The Graveyard Book

The main character of The Graveyard Book, Bod, has brilliant circumstances that make up the entire book.  He himself, however, is a bit of a cliche.  I have been noticing that if somebody wants to really make a clever character in a book, they will make him or her quiet, observant, and full of questions, even though the first and last of those qualifications contradict each other.  Bod exemplifies these traits, just like all of the other characters that are like this in all the other books.  In The Graveyard Book, there seems to ten times the story if one is familiar with all types of mythology.  I am not, but it seemed to be there, just beyond my reach.  I liked the idea of the Jacks as well.  All in all, it has a good premise and has Neil Gaiman's standard wonderful prose, but the main character is a bit too stereotypical for my tastes.

Splash

If you read the back cover of Splash, you'd think that it was a ridiculous book about people killing each other over water guns.  The white chalk outline on the front cover doesn't help, either.  I checked it out from the library because it seemed to have a ludicrous premise.  However, nobody actually gets hurt because of the water gun game in the book.  Splash is fast-paced and fun.  It starts off with far too many characters, but they get eliminated quickly.  While I wasn't exactly gripping the pages with white knuckles, desperately hoping for my favorite character to win, it was fun to see where they would all go.  Once it got down to nine or so players, the action tapered off a bit, but it managed to maintain its pace by introducing a bit of drama.  A decent book overall.

Gone

Janie is very depressed.  This is understandable, considering the events of the book, along with the events of the previous books.  However, it starts out with a vacation scene, where she is getting away from it all, and she's depressed at the slightest things there, too.  For example, when she falls in while water-skiing, she's scared for her life, disgusted with the water, and mad at everybody for making light of it.  The small incident is given as much detail as if she was crashing a plane instead of some water-skis.  Throughout the rest of the book, she tends to be over-the-top unhappy, and though this is sometimes justified, she snaps out at Cabel for no reason every other page.  She also developed a new habit: thinking in circles.  Not just a few circles.  I would expect a tough choice to take up a few pages, maybe even a whole chapter.  People do go over things multiple times when making a hard decision.  Her choice to either isolate herself or stay with Cabel, however, appears to take up more words than the actual plot.  The entire book could easily have fit into fifty or so pages, and seemed to be filled up mostly with whining and her having the same debate with herself over and over again.

Gifted

Gifted appears to be about an extremely Machiavellian boy who learns that being a stuck-up jerk in preparation for future admiration is not as good as being a stuck-up jerk for present admiration.  He flat-out lies several times to further his own ends and is obsessed with two things: himself and revenge on the school bullies.  It's not a dark book, though.  It appears to be quite light and whimsical, in fact.  I actually like that the character is unsympathetic:  it's harder to write and makes for an interesting read.

iDrakula

iDrakula had more fluff per page than any book I have ever read, barring children's picture books.  Most pages had word counts that made Dr. Seuss look like Tolstoy.  The average page consists of an overwhelming amount of white space with a phone in the middle and a text message going on in the screen of said phone.  I haven't read the original Dracula, so I don't know how good of an adaptation it is.  In fact, I don't like adaptations in general, so it's probably a good thing for iDrakula that I haven't read its predecessor.  Expect your hands to get tired of page-turning long before your eyes get tired of word-scanning.

Lost Boys

Lost Boys is both complex and easy to keep track of.  The creep who fantasizes about children and the mentally unstable man who thinks he's a god are both not the serial killer.  I expected it to be one of the two and was pleasantly surprised by it not being either.  Good job for not being predictable, Orson Scott Card.  One of the characters, DeAnne, grated on my nerves whenever the writing was centered around her.  She treated her children like idiots, was unnecessarily preoccupied with keeping them safe (read: not letting the children play near the part of the sidewalk that has a rain gutter on the curb because she's afraid they'll fall in), she got mad at her husband for no reason in particular, and never treated any of her children like human beings.  She is one of the protagonists, and this is seen as a normal, good thing to do.  I'm not quite an adult myself, so maybe I'm a bit biased, but it does not seem correct to act like childhood is analogous to drunkenness: a child is not to be believed or trusted, ever, has to be watched like a hawk to keep from being a complete idiot or getting themselves hurt, and often-times needs to be fed complete lies -- not on sex or graphic violence or anything many wouldn't mind being kept from children, mind you -- because they are too stupid to comprehend even the most simple things.  I really do not like DeAnne.  I read through the entire book hoping that she would be killed off.  Otherwise, it was a wonderful book.  The last twenty pages or so turned the entire plot around. 

Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say "No" to Drugs

I realize that it's not a novel, or the kind of book I would usually ever touch with a ten-foot stick.  However, numerous websites have told me that this is one of the worst books in existence, so I had to see for myself.  Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say "No" to Drugs is about a young horse who feels compelled to copy whatever she sees.  She is lured into the "smoking games" and "drinking games" of the malicious Connie.  Luckily, her two wise sisters see what's happening, and knock the bad stuff out of her hoof.  Did I mention that these horses are drawn realistically and not anthropomorphically?  Their hooves must be made of something exceptionally sticky to be able to lift anything.  The prose is simplistic and repetitive.  The horses themselves consist of the cult of people who use drugs and want to convince others to do likewise and the innocent horse family ready to be led by their wiles if weak enough.  A good read for a laugh.

Pebble in the Sky

Well it's written by Asimov, so of course it's good.  I cringed a bit when Schwartz got telepathic powers -- surely Asimov could have invented something else to achieve the same result -- but it was overall a good book.  It did not so much keep me excited for the next page as the next paragraph.  The story was full of wonderful little details, like how people in the distant future have a different skull structure, fewer teeth, and a smaller appendix. 

Equal Rites

I must admit, I haven't read enough of the Discworld series to truly enjoy this.  It didn't really reference much outside of itself, but I felt as if I would have gotten a much richer experience by having read more Pratchett books beforehand.  It had a good combination of humor and plot, as most science fiction or fantasy humor books really try to hit the readers over the head with humor at the expense of the plot.  I hope to read more Pratchett books in the future.

Timeline

Though I'm reviewing two time travel books in a short time, I usually don't read time travel fiction, because there always seems to be a rush on things imposed solely by the author.  There was a fair amount of this in here, but most of it had the explanation that the time machine would disappear in a day.  The plot was decent.  The technology explanation seemed mildly believable, especially when they threw in facts that most people know.  I loved how they had to struggle with the languages of the time.  Most authors seem to think that people all spoke English centuries ago. 

The Red Badge of Courage

It would be hard to find fault with The Red Badge of Courage.  The main character goes from being somewhat of a selfish brat to a worthy man.  The other characters get jumbled up a bit -- I really couldn't keep track of who was who -- but that seems to be how it is in real life, unless someone has some sort of astonishing physical feature.  I've never even considered participating in a war, so I will trust others' accounts on how realistic it is.  From all that I had heard of it, I expected it to cover a longer period of time, but it put enough emotion and detail in the battlefield to make up for it.

The Stranger

The Stranger is a quirky little book about a man with very few feelings who commits a murder.  Nothing seems to matter to him throughout the book, and he is quite detached from everything else, with a vaguely friendly attitude and a willingness to take whatever is thrown at him.  He cares not for extreme happiness or extreme hatred.  The whole thing has a slightly creepy air to it, but it lacks the passion of many books about murders.  The author must be skilled to pull off a first-person perspective about an amiable young man who cares about nothing and kills a man.  I don't quite know what to make of The Stranger.

The Iron Ring

Why, after the failure of The Arkadians, would I read another book by Lloyd Alexander?  First of all, I am trying to go through the "A" section at my local library.  Second of all, authors can write good books and bad books: I loved Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground, but I consider The Idiot one of the worst books I have ever read.  The Iron Ring acted similarly.  While The Arkadians was a miserable failure, The Iron Ring was quite good.  The only major flaw was that it had enough characters for a book twice its size, which made those characters a little hard to keep track of at times.  Most of the characters, however, were very different from each other, which made it much less painful than the average too-many-characters book.  The story was quite interesting.  I enjoyed the ending and the nature of Jaya came as a surprise for me.  The entire premise, in fact, mesmerized me from the start.  Though many of the main characters seem to have values that are western as compared to the implied rest of the book's populace, it seems to do this less than most other books.  Tamar only starts to dislike the caste system near the end.  This quirky novel fascinates and compels, and anybody who picks it up will certainly want to follow it through to the end.

