Dream with Our Eyes Open

Some context: when I was about 8 or 9, I would create lavishly illustrated stories about girls who wore "foofy" princess dresses (me and my younger sister's Term of Art for the kind of thing worn to the ball by Disney's Cinderella). Invariably there was a Mean Girl, almost always blonde, with maybe a couple of henchgirls. The star of these little costume dramas was sweet and brainy and less elaborately dressed, and always a brunette.

The Belles is pretty much the same story, only 100 times more lush and elaborate, with added torture and body horror.

In Camellia Beauregard's world, everyone is born red-eyed and grey-skinned. They would stay that way if it were not for the Belles, young women with the secret of Beauty. As far as Camellia knows, she and her sisters are the only Belles in existence: all six of them for everyone in the land of Orleans. Both the reader and Camellia should probably think about this a bit.

All the Belles want to be the royal Favorite. In the book's opening scenes, Camellia loses the competition for this coveted post to her sister Amber. They have an ugly little spat, and Camellia is sent off to a "teahouse" to minister to members of the public. She soon finds herself overworked and short on sleep, because nights at the teahouse are filled with unpleasant sounds, like sobbing. But before she can solve this mystery, she is surprised to be summoned back to the palace in place of Amber, who has been sent off in disgrace after badly messing up some of her beauty clients.

We soon meet our villain, Princess Sophia, who is the default heir because her sister is in a mysterious coma. By the time Camellia fully realizes what happened to Amber and why the true heir is in an everlasting slumber, a gay character has been tortured to death with beauty treatments. You have been warned.

Clayton has a compelling voice, and I kept turning those pages even as things got worse and worse, and despite some overly precious writing. Cute excessive hyphenation abounds: the Belles have their hair styled in "Belle-buns," which are often ornamented with "Belle-roses." People have tiny "teacup" animals as pets, ranging from monkeys to dragons. Everyone's coloring and other physical characteristics are compared to foods. Food itself is described in lavish detail, and 90% of it is sugary, from cakes to fruits. There is a passing mentioned of meat skewers with garlic, and I think someone eats a mouthful of salad at some point. The poor salad doesn't rate any additional description.

Camellia eventually starts to show some interest in using her powers for something other than beauty treatments, and I guess I'll have to read the sequel to find out how that goes. But my brain felt really sticky and sugar-comatose by the time I finished this.

This book is a finalist for the Lodestar Not-a-Hugo for Young Adult works. It is not my first choice.

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

Well, it's been a while. I have been reading like crazy, but I doubt I can remember all I've been reading off the top of my head. Here's what I can recall at the moment:

For whatever reason, I have never previously read anything by Tamora Pierce. Recently, Big South American River had all three volumes of the Beka Cooper series on sale as ebooks for a pittance, so I bought them. And after a re-read for a writing project, I read them. And read them. Until I finished the whole thing.

Rebakah (Beka) Cooper is a child of the slums, but she, her siblings, and her mother come under the protection of a powerful nobleman and are taken into his household. The mother dies, and the children are trained in jobs that befit their station: the boys as couriers, the girls as maids ... except that Beka wants to be a Dog, one of the constables that their patron commands. She has a natural aptitude for it, as well as some supernatural powers that come in handy on the job (mages of various kinds are not uncommon in this world). The series opens as Beka as become a Puppy: a Dog trainee. It follows her as she becomes a full Dog and then one of the most skilled in her city's company.

It's very absorbing reading, vivid and enjoyable. I had a very strange feeling about the first two books versus the third, though. It was as though Pierce had conceived of and possibly even written the third book first, and then went back and wrote the first two. The first two are written as though they are the diary of teenaged Beka, and they work pretty well in that way. The third, where the stakes are much higher and where Beka and her team are crossing miles and miles of countryside, gets less plausible as a diary and also somewhat less engaging for me. There's also a plot twist that I'm not sure I buy as in-character for the person involved.

Is anyone here a Pierce fan? Which of her other books would you recommend?

I've also picked up the most recent volumes of the manga Black Butler (vol. 26) and The Ancient Magus Bride (vol. 9). When they arrived, I discovered that I had completely lost the plot of both series, and the previous volumes were lost somewhere in the house. The Mr. finally tracked them down for me.

Black Butler takes a serious turn after the arc about the mysterious doings in the popular music hall, in which we saw Victorian "boy bands" captivating the crowds (anachronisms mean nothing to mangaka Yana Toboso) as a front for far more sinister activities. Ceil discovers something momentous about his past... although this being Black Butler, I'm not sure of the truth of what he has discovered.

The Ancient Magus Bride covers the final part of the arc in which Chise has suffered grave effects after preventing a frightened young dragon from laying waste to London. She, Elias, and some fairy allies also put their main adversary to rest, at least for the time being. This is apparently not the end of the series, but a new major story arc seems to be next.

For Hugo reading, I read Sarah Rees Brennan's In Other Lands, which hit an awful lot of sweet spots in the fashion of a piece of fanfic. It's funny, because I believe that some of the other YA not-a-Hugo nominees are better pieces of writing on a technical scale: Summer in Orcus, A Skinful of Shadows, and The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage are all more accomplished in that way. But this appealed.

