Amy Kathleen Ryan, Glow (Sky Chasers, vol. 1)

Glow is one of the reasons I love my job, and it has very little to do with it.

I get promotional emails from Publisher's Weekly, in order to keep current with teen literature, in a niche of which I publish. My niche is small and isolated, and I need PW to help me take a look around at what the age-mates of our intended readers - struggling, teenage readers who need exciting, accessible literature to help them become successful, habitual readers - are devouring. I want to know that makes them excited to read more, and what they wish they could read because of peer pressure and inherent interest.

One of the recent ones offered an advance reading copy of Glow, the third novel my Amy Kathleen Ryan. I read the first chapter or two, free online, with great interest. It coincided so closely with the setting and tone of first-time novelist Beth Revis' Across the Universe, which I read, and reviewed here, earlier this year.

Whereas ATU gripped my viscera at the beginning and subsided a bit into a simmering intergenerational confrontation and murder investigation aboard an interstellar space ship carrying humans from a battered Earth to a new home for their descendants, Glow built up from the hopes of appealing main characters into a thrilling intertribal confrontation and coming-of-age story aboard two interstellar space ships carrying humans....oh, you get the idea.

First, I am fascinated at the never-rains-but-it-pours aspect of this. I wasn't aware of any novels with such scenarios in the past decade, when I got swept up into Potter-mania, a bit late in life and in the timeline of Potter-mania. Now, with apparent suddenness, there are two.

Second, I loved the building tension of Glow. Similar to Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games, Glow starts by introducing deeply likeable teen characters, one male and one female, in an exotic setting that feels natural and whole, and then tears them apart. But whereas Hunger Games maintains Katniss Everdeen at the center of the narrative, Glow like ATU shifts the narrative  between the two main characters. In ATU, the main characters are less positively appealing. We feel sorry for them in many ways, but we never saw them at their best. We never had the chance to get to like them, to look forward to meeting them again.

In Glow, protagonists Waverly and Kieran seem like people I would have liked when I was their age. Their reactions to events evoke sympathy, emotional investment, because they are founded on a previous identification, a founding emotional investment. Even the dangerous and damaged  supporting characters look like people I got caught up with, cared about, and suffered with or because of when I was that age.

This means that when the climactic conflict occurs, so much of the reader's emotional investment is riding on it that it feels real. I felt my pulse quicken (just as advertised on the ARC back cover with the trite but applicable phrase "pulse-pounding"), even though the actual physical aspects of the confrontation were smaller than the conflicts at the opening of the second act of the novel.

After reading and enjoying Across the Universe, I was thrilled to read something in the same genre and in a very closely related setting, but when the book ended, I was caught off-guard. My wife figured this out first. "It must be part of a series," she said. (She's right, it's called Sky Chasers: http://us.macmillan.com/author/amykathleenryan.) However, it felt unfinished to me.

The Potter novels all (but one) end with the denouement of Harry returning to Privet Drive. The first two Hunger Games novels end with the tension ratcheting up in a new area. Glow ends differently, as if fifty pages had been left off the end. The conflict at the beginning isn't resolved. The new conflict is intriguing, and will probably draw me to reading the sequel. But I'm confused about the title's significance, the series name's significance, and the abruptness of the first novel's ending.

I saved money!

And  you can, too! Now, using the power of the Internet, you can sample terrible first chapters of promoted new books, and know for a solid fact that you will never willingly spend a dime on them!

I saved $15.99 by reading the first chapter of The Gift, by Brian M. Litfin. It's the second book in the Chiveis Trilogy, which was news to me. Not important news, but news nonetheless.

Foolishly, I had followed the link under this promotional text, which I received in an email, a sponsored email, from Publishers Weekly:

Hundreds of years in the future, war and disease have destroyed civilization as we know it. Much technology has been discarded and history is largely forgotten. Slowly, the few survivors have begun to build new communities, and kingdoms now prosper in a kind of feudal order. But the Word of God has been lost for centuries.

Hokey, right? I mean, the come-on is almost unreadable. I admit that I followed it out of morbid (as in, How bad can this really be?) curiosity.

It's bad, in an almost delectable, look-how-I-did-all-the-bestsellers'-tricks kind of way.

There's longing (the main characters used to be royalty, and now they're refugees!), pathos (a nightmare, a snake, and obeisance to the will of "Deu"), romance (a beautiful princess, a daring prince, and a small tent), adventure (a small tent...that's as far as I got), and lots of unexplained crap, like how life reverts to a Harlequin novel's version of the Middle Ages after the collapse of civilization, and why the men do the manly patrolling with swords and the woman does the cooking and cleaning.

There's also a real disregard for language, both in the specific Riddley Walker kind of way, in which novelist and children's story stalwart Russel Hoban imagines an almost impenetrable post-Apocalyptic patois, and in the generic people-don't-actually-think-or-speak-like-that-you-idiot kind of way.

