Book Review: Valencia, by Michelle Tea

Michelle Tea gives some background to her memoirs and talks about her move into writing fiction.

Valencia is a memoir by Michelle Tea, about her time living in San Francisco, falling in and out of love with a succession of girls, going to various nightclubs, parties and gay pride marches, and losing several jobs. It's split into chapters but is told in quite a stream-of-consciousness style - she'll start out telling one story but will diverge into telling us umpteen other people's stories in between. I wouldn't read this if you require a plot to get along with a book, because the narrative here isn't going anywhere, it's just a continuous description of things that happen and people the author knows.

I wasn't expecting to laugh a lot whilst reading Valencia, but although some parts were sad and some of the people described were troubled, other parts were hilarious. There are so many strange but still very real characters, and the author tells us what she was thinking at these times in her life in a really deadpan way. For example, at one point, she has a job at a courier company, and she wants to lose it, but they won't fire her. The way she talks about why she won't just quit, rationalising what doesn't make sense at all, is so ridiculous I couldn't help but laugh out loud.

I thought the introduction to this edition was particularly interesting (I studied life writing - nerd alert), because Michelle Tea writes about how writing about her own life has frozen it in time. With time and distance, we view things that happened to us differently, and she says this process has happened slowly for her, because when she performs extracts from the book, she has to inhabit the way she felt at the time, and cling onto it.

Valencia was easy to read but not absolutely compelling - it would probably be more interesting for people who are involved in similar 'scenes', and who have more in common with the ambitionless, hedonistic characters. I'm not sure whether I'll read it again,  but it has reminded me of how interesting the everyday can be when described with intelligence and humour.

Book Review: grl2grl, by Julie Anne Peters

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grl2grl is a collection of short stories about LGBT characters, mostly girls, hence the title, grl2grl. There are ten stories in the collection, and each is very different from the next, dealing with a range of issues, from coming out to being dumped, abuse to abstinence-only education. I often describe short stories as being either complete stories or snapshots from a character's life, and there are both kinds here. Julie Anne Peters tries to give each character a distinct personality, and I think that she succeeded, although the narrative styles are quite similar in some of the stories.

My favourites were 'Can't Stop The Feeling', which is about a girl who is trying to pluck up the courage to go to a meeting of the Gay/Straight Alliance group at her school, 'TIAD', about a girl who has just been dumped and goes online to a chatroom for advice and companionship, a story I really liked as I thought it was quite original - and 'Two-Part Invention', about a violinist who's in love with the cellist she plays with at summer music camp. I just love musician stories.

I don't think that every story should have had a dramatic impact - the presence of happy endings and sad endings and ambiguous endings makes the collection more interesting - but some of the stories I liked less were a bit too much like a tiny snippet from a life, with nothing really happening in them. Overall, however, the insight into the minds of the characters was compelling and sometimes really affecting.

It's a very American book, a lot of the things referred to don't really exist this side of the pond - I have only heard of a couple of schools with Gay/Straight Alliance groups here, and there are only a couple of summer camp organisations. But if you've watched American teen movies then this shouldn't cause much of a problem.

I think that in a perfect world, every library would have a copy of grl2grl. I think it's one of those books with the power to make troubled teenagers feel as if they're not alone, and as the stories are indeed short, it would be great for reluctant readers. My only complaint would be that it's such a skinny little volume, and it left me wanting to read more from the author. But that's fine, as she's already written novels!

Book Review: Empress of the World, by Sara Ryan

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When Nicola Lancaster arrives at the Siegel Institute Summer Program for Gifted Youth, she doesn't plan on making any friends. Her only goal is to find out, by taking the archaeology class, whether she actually wants to be an archaeologist or not. She spends the introductory lecture drawing and writing notes about the other students, but Katrina sees her sketches and grabs her notebook, passing it around to some of the other students. It's easy for Nicola to be friends with excited, friendly, Katrina, but she finds Battle Hall Davies more confusing, intriguing, and beautiful. Nicola is plain and boring, or so she thinks. Battle could never be interested in her...but of course she's wrong.

A book about a girl who has decided to spend the summer at, well, school, may not sound exciting, but I really enjoyed Empress of the World. It's quite a short book, with only 214 pages, yet it covers Nicola's entire time at the Siegel Institute. It's written in sections that have the date, time and location at the top, like diary entries, and there are quite often several days between these reports, which sometimes include passages in a handwriting-style type, like actual diary entries. Sometimes the gaps were a bit off-putting, but Nicola usually summarises what she's been doing. I really liked the characterisation, Nicola was an engaging narrator, and I thought Katrina was fantastic, her weird fashion sense making her definitely my favourite character. The minor characters were nicely drawn, but not so intriguing that I wished they were the focus of the story instead. I have to confess that I didn't entirely understand why Nicola liked Battle so much for much of the book. I think her personality was overshadowed somewhat by Katrina's, it seemed less clear, but maybe that's the point. She is supposed to be mysterious, someone that Nicola can't quite work out. In the end I was rooting for Nicola to get the girl, anyway!

This is one of those books that I read and then thought "Was this really supposed to be controversial?". Okay, there's some drinking. And Nicola and Battle are both girls, and their relationship does get physical, off the page. But they're at a summer camp for intelligent, studious teenagers! And they all do their homework! Some people's children.

I wouldn't say Empress of the World is a must-read, it's a nice way to spend an afternoon or two, but I didn't find it to be unputdownable. I don't think it's supposed to be a thriller, but it's a gentle story of self-discovery and romance, not an emotional rollercoaster ride that keeps you turning the pages. 

