But wouldn't that be the right thing to do? The nice thing to do?

In any event, I think I've finally wised up. For my next book, I'll either survive without ARCs or go digital only. I really don't have the time or money to be shipping books to people who plan to use them only to prop up the furniture.

YA Guy Reviews... EXO by Fonda Lee!

Being YA Guy, I read a lot of YA science fiction. I've always loved sci-fi, and my own novels are in the genre. So I'd say one-third to one-half of the YA titles I read every year are billed as science fiction.

But you know, most of them are really bad.

Derivative plots. Weak or nonexistent science. Magic instead of logic. Zero philosophical complexity. Heavy petting and happy endings where I'm looking for ambiguity and enduring questions.

The problem, it seems to me, is that far too many writers of ostensible YA science fiction aren't really interested in sci-fi. They don't know it; they don't care about it; they don't feel it. They write it, I can only speculate, because it's popular in the wake of titles like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and Divergent (which, whatever strengths it might have, is very weak science fiction). Instead of being lifelong lovers and advocates of the genre, they're dabblers. They write romantic fairy tales set in the future and call it science fiction, and those of us who cherish the genre are, I think, rightfully appalled.

All of this is preliminary to announcing that Fonda Lee, author of Zeroboxer (2015) and the brand-new Exo, is an exception to the above. She writes YA, but she's a true science fiction writer: in her heart, in her mind, in her blood. She knows the genre--its history, its traditions--and she pays tribute to it while extending it in exciting ways. That's what makes her so good.

Exo tells the story of Donovan Reyes, a teen soldier on a future Earth that's been colonized by an alien species. After years of war in which humanity suffered greatly at the hands of a technologically superior race, an accommodation has been reached between us and them; though the aliens effectively run the show, they've shared certain aspects of their technology with humankind, incorporated some humans into their kinship networks, and biologically transformed a select group of human beings, including Donovan, to exude an exoskeletal armor covering at will. When Donovan's captured by humans-first terrorists and forced to confront their beliefs head-on, his allegiance to the alien regime is called into question. And when he's required to choose between his father, who's a key figure in the accommodationist government, and an equally important person from his past, who's a central member of the terrorist group, Donovan's conflict comes to a head.

I didn't love everything about Exo; some of the emotional turning-points in the early going felt rushed to me, while the ending felt emotionally but not entirely intellectually satisfying. But what I did love about the book far made up for what I didn't: the imaginative rendering of an alien civilization; the plausible representation of human life under a colonizing power; the probing philosophical questions and moral quandaries; and, quite frankly, the really cool exocel armor system. There's action aplenty in Exo, and some romance too, but I never felt the way I feel about too much YA science fiction: that the futuristic setting is an excuse for lots of poorly executed fighting and smooching scenes. In Exo, the science fiction comes first, and that's the way it should be.

One of these days, I'm going to get around to compiling a list of my favorite YA science fiction books and authors. When I do, I'll share it here. And you can be sure that Fonda Lee and Exo will be on it.

YA Guy Talks about... Diversity in YA Literature!

YA Guy originally planned this post for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, but then I decided to celebrate the holiday with my family instead of blogging. So….

The movement for diversity in YA literature is going strong, with readers, authors, and publishers searching for stories that feature characters representing various racial and ethnic groups, sexual identities, physical and mental abilities, and more. That’s great, and YA Guy hopes the movement continues to grow.

Lots of questions remain contested, however. Can writers from one racial/ethnic/other group write about (or from the perspective of) characters from another group? Should books that play into stereotypes (about Muslims, for example) be published—and when they are, should they be protested? What about when reviewers, as in the recent scandal involving VOYA magazine, reinforce stereotypes about non-dominant groups? Must all YA books strive for diversity?

I was thinking about this when I read a Kirkus review of S. L. Duncan’s latest book in the Gabriel Adam series, a YA fantasy trilogy about teens who discover they’re reincarnated angels, just in time to save the world from demonic forces. The reviewer, clearly missing the fact that one of the teen archangels is Iranian and another African, sniped that the cast consists solely of characters who are “apparently white.” I found a similar misconception in a Kirkus review of my most recent novel, Scavenger of Souls; writing of the biracial character Mercy, the reviewer opined that Mercy is “notable for her dark skin in an otherwise predominantly white cast.” Clearly, this reviewer missed the fact that Mercy’s mother is African, and her brother and sister biracial; that the character Wali is described as bronze-skinned and curly-haired; that the character Soon has an Asian name; that the character Nekane has a Hispanic name; and so on. I was striving for a multiracial, multiethnic cast in this novel, my reasoning being that, after the wars that decimated much of the human population, the few who survived would likely represent a spectrum of races, ethnicities, and nationalities. I had hoped that readers would pick up on this, but this reviewer, at least, did not.

The issue here, clearly, goes beyond careless reviewing (which, to be fair, is a function of how many YA books industry reviewers have to keep up with). Readers schooled in dominant traditions and aesthetics often assume that all characters are white, heterosexual, able-bodied, etc. unless these characters are overtly “marked” otherwise. But if a character's "difference" isn't essential to the story, should such characters be so marked? If the writer doesn’t call attention to the skin color of white characters, should the writer invariably do so in the case of nonwhite characters? I wrestled with this question in the case of Scavenger of Souls, and eventually I decided that in Mercy’s case, I needed to “flag” her racial ancestry so that readers wouldn’t miss the fact that she and my protagonist, the blond-haired and blue-eyed Querry Genn, form an interracial team. In other instances, though, I left it to readers to draw their own conclusions. In my forthcoming novel Freefall, a science fiction story with a multinational cast including a central relationship between a white teen from the industrial West and an Asian teen from the developing world, I’m reasonably confident that no one will mistake the characters’ racial or cultural backgrounds. But readers were confounded—and in some cases outraged—to discover that Rue from The Hunger Games is black, so you never know.

I personally believe that writers have a responsibility to present the world in its actual diversity. But I also believe there’s an equal responsibility on the side of readers, who have to be willing to read against preconceptions and discover the diversity in the author’s invented world. Working together, authors and readers can help move us toward an acceptance of difference. I get the feeling we’re going to need this more and more in the coming years.

