Flight into Fantasy

It’s been another long time since I blogged. I’ve been feeling a bit out of touch with the blogging community, too, and so I’m figuring that the only way to remedy that fact is to start again.

So what’s gotten me so far behind? Mostly a combination of burnout and worries about what I want to do with my blog. I want to provide something unique, but I’m not really sure that I do, and I’m also not really sure that it matters anyway.

So I’m going to muddle along, possibly tweaking things like my review format, and see where it all gets me. I really appreciate any of you who’ve stuck around, and I hope to be providing more interesting content soon.

I’m also sorry that I didn’t have time to participate in Book Blogger Appreciation Week. I really love being a part of the book blogging community, and, even though I didn’t really participate, I did enjoy reading the BBAW posts that came across my feed reader.

I am looking forward to the fall Readathon, though. I intend to participate fully this time, though, being a slow reader, I’m not sure I can actually finish more than maybe one, possibly two, books in a 24-hour period. It’s from the 24-25 of October, and I’ve already got a few things picked out to read.

In the meantime, I have reviews to write which I’m hoping to get posted up this week. I know I always say that, but hey, good intentions count for something, don’t they?

You know how there are some books that, even though the pages absolutely fly by, all you really want to do is sink into the story and hang out with the characters for a long time? For me, Tales of the Madman Underground by John Barnes was that kind of book. It was compulsively readable, and I did not want to finish it.

This year, Karl Shoemaker’s senior year, is his year to be normal. Every other year, he’s been included in the Monday morning therapy group that the members call the Madman Underground. But this year, Karl doesn’t want therapy. He just wants to lay low so he can graduate high school and get the hell out of podunk Lightsburg, Ohio. Of course, that doesn’t quite work so well, because if nothing else, Karl’s a good friend, and he can’t just abandon the other Madmen. Complicating his life further are the antics of his alcoholic hippie mom, his near-constant working, and the realization that he’s not the only one trying to have a normal year.

The thing about novels written in first person POV is that the narrator has to be someone the reader can at least like. And I loved Karl. He’s basically a good kid, maybe a little screwed up, but justifiably so. He’s got a lot on his plate, and he handles it all with aplomb. He’s not perfect, but his loyalty and his basic goodness as a person warmed me to him immediately. Plus, he’s a snarky narrator, and there can never be too many of those.

The other Madmen are well-developed. I got a sense of who each of them were, from the pretty, perky Cheryl, whose family is seriously screwed up, to loyal jock Squid, to my favorite, Darla, a brassy, crazy girl who regularly talks to her stuffed rabbit and thus gets away with saying all kinds of crazy stuff. It’s clear these kids are close-knit and there for each other, and I really felt their connection.

Best of all, this isn’t one of those novels where the adults are basically just stock characters. Karl’s mom is a real piece of work, and Coach Gratz, one of Karl’s teachers, is well-meaning but misguided. As with the kids, the adults have their flaws, their weaknesses, and things that make them human. What’s more, Karl seems to genuinely like them.

The story is all about the connections to other people. Not a whole lot that’s earth-shattering happens to Karl over the first week he spends at school, but he does a lot of growing up and learning about what it means to be a part of a community. In the end, he’s in a much better place than he was, and it was fun taking that journey with him, through the happy times, the frustrating times, and the tear-jerker moments.

I find myself drawn to YA fiction of this type lately. I find these coming of age stories intensely satisfying, and this one was no exception. Parts of it have stuck with me days later, and for that I have to give it a rare A. Apparently, John Barnes has written science fiction. I really need to find some of it and read it, because if his science fiction is as good as this YA novel, then he’ll become an instant favorite author!

Other Reviews

• In Bed with Books

Several years ago, before the advent of the Internet in my life, I was as much of a book geek as I am today. I actually subscribed to and read the Washington Post Book World, and I want to say that it was in one of their all-too-infrequent features on science fiction that I ran across mention of Dead Girls by Richard Calder. For some reason, the idea of women turning into inorganic creatures that come straight out of Freudian nightmare filled me with intrigue. But it’s not a well-known book, and I figured I’d never read it until a friend, knowing that I’d wanted to read the book, and being a huge fan of the author, scanned it for me.

Dead Girls is the first in a trilogy, and, as mentioned, it’s about dolls–nonorganic women straight out of male fantasy who, rather than simply having been created, can infect people. They find the blood of men addictive, and men, like our protagonist, Iggy, find the bite of the dolls equally as addictive. The men thus infected with the doll plague go around having sex with normal women, and, if daughters are born, they turn into dolls. Yep, it’s exactly as twisted as it sounds.

Anyway, Iggy’s friend Primavera is one such doll, having been born human and metamorphosed into a doll at puberty. Since the government is trying to contain the doll plague, naturally, she and Iggy run away, fleeing to Thailand where Primavera gets hired as an assassin by the ruthless Madamme Kito. But some people want Primavera rather badly, and they want the secrets she knows, and are willing to kill her in order to extract that information.

My plot summary is completely inadequate to the story, because it really does have to simply be experienced. Also, the book is classified as New Weird, which is a genre of science fiction that baffles me completely. Basically, a lot happens, and it’s the kind of book that requires the reader to pay attention, because otherwise stuff will be missed. That being said, unlike most of the other New Weird books I’ve read, this one wasn’t too caught up in its ‘new weirdness’. There are some running themes, but the story itself is engrossing.

The characters are hard to talk about without major spoiling. They are well-rounded and nuanced, but hard to like. Iggy, our narrator, is quite frankly an ass, and though Primavera gets my sympathy because of the difficulty of her circumstances and because of her obvviously deep connection to Iggy, in many ways I felt distanced from her because Iggy’s obsessed with her, and that makes her hard to relate to. The other characters are all screwed up in their own special ways.

Normally, that’d be a deal breaker for me, because I’m nothing if not a character reader, but Calder’s writing style was gripping. I had to know what would happen, to figure out if these two characters would make it through all the stuff they went through and survive.

My friend is scanning the two sequels, so I’m sure I’ll definitely find out sooner than later. Still, I’m not entirely sure who I’d recommend this book to. If you’re a fan of edgy, cyberpunkish science fiction that deals with more than just playing with nifty toys, you might like this, provided you have a strong stomach. For me, this book rates a B-.