The Sharp Time by Mary O'Connell

Title: The Sharp Time
Author: Mary O'Connell
Publisher: Random House/Delacorte Press
Release Date: November 8, 2011
Pages: 228 pages (hardback)
How I Got the Book: Christmas gift.

Sandinista Jones is a high school senior with a punk rock name and a broken heart. The death of her mother has left Sandinista alone in the world, isolated and vulnerable, When the school system lets her down, her grief and instability intensify, and she ponders a violent act of revenge against a teacher.

Still, in the midst of her crisis, she gets a job at the Pale Circus, a funky vintage clothing shop, and finds a kindred spirit in her coworker, Bradley, a boy struggling with his own secrets.

Even as Sandinista is losing heart, confronted repeatedly by the failures of those in authority, she is offered a chance to believe in the redemptive power of friendship. Now she must choose faith--and forgiveness--or despair and vengeance.

Readers will cheer Sandinista on as she navigates an often brutal but unexpectedly beautiful world.

Review:

Since the death of her mother a few months before, Sandinista has been on a slow downward spiral and a haunting incident involving her, Alecia Hardaway, and their teacher Catherine Bennett has pushed her closer to the edge. Getting a job at the Pale Circus, a vintage clothing store, with Bradley and the store's owner Henry helps her and getting to know other business owners on the same street does too, but that might not be enough. If she can't conquer her anger, Sandinista may end up taking her pretty pink gun and doing something she will regret.

I may not like most of the characters (especially Erika; what happened to her is terrible, but what she is doing is wrong and not at all anything that should be construed as "girl power" or feminism, something I'm glad Sandinista realizes), but I understand why they are the way they are and sympathize with them. That's an accomplishment in itself because if I dislike a character, it's often because I find them unsympathetic. Sandinista, our school-skipping and orphaned heroine, is a little difficult to understand, fairly sympathetic, and very, very angry. I can't recall if I've ever read about such an angry heroine.

One of the novel's main subjects, the abuse of students by teachers and faculty and how the school system can so badly fail the students, was unexpected, but I found it to be a powerful event to focus on. No parent wants to think their child is being abused not just by their peers but by the teachers that are supposed to be helping them. As I've seen while watching the news, this still happens all too often to be comfortable. I wish I could find more YA novels dealing with that subject. Recommendations, anyone?

I did struggle with the novel at some parts. Multiple times, I stopped and thought that this was less of a young adult book and more of an adult literary novel. I wouldn't be able to come up with proof to support why I feel that way, but that's what kept coming to mind. I do have an appreciation for adult litfic, but one reason I don't seek it out as regular reading material is because it reads so monotonously to me. It's nothing to do with the content, just the way it's written. That same problem happened to me while reading The Sharp Time.

Not to say the entire novel reads in such a dull way (or as dull as this review, if you ask me, but I guess I expended so much of my energy and enthusiasm on a recent glowing review that I'm having trouble being my usual bouncy self while reviewing). Some of the scenes in the novel are undeniably tense, like when Sandinista drives to Catherine Bennett's house with her gun and ends up throwing Toad at her window. I just about bit another hole in my lip when I was reading that scene.

Strangely enough, my brother shares a name with the character Bradley. I love my brother (I call him Bubba), but he says things that make me want to castrate him. Book Bradley said this on page 37: "How fun to work with a girl; it's like having my very own Barbie doll." If Bubba were less of the foul-mouthed-gamer type and more free-spirited, I could see him being like Book Bradley just because of that one line. The problem? Bubba is a misogynistic shitwaffle. Book Bradley reminding me of Bubba in such a way was not good for him at all.

I've been debating with myself back and forth about whether or not I would recommend this for anyone, but I think I'll go with yes. It may help to approach it as adult litfic instead of young adult, though. Maybe if I'd known ahead of time and approached it differently, this short book wouldn't have felt like it was five times longer.

3 stars!

What am I reading next?: The Ghosts of Ashbury High by Jaclyn Moriarty

My Message to Authors

After some recent events involving the behavior of YA authors, I have something to say. I've rewritten this post several times now trying to say it right and while it would normally go on my personal blog, I think it needs to be posted here.
Being a member of Goodreads, a reviewer, and just someone who loves YA in the digital age makes keeping track of books, authors, and the occasional author shennanigans much easier. I say occasional because normally, there is some spacing between incidents.This is some of the behavior I have seen authors--self-published, vanity-published, and traditionally published alike--engaging in recently (and by this, I mean within the past two weeks):

• Passively-aggressively trolling a Goodreads review where the reviewer is angry about how portions of the book inaccurately portray feminism and inciting a group of authors to trade insults about it on Twitter (though to be fair, many of the people involved have now said they were not aware of what the conversation/hashtag was about and have apologized);
• Comparing Goodreads to 4chan;
• Getting negative reviews of their book deleted on Goodreads and possibly Amazon because they were supposedly written by sockpuppet saboteurs (one of the supposed sockpuppets recently approached me and turned out not to be a sockpuppet, just an honest reviewer who didn't like the book), writing an article on a major webstite about it that also tells reviewers how to review, and posting a comment on a negative Amazon review of the book calling the review an act of sabotage;
• Calling a reviewer a cow and a bitch while starting an email campaign to mess with the Amazon system and get a negative review of the author's book voted down;
• And using actual sockpuppets and/or asking fans to give a book one star because of a personal beef with the book's author.

What happened? Why have so many authors in such a short period of time lost their minds and also lost the ability to act like professionals?

According to what some friends have told me, there isn't a lot of media training for new authors. Considering the above-listed behavior and how easy the digital age makes author-reader interactions, I think this needs to change. Some would say they need to rely on common sense to not make mistakes like that and to a degree, I feel the same way. As much as we would like it to, common sense can't cover everything and letting unprofessional behavior going unchecked like this can do some damage to the author's career. I don't buy the books of authors I see ridiculing reviewers and generally behaving badly and I'm far from the only reader that does this.

I'm almost ashamed now that I want to spend my life working in the YA industry. I'm not going to let one very small group of horribly behaved authors crush something that has been my goal since I was a fifteen-year-old in her freshman year of high school, but I hope none of the hypothetical authors I may one day work with ever behave like this.

Good authors who behave well and know how to act like professionals (like one specific author involved in one of the above incidents)? Thank you for doing so. I hope others who are published, awaiting publication, or just dreaming of it for the moment can learn from your examples.

Anyone who wants to know who I'm talking about and which authors did what can email me. I don't want this to show up as a result for their names through Google Alerts. After what I've seen the past few days, I have justifiable reason to fear that someone would attack me if I attached names to deeds in this post.

The Gathering Storm by Robin Bridges

Title: The Gathering Storm
Author: Robin Bridges
Publisher: Random House/Delacorte Press
Release Date: January 10, 2012
Pages: 400 pages (hardback)
How I Got the Book: From the publisher via NetGalley

St. Petersburg, Russia, 1888. As she attends a whirl of glittering balls, royal debutante Katerina Alexandrovna, Duchess of Oldenburg, tries to hide a dark secret: she can raise the dead. No one knows. Not her family. Not the girls at her finishing school. Not the tsar or anyone in her aristocratic circle. Katerina considers her talent a curse, not a gift. But when she uses her special skill to protect a member of the Imperial Family, she finds herself caught in a web of intrigue.

An evil presence is growing within Europe's royal bloodlines—and those aligned with the darkness threaten to topple the tsar. Suddenly Katerina's strength as a necromancer attracts attention from unwelcome sources . . . including two young men—George Alexandrovich, the tsar's standoffish middle son, who needs Katerina's help to safeguard Russia, even if he's repelled by her secret, and the dashing Prince Danilo, heir to the throne of Montenegro, to whom Katerina feels inexplicably drawn.

 

The time has come for Katerina to embrace her power, but which side will she choose—and to whom will she give her heart?

Review:

Duchess Katerina Alexandrovna of Oldenburg has a secret: she's a necromancer, one who can raise the dead. Since discovering her gift as a child, she has refused to use it again out of fear, but a threat to the tsarevich by the Montenegrin princess and sorceress Elena forced Katiya to use her powers once again. This pushes her into a tangled web of intrigue where the Montenegrin royals, now aware of her gift, are trying to win her over, fellow royals use Katiya and tell her only what suits their agendas, and the tsar's middle son accuses her of being a threat to the tsar. The truth is that the greatest threat is yet to come and Katiya's powers are the key to defeating it when it comes.

Katerina--Katiya, from this point on--was a great character and I enjoyed both her and the conflict she had with her powers, but there were time I thought she was ridiculous. For instance, she can believe that faeries, necromancy, sorceresses, and general magic exist because they're all around her, but vampires and prophetic dreams? She calls bull on that. Really? It boggles my mind how she does that. If there's one mythical being out there, it's not a far stretch for there to be more, is it?

I initially had worries about the book due to the mention of an apparent love triangle in the summary, and I was relieved to find that this was not the case. It's a little more complicated than that. Our antagonist (one of about fifty million, really) Danilo, appropriately creeped me out and made me hate him, but I wasn't quite sold on Katiya's love interest George. When a guy spend half the book glaring at her/accusing her of being evil and then spend the other half of the book only starting to warm up, and then does something as dramatic as George does at the end of the book, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to feel.

Though I am not overly familiar with 1880s Russia, it appears the author has done her research on royal titles, the Russian naming system, and more. Only one or two things please me more than seeing that an author has done their research well and not contradicted themselves in multiple places. So thank you for that, Mrs. Bridges. Thank you. Now, if only some other authors could follow that example...

