Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd (Edited by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci)

If you’re a nerd or a geek (self-proclaimed or not!), go all out an celebrate your geektastic nerdiness! “You’ve got the heart and soul of a geek or you don’t”, Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci must have thought and they knew they had friends who’d think just the same… so never too shy to try something completely out of this world, they asked some of their YA writer friends to contribute a story of their own (whether they be Klingon, Quiz Bowl, LARP or band-inspired). Sara Zarr, John Green, David Levithan, Garth Nix, Barry Lyga and a bunch of other secret or not so secret geeks jumped at the occasion et voilà…Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd was born.

There are definitely a couple of standout stories in this collection. The first highlight for the cat came with David Levithan’s “Quiz Bowl Antichrist” (in the middle of the book), about a boy’s own reasons for joining the quiz bowl team and secret admirations. Levithan is a master at characterization and proves that here as well. Barry Lyga’s “The Truth about Dino Girl” is at first almost “typically” geeky (the geek as outcast and victim), but then gets a very dark twist at the end – we don’t need to over-glorify “the geek”, you know, lots of them have mean streaks, just like those meanies out there… Plus you get the added bonus that it’s set in Brookdale! Wendy Mass’s “The Stars at the Finish Line” is a very sweet story about stars and love! There is a great dynamic between the two protagonists here. What more do you need? And then the collection ends with an absolute bang… Libba Bray’s “It’s Just a Jump to the Left”! You knew there had to be a story about Rocky right? And Libba does it right and manages to write a whole coming of age novel in the span of a short story!

There’s a story for every type of geek here, and obviously not all the stories will work for everyone (the cat admits to not feeling much for a couple of the stories here!). But I don’t think that was the point of the editors. I think they wanted to come up with a book full of stories of being passionate about something, and sometimes that passion can get out of control and become an obsession, and sometimes that passion is what defines you, but sometimes it’s not.  Sometimes you grow out of your passion or obsession, sometimes it’s the thing that will comfort you forever. Geeks, nerds, freaks… they’re not all the same, you know.  It just happens that it’s the geeks who end up being picked on all the time, or made fun of. But that’s alright because at the very least, they don’t forget to be awesome. And if you keep an open mind, and look past what exactly it is “the geeks” are passionate about (instruments, books, sci fi, The Rocky Horror Picture Show…), you’ll see that these stories are what a lot of stories for teens are about: finding love and acceptance, finding yourself, staying true to yourself. Isn’t that the most natural and universal thing in the world?

The Diviners (by Libba Bray)

If there’s one undisputable thing about Libba Bray it’s that she writes and writes and writes like her life depends on it. Give her a pen, a typewriter, a laptop, a napkin, anything, and she will fill it with what’s inside that fantastically maniacal brain of hers. No wonder that her novels hardly ever clock in under 500 pages… Libba has things to share. On her blog, Libba recently confessed that she has “only one extreme sport in [her] and it’s writing. [She] plunge[s] into the unknown morass of [her] novels armed with some weird ideas, a handful of nascent characters, vague connections, a tingling in [her] Spidey senses, and the hope that it all comes to something.” It’s also been no secret that the cat feels the result of that brain effort has been a mixed bag: from the incredibly übertastic Going Bovine to the almost shockingly atrocious Beauty Queens. Clearly there must be something that – for the cat – works and something that just doesn’t work.

Her newest exploit, The Diviners, was a hit even before it reached the shelves. There’s also a great advertising spielgoing on, which – although probably necessary in this day and age of dwindling book sales (e- or otherwise),  you gotta grab’em any way you can, right? – seems as over the top as an author walking around Manhattan in a cow suit. So hypes get built, great expectations arise which may or may not be met once you finally get your hands on the book. Every time a novel is built up like this, it makes the cat very wary…

But… luckily, Libba Bray hasn’t turned out another miss, but a a pos-i-tute-ly divine – although completely over-the-top (as per usual) – page turner! Just to be clear before we continue: the cat loved reading The Diviners! A fascinating and engrossing read. A mystery and a fantasy. And totally addictive! A definite 4-star book!

17-year-old Evangeline O’Neill (Evie) is sent from Ohio to New York City to live with her uncle, Will Fitzgerald, curator of The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult – aka The Museum of the Creepy Crawlies. Although her parents intended for this to be a punishment for Evie, she can’t wait to escape her tiny hometown to the buzzing New York City, which is – in the roaring 1920s – the city of speakeasies, movie palaces, glamour and all that jazz…  Evie also has a secret,  a special ability (she can ‘read’ people), that may actually help her when New York City is being haunted by a mysterious killer. Besides Evie, there’s a string of other characters: Memphis Campbell, a Harlem boy who used to have the healing power, Sam, whose sleight of hand even lands him a job with Evie’s Uncle, Uncle Will, the mysterious Jericho who works with Will at the Museum, Theta Knight, the stunning Ziegfeld girl… Each of these characters has their own back story, and some are even more fantastical than the next.

