Great Magyk Willoughbys Help Rampant Mouse

[maribou]

The Willoughbys, by Lois Lowry
The kind of parody that transcends parody and manages to ALSO be a top-rate exemplar of the genre it's parodying - without losing its sense of humour about itself (frex Gulliver's Travels). If you read many classic children's books as a child and are now a cynic, but still have fond memories - or if you wished the charmingly ironic Series of Unfortunate Events was both darker and sweeter.... you should definitely give this book a whirl. PS Some people may be interested to note that this book contains more than one Barnaby.
(21/200)

The Great Influenza, by John M Barry
Content very very interesting (1918 flu epidemic contextualized within a history of American medicine), writer's tone rather pompous and irritating. Thus, a slog, but one I'm glad I made. YMMV.
(22/200)

Magyk, by Angie Sage
Middle-grade fantasy, fairly straightforward and of course I grasped the entire outline of the overarching plot within the first thirty pages. But the descriptions are vivid, the characters are delightful, and the individual incidents that make up that predictable plot are engaging and original. A restful, endearing read.
(23/200)

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
The good: This story was plenty engrossing and once I got past my initial irritation at the way the author rendered dialect, I was definitely hooked on finding out what happened to the characters, who felt real to me. The bad: As a whole, the book felt like "Maeve Binchy does Toni Morrison" - a book clubby kind of story for white ladies who don't feel comfortable reading important African American authors, maybe found they were "too angry" for their tastes, but still want to be able to empathize with the struggle for civil rights. I really don't think that's what the author set out to do and I feel vaguely guilty for having that dismissive reaction to what was, actually, a pretty interesting, not-all-sweetness-and-light story that I enjoyed reading. It has merits! But in the end, I'm not able to decontextualize it from my irritation at the assumptions I've made about its success.... which bums me out - the author seems to be writing from a sincere and vulnerable place. But in the end it just didn't feel right.
(24/200)

Rampant, by Diana Peterfreund
SO much fun!!! The heroine spends her childhood putting up with her mom's crazy delusions that she springs from a line of unicorn hunters (and that unicorns were both real and top-of-the-food-chain superpredators).... and then finds out her mom was right and unicorns aren't actually extinct. Astrid's dogged efforts to figure out rational explanations to flesh out her completely irrational new situation in life are both funny and empathy-generating. The violence is no-holds-barred and the characters cuss and make out and a very unpleasant thing happens that some may find triggery - but despite all of this, I was somehow put in mind of Madeleine L'Engle more than anyone else. Our protagonist is working very hard at being good (though she would never put it that way) and I felt that the characters who weren't fleshed out were actually much more complicated than what I was told about them. I loved it! (Thanks to dreamingcrow for telling me to read it often enough that I actually listened.)
(25/200)

Mouse Guard: Fall 1152, by David Petersen
I picked up a single issue of this comic at some point, tried it, and thought "WTF was everyone liking about this? It doesn't even make sense!!" Well, I should've started at the beginning. The story is slight but compelling - and the art is gorgeous. Full of adorably valiant mice and suitably terrifying snakes, crabs, etc. Whee!
(26/200)

Comments

[eeyorerin]

The Great Influenza was a book that an AP analysis passage was taken from, so in 2008 I spent an entire WEEK reading students' interpretations of one page of that book. We all HATED John M Barry by the end of the week.

[maribou]

OMG so would I - it was bad enough in small occasional doses over the last two months.

[shebear.livejournal.com]

I've started The Great Influenza a few times and never been able to get very far into it.

My friend Heather loved Mouse Guard, but then she really loved both graphic novels and mice.

[maribou]

I don't think I would've finished the Great Influenza had it not been our book club read for January. Not that I finished it before the meeting... but that got me past the enormously irritating summary of American medicine through the 1800s and into the stories of the doctors themselves.

From what I've heard, I suspect Kolata's Flu is a less thorough but better written treatment of similar materia.

I'm reading Mouse Guard stuff b/c I may be playing in a Mouse Guard RPG. I started reading the rulebook and realized 1) it was more appealing than I remembered and 2) I was going to spoil myself for the actual story if I read the rule book first. It's a really quick read, if you feel like being charmed for an hour or two. Me, I'm usually more on the predator's side of the equation, but I do like mice and I do LOVE graphic novels:)

[manintheboat.livejournal.com]

I felt the same about the great flu.

[maribou]

I'm glad it's not just me, all my book club ladies loved it. (They are awesome, too, not the stereotypical kind I was referring to in my review of the help.)

[maida-mac.livejournal.com]

Yay! I'm glad that you read it.

[maribou]

Me too:)

[apotropaic.livejournal.com]

I wanted to like The Great Influenza. I really did.

But I didn't. It is one of the few books in my life that I just gave up on and did not finish.

Sad, since it's such great subject matter.


And I really liked The Help, although there were a few weaknesses in the story. It will be interesting to see what the author does in the future.

[maribou]

Yeah. I just got tired of being told how Nature was picking its battles, etc.

And yes, I would try another one of Stockett's books despite my issues with this one.