Fates. By Lanie Bross.
Delacorte Press. $17.99.
The Glass Casket. By
McCormick Templeman. Delacorte Press. $17.99.
Pieces of Me. By Amber Kizer.
Delacorte Press. $16.99.
There are many predictable
elements in novels intended for teenagers, including lots of soul-searching,
difficult choices that must be made, romance and more. Many such novels
nowadays also throw in something of the paranormal or supernatural. Then it is
just a matter of arranging the elements within a reasonably coherent plot
structure and moving matters along at a speedy enough pace to keep readers
interested. These three new Delacorte Press books all follow the formula
carefully; how teen readers respond to them will depend on just how they like
their story elements mixed. Fates,
the first novel by Lanie Bross, is the first part of a planned two-book series
about a capital-F Fate named Corinthe who has been exiled from her home in
Pyralis Terra to Humana, the human world, where she is required, as penance for
the curiosity-driven misdeed that got her banished, to ensure that people’s
small-f fates develop as they are supposed to. (For some reason, Executors are
necessary to guarantee that this happens in cases of “the clouded marbles, the
damaged ones”; Corinthe is an Executor.) Corinthe has been motivated for years
by a desire to finish her penance and return home. She is given a final
assignment and told that she can return home if she completes it – but alas, it
involves killing a human boy named Luc, for whom Corinthe develops decidedly
un-Fate-ful (but obviously “fated”) feelings. All this occurs against a
background of political machinations among the beings of Pyralis Terra, and not
surprisingly, Corinthe is far more important to the maneuverings than she
realizes – even though she herself is not directly involved in them. On the
other hand, her decisions may be “fated” to be more consequential than she
knows. Unsurprisingly, Luc finds out what Corinthe is, or at least that she is
not human despite her appearance; and it turns out that the two need each other
for purposes of different but related quests. The book tosses out questions
that are intended to seem profound but come across as rather sophomoric: “Could
there be choice in a universe so large? But if everyone had choice, who would
maintain the balance?” And it becomes clear that Luc and Corinthe have some
major universe-saving to do in a location called Kinesthesia: “This place was
the pulse of the universe, keeping everything outside it regulated and
connected, and it was falling apart.
All the worlds were intertwined, feeding off each other to keep balance in all.
Corinthe shuddered to think of the consequences that would ripple outward because
of this.” All this is, considered logically, quite ridiculous, but it is not
supposed to come off as silly; and the inevitable sacrifice that occurs at the
book’s climax is intended both to make the whole plot seem fraught and serious
and to set the scene for the followup book. It certainly counts as an effective
cliffhanger.
The Glass Casket, the second teen-oriented book by McCormick
Templeman (after The Little Woods),
also sounds as if it should have mythic resonance: the title produces images of
Snow White being put on display until she can be appropriately revived. Indeed,
The Glass Casket straddles some of
the lines between life and death and does share some sensibilities with the
Grimms’ often-grim stories. Its protagonist is Rowan Rose (a name filled with
fairy-tale significance), who lives in a once-calm village called Nag’s End, near
which five of the kings’ soldiers have died mysteriously and brutally, shortly
after riding through town. Something dark hovers over or broods within the town,
and somehow Rowan is at the center of whatever is going on – for one thing, it
is she to whom the local witch, Mama Lune, wants to talk, even though Rowan’s
father is no friend to witches. There are many elements of fairy tale here,
such a tree whose inside “was too large, and it seemed to recede impossibly
far,” and apples that “tasted otherworldly,” all within haunted and deadly woods
where strange things happen, not the least of which is the appearance of a girl
named Fiona Eira who quite clearly has been killed – her heart ripped out – but
equally clearly still lives, at least in some sense and some of the time. The Glass Casket is full of things glimpsed
and partly understood, of odd comings and goings, of uncertainties that hover
on the edge of understandability without ever quite crossing into sureness. Eventually
Rowan sees something “so vile, the sight of it made her feel foul, dirty,” with
“legs made of splintered bone,” with “teeth like great needles and eyes like
the blackest of pits,” and realizes that this thing, this death-thing, is
responsible for all the evil that permeates Nag’s End. Or is the true evil
something that controls this monster? And what is to be done about all this? The
responsibility falls on Rowan, of course, and her confrontation with Fiona
unsurprisingly takes an unexpected turn; and this eventually leads Rowan to an
important talk with a witch – not Mama Lune but Mama Tetri, who turns out to
have a connection with Rowan dating back to Rowan’s birth. This in turn
produces a lengthy explanation of everything that is going on, including what
Fiona is (readers will have figured this out already) and what the terrifying
creature is: “an old thing – from long ago, when the world was a wicked place.”
Logically, if “logically” is an applicable word here, Mama Lune and Mama Tetri
should join forces with Rowan to combat the evil – which they are aware is
strongly witch-related. But instead, the witches bow out, saying that “this is
not our battle” and that they “cannot make you understand the ways of the
witches.” So much for that. The final battle, when it does come, is an intense
one in which family ties bind and come undone, sacrifices of several sorts are
made, and eventually Rowan emerges in a sort of ambiguous triumph that fits
modern storytelling better than it would have fit the old fairy tales that are
foundational to the plot and tale-telling of The Glass Casket.
Pieces of Me is a fairy tale, too, but one given a thoroughly
up-to-date setting and taking off from modern science, which it twists into a
sort of “angry dead” motif not unlike the one in The Glass Casket. But while Templeman’s book seeks resonance from
the past, Amber Kizer’s goes for the more-modern approach of following
disparate people – brought together by something they unwittingly have in
common – and following ways in which their fates entwine. A high-school girl
named Jessica Chai is the moving force behind everything: she dies in a car
accident, and her parents decide to donate her organs to teens who are
desperately in need of them. This is inherently unrealistic: organ donations go
to people of all ages, and the odds that a teen’s would go to four other teens
are astronomical; but without this arrangement, there could be no teen focus
here. In addition to Jessica’s story, Kizer tells those of Vivian, who has
cystic fibrosis; Misty, whose liver is failing; Leif, severely injured playing
football; and Samuel, who needs four hours of dialysis a day. These characters
are types – there is no real attempt to make them fully realized people, any
more than there is such an attempt for Jessica herself; she is simply a loner, the
child of divorced parents to whom she lies often and easily, and proud of her
super-long hair that is cut off in the book’s opening chapter in a cruel
incident that, it is suggested, somehow precipitates everything that comes
afterwards. Disbelief needs to be suspended again and again as the book
progresses and its protagonists live their separate-but-connected lives, with
Jessica hovering over all of them like the ghost she is, initially drenched in
self-pity and, not having had much of a life, not having much of a death,
either. However, Jessica moves quickly from resenting the removal of her organs
to involving herself in the recipients’ lives, and she gains empathy rather
speedily, too, as when Misty – who connects by computer with Sam, not knowing
that they share a deeper connection – flees to a bathroom to lament her
appearance: “I tried to stop her. Hug her. Soothe her. I wanted to rub lotion
on her skin and salve on her broken heart. The self-loathing radiated out until
the bathroom filled and I felt like we drowned in it, like treading water in
the middle of the ocean without reprieve. It was killing us.” There is a lot of
this soul-searching and lamentation in Pieces
of Me, and there is no neat pairing-off of the characters despite hints
that this might happen – but everything does get tied up neatly, rather too
neatly, at the end, in a life-goes-on message that specifically includes room
for miracles (both everyday and exceptional). Like Fates and The Glass Casket,
Pieces of Me has strong and weak
points, straightforward ones and twists, entirely formulaic elements and ones that
try to bend (if not break) various formulas. Each of these novels is aimed at
teen readers, but there is enough variation among them so that it seems
unlikely that the same readers ages
12 and above will be interested in all three of them, or even in any two.
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