Ship Breaker

I was recently out of town for a few days.  I visited a bookstore and bought myself a couple of books there (it was a birthday present to myself!) When I got home I decided to give one of them, Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi, a read.

Ship Breaker caught my eye because of the premise.  It's climate fiction/dystopian, set in New Orleans after the polar ice caps have melted.  Nailer, the main character, is part of a light crew who goes into old ships and dismantles them; light crew take light things like copper wiring, while heavy crew will actually dismantle the steel etc. of the ship. One day Nailer discovers a beached clipper ship and is faced with the decision of whether to claim it as salvage, or rescue the wealthy girl who is its lone survivor.

It took a long time to actually get to Nailer finding the clipper.  First he had some adventures in the ship he was dismantling (he almost drowned in a pocket of oil on board the ship - that incident actually sets the stage for him even considering helping the wealthy girl rather than just claiming her ship as salvage).  Then once he makes his decision, the remainder of the book is Nailer dealing with the consequences of his choice (and largely trying to get away from his father, who is easily the scariest person in the entire book).  So the book kind of dragged a bit, but the climax was sufficiently entertaining (there was a fun boat chase!) that it was overall an alright read.

I also liked that even though the book centered around Nailer, a few other interesting characters were around a fair bit as well.  For the first part of the book, Nailer was usually with Pima; Pima was even with him when the clipper ship was discovered.  Nailer considered Pima and her mother to be more family to him than his own father, so a lot of what he did, he would be thinking about them too (and he had no intention of leaving them behind, no matter what decision he made).  For that reason, I thought Ship Breaker was a good story about the family we make, rather than the family we were born with.

I thought the worldbuilding in Ship Breaker was pretty great.  I liked how Bacigalupi imagined the area around New Orleans once the sea level has risen.  And also how the people like Nailer are able to make their meager living by salvaging ships (and how Nailer constantly appraised his surroundings for salvage - that was a nice touch).

An interesting note is that the next two books of the series follow Tool, an augmented man who is made with dog, hyena, and tiger genetics.  Tool was a far more interesting character than Nailer, (particularly because he is not bound into servitude like all the other augmented people are in this world) so I am tempted to keep reading the series to find out more about him.  If the rest of the series kept following Nailer, I would have been finished with it at the end of this book.

The Marrow Thieves

I read the synopsis of Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves and was totally hooked:

In a futuristic world ravaged by global warming, people have lost the ability to dream, and the dreamlessness has led to widespread madness. The only people still able to dream are North America's Indigenous people, and it is their marrow that holds the cure for the rest of the world. But getting the marrow, and dreams, means death for the unwilling donors. Driven to flight, a fifteen-year-old and his companions struggle for survival, attempt to reunite with loved ones and take refuge from the "recruiters" who seek them out to bring them to the marrow-stealing "factories."

Isn't that great?  I lucked out too that the library had a copy! :)

So The Marrow Thieves is the story of Frenchie, the young fifteen-year old boy the synopsis mentions. At the beginning of the book, Frenchie's brother sacrifices himself so that Frenchie can get away.  Frenchie then manages to find a group of people who are fleeing northward; they take him in and he becomes part of their adopted family.  They spend half of the book fleeing northward to escape the recruiters and their new residential school system that has been created to hold Indigenous people (and later suck the marrow from them).  After a few chance encounters, which diminishes their numbers, they manage to find their way to a small rebellion.  The rebellion agrees to help them rescue one of their elders who had sacrificed herself to the recruiters so the rest of them could escape.

Now I managed to read The Marrow Thieves in a day, so what I'm going to say may seem a bit counter-intuitive: this was a slow, ponderous read.  The book sped up a bit as you got nearer the end, but it was still pretty slow going.  This was especially true after reading Murder on the Orient Express, which has a much faster pace.  I think the slow pace had to do with the writing (but I'm not positive because I've never read anything by Dimaline before so I have nothing to compare it to - plus I am not really thinking straight today - I had a bit of an accident last night which has left me with a bump on my head and headaches).

I wasn't very fond of Frenchie as a character as the book wore on.  He was a confused teenage boy, which was understandable - growing up can be confusing enough without a country hunting you down for your marrow.  But near the end he became super jealous and really confused about his feelings to the point where it was difficult to read/care. Like he literally went to hang out moping on a bed a few times while puzzling through things....it reminded me of the first half of Mockingjay, where it was also boring to read about confused Katniss.

I should say that there were some really interesting characters like Wab.  Unfortunately the book seemed to largely forget these characters existed in the latter half of the book, just making the odd mention of them being there.

I also don't quite know what to make of the ending.  On one hand, it was a good ending which left you with the feels.  But on another hand, it is so open-ended that I don't know what to think. 

But on the plus side, the premise was really cool.  I liked the dystopian world that Dimaline gives us, especially since it is built off of global warming and wars over water, which are both very topical. And the way the residential schools are built on - they are a very sad/upsetting/angering part of Canadian history - I loved how the people in this book had overcome their effects of the past (yet hated how they were having to deal with them all over again, but in a Nazi-deathcamp sort of way). It was a very interesting look at this subject as here in Canada we are presently trying to have an era of Truth and Reconciliation.

And I have to say - I loved all the discussion of Indigenous culture.  I read a lot of fantasy and speculative fiction/genre fiction of one form or another and do not encounter books celebrating Indigenous culture; this was a wonderful treat amid such a serious book.

So where does that leave me?  I loved the idea of The Marrow Thieves and so much of what it brings to the table. But it is still a hard read thanks to its writing style.  I enjoyed chunks of the book, but really wanted to love it more than I did.  And in the end, I think it is worth reading, but it's definitely not for everyone. 

The Handmaid's Tale

After reading The Lovely Bones, I wanted something that was not depressing so I started reading Island: How Islands Transform the World by J. Edward Chamberlin.  My thought was that a nonfiction book should be the opposite of depressing. Unfortunately I was having a really hard time reading it; I would get twenty pages in and have to stop.  After this happened the second night, I reached over to my shelf and grabbed The Handmaid's Tale.  And read 90 pages in one sitting!  

Now make no mistake, from looking for a non-depressing book, The Handmaid's Tale was not a great choice.  It tells the story of Offred, a woman of the Gilean Republic.  Gilead is what became of the United States after some disasters destabilized the world.  Part of the disasters is that many people (men I think?) have become sterile.  So women of childbearing age have become handmaidens, or women who are present only in the hopes that they will get pregnant.  There's a very clear household hierarchy, where the man's wife is ruler of the household; the wives only tolerate the presence of the handmaidens because they can no longer conceive themselves but they want babies.  (I got the feeling that the wives in question were too old to be bearing children).

So Offred goes about her life, explaining what it has become but also remembering what it was like before, when she had her own name, and lived in the United States with her husband, daughter, and cat and was able to see her best friend Moira.  

I really liked the juxtaposition between the two stories, particularly in the beginning.  The beginning of the novel was so good.  Unfortunately I felt like it started to fall apart a bit as it progressed because the plot isn't really that interesting.  Offred's Commander starts inviting her into his rooms at night to play Scrabble (so illegal on many levels - he should not be alone with her, and she should not be using reading skills).  He eventually invites her out to the Commander's "club" (it's very much one of those types of clubs with women everywhere in weird/skimpy costumes).  There she is reunited with Moira for the evening.  After that, the Wife has set her up to have sex with their hired hand Nick because the Wife really, really wants that baby.  Offred starts having an ongoing affair with Nick, risking everything and also losing interest in a lot of the other aspects of her life (this was probably around when the story felt boring to me, plot-wise).  Eventually she is whisked away, whether to a horrible fate or to freedom, we are not made to know.

Except that we know something: the end of the book has a lecture from the future, where professors have uncovered her story, which was left on cassette tapes.  So she at least got away long enough to tell her story to someone (and to have it recorded).  I thought the lecture was a really neat touch to end the book with.

The Handmaid's Tale really felt like something I should have read while I was in school (particularly in University).  It's one of only two stories I've read so far by Margaret Atwood (the other two being "Bluebeard's Egg" and The Edible Woman).  It feels oddly topical right now, with what is going on in the United States.  It's an interesting story with some major flaws in its execution (as one reviewer pointed out on Goodreads, the setting makes no sense because the United States wouldn't go from the way it is today into a weird oppressive society in like a year's time).  I think it was very much worth reading, but it is by no means a favourite book of mine.

Under the Empyrean Sky

I started Chuck Wendig's Under the Empyrean Sky about a month ago. I got it from the library at the time, thinking that as a YA book it would be an easy read. But I couldn't get into it at all. So back to the library it went.

I wanted to try again a few days ago. So I bought it on my Kindle and started reading. To my amazement, I was now into the story and didn't want to put it down!

Under the Empyrean Sky is the tale of Cael McAvoy. Cael is the captain of the Big Sky Scavengers, the second best scavenging crew of Boxelder. Cael's crew flies over the corn fields of the Heartland, looking for anything useful that they can sell to support their families. Cael's tired of being bested in the scavenging game by the mayor's son, the captain of the best scavenging crew in town. But when he spends the crew's ace notes on new panels from his ship just before his ship gets trashed, he's not sure what to do. To make matters worse, he's worried about losing his first mate (and love of his life) when the Empyreans announce their arranged marriages (Obligations) in a few days. And with his mother sick, his sister running off again and his father barely able to scrape by, Cael isn't sure how he'll keep his family afloat. But that's life in the Heartland.

Under the Empyrean Sky was a really interesting book. The world reminded me of The Hunger Games, with the Heartlanders being like the districts, and the Empyrean controlling the world and making the rules from above (quite literally - the Empyrean live on flotillas, flying around above the earth, closing schools and generally making life miserable for the "unenlightened" Heartlanders below them). The Empyrean have outlawed all crops except the corn, which ravages the earth, spreading and killing all other plant life. Their one consolation to the Heartlanders is the Lottery; once a year, a Heartland family is selected to live on the flotillas with the Empyrean.

Cael's crew was pretty great. There's Lane, Cael's helmsman, who lost his family and now lives alone. Lane isn't looking forward to the arranged marriages because he doesn't want to marry any of the girls. The third mate, Rigo, has an abusive father who has sucked the boy's confidence from him. But even though he's afraid, he still manages to find his courage when he really needs to. And Gwennie, the first mate, is the brains of the entire organization. Unfortunately we don't get to see a whole lot of her (spoiler: she's Obligated to the mayor's son; Cael spends a lot of time pining for her or fighting over her, but we don't get to see a whole lot from her perspective). And Cael's dad, Pop, is pretty awesome (another spoiler: he's growing an illegal garden with the help of hobos!)

I guess I was just in the wrong frame of mind when I started reading Under the Empyrean Sky the first time. But I'm super glad I gave it a second chance. And now I can't wait for the second book, Blightborn, which comes out later this month!

Kindle Book: Mockingjay

So I did it again. I finished Mockingjay in one day. I told myself I wasn't going to, but as I was reading, I just didn't want to put it down. At this point I just wanted to know how the story ended.

I'd like to take this moment to give another spoiler warning. Now that I've read all three books, I will be saying things that give away earlier plot points. I'd also like to discuss Mockingjay in more detail than I've done for the other two books. So if you haven't read the trilogy yet, you might want to stop reading.

Mockingjay was a really strange entry in the Hunger Games trilogy. As I was reading it, I was struck a few times by how it felt like I was reading a completely different story. Sure, the characters were all there (or mostly there anyway - although even the characters who died tended to come up quite often). I find myself comparing Mockingjay to Worldwired, the final book of the Jenny Casey trilogy by Elizabeth Bear. No, Mockingjay doesn't start following other characters. But the scope of the story changes.

The one word that comes to mind when I think of Mockingjay is "revolution" (or "rebellion" works too). At the end of Catching Fire, Katniss was rescued from the arena along with a couple of the other tributes only to discover that District 12, her home, no longer exists. It was firebombed, much the same as District 13 was in the Dark Days which preceded the Capitol's complete control of the country and the beginning of the Hunger Games. Her rescuers are bringing her to District 13 which was actually not destroyed as everyone was led to believe. Unfortunately Peeta was left at the arena and is now in the hands of President Snow.

Katniss has been the spark that began the rebellions in several of the Districts. Those in charge of the rebellion (mainly headed by the President of District 13) want Katniss to continue rallying and inspiring the revolution by becoming the Mockingjay, the symbol of her pin (and the dress her stylist made for her to wear during Catching Fire). After a lot of time resisting, Katniss eventually agrees, but only if the tributes who were left behind in the arena (Peeta and a few others) will be given immunity.

And so begins Katniss's adventures in propaganda. After an initial attempt to produce a video in-studio fails (Katniss is a terrible actress), she is sent into the field. The shoot is supposed to be safe, with Katniss walking around a hospital talking to the wounded, but the hospital is attacked, giving Katniss the opportunity to shoot down some hovercraft. This gets her camera crew some amazing footage.

Meanwhile, President Snow hasn't been idly sitting by. He keeps staging interviews of Peeta on TV, showing Katniss how much Peeta is deteriorating. Finally, Katniss breaks down, prompting a rescue mission. Unfortunately Peeta has been more badly damaged than anyone can anticipate; he has been tortured in such a way that his memories of Katniss have been confused and he believes she is the enemy. He tries to kill her when he first sees her.

And this becomes the first real big setback to her possible relationship with Gale (who I had been rooting for since book 1). Other setbacks happen, making a relationship with him less and less possible (the most noticeable one being his plan to cave in the last place of resistance within the Districts - it is painful for Katniss because her father died in a mining accident).

