My life in books

Heinlein wrote few adult novels during the period that he was focusing on short stories, and juveniles. Some of these may be considered as experimental novels, others began as juveniles but were eventually marketed as adult books. There s some thematic continuity between two of these, Double Star and Starship Troopers, both of which take as main themes the ideas of civil duty and sacrifice of the one for the good of the many. But not so much with the others. These transitional books - books appearing between his short story writing period and his mature period a a writer almost exclusively of novels - were:

The Puppet Masters 1952
Double Star 1956
The Door into Summer 1957
Starship Troopers 1959

The Puppet Masters is, like the pre-war novels, an adult novel written for magazine publication, and may have represented an effort to break into the mainstream adult market. The magazine version, serialised in Galaxy in 1951, was heavily cut from the original, and the editor revised it again before novel publication in 1952. An uncut original was published with Virginia Heinlein’s consent in 1990. My comments are based on the uncut version.

The novel is generally considered to be Heinlein’s most extreme cautionary novel against Communism - marked by the paranoia generated by the slugs who can move in almost perfect secrecy when their hosts are careful is highly reminiscent of the fear of “communists under the bed.” Heinlein didn’t approve of McCarthy’s methods, but he did have a strong loathing for what he imagined communism to be. Anyone who attempted to curtail free though was, in his mind, a commissar, and thus an enemy of freedom. He believed that under communism no one was allowed to have their own opinions, and was as helpless as any of his ‘ridden’ characters in The Puppet Masters, unable to act as an individual.

As it is, it’s also unlike Heinlein’s other work in tone, being more horror than science fiction. As a horror novel, it is extremely uncharacteristic of his work, being lurid in many arts, and focusing on the visceral - the sense of slime, the feeling if a master when it bursts - in ways that his usual descriptions, though powerful, don’t normally display. There’s little else in this book that plays into Heinlein’s main themes of social responsibility and personal integrity, (aside from certain aspects of gender relations) just an ‘us and them’ story in which all humans should unite against the monster who could be walking next to you.

Double Star is, on the other hand, perhaps the most extreme example of Heinlein’s theme of civic duty. In this novel, Lorenzo Smythe, a young, not too successful actor is hired to take the place of a great politician and statesman who has been kidnapped in order to interfere with a diplomatic event that will seal the alliance between humans and Martians. If the kidnapped man, Joseph Bonforte, does not appear on time to complete the Martian ceremony, war between planets is likely.

Lorenzo, after some quibbling and rabbitting, agrees, and does an excellent job. And then the real Bonforte is found, his brain deeply damaged by an overdose of drugs. Smythe must carry on in the role until the damage can be repaired. Then the final blow - Bonforte dies, and Smythe must face an enormously difficult decision - return to his own life and kill the plans for reforms and expansion of franchise to all the civilisations in the solar system, or sink fully beneath Bonforth’s identity and carry out Bonforth’s plans. It’s the ultimate demand - carry out a vast amount of good by giving up your own self, or hold onto your identity and let the future good of society be destroyed.

The Door into Summer is another time travel story in which the ultimate goal is to still be a youngish man when the prepubescent redhead you fancy is grown up enough to marry you. It’s at the heart of a much longer, convoluted tale of revenge and regaining what was indisputably yours through a story of multiple doubling up of time lines due to frozen sleep and real time travel. The plot is complex and involves a lot of legal maneuvering, both in the original betrayal and again in the secondary time loop that represents the retribution and reclamation of one’s own.

And because it’s important, relax and enjoy the ride, the cat lives.

Finally, there’s Starship Troopers, which was originally much shorter, had a more poignant ending, and was intended as a juvenile in the lineage of Space Cadet. The later showed a world at peace and the moral youth growing into it. Starship Troopers addresses the question - what if we are at war through no fault of our own? What is civic duty in a universe of violence?

It’s the most didactic book Heinlein had written up to this time - vast sections of text are set in the protagonist’s high school Moral Philosophy class, or in later conversations with remarkably erudite platoon sergeants, officers, and another Moral Philosophy class in Officer Training School and consist of arguments for the kind of society that Heinlein examines in his world of war with creatures you cannot talk to or negotiate with.

His regular publisher rejected it because they felt the story was thin and the text too didactic. It was picked up by another publisher who asked for something a bit more adult, with more material. Heinlein added a few battle sequences, took the protagonist from boot camp through officer training, and gave it a more positive ending.

It’s basically the story of privileged favoured son Johnny Rico - incidentally, one of the first Asian (Filipino) protagonists in science fiction - who joins the infantry on a whim and learns through his training and his service the way to fulfill one’s civic duty in a world based on war.

Starship Trooper’s moral world is a grim one indeed, where the height of civic duty boils down to one thing only - the willingness to put your life on the line for your society.

Heinlein project, revisited: now that Farah Mendlesohn’s book on Heinlein and his work is out and I’ve started reading it, it’s really time to finish the project I’d set for myself, to reread all his sf and fantasy work so I could appreciate her text more readily. I’d finished up the early novels and the short stories, so now for a quick tour through the juveniles.

The juvenile is an odd thing. It usually begins with the protagonists squarely set in the category of children, because they need to be people that a young person can identify with as someone like them, or at least like them in a few years. These days we also have the young adult novel, which lets us fudge things, pick almost adult protagonists that perhaps could reasonably overthrow a government or build a ship that will take us to the moon. But for adults to read and believe that a child could do these things requires a strong ability to invoke a sense that yes, it could happen. Never mind that n our past, people we’d consider children have in fact done such things - we don’t see the possibility of children doing it n now. Thus, with Heinlein’s first juvenile, we begin within pages to accept the ideas that an adult man with access to used rocketry equipment and some radioactive fuel can build a space ship - more, would choose to do so - with three teenaged amateur rocket enthusiasts.

Reading the juveniles together in close sequence allows for an interesting reading of the exploration and colonisation of the solar system, at least among the first half dozen stories. Whether this reading was part of Heinlein’s intentions with these books, I do not know. But viewed together, it seems to be on the one hand, Heinlein’s view of how and why civilisations spread to new worlds, and on the other, how to discover and train the kind of ethical man who will carry the best of a civilisation to its new home.

Rocket Ship Galileo, 1947

Heinlein’s first post-war novel, and first juvenile novel was not sold to Campbell at Astounding. It focuses on three budding young rocket scientists and their trials to build a real space ship - something a lot of kids were engrossed in in the late 40s and 50s, when it seemed as though every neighbourhood had some kind of space exploration club. Of course, this is set a bit in the future, when rockets are already a part of life, but the moon is still a goal. So these kids and their science club have a head start over the youth Heinlein anticipated as the audience for his novel.

What’s interesting about the protagonists, young Art Mueller, Morry Abrams and Ross Jenkins is that they’s all highly intelligent and motivated, they attend a science-and tech oriented high school, and they have adult mentors who let them actually get away with building a space ship. They are also a varied group - Morry is Jewish, and Art is German, his father a defector.

Most of the book is straight procedural with a shot of mystery/espionage - what has to be done to build and crew a space ship, and how to handle mysterious break-ins and other disquieting events while doing so. In places, it reads like a rocketry manual rather than a novel. It gets busier, of course, when they find both a secret Nazi base and ruins from an ancient civilization awaiting them, and end up saving the world by the skin of their teeth. Pretty impressive for a bunch of scholkids.

From a teenager’s perspective, it’s a great adventure story, but read from the viewpoint an adult, it sure looks like criminally negligent exploitation of three naive young men by a single-minded scientist who can't persuade anyone to give him the backing to carry out his experiments in a safe and ethical manner. Instead, he uses the unpaid labour of the boys and never discloses the full scope of the risks – particularly the indications that someone who is not averse to violence is trying to keep him from getting to the moon. Also, what is up with the parents of these boys? Two boys simply tell their parents about the scheme, and they say “if that’s really what you want, dear.” The third set of parents initially say no, but when creepy exploitative scientist talks to them about using their kids as unpaid labour and risking their lives in space, we discover that all the parents are really worried about is their kid not going to a good school in the fall – and when creepy scientist promises to tutor the boy, this makes it OK.

As a story, there are a number of things not particularly well thought-out, but Heinlein was at the beginning of his career writing juveniles, and he hadn’t quite hit on the formula for making a protagonist young enough, but not too young, which is a tricky thing to do.


Space Cadet, 1948

Space Cadet is the classic boy’s boarding school juvenile dressed up as a training camp for an elite force of Peacekeepers. It’s also a picture of how to train the ideal individual, if that person also has to be a spaceman and a peacekeeper.

The first half of the novel covers the basic training of the protagonist Matt Dodson and his friends, with special attention paid to those psychological moments that set out the change from civilian mindset to that of the committed patrolman, and more importantly, the spaceman. This is something common to Heinlein’s writing about living in space - the idea that there is a kind of psychological distinction between the spacing outlook on life and the ‘groundhog’ outlook.

Once Matt and his friends are truly cadets, the action begins. On their first cadet mission, their ship locates a lost vessel, carrying information indicative of an ancient civilisation. They then encounter a nasty confrontation brewing between humans and indigenous Venusians that only the Patrol can resolve, proving that after everything they’ve been through, they are true members of the Patrol. T

Red Planet 1949

Heinlein’s third juvenile is set on Mars, and among other things continues to drop hints about Martians, which will come to fullness in Stranger in a Strange Land. Here we meet young colonist Jim Marlowe, his friend Frank Sutton, and his Martian ‘pet’ Willis. No one in the colony has any idea that Willis is actually an infant of the dominant species, but Jim forms a close rapport with him, and senses that he is more than just an animal. When Jim and Frank go away to boarding school, at one of the communities on the path from the northern settlement, where the colony spends the summers, to the southern settlement, where it spends the winters, Wills goes with him.

But major changes that will affect all the colonists are in the air, and they begin with the Headmaster banning pets and confiscating Willis to sell to a zoo on earth. Jim and Frank discover this, and the company’s plans to end the habitual migrations, and escape the school in an attempt to get home and warn their families.

They run into some serious difficulties, but thanks to Willis, Jim and Frank are accepted as water brothers to Willis’ family, and are able to bring proof of The Company’s perfidy to the Martian settlers. Here as in other places, Heinlein’s inclinations are capitalist but anti-corporatist, as the human settlers defeat the Company and force a reevaluation of the new policies, while the Martians ensure that those who wanted to put Willis in a cage are never seen again.

Farmer in the Sky, 1950

In Farmer in the Sky, we begin to see the somewhat dystopic future for earth that is hinted at in Red Planet and some of the historical sequence stories - population pressure driving immigration, scarcity of resources, rationing.

Farmer in the Sky is a book about the perils of homesteading, a topic Heinlein was clearly attracted to, and would revisit in other novels, particularly Time Enough for Love - and if a particular theme is of importance to him, then it will be found somewhere in Time Enough for Love.

Bill Lermer and his father George are unhappy on Earth. George is a widower who wants a new beginning; Bill wants a different kind of life. Naturally, the new arrivals on Ganymede discover that conditions are far from what was claimed, the Colonial commission has set things up to work in the worst possible way, the current settlers resent them, and life on Ganymede is going to be ten times harder than they’d thought it could be....

But it’s possible, with some good will, and what follows is a manual on what you need to think about to colonise a new planet, and what not to do. Again, there is a strong suggestion that there are people who are ‘right’ for the rigours of a life away from earth, and it’s made quite clear that those who aren’t ‘the right stuff’ aren’t really pleasant people to be around, at least in Heinlein’s eyes. The kind of person needed for the job of space man or planetary colonist is the sort of person Heinlein sets his readers up to identify with. And the events of Farmer in the Sky are exactly what one would expect to find in an examination booklet on finding out if one has what’s needed to be the best colonial settlers.

Between Planets, 1951

In previous juveniles, Heinlein has implied some tensions between Earth and various colonial governments, and the colonies, developing independence, filling up with (at least for the first few generations) people who have, and are, the ‘right stuff.’ In Between Planets, one of the few real interplanetary citizens - Donald Harvey, a young man born in freefall, his mother a Venusian, his father from Earth, both scientists now living on Mars - gets caught in the middle of an interplanetary war when Venus declares its independance while he is at school on Earth. His unusual birth circumstances mean that no one trusts him, and no one is willing to do the obvious thing of sending the neutral citizen to a neutral planet. And as it turns out, he’s not exactly neutral - his parents represent an unknown but active factor in all the negotiations and allegiances, and they’ve committed Don to something he doesn’t know about, without his consent or understanding. This will leave Don with two serious ethical issues - first, which of all the people who want the secret he knows, are the people his parents would have trusted, and second, does he agree with his parents?

