Posts on science fiction

Books Boys Like: The Compound

Lisa — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:20:31 -0700

I love gritty speculative fiction, even though it has a tendency to give me bad dreams. The scenarios lie on the borders of the realm of possibility, just a little too close for comfort and utterly gripping. So, of course I picked up The Compound, by S. A. Bodeen.

Eli Yanakakis’s billionaire father has always warned the family about the possibility of nuclear war, the need to disappear underground when the bombs hit. On Eli’s ninth birthday, that time comes. The whole family flees to the state-of-the-art bunker Mr. Yanakakis has prepared for them in eastern Washington—the whole family except Gram and Eli’s twin brother Eddy.

Six years later, Eli is wracked with guilt and starting to worry for himself and the rest of his family. There’s no way their food supply is going to last the whole fifteen years needed to survive a nuclear winter, and Mr. Yanakakis is behaving strangely. He’s the only one with the code to the exit. What else is he hiding from Eli and his family?

This page-turner is packed not only with mystery and action, but also plenty of fodder for discussion. I could easily see it being a teen or parent/son book group selection for junior high age and up.

One quibble.

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So, the big reveal is that Eli’s family is actually trapped in the bunker on Mr. Yanakakis’s whim. One, of course, wants to know why. The father in The Mosquito Coast drags his family to Central America because he despises American culture. The father in The Poisonwood Bible refuses to evacuate his family from the Congo because he’s on a mission from God. Their obsessions distort their reasoning, pushing it over the edge into the realm of insanity, but everything they do still makes sense in its own scary way.

Bodeen gives Mr. Yanakakis his reasons, too, but I couldn’t quite buy them. Making a bunker prototype to sell for gazillions of dollars? A little nuts, but okay: greediness is a fine motivator. Trapping your family inside it to spend quality time with them? Again, crazy, but family values are a good motivator, too. But it doesn’t make sense to challenge your spoiled kids to be “brave and determined” by locking them in a bunker with a home theater, a gym, and other such niceties, then telling them they’ll have to eat their younger siblings or starve. What’s the motivation there? That’s just insanity talking, no logic behind it. That made the pay-off disappointing to me.

Still, as I said, there’s plenty to enjoy here and plenty to talk about. What I quibbled about above? Maybe it’s just me. I’d be interested to know what other people who have read it think.

(Go to the Head of the) Class in YA Lit

Lisa — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 18:51:27 -0800

Reaching waaay back in time (all the way to 2007!), there the YA YA YAs initiated a discussion about social class in young adult literature. Whether/where poverty is depicted in YA lit, whether/how it's tied up with race, etc. Figures that in the month since, I've read several good books that deal with class differences.

Mortal Engines, by Philip Reeve.
I'd tried reading Larklight and just couldn't get into it, so I was intensely surprised and pleased when I discovered I LOVED Mortal Engines!

It's a steampunk adventure set on a far-future Earth where wheeled cities roam the continents devouring smaller towns. The gentry live on the top tier, slaves operate the engines in the bowels, and everyone else falls somewhere in between.

Our story’s heroes are Tom, an apprentice historian (middle-class), Katherine, the Head Historian’s daughter (nouveau riche), and Hester, a would-be assassin (outsider/untouchable). All become embroiled in London’s sinister plot to dominate Eurasia. It’s a page-turner with three glorious sequels. Oh, and did I mention the pirates?

To me, it read most like Kenneth Oppel’s Airborn and Skybreaker, but it will find fans among most literary fantasy/science fiction (Philip Pullman, Garth Nix, Diana Wynne Jones, etc.) lovers, junior high and up.
Taken, by Edward Bloor.
In this near-future suspense, 13-year-old Charity has been kidnapped, presumably for the high ransom her parents will pay. Kidnapping children from wealthy families has become an industry in this America of intense social stratification (yes, even more intense than today). Fully expecting to be returned home safely within the typical 24 hours, Charity is forced to reevaluate everything she knows about her family when the kidnappers stray from protocol.

