Half World and Darkest Light, by Hiromi Goto

This is the other book & sequel that I read on my Spring Break holiday, and Hiromi is Canadian, so they count as two more toward my Canadian Book Challenge! (I think I'm up to 10 now.)

Do you remember Monty Python's famous quotation, "And now for something completely different . . ."?

That's how I feel about Hiromi Goto's two YA fantasies: completely different from anything else out there.

Have you ever seen Hieronymus Bosch's famous painting The Garden of Earthly Delights? I'm fairly certain that some of the inspiration for Half World comes from this bizarre painting (these are just two small sections of the whole thing):

If all that gorgeous and weird art hasn't piqued your interest enough, Goto has created a fantasy world built on Eastern philosophy, not Judeo-Christian Good vs Evil. It has a very different feel. Disconcerting, sometimes, if you're not used to it, but interesting.

Of the two books, Half World has the more conventional plot: Melanie's mother goes missing and Melanie has to travel to the alternate realm of Half World in order to get her back. There is the creepiest villain you've ever met and Melanie has to defeat him. Or does she? The ending is quite unexpected and makes you rethink all the other stories you've read that had typical Good Guy Wins endings. (Don't worry, I'm not spoiling it for you. You still have no idea what happens!)

Darkest Light was harder for me to read. Gee is the most fascinating protagonist I've ever encountered, and his development was compelling to follow. (Anything I tell you about him would be spoilery, so I shall say no more!)(Don't read any Goodread reviews either, at least not until you've read Half World!) His story delves more deeply into Half World, which is an uncomfortable place for a Judeo-Christian reader to be: this is not an after life in which the good are rewarded and the wicked punished. Innocent people have to suffer in Half World until the trauma of their life is worked through. As much as I enjoyed the creepy, imaginative ways Goto represents suffering souls, I did not want them to have to suffer! So I had a hard time wrapping my head around some of the things that happened. But it was thought-provoking and very cool.

Maybe the most unusual thing about these two books is that there are only two of them: they aren't the first two books of a trilogy. How original!

The best comparison for the Half World books is the mango roll at our local sushi place: raw pacific salmon and albacore tuna wrapped up with mango. Raw fish takes some getting used to if you've never had it before. But it's so delicious!

Disclaimer: I didn't know Hiromi Goto when I first read Half World, but I have since met her and worked with her, and she's a very nice, funny, intelligent, thoughtful person. So I'm not likely to say anything negative about her books! But if I didn't like them I wouldn't mention them here at all, so you can be reassured that this isn't false praise.

For more great Canadian reads, check out John Mutford's The Book Mine Set, with a monthly round-up of reviews of Canadian books. Also go here to vote on John's weekly book question:  What has been the best small or big screen adaptation of a Canadian book?

(My vote is for Anne of Green Gables) :)

I promised you sequels: Cinder and Scarlet

What on earth happened to April? Yikes! Almost an entire month ago I said I'd get to the sequels I read over Spring Break soon. I guess three weeks counts as soon in Dead Houseplant Land. I'd better quickly get caught up!

I didn't read everything I said I was going to, and I read some things I wasn't planning to, but I did re-read Cinder and then read Scarlet, by Marissa Meyer.

Here's my Goodread's review of Cinder, just to bring you up to speed if you haven't read it yet:

A steampunk Cinderella? With a believably-realized world of human cyborgs and plagues and moon people? Too fun! I was willing to buy the book for the joke of Cinderella losing her foot rather than her shoe, but I was completely won over by the characters, the romance, the suspense, the fascinating world. Eagerly awaiting the second book.

I enjoyed Cinder just as much on rereading. It's not one of the books I'll go back to again and again, but it's certainly entertaining. And I found Scarlet a very satisfying second book. We still get to see quite a bit of Cinder (not too much of Prince Kai, unfortunately), and I loved the new characters: feisty Scarlet, mysterious Wolf, and disreputable Thorne. There's plenty of action, and we learn a bit more about those strange Lunar people and their scary queen. Apparently the next book will have Rapunzel in it. Light, fun, intriguing--and with awesome covers: I'll probably buy Cress in hardcover too.

