Book Review: The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

Title: The Heart Goes Last
Author: Margaret Atwood
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
Content Alert: sex, language

At a time in a dystopian near future, the Earth has fallen to ruin. Like many of their peers, Charmaine and Stan, who formerly had steady jobs (she had a college degree and worked in a nursing home), now live in their car, surviving on donuts, never knowing when their next shower will be. When they learn about Consilience, a utopian development, their desire for stability overrides any concern they might have about the place, even though part of the condition of living there is that they voluntarily surrender themselves to a prison every other month. Soon they find themselves involved in all sorts of entanglements (romantic and more nefarious), until they wonder if life on the inside is all it's cracked up to be.

Before I read The Heart Goes Last, I would have told you that I loved Atwood's realistic fiction (The Blind Assassin is one of my all-time favorite books), but was less a fan of her speculative fiction (yes, I appreciated The Handmaid's Tale, and I think it is one of the best book club/literature seminar books because it's so much fun to discuss, but it's not where I'd naturally gravitate). This book is dark, funny, and profoundly weird. It's also really memorable. While the experience reading it wasn't as enjoyable for me as some of Atwood's other novels, I'm still glad I read it, and would love the chance to talk with other people about Atwood's purposes for creating this story.

Book Review: The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey

Title: The Girl With All the Gifts
Author: M.R. Carey
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Kindle
Content Alert: Swearing, violence

When we meet Melanie, we know she's a little girl who is living all alone in a cell. Every weekday she's strapped into a wheelchair and wheeled to a classroom in the basement of the bunker where she lives with a bunch of other kids. On weekends she's left alone for the entire time. Every so often one of the kids disappears permanently, and Melanie soon learns that she and the other kids are special-- they have been infected by the spores that turned most of the population into zombies, but for some reason they are still sentient-- sentient, and deadly.

Oh my gosh, I am not a fan of the zombie thriller. Ed has watched every single episode of The Walking Dead, and when the first season came to a close, I told him he would be going to Fort Benning without me. If I had known that the main characters of The Girl With All the Gifts would essentially be Michonne and one of her walker pets, I never would have downloaded the book. But I did, so I read it, and by the time I realized what Melanie was, I was too invested in her perspective to put it down. The first part of the story, where we learn what Melanie is and how lonely her life is, and the final few chapters, where we learn about her potential, completely redeemed what was otherwise just Rick, Michonne, that creepy scientist from the NIH, and some other disposable guy fighting off the other humans and the walkers. Carey does a lovely job showing the complications of various perspectives-- in their minds, all of these people had good reasons for their actions, which often came into conflict. The Girl With All the Gifts was not my cup of tea at all, but if it's yours, this one was done very well.

Book Review: The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon

Title: The Bone Season
Author: Samantha Shannon
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
This book would be rated: PG-13 for language, violence and a couple of sexy scenes

Sometimes I find myself really enjoying a book while I'm reading or listening to it, and then in the span of time in between finishing the book and writing the book review, I forget nearly everything about the book, that is a sign to me that it wasn't a great book in the first place.

The Bone Season was getting tons of hype a month or so ago. I must have gotten half a dozen emails from Amazon and Audible and Goodreads about it (yes, I realize they are all the same company), and eventually I found myself suckered into buying it, even though I know that I'm not a huge fan of dystopian novels and I'm also not a huge fan of trilogies.

Paige Mahoney is living in London in 2059. Her father thinks she works at an oxygen bar in the city, but she's really a voyant (someone with supernatural powers), and she works as part of an underground syndicate with other voyants. She's able to enter into the dreams and minds of other people, and she accidentally uses this power to kill several people on a train. This blows her cover and she's rounded up and shipped off to Oxford, a city where voyants can live out in the open, but they are controlled by Rephaim, an alien species.

Paige, being a feisty girl, has no patience for her situation and wants to escape. She's put under the control of Warden, the fiance of the really creepy woman in charge of the whole place. Warden seems tough and cold, but eventually Paige learns that he also wants to be free of the rules of the place. But can a small group of fighters go up against all of the Rephaim?

