Ophelia by Lisa Klein

Ophelia, by Lisa Klein, is a retelling of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet through the eyes of the world’s most famous spurned lover. A young and blossoming girl, Ophelia catches the eye of the dark prince Hamlet, and the well-known story unfolds with just enough innovation to make it interesting.

We get a far more in-depth picture of Ophelia. The book spends a somewhat excessive amount of time describing her alabaster skin and lithe figure, but beyond that her thought-processes and intelligence are explored quite completely. She is no longer a pale, watery mystery, writhing blurrily in tragedy and madness. She is calculating, intelligent, and stifled. As she says in a bout of frustration, "The wild doe has become a gentle deer. I fear I have been forcibly tamed."

Ophelia is youthful, ripe, lovely and restlessly clever. The author did a great job of blending the ideal of a young girl as a blooming sexual object with the well-tested narrative of a girl who wants a life bigger than she is allowed. Ophelia won’t stand for becoming a lady. She wants out of the castle, out of her limited life. And she will achieve this in ways that --given Ophelia’s stigma-- may surprise the reader.

The first half of the book is fast-paced and compelling. It chronicles Ophelia’s childhood and whirlwind, frightening and magical love affair with Hamlet. They are intellectual equals, and while they once enjoy a relationship solely based on their love and their fantasies for the future they will have together, it becomes an affair spurred on by a spark of madness. They twist through a black maze of heat and passion and the constant possibility that the person in their arms will suddenly morph into a ghost-possessed demon.

What is madness? How does it spread? How does it infect? Is it always there, festering, waiting, or is it a malady foreign to the natural mind? Ophelia watches as her bright and brilliant Hamlet dances along the path of madness—assuring her he is merely playing, pretending and scheming to achieve his goals. He is above it all, he is in control. But it is a steep and slippery slope, and Ophelia watches as her love and equal becomes a creature unknown to her. And it is exciting and it is beautiful and it is breathtaking. But so, so frightening.

Is madness inborn? Can it be faked? Is there a line between true madness and the trickery of the mind? These questions are explored directly and indirectly throughout.

That was something the book does very well. Unfortunately, after the wonderful first half, the book loses much of its momentum. It meanders and drags, and I found myself having to force myself to read. Yes, there is a great little twist that skews the well-known story and completely changes where the latter part of the book goes—but the novel fails, after the initial idea, to follow through and make it interesting. It devolves into immoderate pockets of unnecessary description and repetitive pages that weren’t really interesting in the first place.

If you can make it through the duller second half, the beginning of the novel is definitely worth a read. It will be significantly more rewarding if you are familiar with Hamlet, however.

2 and a half evil daggers.



Yours in madness and sanity (whatever that is),

Briar

Gossip of the Starlings by Nina de Gramont

Gossip of the Starlings, by Nina de Gramont, is a boarding school story with a twist. Catherine arrives at Esther Percy School for Girls, having been forced from her old (coed) school for boy-related reasons. The school seems rigid, constraining, lonely, until Sky Butterfield chooses Catherine as her friend. Beautiful, eloquent, daring, and brilliant, Skye, the Senator’s daughter, is brimming with life and vim. She transforms Catherine’s life into a whirl of hazy, weed-brightened nights and days of rosy adventures merely rimmed by classes.

Skye is passionate and vibrant, but her desperate thirst for dare and danger becomes concerning for Catherine. Skye has a tragic soul and seems to believe that she is indestructible—a belief she tests more and more frantically, engaging in increasingly dangerous adventures. Skye defies convention, takes what she wants, lives hungrily yet can never be satisfied. She is a tightrope walker, an enchanted seductress, an angel. She is a presence in both of the worlds she inhabits—the world of Esther Percy and the world of my mind. It is tough to say where she is more at home.

Gossip of the Starlings was fantastic. The writing was pure poetry: smooth, eloquent, daintily descriptive without ever being too thick. The characters were painted gloriously, the plot and the allusions drawn were constantly keeping me interested. The following is just a snippet from the long, intricate work of art Gramont has created.

“Now, when I see teenage girls laughing. When I see them loosed on a summer evening – their limbs tanned and gossamer, their imagined freedom radiating like nuclear light – I can’t help but fast forward two decades or more. I know the curve of their bones has already made an imperceptible bow to gravity. I see the decay in slow motion, even or especially through those stunning and immortal years.”

