Review: Rotters

Rotters by Daniel Kraus. Delacorte, an imprint of Random House. 2011. Review copy from publisher.

The Plot: After Joey Crouch’s mother dies suddenly, the sixteen year old is sent to live with a father he’s never met. Chicago’s DCFS assures Joey that his father is expecting him and that the local county services has ensured it will be OK. Reluctantly, Joey leaves Chicago, the only place he’s ever lived, leaves his best friend, Boris, and goes to the small town of Bloughton. Nothing is as he expected; no one meets him at the train station. The house his father lives in is a one-room shack, dirty and smelly, with his father, Ken Harnett, nowhere to be seen.

School is even worse; Harnett is the town outcast, and Joey quickly becomes the target of bullies, both students and teachers. Joey thinks he’s discovered Ken’s big secret, that Ken is a thief. Joey thinks he’ll catch his father in action and then . . .  what? Turns out, Ken is a thief. Just not the kind that Joey and the towns people think. Turns out, Ken robs graves.

The Good: Rotters is a haunting book. It is horror, that unique type of horror book that has nothing to do with either the supernatural or serial killers. How can digging up the dead, disturbing corpses, stealing jewelry and gold teeth be anything other than horrifying?

And yet . . . And  yet when Joey discovers the truth about his father, he stays. He not only stays, he semi-forces himself onto his father as an apprentice in graverobbing. Soon Joey is learning about the ancient craft of robbing graves, with ties to both the “Resurrectionists” who stole bodies to sell to medical schools and the people who plundered the tombs of ancient Egyptians. Ken, who lives off the grid, relies on his memory, books, and newspapers to determine which graves to target. It’s not just who died, but who they were, as he decides who is likely to be buried with something worth digging up

Usually “world building” is something one thinks of for fantasy, or perhaps historical fiction, but rarely for contemporary fiction. In Rotters, Kraus has created a secret society composed of those who live beyond the edges of polite society. There are rules and treaties, ways of doing things and ways of not doing things. Kraus’s world is so full that I found myself wondering what parts of the world of cemeteries, decay of bodies, and burial were true and what parts made up.

Rotters is disturbing — the reader is there with Joey, shovelful of dirt by shovelful, as he digs up his first grave, uncovers his first corpse. The dirt, the smell, the aching muscles are all painted in detail. I’m going to be looking at cemeteries in a whole new light.

Rotters falls under the category of “books I want to discuss”. Part of it is to figure out, to explore, to go deeper into what Kraus has written. As mentioned in my review, and others, Joey’s father is a grave robber. Joey doesn’t learn about this right away. The first part of the book sets up Joey’s isolation and abandonment: his mother dies, he leaves his city, his best friend moves on, and in his new town his father is neglectful and he is shunned and mistreated at school. Why, I wonder, does it take so long to get the digging? Is it for the reader to understand, to sympathize with Joey, to understand why he takes the leap to embracing something so terrible?

The structure of the book continues in such a way that I kept thinking of it as independent Acts. Act I, Joey has to start at a new school were he is ostracized. Act II, Dad’s a gravedigger. Act III, the world of gravedigging revealed. Act IV and Act V, well, that would be spoilers.

Once Joey learns his father’s secret, a strange bonding / apprenticeship begins. Gradually, Joey finds out his father is not the only grave robber out there. It’s an odd world, a world of outsiders, who are driven by — what? And this is where I want to really discuss this book with others. What is the motivation? Am I too turned off by the desecration these men practice to buy into their fascination with the dead? Through the world of gravediggers, Joey gets what he lost: a father, a family, friends, a place, a history. He even gets his mother back, in a way. Rotters continues with strange and sudden twists — a reunion of sorts, a demented road trip, a character named Boggs/Baby who I pictured as Truman Capote playing Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, a family seeking revenge for their families’ graves being dug up, and a fight scene played out during a hurricane.

I admit, one reason I want to discuss this is I’m not quite sure of Joey’s own journey and relationship with grave robbing and graves. Much horror is metaphor: high school is hell, as Buffy the Vampire Slayer taught us. Joey is attracted to grave digging, but why? What drives him?