In this book, race and class are definitely intertwined. In Charity’s South Florida community, the people living in gated communities seem to be mostly white, while the new servant class is largely Hispanic, African-American, or otherwise “of color.” Taken sort of hits the reader over the head with its social commentary, but it’s still one of the better written and thoughtful suspense novels for the junior high age group available. It should appeal to both boys and girls.
Another Kind of Cowboy, by Susan Juby.
And now for something completely different. This contemporary YA book explores teenagers Alex and Clio’s coming of age. Alex is a reserved, closeted gay teen who lives for horses. Clio is a spoiled and naive debutante at the local equestrienne school. Alex’s lack of money causes problems in his quest to pursue the dressage method of riding, while Clio has more money than she knows what to do with. In spite of their glaring differences, they somehow become good friends.

I really enjoyed the book’s realism and dry humor. It reaches a very satisfying conclusion, and avoids the obvious solution to Alex’s financial problems by having Clio bail him out.

First Light

Lisa — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:54:54 -0800

First Light, by Rebecca Stead (Random House, 2007) is one of the best books I’ve read this year with obvious cross-gender appeal. By “one of the best”, I mean not only is it well-written, with an interesting premise and three-dimensional characters, it’s a page-turner. I carried it around with me, just waiting for a spare moment in which to sneak another peek. I’m confident it will have the same effect on many upper middle grade readers, too.

First Light follows the lives of two young characters, Peter and Thea, who live in separate worlds. Peter lives in modern-day New York City, while Thea lives in a time and place we can’t quite pin down. All we know is it’s foreign. Cold. Dark. A colony enclosed by ice, called Gracehope.

Both Peter and Thea are looking for answers. Peter seems perfectly ordinary, except for his headaches, which are accompanied by strange visions. There is, however, the question of his mother’s depression, which seems tied to the red notebook she’s always writing in but won’t let Peter see.

As for Thea, she’s concerned for Gracehope’s future. Her people came to Gracehope seven generations ago, and have grown greatly in number. How will they survive without leaving Gracehope and entering the “wider world” to find a bigger place to live, with greater resources? Unfortunately, the elders of Gracehope, particularly Thea’s grandmother, are completely resistant to exploring that option.

It isn’t until Peter and his parents visit Greenland – ostensibly for his father to study global warming, while his mother writes a book on mitochondrial DNA – that Peter and Thea’s worlds are set on a collision course, and all their questions are answered. The hows and whys are the mystery that will drive readers onward.

The Library of Congress has cataloged First Light as an adventure story, but I’m going to call it science fiction. It’s speculative, involving situations and technology outside current reality. Aside from a touch of prophecy, all explanations are scientific rather than magical in nature. It does have elements of adventure and mystery, but I think it shares most of its appeal with speculative fiction such as Lois Lowry’s Giver trilogy, Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Running Out of Time and Shadow Children series, and – the parallels will be obvious to any reader – Jeanne Du Prau’s City of Ember. And boy howdy, do those books have a lot of fans, many of whom would probably enjoy First Light!

To be critical for a moment, the “scientific” elements of the story were, to me, the least interesting or plausible. Without giving too much away, Peter’s mother’s mitochondrial DNA explanation for Gracehope’s people works for the present-day, but I wasn’t sure why it was necessary for the founder of Gracehope to have known about it as well (down to the double-helix, even!). That, along with certain other technology "invented" by the founder, seemed almost magical in an otherwise fairly grounded story. Meanwhile, global warming provides a compelling reason for Peter’s family’s visit to Greenland, but I didn’t feel the full weight of global warming’s consequences for Gracehope. This is probably because the story ends without Gracehope’s people confronting the truth themselves.

If one doesn’t dig too deeply into pragmatics, however, there’s plenty to enjoy here for both boys and girls, grades 6-or-so and up. I look forward to adding it to my library’s list of recommended science fiction titles and talking it up next time someone asks me, “Read any good books lately?”

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