When you read a Gaiman novel, it invariably leaves you wondering how such lightly played words can create plots with such weight. Especially in his boWhen you read a Gaiman novel, it invariably leaves you wondering how such lightly played words can create plots with such weight. Especially in his books targeted at the juvenile set -- his Coraline was a terrifying book, rendered so effortlessly that I was perpetually struck with how eerie it was that a light and flaky pastry like that could deliver such a dense and dark horror.
The Graveyard Book goes one level more complex. It is, on its surface, a light narrative about a young boy abandoned in a cemetery by the vilest of circumstances. The ghostly inhabitants of the cemetery bring such ebullience to the situation that one is genuinely glad Bod (the boy's eventual nickname) has been made "safe" in the dark corners of a graveyard.
Just as in Kipling's Jungle Book, the set of tales that inspired this collection, peril awaits Bod at every turn. Between witches and other ghouls that would harm the young lad, we are pleasantly surprised that Bod survives again and again.
Gaiman's genius certainly lies in his unassuming narrative style; the utterly believable dialogue (re-read that: how can dialogue between the living and the dead be so natural? genius); and the compelling characters, each of which elicits a gentle compassion from the reader. But he is at his grandest when crafting the fantastical rules and procedures by which mythical, or in this case, supernatural, beings must behave. The rules of the Graveyard and its inhabitants create a sense of order in what might otherwise be an afterlife filled with randomness and contradiction.
Most powerful in this particular book is Gaiman's ability to drive to a meaningful conclusion. All the light stories tossed into the first two-thirds of the novel like so many minor anecdotes prove to culminate in a climax of sinister proportions. People we love will die (I'm noticing that this is an issue for me; you will, too, if you read my other reviews); others will face great peril in ways that are not obvious to us at first but perfectly sound upon later inspection. And the tiny mystery that initiates Bod's graveyard life expands to become a struggle of millennial proportions.
Hats off to Gaiman for this delightfully grave tome....more
Did you like the Hunger Games but feel let down by Mockingjay? Did you wish it ended differently? Even though I loved it, I longUpdate: November 2010.
Did you like the Hunger Games but feel let down by Mockingjay? Did you wish it ended differently? Even though I loved it, I longed for an ending that put Katniss back at the center of the story and made her growth a powerful symbol for a Panem about to take flight. So instead of complaining, I wrote that ending: . Give it a read and see what you think, I'd love to hear whether this is an ending that works for you.
**Original Review begins here**
Mockingjay, the concluding book in the Hunger Games trilogy, is a complete mess. And I mean that in the best possible way. Let me explain.
Any book that intends to complete a series suffers from an immediate disadvantage: The reader knows it has to tie up all the loose ends, resolve all the character issues, and provide a satisfying climax. This is true for television shows, too, as we saw earlier this year in the series finale of Lost: there is no satisfying way to end a good story because good stories, like life, offer too many roads to peer down to sufficiently explore them all.
As a result, writers generally choose one of two paths: 1) Tie it all up with a nice bow (aka, a Hollywood Ending), or 2) Leave it a mess.
Suzanne Collins has left the world of Katniss Everdeen a complete mess. Those of you who have already finished it (NO SPOILERS HERE) might disagree: after all, the major issues appear to be resolved, right? Wrong. While it is certainly true that some specific plot points are given closure (and certain important decisions such as: which boy to love? are answered), the truth is that Hunger Games was about much more than just which boy the girl will choose.
Don't get me wrong, I loved the author's handling of the two-men-are-not-enough theme, the same one that Stephenie Meyer seems obsessed with (see my reviews of the Twilight Saga to see how I've dealt with that in the past). It fueled Katniss's character in ways that were meaningful to her and to us. But that theme was not the purpose of the trilogy.
Instead, the Hunger Games is primarily a book about war and human tragedy. About what we will do to each other in the name of preventing the same thing from being done either to ourselves or someone we love. This particularly painful decision is achingly rendered again and again across all three of these books and Katniss is most believable when she is torn between harming people to achieve important objectives and allowing herself to be damaged in order to spare others. This concluding book does not shrink from the same dilemma, this time painting the decision to kill or be killed in starker, more culpable colors.
