needs more demons? maybe.

I think this was mostly because of Proginoskes, an unusual and seriously awesome character.

But it’s not possible for me to sustain my former opinion of the novels’ relative merit this time around. The events in A Wind in the Door clearly happen after those in A Wrinkle in Time, but the characters seem curiously unaware of those events — they have to go through the passage of disbelief deal all over again. Some fantasists — Tim Powers comes to mind — employ this deliberately, with the implication that the human mind blots out events that violate our understanding of the universe as soon as they’re over. (Characters in some of Powers’ fiction have their most explicit encounter with the unreal when they’re pretty much blotto, which helps.) But first, there’s zero textual support for this interpretation in A Wind in the Door, and second, it runs counter to the thematic content of the novels, which is about increasing mental openness and spiritual awareness. Speaking of which . . .

They’re basically the same book, thematically. Meg has to move a little farther along the same path, but it is pretty clearly the same path, and even the nature of the specific plot threat is somewhat similar.

Other things that struck me:

• Since I made a big deal of the explicit Christian textual references in “Wrinkle,” I should probably mention that it’s dialed way, way down here, and mixed with a healthy dollop of pantheism.
• There’s some pretty cool scientific extrapolation/invention, but also some sloppy stuff, with “parsec” being used as a unit of time one of the most glaring. (Just like Star Wars!)
• At a certain point the novel gets kinda amazingly non-concrete. I was actually reminded a wee bit of Woolf’s The Waves.

needs more demons? Mmmaybe. But I do still love it.

• Yowza, one of my all-time favorite novels starts with “It was a dark and stormy night.” Did she do that on purpose? I feel like almost any editor in the current decade would just stop there. It wasn’t L’Engle’s first novel, but still.
• As a kid, I didn’t think of this as a particularly Christian book. I was probably kind of obtuse, I don’t remember really noticing the Christian symbolism in Narnia either, until The Last Battle, where it sort of whops you over the head with an anvil. So this time I was more aware that L’Engle frames her good-versus-evil conflict in a context that’s congruent with Christianity. Narnia aside, explicit Christian references seem a bit more prevalent throughout than I remember from other children’s/young adult fantasies. Maybe if I revisit Cooper’s Dark is Rising cycle I’ll just find further evidence of my former obtuseness.
• This book was published in 1962 (and according to Wikipedia written even earlier). A few aspects betray its age — some dated slang mostly, and Calvin’s behavior toward Meg seems a little presumptuous in spots. But it’s striking how current, even progressive, most of this is. A tough, but credibly fallible, girl hero! Her equally tough scientist mom!
• Speaking of which, there are strains of Christianity that are either implicitly or even explicitly anti-science. They draw a lot of media attention and sadly have a lot of influence on school textbooks in some districts. L’Engle is not that sort of Christian at all. Huzzah!
• Wow, what a long, long shadow this book has cast. When this book was released, I don’t think anyone would have described young adult (or “tween,” ugh) fantasy as a genre — because there was Narnia, The Hobbit, this, and darned little else. Lucy Boston’s Green Knowe books, I suppose, maybe a few others. And by 1962 I suspect Susan Cooper and Lloyd Alexander’s first novels were well underway. But still, I think you could make a case that this book is about as influential on young adult fantasy as The Velvet Underground and Nico was on indie rock.
• Wow, that ending seems abrupt. Both the resolution of the conflict, and the wrap-up after it. I think an author in the current climate would have been encouraged to pad it out a lot more, if not to stretch the plot across multiple sets of covers.
• I won’t confess to how long ago I last read this, but it’s got to be decades, plural. And there were whole chapters I’d so nearly forgotten that I didn’t know quite was next. But oh my goodness, there were whole paragraphs I could literally still quote verbatim. I could feel them getting near: here comes the ant metaphor of travel via warped space, and the moment where I know both what Meg can’t do and what she can do.

needs more demons? Of course not. Goes without saying.

It’s also a bit of a love letter from Steadman to Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Miranda’s favorite book, and clearly one which made a big impression on Steadman.

I liked it a lot. It reminded me of two other books for young adults I’ve read recently: It’s Like This, Cat for its very specific sense of place and (earlier) time, and As Easy As Falling Off the Face of the Earth for its unusual, puzzle-y structure and vivid language. I had two major hypotheses about how things were going to pan out, and When You Reach Me kept me guessing between them almost up to the end. Definitely the sort of book that left me wanting to mull over it for a bit before diving into some other work of fiction. Also the sort of book that makes me want to revisit some Madeleine L’Engle.

needs more demons? nuh-uh.

