The Age of Miracles

(coming June 26, 2012)

“It still amazes me how little we really knew. Maybe everything that happened to me and my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It’s possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much.”

Thursday my Random House rep handed me The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, saying not only that Random House expects it to be really big, but it'll be the book he'll still be pushing ten years from now because it's just that good. I was intrigued. I went straight home & started reading it (I should probably mention I'm halfway through A Clash of Kings & was eager to take a little break). I can't say I read it in one sitting, but in the times I was either at work or otherwise not reading, I was constantly thinking about it. I finished it last night, wiping away torrents of tears.

One Saturday morning, 11-year-old Julia & her family wake to discover the news that the world's rotation is inexplicably slowing. Minutes are added to the day, then hours, until eventually the sun stays up for a week at a time before plunging into a week-long night. The story is about how Julia copes with the changes in her family & friends, the perils of middle school & the beauty of first love, as the world disintegrates around her.

I'm not sure exactly why I loved this book as much as I did. Walker is a beautiful writer; I was underlining memorable passages left & right. The concept is super cool & she portrays it in a very human - not to mention terrifying - way. But more than that, I think it's the spot-on way she captures the pain, sadness, & awkwardness of being an unpopular middle-school girl. It hit seriously close to home. Walker had to have been one of us, too; she never would've known, otherwise. But she gets it. This book has a heart that so many books these days don't have; it mainly resides in its characters - Julia, her mother & father, her neighbors, her grandfather, her school friends, her crush.

If the scientific aspect of the novel (the repercussions of the slowing of the earth's rotation) is what most draws you to read the novel, I might not recommend the book so strongly. I was constantly having to suspend my disbelief because I'd ask a question regarding the environment, animal & plant life, the world's temperature, what was happening at the poles, the effects of the slowing on the human body, etc., that couldn't be answered, or because Walker's theory wasn't satisfactory to me.

But if you're willing to suspend your disbelief & focus on the novel for what it is - a realistic picture of how relationships flourish or crumble in the face of uncertainty & tragedy - then I think you'll love this book. I rarely am so deeply affected by a story. It's one of those books that leaves you wandering aimlessly after you turn the final page. You're so numb from the experience that all you can do is keep reading - you read the acknowledgements, the jacket copy, the back cover blurbs, you reread the last chapter two or three times, all because you aren't ready to pull yourself out of the world. These are my most memorable reading experiences, & are almost always coupled with uncontrollable sobbing. The Age of Miracles falls into company with Beatrice & Virgil, The Amber Spyglass, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, Peter & Wendy, Jude the Obscure, & a precious few others.

I was worried my Random House rep had oversold the novel, but he absolutely didn't. This book will take up a special place on my shelf, to be reread many times. Three months from today, seriously, pick up this book. 
    

The Magician King

The Magician King, Lev Grossman, Viking, August 2011.

Today is the official release date of Lev Grossman's The Magician King, so what better day to finally get around to reviewing it? I was still undecided about The Magicians when I picked up the sequel, but after I finished The Magician King I loved them both. They aren't two books; they are two parts to a very satisfying whole.

The Magician King opens on Quentin as a jaded king of Fillory, much like the first book opened on Quentin as a jaded New York teenager. Only now he's more fashionable; he's all decked out in royal garb & the final standoff in The Magicians has left him with snow-white hair. But he's bored (What else is new, right?) & looking for adventure, which quickly finds him. A morning hunt takes a very ugly turn, leading Quentin & Julia to charter a sailing ship to fulfill an errand that takes them to the sheer edge of the world, as well as back to Chesterton, Massachusetts, where Quentin's parents live. At first Quentin's attitude is as aggravating as in book one. "I guess I'll take this awesome ship on an awesome quest. I have nothing better to do. Might as well go kill some time."  But this doesn't last long, thankfully.

What I really appreciate about this book is that Quentin & his comrades change. This didn't happen in the first book, but now, viewing them as two halves of a whole, I can see that they just needed a few extra hundred pages to grow up. Eliot & Janet soften, Quentin matures & learns to stand on his own two feet, & Julia becomes the woman she was always destined to be - which is easily the most badass thing that happens in the book.

Quentin tells half the story, but about every other chapter belongs to Julia, whose voice is angry, powerful, & compelling. We learn what she was up to while Quentin was attending Brakebills & gallivanting around Fillory in book one, & it's a gritty, urban, from-the-ground-up counterpart to Quentin's story of easy success. The dark hunger for magic, for an entry into Quentin's world, fuels Julia & comes close to destroying her. Her story really makes the book. 

The Magician King has it all: well-developed characters, beautiful description, wonderfully varied settings & circumstances, a quest. What is it about books about quests that makes them so awesome? Quentin & Julia are on a quest for the fabled seven golden keys of Fillory, with a fantastic supporting cast of characters (including a talking sloth named Abigail whom I just loved). When I was twelve, my favorite of Brian Jacques's Redwall books was Pearls of Lutra, about a quest for six pearls. My favorite Narnia book has always been The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, about a quest for the seven missing Narnian lords. & my favorite book of all time is Michael Ende's The Neverending Story - the most epic quest ever! - about a boy searching for the archetypal water of life & a way home. 

His nods to Dawn Treader & Narnia, by the way, are many, & I appreciated them very much. Some are subtle, like his use of the phrase "further up & further in" from The Last Battle, while others are more obvious. Grossman's world's end definitely calls to mind the world's end that Edmund, Lucy, Eustace, & Reepicheep discover in Dawn Treader - the pair of people, an old man & a young woman, guarding the door at the end of the world, for example. 

So okay, I'm a sucker for quests. But that also means I'm a harsh judge of quest stories, & Grossman wrote an amazing one. It's a pair of books I will reread over & over, rereadability being one of my marks of a really great fantasy. The ending of The Magician King (also a nod to C. S. Lewis's books) might frustrate some readers, but I thought it was perfect. All in all, a worthy addition to the fantasy canon.

Next up: Okay for Now by Gary Schmidt. 

We the Animals

We the Animals by Justin Torres, HMH, September 2011

I picked up We the Animals at BEA this year after Publishers Weekly dubbed it "One of the Books You Should Pick Up at BEA This Year." My first thought as I snatched a copy from the Houghton Mifflin booth was "Well, dang. I thought I was getting a galley*. This is just a blad**." The slim volume is maybe 1/2-inch thick. I am so used to hefting a few-inches-thick YA paranormal romance (hefting most right into my giveaway pile) that when I get a book that adds up to all of 125 pages, it doesn't feel like a book at all. Funny how times change.

Before I get into the book itself, I want to add that it's interesting how the cover changed from the ARC I have to the final cover you see above. The cover of the ARC is solid blue, with the title, blurbs, & author name scribbled in white writing, harsh lines that almost look scratched into blue paint by a child. From the front cover a large pair of black & white eyes looks out, also crude & hand-drawn. Two smaller pairs look out from the back cover. They aren't sinister, like the predatory eyes that shine from the blackness in cartoons. But they aren't kind, either. They might be curious, looking out into the unknown. The cover perfectly captures the spirit of the book: animalistic, innocent boyhood. Boys aren't cruel & predatory, not intentionally, nor are they kind, again, not intentionally. They are natural, wild, animal boys, the three brothers.

Doesn't the cover above look joyful by comparison? That image evokes summertime, joy, Peter Pan - perhaps then, the idea of eternal boyhood. (Maybe this isn't coincidental; one chapter of the book is called "Never-Never Time.") To me, this image of leaping, bounding, joyous brothers doesn't at all capture the spirit of the book the way the ARC cover does. It doesn't balance the joy with darkness. But hey, it's just the cover. That's not what you came here for.

We the Animals is a dark, beautiful, raucous novel - or novella, I suppose - that never stops moving. I read it in one sitting, completely caught up in the musical, poetic quality of Torres's writing. Now, a few weeks since finishing it, the memory of reading it feels like a flurry of activity and violence. No emotion in the book, which follows in sharp vignettes the growing-up years of brothers Manny, Joel, & the nameless narrator, & their Puerto Rican father & white mother, is felt halfway. Every feeling is strong. The anger & hurt are harsh, but so is the love. Even love - parental love, brotherly love, romantic love - is expressed through gritted teeth, & always haunted by the fear that the hug or kiss will soon turn violent & dangerous. It almost always does.

From the book's opening line, "We wanted more," to its closing line, "Here they go," nearly every sentence in the novel suggests movement & intense emotion. There is not a word too many in this book. What I found most fascinating is that despite the spare prose & short length of the story, after the narrator grows from the trusting naivete of youth to the confused & frightened sexually aware adult, I found myself longing for his boyhood, of the time before the boys understood their parents' relationship, of the time when the narrator & his brothers smashed tomatoes in the kitchen. Their mother caught them; instead of getting mad, she joined in. "Do it to me," she says. They smash a ketchup bottle with a rubber mallet & cover her. The images of their gleeful childhood moments that express the strength of the family are indelible & endearing, yet always juxtaposed with inescapable violence, the dysfunction. "Our mother yelped & slid to the floor & stayed there... ketchup everywhere, looking like she had been shot in the back of the head." 

The boys-as-animals metaphor might be too heavy-handed if the book were longer, but as it stands, it is parcelled out into a perfect portion. If I have any complaint with the novel, it is that the narrator's discovery, exploration, & struggle to come to terms with his homosexuality is crammed into the last 40 pages of the novel. It isn't that it was poorly explored or fleshed out, or out of balance with the rest of the story, it just wasn't quite enough. I suppose I felt like the brothers sitting around the table at the opening of the novel, banging their forks on the kitchen table. I wanted more. 

*galley: proofing copy of a book often used for advance reading copies

**blad: or, book layout & design: a pre-pub booklet that might just have a few chapters of the book in it

P.S. Just as an aside, I have to mention that Justin Torres is incredibly nice. I always enjoy a book a little more when the author is kind & personable (conversely, I always enjoy a book a little less when the author is haughty or rude). I look forward to reading more from him.

Next up, Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai.