GAL Novelty

This is not quite a goodbye post

2011-10-14T18:04:00.001-04:00

Hey. There are a few things this blog post is not about

1) This is not the post wherein I say goodbye to the blogsphere all together.

2) Nor, is this the blog post announcing a renewed vigour of blogging... at least on this particular blog.

Over the last year in France, I felt myself change and grow in ways that are not reflected in the self that used to blog here, before I left for exchange. I was feeling a fatigue, and I thought of quitting so many times, but I still find myself lurking over review pages, never quite able to give things up. I knew I needed to change though, a restart.

So this is, I guess, a kind of table rase, a creation of a new book blog, a fresh start.

I will not delete this blog, not just yet. But I might in the future. Or I might not. Still indecisive, always.

My new book blog is http://aworldofpaperhearts.blogspot.com

Perhaps I'll see some beloved familiar faces there.

Friday Five, or Breaking the Radio Silence

2010-11-11T16:39:00.003-05:00

1. Did anyone see the new 2011 Jane Eyre trailer? I think you should go and watch the Jane Eyre trailer. I mean, I don't even like the book very much (Let me qualify this: I was more or less okay with this book, but then Mr. Rochester showed up and I hate his face. And thus I hated the book. I haven't reread or touched the book since that summer eight years ago when I was vacationing in Malaysia and yelled angrily at the book for its ending.) but the trailer's suspense spookiness drew me in. It looks all properly gothic and stuff!! I'll just, I don't know, close my eyes every time Mr. Rochester does that I Am A Poor Tragic Hero crap on me or something.

2. So, that reclist email I promised people who signed up for it. er, I kind of overestimated my abilities to make a personalized reclist? Ahaha, I don't know, I just kind of assumed that it'd be about as easy as reccing things to my friends, which I do more or less all the time, but I forgot to take into account that the reason why it's mostly easy for me to rec things to friends is because I know them pretty well, am familiar with their tastes and can rec things with ease. Whereas here, I'm finding myself having to hazard a guess from people's booklist from GoodReads and their blogs, if they own any. And... it's not the same? Like, I mean, two people can like the same Harry Potter book, but maybe one is all about the hero's journey whereas the other person just really likes boarding school with magic shenanigans. And it's just really tricky to tell.

Also as I was drawing up a preliminary list of possible book recs for each person who signed up, I ended up losing the paper. *dies* That will teach me to go the paperless way more often. Save some tries. And er, not bring blog-related things to class to fiddle with...

Don't worry I won't back out on making the reclist. I'm kind of hoping that my paper reclist is still in my room somewhere since the thought of trying to make a new list of possible recs for every person is making me die a little inside. (I am a horribly disorganized person, fyi... it's quite possible it's still here somewhere, hidden under the piles of disorderly-ness... *crosses fingers*) But if not, when winter holidays comes around I can dedicate at least 48 hours straight on working on this reclist for y'all (and I will be needing at least 48 hours since--if I remember this correctly--I spent at least 3 to 4 days straight working on that reclist before losing it and cursing the world...)

For a sneak peak though, I think a lot of my recs ended up mentioned The Summer of Ubume, Gullstruck Island, and The Lord of the Sands of Time a lot. So if you don't want to wait around until Christmas, you can check those three titles out.

3. Um, this blog. I don't know what to do with it? I had this Crisis wherein I looked at my reviews and was quite horrified to realize that a lot of them read like tangents more than anything. I kind of blame this on the fact that sometimes the things I want to talk about have nothing to do with critiquing the book as a whole but analyzing the novel from one perspective? For instance, no matter how many times I try to draw up a review for Hex Hall, all I really want to talk about is the characterization of the lesbian vampire best friend character. Which er, is not the point of Hex Hall. And they're all so rambly and disorganized! It's like I just vomit out words onto a word document and paste them up online or something! *crawls into a hole in SHAME* (Note: um, this is just me showing that I'm kind of dissatisfied with the reviewer I am and that I'm thinking of changing my reviewing style. I'm not fishing for compliments here or anything.)

And I've been having Thoughts about the whole idea behind book reviewing blogs, and what I hope to achieve with it, and I wish I kind of just knew what I want to do with it then I will know what to do? And it's very hard to organize it all in my brain because I am, in case it isn't terribly evident, one of those people who have Opinions on Everything, but this is meant to be a book blog it's not like I can go around spouting just every little thought that comes to mind and I'm starting to think it'd just be a whole lot easier if I just had a Blog of Opinions, wherein I could just say whatever I want on anything I want and not try to put things in boxes or worry too much about if I'm being coherent and comprehensible or being relevant or whatever.

But I still want to keep a book blog because I kind of miss how it really challenged me to think critically about a book I loved and if I could just find a way to make this blog work for me so that I can talk to my heart's content about the books I've read, and I really do enjoy posting about books I love and particularly doing my best to do justice to books I've loved. I mean, sometimes I feel like I got the review all wrong and it's frustrating, but other times I look back and I'm like, I think I wrote something pretty good here, so yeah. I don't want to give up. Instead, I'm trying to think of a way I can make this work for me, but for now I think it'll be safer to say that I'm on a mental hiatus until I figure something out i.e. figure out my Goals.

However, all galleys and ARC reviews will still go on. If I don't cough up that Solace on the Road review by next weekend feel free to throw stones at me or something.

4. One of the interesting things I've noticed about my reading habit in France is that I'm reading far less books geared towards teens. This is not really a taste thing, but more of a thing of economics. As I was musing with my friend on an email earlier:

I'm kinda amused by my book selection in France. Like, I never really touch the YA section because the prices are like inverse to what happens in Canada. There is only trade paperback and it's frickin expensive, like 25 bucks if we convert to canadian dollars and they don't have a 'poche' edition to them (the french version of a mass bound paperback aka the cheaper books) whereas all the adult books have 'poche' editions and it's actually cheaper to read High Literature of Serious Business than teen lit. Soooooooo I end up reading a lot of very serious novels about war or something, lol. Mostly from WWII and Holocaust related stuff.

And then, you know, I started having these thoughts about how people's reading decisions are limited what is available to them and the way it interacts with all these -isms and ladida all sorts of stuff my brain came up with that is very incoherent and probably of no interest to anyone here. ^^;

5. Hmm, I suppose I should save this for the WoW meme, but I am a very lazy meme-er so~ la. Also i just saw this today and was very excited for it and thought I'd spread my happiness around or something. ~~Yes I know this post is also a meme too, but indulge me, why don't you?)~~

Isn't it gorgeous? YA Fantasy with Latina lead, and while I can't vouch for the contents at all since I haven't read it, at least we can all admire the cover's beauty and non-whitewashed-ness.

Summary: Consuela is a typical suburban Latina teen until she unwittingly slips into the world of the Flow. Discovering that she has paranormal powers and a mission to save people from dying before their time, Consuela—who has the power to slip out of her worldly skin and cloak herself in elemental skins including water, fire, and air—joins other teens with extraordinary abilities, bound together to safeguard a world they can affect, but where they can no longer belong. Yet when murder threatens to undo the Flow, the Watcher charges Consuela and elusive, and attractive, V (who might prove more than an ally in battle) to find and stop the killer.

Readathon Wrapup

2010-10-11T08:02:00.002-04:00

A couple days late, but I've been feeling worn out post-readathon. Is anyone else feeling the same thing?

Instead of doing the final meme, I'll just give brief impressions of the book I read.

1) La prochaine fois - Still don't like it after I've had some distance with that book, and I'm pretty sure Marc Levy is not the author for me. Actually he kind of reminds me of Nicholas Sparks in terms of the romance but with a dash of fantastical elements in it? Slow, meandering, and the chemistry lacklustre... Yeah, just didn't do it for me. Interestingly enough I was quite amused by the banter of Jonathan and Peter, the two main male characters, and I'm pretty sure they had a gazillion times more chemistry with each other than Jonathan ever had with Clara. It's like, with Clara Jonathan is all doom and gloom Tragic Hero, but with Peter he suddenly develops a sense of humour. It's quite disconcerting, actually.

2) Coeur de Jade - I think, my problem with this book was the fact that I walked in with expectations for a heroine's journey with tons of character development, and lots of fantasy elements in a historical backdrop, and instead it gave me a historical epic with a large multicast with minimal fantasy and lots of action and sword fights? Which is not to say that the latter wasn't good (the sword fights were most excellent), just that it wasn't at all what I expected. I still wish that they developed Jade Heart more, and had more explorations of the dynamic between her and the dragon, but I suppose I'll have to read the rest of the trilogy to find out more. At the end of the day, while I didn't enjoy this Chinese historical fantasy epic as much as I wanted to, I'm interested and invested enough to plan on reading the rest of the trilogy. The development of the settings was pretty solid, though I thought the author could have handled the transliteration stuff better (footnotes > glossary - it's the Truth), and if this book ever became available in English, I totally would recommend others to read it.

3) Perrault's fairy tales - Some fairy tales were more disturbing than I remembered them to be (Donkeyskin and Little Red Riding Hood, for example) but I really enjoyed Diamonds and Toads, and Blue Beard. Though, wtf at the translation of the Diamonds and Toads title, the original was "Les Fées", aka The fairies, and I was very confused when I read it and thought to myself that they sounded very familiar... Interestingly enough, most of the romances have the couple actually talking to each other before marrying, and it's an interesting clue-in on the emerging feminist thoughts in Perrault's time. Of course, there were still some stuff I thought could be construed as rather genderfail-y (me and Little Red Riding Hood, we must have Words) but still, very interesting.

4) La Treve - I totally wouldn't have thought of starting off this memoir if it wasn't for the non-fiction meme, so I owe RAT for this awesome read. Primo Levi has a lovely way with words. I only barely started reading this before the whole readathon thing was over, but I plan on finishing this off sometime in the near future.

Thoughts:

Damn, reading so much French was damn hard. I can't read as fast as I want to, and I'm always deciphering words before I see the story beneath it all, and it's very frustrating and there's always that temptation to take constant breaks because my level of focus I have to employ reading in French is sooooooo draining and there's this disconnect I have when I'm reading in French than I do when I read in English. Probably because I can't sink into the story when I'm busy puzzling out the meaning. Hopefully if I just read more I'll get to a point wherein I'll be able to sink into the story instead of always floundering over elusive words, but I confess, the moment the readathon was over, I dashed off to NetGalley and read like, 3 English novels (Butterfly Swords, A Long Walk To Water, Hunger) in a day. I just miss reading novels and not having to second guess my level of understanding. I kind of feel guilty about it though, and will push myself to read more in French.

You know, maybe when I'm back in Canada or something I'll try the marathon with English novels. I've always read really quickly in English, and I'm curious to see how much I can do in 24 hours.

Dewey's Readathon: My Booklist

2010-10-08T15:57:00.006-04:00

So, I'm going to participate in this for the first time!

Priority Book List (aka I will finish them this readathon EVEN IF IT KILLS ME *_*):
Coeur de Jade, lame du dragon : Tome 1 - Le secret des masques par Kristoff Valla (trans. Jade Heart, The Dragon's Blade: Book 1 - The Secret of the Masks)
La prochaine fois par Marc Levy (trans. Next Time)

Other French Language Long Narratives:
La traversée du continent par Michel Tremblay (The Crossing of the Continent)
Les liaisons dangereuses par Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (Dangerous Liaisons)
The Sky Crawlers par Hiroshi Mori (A Japanese-to-French translated novel)
La Trêve par Primo Levi (The Truce - An Italian-to-French translated memoir)

Short French Language fictive works:
Contes par Charles Perrault ([Fairy] Tales)
Boys Next Door par Kaori Yuki (manga)
Kaine par Kaori Yuki (manga)
Neji par Kaori Yuki (manga)
The Royal Doll Orchestra - Tome 1 + 2 par Kaori Yuki (manga)

English Novels:
A Reluctant Cinderella by Alison Bond
Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
Other possible netgalleys I've received from publishers, etc.

The plan for this readathon is for me to read as much of my french novels as possible. The English novels are really just there for a placeholder in case I actually finish all these books before the 24 hours period (not likely, but you never know). Or, if, you know, I hit a certain point in my readathon wherein I start thinking I CAN'T READ ANOTHER DAMN FRENCH WORD, I have other options open to me, like the healing sight of the English word and its soothing presence of comprehensibility, or something.

Also, I may possible cheat on this 24 hour readathon, because well, this weekend the weather happens to be nice, and considering I've been living over a week of dreary rain, I fully intend on being out in the warm sun as much as possible. That would most evidently cut down on my reading time, so I may start before dawn and basically squeeze in reading time when it's dark out. Also, I intend on reading literally 24 hours, even if it isn't consecutive. Which means, let say I read for 3 hours and then took an hour's break - I won't count that one hour and consider what I've read as 3 hours in the 24 hours readathon scheme.

I will probably update this post with my reading updates on this readathon journey, so as not to bother those who have me on their feeds or google reader with a bombardment of spam.

Anyhow, is anyone else participating in this readathon? Are there any other participants planning on reading in their non-native tongue? I'd love to hear from everyone and good luck to all the participants! =D

Update 1

So it's Hour 11 in this readathon and I think I'm going to have to take back what I said about reading literally 24 hours and just count whatever I read during this 24 hour period as what I'll end up with for the challenge.

I've finished my copy of La prochaine fois, which took me 2 hours and 41 minutes, not counting all the loooooong breaks I took in between reading this. (It got to a point wherein I basically welcomed distractions from my roommates. This book! So mind-numbing!) It was such a slow read for me, considering its tiny page number. (less than 300 pages) I'm not understanding the great popularity of this Marc Levy author? The Eternal Tragic Love romance mostly induced eye-rolling reactions the whole time I spent reading this book (I do like reincarnation stories, but the way it was handled here was just so CHEESY and ughhhhhh), and I suspect if I let my brain think harder about the roles of women in this book, I'd be enraged. (Women are manipulative evil crones! Unless they're your love interest-in which case she will sigh and pine away at hero's awesomeness and then waste tragically away and die in your arms as the narrative continues to focus about how this is so Tragic For Our Male Hero! The faaaaaaaail, and the whole treatment of justifying cheating fiancee's actions, blaaaaaaaaaaaaah) But as such, I'm more mildly annoyed than anything and try not to think too much about it while I was reading. Ah well, this was a book a friend lent me, so at least I can 1) finally return it 2) honestly say I've finally given Marc Levy a shot (and will probably never read anything else by him) and 3) practiced my french.

Was 50 minutes into reading Coeur de Jade and I've reached a point wherein I'm reading the words and not even understand what it's saying. Probably because it's like, 12 am as I write this. Also this being an action thriller, a lot of the fight scenes require that mental visualization thing that I've never been really good at, and it being in french just sucks out all my brain effort into this gooey mush.

Haha, so basically out of the 11 hours so far I only spent about 4 hours reading. Honestly the rest of the time I spent either eating or hanging around outside because YAY FINALLY GOOD WEATHER.

Will now go back to see if I can read Coeur de Jade but if now I'll pop open my Perrault's fairy tale collection or the manga I have lying around.

Update 2: Hour 12

Mid-Event Survey:
1. What are you reading right now?
- I'm on Contes de Perrault.
2. How many books have you read so far?
- Well, I finished Marc Levy's La prochaine fois, was in the middle of reading Coeur de Jade until I decided to drop it for something lighter. Hopefully I'll get back to finishing it before this readathon is over.
3. What book are you most looking forward to for the second half of the Read-a-thon?
- Honestly if I manage to finish Coeur de Jade by the end of this I'll be quite content.
4. Did you have to make any special arrangements to free up your whole day?
- ... Actually I... kinda allowed myself distractions? Ironically this Saturday was the first sign of nice weather in a week and I couldn't say no to going out to the park. Also the first book I trudged through was such a painfully slow read that everytime someone knocked on my door I'd be like 'Why yes, dear roomate, come in and tell me more about distraction things! Anything if it means I don't have to read this book!' So... yeah. 8D ^^;;;;;;;
5. Have you had many interruptions? How did you deal with those?
- Kind of covered it in #4 but basically I just let them happen. When I found out today was going to be good weather though I did make an attempt to read before the start time to make up for the time I knew I was going to spend outside, but I didn't get far due to not liking my book, etc.
6. What surprises you most about the Read-a-thon, so far?
- Actually, I was surprised to hear that there is a French Readathon? I didn't know and if I did, I probably would have registered for that one instead. But oh well. Also the whole cheerleading business is very nice. I didn't expect it so when I saw all the nice comments on this post I was real happy. =d
7. Do you have any suggestions for how to improve the Read-a-thon next year?
- lol not really? It's been good so far.
8. What would you do differently, as a Reader or a Cheerleader, if you were to do this again next year?
- Choose less novels, more short stories.
9. Are you getting tired yet?
- sooooooooooo tired. I'm thinking of napping a little after this meme.
10. Do you have any tips for other Readers or Cheerleaders, something you think is working well for you that others may not have discovered?
- haha actually I think I'm really not in the position of giving others advice this time around? Perhaps when I'm a more "seasoned" readathon-er, I'll have something to contribute here.

Update 3: Hour 23

The final stretch. I finished Coeur de Jade about an hour ago, so I got everything I wanted finished on my Priority List! Yay!

At first I thought of using the time left (besides taking the time to shower/eat/daily necessity things) to just finish off my Contes collection or maybe start a manga, but at around Hour 19 there was a Non-fiction challenge and I thought I'd crack open my copy of La Trêve. Man, I forgot how eloquent Primo Levi was. Thoughtful, and humble with his select word choice and cuts through all flowery language and is deeply moving. This is the kind of book I'd like to read through slowly.

Anyhow, meme:

1. Have you ever read a memoir/true story (Or book 'based on true events'?)
-I've read a couple, both for an outside of class.

2. If so, what was the title/author?
- Si c'est un homme by Primo Levi was the most recent one that comes to mind (I read this for class). It was about the author's experience in a concentration camp. I loved it so much I bought the sequel to it on my own time. For non-class readings, there was a time when I scoured my library for every Genghis Kan biography available. I especially liked the ones that focused on his years as Temujin. I read Rape of Nanking about two years ago and am still haunted by that book till this day.

3. What what it about?
-lol kind of answered this already in #2

4. Did you like it? Would you recommend it?
-See #2

5. How many have you read?
- *shrugs* I think I read memoirs about once every one or two years? I'm usually more of the documenting historical events non0fiction reader.

6. Why or what made you want to read it?
-For Si c'est un homme, well, it was for class. I can't quite explain my fascination with Genghis Khan. Like all conquerors he committed terrible atrocities, but he had like, this grand vision, the way he thought about himself and his place in the world and I was just lured in by his story. I mean, you know how some people are like, fascinated by Napoleon (my dad is one of those people, lol) or Alexander the Great or something? Genghis Khan was that kind of person for me. Also I read The Rape of Nanking because it was the summer and I found a copy lying around my house.

7. What was the saddest/scariest one you read?
The Rape of Nanking for sure. EVERYONE, READ IT.

8. Did it have a 'happy ending'?
- No

9. When choosing a memoir/true story, do you look for a certain kind? ( i.e. historical diary, inspirational like The Freedom Writer's Diary, Christian, non Christian)
- Not particularly. With memoirs I mostly go by recommendations from others.

My Reading Journey In France: Reflections on Choice and Accessibility

2010-10-03T08:20:00.002-04:00

A MV of a French book I just recently finished direct link in case embed vid doesn't work

Looking back, I can't believe so much time passed by since I last posted. My Blogoversary went by without any comment from me, my birthday shortly afterwards, and now, it's October. *guiltyface* My apologies.

My Reading Journey In France: Reflections on Choice and Accessibility

When my Blogoversary was coming up, I had a hard time figuring out what I would say for it, mostly because I have no idea how my reading experience would be like in a different country. Because, you know, crossing an ocean to a country that predominantly speaks a non-English language really changes my reading habits. I don't have those shiny ereader things so I must rely solely on the local bookstores for books, and... You guessed it, it's hard to find English books in their original English text. Well, the ones that aren't top bestsellers or classics, at any rate. That, combined with the fact that I'm basically in France to improve my French, means that I will be doing my best to read almost exclusively in French. (This also means I'll be reading less books in general since, as I've discussed before, I read slower in French.)

I had a feeling this would impact my blogging, and, you know, it does. I'm still struggling over how I'd review a French book in an English review when 1) the book may not be available in English and thus my readers will probably not care about what I'm reviewing, and 2) I'm actually not at all well-versed in the French literary canon, (I used to not really read more than 3-5 French novels in a year, and most of that - if not all - comes from those compulsory reading materials in my French classes.) and I feel like I'm not quite at the point wherein I can fairly gauge how well the book was written on a word-by-word scale.

I'm looking at my book buying habits here over last month, and I believe that I'm buying more translated into French texts than works written originally in the French language. To be honest, this mostly has to do with the fact that manga here is cheaper than back home, and France licenses quite a number of shoujo manga I can't find in English, or they're releasing the volumes here faster, etc. Aside from manga, I'm also buying more translated novels because... Well, I find that the US publishing industry is not really up in the forefront on translating novels from other places into English. For instance, I've always wanted to read The Sky Crawlers because the movie that was based on this book was simply stunning, but so far there's no trace of a translation in English project in the works. When I found it in the local bookstore here in French I possibly may have made a public display of myself and paid 14.99 euros without so much as blinking. Also, when the book is translated from a language I am not fluent enough to read in its original language like Japanese or Korean or Chinese or Italian or German, etc etc, I feel like whatever language I read it in won't matter since things will be lost-in-translation either way and if I choose to read it in French, my French reading materials also increase.

Also, a side effect of not having read much from the French literary scene is that I'm walking into the bookstore more or less clueless and not quite sure what to buy. I'm one of those really cautious book buyers, wherein every time I pick up a book, I try to think, will it be worth it? What if this book ends up not being my thing? (Aaaaaaaaand I also look for the cheapest book prices possible, lol.) I'm picking up less reading material, and the fewer books I read, the less book reviewing materials I have. However, I suppose this factor can change once I read more and get a feel for what kind of French book I like.

Another factor in my book selections is that recently I'm much less willing to accept novels that depict a white-washed world. (Please note that I'm saying 'less willing', not completely unwilling.) I do like to see at least a hint of diversity in what I read, and, well, when I scanned the 'jeunesse' section (mostly the equivalent of the Teen's and MG section in Canada/US if the two subcategories were meshed into one) of the bookstore and trying to gleam out the novels written originally in French from the translated novels (So many translated novels!! Almost all coming from the US publishing industry! They practically take up 80% of bookshelve space! This is so strange for me... And, you know, kind of visibly showed me the clout of the US publishing hand has on a more global scale.), it is all very overwhelmingly white European. This is not to say that they don't exist, just that the ones I see on the shelf can't be more than what I can count on one hand. So, I'm basically having trouble mustering up enough enthusiasm about the jeunesse titles I see to fork out the cash and buy them.

Besides the whole book buying scenario I have, I'd like to say that I am aware that there are other ways to get English books from the online community. It's a bit limiting for me however since I'm actively avoiding book giveaways available to me from the YA book blogging world (also even if I were to rely on these giveaways not many are international) and refusing ARCS unless I can, you know, pass them along to someone else afterwards in a tour thing. Why, you might ask? Well, as much as I'd like to read all the shiny books being given out, I'm returning to Canada in a year, and the idea of lugging around a pile of ARCS back home next summer makes me wither and die a little inside, lol. I suppose the perfect fit for me then would be to sign up for those blog tours wherein I get to pass along the ARC to the next reviewer when I'm done, but the big YA blog tour sign up requires me to hand out stats info and I don't keep stats on this blog. Seriously, if I did, it'd drive me nuts. I did that once for an old defunct non-book blog I had and I constantly refreshed the page and would curl up into a ball muttering 'omg no one read that post, NO ONE LOVES ME' and I basically became a crazy person. NEVER AGAIN, people. (Okay, I admit that maybe getting that stat thing that links you to whoever links to your post or blog is useful, but I haven't gotten around to installing it yet...) When I started this book blog I told myself that this blog with first and foremost be about ME ME ME and a place for MY thoughts and I will not care if my posts are not widely circulated, how many people visit, how popular this blog is, etc. (That is not to say I don't love each and every single reader that drops by, and special love to all who decide to follow and drop a comment once in a while. It's just that I refuse to be stressed out about how 'popular' this blog is.)

An easy solution for acquiring more English reading material would be to read those NetGalley books, but I'm really bad with reading novels or other long narrative works online. I'm much better at going about reading short stories stuff online from those SFF anthology magazines (did anyone read the latest Yoon Ha Lee work Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain? It's BRILLIANT.) or fanfiction or fanzines of original works written by fandom people (my latest favourite from a pretty popular gay anthology called Shousetsu Bang*Bang: Strength, Gallantry, and Other Useless Bits - it's in two parts, set in an all-boys Chinese boarding martial arts school AND ITS HILARIOUS.) Haha, now that I think about it, online short stories are probably the only fiction pieces I've read in English in over a month...

(And I refuse to get a library card here. Apparently I have to buy a library card?! The cheapskate in me finds this an absolute scandal.)

Okay, so I'm going on and on retrospectively about my reading situation here, and you're all probably wondering, what exactly am I getting at? Well, looking at what I'm reading, I suspect that any books I will review in the future will probably be translated French books. And, you know, my ponderings over how one is limited to what they read by the resources that's available to them, book choices are shaped by one's environment etc. This is a terribly self-indulgent rambling blog spot wherein I'm thinking aloud through typing, which was helpful for me, and also is hopefully of interest to a handful of my readers.

Anyhow Question to my Readers? Do you find your reading habits or book buying choices changes? I'd be interested in hearing any stories anyone has to say about their experiences in the comments. Of course I'm not addressing just those readers who've undergone a similar going-off-to-live-in-a-foreign-country situation, but little changes, like if the seasons changes your taste in books, or a new school, etc. =D

My 150 Followers Personalized Reclist Gift Giveaway

2010-10-02T10:06:00.010-04:00

IT'S PARTY TIME! source

Once again, sorry for my absence. I actually have lots of blog post ideas I want to put in, but I haven't gotten around to really focus on this book blog until this weekend. I'm working on scheduled posts as we speak and I can AT LEAST guarantee you one blog post tomorrow. My plan is to have the following week fully of blog posts up for y'all, but as I'm terrible with promises, I'll just shut up now. Actions speak louder than words and we'll just have to see if I actually stick to this, lol

Okay, so judging from my poll and comments on the last post, only a small number of people are interested in this reclist idea of mine. However, no one said they hated the idea, so I think I'll proceed with it anyways as a gift to all those who are even slightly interested. It's just that no one will be winning a personalized snail mail reclist from a draw. Basically, anyone who fills out the form at the bottom who's a follower of my blog will definitely receive an emailed reclist from me, ie EVERYONE'S A WINNER. =D

More details:

Your personalized reclist should arrive in your mailbox within 5 to 10 business days of having filled out this form. The reclist will consist of a minimum of 3 novels with a short summary and my pitch about why I think this book would be perfect for you. Any additional title mentions will come as honourable mentions without details/specifications on why I think the book is a good fit and will only come with a title + author mention. Please note that there is no real deadline to filling out this form, except that my followers giveaway will change the moment I hit 200+ followers. Please only fill out this form once.

Optional: If you wish to get a more detailed email on any of the honourable book title mentions for what I think you will enjoy the book, please reply to the reclist I send you with 'BONUS MATERIAL' mentioned somewhere in the subject line or the body message. As the first time, this next reclist within 5 to 10 business days of having received the replied message.

Please remember that this is specifically a gift to my followers, so, in other words, you do have to be a follower to enter for this reclist giveaway.
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AM IN FRANCE + 150 Followers w00t! + Linky Guest Posts + Upcoming Blogoversary

2010-08-29T02:16:00.004-04:00

HEY FOLKS. Long time no... exist?! I truly apologize, it's just that this year I'm on a France exchange (aka I'm studying this year in France. In a French University. FOR A YEAR. AHHHHHHHH) and August was this mad dash to get all my papers sorted out and you know, getting together my living expenses and making myself familiar with the town I'm in... Okay, basically it's been deathly busy, my month of August, and I'm sorry for the lack of comments/replies/posts/etc etc. But I thinkkkkkk by next week, it will be less hectic for me and I can start making posts again! Because I have a lot of posts I want to make! 8D (but NOT until the end of tuesday, because right now I have to study for my language test, holy shit I knew I should have opened my grammar book this summer but nooooooooooooo)

Like this whole 150 followers thing! THANK YOU for choosing to follow me!! Unfortunately I won't be able to do any giveaways to celebrate because I kind of really need to conserve my money, especially this first stretch of settling myself down in a new place, and also I didn't lug any books across the ocean with me to giveaway. Well, unless you're including my copy of Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey. BUT YOU CAN'T HAVE IT, IT'S MINE MINE MINE. (You may read Agnes Grey on Gutenberg for free though, YOU SHOULD ALL READ IT, I HAVE SUCH LOVE FOR THIS BOOK, OMG.) Buuuuuuuut, I was thinking I could send people a mail of a personalized booklist recs!

Basically you tell me your likes/dislikes in a novel, and I'll put together a list of minimum 3 novels I think you'll enjoy. Everyone who asks for this will get an email from me, but there will be a draw for a customized, snail mailed booklist letter to the one lucky winner by moi at the end. But I'm not sure if anyone wants this, so I'd just like to take a poll to gauge the interest. If there's more no's than yes's then I won't bother with mailing anything out, but for the people who are interested, I'll set up a post where you can leave me your email and I'll fire away some recs at you. =D

Ahaha, I know this isn't much of a post, but I'll link to a guest post I made for Ari here: Let Us Write Our History, in which I talked about the fictional depiction of (sourlander) Asians in history through the English language canon, pulling from novels to movies to musical examples. Though, I do want to make a note that I really DO NOT think the solution is as simple as just getting more Asians to writing Asian historicals as the title might imply, but really I suck at making titles and I suppose it will have to do. This was er, actually the guest post I meant to write for Ari back then for her blogoversary but I am REALLY REALLY SLOW and thus ended up finishing it later than I wanted to.

Shoutout to Emma, I swear your guest post is coming! I'm just, really really slow. But it'll most likely end up being the usual very long guest posts I tend to end up writing, so maybe its length will make it worth it?! So sorry.

Note to self: Stop accepting to do guest posts unless I have up to 2 months to prepare or it comes with a prompt that I can more or else easily manage to brainstorm ideas for a post.

Blogoversary - it's coming up! I'm still trying to figure out what exactly I will do to celebrate, but er there will of course definitely not be any giveaways this round, ahaha... But I was wondering if anyone would be interested in doing guest posts for me here? If you are please drop a comment here with some means to contact you and we'll talk! =D

My Strange Angels hate, lemme show it to you

2010-07-29T21:05:00.003-04:00

[Note: Normally I save my book hates on Never Gonna Be Finished Books for my dreamwidth blog, but I figured since I haven't posted here in forever and I had a bookish related post all readily typed up, I'd just repost it here too. Also this Anti-Rec at least has some general concluding thoughts I had that I think go just beyond this novel, so it isn't just hating. =D]

So, there's this YA novel plaguing the shelves right now called Strange Angels by Lili St. Crow. I've read about three chapters of it.

I hate it.

I really, really, really hate it.

There are three basic reasons why I could not read beyond the 3rd chapter of this horrendous book.

1) THE WRITING

omg so atrocious. St. Crow really likes to use similes and metaphors. The problem? She kind of sucks at them. THEY DON'T EVEN MAKE SENSE!! Like, I could barely concentrate on the story because she'd throw in a line like

"my head hurts like a bowling ball being squeezed by a giant's fingers" (paraphrased, but it's in the first paragraph of the 3rd chapter if you don't believe me)

And I couldn't even pay attention to what's actually happening in the story because all I can think is WTF DO YOU MEAN YOUR HEAD HURTS LIKE A GIANT'S FINGERS LIKE WTF I CAN'T EVEN SAY THIS STRAIGHT WITHOUT IT SOUNDING STUPID OMG WHY COULDN'T YOU JUST SAID YOUR HEAD HURTS PERIOD?!?!?!?!?!?!

DON'T USE A SIMILE IF YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO USE IT PROPERLY, DAMNIT.

Some people should just never ever write a metaphor or simile ever. St. Crow is one of those people.

2) IT'S SO RACIST

Lili St. Crow thinks it's perfectly okay to describe a Half-Asian character as a "half-breed" Multiple times within one chapter.

I... don't know what to say to this. EXCEPT THAT IT IS A RACIST, RACIST, RACIST PIECE OF FAIL!!!!

3) PRETTY GIRLS CAN BE COOL TOO, OKAY?!

Gawd, the narration just can't seem to get through a single chapter without some cheerleader hating. Why is it that pretty = stupid = useless?! ugh, I mean, cheerleader hating is widespread all over YA, but this book just sent me over the edge.

Quote~ "Better to be strong than pretty and useless. I’ll take a plain girl with her head screwed on right over a cheerleader any day."

Everything I am quoting happens before chapter 3 is over, btw.

+

So I chucked this book soundly against a wall ~~like it deserves~~ and proceeded to loudly anti-rec this book whenever I get the chance or remember when talking to friends.

You know what's sad though? Is that while people might try to argue with me that I should still keep going with the "half-breed" line or the cheerleader crap, but 100% of the time when I mention the atrocious writing then they would concede that my dropping of the book was a good idea. Like, hating on a book because the writing sucks is okay, but hating on a book because it was racist or has some misogynistic shit in it is not?

I mean, I'm not surprised or anything by these kinds of reaction, but it still makes me HEADDESK all the same.

I AM ALIVE

2010-07-29T15:06:00.004-04:00

A thousand apologies for being so very absent from the online stage. I guess you could say I was feeling a sort of fatigue? Not just from blogging, but even my reading seems to be affected. While I was not posting reviews I was still making my way through plenty of novels, but lately I haven't been able to concentrate on reading the written word. My eyes glaze over, and I'd drop said book to make way for eating or TV or something. (Like, I couldn't even focus on a Cynthia Kadohata book! *sobs*)

You might be thinking, but Yuan! You claim to have read a bunch of books before you hit this recent reader's block development! Why don't you just spend this time during your reading slump to like, type up your reviews?

Which... I would, but I've also been hit with a reviewing slump too (hence my shame in not posting). No, seriously, I'd type a review, and it'd be like this:

'This book reminds me of a mecha anime series, with delicious star-crossed romance and time-loop amazing-ness and a whole lot more swearing than your typical mecha fare but sadly no melodramatic music accompaniment to go with it. Still, AWESOME' (see: All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka)

Which... 1) No one but people who know about anime or gundam stuff will understand and 2) it's like, a sentence long.

The only time I managed to write more than one paragraph about a novel I read was when I'm talking about them in the context trying desperately to convert someone to reading a novel mixed in with fangirl screaming through caplocks. (In other words, my version of a book recommendation)

For example, Standing in the Wind by Traci L. Jones. (Note: this was literally copy+paste from an email I sent to a friend)

omg okay so there's this book called Standing Against the Wind by Traci L. Jones AND YOU HAVE TO HAVE TO READ IT. SO ADORABLE LIKE I CANNOT EVEN BEGIN OMG.

Okay so it's middle grade school and Patrice is like this super nerdy girl who moved to this deadbeat school for lalalla family reasons that involve her mom being in jail and having to stay with her aunt who lived in a poor neighbourhood. She's like super quiet and stuff and has puffy hair so everyone makes fun of her at school but there's this one guy who lives in her neighbourhood who's popular that treats her okay, and tells people to knock it off if he catches ppl teasing her to the point of tears. ANYHOW, so one day popular guy approaches her and asks her to help tutor his little brother who's struggling in school and then they meet up at each other's place or at the library and BOND OVER HOMEWORKING AND SIBLINGS AND GAHHHHHHHHHH SO CUTE YOU HAVE TO READ IT!!!

And it's so so adorable because clearly the guy is interested and uses his brother as a pretext to hang out with her, and is such a joker and very nice, and she's all like 'guh, why does he want to hang out with me in the library instead of going to the park with friends?!' and it's so obvious that the guy thinks the world of her (he is always like 'you're the smartest person I know!' with a kind of awe and is just really proud of her and stuff) and he starts working at schoolwork and stuff just so he can have an excuse to hang out with her, and even if Patrice had no confidence in her looks the guy thinks she's totally fine and he does everything he knows how to make her happy and I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH LIKE YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE OMG.

SERIOUSLY READ IT READ ITTTTTT

Also! I dont' put much stock in the whole awards winning thing, but this book won the same award that Angela Johnson (author of The First Part Last) so you know it has to be at least halfway awesome.

THINK OF THE MIDDLE GRADE CUTENESS AND BONDING IN LIBRARIES. IT'S SO NERDY AND CUTE AND EVERYTHING I LOVE AND OMG I WANT A SEQUEL AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

... wait readers! DON'T RUN AWAY. I will never inflict this kind of madness on the public again, I swear!

*coughs* But anyways, I seem to have momentarily lost my ability to think critically about the books I've read and enjoyed lately. And on the complete opposite side I'm also developing even less patience than before with books that tick me off and end up not finishing them, thus not leaving reviews for y'all about the atrocious-ness I suffered through.

Sooooooo, I've been thinking about ways in which I can still maintain this blog even if I have this review and reading slump, and then it hit me: MANGA REVIEWS. See, I might not be able to sift through text these days, but my abilities to wade my way through manga and reading visual text haven't been hindered in the slightest. This is perhaps a little bit problematic since I suspect my readers here are more into the whole novel thing, and not many visitors here are familiar with the sequential art reading ways. But whatever. It's what I feel capable of discussing these days, so I guess I'll just go forward with it.

(But I do promise a book review for Siobhan Dowd's Solace on the Road sometime very soon, as I got it for a review copy and I will FORCE WORDS OUT OF MY FINGERS to write it if I have to! =D)

And don't anyone think I forgot about the whole Asians-on-Covers matter. I have been working on this one post and it should be up within the coming week. I'll also try to promote more meta-like discussions here as well. A soapbox post on critiquing reviews is probably coming up soon as well.

So basically, I'M NOT DEAD, I SWEAR. AND I WILL MAKE A COMEBACK. *pumps fist in air*

BBAW Registration

2010-07-06T23:38:00.002-04:00

As usual, I'm signing up for all this last minute, but better last minute than late, right? (... at least, I hope I'm not too late?!?!)

So, I decided to go for the "Best Cultural Blog" category, because while I don't really see this book blog as one culture specific or whatever, I identify very strongly with the Asian diaspora identity and often talk about this in my reviews and other related posts. Also I do try to be mindful of people coming from different cultural backgrounds from myself, but who knows if I'm actually successful? lol.

Best Cultural Blog:

Child of the Owl by Laurence Yep
Wait for Me by An Na
Crossing by Andrew Xia Fukuda
The Faces of Covers: On Whitewashing and Fantasy
My many feelings on the new Silver Phoenix covers

Just for fun, entering for "Best YA Book Blog" because while I do review MG and the rare rare occasional adult (mostly SFF) title, my passion is YA and the majority of the books I read and ultimately discuss are YA as well.

Best Young Adult Book Blog:
Second Childhood: Review of Song Quest by Katherine Roberts
Triple Snapshots: YA Faerie Romance
Review: A Spy in the House by Y. S. Lee
Shine, Coconut Moon by Neesha Meminger
Give Up the Ghost by Megan Crewe

Also entering for "Best New Blog" category.

Best New Blog

Sequential Art Review: Le pacte des yokai by Yuki Midorikawa - Vol. 1
A Girl Made of Dust by Nathalie Abi-Ezzi
Discussion Post: On Minor Characters
Discussion Post: Reading in a Second Language
Triple Snapshots: Cynthia Kadohata

My many feelings on the new Silver Phoenix Covers

2010-07-06T10:40:00.005-04:00

Oh, where to begin? Please read inkstone's post on this, dear readers of this blog, even if you don't want to go through my own post on this topic. It's important. And if you'd like to read more, inkstone is also collecting a linkspam on this issue.

On the eve (just a couple hours before, in fact) of The Last Airbender opening night, I saw a new blog post by Cindy Pon, author of the fabulous fantasy Silver Phoenix. It broke my heart. I refrained from commenting anywhere that night and literally turned off my computer so I could just, you know, take that time for some indulgent self pity. And also write a private journal entry to myself about this + TLA that I refrained from posting up publicly because I basically keysmashed expletives for about 10,000+++ words in capslock.

In other words, I was too distraught to be coherent enough to offer anything meaningful or constructive to add into the conversation. Having given this a couple of days to calm down enough to write something beyond FUCK and HATE though, I think I am reading to put in my own two cents about this situation.

*deep breaths*

This was the original cover of Silver Phoenix in hardback:

THESE are the new repacked covers for the first book and its sequel:

Many people have contributed in blog posts and/or comments on how they felt about these covers. I too have many many feeeeeeeeeeelings on this matter, and there will probably be a series of posts regarding Silver Phoenix and Asians-on-covers related things, but for this post in particular I wish to simply address the covers on their own. I will speak about these covers in 3 parts.

1) Blaming Lack of Title Success Because of Asian Cover Model = Ridiculous. Whitewashing the Cover Repackaging As the Answer? THAT'S RACIST.

Make no mistake, these covers were clearly repackaged to remove any traces of "racial markers" that would give away the protagonist's "Asian-ness", to make it “less ethnic” to reach a “broader (white) audience”. I, and many people who have posted on this, find this a disgrace. Please do not bring up the fact that these new covers are ambiguous enough to be a person of Asian descent, the fact that they tried so hard to make these covers look ~*racially ambiguous*~ (i.e. can pass for white) speaks for itself. The novel Silver Phoenix is a fantasy deeply steeped in Chinese culture and folklore, and to advertise the story with a cover that tries to obscure this fact is dishonest and downright wrong. As bookshop has put it, it robs this novel of its integrity.

The reasoning given behind these cover repackaging move was because the first book didn’t sell well. A large part of this had to do with the fact that the book buyers who decide what will be stocked in shelves choose not to include this title. Now, we may never know whether or not the book buyers skipped this title because it had a clearly Asian face on the cover, but the undeniable fact is that the PUBLISHERS decided that THAT HAVING AN ASIAN FACE ON THE COVER MUST HAVE BEEN THE REASON BEHIND THIS TITLE NOT GETTING PICKED UP. It upsets me, really really upsets me that this was the reasoning given, because it’s SO NONSENSICAL. Think of it this way if for some reason anyone reading this still think this is a logical conclusion: no one ever goes ‘gee this fantasy title about a Caucasian girl going to magic school didn’t sell well, it must have been because we had a white girl on the cover.’ THIS ONLY HAPPENS WHEN WE HAVE A POC ON THE COVER. If a POC title doesn’t sell well, having a POC protagonist is always to blame. FAIL FAIL FAIL RACIST SHIT FAIL I’M SICK OF THIS CRAP.

I understand the need for a cover repackaging due to the first hardcover editions poor sales. Repackaging the cover makes sense. But whitewashing the cover as a marketing strategy? Is wrong. And most likely has far more to do with the prevalent systematic racism type mentality rampant all over the YA (and probably other genres/categories) book industry than any type of reality in the actual success of a novel.

This is all I have to say about this stupid, stupid matter, but if you want to hear in more detail about why this kind of marketing mentality is ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS, megwrites wrote up a long post detailing and explaining why this is such a logic!fail Attack of the Whitewashing Strikes Back Again!

2) No One Needs More Passive Agency-Removed Female Cover Models

These covers not only were repackaged to obscure Ai Ling's race, but they were also repackaged to imitate all the Melissa Marr/Alyson Noel/Kelley Armstrong/etc look. This was presumably done as a business tactic, to imitate covers of successfully sold fantasy/paranormal titles so that the book buyers of the large retail bookselling industry will decide to actually stock this book in its shelves. Besides calling into this sketchy business tactic rationalizing the whitewashing of Silver Phoenix, don't people just find the fact that publishers are actively putting out more of these same-old covers grating? I honestly probably would have swallowed a new cover repackaging of Silver Phoenix a whole lot better if they just went for a pure object cover or something, since the cover also besides the whitewash seems to like to emphasize the ~*glowing*~ object, but no, we get these types of passive!white girls holding shiny object crap that takes away the woman's agency. When you cut off the eyes, the face, the body parts of the cover model in the cover frame to maximize the focus on an inanimate object, you RENDER THE PERSON IN THE COVER, A WOMAN, INTO A PROP, A BACKGROUND.

THAT. IS. WRONG.

And, okay, you know what? I get it, shiny objects are pretty, yaddyadda, but honestly I think you can achieve the same shiny!object with the whole ~*dark urban*~ kind of cover just as effectively with those purely object covers a la Holly Black. If the cover is just the shiny object then it's symbolism without the skeevy cut-up woman agency-removal stuff (and also sans the whitewashing problem! YOU COULD HAVE KILLED TWO BIRDS WITH ONE STONE, GREENWILLOW). Judging by the fact that publishers are repacking covers to imitate this look in order to get more sales is basically a horrifying alarm bell sounding on what our future shelves. Just one or two of these covers are fine and are less problematic so long as we still have covers featuring active!woman with a full face and/or showing the eyes looking out towards the reader, but I am not cool with seeing these kinds of agency-removal covers DOMINATING the YA paranormal romance section for the next 10++ years of YA lit. *SHUDDERS*

I understand that these covers are a norm, but it's a norm I'm not willing to embrace, and I ask for those who care at all about the portrayal of postive women in teen fiction and women with agency on their covers to please listen and let's work together to stop feeding the YA book industry in churning out sales that promote these kinds of cover marketing. Please. Let's ask for change. We deserve better.

3) Because Asian Girls are All Passive Demure China Dolls…?!?!

Okay okay, seriously, WHO THE FUCK DO I HAVE TO BLOW IN ORDER TO GET A DAMN FULL FACE OF AN ASIAN GIRL WITH HER EYES TOWARDS THE AUDIENCE ON THE DAMN COVER?!?!?!?!

For white teenage girls, the covers a la Melissa Marr/Kelley Armstrong/Alyson Noel are not, as of yet, all they get for cover models on their YA books. We have white women cover modeling their full faces, a full figure, their back figure, their side profile, a close up of their eyes ETC. And sure not all YA books about white teenage girls make it on the shelves but YA books featuring white female protagonists do dominate the YA shelves and even if we weren't happy with the way one type of cover featured (white) women, we could just move to the next shelf and more or less easily find another one that will have active women looking head on at her audience.

Let me tell you something about the likelihood of getting a FULL, eyes-looking-out-at-the-audience distinctly Asian face on the foreground of the cover for YA books: Maybe 1 or 2 covers from 1 publishing house, every one or two years. Probably 3 years if we're only including these types of covers with Asian authors.*

Do you see - do you understand, how amazing and incredible it was to have the Silver Phoenix original cover the way it was? Nevermind just YA books, across all genres and categories of the US publishing industry, fiction featuring Asian females almost never ever show a full face like that, the EYES so clearly shown. It's not that these covers never happen, but that they come so rarely I could probably count them on my fingers and they always grab my eyes because they're like crumbs to me, to those starving for Asian representation I can get behind on fully.

If ever I get an Asian female protagonist's FACE on my cover it's usually with her head bent a little forward, eyes lowered and showing the eyelashes. Because the face of Asian women is a demure and quiet one, see?!?!?!?!

The fact that the book buyers refused to have this face on their shelves, the fact that now we have another cover of a teenage girl who is of Asian descent displayed as being passive and demure is like ten steps back from where the original book packaging has gone. And I won't lie: this hurts me. As a teenage girl of Chinese ethnicity, this hurts like burning.

What will it take for active!Asian protagonists to be fairly portrayed on covers AND be shelved in bookstores faced-out for readers to buy? WHAT WILL IT TAKE?!

A Post Script:

My father once cautioned me against hoping for so much. Don't look for Asian faces in Hollywood, don't look for Asian faces in this white-dominated world, if I really needed one watch a Mainland China film, a Hong Kong drama, a Taiwanese rock concert -- but I'm still here. I'm still asking. And maybe my dad is right, maybe this path can only lead to disappointment and heartbreak as this book making industry keeps making all the signs that they just don't give a damn about what I want, but I have met some good people on this blog, and I'm still young (maybe childish?) enough to believe in change.

Thank you to all who read this post to the end. Thank you for listening. If you care at all about this, as a YA reader, as a believer in rightful Asian representation in fiction, whatever, please consider spreading the word, speaking up. Words are the start of change, and silence only reinforces the status quo. (Disclaimer: I cannot and am not obliging anyone to speak out! If you don't care, then you don't care, I can't make you change your mind.)

Finally, an embed video of Silver Phoenix's book trailer. Because Cindy Pon wrote a beautiful story, and everyone should give it shot:

(If you liked the trailer and wish to read a few sample pages, you can find the first 70 pages of Silver Phoenix here.)

*Not sure how empirically I can prove this, but I find that most of the full Asian faces I see on covers have a white author attached to writing it. If you want to prove me wrong and that the cover treatment on Asian content for white and Asian authors are completely level and exactly the same, go ahead. I'll listen.

Review: Wait For Me by An Na

2010-06-27T10:21:00.003-04:00

Title: Wait for Me
Author(s): An Na
Genre: YA Contemporary, family, romance
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Speak

The Summary: Teenager Mina plays the Perfect Straight-A Model Asian daughter, but she knows more than anyone that this is a lie, and her chances at getting into Harvard are basically nil. Suna is Mina's deaf sister, dependent on her sister and starving for a glimpse of any affection from her mother, who leaves her in neglect. The presence of Ysrael, a new employee into their family's laundromat brings about a whole new chain of events as the two start cracking the mold they fit into their lives...

The Review: Wow, this is a complicated book to review. Let me say first that above all else, this novel haunted me. Having read An Na’s The Fold before, I came into this book not quite prepared for this much darker tone presented in this novel. I’m not sure whether my emotional response had more to do with Na’s writing or simply her subject matter, but the story and Mina’s voice lingered long after I put down the book, always at the back of my mind.

This book wasn’t an easy read for me. I must have walked away from this book over ten times within its rather short 200-ish pages. And I suspect it has a lot to do with An Na’s take on the Model Minority Myth: because that was what it was. A myth. A lie. And how damaging keeping up pretences can be. I was so struck by Mina and Jonathon, the lengths they would go to put up that Model Minority front even as they wanted to be something, someonemore, because this is such a reality, people. I know it seems extreme, the lengths these characters go in trying to keep the image of the Perfect A Asian student who does well at school, but I’ve seen this happen, to my Asian classmates, my cousins, my friends, those close and around me. I know that it could be easy to respond to these issues brought up by simply saying “follow your dream” and I can see readers being frustrated at Mina for lying and not doing the things she wants for herself, but for me these kinds of things have never been a straight-cut easy choice, and I believe An Na’s depictions of these moments as muddied and tied up was very intentional penned out. It was rather uneasy reading experience for me because of it--because Mina’s story is an all-too-familiar story I recognize--but I commend An Na’s depiction, for refusing to simplify these moments, for portraying Mina not as someone who necessarily does everything “right”, but as someone tied up in her circumstances and wrestling with every step, every decision she makes. In fact, the relationship between Mina and Jonathon was the most convincing and the most heartsearing for me, and it’s this relationship that I took the most away from out of this reading experience.

I liked how An Na depicted their friendship gone awry and twisted to the point beyond repair, and how she didn’t pull brakes to make their actions sympathetic. This relationship was not a healthy one, and An Na does not try to make it come across as so, which I appreciated. While sometimes I worry that An Na is letting Jonathon’s actions get off the hook too easily, it became clearer and clearer to me than the excuses he spouts are meant to be exactly that: excuses that don’t stand when their relationship is called into light. Their manipulations of one another was their ruination, and it worked so well for me because Mina’s immediate fear of Jonathon felt palpable in her immediate first person narration, and Jonathon’s clinging onto Mina and his frustration came across strongly through their scenes together, and all that combined with the complication of having grown up together, of their memories before things went wrong, it was all so immediate and arresting for me. Any relationship between Jonathon and Mina would have been beyond broken, and every scene they had was filled with tension, things said/unsaid, and I bought into their characterization and interactions so completely. It was mesmerizing, reading them. It was like a train wreck. I wanted to walk away, but I couldn’t. I just watched.

Another theme An Na dealt with, albeit with less (imo) success, is her duality on what others want versus what the self wants. In this story, Mina, who has always lived for others, is starting to confront the things she wants for herself. Usually when this kind of theme pops up we are often told that what the Self wants is far more important than the considerations of others, and it’s all very tidy and clean and simply portrayed. This is not a motif I personally buy, because this kind of motif does not acknowledge the points of the other side, how sometimes in doing things for others you feel happy 1) for making another person happy and 2) for being happy that you could give happiness to others. (ex. Don’t you feel happy when you think of the perfect gift for a person you care about, and then find out that your friend loved your gift? Doing things for others is not as insufferable or oppressive or harmful as “Western” fictional mediums like to depict it to be.) I do not believe that An Na intended for this to be the usual Self triumphing over Other’s Desires thing I’m used to seeing in these Asian-American stories, if the Suna ending is anything to go by, but I thought An Na’s development of this theme was inadequate and left her conclusion missing the impact it needed. In Mina’s case, the line between doing things for others for love and doing things for others is bringing the Self suffering is crossed, and this struggle to re-negotiate these boundaries are tentatively put up into play. The problem with the depiction of this theme was that one side was too strong over the other; the mother’s desires are almost caricatures of oppressive harm, and on the other side, Mina’s love for Suna was unconvincing. They’re too didactic, and it makes this theme come across as inadequate.

This, I think, was largely a byproduct of the depiction of the dynamics between the two sisters in general. For one thing Mina’s voice was just far more immediate and convincing than Suna’s, hence already one side of the relationship looks weaker in comparison. Suna’s chapters weren’t convincing in the slightest. The third person present tense had this dreamy quality that, while on rare occasions managed a lyricism that drew me (The part wherein Suna wore the dress? Beautiful, and probably the only truly empowering scene Suna had in the whole novel.), most of the times made Suna to seem like an infantile preteen stuck in her own head. She sounded simply way too young and naïve, and I find this childlike depiction of Suna and the connection between her disability leading to her mother’s rejection and her sister’s fierce protection disingenuous and terribly problematic. Also this dreamlike quality made her interactions with her mother and her sister never quite believable to the reader, which definitely hindered the reading experience. It is too bad that An Na was not quite able to depict a believable sisterly relationship between Mina and Suna, because so much of this book rests on the results of their sisterly bond, but none of the story’s climax and ultimate conclusion had the desirable effect it needed to pack its strongest punch. The caricature of the mother and almost non-existent father did nothing to help matters.

I also am ambivalent about Ysrael’s role in the story. The tension he supposedly brought between the two sisters felt overwrought to the point of ridiculousness, and I was never convinced of Ysrael as a person. For me, he never broke out of that love interest role he was designated and failed to come across as anything beyond a two-dimensional typical love interest boy in these YA contemporary romances. (You know, the whole perfect considerate boy walking in and changing the heroine’s life for the better.) I’m tired of having The Man being a catalyst for all of the heroine’s major changes in her life. Their whole shared music passion also failed to be believable for me as well, since their interest in music was portrayed vaguely at best and I’ve seen other YA books wherein two characters bond over music done much better than here. And also I just didn’t really buy the part wherein Ysrael supposedly opened Mina’s eyes to different future possibilities. The scene played out as if Mina never even heard of the possibility of doing what she wanted, which I found utterly unbelievable. I bought the ties between Ysrael and Suna even less. (Basically, comparing Ysrael's scar to Suna's hearing aid just did not fly for me, and was a very superficial tie at best. Also they had no romantic tension whatsoever.) Finally, I thought that in spending all that time developing a connection between Ysrael and Mina, the development of Mina and Suna’s relationship suffered because of it, focusing too much on the love triangle dynamic instead of the sisterly bond. It would have been fine if An Na intended the novel to be primarily about the budding romance, but it’s clear to me from its premise and execution that the family was and should have been the dominating storyline. I mean, I did like some scenes with Ysrael in it, (the kiss scene was simply beautiful) and certainly it’s nice to have at least one healthy relationship depicted in a novel (because Mina’s relationship with everyone else in this novel – Jonathon, Suna, Uhmma – were so incredibly dysfunctional) but this subplot just didn’t intertwine convincingly into the main story.

The Verdict: Reading this book wasn’t an easy experience for the subject matters, but also because I found the structure/pacing/unfolding chain of events unfortunately uneven as well. I enjoyed the premise, but the execution, the imbalanced two person narrations and the abrupt ending took away from what could have been a brilliant novel. I was drawn to many elements of this novel, like the exploration of the Model Minority Myth here, and it’s good to see a novel with inter-POC romance and POC characters with a disability as well. The scarcity of inter-POC romance and disabled POC characters in YA fiction (and I suspect across all genres/age categories) is disappointing enough to make these aspects of Wait for Me to stand out. There are all types of people from all walks of life interacting with each other: the fact that these books are rarely told sends a sublime signal that their stories don’t matter/aren’t worth telling, and that is wrong. We should, and can do better. I also suspect I would have had fewer problems with Suna and her characterization as childish if only we had a variety of differently abled characters presented in Fiction, but this prevalence of infantilizing disabled characters rubs me in all the wrong places and the fact that Suna fits and continues this trend is disheartening. Not my favourite of reads, but as I said in the beginning, above all else this novel haunted me, the scenes between Mina and Jonathon arrested me, and despite my scruples, I definitely will remember the name of this novel long into the future.

Rating: 3/5
Enjoyment: N/A - I didn’t enjoy myself reading this novel, but I couldn’t walk away from or stop reading this novel for the life of me. Make of that what you will.

Title and Cover Discussion: You know, this title does fit, but I don’t like the message it sends? Also I thought the cover was hideous, fade into the background type. I could never notice this book passing by it on the shelves. In fact, I have by passed this novel multiple times in the library.

Aside: Does anyone else find An Na's romanization of Korean strange? I mean, I'm not nitpicking the way she spells out the words into English letters since I'm not the most familiar with the romanization systems for the Korean language. I just find her insertion of a hyphen in between every syllable jarring. It makes reading the romanized Korean sound stilted and stiff, and Korean doesn't really sound like that, imo. I'm speaking as a person who doesn't speak Korean personally and mostly hears the language through friends or kdramas or just people talking in public areas, FYI. (Opinions of Korean speakers are welcome.)

Winner of Vampire Academy + Waiting on Wednesday: Keys to the Repository

2010-06-23T12:43:00.004-04:00

Thank you to all entrants to submitted to my 100 Followers Giveaway. The entrants for this round of giveaways about doubled the entries for my previous giveaways combined, lol. I... did not quite realize how popular Vampire Academy was? *amused*

Also according to my comments a majority prefer series to standalones, lol. Fascinating.

Anyhow, the winner of the giveaway is~

Misha Mathew

I have sent you an email, please reply within 48 hours or I'll have to pick a new winner.

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Blue Bloods: Keys to the Repository by Melissa de la Cruz

The school year at Duchesne is always packed with drama, mystery, murder, and midterms for Schuyler Van Alen and her friends (and enemies). But what about that glorious patch of time from June to August? In this collection of short stories, New York Times bestselling author Melissa de la Cruz reveals how the stunningly gorgeous, ridiculously wealthy, and completely undead members of the Blue Bloods spend their summer holidays. Hamptons, anyone?

My thoughts: omfg you guys have no idea how excited I am about this. Basically my favouritest YA Vampire Romance guilty pleasure evaaaaaaar. Her world is sprawling and epic and all things wondrous, and I wolf down each new Blue Bloods title with glee. IS IT JULY YET?! (Also, to all those who are clamouring about how fallen angels are the next big thing, well, guess what? In Blue Bloods - VAMPIRES = FALLEN ANGELS. LAWL.)

Any new YA Vampire titles you're excited about? Or just upcoming books in general? I'm all ears. =D

Blog Updates! + Discussion Post: On Minor Characters

2010-06-15T10:35:00.002-04:00

Sooooo, I have done some cleanup on this blog. For one thing, I actually TAGGED everything for once! And I made pages!

About the Blog and I is where you should go if you want to know more about this blog and myself.
What I Read gives a list of the types of stories I like/dislike. Am slightly amused that my dislike list looks longer than than my likes... ^^;;;
Review by Title in which all my reviews in this book blog are listed and linked to.

Now all I need to do is make a Contact Page (the email is galnovelty AT gmail DOT com if anyone wishes to speak to me about anything) and maybe a Links Page so that people know where to find me and organizing my Challenge post...

Speaking of which - Anyone want to help explain to me how to make those contact form thingers? I'd normally bug Ninefly for all my tech-y blogging needs, but she's currently busy traipsing around the grasslands of Mainland China, the minx. *IS NOT JEALOUS, NOT AT ALL*

And please feel free to tell me what other pages you think I should consider putting up, etc.

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My Minor Character Problem
Folks, I have a confession to make. I have a problem. One that my RL friends like to make fun of me for doing all the time. See, I have this habit of falling in love with the Minor Character. Which is okay if I still like the main story but then, I would sometimes like the Minor Characters more than the main characters. And then, they die. Or disappear. And they make me sad.

They also make me incapable of talking about the books properly.

Let's use the Time Traveller's Wife example.

FRIEND A: So have you read that really good book Time Traveller's Wife?
ME: OH GAWD THAT BOOK I WAS SO SAD. IT WAS A TRAGEDY. A TRAVESTY.
FRIEND A: Well, I suppose the romance was a bit on the tragic level -
ME: SHE DIED.
FRIEND A: ... What? Claire didn't die!
ME: NOT HER. Ingrid.
FRIEND A: Ingrid who?
ME: The girlfriend who loved him and said fuck you to the whole destiny crap and we had to see her die OVER AND OVER AGAIN AND IT WAS SO SAD.
Friend A: Oh I kind of remember something like that - wait a minute, Yuan, SHE APPEARED FOR LIKE, TWO PAGES.
ME: *sniffs* The most tragic two pages of my life.

Even the most optimistic of situations, liking the side minor character is a frustrating experience. You'd read the whole book, but you are left feeling unsatisfied because that book wasn't the story you WANTED to read. Like John Green's An Abundance of Katherines. I don't care how many times our MC got dumped and his stupid math theorem! I JUST WANT HASSAN GOING AROUND BEING A LOVABLE LOSER AND MAKING STAR TREK REFERENCES AND WATCH JUDGE JUDY FOREVER.

You'd think a good solution would be to pick out a favourite character who's one of the main leads (usually the MC or the Love Interest in YA is a pretty good shot) as a favourite character, BUT THEN, A BOOK LIKE WHITE CAT COMES ALONG.

ME: So I read this book called White Cat wherein I actually liked the love interest for once AND THEN I WAS SCREWED.
FRIEND Y: Why? What happened? What's this character's name?
ME: LILA. OH, DEAR, DEAR LILA.
FRIEND Y: *reads WC summary* Yuan... it says in the very summary that Lila is dead. How the hell did you think picking out her as a favourite character would be a good idea?
ME: Sometimes, I hate myself. *sobs* LILAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I can't help it! Something about these characters just draw me in and I've always read my books with character love as the foremost priority. And then I would read this books and be all crushed and no one has sympathy for my loss. *wallows* And I also can't even give proper reviews for these books because ALL I WANT TO DO IS SPEND THAT TIME TALKING ABOUT THAT MINOR CHARACTER, and talking about things that isn't really relevant to the main story is not good review-ing material.

Surely I'm not the only one afflicted with this problem? Tell me about your minor character loves. Or, if you always like the main characters and do not understand my problem, tell me how silly I'm being and show me ways to get over this problem of mine. Or just talk to me about characters you like in general!

Triple Snapshots: Cynthia Kadohata

2010-06-13T09:56:00.001-04:00

Triple Snapshots is when I give a paragraph description on the impressions of books I get. Today’s theme for my Triple Snapshot feature is exactly as the title indicates. Now with an added 3-Sentence Summary feature in which I summarize the book.

Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata

3SS: It's the 1950s and the Takeshimas are moving into the US South. The core of the story is that between two sisters, as they grow and make sense of their world. What will Katie do when tragedy strikes her family?

Kira-Kira is a wonderful tale of the bond between two sisters, and growing up. Katie was a wonder of a protagonist to be with, and I simply fell in love with Kadohata’s voice in this book. Kadohata has that ability to capture young pre-adolescent voice perfectly without ever oversimplifying or sounding fake, and I was thoroughly charmed. As with all Kadohata books, she leaves you crushed and heartbroken as she brings her cast through tremendous trials, so I do warn for those especially teary-eyed to keep a box of tissue at hand, but the experience of reading such a fine MG novel will be well worth all the tears. I recommend this book to anyone across all ages. I freely admit I lent this book out to my young little sister and she does not seemed scarred by the experience besides wailing at the ending, and she told me she loved it, so there you go. Even non Kadohata-biased people liked it, so EVERYONE JUST READ IT NOW.

Cracker! The Best Dog in Vietnam by Cynthia Kadohata

3SS: Cracker, our doggy protagonist, becomes separated from her boy and is sent to the army to be trained as a military dog to scout out bombs and other artilleries. She forms a strong and lasting bond with her soldier companion as they warm up to each other through the training. And then, the two of them get set to the front lines for war...

