Graphic Novels of Note: I Kill Giants

I Kill Giants, written by Joe Kelly and drawn by JM Ken Niimura, tells the story of Barbara, a fifth-grader who wears rabbit ears and carries a heart-shaped purse named Coveleski. She lives with her brother and an older sister who takes care of them both. And she kills giants.

Barbara doesn’t have many friends, and the school psychologist takes a special interest in her. But not just because of her avowed giant killing. Something has happened to Barbara, something so upsetting that she refuses to talk about it.

Rather than drawing excitement from the question of whether Barbara’s giants are real, the true tension comes from the slow revelation of the devastating real-life tragedy that Barbara is escaping by subsuming herself in fantasy. And the reader doesn’t get to find out what it is until Barbara is ready to admit it to herself.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Part of the reason I didn’t date in high school is that I wanted the kind of 17-year-old boy who appears in YA books: sensitive, kind, and desiring of a committed adult relationship. But even teenage me knew the truth: no 17-year-old boy is ready for an adult relationship. (Or 17-year-old girl, for that matter. I certainly wouldn’t have known what to actually do with one if I came across it at that age.) However, Augustus Waters, the love interest in JohnGreen’s The Fault in Our Stars, is ready for that kind of love because he has to be. He’s a 17 year old with cancer; if not now, there may be no when.

The End of the Chapter: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

The opening lines of a novel establish tone, mood, voice, and a whole mess of other things, as well as being responsible for pulling the reader into the story. The closing lines of a novel have the job of summing up the story, providing closure, and making readers feel a simultaneous joy at the ending and sorrow that their reading experience is over. But what pulls the reader through their journey from the excitement of a beginning to the bitter sweetness of an ending?

As each chapter ends, the desire to put the book down in order to go to the bathroom, go to sleep, or get going to work may come over the reader. Smart authors avoid this by making the ends of their chapters so fantastic that the reader has no choice but to continue on their literary journey, uninterrupted. Some do this with thrilling cliffhangers, others with painful emotional reveals. Regardless of the technique, the end of the chapter has a certain feel to it, a teasing look that says, “Sure, this part of the story’s over. But don’t you want to find out what happens next?

The Disenchantments by Nina LaCour

I have been listening to Heart nonstop for the past two weeks, and it is all thanks to The Disenchantments by Nina LaCour. I have always liked Heart, but I have been on a serious love binge, which has helped introduce me to some songs I never knew I loved and reintroduce me to songs I had forgotten I loved. But The Disenchantments is about much more than Heart (even though it does feature a loving tribute in the form of a road trip sing-along that gives this one and this one a run for their money). The Disenchantments is about friends, music, and finally graduating high school only to realize just how terrifying the freedom you longed for actually is.

Dreamland Social Club by Tara Altebrando

 True story: my senior year of high school, I did a presentation about the history of Coney Island. This presentation began with my friend and I singing a commercial jingle for the now demolished Astroland amusement park at Coney Island:

Remember Coney Island, and how it used to be

now it’s everything it ever was AND MORE!

we’re gonna rock, ROCK

we’re gonna roll, ROLL

we’re gonna bop, BOP

and lose control

(That was where we stopped because we couldn't remember the rest.)

Among Others Reading List: Zelazny, McCaffrey, and Heinlein

After reading AmongOthers by Jo Walton, I was inspired by Mor’s prodigious reading list to dig into some classic Sci-Fi and Fantasy. First on the docket: Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny, Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey, and Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. I enjoyed these books, but boy oh boy did reading them make me glad that I never had to be a woman in the 60s and 70s.

The Annas

My library books aligned recently in such a way that I read Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake, immediately followed by Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins.  I have created a table that compares and contrasts the two Annas.

Impossible

I have had Scarborough Fair, by Simon and Garfunkel, stuck in my head ever since I finished Impossible by Nancy Werlin.  But thanks to Werlin, the song is no longer the benign pretty ballad I once thought it was; now it is deliciously chilling.  Werlin’s own realization about the creepy nature of the song—the man asking to the woman to complete impossible tasks in order to prove her love—inspired her to write Impossible.

Impossible focuses on the silent victim of Scarborough Fair: the woman who must somehow make a shirt without seam or needle work.  But this is a different version of the song than the one popularized by Simon and Garfunkel.  In Werlin’s variation, rather than the tasks winning the narrator’s love, the tasks are necessary if the woman wants to escape from being trapped as a true love of the narrator.  Instead of the refrain “Then she’ll be a true love of mine,” Werlin’s narrator says “Else she’ll be a true love of mine.”

Where Oh Where Can My Baby Be?*

I’ve been a little skittish around cars for the past few days. This is not a surprise, considering I’ve been immersed in If I Stay by Gayle Forman and Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver. Both books feature main characters who hover between life and death after a car crash. (Also, both covers have giant lying-down girl heads.)

Tender Morsels

If forced to choose whether a novel I read would have an excellent story or be excellently written, I would choose story every time. Luckily, the YA novels I have been reading lately—Fly on the Wall by E. Lockhart, The Order of Odd Fish by James Kennedy, and now Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan—have made that choice unnecessary. Margo Lanagan’s words seem to lift up from the page and coalesce into a picture around the reader’s head. In Tender Morsels, Lanagan’s lyrical writing brings to life a character who has been so misused by the real world that she prefers to live in a facsimile where everything is safe but no one is real apart from herself and her daughters.

The Order of Odd Fish

China Mieville, author of books such as Perdido Street Station and The City and The City, thinks that authors of fantastical fiction “don’t listen to [their] own filters.” In other words, they imagine something outlandish and ignore the voice that says that their idea is silly or impossible. James Kennedy, author of the delightful and moving novel The Order of the Odd Fish, proves that he has an abundance of this talent. His novel is populated with stylish talking cockroaches, octopi that can be ridden like horses, and an order of knights whose mission is to be wrong in interesting ways. And that’s only a brief sampling.