The Young Elites by Marie Lu
This is the book I had been waiting for. It was a nice splash of YA in the midst of my 400-level English kind of readings. I powered through it in a night, and was surprised by it. It has the pretty standard lines of YA through it, but there were some aspects that had me go, "Oh! That's new!" The protagonist was abused horribly as a young girl, which isn't terribly surprising. However, she's also pretty much established as a horrifying murderer, and her magic is powered by hate and fear, both her own and others'. THAT'S pretty... grisly, I suppose, for a nice little young-adult novel. But definitely the most surprising part---
**HUGE SPOILERS**
was that the prince, the man they were all fighting to put back in power, the love interest even, DIES. And not in any way that lets you imagine, "Oh, maybe he's not really dead and he's just pretending for the sake of the duel!" No. This guy is gutted with a sword straight through his body, guts hanging out and everything. And not only that, but it's the main girl's fault. She attacked him in a blind terror and then his opponent totally gutted him. So... she's not doing so hot in this novel. There was an epilogue in another country though, that suggested we might see him reanimated like a zombie, albeit with some unknown yet creepy complications...I think we'll see....Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Well, this one was for school. I thought I would really hate it, and I kind of did for a while. As I pushed through, I developed a better understanding of it though. This book is an interesting hybrid told in an unusual way. The narrator is the friend of a poet who was murdered. The friend takes it upon himself to provide explanatory notes to his friend's poem so that he can publish it posthumously. However, the narrator just turns everything into a story about his homeland and his king there, like some kind of absurdly patriotic guy who's so upset that his friend didn't write the poem about the stories the narrator told him about his homeland that he's using the poem and established author's fame to hijack it and tell his own story.
That's all true. However, it makes a little more sense when you learn through the process of the egotistical narrator's notes that
**HUGE SPOILERS**
(well, maybe not... but still.)
he's actually the king he knows so much about. It becomes obvious pretty early on, but he never actually gets to the point of expressly admitting it until the last twenty pages or so, when he finally shifts from "The king thought this" to "I couldn't believe how..." (shifts from a clearly false third-person to a more honest first-person). The ending was... odd. The parallel stories were interestingly woven though, and by the end I had a more invested interest and respect for the narrator, the story, and the actual author, Nabokov, for weaving such contrasting threads into a complementary tapestry.The Gate Thief by Orson Scott Card
I didn't actually get much farther in this, but I did listen to some of it so I wanted to include it in here. Clearly, as you can tell from the VOLUMES I had to say about the other two books this week, I had a lot of other things on my mind. :)
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