Splintered - AG Howard (4 Stars)

This stunning debut captures the grotesque madness of a mystical under-land, as well as a girl’s pangs of first love and independence. Alyssa Gardner hears the whispers of bugs and flowers—precisely the affliction that landed her mother in a mental hospital years before. This family curse stretches back to her ancestor Alice Liddell, the real-life inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Alyssa might be crazy, but she manages to keep it together. For now.

When her mother’s mental health takes a turn for the worse, Alyssa learns that what she thought was fiction is based in terrifying reality. The real Wonderland is a place far darker and more twisted than Lewis Carroll ever let on. There, Alyssa must pass a series of tests, including draining an ocean of Alice’s tears, waking the slumbering tea party, and subduing a vicious bandersnatch, to fix Alice’s mistakes and save her family.

She must also decide whom to trust: Jeb, her gorgeous best friend and secret crush, or the sexy but suspicious Morpheus, her guide through Wonderland, who may have dark motives of his own.

Now, LA reads a lot of different things and sometimes refers to herself in the third person because she's crazy. But I don’t just read different things. I also write different things, and one of the things I love to both read and write about is Alice in Wonderland. It takes a lot to write a really good Wonderland story. Tim Burton did it with his film from 2010, and AG Howard has done it now with her fantabulous foray into the absolutely brilliant and bizarre Splintered.

Just so we're clear, this review contains SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERS
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There. That should do it.

Now, this woman is the queen of creepy, a sorceress of the surreal, a witch of wordsmithing, a magician of madness, a wizard of Wonderland really cool. She took a book that actually isn't that great on its own (c'mon, Alice in Wonderland spawns abso-fantastic sequels and adaptations, but the source material's pretty satirical and very classic-lit, which I like in some instances, but not this one) and she managed to make something freaky and bizarre and utterly amazing out of it! I love Splintered, and I am going to tell you why!

Follow me down the rabbit hole, everybody, if you please…

First of all, there's Alyssa Gardner. I cried like a little baby was a bit put-out at first when I saw the MC' name was Alyssa because that's the name of my main character in my Alice in Wonderland urban fantasy faerie quartet, The Twilight Chessboard, but within the first five pages of Splintered I got over it real quick because boy, does AG Howard know how to start the creep off with a bang! I discovered right away that her Alyssa and mine are two completely different people. And besides, how many variations of "Alice" are there in the world, exactly? Not too many…

Alyssa Gardner is the girl I totally would've been friends with in high school — if she would've been willing to be friends with me. She's smart, she's spunky, and she can do some pretty wicked things on a skateboard. On top of that, she makes some of the most beautiful mosaics I've ever seen with my mind's eye (we'll touch on that later…). But on top of Alyssa's personality, she's the punky Alice I've always wanted to see. Tim Burton chose a certain wardrobe style for his Alice in the 2010 film, to give her more of a punkette feel, but AG Howard took Alice and punk, threw them both in one of those drink-mixer thingies (I don't know what they're called, I don't drink, but bartenders use them), and shook that thing up like a tornado. When she dumped it out, we got Alice 2.0 — and she is ready to kick some Wonderland butt.

Her backstory is incredible, too. Turns out she's a descendant of Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired Lewis Carroll's bizarre-o children's books. And apparently all the women in her family are bat-crap crazy insane. They hear flowers and bugs talking when they hit puberty. Alyssa's mom, Alison, is currently locked up in a nuthouse almost the entire book, eating junk out of teacups. Alyssa can hear them talking, too, but she keeps that a secret because she does not want to end up in a straitjacket. Who would?

Quick side note regarding Alyssa's mosaics and the fact that she can hear bugs talking: she makes her art out of insects (obviously dead ones). At first, that totally creeped me out and made me think this girl might be a bit of a psycho kind of squicked me out a bit, but once she described all the cool things she made, I was like, "Oh, never mind. I'm on board the we're all mad here, death to buggies, let's kill some more! pesticide bandwagon! These are pretty!" And her justification for using insects in her art is pretty understandable ("I've been collecting bugs since I was ten; it's the only way to stop their whispers…Once they get chatty, they're fair game.") and is explained on page one, so I'm okay with it.

Alyssa has two guys in her life who basically equate to two Wonderland characters: Jeb the Heroic but Kind of a Pansy Skater Boy (we'll get to that later) and Morpheus the Hot but Kinda Jerky Magical British Guy — aka, the Silver Knight and the Mad Hatter.

