Books My Sister Lent Me

So my sister was in town this last week, and was extremely sweet and brought me some teen books I'd been wanting to read. Meaning today is Adolescent Book Review Day.

Beka Cooper: Terrier, by Tamora Pierce. I think Pierce is trying to branch out with Beka, with mixed results. The story takes place 200-odd years before Pierce's other Tortall books (Song of the Lioness, Immortals, Protector of the Small, Trickster) and features the ancestress of George Cooper, a young woman named Beka. Beka is in training to be a "Dog," the city's equivalent of a police officer, and is working the slums alongside two veterans. Of course, she's the heroine, so she gets a couple of leg ups on her trainers; specifically the ability to hear the voices of dead souls carried by pigeons, and the ability to understand voices picked up by the wind. These get her started on two interlinked cases: somewhere in the Lower City, a man is hiring people to mine gems for him and then killing them so they can't reveal the location of the mines. But someone has found out he has them, and is threatening his family members to give them up. The kidnapper, calling himself after a children's bogeyman, has been doing similar things on a smaller scale for years.

Beka comes as a moderate departure for Pierce -- she's working in an earlier time period in her own universe and for almost the first time, she's dealing primarily with commoners rather than the nobility (only one of Pierce's previous heroines was a commoner, and she within a book or two she was in close with the King and the court, so a commoner merely raised in the house of a noble -- as Beka is, after her mother dies, prior to the story's start -- is rather a novelty). The storyline is far more whodunnit than Pierce's previous work; most of her other characters either already knew or didn't care who was causing them all their problems. Mystery writing isn't Pierce's strong suit -- the twist at the end is neither unexpected nor especially shocking -- but she's writing for teenagers so I'll cut her some slack on that. Not a lot of slack -- if you can't surprise me with the ending, please don't bother trying -- but I was less discriminating in my formative years. So I prefer the glory days of Alanna knowing exactly who the bad guy was and only needing to worry about how to take him down without dying, but I didn't hate Beka's storyline or anything.

Telling the story in diary entries was an interesting choice. I liked hearing the story in Beka's words -- her perspective is pretty good. But the style felt contrived in a lot of places; Pierce doesn't really seem comfortable with it, and the way she uses it for exposition is sketchy.

Some nitpicks -- I know it's a fantasy country and all that, but I do have to ask -- there seem to be very few changes in culture or technology or anything in over 150 years. There's some lip service -- a female knight character, slave trading, different slang -- but the feel is just the same. Yes, the Middle Ages lasted a long time in real life, but doesn't Tortall have a Peter Abelard?

The book does, though, have all Pierce's usual strengths: a powerful, vulnerable heroine, good dialogue, decent humor, strong plotting, and feminist flavor. Overall, fairly average, but definitely worth a look, especially if you're a fan of Pierce's other books.

The Looking Glass Wars, by Frank Beddor. Whew. What to say about this one. Well, the premise is that Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which was inspired by his friendship with Alice Liddell, was a nonsense version of a true story. In Beddor's universe, Alice (or rather, Alyss; Wonderland spells things whimsically, it seems) is a refugee princess from a real fantasyland called Wonderland, who, on her seventh birthday, is driven out by her murderous aunt, Redd. Deemed an unsuitable Queen, Redd was deposed by her younger sister, Genevieve, Alyss's mother. Now she's back for revenge, and Alyss is forced to flee to London, circa the Victorian era, where she is captured for pickpocketing and sent to an orphanage, to be eventually adopted by the Liddells and given the chance to tell her extraordinary story to Reverend Dodgson.

Beddor's premise is interesting and his imagination is good; there are just enough familiar elements and characters to make Alice-lovers happy. (Example: Hatter Madigan, the head of royal security.) Wonderland is interestingly mapped and described, and Alyss herself is fairly compelling and sympathetic.

But the book isn't actually a book. Beddor describes everything in cinematic terms, and as a result, the book feels so like a written-out film it's almost impossible to enjoy. The descriptions are strongly visual, which helps to make them stand out, but the scenes, dialogue, and characters are so dependent on movie archetypes and norms that it's intensely distracting and makes it almost impossible to enjoy the book on its own terms. Scenes that would play off without comment in a movie felt forced and contrived, and dialogue that talented actors would be able to handle without a problem looked odd written out in black and white.

Beddor had a fairly original idea, his plot moves along nicely, and he isn't a bad writer, but he has no appreciation for his medium at all, and it shows. The Looking Glass Wars reads like a novelization of Men in Black: awkward and ultimately unsatisfying.