Between Planets is straight action all the way to the end, with very little of the blatant ‘how to be the right kind of person’ training in the earlier books. What we see instead is Don navigating the path to an ethical decision.

Rolling Stones, 1953

Rolling Stones is a comic, picaresque novel about an eccentric family of Lunar colonists, and in some ways resets the cycle we’ve seen in the earlier juveniles. Now it’s Luna that’s beginning to be too quiet and commonplace for the born explorer. As Hazel Stone, a character one will see as a child revolutionary in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, says to her complacent son, ‘Your mind may not be made up; mine is. Luna is getting to be like any other ant hill. I'm going out somewhere to find elbow room, about a quarter of a billion miles of it.’

The Family Stone consists of Hazel Stone, engineer and veteran of the revolution, her son Roger, also an engineer by trade, formerly mayor of Luna and currently a comic strip writer looking for a change of pace, his wife Edith, a doctor and sculptor, and their children, Meade, the irrepressible twins Castor and Pollux, and the youngest of the family of supergeniuses, Buster, aka Lowell, potential telepath and certified pain in the neck. Before very long, his restless family has convinced Roger to buy a family spaceship.

Before you can say “second star to the right..” the Stones are off on a Grand Tour of the solar system, with virtually al the action resulting from Cas and POl’s generally unsuccessful attempts to not quite con the locals into a business scheme. At the end of the book, they have floundered through Mars, an Asteroid mining city, and Ceres, and are preparing to ramble on toward Titan. The ideal colonist now lives in space.

Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation may be labeled as young adult fiction, but this is no light and easy read. IT’s just after the Civil War in America, and the dead have begun to rise. The shamblers are variously blamed on Emancipation, the wrath of God, or a strange new infectious agent. In America, black and indigenous people have been designated as shock troops, and from the age of 12, young girls and boys of colour are taught how to fight zombies and keep the white folks of America safe.

Dread Nation is the story of one such girl, mixed race Jane McKeene, daughter of a white southern woman of means to an unspecified black man, certainly not her absent husband. She’s being taught to be an Attendant - a lady’s bodyguard - at one of the best schools for Negro girls, but Jane is not exactly a devoted scholar or dutiful pupil, though she does excel at marksmanship and hand to hand combat.

In the course of her somewhat unapproved extracurricular activities, Jane, her ‘bad boy’ friend Jackson, and her fellow student, Katherine, a black girl light enough to easily pass, discover some nefarious plots, of course, and are sent off to languish in the coils of one of them - Summerland, a western colony patrolled day and night by black and indigenous folk kidnapped into service to keep the community safe for white settlers.

But even Summerland hides dangers and secrets still unknown to Jane and Katherine. As the situation grows ever worse Jane needs al her intelligence, ingenuity, and battle skills to survive.

First in a series.

The buzz about Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone has been building higher and higher, and there’s a host of reviews out there voicing one superlative after another about this book. Some of that buzz, I think, is warranted - but not all of it.

The story is set in the land of Orisha, which is largely based on the place we call Nigeria, and draws heavily on Yoruban culture and tradition. The time period is vague, there are some things - mostly weapons and instruments of control and torture - that hint at a well-developed technology, but at the sane time, people travel on the backs of animals and soldiers carry swords.

The land of Orisha was until fairly recently a place where maji, also called diviners, people who can - or could, at one time, not too long ago, before the magic disappeared - call on extraordinary powers, were in the ascendancy, mostly using their abilities for the wellbeing of the people, but slowly falling into the corruption that power brings, coming to be hated and feared rather than loved and cherished. Eleven years before the novel opens, the powers of all the maji simply vanished, leaving them helpless before the resentment of the ordinary populace. King Saran, not himself of a maji family, ordered the Raid, in which thousands of maji were killed or taken prisoner, the remainder stripped of their possessions and position, condemned to live as a marked and reviled caste, easy to recognise by their darker skin and white hair.

