A bunch of books I read last year that I am totally going to write about here one day I promise.

So the second-last time I posted here, almost a year ago, I wrote that one of my New Years resolutions was to read less books & do more work & other stuff & that clearly didn't go very well because Goodreads has kindly informed me that I read sixty books in 2013* which is quite a lot considering I also started writing one & editing another & I had a baby in April & there aren't actually sixty weeks in a year. Yay me?

*Or fifty-nine, with one read twice, comprising of: thirty-seven YA (or thirty-six with one read twice), ten MG/children’s, seven sci-fi /fantasy, two literary, one crime, one chick lit, one non-fiction, one graphic novel. Fifteen were re-reads, six were read because I had to teach a class on them, and three were so bad I almost didn’t finish them.

Here is my favourite book of the year: The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater. It’s so good I read it twice. Did I mention I read it twice? I’m going to go read it again.

Here is a list of books now added to my all-time favourites:

The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater (I read it twice, you know)

The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater

Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta

Code Name Verity by Elisabeth Wein

Friday Brown by Vikki Wakefield

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margot Lanagan

Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma

Here is a list of other 2013 favourites:

This is Not a Test by Courtney Summers

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

The Bone Dragon by Alexia Casale

Vivian Versus the Apocalypse by Katie Coyle

Picture Me Gone by Meg Rosoff

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

Okay, now all I have to do is write a review for each of these to convince you all that you need to read them too. If only I had some way of making some kind of plan to do so - a resolution, one might say - & post more here…

In the (highly unlikely I swear) event that this doesn't happen, you can also find me on Twitter (@moirawithatrema) & Tumblr (ecritureacreature) where I write about books & poems & little snippits of life with a great deal more regularity than I do here.

Happy New Year!

The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare

You know how some people make new years resolutions like: Read Fifty Books in One Year? Well, I think one that better applies to me is: Read Less Books & Do More Work & Other Stuff because by January 3rd I'd already read three books. But that's not entirely my fault. Cassandra Clare shares a large part of the blame.

Here is what the back cover of City of Bones has to say for itself:

When Clary Fray heads out to the Pandemonium Club in New York City, she hardly expects to witness a murder. Much less a murder committed by three teenagers covered with odd markings.

This is Clary’s first meeting with the Shadowhunters, warriors dedicated to ridding the earth of demons - and keeping the odd werewolves and vampires in line. It’s also her first meeting with gorgeous, golden-haired Jace. Within twenty-four hours Clary is pulled into Jace’s world with a vengeance, when her mother disappears and Clary herself is attacked by a demon. But why would demons be interested in an ordinary mundane like Clary? And how did she suddenly get the Sight? The Shadowhunters would like to know...

Clary Fray is a fifteen-year-old artist (because YA heroines always want to be artists or writers when they grow up & never accountants or publicists or occupational therapists*) whose world is turned upside-down when she realises she can see through the glamour that demons & other Downworlders use to become invisible to humans ("mundanes": the new muggles). Then her mother disappears & Clary & her nerdy, bespectacled best friend Simon team up with teenage Shadowhunters Jace, Isabelle & Alec, to find out where she is.

Clary soon discovers that her mother was once a Shadowhunter herself, & that all of Clary's early memories of the demon world have been erased. Also, serious Bad Guy Valentine, an evil ex-Shadowhunter previously presumed dead, wants to summon demons to help him eliminate any Shadowhunters who don't agree with his Death Eater-ish beliefs.

Evil supernatural purists, mysterious tattoos, demons, werewolves & vampires, a beautiful boy with a serious attitude problem: City of Bones (along with its sequels, City of Ashes & City of Glass) sounds like your typical young adult urban fantasy. Which it is. Only not all typical young adult urban fantasy is this addictive. Here's what really worked for me about this series:

1. Good prose. One of the reasons this series is so easy to read is because it's just really well written. The descriptions are gorgeous, the dialogue is snappy & often very funny & the pace is perfect. I could hardly put it down (I read an entire trilogy in three days, of course I could hardly put it down).

2. Good stock characters. In some ways Clary is like every other YA urban fantasy heroine (she's artsy, she thinks herself plain but boys love her even if she doesn't realise they do, she ends up with unusual powers), only somehow, probably related to point 1, she's very likeable & not annoying in the slightest. She's also maybe more fleshed-out than the other heroines I'm thinking of: she's kind of nerdy, a little flighty & quite short-tempered, which makes for a pretty realistic supernatural teenager.

Similarly, Jace is the Regulation Hottie. He's a bad boy with an attitude problem & a blatant disregard for authority who functions as one-third of the love triangle that always seems to involve a "plain" girl, her nerdy but wise-cracking best friend & an aloof & mysterious new boy. But Jace isn't idealised in the way that some Regulation Hotties are (*cough*Edward*cough*); he has a carefully & sensitively crafted backstory to his brooding & can get pretty exasperating (which also makes for a pretty realistic supernatural teenager). So while I'm generally always on Team Best Friend when it comes to love triangles, I have to admit that the chemistry between Clary & Jace can get pretty electric.

Some of the secondary characters include sexy, ass-kicking Shadowhunter Isabelle & her moody, closeted brother Alec; Dungeons-&-Dragons-playing, curly-haired best friend Simon; sarcastic, glittery warlock Magnus Bane; & charismatic but manipulative bad guy Valentine. All pretty standard characters (except Magnus, perhaps, who is too awesome to be counted as a stock character) but all excellently written, engaging & complex. This is how all YA fantasy characters should be written.

3. Forbidden love. I LOVE forbidden love. Tortured romance is so much more satisfying than regular romance, & although this series does action & adventure really well, it often feels like the romantic tension is leading the plot. And with the intensity of the will they/ won't they/ can they/ can't they, that's hardly surprising.

4. ALL the supernatural creatures! If you like vampires & werewolves & faeries & warlocks & angels & demons & you just don't know which to chose, this series has 'em all. Now I have to admit I'm not a big fan of angels. Angels in fiction (especially in YA) tend to make me roll my eyes a lot (unless they belong to Philip Pullman or Neil Gaiman). In the Mortal Instruments series Shadowhunters are humans with distant angel ancestors, & there's a fair amount of angel lore to go with all the demon stuff (while somehow avoiding discussing if any particular god exists within the word of the series) which I suppose makes sense, but I'm not particularly fond of it. The demons of the series are great, however, sort of like Buffy demons only with less of the kitten-eating & more of the human-ribcage-cracking.

Actually, the Mortal Instruments series reads sort of like a cross between Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Harry Potter. (These are a few of my favourite things...) It's good, reliable young adult fantasy & I highly recommend it.

*It used to vaguely annoy me that so many characters in novels want to be or become artists & writers until I realised that for every character who achieves their childhood dream of becoming a writer, there is an author writing these characters who achieved the very same dream.  

Ashes by Isla J Bick

So you know when you pick up a book in the shop (after having judged it by its cover, of course), what's your criteria for determining if you think the book'll be good or not? Mine's pretty simple: I look at the cover, I look at the back cover, I read the prologue & the first few lines. Then, usually, I have an idea about whether or not I think I'll be interested in the whole book.

Here is the back cover synopsis of Ashes:

Seventeen-year-old Alex is hiking through the wilderness when it happens: an earth-shattering electromagnetic pulse that destroys almost everything.

Survivors are divided between those who have developed a superhuman sense & those who have acquired a taste for human flesh. These flesh-hunters stalk the land: hungry, ruthless & increasingly clever...

Alex meets Tom, a young army veteran, & Ellie, a lost girl. They will fight together & be torn apart, but Alex must face the most difficult question of all: who can you trust?

So already this book ticks a couple of boxes. Standard YA pretty-girl's-face-half-obscured cover? Check! Dystopia? Awesome! Zombies? Has potential! Probably resourceful female protagonist? Excellent! So I open the book, & that's when it happens.

Picture the scene if you will: me, beautiful, gorgeous, exquisite, radiant reader standing in the book shop, too old to be in the children's section but looks about sixteen so nobody bats an eye, coming face to face with The Greatest Prologue Ever. Now, I'm not generally a big fan of prologues. I write them, I read them (it's very unusual to find a young adult book without one) but I very rarely find that they actually add to the story. Except this one. This prologue puts all other prologues to shame. This may be the Prologue to End All Prologues.