Complemented by such gems of observations, small moments make up much of the novel. They are painted to such rich perfection that after months I recall them still. The image of a blood promise in a night-dark dorm room stands in my mind bright and vivid—scarlet blood, moonlit curls, tender smiles and flushed cheeks as the girls teeter on the edge of destruction; the first in many daring adventures that take them inches from death, the only way, they believe, to truly experience life.

I loved Skye’s seduction, the way even the reader was drawn to her. I could picture her lush beauty, her tender flawless skin, the dare and the dreams in her eyes. The way she could dance logical circles around any opponent, dangle her ripe sexuality at a whim, manipulating the world into her dark and dizzy playground.

After finishing Gossip of the Starlings, I began to search for other hazy books about poetry and death and life and living on the cusp of womanhood. The only other one I found was the Virgin Suicides (by Jeffrey Eugenides), which was excellent but lacking the strong plot of Gossip of the Starlings. Any suggestions?

Anyway, as if you couldn’t guess—Gossip of the Starlings earns a glowing five daggers.

Off embracing my fleeting youth but always, unalterably yours,

Briar

How to Say Goodbye in Robot by Natalie Standiford

How to Say Goodbye in Robot, by Natalie Standiford, is the story of Beatrice Szabo and her very unique friendship with Jonah “Ghost Boy” Tate. Bea’s family moves all the time, so when Beatrice is told that they are moving to Baltimore for her senior year, she readies herself for yet another year of gossip and parties and shallow friends. Instead, she meets Jonah, nicknamed “Ghost Boy” by his taunting peers, and the two of them embark on a relationship that cannot appropriately be pinpointed by words such as “friend” or “boyfriend.” To Bea and Jonah, their togetherness is much more than that. It is sharing a love for a late night radio show, talking over beer and music in their favorite downtown hang out, and planning secret visits to Jonah’s sort-of-dead twin brother.

Quite honestly, I didn’t feel it. I liked the idea of a friendship above words and gossip and shallowness, but I felt that the author didn’t develop the characters or the relationship enough so that when the friends had a falling out, I didn’t care at all, really. When Bea’s parents had problems, I didn’t feel for them or for her. Overall, I got the impression of a sort of bleak world filled with chickens, greasy hair, and beer, and it was not a world in which I particularly wanted to stay. Not in a good way, either—some books paint a bleak world intentionally and the darkness can be powerful, but in How to Say Goodbye in Robot this was not the case. There were certainly a few touching moments, and the themes of loss and death and how thinking about them is not necessarily a bad thing were very nice, but I didn’t feel any sort of real connection with the characters.

I liked the never-quite-shot-down ideas of inhabitants from the future living in our time thread, and I found the radio show, The Night Lights, very sweet and quirky. I liked the idea that one could have a whole sort of radio community of friends, and that there can be friendship based on more than just gossip and the troubles of this world. Unfortunately, the author didn’t quite portray the sweet world of their friendship, so there was no basis to build off of.

If you care to do your homework and go all the way back to my Toad Hill days, you'll know what this means: How to Say Goodbye in Robot was a bit less than crinterprood.

And that's that.

Briar.

Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman

Noughts and Crosses, by Malorie Blackman is the tale of a world with a clear class distinction, an alternate universe in which racial and social roles are completely reversed. The world is run by the dark-skinned Crosses and served by the white Noughts—hatefully called daggers and blankers, respectively.

The story is that of Sephy Hadley and Callum McGregor , whose love and friendship struggle against the wide gap between their social standings. Sephy, a Cross, is the daughter of one of the most powerful politicians in the country, while Callum is a low-class “blanker,” and would never have met Persephone had his mother not been working for hers. Still, Sephy and Callum build their friendship in secret hours on a strip of beach and midnight meetings in a rose garden. To them, it doesn’t matter that she is a Cross and he is a Nought; they are both simply people. But when Callum is accepted as one of the first Noughts into Sephy’s all-Cross school, everything changes. And as Callum’s family gets more wrapped up in the violent civil rights terrorist organization known as the Liberation Militia, the stakes get even higher. The story whirls into a fast-paced tale of love and trust and hatred and hurting, race and rights and human nature, all tying into the breathtaking climax; a ending no one could have predicted.

