Review: The Young Elites by Marie Lu (The Young Elites #1)

Adelina Amouteru is a maimed survivor of a blood fever that wiped out multitudes of adults and left even more children scarred. From this fever has risen a group called the Young Elites, marked young people with supernatural abilities born from their illnesses.

Adelina herself lost her mother and an eye to the sickness. For years, she has lived in fear of her hateful and volatile father who favors her beautiful and perfect sister, Violetta. When Adelina overhears her father making a bargain to sell her, she flees for her life and ends up killing her father with powers she did not know she possessed.

As always, I am blown away by the intricate world Marie Lu has woven together. I'm particularly impressed with this world because it is entirely original (or at least as original as a fictional world can be). Unlike Legend, which is dystopia, a future version of the world its readers live in, the world in The Young Elites has its own countries, creatures, races, religions, and even illnesses. I personally loved how detached from the reality this book is. It's been a long time since I've read a good fantasy. Every word and sentence in this book feels well thought out; it all seems to matter.

Not to mention how likable I find Adelina to be. For writers it's a difficult job to make a precocious character relatable to his or her audience. Much of the time they come across as pompous or holier-than-thou or just plain better, but Adelina seems like a very real person with a whole lot of reasons to give into the darkness that makes up her character.

And can I just add her darkness is fabulous? You don't often find this kind of legitimate dark emotion, especially not in YA. Despite the fact that it's fantasy, this sort of emotion is REAL, while so much else seems forced or insincere. There are some incredibly powerful scenes where Adelina is struggling with herself, half of her thrilling at her ability to make the world suffer and the other half lamenting over who she is becoming. I am ecstatic to find out in later books whether her powers seize control over her or if she will learn to tame them into submission.

One thing I do not like is the flipping back and forth between perspectives. I am very picky about this sort of thing anyway, but, since most of the book is told by Adelina, the other POVs seem unnecessary and honestly a little... inconsistent. The fact that other perspectives appear so infrequently makes them feel like a cop out; it's like those breaks exist only to tell the reader something that they couldn't learn from Adelina. This is fine, but I would have preferred either the whole story be told by Adelina or for it to have been broken up more steadily throughout AND for there to be consistency regarding first person and third person voice...

This is not to say that the other characters are not good or well rounded. In fact, I like most of them pretty well. There are a few who I do not care for-like Dante and Terren. This is not because they are bad characters (bad meaning "villainous"), but because they seem less complicated than the others. Dante never once wavers from whom I initially thought he would turn out to be. For that matter, neither does Terren. I have read plenty of reviews that say he turns out to be double-sided and deeper than he initially seems to be, but it never quite feels that way for me. He's also just the same character I thought he'd be.

Now Enzo... He's fantastic-dark and dangerous and complicated. The romance with him is subtle, but it's also filled with insatiable tension and holds the potential for so much more. 

Marie Lu has singlehandedly changed my mind about series. Until this year, I had a love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with them and I just could not fathom how so many authors stretch a book limp over the course of three or more books when it could have been a perfectly good standalone. However, Legend and now The Young Elites are proving to me what a good series is: fantastic world development, intricate characters, and intoxicating romance. 

Though I did not find this book to be quite as compelling as the Legend series, I am still anxious and excited to see what is waiting in The Rose Society.

Review: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is essentially everything the title promises it will be and more. Told from the voice of Arnold Spirit (AKA Junior), this is a stark, eye-opening portrayal of what it means to be an Indian in a modern day white man's world.

Junior has grown up on a reservation with his family, but he finds himself struggling to fit in. As a teenager, he has already been to forty-two funerals and recognizes his inevitable future if he holds onto his way of life. When he realizes early on that he is destined for alcoholism, poverty, and a young death if he follows the footsteps of those that came before him, he applies to a ritzy school off the reservation, where the population is predominantly white (and the mascot is actually an Indian).

Though Junior does well enough at his new school, he finds himself ostracized from both sides, from his family for betraying them, and from his new classmates for trying to fit in when he so clearly doesn't. It's difficult to imagine the hellish struggle he must encounter on a day-to-day basis, but Junior takes everything in stride. He actually does not complain a whole lot given the dire circumstances that make up his life.

One of his coping mechanisms is the artwork that decorates the pages of his "diary." Said art is nothing short of superb. I feel as thought it contributed a great deal to the story as a whole, gives the reader a much deeper insight into Junior's mind, and provides an even richer dimension to the humor with which he relays the story. Most of the drawings are very simple, but they are still a great insight into how he sees the world. They invite us into his universe. I applaud cartoonist Ellen Forney for both her creativity and her ability to draw in the role of a teenage boy. Though the illustrations are very subtle, you can see a great deal of talent.

Given his circumstances, Junior is surprisingly well adjusted. He is smart, witty, loyal, and delightfully self-deprecating. He functions through his art. He is devoted to his family, to his tribe, and to their way of life, but, at the same time, he is unwilling to give up the prospects for his own future to appease other people's feelings. He has found a healthy balance between respecting others and his own self-preservation.

Though Junior is the voice in which the story is told, the side characters are just as relatable. I especially enjoyed hearing about his sister, who is a twenty-something still living in the parents' basement doing nothing and going nowhere. According to Junior, his sister just froze after she finished school. She has sort of been living as a non-person, drifting through life neither caring about what will happen nor acknowledging time as it passes. It's only when she sees her younger brother attempting to rise above their circumstances that she begins trying to live her own life.

Every single one of the characters feels real-Rowdy, Junior's parents, even the classmates at his new school. Particularly within the tribe, it is astounding to see people with great differences become so unified due to death. For a moment, everyone can put aside all petty squabbles and disputes. This story has a whole lot of important issues: racism, death, alcoholism, stereotypes, struggles that go along with growing up... It's so refreshing, stunning, wonderful.

The most daunting thing that this book depicts is that this is the reality for an entire group of people. They are still confined to specific areas with little work and little opportunity and have somehow survived decades of scarcity. It's just a little mind-blowing. Unlike most other American Indian literature, which conveys a version of history and not issues from the present-day, this is a contemporary portrayal of a teenager fighting his way out of the mold with all the strength he has.

I kid you not: at times, the writing in this book is laugh-out-loud funny. But, on the other hand, it can be gut wrenching and tear jerking, too. This is the rare kind of book that can snatch you up, drop you down into the pages, and force you to not only sympathize for the character as a witness but to make you experience everything alongside him as well. This book is comedy, tragedy, fiction, and reality all weaved into one. I'm so terribly glad I read it. I wish more books existed exactly like this one.

Review: Life Before Legend by Marie Lu (Legend #0.5)

Three years prior to the beginning of Legend, this story is divided into two parts, the first half belonging to Day and the second to June. Both halves take place within the same couple of days, but the two characters are not directly linked at all yet.

Day's section is about his life on the streets and how desperate he has become. His story mainly concerns the circumstances of his first kiss, what led up to it and what comes of it afterwards. When he attempts to steal canned goods from a rig, he is caught by the leader's daughter, a girl several years his senior. Because of his crime, the girl punishes him by making him work for her and her father for three days. Each day he receives food and he has a safe place to sleep.

On what feels like the other side of the world, June is beginning college at age 12. Because of a traffic hold up (which is Day's doing), she is late to her first day at Drake. Immediately isolated and harassed because of her young age, June stands up to a bully and is reprimanded afterwards for 'fighting.' From this story, it's fairly clear that June has always been a highly-skilled prodigy and that her years in school did not teach her all she knows.

I personally enjoyed June's story a great deal more than Day's. Perhaps the reason for this is that Day's story seems so inconsequential. Note I said that it "seems" that way. It could be significant for a variety of reasons. It could act as the catalyst of his long series of trysts, the start of his self-prescribed isolation, or the beginning of his career in anarchy. The last sentence of his story would certainly imply that, when he says that the Republic has not seen the last of him.

June's half is just so much more engaging. From the beginning of her story, the reader can immediately make the connection between both their lives, even at such an early stage. Day's action causes a reaction in her life that may very well set the tone for the rest of her college career.

It's certainly great to see how skilled both characters are, even at the green age of twelve. June is already impeccable at tracking the passage of time in her head, reading everything about a person by scanning their body language, and literally sidestepping physical attacks. Day is a budding thief and is surviving well on his own. He's clearly crafty and clever, but the handicap of his knee is so much more pronounced, even more so than in the rest of the Legend books. The injury is much more disabling than it ever seemed before. It sort of made me wonder if the pain diminishes slightly of if he just gets used to it over time.

But, as usual, the only unbelievable thing about this is just how young the characters are. If I thought fifteen was a young age for their skill level, then they are blowing me away at twelve. I won't deny that the two of them smooth out and mature throughout the series, particularly emotionally, but it's still so difficult to swallow that people as young as this have such a stirring impact.

I'm glad this was written. I wasn't quite ready to let go of the Legend world.