Author: John Connolly

2011 Atria Books

Filed Under: Young Adult, Humor, Fantasy, Horror

Find it on Goodreads.

A direct follow-up to Connolly’s wonderful 2009 book, The Gates, Infernals delivers everything you could want from a sequel. It’s another great adventure, and delivers all the wacky characters and narratorial humor that made the first book so exceptional.

After helping to save the world from an invasion from Hell, Samuel Johnson, with his trusty dog Boswell by his side, is trying to get back to a normal life. It doesn’t last long. The leader of the failed invasion, Mrs. Abernathy (formerly the demon Ba’al before he was trapped in the possessed body of Samuel’s elderly neighbor), seethes in Hell. The Great Malevolence–Satan–has fallen into a weepy melancholy following the defeat, leaving the underworld open to a tumultuous civil war.

Abernathy, in an attempt to restore her standing as Hell’s #2 demon, as well as save her own hide by preventing the traitorous demon Abignor from usurping rule, manages to open a small portal to Earth long enough to capture poor Samuel and Boswell. They will be an offering to restore the spirits of The Great Malevolence.

Mrs. Abernathy’s shot goes awry though—she hits Samuel and his dog, but also two policemen, an ice cream man, and a van full of drunken midgets who travel around reenacting fairytales in shopping malls. At first, these drunken midgets (Angry, Jolly, Dozy, and Mumbles–known collectively as “Mr. Merryweather’s Dwarfs”), threaten to steal the show. It’s not often I find myself laughing out loud when I read, but these crass little characters did the trick.

As the characters traipse across the sprawling and desolate underworld in search of a way home, however, the spotlight is shared. Samuel’s timid bravery, the demon Nurd’s newly found humanity, along with a large cast of inventive and often funny support characters each have truly great moments from which the story draws strength. Indeed, what sets this book apart from lots of other YA is Connolly’s balanced and skillful writing. He’s a captivating storyteller, and moreover he’s developed a real knack for breathing life into his world through a sharp yet subtle wit.

As with its predecessor, Infernals is littered with footnotes. These are often informative, explaining, for instance, a certain lineage of popes, what the Higgs boson is, or the definition of the word “truculent.” Yet they are all filled with jokes, jokes usually just juvenile enough to be silly but not so infantile as to be unworthy of your time. Though the narrator is not named, and has no plot of his own, his constant presence and sense of humor is crucial to the experience.

Here’s the ending to a footnote explaining Ivan Pavlov’s famous experiments on dogs:

This is known as “conditioning.” You have to wonder, though, if the dogs eventually got a bit tired of the shocks and the bells and the absence of food, and made their unhappiness known to Pavlov. This is known as “biting.”

On top of it though, he manages to sneak in clever, even insightful lines:

the past is a nice country to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Then, occasionally, it dips into downright good advice, revealing a motive on the part of the narrator that touches on endearing.

Most people will spend their lives doing jobs that they don’t particularly enjoy, and will eventually save up enough money to stop doing those jobs just in time to start dying instead. Don’t be one of those people. There’s a difference between living, and just surviving. Do something that you love, and find someone to love who loves that you love what you do.

It really is that simple.

And that hard.

(That was a footnote to a line about two reformed demons brewing cheap ale in the basement of a chemical weapons plant.)

These footnotes and asides build upon each other to give the book a sense of character and purpose that’s pretty rare in YA books lately. And beneath it all is still a charming adventure that strikes a perfect balance between childish fun and maturity of theme and emotion. If you haven’t read The Gates, give it a read first. But be sure to have this book at the ready; you’ll probably want to try and read them both in one sitting.

Similar Reads: The Gates (Connolly), The Mysterious Benedict Society (Stewart), pretty much anything by Terry Pratchett.

2011, Putnam Juvenile

Filed under: Thriller, Fantasy, Young Adult

It’s 1952. Janie is a regular 14-year-old American girl, living in Los Angeles… until she discovers that her parents are Communists, about to be arrested for un-American activities. The family flees to London.

Once there, Janie starts flirting with a boy in her class named Benjamin, and they embark on a mission to spy on a man that Benjamin thinks is a Russian agent. Only, the man he meets is Benjamin’s own father, the apothecary of the title.

From there, Benjamin and Janie begin a fairly typical young-adult-novel adventure: they follow clues, use newfound powers, and become embroiled in a massive conflict with no less than the world at stake.

It’s a familiar arc, and while Meloy writes it well, it’s a relatively forgettable novel. Except, that is, for one aspect, a facet of the mythos of The Apothecary that’s fairly original, but also quite uncomfortable. (Minor spoilers ahead. If you want to go in fresh, skip the rest of this. If you like Harry Potter and the Lemony Snicket books, you’ll probably like this one, as well.)

The odd facet has to do with Meloy’s chosen system of magic. It begins as herbology, a muddled herb in a cup of tea that makes the drinker tell the truth. But it quickly becomes proper magic, as Janie and co. receive a potion that will transmogrify them, temporarily, into birds.

The recipe for that potion, and for every other potion the apothecary can concoct, comes from a massive, centuries-old tome called the Pharmacoepia. That innocent detail makes a world of difference: it means that the magic contained in the Pharmacoepia is available to anyone who can read Latin. It means that Janie and Benjamin are not unique.

This means that the world of The Apothecary, and its magic, is more democratic. It also highlights the fact that one of the great pleasures of this brand of YA book comes from being included, which means, it comes from excluding people. When you read Harry Potter, you get to be a wizard, instead of some frumpy old muggle. And not only that, you get to be among the most famous, most important wizards in the world. If everyone could use magic, the thrill of inclusion would wane significantly.

To make it more palatable, authors ensure that the exclusive group is oppressed somehow, or that they don’t want to be part of the exclusive group. Katniss Everdeen hates fighting in the Hunger Games, but without the status the Games afford her, she’s nothing but a gruntwork drone, slowly starving to death in backwater Appalachia.

There is no such status, and no exclusivity, in The Apothecary. The knowledge of the Pharmacoepia comes from millenia of tireless study on the parts of a long line of apothecaries and alchemists. The Pharmacoepia itself is nothing but a glorified cookbook. Without it, a few people might remember a few potions, but the bulk of the knowledge, the bulk of the magic, will be lost.

Similarly, the users of the Pharmacoepia are interchangeable. If it falls into the wrong hands, the bad guys can use it just as well as the good guys. If Janie and Benjamin get lost or die, two other children could easily take their places. Any two children, from anywhere. They don’t even really need the children.

This makes for some uncomfortable moments. For example, at the end of the book (it’s also mentioned on the very first page), Benjamin slips Janie an alchemical roofie that makes her forget the previous three weeks, which is how long she’s been in London. She forgets all about the good guys and their fight against the bad guys. More unnervingly, she drops out of the alchemical brotherhood and instantly she’s just a regular girl again.

Knowledge of the Pharmacoepia is the only thing that ever makes her special, and because that knowledge can so easily be erased, so too can her specialness. It’s a weird, slippery philosophy for a YA book to be founded on. Meloy, for better or worse, never puts the replaceability of her heroes at the novel’s center, so it can easily be forgotten or ignored. But without it, The Apothecary is a fun but forgettable novel.

Similar books: The Hunger Games series, by Suzanne Collins; the Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling; the Unfortunate Events series, by Lemony Snicket; the Flavia de Luce series, by Alan Bradley

Author: Scott Westerfeld

2011, Simon Pulse

Filed Under: Young Adult, Sci-Fi, Historical.

Get the book.

Goliath closes the YA trilogy Westerfeld opened barely two years ago with Leviathan (if you want to get caught up, you can read my review of Leviathan here, and my review of the middle book, Behemoth, here). Like its predecessors, Goliath is a fun adventure set in a creative alternate history, where World War One is a fierce battle between the steampunk Clankers (Germany and friends) and the Darwinists (headed by Britain) whose army consists of giant biological weapons created by genetically modifying lifeforms–the titular Leviathan being an armored airship supported by a flying whale.

