The Places You Will Go

Mini Review: Ysabel

Ysabel (Simon & Schuster, 432 pages, ISBN: 978-0743252508) is the latest book by Guy Gavriel Kay, a fantasy writer who started out as Christopher Tolkien's assistant during the writing of The Silmarillion.

This is his 11th book. It's about a young boy, Ned, who accompanies his dad (a famous photographer) to Provence on a job and gets mixed up in a age-old feud between two historical figures doomed (?) to keep on being reborn and reenacting their quarrel.

The writing style is very relaxed and I liked that the lead character was a 15-year-old boy. One of the reasons (I realise) that I like children's books is because they don't get bogged down with stuff that I have developed an aversion for (sexual problems, biological clocks ticking furiously, to name a couple). In fact, I thought that Ysabel was a YA fantasy.

However, Kit at Kino said, "No, not YA. The imprint is not a YA imprint."

This annoyed me for a variety of reason, not all of them very logical. I'm as guilty as the next person of labelling and pigeon-holing books. But when Kit said what she did, I pompously replied, "Who cares who the publisher thinks should read the book. Readers make up their own minds."

This is true, but readers might never know the book exists if they tend to only mooch around the YA sections of bookstores.

Anyway, I have passed Ysabel on to be reviewed for the paper.

I liked it, liked especially the two teenage characters, Ned and Kate, who are just clever enough not to be maddening, and charmingly awkward and unsure of their own abilities and instincts. They are attractive characters whom I wanted to know more about as soon as I had met them.

The story is interesting. The way the events unfold keep you guessing and wanting more. However, I don't think Kay developed the plot sufficiently. Too many things are left unexplained and unresolved, and there isn't a sense of satisfaction and closure at the end of the book. Reading the final page I still didn't fully understand the whats, hows and whys of everything that had happened. I was surprised at how simply things were resolved and I continued wondering "Who? How come? What was that all about then?"

Maybe Kay was kept in the dark too? Perhaps his characters have yet to reveal themselves fully to him. Perhaps he intends to write a sequel in which all will be made clear as crystal.

Mini Review: Because of Winn-Dixie

BECAUSE OF WINN-DIXIE

By Kate Di Camiillo

Publisher: Candlewicj Press, 192 pages

India Opal Buloni, the lonely only daughter of the new preacher in town, meets a stray dog when she's out grocery shopping and decides to adopt him.

Winn-Dixie (the name of convenience store she frequents) is the moniker Opal chooses for her new pet and things begin to change for the 10-year-old from the moment this large, hairy, ugly mutt enters her life.

Love Walked In

LOVE WALKED IN
By Marisa de los Santos
Publisher: Viking, 307 pages
(ISBN: 978-0670916177)

I'm not normally a fan of chicklit but I loved this book. In fact, if I hadn't lent it to someone practically the moment I finished reading it, I'd be rereading it now.

Here's why I like it so much:

1. It makes me happy and peaceful and thoughtful. How many chicklit novels do that?

2. The heroine Cornelia Brown is kind and gracious and her head is screwed on the right way round and ever so securely. I like heroines you can admire and imagine as your best friend. I do not like heroines who are neurotic about their weight and obsessed with finding a man, and do stupid things like run up huge debts cos they are shopaholics, or lie in order to get a date. Nothing worse than a desperate woman. Brown is not desperate. Quite the oposite.

3. The other heroine, Clare, who is 11and lovely, vulnerable and adorable.

4. One of the male leads, a beautiful man called Mateo Sandoval who also happens to be sensitive, smart and generous in all ways. And he's straight!

5. The unpredictable storyline: Cornelia meets the man of her dreams (a Cary Grant lookalike). She then meets his daughter. And ...? I'm not saying the ending comes out of nowhere and bites you in the bum: As you turn the pages and learn more about the characters, you begin to see and suspect how things might turn out, but it's never ever a dead cert. De los Santos keeps you in suspense and guessing all the way, and the ending is one that leaves room for all kinds of wonderful possibilities and developments. I hope she writes a sequel.

P.S. Sarah Jessica Parker's production company has bought the film rights to this book and the movie will star Parker as Cornelia Brown. One word: Mistake!

Mini Review: Socrates in Love

Socrates In Love

By Kyoicho Katayama

Publisher: VIZ Media, 208 pages

This Young Adult love story tells of the innocent love affair between two classmates: Saku and Aki.