If anyone could make me a believer of animal companionship tales, Kadohata can. I never cared for stories like Watership Down or Redwall or what you will, but Kadohata’s voice, once again, charmed my socks off. You’re reading this and you feel like this author just gets dogs completely, so convincing is her voice. The war in Vietnam was indeed rather sterilized in this novel, which I admit is problematic, (I’m still waiting for that future novel Kadohata will HOPEFULLY write that does the Vietnamese people who fought on the other side of the war justice, but if this glossed over war aspect bothers you, she does better in her latest novel A Million Shades of Grey) but I say give it a go anyways, especially if you’re a dog lover.

Outside Beauty by Cynthia Kadohata

3SS: Shelby lives with her gorgeous mother and many half-sisters. She cannot imagine life outside of her family, but one day her mother is admitted to the hospital and the sisters get separated as they're all sent packing to live with their biological fathers. How will the sisters reunite to become a family once more?

Oh, Outside Beauty. How much I wanted to like you, and how much did you just not succeed for me. It’s my only Kadohata read so far that turned up disappointing. I suspect it didn’t work because Kadohata didn’t quite manage to balance out together all the elements of this book into the story coherently? Certainly this book has a larger main cast than her other books, and I felt like the depiction of the relationship between all the sisters ended up faltering, and because her character interactions were not quite on par, her message on beauty and family fell short. Also, this is the one book wherein she did not quite manage to grasp at her protagonist’s voice quite right… And I’m not sure if it’s because she’s better at the MG-style voice than YA-voice, or if it’s just because the protagonist wasn’t as well rounded as she could have been. There were elements that I liked, and moments where Kadohata’s voice shines out (Coffee scene! *giggles*) but on a whole this book didn’t work for me. Perhaps die hard Kadohata fans should give this a go to complete their Kadohata book reads, but for newcomers to Kadohata’s novels I suggest you set this one aside and pick up any of her other titles instead.

Review: Boys Without Names by Kashmira Sheth

2010-06-12T09:21:00.002-04:00

Title: Boys Without Names
Author(s): Kashmira Sheth
Genre: MG Contemporary, India, Child slavery
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Balzer + Bray

I received an Uncorrected Proof copy from Edi
The Summary:For eleven-year-old Gopal and his family, life in their rural Indian village is over. We stay, we starve, his baba has warned. So they flee to the big city of Mumbai in hopes of finding work and a brighter future. Goal is eager to help support his struggling family until school starts, so when a stranger approaches him with the promise of a factor job, he jumps at the offer...

-Summary taken from 1st paragraph of Backcover

The Review: After reading Boys Without Names, I do believe that Kashmira Sheth is now firmly solidified as my new must-read MG author. She reminds me of Cynthia Kadohata, actually, and that is no small praise on my part because I practically worship the ground Kadohata walks on. Except, you know, Sheth would be a South Asian version, and her stories more… uplifting in tone. Less painful moments wherein I feel like my heart is being wrenched out of my chest as I stare desolately at the page with the text blurring as my eyes well up. I wouldn’t say happier because the two books I’ve read by Sheth (Keeping Corner and this book, respectively) deal with serious matters, but I can trust that unlike Kadohata’s works, no one is going to die, no one is going to have to be severed permanently from a loved one – in short, at the end of the Sheth novel, I probably won’t be a sobbing mess. If I’m crying, I’m crying tears of joy over the triumph of our beloved protagonists. They’re very similar in style (close 1st person narration, simple free-of-flowery-language and evocative lines that cut straight to the matter and grab you by the heart, but Kadohata has a stronger voice whereas Sheth’s narration is cleaner and almost lyrical in its simplicity) but diverge more drastically on their tone (Kadohata – sadder, Sheth – happier). I don’t prefer one style over the other, just that I find the comparison interesting and that now I know which MG author to go to if I want to read about a charming protagonist going through life’s hardships, but do not want to cry my eyes out.

Anyhow, on the actual novel itself, I am simply in love with Sheth’s writing style. It’s just so clean. When you take a sentence out of the context, they are almost deceptively dull and simplistic, a basic noun-and-verb sentence construction with the occasional adjective. But put her sentence structures together and then you see Sheth’s full mastery of the English language, how her words are carefully chosen to make the most out of what she wants to say. I felt like there was not a word used that was wasted, that her phrases were carefully weighed to produce the fullest effect possible. Everything was just so smooth and clean and flowed so nicely, you can’t help but sink into the story, time passing you by as you leaf your way through the pages.

And the cast was absolutely darling! I loved everyone I was supposed to love, and hated the ones I was supposed to hate. I was totally charmed by Gopal, our narrator, and his deep attachment with his family. He was so full of optimism and hardworking, and very sweet all around. All the family scenes with his concerns over his parents and his entertaining of his younger siblings charmed my socks off. I’m a total sucker for family scenes, and I really loved seeing the family love without, you know, the parental angst or sibling jealousy that dominates the YA novels I typically read. I really liked how Sheth took the time to show Gopal and his life in Mumbai before he was captured too, because it made all his longings for home that much more effective. Honestly, when we got to the point wherein Gopal got caught, I actually had to put down the pages because the very thought of Gopal being separated from his family crushed me. I knew it was coming, it implies so in the summary, but we readers become invested in Gopal and how important it was to be together with his family, and become simply crushed by this rude severing of family ties.

This is of course, not to say that the first half was at all filled with happy go-lucky times. Sheth is telling us a story of a family from a poor class, and the struggles and indignities they go through from being in want of money, the desperation as they run out of money to even make basic needs such as paying for their next meal, and even a place just to sleep. Sheth does not shy away from any of these depictions, but she also paints a loving family willing to stick it out together, so when the family separation occurs it is just that much more devastating.

The second half becomes darker in tone, with child slavery on top of poverty and homesickness, and gritty unhealthy living conditions. Sheth does not sugarcoat, nor does she excessively dishes out the horror for shock factor. Rather, with her clean and simple prose she states the conditions as is, an honesty in the writing that makes the viewing of our protagonist’s experience that much more heartbreaking. His frustrations, his despair, all of it evoked sympathy without it ever feeling like the author was purposely trying to extract these sympathetic emotions from us. The second half was also balanced out with glimpses of endurance and hope, as Gopal learns to survive, using his own character agency in a bad situation. The bonds he forms with the other boys he lives with form slowly and tenderly to make one of the most heartfelt and fragile friendships depicted in MG novels. Sheth breathes life into these boys, and makes them rounded characters that act and react to the protagonist. In other words, Sheth’s abilities in character development were a wonder to behold.

I also liked how the theme of storytelling grew and change in significance over the course of the story. First as a way to entertain himself and his twin siblings, then told as a way of hope as his family tries to make it in the city, and ultimately as a way to connect with the other boys he worked with, they were fun and heartfelt and enriched the novel in such a way that I can’t imagine this novel without Gopal’s stories inserted meaningfully throughout the narrative. The theme of storytelling is essential to this novel, they are not pieces of whimsical fictive tales by the fireside to be forgotten. Making stories-within-a-story is a great skill that not many authors can pull off, and I’m happy to say that Sheth outdone herself in making this storytelling method work completely to her advantage. By the end of the novel I was convinced Sheth is a master storytelling, and I am eagerly looking forward to any new projects Sheth undertakes in the future.

The Verdict: The journey Sheth takes us readers into Gopal’s experiences up to the grand finale is an arresting and riveting experience, with characters you’ll just fall in love for and a reading experience that will haunt you long after the story is over. I’d recommend this novel to everyone

Rating: A
Enjoyment: 100%

Title and Cover Discussion: The title doesn’t quite resonate until we hit the second half, but it works and is a fine, memorable title. The simple silhouette cover design is serviceable and unique enough for it to not be mistaken for another cover. Neither the cover or title is flashy, but it is also different enough from the bland similar type covers that are in shelves in order to make it stand out.

Title: B
Cover: B

Note: Kashmira Sheth has left many links and information on how one can help stop Child Labour and Child Slavery. Please consider checking out the following link if you wish to know more or take action against this social injustice: http://laborrights.org/stop-child-labor

Sequential Art Review: Le pacte des yokai (Natsume Yuujinchou) V. 1 by Yuki Midorikawa

2010-06-10T05:45:00.004-04:00

I've been meaning to do manga/manhwa/bédé/comics type reviews for this book blog, but finding the right approach to reviewing them proved to be difficult because I read manga/etc very differently from the way I read a novel. I’m still kind of messing around with how I’ll approach this type of review, and there’ll probably be changes in my review format before I find my footing. (For one thing, hopefully they'll become SHORTER over time. *dies x100*) Please tell me about your thoughts on this review, especially if you’re not familiar with manga and if you found any of it confusing.

Title: Le pacte des yokai V. 1 – trans. The Pact of Yokai [1] (Original title : 夏目友人帳 Natsume Yuujinchou – trans. Natsume’s Book of Friends.)
Creator: Yuki Midorikawa trans. by Yuki Kakiichi
Genre: Shoujo[2], drama, supernatural, episodic, slice-of-life
Serialized magazine: Lala
Publisher: Hakusensha (Japanese publisher), Édition Delacourt (French publisher)

Summary: Orphaned teenager Takashi Natsume has always been able to see the yokai since he was a child. His life becomes complicated when a notebook, inherited from his deceased grandmother Reiko, falls into his hands. This notebook contains all the names of the yokai his grandmother has defeated in battle, names which allows Natsume to control the yokai and determine their life or death. This powerful inherited notebook brings Natsume new friends and foes as other yokai seek the notebook either to free themselves or to possess the notebook and all the power it contains.

TL;DR: A fantastic debut to a great series, with evocative art, a sweet protagonist to root for, and heartfelt stories that with grab readers by the heart, this is a manga series no one should miss out on.

The Review: Let me indulge in some basic manga perimetres, as this is my first attempt at a manga review and I want to make this clear. In these story mediums using sequential art, the art ITSELF is essential to the story. Art can either make or break a story – and not simply in the sense that ‘oh the art is ugly thus it sucks’ or ‘oh the art is pretty thus it’s good’. Good art in manga is not simply art that looks appealing to your eyes, though of course, like Cover Art in Novels, pretty, appealing art styles of the manga creator can be a drawing factor to get a new audience member to pick up the manga volume. But in all forms of sequential art, THE ART IS THE STORY. The story is told through art. Thus, if the art cannot convey or carry the story, then the story has no substance. The ability of the creator to correctly and smoothly transition the art through action or character contemplation or what you will is far more important than say, how detailed the outfits are, or how lovely the background is.

The art of Natsume Yuujinchou is not one that’s immediately appealing to a new audience. Midorikawa does not use strong bold outlines or fills her manga with lush details. Rather, the art has a ‘soft’ quality, kind of like light sketches in a sketchbook that captures enough of the essence of the image the artist wants to convey, but is absent of a sharply penciled outline of the sketch to make it look more ‘finished’. I have seen accusations of this art being deemed ugly because of this ‘unfinished’ look, but if you look closer you’ll realize that Midorikawa always draws enough to convey all that is necessary to tell the story, and she never slacks on background details when they’re needed, and her art is always spaced out in a way to lend for easy art flow. Midorikawa’s art is by no means flashy, but it has substance, and great thought put into it, and I appreciate this style of art very much. Also, this sketch look in her art lends a whimsical, unassuming quality to her story, and thoroughly charmed me from page one.

Midorikawa favours a three-way vertical split in her page outlines, and it works rather well for her. Transitions within scenes are usually done exceptionally well, and Midorikawa excels at portraying emotional moments of character insight with her minimal, deft artistic hand. She is weaker with the action scenes, but they are serviceable, and this is mostly just nitpicking on my part. Besides, you don’t read Natsume Yuujinchou for the action, lol.

From the premise of boy getting his hands on a powerful notebook, this sounds like your typical shounen adventure fare. What is key to keep in mind is that this is Yuki Midorikawa, and that this is essentially a shoujo story, manga targeted towards teenage girls. She takes a premise normally found in manga for teenage boys, and breathes heart and soul into the story rarely found in the shounen scene. Midorikawa’s true strength in her storytelling abilities is her way of breathing human qualities and thoughtful insights into her characters, not necessarily through an indulgent soliloquy, but moreso through the glimpses of character interactions and things said/unsaid, and her way of making the art slow down or speed up at key moments for maximum effect. In short, Midorikawa is best at reeling in and evoking character sympathy, and then breaking the audience’s hearts. Reading a work by Midorikawa is heartfelt not because of melodrama, but because it is quiet and so dearly sincere.

Instead of taking the powering/leveling up motif that is common in for this type of premise in the shounen market, Midorikawa instead focuses on the human level of what these abilities means to our main protagonist. How does it feel to be able to see things that others can’t? How does it feel to be accused of being a liar for it? Sent away from foster home to foster home because each foster parent thought you were either lying or creepy or sullen in his solitude and loneliness? How does it feel to inherit something from a family relations and discovering that maybe you aren’t so alone after all, that someone besides you had these abilities and gave you an everlasting vestige of her legacy? How is it like, despite all these obstacles, having the desire to want to belong? How do you relate to others when you know that other humans cannot see what you were born able to do? All these questions Midorikawa addresses attentively, the connection between human and yokai, Some of the most compelling sustained character relationships in this series is that between Natsume and Reiko, his deceased grandmother, how he slowly gains insight of her thoughts and feelings in this notebook of hers. This is one of the defining things that make this typical shounen sounding premise morph into an atypical shoujo story: Midorikawa does not choose to develop a story of Natsume rising up to be the king of yokai or even a top notch yokai slayer. Instead, Natsume sees this notebook as something important of his grandma’s, the only woman he knows of who might have understood his feelings and emotions. Natsume chooses to instead give back the names taken by his grandma back to the yokai in question, and through this learns more about his grandma, and the yokai that come to see and meet him. This is not a story of the underdog becoming the best. This is a story about the every day things, the desire for connection as characters interact and grow. (Also I find the compare contrast between our protag and his grandma fascinating because they have the same abilities but it shaped them very differently.)

Midorikawa shapes this story in an episodic fashion, each chapter an equivalent of one episode wherein he would typically help out or get involved with a different yokai each chapter. In these episodic type narratives, a compelling main character is key, because why else would we continue to read an episodic series if we didn’t care about the protagonist? I’ll be upfront and say that Natsume is one of the most sincere and sweetest protagonists I’ve ever encountered in all stories across all sorts of mediums, and he charmed my heart. I understood this fictional character like he was a real person next to me, a living, breathing friend. How he keeps aloof from humans in fear of being rejected, how he has trust issues and how he wants to be kind and good to those he cares about but isn’t very good with his words, how he recklessly acts in order to help those who come to him and how he’s one of the most unselfish and kind protagonists I’ve ever had the pleasure of encountering. I could literally spend all day being like this, rambling on and on about how much I love this protagonist, but let me finish off by saying that Midorikawa has created a protagonist that will make a follower out of the readers and you’ll be willing to read his adventures anywhere and wherever the author chooses to take you.

As for the episodic stories themselves, what can I even say? Words cannot describe how beautiful these stories were. Chapter 2 and 4 especially made me teary-eyed. I found the theme of (missing) communication between yokai and human and a futile desire to connect very evocative and compelling amidst the heartbreak. The heart of these stories has an underlying message of friendship, not in the typical shounen sense of FRIENDS STICK TOGETHER kind of thing, but a desire to form ties with others that has nothing to do with romance and everything to do with wanting to be close to another being who means something to you.

This thoughtfulness in the stories are by no means accidental, as reading the notes written into the sides and endnotes at the end reveal. One of the cool things about (re)reading these serialized manga works (fyi, usually manga is serialized in magazines wherein there is either weekly or monthly chapter updates, kind of like how Charles Dickens wrote a chapter in newspapers if we are looking for an English novelization equivalent…) in Volume form is that they usually come with commentary. I really like reading Midorikawa’s commentaries because they always make it clear how thoughtful she is when she plans out her stories, that she really thinks carefully about her craft and what ways shall she use to bring her story to life, her thoughts on how to carefully position her characters in the best manner, and her worries on using an episodic-type narrative to tell her story (fyi it’s her first time, not that anyone could tell since she mastered it so completely on her first shot.) I also liked the detail on how Nyanko-sensei/Madara/Maitre Griffou (if you read the French version) came to be, and her acknowledgments and praises towards her editor and assistants.

As for the translations itself, I read the French version, and it was passable. They decided not to keep any of the original Japanese syntax and even completely changed the name of Nyanko-sensei, which saddens me, but I almost forgive them because this French edition gives us a lot of brilliant endnotes at the end on the folklore Midorikawa referenced and the yokai lore as well. They even had an interesting yokai overview at the back of the volume. I didn’t care for the yokai-are-the-same-as-demons, but I suppose it’s better than a sublimal message on Othering Yokai and Japanese folklore, etc. *shrugs* I have yet to read the English editions that are out, but you know, the nice thing about manga is that the art tells 80% of the story, so even if the translation was subpar, the art will convey most of the message through, so I say to all the English-speakers to get their copy ASAP!

Quick note on the title: I can see why the French publisher changed the title because Natsume’s Book of Friends does kind of sound boring and cheesy, but I’m weirdly fond of it all the same? *shrugs* Oh well, at least it’s actually related to what’s going on within the story as well.

Art: A
Story[3]: A

[1]Yokai is an umbrella term for supernatural creatures of Japanese folklore, demons being a rough equivalent if we want to think of a European folk creature counterpart.
[2] In this context, Shoujo means manga geared towards teenage girls. For manga, there are two markets for teenagers, shoujo manga for girls and shounen manga for boys. Of course, boys can read shoujo and girls can read shounen, but the general rule is that these mangas are geared towards the specific target audience they have in mind. Shounen and Shoujo thus have very different troupes and conventions.
[3]You may be wondering why I am rating these two separately, since I spent forever trying to explain that there is no story without the art, aka ART = STORY. But what I mean by rating them separately is that, for the Art, I’m rating it based on how effective was the creator in telling the story (which is always predominantly through the art, the positioning of the art, etc) and the rating for story is for the actual story events in the volume, if there was a proper beginning/middle/end, etc. I guess a novel equivalent would be that Art => Writing Style and Story => Plot?! I hope this isn’t confusing.

This entry has been edited for misspellings and broken links

Triple Snapshots: YA Faerie Romance

2010-06-09T10:34:00.007-04:00

Triple Snapshots is when I give a paragraph description on the impressions of books I get. Today’s theme for my Triple Snapshot feature is exactly as the title indicates. Now with an added 3-Sentence Summary feature in which I summarize the book ~~snarkily~~.

Wondrous Strange by Lesley Livingston

3-Sentence Summary: Wannabe teen actress gets role in Midsummer Night's Dream and meets hot faerie dude. Girl finds out she's not all what she seems. Throw in family/romance angst and some saving the world from Faerie and Human world collision into the mix of our run in the mill YA Faerie story.

This book makes it on the list of one of the many books I read for All the Wrong Reasons: Minor Character Edition. That’s right, I plowed through this thing even though I didn’t care for the heroine or the romantic lead, and the romance that made me gag inside. (Can I rant about the whole “his Firecracker” thing? I don’t find that possessive colouring sweet, just… creepy. I don’t even like it when the male leads refer to the girl as “His girl” It makes me want to go, NO, SHE IS HER OWN PERSON, OKAY?! NOT YOURS.) BUT THEN A KELPIE CAME ALONG, AND HE STAYED IN THEIR BATHROOM AND WAS CALLED LUCKY. I was amused. And then the book told me Lucky the Kelpie may turn into Death Horse, and the whole irony of being called Lucky had me cackling and flipping through the pages despite my better judgment. Also Tyff was the best roommate ever. I wish this whole story was from her POV instead. Anyhow, basically what I got out of this is that I really have to stop picking up books because of pretty covers (I love this cover, why oh why did the story within didn’t match up? *sobs*) and crossed off this whole trilogy thinger off my to-read list. As further evidence of my masochistic streak, I actually already heard horrific things about the sequel having a Love Triangle of Doom, and then I skimmed the sequel anyways and it got into this whole Indian mortal child being kidnapped by the faerie queen for his ~*exotic*~ looks AND THEN I was like, fuck this noise. ARGH MUST BLEACH BRAIN. (Needless to say, I didn't finish the sequel) Also if I never read another fairy story that borrows heavily from A Midsummer Night’s Dream ever again, it’d be too damn soon.

Spells by Aprilynne Pike

3SS: Laurel goes to Faerie school! In which we have tourism in faerieland shenanigans for the first (awesome) half and then the second half stops going to awesome school and indulges us all with WHO WILL SHE CHOOSE love triangle drama. Just typical.

I have NO IDEA why I read the sequel when I found the first book so painful. I mean, while I adored the idea of plant fairies and whatnot, the love triangle made me want to die inside and the story formula was just too generic and typical Changeling story (Girl finds out she is fairy and then something comes after her and she has tragic love triangle between a Fairy boy and Mortal boy WHATEVER SHALL WE DO?! Cry me a river.) that I have no patience for this days. Okay, I lie, I do in fact know why I read this. It’s because I found out that the heroine ends up going into fairy school and I was like OMG HARRY POTTER THE FAIRY VERSION?! I am such a sucker for magical boarding schools like you would not believe, people. And I did in fact enjoy it more than the first book. While there was not enough of the fairy school to keep me happy, I really, really enjoyed getting to know more of the fairy world. It’s evident that Pike did some amazing worldbuilding work with this series. It was interesting how we got to know the world too, with the heroine being the tourist and Tamami showing the world. It worked well for me, this way of showing a fantasy world. It’s too bad that Pike simply insists on having the Love Triangle dominate the whole storyline. Watching this whole David/Laurel/Tamami drama drove me quite mad, and made me want to shake all of them. It also made me want to quote Sarah Rees Brennan’s The Demon’s Covenant at them. (“It’s not some kind of tragically stupid love triangle. I’m not going to choose one guy out of two and settle down. It doesn’t have to be either of them for me, or have to be me for either of them. The world’s full of people, if you haven’t noticed.” Pg. 86) ~~But then again I also just want to quote this everywhere whenever I see stupid love triangles in my stories, so I'm not like, singling this out. I'm just a love triangle hater.~~ On the whole, I suggest that unless you’re All About Worldbuilding in your stories (in which case you HAVE TO HAVE TO read this story now. I love this faerie world!), I’d pass on this whole series. It’s really the only thing going for it. (I wish Pike would just write a story set in this world that had no stupid love triangles and more SCHOOLGIRL RIVALRIES and CLASS PROJECTS and stuff, because I'm a geek like that.) Or, unless you actually like the whole Epic Tragic Love Triangle of Ridiculous. In which case you should gobble this up like candy. I’ll try not to judge you. ;D

The Iron King by Julie Kagawa

3SS: Meaghan's bro gets kidnapped by fairies and she goes off to save him. In her saving journey readers subject themselves to a long middle of love triangle romance with creepy killer stalker and jokester best friend in which the girl typically prefers the jerk against all reason. Saving happens at end, but we have crack to entertain us along the way in the form of a cat called Grimalkin, etc.

~~This novel made me so bipolar.~~* ETA I found this reading experience mostly a mixed bag. One second I’d be laughing over the crack (OTAKU FAIRIES LOLOLOL, and FAIRIES CLUBBING IN LEATHER and GRIMALKIN, BECAUSE HE’S A CAT WHICH WAS HIS EXCUSE FOR LIFE) and then the next second the love triangle crap made me want to die. Like, even more than in Pike's Wings series. Ash was the creepiest love interest ever. I mean, he tried to kill her! Literally! And has told her that he’d kill her if ever she was on the other side of the battlefield. And then, after Ash makes his speech of wanting to kill her, Meaghan gets turned on?! WTF?! (This happened SO MANY TIMES.) I came into this book HOPING it’d be about the rescuing brother thing but I think the author evidently thought a stupid love triangle would be more compelling (Um, NO) Also I didn’t care for Kagawa’s spin on the whole technology thing? It was a little too TECHNOLOGY BAD, NATURE GOOD, though she did try to complicate a little, I’ll admit. There just wasn’t enough complexity there in her spin on fairy folk lore for me. (Kinda didactic, I suppose?) I probably wouldn’t have bothered finishing it if it weren’t for the fact that 1) ninefly wanted me to do a read through to tell her my thoughts (She always uses me for a guinea pig to test out new novels.) 2) this was a debut book and would count for the Debut challenge. The random crack and Grimalkin got me through it, but there’s no way I’m touching the other books in the series. Any more Ash swooning and I just may have to kill myself.

*

In short, I’ve been disappointed by these faerie stories I’ve been reading lately. I know this entry makes me look like a hater, but I honestly once really enjoyed all these faerie stories, and was extremely partial to those changeling ones. I've been (masochistically?) checking out every YA faerie/fey/fairy/faery/whatever I can find in my library in hopes I'll come across one that I like, and I just read one this morning that I really enjoyed, so I'll hopefully have a happy YA faery book review for y'all soon. IN THE MEANTIME if anyone wants to rec me a YA faerie story with no love triangles of stupid, and no Midsummer Night's Dream references, that'd be awesome. For more specific references, I'd gobble up anything if there's an all-exclusive fairy school YA book out there (BOARDING SCHOOL SETTING IS PREFERABLY, BONUS IF IT'S ALL-FEMALES SCHOOL WITH RIVALRY NEXT TO A ALL-MALES BOARDING SCHOOL 8D) or a kelpie story wherein said kelpie lives in your bathtub. (Also, when I say fey books, I mean like, not fairy tale adaptations. Just straight-up fairy stories, please and thank you.) So yeah, recs will be great.

* I was reading this and it struck me that I probably came across as offensive and drowning in ablist privilege. I do not deny that I have ablist privilege and wrote thoughtlessly without considering the impact my use of these words may have, but I apologize to anyone and everyone for my language, and especially to those who may have been hurt by what I have said, and I shall try to do better at unpacking the implications of privilege I have, etc. Once again, I am very sorry.

100 Followers Contest for Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy Giveaway! + Your Thoughts on Series/Trilogies/Standalones

2010-05-22T21:09:00.006-04:00

I haz 100 followers! Triple digits!! I'm a bit awed and super happy that people out there like this book blog enough to follow it. I was thinking what paperback book I'd be willing to giveaway, and you know, with the talk of Richelle Mead's Spirit Bound floating around everywhere, I was like, hey, I own a used copy of the first book, maybe people would like it??

I think Vampire Academy is a most excellent book. I just read it recently as I heard so much about it and thought I'd dish out a couple dollars for a copy as I found it lying in a used bookstore. I did enjoy it, but I think hearing too much about a book can kind of skew your perception? Because like, I was led on to believe that Dmitri was going to be the hottest thing that came around the block since Casanova, but I was honestly skeeved out by Dmitri/Rose in general. Now, before Team Dmitri goes off and kills me, I'm sure that he has excellent traits! Just that whenever I see these mentor/mentee relationships they kind of make me shrivel up and die inside. It's one of my squicks, and I can't get over this bias of mine. But I think Rose is a cool narrator, and I'm totally in love with the strong friendship between her and Lissa, and I so dig Christian/Lissa like hotcakes. If the spin-off series was from their point of view I'd probably be all over it. Mmmmmm Christian.

But the whole Dmitri thing isn't the reason why I'm willing to let go of my copy of Vampire Academy. As much as I enjoyed the book (no, really, I was dying for a vampire novel with girl BFF stuff and no boyfriend stealing backstabbing crap but a REAL friendship and oh how this novel delivered. ♥), the idea of following a series is making me die a little inside. It's going to be six books! SIX! With a possibility of a spinoff! I'm a fan of standalones, and tolerate trilogies only because of its profusion in the YA market. I almost sighed with relief when I got to the end of the book and found myself satisfied and not in the least bit curious about following the rest of the series. I mean, I do enjoy a select few long series, but as much as I love them, sometimes they leave me feeling so drained. Does anyone else get this feeling? What is your preference/thoughts on series/trilogies/standalones? Feel free to discuss this with me in the comments. Or, you know, talk to me about ~~Christian FOREVAR~~ the Vampire Academy series. Do refrain from spoilers though. While I don't personally mind being spoiled, having no intention of keeping up with the series, I don't want to risk spoiling others who may wander into the comments section here. Or talk to me about your favourite vampire book! (Everyone into YA has a favourite vampire book! Everyone!) Talk to me about anything! I'm all ears. 8D

ANYHOW, to the part people actually care about: Want to win a copy of Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy? Please fill out the form:

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Yes it's open internationally. Go wild, folks~ *waves* Ends June 22th, 11:59 PM ESt

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? 05/17/2010 + Song Quest Signal Boost + Winner of Crossing Giveaway

2010-05-17T00:47:00.004-04:00

(meme from Book Journey)

....... I feel like I've done nothing but read Demon's Covenant. Which was a great novel, but basically it ate my brain. I blame it for my unproductiveness. But I think I'll manage to pull myself together this week. Somehow.

Completed Reads:
Half a Yellow Sun
Marcelo in the Real World
Princess Ben
Scarlett Fever
Demon's Covenant
Demon's Lexicon (reread)

Planning on Reading:
Crazy Diamond
Code Talker
Monstrumologist
Deloume Road

+

Signal Boost: Becky from The Bookette is hosting a Song Quest Blog Tour in order to get this lovely book back in print. I love this book very much and it was one of my many formative YA fantasy novel reads, and it'd be awesome to see some support! Here's my review promoting the book, and if you're in the UK, Becky is still taking in people who may be interested in being part of the tour, so please consider checking it out or recommending the tour/book to your friends, etc. 8D

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The Winner of Crossing is Melissa Pham. I've sent you an email. Please reply within 48 hours or I'll be forced to pick another winner.

Review: The Demon's Covenant by Sarah Rees Brennan

2010-05-17T00:07:00.008-04:00

Title: The Demon's Covenant
Author(s): Sarah Rees Brennan
Genre: YA Supernatural, Family, Romance
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

The Summary:Mae always thought she was in control, but in the past few weeks control has turned into chaos. She’s learned that her brother Jamie has magical powers and that Gerald, the new leader of the Obsidian Circle, is trying to persuade Jamie to join the magicians. The same magicians who tried to kill Mae and Jamie last month in London. The magicians who get their power by feeding people to demons.

Mae turns to brothers Nick and Alan to help her rescue Jamie, but they are in danger themselves. Every magician in England now knows what Nick really is—and they all want him dead.

Nick’s new power has also caused a rift between the brothers. In the weeks they were gone something terrible happened, something that haunts them both. With Nick as unreadable as ever and Alan making secret bargains with a demon, Mae finds herself attracted to both brothers—though she knows she can’t trust either of them. The magicians are closing in on one side and the dangerous, seductive Goblin Market is tempting her on the other, and Mae has to form her own plan to save them all. She's going to find that the price she must pay is more than she ever imagined.

The covenant is binding. There is no escape.

- From US Hardcover

Note: This is a second book in the trilogy. I've done my best to omit spoilers for both the First and Second book in this review, but there are some hints for one of the big reveals for the first book. If you're a complete spoiler-phobe then please proceed with caution.

The Review: Before I begin, I think I ought to confess how this book utterly ruined my week. People, I had plans. I was going to write up multiple reviews here, do more memes, leave comments on posts, go out into that big blue room with the giant yellow fireball in the ceiling and actually socialize with friends and family, but no, ever since I read The Demon’s Covenant last Tuesday, I could think of nothing else. I cancelled all plans, my to-read posts on google reader is at this atrocious triple digit number, and basically I’ve neglected everything just so I could read this book over a total of four times in six days and a small part of me whispers that if I didn’t have to spend a good chunk of my day going to work, the reread count would have at least been double. I even loved this book so much that I went and dug up a copy of the FIRST book to reread as well. (For the record, I reread it twice in these six days. Apparently my revelation for the week was that a day not reading SRB’s writing was a day wasted.) I harassed my family with constant squeals and sighs as I made a public spectacle of myself going all emotional over the book, roping my siblings into listening to various passages I re-enacted for them, whipped out the book from my purse (yes, I lugged that hardcover book everywhere with me) to wave its gorgeous cover in front of the faces of my friends, and even called a friend long distance the second she told me she finished the novel so that I could TALK ABOUT THIS BOOK with someone. This is the kind of sequel that makes the first book a better rereading experience. In fact, this is probably the most amazing sequel book I’ve ever read, and just a really amazing YA book overall and I love it to bits and it’s going to make it on my top 20 books I read this year, I know it, I can feel it in my bones.

