I, Q by Roland Smith - review

I, Q by Roland Smith Book One: Independence Hall

Hold on to your butts, as Samuel L. Jackson says when he tries to reboot an entire island. And don't try to read this one if you're at all sleepy - Roland Smith has written a spy novel (the first in a series), and he is NOT kidding around!

Our story opens as teenage Q (short for Quest) and Angela become brand-new step-siblings, the children of two single-parent musicians who have found each other, fallen in love, and become massive rock stars at a fairly late stage in life. (Which is kind of a nice bone to throw the middle-aged reader - I had fun imagining Patty Smith as Q's mom and John Doe as Angela's dad. Shouldn't Patty Smith and John Doe fall in love and go on tour?)

Anyway. The new family embarks on a cross-country tour in a luxury bus, but when a crusty old roadie shows up by the side of the road and turns out to be a freelance secret agent intent on protecting Angela from people who want to use her as leverage against her allegedly dead biological mother, a Secret Service agent killed by a suicide bomber at Independence Hall... (remember to breathe)... they realize that their trip is going to be even stranger (and possibly longer) than anything rock and roll could have thrown their way.

I think that sometimes people underestimate how much complexity kids can take. Yes, much of the plot of I, Q hinges on who knows what, when they know it, and how they know it - but that's spycraft for you. The 39 Clues series is similarly sinuous, plot-wise, and also works in missing parents, a boy-girl team, and an overall sense of Trust No-one. Any kid who goes for that series will lap up I, Q like fizzy pink lemonade.

Action, secret identities, shifting alliances, interesting locations (the next one's set in the White House!), groovy rock-star perks (Q can get tickets to the hottest show in town for people who help them), and, most of all, quick-witted cool kids who can think for themselves put this book right up there with the Alex Rider series and other "realistic" adventure novels such as The London Eye Mystery and the Young Bond Series.

If you liked the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer - book list

If. You Liked. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. There. I said it.

I have put together this list I don't know how many times in the past couple of years, and I guess I just have to bite the bully (get it? like Twilight shoves all the other books around?) and admit that: 1) People want to read Twilight and 2) People LIKE Twilight.

I mean, why am I such a snob about these books anyway? What was I reading when I was eleven? I'll tell you what I was reading when I was eleven. No wait, read this book - Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading by Lizzie Skurnick - and you will know what I was reading when I was eleven. And I turned out ok. Reasonably ok. Ok shut up - am I exploring my nascent sexuality with my twin brother or luring my arch-enemy into a leech-infested pool? No. I am not. That was a rhetorical question by the way.

And maybe that's setting the bar kind of low, but I think it is some kind of proof that young readers of Twilight are not going to grow up and fall in love with pale, stalker-y older men. Pale, stalker-y older men are in fact CREEPY in real life, and almost all young women are viscerally and instinctively aware of this. We can trust our girls. (Hi, Olivia! We can trust you, right?)

There's still the issue, recently pointed out by someone at the Princeton Romance Writers Conference (and I am too lazy to go looking for it so I am going to paraphrase), that these paranormal romance novels represent something of a throwback to the old doctor/nurse kind of power differential that turned so many of us against romance novels to begin with (think Mr. Rochester and his employee - Jane - in Jane Eyre). Nowadays, romance novels feature women who are just as strong as, and on equal social footing with, the men, but in Twilight et al, the male character is by definition more powerful than the girl - he's immortal! he can change into an animal! or, uh, sparkle!

But that I don't know what to do about. EXCEPT. To recommend the following pretty good books as follow up reads for people who enjoyed the romance, the drama, the imaginative world of Twilight. Some of these books feature characters with supernatural powers or are set in alternate or future worlds, but some do not. There's at least one cute boy in each, but none of them has a female protagonist as wimpy as Bella.




The Luxe by Anna Godberson. Soapy and irresistably fancy, dripping with drama. Look at that dress!

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I reviewed it here earlier. Catching Fire, the next book in the series, has just been published.

Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception by Maggie Stiefvater. An extremely cute boy, some psychic torment, a well-written, lovely setting, and a harp. It's all good.



Prom Nights from Hell. Stories by Stephenie Meyer, Meg Cabot, Lauren Myracle, and other writers who are all about what it is to be a girl.

Prom Dates from Hell (Maggie Quinn: Girl vs Evil, Book 1) by Rosemary Clements-Moore. Good-looking teens, more dramatic than it looks, snappy dialogue. I reviewed the third book in this series a couple weeks ago.



Tithe by Holly Black. Anything by Holly Black, in fact.

Margo Lanagan's Black, White, and Red books. Dark, with a side of strange, drizzled with a stylish-sexy port wine reduction.



The somewhat overlooked Troll Bridge by Jane Yolen and her son, Adam Stempel. Music, magic, peril, attitude.

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray. The first in the Gemma Doyle Trilogy, about drama and magic in a Victorian boarding school.

Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause. Ms. Klause has been writing about the allure of the supernatural boy for longer than anyone, and in this one, the boy's a werewolf. Grrr!




Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr

Tantalize by Cynthia Leitich Smith



Peeps by Scott Westerfeld

Graceling by Kristin Cashore. Horses, swords, special powers, a fiery heroine, and a gorgeous guy. The sequel, Fire, will be out in early October.


and what the heck... you know what else any red-blooded reader of the Twilight books will like?



Flowers in the Attic, by V.C. Andrews. It's wrong. It's hot. It's so hot that it's wrong and it's so wrong that it's hot. And you just know "V.C. Andrews" is a pseudonym. Who do you think it is really? Wonder if that's what Salinger's been up to all this time.

The Roar by Emma Clayton - review

The Roar by Emma Clayton
Almost five hundred pages of brilliantly unpredictable fully-immersive postapocalyptic British fiction, set in a thriftily-constructed half-drowned London, shot through with luminous sensory stimuli and an extra helping of good old-fashioned LANGUAGE. I read it in two days, and I loved it, and I want to do it justice. So I'm going to keep this short.

He paced and watched the sea and for a while he felt like a firecracker with its fuse lit, a bit dangerous - as if when she walked through the door he would erupt and fly around the room breaking the lights, setting fire to things, and taking lumps out of the ceiling. Then he felt all soft and gooey, as if when she walked in he would melt and she would find nothing more than a puddle of love in the middle of the floor. Then he felt both of these things, that he was a firecracker about to explode, but instead of sparks, he was full of love and it was all going to be a bit messy.

Do not take this passage the wrong way. It occurs on page 471, and contains I think the first and the second (and the last) instances of the word "love" in the book. I picked it because it gives you Emma Clayton using a twelve-year-old's casual vocabulary to precisely describe a complex emotional state - some trick! Plus, cute there at the end.

The best science fiction - and, I would argue, the best teen fiction - pulls pieces of the status quo out of context so that the reader has a chance to see some aspect of contemporary life from a new perspective. In the case of The Roar, Ms. Clayton has picked natural resource management, environmental degradation, and (because she is English and name me one English author who doesn't, given the chance) the injustice of class.

Exciting, beautiful, gut-wrenching stuff, fully on par with, say, Jo Walton or Charles Stross. Cyborg animals, fighter planes, high-stakes arcade games, diverse characters, mutations, truly dreadful villains, and food made of mold! No wonder it nearly crests the 500 page mark. The ending feels a little rushed perhaps, but by the time I hit it, I was so swept away that I did not mind.

Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd, edited by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci - review

Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd, edited by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci

Ok I'm not even fifty pages into this and I need to email everyone I know RIGHT NOW. (That's me paraphrasing Cordelia in the first ever episode of Buffy - AS IF YOU DIDN'T KNOW THAT).
The first story is about what would happen if you were at ComicCon? and you were a Klingon? and you got real hammered and you woke up with your pants off in a room with a Jedi? You MAY have had to have seen the Seth-Rogen-on-Seth-Rogen fight scene in Fanboys to truly grok the matter-antimatter reaction that such a coupling implies.

And I CAN'T believe that just last week I wrote a completely, slobberingly geeked-out review of Highway to Hell, and I'm using all the same references again. Lame, lame, lame, lame, LAME!

Deep breath. No, okay, sorry I'm JUST too excited. All the little icons on the cover? First of all they're by eBoy, who does cool vinyl toys you can get at Atomic Pop and kidrobot, and that's cool - not geek cool, COOL. Second of all... they're the contributors! (Not the unkillable cheerleader or the knight or the old-school vampire, the more normal-looking people) Cecil Castellucci is wearing a Squidfire t-shirt, or at least that ought to be a Squidfire t-shirt. Scott Westerfeld is sporting green goggles like he's just been out machining the brass engine couplings on his armor-plated zeppelin.

