Landscape with Invisible Hand, by M. T. Anderson

If I tell you Landscape with Invisible Hand is about the transformative power of art, will you roll your eyes and move on to the next book? Because you should really stop and read this one before you go. It won't take you long.

This was an artfully crafted little book full of sadness and hope. I thought it was going to be satirical, but really it's just straight up angry. The vuvv have come with advanced technology to solve all the world's problems, but it turns out they only solve them for the rich, and the poor are stuck with unemployment and a ravaged environment. Sound familiar?

By raging against aliens shaped like coffee tables, rather than real-world perpetrators of real-world injustices, Anderson can get away with a lot of serious social commentary without coming across heavy-handed. It's a bleak book with a lot of really, really funny stuff in it. I kept thinking I'd put it down because Adam's life was just getting too depressing, but then a scene would happen that made me go ???!!! I have to see where this is going! (Like the chainsaw artist.) Also Adam's voice is hilarious and I loved being inside his head.

I love that each chapter is a vignette explaining a work of Adam's art. There's layers of—I want to say self-reference, but I'm not sure that's quite what's going on—prose describing art and also describing the artist creating the art and the reactions of people seeing his art, which we can't see but can only imagine. It's interesting and immersive. The art brings Adam's poignant frustrations closer but at the same time sets them in a context that allows perspective. (I guess that's kind of what art does, isn't it!)

I loved the ending; it was funny and hopeful and believable. Remarkably uplifting for such a scathing book.

Miso soup. Just when you think it's too salty, you realize that it's perfectly salty enough.

A Cybil's nominee for YA Speculative Fiction.

MMGM: Ambassador and Nomad by William Alexander

What do you want from your science fiction? Cool ideas, right? Technological, biological, philosophical—doesn't matter, so long as its stuff you've never thought of before, or never thought of in quite that way. Because otherwise you may just as well read realism.

But the best science fiction uses these cool ideas to say important things about who we are: what makes us human; what we get right sometimes; what we're getting very, very wrong.

William Alexander has written the best kind of science fiction in this duology. I hope they end up getting lots of attention, because they deserve to become well-loved classics.

When I finished Ambassador, my first thought was, "this is a lovely, lovely book," and that's not an adjective I expected to use on a book with that kind of cover, about aliens shooting laser guns from scorpion-like spaceships. The spaceships are pretty awesome, but—true to the title—the book is actually about diplomacy—about the possibility for people completely alien to one another to communicate and find common ground.

Cool idea #1:  Ambassadors are all children, because the young of any species are most flexible and willing to adapt to new circumstances, and interacting with aliens takes a lot of flexibility. (I knew this when I was a kid: I was quite certain that if aliens landed in my backyard, I'd be the perfect person to deal with them!)

Awesome quote: "Juveniles have not yet fixed the boundaries of their social world. They haven't drawn a circle around those worth talking to."

Cool idea #2:  It would be pretty hard for aliens to communicate with each other over the fast distances in the galaxy if there wasn't such a thing as entanglement—which I won't try to explain, but if you've read a sci fi book with an ansible in it, you know the principle. In this book's universe it's possible to entangle your perceptions so you can perceive two locations at the same time, even if you're not physically present.

Awesome quote:

"Did that make sense to you?" the Envoy asked.

"It sounded like it make sense," Gabe said carefully. "I'd like to just pretend that it did and move on. Maybe it'll sink in later." 

Cool idea #3:  The Envoy (awesome character!) builds an entangling device out of the washer and dryer in Gabe's basement.

Awesome quote:

"You can make a black hole in the dryer?"

"Yes," said the Envoy. "Please do not stand too close to it."

 "Can I throw something at it and watch what happens?" Gabe asked.

"No," said the Envoy. "It will be very precisely calibrated."

"Not even little scraps of paper or balls of dryer lint or something like that?"

I could fill several blog posts will cool ideas and awesome quotes, but you should just go read the book. I hope you noticed that it's also a very funny book, mostly because of Gabe.

I love Gabe, love the way he perceives the world, love his interactions with his family, love the way he handles all the sudden things thrown at him. I love all the characters: Alexander has a way of conveying everyone's essence in a very few interactions so that you instantly understand and therefore care about them.

Alexander is just a really really good writer. I savoured his sentences, his characters, his metaphors, his plot.

And Nomad is even better. (I don't have to tell you to read Nomad, because as soon as you get to the end of Ambassador you'll be clamouring for it. It's one of the better cliff-hanger endings out there.)(In fact, make sure Nomad is available before you finish Ambassador!) The plot gets even more fraught and perilous; there are more awesome characters and new cool ideas;  it's just as funny and profound, often at the same time. (I think those are my favourite kinds of books: funny and profound. Truth that makes you smile in recognition.)

Have I mentioned that these are really, really good books? For a food metaphor I should go with something Mexican, for Gabe . . . I don't know how authentic it is, but sweet potato black bean soup is pretty nummy and hearty and nourishing, with a bit of heat but a nice sweetness. Just like these books!


So many Marvelous Middle-Grade books out there, and every Monday you can read about more of them on Shannon Messenger's blog.

Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday: The True Meaning of Smekday, by Adam Rex

I think a day dedicated to celebrating Middle-Grade fiction is a wonderful idea, and I've been meaning to contribute to Shannon Messenger's MMGM* for a while, but the logistical challenge of having a post ready for a specific day is apparently beyond me** (and Marvelous Middle-Grade Random Day of the Week just doesn't have the same ring to it). Then I read this truly marvelous book and I was motivated! So, for my inaugural Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday post I proudly present:

This book is screamingly brilliant from beginning to end. It was so funny it hurt my brain. It's a road trip in a flying car with an 11-year-old driver, an alien and a cat named Pig, and it is a wicked, wicked social satire. It has flaky layers of irony as delicious as a Napoleon. Oh, yes, we're definitely going with a Napoleon as the food metaphor. Not only is the writing oozing with multiple layers of humor, from slapstick action to aliens massacring English grammar to ridiculous names like Gratuity Tucci; but also the structure is perfect: layer upon layer of narrative and plot development that doubles back on itself in yummy satisfying ways.

Okay, I'm done with the pastry metaphor. Think Terry Pratchett meets Carl Hiassen. I should really just quote from it so you see what I mean:

Mom went on to explain that the aliens, a lot of them now, had brought her aboard their ship to fold some laundry. They related, not with words but with complicated hand gestures, that they were really impressed with her laundry folding skills. She was guided to a table piled with bright, rubbery suits with tiny sleeves and too many legs. So she got to work. As she folded, she happened to notice another human, a Hispanic man, she said, far off at the other end of the room. They had him opening pickle jars.

This is the low-level background absurdity that underlies the entire narrative. Then we get Gratuity's sarcastic comments on everything:

There are companies that claim to make a greeting card for every occasion. If any of them are reading this, I couldn't find a "Sorry all your friends deserted you after your alien abduction" card when I needed one.

Gratuity's mother is abducted again right before the alien Boov turn Florida into a Human Preserve and make everyone move there.  Gratuity sets off on her own to find her mother, and encounters one of the Boov at a convenience store.

For you time-capsule types, MoPo was something called a convenience store, as in, "The soda is conveniently located right next to the doughnuts and lottery tickets." People who want to understand better how the human race was conquered so easily need to study those stores. Almost everything inside was filled with sugar, cheese, or weight-loss tips.

Adam Rex skewers us repeatedly with these throwaway lines.

And then there's the plot, which involves the alien (who looks absurdly like the aliens from an old video game) souping up Gratuity's car with pieces of his own broken vehicle so that it flies (on cloned gasoline). Oh, and the alien calls himself J.Lo, and the car's name (after part of a slushy machine has been grafted onto it) is Slushious. Girl, alien and cat make their way to Florida, where they discover the Boov have decided the humans can't have Florida after all because oranges taste so good. Now they have to go to Arizona. Gratuity stops to visit Happy Mouse Kingdom first. Then they crash into Roswell (literally)(ha, ha) and find out what really happened there (it has something to do with a long-eared koobish and a water tower). The plot continues being ridiculous and convoluted but making perfect sense in a hilarious, human-skewering way.

Every once in a while Adam Rex breaks out into comic book format to give useful information, like the history of the Boov, or "8 Things You Have Always Wanted to Know About the Gorg But Were Afraid to Ask the Gorg Because the Gorg Might Punch You In The Face." (The Gorg are different aliens that come invading after the Boov. They're worser.)

I need to stop talking now so you can run out and go get this book, and I can sit down and reread it. (Keep your eyes open for the scene with the squishable gaputty: I tried to read it to my daughter and I couldn't finish I was laughing so hard.) Adam Rex is very much like Terry Pratchett in his ability to deal with serious themes like racism and imperialism and all the really stupid things humans do and have you crying with laughter while he does it.

Mmmm. Flakcy.

*  If you follow the link, you'll see Shannon Messenger's MMGM post and links to everyone else who participates: lots of great books to read about!

** It's still beyond me, though this time it's not my fault: I was going to post this first thing Monday morning so that MMGM people could link to it, but I didn't get home from a weekend trip until 3pm. Sigh.