This is made even more gripping because one of Collins's strongest points as a writer is that from Book 1, she has not been afraid to kill characters that we are supposed to love and identify with. And this climactic book takes this tendency to its logical extreme. You can never rest easy in the knowledge that Collins "wouldn't dare go there." She dares. All the while we see the death and devastation, the killing and the mourning, through the eyes of Katniss Everdeen: compassionate, conflicted, killer.
I won't pretend that the book is perfectly constructed. My four-star rating despite my obvious admiration for the book is due to this. Just like her principal character, the author is at her best when thrust in the middle of life-threatening action that requires her naive intelligence and compassionate outrage to find their full expression. But there are significant sections between action moments that move slowly, that seem disjointed from the pacing of the book. Most of this I ascribe to Collins trying to set the stage for an unexpected -- albeit satisfying -- murderous climax.
But even in the midst of the stop and go action, I found myself admiring Collins for not hiding us from the messiness: the action can't flow perfectly, there can be no action-hero sequence in which everything just comes together. In fact, Katniss is a hero that is not particularly heroic.
Because war is hell. And hell is, by definition, messy. So the plot is messy, as is Katniss's mental state throughout the book, as is the conclusion I had to read twice to ensure I understood it and could agree that it had to end that way.
Without giving it away, the end of Mockingjay says this: Humans have always killed each other and will likely always kill each other. But we find the strength to love and the naivete to create life only in each other's forgiving arms, regardless of the damage that has been done to us. Or, in the case of Katniss, the damage we have done to others.
The Strain Is a Disappointment: Or, 4 Reasons Why Twilight Is a Better Book than The Strain
I confess that I am a newcomer to vampire fiction. It was tThe Strain Is a Disappointment: Or, 4 Reasons Why Twilight Is a Better Book than The Strain
I confess that I am a newcomer to vampire fiction. It was the buzz surrounding Meyer's Twilight that dragged me into the genre and I found myself pleasantly piqued to see what else it had to offer. You can imagine, then, my immense pleasure at discovering Guillermo Del Toro's about why we hunger for monster fiction generally and vampire fiction specifically. The essay suggested deep cultural needs that are best expressed in the fantastic persona of the vampire. I finished the essay, posted a link to it to my Facebook page, and promptly bought the Sony Reader edition.
Then I had the misfortune of reading the book. It is safe to label the work as beyond cliche, devoid of any cultural impact, and lacking any real characters. In fact, the book is so, so...so just bad that I came away with a new appreciation for Stephenie Meyer's poorly written Twilight saga. Let me elaborate in 4 points which show that The Strain...
1 - Makes women into empty cliches. Lessee, you have the wonderful ex-wife who only divorced her man because he loved his job so much. You have the beautiful assistant into whose arms the principal character fell before the book even started but whom he can't love. That's it. These are the only two women in the book who we are supposed to develop any feelings for. And we can't, because they never say anything real women would say. In contrast, Twilight's women are painfully true to type, with all the self-consciousness and personal insecurity that real women face -- too much so for my tastes, but at least they had real, if exaggerated, thoughts.
2 - Is action-packed to a fault. One of my biggest gripes about Meyer's writing is that she always shied away from a fight, especially in what was supposed to be a climactic last book (see my review on this point here). But where Meyer fails, Del Toro overdelivers, putting such a premium on action that decapitating vampires becomes tiresome by the end. I skipped several pages in the final battle scene because I grew so weary of the predictable action and -- like Seinfeld's Elaine -- just "wanted it to end."
3 - Depends on plot points that are purely driven by the author's needs, not those of the characters. I won't spoil the plot -- or what there is of it -- by providing evidence here, but suffice it to say that in four days, enough wild coincidences occur to make winning the megamillion lottery seem commonplace in contrast. And characters make some of the dumbest decisions you can imagine, simply to deliver themselves deeper into the increasingly unbelievable plot.
4 - Requires the willing suspension of not only disbelief, but of most brain cells. I know it's supposed to be a vampire novel (or zombie novel, depending on who you want to listen to) but I still want it to feel real. I don't want one vampire to be able to strike lightning fast with superhuman strength at six feet away while another one can seemingly be held at bay with a mere elbow under the chin. I don't want a centuries-old Master vampire to have such an unwarranted personal vendetta against a mere human. For that matter, I don't want Master vampires to stop and explain themselves to their prey. Who does that? No Master vampire I have ever known, that's for sure.