YA Guy Reviews... The Revelation Saga by S. L. Duncan!

You’d think that, as YA Guy, I could predict which YA books are going to be big hits and which aren’t.

You’d be wrong.

Other than the obvious (books by well-known authors and/or those with enormous marketing budgets behind them), I’m often as puzzled as anyone by the fate of a particular YA book. Some that I think are mediocre or downright bad become bestsellers, while others that I think are fantastic gain only a modest readership. It’s just the nature of the game, I guess; different readers react differently to different books, and even the marketing folks in the publishing world don’t always know what’s going to take off and what isn’t.

Which brings me to the subject of today’s post: the Revelation Saga by S. L. Duncan, a contemporary fantasy trilogy about teens who discover that they’re reincarnated archangels, returned to the mortal realm just in time to battle the forces of darkness for the fate of the cosmos. I’ve read the first two books—The Revelation of Gabriel Adam (2014), in which the title character discovers his ancestry and joins the fight against the demonic hordes, and The Salvation of Gabriel Adam (2015), in which the teen archangels face an even more serious threat in the form of the demon Lilith—and I thought they were both terrific. But they’re not gaining the wide readership I believe they deserve.

There are lots of books out there about teen angels, most of them in the paranormal romance or urban fantasy subgenres, and maybe the Revelation Saga got lost in the shuffle. But in my view, Duncan’s books are superior to most of their competitors for at least two reasons:

First, Duncan is well versed in a variety of topics—biblical and apocryphal texts, early Church history, contemporary Vatican politics, the geography of the Holy Lands—that enable him to develop a convincing cosmology. There’s nothing preachy or pedantic about the presentation of this material—it’s all done in the service of story, so, for example, there are no long-winded history lessons dropped into the middle of the action—but the background of authenticity makes the Gabriel Adams books seem less like pure fantasy than like a plausible history of the End Times.

Second, Duncan isn’t afraid to delve into material that’s disturbing or, in some cases, truly horrifying. In the second book, for example, Gabe is traumatized by the violence he witnessed (and inflicted) in the first book, and he's also suffering a slow, painful physical decline. In this respect, Duncan's books remind me of Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone series, which similarly refuses to shrink from the hideous realities of war, even if the war itself is fantasized.

If this sounds like your kind of thing, I advise you to run out and grab the first book in the Revelation Saga. (I recently ordered the concluding book, The Evolution of Gabriel Adam.) Together, maybe we can give Duncan's compelling books the recognition they deserve.

YA Guy Reviews... THE RECKONING by Chris Howard!

YA Guy's been saying it for years: Chris Howard is one of the most inventive and original writers in YA science fiction.

I hope people have been listening.

Howard first caught my attention with ROOTLESS, the series opener in a post-apocalyptic trilogy about a future Earth without trees and the young man, Banyan, who builds facsimiles thereof. Ingeniously bizarre--bordering at times on the Boschian grotesque--and written in a voice like none other, ROOTLESS convinced me that Howard was something special.

It was a long while before the next book in the trilogy, THE RIFT, appeared. That one upped the ante on its predecessor, giving us such gleefully weird imagery as a man with trees for legs, resuscitated mammoths with purple fur, and upside-down mountains under which strange dreams are dreamt. I waited an even longer time for the denouement, THE RECKONING; in the meantime, Howard put out another book, NIGHT SPEED, narrated by a teen who's hooked on the drug she takes to chase down criminals who've been given superhuman strength and speed by the same drug. Make no mistake, Howard doesn't tell neat or easy stories, and he doesn't cleave to formula. He writes his own thing, and leaves it to his reader to decide.

THE RECKONING, it must be said, wasn't my favorite book of the ROOTLESS trilogy; I'd probably give pride of place to the first book, if only because it so blew me away when I read it. (But then, that's the way it often is with trilogies; THE HUNGER GAMES is the best book of the three, as is THE MAZE RUNNER.) THE RECKONING drags a bit in the first third, as lots of exposition gets packaged as dialogue; conversely, the final third feels rushed, with the action taking place in a city we've waited the whole trilogy to visit but then don't spend enough time exploring. Part of my disappointment, I'm sure, stemmed from the fact that I knew this was the last time I'd have the chance to sink into this particular world, and so I set the bar impossibly high. Notwithstanding, I still loved THE RECKONING, and the trilogy as a whole remains a personal favorite.

So I'll say it once more: Chris Howard is one of the most inventive and original writers in YA science fiction.

I hope people are listening.

YA Guy Reviews... I AM NUMBER FOUR!

YA Guy’s thirteen-year-old son is really into the YA science fiction series, the Lorien Legacies, that begins with the book I Am Number Four. He’s read all of the books to date, and is eagerly awaiting future installments.

So we rented the movie version of I Am Number Four. And (in his estimation as well as mine) it stank. At his urging, I decided to read the book. When I did, I had no idea this was a Full Fathom Five project, the HarperCollins imprint headed by James Frey.

For those of you who don’t know, Frey’s the guy who duped Oprah and half the reading public with his largely fabricated drug-addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Moving on from that debacle, he founded Full Fathom Five to cash in on the increasingly lucrative YA market. (By his own account, he was looking for the next Harry Potter or Twilight.) His model is unorthodox and aggressive: he solicits highly commercial YA projects, contracts writers (many of them recent MFA graduates) to write them up according to a tried-and-true formula, and makes a gazillion dollars from them. But here’s the catch: according to some sources, Frey’s author contracts are highly irregular, paying out a mere pittance while prohibiting said authors from performing most of the activities (promotion, etc.) that are typically seen as the author’s right.

I’m not sure how true these reports are. I haven’t researched Full Fathom Five or James Frey exhaustively, though I have read (and enjoyed) another of the imprint’s projects, Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige. I know some people have decided to boycott Full Fathom Five books because of the controversy surrounding the imprint.

Which is unfortunate, because I Am Number Four isn’t a half-bad book.

