A History of Glitter and Blood by Hannah Moskowitz

Title: A History of Glitter and Blood
Author: Hannah Moskowitz
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Release Date: August 4th
Rating: 3/5

Cover Impressions: Meh. Moskowitz has had much better.

The Gist: Sixteen-year-old Beckan and her friends are the only fairies brave enough to stay in Ferrum when war breaks out. Now there is tension between the immortal fairies, the subterranean gnomes, and the mysterious tightropers who arrived to liberate the fairies.

But when Beckan's clan is forced to venture into the gnome underworld to survive, they find themselves tentatively forming unlikely friendships and making sacrifices they couldn't have imagined. As danger mounts, Beckan finds herself caught between her loyalty to her friends, her desire for peace, and a love she never expected.

Review:

I have a love/hate relationship with Hannah Moskowitz.  I love her creative settings, enthralling characters and well paced plots.  I hate how very, very, very, dark her books are.  A History of Glitter and Blood was no exception.

The reader was treated to a book in progress.  Scrap writes about events as they unfold, with a back and forth between before Cricket's death and after.  The tenses change to differentiate between the two and helps keep the reader on track.  The idea of reading the events as they happen gives a unique sense of suspense as we are never quite sure where the story will go or if it will end abruptly.  It also adds an interesting element as Scrap is clearly not the most reliable of story tellers.  He self-edits as he goes, leaving chastising notes for himself and also writes about events for which he clearly could not have been present.  The text itself is sprinkled with additional elements like pictures and pasted in parts from other books.  This adds beautiful visual interest and my only complaint is that I wanted more! I was left really longing for more photographs, particularly of the trio and the different races.
 
Moskowitz creates a really intriguing world in this novel.  Fairies that live, not flitting about in forests but anchored in a city with real jobs.  I was really fascinated by the idea that the fairies never really died.  Instead, they can lose pieces of themselves, but they will always feel them.  No one really knows at what point the fairies stop existing - if they every do.  The plot is evenly placed but, other than the final few scenes, does not have a great deal of excitement.  Rather, it spins a steady tale in which we learn the history of the war and its eventual end.

As always, Moskowitz's world is strange and dark.  She always seems to feature some type of sexual exploitation, especially with young characters and I think it is this inclusion, more than any others, that make me uncomfortable in reading her books.  Perhaps it is being a teacher of teenagers, or having children, but I just find this part of her writing very difficult to get through.  In this book, she explores prostitution.  Beckan, Scrap, and Cricket sold their services to the Gnomes in exchange for food.  However, it is written about in a very strange way.  The characters seemed to revel in their work, despite the very dangerous situations they were placed in and the fact that it had already resulted in the "death" of their friend.  I think it is this that made it so difficult for me to connect to the characters.  I found that I had much more sympathy for the character that was already "dead" than for any of the ones I was supposed to be left rooting for.

Bottom Line: Though this novel didn't quite work for me, it certainly had a unique world and an interesting style of storytelling.  It will be a fantastic read for those readers who are already fans of Moskowitz and those who wish to delve into a dark fantasy with an unreliable narrator who will leave you questioning most of what he writes.

Teaching/Parental Notes:

Age: 16 and up
Sex:  Sex between teenagers
Violence: Gunplay, Knifeplay, Eating of other creatures, Loss of limbs
Inappropriate Language: Fuck, Bitch, asshole, Whore, Bastard
Substance Use/Abuse: Smoking

Other Issues: Prostitution

ARC Book Review: Going Over by Beth Kephart

Title: Going Over
Author: Beth Kephart
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Release Date: April 1st, 2014
Rating: 2/5

Cover Impressions:  The cover is cute and, having read the synopsis, most of the elements make sense.  However, I don't particularly feel this would jump off the shelf at anyone.  To be honest, the reason I stopped to take a second look was because of the National Book Award Finalist tag from an author that I had not yet encountered. 

Review:
I will admit, I got sucked in by the award nominated author tag.  I had never heard of Beth Kephart before and certainly not read any of her books, but the National Book Award is a big, prestigious silver sticker - and she was a finalist!  Perhaps, there is a reason the committee passed her over and I probably should have as well.

Going over is the story of two teenagers stuck on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall.  Full disclosure: that is not a part of history with which I am entirely familiar.  I started the book, hoping for some sort of explanation or perhaps a story that started when the wall first went up (incidentally I would love to read a book about waking up on that morning, suddenly cut off from family and friends whom you had embraced just the night before - get on that authors) but instead, I got thrown right into the midst of the story and actually had to go do a little online research before I felt qualified to read this novel.  Ada lives in the East with her mother and grandmother.  At night she sneaks to the wall to capture the images of famous escapees with her paint cans.  By day she works at a daycare and dreams of the day when her boyfriend, Stefan will make the leap of faith to join her.

I did find this novel rather difficult to follow.  There were no explanations of certain unfamiliar words or customs and I did not understand the mechanics of the wall.  Were people actually allowed to visit from the East?  Weren't they afraid that they wouldn't be allowed to return?  I realize that the West was meant to be a place of suffering and anguish, but the author didn't make this particularly clear.  Stefan never spoke about his hardships, other than have had a job chosen for him, while Ada constantly mentioned hers.  Speaking of which, it seemed particularly selfish that while the family lived in very poor conditions, Ada was spending money of spraypaint to cover the wall.  Perhaps I am reading all of this wrong and it might be different for a reader that is more versed in the time frame and circumstances in which the book takes place.  

Part of the narrative is written in the third person, which takes some getting used to and I am still not entirely sure that I liked it.  Neither of the characters is particularly moving and I did not relate to either of them.  This had a serious impact on my enjoyment of the novel because I simply did not care what happened to Ada and Stefan.  Ada was loud, impetuous and pushy.  She constantly talked to Stefan of escape and would not listen to his concerns about leaving his grandmother behind, not to mention the serious chance that he would be killed in the attempt.  As a result, Stefan did not make many arguments and seemed like a complete pushover.  He was flat and boring with nothing to define his character other than an interest in astronomy.  I was actually far more interested in the story of the little boy who ran away than I was with the two teenagers. 

This most interesting part of the novel, for me, was the snippets of stories of people who either made it over the wall successfully, or died trying.  A particular heartbreaker was

"Giuseppe Savoca, six years old, who wasn't even trying to escape.  Giuseppe was a kid playing with a friend.  They were looking for fish along the riverbank and he fell.  The guards did nothing; they let him drown.  He was six."

These stories were moving and painful and made me even more angry at Ada for pressuring Stefan into something with such real danger behind it.  

The novel itself was pretty slow paced.  I didn't see any real excitement until the very end.  By this point however, I was not emotionally invested enough in the characters for it to have any real impact.  I think this novel had great potential but, for me, it simply was not realized.  


Teaching/Parental Notes:

Age: 15 and up
Gender: Both
Sex: Kissing
Violence: Gunplay, Knifeplay, Murder, Rape
Inappropriate Language: Bitch, Shit, Bastard
Substance Use/Abuse: