In My Mailbox (3)

In My Maibox (or IMM) is a weekly meme hosted by Kristi at The Story Siren. It enables bloggers to mention the books they have acquired during the week. Read more about it HERE.

This week I received three digital ARC copies from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing through netgalley.com. Thank you to the publishers!

Digital ARC:

• Lost Voices, by Sarah Porter (coming out July 2011)
  
• The Betrayal of Maggie Blair, by Elizabeth Laird (coming out April 2011)
• Always a Witch (Witch #2), by Carolyn MacCullough (coming out August 2011)

(look at these covers! It's all about blue this week)

Quick Review: The Mysterious Howling, by Maryrose Wood

The Mysterious Howling, the first book in The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series is a fun little book, a delightful mix of Jane Eyre, Mary Poppins and Lemony Snicket.

Penelope Lemley, 15 years old and recent graduate of the Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females, has been assigned to Ashton Place, a grand house in the countryside, where she is to take care of three children as their governess. These siblings, two boys and one girl, are not in fact ordinary children. Found in the woods by Lord Ashton, they were, it seems, raised by wolves. Named Alexander, Beowulf and Casseopeia they hardly know a word of English, like to walk on all fours, howl as loud as they can, and get really excited if any squirrels come near them. Miss Lumley, aid by her knowledge and love of animals, set immmediately to teach them all she can. Until the Mistress of the house announces that the children shoul be ready to be presented at the grand Christmas party she is organizing, and Penelope fears that catastrophe will ensue.

The book is a quick and engaging read. Told by an omniscient narrator that talks directly to the reader, it recalls the work of Lemony Snicket, although less dark and more light-hearted. Penelope is an engaging character in all of her love of poetry, animals and good manners. Strong-willed and quite inventive she quickly gains the children to her side. The children themselves become fast likable and sweet, with all their howling, special language and love of storytelling. I especially like certain scenes during the Christmas party, that made me laugh. There seem to be more than one mystery surrounding Ashton Place, the children and Penelope herself that are only hinted at in this first book. There is also several commentaries on writing, social manners and expectation versus reality. I will definitely read the sequel, coming out next week on March 1st calle The Hidden Gallery.

Review: Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell

I had loved Karen Russell's collection of short stories (published in 2006) called St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, and had been waiting for something new from her since then. You can imagine my joy when I learned that she had a novel coming out this February (finally!) based on one of the stories in her collection called "Ava Wrestles the Alligator".  I must admit that I was a bit dissapointed because would have prefered she had based her novel on the title story of her collection, as it was my favourite. Nevertheless, the world of "Ava Wrestles the Alligator" seemed to hold much promises with its swampy Florida setting, alligator-wrestling family and ghost-dating sister. Ava sounded like a young little heroine that I would be glad to know more about and learned to love.

Swamplandia! tells the story of an alligator-wrestling family, the Bigtrees, living in a swamp on an island by teh coast of Florida. It follows the decline of their park as suddenly things start to fall apart and the world that they know does not make sense anymore. It especially focuses on the three children: Kiwi, Ossie and Ava. Kiwi, the oldest, decides to leave for the mainland. Bright and sharp, he dreams of one day going to university, but first he must learn to navigate the world he was never a part of, learn to fit in. Angry at his father he also has to figure out what he wants and what he loves and how to keep these things to drift apart in opposite directions. Ossie deals with loss and change much differently. Having read a book on spiritualism, she starts casting spells and communicating with ghosts, leaving on "dates" during the night, meeting boyfriends. As the days pass, she finds herself more and more involve with her ghostly boyfriend, until the day she decides to elope to the underworld. Ava is the alligator-wrestler of the three siblings, and the narrator. She holds fast to the knowledge passed down to her by her mother. She finds herself flundering, grasping at the remains of what her life used to be, dreaming of restoring the glory of their park Swamplandia!, hoping that things could be normal again, but knowing that they seem to be irrevocably changed. Until the dreadful day where her sister leaves, and she decides to go after her, to rescue her from the underworld and the ghosts that haunts her.

I liked Swamplandia! a lot. Karen Russell's prose is amazing, full of details and imageries that made the world of the novel sharp in its clarity. I thought it was a bit too long, though. I felt that, in parts, it was heavy and harder to get through. Like dredging through the swamps the characters inhabit.
I was also a bit dissapointed in the way it was told. One of the thing I had loved about Karen Russell's stories was that they had an aura of mystery. A dreamy-like substance, that even in the most banal and reality-bound passages, made the edges of the worlds they depicted blurry and enchanting. They let you sometimes unsure if things were dreams or reality or a mix of both. On the other hand, Swamplandia!, maybe because of its lenght, is stark, and real. Too real sometimes. It is full of pain and loss and hope and strenght, but it somehow never gave me that feeling of otherworldliness that I was expecting. In fact, it sometimes grabbed me by the throat with its clear edges and sharpness. Not to say it is a bad thing, on the contrary it was often so so beautiful, not just what I was expecting.

Kiwi was my favourite character. This seventeen years old boy, caught between being a boy and a man, between the life he wanted on the mainland and the life and people he loved he had left behind. A boy who learns new words everyday, but never really pronunces them correctly, who builds bridges made of pastas to accompany a three paragraphs essay homework. And also Ava, brave, strong, little Ava, who did wrestle an alligator, but not the kind I, or she, was expecting. I think this story will stay with me for a while, even if I was dissapointed and it was a bit too long and too sharp. There was a truth there that appealed to me even then.

Monday 10: Of Young Adult Dystopia

Monday 10 is a weekly post where I share a list of 10 bookish items based on a theme, subject, idea, fancy, etc.
Every reader and blogger is also invited to participate and make their own list. It doesn't have to have the same theme, it just needs to pertain to books!
If you do make your own list and post it to your blog, share the link in the comments. Or if you prefer write your own list in the comments!
Note: I put 3 asterisks beside the titles I have read and recommnend. Ihave not read all of the books I put in these lists, so be sure to check them all out!

Having just written the review for Bithmarked, I thought I would share other YA distopian books.

* 10 YA dystopian books or series (part 1) *

• The Hunger Games series, by Suzanne Collins ***
• The Uglies series, by Scott Westerfeld
• The Giver, by Lois Lowry ***
• Unwind, by Neal Shusterman
• The Books of Ember series, by Jeanne DuPrau
• The Maze Runner, by James Dashner
• The Choas Walking series, by Patrick Ness
• Incaceron, by Catherine Fisher ***
• Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi
• Inside Out, by Maria V. Snyder

Happy Monday!

Review: Bithmarked, by Caragh M. O'Brien

I quite enjoy the afflux of distopian novels in young adult literature that has been happening these past few years and I've been trying to read as many as I can, or at least read about such novels, as there is something quite fascinating in the high interest and growing following these books garner within the teen community (as well as others, like me, who enjoy young adult literature). The first book I read in 2011 was such book: Birthmarked, by Caragh M. O'Brien.

Far in the furture, after extreme climate changes, society is now divided between those who live inside the wall, a rich, abundant and luxuriant city, and those who live outside the wall, like our heroine Gaia Stone, poor, often malnourish but hard working people. Gaia is a sixteen years old midwife, who has learned everything she knows from her mother. Every month she needs to "advanced" a quota of babies, to be taken into the Enclave (inside the wall) to be raised there by new parents. Things go well for Gaia, until one night where she witnesses the agonizing pain of a mother who refuses to let go of her baby, and where her parents are taken prisoners into the Enclave. Now alone, Gaia is determined to find her parents, and in the process is herself arrested and imprisoned. Gaia is then faced with difficult moral choices, and the even more difficult task of unraveling the layers of secrets of this cruel, well-organized society she inhabits.

The world of Bithmarked, with, at its core, problems and issues of fertility and genetics can easily remind the reader of such book as The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood or Children of Men, by P. D. James, but it also has its own  mythology, its own flavor that makes it different. Gaia, who was badly scarred on one side of her face in her childhood, is a strong-willed and stubborn heroine. She does not hesitate to take risks for what she thinks is the right things to do, no matter the consequences. She has complete faith in her ideals. Her scars prevents her from ever being "advanced", from being able to one day live in the Enclave, so she is totally devoted to her life and her people outside the wall, but even more to her work as a midwife. These scars also afford her a certain vulnerability, of feeling ugly or undesirable that teenage girls, especially, are able to identify with. Nevertheless, I feel it was never taken too far as to be self-pity or over dramatized. Gaia has also learned to live with these scars.

There is a love story in this book, as it seems is de rigueur for any YA book these days, and I must admit I am quite picky about those. I am very difficult to please in this matter, and more often than not, romantic relationships in YA novels make me want to roll my eyes, if not abandon a book althogether. I was then, pleasantly surprised to not have been bothered by the romance in Bithmarked so much. I even quite enjoyed it in parts. While I felt that the male character was interested in Gaia a bit too fast, and maybe a bit too conveniently as it was quite pivotal for the story later on, and that the romance teetered on overtaking the third part of the novel, it never quite did so. More importantly, it never took over Gaia. Too often in YA novels, our strong-willed, determined and independent heroines get taken over by the romance (or by quite creepy male love interests) and loose all of their interesting flavor. Not so in this book. I always felt that Gaia knew what she had to do and kept her eyes and mind focused on her goals even as her heart might have wanted to lead her astray. Her love interest also had a position of power over her, but she never quite let him overpower her as well, which made me want to cheer her on. So while some things bothered me about this aspect of the novel, I was quite pleased in how Caragh M. O'Brien handled this stapled of YA plot and storytelling.

Bithmarked was a quick read, often exciting and riveting to me, a great way to start the year. I am looking forward to its sequel Prized due out in November of this year.