12, 13, 14 The Last Apprentice, by Joseph Delaney

Hey, I'm back! I started a bunch of reviews 4 months ago, so I'll finish some of those and then skip around, probably not reviewing much of what I read this summer. Oh well. At least this blog is alive again.

I lost the piece of paper I used to take notes on this book, and I finished it ages ago, but we'll see what I can remember (the entire point of this blog...oh well) about what I wanted to say.

This book is the first in a series. I'm actually up to book 4 in this series now, since I started this entry early last May. So Technically this entry can be about Revenge of the Witch, Curse of the Bane and Night of the Soul-Stealer. Anyway, the series is about a kid named Thomas Ward who is the seventh son of a seventh son, which means he is eligible to apprentice as a Spook. A spook lives a solitary and terrifying life, wandering around the country and getting rid of evil things that plague everyday society. It's not any sort of secret, though. Everyone's aware of ghosts and boggarts and witches and things, and they need a spook's knowhow on defeating this kind of thing to live peacefully.

I am kind of a wimp when it comes to scary things and I will admit that I read this in my bed at night with my bankie wrapped around me tightly. It wasn't too scary, though. I really like the art in this book, too. There is a whole page for chapter art, not just below the chapter titles, so that's neat. Lots of crosshatching and sketchy linework or whatever it is that art stuff is called.

Something that is kind of annoying, though, is how the back covers proclaim that this is the ideal series for kids who've outgrown Harry Potter. Sunday Times Review, please! These books are cool, and they have neat, creatively imagined monsters and an intricate enough plotline, yes. But there's no way it's even close to as scary or complex or sad or risque as HP. I wonder how many books in this blog I compare to Harry Potter? Maybe I should read less YA fantasy. Or maybe not.
Pages: 340-500, depending on which book
Time: may-july
Rating: 7

11. Skulduggery Pleasant, by Derek Landy

I've got 5 books to report on, so I am starting with the easiest review.

This book cover is hilarious, y/y?

Kids are checking this out left and right at the library, and I found myself on lunch break with nothing to read, so I picked it up. It is about this chick who leads a boring life and then her uncle dies, leaving her all his stuff, and then a LIVING SKELETON named Skulduggery Pleasant comes and saves her from some dude who tries to kill her. Turns out there is this whole huge world of magic people hanging out in the world (except anyone can learn magic it seems like, but most people never notice that they can) and there is some big bad dude out to steal everyone's magic and enslave the nonmagic population. Oh, and lolz, if you though Lord Voldemort was a dumb name, the Big Bad in this book is called Nefarian Serpine. SERIOUSLY?
It's times like these when I am completely astounded by the genius of one Joanne Katherine Rowling. It seems pretty simple to come up with some sort of semiplausible (plausible as fantasy, not reality), world but really difficult to create one that isn't really dumb and with a million holes in it. This book was fun to read. I read it on the plane to Nicaragua and I was thoroughly wrapped up in wanting to know what happened next, but that isn't the only thing that makes a book good. There were no real layers to it. I made no bonds with the characters and in no way did the world created by the author seem real at any point. One mark of a good book is that it sucks you in and you forget you are looking at words on pages because you are seeing the world of the novel as though it were real in your mind's eye. This is hard for any book, but even more hard for a fantasy/sci-fi book, because it has to convince you, even if just for a moment where the story is getting really intense, that it is real. Not real as in within the laws of physics, but real as in you are not thinking "I am reading a book about ___," you are thinking only of what is happening in the story. Harry Potter does that (and of course many others, like LOTR, but that's an entire other league of detailed insanity). JKR puts so much backstory into it that there's not a question you could ask that she wouldn't have the perfect answer lined up for. Derek Landy, with this book, didn't try that hard.

I am going to talk about this even more when I review a book called The Dark is Rising.

It did deal with some pretty neat concepts, though. I like stories that place a lot of importance on names. I have a half baked J novel concept about the magic of names in my head. In this book they talk about how if you know something's real name you can have power over it. In the context of the book it is magic, of course, but it is one of those things that is really just a metaphor for real life. You know, if you know someone's true self you can use it for good or for evil. In the book, everyone has 3 names: your true name (all of them are located in this heavily protected book that no one can read so no one actually knows this), your given name, and your chosen name.

I was pretty pumped about how the main character got to choose her own name. Her given name was Stephanie, and I really hate that name, so I was jazzed she'd get to pick something else so I would get to stop reading "Stephanie," but then she went and picked Valkyrie Cain. Ugh. Skulduggery is a cool name, though. Props, skeleton dude.

So basically it was fun and if there was a sequel (he sort of sets it up for one) I might read it and if they make a movie I might watch it, but I'm not going to be upset if that day never comes.

Pages: 400
Time: Apr 11-14
Rating: 6, maybe 7.5 if I was 12 and the girl wasn't named Stephanie.

10. Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman

This is one of those books that everyone and their mom seemed to be checking out. I figured out that it was partly because it is a Battle of the Books book, but still. I eventually got around to reading it recently (I am typing this one up out of order, but other people want to read it so I need to turn it back in) and man, all the talk is not for nothing.

I have read a fair amount of fantasy in my day. I'm not much for the medieval sort of fantasy with robed princesses with staffs and jeweled headbands holing back their flowing locks on the covers. But the more contemporary sort, you know, with the kid who stumbles upon a secret world and somehow ends up really special. The genre is pretty large, though, and full of not very good books. It is difficult to make something fresh and not done a million times in any genre of fiction, but I feel like it is the most glaringly obvious for fantasy. Some books (Harry Potter, obviously) can be original and well written enough to break through all the millions of predictable plotlines and characters with stupid names. The Graveyard Book pulls it off.

A Man Jack (you find out bit by bit that he's a part of this governmental conspiracy group of Jacks thing) breaks into a house, kills a mom, dad, sister, and the baby escapes (okay yeah that does sound a bit like HP, but it is different because the family is normal and the baby is normal and it just wanders away; it doesn't get saved by magic). The baby wanders into the graveyard across the street and the spirits living (residing?) there, upon figuring out his situation, decide to raise him themselves.

They name him Nobody, call him Bod for short, and give him the protection of the graveyard, meaning he's invisible to the typical mortal, just like they are. He grows up, gets into many kinds of trouble, meets a lady, deals with the Jacks as they try and finish the job, etc.

So as much fun as I've been having reading the fluffy YA fantasy lit (I will review a book called Skulduggery Pleasant that fits into this category perfectly soon), it was really cool to read a book that is what the genre is supposed to be about.

It has a really creative interesting story, good writing, an array of lovable and hatable characters (my favorite being Silas, Bod's semi-mortal caretaker), and an ending that really gets you. It ends at a perfect place in a perfect way, but it still makes me want a sequel. Badly. Nice job, Gaiman.


Pages: 312
Time: Apr 22-24
Rating: 9

6. Life as We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Somehow this book ended up having been put on hold for me at the library. I didn't add my name to the list, and no one I know owned up to it either. It seemed pretty interesting, being about the apocalypse and stuff, so I read it. It ended up being not very interesting, but I went ahead and finished it.
It's the story of this 10th grader and her family after an asteroid hits the moon and knocks it in a closer orbit with the Earth. This messes up things like tides, causing tsunamis, volcanic action, earthquakes, etc. They hang out in their house and try to survive and things like that.

It had potential, but it pretty much sucked. The woman didn't really write poorly; it just wasn't anything memorable and the story was boring. There was some subplot with her being kind of obsessed with some figure skater that was from her hometown and made it big, and then he shows up halfway through the book when like everyone else is dead, skates with her on a pond, and never comes back. It was really annoying. Either take out that subplot or make it matter, woman. also, I'm not sure about the science behind it. I think she might be close, but I wanted a little more backing for all the things that happened after the moon came closer.

It was like someone took The Day After Tomorrow and made it even worse and without any LULZ. They mostly just sat around making bad decisions about water usage. "Oh no, kids! Half the world's population is decimated, we have zero government assistance or healthcare or electricity! I'm limiting us to one bath a week apiece. Our well water should last us to eternity, despite all the drought we've been having!" It was such a consumerist view of what "bad times" means. Wah wah we can't go to McDonalds wah wah I miss the microwave wah wah." Grow some balls. Ok, so in the event of an apocalypse I might miss microwaves a bit. But not very much, and guess what they never mentioned the whole book? Music! What kind of asshole doesn't even think about the fact that all their music is hiding on a dead-ass computer? I'd be hoarding batteries for a boom box, or rigging up my record player to be crankable. Or something.

