Week 1

On June 1st, I’ll be kicking things off with a review of Heather Anastasiu’s Glitch. We’ve talked about this title previously, in our discussion of the trend toward books about human modification. I’m curious to see how debut author Anastasiu examines this theme.

Week 2

On Monday, we’ll be chatting about upcoming YA sci-fi titles that will be available at Book Expo America. Check in before you hop over to the Javits for a great list of novels that will keep your nerd juices flowing. Wednesday will see our usual Animorphs recap, with Sean covering #23: The Pretender. It has Tobias on the cover, which means it will be made of win. And then on Friday, he’ll be reviewing Kim Curran’s Shift. It’s the first title released by Strange Chemistry, Angry Robot’s new YA imprint. Back in February, I interviewed editor Amanda Rudder. She had this to say about it:

SHIFT is a tremendous novel! I read the first couple of pages and was utterly gripped – it’s such a page turner. I especially loved the main character, Scott. He feels so real and reacts to these strange happenings *exactly* as you would expect someone to react. Kim has a real talent for dialogue and characters. Add to that a tale that includes brain-eating madmen and a rather scary conspiracy, and it left me reading late into the night! I simply cannot wait to introduce everyone to this novel!

Week 3

On Monday, I’ll be covering Alan Armstrong’s Racing the Moon for Middle Grade Monday. Armstrong’s a Newbery Award winner, and the blurb makes it sound like a classic exploration of the promise of space:

In the spring of 1947, outer space was an unexplored realm. But eleven year-old Alexis (Alex) Heart and her impulsive brother, Chuck, believe that the stars are within reach. In the midst of building their own rocket, Alex befriends Captain Ebbs, and an army scientist who is working to create food for future space travelers, and who is also a descendent of Captain John Smith. Alex soon introduces Chuck to her new friend, and the trio’s shared interest in space travel sets off a series of adventures that the three will never forget.

On Wednesday, Sean will bring us yet another Animorphs reread post, covering #24: The Suspicion, which apparently features the incredible illustration seen at right. And on Friday, I’ll be reviewing debut author Dan Krokos’ False Memory.

Week 4

On Monday, I’m planning on roping Sean into doing another amazing science post (this is the first he’s hearing of it, so feel free to whine, guilt trip him, or offer him your first born to convince him). Wednesday will see his first Animorphs reread covering a ghost-written book, #25: The Extreme. On Friday, we’ll both be reviewing debut author SJ Kinkaid’s Insignia–whose blurb seems to promise something akin to Ender’s Game:

More than anything, Tom Raines wants to be important, though his shadowy life is anything but that. For years, Tom’s drifted from casino to casino with his unlucky gambler of a dad, gaming for their survival. Keeping a roof over their heads depends on a careful combination of skill, luck, con artistry, and staying invisible.

Then one day, Tom stops being invisible. Someone’s been watching his virtual-reality prowess, and he’s offered the incredible—a place at the Pentagonal Spire, an elite military academy. There, Tom’s instincts for combat will be put to the test and if he passes, he’ll become a member of the Intrasolar Forces, helping to lead his country to victory in World War III. Finally, he’ll be someone important: a superhuman war machine with the tech skills that every virtual-reality warrior dreams of. Life at the Spire holds everything that Tom’s always wanted—friends, the possibility of a girlfriend, and a life where his every action matters—but what will it cost him?

We’re both fans of Intrasolar Space Schools, so it should be interesting!

Week 5

On Monday, I’ll be previewing July’s titles. On Wednesday, Sean will be rereading one last Animorphs title for the month, #26: The Attack (an Ellimist-heavy title!). And then on Friday, Sean will close out the month by reviewing Flutter, the first YA title by author Gina Linko.

WHAT IS OLDEST WILL BE NEW, WHAT IS LOST SHALL BE FOUND.

The ozone is ravaged, ocean levels have risen, and the sun is a daily enemy. But global climate change is not something new in the Earth’s history.

No one will know this better than less-than-ordinary Owen Parker, who is about to discover that he is the descendant of a highly advanced ancient race—a race that took their technology too far and almost destroyed the Earth in the process.

Now it is Owen’s turn to make right in his world what went wrong thousands of years ago. If Owen can unlock the lost code in his very genes, he may rediscover the forgotten knowledge of his ancestry…and that less-than-ordinary can evolve into extraordinary.

-synopsis and cover art courtesy of goodreads

Atmospheric Analysis: Honestly, I’m just not a fan of this type of cover–featuring much-older-than YA models posed stiffly on it. It’s got nice embellishments and a decent shot of one of the underwater structures in the background, but these characters don’t look at all like Owen or Lilly to me.

Planetary Class: Post-apocalyptic science fantasy.

Viability Rating: Predicated on such scientifically implausible tropes as racial memory, the world presented in The Lost Code is not very viable.

Mohs Scale: Keeping the above in mind, I’d call The Lost Code a 1 on the Mohs scale–Science in genre only. It’s a science fantasy title, really, and the techyness is, in many ways, indistinguishable from magic. Of course, Mohs isn’t a marker of quality per se. The trappings of this world are pretty neat, even if they’re not Real Science.

Xenolinguisical Assessment: Emerson’s writing is the easy, accessible type with a broad potential appeal. Save for a few hot make-out scenes and curse words, the prose would just as easily appeal to middle grade readers as it would to fans of YA.

Expanded Report: In many ways, Kevin Emerson’s The Lost Code feels like a throwback to the slim YA science fiction novels of decades past. Told through the accessible, easy narration of Owen, it describes a picture of a typical suburban adolescent experience–a summer spent at summer camp–with a heavy science fiction twist. The Lost Code is set in the future, where mankind lives under Eden Domes, perfect paradises of weather and ecology, safe from the horrors of the ravaged world beyond. Owen has come from a human settlement to spent the summer living as suburban kids once did. That doesn’t mean his life is easy, however–he has to confront bullies, hormones, his own health problems, not to mention the gills he suddenly and inexplicably sprouts while underwater.

All of this sounds promising, and it’s made more so by the easy narration utilized by Emerson. In concept and prose, this is the sort of “boy book” that many librarians and teachers crave. It talks to teens on their level; it’s easily digestible and conceptually fun; it would make both a great beach and fit in well on the shelf of a reluctant reader.

