Be Inspired to Write: Dystopian

 Dystopian, NaNoWriMo 2011, Post-Apocalyptic, Story Inspiration, Videos  3 Responses »
Nov 092011
 

 

OMG I just realized I’m 8 away from 300 followers! *does a little dance* I honestly never thought I’d get this many, but I think I am in love with each and every single one of you. Thank you for letting me do this blog thing that I love so much. I also can’t wait until November is over, not because I don’t love NaNoWriMo, because I do, but I also love your comments, which I’m not getting very much these days. I miss you all. How are your NaNo word counts?

 

 

Doomsday by AndreeWallin

 Reckoning Day by Philipstraub

 

 


Today’s Word Count Goal: 15,003

 

Are you participating in NaNoWriMo? Sign up on the linky so that I (and others) can come cheer you on throughout the month!

The state of the genre in 5 -4 -3 -2 -1-

 Dystopian, Post-Apocalyptic, Topics in Writing  9 Responses »
Sep 022011
 

A Rooted Culture

Dystopia: a world where things are as bad as they can be, often characterized by human misery and oppression.

Most people don’t go happily into the arms of oppression and misery. Our world has a long standing history of toppling empires and evil tyrants who try to pull that crap. To get to a dystopian world, you have to go through a lot of time, apathy, and despair. Big despair.

Despair that goes right down to the marrow of the world.

After a few generations of despair, you can’t take an ingrained ideal, a culture, a way of life, and change it over night. You can’t even convince a person that their way is wrong when it is the only way they’ve ever known. After a lifetime of being treated like they have no choice, like they can’t make their life better or they don’t deserve to have a better life in the first place, it’s not at all surprising when they don’t rise to action.

The Progression of Tension

 Dystopians and post-apocalyptic stories are a singularly special beast. Most stories start out alright, there’s a rise in dramatic tension, some major crisis, life gets bad, bad, very bad, and then climax and the aftermath brings the characters back to a place a little better than where they started. Not so for dystopians and post-apocalyptics. These stories start out nightmarish and then get worse.

It’s not so surprising that the plot of the dystopian novel very rarely revolves around fixing the thing that makes it dystopian in the first place.

The Problem of Happily Ever Apocalyptic After

Here’s a question for you, “Should dystopian novels have happy endings?”

When it comes to dystopians, are happy endings relative?

Is it satisfying for a post-apocalyptic world to be tied up in a neat little fluffy bow at the end of the story?

Can an ending that is not particularly happy still be the perfect ending?

Can a dystopian book still be a dystopian book if everything is all better in the end?

You can’t bring down the big bad government or wander the empty wasteland of Midwestern America in search of a home or do battle with a water-controlling corporation and tomorrow everything will be good again. The Very Bad Things are usually a symptom of the disease, the rotting core of society. The totalitarian government is able to exert control because the people are starving, there’s no electricity, no free communication, no water, no work, no money, no medicine, no identity, no dignity.

Do you all remember what the real world actually looked like in The Matrix? Even with the villain gone, there’s still a dystopian world to face. If the people of the world have been behaving lawlessly for generations, with the villain gone they won’t suddenly go, “Man, I need to settle down. Maybe buy a suit, get a job.”

It’s the problem of dystopian endings. At the end of the day, just after the words “The End,” the characters still have this messed up world with no water and not enough food and thugs, cannibals, zombies, and robots on every corner. Even if everyone is safe and loved at the end of the story, there’s still the tedium of tomorrow to face.

The Great Dystopian Romance

I’m uncomfortable with the trend in dystopian books to be thinly veiled romances and no so much with the grim and the desperate. Don’t get me wrong, I love me a good romance. I mean, I’m not sure what I’m more excited about for the release of Bioware’s Mass Effect 3 – the chance to finally crush some aliens under my cute black boots or that I’ll finally be reunited with my love interest from the first game.

But I like my dystopians to be rough and mean and dangerous and hard and I like my characters, especially my strong girls, to stay focused and not get derailed for some make-outs just before the climax. There’s certainly nothing like danger to make a romance steamier, but when the world’s ending ladies, priorities!