Jeb has been Alyssa's friend since they were kids and she is hopelessly, madly in love with him and wants to have his babies has a biiig crush on him. Unfortunately, Jeb the Complete and Total Pansy Moron Skater Boy doesn't seem to realize Alyssa has a thing for him (though that is not why he's a moron) and is currently dating the girl whose goal in life is to make Alyssa's life suck (that is why he's a moron).

The reason he's the Heroic  but Kind of a Pansy Skater Boy is because he nearly sacrifices his life to save Alyssa. The only reason his life doesn't get sacrificed is because he gets rescued, but he totally would've done it for her. Which annoys me because I don't want to like him, because of how he handles the whole evil-girlfriend bit, gah. But I do, because when Alyssa really needs him, he's always there, and he always puts her safety first, and he's totally in love with her. The idiot.

Why, AG Howard? Why must you make Jeb so flawed and annoying and likeable? Never mind, I already know. It's good writing…but so frustrating for us readers, sigh.

But I still don't approve of how he thinks it's okay for him to try and take control of Alyssa's life just because she's young. I get that he's trying to look out for her, and he's not abusive about it (it's big things, like when she wants to stay in Wonderland and help Morpheus and Jeb's like, "You must  be on drugs. That is so  not happening. We're going home. You're not thinking straight. This guy's doing some kind of mojo on you."), but it still bothers me and makes Jeb seriously not the guy Alyssa should get with. At least Morpheus respects her intelligence. Yeah, she might make mistakes, but Jeb's not infallible and he really needs to not act like it. And he needs to not get ticked off about petty things (like Alyssa taking money from Taelor, her enemy, the witchy girlfriend who's made Alyssa's life into a niche of Hades for years and years on purpose, because Alyssa needed it to save her mom's life and couldn’t get it any other way) when he's gone and done crappy things to Alyssa, too. So meh on Jeb.

Morpheus has also been friends with Alyssa since she was a kid…but she doesn’t remember him. And he is madly in love with Alyssa and wants her to have his babies has a biiig crush on her. His theme song really should be "White Rabbit" (originally by Jefferson Airplane, but the version that reminds me of Morpheus is the version done by the Crüxshadows. “…a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call. He called Alice when she was just small…"). Morpheus is so cool, and not just because he's got this smokin' hot cockney accent and muscles and he's so smexy, why is he smexy, why, it makes no sense, he's not even human, why does this always happen to me? handsome. I've read and seen several different versions of Alice in Wonderland over the years and this is the first one I've seen where someone smushed the Mad Hatter and the Caterpillar into one person (and then had the Caterpillar grow up into a butterfly…or in this case, a moth). That right there is incredibly creative. So kudos to AG Howard just for that.

Although I have to wonder why the Caterpillar is always blue? In the Tim Burton movie, in this book (well, Morpheus is sort of blue; he has blue hair), in the animated Disney film, in The Looking Glass Wars. Why is he always blue?

Morpheus has all the answers to Alyssa's questions — why can she hear flowers and bugs talking? What is the deal with this so-called Liddell curse that makes the women in her family able to hear them? Is Wonderland real? And why does Alyssa have the same mark — a mark she always thought was a birthmark — that Morpheus has?

(Footnote: No, they're not related. Ew! He's her love interest, for crying out loud. That sort of thing only works in seriously angsty books like Flowers in the Attic)

Morpheus is willing to give Alyssa the answers she seeks on one condition: she has to come to Wonderland and endure a series of mini-adventures to right the wrongs Alice Liddell apparently did to Wonderland and the local populace, called netherlings. If she manages to fix all the things Alice messed up in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (like crying that giant pool of tears, which totally screwed up the netherling ecosystem), Morpheus will help Alyssa break the curse on her family and save her mom from the horrible things that they're going to do to her in the asylum. But there's more to what Morpheus wants than he's letting on (duh, of course there is) and Alyssa has to find out what it is before she and Jeb end up royally screwed.

AG Howard should seriously  be congratulated on what she's done with this book. She's taken the creatures we all know from the classic novels Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and turned them into absolutely freaky new things. The walrus from the Carroll poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" (“The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things; of shoes and ships and ceiling wax; of cabbages and kings. Of why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.") has been turned into something completely bizarre with squishy tentacles and octopus suckers and waaay too much blubber and seriously sadistic tendencies and a serious need to go on a diet different. The Bandersnatch is still as scary as ever, but I didn’t even recognize the Jabberwock (which is a good thing; she is ridiculously creative, man!) or the White Rabbit.

