How to read the pieces from this book: 1. Click on the embedded link to the [music] in the title of the poem. 2. Listen on repeat while reading. ____...
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At some point, the head noise of adult life dulls out a vital sense that kids know deep down in their bones: sometimes what you’re looking for is also looking for you.
Charles “Charlie” Ward is almost 13, and newly-made man of the house after his fath...more
At some point, the head noise of adult life dulls out a vital sense that kids know deep down in their bones: sometimes what you’re looking for is also looking for you.
Charles “Charlie” Ward is almost 13, and newly-made man of the house after his father’s recent death in a suspicious hit-and-run “accident.” Charlie’s a Chicago kid who’s looking forward to losing his troubles in a summer of video games, horror novels, ghost stories, and baseball with his friends, until certain doom hijacks his plans: a family vacation in the Ozarks with his mother and annoying eight-year-old brother, Alex. But the summer has its own plans for Charlie, who finds himself headed for Crooked Hills, the most haunted town in America, and home to Maddie Someday, a spirit who wanders the woods at night, in search of children she find by the blood-red light of her ruby ring.
Cullen Bunn, who has written for Marvel and DC Comics, Wildstorm, and IDW, is also author of the horror noir series, The Damned, The Sixth Gun, and Like a Chinese Tattoo. His new juvenile fiction series, Crooked Hills, is a cobwebby trap-door that suddenly appears in the ceiling of your clean, new, suburban home: a portal for children to climb into the ghostly back rooms and hidden spaces of supernatural fiction. And unlike the recent turn that tween supernatural fiction has taken into bodice-ripping, fashion-conscious, narcissistic soap-opera, Cullen Bunn delivers the real goods: worms, spiders, headless chickens fleeing bloody axes, kidnapped little brothers, and girls with slingshots who can track ghost dogs by moonlight.
Crooked Hills is a series you’ll want to kid to read, or better yet, to read together, because all horror and supernatural fiction fans know that the prickling, shuddersome feeling that comes from a good ghost story is no cheap thrill, it’s a vital connection to something larger and and deeper and more shadowy: a key to what’s haunting you.
Forthcoming in February 2012: Cullen Bunn’s,“Creeping Stones and Other Stories.” Individual stories to appear digitally leading up to book’s release.(less)
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L.J.
is now following Rick's reviews
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Soulstice: Luna’s Dream by Lance Dow and Keana Texeira (613 pages/Red Tide Publishing, 2010) ISBN : 9780578053721
Soulstice: Luna’s Dream is part one in a four-part saga about vampires and werewolves co-written by 15-year-old pop-singer/model Keana Texei...more
Soulstice: Luna’s Dream by Lance Dow and Keana Texeira (613 pages/Red Tide Publishing, 2010) ISBN : 9780578053721
Soulstice: Luna’s Dream is part one in a four-part saga about vampires and werewolves co-written by 15-year-old pop-singer/model Keana Texeira and screenwriter, Lance Dow. Texeira will star in the movie version of the book, which was publicized for release in 2011 but has apparently overslept in its coffin. Soulstice is a teen romance written in the voice of its 15-year-old narrator, Luna Tremaine, a vampire who breaks the cultural code of her species by... you guessed it... falling in love with a human boy.
Before you read any further let me do you a favor: if you are a fan of well-written gothic/horror/supernatural fiction, simply skip Soulstice. I doubt you even need me to tell you that. If you are a fan of the Twilight series, you should also skip Soulstice. Frankly, everyone should skip it. However, I have made it a personal point to only write negative reviews when a book goes beyond being junk reading and crosses baldly into the territory of, as Robert Smith sang it, jumping someone else's train.
Don't get me wrong. There is a longstanding tradition of theft in literature, music, art- in all of human nature. No one really invents the wheel: we steal the idea from nature, and then we steal it from each other, making improvements along the way. The line betweeen plagiarisim and inpiration is really the difference between knock-off and innovation: one is an assisted act of creation, fueled by the influences/samples/riffs of others. The other is a cheap vampire.
For fans of the Twilight Series, (and I am not one, but let's just pretend for a moment) Soulstice is going to seem groan-inducingly familiar: the story takes place in a remote town in the Pacific Northwest, it is about vampires falling in love with humans, the trials and tribulations of high school, love at first sight, feats of inhuman strength, vampires defending the humans they love against other vampires, rebellion against cultural taboos, pop culture and fashion, running really fast in the forest, jumping really far, mood swings, brooding, emotional outbursts, and blood. Don’t forget the fashion-conscious-yet-eco-friendly plugs for hemp, as well as Native Americans who appear as caricatures of doomed wisdom.
Soulstice is written in the confessional style it seems pop culture ascribes to being the universal voice of teens everywhere. Texeira’s age is a consideration, but not an excuse to confuse bad writing with “voice.” To be fair, Texeira hits her stride near the end of the book with fast-paced, truly gory fight scenes. If all of Soulstice were written with that kind of focus, wiped clean of asides, self-conscious meanderings off-topic, and tedious scene-setting blow-by-blows, (now I’m parking my bike, now I’m putting on my headphones) it could at least be a guilty pleasure to read at the gym.
