Far From the Tree by Robin Benway

 This one won a National Book Award. I don't really have a problem with the big awards, but winning the National is a bit like winning an Oscar. . . they don't tend to select happy comedic romps. I knew that I was in for it before I even opened to the first page. My biggest worry was that there was going to be some awful tragic death in there that feels contrived on reflection. I hate that, it feels emotionally manipulative.

Luckily, there are no emotionally manipulative deaths in this book.

That being said, I started crying somewhere around page 50 and didn't really stop until I hit the last page. It's an emotional read about three teens who discover that they are biological siblings. The two girls, Grace and Maya, were adopted into families as babies. Joaquin, the oldest, ended up bounced around the foster system.

The action starts with Grace, who got pregnant and gave up her baby girl for adoption. She's a high school junior and she always knew she was adopted herself. Having her own baby and mourning her loss makes Grace yearn to connect with her own bio-mom. It is at that point that she finds out about Maya and Joaquin. 

Maya's adoptive mom, Diane, found out she was pregnant three months after the adoption. As a result, Maya has a sister named Lauren. Maya is the brunette in a family of redheads - obviously and visually marked as different. It is a thing that Maya can't avoid seeing but it's not the biggest problem in her life at the moment. The relationship between her adoptive parents is falling about.

Joaquin's bounced from family to family growing up in a system were there is little that he can rely on. For the most part, the families have been fine but it's still not like having a family of his own. 17 years is a long time to navigate the world with out the foundation of a family. His newest family, Mark and Linda, care for him, he knows that, but it'll end eventually - it's inevitable he thinks.

The three siblings meet and find that they aren't ok, not really. Their relationship with each other illuminates the walls they've built for themselves around being given up. 

I'm not sure why it hit me so far. Maybe it's the number of adopted students I've taught over the years. Maybe it's just a really good book. Benway did an excellent job of examining and narrating the story of these three kids. Adoption is such a difficult topic to really discuss. It's hard for the kids and it's hard for the adopting parents, but unless you are living in it, I don't think we can really understand it from the outside. I don't know if this book is accurate, but I think it is a wonderful thought-provoking read.

Time Travel for the uninitiated

There's something fun about a time travel novel done well. Maybe it's a machine, maybe it's a genetic mutation, maybe it's cryogenic sleep, but whatever the mechanism, it is a story that explores change. The genre divides pretty neatly into two group: time travel to the past and time travel to the future.

Time travel stories to the past are the most common.  These stories have a lot to say about culture shock of a particularly insidious kind. There is a natural tendency to romanticize the past or at least smooth over the rough and disagreeable reality. Good time travel stories to the past take a contemporary protagonist and thrust them into that past reality and shine a light on what it was really like. 

Some examples:

Kindred by Octavia Butler - most of Butler's books are futuristic sci-fi but this one is a time travel story that follows Dana a modern black woman who is repeatedly pulled through time and space into the antebellum South. In the past she lives in the slave quarters of a large plantation until she returns to modern times. Each visit to the past is longer and the situation becomes progressively more dangerous for her.

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis - Kivrin, a historical researcher from the future, travels to 14th century Europe to observe one of the deadliest eras in history. She's been innoculated against all the various plagues and speaks the appropriate dialects, yet she is a single woman traveling Europe during a time when social constructs made women particularly vulnerable. All goes well, until an unlikely crisis strands her in the past. Can Kivrin survive until she is rescued by her instructors in the future?

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain - this deserves a place in the discussion because it's important to the genre but it's different in the sense that the novel is mainly a satire. Hank Morgan is bashed in the head by a crowbar in the nineteenth century and wakes up in the England of King Arthur's court. Obviously confused, he soon finds himself in trouble and is sentenced to death. He uses his understanding of eclipses to evade execution and convince the populace that he's really a powerful magician. It gets him out of his bind but causes a bevy of new problems. 

Unlike time travel to the past, time travel to the future doesn't necessarily need an outrageous or supernatural cause. After all, if you think about it, we are all time travelers we just do it very slowly and only in one direction. These books almost always deal with an appalling future with society or technology (or both) gone amok. These books tend to read like chilling warnings half the time but are still highly entertaining.