Stephen King said, “We make up horrors to help us cope with real ones.” What fascinates for Rotters is that it is not made up horror — Joey’s isolation, abandonment, torment, are all real. Yet even with that, the horror of gravedigging — while not made up by Joey — helps him cope with his life. Is it because gravedigging is hiding in the past, his own past with his mother? Is it believing that there is something noble in something that is base, does it make Joey think he is more noble than his everyday life indicates?

When I’m trying to figure out a book, and I don’t have someone to talk to, I read reviews. What I found that I thought you’d like:

Kraus did a guest post at Cynthia Leitich Smith’s blog, Cynsations.

The Book Smugglers review Rotters: “Elements of Mr. Kraus’s novel were near flawless, in particular the emotions of protagonist Joey, his struggles in school (what with becoming a social pariah and all), dealing with the grief of his mother’s death, and his father’s bizarre sense of paternal investment. Daniel Kraus’s writing style is at turns poignant and insightful, especially at the onset of the novel with Joey’s keen sense of observation (or his tendency to categorize minutia) and narrative voice.” I found their overall observations added to how I thought about Joey, his father, and their actions. Are issues left to the reader to discover on their own?

From The Millions (and the amusing post title, I Was A Teenage Grave Robber): “in a world rife with oatmealy workshop-cookie-cutter fiction, Kraus is absolutely original.” This touched on one reason I liked Rotters; it’s unique. It’s different. It’s over the top, at times, but c’mon, it’s graverobbers! The Millions asked what I asked, “what does it all mean.” Perhaps, sometimes, a story just is. I’m not sure.

Forever Young Adult also had fun with blog post titles with The Worms Play Pinochle On Your Snout. And then this: “Words like ‘beautiful’ and ‘haunting’ encompass a portion of Kraus’s prose, but these words, I feel, are paltry in comparison to how much of an emotional gut punch this book delivers time and again.  I know authors don’t necessarily appreciate being compared to other authors, but the only way I can think to accurately describe Kraus’s writing style in this book is to say that it was as if Flannery O’Conner took a bad LSD trip after watching ‘Faces Of Death’“. Bonus at Forever Young Adult: an author interview.

Review: The Dark and Hollow Places

The Dark and Hollow Places by Carrie Ryan. Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House. 2011. Review copy from publisher.

The Plot: Annah has waited in the Dark City for years, waiting for the return of Elias. As children, they, along with Annah’s twin sister Abigail, had been lost in the Forest of Hands and Teeth. Abigail had been left behind by Annah and Elias, a betrayal that haunts the now teenaged Annah.

Annah waits, alone, scarred, not just by the abandonment of Abigail but also by Elias’s leaving Annah some years ago. Annah is also physically scarred: while exploring the abandoned tunnels of the Dark City, she fell into barbed wire and bears the marks on her face and body.

The city is falling apart, civilization is ending,and Annah is about to flee the city when, miraculously, she is reunited with both her long lost sister and Elias. The reunions are not what she had either feared or hoped. It is made all the more complicated by the appearance of the mysterious Catcher. As Annah adjusts from solitude and loneliness to being one of four, the living dead gain control of the city.

Annah’s world in the world created in The Forest of Hands and Teeth and The Dead Tossed Waves; a world where generations before, the dead did not remain dead. The Forest of Hands and Teeth looked at this world from the point of view of a teenage girl, Mary, raised in an isolated religious village surrounded by a forest full of the living dead. The Dead Tossed Waves was about Gabry, Mary’s adopted daughter (and, it turns out, Annah’s missing sister), raised in safety and love with the dead safely behind walls.

The Good: The Dark and Hollow Places is my favorite book of the The Forest of Hands and Teeth series so far, and that is saying something since both of the previous books made my Favorites Books Read for 2009 and 2010). I adored the character of Annah: she has been beat up by the world, but she is not broken. She has built up emotional walls to protect herself, yet learns to let sister, friend, lover in.

