Demon Road, by Derek Landy

Derek Landy is the ENORMOUSLY popular author of the ENORMOUSLY successful Skulduggery Pleasant series. Demon Road is his first outing into a new fictional world, and it's pretty much guaranteed to be a big hit.

Amber’s life has always been fairly normal. Sure, her parents are pretty odd and wield a surprising amount of power in the community, and sure, they might not show her much love, but she’s always had everything she else she’s ever needed. So it comes as a bit of a shock when she discovers that they’re murderous demons and that – bigger shock – she too has a demon self. But – even bigger shock! – there’s also the part where they want to eat her as part of some power-absorbing ritual. Needless to say, she goes on the run. And boy is it going to be “one hell of a road trip”...

Reviewer ShinraAlpha.com describes Demon Road’s layout/plotting as being episodic in nature – like a T.V. programme – which is so true. It works nicely, adding to the road trip aspect of the book and makes it feel a little like a season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, albeit with more horns. I loved the Charger (a car with a difference) and Milo (Amber’s protector on the Demon Road) and Milo’s development through the story. And hitchhiker Glen was pretty awesome too. I’m usually pretty rubbish at imagining the accents of characters in books and just give them straightforward English voices when I’m reading, but with Glen his Irish accent really jumped off the page and into my head.

Demon Road absolutely does what it says on the tin and I’m certain that Derek Landy’s die-hard fans will be very happy with the new story and the new story world. There’s a lot going on: Will Amber manage to evade her parents AND the Shining Demon, with whom they made a deal so many years ago? How will she adapt to her demon side? Can we figure out Milo’s big secret? And what about Glen and his own mortal countdown?

Overall, I enjoyed Demon Road and I certainly wanted to find out how things were going to work out, but I think I expected there to be more to it somehow. It doesn’t really do anything more than what it says on the tin and I didn’t find much much subtlety in the writing or the storyline, particularly the language, which in some places – to be brutal – didn’t so much border on the cliché as step right into it, making it a bit hammy horror. I have two thoughts about this, though: (1) Does it really matter? (for most people: no); and (2) Is this the point? Is it deliberate, to make sure the book falls solidly within the conventions of the genre, in a slightly tongue-in-cheek way? (maybe, maybe not)

A couple of the ‘episodes’ dragged for me, and I’m not entirely sure what their purpose was within the greater story other than to add a bit more supernatural stuff. There are parts to them which are relevant to the main storyline, but these particular parts of the story felt slightly unwieldy, or over-egged. I’m sure Landy is more than capable of having done better with this part of the story; instead it feels like he got a bit lazy with it, which I found disappointing – I felt that the ‘furthering’ that was done in here could have been done better and more in line with Amber and Milo’s main mission.

Lastly, there is Amber. For much of the story she felt very two-dimensional to me. Her character does develop some – e.g. from someone whose instinct is to run and hide to someone willing to stand up for a stranger on the street – but I didn’t feel like her development was completely rounded. I spent some time trying to understand what it is about her that quite didn’t hit home for me and I think it’s because we aren’t really introduced to who she is before everything changes for her. We know she was in trouble with her headmistress, we know she had a job in a diner, and we know she had a few online friends, but that’s about it and it’s never fleshed out at all – for me, all of this made her difficult to understand exactly what changes for her as she experiences her new reality.

Secondly, much is made of the fact that Amber’s demon form is considerably more beautiful than her human one. I have mixed thoughts about this. It’s really, really good that Landy has chosen to make our heroine not the standard blonde bombshell but dark haired and a bit on the pudgy side. But why would this aspect of her change when she becomes a demon? The demon part is the stronger, more confident part of her personality and I’m not sure if it’s Landy falling back on some sort of stereotype – that heroines are always beautiful to behold – or if its all a metaphor for the beauty under the skin. I’m just not sure on what his line of thought here is which, in a book of this ilk, suggests that some little thing is missing. In many aspects he makes Amber a brilliant feminist, the sort of person who will stand up for a girl being hassled by a jerk on the street, but it doesn’t always follow through in every part of the story.

All of this said, plaudits must go to Landy for the things he has achieved in the story: It’s fun, has a good bit of gore, plenty of supernatural shenanigans and nicely avoids the YA romance cliché whilst twisting the traditions of both the coming-of-age and road-trip stories. Demon Road is ultimately a cool new YA title that I’ve no doubt will have mass appeal. I’ve also no doubt that a lot of people will disagree with my thoughts here and simply read the book for what it is, without needing anything more. And that’s great. My little quibbles are simply because I think that Landy is capable of more. But: go read it yourself and make your own mind up!