HIS story is a situational analysis: two people, a briefcase full of cash, a bottle of vodka, two guns and a pair of handcuffs in a private compartment on a speeding train. What happens? Well that all depends on the alignment of the two people, now, doesn't it? He even includes a grid. Awww. Like anyone reading this book needs an explanation of Lawful vs. Chaotic.

It really should be called "Geekgasmic". There are all these Easter eggs scattered throughout: comics, jokes about furries, numerous bowls of M&Ms, and gratuitous Dr. Who references.

Oh my god you guys - and in the author bios, each person runs down his or her geek cred.

These people are FRRREAKS.

A LOT of them have been DMs. Greg and Cynthia Leitich Smith had the Starship Enterprise on their wedding cake. Libba Bray, who wrote the mystical Regency boarding school trilogy that started with A Great and Terrible Beauty, and whom I always pictured as, like, a collector of cameo brooches and lace jabots, apparently went as Columbia to Rocky Horror for TWO YEARS.

The stories are about geeks and geekiness, and they pull no punches. Very few of the geeks in this book are Secretly Hott Geeks, which is refreshing. Gamer geeks, sci-fi geeks, and Trekkers are represented, but so are literature geeks, a pep geek, and even a Golden Age geek. A surprising number of these stories are quite sensitive, but not in a LOTR climax kind of way, more in a Han-Solo-about-to-get-turned-into-a-penny kind of way.

Short story anthologies are always fantastic to hand to people who are not sure what or who to read next. Teens fall into this category at least as often as adults do, but there are precious few YA anthologies. This is the first I've seen in a while that features realistic fiction. With Geektastic, Black and Castellucci are doing teens a big service, introducing them to the likes of Barry Lyga, John Green, David Levithan, and other members of their herd.

Dragonbreath by Ursula Vernon - review

Dragonbreath by Ursula Vernon
It's possible that my opinion of this book has been influenced by the appearance in my bed this morning (at, possibly, 7am, I don't know, I didn't have my glasses on yet), of a seven-year-old who wasn't interested in it when I suggested it to him yesterday at the library, but who had apparently woken up, read the whole book, and now needed to synopsize it for me, read the funniest passages out loud, and tell me that he needs the next book in the series RIGHT NOW. He could barely get the words out for laughing.

After we kicked him out (my saintly husband: "Let Mommy sleep, ok? Go read something else."), I fell back to sleep and dreamed about pudgy animated dragon pirates. Ursula Vernon, get your agent on the phone with Noggin. Danny Dragonbreath is good animated.

So. Danny Dragonbreath is the only semi-mythological creature in a school full of non-mythic reptiles and amphibians. He gets a little picked-on for this, but his is an upbeat, enthusiastic semi-mythological 5th-grade spirit, and he doesn't let that bully Big Eddy the Komodo dragon get him down. His best friend Wendell is (predictably) a more cautious, intellectual type, and in the way of mismatched best friend pairs everywhere, Danny has to cajole Wendell into assisting him in his pursuit of unorthodox solutions to common problems.

In this instance, the problem is a research paper on the ocean, a subject that Danny knows nothing about. Danny's solution? A visit to Cousin Edward the sea serpent, who takes the gung-ho Danny and freaked-out Wendell on an undersea tour. They explore a coral reef, a sunken ship, and a deep-sea trench. Along the way, sneaky Ursula Vernon finagles interesting facts about sea creatures and ocean phenomena into the adventure.

But it's the snarkalicious writing that will keep my seven-year-old, and other kids who appreciate funny (I'm thinking it might appeal to Diary of a Wimpy Kid devotees, if I can get them past the dragon thing) coming back for more. In a sidebar, Vernon writes, "A school of potato salad can skeletonize a cow in under two weeks, assuming that the cow doesn't get bored and move."

Our library system has Dragonbreath filed as a graphic novel, but it's not. It's one of those hybrids, something like The Invention of Hugo Cabret, with pages of panels carrying the action in some places and pages of text doing the bulk of the work. There could be more graphic passages, I have to say. Ursula Vernon's drawing style is extremely nice - full-on grownup quality work, with a strong line quality and bold shading that highlights each panel's central idea. Think Owly.

Such high contrast sometimes makes a comic look ominous and bleak (Dark Knight Returns, Grendel), but in this case, the choice of grass green as a highlight color keeps that from happening, and it's a technique that is particularly appropriate and effective in the undersea scenes. The vertical panels that show the sinuous Edward diving or rising to the surface are unusually lovely. Page layouts are varied and interesting, but still quite simple and easy to follow.