Dystopian Cities (of the post-apocalyptic kind) are Death Traps

That’s the title of a blog post I wrote earlier this year over at Urban Psychopomp. Here’s an excerpt, read the whole thing here.

Or rather I should say when real cities stop functioning they become deathtraps, even if you aren’t writing a dystopian novel. See, cities are brilliantly designed to house lots of people in a very small space comfortably and safely. This has only been possible in the modern age because our engineers figured out ways to bring electricity and water in while flushing waste out. As long as everything is functioning, the system keeps us from swimming in filth and dodging disease, massive city eating fires, and squalor. And most people, from my experience, would very much like to avoid living in squalor.

Here’s the thing –we can live without electricity. We’d be miserable, but we can do it just fine. We can live without gas and we can live without waste removal.

What we can’t live without is water.

Depending on the temperature around you, the human body can only survive for as little as 2 days without water…. You can hope for ten days if it is very cold, but at those temperatures you have other things to worry about than running out of water.

So if a city has been destroyed and the world plunged into a dystopian landscape, where are people going to get their water? Cities are generally wall to wall concrete. There aren’t lakes in the middle of downtown Chicago. Once the standing water locations have been bled dry and all the bottled water ransacked from grocery stories, where will people go for water?

Who controls the water will ultimately always be a force to reckon with in dystopian fiction and this alone can provide an endless supply of conflicts for the writer. Will deals be struck? Will the water boss be neutral, good, or evil? What will it cost society for a glass of water and what will the characters do if they are cut off?

Water isn’t as sexy as zombie hordes or evil governments, but it can’t be ignored in survival fiction. It is the very essence of life, and two days of sitting still in the shade trying not to dehydrate is not a very exciting way for a character to die.

When faced with dehydration, what will your characters be willing to pay for one more glass of water ?

Dystopian Blogs
Dystopian Author Blogs
Advice for Dystopian Writers
Great Dystopian Reads

Dystopians Coming Soon

 

 

What upcoming dystopian releases are you most excited for?

 

The Venn Diagrams of Speculative Fiction

 Dystopian, Topics in Writing  14 Responses »
Sep 012011
 

 

Science fiction. Dystopian. Post-Apocalyptic. Rarely do genres have such identity issues as these, all of which are sort of synecdoche of speculative fiction. And because it’s fun to make writers crazy, these terms are constantly being swapped for one another. I know I’m guilty of it. But let’s be clear – these genres are completely separate. The confusion comes because there is overlap.

Also, before we get into the disagreements – this is a fun post. There is so much crisscrossing over settings it’s sometimes completely up to the eye of the grim beholder. I think there are some good ideas here, but there’s room for shuffling things around too. Also the debate on whether something can be post-apocalyptic and not dystopian still rages on! What do you think? Is there much of a difference?

So I present to you, the Venn Diagram of spec-fic.

  1. Science fiction features technology beyond what we have today, and generally speaking, the technology is common and embedded into the society – it isn’t reserved just for the Batmans of the world.
  2. Dystopia is society characterized by human misery and oppression – an “as bad as it could be” society. What’s important to note, however, is that dystopians still have some recognizable society. It’s not scavengers in the wasteland, contrary to popular belief. Characters still know their place in the world, it’s just usually not any place anyone would want to be.
  3. Post-apocalyptics are characterized by an event that decimated society as a whole. There is usually a general lack of overall society, an every man for himself paradigm. There might be small scale dystopian communities within the post-apocalyptic world, but it lacks a governing structure as a whole.
Purely Dystopian
  • The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  • Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
  • XVI by Julia Karr

A purely dystopian setting is one that looks just like our regular world, no fancy technology, no big society changing event. The thing that makes it dystopian was usually cultural in nature and so there was no fighting back against it because it takes an entire society to make a cultural change – so it would have been welcomed. Maybe the change happened as a result of some other decision.

Purely Science Fiction
  • Star Trek

Traditional science fiction is characterized by a big, recognizable jump in technology/science from what we have today. But, for whatever reason, society managed to continue progressing in socially and politically acceptable ways. There are probably still poor, hungry, miserable people, but as a society we’re doing ok.

