I love this book.

I love this book so much, that one part of this review will hurt to write. I’m at the same time thrilled with it and also horrified and disappointed.

There’s a little background that people who don’t care about analyzing their literature can skip. The author, Perry Moore, had a problem with how gay characters were portrayed in comic books. He had a good reason to feel this way, which can be read about in Who Cares About the Death of a Gay Superhero, Anyway?. I don’t read comics, so all of this is out of context of the source material, but compiled together is pretty startling. So it’s safe to say that Perry Moore was on a mission: he wanted to write a book with a teenage protagonist that could be looked up to by teen readers, a realistic handling of what it meant to be a gay superhero. Mostly, I think he succeeds.

Hero is about Thom, and how Thom comes to grips with his superpowers and his sexuality. Thom is wonderful; he’s a kid, having to face tough choices, secrets he has to handle alone, and like a lot of kids, forced to deal with his own issues as well as the issues his parents leave behind. In a lot of places it reads like a first novel, the pacing sometimes reminds me of the feeling you get when stepping off a particularly rickety carnival ride and the editing could have used a sharper eye especially in the parts where Thom is listing off superhero aliases like they’re B.F.F. but then states he doesn’t know them, but overall I thought it was an good debut. I do think people who like comics should give it a chance and people who don’t like comics to also give it a chance and then come discuss it with me (what? I never said I wasn’t greedy). Read the rest of this entry »

I am in this place where I want to read a lot of romance and because I have exhausted all fandom resources as far as I can (why am I so behind on every single fandom!). I decided to hook up with some YA novels that looked like awesome romances! I thought this was a straightforward teen romance, but I was misled. It’s actually an extremely well done family drama.

Okay, I am a sap with daddy issues. This book grabbed me by the balls, okay? I love this book. Elizabeth Scott, you are so my new Nora Roberts, even without the hot sex (and if I really need hot sex, well, that’s what I’m in fandom for).

This book has a father who in in the throes of a mid-life crisis, quits his job and starts selling vitamins at the mall, a gorgeous, but generally unattainable guy Kate verbally spars with on a daily basis, a positively delicious mother-daughter relationship between Kate’s mother and grandmother. It also had a very heartbreaking friendship that smacks so close to my own teenage experience that I pretty much spent a whole chapter of this novel in tears! Poor Kate; we have to watch her struggle, and be trampled on until she finally gets it together. I love watching really weak characters grow and change in positive ways, and she did it even with her family problems. I do wish there had been more backbone and less groveling, but in the end it evens out, I think, and Kate comes into her own.

And the romance! THE ROMANCE, GUYS. Kate and Will and Will and the snark and the making out in closets and misunderstandings and arguments over nothing and angst and then more making out! I haven’t read a romance that was more believable in a few weeks. If I was the doodling type, I would be writing their names in hearts in my Lisa Frank notebooks. You know, provided I had Lisa Frank notebooks.

This novel has happy parts but it also has really, really realistic fuckups that make you realize not everything has a happy ending. Kate’s ending wasn’t happy, it was bittersweet, and all the more so because it drives home the fact that even with support and love, some people are just inherently selfish. I hurt at one scene in this novel so bad, I’m not even sure how to describe it besides it felt like getting jumped in an alley with metal bats and soccer cleats.

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Note: I read this book in 2008 and then revisited it after the election when I got into a discussion of why I disliked it with a friend. The time away didn’t warm my heart to it at all. This review reflects my opinion after the discussion, whereas my first was review was more to the tune of “WHY IS THIS SO AWFUL?” I, at least, think it explains my issues more.

Returning to Renay-reads-all-the-gay-YA-novels-she-can-find–to-scope-out-the-competition portion of Let’s Get Literate! 2008, I had a moment of bemusement when I finished this story. Wide Awake reminds me of that little kid who just knows he can get the square peg in the circle hole if he just keeps banging on it.

Don’t get me wrong: Levithan is still a good writer and he still writes about things I think need to be written about. The story here about these boys and their future and Duncan’s worries as he watches things he believed in fall apart were just lost because I spent so much time enraged at the politics. I even agree with Levithan about most of this stuff!

I think it’s safe to say that I am too jaded, cynical and bitter for this book to work on me. It felt fake. I get that Levithan enjoys gay utopias and optimism and hope but this story was kind of like eating five of those pies at once. I can’t buy into it anymore. The timing of the release of this book just gets me so riled up, too. Sure, YA can be political, but there’s no reason to bash people in the face with it.

Places where Levithan lost me: non-shopping malls (I cannot suspend my disbelief this far, I am sorry), demonizing the opposition while preaching against that opposition demonizing our heroes, crammed so full of diversity that it was a joke. I felt like I might vomit rainbows; I’m not against a good character sketch once in awhile, but yes! America is DIVERSE! It was like a game of musical chairs, every time the music stopped we got a new minority individual, a inspiring speech, and sometimes there would even be some character development. I look over the scenes with Duncan watching his girlfriends have issues and smile fondly.

However, mostly it was just inspiring speeches. I should use scare quotes there, because I simply wasn’t inspired. I was bored; I knew what was going to be said already. Maybe too much time in gay rights work.

