Review: Octavian Nothing

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol 1: The Pox Party - M.T. Anderson

Octavian is a slave in pre-revolutionary Boston with a pretty cushy life.   His cage, such as it exits, is a velvet one.  He lives with his mother in a scientific commune where he is treated well and receives a classical education that is second to none.  If he realizes that he is the subject of scientific inquiry, it doesn’t seem strange since it’s the only life he’s ever known.  The men around him have genuine affection for both his mother and him, and their aim appears to be to prove that an educated African is no different than an educated European.  But his happiness relies on a shaky foundation and it doesn’t take much for it to collapse.  “Rational inquiry” isn’t without its horrors while the American’s war for freedom does not apply to everyone.

I was about halfway through this book before I decided that I liked it.  It’s a difficult book and its plot and ideas build slowly.  And then I was in love with it.  And then I got bored for awhile.  And then I liked it again.  It’s been a long time since I read a book about slavery, and this is a shocking and horrifying story, but it’s often told in such a clinical way that it doesn’t feel manipulative.  The readers eyes open to the situation as Octavian grows from a small boy to a young man, as his do.  But there is incredible subtlety and nuance to all of it, including the war.  I think its best hope for finding teen readers is as a school assignment, both because of the history and its amazing writing.

Review: Bone Magician

The Bone Magician - F.E. Higgins

An orphaned boy, Pin Carpue, is adrift in a Dickensian not-London after his beautiful and saintly mother dies and his father has disappeared following his uncle’s suspicious death.  He scrapes by working for an undertaker, staying up at night with the bodies making sure they’re truly dead.  Drugged one night at his post, he wakes to find a man and a young girl raising his charge from the dead so that she can tell her fiancee she forgives their last fight.  He later falls back in with the conjurers, barely escapes from a serial killer, and builds a new family of sorts.

There are a lot of characters and a lot of build up, making the first half of the book a bit of a slow boil.  Once threads start to get untangled, it becomes a lot more engaging.  This is a fun type of scary, more about the mystery and atmosphe than anything truly frightening, it’s perfect for middle schoolers.

Review: The Dust of 100 Dogs

The Dust of 100 Dogs – A.S. King (pub 2/1/09)

Emer Morrisey is born Irish in the 1600’s, hardly a good time to be alive and an awful time to be born a girl.  After Cromwell kills her family and burns down her town, she becomes a refugee with a surviving aunt and uncle, refusing to speak until she meets a boy her age who also hasn’t been speaking.  But true love is given no place to flower, and Emer is sold off to a wealthy Parisian man.  She runs away, and by the time she’s stopped running away from men who want to possess her, she’s captain of a pirate ship in the Caribbean.  Her trademark is popping out one eye from the men she kills, later embroidering those eyes on the fearsome cloak she wears.  She has a good run of it, dying just after she buries her treasure on a deserted island.  But as she dies, she’s cursed to live as a dog for 100 lives.  After about 300 years of this, she’s born as Saffron Adams, a seemingly normal American girl with a bizarrely sophisticated knowledge of history.  She’s willing to share her booty with her slacker family, if only they would get off her back about college long enough for her to find it.

I don’t feel like I’m giving away too much of the story because the book itself opens with a bang, putting all of its cards on the table, daring you not to care about its amazing premise.  Though the beautiful cover was enough to get me interested.

I liked this book, though it couldn’t possibly live up to my outsized expectations for it.  I had some small problems with its pacing at certain points, and I had been looking forward to more “pirate can’t fit in to normal teenage life” hilarity.  But since Saffron had been a girl pirate, it wasn’t that hard for her not to rape or pillage the suburbs.  Also…I don’t think this is a YA book.  There, I said it.  Not that there aren’t teenagers who wouldn’t read and love this book, not that there isn’t a sense of alienation in Saffron that will resonate with teens, but that isn’t a focus of the book at all.  From the author interview in the back, it wasn’t written as YA but was sold and marketed that way.  Which may be a savvy decision.  But I don’t think that in its soul, that is what this is.