Purely Post-Apocalyptic
  • The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  • The Book of Eli
  • Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O’Brien
  • Jericho
  • The Walking Dead

Purely post-apocalyptic settings will be the absolute end of days. Something very bad has happened and our days on this earth are numbered. There is no society, there is no hope. Humans dehumanize themselves in order to survive, because how can you do what you must if you’ve got to face your own conscious? Survival is the best anyone can hope for.

 Science Fiction/Dystopian

What does a sci-fi/dystopian cross over look like? Pretty good actually, if you’re at the top of the dog pile. These societies are characterized by totalitarian governments or central control divisions like corporations or individual races. Technology and science are outstanding, so for pieces of the community, life is probably pretty luxurious and easy. The technology does not, usually, trickle down to the poor and the working class except as means of control and pieces of every day city life (e.g. flying cars.) Communication and data gathering are two of the big tech businesses in these worlds. Sometimes so is space travel. A large part of the population probably see no human or worker rights, hunger, poverty, abuse, and a severe dehumanization of the Have Nots.

Dystopian/Post-Apocalyptic

Always characterized by an apocalyptic event, the dystopian/post-apocalyptic crossover usually zeroes in on Life After. This could be small communities or big patchwork cities, but it lacks completely the comforts of traditional science fiction. There is, however, a form of society and law, even if it isn’t a very pleasant one (like in Mad Max.) Life in the post-apocalyptic dystopia can be pretty hard, dangerous, and miserable. The governing person/group are usually power hungry, sociopathic, and fanatical.

Science Fiction/Post-Apocolyptic

This crossover also has an establishing apocalyptic event that destroys life as we know it, but society has not completely crumbled, it’s just changed. This crossover often takes place generations after the establishing event, so they’ve moved passed the warring factions of survivors to work as a whole on some fundamental level. The technology is often disjointed, scavenged, and often looks nothing like its original source. Sometimes it’s our technology that caused the apocalypse in the first place.

Science Fiction/Dystopian/Post-Apocalyptic

Like the previous crossover, the establishing apocalyptic event didn’t destroy the world entirely, but it probably decimated the population, destroyed the governing system, and left people wandering and in need of assistance. The apocalyptic event usually teaches the society something about not repeating ones mistakes which establishes the dystopian governing body. And maybe in the beginning the people embraced the ideals of this governing body because they needed the control to provide order, food, work, and protection from a hostile environment and from people who might do worse things to them than their over controlling government. Eventually the governing body gets out of hand and people are dehumanized in a whole new scary way. They may have jumped forward in technology and science to prevent or protect the people from the previous apocalyptic conditions, but they might have just scavenged old technology and pieced it together. Society might still exist, but after enough paranoia, widespread fear, and distrust, you wouldn’t want to live there.

 

Clear as mud? Do you have a favorite setting?

 

Why we need it – New Dystopian for Dystopian Fatigue

 Book Reviews, Books, Dystopian  14 Responses »
Aug 312011
 

New Dystopian

Don’t worry, you’ve never heard of this term before because I just made it up about 10 seconds ago, but I think this is a glimpse of the future of dystopian/apocalyptic sub-genres. Just remember you heard it here on Tell Great Stories first. Someone write it down so one day I’ll be listed as the coiner of the term on the Wikipedia page.

Just kidding.

Sort of.

Anyway, for about the past year, the YA-verse has been suffering from dystopia fatigue (not entirely unlike vampire fatigue, paranormal romance fatigue, trilogy fatigue, and love triangle fatigue.)

Contrary to popular opinion, the fatigue is NOT because the books being published in these sub-genres are bad. It’s because they aren’t unique. Sure, they might take place in different countries, in different cities, with a different twist, but it always plays out more or less the same.

The Story We All Know

Protagonist is oppressed by something bigger than themselves (a corporation, a government, water shortage, oil shortage, disease, zombies, poverty, hunger, whatever.)

The protag is given an extraordinary opportunity that allows them to catch a glimpse of who they really are or could be and a world that needs someone to fight. The Extraordinary Opportunity is better known by writers as The First Plot Point and is often thrust upon the protag unwillingly. Once the protag’s eyes are opened, of course, there’s no going back.

