Angelfall is out in paperback

 Book Reviews, Books, Fantastic Authors, The Cybils  9 Responses »
Mar 202012
 

I’ve posted about Angelfall by Susan Ee here, here, and here. It was on the Cybils award short list for Science Fiction/Fantasy Teen category. Everyone was talking about it during the Vegas trip, and everyone I know who has read it has come away awe struck. It’s just that kind of book.

Angelfall is officially out in paperback! Oh my god, why haven’t you read this book yet?!?

My copy came this week and even though I’ve read the book several times over, I sat down and started reading it all over again as soon as I opened my Amazon package. God, it’s such a great book. I’ve never felt this strongly about championing a book before and I hope if you’ve got .99 cents to spare on an e-book or $12.99 on a paperback, you’ll give it a shot.

According to Susan’s blog, Angelfall hit #41 on the Kindle bestselling list and #1 in Fantasy and #2 in Science Fiction/Fantasy! CONGRATS SUSAN!

So if you’ve missed my descriptions of this book before, here’s the official synopsis:

via GoodReads – It’s been six weeks since angels of the apocalypse descended to demolish the modern world. Street gangs rule the day while fear and superstition rule the night. When warrior angels fly away with a helpless little girl, her seventeen-year-old sister Penryn will do anything to get her back.

Anything, including making a deal with an enemy angel.

Raffe is a warrior who lies broken and wingless on the street. After eons of fighting his own battles, he finds himself being rescued from a desperate situation by a half-starved teenage girl.

Traveling through a dark and twisted Northern California, they have only each other to rely on for survival. Together, they journey toward the angels’ stronghold in San Francisco where she’ll risk everything to rescue her sister and he’ll put himself at the mercy of his greatest enemies for the chance to be made whole again.

And here are a few excerpts from my review of the book:

The reason it is young adult is because of the character Penryn, the trials she faces, the growth she undergoes, the themes surrounding her character, and the classic transition from teenager to adult that the book moves toward. In the beginning she might seem like she has it together, more so than any of the adults that surround her, but she’s still just a kid, confused and alone and needy. She might not know how to express this, but her journey alone with a predator – her enemy – makes her come to terms with her childish ways. Forces her to grow into a new woman. She might have survived in the beginning, but by the end she has the strength and knowledge and experience to thrive. In the beginning she still clings to mother and family, but by the end they fulfill her without being a crutch. These themes make this book absolutely young adult.

Unlike your typical paranormal stories, this one doesn’t have the big romance pay off most will be expecting from a young girl and a hot angel wandering the wilderness together. These two characters are enemies. He calls humans monkeys and she is willing to torture him for his help getting her sister back. These are not emotions that generally lead to long gazes across rooms and soft kisses in the moonlight. Their partnership is tenuous, based on need and survival and that makes the few moments of compassion and the threat of intimacy more genuine and valuable. There’s no romance in Angelfall. One doesn’t do romance while running for one’s life from monsters – both the human and paranormal kind. One doesn’t do romance when one is starving and exhausted and afraid.

Instead there is something like hunger and something like need. Something indescribable, thrilling. Frightening.

 

TOTALLY unrelated, but I just read a NYT article about The Hunger Games movie (is it appropriate for teens? Kids killing kids? WUT??) that called John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars a dystopian themed book. HAHAHAHAHAHA.

I would really really like this weird trend of calling everything a dystopian to stop now please. Do you even know what that word means, NYT?? The Fault in Our Stars is no more dystopian than a Janet Evanovich book. Who told you it was dystopian because you clearly didn’t read it.

Outstanding Kindness

 My Life in Action, Things Worth Sharing  7 Responses »
Mar 192012
 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/50230758@N03/4659823808

While in Vegas I learned a thing or two about the nature of human compassion and their shocking capacity for rottenness. It’s not surprising in a city full of extremes, lauding visitors to act out their wild side with abandon, that you meet people at their very worst.

I witnessed two domestic disturbances my first night. They weren’t of the “Quick! Call the police!” variety, but they weren’t cuddly either. A couple got locked out of their room and I discovered the girl on the floor in the hallway crying and the boyfriend screaming at her. The second one happened at 2am where a couple got into a screaming match in the hallway. It is amazing the things we can bring ourselves to say to the people we love when there’s nothing but alcohol between us.

On the second day, a boy and his girlfriend got on the elevator with me and another tourist. The boy was smoking and making crude remarks. When his girlfriend said he couldn’t smoke on the elevator, he said we didn’t mind. When I said I did mind, that I couldn’t breathe, he stared at me, slack jawed, like I was the crazy one. He stopped joking and laughing but he didn’t stop smoking.

