Adaptation – Malinda Lo (Review)

Hardcover, 400 pages
Expected publication: September 18th 2012 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Source: Publisher

Synopsis:

Reese can’t remember anything from the time between the accident and the day she woke up almost a month later. She only knows one thing: She’s different now.

Across North America, flocks of birds hurl themselves into airplanes, causing at least a dozen to crash. Thousands of people die. Fearing terrorism, the United States government grounds all flights, and millions of travelers are stranded.

Reese and her debate team partner and longtime crush David are in Arizona when it happens. Everyone knows the world will never be the same. On their drive home to San Francisco, along a stretch of empty highway at night in the middle of Nevada, a bird flies into their headlights. The car flips over. When they wake up in a military hospital, the doctor won’t tell them what happened, where they are—or how they’ve been miraculously healed.

Things become even stranger when Reese returns home. San Francisco feels like a different place with police enforcing curfew, hazmat teams collecting dead birds, and a strange presence that seems to be following her. When Reese unexpectedly collides with the beautiful Amber Gray, her search for the truth is forced in an entirely new direction—and threatens to expose a vast global conspiracy that the government has worked for decades to keep secret.

Review:

 If you have read the synopsis for this novel, you will understand exactly why it is so intriguing. The mystery it promises reeled me in and I began with the intention of reading a few pages but about two and a half hours later, turned the last page. Lo knows how to tell a story. She knows how to reel a reader in and while Adaptation had some flaws, you have to give credit where it is due.

It is inevitable that I will end up discussing the romance in this novel because of two reasons: one, it is a large portion of the novel and two, it is the weakest part of the novel in my opinion. The love triangle here is inevitable but it is an interesting one because one of the players for our heroine’s affections is a girl. I couldn’t connect to Reese at all and I felt that someone who has such overwhelmingly strong feelings for the boy in her life, falling almost immediately for the next person (regardless of their gender) was a bit unbelievable. The hurricane fast progression of Amber and Reese’s relationship is a bit baffling especially considering that Reese has not even considered liking girls before she met Amber. A bit more caution, a bit more hesitancy on Reese’s part would have made the whole thing a lot more realistic than it ends up being.

The only way I can make myself accept the hurried pace of their relationship is by a bit of theorizing and this will take place under the spoiler tags. (Highlight to read.) Amber is an alien and comes neatly packaged with these supernatural talents which perhaps also includes persuasion. So their relationship may have had genuine seeds but Amber may have used her talents to get the ball rolling and keep Reese entangled, manipulating her emotionally to keep her pliant. This, of course, is supremely icky and I hope I am wrong but well, it makes sense in my head.

David is portrayed a bit too ideally for my taste and he is way too understanding and accepting for it to be realistic. Moving on to the actual narrative, the premise that is unsurprisingly overshadowed by the romance, things are interesting though the entire secret that the book is built on is not really as surprising as I was hoping it would be. And I was surprised how the reason for the plane crash is added in almost as an afterthought.

Despite all my complaints however, I did enjoy the book. It is very readable and Lo shows with eerie precision how helpless ordinary citizens can be when the enemy is the government. When people who are supposed to be working for your good turn around and decide you are expendable, now that is real terror and Lo is uncannily adept at narrating the fear, the terror associated with these instances. I can’t tell you whether to read this book or not, but I can encourage you to make up your own mind about it.

A Spy in the House (The Agency #1) – Y. S. Lee

Synopsis:

Steeped in Victorian atmosphere and intrigue, this diverting mystery trails a feisty heroine as she takes on a precarious secret assignment.

Rescued from the gallows in 1850s London, young orphan (and thief) Mary Quinn is surprised to be offered a singular education, instruction in fine manners — and an unusual vocation. Miss Scrimshaw’s Academy for Girls is a cover for an all-female investigative unit called The Agency, and at seventeen, Mary is about to put her training to the test. Assuming the guise of a lady’s companion, she must infiltrate a rich merchant’s home in hopes of tracing his missing cargo ships. But the household is full of dangerous deceptions, and there is no one to trust — or is there? Packed with action and suspense, banter and romance, and evoking the gritty backstreets of Victorian London, this breezy mystery debuts a daring young detective who lives by her wits while uncovering secrets — including those of her own past.

Review:

This read like a dream. Yes, I said it. Now if you are anything like me and your bibliophilic life started with raunchy mills and boons (Australian and Kiwi editions) and then widened to include historical romance (which were just as raunchy but did teach me a lot about Bonaparte) you will have some level of familiarity with historical novels boasting of a strong heroine and an intriguing hero. This, I hasten to add, is not to imply that The Agency is a romance novel. Oh no, far from it. Or that there are heaving bosoms involved…well, there might be but they’re certainly not the heroine’s. Anyway, what I’m trying to say, albeit not very well, is that first book in the trilogy asserts its position not just as a YA Historical fiction (rare in its genre) but as, dare I say it, brilliant YA Historical fiction.

Let me count the reasons I say this.

There is a fluidity in Ms. Lee’s writing that, quite frankly, grips you by the collar and jerks you into the novel and holds you captive and enthralled until you are unaware of the time that has passed and the work that you have left undone. Her writing is on par with authors that have several novels under their belt and there is no sense of awkwardness in her prose that is so common with debuting authors. You have to love smooth writing, you guys.

Her characterizations are bloody awesome. Mary Quinn is by no means perfect and it is her imperfections that, ironically, make her perfect. The beginning grips you with the bleakness of her fortune, with the depths of despair that have led her to that point and the ending leaves you bemused by the distance she has traveled within the scope of the book alone. I like the fact that Mary is human enough to be relatable to me. That she can give in to human vanity and despite having had to grow up so fast, still retain that sense of childishness, that intrinsic immaturity that is so common to people of her age. Not that I mean anything negative by that. It’s just that she reads like the teenager she is despite being put in a situation where she could have been written like a woman in her twenties. I like that.

James Easton is delicious as the unwilling hero of the tale. Not that he takes over the tale entirely. No. We see glimpses of the story through his eyes and what this does is deepen our appreciation of Mary and the entire novel. James is not as fleshed out as Mary is but that’s okay. He is defined enough that you can, through his unwilling fascination with Mary Quinn, structure the hierarchy in the story and place the social status of the various characters. He also spices up the narrative because the romantic tension between him and Mary Quinn is enough to make a girl swoon.

The other characters are also interestingly hewed. I love it when the author spends enough time to create original characters no matter how small their part in the narrative is instead of using stereotyped, stock characters. This shows that the author has imagined the world she has created down to the last detail. And furthermore, that she respects the intelligence of her readers.

The narrative brings up some very interesting points. The role of women in the society at the time the novel is set in is one of the things discussed. Their limited freedom and the stereotypes they lived under. And what breaking away from these stereotypes and expectations would mean to a woman. What interested me more than that, however, is Mary’s internal conflict about her mixed heritage. In fact, this is one of the most interesting things about the novel. How she addresses these issues and whether they will influence the manner in which she lives her life and the decisions she makes for the future is one of the reasons I’m looking forward to the next two books in the trilogy.

So the verdict? Read the book. It has everything a good book needs and is everything a wonderful book should be. I recommend it to everyone who likes good literature.