Zelie is a maji, the daughter of a maji woman who died in the Raid and a non-maji father, a simple fisherman. Like several other young women in her village, she has been trained in secret to fight with a staff. The story begins with Zelie and her non-maji brother Tzain traveling from their own village to the royal city of Lagos to sell a rare fish at the market there, in the hopes of bargaining for enough money to pay the crippling taxes levied on families with diviners.

Zelie sells the fish successfully, but before she can leave Lagos, she is approached by a terrified young woman, nobility by her paler skin and rich clothing, who begs her help in escaping the king’s soldiers. Impulsively, Zelie does just that, which results in the three young people fleeing from Lagos, now marked as fugitives.

The young woman is Amari, the King’s daughter, who, horrified on seeing her father kill her closest friend, a diviner servant girl, has stolen an artefact that seems to have the power to awaken the lost gifts of the diviners, and fled from the palace. Tasked with pursuing her and her new allies Zelie and Tzain is her brother Inan, heir to the throne and a captain of the King’s guard. The novel, first in a trilogy, tells the story of Zelie, Amari, and Tzain’s quest to use the artefact to restore the powers of the maji in Orisha.

I have a strange, mixed reaction to this novel. Perhaps because it is intended for young adults, perhaps because it seems to borrow heavily from some of the storylines of The Last Airbender, the narrative line seems overly simple, almost predictable at times. The romantic element was actually somewhat repellant to me, because it reinforces the tropes of a fated attraction to the man who hurts you, and trying to save him through changing him. I became frustrated with what seemed to me to be a repetitive structure through much of the novel where story elements were recycled to create more action, without much real movement. Even more frustrating, in some ways, the story seems to spend more energy on Inan’s journey than that of Zelie or Amari - but that could just be me, identifying more with the two girls and wanting the focus to be on them, not the self-loathing, violent and untrustworthy ‘bad boy’ who is nonetheless positioned as the love object for the story’s main protagonist. However, the final scenes appear to subvert some of the more annoying tropes, so I have hopes that the second novel will be more rewarding in these areas.

But. Despite my criticisms of the novel, there are some solid reasons behind the praise it has garnered.

It’s without doubt a powerful exploration of oppression set in a wholly African-derived world. This is a novel of a kind we still have far too little of, a novel that draws on African history, culture, religion, that assumes as a given that a story in which all the characters are black is just as relevant as the thousands of novels in which all the characters are white. It is important because of where it is set, what are its sources, who are its heroes.

And then, too, there is the kind of world in which this story is set, the circumstances that surround the story. The individual incidents of oppression, violence, dysfunctional family dynamics, and wholly toxic masculinity that the two girls encounter again and again in their quest to restore the connection between men and gods that allows magic to flourish, are powerful, searing, indelible images. It is important that we see the horrors that humanity inflicts upon its most vulnerable, that we never forget why we fight for justice.

In the final analysis, it seems to me as if the weight of meaning behind the story is more potent than the story itself, and that leaves me oddly dissatisfied, wishing for a stronger, more unique story to pin such important messages on. But perhaps I’m asking too much. This is, after all, a first novel from a young writer. And had it not been for the hype, I think I’d have been more receptive. As it was, I kept waiting for this book to astound me, to be life-changing and awe-inspiring, and it simply isn’t a strong enough work to deliver on that overwrought expectation. It’s a good debut novel, it presents its secondary world well, and carries some powerful messages about fighting oppression, and it’s an important addition to the growing number of science fiction and fantasy novels that are not based in European history and culture. It’s a good read, and I expect Adeyemi’s work to mature over time. But for me, Children of Blood and Bone does not live up to the press it’s received.

Judith Tarr’s novel, Living in Threes, is a complex interweaving of three stories, in three times, each story focused on a young woman on the verge of adulthood, navigating the journey of her own growing independence while negotiating changes in her relationships with family, and facing the ultimate challenges of becoming an adult, the parameters of life and loss, birth and death.

In the present, Meredith wants nothing more than to spend the summer before her 16th birthday hanging out with friends, riding and taking care of the horses that she loves - especially Bonnie, her Lippizaner, who is pregnant - doing all the things she’s been planning on. But her mother has a an unwelcome surprise - everything has been arranged for her to spend the summer away from home, friends, and her overworked mother - a cancer survivor - in Egypt, working on a dig with her aunt Jessie, an archaeologist.

