Blog is moving!

So, I'm moving the blog over to WordPress, which really has more of the tools I'm looking for and I think will allow me to improve the blog. It's become Accio YA Books over there, so please go check out the new site and subscribe! You can find all the old reviews there and I'll be adding a lot of new content over the next few days.

The Search For WondLa by Tony DiTerlizzi

Only a couple of chapters into this book, I fell in love. Hard. The Search For WondLa features such a curious, adventurous heroine and such a whimsical, weird world for her to explore. Thanks to the gorgeous illustrations (also by Tony DiTerlizzi), the characters and scenery felt tangible. Every time I picked up the book, I was swept away to Eva's world, which is wondrous and terrifying at the same time. You have Wandering Forests, giant tardigrades, terrible oxygen-sucking plants, plus robots and hovercraft. What's not to love?

The Search For WondLa begins with twelve-year-old Eva Nine, who lives in an underground Sanctuary with a robot called Muthr (Multi-Utility Task Help Robot), who is charged with Eva's care and upbringing. Eva is being prepared for survival outside of her Sanctuary, in a world that seems to be much like ours. But when Eva is forced to leave the Sanctuary early after an intruder attacks her home, she realizes that the world outside is nothing like the one she was prepared for. Her Omnipod doesn't recognize any of the plant or animal life, though it notes that some of it is similar to microscopic life forms like tardigrades. As Eva tries to make sense of this unknown world, she manages to make a friend (or at least an ally) with the lone widower Rovender Kitt, and finds out that she is being hunted by a brutal bounty hunter called Besteel.

Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld

The second book is Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy does not disappoint. Behemoth is one of the releases I was most excited for this year, and it completely exceeded my expectations.

In Leviathan, we were introduced to an alternate WWI era, full of fantastic air beasties and mammoth mechanical walkers. Behemoth takes us to Istanbul (called Constantinople by the British), where we're introduced to entirely new wonders. Istanbul is full of giant machines designed to look like elephants, which is kind of a brilliant mash-up of the Clanker and Darwinist ideologies: they take the power of the Germans' machines but are still very connected to the natural world. And one of the Istanbul natives we meet is shocked by the way the Darwinists refer to their beasties as "it" rather than "he" or "she". Each of the different ethnic neighborhoods of the city also have their own walkers, which they call golems and are designed to look like mythical creatures or characters.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan

I think about how much depends on a best friend. When you wake up in the morning you swing your legs out of bed and you put your feet on the ground and you stand up. You don't scoot to the edge of the bed and look down to make sure the floor is there. The floor is always there. Until it isn't.

I loved this book. At its heart, Will Grayson, Will Grayson is about the hardest parts of friendship and love. And about Tiny Cooper, of course, who connects the two Will Graysons and has got to be one of the best YA characters of the past decade. After all, what's not to love about a giant football player who writes a fabulous musical about himself called "Tiny Dancer"? Tiny is the glue that holds this book together. He is Will Grayson's best friend and will grayson's eventual boyfriend, and he is the catalyst for their major character development.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson is written in two voices, alternating every chapter between each Will Grayson. John Green's Will Grayson is Tiny's best friend, but their friendship has been on the rocks. Will feels like Tiny's sidekick, and like he is taken for granted. He gives us the quote I opened this entry with, and his character arc has to do with him opening himself up to people. In the very first chapter, Will states that his two rules are: "1. Don't care too much. 2. Shut up."

 i think the idea of a 'mental health day' is something completely invented by people who have no clue what it's like to have bad mental health. the idea that your mind can be aired out in twenty-four hours is kind of like saying heart disease can be cured if you eat the right breakfast cereal.

David Levithan's will grayson (in lowercase because his chapters are all written this way) starts out heartbroken, after finding out that his online boyfriend Isaac is actually a personality made up by his friend Maura. He ends up, in a fateful turn of events, in a relationship with Tiny Cooper. will grayson is kind of bitter and snarky, and his dark humor is a nice contrast to Will Grayson's more optimistic worldview. In fact, though I was annoyed by reading will grayson's chapters at first because of his apparent hatred of capital letters, I ended up liking him much better than Other Will Grayson. There's a real privilege gap between the two: Will Grayson's parents are together, they seem to have money, they're concerned with what college program he'll get into, he's straight. will grayson is gay, his dad left when he was just a kid, he and his mom don't have much money, he's on meds for depression, and he's gay. Will Grayson comes off as whiny and self-centered sometimes, though he's never made completely unlikeable. will grayson can be overly pessimistic, but you can see why.

do you think there's a single minute that goes by when i'm not thinking about how other people see me? even though i have no control whatsoever over that? don't get me wrong - i love my body. but i'm not so much of an idiot to think that everybody else loves it. what really gets to me - what really bothers me - is that it's all people see.  ever since i was a not-so-little-kid. 'hey, tiny, want to play football? hey, tiny, how many burgers did you eat today? hey, tiny, you ever lose your dick down there? hey, tiny, you're going to join the basketball team whether you like it or not. just don't try to look at us in the locker room!' does that sound easy to you, will?

