Review: Shade by Jeri Smith-Ready

Aura is a sixteen year old with all the usual fears and confusions about relationships, love and sex but that’s not all: like the other ‘post-Shifters’, she has to deal with whinging ghosts and physically distressing shades but uniquely, she is also struggling with a thumping great mystery about her own birth and the disappearance of her mother.  The first person narrative guides us through this melée of emotions and concerns. We feel Aura’s irritations with petitioning ghosts, her distaste for the police that deal with them, which mutates from some sort of teen rebellion against authority figures into adult concern about both their methods and aims, her frustrations when she tries to unravel the mysteries of her birth, and, more than anything else, her total confusion when faced with the apparent choice between Logan’s ghost and the growing love she feels for human Zachary.

This is all handled so expertly by Smith-Ready, that by the end, the reader is as desperate to find answers to the Logan/Zachary and birth/Shift mysteries, as Aura is herself.  On the way, the first person immediacy, does also take us into territory which may raise some eyebrows: the night-time scenes with Aura and ghost-Logan are portrayed subtly but, nevertheless, the very fact of the ghost’s lack of corporeal substance takes us into areas of auto-arousal which make the book unsuitable for the youngest teens.

The finale brings a sort of closure to some of Aura’s issues, but enough questions remain unresolved to leave the reader gagging for the next book.  Jeri Smith-Ready has already won awards for her adult fiction. Shade, her first teen novel, may well win her more.

Originally written for writeaway.org.uk

Interview with Sara Rees Brennan

Sara Rees Brennan is an Irish author, living in Dublin. For a short while, she lived in New York and became involved with a wide circle of writers who encouraged and supported her, including Holly Black, Cassandra Clare and Scott Westerfeld, with whom she has recently completed an American book tour. Sarah has developed a wide audience through her popular blog, where she writes movie parodies, book reviews and stories. Her debut novel, The Demon’s Lexicon, was published in 2009 and was followed in May 2010 by book two of the trilogy: The Demon’s Covenant.

In this interview she talks to Jeannette Towey about her books, writing for teens and country music.

You’re twenty six, and your first novel, The Demon’s Lexicon, came out last year. How did that come about?

The book took about nine months to write, and about four months to revise, with the help of my agent.  I was in London at the time and my agent warned me to fill the freezer with ice cream as it might take several months to sell.  In the event it sold after a week and there I was left with a freezer full of ice-cream. I mean, what could a girl do?

How was writing the Demon’s Covenant been different?

The main difference, of course, is the view point. I’d decided that I wanted to have a different point of view for each of the three books. Nick came first in Lexicon. I liked the idea of getting into the head of a demon. Mae was a fairly obvious choice for Covenant. She was a lot easier, mostly because, unlike Nick, she’s a reader. I don’t find girls’ viewpoints easier than boys’, or demons’, but I do find it easier to get inside a reader’s head than a non-reader’s. This has given me a bit of a problem with the third book too, which is told from Sin’s point of view. She’s also not keen on reading.

So why didn’t you choose any of the other characters?

Well, Alan is too scheming. His view point would be all about plots and I think that would get too complicated. And Jamie is just too quippy. A book written from his point of view would just be tiring!

Demon’s Covenant is certainly steamier than Lexicon. Is that just because it’s told from Mae’s point of view?  

After The Demon’s Lexicon came out I got lots of emails from fans asking for more romance. So I wrote a follow up which contained 36 make-out scenes in response! That got edited, heavily, you’ll be glad to hear. But certainly it helps writing from Mae’s point of view. Nick is never going to find romance anything more than a joke. So Mae offers up much more opportunity.

Is a romantic angle a requirement after Twilight anyway?

I think it’s more a case that all we writers all grew up with Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles: the allure of the dark side, the hope of redemption for both you and the jerk you’re in love with. If you think about it this is a classic teen myth – after all it’s not for nothing that Wuthering Heights is now being rebranded. So I think Stephanie Meyer was just responding to the same thing as the rest of us and it’s what the kids want.

You’re back in Ireland now, after your tour of the States with Scott Westerfeld. Is that where you write?

To some extent, although I prefer to write in a group, and I tend to take trips to the US to meet up with my New York writer pals and then we all go off together and write. We had a really productive trip to Mexico recently. But if I’m on my own then I write to country music.

Country music?

Yeah. I’m a big fan. I go to concerts too, and embarrass my friends by dressing up and everything. I saw Garth Brooks recently; wore the boots, skirt, cowboy hat, all of it. My house-mate was horrified!

OK, if I can get that image out of my head, let’s get back to your writing. What’s the process?

