Divergent took “favorite book of 2011″ and also “best YA fantasy and sci-fi” on goodreads this year.

I’m happy that this book won, but I’m also shocked. Favorite book? A YA book?

Well, 50% of Roth’s goodreads readers were 25 or older. Molly O’Neill, the editor of the book, tweeted about that.

I’m excited to hear that because, well, I’m over 25 (just a tad  ), and I liked the book. So it makes me happy that I’m not alone in this adult love for YA books. I’m also excited because since these are the books I read, they are also the books I write, and I like to see that there’s a market for them.

It’s always been there, really. The market was there before there was a YA category, I think. Amazon lists Anne of Green Gables as middle grade, but those books have always appealed to females of all ages. I’ve read them over at various ages, and loved them every time. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and the Narnia books I’ve also read many times, and they’re loved by young and old.

So I’m glad to see YA and MG books getting some notice from adults. Some adults put up their noses at children’s books, thinking they are of lower quality than books written for adults. But that’s not the case. Heidi is a great book. Airman is wonderful. The Star of Kazan and The Charlatan’s Boy and Little Women…and I could go on and on. These books are wonderful, wonderful books for people of any age.

So I love, that a YA book beat out all other books in all other categories for favorite book on goodreads. It’s not the best book published in 2011, I’m pretty sure. No one made that claim. I doubt we could even judge that. Who has the authority to make such a judgement? But Divergent was a favorite among the rabid readers at goodreads. And I’m thrilled to see this strong crossover market.

So many women and teens in my church loved the Harry Potter books. Then they loved the Twilight books. And those same woman and teens are now sharing more and more books. This is a good thing. I love to see mom’s sharing books with their children. My daughter and I loved the Hunger Games books. (I admit my daughter was on her own for the Twilight series. I read the first one and…um…chose not to continue.) We shared The Amaranth Enchantment (Ooh. Great hardback bargain price on that one. Buy some for your niece’s for Christmas.)  and Faery Rebels: Spell Hunter and Shannon Hale’s books. My son and I passed Gary Paulsen and Eoin Colfer and Treasure Island back and forth. We all loved the Gregor the Overlander books (look at the new price for this boxed set. Oh my!) and The Hobbit and The Wilderking books. (Oh my goodness. Check out the new and used prices on the third book of that series. I have a copy in good condition—I think I even have a signed arc. Maybe I need to have an auction.) Before all of those we were in love with the Little House books and Harry Potter. Some of my favorite moments with my children have come as we’ve loved and discussed books (and movies—any kind of story) together.

I’m so happy to see more and more adults sharing books with their children and even just reading children’s books on their own for the pure enjoyment of it.

So, yay for Divergent, and hearty congratulations to Veronica Roth.

What about you? Have your read Divergent yet? What’s your favorite book of 2011? Any genre.

Interesting article in PW. There seems to be no question that YA is dark. We seem to all agree on that. I guess the trouble comes in when some of us think that’s a bad thing and others think that’s a good thing.

I thought this was interesting:

In those pre-Harry days, one persistent worry was that the YA category was losing the upper half of that audience—15–19-year-olds—to Danielle Steel and Stephen King. Nowadays, the traffic is going the other way: adults are shopping in the YA aisle.

Yeah. I like that.

Other points the article hit on? There’s money being made, the paranormal craze seems to be dying, the dystopian craze may get its second wind with The Hunger Games movie, and everyone is looking for the next big thing but no one is sure what it will be.

I wonder if it the next blockbuster will be ND Wilson’s latest, The Dragon’s Tooth, which I just finished. I’d describe the book as Indiana Jones meets Harry Potter, with a serious hat-tip to Treasure Island thrown in for fun.

This is an MG book, not YA, but it will cross over and be read by all ages, I have no doubt. It’s the first in a series of five, and it has “movie” written all over it.

I’ll be writing a review on this one soon. But don’t wait on that. If you like action books with characters who are real and lovable and with writing that shines, buy this one posthaste. I have it on the Kindle and now I’m buying the hardback for my son—who is way past the middle grades but who will love this one all the same.

I picked up The Girl of Fire and Thorns, by Rae Carson, after Veronica Roth recommended it on her blog. I thought it was interesting that she asked people who find religion to be disgusting and nauseating to read the book with an open mind:

I feel like I should say that if the word “religion” makes you feel squicky, I understand how that feels (I’ve felt that way at certain points in my life, and still do sometimes), but I encourage you to approach this book with an open mind.

I’m sad that she feels it’s necessary to make a special plea to those who find religion repulsive. I’m not saying she didn’t do the right thing (in fact, I’m going to do the same thing), just saying I wish people didn’t find novels squicky when there is an established religious system and a god in the story world.

At any rate, I think fantasy worlds with religious systems are richer than worlds without, so I checked the book out right away. I read one chapter and bought the book. It’s a genre I love, and it starts with a sixteen-year-old girl having to face a life-changing event, which is scenario I love.

