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Octavia Butler, Survivor: As I understand it, Butler later disavowed this book, which fits into her other stories about Clay’s Ark and the involuntary transformation of humanity. Alanna is a “wild human,” rescued by strict God-fearing Missionaries on Earth and taught to at least mouth the same prayers they do, though her background (and to some extent her race) keep her apart from the largely-white community. When the Missionaries get a chance to leave a dying Earth and settle on a new planet, they don’t realize that they’re being used and, in some senses, enslaved by the aliens they find. Another competing group of aliens kidnaps Alanna, and when she’s rescued two years later no one—to some extent not even Alanna—is sure where here loyalties lie. It’s easy to see Butler’s themes—gender, race, power and power plays, coerced consent and the accommodations people make to survive—but it is true that the story jumps around more, and does a bit less with the alien/human encounter, than Butler at her peak mastery did.
Alaya Dawn Johnson, Racing the Dark: Lana is a young diver on the outer islands, collecting the jewels released by dying fish. But she has the potential for great power, and that—along with the ecological collapse of the outer islands, which may have something to do with the weakening bindings that keep the world’s fire, death, and water spirits bound—leads her into the hands of a witch who has mysterious and potentially devastating plans for her. I like Johnson’s later books a lot better; Lana is jerked around by the narrative in ways that make logical sense (many people are jerked around by their circumstances) but that still leave her seeming flat as a character. I for one look forward to more of Johnson’s AU 1920s New York.
William Sleator, Test: House of Stairs was one of the creepiest YA books I ever read; unfortunately, this recent Sleator didn’t do the same for me (though it’s possible that my tastes have changed). In a world where only the bubble test determines whether you’ll have a job that allows you to escape from the constant traffic (unless you’re in private school and don’t have to take the test) and whether your teachers will keep their own jobs, a young immigrant trades his complicity in unlawful and dangerous acts by a landlord in return for answers to the test; meanwhile, his classmate is under threat because of her father’s acts to protect the tenants. Add in a stereotypical rich bitch, daughter of the landlord/test king, not as pretty as the heroine and prone to making recordable threats, and you have the basis for a challenge to the whole system…. Even though journalism is corrupt and only interested in running slapfight stories. The story’s neatness makes it somewhat incoherent, is what I’m saying. There is something to seeing “No Child Left Behind” treated like the Orwellian slogan it is, though.
Alaya Dawn Johnson, Racing the Dark: Lana is a young diver on the outer islands, collecting the jewels released by dying fish. But she has the potential for great power, and that—along with the ecological collapse of the outer islands, which may have something to do with the weakening bindings that keep the world’s fire, death, and water spirits bound—leads her into the hands of a witch who has mysterious and potentially devastating plans for her. I like Johnson’s later books a lot better; Lana is jerked around by the narrative in ways that make logical sense (many people are jerked around by their circumstances) but that still leave her seeming flat as a character. I for one look forward to more of Johnson’s AU 1920s New York.
William Sleator, Test: House of Stairs was one of the creepiest YA books I ever read; unfortunately, this recent Sleator didn’t do the same for me (though it’s possible that my tastes have changed). In a world where only the bubble test determines whether you’ll have a job that allows you to escape from the constant traffic (unless you’re in private school and don’t have to take the test) and whether your teachers will keep their own jobs, a young immigrant trades his complicity in unlawful and dangerous acts by a landlord in return for answers to the test; meanwhile, his classmate is under threat because of her father’s acts to protect the tenants. Add in a stereotypical rich bitch, daughter of the landlord/test king, not as pretty as the heroine and prone to making recordable threats, and you have the basis for a challenge to the whole system…. Even though journalism is corrupt and only interested in running slapfight stories. The story’s neatness makes it somewhat incoherent, is what I’m saying. There is something to seeing “No Child Left Behind” treated like the Orwellian slogan it is, though.
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