There’s a present day plot thread that introduced dramatic tension but never quite felt adequately supported, and I found the diction of the oldest of the quoted texts a little unconvincing, even allowing for the unconventional education of its author. I also thought the novel’s concluding handful of paragraphs were unworthy of what went before, with a touch neater resolution than I would have preferred. But these foibles don’t stop me from enthusiastically recommending the book.

needs more demons? no.

I think my biggest issues with World’s End are primarily about the plot, and fall into two groups. First, characters keep making screamingly bad choices. You know the horror movies where somebody says, “hey, let’s split up so the monster can pick us off one by one”? That bad.* Second, the abilities of the antagonists didn’t seem consistent. They’re more or less invincible until the plot requires them to take a defeat, and then they’re suddenly vulnerable to a pitiful ruse. (You could argue that Chadbourn is employing a venerable tradition of underdog characters fighting mighty evils, but I would counter that the protagonists’ actions would still benefit from a little more credibility.) It’s also a druggier book than I prefer, and suffers a little from the wish-fulfillment guy-irresistible-to-women thing that bugged me so much about Stieg Larsson.

*to be fair, the villains as well as the heroes have some boneheaded moments.

needs more demons? Just not my cuppa, I’m afraid

Two minor quibbles: especially since Wicked Appetite is tied to the Stephanie Plum books by shared characters, I’d expect Evanovich to make a point of differentiating narrator Lizzy Tucker from Plum. But Evanovich gives Tucker a similar background (the whole high school humiliation/blossoming ugly duckling thing) and temperament. It makes Wicked Appetite feel a bit more familiar than it really needs to, especially in the early chapters. And the dénouement felt a little rushed. But overall this exceeded my expectations.

needs more demons? not really.

Winslow in Love isn’t exactly either of those things, but it’s also not exactly neither of those things. But the recommendation for Canty came from such a trusted source that I’d more or less determined to read all his fiction before I started, and Winslow in Love, his third novel, seemed like as good a place to start as any, and it doesn’t at all shake my intention to read more.

Rocketing through Richard Winslow’s moodswings, as he barrels highways in his slightly improbable but thoroughly à propos Lincoln Town Car is a little dizzying, precisely as I’m certain it’s meant to be. “Precise” is a good word for the novel as a whole: incisive dialogue, even more incisive interior monologues, and vivid, but never over-written. But it’s also reckless, like Winslow himself, with jarring narrative elisions and some sharp deviations from the forms it feints at playing with (the academic turf war/infidelity novel, the man-drinks-self-to-death book, etc.).

(The dénouement doesn’t entirely sit easily with me, but it would be very hard to articulate why without damaging the experience of reading the novel.)

needs more demons? no.

The not-so-good: Wake’s prose takes fast-paced to new extremes. Short declarative sentences with a lot of sentence fragments. Like that one. And this one. It seems susceptible to parody, and I found it a tad wearying. But it sure made for a quick read.

The even-less-good: Wake feels more like a prequel than a main event. It’s one of those novels where not a whole lot actually happens, and much of the plot conflict is driven by characters’ lack of clear communication (admittedly, so is Pride and Prejudice, I suppose). It picks up more of its dramatic tension by starting in medias res with a boatload of “how we got here” flashback — which is fine, but I think I might have preferred the res the series is in medias of to be set after the events of this book.

needs more demons? kinda.

But I also think that The Windup Girl would be stronger if it were tightened up a little bit. It’s a good novel as it stands, but it might have been a killer short novel. And although it was not published previously as linked short stories, the density of exposition and the quantity of recapitulations of character relationships and plot points makes it feel almost as if it were originally structured with serial publication in mind.

The Windup Girl returns to the post-global warming, post-fossil fuel world of “The Calorie Man” and “Yellow Card Man,” two of the strongest stories from Pump Six and Other Stories. Part of my problem with The Windup Girl’s quantity of exposition stems from my previous familiarity with Bacigalupi’s milieu, but part of it is legit — after the first few times, mentioning the power source of an item whenever it is referenced is overkill, as if a contemporary naturalistic novelist referred to “internal combustion engine cars.”

This is a shame, because for me it somewhat overshadowed The Windup Girl’s many virtues, like the vividly imagined future Thailand, the slow-boiling twisty plot, vivid characters, and the white-hot core of environmental rage that fuels the book.

needs more demons? needs just a little more focus.