“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

The Giver by Lois Lowry
Houghton Mifflin (1993)
192 pages

This is one of those books that I don’t really have anything much to say about. It seems like everyone has read the book, and most of those who have read it loved it. I liked it a lot, though it won’t make it into any sort of favourite books lists of mine. I especially liked the main character, Jonas.

This book won the Newbery Medal in 1994.

It’s the future, and everything is perfect. No issues, no problems. Family members get together and talk about their feelings, everyone is polite, there’s no hunger or poverty or war, and everything is carefully planned and executed. Everything and everyone is equal, the same, normal. Welcome to the future: utopia has never been this flawed.

Everything starts out very smoothly. Jonas’s community seemed like a very nice place to live in, and I began to wonder what was wrong with this world Lowry has created. After a while, though, the sameness of everything gets a bit disquieting, and when I realised what was missing — colours, memory, music, truth, human emotions — I was rather freaked out by the whole thing. Jonas’s father and the baby that was released was bad enough, but when Jonas’s parents just laugh when he asks whether they love him, it gave me a shudder. Use another word, they say. “Love” is not a precise word, they say: “[it's] a very generalised word, so meaningless it’s become almost obsolete”.

Lovely little place, this utopia. Looks like I’m not moving there after all. Any list about books concerning dystopian fiction should have The Giver in it, that’s what I think.

I like the ending, uncertain as it is. Not only Jonas gets to make his choice and struggle with what comes with it, we get to decide ourselves what happens. It left me thinking long after I closed the book.

I have the other two books by Lois Lowry which are loosely related to The Giver in my reading list: Gathering Blue and Messenger. I think I’ll also pick up Lowry’s Number the Stars one of these days.

The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor
Speak (an imprint of Puffin Books) (2007)
First published 2006
400 pages

This, to put it simply, is a re-imagining of Lewis Caroll’s Wonderland.

Fanfiction? This definitely fits the bill. An articulate explanation about fanfiction can be found here (yes, I like stealing links from other people) and this pretty much summarises my thoughts. In a more readable manner. Without flailing around. The inside back cover of the book says — jokingly, I hope — that Beddor has gone into hiding “to avoid the impassioned vigilantes at literary odds” with his trilogy. That sounds like fandom to me, yep. The only reason he’s not in (more) trouble is because the books are out of copyright.

I love Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Though the Looking Glass. And, as much as I love the source material, I have nothing against Beddor for writing this — it’s an interesting premise. I think I saw someone mention somewhere that The Looking Glass Wars does to Wonderland what Wicked did for Oz: gave it a second chance. Not that I’ve read Wicked yet. While I am glad Wonderland is getting more attention again, I heartily wish that Beddor was a better writer, or had a better editor, though.

I like the idea, but the execution is terrible. (“OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!” goes the part of me which couldn’t resist making a pun of my own writing, and in Wonderland, a card soldier dies. Perhaps one of the Spades.)

It starts off with Alice Liddell storming off angrily from a perplexed Reverend Dodgson, claiming that he had ruined her story, twisted her descriptions of Wonderland. We find that she is actually Alyss Heart, the heir of the throne of Wonderland, and her Aunt Redd is bent on claiming the throne for herself. I have no real problems with the prologue, but I started off quite badly in Wonderland — I can’t like the terms. “Wonderlander” was particularly grating to me and I trip over it each time I come across it, and it’s used often, so the narrative became really stilted for me. (Well. Maybe that’s my problem and not Beddor’s, but “Wonderlander”? Why am I having such weird issues with this book. Then there is “Wondertropolis” — I nearly banged my head on my desk at this one.) And the so stark division between good and bad — White Imagination and Black Imagination — made me wince. Wonderland or not, I doubt any world is divided like a chess board.

The pacing was uneven; it was better when Alyss was in London and was Alice Liddell than it was when she returned to Wonderland. Too many info dumps too often; I don’t know why Beddor felt it necessary to rationalise everything that was nonsensical in the original story. Not that there weren’t any clever moments in the book; there were, but it gets bogged down by the bad writing.

Things picked up in the middle, and the end came quickly enough. It gets strangely Star Wars-like near the end. The dialogue could be really bad at times, especially Redd’s. Awful sound effects, too, for example: “Clangk! Skrich-onk!” No, those weren’t typos. And the book’s more focussed on action than character development; aside from Alyss, most of the characters are quite one-dimensional, and I don’t just mean the cards. Ha ha. (Whoops, there goes another card soldier.)

Well, at least the cover is sleek and well-designed. And there extra pages in the book, including colour pages and illustrations for the story. I find the coloured drawing of seven-year-old Alyss quite sweet looking, with a passing resemblance to the actual Alice Liddell. Her tutor, though, looks like a creature from Star Wars. Almost like a very tall Yoda, to be honest.

Oh well. There you go. I don’t know if this comes off as overly harsh because of my attachments to the original Alice books. I’m not sure how well the story would hold with no previous experience with Wonderland — I think it would be able to stand on its own — and I wonder what someone who hasn’t read the original books would think of The Looking Glass Wars.

Will I read the sequels? We’ll see. Seeing Redd is already out, and the third book is scheduled for a 2008 release. I’ll pick them up if I see them in the library. Can’t say I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for them, though.

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This book was recced by Rhinoa for the Herding Cats challenge.

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner
Greenwillow (an imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books) (1998)
(First published 1996)
224 pages

Uh. I guess I am in the minority for not loving this book like most other YA fantasy fans out there? I liked it well enough; I just didn’t love it like I expected I would.

Also, I must admit I am one of those people who actually do judge a book by its cover. I believe publishers have the facility (and the responsibility!) to make covers that are both attractive and relevant to the story, and this particular cover leaves me frowning at it. I can’t make out who it’s supposed to be. I wonder if the actual target audience of the book would find the cover attractive? I certainly don’t. I wouldn’t have idly picked this one up just because of the book design, that’s for sure — it’s a good thing that I pay attention to book recommendations. ;)

The Thief is the first book in Megan Whalen Turner’s trilogy, and it’s the first book by the author I’ve read. The book is also a Newbery Honor book. It’s in the first person (which probably explains my grouses with it!) and set in world almost like a Greek version of our own. Gen, the narrator, brags that he’s the best thief ever, and ends up being caught. He’s then roped into the King’s service into stealing something really valuable.

It started off really slowly for me. I started it, got distracted because I didn’t quite care for Gen’s voice and stopped reading and had to re-start again, and only did that because it was a library book and it was due in a few days. I did finish it at one sitting once I got past the second chapter; it’s a really short book.

I was rather surprised when I found out that there were cross-recommendations from those who’ve read both The Lymond Chronicles and this series — I couldn’t quite see the similarities here, but apparently it’s more obvious in the later books. I’ll continue with The Queen of Attolia and The King of Attolia, I think; I’m curious enough to see what’s up next for Gen, though I’m not in a rush to check the books out now from the library.

The story’s ok. There’s nothing that I really didn’t like — it’s just that I couldn’t find anything really outstanding in the whole narrative. I like some of the characters — Pol and Sophos, mostly, and the pantheon and world-creation myths were interesting. For a narrative in the first person, Gen really holds back a lot of things from the reader. So when things fall into place, I was rather irritated with him — shouldn’t he have said something about all this sooner? Which made the ending rather problematic, at least for me. And here comes some spoilers, sorry, since this is the part that left me feeling a bit bewildered with the whole thing.

Continue reading The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner »

Postcards from No Man’s Land by Aidan Chambers
Definitions (2007) (First published 1999)
334 pages

My initial thoughts, some of which I typed into a text document while I was reading the book: Oh. That’s a surprising start. And I remember wondering: Will there be boys kissing later on? You can just see the good influences of certain online friends creeping into my thought process, XD. The answer, by the way, is “yes”, but it’s more incidental than being something actually important to the plot.

I don’t really know much about the Second World War. The only parts that are really familiar are often the parts where my country is involved, thanks to the (compulsory) Malaysian History subject I took when I was in school. I know the major events, and some of the major battles, but when it comes down to it, I know very little of the whole thing. (It makes me wonder: whatever did I learn during that one year of World History when I was in the Fourth Form? I vaguely remember chapters about the ancient civilizations and the rise of Christianity and Islam and the Renaissance period. Surely it didn’t stop there?)

Postcards from No Man’s Land is partially about World War II. The story begins with Jacob Todd, an English boy in the present-day (1995, I think?) Amsterdam, who’s there to visit the family that had taken care of his grandfather during the Battle of Anhem, and it’s the fifty-first anniversary of the battle. Jacob, travelling alone for the first time, finds himself facing unexpected situations and having to make difficult decisions.

