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.

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