Milk chocolate-covered nuts, or pretzels, or little fruit nuggets, whatever you like covered in chocolate: tasty and a little bit addictive.

Keeping it short: I'll save my Canadian sequel for the next post (which won't take me another month, I promise!)

Beholder's Eye, by Julie Czerneda

I didn't get all the vacation reading done that I said I would. I did get to a few of those sequels, and I'll do a post about them shortly. I also discovered a couple of new authors I want to read more of. Since one of them is Canadian, and I'm sorely behind on my Canadian Book Challenge (I need 12 by July and I've got 7 so far), today's post is about sci fi writer Julie Czerneda.

I bought Beholder's Eye right before I left, because it was a paperback, my friend said it was good, and Czerneda is Canadian. (Always like to support fellow countrymen.) It turned out to be a perfect beach read: fun, interesting with cool ideas but not mind-bendingly challenging, fair bit of action but not too intense.

Beholder's Eye felt more fantasy-like to me than science fiction. (Just to be clear, this isn't a bad thing in my view.) Yes, there are space ships and space ports, but the story didn't depend on technology in any way. Esen-Alit-Quar is a being who can shift shapes into any species she has "acquired." Faced with a threat to her own existence and to all the life she has encountered, Esen has to decide whether to keep the rules about not exposing her identity, or to risk her own species in helping the others. It's really a coming-of-age story set in a number of fun alien worlds, and a story of friendship and loyalty, using two species as metaphors for the things that keep us from trusting one another. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to YA readers, and to fantasy readers who want to try out science fiction.

This book is a stand-alone, but there are two more books about Esen-Alit-Quar. I'm curious to see how her relationship with the human Ragem develops in the next two books. But my library has the three books in her Stratification cycle, which looks promising, and her latest, which is fantasy and also looks very good (there are giant toads: I think it's a must-read!). So I'm not sure which one I'll try next.

Beholder's Eye is like the tostadas we had in Mexico: lots of different flavours layered on top of crunchy goodness.

For more Canadian books to try, in all genres, check out John Mutford's blog, The Book Mine Set.

How to write description

Sometimes before I go to sleep I pick a book from the piles of read books by my bed, open it to a random page and start reading. When I'm not caught up in the plot, it's easier to pay attention to the writing.

Here's a passage that jumped out at me from Lois McMaster Bujold's Captain Vorpatril's Alliance:

And then they were crossing out of the tube into another foyer, and escorted by Christos through a pair of sleek doors clad in fine wood marquetry to a hushed hallway graced with mirrors and fresh flowers. And then into a broad living room backed by wide glass walls taking in a sweeping panorama of the capital, with the sun going down and the dusk rising to turn the city lights to jewels on velvet for as far as the eye could see, under a cloud-banded sky.

It's the kind of paragraph that whizzes past while you're reading, depositing setting information almost subliminally. How does she do this?

The first thing I noticed: there isn't a single instance of the verb "to be."For a passage of description, there is a remarkable amount of action here. The characters are moving through the setting: "crossing into" and "escorted through" "and then into," so the reader is carried with them. But even the inanimate objects don't just sit there. They are "clad," "graced," "backed." The sun goes down, the dusk rises and turns, the eye sees.

The next thing I noticed is how much Bujold doesn't tell us. Do we know whether the room is carpeted? Do we know what color the furniture is? Is there a couch in the living room? Does it matter? She gives us only the most telling details, enough to convey luxury, taste, beauty. The rest we can fill in for ourselves.

It's not so obvious in this particular passage, but the details Bujold chooses are the ones that the POV character would notice. This is Tej seeing the setting, a woman trained in aesthetics who has never been to this residence before but is familiar with luxurious settings. Tej notices that the mirrors and flowers "grace" the hallway; Tej appreciates the beauty of the sunset. If Ivan were narrating, Ivan who is escorting Tej to meet his mother, he would not have seen any of the things Tej did. He might have noticed anything that was different from the last time he was there, but his eyes would have gone first to his mother, not to the view. Description reveals character, can even reveal emotion, by showing what the character sees.

So there you have it: Three Rules for Writing Description:

1.    Use strong verbs that contribute to the atmosphere you want to create.

2.    Only describe the telling details.

3.     Be aware of who is narrating the scene, and describe it through their eyes.

Another thing I noticed about this passage that might not have universal application: if you're writing an action novel, or a novel for young people, you don't want readers to get hung up on description and get bored. This passage is only two sentences long (and the second one isn't even a real sentence). The description all takes place in prepositional phrases. We read prepositional phrases more quickly than main clauses because we know they're less important grammatically. Our eye seeks out subject and predicate and takes in modifying phrases along the way. The structure of Bujold's sentences speeds our absorption of the description. Brilliant.

I suppose this is more a question of pacing than description per se. So how about A Rule About Pacing:

1.    Use grammar to control how your readers make their way through a page.

Easy, right?

Diana Wynne Jones guest blog and other random stuff

Check out my guest blog on We Be Reading, in which I talk about The Dark Lord of Derkholm and how funny Diana Wynne Jones is. And if you're not already following We Be Reading, Kirsten is filling March with musings and reviews of Diana Wynne Jones, so if you're a fan it's worth joining the conversation, and if you've never read DWJ, you need to check out all the reasons why you should!

If you're looking to while away more time on the internet, I had great fun on this random crime-fighting-buddies generator: They Fight Crime!

There's also a random sentence generator, and Chuck Wendig has a flash fiction challenge using it. You still have time: his deadline is Friday March 15 at noon. Quick, go get a random sentence and write a story using it!

If you've done that and you still have time to kill, Chuck Wendig's latest is a great post about tantric sex--No! It's actually about writing, and how good writing is like tantric sex, not that he would know (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). He makes a great point, and it's something I've noticed about Diana Wynne Jones and Megan Whalen Turner in particular, which is why I so obsessively reread them: writing is all about withholding. Not telling everything.

DWJ and MWT use the fewest words possible to tell their story, so you know that every word is absolutely crucial. There is no skimming through description when reading their books, never any "yada, yada, get to the good part" feelings. Every scene is dramatic and full of conflict; if it doesn't seem like anything important is happening, you reread the scene to see what you missed, because you definitely missed something. And so you read the books in a constant state of frustrated tension: "must find out what's going on." Half the time when I get to the end of one of their books, I have to go back and reread most of it just to figure out what just happened. And I love it.

Sigh. Must go cut out half the words in my WIP.

MMGM: The Ogre Downstairs, by Diana Wynne Jones

Kristen over at We Be Reading is hosting DWJ March, in honour of Diana Wynne Jones, a year after her death. I'm doing a guest post for Kristen tomorrow, but I thought I'd get into the spirit of things myself, especially after reading this book.

I keep finding Diana Wynne Jones books I haven't read, which is wonderful: like finding a $20 bill in the pocket of the coat you haven't worn for a while. I found this one in the library while researching for my guest blog. The Ogre Downstairs was in the middle-grade section beside the Chrestomanci books and Archer's Goon.

It started a little slowly for me. The adventures of a step-family with a magical chemistry set at first seemed a little too episodic and predictable--similar in concept to Half Magic, by Edgar Eager (which I love, btw): kids mess around with magic and something different goes wrong every time. The two sets of kids (Caspar, Johnny and Gwinny from the mom, Malcolm and Douglas from the dad) are obnoxious to each other and their parents, and the omniscient narration skips around a bit, so at first I didn't have any character I was sympathizing with.

But in typical Diana Wynne Jones fashion, the complications multiply exponentially, the characters develop in realistic but quirky ways, and this book is really, really funny. For example, it's not just that the toffee bars come to life; it's that they keep escaping and they love to congregate on the radiators.

