Review of YA novel Seriously Wicked by Tina Connelly

In case you’ve been wondering, pixies are green, frog-like creatures with wings. You have to be a witch to see the wings. Seriously Wicked contains all the classic elements of a good commercial novel: a plucky protagonist with a quantifiable goal, friends in peril, an able ally, an antagonist who knows too much, complications aplenty, high stakes, and a ticking clock. This one also has at least one seriously evil witch and a really sympathetic dragon named Moonfire.

There are also star-crossed lovers, Camellia, our narrator, and Devon, the new boy. Their meet cute involves a goldfinch and a flaming phoenix feather, which might be a first in literary history. Seriously Wicked reads a bit like Harry Potter lite, but Connelly has developed her own taxonomy of elementals, witches, and spells, and a delightfully relatable alternative witch-world, whose residents rely on items like dragon tears, werewolf hair, goats blood, and elf toenails for their spells, and on WitchNet and Witchepedia for much of their information.

While you could read Seriously Wicked as an allegory about the demon in each of us and what we would sacrifice to save humanity from annihilation, it’s more fun to sit back, suspend disbelief, and enjoy the dilemma of a high school girl, imprisoned by a witch named Sarabine, who has summoned a demon that inadvertently gets trapped inside Devon, Camellia’s crush. Sarabine casts a spell, commanding the demon to accomplish a series of tasks, including locating a phoenix stored somewhere on the high school grounds in order to control its supersonic explosion, which is timed to coincide with the Halloween dance just days away. Camellia must find a way to stop this. There’s more. Much more.

If Seriously Wicked suffers from anything it’s a slightly overcomplicated plot. It is so convoluted (although clearly well thought out) that Connelly inserts summaries periodically to help the reader out. The narrative bogs slightly toward the end when the clock slows so that all the answers Connelly has withheld (Why does her friend Sparkle’s nose keep changing? Why aren’t Camellia’s real parents looking for her?) can be revealed in a flurry of expository dialogue. Great. But at this point readers might really just want to know if the town is going to blow up and whether Devon will be restored to his former “boy-band” self.

Connelly exhibits a sharp wit and a keen tongue that make Seriously Wicked a fun read. There is a grocer who stopped doing business with one supplier because he was “caught doing business with people who do business with people who don’t compost.” And our persevering protagonist at one point confides to the reader that she owns jeans that “don’t understand my butt.”

But, there are deeper issues to consider here: What would you do if someone whose beliefs diametrically opposed yours were driving your life? How does one choose between competing desires in a moral dilemma? Camellia insists that she is not a witch. And yet, in order to save the school, her friends, Devon, the town… She must learn, and successfully cast, a very powerful spell (and, meanwhile, not flunk her algebra test).

This is a fast paced, entertaining drama that offers readers the chance to contemplate the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, selfishness and compassion (as well pondering the current color of their auras). Readers will find a happy escape in Camellia’s fantastic world that includes a werewolf puppy and a dragon. But Connelly understands that we face real end-of-the-world threats in these days of rising sea levels, nuclear threats, and terrorism. Camellia, speaking here about witches (who live a really long time) makes a note-worthy observation. “If you know you’re going to be around to see it, you look at the fate of the world differently.”

Connelly supplies a satisfying ending for readers of Seriously Wicked, and some bonus material if you want to try casting your own spells. Before you do, you might want to brush up on your math.

(This review was first published on the New York Journal of Books website: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/seriously-wicked-review-ii)

Review of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven is a complex story. Some assembly is required. 

Mandel begins with a death. An actor, Arthur Leander, plays King Lear in an unusual staging of that play: three little girls (who will grow into the king’s quarreling daughters) sit on stage as the curtain rises. Leander falters, flubs a line, flails out a hand searching for support, and collapses, dead of a heart attack.

