Recs from the printed world

[blamebrampton]

Football? Never heard of it.

The joy of procrastinating is that I have been reading actual books (when not knitting). Since lots of you also read YA fiction, here are two reviews, which will abuse acronyms because they have long titles (and I am in full acronym mode).

To begin with, The Demon's Covenant by Sarah Rees Brennan. This is the second book in her trilogy following on from The Demon's Lexicon in which Mae and her brother Jamie meet Nick Ryves and his brother Alan and discover in short order that there are demons and magicians in the world, that the demons may be the lesser of two evils, and that their dysfunctional family has nothing on some others.

While the first book was told in Nick's voice, this is told in Mae's, and Brennan captures the insecurity and hope of a teenaged girl's voice beautifully. That whole trying on of things: is this someone I fancy? Is this love? Is this being a grown-up? Am I doing it right? Do they love me? -- so much of it is note-perfect. Particularly because Mae's sense of alienation from the adult world is fully justified, she knows secrets she just can't share.
 

In this book, Mae and Jamie deal with the consequences of the first novel. The fact that Nick is a demon and Jamie is a magician have real repercussions, and many of them are dangerous. On a more mundane level, Annabel, Mae and Jamie's mum, is furious that the kids packed up and left for the weeks covered in The Demon's Lexicon, and Mae must do what she can to rebuild their relationship.

TDC answers many of the questions I had at the end of TDL: in particular, it gives far greater sense of the scope of the Magicians and of their power. One very nice note was the parallel question of what constitutes a family. Both Nick and Mae have real and legitimate questions about the adults in their lives, and Brennan deals with them in ways that respect the adults as well as the sense of abandonment the children feel, allowing that both can be right and wrong, even when they are trying.

To me, TDC is a book about family, disguised as an adventure novel, just as TDL was a mystery with the dustjacket of a romance. The adventure is well constructed and played out, as are the urban fantasy notes, but at the heart of the novel are some of the great questions of life: how do we know when love is real? Who can we trust? And what happens when we trust poorly? And it gripped me -- from the start to the end, I cared very deeply about each of these characters and what happened to them. I wasn't fully satisfied with where we leave them, but that is likely to be because this is the middle book of three, or because I am twenty years older than the target audience.

I know it is traditional for young heroes and heroines to lose their parents and parental figures. YA Urban Fantasy (indeed, much of literature) is filled with more orphans than Mrs Miggin's Home for Foundlings. But I was surprised when Alan's Aunt Natasha said she didn't want anything more to do with either of them. In TDL she is compassionate and gentle towards Nick, until he turns on her. It would be more logical to me that she would try to rescue Alan from him, or at least call the police, given that she has good reason to think Nick a violent lunatic. It was one of the vefew character notes that did not ring true to me, but seemed designed to set up drama.

Similarly, I wish that Annabel had survived the novel. She was a fantastic character who made prefect sense in the context of her children. It was easy to see why they all frustrated each other, and yet loved each other, too. And given the number of fencers I went to school with, I found her skill with a sword wholly credible, even if I always preferred archery (strong arms and good eye, rotten reach, so of course I did). I know that the genre almost demands orphans, but I love a good parent in YA novels and wish she had stayed around.

On a purely practical note, surely someone notices that these people disappear. In the real world, Mae and Jamie would be the subject of a massive police hunt, either as suspected murder or kidnapping victims, or as suspects in the disappearance of their mother. People do not step out of established society with ease. Knowing Brennan's attention to detail, I am sure that she will touch on this in the third book, but I personally would love to have seen her keep Annabel a part of the team as our small force fights against the danger of the Magicians. 

Small quibbles aside, it was a rollicking read that dealt intelligently with all the storyline arising from book 1 and set up a series of good plot points for book 3, without suffering in any way from the curses of Lulldom or Expositionitis that can affect middle books. TDC and last year's Flora's Dare revive my faith in the art of the trilogy!

Secondly, there's Will Grayson, Will Grayson, by American writers John Green and David Levithan. It's the story of two boys with the same name, who meet by chance, with each writer providing one Will Grayson and the two appearing in alternating chapters. This could have been a clever-clever disaster, but in fact works really well (you may need to read a few chapters of each to get used to them, a friend only liked the device after 60-odd pages). Will 1 is just trying to get through high school without drawing unnecessary attention to himself. Which he is reasonably successful at, aside from his best friend, Tiny Cooper, who is 'not the world's gayest person, and he is not the world's largest person, but [Will believes] he may be the world's largest person who is really, really gay ...' Despite the fact that he seems to delight in embarrassing straight and shy Will 1, Tiny is a truly brilliant friend, and Will knows it.

Will 2 is clinically depressed (and gay, and against capitalisation, but there's no causal connection), but holds onto hope that things will get better if he can just make it through each day. Alas, his friends are far less shiny than Will 1's, but that's not all bad news -- when a prank sends him off into the city, he runs into Will 1, and Tiny, and life improves dramatically even as it grows radically stranger.

One of the things I loved about this book was the parents. Will 1 has two, Will 2 has one, but all of them love their children and are real people. They leave work early because their child is having a crisis, they grump tetchily when their child is being a pain: there is an authenticity that is satisfying and adds to the reality of the world. Which is for the best, as there are one or two moments that stretch belief. 

The main stretch came with the Tiny arc. Tiny Cooper is one of the most fabulous supporting characters I have seen in years, and his determination to live life unapologetically is dramatically satisfying as well as perfectly credible. But I did lose a little belief in the plausibility of the self-written and scored musical he performs in the climactic scenes of the book. However, even if that came across as fantastic, it didn't matter: it was the fantasy of how high school could be if generosity and friendship were more important than popularity and conformity. And I wonder if perhaps the authors felt they could only deal with that through fantasy, since kindness was not their experience? When we end with more love and more friendship in the world at the end than at the start, how could I seriously grumble at something that was less outrageous than the average episode of Glee or Doctor Who?

The writers really remember what it was like to be a teenager: the insecurities, the uncertainties, the hopes and simple goals. both Wills just want to get by -- the possibility of a girl or boyfriend seems up there with walking on the moon, and the shock to their systems delivered by Tiny Cooper arranging sundry things for them is akin to NASA training. For the reader, it's a sideways lurch to something fresh and unexpected. In a very blokey way, WG, WG is about love and friendship and compassion, while including fake IDs student politics, sport, gross moments of snot and a chorus line. I inhaled it, then went back to the start. Highly recommended!