The latter is a pretty girl, romantic and just a little shallow - predictably so for someone of her tender years. She has a good heart though and she is sensitive and thoughtful.

Saku is a friendly, wise-cracking, laid-back kendo and rock fan. When he and Aki become friends, he is blissfully unaware of his schoolmates resentment and jealousy.

It takes him awhile to realise how much he likes Aki. In fact, Saku is so clueless that he ignores every single one of Aki's hints, even the most blatant.

To her credit, Aki behaves in a dignified and graceful manner throughout. And once Saku gets his act together and starts seeing his buddy as the lovable girl she is, he too reveals himself to be a warm, generous, loyal and considerate person.

Unfortunately, Aki is diagnosed with a terminal illness and Saku has to learn to carry on by himself.

It's always good to read a Japanese novel that isn't brimming with sex and violence. That's why I enjoy Botchan and Totto-Chan so much. However, this story reminded me too much of those awful Japanese soap operas where one of the leads almost always dies.

Still, at least the writing isn't overly sentimental, and the writer's portrayal of teenagers and their feelings, behaviour and actions is accurate (yes, I remember what it was like!). 

This book is a bestseller in Japan so I'm thinking it's lost something in translation.

Honestly, I can't see why it made such an impression. It's an easy and pleasant read, but it didn't really touch me or grab my attention.

Saku and Aki are two nice kids, but I don't think that they are terribly interesting or special.

I think I'd have liked it much more as a teenager though. I remember being very taken with a Japanese soap opera in which the girl, dying of leukemia (or was it congenital heart disease?), falls in love with a bloke who mistakes her for a half-sister and so, nobly, rejects her although he stupidly doesn't tell her why. All very complicated and melodramatic and tragic and sentimental, but I loved it.

Socrates in Love should be a hit with emotional teens age 13 to 16.

P.S. Full marks for the pretty cover!

Mini Review: Totto-Chan

Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window

By Tetsuko Kuroyanagi

Translated by Dorothy Britton

Illustrated by Chihiro Iwasaki

Publisher: Kodansha Europe

This is my first Japanese children's book, recommended to me by my bookseller friend, Kit, when she found out that I was trying to read more Japanese fiction.

However, it's actually not a work of fiction, but based on the childhood of its author (a popular Japanese actress, author and talk-show host, philanthropist, UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and WWF-Japan director), focusing specifically on her experiences as a student at Tomoe Gaukuen, an experimental school in Tokyo, Japan.

The school was founded by one Sosaku Kobayashi who obviously loved children and had unique ideas about how they should be raised and enducated.

Reading about the school, I was filled with envy and longing. Tomoe no longer exists, but educators can learn much from its example.

The book describes Totto-Chan's adventures as a curious, imaginative little girl. She is deemed "impossible" by the teachers in her first school and is expelled, but Kobayashi welcomes her with open arms, and, for Totto, Tomoe is a dream come true, a place where she is allowed to achieve her fullest potential and given the freedom to explore her suroundings and express herself to her heart's content.

If only schools like that existed today. I'd enrol my kids in a flash.

Totto-Chan is broken up into very short chapters, each one relating a short incident or commenting on an interesting aspect of the school or Totto's life and upbringing. It's an easy read - simple, unaffected and charming - and also rather funny.

Totto and her classmates are cute, but the hero of the book is, without a doubt, Kobayashi who was ever optimistic and always ready to see the good in every child.

For more info on Kuroyanagi, read Wikipedia's entry.

Mini Review: Snakes & Earrings

I'm not very familiar with Japanese fiction having read only three or four books by Kazuo Ishiguro, but several friends swear by it, especially Haruki Murakami's novels.

Yesterday I started and finished a Japanese novella that made me think that it's about time I paid more attention to other writers from that country.

The book is Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara and it won her Japan's top literary prize (at age 20). It's about Lui, a Barbie-girl who meets Ama, a literally fork-tongued punk, and is introduced to the pleasures and pains of body piercing, tattooing and pervy sex via his tattoo-artist friend Shiba.

Shiba is a sadist and this suits self-destructive Lui just fine. Her inability to connect emotionally and honestly compels her to form near-anonymous and degrading relationships with these similar disenfranchised and emotionally bereft youths and from Shiba and the nipple-fixated Ama she gets an ample helping of agonising sex, which she faces and even solicits with an odd mixture of nonchalance and breathless anticipation.

Things get violent and sick, but personally speaking, I was too fascinated and to stop reading.

