young adult – It's More Fun to Be Jack of All Trades than Master of One

“Crewel” Gennifer Albin

I reserved Crewel at the library after reading an excerpt from the sequel on tor.com because I was interested in the premise. Don’t read the excerpt if you don’t want to be spoiled for some of the revelations in Crewel btw, and there are some spoilers for plot points later in this post as well.

In Crewel our protagonist is 16 year old Adelice who has just gone through the testing to see if she can become a Spinister – someone who can spin the very stuff of the world. She’s passed – accidentally, her parents had been coaching her how to fail. Tonight they are coming to take her away if she can’t escape. The world is a heavy-handed dystopia, young adult style. Boys and girls are segregated till after they’re 16, then must marry by 18. Women have limited job opportunities with only very 1950s-approved professions available to them (secretary, for instance). Everyone must keep themselves groomed to the appropriate standard – which for women means heavily made up using appropriate cosmetics. The Guild, who control the Spinsters, turn up with overwhelming force and drag Adelice off to her fate … Spinsters are kept in luxury, with their own stylists & so on to keep the girls happy coz we all know that’s all girls care about. But not Adelice, she’s made of sterner stuff and the primary driving force of the plot is for her & us to find out why they haven’t just killed her like they would a normal Spinster candidate who was causing so much hassle.

As you might tell from the tone of that paragraph I didn’t much enjoy the book. I could say “oh it’s YA, that’s why” but I don’t think that actually does excuse the lack of subtlety. There’s quite a lot of anvilicious foreshadowing, and when Adelice does something that shows she’s special we get it referenced several times over a few pages to make sure no-one reading can miss that this is Special. It probably does explain the love triangle which had me rolling my eyes, but that appears to be de rigueur if you have a female protagonist in a YA book. And I’d probably have liked it more when 16 or younger myself, but nowadays I feel it’s rather overdone as a trope.

I found the secondary characters rather shallow. The love interests appear to appeal to Adelice because they’re the first boys of approximately her own age she’s ever met. The antagonists are cartoonish – the leader of the Guild isn’t just interested in Adelice because of what makes her special but SPOILER he’s also interested in her (genuinely? as a means of control? I’m not sure). So there’s a forced-marriage sub-plot that appears out of almost nowhere at the end of the book, with bonus threat of brainwashing if she doesn’t agree. END SPOILER. The other antagonist is a more senior Spinster who takes a hatred to Adelice because Adelice is special and also her pretty boy fancies Adelice, and she’s sufficiently psychotic that she “cleans” (i.e. kills, via the world weaving stuff) a whole handful of people out of petty spite at Adelice not walking into a trap she set (which would’ve ended up with said people dead by Adelice’s hand instead). She doesn’t quite cackle and rub her hands together while talking about her evil plan … but she might as well.

I finished it mostly because it was a quick enough read & I did still like the premise of where this world of Spinsters who could mould reality came from. But I’ve no desire to read further.

“All Our Yesterdays” Cristin Terrill

The book opens with Em in a cell, obsessed with & terrified by the drain in the floor and plotting her & her fellow prisoner’s escape. Her discovery of a note in her own handwriting in the drain – a note she knows she hasn’t written – leads to their success. And the two use their captor’s time machine to head back to 4 years earlier to try & stop the seemingly inevitable chain of events that lead to that cell. The other main point of view is Marina – who starts the book seemingly a shallow, sheltered, spoilt teenage girl obsessed with her looks & the boy next door. Thankfully it quickly becomes clear that not only is that not really an accurate description but also her character arc involves growing out of appearing that way.

Again I picked this up from the library after a review on Tor.com – this time the reviewer had mentioned that she didn’t normally read YA but was glad she’d accidentally read this one. So I still read it even after the disappointment of Gwenda Bond’s The Woken Gods (post) which I’d partly chalked up to it being YA and me not being the target audience, and I’m glad I did read it. Having just read & written up my impressions of Bond’s book something that was very striking about this book was how it felt like the world did exist outside of where the characters & author were focusing on. And Marina in particular has a very naive world view, yet as the reader you see more than she does. The characters feel real, and you get to see enough of their environment & backstory for it to feel like their relationships & attitudes come from their upbringing & their basic personality. In particular I re-read the very first Marina chapter while I was writing the first paragraph of this review, and I was struck by all the little details about Marina & her friends & family. I was left with a sensation that of course this girl acted like that then, just look how she lived & how people treated her.

