When I was a teenager, I lied quite a bit. Mostly about homework and covering for things my parents didn’t want me to do. But also I would do it to make myself look better. Did you know I drove a Ferrari once? (No, not really.) My insides are pretty boring. I still lie sometimes. When you lie you have to remember what you told and who you told it to (and who they might have told). It’s an exhausting experience mentally.

I volunteer as a mentor at a local public high school. The kids I work with lie a lot. Mostly about the same things I lied about as a teenager: schoolwork and covering for things their guardians don’t want them to do. Not so much directly to me, as I’m not an authority figure. But sometimes admitting the truth to anyone makes you feel vulnerable. Very few people want to be vulnerable. For the listener, the experience is trying as well. I stop listening sometimes, because I don’t know what ground is solid enough to stand on anymore.

Justine Larbalestier’s Liar opens with the protagonist Micah Wilkins, a young black girl on scholarship at a private school in New York City, telling the reader that she’s a liar. Then Micah tells the reader about some of the lies she’s told her classmates, such as that she’s a boy. Since she has short hair, is relatively flat-chested, and plays decent basketball, they believe her. That is, until one of the girls hears her laugh and realizes a boy doesn’t laugh that way. Then Micah replaces that lie with another, that she was born hermaphroditic and that’s why she was ashamed to let everyone know she’s a boyish girl.

The book is divided into three running threads of commentary. Before is the thread for Micah’s secret relationship with her boyfriend Zach. Secret from friends at school, because Zach has another girlfriend. Secret from her parents, because Micah’s parents have forbidden her from dating. The After thread concerns what happens to Micah after Zach disappears and the police find his body. Suspicion falls on Micah because of her secret relationship and her well-known proclivity to lie. And the third thread contains bits and pieces of Micah’s history and that of her odd family.

Shortly into the book I realized that Micah could be lying to me, the reader. She sorta warns that this might be the case on the first page, but confirms it solidly later on. After this idea settles in, I didn’t know what to make of any of the things that Micah said. Nothing. And that’s a problem.

In an appearance at the University Book Store on Monday, Justine Larbalestier talked a bit about this. There’s a contract between fiction and a reader. The book is a lie. It’s stuff the author made up. The contract is that the reader pretends the book is the truth. The inability to do that in some cases ruins books. A person might not read fantasy because they can’t pretend wizards flinging bolts of magic is real.

The problem with an unreliable narrator is that it breaks that contract. I can’t pretend what I was just told is the truth. In most stories I’ve read with an unreliable narrator (very few actually), the lies are limited and sometimes there’s a *wink-wink* effect that lets you in on the truth according to the book. Liar doesn’t have those characteristics.

Pretty much everything in the book could be a lie. Micah is the narrator 100% of the way. The perspective never shifts out of the first person. Micah changes her story so often that even the constant things seem inconstant. Micah is the girl who cried wolf one too many times. That interferes with my relationship with the book.

The upshot of all that is that I don’t know if I actually liked the experience of reading the book. Not yet at least. It’s an excellent book. I haven’t read anything else that took the a narrator’s reliability to such depths before, and I can’t imagine many doing it so well. Nevertheless, the experience is very unsettling and I haven’t yet decided if I will recommend it generally.

Aside from the unreliable narrator, there’s much to recommend about the book.

Micah Wilkins is an awesome character. It’s not easy to create an outcast character that isn’t a victim. I got a good psychological sense of why she lied. She’s smart but very messed up. Her rebellion makes sense. She understands her parents’ restrictions but chafes at them too.

The secondary characters aren’t quite as well fleshed out, but they all are realistic and interesting. Micah’s parents and family embody an ex-hippie gone native approach to parenting. Her grandparents live on a farm in upstate New York that’s off the grid. Micah’s dad rejects that approach to live in the city. He still lives a mostly unencumbered life as an underpaid travel writer. Both her parents are loose in how they treat Micah but over-protective and stifling in other respects. The teachers, counselors, and students at school don’t have a lot of depth to them but they aren’t caricatures either.

