#2: How to Ditch Your Fairy, by Justine Larbalestier

How to Ditch Your Fairy, by Justine Larbalestier

In the city of New Avalon, most people have a fairy—an invisible spirit or power or maybe just a chunk of free-floating luck that gives them a particular ability or advantage. Charlie's best friend Rochelle has a clothes-shopping fairy: when she goes shopping, she can always find something super-flattering that fits perfectly... and that is on extreme markdown. Charlie's mother has a Knowing What Your Kids Are Up To fairy, and always knows intuitively when Charlie's gotten herself into trouble. Charlie's classmate Fiorenze has an All The Boys Like You fairy. And Charlie, Charlie has a parking fairy. Charlie hates her parking fairy and wants to get rid of it, and she also hates the way Fiorenze's fairy is jerking around the boy she likes. But her plan to fix both of those things only makes everything worse.

This was a very fun book, very light. What I think of as a bathtub read. It reads very quickly; I finished it in one sitting. And I found Charlie very likable, even when I had those moments where I-the-reader realized that what Charlie was trying to do was very ill-advised. Like Charlie's envy of the All The Boys Like You fairy. I had enough perspective to realize that that would be more of a nightmare curse than a blessing, but it didn't make me see Charlie as an idiot for not realizing it, since I'm not totally sure I would have realized exactly how bad that could be at age 13 or 14. Similarly, at first I thought Charlie was being kind of whiny for wanting to ditch her fairy (a parking fairy wouldn't be my first choice, but it'd surely be better than no power at all?), but I became more sympathetic when I quickly realized that she kept being dragged along (and, in one case, actually kidnapped) on trips she didn't want to make because people wanted to take advantage of her power.

So, anyway, the book was very character-centric and the plot is almost wholly character-driven. Indeed, the 'external' plot, which involved betting on high school sports, seemed the weakest part to me; its most important influence was the way it affected Charlie, and the parts that didn't involve Charlie directly just seemed to fade off. That didn't bother me too much, because I read much more for character and worldbuilding than for plot, but it felt like that subplot was a bit of scaffolding that could have been excised without much detriment to the book. But that's minor. (Also minor: because I'm a worldbuilding junkie, I wanted more of an idea of what was up with New Avalon, its somewhat-unusual social structures, and why they had fairies when nobody else did? Or perhaps other people did but didn't realize it? But again, the book was so character-centric that I have trouble faulting it for not getting into more worldbuilding geekery.)

Anyway. Fast, fun, light read. Recommended, espeically for plane trips and rainy Saturdays. And bathtubs, if you're a bathtub reader like me.

( Some more thoughts, that are spoilery )

#3: Liar, by Justine Larbalestier

Liar, by Justine Larbalestier

You're getting so many of these because I'm in A Mood and am working through my backlog of books I want to review/respond to.

Micah is a compulsive liar. She tells you so on the first page of the book. She also tells you that she's going to tell you the truth in this narrative... but whether she's telling the truth about that is up to you to decide. And that makes it hard to provide even the most basic summary of the book: which of the shifting mosaic of things-Micah-says do I pull out to try to describe the book? Because almost any of them could turn out to be untrue.

Start with this: I'm fairly sure that Micah is telling the truth about being a teenage girl living in New York. I'm fairly sure she had some kind of relationship, perhaps romantic, perhaps not, with Zach. I'm fairly sure that, when Zach disappears and then turns up dead, that it causes a crisis point in Micah's life. And I'm fairly sure that Micah is ill in some way, although whether the illness is the 'family illness' she describes or not is up to debate.

I'm not sure of anything else that happens in the 300+ page book, and that fact will give you a clearer idea of what the book's like than anything else I could say about it, I think.

I liked Micah, although after her introduction I didn't trust a single thing she said. She's completely unreliable, totally, because she's a compluslive liar, and if you're one of the people who are allergic to unreliable narrators, this book is not for you. It doesn't try to sell you on the idea of an unreliable narrator. Instead, it revels in the uncertain. I don't hate unreliable narrators, but I also am not particularly drawn to them, and Micah's story didn't bug me. But that may partly be the way I read it: on page one I decided that I was going to sit back and enjoy the ride, rather than trying to second-guess and predict what was true and what wasn't. I think I enjoyed the book more that way than if I was distracted looking for 'slips,' but mileage may vary.

I think this was a successful book, in that it appeared to be trying to do something tricky—create an at least somewhat sympathetic narrative about a compulsive liar, in which the reader can't ever be sure of anything, and yet still be emotionally satisfying—and, as far as I'm concerned, does so. It was a page-turner, but won't be one of my favorites, I don't think, just because the narrative was very uncomfortable. Of course, it was supposed to be uncomfortable, I think, which is why: successful book. But one I appreciate intellectually more than I enjoy or love.

Larbalestier has said that she deliberately wrote the book so that the ending could be interpreted at least two ways (or possibly three). Actually I can think of a dozen ways to interpret the ending without thinking very hard, and I'm sure I could come up with hundreds more if I tried. But I'm going to talk about that under the cut, because it's necessarily spoilery of a few major plot points to do so, and I think this is a book that ought to be read with as few spoilers as possible. (I was told, in fact, not even to read the jacket copy.)

( Spoilers below the cut )