Meredith has strange dreams. Some of them are about Meru, a young girl living in the future, soon to become a space pilot, who receives a strange call for help from her mother, supposedly on a mission far from Earth. But when she tracks the message to the source, what she finds is worse than anything she could have imagined - plague, quarantine, and death.

Others are about Meritre, a young Egyptian girl, a singer in a temple chorus. The land is recovering from plague, in which Meritre’s baby sister died. Meritre’s mother, also a singer, is pregnant again, but her health may not be strong enough to carry the baby safely. And while the plague is mostly over, still, her father, a sculptor, is ill with something that worries Meritre.

One thing draws them together - a blue scarab bead. Meritre buys it in a marketplace, Meredith finds it in a tomb, Meru is given it by her mother as a clue. And when each one has the scarab in her own time, the three discover that they have one soul, and that sharing their knowledge and experience can help all of them face the challenges before them.

It’s a beautiful story about three young women, growing up and finding courage to do the impossible.

Kang Kira is the Dragon Musado, a hero foretold in prophecy destined to be the protector of a king who will unite the seven kingdoms and restore peace and prosperity. But it seems as though the prophesy is doomed to failure. The foretold king, her cousin Prince Taejo, has been kidnapped by a dragon who demands the return of a talisman that Kira has taken from him, as part of the fulfillment of the prophecy. The dragon has taken the prince to a temple filled with Kira’s adversaries, and surrounded by the enemies of Prince Taejo’s kingdom. If she goes there to return the talisman, Taejo will never achieve his destiny - and she will likely be killed. Yet if she does not go, Taejo will die.

Thus opens King, the third volume of Ellen Oh’s YA fantasy cycle The Prophecy, set in a secondary world based on Korean history and myth.

Kira sets off on a mission to rescue the prince, accompanied by Kim Jaewon, one of the supporters she has gathered during her quest to fulfil the prophecies. Their plan is to sneak up on the temple while the remains of Prince Taejo’s navy create a diversion. The early part of the mission is almost lighthearted, as Jaewon teasingly presses his suit and Kira pushes him back, but with some reluctance. It’s a nice touch, the reminder that simple things like courting the girl you like can co-exist with momentous prophecies and dangerous deeds.

The journey to the temple where the prince is being held has all the tropes of the fated journey - Kira and Jaewon encounter one situation after another, some requiring compassion, some requiring fighting, meeting with tests and allies who give them information about what to expect. It is very much in the style of legendary journeys, but peppered with the humour of human situations. Kira must navigate the dangers of the temple alone, facing still more tests, but not only does she save the prince, but fulfils the final requirements of prophesy, and is confirmed as Dragon Musado by the ancient king of dragons himself.

Next comes the hard part - facing and defeating the Demon Lord, driving out the Yamato, and uniting the seven kingdoms under the rule of the young prince.

This was a good end to an enjoyable story about belief, sacrifice, compassion, courage, and becoming at peace with ones’ self - all excellent ideas to be wrapped up in an adventure about a young girl finding herself, and finding true love, in the midst of chaos and turmoil.

More Hugo reading. This time, it’s a finalist in the Best Young Adult Novel category (which is, technically, not a Hugo just as the Campbell award is not a Hugo) - Summer in Orcus by T. Kingfisher (who is also known as Ursula Vernon). And it is a charmingly original portal fantasy, a work of whimsical imagination, calling back to earlier, even Victorian-era children’s fantasies with talking animals and curious landscapes. There’s more than a touch of Narnia, and a fair bit of Alice’s Wonderland, here, and it’s all held together by a truly delightful heroine, 11 year-old Summer.

Summer is a human girl, and lives with her mother in a world much like ours. Her mother works hard, but is more than a little defeated by the stresses of single parenthood and an ungenerous working environment. She is far too protective of Summer, who isn’t allowed to do much of anything except go to school and play in her own yard. And in some ways she’s come to rely on Summer for emotional support when the world has gotten too much.