Finally, Katniss and company makes her way into the Capitol. Her squad is supposed to be just the face of the rebellion, celebrity tributes and beautiful people being used for propaganda only. But Katniss has other plans, wanting to kill President Snow herself. Her squad experiences a setback when Peeta is sent to them; this is clearly a signal that the District 13's president wants her dead because Peeta isn't really better. But the squad helps him as best they can.

Then on a mission deemed safe, all hell breaks loose. A hidden trap takes out their commanding officer, and other traps kill a few other members of the squad. The remainder escapes just in time before the Capitol's forces blow up the building they were last seen in. Both Capitol and Rebel forces believe the Mockingjay is dead. So Katniss and her squad attempt to continue on and kill the President themselves. Unfortunately he realizes they are still alive and starts hunting them within his city. Slowly she loses more and more of her squad until there's only her, Gale, Peeta and two others left. They make it to the President's Mansion just as the rest of the rebels do. A group of children is kept in front of the mansion, and the children get bombed by a Capitol hovercar. Rebel medics rush into help, including Katniss's sister Prim. In a trap much like one discussed earlier by Gale, a secondary explosion goes off, killing the medics.

Katniss is in a daze for a long time after the death of her sister. She finds herself walking into the room where Snow was being held before his execution. She has a brief conversation with him, which is when she starts to wonder just who bombed the children and her sister.

Finally, Snow's execution is at hand. Katniss is supposed to be the one to kill him with an arrow. But at the last minute she turns and kills the Mayor of District 13 instead. The Mayor had assumed control once the war was over. Katniss is brought into custody where she contemplates killing herself, but in the end she is released to go back home to District 12 (where her house and a few others have miraculously survived). Gale has gone elsewhere because he knows Katniss will always think in the back of her mind that he was responsible for her sister's death. She spends a long while in a fog, doing nothing, until one day she finds Peeta has also come home. And so she slowly mends mentally, living out the rest of her days with him and the children they eventually have.

I know I've gone into a lot of detail about the plot, but I felt it was necessary because this book was so full of twists and turns. The original book was all about the actual Hunger Games, so that was all that happened. The second book was first about Katniss's trip with Peeta, the beginnings of rebellion, and then the Quarter Quell, which was an excuse to get Katniss and Peeta back into the Games. Mockingjay does not feature the Games at all (although the fight through the Capitol is rather like another Hunger Game in many ways). While Katniss is still very much controlled by others, she also seems to lose her spirit in this book. That has a lot to do with the stress of being the Mockingjay, and Snow's attempts to break her using Peeta. But she also spends large amounts of the book aimless, uninterested in her surroundings and rather boring. The beginning and end really drove that home. At the beginning she was recovering from her last Hunger Games (the Quarter Quell) which involved a head injury. She was disoriented, having a tough time adjusting to the rigidity of District 13 and hated being stuck underground. At the end she was tried for killing the District 13 Mayor, but spent the entire trial in solitary confinement. Why didn't we get to see the trial?

I realize that part of this is very realistic. I mean, she was a 16-year-old girl at the beginning of The Hunger Games who liked hunting with her friend Gale. By Mockingjay she has survived two Hunger Games, incited revolution, been the face of that revolution and killed an awful lot of people. She isn't coping very well with all of that, but still has to pull through because everyone expects her to.

But by the end it was hard to like Katniss. Peeta kept saying, all the way through the series, that she had no idea what effect she had on others. And it's true that Katniss didn't. But I as the reader also didn't get it. She had two boys who loved her (although I really don't know why Peeta continued to. No matter what she did, he just seemed to love her unconditionally without really knowing her). She kept doing things that made people notice her. But she was selfish (and admitted that to herself). She knew that good people didn't win the Hunger Games, and that Peeta was special because he was a good person (I keep thinking back to when she realized that before the Quarter Quell began. The only reason Peeta won was because of her. He's too good to have done it on his own. I do not fault him for that - it's part of who he is, what makes him so special). And she seemed to give up too much, particularly in the last book. In previous books she was always determined to fight for something; the fight just seemed to be gone this time around.

I was also really disappointed by her lack of a relationship with Gale. Right from The Hunger Games I thought he was the one for her. Gale was the one who knew her, who watched out for both her and her family. But first Catching Fire disappointed me by not starting with their reunion (to be fair, Katniss tells us about it before long. But I would have preferred to jump right back into the story at that point, not months after it happened). And then their relationship deteriorates more and more as Mockingjay progresses.

