Graphic Novel Reviews: Courtney Crumrin and The Night Things by Ted Naifeh and Good As Lily by Derek Kirk Kim

Paperback, 128 pages
Published September 8th 2003 by Oni Press
Source: Library

Synopsis:
Presenting the initial Courtney Crumrin miniseries in a new digest-sized format. Courtney’s parents have dragged her out to a high-to-do suburb to live with her creepy Great Uncle Aloysius in his spooky old house. She’s not only the new kid in school, but she also discovers strange things lurking under her bed.

Review:

Courtney Crumrin  and the Night Things is the first volume in a rollicking fun series featuring an anti-heroine and a witchy uncle. There is also a creepy house involved and for good measure, parents with aspirations of climbing the society ladder. The graphic novel is quick paced and well-drawn with a sympathetic heroine and an enjoyable cast of side characters. It is not very predictable and while it does play into the trope of the lonely young teenage girl in some ways, it is very different. And really, Courtney is just a fun character to cheer on. Grumpy face and all. Recommended.

Paperback, 176 pages
Published August 1st 2007 by Minx
Source: Library

Synopsis:
A strange mishap on her eighteenth birthday causes Grace Kwon to be confronted with herself at three different periods in her life–ages six, twenty-nine, and seventy–while she and her friends struggle to save a crumbling school play.

Review:

I really do feel that this graphic novel has been misnamed. While “Lily” does have a role in this novel, it is a minor one and the title is misleading. The graphic novel however is fun and interesting. It presents an impossible premise made all the more fascinating because of its fantastic nature. Grace, the teenager, is faced by three versions of her: the 6 year old, the 29 year old and the 70 year old. What follows is a look at how Grace, in all her reincarnations, is dissatisfied with life and how her actions as a teenager affects the people she is going to be and the child she was. It’s a pretty interesting novel, despite the medium and its brevity. I recommend it.

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo (review)

Paperback, 354 pages
Published March 27th 2007 by Chatto & Windus
Purchased: Bookcloseouts

Synopsis:
When a young Chinese woman, newly arrived in London, moves in with her English boyfriend, she decides it’s time to write a Chinese-English dictionary for lovers. Xiaolu’s first novel in English is an utterly original journey of self-discovery.

Review:

This book plays with language and by doing so delves into the depths of our human-ness to a space where we exist without words – where all we are is sensations adrift in a constantly changing world. Z, as the protagonist names herself, is me, you and any other woman trying to forge an identity for herself in a country that is not hers, trying to speak a language that doesn’t make sense to her. She calls herself Z because people don’t pronounce her name correctly and it’s not worth the effort to continue correcting them. I know exactly how that feels. Even though my name is so easy to pronounce, I have had people take the easy way out of pronouncing it and there have been times when I just shrugged and let them call me by that wrong name because it’s too much of a bother to continuously correct them.

Z’s trials and tribulations learning English in London feels particularly authentic, especially since the book is narrated in what is “improper English” but what I felt was a correct depiction of how a person learning English would speak. The English gets better as the book continues and Z learns more but the novel always manages to be beautiful no matter the caliber of English used. There are moments when Z gives up completely on English and Chinese text is followed by an editor’s translation. The book does not just portray Z’s growing proficiency with English but also Z’s growing, deepening, widening as a person.

The romance has a certain weight to it. Z is completely aware of how she comes across to her older lover; she knows that she is stifling him but her inability to let him go despite the disparity in their love feels true and sincere. There’s this portion where she muses:

‘Love,’ this English word: like other English words, it has tense. ‘Loved’ or ‘will love’ or ‘have loved’. All these specific tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, Love is 爱 (ai). It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.

If our love existed in Chinese tense, then it will last forever. It will be infinite.

I loved this novel for many more reasons than I can wholly articulate on this medium. I hope you guys give it a chance and allow yourselves to experience something that is bittersweet and lingering. A love that starts all of a sudden and grows beyond differences in languages and cultures.

Ink (Paper Gods #1) by Amanda Sun (review)

Paperback, 377 pages
Expected publication: June 25th 2013 by Harlequin Teen
Source: Net Galley

Synopsis:
I looked down at the paper, still touching the tip of my shoe. I reached for it, flipping the page over to look.

Scrawls of ink outlined a drawing of a girl lying on a bench.

A sick feeling started to twist in my stomach, like motion sickness.

And then the girl in the drawing turned her head, and her inky eyes glared straight into mine.

