Three
young-adult novels that made a splash in 2012 are back for another
helping. But now that so many YA books are spawning trilogies,
septologies and sequels, how do these second installments keep your
interest? By throwing their protagonists for loops, and revealing some
dark truths about their respective worlds.
Spoilers for the first books and minor sequel spoilers
ahead:
Fractured, Teri Terry’s follow-up to Slated doesn’t,
unfortunately, explore the relationship between the mind-wiped Kyla and her
adopted mother as much as I’d hoped.
Rather, Kyla meets a new and seemingly interested cute boy, Cameron. But
he can’t take the place of Ben, who at the end of the last book tried to cut
his monitoring device off and was last seen being piled into an ambulance after
collapsing and stopping breathing.
But
it’s not just new the new boy complicating Kyla’s life: she’s been contacted by
Free UK, the terrorist organization/freedom fighters that she was with when she
was caught before book 1. She also seems
to be making headway in learning more about the memory wiping process from her
increasingly intrigued and sympathetic neurologist. But the more Kyla learns –
about memory wiping, about her history, about what may have happened to Ben,
even about her mother’s political family – the less her world makes sense, and
the fewer people she can trust.
While
the first book was much more about world building and Kyla’s emotional state,
this book is far more action oriented.
Kyla’s naïveté is harder to believe this time around, with some
betrayals feeling seriously telegraphed, but by the end, she’s finally figured
out how to quit being a pawn and take decisive action. It seems that the final book in this trilogy
will have to focus even more on action and the wider political consequences of
Kyla’s decisions.
Mothership by Martin Leicht and Isla Neal, was a bolt from the blue;
a comedic joyride through teen pregnancy, alien invasions and the high-school
politics of bitchy cheerleaders, ex-boyfriends and loyal best friends. But, as they say, motherhood changes
everything. At the end of book 1, Elvie Nara, supposedly impossibly, gave birth
to a baby girl alien hybrid.
In A Stranger Thing, Elvie, her
hyper-planning father, her best friend Ducky and her hot alien ex-boyfriend Cole
are all exiled with baby Olivia to Antarctica. There, Elvie learns that pretty
much everything she knew – from her family history to basic alien genetics to Romantic
era English poets to how she was going to bond with her baby – was wrong. Really wrong.
And when Elvie is betrayed, it is just as shocking to the reader as it
is to her.
Even in Antarctica, Elvie’s not about to sit around and,
after finding a qualified sitter, she takes off to learn more about the
conspiracy aboard the crashed spaceliner/school for pregnant teens she spent
most of book one on. A Stranger Thing is not quite as laugh
out loud funny as Mothership, what
with a baby being such serious and huge responsibility. Elvie doesn’t seem in
the joking mood and she’s lost the friends and foils who made her quips
possible – but the book ups the absurdity.
If you liked the film Orca,
does this book have a killer whale for you.
The book also has more action and danger than the first book. And it ends with Elvie in an even worse
situation than stuck in an alien prison near Cape Crozier with a week-old baby
and not enough diapers.
Jonathan L. Howard’s Katya’s War keeps the Heinlein-esque adventure feel from Katya’s World, while narrowly focusing almost entirely on the
run-up to and aftermath of a single mission Katya undertakes.
At the end of World, Katya learned that the pirate Haviland Kane wasn’t quite as
evil as she thought, since he, with her help, saved the planet Russalka from an
abandoned Terran warship’s killer AI. But the fallout from their actions is an
all out war between the Feds and the Yagizban separatists.
As the captain of her own mini-sub, Katya
just wants to keep her head down, but Kane isn’t done with her yet. One nice thing is that Kane isn’t interested
in playing games: he willingly shows Katya the things he needs her to see, instead
of hemming and hawing for no real reason except to make the plot more
shocking. Katya has grown into her
captainhood, though her previous adventures and losses have made her both more
cynical about the world and more open minded about some people. She’s also developed a risk-taking streak
that serves her well, but seems coupled to a perhaps dangerous fatalism. Which, given the monumental change wrought at
the end of Katya’s War, may or may
not be a good thing.
One of the most beloved sequels of all time is Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Like these three books, it’s about trust,
betrayal and the difficulty of learning home truths. Expanding and darkening a world at the same
time requires giving up the fairy-tale simplicity of good guys and bad guys for
the complexity of history and the fallibility of human beings.
These young adult novels are all strong
second entries in their series. They’re
not interested in merely retelling the stories of their predecessors with
higher stakes, but of really complicating the lives and worlds of their
protagonists. Also, they prove that you can trust no one. Except maybe war
criminal pirates.