Some examples:

When We Wake by Karen Healey - Tegan Oglietti is a pretty normal teenager from Australia in our near future. She has a boyfriend and a best friend. She's happiest when playing guitar. One day she goes to a protest where the Prime Minister is going to speak and she dies. She wakes up 100 years later after being cryogenically preserved and physically restored. The future isn't a friendly place. Some things are better, but many things have gotten worse and Tegan finds herself caught in a conspiracy controlled by the most powerful people in her country.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells - first published in 1895, this is one of the first time travel novels written. Our narrator builds a machine and travels 800,000 years into the future where he encounters a seemingly utopian society of the Eloi. When he tries to return to his own time, he discovers that his time machine has been stolen and there is a sinister opposite to the Eloi.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman - The leaders of Earth have decided on a war with a distant alien force. So they build interstellar ships and load up an elite military unit which includes Private William Mandella. So he and his unit make the 1000 year trip at near the speed of light. They fight their battle and return to Earth. However, because of time dilation, they've aged months while humanity has both developed and changed by centuries. What will become of these relics from the past?

There are occasional outliers though. A few novels have had a time traveler who moves in both directions. The result tends to be disorientating and the good examples fold that disorientation into the themes of the narrative.

A couple examples:

Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger -  this is really more of love story in a really untraditional way. Clare Abshire is an artist who is for the most part living a pretty typical life until she meets Henry DeTamble. Henry has a rare genetic disorder that causes him to randomly travel through time to different points in his own time line. Henry has no control of this and is often landed in dangerous situations as a result. Henry and Clare fall in love, but it's  a love that is tested over and over again.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut - So this is really more a book explore the disorientation of war, however to do so the main protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is set adrift in time. It's really not my favorite of Vonnegut's books but it does use the idea of time travel to make some interesting observations.

February List

 February's list is pretty similar to January's. Hopefully this month Rando isn't so set on handing me the toughest, densest, and longest material on the list and I'll make more of a dent. I've loaded up with a lot of mystery for this month and replaced the YA. Ryan picked Machine Man to replace Swan Song. It's a short month so we'll just have to see how it goes.

February is a short month, but I'm hoping to get back to the writing schedule and even catch up the three posts that I am behind (1 review and 2 reflections). Additionally, I'm hoping that more of the YA and non-fiction starts coming up on rando. The only reason I'm not more behind in YA is that I was reading Fruits Basket volumes off list.

1. Love, Hate, and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed* (YA)
2. Speak: The Graphic Novel by Laurie Halse Anderson (YA)
3. Kids of Appetite by David Arnold* (YA)
4. Machine Man by Max Barry* (Ryan Pick)
5. Far From the Tree by Robin Benway* (Finished 2/16/2022)
6. The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley (Series book 2)
7. The Homesteader's Kitchen by Robin Burnside* (gift, Nonfiction)
8. Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie (Finished 2/13/2022)
9. The Pants Project by Cat Clarke* (YA)
10. The Poet by Michael Connelly* (Finished 2/8/2022)
11. Caliban's War by S.A. Corey* (Finished 2/5/2022)
12. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Corey Doctorow* (YA)
13. The Wild Things by Dave Eggers* 
14. The Blessing Way by Tony Hillerman (Borrowed from Dad)
15. The Returning by Christine Hinwood* (YA)
16. Kim by Rudyard Kipling* (Classic)
17. Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress*
18. The Disenchantments by Nina LaCour* (YA)
19. Laugh Lines: Short Comic Plays edited by Eric Land and Nina Shengold (Play)
20. The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee (YA)
21. An Offer From a Gentleman by Julia Quinn* (Series Book 3)
22. Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay* (YA)
23. I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika Sanchez* (YA)
24. City of Ghosts by Victoria Schwab* (YA)
25. On the Come Up by Angie Thomas* (YA)
26. The Cheerleaders by Kara Thomas* (YA)
27. Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci* (Nonfiction, gift)
28. Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall  by Williamson (Ryan Pick)
29. The Dead Girl in 2A by Carter Wilson* (Gift, YA)
30. The Quiet Boy by Ben H. Winters (TBR)

I also need to do an emergency reread of The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier to take care of a problem at school. (I really don't like the thing lol)