[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHApCwLkVU0&[/youtube]
I am very excited for this debut novel from Tahereh Mafi. :D
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Scottish Writer of Fantasy & Sci-Fi
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHApCwLkVU0&[/youtube]
I am very excited for this debut novel from Tahereh Mafi. :D
Took me a while, but I finally got around to reading John Green’s “Looking For Alaska”. This is a modern classic in Young Adult books, and it broke a lot of barriers regarding sex, drugs and profanity in teen fiction.
Before. Miles “Pudge” Halter is done with his safe life at home. His whole life has been one big non-event, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave “the Great Perhaps” even more (François Rabelais, poet). He heads off to the sometimes crazy and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young. She is an event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart. Then. . . .
After. Nothing is ever the same.
Author John Green is brilliant, and this story is tightly written – the boarding school setting is detailed and quirky, the teens all act realistically and each character is memorable and loveable, and the plot moves at a good pace with short chapters that focus on key moments and end as soon as that moment is done. It’s a short and fast story, with no words wasted.
What really made me love this story, though, is that is focuses on what’s really important.
A lot of stories that involve suicide focus on the grief, the emotional collapse and crumbling relationships that follows it. These are all good things to focus on, but they’re not the main issue.
Why?
That’s the main issue, the big problem, the all-consuming thought that follows suicide. Because you never know all the answers, all their thoughts, the reasons and the events that made it happen. You are left wishing you could see their last few moments, know their thoughts. You’re left piecing together the reasons because they never line up, there’s always missing moments, facts, questions. There’s always a why.
John Green’s “Looking for Alaska” captures this perfectly.
Seventeen-year-old Lennie Walker spends her time tucked safely and happily in the shadow of her fiery older sister, Bailey. But when Bailey dies abruptly, Lennie is catapulted to centre stage of her own life – and, despite her nonexistent history with boys, suddenly finds herself struggling to balance two. Toby was Bailey’s boyfriend; his grief mirrors Lennie’s own. Joe is the new boy in town, with a nearly magical grin. One boy takes Lennie out of her sorrow, the other comforts her in it. But the two can’t collide without Lennie’s world exploding…
This is one of those books that didn’t quite “click” with me.
The narrative and characterisation is flawless -Lennie and her sister are both loveable bookworms, and the Lennie’s ‘voice’ is light-hearted and absolutely adorable. Every character is someone you’d like to meet, from Lennie’s gardener-extraordinaire Gran and pothead lothario Uncle Big, to Lennie’s best friend Sarah and Joe, the constantly-grinning new boy in her music class.
But the plot just didn’t work for me. Lennie’s relationship with Toby didn’t feel romantic. As much as I wanted to believe it was grief behind Lennie’s relationship with her dead sister’s ex, a lot of her reasoning behind it was that she felt ‘drawn to him’.
Grief can make you irrational, and it makes you want to be around people who understand what you’re going through. But after this has happened a few times it’s more of a matter of Lennie being unable to keep her lust in check, and my sympathy wore off. The story still managed to be amusing and upsetting in turns, but I felt ‘disconnected’ to Lennie and spent most of the story waiting for her to do the sane thing and choose Joe.
The edition I had was gorgeous – it was advertised as a hardcover on Amazon, but it was a softcover with a textured cover and lovely full-colour images of Lennie’s poems throughout. (Ringo the Cat has some pictures of this edition.) I haven’t seen as unique and detailed an edition of a book before, so if you decide to pick this up, that’s the version to buy.
Last month I fell in love with the sparse, disconnected prose and honesty of “If I Stay”. The sequel, “Where She Went”, is a different creature entirely.
Told from the brutally honest point of view of Adam, who was Mia’s high-school boyfriend in “If I Stay”, it’s the bitter, angry counterpart to Mia’s calm detachment.
Three years after Mia’s accident, Adam’s channeled his angst into a multi-million selling album. He’s a hit rockstar with a gorgeous movie star girlfriend, and paparazzi follow him everywhere.
He’s also very clearly unwell – he’s fighting with everyone and pushing his band away, lashing out at reporters, on medication for panic attacks, obsessing over Mia, and hating every moment of his rich-and-famous life.
