Mid-2004 Young Adult Round-Up

It's Saturday, and I've spent a lot of blogging time over the past two days working on a series of posts that should go up on Monday (and make people who miss the Other Me happy, I hope). So, in keeping with my semi-official tradition, here's something from my Usenet vaults. It was originally posted to rec.arts.sf.written 7/3/04, in response to a question about new YA fantasy. It is now thus almost precisely three years out of date.

Well, here's one man's opinions.

For parallax: I like both Lemony Snicket and J.K. Rowling, but the former more than the latter. (Rowling is, unfortunately, bloating due to working so much in public, but I still find her books very readable and entertaining. "Snicket"'s books are wonderful, and I particularly like his writerly tricks -- such as the way he's doling out the back-story in carefully measured bits in each book.)

I've read the first of the "Edge Chronicles" and didn't care much for it. You've got a fairly generic Young Male Protagonist, raised by People Not His Own, setting off to Find His True Place. He wanders through what could be an entertainingly bizarre setting, but it's all pretty flat and very episodic. The series may pick up after this book though -- it looks like he gets into civilization then. (But I don't plan to read them.)

I'm afraid I haven't read Holly Black's "Swiderwick" books, but I have been on pleasant con panels with her, so I must say that buying her books is A Good Thing. (I do think they're "middle grades" rather than "young adult," so they may feel a bit young to adult readers.) I've also heard very good things about her YA novel Tithe, though I haven't read that one myself.

2007 Addendum: I've now read three of Holly's novels -- Tithe, Valiant, and Ironside -- which are all really good, upper-YA contemporary fantasies that I recommend to people who like very teenager-y teenagers in their books.

Other current YA stuff, some published, some not yet:

Children of the Lamp by P.B. Kerr -- I'm not the target audience and I didn't read much of it. But the prose is treacly and the protagonists seem to be the My Kids variation of MarySues, and I just could not go on.

Jonathan Stroud's "The Bartimaeus Trilogy," The Amulet of Samarkand (published) and The Golem's Eye (due out soon) -- my current favorite YA series. These are brilliant, and something like an answer to Harry Potter. They're set in an alternate England where magicians rule (not wisely, much like all rulers everywhere) and focus on a wry and cynical djinn and a cold, vengeful, not very nice boy magician. The djinn, Bartimaeus, narrates half the book in first person, and I love his voice (which will appeal to fans of Zelazny and Brust's "Vlad Taltos" books) -- the rest, focusing on the magician, is in third-person and equally well done. The first book is good, but the second is even better -- it gets deeper into the world and introduces another viewpoint character who sees this world from a *very* different angle. I can't praise these books highly enough.

2007 Addendum: Stroud stuck the landing; the third book, Ptolemy's Gate, is possibly the best of the three, and the trilogy as a whole will be one of the monuments of fantasy from this decade a hundred years from now.

I've also been reading and enjoying Tamora Pierce's various series about the land of Tortall (the first book of the first series is Alanna: The First Adventure). They're a little girly -- the protagonists are all very much spunky girls showing "the boys" that they can do everything very well indeed, thank you. (And there's a lot of animal-tending, as well.) But boys can certainly read and enjoy them, too -- I am one, after all.

There's a book called Peter and the Starcatchers coming up, written by the unlikely team of Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, which claims to be a prequel to Peter Pan. It isn't, really, since it contradicts not only Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens's entire existence (which, I guess, is only to be expected), but also, more damningly, contradicts much of what we're explicitly told in the play Peter Pan and the novel Peter Pan and Wendy. (It also completely misunderstands the nature of Peter Pan from page 1.) That's a pity, since it's a good pirate yarn in its own right -- I'd recommend reading it only if you can pretend that "Peter" is an entirely new character.

If you actually want science fiction in your YA, that seems to be harder to find. I vaguely liked Jeanne DuPrau's first two books -- The City of Ember and The People of Sparks -- but they will feel very familiar to anyone who's been reading SF for more than a year or two. (The first starts in a city deep underground, a couple of generations after an unspecified cataclysm -- everything is starting to run down, and two young people will save everyone.)

Backing up for a step, if you haven't read Peter Pan and Wendy (yes, the novel is usually published as Peter Pan these days, but that's because people are stupid -- Peter Pan is the name of the play) recently, I'd try it again. Barrie is an amazingly interesting writer, and it's not the simple adventure plot you might remember -- quite a lot of it is about death, in one way or another. (I also very much liked the recent film, but that's getting off topic.)

Sign of the Qin by L.G. Bass is Chinese-style epic fantasy, with prophetic tattoos, brother swordsmen, cast-out concubines, and the lot. I couldn't really get into it -- I didn't find any of the characters had more depth than a very flat thing and the plot felt like EFP badly translated into a foreign language -- but others have liked it better.

And Terry Pratchett has been doing some great YA novels lately -- you can tell them from his "adult" novels because they have chapters and the retail price is lower. If you've never read him, I'd try The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents or The Wee Free Men.

Lastly, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (by Susanna Clarke) isn't YA at all, but it is being hyped as "Harry Potter for adults." So I'll mention it here. I thought it was brilliant, but I must warn people that its set in 1806-1818, and was written in prose and style appropriate for the times. (Which means a couple of odd spellings, but, more importantly, the narrative never gets into the heads of any of the characters, which may seem odd to modern readers.) It will probably appeal to Tim Powers readers, but Clarke has additional levels of literary ambition (generally achieved, I'd say) at the same time.