The Desert Mermaid

The Book: The Martian by Andy Weir, a breakaway hit. Maybe you've heard of it.

The Basics: Things have not gone well for the third manned mission to Mars. Just six sols into their thirty-sol mission, a dust storm threatens their ascent vehicle to such an extent that that they have to abort. But as they're fleeing to the vehicle, the storm takes out the communications array, and its collapse kills astronaut Mark Watney super fucking dead. Unable to go back for his body, the crew is forced to leave it behind. And thus, the crew is going to spend the ten-month trip back to Earth very dispirited.

But not nearly as dispirited as Watney is when he WAKES THE FUCK UP STRANDED ALONE ON MARS.

OH SHIT: Yeah, so, he may not be as dead as previously indicated.

So, What Now?: Obviously, Mark's situation is the definition of hopelessly dire: he's on a planet with a very thin atmosphere, enough food to last six people seventy days, living in basically a high-tech tent. It will be four years until anybody can rescue him, but because they think he's dead and he has no way to contact them and tell them otherwise, even that is a longshot. He's clearly going to die.

Except that Mark Watney is an awesome astronaut type person, so after his initial Oh Shit response, he immediately begins considering ways he can survive. Using resourcefulness, creativity, humor, and lots of math, he immediately gets to work making his impossible situation possible. Every time an obstacle is flung in his way, he figures his way around it with duct tape or potatoes or something, and you find yourself looking forward to finding out how he's going to get through THIS completely insurmountable mess.

Sometimes NASA Butts In: And the switch from Mark's first-person log entries to the third-person NASA bits is Weir's weakness. Those portions feel a little like a screenplay or script, and the characters seem a bit stock-Hollywood. One particular character, Mindy, does have an arc, but it's an oddly clunky one. Still, it's got some fun stuff--NASA's eventual realization that Something Is Up is pretty entertaining.

Favorite Bit Of Survivaling: The part where he builds water. Yes, he survives some more immediate and alarming things, true, although his water building is explosive as hell. But I just love that he can fucking BUILD WATER out of its components.

Space Place Book Club Time!: So for some reason a whole bunch of us Space Placers independently decided to start reading this last week. I did because my sister's been after me to read it. I think the others did because the movie is coming out. I waited to finish the book before watching the trailer. And while Matt Damon does not look at all like the Mark Watney in my head, hot DAMN I want to see the movie now.

In Conclusion: I am really pleased that OMGSCIENCE! is becoming so popular in media recently. Especially when the stories are as great as this one. I hope the pendulum doesn't swing away from this too fast, because I want more things like The Martian. Go check it out!


DISCUSSION QUESTION: Do Hindus really say "Oh, gods"? I appreciate him diversifying his cast, but I'm seriously wondering if that's a thing.

The Book: Mothership by Martin Leicht and Isla Neal

The Basics: Portrait of a teenage pregnancy. With skillful application of nonlinear narrative, Leicht and Neal take us through sixteen-year-old Elvie's story, using flashbacks--in which she deals with a vanishing baby daddy, her best friend's overly concerned pregnancy research, bullies, the lack of a mother of her own, breaking the news to her dad, figuring out what to DO with the kid, and tranferring to Hanover School for Expecting Teen Mothers--interspersed with the present narrative, three weeks before her due date, when two factions of warring space aliens charge in to destroy each other with ray guns and end up blasting Hanover out of its low-orbit and right into the path of total disaster.

Wait, What?: Did I mention this book is set in the year 2074, the Hanover School is a space station, both sets of aliens have nefarious designs on the unborn babies, and there are ray guns? Yeah, there's that.

New Rule: Okay, can we all agree that we gave first-person present-tense a good try as applied to action-adventure stories and that it JUST DOESN'T WORK? I don't care how awesome your story is; if it's written in that style I will deduct points. That being said ...

There Are Two Ways To Analyze This Book: If I were feeling scholarly, I could probably get one hell of a thesis out of it. It wouldn't be a stretch to analyze how some of the implications of the world--which range from vaguely creepy to downright horrifying--form a cuttingly clever satire on the current political climate in which men plot and scheme and argue and shoot each other over uteruses without really paying attention to the girls who happen to surround them. I could definitely do that.