Libba Bray has clearly done her homework, setting the 1920s NYC scene with panache and her usual effortless writing flair. She certainly has that down even to the slang used at the time. The story itself – with Evie at the core of it – has more tentacles than an octopus. Libba is throwing it all in, in true Libba Bray-style.  And yes, I do mean, all… and that of course, is a blessing as well as a curse. The Diviners is a book to lose yourself in. And the cat knows that she’ll get the same reaction from it as the one she got the other day with A Great and Terrible Beauty. Two girls come into the school library and one of them recommends A Great And Terrible Beauty to the other. Two days later the girl comes back and checks out both Rebel Angels and The Sweet Far Thing. Once Libba’s got you, she’s got you and reading her words on a page comes natural. She’ll suck you in and you’ll believe anything she throws at you, because it’s just such a great and thrilling ride! Same thing with The Diviners: Libba is a generous story-teller. She leaves no stone unturned, no detail unwritten, no word unmentioned. And you’ve got to love her for it, because that’s exactly the appeal she has, and that’s exactly what makes this book such a fantastically fun (though creepy!) ride from start to finish. But, yes, it’s also her major flaw – it’s always been her major flaw. Usually this is something an editor weeds out, but I guess after six books, to weed out the over-the-topness, to weed out that one idea too many, to get rid of the excess and the extravaganza, would be like taking the Libba Bray out of a Libba Bray book. Like asking Stephen King not to write creepy stuff anymore. We don’t want that to happen.

The cat takes Libba Bray the way Libba Bray is: no bullshit detector/editor necessary. Libba literally writes on that edge. Just like we want more middle-finger writers, we want more edge-writers. And you know what, the cat doesn’t care if Libba churns out a stinker now and then (BTW, that’s not The Diviners!). She’s a writer with heart, and even when she crashes, you know she did it in the most spectacular way possible. And even that is better than reading the tons of lackluster middle-of-the-road stuff, the crowd pleasers, the panem et circenses that’s thrown at us everywhere you look.

PS to Libba: did you and MJ have a bet on who could write the creepiest murder story?

Best Books Read in 2011!

In almost no particular order, this is the cat’s list of favorite books, read in 2011. (Books marked * were also published in 2011)

Please Ignore Vera Dietz (by A.S. King)

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party (by M.T. Anderson)

 Going Bovine (by Libba Bray)

The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian (by Sherman Alexie)

Everybody Sees the Ants (by A.S. King) *

A Monster Calls (by Patrick Ness and Jim Kay) *

Divergent (by Veronica Roth) *

Boy Toy and Hero Type (both by Barry Lyga)

An Abundance of Katherines (by John Green)

Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares (By David Levithan & Rachel Cohn)

The Chocolate War (by Robert Cormier)

Boy Meets Boy (by David Levithan)

The Knife that killed me (by Anthony McGowan)

The Invention of Hugo Cabret (by Brian Selznick)

Rebel Angels & The Sweet Far Thing (by Libba Bray) – The Gemma Doyle Trilogy

Since the cat read part 2 and 3 of Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle trilogy in the span of a week or so, it didn’t really make a lot of sense to write down a separate review for the 2 books. The one-week thing should tell you something. I mean, parts 2 and 3 have a page count of well over 1300 pages, but it’s not like Libba makes it hard on the reader: both books still have the gothic flair of A Great and Terrible Beauty and on top of that, the girl can spin a metaphor like the best of them. What is more, Libba’s prose always keeps on having that natural flow despite her many attempts at Victorian linguistic Britishisms. Anyway, once in a while you’d wish she’d stopped herself to look back on what she’d already written, because redundancy is quickly catching up with her… Where’s that editor when you need him/her???

Beauty Queens (by Libba Bray)

Shaken, not stirred. Yes,… please! Give the cat an explosive cocktail of nerdy to the power of awesome blended with a compassionate story about finding yourself, and she’s there. So it was with anticipatory giddy excitement that the cat opened the nice Amazon box containing the latest batch of literary goodies, such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker and Libba Bray’s latest exploit, Beauty Queens . Alas, alas…it saddens the cat deeply to say that Beauty Queens was the biggest disappointment since err… the Lost finale.