On the heels of a family tragedy, the last thing Katie Greene wants to do is move halfway across the world. Stuck with her aunt in Shizuoka, Japan, Katie feels lost. Alone. She doesn’t know the language, she can barely hold a pair of chopsticks, and she can’t seem to get the hang of taking her shoes off whenever she enters a building.

Then there’s gorgeous but aloof Tomohiro, star of the school’s kendo team. How did he really get the scar on his arm? Katie isn’t prepared for the answer. But when she sees the things he draws start moving, there’s no denying the truth: Tomo has a connection to the ancient gods of Japan, and being near Katie is causing his abilities to spiral out of control. If the wrong people notice, they’ll both be targets.

Katie never wanted to move to Japan—now she may not make it out of the country alive.

Review:

Anyone who is a fan of Jpop/Jdrama/Manga will find the setup of Ink really familiar. Except, in this case, the main character is a foreigner. A “gaijin,” as authors seem fond of saying. I am not saying I understand the context the word is used in in Japan but in Fiji, when we said the word equivalent to “gaijin,” it really wasn’t in a complimentary tone. Anyway. Katie Greene finds herself in Japan after the death of her mother. She’s a stranger among people who do not look like her, speak her language or act in a manner she’s familiar with. Then she happens on arguably the most gorgeous boy in school breaking up with his girlfriend in a very callous manner and she is fascinated. Yes, I am still wondering about that but more on that later.

I recently wrote a research paper on cultural appropriation in children’s literature – it is not something that is generally discussed. At all. I plan on changing that. But my point is, I am sensitive to issues of cultural appropriation but unlike in Stormdancer, I felt that the author respected the culture she was writing about and used the language appropriately without trying to redefine words and traditions to suit her ambitions where the plot of the novel was concerned. Somewhat. I felt that she researched her topic and skillfully wove some of that research into the narrative. Somewhat. I want to give credit where its due so I will say that it was handled with a lot more finesse than in the other book I mentioned. That said, there were more subtle and equally problematic discourses in the subtext of this novel.

First are the threads of post-colonial discourse implied in the novel. Katie Greene is white and shown to be “superior,” because she’s the one who will be deciding the course of the novel. She’s the one who comes in from outside and is somehow more important than all the natives combined. Yeah. No. Her refusal to care about the traditions gradually peters away to her accepting the culture and she does accept Japanese “culture” as the author defines it but that, too, is problematic.

There are several times in the novel when Katie speaks of “shame” in her interactions with Hiro. I don’t understand what she means by shame – unless she is insinuating (and thus creating the Oriental woman) that since she has absorbed the Japanese culture, she is reacting as Japanese women are usually portrayed as doing (submissive, timid, timorous, you get the idea) which doesn’t make sense because she has been brought up in North America and there is no way she has completely assimilated in the Japanese culture in a matter of months. Apart from exoticizing women, this is problematic for the feminist in me.

I also found it extremely bizarre that Katie was accepted so wholly by the friends she doesn’t really treat very well. Anyone who has any sort of familiarity with Japanese culture will know that your peers will not accept you without question or without hesitation and reservation – more so in a culture so emphatically closed off. Katie is also a bit of a Mary Sue. There are three boys extremely interested in her and she chooses the dangerous one, of course. There is barely any character development. Katie goes on vacation with her one friend just so that friend’s brother can move the plot forward by revealing some information. The brother remains a cardboard character.

Katie makes all these proclamations but the one I found most ridiculous was one that occurred on the vacation where she hears the name “Amaterasu” and her “blood runs cold.” Like really? She knows nothing about this goddess, there has been no information or world-building and why would the name of a goddess make her blood run cold? It’s bizarre how everything is all about her. Katie seizes the notion that she is somehow part of this “kami” culture or population even though her obvious foreignness makes it impossible. This unexplained connection is used to delineate Katie’s special snowflake status and is reiterated (usually by Katie) once and again.

The mythology could have been fascinating if handled more deftly than it unfortunately was. The romance is troubling because Katie does not consider that this boy broke up with his girlfriend seconds earlier in a notsonice way. The ex-girlfriend’s absence is also puzzling because considering the manner in which they broke up, I’d think the ex would have some bones to grind with Hiro. The ending has the most ridiculous cliffhanger I have ever come across and rather than make me want to read the next book, it made me roll my eyes and swear “never again.”