Through is the only direction, and so the protag spends the next 50,000 words fighting against themselves and against the oppressor in order to come out triumphant (or nearly so) at the end with a hot love interest by their side. Ta-da.

Which means, of course, there are no surprises.

And as readers, we are just a little bit tired of reading the same thing. We love these settings, these scenarios, these terrible events, but we yearn to be taken by surprise, to feel like the characters are in mortal danger, to believe there are serious stakes and regardless of our passion, we may not triumph.

Why We Need It

New Dystopian is a term I cooked up because I needed a new piece of language to describe a book I recently read that is dystopian but does not, in any way, look like the dystopian we’ve seen in the last five years

It feels different.

 

It disturbs.

 

It takes us by surprise.

 

There are stakes so high that success is doubtful.

 

And we’re not sure there will be a happy ending.

 

In fact, if I hadn’t told you this book was a dystopian, you wouldn’t have known until more than halfway through the book. Because it doesn’t flash its “Dystopian” tramp stamp at everyone. It’s subtle, more like, a way of life and not a defining characteristic.

And I have a feeling that the fatigue we’ve been feeling lately is going to lead to these sorts of books that are dystopian but aren’t so in your face about it. There won’t be cities burning or roving gangs of thugs in the wastelands. Government control won’t be so in-your-face. Dystopian conspiracy theorists will hang out at coffee shops with alien conspiracy theorists.

Never Let Me Go

The book I’ve been slowly building up to was also made into a movie, so if you’ve seen the movie but not read the book, I beg you not to give anything away in comments, as there are some key differences.

The book? Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

And the thing is, I can’t really tell you much about the book because in giving anything away I’d ruin the unfolding and trust me when I tell you, you don’t want me to do that. So I’m going to have to be a little backward about describing the book to you.

Ok, so, the book is told through the recounting of a girl named Kathy H. who grew up at a boarding school called Hailsham somewhere in England. When the book begins she’s a little older, around 31, and we know there is an important reason she’s about to tell us her story, but we’re not sure what the important reason is until like, 75% of the way through the book. And that’s ok. That’s part of the beauty of this book. It’s all in the unfolding.

So Kathy starts out when she was  middle school aged, but she often jumps around, going much younger and much older in her stories. There’s a certain rhythm of memory that you can’t fake here – I feel honest-to-god like we’re sitting at the knees of a new friend telling us her life story and one memory reminds her of something else that happened ten years later or in telling a remembered moment she suddenly understands it so much differently than she did back then. The unfolding story is as much a revelation to her as it is to us.

Kathy’s world is intersected by two friends – Tommy, the boy she loves, and Ruth, her bossy daydreaming best friend. They are interesting in their own right, but let me say this: Pay Very Close Attention to Tommy. I believe that a deeper understanding of the story can be seen through Tommy’s character. He is maybe the only character who’s mind is filled with screams against what is being done to him.

The students of Hailsham are special. How are they special? Well. That would be telling.

But here’s the thing- it doesn’t matter why they are special. Their specialness does not stop them from having normal childhoods full of drama and heartache and manipulation. Their childhoods are not all that different from the one I wrote about in my glittery unicorn diaries. It’s about favorite teachers and sports, doing well, acceptance and bullies. There’s this story Kathy tells about how her friend Ruth, when they were very young, told a small group of them that there was a conspiracy to kidnap their favorite teacher and that Ruth had been charged with protecting this teacher. She tells them she’s forming a private guard and they are to silently, without this teacher ever knowing, protect her and root out the conspirators. These little girls take on this duty with the perseverance and dedication that only little girls can muster.

Do you know you’re in a dystopian story when you’re living it?

Let me ask you this – If we were living in a dystopian society right now, where the government controlled us entirely and we were housed in gated communities were unapproved books were burned and people imprisoned for the smallest of infractions, would you walk around thinking to yourself, “Man this is one hell of a dystopian society.”

Probably not.  You’d probably think, “Man, this life is hell.”