These are not villains. I say this because I spend 80% of my free time working on my superhero story and so a lot of my thoughts circle endlessly around the topic of true villainy – how bad can a character be before we can no longer be sympathetic toward them, before we call for their heads, and before they seem completely phony and over-the-top. These people, the boyfriend berating his girlfriend for ruining his life, the wife who informed everyone on the 10th floor that her husband was bad in bed, the smoker with no regard for civility and grace – they weren’t villains. They were terrible, selfish, and unnecessarily cruel, but they weren’t muahahaha villains.

Which brings me to an uncomfortable realization:  Villains have a purpose, usually to gain something they want and cannot otherwise get access to, and with very few exceptions (like the Joker) they have a set plan to do X in order to gain Y and then they are done. Example: Take the CEO’s son hostage (X) in order to gain blueprints for a space station his company is building (Y).

What I saw was cruelty for cruelty’s sake. Their plan was to cause emotional harm (X) in order to gain dominance over another (Y).

Maybe I’m naive, but doesn’t that seem so much worse? Which begs the question, is it the place (What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!) and these people are otherwise great and kind, or was the behavior normal? If it’s the place, what in us draws us to a place that allows us to drop our usual civility and become monstrous? Why would we desire that kind of outlet and do we cage the monster inside of us when we are within more culturally normative environments? And if the people are normally this abusive and cruel, what is it about a Vegas hotel that makes them take their personal brand of crazy into a public hallway?

But, as Penryn said to Raffe in Angelfall, “Sometimes, as we’re stumbling along in the dark, we hit something good.”

So, gross fact – on the last day of our trip, the high fat, high calorie foods finally got to me and I ended physically sick several times in several public bathrooms throughout the day. Super fun and not at all humiliating. Most of the time people came into the bathroom and then ran out as soon as possible.

But at one point, at my absolute sickest, a woman came to my stall, knocked on my door, and asked me if there was anything she could do for me. She asked if I was ok, if I needed water or a towel. If she should wait with me or give me some privacy. She had the voice of a nurse and it was incredibly comforting. I will forever remember her kindness at such an awkward place in my life.

I met a woman on an elevator who had an awesome ring on her finger. All sparkly and fairy tale-like. She was older and when I commented on her lovely ring, she gushed that it was her 10 year wedding anniversary and her husband had bought it for her. They were at the hotel celebrating and with the biggest smile ever told me she was the happiest she’d ever been in her whole life. I ran into her several times during the week and each time she remembered me and waved. We, two strangers, bonded over romance and it was awesome.

So here’s what I’m taking away from this experience that I am going to share with you –

 

Treat people with outstanding kindness.

 

No matter where you are or what you are doing, even for 15 seconds in an elevator, you can inspire happiness in a person who otherwise would have felt nothing. You are not an island unto yourself. You’re the butterfly effect. You present a stranger with outstanding kindness for a single moment in time and they walk away lightened of the burden of self-doubt. They carry that lightness to their children, their spouse, or the next stranger they come in contact with. A spiderweb of dominos.

Outstanding kindness is contagious and virulent. It doesn’t take much. I was on the elevator and the door was closing and a woman called “Wait!” and made a dash to grab the door. I was quick enough to stick my arm in the doorway and hold it for her. She looked at me and said, “I’ve been here for four days and you are the first person to hold an elevator for me.” Incredible.

We spent less than six seconds together. The same amount of time the elevator smoker and I had together.

 

 

Friday Ephemera, 3/15/12 Edition

 Friday Ephemera  6 Responses »
Mar 162012
 

 

Writing

 

Blogging

 

Publishing

 

Miscellaneous And Awesome

An axe to the face? HELL YEAH BRING IT ON.

 

National Atomic Testing Museum

 Research, Things Worth Sharing  12 Responses »
Mar 152012
 

Speaking of the end of the world stories, one of the adventures the Vegas team went on was to the National Atomic Testing Museum. We had to take a taxi off strip and along the way we saw countless abandoned hotels and restaurants, all boarded up with smashed windows and overgrown parking lots. Some of the saddest urban decay I’ve ever seen.

The museum was fascinating and creepy in a way I can’t quite articulate. There were displays showing toys, cereal boxes, and comics aimed to desensitize a public about the BOMB. Atompunk owes its genealogy to the marketing masterminds. The cartoons taught kids that the bomb was cool. It makes superheroes and laser guns, after all.