Read Me Like A Book by Liz Kessler

There’s a lot going on in Ash’s life. College, boys, friends. Plus there’s her parents, whose constant arguing and complete inability to have a normal conversation without it turning into a bickering match is pretty much at the forefront of her mind. She’s not much of a ‘study’ girl, more of a mess-around-at-the-back-of-the-classroom girl, and her grades know it. But surely her parents will figure things out, and there’s only a year left of college and if she can just get through it then she can move on to whatever comes next. Except there’s one thing different this year: the new English teacher, Miss Murray, who pulls Ash in and makes her want to do better and makes her think maybe she is worth something after all.

I’ve been looking forward to reading Read Me Like a Book for some time, ever since author Liz Kessler first started to talk about it, over a year ago now. It’s the ultimate coming-of-age story, a book about growing up and figuring out who you are and what your strengths are, and what love is really all about. I’m not sure what I expected, but I knew from its history that it would be interesting. All of Liz Kessler’s previous books are aimed at younger readers, but Read Me Like a Book is a step in a new direction in more than just readership age. She first wrote it over ten years ago, but it was put aside because it was felt that it would be too controversial to publish at the time. Which seems pretty crazy now.

A lot of things start to go wrong for Ash at the start of the story – not only her parents’ relationship, but her relationship with her best friend starts going haywire pretty quickly, and she’s got this new boyfriend, Dylan, who should be perfect in every way, but somehow Ash doesn’t feel right about him. The only person she feels able to connect to is Miss Murray, and as the weeks slip by and she’s struggling to hold all the strands together, the idea of Miss Murray takes greater and greater hold. Ash realises she is in love, and not with Dylan.

I think what stands out for me in this story is the naturalness of it. Being 16, 17, 18, its like boiling point. There are lots of different things going on in Ash’s life and figuring out her sexuality is a major part of that, but everything else is just as real and just as major as well. Who she is in love with is the steering factor in the story, but there are other things too, and this makes the book feel all the more real. It’s not a big showpiece with a dramatic ka-boom moment or a massive reveal; it’s a progression, and that’s what life is really like and I really applaud Liz for writing her story in this way because it works in a way that is different to many other novels that fall within LGBT publishing today.

Ash is a strong young woman who, once she figures out how she feels about things, is able to voice them, with the help of her friends Cat and Robyn. Although she’s understandably nervous and a little anxious about doing so, she isn’t afraid because the environment and the world that she’s coming out to is a more open one than it was twenty years ago, and she knows it’s the right thing for her. What better role model could a young person ask for? The story is full of drama and tension, and this builds over the course of the year in which it takes place, with natural ups and downs along the way, and Ash’s character really grows too. It’s not all roses at the end, but the thing is, it doesn’t feel like an end – it feels like the beginning of a new chapter, in which things can only continue to get better.

If Liz was scared about releasing Read Me Like A Book into the wild, she needn’t be; it’s wonderful. It’s a love story, a growing-up story, a label-free story that should speak to all readers and which says good things about the world and where we are headed. Kudos.

Grasshopper Jungle, by Andrew Smith

On the front cover of my copy of Grasshopper Jungle, there’s a quote from Michael Grant, which calls it: “A cool/passionate, gay/straight, male/female, absurd/real, funny/moving, past/present, breezy/profound masterpiece of a book.” This sums up Andrew Smith’s work of genius absolutely perfectly.

Grasshopper Jungle is everything Michael Grant says it is, which might sound like a pretty tough thing to achieve, yet Andrew Smith does this without seeming to break into a sweat. Our protagonist Austin, however, probably sweats quite a lot. What with the unleashing of the end of the world and the running for his life, not to mention the heartache of being in love with two people at once.

It all begins in the small American town of Ealing, Iowa. One question is whether it began fifty years ago, or whether it began four days ago. Either way, an army of six foot tall praying mantises have been accidentally unleashed into the town. Right now, though, nobody really knows anything about it. But the grasshoppers don't care; they only want to do two things: they’re hungry and they’re horny. Which is, when you think about it, maybe kinda like the average teenage boy?

Grasshopper Jungle is not so much an apocalypse book as a coming-of-age story, because it’s Austin’s story - his and Robby’s and Shann’s – so even while the shit is hitting the fan around them, Austin is still, you know, a person. With personal stuff going on. More precisely, he’s wondering how he can be in love with both Robby and Shann at the same time. He doesn’t want to hurt either of them, but that doesn’t change the fact that he is an unstoppable dynamo of a horny sixteen year old boy, slave to his instincts, and this makes him selfish. So it’s kind of inevitable that he’ll hurt someone, and probably himself too, as he tries to figure it all out. Oh, and try to save the world.