It’s got some stylistic problems (over-reliance on the helping verb “start,” excessive use of “is,” and so on). It’s also got some major plot lapses (why, if the alien teen living on our planet wants to stay hidden, does he attend a public high school?). And while the main character’s friendship with an alien-abduction obsessed fellow teen feels sweet and genuine, his romance with a one-dimensional former cheerleader-turned-do-gooder feels flat and formulaic.

But for all that, I Am Number Four also tells a compelling story of a teenage boy who just wants to be normal, who’s sick of moving from place to place every time his guardian says so, and who feels trapped by the weight of responsibility that’s been thrust on him, as he’s groomed to save his home planet from an invading alien race. In the tradition of the Harry Potter series or Twilight, the book’s fantasy concept does an excellent job of tapping into the anxieties and frustrations real-life young people face. In short, the book deserves a better publisher than, apparently, it got.

It’s easy to hate James Frey. He’s an unrepentant literary charlatan. In interviews, he comes across as boorish and egotistical. His interest in YA has nothing to do with art and everything to do with payola, primarily for himself.

But let’s put this in a larger perspective. If Frey is all of these things, why is he heading up a YA imprint at a supposedly reputable publishing house? If he’s all of these things, why is there a place in publishing for him at all?

There's a place for him, folks, because we made a place for him.

All of us in the publishing industry, and perhaps particularly in YA—publishers, editors, agents, and, yes, authors—have helped create the conditions under which a person like Frey can not only exist but flourish. We’ve all been looking for that blockbuster to rival Harry Potter or Twilight. We’ve all allowed formula to trump artistry. We’ve all, to one extent or another, put the dollar first and let everything else go to the devil.

So let’s not blame a disreputable character like James Frey for cashing in on a field that was ripe for his particular variety of greed, and let’s certainly not blame I Am Number Four. Like Victor Frankenstein’s monster, Frey is our own creation. And though we certainly don't have to approve of his activities, I don’t think we have the right to be shocked when he goes out and makes a killing.

YA Guy Reads... YA Contemporary (plus a giveaway)!

As you know, YA Guy’s mostly into speculative fiction: sci-fi, fantasy, horror, you name it. But from time to time I pick up something outside my comfort zone—not too far, mind you, because I can’t see myself reading a book about kissing or vampires (or kissing vampires). Over the past several weeks, however, I’ve read two YA Contemporary novels, and both were excellent.

First was THE TRUTH by Jeffry W. Johnston. This YA thriller concerns a teenage boy, Chris, who wakes up from a chloroform-induced sleep to find himself duct-taped to a chair in an unidentified location, with the brother of the runaway Chris shot in his kitchen threatening to maim him if Chris doesn’t tell the truth about what happened that night. From there, the novel bounces back and forth between the present and Chris’s memories of the events leading up to the shooting. The son of a police officer who died in the line of duty and the older brother of a ten-year-old he suspects was always his father’s favorite son, Chris tells himself he’s done everything to protect his younger brother—including on the night of the shooting. But how can he tell his abductor the truth when he’s hiding it from himself?

THE TRUTH is an intense, fast-paced read, with incredible tension but, given the set-up, relatively little overt violence (for which I was thankful). The story is really about relationships: between Chris and his father, Chris and his brother, and, ultimately, Chris and his abductor. And though I found some of the revelations late in the book less shocking than they were likely intended to be, I was totally hooked by the story of Chris’s coming to terms with his father, his family, and himself.

After reading THE TRUTH, I turned to Pittsburgh YA writer Siobhan Vivian’s latest, THE LAST BOY AND GIRL IN THE WORLD. Given that title, you might think this is a post-apocalyptic tale, but it’s actually a realistic story about a high school junior, Keeley, whose Pennsylvania town has suffered severe flooding and is fighting to stop a riverfront real estate deal that will submerge the town for good. Meanwhile, the boy of Keeley’s dreams has finally started to show some interest in her, and her father, injured years ago in a work accident, has finally found a cause to rouse him from his passivity. But while Keeley becomes drawn into the excitement of these new romantic and familial developments, her lifetime friendships suffer.

What I liked most about LAST BOY AND GIRL is that it’s not only—or even mostly—a love story. Or it is, but as Keely herself discovers, it’s less about her love for a boy than about her love for her family, her town, and her best friend. Vivian’s pacing is totally unlike Johnston’s; where THE TRUTH grabs you at once and never lets go, LAST BOY AND GIRL lets events unfold gradually, revealing ever deeper layers in Keeley’s personal relationships and in the drama of her failing town. I could wish some of the environmental implications of this scenario had been drawn out more explicitly, but that’s not the story Vivian wants to tell. What she does want to tell is a story of the difficult choices one teenager faces as she tries to keep her life from going under, literally and symbolically, and Vivian tells that story simply and beautifully.

Chances are I’ll return to science fiction soon (in fact, I’ve got a manuscript due on my editor’s desk, so I’ll probably be doing more writing than reading in the next month or so). But I’m glad I took a detour and discovered these two great books!

Bonus! Enter the giveaway below for a chance to win a SIGNED hardcover copy of THE LAST BOY AND GIRL IN THE WORLD! (U.S. only.)

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YA Guy Reviews... THE MIDNIGHT SEA by Kat Ross!

YA Guy had the incredible privilege of reading a pre-release copy of Kat Ross's new YA fantasy novel, THE MIDNIGHT SEA.

It blew me away.

Set in an Arabian Nights-inflected fantasy realm, THE MIDNIGHT SEA introduces us to Nazafareen, a teenage member of a nomadic people. When her younger sister is killed by a wight--one of the forms taken by the demonic Druj, undead creatures that once fought against the empire--Nazafareen swears to avenge her sister's death. She's given her opportunity to do so when the elite Water Dogs, soldiers whose job it is to hunt out and slay Druj, recruit her to join them. As a member of the Water Dogs, Nazafareen is "bonded"--linked both physically and spiritually--to a domesticated (or enslaved) Druj known as a daeva. Together, using her power of command and his magical control over the elements, Nazafareen and the daeva Darius set out to destroy Druj. But the discoveries Nazafareen makes about the Druj--not to mention her attraction to Darius, who's anything but the monster she imagined he would be--cause her to question whether she's fighting on the side of justice after all.

I don't read a lot of epic fantasy these days, though it constituted almost my entire reading diet when I was younger. Thus it's always a pleasure to discover a fantasy realm that's totally original and compelling, one I can sink into the way I used to sink into the worlds created by Tolkien, Le Guin, McCaffrey, and Donaldson. That's exactly how I felt while reading Ross's novel; the history of the realm, the mythology of the Druj, the physical description of the various environments, and the characterization of the multiple peoples, both evil and good, were so brilliantly realized I felt completely immersed in a "real" place. If I were to draw parallels to contemporary YA fantasies, I'd put THE MIDNIGHT SEA alongside Leigh Bardugo's Grisha trilogy, which similarly is set in an alternative real world (Russia in Bardugo's case) that feels absolutely unique and absolutely convincing. It's a very special writer who can weave such a rich and complex tapestry, and Ross is exactly that.

I was also drawn to Nazafareen--and teen readers, I'm confident, will absolutely love her. She's tough yet vulnerable, so anguished by the loss of her sister she lets herself believe whatever the Water Dogs tell her about the Druj. Her awakening to the true state of affairs is thus an awakening to emotional maturity--to adulthood. And her awakening to the love she feels for Darius perfectly complements her developing awareness of life's complexities. I'm not always a fan of romantic relationships in YA fantasy and science fiction; they often seem perfunctory and distracting, added more for their marketing appeal than their intrinsic value to the narrative. But here, the love between Nazafareen and Darius--like everything else in the book--feels fresh, original, and completely essential to the story being told.

THE MIDNIGHT SEA releases in May, and it's the first book in a series, so there's much more to come. YA Guy for one can't wait to see where this brilliant new story takes me. 

YA Guy Reviews... DIG TOO DEEP by Amy Allgeyer!

YA Guy recently signed up on Netgalley, and this is my first review based on a book I read via the e-ARC service: DIG TOO DEEP, Amy Allgeyer’s debut YA novel about one teen’s crusade to end mountaintop coal mining in a small Appalachian community.

When seventeen-year-old Liberty Briscoe’s mom goes to jail for an environmental protest that resulted in a bombing, Liberty moves from Washington, DC to Ebbottsville, Kentucky, to live with her maternal grandmother. There she discovers a landscape devastated by mountaintop removal coal mining, and a town too fearful of--as well as reliant on--the mine’s unscrupulous owner to question the strange orange water and mysterious illnesses that have appeared ever since the mining operation began. Liberty’s own grandmother has sickened, and while Liberty struggles to care for her granny while keeping her grades up and putting food on the table, she begins to uncover the toxic secrets the mine has tried to bury. Will she follow in the footsteps of her mother, a woman so busy defending the lives of strangers she never had time for her own daughter? Or will Liberty find ways to protect her own family while reaching out to confront the problems of the wider world?

DIG TOO DEEP is a powerful story about family, the environment, and discovering the courage to fight for what’s right. The Appalachian setting is well realized, and the growth of the main character from angry and somewhat self-centered teen to tireless advocate is exhilarating. Many themes are woven into the novel alongside the more obvious environmental ones, including the strength of mother-daughter relationships, the struggles impoverished individuals and communities face, and the value (as well as the difficulty) of discovering one’s true friends. I was particularly moved by Liberty’s tender relationship with her granny, and I was impressed by Allgeyer’s avoidance of bathos or preachiness in a story that could easily have given way to either.

If I have one reservation about the book, it’s that the resolution was a bit too neat; powerful industrialists such as the mine owner in this story seldom leave so much incriminating evidence in such obvious places. (I wish they did; there’d be a lot fewer of them out there wrecking the environment.) But that’s partly a factor of the book being YA, a genre that tends to simplify complex political issues in the interest of a satisfying resolution, and it doesn’t detract from the story’s many strengths.

DIG TOO DEEP comes out on April 1, 2016. With any luck, I’ll be able to post an interview with the author on the blog around that time. Meanwhile, I’m recommending that you all run out and dig up a copy!

YA Guy Reviews... Two Great Books!

YA Guy's drowning in paper, folks. I'm finishing up one manuscript, working on the copy-edited SCAVENGER OF SOULS, and reading a ton of freshman essays for my day job as a college teacher. Plus I've got some really cool news to report soon, and it's taking up a sizable chunk of my time as well. Hence the fact that I haven't posted anything here in a while.

But hey, that's the writer's life, right?

In addition to all of my writing projects, I've also been trying to keep up with reading. I read Ray Bradbury's classic The Martian Chronicles recently, and found it interesting--not really science fiction, since Bradbury has no real interest in the "science" part, and not at all accurate according to what we now know about the red planet, but very readable in an allegorical, philosophical kind of way. I recommend you check it out if you like thought-provoking fantasy.

I've also had the good fortune to read two amazing recent publications, one of them YA and one of them MG. Without further ado, my reviews:

It's a Wonderful Death by Sarah J. Schmitt

When the first page of a novel features the main character’s accidental death at the hands of a bumbling and overzealous Grim Reaper, you know the rest of the book’s going to be one wild ride!

And that’s exactly the case with Sarah J. Schmitt’s debut YA novel, IT’S A WONDERFUL DEATH. Chronicling the misadventures of RJ, a self-centered cheerleader who’s desperate to prove herself worthy of a second chance at life, the novel careens from laugh-out-loud humor to spiritual rumination to heartbreaking realism without missing a beat. RJ herself is a wonderful character, a teen who’s made some truly awful choices in the name of being popular but who longs to be the better self she knows she can be. The characters who surround her, including not only celestial and infernal beings but RJ’s high school friends (and enemies), keep the action rollicking and the twists turning. When RJ gets the chance to relive three key moments in her life in an attempt to show that she’s redeemable, this Dickensian (or Capraesque) plot device opens up a profound reflection on the seemingly insignificant decisions that make or break a life. But the narrative never bogs down into preachiness or pedantry; RJ’s vibrant personality and the constant one-liners keep the book fun and engaging even when it’s delving deep. And the twist at the end is both shocking and perfectly designed, closing the book on exactly the right note.