And then one day, when Summer is playing alone in her back yard, Baba Yaga’s chicken-legged hut comes wandering down the alleyway and settles down just behind Summer’s house. Baba Yaga, being in a good mood, offers to give Summer her heart’s desire - but Summer doesn’t know what that is, although she does think becoming a shapeshifter might be fun. Baba Yaga, however, seems to have her own notion of what Summer needs, or knowledge of a place that needs a girl like Summer, and suddenly Summer is in the very strange land of Orcus, with nothing but the clothes she’s wearing, the lock that was on the back gate of her yard, a talking weasel given to her by the crone, and three pieces of advice she’s read in a stained glass window.

Almost immediately, Summer meets three shape-changing women, and a tree whose leaves turn into frogs. But the tree is dying, and the shapechangers tell her that there is a cancer at the heart of this world. Summer doesn’t think of herself as a hero, and she certainly doesn’t think of herself as someone who can save a world, but she does want to try and make things better for just one tree, which has used up all its remaining energy to produce an acorn, which Summer carries with her along with the lock and the weasel as she follows the advice of the shapechangers to find the Waystation, where perhaps she can learn her Way.

As Summer travels through Orcus, looking for something that will save the frog-tree, she encounters many unusual beings, some who help her, some who want to stop her, and some who decide to come with her. There’s Glorious, a wolf who turns into a house when the sun sets, and is being hunted by real estate procurers. There’s Reginald Almondsgrove, a somewhat foppish hoopoe, and his flock of valet birds. And there’s the Imperial Geese Ounk and Anhk, sisters and warriors.

Summer’s adventures are at times whimsical and at times truly frightening, and while she does discover what is wrong at the heart of this world, and makes it a little better for a while, it comes at a cost, and part of that cost is Summer’s innocence. But when Summer finally returns to her own world, one does have the feeling that yes, she has gained her heart’s desire, and it will be with her always.

There are a lot of wonderful things about this book, but one of the best is that, while there is a battle between agents of good and evil, it’s not the climax of book and it doesn’t really solve anything. It’s the skills that Summer brings with her to Orcus, and the steadfast loyalty of her companions, that makes it possible for things to be better.

Frances Hardinge’s A Skinful of Shadows is a YA historical fantasy, set in England during beginning if the civil war. Makepeace Lightfoot, the central character, is a young girl, not yet 13, when the novel begins. Makepeace is not exactly an ordinary girl. Her dreams are haunted by ghosts, who she feels trying to burrow into her mind. After the death of her mother in a riot, she learns that she is the illegitimate child of Sit Peter Fellmott, now dead as well, the scion of a family with a history of occultism possessed of the ability to absorb the ghosts of the dead. Her mother’s family being unwilling to keep her, she us sent to the Fellmott estate of Grizehayes, where she becomes a kitchen servant.

Nit long after arriving at Grizehayes, Makepeace realises that she has already absorbed a ghost, that of a tormented dancing bear that had been haunting the marshes near her former home. It’s not easy, keeping the bear’s instincts from overwhelming her own feelings and actions, but she knows that she must keep her secret from the family patriarch, Obadiah, in whom she senses something dark and threatening.

When Makepeace finally is confronted with the full secret of the Fellmotts, and their intentions for her, she makes a desperate bid for escape, beginning a journey that takes her from the court-in-exile of King Charles at Oxford to the heart of the Parliamentarian forces, seeking a way to free herself -and her half-brother James, already a victim of the Fellmott legacy - forever. Along the way, she chooses to absorb several ghosts - mostly out of necessity, hoping their knowledge or skills will help her, but partly, too from pity, offering them a ‘second chance.’

Hardinge’s narrative is distinctly critical of the excesses of the aristocracy of Charles’s era, but at the same time does not soften the harshness of the Puritan vision of the correct, Christian society. Her sympathies - and Makepeace’s - lie with the common people who suffer from war no matter what side they may favour, who mostly just want to be left alone.

Makepeace is a character that grows on one, as she learns from her experiences and grows strong enough to defeat her enemies, find ways of using her strange power for some good, and build a life for herself, her brother, and the community of souls within her.

This is the first of Hardinge’s novels I’ve read, but the enjoyment I gained in reading this one makes me think that I ought to explore her other books.

Fonda Lee’s young adult novel Exo is set in a future society where humans are subordinate to an alien race, the zhree. The fortunate humans are “marked,” tattooed to indicate that they are loyal to a zhree patron. Most other humans struggle to find work, hoping to be marked themselves. And some humans resist, even after a century of zhree presence on earth.

