Review of Tankborn, a young adult novel by Karen Sandler

Kayla is a GEN, a genetically engineered non-human. She was born in a tank, made from a DNA mix of animals and humans that was chosen to ensure she can fulfill a specific role in society. On the planet Loka, GENs are servants without the choice of where they serve, forced to wear gloves if they touch a human and forbidden to look into the eyes of a Trueborn.

We meet Kayla on the eve of her 15th birthday when she will receive her first assignment. But something about Kayla’s first job is odd, and the circumstances surrounding it are not quite what Kayla had been taught to expect. Kayla’s employer is a very old man with many secrets, and his secrets have the power to overthrow Kayla’s well-ordered view of her world.

Tankborn is a thrilling adventure and a romantic love story, but it also echoes (without being annoying) with political, religious and social undertones. It shows the difficulties of being at the top of the social ladder as well as the injustices suffered by those at the bottom, and how religion can be used to control an entire class of people.

The novel has an intricate plot that brings together many details and threads into a tightly-woven world. The planet Loka is complete with wildlife, geography, and climate, and the human impact -- whether through technology, social norms, or the exploitation of natural resources -- on it is already jarring. The higher class uses holograms to beautify homes and gardens. The low class no longer needs to fill low-rung positions like cleaning, mining, caregiving, because GENs are genetically engineered to fulfill these roles. The people of Tankborn are trapped in their positions in society, with only a few who are willing to fight to change the rules.

Karen Sandler’s Tankborn transported me so far out of my own life that, for the few hours which it took me to devour it, I lived right there on the planet Loka with Kayla and watched her adventures unfold as through a camera lens. I am so glad I got to read it -- I don’t often pick up sci-fi novels -- and to know Karen who has been so kind as to answer a few questions about this wonderful novel.

Hi Karen! You’ve said in one of your videos that you would prefer to be Lowborn than Trueborn so as not to have to worry about losing your status. Do you think teens would relate to the idea that it's not that easy to be popular?


I don’t know if I consciously thought of it like that, but yes, being a high-status trueborn is very like being one of the very popular kids in high school. Life can often look easier for other people if we’re watching them from the outside, but we all go through tough emotions in high school (and beyond). As bad as the humiliation was that I sometimes experienced as one of the very unpopular kids, it might have been much worse for a popular girl. She would have so much farther to fall in the eyes of others in her clique.

The world of Tankborn is extremely detailed. Can you tell us what it was like to imagine everything about Loka from scratch?

The world building happened in layers. I got the bare bones of the plot down, then handed it off to my son (a voracious SF/F reader) for a beta read. His feedback led to another layer of world building, then the same with my agents and eventually my editor, Stacy Whitman at Tu Books. Stacy’s feedback led me to fleshing out the most complex elements of the planet Loka and Tankborn’s society. In fact, on my hard drive, there are files full of details that never made it into the book, although they inform the structure of Loka’s society. Stacy would ask questions, which led me to creating a particular aspect of Loka’s backstory, which I would send to her to answer her questions, which would lead to more questions and further answers. There’s some pretty interesting stuff about Loka on my hard drive. Some of it (artists concepts of the flora and fauna, for instance) can be found at the Tankborn website and some will be up on my website soon.


What are you working on now?

I recently turned in to my editor a major re-write of Awakening, the second book of the Tankborn trilogy. I’m just starting the synopsis of Revolution, which will be the third and final book of the trilogy.

I will be looking forward to more of Kayla’s story when it is published!

Please join me tomorrow in a full interview with Karen about her cats, the space program, and why sci-fi is such a great genre to read and write.

To learn more about Karen Sandler and Tankborn you can go to:
Tankborn website
First four chapters of Tankborn
Karen Sandler’s website
Tankborn on Goodreads

Green Paranormal: Review of Sara Wilson Etienne's Harbinger

Yesterday I finished reading Harbinger by Sara Wilson Etienne. I don’t usually read paranormal novels -- it’s not a genre I am fond of -- but for some reason the gorgeous cover of the novel kept calling to me. Have you ever had a cover like that which you just could not resist? The red moon, the sweet-faced heroine with her eyes covered by a red band tied behind her head, her innocent white skin contrasting with her partly-opened, sensual mouth. The stark landscape behind her. I bought the book and immediately started to read.

To my surprise, Harbinger is a green novel, in an eco-friendly, earth stewardship sense. The novel is set in a United states that has depleted its resources, its oceans polluted by oil spills, its animals over the brink of extinction. Suburbs have closed their gates to new residents, and cities have become a center for crime and homelessness. Water is scarce. Food is scarce. And each suburb requires a certain code of behavior from its inhabitants.