Young Elliot Schafer, 13, sarcastic, prickly, Jewish (although minimally devout), and possibly a bit onto the autism/Aspberger's scale, has the ability to see magical portals and so is given a transfer from his boring boarding school to the program over the (seemingly invisible) wall. Puny Elliot is clearly not warrior material, so in Borderlands he ends up in the less prestigious Councilor track. Seemingly despite his social ineptitude, he becomes friends with the warrior elf maid Serene and the promising young fighter Luke. But many things are not as they seem, and although Elliot never does have the type of magical adventure he thinks he wants, he has a very important role to play.

The books reads like "Derkholm" Diana Wynne Jones taking on "Narnia": a great deal of the time, Elliot reads strongly as a sympathetic take on or perhaps and answer to Eustace Scrub in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair (look at their initials!). He is also a queer teenager who has both boyfriends and girlfriends by the time the story comes to an end, and although a lot of that is awkward, it's awkward because teens are awkward in this arena, not because Brennan handles it badly.

The other thing I've read this week was Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett, Because Reasons. I've read it half a dozen times before, but this is the first time I can recall crying at the end: happy emotional release crying. The parts toward the end where Polly realizes that most of the authorities simply don't take the squad seriously as soldiers seemed to ring more bitterly true than usual, and so Polly's decision for action at the end, and her meeting up with the two young recruits, made the wonderful, silly last line hit very hard. When Pratchett was hot, he was on fire.

I think that next up is John Scalzi's The Collapsing Empire, which will finish me up for Best Novel nominees. I love Scalzi as a blogger, but I've always been less enthusiastic about him as a fiction writer. I don't expect that this is going to change my mind, but I owe him the good college try for all the enjoyment his blog has provided.

Wow, I have been off-course with this. In my own defense, I had a writing project, and also the very rainy weather had me pretty gloomed out.

It seem to me that I read a lot of things, but I'm not recalling much at the moment. One thing I do recall, I will hold for FFFriday instead. In the meantime:

sholio has been doing a C.J. Cherryh read and re-read, so I am going through the Chanur series again. I'm just starting Chanur's Homecoming, which is my favorite of the series.

I grabbed a couple of Zoe Chant's paranormal romances for brain candy: Bearista and Pet Rescue Panther. As far as I can tell, I'm not really the intended audience: I enjoy the action sequences a lot more than the romance. On the other hand, I used to love running shapeshifter characters in tabletop RPG, and that's what these are all about. They remind me of Marjorie Liu's Dirk & Steele novels, in a good way. They're much quicker reads, but they have the same action-team + romance thing going on. I do plan to get the third in this sequence, Bear in a Bookshop.

The 2018 Hugo Reader's Packet was released this past week. It's a good thing I had already read most of the novels, because only a few were included in full this year. Still, it's a lot of books and stories.

One of the books that was included was Katherine Arden's The Bear and the Nightingale. Arden is nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. This is a YA fantasy novel based on Russian history and folk tales. I think it will please a lot of the people who liked Novik's Uprooted. Arden is an assured and fairly elegant writer, but the book did have some flaws that loomed large for me (possibly not for others):

1. A new character is referred to by his name several pages before the viewpoint character is actually told his name (and bad on the editor - that should have been caught).
    
2. Most people won't understand the title at all until 75% of the way through the book, and I only picked up half of it sooner than that because I know a little Russian. And the title is still not that great even once you understand what it means.
    
3. Arden completely pushes an annoying but ultimately innocent character under the bus, allowing this character to to die a horrible death. This is not a terribly nice character, but Arden shows us that the character could have been at least 50% of what our beloved heroine was, if not for different circumstances. And that really hit me hard, and I don't entirely trust Arden as an author now, if you know what I mean. Because part of why this character [spoiler: Anna Ivanova]was developed the way she was, was to provide a contrast and foil for the lead. She really seems a victim, and it left me with a bad taste in my brain.

Having finished Dark Lord of Derkholm by Diana Wynne Jones, I had to do the sequel, The Year of the Griffin. I like this one better, but it's strange. The book is set in a university, albeit a magical one, with lead characters who seem in the 17 - 20 age range, and yet the target audience seems much younger, maybe 11 - 14. Some adult-ish things happen, but they are described very simply. For example, some foreign griffins show up. They are crude and rather bestial, and they make lead character griffin Elda (who first showed up in Derkholm) feel weirdly like lying down and giving in ... to sex, clearly, from my much older viewpoint. And I'm not plucking this from nowhere: Elda acts protective toward one of her classmates, hiding him under her wings, and the strange griffins mock her, saying she's clearly ready to be a mother. But would the young pre-teens and teens glom onto what's going on here? I'm not sure.

Now I'm doing a Saga re-read Because Reasons. This is the first time since I started the series 3 years or so ago that I have done a re-read. Holy mackerel, the deaths and the angst.

(For those who don't know this work: Saga is a science fantasy comics series by Brian Vaughan (author) and Fiona Staples (artist). It's about war, and families, and what happens when the two come together. The leads are Alana and Marko, soldiers from the opposite sides of a very long-term war, who hook up, marry, and have a baby. And now the entire universe is pursuing them from planet to planet. It's very violent, sexually explicit, and has some lovely things to say about families, of all sorts.)