But it simply doesn’t live up to all this promise. The first and most significant problem is that it’s just too long. Though the first chapter features Owen’s apparent death (gripping!), the subsequent hundred pages have no true conflict to speak of. Owen deals with a few cardboard cut-out bullies at camp, then falls in with another crowd of teenagers who have likewise sprouted gills. They swim. A lot. And trade conspiracy theories. And flirt and tease. But this was all described in extremely mild, even nostalgic terms. We’re told the stakes are high, but we never feel it. You never doubt for a second that Owen is going to beat the bullies, find people who appreciate him, or get the girl, and so it’s not a particularly interesting read.

When the more significant plot elements kick into gear, it feels too little, too late. Discussions of the ancient Atlantean mythos are particularly dull. Characters hash out and rehash their theories in thudding monotone. And the people having these conversations are mostly undeveloped. Though by the novel’s conclusion I’d begun to get some sense of Owen himself, even his love interest, Lilly, was fairly undercooked. I’d be a loss to tell you anything about her personality at all, only a few hours after finishing the novel.

It’s too bad–cut down by about half, to the length of Animorphs and other successful earlier series in this vein, I think The Lost Code could have been really fun, fluffy and entertaining. This isn’t the type of novel that would ever appeal to lit snob sci-fi fans, but it is evocative of the great commercial science fantasy that’s come before, from Barsoomian adventure stories to Flash Gordon to Star Wars. The problem is that all those serial stories were tightly paced and above all, riveting. The Lost Code instead meanders–when it really should fly.

The Lost Code is available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local indie bookstore.

It’s the end of the world. Six students have taken cover in Cortege High but shelter is little comfort when the dead outside won’t stop pounding on the doors. One bite is all it takes to kill a person and bring them back as a monstrous version of their former self. To Sloane Price, that doesn’t sound so bad. Six months ago, her world collapsed and since then, she’s failed to find a reason to keep going. Now seems like the perfect time to give up. As Sloane eagerly waits for the barricades to fall, she’s forced to witness the apocalypse through the eyes of five people who actually wantto live. But as the days crawl by, the motivations for survival change in startling ways and soon the group’s fate is determined less and less by what’s happening outside and more and more by the unpredictable and violent bids for life—and death—inside. When everything is gone, what do you hold on to?

-synopsis and cover art courtesy of goodreads

Atmospheric Analysis: Lately I’ve been trying to evaluate covers in a large part through the lens of “Does this cover make an accurate promise about the contents of this book?” It seems to me that This is Not a Test is a zombie novel for literary readers, and this blue, melancholy package–splattered with blood!–does a good job of communicating that.

Planetary Class: [Fast!] zombie apocalypse.

Viability Rating: It’s difficult to talk about the viability of the world here because we see so little of it. Electricity flickering off and water disappearing are two very real concerns, but are also staples of the zombie genre. My instinct is to say that the world presented here is as viable as the world in any other horror novel.

Mohs Scale: As with viability, we see so little of this world and learn relatively scant information about how it works. Since the plot hinges on a virus which transforms and reanimates the dead, I’m going to call it a 4 on the Mohs, One Big Lie.

Xenolinguisical Assessment: Summers is obviously an accomplished prose stylist. Her writing lulls you into accepting it as normal; then you encounter a turn of phrase so striking that it might as well be poetry.

Expanded Report: This is Not a Test is an interesting, literary subversion of your typical post-apocalyptic zombie novel. In it, Courtney Summers presents the story of Sloane, a girl suffering through the abuse of her father and her sister’s recent disappearance; she’s actually contemplating suicide when we first meet her. Summers does an effective job of communicating her mental state through her narration, which sometimes slips into a sort of stream of consciousness. The prose itself is emotionally intense and lurid–quite a bit like poetry.

It’s an effective choice; most post-apocalyptic YA novels like Monument 14 and Ashfall emphasize the normality of your hero. This seems to craft an argument that the novel’s events could happen to you, too. But such a composition assumes that “normal” teens are in all ways neurotypical and wholesome, that they haven’t faced abuse or loss or pain. This certainly runs counter to my own adolescent experiences and the experiences of my friends. Overall, it creates a world less believable for all the wholesomeness of it before the disaster (whatever that disaster might be).

By introducing elements more common to the typical edgy YA “issue” novel, then, Summers effectively makes her universe that much more real. We’re viewing this world through the lens of a messed-up kid, and by being messed-up, that kid is, in many ways, normal. It’s an interesting gambit, and largely worked for me at setting this novel apart from its contemporaries.

However, most other elements of the book were less successful. After a brief introduction to Sloane’s tumultuous home life, we’re plunged into the story in media res, and so we have to scramble to learn the back stories of these characters. But this information is both heavily hinted at and ultimately revealed too late; I’d figured all of it out well before Sloane told us, and so the ultimate reveals didn’t quite have the oomph they should. The ending  itself was interesting and gripping, but came, too late, too. In many ways this book is, as one goodreads reviewer put it, “mostly middle” with no real beginning or end.

And, worse, Sloane was one of only three well-defined characters, out of a cast of many. The boys particularly all ran together for me. They weren’t defined by their personalities or appearances but rather by the role they played within the book. This, combined with very similar, bland, mostly four-letter names, led me to be often quite confused about who precisely was who. It also led to some of the weakest prose moments:

Rhys looks at me. “Tell me you didn’t. It’s way too soon to throw this at him.” My face gives it away. He closes his eyes. “Shit. Sloane.”

“That’s Trace’s problem,” Cary says. “Not ours.”

Rhys gets up abruptly, throws Cary a disgusted look.

“I’m going to find Harrison.”

When Rhys is gone, I just stand there, staring at Cary. (p. 267, ARC edition)

And so on, and so forth.

I suspect that several of these characters could have been combined to no ill effect; in fact, it would have likely given them more defined characterization and vividness.

In many ways, this is where This is Not a Test flounders compared to other recent entries in the disaster novel genre. Despite its everyman narrator, the supporting characters in Monument 14 were all very well-drawn. And it’s difficult not to compare these books. Both are built over the same basic plot scaffolding: kids hole up in a business during a disaster, form their own society and get involved in petty romantic drama. Then, just before they’re lulled into a sense of complacency, a pair of adults appear to shake up the established social order. There is much debate over whether the adults are good or evil. Eventually, our characters must journey out.