Annah and Abigail are identical twins: Annah looks at Abigail — now Gabry — and sees what she, Annah, would have looked like and been like if she wasn’t scarred from barbed wire, if she had been loved by a mother and raised in a close, caring community. Readers of The Dead Tossed Waves know that Gabry’s life was not perfect. Annah does not want to be jealous of Gabry, especially since Annah believes it was her fault that the three children were initially lost in the forest. That Gabry ended up having a pretty good life is part of what Annah has to work through; Annah also has to work through Elias and Gabry’s relationship. Does Elias love Gabry because she is the unmarked Annah? This matters to Annah because of her bundle of emotions about Elias: Elias, the only person in her life for years. All her emotional life has been about Elias and now Elias loves another — not just any other, but Gabry.

Let me take a second to say, Ryan pulled me so into Annah’s interior and emotional life that I became more angry at Elias than Annah was! Luckily for Annah (and this reader), there was Catcher. I loved the love triangle here because the love between Annah and Elias was not about lust, not about boyfriend/girlfriend love. And Catcher, well, Catcher has his own secrets that keeps him at arm’s length from Annah and of course Annah believes “oh, it’s because of my barbed wire scars” and up the angst when Annah finds out the connection between Catcher and Gabry.

Just in case you’re thinking this is just an emotional merry go round, let me remind you: Living Dead. Zombies. Civilization survived the initial zombie apocalypse, yes, but the structure that developed has collapsed just as an endless, unstoppable Horde of living dead attack the Dead City. What happens is not pretty, and Annah (along with Elias, Gabry and Catcher) find themselves in the middle of it. The Dead and Hollow Places is full of running from zombies, encounters with zombies, and the nastiness that humans exhibit when faced with the end of the world as they know it.

Because Ryan brings both the emotion and action; because I was so invested in Annah’s well being, both physical and emotional; because the love interests were so real and tense and hot; The Dead and Hollow Places is one of my Favorite Books Read in 2011.

Review: Texas Gothic

Texas Gothic by Rosemary Clement-Moore. Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House. 2011. Review copy from publisher.

The Plot: Amy Goodnight’s summer job is taking care of her aunt’s Texas ranch while her hard working aunt goes on a vacation to China. Along with her older sister, Phin, they’re taking care of the dogs, the goats, and the plants that make up Aunt Hyacinth’s herb farm and organic bath products. What Amy didn’t plan on was the destructive neighborhood ghost. Lucky for her, the Goodnights know more than a little about the supernatural. Amy may try to present a typical place to the world, but the truth she hides yet cannot deny is the Goodnight family is a family of witches. Too bad the very cute next-door-neighbor cowboy doesn’t believe in ghosts or witches and just want the trouble-making Goodnights to stay out of his way and off his land. 

The Good: In my review of Clement-Moore’s The Splendor Falls, I compared it to books by Barbara Michaels: “You know all those Barbara Michaels books you go looking for? Young girl, old family home, dueling love interests, with the three s’s: setting, suspense, supernatural? And when they’re done, you wonder what to read next?” Texas Gothic shows that Clement-Moore is this generation’s Barbara Michaels, and I guess it’s more accurate to say that those teen readers who like these books should be shown the Michaels books rather than vice versa. It is 2011, after all. (For the record, both Leila at Bookshelves of Doom and Vicky Smith at Kirkus make the same comparison).

Let’s see if Texas Gothic contains the elements I listed in the review for The Splendor Falls.

“Young girl” — Amy Goodnight, just graduated high school and on her way to college. For good measure, there is her older sister, Phin, who takes a very scientific approach to her own witchcraft studies. Two young girls! And then there is cousin Daisy, who — well. Let me just say, if you’re a fan of NCIS, you’ll love Daisy.

“Old family home” — Aunt Hyacinth’s farmhouse is a hundred years old. Technically, it’s not Amy’s family home, but I think this counts.

