First the official bio: Kristopher Reisz lives in Athens, Alabama. He writes books about mushroom gods, very strange crows, and heartbroken werewolves. His first book, Tripping to Somewhere, is out now. His second, Unleashed, is coming in February. Writing about himself in the third person always makes him feel a little shifty.

I reviewed Tripping to Somewhere earlier this year and was quite surprised by it, for several reasons. It is urban fantasy, but with some serious twists. First, the protagonist is gay and involved in a relationship with her best friend that sometimes includes sex and sometimes doesn't. This pretty much tears Gilly apart as she loves Sam, while Sam isn't quite sure who she is or who she wants to be - let alone what she thinks of Gilly. (A pretty accurate depiction of any teen relationship when you think about it.) The fantasy part comes in when the two girls run away from their suburban lives in search of the mythic Witches Carnival. They find it and all sorts of possibilities (including immortality) are opened up to them. But real life - home life - doesn't fade away so easily and Gilly has to make some hardcore choices both for herself and Sam. It doesn't hurt that she finds another romance along the way which makes her believe that maybe she is worth living the best life possible - that maybe the harder choices are the ones that will bring her the best rewards.

The more I have thought about Tripping the more impressed I have been by it. There is nothing pedestrian or ordinary about this book and I think Reisz has taken a dazzling number of chances here. Tripping is such a bold book - so in your face kind of fearless - that I dearly hope the author is ultimately rewarded for being so brave. A further explanation of why I liked the book so much can be found in my archives, where I posted about why this book really is that good. Here's a bit:

Is Tripping to Somewhere about a universe where "the highest value is being cool "? Well yeah - it's about high school and being a teenager and I'm sorry, but in that place and time cool is really all there is. The definition of cool is constantly shifting, and a lot of the officially cool people are widely accepted to be jerks, but that doesn't change anything about the social order. The fact that Gilly doesn't buy into all of that by the end of the book - that she's sees that loyalty has a higher value than cool - was the major payoff for me in this book. It's a rich, complex, sexy and profanity laden story but more than anything it's honest and I can see alot of frustrated teenagers embracing these girls from start to finish.

I look forward to his next book and seeing just what he can do with the werewolf genre. Now on to Kris' favorite reads for the year.

Three great urban fantasies I read in 2007 were Holly Black's Ironside, Steve Berman's Vintage, and Neil Gaiman's The Ultimate Sandman.

Ironside picks up where Black's first novel, Tithe, left off, detailing two faerie courts' war through the fringes of New York. Vintage is a gothic romance, as slim and finely-honed as a razor blade, about a gay kid who feels lost in the world falling for a ghost who truly is. Gaiman's Sandman comics, originally published in the 90s and now collected in beautiful hardcover volumes, is about the King of Dreams and how vital story-telling is to human existence. Each of these writers finds connections between ancient legends and modern thought, and each work captures the hand-in-hand terror and wonder of man's oldest myths.

I didn't read much nonfiction this year, but I devoured Barbara Ehrenreich's Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. Ehrenreich tracks ecstatic revelry from Dionysian cults of the Roman Empire to medieval carnival to Woodstock, showing how the primal urge to dance has survived countless attempts to quell its transcendent and revolutionary power.

Friends have been pushing them on me for years. My brother has two cats named Esme and Gytha. And in 2007, I finally got around to reading Terry Prattchet's Discworld novels. I started with Wee Free Men, burned through the rest of the Tiffany Aching series, then started back at the beginning with The Colour of Magic. They're just as funny and brilliant as everybody kept telling me, and with nearly 30 books left to go, I have plenty to look forward to in 2008.
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Okay, strike me down now but I have not read the Sandman series. I don't know exactly how I missed it although I was still very much enamored with my cape titles in the 90s when the series began. And I don't think I really started reading Gaiman until Neverwhere, although none of that is a good enough excuse. So Sandman reading will certainly commence this year as well. (Man am I getting the world's most eclectic reading pile from all these recommendations or what?!)

As for Vintage, I've heard about this book from several different places and it sounds more and more like it might work as a good entry in a romance column I'm plotting for next year. You can read a recent short story by author Steve Berman at Endicott Studio ("Bittersweet"). Terri Windling's thoughts on the book can be found at Endicott as well - here's a bit:

Vintage is his first novel, and one I wish had been around when I was a teen. It's a smart, stylish coming-of-age story about a gay teenager, a seductive ghost, and the many ways that the past shadows the present. It's also a love story, but one that's dark and sharp and full of unexpected twists. Much like adolescence itself.

Thanks for stopping by Kris - we'll be back tomorrow with Nick Abadzis.