IT’S A WONDERFUL DEATH gets my highest recommendation. I can’t wait to see what other wonders Schmitt has up her sleeve!

The Inquisitor's Mark by Dianne Salerni

From a book about the afterlife, I now turn to a book about alternative time schemes. THE INQUISITOR'S MARK tells the story of Jax, an orphaned teen who discovers that he's a "Transitioner," with the magical ability to enter an eighth day situated between Wednesday and Thursday. Normal people can't enter the eighth day unless they're shackled to Transitioners, and there are other people, known as Kin, who have been imprisoned in the eighth day (thus they don't exist during the other seven) as a ward against their potential dark magic. The story delves into Arthurian legend--as well as Einsteinian relativity--to explain the origins and operations of the eighth day, creating an intoxicating mix of magic and science. And Jax's story is deeply compelling, as the parentless boy discovers the existence of a family he had no knowledge of, only to learn that they might be plotting the destruction of innocent people, normal and Transitioner alike. The moral dilemma that's set up by these revelations, as Jax and his newfound cousin must both choose between allegiance to family and responsibility to the larger world, will resonate perfectly with the book's target age group.

THE INQUISITOR'S MARK is the second book in a series that began with THE EIGHTH DAY (which I also loved); book three, THE MORRIGAN'S CURSE, comes out in January 2016. As a guy who's written a second book in a series, I know how tough such books can be; and indeed, for the first thirty pages or so, MARK is a bit overwhelming as Salerni tries to catch the reader up on not only the story's core mythology but the events that occurred in THE EIGHTH DAY. Once you get past that somewhat rough start, however, the story barrels along, delivering both excitement and pathos.  I've read many MG fantasy series, including (of course) the Harry Potter books, and I can truthfully say that Salerni's series is second to none. My son, who's in some ways an even tougher critic than I am, says it's his favorite series of all time. So there you have it.

You might not hear from me for a while (next month is NaNoWriMo, after all), but at least you'll have these two great books to keep you occupied!

YA Guy Talks about... Faith in YA Fiction!

You might have noticed that YA Guy's been quiet recently; that's because I was on vacation with my family in Moab, Utah, right near Arches National Park. (Very similar to the landscape I imagined for SURVIVAL COLONY 9 and its sequel, by the way.) During our week-long visit, we stayed in the house where Edward Abbey wrote parts of his environmental classic DESERT SOLITAIRE. Though the temperature was in the 100s all week--hey, it's the desert, right?--it's easy to see why Abbey saw this area as a profoundly beautiful, spiritual place.

Interestingly, the two YA books I took on my trip both deal seriously with spiritual matters. That's fairly rare in YA, where faith and spirituality tend to be caricatured as oppressive adjuncts of the Regime or the Older Generation. By contrast, both Kelly Loy Gilbert's CONVICTION and Stephanie Oakes's THE SACRED LIES OF MINNOW BLY treat religious belief as complex and conflicted--capable of causing harm, to be sure, but also capable of offering redemption and grace. The books share a great deal in common: not only are both about faith and fanaticism, but both center around murder mysteries and the secrets that keep families together (and tear them apart). Perhaps most importantly, both are terrific debuts that deserve a wide readership.

CONVICTION tells the story of Braden Raynor, a top high-school pitching prospect whose father--a religious talk-show personality--is accused of killing a police officer. While his father is in jail awaiting trial, Braden's older brother Trey, long estranged from the family, comes to take care of his younger brother. Tensions mount as Braden struggles to renew his relationship with Trey, to prepare for an all-important baseball game, and to provide testimony during his father's trial--testimony that may either doom or save the man who's been both Braden's rock and his tormentor his entire life.

Gilbert is an exceptionally fine prose stylist, and her glowing sentences work perfectly for this story of people struggling to find light in the darkness of their lives. Braden and Trey are both remarkably well-rendered characters--but even more remarkably, their father, who could easily have devolved into caricature, emerges as a fully human being, at once grandiose and self-loathing, loving and manipulative, inspirational and horrifying. The enigmas of faith, the human desire to find meaning and certainty even at the greatest of costs, are played out brilliantly as the story shifts back and forth in time, giving us glimpses into Braden's troubled relationship with his father and brother. If I have any reservation about the book, it's that some of the baseball material doesn't feel quite right--the language and scenarios sound more like the work of an educated fan than of an actual player like Braden. (This wouldn't be a problem if not for the fact that for Braden, faith and baseball are integrally connected.) But that's a minor complaint about a book that's otherwise so rich and rewarding.

THE SACRED LIES OF MINNOW BLY was originally scheduled for a 2014 publication, so I've been waiting for it a long time. When I heard that the story was loosely based on a Grimm fairy tale about a handless maiden, I expected the book to be fantasy--but it's not. Instead, it's a realistic story of a teenage girl, Minnow, who escapes a brutal religious cult only to find herself incarcerated in a juvenile facility after she commits a violent crime that may have been induced by her traumatic past. As with Gilbert's book, SACRED LIES moves back and forth in time as Minnow recalls her life as a cult member, her growing doubt in the cult's charismatic leader, and the loss of her hands as punishment for her disobedience. It's a chilling story, and a complex one to tell--indeed, at times the temporal shifts struck me as a bit awkward. But if more lurid and macabre than CONVICTION, the book is equally adept at exploring the paradoxes of belief; Oakes's great strength as a writer lies in getting under the skin of people who'll risk everything for their faith, even their own and their loved ones' lives. Minnow's story is heartbreaking but ultimately uplifting, and it'll keep readers up at night not only while they're reading but after they're done.

Turns out I couldn't have taken two better books along on my western pilgrimage. I look forward to more explorations of faith (and other subjects) from these talented YA writers!

YA Guy Reviews... Non-YA Books!

As I think I mentioned in an earlier post, YA Guy's taking a little break from YA this summer. Maybe that's because I've read over 150 YA books in the past three years (plus writing several more), and I felt a need to read outside my genre. Personally, I think YA writers need to read widely; I think you can learn a lot about writing YA by reading things that aren't YA. But leaving aside the benefits as a writer, it's just fun to read other stuff from time to time.

