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Review of The Archived

Deirdre Baker — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 16:24:00 +0000

The Archived
by Victoria Schwab
Middle School, High School Hyperion 324 pp.
1/13 978-1-4231-5731-1 $16.99 g
Mackenzie is a “Keeper”; her job is to return the wakeful dead (or “Histories”) to the Archive, a repository of all human memory. Persuading the dead to return to their rightful resting place often involves kick-ass combat, but never so much as when Mac’s family moves to an apartment in an old hotel. Suddenly, the Archive experiences a rush of escaped Histories, and it’s no longer the silent domain it should be — nor is Mac, grieving the loss of her younger brother, as dispassionate as she once was about the dead. This is no common policing-the-supernatural romantic thriller: Schwab’s image of the Archive and  its Librarians is both poignant and intellectually piquant, a suggestion that the repository of human memory goes beyond personal loss and is central to human culture. She writes of death, sorrow, and family love with a light, intelligent touch and inventive vigor, and provides romance with a pleasing edge of unpredictability. It isn’t often that lines from Dante’s Inferno make their way into supernatural thrillers for teens, but they do here — and to good effect.

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Gary D. Schmidt on What Came from the Stars

Deirdre Baker — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 16:20:36 +0000

From the September/October issue of The Horn Book Magazine:
Reviewer Deirdre F. Baker asks What Came from the Stars author Gary D. Schmidt about the function of elevated language in the novel. Read the full starred review of What Came from the Stars here.

Deirdre F. Baker: For the book’s fantasy elements, you hark back to biblical, Old English, and Tolkienesque language, imagery, and style. How do these inform the story’s contemporary-realism scenes?

Gary D. Schmidt: What we know about our world—and ourselves—is mediated through language, so when I decided to try a fantasy, it seemed right to enter that alternate world through a fitting medium. And since I wanted a high, noble, epic world for some chapters, I turned to Old English, which, as C. S. Lewis rightly noted, sounds like castles coming out of your mouth—an apt contrast to Tommy’s everyday life. The two languages’ representations of their worlds create the conflict—which is echoed in the story’s events.

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Review of What Came from the Stars

Deirdre Baker — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 14:20:48 +0000

What Came from the Stars
by Gary D. Schmidt
Middle School Clarion 293 pp.
9/12 978-0-547-61213-3 $16.99 g
Schmidt brings high heroic fantasy and contemporary realism together in this novel of a bereaved family. In Plymouth, Massachusetts, Tommy grieves for his mother, who died eight months ago. And on a distant planet in “Weoruld Ethelim,” Young Waeglim invests all the Art of the destroyed Valorim—his culture—into a chain necklace, sending it into the universe to keep it safe from evil Lord Mondus. When the chain falls through worlds and lands in Tommy’s lunchbox, it brings Tommy vivid memories of the Valorim—and gives him superhuman abilities, including the power to create paintings that move and to conjure alien creatures from sand. But Lord Mondus wants the chain himself, and Tommy is caught up in a fight that mingles humdrum real estate chicanery with cosmic greed; the school bully with an epic warrior; and human consolation with celestial triumph. Schmidt gives us two parallel stories, one told in the formal, archaic style of epic Tolkienesque fantasy, with Old English and biblical resonances; the other in down-to-earth contemporary language. Gradually, the two styles merge, underscoring that inner change is itself the stuff of classic heroism. The life and power of Art is central to this artful interplanetary story in which a boy misses his mother “like he would miss the planet.”