Or I could just tell you that this book was ASTONISHINGLY FUN TO READ. It was a silly, happy-go-lucky, action-packed chunk of WHEE SCI-FI, like some glorious form of TV Tropes Mad Lib. And a lot of these tropes manage to piss me right the hell off most of the time,* but somehow they managed to come together to make the most wonderful triple-layer frosted cake with sprinkles of a story. And for all the authors' slightly forced attempt at Teen Voice Narration, Elvie is actually a pretty cool character, with solid goals (she's going to go to a top university for space engineering to get in on a Mars colonization project), an actual sense of humor, and confidence, flexibility, and competence in a crisis. She can change her mind while still making sure it's her mind. (Bonus points for when she tells someone, "It would really help the running narrative in my head if I actually knew what to call you." I'm a sucker for metahumor.)

It could work as a stand-alone book, but I'm glad it's the first in a planned series. I am seriously looking forward to more ray gun adventures in the future.

( Discussion Question WITH SPOILERS! )


*The one about how the only reason humans have civilization is because of the intellectually advanced aliens among us moving our dumb asses along, for example. That one annoys me --particularly if a defining factor of the aliens in question is that they are all male. That right there is the Unfortunate Implications trope in a nutshell.

**Fortunately, the authors seem to know that, and so does Elvie.

So a couple weeks ago, acrossthelake sent me a book: There And Back Again, by Pat Murphy. I had a vague recollection of her describing something like it to me in the past, but it was just that—vague. I wasn’t really sure what to expect.

Then a couple days ago I sat down and read it. And you couldn’t get a coherent sentence out of me afterward, because OH MY GOD.

The Basics: THIS IS A SPACE OPERA VERSION OF THE HOBBIT.

Really, I could stop there. I mean, after all, what more information do you need than that THIS IS A SPACE OPERA VERSION OF THE HOBBIT? It’s totally enough for me. But I’ll try to tell you more. Here goes …

THIS IS A SPACE OPERA VERSION OF THE HOBBIT.

Whoops! Sorry. Okay, let’s try again.

The Plot: C’mon, you know this plot. Bailey Beldon is a “norbit,” which is a population of compact, gregarious, spacefaring folks content to live a quiet life in the asteroid belt.* All is well and good until the mysterious Gitana shows up, along with seven women from the Farr clone family, looking to retrieve a message capsule he had found. The message contains a map! To the center of the galaxy! Where treasure awaits! So that the Boss Clone, Zahara, may reclaim the honor of her family! Glory and riches for everyone!

So somehow Bailey gets roped into this quest, and the next thing he knows he’s on a Crazy Space Adventure. He winds up diving through wormholes and dilating time to make his way to the center of the galaxy, becoming an important crewmember in short order.

You Had Me At “Norbit,” But … : This book is not a classic in the same vein as the original. But I’ll tell you what this book totally is: IT IS PURE CRACK.

It is like a pinball game that bounces off every crazy Golden Age grain-of-science trope you could possibly dream up.** There are neuro computers and clone clans and killer nebula spiders and and brain-stealing marauders and space pirates including Space Blackbeard and a scrappy starfighter AI named Fluffy and a giant robotic space dragon. Pat Murphy could not have found more of my squee-buttons if she’d sat down and interviewed me.

Don’t Worry, Tolkien Purists: Bailey is fun, but he’s no Bilbo. Bilbo’s brilliance as a character is almost impossible to duplicate. He’s a perfectly relatable combination of goodhearted, whiny, resourceful, petty, polite, useless, clever, snarky, cautious, and homesick. We all like to pretend we’d totally Batman our way through any adventure that came our way, but there is something really reaffirming about a story where a character with all the flaws we all have still manages to average it out to being pretty awesome. Bailey skirts toward that, but with him, the flaws don’t show through as often—and as a result, he’s less engaging.

On the other hand, I rather liked that the clones had a bit more individuality than the Dwarves, who came across more as a collective—and yes, I know just how ironic that is. Also, it was nice to have some women in the story, without any fuss over the fact that they were women. That’s always refreshing.

In Conclusion: THIS IS A SPACE OPERA VERSION OF THE HOBBIT.

Seriously, you didn’t need anything else, did you?


BONUS POINTS: Ever since beccastareyes pointed out how often writers get this wrong, I can't help but pay attention when a writer tells you the phase of the moon, the position of it, and the time of day/night. This book always got it right. Good on ya, Murphy!


*They go from asteroid to asteroid in steam-powered rockets, which must take forever to get anywhere. Asteroid belts aren’t quite the dense messes they are in movies, y’know, but whatever.

