Chloe’s older sister, Ruby, is the girl everyone looks to and longs for, who can’t be captured or caged. When a night with Ruby’s friends goes horribly wrong and Chloe discovers the dead body of her classmate London Hayes left floating in the reservoir, Chloe is sent away from town and away from Ruby. But Ruby will do anything to get her sister back, and when Chloe returns to town two years later, deadly surprises await. London might not be dead after all, Ruby is hiding deadly secrets, and something in the reservoir wants to find Chloe…

First, a slight disclaimer. Nova is a friend(ly acquaintance) of mine, and she actually mentioned this book to me in passing ages before it was finished up or sold. Since she’s very close with her younger sister and knows that I’m very close with my older sister, she mentioned to me she was writing a book about, well, sisters. And at its heart, all fantastical elements aside, that’s what Imaginary Girls is: a story about sisters.

That’s the level where the book got me. It’s narrated by Chloe, a younger sister who was essentially raised by Ruby, her older sister — and oh yeah, did I mention they live in a tiny town in upstate New York? Just like my sister and I did, growing up? So for Chloe, Ruby has always been this larger-than-life figure, a celebrity in their home town. Chloe’s internal struggle between wanting to be herself, not just Ruby’s Little Sister, but also wanting everyone to know about her connection to Ruby and how she’s Ruby’s favorite person, were so spot-on that it ached (and frankly it astounded me that this book was written by an older, not younger, sibling). And all the identifying I did made the book’s escalation extra-eerie, as it builds up and becomes clear that Ruby doesn’t merely seem larger than life, she’s actually got some kind of powers that bend the world to suit her.

I will say, the major strengths of the book are the relationship between the girls and the book’s tone, which is creepy but beautiful, and more literary than most of what I read. Aside from the girls’ relationship, the book also has some fantastic world building. There’s a slightly claustrophobic, small town feel, which just feeds into the creepy tone of the whole book as the town falls more and more under Ruby’s spell; and there’s Olive, the other tiny town — the one that was drowned when the reservoir was built. I shudder just thinking about it.

The book’s actual plot (the dead girl who won’t stay dead, and how no one notices but Chloe) is a little bit secondary to all that. I pretty much guessed the major twist from the get-go. But it also feels to me like the plot in Imaginary Girls exists mostly as a peg to hang Chloe and Ruby’s relationship on. Generally, something that’s not plot-driven is a pretty big problem for me, and because of that, it actually took me a few chapters to get into it. But I’m aware that that’s totally a your-mileage-may-vary thing, and the book definitely seems to accomplish what it wants to do, and does those things very well.

That conflict, between my love of plot and fast paces, and the fact that those things are just not what this book is about (not to mention the fact that I think the writer is awesome) makes it really hard to rate, but I’m going to give Imaginary Girls four cupcakes.

Summerton is the most beautiful resort town in New Zealand, but since Keri’s older brother killed himself unexpectedly, she’s been even less enchanted with the town than usual. Then she talks to Janna and Sione, whose older brothers also killed themselves – without warning and without leaving a note. Sensing a pattern, the three of them start looking for a serial killer, but Summerton’s secrets may just be darker – and more supernatural – than they think.

The Shattering is not a book about magic. Oh sure, there’s magic in it, and that’s what sets the plot in motion. But at its heart, The Shattering is about things that are much more raw and real: the grieving process. Secrets. Bullying. The complicated ways we relate to the places we’re from. Summer flings. Friendship. In fact, for a significant chunk of the book I wasn’t 100% sure there was going to be any magic, and I wouldn’t have minded in the least if there hadn’t been, since everything else was handled so deftly – except that I wouldn’t have been able to tell you guys about it here.

I honestly don’t have a lot of deep thoughts to share about this book, but here’s a few salient points:

• It’s incredibly gripping – I picked it up while sitting by the pool on vacation in Florida, and the next time I looked up the sun was setting and it was time to get ready for dinner. It’s also a little creepifying – don’t read it right before bed, maybe.
  
• The characters are wonderfully complex and feel like real teenagers; even when they’re saying horrible things or being petty or cruel, they still read as decent, complicated people.
  
