Monthly Archives: June 2019

South of Ela Cartaz

Posted on by Henry

I’m away Thursday, so here’s a little setting-seed to tide you over:

There is an island on the southern coast of Ela Cartaz, where the winds bluster chill and wet. Under the moss and rot and the hanging vines, beneath the old trees whose roots eat older mortar and clutch at broken foundation-stones like pearls, there is a warm light. This is the light sought by many, the light for which thousands died before the fall of the first Ela Cartaz. It waits in darkness, while around it the remnants of a lost past whir and click and hum.

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Legend, by Marie Lu

Posted on by Henry

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I dismissed this book too quickly.

I bounced from the jacket copy and didn’t click with the forecasted tropes. I saw there was a scion of a privileged family falling in love with a street rat with a heart of gold—all wrapped neatly in a dystopian shell—and I absolutely checked out. I only read it because it was still on my list and I felt compelled to finish it before I returned it to the library.

I misjudged Legend.

It’s not that those forecast tropes aren’t present. It’s not that the romance pulled me in (it didn’t).

It was the parallels Lu created between her two lead characters that caught me, her own reformulation of (as she put it) Javert and Valjean from Les Miserables. That was the twist I hadn’t expected, the one that convinced me I had to finish the book. That was what I really liked.

Past-Henry could have reminded me that I loved Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Summer Prince, which used the same forecasted tropes. That book blew me away. Maybe then Present-Henry wouldn’t have been so surprised to enjoy Legend.

I must note that Legend is not The Summer Prince. Few books deliver so much beauty, normalized queer representation, and so many deep questions about the role of art and artists in society as The Summer Prince does.

But Legend zeroes in on and plays with two characters who are opposite sides of the same coin, and I had a lot of fun with that. I would certainly recommend it on those grounds. If you also like star-crossed lovers from different social strata, betrayal, intrigue, and murder then this book is definitely for you.

Cosmic, by Frank Cottrell Boyce

Posted on by Henry

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This is not the kind of book that I read when I was a kid. It’s not quite the kind of book that I prefer to read right now. Despite that, I enjoyed it.

In terms of age range, Cosmic is definitely middle grade. I can see why it is called sci fi, but I think that classification is misleading when compared with other middle grade science fiction. With an allowance made for several advancements beyond current technology, this story is fundamentally about our own world—and the few pieces of advanced technology that are present don’t change that.

The writing honestly made me uncomfortable, and didn’t pull me in right away; the story moves slowly, and from the beginning I felt a looming sense of dread due to the effective foreshadowing. I wonder whether readers of the intended age would feel differently. Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, for example, is famously fun for kids and terrifying for adults… perhaps Cosmic is similar?

I don’t mean to say that the book is bad: it’s actually quite good, once you get into it. But it’s slow and meditative, and it took a while to grow on me. Also, when it did finally grow on me, I felt like I was appreciating it very specifically as an adult; that’s quite distinct from how I’ve felt about some other good middle grade sci fi I’ve read recently. Perhaps a reader less invested in the adventure fiction that I loved as a kid would be more interested in Cosmic. Or maybe I’m just not the right kind of kid inside to really enjoy this book.

If you want a meditation on growing up, the arbitrariness of childhood and adulthood, feelings of connection and responsibility, and maybe just a little bit of space, Cosmic is a good book for you. If you want something fast paced and snappy, I suggest you look elsewhere.

Illuminae, by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

Posted on by Henry

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I’ve been reading a lot of Young Adult and Middle Grade sci fi over the past few months. A good deal of it has been a grind, predictable material that didn’t excite me but which I knew I had to finish for due diligence. Not so with Illuminae. This is a book I inhaled. It was fun, tense, well-paced, and knew how and when to stab me in the feels.

If you like sci fi, action/thriller stories, and dramatic feels I strongly recommend it. This is solid YA sci fi.

I also strongly recommend reading it in hard copy. I don’t know whether an ebook would deliver the experimental (and effective) layout and formatting, and I’m certain that an audiobook would lose a lot of the value. It’s like Code Name Verity in that way. There are layers of paratextual content that would disappear without the physical book in front of you, and the design itself is worth appreciating.

Though the book is thick, it isn’t dense. The designers’ formatting and layout choices make excellent use of space and spatial alignment to convey the book’s underlying pretext, as the whole piece is found-text: transcripts of chat logs, audio files, video records, and more. There are a few places where the layout and design get even weirder, and most of those spots worked extremely well for me. I won’t spoil them.

Speaking of spoilers, I have some appreciative thoughts which don’t ruin anything but which might be considered *spoiler-ish* by the sensitive. There was a moment a ways in when I realized that there was no guarantee that things would turn out “well” for the primary subjects of the story. I returned to the first pages, re-read the contextualizing introduction, and confirmed my fears. I read on, heart firmly in throat. I was very impressed. I deeply appreciate any book that manages to make such good use of its underlying context to pull the legs out from under the audience, and Illuminae managed that skillfully. *End spoiler-ish*

I don’t think I need to say any more, honestly. Check out the book. If you like the first page, sit back, read on, and enjoy.