It's not written for teenagers but I can imagine teens being absolutely riveted by this book. Not only is it easy to read (the language is simple, stark and blunt yet vivid, evocative and forceful), it describes stuff that's thoroughly kinky and forbidden, thus endlessly, deliciously, compellingly appealing.

However, I'm not sure if I'd encourage my children (if they were teenagers) to read it. If they really wanted to I'd want a lot of discussion before and after. At very least the sex and violence, explicit as they are, are not at all gratuituos and that's much, much more than I can say of a lot of the coyly titillating rubbish on the Young Adult Fiction shelves these days.

Mini Review: Guitar Girl

Guitar Girl

By Sarra Manning

Publisher: Speak

For a little light reading I thought I'd try Sara Manning's Guitar Girl. It's about a rock band callled The Hormones, fronted by 16-year-old Molly Montgomery.

(Flipping through I'd seen references to NME and Glastonbury rock festival. Cool! Anything to remind me of my youth!)

Well, I started reading it last night and, yes, it's an easy-read and quite entertaining, but if you have ever been in a band you know it's also a lot of rubbish.

For a start, it's just not convincing how three teenage girls learn to play guitar and drums and, just like that, start writing and performing songs about Hello Kitty. Even if they all comrpise just three chords.

What's even more unbelievable is how they have no amp problems. That's impossible considering how clueless they are. Like they're just getting up on stage and playing without plugging in their guitars. Crazy! (And not in a good way.)

Still, this book is obviously not meant to be a true-to-life account of a band's rise to fame. It's just meant to be fun and so it is!

It's worth reading epsecially if.

1. You've always wanted to be in a band.

2. Always fantasised about dating a sulky Britpop-type rock star.

3. Want something you can read even if most of your brains are on leave.

Mini Review: Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception

Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception
By Eoin Colfer
Publisher: Puffin/Hyperion

What It's About:
Well, you know the drill, or you do if you've been reading since the first book. If not, then Artemis Fowl is this boy genius and criminal mastermind who keeps getting mixed up with the fairy police, in particular elf Holly Short. At the end of the book before this one, Artemis had his mind wiped by the Lower Element Police's technical wiz, Foaly (a centaur), after he helped them apprehend an evil pixie named Opal Koboi and just as he was developing a conscience.

Mini Review: Century

CENTURY

By Sarah Singleton

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

What It's About: Century is a house, the home of a pair of sisters, Mercy and Charity, their father and the household staff. Here it is always winter and each day passes in exactly the same way. The girls rise in the night and go to bed at dawn. They cannot remember it ever being different.

The book opens with a haunting. Mercy can see ghosts, but one day she sees one that has never appeared to her before - a woman floating beneath the ice in a pond. It scares her, not because it is a ghost, which she is used to, but because it means a change in her daily routine. It is a signal, perhaps, that something is wrong. 

Mercy wakes one morning soon after to find a snowdrop on her pillow. She then meets a mysterious young man in the grounds of the house who tells her that her life is not what it seems. Slowly, it becomes clear that the family is caught in a web of secrets and lies, and Mercy must find a way to break free.

What I Liked About It: I was reminded of the film, The Others, in which there are also two children who live in a twilight world. Century is as creepy as that movie and it's not because there are shrieking banshees everywhere or bloody beheadings on every other page. The eerieness is conveyed in a much more subtle manner by the author who describes this nighttime world so well that I felt I was walking through the shadowy garden paths with Mercy, and could see the moonlight fall like silver on my path; and feel and taste the cold air.

There is also a sense of taut and silent tension, so extreme that it's you almost dare not breathe as you read about Mercy trailing after a ghostly child and stepping into another world which holds the key to all the secrets of her existence.

It's been a long time since a book scared me so. It's a feeling both horrid and delicious.

If You Like the Sound of this Book, You Should Also Try: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

 

Mini Review: Get Spooked - Eerie Tales to Chill Your Bones

GET SPOOKED: EERIE TALES TO CHILL YOUR BONES
By Freaky Nick
Publisher: Times Editions, 142 pages
(ISBN: 9833001068)

What It's About: Get Spooked is a new series of ghost story collections. Each book is supposed to contain stories that stick to a particular theme. Most of the time the themes seem pretty general though, as you can see from the one I've just read.The two collections mentioned in the back of the book are Terrifying Tales Untold (although, now that they're in a book, shouldn't they be Terrifying Tales Told?) and Experience the Unexpected. There's another title, Spirits of the Forest, listed on Amazon.com.