• As with Karen’s previous book, Guardian of the Dead, The Shattering is consciously diverse and explicitly addresses issues of race, gender, and sexuality throughout. It also draws strongly on its New Zealand setting and references Samoan and Maori traditions and culture. All of that is basically super great.
  
• It is, unsurprisingly, pretty sad – after all, it’s about three teenagers whose brothers have just died. I was in tears by the end, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
  
• Did I mention? It’s really freaking good.

While Guardian of the Dead was excellent, The Shattering is nearly flawless. My one teeny tiny quibble is that while the book spends a lot of time on its heterosexual love triangle, I would have liked to see Keri, who is gay, have at least a hint of a love life, even a one-sided one. Still, as she’s the primary narrator, she doesn’t exactly get short shrift, story-wise (and there is a mention of her dating at the very end).

All in all, The Shattering gets the full five cupcakes. Bring on the next book!

(Requisite disclaimer: Karen is a pal of mine. But honestly, I think I would have loved this book just as much if she were my mortal enemy. Well, maybe not just as much. But close to it!)

Josephine is sure she’ll be bored when her parents move her to the tiny town of Awkward Falls, Manitoba, but that’s before she discovers her next-door neighbors: kid genius Thaddeus Hibble, his robot butler, and a zombie cat. But the deranged killer Fetid Stenchley, who killed Thaddeus’s grandfather, has escaped the insane asylum and is on his way to take out Thaddeus as well. Throw in an aging movie star, half a dozen enormous genetic monsters, and some dark secrets about the past, and Awkward Falls is turning out to be not so boring after all.

This is a first novel (though Graves has written “many picture books,” according to the author bio), and it shows. The prose is mediocre; it’s not really bad, but it’s not terribly engaging, either. It’s just…there. The plot structure is kind of a mess – there’s almost no rising action, just chapters and chapters of climax, an awkwardly-placed moment of downtime, and then brief excitement that ends abruptly without actually resolving anything.

Most egregiously, though, Josephine, the ostensible heroine, is a complete cipher of a character. The bland Everykid protagonist can be a problem in kids’ lit, but I usually see it with boys. Josephine’s a shining example of it. We’re told in quick succession that she’s quirky, but also wants to be normal, but also doesn’t want to be normal. She doesn’t appear to have any interests or hobbies, and before she makes her only significant action of the book – going over to the Hibble house and meeting Thaddeus – we’re given a long explanation of how impulsive she is, instead of, you know, being shown her doing impulsive things. Eventually she disappears into the background of the narrative in favor of the more colorful Thaddeus and Stenchley and Felix, the zombie cat. (Really, Felix is the closest thing this book has to a hero.)

But my major problem with the book was that it was…well, gruesome. Aggressively and unrelentingly so. Stenchley is a cannibal, so he spends the book doing his best to literally eat people alive – he bites Josephine so hard he draws blood. His past crimes – including strangling Thaddeus’s grandfather – are described in loving detail. So is the absolutely horrendous “treatment” he receives in the insane asylum, which involves opening up his skull (it’s kept shut with Velcro) and applying extreme heat to his brain. Thaddeus, meanwhile, has a genius for reanimating dead animals, and his work is also described in elaborate, squishy detail. His grandfather, who has been dead ten years, is reanimated halfway through the book, and the rotting zombie stumbles around, decaying in, I probably don’t have to say, extremely gory detail until he is devoured by the mutated monsters he invented.

Look, I’m not clutching my pearls and crying “Think of the children!” This book is intended for sixth graders, who can probably handle it. I just think it’s gross. Gratuitously, excessively gross, with no strength of plot or characterization to balance it out.

Overall, The Orphan of Awkward Falls is simultaneously kind of bland and extraordinarily icky, and so it gets one and a half cupcakes.

[Sometimes we come across books that even we can’t finish. But how can we give them a rating if we haven’t finished them? Thus we have the Unfinished/Unrated category, for those times when we want to talk about a book we didn’t finish – and why.]

From the back cover copy: “In order to fit in at her new school, Jessie accepts a dare to spend one night in a local cemetery. Once inside the heavy iron entrance gate, she encounters a handsome young boy named Paul. He tells her that she is just in time to watch the rehearsal of Tombstone Tea, a memorial for those buried in the cemetery in which actors impersonate the deceased. But Jessie notices that there is something strange about these actors – something deadly.”

I struggled about a third of the way through this book before eventually giving up, but I was skeptical of my ability to finish it by the second page. I didn’t run across anything that offended me or anything – it’s just really poorly written. Like, the worst prose I have encountered since this blog started, or at least the worst prose that wasn’t a translation from another language. In fact, I checked the author bio very early on to make sure it wasn’t originally written in German or something. Since Dahme is a lifelong Philadelphian, I’m guessing not.

The book is written in first person, which makes the awkward, stilted prose seem even more unnatural. It doesn’t help that Dahme seems to have a hate on for contractions, and doesn’t always make her sentences cohesive. Here’s an example from the second page, where Jessie describes her ability to sense the presence of the dead:

“A face would flash before my eyes, or I’d hear a voice I did not recognize whisper or laugh in my ear. It was a bit distracting and, of course, I never shared this with anyone. People would think that I was crazy, although it had happened in small ways for as long as I could remember, particularly if I was in a place that had some history.”

The “did not” in the first sentence so jarringly formal that it took me out of the narrative. In the second and third sentences, the first clauses have nothing to do with the second. What does the distracting aspect of seeing ghosts have to do with telling other people? What does the length of time Jessie’s been seeing them for have to do with people thinking she’s crazy? I’ll admit my current love affair with Reasoning with Vampires has made me more conscious of grammar as I read, but seriously, this is not good writing.

The blurb I quoted at the beginning of this review shows the other major problem with Dahme’s writing – it’s more concerned with description than action or character. Is it really necessary for us to know that the entrance gate to the cemetery is heavy iron (as opposed to what, light iron?)? No. But you’d best believe that I learned all about the heaviness of that gate – as well as every other aspect of the cemetery, because the entire first third of the book consists of one scene with one setting. I’d really have been more interested in seeing Jessie do something.

I could have forced my way through Tombstone Tea, but I wouldn’t have enjoyed it, and the book wouldn’t have rated more than a cupcake, probably less. For a bestseller, I’d make the effort to at least keep abreast of market trends. Since this book seems to be almost completely unheard of, I’ll pass.

Immortal Nastasya has been a party girl for over four centuries, numbing her feelings in an effort to forget the tragedies she’s seen – and caused – in an endless lifetime. But when she realizes the shallow callousness of her friends, she turns her back on them and seeks refuge at River’s Edge, a haven for immortals seeking to turn over a new leaf. There she struggles with her own fears and dark memories – not to mention her attraction to the handsomest, jerkiest immortal she’s ever met – and comes to terms with her birthright, her power, and herself.

I couldn’t discuss the biggest problem with the book without spoiling part of the end, so be warned: uncovered spoilers lie behind the cut.

I tried really, really hard to write a fair blurb for this book, because any attempt to summarize it makes it sound a lot stupider than it is. I actually put off reading it for months because the blurb on the back is so dreadful – and yet it’s completely accurate! There is almost no way to describe this book without making it sound like some kind of awful Twilight/Gossip Girl bastard child. And it’s actually pretty good!

To be fair, there is some stupid going on that can’t be avoided. The heroine’s name really is Nastasya – “Nasty” to her friends. (At least, that’s the name she’s currently going by; immortals tend to switch it up.) Her best friend’s name is Innocencio (“Incy” for short). Really. The love interest, described snarkily by Nastasya (and completely earnestly in the blurb, which was part of what made it look so awful) as a “Viking god,” is named Reyn. It’s all kind of overwrought and silly.

Worse, the book takes an awful lot of narrative shortcuts. It begins with Incy using magic to break a cabdriver’s spine, just because the cabbie was a jerk. Nastasya is horrified and runs off to, essentially, immortal rehab. The thing is, Nastasya comes off kind of…incredibly naïve and stupid for someone who’s been around 449 years, and been friends with this guy for a large portion of that. It’s not like she just met him. Yet suddenly this one action is, as the first line of the book tells us, causing her “whole world” to come “tumbling down.” She gradually comes to realize how awful her friends have always been, but we never find out why this one event changed everything for her.