Of course, that she crafts a story which fits perfectly in the tropes of the genre is not necessarily Summers’ fault–in many ways it shows her familiarity with the zombie apocalypse canon. But in a crowded market of similar books, This is Not a Test isn’t particularly likely to distinguish itself with kids who have read a lot of apocalyptic fare. I’d recommend it, instead, for readers of literary novels who want to dip their toes in the genre pool.

This is Not a Test comes out June 19th. You can preorder it now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble,  and your local indie bookstore.

I'll show you, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Space is the final frontier a popular setting for SF, with good reason. Now that James Cameron has been to the bottom of the ocean, space is the only setting where we could run in to alien artifacts or extinct civilizations or giant crystalline computers housing sentient AIs but then the twist at the end is that they’re naturally occurring I guess? (That’s my idea. You’re not allowed to use it.)

So space is awesome. It’s also way outside our ability to easily visualize, which is why astrophysicists are paid so lavishly* to visualize it for us.

*(Citation needed.)

Even still, there are a few fundamental aspects of space travel that almost every SF writer overlooks. Even a quick Google search would reveal to them the true depths of their folly, and yet they make the same mistakes over and over again.

With that in mind, your space travel might be terrible if…

…you forget about Newton’s First Law.

This is easily the most common mistake SF writers make when they write about spaceships. Newton’s First Law states that:

The velocity of a body remains constant unless the body is acted upon by an external force. (Wikipedia)

We’re used to traveling around on Earth, where the general rule is ‘stuff only moves if you keep applying force to it’. If you stop your car’s engine, the car is only going to keep coasting along for a few seconds before it comes to a halt. If you’re riding a bike and you don’t pedal for long enough, you will eventually come to a complete stop. That’s ‘just how things work’, the same way a priceless vase will ‘just fall’ if you happen to knock against it as part of a comically over-the-top slapstick routine.

In space, no one can hear you scream those rules don’t apply. Or rather, they do, but the factors that make them work the way they work on Earth are largely absent. There is very little ‘external force’ to act upon a space-body in motion.The most obvious consequence of this is that a spaceship (or anything else) in motion will stay in motion unless something stops it. Remember, the ship doesn’t have wheels trundling over tarmac, nor is it fighting resistance from air (more on that in a bit). If you use up three-quarters of your fuel getting to top speed, you now have no way of stopping, because slowing down completely is going to take just as much fuel as accelerating. You’d end up drifting through space forever. (Well, unless you hit something. But that’s spectacularly unlikely.)

Of course, this also means that there’s no reason whatsoever to run your engines constantly. You need them to accelerate, but not to keep going; again, you’re not talking about flying a jetliner here. Unless your characters are in an unstable orbit around a planet and need to readjust their trajectory immediately or else risk crashing, their engines ‘failing’ shouldn’t trigger a desperate scramble to repair them, because they don’t technically need to fix them until they have to either  stop or change the direction they’re going.

This mistake is closely related to the following one.

…you forget that space is frictionless.

On Earth, aircraft are designed to take advantage of the fact that our atmosphere is composed of some sort of gaseous, air-ish stuff. Scientists call it ‘air’. Anything designed to go really fast through the atmosphere is going to need to take into account the fact that air suddenly becomes a lot more difficult to move through when you’re traveling upwards of 1,000km (or more) per hour. That’s why jet fighters are shaped the way they are: they need to be aerodynamic.

Space vehicles have absolutely no business looking or behaving anything like a jet fighter unless they routinely take off through an atmosphere. If they stay in space all the time (as any really large spaceship would), their design should be constrained by factors other than air resistance.

For example, look at the International Space Station:

Also known as 'My 2030 holiday destination'.

That thing would snap like a twig if you tried to fly it through the atmosphere, but there’s no particular reason why you couldn’t strap some rockets onto it and send it blasting through deep space.

This also means that spaceships shouldn’t maneuver the way planes do. If a spaceship wants to turn around, the easiest way to do it would be to turn around on the spot, so that it would be flying ‘backwards’. (Remember, it’s going to keep moving in the direction of its last acceleration, not in the direction it’s now facing). Any dogfight in space would quickly end up with two ships moving in the same direction while facing each other and then promptly blowing each other up. This is also a good reason for ships to not have thrusters only at the back, by the way, because that would limit their ability to reorient themselves relative to whatever they’re interacting with. In space, that would be far more useful than being able to swoop around like a jet fighter.

Incidentally, this also means that Asteroids is a more realistic depiction of how a spaceship should behave than any other video game ever.

"Ahead of its time since 1979!"

…you have no sense of scale.

Space is big, that Douglas Adams quote, you know the drill. Except maybe you don’t.

While most people understand on some level that the distances involved in space travel are orders of magnitude larger than anything involved in traveling around Earth, they sometimes ignore the consequences of those distances…like the fact that being able to move at a significant fraction of the speed of light still wouldn’t be good enough if you want zooming around the galaxy to be as easy as going for a cruise. (Keep in mind that even traveling at the speed of light, it would take over four years to reach Proxima Centauri.)

Space-distances (the official term for them) also have some pretty serious consequences for long-distance communication. Recall the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the BBC airs an interview with the main characters. It’s mentioned at the beginning that there’s a significant time delay between a question being asked and the TV station receiving the astronauts’ responses because of how far they are from Earth. The delay is at least several minutes (I’ve forgotten how long exactly), making real-time communication impossible, even though the people trying to communicate with each other are within the same solar system.

Now imagine what it would be like to communicate between systems. If a distant colony sent out a distress signal, it would be year before any other system received it. By the time the would-be rescuers could react and launch a rescue mission, the problem would either have fixed itself or else the colonists would all be dead, even if the rescuers had ships capable of light-speed travel. If the Proxima Centaurians needed our help tomorrow, the absolute minimum possible time between them sending a message and us arriving would be a bit under 8.5 years (from their perspective.)

The easiest way around this problem is an ansible, which is one of those SF tropes that are so common you almost don’t need to explain it. Also keep in mind that having faster-than-light travel doesn’t necessarily fix the communication problem if you don’t pair it with some sort of ansible; in an FTL/no ansible scenario, it would actually be faster to send a letter on board a ship than it would be to communicate the same message via radio waves or some other broadcast signal.

(Also keep in mind time dilation, which kicks in at noticeable levels when you’re going really fast and might be of use if you’re okay with your space travelers outliving all of their loved ones/their entire civilization while they’re on their way to the Adventure System.)

But all is not lost! Your space travel might not be terrible even if…

…you have gravity on your ships.

Look, some SF novels are so hard that they were originally bound in diamond. If you’re writing something like that, you will probably not get away with having your characters walk comfortably around their spaceship with no mention of how they’re generating artificial gravity. (Although do keep in mind that being weightless because you’re in an orbit is not the same thing as being unaffected by gravity.)

For everyone else, hand-waving the gravity problem is perfectly acceptable. In fact, don’t even bother hand-waving it. Just don’t mention it. Nobody cares, and any explanation you give will only remind people that you’re technically breaking the rules.

…you have FTL with no real explanation.

This is going to be a contentious one, but I see nothing wrong with saying ‘Hurray, we invented FTL travel at some point, ‘it’s adventure time,‘ even for serious SF. Throw in some advanced alien technology if it makes you feel more comfortable with it, but just remember that most readers are willing to look the other way when an author casually violates the laws of physics.

…nobody dies of radiation sickness.

Do I even have to elaborate on this one? Yes, space is awash with dangerous radiation. No, that doesn’t mean most people want to read about it.

And now you’re all set to go and write some space-travel SF! Did I miss any important points? Let me know in the comments.

I believe we were 2/3 of the way through the ‘David Trilogy’ when I decided to take a break and do…something. Now I can’t remember what. It’s almost like I have a mental block stopping me from remembering what I wrote about for the previous two weeks. Eh, it’ll come back to me.

Onwards!

Rachel's most fearsome morph yet!

Book 21 ended with Jake on the verge of death, Tobias possibly lying just on the wrong side of the verge of death, and Rachel…

Wait. What’s that in the upper-right-hand corner of the cover art?

Oh god, that’s what I was writing about FLASHBACKS.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-

-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-

-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH.

Okay. Okay. There’s no need to panic here. I can…I can get through this. Just take a deep breath and don’t think about the TV show.

So Rachel (who is NOT played by Brooke Nevin) gets woken up by Ax (WHO DIDN’T SPROUT A WEIRD HUMAN MOUTH AFTER DOING THE FROLIS MANEUVER). Ax tells her what’s going on with David, and Rachel makes the correct assumption that Jake wants her there because she’s the most violent among them and is most likely to be willing to kill David if it comes to that.

They find Jake on the roof of the shopping mall. He’s unconscious, but alive. Rachel goes after David and almost dies when he attacks her in lion morph, but manages to get to safety via some fancy gymnastics moves. Unfortunately, the police have arrived and Jake is still an unconscious tiger, so Rachel and Ax morph into flies and hide in Jake’s ear (yes, really).

The police take Tiger-Jake to the Gardens, where Cassie intercepts them and says that the tiger is one of theirs. (Which is sort of true, since Jake is morphing the tiger from the gardens.) So that’s one plot thread on hold for now! There’s a lot going on in this book, trust me.

They go off to Marco’s house and wake him up. Ax flies in through his bedroom window in bird morph, but ‘Marco’ whips out a baseball bat and hits him with it so hard that part of his beak flies off. I remember this scene vividly from the first time I readit, because the idea of getting hit so hard that a piece of your face goes flying through the air has a way of sticking with you when you’re eleven.

It turns out that they were actually dealing with David, who acquired Marco and then morphed him.

Ax lay on the grass, unmoving. Marco/David held up one finger. Then another. Then another. One, two, three.

He was counting how many of us he’d killed. One, two, three: Tobias, Jake, Ax.

It’s kind of hilarious that after months (a year?) of going up against Visser Three and all of his Conrollers, the Animorphs come closest to defeat when fighting a single whiny kid. It makes you wonder how the Yeerks ever managed to become such a huge threat.

Rachel comes up with a cunning plan to lead David into some overhead electricity wires while they’re both in bird morph, but he manages to outwit her and almost kills her. She’s saved at the last minute by (drum roll) Tobias, who is actually not dead.

My surprise, it is palpable.

Ax is also fine, despite getting his beak knocked off (aaaargh), but David is still on the loose. He shows up at the school the next day and demands the morphing box, which nobody is about to hand over to him. Cassie works out that he’s planning on trading it to Visser Three in exchange for his parents (good luck with that one!). Rachel gets into a fight with him and actually threatens to murder his parents if he tries to turn them in to Visser Three, which is pretty cold even for her. She also comes close to stabbing him in the ear with a fork.

But never mind all that, there’s a Yeerk plan to foil! Again!

Yes, they take another shot at ruining Visser Three’s plan to take over the world via politician infestation. Their plan this time is straightforward but smart: they go smashing through the hotel walls as various large animals, causing so much chaos that the big conference will inevitably be called off. It all goes perfectly for a change, except that David intercepts them on their way out and reveals that Rachel threatened to kill his parents. She denies it, but none of the others come to her defense, which naturally makes her feel pretty crappy.

She goes home and discovers that her cousin Saddler (who is still named Saddler) isn’t doing so well. In book 21 we found out that he’s in the hospital, so it seems his condition has deteriorated. Do doctors every actually say that, I wonder? I mean they phrase it that way on TV constantly, but I’ve been burned in the past when I relied on TV for my medical knowledge.

Anyway, he’s not doing so hot. Rachel and Jake go to visit him, only to find that he’s been ‘miraculously’ healed. Take a wild guess as to what’s actually going on.

David apparently waited until Saddler was being rushed to the operating room because his heart had stopped, found a way to acquire him, and then essentially took his place. He doesn’t come right out and say that he killed Saddler, but it’s kind of implied. And at the very least, he had to have done something with his body.

So…yeah. Oh, and here’s a nice discussion between Rachel and Jake:

“I worry about you, Rachel. More than any of the others except Tobias. I feel like this war is to you like booze is to an alcoholic. Like I don’t know what will happen to you if it all ends someday. What are you going to do? Go back to being the world’s greatest shopper? Go back to gymnastics and getting good grades?”

I laughed harshly. “You worry about me? What do you think you’re going to do? Jake, you’re a leader now. You make life-and-death decisions. All the time. You’ve learned to do that. And,” I added bitterly, “you’ve learned to use people. You use them for their strengths and their weaknesses. Worry about me? Like when all this is over you’ll go back to being a mediocre basketball player and a decent student? You’re not even in high school yet and you’re the most wanted person in the Yeerk Empire. Visser Three would trade his Blade ship for your head on a stick.”