“Dueling love interests” — I wrote this meaning two possible love interests for the main character, and that isn’t present here. However, from first meeting, cute cowboy Ben McCulloch and Amy are dueling. He is annoyed that rumors of ghosts are interfering with his management of the family ranch, a responsibility he took on after his father died. He blames Aunt Hyacinth for the rumors, and fights Amy and her family tooth and nail. Just as Amy needs to convince herself to embrace her witch side, so, too, does Ben need to be convinced that ghosts and witches are real. “They fight endlessly but like each other” is really hard to pull off, because if people are fighting, how can they get to the point of liking each other? The cause for the fighting makes sense — Ben feels his family and home are threatened by made up stories, Amy doesn’t like her family mocked. As time goes by, the cause for fighting shifts. Ben still doesn’t believe in ghosts, so when he sees Amy putting herself in danger he gets angry at her foolishness. Amy gets angry right back at his failure to trust and respect her when it comes to the supernatural. As for the like — well. Did I mention that they first meet when Amy is in her underwear? (It covers more than a bathing suit, but still). Amy admires Ben’s sense of responsibility that led him to drop out of college to take care of the family business — plus, he’s cute. Ben admires Amy’s dedication to her own family.

“Setting” — Texas! Texas Gothic is full of details that made this Jersey Girl believe she was experiencing those wide-open spaces and the herb farm. Excavations to build a bridge reveal a body, long dead, and so a group from the University come out to conduct a dig. Ben is not thrilled with that — especially when more bodies turn up. (Not to give away any spoilers, but the bodies are of European descent).

“Suspense” — first is the ghost, of course. Is there a ghost? What does the ghost want? There have been rumors of a ghost — the “Mad Monk” — for years, including the Mad Monk being responsible for accidents that seriously hurt people. Amy, Phin, and members of the local University’s forensic team try to determine whether the bones have anything to do with the ghost. Clement-Moore does a great job of weaving together two different suspense threads — the ghost as well as the story of the ghost. Well versed in tv and media, the crew quickly realize that stories of ghosts could be used and manipulated by people to hide other activities, or just to cause trouble.

“Supernatural” — ghosts and witches are real! And, from the start, Amy knows it. She feels her job in the family is to protect her family from outsiders who wouldn’t understand, including stopping her older sister from honestly sharing her knowledge and opinion with those who don’t believe in ghosts and witches. Oh, remember Aunt Hyacinth’s herb farm and organic bath products? Spells! You can literally wash that man right out of your hair. Amy’s combination of familiarity and distance with the supernatural is a great way to introduce the reader to the world of witchcraft in Texas Gothic.

I loved Amy and her family. Amy’s desire to protect/deny her heritage stems from an incident when, as a child, she and her sister went “ghost hunting” for a La Llorona that ended with the two girls almost drowned and their furious father threatening to take them from their mother. Amy reacted by boxing up all her ghost books and keeping witchcraft at arms length; while it’s not explicitly said, Phin’s reaction is to view witchcraft as one big science project, matter of chemistry, physics, tests, cause and rection. I would love to see Texas Gothic the start of a series of related books, with Amy, Phin, Daisy and other Goodnight women solving more supernatural mysteries.

Review: The Queen of Water

The Queen of Water by Laura Resau and Maria Virginia Farinango. Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House. 2011. Reviewed from ARC from publisher.

The Plot: At age seven, Virginia, an indigenas living in an Andean village in Ecuador, is taken from her family to be a servant of a mestizo couple. Her parents, poor tenant farmers, are to be paid for her services; she is supposed to visit them, as her older sister, twelve year old Matilde, does.

Instead, Virginia is told she is a stupid, called a longo, told she can expect no more than a life of servitude. She is told her parents don’t want her. Virginia at seven, at eleven, at thirteen, at fifteen, tries to figure out her place in the world. She stops speaking her native Quichua and becomes fluent in Spanish; she stops wearing an anaco, preferring the clothes of mestizos. Is her future that of a servant? Is it in her parents’ one room house?

The Good: Amazing.

It would be easy to say that The Queen of Water breaks your heart; when a seven year old is taken from a family and shown a dirty rug to sleep on. When she realizes her parents aren’t going to bring her home. The first time she is hit. The second time. When her desire to learn to read is mocked. When the person she trusts betrays her. When she realizes that she is caught between two cultures, without a home.