The Machine Stops

Have you ever read The World Inside?  The first part of The Machine Stops follows a similar story, but it predates The World Inside by decades.  The Machine Stops was a rare and early version of the story of people relying too heavily on a mechanical device, a story that has grown in popularity in years since.  Its prose is unparalleled, and its story provokes both thoughts and emotions.  The book, in 1909, predicted as strange and futuristic of things as teleconferences and social networking.  The mother, Vashti, expresses the traits that we all have and we choose to ignore.  The fact that we ignore those traits is one of those traits, by the way.  The son, Kuna, is the one we all hope survives, but he seems half-mad, and it is unknown whether his hopeful prophecy at the end is nothing more than a delusion.  The religion is also a nice touch.  If you choose to read The Machine Stops, you will come out glad you read this brilliant and deep little novella.

Toys

James Patterson is, quite frankly, a glorified editor.  Let me explain.  You might have noticed that nearly every single book he writes is written by with a coauthor.  He has publicly stated that the coauthor write the first draft and he takes it from there.  This means that the entire story, including every major detail and most of the minor ones, is written by the coauthor, and James Patterson simply makes it look like his style.  I am writing a book.  I know how first drafts work.  Most of the information in a book will be conveyed in the first draft.  He does little more than spruce up (or down) a few details, italicize the important parts, and break the chapters into three pages apiece. 

Now, for James Patterson to have his name in big letters and Neil McMahon's name in letters that are a similar color to the rest of the cover, smaller, and near the bottom, one would think that he did a lot of editing of that first draft.  It should come out bursting with imaginative prose, subtle details, and all the other non-plot things that, though there in a first draft, really start to shine in later drafts in a book.  Not so.  It reads like, well, a first draft.  Details are nonexistant.  I wouldn't be surprised if James Patterson took out the details from Neil McMahon's first draft.  You're supposed to feel for some of the characters, especially the protagonist and Shana (Hey!  That's my name spelled differently!  Why'd you have to make her a slut?), and, I presume, get some real "evil" vibes from the Toyz company.  I certainly didn't.  This is a great book if you are used to flimsy worlds made of cardboard and need every point drilled into your head in blunt phrasing.  Otherwise, stay away. 

On an ending note, I just looked it up, and there is apparently a different cover available for Toys that says that James Bond and Jason Bourne have just been topped!  This is a falsehood.  I didn't put any quotes around this because there aren't any on the cover.  I presume the author himself said it.

This World we Live in

This World we Live in is an imaginative book with compelling imagery.  It may be only becaue I'm partial to dystopias, but I love this book.  The best part is when they find the man who'd been eaten partially by his dog.  The way Susan Beth Pfeffer tells it, you will never get that image out of your head -- which says a good thing for her writing, but it is not the most pleasant of images.

Stardust

Stardust seems not to have been written by human hand.  The words on the pages must have been originally forged by the creatures of Faerie, or even the stars in the sky, and simply dictated to Neil Gaiman.  The story has many interesting and original parts -- there is a boat that fishes lightning -- and seems to run on pure imagination and cause the reader to stop for wistful glances.  I would recommend this book.

Siddhartha

When you read Siddhartha, and you journey with the protagonist through a wild variety of lifestyles, it is unlikely that you will not find at least one part of Siddhartha's life that is not unlike your own.  Siddhartha is about a man who thinks he finds perfection in almost every chapter and seems to find it at the end -- but it makes me wonder if had there been more chapters, Siddhartha would have realized yet again that what he had thought was wisdom was really folly.  The English translation that I read had a quite poetic prose, saying several thoughts in a single sentence.  It was incredible to me that so many things could be expressed in a mere 157 pages.

The Metamorphosis

I've been wanting to read this one for a long time.  It's a book that I've heard much about, and I have before read its famous first line.  The Metamorphosis is beautiful and thought-provoking.  Even as he tries his hardest to make his ppresence better for his family, he becomes more and more something they would be happier without.  Shortly after his death, they happily buy a new apartment.  When he tries to keep his human nature, he doesthe things that disgust his family the most.  This dark tale s a must-read.

Pathfinder

 Pathfinder has its own special brand of logic.  In Pathfinder, things that do not happen influence things that do happen.  Umbo went back and warned Rigg.  Rigg changed his actions.  Umbo then decided that he actually now didn't need to go back in time, because something that had happened when the warning wasn't in place now didn't happen.  It was a bit confusing, but I got the feeling that it broke logic up a bit.  Besides that, it was very well written, with an original storyline and several original elements in said storyline.