Then, once she reaches River’s Edge, the plot pretty much…stops. She just goes through the rehab program. Everything else is learned via flashback, and super-accurate dreams and visions, both of the “flashback” and “see what other characters on the other side of the world are doing” varieties. Lazy, lazy plot structure. Give us a character, show us why we should care about her, show her fall from grace, and then you can show her painstakingly putting herself back together. The truth is that a redemption arc is really hard to do with the protagonist; that’s why we get them with characters like Darth Vader and Angel from the Buffyverse, who we already care about because of how they interact with the protagonist.

In keeping with the lazy plot structure is lazy character building. Nastasya herself is fine, but River’s Edge is inhabited by a parade of racial and cultural stereotypes. The Japanese man is tidy and quiet. The Italian man is flamboyant and expressive. The black woman is a “cheetah” and “incredibly vibrant, a hot-house flower.” The gay man is always “trim and dapper.” Yes, I’m glad to see minorities and a gay character in a YA novel. But I wish they got to do more than fill up the ranks (the major characters are all originally Western European, and Nastasya and Reyn in particularly are Scandinavian and thus super Aryan), and I wish the one or two character notes they each got didn’t derive so blatantly from accepted stereotypes.

All this, however, pales in the face of the biggest element of fail in the book: the rape apologia. See, it turns out that Reyn was part of a raiding party that killed Nastasya’s family, four hundred and fifty years ago. Their two families basically slaughtered each other; though neither Reyn nor Nastasya killed anyone, they were both left with identical scars. Some years later, Reyn – who had become a legendarily evil raider, the Butcher of Winter – came through the village where Nastasya was living, slaughtered most of it, almost killed her infant child (who died a few months later of disease), and almost raped her before being called away by his men. He has killed hundreds of people, and is accused of committing many rapes, which he does not deny.

Now, of course, he’s at River’s Edge trying to turn his life around, and has spent the past couple hundred years trying to not be evil. When she realizes who he is and what he’s done, Nastasya says she will never forgive him – but there’s an enormous physical attraction between them that leads to a couple of enthusiastic make out sessions, and by the end of the book she seems pretty willing to let bygones be bygones. And River, the book’s font of wisdom, tells her “how much worse it is for the people who actually committed such atrocities…As bad as it is to be a victim, and believe me, I know how bad it can be – the inescapable truth is that it’s even worse to be the perpetrator. To have to live with that…”

No.

No, no, no.

Do not ask me to feel sorry for rapists. Do not make apologies for them. Do not tell me how hard it is to be a rapist, and feel super-guilty about all your rapey ways. This sort of “he did bad stuff but now he feels really bad about it” thing worked for, say, Angel in Buffy (forgive my using the comparison again, but it’s relevant) because a) that wasn’t really him, and b) VAMPIRES AREN’T REAL. Rapists are real, and this plea to see things from the poor misunderstood rapists’ point of view instead of the victims’ is a pervasive and disgusting element of rape culture, and unacceptable in any form of media, let alone a book aimed at teenage girls.

By all means I should have disregarded Immortal Beloved as stupid, carelessly crafted, and offensive. But as I mentioned above, it’s actually…pretty good. The writing is incredibly compelling – I didn’t want to put it down. Nastasya is a quirky narrator, but in an enjoyable way, not a trying-too-hard way – she comes across as genuinely witty. Since the comparisons to Twilight were inevitable in my head, I loved that she was allowed to be the most interesting person in the book (unlike sad sack blank slate Bella Swan); she’s led a rich life full of interesting historical fiction from all over the world, and we get to see a lot of it. I also loved that she got to own her sexuality; she feels desire and is not chided for it by herself, the other characters, or the narrative. There is some very good stuff happening in this book.

In the end, Immortal Beloved is fairly difficult to grade, because I really enjoyed it and yet I had so many problems with it. I’d rate it a respectable four cupcakes, but the rape apologia really knocks it down to two cupcakes – and yet I’ll be picking up the next book in the trilogy. Hopefully it will be just as gripping and a lot less infuriating.

Finbar Frame is pale, skinny, broody, and allergic to the sun – but it’s not until a vampire-novel-obsessed girl on the train mistakes him for a vampire that he decides to become one. Or at least pretend to become one. After all, girls dig vampires, right? But when his masquerade gets underway, sorting out who he really likes, who really likes him, and why – not to mention figuring out who he really is – gets a little more complicated.

