YA: Your Athenaeum

In celebration of the 2012 summer reading theme across Rhode Island, Own the Night, every Monday our blog will feature two night-dwellers or otherwise creepy characters facing each other down. Vote on one below, or come on in to the Athenaeum to vote in person and see the full bracket of all the contenders!

This week we have the bright enchanting villain of C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe versus the shadowy criminal caretaker of Holly Black’s Curseworker series. Grandad and the White Witch are both characters a charming smile and deadly touch.

If you haven’t read Holly Black’s Curseworkers series (White Cat, Red Glove and Black Heart), first of all, you should. In the world of Cassel Sharpe and his con-artist family, magic isn’t found through a wardrobe but at the tip of a curse worker’s fingers. Cassel’s Grandad used to be tied to the mob, but he’s mostly put his working days behind him. At any moment, though, he could slip off his gloves and use his nefarious magic gifts – death work, the power to kill anyone with the brush of his fingers. His, ahem, remaining fingers, that is.

The White Witch has more power, as she was able to keep all of Narnia into an endless winter. And though she doesn’t have Grandad’s touch of death, her habit of turning anyone who displeases her into stone has essentially the same end result.

This contest would likely come down to a test of wills and wiliness rather than magical prowess. Would mob-savvy Grandad fall for the White Witch’s enchanted food and false promises? Would the cunning White Witch underestimate the old man enough to let him close enough to touch her hand? What do you think? Who’s left standing? Who will own the night?

In celebration of the 2012 summer reading theme across Rhode Island, Own the Night, every Monday our blog will feature two night-dwellers or otherwise creepy characters facing each other down. Vote on one below, or come on in to the Athenaeum to vote in person and see the full bracket of all the contenders!

The contenders this week are inspired by the whimsical YA anthology with a very straightforward name: Zombies Vs. Unicorns.

Unicorns are known for being beautiful, but they’re a lot of substance behind all that rainbow-and-glitter style. According to European folklore, their horns are imbued with incredible healing and purifying powers. Their fierceness and intelligence made them impossible to hunt – the only way to capture a unicorn was if one should choose to appear to a maiden.

The term “zombie” originated in Haiti, referring to a person brought back from the dead or in a mindless trance. Horror and fantasy literature has transformed the walking dead into a monster with singular purpose – consume. In their quest for flesh, the zombies of fiction can spread the plague or curse that transformed them and multiply rapidly. The unicorn might dispose of one zombie easily, but one zombie never stays just one for long…

If you’ve read the collection edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier, you know which team many popular YA authors are on… but that’s all about which stories are best. When it turns into a brawl, who’s left standing? Who will own the night?

Currently on the New YA Bookshelf is Zombies vs. Unicorns, a very entertaining collection featuring some of the YA world’s bestselling and most beloved authors. From editor Holly Black’s official website:

It’s a question as old as time itself: which is better, the zombie or the unicorn? In this anthology, edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier (unicorn and zombie, respectively), strong arguments are made for both sides in the form of short stories. Half of the stories portray the strengths—for good and evil—of unicorns and half show the good (and really, really bad-ass) side of zombies. Contributors include many bestselling teen authors, including Cassandra Clare, Libba Bray, Maureen Johnson, Meg Cabot, Scott Westerfeld, and Margo Lanagan. This anthology will have everyone asking: Team Zombie or Team Unicorn?

My personal favorites from each category were Diana Peterfreund’s The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn and Libba Bray’s Prom Night. This anthology joins the Athenaeum just in time for the RI 2012 Summer Reading theme, Own the Night. Visit the Ath and devour a few stories!

Book three in Holly Black’s Curse Workers Trilogy, Black Heart, has arrived at the Providence Athenaeum! I just finished it myself, and it’s a great conclusion - easily the most thrilling and addictive of this dark urban fantasy series, and wrapped up with a morally ambiguous sort of hope. Any summary or synopsis would likely spoil some surprises in the first two books, so instead, here’s an excerpt from Chapter 1, when our hero (using the term loosely) Cassel has an unexpected run-in with an assassin sporting gold teeth:

“That girl - if you know her, you know what she’s about.” He reaches into his mouth and pulls out a loose tooth - a real one - black with rot at the top. It sits like a flawed pearl in the palm of his glove. Then he grins. “Good thing murder pays so well, right? Gold’s expensive.”
I try to hide my surprise. A death worker who loses only a single tooth with each hit is a very dangerous guy. Every curse - physical, luck, memory, emotion, dream, death, and even transformation - causes some kind of blowback. As my grandfather says, all work works the worker. Blowback can be crippling, even lethal. Death curses rot a part of the worker’s body, anything from a lung to a finger. Or, apparently, something as minor as a tooth.
“What’s a death worker need a gun for anyway?” I ask.
“That gun’s real sentimental. Belonged to my gran.” Gage clears his throat. “Look, you’re not going to shoot. You would have done it already. So can we just -“
“You sure you want to double dog dare me?” I say. “You sure?”
That seems to rattle him. He sucks on his teeth. “Okay, all I know is what I heard - and not from her. She never said anything, except where I could find him.”

…Girls like her, my grandfather once warned me, girls liker her turn into women with eyes like bullet holes and mouths made of knives. They are always restless. They are always hungry. They are bad news. They will drink you down like a shot of whisky. Falling in love with them is like falling down a flight of stairs.
What no one told me, with all those warnings, is that even after you’ve fallen, even after you know how painful it is, you’d still get in line to do it again.

Currently on the New YA Bookshelf, the first two books in Holly Black’s Curseworkers trilogy: White Cat and Red Glove. The final book, Black Heart, comes out in April.

The books star Cassel Sharpe: prep school student, con artist, and the youngest son of a worker family. A worker can manipulate your luck, your memories, your dreams… all by the slightest touch of their hands. At the beginning of White Cat, Cassel’s mom has landed herself in jail after using her emotion work to make one too many millionaires fall madly in love with her. His oldest brother, Philip, uses his physical work to break bones for a crime family. Cassel is the only one who doesn’t have the magic touch. He’s just a normal guy, except that he’s the school bookie - and that he killed his best friend, Lila. But when his family starts acting more suspicious than usual and he’s haunted by visions of a white cat, Cassel starts unraveling the truth about himself, his past, and that terrible night.

The Curseworker Series is a thrilling modern fantasy. Though you might figure out what’s going on before Cassel does, there’s plenty of dark twists to surprise you. The excellent cast of characters (like Cassel’s gruff but loving Grandad and his good-hearted built-like-a-bear horror-junkie roommate Sam) kept me invested in everyone’s fate (“What’s going to happen to Maura? Oh, just one more page…”) through White Cat and the sequel Red Glove, in which Cassel has to deal with the fallout that comes with uncovering the truth and decide if he’ll walk the straight path or be drawn deeper into the world of the mob.