Virginia doesn’t want your pity. She doesn’t want to break your heart. A stubborn child, she uses that willfulness to adapt, to learn, to grow despite all obstacles, even when those obstacles are her own fears and insecurities. This is a story of triumph, of hope, of finding one own’s way, and being true to oneself. Being true to oneself is never easy, because first you have to know yourself. How can you know yourself when your parents give you away? When the world you live in and is told is “good” labels you and your heritage “bad”, “stupid,” “ugly”?

What should break your heart is that the couple Virginia lives with, educated, intelligent people, see nothing wrong with taking a child from her home and expecting her to watch an infant and clean a house. Nothing wrong with not paying her or her family. And even though some are upset at the beatings she gets, the beatings go on. Police aren’t called. Her servitude is viewed as normal, natural, expected. Virginia doesn’t have to just escape a situation, she has to escape a world view that is all around her. How she does that, how she manages to find balance, is a stunning story.

ARGH. You know what is so frustrating? Wanting to say so much about this book, and Virginia, and her journey — and finding all I’m doing, really, is listing scenes from books and that really doesn’t help you. So what I’ll say instead is The Queen of Water, set in Ecuador in the 1980s, offers a wonderful defense of television and the powerful, positive impact in can have on a person. No, really. Virginia watches MacGuyver, and her daydreams about meeting MacGuyver give her much more than a fantasy to get through rough times. It gives her a role model, of a person who uses brains to succeed; and it gives her a story where it always works out, giving her the hope that her story, too, will work out. It shows that people find inspiration in many places, and that should be respected.

Note the co-author’s name: Maria Virginia Farinango. Yes, she is “Virginia.” This is a fictionalized account of Farinango’s childhood and adolescence, the result of a six year collaboration between Resau and Farinango. Notes and the author’s website explain more. Sometimes, a true story is best told as fiction — it allows the writers to shape the story, much as Laura Ingalls Wilder, Sydney Taylor or Maud Hart Lovelace did. Resau’s writing partnership with Farinango is a model for authors writing outside their culture: one of respect, of honesty, and cooperation.

Add this to my list of Favorite Books Read in 2011.

Review: Revolution

Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly. Delacorte, an imprint of Random House. 2010. Reviewed from copy from publisher.

The Plot: Andi Alpers, a senior, doesn’t belong anywhere and doesn’t care. After her brother’s death two years ago, her world fell apart. Her father, a Nobel winning scientist, always a worhaholic, moved out. Her mother’s grief registers itself in painting portraits of her dead son over and over. Andi’s about to be expelled from her expensive, prestigious private school but she doesn’t care. All Andi cares about her guitar and losing herself in her music with the occasional help of prescription drugs and a warm body.

Her father comes back into her life in “take charge, I can fix this” mode, as if Andi and her mother were another thing on his “to do” list. Her mother gets sent to a hospital and Andi is brought to Paris for her winter break, where her father can supervise her work on her ignored senior thesis. In Paris, Andi discovers the late eighteenth century diary of a teenage girl, Alexandrine Paradis, who was caught up in the French Revolution. Andi is captivated by the words of a girl her age. Twin stories unfold: Andi’s in the present day, Alex’s in the past, until the stories come together in a powerful ending that offers grace in a dark world.

The Good: Revolution is stunning.

The first section of the book, “Hell,” has an epigram from Dante: “And to a place I come where nothing shines.” Nothing shines in Andi’s life. Revolution begins with Andi’s privileged classmates (“a diplomat’s daughter,” “a movie star’s kid”) having a party. From the start, the connection is made between present day and the French Revolution with haves and have nots, an upper-class and underclass.

Andi’s grief over her younger brother’s death seeps through every page, every sentence, every act: “…and then I play. For hours. I play until my fingertips are raw. Until I rip a nail and bleed on the strings. Until my hands hurt so bad I forget my heart does.” Her grief is fueled by guilt for her role in her brother’s death as well as the breaking down of her family. “Rain washed away the blood long ago but I still see it. Unfurling beneath my brother’s small, broken body like the red petals of a rose. And suddenly the pain that’s always inside me, tightly coiled, swells into something so big and so fierce that it feels like it will burst my heart, split my skull, tear me apart.”

