I haven’t reviewed any books since August, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading. In fact I’ve read ten novels in the past six months.This would be more impressive if, once upon a time, I hadn’t been an English lit major who read twice that many novels in half the time, plus wrote papers on them. On the other hand, back then I was a full-time student with no responsibilities but reading, while now I’m a full-time mom who–

No. I don’t think I can come up with a negative comparison, when I’ve clearly found time to read and occasionally write about it.

It wasn’t until I compiled this list that I realized I’ve been reading a lot of sci-fi and fantasy; only one of the ten books is not sci-fi or fantasy. Which proves that despite my best efforts, I am a geek. (As if Battlestar Galactica being my number one top-ranked show ever wasn’t evidence enough of that.)

In addition to not having a broad representation of genres here, I also seem to have rated all my recent reads very highly. I hope this doesn’t indicate an indiscriminate taste in books; the day the Twilight saga appears on my reading list, you’ll know that’s the case. Until then, we’ll just chock it up to two things: #1, all these books are actually good, and #2, I don’t bother to finish books I don’t like. (If I did, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo would make two non-fantasy/sci-fi reads out of eleven–but I quit after 100 torturous pages of it, which is ironic, as I didn’t even make it to the torture scenes.)

Onward to the reviews!

1. Children of the Mind, by Orson Scott Card

The final book of the Ender Quartet is my favorite book of the series. Not only does the story careen to a satisfying conclusion, but it rectifies the flaws of the previous three books by minimizing time spent with the annoying characters and focusing on the most exciting ones–particularly Wang-Mu and a new avatar of the long-dead Peter Wiggin, who share an adventure that is less interesting for what it is than for the delightful snarky chemistry these two share, and the new perspective we get of Peter, who has previously been characterized as nothing short of an evil political mastermind.

My gripe about this book is an uncharacteristic one for me: a lot of time is devoted to romantic relationships. The pairings aren’t really the problem (though the one involving Young  Valentine is rather screwed up on multiple levels), it’s that romance isn’t Card’s strong suit, in this or in subsequent books.  He can’t seem to escape the idea that as soon as a couple recognizes romantic feelings, they must immediately marry and procreate–which isn’t a problem in itself, except that as Card applies it, he undermines his characterizations of strong females, relegating them to breeding machines.

But this quibble is really a minor one, especially in Children of the Mind (marriage and babies become bigger plot points in other books). And while I’m mentioning titles, I must comment on what a talent Card has for naming his books. Half the fun of reading Children of the Mind is paying attention to the various ways this theme plays out throughout the story. It’s both literal and figurative on multiple levels. I’d give anything to be able to come up with titles like that.

Rating: 5/5 stars

2. Ender’s Shadow, by Orson Scott Card

Have you ever wanted to read a book from another character’s perspective and find out just what they were up to and thought during all the central action? (I wish J.K. Rowling would do this for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, in which all the really interesting stuff happens to everyone but Harry.)

In Ender’s Shadow, Orson Scott Card improves a story you didn’t think could get any better by telling the same story over, following the point of view of Bean, another child genius who spends much of Ender’s Game as an enigma who, well, lurks in the shadows. The result isn’t a mere re-telling of the events, but instead completely shatters every conclusion you’d drawn about Ender’s Game. It’s a great example of what a narrator means to a story: Ender, you learn, has been an unreliable narrator, so in a sense it’s not until you get his story (well, it’s Bean’s story, but his story is inseparable from Ender’s) from another character’s perspective that you get the real story. And it’s a darn good one–though not, of course, without its flaws.

The “flaw” that stays with me the most probably really isn’t truly a flaw at all. But I imagine anyone who has children or has spent a good amount of time around children will have difficulty picturing Bean saying and doing the things that he does at the age of four. We’re not talking precociousness; this is a little boy who’s not only a genius and a prodigy, but extremely physically developed, as well (except that he’s tiny for his age). Maybe it’s because I live with an almost-one year-old, but I just cannot conjure up a mental image of a kid the Burt Squirt’s age (and he’s pretty advanced, having begun walking at 9 months) climbing out of his crib, toddling into a bathroom, lifting up the lid of a toilet tank (not the bowl, the tank), climbing inside, and hiding for a few days. But that could just be me…

Rating: 4/5 stars

3. Shadow of the Hegemon, by Orson Scott Card

It took six books, but Shadow of the Hegemon finally tells the story so tantalizingly hinted at throughout the Ender series: how Ender’s older brother, Peter, becomes the leader of a united world. Once again, preconceptions drawn through Ender’s unreliable narrative in previous books are shattered as Peter doesn’t become Hegemon in a megalomaniac bid for power; instead he’s helped by Bean, who’s trying to defeat an old nemesis who also wants to rule the world–and who, unlike Peter, is truly evil. The plot plays out rather like a game of Risk.