Within the first six pages of this Most Wonderful Prologue of All this is what you, the reader, learn: Alex is hiking completely alone. Her aunt Hannah (presumably her legal guardian) calls her, not knowing where she is. Alex has her father's gun. She is not suicidal but has been in the past. She also has a brain tumour & the treatments she's been taking aren't working so she wants to take this hike while she still can. She is competent & resourceful (& has a wonderful narrative voice - all wry humour & matter-of-factness) & this'll be the last time she'll ever speak to her aunt again.

And just like that, you're hooked. There is no way you can't buy this book. The protagonist is clever, she has a fascinating backstory, & you know that zombies are going to come along at any minute. So you buy the book & read on.

(Also, because I think everybody should read this book, this review will contain NO MAJOR SPOILERS. I hope.)

That hooked feeling of I can't stop reading now because Something Dramatic is going to happen that will Change Everything lasts for pretty much the entire book. Every chapter ends with a cliffhanger that is carefully placed for you to keep turning the pages as fast as you can. The sudden apocalypse in the middle of nowhere is pretty much standard zombie fare, but the distinction between those who die immediately & those who become zombies is very interesting, & the fact that Alex, Ellie & Tom are pretty much alone in the wilderness for most of the book actually amplifies the post-apocalyptic anxiety.

Ashes is more or less split into two halves. The first half is fast-paced & hell-for-leather. The three characters, Alex, nine-year-old Ellie & twenty-year-old army dude Tom are all equally fascinating, & their relationships are complex & human, & make a lot of sense in context. Still, Alex's relationship with every other character is tinged with varying levels of uncertainty. Even grumpy Ellie & love-interest Tom are potentially keeping big secrets. So the first half swoops you, the reader, up & doesn't put you down until approximately halfway through the book, when Alex finds herself in Rule, a cultish little town that proves to be strangely adept at keeping the zombies at bay.

After that, the action slows down significantly but by now you're almost grateful because you've developed craps from turning pages so quickly & you really need a cup of tea.

The second half of the book is paced very differently & almost loses its voice a little - Alex is suddenly a lot less Alexy - but the chapters set in Rule end up being a little like the Hallows-searching sections in Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows. A lot of readers thought those chapters were dull & lagging, but I like to see them as evidence of the writer emerging the reader in the characters' worlds. The characters feel bored & disillusioned, so the reader does too. I think that's what happens in Ashes. The various circumstances that bring Alex to Rule take their toll & so the character changes, & the story, so bound up in the character's narration, changes too. It's interesting in its own way, & it lets us see Alex, & the world she's suddenly woken up in - in a different light.

Then, about eight chapters from the end (this is a big book with small chapters), you forget everything I just said (just like you forget the fact that my pronouns are completely mixed up today) . The pace picks up, the action kick-starts again & within a few pages there's no way you're putting this book down again. By the time you close the book you're absolutely aching for the sequel, which, unfortunately, won't be available for another year.

Ashes, however, is. So if you like dystopias or zombies or survival-in-the-wilderness narratives or post-apocalyptic fiction (& who doesn't?) you really should at the very least read the Prologue of Amazingness. And I defy you not to read the whole book after that. 

Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr

(This isn't about The Vampire Diaries, sorry. I will totally catch up soon though, I promise.)

When faced with a book synopsis that starts with Rule #3: Don't stare at invisible faeries, I was equal parts intrigued & disinterested. I was intrigued because that's a really great line, & disinterested because faeries, really? The prologue had me a little wary (it seemed to be very much of the fairies, really? variety) but my disinterest soon became reading-on-the-bus interest & even reading-while-walking-from-one-bus-stop-to-the-next interest. So let me preface this review by saying that I liked the book. And that I bumped into a lot of people while reading it. And a couple of lampposts.

Here is the full inside-cover synopsis:

Rule #3: Don't stare at invisible faeries.

Aislinn has always seen faeries. Powerful & dangerous, they walk hidden in mortal world. Aislinn fears their cruelty - especially if they learn of her Sight - & wishes she were as blind to their presence as other teens.

Rule #2: Don't speak to invisible faeries.

Now faeries are stalking her. One of them, Keenan, who is equal parts terrifying and alluring, is trying to talk to her, asking questions Aislinn is afraid to answer.

Rule #1: Don't ever attract their attention.

