Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron

I have to talk about the color specifically though. Color is everything in this world. People are divided into social ranks according to what colors they can see. Who they marry is largely determined by what their combined color ratings will do for their offspring. For instance, Eddie Russet, the protagonist, is a Red trying to marry into the Oxbloods, an old Red family that wants to increase their red percentage. It’s crazy-sounding, but with a little thought it’s not that different from marrying for money or some other kind of prestige.

Despite the fixation on color, Eddie’s world is very black and white. He lives in a rigid society that is completely dedicated to the Rules. He knows his duty and he does it, both as a member of society and as a young man looking for the best marriage. But he soon finds out that there’s a lot more underneath his orderly world than he ever guessed.  And he finds that he’s willing to risk more than he realized to find out the truth.

Shades of Grey is a meticulously constructed book that was a fascinating exploration of a very different kind of post-apocalyptic world and the decisions we face when we confronted with a shift in worldview.  I’m looking forward to the sequels, and I think I need to check out some of Fforde’s other work as well.

Update: Also, if you like the book, definitely check out the Shades of Grey website.  Barcoded animals! Lincoln green! You’ll just have to read the book to truly get it.

In order, the Gallagher Girls books are:

-I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You

-Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy

-Don’t Judge a Girl by Her Cover

It’s hard to talk about all three books without spoiling any of them, especially since each book is full of twists and turns that teach these spies-in-training that the world is not always what it seems. It’s fascinating to watch Cammie, the narrator, approach her world with the skills she’s learned in her years at Gallagher Academy: martial arts, hacking, multiple languages, and other invaluable spy skills. And yet like any teenage girl, she’s often blindsided by her emotions.

Despite being the daughter of the school’s headmistress, Cammie’s specialty is being invisible. She’s known as the Chameleon because she can blend into her surroundings so completely that even her friends can’t find her. She’s also learned how to disappear at school by exploring the old building’s many hidden passageways.

Cammie’s voice is smart and confident, but also funny and very personal with conversational asides sharing her thoughts about boys or the current mission. Her training as a spy pervades her life, with parts of the text even being told in the form of a covert ops report, as well as lists that show Cammie’s ordered mind. Cammie has known for most of her life that she wanted to be a spy like her mom and dad, and it shows in the way she thinks.

Like Cammie, her friends at the Gallagher Academy think like spies, though each has her own background and unique personality. I love how real Cammie and her friends are, and yet how diverse. Each girl feels completely authentic, with her own very believable strengths and weaknesses. They may be taught to hide their emotions and think in terms of neutralizing threats, but even as their skills develop, the Gallagher girls remain very human, very accessible.

In fact, this is one of the themes that runs through the Gallagher Girls books: what does a spy give up in order to be the best she can be? The ability to be herself instead of one of her numerous “covers”? Honest relationships with people who don’t have a high enough clearance? Any semblance of a normal life? Cammie and her friends wrestle with these ideas and the hard decision of whether to pursue the life of a spy with all its dangers.

It’s no surprise that a girl surounded by spies-in-training and taught by ex-spies is also surrounded by secrets. Some of these are relatively harmless, though they might be classified. Others could cost her and her friends their lives. Cammie stumbles across both kinds in her quest to be at least somewhat normal, especially when it involves boys.

And yet Cammie and her friends address the mystery of boys like spies rather than like your average high school girl. In the first book, Cammie creates a cover story to tell her normal boyfriend. She and her friends hack into various government databases looking for dirt on him. And her friend Liz is working on a boy-to-English decoder. These twists on the usual teen-girl-obsessed-with-boy trope were a welcome change.

Things grow a little darker in the second book, with the danger more real than just a class exercise, and darker still in the third book, which leaves us and Cammie with more questions than answers. In fact, the question at the end of Don’t Judge a Girl By Her Cover gives me that anxious sort of itch that makes me wish I didn’t have to wait so long for the next book in the series. But I’m sure it will be worth waiting for.

The fourth Gallagher Girls book, Only the Good Spy Young, is scheduled for release in June 2010.

(The first book of Ally Carter’s new series, Heist Society, also looks pretty interesting. Out February 9, 2010.)

