On Monday night, I checked out six books from the public library. My return flight to North Carolina leaves on Saturday morning, which means I had approximately 4.5 days to finish six books. Besides cram-reading books for class, I don't think I've ever forced myself to read back-to-back books at such a pace, but that's the luxury of the winter holidays for ya.
I was considering writing single posts for each book, but once I sat down with my laptop, I decided there wasn't really all that much I wanted to say about some of the books. Or rather, I'm just lazy and want to spill it all out in one go, since I'm really just writing these book reports for my own purposes--so I can remember what the heck I've read and jot notes on what I noticed. If this were a book blog that people referred to for recommendations, then maybe I'd put some more effort ha-ha.
In the order that I read them:
1) Love in the Time of Global Warming by Francesca Lia Block
If we're judging a book by its cover, then this book would be awesome. First things first, I love the title. Obviously a play on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, which I've been meaning to read for ages. The summary describes the story as a post-apocalyptic retelling of the Odyssey--cool, right? Finally, FYA has entire posts about this topic, but I just want to second the motion that YA book designers need to stop creating embarrassing covers with big faces and pretty dresses and pastel fonts that scream TEENAGE GIRL TEEEHEE. Many people don't take YA seriously, and these book covers aren't helping the cause. I couldn't even get my friend to read Daughter of Smoke and Bone until I took off the jacket cover with the big face on it. (Fortunately, I got her completely hooked on the series... victory mwahaha.) As a matter of fact, I read this book first out of the six precisely because it had my favorite cover out of the bunch.
As for the actual contents of the book, I'd have to say that out of her newer releases (aka the ones published in the last five years), this is probably one that I like better.The language didn't enchant me with the same power it had when I was in high school, but I'm not sure if it's a matter of Block's writing or if my artistic tastes have simply changed over time. Probably both. I will forever hail Block for how she manages to weave diverse LGBT characters into her work without making them "issue books," and she does that nicely here.
I guess I didn't fall in love with this book though, because I was expecting more. Given the world we live in today, there's a lot that can be said about the apocalyptic future of global warming gone too far. I guess I was hoping to see more of a reflection on today's society in that regard, but Block undermines this by adding the whole mad scientist/bad science thing with the giants schtick. On one hand, I understand that the giants were necessary for the "Odyssey" theme, but on the other hand, I feel like I would have been more impressed if there had been a more radical spin on the giants. Fantasy elements such as giants and fairies are Block's territory, but I guess for me personally, I was sort of disappointed by having such a literal re-interpretation of Neptune's sons. I still prefer her older works and felt like the execution of this one was a bit of a miss, but overall it wasn't too bad.
2) The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black
So here's the thing about me and vampires.
I am generally not a huge fan of the paranormal genre, but one thing I did enjoy about the vampire explosion in the last few years is how the "rules" are crafted in different stories. I was not impressed by the whole sparkling-in-the-sun thing from Twilight, but there have been a couple vampire stories I've stumbled upon that I've enjoyed. The Vampire Diaries TV show was fun to follow for the first few seasons, especially since the show wasn't afraid to turn people into vampires and kill some pretty important side characters. I've avoided most of the vampire YA books, but there have been some manga with interesting spins on the vampire lore. In one of the more intriguing ones--I actually can't remember the title of the series--the idea is that if a vampire ever kisses a human, their fates become bonded such that the vampire can drink only that human's blood. Once the human dies, the vampire loses its blood supply and will die soon after. Can you even imagine being the vampire in this situation? It's like true love on steroids, like marriage except 100 times the gamble because you're putting your life on the line and there are no take-backsies.
The Coldest Girl in Coldtown sets up and executes a very interesting set of rules about vampirism. Here, being bitten by a vampire inflicts something known as the Cold--a "fever" that lasts 80 hours where you begin craving blood to the point of insanity. Drinking human blood completes the vampire transformation, but if you manage to resist for 80 hours, the Cold flushes out of your system. Coldtowns are kind of like ghettos where the vampires and some humans are kept within walls, and the US has realized that putting cameras in these Coldtowns--something of a cross between puppycams and reality TV--is profitable business. As a result, a lot of naive teenagers fantasize living in a Coldtown and turning into an eternally youthful vampire.