Last summer, I read non-YA science fiction. This summer, I'm focusing on classics. I've read only two in the past month--they take longer to read than YA!--but they've definitely been worth it.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Way back in graduate school, I taught a class on science fiction, including H. G. Wells's novel The Invisible Man. My graduate mentor visited my class on the day I was discussing the Wells novel, and she was totally confused because she thought I was teaching the Ellison book! But I hadn't read it at that point, and I didn't read it until this summer.

It's a pretty zany book. Some of the scenes--such as the oft-anthologized Battle Royal or the scene in the paint factory where the anonymous narrator's job is to mix black paint into white--are almost preposterously allegorical, and as such they have little realism. But other parts of the book--in particular, the Harlem episodes, including the narrator's struggles with the Brotherhood (a thinly-veiled Communist Party)--are striking as realistic representations of urban African-American experience in the middle of the past century. And the narrator's voice, at once learned and naive, bellicose and timid, hopeful and cynical, is one of the great inventions of American literature.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

You have to go even farther back in my history for my first encounter with this book. I read the Classics Illustrated version of it when I was nine or ten (the version pictured to the right), when my parents were trying to introduce me and my siblings to great literature. (That was the way I discovered a lot of classics I'd later read for real: Frankenstein, The Last of the Mohicans, Moby-Dick, and more.) I've read many Dickens novels since, but for some reason, I never read A Tale of Two Cities. So I decided it was time to take the plunge.

I'll admit, it took me a while to settle in to Dickens's verbose, orotund style. I've heard that Dickens protracted everything because he was paid by the word for his serialized fiction; whether true or not, it was a bit much to take at first. But once I got into the story, I was able to accept the style. Dickens produces some great set pieces, particularly those surrounding the events of the French Revolution, and some great characters, particularly the ominous Madame Defarge, who scares the hell out of her own creator but who I saw as a precursor of many "kick-butt" female characters of the present day. And the novel's title, I discovered to my surprise and delight, has less to do with the two physical cities in which the action takes place--Paris and London--than with the two metaphysical "cities" sometime protagonist Sydney Carton struggles between: the hellish city of selfish sensuality and the heavenly city of selfless sacrifice. I don't remember much from the old comic book, but I do remember Carton's ultimate action and concluding speech. They were powerful to me back then, and they're still powerful to this day.

So I think I'm going to read either Les Miserables or Crime and Punishment next. Then it'll be back to the great YA novels I've got waiting on my Kindle!

YA Guy Reviews... Climate Change Books!

Here's a little known fact: YA Guy has a passion for the environment.

Well, maybe that's not such a big secret. Some of my blog posts are environment-related; my novels are set in a desert world radically altered by environmental degradation; and I'm sure if you checked my Twitter feed or Facebook page you'd find environmental stuff there too.

But did you know I've been an environmental activist for almost ten years? And that the focus of my activism has been the fight against global warming?

It's true. Ever since I saw the film An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, I've been involved in raising popular and political consciousness about the threat posed by a changing climate. I've organized and participated in marches and rallies, met with politicians, developed a regional citizens climate change network, hosted teach-ins on climate change, taught the subject in my college classes, sat on a local college board dedicated to reducing campus emissions, and done whatever else I could to highlight the issue of climate change and advocate for personal and political action to combat it. I sometimes feel I haven't done enough, but I've sure tried.

Nor do I see this side of me as inconsistent with being YA Guy. I believe (and the science backs me up) that climate change is the greatest challenge future generations will face. While my existing novels are not in any way political polemics (and none of my works-in-progress directly addresses climate change at all), I believe YA literature has a responsibility to dramatize this issue.

Lots of great YA books do just that: Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities, Mindy McGinnis's Not a Drop to Drink and In a Handful of Dust, Sherri L. Smith's Orleans, Emmi Itaranta's Memory of Water, Saci Lloyd's The Carbon Diaries, and many more recent YA books use climate change as either a backdrop or central feature of their fictions.

A new scholarly book by Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (2015), barely touches on YA (which is one of its weaknesses), but it's an interesting analysis of the emergence of climate-change fiction (which some, following the coinage of Dan Bloom, call "cli-fi," but which Trexler calls "anthropocene fiction"). Trexler asks two main questions: how can fiction help us to conceptualize and address the problems we're facing and will continue to face in a climate-changed world? And how will fiction itself be changed by the changing climate and all its ramifications? Though I take issue with Trexler's claim that there is "entirely too much science fiction" (6) among climate-change novels--as if science fiction is a poor substitute for realistic fiction rather than the thought-provoking genre it has always been--this review and analysis of anthropocene fiction is a welcome addition to the literature of (or about) climate change.

The same is true of journalist Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014). Klein argues that the truly inconvenient truth about climate change--something Al Gore's film refuses to admit--is that we can't meaningfully address the changing climate without radically restructuring the economic, political, and cultural underpinnings of the society that has caused the problem. In other words, so long as we remain addicted to capitalism's mantra of limitless growth, we'll never be able to resist the fossil-fuel mania that is driving anthropogenic climate change. Klein argues that local economies, democratically organized, are a necessary alternative to our current global economy, an economy ruled by corporations whose sole mandate is greater profit even at the expense of people and planet. I tend to agree with Klein; the cheery idea that we can solve the problem utilizing the same models that produced the problem strikes me as fulfilling the classic definition of insanity. Whether we as a species can actually take the radical steps Klein advocates is, of course, another matter.

As a writer, an environmentalist, and a father, YA Guy certainly hopes we can.

YA Guy Reviews... ZEROBOXER by Fonda Lee!

Zeroboxer kicks butt.

YA Guy doesn't say that very often, mainly because it's become such a cliche in YA. How many YA novels and/or main characters have you heard described as "kick-butt" recently? And how many of those same novels and/or main characters actually merited the description?

Well, Zeroboxer does.

