Graceling

So guys, guess what? No, I didn't learn how to roller disco. Stop asking me that. It'll happen when it happens.

Believe it or not, I found another gem!

It’s called Graceling and it’s by Kristin Cashore and it’s awesome andzomgeveryoneshouldreaditbecauseit’sthebest!!!!

ahem.

Ok, so, background: Katsa is a girl living in the Seven Kingdoms. These Seven Kingdoms are constantly shifting alliances and there’s lots of political confusion and all that really fun stuff. (That last bit sounded sarcastic but it’s not. I reeeaaaallly like this book).

There are some people in these seven kingdoms who are known as “Gracelings”. Their eyes have two different colors (like husky dogs!) and they have special abilities. One Graceling might be really good at cooking, another dancing, swimming, building, tic tac toe, whathaveyou.

So the setting of this book is kind of middle-ages-y. It’s got a real Robin Hood vibe to it.

But not this. This has a failing marriage vibe.

THERE WE GO.

Now imagine that’s a teenage girl. And she is graced with the ability to kill people.

She doesn’t just rob the rich. She flippin’ kills them!

Katsa is the king’s niece, and he uses her as his assassin. Katsa doesn’t agree with her uncle’s politics and hates what he forces her to do, so she starts her own secret society of people who put thing’s right behind the kings’ backs.

JUST LIKE THE MERRY MEN!!!

Just like this.

So what is it about this book that makes it a gem? No it’s not the gleaming sheen of its cover or the fact that it formed 400 kilometers below the earth’s surface. (this last part is probably not true but I have not yet confirmed that it isn’t.)

Kristin Cashore in her teen years.

What makes this book wonderful is the plot. It’s kick ass. There’s an evil king, and Katsa has to save his daughter with the help of, wait for it, a totally hot prince! His name is Po and he’s also graced, and Katsa and him have all these awesome fights full of kicks to the face, round-house punches, and a healthy dose of sexual tension. And though a movie has not been made yet, meaning that I can’t show you photographic evidence of this, there is some really weird fan art that I am more than willing to share:

This was a fairly popular Nickelodean children's show in the 1490s.

I also found this:

Just because she’s holding a knife does not prove that she is not a fairy princess. That could be her steak knife. To cut her fairy princess steak.

But I’m not here to talk about fair princess steak. I’m here to talk about how much Graceling rocks. I think that my favorite thing about this book is that the main characters aren’t idiots. I have found all too often in my travels through young adult literature that the main characters usually have shit for brains. Take Percy Jackson for example (I’ll probably right a review for that series pretty soon). Percy is a normal, dumbass, twelve year old kid, who gets attacked one day by a screeching, winged, she-beast that was disguised as his pre algebra teacher, and he also finds out he’s the son of Poseidon. Meaning he’s a freakin’ demigod. THEN he gets his mom get’s carried away by a flippin’ minotaur and he’s like “but wait… minotaur aren’t reeeeaaaaallll.”

COME ON, PERCY. I know you didn’t really get a good education, what with your teacher being a she-beast and all that but use some goddam brain cells! You accept the fact that you’re father is the Greek god of the sea, but you don’t accept that an animal that is alarmingly close in physique to a bull could possibly exist?

That’s why Katsa and Po are such wonderful characters. They aren’t idiots. They figure out what’s going on fairly early in the story, and spend the rest of the book trying to stop it. No crazy plot twists, no life-changing discoveries that the reader had figured out chapters before. Sometimes, devices like that work in young adult literature, but they are always risky. I respect Kristin Cashore for staying on the straightforward path and just telling a really good story.

But anyway I don’t really want to say much more about Graceling because I want everyone to go read it. Trust me. It’s good. It’s completely engrossing, it has a super badass female protagonist, and the plot is really smart. All around gem.

Bob Rankin? Why is my fairy princess steak so dry?

Photo Cred:

http://i2.listal.com/image/55400/936full-robin-hood-photo.jpg

http://www.buycostumes.com/Robin-Hood-Adult/27237/ProductDetail.aspx

http://www.pdplayhouse.com/robin%20hood%20pics.htm

http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Cave-troll

http://jeelchristine.tumblr.com/post/7034432551/katsa-and-po-of-graceling-snuggling-fighting

http://jeelchristine.tumblr.com/post/7044519786/katsa-no-fairy-princess-by-jackie-lyn-on

http://askbobrankin.com/gems_and_minerals.html

The Forest of Hands and Teeth

Ok, raise your hand if you saw The Village.

Now raise your hand if you liked The Village.

Now raise your hand if you like books that follow the same plot line as M. Night Shyamalan movies.

That’s what I thought.