Deryn, the girl posing as a midshipman in the British Air Navy, and Alek, the Hapsberg prince hoping to find a means of peace, continue their adventure right where things left off. There’s plenty of spectacle in this book, and even more historical figures make their way onto the pages (Nikola Tesla, William Randolph Hearst, Pancho Villa, and others).

As you might expect from the third book of a trilogy, Westerfeld elevates the main characters to global importance, making them lynchpins in the outcome of a world war. Another major factor is a doomsday weapon know as Goliath. With it, Tesla has managed to harness the ability to influence electrical currents from across hemispheres. But whose side he’s on isn’t entirely clear.

There’s a healthy dose of politics at work in this installment, both concerning the war and allegiances, but also in the bubbling up and concealment of series-long secrets–namely Deryn’s gender. It’s good that these threads carry so nicely between the books, because like its predecessors’ plotlines, the events here all open and close neatly in a single volume. But unlike the previous books, which more or less occur in a single setting, this book features lots of globe-trotting.

While adventurous, this served to highlight for me this series’ biggest shortcoming: Westerfeld focuses too much on moment-to-moment adventure at the expense of big-picture storytelling. There’s a a really interesting overarching storyline, it just isn’t granted enough attention to feel nearly as epic as it should. This is a book about a great war fought between nations that use fantastic machines and creatures as weapons and vehicles. It’s a creative setting, and an awesome one; one that ought to be vibrant and as memorable as you can get. The elements are all there, but even after three books, it just never clicks.

Here’s where I come down: this entire trilogy should have been one book. Had that been the case, I think talking about it as a lasting work of children’s lit could be warranted. But instead, the story has been chopped up into 3 somewhat short and easily consumable–then, unfortunately, forgettable–pieces. This was a concern I mentioned in my write up of the first book, as the plot arc quickly closed just as I was being drawn into the greater story, leaving the novel feeling more like an episode than a complete entity.

All told, this entire trilogy isn’t that long. Each book weighs in at 400-500 pages, but with big margins, lots of white space and dialogue, and the copious illustrations (one of the books’ many strengths), they feel a whole lot shorter. The entire trilogy would fit, I surmise, in a normally laid-out paperback of about 500 pages or so.

An epic story like Westerfeld’s in a single big novel is the kind of thing I would have gobbled up when I was younger, and probably still might today. (Of course, in that form it couldn’t be sold to me at the price of 3 hardcovers.) I hope these books found success, it is a great adventure set in a unique world. And perhaps it’s not fair to blame Westerfeld for following the genre’s conventions for serialized scenarios, or for earning the best living he can. But it’s impossible not to notice.

It’s just a shame this is the kind of book that gets lost in a sea of shiny-on-black-cover YA books lined on a Barnes & Noble shelf, rather than one earning its tattered cover in a young reader’s backpack. Hopefully when they get around to releasing these in paperback they consider compiling them, but somehow I doubt that happens.

Similar Reads: Leviathan (Westerfeld), Behemoth (Westerfeld), Boneshaker (Priest)

1994, Ace Books

Filed Under: Fantasy, Young Adult.

Get a copy at Powell’s.

The Redwall books were among my favorites when I was actually a young adult reading YA books. Salamandastron stands out in my memory because it was the first I ever read. I remember first seeing the cover with the badger holding the spear, and just lighting up. I was a pudgy little dork who really liked Watership Down and the Final Fantasy games, so this book screamed awesomeness to me. I wasn’t let down, and I devoured the rest of Jacques’s books with ever-increasing voracity.

