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<![CDATA[Kater added 'If You Follow Me']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/81106108
to: If You Follow Me (Paperback)byMalena Watrous
Would I have adored this book so much if I hadn't been an English teacher in Japan myself? I don't know. All I can say is that it hooked me from the first letter, in which Marina's supervisor chides her for not following _gomi_ (garbage) law. Suddenly I could remember myself trying to figure out if my garbage was -moeru- (burnable) or not, and where to put it, and all the million other ways a foreigner could make mistakes in Japan.
While this book is set in Japan, it's not just about Japan. Nor is it exactly about teaching recalcitrant students, coming to terms with being bi, or grieving after the death of a parent. It's about all of those things, and more. While the amusing and true-to-life experiences of a JET (foreign exchange teacher) were what sucked me in, the amusing and heartfelt look at the characters kept me going even when the story made me cry. Watrous makes no character a paragon, but shows us just enough about their flaws to make us pity them, and in most cases, like them. No one felt like a stereotype or cliche.
I usually don't like novels, especially ones that make me cry. So it was with great surprise that I found myself not wanting to put the book down, skipping things I needed to do just to read a few more chapters. I usually don't give a book this many stars, but I felt that any book that could overcome my depressing-novel prejudice and make me enjoy it this much must be doing something very, very right.
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<![CDATA[Kater added 'The Dark Divine']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/80359971
to: The Dark Divine (Hardcover)byBree Despain
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
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<![CDATA[new comment from Kater]]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/80359971
Kater's review of
The Dark Divine byBree Despain
I mean um, no. No he's not.
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<![CDATA[Kater added 'Great Expectations The Graphic Novel: Original Text']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/79991688
to: Great Expectations The Graphic Novel: Original Text (Paperback)byCharles Dickens
Since I was forced to read this (the real version) in high school and hardly remember a word of it, I thought it might be nice to try again, this time with pictures. I have to say, adding pictures to classic novels makes a whole lot of sense. This time around, I could actually follow the plot, though a lot of the characters' motivations were baffling to me. Why, for example, was Pip so aghast when he found out who gave him the money to become a gentleman? Why was he so keen on marrying an ice-cold bitch, when there were surely plenty of other women in London? This is of a series of books written to help students comprehend the classics, and I think it's a fabulous idea. There's a lot to discuss in these novels, especially about the huge societal difference vis-a-vis class distinctions, but even bright, well-read teenagers can have a hard time plowing through Dickens' fruitcake-dense prose. Having an abridged version, with pictures makes it comprehensible.
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<![CDATA[Kater added 'Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You: A Memoir']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/79826814
to: Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You: A Memoir (Hardcover)bySean Thomas
This book is a funny, yet exceptionally crass memoir of one man's experience with dating. He's so vulgar that the only thing that redeemed him to me was his obvious fondness for short women. (Naturally, this preference shows good taste.) The in-your-face carnal descriptions, combined with the crude language almost made me put the book down. (And the Britishisms make it even worse. "Snogging" and "Shagging" sound like things you have to wear a hard hat and have a union card to do. Not to mention that the "c" word is even less palatable than the f-bomb). I did finish it, and enjoy it, because when he was funny, he made me laugh out loud.
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<![CDATA[Kater added 'I Don't Know How She Does It']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/79138611
to: I Don't Know How She Does It (Paperback)byAllison Pearson
On one hand, this is a funny, over-the-top "we hear you" novel about women for women. In that it succeeds. The characters are well realized, and exaggerated without veering into implausible. But it's more than that too. Pearson's prose is spot on and witty, the kind of sentences that make you need to read them out loud to the people you're in the room with.
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<![CDATA[Kater added 'Ash']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78806391
to: Ash (Hardcover)byMalinda Lo
In this otherwise straightforward retelling of Cinderella, Lo has reinterpreted the fairy godmother as a dark sidhe whose motives are not platonic. She's also introduced a new character, the King's huntress, so that the love story can be between two women. While there is a prince looking for a bride, Ash isn't much taken with him.
The writing is lovely and well-paced, and if you adore fairy tales, you'll find much to like both in the familiar story and in the fairy tale vignettes intersperced within the book.
The weakness of this novel was that it wasn't very original. Yes, it was nice to see a little gender exploration, but what role exactly did the King's huntress play in society? There's some talk of philosophers and their differences with the greenwitches, and she hinted at a cool masked revelry that took place during "Yule" but the details were so solidly European that it felt like a carbon copy McFantasyland to me. For me, much of the joy of fantasy comes from the setting.
I also didn't quite like how much Ash had to do to maintain the relationship. The huntress invites Ash to attend the hunt, which means that Ash must indebt herself deeply to the fairy in order to have the right clothes. The huntress had to have known that that would happen, but she didn't seem to care. It made Ash take a more active role in the plot, but it also made the huntress seem ambivalent. Ambivalence is not what heroines seek in a lover.
I feared at one point that it was going to be a cliffhanger with a sequel, but it wasn't. It just ended rather quickly, and I thought Ash's debt with the fairy should have had harsher consequences. As it was, she got off so easily that I felt I missed the climax and went straight to the denoutment.
Still not a bad read if you're on a plane: entertaining despite its predictability.
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<![CDATA[Kater added 'Jailbait Zombie']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/77713278
to: Jailbait Zombie (Felix Gomez #4)byMario Acevedo
This is as hard boiled a noir thriller as you can get, with a dash of dark fantasy thrown in. Felix Gomez, who apparently has three other books behind him, is a vampire detective, at home with the paranormal and the gritty underworld both. The short chapters cut off right at the cliff, so the action keeps the story moving along quickly. The prose is extremely curt, which works well with this sort of story, but got a little grating at points. The sex and violence are both gratuitous, the latter more than the former. Be prepared for squick.
I read this differently than I'd read a lot of fiction, given that it was in the same subgenre that I write in. I loved some of the things he did with vampires, some of the teminology he chose. For example, calling humans they drink from "chalices," and having the dark spirit that animates them the kundilini noir. Don't know what that means, but it sounds pretty cool. I also like that the vampires have to take their contact lenses out in order to hypnotize someone, though the protaganist did it so often with dirty hands that I had sympathetic conjunctivitis. As usual, didn't like the near godlike powers the vampires had--I prefer heros to superheroes, but I seem to be in the minority.
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<![CDATA[Kater added 'Panverse One']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/77697349
to: Panverse One (Paperback)byDario Ciriello
This is an anthology of five novellas that I got as a review copy from a friend of a friend at WFC. I've already written an extensive review, which I'm trying to place somewhere since Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing is ending.
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