FIFTY SHADES OF GREY

by E.L. James
528 pages, Vintage

Review by S.F. Winser 

The things I do for this ****ing job.

So a librarian, a reviewer. Incurably curious. These are usually great things to be.

Also being Facebook friends with Hereward Proops turns these things dangerous. I promised Hereward I would be a good librarian and a good reviewer, give in to curiosity and read this.

So I did. Yes. I did that. I read Fifty Shades.

And.

And now what the hell do I do?

I can’t review this. This isn’t literature. It’s porn. Pure and simple rumpy pumpy for pumping blood to the rump. It is stuff written to do nothing but titillate. Don’t get me wrong; there’s nothing wrong with that.  Not a damn thing. Such stuff does exist, should continue to exist and I will defend that to the death.

What I can’t do, is review it.

I just can’t. You can’t judge porn objectively any more than you can judge sex objectively. They are inherently personal, subjective and taste-driven.  Does it hurt anyone? (Okay, in this case I will qualify that a bit more clearly). Does it hurt anyone in any way that they don’t agree to? No? Are you enjoying it? Then go to it, with my blessing and the all the energy you can muster! If I don’t like it, that’s my problem, not yours.

I will say again, loud and clear, that this is porn. It should, in no way, be seen as a relationship guide. It is fantasy and should stay there. Christian Grey is messed up and that is his job to fix, not yours. The poor women looking for a real-world Mr Grey are gonna have a bad time. There is one part where the word ‘just’ and the phrase ‘control freak’ appear in the same sentence. This is a sentence that is wrong on many, many levels, the most important one being: if you are dating control freak and you know it, you should have run away twenty bloody chapters ago.

Just so you know, it’s not great writing. At times it is downright terrible writing. I will be honest and admit that a phrase or two of arguably good bits of language are scattered about but much of it is crap and actually laughably bad. I mean, I literally laughed out loud. And also groaned (not in a good way) out loud. And at one spot, swore out loud at the page.

But this is reviewing porn. People don’t (or shouldn’t) go to porn for good writing or relationship ideals. Not even sexy ideals. No one has that much stamina in real life. People don’t watch porn for filmic cinematography, they don’t read porn for pretty word-usages, they don’t look at pornographic pictures and say ‘Wow! That’s some great framing!’  This is porn. It is BDSM ‘themed’ porn with a vocabulary firmly aimed at titillating jaded, middle-aged, middle-class women who don’t read. And that’s not actually a bad thing. Who says that they aren’t allowed to enjoy themselves?

Just recognise Fifty Shades of Grey for what it is and don’t get annoyed with it for not being something else. It’s not literature. It’s not trying to be. Read it if it sounds like your thing, ignore it if it doesn’t. That’s all I have to say about it.

THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

by John Green
336 pages, Dutton Juvenile

Review by S.F. Winser

The last thing anyone reading a review wants to read about is the reviewer whining about how hard it is to review things.

So here's that whine: in the past year I went from one of Booksquawk's most prolific reviewers to one of its worst. This is not because I suddenly stopped reading shitloads of books. Oh no! That will never happen. But mainly for the very complex yet simple reason that I became completely enamoured with the process of reading in a way that I haven't managed in years. I became obsessed with the unfolding of a novel. With the transition from beginning to middle. With the way an author draws in a reader from the very first sentence. To experience books completely I stopped reading blurbs and back-copy. I stopped reading reviews and started reading only on verbal recommendations from people who were allowed to only tell me the vaguest details of books that they'd loved.

I didn't want to know how or why a character went on a road trip in a road trip novel. I didn't want to know who got murdered in a murder mystery. Not just keeping the ending a mystery, keeping the beginning a mystery - that's what was important to me. Of course I didn't want to know the murderer. But neither did I want to know the weapon, or the detective's favourite car or how he or she became involved in the first place. I wanted good writers to show me all these very important things in their own words, not because the back cover told me so just to make me intrigued. Premises are just as important to novels as climaxes and denouements, and I wanted to find out the premise from scratch.

And reviewing, well... It was so hard to destroy even the slightest of that experience for others. Because reading this way was WONDERFUL! Stuff that didn't really count as spoilers still removed some of that joy of sinking into a novel knowing not the slightest thing about the structure or direction. Everything was a surprise. It was totally the author's responsibility to keep me interested or lose me due to their writing skill. I loved it and hated anything that took that possibility away. I certainly couldn't take that away from people whom I have never even met. So I found it very hard to write reviews. You should at least prove that you've read the book you are reviewing by writing a short introduction. I couldn't bring myself to do so.

I'd even taken to handing books to friends with paper taped over the back cover and the words 'trust me' written in the place of the back synopsis.

But here I am. Reviewing a book where I fear destroying this experience for the reader almost more than any other book that I have read this year. But I have to tell you about it. I loved it too much not to share.

John Green is a writer with a devoted, almost rabid, following. He writes books about impossibly smart, funny, geeky kids going through complex relationship troubles. He writes some great sentences and some gorgeous paragraphs. He has a few favoured ideas that pop up in various books, but are usually forgivable despite their overuse. He is one of the best YA authors out there, and a great place for curious and brave adults to start on the wonderland that is lit-YA.

Reading one of his previous works is what cemented my belief in 'blurbs destroy everything'. I had already been doing it for a while, but after reading his brilliant 'Paper Towns', finally reading the blurb and realising that it gives away two thirds of the plot and destroyed one of the central mysteries of the book, I vowed never to risk ruining a reading experience like that unless I absolutely had to. All I would have had to do is accidentally read one sentence and half the book would have been destroyed. Screw that. The book deserved better. I deserve better.

So, yeah, I kinda like John Green. I'm on a mini marathon of his books at the moment. Even counting all his other good stuff 'The Fault in Our Stars' is the best thing he has written. Reviewers are going mad for it. Myself included. Readers are loving it. For a time it had triple digit five star reviews on Amazon and NOTHING ELSE. Not even a single four star in over a hundred legitimate reviews. In my experience, that's near unheard of.

And considering how much of this book relies on gentle (or not so gentle) uncovering of incident and relationship, that's all I dare tell you. If that intrigues you, read it without knowing anything. Don't read a single review. Don't go to amazon. Don't look at the back cover. If you do decide to give it a go, don't even talk to anybody about it until after you've tried it.

Trust me?

VIOLENCE 101

by Denis Wright
240 pages, Putnam Juvenile

Review by S.F. Winser

This may be the most disappointing good book I've read in a while, but I don't think that's actually the fault of the book. I'll explain that in a moment, but first I'd better tell you about the book itself.

'Violence 101' is a very good book. It's the story of Damon, a New Zealand teenager in a boy's detention facility. Most of the book is told from his perspective in a series of diary entries. There are two main things you need to know about Damon, first he's highly intelligent. Second, he's nearly psychotically violent.

Damon's voice is palpable. There's very rarely a dishonest note. His writings are, at turns, heartbreaking, funny and downright disturbing. Mostly disturbing. This book was doing something great. We have a teen Hannibal Lector, but with some deliberate questions about how society handles its monsters because the book constantly rubs in your face that Damon isn't a monster, he's a teenaged boy – deeply disturbed, but just a boy. Damon is sympathetic, worrying and persuasive. There are large passages where Damon pretty much defends atrocities or promotes dangerous ideas (because he's obsessed with politics, war and education) and does it well, with decent logic and evidence and does so with such barefaced earnestness that it nearly seduces the reader. These parts of the novel were, for me, the most effective and affecting part – well above any nasty stories about science experiments on the neighbour's pets. Damon is never ascribed an actual pathology – a deliberate choice on Wright's part – so the reader is never given the opportunity to label him a sociopath or a psychopath and constantly has to see him as a person rather than a condition. A person who could conceivably exist in the real world.

However, I had the (mis?)fortune of hearing Denis Wright speak about this book a few months ago. He's a very interesting man, who had very definite goals for this book. The problem being that he admitted that he had been forced to change the ending by his publishers and that he wasn't happy with it. I was very aware of this fact, and when the tone changed, when Damon goes on an almost spiritual quest and towards redemption and sort of succeeded, it felt very dishonest all of a sudden. One of the better minor characters appears in order to give Damon a fortuitous lift to his destination, but most of the rest of the book simply fell flat for me. I may have been over-sensitive, recalling Wright's comments as I read, but I could almost feel Wright forcing Damon towards a type of resolution he had never intended.

