Jaime Reyes was an ordinary kid, until a piece of advanced alien tech shaped like a scarab attached itself to his spine, giving him superpowers, and the Justice League dragged him into space to fight an evil satellite. Now he’s back in El Paso, trying to put his life back together after being missing for a year – and trying to learn how to control the scarab in his back, which wants to turn him into a killing machine. Oh, and the scarab’s creators, the Reach, have arrived on Earth, and Jaime’s the only one who knows they’re here to take over. Can the new Blue Beetle stop an alien invasion, protect his family and his city, and survive a legacy that’s already killed both his predecessors?

In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit my bias here: Ted Kord, the Blue Beetle before Jaime and who Jaime spends much of the series fanboying, is not just one of my all-time favorite superheroes, but one of my all-time favorite fictional characters, full-stop. So is his best friend, Booster Gold, who makes a heroic appearance towards the end, and Guy Gardner, the Green Lantern who makes regular appearances in the book, is way up there. And Ted, Booster, and Guy all met in the pages of Justice League International, one of my very favorite comics of all time, and one which this series makes deliberate allusions to. And Supergirl, my absolute favorite superhero, makes a cameo, and I’m awfully fond of Dan Garrett, the first Blue Beetle, and…look, this comic has a lot of things I adore in it before you even get into the actual subject matter. I’m predisposed to love it.

That said, even if you’re not me, it’s pretty darn good.

(A side note: Ongoing superhero comics, particularly those by DC and Marvel, tend to presuppose a certain familiarity with up to 70-plus years of backstory. Blue Beetle is better than most in that regard, but there are certainly moments that are caught up in the history of the Blue Beetle legacy, or characters the previous Blue Beetle was friends with, or what was going on in the rest of the DC Universe at the time. If you pick up these books based on this review and are confused, feel free to email me; I can talk for hours on end about Blue Beetle. Just ask my long-suffering co-blogger, who after years of friendship with me can tell you where Ted Kord grew up (Chicago), his favorite book (The Brothers Karamazov), and what kind of underwear he wears (boxers).)

Blue Beetle is both hilarious and exciting, but the real strength of the book is the characters. This, of course, starts with Jaime, who is endlessly lovable. He’s certainly a teenage boy, awkward and impatient and goofy, but he’s such a good boy; he’s brave and smart and responsible and he doesn’t want to hurt anyone and he loves his parents and his friends and his little sister and he makes people better just by being around them. His dream is to become a dentist so that he can pay off his parents’ mortgage. And yet he never comes off like a too-perfect Gary Stu; he’s a believable, funny, kind of dorky, unbelievably sweet kid, in over his head but trying his best.

It’s very clear that this is in large part because of how he was raised. Jaime’s parents are fully realized characters in their own right, and wonderful. They expect obedience and respect from their son, but they also trust him – there’s a great scene where they lay down the ground rules for crimefighting at night (he doesn’t have to ask permission if there’s a natural disaster, but he does have to call). (Incidentally, the fact that Jaime’s family and friends all know his secret identity is extremely rare in comics, and very refreshing – rather than constantly lying to his loved ones, Jaime just trusts them, right away.) They believe in peace and the sacredness of human life, and talk to Jaime about forgiveness and turning the other cheek, but Bianca can back down a Green Lantern (one of the most powerful superheroes in the cosmos) like a naughty child, and Alberto will fearlessly face off against a mob boss who dares bring guns onto his property. The strength of Jaime’s upbringing is encapsulated in one wonderful panel: when a defeated supervillain asks why Jaime doesn’t just kill him, Jaime simply says “That’s not how my mother raised me.” Darn straight.

Milagro, Jaime’s much younger sister, is great, too – whiny and plucky and believable. One particularly sweet moment between her and Jaime led to me bursting into tears on the subway (which happened three times – between that and all the giggling, I must have looked like a lunatic). And Jaime’s best friends, Brenda and Paco, are pretty much everything I love wrapped up in a bow – Brenda is a smart, overachieving, determined and independent redhead who can flip a guy twice her size to the ground, and Paco is a big, lovably smug goofball who acts like an idiotic BMOC but is actually extremely smart and loyal. She fights aliens! He saves babies! Maybe they’re in love maybe? Shh, don’t tell them.

