Ultraviolet

by R. J. Anderson

Carolrhoda Lab

978-0-7613-7408-4

303 pp.

Ages 14+

2011

R. J. Anderson, author of Faery Rebels: Spell Hunter (HarperCollins Canada, 2009) and Wayfarer (HarperCollins Canada, 2010), continues her foray into speculative fiction, but this time immersed in the issue of youth mental health, a reality that could read like fiction.

Waking up in a hospital, Alison Jeffries learns quickly that she has been admitted to a psychiatric department after a psychotic episode that had her harming herself and assaulting  a police officer.  Upon her transfer to Pine Hills, a youth facility, she realizes that another Gr. 10 student from her school, Tori Beaugrand, disappeared on the same day of Alison's crisis, and that many believe that Alison had something to do with the girl's disappearance.  Of course, it also might be because Alison claimed that she'd made Tori disintegrate.

Because of her interactions with Constable Deckard (who returns several times to question her memory of the day's events), her therapy sessions with Dr. Minta (who seems to see every action of Alison's in terms of psychoses), visits from her family (or lack thereof), and a visit from her best friend, Melissa, Alison spends much of her weeks in Pine Hills recalling that day's events, particularly her memory of seeing Tori vanish before her eyes.  She believes that she might have always been "crazy", recollecting her mother's reaction to her sharing the colours and shapes and smells she associates with random items and feelings.

While she learns to interact with her Pine Hills' peers, who deal with anorexia, bipolar disorder, depression, paranoia, etc., her most significant relationship is established with the young Dr. Sebastian Faraday, a neuropsychologist from South Africa, whose unique violet eyes and startling beauty assure and calm her.  Faraday identifies Alison as a synesthete, one of only 4% of the population whose senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste) are interconnected.  Convinced that Alison is not crazy and that she is not responsible for Tori's disappearance, Faraday becomes a strong emotional support for Alison, causing some awkwardness for flirtatious patient, Kirk, whose anger and jealousy are brought to the surface, resulting in a destructive fire, the removal of Faraday from Pine Hills, and permission for Alison to visit home.

But, that is hardly the end of the story.  A whole new set of circumstances bring Alison's relationship with Faraday and the "madness" of her experiences with Tori into play, demonstrating the speculative nature of Ultraviolet.  Telling you any more than that would destroy the systematic "aha" moments that bring this story to its unpredictable resolution.  Fortunately, the story has not concluded, since a sequel, tentatively titled Quicksilver, is slated for publication in 2013.

R. J. Anderson seems to whip up amazing plots that are rich in their interconnectedness and their complexity, here taking mental health issues and wrapping them in fantastical elements, playing down the fear and anxiety of mental illness while revealing much about it.  Her characters can be enigmas, not unlike most of us, who change their minds and alter their behaviour, sometimes without apparent rationale.  But, they ultimately reveal themselves as complex beings and begin to see and be seen beyond first impressions.  Creating empathetic characters in speculative fiction is a skill that R. J. Anderson has demonstrated repeatedly, recognizing that the richness of her characters can carry any bizarre plot she may be imaginative enough to create. 

 

 Uploaded by LernerPublishing on Mar 30, 2011

The publisher, Carolrhoda Lab, is an imprint of Lerner Publishing, who has posted this very brief trailer for Ultraviolet.

Spoiler alert: If you'd like to see a Fan trailer for "Ultraviolet"that focuses on Alison and Faraday, check out this link BUT it does include a spoiler not revealed in this review.

Blood Red Road wins Costa Children's Book Award

Congratulations to Moira Young and her book Blood Red Road (Doubleday Canada, 2011) reviewed here on December 27, 2011 which has been awarded the 2011 Costa Children's Book Award.  Although a native Canadian, Young currently lives in the United Kingdom, making her eligible for the Costa Awards for popular books by writers based in the UK and Ireland.

The Costa Awards, which have been bestowed for 40 years, cover 5 categories: First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children's Book, with the winner of each receiving £5,000.  The winners of the five 2011 awards were announced January 4, 2011,  Announcement

Now, the winners of the 5 different awards are pitted against one another for the Costa Book of the Year with the winner receiving an additional £30,000.  This award will be selected and announced on January 24, 2012.

