A little while back, I was rummaging through Amazon to find lesbian teen novels and fell on Empress Of The World. I found the cover so beautifully poetic and evocative that I immediately bought it. The story is beautiful, the characters endearing and the story-telling wonderful! I searched for other novels written by Sara Ryan and realised that she had written a companion novel to Empress Of The World, The Rules For Hearts. This second book is different from the first and brings different themes and feelings. You definitely need to read them both!Nicola is one of those girls who spends her time over-analysing things in her head and isn't very sociable, she goes to the Siegel Institute Program for Gifted Youth for the summer to confirm her lifelong dream of being an archeologyst. Nic doesn't know what to expect from the Institute and is very surprised to become friends with a bunch of people on the first day. People who even *gasp* want to spend time with her. There is Katrina the crazy computer girl who has the best personality ever, Isaac the shy nice guy who is attracted to Katrina, the annoying Kevin (like Nicola, I found him utterly annoying, so there, last time I will mention his existence) and then there is Battle. Battle Hall Davies is a beautiful girl named after a building (parents are just so cruel sometimes) who has already been to the Institute the year before and is studying history. Nicola may not have been that much bothered about defining her identity and her sexuality before, but she only needs to glance at Battle once to feel profoundly attracted to her. Battle is not only beautiful but clever and spiritual and full of mystery. At first, Nicola thinks that whatever is going on in her is a sort of admiration and jealousy for the perfect Battle, but she soon realises that there is so much more... and that it might be mutual [insert swoon here].This is a very sweet tale of finding yourself and first love. The writing was very sensitive and the story adorable. It felt very real and relatable the way they realise their infatuation and tiptoe around each other wondering what it would be like to be together and then relax and start to be themselves with each other. Very much like A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend, the story isn't about "I am a lesbian, and I've always know I was a lesbian, and I will never look at a boy in my entire life", it is about falling for someone whose personality and attitude makes your heart beat faster and brings butterflies in your stomach, regardless of who that person is. It is about finding someone with whom you can be yourself.The book also talks about parents/children relationships. Nicola comes from a very sheltered background, in a family where her parents love each other and she feels loved, and she has never questioned the relation they had. But then she meets this group of people and half of them have parents who are divorced and others have terrible relations with their families, etc. It is a recurrent theme in YA and even MG novels where parents are either dead, divorced, unknown or don't care about their children but I felt that it was subtly and realisitically shown through the story of the characters in here.And talking about them, the characters are the best aspect of the novel: multi-faceted, believable, full of crushes and silly aspirations in life, I really felt like I was back in high school and had a life of choices in front of me. I really liked how different Nicola and Battle were. Nicola is at times a bit fastidious by over-thinking things all the time, but I was exactly the same at her age and a tiny crush would roughly take over my life for a week until I was becoming ill of it and ended up rationalising that it would never work and found something else to occupy my thoughts (*cough* I mean, I know someone who knows someone who may have been doing that, not me at all *cough*). I loved Battle's character and I'm really glad we get to see more of her in The Rules For Hearts. Katrina is literally the best character ever and you need to read the book to discover her complete awesomeness. She made me laugh out loud more than once and I really wish she was real. Isaac isn't very present at first, always shy and crushing on Katrina, but he progressively gets more and more open and I thought he was genuinely adorable. They are all geeks (the real deal, not the fake ones who think that wearing glasses makes them intelligent), they work hard at school and do think about other things in life than partying and be ultra cool and popular all the time so they were fantastic to read about. Even though Nicola faces some harsh dumb homophobic comments and there are some dark passages, it is a really uplifting story.I love this book to pieces, it has everything that I love in books from the setting to the characters, the humour and the more serious themes in the background. The romance is the cutest thing ever so all you romance lovers will love it. I cannot recommend it enough!
