Review: The Water Wars by Cameron Stracher

Opening lines of the book:

“The year before he joined the Reclamation, when he was still seventeen, my brother Will set a new high score at the YouToo! booth at the Gaming Center.”

Why I read it:

I’m curious about dystopian fiction and this particular future sounds all too plausible. Plus I scored a signed copy of this book at BEA last year.

What it’s about:

In a future where water is incredibly scarce, fifteen-year-old Vera and her older brother Will befriend the mysterious Kai, the son of a driller. When Kai disappears under suspicious circumstances, the siblings set off to rescue him.

What I thought:

I found the beginning of The Water Wars by Cameron Stracher quite slow, and it didn’t help that Kai rubbed me the wrong way from the start: when Vera first sees him, he spills the last remaining drops of a glass of water into the dust. In a world where water is so scarce that men will kill for it, this gesture seems both foolhardy and arrogant. The pace of the book picked up when Vera and Will went looking for Kai, but unfortunately, the story didn’t have enough tension for me. Vera and Will get themselves into some serious situations, but I never felt like they were in any real danger, which diminished my enjoyment of this book. Stracher also makes the mistake of summarizing some of the action (via Vera, who is the book’s narrator), rather than showing us what is going on.

Favourite quotes:

“When he was a boy, there were still green fields and blue lakes. Kids played sports outside, like baseball and football, that existed now only on the screens. You could lie in a tub filled with warm water for no reason except to relax. It seemed foolish and wasteful and wonderful—to live as if the sky were endless and time itself had no measure.” (p. 31)

“A new beginning, I thought. Without hunger, thirst, or war. A river could be like a time machine: Step into the same place and it was already changed. But I wondered if there could ever be enough water to start again.” (p. 33)
 
Final thoughts:

Although the world Stracher creates is all too believable, the story he tells unfortunately is not. While the book was interesting enough to keep me reading (to find out what was going to happen), I found the ending simplistic and disappointing. I can’t recommend this book.

Thank you to Sourcebooks for providing me with this book to review.
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Other reviews:

365 Days of Reading • At Home with Books • Book Chatter • Books and Literature for Teens • Daemon’s books• Linus’s Blanket • Luxury Reading • novel novice • Presenting Lenore • Reading Addict • Reading Nook • Reading with Tequila • Rhapsody in Books Weblog • Squeaky Books • thebookbind • The Future Fire • The Literary Life of the Well-Read Wife

Interview with the author: Presenting Lenore
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The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson (a review)

I don’t read short stories very often, mostly because I feel like just as I’m getting to know the characters, the story ends. As a result, I tend to only read short stories in anthologies (a great way to try out new authors without committing to a whole book) or in collections written by authors I particularly enjoy. The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson falls into the second category: I was first introduced to Wilson via his fantastic Hugo-nominated novel Darwinia, which won an Aurora Award from the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association in 1999. As I had been feeling a certain “reading restlessness” recently (which meant I was having trouble concentrating long enough to commit to reading a full-length book), this seemed like the perfect time to try out this collection of nine short stories.

Although most of the stories in this book are set in Toronto (and the same bookshop is featured in several of them), they are not linked in a traditional sense. That is to say, they may all begin in a recognizable Toronto, but the deeper you venture into each story, the stranger things get—and each story is unique in its strangeness. Wilson slips easily from metaphor (such as mental illness as a separate city) to science fiction (in which it is literally possible to get lost in a parallel city) as well as from accepted scientific knowledge to plausible extrapolation. Many of his stories are grounded in science, but elements of mysticism and horror are also present in these stories.

It’s hard to pick favourites in this collection: all of these stories are dark, deliciously creepy and deeply satisfying. The only one I liked less, in fact, was the first one, “The Fields of Abraham,” the only story not set in contemporary Toronto (it takes place in 1911) and the only one to feature a plot that felt somewhat familiar (it is also the harshest story). I highly recommend this collection, which turned out to be the perfect cure for my reading restlessness!

For other takes on this book, check out these reviews:
From a Sci-Fi Standpoint • January Magazine • Steven Silver’s Reviews • The Groovy Age of Horror • The Horror!?

The Corpse Will Keep and Farthing (two reviews)

If mysteries fall on a continuum from light and fluffy cosies to dark and gritty thrillers, the ones I read are found on a narrow strip somewhere in the middle. I want a realistic plot (which means most cosies are out) but no psychopaths or serial killers, no terror and no blow-by-blow descriptions of murder or its results. This means that I’m always on the lookout for new authors, since there are relatively few mysteries that fit my specifications. So I was pleased to discover Pat Capponi’s new series featuring Dana Leoni, of which The Corpse Will Keep is the second. (I read and enjoyed the first in the series, Last Stop Sunnyside, a few years ago.) Although this series is a bit more unrealistic than my favourite mysteries, the characters in these books are what keep me hooked. Dana, a budding PI, lives in a rooming house in Parkdale, a fairly down-and-out working-class neighbourhood in Toronto. The other residents in the rooming house help her solve the mystery, and through them, Capponi gives us a glimpse into the lives of some of Canada’s most marginalized citizens without turning them into problems or statistics. This is a fun, relatively light read.

Luanne at A Bookworm’s World also reviewed this book.

Thank you to Harper Collins Canada for sending me this book to review.

Another mystery series I just discovered (thanks to a LibraryThing recommendation) is the Small Change books by Jo Walton, of which Farthing is the first. This novel is set in an alternate history in which the Allies didn’t win World War 2, Britain has “made peace” with Hitler and Lindbergh is president of the United States. For the first half of the book, I felt slightly perplexed as the whole thing reads just like a traditional country house whodunit. Although the story is intriguing, the characters well-drawn and I enjoyed the alternating points of view of the inspector who is investigating the murder and Lucy Kahn, the daughter of the house who has fallen out of favour by marrying a Jew, what was the point of the alternate setting? It turns out I was being impatient because the second half of the book suddenly veers sharply to the right and the results are chilling in their implications. The book definitely lives up to its dedication (to “everyone who has ever studied any monstrosity of history, with the serene satisfaction of being horrified while knowing exactly what was going to happen, rather like studying a dragon anatomized upon a table, and then turning around to find the dragon’s present-day relations standing close by, alive and ready to bite”); however, the ending does feel like a set-up for the next two books, Ha’penny and Half a Crown. Regardless, I highly recommend it and am looking forward to reading the next two instalments.

This was one of my favourite books in 2008.

Other reviews of this book:
bookshelves of doom • Giraffe Days • My Individual Take (On the Subject) • OF Blog of the Fallen • Rat’s Reading • Stella Matutina