And the story! The series is brilliantly-plotted and paced; the second half of End Game had me on the edge of my seat. (It should be noted that the series continued after this for about ten more issues, but I haven’t read those yet.) The gradual development of the scarab is beautifully done, and the climatic battle, with all of Jaime’s allies coming together, is one of those moments that makes the reader want to stand up and cheer (the one crazy thing I actually did manage to avoid doing on the subway).

I also loved the art, which goes through quite a few artists but always has a modern, kinetic, urban feel that fits both Jaime’s character and his powers very well. It’s also refreshing that none of women are drawn in nonsensically skimpy outfits, or contorting their bodies into uncomfortable, “sexy” poses; though the teenage girls have a tendency to wear belly shirts, it comes off as oddly dated fashion more than creepy objectification.

Oh, and did I mention that the cast is almost entirely Hispanic and the setting within a Latino community is handled with taste, careful thought, and understanding? The characters never come off as stereotypes, the bilingual factor is handled well (one issue is almost entirely in Spanish, and it’s wonderful (don’t worry, there’s a translation in the back)), and – there’s that word again – it’s just refreshing to see a non-white hero leading a non-white cast in a story that’s about the character and not his race, since mainstream comics don’t often handle that well. (Jaime’s interracial relationship with his Asian – and incredibly competent and funny magical detective – girlfriend Traci is also well done and very cute.)

The only bad thing I can say about this series is that it was sadly canceled after 36 issues (the four books reviewed here cover the first 26 of those). (Don’t worry, Jaime’s still appearing in the sadly-dreadful Teen Titans and will be featured in the upcoming Generation Lost, and is a major player on the animated Batman: The Brave and the Bold, so the character, at least, isn’t going anywhere for a while.) Since I can’t fault the series for heartbreaking decisions made by the company, Blue Beetle gets the coveted five cupcakes, and a double thumbs-up from longtime Blue Beetle pal Booster Gold:

It doesn’t get much better than that, I tell you what.

Incarceron is a prisoner unlike any other: it is alive, and holds thousands of prisoners inside it, in a bleak, ever-changing, deadly landscape. Finn awoke inside with no memories, but is sure he came from somewhere else — even though most other prisoners don’t believe the Outside even exists, or that Escape is possible.

Claudia is the daughter of Incarceron’s warden, soon to be married to a prince. Caught up in a web of intrigue and not sure who to trust, she searches for her father’s key — and through it finds Finn. Desperate, she’s sure Finn is the only one who can help her, and she’s certainly the only one who can help him.

But they have only hours to get him out, before her wedding takes place, and all hope to free not just the prisoners, but the entire trapped world is gone…

Oh man, you guys. During the four days I was reading this book, I kept running into articles about how it’s going to be the Next Big Thing in YA, and had to flee spoilers. But I hope it is the Next Big Thing, because it’s pretty much awesome.

I’m crazy for worldbuilding, and Incarceron’s world is awesome. The world itself is one of the most interesting dystopias I’ve run across: several hundred years in the future, after some sort of horrific war (the “Years of Rage” — the book does have a minor tendency towards Significant Caps, but thankfully doesn’t take it too far), technology has been banned, but the wealthy still have it in semi-secret. The world itself is subject to Protocol (like I said about those caps…), which forces everyone into a sort of pre-industrial revolution existence, complete with corsets and capes and carriages (…alliteration is all mine, though). But the Protocol is oppressive, and the only people who find it entertaining or romantic are the people wealthy enough to use contraband technology — everyone else, for example, is illiterate, and likely to die from lack of vaccines. The combination of the Protocol and the sci-fi tech gave the whole thing a steampunky feel, which I really liked. (Hence it gets both the dystopian and steampunk labels up top.)

And then there’s the inside of Incarceron. Creepy, creepy, creepy. And again, a strange blend of sci-fi and steampunk — people born with mechanical limbs, metal forests, and the technology of Icarceron itself, contrasted with people living in semi-nomadic tribes, fighting with swords for survival, believing in magic and superstition. (Or is it only superstition …?)