I start off with a chapter plan: about 5 bullet points for each chapter. I wander around for days with it glued to me. I won’t let go of it. It’s too important. Then I start writing and about half way through the chapter plan get’s lost, forgotten about, completely dumped. I tend to overwrite first time around: typically I write about 1000 pages for a 400 page novel. So I apply a strict rule: every scene has to do at least two things; if it doesn’t it gets cut.

And then there’s all the research.

Tell me about it.

I think it’s important to get the details right. So I do the research. There’s a scene in The Deomn’s Covenant where a duel takes place on the Millennium Bridge. I wanted Nick to jump up on the support struts but I wasn’t sure if they’d take his weight. So I visited the bridge and climbed up on the struts, only to be pulled off by one of the Tate Modern security guards who was convinced I was trying to commit suicide. He kept telling me it would all be OK, while I was trying to explain that I was just a writer. Then he told me not to worry, I would get a publisher!

And, finally, what about the third book?

I’ve just finished it and it’s with the editor. As I mentioned before, this one’s told from Sin’s point of view.

And its title?

Well, it will be Demon’s something but we haven’t settled on the something yet. There are a couple of possibilities at the moment – they both begin with T – but who know what it will be.

Thank you Sarah Rees Brennan for talking to WriteAway.

Interview with Scott Westerfeld

Scott Westerfeld is possibly best known as the author of the hugely successful Uglies series, but he has also written another YA series, the Midnighters, three stand alone YA novels and five science fiction books for adults. And, of course, Leviathan, the first of yet another series. He’s a Texan by birth, but spent his childhood living on both sides of the US. Maybe that goes some way to explaining why he and his Australian writer wife, Justine Larbalestier, are ‘bisummeral’: splitting the year between New York and Sydney summers.

In this interview in London (it’s sort of en route between his two bases), he talks to Jeannette Towey about Leviathan, working with an illustrator in particular, and teenagers.

Leviathan is a very different sort of book. Where did the idea come from?

The success of Uglies gave me a huge opportunity. It meant I could do what I wanted. So I made a list of stuff that I liked. I spent a lot of time in my parent’s attic going through boxes of old boys’ adventure stories. And of course, there was the technology. I write about that a lot. I think people spend a lot of time with tools; often tools define how people turn out, what they are. So if you play with technology, you play with people.

And what about the illustrations?

I wanted the book to feel like it came from a different time and place. When I’d written about sixteen thousand words, I realised it needed illustrations. I did some research, looking for the sort of illustrator that I thought could produce the look and feel I wanted, and I found Keith Thompson. His background isn’t illustration: he worked previously in video game and movie design, focussing on creatures. He has a perfectionist sort of attitude and does loads of research. For example, when he started, he studied Punch magazines from the 1910s so that he could recapture the period look.

How do you work together?

Working with an illustrator is very different to working alone. Writers can hedge a bit about what something looks like but an illustrator needs precision. Keith needs to know exactly how big something is, its shape, how it works, everything.  He’s actually produced these amazing colour drawings of the Leviathan, for example, with cut-aways showing all the major rooms, and everything. It’s great for me when I’m writing a scene because I can see exactly how it will play out. We’re hoping to publish these drawings in a large ‘field guide’ sort of book to go with the series.

What about the mechanics of working together? What comes first text or illustration?

Generally I write a couple of chapters, Keith produces sketches, and I rewrite. All sorts of considerations come into play when you have illustrations. Keith might ask me to remove a character from a scene because the drawing composition just won’t work with that extra character. You also have to be careful about things like not having too many night time scenes, one after the other, or too many indoor ones. We try to get variety into the illustrations, alternating big scenes with detailed ones, things like that.

The next book in the series, Behemoth, is out in the autumn. What can you tell us about it? Does the egg hatch?

Oh yes. The egg hatches and just in time!

The Ottoman Empire appears in Behemoth and that’s really interesting because although the Ottoman Empire is a Clanker power it’s also embedded in another aesthetic which is more organic. So what you end up with are mechanised animals, like the huge mechanical elephant walkers that the Emperor uses. History starts to diverge in Behemoth too. In Leviathan I kept pretty true to history, but events in Behemoth take the First World War in a different direction

There’s a lot of dystopian fiction around for teens at the moment. Do you think that’s anything to do with the aftermath of 9/11 and war on terror.

Possibly. It’s a bit like the ash cloud. We suddenly discovered that technology that we’d taken for granted didn’t work anymore. 9/11 had that effect too. Then you could fly but no-one wanted to. So you had to find another way to travel. Cell phones didn’t work for a while either.

And the psychological impact?

I’m not so sure. It seems to me that modern teens have any number of apocalypses on offer: 9/11, H1N1, Aids, global warming, etc. That’s the difference between modern teens and those growing up in the 70s, say, where the only thing to worry about was the Cold War. There’s pleasure to be had out of apocalypses though:  figuring out if you’d survive and how. Plus there’s no more homework to do, no grown-ups nagging you, freedom! So I think dystopia means escapism. And I think teens need that. They get a bad press but I think they’re pretty impressive. I don’t think we’ve figured out what it means to be a teen, even when teenage starts and ends. If they go round in groups we think they’re threatening. We don’t really treat them as human at all at times. And yet they come through it all. When you think about it, that’s really amazing.

Leviathan is supposed to be aimed at a younger audience than your previous work. Did it feel different writing it?

I don’t really think about age ranges when I’m writing and I’m not at all sure that Leviathan is for a younger age range any way. What I do know is that it gets read by reluctant readers and also teens with a younger reading age. I think that’s because of the illustrations. History teachers like it too. I think alternate history is quite popular with teachers. And a lot of military liked Leviathan. I got a lot of fan email from guys with military email addresses. That’s how I know.

You travel a lot. How does that affect your writing?

I try to write about 3-4 hours a day wherever I am. I create rituals to help me. So I try to write at the same time each day and I have a particular chair, one in New York and one in Sydney. Plus, of course, travel is good for writing. It raises questions, makes you think.

Did you travel for research for the Leviathan series?

Absolutely. I took a big tour of Austria, Germany and Italy. I even got to go up in a Zepellin in Germany. That was an amazing experience. They fly low and slowly. So you get to see all the detail in the landscape and because the engines are so far away from the gondola, they’re very quiet. I took loads of photos. In fact I started to feel like I’d become glued to the camera while I was up in that thing.  It was a fantastic experience.

And finally, what comes after Behemoth?

The next in the series: Goliath.

Thank you, Scott Westerfeld, for talking to WriteAway and for sharing your wonderful photos and illustrations on your ipad.

Review: Witchfinder: Dawn of the Demontide by William Hussey

A year ago a new editor joined Oxford University Press. She was young, energetic, full of enthusiasm and on the lookout for the first book which she could fall in love with. Then along came Dawn of the Demontide and she was smitten.

And now I’ve read it, I know why.

The story opens with a human sacrifice. A boy, Luke, is dragged, screaming, from his bed, across a rocky beach to Crowden’s Sorrow. His pyjamas are torn, he is soaked through with rain and shivering with fear, and hooded adults, whose voices he recognises as friends and neighbours, pull back his head and slit his throat.
And that, pretty much, sets the tone for the rest of the book.
Luke was sacrificed, we learn, to ensure that hoards of demons cannot break through the door in the cavern known as Crowden’s Sorrow. Twenty five years later the door is threatening to open once more and an almighty battle breaks out between the guardians of the door, the Hobarron elders, and Crowden’s coven, a band of witches dedicated to the release of the demons. And at the centre of the maelstrom is Jake Harker, a fifteen year old loner and horror comic fanatic.
This is a real page turner. It’s fast paced and full of action and it’s one of the creepiest books I’ve read in a long while: Jake Harker wasn’t the only one having weird dreams, I can tell you! It’s full of well-rounded characters and a cast of evil creatures to make your stomach churn (the exploding poisonous toads that rain down on Hobarron village are truly disgusting). Adults are generally untrustworthy, and some of the children are no better, and Jake is faced with impossible odds if he is going to avoid the inevitable and bloody end.
It has to be a must for all horror fans. And if you want more, there are two more books Gallows at Twilight and The Last Nightfall due out in January and September of next year. In the meantime the website http://www.witchfinderbooks.co.uk/ is well worth checking out. There’s a reading by the author and a competition to win signed copies (closes 1^st July 2010).
Witchfinder: Dawn of the Demontide, out March 2010.

Review: If I Grow Up by Todd Strasser

DeShawn lives on the Frederick Douglass Project, a run-down estate, dominated by drugs and gang violence, in the wrong part of New York. Dropping out of school and joining a gang is the norm and every kid knows someone who’s died. Gunshots ring out on a regular basis. DeShawn is smart  enough to know that he should stay in school and keep away from the gangs but while his friends have drug money to buy what they want, DeShawn’s family can barely afford food for the month. How can he stick to his principles when his family is hungry?

This is a gritty, no-holds barred depiction of life in the worst sort of neighbourhood in New York, where the amount of bling on your body and the number babies you have sired are the marks of achievement for teenage boys, and having a baby is the one and only future for teenage girls. In the middle of all this are DeShawn and his girl friend Tanisha. He comes from one gang’s territory. She comes from another.  But this is no simple Romeo and Juliet remake. Faced with watching his sister feed her twin babies sugar water because she can’t afford formula, DeShawn makes a decision. When his love is threatened too, he makes another, thus ensuring both his current and future families are secure. I won’t reveal the nature of his choices as that would be to spoil the book, but I will say that the results are as exciting for the reader as they are life-changing for DeShawn.