Noughts and Crosses is possibly one of the best books I have ever read.

It could easily have been a simplistic story about how racism is bad and all are equal (which is perfectly good and true, but makes for a rather predictable novel), but Noughts and Crosses delves into the deeper, rawer side of that. Rather than simply black-white racism itself, the story examines human nature and the foundation of prejudice. I think the most important thing was the reversal of who had the power. With the dark-skinned people in charge rather than the light-skinned, real-life politics and pre-formed notions are stripped away, and we are left with simply a picture of prejudice.

What was interesting was how false notions about African Americans that have mostly died out the idea that they smell bad, are less clean, and so on, translated to the blacks’ perception of whites. And it fit perfectly! In this scenario, the whites were portrayed as the dirty second class, and all of the terrible racial stereotypes people held and still hold about blacks are given to the whites in this book. One can see that they have nothing to do with a particular skin color, merely the fact that the color is different and perceived as inferior.

The book studies these ideas far more naturally and subtly than I do, giving them a pronounced presence in the story without ever having to state them bluntly as I have just done. Truly, this book is excellent. It does delve into really interesting questions and ideas, but it also paints a picture of friendship and love startlingly well.

Noughts and Crosses is the first in a trilogy, and I give it five out of five daggers. And no, I don’t mean the fictional slur for the Cross class.

Thinking and mind-blown,

Briar

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Somewhere in the expansive throes of the future, across a land once known as “North America,” lies a country, Panem. Led by the power-mad and appearance-obsessed Capitol, the country’s twelve districts are forced to offer up two “tributes,” or teenage sacrifices, to partake in the country-wide battle called The Hunger Games. The tributes are chosen by lottery (although one’s name can be entered as many times as one likes, in exchange for a tessera—a year’s worth of grain and oil to help support a poor family). In some countries, participation in the Games is an honor, as one’s district gets showered with money and food for an entire year, and eternal glory is thrust upon the winner. But when Katniss Everdeen, a poor but fiery citizen of District Twelve (the country’s poorest district), finds herself a tribute, her entire world comes crashing down. For you see, the Hunger Games are no ordinary reality show—the twenty-four tributes are placed in an arena in which they must fight to survive not only against the environment, but most of all, their fellow tributes. It is the duty of each tribute to kill as many of each other as they can, for the winner will be the one that is the last to survive as all others are dead.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, was a positively riveting book. I felt my eyes were actually glued to the pages, and I finished it in a matter of hours because I found it so difficult to pry myself away. Filled with some astonishing twists and turns, the games themselves were nerve-wracking and heartbreaking, as Katniss would constantly have to remind herself that trusting anyone would result in pain as only one could win, but moreover, a smile and a knife in the back.

The scariest part, perhaps, is that the whole thing reads like a glorified reality show. Sure, it is government run and mandatory to watch—the government likes to remind the citizens just how at-their-mercy they are—but one has to think about how easily we watch reality shows that, by a stretch, were born from the same seed as the Hunger Games.

For Katniss and her fellow tributes, the reality show aspect means that they must be constantly putting on a good face, proving themselves to the audience who have placed bets on their lives, as well as trying to win sponsors who can send them gifts in dire situations.

I was so impressed by this book. It managed to effectively weave a futuristic sci-fi setting with a reality show that is hard to stop turning over in your head, with a commentary on image, as well as a love story. I can’t even weave that sentence to sound ordered or clear, yet Suzanne Collins managed to do so beautifully, creating a book that is a package of sheer suspense and delight.

The first of a trilogy, it has certainly caused a stir among both readers and professionals. Stephenie Meyer and Stephen King both gave rave reviews, and the rights to a movie have been already bought, with the author herself adapting it as a screenplay.

But even more exciting—there is something in which YOU can get involved! The author is hosting a competition in which teens can enter to win an ARC (Advanced Readers Copy) of the book’s sequel, Catching Fire. The entry consists of writing, in 500 words or less, how you would survive the Hunger Games. For more information, check out their website here.But hurry, because the contest ends May 15th!

Again, I absolutely loved this book, and am under the impression that everybody should read it. Unsurprisingly, I give it a whopping and wonderfully evil (oxymoron? no way-- Evil IS wonderful!) five daggers.



Relieved that OUR kind of evil is delightful rather than murderous,
Briar