Book Review: An Dantomine Eerly (Middleton)

*ARC alert*

An Dantomine Eerly is J.R. Middleton’s first novel. It will be released by Dark Coast Press on March 30th, 2010.

What initially attracted me to this book was curiosity about its derivation from the Irish aisling (“ASH-ling”), which was a word I had recently encountered as the protagonist’s name in Malinda Lo’s Ash, but had never heard before that. As it turns out, the aisling is a poetic form in which the isle of Ireland appears to the poet in a vision and gives prophecy about the future fortune of the Irish people.

I believe that in An Dantomine Eerly (which is apparently the name of the Irish psychopomp), the apparition-women, of which there are two or three, are not personifications of Ireland, but of the spirits and memories which guide the narrator in his quest to discover the fate of Dallin, another poet, and his wife Aisling.

This book is a surreal exploration of death and the secrets the lie at the end of the universe- because of this, and the author’s profound vocabulary, it becomes confusing at times. To be honest, for these parts of the book, I simply sat and read aloud, because whether or not you pick up on all of the vast meaning, it’s like reading a painting; you might not know precisely what the creator meant to say, but it’s still beautiful to look at, and you get the sense that there’s something profound just beyond your grasp. I postulate that Mr. Middleton did this deliberately, as it seems to match his message on the nature of death. The result is awesome in scope, and honestly, don’t be put off. Most of it is comprehensible to us mortals.

All in all, a delicious tragedy that isn’t for the faint of heart- or the low of reading level. Work past those moments of mystification and you’ll be well rewarded.

This book contains explicit sexual content.

Celebration

I just got the pressure sensitivity on my tablet working with the GIMP! To celebrate, I have made a comic for your enjoyment.

I am a comic genius.

Book Review: Rampant (Peterfreund)

This seems to be my week for reading (and liking) books to which my initial reaction was, “Ehh… that sounds pretty dumb.”

What “sounded pretty dumb” to me in this case was Diana Peterfreund telling a story in which unicorns are actually venemous fanged monsters that crave human flesh. It sounded completely incredible to me. The pure, white, virgin-associated unicorns, attacking and eating people? Nonsense!

As a mythology buff, I really should know better. Ten minutes of research into the matter will reveal that until Christian propaganda stepped in during the Dark Ages, unicorns came in all shapes and colors, many of them vicious. For a quick but accurate summary of the various unicorns depicted in Rampant, and their historical bases, go here. I especially love the story of Bucephalus. For lack of a good reason not to, I’m going to choose to believe that that’s true.

Having thusly established the credibility of the fantasy, let me just say that the book itself was well-written, well-paced, and generally lively and interesting. At times, I couldn’t quite understand why Astrid bowed to her mother’s wishes so easily, but that could just be me. I also had trouble keeping all of the girls straight in the very beginning, but they quickly established themselves as individuals in my mind. I loved Bonegrinder; best pet ever.

So if you want to read a story about unicorns that aren’t so sparkly and saccharine as to make you vomit, this is the book for you. Great protag who really kicks ass, wonderful mysteries surrounding the whole unicorn hunter mythos, and enough left hanging that the sequel looks promising.

Book Review: Shiver (Stiefvater)

Grace, 17, loves the peace and tranquility of the woods behind her home. It is here during the cold winter months that she gets to see her wolf—the one with the yellow eyes. Grace is sure that he saved her from an attack by other wolves when she was nine. Over the ensuing years he has returned each season, watching her with those haunting eyes as if longing for something to happen. When a teen is killed by wolves, a hunting party decides to retaliate. Grace races through the woods and discovers a wounded boy shivering on her back porch. One look at his yellow eyes and she knows that this is her wolf in human form. Fate has finally brought Sam and Grace together, and as their love grows and intensifies, so does the reality of what awaits them. It is only a matter of time before the winter cold changes him back into a wolf, and this time he might stay that way forever. (synopsis from School Library Journal)

As a huge fan of all things werewolf… I honestly avoided Shiver for a long time. The strong romantic rather than adventurous thread and highly unorthodox approach to how werewolves work (winter as a wolf, summer as a human) were offputting to me. When I did eventually pick it up, though, I was sucked in almost immediately.

I’m failing as a reviewer here, but I honestly couldn’t tell you what makes Shiver so good. A good part of it is that Maggie Stiefvater is such an amazingly lyrical writer, but there’s something beyond that, just a magic to the whole book that helps you fall in love with it. There are a couple of flaws- I never really got what happened with the one female werewolf, for example, but overall it’s compelling and deeply moving; not at all what I had expected, which was basically Romeo & Juliet but with werewolves and a faint aftertaste of Twilight. Don’t make the same mistake I did and try to steer clear of it.

Book Review: The Adoration of Jenna Fox (Pearson)

Seventeen-year-old Jenna Fox awakens after more than a year in a coma to find herself in a life—and a body—that she doesn’t quite recognize. Her parents tell her that she’s been in an accident, but much of her past identity and current situation remain a mystery to her: Why has her family abruptly moved from Boston to California, leaving all of her personal belongings behind? Why does her grandmother react to her with such antipathy? Why have her parents instructed her to make sure not to tell anyone about the circumstances of their move? And why can Jenna recite whole passages of Thoreau’s Walden, but remember next to nothing of her own past? As she watches family videos of her childhood, strange memories begin to surface, and she slowly realizes that a terrible secret is being kept from her. (synopsis from School Library Journal)

This is one of those books that makes me feel somewhat out of the loop. Apparently it was something of a Big Deal. Like Keturah and Lord Death, it’s not the next great American novel or anything, but well-received and sort of acclaimed. I had never heard of it and picked it up on a whim. But I am glad that I did.

Now, personally, I will gladly debate almost anyone on politics/religion/the big questions- American culture, Christianity’s merits and flaws, LGBT rights, whether the human race deserves to go extinct… just about the only thing I won’t touch is medical ethics. This is because medical ethics are very, very scary. Drawing a line between doing right and saving lives and playing God, meddling with what shouldn’t be meddled, that is something which I refuse to have an opinion on, because it seems like a question so convoluted as to be impossible. With the kind of technology we have today, and will have in the years to come, we can do some amazing things to help people. But atque in luce, sic semper in tenebra (“as it is in light, so always in darkness”), and so on. We as human beings always manage to hurt people with our miracles, and the capacity for harm in some of the things we’re developing is mind-boggling. I don’t want to get involved.

So when someone, in this case Mary E. Pearson, tackles the very questions I’m too wussy to examine with literary grace and aplomb, I tend to cheer them on. Not only is this book full of deep thoughts, but it presents them in a way that provokes further examination long after you’ve closed its covers. Ultimately, it even presents a funny kind of hope, though the limits Pearson defines are too far past my own personal lines for comfort. It’s only 265 pages, almost slim, but is weighs on you heavily enough that it feels much longer. Gripping and powerful are the two words that come to mind, overused though they may be.

The romance seemed a little thin to me, and never quite got the point of the character Dane- he could probably have been cut out and I wouldn’t have missed him- but otherwise I liked it. Jenna herself seems to be emotionally distant for much of the book, but it fits with her lack of/developing identity, so it works. Four stars.

Alice in Wonderland

Holy wow, guys.

It was glorious, absolutely glorious. I am, of course, a sucker for re-imaginings of Dodgson’s masterpiece (and women that put on armor and run around with swords) but still, glorious. If you haven’t seen it yet, you must intend to. If you don’t intend to, then I have only this to say:

Does that not look amazing? It is amazing, and it proves quite definitely that Avatar was no fluke. 3D is here to stay, my friends. It is here to stay and I am so glad to have it that I’m planning on going back to Alice once or twice more.