The War of the Worlds

This book has been sitting around unread for a while, and I thought I'd finally give it some love.  The War of The Worlds is, even after decades of people writing about similar things, very original and imaginative.  Every paragraph is useful and memorable.  The imagery seems realistic and grand.  The decrease in humanity of everyone near the end is portrayed very well, and certainly much better than most modern books.  I love it.

Chuck Dugan is AWOL

Chuck Dugan is AWOL manages to be lighthearted, yet not blatantly comedic, throughout the whole book, eve in scenes of injury and gunfire. It's not often that you find a book like that. It suffered from every character being every other character -- if you meet somebody new in this book, there's a strong likelihood that they've been mentioned before. Other than that, however, it was a good book. It balances suspense and humor without overdoing either.

This was meant to be posted yesterday.  It did not get posted because of a glitch in the system.

Night

Night, in just over a hundred pages, manages to completely capture both darkness and optimism.  It is about a young Jewish boy taken to concentration camps during the Holocaust.  He is starved and beaten, and, at the very end, he watches his father die.  Night is made all the better by being an autobiography.  I do have a question though.  I mean no disrespect, but when they were starving within an inch of their life and people were dying of hunger consistently in the cattle cars, why did they not resort to cannibalism?  I mean no offense by this question; it just seems the logical thing to do in such a situation.  That minor detail aside, Night was an excellent book that gives a unique perspective on the most terrifying and horrible event in recent history.

Speak

Speak is about a girl who loses and then regains her desire to talk at all after becoming a rape victim.  She goes through high school like this.  I cried at one particulalry poignant scene, where her only friend deserts her to be with a more popular crowd.  There isn't much to really say about Speak, as reading it is really the only way to know about it, moreso than in many other books.

The Arkadians

This is a what could have been a quite complex and interesting story.  It was hampered by two things.  The biggest hindrance was the the writer.  Lloyd Alexander has a thing about the reader always knowing what the motivation of every character is for every action.  Now, that isn't that bad in itself.  An author could really have something like that either way.  It's how he shows each character's motivation that weakens the book: by speech.  Even in the most unlikely ties, the characters will say exactly why they, or in some cases, another character, is doing something.  They can also be quite fond of talking to themselves for the same reason.  The writing style itself also has a lot of room  for improvement, giving this little gem quite early on: "If I didn't know I was awake, I'd think I was asleep."

The second thing that makes this book bad is the ending.  The truly evil baddies are burned in an all-consuming flame.  Fronto, a donkey who takes the whole book up in his quest to be human, is also in that flame... but guess what?  The author stated earlier on that he could also turn back into a human by being burned.  So all is good for the good guys.  Can't have one of them harmed.  That would just be awful, wouldn't it.  There are no less than three mairrages arranged between prospective couples in the book in the last fifteen or so pages.  The almost evil guy who was only a victim of circumstance gets off easy, and the only good guy not mairred seems to be the I-can't-believe-it's-not-a-satyr kid, who is too young.  Honestly, can anything turn out better at the end?  Based on the rest of the book, the ending is completely unrealistic in how happy it is.  The second most ludicrous happy ending I've ever read, rivaled only by Eoin Colfer's Airman.  This book had a decent story, but it was by no means a good book.

Ishi

Ishi was the last of his kind.  What makes this so special is that this is non-fiction, and it shows the history and personality of the last of a Native American tribe.  Ishi went from stone age to the modern age overnight, and this wonderful book tells of both im and his tribe.

Brian's Winter

Brian's Winter, like most survival in the woods stories, is a string of lucky accidents that cause a kid to survive who would have been dead within days.  The whole thing would have been a lot more complicated, for example, had he not had that extremely accurate shot on that moose.  The prose, on the other hand, is excellent, and seems quite close to human thought without being hard to read.  Unfortunately, it doesn't really make up for the fact that he gets by mostly on luck.

M is for Magic

Neil Gaiman's book, M is for Magic is, like all short story collections, hit-or-miss.  However, it is mostly hit.  The Case of Four and Twenty Blackbirds was one of the misses.  Books with a serious or modern tone that use fairy-tale and nursery rhyme characters have been done before, and often.  This one used characters from far too many nursery rhymes to be a good read.  It was like reading the little stories at the back of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: a lot of references just thrown out there trying to sound cool or funny, but quite tedious for somebody who doesn't know every single one.  Troll Bridge was a masterpiece.  Though a tad vulgar, it conveyed a deep message.  It had a feel to it of taking place in a world many times richer and more soulful than our own.  Don't Ask Jack was unmemorable.  It had a plot that has been done by several authors several times, and Neil Gaiman's rendition of it didn't exactly knock me out of my seat.  In fact, though I read it only a few hours ago, I had to look it up to refresh my memory.  The plot of How to Sell the Ponti Bridge was fantastic and well-thought out.  The only problem was the frame story: the Rogue's Club could have been left out entirely and it would have made the story much better.  October in the Chair was fun.  This one had both a good frame story and good main stories.  Even though it was not the main attraction, I particularly enjoyed the small story about the airport security guard.  Chivalry was hilarious.  The little details about sir Galaad giving pony rides to the neighborhood children and how the apple felt to the old lady made the story all he better.  The premise was incredible and original as well.  The Price had an exciting premise, but it could have been told better.  It definitely should have been longer.  I think I'd have liked it more from the perspective of the cat.  I've read Gaiman's work before, and The Price has little of his way with details.  How to Talk to Girls at Parties was hilarious, though the main character's friend seemed unusually dark for a humorous story.  His rough way with girls was shocking from beginning to end.  I was fascinated by the girls' stories.  The story, though small, was bursting with ideas, as if Gaiman had hundreds of them and wanted to stuff in as many as he could, which was not a bad overall effect.  Sunbird was a good read.  It was better than the average short story, but was not a masterpiece for Gaiman.  The Witch's Headstone was beautifully written, and by the end, I still couldn't tell if the witch was good or bad.  Most of the elements were either completely made up or taken from mythologies that I am not familiar with, so it was wonderful to read something fresh that hadn't been done hundreds of times, like most books and short stories seem to be.  Instructions probably belonged in another book.  I don't know what to make of it.  I would review it similarly to The Case of Four and Twenty Blackbirds, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt by saying that it belongs in another book.

Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Hello.  My nme is Shannah McGill, and I read a book every day.  I've been reading a book every day for years.  This blog will review, every day, one book.  Enjoy!

Always remember before reading my review: I WILL put spoilers, if you were planning to read that book.

Today's book is Abarat: Absolute Midnight by Clive Barker.   I haven't picked up an Abarat book in a long time, so this one had to refresh me on all of the characters, settings, and problems of the last books.  It did so reasonably well, and without one of those "explanatory chapters" som series like to put at the beginning.  It also had none of the obvious "recap dialogue" which is another favorite of some authors.  What I love about the Abarat is the lack of werewolves.  Unfortunately, there are dragons, but those are pretty much the only creatures that have been thought of before.  Most books seem to love to use magical creatures that have already been invented centuries ago and are extremely overused.  The Abarat, on the other hand, has geshrats, orange humanoids with large flaps of skin on their heads and four small horns.  One of my favorite creatues is the Johns, a person with enormous horns sticking out of his head with eight speaking heads sprouting from them.  Absolute Midnight gave a lot more attention to my favorite character: Christopher Carrion.  I love the story of the tender-hearted soul who is the youngest of a great dynasty of evil.  Christopher Carrion looks fierce, surrounding the lower half of his head with a liquid in which nightmares swim, but this dazzling and fearful lord of midnight is softspoken when not in battle.  This book does have its problems, though: especially a certain problem named Gazza.  Many book series these days have fomed the ugly hab it of getting a wonderful story going and then wrecking it by putting romace in.  I do not read romance novels.  They are boring and revolting, filled with kissng and pet names and all of that junk.  When a normal novel gets a romantic subplot, I cringe.  It could be a wonderful adventure, but no.  Gazza has to be the love interest.  There is no reason for him to be a love interest, or for a love interest to form anywhere in the series for Candy.  The fact that Gazza starts out as a scoundrel pointing a knife at Candy makes it all the more ludicrous.  Another flaw is the similarity of Rojo Pixler beingtaken over by the Requiax and Zephario Carrion beingtaken over by the Nephauree.  What's the likelihood that within an extremely short time, TWO people will be taken over by Lovecraft-style evils that hate all life?  The author, I assume, thinksthat it would be good writing to have that happen and then have it as a "theme" where they are "contrasted", when all it really does is take away from the coherency of the beautiful Abarat. 

Despite those setbacks, Abarat: Absolute Midnight is a good book overall, with colorful chracters and unique pictures splashed throughout.