The Zen Leaf

This book is part 1 of a trilogy about a girl who wakes up with amnesia and who struggles to remember her past while also dealing with bizarre physical abilities and haunting hallucinations that might just be real.

I’m not sure what I think of this book yet. It ends in such a way that it feels like part 1 of a book, rather than part 1 of a trilogy. No closure, no answers. I will need to read the next books for it to fully make sense.

It was an easy read though, took me only a couple hours yesterday. Though this classifies as a YA book, the writing seemed much younger, more middle grade.

I’d hate to give a like/dislike analysis right now, because I simply don’t know enough yet. Is the girl schizophrenic and completely delusional? Does she really have the ability to destroy things she’s not touching? Are the people around her real or figments of her imagination? And who was she prior to waking up with amnesia? All questions that have no answers by the end of the first book, and some interesting implications on either side of the crazy/supernatural argument. So we’ll see. I’ll have to read the other two.

(PS – I love the cover art.)

This is a story about an odd mouse who falls in love with a princess and risks everything to save her from an odd serving girl and an odd rat. That’s probably the simplest way I can wrap up the plot.

This one didn’t appeal to me. I think it was just too young for me, despite the fact that I love children’s and YA lit. What particularly irked me was that the narrator spoke to the reader the whole time, asking them if they knew the definitions of certain words, asking them questions, etc. Maybe if I was younger, this wouldn’t have bothered me, but because I’m 29, I didn’t appreciate being addressed like I was 5. I understand that it’s a children’s book, but it got on my nerves. It got on my nerves so much, in fact, that I really paid little attention to the story itself.

I will say that I think this is going to make a great movie. The movie is supposed to come out next month, and I think it will be far superior to the book. It’s not often that I say that, but I do think this story will lend itself to film quite well. I think screenwriters have the opportunity to make something much bigger and better out of it.

There’s really not much more for me to say. I recommend the book for children.

Gathering Blue is the companion novel to The Giver and second in Lois Lowry’s trilogy. (The third book is Messenger, which I plan to read in 2009.) I’m not actually sure why this is considered a companion novel beyond the fact that the two are dystopian and they may or may not link together in the third book. Other than that, these two have no similarities.

In this dystopian (or more accurately post-apocalyptic) novel, society consists of people with very primitive knowledge. They are poor and live in hut-like dwellings, without running water for most of them, electricity, or pretty much technology of any kind. They are an almost stereotypical hunter/gatherer society, except not nomadic. The women are inferior to men (they aren’t allowed to read, for example), the men fight for hunting rights, and the children are beaten by their parents. The weak – deformed, injured, etc – are left for dead in a nearby field. One mother, however, fights for her child. Kira is born fatherless and with a twisted leg. By the rules of society, she should be left for dead, but her mother and grandfather convince the Council to let her stay. She becomes a weaver’s helper because of her strong hands, and later, when her mother dies, she is taken under the Council’s wing in order to thread for the Singer’s robe. The Singer holds all of the world’s history, and once a year, at a ceremony called The Gathering, the entire village listens to him recount the historical song, which he remembers by use of a detailed carved staff and an embroidered robe.

As usually happens in dystopian novels, layers are peeled away as the story goes along until the dark undersides become apparent to the reader. While this book has less of that perfect/imperfect feel (since it’s more post-apocalyptic than dystopian), it does still have a certain amount of dystopian elements, and by the end, the reader is left pretty creeped out. It was well done. Lois Lowry, as usual, proves that she’s a brilliant writer.

Only two parts of the book irritated me. First, the ending was very abrupt. I turned the last page, thinking there’d be another chapter or two, and found out that reader’s guides and interviews populated those last 15-20 pages. The book ended with a lot of unanswered questions, just like The Giver, and I hope some of those things are resolved in the third installment. Second, the poorest of the poor in this book, who live in a place called Fen, are given a dialect that sounds, to my admittedly unstudied ear, like old slave/post-slave dialect. This made me quite uncomfortable. There is no mention of race – in fact, one of these Fen children are called “pink-faced” at one point – so I don’t think the poorest of the poor are in their situation because of race. The implications still made me uncomfortable, however.

Overall, though, this was a decent book. I do hope the unresolved issues in both the first two books get resolved in the third. There is so much stuffed into these books, that they are bursting with more than they can hold. I want to feel satisfied at the ending of the third.