Evy Stone, a hunter of Dregs (nonhuman species like goblins, vampires, and weres), has been resurrected into a new body and has three days to figure out who killed her and why. She has no hope of living past the time limit, but she’s still intent on saving her city from the potentially horrific results of a planned alliance between the goblins and vampires. Not only that, she wants to figure out who killed the other two members of her Triad and framed her for their murders. With the help of the only person she can trust, her Triad’s former handler, Wyatt, she follows a trail of lies and deception to the truth, which is worse than anyone thought.

It’s a strange thing to play detective in your own life, but Evy’s reactions to her discoveries were well-balanced emotionally. Part of her is intent on solving the mystery, reacting to challenges as decisively as any kick-ass urban fantasy heroine, while another part is sometimes overcome by the betrayals and painful memories she discovers. These occasional reminders of Evy’s human vulnerabilities only increased my admiration for her courage and made me want to find out who had killed her and why. Helping the reader connect to Evy’s previous life are the vivid portrayals of human and Dreg minor characters, both allies and enemies. While the sheer variety of Dreg species were sometimes hard to keep track of, I appreciated the blending of traditional and fresh depictions of these fantasy staples.

With only three days to live, the story moves fast from the moment Evy wakes, the short time she has left emphasized by the countdown at the beginning of each chapter. So at first the romance subplot threw me off, as it seemed like too much of a distraction considering everything else Evy had to do in those three days. But the characters and their interactions were so real that I believed in their relationship with the help of some flashbacks that gave me a good sense of their prior friendship.

One of my favorite parts of this book was watching how Evy adapts to her new body. At first she flounders a bit with physical skills she’d been proficient with in her old life, and later she discovers her new body has some different feelings and abilities, which also take some getting used to. I liked this touch of realism and the accompanying entanglements of the life of the woman who had previously owned Evy’s body.

Three Days to Dead is very tightly plotted, with all the clues, whether they prove true or false, clicking together in a puzzle picture that grows clearer as the story progresses. Reading with my skeptical writer brain, I expected to find a few threads left unresolved, but everything wrapped up in a tight, satisfying way. It’s quite a feat to cram that much story into 72 hours, but I believed it was true to the way smart, determined Evy Stone would have lived, both before and after her death.

I haven’t read much urban fantasy beyond Jim Butcher and Laurel K. Hamilton, butThree Days to Dead makes me think I need to read more widely in the genre. It’s a definite keeper, and I’m certainly looking forward to Meding’s next book, As Lie the Dead, out in summer 2010.

In his introduction, Chris Baty acknowledges that writing a novel in a month is insane, and yet his humorous style makes it seem like a fantastic idea. Like many of the best writing books, the infectious enthusiasm of No Plot? No Problem! made me want to drop the book and get busy writing.

Baty begins by recounting his first mad attempt to write a novel in a month, when he learned that “the biggest thing separating people from their artistic ambitions is not a lack of talent. It’s the lack of a deadline.” This idea, together with the concept of “exuberant imperfection,” became the philosophy behind National Novel Writing Month. The key to NaNoWriMo is the realization that you shouldn’t be worrying about writing a brilliant story with hauntingly beautiful prose as a first draft. Rather, removing your expectations and giving yourself the permission to write something terrible lets all your uninhibited ideas shine through and makes for a better story in the end.

If you want to get something done, Baty says, ask a busy person to do it. That’s the reason for the breakneck speed and intense adrenaline rush needed to finish a novel in a month. The pace and desperation will narrow your focus like a laser beam, and you’ll scorch right through your inhibitions. The secret is that if your life is so busy that writing becomes a treat, you’re much more likely to do it than if writing is just the Task That Won’t Die on your to-do list.

In the first few chapters, Baty discusses preparations for the month-long novel, including finding a suitable place to write and carving time out of your schedule by giving up distractions like surfing the web. When preparing the story itself, Baty recommends not starting too early. It can be difficult to watch a long-prepared novel go up in flames as you desperately rush toward the finish line. Instead, start planning a week or so before you begin writing. A week is enough time to sketch out your characters, plot, and setting without getting too invested in them. Let the rest of it evolve as you write.