In sum: . I've been looking for a Babymouse for boys for a long time, and I think Dragonbreath is it - snappy, giggleworthy text and strong, coherent graphic passages telling a fun, friendly, exciting story with just the right balance of realism and fantasy. I'm with Mao - we're waiting for Dragonbreath: Attack of the Ninja Frogs with bated breath!

Highway to Hell, a novel by Rosemary Clement-Moore - review

I am woefully behind in my YA reviewing. I have been reading YA books all summer - in part because I like YA books, partly because I got so many YA ARCs at BookExpo, and of course, partly because I like to be able to recommend books to teenagers.

But I haven't been able to bring myself to review them. Sure, Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception by Maggie Steifwhatever was fine, with romance and uncertainty and music and telekinesis, and the similar but less romance-y Troll Bridge: A Rock'n' Roll Fairy Tale I would recommend without hesitation.

The forthcoming Sphinx's Princess, in which Esther Friesner imagines the pre-royal life of Nefertiti (King Tut's wife) the same way she did Helen of Troy's in Nobody's Princess, was perfectly serviceable clean teen historical romance fiction. The Goldsmith's Daughter, about an Aztec teen who crosses gender lines to protect her family, was terrific - right up until she fell in love with a conquistador. Hey, doesn't everybody love a good-Nazi love story?

I read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and I have independent confirmation that YES it is a good choice for young adult readers. Wondergirl, my favorite middle schooler, read it over the summer at my suggestion, then rented the movie and laughed all the way through it. Hee hee hee!

But WHYYY have I not reviewed all these things? What is the MATTER with me? Have I lost my joy in reading and nowadays I am just plowing through these novels for the sake of getting them done? WOE!




Cough. That was probably a little more melodramatic than the situation warrants. Anyway. I am, by contrast, supernaturally excited about this book, the most recent in the Maggie Quinn, Girl vs. Evil series. I am a newcomer to Maggie, her friend D&D Lisa the evil genius, her paladin of a boyfriend, and the trouble - EEEVIL trouble - that seems to dog their footsteps. I picked up the book because I liked the coolio Craig Phillips cover, and because on it, Maggie wears aviator sunglasses while motoring along in her Jeep with no doors.

And now I've just finished it and I'm happy, I'm happy happy happy. Maggie and Lisa are geeky plus good-looking, but in a believable, Kristen-Bell-in-Fanboys kind of way. Their banter is witty but not so witty that it sounds fake. They call each other "moron" with regularity. They are aware that together, they make up Bart Simpson's sisters, and if you point it out, they will roll their eyes so hard they'll almost knock themselves over.

Maggie is psychic and Lisa is a witch, and BF Justin has the looks, the good manners, and the physical competence of a Riley Finn without all the whining. Seriously, I'll never forgive Whedon for what he did to that character. Make him evil, kill him off, but emasculating him like that was just mean.

The plot is TIGHT. There's enough going on that the author could be forgiven for letting a detail or two go unexplained, but she does not. Furthermore, answers are not hurled into the text at the end in any old "Have this droid's memory wiped" manner. They are woven in, sometimes not even overtly. My new pal Rosemary Clement-Moore doesn't seem to think it's necessary for a character to say, "Oh so that's why the demon absorbed that shotgun blast without injury." If it's not a major plot point, she'll let you make that connection yourself, which, I have to say, is extremely generous. If I'd written anything half so clever, you can bet I would be showing off all my tied-off ends like a Boy Scout who just earned his Knots merit badge.

PLUS. Maggie is petite and powerful, and sassy and cute. I'm a geek. But I didn't think of Buffy until page 270, when she tells a giant amalgamated demon who is doing a good job of intimidating her, "You are so full of crap." Of course, now I can't stop.

The book is, somewhat refreshingly, not without God. I am a little weary of the dances that many authors do in order to keep their teen demon-fighting free of any actual discussion of faith. As when Buffy runs into a high school classmate in the cemetery and he asks (about God), "does he exist, by the way? Is there word on that?" and Buffy answers, "Nothing solid."

In this book, Lisa, in particular, is quite concerned about going to Hell after having summoned a demon in a previous book. There are Catholic characters who participate in the Back Demon Back, saying prayers and swinging branding irons.

Our setting is the fictional Dulcina, TX, right down in the foot of Texas, near the Gulf of Mexico. Lucky for us, Clement-Moore knows her Texas. She writes the landscape - its smells and sky, its few features, the effect livestock has on it, and most of all its subtle rises and falls - really well, with unstrained, natural imagery. You get the feeling she's spent some time on a horse.

