The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu

 Marie Lu is one of those authors that I can't quite decide what I think of. She made a big splash in 2011 with Legend which is the beginning of trilogy. It's yet another entry in the long list of YA dystopian series that were published around that time. My perception of the series was probably negatively impacted by the glut of dystopian fiction however I was impressed by the structure she used for those novels. I found it interesting. 

The Kingdom of Back I found in a used bookstore and picked up on a whim. It is completely unlike Legend. This is a cross between a fairytale and historical fiction. Apparently Lu played piano when she was younger. Like many youngsters who were devoted to classical music she started reading biographies of her heroes. She happened to read a bio about the Mozart siblings who did tell stories to each other about a fairy tale land called the Kingdom of Back.

Nannerl Mozart was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's older sister and every bit as much of a prodigy as her brother. However as a girl, she was never going to have a career as a musician as an adult. Even though she was known to compose, none of her compositions survived the passage of time. 

In this novel, Lu has imagined a rich and complicated imaginative life for Nannerl. One in which she struggled with the idea of fading into obscurity. This struggle is told through an adventure in the fairy tale Kingdom of Back. Nannerl meets a mysterious princeling named Hyacinth who asks her help in regaining his kingdom. In return he will ensure that she is never forgotten. 

From the beginning, it is unclear whether this fairy tale land is meant to be real or just a game she invented with her brother as she struggles with her probable future. It makes for some interesting reading and I'd like to track down the biography that Lu mentions in the author's note.

This isn't my favorite YA read of the year. However, it is a thoughtful and intriguing read that I would happily recommend to any teen with a love of history or classic music. 

Those Pink Mountain Nights by Jen Ferguson

 First one of the new TBR batch. My recommender chose this book because of my frustration with literary fiction. I went through a year wishing I could find more good literary fiction. I knew what I meant by that. . . vaguely. . . but what my recommenders handed me was mostly a parade of dreary stories featuring female protagonists who were miserable at the beginning of the novel and either were still miserable at the end or somehow made peace with their misery. Nothing fundamentally changed and it was just depressing. The most depressing of them had such promise at the beginning, wonderful set-ups. There was the occasional winner in there, but for the most part, I began to question what people were calling 'literary'. In the end, I told TBR not to give me anymore lit fic among a rant about the difference between existentialism and 'literary'. 

Turns out I don't enjoy existentialist navel gazing in my reading.

This book, Those Pink Mountain Nights, is a YA novel that my recommender felt accomplished what lit fic aims to achieve but with a more meaningful ending. Three teens in a small Canadian (I'm pretty sure) town work in a local pizza parlor. It's a town situated next to a series of ski slopes and that relies on the tourist trade. It also has a high percentage of Native peoples. Two of our teens in fact are Native and at the beginning of the book they are both still mourning the disappearance of a third Native teen named Kiki. 

 This is an issue driven narrative. Despite the large number of stories in various shows and articles in newspapers, many people are unaware of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) issue. Indigenous women are going missing or getting murdered at a rate 6 times the national average for women in North America. The action of Pink Mountain centers around the disappearance of Kiki which is actually resolved at the end of the novel. Other themes have to do with the survival of small business and the way secrets affect friendships.

It's a pretty good book, but I don't think many people would agree with her that this is lit fic. It has a certain coming of age angle, but really this is a slow played mystery. It is also is a slow starter. I really struggled to focus for the first 100 pages, however at that point it picked up and I ended racing through the last 200 pages over about two days. All in all, it's a good read. 

The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow

 Somehow this keeps happening to me this year. The Bezzle is book two in a series and I have not read book one. In this case, I don't think it matters so much. It rather seems like the main character goes on adventures that are mostly self contained. This book snuck into September's reading because my son needed to get a library card for school. While we were there I renewed my card and snooped around in the new books. Before I knew it, I was walking out of the library with a handful of books. I think I'm doomed to be eternally awash in books but at least these eventually have to go back.

I picked up The Bezzle because I'm toying with being a Cory Doctorow fan. I really loved some of his earlier novels such as Little Brother and For the Win. These days, when I see one of his books, I tend to pick it up but many of them are sitting in stacks at home. Because it was a library book, I just dove into this one. I read it over the course of a lazy Saturday.

The main character, Marin Hench, is a forensic accountant with an aversion to a steady job. Instead, he takes contract work to find misappropriated money and he gets a percentage of whatever he locates. He takes the jobs he wants to only from the clients he wants to. Occasionally, he takes a job pro bono because he wants to help. It's not hard to imagine that Marty has seriously annoyed some powerful people over the course of his career and that some of those people are willing to take retribution. 

In this story, Marty takes a pro bono case to help the residents of an island resort break up a ponzi scheme that had involved most of the islands full time residents. Doing so earned Marty and his friend the enimity of the local businessman/crime boss. 

This reads a little like a crime caper and reminded me strongly of Douglas Coupland and Matt Ruff. Over all, I highly recommend the book. I'm going to back up and find the first book in the trilogy next.

October List

So this presetting the random order, is a fun twist. Problematically, I'm still not getting through books very fast. I have come to realize that I need to have my non-fiction and my fiction on separate lists. As much as I really do like non fiction, they are always slow reads and I do best if I intersperse chapters with fiction. As a general rule, it's good for me to have multiple books going at a time.

In other news: The family has all renewed their library cards. Thomas's school librarian started an inititive. It's a good thing though, it's like guilt free shopping with a time limit. I managed to find all my TBR books for this cycle at the library and a couple of interesting books off of the new book shelves. Obviously these books have a time limit, so I made sure they were in the first 10 books on the list and reassigned the rest of them new numbers. It's a silliness but also a lot of fun. 

1. Poppy by Avi - (Dropped - yet another second book in a series that I haven't read the first of)
2. Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi (Library Book) - 7
3. Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford (professional Reading) - NF 2
4. Those Pink Mountain Nights by Jen Ferguson (Finished 10/9/24)
5. A Market of Dreams and Destiny by Trip Galey (Finished 10/29/2024)
6. Lord of the Flies by William Golding (class novel) - 17
7. My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, & Jodi Meadows - 6 
8. YouSpace Series by Tom Holt (Fantasy)
1. Doughnut (Finished 3/5/2024)
2. When It's A Jar (Finished 7/6/2024)
3. The Outsorcerer's Apprentice (Finished 1/15/2024)
4. The Good, the Bad and the Smug - 15
5. An Orc on the Wild Side - 16
9. The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu (Finished 10/18/2024)
10. Spider Gwen, Ghost Spider (Marvel Universe - Graphic Novel) - 12
11. Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor -11
12. A Stroke of the Pen by Terry Pratchett - 13
13. The Discworld Graphic Novels by Terry Pratchett - 14 
14. Her Night with the Duke: A Novel by Diana Quincy (Finished 10/20/24)
15. You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo (New TBR) -10
16. Cover Story by Susan Rigetti (previous TBR) - 19 
17. The Algorithm by Hilke Schellmann - NF 1
18. The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma -8 
19. Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein - 18
20. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu (Science Fiction) -9

Assigned or otherwise pre-scheduled Reading:

1. Strategic Communications for School Leaders by Vicki Gunther, James McGowan, and Kate Donegan (Grad School)
2. The Principal's Guide to School Budgeting by Richard D. Sorenson & Lloyd M. Goldsmith (Grad School)
3. Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Titan's Curse by Rick Riordan (Thomas Book)