The back was all "You are going to crap yourself this is so scary!" But it wasn't scary in the slightest. It was like an apocalypse novel for people that had never thought about an apocalypse thoroughly before. Which is probably lots of people, and I am probably a minority in my "what can I ask for for my birthday that will aid me after the collapse?" mentality. But still. Boring.

The main character was an SJ, too. Who writes SJ main characters? BORING. Ugh.

I think that crisis novels written from the P.O.V. of a child (or young adult) can be really poignant if done well. You're supposed to get something out of the fact that you're seeing the world fall apart through the simplified lens of a child's eye. Kind of like Persepolis! But this book didn't pull that off, and was just not very interesting, instead.

God, I could write such a good apocalypse novel.

Pages: 360
Time: Feb 16-Mar 4
Rating: 3

5. Boy Meets Boy, by David Levithan

I'd never heard of this book before a kid checked it out from my library. It looked interesting, considering my library's severe lack of GLBT anything, so I decided to put in on hold for myself. The kid took forever to bring it back, so I forgot about it, but it came back in a few weeks ago. I had it with me in my bag when I was babysitting. The kid I was sitting was engrossed in some creepy Disney Channel show, so I was bored. I had originally planned on reading another book next, but this was all I had handy, so I read it anyway.

It's a sort of day-in-the-life type narrative of this gay high schooler named Paul. He has boy troubles, family troubles, best friend turns into a bitch troubles, plans a school dance, does his homework, learns a bit about himself. That sort of thing.

At first I pretty much hated it. The plot is simple (as the title indicates), and there was just too much too-good-to-be-true gay stuff. Like, the boy scouts changed to the pride scouts because boy scouts don't include gays, the PFLAG is bigger and more involved than the PTA, and everywhere you look another character is gay. It sort of reminded me of the worst kind of fanfiction where it's like "Oh my, Harry's gone and slept with the entire Slytherin Quidditch team! He'll have to move on to the Ravenclaw team now. I hear that Roger Davies can handle a quaffle if you know what I mean." Anyone? Just me? Ok anyway, the point is that everyone does not need to be gay in order to make gay literature significant! I think it'd actually be much more effective if the world in the book was more realistic, instead of taking place in a superopenminded town where one kid's parents are religious and conservative and everyone else in town sports a rainbow bumper sticker. Maybe I'm just too used to the south, where the opposite is the norm?

To be fair, it does seem like lots of times gay people are mostly friends with gay people, so that could be why almost all of the characters in the book were gay. I dunno.

Anyway, I was real pissed this was the only book I had with me, but since this was the case, I kept reading it. And it really ended up sucking me in. Those things I said up there still bothered me, but Levithan was really extravagantly good at creating interesting, believable characters, despite the unbelievable setting he put them in. The main character in this book (Paul) looks at certain aspects of life the same way I do, and this is something I do not think I have ever seen so accurately described before, by anyone I know or in any book I have read. By this I mean, mostly, the importance of the moment. The tiny details that make a space of time meaningful. Paul is always describing the actions of people in this poetic way where he interprets them and their many reasons for doing what they do. He notes the subtlety of body language and knows what people mean between the words they don't say, talks about objects holding secrets, stories being tangible things, and understands the weight of the important balance of old love and new love. So basically his mind is analyzing everyone around him in the same way I do, and describes it better than I've ever been able to describe it. So for that I really liked the book.

It wasn't excessively campy, with dumb stereotypical gayness all over it. There was some camp, but it was in the background. I liked the universality of the feelings the characters felt, that it put forth that love is love and homosexual love isn't different in either a worse or better way than hetero love. The honest emotions and beautiful simplicity of the love story made up for the implausible setting, but dammit, the book would have been a 10 if the setting were more realistic. Also, the last few lines of this book were kind of too feelingsy for me, so that's gonna cost it some points. All in all, it was like a more gay and less lame version of The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Although, to be honest, I loved the hell out of Perks back in the day.