ALL ABOARD THE ANGST TRAIN.

But anyway, back to getting rid of David! The kids all have a pretend-meeting in Cassie’s barn where they talk about how the morphing box dealie can totally split itself into separate pieces. For reals.

They go the mall and are accosted by Saddler-David, who tells them that he was in the barn while they had their meeting. Oh noes! Rachel leads him back to the Construction Site of Destiny, which is where she supposedly hid the fictitious box. Once there, he tells her to morph into a rat and lead her to each piece of the box in turn. He also morphs a rat so he can follow her.

Rachel leads him through a series of pipes underneath the construction site, stopping to retrieve what she claims is a piece of the blue box. In reality, it’s just a piece of Lego. She waits for the right moment and then leads David into a cage, narrowly avoiding getting killed by him in the process.

So, now they’ve got him trapped in a box. What to do? Wait two hours for him to be stuck as a rat forever, of course! It turns out Cassie was the one who masterminded the whole plan, since she was able to predict more or less everything David would do from the barn onwards. She’s not happy about it, but it’s not like David left them with a choice, right?

Ax and Rachel fly David out onto a remote island/rock a few miles off the coast and leave him there. For the rest of his life. (Which won’t be too long, given that he’s now a rat.) Thus ends the David Trilogy and possibly the most depressing book in the series so far. And if you’re thinking this is the most morally questionable thing the characters will ever do, YOU WOULD BE WRONG.

Seriously.

Join me next Wednesday for my re-read of Animorphs #23: The Pretender. According to the cover, it involves Tobias morphing into an adorable rabbit.

Stranded aliens seek out Earth’s most intelligent species. (Hint: It’s not us.) A bully discovers the meaning of “spatial displacement.” Two girls find out why you should never annoy a witch. When a swarm of sneaking, slashing, scurrying ninja weenies invades their neighborhood, a boy and his best friend find a way to fight back.

Acclaimed author and master of the macabre David Lubar is back with his sixth collection of warped and creepy tales. Here are thirty-three hilarious and harrowing stories that will scare you, make you laugh, or see the world in a whole new way. Find out where David got the idea for each story at the end of the book.

Don’t be a weenie. Read these stories. If you dare!

-synopsis and cover art courtesy of goodreads.

Atmospheric Analysis: Only in middle grade will you encounter a cover like this–illustrated, graphically interesting, and hilarious. I often feel that strong art is what’s missing from the world of YA covers; Beware of the Ninja Weenies‘ cover is a nice example of how MG often does YA one better in the cover department.

Planetary Class: This selection of short stories encompasses a large variety of fantasy and sci-fi subgenres. Everything from social sci-fi to horror to cartoonish fantasy is represented.

Xenolinguisical Assessment: The language in Beware of the Ninja Weenies was my biggest stumbling block. It’ll be a hit with reluctant readers because it’s very accessible, but it’s also so without flourish that at times it falls very flat.

Expanded Report: There are two types of kid’s books. The first is the kind beloved by children, and only by children; the second has the kind of cross-generational appeal that means they also work for parents and other adult readers who like strong stories about childhood and adolescence. As you’d probably guess, I’m fonder of the second type of book. While I can appreciate what kid’s books that are firmly for young audiences bring to the table in terms of entertainment value and accessibility, I still like a little bit more nuance and depth in my children’s literature.

David Lubar’s Beware the Ninja Weenies (the latest in a long series of Weenies books) is very much a kid’s book that’s strictly for kids. In many ways, this collection of science fictional short stories just didn’t work for me–they were too short, too punny (one features a gorgon who turns kids into gorgonzola), too familiar (another features a plot that Lubar acknowledges is right out of The Twilight Zone), too simplistic. However, it’s incredibly successful in meeting the needs of upper elementary and middle school readers on their own terms. These short, cheeky stories are often surreal and tap right into a kid’s sense of language and logic. In one, a boy gets “gummed up” when he swallows gum. In another, Lubar explores what it means to be an “artist’s model.”

I should note that some of these stories are a touch scary. Most of them aren’t horror, not exactly, but Lubar’s characters inhabit an oddly solipsistic universe. The predominant theme seems to be that you might as well be invisible–that the world is cold to the dangers it inflicts upon you. Very sensitive children might find this unsettling

But for those with strong constitutions, these stories are just the right length to read one or two before you tuck in at night. They’re quick, interesting, and ultimately cheeky. Stand-outs include “Poser,” featuring the aforementioned artist’s model, and the excellently voiced “Frigid Relations.”

Beware the Ninja Weenies and Other Warped and Creepy Tales comes out June 5th. It’s available for preorder now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local indie bookstore.

For thirty-five girls, the Selection is the chance of a lifetime. The opportunity to escape the life laid out for them since birth. To be swept up in a world of glittering gowns and priceless jewels. To live in the palace and compete for the heart of the gorgeous Prince Maxon.

But for America Singer, being Selected is a nightmare. It means turning her back on her secret love with Aspen, who is a caste below her. Leaving her home to enter a fierce competition for a crown she doesn’t want. Living in a palace that is constantly threatened by violent rebel attacks.

Then America meets Prince Maxon. Gradually, she starts to question all the plans she’s made for herself- and realizes that the life she’s always dreamed of may not compare to a future she never imagined.

-synopsis and cover art courtesy of goodreads

Atmospheric Analysis: We’re all sick of girls in dresses, every cover looks the same, you know the drill. This particular instance of the girl-in-dress trend manages to cross a sort of dress event horizon, though, with the dress on display being so elaborate that it loops through Boredom Space and becomes interesting to look at again. Also I like the background effect with the reflections. It’s a nice touch.

Planetary Class: Dystopia…ish? I’m tempted to call this near-future social SF, except that the ‘near-future’ part is a bit shaky. The technology level on display here makes it seem alternate-present, but there’s mention of a Fourth World War and geopolitical developments that would have needed a while to develop.

So let’s just go with ‘Social SF’ and leave it at that, shall we?

Viability Rating: Uh.

So, here’s the thing: I don’t demand iron-clad worldbuilding in speculative fiction. I’m willing to overlook leaps in logic or hand-wavey explanations for technology if I can see why the author did it. But the worldbuilding in The Selection goes beyond hand-waving territory and into the realms of incomprehensibility. Its setting is the fictional country of Illéa, which appears to have popped into existence overnight with no cultural or national precedents. Everything about it, from its political makeup (a monarchy, strangely) to its counter-intuitive caste system feel manufactured. The long infodump of a history lesson we get halfway through the book only makes things more confusing. Even the whole process of the Selection itself never gelled for me, which is a problem given that it’s the central conceit of the novel.

So we’re not looking at a terribly viable world here, is what I’m saying.

Mohs Scale: We have a 5! Not because the science here is truly speculative, but because science isn’t really the point. As I said before, The Selection could almost take place in our own world if not for the fact that it’s explicitly set in the (near? far?) future.

Xenolinguisical Assessment: The writing here is surprisingly good, given all my other complaints. America’s narration (in past tense, huzzah) is unaffected and easy to read. It’s not going to knock your socks off or anything, but it also isn’t ever objectionable. If that’s all your looking for in your prose, you’ll be happy enough with this.

Expanded Report: If you’ve read this far, you’ll probably have gotten the impression that I didn’t particularly like The Selection. And you’d be right! The worldbuilding is nonsensical, the plot is tepid (there are several ‘rebel attacks’ on the royal palace, none of which are in any way interesting) and the characters are fairly one-note. The romances (which look distinctly triangular when viewed together) are rote as these things go: forbidden past love, new love is the Prince but he’d never want our plain-Jane hero, except wait he does. I really hate to sum up a review as ‘If you like this sort of thing, you’ll like this sort of thing’, but, well…if you like this sort of thing…

Having said that, reading The Selection did get me thinking about how so many YA authors seem intent on commenting on the reality TV craze in their fiction. I will now share those thoughts with you while pretending to still be writing a review.

The Hunger Games is often described as being a ‘critique on reality TV’ – erroneously, in my opinion. What happens in the Hunger Games books bears no resemblance to what happens on, say, The X Factor, which involves thousands of people clamoring for a chance at becoming a cog in a well-oiled publicity and marketing machine. People actually want to appear on The X Factor. For better or for worse, that particular brand of entertainment has become a cultural icon.

In a way, it’s not hard to see why. These shows are masterful in the how they manipulate the emotions of their audience. The contestants are shown to be in a position of incredible glamour and fortune, surrounded by a massive effort to make their dreams come true – if they do well enough. It’s the ultimate test of talent and skill, and the whole world is watching.

Or that’s the glamour, at any rate. We all know (or most people know) that what you see on the screen is only what the show’s producers want you to see. The judges are spouting what are clearly canned lines, the audience is cheering at all the right moments and the music is hand-picked to make everything seem as bombastic and grandiose as possible. In something like The Selection, then, the lure isn’t so much ‘What would it be like to win the X Factor’ as it is ‘What would it be like to win the X Factor in a world where that means something‘. What if the nation was watching your progress with rapt attention, all of them knowing that the grand finale of the competition would decide more than which contestant gets to put out a mediocre album and then fade into obscurity? When the girls in The Selection are…well, Selected, their lives really do change overnight. When they compete for the affections of Prince Maxon, they’re competing to become the future monarch of their country. It’s reality TV wish fulfillment on a grand scale, and I can at least appreciate why it must appeal to some people even if it doesn’t appeal to me.

If you want a story with a very traditional romance narrative front-and-center, and where everything else surrounding that romance exists solely to support it, then you should consider reading this book. If you don’t want that, don’t read it. It’s as simple as that.

The Selection is available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and your local indie bookstore.

Incapable. Awkward. Artless.

That’s what the other girls whisper behind her back. But sixteen year-old Adelice Lewys has a secret: she wants to fail.

Gifted with the ability to weave time with matter, she’s exactly what the Guild is looking for, and in the world of Arras, being chosen as a Spinster is everything a girl could want. It means privilege, eternal beauty, and being something other than a secretary. It also means the power to embroider the very fabric of life. But if controlling what people eat, where they live and how many children they have is the price of having it all, Adelice isn’t interested.

Not that her feelings matter, because she slipped and wove a moment at testing, and they’re coming for her—tonight.

Now she has one hour to eat her mom’s overcooked pot roast. One hour to listen to her sister’s academy gossip and laugh at her Dad’s stupid jokes. One hour to pretend everything’s okay. And one hour to escape.

Because once you become a Spinster, there’s no turning back.

-synopsis and cover art courtesy of goodreads.

Atmospheric Analysis: This cover’s colorful embellishes do a surprisingly effective job of communicating major bits of both atmosphere and worldbuilding.

Planetary Class: Crewel is mostly a dystopian novel, one that exists on a sort of sliding scale of fantasy vs. science fiction depending on how far in you read.

Viability Rating: At times, the cracks in Albin’s dystopian world show; for example, spinster women are subjected to rigid purity laws that seem to exist for no reason other than to up the stakes and draw a possible textual comparison between this world and the one glimpsed in The Handmaid’s Tale. But the logic here is somewhat circular and contradictory (spinsters are always chaste women because women are more easily controlled; women are more easily controlled because they’re told they must remain chaste), not organic or incisive as in Atwood’s case. Still, the world of Arras is so pretty, original, and vividly described that it mostly doesn’t matter. It feels real.

Mohs Scale: Crewel is fairly soft science fiction–2 on the Mohs scale, a world of phlebotinum where time and space can be manipulated on giant looms.

Xenolinguisical Assessment: Albin’s writing is gorgeous, the type of delicate, evocative prose rarely seen in YA. Clothing, food, and setting are particularly lovely in their descriptions. This author knows her way around the written word.

Expanded Report: When it comes to Crewel, Gennifer Albin’s highly buzzed October debut, I’m of two minds. On the surface, this is one of the most innovative titles to come so far out of the dystopian craze. It’s the story about Adelice, a gifted spinner who can miraculously see–and manipulate–the very threads of matter and time that make up her world. All girls so blessed must become Spinsters, locked in an opulent compound where they live a lavish lifestyle of parties and gowns while tasked with the responsibility of tending to time and space. Of course, in return they will never see their families again and, more, must live lives of chastity.