Faye, the protagonist, suffers from visions and panic attacks. Her parents send her away to Holbrook Academy, a strange school for misfits where guards walk outside armed with pepper spray and tasers, and where the students are forced to swallow sleeping pills at night. Each night Faye and her friends go to sleep in their beds but wake up on the floor, their hands colored with blood. Faye suspects she is the reason behind the strangeness of Holbrook, and she sets out to discover why.

Maya, one of the students at Holbrook, is a save-the-world fanatic. “Don’t you know you’re devouring the earth?” she yells during the first dinner at Holbrook. “We’ve squeezed this planet dry. Stomped the hell out of it with our carbon footprint. Sent cow shit and pesticides sludging through our rivers and drinking waters.” A paragraph later, as the guards are closing in on her, Maya keeps on shouting: “Our world is melting, frying, starving, and suffocating, and you just keep on chewing.”

While Maya is the more extreme advocate for saving the world, pounding us with her beliefs as with a sledgehammer, for Faye reclaiming nature is a theme which weaves in and out of her thoughts like a song long-forgotten and now remembered. Trees entrance her and terrify her at the same time, as does the ocean. And where Maya seeks to make a difference by forcing others into her point of view, Faye ultimately understands that saving the world is an intensely personal sacrifice.

I read Harbinger in two days. It is an intelligent, well thought-out novel. Faye is an impressive protagonist, unafraid of challenges, willing to risk herself to uncover the truth. Beneath the dystopian, somewhat post-apocalyptic tones of the novel, hers is the story of a girl who just wants to be loved and belong, and who must, in the end, face a choice between her friends and her destiny.


You can find Harbinger on Goodreads.
Writer NutschellAnne Windsor interviewed Sara Wilson Etienne and reviewed the novel on her blog, The Writing Nut
Sara Wilson Etienne has a website http://www.sarawilsonetienne.com/ and http://www.holbrookacademy.com/

Missing the Novel by Reading for Action

A few months ago I read Kristin Cashore’ Graceling. I loved the fantasy world Cashore created, the strong characters, the danger that bubbles below (and above) the surface. Graceling enchanted me, whole and complete from beginning to end, so much so that after I read the last word, I knew I was not yet ready to revisit its world. All around me, however, readers were raving about Cashore’s second novel, Fire, and so finally, expecting to plunge back into the world of Graceling, I began to read.

While reading Graceling, I wondered again and again how Cashore would challenge Katsa, the powerful fighter she had created. After all, what could possibly stop a woman so strong that none, neither man nor force of nature, can defeat her. When the challenge came, it was complete. The stakes were high, and I trembled and read faster, wanting to find out if and how Katsa will win the day. I cheered for her, because despite her immense strength I could see her humanity, her frailty, her dependence on the other characters which I knew would not help her when the moment came to face her test.

I had a harder time empathizing with Fire, the heroine of Fire. She appeared to me a passive heroine, floating through the novel, experiencing rather than causing the action around her, engaged mostly with her own inner turmoil. With mind reading abilities and the capability of altering people’s behavior and thoughts, Fire ought to have been a powerful character. And yet because she never fully acknowledges her magic, or because she is always surrounded by her bodyguards, I felt she never fulfilled the promise of her potential.

Fire limits the physical and mental manifestations of her powers. Since the sight of her beauty causes people to lose their self control, she covers her hair and downplays her physical appearance. She refuses to touch people’s mind unless for self defense, and even after the royal family convinces her to work for them as an interrogator, she reads the prisoners’ minds with a gentleness and kindness that attests to her distaste for any form of violence or invasion.

Though Fire deals with war, it is as calmly written and as introspective as a ride down a tranquil river. I think, after Graceling, I imagined something more like a class five white-water rafting trip. I wonder if I read the novel too quickly, with an eye for the action and plot rather than the intricacies of character development and relationships. Perhaps I ought to have taken the time to enjoy the thought process that turns Fire into the heroine she is. Fire, I think, is a novel to read slowly and carefully, not a race to the end.

Maybe my expectations were at fault, but far from feeling discouraged, I plan to approach Bitterblue, Cashore’s third novel, with fewer beliefs, to luxuriate in her poetic prose and enjoy her perfect building of character and world.