On a one-night stop in New York before he embarks on a dreaded European tour, Adam finds out that cellist Mia, now a rising star in the classical music scene, is playing in the city. She spots him at her concert, and they end up face-to-face for the first time in free years.
Is one evening in New York enough time to repair all the damage they’ve been through?
This is a very different story from “If I Stay” – it’s a much more self-constrained story about the two characters. I adored it – just like in “If I Stay”, every little interaction is brimming with character revealing-details. Adam’s narrative is a perfect example of a guy with issues, and it never pulls any punches. The dialogue is brilliant, but for the opposite reason – while Adam’s narrative is wordy and honest, the spoken words that follow are clipped and false. A perfect example of the contrast between what we think and what we say.
Recommended for fans of: “Before I Fall” by Lauren Oliver, “If I Stay”
A copy of this book was provided for review by the lovely people at Random House.
YA Highway asked, for their regular Road Trip Wednesday feature, what books you were obsessed with when you were a kid.
For me, three series stand out. Two of them, notably, were the books that helped me take that step from children’s fiction to adult fiction – up until then I’d been sticking dutifully to the appropriate section of the library.
Goosebumps! I sped through every one of these horror novels when I was young, and watched the TV Show every chance I could. My favourite involved a colourless world and a girl’sl lipstick tube, I think it was The Haunted School.
Harry Potter! I caught onto this series on my best friend’s recommendation, just before it became a huge thing in school. After doing a parade for the Girls Brigade, I think it was, I got to pick up ‘The Prisoner of Azkaban‘ from the supermarket. I remember reading the jacket copy and thinking ‘it’s about serial killers is this really a children’s book SERIAL KILLERS should I buy it IT LOOKS SO DARK’. After I convinced myself to buy and read it it, and thought it was the most amazing thing ever, especially the hippogriff and the time travel.
It’s still my favourite book out of the seven, and I was gutted when the Harry/Hermione relationship didn’t work out. Romantic hippogriff flights! It was meant to be.
Discworld! Again thanks to my best friend’s savvy recommendations, I picked up my first Discworld book, The Truth, out of the local W.H.Smith and felt a little guilty every time Sir Terry mentioned unusually shaped vegetables, because this was A Book For Adults and they were making Jokes For Adults.
Other books I loved: Malorie Blackman novels (especially Hackers, and Pig-Heart Boy), The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, anything by Eoin Colfer (especially The Wish List and the Artemis Fowl series), The Saga of Darren Shan, and Garth Nix’s Abhorsen trilogy.
What books did you love when you were young? Drop me a comment, or join in the blog road trip yourself. =)
I’d seen the work of Scottish artist Vincent Deighan, penname Frank Quitely, before in the Sandman comic “Endless Nights”, and I’d enjoyed legendary comic writer Grant Morrison’s work in “Arkham Asylum”.
So when I heard about their miniseries “We3”, a short story about three ‘animal weapons’ that escape captivity, I went straight out and bought it. Robot animals!
If you’re an animal lover, We3 is heartbreakingly powerful. It’s also gorgeous – hyper-violent and bloody, yes, but the art is colourful and the detail in the mech (robot) designs is amazing. It’s often described as a ‘Western Manga’ style, but any influence is slight – the art is still recognisable as comic-styled and the realism of the animals really helps to carry the story.
The panel layouts are fantastic – an opening scene is told through rows of tiny squares representing CCTV stills, panels twist and bend to fit the motion of the action, and huge graphic scenes are overlaid with smaller panels showing the details of the fight.
The 3 animal main characters – a rabbit, cat and dog all modified to become powerful animal weapons – speak very little, but still manage to be sympathetic and realistic characters. They act like you would expect your pets to act, searching for shelter and safety, which makes the moments when they’re forced to fight or injured in battle all the more difficult to see.
It’s a short read – almost too short, as I’d have loved a little more time with the characters – but it definitely makes good use of every available page.
[easyreview cat1title=”Overall” cat1detail=”A perfect example of standalone comic storytelling, with stunning art, solid writing and a fresh sense of experimentation with panel layout.” cat1rating=”5″ overall=false]