Being a time travel novel, the plot is like a jigsaw puzzle or an intricate piece of knotwork. I think Cristin Terrill did a good job of setting up the revelations so that you began to realise who someone was or what the cause of an event was just enough before the reveal that it felt right. A few things were hidden by clever word choice or by not naming someone, but generally those were lampshaded reasonably well – like a little conversation between Finn & Em about how she can’t bring herself to use the antagonist’s real name any more. I mean, it’s obvious it’s there to keep some doubt going about who it is in the earlier timeline, but I was willing to accept it for long enough for it to do its job. Terrill also manages to pull off telling us how the loop & the plot will be resolved right near the beginning – the note says “you have to kill him”. But there’s still tension. And even tho you know how it will inevitably end, you don’t know how it will end – what the details are, how it will play out.

There’s a lot of underlying stuff about consequences in the book – kinda obviously as it’s a time travel story. But this also feeds into one of the themes – do the ends justify the means? If you “know” that killing someone will prevent a lot of other deaths, should you do it? Even before they did the things they did? The antagonist is definitely someone who believes that the ends justify the means, but isn’t Em too? And unintended consequences abound – the antagonist is trying to fix things, make the world a better place, but the cumulative effect of his fixes make the world overall a worse place even as the specific things don’t happen.

It’s not flawless – no book is. I had a niggling feeling that not really enough time had passed between the two time periods for people to’ve changed the way they did, but that Terrill had wanted to keep Em & Finn young adults so 4 years was all we got. I also have a niggling feeling that if I poked at the plot enough I’d find other paradoxes (not just the one that’s lampshaded in the text as the way time travel works), but the strength of the book is that I don’t want to follow up on that niggle.

A good book. It ends in a satisfying place, but I believe Terrill is writing a sequel – presumably working out the unintended consequences of the end of this one 🙂

“The Woken Gods” Gwenda Bond

Kyra is a teenager living in Washington, D.C. – but this is a Washington after the gods have woken and are walking the Earth among us. After her father disappears she & her friends band together to try & find him. What Kyra finds is that she’s not just a normal girl, and the reasons for her father’s disappearance have implications for the whole world.

I picked this up from the library after I read a review of this on Tor.com, and it mentioned that instead of the “normal” pantheons of gods that you often find in fiction like Greek or Norse gods this book had Egyptian gods (amongst others). So I thought I’d give it a go, despite it being Young Adult. I think one reason I have problems with this book is that I’m not the target audience any more – I suspect at age 13 I’d’ve liked it a lot more. It feels very “young”.

There wasn’t really much Egyptian mythology. Sekhmet has been executed shortly after the gods woke by the Society as a show of power over the gods – and that’s a shame coz I’m fond of Sekhmet. But I guess if you (i.e. the Society) want to make a point about how living gods can be killed then killing off a personification of rage & war makes that point well. The on-screen Egyptian god is Set, along with a Sumerian god (Enki), the Voodoo god(?) Legba and a selection of other trickster gods (Coyote, Loki, Hermes all get walk-on parts). Sadly Bond refers to Set as jackal headed*, which then made me wonder how well researched any of the gods I didn’t know about were.

*According to the books on Egyptian gods that we have, it isn’t known what the Set animal actually represents and it’s thought to be completely mythological … wikipedia on the other hand says the Set animal is a jackal in one of the articles. Did all of the mythology come from wikipedia? I don’t know enough about the rest to know.

The world-building in general was a bit on the insubstantial side. It didn’t feel like the world existed outside of where the author was looking. Too much of the world seemed to be carrying on as if it was business as usual as if when the gods woke everyone just kind of shrugged and got on with life. But then when “cool facts” were needed we had differences – like horse drawn carriages coz tech is affected (how?) & no-one flies anywhere coz interference by a god when you’re on a plane is more likely to be fatal. The government has apparently been replaced by the Society – in the US? in the world? I don’t know. Most of the time the fact that there’s a country outside Washington D.C. isn’t obvious, let alone a world outside the US. And apparently (and plot-importantly) this all happened only 5 years ago, but it feels far too settled for that. It could be that Kyra is just uber-sheltered (a distinct possibility) but it would’ve been nice if the reader was made more aware of that even if Kyra herself didn’t notice.

There’s a phrase I’ve seen used in reviews of various books elseweb – “Too much boyfriend, too little X”. And that sums up most of my impression of the book – in this case X is Egyptian mythology, or maybe just mythology in general. I could’ve done with less of Kyra’s drooling over the love interest’s muscular chest, and more attention paid to the world the story was in. Overall a disappointing read that could’ve been cool.