The best thing about this book is, of course, getting to finally know Peter for the first time–not Peter through Ender’s eyes, or through Valentine’s kinder but confused perspective, or even through the version of Peter in Children of the Mind, but actual Peter, as he really is: intensely flawed, but endlessly fascinating. And possibly a little bit crushworthy. If you’re the type of person who gets crushes on fictional characters. Which I certainly am not.

We also get to know some of Ender’s other Battle School friends a little better, in particular Petra Arkanian, who made more of an impact on Bean (or vice versa) than you realize in Ender’s Shadow, and who shines as a female lead who manages to be a consummate military mind while remaining wholly feminine. Ender’s parents, Theresa and John Paul, are fairly major characters in the Shadow saga, too, frequently providing welcome comic relief through their peculiar relationship with Peter who, for all his political shrewdness, regards them like all teenagers regard their parents: as idiots. Of course, the Wiggins are anything but idiots, which adds to the fun. If there was a whole book consisting of nothing but dialogue between Peter, Theresa, and John Paul, I’d read it.

In a departure from the previous of the Ender and Shadow books, Hegemon is, understandably, more political than sci-fi. But we do get a sci-fi element which becomes Bean’s ongoing storyline for the remainder of the series.

Rating: 5/5 stars

4. Shadow Puppets, by Orson Scott Card

On the whole I liked the third installment of the Shadow saga. The storyline about Peter nearly committing political (and literal) suicide by trying to use his former political opponent in order to secure his own power, and requiring Bean, Petra, and his parents to get him out of the colossal mess this inevitably creates, is fantastic. The Bean storyline? Not so much.

It’s not coincidental that when Bean gets a romance things go downhill story-wise, as it bears repeating that Orson Scott Card is no romance writer. All the issues I have with the romances in Children of the Mind are amplified here, as Bean and Petra embark on marriage in their tender teen years. Admittedly, when characters save the world from an alien enemy before they’re teenagers, it’s not completely inconceivable that marriage and children would be the next thing for them. My problem with it is not that it happens, but what it does to the characters, particularly Petra, whose balancing act between soldier and woman gets all out of whack as she obsesses about babies in an unnecessarily angst-ridden plot. Perhaps it’s that I just didn’t expect a sci-fi political page-turner to go there. I’m not sure, but by the time Petra gets her babies, I felt as brow-beaten and un-enthused about it as Bean does. If Card is trying to promote a message, he could stand more subtlety. Or he could let someone have Peter’s babies.

Female characters in general suffer in this book. Another Battle School graduate, Virlomi, becomes a central figure in the restructuring of the world order, but Card doesn’t depict her with a great deal of personality in this book, nor is her role in this book engaging, but rather reads like a big set-up for the next book.

The political parts of the book more than make up for any weaknesses in the relationship and characterization department, as things really ramp up for Peter’s expansion of the Hegemony. Battle School veteran Alai becomes Caliph of the unified Islamic nations, and their cooperation with Peter is tenuous as they face the threat of a dominant China–all of which, obviously, brings to mind real world conflicts. And it’s that hint of reality, of relatability, that makes for the very best sci-fi.

Rating: 4/5 stars

5. Shadow of the Giant, by Orson Scot Card

Possibly my least favorite of the Shadow series, I found this one difficult to read because so much of it is political strategy and military talk, which tends to bog me down. I’ll give Card a pass for that, as the more strategically-minded reader will likely lap that up, but Shadow of the Giant also lost me at the character level. My issues with Petra from the previous book continue in this one, and though it’s intentional on the part of the author, Bean’s story is all but finished, and circumstances have left him bitter and morose and generally unpleasant to read about. The Bean/Petra relationship is loaded with angst and at times even borders on melodramatic, which would be fine if their relationship had ever been truly healthy, but it hasn’t.

Then there’s Virlomi, who I complained about in Shadow Puppets as not being terribly interesting. She does get more interesting, but not in a way that’s a mark in Card’s favor for the development of admirable female characters. Going from fanatical to insane, engaging in the most ruthlessly manipulative tactics to amass power for herself, Virlomi makes a good villain, and I will grant that if it weren’t for Virlomi keeping me turning the pages, it might have taken me a lot longer to get through this book than it did. Still, it would be nice to have a female character in these books who I actually like. The best that can be said for Virlomi is that she’s more likable than Novinha in the Ender series.