There's not one thing that makes this book good. It's a bunch of smaller things that I really liked that made it into a book I'd recommend. Nicola, the main character, is a likable character and certainly relatable. She's knows she's not gay, she knows she's not straight, but she feels uncomfortable with the bisexual label. She gets bullied because of her relationship with the Battle. She has a lot of different interests and talents- theatre, music, art, a touch of science. She has friends but no real 'friends' friends. She is definitely someone I could see myself knowing.The friends she makes at camp (is that the right word? I don't know) are a little more one-dimensional, particularly Katrina. But Nic admits that maybe she didn't get to know all of them as well as she could have. I liked Isaac the most, if only because I got the feeling he just wanted to have a girlfriend, and it didn't matter if it was Katrina or Nic. Again, realistic. Battle I had the most problems with. Firstly, her name. Now, those of you who follow my reviews closely (har har) will know names matter a lot to me. 'Battle' just seems way too bizarre for her parents to have chosen. We didn't really get to know her at all. She was just there, very aloof. I also got the feeling she didn't care at all for Nicola. She struck me, unfortunately, as one of those faux-bis- lead a girl along to get a guy's attention and to say she's been with a chick. And what's the deal with making out with Kevin? Low blow, Battle, way to break the budding lesbian's (?) heart. I understand Sara Ryan wrote a sequel to this book, so I hope some of Battle's characterisation issues were worked out.I also felt that Nic and Battle's relationship moved way, way too fast. It spanned only two weeks and already there were declarations of love and heartbreak and cheating and adultery and oh my! I'm of two minds about this: one, it can be read as realistic. Teen relationships can move very fast. But on the other hand, I like my novel relationships to tread a little slower.So having mused on all this as I've written my review, I believe the reason I'm rating this book four stars is because of our main character, Nic. She's just a believable person to read about. She has her flaws, yes, and she has also has a couple of informed flaws that I didn't really see. I didn't see her over analyising her situation with Battle at all, which Battle (and Katrina, quietly) accused her of. I thought she was just wondering why Battle liked her- a fair thing to wonder about. Nic, as far as I can tell, never had a mutual crush on a girl, and she wanted to know how Battle felt. That's a fairly realistic thing to want. So yes, Nic is the reason I like this book, I think.There's also a shout-out to Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat series for all you FLB fans. Nice!
Do You like book Empress Of The World (2003)?
I really enjoyed this book. I found it to be a refreshing story about young love. Although it was pretty slow for about half or a third of the book it got good though out the rest. The characters were interesting and the way they socialized and were presented really made them feel real. This story isn't just about a summer fling or a love story between (oh man!) two girls; it's about navigating the world towards finding your self, self identity, friendship, angst, confusion, and the longing to be different or to know why you're different. It's tough navigating human sexuality especially when your "preferences" may not be what's totally socially excepted or considered the norm and I think this book shows that. The writing was good and I thought the ending was perfect. You don't find out what happens after they leave but really it doesn't matter because they enjoyed their last day together and found peace within themselves. I think a lot of people can relate to the trials and tribulations that these teens went through, regardless of whether or not you're gay, straight, bisexual, etc.
—Erica Brown-carter
After finishing another young adult novel exploring the LGBT spectrum, I was looking forward to this one. I had heard about it previously and was expecting to enjoy it more than I did. I found that the writing was done well and the actual layout and idea of the book was fine and didn’t discourage me as much as the actual plot or exploration of the idea did.Character arrives at a camp for ‘gifted’ students (a camp that, in my opinion, needed more explanation). Character falls for another girl. Character asks a few too many questions and said other girl gets upset. They never officially get together or break up or really say anything about anything. I think that the specific plot points were done well; the specific scenes were nice to read and allowed for some growth. The path to those scenes was kind of messy and, to me, rushed. Maybe it is my own personal taste that got in the way but I needed some answers. I needed more conversations between the two main characters to allow me to recognize why they broke apart and why they all of a sudden fell back into whatever sort of relationship they had. I needed more to the ending. In general - I needed more.This book isn’t for everyone, I can say that. If you are looking for a quick read that has some cute moments between some teenagers then you could give it a try but, all in all, it wasn’t what I was hoping.
—Allison
A solid first novel about young (queer) love with a minimum of angst.Empress of the World is a fairly short book about teenagers at a summer institute for the gifted. I liked the lack of angst the teens showed about most stuff - it was there, but minimized - the interplay of one character trying to "figure out" the other one, and the setting. It was realistic without being boring.I wasn't sure why the characters had to be super gifted. They didn't seem particularly smarter or more precocious than any other teenagers I've read about, and I wasn't sure how it helped the plot or character development any. Of course maybe that was the point - that no matter how smart a kid is, they are still going to go through the same things as everyone else and be emotionally lost. Or maybe it's an easier explanation for the setting than summer school for "scholastically challenged" kids.Now I'm starting on Ryan's Rules for Hearts, so we'll see how the sequel of sorts measures up.
—Jill