**I literally jumped when they mentioned cooking right- and left-handed food. “Ooh! Ooh! I know this one! Stereoisomers!” Apparently wormholes make you into a mirror image of yourself, right down to the molecules.

The Book: Mermaid: A Twist on the Classic Tale, by Carolyn Turgeon. Wouldn’t you know it, just as I’m explaining to people that Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid is Teen Supernatural Romance, along comes a retelling that plants it firmly in the Teen Supernatural Romance category.

The Plot: Human princess Margrethe and mermaid princess Lenia are both trying to win the affections of the same dude, Prince Christopher. Margrethe wants to marry him in order to end the bitter war between their two kingdoms. Lenia wants to marry him in order to score an immortal soul, something God apparently forgot to give to merfolk. Thank goodness for loopholes!* Oh, and they both love him, I guess.

The Twist: The twist is that Turgeon wants to explore the character of the Other Princess, the one the prince actually winds up marrying. And it works—Margrethe is an excellent character, analytical and romantic at the same time, intelligent, and brave. Unfortunately, Turgeon forgot to make any of the other characters interesting—which is a crying shame, since adding in a tentative friendship between the two princesses before the whole “turning human” bit goes down was inspired.

Mostly, though, it made it difficult to believe either of them was really in love with the prince, whose two main personality facets were an interest in The Odyssey and horniness. I’m trying to figure out if such a lack of character was a clever bit of gender-bending (I’ve lost track of the number of books and movies that have two guys vying for the affection of some woman with all the personality of a blow-up doll), or just a failure to make a character work. Either way, though, I think I’d have preferred it if Turgeon had left the “love” part out entirely and just gone with the ulterior war-end and soul-get motives. It would’ve felt more honest.

One more twist at the end is how the mermaid secures “immortality.” I was indifferent to Turgeon’s solution, but I do think it was smart of her not to go with the original ending where good ol’ Crazy Hans completely lost his shit and had voyeuristic angels vaporize the mermaid and explain that if you disobey your parents she will be doomed to drift around the world bemoaning her fate like Jacob Marley for WAY longer than necessary due to some weird contract with God. Good move, that.

We Are Committed To Sparkle Motion: Here in this novel we learn that mermaids are pale white, cold, marble-hard, difficult to destroy, and glittery. First they came for the vampires, and I did not say anything because I never liked vampires. Then they came for the angels …

Down In Fragment Rock It took me a while to form an opinion on this book because I kept tripping over badly-placed sentence fragments the author mistook for lyricism. Now, normally I like sentence fragments, but that’s because they’re supposed to help a story flow. This time around it was like when you stumble over something and have to go back and inspect the ground to see what you hit. I had to keep stopping to make sure I hadn’t just missed a predicate somewhere.


*For those of you who only watched the Disney version, this bit is straight out of the original story. As is the part where she will feel like her legs are being stabbed FOREVER, and where giving up her voice means the witch hacks out her tongue.**

**Neither Andersen nor Turgeon seem to realize that this doesn't actually remove your voice; it just makes it very difficult to articulate anything and you sound weird and alarming. They keep claiming she laughs silently, or that she can't scream. Turgeon does describe how Lenia can taste food after losing her tongue, which is true to a very limited extent, but I'm not sure if she did that on purpose or not. I'm guessing not, because the food has a LOT of taste.

The Lost Journals of Ven Polypheme by Elizabeth Haydon

I’ve never read anything else by Elizabeth Haydon, but I like these YA books. They’re well-written, fun, and imaginative, and they put enough twists on familiar character-types to make me actually like them, especially Ven. I also thought the narrative style was nicely integrated—it alternates between bits from Ven’s journals and standard third-person past tense. I’d expected it to be clumsy, but Haydon manages to use it to her advantage.

The only thing I could do without is the patronizing appendices full of discussion questions and “research activities.” Fuck you, this is a book, not a god damn homework assignment. Start asking me to list examples of how Saeli’s affinity for plants can help her or how they can make her vulnerable, or telling me to look up myths on the internet, and I feel like you’re just trying to trick me into a Valuable Reading Experience. This shit was condescending in third grade. Don’t expect me to appreciate it now.

Aprilynne Pike’s Wings comes highly recommended by Stephenie Meyer, right on the cover and everything, but despite that it actually has a good premise.

Okay, the premise may not be able to save it, but by damn credit goes to her for trying.

Our hero, fifteen-year-old Laurel, is strange. Not in any personality sense (partly because, despite sprouting other things, Laurel never sprouts a personality), but in a behavioral sense. Laurel likes to expose her skin to outside air, rarely eats anything but salad, canned peaches, and soda, has never seen a doctor, and looks like a supermodel. Strange! Oh, and also she was left in a basket on her parents’ doorstep when she was a toddler, and she has just sprouted a giant winglike flower out of the middle of her back.

Despite Laurel’s supreme lack of interest in her own body (doesn’t care that she hasn’t started her period yet, or really wonder how she’s still alive on her anorexic diet), this last one sort of galvanizes her. She is no biology whiz, but she’s pretty sure this is not a normal part of puberty, so she goes to see her love interest, David, who is a biology whiz, and ask him if he has any ideas.

And it was then that I started to get prematurely excited.

( And also where I just KEPT TYPING )

In The Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, And The Mad Dreamers Who Tried To Build A Perfect Language by Arika Okrent

To understand why I was a little personally disappointed with the book, you have to understand that conlangers, like any other tiny, highly specific subgroup, are bitterly divided. On the one side you have the auxlangers, whose primary goal is to build languages designed to be easy to learn and speak—international auxiliary languages. (For some weird reason, auxlangs often are derived from European linguistic roots.) On the other side, you get the conlangers, whose primary motive for building languages is because why the hell not.*

Basically, auxlangers believe that language is flawed and needs improvement; conlangers believe that language is pretty darn interesting the way it is and, in the way of an artist wanting to emulate and recreate and play with something they like themselves, they decide to build their own.

And though she begins her book with an anecdote on Klingon, Arika Okrent’s In the Land of Invented Languages concentrates mostly on the auxlangers. I enjoyed her outlines of the changing goals of constructed languages and the history thereof, but I was disappointed with the very short chapter dedicated to the just-cuz conlangs of the present day. Sections devoted to John Wilkins’s philosophical language, Esperanto, and the interesting use found for Blissymbolics** tended to eclipse her mention of the languages constructed just for the sake of creative linguistics.

This had an interesting effect, too: her tales of the history of auxlangs rely heavily on both the wacky antics of the creators and to a lesser extent the users, and the overall effect is to make conlangers seem, well, a lot more sane than auxlangers. It’s true all the way through the book, too—the folks who embrace some auxlang less for some political ideal and more for simple appreciation seem consistently less bonkers than the ones yelling that their pet language will revolutionize the mind or the political landscape or something.***

And ultimately, she decides that improving language doesn’t work—she goes through the question of whether something’s a bug or a feature, and often comes down on the “feature” side for something the auxlangers would definitely mark a bug. She notes this is something the conlangers seem to feel, too, but she doesn’t really delve into why—you get only a glimpse of the idea of language appreciation, of the possibilities of anthropological linguistics or messin’ with modes of transmission through her somewhat baffled descriptions of Klingon and the Language Creation Conference. And the thing I was really hoping for—outlines and examinations of conlangs—pretty much didn’t exist.

So I’m not sure what I expected out of this book, but whatever it was this wasn’t it. It was interesting, but I will keep my eye out for other books on conlangs, and hope they’re actually about conlangs themselves.

(Also, she only mentioned Tolkien in passing. That’s like writing a history of the mystery story and only name-checking Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as “influential.”)


*There’s a third category that sort of straddles these two, actually—the engineered languages. They’re languages designed to meet some objective, logical goal or to be some experiment in linguistics. But it seems that depending on the creator’s goals, an engineered language can fall into either the auxlang or conlang category.

Also, bear in mind the conlang community might dispute these categories and nitpick. This is only fair.

**Which was fascinating, both for the interesting niche it found for itself—as a communication tool and stepping-stone into reading for children with cerebral palsy—and for the sheer, utter, unadulterated batshit of its creator.

***This despite the fact that she gives some of the weirder detailes of attending the Klingon Language Conference. Our ASL club at UO got weird enough stares when we’d go out for pizza. Klingons would be spectacular.

The Case of the Missing Marquess: An Enola Holmes Mystery by Nancy Springer

Enola Holmes is awesome.

Okay, it’s no secret that I love the hell out of Sherlock Holmes. And while I am not dogmatic about what is canon and what is not, my love for the original stories means I will watch your attempts at reinterpreting Holmes with a fearsome look of cool appraisal in my eyes. Usually I will deem it unworthy and simply delete it from my mind.