And that was part of the real problem. This was a book building towards blood. Real world consequences for Damon's disturbing obsessions would have been more thematically redeeming rather than the actual, near redemption of Damon himself. Instead Damon starts to become a better person. Nothing wrong with that, but not exactly a brave choice by the publishers to leave it at that.

And that's why it was disappointing. This was a very good book, well worth anyone's time, with a great main character. But it was hamstrung. A great book forced into being simply a very good book by editorial fear.

A POCKETFUL OF EYES

by Lili Wilkinson
508 pages, ReadHowYouWant.com Ltd.

Review by S.F. Winser

It's YA! It's a romance! It's a mystery! It's funny as hell!

Bee works in a museum taxidermy department. She's focussed. She likes making lists. More than a touch nerdy, (though her even nerdier mum takes the cake for most honest geek in literature) Bee loves her job and is hating the idea that, once holidays finish, she'll have to go back to high school.

Unfortunately a few complications get in the way of her calmly completing all her tasks and getting on with her quiet life in her quiet workspace.

The first is the arrival of the annoyingly cute, annoyingly charming and just plain annoying university student who needs to get some extra credit for his anatomy classes. It's hardly her fault that Bee does embarrassing things with him on the back of a stuffed tiger.

Also, her mother's regular Dungeons and Dragons sessions seem to have manifested her mum a new boyfriend in the shape of a Giant Celestial Badger. (Every time I read something about Bee's mum and thought “Now THAT'S too geeky to stay true to a real character”, I'd remember some of my geeky friends from high school – and lets be honest, myself in high school – and realise that Bee's mum doesn't even come close to too nerdy.)

Oh, and someone died in the museum. Only Bee, obsessed with crime novels and science, seems to realise... suspect... be paranoid enough... to think it might be murder. It all boils down to someone having 'A Pocketful of Eyes'.

I love Bee. She's intense and serious but with an unwilling sense of humour. It's almost like she knows she's funny, but wishes she wasn't. She has lots of great lines. My favourites being about David Bowie's 'magic pants' in the movie 'Labyrinth'. Or any time she's dissing Nancy Drew for being too god-damned perfect.

Balancing the three (really two and a bit) plot aspects here is tough and Wilkinson only rarely stumbles. Thankfully she has Bee and the uber-charming Toby to keep the reader interested when the mystery gets a bit exposition-heavy or the romance a little lost in the midst of trying to keep the rest of the plot pumping along. And these bits are very rare.

Seriously, while I want to do the good Booksquawk thing and start examining deeper meanings and what have you, all I really want to say is that I had a blast reading it. It was, in the simplest terms, bloody good fun. A bit of humour, sweetness, mystery, great characters... what else could you ask for except possibly the words 'Bee and Toby return in.... book two of the science mysteries!' or what have you? Probably a better title would be advisable. This is why I don't work in a publisher's marketing department.

This has serious series potential. A library colleague and I were recently bemoaning a lack of 'funny' mysteries for young girls. There are the Nancy Drews, the Lady Graces, the Trixie Beldons to fill the same sort of niche as Agatha Christie or Anne Perry... but no real equivalents to Janet Evanovich or Kerry Greenwood. This book is aimed a bit older than what we were talking about, but it's just the kind of thing that's missing from the YA market as well. There are plenty of fun crime novels for adults that are laced with humour, and very little of the same for the younger demographics. Wilkinson is on to something here. I hope she stays on it.

Also, for a quick bit of research, I checked out Wilkinson's blog where she often has very wise things to say about YA and teens in general. Anyone working in the field would be rewarded by a quick visit. She even had a nice (and funny) post about character's 'wants' and 'needs' that just helped me clarify an issue I'm having with my current never-to-be-published-by-anyone-sane manuscript. She worked for the State Library running their teen website and teaches creative writing – she knows what she's doing.

SONGS OF THE EARTH

Wild Hunt Book 1
Elspeth Cooper
467 pages, Gollancz

Review by S.F. Winser

Elspeth Cooper has a way with scene setting. Epic fantasy, in many ways, is only as good as its world building. This is often achieved with high detail and overtly rococo styling. 'Songs of the Earth' is a fantasy where the scene is set, a room decorated or a character drawn with a few simple but well-chosen images, or smells, or sounds. It's extremely effective. It also means that the book moves with a fair pace without getting caught up in its own faux medieval-ness as is the downfall of many fantasy novels.

The idea is that there is a boy – Gair. Gair is a witch in a highly religious society and the book opens with him in a cell, after months of beatings and torture, about to be sentenced to the inevitable burning at the stake that is the fate of all witches...

...except that the church hides secrets. And Gair escapes this doom, though through no doing of his own.

Gair spends this first novel coming to terms with his state as a condemned sinner and as someone who can hear 'The Song of the Earth'. (The basis of an interesting magic system Cooper has created. It's sort of a pantheist power, coming from the world and strengthened by the natural order of things, but manifesting in a song only heard by the magically powerful.)

However Gair isn't just a witch. He's also a knight in training, raised in a religious cloister with secrets in his past that are so secret, he doesn't even know they exist.

What's great about Gair is the way Cooper has taken this boy, trained for years in a chapterhouse of a religious templar-like society and forced him into a situation he sees as inherently sinful. Gair questions his religion and his upbringing as it conflicts with the beauty of the magic he can't help but embrace... but he also can't quite shake his previous life. In many ways, he is still a warrior-monk in training. He doesn't wallow in self pity to the point of losing the reader's sympathy, but neither does he do a belief-straining character reversal. He may question his beliefs and leave much of his religion behind, however he keeps his sword, his religious manners and often still prays to his old Goddess. It makes Gair truly intriguing and sets him apart from the other characters carved from the orphan-with-magic trope.

I hate to review a new series only one book in, but Cooper is a promising new writer with a deep new world and a great main character. There's no way in hell I'm not gonna buy book two.

THE KINGKILLER CHRONICLES

The Name of the Wind, 672 pages
The Wise Man's Fear, 1008 pages
by Patrick Rothfuss

Review by S.F. Winser

In my ongoing heroic quest to reintroduce myself to epic fantasy I've done myself two major favours in the past month.

The first was watching the HBO series 'Game of Thrones' which, even though this is a TV series based on a book, I will digress long enough in this book review about a totally unrelated book to spray various rantings at you like 'fantastic' and 'awesome' and 'bloody hell, there's a lot of blood!'.

The other favour was to give in to the curiosity that I had about the first book of this trilogy: 'The Name of the Wind'.

I was twenty pages into book one when I started to make plans and reorganise budgets so that, at some point in the very near future – preferably before I finished this first book – I would hie me to a bookstore and purchase book two, 'The Wise Man's Fear'.

So in the space of four days – in the middle of every other task I actually need to perform to keep my family in foodstuffs and our house from descending into total squalor (rather than its usual state of borderline squalor) – I managed a handful of hours sleep, blew my book-buying budget and flew through about two thousand pages of awesome storytelling.

This is the story of Kvothe. Kvothe is a simple bartender in a tiny town. Except he's not known as Kvothe, he goes by another name because Kvothe is the name of a storybook hero. A swordfighter of note, an assassin, a wizard and a renowned musician. Kvothe the Mighty, Kvothe the Bloodless.

He's hiding in this out of the way town for several reasons. We don't know what most of them are, though one major motivation seems to be simply hiding from his own stories. There's definitely something else going on, though.

Kvothe has been tracked down by a man known as The Chronicler (because of his obsession with history), who has been looking for Kvothe for years. Eventually The Chronicler convinces Kvothe to tell his side of the story of all the legends that surround him. Reluctantly – very reluctantly – Kvothe agrees.

This makes up the body of the books: Kvothe telling the story of his life from childhood, thorough university, through musical quests, through university, through university, finally out in the world then back to university (seriously, there are a trove of awesome happenings, but my one major problem with these books is how long they linger on Kvothe's academic life). These are interspersed with minor (but dramatic) happenings in the bar that Kvothe now runs under a pseudonym. It is the clashes between the high heroics of the stories and the ineffectualness of Kvothe in the here and now that builds a real intrigue into the book beyond a collection of otherwise well-told happenings in a fantasy world. Kvothe is a genius and well-trained in magic, famed through the lands for his magical power. Why can't he cast spells? How does the master swordsman get his butt kicked by thieving bumpkins?

The Kvothe of the past is a tragic genius. There's a tendency to almost want to hate him. He's a gifted musician, a fantastic wizard, a clever inventor, great with words, too smart for his own good... It's this last that both saves and makes the book. Kvothe may have talents out the wazoo, but he's also always, always in trouble. Often tragic, heartbreaking trouble. And much of it of his own devising. Kvothe isn't some mystical hero – he's an extremely-bright, overly-confident kid with a sad history and a completely believable need to prove himself.

There's a thoroughly intellectualised magic-system. Magic in this world is complicated, takes concentration and training and is mainly used by the highly-educated. There's a femme fatale at the heart of a sad love story that runs through the book. There's believable world-building full of intricately described cities and countries with their own individuality. There are quests (with only an exception or two) of a completely worldly base. What killed Kvothe's loved ones? How will he survive on the streets? How will he find his love? How will he get tuition money? And along the way he almost accidentally causes legends to spring up around himself. The quest of 'make love to as many women as you can just to prove how good I am at teaching lovers' that Kvothe is given by a fairy lust-goddess is one of the less 'serious' quests that start to strain believability. For the most part, all of this gels into believable characters in a fully-realised world acting from truthful motivations.

It is also, quite often, hilarious. Rothfuss is brilliantly wry. It's also creepy here and there. The 'all seeing, yet evil, talking tree' may not sound ominous, but I admit that it caused me a few day of philosophical ruminations caused by the concept of a malevolent being with pure foresight who can influence the future with its words. Any reaction you have to meeting it – is the wrongest possible reaction. Including trying not to react to it.

This is (so far) a great series of books. At turns funny, dark, exciting, sad and always well told. This is a book, in many ways, about the nature of story and Rothfuss is a brilliant teller-of-tales.

FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON

by Daniel Keyes
324 pages, Mariner Books

Ignorance is Bliss and Other Myths

Review by SF Winser

So I finally read this one. It's a bit of a high-school text in the US, I believe. A minor classic. So I read it. And then really didn't want to review it because I expect everyone ever forced to write a high-school English essay on the thing will now be judging me, telling me where I'm 'wrong' and hating me for not seeing the inherent floral symbolism and its deeper meaning.

Also because, while I appreciate the book I couldn't say honestly that I liked it. And here, many other ex-essayists are cheering me (I was RIGHT to hate it when Mr. Horniman assigned it!).

Charlie Gordon, thirty two, works in a bakery and is a mentally-disabled man. No, he's a PERSON who happens to have a mental disability. The most dignified of the themes in this book is the idea that Charlie Gordon, smart or dumb, is a person of worth. He's had a drive to learn since he was young, but he's never been able to.

Until he is chosen to undergo an experimental procedure (so far successfully trialled on a mouse called Algernon) designed to boost mental acuity.

It works. Charlie has to take on the responsibilities and concepts of a genius after a life of restricted experiences. And this is where the misreadings of this book as 'Ignorance is Bliss' come from. Because Charlie doesn't have an easy time of it.

I don't think it has aged well, quite frankly. While the text (and I can't help thinking of it as text rather than as a novel) is clear and well-written, while there after many interesting characters, plenty of symbols and/or analogies to be unpacked and some very interesting things to say about human worth, growth, intelligence, love and maturity... I was just kinda left cold. Keyes lets the theme drive the book too much. I could feel the 'shape' of the book while reading, so there were few surprises. I think the only genuine bit of emotion that I felt was when poor Charlie returns to his special education class by mistake towards the end. Besides that, I felt too distant from Charlie. He gets caught up in himself and his situation too much to stay relatable. His 'friends' at his old job all suck, his teacher is weirdly attracted to him for no apparent reason except that book needs her to be. The closest thing to a character who is both believable and likeable is the bohemian artist who lives across the hall from Charlie, and even she figures out Charlie is kind of using her.

The setting is old fashioned and the plot is technically sci-fi. The non-deliberate incongruity made this a hard read. I'm all for some steampunkish retro-tech but the psychology/neurology here is so outdated, but held up as so futuristic and successful, that it's almost laughable. Yes it's a macguffin, but it has - through no fault of Keyes' - become a very unbelievable macguffin. I suppose, technically, one could make the same claim of 'Frankenstein' (which is a book with a lots of structural and thematic similarities to 'Flowers for Algernon') and all I can say is that perhaps Keye's setting of early twentieth century is both too old for the conceit it uses, but not far enough in the past so as to get away with it. This 'Near Future' stuff is actually more problematic as to longevity than more far-reaching sci-fi. Mary Shelley is lucky enough to have more years than Keyes' work, and perhaps better writing to hold her psychosurgical conceit together. It helps that once Shelly uses her macguffin, she (mostly) leaves it the hell alone, whereas Keyes nibbles and gnaws at his and puts it central to Charlie's motivations for huge parts of the book. So as time inevitably shows up the impossibility of each science-fictional set-up being achieved, Doc Frankenstein's zombie-work is more easily accepted by a reader who isn't constantly asked to think about exactly which nerve ending got attached to which cortex.

A worthy read. A bit too 'worthy', in fact. A fine piece of work, but not the most fun I've ever had with a book.

THE MIDNIGHT ZOO

by Sonya Hartnett
208 pages, Candlewick

Review by SF Winser

This is another of the YA novels on the shortlist for a prestigious Australian children's literature prize.

One of the problems in reading to a shortlist for a prize is that one stops reading as a reader, or even from the problematic viewpoint of a reviewer ('Oh, crap! I'm gonna have to say intelligent things about this for Booksquawk! Pay attention, SFW, and think about Theme and Character and Symbolism!) and starts to compare books – which were never intended for comparison – with one another. Is this book 'better' or 'more worthy' than the other books on the list? What does 'more worthy' even mean? What does better mean? Thank goodness I'm not an actual judge.

What does any of this have to do with this little work of art? A piece of writing intended for readers, not judges, and that, with no fight-training and through no fault of its own, is about to be sent into a battle royale with books about Victorian resurrectionists, graffiti artists and lesbian relationships?

It's a wholly artificial viewpoint. And I can't help but wonder if it has coloured my judgement of this book. Because let's say it straight up... I was left completely and utterly underwhelmed here. And I'm told that Hartnett is usually a good bet for YA novels.

The Midnight Zoo is a fable. It has talking animals and lost little children. But it's a harsh fable, set in WW II. Not that we are ever told this. We are never told outright that we are in Russia during the Nazi invasion – only someone with a bit of grounding in language and/or history would work that out.

The book is about three gypsy children... or Rom... or Romany... or.... ummm... I don't know what the politically correct term is right now. If I've used the wrong one, my apologies for my ignorance. The children are wandering West Russian towns, scavenging without adult supervision, through bombed ruins and surviving as best they can.

They stumble, in the midst of a flattened town, into a small zoo—just a circle of cages—with a variety of wild animals. Who talk. Some are wise, some are mad, some are pitiful. No, they're all pitiful.

They talk for a while.

We learn the short backstory of the children, the zoo and a handful of the animals. There's probably some symbolism I was too dumb to see. And then it ends.

Meh.

There is some excellent, excellent writing. Hartnett catches the mythic, fabled tone really well. The characters have this feeling of symbolism that's hard to deny. But I'm left with the idea that sometimes literary novelists have forgotten that style isn't everything. I just wasn't moved. I wasn't caught. I didn't care very much. And then, just as I was building a relationship with the animal characters and finally had a proper idea of who the children were, the book abruptly finished in a rather lacklustre way.

A dark fable with the motto, if there is one, that life is short, freedom is hard, alluring and sometimes destructive and then you die.