Anyway, I finished this forever ago. This seems to be a theme. It is looking like, with my current schedule, I will not make it to 50 books this year. I'll keep trying, though.

Pages: 185
Time: Feb 10-Feb 12.
Rating: I dunno, 8.75 for characterization and style and 5 for what were you thinking with that unrealistic background noise?

3. Coraline, by Neil Gaiman

Coraline was my first Neil Gaiman book. I'd always heard of him, but never wanted to read any of his stuff because I think I lumped him in with Stephen King, which was probably not the right thing to do. It was really interestingly written and very creepy. If I'd been in the intended age bracket when I read it I would probably still be having nightmares.

Coraline is a little girl leading a comfortable (but boring) little girl existence when she stumbles through a door into a world that is a lot like her own, only a little off. All of the characters from her regular life are distorted and seem, at first, to be happier versions of their real selves. Soon enough the differences become more than just the button eyes everyone has, and what starts out as harmless difference slowly slides into a life-or-death race for time against a creepy (and sort of sexist maybe in the GIMME MORE BABIES MORE MORE MORE BABIES! way)pseudo-mother.

What I liked about this book the most was the confrontation of the assumption that what you want and what you need are the same thing. Everyone seeming to have everything they want ends up coming off decidedly creepier than you might think. If the movie they made is anywhere as spine-tingly as the book, I will definitely go see it. I don't like thrillers or murder mysteries or anything like that. This book had some good, old fashioned otherworldly creepy that never felt forced or heavy handed.

I will probably want to read more Gaiman after this. Owen recommended the Graveyard Book. Any others?

Pages: 192
Time: Jan 19-22
Rating: 7.5
Also, sorry for taking so long to post this. I finished this book forever ago and am almost done with another one.

2. Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi

Huzzah! I did not give up so soon! I have a more or less constant stream of quality YA lit coming at me from Owen's side of the library, so I was able to finish another one in a relatively timely manner. Sort of.

This is a graphic memoir that spans the childhood of the author. She lives in Iran during the Islamic revolution/Iran-Iraq war. This is another period of history I didn't previously know much about. Chances are, most of history is something I don't know much about. Ok, so that wasn't a very astute statement, but anyway, I was occasionally confused, as it's one of those books where the protagonist is a kid who tells things as they understood them at the time, not with the clarifying benefit of hindsight.

I really liked the hearing of the horrors of war through her lens of inexperience, though, despite the confusion. It reminded me of what I've heard about that Foer book about 9/11 that I haven't read. Occasionally it did leave me wanting more information, but when things got intense (which happened all the time- you barely have time to get to know a few of the characters before they get killed off), it is sobering to watch these things happen through the eyes of a child.

This is one of those books that makes me wish I knew more than 1.5 languages, because I could tell there were things lost in the translation from the original French. Graphic novels are full of short, sometimes disjointed sentences anyway, and the translation was sometimes awkward, but that isn't the book's fault.

I didn't particularly identify with Marjane much, as I was not a particularly political kid. I did think she was pretty endearing, though, mouthing off to her extremist teachers and talking to both God and Marx at night.

The art was cool, too. It would be pretty disappointing to read a graphic novel and not like the art, actually, but I found the simplicity of the black and white appealing. I watched most of the movie version of this book the other day, also. The movie also covered the sequel to the book I read, but I've not read that yet. The movie's art was the same as in the book, except moving, so I liked watching it a lot. The plot moved kind of fast and left things out, which was too bad, but that usually happens with film adaptations anyway. The swirly prettiness of the movie mostly made up for it, but not entirely. I want to read the second one now, but I probably won't do it right away.

I spend a lot of time griping about American politics. So yeah, a lot of things are wildly messed up in my country. But when you're reading about people getting arrested for having playing cards and executed for possibly being maybe a little Communist, and you yourself live in a country in which people can manufacture and sell presidential shaped sex toys on the internet, it sort of puts things into perspective.

Pages: 153
Time: Jan 14-18
Rating: 7