This cries out for an example. Here's the first paragraph:

Anastasia lay awake under a bearskin cloak, listening to the alien sounds of a land far from home. The stub of a candle hung from the ceiling of her leather tent, providing enough light to chase away the nocturnal spirits, but not the heaviness in Ana’s heart.

Notice the similarity to the start of The Hunger Games. Only, that was good. This has imagery (check), evocative vocabulary (check), and vacuous nonsense.

Why a bearskin cloak? What does that get us in the first sentence?

And what kind of sounds does one expect in "a land far from home?" Also, she just crossed the mountain to get there, so how far is far? Are the birds different? Does the wind moan or cackle? What are the sounds?

How does one hang a candle? Wouldn't it burn the string? Maybe it's the kind that burns upside-down!

And oh! the heaviness in her heart! Why is it there, you ask? "Read on!" says the author. "I'm not telling!"

In other words, we learn nothing useful or particular in this first paragraph, except the limits of Litfin's imagination, or of his patience for rewriting.

I'm being really harsh and sarcastic, I know. And after only suffering through a few pages near the beginning.

By contrast, Suzanne Collins hits us with this scene of the heroine waking up to loss:

When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim's warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother. Of course, she did. This is the day of the reaping.

The bad thing about reading this paragraph is that now I want to read the Hunger Games trilogy again.

I should really thank Mr. Litfin. First, he helps show that there is a range of quality in fantasy books published today. I had thought I was slipping, falling so easily under the sway of Suzanne Collins, Rick Riordan, Dave Barry, and buying from the promo chapter Beth Revis' Across the Universe. I am reassured of my own continued ability to discriminate gold from dross by the bile welling up in my throat.

Second, I keep worrying that my own writing is just a waste of time. Will I ever finish? That's in doubt, but I feel much better about trying now, seeing that my puny, incomplete draft of a chapter is so much more readable and interesting than this.

And third, if book publishing is really about to disappear (right as I get started in writing, and less than a decade after I switched to a career in publishing), I can take comfort that it's not really so bad, because this will be part of what is lost.

Last, does it really matter that, on trying to find the market price for The Gift by searching "litfin chiveis," I discovered that he "was born in Dallas, Texas, and raised in a Christian home as the son of a seminary professor, pastor, and college president," and that the series revolves around the loss and rediscovery of Biblical knowledge?

Nah. It's bad enough in its own right. Thanks, Mr. Litfin. You've done me a favor. I'll use the money to buy several pounds of coffee from Trader Joe's, I think.

crossing paths: Philip Dick in Marin

Just read a review in NYT about Philip Dick's third wife's memoir/bio, The Search for Philip K. Dick. Anne Dick still lives in Pt. Reyes Station, about 25 miles from where I work, and about the same distance from where I grew up, all in Marin County, CA.

Turns out my favorite book of his, one of my favorite novels, The Man in the High Castle, was from his short residence in West Marin.

I've also lived in Berkeley, which he made his home many years before I did, and in LA, where he preceded me by decades. He sets many of his earth-bound novels and stories in the Bay Area. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" a short story that became an almost equally fantastic movie, was set in an alternate San Mateo.

Dick's writing is unfriendly. He was beset with psychological burdens, famously paranoia and addiction, but I learned from this review agoraphobia as well. He wrote on a typrewriter in a shed in Pt. Reyes Station, a shed he called The Hovel. He remembered in an interview I read awhile back that he had a psychotic break on his way to the shed one day. That was the source of a trilogy for him.

Married and divorced three times, deceased in 1982, his now-adult children coping well (reportedly) with the strangeness of their home lives and their father's posthumous success, addicted to mind-altering drugs...I don't consider the trade-offs worth it. I am confident he did not so much choose to pay so dearly for his art. And he wasn't particularly successful in his lifetime. What would have happened if he had?

The way he wrote - I call it "unfriendly" for lack of a better term. It's not sloppy, but he passes up opportunities to sweeten it. I'm reading a lot of very clever YA fantasy these days. I'm especially happy having read Suzanne Collins. Like Dick, Collins writes in The Hunger Games about a dystopian, bleak future.

So what's different?

I think with Collins, I could see the weave. It's not that it wasn't skillful - quite the contrary. I just felt that I understood what she was accomplishing, paragraph by paragraph. With Dick, it's never very clear. Information is a character. It changes its moods. It gets sick, dies, goes away, or betrays the other characters. The effect is very unsettling.

Was that the result of planning? Did Dick hide the cogs of his plot more effectively than Collins? Did it have cogs? I wasn't the same reader for their works. Maybe I should read Martian Time-Slip. I gave my aunt and uncle my copy of The Man in the High Castle. (They gave me Alas, Babylon - not a PKD novel...damn, I have a long reading list!) I wonder if the difference is in the reader.

Any PKD fans out there want to tell me what I'm missing?