Who doesn’t love a fat stack of YA novels to accompany them through the final days of summer? I’ve been revisiting some old favorites, all of which hold up marvelously on rereading. YA novels dive into our deepest issues when they’re at their most dramatic; everything is new and fresh, and there’s less ennui than in adult fiction.
The problem with YA is that when a book hits it big, that genre blows up. I, personally, don’t want to read another YA dystopian or fantasy novel for another ten years. Love triangles make me roll my eyes and throw a book on my to-be-returned pile. (Has anyone ever actually been in a love triangle? YA would have me believe that the population of Earth is 2 guys:1 girl.)
My YA deep dive has really only lasted about a week so far. I’m moving soon, and returning to comforting books is a big help. I remember rereading all the Kiki Strike novels the last time I went to Germany, with the final one keeping me company on my first night in my apartment, when everything was new and creepy and exciting. This time it’s Rainbow Rowell and Ally Carter to the rescue.
Rainbow Rowell is my favorite author. Her books are amazing, and I absolutely had to reread Carry On since the sequel, Wayward Son is coming out this month. Carry On is a deconstruction of the Chosen One myth, and it features characters who are a bit like Harry Potter and Malfoy, but Baz is 100x more likeable than Malfoy. I love Baz. And Agatha. And even the numpties. But most of all, I love the writing.
The bulk of my YA reading binge has been the Heist Society series by Ally Carter. These books are about teen thief Kat and her crew of international criminals. They’re somehow very like and very different from Kiki Strike. The narrator isn’t always reliable, which makes the books fun to read as Kat hops from continent to continent. I also love the con names. (Anastasia? Wind in the Willows? Humpty Dumpty?)
The idea of the con reminds me of my favorite movie, The Brothers Bloom. In this film, the titular brothers try to con a rich heiress named Penelope out of a few million dollars. Of course, the younger brother doesn’t realize that the true purpose of the con is to set him free from a con man’s life by introducing him to Penelope. The cons in this movie aren’t as important as the idea of the con and the life of the con man.
There’s a lot of hope in a con, and a lot that can go wrong. (That being said, please don’t con me. I’m not rich.) The idea of the confidence man (or woman!) is fascinating because they’re not afraid of breaking the rules in plain sight in order to achieve their objective. Breaking the rules isn’t the same as getting caught; the great con stories don’t involve close shaves with the authorities, but close shaves with time and fate, which are the close shaves that most of us experience in our lives.
Going back to Simon Snow, you could even say that the Mage’s power grab was a con because he staged the attack that led to him being named headmaster of his school. Everyone believed they needed him to keep the evil things at bay when the most evil of them all was their leader. The difference is that the Mage wanted power, not money. His obsession with mastering fate was his undoing, while the con men and women above respected time and fate as worthy adversaries.
My end of summer reading has been really fun and really obsessive. I read a book a day for four days before I finished all three Heist Society books and gave it a bit of a rest. Since I’m studying English soon, I wanted to get some quality leisure reading in before I hit the books again in the academic sense. But why shouldn’t books like these be studied in schools? They’re interesting, easy to read, and contain themes as relevant to society as any 19th century treatise on marriage. They reveal our core obsessions, our class structure, and they preserve how we speak now. Of course, 19th century treatises on marriage are also interesting and funny and preserve how people spoke back then. Too many books, too little time. And time, as we know, can’t be conned.
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Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash
A Practical Pixie 