I went into this book with great expectations. I expected it to be good. It was researched acceptably where daily life and traditions are concerned. However, the novel is extremely unconvincing in its creation of a mythology that buoys the novel. The main character is entirely unlikable and the subtext is problematic. I wouldn’t recommend it.

Art Spotlight: Kokage

Kokage

Pixiv | Blog

Book Hype: A Discussion

I’ve been thinking about this topic for a good long while now. I may already have said some stuff about it before but I don’t care to wade through the archives to see if I did so I shall say something entirely new and different (hopefully) in this post.

Books and Hype. Or books and buzz. Book Buzz and Book Hype. You know what I refer to.

Both of these refer to that same annoying oversaturation of a book’s mention in the blogosphere/twitter/facebook. Heck, even tumblr and pinterest don’t escape. That book is everywhere you turn around. From posters, to giveaways (that you never win) to book trailers (that are plain annoying). Bloggers who have been lucky enough to get a copy of it are raving about it (and you never know whether it’s a true rave or I want to please the publisher rave) and articles are appearing about it being snatched up by one or other movie production houses. Rights have been sold! Coming to a cinema/television set near you!

Repeat that about a million times until you are wholly sick of the book and that’s book hype. Hype and buzz are both indicative of annoying sounds/behavior so I don’t know why anyone would want to push a book on someone using that strategy. There is such a thing as too much publicity and smart publicists know that to do things in excess will actually cause more harm than good.

Every time I have given in to hype, I have regretted it. There was Divergent which I absolutely did not like. Shatter Me which I DNFed because the purple prose blasted me into outer space which is where I am blogging from today. Daughter of Smoke and Bone which I may have truthfully liked better had I come across it on my own rather than after having references of it rain down on me with the force of a hurricane. Other books that were hyped but I did not pick up until I wanted to was The Hunger Games trilogy which I loved simply a lot because I came to it on my own and not because I was pushed into reading it.

Book hyping/buzzing creates enormous expectations that books hardly ever can live up to. Even if that book is splendid, it will still not match up to the idea of it. That’s just human nature. And when it doesn’t measure up, there is disappointment and this in turn affects the entire reading experience. That’s why I tend to very wary of books that have been buzzed or hyped.

Also, I wonder how publishers choose which books to hype and which books to completely ignore. I have noticed that Simon and Schuster spend a lot of time and energy hyping Cassandra Clare’s books and the upcoming movie. Is it because she has already proved a strong seller for them? However, they tend to completely ignore other books that are being released from them and that behaviour doesn’t make sense to me. Sure Clare’s books are bestsellers but perhaps a little more publicity will get other books out and read? I really don’t know how publishing houses work. Maybe one of you can educate me.

There is book buzzing, the external, where the buzz begins via the publishers who push books onto bloggers who continue carrying the torch. This is a bit artificial and the one I am wary about. However, there is another kind of buzzing that I actually wholeheartedly love and this one is the more organic kind of buzz where lesser known titles are read by discerning bloggers and their value spread through word of mouth. I find this kind of buzz invaluable. Some of the titles I have enjoyed by listening to my fellow bloggers are Titan Magic by Jodi Lamm, Angelfall by Susan Ee, Shadows by Paula Weston and And All the Stars by Andrea K. Host. These books do not come attached with huge marketing budgets to bolster their presence. What they do is simply tell a story well and that buoys them and takes them far.

So yeah, there is book buzzing and book buzzing. I tend to prefer the latter.

Handbook for Dragon Slayers by Merrie Haskell (review)

Hardcover, 336 pages
Published May 28th 2013 by HarperCollins
Source: ALA

Synopsis:
Tilda has never given much thought to dragons, attending instead to her endless duties and wishing herself free of a princess’s responsibilities.

When a greedy cousin steals Tilda’s lands, the young princess goes on the run with two would-be dragon slayers. Before long she is facing down the Wild Hunt, befriending magical horses, and battling flame-spouting dragons. On the adventure of a lifetime, and caught between dreams of freedom and the people who need her, Tilda learns more about dragons—and herself—than she ever imagined.

Merrie Haskell, author of The Princess Curse, presents a magical tale of transformation, danger, and duty, starring a remarkable princess as stubborn as she is brave.

Review:

Merrie Haskell’s The Princess Curse is one of my favourite MGs so when I managed to pick up her sophomore novel at ALA, I was beyond thrilled. Of course it languished in my reading pile for quite a long while until one of my cohort who had attended ALA with me told me how much she had loved it. And that was it. I knew I had to read the novel and I pounced on it as soon as I got home.