Okay, this book isn’t technically fantasy, but I’m reviewing it here because it plays on the most popular trend in YA fantasy right now. (And because I haven’t read anything else remotely applicable recently and I need a blog post. Shh.)

When my friend gave me this ARC, I was more than a little leery. Now, I don’t particularly care for vampires in general, am waiting impatiently for the current vampire trend to be over, and despise Twilight with all of my soul. But at the same time, these are female fantasies written for teenage girls by women (for the most part), and when I looked at Bloodthirsty, I saw a man trying to make money off of teenage girls by making fun of that fantasy. “Hey, girls! That thing you like is dumb! Give me money.”

And yes, that is part of what’s going on in this book, but that aspect wound up not bothering me as much as I thought it would. Partially this is because it turns out Flynn Meaney is a woman – whoops, initial preconceptions! But mostly this is because the vampire parody is…rather defanged, if you’ll pardon the expression. While she tears into romance novels (which pissed me off, because guess what? I read those too, and there are excellent ones out there) she mostly just references Twilight, True Blood, and the like, rather than mocking them. So it’s mercenary, but it’s not necessarily any more mercenary than a straightforward book about vampires would be – it’s just cashing in on a trend.

I was bothered more as I read by the Nice Guy issue. Finbar repeatedly describes himself as nice and sensitive and blames the fact that he doesn’t get girls on these characteristics. Well, fine, except he doesn’t actually behave in a nice fashion. When he says “nice,” what he really means is “tries to hard and comes off creepy,” like when he has a disastrous first meeting with a girl he knows on the internet. She asks him to meet at a coffee shop. He gives her the address of an expensive French restaurant instead and brings a present, turning a casual meet-up into a formal date and blindsiding her. I don’t blame her for no longer wanting to have anything to do with him, but all he can think about is how much money he spent and how horrible she is for not appreciating it. Um, no, dude, you’re creepy.

He also spends a lot of time comparing himself to his twin brother Luke, who is handsome and athletic and popular, and blaming the fact that he’s not as popular on his skinniness and intelligence – but Luke is generous, cheerful, and selfless, while Finbar spends an awful lot of time taking potshots at his brother’s learning disability in his head. Yes. That’s very nice.

Shockingly, Finbar eventually actually kind of realizes he’s not always nice and thoughtful. He’s spent the book in pursuit of the beautiful, cool Kate, while palling around with the geeky Jenny, who obviously has an enormous crush on him. Finbar doesn’t twig to this until the end of the book, though, at which point he realizes how obvious it was – and that if he was really the thoughtful, caring person he always believed himself to be, he would have noticed. It’s actually kind of an amazing revelation, given how incredibly common Finbar’s character type is and how rarely they realize that they’re actually self-involved, whiny jerks. So kudos to Meaney for that.

So the “cashing in on a female fantasy” issue wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected, and the Nice Guy issue was actually dealt with a little. And yet the book infuriated me. Why?

Well, remember that beautiful, cool Kate? She tells Finbar she transferred to their school because she wanted better AP classes. show

On top of the appalling, misogynistic slut-shaming, there are also a handful of casual transphobic jokes for no reason, and a couple of lines make light of sexual harassment and domestic abuse. Because these things are all hilarious, you see. It all fits in with the prose of the book, which is 20% legitimately funny, 80% trying too hard. Example: at a fantasy convention, a guy is described as wearing a mask with devil horns “the color of foreskin.” I don’t know what that means, but I do know Meaney is trying way too hard to be shocking there.

There were nuggets of good in there – Finbar’s semi-realization of his own jerkiness, and a handful of good jokes. But that doesn’t overcome an obnoxious narrator and the infuriating resolution of the romance, and that’s why Bloodthirsty gets two cupcakes.

By Carrie Ryan [Goodreads]

Mary’s village is the last village, the only village, haven to only living people left in the entire world. Beyond the village fences is the Forest of Hands and Teeth, full of undead Unconsecrated who hunger for human flesh, and only the word of the Sisterhood keeps the village on God’s path and protected. But Mary stumbles on to a secret, a stranger from Outside, which means the Sisterhood has been lying for generations. But what are the Sisters covering up — and what is outside the Forest?

There’s some general spoilery stuff unhidden under the cut.

