A Wrinkle in Time (Madeline L'Engle)

A Wrinkle in Time
The Time Quintet, Book 1
Madeline L'Engle
Listening Library
Fiction, MG Fantasy/Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Everything about teenage Meg Murry's life is going wrong, from her grades (even though both her parents are scientists) to her looks (plain, bespectacled, and wearing braces, as opposed to her beautiful mother) to her attitude (when are people going to stop telling her to be positive when there's nothing good to be positive about?). The worst, however, is the fact that it's been years and her father is still missing, and the small town rumor mill won't stop their whispering, muttering, or outright telling the Murry children to their faces what they think about that. There's only so much a girl can take, and certainly Meg's at her limit. Then things take a very strange turn. Her odd little brother, Charles Wallace, starts talking about "friends" in the old abandoned house in the woods. Then one of those friends comes to visit, and a very odd person Mrs. Whatsit turns out to be, indeed. Then fate seems to conspire to bring Meg, Charles, and classmate Calvin together, just in time to be whisked away on a dangerous journey across space and time. At the other end, Meg may finally find answers about her father... or she might find nothing but ultimate darkness.
This audiobook presentation also features an introduction by Ava DuVernay, the director of the 2018 theatrical film, a foreward by the author, and an afterword by Madeline L'Engle's granddaughter Charlotte Jones Voiklis.

REVIEW: I've been meaning to get around to this classic for a while, but I was leery after my first childhood introduction to the Time Quintet: a teacher in third grade read us part of another story in the Time Quintet (which I remember as being A Swiftly Tilting Planet, but the plot summary sounds more like A Wind in the Door), and without context my chief memory of the experience was being bored to tears. But I finally got around to giving the first installment a try. While I wasn't bored to tears this time around, I can't say I was as blown away by it as many people seem to be.
Published in 1962, A Wrinkle in Time challenged what many publishers thought was "appropriate" material for children, even older children (the middle-grade distinction, separating younger from older children and both from the yet-to-be-created young adult/teen category, not being a thing yet). It still does, as witness the many challenges and bans aimed at it. While I can appreciate that it intentionally pushes at boundaries, I still found myself grinding my teeth now and again as I was bludgeoned with Lessons, not to mention casual assumption of (white) Christianity as the default human baseline culture (despite some lip service to other cultures existing) and galactic norm. While there's talk of advanced physics and metaphysics, the story leans far more on spirituality and religion; the Murry father vanished because he ran afoul of the malevolent "Black Thing" which already shadows Earth and has consumed whole worlds, the mysterious Mrs. Whatsit and her companions are clearly angels working for a masculine divine creator in the ongoing war against the darkness, and the whole tale is punctuated by Bible quotations. (There are also some elements that just plain don't age well; the focus on Meg's looks as a reflection of her self-worth, particularly how she needs a handsome boy to validate her existence - validation that comes in the form of Calvin telling her her eyes look pretty, so maybe she should stop wearing glasses, but then deciding that he'd rather she wear glasses so no other boy notices she has pretty eyes, which totally isn't creepily possessive for a veritable stranger to say to a girl at all - not to mention the slang that almost had me snickering it was so out of date and stilted.) As with most books that focus on Lessons, characters could sometimes take a back seat. Meg starts an emotional, somewhat whiny teenager - not entirely without cause, given what she's going through - but she leans awful hard into the role and only belatedly makes any effort to stand up, despite the whole of Creation evidently going out of its way to teach her personally. Her kid brother Charles Wallace is an unbelievably advanced five year old who almost shouldn't even need his sister's help (or Calvin's, though it's pretty clear the main reason Calvin is part of the trio is because of Meg, because heavens forfend a female find her own validation for existence or an independent future or actually be important save how she can help males who are her clear superiors succeed). In any event, many strange, sometimes beautiful and sometimes scary (and often eye-rollingly allegorical) things happen as Meg, Charles, and Calvin pursue Meg's father and confront an avatar of the foul Black Thing on a planet that has succumbed to its power.
While the plot doesn't drag overmuch, I have a low tolerance for preaching. That, plus aforementioned parts that don't age well (plus some irritation with the audiobook narrator's delivery), held it back in the ratings. I can still see the appeal, though, and how it changed the landscape of children's literature. (And the fact that people are still trying to ban it and rip it out of children's hands says it's still striking a nerve that needs to be struck, because I've yet to encounter a book banner who actually had the well-being of children and society at large in mind, despite their pearl-clutching rhetoric... but I digress.)

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There There (Tommy Orange)

There There
Tommy Orange
Knopf
Fiction, General Fiction
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Despite what popular media likes to show, Native Americans exist in places beyond the "rez", in suburbs and cities. Here, as everwhere, the scars of historic and ongoing mistreatment and prejudices linger and fester, and even as they reach for a connection and a future, too often it's snatched away. The city of Oakland is one such place, where Natives have gathered and been pushed into the cracks. From a young man branded by his mother's alcohol abuse to a woman fleeing an abusive relationship, from an aging ex-con to a boy trying to connect with something greater than himself, even to the lens of a would-be filmmmaker trying to document lives the world seems bound and determined to not see, numerous Native stories weave through the city's streets. At the coming Big Oakland Powwow, lives and generations will come together - and a terrible tragedy will play out.

REVIEW: If the description seems a bit vague, it's because this story is more a collection of stories and lives than a single cohesive arc. Orange jumps from character to character, often with tangential relations to each other that become apparent to the reader (if often not the people) as their tales unfurl. Nobody here is happy or thriving, but the back-breaking weights of history and living in a dominant culture that's still bound and determined to stuff Natives into ever-smaller boxes for ultimate disposal stack the odds against happiness or thriving for everyone here. Abuse, from alcohol to harder stuff (and from emotional to physical and worse), runs rampant, unhealthy coping mechanisms at best but about the only relief some can find. With the powwow, the characters try to recreate lost connections and save fading cultural values and memories, but even in these places nobody is safe from the tragedies all around them.
While the various lives examined show different aspects of modern urban Native American life with an insider's nuance and insight, sometimes the stories feel meandering and tangled. What ultimately cost it a half-star was the climax and ending, which felt rushed and incomplete; I almost wondered if the audiobook I listened to had been abridged, especially given how much time and attention went into setting everything up and putting every character into position for the violence at the end. But apparently it does just end like that, almost mid-thought, with no wrapup or examination of the fallout. That aside, it's a solid, often harrowing portrayal of lives and cultures too many have learned not to care about and pain too many have learned not to see.

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The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (N. K. Jemisin, editor)

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018
N. K. Jemisin, editor (John Joseph Adams, series editor)
Mariner
Fiction, Anthology/Fantasy/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Rivers take human form to escape captivity... a young woman discovers a dark family secret in the worst possible way... a robot on a galactic spaceship is forced into an impossible choice by a stowaway... These and more stories are collected in this volume, edited by author N. K. Jemisin.

REVIEW: Yes, it's a few years old, but I keep meaning to read more short stories, and this book was free to me. (I also, as I've noted in previous reviews, have somewhat iffy luck with anthologies, but I like what I've read of Jemisin's work and decided to trust her judgement... and, again, free to me.) As with the majority of anthologies and collections I've read, the results are a bit of a mixed bag. A few I thoroughly enjoyed, some others were decent explorations of their concepts (if not quite my cup of cocoa), a few more I just could not connect with, and one I admittedly had to resort to skimming to get through. More than one of these seemed a bit long, not just for the anthology but for the stories they were telling. Many of the tales reflect the year in which they were written, the tumultuous gut-punch fallout of events in 2016 that continue to resonate unpleasantly through the nation and greater world; not surprisingly, the overall tone of the anthology leans dark and bleak and more than a little angry. At the end, information about the authors is presented, along with statements about the tales included, their inspirations and influences. I wish the stories had been more clearly connected, or at least the author notes had been presented in the same order as the stories appeared instead of just alphabetically; by the time I reached the afterword, I had to flip back and forth to even try matching up who had written what. This extra behind-the-scenes discussion helped lift the volume to a solid four stars. Overall, it's a decent assortment of tales reflecting the modern state of the genre.

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Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods (Catherynne M. Valente)

Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods
Catherynne M. Valente
Margaret K. McElderry Books
Fiction, MG Fantasy
***** (Great)

DESCRIPTION: Long, long ago, when a particularly wild forest fell in love with a particularly mild valley, all was right with the world... but, of course, things change, as things are wont to do. The forest created a whole host of creatures just as wild as itself, while the valley built a tidy little village just as mild as itself, attracting all manner of people. Then the creatures, particularly the wildest sort known as Quidnunks, started to hunt the people of Littlebridge, and the people hunted the creatures and Quidnunks, and only the creation of a powerful treaty kept them from killing each other off outright. Under the treaty, for every human killed, a Quidnunk must marry that human's ghost and live in the village of Littlebridge, and for every Quidnunk killed a human must do the same, going to live in the wild forest villages. Again, for a time, all was right with the world... but, again, things changed...
The boy Osmo Unknown knows every nook and cranny and plank and cobblestone of Littlebridge - and he hates it. He hates how mild and orderly life is here, how nothing ever seems to happen, especially to a boy like him. He hates how he's expected to become a hunter like his mother, even though hunters at least get to venture into the Fourpenny Woods beyond town (forbidden to all else) in search of increasingly-scarce game. He hates how wealthy girls like Ivy never notice boys like him, and never will. Just once, he wants to get lost, find himself elsewhere, have an adventure, but these days the world seems fresh out of adventure; there haven't been any strange creatures or Quidnunks sighted in so long that some, like Osmo, are convinced they're just a myth, a metaphor, something made up to keep little children from breaking the rules. Then his mother accidentally shoots an odd creature just outside the village - a creature with gold blood. A Quidnunk.
Whisked away by a cantankerous being, the half-badger, half-skunk Bonk the Cross, Osmo finds himself deep in the Fourpenny Woods, far from everything he's ever known. If he fails in the seemingly impossible quest set before him, the treaty will be broken and his whole village will suffer the wrath of the wilds. This is just the sort of thing Osmo used to dream of happening in his boring, mild life back in Littlebridge... only it's far more terrifying than he ever anticipated, to actually be on an adventure instead of just reading about one.