But, since the end of this book leaves tantalizing possibilities for Card’s yet-to-be-written final installment of the Shadow saga, which I’ll be first in line to read, I can’t bring myself to give it a low rating.

Rating: 4/5 stars

6. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

At first I was leery of this wildly popular teen trilogy (knowing the content of other wildly popular teen series), but I couldn’t resist the premise (which is just about the only YA series that isn’t about vampires): a post-Apocalyptic United States (now called Panem)  in which children are chosen annually from each of the redesignated “districts” to fight each other to the death on 24-hour television which the rest of the country’s citizens–including the children’s families–are required to watch. Gruesome, I know, but I love me some dystopian fantasy.

The protagonist is a teenage girl named Katniss, and she is everything a female action hero should be. Convincingly  hardened by a lifetime of poverty and, after her father’s death in a mining accident, bearing the burden of her family’s survival, Katniss is neither too skilled to be believable, nor too confused or naïve about human behavior and matters of the heart to make you want to shake her, like certain other YA fantasy heroines. It’s not easy to juggle an action story with an emotional arc, but Collins progresses both plot lines in a well-paced manner through a skilled first-person POV–which is not by any means an easy voice to master, especially in an action-heavy book, but the author does so without ever coming across as awkward or stilted; in fact, Collins is a master of the art of tight, concise writing, developing an entire, vast world in broad brush strokes that comes alive in the imagination without requiring hundreds of pages to do so.

Props also go to Collins for developing a teen love triangle that is about so much more than which boy is hotter or more romantic and better suited for the heroine. Unlike other teen series, love here is explored from the standpoint of what the characters bring to the table, rather than what they get from each other, and while there’s physical stuff, it’s not there for the sole purpose of titillating rabid fangirl readers (or indulging the author’s own fantasies), but to explore the relationship between physical attraction and real love, all within the context of the heroine getting to know herself and becoming more herself instead of losing herself to an irresistible passion–a line which I think I might have borrowed from Jane Austen’s Marianne Dashwood. It’s the kind of teen love triangle I’d feel comfortable with my own child reading, and even enjoyed reading myself because it’s realistic, making good use of the fantasy genre rather than cloaking romance in an ill-fitting fantasy gimmick (rather like my thinly-veiled Twilight bashing).

Rating: 5/5 stars

7. Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins

I should have learned after being so pleasantly surprised by The Hunger Games not to underestimate this series just because it’s marketed to teens. Because of the rules laid out in the first book for the Hunger Games, I thought I knew what was next up for Katniss and settled back to enjoy a well-written but predictable book. A very few chapters in proved this not to be the case, and the surprises just kept coming right until the cliff-hanger end that was so cruel I was really glad I discovered this series after the final book was published so I didn’t have to wait to find out what happened next.

If Catching Fire has a flaw, it’s that it’s the middle book of a trilogy and, as middle books tend to do, doesn’t stand out on its own like the first and last books do. But that’s a very minor complaint about a tightly-written story that introduces a lot of new characters and ideas crucial to the overall trilogy arc.

Collins is also to be commended for her daring to write a second book about the same characters returning to the Hunger Games without it coming across as same song, second verse. In fact, she outdid herself, devising a truly scary set of obstacles to serve as backdrop for a set of characters that are more multidimensional and compelling than those in the first book.

Rating: 5/5 stars

8. Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

The conclusion of the Hunger Games trilogy shines as it brings Katniss’ adventures to a satisfying end. Not a happy end, which I’ve seen a lot of complaints about, but the right end.

Even though Mockingjay breaks out of the Hunger Games arena to launch a full-scale revolution against the totalitarian regime that instituted the Games, Collins maintains her themes of control and manipulation throughout Katniss’ journey as the symbol of the rebellion. In true dystopian form, this book depicts the struggle not between good people and evil people, but between two conflicting ideologies, one being evil and the other being willing to employ evil for the sake of a cause. It’s not a new theme, not even in YA lit–in fact, it J.K. Rowling sort of addressed it in the Harry Potter series–but Collins excels here because she doesn’t get preachy or try to draw any big earth-shattering moral conclusions, except as they apply to Katniss, who is still a teenager and trying to process all of this while suffering great personal loss in the fight for what she (isn’t sure she) believes in.