I took this advice to heart when I was choosing my story. I had considered a novel that had been nagging me to be written for years, but I have so much emotionally invested in it that I think I would be rather shocked at the results of my first NaNo draft. Instead, I did some quick brainstorming, came up with three or four ideas, picked the one that interested me the most, and have been developing it now for about a week.

Next, Baty offers tips on shutting up your inner editor so you can get on with your writing without feeling compelled to edit your spelling. Then he delves into a brief primer on novel concepts like plot and characters and setting. And he’s serious about the No Plot?, No Problem! title. If you spend enough time getting to know your characters, he says, the plot will naturally follow. When you get stuck, just make them do something, anything, and see where it leads you.

The next four chapters are week-by-week pep talks, advice, and exercises addressing the problems of each stage of the month-long novel. Issues for each week include:

Week 1 – how to harness your initial creative jolt in preparation for the long slog ahead
Week 2 – how to keep going when the euphoria wears off and you realize you still don’t have a plot
Week 3 – how to figure out where you are and how far you have yet to go
Week 4 – how to convince yourself to finish instead of taking a well-deserved break

The last chapter offers some advice on deciding whether to continue working on your novel and how to go about rewriting it if you choose. Baty’s ideas on rewriting are simple and encouraging for a NaNo novel, or any novel for that matter. I was happy to see this, since so many writing books get you all excited but leave you hanging part way through the first draft.

It may be the guidebook for a month of frantic writing, but the lessons learned will help writers with more leisurely writing as well. And if procrastination threatens to set in, you can always declare your own novel writing month and get back into shape. In the end, Baty makes it very clear that “literature is not merely a spectator sport.”

According to Gore, if you have no idea how to publish a book, get out there and do it anyway. If you’ve wasted too much writing time daydreaming about being famous, stop. Stop dreaming and start doing. Ariel Gore’s message is that no matter how shy and reclusive you are, even if you’re the stereotypical writing hermit, you can publish and promote your book.

In 78 brief chapters, Ariel Gore outlines the steps to “Give Yourself a Lit Star Makeover,” “Master Your Craft,” “Publish Before You’re Ready,” “Play with the Big Dogs,” and “Become a Brazen Self-Promoter.”

How to Become a Famous Writer is devoted less to the art of writing than to the art of becoming a lit star. Gore takes the stance that if your writing isn’t up to snuff just yet, constant practice and lessons from the school of hard knocks will get you where you need to be. “Publish Before You’re Ready” details ways to get your work published no matter what, on the theory that the experience of having your work in front of readers will teach you as much as endless writing classes. She addresses both traditional publishing routes, like finding an agent and an editor, as well as independent methods like zines and print-on-demand services.

Throughout, Gore interviews successful authors of various niches from household names like Dave Barry to lesser-known zine editors. Her quirky interview style gives bold insight into the guts of writing and publishing. A fast read because of Gore’s engaging style and sharp wit, it’s plain from her examples that she’s speaking from experience about mistakes she’s made and how she would do it again. I’m dying to read some of her other books and see how her voice is transformed by fiction and memoir.

The hard truth for any author in the competitive world of publishing is having to do one’s own publicity. Gore shares her experiences with promoting herself as a lit star, emphasizing the importance of writers viewing themselves as entrepreneurs. She tells how to take the promotion of your book into your own hands, whether you’re published or not, by a big house or with zines you photocopied yourself. She talks about gaining confidence through open mic performances, scheduling your own tours by grabbing some musical friends and going on a road trip, and the successes of others who have taken matters into their own hands. If it all seems like too much, too intimidating, Gore makes it sound like a blast. She doesn’t deny that promoting your own books is hard work, but her energy and enthusiasm are contagious.

“You must know that it is the writer’s job to love the world,” says Gore. Don’t let your fear of failure still your voice. The last thing you should do is sit and wait for the rejection letter, letting a publisher decide your literary fate. Anyone who works equally hard at developing their writing craft and their lit star confidence can impact the world with their writing. And why else did you want to be a writer if not to speak? Let your voice be heard.

—-

I saw How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead recommended on the Anti 9 to 5 Guide blog, another terrific resource for aspiring independent writers.