How Feminist Dystopian Fiction Is Channeling Women’s Anger and Anxiety

NYTimes 10/8/18: How Feminist Dystopian Fiction is Channeling Women's Anger and Anxiety by Alexandra Alter

how not to be popular

Confessions of a Teenage Leper by Ashley Little
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction, YA
Review: What happens when the presumptive prom queen finds out she has Hansen's Disease?  You get some really great moral lessons about the difference between being beautiful on the outside and on the inside.  Fortunately, Little inhabits her character so well that the talk of inner beauty goes down smoothly and the focus remains on Abby and her struggle to be healthy and to find a new path for her life.  Abby's voice is so vivid that the pages of the book seem to turn themselves as she goes from mis-diagnosis to mis-diagnosis to treatment to beginning to heal.

For all the cliches about inner beauty, there's a lot packed into this book. Abby has to deal with all the usual high school angst around parties, sex, friends, and her brother.  As a result, she's a very relatable character, neither saint nor sinner, but just a flawed teenager who you can't help rooting for.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

the end of the world

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
Genre: science fiction
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Review: Harry August is a kalachakra, a term which refers to the Buddhist idea of the Wheel of Time. Kalachakras are people who are born again and again into the same life, with full memory of what they have done previously. Harry is born on January 1, 1919, the illegitimate son of a wealthy British landowner. His mother dies in childbirth, and he is adopted by a childless couple living on the estate. So much is the same, over and over again.

Naturally, there is a society of kalachakras, which, while the individual members are only loosely connected, has very strict rules about changing the timeline. After all, when you’re reborn knowing what will happen throughout your lifespan, there’s lots of potential to wreak havoc. The Chronus Club also has mechanisms for communicating into the past or future, which is how Harry learns that the world is ending. As he is dying for the 11th time, in 1996, he is told that the world ends in a thousand years and that future generations are powerless to stop it.

Armed with this knowledge, Harry enters his next cycle and passes this information on to other members of the Chronus Club, which embarks on a long term plan (think, several lifetimes) to figure what’s causing the end of the world and how to stop it. In the course of this mission, Harry tells us a great deal about how he’s lived his previous lives, and it’s very interesting to meditate on how one small change can have large effects. The bulk of the dramatic drive of the book, though, comes from the question of whether Harry will be able to solve the mystery of the end of the world, before he himself is destroyed.

master of her craft

A Spark of Light by Jodi Picoult
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Review: Once again, Jodi Picoult has written a thoroughly compelling story that tackles a hot-button controversial social topic.  This time it's abortion, and told through multiple perspectives on both sides of the issue.  In contrast to many of her other books, I wasn't able to develop any sympathy or much empathy for those on the "other side" of my personal beliefs, despite the very well-developed characters.

Picoult also makes the very interesting choice to tell this story backward, beginning mere moments before the end of a hostage situation and rolling time back hour by hour to the morning of that day.  This technique both works and doesn't work for her.  The tension definitely rises as you find out more and more of what happened, but at the same time, because lives were left hanging in the balance at the end of the day, I reached a point where I just wanted to know who lived and who didn't, and stopped caring about all the backstories.

While not everything in this book worked for me, Jodi Picoult is a master of her craft, and has gifted readers again with a deftly told story.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

sole survivor

Relic by Alan Dean Foster
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Genre: science fiction
Review: Ruslan is the last human survivor.  Having been rescued by the Myssari, he is resigned to spending the rest of his long life with them, being treated very well, but no less a specimen of his doomed race for all that, as he reminds the reader at least once in nearly every chapter.  For all its repetitiveness on this subject, this is good science fiction.  It's got everything from technology and alien worlds and cultures (and clashes), and the ultimate question of whether humanity can be resurrected will keep you reading until the very end.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

resolution

Changers, Book Four: Forever by T Cooper and Allison Glock-Cooper
Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Review: The end is finally nigh for Ethan/Drew/Oryon/Kim/? (I'm not going to give away anything about his/her final identity).  S/he has one more year to go before s/he can choose his/her final identity.  Who will s/he be this time?  What choice will s/he ultimately make?  These are the questions that made me want to read the last book in this series, and kept me reading until the end of the book.  I have to admit, though, that it was sort of tough going.  First of all, the plot holes are back and better than ever!  Secondly, slang vomited all over this book.  It definitely helped the character have a voice, but it got grating.

And then.  Oh, and then.  For the first quarter or so of the book, we're still with Kim as she wraps up her affairs, particularly with Audrey, with whom she swears undying love and devotion, no matter what the next identity is.  Until it's time for said identity when s/he totally bails.  Good reason?  Maybe.  But not big enough to close the plot hole.  And made most of the second half of the book aggravating.

But, it's all over now.  Ethan/Drew/Oryon/Kim/? has made his/her decision and started the rest of his/her life.  And I will say that the ending was quite lovely.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

no tension

The Prisoner in the Castle by Susan Elia MacNeal
Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)
Genre: historical fiction, mystery
Review: Maggie Hope just cannot catch a break.  In her latest adventure, she finds herself a prisoner of SOE and MI6 because she knows too much.  She and other highly trained agents are being held in relative comfort on a remote island in the Hebrides.  That there was such a "cooler" in a remote part of Scotland is historical fact.  One can only hope that the agents who were actually held did not have to deal with a murderer picking them off one at a time (a la Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, which gets a shout-out (under its original name) at the beginning of the book), or a Nazi spy.  You would think that with all that going, there would be a lot of tension in this book, but you would be wrong.  Someone dies, they all gasp, but remind themselves that they are not only British (stiff upper lip, old thing) but also trained agents, so they must just soldier on.  We hear Maggie's interior monologue that reminds us that she's so scared and just wants to go home, and that she's a trained agent and can handle this, and she steps forward and takes charge of the situation and tries to calm everyone else's fears (frankly, most of the others don't act like trained agents).  And then someone else is murdered and they all repeat the process.  Oh, and there's a couple of really enormous red herrings.

This is definitely not the strongest book in the Maggie Hope series, but, as always, I look forward to seeing what MacNeal gets Maggie up to next.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.