But sometimes I’ll find something I like, and this time around that is Enola Holmes.

Nancy Springer’s portrayal of the younger sister (by at least two decades) of Sherlock and Mycroft is everything you’d ask of a Holmes. Enola’s intelligent, independent, multi-talented, and resourceful. And best of all, she does this all within the labyrinthine confines of Victorian England etiquette—a twist that earned Springer my undying respect.

This isn’t your average story of a 21st-Century tomboy displaced; this is historically accurate portrayal of a Victorian Suffragist, giving you everything from the writings by Mary Wollstonecraft to Enola’s mother’s preference to wear “rationals.” She also makes certain not to let Sherlock Holmes’s awesomeness eclipse his flaws—dude’s as dismissive of women in this story as he is in the originals. But this isn’t really his story—Enola does not barge into his canon and start mucking around, another thing I respect, so what we get is the story from one of the women he dismisses.

Enola’s resourcefulness draws heavily upon the ninjalike ability of women from that era to get around the social mores and ridiculous rules. She uses the language of flowers to communicate with her mother, and can read messages coded in the placement of postage stamps, of fans, and even of undergarments. She would never part with her corset—while she refuses to tighten it, it’s a perfect place to hide a dagger, serves as armor against others’ daggers, as well as having many other uses she points out through the story. It’s the details that get me—I go absolutely wild with glee when she turns something to her advantage.

And the story is good, too—putting Enola on the run from Sherlock (if he finds her, she is legally bound to follow the orders of her elder brother Mycroft, who wants to send her to boarding school) pits her wits against the world’s greatest detective—whom she idolizes. And she’s a terrific match—anyone who uses Holmes’s own failure to account for intelligent women to outsmart him wins extra super bonus points with me.

Oh, and it’s listed as juvenile fiction, but I want to make this clear—Springer doesn’t stop for slow readers. You’re expected to keep up with the references and the language, which is another way to earn my undying respect. She does hit you over the head a bit with the ciphers (YES, WE GET IT, IT'S "ALONE" SPELLED BACKWARDS), but for the most part she refuses to hold your hand. It's GREAT.

In conclusion, I loved the goddamn hell out of this book, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series. I know not all Holmes fans will like the same thing, but if you’re into Sherlock, give this a shot.

So I picked up Darkly Dreaming Dexter from The Liberry a while back. I have still only seen Season 1 of Dexter, and I hear it followed the first book before the two media diverged, so I figured it’d be interesting to take a look at it first.

And really, I hate to say it, but there were a few things about the show I liked better. Namely plot, pacing, character development, and content.

Let’s face it: while the premise was interesting, the book just didn’t pull it off that well. Jeff Lindsey doesn’t really know what to do with his idea—the characters mostly appear to sit around and wait for the climax to happen. The only proactive person in the story is the Other Serial Killer, and he tends to repeat himself. (“I kill a whore! I kill another whore! And another!”) The climax itself brings revelations out of nowhere, machine-gunning them at you in the last few pages and muddling them together so that it starts to sound like that ridiculous “revelation” scene from Wrongfully Accused. (“I’m your mother’s identical twin sister, born ten years later but still identical. I killed your mother. Penis envy. She was a hermaphrodite.” “My mother was … my mother and my father?” “And Sean’s adopted.”)

The show does have the same revelations, but it doesn’t just wait until the season finale for them. It slowly builds them over some episodes, with the Other Serial Killer leading Dexter into this weird journey of self-discovery with each new incident. It’s a lot more of a dialogue between Dexter and his playmate than the book’s monologue—and you get to know both of them better. It also takes the time to explore the other characters and his relationships, along with the idea that maybe the other characters exist independently of Dexter. They don’t just materialize around him, and they are much less one-dimensional—Deb has her own interests and ideas, Rita starts to establish her own strength, LaGuerta is an interestingly flawed but capable cop,* and they even try to make Doakes exist for some other reason than to stand around menacing Dexter. This is a good move, because it makes you, y’know, care what happens to them, and wonder how Dexter’s relationships to them will affect what he does next.

Basically, the whole story was much more interesting and well-executed.

Plus, Dexter’s Worst Flashback Ever is a lot more terrific and awful the way they show it.**

As I understand it, the books tend to take a weird left turn after a while, but as it is, I prefer the show. I’ll stick with that—and get started on the next few seasons.