The Forest of Hands and Teeth, by Carrie Ryan, has all the makings of a really captivating story. A girl living in a village surrounded by a forest where zombies live. She needs to find out if there is anyone else alive in the world outside her town. It sounds pretty sweet. Post-apocolyptic. Zombies. Not to mention the reviews on the back said it was sexy. But even with all this going for it I was still weary. Because I saw The Village once. I did not see The Village Twice. There is a reason for that. And the fact that The Village came out in 2004 and this book was published in 2009 is more than a little suspicious.

But I was having a hard time finding something to read so when I saw it at the library I grabbed it.

I was pleasantly surprised.

The story starts out with a town that is very old-fashioned, you know, arranged marriages, doing your own laundry in a babbling brook, no cell-phone service type of old-fashioned. The main character, Mary, is approached by another character, Henry who asks her to marry him. But, what’s this? Mary is in love with Henry’s brother, Travis. But, sacre bleu! Travis has already asked Mary’s best friend, Cass, to marry him. So what does Mary do?

She watches her mother get infected by zombie disease, has her brother kick her out of the house, and becomes a nun. (by the way, don’t google image “zombie nun.” It’s not as fun as it sounds.)

This is where things get cool. The town is basically run by these nuns and boy do they mean business.

But not this type of business. More like, we’re going to keep everyone trapped in this town through a combination of fear and religious devotion kind of business. I’m also pretty sure the nuns in this book don’t wear Teevas.

So it becomes pretty clear pretty soon that the nuns know more about this zombie situation than they’re letting on, and that they want to keep everyone here for a reason. Which, yes, is exactly like The Village, but for some reason I was more intrigued by this because of the strong religious overtones.

Atheist.

So, as Mary is discovering that the Sisterhood is corrupt, Travis hurts his leg and is being treated in a room close to Mary’s. She visits him often and some sexy encounters occur and we soon realize that Travis is totally into her! AHHHHHH!!!! But wait. He’s still engaged to Cass.

But that problem is solved as well! Because while Cass is fretting about Travis’ injury, Henry is comforting her and she totally falls for him!

AHHHHHHHHH!!!!

But wait. Henry is still in love with Mary. But you know what? When three out of the four people being married are upset with the situation, and changing around the pairing just a little will make three out of the four people very happy, then doesn’t it make sense to….

Apparently not, because they all decide to go along with the marriages they had already planned. Because I guess Henry’s feelings matter more than everyone else’s. Maybe he throws really intense tantrums or something.

“IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH!!!!”

So Mary marries Henry so that she can escape from the corrupt Sisterhood, but I’m thinking, ok, there’s definitely gonna be some more info about these nuns ‘cause they’re messed up, man. This could make for a really interesting story of politics, with the zombies as a backdrop, rather than literally the only plot device.

But no. According to Carrie Ryan, the zombie plot device trumps all. The night of the double wedding that could have very easily been a happy day for most, but because Carrie Ryan wanted to make her characters unfulfilled, and the only way that she could think to do that was by putting them in a very fixable situation, most of them were miserable, something awful happens. SPOILER ALERT: The zombies break into the village and kill EVERYONE. Like literally EVERYONE. The only survivors are Henry, Cass, Mary, Travis, Mary’s brother and his wife, a small boy named Jacob, and a dog.

Now, this is awful for a couple of reasons. I mean, first of all, their entire town was totally destroyed. That’s pretty bad for the characters. But looking at this from the perspective of someone who knows that this is a book that was written by an author who has total control over what happens in it, that was literally the worst plot twist I’ve ever seen. You had a good thing going, Carrie Ryan! You were creating intrigue! But now that intrigue is gone because not only did you kill off the characters creating it, you demolished the entire village, leaving the subject moot.

This happens pretty early on in the book too, and let me tell you, the rest of the book sucks.

Carrie Ryan got all the good stuff out of the way early; things like dystopian society, crazy nuns, even all the sexy scenes were when Travis was injured. The rest of the book is devoted to the survivors making they’re way through the Forest of Hands and Teeth, protected by a fence that is set up along a path. That is literally ALL THAT HAPPENS. Sure, they find another town, but oh, guess what? Carrie Ryan can’t get over her zombie fetish so that town has also been destroyed by the undead.

LEAVE US SOMETHING TO WORK WITH, CARRIE!

So, I really couldn’t stand this book. It lost me as soon as everyone interesting was killed and we were left with the boring losers who couldn’t figure out how to get married.

There are also two sequels to The Forest of Hands and Teeth, but I don’t think that they have the same characters because SPOILER ALERT: everyone except for Mary dies at the end.

...Yeah, this book is awful.

