Secondhand Saturday winner, plus, would anyone like some ARCs?

Well, seeing as I got only one entry on last week's post, the winner of my Secondhand Saturday is:

Mandi!

I'll be emailing you shortly, but if you read this before then go ahead and email me with your pick of last week's list. 

I'm a bit disappointed, because I really need some help getting rid of these books!  I've got more than I know what to do with, and I'd love to see them go to another cash-strapped blogger.  I think I'll try Secondhand Saturday again in a few weeks, but in the meantime do any of my followers want to do some kind of ARC swap or some other arrangement?  I'm open to ideas.  Normally I'd run the books over to my used bookstore, but I hate doing that with ARCs - it just doesn't feel ethical.  So if you're interested, email me or leave a comment and we'll work something out. =)

Some thoughts on memes

In case you didn't notice, I didn't blog yesterday.  Bad me.  You know why that feels kind of ridiculous?  Because I spent 40-50 minutes writing my review of Koyal Dark, Mango Sweet on a Wednesday, when, by book blogger right, that's my slack off and do a WoW post day.  I woke up this morning wondering why the heck I didn't, and then had some Very Deep Thoughts about memes and why I love/hate them.

In case you don't know what a meme is (in which case, I don't know how you found your way onto this blog), it's a post hosted by one blog that invites other blogs to participate, usually via Mr. Linky.  It's a promotion tool for the host blog and for all the little satellite participants, and it's a great way to help new followers find you.  That's great, right?  Um...right?

It is great, but here's the problem.  Pretty much every book blog I know of does an In My Mailbox post on Sunday (or the multicultural equivalent of New Crayons).  Ditto for Waiting on Wednesday.  Quite a few do Teaser Tuesday and Follow Friday, too.  And when I'm scrolling down the blog list on my sidebar looking for interesting posts to read, unless I can see it's a WoW title I'm also dying for or it's one of those IMMs that's going to have 30 books and lots and lots of pictures for me to drool over, I just sort of...move on to the next post down the line.  And when it's pretty much all a book blog posts, that blog tends to get culled from my sidebar rather quickly.  This makes me feel bad, because what if these folks are doing a book blog on top of a full time job?  Or college/high school/some education institution involving insane amounts of homework, too?  Am I an over-memer?

Usually when I'm not sure about something on my blog, I look at the blogs I love to read, try and figure out what makes me love to read them, and adjust accordingly.  On memes, however, I'm stuck.  I don't like blogs that meme more than once a week.  Great.  I also like blogs that post every day.  Unfortunately, unless I do IMMs and WoWs (my current two memes), I probably won't manage that.

So, follower input time.  Do you like my memes, or would you rather I just stuck with reviews and pensive posts like this one?  Please help me out of a dilemma and leave your thoughts in the comments!

Review: Koyal Dark, Mango Sweet

Koyal Dark, Mango Sweet by Kashmira Sheth
Find it at a local indie!

• Why I read it: India, ZOMG COVER LOVE
• Disclosure: Found a used paperback copy at my local thrift store.  I'm poor, what can I say.

Jeeta's family is caught up in the whirlwind of arranging marriages for her two older sisters, but the drama and excitement leave Jeeta cold. Even though tradition demands the parade of suitors, the marriage negotiations and the elaborate displays, sixteen-year old Jeeta wonders what happened to the love and romance that the movies promise? She dreads her turn on the matrimonial circuit, especially since Mummy is always complaining about how Jeeta's dark skin and smart mouth will turn off potential husbands.  But when Jeeta's smart mouth and liberal ideas land her in love with her friend's cousin Neel, she must strike a balance between duty to her tradition-bound parents, and the strength to follow her heart. 

In case you didn't notice, I put the cover image on this one EXTRA BIG because I love it that much.  Holy crap.  As soon as I saw this cover I knew I was walking out of the store with it.  Note to publishers: Mehndi/henna tattoos on covers?  Major win.  I will spend hours trying to copy the designs on my hands, resulting in cramps, carpal tunnel flare-ups, eye strain, and only moderate success, but much, much dizzy excitement.  One last superficial note before I get to the meat of the story - every time I say/hear/think about this title, this incredibly awesome song titled "Koyal (Songbird)" by Nitin Sawhney gets stuck in my head (he composed it for the soundtrack of a silent movie, which you can see in the video).  I love that song and anything else by Nitin Sawhney, actually, and never mind having it stuck in my head, so there was EVEN MORE WIN when I saw it on the thrift store shelves.

With all these expectations riding on it, I was pretty much set up for disappointment with the actual book here.  As I scanned the Goodreads reviews (which I hardly ever do and can't remember why I was doing, actually), sure enough, there were the people flaming it's "middle grade" style and "feeble stabs" at romance - I can't remember exactly what the quotes were, but that was the gist of it - and my heart just sank.  It languished on my shelves for months until I remembered that hey, I have a book blog, and bad books are part of the gig, so suck up and deal and besides, COVER LOVE!  Ahh!

I am so glad I got over it, because I loved this book with very few reservations.  Sure, the characters never quite hit three-dimensional.  Sure, the romance fell a little flat.  Sure, the prose wasn't brilliant, and the info-dumps were annoying.  But I could rattle off dozens of books like that for you, if you'd like, and very few would have the heart of Koyal Dark, Mango Sweet.  Jeeta's agonizing over her dark, "cinnamon" skin was the same agonizing every teen goes through, only times ten.  (Speaking of, is that just me or is the cover model too light-skinned?  Discuss.)  Her relationships with her family were also particularly relatable for teens.  The Other Boleyn Girl may still reign supreme when it comes to capturing the subtleties of love-hate sister relationships, but Koyal Dark, Mango Sweet was pretty darn close.

I wasn't a huge fan of the romantic elements, like I said.  The characters were just too wooden for it to work.  It worked as a novel, though, because it's pretty clear that the focus is on Jeeta's personal growth, if you'll permit my sounding like an after-school special.  Funnily enough, while I didn't realize it as I was reading, I'd actually read another book by this author pre-book blog: Blue Jasmine.  That novel focused on the immigrant experience, and while I don't remember much about it, I do recall a lot of the same themes of family vs. self, duty vs. happiness.  Sheth clearly pours her experiences into her writing, and it's fun and interesting to read.

In short, it's a fast, poignant read that explores problems universal to all teens - not just ones in Mumbai.  Four out of five stars, and apologies for the discombobulated review.  Sometimes college is murder!

Spreading the L.K. Madigan love

I begin this post with a disclosure - I have read neither Flash Burnout nor The Mermaid's Mirror by L.K. Madigan.  Yet.  However, I have been an interested blog and Twitter follower for some time, and always planned on getting around to her books on my usual reading timeline: Eventually.  Unfortunately, as she shared this week on her blog, sometimes there isn't an eventually.

It doesn't matter that I don't know Lisa in real life.  It doesn't matter that I haven't read her books - yet.  I was absolutely devastated to read her post, because it reminded me how short life is.  Maybe I'm too young to be having issues with my own mortality, but it always blows me away how little time there is to do what you want to do.  Be who you want to be.  Meet the right people.  Read.  Write.  Make a difference.  I'm writing this post because Lisa has made a difference worthy of a standing ovation: She writes for the most picky, persnickety, difficult, and hard-to-please people on the planet.  Not the New York Times Book Review, though that's the more respected path.  She writes for teens.  Us.  Me.  And I think that's special.  Bravo.

To celebrate and support Lisa during this time, the 2009 Debutantes are hosting a giveaway of 40 sets of Flash Burnout and The Mermaid's Mirror on their blog.  To enter, spread the L.K. Madigan love as far and wide as you can - there's a list of ideas towards the bottom of the post.  I, for one, can't wait to dive headfirst into Flash Burnout as soon as humanly possible.

Thank you, Lisa, for having one of the toughest jobs in the world.  Here's from a real teen who appreciates it.

Review: Ship Breaker, aka an ode to speculative fiction

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi
Find it at a local indie!

• Why I read it: Hardcore dystopia, haves and have-nots, eco-catastrophe
• Disclosure: Checked it out from the library, but I will be buying a hardcover copy because it's just that good.

Set initially in a future shanty town in America's Gulf Coast region, where grounded oil tankers are being dissembled for parts by a rag tag group of workers, we meet Nailer, a teenage boy working the light crew, searching for copper wiring to make quota and live another day. The harsh realities of this life, from his abusive father, to his hand to mouth existence, echo the worst poverty in the present day third world. When an accident leads Nailer to discover an exquisite clipper ship beached during a recent hurricane, and the lone survivor, a beautiful and wealthy girl, Nailer finds himself at a crossroads. Should he strip the ship and live a life of relative wealth, or rescue the girl, Nita, at great risk to himself and hope she'll lead him to a better life. This is a novel that illuminates a world where oil has been replaced by necessity, and where the gap between the haves and have-nots is now an abyss. Yet amidst the shadows of degradation, hope lies ahead.

Very occasionally, there are books that I really, truly lose my head over.  Books like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan, Lisa McMann's Wake, Dia Reeves's Bleeding Violet.  Books that reimagine YA in a way it's never been done before.  Books that I can't even do justice in a review because they were just.  That.  Good.  Ship Breaker?  Definitely one of those books.

Reading that list over before I start the next paragraph, I realize that every single one of those books is speculative fiction.  There's a reason for that.  When I think good YA, I certainly think of books like M.T. Anderson's Octavian Nothing and Walter Dean Myers's Monster and Melina Marchetta's Jellicoe Road and John Green's Looking for Alaska and lots, lots more books about Real Teens doing Real Things.  It takes a lot of guts to write books like that, and they make me cry and totally blow my mind.  As much as I love them, though, they will never hold the place in my heart that speculative fiction across the spectrum of urban fantasy to dystopia to hard sci-fi does, because there is nothing quite like a world where anything can happen.