"Bring some biscuits when you get the box," said Caspar. "The toffee bars may be hungry too." [hilarious line all by itself]

So Johnny rammed the lid back on and went down to the kitchen, while Caspar collected all the toffee wrappers he could find and made a careful count. It came to nineteen. The thought of catching nineteen nimble toffee bars was a little daunting. [Another sentence that makes me grin every time: the alliteration, the understatement, the juxtaposition of nimble and toffee.] He had only succeeded in catching one by the time Johnny came back with a large cardboard box and a packet of Small Rich Tea Biscuits, and the only reason he caught that one was that Johnny had bitten a piece off it the evening before. It was much slower than the others in consequence, and went with a sort of limp. [This is the kind of thing DWJ is brilliant at: the extra little realistic detail that makes her magic completely believable. And so funny!] 

"Oh, the poor thing!" Johnny said, when Caspar showed him. "I'll never eat another toffee bar again!" He put it tenderly in the cardboard box and made it comfortable with some comics and a small Rich Tea biscuit. [Comics!  For a toffee bar!] It did not want to stay. Crippled as it was, it kept trying to get out, until Caspar thought of putting the box against the radiator. The lame bar seemed to like that. It curled up peacefully and began to look a little sticky.

And that's just the potion that brings things to life. There's also the flying one, the switching places one, the one that turns you different colours, the invisibility one. . . The two halves of the family at first compete to see what they can do with the chemicals, but as they get into deeper and deeper messes they have to help each other out. In the meantime the Ogre (the dad) is getting more and more frustrated with these kids who make so much noise and cause so much trouble. And the consequences end up being very real.

Diana Wynne Jones is brilliant at understanding how children think and behave and how family dynamics work. All her children can be perfectly beastly: they whine, they get jealous, they are cowardly and malicious and selfish. But they are also creative and empathetic and flexible and kind. Siblings both hate and love each other. Parents don't understand kids. Kids make dreadful mistakes. But if there's love in the mix it all comes out okay somehow. The resolution of the complicated mess at the end of The Ogre Downstairs is funny and sweet and quite satisfying.

The Ogre Downstairs is a trip to one of those great candy stores that has crazy candy from everywhere and you can't even decide what you want to spend your allowance on.

For more Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday choices, go to Shannon Messenger's marvelous blog.

Vacation reading list, plus why humanity isn't all bad

If I had a Twitter account, here are a few things I'd tweet:

The Kindness Project is a blog I found out about because fellow Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday-er Barbara Watson is a contributor. On days when the news convinces me that humanity is going to destroy itself and good riddance, it's little projects like this that remind me there is every bit as much good in us as evil. Be sure to watch this wonderful video.

And more David Malki love: I sent a few links to some favourite Wondermark comics last week, and here's another one, but did you scroll down and read his blog entries? He's got this amazing concept--the Machine of Death--that has so far created two short story collections and is now being turned into a board game that sounds like the best board game ever: kind of a cross between Balderdash and Clue and Munchkin. This post has a video describing the game, a link to its Kickstarter page, and best of all, links to three stories from the second Machine of Death story collection, This Is How You Die! Such a creative, fun, funny, interesting idea. I love good ideas! And speaking of good ideas, in this post Malki describes his idea for the "dumbest viral video trend possible": Suddenly Streamers. I love this guy's sense of humor. Another reason to have hope for humanity.

Vacation reading: we're going to Mexico for Spring Break. It's only for a week, but I plan to get a lot of reading done. I've been saving a few sequels: Scarlet, sequel to Cinder (I'll probably reread Cinder first, if it will fit in my suitcase. But I have them both in hardcover (they were so beautiful, I had to), so that's kind of heavy.) Froi of the Exiles, sequel to Finnikin of the Rock. The Runaway King, sequel to The False Prince.

I would also like to take along some Octavia Butler, maybe The Parable of the Sower. And there's a (relatively) new Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior, that sounds good. I could catch up on my Flavia de Luce mysteries, because there's a fifth one and I think I've only read the first two.

Have you read any of these? Are they worth their weight in my luggage? Or their cost to buy for my iPod? (since I have one that's so old it can't download the new software required to borrow ebooks from the library) Any other books you think I must bring to Mexico with me?