In the audience, sits Jeevan Chaudhary an aspiring paramedic, recently a member of the paparazzi. Jeevan leaps onto the stage and attempts, unsuccessfully, to revive Arthur, as Kirsten Raymonde, the girl playing Cordelia, looks on. In the ensuing melee, Jeevan leads little Kirsten off to find Tanya, the child’s “wrangler,” and then wanders off into a snowy Toronto night. The rest of the cast retires to a local bar to discuss the evening’s tragic event and provide the reader with some backstory: Arthur’s three divorces, his one son by his second wife. 

Mandel closes this chapter with: “Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He dies three weeks later on the road out of the city.” Unbeknownst to all, the highly contagious and lethal Georgia flu is quickly devouring the world’s population.

Mandel’s opening of Station Eleven is brilliant, and that brilliance continues throughout the book. Her take on a post-apocalyptic world is not as grim as might be feared. Station Eleven is as much about survival as it is about death and the end of civilization, as we know it. Still, Mandel provides plenty of opportunity for readers to ponder how they might fare in this new world order and the true value of what’s been lost.

Station Eleven moves back and forth in time and place and point of view, as Mandel slowly and carefully constructs her story and connects her multitude of quirky characters in a manner reminiscent of Dickens or possibly Shakespeare. 

We next meet Kirsten, “twenty years after the end of air travel” and follow her, now a member of a traveling Shakespeare company, as they drift from town to town, putting on shows in an often dangerous landscape, where those who survived the epidemic⎯and those who’ve been born since⎯encamp in abandoned box stores, hunt for food, and ransack empty houses for anything useful. They encounter other survivors along the way, including one self-proclaimed prophet.

Kirsten has only a vague memory of the time before, shadowy images of having been in a production of King Lear, for instance, and of the lead actor giving her several volumes of a comic book series called Station Eleven, which she now counts among her most prized possessions. Almost no one, including Kirsten, remembers who wrote the little booklets or why, and yet they begin to take on special significance and power as they make their way across this new land. 

Mandel’s observations about civilization, religion, Shakespeare, and relationships are astute and subtly rendered. The suspense builds slowly, in part because the narrative does not proceed in a straight line. The ending, therefore, doesn’t deliver the punch some readers might want. 

Then again, the final page of Station Eleven isn’t an ending. As Dr. Eleven asks in the comic book version, “What was it like for you, at the end?” The ghost of his mentor, Captain Lonergan, replies, “It was exactly like waking up from a dream.” 

The same might be said of Station Eleven. Emily St. John Mandel writes of a world that we will, with luck, never know⎯one that is dreamlike (no one keeps track of time, because there are no clocks) and from which readers may well find themselves strangely sorry to wake. 

Is the Right Writer Writing?

(This post was originally published on the blog Live to Write, Write to Live.)

I tell people it took me between two and fifty years to write my first book, Her Sister's Shadow. The manuscript itself took two years, but I’d been gathering stories and getting to know my characters (the book was inspired by my mother and her sisters) for most of my life. What might it take to drive sisters apart, I mused, as I listened for years my mother talk about her childhood on the South Shore of Boston, in a weather-shingled house overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. And what might it take to bring them back together? Her Sister’s Shadow was published in 2011.

Then it was time to write another manuscript. What, I wondered, as I sat, fingers tensed, staring at a blank computer screen, could I write about? “You’ve used up every one of your good stories,” I heard myself say. “You’ve exploited every single foible a character could possibly possess and exhausted every topic of interest to anyone. (And all the good lines, too.) And, by the way, you don’t have another fifty years to come up with more.”

                         

My fingers began to cramp; the page remained blank. “It was all a big mistake, that first novel. Eventually someone will figure that out. Not a chance you can write another one.”                                                                                          

Who Asked You, Anyway?

This wasn’t writer’s b--ck (that which must not be named). It was that the wrong writer was trying to write the first draft. Every author needs an internal editor. This persona is as important to subsequent drafts as a copy editor is to the final one. Just don’t let her “help” with the first draft. They say that writing is revising. But first you’ve got to get something down on paper. It’s a bitch to revise a blank page.

Have Fun for Heaven’s Sake

For the first draft, you need to employ your generative side. Invite your kid-self to climb up on your lap and bang away at the keys. Give her plain white paper and colored markers and watch her mind-map her way to a plot. Supply her with colored index cards and see how quickly scenes present themselves. (Pink for romance, green for adventure, blue for drama. Why not?)

                 

Strew your desktop and office with toys, open the windows and listen to birds, take her for a walk down a city street or out into nature (maybe in the rain, why not!) and see what she sees, take her out for ice cream or to a movie, and listen to what she hears. Let her mind roam free. Start transcribing.

Later you will be grateful when that voice says, “That “fabulous” metaphor that you forced into a sentence on page 212, and then shaped into that really awkward scene? Take it out. It doesn’t work. Yes, the whole thing. Out. It. Doesn’t. Work. (Any more than Aunt Betty’s old armoire belongs in the dining room, where it’s blocking half of one window, by the way. Get rid of that, too, while you’re at it.”)

But for now, ignore her. Instead, sail blissfully through your first draft, your mind as open as a summer day. Be a kid, have fun. There’ll be plenty of time to grow up later.

Katharine Britton’s second novel, Little Island, came out in 2013. She is having fun with her third. Visit her website www.katharinebritton.com

When Writing is Like Gardening

Each spring in Vermont I shuttle from garden center to garden center, buying plants to fill what appear to be holes in my garden. I fill pots and window boxes with Moo-Do and pile in as much color as possible. (Impatiens do the trick with, really, very little effort on my part.) Gerananium, angelonia, lavender... go into pots. Lettuce, basil, and bean seeds land, inexpertly, in four, 3X3 foot raised beds. Cherry tomatoes live in large pots on the patio. I water, fertilize, and anticipate. 

For weeks, it seems, not much happens. Then I forget to check on things for a few days and when I go back, those holes in the garden turn out to have been the spaces the plants needed when they grew to full size. Lilies now overshadow iris, echinacea fight for space and light, the phlox has marched right over the sedum, and monarda has insinuated itself everywhere. Out in the vegetable patch, the basil has gone to seed, and the deer ate half the lettuce. Okay, so maybe my absence was slightly longer than a few days, but still. 

Novels, if you leave them alone for too long, will also run amok. When life first calls me away from a new manuscript I'm working on, I experience acute separation anxiety. I long for those relationships I've come to rely on and the characters who've kept me company for months. Plots often unfold as I go along, so writing a novel engenders almost as much eager anticipation as reading one. What will he say the next time they meet? When will she discover the girl's true identity? It's like a thirst for knowledge. 

By day three, my anxiety becomes nostalgia for friends fondly remembered. By day ten I have trouble recalling characters' names. By day fouteen I am afraid to go back. Much as I am when I haven't visited my garden in two weeks. (See note above.)

My initial reaction when faced with my garden in mid-July, after a two-week hiatus, if the weather has been (as it was this summer) very wet is panic. "This garden looks terrible!" I say to anyone who'll listen. "What was I thinking planting all those lilies?" Those lilies looked so petite and perky in June! They now bristle with unadorned stems, their foliage sags, spent blossoms litter the ground. "Off with their heads!" I want to start pulling plants immediately, despite the fact that it is 90 degrees and digging them up will, truly, leave some holes in my garden.

Gardening is a process. So is writing. It is a love of the process-as much as, or more than-the outcome, that gardeners and writers must learn to cultivate. There are days, even weeks, when my garden looks great. And days and weeks when it doesn't. The same is true with a new manuscript-or even one well into a fourth or fifth draft. Moderation is the key. Putting in too much material, too early, tempting as it is, isn't good in either medium. Impulsivity rarely pays off: whacking out huge sections of a book or garden now often leads to regret later. Better to pull weeds, edge, take notes, contemplate, watch, wait. Just don't leave it alone for too long.