Today, I Recommend

From the publisher:

Oct. 11th, 1943--A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Its pilot and passenger are best friends. One of the girls has a chance at survival. The other has lost the game before it's barely begun.

Over the past few years, there have been a handful of books I pushed on everybody, rather than, yanno, trying to match my recommendations with what they liked. These books were The Hunger Games, Incarceron, Rot and Ruin, and The Girl of Fire and Thorns. Today, I am going to push you toward Code Name Verity. It's quite a bit more intense than what I would normally start buying up by the case to give away, or perhaps I feel this way because it's historical YA fiction, without the danger distance of something sf/f.

Because I had an advance copy--thank you, Hyperion and Net Galley--I've been avoiding spoilers like anything. I don't want to spoil you, so let me be as brief as possible. Two girls, one Scottish and upperclass, one Jewish-Russian in heritage and much less affluent, become the very best of friends while working for the war effort in England during WWII. The first, Queenie, has everything it takes to be a spy; playacting is second nature. The second, Maddie, is a whiz with engines and airplanes, and is part of the group of pilots who ferry military personnel around the country, often at night, navigating by memory. Their friendship is tested when Maddie, filling in for another pilot, flies Queenie to Nazi-occupied France, and their plane is hit by enemy forces.

Author Elizabeth Wein doesn't pull any punches here. There is torture, death, and danger. There is no shine. But it's brilliant, and structurally brilliant, nonetheless.

For a more detailed review that doesn't give away the whole plot, the NY Times is a good place to start. I have a mild disagreement about the statement in that interview regarding appeal to teenagers; I look at this differently--I think it will be unsettling, and a responsibility, because there is no way to not think after reading. I do agree with that reviewer that the cover is probably a mistake, though not for the same reasons the reviewer cites.

Code Name Verity is out today in the U.S. from Hyperion.

Seven Daughters and Seven Sons by Barbara Cohen and Bahija Lovejoy

Despite the title, this story--credited as a retelling of an Iraqi folktale from 1000 CE or so, though I suspect it's not so easily summarized--doesn't spend much time on all those daughters and sons. Instead, it focuses on Buran, one of seven daughters, and the apple of her father's eye. Dad is a kind man, but isn't great at business, and can't scrape together enough money to make any of his seven daughters attractive enough to make _his_ brother amenable to marrying any of those daughters to any of the brother's seven sons. Yes, that is a convoluted sentence. To add insult, Buran's favorite cousin speaks ill of her when he rebuffs the marriage proposal.
As thing spiral downward for her family, Buran gets to spend time with her father, and is introduced to things like chess, a man's game. At last, she must act. She cuts off her hair, dresses in men's clothing, and finds a place in a caravan, determined to make her fortune as a trader. It's a rough beginning to her heroic journey, but she fools people. Mostly.
That would be enough of a story, but there are two more parts. In part II, Buran--now Nasir--befriends a prince, who upon finding that he loves his friend, sets out to prove that Nasir is a woman. This part was a little sketchy for me, but it's likely enough, and I'm giving this 30-years-old retelling a bit of a mulligan, as it's attempting to recreate a time in the past (and certainly, reflective of people's attitudes about gender today). The underlying idea is that the prince is pleased to have found a woman who can be his friend and lover at once, so there's that, at least. Yes, women can be considered human! (It's more complicated than I'm letting on, but modern-day-me had some issues.)
In part III, Buran, now wealthy, knows she's going to be revealed, and returns to her hometown of Baghdad as a woman. She can provide for her family, and while her movement is constrained again, she can still take part in trade by proxy. She even manages a little revenge before the prince catches up with Nasir...
I read this as part of scoping out "tales retold" for Sirens (www.sirensconference.org); it didn't turn out to have a lick of anything resembling fantasy in it. But despite some misgivings--that stilted sort of fairytale retelling style at the beginning, a creepy gender reveal plot in the middle--I ended up being pleased with the story on the whole. I think it was the dad's confidence in Buran and the revenge plot.