I still have all my Redwall books. The covers are worn, the pages yellow and tattered. They’ve survived moves from apartment to apartment, been lent out and miraculously returned more than once. I’ve always said I would revisit them at some point but never did. When Brian Jacques died in February, I finally decided to return to them. My initial thought was to hit the three core books (Redwall, Mossflower, Mattimeo), but then I saw that cover again and knew it had to be Salamandastron. Just look at that badger –he’s not some goofy Looney Toon. He stands there in armor, holding his pike and helmet and seeming, well, somber.

These books are full of high adventure and comedy, scores of wonderful characters, and, as many who read them will remember, long and mouthwatering descriptions of epic feasts full of creative foods. They’re also filled with death and loss.

Like many of the others in the series, Salamandastron concerns peaceful anthropomorphic critters (mice, squirrels, hares, moles, otters, badgers) besieged by a horde of villainous vermin (rats, weasels, stoats, foxes). A few unlikely heroes emerge: Samkin, a young squirrel from Redwall Abbey, quests after the treasured sword of Martin the Warrior which has been stolen by rogue stoats; Mara, a recalcitrant badger girl, storms out of the mountain fortress Salamandastron only to be captured by the horde of plunderers and murderers led by Ferahgo the Assassin , an infamous weasel brigand; Thrugg the otter and Dumble the baby dormouse trek to the mountains of the north in a race against death.

Jacques is an excellent story teller: the plots of his books are always crisp and perfectly succinct but take just enough detours and twists to keep the story exciting. Everything ties up perfectly. The two stoats who stole the sword (deserters of Ferahgo’s army) manage to infect the inhabitants of peaceful Redwall with a plague called Dryditch Fever. Samkin takes off after them while Thrugg and Dumble seek medicinal flowers from the dangerous mountains to the north to save the dying residents of Redwall.

Meanwhile, Ferahgo’s clan has surrounded Salamandastron, convinced it houses great stores of badger treasure. They take Mara hostage, but she escapes and seeks help for her embattled friends. Salamandastron is lead by the great badger warrior Urthstripe (presumably it’s him featured on the cover), and inhabited by a battalion of fighting hares. (Every species has its own idiosyncrasies and the hares, who speak like Tommy Atkinses and have bottomless appetites, are my personal favorites.) The plot follows the various characters’ paths and ultimately winds into satisfying crescendo.

Jacques’s ken for creating dynamic characters despite being completely polarized to either good or evil is testament to his ability as a storyteller. Ferahgo is wonderfully villainous. He has no redeeming qualities, yet he’s one of my favorite characters. Other creatures are so purely good you’d either hate them in real life or at least assume them Mormon. But it all fits perfectly in the world he creates. There is a balance to Jacques’s world, there are rules.

But, done right, that’s exactly what makes a great children’s story. You know from page one that the good guys will be knocked down, almost lose, then win in as heroic a fashion as possible. The fun is in the ride, in getting caught up in the excitement and adventure. Turns out that 18 years later, I still found myself able to do just that. Thanks, Brian Jacques.

Similar Reads: Redwall (Jacques), Mouse Guard 1152 (Petersen), Watership Down (Adams)

Author: John Connolly

2009, Washington Square Press

Filed Under: Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Young Adult

I stumbled upon Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things a few years ago and really loved it. At some point I’ll go back and reread it for review, then probably crown it a Great Read too. That book was engrossing, surprisingly deep, and quite dark. Despite being about demons trying to incite Armageddon and annihilate the human race through a trans-dimensional wormhole, The Gates is not a dark book. It provides levity with cheeky humor and a colorful cast of characters (both demonic and not).

Samuel Johnson, who is 11, and his personable dachshund, Boswell, while staying out past their curfew, espy a weird Satanic ritual take place in a neighbor’s basement. The neighbors are possessed by demons and set about opening a gate to Hell in order to allow The Great Malfeasance to lead his army through and destroy the planet. How did the first demons get through? Because of a tiny particle that escaped the CERN hadron collider.

