Uncreated Conscience

Back when I was first starting to blog, I used to make weird puns in my titles. I am bringing back my inner 17-year-old for today’s post. Anyway, where have you been, JJ? you might ask. (Or not. You probably don’t care.)

I was here. Book Expo America. And at social invents related to BEA.

BEA itself was amazing. I managed to attend the Young Adult Editor Buzz panel (featuring St. Martin’s Press’s very own Jen Weis) and steal a few galleys and ARCs, including MATCHED, which I have been anticipating for the past 6 months. (It won’t be out until the end of the year though so MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.)

However, the highlight of my day at the trade show this year was managing to fangirl Arthur A. Levine. He was also at the Young Adult Editor Buzz panel, but he happened to be leaving the Javits Center at the moment my coworkers and I were leaving and we had the amazing privilege of sweating our way to the subway with the man who essentially defined children’s literature for my generation.

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Ack, BEA is fast approaching and I still have two more books to review. Right, no excuses, JJ, just jump on it.

Review of WHITE CAT by Holly Black

WHITE CAT by Holly Black

Because I suck at writing cover copy, I’m just going to swipe the one on Holly Black‘s website.

Cassel comes from a family of curse workers — people who have the power to change your emotions, your memories, your luck, by the slightest touch of their hands. And since curse work is illegal, they’re all mobsters, or con artists. Except for Cassel. He hasn’t got the magic touch, so he’s an outsider, the straight kid in a crooked family. You just have to ignore one small detail — he killed his best friend, Lila, three years ago.

Ever since, Cassel has carefully built up a façade of normalcy, blending into the crowd. But his façade starts crumbling when he starts sleepwalking, propelled into the night by terrifying dreams about a white cat that wants to tell him something. He’s noticing other disturbing things, too, including the strange behavior of his two brothers. They are keeping secrets from him, caught up in a mysterious plot. As Cassel begins to suspect he’s part of a huge con game, he also wonders what really happened to Lila. Could she still be alive? To find that out, Cassel will have to out-con the conmen.

Spoilers after the cut.

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I love living and working with book people: I get to 1) steal books from their shelves and 2) “borrow” books from work. Russ has been the most consistent purveyor of new material to read; in addition to PURE, he’s also given me WINTERGIRLS, a Brian Eno biography, and Chuck Palahniuk’s PYGMY (which I have started but have not yet finished). Most recent on my to-be-read pile from him was A RELIABLE WIFE by Robert Goolrick, with the recommendation, “You like Victorian lit, right?”

Review of A RELIABLE WIFE by Robert Goolrick

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

I do indeed love Victorian literature, although I wouldn’t classify A RELIABLE WIFE as “Victorian lit”, despite the fact that it is set in 1908 Wisconsin. This is the where the pedant in me gets a little nitpicky; Victorian literature had a lot of conventions that are missing in contemporary literary fiction, as well as “cliché” storylines that I feel most writers try and avoid, or at least subvert to the best of their ability. “Good girl/boy is rewarded for his/her virtue and/or tenacity!” (GREAT EXPECTATIONS by Charles Dickens) or “Good girl falls from grace and dies tragically!” (THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton) or “There is hypocrisy and corruption in our society!” (see: most of the works by Henry James and Evelyn Waugh) or else it is a novel of manners (see please Oscar Wilde, William Dean Howells, and E.M. Forster).

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