*I was especially disappointed with book!LaGuerta, whose character arc goes: dumb, dumb, dumb, hey wait maybe I underestimated her, no wait nevermind she’s really quite dumb, the end.

**I keep picturing Dexter and Harry Potter sitting around talking about their flashbacks. “Ooh, a hazy infant memory of a big flash of green light and your mother begging for your life? LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY ONE BAD DAY.”***

***Also, I’m trying to picture what sort of psychological impact the filming of that scene had on the child actor. Obviously he didn’t actually witness anything, but the setting itself was pretty … well, ghoulish. Also, if they used one of the more delicious recipes for fake blood, that’d just mess the kid up even more.

Finally picked up A Mango-Shaped Space by Wendy Mass—queenlyzard recommended it to me some time back as a YA novel about synesthesia, something I might, for obvious reasons,want to take a look at . I kept forgetting to look for it, but when I came across it while shelving books the other day, I seized it.

And, as with any book that portrays an experience that I can share, I have opinions. Starting with the cover.

I love this cover. I have never seen a book cover that was so surprisingly accurate and so infuriatingly wrong at the same time.



I’m not talking about the cover art, which is not very interesting, but about the letters at the top. I don’t know if it’s apparent on this image, but each letter has not only a specific color, but also a texture. The g even has purple spots. This is actually pretty true to what goes on in a synesthete’s head—letters do indeed have color and texture.*

However … it’s still overwhelmingly wrong.

I mean, in what crazy mixed-up backwards upside-down bizarro universe is the letter a YELLOW?

Seriously. Everyone knows it’s bright pink.

Don’t even get me started on that m. Good god.

Anyway, while the book has a nice enough plot of standard tweenage Journey Of Self-Discovery, I must admit the portrayal of The Synesthesia Experience felt—well, overdone. Granted, I’m only comparing to my own experience, but it is strange to see its process be so dramatic. Unlike the main character in this book, I had no traumatic school experiences involving ridicule by classmates and angry parent-teacher conferences; no fleeting fear that I was crazy; no carrying it as a deep dark secret; no real way it inhibited my life. I just remember it always being there, and finding out through a very short conversation** (so unremarkable that I don’t remember who it was with) that I might be unique, and then not really worrying about it or even giving it a second thought. Then I found an article that named it, and I got rather interested in it for a while because hey, who wouldn’t be interested in their own newly-discovered mutant power? It never would have occurred to me that it was a stigma of any sort, or something to fear.

And the badge on the cover saying that this book won the ALA Schneider Family Book Award, which honors the “artistic expression of the disability experience,” is just bizarre. When the hell has synesthesia ever been a disability? I mean, yes, it’s unusual, and yes, for some it can be distracting, and yes, it can give you strong opinions about really weird things. And, yes, every once in a while somebody reacts with slight hostility when you explain what it is.

That, my friends, is not a disability. You can’t say, straightfaced, that synesthesia is anything like those real disabilities, the ones people really have to work around. A synesthete can’t tell someone with, say, severe ataxic cerebral palsy “Oh, yeah, I know exactly what you’re going through with your disability, with the falling down and the speech problems and the writing problems and the morons who think you aren’t intelligent and so forth. Why, just the other day I saw a poster with the letters all mixed up, and it was mildly irritating.”

Hell, I don’t think synesthesia even counts as a condition. It’s pretty much a sensory bonus.

*ahem* Sorry. Sometimes I get a little annoyed with that sort of thinking.

But there were some moments that rang wonderfully true. For a non-synesthete, the author gives some pretty spot-on descriptions of the main character’s extremely specific sensations for the colors of graphemes, and there’s one great bit when a the synesthesia specialist asks the main character how she pictures the calendar year, and she says “Just like everybody else” and then launches into a long confused description of the year as a Ferris wheel that goes counterclockwise and falls over and god knows what else. And the way she feels totally attached to it, like it’s an important part of her, is great.

Mostly my response to the book is one you get when someone else describes something you’ve experienced, too—you want to tell your version of it. And it will probably help at least a few kids recognize their own synesthesia. Likeable, but not my usual style.


*And also 3-D depth, lighting, highlights, gender, personality, and location in space, but that’s hard to render on a book cover. And it’s not always, mind. Just for some.

**“You ever notice how letters and numbers have color?”
“... No.”
“Oh. It must just be me then.”