Justine Larbalestier, How to Ditch Your Fairy
Awww, man, this was just really adorable. So the premise is this: our Heroine, Charlie, lives in New Avalon, which is a bizarre mishmash of Australia and the US. In Charlie’s world, almost everyone is born with a fairy (who is invisible, thankfully): the most common is the loose change fairy, who always helps you find change, but there are a wide variety. Charlie’s friend Rochelle has a shopping fairy, who always finds her the best outfits at the most reasonable prices; her arch-nemesis, Fiorenze, has an every-boy-will-like-you fairy, which means she’s constantly followed by a slavering pack of freshman boys. Charlie, poor thing, is stuck with a fairy who will ALWAYS find her the best possible parking space, which is unfortunate, since she’s too young to drive, she doesn’t like cars, and she always smells faintly of gasoline. Also, a senior member of the water polo team keeps trying to kidnap her so that he can score sweet parking spots around the city.
By the beginning of the book, Charlie has Had Enough: she’s walking everywhere in the hopes that her fairy will get depressed and LEAVE HER ALONE. Of course, things are not that simple, and hijinks ensue. Larbalestier manages to make several generic plotlines seem fresh–is Fiorenze really that awful? Will Steffi, the boy Charlie likes, ever like her back? Is being liked by every boy really all it’s cracked up to be? Larbalestier also raises interesting questions about provincialism without seeming preachy (everyone thinks New Avalon is the center of the universe, which frustrates new transplant Steffi to no end). Plus, she’s purposely ambiguous about the races of her characters, although it’s pretty clear that most/all of them are not white (yay for no default white!), and she casually slips in a number of gay tertiary characters, as well as a sexually questioning main character. In short, this was light without ever being fluffy. I liked it immensely.
Recommended for: I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed this one, and would recommend it to any fantasy-lover over the age of 12.
Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere
It’s like a YA version of The Lovely Bones. No, seriously. 15-year-old Liz forgets to look both ways while crossing the street one day and is hit by an oncoming cab; she wakes up on the S.S. Nile, a ship on the way to Elsewhere, where the dead live. There, everyone ages backwards until the day they return to very early infancy, when they’re placed back in the river between worlds and are reborn into our world as a different person.
Understandably, Liz is not thrilled by this prospect.
This was a cool concept, and I could see really liking it as a teenager, but the characterization was completely flat. I wouldn’t say Liz was a cipher, because I knew pretty much everything about her—it’s just that there wasn’t much to know, and what I did know was boring. Also, I felt like Zevin avoided a lot of thorny issues. For instance, everyone we meet in Elsewhere died in a way that’s not really anyone else’s fault. Liz’s grandmother died of cancer, her friend Curtis Jest overdosed on heroin, her friend Thandie was accidentally shot during a drive-by, and her love-interest Owen suffocated while rescuing a cat from a burning building. Thandie is technically a murder victim, but she wasn’t the intended target and we never deal with the cause of her death. It’s just kind of brushed under the rug, as is Liz’s simple question to her grandmother: Are there any murderers here?
Also, Thandie was such a stereotypical black friend that it made me cringe. First off, she’s the only murder victim, she was killed in a drive-by, she’s from DC, and she ends up living with her cousin Shelley in Elsewhere, because Shelley ODed on heroin. Also, we spend probably the least amount of time with her as a character: even Liz’s grandma gets more of a role.
Try harder next time, Zevin.
Ultimately, though, I think my major problem with Elsewhere is that it simply didn’t appeal to me as a concept of the afterlife. I don’t particularly relish living what amounts to the same life over and over again, sorry. Being a teenager once was more than enough.
Recommended for: If they’re too young for The Lovely Bones but are obsessed enough with death to be interested in that sort of thing, chuck this one at ‘em. Otherwise, eh.
E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
Frankie is a mega-hot sophomore dating one of the most popular boys in school—who happens to be a senior—but she’s irritated with him because he (and everyone else) keeps underestimating her intelligence. It’s like her boobs cancel out her brain or something. Anyway, she discovers that her boyfriend is part of a male-only secret society at their upper-crust boarding school; she also discovers that the “pranks” the boys are pulling are BEYOND lame. Wanting to prove herself to her boyfriend, she steals the online identity of the leader of the society and starts giving the group directions; the leader is furious, but can’t do anything because he’s too busy taking credit for Frankie’s brilliant ideas.
SPOILER: none of this ends well.
I wouldn’t say I particularly liked this, but I did admire it. It wasn’t my thing, but I did appreciate the points Lockhart was trying to make, especially about not wanting to be underestimated simply because of your appearance, and about not wanting to be excluded simply because of a factor out of your control (in this case, Frankie’s gender). When Frankie’s sister Zada tells her to quit being so obsessed and just form her own counter-group already, she completely misses the point: Frankie doesn’t want a new group, she wants their group, because whether the boys accept it or not, she is just as smart and capable as they are. She shouldn’t have to form a new secret society, because she’s worthy of being a member of this one.
Lockhart also has a lot of interesting stuff about the role friendships with the “right” people can play in your future, as well as how sometimes, it is better to lose the boy than to have him think that you’re just a fluffy little bunny.
Recommended for: Teenaged feminists.
