Lone Wolf

Written By Jodi Picoult
Original Publication Date: 2012

Rating: 2 Stars

I have really got to stop expecting new and exciting things from Jodi Picoult.  My Sister's Keeper was a one hit wonder, and the rest of her novels are bubblegum or rehashes with very slightly different casts of the same novel.  At least they're easy reads.  Bubblegum isn't terrible, just not good.

Let me sum it up for you:  Life or Death Situation is followed by Awkward Family Moment, usually in a hospital, is followed by an Ethical Dilemma in which there is an Intense Disagreement and Alienation of Certain Family Members.  All this is followed by the Big Courtroom Drama Law and Order SVU style, then a Dramatic Decision is made, which is followed by a Big Reveal of a secret or Big Twist Ending that changes everything.

This book had some serious potential.  There's a family.  Luke, the father, works with wolves.  He has been known to take off and live with packs of wolves.  Cara is his high school daughter.  Edward is the estranged son.  Luke's ex-wife is married to an attorney and has young twins from her second marriage.  There is a car accident, when Luke is picking up Cara from a party that she had attended.  Cara drags him out of the car, but he is non-responsive.  Luke's character could have been so fucking cool.  Instead, the story just sort of petered out into a Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper rehash.

The Eyre Affair

Written By Jasper Fforde
Original Publication Date: 2001

Rating: 2 Stars

Book Notes:

22%

Jasper Fforde is certainly tipping his hat to 1984 with the Goliath Corporation and the Crimean War.

28%

"HyperBookwormDoublePlusGood."  That hat tip to 1984 just became a deep bow.

61%

THURSDAY.  WHAT.  IS.  WRONG.  WITH.  YOU?!

Your uncle has been kidnapped.  The bad guy just shot the crap out of your unit.  He's probably going to kill Martin Chuzzlewit, and possibly your uncle when he realizes he's been duped.

AND ALL YOU CAN THINK ABOUT IS A MAN YOU BROKE UP WITH 10 YEARS AGO?!    YOU BROKE UP WITH HIM.  GET OVER IT!

Review:

I had such, amazingly high hopes for this book.  I adored Shades of Grey  (no, not Fifty Shades of Grey, Godfuckingdamnit) and assumed that a novel written by the same brilliant quirky mind in a universe where you can step into novels, especially when stepping into one of my all time favorites, Jane Eyre, would be of the same caliber, if not better.  I was bloody disappointed.

Thursday Next is the stereotypical drop-in Female Agent Character; see The President's Daughter and Sympathetic Sue, from tvtropes, to see what I thought of how her character was built.  She was wanted by various parts of Special Ops because of what her father did in the Chrono Guard.  Her brother was lost at war, and because of something to do with this fact, she also broke up with her fiance of the time.  My real problem with Thursday as a narrator was that her entire focus was on the "pity me" crap from her past.  All she can think of during the climax(es) of the novel is of Landen, her ex-fiance.  I know she's a woman, but come on Fforde, we do think of things other than our men.

It made me want to kick her in the face hole.

Acheron Hades - what an evil name, right?  Okay, so he's kidnapped Thursday's uncle because he built the machine and bred the bookworms that allow one to step into fiction.  Okay, so he's stolen a manuscript or two.  But Gods above, he is taken as such Serious Business, and I don't see him as as evil as his name and his adversaries seem to make him out to be.  It just escalates too damn quickly for me to really see him as a villain, instead all I saw him as was a mostly-invincible dolt who wanted to be evil.  He was a Card Carrying Villain, instead of a truly evil man.

What really, really, disappointed me though, was that even though this novel is called The Eyre Affair, we don't really get to jump into Jane Eyre until two thirds of the way through the book, and it was so random after the first 2/3.  It seemed like two different stories that were really only barely related to one another.

It did earn itself a star because the stuff with Jane, Rochester, and Thursday was pretty fucking cool.  I just wish there'd been more of it.  And the parallels between Jane and Rochester and Thursday and Landen almost made Landen bearable - almost. 

And that ending!?  Dear Gods, we wrapped it up with a neat little bow.  And they rode off into the sunset, Happily Ever After.  

Headdesk.  Please excuse my while I shoot myself.

I am honestly not sure I care enough to read the rest of the series, which is really, really sad because I so loved Shades of Grey (I recommend it to everyone!).  I just fear that while this was Fforde's first novel (obviously) that this lack of editing continues.  He really needed a good editor for this book, but the series has done so well that I'm afraid he's been given free reign.  Though on the flip side of that same coin, I'm sure that in the past 12 years, the man has matured as an author and it'd be interesting to read one of the more modern Thursday Next stories.  Hmm.  We'll see.

The Heretic's Daughter

Written By Kathleen Kent
Original Publication Date: 2008

Rating: 2 Stars

Book Notes:

Well, it's been a while.  This book took me quite a while to get through.  I just started a new job and I needed to be focused on that; besides, my new boss has been changing my schedule every 24 hours, so it's been hard to find much time to read.  I think it's finally settling down, so the reviews should come quicker again.  I will not let this job affect my reading.

Page 151

Finally the story's picking up!  Maybe I'll actually finish this sometime in the near future!

Review:

As a modern-day Pagan, with roots in modern Wicca, I was incredibly excited to finally find this title used, for cheap (hey, I was unemployed for a long time).  I had been wanting to read it for quite some time, as I have read a fuckload about the Salem Witch Trials, and love to visit the place.  To read a fictional account of real people who were part of the fiasco sounded awesome enough.  Add to that that Kathleen Kent is directly related to Martha Carrier?  Sounded like a gold mine to me.

Unfortunately, I found myself incredibly disappointed.  I guess I was hoping that because Kent is related to these people that she would have had a journal or something that would have added something more to these events that swept the colonies.  Maybe my hopes were simply too high.

I found the first 151 pages fairly boring, they were the day to day life of Sarah Carrier, daughter of Martha Carrier - one of the women hanged for witchcraft.  They were boring, but they did a decent job of exploring the conflicted relationship that every woman/girl has with her mother.  We love her, we hate her, we resent her, we need her, we blame her, we rely on her, we take her for granted.  By the end of the novel, I had actually decided that this relationship building part of the novel was more interesting than the Witch Trails themselves.

I thought it would get more interesting and pick up, once the Witch Trails came to Sarah's front door.  Damn, was I wrong.  I felt very little emotion come up from the page when Sarah's mother was arrested.  I felt very little when her brothers were arrested.  I felt very little when Sarah was arrested.  It plodded.  Somehow the drama of the Witch Trails was made boring.  Seriously, how is that even possible?  I've read completely non-fiction accounts of the events and they were less boring than this fictionalized account.

Some of the absolute best writing came from the last 50 pages or so, when Sarah is describing the prison scene and how the women either came together or pulled away to survive.  That, was the only part of the novel that I didn't label as boring.  The human emotion was truly raw and awesome during this time.

Mini Review: Deadpool MAX, Nutjob

Written By David Lapham
Illustrated By Kyle Baker
Original Publication Date: 2011

Rating: 2 Stars

I've read a handful of Deadpool comics, and this just didn't stock up against the other ones.  It simply wasn't as funny as it should have been.  In the comic book store where I bought this, I was flipping through the issues of the new story arc and they had me rolling.  Come on, his nemesis this time around is bringing presidents back from the dead to fight him.  There is nothing funnier than Deadpool punching Abe Lincoln in the face.  Sorry man, you know I have the greatest respect for you.  

This Deadpool, because the main perspective was Bob, his handler, lost a lot of the Deadpool charm.  Yes it was vulgar and silly, but seeing Deadpool through the eyes of someone who can't understand him is a little annoying.  Deadpool is wonderful in his self-deprecating randomness that goes on in his brain, and that was simply missing from this book because of the perspective.  Not a Deadpool win, in my opinion.

Mini Review: Wonder Woman, Love and Murder

Written By Jodi Picoult
Illustrated By Drew Johnson, Ray Snyder, Rodney Ramos, Terry Dodson, Rachel Dodson, & Paco Diaz
Original Publication Date: 2007

Rating: 2 Stars

Note: I decided to start a new kind of review for my graphic novels: Mini Reviews.  Graphic novels are simply hard for me to review as I'm not an artist, and don't have the kind of grasp of what good versus bad art is to give the novels the reviews they deserve.  So, now I've got a tag for those comic books/graphic novels/other books that I don't know how to review.

First of all, this is technically a second story arch in a series.  There is however a "Previously on Wonder Woman" page, where you can read what happened in the first novel.  Basically, Wonder Woman did something that society and the other heroes don't particularly agree with, and she has to go into hiding.  She is working as Diana Prince and is given the assignment to bring Wonder Woman in for her crimes.

It's interesting to see how Wonder Woman handles a "normal" human life.  There is very little that she understands intuitively.  Amazons are obviously an entirely different sort of culture and that was the last time she was "normal."  At one point her mother is brought back, and the kinds of issues she has with her mother are very human.  She's struggling to differentiate herself as well as to learn who she is in this human world.

Unfortunately, the crap that happens after she's in her Wonder Woman gear is simply ridiculous, and poorly done.  It felt like Jodi Picoult gave DC her ideas to make Wonder Woman more relatable, and they said "Gee, Picoult wants to make Wonder Woman more relatable to real women.  I guess we could do that.  Especially since then we can go right back to her being a sex object and never think of her as anything more ever again."  It was bastardized Picoult.

It was interesting, (especially because I am a Picoult fan) but not awesome.

The Last Myth: What the Rise of Apocalyptic Thinking Tells Us About America

Written By Mathew Barrett Gross and Mel Gilles
Original Publication Date: 2011

Rating: 2 Out of Five Stars

Book Notes:

Page 23

We really did delude ourselves, as a culture, in the 90s that we were living in a never-ending Golden Age.

Page 67
The apocalypse is new to our era; the nature of Endings that were in other cultures were also Beginnings.  The cycle of living was important.  It's our understanding of history as linear and unique, rather than cyclical and mythologically repetitive that created the idea of the END.

Review:

First of all, I received this book in a Goodreads giveaway, back in ...March?  I kept trying to pick it up, I swear!  For some reason it just sat on my bedside table, totally ignored.  I'd put it on my bedside table, ignore it, put it away, rinse and repeat.

Turns out my instincts were right.  It's not really worth reading.  The first couple of chapters are very interesting.  Those chapters are a conversation of when apocalyptic thinking first existed.  In very early history, there was no history as we understand it today.  Everything was cyclical and a re-creation of a myth. Nothing ever truly ended, because it was always reborn as a beginning.  It was when humanity started thinking of history as linear, as we do today, that apocalyptic thinking was even possible.  When history was cyclical, apocalypse as was understand it today wasn't possible, but when history became a straight (random) line, we wanted to know when that line would end.

For many hundreds of years, the apocalypse-thought-process didn't even focus so much on the end, but on what came after.  Isrealites lost their homes over and over and over again, but because they believed that after the judgement day came, they'd have everything - more than they could ever have imagined - this is why they never lost hope.  The apocalyptic thought was actually a positive!

From those two points, we can very clearly see how the advent of science created an apocalyptic thought process that focuses more on the end, than on what comes after the end.

Alright, that was interesting - it really was.  I enjoyed the first 100 pages or so.  Then all of a sudden, it got repetitive.  The sentence structures felt like they'd simply been transplanted from earlier in the book.  They couldn't even bother to write new sentences!?  Copy Pasta is not how to make an interesting book.  Maybe if they'd simply focused on the history, or hell, even ended the book after those 100 pages, it would have gotten a higher rating.  But once it hit the 100 page mark, I felt like I was re-reading what had already been said.

Truth be told, I skimmed the last 50 pages or so.

The Perks of Being A Wallflower

Written by Stephen Chbosky
Original Publication Date: 1999

Rating: 2 Stars Out Of 5

Review:
There's a certain kind of “coming of age” novel that I simply cannot relate to.  Books like The Catcher in the Rye, Hairstyles of the Damned, and this one.  I'm not sure what differentiates these books from other coming of age stories – I read a fuckload of YA, and 90% of those are coming of age stories.  It has something to do with the “I'm so gifted and weird and punk and cannot communicate with other people so I'm not going to try,” stream of consciousness.  At least I think that's it.  Believe me, I was a weirdo in high school.  I was the wallflower that saw everything and only rarely spoke of it.  I read everything I could get my hands on.  But for some reason these books don't resonate, even a little bit.  They read like bullshit or pretentious fantasy to me.  I don't understand what is so special about those novels.  Maybe I'm just too old for this kind of coming of age story, and when I was the right age, I was too busy coming of age myself, to appreciate them.

What I Disliked About This Book
No fifteen year old boy talks like this, even in writing.  The writing style is that of a seven year old boy.  I think it would have done better if the narrator were in 7th grade, and his friends were all going away to high school at the end of the novel.  A middle school student with that level of writing skill is far more believable.

Even with a learning disability, some form of autism, a trauma, etc. I felt he was too much a weird mishmosh of youth and self-awareness.  Children with autism and learning disabilities think differently, not just younger - it's why I find the brain of those with autism and various other quirks so fascinating.

His ignorance of sex is monumentally ridiculous.  Just because he's gone through a lot and may or may not have some sort of mental special need, doesn't mean he'd be that unaware of himself.  I worked at a camp for kids with special needs, we had to have 'masturbation stations' for kids that had hit puberty, because what kids do understand is that when they do something that feels good, they should keep doing it.

I had the “twist” ending of the novel figured out in the first 50 pages or so.  On top of that, the last 30 pages of a 230 page book were dedicated to spelling out the twist.  I feel like I was bashed over the head a few times with a dictionary, in order to get the “twist” to sink in.  I thought Life of Pi bashed me over the head with its ending; this felt way worse.

What My Inner English Major Thinks
Charlie's maturity level, along with his understanding of sex, froze at the age of 7 when his Aunt Helen died in a car accident.  He wasn't able to move beyond the screwiness of the first 7 years of his life.  That was the first time he was in a mental hospital and his grief and pain froze his maturity level.  It makes the style in which this book was written make a lot more sense.  It was more of a regression than a disorder.

What I Liked About This Book
There was a reason, no matter how thin, for Charlie's maturity level.

The fact that he read a lot, in order to escape the real world.  I was able to relate to this well.  I was very good at disappearing into books when I was a kid.

Sam and Patrick.  They seemed a lot less cookie-cutter than all of Charlies other friends.  There's a formula for the weird kid's friends and most of Charlie's friends sat right on that line.

The drug usage.  As weird as it sounds, I really liked the way that Charlie expressed himself when he was high or on LSD – even though it was a bad trip.

Something That Drove Me A Little Crazy
He obviously disliked abbreviations, such as MASH or e.e. Cummings, but for some reason he was constantly abbreviating “girlfriend” to “girlfr.”  I liked the touch that he didn't enjoy abbreviations, but the “girlfr” thing made me rage.  Charlie didn't strike me as a character that would have liked any kind of textspeak, even his own created textspeak.

Long Story Short
I don't understand what makes this book so special.  However, I believe that the movie may be worth seeing.  I can see most of my annoyances becoming part of the background when it is on film rather than on paper.

I had a hard time picking a rating for this novel, in the end I went with two stars, but it could have been one or three just as easily.