The writing is absolutely beautiful, and herein lies Albin’s greatest gift–the ability to perfectly describe a world completely foreign from our own and make you believe it. Arras is a hint classical–towns are named “Romen” and “Cypress,” and there are fishing villages filled with copper-skinned rebels. But it’s also a hint evocative of a Stepford America, too. Women work only as secretaries and teachers, and they don pantyhose and heavy make-up. Men wear smart suits (some double-breasted) and generally look like early-sixties Ken dolls. And yet these two very disparate sides of Arras mesh seamlessly. It’s a vivid, innovative setting, and I believed it completely.

The mystery that lurks behind Arras’s shining, gold-threaded surface is undoubtedly the strongest driving force of the novel. Who are these girls who can weave time and space? What happens when people are “cleaned” and “ripped” from the looms? Why did Adelice’s parents so fear her becoming a Spinster? How did such a world begin? The quest to discover the truth about a novel’s world is more common in adult science fiction than YA sci-fi. I can think of only two YA titles whose universes were as well-rendered and deliciously compelling (Incarnate, and A Confusion of Princes). It’s a bit like Lost in that way; some readers will want to keep up with the story so that they can discover the truth about those polar bears.

But . . . this is also where my major hesitation about Crewel lies. I intuited early on what the truth of this world might be, and after that, the pieces fell a bit too easily into place. This is a story you’ve seen before (with at least one major motion picture release centering on the same twist). Well before the reveal, I became  frustrated, rather than riveted.

I suspect this was largely problematic because Adelice’s personality only became fully-formed near the end of the novel. Early on, she was rather sketchily described, an impression not helped by her lack of response to the trauma she faces throughout. Eventually, she became a rather angry girl–an interesting twist, but one that happened just a little too late for me. Likewise, her love interests were very faintly drawn. And some of the more political thematics, about women’s roles, compulsory heterosexuality, purity, and beauty standards, felt ill-fitting with this world once I discovered the truth behind it.

And yet Crewel is still a promising, beautifully written, and iminently interesting book. It takes the kind of risks that I wish more YA sci-fi would, even if they don’t, in the end, always pay out. I’d recommend it for any reader who enjoys lyrical prose and rich worldbuilding. And, while the ultimate mystery of the world didn’t work for me, I’m sure it will be quite fresh and surprising for its intended audience of teenagers.

Crewel comes out October 16th, and is available for preorder from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local indie bookstore.

I can see that you’re skeptical, and with good reason! Earth is the default milieu for all manner of YA speculative fiction, after all. Dystopians? Set on Earth. Post-apocalyptic? Post-apocalyptic-Earth, more like. Science-fiction? For the most part, there’s not a spaceship in sight.

People. We need to do something about this.

The Pitch

What is it about science fiction that makes it unique? Why is it so enduringly popular? You could give a hundred different answers to those questions, but for me, SF’s appeal lies in its ability to push every boundary you can think of when it comes to setting. A writer can produce SF stories set at any point in time from the beginning of the universe to its hypothetical end, and at any point in space from a specific location on Earth to the entirety of a multiverse. You can do anything. You can bring the reader anywhere.

The best works of science-fiction manage to produce in readers the same kind of awe experienced by astronomers when they consider the larger structure of the universe. There are astronomical events happening all around us that rival anything from the annals of fantasy in terms of sheer majesty. Taking a longer view of history, the universe is eventually going to become a very strange place indeed. Here’s a brief plot description for an upcoming game that takes advantage of that fact:

In 1988, a brand new deep sleep cell was released, compatible with all popular 16 bit computers. Unfortunately, it used big endian, whereas the DCPU-16 specifications called for little endian. This led to a severe bug in the included drivers, causing a requested sleep of 0×0000 0000 0000 0001 years to last for 0×0001 0000 0000 0000 years.

It’s now the year 281,474,976,712,644 AD, and the first lost people are starting to wake up to a universe on the brink of extinction, with all remote galaxies forever lost to red shift, star formation long since ended, and massive black holes dominating the galaxy.

Goddamn. This isn’t some hand-wavy ‘Magic is vanishing from the world’ fantasy stuff we’re dealing with here – it’s the real death of our real Universe, and it’s actually going to happen eventually. (According to some models of physics.

My point isn’t just that this kind of scenario is more incredible because it’s ‘real’, but rather that the reality of the universe so often trumps anything we humans could imagine. (Exhibit A for me being almost any of the images generated by the Cassini-Huygens mission.) Yes, you can set your story on Earth, but you don’t need to; you have at your disposal anything that has been revealed or suggested by modern science. The world of your novel can be the interior of a vast generation ship or the moon of a gas giant. It can be a planet lit by the twin suns of a binary star system or a research vessel orbiting a black hole. It can be anything and anywhere. You have the biggest sandbox imaginable to play around in.

There are a few more practical concerns as well. You might have gotten the impression that I take issue with the worldbuilding in a lot of YA dystopian novels (“Never!” gasps the comment section), and an awful lot of that can be chalked up to the fact that those books are set on Earth. At some point, you’re going to run up against the problem of how our present became your book’s future, and it’s going to take a gargantuan effort to make the two gel together if you’ve created a particularly outlandish fictional society. Set your story on another planet, and suddenly that’s not so big an issue; your society can be brand new, constructed according to the whims of its founders, or else it can be the remnants of an interstellar colonization attempt. Either of those scenarios (and you could easily come up with a dozen more) neatly bypass the need to explain how our own world morphed into the one in your book, because there’s a fundamental disconnect between the two (the movement of settlers from one planet to the other). I’m not saying you should think of it as an easy solution to complex worldbuilding problems, but…well, you totally could. If you were so inclined.

‘Think big’, is the short version of my pitch. Science fiction doesn’t just have to be about the ‘when’ – it can also be about the ‘where’, and that can be more compelling than anything our world can provide.

This post brought to you in conjunction with Phoebe, who is both a YA author and one of Saturn's moons.

The Problems

And now to bring you crashing back back to Earth (pun fully intended) by listing some of the difficulties inherent in setting your story on another planet. You’ll want to think about some or all of these before you decide to write about the settlers of Gliese 581b.

1) We know about the composition of a lot of near-Earth solar systems, and most of them probably can’t support life. Yet another case of science ruining fiction for everyone! Before deciding which star your fictional planet is going to belong to, you may want to make sure it’s not one that’s already known to be orbited by nothing but massive gas giants. (Although remember what I said up above about the moons of gas giants. If James Cameron could do it, then by God, you can too.)