But can we talk about how nice it is to see a main character in a YA book who is gay and struggles with mental health issues? It's so refreshing, and will grayson is a great contrast to Tiny Cooper, who is closer to your typical flamboyant gay character. Even Tiny himself is written nicely out-of-the-box: yes, he's openly gay and loves musicals, but he's also a football player and a best friend and a romantic, and through the two Will Graysons, we get the chance to see different sides of Tiny. Will Grayson sees Tiny as incredibly confident and proud of who he is, and is clearly embarrassed to be around Tiny sometimes. will grayson gets to see the vulnerable side of Tiny, who is bullied for his size and tries to be happy to make everyone around him happy, but feels unappreciated. It's kind of fabulous how two authors writing the parts of two different characters can come together to give you such a nuanced portrait of one shared character.

While Tiny decides his musical should be about love, not about Tiny Cooper, this book is really about Tiny Cooper in the end. Hold me closer, tiny dancer!

Zombies Vs. Unicorns, Edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier

Something terrible has happened. I was totally Team Unicorn going into this book. I just really wanted to read about some awesome killer unicorns. And there were indeed some awesome killer unicorns. But I found myself completely seduced by Team Zombie! All of my favorite stories from this anthology are zombie stories.

As you have probably gathered, Zombies Vs. Unicorns is a short story anthology in which editors Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier pit their respective supernatural creatures against each other. Sadly, these two ladies (who are two of my favorite authors) did not write stories for this collection. However, they did write introductions to each story, which are full of smack talk about each others' teams and help bind the stories together.

Holly Black leads Team Unicorn, which includes Kathleen Duey, Meg Cabot, Garth Nix, Margo Lanagan, Naomi Novik, and Diana Peterfreund. Team Unicorn presents us with some traditional unicorns with healing powers, some ironic hearts-and-rainbows unicorns, and lots of killer unicorns goring people with their horns. My favorite unicorn story is Meg Cabot's "Princess Prettypants", which takes a kind of traditional coming-of-age story and adds a humorous unicorn who glows and farts flowers, and then helps the protagonist get revenge on the boys who have hurt her and her best friend. I also love Diana Peterfreund's story, "The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn", which takes place in a world in which unicorns are going extinct, but they are considered nasty, bloodthirsty monsters.

Heading up Team Zombie is Justine Larbalestier, and shambling behind her are authors Libba Bray, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Cassandra Clare, Maureen Johnson, Carrie Ryan, and Scott Westerfeld. Carrie Ryan's story "Bougainvillea" is my favorite of the entire anthology. I guess this shouldn't be surprising, since as the author of The Forest of Hands and Teeth series, Ryan is the zombie queen of YA right now. I love how she uses dual timelines to introduce us to the protagonist, Iza, and jump into the action simultaneously. The best part is the way she subverted the romance novels that Iza loves to read into an ending where Iza is a kick-ass girl who rescues herself instead of needing to be rescued by a man. Alaya Dawn Johnson's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is a funny, sexy zombie story, which is something I never thought I'd say. And "Prom Night" by Libba Bray is a very clever take on a typical teen trope. In Bray's story, the adults have all been infected with the zombie virus, so the teenagers have driven all the adults out of town or killed them, and are running the town by themselves. It's a bittersweet story that takes place on a night when most teens want nothing more than for their parents to go away.

Zombies Vs. Unicorns comes out on September 21. Go Team Zombie!

Behemoth Cover

Scott Westerfeld shared the UK cover of his upcoming book Behemoth (sequel to last year's Leviathan) on his blog today. I love it! It almost makes me wish I was in the UK, because I prefer it to the American cover. I love the Darwinist elements -- the tusks and tentacles -- which mirror the Clanker gears on the Leviathan cover. I'm not crazy about the US cover for Behemoth. I think the photo-realistic style used on the cover counteracts the lovely ink illustrations in the novel, in a bad way. The two have drastically different looks, most noticeably in the skies: the UK cover has a clear, sunny sky, while the US cover has a dark, stormy sky. I'll definitely be interested in seeing which the tone of the book seems to match. Which cover do you prefer? (Left, UK cover; right, US cover)

That said, I'm eagerly anticipating the release of Behemoth (October 5), because Leviathan was just fantastic! But cover art is so interesting to me, and very important to me as a reader. Expect to see more posts discussing cover art on this blog, and a review of Behemoth when it comes out!

Next up: Zombies Vs. Unicorns

Coming up later this week, my next review will be the short story collection Zombies Vs. Unicorns, edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier. I got my advance copy signed at BEA by Holly and Justine, as well as contributing authors Scott Westerfeld and Alaya Dawn Johnson! I am loving it so far. Something is troubling me, though: while I initially thought I was Team Unicorn, I fear I am being swayed by Team Zombie! I don't want to become one of the shambling masses! Team Unicorn, don't fail me.