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Review of A Confusion of Princes

Deirdre Baker — Wed, 30 May 2012 14:32:21 +0000

A Confusion of Princes
by Garth Nix
Middle School, High School    Harper/HarperCollins    337 pp.
5/12    978-0-06-009694-6    $17.99
Library ed. 978-0-06-009695-3    $18.89    g
Nix’s gaming-inspired, sci-fi fantasy is a pleasing mix of high-adventure space drama, total bunkum (e.g., “it’s functioning on the tertiary backup level, without a holo…”), and wry, boyish charm. Khemri’s coming-of-age story begins with his emergence from years of genetic and technical “remaking” to take up his title of Prince. But he’s only one of millions of Princes in the Empire, and immediately finds that Princely life isn’t the easy, glamorous ride he’d imagined. Instead he has to join the Navy, suffer manifold humiliations, and, if he wants to live, heed his personal Master of Assassins. But Khemri’s telepathic intelligence is above average, and eventually he moves into a new sort of training that involves him becoming an almost normal human. That experience and his native intelligence cause him to reinterpret everything he’s been taught about the Empire. Nix’s fantasy has enough gadgets, escapes, battles, duels, deaths, and near-death experiences to keep die-hard adventure story readers enthralled. Happily, Khemri is also a thoughtful, winsome, and somewhat complex character, and his cheerfully self-deprecating tone and unpredictable choices make this romp entertaining on multiple levels.

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Review of Code Name Verity

Deirdre Baker — Wed, 09 May 2012 16:17:59 +0000

Code Name Verity
by Elizabeth Wein
High School    Hyperion    337 pp.
5/12    978-1-4231-5219-4    $16.99    g
e-book ed. 978-1-4231-5325-2    $16.99
Wein’s exceptional—downright sizzling—abilities as a writer of historical adventure fiction are spectacularly evident in this taut, captivating story of two young women, spy and pilot, during World War II. Wein gives us the story in two consecutive parts—the first an account by Queenie (a.k.a. Lady Julia Beaufort-Stuart), a spy captured by the SS during a mission in Nazi-occupied France. Queenie has bargained with Hauptsturmführer von Linden to write what she knows about the British war effort in order to postpone her inevitable execution. Sounding like a cross between Swallows and Amazons’s Nancy Blackett and Mata Hari, she alternately succumbs to, cheeks, and charms her captors (and readers) as she duly writes her report and, mostly, tells the story of her best friend Maddie, the pilot who dropped her over France, then crashed. Spoiler: unbeknownst to Queenie, Maddie survived the crash; part two is Maddie’s “accident report” and account of her efforts to save Queenie. Wein gives us multiple doubletakes and surprises as she ratchets up the tension in Maddie’s story, revealing Queenie’s joyously clever duplicity and the indefatigable courage of both women. This novel positively soars, in part no doubt because the descriptions of flying derive from Wein’s own experience as a pilot. But it’s outstanding in all its features—its warm, ebullient characterization; its engagement with historical facts; its ingenious plot and dramatic suspense; and its intelligent, vivid writing.

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Review of The Cabinet of Earths

Deirdre Baker — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:42:56 +0000

The Cabinet of Earths" width="178" height="266" />The Cabinet of Earths
by Anne Nesbet
Intermediate    Harper/HarperCollins    260 pp.
1/12    978-0-06-196313-1    $16.99
e-book ed. 978-0-06-209919-8    $8.99
“Well! It is better to read fairy tales than to find yourself caught in them,” Nesbet’s narrator declares, a predictor of what is to be found in the subsequent pages — for Nesbet’s story is a-shimmer with magic, in plot, characters, and literary style. In Paris with her family for a year, Maya is bemused by many things: her cousin Louise (“too vague to be properly ordinary” and “less notable than people usually are, somehow”); the door handle next door (a bronze salamander that actually flicks its tongue at her); and the discovery of an elderly relative, keeper of the mysterious Cabinet of Earths. Then there are her family worries: her frail mother, recovering from chemotherapy; her overly charming little brother…Maya finds herself pondering the values of liveliness and mortality in a life-or-death struggle when she becomes next Keeper of the Cabinet of Earths. Nesbet’s first novel is an impressive achievement, its substance and style gracefully blended. The bright, engaged narrative voice whisks us along with breezy, intelligent energy; words are neatly fitted, nicely unpredictable, and resonant with multiple meanings. Above all, Maya is a fully rounded, complex character, someone whose qualities and struggles are admirably and appealingly central to the fantasy.

