Reading Wednesday

The Hugo reader's packet is out. I liked so many of the authors of this year's Best Novel nominees that I had already bought and read them all by the time nominations closed. Ditto the novellas, which I had either read or ended up buying to read on JoCo. Now I am hitting the YA stuff and the shorter fiction.

Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman is sort of a side story to Hartman's earlier Seraphina and its sequel Shadow Scale. Tess Dombegh has always been, in her own estimation, the kind of girl likely to get spanked. Her non-identical twin sister Jeanne is good and pretty, and Tess has grumpily but loyally devoted most of her young life to helping their mother and other relations make sure that Jeanne marries well. By the time we're a couple of chapters in, it's pretty clear that Tess is pretty depressed and is self-medicating with alcohol when she can. Shortly after we learn why, she runs away from her life and hits the road.

As another reviewer has noted, Tess' physical journey mirrors her mental/emotional arc. She has various misadventures, does some good deeds, and learns some truths about herself and the world. When she returns to her home city and takes up a temporary job that provides a much better home than she had previously, she develops a new addiction: scholarly acclaim. As she did with drinking, Tess overdoes things and commits what is, as far as I am concerned, her only real sin. By the end of the story, she's off another journey, one that may give her a chance at making amends for what she has done.

To me, this is not as magical as the earlier Hartman books, and I'm not as moved by Tess' situation as I would have hoped, despite some similarities in our lives (depression and very moody, resentful mothers). I also thought there weren't enough immediate consequences for what Tess caused to happen near the end. If anyone else has read this, I'd be interested in your take on this issue.

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland is a complete page-turner that kept me up far too late the night I started it. In this alt-history horror/fantasy, the Civil War was interrupted when the dead began to rise. The South is now a Shambler-haunted wasteland scattered with armed compounds, while the North is finding Shamblers (read "Zombies") coming closer to its well-guarded cities despite their best efforts. (Like the troll infestations in the webcomic Stand Still Stay Silent, the Shambler menace spreads more slowly in regions with cold winters.) Although outright slavery has been abolished, Black and Native youngsters are generally taken from their families and trained in special schools or camps to fight the Shamblers.

Jane McKeene, a clever, strong, independent, and not-overly-truthful teenager, is being trained in the finest school around, Miss Preston's School of Combat for Negro Girls. Graduates of this institution are usually placed as Attendants, bodyguard-companions to wealthy white women. Jane is excellent at most combat skills (except for rifle shooting), but she is lousy at (and rebellious about) etiquette, unlike the lovely, light-skinned blond Katherine Devereaux, who is the teachers' pet. And the less said about Jane's one-time beau, the fascinating Red Jack, the better.

All three teens end up pursuing the mystery of what happened to Jackson's little sister, who was housed with a local white family, and find out far more than they should. They are apprehended and shipped off to Summerland, a supposedly idyllic settlement on the Great Plains that's run by the Survivalists, who believe that the freeing of the slaves is one of the causes of the Shambler menace. If life in the suburbs of Baltimore was unpleasant for a person of color, life in Summerland is a waking nightmare, even without the ever-increasing Shambler attacks.

In addition to being a rip-snorting zombie-slayer adventure, this story has real depth and grit. The real story of Jane's parentage comes out in tiny morsels throughout the story: she is an exceedingly unreliable narrator, and yet I never felt cheated: she has reasons for what she is. The subtleties of Katherine's equally sad situation are also well worked out. The story ends rather abruptly; perhaps there will be a sequel.

And I may have to continue tomorrow. I also read two Hugo-nominated novelettes and the latest volume of the manga Ooku