Breathers: A Zombie's Lament by S.G. Browne

Andy is a zombie, in a world where zombies are well-known but not accepted. He still has all of his faculties intact, but he is dead and decaying, and zombies are second-class citizens if they're citizens at all.

This is a really interesting zombie book, thoughtful, quirky, original, and gross, on every page. It's written in that modern men's Nick Hornby fiction style, which I don't always like, but in this case it makes the story very clear and accessible. It's easy to start reading, and hard to put down. (The book design has a lot to do with that too... Great cover and overall design, the physical act of reading was pleasurable.)

But, lest you think it's all whining and introspection, let's not forget Andy's new friend Ray and that tasty, er, venison, he's been serving.

I'm not sure I'd say I "liked" the characters, plot, etc., but it was definitely worth reading. There are two conflicting ideas coming from the text and I'm not sure which one is the intended (or even unintentional) Aesop. Are zombies just people like us, or are they total monsters that need to be killed for our own protection?

I hate the ending a little bit, but it's not out of the blue, and it certainly isn't disappointing. Browne doesn't rely on his premise to carry the book, he definitely puts in the effort and writes the whole way through, which I think is fantastic.

World War Z (reviewed last week) was the book that piqued my interest in zombies, and is without compare for zombies on a global scale, like Breathers is for the personal scale. Breathers also reminded me of The Reformed Vampire Support Group (reviewed last August), although RVSG is firmly YA and Breathers is firmly adult. Browne also has an (unrelated) new book called Fated coming out in November, and I'm super excited.

World War Z by Max Brooks

I heard a lot about this one on the interwebs a while (like, months) ago, and apparently put it on my automatic holds list at the library because, lo and behold, when I wasn't thinking about it at all, there it was. I then proceeded to dawdle over it for more months, piddle around with the first chapters for three or four days, and then down the entire thing in an afternoon.

World War Z is composed of interviews with/statements made by various survivors of the zombie apocalypse. The research that must have gone into this is mindblowing, because it really has a worldwide scope. There are interviews with soldiers from all over the world, civilians, doctors, everyone, through the whole course of the war. Max Brooks must know everything about everything by now.

There are a few recurring names, but no "main characters," and the book benefits from that immeasurably. This isn't "small group gets trapped in Sav-A-Lot with zombies outside," or "young soldier gets caught up in a zombie war," or what-have-you. It's ALL of those. It's kind of an immersive experience, terrifying in its realism. Everyone's affected, and there's nowhere to run.

I was impressed with the range of human behavior included in the book. There were brave people, cowards, good leaders, bad leaders, greedy jerks (to put it tactfully), and selfless heroes. That tends to tell me Mr. Brooks was actually writing a story, not a pamphlet for some agenda, which is always a danger in any book that deals with politics.

World War Z is thorough, gripping, realistic, intense, and a resounding success. Not to mention the words that are rapidly becoming the highest praise I can give a book: well-written.

Buy World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

The Zorgamazoo Audiobook!

Yeah, it's not out yet. Hasn't even been made yet. But, guess what I just heard from Robert Paul Weston's blog? Alan Cumming is going to be the voice! Alan Cumming! THIS IS AWESOME AND I CANNOT WAIT!

For the uninitiated, Zorgamazoo is one of my absolute favorite books. I reviewed it here, and here's my interview with Mr. Weston, the author.

Demonkeeper by Royce Buckingham

No review last week because I was sick. It was not awesome.

And I know awesome, because Demonkeeper is awesome. Just look at the puppy eyes the blue demon on the cover is giving you. Go ahead, I'll wait while you wibble.

Nathaniel Grimlock is a 15-year-old Demonkeeper, who is left on his own in a house full of demons when the older, fully trained Demonkeeper dies. It's now his job to keep the demons contained and cared for. Luckily the demons are friendly (if a little destructive)... Except for one. Guess which one escapes?

This quick-paced (but fully developed) horror for tweens. Bruce Coville blurbed it, and that's fitting because Royce Buckingham is on par with him in this book. I don't say that often. I don't know how Demonkeeper can be so terrifying, and yet so unbelievably cute! When I say "terrifying," I mean tween-suitable "AAAAAAH!" and "eeew gross!" and when I say "cute," I mean so adorable your brain might just explode. The book was like a breath of fresh air in the midst of a pile of bigger books that, while also awesome, were emotionally draining and/or a trial of my stamina.

The other main character, Sandra Nertz, isn't quite as adorable as Nat or his minions, but she is fun. She's a junior assistant librarian!

Obviously, I loved it. Buckingham's other book is called Goblins!: An UnderEarth Adventure, and I'm looking forward to reading that... Other books I recommend are Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy (review here) and anything by Bruce Coville, especially Goblins in the Castle.

Buy Demonkeeper

The Masterplan by Scott Mills

The Masterplan is an indie sci-fi graphic novel coming to you from Top Shelf Productions, which you might have heard of. They've also published several books by Alan Moore, the Owly series by Andy Runton (LOVE), Tales from the Farm by Jeff Lemire, and a bunch of other stuff that I haven't read. Just judging by the ones I have read, Top Shelf only publishes works of stunning genius. I could be wrong.

Anyway, The Masterplan. A brilliant scientist drags his ex-wife and his brother along on a mission designed to keep the universe from expanding too far (gazillions of years in the future, when that might be a problem.)

This isn't a traditiional graphic novel... It reminds me of a webcomic more than anything else, except not designed to be read one strip at a time. The art is in black and white and minimalist, with the characters mostly just distinguishing characteristics with a hint of background behind them. It makes the reading really smooth, and it feels sort of wistful and pure. It suits the story.

This is a pure kind of sci-fi, very much about ideas and science and an intergalactic, universal scope. It's not science-y, it's very easy to understand and I don't know how accurate any of the theories might be, but it is about science. It's also about those three characters I mentioned, but it's not like we have to know every detail about them. We know how they feel. It's about travelling all over time and space, meeting aliens, robots, themselves, and other awesomeness, but its also touching and sad in a way that's hard to describe. Wistful.

This is a great book and I highly recommend it. It's hard to describe, but it's an experience I really enjoyed. You'll want to have a few hours to yourself and just sit down and read it all the way through, and then sit there staring at the cover for a while before you move on. (If you ever do.)

Buy The Masterplan

Elemental Masters series by Mercedes Lackey

Intro

I'm aware that my posts have been erratic for a while. We're hopefully back on a weekly, weekend post schedule now.

Way back in September I gushed about The Fire Rose and how much fun it was. I mentioned that it was the first of a series. Well, I finally finished the rest of them, and instead of taking up five more reviews I'm doing them all at once. It's a little on the long side, just to warn you.

The Fire Rose (awesome!) was written in 1994. Then, in 2001, Lackey started the Elemental Masters series, which is the same series, but without The Fire Rose listed as number one. So... I have no idea what's up with that, but at any rate, each book retells a classic fairy tale, but set in the 1800s (I think) in England, and centered around various elemental magicians. Some characters have cameos in multiple books, but each book stands alone and has a different set of protagonists and villains.

Another warning: Two of these books are awesome, including The Fire Rose. Two of them are enjoyable. Two of them are hideously awful and should never have been published, and I can't believe the same author wrote all six.

The Serpent's Shadow

This is one of the enjoyable ones, a very loose rendition of Snow White. (It's not like Beauty and the Beast, where the recognizable elements ARE the plot. The recognizable elements aren't as significant to the story in Snow White.) It stars a half-Indian lady doctor, Maya, who is also a magician. She was a fantastic, strong woman with anything BUT a stock character profile. She had a unique perspective on things and a pragmatic attitude that I found refreshing. The plot involves a lot of Indian mythology, and that put an interesting light on things without overwhelming the story.

Lackey spends a lot of time ranting about the anti-feminism of the time period, and even though she has a point, it was really frustrating because it's not like I can do anything about it. It was two hundred years ago. Stop ranting at me and tell a story, for Pete's sake!

The Gates of Sleep

Sleeping Beauty! Perhaps the one fairy tale in which the heroine does the absolute LEAST! Surely that'll make a great heroine-centered book, right? Well, no, not really.

The first 120 pages of the book could have been cut and it wouldn't have mattered, because NOTHING happens. The whole thing is a long, boring ramble on the social conditions of the time and how terrible it would have been to be poor back then. Another situation which I am powerless to rectify, and also, not a first act of a story, which, when that annoying interlude is removed from my mind, was still horrible. The first event is a mother's baby being taken away without her even getting a chance to get used to the idea, when that kind of urgency was totally uncalled for, and the next interesting thing that happens (120 pages later) is the same child being taken away from her new parents without being given any inkling of the danger she's headed for.

And, when the curse finally takes effect on the girl, her guardians go into fits. What did you THINK would happen when the woman you've been hiding from this entire time got her hands on the EXACT THING she wanted? HELLO?! The stated reason why they didn't come to rescue her at the beginning was that "as long as we didn't hear anything, we assumed the witch hadn't figured out how to curse her." So, they just waited to hear something. Um, okay.

I didn't really hate the characters, but I didn't like them either. They were all so unremarkable that they might as well not exist at all. I enjoyed the book more than I'm letting on, and the villains were fantastic (and the book was freakishly similar to Hotel Transylvania for some reason). Read it if you're a completionist, love Sleeping Beauty, or just like this series and want to look at some of the intricacies of the magic system Lackey's created, but otherwise you won't miss much if you skip it.

Phoenix and Ashes

Awesome! And yet, I have no idea why. I keep a book journal, and my notes are basically "I love it! I'm enjoying it so much!" for half a page. Fantasy and/or romance fans, definitely read this one.

It's a fairly faithful retelling of Cinderella, but there's a little bit of a role reversal here. The Prince needs saving almost as much as Cinderella does, and to me, she was the strong one in the relationship. Not that I don't like strong men, because I do, and this Prince is no weenie, but there's just something different about this romance. It's not just a marraige of equals, if you'll pardon the pun, but a place where two separate, damaged people come together and make a whole relationship. The Prince isn't the kind of romantic hero that I swoon over, but at the same time I really love and respect him and I can actually cheer on the princess even more, be more invested, because I'm not jealous of her. :)

I think the two things this book has in common with The Fire Rose are 1) the special romance at the heart of it, and 2) how it stays true to the fairy tale, but isn't bound by that fairy tale. The rest of the books either kind of wander off to do their own things or wander WAY off and are just in the same territory. These two fantastic ones take the immortal heart of the story and go from there, rather than taking the trappings and trying to force a new story into them.

The Wizard of London

Skip this one, if you have the power. (I, too, have felt the urge to finish terrible books just because I started them, and to start them just because I've read the rest of the series. I feel your pain, completionists, especially where this book is concerned, and I support you in your coming time of trial.)

This is one of the most mindnumbingly boring books I've ever read, and I've read The Grapes of Wrath. It's based on "The Snow Queen," a very odd and confusing fairy tale to be sure, but that doesn't have anything to do with how boring this book is because the book doesn't seem to have a thing to do with the fairy tale.

What it does have to do with is two special kids in a boarding school and their animal companions. Two sickeningly average special kids in a boarding school and their sickeningly average animal companions. Seriously, the majority of the book is the two little girls doing... Well, not much of anything. It's SO day-in-the-life that MY life was infinitely more interesting, and it took me about three weeks of two or three chapters a day to get through this beast.

I did like the new things Lackey incorporated into the magic system, how it's all very systematic but still complicated, but still a lot of elements just seemed stuck in there to take up space. I also liked how sensible the characters (mostly the kids) were, always telling someone else where they were going and when they'd be back, etc., but at the same time, they keep foiling the villains' plans and the plot never goes anywhere.

SPOILER:

I kid you not, the villain is defeated by two small children overwhelming him with the power of love. Um, okay. END SPOILER.

The one character I liked never stuck around longer than a few pages. (And it's not the woodland spirit you might be thinking of if you've already read it. It's the husband.) The depths that were available were never plumbed. I kept reading hoping it would get better, but it never did. Skip it.

Reserved For the Cat

It's based on "Puss in Boots." You guessed it--talking cats! Woohoo!

I love talking cats!

Anyway, the basic story is that a Russian ballerina comes to England and pretends to be a famous Russian ballerina, at the behest of the talking cat.

This book was fun. It wasn't mindblowing and the writing wasn't magnificent, but I did enjoy it. I had a good time trying to figure out who the prince was going to be (it could have been one of three or four people at one point,) and there were machinations! I also love machinations.

It's pretty standard stuff, so don't let it preempt something awesome on Mt. TBR, but if you love ballerinas, talking cats, and/or machinations...

Conclusion

Surely, if Ms. Lackey can write glowing tomes of happiness, she shouldn't also write (or at least publish) horrible piles of drivel. Or even enjoyably average novels. I just don't get it. But I'll keep reading all her stuff, because I'm pathetically addicted to her glowing tomes of happiness...

Fate's Favorite Superman Books

I've devoted a not inconsiderable amount of thought to reviewing graphic novels in recent months. I LOVE graphic novels and I read at least one of those to every "normal" book I read, and of course I have plenty of thoughts about them, but I couldn't figure out how best to do reviews. There's not much point in telling you how much I liked Elongated Man #783 (fake example) if you don't know who Elongated Man is and haven't read the preceding 782 issues.

For the moment, I'm going to try to do graphic novels that stand alone and tell a complete story, and I'll probably continue to do more than one at a time when I do them. So, without further ado: Superman!

My three favorite titles, through mild coincidence, have nothing to do with each other but do tell an overall story. All Star Superman by Grant Morrison, Superman: For Tomorrow by Brian Azzarello, and Kingdom Come by Mark Waid.

All Star Superman is the only Grant Morrison title that I have any kind of enjoyment for, but it is AMAZING. We already know the basic story, about how Superman was sent as a baby from the planet Krypton, raised by a good farming couple in Kansas, etc. The Superman story has been told at least a thousand times, and Superman, on average, kind of bores me. All the stories are the same sometimes. But Morrison gets rid of the transitional material, the "story glue," and just shows us the panels that are important to the story. He shows us the heart of Superman, the reasons why we loved the story the first time we heard it. He shows us a naive, innocent man who is able to wield amazing power, and what's more, wield it well. The art is hard to explain, but I really like it. The whole story is contained in two volumes.

Superman: For Tomorrow is another two volume book, set a year after The Vanishing, a moment in which a substantial portion of Earth's population simply disappeared. It's a darker and edgier story, sparely written, and deeply moving. You have to fill in a lot of the story yourself, so it'll bear multiple re-readings. I was really surprised by how well the whole book was done... Azzarello shows us what happens when Superman loses his naivete and finds out the world is more complicated than he thought it was. It breaks his heart a little bit, but it doesn't break HIM. He doesn't lose his idealism. The art captures that story beautifully too... It looks like Superman in all his iconic awesomeness, but it incorporates shadows and uncertainty.

Now, if you've been following me for a while, you know how much I love Kingdom Come. It's one of my favorite graphic novels EVER, but it's also becoming one of my favorite Superman graphic novels. The Kingdom Superman is full of sorrow, and even bitterness, and he isn't perfect, but that doesn't make him any less Superman. He's still trying to do the right thing, and trying to save people. He still knows how to throw a punch and how to fill out spandex. I think Kingdom Come can be thought of almost as the future of For Tomorrow in a way.

I see these three graphic novels as partly a timeline, showing an almost childlike Superman growing up, but also as three kinds of Superman/Superman story. The simple kind, the kind that looks at the darkness, and the kind that goes all the way. Whole, breaking, broken. And the best thing is that all three kinds are about idealism. I love all of them. I love Superman. I love to turn a page and see a big, full-page drawing of Superman flying above all of us who are on the ground, because he's better than us, and he inspires us to be better too. Even when he's not perfect, he's inspiring.

There have been a few other ones I liked (Superman for All Seasons by Jeph Loeb was great, and the Superman: Man of Steel series that started in the eighties is my favorite longterm series) but these are my absolute favorites so far. For those of you who have never read Superman, I envy you the joy of discovering him for the first time, and I recommend Superman for All Seasons and then All Star Superman as a great place to start.

Buy All Star Superman (Volume 2 should be out in paperback at some point.)

Buy Superman: For Tomorrow

Buy Kingdom Come