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Present Tensions, or It’s All Happening Now

Deirdre Baker — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 15:08:35 +0000

When the 2010 Man Booker shortlist was announced in the UK, the Daily Telegraph ran this headline: “Philip Pullman and Philip Hensher criticise Booker Prize for including present tense novels.” In fact, what Pullman said, as he explained in an article in the Guardian, was that “the use of the present tense in fiction had been getting more and more common, and [he] didn’t like it.”

Pullman’s article drew sympathetic responses from many readers who shared his dislike of novels written entirely in the present tense. In the interests of full disclosure, I confess that often I too experience an involuntary feeling of resistance when I confront a novel written in the present tense.

What is it about novels written in the present tense that makes some people so irate?

And why is it that for many people, the past tense is the default tense of the novel? What does the tense of a novel tell us? And why in the past few years have we seen such a proliferation of young adult novels written in the present tense?

In the middle of last summer, in the middle of Fargo, North Dakota, in the middle of an oil crisis, in the middle of six lanes of pickup trucks, SUVs, 4x4s, semis, and minivans, all busy idling, I understood.

This is about not connecting yesterday with tomorrow, I thought. It’s about “it’s all happening now.” About looking neither backward nor forward. It’s about being in an adolescent’s head—a head of hyperbole in which “ruin my life forever” and “worst hair in the history of the world” (say) are statements about Now and only Now.

But writing in the present tense is also a political, even an ideological choice—just as writing in the past tense is a political choice. For many years, virtually every novel was written in the past tense. It was, in a way, how the author, through the narrator, asserted authority: I am a historian, even if of a fictional universe. This is how it happened, the author declares:

The trouble started the day Howard came home from school to find the Goon sitting in the kitchen.

—Diana Wynne Jones, Archer’s Goon, 1984

On the morning of his fourteenth birthday, Pepper had been awake for fully two minutes before realizing it was the day he must die.

—Geraldine McCaughrean, The Death-Defying Pepper Roux, 2009

It was seven o’clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day’s rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips.

—Rudyard Kipling, “Mowgli’s Brothers” in The Jungle Book, 1894

These lines don’t invite us to respond, “Oh yeah? It did? Sez who?” There’s nothing provisional about them—they state the day, the age, the very hour. They establish a world; they make a claim. The narrator may be reliable or unreliable, but in either case, he or she is making a statement about something that has happened, and in a voice of authority.

But the past tense does much more than that. The very past-ness of the story acknowledges that the story has been shaped. The past tense shows the narrator, perhaps even the author, quietly admitting responsibility for the way the story is told, admitting that it’s a product of looking back and seeing the threads of cause-and-effect. It’s a silent declaration on the author’s part: this is an act of interpretation, of art, with what I see as the meaningful bits included in the story. In a sense, the past tense is the author acknowledging that to write is to take a stand, to come up with a reading. To put this and that together: to discern cause and consequence.

Of course the story in the present tense is also shaped, but the present tense hides that influence. It doesn’t admit to the determining hand of the writer or narrator, so readily available in the interpretation in retrospect. We don’t have the past-tense assurance that the narrator has made sense of what’s happening, nor the tacit acknowledgment that some bits are included, some left out, and what is mentioned is fundamental to someone’s interpretation of the story, of turning it into a meaningful idea. In this way the present tense is a layer of concealment over the writer’s influence on the way the story is told, and on the fact that to tell it, the writer has taken a stand. The present tense is reportage or live drama: every present tense verb is a step into nothing, into a tale that must make itself up from moment to moment. A Tweet, perhaps. A Facebook comment. Or even reality TV—happening right before your
very eyes.

No wonder, then, that Suzanne Collins uses the present tense in the enormously popular The Hunger Games (2008)—because Collins’s first-person narrator, Katniss, is fighting for her life in a deadly, Survivor-inspired game show. Everything happens now: suspense, fear, breathlessness, nasty, nasty violence, and an intensely pitched uncertainty about the outcome.

