For people who want to see only titles without commentary, a distilled list is here.
This year, I read 40 young adult and middle grade novels that were published in 2012. (That I have a record of; it’s possible that I read others during the year and forgot to document them.) I compiled my list through: 1) books that caught my attention during the year, usually because of familiarity with the author or because of recommendations, 2) contacting members of the Norton jury (the Norton award is the award for young adult and middle grade novels that’s granted by the Science Fiction Writers of America) toward the end of the year for their recommendations, and 3) contacting young adult and middle grade authors of my acquaintance and asking them which books they’d felt passionate about during 2012.
The nice thing about this method is that it allowed me to skip straight to the really good books. I didn’t end up reading the, say, 60 random books that aren’t very good which I might have picked up otherwise. It’s possible that one of those sixty would have blown me away and that’s always a negative of using other people’s filtering, but doing it this way meant that half of the books I read rated highly above average for me, thirty that rated above average, and only 6 that I rated below average.
Since I know the distinction isn’t clear to everyone, young adult and middle grade novels basically represent two facets of the market for children and teens. Young adult novels tend to be marketed at ages 13-20, have main characters around 16, and feature more romantic content (e.g. the characters may be having sex). In middle grade novels, the characters are more likely to have their first kiss, and be around 12-14, and the novels are marketed at ages 9-14. There are finer distinctions than that, and of course the books vary individually from the broad template, but those are more or less the basics. To put this in movie language, CORALINE is middle grade and TWILIGHT is young adult.
MY BALLOT:
I’m still taking some time to think through what exactly will be on my ballot, so here are some likely candidates (order is alphabetical).
PROBABLY ON MY BALLOT:
THE DROWNED CITIES by Paolo Bacigalupi – THE DROWNED CITIES is the sequel to Bacigalupi’s extremely successful SHIPBREAKER. Although the book is set in a future, post-apocalyptic, post-global-warming-floods United States, it deals with issues that affect contemporary nations.
The main character is the daughter of a local woman and a Chinese peacekeeper who abandoned his family when China pulled its forces out. The warlord factions who filled in the void of power have no love for “half-breeds”; girls like her are routinely killed. Before the book begins, one faction captures her and cuts off her right hand. They would have killed her, if she hadn’t been rescued by the secondary character, a young boy fleeing the destruction of his own home. The book opens with both children studying medicine from a doctor who believes in showing orphans mercy, but when a bio-engineered dog/man/warrior shows up, trailed by a warlord’s troops, both children are forced to run again. The boy is captured by a faction and forced to become a child soldier; the girl chases after him, trying to save him from that fate.
Like much of Bacigalupi’s work, this, too, is depressing and often horrific. However, the book avoids the pitfalls of some narratives that deal primarily with the bleak–the book isn’t just a one-note drumbeat of emotion, pacing, or imagery. The characters are fully realized; there are moments of humor and beauty. One-note books often flatten themselves out into something dim and muddy. The variety here allows the emotions of the book–positive and negative–to come across more keenly.
Both viewpoint characters are so well-rendered that I suspect they are the primary reason why the book succeeds as well as it does.
THE DIVINERS by Libba Bray – This is the first book in a series, which generally makes me grumpy, but it does manage to complete a full, satisfying arc, while still leaving tantalizing hints about the sequel-to-come. The story follows several teenagers in the 1920s in New York City, each of whom is gifted with a kind of magical power. The first is a young, white, fun-loving flapper who was banished to NYC after using her gift of reading the stories from items in order to expose the perfidy of a wealthy, influential boy. She becomes the story’s protagonist, but almost as important is a black poet from Harlem who once had the gift of healing, and now helps protect his little brother who has the gift of prophecy. While the book has epic fantasy elements about saving the world through magic, it’s also a successful character piece and historical novel which gives it a broad base of ways in which to tantalize and delight.
The book has a lot of careful, historical details, which I enjoyed, although there were moments when it felt as if the book was giving me a… how do I put this?… stereotypical version of the 1920s? Ish? It felt like it was covering all the bases. Dance marathons and speakeasies and the things one thinks of when one thinks 1920. But I don’t think this is a particular problem per se. I just kind of had a check-list in my mind. There’s the country girl who ran away from home to get on the stage, sort of thing.
What stands in immediate contrast to that feeling, though, is the inclusion of characters from diverse backgrounds. We’re rounding all the flapper bases, but how many books from the 1920s also focus on the Harlem Renaissance? I can envision the check-list as almost a political statement. Here are the things you think you know, see? And you can still enjoy the fringe and sequins. And here are the things that the history books ignore: the untold, subterranean stories.