I really don't want to say much more about Mockingjay or the whole Hunger Games trilogy in general. I did enjoy reading them (I did read them in three days afterall). I found I didn't want to put the books down. But I was struck, over and over again, that if this had been my story, it would have been a lot different. But this isn't my story, so I cannot fault Suzanne Collins for telling her story her way. As I said, it's a good read, so definitely consider The Hunger Games trilogy if you're looking for a good post-apocalyptic tale.

Kindle Book: Catching Fire

Well, I somehow did it. I managed to read Catching Fire in a day, just like The Hunger Games. And hopefully this time I'll be able to get a good night sleep now that I'm done.

At this point, I am going to issue a spoiler warning. It's impossible to talk about Catching Fire without giving away some of the stuff from The Hunger Games. I may also be ruining some cool stuff about Catching Fire, so if you don't want to know, please stop reading now.

I'm going to say that I was disappointed with Catching Fire right from the start. The way The Hunger Games ended led me to believe Catching Fire would take place immediately after The Hunger Games. It didn't. Catching Fire took place months after The Hunger Games, leaving out a lot of the things I wanted to read about (most importantly Katniss's homecoming and reunion with her family and Gale). But no, it skips ahead to her tour with Peeta halfway between their Hunger Games and the next one.

Once I got over that though, I was pulled in by the story. The Capitol's President appears in person at the beginning of the tour to issue Katniss a dangerous ultimatum: she must convince the entire country that her feelings for Peeta are genuine or else those she is closest to will die. After the events of the previous book, several of the Districts are beginning to rebel, and they are using her act of defiance (and the unprecedented two champions of the 74th Hunger Games) as their symbol of rebellion.

So Katniss tries her best, but it isn't enough. The Districts start rebelling, leading to harsher conditions back in her home District (even though the people have not rebelled there). Gale is severely punished, after which they lose access to the woods. And then the unthinkable happens: for the 75th Hunger Games, the candidates will come from the living winners of previous Hunger Games. And in Katniss's District, there are only three. And only one of them is female.

Catching Fire was a pretty good story, even after my initial disappointment. There's a lot going on, and you can really tell that it's an important turning point for not only Katniss but her entire world. But that being said, I don't think Catching Fire was as good as The Hunger Games.

So now I'm onto Mockingjay, the final book in the series, tomorrow. I'm really hoping it will be a great ending to the trilogy. And I'm hoping that this time, Mockingjay will take place immediately after Catching Fire's story ended.

Kindle Book: The Hunger Games

At work, The Hunger Games has been extremely popular for the last while. I've seen it and the other two books in the trilogy go by countless times. And I've always kind of wondered why exactly everyone was in love with it. A couple of friends also recommended it to me. I heard rumours of a movie being made (which wasn't surprising; the book's been so popular at work and everywhere that why wouldn't Hollywood jump on it now?) Then my mom bought it on her Kindle and read it in an extremely short period of time while I was reading The Help. So as soon as I finished The Help, I borrowed my mom's Kindle and started reading.

Needless to say, I finished it in one day. I wasn't honestly planning on doing so, but I wasn't able to sleep and the book was so good that I didn't want to put it down!

The Hunger Games follows Katniss Everdean. She lives in what used to be North America. In the recent past (less than a century ago), the outlying districts of her nation rose up against the Capitol and lost. As part of the result, every year each district has to send a boy and a girl as tribute to fight each other to the death in the Hunger Games as sport for the Capitol's people. The winner is showered in riches for the year until the next Hunger Games.

Katniss is an illegal hunter, working with her partner Gale to keep their families alive. Coupled with a yearly "tesserae" (I guess it means portion or allowance) of grain and oil, they trade their kills and finds (they get wild plants as well) for other necessities to survive. But that yearly tesserae isn't free; for each person-worth of oil and grain you need, you have to enter your name an extra time in for the Hunger Games. And those entries stay with you until you're ineligible as an adult.

In an effort to protect her sister Prim, Katniss refuses to let the girl take the tesserae, preferring to put her own name in however multiple times are necessary. But despite Prim only having a single entry, the unthinkable happens: Prim's name is chosen! Katniss doesn't hesitate a moment but jumps forward and volunteers in Prim's stead. And so begins her adventures having to fight for her life in the Hunger Games!

Prim finds herself heading to the Games with Peeta, a baker's boy who helped her once when she was younger. The two of them are being helped by the last man who won the Games from their district and a team of stylists. After a week of ceremonies, interviews and training, they are brought to the arena and pitted against one another; there can be only one winner.

After reading it, I finally get why everyone's loving The Hunger Games. It is an extremely well-written book, fast paced and entertaining. The end wasn't exactly the greatest, but it leads right into the second book, Catching Fire. But I'm willing to forgive that because I'm going to start the second book right away!