Parallel to his story is the story of Geertrui, the young woman who takes care of Jacob’s grandfather during WWII. The narrative switches between Jacob wandering through the streets of Amsterdam and Geertrui struggling for survival during the war, and the stories eventually come together.

I mostly liked the book. It’s well written, a bit slow at points, but the shifting narratives between Jacob (in third person) and Geertrui (in first person) didn’t bother me, which is a really good thing because the first person POV often gets on my nerves, and the last book with dual narratives — that would be Diana Wynne Jones’s The Merlin Conspiracy — left me gritting my teeth in frustration. The ending is a bit clunky and perhaps a little hasty, but it still works for me. The later parts of Geertrui’s narrative reminded me — very sharply, actually — of Daisy in Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now: there was something similar in the desperate, we-only-have-this-moment tone in both of the girls’ voices.

I found Jacob’s story more interesting than Geertrui’s. His self-consciousness and shyness and his trying to accept himself is rather endearing. And I rather liked following him around Amsterdam as he discovers the city (and himself) than reading about the hardships of war; besides, he ends up having rather interesting conversations with Daan, Geertrui’s grandson, one of them about art history. Curious stuff.

More than anything else, this is another coming-of-age story — about sexuality and discovering yourself, finding your way, making choices, falling in love. The book also touches on other issues such as euthenasia and fidelity and adultery and bisexuality, and you’re pretty much left to make up your own mind at the end of it.

This book won both the Carnegie Medal (1999) and the Printz Award (2003). Apparently the book is part of a sequence called The Dance Sequence, and this is the fifth book. Other books in the sequence are: Breaktime, Dance on my Grave, Now I Know and The Toll Bridge. The library only has the sixth (and last) book, This Is All: the Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn, which I’ll probably borrow one of these days. Not any time soon, though. It’s really, really thick! And so many frustrated reviewers. Hm. We’ll see.

Kit’s Wilderness by David Almond
Delacorte Books (2000)
240 pages

I picked up this book mostly because I recognised the title as one of the Printz winners. The Printz winners and honour books have never disappointed me yet — it’s one of the awards where I’ve consistently liked the books, compared to, say, the Carnegie medal winners, for instance. So this ended up as one of the first books I checked out from the community library. My first thought, barely a few short chapters in, was “my sister would love this book”. I have a bad habit of thinking my sister being younger than she is. She’s already almost twenty, but I still think she’s twelve or so. She loves John Green’s books, though I’ve never asked her if she preferred An Abundance of Katherines (which I still haven’t read, woe, shame, etc) or Looking for Alaska, or she loved them equally. If nothing else, the way Kit’s Wilderness lingers with you even when you put it down made me think of Looking for Alaska, especially the second half of that book.

Kit is thirteen, returning with his parents to live with his grandfather in a small coal-mining town in England after his grandmother’s death. Kit’s ancestors had lived and died in the mines, and there’s a lot of history he’s coming home to. He’s sensitive, quiet, perhaps a little too naive, and he befriends the bright, cheerful Allie and the dark and brooding John Askew. Askew gets Kit into trouble with the game of Death they play, which to many of their friends is just make believe, but Kit begins to realise that there’s something more.

The prose is haunting and careful and delicate, the imagery beautiful. The skinny ghost children Kit sees still give me a shudder when I think of them. What’s real and what’s not gets blurred steadily as the narrative moves along, and I simply stopped questioning it and just believed. The first person narrative actually works for me this time. The dialogue trips me sometimes, but often it works well enough to make me smile. (Poor Kit gets flustered so often, going “Eh? Eh?”, causing Allie to mock him, though never with real malice. Oh, Kit.) There are many threads to the story — the story of Silky, told by Kit’s grandfather whose health is slowly failing, the stories Kit writes, John Askew’s drawings and his troubled family, Allie’s love for acting — and all of them are woven together slowly and deliberately, holding everything together.

The character relationships made this work. Kit and Allie, helping each other, even when they are at odds; Kit and Askew as Kit struggles to understand him and bring him back. And then there’s the wonderful parts with Kit and his grandfather, and the stories and memories he shares with his grandson.

The pace is a bit slow, yes, but I think it suits the book’s careful dealing of darker themes.