The Book Review Club - The Passenger

The Passenger
Alexandra Bracken
YA

I love the books I struggle with. It's all about the challenge. Alexandra Bracken challenged me with The Passenger. And she's still challenging me. So let's hit the ring!

Basic premise: On the night of violinst extraordinaire and lifelong New Yorker, 17 year-old Etta Linden's premiere recital, her teacher is murdered, a hole opens up in time, and Etta is thrust into a centuries-old battle for control of basically all of humanity. Her only friend, Nicholas, is fellow time traveler, and secretly sent to keep Etta in line in her quest for the one object that can tilt the scales of power in favor of the least favorable hegemon, who now holds Etta's mother captive.

Get ready for a ride. Bracken takes readers from 1776 New York to WII London, the jungles of Cambodia, late 1800s Paris, and the deserts surrounding Damascus. There is nary a dull moment. Add to that a fierce romance between Nicholas and Etta, and you've got yourself perhaps the first summer read of the Spring.

What challenged me most about this piece was the balance of romance and action. Etta is no damsel in distress, but Nicholas, a former slave, comes from 1700s America and does have a bit of the hero to him, which is at once a fabulous twist on the hero and yet a hero nonetheless. Etta, however, coming from the present day, sees them as partners. Thus, there is a tension in expectations throughout the story - Nicholas trying to live up to an ideal no human can, and Etta not expecting it and working to redirect, to get him to see relationships in a different light. Again, kudos to Bracken. It's a struggle this generation of women, if not my own, faces with the cultural expectations through which the opposite gender has been raised to see itself.

So, despite all of that, because of the strong male character, this piece does devolve into a somewhat more, seemingly predictable romance novel. Granted, it does not end that way exactly. However, you've got to stick with it to find that out, and that may be hard if you're looking for something that doesn't tiptoe into classic romance lit, complete with swooning and getting swept away. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It's just a predictable one.

Which makes me question where YA is headed these days. This is just one book of many coming out, but it seems to be that we're falling back into old patterns. There are the realistic YA novels, such as the Fault in Our Stars. They're nothing new to literature (see, Catcher in the Rye). And there are the Twilight sagas, such as The Passenger. The one book I have a hard time categorizing, honestly, is The Hunger Games or Divergent. Dystopian? Sci-Fi? But yet YA?

Categorization is a fun hobby, like collecting stamps, but it doesn't change literature. Nonetheless, stepping back and looking at literature as a categorizer can give a writer an idea of where the tide may be headed. Perhaps Suzanne Collins great contribution has been - aside from a riveting read -  genre mashing, pushing dystopian and YA together. It begs the question, what other unique mashes can we come up with? Writers of the world unite. Let's break some new boundaries!

For more great reads, and less revolutionary calls to arms ;-), skip on over to Barrie Summy's site. She's serving them up fresh and tasty!

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

The Book Review Club - The Apothecary

The Apothecary
Maile Meloy
Young Adult

Something Cold War-ish must be in my reading water. I seem to be choosing books with a Cold War themes fairly regularly -- David Almond's The Fire-Eaters, which centers around the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cecil Castelucci's Rose Sees Red, which is set in the early 80s with the Cold War tension as a back drop to a friendship that develops between an American and a Russian immigrant, and now, The Apothecary. It's not the side effects of too much dystopian ya for dessert, I promise.

It was for dinner.

Nonetheless, if  you find yourself feasting on dystopian but are looking for a little diversity in your dark, The Apothecary serves it up fresh and fun. The story centers around Janie, a teen whose writer parents are marked as Communists during the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s and thus forced to leave LA for London where they get jobs writing for the BBC. At her new school, Janie meets a boy, Benjamin, who wants to be a spy, a Russian boy whose father is, and a chemist-apothecary-physicist triangle trying to contain the effects of a nuclear bomb.

There are so many twists, James Bond-like chase scenes, an unexpected apothecarian surprises, replete with a serum that turns humans into birds and another that can make them invisible, as well as the threat of a nuclear bomb that does go off. It's all there in spades.

The biggest leap of faith I found strained in the novel were the serums. The book is so solidly set in the Cold War, that to expect a character, let alone the reader to buy into the fact that chemical compounds can do what alchemists believed they could do hundreds of years ago is tough. The author acknowledges this by having her character say that it would have been hard to believe her friend could turn into a bird if she hadn't actually seen it happen herself. Still, for me, it disrupted the fictional dream. I believed that chemstry and physics could come together to undo the destruction of a bomb, but to tie that right into the magicalness of herbs was a stretch.

Then again, I spent my teens in the Cold War era. I'm bomb scare scarred. Today's young audience will likely have far less trouble taking that leap. If the reader does, the book continues on in a fast-paced, no-holds-barred, edge-of-your-seat ride to the very end.

One other interesting note. The book is told from the perspective of the main character, Janie, albeit as an adult. I haven't run across too many POVs from this angle of late, and Meloy plays it lightly, allowing the adult only to surface at the very beginning and the end to lend the story an air of continuing mystery. It's well-balanced and a great example of how to use the adult POV to a writer's advantage.

For more great reads and winter distractions, sled on over to Barrie Summy's website. She's serving them up hot...and with marshmallows!