You probably wouldn’t spend most of your time dissecting the goings on of the government. You’d be too busy keeping your head down and food in your mouth. Most of the dystopian books coming out lately can’t stop pointing out their genre to you, but not Never Let Me Go (which, granted, came out in 2005, so it’s not new new.) This is what I mean by New Dystopian. It’s not a genre for this book, it’s just the way life is.

Which is why the ending, though you can kind of see it coming, slams into you like a freight train.

I can’t recommend this book enough, though for all that is holy in this world please do not go watch the trailer for the movie. Don’t go anywhere near the movie until you’ve read the book. The movie is lovely and captures the heart of the story sure, but it also lacks the subtle  nuances of the book that make it such an intense and life changing read. The trailer alone will give away the twist (ARGH! HULK SMASH) and flashes HI I’M AN OPPRESSIVE DYSTOPIAN all over the screen.

So just avoid it until you’ve read the book first.

If you’ve read the book or if you don’t mind spoilers, author Margaret Atwood digs into the heart of this creepy tale in this book review.

This book is for anyone who has ever loved the following books but the idea of reading yet another dystopian book/trilogy fills you with a sort of exhaustion that makes you think, “I can’t be bothered.”

  • Delirium
  • XVI
  • The Hunger Games
  • Wither
  • Divergent
  • The Water Wars
  • Matched
  • Restoring Harmony

 Where do you want to see Dystopian fiction go next?

The Problem of Free Will, Free Choice

 Dystopian  22 Responses »
Aug 302011
 

It always comes down to free will and free choice. Sometimes it comes by way of art or choosing who you get to love, or what music you get to listen to or books you get to read, but it always comes back to the right to choose our own path.

There is nothing worth losing our freedom of choice for and it is always worth fighting for our right to be who we want to be.

Not a Black and White Issue

Most stories always make this a very simple black and white issue. A government or villain or alien or corporation has taken away our right to choose our lives and everyone bows under the weight of their tyranny until someone rises up and fights back, winning the freedom of the people.

And I’ve always had a problem with this deep down in my gut. Because this issue is really anything but black and white and our stories deserve the complicated gray areas too.

I’m going to pick on Matched by Ally Condie for a minute because it highlights this problem perfectly. It’s also a pretty good book and I suspect the second book will be superior still. See, in the world of Matched, the government controls everything, but to a utopian end. By using technology and your own personality and reactions throughout your life (which of course is monitored constantly), the government can use a computer algorithm of patterns to pick your perfect match for you, saving you loads of time and effort. You don’t have to get married, but if you want to you’ll be matched to someone who will make you happy in every way. The government creates perfectly nutritionally balanced meals for each person and they are delivered to you pre-made at a designated time every day. You’re matched with the perfect job you excel at. Everyone has a home, food, medical care. Everyone is guaranteed to live to a certain age and then you’ll die a quiet, painless death surrounded by your friends and family. The available forms of entertainment are perfectly calibrated to your desires and what you are good at and what you will enjoy.

In exchange, you give up a degree of free choice. You accept the best the world can offer you and you don’t try things out for yourself. There are some people who fall outside the status quo who are relegated to crappy jobs like making the food for everyone else, but the majority of the population are perfectly, happily, average in every way.

Painfully Gray

Honestly, in the face of so many problems, both personal and global, that sounds pretty good most days. When I hear about youths beating and robbing strangers in giant flash mobs in Philadelphia with a kid as young as 11 arrested for helping to put a man in the hospital with a fractured skull for no better reason because they were bored – I can’t help but think maybe having less choice and more peace wouldn’t be so bad.

And this kind of thought can send people to riot, in and out of fiction. Just saying it out loud and I’ll have the torch and pitchforkers outside my door any minute. It practically makes me a villain.

Would I be able to freely give up books and movies and art except those deemed acceptable by a higher power?

Good god it would break my heart.

But I also think about those youth mobs, the riots in London, the natural disasters in poor places who still haven’t recovered because they have less money and it is easier to forget the suffering of people with less money. I think of New Orleans, Haiti, Mississippi. I think of grownups that kidnap kids and destroy their lives. I think of teenagers who commit suicide because of bullying and harassment. I think about poverty and hunger and I think about some of the kids at my husband’s high school whose parents are in jail, who’ve lived in multiple foster homes, with friends, in cars. I think about the ridiculously high divorce rate and my friends and family who spent $15,000-25,000 on their wedding only to see their marriage crumble less than 3 years later. I think about the obese, the sick, and the uninsured who can’t seek medical treatment because the cost is prohibitive and the poor who can’t eat healthy because it’s cheaper to eat crap food. I think about the wars and the terrorism and the political maneuvering at gun point in places like Darfur.

The Confusion of a Hero

I think about all these things, these many, colorful ways we impose intense suffering upon each other and that breaks my heart too. And I can’t help but wonder – is free choice that leads to all this suffering worth it? Is choosing what books to read and write and what art to enjoy or songs to sing or people to marry worth more than a world without all those other terrible things?

And if the hero or heroine fights to free the people from control so they can live in a world with more free choice but more suffering, what of the people who didn’t want to be “freed?” Is the protagonist still a hero if they just delivered people unwillingly into a world they didn’t want?

 

Is it selfish or heroic?

 

Who decides? The victims or those who agree with the protagonist?

 

And how gorgeous is the fiction where the good and evil sides are kind of confused?

 

That.

 

Because there are no easy answers. And there shouldn’t be.

 

It’s beautiful to be idealistic.

 

And villainous to play devil’s advocate.

 

Especially when both sides kind of have a point.

 

That is why dystopian fiction is so important, so relevant, so universal. Because the only way through the questions is by way of the hardest answers.

 

Why are we still obsessed with Dystopian fiction?

 Dystopian, News, the Good and Bad, Speculative Fiction, Stranger than Fiction  23 Responses »
Aug 292011
 

News from 2011:

Human Alterations and Phenomena
Disasters
Scary Nature
Medicine and Genetic Research
Invention
ROBOTS and Technology
End of the World

 

 

 

Is it starting to make sense now?

 

 

Love is in the air! (Also, zombies)

 Awesome Nerd Things, Zombies!  24 Responses »
Aug 252011
 

Happy Thursday zombie friends!

So, for a while I’ve been kind of, oh, what’s the word I’m looking for…ho-hum? How about boring? Can I meet your boring and raise you an idle and uninspired?

Well I’m getting my groove back and starting Monday I’ll be back to bringing you more College of Blogging posts, more writing posts, more inspiration and maybe just a little bit of awesome. What do you think? You guys all good with that? Next week I’m actually bringing back Hot Dystopian Summer Nights ! I’ll talk dystopian all next week and if you want to read what I covered last year, here’s a list of posts: Hot Dystopian Summer Nights 2010!

But first I must share with you one of the MOST WONDERFUL engagement announcement pictures ever by a lovely, inspiring couple from California. These pictures are spreading like wildfire across the internet, and the reason I am reposting them here is because the photographer has been so cute about them being posted everywhere. Photographer Amanda Rynda said in an interview here, “I can’t say I’m surprised. I think viral activity is part of the zombie nature, right?”

Tell me these are the best engagement photos ever?

Peculiar Children and Peculiar Places

 Book Trailers, Dystopian, Speculative Fiction, Things Worth Sharing, Videos  8 Responses »
Jun 132011
 

Thing 1:

This week I was going to talk about the elements of visual rhetoric and how it plays into things like cover design and blog design and I was going to break it down later in the week into typography and fonts and color and IT WAS ALL VERY INTERESTING and next week I had planned several great guest bloggers to talk about their favorite covers and why they work but scratch all that for now. I’m shifting the whole set of blog posts one week because a lot of things have been happening in my life and the world around me and I felt like I needed to take a week to talk about those things. Some are good. Some are beautiful. Some are tragic. Some are vitriolic and toxic.

Please forgive my schizophrenic blogging. Best laid plans and all that.

Thing 2:

A book was released this week called Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs. Ok, first, BEST TITLE EVER, and second, AWESOME COVER IS AWESOME. I hadn’t heard about it before now, but several people I follow on Twitter posted about the trailer. And I was all like, AWESOME TRAILER IS ALSO AWESOME. And I knew it would be in an Amazon order post haste, but I couldn’t help but feel like I’d heard the author’s name before and there was something naggingly familiar about something in the trailer.

 

 

After an hour, **FLASH**BANG** I realized what it was. I had, a long time ago, favorited a YouTube video BY this author which had nothing at all to do with writing but it was a video I fell in love with. Connection made, and I’m thrilled to get my hands on this book. Oh man, two days is too long. Watch the trailer above and then watch the video by the same man called Talking Pictures, below.


 

Thing 3:

AND THEN the more I thought about Ransom Riggs, the more I realized that he was also the creator of another video I had planned to share with you at a later date because it is a fantastic visual bit of inspiration/research for those of you writing speculative fiction in a dystopian future (or past, that would work too.) So I’ll just go ahead and show that video here as well.

It is called The Accidental Sea and is about a place called The Salton Sea in California. It was an accidental sea created by man when we tried to  alter with the route of a river and somehow, in our great wisdom, screwed it up to pump an entire river into the desert and were unable to fix it for two years. When the giant sea didn’t disappear, we moved in to make money off beach front property. That is, until the idyllic landscape turned to horror, desperation, and ruin.

Want to know what the world will look like when we are gone?

 

January Book Review Round-Up

 Book Covers, Book Reviews  No Responses »
Jan 312011
 

Books I read in January, 2011:

Looking for Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta

About the book:

From Goodreads: For as long as Josephine Alibrandi can remember, it’s just been her, her mom, and her grandmother. Now it’s her final year at a wealthy Catholic high school. The nuns couldn’t be any stricter—but that doesn’t seem to stop all kinds of men from coming into her life.

Caught between the old-world values of her Italian grandmother, the nononsense wisdom of her mom, and the boys who continue to mystify her, Josephine is on the ride of her life. This will be the year she falls in love, the year she discovers the secrets of her family’s past—and the year she sets herself free.

Spoiler-free Review:

Looking for Alibrandi is plagued by a very slow start, but once Josephine Alibrandi and Jacob Coote collide a few chapters in, there was no looking back.

Jacob Coote is a character most writers couldn’t successfully include as a romantic interest for their dorky, awkward female lead. He is wrong in every way. And yet there is something lovely about him. He seems fond of Josephine from afar. He is pushy but also awkward and unsure of how to ask for the things he wants. Their inability to get it together and deal with their differences becomes a microcosm for the conflicts in the rest of the book, particularly in regards to race issues (Josephine is Italian, a problem for native Australians – Jacob is a native Australian) decorum, (Josephine’s mother never married – Jacob is not a proper Italian and his manners are horrible), and money (Josephine is on scholarship because her family is poor  – Jacob is poor but doesn’t pretend to be able to be otherwise.)

Looking for Alibrandi is also about what happens when her biological father finds out she exists and isn’t particularly interested in having a daughter and she’s not sure she even wants a father. And there is a boy who seems to have everything going for him, everything that Josephine wants for her own life, until he does the unspeakable and sets every character in the book into a tail spin.

I loved Jacob and wanted the best for him, which makes the end particularly hard to read. It isn’t exactly satisfying, especially because it is so abrupt, but the story isn’t about Jacob, it is about Josephine, and that story ends having grown and changed beautifully from its awkward beginning. While my favorite relationship was between Josephine and her father, there is a strong and heartbreaking subplot between Josephine and her very Italian grandmother that left me a little heart-bruised in the end.

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The Water Wars by Cameron Stracher

About the book:

From Goodreads: Vera and her brother, Will, live in the shadow of the Great Panic, in a country that has collapsed from environmental catastrophe. Water is hoarded by governments, rivers are dammed, and clouds are sucked from the sky. But then Vera befriends Kai, who seems to have limitless access to fresh water. When Kai suddenly disappears, Vera and Will set off on a dangerous journey in search of him-pursued by pirates, a paramilitary group, and greedy corporations. Timely and eerily familiar, acclaimed author Cameron Stracher makes a stunning YA debut that’s impossible to forget.

Spoiler-free Review:

First, the world of The Water Wars is brilliant, vivid, and scary. The events described in back story fill in as if they could happen, have happened, will absolutely eventually happen. Stracher is thorough and spares no expense to the tactile sensation of living in this parched, burnt out world. I was impressed from page one.

Stracher didn’t just consider the sensation of the world either; he brought in politics and greed, self-sustaining cultures and criminals with well defined and believable agendas.

First, you should know that I honestly enjoyed reading this book. I read it in almost one sitting. My criticism is not one I’ve ever actually given to a book before but here goes: The Water Wars should have been more than one book, at least two, maybe even three. One book was incredibly inadequate, especially when it comes to character development. There is so much going on in the world of The Water Wars that there is never enough time spent on any one moment or one theme or one character to do any of them justice.

The main character, Vera, meets a strange boy named Kai who does not seem to be affected by the water shortage. Very quickly, Vera, her brother Will, and Kai become close friends. Kai has access to fresh water, an impossible expense, and their wonder and obsession with Kai and his water (especially after he tells them he knows of a secret river) is understandable. The relationship that develops between the three children happens so fast that Kai literally has less than a few sentences of dialogue before he is kidnapped and removed from 90% of the story.

Then, because I don’t believe in any deep friendship between them, I have problems with why Vera would decide to risk her and Will’s lives to save Kai from his kidnappers.

When the adventure begins, there are pirates and helicopters and dogs, environmental terrorists, mysterious doctors, exploding dams, child slave camps, evil and corrupt corporations, evil and corrupt governments, and a woman with a mysterious past – but none of these things get even a quarter of the attention they deserve. If this wonderful adventure story had been broken down into at least two books, these great moments could have been plumped to emotionally charged and exciting tales. Instead each situation suffers under too much deus ex machina in order to shuffle them to the next event. The Water Wars is a wonderful story and an exciting premise that got short changed by page count.

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Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

About the book:

From Goodreads:

1922
The story opens with the confession of Wilfred James to the murder of his wife, Arlette, following their move to Hemingford, Nebraska onto land willed to Arlette by her father.
Big Driver
Mystery writer, Tess, has been supplementing her writing income for years by doing speaking engagements with no problems. But following a last-minute invitation to a book club 60 miles away, she takes a shortcut home with dire consequences.
Fair Extension
Harry Streeter, who is suffering from cancer, decides to make a deal with the devil but, as always, there is a price to pay.
A Good Marriage
Darcy Anderson learns more about her husband of over twenty years than she would have liked to know when she stumbles literally upon a box under a worktable in their garage.

Spoiler-Free Review:

There are four stories in Full Dark, No Stars, and each of them more horrible than the last. The books I’ve read by King have always been filled with horror, but none of them have been quite so horrible. These stories have no scary demonic clown or car to blame for what awful things transpire. No, the sick tragedies that unfurl are man made from the darkest places inside. There is a sensation with each story that you are stepping further down a dark staircase and you just don’t want to know what is at the bottom.

The first story is interesting but very long and sometimes slow. It is set just outside my hometown though and my city, in fact, streets in my neighborhood, are named. It was eerie, to say the least. The second story, Big Driver, has one of the hardest to read scenes I’ve ever encountered. I can’t even describe it here to do it justice and I don’t want to accidentally inspire you to read it because I’m not sure you should. The third story is the only one with the vaguest of supernatural influences, and while not as horrific as the other stories, definitely highlights the human condition in all its murky detail. The last story I think I enjoyed the most. It was inspired by the BTK killer and wonders how it might be to be the wife of a man who turns out to be a monster? The story starts slow but ends with an explosion. I recommend reading the afterward too, because King’s insight into his own writing is particularly shiver-worthy.

Is this book good? I don’t know. The writing is fantastic and certainly the stories take you away from the world, it’s just you don’t necessarily want to go to those places. The horrific things that happen to the woman writer in “Big Driver” made my stomach nearly upend. There’s little pleasure to be had reading these stories. Yet they are stories you won’t get anywhere else. You’ll never brush the darkness like this anywhere else. You cannot unsee these stories once you’ve read them. That is sort of the problem.

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