Tagged with fiction

There are cyclons in Victorian England. Other dangers include emotionally unavailable hottie demon slayers, wayward brothers, and the usual supernatural suspects (vampires, warlocks, werewolves). 16-year-old shapeshifting Tessa Gray is a likable protagonist, and the other characters, both naughty and nice, are both naughty and nice, meaning that the good guys have their flaws, and you have some understanding or respect for the bad guys. This is the first installment in what the annoying (how do you turn off the sound?!?) website indicates will be a trilogy. It does read like exposition and denouements, but doesn't end.

I'm having a hard time writing this review because I love the book so much. I've read it a bunch of times (five? ten?) since I first encountered it as a child. It's about a 14-year-old African-American girl coming up in a poor neighborhood of an unnamed northern city. She wants to feel like part of something, and gets her chance when she wrangles a former storefront church with an old piano in it into a clubhouse for her and the kids who previously had to hang out on the street, dodging a vindictive cop named Lafferty.

I don't want to be mean about a book on this blog. Usually if I don't like a book, I just don't finish it, but for some reason I stuck with Conception, even though it rankled. I guess the story was relatively compelling. I had two major problems with the book--its narrators: the protagonist and the talking fetus. I didn't find 15-year-old Shivana Montgomery likable, or even sympathetic. I had a hard time getting past the unborn child having a voice and the somewhat pro-life stance of the novel. When I could get over my politics, I still couldn't get into its tales of its previous martyred mothers. African-American women don't have much of a chance in the past or present of Conception. If that is Buckhanon's point, she makes it successfully, but not in a way that reaches me emotionally. I'm interested to know if any of y'all have read this book and whether you had a different take on it. (Celia, give it a try during the winter break. It takes place in Chicago, if that helps.)

"What just happened?" I wondered when I finished this episodic novel. Why did she put the last story first? Although the book left me unsettled it was a moving read. Ms. Lee can write. In broad terms this is a coming of age story about a light-skinned black girl/woman coming of age, from her childhood as a civil rights preacher's kid attending a Quaker school, integrating a private school, going to Harvard, and then doing the ex-pat thing in Paris.