Andi’s father goes to Paris to visit and work with an old friend, a historian whose specialty is the French Revolution. Together, they are working on testing the alleged heart of Louis XVII, the “lost dauphin,” ten year old Louis-Charles, the child of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Did the child die, alone and broken and terrified? Or was he smuggled out for a dead child? Andi discovers a diary of a young girl, Alex, a poor actress who became companion to Louis-Charles. “They keep him in the Tower, a cold, dark room with one window, small and high. The guards are cruel. There is no stove to warm him. No privy. His filth piles up in a corner. He has no playthings. No books. Nothing but rats. What food he is given, he puts in a corner, to draw them off. He does not know his mother is dead and writes these words with a stone on his wall — Mama, please….   Once you were brave. Once you were kind. You can be so again.”

Andi works on her senior thesis, about a French composer who lived during the Revolution, reads the diary of Alex, wanders through Paris. Her Paris, the Paris of Alex, are told in wonderful detail. Past and present come to life. Andi’s music connects her with fellow Parisian musicians, including an attraction to handsome Virgil. Those relationships begin to anchor her in the present. At the same time, she is desperate to get home, to rescue her mother from the psychiatric hospital she’s been committed to, to not leave her alone.

The parallels: Andi’s privileged life, the privilege of the French aristocrats. Her brother Truman, dead at ten, a death Andi blames herself for. Louis-Charles, dead at ten, a death that Alex feels responsible for. Louis-Charles, imprisoned in a tower and denied any comfort or love; Andi’s mother, imprisoned in a hospital, an artist denied paints and brushes. The music, Andi’s own music and those she hears around her, tied to the past, to the musicians that came before, and her research into the French composer Malherbeau. The DNA found in people, the DNA of musical influence. It all works, comes together beautifully. My heart aches for Andi, wonders if she can forgive herself and become brave and kind again. I got caught up in Alex’s diary, with concern for that small boy, and wondered if Alex’s increasingly desperate and risky acts to try to let Louis-Charles know that he is not alone, he is not forgotten, he is still loved worked. Did they do anything? Did they ease her guilt, did it give hope? Does hope matter when the end of the story is a cold, brutal death?

Just because “the wretched world goes on, as stupid and brutal tomorrow as it was today,” do we have to be stupid and brutal? Or can we be brave and kind, no matter what the world brings?

About two-thirds through the book, there is a second section. “Purgatory,” again with a quote from Dante. Andi descends into a catacomb for a party with her new friends. And here, Donnelly makes a choice about the story that not everyone will love. I am personally torn as to what exactly happens, what it means. Andi is in a bleak place, unsure of herself and her place in any world, still seeking an end to the endless sorrow of her brother’s death. Whether what happens next is literal or not, real or a dream, Andi is given the opportunity to work towards redemption. The final chapters are “Paradise,” again Dante: “Till I beheld through a round aperture Some of the beauteous things Heaven doth bear; Thence we come forth to rebehold the stars.” Those of you who have read the book, let’s discuss that in the comments. Those of you who haven’t — don’t read the comments until you  have.

A revolution is an event: the French Revolution, the American Revolution. It is also a change in a way of thinking. This is Andi’s revolution.

A note on book design. I don’t have an e-reader; I’m not sure if e-books will replace physical books. I do know that the book design of Revolution shows the value of a physical object and how it adds to the book and is not merely a physical case to hold pages. In addition to the stunning artwork (a photograph of a modern girl, the painting of a 18th century girl, upside down, revolving) there is the red ribbon. Andi wears a red ribbon around her neck, holding a key that belonged to her brother; the surviving nobles of France wore red ribbons to remember those relatives killed by the guillotine.  The ribbon is glossy, raised, and the spine shows the key. The endpapers are blood red.

Oh, and for the historical fiction lovers like myself, there are acknowledgements and sources.

Because the language is stunning. Because Andi and Truman, Alex and Louis-Charles haunt me. Because I am still wondering at the difference between stupid and brutal, brave and kind, and whether it matters. Because my reservations about the book are about only a handful of pages, and those handful do not outweigh the seeking of braveness and kindness in ourselves. Revolution is a Favorite Book Read in 2010.