Photo Cred:

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/modern-nuns-ready-for-business-don-wolf.html

http://www.tiptoptens.com/2011/08/04/10-most-popular-cgi-characters/hulk/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthracite

Twilight Needs Some Re-Vamping

So I saw Breaking Dawn Part 1 and I'm wondering why NO ONE IS MAKING A BIGGER DEAL OUT OF THIS.

COME ON.

This movie deserves to ripped to shreds. It deserves to be publicly humiliated. It deserves to be attacked by squealing middle aged mothers in garish clothing and make-up.

One of those plans has already been set in motion.

As for the other two, the best I can do is this scathing review. Now, I know that this blog is dedicated to young adult BOOKS, but I think that we can make an exception for this movie, because it was so potent that it managed to disgrace the name of young adult literature while not even being literature.

Oh, and sorry for the lack of pictures in this post. It was originally written for a newspaper, which can be read in it's entirety here: http://www.uvm.edu/~watertwr/

Now onto the review:

The word “appalling,” meaning awful, terrible, and horrifying, originates from the Old French word “apalir,” meaning “to grow pale.” It is, therefore, the perfect word to describe The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part I, which was appalling in so many ways, the first of which being that every character was so pale that they all looked like a blood-sucking family of mimes.

I saw this movie over break, managing to snag a front row seat right in front of a squealing group of thirteen-year-old fan girls. I did not join in their enthusiasm even though, yes, I admit, I have read Twilight. And yes, unfortunately, this movie followed the book pretty well.

If you are unfamiliar with the story then DON’T SEE THIS MOVIE. You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. If you are familiar with the story then you know that the movie starts with Bella the human and Edward the vamp finally tying the knot (I mean, they’re eighteen. Talk about taking your time, eh?). The newlyweds fly off to an island owned by Edward’s filthy rich vampire father and they lose their virginity in a passionate, bed-breaking bout of lovemaking. The first forty-five minutes of the movie views like a feel-good romance, with the central conflict being that Edward refuses to sleep with her after that first night owing to the fact that the bed got just as fucked as they did (meaning they literally broke the bed in half) and his wife walked away from the experience covered in bruises. Edward is nothing if not rational.

But after forty-five minutes this movie takes a turn. You see, Bella and Eddie don’t use condoms because they figure, since Edward is technically dead, he does not have the ability to impregnate her. But oh does he impregnate her. Edward’s undead sperm beats the odds and manages to create a horrifying, terrible, appalling vampire fetus that literally starts eating Bella from the inside. Finally, I thought as I watched from my front row seat. Something awesome is happening.

But, alas, I was mistaken. No, nothing happens. Bella sits on a couch and gets gaunter and more pregnant and more disgusting, Jacob runs around in the woods as a wolf all upset and shit, and Edward is just mad and pale and sparkly, for like literally an hour of the movie. When a film has a running time of 117 minutes, forty-five of those minutes are spent on the vampire sex and another sixty are spent on the woes of vampiric pregnancy, then that only leaves twelve precious minutes for a plot climax. And oh how those twelve minutes were utilized.

I was fortunate enough (in a sense) to have read the book before seeing the movie, meaning that I had a little warning but even so, when you’re sitting in the front row, in a seat nailed to the floor, facing a giant screen with the climax of Breaking Dawn Part I projected onto it, twelve minutes can seem like an eternity.

So the climax of this movie is basically a detailed account of the result of Edward’s climax. Oh, I should mention now, this film is not suitable for women who are pregnant or may become pregnant. We go from feel-good romance, to family drama, to a scene from Saw V with literally no transition. There’s Bella innocently talking about her horrible ideas for baby names, when suddenly her spine snaps, her ribs break and her huge throbbing stomach is chewed open by her devoted husband in the most appalling C-section imaginable.

But, to tell you the truth, it wasn’t the sickening birth or even the rough vampire sex that was most appalling about this movie. No, it was the fact that even though this movie made $61.8 million dollars in one weekend, the special effects still looked like graphics from a cheap video game. It was appalling that even though they could have absolutely fit the entire book into a single movie, (anyone who has read the book knows that absolutely nothing happens in the second half. Or the first, for that matter), they had to stretch it out, doubling their profits by making two incredibly boring atrocities. I can think of at least 5 two and half minute long montages that were obviously only there so that they could drag this sucker out into a full-length feature. Hollywood should think about enforcing a montage cap, because this was just ridiculous.

So, if you’re looking to be appalled, then be my guest. If not, then I do not recommend seeing this. Not even for those “it’s so bad it’s good” lovers. It’s just a rollercoaster ride of bored, disgusted, bored, bored, AHHHHH OH MY GOD WHAT, appalled.