brigidkeely.com

First of all, I was given the chance to read an advance copy of this book for review purposes. I have not been compensated in any way (other than being given a PDF copy of this book) and my opinion on the book are entirely my own.

Second, this book contains depictions and discussion of disordered eating/anorexia and cancer and may be triggering for some people.

15 year old Diana Keller is having a really hard time. Her mom is sick, incredibly sick, with cancer and that’s a lot to deal with. Her friends are maturing and changing and she’s feeling left behind and left out. And she’s tired of being Fat Diana. She meets Jesse, a new arrival in their tiny rural town, and they start dating, and she wants to be perfect for him. So she starts doing something… she starts exercising, a lot. And she stops eating.

It… doesn’t really help.

This is a pretty unflinching look at ED and the way it impacts people. Arens really digs into the mindset of ED, the obsession, the logic and illogical. It’s beautifully written, but sometimes hard to read because it’s so meaty. Despite the meatiness, however, there’s a lot of humor in the book, and a lot of hope. Diana is, ultimately, lucky: she has some very good friends, and a very close and supportive family. A lot of people notice that Something Is Wrong and do their best to help her. Arens also draws parallels between acceptable ED (young men trying to drop weight to get into a lower weight class for sports) and unacceptable ED (young women trying to drop weight because women are supposed to take up as little space as possible).

If you’re of a certain age, you might have spent Junior High and High School inundated with “problem books” or “issue books,” edifying fiction novels usually featuring teen aged women who have SERIOUS problems in an unending stream. Their parents have cancer or are dead, they have cancer, they want to be concert pianists but break their arms on the weekend before The Big Audition, someone is beating them, someone is raping them, they can’t stop shop lifting, etc. They were depressing books. It would be easy to glance at this book and see “mom has cancer” and “ED” and assume it’s more of the same. It really is not, however. There’s far too much hope, humor, and support in the book. Additionally, giving a character’s mom cancer is usually a way to write mom out of the picture while giving the protag some big drama thing that shapes them. Arens manages to center Diana’s relationship with her mom. Her mom has cancer, but she’s still mom, and she’s still important.

There are two other things I adored about the book. One is Diana’s best guy friend. They love each other very much and trust and respect each other and are siblings with different parents, basically. They are very close emotionally and comfort each other physically (hugs, cuddles) but there’s no romantic pressure or expectations. I really hate the idea that men and women can’t be FRIENDS because SEX/ROMANCE IS INEVITABLE. So it’s super refreshing to see a positive, affirming heterosexual relationship. And speaking of sex, another thing I liked is that Diana has sex and doesn’t get shamed/punished for it. She worries briefly about the consequences of pregnancy and if her boyfriend will still respect her, but he does. She worries her parents will find out, but they don’t. (and if they did, well, they stick by her in every other way so I doubt finding out she got her bone on would be the end of the world) One of her best friends is well known for “kissing” every available guy she sees, and another has a very serious boyfriend and spends a lot of time behind closed doors with him. Neither gets in trouble/shamed for their actions. Whaaat! Young women have sex and it’s not the end of the world!?! ADORE.

That said, I think my absolute favorite scene in the book is Diana’s snippy Passive-Aggressive “attack” on a teacher she doesn’t like. She cracks open “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” and slips a saying about hypocrisy under his door. Oh, nerdy teen angst, I adore and identify with you!

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Hold me closer, Necromancer by Lish McBride is the first book in a series. Intelligently (and humorously) written, with a well-developed world and paranormal structure, it’s one of those books That Could Have Been Better… but is good enough as is that its shortfalls are pretty painful.

Sam (Samhain) Corvus LaCroix is a college dropout loser working fastfood with his best friend, Ramon and pals Brooke and Frank. What Sam doesn’t realize until a fateful game of potato hockey in the restaurant’s parking lot is that he’s also a Necromancer, someone who was born with the ability to talk to/raise/command/etc the dead. Also: his mom’s a witch, as in, she literally has magical abilities. And his nozzle of a dad who abandoned their family to start a new franchise in a much nicer part of town did so because of their supernatural abilities. And some dude named Douglas who’s a total badass wants to either train him, or kill. Or both!

Douglas kicks off Sam’s adventure by decapitating then reanimating Brooke, and sending her to Sam as a message.

And that’s part of the problem I have with this book.

Sam’s surrounded by totally awesome, powerful, confident, attractive women. His mom (the witch), his sister (maybe a witch, too), Brooke (who is smart and hot and athletic and is murdered to send him a message), Brid who is a powerful werewolf and next in line to lead her Pack, his next door neighbor (also a witch). These women are smart and capable and foxy and are secondary characters because… why? Conversely, why couldn’t Sam be female? There are a lot of super awesome writers who pull this shit (Lois McMaster Bujold and the Vorkosigan books and Scott Lynch and the Gentleman Bastard books I AM LOOKING AT YOU SO HARD RIGHT NOW) and it’s depressing. Because it sends a very clear message that it doesn’t matter how totally awesome a ladyperson is, she is fit only to be a secondary character and prop up a loser of a dude who can’t pass Bio101.

Years ago, I was in Band and I played the Cornet which is kind of like a Trumpet but different somehow (the tubing is shaped slightly differently, I think). I was unrelentingly awful at it, and eventually quit because I hit a plateau and just did not improve (being partially deaf in one ear did not help). Anyway, at one point early in my musical journey, my teacher kept piling on more and more specific complaints about my playing, and I got frustrated. And he said, the reason I’m complaining is that you’re getting better, so instead of one huge wall of wrong things we can pick out the individual things that are wrong. So although it SEEMS like I’m finding a million things wrong with your playing and that’s a bad thing… it’s actually good, because there’s enough that you’re doing right that the wrong things are standing out.

And I kept thinking about that while reading this book, because there’s stuff in this book I really liked. The action was quick paced, the Council and supernatural world feel fleshed out, Douglas was a good villain. The way Necromancy works in this world, and what it is, is well thought out. McBride manages to make the setting (PNW) real for me, someone who grew up in the midwest and lives in Chicago. The dialog is snappy. It wasn’t very predictable. It’s the first book in a series and I will probably check out the next book, something I wouldn’t do if I disliked a book.

I like Sam. I like the secondary female characters. It’s nice to see so many kick ass ladies tromping about. But at the end of the day, the people who are the focus of the book and the saviors are all male. And I’m just really tired of that.