Of course, no one believes Samuel at first–still, the demon leader Mrs. Abernathy, possessed by Ba’al, knows the trouble children can cause. She throws everything she can at him: monsters under his bed, giant spiders, flying skulls, demons of all ranks. But Simon and Boswell are resourceful and prove a formidable match for the legions of Hell.

This book is rife with rich characters. Connoly is creative with the demons he springs from Hell, and he uses them very well in the narrative. Many of the underworldy creatures interact with our dimension with a lovable aloofness and confused curiosity (think Napolean at the Ziggy Pig). It’s  all very tongue-in-cheek and very entertaining. The whole book is saturated in a suburban charm akin to some of the great kids’ monster movies of the 80′s–Gremlins, The Monster Squad, etc.

Much of the book’s mood derives from a playful-yet-authorial writing style not unlike that of Neil Gaiman. And, indeed, Connolly is in the same realm of skill as Gaiman. The narration of this book steals the show. There are constant asides from the faceless narrator. Many made me chuckle, and most were pitch-perfect.

It is a curious fact that small boys are more terrified of their babysitters than small girls are. In part, this is because small girls and babysitters, who are generally slightly larger girls, belong to the same species, and therefore understand each other. Small boys, on the other hand, do not understand girls, and therefore being looked after by one is a little like a hamster being looked after by a shark. If you are a small boy, it may be some consolation to you to know that even large boys do no understand girls, and girls, by and large, do not understand boys. This makes adult life very interesting.

I enjoyed this book even more than I expected I would. I wish I could have read it when I was 12 or 13, because that Sean would have enjoyed it even more. It’s a funny, charming, and engrossing book; the best YA novel I’ve read in a while. The Gates is definitely a Great Read.

Similar Reads: The Graveyard Book (Gaiman), The Book of Lost Things (Connolly), The Mysterious Benedict Society (Stewart)

2010, Margaret K. McElderry

Filed Under: Short Stories, Fantasy, Young Adult

This collection isn’t quite what it sounds like: it’s not a bunch of stories about zombies and unicorns in battle. That would have been awesome. Instead it’s a collection of stories, some about zombies, some about unicorns. Each is preceded by a short dialogue between editors, each of which helms one of the two camps. The whole debate is pretty juvenile, even for a YA book, but that is, of course, to be expected to a degree considering the subjects at hand.

So does it work? Sort of. This collection is what it is. It boasts a number of recognizable  young adult authors, and a few stories (such as “Inoculata” by Scott Westerfeld) are fairly good. The rest, not really so much.

As a unified work, this collection feels noticeably lacking. I had the distinct impression that this is the product of the editors calling in favors from their writer friends for stories, then feeling compelled to print them even if they weren’t really worthy. Some of the stories (Carrie Ryan’s “Bougainvillea”) are competent, just not really interesting. Much of the content of this book could have used more vetting, more big picture editing. The most succesful stories, such as “The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Unicorn” by Diana Peterfreund, I could see finding print in books not titled Zombies vs Unicorns, but for most that’s not the case.

Oddly enough, coming from my particular preferences, I found the unicorn stories to be, on average, better than the team zombie entries. This was mainly because they felt slightly more original and creative. Peterfreund’s story is the most creative of the collection, telling the story of a girl who surreptitiously raises a unicorn orphan in a world where unicorns are vilified for being murderous wild beasts. This story, while far from perfect, succeeds in creating a unique and interesting mythology in a short space. Many of these stories try to do something different, but fall short of gripping. In addition a consistent theme in a lot of the poorer stories is somewhat mature subject matter handled rather immaturely. For instance (from Alaya Dawn Johnson’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”):

I’ve eaten big jocks and old ladies. I’ve raided funeral parlors (not recommended: formaldehyde is to corpses what the Kraft factory is to Vermont cheddar). I’ve even put an ad online!

Still, this book did provide me with some fun reading. And a distinct advantage to a collection of unlinked stories such as this is bad stories can always be skipped. I imagine those that fit into this book’s true audience (fairly dorky young adult readers, ones closer to young than adult) will probably find a decent amount of entertainment to be had with this. Zombies vs Unicorns is definitely a library pick-up and not a purchase though.

