Hugo Reading 2018: "In Other Lands," by Sarah Rees Brennan

 

Bah. I tried to like this book, I really did. I gave it 70 pages, which I think is a fair shot. I usually take my current read to work and read it during my lunch break. I did that today, and looked at the book and thought, "I don't like this, and I don't care what happens to these people" (otherwise known as the Eight Deadly Words). With all the good stuff I have to read, I'm not going to waste my time with something I don't like.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that Elliot Schafer, the protagonist, is a mean, nasty, sarcastic little jerk. This kind of character can be done well, obviously, but that is simply not the case here, at least as far as I am concerned. He has a few funny lines (one in particular made me laugh out loud, but no more than one), but he is not the kind of person I want to spend any time with. The second problem is the paper-thin, cliché-ridden worldbuilding. I realize, according to the blurbs on the back cover, that these well-worn fantasy tropes were deliberately set up to be subverted by the author, but since I didn't care enough about the characters or the story to get to the subversive parts, all this cleverness was rather wasted on me. The story came across as a cheap, shallow, boring network sitcom, and I am not a fan of sitcoms.

Nope, going to move on from this one. The next book I've started has already drawn me in, even though I'm only on page 28. (The Art of Starving, by Sam J. Miller, if you must know.) Life's too short to slog my way through what is, for me, a bad book.

Hugo Reading 2018: The Art of Starving, by Sam J. Miller

 

This book is kind of a mixed bag. I think it does several important things. First of all, the main character is a gay male teen with an eating disorder (anorexia), which I understand is rare in YA fiction. Matt is not a likable protagonist, but he's not meant to be: he acknowledges that he's all kinds of effed-up. Side plots includes Matt's being bullied by his classmates, and the stress of coming out. This book is raw, honest, and straightforward, whether it comes to Matt's emotions, his dysfunctional relationship with food, or his hate/love for his boyfriend, Tariq. Taken strictly from a characterization and YA coming-of-age story viewpoint, this book is excellent.

However.

(You knew that was coming, didn't you?)

I mainly read SFF (science fiction and fantasy). This book has been nominated for several SFF awards, and just won the Andre Norton Award (presented at the Nebula Awards Banquet) for best young adult SFF book. Unfortunately, to me the SFF element (Matt's anorexia gives him superpowers) is the weakest part of the book. (Not to mention that it seems a problematic plot element, to say the least. But I'm not gay and have never been anorexic, so I'll defer to the author, who is and has been both. Obviously, he knows whereof he speaks, and that lived experience is a huge part of why Matt's character rings so true.) It didn't take me long to realize that Matt is an unreliable narrator, and to my mind there is a great deal of question as to whether Matt's expanding senses and what seem to be mind-control powers are actually happening, up until the last couple of chapters. So at the end of the book, apparently Matt really does bust the pigs out of the slaughterhouse and lead them on a revenge march through his small oppressive town. Then, after he completes his ED treatment and rejoins his family (and this section is, to my mind, unnecessarily rushed--after the extensive details of how his eating disorder took hold of his mind, we should have gotten to see how he freed himself from it), his powers seem to be dead.

Or are they? In the very last chapter of the book, that suddenly isn't the case--he ends up controlling one of the pigs he set free, and it dawns on him that maybe his "powers" aren't tied to starving himself after all. Which, to this reader, makes the entire thing a cheat, and is a huge disappointment. I would have much preferred leaving out the SFF element altogether, if this is how the book was going to end. I think it would have made the story more honest.

This book is worthy on the one hand, and has much to recommend it, but it is also extremely flawed. Still, the author is worth picking up--he has a deft touch with characterization, and his prose is gorgeous. But this book is not something I'm going to keep around.