I expected more warnings and, at the very least, tales of caution and regret. Instead, all of the news reels and interviews we watched were ones of hope and prosperity. The aged researchers talked about how sure, there were higher instances of cancer among the workers at the testing sites, but they were protecting their country. They were patriots and I swear their eyes actually shone as they said it. There is nothing like this sort of patriotism left in the world, and to see it in such a weird, stark place was a little unnerving. These men and women stood at the tests sites with goggles on and watched the bombs go off in the desert – watched the mushroom clouds and braced for the shockwaves that eventually passed over them. They weren’t right up on the blast site but geez, they were still in viewing distance. And they weren’t angry about being irradiated regularly. It was part of the job. Something they were proud to be a part of and disappointed with the American government for shutting the testing program down in the 90s. Not just disappointed. Angry.

The tunnels were very Fallout 3 and so were the quirky cartoons teaching us about the power behind the splitting of an atom. The little underground theater gives you an idea of what the viewers watching the explosions would have felt like when the shockwave struck them. We were sitting there watching the movie of the prep of a bomb when the ground started shaking and a mega blast of air walloped us. I almost peed my pants. How did anyone sit through one of those on purpose and not been scared to holy hell?

They built houses, furnished them, and set manikins up like normal people. The manikins wore J.C. Penny clothes, who, by the way, aided in the war effort but publishing the damage the blasts did to the clothes. The government sold kits with medications for your shelters which they also gave out plans for.

There was something frighteningly wholesome about the way the government marketed bomb preparation to families.

 

 

 

The Social Canary

 Books, Topics in Writing  13 Responses »
Mar 142012
 

On the plane to and from Vegas I finished a book called PARTIALS by Dan Wells.

It was a very good book, but I realized something interesting while I was reading it. I now understand why teenagers (and adults) are so obsessed with the hot dystopian/post-apocalyptic books hitting the shelves lately.

In PARTIALS, a genetics company created a bio-synthetic form of a human being – a partial – that aside from being tank born, are in every way human. But better. They are faster, stronger, have more endurance, and in many ways are strategically smarter than their womb-born counterparts. They were originally created for the front lines of a massive and bloody war the US was engaged in with China. The partials helped us win the war, but after it was over there was nothing left to do with these not-humans. They were given crappy jobs in factories and mines. These creations – these beings that were, for all intents and purposes BETTER humans – had the worst possible future. So, of course, they rebelled.

The story of a synthetic being rebelling against their organic creators has been done and done and done again. We are so freaking terrified that our computers are going to become self-aware and why not? So much of our science is poured into making a better computer. Of course we fear the things that are better than us.

During the rebellion a virus was released on human beings that wiped out 99.9% of them. Only a small number of people survived, something in the 100,000s and they were driven to Long Island by the partials and left there. They formed a new government and a new way of life and put down defense roots around the island in case the partials returned. They didn’t. The book begins 11 years later when 16 year old medic-in-training Kira watches a girl giving birth to a baby about to die from the virus because no babies have been born since the virus’s release and survived. The youngest human is 14 years old and even though the partials didn’t wipe us out, we are looking at the end of days for humanity.

In response, the human government has instituted the Hope Act requiring all girls 18 years old and older must get and remain pregnant as often as possible. Some humans rebel, but most acquiesce because the Hope Act is trying to out-statistic the virus. At some point, some baby is going to be born immune and so the more babies they have the better their chances of survival. Of course this also means all girls are relegated to baby making machines for the rest of their lives. When rumors that the Hope Act will be altered to 16 year old girls, something has to change.

PARTIALS is not the first book to deal with the rights of girls to choose how and when they have sex. XVI by Julie Karr, Bumped by Megan McCafferty, Wither by Lauren Distefano to name a few. Why so much obsession with the sexual rights of girls?

Just before I left for Vegas, women’s reproductive rights were all over the news. A panel of men were judging whether or not employers could decide not to allow insurance coverage to women for contraception on moral grounds. A law student was barred from speaking on behalf of women needing contraception for non-pregnancy related issues. Female state representatives were fighting against all these bills being passed requiring women seeking an abortion to jump through all kinds of crazy hoops. With all this attention being put to women’s reproductive rights, women were asking why it was so easy for men to get Viagra and vasectomies paid for by health insurance companies but everyone had an opinion on what women should be doing in the bedroom. Then Rush Limbaugh opened his big ugly mouth and dumbed down her whole message into a statement that she wanted to go have so much sex that she needed someone to pay for her contraception and that made her a slut. Horrifying.

So why are YA dystopian and post-apocalyptic books so concerned with controlling woman’s sexuality? Because the rest of the world is so concerned with it. And it’s freaking everyone the hell out.

YA books are like the canary in the mineshaft of social issues. If it’s scaring teens enough that they want to read about how these issues can be beaten by a hero/heroine just like them, you can bet they are worried about how these issues are going to affect them in the real world.