book review: life as we knew it

[photo credit: Giant Moon by Timmy Toucan]
Life As We Knew It is a book by Susan Beth Pfeffer about survival through massive disaster.

Miranda and her family live in kind of rural Pennsylvania and she keeps a diary. She used to figure-skate and her dad lives in Massachusetts with his new wife. Then an asteroid hits the moon, knocking it way closer to earth. I do not know how possible that is no matter how dense that asteroid was, but don’t worry too much about it, because the take-off point is about what a giant disaster this is for the globe. The moon isn’t crashing into the Earth or anything, but the changes to tides cause tsunamis and earthquakes and volcanoes. There are ash-clouds and it might be the end of the world.

Miranda and her family are better off than some people. Her mom goes into survivalist mode right away and they stockpile food. They have a wood stove and land to get firewood from. They look after their elderly neighbour but other than that it’s a strict “family first” policy. This all happens in the spring, and things just keep on happening through the (almost) year the diary covers.

The big thing is Miranda dealing with how abnormal this makes her life. She vacillates between self-pity and being really strong in a way that feels realistic to how a person outside a story does. I think that’s something that the diary form for a book like this does really well. In Carbon Diaries 2015 the author used the same diary format to really get at what day-to-day life would be like if everything would be different (though the Carbon Diaries was less apocalyptic than Life As We Knew It).

Apart from the cause of the disasters in this book I feel like it’s a really good realistic look at what life immediately post-disaster would be like. There aren’t any zombies (The Walking Dead) or radioactive wastes (Z for Zachariah), just terrible weather and not enough food. I appreciated that it takes place outside an urban centre, so things like looting and violence are more ominous and less omnipresent.

Very good science fiction for YAs who like realistic fiction.

book review: bad island

Doug TenNappel’s Bad Island is a comic about a family of four who go out on a sailboat vacation and end up shipwrecked on an island filled with strange creatures. It’s also about an intergalactic being who went to war despite its parent’s wishes. The comic has lots of good family banter (everyone is funny and trying to make the best of a bad situation) and excellent splash pages of pople running from rock monsters or whatever. I love TenNapel’s drawing style. The intergalactic being story was a little bit confusing with its early lack of context, but it all works out.

book review: the annotated northwest passage

Scott Chantler’s The Northwest Passage is a comic about fur traders and family and lots of action in Rupert’s Land back in 1755. Charles Lord, the governor, is heading back to England but before the supply ship arrives, one of his old Cree friends ends up shot and brought into camp, with tales of a vision of death. Then the French show up and take over the Company’s fort, Lord escapes into the wilderness, family relations are strained, and he gets the old gang back together again to retake what’s his. This is historical fiction with a very action-movie bent to it. The characters are all made up and there is a bit of Die Hard-ishness, especially in the final big set piece. The dialogue wasn’t great (very pulpy), but the clean cartoony style almost makes you overlook the amount of violence going on in the story. It was a fun read, but nothing earth-shattering.

book review: trailers

Trailers, by Mark Kneece, is about Josh, a kid living in a trailer park with a terrible mother and his younger siblings. His mom kills her drug dealer/pimp sort of person at the beginning of the story so Josh buries the body out in the woods. An incredible amount of things happen to him afterwards as a result. Late in the book, he tells the popular girl who’s trying to be his friend that there’s no way she could really understand what he’s going through. Then he lays it all out there and it sounds insane. Not in a wacky kind of way, but in a “Why is life so terrible?” kind of way.

I wasn’t a huge fan of this one, but it wasn’t terrible. The art was a little rougher than I’d have liked and nothing seemed very believable (but that may be me talking from my experience of a much different kind of family).

book review: level up

Gene Yang’s Level Up is a comic about videogames and “fulfilling your destiny.” The protagonist is basically deciding between the pleasurable life of videogames and eating bitterness (they’re an Asian family) and becoming a doctor to fulfill his parents’ dreams for him. In the end the negotiation is made quite well. It’s not just a simple “I’ve got to do my own thing!” kind of story, but is a story of the complexity involved in doing what you love.

