Read This: White Devil, Blue Envelope
I’ve got a new Shelf Awareness review this morning, for The White Devil, a ghost story by Justin Evans set at Harrow, the boarding school Lord Byron attended as an adolescent—which has a direct bearing on the contemporary supernatural dilemma. I was distracted by a few of the novel’s structural elements, but Evans has come up with a narratively sensible explanation for a prominent lacuna in Byron’s life and built a good ghost story around it, so I was pretty well entertained the whole time.
Today is also the release date for The Last Little Blue Envelope, Maureen Johnson’s sequel to her popular 13 Little Blue Envelopes. If you’ve read that earlier book, you know that Ginny received 13 envelopes from her dead aunt, which sent her on a life-changing trip across Europe, but that she never did get to open and read the final envelope. Now, a few months later, Ginny is struggling with her college application essays when she hears from somebody who’s gotten hold of that last message and is willing to share it with her—for a price. Soon, she’s back in Europe—with the most awkward travel companions imaginable—and this last quest is not only satisfying in its own right, it fills in some of the unanswered questions from the first book. (What was supposed to happen in Amsterdam? Now you’ll know!) One of the great things about Maureen’s writing is that just about every character in these two books, even the ones with walk-on parts, seems like they could have their own remarkable story, if only we went off and followed them instead of sticking with Ginny. I hope this will be as big a hit with YA readers as 13 Little Blue Envelopes was—just as Megan McCafferty was able to take Sloppy Firsts and carry it forward into Second Helpings and the subsequent sequels, Maureen’s found a character who’s interesting enough (and still has enough room to grow) for multiple novels.
26 April 2011 | read this |
Read This: The Great Night
In my latest Shelf Awareness review, I tackle The Great Night, the new novel from Chris Adrian, which expands upon “A Tiny Feast,” his New Yorker short story about Oberon and Titania, the fairy king and queen, in the modern world, with a changeling boy being treated for leukemia. The novel begins a year or so after that story—their marriage has been torn apart by grief over the child’s death, and Puck has seized an opportunity to take revenge upon the entire fairy court, which in this day and age is located in the middle of San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park. You will not be surprised to learn that a small number of mortals get caught up in these events.
The plot’s structure is loosely borrowed from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though Adrian uses Shakespeare less as a template than as a springboard. About the most “faithful” transposition is the Bottom subplot, re-imagined as a troupe of homeless men and women who are corralled by their leader, Huff, into performing a musical version of Soylent Green. (Huff is acutely paranoid, and has his reasons for believing this is political theater.) Otherwise, Adrian spins the story in directions of his own choosing—leaving several clues to the subtle connections between his three primary human characters. I read The Great Night through the prism of literary fantasy, and in that frame of mind I quite enjoyed it: A bit slow in spots, and anticlimactic, but still quite a good story.
19 April 2011 | read this |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