By the way, you may want to check out the different covers for Blood Red Road as available in Canada and the UK. Personally, the subtle colours and dusty appearance with Saba walking off the cover are my preference.  Must be the understated Canadian nature at play.

Doubleday Canada, 2011 

Marion Lloyd Books, 2011

All Good Children

by Catherine Austen

Orca Book Publishers

978-1-55469-824-0

300 pp.

Ages 14+

2011

Here's a way to start out 2012: read about a future that is so terrifyingly probable that you wonder how we're ever going to stop it from happening.  Catherine Austen's All Good Children may be science fiction but it certainly alludes to the direction we may be heading.  How many readers have heard a teacher, librarian, parent or any adult who works with young people declare repeatedly about young troublemakers taking all of their time and efforts?  If you have, then All Good Children could be our future, sadly.

Max Connors and his best friend, Dallas Richmond, would both consider themselves fifteen-year-old troublemakers and smile at that label.  In their gated community of New Middleton, owned by Chemrose International, they pull a lot of pranks, don't hold back their opinions of others, live for their RIGs (Realtime Integrated Gateways) and religiously follow Freakshow, an "entertaining" reality show in which deformed adults (as a result of chemical contamination) compete against each other.  The boys and their families are actually very fortunate: first, by living in a region devoid of environmental disasters such the drowning of New York City or desiccation of Phoenix; second, by living in homes in New Middleton, rather than the tents or shanties of the forests outside the gates; and, third, by attending academic schools because of their genetic status (Dallas is an ultimate, and Max a best-of-three) and not being the throwaway kids of the trade schools. 

In fact, Max's little sister, Ally, a six-year-old, has been very fortunate having missed the first week of school when the family (Mom, Max and herself) attended a funeral in Atlanta.  Upon their return, Ally notes that all the Grade 1 and 2 students are acting kind of slow and fuzzy, emoting very little, repeatedly using phrases about being lucky to be in school and that all their teachers deserve respect.  Consequently Ally is cited as not fitting in at her academic school and transferred to a trade school.  With a bit of investigating at the middle school, Max, his brilliant but quirky neighbour, Xavier, and Dallas learn of a new motivational leadership program called NEST (New Education Support Treatment) being delivered to all students, youngest first, via vaccination.  Max's mother, a nurse at a geriatric facility where patients are subjected to a similar treatment,  is determined not to allow her children to be vaccinated and initiates plans to evade the mandatory program.

While the plot keeps the reader on edge, anticipating exposure of Max and Dallas' deception and the family's plan for evasion, the moral dilemma of identifying children as "good" or not and consequent programs to improve their status was far more compelling to me.  Skillfully, Catherine Austen ensures that Max is seen as a smart aleck kid who has moments of brilliance and compassion, helping the readers clarify their own perspectives on this new world and its way of doing things.  Does Max need to be turned into a "good" child or is he already such a child, just an individual?  Who is able to judge a child's "goodness": a parent/guardian, a principal, a teacher, the child?  Think about the number of mothers of criminals who will claim that their children have good hearts or would never have done anything like that.  Really?  Should I trust their assessment or look to the evidence?  Having seen enough students similar to Max in my classes, I would never classify him as a "good child" but I would surely support his right to be an individual.

Moreover, while mass vaccination of a population is not unusual (e.g., against polio and small pox), their use to ensure compliance and the lack of opportunity to decline treatment is more akin to forced psychiatric drugging than "motivational leadership".  A rose by any other name?  Be the child or the parent/guardian and the perspectives may be very different, whether it is called nesting or psychiatric treatment.  Dallas' father certainly has a different perspective than his son and Max's mom.

As in her first book, Walking Backward (Orca, 2009), which was shortlisted for the Canadian Library Association's 2010 Book of the Year for Children Award, in which a family comes to terms with the mother's death, Catherine Austen poignantly reveals the psychological workings of a family under duress with parent and children all searching for clarity and understanding and always hope.  Charmingly, hope is offered in a country called Canada.

New #kidsCanlit for 2012

Fearful that you might miss out on the release of the last Hunchback Assignments or the final The Boy Sherlock Holmes Case?  Do you know when Marsha Skrypuch's Making Bombs for Hitler will be available?  Check my calendar below for some of the more prominent #kidsCanlit I'm tracking that are scheduled for release in 2012. Titles in blue indicate those reviewed previously. (n.b. Titles listed here include only those currently listed for release.  Updates will be announced regularly.)

Little Jane Silver

by Adira Rotstein
Dundurn
978-1554888788
268 pp.
Ages 9-14
2011

The yarns that Long John Silver the Second and Adira Rotstein weave are the rich tales told before roaring fires on winter's nights, when the seas are too cold for pirating and the coffers too empty for shopping.  They're stories of heroes and villains, kindness and treachery, gentle rocking and violent swordfighting.  Luckily for readers, Rotstein's stories are meant solely to entertain and will not result in the inadequate education that Little Jane Silver may endure courtesy of her father's tongue.

Of course, Little Jane Silver is in rapture of her father's story-telling, just as she adores her parents, Captains Long John Silver the Second and Bonnie Mary Bright, as they do their only child.  Little Jane (how she despises that inescapable moniker) hungrily absorbs the details of their pirate lives in hopeful preparation for her anticipated entry into the family business.  During the cold, rainy season, Little Jane lives at her family's inn, the Spyglass, at Smuggler's Bay.  But during the warms months, she joins them and their crew on the Pieces of Eight, pirating, smuggling and hiding loot on the cursed Nameless Isle (actually only her parents are able to hide the loot without harm).

At age twelve, however, Little Jane realizes that she isn't regarded as a pirate to be respected or feared and she begins her training by making observations in her journal, How to be a Good Pirate, as advised by the ship's cook, Ishiro.  Unfortunately, Jane's observation skills earn her the directed wrath of the boatswain, Ned Ronk, whose intimidation and mutinous attitude will ultimately separate Little Jane from her parents and put their lives and happy family in danger.

Adira Rotstein balances the language and jargon of pirates with the subtle humour that affords the text the lightness to scoot the story into a high-seas adventure.  When Little Jane's fencing tutor is described as "upper crust" (pg. 69), the young girl suggests that it would be more fun to be the fruit filling.  Even a misunderstanding about her father by nasty Charity and Felicity ("cannibal" for "cannonball"), when Little Jane tells them that "a cursed cannonball chewed off his foot" (pg. 246), results in Little Jane declaring, "how could I be the daughter of a cannonball? Ain't anyone ever told you babies don't come from cannons? Artillery's got nothing to do with it"(pg 246).  Yet the depth of feelings demonstrated by Little Jane and her parents for each other is very clear, ultimately leading Long John Silver the Second to declare that they would survive so that he might tell Little Jane his true story and Little Jane promising to find her parents.  Sadly, the reader will need to wait until the next book in this series,  Little Jane Silver and the Nameless Isle, comes out in September, 2012 to learn the fates of Little Jane, Long John Silver the Second and Bonnie Mary Bright, as masterminded by the friend-turned-foe, Fetz.

Blood Red Road

by Moira Young

Doubleday Canada

978-0-385-67183-5

459 pp.

Ages 14+

2011

Moira Young's debut novel, Blood Red Road, begins as a dust storm: sudden, painful, devastating and gritty.  In their post-Wreckers world at Silverlake, eighteen-year-old Saba and her family endure the lack of rain and resources, looking to the stars for guidance and the landfill for materials. After a violent dust storm, accompanied by lightning, which turns everything red, life just shifts from bad to worse.  Men on horseback murder her Pa and abduct her twin, Lugh.  Leaving her shanty existence for the first time, Saba pursues her brother's trail, accompanied by her pet crow Nero and her nine-year-old sister, Emmi.  Learning more about her parents' early lives and their stay in Hopetown, Saba heads for the brutal town where the violent Tonton, who took Lugh, control the people and slaves with the use of a drug, chaal.  Unfortunately, it's Saba's anger and tenacity that make her attractive to Rooster Pinch and Miz Pinch, who press her into the brutality of cage-fighting (as the "Angel of Death") by threatening Emmi.  Sadly, only if they escape Hopetown do Saba and Emmi have any chance of finding Lugh. 

Their isolation at Silverlake has not prepared Saba for the multitude of characters that she encounters in her quest for Lugh, making it difficult for her to assess accurately their true natures, sometimes not until it is too late.  Her most difficult relationships seem to be with Emmi and with Jack, a young male cage-fighter.  Saba continues to vacillate between trust and resentment, often overlooking the insights of others or almost squandering opportunities for assistance.  As strong as she is physically and emotionally, Saba's misunderstanding and naiveté weaken her, threatening to jeopardize her self-imposed mission.

