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I think it was a 2012 "book a day" calendar that had this, and the blurb sounded interesting. The book was certainly different, but I came away not liking either of these guys.

This is an article, and a conversation about that article between the author and the magazine-hired fact checker. Both are hard-headed, and both go where they don't belong (the author changing facts on a whim and being a right prig to the the fact-checker; the fact-checker objecting to stuff that isn't a fact in the first place, and not keeping the story in context). The small portion of the book that is their conversation about what constitutes a fictional story, a factual account, and an "essay" is interesting. The rest has a few crumbs of interest, but in general is forgettable.

I highly doubt a fact checker would parse one sentence at a time and then check the veracity without reading the entire article first, so the whole process of "fact checking" as presented here is likely to be untrue.

Holly Black's "Tithe" is categorized as "Young Adult" fiction, but I don't intend to let that sway my judgment. I agree with John Green, who said that "Teen readers are not looking for characters they can identify with. They are looking for characters that they recognize are not bullshit!"

The main character is an outsider, a girl who works to provide her mom with money and food. When things go badly in the first chapter, they return to New Jersey and Kaye falls back in with her friends from six years prior. I found Kaye to be a very unlikeable character, and her former friends are barely two-dimensional. The relationship she has with rings false to me, and if Janet was once her best friend, that relationship is even worse. Is it because Kaye was that much of an outsider? The author never lets us know.

As Kaye was growing up, she had friends that were faeries. These three characters are also completely undeveloped, but then they are alien to our way of thinking. Other fae appear in the novel, and a few of them are less than completely wooden – but again, none are the least bit likeable.

A character who strives for likeable is Corny. He is the older brother of Janet, and is the vehicle (literally) through which much of the action happens. Other than that, he is underdeveloped, and when he does something outside of the norm later on, it really doesn't make sense. No explanation is given either; perhaps a later novel in this series revisits this character?

In my opinion, the characters and situations don't pass the bullshit test, and the writing is worse. Each chapter seems to be a scene, and there is little to connect the episodes together. In most cases the writing is inconsistent, the dialog is dull, and most of the book feels unpolished. On the positive side, some of the ideas are interesting and the descriptions of those are very colorful – one sees that these paragraphs were well loved by the author. Jarring the reader out of those are sentences like "she wanted to cling to the facade of humanity with both fists" which both confuse and annoy me. Literature this is not.

I couldn't find any details for why this is on a "banned book list", but I can guess. In the first few chapters there is an excess of hard alcohol (and these are teenagers?) along with quite a bit of swearing (yup, these are teenagers). Other possibilities are the occultism of the Faerie, or the potential Sadomasochism of one of the characters.

The book ends with our unlikeable character going through life altering events (unchanged) and ends with a romance novel kiss. I can't think of a book I was happier to see finish. Rebecca Stead points out that "kids grapple with big stuff" – in this disappointing book, that stuff goes mostly unremarked.

Catherynne Valente's Deathless is so much more than a Russian fairy tale history of growing up and growing old.

The structure of Russian folk tales is the first thing we encounter. Familiar characters are here (Baba Yaga, Father Frost, and of course Koschei the Immortal) and familiar themes (birds, objects that summon others, and repetition in threes). The protagonist Marya Morevna has her own Russian folk tale lineage, as the queen or warrior princess of her own province of historical Russia.

Through the marrying of Marya's sisters, we first encounter history – the first sister married to a member of the Tsar's guard, the second to a member of the White Guard, and the third to an officer in the Red Army. Later chapters go further into the early history of Soviet Russia, and that adds to both the history and the folk tale.

Satire of Soviet Russia factors in also, with "Chairman" Yaga, a scarf of the Red Pioneers, and a whole section set in the dream village of Yaichka, where Josef and Leon make trouble for Vladimir Ilyich by ruining the roses. When Vladimir discusses this with neighbor Nikolai Aleksandrovich, he "laughed and sent old Vova on his way, his sympathies being rather with the roses."

Except for a few italicized portions, the story is told from the perspective of Marya, and history flows around her story from youth in Tsarist Russia to old age in 1952. Marya is from and returns to St. Petersburg / Petrograd / Leningrad, and the 900 day Siege of Leningrad plays a major role in the latter part of this story. As she grows, she learns many things and collects the wisdom of many around her, along with a few items of folk tales. The wisdom and items come back to help her in the end, as you would expect.

An underlying theme shows that this is more than just a story, it is both history and destiny. There is a sense that the story has played out many times before and will keep playing out until it is perfected. Did Marya's choices perfect it this time? Is the end result the best of worlds or the worst? This inevitability is another recognizable Russian trait.

All in all, I enjoyed this story of growing up and growing old. At times it was a little rough – perhaps those were the transitions between historical eras, where the folk tales were the least evident. Catherynne Valente has put together a very good tale – 4 ½ red stars.