Christine
In 1988, I totally had hair like the main character's. This graphic novel gets the nostalgia right in a big way, without being too reliant on that element. There's plenty of substance, as well as strong plotting reasons for the setting. Seeing those reasons emerge is a huge driver of this story - as we saw more clues about what was happening, I became increasingly desperate to find out what would happen next! Action packed, with a cleverly enticing mystery to pull you along - this story is addictive.
Do yourself a favor - if you decide to give this a try, just have Volume 2 standing by. I'll bet when you turn the last page of this volume, you'll have a burning need to read on!
Oh, and by the way, this has some of the best depictions of nightmares I've ever seen. It viscerally captures the messed up logic, mishmash of subconscious flotsam, and terrifying emotional impact that makes you wake up with your heart hammering after a bad dream. The subconscious flotsam also represents not just an individual girl's but that of the collective unconscious of 1980s America - brilliant!
This put me through an emotional wringer! At first it was a bit of a slog, and the detective story didn't really draw me in. But then the overall mystery and the political machinations really got me interested, and I couldn't wait to find out what happened next. Then it seemed like every time we were closing in on a climax and resolution, there would be a new, more difficult threat or challenge. The repeatedly rising tension eventually drove me to look up the plot summary of the last 15% or so, because my nerves just couldn't handle any more “What NOW?!” revelations.
Despite my anxiety, the ending brings together the emotional threads of the story in a pretty damn satisfying way. And the plot elements are resolved, though I found it a little confusing. Or unsatisfying, or something. Without giving spoilers, a big issue that drove the plot in a very urgent way suddenly gets treated as relatively trivial, and it didn't sit right with me, but I guess I can see the argument in the other direction (that it truly became relatively trivial given what develops).
Anyway, this was a really good story with some wonderful characters. Still, I'm not sure I'll read the next one, since the pacing wasn't a terrific match with my tastes. In addition to the ratcheting spiral of tension, there was a lot that could have been trimmed and suited me fine - less navel-gazing by the characters and more economical action scenes would have been nice. But I can also see why people love this book, and might welcome the slower pace and investment in detail. The characters you get to know are beautifully drawn and feel like friends by the end.
I really like Ford's fire. This was at its best when she caught hold of a topic and gave an opinion that might seem controversial or novel, but she just says it flat-out, unapologetically, and makes you realize that, hey, yeah, abortion doesn't have to be something discussed solely in hushed tones, as an unavoidably Terrible Decision, or hmm, I've been walking around for 30+ years with the unconscious assumption that women kind of owe beauty/thinness/hairlessness to the world, and that is patently ridiculous when you consciously examine it.
At other times, this feels a little rambly, and Ford goes to great lengths discussing issues that are foreign to me (like a program exclusive to Australia) or just not that pertinent in my mind. I feel like feminist writing often centers too much attention on internet trolls, and Ford spends a lot of time on a litany of awful online comments. Maybe people who are unaware of the cesspool of misogynistic comments that is internet comment sections need to see this, but it was just depressing and made me feel weary. Similarly, the extensive catalog of specific, horrifying instances of sexual violence was too much. It seemed to stray from any theme or point, and to just bludgeon the reader to the point of despair.
My other concern is that Ford's attitude toward mental illness is downright dangerous. While it is her personal, lived experience, and she has every right to avoid drugs and use long walks to handle her own anxiety/depression, she sends the message that antidepressants are bad, and frankly comes across very like the most odious David Avocado-style memes that exhort mentally ill people to “just get over” their medical condition with a good dose of nature!
Overall, I'm glad I read this, and I love Ford's passion and courage. I only wish the book were edited a little more tightly, and that she could talk about her mental health struggles without vilifying medical intervention.
This may be the strongest book in the John Dies at the End series - it retains the delicate balance of goofy humor, existential dread, and grotesque horror, but it hangs together better as a coherent arc, where its predecessors sometimes rambled with less direction.
Wong/Pargin does a great job of setting up a truly disturbing scene, or poignantly addressing depression and its impact on loved ones . . . and then having John barrel through doing something insouciant, egotistical, and ridiculous. It doesn't undo the more serious themes, it just makes them easier to handle. And provides a good portion of laugh-out-loud moments, which is a worthwhile endeavor all on its own.
And blessings on the author for his afterword, addressing the fans who have contacted him about their real-life encounters with monsters - he kindly exhorts these folks to seek medical help, reassuring them both that his work is 100% fiction, and that seeing visions like this is not uncommon, but is very treatable. You wouldn't necessarily expect important and compassionate reflections on mental illness in a book that deals so much with silicone sex butts, but this novel really delivers on both.
This is a meringue of a book - light and airy and sweet. Maybe it doesn't have a ton of substance, but it's very enjoyable. Anyone who has been a theater nerd or endured the maddening ambiguity of early teen romance will relate. It evokes very poignantly the feelings of crushes, friendships, and the difficult territory in between.
The art is fun and engaging, and you feel the author's love of theater shining through.
It's nice to see representation of different ethnicities and sexual orientations. Everyone has their own unique character, but kids of all kinds are presented as just part of the gang. Sadly, the LGBTQ+ acknowledgement has earned this book challenges and bans. Just having gay characters is pretty much anathema to so many benighted people, sadly.
I love Matthew Inman's online work, but I feel like he was under pressure to create a bunch of extra cat-centered content for this book, and that stuff is pretty ho-hum. He seems to be at his best when he can write stand-alone posts about whatever brain adventure occurs to him. Seriously, check it out. He has made me laugh till I cry, and then on occasion just cry (“It's Going to Be OK” is a really amazing story, for instance).
I think if you're a cat owner, this book will be funnier. And it's a fun gift for someone in your life who owns cats.
I read this for the PopSugar reading challenge prompt “A book you loved as a child.” I actually don't have specific recollections of this book, but I knew that I greatly enjoyed reading Bellairs as a kid, and he was instrumental in developing my enduring love of weird fiction and horror.
Unfortunately this didn't keep its magic for me. It had its moments, but felt a little off-key. I was also struck by how much Catholicism forms the backdrop - probably as a Catholic child, I didn't even notice! But as a non-religious adult, it jumped out at me, and made me wonder how accessible the story is to those of other faiths.
Overall, I think the story has weaknesses in plot and pacing that would be less noticeable to a young reader. And honestly I think my experience of Bellairs was greatly enhanced by the Edward Gorey illustrations that appeared in my old editions. They were absent from this printing, and sorely missed.
I really loved this. I do believe I'll be reading the whole City Watch series, before sampling any other Discworld threads again. Somehow the other stories never please me like Vimes & company.
I guess the heart of it is the characters. I can't decide on my favorite - of course I love Carrot (as everyone does), but Angua is awesome, Cuddy and Detritus as enemies turned buddy cops are a lot of fun, Gaspode is a delight, and Colon and Vetinari are highly entertaining. And of course Vimes is Vimes (this story includes his famous theory on how the rich stay rich by their ability to spend less money, among other cynical and poignantly true observations). The only person who gets short shrift is Sybil - hopefully she'll play a bigger part in future tales.
In its way, this winds up being surprisingly political and topical, for all the silly puns and slapstick jokes. I'll say no more to avoid spoilers, but it cemented Pratchett as an author I admire.
I listened to the audio book, and its quality was very uneven. Nigel Planer is a brilliantly talented reader, and invents gorgeous voices and accents for each distinctive character. He conveys Carrot's earnest goodness particularly artfully. But it escapes me why he styled the female lead with a voice lower and more gormless than the trolls! Also, the sound quality varies from “acceptable” to “awful,” sadly.
This juuuust eked out a third star from me, due to a few funny nerd in-jokes.
It was OK, but really failed to keep my interest. In a lot of ways it read more like a treatment for a movie that will be billed as “the next Hunger Games!” than a novel. A lot of ink was invested in describing settings, action sequences, and clothing rather than advancing the plot.
Said plot is fine - I was curious how things would play out, and the solution to the mystery was reasonably satisfying, if a tad predictable. The romance was probably at the normal level for YA - there was definitely some heat generated, but nothing gets too horizontal.
I won't be reading any possible sequels, but I'm game to take my kids to see it if it's rendered on the big screen in all its neon, CGI, Big Badass Battle Sequence glory.
We've all seen the movie, right? Well, the novel lends some interesting background to Norman's story. (Actually, the backstory is used in Psycho IV: The Beginning - cut me some slack, I watched in the Olden Days when you had to make due with what was on TBS to while away a Saturday afternoon!), and made much clearer to me Mary/Marion's motivations. It's also just a fun, quick guilty pleasure of a read.
Bloch's story is a weird collision of pop psych freakshow, character study, and Columbo-style murder mystery, with a soupcon of salacious material that probably had many boys hiding this under their mattresses in the '60s. But mostly it works, driven largely by Norman and Lila's characters. Like the film, the book wraps up with the odd doc-splaining of Norman's history and condition, which falls pretty flat, but being in Norman's head for much of the story is equal parts intriguing and repellent - but always interesting.
Definitely recommended, and the audio book was very well done - the reader does a great job at presenting the characters and accentuating the tension in the story.
This was OK, not great. For all that I'm a Lovecraft fan, some of his favorite stories fall a bit flat for me. This, “The Willows,” “Count Magnus” - they all strike me as inferior to other works by their authors.I'd say the biggest chill here comes from the “found footage” feel - the bulk of the story is a diary clearly never meant to be read by anyone but its author. The fact that the author was a young girl, and she recounts increasingly disturbing** details of her nanny's tutelage, give this a feeling of building dread.But it failed to make a full emotional impact on me, and the framing tale is off-putting in its droning pace and pedantic tone. So this is a “glad I read it, but it didn't really work for me” story.For those interested, I found Blackwood's “The Wendigo” to be a better iteration on “The Willows”;M.R. James's “Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book,” “Lost Hearts,” and “The Mezzotint” are all better than Magnus, and that's just picking the first three that appear in his catalog;As for Machen, “The Great God Pan” is the classic, in my opinion.But don't get me wrong, HPL also introduced me to some amazing stories like [b:The Were-Wolf 6519002 The Were-Wolf Clemence Housman https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328319128s/6519002.jpg 6710866], [b:The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories 129798 The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories Robert W. Chambers https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1416873291s/129798.jpg 954927], Crawford's “The Upper Berth” and “The Dead Smile,” and many others.**Knowing that Machen was a Christian who basically believed in withcraft/pixies/The Good Folk lends understanding here. For him, reading a little girl's secret diary about her initiation into pagan magic would probably be as horrifying as a diary recounting pedophilia would be to us.
This was so much fun. Take the classic Scooby-Doo cartoon characters, scramble them up a bit and morph them into real-life people (and dog), suppose that they have to confront one case where it's NOT a guy in a mask, but unnameable evil they must fight, and tell that story in a totally self-referential way - this gem is what you will get.
Cantero clearly knows and loves the English language, and thereby earns the right to color outside the lines. (He won me over early, when he correctly used the word “lectern.”) Casual neologisms get cozy with OED chestnuts. Descriptions get downright fanciful, with anthropomorphized hair and chapter intros like “She flung the door open to clamorous nonreaction, silhouetted down to a bulky jacket and a baseball cap, the blue wind blowing away the title card.” During a tense dialog, a portentous question doesn't merely hang in the air, but “levitates” over the diner table. The playful use of language is worth the price of admission all by itself.
But of course the main attraction is the metafictional take on a Saturday-morning cartoon. This is very self-consciously a work about other works, peeking through the fourth wall at you with sudden stage directions or script-style dialog, then inexplicably flowing back into standard third-person narration. Meta silliness would make me laugh out loud, but I got some shivers too. This book will broadly wink at you one moment, then the next moment the winking eye deliquesces into something unspeakable staring from a dead socket.
At times I'd say to myself, “It doesn't make sense for them to do that,” or “This sequence seems a little too goofy,” only to realize that Cantero managed to evoke these reactions as a way to make the reader reflect back on the source material. To be honest, I think he uses this trick to paper over a few weak spots, but it was still fun.
Said weak spots: the pacing is a little off for me (it probably could have been shortened to good effect), and sometimes character motivations are too murky or preposterous to be fully excused by “But that's exactly what the Scooby Gang did!” But these are minor complaints. As a whole, this is both delightful and truly original (by way of putting together lots of familiar elements, from Scooby-Doo to Lovecraft to IT, in a wholly distinctive way).
I'll end by noting that I'd love to see this adapted as anime - in talented hands the sly tone could be conveyed with visual puns and references rather than textual ones, while the horror elements would really hit home! But if that never happens, I'll be satisfied to read it again.
I picked this up “to read for 15 minutes before bed.” Couldn't put it down and finished it in one sitting.
This is a wrenching tale, beautifully told. There are two interwoven tales - one is the story of a silent girl, told in her own words. The other is the silent tale of another girl, told entirely through drawings. It's ultimately a story about desperate loneliness and grief. Does it have a happy ending or a tragic one? I'm not sure.
I know I was immediately invested in Mary's diary entries cataloging a merciless cycle of bullying and exclusion. And the drawings set in the present become more revealing of Ella's inner life and circumstances as you go.
While this story contains great sadness, it's also beautifully crafted and the drawings contribute so much that wouldn't be quite the same if told in words. This is a wonderful, different book that's well worth experiencing.
Definitely worth reading for many of the stories, notably “Who Looks Back,” “Old Wave,” “Snack Time,” “Last Things Last,” (my first experience of Delta Green) “One Small, Valuable Thing,” & “And I Feel Fine.”
There were some real clunkers as well, so I'd recommend picking this up and grazing on stories that appeal without feeling a need to plow through the whole thing. The whole proposition of the anthology is action-oriented Lovecraftian tales, which is a challenging task, after all.
This seems to be a case of a clever writer in desperate need of a professional editor. I liked the main character and enjoyed a lot of the humor, but the story needed to be quicker and more tightly plotted, and the editorial quirks (particularly the complete lack of contractions) started to grate too much. This goes on the DNF pile.
I'm not sure what this book is for, but I enjoyed looking at it. It's definitely more about the art than the text, and that art is very rich and evocative. I rarely just sit down and look at drawings, so this was a nice example of the PopSugar reading challenge leading me to books I normally wouldn't pick up!
So, why am I unsure about this? It's structured like a kids' picture book, but the drawings can be pretty disturbing. For the right kid, it might be perfect, and it seems like it's meant as an impressionable little brother parsing his sibling's admonishments through his own surreal fantasy world. So ultimately not too terrifying.
And yet. The eldritch flora (and fauna?) that spill in through the negligently unlatched door overnight - shiver! And the series of pages showing the little brother locked in a gray cell (or furnace?!) as the surrounding city crumbles to dust and black birds form a growing flock - the images give enough information to set you on a path, but leave enough ambiguity to get under your skin for a while.
Check this out if you want to spend 15 minutes restocking your nightmare fuel, or you have a particularly morbid child to read it to!
This gets high marks for bringing vegetables to the fore and coming up with some truly mouth-watering recipes. Also, there are some basic techniques such as “burning” eggplant that can become part of the cook's toolkit - to be used forever after, in many applications, not just in the particular recipe.
I can't give it five stars because it often falls into super-fussy recipes calling for a barrage of esoteric ingredients. I don't have 8 hours to cook dinner in 33 easy steps, and I don't have an artisanal goat cheese shop worthy of a Monty Python sketch in my neighborhood.
Still, some of the recipes are beautifully simple, like watermelon feta salad, and have charming notes such as, “this should be eaten on a beach.”
If you liked The Martian, do yourself a favor and check this out. It has the same artful blend of hard sci-fi with a really fun human story.
I recommend you just jump in without knowing too much. Following Bob's journey was really entertaining. (If you know the general storyline, it's not going to ruin it or anything. I just think the earlier chapters are more fun if you learn along with Bob what's going on.)
The only demerit I can give is that this isn't so much a self-contained novel as the first piece of a giant opus that they had to split up for publishing expediency. There is one arc that kind of comes home as the book closes, but for the most part a bunch of story is just left hanging.
Luckily there are two more books, and I have a big appetite for seeing this story sprawl out across the galaxy. So many intriguing ideas, so many threads that could come together later. Bring on more Bobiverse!
This was cute and had some neat ideas about making happy coziness a part of your life on the regular. It also has nicely designed illustrations that really add to the atmosphere of the book, and it gives a small window on Danish culture that was interesting.
The big demerit for this was it felt like it had a couple/three blog-posts worth of actual content, padded out into a full book.
Still, the voice of the author is warm and self-deprecatingly humorous, and this did wind up being the ideal book to read when I woke up at 3am and couldn't get back to sleep - very snug and happy, and definitely not taxing on the brain.
Yay, I had time to plow through the last 3 hours of this today! My interest level varied throughout the first 40% of the book or so, ranging from “this is freaking amazing” to “hmm, is this going somewhere I care about?” But once the key conflict was established, I was hooked.
A lot of the “drag” came from something I think is actually pretty admirable - Zoey is a fish out of water who remains totally out of her depth for a believable amount of time. Her utter failure to grasp her situation results in some painfully bad decisions, but on reflection this is thoughtful character-building. Zoey isn't a Strong Female Character or Chosen One who miraculously rises to crafty politicking and ninja skills in an improbable span. She's a barista who grew up in a trailer park and that point of view credibly drives her actions.
The other characters grow more interesting around the halfway point as well. Zoey's interactions with Will are compelling, and Andre has some great lines. I got to a point where I'd love to see Echo developed more if there's a sequel. And what I wouldn't pay to see a movie adaptation with Stephen Fry as Carlton!
On occasion an attempted witticism lands with a thud, but there's ample compensation in the bits that do work, and in some golden life advice Will delivers.
This had great atmosphere - Klein manages to evoke that Dunwich feeling in modern (yes I'm old) New Jersey, deftly setting up the natural surroundings as ominous and creepy crawly.
It also shows both deep knowledge of weird fiction, and a playful attitude in making use of references. Taking a summer to read creepy stories in a primitive building in the wild - what could go wrong? (I strongly recommend listening to the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast analysis, with guest Ken Hite - he understands all the nuance of Klein's use of uncanny literature, as well as taking the listener multiple layers deep in the “unreliable narrator” question.)
Overall, this is a must-read for fans of Lovecraft, Gothic tales, or weird literature in general.