There is very little in Soulstice that is not derivative of Stephenie Meyers’ world (itself filled with bald plagiarism of Anne Rice, but don't get me started), which begs the question: why does Soulstice bother itself with being about vampires anyway? If nothing new is being brought to the mythology, why not do something creative with the concept and take the passionate, fresh, bloodthirsty focus of a teenage perspective and apply it to a new vein? Since the Twilight Series has done this decades' work of re-opening the pop-lit artery, the answer seems to be that there’s a feeding frenzy on for derivative blood money.
Meanwhile, a generation of new hemophiles will eventually (hopefully) figure out for themselves that reading books like Soulstice is about as satisfying as a bottle of cold, skunky Tru Blood.(less)
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Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys Kay S. Hymowitz, Basic, $25.95 (187p) ISBN 978-0-465-01842-0
What do Adam Sandler movies, Maxim magazine, and South Park have in common? According to journalist Hymowitz's unpersuasive polemi...more
Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys Kay S. Hymowitz, Basic, $25.95 (187p) ISBN 978-0-465-01842-0
What do Adam Sandler movies, Maxim magazine, and South Park have in common? According to journalist Hymowitz's unpersuasive polemic, they are compelling evidence that "crudity is at the heart of the child-man persona," an increasingly ubiquitous personality type among men age 20–40 who don't grow up because they don't have to. Weaving together the socioeconomic and cultural paradigm shifts of the last half-century, Hymowitz identifies the appearance of "a new stage of life" in developed societies--pre-adulthood--where the traditional life-script: grow up, marry, have children, and die, is now: "What do I want to do with my life?" But in a world where social demands no longer equate manhood with maturity, frat dudes, nerds, geeks, and emo-boys can remain in suspended postadolescence, while women, whose biological clocks are ticking, are forced to choose between single parenthood and casting their lot with a "child-man." It's a provocative argument that Hymowitz advances with considerable spirit, but she conflates character with maturity, and her blaming feminism for the infantilization of men wrests more power and control away from men, suggesting that they can't develop a sense of responsibility without a woman's help.(less)
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American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It) Jonathan Bloom, Da Capo, $26 (368p) ISBN 978-0-7382-1364-4
Since the Great Depression and the world wars, the American attitude toward food has gone from...more
American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It) Jonathan Bloom, Da Capo, $26 (368p) ISBN 978-0-7382-1364-4
Since the Great Depression and the world wars, the American attitude toward food has gone from a "use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without" patriotic and parsimonious duty to an orgy of "grab-and-go" where food's fetish and convenience qualities are valued above sustainability or nutrition. Journalist Bloom follows the trajectory of America's food from gathering to garbage bin in this compelling and finely reported study, examining why roughly half of our harvest ends up in landfills or rots in the field. He accounts for every source of food waste, from how it is picked, purchased, and tossed in fear of being past inscrutable "best by" dates. Bloom's most interesting point is psychological: we have trained ourselves to regard food as a symbol of American plenty that should be available at all seasons and times, and in dizzying quantities. "Current rates of waste and population growth can't coexist much longer," he warns and makes smart suggestions on becoming individually and collectively more food conscious "to keep our Earth and its inhabitants physically and morally healthy." (Nov.)(less)
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Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts Gregory David Roberts (933 pages/St. Martin’s Griffin)
Shantaram parallels its author’s own true story of escaping a maximum security prison in Australia and living as a drug runner and passport forger in Bom...more
Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts Gregory David Roberts (933 pages/St. Martin’s Griffin)
Shantaram parallels its author’s own true story of escaping a maximum security prison in Australia and living as a drug runner and passport forger in Bombay during the 1980’s. Roberts was eventually captured and forced to serve his 19 year sentence, where it took him “thirteen long and troubled years to write Shantaram. My hands, damaged by the residual effects of frostbite, suffered so badly during the winters in the punishment unit of the prison that many pages of the manuscript journal, which survived and which I still have with me, are stained and streaked with my blood.” Shantaram is narrated by the protagonist Lin, who ends up living in a slum where he runs a makeshift medical clinic. His physical and philosophical struggles form the heart of the novel’s emotional thrust. Can someone be a good person after making many mistakes, or is it possible, “to do the wrong thing for the right reasons?” This moral argument becomes the lynchpin of the story and the heart of a deep conflict over where to invest a moral authority. Lin observes both fault and favor with society’s ways of dispensing justice, comparing the cruelty of the prison system with the communal compassion and punishment he sees meted out in the slums in Bombay, but all the while considering himself an outsider, no matter how desperately he wishes otherwise. Shantaram is an uneven, messy book involving tens of characters, plotline after plotline, and the physical and emotional geography of what is essentially ten years worth of the author’s life, and the writing reflects that inconsistency. At its best moments, Shantaram is alive and eloquent with true self-expression, while at other times it collapses into cliché so groan-inducing it’s hard to believe the same author wrote these lines. In the end, it is a sense of the deep-down desperation of a man who must tell his story that keeps you reading. One way or another, Shantaram grips you by the hand and says, let me tell you a story that matters.(less)
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