2) Stars are really far away. Like, really far away. If your settlers are going to get there without using some form of stasis or a generation ship, they’re going to have to be leaving Earth at a time when we’ve got some pretty advanced propulsion systems. Intergalactic travel is orders of magnitude (literally) more difficult than the interstellar variety, and should not be attempted by any but the most audacious writers.

3) Alien planets probably aren’t going to be very hospitable. A lot of science fiction basically ignores this problem, but it’s nice to at least acknowledge the problem of evolved-for-Earth humans living on a planet whose ecosystem will likely be radically different.

4) You can’t entirely get away from Earth’s influence. If your settlers are first or second-generation, they’re going to have brought some of their culture(s) from Earth with them. If that’s a problem, you might want to set your story long enough after the planet’s first colonization that its population will have had time to develop a culture radically different to anything found on Earth. For extra bonus points, be sure to suit their culture to the physical conditions of their lives on Planet Whatever.

So, are you convinced? Not convinced? Give voice to your ire in the comments section! Also feel free to list some of your favourite YA that isn’t set on Earth.

Aiden Nomura likes to open doors—especially using his skills as a hacker—to see what’s hidden inside. He believes everything is part of a greater system: the universe. The universe shows him the doors, and he keeps pulling until one cracks open. Aiden exposes the flaw, and the universe—or someone else—will fix it. It’s like a game.

Until it isn’t.

When a TFC opens in Bern, Switzerland, where Aiden is attending boarding school, he knows things are changing. Shortly after, bombs go off within quiet, safe Bern. Then Aiden learns that his cousin Winter, back in the States, has had a mental breakdown. He returns to the US immediately.

But when he arrives home in Hamilton, Winter’s mental state isn’t the only thing that’s different. The city is becoming even stricter, and an underground movement is growing.

Along with Winter’s friend, Velvet, Aiden slowly cracks open doors in this new world. But behind those doors are things Aiden doesn’t want to see—things about his society, his city, even his own family. And this time Aiden may be the only one who can fix things… before someone else gets hurt.

-synopsis and cover  art courtesy of goodreads.

Atmosphere Analysis: The cover art for The Forgetting Curve has got a retro vibe to it that I like. Big green text isn’t usually my thing, and the mis-matched fonts are a bit painful, but overall it works better than it feels like it should.

Planetary Class: Cyberpunk-ish sci-fi.

Viability Rating: Apart from the ubiquitous ‘Therapeutic Forgetting Clinics’ (memory-erasers, basically), most of the technology in The Forgetting Curve is at least superficially plausible. When you’re dealing with near-future abstractions of our own consumer technology, there aren’t too many places where you could trip up.

Mohs Scale: An easy 4, with the memory-erasing tech being this book’s ‘one big lie’.

Xenolinguisical Assessment: For as long as I can remember, I’ve dreaded reading books that deal with computer-savvy protagonists. I became a computer nerd at a fairly young age, you see, and it still surprises me often authors think they can write a story that centers around technology while knowing absolutely nothing about it. The slang can be particularly painful. (‘They’re hacking our mainframes! But don’t worry, I’ll backtrack up a firewall daemon. That’ll totally burn them!’) Thankfully, Angie Smibert dodges that bullet by knowing what an IP address is and keeping the hacker lingo to a minimum.

Apart from that, The Forgetting Curve is written in a way that manages to make it feel dense yet breezy at the same there. There’s a ton of stuff happening on almost every page, but the narration never gets bogged down. It does sometimes get confusing, though, mostly because the book features three viewpoint characters and isn’t afraid to switch between them with whiplash-inducing frequency.

Expanded Report: Cyberpunk. What does that word make you think of? For me, it calls to mind the idea that technology and the manipulation thereof is inherently cool. The internet? Cool. Installing any sort of non-standard operating system on your laptop? Cool. Accessing data that you’re not supposed to be accessing?

Cool as shit.

These days, the idea of an elite hacker class who can bend the modern world to their will feels more than a little bit outdated. Computers are commonplace now, and I think most people have copped on to the fact that you can’t magically disable every electronic lock in a high-security building just by running a program from your phone. Even still, there’s something alluring about the idea of people who can peer behind the digital curtain and see our technology-infused society for what it ‘really’ is.

The Forgetting Curve feels like a YA homage to the days when cyberpunk still aspired to prophesy instead of fantasy. Its characters are all teenage ‘hackers’ of one sort or another, whether they hack computers, machinery or society itself. They’re all outsiders of the most fashionable variety – quirky, wise-for-their-years and possibly a little bit unbalanced. I went from liking them to disliking them to liking them again over the course of the book’s relatively scant 200-or-so pages.

My ‘dislike’ period came when I started to suspect that I was supposed to buy in to the idea that these kids really ‘get it’ in a way that none of the boring, buttoned-down, sold-out-to-the-MAN adults around them could ever manage. Thankfully, the book starts to muddy the waters enough in its second half that I could get on board with the implausibly-adept protagonists. Aiden in particular (hacker extraordinaire) grew on me a good deal after a slightly rocky introduction.

I was slightly less enthusiastic about the rest of the book. Part of the problem is that this is a sequel to Memento Nora, Smibert’s first book, which I haven’t read. I suspect, however, that even a thorough understanding of The Forgetting Curve’s predecessor wouldn’t help with what often feels like an over-stuffed and under-planned plot. There’s an incredible amount of stuff going on at any one time: characters being reunited with their extended family after years in a mental hospital, a largely-unseen war, memory erasure clinics being mysterious, shady corporations being even more mysterious, and so on. It doesn’t help that all of the main characters at one point or another begin to suspect that their memories have been altered. Trying to untangle an amnesia-tinged conversation between three people you don’t feel entirely connected to is less fun than you’d imagine.

Despite that potential stumbling block, The Forgetting Curve is unrelentingly interesting throughout. Erased-memory plots may be confusing, but they’re also buckets of fun, and Smibert manages to get a lot out of the conceit over the course of the novel. I enjoyed myself enough that I might keep an eye out for Memento Nora at some point, and fans of that book should definitely check out this one. Hopefully Smibert won’t be the only author out there who feels like bringing some cyberpunk to YA.

The Forgetting Curve is out May 15th and is available to pre-order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and your local indie bookstore.