When I was in sixth grade I read a Goosebumps book and it scared the crap out of me, and I think this is the first horror novel I’ve read since. But I figure that zombies fall close enough to sf/f to review here, right?

The book’s biggest weakness is pacing. The first half flounders a bit, as Mary deals with the loss of her parents (both zombie-fied), being turned away by her brother, being forced into Sisterhood because no one will propose to her and then getting proposed to by the wrong brother (there’s a love triangle through much of the book, which is really not my thing at all), and some mystery and intrigue, but it took a really long time for me to get into it. Basically what finally snapped me into the narrative is the zombie attack roughly halfway through the book, when the Unconsecrated breach the fences and Mary and her companions are forced out of the village. That is a long time to settle in. And even after that point it still drags in parts.

The characters also wavered in quality. Overall, I liked Mary; I liked that despite the love triangle, she was driven by a need for more, I liked that she was human enough to freeze up at a few key moments but keep moving at others. She’s a first-person narrator, so it isn’t shocking that she was the strongest character. But I didn’t buy the love triangle, or her relationship with her best friend, because we never really saw why any of their relationships were happening the way they were. Mary loved Travis for… some reason? I never got much of a sense of why she was so desperate for him — or even why she wanted him over Harry, since I never got much of a feel for either one. Ditto for her friend Cass; they have a lovely moment near the end, but we never see them as friends before all of the tension between them, so I never cared much about their friendship. (That said, her relationship with her brother is a bit better, since it actually grows and changes through the book, so I got it on a deeper level.)

Final frustration: the book raises a lot of questions about their society in general and the Sisterhood in particular, some of which I’ll stick behind a spoiler cut: show

But with all that said, what the book did well it did very well. I am a wimp when it comes to horror, but I think this book is legitimately scary. Like, I could only read it in small chunks, and not too soon before bed, because I needed a few minutes of daylight and sunshine and non-zombified human contact after a spell of reading. Two other words come to mind: claustrophobic and unrelenting. That’s what makes it all work, I think; the antagonistic force will never stop coming and are always right there with only a fence separating them from the antagonists — and in some places the path is so constrictive that they can only walk in single-file, with zombies on either side of them trying to break through and kill them. And as for unrelenting, it isn’t just the zombies; it’s that Ryan doesn’t pull punches with how death-filled this world is — it isn’t just that several characters die along the way, it’s that as I edged closer to the end, every time Mary faced a group of zombies I wondered if maybe Mary was going to die. Not in a general, “Oh, the hero is in danger,” way, but because despite being in the first person, it seemed like a totally viable way for the story to end. There are moments of hope worked into the narrative, but it is freaking bleak. Really well-done bleak, but bleak.

Overall, I think this book was not really my cup of tea — the world building was well put together, but not enough questions were answered to satisfy me as a reader; and while the horror elements were very well done, they aren’t something that makes a book for me, personally. I’m on the fence about the companion; curious, but not enough so to spend money on it. So: three and a half cupcakes.

Title: Bite Me!
Author: Dylan Meconis
Genre: Humor/Horror/Graphic Novel
Pages: 168
Summary: A ragtag group of vampires attempt to rescue their coven during the height of the French Revolution.
Thoughts: I’ve read Bite Me! in its online form before, but I always prefer having a copy to hold in my hands, so I bought a copy at MoCCA. The story is hilarious; the art, drawn over several years starts out lively and fun and becomes lively and fun and fantastic as Meconis comes into her own. Good times.

Four cupcakes

When Dice’s cousin Pen has a near-fatal fall from a tree, she winds up possessed by one Sinclair Youngblood Powers, a ghost who was hanged in that very tree 250 years ago. Sin is determined to get revenge on the town that killed him, but Dice is just as determined to stop him. However, after an exorcism gone wrong, Sin finds himself in a body all his own – and Dice finds herself forced to try to stop the boy she’s already fallen in love with.

I could tell just from reading the blurb that Swoon is blatant Twilight rip-off. You’ve got the dark-haired, pale girl who moves from a big city (New York, in this case) to a monosyllabically-named small town (Swoon, Connecticut) where she’s supposedly a fish out of water although in actual fact she’s pretty popular. You’ve got the dreamy undead guy who may or may not be evil, and the love at first sight. You’ve even got the bizarre preoccupation with expensive cars.

