An Outsider No Matter Where He Goes: The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells

This book came to me unexpectedly thanks to a friend's recommendation and the fact that I love things that are free. Whenever I hear about a book recommendation from someone that is free for my Kindle, I will get it just because I love having books--the six overflowing bookcases in my apartment will attest to this as well--but I was pleasantly surprised at what a good fantasy novel The Cloud Roads turned out to be.

Moon, the story's main character, is alone in the world. He was orphaned as a child, and though the many cities and towns he has traveled to throughout his life are populated by intelligent species of humanoids that look somewhat like him, he has never found a place where he belongs, and he has no idea where or even what race of people he comes from. The reason why he doesn't fit in is because he can shift from looking like a 'groundling' into a large, dangerous-looking flying creature, and the problem with that is that the world is plagued by a race of violent, warlike creatures called the Fell and, though he is not one of them, his flying form looks remarkably similar to that of the Fell. When the story starts, Moon has been living with a settlement of peaceful groundlings for several years and finally starting to feel like he belongs there, but one night, someone sees him shift into his flying form, believes he is a Fell, and the entire village turns against him. They drug him and stake him out to be eaten by wild creatures, but he is rescued by a flying monster that he soon discovers is another one of his people--a Raksura.

This Raksura is named Stone, and he is the consort to the queen of a colony of Raksura who are in desperate trouble. A complete explanation of their physical and social heirarchy is best left to a reading of the book, but, to put it simply, they have both fertile and infertile males and females and their biology determines their place within the colony. Stone's colony is in trouble because it has been unable to produce consorts, the only type of Raksuran who can mate with Raksuran queens, and Moon just happens to be one of those, so Stone convinces Moon to come back to his colony, where he will finally be among his own people again.

Of course, Moon's problems don't end there. The colony's population problems stem from trouble with the Fell, he is not easily accepted into their home, and he has to find a way to save the colony even though many of its people, including its queen, hate him for being an outsider who is ignorant of their ways. All of this conflict creates an excellent story that made the book hard to put down. I am not well-versed in all of the different styles of fantasy, so this was a new and intriguing read for me in more ways than one, and I plan on looking for more books by this author and in this fantasy style in the future.

This book also got me thinking about a trope in fantasy and science fiction that was recently brought to my attention--that of telling the story from the point of view of the naive outsider. It is such a common and necessary trope when introducing readers to a world outside of their sphere of knowledge that it can easily go unnoticed. In this story, the trope was more obvious than most, but only because Moon's outsider status was a stigma both in the world where he didn't belong and in the world where he did. The style has its strengths and weaknesses--it makes a strange world populated by non-humans much more accessible and easier to visualize and accept without being pulled out of the story by long descriptions, but it also means that some of the character's personal story can be sacrificed for the sake of his new experiences-- but recognizing this storytelling style and being able to analyze its strengths and weaknesses within one book whose plot was tailor-made for it has already opened my eyes to its possibilities in my own writing, which is what I am striving for first and foremost in reading books with a critical eye.

Though The Cloud Roads is no longer being offered for free as an Amazon Kindle download, I still recommend that you get your hands on it and read it, especially if you love fantasy and good stories about outsiders finding a place to call home. Enjoy!

The Cloud Roads, by Martha Wells

This Very Timely Read Was An Accident: The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood

When I started reading The Handmaid's Tale, I expected to be writing this review as a comparison between fiction and literature. The similarities between the dystopian young adult novels that I've been devouring over the last few years, such as the Hunger Games trilogy, and dystopian literature like The Handmaid's Tale (as well as my favorite dystopian novel, Brave New World) are more numerous than you might imagine, but the differences are also vast and would make for a very interesting discussion. However, current events have interceded and made this review a more timely one than I would have expected, so that is what this post will be about instead.

The Handmaid's Tale is the story of a future not that divergent from our recent past. The book was written in 1986, so it still reflects many of our society's modern fears--religious war, extremism, and environmental disaster. In the world of the novel, nuclear waste and other poisons have caused a severe drop in fertility, and a takeover by fundamentalist Christian extremists has turned a vast section of North America into a theocratic state in which women are no longer free and equal with men, among other horrors that, I confess, have haunted my nightmares well before I ever read this book. The story is told by a woman whom the reader only knows as Offred, though this is not her actual name. She is the Handmaid of a man (named Fred, hence Of Fred) who holds some high military position within the new government, and her job is to bear him a child, since his wife can no longer do so.

The story jumps around between Offred's present, where she describes her daily activities and the changes taking place in her life, and memories of her past, where she describes--in no particular order--from her personal perspective how the world changed from what I presume was the modern world of the early 1980s to the world that she knows now. The diversions to the past are never quite complete, and are sometimes delivered with maddening vagueness, but in the end the story of her life can be pieced together, and when you finally understand it all, it is almost horrifying that she seems to have adapted to her current situation with such ease. She was a smart, educated young woman, the daughter of a feminist, with a husband and a daughter, and she slowly saw her whole life taken away from her--first her job, then her ability to be an equal functioning member of society, then her husband and daughter, simply because she married a man who had been divorced. They tried to escape what was going to happen to them, but they failed, and now she is alone and doing her best to survive in a world that is as alien to her as it would be to us.