But it's too late. Keenan is the Summer King & has sought his queen for nine centuries. Without her, summer itself will perish. He is determined that Aislinn will become the Summer Queen at any cost...

(There will probably be spoilers in the rest of this review, so don't read it if you plan on reading the book. Unless you like spoilers. Some people are into that sort of thing.)

Aislinn is a pool-playing, rock-music-loving teenager who is just a little bit traumatised by the pretty horrific acts that faeries do to & around humans without our knowledge. She's always ignored the faeries she can see, until one of them becomes strangely fascinated by her & won't stop following her around. She finally confides in her friend-&-sort-of-love-interest Seth, & they decide to find out what Keenan the faerie Summer King & his tragic Winter Girl Donia want with her.

What Keenan wants is for her to be his queen, because that's ultimately what all men faeries want. He has also wanted a lot of other girls to be his queen in the last few centuries but only his One True Love can hold the staff of the Winter Queen without being burned by the frost & any girl who fails becomes a cold, bitter Winter Girl, endlessly bound to Keenan & always in pain, waiting for the next girl he chooses to try to take the staff. Any girl with whom Keenan falls in love becomes marked & begins to change into a faerie, so those who choose to try taking the staff & fail become pain-filled Winter Girls & those who refuse to try become pleasure-seeking Summer Girls. Women of both seasons are equally bound to Keenan. Overseeing all of this is Keenan's Very Evil mother, the power-hungry Winter Queen, who will stop at nothing to ensure that Keenan fails to find a Summer Queen, & who wants the world to be trapped in an Endless Winter Mwahahahaha.

So. The plot works well despite not being the most gripping, as do the various moments of menace & tension throughout the book, the wonderfully realistic & really quite creepy descriptions of the faeries, & a couple of spark-bright characters.

Aislinn's a pretty cool heroine. She's smart & capable & doesn't make any silly mistakes (unlike a certain famous heroine *cough*Bella*cough*). She also has an Awesome Feminist Grandma. Keenan is presented as charismatic but comes off as selfish, manipulative & stalkery (not unlike another supernatural love interest I could name). Donia is multi-layered & conflicted, & not presented as the angsty jealous lover she could easily have been. The relationship between her & Aislinn is one of the most interesting relationships in the book, & while I feel like it could have used more screen time (so to speak) it works really well & definitely adds something to the otherwise pretty straight-forward romance. However, Seth is a little too perfect to be a teenage boy, & the Winter Queen is like something out of a pantomime.

It's not that I necessarily need my faerie queens to be terribly believable, but one-dimensional villains that are a bit camp & more like Disney baddies than actual antagonists aren't as scary as the kind of unsettling villains you can almost understand. As for Seth, well, he's the boy all teenage girls who hate Edward Cullen dream of having. He & Aislinn start off as friends & he waits patiently for her to notice their growing attraction. Before they sleep together, he gets a full STI test & presents her with the papers. He makes the first move but respectfully (& very obviously) waits for her to retaliate & asks her if she's okay with what they're doing every step of the way. He won't have sex with her for the first time when she's feeling fragile & later even lectures her on the importance of consent. Oh & he goes down on her & is totally really great at it. And I am all for anti-Edward-Cullen characters, I really am. I am all for safe sex & the importance of consent & cunnilingus & other alliterative acts but Seth is not like any teenage boy I ever knew (no offence to the teenage boys I used to know). And that sort of takes away a bit from the believability of his character. Having said that, it's refreshing to see a kind, respectful young man as love interest in a supernatural young adult book, because those kinds of characters are few & far between.

I worried for about half the book that this was going to pull a Twilight with Team Keenan winning out over Team Seth in the end as the Summer King got progressively more sympathetic but it almost feels like Wicked Lovely was written in direct retaliation to texts like Twilight & although you sort of got where Keenan was coming from at the end, he's still a manipulative spoiled brat & Aislinn is smart enough to realise this.

All in all, Wicked Lovely was a lot better than I was expecting. It turns the tired tropes of Twilight & many of its offshoots on their heads, the action is pretty fast paced while still allowing for a certain amount of character development (if only for a select few) & both Aislinn's world & the invisible faerie world that exists alongside it are vibrant & believable. I won't be tripping over my feet to buy the sequel, but I'll definitely read it at some point, & with great pleasure.