I couldn’t call the plot at all. That is actually pretty hard, and most of the books I review are the ones I can say that about. I hate it when I can call the plot. But I couldn't call anything in this book at all! It kept me guessing right to the second-to-last page (since the last page had like, 2 paragraphs on it — whoopee…).

All in all, this book is a 4.75/5 stars. Only one thing kept it from being a full 5 stars — Jeb and the fact that he's not just Heroic, but a Heroic Pansy. And she's with him at the end…well, sort of. She wants to be with him instead of with Morpheus, and I'm like, "I get that he's sneaky and a bit manipulative, but he seriously pulled through for you in the end every time, Alyssa, seriously! He totally had your back the entire time! Whereas Jeb has your back on the big things but not in the small things like with the stupid girlfriend! GAH!!! Morpheus is better!"

Meh. She's running away from the truth. She'll get over it eventually. Morpheus has her back. Jeb probably doesn't — not every time. Sure, when it's super important, but boyfriends should have your back every time. So meh.

Anyway, AG Howard, my verdict is clear — your book is awesome, I can't wait to read Unhinged, and please let her get with Morpheus because I'm sooo ticked about the whole way Jeb handles the girlfriend-thing. Boo. But I adore you anyway! So much love pouring out of me right now  that I can't EVEN  because this book is the most amazing thing I've ever read in my entire literary existence except for Nevermore  and Dearly, Departed!  This is going on my I LOVE YOU SO MUCH shelf right next to those two books because it's so incredibly fantastic, it's so fantastic I'm gonna die ohmigawd!

Best,

LA Knight

PS — I'm currently reading this book to my roommate, and we had to stop while she was making dinner because she got so wrapped up in it that she forgot to flip the pancakes and we ended up with a few pieces of flat charcoal.

PPS — I've finished book two, Unhinged. All I can say, AG Howard, you are so cruel to me! Whyyyyyyyy?!?!

Quarantine #1: The Loners by Lex Thomas (4.5 Stars)

 

It was just another ordinary day at McKinley High—until a massive explosion devastated the school. When loner David Thorpe tried to help his English teacher to safety, the teacher convulsed and died right in front of him. And that was just the beginning.

A year later, McKinley has descended into chaos. All the students are infected with a virus that makes them deadly to adults. The school is under military quarantine. The teachers are gone. Violent gangs have formed based on high school social cliques. Without a gang, you’re as good as dead. And David has no gang. It’s just him and his little brother, Will, against the whole school.

In this frighteningly dark and captivating novel, Lex Thomas locks readers inside a school where kids don’t fight to be popular, they fight to stay alive.

Welcome back, peoples! It's a new week of a new month of a new year! And I've got lots of book reviews for you all! Whoo-hoo!

Now, I actually read this book last year around November I think, but I was so busy working on I Hear the Bones Singing and Garnet and Darkness There, and Nothing... that I didn't have time to sit down and write a review for it. I love this book sooo much! Unfortunately, the sequel was a big disappointment and I'm a little annoyed at the writing team of Lex Thomas, but we'll get to that. The first book was phenomenal! What book am I talking about?

Quarantine #1: The Loners, by Lex Thomas! Now Lex Thomas is actually a pair of guys writing together, which is cool in and of itself. You don't see too many dudes writing for the young adult market. I can think of maybe ten or twenty, tops, and most of them are either working with a female author or have been writing for a looong time, like RL Stine or Bruce Coville. So it's nice to see a new male YA author out there, much less two of them.

Basic overview of the awesomeness of this book:

— realistic and (mostly) likeable male leads, which I don't see as often as I'd like unless they're paired up with a girl

* not that those are bad, but I'd like to see male leads stand alone the way a lot of female leads do; rare examples of this are SJ Kincaid's Insignia, Ender's Game, Harry Potter, and  The Vicious Deep by Zoraida Cordova

— a very complex and pretty scary (but also believable and easy-to-follow) world

— well-fleshed out, believable secondary and even tertiary characters

— well-executed but realistic violence

— and a lack of copious, gratuitous anything.

Well done, Lex Thomas, on your debut novel!

So this book has one of the scariest concepts that I, as a teenager, probably ever considered in my live ever—being stuck at school for days and days, weeks, even months, with no adult supervision whatsoever!

In The Loners, a mutating super-virus infected a group of kids in this relatively small town, and when the government tried to help treat it, the virus mutated even faster, mutated even worse, and started killing people literally in mere minutes. Even worse? A kid got away and infected the entire town, and the townspeople managed to infect the country (and probably the world, given how people travel these days). So basically the world's populace is under fire from this incurable virus that kills everyone who catches it…except…

There's one exception: teenagers. Kids who've hit puberty but haven't finished with the majority of it yet carried the virus. It didn't affect them, except to make their hair fall out upon first contracting it. Now, technically anyone under twenty or twenty-one should have been safe, since your body doesn’t really stop changing until about then, but it's such a tiny piece of "wait a minute" that I didn’t even care when I realized that. But that's also how the virus managed to spread, too.

When the virus hits, the people immediately affected in-text (aka onscreen; what we, the audience, are seeing) are the staff and students of McKinley High School. The government immediately puts them on lockdown—or as immediately as possible—to prevent them from spreading the virus, but this is after all of their teachers die.

So we've got about a thousand, fifteen-hundred teenagers in a dangerous situation, no contact from their families, a bunch of dead adults, and the only people who can help them are the government/military guys in charge of their quarantine, who warn them that if they try to escape, they will be immediately shot. Way to inspire confidence, huh? But sadly necessary.

So what does everyone do? During the first few weeks, when kids are getting attacked and going crazy and panicking and whatnot, they form tribes based on their different cliques:

— Varsity: headed by Sam, the varsity quarterback, this tribe comprises every jock in the school, football or basketball or soccer or lacrosse. Their HQ is in the gym, which they share with the Pretty Ones. Every member of Varsity dyes his hair yellow*.

* Quick side-note: a side-effect of contracting the virus for a teen is that their hair falls out, and when it grows back, it grows in white. Not platinum blond, but white, like an old person's, no matter your race.

— Pretty Ones: their leader is Hilary, captain of the varsity cheer squad. All the prettiest and most popular girls are part of this group, and they're protected by Varsity. In return, Pretty Ones are expected to "play nice" with Varsity guys. Anyone who upsets Hilary, Sam, or a member of Varsity can be kicked out.

Pretty Ones also have yellow hair. They make cosmetics and wigs (their suppliers are very "black market," as it were) for the weekly Market held in the main hall of the school.

One of the three main (but really mostly-secondary as of book one) characters, Lucy, is a former Pretty One who refused to let a drunken Varsity boy rape her.

— Nerds: all the smart kids, their headquarters are in the library. People go to the Nerds when they need help with electrical equipment like cell phones or iPods, for essentials like batteries, for books, or for medical attention.

— Geeks: the kids in band, drama, or other fine arts classes. You'd think they'd have no skills of value, but a lot of them can make or mend clothing, make cosmetics, make jewelry, things like that. On top of that, the Geeks give a performance every week in the auditorium, which is considered a neutral zone. When your life sucks, escapism is sometimes the only way to stay sane.

— Skaters: the Skaters are exactly what their name implies. However, they're also expert builders who can make things from beds to drawers to weapons, using a lot of the debris from their wrecked school (like desks). The Skaters also teach themselves self-defense and battle tactics using skateboarding maneuvers and surprisingly effective teamwork.

— Sluts: contrary to their name, the Sluts are not the skanks of the school—they're the Amazon warrior women. Instead of skimpy outfits, they wear homemade armor. Their leader, Violent (formerly known as Violet), often wears stripped and duct-taped shoulder-pads spiked with pencils, as an example.

Other than Varsity and the Pretty Ones, we know the most about the Sluts, but only as of book two. Slut Initiation is known as Naked Week, when a girl is stripped of her clothes (in the safety of Slut HQ, the cafeteria, where no one is allowed in—so no one but other girls ever sees the naked girl) and ordered around and bullied by the other girls until she fights back. The minute she shows even a little defiance, initiation ends and she becomes a member of the tribe.

At first I didn’t like this much, but in book two you see Naked Week both from the point of view of an initiate and the POV of the other Sluts. I was surprised to learn that all the girls watching the initiate were saying things like, "Come on. You can do it. You're strong. You can do it. Fight back." The initiate didn’t hear anything, but it impressed me. And the moment an initiate defies the group, all the girls start cheering and hugging her.

Only one demographic can enter the Sluts without going through Naked Week: pregnant girls. The Sluts offer them immediate and thorough protection from the rest of the school, another thing I like.

Sluts are the fighters at McKinley High, and they trade their skills as weapons-makers, fighters, and nurses at the weekly school Market, as well as essential items delivered during the government-ordered supply-drops like sanitary napkins, new clothes, and medical supplies. All Sluts dye their hair bright red with things like markers and colored printer cartridges.