Todd Strasser pulls no punches and this is not a book for the squeamish.  It contains violence, drugs, and teenage pregnancy, although without, it should be said, any explicit scenes. The language is largely street, too and English audiences might need the odd translation (gangbanger, for example, seems to mean simply ‘gang member’ but it gave this reader a few raised eyebrows before she realised that). It moves fast, with short paragraphs and an easy style and can thus be read quickly, which makes it perfectly adapted as a discussion text for any lessons dealing with ethics or morals, although, the teacher might want to advise readers to omit reading the heavily sermonising final chapter so that they can reach their own conclusions.

Originally written for writeaway.org.uk

The lovely folk at Simon & Schuster sent me this review copy. If you would like one for yourself please order it via the link below and the nice people at Amazon will make a small contribution to the maintenance of this blog.

 

Review: Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

Set in the lushly drawn deep south of America, Beautiful Creatures is the tale of forbidden love between a mortal and a ‘Caster’. It’s Bella and Edward with swamps, voodoo, and confederate history, and the not-so-subtle twist that the whole story is told from the male mortal point of view with the dangerous supernatural love interest being female.

Ethan Wate, the sixteen year old, only son of a recently deceased professorial mother and a writer father who has surrendered to grief, is ticking off the days until he can graduate from school and leave the stifling environment of small town, Gatlin. Lena Duchannes is the mysterious new girl at school, niece of Macon Ravenwood, Gatlin’s mysterious shut-in, who lives in the town’s oldest building, which also happens to be one of the only two buildings that survived the fires that wiped out the rest of the town in the American civil war.

Ethan and Lena are drawn inexplicably to each other: he has solid southern antecedents and is accepted without question into the local community of Daughters of the American Revolution and their quiescent husbands; she is shunned, an outsider, who neither dresses nor acts the right way and drives a hearse to school.  Why they should be connected is a mystery, until, piece by piece they discover their common history and another tale of forbidden love played out as Gatlin burned.

This is a heavily textured book. The sounds, smells, humidity of the south are almost tangible. Anything seems possible in this claustrophobic hothouse and it takes little suspension of disbelief to be swept away by the outrageous actions of the town’s bigots, the voodoo charms and prayers used by Amma (who looks after Ethan), and even the spells cast by Lena’s Caster family.

 I found it harder, though, to be swept away by Ethan. This is a basketball jock who reads. Now, I confess that I don’t know how one of these would sound, but I can’t help but think that he would be more likely to opine on who should play point guard than the quantity of taffeta comprising the cheerleaders’ prom dresses or the number of bobby pins in their hair. Ethan just doesn’t come across as a sixteen year old boy, which makes the very end of the book, when the point of view switches between him and Lena, quite difficult to follow: their voices are just too similar.

Bizarrely, the love story still works in spite of this, possibly because Lena is very well drawn and the environment and atmosphere are so convincing. Essentially this is a reworking of the Romeo and Juliet story, but with large amounts of Confederate history and something akin to race hatred thrown in. As such it prompts interesting analogies with the civil rights movement and is undoubtedly revealing about the psyche of the deep south.

Originally written for writeaway.org.uk

Review: Everwild by Neal Shusterman

The fate of Everlost is at stake. Nick, the ‘Chocolate Ogre’ wants to help the children reach the light at the end of the tunnel, but Mary Hightower wants to trap them forever, and joins forces with Pugsy Capone, a death boss, who gains subject children in a terrible way. Meanwhile, Allie has gone in search of her parents and joins a group of ‘skinjackers’. But as her search takes her further away from Nick and the children of Everlost, Allie uncovers a shocking secret: it seems that ‘skinjackers’ are not actually dead.

Everwild is the second novel in a trilogy which started with Everlost a couple of years ago and will finish with Everfound next year. Readers of Everlost will welcome the reappearance of that book’s quartet of protagonists: Nick, Allie, Mary and Mikey McGill. Readers who come straight to Everwild, on the other hand, will have no difficulty in finding their bearings, courtesy of the ‘Read Me’ placed at the very beginning of the book. Both will enjoy the fast plot, character developments and revelations about the world of Everlost.

This is not a simple book. The world created is complex and raises thought-provoking questions about what it means to be alive, and what, if anything, might exist after life. And we find out about it all through the viewpoints of a group of antipathetic but well-drawn and irresistible characters. This enhances the depth of our understanding of Everlost as well as driving the pace of the plot by leaving us wondering what has happened to one group of characters whilst reading about another.  Add to this some gruesome details and spine-chilling imagery, delivered via a witty writing style, and supported by a website where the nerdier reader can immerse themselves, and you have a novel which will please a good number of teens, boys and girls alike.

Originally written for writeaway.org.uk