One last thing that can be observed just by grabbing it off the shelf: the cover art is pretty cool. It’s an elaborate doodle that spans both covers depicting an epic battle between the titular factions.  Unfortunately, it passively oversells the content in the book.

Similar Reads: Purple Butterflies (Golden), Leviathan (Westerfeld)

2005, Puffin Books

Filed Under: Young Adult, Fantasy

Read this book. If you are an active reader of fantasy, someone who has a former appreciation for the genre, or an adult interested in passing on a your passion to a young reader, you will definitely be rewarded by reading this initial installment in the widely popular series by John Flanagan.

Frankly, I balked at the prospect of reading the New York Times Bestselling Ranger’s Apprentice series. First of all, it’s genre fiction on the New York Times Bestseller List, too often a haven for popular but rather uninspired writing. And “Ranger’s Apprentice”? Does that not smack too much of Tolkien’s king hero: a kind of young Aragorn type of book? Does this series represent yet another writer’s and publisher’s attempt to cash in on the popularity of the movies by Peter Jackson? Or, is this the series that a big name publisher is putting its weight behind to make sure that the momentum of the Harry Potter phenomenon does not dissipate?

The series kept cropping up in conversations with friends and colleagues; their comments were overwhelmingly positive. Jumping to a slew of wild conclusions based simply on a cursory reaction to a book’s title certainly didn’t seem too fair, or open-minded a treatment of a book. Young adult, and 249 pages, I wouldn’t lose much time by reading it, so I gave it a shot.

The Ruins of Gorlan is a well-written book. I felt an an immediate feeling of familiarity with the story, as if I’d read it before. And, because it’s genre fiction, in many ways I have. But the familiarity Flanagan establishes is a compliment to his abilities as an author. He makes the art of storytelling look easy. The setting and world are vivid and immediately accessible. He manipulates and incorporates the conventions into his book seamlessly. This allows him to develop what becomes the heart of the book – a coming of age story, one of the very best traditions in fantasy.

The boy, Will, is very human. Flanagan does a good job of creating a youthful character. He has typical fears and confidence issues. He accurately explores the attitudes of the young Will, his misgivings, his dreams, and his earnestness.

Will is protected by a legendary figure, the Ranger Halt, who played a critical role in turning the tide to the allies in the last Great War. But Halt is no ever-powerful wizard, he is no invincible warrior who can take a dozen men at once, he is no Ranger king. He’s just a highly skilled forest ranger, and he’s getting old. Through a directed regimen of hard work and practice, the gruff old ranger develops Will’s determination and his own sense of power and self-assurance.

It was a pleasure to see how focused the story remained on character and character development. Subjugating the great conflict was brilliant. Familiarity with the genre has shaped my expectations of a great conflict. I know what’s coming and how it will end. By not including it, Flanagan masterfully leaves it up to the reader’s imagination. Thus, in many ways, The Ruins of Gorlan is a stand alone novel. The novel doesn’t rely on the nature of the series. Sure the reader might be left with some questions, or  a want to know more, but Will’s story is told.

Magic plays a minimal role in this world, and I appreciated that. Sure, it’s there, but mostly as superstition, suspicion, or misunderstanding. Too many fantasy novels focus too directly on magic and it often gets in the way of the story. In these cases, magic often appears as spectacle masquerading as a writer’s imagination. The main character’s path of development is a meteoric rise to near invincibility, or he travels in the company of such awesome strength that all conflicts are stripped of any drama–there is no fear for the character’s safety and there is little doubt his quest will be completed.

There are plenty of monsters and conflicts, but there is no excessive violence and no cursing and glorification of evil. In fact, one of the most difficult passages to read would be that one of Will’s comrades suffers from bullying, not the horrific spectacle of blood and gore from a sword fight. The ranger relies on guile, skill, and cunning, and wit, as well as force. But it isn’t a hack and chop blood fest or an endless string of fights and battles, ala Conan.

The Ruins of Gorlan isn’t a story of destiny where the young child must save the world in dramatic, king-like fashion. Sure there is a once dormant evil massing a monstrous horde that threatens civilized society. There is a world that needs saving and the protagonist is an orphan of small stature and seemingly insignificant. But Flanagan subjugates this information. Most of it is relegated to the Prologue and is therefore more an introduction to the greater world, than a pointer to where an epic might unfold.

There are a few points that didn’t agree with me, though. The first is the style. Flanagan’s use of interrupters to explain the obvious or implied is tiresome. This might be attributable to the book being young adult fiction where a reader may be presumed too immature or to benefit from having certain aspects of human nature related explicitly. But this is infuriating for an adult reader and, I don’t think this stylistic device gives the young reader enough credit.

Secondly, there wasn’t much in the way of humor. There is some relationship humor, embarrassment that comes with cutting your teeth, and the typical banter between master and pupil. But there is no real laugh-out-loud moments or that outrageous character that can often make a fantasy series pop.

Overall, I think this is a fantastic young adult fantasy series. I definitely recommend The Ruins of Gorlan to anyone who has an appreciation for the fantasy theme. Adults and kids alike will enjoy Flanagan’s story. Any parent wanting to turn their child on to fantasy in a contemporary work would benefit from going here. I look forward to passing the book along to my son.

Similar Books: Pawn of Prophecy, David Eddings; Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman; The Magician: Apprentice, Raymond A. Feist; The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks; Lord Foul’s Bane, Stephen R. Donaldson; The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan

Author: Richard Adams

1972, Rex Collings

Filed Under: Young Adult, Fantasy, Literary

Every so often we like to go back and do a quick mini-review/reminder of a great book. I’ve done it before with Frankenstein and Lolita, and I now I’m doing so with another of my all-time favorite books. I’ve read Watership Down close to as many times as Lolita, which is to say many. I know it backwards and forwards, and it holds up just as well as a book for adults as it does a story for children.

This book is about a bunny rabbits. Physically they and the world around them are realistic; in fact, all the locations of the books are real places in England. There is no sword-swinging or clothes-wearing, the rabbits are anthropomorphized only in that they are given language, reason, culture, and names. Fiver is the runt of the warren, bullied and ostracised. He often sees visions, but only his brother Hazel ever takes him seriously. When Fiver foresees the destruction of their colony (by real estate development), and the chief rabbit ignores the warning, Hazel organizes a ragtag group of exiles, made up of mostly weaker rabbits, but with a few tough guys, including the badass Bigwig.

In their search for a new home, the group encounters perils and dangers (the fatalistic poet-bunnies of a rabbit farm, who do nothing when one of the travelers is caught in a snare, stand out in my mind), and not all make it alive to the hill called Watership Down. There they dig their new colony beneath a large tree. It doesn’t take them long to realize they are all males, and that it’s pretty tough to have a successful colony that can’t reproduce. With the help of an unlikely seagull friend named Kehaar, they begin scouting for other warrens in the hopes of finding some mates.

The second half of the book concerns the gathering of some bunny babes. There’s a raid of some hutch rabbits from a nearby farm, but the addition of mates is primarily approached through a daring jailbreak of unhappy does at a overpopulated warren called Efrafa. Efrafa, ruled by the gigantic and vicious General Woundwort, is a totalitarian police state run with ruthless, brutal efficiency. Woundwort isn’t into sharing.

Hazel’s rabbits are cunning and endearing. Their characters differ wildly, but combine to form a lovable and lasting cast. There is plenty of adventure in this book. At times it can be quite gripping. I also love the Lapine language (not enough to be annoying or cumbersome, just rabbit words for, say, “badger” or “car”–lendri, hrududu), and the mythos of rabbitkind depicted in the legends of creation and the trickster rabbit, El-ahrairah.