But – and we all know how I feel about Twilight, so you know how much it pains me to say this – Twilight is better.

For starters, the prose of Swoon is aggressively, obnoxiously quirky. I don’t have the copy I read in front of me, so I can’t pull out too many examples, but I do remember my favorite phrase, from when Dice, Pen-as-possessed-by-Sin, and a couple of boys get out of a car: “…we denuded the sumptuous ride of our genetic material.” Not “we got out of the car.” We denuded the sumptuous ride of our genetic material. It took me three read-throughs of that sentence to figure out what she was talking about, especially since I have heard “genetic material” as a euphemism before, but never as another word for bodies. And the whole book is like that.

And it’s not just the prose that’s aggressively quirky. The whole reason the main character is called “Dice” is because everyone in Swoon has to have a monosyllabic nickname for no very clear reason, and that was her preferred shortening of her real name, Candice. So…Dice and Sin. Yeah. And while one of my major problems with Twilight was that Bella had no personality, Swoon has the opposite problem: its characters have too much, or even too many. Malkin couldn’t quite seem to decide whether Dice was an ordinary, quiet girl (just like you!) or a sexy New York club kid who goes to parties in a red bra under a black mesh shirt. Nor could she seem to decide whether Pen, Dice’s cousin, is a wholesome good girl or a wild bad one, and when her behavior’s already completely unpredictable, the crazy things she does while Sin is possessing her don’t have the impact they should. It all adds up to a distracting, hard-to-follow book, populated by characters the reader never really gets to know.

I will give Swoon this: while Twilight seems blissfully unaware of the problems with Edward and Bella’s relationship, Swoon owns its crazy. Dice is well aware that Sin is bad for her – because he’s dead, sure, but also because he’s a bad person. That doesn’t actually stop her from being with him at any point, but at least she twigs to the unhealthiness of their relationship. It gets a little worse, though, when show

Oh, and in case you were wondering how Sin is planning on destroying Swoon? The dastardly deeds Dice is determined to prevent?

He starts orgies. There are four or five of them in the book. Orgies. Yep.

So, you know, there’s that.

Will Swoon be the next Twilight? Only time, and fourteen-year-olds, will tell, but here at Active Voice it gets zero cupcakes.

When Rue’s mother disappears, Rue starts seeing…things. Faeries, to be precise. And as if that weren’t enough for any high school girl to have to deal with, her father gets arrested. Did Rue’s father really kill her mother? What was her mother, exactly? And can Rue stop the war between humans and faeries that is brewing in the wings?

As I mentioned the last time I reviewed a Holly Black book, I’m not a big faerie person. I am, however, a big comic book person, and so I picked up this graphic novel.

The story is strong. The mythology is solid and creepy, and though the gradual reveals about Rue’s family aren’t by any means shockingly original or surprising, they’re still told in a way that engages the reader’s attention. This continues all the way through to the big reveal on the final page, which, while expected, is done pretty spectacularly and made me wish I had the second book in my hands. Rue’s a solid enough protagonist, smart and plucky but with believable emotional reactions to the supernatural (and traumatizing) events around her.

However, it’s pretty clear that this is Black’s first graphic novel; the pacing is awkward in spots, and the book itself seems somehow scanty, like there’s not as much story as there could be. Characters that I expect would have been more fully fleshed out in prose are only vague shapes in this. I know what Headbanded Boyfriend and Goofy-Haired Father look like, but I don’t know anything about them.

This is, however, possibly more a problem with the art than with the writing. I was not a fan of the art in this book. Part of that is subjective – I’m very aware that I prefer a cartoonier, less moody style. But some of the issues with the art were more general problems. Sometimes the facial expressions didn’t match what the characters were saying; they were drawn with gritted teeth or screaming faces when the text bubble above them contained a relatively calm statement. It was also hard to tell a lot of the characters apart; there was kind of a surplus of slender, androgynous young people with dark hair and fishnets on. The fact that everyone was dressed in over-the-top goth couture didn’t help.

I do want to find out what happens to Rue in the next book, but I have to say I was somewhat disappointed by the rather blah quality of this one. It’s a totally middle-of-the-road book, and so it gets a totally middle-of-the-road grade: three cupcakes.