Donovan Reyes is 17, and marked, a soldier-in-erze. He’s an exo, surgically modified with alien technology that protects him for projectile weapons, heals his wounds, gives him advantages over unmodified humans. But it still doesn’t prevent him from being captured by the resistance, known as Sapience, during a routine check of a civilian tip. What keeps the resistance from killing him at first is the fact that he’s the son of the Prime Liaison, the human representative of the zhree.

Lee’s vision of conquerors and resistance is a nuanced one. The alien zhree take good care of their human associates, especialy those accepted into the zhree social network, those “in erze.” They are patronised, they have no political autonomy, they have been colonised, but they are not slaves. It’s very much a rcapitulation of the “white man’s burden” style of colonial rule, with the zhree as benevolent rulers and compliant humans as junior partners.

And the resistance is not necessarily the ‘good guys’ - they are engaged in guerilla warfare, and that includes all the tools, including bombings, assassinations, hostage-takings and provocations intended to make the aliens deal more harshly with humans, to generate more support for the cause. They torture captured exos to death and release films of these executions. They don’t protect innocent civilians caught up in violent interactions with zhree or human exos. They are fighting by any means necessary and there is little that’s noble about their methods - it’s a realistic picture of resistance fighters justifying the means by the ends.

As an exo, Donovan is “other” to both non-modified humans, and zhree. He is only really comfortable with other exos. Though his father sees him and other exos as a bridge between the two peoples, he is in reality neither fully part of either group. As if to underscore the way his identity is caught between worlds, once he is taken to a secret resistance, he learns that the mother who left him as a child is one of the resistance leaders. Part human, part zhree, he is also caught between the humans who comply, and the humans who resist, bound by ties of family to both factions.

Lee crafts a tightly woven story, combining YA themes of coming to terms with the influence of one’s parents and finding one’s own moral code with standard science fiction themes of alien invasion and colonisation and the use of advanced technology. All of the factions - rebels, marked humans, exos and zhree - are drawn with complexity; there are no clear heroes or villains, and no monolithic blocks where everyone shares the same opinions. There are just sentient beings doing what they think is best for their people, however they may define that. I thought that Donovan’s situation at the end of the book was a little far-fetched, but so did several of the characters, which made it a bit more believable. This the first book in a series, and I am curious to see where it leads.

In the dystopic world of Cindy Pon’s YA novel Want, the earth is irretrievably polluted. A tiny percentage of people, the ones whose families run the Corporations, receive the benefits of wealth - genetic engineering, safe neighbourhoods, clean food, water and air. They live normal life spans, insulated from the poverty and disease which mark the short lives of the others. When they leave their clean homes, they wear designer environmental suits to protect the. From the poisoned world everyone else inhabits. In Taipei, they are known as “you” people; the poor who do the work and die from hunger and the toxic waste that surrounds them are called “mei” people.

The protagonist, Jason Zhou, is a member of an ecological activist group, mostly teenagers from a variety of class backgrounds, led by a respected scientist, Dr. Nataraj. They’ve been supporting her quest to launch legislation that might begin to reduce the pollution that chokes the island, but nothing they do has made any headway against the influence of the powerful corporations.

And then, Dr. Nataraj is murdered, her office found ransacked. The group’s hacker, Lingyi, uncovers evidence suggesting the hit was ordered by Jin Feiming, “the richest and most powerful man in Taiwan” and head of the Jin Corporation, the organisation that builds and provides the power sources for the suits that protect the wealthy from the environment around them.

A desperate plan evolves, to infiltrate Jin Corp, destroy its production facility, disabling the environmental suits and forcing the “yous” to live in the same poisoned world that everyone else does.

Pon’s dystopic thriller is a tightly plotted narrative, with a memorable setting and strongly realised characters. The non-Western setting and the multi-ethnic cast - the main characters are Chinese, Indian and Filipino - make this a welcome addition to the growing list of diverse YA literature. There’s some very kickass female characters (two of whom are queer), a romance that grows across class lines, plenty of action and suspense, and a strong message about environmental issues and corporate callousness and greed. Entertaining and thought-provoking fiction like this is something we can always use more of.