Extras

By Scott Westerfeld. Sequel to the Uglies trilogy. (Westerfeld writes in his dedication: "To everyone who wrote to me to reveal the secret definition of the word 'trilogy.'")

Aya, a 15-year-old "kicker" (basically a blogger) living in a city with a reputation-based economy, searches for the story that will bring up her face rank—a measure of status that doubles as purchasing power and will save her from babysitting and schoolwork. She stumbles onto a Special Circumstance when she follows a lead regarding a secretive group, the Sly Girls, who try to keep their reputations low key despite the dangerous games they play.

I finished this book in a single afternoon, but I don't know if I would have enjoyed this as much if I hadn't already known about Aya's world from reading the trilogy. It seemed faster paced than some of Westerfeld's other books, but that could be because I read it faster. It did seem a little lightweight for being more than 400 pages long. One particular action was described in almost the same words at least three separate times, a bit repetitious even if the action in question is exciting.

Religion plays a tiny role in the world, which I am starting to notice is a common theme in Westerfeld's books: not that I expect a book to center around it, but it seems to barely exist in his worlds.

In the end, this was an exciting story, but somewhat disappointing because it wrapped up a bit neatly (and perhaps too easily) and didn't leave much to think about afterwards.

Some anthologies

Not a review, since I mostly lack the patience to go through anthologies story by story, but I thought I'd mention a few.

I've been reading some of the stories in Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow's latest anthology, The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales, but while some of them are pretty good, I think their anthology The Faery Reel is still the one I enjoyed the most. (They also did The Green Man and some others that I haven't read.)

I've also been reading Gene Wolfe's Starwater Strains and Strange Travelers. I enjoyed many of the stories in Starwater Strains and almost all of them made at least some sense ("The Game in the Pope's Head" was the exception, but perhaps I just didn't want to understand it since Wolfe introduced it as a Jack the Ripper story). "Viewpoint" stands out as the first story and as an original, disturbing take on "reality TV"; "Empires of Foliage and Flower" is a fable nominally set on Wolfe's Urth, but which really could be anywhere; "Golden City Far" also stands out, as the first and last stories in such collections tend to do. In Strange Travelers, "The Haunted Boardinghouse" caught my attention, as well as the nifty idea of a traffic jam that has lasted for years, long enough for its occupants to begin developing their own unique freeway culture, which appears in the first and last stories in this collection.

Last night I started reading Vera Nazarian's collection Salt of the Air. The writing is pretty good, although I'm not sure what to make of the cover art. $29.95 also seems awfully expensive for such a small book (I checked it out of the library); sure, it's probably a small press, but for that price you would think they could have done a better job proofreading. (For example, the running titles at the top of the page are not always right, and there is a glaring typo in Gene Wolfe's three-page introduction.)

I can't remember what the "other things" I wanted to put in this post were (I knew last night, but alas...), so I'll stop here.