I think Liar captures the high school experience pretty well too. It never goes into a caricature. The strong kids pick on the weak, but it never seems arbitrary like a sit-com.

And one comment about the cover, a previous version of which got a lot of negative publicity. Some of the kids I mentor really do spend a lot of time covering their faces with their jackets like on this cover. Hiding from any kind of attention like Micah frequently does. It’s heartbreaking. While it doesn’t really say much about the plot of the book, I think it really does capture Micah’s demeanor, or what I imagine her demeanor to be.

Now that that’s out of the way, there’s some things I want to discuss about the book that involve spoiling it. So I will go on to page 2 for that. Don’t read that until you’ve read the book or decided you won’t ever read it. Ms. Larbalestier has written that the ending can be taken a couple of different ways. Reading how I interpreted the ending can bias you toward a particular interpretation. Normally I don’t really worry about spoiling a book when the result is the lack of surprise. A book should be stronger than that. But in this case I’d rather not influence your interpretation of the ending. So read on only when you’ve come up with your own opinion.

Some other blogged reviews:

• Writer Musings (spoilers)
• Babbling About Books, and More
• Presenting Lenore
• Fyrefly’s Book Blog
• Hey! Teenager of the Year
• The Book Smugglers

Title: Liar
Author: Justine Larbalestier
Cover creator: Danielle Delaney (designer) / Ali Smith (photographer)
Imprint / publisher: Bloomsbury
Format: Hardcover
Length: 371 p.
Publication date: October 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-59990-305-7
Subject: Honesty — Fiction
LC classification: PZ7.L32073 Li 2009

The comments below may contain spoilers. Don’t read them if you ever care to read the book and haven’t yet done so.

Show me a cover picturing a woman in leather or boots with a gun and you may just have sold me a good impulse buy. Sadly, in the two cases I’ve succumbed I haven’t been particularly thrilled with the book, including Greywalker. It has some strong positives going for it though.

On the negative side, the climactic battle in the book was over something that really would affect only undead creatures, so I didn’t really care about it much. The main character, Harper Blaine, is partially undead and my level of caring toward her is partially attributable to the relative lack of depth of her character. On the positive side, it’s one of the few books I’ve read where normal people run into vampire types and the normal people’s reactions seems reasonable. Also, despite the author being a transplant, I think she portrayed the feel of Seattle better than most books set around here. (Well, except the sooper-sekret vampire club in Pioneer Square.)

Harper Blaine is a private investigator based out of Pioneer Square. When we are introduced to her in the first paragraph, she’s getting her ass handed to her by the subject of one of her investigations. She’s caught him perpetrating some sort of fraud, he doesn’t like it, and he beats the crap out of her. She’s dead. But just for a couple of minutes before the paramedics revive her. Afterward, black and blue, she starts seeing strange things that aren’t attributable to the blurred vision she has from getting beat up. Ghosts.

Yep, ghosts everywhere! Having been dead herself, she can now slide in and out of the land of ghosts, or the Grey (hence, Greywalker). Being new to the ability, she’s not very good at it. But Harper Blaine is now one of the few beings who can go Grey and back, and so all the world of the undead now has it’s own private investigator. Though not all of them know it.

First case, woman hires her to find her son, last seen in the company of a very white serene goth looking guy with big fangy teeth. Second case, a voice on the phone hires her to track down an antique his family lost several decades prior. The antique seems to have a mind of it’s own.

Harper Blaine is really really whiny. Not quite as bad as Meg in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time series, but pretty close. Every time she has to do something, the doing is preceded by several paragraphs to several pages of Harper’s discussion about being afraid to do whatever it is she has to do. In addition, she has these newly found powers to go back and forth to the Grey, and she barely uses them of her own volition. Nearly every time something happens, it’s either an instinctive reaction or it’s someone else doing the work for her.