I spent about 90% of the book debating how literally I should take Austin’s account of “the end of the world”. Is it really the end of the world as in The End Of The World, or is it (a) just the end of the world in Ealing, Iowa, (b) what could have been the beginning of the end of the world but fortunately turns out not to be, or (c) maybe simply, given his heartache, just the end of Austin’s world? In many ways Austin’s account of what could be the more terrifying aspects of this story are almost blasé and almost (almost) so taken-for-granted that it’s difficult to divine how serious it all is. Is this because by the time he comes to write this account, he’s pretty much inured to the whole thing? Or because, at the time it’s all happening, it’s overshadowed by the bigger question in his life: how can he be in love with two people? Plus, you know, giant grasshoppers.

Is Austin to blame? The Hoover boys? Dr. Grady McKeon? The world’s need for unstoppable corn? Told not as a diary, but as a personal historical account, Austin likes details and he likes connections, and his history includes both of these, linking together what could be considered unrelated events into a big spider’s web of a retelling. Ultimately, of course, all the connections become clear, but can there be a happy ending. What, after all, is a happy ending? It’s immense and tiny, intense and careful, pacey and thoughtful, funny and sad, and it’s impossible not to root for Austin to get everything he wants, even when all of those things are seemingly contradictory to one another.

I loved every part of this book, from Austin’s complete confusion over his two best friends to the frankly rather bizarre apocalypse he’s caught up in the middle of, the brilliant antics of these three kids in their small hometown and the eclectic way that Smith/Austin goes about writing the story, sliding from personal account to family history to multiple viewpoints as the praying mantises take over. I want to tell you it’s one of the most interesting and unusual novels I’ve ever read. I want to tell you it’s genre busting, and gender busting too. I want to tell you it will appeal to fans of John Green, Patrick Ness, Michael Grant, Suzanne Collins, Stephen King. Mostly, though, I just want to tell you it’s so completely brilliant you have to read it for yourself.

Picture Me Gone, by Meg Rosoff

Picture Me Gone is breathtakingly wonderful, Meg Rosoff at her absolute best. Just when I’d given up on her (I didn’t manage to finish her last book), she goes and writes this. It is heartbreaking and tense and a sort of sadness permeates the text, yet it’s neither weepy nor depressing; instead it is simple and tidy whilst filled with beautiful and wonderful thoughts, sentences, ideas. It is a story of loss, of being lost and of getting lost, and yet a lot of things are found in it.

Mila likes to solve puzzles – and she’s good at them too, good at seeing things other people don’t see, that other people don’t feel. Like the waitress who doesn’t know she’s pregnant, or the father who forgets his child is only a child. But now, Mila’s father’s best friend has gone missing, has simply walked out on his life. Can Mila help her father figure out where Matthew’s gone and why he left? Matthew, though, is a stranger to Mila. She only knows him through her father’s eyes: friends from childhood, the man who saved his life. But who is Matthew really? What will Mila find when she starts to see him through other people’s eyes? What secrets has he been hiding, and what really happened the night that his son Owen died?

Mila and her father, Gil, were already planning a visit to America to see Matthew, so when he goes missing, they continue with their plans, hoping instead they’ll be able to help his wife find him. Gil is a translator, a master of languages, and translation is a strong theme wound through Rosoff’s story: how we translate what others tell us, what we see, what we choose to see. Mila’s self-appointed task is to translate all the little bits and pieces she gathers from her father, from Matthew’s wife and family, and turn them into an explanation for Matthew’s behavior. But can a person ever really be wholly translated to someone other than themselves?

It is a far more difficult exercise than Mila ever imagined. In the beginning, in many ways Mila takes on the role of the grown up, and we can’t help but think of her this way as she looks out for her father, but as the story develops and her discoveries get progressively darker, her assertions that she is a child become ever stronger. Her emotions are swept into a whirlwind, the world she thought she knew turned into a mountain of questions and uncertainties. The bright lights and bright colours of the book’s cover belies what Mila finds inside – reflected further by the snow storm that dampens everything down, covering the world in a blanket of white – but it’s not a blanket that can protect Mila from the future, from growing up.

Rosoff’s language is so clean and sharp that it forced me to read slowly, to take in and appreciate every part of the story and the poetry she invokes, yet it’s impossible not to keep turning the page as her words seeped into my everyday life, taunting me until I could return to the story. Undoubtedly one of the most accomplished young adult books of 2013.