REVIEW: I've had pretty good luck with Valente's work in the past, so when I saw this audiobook available on Libby I snapped it up for a listen. With wonderful turns of phrase, colorful characters, bold adventures painted in all the colors of imagination, and genuine heart, Osmo and his companions kept me wonderfully entertained from start to finish. It moves at a fairly snappy pace, yet manages to create characters and situations with some roundness and dimension to them. No scene, no sentence, no word is ever wasted. I also must say I appreciated the narrator, Heath Miller, who gave such life to already-lively prose and did so in a way that I could actually hear, without mumbling or muttering or whispering or otherwise making me adjust the volume on my earphones every five seconds (unlike some audiobook narrators I've encountered). I can highly recommend it to readers of any age who want a wild and whimsical adventure.

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Ice Planet Barbarians (Ruby Dixon)

Ice Planet Barbarians
The Ice Planet Barbarians series, Book 1
Ruby Dixon
Berkley
Fiction, Romance/Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Georgie never believed in aliens, until she woke to find herself in the cargo hold of a spaceship, along with a half-dozen other young women. Whoever the strange little green men are (or their brutal orange guards), they aren't the catch-and-release type of abductors. Instead, they're more the catch-and-sell-off-to-unknown-aliens-for-unknown-reasons type... and none of the captives want to think too much on what it might mean that they only went after young, single Earth women. But Georgie's not the kind to go down without a fight. And when a problem with the abductors' ship leads them to drop the human cargo off on an iceball planet, she's not going to pass up the chance to escape. Only she finds more than she bargained for when she's snared by the massive blue barbarian. He has horns and armored skin and even a tail, his eyes glow green, and the biting cold that's slowly killing her hardly seems to phase him, but darned if he isn't the hottest thing she's ever seen. But she has to get back to Earth, hopefully before the abductor aliens come back to reclaim their "cargo". She can't afford to lose her heart to a big blue brute.
Vektal doesn't know what to make of the strange thing dangling in his hunting snare. It looks sort of like a person, if small and pale and soft and with too many fingers - nothing at all like a proper sa-khui. Where could she have come from, and what's she doing here? But his khui, the symbiotic life form in his heart, tells him this is his life-mate, future mother of his kits, and the khui are never wrong. Now, he just has to convince the strange woman of that. No easy task, when she can't speak his language and doesn't even have her own khui. But there are other ways of talking than mere words...

REVIEW: I've heard some talk of this book around, so when I saw it available as an audiobook via Libby - and when I needed a relatively short title to fill out the end of a work day - I figured I'd give it a try. I've read (and listened to) other romance titles (and erotica, which this leans strongly toward), so why not? Considering that I didn't have high expectations going in, I was actually pleasantly surprised.
Initially, this looks to be a typical erotic sci-fi romp where sexy young Earth women hook up with hot aliens who seemed to have evolved primarily to pleasure said Earth women in ways no mere Homo sapiens man could manage. To be fair, that is the basic plot arc (no real spoiler, that; it's right in the title and cover art and blurb). But Georgie actually has some moxie in her. As the leader of the abductees, mostly because nobody else steps up to the plate when a leader is needed, Georgie spearheads their initial escape attempt and later explorations of the ice world. She's not just talk; she does hard things and makes hard decisions, thinking of the needs of others and not just herself. (Well, she does reserve some selfishness in regards to intimate interspecies relations, but she keeps her pants on, or at least puts them back on, when the others need help). Vektal, for his part, is also a leader of his people, but doesn't know at all what to make of the first human woman he's ever set eyes on; his people don't even have the concept of aliens. He initially takes her for something weak, and compared to him she is - physically, at least - but he comes to understand that there's a lot more to her than her diminutive (compared to him) physique. Despite the fated-mate aspect of the tale, consent is actually discussed and a key part of the plot; Vektal's race may be a bit fuzzy on the term, given how the khui determine much of their lives (including their life-mates, though before finding that one special person they aren't expected to be celibate), but Vektal never forces the issue and is willing to learn for the sake of love, even being willing to give Georgie up if she ultimately chooses her home over his.
The story moves pretty fast, and throughout has both action and humor. There's a certain self-awareness beneath the words, a bit of a wink and acknowledgement that never denies its genre or ambitions; this is not high literature or deep philosophy, but a sex-filled alien adventure, and never pretends to be otherwise. As for the expected erotic explorations between humans and sa-khui, they're suitably steamy (and more than a bit over-the-top, intentionally). It ultimately lost a half-star for leaning a bit too hard into the fated-mate (and breeding) aspect, and just not being quite my cup of cocoa in the long run. But it definitely rose above my expectations, and I've read far worse stories, with far flimsier characters and romances.

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