Variant

Lord of the Flies was an intriguing book to me, and because of that, I love to pick up young adult books that remind me of it. Gone, by Michael Grant, was one of those, and Variant, a novel by Robison Wells, is another.

Variant kept me interested purely through suspense. It's a dystopian, somewhat futuristic novel about a double-walled private school for teenagers. Benson is sure that his sad life moving from foster home to foster home is over; he's applied for and received a scholarship to Maxfield Academy. But things go from weird to horrific quickly. When he arrives at the school, he finds it heavily secured under lock and key with cameras everywhere, but what's worse is that there are no adults to be found. Maxfield is run by kids. They cook, clean, repair, and teach the classes. Certain groups have monopolies on the good jobs, including security. The only adults they see are the lady who brings the new kids by car and Iceman, who appears on a screen to give them commands. The scariest thing of all is that broken rules have severe punishments, including detention, which nobody comes back from...ever. Benson has just entered a prison, and he's determined to get out, even if it means risking his life.

As the horrors build up, Benson realizes just how much danger they are all in and, as the book's tagline aptly puts it, that he can "trust no one."

Pure entertaining suspense. I really liked this book...until the very last page. Wouldn't you know, it's only Book 1, so there was an ending of sorts but not the one I was hoping for. Worse, the end totally confused me. I must have reread that last page ten times, looking for what I'd missed. And every time I read it, I found another interpretation. I can't tell you about it because it's a huge spoiler...well, I think it is, at least, from what I can tell, it's that vague. But for certain, you don't want to read the last page first if you are the type of despicable person who does that (ha, ha, just kidding, but you are weird).

This book only comes out in October, so I'm not sure if I can go online yet to see what other people think of the end. Regardless, I couldn't tell you even if I found out. So, all I can say for the book is that if you like suspense, with endings akin to something the TV show Lost used to produce, this book is great. But I think Lost endings never had me quite as lost as Variant. Check it out for yourself, and then we'll discuss (in private, of course, wouldn't want to spoil anything).

This book has violence most appropriate to age 15 and older.

The Candidates (Delcroix Academy, Book 1)

This was a relatively intriguing idea, but it was mediocre in its delivery. The Candidates (Delcroix Academy, Book 1) begins a new young adult series by Inara Scott. Dancia is average in everything except one, and it's that one thing that makes her determined to stay below the radar in everything else. She has a secret power, but the problem is, it's uncontrollable. Whenever she gets upset, people end up getting hurt and going to the hospital. Dancia has determined that the best way to keep people safe is to guard herself against getting attached to anyone. She reasons, if she doesn't care, she can't get upset.

Everything changes when recruiters come from the prestigious, out-of-her-league boarding school called Decroix Academy. They think Dancia is special, but they couldn't know about her power, could they? Dancia is sure they have made a mistake, but she accepts their full scholarship offer anyway. The thing is, it's impossible to be average at Delcroix. Everyone has talent, whether it's in math, music, science, or language. Dancia begins to wonder why some people, including herself and her new friend Jack, don't seem to have any talent, at least none that others can know about. Then there's something mysterious about the school itself. It's overly protected, and some of the older students seem to have their eyes glued to Dancia's every movement, including a very hot junior who was one of her recruiters.

This story has so much potential, but it didn't play much with it. Dancia is a girl with superpowers, but she barely uses them throughout the book. When the hidden purposes of Delcroix are revealed, they are somewhat disappointing. Nothing really happens at the end of the book. The climax is underdone.

If you want a story about superpowers at a boarding school, H.I.V.E. is a better option. It's a story about a secret boarding school for the children of supervillains. It has much more danger, and the characters are more interesting.

The Twisted Thread

I realize it has been a long time since I reviewed a book on this blog. For awhile, I had a new book review up every week, and then I started reading a book thats a bit outside my typical arena of interests. I still haven't finished that book (though I plan to and don't think it's a bad read), but I did read and review another in the interim. Now I have read one more since starting that book, and I suspect For the Win will have to wait a little longer while I squeeze some fast, light reading in over the next few weeks (hopefully!).