My reservation about recommending this book as young adult is that the main plot features a serial killer along the lines of H. H. Holmes, and when he appears, the book is dark and gory in an extremely gut-clenching, visceral way. I don’t have an objection to dark material in young adult books–if I did, I couldn’t recommend DROWNED CITIES, for one. But in DROWNED CITIES, it’s very clear from the beginning what you’re in for, whereas THE DIVINERS is a cheerful, Charleston sort of story, with magic and bobbed hair, that suddenly drops into these intense scenes. Also, Bray’s novel is distinct from most sorts of urban fantasy that have a fun theme interleavened with darkness because, well, she’s a very good writer. She brings one into the scene sensorily, vividly; you breathe and feel the murders. There’s a particular detail… I don’t want to bring it up spoiler-fashion here, but if you’ve read the book and want to ping me, I’ll share my shiver moment and see if you shared it.
Anyway, I thought about this, and I decided that the violence really doesn’t disqualify the book from being something I can recommend as YA. It’s not what I turn to YA for — as an adult reader, I want my YA to be predictable in certain fashions, and usually I read it when I’m not ready to give over my spirit to be crushed without warning. But whatever. I don’t think that’s why teens are in the reading game, and they certainly don’t need fussy protection from me. THE DIVINERS is a very good book and I think most teens will enjoy it.
VESSEL by Sarah Beth Durst – A desert civilization is broken into many nomadic parts (ten?), each of which worships one of the gods. Once a generation or so (it might be once a century; I read the book a bit ago), one child from each group is chosen to be the vessel for the group’s god, which they welcome into their bodies by dancing. VESSEL’s main character is such a girl, but when she dances for her goddess to come, nothing happens. Her people declare her unfit and leave her alone in the desert to fare for herself, with only the resources her family is able to hide for her before they depart.
She goes out on a quest to find what has become of the gods. She travels between groups, finding other vessels who have been rejected, and gathering information about why their rituals didn’t work, and a threat from the nearby empire which appears to have colonial ambitions.
I thought this book was a real vivid, fun adventure, the kind of yay-we’re-on-a-quest literature that I loved as a kid and want to love as an adult even though I’m more picky now. This one passed my picky test. I thought the quest journey itself was gorgeously described, and enjoyed seeing how Durst decided to build up religions and civilizations.
Someone asked me recently in email whether this book might be considered appropriative if there were a contingent of Bedouin bloggers who were evaluating it. Honestly, I don’t know. (And if there are such evaluations and I haven’t run into them, I’d be interested in seeing them.) I didn’t think Durst was building her civilization as a Bedouin analog per se; there are a number of nomadic desert groups, and it was my impression that she was building one that shared some of the traits common to those, while not imitating any one group specifically. Other, more knowledgeable readers may see something I didn’t.
The first book by Sarah Beth Durst that I read was ICE which was nominated for the Norton award several years ago. It had some lovely imagery, and some interesting ideas, but overall I thought it was way too fast-paced for me to actually sink my teeth into; every time there was the potential for an interesting scene, the prose just raced past it, as if terrified to ever stand still for a moment and let emotions run their course. Next, I read last year’s DRINK, SLAY, LOVE, about a vampire who gains a soul, which I enjoyed as a quirky, self-aware urban fantasy. This one is even better; I’m excited to see what she does next.
SERAPHINA by Rachel Hartman – SERAPHINA takes place in a world where there are both dragons and humans. After years of fighting, the two factions have made an uneasy truce. Dragons, who can shapeshift into human form (but never quite understand human culture), visit the human kingdom, but are viewed with suspicion. As the time comes for a royal visit from the dragon king, tensions rise, and a young woman who is secretly the daughter of an illegal dalliance between a human man and a dragon woman must navigate the two parts of her heritage so that she can protect the peace.
I’m not sure how much I have to say about this one. It’s just kind of sharp and interesting. The best character is the main character’s dragon uncle who is struggling with the assimilation of human culture and how it changes his draconic-oriented mind. There are lots of cool details about music, since the main character is the assistant to the court musician, and then there are just some randomly cool details, like the garden that exists in a corner of the main character’s mind, which is populated by strange, unpredictable and sometimes dangerous denizens, whom she must take care to tend each night. Also, there’s a demi-species of not-dragons, not-humans, who cling to walls and the undersides of things like geckos, and like to make sculptures, which are bizarre and kind of fantastic.
POSSIBLY ON MY BALLOT:
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