I think Hartnett was trying to make some connections between humans and wildness. Or simply humans and animals—that the border between isn't as hard as we pretend. There's a bit of preaching against zoos. And some for zoos. Apparently, also, humans suck. And sometimes death is the only freedom you'll get... and... I don't know. I'm trying really hard to work out what Hartnett was trying to say and I either come up with 'Nothing' or 'The world is hard, we're all trapped, you can't handle freedom, death is coming.'

A bit harsh for a YA novel. For any novel. And more the over-generalised darkness I'd expect from a heavily eyeshadowed, psuedo-intellectual in a wine-bar after too many glasses of Cab Shiraz than from an insightful novelist of high calibre.

I'd rather assume that I've somehow missed the actual point. I'm happy to admit that that's possible. I already admitted that I don't think I read this book with the correct attitude of a reader. I'd love to hear other people's opinions and change my mind.

GRAFFITI MOON

by Cath Crowly
272 pages, Knopf Books for Young Readers

Review by S.F. Winser

In my quest to read as many if the 2011 Australian Children's prize shortlist as possible (or at least the stuff aimed at the YA audience), this was my starting point. A good place to start.

In Graffiti Moon there are three POV characters and a sidekick or two. The main two people we need to worry about, though, are Lucy and Ed.

They're both coming to the end of Year Twelve. It's the last night of official classes in fact, and everyone's off doing different things to celebrate the end of High School, blowing off steam before final exams start. Lucy, an art-obsessive and talented glass-blower has been roped into a double date by her best friend. What she'd rather be doing is hunting shadows. Well, 'Shadow' and 'Poet'.

Shadow is the pseudonym of one of Melbourne's more talented young graffiti artists – a Banksy-esque social commentator and visual symbolist. Poet is his cohort. A clever writer who enhances Shadow's artworks with telling titles or accompanying poetry. Lucy is desperate to find Shadow (or Poet). She's been searching for them for weeks. She can see things in Shadow's art that resonate with her and she would do almost anything to talk to him.

Luckily she manages to convince her friend, her friend's date and her own blind date into following her on a Shadow-Hunt. She convinces them that it might be a fun way to waste the last night of Year Twelve. Although Lucy herself is taking up the search in earnest, she suggests that her companions would be able to use it as a kind of false-quest. An excuse to party-hop and hang around in dark cityscapes.

Poor Ed, however, is Lucy's blind date. The last thing he wants to do is follow Lucy's plan of hunting for Shadow all night by hitting parties and cruising through Shadow's known hot-spots. Partly because he got into this blind date unwillingly. He's just gotten out of a relationship and isn't looking to date anyone, no matter how much his friend needs him to make up the fourth in the group.

Also, also... because Ed is Shadow.

There is some fine writing in this. Shadow/Ed's best friend and co-artist 'Poet' is the other POV character and his poetry, when it makes it into the book, is simultaneously affecting, brilliant and ever-so-slightly immature. Just like real poetry written by a talented, but barely trained teenager. The descriptions of artworks come through clearly and with some emotional resonance – and it's notoriously hard to represent visual art though textual-medium. A picture is worth a thousand words and so-forth.

The plot has a few twists and surprises, redemptions and growth, all in a night. I feel only the barest compunction in revealing Ed's true identity because the reader finds that out early on – there are other surprises in the book. Why Poet is in trouble... The identity of the mysterious stranger at the party... The tale of Lucy's last boyfriend and what she did to him...

Part of the fun is seeing Ed squirm during Lucy's penetrating and uncomfortable detective-work. Or comparing the real person in front of her with her imaginings of Shadow, the romantic-artist archetype, while Ed finds a kind of amused distaste at her ideal. There are some interesting discussions and themes around the quirkiness of love. The situation with Lucy's (estranged? divorcing? loving?) parents is really well handled. Love works in odd ways. So does art.

This is a great book with a fun set up. Not too long, funny, insightful and well-handled. And just edgy and honest enough to keep YA readers of both sexes intrigued. The rest of the shortlist better be pretty damn good.

THE LIFE OF A TEENAGE BODY-SNATCHER

by Doug MacLeod
312 pages, Penguin Books Australia

Review by SF Winser

Heads-up at the start: I read this one as part of my quest to read as many of the YA shortlisted books for the big Aussie children's fiction award. This has apparently screwed up my judgement. Be warned.

The Life of a Teenage Body-Snatcher defies my abilities to categorise it. It's often very funny though I wouldn't quite call it a comic novel. The best I can do is: it's a black-humoured book, inspired by, and partly parody of, Victorian-era penny-dreadfuls, turned into rollicking, adventurous farce. One thing I can call it without reservation is bloody good fun.

This is supposedly YA. Forget that. Adults should jump in with both feet. No, don't do that. It's a book and you'll tear the pages. Jump in with both eyes. If you have two. And know how to jump with them.

The closest I can think of comparing this book to is Jane Austen's 'Northanger Abbey'. That, too, was a parody of the Gothic Horror dreadfuls. But it was necessarily restricted to the romance and haunted house aspects. This, by simple expedient of having a Victorian-male protagonist and being written in the 21st Century, is more far-reaching in plot. It's more adventurous, with more mature undertones and can go places other than front parlours and nice carriages.

Thomas Timewell is sixteen and wants to be a doctor. His grandfather, a man of science, has willed his body to be donated to surgeons for anatomy practice, but his mother has demanded that the body be buried. In order to fulfil his grandfather's wishes, Thomas visits the grave on the night of the burial with a shovel and some grand ambitions.

In the process he meets Plenitude, the resurrectionist, who sells fresh bodies to medical schools. Thomas ends up working with him on other burials in a mixture of curiosity, honour and blackmail.

Plenitude is an awesome character. A smart, well-spoken charmer. He's full of lies. He's full of good-will. He's full of tricks. He might have a sea of human heads in his basement. He likes orange muffins.

I picture him as a plummier, well groomed Michael Caine. He's a happy conman with a world of secrets.

But Plenitude isn't the only great character. Thomas encounters rival resurrectionists, a pack of addled society matrons with laudnum addictions, mad gypsy women covered in tattoos handing out dead mice as good luck charms, sociopathic school-masters and the worst novelist in the world. There are at least one – possibly two – bakers selling meat pies full of human meat. And the Grim Reaper shows up along the way.

There are also more than a few twists worthy of Victorian literature. A couple of laugh-out-loud moments contrast with moments of horror and even touching relationships.

This was the book in my current pile that I was most worried about. The title screamed 'supernatural horror cash-in'. It felt like the token fun novel in a shortlist full of 'worthy' literature. It ended up kickin' its fair share of literary butt. It took me a few pages to get into, and the denouement is a touch lighter in tone than I liked after the dark climax, but once I was in I enjoyed every bit of it. I'm going to try and get to a few more of Doug MacLeod's books, because this one was so very, very good.

BLACKVEIL

by Kristen Britain
464 pages, DAW Trade

Review by SF Winser

It's been ages since I've read any epic fantasy. Not the aimed-at-adults kind. And that stuff used to be my escapism of choice about 20 years ago. I've recently been thinking I should go back and see if it's just me maturing beyond an infantile genre or simply because my horizons are broader.

So I started with the first book of this series, 'Green Rider'. And loved it. It had all the action, adventure and magic I remembered from a good dose of fantasy. There wasn't anything immature... I just have broader tastes now, so I get to read this big fantasy stuff less often than I used to. Yay me for maturing and developing more eclectic tastes! Yay epic fantasy for not actually being immature and remaining one of those tastes!

(I'm not doing a good job of impressing you with my maturity here, am I?)

So I spent the next fortnight (and more money than I could afford) buying up the recent UK reissues of the older books and, eventually, the new title, 'Blackveil'.

Fantasy is, first and foremost... fun. If you don't read for fun, then bugger off, this review is not for you. There are lots of reasons to read. Intellectual stimulation and joy in artistic language can be one of them. Fun, however... Story... these have always been the main reasons for me. And there's plenty of that here.

This is very-much character based fantasy. That is not so much that the plot is driven by the characters—There're too many political infights/big bad monsters/interfering supernatural forces to be able to claim that as entirely true—but that readers tend to fall in love with the characters and want to see what happens to them next.

