The Annotated Sandman – Neil Gaiman and Leslie S. Klinger

     I just finished the first volume of the Annotated Sandman. I thought it was brilliant but when do I not think Neil Gaiman is brilliant? I like the idea of the Endless, the few permanent anthropomorphic pieces of the universe that will stick around until the end. The whole series starts when Aleister Crowley and his cronies are preforming a ritual to capture Death and instead get Dream. The series then follows what happens in the years that Dream is imprisoned and the things he has to do to set his realm back to rights. Of course being a comic and working closely with DC, there are quite a few appearances from other superheroes and villains. Constantine and Arkham Asylum both show up in the first few issues as well as the original Sandman from the 70s. There are seven of the Endless but by the end of the first 20 issues you are only really introduced to 3 and a Fourth is mentioned. So I’m eager to see how the rest of the Endless fit in and interact.

     There are a few stand-alone issues as a break after a lot of the major storyline is done for the first part. You also get a sense of Dream’s history with mortals and surprisingly his love life. My favorite was titled A Dream of A Thousand cats. A cat is wronged by her owners and begs and prays for answers from every deity and demigod she could think of, Dream is the only one who answers. He spins her a tale of how the world used to be, where humans were tiny and hunted and cats were gargantuan and rulers. By humans using the power of dreams, they changed things to be (and to always have been) the other way around and all it took was one thousand people all believing the same dream. So the cat travels the world spreading her message from Dream that if a thousand cats all believe and dream the same dream then the world can be put back into its proper place. The (new) Dr. Who series 3 Finale is very reminiscent of this comic and may even have been inspired by it.  

     Did I mention I think Neil Gaiman is brilliant? The art work is gorgeous. While I didn’t pick this up for the annotated parts (and I’ve never read an annotated work before), the notes were useful in picking out who was important to remember and seeing what cool little references and Easter Eggs were slipped in there. It was also a big help to know the years from the comic cameos and who they were. I never would have been able to find half that stuff out without much internet research since I’m not a huge comic fan. It’s a very dark kind of series so far. Even the stand alone issues aren’t extremely light hearted and fun but they do raise the mood for the more serious and overarching story line. These stories arches do tend to end on an “everything will be fine eventually” note which makes dealing with the more disturbing storylines easier. If you like serious (but entertaining) stories, if you like comics, if you like…anything, go pick this up from the library if you can’t find it in stores. Now I’m off to return this one and pick up volume 2. 

The Forest of Hands and Teeth – Carrie Ryan

     Mary lives a simple life until her parents get bitten by the Unconsecrated and turn into them. This throws Mary’s life into chaos. Her brother refuses to talk to her, her village sees her as bad luck, and no one is willing to marry her any more. Since everyone in their forest-surrounded village either has to get married or join the priesthood, she is forced to become an acolyte. The church is everything in this one last bastion of protection from the Forest and the Undying who live there. When a mysterious stranger appears in the village and the church authorities hide her away, Mary begins to suspect there are more survivors in the Forest and things the church is hiding from them all.

     I read this series a few years ago (before the big zombie revival) and I enjoyed it greatly. After reading some other reviews, I went back and reread the first book. I probably shouldn’t have. I absolutely detest the character of Mary. Here she is supposed to have grown up years, decades even, after the zombie apocalypse, in this idyllic little village (minus the ever present zombies) and she never seems to think beyond what she wants at the moment. It would have been fine to write the character that way if she was supposed to be a teenager (and zombies were a new thing) but she is supposedly a fully grown adult. The summary (on the book as well as the one I wrote) makes it seem like this is going to be a story of intrigue and discovery. It wasn’t. It was Mary being selfish, Mary being resigned, Mary being selfish again (on purpose this time), Mary appearing to stop sucking as a main character, and then Mary being selfish and sucking but getting her greatest wish while managing to get everyone she cared about killed in the process. I remember reading the first 3 books one after the other and the short stories as they came out. I also remember them being good. I am definitely going to go back and read the other books (since they aren’t about Mary) and see if I can rediscover why I liked them so much. If you want to try this book out (because you like zombies and are a masochist), get it from the library before you pay for it. 

How I Live Now – Meg Rosoff

     New Yorker Daisy is sent to live with her cousins in England when her issues become too much for her father and pregnant step mother to handle. Daisy tends to keep to herself so her aunt and cousins don’t judge her (to her perspective) for not eating or send her away like her stepmother has. A few days later her aunt is called away to a conference, leaving the kids in the care of the oldest cousin. The cousins are Osbert, who is the oldest at 17 and the most normal; Isaac and Edmund, 14 and both have telepathic abilities, one with animals and one with people; and Piper is the youngest and the only girl, she has the same abilities as her brothers except with both animals and people; Daisy is 15 and the protagonist, she has an eating disorder that features somewhat prominently. Not long after Daisy’s aunt departs for Oslo, several major cities are attacked and Britain is taken over by occupying forces. As Osbert becomes involved in the local defense, the younger children are left more and more to themselves. They continue their routine of collecting rations and news from the village and try not to panic the rest of the time. During this period, Edmund and Daisy start carry on a sexual relationship. Their living situation is eventually found out when the defense forces take over their home and separate the “children” and send them off to live adults in various controlled, refugee communities. The twins are sent to one farm, the girls to another and Osbert joins the soldiers (and that is pretty much the only time he is involved in the story). When the girls’ refugee community is attacked and overrun, the girls escape and try to make their way back to the only place and only people Daisy considers home and family.

     No I couldn’t have made that any longer without putting a few major spoilers in there. It is written from the point of view of Daisy and it feels that a teenager wrote it. Her thoughts are spot on and her general disregard for adults who are not immediately important is very typical of what it’s like to be a teenager. I’ve seen a lot of reviews trash the novel because of the cousin sex thing but seriously? It’s not graphic at all and it happens all the time even without the added pressures of war and doubting you’ll live to see your next birthday. The Movie version changes things up a little bit. Edmund is a bit older and not a twin, the oldest brother is taken out completely, and they add a friend for Isaac. They also leave out the epilogue and change the timing of minor events. The thing is the movie is brutal; character deaths galore. Almost no one essential to Daisy’s world dies in the book; that’s not to say other messed up things don’t happen, but death? Not so much. They also downplay the telepathy and give Daisy a nasty case of OCD and a germ phobia to go along with her anorexia. Both versions have their good sides and bad sides. I thought they were phenomenally well done. It’s been about a month since I’ve read the book and I can’t stop thinking about what I would do in such a situation. I’m finding that other books just can’t keep my attention because I keep comparing them to How I Live Now. 

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane – Katherine Howe

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane flips back and forth between modern Massachusetts and the Salem Witch Trials. When Connie’s mother calls and asks her to clean out her grandmother’s old house so it can be repossessed, Connie, a doctoral candidate, gives up her summer to clean out the old house. Connie discovers an old bible with a key and a note with the words “deliverance dane” inside of it. Weird things start happening and her advisor starts acting strange and now Connie has to figure out what is going on. 

This book is hard to recommend in all honesty. The main character struck me as terribly incompetent for who she was supposed to be. She was a doctoral candidate in colonial history who seemed to know nothing of her family from that era, how to research anything or even realize that most people of the time were functionally illiterate and often spelled things phonetically. Plus some things just didn’t make sense. Connie’s mother owned a house since Connie was four or five, was a single mother, and didn’t mention it once or pay taxes on it for 20 plus years and it’s only being repossessed now? Connie’s weird, obsessed advisor/professor taught her for at least two years and didn’t see fit to even hint that Connie should look into her family history during the time period she was supposed to be an expert in yet knew all about it? Seriously, can we say psycho stalker? Connie dates a guy for about a month and suddenly he’s “cursed” and some random recipe in her many times great grandmother’s book is the only thing that can save him, really? It started out as a decent contemporary fiction novel and then tries to become a paranormal thriller. The transition did not work very well. There were so many other places the author could’ve taken the story. The flash backs to the colonial era were interesting but that’s about all I can say this book had going for it. All in all it just comes down to the fact that the characters are unlikeable and nonsensical and it really diminishes the storytelling for me. Library rental at best. 

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

This book is one I read over and over growing up. I’m going to take a moment to sound terribly cliché, coming of age story, fabulous writing, good storytelling, timeless classic. Now for why’s of all that. This book was written in a time (1943 for any one who’s curious) when there was a lot of competition so to be a good book the writing and story had to be done well. I reread it because I wanted to see if it still held the same allure for me as it did when I was a kid. It does.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is about a little girl growing up in Brooklyn during the Great Depression with a little bit of how her parents’ relationship started thrown in. I always felt a little bit like Francie. Few friends, a love of reading, siblings to take care of: any wonder I identified with the main character? The part that sticks with me most is the ending. After growing up impoverished, starting work at 14, having to delay her education, and disappointments in love; the author does not wave her magic wand and give Francie a happy ending. She does give Francie the tools to find a happy ending: intelligence, pride, ambition, and a bullheaded determination to earn what she knows will make her life worth while.

While I have your attention: this book is also semi-autobiographical. Francie may not exist but the woman who wrote this book grew up poor during the Great Depression in the same neighborhood she based this book on. There aren’t many people left who can give us an accurate personal picture of what it was like during that time. This is as close as many of us will get to understanding what life was like 80 years ago.

Geek Out

     Geek Out was a gift from some friends of ours. It’s like Trivial Pursuit with “geeky” subjects. The game is played by rolling a die to select a category and then answering the corresponding question. Before the question can be answered there is a bidding element. For example: the question is “Name 2 Smurfs”, the original person says “I can name 2 (or 4 or however many she can name).” The next person can pass or bid higher. This goes on until everyone has passed and the highest bidder gets to attempt to name all the Smurfs they can think of.  If the highest bidder gets it wrong, he gets a -2 points token. If he gets the question correct, he keeps the question card. It features such categories as Comics, Sci Fi, Fantasy, Games, and Miscellaneous. The White space on the Die is a Pick your own category space .The first player to answer 5 questions correctly (after subtracting their minus tokens), wins the game. The rules even use Anne and Wil Wheaton in the examples of how the game is played. So Geeky, So Cool.

     We have played a few games in the last month and I have come to the decision, it is not a balanced game. The Die almost always lands on Blue (which is impossible to differentiate from green depending on your lighting) and, occasionally, White or Black. No one has even rolled the other three colors. We all have different areas of knowledge. While the bidding helps even that advantage out, getting only those 3 categories of questions really limits who wins. There’s no time limit on how long a person can take to bid. We can’t write answers down to keep track of them, so halfway through a long list at least one gets forgotten. Players tend to stop and argue about whether or not something should be included. At which point, the person trying to answer the question has forgotten later answers and needs to start over. I really enjoy the concept of this game but with the same person winning every time it’s a little frustrating that the rest of us don’t even challenge him because our specialties don’t even get asked. I’m going to give this game one more try with a larger set of people. If we still run into the same issues, House Rules are going to have to be introduced to even out play.

Monstrous Regiment – Terry Pratchett

“The enemy isn’t men or women, it’s bloody stupid people and no one has the right to be stupid.”

     In the country of Borogravia, nearly everything is an Abomination of their god Nuggan, including the color blue and red haired people. Pretty much the only three things that haven’t been outlawed are Men in manly roles, Women in womanly roles, and trying to kill anyone who doesn’t follow Nuggan. As the book opens, Polly Perks is in the process of becoming Oliver Perks. Polly’s brother joined the army the spring before and now he’s gone missing in action. Polly has always protected her older brother so stupid rules aren’t going to stop her from protecting him this time. “Oliver” joins the army recruiting party and learns that the situation of their country isn’t as good as the government has been claiming. There are almost no whole men left. Everyone who has returned from the battles has been injured in some way and that’s if they returned at all. The country is on the brink of starvation. Her fellow recruits are almost all girls who have decided to disguise themselves for their own reasons. Their capital has been captured by forces from Zlobenian and Ankh Morpork trying to end the eternal war between Borogravia and everyone else. Polly decides to see if the girls of the country can’t succeed where the men have failed and attempt to free the capital and save her brother at the same time.


     Technically this book belongs in the City Watch series of the Discworld novels. While Polly is the main character, Commander Vimes and some of his officers have been called in to help stop the fighting because it’s disrupting trade in Ankh Morpork. This is one of my favorite Discworld books. It is so much better than Equal Rites, that the comparison is almost unfair. Instead of the women can’t do that, let’s find a man to teach you vibe, everyone in charge of Polly’s unit just sits back and lets her to do as she wishes. This book doesn’t set out to prove that women can be as good as men, it points out that women have already proven that even if the idiots in charge wouldn’t admit it. It also points out that gender shouldn’t be an issue but the abilities of the person. I know there’s almost 20 years between his writing Equal Rites and Monstrous Regiment, but the sentiments behind this one are what I wish Equal Rites had used.