Fonda Lee's debut not only delivers some amazing fight sequences--conducted, as the title indicates, in zero gravity--but constructs an excitingly original science fiction world set on Earth, Mars, and a lunar colony. The story, which concerns the rise of young Terran zeroboxer Carr Luka to the pinnacle of his sport--and the secrets and lies that threaten to tear him down--is told with the directness and visceral energy of a boxing match, while the subplot concerning Terran/Martian tension and prejudice provides a reflective backdrop to the whole. Carr himself, and the cast of characters surrounding him, are all sympathetically rendered--especially Risha Ponn, an expatriate Martian who works as Carr's marketing strategist and who becomes his romantic interest. Lee's writing is clean, her plotting seamless, and her visualization of what sports and sports marketing might look like in the era of space colonization utterly convincing. Here's a sample, from a scene where Carr encounters some diehard fans:

"They all grinned. How childlike they seemed. They were teenagers--one or two of them looked eighteen or nineteen, around Carr's own age--but to him, they all looked like [his fan] Enzo, silly with enthusiasm. This was fun for them, traveling all the way here, sharing in the fandom, getting close to the drama of the [fighting] Cube and the fighters they'd seen in holovid. Zeroboxing defined Carr's life, in every way, good and bad, ecstatic and heartbreaking. He'd given his entire childhood to the sport. It had made him and aged him. But to them, it was all entertainment."

That's pretty good stuff!

Like many reviewers, I usually point out something I didn't like about the books I review. But in the case of Zeroboxer, I'm honestly drawing a blank. Lee's terrific debut should be on the reading list of anyone who enjoys genuinely kick-butt YA sci-fi action stories.

YA Guy Reviews... WE ALL LOOKED UP by Tommy Wallach!

There's plenty of post-apocalyptic YA. (In fact, YA Guy's written some of it myself.) But what about pre-apocalyptic YA?

That's exactly what Tommy Wallach's WE ALL LOOKED UP is. The story of Seattle teens whose lives are irrevocably changed when reports emerge of an asteroid on a fatal collision course with Earth, this novel deals not with the aftermath of the collision but with the build-up to it. (Spoiler which isn't really a spoiler: we never learn if the asteroid actually hits.)

What we do learn is how people, and especially young people, respond when their life expectancy is radically shortened by forces beyond their control. Some, predictably, give up. Others freak out. Some decide to fulfill unfulfilled dreams (singing on stage, dating a secret love). All, however, are changed by their realization of the ephemeral nature of life.

Wallach writes well, in a nicely controlled third person that jumps among his central quartet of characters: athlete Peter, who's begun to wonder whether prowess on the court is really all it's cracked up to be; photographer Eliza, whose father is dying and who fills the emptiness inside her with a series of meaningless sexual encounters; over-achiever Anita, who chafes against the life her parents have planned for her; and slacker Andy, who spends most of his time getting high with his dangerous and unpredictable friend Bobo. Watching the lives of these characters intertwine is what gives the book most of its considerable narrative drive. And it's nice to read a YA book that isn't afraid to philosophize and to touch on subjects of spirituality and ultimate purpose.

There are a few things about WE ALL LOOKED UP that are less successful. The book's second half is devoted in large part to an implausible rally-and-prison-break that seems to serve little purpose other than to generate artificial danger and thus hasten the development of romantic relationships. And the author's understanding of teenage girls is often badly off the mark, as for example in this head-scratch-worthy observation:

"Eliza was getting a distinct passive-aggressive vibe off Anita, and she had no idea why. It wasn't as if they were competing or something. Neither of them were interested in Andy, and Eliza was as bad at singing as Anita probably was at taking photos. Maybe it was inevitable--one of those rivalries that so often sprout up between girls, like mushrooms in the crevices of a forest, craning up toward whatever attention filters down through the canopy."

But Wallach is young, and one hopes he'll outgrow such sophomoric stuff. I recommend WE ALL LOOKED UP to those who want an original take on the end of the world.

YA Guy Reviews... A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA by Ursula K. Le Guin!

What could YA Guy possibly say that hasn't already been said about the first book in Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series?

I mean, the book's a classic. It's been reviewed all over the place. There are nearly 700 reviews on Amazon alone. What's the point?

Well, stick around. I might surprise you.

I first read Le Guin's books when I was twelve years old, right around the time I started reading epic fantasy pretty much exclusively. I read Tolkien, Terry Brooks, Anne McCaffrey, you name it. (I also played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons and watched a lot of fantasy films.) My first finished novel was a swords-and-sorcery tale very much in this vein. It was what I was into as a kid, and I ate the stuff up.

I'm not really into high fantasy anymore. I prefer science fiction. Maybe because I've gotten older (and more cynical?), I like my fantasy to be grounded in reality. The most recent epic fantasy novel I read, George R. R. Martin's interminable A Game of Thrones, was pure agony. I finished it, largely so I could say I'd read it, but I don't think I enjoyed one page of its eight hundred (or was it eight thousand?).

But lately, I've been reading novels with my son, who's almost twelve. He reads on his own, of course, but he also likes to read with me, so I've been pulling out some classics from the bookshelf and reading them to him before bedtime. Given his tastes, our reading inclines toward the fantasy books I used to read at his age. We've read The Hobbit, A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door (which are basically fantasy or even allegory though they're billed as science fiction), and others. We just finished A Wizard of Earthsea and have started The Tombs of Atuan.

I found Wizard every bit as enjoyable as I did the first time I read it. I loved the world-building, the beauty of the language, the impeccable craft. But I also discovered something in the book I hadn't remembered.

In A Wizard of Earthsea, you may recall, the hero, wizard-in-training Ged, unleashes a monstrous shadow from the netherworld when one of his prideful spells goes awry. The book's pacing is pretty leisurely, with lots of time for exposition and character development, but it picks up steam once the shadow's released. From that point on, Ged's quest to confront the shadow drives the plot forward to a satisfying conclusion.