(I briefly became a little concerned that the "Moore" in "Clement-Moore" was as in Christopher Moore, which would make sense, kind of like when I found out Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld are married, but looks like not. Apparently, though, she and I are the same person, because she lists Television Without Pity and Go Fug Yourself as good wastes of time, and Susan Cooper and Meg Cabot - whose blog writing I thought of more than once while reading this book - as hero authors. Plus she liked Firefly. Awww.)

Funny and smart, exciting and hip, Highway to Hell was just the squirt of lime I needed to cut through my midsummer complacency.

The Dunderheads, by Paul Fleischman, illustrated by David Roberts - review

The Dunderheads, by Paul Fleischman, illustrated by David Roberts
Do you want to live in David Roberts's world? I want to live in David Roberts's world. In David Roberts's world, no trip to the thrift store does NOT yield a polyester caftan in a trippy geometric pattern. Or at least a pair of green Chucks. In David Roberts's world, every surface is there to be customized with gaffer's tape in lots of colors. In David Roberts's world, it is impossible to pass by a jacket with a circle zipper pull and not want to put it on. (The circle zipper pull being, of course, the sexiest item ever to appear in the notions aisle.) In David Roberts's world, even a lawn chair with yellow and gray webbing is the coolest webbed lawn chair I have ever seen. That part's actually a bit frustrating. I'm never going to find a lawn chair that looks that good.

But what makes Dunderheads the perfect storm of quirky greatness is that David Roberts's world has somehow overlaid and merged with Paul Fleischman's world. Paul Fleischman, whose previous world, Weslandia, was also a world I wanted to live in. Not least because it's just a darn clever name.

In Paul Fleischman's world, every child feels free to express his or her individuality in every way possible - through the acquisition and deployment of bizarrely abstruse knowledge; by discovering and practicing (and in some cases, inventing) an unique talent; or? by filing one's fingernails into handy tools. In Paul Fleischman's world, Pluck Conquers All.

The Dunderheads are a group of kids so labeled by their villainous teacher, a towering bully who despises children and loves things with pointy teeth and/or spikes. Miss Breakbone keeps an electric chair in her classroom and awards herself a gold star whenever she makes a child cry. In other words, she is a Miss Trunchbull in dire need of a Matilda to scare her off. But this is Paul Fleischman's world, remember?

What follows is not a Use of Underage Magic story - what follows is a classic American Kids Get Even tall tale. Didn't you hear those stories when you were growing up? The story about how those kids, a few years older than you, finally got back at Coach Wolf by putting a potato in his tailpipe? Or how Miss Park lost her eyebrows one time because somebody doctored her makeup? Those kids in those stories were HEROES. Like Paul Fleischman's heroes. Everyday, funny, underdog heroes.

Man, I am really babbling along here, aren't I? It's because I just keep paging through the book and finding more to love. I am pretty darn sure David Roberts has quoted a couple of his own characters from Iggy Peck, Architect and Dumpster Diver, but I can't be fussed to go get those books to check, because they're in the room where my sons are (supposedly) sleeping.

So, one day, Miss Breakbone goes too far. She confiscates an item that the smallest kid, a boy called Junkyard, who wears a rainbow on his sweater and a Quadrophenia patch on his jeans, had been planning to give to his mom for her birthday. She makes him cry. The kids embark upon a daring plan that will humiliate Miss Breakbone and restore Junkyard's pride, not to mention his property.



It's worth mentioning that Dunderheads is a long-form picture book, almost a graphic novel, really. My rising third grader read it to me and to his younger brother with no trouble (their faces shining - they love it when the bad guy gets his due). In the picture above, 5th grader Rabbit is reading it to rapt 3rd graders Legolas, Zee, & Mao, plus my 1st grade Zhou. Although not a chapter book, it falls into that short-long space that is so hard to keep populated when the second graders come around. Thanks, Mr. Fleischman!

It is also worth mentioning that while David Roberts is a master of stylized, expressive characters sporting fearless fashion choices ("from the sixties, seventies, AND eighties" as the classic rock station trumpets), there are many many illustration and design elements quoted from various sources and executed in different styles, all of which he does well. It gives his world a lot of depth. As Laurie Anderson said, "You know? I think we should put some mountains here. Otherwise, what are all the characters going to fall off of?"

And I'm out. Go find this one.