Salvage

I didn't love Salvage, a young adult novel by Alexandra Duncan, but I found it interesting nonetheless. Ava is a girl who's never touched foot on Earth. In fact, to do so would be to destroy her soul, according to the belief system aboard the Parastrata trader ship. Women are too delicate for Earth and anything requiring brain work, though not too delicate for hard menial labor and bearing children. Ava has it better than some. She's top of the ranks of unmarried girls, daughter of the captain, and of marriageable age. She will be married off in a trade agreement with another crew and ship. Ava only hopes it will be to a more lenient kind of crew where women can do mechanical work, which she has learned in secret. But suddenly her world comes crumbling down around her, and her only hope is to escape to the one place where she will likely die.

This book so cleverly describes a cult without ever using the word. Slowly, Ava discovers that nearly everything she's known was meant to oppress her. That's not to say her life becomes all sun and roses. That's not to say she won't still encounter grief and betrayal. But the story is about coming of age and deciding your own fate in a world where injustice has many faces.

It's science fiction, but the focus isn't on that. It really is about Ava's journey. However, it doesn't try to hammer the reader with a message either. It's simply Ava's story, narrated from her point of view. There's a bit of romance, a bit of adventure and discovery. There's a bit about the dynamics of family relationships and about choosing family when the one that's yours has thrown you out. In some ways, it's heavy stuff, but it never crosses that line into being a self-help guide. It's never preachy. I kept expecting it, but it didn't go there.

I didn't love it for various reasons, most small. (SPOILER follows) The biggest is probably that Ava has sex with a boy when she knows it's taboo. Ava is a minor rule-breaker, but I found it hard to believe that someone who grew up in such a sheltered, rule-laden community would commit one of the greatest crimes for a woman without considering the consequences. And she does consider the consequences somewhat, but it's not enough to stop her, and I think a person in her situation would have stopped before going that far. It just didn't ring true for me. (SPOILER ends)

Other that that, the strangeness of Ava's life and speech just threw me off a bit, and I didn't connect with her right away. A few other plot points seemed abrupt or contrived sometimes.

I did, however, appreciate the Earth settings, including Mumbai. Even though the setting is somewhat futuristic, it still feels authentically like what I imagine India to be like from what I know.

I appreciated the end of the book and Ava's journey to freedom. But minor plot and flow issues in the story keep me from giving this more than a three-star, "liked it" rating. This book will be available in April.

Frozen in Theaters Now

(Review contains minor SPOILERS)

I had little interest in seeing Frozen (PG, 102 min.) until people started talking about the story and saying how good it was. From the previews, I thought it was some silly story about a snowman and a reindeer fighting over a carrot. The movie poster predominantly features this snowman as well. Seriously, who thought that was a good hook for this movie? Actually, Frozen puts a spin on Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale of The Snow Queen, telling the tale of two sisters growing apart because of the eldest's dangerous ability to turn the world to ice. When they are children, Elsa accidentally injures Anna, and because of this, their parents find a way to erase Anna's memories of Elsa's powers and make Elsa hide her ability. But when it comes time for Elsa to be queen, she is unable to hide the truth any longer, and it will be up to Anna to set the world right.

It's a very well-done Disney princess epic, if you like those kind of things, and I do. Though I'd like to see Disney try something new, I have to say this story is beautiful and fresh in many ways. The biggest way is that the plot doesn't all hinge on romantic love. In fact, the story plays with that a little in what is almost a parody of love at first sight. But when it comes right down to the important stuff, it's about the love of two sisters.

I was so pleased to see that the talking snowman is a rather minor character in the movie. Anymore of him would have been annoying. As it was, I didn't love him, but he does provide a few moments of silly fun, including a song that doesn't talk about what happens to snow in the summer. The scene of the carrot, shown in the previews, is not even in the movie.

Before I saw this, a friend of mine, Tim, was talking about one of the big song numbers from the movie, "Let It Go." Apparently, it's getting a lot of praise and even Oscar nods. It's definitely a beautiful, catchy song, but Tim is right, it's not quite the high point of the story. Elsa has found freedom of sorts, but it's a freedom that comes at the price of everyone else's. Her freedom hurts others. The song celebrates Disney's old, overused mantra: be yourself and be anything you want to be. Though the movie eventually comes around to showing the consequences of being yourself without regard to anyone, I'm not sure we are getting the right message. One is being belted out at the top of our lungs, and one is disguised as a feel-good ending. Which one is going to stick?

Overall, though, I was very pleased with the movie. The characters are lively and original, including the love interest. The music is memorable and worthy to be included among the epic tunes of Disney's greats. The animation is breathtaking and colorful, particularly the ice scenes. The story is not too rote. This is one I would be happy to own.