Independence and the Absent Mother

Yesterday afternoon I sat by the kitchen table and cried as I finished reading Sharon Creech’s middle-grade novel Walk Two moons. I had picked it up the week before in a used bookstore. On the back cover, a quote from the School Library Journal promised “A richly layered novel about real and metaphorical journeys.” I started reading the novel wondering what it will be like.

Sal, the narrator, tells of the trip she took with her grandparents to Lewiston, Idaho to see her mother who had left on a bus trip a few months before. She promised to return but hadn’t. Sal hopes to arrive on or before her mother’s birthday and to convince her mother to come back home.

As they drive, Sal tells her grandparents the story of her friend Phoebe and her family who are all “thumpingly tidy and  respectable.” Sal describes Phoebe’s mother as “ Mrs. Supreme Housewife” and her father as “Father with a capital F.” But Phoebe also notices that underneath her enthusiastic baking and cleaning, Phoebe’s mother is unhappy. When Phoebe’s mother disappears with merely a note promising to return in a few days and a freezer filled with prepared meals for her family, Sal has a bad feeling. It is her experience that mothers promise to return but don’t.

Another friend, Ben, lives with his uncle and aunt, with no mention made of where his family is. Three absent mothers: Sal’s mother, Phoebe’s mother, Ben’s mother. And questions abide. Why did Sal’s mother stop writing to her? Why did she leave? How could she leave? And as a mother, I could not help but feel upset. Why all these absent mothers? How could Sal’s mother, who so clearly loved her, leave her? What is this story teaching children? I asked myself. That mothers are not to be trusted? That they can leave any moment? That mothers are inherently unhappy being just mothers? That if the child does not notice the mother’s unhappiness, does not appreciate her, then the mother might leave?

In children’s literature, parents are often missing: dead, or emotionally unavailable. This allows the main character to solve problems on his or her own. Thus Harry Potter is an orphan and his adult helpers either die or are incapable of helping him. Taran, of Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series, is an orphan. The children going to Narnia live apart from their parents (and Aslan either is not present or is presumed dead). In the novels, these characters move from youthful dependence to independence. But at what cost? 

Sal’s story takes her on a journey halfway through the United States and inside her own heart, through anger, guilt, denial, fantasy, and finally acceptance. I cried at the end, and I forgave Sharon Creech for the missing mothers. And yet my question remains: could we as writers find a way to allow our young characters to grow with the support of a family behind them?

What do you think?

The Winds of Change

A few days ago I finished reading Karma, a teen novel in verse by Cathy Ostlere. Karma follows a few months in the life of Maya, a young Indian girl who grew up in Canada to a Sikh father and Hindu mother. Maya visits India with her father and finds herself adrift in India after the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the anti-Sikh riots that followed. Her father disappears, and Maya, after waiting for him at the train station, finally leaves Delhi by herself.

On her way Maya meets all kinds of people. She discovers kindness in unexpected places as well as self-interest and cruelty in others. It is a time of upheaval which brings out either the worst or the best in people, and in a country like India the extremes are in plain sight for Maya to see. As she summarizes: “There is/ so much life here. And too much death.”

The landscape Maya navigates in the novel is predominately dominated by males, all of whom feel entitled to control her fate. The few women she meets are either disinclined or unable to fully assist her. Maya must learn to tap into her strength, to speak up for herself, assert her independence and her own wishes in order to survive. Like the Buddha, she needs to face her own suffering as well as mankind’s so as to grow both emotionally and spiritually and begin to understand the confusing world in which she lives.

Maya passes, phoenix-like, through fire, silence and a desert storm in order to be reborn an older, wiser Maya. After witnessing the murder immolation of a Sikh on the train she says: “sometimes there’s nothing left/ to say to another human being.” She is struck mute by her feelings of guilt and horror. For over one hundred and fifty pages, the story is turned over to Sandeep, a young man who tries to become Maya’s protector in her silence. But Maya is the only one who can save herself, and she must speak up in the end.

Toward the end of the book, Maya discovers the confidence to assert herself: “...I take a deep breath and explain/ what it all means: I have learned what love is.” And later she says: “...I have proved that I am/ more than just a daughter in this/ world.” Maya grows beyond her roles as a girl, daughter, and female to become Maya, the goddess of change, able to see the wind as it blows across the story of her life.

I was fascinated by the symbolism of Maya’s birth as daughter to a Sikh and a Hindu, the unresolved religious disagreements between her parents, and the anti-Sikh killings by Hindus which followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards. None of these conflicts is resolved by the end of the novel, and I found this so very real. Sometimes conflicts just are. But a hope remains: Maya’s love for Sandeep and the possibility that the hostilities will in the future end with them.