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

9. Savvy, by Ingrid Law

I honestly wanted to read this book because of its cover. Which you're not supposed to do, but hey, sometimes judging a book by its cover works out. This time it didn't, though.

This book was about a family of people with exciting talents like electrical manipulation, the ability to create land, water manipulation...other elemental manipulation, etc. You get the picture. You turn 13 and your "savvy" manifests. So on the main character's 13th birthday, her dad is in an accident (he is a normal dude) and she freaks out, wants her savvy to be something that saves lives, finds herself on some madcap road trip with her brothers and some stuck up preacher's kids on her way to find her dad. I like reading about siblings, especially brothers, and I liked her youngest brother who hides like a cat and doesn't talk to people.

Still, though, it was thoroughly mediocre writing with really obvious plot twists and there was too much God in it for my liking. He wasn't a large force in the book, but I guess everyday references to stuff like praying for your coma-bound father to wake up rub my bitter atheist heart of stone the wrong way. Whatever.

But it was a J book, meaning its intended audience is like 8-13 year olds. And when I was 8-13 I wouldn't have caught on to the transparently contrived foreshadowing, I hadn't solidified my annoyance with unnecessary references to the Lord, and the chaste handholding would have made me blush pleasantly.

Also, the concept of powers manifesting at a certain age has always been extra cool (I am still waiting for my Hogwarts letter, and with each passing birthday I amuse myself by pretending that in the real world it comes not at eleven, but one year later than the age I just turned). So basically I'd have liked it if I was 10, or if it was the same premise but for older people.

As it is, though, I'd recommend wholeheartedly it to any young kid who, like myself at their age, desperately wished to stumble upon one of the many secret magical worlds hiding quietly within our own. Just, you know, for myself, it was kind of boring. I did read it in like one sitting, though, so it didn't take much out of my life.

Pages: 342
Time: Mar 27
Rating: 5, unless you are 10, then maybe 7.5

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