Yes, Stephenie, there really is a Santa Claus, and he has just brought you a gift called The Strain, a vampire novel so unbelievable and uninteresting that it elevates your flawed but sincere saga to the level of darn good book.
Reviewer update Aug 2009: I have demoted the book from 5 to 4 stars. My confession/explanation is at the end of the original, unedited review. ___
Yes, Reviewer update Aug 2009: I have demoted the book from 5 to 4 stars. My confession/explanation is at the end of the original, unedited review. ___
Yes, I gave it 5-stars. This is partly because I was so pleased by it compared to the last two books in the series that I overreacted. But I also approve of her approach to the book and have rated it so highly in order to counteract those reviewers out there who hated it because they felt Bella was a bad example to young girls.
***THESE TWO PARAGRAPHS SPOIL THINGS THAT HAPPEN EARLY IN THE BOOK*** I have a bone to pick with these people. Read some of the reviews on Amazon or GoodReads and you will find a certain type of person who feels that Bella's character fails as a role model for young women today. Why? Because she, gasp, got married and had a child at a young age.
Oh, my, what is the world coming to when young people choose eternal love and devotion! (Oh that more young women could be more like the implausibly articulate yet utterly selfish lead in the movie Juno!) In my favorite example, one reviewer on Amazon claimed it wasn't credible that a girl as young as Bella would feel joy at sensing a baby growing inside her. "I'm 28 and if I felt something moving in me, I would freak," she said, "I can't believe a 19-year old would be happy about it." ***END OF SPOILAGE***
Sadness ensues. Women and men from every culture in every era of history have found a tremendous and peculiar satisfaction in their children. It doesn't matter where you believe this instinct came from, it's real and it manifests millions of times over. Should we be so surprised that Stephenie Meyer would be one of the billions who believe this love to be real? Read the author's bio and it becomes clear: She was married at 21 before she finished college and had three children while still in her 20s. But one can hardly call her a "failure" for choosing family first. By all standards she's fabulously successful and wealthy. Plus, she has a college degree (one of the big beefs some people had with Bella's choice to postpone college). Are we really surprised that Stephenie would see the world through rose-colored, happiness-prone glasses when her own life is exactly that, deliriously happy?
Social polemics aside for a moment. The one thing this book lacked was a satisfying climactic, apocalyptic battle royale between the forces of vampire good and vampire evil. I know this book was intended to cap off a romance series, not The Lord of the Rings but there's a reason books of high fantasy all end in cataclysmic bloodshed. It takes a conflict of such dramatic proportions to drive the point of a story deep into our minds. And the point of this story, if you weren't too focused on your own family planning to notice it, was worthy of such dramatic punctuation.
The real point of this book is that we can and should choose love. That despite our personal weaknesses and faults -- our immature attempts at love and our petty jealousies -- we can make important, permanent decisions that will tie us to other people, making their lives and our lives better in the process. The battle I propose -- one I hope sees the light of day in a future novel -- would seal Bella's decisions and the decisions of her family and loved ones in a way that would render their commitments real. Their marital love, their parental love, their familial love, and the love of fellowship with others who share their principles.
Some would have to die to preserve the love they have made immortal. Others would have to kill to do the same. Nothing is more final, especially for immortals. But they would do so to symbolize the triumph of their love over the petty dynasty of the Volturi and thus establish a global movement of vampires that respect human life and restrain their selfish hungers in deference to the greater good. Something that wise humans do every day.
Such a symbolic battle would take this series to the next level. But even without it, this book is the best evidence that Meyer wasn't really writing a sloppy romance saga for misty-eyed girls, but was instead telling a story about the eternal power of love and self-denial.
___ Update from Aug 2009 I have had some fabulous comments to my review (please read them, most are very intelligent). I have been properly chided by many of these reviews for overreacting to the "Bella is a bad role model" flack and failing to acknowledge the principal flaw of this book. Amy said it best below: Meyer shortchanged us by not forcing Bella to face any hard choices. Bella got everything she wanted, including a (strange) relationship with Jacob. Nobody she loved got hurt -- which was the problem I did mention above -- and she never had to disappoint anyone.
Given that a year has passed, I have some distance on all the whining that went on about Bella not being a protofeminist. As a result, I should own up to the fact that this fourth book fails to deliver not only the climax I hoped for, but the real character crisis and development that a saga of this length should strive for. Or that we all should strive for in our own lives, to go all metaphysical on you for a moment. So I have demoted the book from 5 stars to 4 and begun to ruminate on the topic of why Meyer -- a woman possessed of such clear imagination -- was unwilling or unable to make Bella's life hard. Here's what I have come up with, for what it's worth:
1 - Meyer's own life is pretty darn pleasant. Let's be honest, she has everything most people think they want. All of us who struggle to write books that nobody reads desperately wish for her success (a fact that generates more than few snippy comments on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, I might suggest). She has a whole community of women around her who adore her and come to all-night parties when she debuts a book or movie, just to be near her. In the end, she might make Bella after her own image because she doesn't know that life ultimately requires pain.
2 - Meyer is a Mormon. For those not acquainted with the faith, Mormonism is a faith that believes everything will ultimately be okay. If not in this life, then in the next. In fact, the whole vampire immortality gig is just a metaphor for the Mormon idea of the afterlife: You get to be with the ones you love forever, without pain. In that way, Bella is a perfect reflection of the ideal Mormon eternity: God forgives us for our idiocy, acknowledges our flawed attempts at love by magnifying them and making them eternal. Though this is only one side of Mormonism -- it's also a faith with sorrowful history of persecution. Mormons certainly suffer plenty in this life just like everyone else, so this explanation is only true to the extent that Meyer has willingly isolated Mormonism's view of the end state of humanity.
3 - Twilight is just escapist fantasy. This is not only the most obvious but probably the strongest of my three explanations. We're so accustomed to watching James Bond run through the street with machine guns trained on him that never hit their mark that we no longer point out that Bond is completely implausible and ultimately unsatisfying as a character. But we're not used to reading fiction in which women get everything they want. (At least, I'm not.) So we get tied up in knots about the lack of deeper meaning and pathos when in reality, Meyer never promised us a garden of sorrow and personal growth.
So even though I have to demote the book, I still feel like the saga was worth reading; both because of the fun I had teasing about its flaws but also because it gives me fodder for worthwhile introspection. Oh, and it connected me to some great commenters who I now follow on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ. ...more
"You gave it three stars?" she asked me, biting her lip and holding her breath.
"Yes," I finally answered with my marble lips, cold yet strangely comfo"You gave it three stars?" she asked me, biting her lip and holding her breath.
"Yes," I finally answered with my marble lips, cold yet strangely comforting, even warm. "Stephenie, don't forget to breathe."
"Oh, of course." A storm seemed to rage in her for just a moment.
"I gave it a three. It's good." I would never lie to her, could never lie to her. Yet, somehow, she felt it was a lie and brooded in stillness for a moment that seemed to last an eternity.
Finally, I broke the aching silence. "I gave it a three because the vampire lore was that good -- the extended plotline and the setup for a decent fourth novel were all enjoyable." There, I said it. Would it be enough for her? No, it would never be enough.
"But you absolutely hated the tent scene with the [spoiler removed:], and you wanted to send Bella straight to vampire hell for her self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-obsessed self-ness by the end."
We paused and I noticed sobs erupting from deep inside her.
"Stephenie, breathe, and stop biting your lip, it's getting really annoying. Quit with the crying already. Yes, all of those things are true, and if I could release myself from your books, I would. But-"
"But?" she asked longlingly, her fingers caressing my face while my fingers caressed her face and somebody else's fingers were somehow caressing both our faces because you can never have too much face-caressing going on -- whose fingers are those, anyway?
"But despite how much I hate Bella by now, I really want to find out more about the Volturi and the process of becoming a vampire and whether Bella is somehow part of an ancient bloodline that stirs up all the vampires and werewolves whenever she's around. That's why I gave it three stars, and that's why-" I gasped, she gasped, we both forgot to breathe and bit our lips, "-why I will be reading the fourth book as soon as it is out."
Finally, I remembered to breathe and stopped caressing her face, looked into her eyes and with my godlike, cool, marble lips, asked, "Satisfied?"
It turns out we don't need Dr. John Gray to tell us that men are from Transylvania and women are from Venus. We just need to read Stephenie Meyer bookIt turns out we don't need Dr. John Gray to tell us that men are from Transylvania and women are from Venus. We just need to read Stephenie Meyer books. For example, from this book we learn that the millions of women who have wolfed down the Twilight series (pun intended) want men who:
1. Talk about their feelings. Either Meyer's husband is the single-most communicative male on the planet and she doesn't realize how unusual he is, or she, like most of her female readers, is using her fiction to imagine a world where men not only have deep emotions but want to admit to having them and talk about them over and over, articulating even the most subtle of their internal dramas.
2. Make them flutter. But just being a sensitive new-age kind of guy doesn't cut it. A man has to be hard-bodied, chiseled, dashing, and have eyes that pierce the soul, if not the skin (even as they never look at your chest). This book suggests that a real man makes you constantly stumble over your words, bite your lip to refrain from exclaiming adulations, and lose yourself in the sweet smell of his breath.
3. Are fiercely devoted. That a girl of no spectacular beauty, who lacks any trace of conversation skills -- whose only virtue is that she smells really yummy -- can inspire an immortal creature of godlike power and grace to alter his entire existence to serve and protect her, watching over her by night (more on that in #4). This is a woman's ultimate fantasy -- to have the perfect man, perfectly devoted, for no good reason at all.
4. Want them so bad that they won't take them. This, alas, is the most transparent aspect of this book's appeal. It speaks volumes about the differences between men and women to have so many women toss their bodice-ripping romances aside in order to read how a feral man with otherworldly physical desires can contain his passion and lust out of his pure and perfect love for his beloved. It says that women really do wish they could have it both ways, to be an object of lust and devotion at once, to fulfill a man's desire without actually slaking his thirst for her. To have a man watch you sleep and not want to have even a little peek under the covers -- now that's hot fantasy for today's woman who is otherwise told on a regular basis that to be her best self she has to enage in casual and risky sexual behavior.
To see just what an indulgent fantasy this book is, just imagine the male-centric version of Twilight, in which a troubled teen boy moves to a small town to find the hottest girl in town is a vampiress. Such a book would be about 100 pages long (all the unnecessary internal dialogue would be removed). No one would talk except to comment on the awesome size of, um, one's videogame library. The vampiress would be simple: relatively dumb, incredibly hot, wearing almost nothing, and with no expectations of her man but drawn to him only by the smell of his gym bag. She wouldn't hold herself back from trying to bite her intended, but would get so distracted with his bedroom technique that she would never get around to it.
We would laugh at such a book (in fact, we know it would never be a book since men don't read; it would be a movie, and it would be a smash summer hit called American Vam-Pie-er, I'll start the screenplay right away). Somehow, when this story is told in a similarly indulgent female-centric vein, we don't reject it, but sympathize with it. I believe this is because women get to indulge in their fantasies so rarely outside of Jane Austen novels while men are surrounded with theirs. So far I have yet see spam email inviting one to "read hot things devoted husbands would say to their wives" or "see pictures of hunks promising not to get nasty out of respect for their women" or "buy this purple pill so you can stay up late and share your feelings -- seven times in one night!." So hats off to Stephenie Meyer for figuring out what it is that women really want and giving it to them. ...more
My first Meyer book and a great one to start with. Her fantasy/sci-fi chops are first-rate and she blends romance into the mix intriguingly. Most admiMy first Meyer book and a great one to start with. Her fantasy/sci-fi chops are first-rate and she blends romance into the mix intriguingly. Most admirable is the way she creates an invading alien force that is sympathetic and benevolent -- a nice twist on the old theme....more
In this book, Gaiman brilliantly issues immigration visas to all the traditional gods and spirits of the cultures that have melted into the American mIn this book, Gaiman brilliantly issues immigration visas to all the traditional gods and spirits of the cultures that have melted into the American milieu. Once he has them here, he initiates the metaphysical brawl of the century. The book maintains this brilliance right up until the last handful of chapters, when the multiple threads of religious imagery muddle into confusion. (Oh, and what's with the nearly pornographic scenes? Reader beware.)...more
Heavily promoted by Amazon, Donohue's debut novel is sweetly inviting, but ultimately fails to deliver on the promise of the premise. Worth the read, Heavily promoted by Amazon, Donohue's debut novel is sweetly inviting, but ultimately fails to deliver on the promise of the premise. Worth the read, nonetheless, for the way it weaves the ancient lore of changelings into a modern setting complete with characters who struggle to "fit" into their skins -- something all of us can relate to....more
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