Lexicon

Lexicon by Max Barry
Penguin - June 18, 2013
390 pages

At an exclusive school somewhere outside of Arlington, Virginia, students aren't taught history, geography, or mathematics--at least not in the usual ways. Instead, they are taught to persuade. Here the art of coercion has been raised to a science .Students harness the hidden power of language to manipulate the mind and learn to break down individuals by psychographic markers in order to take control of their thoughts. The very best will graduate as "poets" adept wielders of language who belong to a nameless organization that is as influential as it is secretive.
Whip-smart orphan Emily Ruff is making a living running a three-card Monte game on the streets of San Francisco when she attracts the attention of the organization's recruiters. She is flown across the country for the school's strange and rigorous entrance exams, where, once admitted, she will be taught the fundamentals of persuasion by Bronte, Eliot, and Lowell--who have adopted the names of famous poets to conceal their true identities. For in the organization, nothing is more dangerous than revealing who you are: Poets must never expose their feelings lest they be manipulated. Emily becomes the school's most talented prodigy until she makes a catastrophic mistake: She falls in love.
Meanwhile, a seemingly innocent man named Wil Jamieson is brutally ambushed by two strange men in an airport bathroom. Although he has no recollection of anything they claim he's done, it turns out Wil is the key to a secret war between rival factions of poets and is quickly caught in their increasingly deadly crossfire. Pursued relentlessly by people with powers he can barely comprehend and protected by the very man who first attacked him, Wil discovers that everything he thought he knew about his past was fiction. In order to survive, must journey to the toxically decimated town of Broken Hill, Australia, to discover who he is and why an entire town was blown off the map.
As the two narratives converge, the shocking work of the poets is fully revealed, the body count rises, and the world crashes toward a Tower of Babel event which would leave all language meaningless. Max Barry's most spellbinding and ambitious novel yet, Lexicon is a brilliant thriller that explores language, power, identity, and our capacity to love--whatever the cost.

And the answer is no, I couldn't have shortened that anymore, so I'll write a short review. This was a good book.

Okay, not that short. I'm not a big fan of mystery/thriller/suspense books, but this one was fun. You had to focus a lot on it and keep looking back to make sure you knew what was going on, but it turned out to be great. The Emily story begins several years before the Wil one, if it takes you a while to figure that one out, by the way.

The one thing that I didn't like was that Kathleen Raine was made out to be working with Virginia Woolf at the beginning of the story, but it turns out that she has pretty much nothing to do with it. I think maybe an editor should've caught that.

And while this was a good book, it's not something I'm going to be recommending to people like crazy because it didn't feel like a "me" book. I certainly enjoyed it while it was happening, but it's not something that I would go crazy over if it was made into a movie (which is good, because I think it's pretty much unfilmable without giving away all the secrets).

Grade: A-

Chomp

Chomp by Carl Hiaasen
Alfred A. Knopf - March 27, 2012
304 pages

Wahoo Cray lives in a zoo. His father is an animal wrangler, so he's grown up with all types of creatures in his backyard. The critters he can handle, but his father is another story.
When his father takes a job for a reality TV show called Expedition Survival!, Wahoo has to do a bit of wrangling to keep his father from killing the star, boneheaded Derek Badger, before the shoot is over. Things keep getting more and more complicated as Derek insists on using wild animals in his stunts. Then there's Wahoo's new shadow Tuna, a girl with an abusive father who needs somewhere to hide out.
It's anyone's guess who will actually survive Expedition Survival!...

I had to cut a paragraph out of that description because it pretty much gives away a chunk of the story due to the type of lousy publicity that Hiaasen has that decides to spill out over half the novel in a 3 1/2 paragraph description.

I love Carl Hiaasen, especially his YA books about the Everglades: Hoot, Flush, and Scat. I've been waiting more than a few years for the next one, and I can tell you that Chomp sufficiently meets my expectations. Instead of being about saving a species, like burrowing owls or Florida panthers, this is about a  broke wildlife wrangler and his son who take a job for a "reality" show to pay off their debt.

In the usual Hiaasen way, Chomp is enough to make you laugh out loud on several occasions and is filled with nearly caricature characters, but it also has elements that I don't remember seeing in previous YA Hiaasen Everglades books: actual suspense and danger where you legitimately worry about the lives of the characters.

Ladies and gentlemen, what can I say? Hail...to...Hiaasen! (If you don't get that reference, brush up on your controversial musicals)

Grade: A

Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
Little, Brown and Company - August 1, 2012
335 pages

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old be, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.
Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her family reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle--and people in general--has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.
To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an obscene world.