Several plot lines are going on in the book--the dead soldiers coming back to life, the Montenegrins' plans, strange happenings around St. Petersburg, and what's going on behind the scenes--but the book switches seamlessly between them, timing them just right so the switches happen when the reader begins to tire of one plot line and wonder when advancements will be made on one of the other plots. I can't remember the last time I read a book so well-paced in such a manner!

The Gathering Storm was a worthwhile read I know I'll be getting a copy of once it is released. There was a troubling detail or two towards the end (mainly an element coming in that should forbid George and Katiya from being together, and those forbidden romances are so passe), but I look forward to the sequel in... Wow, it's going to be a while. Reading the ARC of a fantastic novel: a double-edged blade.

4 stars!

What am I reading next?: Seraphina by Rachel Hartman

Ignite by Kaitlyn Davis

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope 2012 treats you well both lifewise and bookwise. Unfortunately, my year in books has... To say the least, it has not started off well.

Title: Ignite
Author: Kaitlyn Davis
Publisher: Kaitlyn Davis (self-published)
Release Date: October 9, 2011
Pages: 207 pages (according to Amazon estimate; Ignite is only available in ebook format)
How I Got the Book: Bought it.

"With one last look, one final search of the lines of his face for some sign, Kira turned and ran away from the sound of the man she loved laughing in the face of her death."

When Kira Dawson moves to South Carolina, she meets Luke, a blond goofball who quickly becomes her best friend, and Tristan, a mysterious bad boy who sends shivers down her spine. Kira knows they're keeping secrets, but when she discovers Tristan's lust for blood and her own dormant mystical powers, Kira is forced to fight for her life and make the heartbreaking decision between the familiar comfort of friendship and the fiery passion of love.

Review:

Unable to afford staying at the boarding school she attended in New York, Kira is back home in South Carolina for high school. On her first day there, she meets and immediately becomes friends with Luke and develops a fascination for Tristan, one of the misfits Luke seems to have something against. As Kira and Tristan slowly grow closer, the secrets they keep come out in the open: what Tristan is, what Kira can do, and the threat each presents to the other. Will they be able to make it work or will their adversarial natures win out?

Most of the characters simply fell flat, but Kira was difficult to like and I never completely came around to her. What was there for me to like? Thieves who act entitled to what they stole are not fun to read about, nor do I care to read about characters who come off as terrible friends but seem like they're supposed to be seen as good friends. Everything is so convenient for her, almost to the point of becoming a deus ex machina, that it robs all obstacles in her way of conflict.

Even after finishing the novel and thinking it over, I lack an understanding of what drew Kira and Tristan together in the first place or what they see in each other. The grand, genuine connection they're supposed to have feels more like insta-love. One of the grand flaws of the novel is its lack of genuine connections between any of the characters. I didn't believe for a second Kira was truly friends with any of her "friends" and I felt the same way about her relationship with her family.

I'll cut to the chase: In regards to the writing, this is an insult, not a book. When I read a novel, I expect it to demonstrate a mastery of basic grammar, word usage, and punctuation in whatever language I'm reading it in. This is supposed to be a final copy of Ignite, meaning it should be the absolute best it can be, but there is nothing that can convince me anything more than the bare minimum effort required was put into this novel. Being self-published is no excuse. If I were an editor, I would never take something of this quality. Cheating at narration, horrible syntax, overly blatant foreshadowing,... It hits all my pet peeves at a reader.

Ignite follows the same basic YA paranormal romance formula and feels heavily derivative of more popular works. I've seen a lot of formulaic YA around; I'm not much for such books anyway, but at least most of them have a feeling of life to them, like someone really believed in that story. For all the forbidden romance and conflict Kira is supposed to have, I felt no life or passion from it. It does try to be a little original at times and that is appreciated, but they aren't necessarily good tries. The "channeling the sun" business still makes me spare a giggle or two when I think about it.

One of the problems with formulaic YA is that the same problematic elements tend to carry over without comment or examination and I'm sad to say that problem happens here too. Some of Tristan's behavior comes off as creepy, mean, and downright scary, but he is supposed to be attractive. I do not find it sexy or remotely appealing when the love interest creeps me out and the main character openly admits he is scaring her. Romanticizing such behavior is one thing I wish YA could stop doing.

This is a small secret of mine, but vampire novels have an advantage with me as a reader. I survived the flood of vampire YA in recent years and still love the monsters of the night dearly. Not only am I a big vampire fan, I'm a nostalgic one too--remind me of one of two kinds of vampires and you have me. Even with a handicap in its favor, Ignite failed to win me due to its lack of genuine connections between characters, formulaic and derivative storyline, and the apparent lack of effort put into it. When I pay for a book, I expect to read a book, not a first draft.

0 stars!

What am I reading next? The Sharp Time by Mary O'Connell