The characters were great: Finn calls on a lot of standard fantasy/scifi tropes, but does so very well. I love that he isn’t just instantly a nice guy in a bad situation — he does bad things, and spends a lot of the book coming to terms with them and growing a conscience. I had a harder time getting a bead on Claudia, since she’s less archetypal, but she’s an active heroine (yay!), interesting and complex in her own right. And the supporting cast is equally complex: for example, the morally ambiguous guy is actually ambiguous. In many novels, that’s the guy you can tell either going to defect to the badguys, or get an obvious redemption in the end. Instead, I actually wasn’t able to tell which side he’d end up on in the end.

And then there were the twists at the end. I thought I called the book’s big twist — turned out it wasn’t the biggest, or even close. The last section is just reveal after reveal, and wow. I haven’t wanted a sequel this badly since I finished Catching Fire.

The one real quibble I had is minor at best. The first section has a lot of people expositioning awkwardly at one another — “Well, Claudia, let me explain this thing to you that you and I are both already aware of, but it bears repeating for no real reason except it’s a good way to explain to the reader.” It’s less than graceful, needless to say. But since I couldn’t put the book down, and every time I started to write this conclusion I realized I had another glowing thing to say, this book is a solid five cupcakes.

Nick has spent his life on the run from magicians and the demons they call up, with only his brother Alan and his crazy mother. But when a couple of kids come to him and Alan for help and Alan gets marked by a demon, Nick discovers that Alan has been lying to him for his whole life and nothing — not Alan or even Nick himself — is what it seems.

I’d heard a lot about The Demon’s Lexicon before finally reading it, and most of that was very good — and about Nick. Nick is the main thing makes the book so interesting: while he fits roughly into the “dark and broody boy” archetype, he’s an almost totally unsympathetic character. For all intents and purposes, he’s a sociopath. He has no empathy whatsoever, feels nothing, and can easily kill without a second thought. The only thing standing between him and complete blankness is Alan, who he loves desperately and will do anything to protect.

I think Breenan walks a very fine line with Nick. He’s not a character people should be able to identify with, but having a completely non-empathetic protagonist could also make it hard to enjoy the story, since it’s entirely told through Nick’s POV. But Nick manages to stay readable if (for me) a little frustrating. I spent most of the book a little bit bothered that, while he was very interesting, we didn’t know why he was like that — but that problem is cleared up by the end. I think overall the character works well and I did certainly end up caring about him, even though I’d never identify with him (which is generally my preference as a reader).

But I think it’s also one of the few problems with the book, even aside from my personal preferences. Nick’s POV is uncaring, so it isn’t like he asks other characters what they’re feeling or why, how they’re doing, how they got to be the way they are. Because he never gets into anyone else’s head — he just doesn’t care — the reader doesn’t get to, either. I felt somewhat cut off from the supporting cast throughout, which included characters I probably would have otherwise been able to empathize with. Mae and Jamie, the kids who go to Nick and Alan for help, are pretty interesting; we see glimpses into their lives before the book, we see some of their relationships and interests, but there’s never much of what they’re feeling — not much sense of how scared they are over the sudden introduction of demons to their lives, even when they find out, early on, that Jamie’s mark means he’s going to die. I think having a better sense of the peripheral characters might have evened out the narrative a bit, and made up for some of what Nick lacked as a protagonist. (I didn’t spoiler cut that because it’s like…chapter two.)

All that said, I don’t want to sound like I’m knocking the book or the way the Nick was written. It all came across as very deliberate, very well thought out and well executed by Brennan. It wasn’t my preference, which meant the book never quite clicked for me as a reader, but it was still a good read and I can definitely see why other people enjoyed it so much.

I really liked the book’s world building and approach to magic, magicians, and demons. For most of the book, I was feeling a 3.5 cupcake rating — and then I hit the climax, the last 40 pages or so. That was really, truly brilliantly executed. I thought I’d seen the big twist coming — I certainly saw part of it — but the final reveal? Wowzers. So at last second, this book got knocked up to four cupcakes, and after that climax, I will definitely pick up the sequel when it picks up.

By Frank Beddor [LibraryThing]

The day Princess Alyss Heart turns seven, exiled Queen Redd attacks and takes over Wonderland. Forced to flee for her life, Alyss falls through the Pool of Tears and lands in England in the 1850s. Abandoned and alone, she loses her magic. Meanwhile, Redd rules Wonderland with an iron fist, and only a small band of rebels resists her. Their only hope is that somehow, Alyss can be brought home to take back the country that is rightfully hers.

This is a frustrating book. It’s got plenty of good ideas in it, but it reads like Beddor just had a bunch of awesome Wonderland-related ideas and threw them all into the book, without actually picking anything to focus on. The book starts and stops repeatedly: first it’s about Alyss’ escape and what’s going to happen to a war-torn Wonderland. Alyss shows up in England, and the book seems sort of like a riff off of Oliver, but with a girl — who has magic! I would love to read that book. But Looking Glass Wars is not that book either, because then there’s a really lengthy segment about how Alyss (now Alice) grows up and is adopted and forces herself to forget Wonderland and marries a prince (no, really, a real prince), and then it starts again when she gets back to Wonderland and has to remember how to use magic to save everyone. That is too many stories. Any one of them (except the dull middle section) would have made for a fine novel, but all together, it meant the novel was scattered.

The worldbuilding was also shaky. Part of it is that Wonderland isn’t really designed to be a physical, mappable place; it’s more like a dream than a country. Elements like Redd’s evil casinos and the urban decay imagination-drug addicts don’t fit into the fantasy world, and way more time was spent explaining things like how the looking glass worked than was necessary. My very smart older sister just read it and pointed out that the book can’t even decide if the strange things in Wonderland are real or not; on the one hand, the White Rabbit has been reimagined as an albino human with enormous ears, whose name anagrams to “white rabbit,” and the Mad Hatter is actually a bodyguard named Hatter Madigan; but on the other hand, you have an actual walrus wandering around the palace.

Also, because it’s Wonderland… Look. It’s long-established around these parts that Jess is the blogger who likes whimsy where I tend to shy away from it, but this book needed some whimsy. It didn’t feel at all like the Wonderland that Carroll created. I know it was meant to be a darker, grittier story, but it retained none of the fun of the actual Alice novels.

But my biggest frustration was the end: it was too easy. Spoiler! show

All that said, the book as a whole improved as it went on; despite finding it very, very frustrating, I enjoyed actually reading it well enough. There were even elements I liked — particularly Homburg Molly, a pre-teen rebel who will eventually, presumably, take over the Hatter’s duties. Unfortunately, she wasn’t introduced until almost the end, but she’s the main reason I’m planning to read the sequel. So, even though I am planning to read the next book, this only pulls off two cupcakes.

Princess Raisa is the heir to the queendom of Fellsmarch, but all princess heirs seem to learn about is etiquette and flirting, when Raisa wants to know about politics, strategy, and the lives of her people. With war at the borders, unrest among the poor, and friction between the matriarchal clans and patriarchal wizards who make up the most powerful forces in Fellsmarch, she’d better learn fast. Meanwhile, ex-thief Han Alister just wants to put his past behind him and find his place in life, but when he comes into possession of an ancient, powerful amulet, he finds himself caught up in danger, court intrigue, and the part of his past even he doesn’t know.

I will say right off the bat that The Demon King is a terrible title. The demons in this book’s world don’t fit in at all with our popular conception of demons, and the character himself is a legend who doesn’t actually appear in the text (though it’s the first part of a trilogy, so who knows what the future holds?), so it’s a very misleading name that implies horror and the paranormal instead of high fantasy, and led me to put off reading my free copy until Tamora Pierce gave it a positive review on her blog. Since I always do what Tammy tells me to, I read it – and as usual, Tammy was right.

The great strength of The Demon King is its characters, and how wonderfully complex and well-rounded they are. Raisa is certainly your standard plucky princess, but she doesn’t want to go charging into battle just for the heck of it, or run off to marry for love. She is very practical about her role as the princess heir – her primary goal in the book is to learn more about the state of her queendom so that someday she can be a stronger queen than her rather vapid mother. Nor is she perfect – she’s woefully ignorant of the poverty in the city and the corruption in the Queen’s Guard, and she does tend to run headfirst into dangerous situations, as all good plucky protagonists do. She can be petulant and stubborn and very teenaged, and you like her even while you want to reach into the book and shake her.

Han, too, is likable yet flawed, and Amon, Raisa’s childhood BFF and bodyguard, is pretty much the best boy in the world, but what struck me the most was two supporting characters. Micah Bayar is a wizard who hates the clans; Reid Demonai is a clan warrior who hates the wizards. They are both wrong, and Micah (a more prominent character) certainly acts villainously – but their motivations are always understandable. They get a three-dimensional treatment that minor characters usually don’t, which is quite impressive.

I was also surprised – and pleased – by the fact that though Han and Raisa clearly have a romance in the works, they are both permitted to be interested in other people. Han has an ex-girlfriend from his thief days and a sort of nameless relationship with one of his good friends in the clans, while Raisa flirts with all the boys at court and particularly likes Micah and Amon. And why not? They’re sixteen! It’s rare to see a healthy, casual treatment of teenage sexuality like this, but I enjoyed it a lot.

My biggest problem with the book was that it was very, very slow, and very, very dense. Looking back over the plot, not a whole lot actually happens over the course of 500 pages, and it took me at least 150 of those pages to sort out the history of the country and all the warring factions. I still don’t have the neighboring countries straight. Chima has clearly put a lot of effort into worldbuilding (apparently this book exists in the same universe as her previous novels, but that doesn’t help me a lot, as I’ve never read anything else by her), and from what I can understand I like it, but I wish she’d simplify it a bit, or cut through some of the filler to give us more action (by which I mean things happening, not necessarily just fight scenes). Much of this book seems like it’s just setup for the rest of the trilogy.

On the whole, though, The Demon King earns a very solid four cupcakes, and I eagerly await the next installment.

Fire is a human monster with the power to captivate people, to slip inside their minds, to force them to believe what she wants — a power she fears, because of all of the evil her father used his power for. But when her country is in danger and the King himself pleads for help, she’s forced to confront her worst fear: herself. Is there a way for her to use her powers for good, or is she destined to be the monster everyone calls her?

I really wanted to love this novel. I absolutely adored Graceling, Cashore’s debut novel; Fire is set on another continent on the same world and ties in a little bit. But this book just didn’t quite do it for me. I think that’s because Fire, as a character, just didn’t do it for me, and there wasn’t much to the book except for Fire. Fire isn’t a bad character or anything, but she was too passive to carry a book of this length along. The main conflict of the book is internal — should she use her power or not? — and until she makes that choice she’s almost entirely reactive, swept along by what few events there are. It makes her come across as pretty wishy-washy, and while that was happening, there wasn’t enough sense of urgency in the external plot to keep me engaged.

The external plot wasn’t terribly engaging, either — political intrigue, and a lot of talk about a potential war, but as I said, lacking much sense of urgency. Then there was a kidnapping sequence, which at least was a major thing happening, but it felt pretty pasted on, awkwardly shoehorned in to give the book a tie to Graceling. It didn’t really need that — it was cool to get the Graceling villain’s backstory, but that section of the book really had nothing to do with anything else.

That said, there were some interesting things happening in the book. A lot of it seemed to be an exploration of female sexuality — Fire’s monster powers make her irresistible and desirable, but that’s a real problem more often than not. Other people (particularly men) harass her, desperately wanting her whether she wants them or not, and a lot of them simply feel entitled to possess her. (The interplay between Fire and her best friend/occasional lover Archer was really good in that regard — he did care about her, but also was jealous and protective of her in a way that was inappropriate, and she often let him because it was easier than fighting; but at the same time she resented it and wanted him to respect her, not just desire her. Great dynamic, one of the best parts of the book.) Plenty of people are in love with Fire, but there are also plenty who hate her — because she is an object of desire (very clearly an object in those cases) and they can’t have her. And the juxtaposition of Fire and her father was intriguing — he was also a monster, also always an object of desire, but as a man he was able to own and control his sexuality, and able to revel in it; as a woman, those same things caused Fire trouble, put her in danger, and made her afraid of her own sexuality.

Ultimately, I don’t think I agree on the book’s take on sexuality — as with everything else in the book, Fire is passive throughout, and never really hits a point of coming in to her own or having her own desires. She’s also obsessed with the idea of children, and how she will never have any, but questions her very existence if the point of her being alive and female isn’t to have babies. I’d have been a lot more frustrated by that, but the book wasn’t actually message-y about it; it read as more of an exploration of a lot of questions about sexuality and being a woman — as Fire’s opinions and conclusions, not as a real statement of How Things Are for the readers. (Though I would have liked to see an opposing position, personally, but it was a very limited third-person POV, so we never saw anyone but Fire’s perspective on anything.)

All that said, I did speed through the book; Cashore’s writing is enjoyable, and her world-building is fantastic. So the book slides in at three and a half cupcakes, a respectable grade, though I hope that her next book will pick up in action again.

All Vincent wants to do is invent toys, but it’s hard to do that with his family moving, his stepmother and stepsisters picking on him, and his inventions falling flat. When the chance to enter a toy inventing contest arises, though, Vincent knows that this may be just what he needs to make his dreams come true.

Nyaaaaargh.

I’m sorry, did you think I was leaving something out of that plot summary up there? Nope. I sat down to write this review, drew a complete blank on what to put as the summary, and resorted to checking the back cover blurb, which is just as vague and useless. I can’t really blame the blurb writer, though – the fault is with the book, which goes nowhere, ends nowhere, and accomplishes nothing along the way.

Basically we’ve got this Vincent kid, who lives in New York and wants to be a toy inventor. Then his mean old stepmother moves them to Minnesota. Then he hears about a world famous toy contest (What do you mean, a kid who cares about nothing but toy inventing should already know about a contest like this? Pshaw.) in New York. So he goes back to New York and enters the toy contest. That’s…pretty much it. There’s a subplot about a bunch of Nicola Tesla inventions that have just been found in a hotel, and how no one can figure out what one of them is, but a) the mystery was so poorly written that it took me hours after finishing the book to figure out why I had a vague sense of something being unfinished in the book, and b) it’s resolved so anticlimactically and off-the-cuff-ly that I, you know, had a vague sense of something being unfinished in the book. Also the villains aren’t introduced until halfway through the book, and don’t really do anything. Well plotted, sir.

Then there’s Vincent himself, who is incredibly unlikable. Aside from the fact that he’s thunderously boring, he clearly believes that the entire world should revolve around himself and his inventions. At one point he steals his six-year-old stepsister’s stuffed animals, cuts them up, and rearranges them into “Mixablez,” stuffed animals made up of two different kinds of animals. First off, it’s been done. Many times. (Don’t worry, I’ll get to the idiocy of the inventions in a minute.) Second, stealing your little sister’s toys and mutilating them? Kid, you aren’t an inventor. You’re Sid from Toy Story. You’re a monster. He also takes a fan from the hairdryer for an invention, causing it to almost electrocute his teenage stepsister the next morning. Not only does he not confess to or apologize for almost killing his sister, he feels absolutely no guilt about it. This turns into a “wacky” running gag where he takes parts from all of the household appliances and doesn’t tell anyone about it, thus inconveniencing his entire family, because, you know, he’s a genius.

And then we have the inventions. For starters, they all end with a Z: Mixablez, Windless Kitez, Pop Tunz. There is no explanation for this. Look, kids know that’s not cool. It’s what uncool grownups do to look cool. More importantly, though, there is nothing whimsical or fun about the toys. There’s one featured invention from Howard G. Whiz, the eccentric toymaker hosting the contest, who Kehoe clearly thinks is a new Willy Wonka (he’s not). It’s…a skateboard. WOO TASTE THE EXCITEMENT.

Vincent’s toys, meanwhile, are not only dull, they miss the entire point. He’s got a basketball that you can aim with a targeting system so you never miss, and a baseball bat that expands when you swing so that, again, you never miss. Way to completely ruin the game, dude. Then there’s his Windless Kitez (arrrrrgh), which are made of metal and work by running high voltage up them, so they don’t need wind and you can fly them inside. Not only are they, you know, lethal, but people don’t not fly kites inside because there’s no wind. They don’t fly kites inside because there’s no room. The point of a kite is to run outside, into the wind, to let it unspool from your hand and watch it dance on the breeze, a tiny point of color in a field of blue. It’s not to stand alone in your bedroom staring at something that doesn’t move. All of the inventions are like this. It’s like Vincent’s childhood is so depressing he wants to force the children of the world to buy his toys and be equally depressed.

I wracked my brain, but I couldn’t think of one positive thing about this book except that it’s kind of short. So The Unusual Mind of Vincent Shadow gets zero cupcakes, and is getting kicked out of book collection posthaste.

It’s 1914, and the world powers are on the brink of war: the German and Austria-Hungarian powers (Clankers) with their enormous machines, and the British, French, and Russian (Darwinist) powers with their engineered beasts. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand is the spark needed to light the powder keg, and war spreads quickly, throwing millions of lives into turmoil.

In Serbia, Alek Ferdinand, son of the assassinated archduke, must go into hiding when he learns that his allies were behind his parents’ murders, and his own people might be even more dangerous to him than the enemy. Meanwhile, in England, commoner Deryn Sharp has disguised herself as a boy and joined the British Air Services, where she serves aboard the whale airship Leviathan. But when the Leviathan is called on for a strange mission, things go badly very quickly, and not even neutral territory can protect Alek and Deryn when they meet…

Oh, man. If I were going to make a list of my very favorite tropes, “girl kicks butt while disguised as a boy” would be in the top five. Maybe even top three. Way up there, is what I’m saying. So, as you can imagine, I really, really enjoyed this book. But where Deryn’s chapters grabbed me immediately, Alek’s part of the story took me awhile to get into. But his picked up too, once he began to get a grasp on the situation in the world. Where Deryn spends most of the book active and having adventures — and how much do I love having an extremely active female protagonist? — Alek’s story is more about becoming active, learning what’s going on and what he can do about it. He has more of a character arch than Deryn does, and once it gets into full swing, he shines as a charming character in his own right.

Aside from the characters, the premise of the book is awesome. I’m not particularly into steampunk, but the idea of a genetically engineered floating war-whale? What about that does not sound awesome? But there’s also a certain amount of weakness in the premise, which is that the situation is complicated. Virtually all I remember about the lead-up to WWI from high school history is the assassination and that powder keg metaphor. The book deals a lot with shifting alliances between countries and betrayals within those alliances, and the balance of power, and etc. That stuff never became quite clear to me — it didn’t hinder the immediate plot of the book, but it did make it harder for me to wrap my head around some sections, especially Alek’s.

There was one other little quirk that irritated me, a minor over-reliance on period (or period-style) slang in Deryn’s chapters. I find that a little goes a long way, and there’s a very fine line between using slang phrases effectively for world- and character building, and overusing them to the point of it sounding like a nervous tic. While this was nowhere near as extreme as I found it in Westerfeld’s Uglies series, it occasionally did step across that line. But that was a very, very minor quibble.

Overall? ZOMG I NEED THE NEXT BOOK NOW. I will definitely buy it as soon as it comes out — in hardcover! — and thus this book is a solid four cupcakes.

When Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, receives a telepathic cry for help from a dear friend at the secret monastery of Vbngoom, he and his best friends Katie and Lily journey to the mountains of Delaware to offer their assistance. But Delaware is a strange and dangerous place, and they must make their way past dinosaurs, tourists, spies, mountain squid, riddles, and a creepy staring-contest team to reach Vbngoom – and there’s something even worse waiting for them at their destination.

A few years ago I read the first (and apparently only) two books in the M. T. Anderson’s Thrilling Tales series: Whales on Stilts and The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen. The first was just kind of a brisk, silly story; the second one, while equally silly, broke my heart in all the right places. The protagonist of both books is Lily Gefelty, a smart and somewhat shy but basically average tween. However, her two best friends are each the stars of their own (fictional) book series. Katie Mulligan is the lead in the Horrow Hollow series, a sort of combination of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Goosebumps and is constantly fighting werewolves and witches and demonic mold and such. Jasper Dash is the star of Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, a pulp science fiction series from the 1930s and 40s, and is constantly inventing (often unhelpful) gadgets and saying things like “Dash it all, chums.” Lily longs to be adventurous and exciting like her friends, but the Thrilling Tales series showcases her own heroic traits while brilliantly exploring what it means to be a beloved fictional character.

While I loved Jasper in the Thrilling Tales books, I was worried that Anderson was moving away from spotlighting Lily, but I needn’t have worried – the book is split fairly evenly between Lily’s worries about being inferior to her friends, Katie’s full throttle sass, and Jasper’s struggles to live in a modern world while upholding justice and fair play. It’s hilarious and exciting and, yes, I got a bit misty at the end. Curse you, Anderson!

Now, these books aren’t for everyone. I can tell you right off the bat that my co-blogger Becky probably wouldn’t enjoy the aggressively whimsical tone of the prose; my roommate read the first two and didn’t enjoy the silliness (although she loved Anderson’s completely different Feed and Octavian Nothing); my friend Mackenzie probably wouldn’t like all the metatextual navel-gazing. But I love silliness and meta, and I’m a big fan of the whimsical tone when it’s done well. If you enjoy the flippancy of A Series of Unfortunate Events, you’ll probably enjoy Jasper Dash.

There’s honestly not much to say about this book beyond praise. Lily and Katie are both wonderfully strong in their own ways, and Katie’s romantic tribulations were handled very touchingly and age-appropriately. Jasper is hilarious and endearing, and the friendship between the main three is rock-solid, moving, and blessedly free of any whiff of romance. The plot, despite the silliness, was engaging, and the excitement exciting, and the subtle digs at racist tourists were well done.

Obviously, Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware gets five cupcakes. More, please, Mr. Anderson?

After the Boov aliens kidnap Gratuity “Tip” Tucci’s mom (and oh yeah, invade and take over Earth, renaming it Smekland), things get… Weird. Tip decides to travel on her own to the human reservation in Florida, rather than taking the alien transport, and on her way she meets a Boov named J.Lo who might not be all bad, and she discovers her mom might still be alive somewhere. But nothing is what it seems, the humans aren’t in Florida after all, another alien race is threatening humans and Boov alike, and Tip, J.Lo, and Tip’s cat Pig might be the only hope for humanity.

Wow. I didn’t get Tip’s nickname until I just typed it above. Clearly, I am super-smrt.

This book just treads the line between message-built-into-story (which I love!) and story-built-around-a-message (which tends to bother me), but I think it stays pretty well in “fun story that makes you think” territory. Essentially, what happens with the alien invasion and human relocation parallels white folks colonizing the “New World” and the genocide against American Indians. (There isn’t exactly a genocide against humans, but they are brutally taken over, have all of their rights curtailed, are referred to as savages and barbarians [and the invaders all think they're saving humans from themselves by civilizing them], and are sent to live on small reserves with few resources, while the Boov keep changing the terms of the deals they make with humans, or outright going back on them, so yeah, it’s pretty clear what’s happening.) There are a few moments that were… Uh, not subtle about the message; but there were a lot of small moments that were very powerful.

Clearly, the book dealt with racism in a head-on way. It’s demonstrated a few times with the way a group of people in Roswell deal with an American Indian character — they write him off as a crazy drunk and, as far as they know (or care), his name is Chief Crazy Legs. Tip actually stops to talk to him, and discovers a) his name is Frank; and b) he’s probably the smartest person in the book. And Tip herself is biracial; in one moment that stuck with me, another character said something along the lines of, “Your mother isn’t what I expected.” To which Tip, smart and wry, basically answers, “You mean white?”

The biggest issue with this book was the pacing. It was slow and meandering — there were a lot of elements that could have been condensed or cut. They drive to Florida, looking for humans, and that’s the first half of the book; then the second alien species appears; they get chased to Arizona, still looking for humans, get sidetracked in Roswell for awhile, and the climax doesn’t even start until you’re 375 pages in. I feel like a lot of those elements could have been combined or trimmed, because by the end, even though I was still enjoying the book, I also was wondering when the heck it was going to be over already. That’s really not what you want, especially in a book that’s on the younger side of the YA spectrum.

The book took awhile to settle into itself, too. In the first quarter or so, a lot of the humor is of the forced, look-how-wacky-I-am! variety (case in point, J.Lo the alien’s name). It eventually calms down into being actually funny — my favorite bit was J.Lo’s “Pictorial History of the Boovish Race With Pictures” — but it took awhile for me to get into it. I was also put off by the parodies of brand names. I wouldn’t have noticed, except that Happy Mouse Kingdom (guess what that was) was a major plot point, so there were constant references to the Happy Mouse character, which meant that instead of being a funny gag, it was way too much.*

The book would probably be a three-and-a-half cupcake affair if it didn’t deal so well with race issues; I enjoyed it, but don’t have much of an urge to seek out Adam Rex’s other books. But because it did manage to deal with issues that I consider important (while remaining funny, no less!), it gets knocked up to four cupcakes.

Bonus: When I was googling to find the cover image, I ran across this video. If it makes you giggle, you would definitely enjoy the book.

* I was going to say I get this, if it was due to copyright reasons and because a section of the book takes place there, but then I noticed the book is published by Disney-Hyperion, so… Bzuh?