Karigan is our main character. She's a sixteen year-old student, daughter of a self-made wealthy man and she's just been expelled from school for fighting with bullies. In a mixture of self-righteous huff and confidence that she can walk across the country without problems and explain the situation to her gruff-but-loving father face-to-face, she sets off into the wild without telling anyone where she's going.

And then a King's Messenger—a Green Rider—falls off his horse in front of her, two arrows in his back and a message she MUST deliver or the kingdom will fall to dark forces.

And so begins Karigan's life of adventure. She has been chosen by the Green Riders, who have a bit of magic in their make-up, to perform the task of messenger until she dies or is rejected by the messenger service. The death thing happens to lots of riders.

Each of the novels is, in a way, stand alone. There is a minor story arc which must be resolved and usually is. However, they fit into a broader arc involving an amorphous, ancient Big Bad, a star-crossed romance or two and ancient races, ancient lineages and the history of the Green Riders and their sister organisation The Black Shields. The later books also have a minor character arc involving a gentlemen thief, some pirates and an ancient magic.

They're fun and new in lots of ways. There is magic, but most of it's minor in scope—no grand flame-throwing mages here. Karigan is involved in battles for the kingdom, but usually in small ways. The simple fact that Karigan is pretty much just a glorified postal-rider makes this an unusual take on fantasy from the beginning.

In Blackveil Karigan has joined a quest to investigate the tainted land of the Big Bad I mentioned earlier. He is missing in time, the wall that separates his twisted lands is temporarily breached and if any investigation of the old, overtaken Eletian (aka Elven) ruins is going to happen, it must happen now. But this involves a party of Elts, one of whom once tried to assassinate Karigan, an Eletian princess who doesn't want to go and a brand new assassin sent by the Princess-to-be's family to kill Karigan before the King falls in love with her any more than he already has.

This isn't a Frodo-sque adventure into Mordor, with the fate of the world in balance. It's a dangerous and deadly journey, in bad company, for unknown and probably non-existent reward.

The magic systems are subtle and interesting. As is typical of ongoing stories involving magical or superheroic powers, Karigan's very minor abilities get a bit of feature-creep. But they remain, always, taxing and dangerous. The varied and always 'minor' powers of the Green Riders are handled very well by Britain. The wild magic of Blackveil and its minions is creepy and creeping. There's no feeling of 'Dungeons and Dragons-Lite' that pervades many fantasy series. The magic here comes from many places and is often very hard to access. When it is used, the effects are minimal and sometimes counterproductive.

Speaking of counter-productive, Britain has a great way of interweaving character interactions that makes the world feel very real—good characters, acting for good reasons, end up accidentally advancing their own destruction, or end up helping out the 'bad guys'. And vice versa. And some good characters aren't entirely good. And some bad characters aren't entirely bad. Each side has its share of moral-grey-area inhabitants.

Not to say that there are two sides. There are factions, and dynasties and families and societies and individuals who all have their own sometimes conflicting agendas. The background Big Bad only really puts in a truly directed appearance toward the latter end of the series—every other 'negative' plot device is done second-hand or for nefarious purposes that have nothing to do with the overly ambitious 'Take over the world' plan of the traditional Big Bad.

And that brings me to my main problem with the series. This is a great approach but... well... after four rather thick books I'm starting to pine a bit for a traditional resolution. We need the Big Bad defeated. Karigan and the King need to get their groove on or one of them needs to move on. The secret ambitions of the otherwise benevolent Black Shields towards Karigan need to be revealed and whatever the hell is going on with her and the God of Death really needs to be sorted soon or I'm gonna start getting grumpy. Also: fix the four-book problem of the hole in the damn D'yer Wall already. It's all well and good to keep this grand theme stuff in the background—the real world does work more like that, of course—but we DO need this stuff to be worked out eventually. And soonish. This IS fantasy. We read it because it's not the real world. I really want that revelation soon. Especially since Britain takes a few years to write each book.

ABOUT A GIRL

by Joanne Horniman
194 pages, Allen & Unwin

Review by SF Winser

This is a Joanne Horniman book. If you don't know what that means, you should pick up one of her other works. 'Mahalia' is good bet. Or this one. It's all good.

'About a Girl' is just that. Anna, a young woman in a minor funk has moved away from home for the first time (we learn about why as the book progresses). Across a room one night she sees a girl playing guitar – Flynn – and is smitten. The book is about Anna and Flynn working out their relationship through its early stages. It's about a girl. Which one is up to the reader to decide.

Like the other books Horniman has written the prose here is gorgeous. Lyrical with a hint of sadness.

I have only one problem with this book: all the characters are physically beautiful and are described as such at least once each. Even minor characters. Anna, Flynn, Molly, Michael, Josh, Anna's mum, her dad, her step-mum. All striking. After a while I was kinda wailing at the pages... 'What about we plain people!? Or the complete uggos? Aren't we worthy of love, too? Are only beautiful people capable of inspiring adoration?'

Otherwise it's a very wispy book. Flighty. Like the character of Flynn (and to some extent, Anna) it's deep and contradictory, Quirky and gorgeous yet a touch distant. There's a very solid sense of emotional truth and compassion, but I still felt a little apart from it. This may be the subject matter – the tale of a budding female same-sex relationship between two older teenagers is a little removed from a thirty-something male. Though I sometimes think that Horniman's focus on language, her care to the point of poetry, is always going to be more alienating to readers such as myself whose tastes don't always respond to the overtly-literary.

But Horniman I like. She's a brilliant, assured writer who creates prose that sings and characters who breathe real air and feel real pain.

And there's an odd little bit that I must mention even though I'm not sure how much it adds to the review. In the later stages, Anna looks across to a piece of graffiti that's signed 'Shadow'. Now Shadow is the name of the graffiti artist in Cath Crowley's 'Graffiti Moon' which, like 'About a Girl', has been nominated for a Children's Book Council of Australia award. They're in the same Young Adult prize-category. I don't know if this is a bit of cool inter-textual playfulness on Horniman's part or an equally cool coincidence. Either way, I just had to point it out.

JAMRACH'S MENAGERIE

by Carol Birch
348 pages, Text Publishing

Review by SF Winser

Filth. Disease. Foul aromas.

These are the heroes of this book. The story of London in the 1800s, of animals, of ship life and all their accompanying horrors and everyday dirtiness. Sh*t and dirt and smells pervade every page.

It's wonderful.

Charles Jamrach was a real person in London in the mid nineteenth century, selling animals to artists and zoos and naturalists. In 1857 one of his tigers escaped and nearly ate a small boy in mid-London. The boy was saved only when Jamrach launched himself at the tiger and forced it to spit the boy up.

This is the ficitonalised tale of Jaf, the young tiger-attack survivor. Growing up poverty-stricken, given a job in the menagerie by Jamrach and eventually going a-venturing to discover new animals himself.

It's a well-told tale with some very nice use of language – though this never gets in the way of the story. I'm still not sure what the deeper themes are, or even if there are any beyond 'survival is tough'. It's more an experiential novel than an inspirational one. We experience these things along with Jaf, wonder how we will survive them – survive poverty, survive tiger-attack, survive friendship, survive love. We follow the narrator, young Jaf., through childhood, teen years, adventures and eventual settling down. We see how he struggles with each of these. How the time before each of these happenings makes coming through his most recent circumstances tougher. I couldn't help but compare it to the bildingsroman novels of Dickens, with their emphasis on growth from childhood and onwards. In that regard, the whole time I was reading this I actually felt that the only criticism I could level was that it was too short. In 'Jamrach's Menagerie', Birch has made a world in which the reader can feel and inhabit with her characters. I kept wanting a more epic scope and a slower pace to kind of revel in her world – foul as it was. I wanted her to make this book 500 pages long. And I mean this as an actual criticism, not as some sort of backhanded compliment (though it works as that, too). This book, though not short, needed to be longer to bring it from excellent to amazing. Don't let that stop you from reading it, though. It remains excellent.

There are some absolutely knockout sections. At one point there is a slow series of deaths. Each one is uniquely horrifying and singularly affecting. Poor Jaf nearly loses his mind. It reaches almost horror-novel gruesomeness in a perfectly justified way. After so many passings it would have been easy for this to have become a numbing litany. Birch makes every single death count until even the reader is in a near-traumatised state.

There is also a wonderful mad-boy. He is disturbing and likable and simply insane. The way he inserts himself into the narrative and convinces others to take his madness seriously is elegantly handled. There's no real attempt by Birch to make his madness prophetic or real, even when she lets Jaf be sometimes seduced by it. For once, someone with mental illness in a book is not actually secretly psychic even though other characters sometimes think he is. He's just dangerously nuts.

My only other minor criticism is the title. Jamrach is the only 'real' person in the book. Jaf himself is an amalgam of at least two real people and a massive dose of made-up stuff. But Jamrach is not actually a main character. His menagerie is, at best, a secondary device and scene. The title implies a greater role of both Jamrach and/or his menagerie. It's a bit like calling 'The Lord of the Rings' 'Bilbo's Shire' or calling 'Anne of Green Gables' 'Diana's Front Parlour' or drawing a comic strip with a dog and some kids where the humour comes from a dark examination of their psyches and silly dog-jokes and calling it 'Peanuts'. It makes very little sense to me. But authors often have no say over their titles, so I can't necessarily lay that at Birch's door. It's a misleading title when Jamrach is, and his menagerie are, more middling catalysts than major players.

Smelly, shocking, well written and far too short.

THE STRANGE CASE OF ORIGAMI YODA

by Tom Angleberger
141 pages, Amulet Books

Silly, this book is. Laugh you will. Cry you will probably not. Be amazed you may. Fun to write this way it is. Too long this title has become.

Review by SF Winser

Tommy is in middle school. He hangs about with some of the less popular kids, though he's not a total outcast. One of the kids he sits with, however, is almost that far gone.

Dwight is eccentric to say the least. Dwight doesn't care about what anyone thinks of him. Not even his teachers. Sometimes Dwight seems hyper-smart. Usually he seems hyper-dumb. He gets straight As in math and straight Fs in everything else. The kind of kid who eats so many canned peaches at lunch that it makes him spew.... because he felt like eating enough peaches to make him spew. Or who wipes up spilled drink with the shirt he's still wearing. One thing he is good at, is origami. He even makes up his own origami patterns.

One day Dwight creates an origami Yoda, henceforth known with the honorific capital: Origami Yoda. This would be cool, except that, being Dwight, he does a bad Yoda impression and starts wandering the school, with Origami Yoda on the end of his finger like a finger-puppet, giving silly advice to random people. He even gets in trouble in class for refusing to remove Origami Yoda from his finger.

The thing is... somehow... this un-asked for advice seems to be perfect. Almost wise.

Dwight, the total loser, can't be responsible. Especially since Dwight has knowingly disobeyed Origami Yoda's advice... and been stung for it. There has to be more going on than that.

Tommy is determined to find out if Origami Yoda is lucky, psychic or just weird.

He needs to know because Origami Yoda's most recent piece of advice is for Tommy to ask out the girl he likes. A girl who Tommy knows is well out of his league. So Tommy has put together this book – a casefile – of his and other's encounters with Origami Yoda's sage (and sometimes plain weird) advice. One of his friends is skeptical and provides chapter notes at the end. Another of his friends is good at drawing and illustrates the casefile. Other kids in the school provide chapters, or recordings or txt messages of what happened when they asked Origami Yoda for advice. It's all evidence for Tommy to weigh in deciding whether or not to ask Sara to the dance.

And that's the rather cute set-up. It's aimed straight at the 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' readership with its heavily-illustrated, middle-school worries and happenings.

Though it's rather short, 'The Strange Case of Origami Yoda' is actually pretty damn funny. Even better, it's rather clever. What seems like a few thematically linked short stories - the story of Origami Yoda and the Snapped Pencils, the story of Origami Yoda and the Cheetos Hog and so forth - start to feed into each other and, at the end, we find we've actually been shown a set of clues to a bigger mystery that weaves throughout the entire book. While it's an obvious thing to compare this to 'Wimpy Kid...' I think I like the characters and plotting and even the jokes better in this. It's a shorter book, but a better one. It's both unexpectedly smart and cheerfully silly. It even includes instructions on how to make a 'simple' Origami Yoda.

I read this in two short sittings and enjoyed myself immensely. I've been stressed that I had to go to work today because it meant that I had to wait before writing this review and telling you Squawk—Readers all about it. It's an excellent piece of junior fiction, aimed mainly at older boys and young ‘tween males. But I'm pretty sure it'll get a bit of happy gender cross-over and age-drift. There are plenty of references only die-hard Star Wars geeks and adults will get. I'm already looking forward to the sequel 'Darth Paper Strikes Back'.

DEATH NOTE

by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata
Viz Media, Volumes 1 to 12 (and including 13 'How to Read Death Note')

Review by SF Winser

Death Note is a gothic, supernatural detective novel done as manga. Its plot twists and turns like an offramp designed by a stoned dervish on a rollercoaster. The amount of plot twists, backstabbing and plotting that occur necessitated the creation of volume 13 'How to Read...' which has some nice interviews and chapter breakdowns of the plotting that doesn't always get pagetime enough to easily follow. How the hell anyone followed the plot when it was a month-per-chapter serial in a manga magazine is beyond me. I started to get worried if I had more than a gap of a week between reading entire volumes. It's a series that you must dedicate yourself to reading through in one go.

The basic idea is that there is a team of police trying to track down the world's most prolific serial killer who is killing people by some unknown supernatural means. They are assisted by the enigmatic 'L', a secretive and Machiavellian private detective who mostly communicates via computer screen and whose face has never been revealed.

The first twist – and it's not really that major – is that the main character in the series, Light Yagami, IS the serial killer. He's a college student who finds a Death Note, a supernatural killing tool that is possessed by a deceptively dumb and bored Shinigami/Death God. It's not so much a twist as it is the basis of the entire story. We always know that Light is killing criminals using his Death Note. He wants to make the world a better place. But the detectives – with whom he sometimes works – never know the devil in their midst. Or do they? Maybe someone suspects? Or are they wrong? No, no one suspects. Yes they do. Crap! Now they're dead.

NOW no one suspects.

The real fun of this book is the plotting and counterplotting of serial-killer Light and super-detective L. Both brilliant and both playing mind-games with the other for their very survival. Imagine Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty at a Masquerade Ball where they each have a poisoned cup of wine and have to trick the other into drinking it – once they find out which partygoer is the real enemy. But they have to realise that if they're too smart about it, their foe will figure them out before there's a chance to get away alive. It's a vicious and dramatic counterplay that lasts for entire volumes and... well... let's say you won't see the outcome of THAT little battle coming. The new and inventive ways Light creates to get away with his mass-murder are brilliant and of headache-inducing complexity.

No, the real fun is the artwork that is rather stylistically dark yet somehow hyper-real at the same time. In particular, the character-design of L and his poses/acting. They're brilliantly weird and affecting. There are some nice biblical artistic references that are sometimes important, sometimes deliberately obscuring and every so often just chucked in because manga artists think biblical references are cool.

No, the best fun is the constant moral questions thrown at the reader. Light's a GOOD guy. No he's not, he's evil. But he's trying to make the world a better place and succeeding! But his methods suck, so does he still count as a good guy? And will he kill innocents to protect his new world and is he justified if he does so? If the world were to get worse by stopping him, would it still be the right thing to do? Has Light been corrupted by an evil power and if so, is he still evil? I know that this book gets the odd bit of flak from social commentators for promoting an obsession with death and the occult. That's very much missing the point. There's more than a bit of philosophising about good and bad, right and wrong. To do that, the creators needed to take the book to some dark places. And the conclusions the creators tend towards are usually pretty moral high ground kind of stuff. Most people reading this book will come away better people even if they also want to wear too much black and get tattoos of Death Gods eating apples on their arms.

Sometimes the plotting gets too obtuse, some of the motivations are a little laboured and there's the odd bit of fan-service artwork thrown in. Light's Goth-Lolita 'girlfriend' is disturbingly dumb and submissive (in many senses of the word). She'd be bad enough to get the creators accused of sexism if it weren't for the fact there are many equally smart women in the books. Or are, until being a smart woman anywhere near Light gets them killed. There are some almost silly plot points – a tennis match!?!? What the hell? The ending, if it hadn't been so natural and well set up from the very beginning would be almost classic deus ex machina. Like, with actual gods.