I was actually surprised that I loved this book so much, because I wasn’t wow’ed by the first book. I mean, I really enjoyed it, but it wasn’t my favourite read of the year or anything. The first book had its moments of emotional intensity, and a really fast paced plot, (It reminded me of The Hunger Games’ pace, but with a much more careful eye at her choice of words, and interesting metaphor usage. ~~Yes, I am indeed implying that Sarah Rees Brennan writes better than Suzanne Collins.~~) but for the most part I was mostly swept by apathy towards all the characters unless their name was Alan or Nick (For the record, I liked Jamie’s lines, but I didn’t get attached to his character like the way I did with Alan or Nick.). In many ways, Nick’s world was very small, with very few people he considered important in his life, and this apathy towards anyone who wasn’t his brother was reflected throughout the writing of the first book and ended up generating a lack of story connectivity for me unless it was an emotional moment between the brothers. I also found the dialogue rather forced, with Nick’s lines trying a little too hard to be sarcastically funny (which looking back, I think was on purpose as it was Nick’s way to try to make Alan happy, but I didn’t see it this way a year ago) and the worldbuilding wasn’t to my taste. (Briefly, I prefer my fantasy based strongly on a body of related folklore/mythology instead of a mishmash of different myths/stories mixed together, and the magic here, while neatly laid out, feels a little flat in its tidiness and simplicity.)

The world building still isn’t to my taste, to be honest, but I don’t care about any of that because, my gawd, the characters just blew me away here. I was doubtful about this character POV change to Mae, whom I had a mostly reserved reaction to in the first book, but this story from Mae’s POV was so good . It gave me all the very human moments that neither Nick nor Gerald (who was also considered as a possible narrator for Book 2 ~~and I praise the heavens that this didn’t happen~~) could have provided, and I got her now, understood her in the ways I couldn’t gleam out of Nick’s narration in Book 1. Mae is totally a female protagonist you can root for, determined and good hearted and funny and all-around fun, and how she doesn’t sit around being a passive narrator and takes measures into her own hands. I’m sorry I doubted the strength of Mae as a narrator for even a second, or Sarah Rees Brennan’s ability to make her sympathetic. Because if there is only one thing I could name in terms of the author’s strengths in her writing abilities, the first and foremost thing that comes to mind is her way of drawing her characters so vividly, through amazing interpersonal character interaction that not only brings out the protagonist’s characteristics, but the other person she’s interacting with as well. Mae’s POV illuminated the very raw and achingly beautiful brother relationship between Alan and Nick that was different from the first book, but in no way less powerful. I love how we got to really know a good slew of people in this novel that we didn’t get in the first book, and there was none of that character disconnection I felt in the first book, which I believe probably stems from the fact that Mae herself is anything but apathetic towards the people she meets and interacts with around her. The experience of reading this novel was just so intense, because you feel like you really got these characters, and you care so much and there’s so much stuff happening and thrown at the character’s way, and you want everything to work out so bad. I wish I could explain this ability of Sarah Rees Brennan’s more clearly, but I’m not skilled enough with my words to do so, and instead I’m going to direct you this reaction post to The Demon’s Covenant that explains the character interaction thing in this novel much better than I have done here.

A large part of The Demon’s Covenant dealt with the idea of consequences. To the best of my abilities in talking about this without spoiling, in the first book people were willing to do the “wrong” thing to “protect” the important person in their lives, and in the second book, it deals with what happens after you do the unforgivable thing. Sarah Rees Brennan doesn’t hesitate to blur the line between Good and Bad, complicating her characters with varying shades of grey, and I really enjoy that, how not only does she challenge the rights and wrongs but is willing to take this a step further and examine the good/bad decisions her characters have made.

I really, really love the theme of family in this trilogy. Of course Nick and Alan was very lovely, and my fondness towards darling lying Alan continues to grow. I really enjoyed seeing the sibling interaction between Mae and Jamie, as a lovely contrast to Nick and Alan, and of course on its own right. It’s nice to see siblings in YA novels who don’t hate each other or the stereotypical Annoying Younger Sibling vs. Distant Older Sibling. I mean, they fight, but they love each other, the kind of family bond siblings share, and they always come through for each other no matter what. I'm so glad we got a better handle of Jamie in this book, because while I liked his lines in the first book, I didn't feel like I really got to know him. All that is rectified in this book. I loved how he was gay without making the whole coming out and what not stuff a Big Issue and he gets a love story and everything, and it was just really, really well done and I want him to be happy. I also enjoyed Mae’s interactions with her mother. Mae’s mom is seriously badass. I may have been a little in love. Actually all the women were rather badass in this novel. No helpless damsels as victims here. Sin in particular was my favourite. (Who is gorgeous and a dancer and an older sister and good with knives and incidentally biracial in the Not Making Race A Dominant Part of Her Identity way and will be the narrator of the third book! So excited!)

I also loved the string of makeout scenes in this novel, but that may be influenced by the fact that I am shallow. Also these kissing scenes were just really hot and sizzling in general. Mmmmmm... *coughs* Er, the fight scene was brilliant too! Very intense, especially the one on the bridge. The dialogue here was much smoother and flowed well to boot, and this book made me laugh and gush sniff and broke my heart and brought it back together all at once. I honestly can’t recommend it enough.

The Verdict: If you’ve read the first book and haven’t put the second book on your to-read this 1) there is something very wrong with you and 2) RECTIFY THIS TERRIBLE AND HEINUOUS ERROR OF YOURS NOW. If you’ve haven’t read the first book, read that first, and then run immediately to grab a copy of the second book. Theorectically I suppose you could read the second book without having read the first, since there’s enough context to pick up what’s going on without getting too lost, but it spoils the first book terribly and the experience of reading the first book would be utterly ruined, so I don’t suggest this. This is one of those rare special sequels that not only tops the first book in every way, but makes the first book better by proxy, and you’d be missing out if you skip out on reading covenant. Plus, the US version is all repackaged with a new gorgeous look with some amazingly beautiful cover models, and HOW CAN YOU RESIST THAT. Dark, intense, funny, and heartwrenching, the story will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading it. ~~And it'll also make you want to commit ritual sacrifices to get your hands on the third book.~~

Rating: 5/5
Enjoyment: Look, I’ve read this over FOUR TIMES already since having bought it less than a week ago. If this doesn’t make it obvious that this is the book I enjoyed reading the most so far this year, I don’t know what will.

Title and Cover Discussion: EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS IS BEAUTIFUL. EVERYTHING. I’M SO HAPPY THE US COVERS GOT REDESIGNED. I am in love with the font style and colour choice, the dynamic movement of the models, the beautiful blue flames of beauty, the twirling white dress. I am no longer jealous of the UK covers, as this beats the UK version, hands down. I loved it enough to pay full price for the hardcover, which I wasn’t supposed to do since I’m making an attempt to “save money” but I couldn’t let the precious book out of my hands. (I do miss the secret cover of the first US hardback though, as I was kind of hoping for the same thing with the second book, but blue flames make up for everything.) Although now I’m all ~*conflicted*~ since I don’t have matching covers and I want a matching set for this trilogy and don’t know whether or not I should go and collect this trilogy with the UK covers or US, but I am thoroughly off topic by now so I’m just gonna shut up and give this whole package an A

Title: A
Cover: A+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? 05/10/2010

2010-05-10T00:15:00.001-04:00

(meme from Book Journey)

So... my catching up on reviews is not quite going as I planned, as I slacked off majorly halfway through last week. lol in other words I don't think I'll get 30 reviews done this month, but how about I promise getting a good chunk of it done by this month? The vague numbers makes all this feel more manageable, lol.

Finished Books
Song Quest by Katherine Roberts
In a Heartbeat by Loretta Ellsworth
Boys Without Names by Kashmira Sheth
Front and Center by Catherine Gilbert Murdock
Hearts at Stake by Alyxandra Harvey
The Clearing by Heather Davis
La joueuse de go by Shan Sa
The Color of Earthy by Dong Hwa Kim
Water Baby by Ross Campbell

Still Reading
Half a Yellow Sun by Chimanda Ngozi Adichie
The Darkness Under Water by Beth Kanell
The Vast Fields of Ordinary by Nick Burd

Planning on Reading
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork
Wait for Me by An Na
Princess Ben by Catherine Gilbert Murdock
Scarlett Fever by Maureen Johnson
La Traversée du continent by Michel Tremblay

Reviews Completed
Freak Show by James St. James
The Year of the Horse by Justin Allen - TS
Skunk Girl by Sheba Karim - TS
North of Beautiful by Justina Chen Headley
Song Quest by Katherine Roberts - SC

Upcoming (potential) Reviews
Boys Without Names by Kashmira Sheth
Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin
Soulless by Gail Carriger
The Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
Deadtown by Nancy Holzner
Dairy Queen, The Off Season, and Front and Center by Catherine Gilbert Murdock
Hearts at Stake by Alyxandra Harvey
In a Heartbeat by Loretta Ellsworth
The Clearing by Heather Davis? <- may wait till I own a copy before I review

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Reminder: There's still time to enter my Crossing Book Giveaway! Opens internationally, and ends May 14th.

Second Childhood: Review of Song Quest by Katherine Roberts

2010-05-09T22:50:00.011-04:00

About the Song Quest Campaign:

As some of you may or may not know, The Bookette is hosting a Blog Tour to help get this awesome book back in print. I am very fond of this novel and am sad to see that it’s no longer being put out there for new readers in bookstores, so here’s my contribution to the cause. For more details, please go here, or follow the Bookette's blog for more updates and new reviews of Song Quest.

Summary (From Backcover of US 1st Edition paperback): Far from the purple plains and the mountains of midnight, nestled in the crystal-blue waters of the Western Sea, lies the Isle of Echoes, where the forces of good and evil are held in harmony by strange and mysterious people: the Singers. The Singers can hear the silent voices of magical half-creatures and can speak over great distances using only their minds. Safely hidden away on the enchanting Isle of Echoes, they use their unearthly songs to keep peace in their world.

But a great evil threatens to destroy their isle and all that is good in the world. Now, only two young Singers can defeat the forces of darkness: kind Rialle, her voice as sweet as sunlight, and rebellious Kherron, whose longing for freedom may thrust him into the arms of the enemy.

Alone, stranded far from home, Rialle and Kherron are caught up in a dangerous and sinister web, struggling against the powers of darkness that threaten to destroy their world.

Note: As this was a book I read when I was a kid, I have pretty deep emotional responses in the re-read that colours my perception and how I interact with the book. For this reason my review format will be different from my usual reviews, and I’ll be using the format I previously utilized for my old Throwback Thursday posts, which I’ve stopped because 1) I got lazy, and 2) my approach is less review-heavy and more about my personal experiences of a reread, ie. very different from the TT meme going around. I decided to call these types of reviews Second Childhood as a tentatively new feature on my blog, but as I'm not the greatest with keeping to schedule, I'll hesitate to make any promises on this being a regular feature... For now.

Blast From the Past: Growing up, I did not own many books, let alone new ones. For one thing, we had a strict budget on what we could buy because we were new immigrants trying to make it in the city, and had various mortgages to pay off. (Of course my younger self never quite understood the details of our financial situation and all this just translated to me growing up knowing I can’t ask for gratuitous toys like tamogotchi even if I really wanted it because everyone else had it.) Also, no one in my family was a really keen book reader besides me, so book buying was not the biggest priority on their list of things our family Must Need. I mean, they bought all the basic early learner books to try and help boost our English reading abilities to acceptable levels, but buying novels for leisure? Hardly ever. The only new, non-used novels I ever got were three of those Princess Diaries from around the world books one Christmas, Brian James’ Tomorrow Maybe, Deborah Ellis’ The Breadwinner, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne series, and the Harry Potter series. (I also smuggled some Artemis Fowl books into our cart when we shopped around Costco.) An overwhelming majority of the books I read growing up were checked out lovingly with the library card my dad helped me get.

One of the many reasons why Katherine Roberts’ novel Song Quest was so special to me was that it was one of the four used books I got to pick out during that one time my parents decided to indulge me when we were roaming the flea market. (FYI, All of them fantasy titles, lol.) It was one of the few books I actually owned and loved, and the fact that I picked it out for myself made it that much more special. I think I was really in love with the idea of wielding magic through song. I remember my younger self reading the Echorium Anthem displayed just after the map splash page, imagining a song in my head and giddy over the idea that a singing voice can have a magical power. Also, I was simply charmed by Kherron, one of the two protagonists, which I’ll explore and elaborate on in the Re-visiting experience section. All my favourite scenes happened in Kherron’s storyline, and I was very fond of his new Mainlander friend Lazim. Him and Lazim were my two favourite characters back then. Finally, it was just an amazing yarn of a story, a world familiar enough to identify with but with enough magic infused into it to make the world special, with doses of high stakes and how it’s up to the kids to save the day. I reread this book so many times as a kid that you can see how worn the cover is around the edges, the creases. I always considered Song Quest one of my formative childhood books and first few fantasy loves.

WARNING: A few spoilers in this section below

The Re-visiting Experience: I actually haven’t reread this book since I started high school (… wow, so long ago), so rereading this book really took me back. It was really fun like the first time around when I read this novel, and I’m so happy that the whole singing aspect was just as captivating as I remembered it. I still love Kherron’s storyline, but I confess that I’m kind of shocked at my younger self for liking him so much. As enjoyable as he was, he was honestly not a nice person and had a bit of a mean bully streak. His charisma still took over the stage and he was always quick on his feet with savvy smarts, poking his nose all around trying to untangle the big secret of the Mainlanders, and at the end of the day I still picked Kherron’s story over Rialle, lol. Perhaps I liked him so much because lots of action takes place in his storyline, especially compare to Rialle’s tale. And honestly, I do still like him. How he was a bit vain and selfish, and terribly jealous of the girl who always beat him for the #1 spot in class, and how behind his show of arrogance is a boy desperately wishing for the recognition he wants, how behind everything he does is a show to try and prove himself. (Actually, thinking about this carefully, I think I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for the selfish, ambitious types, so I guess I shouldn’t have been this surprised that I liked, and still like Kherron.) Also, I think with these flawed characters, we get more room for great character development, which always makes their transformative journey very interesting to see. This is not to say that Kherron is a totally nice person by the end of the story, but he’s humbled by the end of the journey, and does some growing up, while still being the believable hothead impatient boy he was at the beginning of the novel.

The thing I was really shocked by though? Was my younger self’s love of Kherron/Rialle. I mean, as much as I like Kherron, he totally does NOT deserve Rialle. She’s just too good for him. Also, I wouldn’t wish Rialle on someone who's hotheaded and selfish. A relationship between the two of them will just go badly, with Rialle going into tears and Kherron yelling his frustration. I think I liked Kherron/Rialle because I liked Kherron, and of course the Big Damn Hero of the day should get the girl. Also somewhere in my mind I was just used to the idea that Nice Guys Never Win, so when the Nice Guy did, I was taken by surprise. I guess that’s why I was so shocked when it didn’t quite work out like that when I was young. It didn’t fall into usual formula I was used to! It was weird! But rereading this again, I’m really glad Rialle ended up with Frenn. (Okay I guess this was a spoiler, but come on, they were making eyes at each other since page one at the beach, it was so obvious, even if my twelve year old self couldn’t see it.) They’re just really sweet on each other and adorable, and I love how Frenn worships the ground Rialle walks on and thinks she’s brilliant, lopsided smiles and jokes always at hand. The biggest change when I reread this novel was that I utterly and completely fell in love with Frenn 50 pages in. I never liked him when I was young because I was so Kherron-biased and the two boys didn’t get along, but now that I’m older I see all of Frenn’s charms. Rialle and Frenn just fit each other to a T. They’re just two really kind people, one who would do anything to help others and the other who would do anything to stay by the side of the love of his life. I think we need more romances like this in YA, wherein the bad boy does NOT get the girl for a change, and the main romance is just very sweet and beautiful and heartwarming.

I also appreciated Rialle’s storyline a lot more in this reread. I mean, it wasn’t that I hated Rialle back when I was young. I just thought she wasn’t half as interesting as Kherron. I do still think her storyline doesn’t have that zing like in Kherron’s that drew me in so much, but I do appreciate the thoughtful, emotional, close introspect we got from Rialle’s perspective. While Kherron’s story has more action, Rialle’s has more heart, and they balance each other out very nicely. Also it’s topped with that sweet love story of cuteness, and I aww’ed too many times in this reread to count. I also like Rialle much more as a person now. I used to think she was boring and too weepy, but I see and appreciate her shy kindness, the way she would try so hard for others she loves, and the way she fights back not with action like Kherron, but with her singing abilities, showing time and again that her spot as #1 in her class isn’t for nothing.

I’ll confess that a plotline that fell flat for me was the manipulated king storyline. The novel basically erased Lord Azri of responsibility for the Half-Creatures massacre. I don’t really buy a “good” king who was so easily tricked and used to justify the killings, and he comes across more as a weak leader and a naïve fool to me more than anything. I mean, you never once checked to see how you were getting your medicine? Never did the rounds on the priests? A king like that, I kind of expect the whole kingdom of Karch to just crumble in its foundation. But this is honestly a minor quibble in relation to the rest of the very enjoyable story. ETA The book also suffers from an Evil Villain of Irredeemable Evil, but this villain figure is familiar enough to me in MG/YA fantasy for me to not really get hung up over it.

And finally, a thing struck me about this novel while I was reading it. This is one of those fantasy worlds that didn’t read as exclusively European medieval fantasy social infrastructure to me. The description of the people’s features were left vague enough for me to fill in any face I want, and there’s no emphasis on Awesomely Coloured Eyes, or Golden Locks of Luscious Hair or the beauty of pale pale pale white skin. And yet, when I was young, I always thought of the characters as ‘white’. This mentality of white-as-default is a pervasive and problematic reader’s response that’s outside of this novel though, and not much to do with the actual story itself. I just thought it’d be interesting to note.

All in all, an awesome reread experience, and I encourage everyone who’s keen on a different kind of fantasy to give this a shot.

Passage Quotes: (because I can. =P)

Some Frenn/Rialle cuteness-

"I don't want Challa. It makes me forget things. What if you're not around when Eliya's finished with me? I might forget you."
"Why wouldn't I be around?" Frenn stared at her for a moment, then pulled off the red bracelet he'd found on the beach, took her hand, and slid the thick metal up her arm. It went all the way past her elbow, and was still warm from his body. "You won't forget me now," he said, giving her that familiar lopsided grin as he scrambled to his feet. "I'd better go now. It'll be my turn soon."
Rialle fingered the bracelet, a lump in her throat. "But what if she gives you a Song?"
"Challa makes you dream, Shi makes you cry, Kashe makes you laugh, Aushan makes you scream, Yehn makes you die." Frenn repeated the pallet-ditty, still grinning. "She'll have to give me Yehn before I forgot you, Rialle! (pg. 28)

Kherron, being Kherron-

The caves have been a stroke of luck, but he'd been right about the tide. It had been far enough out for him to splash around three headlands without getting much more than the hem of his tunic and the bottom of his leggings wet. No one had come after him. Kherron smiled again. Ha, the others were pathetic. Follow meekly where Graia led, getting all excited over a few moldy old timbers and broken lanterns, when it was perfectly obvious the best treasure would be found where there weren't any people. And when he found it, even old misery-guts Eliya would have to recognize he was no longer a child and let him sing. (pg. 20)

Like my review? Think the book sounds interesting? Please consider buying one (Amazon.Com has a few copies left) or ordering it from your local library. I need people to talk to about this book! And maybe get more people on Team Kherron while I’m at it. Surely I’m not the only one who’s a sucker for those selfish, arrogant, ambitious types? Also please follow The Bookette for more updates on this Song Quest Blog Tour.

Triple Snapshots: Asian Matters

2010-05-06T10:05:00.001-04:00

Triple Snapshots is a (hopefully) weekly feature on my blog wherein I take a break from my typical overly long reviews to post short one-paragraph impressions on the books I've read. For this week's theme, the three books have at least one Asian character in the main cast (Two Chinese, One Pakistani)

The Year of the Horse by Justin Allen
Ah, The Year of the Horse. A fascinating concept that failed to deliver for me. This was mainly because I couldn’t connect to any of the main characters and in turn couldn’t care less about their adventures. I wanted to like Lu because, hey, Asian-American protagonist in a Western, yay! But he was the passive narrator type, and I don’t care for those. Couple that with his incessant hero-worship of Jack (whom I was thoroughly sick of by the time Chapter two came along, and spent half the time during the reading discussions I had with ninefly and Ari complaining about Jack, and wanting him to get off the stage) and our protagonist elicited feelings of complete apathy on my part. I didn’t care about the characters, I didn’t care about their adventures, I didn’t care about the plot direction, I found the writing uninspiring and I suspect that I wouldn’t have stuck to this book so long if it weren’t for the fact that I was reading this along with others, and that their reactions to the story were far more interesting and enjoyable than the reading experience itself. (For instance, we had a bit of a running joke over Lu’s horrible nicknaming abilities, and I personally think that if ever Lu and Sadie hook up, he should leave all the children’s naming decisions to the lady.) I did, however, fall madly in love with this total minor character called Bill. Mostly because he keeps dangerous animals as pets (He calls his mountain lion Sweetheart! And his snake Hank! Squee~) and names a gun after his wife, lawl. And got all emotionally invested yet another minor character Goklayeh, and his non-existent’s backstory (I’m convined that he and the unnamed scarred girl had a torrid tragic love story and it was all very epic and things of melodrama and tearjerkers.). I think my biggest personal problem that hindered my reading enjoyment was that I kept on wishing that the story was about anyone else but the main characters. I suppose next time if ever I crave a Western setting storyline featuring Asian protagonists, I’ll just watch some East Asian films with a 'Western-esque' troupe. In fact, my Asian entertainment-viewing friends have been badgering me to get on with watching South Korean film The Good, The Bad, The Weird for the longest time, perhaps I’ll get around to finally watching it.

Skunk Girl by Sheba Karim
I really enjoyed this YA novel. It had a lot of heart. Nina was a perfectly lovable protagonist, and I love seeing her navigate through her life experiences, from family setting to school life to love life. This book was all about character growth, not just in the protagonist, but with other characters that surround and make up Nina’s life. In other words, my favourite aspect of the novel was the characterization. Everyone was so wonderfully fleshed out, and the interactions were all very genuine. I liked how her interactions were varied too, and not totally dominated by only one type of interaction (I'm thinking romantic interactions, a phenomenon that’s pretty prevalent in YA books, unfortunately.), and that she has pretty significant, sustained interactions with her family members and friends along with her crush. The voice was charmingly funny and witty in the understated way rather than the outrageous laugh-until-there’s-no-air-in-your-lungs way, and I think this tone suits the narrative of this novel very well. Highly recommended, and I keep hoping that this novel will either be optioned for a movie or a tv series. For this type of slice-of-life genre, I like seeing the story unfold in a motion picture medium, and I think it’d make a great show with lots of hilarity and heart, y/y? I’d vote for Zarqa Nawaz (creator of Little Mosque on the Prairie sitcom) to adapt this novel. 8D

North of Beautiful by Justina Chen Headley
Justina Chen Headley has, after reading and falling in love with her first two books, become an instant must-read author for me. So of course when North of Beautiful came out, I had to hunt it down as fast as possible. Writing an objective review on this novel though, was rather difficult for me. Because while I enjoyed and loved the book, a part of me realized upon finishing it that I mostly liked it for the familiar Headley style in this novel. I enjoyed it because I liked Headley’s writing and the Girl Overboard cameo moment, and not so much the story itself. Because, truth be told, when I had time to step away from the afterglow of being all giddy over Headley’s words, I realized that I enjoyed the actual storyline far less in comparison to her previous works. I’m a bit ambivalent about the message of beauty in this novel. It’s a good message, to be sure - I just wasn’t too fond of the way that orphanage scene unfolded when Terra meets her so called Chinese girl counterpart, and how beauty and race intersected there... I found the family drama rather weak in the first half as well. (The mother-daughter develops improved tenfold when we hit the second half though, to be fair.) The pacing was off and the story doesn’t really take flight until the second half when they go to Mainland China. I was actually surprised that this was my favourite part, as I really despise the whole white-tourist-in-exotic-locale type stories. But it was more or less done right, and most importantly, the romance between Jacob and Terra blossoms. I think I’ll be forever fond of this novel as Headley’s first truly romantic story, aka with the romantic storyline dominating. (As much as I liked her first two novels of young girls empowering themselves and finding their place in the world, I was totally ready for a Headley style romance, and this novel delivered.) Also because I am extremely fond of Jacob. He’s so boyfriend material. I wish that we got to know more about him actually because his role in the novel was predominantly that of a love interest, and we only see glimpses of other facets to his persona. ~~Also the description of a scar on his upper lip is totally hot.~~ I do think however, that he has quite a lot of baggage issues that have yet to be unpacked by the end of the novel. He never really does reconcile with his Chinese heritage and his whole background as a transnational adoptee. His declarations about how his mom and Terra’s mom were “More Chinese than the Chinese” nonsense didn’t sit well with me either, especially since this claim goes unchallenged. But as Headley has handled race much better in her previous books, I’m willing to overlook this factoid. ANYHOW, I think fans of Headley’s works will be slightly disappointed but get a kick out of this novel anyways if you’re fond of her writing, and I think this novel will convert new readers to Headley’s works, so it’s a win situation overall.

Waiting on Wednesday: Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime by Mizuki Nomura

2010-05-05T00:05:00.001-04:00

(Meme from Breaking the Spine)

This week I'm waiting on the U.S./Canadian release of Japanese light novel Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime

Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime by Mizuki Nomura

For self-styled "book girl," third-year high school student Tohko Amano, being the head of the literary club is more than just an extracurricular activity with minor perks. It's her bread and butter . . . literally! Tohko is actually a literature-gobbling demon, and instead of the less palatable option of water-soaked bread, she opts to munch on torn out pages from all kinds of stories. But for Tohko, the real delicacies are handwritten stories. And to satisfy her gourmet tastes, she's employed (aka. browbeaten) one Konoha Inoue, an underclassman who has retreated from writing novels after his experiences with getting published at an early age. So day in and day out, Konoha scribbles away to satisfy Tohko's appetite. But when, one day, another student comes knocking on the literary club door to seek advice on writing love letters, will Tohko discover a new kind of delicacy to whet her voracious appetite?

Release Date: July 27, 2010

I've been hearing about this title on and off for the last year. Or, to be more specific, I've been hearing about the buzz for the anime film adaptation Bungaku Shoujo, which was going to be produced by Production I.G., whose company is known for producing quality shows/movies/OVAs. (I concede that there is also a 3-part OVA adaptation for this novel as well, but I've heard less buzz over that, and wasn't aware of it until recently) So when I found out that the novel was getting translated into English, my interest was piqued because I always like to try reading the original novel source before watching the film adaptation, you know? Also finding this review for the novel made me even more curious about this title. From the summary I thought it was going to be a straight-up comedy, but it seems to be going down a slice-of-life wistful tone which can be an interesting handle on playing out this premise. With translated books though, often the quality of the translator's work will make or break the book. A lot of light novels that get translated have pretty shoddy to mediocre translations at best (Though I do tend to like the translations provided by VIZ company, they're pretty reliable. This book however, is done by YEN Press, and while I like their manga/manhwa translations, the translation of the Haruhi novels on the other hand, were awkward). Oh well, guess we'll have to wait for July to see.

I will hopefully get to this novel and finish reading it in time for the Debut Author Challenge, as this U.S./Canadian release is Mizuki Nomura's debut on this side of the ocean. I'm being flexible with my interpretation of the YA/MG qualifications of this challenge here, as I'm interpreting this as any novel that is marketed towards a teenage audience, nevermind that the original language it was written in wasn't in English and the target audience isn't based in the US or UK. While I see that international blogger participation is encouraged in this challenge, I think non-English-language titles are far less promoted for this Challenge. In fact, I have yet to see one review for a non-English debut YA title. (Please correct me if I'm wrong about this.) And I see no reason why this should be the case.

Movie Trailer:

OVA Trailer:

Review: Freak Show by James St. James

2010-05-04T00:09:00.002-04:00

Title: Freak Show
Author(s): James St. James
Genre: YA Contemporary, High School
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Puffin

The Summary: Meet Billy Bloom, new student at the ultra-white, ultra-rich, ultra-conservative Dwight D. Eisenhower Academy and drag queen extraordinaire. Actually, “drag queen” does not begin to describe Billy and his fabulousness. Any way you slice it, Billy is not a typical seventeen-year-old, and the Bible Belles, Aberzombies, and Football Heroes at the academy have never seen anyone quite like him before. But thanks to the help and support of one good friend, Billy’s able to take a stand for outcasts and underdogs everywhere in his own outrageous, over-the-top, sad, funny, brilliant, and unique way.

The Review: I will not lie, this book made me feel like I was on the sugar high of my life. (btw this is not a bad thing. I love my sugar!) Probably because our protagonist is outrageously funny, witty and all around awesome. I basically giggled my way through this book as Billy swoops in with theatrics and charisma pouring out of the pages, demanding you pay attention as she puts sequins onto her face. It’s like life and reality keep shoving Billy all this crap, but does our star of the story take this lying down? NO, BILLY BLOOM WILL ALWAYS BOUNCE BACK. She gets up again and again, striving to be true to herself. * She will come back at you, with more sparkle and charm than before, and win the heart of her audience. She certainly won my heart, at any rate.

Looking back, there were a lot of intense issues raised in this novel, and Billy had to go through some experiences of abuse and abandonment that was so very wrong. And yet, I do not recall feeling once deep bouts of angst or moments I wanted to cry in this novel. In fact, I mostly felt that sugar high happiness I mentioned previously, even during the bad times. (Okay, a bit towards the end I felt a little like crying and hurting a certain bastard, but then our author gave us the sweetest, darling ending ever of cute and happiness, and I totally forgot about the jerk, who totally wasn’t worth the expenditure of my anger, at any rate.) When faced with bigotry, bullying and abuse, she fights back with her endless supply of humour and refuses to change herself. And for the really scarring moments of her life, she relays them in this dream-like, disconnect fashion, implying that what’s past has past, and what’s important is moving on. I might be wrong about this, but this novel, above all, conveys the message that life’s too short to let bigots bring you down, and Billy’s attitude of never apologizing or changing herself, of bouncing back is so uplifting to see. How can you not help but root for her?

My favourite part about this novel though, outside of Billy’s narration, is the sweet romance that builds between Billy and the Golden boy of the school, the star football player, Flip. At first it just seems like your average crush that probably won’t go anywhere. But then towards the middle of the novel they start to become friends, and it’s so sweet and adorable as Billy learns about the person behind Everyone’s Nice, To-Go-To Guy. (I really like what he had to say about love and like, wherein – paraphrased, mind – he says it’s so easy for him to fall in love with a hot guy, liking someone was far more difficult, and how that made Flip special. No lie: I aww’ed *is such a sap*) Flip himself is sweet too, and he was so very typical dumb hot jock on the surface, but the author gives Flip such character nuances through Billy’s eyes, and I loved him very much as we start seeing his character grow and all the sweet, endearing moments he shares with Billy.

Of course, I adore the writing. Not so much because it’s sophisticated or pretty, but it captures Billy’s drama queen persona so well. James St. James doesn’t pull any stops; he brings on the capslock, the italics, the exclamation marks with unabashed zeal and fervour. And I love every second of it! I suppose theoretically one can be put off by this kind of writing, but I had too much fun reading this to take anyone’s criticisms on the capslock crazy seriously. ~~I personally say that all the nay-sayers just need to find themselves a sense of humour.~~ And I thought this novel covered a lot perfectly even sequencing that made sense. The novel passes by the three main stages of new-girl-in-town, romantic development, and then her empowerment as a transwoman and reaffirmation of identity sprinkled with flashbacks. (I especially love the third part of the novel, wherein Billy declares loud and proud that gender is a choice and sticks it to the Bible Belles of the school who won’t accept her or label her as a freak.) I suppose it’s all kind of predictable, but the theatrics of our lead character will keep readers entertained throughout the reading experience. Above all, Billy is a very sympathetic teen voice with very high school-esque concerns ranging from finding your place in the high school social hierarchy and what to wear for prom. You can’t help but love her.

And finally, this book may possible contain the best football game commentary ever. None of that game plan technical ramblings that no one cares about, and focuses instead on Flip, Flip, and more Flip. Our protagonist totally got her priorities down pat.

The Verdict: So much outrageous fun! You like YA contemporary and comedy? A sweet romance? Drama queen personas? If so, run and get a copy of this novel NOW. I had an absolute blast reading this.

Rating: 4.5/5
Enjoyment: !!!100+++%!!!