It’s too much, all at once. The story is set in some nebulous future where a gay man is good enough and the society changed enough for him to get on the ticket, when we’re sitting in 2009 and I watch racism ruin friendships and various forms of media and tell me my president isn’t actually black because he looks white, even though he identifies as black? It started in 1862, for varying degrees of beginnings, that’s 147 years. 147 years later and we finally have our first black president. Right now, in many states, in my state, gay people can’t even get married and the Supreme Court hasn’t even gone near it yet. This book is set too close to our time. That’s what it boils down to: I cannot buy the premise of this book at all based on the numbers. The numbers don’t crunch and I have given up on urban sprawl and education to speed up the process of changing minds. Maybe after March and the decision in California in announced I will reevaluate.

The opposition are still awful people, characterized like big meanies. Listen, I live in the South. I know some of these meanies, meanies that will have my gay friends over for dinner and be perfectly nice and then go vote and pass an amendment banning gays from adopting. This book took all the bad parts of these people I know and made villains. Excuse me, they’re not evil. They’re a product of their times and minds don’t always change fast, even with wars and disease and poverty. People who are not okay with gay people are not evil because they are afraid of what redefining their worlds means and it does a disservice to paint them with that brush, because it takes away their humanity—the very thing most of our biggest detractors do (don’t forget, gay people fuck goats). It’s pretty hypocritical for Levithan to write a book about uniting humanity but save a little bigoted piece so there could be some drama! It’s wishful thinking and wishful thinking doesn’t tell a good story. It reads like an AU fanfic of election 2000. I do not know what Levithan intended with this book but it missed for me. I hope other people get more out of it.

Final point: I think this is an important book, because it shows where too much optimism can lead: imagining a future that’s impossible with our past, just to critique our present and oh, have a pastede on gay romance.

I’m sorry, David Levithan! Um. I love your co-authored stuff? *mourns*

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I read this book last year and I find I still agree with most of what I said when reflecting on the book in hindsight. Especially the fact that I had no clue this book was part of a series. Looking back I probably wouldn’t have started it if I had known because of my pesky need to complete everything. Although I guess the author is better about releasing her next titles than certain fantasy writers I won’t name here. >.>

The sequel is out now.

Another qualifier for the deus ex machina award! I fell in love with this premise when I saw a review of an ARC copy somewhere. Janie has the ability to see people’s dreams, only the ability comes with a downside: if someone is napping or sleeping near her, she is unable to control being pulled into their dreams. This means that she goes blind and if she happens to be doing something in public—it looks like there’s something wrong with her.

On top of that, she’s sick of watching the classmates that shun her dream about their fears or their sexual fantasies. The jacket flap says “fantasy booty” but to me that just reads COCK. This book sets up a million cock jokes and never, ever makes them. Okay, well, maybe once. Sort of.

After reading this book, I’m just not sure about how I feel. The structure was confusing, very disjointed. I almost didn’t like it because I felt so yanked around. After I finished, I decided thatb was the point. That’s exactly how Janie feels and for me, the narrative trick worked because I was always dreading the next jerk to another scene. This story had other problems, though: I think the narrative was awkward in too many places. Almost all the resolutions come out of nowhere, dropped into the story at the tail-end. It all felt rushed and rather haphazard, and then: McMann made an explicit connection between two unrelated characters out of nowhere, even when she had the chance to set up all these things through dream sequences earlier in the book.

Foreshadowing is for everyone!

This move screamed to me of sequel and made the end of the novel weaker. It’s not explicit going in that this is part of a series, and I don’t think this novel stands well on it’s own with the choices made for how to distribute important information.

I also find it odd that Janie, who otherwise seems very prone to taking care of herself and self-aware, would wait until the time she does to start reading about dreams. Seriously? A kid who falls into dreams of other people isn’t going to hit up whatever resources she can find as soon as they’re old enough. If she didn’t do it because she was trying to avoid her ability, okay, but I didn’t get a strong enough vibe about it. If it was there it was simply not strong enough to convince me it would have taken Janie that long to go learn everything she could. Especially when she’s going on overnight trips where she’ll have to face her problem head on.

Cabel and Janie, though, I loved. That was handled beautifully, I thought. So much mistrust and affection and miscommunication. I hate to be so down on the novel when I really liked pretty much every scene Cabel was in, especially the first scene between he and Janie in the library. I think it’s another reason I was sad Janie wasn’t more self-aware — because then Cabel could have been the one to do more teaching about lucid dreaming outside of just theory in a book as Janie opened up to him about what she could do — it would’ve been neat for him to be able to help her instead of her just reading a book and magically being able to do things on the first try. A deeper connection for them, perhaps? Alas, it was not meant to be, but his tricks were fun.

I will probably read the sequel (ha ha, 2009) to see how things pan out and I’m not too disappointed. I think just as many things worked as didn’t, and things that made me roll my eyes will make another reader go, “oh, yay, a mystery!” I just have to call shenanigans on that side-character connection, left totally untouched until the end of the novel. Shenanigans.

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I needed to start labeling reviews I did before I started YA Fabulous with something. I chose the word “retro” because it seems to be making a comeback and I am a big fan of hopping on comeback trains. I chose this review because I figure it’s good to start getting the grudge reviews out of the way. That said, if you love Twilight you should not read this review because it is the review equivalent of me taking out a pack of romping werewolves with a sniper rifle.

Okay, well, maybe not that bad. This review will never be as epic and amazing as this one (ilu, Mem). Still, though. STILL.

For the record, looking back over this review I wrote it when I was still uncertain and finding my literary legs enough to say WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS, ARE YOU KIDDING ME. I think this series is gross and sexist, but I am thankful for it at least giving me sparklefield. Read the rest of this entry »