— Freaks: the name pretty much says it all. It's never really clarified as to what makes a Freak a Freak, except their blue hair (dyed using those blue cleaner-cake things in toilets, ewww!) but they're the ones to go to if you want something hard to get because apparently they can get anything. However, you're most likely to run into crazy kids or drug addicts in this tribe.

— Scraps: the lowest of the low, these outsiders belong to no tribe, and exist on the fringes of the school's current society. While there are more of these than any one other group, they're "scattered, divided, leaderless" (to quote Lord Elrond).

Lex Thomas accurately and realistically portrays the lives of two brothers, senior David and freshman Will (who has epilepsy and doesn't have inexhaustible medication, as if things couldn’t get any worse) trapped in McKinley the day after David ticked off and alienated the entire varsity football team by attacking Sam, the quarterback. He had a good reason—Sam, who claimed to be his best friend, was screwing around with David's girlfriend, Hilary, captain of the cheerleading squad, behind David's back—but the timing is obviously terrible.

David and Will survive by camping out in an abandoned elevator (the school's huge, by the way; they have an underground pool for the swim-team, for crying out loud!) and doing something necessary but kind of sucky—David is a laundryman. He cleans clothes for anyone who'll pay him using a variety of tools he made himself in an abandoned bathroom (I'm a wimp, I know, but ewww! I can't even…).

Will, the ungrateful wretch, refuses to learn how to do it, too, even though once David hits about eighteen, he'll be processed by the military and leave the school and Will is going to be on his own. And cruel as it is, none of the other tribes are going to want an epileptic kid in with them, because his seizures unfortunately make him a liability during the often violent supply-drops. However, the thing I love about Will is that although he makes a lot of dumb decisions and can be a real jerk sometimes, he never does anything unforgiveable, never betrays anyone, and never abandons David. Even though he needs an attitude adjustment, he always stands by the people most important to him. And the one time he isn't there to help David, he makes up for it by being there whenever David needs him after that.

I don’t really need to go into the main plot here, like I do with most books, because I don't have any problems with it. The things that happen are realistic and make sense. I don't want to deck any of the characters. Their characterization is both very real and in-keeping with what we see of them at all times; they never do things out of character. The world-building is phenomenal. I adore this book. If it wasn’t for book two, I'd want to own it. And sneaky, sneaky Lex Thomas, The Loners ends on a flipping cliffhanger! Grrr…all my soul was within me burning when I got the end of The Loners. I hope you're happy, Lex Thomas!

A few things I absolutely LOVED about this book:

— Will and David are very much boys, and they behave accordingly. When they get in this huge, huge, huge fight over a girl, they go their own ways for a couple of days (still with each other, but not really speaking or anything) until at one point Will shows up, David tries to apologize, Will punches him in the face just once, and says, "I accept your apology, and I don't want to talk about it again." As someone with a few guy-friends, I've seen them do that. Totally realistic. Not to mention kind of funny.

— The reason for the name of the book: The Loners are a tribe that comes together because of David. When Sam goes publically gunning for David, a lot of the Scraps decide they've had it, and they join up with David, who renames them the Loners (since there are still Scraps out there). With David's leadership, the Loners become the largest tribe in all of McKinley High. And even though bad things still happen to them (heck, to everyone stuck there), things get better after that.

— There's funny stuff! One of the things that bothers me about a lot of books that have come out recently is that there is no levity in them at all! I don't understand this, because you have to have goodness and light in your life in some places or you just lose your ever-loving mind. I'm tired of oppressive, unrelenting anguish and death and pain. So congrats, Lex Thomas, you succeeded in balancing realistic darkness with realistic humor. Especially considering this is your first novel, well done, gents!

All in all, I give Quarantine 1: The Loners 4.75 stars out of 5. It would be a full 5, but the whole passing-out-of-puberty thing is a bit unrealistic, since you don't stop growing and changing until you're about twenty.

I understand why it was needed, because it wouldn’t make sense for David to be at school at twenty, really, unless he flunked or something, and they needed to give him a reason to "graduate" and lose his immunity when he did (not to mention, his love interest is like, fourteen; at eighteen, I can handle that. At twenty? It would take waaay too long setting up all the circumstances I'd require to be okay with that, and that wouldn’t work unless it was the point of the book, which it's not).

So I understand why they did it that way, but they lost a quarter of a star.

I really like this book, and I would totally buy it and would totally recommend it to everybody…except for the sequel. I was very disappointed with the sequel, as we will see in my review at a later date. But for a debut novel especially, it's fantastic. The writing duo that make up Lex Thomas deserve to be commended!

Stay tuned for more reviews,

LA Knight