So I snapped it right up.

The Cover

I’m afraid I would have never bought this book if I’d been browsing shelves and came across it. I would not have even picked it up to read the backcover copy. I’ve read that others like the cover. The designers and publishers apparently like it. Sadly, I am not taken with it. (I didn’t care for the cover of The Diamond of Darkhold, either, come to think of it. Maybe I have a thing against large blue gems on covers.) If you find the color and the gem with the woman’s face inside of it to be off-putting, disregard the cover and buy the book anyway. It’s a good book. A very good book.

If you like the cover, just ignore that preceding paragraph, please. (But really is it just me? What do you all think of the US cover above and what do you think of the UK cover here? I would have snapped up the UK cover to read the first chapter.)

Enough about the cover. What about the book?

A Smart Heroine

I liked Elisa from the beginning. She was smart, and self-sacrificing. She suffered from a low self-esteem, but she was a strong character from the beginning. Very strong.

At sixteen she is being married off to a king she’s never met. She feels inadequate. She also thinks that her family is getting rid of her because they don’t like her much. She’s a fat girl, and she’s afraid her new husband will hold her in disdain. But all the feelings of inadequacy don’t bring the character down because it’s clear from the begining that she’s a very smart girl. She’s studied classical literature and languages. She’s studied the art of war. She’s not sure what use can she be to anyone but the reader can see that she’s got good brains and we can guess that those are going to come in handy.

I love this kind of heroine. I was just lamenting last month on the fact that so many kick-ass heroines beat up men with their bare hands. This book gave me a kick-ass heroine who outwits her opponents. I liked it.

The Story World

As I’ve already said, I think worlds with religion feel more fleshed out. People are religious. Men have always worshiped something. But there was much more to like than the religion. The book is well-written and the world is well developed. There are forests and deserts and all of it was well painted so I could visualize the countryside and the buildings in the cities. I had a good picture of the land in my head, and I had a good understanding of the political situation.

The Theme

The religion in the book wasn’t Christianity, though it seems sure that the author was influenced by the Christian Scriptures when she wrote up some of her own sacred texts for her world. I don’t care what the religion is, I’m just saying that for people who find Christianity offensive: This book wasn’t pushing Christianity at all.

One lesson in the book that seemed important to the author was the idea that we can’t really know what God’s will is. Different people devoted to the sacred text interpreted it differently, so no one really knew what their God’s will was.  The heroine was the only one who admitted to not knowing his will and that was presented as the superior position, I think. That was an interesting comment the author made on the Church, I thought. The character went to the texts to see for herself what she believed, but she didn’t find any answers in the text, that I remember, which was also interesting.

The book also seems to hit on self-esteem, which is not a favorite theme for me. I, being a cranky Calvinist, would like to see young people today have a lot less self-esteem and a lot more of the mind of Christ which esteems others as better than itself. But I also saw a lot in the book I could get behind. I saw that fat girls aren’t necessarily stupid or lazy. I also saw that beauty is way more than skin deep. Some of the most beautiful characters, physically, were wicked and/or cowardly. The book also made of point of showing that keeping promises is important and that doing what you can do is better than sitting around saying you can’t do anything.

Conclusion

I liked this one very much. I loved several of the characters, including Elisa, and I’m buying the next one in the trilogy for sure. If you like Shannon Hale and Julie Berry, this one is for you.

I’m not a huge fan of historical fiction, but with a cover like this…how could I resist Cleopatra’s Moon, by Vicky Alvear Shecter? Yes, I do judge books by their covers all the time, shallow though that may be. I figure if the publishers love the book enough to give it a great cover, there’s a good chance that it’s a worthy book.

I have never seen a cover that is more beautiful than this cover. The picture doesn’t do it justice because it doesn’t capture the soft black of the background, the rich gold of the borders, or the warm bronze of her skin. This is book you’ll want in hardback. It’s a work of art.

That said, oddly, I never pictured Cleopatra Selene, the star of the book, as looking like the girl on the cover. I pictured her looking like the bust of Cleopatra I’d seen in pictures. The girl on the cover is more beautiful than the author painted the girl inside to be, I think. So…I find it a  little sad that the daughter, two-thousand years later, can’t get out from under the idea we all have of Cleopatra’s beauty.

Cleopatra Selene and her Mother

But enough about the cover. The book is about Cleopatra Selene, the only one of Cleopatra’s children to live to adulthood.

We see the political and religious life of Egypt through the eyes of the young Selene, but mostly what we get early in the book is the idea that Cleopatra Selene worships her mother (and Mark Antony, her father). From Selene’s narration a picture emerges of the most powerful woman in the world. She sees her mother as perfect and I think the author, who is making all this up (Selene’s feelings toward her mother) has hit on a likely scenario. If you were the daughter of Cleopatra, Pharaoh and Queen, and you saw that she had the power of life and death in her hand, and you saw people worshiped her, wouldn’t you also believe that your mother was wise and brave and good and worthy? A goddess even? Why would Selene doubt any of this?

