Stream of Consciousness

So it’s no secret by now that I really like the fantasy genre.  But if there’s anything that I love, it’s magic in our world, or at least something very close to it.  Ladies and gents, I give you: The Curseworkers.

I have a little literary crush on Cassel Sharpe.  A clever boy with more than a little charisma and a strong desire to be good and do the right thing, even with his criminal family and their ties to the mafia making that extremely difficult.  Imagine, if you will, a world like ours except magic is accepted as something that a significant portion of the population can use.  To do so, they need skin contact through their hands with the flesh of their intended target.  Therefore, everyone (and I do mean everyone) wears gloves.  Magic, or curseworking, as it is called in the series, is illegal and the general populous lives in fear of those who have the ability, going so far as to attempt to have such people tested and accounted for.  This is Cassel’s world, the only non-curseworker in his family.  The story follows his attempts to find his place in the world, preferably one that doesn’t require him to be a criminal or betray his family.  A near impossibility, but if anyone can do it, it’s Cassel.

Holly Black’s writing can only be described as dynamic.  I could not put the book down either because I was laughing so hard, or I was anxious to read what happened next, or I couldn’t bear to leave them where they were, and all of a sudden they were over.  If the Hunger Games books were about revolution and the ugliness of war, The Curseworkers is about political activism and the ugliness of racial discrimination.  But because Holly lets you root for Cassel and hope for the good in him to win out, these books have worked their way into my heart.

Definitely a permanent favorite! (10 of 10)

It’s been about a month since I actually read the books, but they were on my shelf and I read them, so I might as well.

So let me just start by saying that to me, these are one story in three parts, not three separate story lines, so I will be treating them like one work.

There isn’t much about these books that hasn’t been said already, but at their most basic, they are responsible for a recent surge in post-apocalyptic young adult fiction, much like Harry Potter with fantasy and Twilight with vampires.  Which is to say, they are popular.  This has no bearing on whether or not they are well written, but it is significant.

Katniss Everdeen, a big sister whose instinct for survival is only trumps by her sense of self-sacrifice when it comes to family, is in a moment sent careening down a path that ends with her being the face of rebellion against the oppressive central government.  But her fight with the government and her choice between two potential romantic partners does not interest me nearly as much as how she deals with the damage to her psyche.  Or rather, how she doesn’t.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about these books is their unabashed treatment of topics nobody wants to talk about, or even think about.  War, social injustice, abject poverty, and communal apathy/sadism are laid out in gory detail for all to see.  Collins does not sugar-coat anything.  Rather, at times it seems like she deliberately thinks up the most horrific ways to kill her characters (and many, MANY of them do die) simply to shock her readers.  In fact, I am positive that most of the worst scenes are specifically written to stay with you, like literary PTSD.

I’ll be honest here: I did not like this series.  I respect it as a well-written work.  It is undoubtedly going to be on many school required reading lists in the future.  I’d even put money on it being declared a classic in a few decades.  But I like my stories to come with some measure of hope, because that’s how I view the world.  It’s a crappy place that deals out pain to everyone who sets foot here, but life has lots of little things that make the struggles worth it.  There is no hope in The Hunger Games.  Collins ensures that there is nothing left for you to cling to and sets you loose, adrift on your anomy.  So I don’t like it. At all.  But I will still give it the rating it deserves.

Worth rereading (8 of 10), because I’m sure I will, eventually.

So the spring semester is finally over, which means that I finally have some time to read again.  We will begin the vacation with an odd and intriguing little work, recommended by one John Green (whose opinion I trust a good deal more than the New York Times, although it made their list too).

Jacob Portman is a young man who grows up loving his grandfather’s stories of his childhood, children with remarkable abilities and the gruesome monsters that haunted them.  But he puts them aside when he is told that they are the products of his Holocaust-survivor grandfather’s grief-ridden psyche, rather than factual accounts.  When he witnesses his grandfather’s brutal death, his grandfather’s final words and the nightmarish shadows he sees send Jacob looking for the truth about himself and his grandfather’s past, regardless of how bizarre it might be.

Predictably, Jacob’s story is one of growing up and finding your place in the world.  It’s a common theme in young adult fiction, but one that bears retelling.  This version in particular is rendered in a dreamlike blend of realism and fantasy, paradoxically impossible but not.  That said, the story itself is a bit underdeveloped.  The ending leaves the story feeling very unfinished, but that is to be expected as a sequel is already in the works.  If all stories are quests (and this one definitely is), it dropped off after the first major challenge, before the goal of the quest had really been achieved.  There are numerous interesting characters in the book as well and I did not feel like I was given sufficient time to get to know any of them.  Jacob himself is a little bit flat.  The protagonist’s self-discovery that I look for as part of the story-telling was there in glimmers, but not yet fully realized.  I have high hopes for the next book though, and am looking forward to further development, both story-wise and character-wise.

Ransom Riggs is a quirky character who finds beauty in the barren and bleak (check him out: www.ransomriggs.com).  He should probably be the main character of a novel himself.  Instead, he has taken his extensive collection of old photos of strangers (and others’ collections as well), and used them as inspiration for his story.  He even included them in the book for readers to ponder.  His first work is commendable, captivating in its difference, but I’m holding out for something amazing.

Worth Keeping (7 of 10)