That makes it really hard to care about Harper Blaine’s character. Since she’s the only viewpoint character, that’s a bad spot to be in. The climactic conflict is over what is essentially a bomb for the undead. Ghosts, vampires, necromancers, and maybe a witch or two. Those are the people who will get blown to smithereens if someone cuts the red wire instead of the blue wire. I don’t care about them. They are bad guys, except for Harper Blaine. And she’s not someone I care to care for either, so the upblowing of the bomb doesn’t pique me.

However, Kat Richardson did capture the feel of the Seattle in which I live. In particular, a brief sojourn into the University District was spot on. I popped for the scene set inside the Grand Illusion theater as well the note about dodging skateboarders while walking the Ave. J. A. Jance set one of her series in the city and does a pretty good job of using the geography to advantage, but the feel of the city is more the feel of Seattle in the 1970s if at all. Greywalker fits better for a younger generation.

If you’re into the urban fantasy genre, I doubt this will be too bad a read. For this sub-genre outsider though, it wasn’t a great introduction.

Other blogged reviews:

• Word Nerd
• The Dreamcatcher Workshop
• Graculus’s Blog

Title: Greywalker
Author: Kat Richardson
Cover creator: Ray Lundgren (designer) / Chris McGrath (artist)
Series: Greywalker; 1
Imprint / publisher: Roc / Penguin
Format: Paperback
Length: 341 p.
Publication date: October 2006
ISBN-10: 0-451-46107-X
Subject: Blaine, Harper (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Women private investigators — Washington (State) — Seattle — Fiction
Subject: Vampires — Fiction
Subject: Seattle (Wash.) — Fiction
LC classification: PS3618.I3447 G74 2006

After reading Midnight Robber last year, I decided to use one of my Audible.com credits to pick up Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring. Brown Girl is Hopkinson’s debut novel, the winner of a new voice in fiction contest that publisher Warner Books held in the 90s.

While interesting, I wasn’t as enamored of this book as I was of Midnight Robber. For one, I expected science fiction. But it’s really a horror novel set in the near future using Caribbean folk religion as the base. Too much voodoo ritual and too much blood for me. Voodoo in quotes not because it’s bad or scary but because I don’t know what the name for the religious tradition is for the kinds of things Hopkinson uses. If you’re into that sort of thing, this will be a great book. I don’t mean that facetiously either. The writing was really quite good. I’m just not into religious themed horror.

Ti-Jeanne lives in near future Toronto, an ungoverned zone abandoned by the Canadian government and ringed with roadblocks to prevent the lawlessness inside from touching the still extant normal society in the rest of Ontario. Kind of like I imagine lots of people want to do to Detroit right now. Her mother left a decade prior to the story, and she lives with her grandmother Gro-Jeanne, who serves both as a medical doctor of sorts as well to the masses and as a Caribbean witch doctor to those who believe. Ti-Jeanne has newborn, not even named just yet. The father is Tony, a low-level runner for the Posse, the drug gang that controls most of Toronto. Ti-Jeanne left Tony to move back in with Gro-Jeanne because he couldn’t straighten himself out and Tony doesn’t know the child is his. She still carries a torch for him though, which is why she talks Gro-Jeanne (who doesn’t like Tony) into helping him escape from Toronto to the burbs. Outside, he’ll straighten up, find work, and send for Ti-Jeanne.

The Posse’s boss Rudy knows Tony is shiftless, but that he has some medic training. They give him a job to find a donor human heart for which the Posse will receive a generous fee from a hospital outside lawless Toronto. He doesn’t want to do this. Tony doesn’t seem so much unwilling to kill, as scared.

Here’s where the religious horror comes into play. To get Ti-Jeanne and Tony out of Toronto, Gro-Jeanne calls on the spirits to hide the two. But then it becomes apparent that Rudy himself has a Caribbean duppy (human soul) under his control. The duppy can do most anything, including track Tony. This starts an escalating war of spirits, which doesn’t end bloodlessly. Really, lots and lots of blood.