Title and Cover Discussion: I’ll say upfront that I have no way of weighing on this objectively. Every time I see this cover, the pink glow radiates off and colours my vision, and just looking at the pink cover of happiness makes me so, so happy. The sound of the title makes me smile and giggle like a fiend. I kind of, sort of, maybe remember a time when I first saw the cover and recoiled, but I decided that my past self simply had no taste. Am not going to rate this, and any criticisms of the pink cover of awesomesauce gets a LALALA CAN’T HEAR YOU from me. 8D

*I am purposely using the ‘she’ pronoun because it is pretty clear that the gender Billy identifies with is female.

Author Interview: Andrew Xia Fukuda

2010-05-03T14:12:00.004-04:00

Hey folks! I'm here with an author interview featuring Andrew Xia Fukuda, author of the most excellent novel Crossing. I'm super excited and nervous about this because, truth be told, this is my first author interview ever, and hopefully I'm not messing up my first foray into this whole interview business too badly.

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Yuan: I confess that one of my favorite aspects of your novel Crossing was the singing element. What made you decide on giving Xing a singing talent?

AXF: I'll need to confess something in order to answer that: I can't sing a lick. I croak like a frog when I try to sing. I've often wondered what it must be like to be able to sing lights-out beautiful, to own a musical instrument in your voice box. They say authors often live vicariously through their protagonists and this is certainly the case with me here. Once I decided that Xing would be a singer, I found and developed some metaphorical meanings behind Xing's rediscovery of his voice, but the simple answer to the question is I finally found a way to sing, albeit vicariously.

Yuan: You decided to name your protagonist Xing, and at the front we are given two definitions of the word (star and crossing). I suspect that this choice in name is very deliberate on your part. Can you please share with us more details on why and how you chose this name, its significance, etc?

AXF: Yes, it was a deliberate choice. First, "Xing" is a word that just seems all wrong and out of place yet sticks out a lot as well. That's an apt way to describe how many immigrant teens feel: out of place yet conspicuous. Second, Xing is a conscious play on words: it can mean star or crossing. Star connotes the sense of hope which Xing (and his parents) initially attached to the ideal of America. "Xing", when found as a road sign, also stands for a crossing. This obviously relates to the crossing to America. But crossing also works in a different direction in the novel: the reader makes a crossing into the life of Xing - walks in his shoes, lives in his skin, sees the world as he sees it. For me, this crossing of a reader into the very life and heart of a kind of person usually ignored and bypassed was a big part of this book.

Yuan: There is quite a dearth in Asian teenager leads in English-language fiction. In fact, I believe that your novel is the only debut American novel of 2010 I came across this year that featured an Asian (teenage)* protagonist. Do you have any book recommendations for an audience seeking English novels that can speak to a shared Asian Diasporic experience?

AXF: I love all of Jhumpa Lahiri's works, especially her short story collections Interpreter of the Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth. And although a little out-dated, John Okada's No-No Boy has always resonated deep within. Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor was Divine also has a quiet elegance and eloquence about it. None of these has a teenage protagonist but they each in their own way powerfully capture something about the sense of displacement and the yearning for a place called home.

Yuan: Finally, for all your new fans converted after having read your most excellent novel Crossing, do you have a future project coming up for us fans to look forward to? And if possible, do you care to share any details?

AXF: At the moment, I have the opposite of writer’s block: two stories have tumbled into my head and heart, and both, apparently, are jostling to be written before the other. They are completely different genres involving drastically different writing styles: one is literary romance (this caught me by surprise) and the other is a YA novel with a neat spin on the dystopian genre. It’s a bizarre experience; if I spend too much time on the one, I feel unfaithful to the other. Both are flowing so well that I dare not put either aside out of fear that that might somehow dry up the creative stream.

* Note: When I asked this question I forgot to add in 'teenage' into the question.

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Interested in finding out more about his debut book Crossing? You can check out my review, and please consider entering my Crossing Book Giveaway for a chance to win a most excellent novel! (Opens internationally and ends May 14th)

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? 05/03/2010

2010-05-03T00:30:00.001-04:00

(meme from Book Journey)

You know, I think I'm just going to do this kind of meme instead of bothering with the mailbox or library loot meme. It just feels more productive, and for any POC titles I want to highlight, I'll just contribute to the New Crayons memes over at Color Online. I don't particularly feel enthused about sharing the library books I borrow, especially since I don't tend to finish half of them (because I'm less concerned with whether or not I'll like the book and more concerned with how much I can stuff into my bag, so with my luck I always pick out a lot of duds. Pretty covers don't always mean good novels, and yet I never learn my lesson...) I dunno, for me, I just prefer laying out what books I'm currently reading, as opposed to showing off my latest purchases or loot from the latest library trip. Unless I get wicked deals for bargain prices for over 10+ books, then I'll make an exception. So! long story short, ITWAYR memes will be replacing the IMMs for the most part. Also this meme makes me feel sort of organized! ~~I rarely get this feeling~~

Finished Books:
The Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
Very LeFreak by Rachel Cohn
Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver

Still Reading:
La joueuse de go by Shan Sa
Half a Yellow Sun by Chimanda Ngozi Adichie
In A Heartbeat by Loretta Ellsworth
Boys Without Names by Kashmira Sheth
The Black Dancing Body by Brenda Dixon Gottschild
Front and Center by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

Planning to Read:
Song Quest by Katherine Roberts - This is a reread for the blog tour
The Pack ARC by L.M. Preston
The Darkness Under Water by Beth Kanell
Hearts at Stake by Alyxandra Harvey
The Vast Fields of Ordinary by Nick Burd

Reviews Completed:
Crossing by Andrew Xia Fukuda
Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver
Very LeFreak by Rachel Cohn
Split by Swati Avasthi

Upcoming Reviews
Freak Show by James St. James
Song Quest by Katherine Roberts
Skunk Girl by Sheba Karim
Soulless by Gail Carriger
The Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
Deadtown by Nancy Holzner
North of Beautiful by Justina Chen Headley
The Year of the Horse by Justin Allen
(Potentially a manga or manhwa review. Assuming I figure out a format of sorts in time.)

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Reminder: There's still time to enter my Crossing Book Giveaway! Opens internationally, and ends May 14th.

Review: Split by Swati Avasthi

2010-05-02T00:00:00.001-04:00

Title: Split
Author(s): Swati Avasthi
Genre: YA contemporary, family, abuse
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

The Summary: Sixteen-year old Jace Witherspoon arrives at the doorstep of his estranged brother, Christian, with a re-landscaped face (courtesy of his father), $3.84, and a secret.

He tries to move on, going for new friends, a new school, and a new job, but all his changes can't make him forget what he left behind. His mother is still trapped with his dad. And his ex-girlfriend is keeping his secret--for now.

Turns out there are some things you can't just walk away from.

Swati Avasthi gives us a riveting portrait of what happens after. After you've said enough, after you've made the split--how do you begin to live again? Readers won't be able to put this intense page-turner down.

--from the cover flap

The Review: I fell deep into this novel from page one. The thing I really enjoy in YA lit is that a lot of them take you deep inside the character’s psyche, and this novel delivers on this aspect in spades. Perhaps it might seem problematic, to identify so much with a bruiser - because, make no mistake, our narrator Jace does show signs of abusive behaviour – but I really appreciate the way the author handles this, getting us to fall in love with Jace while calling out his behaviour, and saying outright that it’s wrong. Too many times have I seen the boyfriends of YA lit showing “bad boy” abusive tendencies, that we are supposed to accept solely on the fact that he is the Love Interest, and can’t do wrong. This take on the bad boy is very refreshing.

And to look at the flip side, I also appreciate the fact that we get sensitive portrayals of Jace and Christian’s mother, who has stayed with their father for a very long time. There is no “Why is she still with him?” victim-blaming questions, but probes deeper, fleshing out her personality, her ties with her sons, and we readers get a realistic portrayal of their mother, her psyche. There are not inherently good or evil people: there is wrong and right actions, and owing up to what you have done wrong. By portraying her characters in this light, Avasthi makes her cast intricately complicated, and also that much more human.

I really liked Avasthi’s take on the meaning of family in a broken household, and the interactions between the two brothers in particular. In Sarah Rees Brennan’s post about this novel, she gives us a nice sentence on the deep probing Avasthi delves into in the interactions between the two brothers – one who stayed and one who ran away from home. “It isn’t a question of what you sacrifice, with family – it’s a question of who you sacrifice, and the answer is someone you love.” There’s that tension when these two severed brothers meet again, of not knowing where you stand, of tenderness towards familial ties. It was a relationship that was without a doubt, severely broken, but I as a reader found myself willing for things to work out, hoping desperately as I flipped through the pages.

This novel is one of those extremely character-driven types (ie. the ones I enjoy very much), and we spend all our time in Jace’s head. Honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way. He was a very raw, intense character, and you can practically feel his anger bubbling on the edges, and with Avasthi’s deft hand she paint his narrative in a sympathetic fashion. I don’t believe I must agree with all of the protagonist’s actions or that they must be a good, upstanding person in order for me to enjoy their narrative; all I ask is that they have strong, convincing personas that fly off the page, and Jace fits this bill in spades. Of course, as we are in Jace’s head so much, we don’t really have a sense of the characters in the periphery, but the characters we do get to see are deeply complex and believable, whole beings.

Okay, let’s talk about the women! I love the women that surround Jace’s narrative. Both Jace and his brother are drawn towards “strong” women, ones who stand up for themselves, and I’m all for it. The women here aren’t, you know, the trophy love interest, their reward for being the Big Damn Hero, but fully fleshed out characters who not only interact with our boys, but react back. As much as this is very much a book about a boy, it is also about a boy who has significant interactions with other human beings, a lot of which are made up of women. This is no All-Boys-Exclusive-Adventure novel that forgets half the world’s population, and I’m all for it. I really enjoy watching Christian and Mirriam interact. Can I say how much I love Marriam? I mean, she’s not perfect, she’s bossy, and always sticks her nose into places, but she’s also very sincere, and does her best to help people. (Actually, she kind of reminded me of Hermione from the Harry Potter series, except, you know, an adult version who is less of a bookworm, in a mature relationship and of South Asian descent. AKA she is much cooler) I also liked how she was ethnically Asian and it wasn’t like, a big deal or the focal point of her existence; and how she didn’t feel like a token POC character (even though she is the only one who is explicitly stated in the text to be POC) because she was a very well-rounded character with agency.

I also really like the budding relationship between Dakota and Jace. It was kind of sweet and awkward in the will-they-won’t-they aspect, and I just enjoy seeing Jace’s joy around Dakota, hanging around her solely because he likes being next to her and how they go around being cute together over photography and dances and whatnot. I think a lot of his interactions with Dakota are him trying to start over for himself, changing the direction of who he can become into something better. I like how it’s not easy, but how sincere Jace is, how hard he is trying.

I personally had no pacing issues with this novel, but I’m starting to acknowledge that any concerns over pacing flies out the window for me when I get engrossed in a character-driven novel. With these types of books, the pacing could be all over the place, but I wouldn’t care a smidgen because I would be so in tune with the character’s mindset and character development starts to take precedence over any concerns over objective analysis on the sequence build-up. In other words, take my words on the pacing in this novel with a grain of salt. What I can tell you though is that Avasthi builds up character development very skillfully not only through character interactions, but in weaving key flashbacks into present events at opportune moments. Nothing felt out of place. As much as this novel explores dark issues and broken families, it is also a tale of hope and change. The ending was utterly satisfying, and I am looking forward to new works by this promising new voice in the YA market.

The Verdict: A dark, emotional, and ultimately uplifting novel that will grab readers by the heart. Our protagonist Jace is a compelling and strong voice that will captivate YA readers as they experience his struggles and pains. The character interactions are brought vividly to life by Avasthi’s talent as she asks probing and important questions about domestic violence and abuse. This novel will make you think, laugh, cry, and root for the characters with all your hearts. Highly recommended, especially to those YA readers who like their contemporary lit fare on the “edgy” side of the spectrum or those into character-driven storylines.

Rating: 4.5/5
Enjoyment: 100%

Title and Cover Discussion: I think the title is serviceable, but not particularly memorable. However, I confess that I am biased against one-word titles, my lack of enthusiasm may be influenced by this factor. With the cover, it looks very plain on the surface, but what I find interesting is the dual image of the two figures in profile if we look at the sides. I think the keys and character side profiles is a very interesting cover concept, but I’m afraid that it’s not the most polished cover execution. It’s a little too rough around the edges for my liking. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with the title or cover, persay. It’s just that I don’t find them particularly grabbing, and if I passed this novel by in the bookstore without prior knowledge of it, I may have just passed over it.

Title: C+
Cover: B

Signal Boost + General News Updates

2010-05-01T19:34:00.005-04:00

Okay, on Dreamwidth, I've seen this AMAZING post linked e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e by everyone and their sister, but not so much attention has been brought to it in the YA book blogger world, so I'm going to showcase it now.

No Country for Strangers is an excellent, amazing post that started off as a continuing conversation over the Charles Tan's Racefail post, but illuminates so much more, and touches on many social stratospheres that make up the relationship between the Phillipines and the United States, the colonized and colonizers. I recommend everyone to read through it slowly and carefully, but I'm going to quote some of the passages that touch on literature and/or writing, specifically on the one that touches on cultural appropriation in literature. (Actually, I kind of just want to quote the whole post - because it's brilliant, especially the part about migration - but I'm restraining myself. So many good passages to choose from~)

I will not say: no foreigners allowed. That is a rather horrible thing to say considering an overwhelming tendency here to welcome foreigners with open arms and bend over backwards for them, at the cost of discriminating against our fellow Filipinos. It is a statement that assumes we have the power to say such a thing and enforce such a rule when we, well, don't. "No foreigners allowed" is a fantasy -- a short-sighted, narrow-minded, twisted fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless.

Instead I will say: this is no country for strangers. This is not a people that can be known by observation alone, without the risk of actual engagement. This is no land where you can set yourself apart and then delude yourself with claims that comprehension naturally comes with high-minded goals and noble intentions to enlighten a system whose only fundamental flaw is ignorance of your ways. This is not a place that needs more foreigners coming in to visit, then taking away with them their misconceptions and their privileged judgments -- because we have been misrepresented enough, not just in the international community but also amongst ourselves, and false categorizations and claims about who we are and where we came from and where we should go are unneeded and shouldn't be welcomed.

This is a place where one must know rage to know sight. I wrote, somewhat recently: "[S]ometimes rage is useful. Sometimes anger is necessary. Sometimes you need a great and brutal force to drive ugly and hidden secrets into the light; sometimes self-satisfaction and complacency cannot be worn down gradually, but must be wrenched apart. Sometimes fear is the only edge that will compel you to walk a difficult and unfamiliar path. Sometimes you can't just politely ask rotting structures to make way for the construction of new ones. You have to knock them down. Burn them to the ground." I believe this is as true of the writing of fiction as it is of development policy, or economic research, or the study of Philippine institutions.

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Today is the FIRST DAY OF MAY. MY FOUR MONTH LONG SUMMER IS HEREEEEEEEEE. ~~Which will be spent paying off school debts taking whatever shifts my boss gives me. orz~~ I've decided that I'm going to whip this book blog into shape by the time July rolls around. Considering how much of a slacker I am, I'm not fooling myself into believing I will actually have everything all shiny and perfect in this blog by the end of this month, so instead I will make this month my Catch Up On Review Backlog month! I don't know about you guys, but I read way faster than I get around to review a novel. (Confession: sometimes I don't review a book for months after having read it. <- made of suck.) Basically my plan is to work on exactly one review (or more if I'm feeling particularly motivated) every day, and I should have about 31 or so reviews for everyone by the end of this month. Doesn't that sound wonderful? 8D

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Crossing Book Giveaway!

Review: Very LeFreak by Rachel Cohn

2010-04-30T22:32:00.006-04:00

Title: Very LeFreak
Author(s): Rachel Cohn
Genre: YA College, addiction, character-driven
Page Count: 303
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

The Summary: Meet Very LeFreak, playlist maker, party planner, heartbreaker, good-time girl who can't get enough good time.

Mute Button? As if.

Off button? Never.

-- from backcover

The Review: As much as I enjoyed this novel, I suspect that it isn’t for everyone. Very’s voice is very pronounced, and it’s a bit hard to get into at first because she’s just so intense and almost offputting with her out there, off-kilter personality, but if you adjust to “Very speed” you’ll find a most enjoyable novel. In fact, I ended up enjoying this novel for its extremely character-driven story, and Very’s over the top antics. And I loved that despite how off-kilter and out there Very can be, there’s a part about her that makes you think that you can see a bit of yourself in her character. (On the flip side, if you never warm up to Very then you’re never going to enjoy this novel. Your enjoyment is mostly definitely dependant on how much you like the main character here.)

I actually reallyyyyy liked the fact that Very was totally open about sexuality. I know that given Very’s personality, she would probably resist all attempts at labels, but she comes across to me as pansexual, which is totally cool in my books. Also, it’s just so refreshing to see female characters who own their sexuality and are not portrayed as evil!whores (usually next to the nice virgin female protagonist) because of it. I’m also extremely happy that this technological addict protagonist of ours is depicted as totally a social extrovert and gorgeous to boot. I haven’t read much YA books with techno addicts as part of the cast, but usually in animanga and stuff, girls who like techno, internet or gaming related things are depicted as these super hideous, socially awkward people.

While this book is very much an All-Very on-the-spotlight show 24/7, we get a nice cast of diverse characters with strong personalities that make a lasting impression. I really love the growing relationship between Very and Lavinia-who-is-really-Jennifer. (this book totally passes the bedchel test, btw. ♥) MAJOR ENDING SPOILERS: [ It’s so nice to see relationships that start off with two people actually being FRIENDS first, instead of you know, jumping into the whole love-at-first-sight thing. They kill me with their cuteness.] I love seeing their banter, and the way Lavinia shakes her head at her impossible friend but sticks with her to the end. And the boys! Cuddly-yet-total-sore-loser Bryan, to green eyeliner French-Canadian-Chinese Jean-Wayne, and extreme, sultry, gorgeous Vikram. All delightful, fascinating interactions. I ate up the dialogue in this novel like cake.

I really enjoyed this novel’s use of technology. I know all the pop culture references could end up sounding dated, but for me I really connected with it. And I’d like to think that the descriptions of the way Very was obsessed would override the dated aspect that may arise in readers of the future diving into this novel. And that obsession with technology totally rang true for me. Incidentally I connected with the playlist and music stuff less, because I only casually listen to USian music, but I found them enjoyable even if I didn’t know a lot of the songs mentioned, because the song titles were cues enough to understand what Cohn was trying to get at. I’ve seen reviews saying that they found the first part lacking/boring/confusing, but I confess that I really enjoyed it. I liked the depiction of campus life. It conveyed all that rush and buzz of March Madness in the undergrad’s life, and how you should really be writing this paper but end up using media to block out all the pile of assignments that are overwhelming you. (Who has gone through undergrad and NOT done this? ~~If anyone says otherwise they’re liars~~) I also think this part was necessary for the second part to ring true because we need to see Very’s high before she crashes in order to embark on a journey with her to deal with her addiction.

The second part was most excellently done without being preachy as well. It was less on how Technology Addiction Is Bad, and more focused on Very unpacking her emotional baggage and trying to forge a new, healthier path for herself, trying to change for the better. I surprisingly enjoyed all the Keisha-the-counselor and Very interactions, and I liked how Keisha lets Very sort things out for herself, and guides her when Very asks for advice. There was a lot of hilarious anecdotes in this second half as well. One of my favourite interaction scenes, besides the Lavinia ones (which carry on being awesome into the second half), was the confrontation moment between Very and her aunt. It was awkward yet sweet, the tender attempts at bonding with your estranged family relation. (I’m a total sucker for family moments, in case my followers haven’t realized yet, lol.)

I really enjoyed the writing too, because it captured Very’s voice so beautifully in the Very Narration. (Har har, my puns are fail) I loved her splattered tangents, her fluid exchange from real life experiences to her constant text-ing, her endless and highly amusing fantasies with El Virus. Even the use of capslock was totally effective. (I was with Very 100% on her rage over Bryan. ~~That may say something more about me than I’d care to admit though, lawl.~~) It’s so original and fun, and I just had a blast reading this from front to back. And I’m resolved to read more of Cohn’s works after this (Can you believe this is my first exposure to Rachel Cohn?! Blasphemous, I know)

The Verdict: SO MUCH FUN AND AWESOME. I had a great time reading this novel. I love the voice, the characters, VERY HERSELF, I know it’s hard to get into at first because it’s just so out there, but seriously, so much fun, everyone should at least give it a shot. ~~All those negative reviews are LIES, LIES I TELL YOU~~ I think undergrad students will enjoy this novel a lot, especially if you’ve just got passed March Madness, and finished with the last of your exams. (I mean, it was fun to read this, but I think if I read it during March some of her procrastination experiences mayyyy hit a little too close to home, lol. Er, not that I am an extreme procrastinator or anything like that!! <- lies lies lies) I can’t wait to check out more of Rachel Cohn’s works!

Rating: 4/5
Enjoyment: 100%!

Title and Cover Discussion: omg, the cover is SO PERFECT. Unique, strange, and memorable, and embodies the whole novel snugly like a glove. And I personally think the cover is drop dead gorgeous. The cover model’s got some seriously beautiful hair, and I am simply in love with the font. It’s the kind of cover that makes me stop and reach out for a copy in the bookstore. 8D

Title: A++++++
Cover: A!

Review: Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver

2010-04-30T21:00:00.003-04:00

Title: Before I Fall
Author(s): Lauren Oliver
Genre: YA Contemporary
Page Count: 480
Publisher: HarperCollins

The Summary (in my own words): It was supposed to be a regular school day like any other. Chilling out with her friends, partying it out after school. But then Samantha Kingston died -- and wakes up the next morning of the exact same day of her death. Seven repeats of the day you die. Seven chances -- is it enough for a person to change their lives?

The Review: This was honestly one of the most beautifully written novels I’ve ever read. In fact, I’d say it’s probably the most well-written debut YA novel of 2010. When I heard about the hype and how this novel made its way to the bestseller list, I was afraid of overhype, of being disappointed. But I was wrong. It was everything people said it’d be. And more, so much more.

From the summary, I had no intention of reading this novel. I mean, reliving one day over and over, how interesting can it be? But then, when I was hearing all the excitement bubbling over this book around the time HarperTeens was putting up a 100+ page preview for this novel, I decided to give it a shot. I sank right in. Everyone who lauded praise upon praise over Oliver’s writing was absolutely, irrevocably right. I cannot describe just how beautiful Oliver’s prose is, because I am not talented by half enough to explain it. It’s just – so incredibly beautiful, lush, tangible, delicious prose. Like, we get the exact same day described to us, and every time Oliver described the weather, the scenery that has not changed, she still manages to evoke different and varied sentiments, seven different ways of describing the exact same scenery that works and never, ever gets old. I flew through the pages, completely absorbed in Sam’s world.

I, like a lot of people who’ve read this novel, really enjoyed watching Sam’s transformation. I liked how her Mean Teen Girl persona was so very believable, and how she desperately tries to change her fate makes her grow as a person. All the changes in Sam felt believable, and it’s to Oliver’s credit that she develops this transition and character growth in ways that don’t stretch believability and even invoking sympathy, while always remembering that Sam is far from being a Nice Person. Also I liked Oliver’s convincing portrayal of high school life in general. It felt right and honest. And the high school scene isn’t completely whitewashed. While none of the prominent characters were POC, there were hints at the minor background characters being of Asian descent, which I’m pretty down with, personally.

I have seen many people citing the romance as one of their favourite aspects of this novel. I do enjoy the sweet romance unfolding between Kent and Sam (Who can NOT love Kent? Seriously adorable and sweet, that one. Totally boyfriend material.), but I’ll admit that it’s the portrayal of female friendships/interactions fostered and broken was that truly won my heart. (Why didn’t anyone tell me this book passes the bedchel test?! Sheesh, I’ve very disappointed in all of you. Jks) Yes, they’re Mean Girls, but the friendship that the four girls have is so genuine and true. They can be awful to others and sometimes even to each other, but we know that they truly liked each other, that they’re friendship wasn’t a sham. And Sam doesn’t just interact with her clique. We see her interact with the school’s residential “slut” (who was given a personality and breath, and it should be noted that there is absolutely no slut-shaming messages in this novel, which I totally appreciate), the sophomores, etc. In all of Sam’s interactions between different people during that seven repeats of the same day, we see this theme of hope permeating and blooming, that potential for making a difference, and the interactions Sam has with the girls around her were my favourite messages of hope. I especially enjoyed the Juliet Sykes interactions, the unveiling of secrets, and how even when things weren’t going so well, people have hope for change. SPOILERS AHOY: [I really liked the transformation of how Sam began to connect her salvation through saving Juliet, which started off very self-centric, but then transformed into a genuine wish for Juliet’s well being, and her sincere but awkward attempts at being “nice” was wonderful to see. That’s another thing I really appreciate about Sam’s transformation. It wasn’t that she suddenly became a “nice” good girl or anything - but that she starts to make this effort to be kind that won me over.]

I thought Oliver used the idea of the time loop most effectively to showcase Sam’s character transformation. The possibilities of the littlest changes in your actions to bring about change in your day fascinated me as well. The story unravels steady and slow, picking up speed towards the climax with that emotional ompf that will grab at the reader’s hearts. I never once felt that the story went too slowly, or got repetitive. The climax and the ending stayed with me for a long time, and left me hungering for more. This is the kind of novel that will convert new readings into instant fans of the author. With her writing being so polished, I can’t wait to see what she does with her next book.

The Verdict: Believe the hype, people, and grab yourself a copy of this amazing novel. The writing will blow you away, and the characters will enchant you. Definitely one of my favourite debut novels this year.

Rating: 5/5
Enjoyment: 100%

Title and Cover Discussion: I LOVE THE TITLE. It’s simple and memorable, and fits very well with the story. As for the cover, I’m a bit lukewarm on it. It feels so… normal, somehow? But I kind of like the unnatural stillness of the cover model, a curtained deadened quality to her next to the warm yellow colours in the cover. The font was very nice as well.

Title: A
Cover: B

Sing Boys, Sing! The Chinese Version + Crossing Book Giveaway

2010-04-29T23:25:00.010-04:00

(FYI details on giveaway at bottom of post)

I decided the way to celebrate the new release of Andrew Xia Fukuda’s novel Crossing was by showcasing some super talented Chinese male singers. As I’ve mentioned in my review, our narrator is depicted to have some amazing pipes (i.e. his singing will knock you dead) and I figured it’d be a good ~~excuse~~ opportunity to showcase some wonderfully talented male Chinese singers on my blog.

Note: The singers I will showcase are mostly based in Taiwan, because TW-music predominates not only all the Chinese songs I listen to, but just, make up a large majority of the music I listen to in general. I heart the Taiwan music scene. (They gave me F.I.R,! ♥ So if you think I'm biased towards Mandopop/rock... YOU'D BE RIGHT. *shot*

I’ll start off with songs sung in English, as I believe those who visit this blog predominantly speak English.

First up, recent Youtube sensation Lin Yu Chun, who can sing like Whitney. Rock on!

Sam Tsui - who sings the most awesome medleys and if he doesn’t win the Glee audtions, THERE IS NO GOD. *

(Unfortunately this is all the English ones I know. Now, onto MANDOPOP~)

My absolutely favourite Mandopop male singer is JJ Lin, who made a name for himself in Taiwan, and hails for Singapore. I am a complete sucker for his ballads.

I’m not big on Wang Lee Hom, but he’s extremely popular, and also, he’s Chinese-American based in Taiwan who made it big in all of East Asia. Gotta give him a shoutout.

And... I apparently can’t talk about Mandopop without someone popping out Jay Chou’s name, so I might as well get him out of the way, even though I’m not a fan of the way he likes to slur his words together. Blah. (His lyrics are ah-mazing though, I'll give it that.)

BOYBANDS. Such as Fahrenheit. I’m no diehard fan, but their songs can be quite catchy. ~~Also I’m a sucker for all the pretty faces~~ *hums along*

Mayday. Rock bands FTW. (Thanks to ninefly for helping me pick out the song title)

I actually don’t listen to much Cantopop (okay, I don’t listen to them at ALL...), but I figure it’s not fair for me to go on and on about Mandopop without even at least giving one Cantopop song a nod. So here’s to Hins Cheung, recced to me by one of my very awesome Hong Kong Canadian friends.

And, just for jokes: everyone’s favourite crack Taiwanese song. *giggles like the little girl I am* ETA Replaced with Michelle's rec of Ah Niu's version, which was indeed much better than Richie Ren's. 8D

ETA OMG. Okay, Michelle just helped me point out something glaringly missing in this post: NO MALAYSIAN-CHINESE DUDES SINGING. Which is totally wrong of me, and I will now showcase my favourite based in Taiwan (like usual), Nicholas Teo, to rectify this.

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Okay, so I’m finally getting to the part that people actually care about: THE GIVEAWAY. Want to win a copy of Andrew Xia Fukuda’s Crossing? ETAThere are three options on how to enter. Please pick only ONE of the following.

1) Email me at gal novelty [AT] g mail [DOT] com with the subject title: CROSSING, telling me who is YOUR favourite Chinese male singer/boyband/all-male band (it can be one of the guys I named in this post if you were never exposed to the dulcet tones of Chinese men singing, OR a Chinese male singer I neglected to mention here), and you can win yourself a most excellent novel!

2) Leave a comment telling me who is YOUR favourite Chinese male singer/boyband/all-male band. Please also leave your email in the comments so that I can contact you if you've won.

3) Fill out the Form

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Details:
-Open internationally
-Extra entry for linking this giveaway somewhere on the worldwide web, and there’s no limit to how many you can link to.
-Contest ends two weeks from today ie. May 14th 11:59 EST
-Yes you must answer the who is your favourite singer question. I mean, if I am hosting a contest, at least let the entries be interesting for me, right? 8D

* I am actually unsure if Sam Tsui has any Chinese ancestry, but he looks biracial to me and his last name reads very Chinese transliteration to me. I apologize if I’m wrong in my assumption.

Review: Crossing by Andrew Xia Fukuda

2010-04-29T11:20:00.009-04:00

Title: Crossing
Author(s): Andrew Xia Fukuda
Genre: (YA) Mystery, Suspense, Coming-of-Age
Page Count: 213
Publisher: AmazonEncore

I received an ARC from the publicist.
The Summary: A loner in his all-white high school, Chinese-born Xing (pronounced “Shing”) is a wallflower longing for acceptance. His isolation is intensified by his increasingly awkward and undeniable crush on his only friend, the beautiful and brilliant Naomi Lee. Xing’s quiet adolescent existence is rattled when a series of disappearances rock his high school and fear ripples through the blue collar community in which he lives. Amidst the chaos surrounding him, only Xing, alone on the sidelines of life, takes notice of some peculiar sightings around town. He begins to investigate with the hope that if he can help put an end to the disappearances, he will finally win the acceptance for which he has longed. However, as Xing draws closer to unveiling the identity of the abductor, he senses a noose of suspicion tightening around his own neck. While Xing races to solve the mystery and clear his name, Crossing hurtles readers towards a chilling climax.

(from the backcover)

The Review:While I don’t think this book is marketed as a YA novel, I think it will do well among the YA reader circle. The raw emotional experiences shown to us through Xing’s narration can resonate well with anyone who remembers high school, its isolation and the wish to fit in. The requisite love story and dreams of our underdog taking the singing lead will also ring familiar and true to those who enjoy their YA high school setting stories. And I believe that those who loved Justine Larbalestier’s Liar will enjoy the way this suspenseful story, for we once again get an unreliable narrator telling the tale, but not because Xing is a liar. Xing, instead, comes across as unreliable because he does not speak out for himself. He unravels his side of the story in the narration, but he never defends it wholeheartedly, letting other people’s assumptions dominate. It gives the readers the choice of who you are going to believe is telling the true story of events. I found this unreliability in the narrationf very interesting, because the whole time we can feel Xing seeking validation: for his innocence, for his potential to be more than the stereotype. But when it’s not given, he crumbles, and lets others and their opinions take over. It’s painful to watch, and it made Xing feel so real to me.

I’ll confess that I have no handle in the whole mystery/suspense genre. I suck royally at guessing who is the real killer and all that jazz that goes with this genre. Instead, I connected very deeply with Xing’s emotional development and his desire for his singing talent to be recognized. For me, this book was all about the broken, failed American Dream. How the promises and dreams that lured in immigrants failed spectacularly for Xing and his future. Xing had all this potential, was depicted as such a happy kid before arriving in the States, and all his painful experiences shattered him, ruined his voice, and how absorbing all that hate directed his way for simply looking Chinese with the wrong accent warped and changed him.

All the reflected experiences of growing up as an Asian immigrant felt extremely familiar to me. This is not saying that my experiences as a Chinese-Canadian is the same as the one depicted by Xing or by the one another Chinese character in the school, Naomi, as the experiences of Asians in North America are varied and diverse, but there is that thread of familiarity that struck real for me. For instance, the description of accents: “Her English was Julie Chen perfect; mine was Jackie Chan cumbersome.” (5) I could literally hear exactly what Fukuda meant by the difference in their accented English, and feel that chasm of difference it makes between the two, how the way you talk can make the difference between peer acceptance or ostracism. There is that fine line you have to thread, to look and speak a certain way so that you are “Canadian” or in this context, “American” enough, and when you fall too far away from this line standard you become too ethnic, too Chinese, too Other, the perpetual foreigner. Xing’s struggle with that fine line resonated deeply with me, and it made all his failed dreams in America hurt that much more. Every time we got a scene wherein Xing wished to look white, to have those blue green eyes and blond hair, how he equated that with acceptance, it stung raw because that could be my brother, my sister, my cousin, any of my Chinese-Canadian friends growing up who didn’t feel like they belonged enough.

Also, more of a sidenote, but I really liked the author’s choice of giving his narrator the name Xing Xu. I suspect the use of “X” in the name is very deliberate on the author’s part because it’s one of the transliteration of Chinese-to-English that gets most of your (white) teachers/authorities baffled and confused, resulting in very embarrassing but also very common attempts at pronunciation of your name during roll call in front of the classroom for the world to hear. It’s not uncommon to see Chinese immigrants adopted “English” names, and I appreciate how this detail was woven into the story, the roll call experience of getting your name butchered and asking to be called something else instead to avoid this. (fyi, Xing asks to be called Kris in this situation.) What I mean to say is that the details of Xing’s Chinese-American experience is so precise and woven in without making it the big moving storyline of the novel, and it was really nice to see.

The Verdict: An amazing read. Readers who enjoyed books like Liar or works by Robert Cormier should run to grab a copy of this novel. You’ll connect deeply with our narrator’s psyche, and I personally can’t wait for future projects by this talented new voice in the publishing market.

Rating: 4.5/5
Enjoyment: 100%

Cover and Title Discussion: I liked the idea of the shadowed silhouette within a snowy scenery, as snow and winter features prominently as a motif in this novel, but I suspect if ever the publishing house wishes to repackage this novel as YA, they’ll need a flashier cover. Also, I thought the red star could have been incorporated better. The title font is okay, but I thought the positioning of the title was awkward. Same goes for the author’s name. I also suspect that I’m too fond of the old cover concept that was released a while ago, one with the dual image of one closed eye with tears running down, but when you look closer it’s footprints walking into the snow. *shrugs* Oh well, there’s nothing terribly wrong with the cover design as a whole, but it’s also not particularly eye-grabbing either. As for the title itself, I thought it’s okay, but also kind of easily forgettable. I confess that when I recommend this novel I forget what the title of the book was, and would refer it to people as “that debut suspense book by the author Andrew Xia Fukuda” (I remember author’s names better than titles, usually) instead.

Cover: C+
Title: C+

ETA by popular demand, this was how the old cover looked like. Feel free to tell me what you think.

New Releases Spotlight: 04/27/2010

2010-04-27T11:35:00.008-04:00

Behold, some exciting new releases!

Crossing by Andrew Xia Fukuda

A loner in his all-white high school, Chinese-born Xing (pronounced “Shing”) is a wallflower longing for acceptance. His isolation is intensified by his increasingly awkward and undeniable crush on his only friend, the beautiful and brilliant Naomi Lee. Xing’s quiet adolescent existence is rattled when a series of disappearances rock his high school and fear ripples through the blue collar community in which he lives. Amidst the chaos surrounding him, only Xing, alone on the sidelines of life, takes notice of some peculiar sightings around town. He begins to investigate with the hope that if he can help put an end to the disappearances, he will finally win the acceptance for which he has longed. However, as Xing draws closer to unveiling the identity of the abductor, he senses a noose of suspicion tightening around his own neck. While Xing races to solve the mystery and clear his name, Crossing hurtles readers towards a chilling climax.

A most excellent debut novel. Go order it now. I have plans to hold a sort of release party for this novel on this book by hosting a giveaway and whatnot this week, so stay tuned for that, and a review and possibly some other special, related posts for this novel. (Actually the review was supposed to be up today, but due to time constraints from work and whatnot I don't think I'll be able to post it up until tomorrow. =X)

The Demon's Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan

In The Demon's Lexicon Nick must find a way to save his brother from the demon's mark that means certain death.

+ Yay TDL is out with the new shiny cover! ~~So much better than the old one...~~ Which of course, means I can happily go around recommending this book without constantly having to say 'I know the cover sucks but you should read it anyways!' While not my favourite book of last year, it was certainly one of the most enjoyable debuts of 2009 I had the pleasure of reading, and I'm looking forward to the sequel. Or anything Sarah Rees Brennan writes, really. 8D

It's Not Summer Without you by Jenny Han

Last year, all of Belly's dreams came true and the thought of missing a summer in Cousins Beach was inconceivable. But like the rise and fall of the ocean tide, things can change-just like that. Suddenly the time she's always looked forward to most is something she dreads. And when Jeremiah calls to say Conrad has disappeared, Belly must decide how she will spend this summer: chasing after the boy she loves, or finally letting go

lol I am an eternal fan of Jenny Han ever since I laid my eyes on Shug, so I had to give this a shoutout even if I'm pretty ambivalent about the direction of the storyline for this trilogy. Wrote up a review for it, if anyone's interested

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In other news, damn it's harder to get back into the groove of book blogging than I expected. My review backlog intimidates me, lol. *coughs* Anyone, any new releases today people feel like sharing? 8D

Review: It's Not Summer Without You by Jenny Han

2010-04-24T11:10:00.005-04:00

Title: It's Not Summer Without You
Author(s): Jenny Han
Genre: YA Coming-of-Age, Romance, Family
Page Count: 275
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

WARNING: Spoilers for Book 1

I received an ARC from a contest.
Summary: Last year, all of Belly's dreams came true and the thought of missing a summer in Cousins Beach was inconceivable. But like the rise and fall of the ocean tide, things can change-just like that. Suddenly the time she's always looked forward to most is something she dreads. And when Jeremiah calls to say Conrad has disappeared, Belly must decide how she will spend this summer: chasing after the boy she loves, or finally letting go

The Review: You know, I was extremely nervous about how I would feel about this novel when I first cracked open the pages. I mean, I loooooved Shug, but was far more ambivalent about The Summer I Turned Pretty. A large part of this had to do with the fact that the guy I was rooting for was this minor character called Cam,* who was a total darling and a much better love interest than either the two brothers and I was put out by the fact that he probably won’t appear again. The love triangle was obviously that between the two brothers, (which the cover never fails to remind us of), and I just don’t really care for either of them. But there’s something about Jenny Han’s writing that always pulls me in. I’d read her prose, and even if I don’t care for this type of romance story she could still pull me in. Her writing evokes such sympathetic emotions within me for the characters even when I don’t care for their personalities. In other words, I don’t think I would have stuck to this series this long if it weren’t for Jenny Han’s writing, I don’t find the characters endearing so much within their character traits (in fact, if I were to be honest, the leading characters are the types that really don’t do it for me. Ugh, Conrad) as for the fact that Jenny Han convinces me to be sympathetic through her dreamlike, lush prose. Steph Su described this book in her review as having powerful "emotional resonance", and I have to say that I agree. This emotional resonance is what will pull you in from the first page to the last. Was the story itself worth it though? I’m not sure, we’ll have to see with the final book in the trilogy.

One thing’s for certain, I like the premise here infinitely better than in the first book. I don’t really care for the whole concept of First Love Is Forever nonsense, and I’ll admit I was quite baffled at how Belly kept on insisting that the other brother, Conrad**, was the only one for her, etc. This book is much more about moving on, both in love and in the memory of those who’ve passed on, which is a concept I can totally get behind on. I also liked how the story with the two brother’s angst felt much more integrated in this book than the first. I’ll admit, I was super annoyed at the whole bit at the end of the first book wherein Belly goes on about basically how the story wasn’t about her and it was about the boys, which had me going like ‘Noooooooooooooo,’ and wanting to ram my head against a wall. I was like, ‘way to make the story NOT about the protagonist!’ *coughs* Anyhow, in THIS book at any rate, we didn’t have a random point thrown in wherein the story stopped being about Belly and being about someone else instead. I think the whole Jeremiah narration helped with this. I can accept a story about the boys i.e. Jeremiah if he was narrating on it, so when we had the brothers-centric narration through Jeremiah, I didn’t get mad about the absence of Belly. Likewise, for Belly’s narration, in all her parts the story was still moving around her, and I liked that. No passive narrators telling us the story of others for me!

I think I would have found all this romance stuff rather nauseating if it weren’t for the fact that it is also parallel with a strong family storyline. Love triangles like these annoy me, and it reminded me too much of those melodramas from Korean shows that I don’t like, the ones wherein we have the sweet innocent girl who is devoted to some cold-hearted leading guy I as a viewer despise and every guy related to the leading man loves her, from brother to cousin to best friend to uncle for all I care. *** To give it credit, I actually wasn’t completely annoyed with the romance this time around. Jeremiah was like, an actual competitor for Belly’s affections! ~~And there was less Conrad!~~ But what I really liked was the family stuff. I reallyyyyyy liked the whole storyline about the summer house, and the memory of Susannah, etc. The moments wherein they try to keep the house, the parts wherein we get familial confrontation, those are my favourite moments. I think the only thing that we could have improved on was to give some equal focus to Belly’s family. I still don’t have a sense for Belly’s brother and his characteristics. I’d like to see more of the sibling relationship exploration through Belly’s perspective.

I’ll admit, I was kind of looking forward to seeing Belly interact with more characters outside of the boys and their family, but this was not meant to be. Belly doesn’t really have any significant interactions with anyone outsider the two brothers and her mom, and to me it makes me feel like Belly’s world is so incredibly small. I mean, doesn’t she have real friends at school to talk about things outside of boys? Her friendship with Taylor in the first book always felt weak to me, and it really didn’t improve in the second book. **** That’s another reason why I’m kind of hoping Belly will just end up with a guy that’s totally unrelated to Conrad or Jeremiah. There’s more to the world than just those two boys. It was cool that the people around Belly in school and stuff were casually multi-ethnic though. There were some last names that struck me as distinctly Korean, etc. Though um, the description for Conrad’s love of his life bugged the heck out of me. My copy described her as “East Asian, maybe Indian”, and if you know your geography at all India is SOUTH, not east. I was willing to write this out as maybe just an uncorrected mistake from the ARC, but I flipped through the book that’s out in the bookstore and it hasn’t been fixed. [/tangent]

The Verdict: An improvement in storyline over the first book. The writing is beautiful as always, and you can’t help but be moved by the emotional portrayals in this story. If you liked the first book than you definitely won’t be disappointed by the sequel. It definitely pulls in a bigger punch. Conversely, if you didn’t care for the first book, then I doubt your opinions will change with the second. However, as for myself, I’m still unsure about how I feel about this book, due to my inherent dislike of love triangle premises like these ones. In other words, I suspect that most of my problems stem from the fact that this type of story is generally not my thing, and less to do with the actual quality of the story itself. I’ll probably know how I feel about this whole trilogy once I get my hands on the third book, wherein Jenny Han will hopefully have Belly move on with a new love of her life orrr perhaps redeem Conrad/Belly for me (I’m not optimistic for the latter. Which is a shame, because I think Conrad/Belly is the most likely outcome). ~~Or we could get Belly to say stuff you to the two boys and run off with Cam. I want this to happen so bad, but the possibility is like, less than zero.~~

Rating::4/5
Enjoyment: 60%

Title and Cover Discussion: It’s fine? I mean, the title is simple enough to remember, and the cover is different enough from the other single-white-girl covers that I feel permeate this Sarah Dessen-esque genre, but there’s nothing particularly striking about this cover or the title to make me say I love it! Or anything. *shrugs*

Title: B
Cover: B

*WHO WAS ON TEAM CAM BACK IN THE FIRST BOOK?! I CAN’T BE THE ONLY ONE HERE.
**… I actually momentarily forgot his name while typing up this review and had to google the book to remember. Shows how much I cared for that guy.
*** Not that I totally hate all melodramas from South Korea. I do like watching some melodrama fares, but I’d rather stay away from the melodramas wherein we have all these weirdly related guys fighting over the same girl. But I’ll admit, I prefer the romcoms and saeguks (historical dramas) from S. Korea.
**** Also, why can’t we have female friendships wherein your best girl friend doesn’t turn out to be a boyfriend stealer or something? That’s what really annoyed me in the 1st book. It made me wish we got more portrayals of the moms’ friendship, because that actually felt like a female friendship that was genuine. And of course, would offset the Taylor fail.

Waiting on Wednesday: Dragon Soul by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett

2010-04-21T05:23:00.007-04:00

Meme from Breaking the Spine

You know, I suspect it is rather tacky to have a comeback post in form of a meme, but I really wanted to do WoW because there’s this book I’m really, really excited about. And yes, I AM BACK FROM MY HIATUS. Well, after 12 pm EST today anyhow, when my last exam is officially over and I can kiss my campus goodbye for the rest of the summer. Technically at the time this is published I am not yet over my hiatus, because I should be studying for the exam I will have in a couple hours (holy sh*t alfjsjalfja;f). Buuuuuut, I want to procrastinate, SO HERE I AM.

Dragon Soul by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett

With just two novels under their belts, young writers Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett have established themselves as two of the hottest new stars in fantasy. Havemercy introduced readers to a brilliantly realized world riven by an intractable war between the kingdoms of Volstov and Ke-Han—a war in which the great dragons of Volstov—deadly hybrids of machine and magic—and their equally fierce human riders were all that kept the dark sorcery of Ke-Han at bay. In Shadow Magic, Jones and Bennett brought the common humanity of the opposing sides to life in an adventure that showcased once again their talent for creating not only fantastic settings but vivid characters to inhabit them.

Now Jones and Bennett are back with their most accomplished novel yet, featuring the return of two beloved characters, the brothers Rook and Thom. When the war was at its height, there was no fighter on either side who could match Rook for sheer arrogance and skill. Only Rook could ride the great dragon Havemercy, whose savagery and bloodlust matched his own. Thom could not be more different. Bookish, diffident, reserved, he yearns for his brother’s approval—yet fears he can never earn it.

With the war over, and an uneasy truce holding between Volstov and Ke-Han, it seems the perfect opportunity for the long-lost brothers to forge a bond by taking a trip together. At least, that’s how it seems to Thom. Rook hasn’t given a rat’s ass about anything since the end of the war, his brother included, and he’s not about to start now. Not when the one thing he loved in the world—Havemercy—lies scattered in pieces across Ke-Han.

Then Rook and Thom discover that someone is buying up bits of the fallen dragons, including Havemercy. Though the dragons are dead, the magic that powered them is not—and if that magic and the technology created to harness it should fall into the wrong hands, the fragile peace could shatter. An agent from Ke-Han, a sorceress from Volstov, and a group of desert tribesmen are all in the race, and the future rests on whoever gets there first. But all that matters to Rook is that someone is desecrating his girl, so he vows to leave no stone unturned in laying her to rest—and taking his revenge.

ASDL;FJAFJASDLFJ THE THIRD BOOK BY THE JAIDANI TEAM!! LAFJKLASDJKFAS I love this series. It might not be obvious from the majority of my reviews, but fantasy is one of my favourite genres. I’m pretty big on YA Fantasy (Graceling, anyone?), but I’m also highly fond of select Adult Fantasy genres as well. And I waxed poetry on my love for the book Shadow Magic wayyyyyyyyyyy back when this book blog got started(see review) Don’t let its crap cover fool you; this is actually one of the best East Asian-inspired fantasies I’ve ever read.

I will admit though, I actually wasn’t terribly excited about this book until the character reveals came along. As the summary insinuates, it makes it seem like very much a Boy’s Adventure, and all of Jaidani’s previous works have given no indication of countering this. (I mean, there was a smalllll likelihood of maybe one lady pov from the mention of a female magician, but I didn't want to get my hopes up.) They always write in the style of 4 persons, 2 entwined storylines, and every single time the narration was coloured by men. Which was great for the first two books, but I was ready for some ladies to step up on stage, you know? AND IT HAPPENED. Through a reliable reviewer, I found out that not only is there a female lead in the story, but there are TWO. And one of them is from Ke-Han! (I prefer the Ke-Han over Volstov, but I understand that this is a minority opinion.) Just knowing that there will be more females and more Ke-Han appearances makes me squee in pure delight. It made me go from ‘oh look, the third book, I’ll check it out when it’s in my library’ to ‘ OMG CAN THIS BOOK COME OUT NOW?! I SHALL BUY IT IN ALL ITS FIRST EDITION HARDCOVER GLORY, YESSSSSSSSSSSS’

So yes, I’m seriously pumped. WHO’S READING THIS WITH ME?! (Also, if you haven’t read Shadow Magic yet, WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING WITH YOUR LIFE?! Go buy it now.)

*buries self in last minute cramming*

March's GLBT Reading Challenge: GN Impressions of Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

2010-03-31T22:40:00.007-04:00

The Summary: In Bechdels affecting account of her relationship with her late father, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power. Bechdel grew up in a small Pennsylvania town, in a Victorian house that her father was painstakingly restoring to its period glory. Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the "Fun Home." It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve. -- from GoodReads.Com

My Impressions: I will confess that I... don't really know how to go about reviewing this. It's been a long long time since my last GN when I read Fun Home, and while I do know how to approach a manga/manhwa review, this GN... Not so much. For me, the ART is very essential to the telling of the story in comic-formatted works, but my aesthetic for art is just so very different from the way this one is done. I'm used to flowing lines and spread pages, not these blocks of squares that I think is more prevalent in the U.S. comic strip scene. (And when I say comic strip I mean those Garfield/Zits/etc four-panel types that you often find in the newspaper, and less superhero comics) And I don't want to fault the art just because I'm not accustomed to the art tradition this comic follows, since that wouldn't be fair at all. But on the flip side, the art really does influence how I read a comic, and as I couldn't get into the art, it affected the way I read this graphic novel.

Also, funny/ironic sidenote: I always felt that the term "graphic novel" was so phony. I always thought, why can't they just call a comic a comic and get it over with? But reading Fun Home is the first time I felt like the term "graphic novel" was really applicable. I'm not sure if this is because I'm just not sold on this art style, but the whole way through I thought that this could have just been rewritten into a novel or a novella very easily even without the art. In other words, the art didn't feel so integral to me, and I felt like I was reading a "novel" with pictures in it. It was like reading, say, The Absolute True Diary of a Part Time Indian but with more illustrations. I'm used to my comics stripping away most of the written narration and "narrating" instead through the art, but there was heavy narration in this comic which... Was a weird comic reading experience, I'll admit. BUT I'm going on this tangent for way too long.

ANYHOW, the whole read felt just very off for me, possible due to my expectations. Not just in the art style, but in the story too. As this was a memoir, I was kinda expecting this to be about the author herself. Instead, it was very much about her father, and her relationship with her father. I got the sense that in trying to understand her father she was attempting to understand herself. Which was interesting, but, just - not what I expected. And I don't know, I was just very thrown off by all this.

But I'll give it credit and say that it told the coming-out story in a very engaging way. It was almost suspenseful, the way the author told the story out of chronological order as she tried to fit the pieces of her father's AND her own identity. Did I enjoy it though? Not so much, but I'm afraid that this is a more of a it's-not-you-it's-me situation.

Ack, I feel bad because I just can't give this Graphic Novel justice. Hence why I'm wimping out of a proper review in ratings and stuff. I just don't feel like I can judge this graphic novel fairly. Please take all these ramblings with a grain of salt. This GN is very critically acclaimed and a bestseller, so I'm sure others will enjoy this far more than I did. (Incidentally, if you're a novel-type person, I think you might like this more? Because there's less of that reading art thing you'll have to adjust to if you don't really read comics and a lot of narration, so you can have your narrative while picking up ways to read the speech bubble directions and whatnot.)

But if you have a review for this GN or know a review for this GN that I should check out, please link me in the comments and I'll check it out!

(Also, on a side, would anyone like to see manga/manhwa reviews from me here? 8D Lemme know.)

Review: Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

2010-03-31T22:28:00.006-04:00

Title: Purple Hibiscus
Author(s): Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Genre: YA contemporary coming-of-age
Page Count: 307
Publisher: Algonquin Books

The Summary: In the city of Enugu, Nigeria, fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother, Jaja, lead a privileged life. Their Papa is a wealthy and respected businessman; they live in a beautiful house; and they attend an exclusive missionary school. But, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, their home life is anything but harmonious. Her father, a fanatically religious man, has impossible expectations of his children and wife, and severely punishes them if they're less than perfect. Home is silent and suffocating.
When Kambili's loving and outspoken Aunty Ifeoma persuades her brother that the children should visit her in Nsukka, Kambili and Jaja take their first trip away from home. Once inside their Aunty Ifeoma's flat, they discover a whole new world. Books cram the shelves, curry and nutmeg permeate the air, and their cousins' laughter rings throughout the house. Jaja learns to garden and work with his hands, and Kambili secretly falls in love with a young charismatic priest.

When a military coup threatens to destroy the country and Kambili and Jaja return home changed by their newfound freedom, tension within the family escalates. And Kambili must find the strength to keep her loved ones together after her mother commits a desperate act.

-- from GoodReads.Com

The Review: I was been told to read this book years ago by someone with a reading taste I trust, but for some strange reason I kept on putting it off. Then a couple months ago I was reminded to read this book by the author’s brilliant speech “The Danger of a Single Story” (watch it, especially if you have even the tiniest interest in storytelling) and I was like, how did I not get around to reading her works yet? So I finally checked the book out of the library earlier this month and damn, what a haunting read. Beautiful, intense, and I was a fool for not having read this sooner.

This is a story revolving around the domestic abuse of the narrator’s father. And yet, this is not a story of melodrama angst and heartbreak. Yes, there is a lot of anguish and pain and sadness in this novel, but underneath these painful moments is a spark of joy, and laughter. The premise of the story is not that of a victim enduring abuse, but a girl who gets a chance to step away momentarily from a world in which her and the whole family is subjugated to the mood swings of the father, as Kambili forges a world for herself in which she can start laughing without having her father’s opinions pervading and influencing her every move. Her transformation from the fearful daughter desperate to please her father to a girl who can smile and laugh on her own whim was an extraordinary journey that I’m so happy to have had to pleasure of reading. Purple Hibiscus is the kind of novel that the reader won’t forget soon after reading.

The novel sticks really close to Kambili’s head, so I’m thinking that the potential reader’s enjoyment of the novel is very dependent on much you like or sympathize with Kambili. I personally thought Kambili was a lovely protagonist, and loved being inside her head. I love seeing how timid and quiet she was at first, and then how she grew from thereon out. We’re so in her head and her personal problems and concerns that the problems with the riots and censoring in contemporary Nigeria take a backseat, but I don’t think this is a detriment to the novel at all. Reading from Kambili’s perspective was like having a glimpse at her innermost thoughts, a peek at her private diary, and there’s something so honest about the narration that I just completely fell in love with. This novel does more than just capture an amazingly authentic teenage voice – it moves you with its sincerity and honesty.

I really enjoyed the character interactions in this novel as well. Kambili and Amaka’s rocky cousin relationship was interesting to watch, as they start to step away from their misunderstandings of one another. And the rest of the family interactions were great too. I really liked how family was so central to this novel. It was really interesting to see the contrast between Kambili’s family and her aunt’s family, from the obvious differences (abusive relationship vs. loving relationship etc) to much subtler ways, like how Kambili’s family household is very quiet, versus her aunt’s boisterous laughter that rings around her own household. There was also some very nice class differences explored in this novel, which is nice to see. But my absolutely favourite aspect of this novel was the achingly sweet budding romance between Kambili and Amandi, a priest. Their growing affection for each other felt so natural, and the author captures the emotions of teenage first love so well. If I must compare her portrayals of first love with another YA author, it’d be Jenny Han, but more The Summer I Turned Pretty-esque as oppose to Shug-like. We are convinced by their portrayal of first love because it’s very honest. Also, Adichie writes like a dream, and the way she selects her words to describe that feeling of first love is so perfect and beautifully original.

The afternoon played across my mind as I got out of the car in front of the flat. I had smiled, ran, laughed. My chest was filled with something like bath foam. Light. The lightness was so sweet i tasted it on my tongue, the sweetness of an overripe bright yellow cashew fruit. Pg. 180

Doesn’t that just make you want to pick up the book ASAP?! Even if my not-very-elegantly-phrased review is not convincing you, read it for the beautiful, lush prose, at the very least.

The Verdict: One of the most beautiful pieces of fictive narratives I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. Painful, sweet, and a spark of hopeful joy – the reader will sink into Kambili’s mindset right away as she forges a life for herself. I’ve been told that as this was Adichie’s first novel, her later works are much better. Which makes me really excited because as her writing is already so amazing here, I can’t wait to see how she tops it in Half a Yellow Sun

Rating: 5/5
Enjoyment: 100%!

Title and Cover Discussion: One of the things I didn’t get to talk about in the review was the purple hibiscus motif, which was subtly woven into the story to lead us to some of the novel’s most memorable scenes. Anyhow, the title is brilliant and if you’re curious about how Adichie uses the purple hibiscus as a symbol, I say read it to find out. 8D As for the cover... I don’t know, I’m really sick of cut-off female faces, and on top of that, the black-and-white photograph doesn’t do it any favours. Another cover has the hibiscus in actual purple, but I don’t really want to rate a cover if I haven’t seen it with my own two eyes. (I find that seeing covers online and in real life is two very different experiences.) Soooooo I’m going to cheat on the cover ratings and drop them. I just don’t feel fair with faulting a cover when there’s another one out there that may be better. It just brings too much attention to the old cover, ya know? Feel free to share your thoughts on the cover, or anything you want.

Title: A+!

This counts for the Social Justice March Challenge and POC Challenge

Review: A Spy in the House by Y.S. Lee

2010-03-31T14:51:00.004-04:00

Title: The Agency: A Spy in the House
Author(s): Y.S. Lee
Genre: YA historical mystery
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Candlewick

Disclosure: Review Copy sent to me by Sarah Rettger
The Summary: Rescued from the gallows in 1850s London, young orphan (and thief) Mary Quinn is surprised to be offered a singular education, instruction in fine manners — and an unusual vocation. Miss Scrimshaw’s Academy for Girls is a cover for an all-female investigative unit called The Agency, and at seventeen, Mary is about to put her training to the test. Assuming the guise of a lady’s companion, she must infiltrate a rich merchant’s home in hopes of tracing his missing cargo ships. But the household is full of dangerous deceptions, and there is no one to trust — or is there? Packed with action and suspense, banter and romance, and evoking the gritty backstreets of Victorian London, this breezy mystery debuts a daring young detective who lives by her wits while uncovering secrets — including those of her own past.
--From GoodReads.com

The Review: Woah, where to start? I love this book, and I’m not confident that this review will do the book just. Well, first things first, as I suspected from following Y.S. Lee’s blog tour, the setting was AMAZING. I felt like I was transported in time to 19th century London. Everything felt so tangible, the grime and stink and grit of the city, and the house Mary was assigned to just felt so real, like I could imagine myself walking through its kitchen and corridors and what have you. Best of all, the setting felt like such an integral part of the story, a story that couldn’t take place anywhere but in that time period and in that city, that context. It’s not just, you know, Victorian window dressing to make everything look pretty and get an excuse for the ladies to wear pretty frocks. I wish more historical novels set in the Victorian era read like this book.

I’ve seen quite a number of reviews giving attention to the banter between Mary and James, saying that this is their favourite aspect of the novel, and while I too enjoy good banter (and the ones between Mary and James were really good), those didn’t make the novel for me. I mean, I do like the Mary and James interaction because they were just really well-written and fun, but this wasn’t an aspect of this novel that made the reading experience so memorable for me. Nor was it the mystery aspect, as I confess I have absolutely no taste or sense for mystery/detective written narratives. Some of the stuff that really stuck out for me was not really mentioned in the reviews I have read, such as the basic concept of the Agency Lee brought in. I love the idea of an all-female intelligence force giving opportunities to young women in Victorian England who may not otherwise have access to. It’s such an interesting and empowering aspect into the story, and I kinda wish we got to have a story that took place IN the school, a bunch of girls gathered from all walks of life learning and dreaming for a future in a kind of Victorian boarding school way. (This is because I am partial to school setting narratives) Anyhow, what I’m trying to say is that the concept of the Agency really appealed to me, and I hope that the workings of the Agency gets fleshed out as we get more books in the series.

The other thing I really like about this novel was just Mary herself. I found her fascinating and relatable, a really interesting yet flawed character. It’s been a while since my favourite character turned out to be the narrator of the whole story, and it’s really nice to always be on the narrator’s side for once, lol. I liked her brashness, her wit, how she takes action without always thinking things through clearly. I also liked that, even though she’s not exactly the conventional leading lady for a Victorian England setting, Mary still fits into the historical setting without feeling like a “modern” day woman transported in time. Mary, despite not being conventional, is still very much shaped by the Victorian era she lived in, and I appreciate that. I enjoyed all her interactions with the rest of the cast. There’s a nice amount of character development in this book, wherein people change as they encounter and talk with others, and getting to see all of this from Mary’s perspective was lots of fun. Not only did we get to see other people change, but we can also pick up on the subtle changes in Mary that she herself may not realize as of yet. In fact, I must confess, the most memorable character interaction scene was not between James and Mary, but this one scene towards the end, with Angelica as they talked about what they want and their futures. In fact, my favourite line came out of that scene! “It’s terrifying to be on the verge of finally getting what you want.” (pg. 281) You know that moment when something you’ve hoped for seems finally possible to attain, how it’s kinda scary but amazing all at once? This moment of interaction just brought back all those emotions: of self-reflection and hope and a dash of fear for the unknown. (I do know that this comes up with Cass too, but I happen to like this moment of interaction more. I suspect because this one was more dialogue-y?) I really liked seeing how Angelica grows in Mary’s eyes, from the spoiled sullen girl she was assigned to, to the lady with a goal to fulfill.

I liked how Y.S. Lee handled the passing aspect as well. Will not go into details about this as it’s spoilery, but I enjoyed slowly finding out more about Mary’s murky, hidden past, and I hope we get to see more of this family exploration in the next few books. The writing of the novel was fluid and accessible, almost deflecting attention from itself so that the reader can concentrate on the many plot twists thrown our way, which is very helpful. The ending left me satisfied yet wanting more story, new adventures for our leading lady Mary Quinn. (WHERE IS THE CIGAR BOX?! I MUST KNOW. *whimpers*) The sequel just can’t come out fast enough.

The Verdict: Excellent book, and I think everyone should give this novel a try. It was an engrossing read, with a lead character you can root for with all your heart, an interesting premise, and a nice heavy amount of twists to keep mystery fans pondering. I, personally, am dying for the sequel. Is it August yet?!

Rating: 4.5/5
Enjoyment: 100%

Title and Cover Discussion: I know technically this book is called The Spy in the House and the seriesname is called The Agency, but I keep calling this book the Agency in my head. I suspect I’ll start properly calling it The Spy in the House once the sequel comes out though. As for the cover, I’m a bit ambivalent. Passing is a bit complicated to portray when we have face covers, ~~but getting a white model (I think the model is ‘white’? Feel free to correct me) to portraying a passing protagonist is rather problematic.~~ I'm informed that the model is indeed of mixed heritage. I suspect this cover would work better for me if it was an illustrated cover instead, but oh well... It’s visually appealing, I’ll admit. Skipping out on ratings because I’m ambivalent about how I’d rate them. =D

Spotlighting Y.S. Lee's epic blog tour of awesome

2010-03-22T20:22:00.004-04:00

At first I was debating whether or not I should work on a review post for Y.S. Lee's debut book of awesome The Agency: A Spy in the House, orrrrrrr if I should talk about her amazing blog tour and interviews. I suspect it'd be more conventional for me to talk about the posts by an author AFTER having actually reviewed the book on the blog, but I just can't resist this post. Because Y.S. Lee's blog tour? Was the best blog tour I've ever seen!

But first, I suppose I should confess to the reasons why I started checking out her blog tour in the first place. I don't normally get excited about debut books, but Ari from Reading in Color directed my attention to this book and I clicked around to check out her site for some excerpts to see if this book could be my thing. Which had me stumbling upon this little 10 Things You Didn't Know About Me post on Walker Books, wherein I found out the author was grew up in Singapore and moved to Canada when she was two and a half. And I was like, hey, if we replaced Singapore with Malaysia, that could be me! And was duly impressed that she actually spoke English, Chinese *and* Malay before getting to Canada. (I am no natural linguist: only knew Mandarin pre-school years, which I lost, and gained French and English instead.) Also, I was just charmed by the 10 things list in general. She just sounded really fun and witty. But I was still wary about the book itself. The summary didn't really make it sound like my thing, since I don't normally enjoy mystery novels (TV shows is a whole different story though), and a book about spies will abound with mystery-ness. Still, I kept the author's site bookmarked, and kept the book in mind.

Fast forward to this month of March, wherein bits of Y.S. Lee's blog tour posts were cropping up in my google reader, coupled with usually glowing reviews next to them. I was once again charmed by her posts. I'll confess that since being introduced to the concept of blog tours after having made this book blog, I was not converted to its appeal. I usually find the endless string of interviews dull (there's only so many times I can read the same answers for the similar type questions of Where Do You Get Your Ideas? and What's Your Inspiration or something), and a too large onslaught of reviews for the same book usually creates apathy on my part. However, if everyone had blog tours like Y.S. Lee's I'd never complain again. She totally set a new bar for the quality I expect out of a blog tour. Her guest posts are AMAZING. Seriously, they make the history factoid nerd in me all floaty in happiness. It's amazing how much she knows about Victorian England, and I love how accessible her posts are, this wry touch to her posts that I really enjoy. It also made me confident that Y.S. Lee's version of Victorian London will come to life with her impeccable amount of research. And it may also have ruined me for other blog tours forever - for historical novels anyhow. I'll probably be thinking inside, But why don't you have awesome geeky guest posts on history factoids of awesome?! Why aren't your guest posts like Y.S. Lee's??!?! Which I suppose is unfair to these future historical authors pursuing their blog tours, but new standards must be met! 8D

Heck, I even enjoyed the interviews, and I usually ignore Author interview posts. Her answers were very conversational and I approve her thoughts on Jane Eyre ending (one word for y'all on that subject: disappointing). Also, her answer to Steph Su's interview on her possible next novel was the best answer EVER (for me, anyhow. I acknowledge my South-East Asia-centric bias here.) I liked seeing everyone's opinion on the novel in their reviews, and they didn't start going dull on me mostly because of how the reviews were carefully worded so as to not give away the mystery stuff, and by consequence fuelled my imagination. I was all, What is this big secret no one wants to spill?! and combed through every word of the review trying to gather hints... Which is totally ironic since my initial reservations revolved around the whole mystery factor, lol.

*coughs* So anyhow: Y.S. Lee's blog tour posts are the best things ever and everyone should read them. And as I'm the most amazing and generous person alive, I decided that I'm going to LINK all 8 of the posts right here! 8D

Sexy Victorians

Myth 1: “Lie back and think of England”. There is absolutely no evidence that Queen Victoria (or any other woman of the 1800s) ever advised anyone to “lie back and think of England” during sex. In fact, Queen Victoria thought her husband, Prince Albert, was gorgeous and confided to a friend that “Greek statues are nothing compared to Albert in his bath”.

LOLOLOL

Victorian Child Labour

In a different district, work might involve crawling through a coal mine, because skinny bodies and tiny fingers were good at collecting little bits of coal. Urban children went to work in factories, where their small fingers were useful once again – until they lost them in industrial accidents, and were thus unemployable.

T_T

Victorians of Colour

So when I started to imagine my novel, The Agency: A Spy in the House, I included a population I’d stumbled across in my PhD research: Lascars, aka sailors from the Asian subcontinent. Some were simply passing through London between ocean voyages; others chose to settle down, marrying English women and having families; others still were stuck in England, unable to find passage back to their home countries. For this last group, there were actually specific charities that aimed to help them (and convert them to Christianity at the same time). The “Imperial Baptist East London Refuge for Destitute Asiatic Sailors” mentioned in Spy is parody of their usual tone.

There are ASIANS, in a Victorian England setting!!! This post alone would have gotten me to fork out my money for the first available copy in my bookstore.

5 Reasons Why Historical Fiction > Time Travel

The family toothbrush. According to John Sutherland, whom I never doubt, dental hygiene is a relative latecomer to Western culture. In his terrific essay, “Heathcliff’s toothbrush”, Sutherland contemplates the state of our favourite Brontë psychopath’s teeth. Apparently, Heathcliff is unlikely to be able to gnash his gleaming white teeth in fury, because it would be rare for men of his age to have gnashable teeth. Indeed, while Victorians bathed regularly and believed in fresh air, they generally had only one toothbrush per household; the family toothbrush, if you will, in much the same way that families now have one nailbrush, or one shoe-polishing kit. A fortnight’s stay in 1840, anyone? I thought not.

Ewwwwwwwwwwww. Also a very convincing argument. 8D

Cadavers and Childbirth

Semmelweis noticed that at the doctor-staffed clinic, about 10% of the women died of something called childbed fever. In contrast, at the midwife-staffed clinic, about 4% of the women died of childbed fever (also called puerperal fever).

This didn’t make sense to Semmelweis. The higher death rate at the doctors’ clinic troubled him for years – until he realized that the doctors moved freely between the autopsy room and the delivery ward. (Yes, you read that correctly: they sliced open corpses, then went straight on to deliver babies without washing their hands in between!)

... And you thought the family toothbrush was bad. *grins*

The Great Stink

All through the history of the River Thames, Londoners dumped their garbage into it: food scraps, human waste, anything they didn’t want to deal with… it all went into the river. It’s a big river, though, and this was basically okay. They also used it as a source of water for cooking and bathing. Again, it was mostly tolerable. And then came the 1840s, and the invention of the flush toilet. Guess where they all flushed into? That’s right. Straight. Into. The Thames.

This is all horrifying in a fascinating way, y/y???!! *inner history geek is happy*

Victorians and Opium

Laudanum, however, was a liquid tincture of opium widely prescribed by doctors for pains, for anxiety, as a sleeping aid, and other general ailments for which a little light sedative might be helpful. It was unregulated in Victorian England. It was a major ingredient in lots of over-the-counter medicines, and few households were without their little bottle of laudanum.

I really liked how she debunked the whole opium dens and the exotic east connotations opium has here. =D

Victorians and the Corset

Little-known truth: men sometimes wore corsets, too. It’s true, it’s true! Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, was admired for his great posture and splendid tailoring. Turns out that he had help with his posture. And he certainly wasn’t alone.

CORSETS FOR EVERYONE. lawl

Do go check out these epic guest posts. 8D Also, I promise a review for The Agency: A Spy in the House sometime this week. 8D

Review: A Million Shades of Grey by Cynthia Kadohata

2010-03-21T19:21:00.007-04:00

Title: A Million Shades of Grey
Author(s): Cynthia Kadohata
Genre: MG Historical, War
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Disclosure: I received this review copy from Book Chick City
The Summary: Y'Tin wants nothing more than to spend the rest of his life with Lady, his elephant, and become a elephant handler. But the Vietnam War looms closer and closer into his tribe's every day life. As the Americans leave and the North Vietnamese army marches closer and closer, Y'Tin seeks a way to live and stay with Lady - no matter what it takes.

The Review: Some confessions I must make before I proceed with the review: I love Cynthia Kadohata's works. From the momemt I read the first page of Weedflower back in the cold wintery day of January last year, I fell in love. Kadohata has this wonderful way of capturing her protagonists' voice, and her stories are so intimate, so personal, like the protagonist is speaking to me, and her stories break my heart in all the right places.

Now, despite this love, I was also somewhat apprehensive about this novel. For one thing, as much as I love Weedflower, Kira-Kira, and Cracker: The Best Dog in Vietnam, I did not care for Outside Beauty at all, which was her latest work just before A Million Shades of Grey came out. It utterly failed to impress me. That was the first time I felt that the voice of the protagonist was unconvincing, and voice is the best aspect of Kadohata's writing. I, well, I admit to wondering if maybe Kadohata might be losing her touch. That coupled with the fact that this will be the first novel I read by her with a male protagonist, and I was weary in wondering whether she could pull off a male's voice.

Well, this book just blew all my apprehensions out of the water, and taught me that I should just never doubt Cynthia Kadohata's mastery in writing ever again (I'll just chalk Outside Beauty as an anomaly). It was amazing. Brilliant! It is actually the saddest Kadohata story I've read, and if anyone's familiar with any of her other titles, you know I'm really saying something here.

Y'Tin was a brilliant protagonist. Kadohata proved to me that not only can she completely charm me with her portrayal of a young boy's voice, but capture the child perspective of the war around him in the most convincing fashion. I was in Y'Tin's head the whole way through, and every laugh, every heartbreak Y'Tin went through, I not only sympathized, I felt it inside with him. His heartrendering relationship with Lady, the elephant he trained, was one of the most beautiful animal companion relationships I've ever seen, and I'm saying this as a person who is normally skeptical of animal companionship tales. Y'Tin tells us he cares about Lady more than anything in the world, and you just - you really believe it, and that's why when the events of the novel unravel, it just breaks you - there.

And the story! Wow, what a story. Like all of Kadohata's work, the ride is slow but sure, as she draws you into the lives of her characters then slowly builds up the events, one at a time to a breathtaking climax, and an ending that will tear your heart out. If anyone was worried about this book not being able to pull off the grittiness and ravages of a war setting - since, well, as much as I loved Cracker, Kadohata gave us a very sanitized version of the Vietnam War in that particular book - no need to worry about that here, the horrors of war are shown in all its traumatizing glory! I may or may not have completely embarrassed myself at a dinner party as people saw me bawling in public, book in hand. I like how Kadohata decided to show the war from the Montagnards' perspective, an indigenous tribe living out in the jungle of Vietnam. It offers us a perspective that's outside of the usual Vietcong or American GI perspective, yet still very much a part of the war. Y'Tin's family helped out the Americans, and it was fascinating to see the effects towards the end of the war for this decision, as the Americans left them to their fate and the Vietcongs come closing in. I was reading a review of this book by The Bookbag which argued that it idealized the American GIs way too much and vilified the Vietcongs. Which is a valid interpretation, and I do see shades of that in the story, but I think the reason why it worked for me, this portrayal of the Montagnards helping the GIs is that the Montagnards do not benefit from this aid. The Americans were not at all their knights in shining armour coming to their rescue - it was quite the opposite. The whole story is set around the time when the Montagnards were to fend for themselves, and explores the broken promises of protection made by the Americans, and it was very sad, and very painful to see. We see the slow change in which Y'Tin's peers reacted around him, as the people within his tribe blamed his family for helping the Americans and it's a credit to Kadohata's fantastic writing abilities that she is able to render these moments heartwrenching without overwrought writing.

It's worth noting however that while there were some positive portrayals of the Americans, by contrast there were absolutely none of that when we see portrayals of the Vietnamese people. If they weren't calling the Montagnard savages, they were attacking their villages. I am not too 100% sure of Thorat's ethnicity, who was character portrayed sympathetically, but even so, he was a sympathetic teacher teaching French, a colonial language. (Oh! Sidenote: the French here is all grammatically correct! I say this because I often get annoyed when I find books that don't bother checking their grammar when they decide to have the characters spreaking French in the story.) Hopefully Cynthia Kadohata would consider writing another novel set in Vietnam that gives the side of the Vietnamese more justice.

The Verdict: This is decidedly the best work by Cynthia Kadohata so far, and most definitely my favourite. Clear, crisp writing, a charming protagonist, a sweet animal companion tale, and a war-ridden setting that shatters your heart. After reading this novel, I couldn't get the story out of my head for weeks. This book will make you smile, laugh, cry, and leaves you with a sad, yet hopeful at the end. What more can we want out of a novel, really? This book deserves to be up there and known with the other amazingly wrought war stories such as Markus Zusak's The Book Thief and the like. Run, don't walk, to get a copy of this novel. You won't regret it.

Rating: 4/5
Enjoyment: 100%

Title and Cover Discussion: The title is passable, I suppose. However, the title doesn't give me an immediate connection to what I've read in the story. Which is too bad, since all her other titles (Kira-Kira, Outside Beauty, Cracker, Weedflower) did this so well. But I think it hints at the layers of war being explored, that the side to the story isn't all just black and white, that there's the people not on either sides. Of course, I could be wrong, and those who've read the novel can feel free to share the title thoughts they have about this with me here. I'm all ears! I do love the cover. It's not exactly shiny or anything but it has Y'Tin AND Lady being all BFF there! How can I not love it? ♥ And I passed by the hardcover of this book a while back in the bookstore and the inside of the cover is beautifullll. It is the pattern of the jungle leaves we see on the top of the cover. But I'm not really a fan of the cover for the hardback... What's the difference, you ask? Well, they photoshopped in the 'Asian' hat. Not only does Y'Tin never actually wear that hat in the story, but I get the sense that the hat was pasted on to hint and the ~*exotic*~ Asian-ness. This is not the first time this happened with Kadohata's covers, but they make me sigh. lol, but w/e my version doesn't have the hat on it so YAY HAPPINESS. ♥

Title: B
Cover: A

This counts for the POC reading challenge.

Discussion Post: Reading in a Second Language

2010-03-14T14:31:00.005-04:00

Ughhhhhh I'm supposed to be doing school stuff ~~like studying for finals omfg~~ but this post won't go out of my head, and I've been wanting to hold a discussion-type post here for a long time, wherein I get feedback from my readers! (Okay not true, the long time thing. I did have a sort of last minute discussion thing towards my winner of contest post, wherein after I gave answers to the Chinese Actress questions, I further asked about the Chinese movies/shows ppl like to watch, or would like to start watching, buuuuuuut that isn't quite a READING related discussion, which I plan on having here.*)

The topic in which I'd like to discussion: Reading in a Second Language

As a few of you may already know, besides English I do happen to be able to speak/read/write in another language with passable fluency: French. I'm currently at the stage wherein I can hold my own in conversations, but do not quite have the expanded vocabulary nor slangy ease to be considered fully fluent. In the past few weeks, as I tried rushing my French readings to write my paper for one of my classes, I decided to time how long it took me to read my assigned books. Result?

For french works, I was reading at 50 pages an hour.

I was quite horrified, to say the least. Why is this, you say? Because normally, in English, I read at least twice that pace. Reading 100+ pages an hour is no big deal for me. In fact, I suspect that would be me going quite slow. I easily devour 400-500 page books in about three or four hours, provided I'm not distracted by anything. Just, reading at half-speed makes me feel so bogged down, because I know in another language that I'm fluent at, I can do so much better. And I really want to be fluent in French. I do, I do.**

I've made an oath to try at speed up my French reading by taking the time to read French books leisurely (and not just once a week my textbook for one course) on a daily basis. For now, I'm holding off reading the what I'd call 'difficult' books and reading the ones with simple enough prose that, even if I didn't understand all the words, I can at least guess by context. (I'm the type of reader that hates referring to the dictionary for every word I don't understand. If I don't know it but can guess it's meaning I'd just speed on forward.) Hopefully when I have more time during the summary I'll go through and read Alexandre Dumas' works in French, particularly Le comte de Monte-Cristo, because while I really want to read it, reading it in French without a dictionary is quite beyond me. Believe me, I tried. *sighs*

But! Back to bring about a discussion focus on this: as I was thinking about how I could increase my french-reading capacities, I also started thinking about the ties between the degree of fluency in the language and reading choices. I was not too young that I don't remember my struggles with my English reading abilities as a child. English was not a language taught explicitly to me in school until Grade 3, when the French Immersions*** finally have a single class in English. I could speak fluently in English of course, due to growing up in the Anglo-speaking part of Canada, but my reading abilities were not quite on par. I still remember how I slowly progressed in my English readings, starting off with the early chapter books and by the sheer force of trying to read every single day, I read faster and faster to the point wherein I can read at the pace I am at now. I reminded myself that gaining the skills to read was not easy. How I couldn't read certain books if they were too long, or had too many unrecognizable words that I couldn't figure out by sounding out. I wouldn't say this inability to read the 'harder' books ruined my early reading experience, since I deeply enjoyed the books I read, but it did stop me from reading a type of book, or at the very least I couldn't read all the books I would have found interesting from hearing the summary only, because I didn't have the words to read them. Your vocabulary can certainly be enriched by the books you read, but it can also stop you from reading books with outlandish vocabulary until you have access to a bigger vocabulary in order to read them. And getting a bigger, stronger vocabulary takes time.

And then I go even further back and think about how you need a certain kind fluency with a language to even begin enjoying the stories you read. I think, there are two ends of learning how to read in a language. There's the first part, wherein you're still trying to memorize the basics, ie.e the letters for phonetic script, and then this basics have to start coming together to make words, then words with other words to create phrases, then eventually a sentence that has meaning. And I think, until you get to the point wherein you can see that sentence and that sentence has meaning for you, can your reading abilities or speed start taking flight towards the path of claiming reading language fluency. Perhaps this is just a roundabout way of consoling myself over my French reading speed, by telling myself I can only go up from here if I just put effort, that I'm over the big hurdle already and have only up to go, but it *is* a comforting thought for me. It keeps me optimistic, and I think you need that, when trying to acquire fluency in another language. =D

I do have more thoughts on language fluency and transitioning between different languages and whatnot, but I think I'll stop here.

Questions for my readers: Do you read in two or more languages? If so, how does your reading speed between the two compare? Is your reading material affected by your acquired vocab on what you can read? Any perks in a potentially expanded reading choice of material by knowing two or more languages? Or, if you don't know more than one language, do you think you'll ever try picking up another language? I always think that learning languages is tough, damn hard work, and if I were to ever pick up another language (or make another excruciatingly painful attempt at improving my Chinese, which has yet to go anywhere), I always like to imagine what I *could* use so-or-so language for, so that all that work and sweat will pay off, lol. Anything at all you'd like to talk about that's relevant to this post, I'd love to hear. =D

*Do feel free to go back and answer, if you want to participate in that discussion! I will see the comments and will most likely reply, lol.

**Why else would I suffer through signing up for french courses and having to write my papers in french for?

***French Immersion is a program wherein parents of non-french speaking backgrounds can enroll their kids into elementary school to learn the french language.

Linky linky links! Or, In Which Other Bloggers Write Very Epic Posts

2010-03-13T09:50:00.006-05:00

Helloooooooo book blog. Which I have sadly neglected in the past few days. Unfortunately, this post isn't a post declaring my return, as I'm still swamped by a million research papers coming up and finals looming overhead, but I thought I'd take the time to point out some posts because, woahhhhh so many thoughtfully written posts this week. ~~Also, an excuse to procrastinate.~~

In the world of US Sci-Fi blogsphere, we got this really ridiculously ethnocentric "World SF" post by Spinrad (Third World Worlds, APPROACH WITH CAUTION, THE FAIL IS HEADDESK-INDUCING) this week. Fortunately, there are awesome rebuttals by others about how wrong this is, and one of my favourites is the rebuttal by Haikasoru: World SF, Worth Reading BEFORE developing an opinion. Damn, I love this imprint. ♥ (Loups-Garous should come out, like, NOW.)

The problem is that Spinrad is just making an appeal to ignorance. He’s not familiar with the many writers of world SF, so he assumes they do not exist. For whatever reason, though he could be familiar with Japanese SF as some of it has been translated into English, he decided to ignore actually existing Japanese SF. He also utterly ignores Chinese SF, which has been a going concern since 1904 at least. China is also the home of Science Fiction World, the most widely read SF magazine on the planet.

Also more ridiculous fail over this orientalizing term for Asian steampunk, which, imo, should just be called Asian steampunk, and not that new term Gatehouse is trying to promote. Jha explains why this term is so wrong in the most eloquent fashion: Countering Victorientalism. Seriously, read it slowly, take it in before jumping into conclusions. And I swear to the heavens there won't be any use of this Victor******ism here on this blog. Everyone can just damn well call it Asian steampunk and get over themselves.

Due to the power invested in Westerners today, borne from the history of colonization, there is no way to safely recreate the Orient, without yet creating more assumptions of stereotypes, without imposition of these stereotypes on actual people. This practice has precedent in the term “The Orient” alone: once a simple term to describe “the East”, it has over time become loaded with immediate association to the exotic, the opposite, the Other.
Today, Westerners continue to consume cultural artifacts from other cultures, many of whom unaware, or unwilling to acknowledge, that cultures are not meant for decoration, nor do they exist for the entertainment of the current hegemony, much like Europeans from the 19th century buying porcelain and silk.

Justine Larbalestier has a continuation of amazing guest posts on her blog, and Alaya Johnson's "What My Dad Said" broke my heart. Please, do read the whole thing.

“Alaya,” my Dad said, later that day, over dinner, “you have to understand that you live in the world. You can’t mess around with the way you wish things would be. You have to deal with the way that they are. A black woman writing a book with a cover like that is going to get shoved in a category you might not want to be in.”

ninefly has been posting every friday about covers in her cover cravings meme, and this week's theme is one of my favourites: Title Fonts *grins*

I love it when cover artists take the time to really fancify the titles rather than just slap them on half-assed in the default Times New Roman font (though that works for some designs).

choco wrote a hilarious post called YA fiction of the future on YA titles that landed a 7-figure deal this week. (Yes you read that correctly: S-E-V-E-N.) All debut too. Colour me jealous. The best part about this post though? Is how amazingly funny choco is. (You don't follow her yet? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? Go and follow her now.)

But what will the next big advance go to?

I'm betting on mermen. Their ~~skin~~ scales sparkle in the water! What danger their hunger for ~~blood~~ fish poses! They could carry ~~Bella~~ the main character on their backs and ~~race~~ swim off into the deep ~~green~~ blue ~~meadows~~ waters of the ~~forest~~ sea! And play ~~baseball~~ water polo in truly EPIC proportions!

Justin Allen wrote a mega, megaaaaaaaa long humourous post with a title to match it called For the Love of Pete, Don't Mix Your Genres; Or... The New York Times Book Review Hates YOU, but I Don't; Or... Why Where Your Book Gets Shelved Determines Your Intelligence, Work-Ethic and Value to Society. It's pretty classic genre vs. "literary" and my favourite aspect was the mixing of genres part. Quoting his intro to the 3-way essay:

That's a longish title I'll admit, and while I generally don't go in for such larded vessels, in this case I'm willing to make an exception. Monstrous though it may seem (and most assuredly is), the above title sums up pretty much everything I have to say on the subjects of writing and publishing. The first line ought to be read as a word of warning to struggling writers. The second explains - in as much as an explanation of the unintelligible is even possible - why the publishing industry behaves as it does. And the third highlights our common enemy, which turns out to be ourselves.
Really - if I must say so myself - that title is a wonder of economy, precision and restraint. But maybe you'd like me to elaborate? Normally I'd refuse - principally on the grounds that my arguments tend to be weakened by exploration - but as I have been contracted to provide a minimum of fifteen minutes of reading diversion, I will betray myself and attempt to explain...

Sonya Chung has a very interesting post on covers called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Designing a Book Jacket, specifically her cover of her new book Long for This World by Sonya Chung. It's pretty amusing, but I'm also, I'll admit, somewhat miffed. Why yes Asians CAN have wavy/curly/thick hair too! AND go from dark brown to reddish brown too without the use of perm/dye/having white ancestry. It's not always all straight jet black! Dun, dun, dun. Next thing you know I'll be claiming we don't all have "single" eyelids. WHEN WILL THE WONDERS CEASE. [/sarcasm] *coughs* But it's an interesting post when we contrast it with the stereotyped Asian covers.

I mentioned these responses to my editor. She was shocked; it never occurred to her that the figure would be perceived as non-Asian, nor did it to me. As I looked more closely, brightening my screen settings, I saw that the woman’s hair had brownish highlights, accentuated by the light emanating from the horizon; it also had a slight wave to it. I thought, this must be what my friends are reacting to.

Well, that's all for now. Again, sorry for not being around. I probably won't be active here until like, April (school's kicking my ass to the curb, bleh) but do know that I do check my google reader and try to keep somewhat in the loop, even though I'm rarely dropping by with comments now. I'll be backkkkkkk *slinks back into study/essay-ing land*

P.S. incidentally, you may potentially find me more active on my twitter. Or even my other general blog. You know, in case you guys miss my voice or something. =D

Signal Alert: Cover Whitewashing of White Cat ETA w/ new cover photo & link

2010-03-05T22:24:00.010-05:00

I've been linked by Meaghan on her own blog and Claire's goodreads review about the whitewashing of Holly Black's upcoming White Cat novel. As far as I understand, WC is about a boy named Cassel who lives in an alternate world that's similar to our own, wherein there's cursework.

Here's an except of Meaghan's post, wherein she shows us quotes that hint at Cassel's ethnicity:

(Quotes taken from the ARC, and thus may not be exactly matched the final, published edition. I've removed character names to avoid spoilers.)
[My brother's] dark skin makes his teeth look whiter when he smiles. pg. 30

I shake my head. "...Gramps says that his father--her grandfather--was a maharaja of India. He sold tonics from Calcutta to the Midwest. Makes some sense that he could be Indian. His last name, Singer, could be derived from Singh."
"Your grandfather told me that your family was descended from runaway slaves," she says. [...]
"Yeah," I say. "I like the maharaja story better. And don't even get me started on the one where we're Iroquois." pg. 43

______'s hands go to her hips. "She's your [Cassel's] cousin?"
______ scrunches her eyes for a moment, then a wide grin splits her face. "Oh! Because I'm so pale, right?" pg. 226

Aaaaaaaaand here's the cover:

I'm doubly sad about this because the publisher of White Cat is Simon and Schuster, who did the cover for Bleeding Violet. Two steps forward, ten steps back?

Incidentally, the UK cover is simply of the cat, by a different company. If this unfortunate whitewashed cover won't get changed before publication, I'll be getting the UK one. On its own, a cat cover isn't problematic in the slightest, but I think we'll find that with covers of novels with a POC characters, if the cover ain't whitewashed then it is probably an object/design-heavy/silhouette cover. The Faces of POC are rarely featured on covers themselves. Note: am speaking specifically on the US YA market, other markets and genres may have different-but-similar situations. It's never about just the whitewashing of one singular cover, it's about how the whitewashing of covers is still prevalent in the publishing industry to this day. And you know what? That's racist. Period, full stop.

Re:White Cat cover, I'll be filing a complaint on S&S's contact form. I won't be allowing comments on this post because I currently have two research papers due one after another in a couple days and I don't think I can give any full attention to either moderating or responding to this topic at hand. I hope that those who feel strongly that whitewashing is wrong will considering speaking out. Sometimes if we generate enough noise change can happen, re:Liar and re:Magic Under Glass. One can hope that something similar can happen for this cover.

In the meantime, for those who want to consider taking pro-actions against whitewashing covers, consider joining Readers Against WhiteWashing, if you have facebook. Or consider supporting books that do feature POC characters on the cover.

Ta, folks.

ETA with New Cover of White Cat:

As we can see, this photo is the less-photoshopped-to-make-cover-model-paler-than-he-actually-is cover. Book Smugglers did an intensive writeup on this issue: Whitewashing Strikes Again? The Case of White Cat by Holly Black

Still bogged down by papers, so no thinky-thoughts from me on this for a while. But if you want to have discussion do go to the Book Smuggler's post and comment there if you wanna talk it out, etc.

(Should I do IMM? *sighs* I only got one book, maybe I'll just clump it together with next week... ~~though it'd be good procrastination NO NO NO MUST WRITE PAPERS.~~)

Winner for My 50 Followers Giveaway Contest!!

2010-03-05T18:13:00.011-05:00

Disclosure: I drew out the number based on Random.Org. =D

And the winner issssssss

Esme.

*throws confetti*

I have sent you an email. Please respond within 48 hours. If I don't get a response I'll have to choose another winner.

ANYHOW, some interesting stats and, of course, the answers to Recognize Your Chinese Actresses? under cut.

The number of people who wanted the two books are pretty even, but MGRG won by about a margin of 2. Veryyyyy interesting. 8D

The first two photos were the easiest and the ones that most people got. Photo #1 was Lucy Liu and she was mostly recognized for Charlie's Angels and a couple of people named Ally Mcbeal. (Only one person named Kill Bill. xD) Photo #2 was Michelle Yeoh and was almost universally recognized for her role in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. There were a couple of people who named Memoirs of a Geisha, and one person actually named Tai Chi Master. (You rock!)

Only one person got Photo #3 and Photo #4 each, and they are Zhou Xun and Jessica Hsuan, respectively. I was actually kinda surprised about Zhou Xun, because she's a pretty big superstar in Mainland China, up there with, say, Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li and Tang Wei and whatnot, but I suppose since she was never in Hollywood, that's why people don't know? Which makes me also guess that my reading audience is predominantly from the US. xD Oh, and anyone who has ever seen a TVB series will recognize Jessica. She OWNED the tv screen. xD

No one got Photo #5, lol. She is Ady An, and she's pretty big in the taiwanese drama scene, starring in shows like The Outsiders and Autumn's Concerto. The band F.I.R. debuted with Lydia as the ending theme of The Outsiders, which anyone and everyone who ever went for Chinese Karaoke will know the song. 8D 他走了带不走你的天堂~ *hums*

Thank you to all those who participated! It's been fun. 8D

QUESTION: (to make this interesting for myself) What shows/movie starring Chinese actors/actresses have you enjoyed, or any upcoming movies/shows you're looking forward to? I'd love to hear! Also, for those who haven't actually watched any, can you think of a title of a show or movie that you'd like to watch? 8D

Personally, I am a big, bigggggggg fan of Taiwanese shows. They're kind of my guilty pleasures since, it's not big secret that the taiwanese drama scene is plagued by mediocrity and cheesy storylines and awful special effects. But some of them are just so endearing and sometimes, every couple of years you'd randomly come across a twdrama that's actually honest to god GOOD, like Bump Off Lover and Black and White, for instance. I also grew up on those TVB dramas (My mom loved those shows...), aka shows from Hong Kong, and while I don't personally like any of them, I kind of take a sadistic joy in mass making fun of them. As for movies, I grew up watching Hong Kong action/martial arts movies, mostly against my will because every time we went to, say, Blockbusters to rent out movies, I'd always get outvoted by my brother and dad. (They didn't appreciate my taste for anime movies, or those rom coms/melodrama) I've learnt to kick back and just enjoy, but honestly action movies aren't my kind of thing. I did enjoy the old Jackie Chan movies though, and LOVE LOVE Stephen Chow... but trying to get me to like Jet Li is impossible, not matter how many times my brother tries to convince me of his goodness or whatever. (Clearly, the comedies worked way better for me that just straight up action films.) When I watch Chinese movies, I usually enjoy the huge, big budget historical epic types from the Mainland, like the recent Red Cliff movie and a dash of the new wuxia films here and there (they're very pretty. =D). Also, I'd watch anything with Zhou Xun in it. Favourite Chinese actress evar. Don't watch too many HK movies now that I can pick movies for myself without constantly being outvoted by the boys in my family, but I did enjoy the Infernal Affairs trilogy way back. 8D I don't really watch any of the Chinese-starred indie American movies because, um, they're kinda ridiculously hard to find and few in between, but recently I watched Saving Face, which is the sweetest lesbian romcom with, le gasp, a HEA ending, and EVERYONE SHOULD WATCH THIS NOW. New shows I'm looking forward to: Pandaman (I lay no claim to taste, alright?), and new movies: The Lady Generals of Yang Family (omg Zhou Xun AND Michelle Yeoh AND Gong Li!!!! And and historical epic + kickass ladies being awesome?! Damn, can this movie just come out, like, now?)

February Social Justice: Water

2010-02-28T23:46:00.004-05:00

This month's theme for the Social Justice Challenge is Water. I will admit that when it comes to water, I don't really think much about it. It's something that I've always taken for granted. when I'm thirsty there's always water available for me to drink. Both hot and cold faucets work, and my throat has never grown parched from the lack of water availability. But I've been scanning through articles related to water issues, and they got me to start thinking. Especially about the dwindling availability to water, which is so integral to our survival, and the commoditization of water. A lot of the articles I've been coming across were depressing and scary and sad, and I think I ought to make a self-resolution on what actions I can take to personally save on water...

But enough about me and my fumblings. I'd like to point out an article I found most fascinating and informative:

How Peru is netting water supplies - I am in love with the concept of capturing fog as a source of water. 8D And I liked how it followed up with the realities of Peru and the water crisis at hand, how change must be had.

Also:

Perhaps these are a little too feel good, but I think it's also important to see hopeful, possible solutions to the water crisis, y/n?

Do also consider checking out the reviews written for this month. I'm particularly excited now to read Frank Herbert's Dune from this review. Or if you feel like recommending an article/documentary/book/anything related to this water issue, or any action steps I can take, please do let me know in the comments

Review: 8th Grade Superzero

2010-02-28T19:06:00.007-05:00

Title: 8th Grade Superzero
Author(s): Olubgemisola Rhuday-Perkovich
Genre: MG Contemporary Coming-of-Age
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Arthur A. Levine Books

The Summary: For middle schooler Reggie McKnight, being called “Pukey” is the least of his problems. School elections are coming up, but he’s as far away from being school President as he is from shutting down his enemy Donovan or meeting up with the beautiful Mialonie. His friends Ruthie and Joe C. have his back, but let’s face it: Reggie can only be a superhero on the pages of his graphic novel, Night Man.

Then Reggie gets involved with a local homeless shelter, the Olive Branch. Haunted by two of the clients there -- George, a once proud man now living on the streets, and five-year-old Charlie, who becomes his official “Little Buddy” -- he begins to think about making a difference, both in the world and at school.

-- from goodreads, though I omitted the last sentence, as it was spoilery.

The Review: I basically inhaled this novel between the hours from the time I had breakfast to lunch. It was adorable! I wasn’t even put off by the superhero stuff! (Note: Not a fan of superhero genre.) Reggie was lovable, and I really liked how he makes mistakes that not ONLY are acknowledged within the text, but he owns up to his mistakes and apologizes to the wronged party later. It’s nice to see our protagonists not being Always Right. I also liked how Rhuday-Perkovic handled Reggie volunteering at Olive Branch and the homeless residents, how helping out became gradually more and more important to him. And it was tres cool that there were a number of kids in the cast who were concerned with social and/or global issues. It wasn’t done in such a way that I thought these middle graders were acting too old for their age, and also I can see how giving this book to a middle grader can make them think about these issues at hand.

But my favourite part of this novel was Reggie’s relationships with the significant people in his life. I think, out of all of them, Reggie’s buddy relationship with Charlie was the sweetest. (Dora shoes!! ♥) I loved the every changing perceptions of each other, and how their actions influenced each other in good or bad ways. Reggie and Ruthie’s relationship was adorable too. Childhood friendships are the best!! ~~Their love is trueeeeeeeee.~~ (Who’s Mialonie again? =P) I even liked the sibling antagonisms between Reggie and Monica! These moments are always the ones that get me to switch sides from sympathizing with our protagonist Reggie to wholeheartedly supporting Monica. I love Reggie but he’s so clueless about girls. (And also, being a sister, with sibling arguments, I firmly believe that the sister ALWAYS wins. Natch.) Reggie and Monica’s talk was one of my favourite scenes in the whole novel. It was awkward, and loving in the only way squabbling siblings can be, and I love it. I loved seeing how, with siblings, you can be very cruel to one another, but when it comes down to it, you care, even when you don’t show it. I just wish there were more Reggie and Monica scenes. There is just not enough sibling interactions in MG/YA fiction.

If I have to complain about anything though, it’d be the villains. I know it’s from Reggie’s perspective, but Donovan’s villainy was a bit too 2D for me. We got a tiny glimpse of another side to his character, but it was never really developed so that we see Donovan is a character that went beyond his mean bully role. Vicky wasn’t quite as bad in comparison, but still, not as developed as I’d like. Also, while I knew Reggie’s mom was there, her presence wasn’t very strong, especially next to his father and sister. But these are just minor quibbles. The cast more or less satisfies me. I particularly appreciate how there were lots of minor characters around that, while we don’t see a lot of their background, we get just enough of them to feel like they have whole and separate lives beyond Reggie and not like, stock minor characters. =D

I liked the pacing. It was steady and gradual, building up to a good climax and finale. My favourite aspect was the fact that not everything stayed the same, and how we see people and people’s relationship with one another change over the course of the story. I also liked how multicultural the people in the story were, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY how, while their ethnic background is a factor of their identity, it is NOT the dominant driving force of the story. It’s so rare to find POC protagonists with stories that aren’t all about their racial identity, so I reallyyyyyy like that.

The Verdict: If you haven’t read this awesome debut yet you should definitely plan to. Reggie is a wonderful protagonist and it’s cute and funny and FUN and I am already forcing my youngest brother to read this, and basically this book comes highly recommended by me. READ IT!

Rating: 4/5
Enjoyment: 100%

Title and Cover Discussion: The title is absolutely PERFECT. I also am charmed by the cover. I love the colours and the yellow with the dark skyline and silhouette. It's very colour designed oriented, as oppose to, you know, the usual photo stock images or even illustrated covers, so it sticks out for me. I kinda wish the shoes at the top were Dora though. But that's really nothing to kibble over.

Title: A+!
Cover: A

Thank you Zetta, for mailing this to me!
This counts for POC and Debut 2010 reading challenge

Triple Snapshots of Feb '10 - Children of the Waters, The Housekeeper and the Professor, and Eon

2010-02-28T14:56:00.008-05:00

Triple Snapshots is a feature in which I do 3 mini-reviews of novels on the last day of the month.

This month 2/3 of the books are POC related. [I don't care what people say about Eon, that book doesn't deserve a POC subject label)

Children of the Waters by Carleen Brice

I’ll have to admit, this novel was a bit slow for me at the beginning. This may or may not have been influenced by the fact that I was anticipating that sister reunion far sooner than it actually happened in the story, which I would like to blame on the summary, lol. But once the sisters meet, it was a non-stop roller coaster ride for me. The most fascinating aspect of Children of the Waters, for me anyhow, was the challenges to both sisters on the perception of family and race. Between the two sisters, I found Billie’s storyline on how she confronts having a ‘white’ sister the most compelling of the two. I’ll confess that there were moments when I was simply exasperated with Trish. Yes, I know she means well, but her cluelessness and her insistence on a “colourblind” world just made her seem rather naïve. It wasn’t that I hated Trish, quite the opposite: I’m honestly very fond of her attempts to connect with her sister. In fact, I did like all the characters and their flaws, and there were moments between Trish’s and her son Will’s exchange that either had me laughing out loud or veering off to the other spectrum, of sadness and pain. All in all, besides the thing Brice chose to do with the ending [SPOILERS: "I’m iffy about the whole Trish finding some shiny Japanese Zen Buddhist tradition to ~*heal*~ her sister, to be honest. Didn’t gel with me.] I really enjoyed this novel. =D

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa, trans. Stephen Snyder

O. M. G. This was AMAZING. Simply astounding. It grabbed me from page one and had me racing through till I got to the end. Heartrendering and beautiful and perfect, the type of novel that I’d go out and buy in a heartbeat. (FYI, borrowed this from the library) I loved how Ogawa told her story without ever giving names to her characters – indeed, I barely paused to wonder at why we never know the names. I liked the way Ogawa used the roles of the characters to refer to them, the exploration of the relationships between each cast member. I’ve seen a lot of reviews that say that they found the relationship between the Professor and the son Root the most compelling but I will admit that it was really the relationship between the Housekeeper and the Professor (as the title says) that grabbed me by the heart – possibly because it’s so much more fragile and transient. With the Professor and the Son, our Professor shows instant like towards the son even though he doesn’t remember the kid, whereas every time the Professor and the Housekeeper meet, the meeting is much harder in comparison. The absence of that connection should have estranged their relationship with one another, but each time they meet the ties that get newly formed every couple hours is beautiful in that evanescent way, like the view of autumn leaves, rendered beautiful because we know they won’t last. This book even managed the impossible and made me enjoy the MATH in the story, and anyone who knows me IRL knows how much I can’t take math. (ugh graphs *shudders*) For the time I spent reading this novel, I was a math convert and saw the beauty in numbers and equations. (… I can’t believe those words just came out of my mouth. SEE HOW AMAZING THIS BOOK IS?! It actually got my stubborn self to CHANGE MY MIND about math – for a moment.) Beautiful, and the translation was fluid and lovely as well and basically what I’m trying to say is that you HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK NOW. So good, so shelf-worthy. I can’t recommend this book enough.

Eon: Dragoneye Reborn by Alison Goodman

… Holy shit, what was this crap? This book is reminded me of all my reasons why my gut reaction is to always shrink whenever I see white authors trying to write out “Asian fantasies” - 99% of the time all I get is faux chinoiserie orientalist CRAP. The world screamed FAKE FAKE FAKE and omg the crappy gender relations was so awfully handled. It was like Goodman has this uber shallow understanding of the Yin/Yang concept and then just shoved in all her “modern” gender role theories into the novel and it was soooooo awful, it made me want to scream. And, just for good measure, when I managed to get to the END of the novel, the author’s notes goes as follows: “The Empire of the Celestial Dragons is not a real country or culture, It is a fantasy world that was at first inspired by the history and cultures of China and Japan, but rapidly became a land of imagination with no claim to historical or cultural authenticity.” (italics and bold mine) WAY TO RUB SALT TO THE WOUND. Not only was the worldbuilding awfully handled, but now I *also* know that she didn’t even TRY for authenticity and thorough research. Always nice to know. [/sarcasm] And you know what’s the worst part (for me)?! Not only did I read this all the way to the end, but I actually want to read the last book of this damn series. Don’t you hate how you get all attached to some stupid minor character and have to read to the bitter bitter end just to see how it goes? (Sounds familiar? Why yes, I am doing the same thing for the Darkest Powers series. Clearly I have a masochistic streak) Because I’m all fond of Lady Dela, who is a trangendered woman (transgender in my fantasy whut?!) and I so badly want her and Ryko to end up together. Which is terrible because some part of me tells me they’re going to end up with a tragic rocks-falls-everyone-dies kind of ending, or either be sacrificed as the loyal sidekicks to Eona’s awesomeness. So when the last book comes out and they don’t end up together, if you see me lying around in a sobbing mess and hating on everything and being generally useless, you now know why I’m in such a state.

IMM: New Crayons Galore! 02/28/2010

2010-02-28T13:26:00.007-05:00

(In My Mailbox Meme from The Story Siren and New Crayons Meme from Color Online)

This week every single book I got were all POC-related, either by content or author or both. 8D And er, you’d think after blowing my money last week I would have learned to hold back a bit. But no! Too many shiny books out there to be bought! Namely the newly released Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and the fact that Michelle Sagara West was available for signings this week propelled me to buy the remaining two books of the Sun Sword series. I’m trying hard not to think about my dwindling funds in my bank account.

Books will be talked about from top to bottom, left to right, under the cut. 8D

The Year of the Horse - Justin Allen (signed)

Year of the Horse is a tale of Western America, with a difference. Yen Tzu-lu, a child of immigrants unwillingly pressed into service beside a gang of roughnecks, bent on stealing a gold mine from a shadowy villain deep in the western wilderness. Along for the ride are Jack Straw, a famed gunslinger and mystic, Henry Jesus, a former Union soldier and freed slave turned buffalo hunter and marksman, Chino, a Mexican outlaw from California whose very country was yanked out from under him, John MacLemore, a Confederate ex-patriot gone west, and his daughter, a true wild child of the western frontier. They must cross the continent: through desert, plains, canyon and forest; survive run-ins with Union soldiers, Indians both friendly and vicious, wild animals, deadly storms and suspicious settlers. If they make it, they'll be rich. If they don't, they'll almost surely be dead.

Won from a giveaway! (thanks Justin Allen and Melissa Walker!) ninefly are thinking of reading this book together, and I'm refraining from reading this until she gets her copy. Anyone is free to join us on our reading discussion. Just leave a comment saying you want in and I'll contact you. 8D

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms – N. K. Jemisin

Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle.

I bought one day before the release and have already read it. I demand that everyone go forth and read this book now. It’s that good. (Or, alternatively, pledge to buy the next two sequels for me. I’m down with that. Jks! =D)

Boys Without Names - Kashmira Sheth

For eleven-year-old Gopal and his family, life in their rural Indian village is over: We stay, we starve, his baba has warned. With the darkness of night as cover, they flee to the big city of Mumbai in hopes of finding work and a brighter future. Gopal is eager to help support his struggling family until school starts, so when a stranger approaches him with the promise of a factory job, he jumps at the offer.

But Gopal has been deceived. There is no factory, just a small, stuffy sweatshop where he and five other boys are forced to make beaded frames for no money and little food. The boys are forbidden to talk or even to call one another by their real names. In this atmosphere of distrust and isolation, locked in a rundown building in an unknown part of the city, Gopal despairs of ever seeing his family again.

But late one night, when Gopal decides to share kahanis, or stories, he realizes that storytelling might be the boys' key to holding on to their sense of self and their hope for any kind of future. If he can make them feel more like brothers than enemies, their lives will be more bearable in the shop—and they might even find a way to escape.

Thanks to Edi for sending this over! First time I ever got an uncorrected proof ARC. It’s Sheth so I’m pretty excited about how this novel will go. (Did anyone read Keeping Corner? I enjoyed that a lot)

Brown Girl In the Ring - Nalo Hopkinson (signed)

The rich and the privileged have fled the city, barricaded it behind roadblocks, and left it to crumble. The inner city has had to rediscover old ways-farming, barter, herb lore. But now the monied need a harvest of bodies, and so they prey upon the helpless of the streets. With nowhere to turn, a young woman must open herself to ancient truths, eternal powers, the tragic mystery surrounding her mother and grandmother.

She must bargain with gods, and give birth to new legends.

… Bakka Phoenix was selling signed copies. I have no self-control. I remember reading this back when I was young, and the title stands out for me as one of the few sci-fi novels I came across as a kid that didn’t leave a bad taste in my mouth. Wanna see how this feels upon a reread. (Also, Toronto in a SFF setting! w00t!)

River Shield and Sun Sword - Michelle West (signed)

[No summaries because spoilery for developments in the series]

I had to buy the two remaining copies and have a complete set of fully signed Sun Sword series. Yay for signed collection! 8D I got to meet Michelle West yesterday and she was lively and lovely and very nice. *giddy*

The Moon Under Her Feet – Derwin Mak

Father Mak Wycliffe is a Roman Catholic priest and space engineer. One the Moon, he meets Jessica, a teenage girl in a Catholic school uniform. Jessica loves to shop and hang out at nightclubs. But Jessica also claims to be Jesus Christ.

Will Jessica use her special powers to start a nuclear armageddon? Will Father Wycliffe, the Virgin Mary, scientists, and clergy be able to stop Jessica from carrying out her Father's will? While the mortals and Jessica's immaculate mother try to foil her, Jessica happily splurges on designer clothes, luxuries she never had in first century Judea.

The Moon Under Her Feet combines space opera, ghost story, and theology in a way never before seen in science fiction. From Derwin Mak, the author of "Transubstantiation," winner of the 2006 Prix Aurora Award, Canada's national science fiction award, for Best Short-Form in English.

Now, you may or may not look at the author’s name and go, “Hmm, where have I heard of him before?” I had that negliling feeling too when I saw the author’s name, but all that flew out the when I flipped through the chapters and died laughing inside. Jesus = Jewish girl in a Catholic Schoolgirl uniform?! REALLY?! Also it charmed my socks off for having an ethnically diverse cast in an SF setting. Not too often I see that. Going home, I looked his name up and realized that he was one of the editors of Dragon and the Stars, who’s cover I already bitched about, so I’ll save my breath. I’m seeing a trend in his unfortunate covers here (this cover? Is NOT easy on the eyes) but between this one and the other of whitewashing!fail, I’d take this cover any day. =D

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Giveaway Reminder

You can win either Exclusively Chloe by J. A. Yang or Mountain Girl River Girl in my 1st 50 followers giveaway contest. Opens internationally and ends March 4th.

Five Things - In Point Form

2010-02-26T18:06:00.008-05:00

1. Did you see the new Magic Under Glass cover going around?! It's kind of ridiculously gorgeous. I'd talk more about it, but there's already other posts showing this cover and Steph Su basically said anything I would have wanted to say about this cover and more, and I already previously gave my two cents on POC faces in fantasy covers, so I'll shut up and just show everyone this cover so that y'all can bask in its beauty. This is totally a cover in which I support further reposts. ~~I would not mind a new flurry of posts a la mockingspam if this was the featured cover.~~ (Don't hurt me, Hunger Games Fans! I love the trilogy and am very excited for sequel, honest! I mock with love! 8D)

2. I just finished reading The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and OMFG SO GOOD. How can a book be so amazingly epic? I'm trying to refrain from saying too much (YEINE + NAHADOTH FOREVAAAAAAAAAAAR) because I want to have a long fleshed-out review to give the book the love it deserves, but right now I'm gonna show off the cover, which also has a POC face! (So much better than the german cover of fail) Also, I'd sell my soul for the next two books in the trilogy. For all those who haven't put this on their reading list/haven't bought it yet/whatever WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE?! Go to the bookstore and get it now. I say this to right what is so wrongly missing from your reading experience. 8D Very thoughtful of my reading audience, I am.

3. SO MANY AWESOME POSTS BY AWESOME PEOPLE. Today, Book Smugglers has a lovely comprehensive post on Whitewashing Covers and Zetta Elliot has a Guest Post on Huffington Post about the UK Publishing Equalities Charter and it sounds promising and I am crossing my fingers that the publishing industry takes note and considers drawing up a similar charter. 8D Also, it's about a week old but N. K. Jemisin did another very interesting Describe Characters of Colour writeup, which I encourage everyone to check out.

4. Should I brave the snow to get my copies of Michelle West's Sun Sword series signed tomorrow? ... *looks at 10 cm of accumulated snow today and cries*

5. Anyone wanna give me some tips on how to further promote my giveaway contest? I already linked it to various sites such as Goodreads, Book Reader Times, The Black Cell, and Bookworming Through the 21st Century, and spam my twitter about it ever so often, but I was wondering if there are venues out there that I can link to that I'm currently unaware of.

Teaser Tuesday - 02/23/2010

2010-02-23T00:01:00.004-05:00

(Meme from Should Be Reading)

* Grab your current read
* Open to a random page
* Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
* BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
* Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Stars, clear and clean, a slowly spreading white fan across the ebony sky. The Festival of the Sun could seem, on a night like this, the custom of a foreign country, distant and unreal.

--pg. 565 of The Broken Crown by Michelle West

Chromatic Casting Meme: The Dark Divine - Kdrama style

2010-02-22T11:00:00.008-05:00

Hahaha, I had to do the chromatic casting for The Dark Divine (review here) because, seriously, the storyline makes this TOO EASY. ~~Also allows me to slack off on reviews while still feeling like I'm being productive.~~ K-drama style, for obvious reasons.

So Ji Sub as Daniel

Mostly inspired by that moment in the novel where he goes from shaggy look to clean cut sexiness. So Ji Sub can look good in anything. ♥

Shin Min Ah as Grace

Because she's so sweet-faced, and I can totally see her as the pastor's daughter. Also, the DIMPLES. ♥

Hyun Bin as Jude

I had to shove in Hyun Bin, my first S.Korean celeb crush in, obviously. I know he often plays the cold arrogant guy with the soft heart inside, but I'm also just as sure that he can pull the role in reverse. And: DIMPLES. ♥ (I'm telling you, the Divine family is totally a dimpled-faced family. It's the Truth)

Chun Ho Jin as Father Divine

Influenced by his role in Will it Snow For Christmas. He can totally pull off the pastor look.

Song Ok Sook as Mother Divine

I didn't watch much of Smile (didn't like it, sorry) but what I remember of her, I thought she would make a good fit too. =D

Rain as Pete

Oh, I am so mean for doing this, but I can totally see him as the swarmy boyfriend type. Fans, don't kill me please.

I didn't bother including the rest of the Divine family or April because I just didn't have a good enough grasp of their characters to warrant a thoughtful(ish) casting. But, of course, if you'd like to make suggestions, I'm all ears.

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Giveaway Reminder: I'm holding my 1st 50 followers giveaway contest. You can win either Exclusively Chloe or Mountain Girl River Girl. Contest is open internationally

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? 02/22/2010

2010-02-22T09:30:00.005-05:00

(meme from bookjourney)

Completed Last Week (Hahaha, how behind on reviews am I? *dies*)
A Million Shades of Grey by Cynthia Kadohata
The Dark Divine by Bree Despain
Love is the Higher Law by David Levithan
8th Grade Superzero by Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich
Freak Show by James St. James
The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han
Princess Academy by Shannon Hale
Deadtown by Nancy Holzner

Reading This Week
Ravenous by Sharon Ashwood
The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove by Lauren Kate
The Broken Crown by Michelle West
The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine

Giveaway Reminder

Do consider entering my 1st 50 followers giveaway contest. You can win either Exclusively Chloe OR Mountain Girl River Girl and I am opening this contest internationally =D

Other Posts of Note

Chromatic Casting Meme: The Dark Divine - Kdrama Style

In My Mailbox - 02/21/2010

2010-02-21T00:15:00.008-05:00

(meme from The Story Siren)

lawl I had to make 2 photos for this book haul. *dies ever so slowly* Lazy IMM w/o goodreads links because I'm lazy.

THE BOUGHT AND THE MAILED:

Top to bottom, left to right (all bought unless I say otherwise):
Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner
The Fall of Kings by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman
The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner
A Wish After Midnight by Zetta Elliot, signed (Thanks for sending it, Zetta! ♥)
All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka
Enchantress from the Stars by Sylvia Louise Engdahl
8th Grade Superzero by Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, signed (Thanks again Zetta!)
The Uncrowned King by Michelle West
The Shining Court by Michelle West
Sea of Sorrows by Michelle West

w00t, I finally got my hands on the rest of Ellen Kushner's works! For 13 bucks, no less. *_* And yay for it going to count for my LGBT challenge. *_* As you can see, Zetta was amazing and sent over a marvelous package of the brand new awesome version of AWAM with the pretty cover, and 8th Grade Superzero which I finished and will have a review up this week. *crosses fingers* Anddddddd got my hands on most of the 1st half of the West's Sun Sword series. I'm that much closer to getting the whole complete set. *_*

THE BORROWED AND THE SWAG

Top to Bottom, left to Right:
The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove by Lauren Kate
Freak Show by James St. James
Deadtown by Nancy Holzner - borrowed from ninefly
The Dark Divine Swag (bookmark + sticker) - thanks ninefly!
A Wish After Midnight Swag (5 bookplates!) - thanks Zetta!

Okay, so how much do I love the swag? I already read and loved and reviewed the Dark Divine, and while I may not have my own copy of TDD (which will be rectified soonnnnnn, very soon) but I haz bookmark and sticker to comfort me while I wait for paperback!! (trying to ease up on the hardcovers, for I am brooooke) Which is all mine mine mineeeeeeee, mwuahaha. And the AWAM bookplates!! *HUGS THEM* I was wondering if anyone'd be interested in winning the AWAM swag in a giveaway. I have four left over that I can totally give away, but one is for myself. 8D And, also, I might as well mentioned that I gobbled up and finished Freak Show already and OMG MY SAPPY SAPPY HEART, HOW FABULOUS IS THIS NOVEL?! I HAVE NO WORDS. REVIEW IS COMING, I SOLEMNLY SWEAR. (I'm so behind on reviews. It's disgusting)

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Pimping my first book giveaway. Join it! Please? =D

*wanders off to sleep*

Chinese Gals Front and Centre - My First 50+ Followers Giveaway! (Exclusively Chloe OR Mountain Girl River Girl)

2010-02-20T13:38:00.018-05:00

... I have no excuse for not posting up this giveaway sooner. I mean, I had the giveaway spreadsheet more or less done, and I picked out all the photos, I was just too damn lazy. BUT NO MORE. Without further ado, I'd like to present my First Giveaway in honour of having reached 50+ followers!!! *throws confetti everywhere*

As the title of my giveaway suggests, this is all about the Chinese Gals, FRONT AND CENTRE. In other words, the books I'm giving away both have very awesome Chinese girls as our beloved protagonists. The two books areeeeee *drumrolls*

1. Exclusively Chloe by J. A. Yang OR 2. Mountain Girl River Girl by Ting-xing Ye

Note: Both are lightly used. As I had MGRG longer, it does have two coffee spots on the sides of the book, but it didn't ruin the pages or anything. (I totally swore off coffee now so this won't happen with my other books. Really! I've been going strong for 2 months!!) No stains on EC though.

That's right, I'm only going to be giving away ONE of these books. Unless, of course, I get 100+ followers, then the prizes mayyyyyyy possibly be both. Possibly. *winks*

Also, *deep breath* This contest is opened INTERNATIONALLY!! (watches my wallet cry softly) And um, contest deadline is momentarily up till March 4th 11:59 PM EST, but I will probably extend it. Once I figure out how to change the date on the Google Doc form, anyhow. (Help? Please? *_*)

What must you have in order to participate?

1) Be a follower. I know, this sucks, but this is really a follower's giveaway at heart, Old followers shall be rewarded, et all.

2) Leave your google friend connect name and a email so that I can contact you

3) THAT'S IT.

Of course, there are the usual ways to get extra entries. tweeting, sidebar, blog post, add up entries... BUT I thought to add to my fun, I'm also going to have another way for y'all to get extra entries called Recognize Your Chinese Actresses?. Basically, Look at the 5 photos of chinese actresses before you. If you know any or all of them, name the # of the photo, then name of actress ~~(+1)~~(+2) and/or a show/movie she was casted in ~~(+1)~~(+2). Soooo, you can get up to ~~two~~FOUR points for each actress and if you know ALL FIVE, You can get up to TWENTY. yes, TWENTY points. =D I wish y'all the best of luck. ETA: I'M A DUMBASS AND CAN'T DO MATH. It's edited now, but basically you get two points for actress name and ANOTHER two points for actress movie/tv show. So it's FOUR points in total and THUS does actually add up to twenty. Sorry for the confusion. T______T

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

CONTEST NOW CLOSED

And that's it! If, however, you for some strange reason need convincing that either Exclusively Chloe or Mountain Girl River Girl is worth the read, click the cut link and I'll tell you why these books rock.
First up, in alphabetical order, my pimping of Exclusively Chloe. Why do you want to read this, you say? Because this is the sweetest, funniest adoptee story EVAR. Seriously, when was the last time you read a fluffy adoptee story? What's that? NEVER?! *le gasp* Obviously you ought to rectify this by READING EXCLUSIVELY CHLOE NOW. Chloe is so sweet and relatable and her adventures are adorable. Also we all need more glamourous Asian girls in our lives. AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, THE FAKE DAD. OMG THE FAKE DAD, SO AWESOME. He was all blackmailed into doing his job and then the NEXT THING YOU KNOW he's all, "Hi Chloe do you want to eat my baked cookies?" and "Chloe dear, how's school? Meet any cute boys?" and taking his dad role way too seriously and it's ADORABLE AND I LOVE IT. ADORABLE ADORABLE ADORABLE. *squees*

But then, you may go, Yuan! I don't want your silly adorably sparkly pink story stuff. I am all about srs bzn here. Give me down-to-earth, meaningful relationships with a touch of hearbreak!

To which I say, well then, I also have the perfect book for you! It's name is Mountain Girl River Girl and I hope you can handle the combination of two lovely ladies being awesome. Whereas our Exclusively Chloe is about a Chinese girl in the US, our ladies here are in contemporary Mainland China, trying to make their way on their own. Our girls have the loveliest friendship ever, and, get this, they talk to each other about things totally unrelated to boys!!! Do my eyes deceive me? Does this YA book pass the bedchel test?! Stare at this book and BELIEVE.

Also, their friendship is kinda just really awesome on their own. Shui-lian is our firecracker and Pan-pan is more quiet and sensible (in comparison at any rate). Allow me to illustrate.

Nice Old Man: Hello ladies, would you be interested -
Shui-Lian: OMG CREEPER, STAY AWAY GET OUT OF HERE I WON'T FALL FOR YOUR PLOYS
Pan-pan: ... Shui-lian, calm down. It's broad daylight and he's old, he can't get to us.
Shui-Lian: NEVER TRUST THE OPPOSITE SEX. THEY'RE OUT TO KILL US ALL. KILL US ALLLLLLLLL.
NOM: Er, actually, I am a hired job recruiter for the factory and am handing out flyers.
Pan-pan: Why don't we just hear the guy out before judging?
Shui-Lian: ... Fine. But I don't have to like it.

They're a lot of fun, and I love how Ye deals with the good and bad stuff Shui-Lian and Pan-pan go through together. You just can't help but root for them. =D

Hopefully either one of my pimpage sold the books to the ~~unbelievers~~ previously unconvinced! =D

Review: Love is the Higher Law by David Levithan

2010-02-20T11:40:00.004-05:00

Title: Love is the Higher Law
Author(s): David Levithan
Genre: YA contemporary
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf Books

The Summary: First there is a Before, and then there is an After. . . .

The lives of three teens—Claire, Jasper, and Peter—are altered forever on September 11, 2001. Claire, a high school junior, has to get to her younger brother in his classroom. Jasper, a college sophomore from Brooklyn, wakes to his parents’ frantic calls from Korea, wondering if he’s okay. Peter, a classmate of Claire’s, has to make his way back to school as everything happens around him.

Here are three teens whose intertwining lives are reshaped by this catastrophic event. As each gets to know the other, their moments become wound around each other’s in a way that leads to new understandings, new friendships, and new levels of awareness for the world around them and the people close by.

David Levithan has written a novel of loss and grief, but also one of hope and redemption as his characters slowly learn to move forward in their lives, despite being changed forever.

The Review: After finishing this book, the first thing I was convinced of was that I was a fool for not having tried any of David Levithan's work in the past. I am in love with his writing, I love how he can fluidly change writing styles for different characters and yet still has the same signature Levithan writing underneath it all. Beautiful, lovely prose. I can't praise it enough.

That being said, I thought the linking between characters was a bit flawed, specifically in how Claire fit into the equation. The interactions between Jasper and Peter really came to life, but their interactions with Claire doesn't work half as well. I wanted to like Claire, I really did, but I think her role as a sort of catalyst between Jasper and Peter did her no favours. Levithan kinda assigned her the role of being the one who embodies the hope of post 9/11 and the goodness of humanity, and she's often portrayed as the observer rather than the participant of events. (i.e. the party) It's not that I think she never went beyond her symbolic role as observer and human goodness, but we just didn't see enough of her to get a sense of her personality beyond her designated role. I mean, I know she had a life outside of Jasper and Peter but it was never really shown to us readers. I just wish there was more variety in the shown Claire interactions. Maybe another POV from another character's perspective like Claire's brother or Marisol? I felt like Claire was one of those character sketches that had potential but just didn't go anywhere.

The Peter and Jasper characterization went much better, especially on Jasper's part. I loved Jasper's voice and personality, and how sardonic he was. Also, it's kinda sad, but this is one of the rare times I actually came across a snarky Asian protagonist in the english-written novels I read, so I doubly appreciate it. I'm not too sure how I feel about the portrayal of his parents though, the whole aloof father and overbearing mother thing. It was tipping on the verge of over the top stereotyping, but I decided that this didn't bother me much, and to keep in mind that this was how Jasper viewed his parents, and doesn't necessarily mean the parents are supposed to embody that stereotype themselves.

I liked Peter as well. What a music junkie he was. ♥ And as I mentioned before, the chemistry between Peter and Jasper was so sweet and awkward and I loved it. I thought this love worked out well with the title, a kind of connection formed in spite of the horror and sadness of the events of 9/11. I loved seeing Jasper from Peter's eyes and vice versa, something that didn't shine in at all the same way when we see Jasper or Peter's view of Claire.

The pace of the novel was nice and fluid, not so much in the traditional novel format way but more of the little short stories that build up and intertwine. I only wish that Claire's story was integrated better into this novel. And it brought back the day of 9/11 vividly in my mind, so real was the immediate setting, from the description of the towers and the very real reactions of the people in the city. I appreciated the balance of humour and solemnity and I can't wait to read more of Levithan's works.

The Verdict: A lovely read. While I wish we got more out of Claire, I'm convinced by the end of this novel that Levithan is a master storyteller, with exquisite writing and a lovely ability to switch between humour and sadness flawlessly. The romance between Jasper and Peter was one of the best mix of awkward and sweet love stories I've come across in a long while, and I clearly need to get my hands on more of Levithan's works.

Rating: 3.5
Enjoyment:: 95%

Title and Cover Discussion: LAWL I know that the title fits, but I keep messing up this title. I'm not sure why, but my brain keeps telling me that this book is called "Love is the Higher Order" instead of Law. I'm not sure whyyyyy I think this way, but there you go. And the cover tells you exactly the content of the novel (9/11) but I'll also confess here that the cover didn't connect with me. I'm rarely moved by night city skylines, I'll admit. Soooooo as I have a feeling my personal biases are going to influence the ratings too much to be of any worth to anyone, I'm going to chicken out of the title/cover ratings. Do feel free to tell me what you think of the cover and title though. =D (Surely I'm not the only one who constantly messes up this title?)

Note: Counts for POC reading challenge and GLBT reading challenge