I think my husband is planning on reading this book, so it’ll be interesting to get his viewpoint on it.  I’d love to discuss it with someone.

Review: What I Saw and How I Lied

What I Saw and How I Lied – Judy Blundell

I don’t generally pick up historical fiction for children or young adults because I don’t read books to be taught something and it’s harder to write for a younger audience without trying to explain things and put them in context.  Having won the National Book Award wouldn’t except this book from that danger, but the idea behind it made it seem like I wouldn’t be reading an edifying story of America after the war.

The book starts out in New York in the heady, go-go period immediately following the end of World War II.  Evie lives in Queens with her beautiful mother (a femme-fatale blond), her loving step-father (a neighborhood bigwig) and his prying mother.  At 15, after years of hardship and barely scraping by, her biggest problem is her inability to “fill out a sweater.”  When her stepfather, Joe, dashes them off to Florida for an impromptu vacation she doesn’t even stop to consider how strangely he’s behaving.  Palm Springs is a ghost town at the tail end of summer.  As they become friendly with a few other vacationers who bring with them an air of glamorous malice that Evie senses, it isn’t enough to stop her from getting carried away by it all.  She also doesn’t see how her mother has been holding her back and how scared she is to see her daughter on the brink of womanhood.  As Evie begins to blossom under the attentions of a former soldier she meets who has shady ties to her step-father, she also slowly pieces together what everyone has been hiding from her.

I really enjoyed this book but I think if it had been written as an adult book, I would have loved it.  It was written as a flashback, but from not very far into the future.  Evie has perspective about what happened, but she’s still a girl and not very far past the action.  As things unfold, the reader senses where it’s going before Evie does and can see her naivete and enthusiasm interfering with her understanding.  It’s very skillfully done and didn’t make me want to shout at her “the killer’s behind the door you silly girl!” especially since in effect, she was the one telling me the story.  But I still would have liked the story better with the consideration and lack of immediacy that stories about teenagers written for an adult audience have.  As a bildungsroman, if it had been written with more than just a few months of hard-fought perspective, it would have had more impact.

I read this in an evening, which isn’t always the best way to give a book deep consideration, but I think there are a lot of things about it that will stick with me.  There is a palpable sense of malice and foreboding that doesn’t take away an understanding of Evie’s enjoyment of her adventure, but does cause you to wince at how slowly she’s realizing her part in a noir murder-mystery.

Recap: Cabinet of Wonders

The Cabinet of Wonders by Marie Rutkoski

Last night was the book release party for Marie’s first book, The Cabinet of Wonders. It was filled with professors, economists and rock climbers. And my husband was right, the bathroom was astonishingly large. Marie, though not the actual host, did a wonderful job of getting people to mix and introducing everyone around. We had fun and stayed later than we should.

Marie was bullied into giving us a copy of the book pre-release, and it’s really a joy though it’s been a couple of months since I read it. It’s being reviewed very well and getting publisher’s weekly stars and sequels will be released. I think this book will be an easy sell. It’s got a pretty cover, a plucky heroine, a mix of believable history with magic and fantastical science, and a wry sense of humor I had forgotten about until hearing Marie read aloud from it last night. If clockwork-punk isn’t a thing yet, it should be.

Clock detail, from Wikipedia

Based loosely on Prague’s Astronomical Clock, in the story a powerful clock is built for the Bohemian prince by Petra’s father. Upon completion, the prince steals the clockmaker’s magic eyes not only so that nothing can built to rival it, but so that he can unlock its secrets on his own. Petra travels to Prague hoping to bring back the eyes, not realizing how entangled in the castle she’ll become and how dangerously close she’ll get to the prince.

The time period, as both created and recreated by Marie is dangerous and exciting, it’s a world on the brink of scientific change and discovery, with stakes made high by the presence of small magics.

Ages 10-13 are the best fit for the book and I think it would find a happy place in both children’s and young adult collections.