But here's the thing I didn't remember: the shadow has the ability to possess human beings, turning them into something Le Guin calls a "gebbeth." Here's her fullest description of this creature:

"The body of a gebbeth has been drained of true substance and is something like a shell or a vapor in the form of a man, an unreal flesh clothing the shadow which is real. So jerking and billowing as if blown on the wind the shadow spread its arms and came at Ged, trying to get hold of him as it had held him on Roke Knoll: and if it did it would cast aside the husk of Skiorh and enter into Ged, devouring him out from within, owning him, which was its whole desire."

When I read that passage, my mind jumped to my own novel, Survival Colony 9, and especially to its hero (Querry Genn) and monsters (the Skaldi). Can it be an accident that I too created a monster that devours human beings and travels in their hollowed skin? Can it be coincidence that the name "Genn" sounds an awful lot like "Ged," just as the word "Skaldi" sounds an awful lot like the name of the gebbeth "Skiorh"?

We authors try to be as original as we can, but we're always borrowing from what we've read. In my case, though I haven't read epic fantasy seriously for over thirty years, what I did read as a teen and pre-teen went into me so deeply that certain aspects of that reading--not only specific names and scenarios but the overall structure and pacing of the writing--were bound to come out in what I wrote. As I prepare to revise the sequel to Survival Colony 9, I'm sure I'll be doing the same thing: channeling what I've read into what I write, creating something neither wholly original nor wholly derivative.

So if I were to review A Wizard of Earthsea, I'd say this: it's so good it's gotten into my blood, my brain, and my pen. It's devoured me, though in the good way of great writing, not in the monstrous way of the gebbeth and Skaldi. One of these days, I hope someone can say the same thing about something of mine.

YA Guy Reviews... BLUE GOLD by Elizabeth Stewart!

Elizabeth Stewart’s BLUE GOLD tells the story of three teenage girls on three continents, all of their lives connected by the "blue gold" of the title: the mineral coltan, which is used in many electronics including cell phones.

In Africa, Congolese refugee Sylvie fights to keep her family together after her father’s death, her mother’s descent into despair, and her brother’s attraction to the militias that rule the refugee camp. All are fighting to control the coltan market, and Sylvie fears that if she can’t find a way to get her family out of the country, the deadly battles will consume them.

In Asia, farm-girl Laiping moves to the big city to take a job in a cell-phone factory. At first it seems a dream come true, until the monotonous labor, arbitrary system of reward and punishment, and crackdowns on worker protests reveal the true nature of the system. With her father ailing and her options dwindling, can Laiping find a way to preserve her rights and her pride?

In North America, Vancouver teenager Fiona snaps a suggestive selfie for her boyfriend, only to discover that once the image enters cyberspace, there’s no controlling who has access to it. Fiona’s struggle to regain control of her reputation and her life will lead her in surprising directions, and force her to confront the problems faced by teenage girls beyond her relatively privileged world.

BLUE GOLD is, self-evidently, an “issue” book, one that explores the connections between the consumer lifestyle of developed nations and the poverty, violence, and abuse that exist elsewhere in the world. But though the book can be overly obvious at times, it’s never heavy-handed; the three girls’ lives emerge in vivid detail, drawing the reader into their flesh-and-blood stories. And these stories are rendered with unsparing realism; Sylvie’s rape by militia members, Laiping’s brutal treatment at the hands of her employers, and Fiona’s suffering from a single impulsive act are all handled straightforwardly and with no sugar-coating or artificial uplift. Mere survival is a triumph for these three young women, and the book never suggests that there’s an easy answer to the problems they, their sisters, or their societies face.

I was very impressed by this book, so much so I plan to read Stewart’s other novel for young adults, THE LYNCHING OF LOUIE SAM, which is based on a real-life incident involving the lynching of a Native American teen. If you like realistic stories that address issues beyond the sometimes claustrophobic world of YA, I highly recommend BLUE GOLD. And I also recommend you check out the website The Pirate Tree, a site covering social justice literature for young people, where I first learned of Stewart’s book.

YA Guy Reviews... THE HOUSE OF THE SCORPION by Nancy Farmer!

In YA Guy's previous post, I said I review only those books I can recommend. And that's certainly the case with today's review of Nancy Farmer's THE HOUSE OF THE SCORPION.

Not that Farmer's book needs my recommendation. It's a bestseller, a multiple-award winner (the Newbery Honor, the National Book Award, and the Printz), and, so I've heard, a movie-in-the-works. My older brother, who unabashedly admits he never reads anything but the sports page, read it and loved it.

And there's lots to love. The concept is intriguing: in a future drug empire carved out between the United States and the former Mexico, the drug lord Matteo Alacran (known as El Patron) creates a clone of himself, Matt, for unknown purposes. Told from Matt's point of view as the boy grows up in a society that treats clones as inhuman beasts, the story traces Matt's journey to manhood. The surrounding cast of characters--including the sympathetic bodyguard Tam Lin, Matt's surrogate mother Celia, and his playmate and social conscience Maria--are all well rendered; the science fiction world is wildly imaginative and, for the most part, coherent. I have no hesitation in recommending this book; chances are very high that you'll like it a lot.

But here's the thing: I didn't.

For all its strengths enumerated above, THE HOUSE OF THE SCORPION never caught fire for me. I didn't connect with Matt as I expected to, and I didn't find the narrative, whereby he discovers the evil machinations that lie behind his birth and his patron's empire, compelling. I recognized how well written the book is, and I completed it in hopes I would connect with it at some point, but I never did.

What does this mean?

Nothing earth-shaking. It simply means this wasn't the book for me. More broadly, it means that no matter how good a book is, no matter how worthy of recommendation--and remember, I am recommending this book, because I appreciate its strengths even if they didn't work for me--some people won't like it. That's just the nature of reading.

Those of us who are authors wish everyone would love our books as much as we do. We relish the positive reviews and feedback, and we cringe when the negative reviews come in. But we have to accept the reality that the reader-book connection is a very individualized and idiosyncratic thing; readers who might love a book similar to ours might hate ours, and vice versa. Or they might hate our book when they're fifteen then come back to it when they're thirty and love it. Or vice versa. There are too many variables involved to predict a particular reader's reaction to a particular book at a particular time, and so we'd probably be better off not trying.

We'd definitely be better off just writing. The reading part will take care of itself.