A note: as you can probably tell from the trailer, it’s nothing like the original book. This movie takes place thirteen years after Alice visited Wonderland (or, more accurately, Underland) as a child. She’s nineteen now and has since forgotten all about the place, dismissing it as a dream… but Underland hasn’t forgotten about her.

(EDIT: This isn’t finished yet, but it looks like it’s going to be a great music video, mixed by a dedicated amateur from clips from the movie and the song “Her Name is Alice” by Shinedown. Great song, great film, great maker- I would keep an eye on this.)

Top Five Picks

I figure this would be a good thing to do every so often, maybe once a year, maybe every six months, whatever. Basically I intend to list the five books which in my opinion need to be read. Because you can’t possibly expect me to limit a list of five books to just five books, I retain the right to list several volumes of one series as one.

So, here goes. (Of these, I have already reviewed Fire and will do the rest when I get around to it.)

1. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its even better sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire, both by the late Steig Larsson

2. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

3.  Graceling and its companion, Fire, both by Kristin Cashore

4. The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex (which is, quite seriously, the most consistently hilarious book I have ever read. His illustrations are great, too)

5. anything by Robin McKinley, but especially Sunshine, Deerskin, and Spindle’s End

Book Review: Ash (Lo)

From a distance, I thought she was a puff of ash. Clever.

I try to judge books by their characters and story rather than blunt subject matter, but when I heard that someone had written a lesbian retelling of Cinderella, I couldn’t help my gut reaction: Yes! You go, Malinda Lo!

As a brief “public service announcement” (as Lo herself calls it on her blog): yes, I myself am gay, and I’ve been openly so since the day I figured it out. I am also a lover of fairy-tales and their retellings, especially those by Robin McKinley and Donna Jo Napoli, Shannon Hale, Gale Carson Levine, and others like them. Their romances, I might note, are straight. I like to read about love between men and women, but there’s a certain thrill to picking up a romance that speaks to me in a highly personal way. Part of what appeals to us as readers in fairy-tales is the understanding that yes, you too can have a happy ending. Love really can conquer all. Ash sends a much-needed message to young adults and all of its readers, I feel: Happy endings aren’t reserved for those who want “traditional” love. Love conquers all no matter what form it takes, and love isn’t wrong.

At the same time, though, this isn’t a book where the author beats you over the head with “OMG guys look at me I’m writing about lesbians!” Lo has mentioned in the teaser video for Ash that the fact that Ash falls in love with a woman is secondary to fact that she falls in love,  and says elsewhere on her website that originally, she did fall in love with the prince. It was only upon rereading her own manuscript that Lo realized, at the prompting of a friend, that it wonted for romance with Kaisa.

Okay, so /rant. On to judging the book by its characters and story.

Since this is a retelling of Cinderella, some elements are to be expected: the dead mother and cruel stepmother, the father that is often absent and soon dies as well. Aisling, called Ash, (which I felt was a delightful transformation of the impetus for “cinder” names) has two stepsisters, the younger of whom is traditionally kinder to her, and she is the sole hardworking servant of the household.

In this story, however, there are a few key differences beyond the LGBT twist. Instead of a fairy godmother, Ash has Sidhean, a mysterious fae man who warns her of the danger of his realm even as he presents a promise to steal her away. Ash, still grieving for her mother and downtrodden by her life as a slave, wishes to be stolen away by the faeries, tales of whom she has always loved. This changes when she meets Kaisa, the King’s Huntress.

Without revealing too much about the book, it’s a wonderful retelling which contains elements of both the Perrault and Grimm’s versions, but is still entirely original. I believe that Ash’s original desire to be stolen away by the fairies is an allegory for something which real teens feel far too often: suicidal thoughts, and that this makes her finding Kaisa as a reason to live again that much more powerful. Neither of the young women is masculine or “butch,” and though Kaisa is the picture of a strong, confident young woman, Ash herself is somewhat submissive. I credited this to a quiet nature and to her last several years spent being trod on. All the same, even as Kaisa rescues Ash from her misery, in the very end the young heroine must save herself from Sidhean’s entanglement.

The ending itself was somewhat confusing, but for the sake of the rest of the story I’m willing to go along with it on the premise that Ash herself isn’t quite sure what happened. Perhaps someday (yeah, right) I’ll have a chance to speak to Malinda Lo and see how she defends it. Four stars.

Book Review: Keturah and Lord Death (Leavitt)

I will tell you a story of magic and love, of daring and death, and one to comfort your heart. It will be the truest story I have ever told. Now listen, and tell me if it is not so.

So begins Keturah and Lord Death, the story of a sixteen year-old girl who becomes lost in the woods and meets Death. With her gift for storytelling, Keturah is able to charm Lord Death into giving her one more day- and into promising that if in that time she is able to find her true love, she may live.

Keturah, of course, wants to live very badly. She immediately returns to her village and begins examining all of the local bachelors, but time is short, and her quest grows ever more desperate. Added to her concern for herself is concern for everyone in her beloved village, because before letting her go Death lets slip that there is a terrible plague on the way. Can Keturah save the ones she loves? Can she save herself?

I admit that the book-jacket synopsis (which of course wasn’t as wonderful as the one that I just wrote) didn’t make Keturah and Lord Death sound terribly magnificent, but this book is a gem. It’s one of those treasures that I stumbled upon accidentally, in a shipment from BookPig, in fact, but had never heard of before. But for whatever reason, I picked it up anyway, and now I’m terribly glad I did.

Keturah and Lord Death is a fairy-tale in the same way that The Book Thief is a story about the Holocaust- technically true, but so much more (for fairness’ sake, I have to add that while magnificent, K&LD is not the next great classic, as The Book Thief will probably be). It’s one of those books that puts you in a daze for an hour or so after you read it, and when people ask you, “Hey, what do you want for lunch?” you stare at them blankly and change the topic to a philosophical conversation about death.

There were a couple of moments where I felt like there was a brief jar in the story, but they were for the most part small, and the book was gripping enough that I didn’t really mind. The climactic finish was unexpected, but inevitable. Keturah and Lord Death will be one of those novels that becomes part of my consciousness and affects the way I look at the world for years to come. Five stars.

Okay, Amazon, Seriously?

As a denizen of a small town with no major bookstore, I usually do my shopping online, through Amazon. I know that there have been criticisms of this company in the past, some of them serious, but I’ve tried to ignore those for the sake of books and free shipping. But this is just laughable.

I had a bit of money to burn today, so I logged on and started loading up my cart. I went to check out, and hey, add $3.42 to your order to get free shipping. Alright. So I click around my recommendations for a while, and nothing stands out. Then I go straight to the “bestseller/most popular” list for Teen Sci-fi and Fantasy. The first few goes as follows, nothing surprising: a Percy Jackson book, Percy Jackson, Percy Jackson, Percy Jackson, Twilight book, Jackson, Twilight, Jackson, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Wait. What?

Now, I hated that book, and I know that most teens wouldn’t make the effort to read classics for the sake of it, so how does 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea make #9 on a teen bestseller list? But okay, maybe Jules Verne is suddenly popular for some reason. But as I keep going, I can’t help but notice that some things are inexplicably well-liked, according to Amazon.

Out of  16,107 results,

Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood is #15.

Orwell’s 1984 is #24.

Orwell’s Animal Farm is #64.

Fahrenheit 451 hits the charts at #92, one step above Twilight: The Complete Illustrated Movie Companion (in what universe?).

And, my personal favorite, #135 (out of over sixteen thousand, mind you)… One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (I Can Read It All By Myself). Not only is this apparently considered teen fantasy, it’s listed as being by both Dr. Seuss and Theodor Seuss Geisel, who I’m fairly sure are the same person.

I applaud you, Amazon.

On the other hand, that nice little copy of One Fish Two Fish is only $4.95, so if I pick it up, I’m not only indulging in quality YA literature, but I’m almost exactly at the amount I needed for free shipping.