As if in a last-ditch effort, Peeta raises his fingers, dripping with blood from his leg, up to Cato’s arm. Instead of trying to wrestle his way free, his forefinger veers off and makes a deliberate X on the back of Cato’s hand. Cato realizes what it means exactly one second after I do. I can tell by the way the smile drops from his lips. But it’s one second too late because, by that time, my arrow is piercing his hand. He cries out and reflexively releases Peeta who slams back against him. For a horrible moment, I think they’re both going over. I dive forward just catching hold of Peeta as Cato loses his footing on the blood-slick horn and plummets to the ground.

Here the present tense gives us one movement after another—raises, veers, makes an X, realizes, cries out, releases, slams back, dives forward, catches hold, loses footing, plummets to the ground. Action after action builds the suspense: will our narrator survive to the next paragraph? The reader is mesmerized: it’s all happening in front of our eyes!

Collins is a canny, effective writer; she enfolds simultaneous action and split seconds into her narrator’s perceptions, intensifying the nowness of it all, the life-or-deathness of it all. Captive to the motion of the moment, walled into the arena in which televised Katniss fights for survival, we are transfixed in the present. Ironically, Collins provides us with the very kind of entertainment she is trying to critique: we have become enraptured viewers of a reality show, and are pumped with triumphant, sickened relief when the other guy falls to his death.

And like viewers of a reality show, we aren’t being shown that the fix is in. We hear Katniss’s eloquent, simultaneous reporting; we see through her eyes. In the immediacy of her account, Collins doesn’t tip the shaping hand of the story-maker—narrator or author—but instead intensifies the Now through dramatic enactment in the present tense. Is there a moment after this moment? Nothing about the words promises one.

It’s that difference, partly, that makes present-tense naysayers irate. Whatever the pretense of your fiction, acknowledge your part in it! Tip your hand; remind your reader that this is artful invention, not reportage! Don’t compose your story as a momentary blip followed by another momentary blip; pretend that it will last until the present is past!

After all, the present is so fleeting that it barely exists (and really, the pretense that a girl like Katniss has the leisure to compose her story so eloquently under the circumstances is laughable). The present is over in less than the time it takes to read a word. It has no duration, but it does ensure that the story will always be happening now: no young adult reader will be able to pick up the story and say, “It happened long ago; it’s irrelevant.”

It’s the video aspect of The Hunger Games that clues us into the proliferation of present tense novels, I think. For the present tense is the tense of Twitter and Facebook; but even more it reflects the experience of video culture. With present tense verbs, video culture finds its way into the written text. If every second of a film or YouTube clip can happen again and again in front of our eyes in real time, perhaps we have given up the notion of pastness as well as the notion of conclusion. Re-viewing makes the past present, after all, and the scrolling motion of film that used to accentuate the brevity of the time (now you see it; now it’s over) now allows us to stop the image and live in an endless present. The present is the tense of motion but, ironically, it’s also the tense of arrested motion, of stasis:

The rest of us link our arms for warmth and let our feet lick at the sandy bottom. We’re like a band of floating nomads.

—Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty, 2003

I turn away from the railing. I cannot stand this any longer.

—Veronica Roth, Divergent, 2011

maura: i am isaac, will.
me: don’t be stupid. he’s a guy.
maura: no, he’s not. he’s a profile. i made him up.
me: yeah, right.
maura: i did.

no. no no no no no no no no no no no no no.

me: what?

no please no what no no please no fuck no NO.

maura: isaac doesn’t exist. he’s never existed.
me: you can’t—
maura: you’re so caught.

—John Green and David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson, 2010

The verb drops out and there it is: the eternal present. The tense of live drama, enactment, improv, adolescent nowness, being stuck in traffic, and lifting a foot to step forth into a future that may or may not exist.

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