The thing I found the most fascinating about this book was trying to imagine being in Offred's place. Most dystopian fiction that I read takes place long after the events that turned the world on its head in the first place, so the characters generally accept that things, no matter how wrong they are, are that way for a reason. But Offred remembers how the world was before the theocracy that she is now forced to live in. She remembers going to school and having a job, when in the world now women aren't even allowed to read and their daughters will never learn to. She remembers going to feminist marches with her mother as a child, and now all they fought for has been stripped away. As a young woman living in our modern society, I don't think I would survive those kind of changes in my life. I would have fought it to my very last breath, and if I was forced into the situation in which Offred lives, I probably would go stark-raving mad.

The flipside of that fascination, though, was the disturbing realization that not only did I understand most of the biblical references that made up the language of the book's theocratic society (the Handmaids, for example, are a reference to the story of Abraham and his wife Sarah, who, when she discovered that she could not bear children, told her husband to lie with her handmaid so that he might have a son) but I also saw this dystopia as much less impossible than most of the worlds in other books that I read. There are still parts of the world in which women are not educated, or allowed to be independent entities from the men of their household, or are forced to cover themselves to keep from tempting men with their bodies, and these customs persist even among people who live in modern, liberal societies, and are forced upon women in more repressive countries even if they do not adhere to the same religious beliefs as those whose beliefs demand such things of women. Worse, there are conservative elements in our own country, possibly on this very day and at this very hour, discussing how to turn the clock back on a woman's right to control her own body and its ability to bear children. Though there is obviously a difference between denying the woman a right to decide whether or not she has a baby when she chooses to have sex to demanding that women have children for people who cannot have them, it is not a large one, especially since that is practically what anti-abortion activists who tell women to put their babies up for adoption are saying.

It is these sort of revelations that keep bringing me back to dystopian fiction, even though it is about as disturbing to read as it is enjoyable. There is merit in looking at the worst-case scenario, if for no other reason than that there is educational value in trying to imagine yourself in the same situation or a similar one. A part of me wishes that the book had been more informative about how the world came to be that way, about the people who let it happen and the people who fought back, because, at least from Offred's point of view, it all seemed to have happened too easily, which was the most terrifying thought to come out of the whole book. Every time a new election comes around and I see no real options for the progress or betterment of society, I content myself by saying, "Well, at least none of them will have enough power to make it any worse." But lately, as I watch what seems to be a systematic rolling back of women's rights within this country, I am beginning to wonder if I was wrong, and the biggest problem with that is that I'm not sure what can be done to make it right again.

The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood

A Fine Line Between Terrorist and Freedom-Fighter: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

(Author's Note: Spoilers... you know the drill... blah, blah, blah... just read the books already! Especially since this time there are actual spoilers for the actual ending of this book. - S)

It's hard for me to know exactly what to say about this book in comparison to the first two. It is not as good as the first two books--it lacks a straightforward plot, it spends a little too much time inside Katniss's head as she agonizes over her relationships, and it tries to cram too much into the final chapter of this story about what it takes to start and finish a revolution--but it still manages to pull you in with a fast-paced narrative, and after everything the first two books have spent building up, it's very hard to put this book down until you know how everything ends.

And I actually admire Suzanne Collins for not taking the easy way out when choosing an archetype for her freedom-fighter army. She could have made them as noble as their cause certainly is, which would have made the ending to this story much less emotionally jarring, but she chose to--in my opinion, at least--write a little closer to reality. Two ideas that I've thought about far too often over the last decade or so kept crossing my mind as I read this book: "There's a fine line between a freedom-fighter and a terrorist," and "War makes monsters of men." The tactics that the Capital used at the end of the first rebellion to prevent further uprisings--the enforced poverty, the isolation and separation of the Districts, the marginalization of a majority of the population, and especially the Hunger Games--were abominable, and there was no question that they needed to be brought down, but, unlike in the stories we are all told as children, one does not vanquish evil simply by being its opposite. Any war, even a just war for freedom, is a messy business that often requires the worst even of good people, and the killing of others, no matter how bad they are or how hard they were trying to kill you, changes a person, and Collins doesn't shy away from those harsh realities.

To call the ending of this story bittersweet would be a gross understatement, but I am still glad that it ends with the two people who most deserved peace and a future together finding it. By the end of the story, I can forgive Katniss her wishy-washy emotions and her selfish tendency to focus too much on what people think of her despite the fact that there was a war going on. She was a teenager, and some things about teenagers will always be the same, no matter how quickly their circumstances in life expect them to grow up. What matters in the end is that she is able to see things for what they really are, make the best choices available to her, and try to find some peace with herself once she has brought about a future in which she can have that peace.

The one thing that truly makes the entire story bearable and almost enjoyable to read over and over again, though, is that it brings Peeta a happy (sort of) ending too. Peeta is, without a doubt, my favorite character, because he is the only one of the main characters who is a truly good and decent person. From the very first time you meet him, you can see that he has a good heart, and he manages to keep it all the way through, even after being tortured and having his memories and his emotions twisted by President Snow. The fact that he survives and is able to make a life for himself, the girl he loves, and the family that they have together in the end brings a peace to the ending of this amazing yet troubling story that I hope can be found by all good men who find themselves scarred by events in their lives that are out of their control.

Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins