Huge, epic books are fun, but sometimes it’s nice to grab a short book off the shelf. One can try something new, or return to a familiar world, without the long-term commitment of some of those frighteningly giant, phonebook-sized novels. (I’m looking at you, The Stand. And you, Atlas Shrugged.)
With that in mind I found three short books to read and review: Katie Williams’ Absent, Philip Pullman’s Once Upon a Time In the North, and finally Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight companion book, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner. Which I kind of liked. You heard me.
Absent
I picked out Katie Williams’ book partly because it was short, and partly because it looked like it was a ghost story. And it is, but it’s also a teenage, high-school slice-of-life story. I don’t have anything against those books, but I don’t usually seek them out either.
I enjoyed the heck out of it.
Williams tells the story of Paige, who dies in her senior year and wakes up to find herself one of three resident ghosts at the school. When she overhears one of the most popular girls tell everyone that Paige killed herself, Paige is determined to find some way to tell everyone the truth, get revenge, and hover around her still-living, not-quite-boyfriend at the same time.
That sounds clichéd, but it’s a wonderfully written story, full of intelligent plot twists and beautiful imagery. Williams’ style is casual and clever, and though there are a lot of messages she’s trying to get across (accepting yourself, accepting others, and seeing past stereotypes) she’s never preachy, and her points are subtly made.
If you like young-adult high-school stories, you’ll definitely like this one. If you don’t like young-adult high-school stories, you’ll probably still like it, and you should give it a try. It’s an easy read, less than 200 pages, and very fun.
Once Upon a Time in the North
I read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series several years ago, and somehow missed the fact that he wrote a short (96 pages) prequel to the series back in 2008. I loved the chance to go back to this world, especially since it’s not quite so dark as the original. (Don’t get me wrong, I loved the original series, but it’s so dark you need recovery time after reading it.)
There’s something really wonderful and disturbing about Pullman’s creations, the daemons; a too-simple explanation is that they’re part of people’s souls, who travel beside them as intelligent animal companions. A person can rarely be more than a few yards away from their daemon without severe pain. If a human dies, their daemon disappears forever. If a daemon dies, the human either dies quickly from shock, or shortly afterwards from suicide.
That’s much too short an explanation, but the interactions between humans and their daemons, and all the drawbacks to having one, have always fascinated me. It would be amazing to have a life-long animal companion that can speak and is completely loyal to you in all things. It would be awful to be killed if someone deliberately pulled you too far from your daemon, and Pullman describes that feeling almost too well.
But there’s less of the disturbing elements in this short story, and more of the fun and interesting ones. Lee Scoresby and his jackrabbit daemon Hester are nicely written; the plain-taking yet honorable Lee (played perfectly by Sam Elliott in The Golden Compass) and his tough-as-nails, take-no-crap rabbit both show a lot of cynical wit, but the deep-seated love between them is always there too.
As a bonus, anyone who boycotted the original series because of the anti-organized-religion stance will like this book better; that aspect wasn’t shown here. It didn’t bother me in the original books, but I understood why many people found it so disturbing, and everyone’s viewpoint is different and valid.
The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner
I’ve mentioned before that my feelings on Twilight are right in the middle; I liked the first two books, and disliked the second two. I thought some of the Cullens were interesting, just not Bella or Edward. I watched the first two movies, then gave up on the rest after seeing Bella and Edward run through the forest. In slow motion. Sparkling.
So I don’t feel the need to hate on it, but I wasn’t planning on investing any more time in it. Then I saw The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner and I was curious. It’s not even 200 pages. Even if I disliked it, I wouldn’t have spent too much time on it. I thought at the very worst I could write a good, scathing review of it.
I’m surprised (and almost disappointed) to say I liked it.
The story centers around Bree, who appears very briefly near the end of Eclipse. Stephenie Meyer says in the introduction that she sometimes writes notes on the back stories of minor characters, to flesh out any facts or events that the main character doesn’t see from their point of view. When she started writing a little about Bree, she was surprised to have it turn into a whole story.
The book is improved by the fact that the main character isn’t a tortured soul like so many other vampires. She’s only been one for about three months, and while she doesn’t necessarily enjoy killing people and drinking their blood, she’s too thirsty all the time to feel bad about it either. She’s a little on the passive side, but it’s refreshing to see a Twilight main character that’s not second-guessing her every move, or complaining about her life. She wants to survive, and she wants to be left alone.
She meets another vampire that’s part of the same group, and because the story is so short there’s not enough time for it to develop into an epic romance; it’s just a very close friendship. They’re drawn into the events that lead to the climax of Eclipse, and readers familiar with the book will know those events don’t end well for the new-born vampires.
Before that happens, the reader gets one or two interesting details about human-preying vampires that aren’t spelled out in the stories about the “vegetarian” Cullens. The book moves along at a good pace, and doesn’t have time to get bogged down. It’s not a happy story, but it has some happy moments.
It’s possible that if the story was longer it might have had room for the Twilight elements that I never enjoyed; controlling relationships, accidental abuse, and a lot of angst-ridden introspection. As it is, I thought it was fun, interesting, and nicely written. I didn’t even mind the sparkling.