And I did love it. Oh I loved it in so many ways for so many reasons. First there was the world class world building. Then the characterizations and then, as is Haskell’s specialty, the twist in the perspective. Like in The Princess Curse the story is not told from the viewpoint of the character who would traditionally be the protagonist, in this case, the actual dragon slayer, but from the viewpoint of their scribe, the princess. Tilda, when we meet her, is not a very inspiring character. She has potential, of course, but due to her disability, a bad leg, she is almost drowned by insecurities. Even though she is the heir to a principality, responsible for the lives and livelihoods of so many people, she doesn’t want to take on the mantle of responsibility. For that reason, I wasn’t too sure I would jive with her initially but as the journey unfolded, she changed and her evolution as a person and a princess won me over.

There are many things going on in this novel and were it not handled with a fine hand, it would have felt overwhelming. However, Haskell manages to link each event and maintain a progression of the overarching plot despite the occasional segues. I love the horse characters as I do all animal characters and I love the dynamics between the three friends who are all very different people with different motivations and pasts and presented thusly. I especially loved how Tilda’s perception of dragons change and how her brief interlude wearing the skin of one is presented. Haskell portrays the non-human character really nicely.

The romance, what there is of it, is very light and totally suitable of a middle grade novel. It spices up the narrative but is very much a side plot that is hinted at but never delved into. For that reason, this book will be a success with younger readers and older ones who are weary of melodramatic he loves me and he loves me not stories.

In conclusion, this is a fantastic novel. Read it.

Spirit and Dust (Goodnight Family #2) by Rosemary Clement-Moore

Hardcover, 1st Edition, 304 pages
Published May 14th 2013 by Delacorte Books for Young Readers
Source: Library

Synopsis:
Daisy Goodnight can speak to the dead. It’s not the result of a head injury or some near-death experience. She was just born that way. And she’s really good at it. Good enough to help the police solve the occasional homicide.

But helping the local authorities clear cold cases is one thing. Being whisked out of chemistry class by the FBI and flown to the scene of a murder/kidnapping in Minnesota? That’s the real deal.

Before the promotion can go to Daisy’s head, she’s up to her neck in trouble. The spirits are talking, and they’re terrified. There’s a real living girl in danger. And when Daisy is kidnapped by a crime boss with no scruples about using magic—and Daisy—to get what he wants, it looks like hers is the next soul on the line.

Review:

          Rosemary Clement-Moore is fast becoming one of my favourite authors. While I have not loved all her books, I have liked them all and found in them a joie de vivre that works so well for me. Her protagonists are always so spunky and even when they have their share of insecurities and flaws, they are always easy to relate to and likeable. I remember Daisy from the Texas Gothic and I remember thinking that she had a colourful character about whom I wouldn’t mind reading more about. I got my wish in this book as Daisy sets off on an adventure that could rival Katniss’s trials and tribulations in the games arena.

Being a Goodnight, Daisy has seen more than her share of things that other, more mundane, people would write off as crazy. She is a consultant for the FBI, using her considerable supernatural powers to help them find murderers and other elements from the criminal world. The novel is fast paced and thrilling as things go from bad to worse when Daisy is kidnapped by what seems like a mob boss and then partnered with his son to find his missing daughter. What follows is a whirlwind race from one state to another, stealing cars and avoiding capture by not just the bad guys but the FBI.

Carson, the love interest, is so delicious. He is smart and witty and absolutely fun to read. But it’s Daisy who won my heart. She is practical and not given to moaning and whining. Even when things are not going her way which is most of the time. She doesn’t make any stupid decisions that make me want to pound my head against a wall and despite her attraction to Carson, she doesn’t let all the feels consume her and distract her from the primary purpose of her mission – to find the mob boss’s daughter so he can remove the geas from her.

I would have liked to see more Goodnights but the two we have are more than enough. And the plot is rather more complicated than one would have thought it to be with secret agendas and motivations holding sway. We get a glimpse of the lengths a person can go to for power and how a person’s desire to do good can be twisted and utilized to commit actions that would have the opposite effect.

I loved this book a whole lot and if you are looking for something thrilling and wondrous, this is for you. If you dislike the cover on the hardback, the paperback has the beautiful original cover. Get it, read it and enjoy it.