Keep Reading

Now, I have a confession. I’m really not a patient reader. My attention span has been affected by the Internet, I’m afraid, and I like page-turning dystopian stories better than richly-written character studies. I’m not proud of that, and I only admit it here in case you’re like me and the early pages of the book move a little too slowly for your tastes. Don’t give up. You’ll miss out on a rich book, with a memorable heroine, and a twisty plot if you quit early. In the beginning Selene isn’t a heroic figure. She’s a little girl with no power who is mostly just an observer. But stick with this book. The pace picks up heaps as soon as she gets to Rome. There, at Caesar’s home, Selene has to protect herself and her brothers while she plots to win back her mother’s throne.

The Author’s Integrity and Skill

There was much to love about this book set just a few decades before the birth of Christ. I enjoyed seeing and hearing and smelling the world as it was back then. Shecter spattered details liberally—delicate and pungent scents, gold and stone and sand and sun, and marble floors buffed to a high gloss and covered in blood.

I also really appreciated the integrity with which the author presents the ancient world, without remarking on the rightness or wrongness of any of it. She downplays the incestuous unions in the Ptolemy family tree, I think, and the political executions, giving Selene uncomfortable feelings about it all when the Roman children taunt her, without coming out and admitting or condemning it. Shecter deals with extramarital sex in the same way, allowing Selene to react to it without authorial comment. In the case of the extramarital sex, Selene feels no discomfort over the thought of her brother having sex with a boy or a girl. I’ve heard that these behaviors were common then, so it seems likely that Selene would not find them odd or disturbing.

I particularly loved that Shecter let the young Cleopatra Selene have her spiritual visions, some drug-induced and some not, and she didn’t write the goddess worship off as superstitious. I believe the Egyptian gods are real spiritual beings. I would call them demons, not gods, but Selene, of course would call them gods.

Feminism

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I often say that I’m one of the biggest anti-feminists around. I don’t just say that to get a rise out of people. I truly believe feminism, as it has played out in the USA in the twentieth century has been a great evil. So, being sensitive to feminism as I am, I didn’t miss the author presenting in the book, several complaints against the poor treatment of women. These complaints came through Selene and were in character and not intrusive.

Considering the evils of Cleopatra Selene’s world, where slaves and children (and even wives, I think) could be beaten to death without reprisal, wanting autonomy in marriage in that day hardly compares to twenty-first century pampered rich girls with entitlement mentalities, demanding autonomy and rebelling against lawful and good authority. Considering life in the ancient world, gives teeth to St. Peter’s instruction to wives to obey without fear. Wow! But he also commanded husbands to love their wives, so I was in favor of the slight feministic bent to the book. When the world is broken it is not wrong to say it needs fixing.

In conclusion

So I closed the book with a huge sigh of satisfaction. I considered recently what I want from a novel, and I found that what I want is character growth. I want a character to be better off morally at the end of the book then she was at the beginning. I loved Cleopatra Selene. She’s one of those wonderful larger-than-life characters that grabs you because of her voice and courage and her will to survive. I felt great pity when she lost people she loved, and I admired her strength and her resolve to fight and risk her life to do what she believed was right, but mostly I loved that she survived and even went further and grew, so that it could be argued in the end that she was wiser and more powerful than her mother. A very satisfying conclusion to the story of a brave young woman living in tragic circumstances.

I put up my first post today over at Novel Rocket. I’ll be posting there on the second and fourth Saturdays of each month. Stop on over there and say “hi” if you’ve got time. This week I posted on YA Warriors—kick-ass heroines and feminism in YA books.

What set me off on thinking about kick-ass heroines to begin with was Sarah Sawyer, talking about speculative novels and movies. She thinks superhero stories are on the rise, in part because:

They appeal to a desire to be a unique individual capable of offering something significant to the world. For the time that you experience the story, you get to cheer on someone gifted with special abilities–whether inherent, genetically added, given by a special device, or acquired by some other means–and watch them change their world. In reality, as [Christian] believers, we are ordinary individuals infused with the extraordinary…and superhero tales offer a glimpse into what that might mean on an epic scale.

I think she’s right in saying that superheros appeal to our desire for significance. When I was young, I often fantasized about doing great things and winning the admiration of the world. Like James Hunter (James at Fifteen), I dreamed about being important. Children aren’t the only ones who feel this way. I’d guess that most adults have something of Walter Mitty in them.

In the children’s publishing world, it is a truth universally acknowledged that powerless children in possession of a good library must be in want of powerful protagonists. We are always hearing that children’s books should empower readers.

Maybe, but I think maybe we only want power because power is a way for us to have significance.

What do you think? Are children looking for power or significance? How do we empower them and how do we convince them that they are significant?