Mind Games

I liked the premise of Kiersten White's young adult novel Mind Games. You don't see a lot of novels that focus on sisterly relationships, and while an almost-love-triangle exists in this book, it's not the primary emphasis. In fact, though there's room for romance to develop in future books, you could really say this book isn't a romance at all. It's more of a science fiction thriller and character study at the same time. Though one genre seems fast-paced and the other slow, they meld together pretty well.

Both Fia and Annie narrate the story, but the book is more about Fia, the girl with instincts so good she can almost never choose wrong, the girl who could be a weapon in the wrong hands. And, man, is Fia ever in the wrong hands. Her handler is a boy who she knows is bad and dangerous but who she wants to fall in love with anyway. He, in turn, is the son of an even more dangerous and mysterious man who collects women like Fia and Annie in order to control and use their special mind powers. Most of these women are Seers, seeing the future (like Annie), or Readers, reading minds, or Feelers, feeling emotions. Fia is none of that. She calls herself the hands. With special training and perfect instincts, she is the most dangerous of them all, a killer. And she has to remain a killer if she wants her sister to live.

The dynamics of the relationship between Fia and Annie are what this book is all about, but personally, I didn't really take to Annie. I can't say I loved Fia either, with her obsessive, angry thoughts and stream-of-consciousness narration, but she is clearly the character the author wants you to care most about...not that the reader isn't supposed to care about Annie. The reader is supposed to care about what Fia thinks of Annie, and Fia will do anything to protect her older, blind sister.

The book took longer than some young adult fiction takes me to get through, probably due to switching narrators but also due to flashbacks. That's why I said the story was part character study. We get a lot of background on Fia and Annie leading up to the present. It's an interesting way to tell a story. We get thrown right into the action, and then slowly, the specifics unwind. Interesting, yes, but I didn't love the way the story was told.

Still, having said that, what I really did enjoy was the concept of an unwilling human weapon. My husband can tell you that I love stories with powerful female protagonists. Under very different circumstances, I could have been a feminist, I'm sure. I love to see girls kick butt, and I'm a second degree black belt myself. But I also find it intriguing when a girl is powerful yet doesn't want to be. It provides for fascinating internal struggle, and in this case, it raises a lot of moral questions, too. How do you do detestable things to protect a loved one and still save your own soul? I wish there was a little more about that particular question in the book, but Fia is beyond believing she has a soul to save. Her hopelessness is understandable in light of the story, but it gets a little depressing. I do, however, like the way this first book of the series resolves itself, and I hope there is some interesting moral exploration in the books to come; the set-up is certainly perfect for it.

Three stars.

Entwined

This book surprised me. As I stepped into its pages, I felt like I was stepping into an old fairytale. I searched the book's extra content to see if it was, perhaps, based on a fairytale, as many of the books I like are these days, but I didn't see any references to outside stories. So, to my knowledge, Entwined is a new fairytale for young adults, one with all the weight and substance of the beloved classic tales.

Azalea is the oldest of 12 sisters. They live in a castle that was once enchanted but which now has only vestiges of magic left over from the days of an evil king. Their favorite pastime is dancing, and Azalea is the best dancer of all. She is also the Princess Royale and must marry whomever parliament and her father choose. But when the princesses' mother dies, their household is thrust into a year of mourning, and the girls will do anything to be able to dance again, even if it means keeping a dangerous secret from their father and escaping through a magic passageway to an enchanted silver forest where the mysterious Keeper lets them dance the nights away.

This book is simply beautiful and much more than the typical princess romance. In fact, the story is about 12 princesses who learn what it means to be a family and how to care for each other in their misery. Interestingly, the royal family is poor. Though they are royalty, they have less to eat than the marriage-seekers who visit Azalea during their year of mourning. They even have to mend their own dancing slippers, which they wear out every night (though this is mostly because they are dancing in secret).

Twelve sisters seem like a lot of characters to keep track of, but Heather Dixon does a fine job of giving them each their own quirks, and by the end, readers will be familiar with them all. The king is another interesting character. Readers will not know what to make of him at the beginning, and they will find that the princesses do not know their father very well. At the risk of spoiling a plot line here for some, I will say that the king begins the story as the antagonist, but surprises wait along the way. This story is as much about the girls' relationship with their father as it is about their sisterly affection or about the romances of the older sisters. Every character is vivid and entertaining, and as the danger increases, the characters become more and more intriguing.

This is also a book of morality and chivalry, celebrating an older time when even a girl's ankles could make a man blush and when overstepping boundaries with a woman deserved a punch to the face, if not a duel.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Entwined, but you will have to wait until its publication in April 2011.