Ship Breaker's world, to put it lightly, sucks.  That suckiness does not refer to Mr. Bacigalupi's world-building, which is somewhere beyond the vicinity of excellent, but rather to the fact that everything has gone to hell.  It has not gone to hell in the usual manner of YA dystopias, in which some elite group of people control every little aspect of their citizens' lives.  It has gone to hell because that elite group of people doesn't give a crap about everyone else, and that reversal is what makes Ship Breaker chilling to the bone.  You've got a bunch of people living on the beach with their own slang and rules and day-to-day lives, praying  for Lucky Strikes and that they stay small so they can stay on the light crew and fill their lungs up with a bunch of crap and die young, just so they won't die younger of starvation.  And then you've got the "damn swanks" on clippers.  That's the other reason I love speculative fiction - because, in a world where anything can happen, we can be truly honest about our own world.

And don't even get me started on the characters.  Descriptions like this one, of Moon Girl -

"Moon Girl, the shade of brown rice, whose nailshed mother had died with the last run of malaria and who worked light crew harder than anyone else because she'd seen the alternative, her ears and lips and nose decorated with scavenged steel wire that she'd driven through her flesh in the hope that no one would ever want her the way they'd wanted her mother."

- broke my heart and also blew my writing mind.  The prose is stark, it's as richly spiced and diverse as the characters (hardly any of whom, realistically, are white), but it also never draws attention away from the story where it belongs.  Allow me a teen moment: Just.  OMG.  Wow.

In short, if you can only take me up on one of the recommendations I've made so far on this blog, you could do a heck of a lot worse than this one.  Hands down one of the best YA novels I've read, period.  Five out of five stars.

New Crayons/Read This Week #10

As the only books I received this week were PoC/multicultural, I'm skipping the usual IMM to participate in New Crayons, hosted by Color Online (currently on hiatus).  All of these were very graciously passed on to me from Lyn Miller-Lachmann - thank you so much, Lyn!

Jazz in Love by Neesha Meminger

Jasbir, otherwise known as Jazz, has always been a stellar student and obedient, albeit wise-cracking, daughter. Everything has gone along just fine--she has good friends in the "genius" program she's been in since kindergarten, her teachers and principal adore her, and her parents dote on her. But now, in her junior year of high school, her mother hears that Jazz was seen hugging a boy on the street, and goes ballistic. Mom immediately implements the Guided Dating Plan, which includes setting up blind dates with "suitable," pre-screened Indian candidates. There's only one problem: the new boy at school, the very UNsuitable hottie, is the one who gets Jazz's blood boiling. When Jazz makes a few out-of-the-ordinary decisions, everything explodes, and she realizes she'll need a lot more than her genius education to get out of the huge mess she's created. Can Jazz find a way to follow her own heart, and still stay in the good graces of her parents?

I have heard only good things about Shine, Coconut Moon, so I have high expectations for this novel by the same author.  Love the cover, too!

Red Glass by Laura Resau

ONE NIGHT SOPHIE and her parents are called to a hospital where Pedro, 6-year-old Mexican boy, is recovering from dehydration. Crossing the border into Arizona with a group of Mexicans and a coyote, or guide, Pedro and his parents faced such harsh conditions that the boy is the only survivor. Pedro comes to live with Sophie, her parents, and Sophie's Aunt Dika, a refugee of the war in Bosnia. Sophie loves Pedro - her Principito, or Little Prince. But after a year, Pedro's surviving family in Mexico makes contact, and Sophie, Dika, Dika's new boyfriend, and his son must travel with Pedro to his hometown so that he can make a heartwrenching decision.

Talk about cover love, this one's even prettier.  Sounds like a really heart-wrenching and relevant storyline, too.

The Indigo Notebook by Laura Resau

 Zeeta's life with her free-spirited mother, Layla, is anything but normal. Every year Layla picks another country she wants to live in. This summer they’re in Ecuador, and Zeeta is determined to convince her mother to settle down. Zeeta makes friends with vendors at the town market and begs them to think of upstanding, “normal” men to set up with Layla. There, Zeeta meets Wendell. She learns that he was born nearby, but adopted by an American family. His one wish is to find his birth parents, and Zeeta agrees to help him. But when Wendell’s biological father turns out to be involved in something very dangerous, Zeeta wonders whether she’ll ever get the chance to tell her mom how she really feels—or to enjoy her deepening feelings for Wendell.

I'm a sucker for artsy-moms-that-put-their-kids-through-hell stories.  Looks like this one fits the bill perfectly.  Also, Ecuador!

What books did you receive this week, multicultural or otherwise?  Please leave the titles in the comments, I'm always looking for recommendations!

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Read This Week

Koyal Dark, Mango Sweet by Kashmira Sheth

The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman