The Amazing Screw-on Head, by Mike Mignola (2002) K

Date Read: 1.30.09
Book From: Personal Collection
Reviewer: Kakaner

This humorous, 2003 Eisner Award winning one-shot is the story of an unlikely superhero, Screwn-on Head, who researches an occult myth at the behest of Abraham Lincoln. Apparently, an evil zombie named Emperor Zombie has stolen important ancient tomes that could lead to the destruction of the earth. The cast of this comic also includes Mr. Groin, Screw-on Head’s manservant, and Patience, Screw-on Head’s old vampire lover.

the-amazing-screw-on-head-opening-sequence

I actually first watched the TV pilot adapted from this comic written and developed by Mike Mignola (best known for Hellboy) and Bryan Fuller (Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies). After holding out for about a month to find a copy of The Amazing Screw-on Head, I gave up and attained a much more accessible copy of the TV pilot. Later, I finally found a copy on eBay (cursed OOP’s).

Continue reading The Amazing Screw-on Head, by Mike Mignola (2002) K

King Rat, by China Miéville (1998) E

Date read: 10.10.08
Read from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

The day after stumbling drunk into his father’s flat, Saul Garamond wakes to find that he is the chief suspect in his father’s killing – which occurred as he slept one room over. Sprung from jail by a raggedly pompous, sinuously sinister figure who calls himself King Rat and claims that Saul’s mother was herself a rat, Saul uncovers the truth of his father’s death, and of his strange heritage in the sewers of London.

So this was an “eh” sort of read. Very Miéville (twisty, dark, and Urban with a capitual u, and an umlaut for good measure), and  good for a first novel, but still obviously a first novel – it’s clear why he didn’t make it big until Perdido Street Station. I found the book intriguing, but not compelling: I was convinced of its mythology and milieu, but not terribly interested, and it simply didn’t have the heft and engrossing sense of reality that the Bas-Lag books do. Add in a general sketchiness as far as character development goes, and the result was that that I imagined Miéville sitting down one day and telling himself that he wanted to write a novel about the Pied Piper legend…. WITH DRUM ‘N’ BASS. And of course a good helping of Socialism. So: too many pet elements without enough connective tissue for them to hang together comfortably. I did like the ambiguity of the King Rat character, though, and found him a memorable figure.

For the record, those interested in other Pied Piper retellings might try looking up Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents and the first story, “Paid Piper,” in Tanith Lee’s collection Red as Blood. The former is very polished and amusing, and the latter is very weird. There’s also a not-so-great one with a silly twist ending in Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling’s Snow White, Blood Red (from their retold fairy tale anthology series), whose not-so-greatness is manifest in the fact that I can’t remember the author, although the title was something along the lines of “A Sound, As of Angels.” Hmm.

Go to:

China Miéville
Looking for Jake (2005) K
The City & The City (2009) K

Ender in Exile, by Orson Scott Card (2008) K

Date Read: 12.28.08
Book From: BNN Piracy now Personal Collection
Reviewer: Kakaner

After Emera posted her Shadow Puppets review, I was inspired to dig this up, so here it is.

Summary

After the Bugger Wars, Ender is caught in social crossfire and a political tug-of-war on Earth; as a result, he ultimately decides to embark on a deep space colonization journey with his sister Valentine. Through the eyes of other colonials, Ender’s Battle School acquaintances and mentors, and Ender himself, we learn of Ender’s journey to becoming Speaker for the Dead. Along the way he encounters many of his old Battle School jeesh and finds himself once again involved in and responsible for their actions.

Review

This will be a rather spotty review– at the time I read Ender in Exile, I simply wrote down different aspects or parts that really jumped out at me or about which I had something to say. And since that is what I have to work with, that is what you’ll get.

I picked this up (like I suspect most others did) after having been away from the Ender universe for years. So many things were disconcerting yet familiar… such as the ever-present discrepancy between the age and maturity of characters. For example, whenever Card reminded us that Ender was 12, I would do a huge double-take. Same with Valentine. And Virlomi. And basically all other world/nation leaders. When I read Ender’s Game as a child, I thought the concept was brilliant, and really admired Ender and his jeesh for being so ahead of their time and age. However, the more I read into the Ender universe the more I wonder if it’s possibly Card‘s inability, disregard, or lack of willingness to embrace the YA characters and genre.

Continue reading Ender in Exile, by Orson Scott Card (2008) K

Shadow Puppets, by Orson Scott Card (2002) E

Date read: 8.22.09 (re-read; originally read in about 2004 or 2005)
Read from: Borrowed from Kakaner
Reviewer: Emera

N.B. This review is probably not very accessible to anyone who hasn’t read any of the Shadow Saga sequels to Ender’s Game, as this comes nearly at the tail end of the series. If you haven’t read any of the series, you may also wish to not read this review for fear of spoilers.

Some poor decision-making on the part of Peter Wiggin, adolescent Hegemon extraordinaire, leaves the fledgling Hegemony and its resources in the hands of Achilles. Though nominally disgraced in the eyes of the world after the revelation of his international-scale treachery, Achilles is as dangerous as ever. His new power puts him in position to re-enter the game of political manipulation, and sends Bean and Petra – his most hated enemies – into hiding. Meanwhile, the other members of Ender’s Jeesh continue to jockey for the precedence of their respective countries, while themselves often ignored or manipulated by their own governments. In short, the world is paying the price for having nursed a generation of young Napoleons, and Bean and Petra find themselves at the center of events, just when they have come to realize that what they value most is simply each other’s happiness.

My main impression of this was: bridge novel. It’s so obviously written as the sort of mid-series book that has to begin at one place, and get to another, such that while I was fairly engaged when reading, I kept on losing interest in following it as a whole. Overall I’ve become slightly disenchanted with Orson Scott Card, both on the basis that I find many of his political and personal opinions repugnant and on the basis that… frankly, I don’t think he’s a genius as much as I used to anymore. I’ve been re-reading the Shadow series because the final book hadn’t yet been published when I first ran through the series, so I’ve had to catch up again. A lot has changed in how I read in these past few years, so while Ender’s Game is still next to sacred in my canon and thus I don’t let myself nitpick it, it’s easier now to see the flaws in the rest of his books.

Continue reading Shadow Puppets, by Orson Scott Card (2002) E

The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger (2003) E

Date read: 8.27.09
Read from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

Henry DeTamble travels, involuntarily, in time; Clare Abshire is the woman who has loved him since she was 6 years old, and he, displaced in time – but in his own timeline already married to her – introduces himself to her in a meadow. The Time Traveler’s Wife charts the the convoluted course of their love, and all the hazards, vagaries, joy, and anguish that Henry’s strange condition brings into their lives.

Kakaner has been begging me to read this for years. This August I finally gave her the satisfaction of receiving a barrage of emails from me exclaiming over the book as I plowed through it in a handful of days. I was absolutely sucked in, and despite her warning that she’d found the first 100 pages of the book slow going, the first half-ish of the book was actually my favorite. I loved the slow back-and-forth as Clare works her way through life to her first meeting with in-time Henry – I found the scenes of her childhood and young adulthood (and the interspersed glimpses of Henry’s childhood and his first, innocently bedazzled experiences of time travel) beautiful and singularly lush, and I loved feeling so connected with Clare as a character, so immersed in her experience of growing up, and feeling as intensely as she does the anxiety and excitement of each impending encounter with Henry. (Sucker for young love, right here.)

Continue reading The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger (2003) E

If you’ve ever felt inadequate about your bookshelves…

…take a look at Neil Gaiman’s library. As featured in Shelfari, which appears to be a sort of Facebook for people obsessed with books.

The only other time I’ve seen that many (predominantly) genre books in one place is, well, never. (Maybe Kakaner has seen more, given that she’s personally ransacked the catacombs of the MIT Science Fiction Society Library, but I’m still betting that Mr. Gaiman’s shelfapalooza could hold its own.) Also, this is apparently only “the downstairs library,” as the “upstairs library with all the good reference stuff in it” is not featured.

….uh.

It’s pretty delicious to go through each full-size photo and check out the individual books – like four copies of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s Swan Sister, and a Swedish (?) edition of one of the Sandman volumes.

Now excuse me while I go and take a cold shower.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by Lisa See (2005) K

Date Read: 7.28.07
Book From: Borders Piracy
Reviewer: Kakaner

Summary

Lily is born to a poor village family, but a prominent matchmaker notices Lily at a young age and informs her that her physical beauty may promise a prosperous marriage. To help the process, Lily is paired with a laotong (Chinese companion for life), Snow Flower, to increase her credibility and status. For their entire lives, Snow Flower and Lily share a deep friendship and endure their hardships and married life together.

Review

Back when I first reviewed this book, I wrote down “Good… awesome… but not mindblowing”. And it was exactly that. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is such an excellent book– great character development, writing, plot, historical references– but it is never one that I immediately think to recommend to people. It’s definitely a book that misses the wow factor, and as engaging as it is, fails to completely immerse the reader in the world. I found myself reacting very strongly to events in the book, but not coming away feeling attached.

Overall, many elements of the plot are a bit of a reach in that I think it was extremely unlikely that all of these fortunes would fall upon a common Chinese village girl. In this way, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan reminds me of Memoirs of a Geisha, another book that clearly knows its history and society’s makeup but reaches a bit too far to make an interesting and compelling story. However, if you focus on just the laotong relationship instead of how it came to be, it really is quite beautiful. Their dialogues really impress upon the reader the objectification, cruelty, and lack of purpose experienced by Chinese women.

It’s certainly a book to read if you are interested in historical chinese traditions. In particular, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan contained one of the most vivid accounts of footbinding I had ever read. See devotes an entire chapter to Lily’s hardships during her footbinding experience, underlining the layers of tensions between Lily and her family that accumulate because of this process. It is extremely instructive in the nature of the relationship between parent and child in older chinese cultures, as well as the female to society.

If you liked Memoirs of a Geisha, you will enjoy Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, but prepare yourself for a different emotional journey.

