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Dec. 3rd, 2011 12:22 pmSo ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rachelmanija is running something pretty nifty: a Permanent YA Floating Diversity Book Club, in which a theme is announced, people vote on the book to read, and then everyone posts reviews of it and talks about it!
I think this is an awesome idea; I don't have the time to run one myself, but I am super excited to be a floating bit of Rachel's. Last month's theme was YA sci-fi/fantasy with gay protagonists, and the book was Scott Tracey's Witch Eyes.
So Witch Eyes, in the tradition of paranormal YA, stars a boy named Braden who has MAGICAL COLOR-CHANGING EYES and OVERWHELMING MAGICAL SUPERPOWERS.
(Unfortunately using those magical superpowers gives him a killer migraine at the best of times and makes him pass out at the worst of times, but so it goes.)
Braden makes one exceptionally dumb decision at the very beginning of the novel, which is, after seeing a vision that terrible things are going to happen to him and the uncle who raised him is going to die in a certain small town . . . decide that the only way to save his uncle is to run straight to that small town! GENIUS. However, it is only in that small town that he can meet the rest of the cast:
1. Mysteriously sexy bachelor number one, who accosts him on the bus, is rude, and makes sinister references to magic
2. Mysteriously sexy bachelor number two, who accosts him when just off the bus and decides that he needs following around and taking care of
I was not particularly enamored of either Mysteriously Sexy Bachelor (although not any less so than I am your standard paranormal romance Mysteriously Sexy Bachelor), but I did rather like Braden -- occasional astoundingly bad decision aside, he is generally proactive and surprisingly un-prone to wallowing in his own angst, given the fact that arriving in the small town promptly dumps a load of daddy issues and romance issues and sinister magic issues at his feet. Also he has some lady friends, who are both pretty independently nifty, and given how easy it is for stories about gay boys to ignore the ladies entirely, I was surprised and pleased to see that.
And the story is interesting - feuding magical families! Mysteriously powerful woman in the town's past! shapeshifters! secret internet magic-watching forums! hellhounds running around just because! - and I love that this is a book about gay teenagers where the gay kids get to do lots of things that aren't angsting about being gay, like having awesome superpowered magical battles! (I actually thought the balance there was great -- Braden's busy having identity crises in a lot of areas, so it's nice that he's pretty comfortable with his own sexuality, even though not everyone else around him is.) The downside, though, is that I found it very difficult to get emotionally involved in the book as a whole; the book was very short, and a lot happened, and a lot of emotional relationships were set up very quickly, and Braden, who has been home-schooled by his uncle for the past sixteen years, also seems to adapt astoundingly quickly to interacting with other human beings all the time, and - hmm. I think maybe it's just that it really could have used another hundred pages or so just to add actual depth to all the characters and events running sort of hectically around the place. The bones of a good story are there, but there isn't much flesh to hold it together.
rachelmanija is running something pretty nifty: a Permanent YA Floating Diversity Book Club, in which a theme is announced, people vote on the book to read, and then everyone posts reviews of it and talks about it!I think this is an awesome idea; I don't have the time to run one myself, but I am super excited to be a floating bit of Rachel's. Last month's theme was YA sci-fi/fantasy with gay protagonists, and the book was Scott Tracey's Witch Eyes.
So Witch Eyes, in the tradition of paranormal YA, stars a boy named Braden who has MAGICAL COLOR-CHANGING EYES and OVERWHELMING MAGICAL SUPERPOWERS.
(Unfortunately using those magical superpowers gives him a killer migraine at the best of times and makes him pass out at the worst of times, but so it goes.)
Braden makes one exceptionally dumb decision at the very beginning of the novel, which is, after seeing a vision that terrible things are going to happen to him and the uncle who raised him is going to die in a certain small town . . . decide that the only way to save his uncle is to run straight to that small town! GENIUS. However, it is only in that small town that he can meet the rest of the cast:
1. Mysteriously sexy bachelor number one, who accosts him on the bus, is rude, and makes sinister references to magic
2. Mysteriously sexy bachelor number two, who accosts him when just off the bus and decides that he needs following around and taking care of
I was not particularly enamored of either Mysteriously Sexy Bachelor (although not any less so than I am your standard paranormal romance Mysteriously Sexy Bachelor), but I did rather like Braden -- occasional astoundingly bad decision aside, he is generally proactive and surprisingly un-prone to wallowing in his own angst, given the fact that arriving in the small town promptly dumps a load of daddy issues and romance issues and sinister magic issues at his feet. Also he has some lady friends, who are both pretty independently nifty, and given how easy it is for stories about gay boys to ignore the ladies entirely, I was surprised and pleased to see that.
And the story is interesting - feuding magical families! Mysteriously powerful woman in the town's past! shapeshifters! secret internet magic-watching forums! hellhounds running around just because! - and I love that this is a book about gay teenagers where the gay kids get to do lots of things that aren't angsting about being gay, like having awesome superpowered magical battles! (I actually thought the balance there was great -- Braden's busy having identity crises in a lot of areas, so it's nice that he's pretty comfortable with his own sexuality, even though not everyone else around him is.) The downside, though, is that I found it very difficult to get emotionally involved in the book as a whole; the book was very short, and a lot happened, and a lot of emotional relationships were set up very quickly, and Braden, who has been home-schooled by his uncle for the past sixteen years, also seems to adapt astoundingly quickly to interacting with other human beings all the time, and - hmm. I think maybe it's just that it really could have used another hundred pages or so just to add actual depth to all the characters and events running sort of hectically around the place. The bones of a good story are there, but there isn't much flesh to hold it together.