The grittiness of the story is matched by the text, told from Saba's perspective and in her words, just as she speaks them.  She trusts the red hot in her stummick that tells of her raging anger and she knows about talkin an fightin but not about books or history or the technology of the Wreckers such as their bolt shooters or long lookers. The text can be disconcerting to read, with its lack of quotation marks for dialogue and its perfunctory spelling, but it emphasizes the reinvention of a society to its most fundamental - survival.  Literacy and progress have been eschewed as the values of a Wreckers' society whose failure is evident in their abandoned settlements littering the landscape.

Justifiably, Blood Red Road has been compared to Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy with its theme of survival in a dystopian world led by a despot and his cohorts who rule over the suffering masses.  Luckily, another commonality lies in the book's inclusion in a trilogy.  To my great relief, Blood Red Road is just Book 1 in the Dust Lands trilogy so readers (particularly those reading it in the White Pine reading program) can look forward to a sequel in 2012.  My own heavy heart at the end of my reading of Blood Red Road has been assuaged, knowing that soon enough I will learn more about Jack's pre-Saba life, the mystery of DeMalo and the nature of Saba, Lugh and Emmi's new life at the Big Water.

Falling for Henry

Written by Beverley Brenna

Red Deer Press

978-0-88995-442-7

281 pp.

Ages 12+

2011

Discontented Kate Allen hardly seems a substantial enough character (except for her full figure) to carry her from the 21st century back to 1507 to connect with young Prince Henry, Duke of York, future king.  But, a bizarre incident in a tunnel slips Kate back in time to become Katherine of Aragon, widow of Henry's elder brother and soon-to-be first wife of Henry VIII himself.

Amazing circumstances for a young girl, unhappily living with her older sister in London, following the accidental death of their father in New York.  With a mother who disappeared when she was quite young and a grandmother in Brighton, Kate moves to England where her sister, Willow, is attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.  During a school field trip to Greenwich, claustrophobic Kate enters a tunnel and strangely witnesses a hunting party led by a red-haired young man who kills a buck; a young girl on a gray mare hiding from the others; and a wolf cub and a snarling adult. Although she's convinced she is imaging things, Kate warns the teacher of the presence of wolves, setting herself up for more humiliation from her peers who claim there have been no wolves in Britain for centuries.

Back in the real world, Kate is surprised by the attentions of an older schoolmate, Hal, who takes her out, kisses her, and makes her feel special.  But, while taking out the garbage, Kate sees Hal kissing another girl, petite and blond.  This chain of events, including Kate wearing a stunning blue dress (an unused costume from Willow's current play, Henry VIII) that Willow planned to alter for her, seems too contrived for this reader, especially as Kate, desperate to get out of sight, boards a bus and ends up back in Greenwich at the tunnel where she first slipped back in time.

Regardless, Kate enters the world of Katherine of Aragon, daughter of the King of Spain, love interest of Prince Henry, charge of  Doña Elvira, and confidante of William Fitzroy, the Prince's companion, who is tending to an injured wolf cub, though wolves have been outlawed.  While she has some inherent knowledge of Katherine's life, Kate lacks many memories, stumbling her way through her days of being courted by Henry, while keeping her contemporary insights at bay.  However, the erratic nature of Kate's memories as Katherine (e.g., she cannot remember gifting the astrolabe but knows she practised equestrian arts as a child) as well as Henry's acceptance of her use of words such as technology (pg. 226) continued to throw off my temporal train of thought, often leaving me unsure of what Kate knows and how she would react.

Luckily, Beverley Brenna undertook an exhaustive research regarding Henry VIII, wolves in Britain, an illness called the "sweating sickness" and all manner of Tudor customs, providing young readers with an authentic perspective on British history, made all the more intriguing by focusing on Henry VIII's life as a charming young prince rather than his disreputable nature as a husband.  Although the parallels between Kate's and Katherine's lives seem somewhat fabricated (e.g., suitors Hal-Henry, mothers Isobel-Isabella, dogs Patch-Patch, friend William-Will), the lesson Kate learns, that "No matter how long it takes...the best any of us can wish for...is to fill our place" (pg. 265), cannot so easily be manipulated and is one she will need to work out for herself.