Go To:

Lisa See

The Inside, by Isaac Marion (2008) E

Date read: 2.6.09
Read from: Originally borrowed from Kakaner; now in personal collection, via Burning Building
Reviewer: Emera

At twelve, David falls asleep on a schoolbus, and meets, literally, the girl of his dreams. In real life, he grows up, marries a woman he thinks he loves, and proceeds to destroy both of their lives. He is unable to shed the belief that somewhere beyond the world he sees every day, there’s another one that’s more vital, more beautiful – and most importantly, is home to the girl whom he still glimpses in maddeningly brief and unpredictable snatches. Soon, even his waking life is invaded by the inexplicable: radio towers appear and disappear; cryptic cassette tapes appear on his welcome mat; he wakes up in his car in places that he doesn’t remember driving to. David is terrified, infuriated, and eventually obsessed by these “messages,” desperate to take control and escape a life that seems to hold no meaning except for the conviction that love lies elsewhere.

The Inside is a strange book. Though I hate to pin it down with genre terms (I know, then why am I doing it?), it’s most easily described as part psychological horror/suspense, part romance, part weird. After Kakaner lent me her copy (I bought my own later), I was haunted by it every moment that I wasn’t actually reading it, quite as obsessed as David, and a little frightened. Ultimately, I didn’t even care so much about the eventual reveals as I did about the process of getting to them, which is absolutely absorbing, often moving, and beautiful in a crazed, pained kind of way. I do think the novel falters towards the end, which I found somewhat rushed and a little incoherent, and there are certain other moments when Marion tries too hard to maintain the book’s tone, and slips into wryer-than-thou territory. Overall, though, Marion is an extremely assured writer, with a distinctive, effective voice and good control of pacing and plot.

Continue reading The Inside, by Isaac Marion (2008) E

Unveiling our Top 10 YA Books List

The time has come for another list! As you will all soon come to realize, Emera and Kakaner have a dire weaknesses for creating and maintaining lists. We are also both fanatic collectors and readers of YA books, even in our post-teenage years

The list is reproduced below, but its permanent home is on our Lists page here:

The Black Letters Top 10 YA Books

In alphabetical order by author:

  • Alice in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll
  • Ella Enchanted (1997) by Gail Carson Levine
  • The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) by Justin Norton
  • Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1971) by Robert C. O’Brien
  • The Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960) by Scott O’Dell
  • Bridge to Terabithia (1977) by Katherine Paterson
  • The Perilous Gard (1971) by Elizabeth Marie Pope
  • The Witch of Blackbird Pond (1958) by Elizabeth George Speare
  • Maniac Magee (1990) by Jerry Spinelli
  • Dealing with Dragons (1990) by Patricia Wrede

Well, we started with about 20 choices and it was slightly tricky narrowing it down to 10. The genres range from fantasy to urban fiction to historical fiction to animal fiction, which we believe is a pretty healthy smattering of YA genres. If anyone hasn’t read any of these, well, he or she should. All these reads would probably take about an hour, two hours tops, and promise to be most rewarding.

Anna, by Isaac Marion and Sarah Musi (2009) K

Date Read: 6.11.08
Book From: BurningBuilding, now Personal Collection
Reviewer: Kakaner

The summer I discovered Isaac Marion‘s fiction (or more correctly, Emera discovered and I piggybacked on that), I ran around my friends group trying to get everyone to read his stories. I basically spent all of a work day on BurningBuilding engrossed in his short stories, sometimes reading some more than once. Out of all these, the one I repeatedly recommended was Anna, a story I believe is impossible not to love.

Anna is the first person tale of a young ghost who wanders through earth and time, and one day, falls in love with a young boy and follows his life. The story is a mixture of emotions, atmosphere, and a small bit of dialogue that somehow come together to produce a sweeping epic effect. Its simple but beautiful prose is proof that one doesn’t need embellishments and flourishes to successfully tell a story.

The word that always comes to mind when I read Anna is “floating”. First of all, Anna… well, she floats, so I believe it is appropriate. But the word also captures the way Anna lives out her “life”, carried by a wind of time, sometimes skipping 10 years, sometimes 100. This ephemeral quality is also skillfully conveyed by Sarah Musi‘s illustrations, which feature a lot of flowing lines and a bit of whimsy.

In particular, Anna contains one of my favorite scenes ever:

“One day in high-school the boy met a beautiful girl, and they kissed under the football bleachers. Anna turned away, and wished for a strong wind to blow her far from there, but the air was still. She floated into a mountain instead, moving through the rock for miles until she reached the mountain’s heart, and closed her eyes there, feeling the warm, dark crush of the mountain’s life grinding around her.”

I love the idea of withdrawing into the heart of a mountain to mourn. It is such a powerful, majestic image (or maybe I just love mountains and am obsessed with Now We Have a Map of the Piano by Mum), and I like to believe the mountain also lends Anna strength for the rest of her journey.

As of this entry, Marion still has 25 remaining copies of Anna. These are gorgeous, self-published illustrated books on very fine, sturdy paper. If this sounds interesting, you should definitely purchase a copy before Marion becomes too famous =)

Go To:

Isaac Marion
Purchase Anna
Online Sample
Anna (2008) [E]