Ambivalency

Sounds like a book title, right? ;) I've been feeling ambivalent about adding to the Google machine, and VERY ambivalent about all of the redesign(s), so a combination of things to do and an icky feeling means blogging has been low on my priority list of late. Oh, I'm not tired of it--I really want to talk about the books I'm reading, and the books I've read and haven't blogged about that stare at me, dusty and baleful. I want to keep posting pretty pictures of Australia and explain that I maybe didn't turn out to be as much of a fool as it looked like I might end up. I want to tell you nifty things about Sirens and how programming proposals are due in under two weeks. I want to write about--but I won't--challenges and decisions and worries, closure and hope and fear.


Instead, to quote Jessica Simpson, a twofer.

   Spoiled by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan (Little, Brown - Poppy) has, I think, a great cover. I liked it so much that you get to see it even though Blogger no longer does a great job with images. No head-chopped-off girls (something that actually doesn't bother me so much, to be honest), no flowy gowns, no pale waifs waiting for their boyfriend to show up.

It was the cover that made me want to give it a try, actually. I tend to avoid reviews for books I haven't read, but I couldn't avoid seeing reviews for Spoiled. They seemed to come in two flavors: negative, from readers of the authors' site GoFugYourself, and positive, from non-readers. I fall into the latter category, with the positive reading, and I'm sort of glad, because I know how it can go. You really, really love someone's work in one realm, but when trying something else, you're disappointed--maybe because the feel is different, or it wasn't what you were looking for, or it doesn't work. I sometimes call this the "duck two ways" problem, taken from every cooking contest show ever. The chef can't decide on a preparation, or wants to show off skillz by providing two takes on a dish; all I can think is that most of the time, one of the two ways is going to be not as good as the other, and all the judges will remember is that part of your dish is disappointing. Also, I'm tired of "dish two ways" on cooking shows.

Anyway. Molly Dix is the love child of her mother, a former Hollywood makeup artist, and one of those sexiest-man-alive-type movie action heroes. Her mom has just died, and her dad--who married someone else, and has another daughter, Brooke, the same age--wants Molly to come live in California. Brooke has been waiting for her turn in the limelight and in the spotlight of their shared dad, a guy who looks like Adonis and thinks like a Ben Stiller character, so she's happy to ensure that Molly doesn't fit into competitive, glamorous, stylish Beverly Hills...not that Molly was going to fit in in the first place.

It's been a while since I read Spoiled, but here's what I really liked: 1) It was funny, in small-humor and big-humor ways, 2) it captured a particular aspect of part of California life that I recognized--and when I lived there, hated--and gave it a good poke in the eye, 3) it focused on the sibling relationship between Molly and Brooke, and secondarily, on the larger family relationship, even though there were average teenage concerns like cars and boys. For me, it has the heart missing in a lot of the over-the-top glitz-and-glamour titles for YA.

I mentioned recently that I'd been a little out of sorts about Fortune's Folly by Deva Fagan (Henry Holt). This is a duck two ways problem: for some reason, I'd thought this book was set in, like, Sri Lanka or something, so that rubbed up against my realization that this was a (very loose) take on "The Elves and the Shoemaker" with an Italianate setting. Fortunata and her father are down on their luck--her father just can't make nice shoes now that Fortunata's mother is dead and not there to trick him into thinking that magic helped him work--and they end up, after being scammed and robbed by the leader, part of a band of traveling performers, with a focus on fortune-telling.

Fortunata is the adult in the relationship with her father, and the troupe leader has them both under his thumb. To survive, she learns the "art" of telling fortunes, and soon, she's the money-maker, squirreling away a coin or two to make an escape. Before she's able to do this, she's roped into providing a prophecy for a prince, and into accompanying him on his quest, because if the prophecy doesn't come true, her father will die.

This is where the book really took off for me. The relationship between Fortunata and the price is sweet and slow-growing, and they both take an equal hand in defeating foes and solving puzzles. Fortunata has real, tricky choices to make regarding how and when she lies (never really liking it, but forced by circumstance and an inability to back down from her story), whom to trust, and how to get the things she wants for herself and others. Most of all, though, I liked the subtle interweaving of the idea that belief, faith, and magic are what you make them to be--that you make magic all on your own, and that you can make life wonderful for others.

I've added an MG tag to this post because I think Fortune's Folly is toward the younger end of the young adult category, and a crossover book for middle grade readers.