It’s a wonderful book, entertaining and playful, at times suspenseful, at times quite deep. If you’ve never read it I suggest you do so; if it’s been a while, now’s as good a time as any to revisit.

Similar Reads: Animal Farm, (Orwell), Charlotte’s Web (White), Redwall (Jaques), Frisco Pigeon Mambo (Payne). Also, check out the Watership Down movie; it’s a pretty solid (and at times dark) old school animated film–with Zero Mostel as Kehaar the seagull and some sweet Art Garfunkel tunes.

2010, Tor Teen

Filed under: Young Adult

This is a pretty dorky book. It’s initially about gold farmers: low-salary workers in China, India, and elsewhere, mostly, who grind MMO games like World of Warcraft for in-game currency and items, then sell them to Westerners. In For the Win, groups of these gold farmers band together to form an international union of workers, both online and offline. Interestingly enough, it’s not dorky in that it dwells in descriptions of video game worlds and fantasies (it doesn’t, really). This book is dorky because it doubles as a pretty sound lesson in fundamentals of economics. I learned a lot actually.

An econ lesson taught through video games? That might sound boring, but actually For the Win is riveting. Doctorow describes some complex systems, and replicates them with the structure of his book. The unionizing internet workers (Webblies, a play on the IWW nickname, Wobblies) are cogs in a complex system that makes investment bankers across the world quite rich. Some of the videogame economies are amongst the largest in the world, and some of their virtual commodities are trading in real markets. (This is not so far from real life. Remember the virtual property boom?)

Similarly, FTW features many points of view from characters of different stature and purpose within the system. There are gold farmers, thuggish bossmen, economists, system administrators, investment bankers, idealistic economic students, exporters, union leaders, it goes on. They all play a role in a tightly woven narrative.

Doctorow does a great job of breaking down economical situations and presenting them as a cause-and-effect relationship crucial to the plotting of his story. He succinctly explains financial systems and concepts, as well as external forces upon an economy. He explains the various players in these systems. And the reader (this is written for a young adult audience) is encouraged to put together the pieces along with the growing movement of virtual teamsters. Here’s a snippet:

And if any worker, anywhere, can communicate with any other worker, anywhere, for free, instantaneously, without her boss’s permission, then, brother, look out, because the [cost incurred in making an economic exchange that will result in] demanding better pay, better working conditions and a slice of the pie just got a lot cheaper. And the people who have the power aren’t going to sit still and let a bunch of grunts take it away from them.

The Webblies expand from a group of gold farmers to other professions employed in online games, such as Turks. Soon they combine forces with factories workers in China, and textile workers in India, many who have never heard of the games the gold farmers play. Strikes break out with international solidarity, and threaten global economies, both government and virtual. The battle they find themselves in is no longer just a virtual one with spells and swords. People are injured in this book; people die.

Much like Doctorow’s Little Brother, FTW focuses on young computer geeks. National identities are skewed for the Webblies. A California Jew names Leonard refers to himself as Wei Dong, and one of the Chinese goldfarmers is named Matthew. The cast is international, most working class and impoverished, many only share computer slang as a language. But due to their sharing a virtual space, they develop a sort of patriotism all their own. They become a pretty endearing crew, zits, body odor, and all.

Despite the unorthodox premise and setting, FTW scratches that us-versus-them YA itch: empowerment through friendship and the chance to save one’s world. I found myself surprised and pleased with the depth of its themes and concepts, and the story was exciting and well-paced. MMO games don’t appeal to me even a little bit, and when I realized they played into the premise of FTW, I almost put it down. I’m glad I didn’t. There’s isn’t much video game dorkery in here, and what there is is presented in a manner approachable to whatever reader just had to Google “MMO” to see what I was talking about. This is the best YA book I’ve read yet this year, so if you’re up for a good one, give it a shot–the ebook is free (as are all of Doctorow’s ebooks).

Similar Reads: Ender’s Game (Card), Wastelands (Adams, ed.)