Thien Pham’s art was a little cutesy for my taste (I much prefer the bolder stylings from Yang’s American Born Chinese, for example) but it gets the job done.

book review: overqualified

Overqualified is a novel told in job application cover letters. It’s by Joey Comeau, who does the comic A Softer World and wrote the zombie novel One Bloody Thing After Another. (I haven’t read his latest, Bible Camp Bloodbath yet, but I will.)

When I told my girlfriend about the concept of this book she thought it sounded neat. Then I read her one of the letters and she said “Oh. It’s not very realistic. It’s just a gimmick. No one would actually write that.” And I was a little thrown off. I must have read it wrong, or prefaced it wrong. I mean, of course no one actually would write about their dead brother and throwing lightbulbs off an apartment building in a job application to GE, but it’s beautiful and sad. Or beautiful and angry like his letter to Gillette about razor-blades and sex. Or beautiful and cynical like his Hallmark greeting card ideas:

Front cover is a picture of a puppy dog with big, sad eyes. A Golden Retriever, maybe. Some breed that everyone loves, something vulnerable. The text on the front reads: “You think love has to last forever for it to be real. You think it isn’t true love unless it lasts until one of us is dead.” Inside text: “That isn’t love. That’s dog fighting.”

In every case there’s this desperation and weirdness that was weird and painful and amazing.

It’s not a clever story, which you might think it would be, with the tagline I gave it above. It’s just a weirdly emotional one about a man who’se trying to hold on to some sort of memory or reality by writing to corporations to the nonhuman beings that have all the power in our world. Reality shifts about him as he talks about all his many qualifications, but his pain remains constant.

So I should revise my original words. Overqualified is a dark, funny story about pain. Told in cover letters.

book review: one bloody thing after another

Joey Comeau’s book One Bloody Thing After Another, keeps on getting billed as a zombie book. I bought it direct from his hands at Comix & Stories in Vancouver, asking “That’s the zombie one, right?” (and Emily Horne said, “Of course it is; it’s got a kitten on the cover!”). But it isn’t really a zombie book. It’s a ghost story and a juvenile romance/delinquency story and a story about family and a being crazy and letting people see story and a breaking glass story, but zombies? Sure there are a few, and they’re kind of terrifying, but it’s this cryptic weird emotional kind of terrifying that you have to turn the music up really loud so you can’t pay attention to the bad shit going down. It’s not a book about “oh no it’s the end of the world and zombies!” but about “oh no the world keeps on happening and nobody cares about your zombies/ghosts/idiot-dogs but you.” Which is kind of scarier.

It was a beautiful book and doesn’t really deserve to be lumped into any zombie fashions going around these days. I’m just saying.

book review: man in the dark

Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark was short and a good example of why genre labels are weird. Though this one has a reality shifting character who travels between this world and a world where America is in civil war (and the Yankees and Rockettes have switched roles), because it’s Paul Auster it counts as literature. Weird as hell, but not to be found in the SF section. It’s a short book and as always when I finished it I asked myself why I don’t own everything he’s ever written.

I was trying to read it yesterday on my way out to a family gathering but got dirty looks from the people I shared the back seat of Sri’s Civic with. It was important I listen to the litany of death crime and fear that comes out of my aunt’s mouth I guess, instead of reading about a man with a broken leg and his creation who doesn’t want to kill him. Selah.

overheard complexity

I’m shelving picture books in Children’s and there are two young women with a stroller and a little kid running around/being carried. The non-stroller pusher is obviously pregnant.

Stroller: So you ready for all the diapers and shit again.
Pregnant: Eh, it’s not so bad this time. Jamie’s pretty excited. Not like last time with Marcus. He and my stepmom wanted me to get an abortion so bad… but I told them no way.
Stroller: Man, I wish my mom had told me to get an abortion.

The conversation went on with so many names being thrown around of kids step-fathers, step-siblings, exboyfriends’ girlfriends/stepmothers. I was trying to keep it all straight but it was like the first time reading a Russian novel where every character has 17 names. Though I don’t think anyone in the conversation was referred to twice.