(Spoiler level: Major in the third paragraph)

Let's start with the news praise: OMG this book is totally hilarious and full of heart with lots of crazy twists and amazing, unforgettable characters and everyone should buy this because it's so totally amazing! A+++ (okay, hopefully no magazine actually said that, but you get everything that's being said about the book)

Now for my praise: The book is completely fast-moving. It's an epistolary novel consisting mostly of emails between Bernadette and her virtual assistant in India as well as Bernadette's nemesis Aubrey Griffin and her friend Soo-Lin Segal. While I don't normally enjoy epistolary novels, I found this one to be quick. There are also little breaks of straight information. Bee and Bernadette are fully-developed characters with dreams, hopes, etc.

And finally my problems: First and foremost, the ending seems completely rushed. Everything was wrapped up way too soon. It especially felt wrong in that Semple makes it sound like everything's going to be okay when the circumstances say that in no real situation it would be okay. If you ran away from home and your husband is the baby daddy of a coworker, things are not going to be okay. Period. End of story. Second, everyone says that this book is hilarious, but there were very few points that I found truly funny. Third, Bee and her friend Kennedy are 15-year-olds in eighth grade. I understand that Bee would be a year behind, because she was born with heart defects that led to multiple surgeries. But Kennedy is totally normal and therefore should be thirteen turning fourteen, not fourteen turning fifteen. There is no explanation as to why she would be a year behind.

In a nutshell: Everyone adores this book. It's fast with a couple of remarkable characters, but the ending feels incomplete, it's not as funny as everyone says, and there's no explanation as to why eighth graders are fifteen.

Grade: B

Fenrir

Fenrir by M.D. Lachlan
Pyr - January 1, 2011
441 pages

Let me give you the basic setup, i.e. what the book is for the first twenty pages or so before Lachlan just rips everything established to shreds. The Vikings are in Paris and they're setting fire to everything. They say that they want the Count's sister so that they can marry her to their ruler Helgi. The Count doesn't know what to do, so he calls Jehan of St. Germain, a blind and crippled confessor, to help him. Meanwhile, his sister Aelis is running away because Munin and Hugin are after her. Then there's the Easterner Leshii, who happens to be hanging out with a man named Chakhlyk (I don't remember, it's something crazy like that). Chakhlyk also happens to be a werewolf. Then there's the Viking chieftain Ofaeti.

I'm just going to get this out of the way: Chakhlyk = Sindre. This is never explained in the book. First he's called Chakhlyk by Leshii, then Aelis calls him the wolfman, and then all of a sudden (without him telling her his name, mind you) she starts thinking that he's called Sindre. It took me a few chapters to realize he was Chakhlyk/the wolfman. That was part of the overarching problem with the book: it's trying to be mysterious and just ends up being confusing. The last chapter has LITERALLY NOTHING to do with the rest of the book. This is the second book in a trilogy and I was told that you could understand this just fine without the first book. Something tells me even with the first book I wouldn't know what was going on. The one saving grace was that it was only 441 pages instead of double that.

Grade: D

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux - October 2, 2012
304 pages

Clay Jannon worked at the technological bagel store NewBagel for a few months. Then the recession hit and NewBagel drastically changed its style and became Old Jerusalem Bagels. Now Clay is unemployed and roams the streets of San Francisco when all of a sudden he sees a "Help Wanted" sign for Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. He gets the job and works the night shift. But the store is odd. The books Penumbra carries are arbitrary, although it's nothing popular. And then there's the Waybacklist, full of books printed in a cryptic code. These books are "borrowed" by a variety of strange customers. Clay has to get to the bottom of what is happening here.

This is possibly the geekiest, most hipster-y book that I have ever read. Not that it's a bad thing. In fact, it is very much a good thing for this reviewer. Anything with smart female geeks and bookstores is off to a good start, but when you throw in Swiss typography from the 1500s and a book series within a book about singing dragons, and that excels it to further levels of glee. My one major problem with the novel was of Clay's roommates, Mat and Ashley. Mat's greatest importance is forging one of the logbooks of the bookstore, and Ashley exists for no other purpose than to act like a robot when not making out with Mat. Throw that blonde bimbo out on her head, give Mat something else to do, and this book would have been among the best.

Grade: B+

Daughter of Smoke & Bone

Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor
Hachette Book Group - September 27, 2011
432 pages

Karou is a seventeen-year-old Prague art student that hasn't exactly led a normal life. Blue hair sprouts from her head, no dye required, and she's sent around the world to collect teeth for a group of chimaera, or creatures with attributes of both humans and animals. She has bullets in her stomach that she doesn't remember, as well as tattoos of eyes on the palms of her hands. She speaks nearly all human languages there are to offer. One one of her missions she finds an angel named Akiva, and the two of them help her discover a past life that has been long forgotten.