Gro-Jeanne, Ti-Jeanne and Tony are great characters. Rudy is more of a caricature, but he’s still pretty enjoyable. The Caribbean flavor to the characters is somewhat interesting as well. Surprisingly, there’s very little unique to Toronto in the story. The Posse’s headquarters is in the CN Tower, and Hopkinson makes liberal use of Toronto’s street names and neighborhoods. But the culture seems to be Caribbean focused. Then again, Toronto isn’t known (at least to me) for it’s distinctive culture.

Unlike Metatropolis, I really enjoyed the narration in Brown Girl in the Ring. Peter Jay Fernandez was the narrator for the book. He did distinct voice characterizations for everyone. Best was the women got female sounding voices, without Fernandez using weird falsettos or anything like that. I won’t shy away from anything he’s reading in the future.

Title: Brown Girl in the Ring
Author: Nalo Hopkinson
Narrator: Peter Jay Fernandez
Imprint / publisher: Recorded Books
Format: Audiobook
Length:
Publication date: 1999
ISBN-13: 978-1-4361-7966-9
Subject: Inner cities — Fiction
Subject: Obeah (Cult) — Fiction
Subject: Future in popular culture — Fiction
Subject: Toronto (Ont.) — Fiction
LC classification: PR9199.3.H5927 B76 1998

Lord save me from self-published books!

This is the second on my reading list from the Feminist SF Top 10 Obscure Speculative Fiction Books. However, in this case, this is one book that should probably stay obscure. Ulises Silva, the author, repeatedly asked his friends/readers to vote up his book. It’s the only generous explanation I have for it winning top spot.

The book has a lot of promise. The premise is that certain people are born with the ability to change reality by writing about it. These Scribes can pen a story, and the story comes true. The other piece of the puzzle is that a shadowy organization consisting of Editors and Researchers exists to check the Scribes and make sure their power doesn’t go to their heads. That’s the set-up. Our plot concerns someone systematically killing Scribes. The Editor organization sends in their best, Io, to figure out who and rid the world of the menace.

One Scribe has really gotten out of control, sending a message to the entire world predicting the apocalypse in one week’s time.

Or I assume that one Scribe has done this. I quit reading before finding out.

Why? The execution of the good idea annoyed me.

The writing is overly florid for one.

Io startled and immediately made up her mind to ignore the call. But her cell phone, nestled in its slot on her center console, continued to blare out. Loudly. Her cabin seemed to amplify its electronic shriek beyond her closed windows, echoing it as a schizophrenic, disharmonic chorus.

Also, the author tends to write in a peculiar passive voice (not technically passive, but might as well be). People don’t do things. They find their legs carrying them places. Hot casings spit themelves out rather than Io emptied the gun into the object of her wrath.

The characters are all over the top clichés with no subtlety to their actions whatsoever. Io lashes out at everything, usually murdering someone in the process. She’s the quintessential angry 16 year old, except she’s not supposed to be 16. Yuniko… pauses… between… every.. phrase she… utters. She’s afraid… to talk… to… anyone. All of Io’s colleagues hate her because she supposedly thinks she’s worthy to judge others. I’d hate her just because she’s a bitch. Their reasons don’t make sense given they do exactly what she does. Not one of the characters made me want to care what happened to them. X-Pac heat.

So in the part I read before giving up, we learn nothing. A couple of things happen with the message about the end of the world. But nothing happens to move the story along.

And as soon as that message gets out, pretty much everyone immediately turns into a bad parody of Lord of the Flies. The world ends in a week, so everyone feels the need to murder their neighbors and set fire to the airport. This is me rolling my eyes.

Thing is, despite the many problems with the book, it could be something with a good editor and a large re-write. Add a little nuance to the characters. Cut the floridness from an 11 to a 10. Move up some of the storyline into the first 100 pages. Do that and this would be a decent book. But in this form it’s unreadable, and I stopped at page 93.

Edit: Read Ulises Silva’s reaction to this review.

Title: Solstice
Author: Ulises Silva
Cover creator: Nicholas DeWolf (artist) / Leda DeWolf (designer)
Imprint / publisher: Tragical Mirth Publishing
Format: Paperback
Length: 342 p. (I stopped at 93)
Publication date: 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-9794513-0-0