 I felt that Paige was a fairly flat character-- she's a stock feisty girl, and Warden is pretty much exactly like Edward Cullen or Matthew Clairmont from Discovery of Witches. I didn't want them to get together, but it felt inevitable that they would.  And reading about fighting bores me, but overall the book is engaging and easy to listen to. But that doesn't mean that I'm on board with books two and three in the series.

Book Review: Divergent by Veronica Roth

Title: Divergent
Author: Veronica Roth
Enjoyment Rating: ****
This book would be rated: PG-13
Source: Audible for iTunes

We've had a stretch of super-nasty weather here in Salt Lake. It started around New Year when the temperature plunged to lows below zero and highs in the single digits. Then a little over a week ago, two feet of snow dumped on our fair city, and when the snow blew out of town, it brought in an inversion that has stayed for at least a week. I can't see the mountains. The mountains are huge, and they start a mile from my house. It's the kind of weather that keeps runners inside.

For a few days, I did stay inside, on my treadmill, which is worse than anything except not running at all. Then I started up outside again, and I needed something to keep my mind off the fact that my fingers and toes were turning into blocks of ice. I was lucky to have Divergent to keep me company. My friend Michelle recommended Divergent, and although I'd seen it in the Audible sales from time to time, I'd always passed over it, writing it off as "just another teenage dystopian romance" in the vein of The Hunger Games. But I trust Michelle, so I downloaded the book, and it was another that kept me listening until the kids begged me to turn my iPod off.

Beatrice is a sixteen-year-old living in Chicago, but a very different Chicago than the one we know. Residents of the city are sorted into one of five tribes (think Hogwarts), each based on a character attribute that the people in that tribe have or want to have (a flawed premise, but you have to buy into it if you want to enjoy the rest of the story) . The sorting is based on an aptitude test, and when Beatrice takes the test, she's told that she's divergent, which means that she'd do equally well in more than one of the tribes. But she chooses Dauntless (the brave ones) instead of Abnegation (the self-sacrificing ones), the tribe she'd been brought up in.

Most of the book centers on Beatrice's training in Dauntless, and her budding relationship with Four, one of her trainers. But as the story progresses, the plot thickens and the tribes, which have lived together peaceably for many years, suddenly face an uprising.

Book Review: The Twelve by Justin Cronin

Title: The Twelve
Author: Justin Cronin
Source: Audible for iTunes
This book would be rated: R for violence, language, sex-- you name it
Enjoyment Rating: ***

One of the first Audible books I ever listened to was Justin Cronin's The Passage, which is the prequel to The Twelve. The books are about a dystopian world in the near future and about 80 years into the future, when the planet has been overtaken by genetically-engineered vampires. Until listening to The Passage, I was not a fan of dystopian/horror books at all, and I was surprised at how much I liked that book. Cronin developed great characters, fractured his characters in an interesting way, and wrote a book that was enjoyable to read, despite all of the death.

So I was excited for The Twelve. Like its predecessor, it's well written with great characters. But there are SO many characters that it was a little hard to follow. Cronin doesn't pander to his audience by refreshing the back story, so I spent the first hundred pages or so trying to figure out who all the characters were (it had been several years since I read the first installment).  And then it was a lot more death and killing. Audible chunks its books into easily downloadable segments, and this book had four chunks, each 6-7 hours long. By the fourth one, I was hooked by the story, but it took a while to get me there. I'm not sure if I'll invest another 26 hours in the final installment of the story when Cronin finishes the trilogy.

Book Review: American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Title: American Gods
Author: Neil Gaiman
Enjoyment Rating: *****
This book would be rated: R for sex, language, and violence
Source: Audible for iTunes
Books I've read this year: 114

This is another book that sat at the bottom of my Audible pile for a long time, and while I know why it took me a long time to get to it (I'm generally not a fan of fantasy/sci fi, my mom started it and said it was nasty, and it's super long), it was like a great big, super tasty, greasy bacon cheeseburger. A book that was a delight to greedily plow through, but one that left me feeling a little bit guilty afterwards.

Shadow is nearing his final days in prison when he learns that he's going to be released early because his wife was killed in a car accident. On the way home for her funeral, he meets a mysterious man called Wednesday. At first, Shadow is repulsed by Wednesday, but within hours, he agrees to work for him-- to do his bidding, whatever it may be. It's apparent to the reader (although perhaps not to Shadow) that Wednesday has him under his spell. And Wednesday is no ordinary boss-- he's both a con artist and the Norse god Odin, and he's hired Shadow to help him prepare for a war between the old gods and the new ones, most of whom have moved to America.

For the next 500 pages, Shadow and Odin traverse the country, gathering the gods on their side, getting themselves into scrapes, and running into Shadow's dead wife. The first 400 pages throw out so many threads of a story that I wasn't sure if Gaiman was going to be able to wrap them up in a satisfying way, but he definitely did. I listened to most of the last seven hours in one furious session, sure to pop the earbuds in my ears whenever the kids were within listening range. The book is one part murder mystery, one part spy thriller, one part romance (although not a great part of the book, since the female lead is rotting), and all parts great writing. It's a dark story that really moves.

Book Review: The Dog Stars by Peter Heller

Title: The Dog Stars
Author: Peter Heller
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Library Copy
Books I've read this year: 106

We decided to adopt a baby about two weeks before undertaking an enormous landscaping project. Consequently, I've spent the fall economizing almost all other aspects of my life.  I told Ed that I'd do my part by giving up my habit of buying books with reckless abandon, and started reserving them at the library instead. Most of the time, it's a great solution (except I miss reading myself to sleep by the light of my iPad), but I will admit that I get a rush of panic when the library alerts me that I have (another) hold waiting for me. You may have noticed that my reading pace has slowed considerably this summer and especially this fall since I started teaching. And when four reserves, four books I know I won't be able to renew, all come in at the same time, it makes me read really fast.

Unfortunately, The Dog Stars is the kind of book that isn't mean to be read fast. Oh yes, it's possible to quickly plow through this tale of a man, Hig, who survived an apocalyptic flu and now lives in what used to be Denver with only his dog and a gun-crazed neighbor for company. But that isn't how it's meant to be read. Heller's MFA is in both fiction and poetry, and it shows. His language is poetic, and we really get into Hig's head and feel what he feels as he flies his plane above the ravaged American west, both looking for survivors and afraid of what he'll find.

I know, the summary of this book may make it seem like something you don't want to read, but there are no zombies in The Dog Stars, unless you count the survivors, afraid of embracing life. I'm glad I gave up my much-needed nap last Monday to finish it in a quiet house. I'm still thinking about it.

Book Review: Variant by Robison Wells (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Variant
Author: Robison Wells
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Referral: I'd heard about it several times but decided to buy it after Emily Milner talked about it at Segullah
Source: Kindle for iPad
Books I've read this year: 155

When Variant starts, seventeen-year-old Benson Fisher arrives at a boarding school in New Mexico, feeling like it will be the first place he will ever be able to call home. He's a foster kid who has lived in too many places to count, and when he gets the opportunity to apply for a scholarship at Maxfield Academy, he jumps at the chance to have a place to belong.

However, it becomes evident even before Benson crosses the threshold of the school that something is seriously messed up at Maxfield. There are no teachers, no adults of any kind. In order to keep a Lord of the Flies-style anarchy from erupting, the students have broken up into three groups, and Benson has to choose which one to join on the first day (he joins the Vs, or the Variants). While the school has only four rules, no one seems able to tell him what it means to be sent to "detention" (the punishment for breaking the rules). Benson decides it's high time to leave, but he soon realizes that escape will be more difficult than he imagined.

I hesitate to call Variant a dystopian novel, because it's not immediately apparent that anything dystopian is going on. Benson's world appears to be like our world. And even when he gets to the school, it seems pretty draconian, but not necessarily out of the realm of possibility. It's not until three quarters of the way through the book that the dystopian elements emerge, so I can't decide if it's a card well played or if Wells is messing with our expectations as readers. While the story really picks up at the end, the middle third is slow-- we see a lot of paintball, and not much else. I also think that the budding love stories should be built up more to justify Benson's reactions to them.

I'll say this for Variant-- it didn't feel like a trilogy, or even like a "stand alone book with series potential" even after I finished it. I was a little bit confused by the ending, and by the potential love triangle it opened up, but it never felt like it was working its way toward more books. So I'm intrigued that Wells (like his brother Dan, whose first Monster book didn't feel like part of a trilogy) has two more books in the works.