The book I just finished was not fast, light reading. Actually it is similar in one way to For the Win, that being that the point of view switches each chapter to another person, and there is nothing that slows down reading for me like that. Switching point of view offers a natural break, and you are more inclined to slip your bookmark in and leave it for another time or day. You lose the sense of urgency that keeping to one point of view gives you. Now, it can be done well, this switching, if each character is fascinating and adds valuable pieces to the puzzle.

But The Twisted Thread (out in June of 2011, no cover yet) wasn't an example of that. Charlotte Bacon's novel is adult mystery. (For once, I didn't read a young adult book, and as you'll see, it only confirmed for me why I prefer young adult.) Why adult fiction thinks it has to be so literary and verbose I don't know. By "literary," in this case, I mean the attempt to create depth and evoke color out of the most mundane aspects of life, usually by giving far too many completely boring details. Young adult fiction, on the other hand, knows it has to work hard to keep its audience, so it's more snappy, more to the point. Occasionally, the slower pace of adult fiction is pleasant, but in that case, there has to be a real spark in the author's writing to keep you hooked.

The Twisted Thread lacked spark, but what it mostly lacked was pay-off. I found the concept interesting enough to read and keep reading, despite the many breaks due to changes in point of view. The book begins with the discovery of a teenage girl's murder on an elite boarding school campus. An intern named Madeline, one of the book's points of view, sees the body and realizes the girl has just given birth, but no one knew she was pregnant and the baby is nowhere to be found. The school is used to solving its problems in-house, and everyone clams up when the police get involved. Everyone seems suspicious, and as Madeline discovers a secret girl club called the Reign of Terror, she realizes there are many things wrong with Armitage Academy, on many levels.

If that sounds as interesting to you as it did to me, let me save you a lot of wasted time. I'll even tell you the end, I'm that confident you don't want to read this book. So, obviously, SPOILERS. The Reign of Terror ends up having almost nothing to do with the end. The murdered girl was their leader, and they had disagreements. But they didn't kill her. It turns out the girl, Claire, was just a spoiled rich kid who found out the head of her academy once loved her mother. Angry at the life she felt she'd missed out on (despite being rich already), she slept with the head's son as a kind of payback. But then she got pregnant and realized she could use that to ruin Armitage and the head's family. So, she carried the baby secretly, and when it was born, she got her boyfriend (not the boy she'd slept with) to hide the baby. The baby's father, the head's son and a senior at Armitage, accidentally kills Claire in a fit of rage.

What I couldn't understand when I finally read this disappointing revelation was why everyone who knew anything kept it secret. It just didn't seem...well, big enough. I mean, it was tragic, and I can understand why the head would be reluctant to turn in his son. In fact, he tries to tell the police he did it instead of his son by the end, but the whole book basically convinces you that the head's a decent guy. At the end, you still feel like he's a good man, and so you're just left wondering why he tried to cover things up. And you wonder why the people taking care of the baby or the boyfriend who hid the baby don't come forward. They all have their reasons, but none of them seem good enough. It might have been logical, and it might have been how something like that would really go down. But it didn't make for a good story pay-off. Am I saying I wanted more scandal at the end? For this book, yes. The book seemed to be leading up to it, and then it wasn't nearly as bad as you'd been led to believe. Strangely enough, morality conscious that I am, I wanted something a little more edgy at the end. But rather than edgy, I got a different kind of immorality.

Morally, the book wasn't too bad until the end. The F-word was used a few times, but in adult fiction, I'm not too bothered by it. What really disgusted me was that at the end, Madeline, who has been attracted to two men the entire book, sleeps with one and has a summer relationship with him and then decides his life is going in another direction and begins a relationship with the other one. Okay. So, that, sadly, happens in real life. It's more messy in real life, but it's there. The thing is...this is a book! This is a story that should be bigger than life! I don't want my heroine to sleep with one guy and then agree to have dinner with another one at the end. What's romantic or happy about that? What's satisfying about that? Yuck.

So, I didn't like this book at all. The only reason I even give it as much as two stars is that it grabbed me enough to want to know the outcome. I shouldn't have expected the outcome to be any more interesting than the rest of the book.

I'm looking forward to reading some good young adult fiction again next.