Of course the love triangle is finally resolved, too, and it resolves in the only way it really could resolve. What I like about the way Katniss finally makes her choice is not that she is wooed or rescued by either suitor, but that she works with each of them, sees all their strengths and weaknesses laid out before her, and, weighing it against her feelings for each man, makes a choice that is true to herself. It may seem more pragmatic than romantic, but it works for the genre, and, I think, has a lot more in common with those more enduring literary pairings than with the pop romance that permeates teen and adult literature. To paraphrase Albus Dumbledore, we could use a little more of that kind of love in the world.

Rating: 5/5 stars

9. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

What can I write about The Help that will do it justice? It’s one of those books that, when I finished it, I couldn’t bring myself to start anything new for a few days because I couldn’t say goodbye to the characters I’d grown to know and love, and I actually started recognizing those characters as I went about my day-to-day life. (Walmart Tempie is Aibileen; I’m going to have a difficult time adjusting my mental image for the film.)

I grew up in a small East Texas town where Welcome to Greenville, the blackest land, whitest people was printed on a sign that hung over the main street and on the water tower. I’ve heard people claim this wasn’t meant to be racist, that it referred to the rich soil that made Greenville and its surrounding communities the cotton capital of Texas, but this is the same town were the mayor defended a mob for lynching a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in 1908, and in 1996 a KKK rally followed a rash of black church burnings. Even when I graduated from high school in 2001, the black kids and white kids formed two distinct groups in the cafeteria.

But even having been aware of racism, having witnessed the lingering effects of the segregation days on my community, having studied Jim Crow laws in history class, none of that really put a face on the millions of people who suffered, and continue to suffer, racial inequality in this country.

Then I read The Help.

Through the fictional narratives of two black maids and one young white woman in the 60s, Kathryn Stockett (a white woman and first-time novelist) gives a glimpse of race relations that is on the level of To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s that good, that beautiful, even though so much of the content is cruel and ugly.

If  the three main characters were actual people, I couldn’t love them more: Aibileen, always quietly dignified and courageous under the most demeaning treatment, yet somehow un-embittered by her experiences so that she’s able to teach a little white girl not to emulate the racism being bred into her by her parents; Minnie, who makes her complaints against her white abusers known loudly and often hilariously but breaks your heart as she cowers beneath an abusive husband; and Skeeter, the young white woman whose eyes suddenly open to the fact that the way things just are is wrong, and who gives up everything and finds herself as she does what she can to make things right. And these are just the three leads who stand out against a backdrop of dozens of equally fascinating minor characters representative of the different boundaries that we place between ourselves, so that in the end the book isn’t only a commentary on racism, but on social behaviors at large. Which I think is interesting as discussing The Help with my girlfriends has brought to life a book club rather burnt-out by several lackluster reads, and it’s teaching us a lot about each other, as well.

A 5/5 rating when I’ve rated less profound books that highly doesn’t seems right. So I’m adjusting the scale a bit to emphasize how there just isn’t enough good I can say about this book.

Rating: 10/10 stars

10. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

I read this because I saw the movie a few weeks ago. It was such a haunting and disturbing story that I couldn’t shake it and wanted to know more about it (because obviously books never make it into films in their entirety), so I immediately downloaded the ebook and read a few chapters before bed. I can’t say too much about the premise because that’ll spoil it (and I almost wish I hadn’t seen the movie first, because I missed the opportunity to discover exactly what was happening to the characters as they discovered the truth themselves), but Never Let Me Go deals with the subject of cloning, what use might be made of clones, and how clones live within the world for which they’re created.

Interestingly, the author (who also wrote Remains of the Day) doesn’t choose to set this story in the future, as one might expect, but places it within an alternate history, which lends an extra layer of fear because you don’t read it with a sense of foreboding about what people might do, but rather a sickening guilt about what we have long been capable of as the text–never explicitly–turns your mind to Nazi medical experiments.

The text is delicate and subtle, told in a rambling, conversational narrative that’s a break from sci-fi norms, yet somehow manages to be just as much of a page-turner as an action novel. And that everything is presented in such an objective, almost dispassionate tone, perhaps tinged with regret, further communicates that sense of horrified surprise that we let this happen. At times the subtlety frustrated me, because some sick part of me wanted the gritty, specific details of the world, but that it’s all kept vague and clinically distant, accepted by the narrator who assumes the reader knows the general gist of things and the rest is irrelevant, makes it that’s much scarier because it drives home all the points the novel makes about the value (and devaluing) of life.

Rating: 5/5 stars

What have you been reading?