Still, there's a reason why this is one of the more popular manga series out there. It's stylish, smart, deep and very well done. It's a lot of fun and it doesn't go for the twenty-million-billion-and-a-half volume running time of some other popular manga series. A definite bonus. It has a beginning a hyper-convoluted middle and a properly planned ending. It's certainly one of the better manga series that I've read.

THE EVOLUTION OF CALPURNIA TATE

by Jacqueline Kelly
340 pages, Henry Holt and Company

Review by S.F. Winser

Science-y kids rock!

It's amazing the parallels between this book and the story-within-a-story from 'The Selected Works of TS Spivet', another book I recently read about kids and curiosity. I won't point out too many of them, lest I ruin either book but the themes of science-love and feminism done as historical-fiction are very broad in both, almost to the point where I regret reading them so close together.

'The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate', however, is more Junior Fiction oriented. There are a few adult concepts, but it's not an adult book in the same way as 'Spivet'. By now, Booksquawk readers should realise that that doesn't mean it lacks depth, or is even less deep than an adult novel. It's just deep in a different way.

'Evolution' won a Newberry Honor, which it deserves for its richness. It's the story of a young girl in 1899, in Texas, who is the only daughter of seven siblings. It's about her relationship with her off-handed and off-putting grandfather, with her growing love for Nature and Science. It's about post-slave-era Southern towns. It's a book about finding your way through competing expectations.

There's actually very little story. Calpurnia makes it through several months of normal life. She deals with the politics of having a cute best friend, a desirable older brother, a mother with expectations. It's diary-like in it's gentle meandering through the events of her life. It's evocative of a time and place. It's deep in its love for knowledge-seeking.

Kelly creates some wonderful characters, all very real and with typically domestic desires, and into the mix throws a science-obsessed old man and his hyper-curious granddaughter and lets them work their way through normal life. There's no real follow-through plot, just happenings that take time. There's just... growth. Evolution. It's more a study of a time, a type of place and the character of Calpurnia.

It's a simple, beautiful and deceptively deep little book. I love that it’s a book set in the South that just accepts evolution as fact – Quotes from Darwin's 'Origin of the Species' act as chapter openers and thematic hints as to the content of the following chapter. Both Calpurnia and her grandfather are great admirers of Darwin. It's nice to puncture the stereotype of Southern good-ol'-boys who do what Preacher says so gently and so well.

When I read YA and Junior Fiction books I always have one eye on to whom will I recommend this book. It's kinda my job. This is one I wouldn't hesitate to jam in the hand of almost anyone. There's nothing nasty, there's some genuinely good writing, there's some nice emotional and thematic depth and it's simply a good read. In fact, because it promotes the idea of girl-scientists (and simple Science) with such love and wonder, I'm probably going to have to restrain myself from forcing it into the hands of random library patrons. It's a book that radiates goodness.

MOON OVER MANIFEST

by Clare Vanderpool
351 pages, Delacorte Press

Review by S.F. Winser

This is a Newberry winner about small-town America. It's actually more like two historical novels, a generation apart.

In 1935, Abilene Tucker has been sent to Manifest, Kansas because her father is worried about her following him on his nomadic railway job. Abilene has heard stories about Manifest for years. And when she gets there, she and some new friends decide to hunt a spy mentioned in some old letters Abilene finds. But her real task is to try and track down the threads of her father's childhood in this town that has taken on almost mythic proportions in her mind.

Because she can't find any. It's been a big part of his life and her upbringing, but now that Abilene has finally arrived, there's no trace of her father ever having been there.

And that's not even the real story. The REAL story is the story told to Abilene as she tries to understand how this could be. The story of Manifest as it was in 1917. Abilene, in many ways, is just a bridging device. Her own little quests and happenings are endearing enough, and are a great way to perform narrative reveals, but it's the story of the oppressive mine-owner, and Prohibition and WWI and friendship and Depression-era style con-jobs in a small town that really drive the book.

The interweaving of war letters, reminiscence, newspaper articles and dialogue is brilliantly handled. The characters are well-drawn. Abilene is wonderful in 1937. Equally wonderful are Jinx and Ned, the core of the story from 1917. As is Shady, who is one of the characters to appear in both narrative lines. And many others are nicely drawn and, more importantly, real.

I didn't even notice that this had won the Newberry for children's literature when I decided to read it. When I did, I was annoyed. There was too much overtly literary styling. Vanderpool often gets well into telling the story, seems to notice that she hasn't done anything 'Literary' for a while and then throws in a bit of 'Literary Doings' before getting back to the storytelling. And these are often jarring. It's been a while since I've hated a first line so very much, for example. 'The movement of the train rocked me like a lullaby' is actually... okay. A little self-aware, but forgivably so. But then, besides closing her eyes, Abilene remains alert and agile-minded for the rest of the chapter. There's nothing lullaby about anything here. If anything, she's closing her eyes to become more focussed upon her thoughts, which are edged with worry. It's literary styling for the sake of looking literary. It really irked me. There are further examples. The overly-symbolic timing of the lancing of a wound is another clunker.

But I'd promised a colleague that I'd read this one fast, so I didn't blow it off then and there. And Vanderpool picked me up and carried me along into this intricate little story, where if the main revelation about Abilene's father is predictable, everything else is far from so. The twist relating to the old gypsy woman is so left-field that I was genuinely gob-smacked for a few moments. In a good way. This deserved the Newberry, despite my grumpiness with Vanderpool's sometimes fumbling stylings. Moon Over Manifest is an excellent little book that will resonate with adults as much as with children.

THE SELECTED WORKS OF T.S. SPIVET

by Reif Larse
400 pages, Penguin Press

Review by S.F. Winser

Huzzah for Science!

Curious kids are my reading theme for the past few weeks. (Coming soon: my review of 'The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate' and 'Moon Over Manifest'. Both about curiously curious children.)

T.S. Spivet is a child. A child with a scientist's eye and the drafting skills of a fully-trained diagrammatist. He has been published in journals and is sought-out by scientists to do their illustrating for their articles.

His mother is an entomologist on a quixotic bug-hunt, searching for a species that may not exist. She is barely present in her children's lives, but T.S. still sees her as an inspiration and unknowing colleague. (His mother doesn't know how famous he actually is, caught in her introspective quest.) His dad is a stoic, laconic rancher who simply does not understand his son's mind.

TS also has a sister. A talented actress, a normal teenager in an abnormal household, she's the closest thing to a friend TS has, but she's also so far removed from his experience of the world as to be more a research subject than a sibling.

He also has a brother. A companion. A rough-and-tumble, curious brother who rides and shoots and is the apple of his father's eye.

Or was, until the Accident.

Since Lanyon's death the house has been caught in a little puddle of quiet hurt. Especially TS and his father. But this has just driven them further apart.

And then The Smithsonian calls. TS's work has qualified him for a year-long position as a resident illustrator for the museum. They think he's an adult – why wouldn't they?

So TS runs away. He rides across the country, stowing away in freight cars to get to his new job. His family doesn't need him. Some of them may even prefer him gone.

So he goes.

And that's the story. It's a brilliant little set-up. But that's not the genius of this book. The best bit is that the text is interwoven with TS's near-obsessive cataloguing of objects, occurrences, distances travelled and observances. It's a story told through diagrams and notes as much as by narrative.

And through it all is this wonderful feeling of science. Now most people wouldn't call science a 'feeling'. But that's what comes through here. Curiosity and joy of discovery and the comforts of knowledge and the challenge of the unknown and the feeling of gleeful, wondrous striving that are really wrapped up in the practice of science. TS feels it. The story-within-a-story that he encounters on his journey expands upon it. The people he meets once he completes his journey embody it.

And it's really, really well handled. The book is worth reading for any of these elements.

There's also some nice stuff about reconnecting with loved ones. Especially the way TS reconnects with someone while they aren't even present.

There are two major problems I had with it, though.

The ending is rushed.