Sara Ryan has also written comics featuring Battle and Katrina: Me and Edith Head, a prequel to Empress of the World starring Katrina, and Click, which is about Battle with a small appearance by Katrina, and takes place in the time between Empress of the World and the sequel/companion book, The Rules for Hearts. I definitely want to read The Rules for Hearts - it sounds like a good story, and I think it would help me understand Battle more.

Book Review: Dramarama, by E. Lockhart

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Sarah Paulson longs for a life more exciting than the one she's got in boring Brenton. Her 'friends' are totally bland, and her parents don't understand her dissatisfaction, let alone her love of musicals. Everything changes when one day, after her tap dance class, she sees an advert for a musical theatre summer school: The Wildewood Academy for the Performing Arts. At the audition, she recognises a boy she goes to school with, Demi Howard. He recognises her, and most importantly, the Lurking Bigness that she feels she has inside her, waiting to come out and take the world by storm.

Together they reinvent Sarah as Sadye, and she feels like she finally has a true friend. Then Sadye and Demi both get into Wildewood, and they can't wait to get out of Ohio and go. But when they arrive and immerse themselves in the drama and glitter, everything becomes a lot more complicated than it was when they were best friends in Brenton. When Demi needed her as much as she needed him, and he didn't have boyfriends, or lead roles in plays. After their first few arguments, Sadye starts to feel like she's losing him. Will their friendship survive the summer? Will Sadye's Bigness ever stop Lurking?

I loved finding out. In fact, I was so excited to finally be reading Dramarama I think I squeaked as I turned the first few pages. I loved Sadye and Demi immediately. I could really relate to both Sadye's descriptions of her Lurking Bigness, and the trouble she has trying to release her potential. I thought Demi, with his incredible self-belief and talent, was a fantastic character. I also adored the whole world of Wildewood - lunch-table-top performances, rooftop evenings, gossip, glitter, and all. Sadye's roommates are a diverse, fun bunch. I love E. Lockhart's groups of friends. She gets the group dynamic so right. The teachers at Wildewood were completely believable, very flawed, but interesting. Special mentions also go to Lyle's possibly-hopeless love for Demi (I won't spoil it), the cuteness of Theo (oh E. Lockhart! How do you create so many varied and wonderful fictional specimens of attractive boy‽), and the Blake song.

I liked that Sadye struggled with fitting in, which at Wildewood is the same thing as standing out. I could see why she indulged in being cruel to her friends sometimes. And I could understand why Demi disagreed with Sadye's opinions, even though I could also understand all the misgivings she had about her teachers, and I think I would have had them too. It was great seeing Sadye develop over the summer.

Some other reviewers didn't like the ending, I know. I did think it was a bit rushed, because the pace was slower at the start of the book. It felt like there was a lot of build up, and then it was over quite quickly. I didn't have a problem with what actually happened though, it seemed realistic and necessary for Sadye's development as a person.

Dramarama is a fantastic read. Even if you don't know much about musical theatre, I'd give it a go - there are YouTube videos for almost every song mentioned and every reference can be Googled, and it's so much fun!

Book Review: Swordspoint, by Ellen Kushner

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Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Mannersis a fantasy (of manners) novel set in a capital city and the almost-lawless Riverside district nearby. Neither the city nor the country are named, but the world is very different from our own. This society doesn’t have any modern technology, but they have strict laws, and a police force of sorts. The country is run by nobles, Lords and Dukes who see themselves as superior to the ordinary people. The nobles live decadent lifestyles under different laws – they go to parties, gossip, and when they quarrel they hire swordsmen to fight on their behalf, often to the death.

One such swordsman is Richard St Vier, the main protagonist of the novel, who lives in Riverside with his lover Alec. St Vier is the greatest of all swordsmen, and sought-after by the nobles. He can even, controversially, pick and choose who he wants to fight. He and Alec live as comfortably as people can in Riverside, drinking and gambling until the money runs out and St Vier needs to fight again. But this comes to an end when they get mixed up in the political plots of the nobles, who wish to use Richard to advance their own goals.

The world of Swordspoint does not have a strict moral code, some characters have tighter ethics than others, and every one is a product of the difficult, often brutal society they have been brought up in. I found all the characters very interesting, and although I wanted to know about some of them more than the others, they were all shrouded in enough mystery to keep me guessing and reading on. The characters were very believable. Although most of them didn’t develop over the course of the novel, they stayed pretty much the same; it didn’t matter because there was so much going on. The reader never gets to be ahead of the characters – so I was constantly trying to predict what was going to be revealed about who next. The story is written in third person, and follows several different characters at different times. Though the narrator doesn't seem to be a character, it has a very distinct style.

Swordspoint is quite a long book, and it took me a couple of weeks to finish it. This might be why I felt that it was over a bit too soon. It seemed to me as if the author spent a lot of time building up all this detail about the world and the characters only for the plot to turn out to be quite simple (though not predictable) and for the story to finish quite quickly. I also felt that one character, after having quite a large role in the narrative was just dropped, and it was disappointing that we didn’t get to see more of them.

However, the novel was really enjoyable, and beautifully written, with just the right amount of descriptive detail, in my opinion. I’m quite fussy about description, I need it to flesh out the world of the story and imagine it properly, but I don’t want so much that I don’t have any room to put my own spin on the way things look, and have to struggle to hold it all in my head. I love reading books that feature characters that live glamourous lives in an old fashioned way, and so I had a lot of fun reading Swordspoint. 

I am looking forward to reading the sequels to Swordspoint; The Fall of the Kings, and The Privilege of the Sword. I first heard of these books when I read Rie’s review of The Privilege of the Sword at Leaving Shangri-La.