I need to make some Saga icons. Also, this series is becoming popular enough that there are Funko Pop! figurines of the most popular characters, including Marko, Alana (either with baby Hazel or a gun), The Will, Lying Cat, and Izabel. I love Izabel in the series, but I don't care for her Funko figurine. There are also some more realistic action-figure-type figurines available of the first four. I also saw a plush Lying Cat, but it was just awful.

I took a brief tour through TVTropes' article on Saga and found the following wonderful quote from the author, ca. 2012 when it was just starting: "This is an original fantasy book with no superheroes, two non-white leads and an opening chapter featuring graphic robot sex. I thought we might be cancelled by our third issue."

*Tears myself away from the Yuletide tagset*

*Ahem*

When last we left our intrepid reader, she was about to finish Max Gladstone's Ruin of Angels. Holy crap, was that an enjoyable read! Violent as all get out, scary sometimes (Kai, survivor of the Penitents on Kavekana, is squicked out when the antagonist describes her culture's positive-reinforcement equivalent ... and I don't blame Kai one bit), full of action, and a very-much-earned happy ending.

Next up was Rebel, third volume of Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith's Changes series. We're back in the post-apocalypse Wild West town of Las Anclas, where teenagers have serious responsibilities (actual and critical jobs, for example) and yet remain kids, with raging hormones and still-developing communications and judgment skills. Ross, the titular "stranger" of the first book, starts remembering more of his past—and part of it comes to join him. Mia comes to terms with some parts of her relationship with Ross and Jennie that had been worrying her. Felicite's pampered life falls apart a little further (and she remains surprisingly three-dimensional and sympathetic). Kerry becomes more and more a part of the community (and continues to be haunted by the possibility that her terrifying father may yet show up at the town gates). This installment has no huge crisis with a correspondingly huge climax but is instead a series of satisfying mini-arcs.

I was going to read Seanan McGuire's Down Among the Sticks and Bones next, but decided instead to take a break from new plotlines with an old favorite, Diana Wynne Jones' The Time of the Ghost. I'm just at the point where the ghost has learned for sure which Melford sister she was in life; now the plan to save her, with the support of her three sisters and their two friends, is being set into motion. Mmm good!

The Exchange at Fic Corner is a gift exchange for fic based on children's and YA books and short stories from picture books to edgy teen novels. The FAQ can be found on Dreamwidth (and I think on LJ still).

June 18th - June 27th - Sign-Ups
June 28th - Assignments Sent Out
August 21st - Deadline for Stories
August 28th - Collection Goes Live

Tag Set (on AO3)

Sign Up Form (on AO3)

lady_ganesh hooked me up with some really good stuff: Maggie Stiefvater's YA series The Raven Cycle. This consists of

• The Raven Boys (finished!)
• The Dream Thieves (finished!)
• Blue Lily, Lily Blue (finished!)
  and
• The Raven King (still reading, unlikely to finish tonight)

Also, apparently some extra-story authorial snippets exist (I only just discovered this while checking the titles of the main series).*

In the little town of Henrietta is a posh boarding school called Aglionby. The mascot of the school is a raven. Eccentric local girl Blue, the scion of a houseful of psychic women (including her mother, Maura), thinks Aglionby boys are nothing but trouble. Local wounded-at-the-core boy Adam is attending the school on scholarship; he has managed to become best buds with the charming and earnest Gansey (that's his last name), whose circle also includes the tough-but-brittle bad boy Ronan. And then there's Noah, who shows up somehow at the off-campus digs that Gansey and Ronan share in an old factory.

Gensey is obsessed with the local ley line, which he thinks will lead him to the tomb of the Welsh hero Owen Glendower. The others are drawn into his search—including Blue, who starts out as somewhat of a mascot but becomes something much more. There are dreams, magic, terror, and lots of fast cars.

Parts of this seem to be the love child of Alan Garner's The Owl Service and the better "After-School Special" types of teen novels, but it's very involving and tremendous fun. The writing has some weaknesses, especially when Stiefvater seems to be marking time until she can get to the Good Bits, but she's very good at action sequences and the spookier parts are truly chilling.

A Kids' and YA Book Fic Exchange

What is The Exchange at Fic Corner?

The Exchange at Fic Corner is a gen, het, femslash, and slash multifandom secret fiction exchange for kids' and YA book/short story fandoms. The name was ruthlessly stolen from that classic of children's literature, The House at Pooh Corner. Basically? This is for the book fandoms that you loved or would have loved as a kid (even if you just read them for the first time a week ago).

The Exchange at Fic Corner was inspired by Yuletide (the obscure or rarely written fandoms project) and much of the format and rules are based off that exchange.

The Exchange at Fic Corner 2013 Schedule

July 6th - Comm Opens for Brainstorming
July 12th - 21st - Nominations
July 22nd - 29th - Sign-Ups
July 31st - Assignments Sent Out
September 22nd - Deadline for Stories
September 29th - Collection Goes Live