This is the first book I've read by Holly Black, and I enjoyed it a lot. I gobbled up all the satirical jabs at our celebrity-infatuated culture, and there are plenty of deaths to keep the stakes high. (One thing I didn't like about Twilight... given the deadliness of vampires, the action seemed awfully sterile.) The latter portion of the book loses a little steam, in my opinion, but I did not see the twist at the end coming, so bonus points there. Gavriel felt a little flat to me (I rolled my eyes once he started getting into the whole "you-reel-me-back-to-my-humanity" love territory), but holy pomelo, that one scene with Tana when they first enter Coldtown was scorching. If more vampire books had been like this, maybe I would have jumped on the bandwagon.
3) The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo
I had never heard of this book before, but I happened to find it in the New Books section and the summary was too good for me to resist. Set in colonial Malaysia, the daughter of a genteel but bankrupt family is asked to be a ghost bride for the recently deceased son of a powerful family with secrets. She is soon haunted by his ghost but also finds herself drawn to the new heir of the family. This premise had me thinking of Tokyo Crazy Paradise where Tsukasa and Ryuji are obviously endgame but the obstacles for getting them together seem almost insurmountable. I read the jacket summary thinking that the heroine was coerced into accepting the ghost marriage and fell in love with the new heir while living in the new household. Potential adultery against a ghost? Mysterious family secrets? Oh heyyy.
As it turns out, I misinterpreted the summary--she doesn't accept the ghost marriage. The Ghost Bride has a lot more fantastical elements than I expected, which I probably should have anticipated if I read the last paragraph of the jacket summary a little more carefully. The latter two-thirds of the book take place in the Chinese afterlife, which I've seen people compare to Spirited Away on the Internet. They both take place in a spirit realm, but I don't know if I would describe it as such. Spirited Away is one of my favorite Studio Ghibli movies, and it might have the advantage of being animated but its setting feels so much more vivid, like a place I would actually want to visit as a tourist for a day. I feel that in the hands of someone like Laini Taylor with superb skills in world-building, the afterlife of The Ghost Bride could have been even sharper. On the other hand, I appreciated seeing the elements of Chinese mythos and culture woven into the story--given my Taiwanese heritage, I caught onto a lot of things pretty quickly, though I wonder how the world-building came across for someone with less exposure.
Given that the storyline turned out to be so different than what I'd been expecting, I'm not quite sure how to pass judgment on the book. I don't mind stumbling across a story completely different from my expectations, but with The Ghost Bride, I didn't fall in love with what I ended up finding. The third love interest, Er Lang, caught me off guard because I failed in reading comprehension of the summary, but I almost felt like the three suitors were never fleshed out enough for me to care much about them.
The main thing that caught my attention though is that parts of Choo's writing reminded me of my own drafts. One of the things I've been struggling with recently is that at times my prose feels too slow or disengaged. Choo's writing seemed at times eerily similar, and I kept trying to figure out why. Does it have to do with the natural cadence of my writing? Do I use too much passive voice? I'm still pondering this matter.
4) The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr
I've heard good things about Sara Zarr but haven't felt compelled to read the one she's most famous for: Sweethearts. It's one of the six books I borrowed though, so I may get around to reading it tomorrow. The summary of that book didn't quite hook me, but there seems to be an inverse proportion between my expectations for a book and how much I actually end up enjoying it. But anyways, I ended up reading The Lucy Variations first because I was curious how Sara Zarr approached the whole young-pianist-giving-up-her-music-and-finding-it-again thing that I'm trying to do for Charlotte in EP.
I do like Sara Zarr's writing style, so I probably will give her other works a chance. What didn't work for me in The Lucy Variations though was that I didn't give a flying duck about any of the characters. This was particularly true with the protagonist, Lucy Beck-Moreau, a girl who falls for men twice her age and who I would probably not get along with in real life. I already wrote a post last month about why I don't like reading teacher-student love stories, and in this book Lucy falls in love with not only her English teacher but her brother's married piano teacher. Though the book stays in PG territory, this stuff was already making me feel nauseous. I also felt that Lucy wasn't a very good friend to her besties Reyna and Carson (who is Taiwanese!), so basically I didn't feel very fond of her at all.
And yes, I felt a bit of sympathy for how she grew up being pressured by her grandfather and mother into being a child prodigy. As a tiger cub who wasn't a child prodigy by any means but also grew up feeling chained to the piano at times, I could relate to Lucy's struggle with music. But when you strip the story to its bare bones, there wasn't much of a narrative arc for Lucy's return or any real character growth. And so much of it was propelled by her attraction for the piano teacher that the whole thing made me feel kinda icky and detracted from whatever punch the story might have had about loving music on your own terms. On the plus side, reading this book made me a little hopeful that I can pack a harder punch with Charlotte.
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