There is one major problem that I have with the book: it destroys Roman Catholicism and basicially all other religions with a concept of angels and/or devils. Basically, there are chimaera (devils) and seraphs (angels) that have no ties to God or Satan or any other deity because there are no deities outside of the goddesses Nitid and Ellai. Now, I'm fine with a nice pantheon or whatnot set in another world, but this actually tears apart true religion and labels it as wrong. That being said, the pace built wonderfully and the characters were rich. There were a few awkward one-sentence chapters, though, that some may enjoy but others, such as myself, found jarring.

Grade: B

The Owl Keeper

The Owl Keeper by Christine Brodien-Jones
Delacorte Books for Young Readers - April 13, 2010
320 pages

Maxwell Unger has always loved three things: the night, silver owls, and his gran. Well, the night will always be there, but his gran is gone now, and silver owls are hunted down by the High Echelon, who claims that they carry disease. Maxwell knows better, though. His silver owl, the one he keeps in the tree nearby, has no disease. She just has a couple injuries from a rough flight. His gran used to tell him the story of the Owl Keeper, who would bring back the silver owls and sages and unite them to fight the power of the dark. When a mysterious girl comes along and Max has nightmares about killing his silver owl, he knows that things aren't going to stay normal for long.

This concludes my cycle of six book read for an event that began with Mockingbird and also included Chasing Lincoln's Killer, The Maze Runner, Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, and The Grimm Legacy. I'm pleased to say that this is my favorite fictional read (Chasing Lincoln's Killer is still the best altogether), considering I started off so poorly with Mockingbird. The characters, setting, and mythology are well-crafted, and information is delicately placed where it is required the most, as opposed to a page-one info-dump. The slow reveal of the mystery behind Maxwell's world kept you guessing until the end. I don't know if there'll be a sequel or not, but The Owl Keeper was one of those rare books where you would be pleased either way.

Grade: A-

V for Vendetta

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

Quality Comics - March 1982 to May 1989
10 issues

In "futuristic" (futuristic at the time, though the event is now in the past) London, the fascist government of Norsefire has control over everyone and has killed all those who were not white, conservative, and straight. London is controlled, until an anarchist named V in a Guy Fawkes mask ignites a revolution when he detonates a bomb in Parliament, setting off fireworks in the shape of a V. A woman named Evey Hammond, who he had saved earlier in the night, watches and comes to help him destroy Norsefire.

How is it that I am reading so many sexist books? Evey Hammond is an extraordinarily passive character, doing next to nothing throughout the course of the graphic novel. The most she does to help V is sit there and gasp when he sets off another one of his bombs. You think that she's becoming a stronger character when she's imprisoned, but it turns out (spoiler alert!)that it was all a trick by V in the first place. She "enjoys" her freedom by becoming the girlfriend of a Scottish gangster and only comes back when V dies. Finally, when V dies, she decides to become the next V, although by now London is already an anarchy, so there's not much she CAN do.(spoiler end) This was ridiculous.

Grade: D

Christine

Christine by Stephen King

Viking - April 29, 1983

526 pages

Arnie Cunningham noticed the 1958 Plymouth Fury when his best friend Dennis Guilder was driving him home from a day of high school, and he immediately wanted it. Roland LeBay, an elderly man with a back brace, sells Arnie the car for $250, though it will take much more to repair it. LeBay refers to the car as "Christine". Soon after, Roland LeBay dies suddenly and Dennis begins to notice a transformation in Arnie Cunningham. He and Arnie's girlfriend Leigh must work together to stop Arnie and Christine.

I appreciate the Philadelphia setting of this novel, a change from King's usual small-town Maine (which is occasionally filled with an annoying Yankee accent). However, what I do not appreciate is the overwhelming sexism in the novel. The one true female character (I'm not counting Christine here) is a teen-queen object of every man's affection, and she ends up doing little to stop Christine in the end of the novel.

Grade: B-

The Running Man

The Running Man by Stephen King as Richard Bachman
Signet Books - May 1982
219 pages

It is the year 2025, and citizens of Co-Op City are in for a spectacle; a competition known as "The Running Man", where contestants are officially declared to be "enemies of the state" and are hunted down by people known as Hunters, an elite team of hitmen hired by the Games Network. For each hour they survive, the contestant earns $100, and for each Hunter they kill they get another one hundred. If they stay alive for thirty days, they get one million New Dollars, or three million Old Dollars. Ben Richards has a sick daughter and needs money badly. His solution is to go to The Running Man.

Okay, it sounds sort of like The Hunger Games without that silly love triangle, right? Well, that's where you're wrong. It sounds sort of like The Hunger Games without that silly love triangle for about the first half. Then (spoiler alert!)Ben Richards gets into a huge police standoff---must be some kind of Richard Bachman trademark, having a police standoff---in which trades are negotiated, bluffs are made, and ultimately everyone dies. Not joking. This is the end of the book.(spoiler end!) I'm not saying that it was not necessarily a bad book, just not what I was expecting.

Grade: B-

Firestarter

Firestarter by Stephen King

Viking Press - September 29, 1980

426 pages

Charlie McGee has a power; she can start fires with her mind. This wasn't supposed to happen, of course, but it was a result of her parents. When they were in college, they took part in an experiment for a drug known as "Lot Six" by a goverment agency known as The Shop. When Andy McGee and Victoria Tomlinson participated in this experiment, they retained minor psychic effects. However, that laboratory was where they fell in love. They ended up getting married and had Charlie. Because they both retained minor abilities, Charlie was born with major abilities. The Shop wants Charlie, and they killed Victoria for information. Now Charlie and Andy are on the run.

One problem I had with this book was the fact that a horse named Necromancer was given major significance and then has no end. (Spoiler alert!)Charlie and Andy get captured by The Shop, and they realize that if they don't want Charlie to burn the whole place down, they have to be nice to her. She likes horses, so they show her Necromancer and she learns to ride. When Andy and an officer named Cap plan to escape with Charlie, they decide that she can say she's going to ride Necromancer and then escape. When Charlie burns down the barn, Necromancer escapes and is never seen again. Seems like a waste of forty or so pages about a horse that eventually just runs wild.(Spoiler end) The description could be overpowering at times, but it was okay. Not his greatest, but okay.

Grade: B

Rage

Rage by Stephen King as Richard Bachman
Signet Books - September 13, 1977
211 pages

Charlie Decker is called to meet with his principal after attacking his chemistry teacher with a wrench. His anger with the principal causes him to let out a string of insulting remarks, resulting in his expulsion. Once he's expelled, he goes to his locker, burns all of the things he no longer needs, destroys his health book, and takes a pistol from his locker, as well as a few bullets. He walks back into class, and a single gunshot kills his algebra teacher and turns his senior class into hostages.

This novel is extremely hard to come by today in bookstores; it fell out of print in the United States and was taken out of recent editions of The Bachman Books after it was attributed to multiple high school shootings. I got a copy from the library as part of an old copy of The Bachman Books. Rage was an incredibly fast read, and not just becaus it was short. I read the whole book in an hour and a half. I didn't sympathize with Charlie, so I wasn't inspired to shoot up my school, but instead I feel like he was falling into the dark chasm of psychological disorder. The characters, while they had extremely similar names that I often confused, developed personalities on their own in the four-hour standoff that Charlie keeps them. Rage is not your average story of a kid who's pushed too far and opens fire; instead it's the story of all twenty-five high school seniors who had algebra second period that day.

Grade: A-

Zach's Lie

Zach's Lie by Roland Smith

Hyperion Book CH - April 28, 2003

224 pages

Jack Osbourne has a problem. His father, who left commercial airlines a few years back to fly privately, has been shipping illegal drug cartel for gang lord Alonzo Aznar. But now his dad got caught, and the police are going to let him off if he can tell them about Alonzo. The drug lord isn't going to let that happen, though, so he attacks Jack and his family at home. The police have assigned them to the Witness Protection Program, and Jack, now Zach, and his family have been relocated to the small town of Elko, Nevada, and one false step could have Alonzo back on their heels.

Zach is not the brightest character I have ever seen. He makes a lot of ridiculous mistakes that make it hard to sympathize with him when (not so much of a spoiler alert!)Alonzo finally finds them and wants to kill them. (not so much of a spoiler end) I like the supporting characters though, the custodian Sam and his crush Catalin, who both get him out of the worthless trouble he creates. Captain IF, Zach's imaginary friend, was a pointless attempt at humanity/a recollection of childhood, especially since the little astronaut guy gets broken and shipped off more times than I can count. Smith could have easily cut down on the amount of pages in the book if he had gotten rid of Captain IF as well as flashbacks to when Zach broke both of his legs jumping out of a window. Part of me wants to see how things would have shaken out if Zach had been extremely careful, but Alonzo had still found them through spies, battering people until they give up what they know, et cetera. The other part of me wants to see how my life would be affected if this book didn't exist. At least it's short.

Grade: D