And the build-up to the ending is silly. It's trying to convey the fun and sometimes necessary irreverence those in the scientific community have when competing with the business and stuffed-shirt brigade who are often in charge of scientific enquiries. Instead it ends up showing these guys as eccentric weirdos. Kind-hearted weirdos, but after a book so far full of depth of feeling and meaning to turn to borderline farce is just jarring. The silliness was there to cut through the potential for seeing the treatment of science as over-reverential but ended up overdone in the opposite direction. And the 'Business with the wormhole' just didn't work for me at all.

Minor issues also abound. I'm getting a bit sick of 'narrative-within-narrative' as a device. It sucks for the same reason flashbacks and dreams suck. It's often lazy (not in this case, but leave me alone, I'm ranting) but mainly because it's a separate 'ask' of the reader. 'I've gotten you involved in this story, now I'm going to ask you to get involved in this one that is in at least one way, only tangentially related'. The second story here is really good and is the basis for several plot points simply by existing... but it's still an 'ask' the reader doesn't expect.

Also, TS parent's reactions to his running away are really unbelievable for huge chunks of The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. (Some aspects of them are explained later, and one of them is SUPPOSED to be unbelievable, but even beyond that...far too unreal.)

But I heartily approve of this idea of science finally getting a proper treatment in novels. The literary community is often seen as anti-science, pro-woo and full of woolly thinking. I love anyone who manages to portray the beauty and art and humanity of science through art and do so so very, very well.

THE CLOCKWORK THREE

by Matthew J. Kirby
391 pages, Scholastic Press

Review by S.F. Winser

Steampunk, as a genre, tends towards the bombastic. Giant machines, showy magic, corsets, explosions and smoke and fog. And that's hella fun. I refuse to complain about that in any way.

But it does leave room for someone to try a different approach.

'The Clockwork Three' is a delightful, well-balanced and restrained work that revolves around three children and their very real-world problems. It happens to be set in a New-York-analogue city in the late 1800s and has magic... possibly. It has clockwork machines which are (for the most part) entirely plausible. It has real-world historical tidbits (Kirby is an historian of early New York and uses this to a very atmospheric advantage) that weave through this fictional city and make it feel realer than many other authors’ attempts at rendering the actual New York.

The main characters are children with goals that are based on historical starting points. Freedom from indentured servitude, the stability of a poverty striken family, tracking down long-lost parents. Any magic here serves the plot; it doesn't in any way drive it. It's fantasy by stealth. Perhaps Magical Realism might be a better subgenre label, much as I hate that term. No one is trying to Save The World or Rescue The Princess or collect the Seven Plot Coupons of Power. This is a set of three children who are trying to make their lives not suck quite so badly and who end up needing to rely on each other to complete these goals. One of them is a clockmaker's apprentice, but it is the three children who work as three interlocked cogs to move the plot forward.

And as I said, the magic is elegantly restrained. I could list witches, golems, psychics, robots, enchanted fiddles, potions... all of these are in the book. Or, they aren't, if you choose not to see them. And when they appear, most of these elements are built into the background reality. It would be possible to interpret these books as containing absolutely no magic at all and make a convincing case for it. Yes the violin is special... but maybe it's just a very good violin that inspires a very good musician to musical heights. Is the robot a magical golem, or simply a very advanced, mobile Babbage machine? Is the psychic actually talking to the dead... or is she a convincing folk-psychologist with a good heart?

I received this book as a Christmas gift from my wife, striking terror into my heart. She likes to buy books that are within my range of preferred reading (YA fantasy in this case), but that I'd be unlikely to pick up myself in my headlong rush to keep up with the newest thing that might ensnare a reluctant teen library patron. This means that I often get books that... are not to my taste. (Let's leave it at that. There's a chance she might read this. I'd like live.) But sometimes they are unexpected corkers. I devoured 'The Clockwork Three'. Drowned in it. There are one or two points where the fineness is thinner, to state a point as subtly as possible (a couple of deus ex machina moments. Some of the later character interaction is a touch forced) but so much of it is so well done that I feel like a bore to point it out. Such are the risks of those who dare to review. Sometimes being honest makes you feel like a jerk and an unworthy one. This book is undeserving of me picking-nit. It's a wonderful read that I loved dearly.

SMALLWORLD

by Dominic Green
339 pages, Fingerpress

Review by S.F. Winser

Booksquawk Disclosure: This was a free review copy.

Smallworld, or THE small world is a tiny planetoid named Mt Ararat. It is, essentially, two big asteroids, imperfectly smashed together into a kind of rocky snowman, fused together by a core of heavy metal and orbiting in the rings of a gas giant in another solar system. It is an odd and cool little place, seemingly built of pure improbability. It's big enough for one of the globes to hold a large farm, a lake, a small town and not much else. And the other globe, inhabited mostly by corpses, has stories all its own.

Mt Ararat is home to the Reborn-In-Jesus clan. A family made up of the very few surviving members of a psuedo-Christian utopian society that, a few years ago, failed at being utopian, Christian or even a society once most of the people who were to populate this society died due to devil-attack (yes, they were attacked and killed by a mechanical devil). The survivors include only two living adults (Mr and Mrs Reborn-In-Jesus) and a herd of their children both biological and adopted. The book is a story of their adventures and the secrets that even a tiny speck of a planet, in the middle of nowhere, in a sea of galaxies can contain.

The approach Green takes to his story – or, more honestly, to this set of interlinked stories – is attractively odd. This is far from hard Sci-Fi... but Green has jammed some rather nice hard SF concepts in – along with some decidedly soft SF ones, too. (A faster than light ship is technically also a time machine, he says a few times. True. But that doesn't mean that I can use a FTL drive to change localised time. A plane is technically a car with wings but that doesn't mean I can drive it through the Chunnel. Usually the reader lets him get away with these little things for the sake of the story) It's not quite a comedy... but it's sometimes as funny as hell. It's not quite an action-adventure... but there's violence and gun-slinging aplenty. I admit it took me quite some time to get into the book, partly because of this approach, partly because the narrative structure is more that of consecutive short-stories rather than the whole, narrative arc I'd been expecting. But once I was in I was hooked. There are intrigues and cool ideas and funny lines and more exploding space cruisers than one tiny planetoid of religious farmers should ever see. Green is writing whatever feels like weird fun, screw you if you don't like it, go read something else. I love that he does this. This is why people should read stuff from indie publishers: you get the novel stylistic approaches and out-of-the-ordinary ideas that aren't straightforward or easily marketable.

There are some great characters – “Uncle” Anchorite is the stand-out – the secretive hermit with reserves of cunning so deep he probably stole other people's cunning in order to become more cunning. (Also, I like repeating the word cunning until it loses all meaning and starts sounding rude.) He's not all he seems and his link to the homicidal devil that wiped out most of the colonists is the least of his secrets. The tribe of similarly-named children are tougher to get a handle upon, and sometimes blended together for me in ways that weren't conducive to a pleasant read, but a few of them do eventually stand out. The escape artist and criminal von Trapp is another semi-lovable rogue and nice construction. Both of these scampish good-guys/bad-guys tended to just the right side of nastiness to still keep some reader sympathy.

One thing I really liked about the book was the sense of a greater universe. Politics change, history has happened and all of it impacts on even this tiny little worldlet. There is only one scene that happens on another planet, but we still get the feeling that Mt Ararat is just one other world out of millions. There are fleets of ships out there... somewhere... all with their own goals. Political parties, enemy robot armies, government departments, manufacturing concerns all exist out there and feel like they are all interacting with each other in ways that never effect Mt Ararat, but still go on. It's amazing the way Green has managed to make this impossibly busy outworld still feel tiny not just physically, but within the greater socio-economical/political/historical universe. There may be many, many unexpected visitors and pirates and prisoners and traders and itinerant re-education officers and mining corporations... far more than a tiny chunk of rock should ever expect to see. But this never seems to impact on the feeling that Mt Ararat is remote and physically-tiny and politically insignificant.

This isn't perfect by any means. As I said, some of the characters are too indistinctly drawn. Not all of the little narrative threads that link some of the stories are completed by the end of the book, leading to some dissatisfaction lingering (What's the plan for the psychic psycho locked in the dungeon!?) and the episodic approach is not exactly to my personal taste. But what Smallworld is, is the work of a talented writer having lots of very smart fun.