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Book Review: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

6/27/2016

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Book Review:
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
By Ransom Riggs
 
Quirk Books, 2011
 
B


The Basics:
 
Jacob’s grandfather has always been full of fanciful tales about his youth. For much of his life, Jacob assumed them to be nothing more than that, but when he gets the chance to take a trip to the island where his grandfather weathered World War II as a child, he finds evidence that the magical children’s home of his grandfather’s stories is not only real, but still there.
 
The Downside:
 
The tone of the book isn’t well telegraphed by the cover, and as a result, enjoyment of the contents depends wildly on personal expectations and how fortunately tastes happen to align. Many reviews I’ve come across after reading it myself complain that the cover promises horror and that the text fails to deliver. I personally expected something fairly whimsical based on the title and was surprised (pleasantly, for my taste) by the more effectively disturbing moments within. Some readers might be disappointed by how much of the book is spent in the ordinary world before reaching the titular home for peculiar children, but as the ordinary world parts are the strongest, I won’t complain on that point either.
 
Less pleasant, whatever your tonal expectations and preferences, is the flatness of the inhabitants of the home once we meet them. Each is defined by a peculiar ability and a few broad strokes besides, at best. There’s also a dose of open sexism draped only in that sneaky veil of self-deprecation (“boys can’t be expected to be as smart and responsible as girls!”) that certain authors seem to imagine is charming.
 
The Upside:
 
Where the peculiar children themselves fall short, the setup of Jacob’s ordinary life and family steal the show. Rather than cleanly vanishing into the background the moment the low fantasy elements arrive to whisk Jacob away to his destined escape, Jacob’s family of alienated generations of sad, unfulfilled people crumbles apart under its own uncomfortably real weight. Jacob is left by honest dysfunction rather than genre convention to decide alone how deep he means to plunge into the peculiar children’s unsettling world.
 
Exactly how unsettling does that world get? Well, here’s a spine-chiller of a concept: Bodies can’t age at the home for peculiar children. They also can’t decompose. This means that one of the children who died by accident at some point in their eternal seclusion is still lying in one of the home’s bedrooms, perpetually as fresh as the day it happened. Every so often, as a treat to the others, the one child whose peculiarity involves power over life and death saves up enough still-beating hearts from dead animals to rev up the dead friend’s corpse into a half-alive zombie state for a brief chat.
 
A strange juxtaposition with the nearly middle grade vibe that sometimes stems from the prepubescent attitudes and fairytale-like simplicity of the peculiar children? Yes, very. But genuinely creepy on the teens-and-up horror level that most of the book seems to aim for? Oh yes. The creep factor is both real and memorable with a particular vintage flavor, enhanced by the real antique photographs around which many of the story’s gags are written.



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Why Trying to Measure the Darkness Is Holding Superhero Movies Back

6/20/2016

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Okay, fiction rant time:
 
Can we stop arguing over whether superhero movies are too dark or just dark enough, as if level of darkness is a single defining aspect by which these movies can be quantified and catalogued?
 
Can we please talk instead about whether these movies are good?
 
I don’t demand that superhero stories make me feel warm and fuzzy inside. I don’t demand that they make me feel sad or disturbed. All I ask is what I ask of every story:
 
Make me feel something. Well, something other than bored, insulted, or ironically amused. Make me feel something on purpose.
 
You want to tell a superhero story that will make me laugh? Make me laugh. You want to rip out my heart and drag it through the mud? Do it. I dare you. I will thank and respect you for it if you can.


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Nope, that’s not it.

Man of Steel and Batman V. Superman utterly fail in this attempt. Why? Because they pile up the mud as high as they can, and they pull with the power of a freakin’ locomotive, but what are they pulling on? It’s sure as hell not my heart, because no part of these movies ever bothered to put the hooks into it first.
 
You can knock over as many imaginary buildings as you want. No one’s going to shed a tear if we haven’t had the chance to care about anyone inside them. You can put Superman through an endless gauntlet of public scrutiny and criticism, but if all you ever show us about your version of Superman is how much he has it coming, who cares?


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One shot of playfully falling fully clothed into a bathtub does not a character make.
 
Deadpool works because it knows what it wants to be; a smart, biting, R-rated meta comedy, and that’s what it is. It goes all out with its humor and does it well, but it lets in the darkness where the character development calls for it.


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Ditto Kick-Ass.

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Ant-Man
and Guardians of the Galaxy work on a similar principle, starting with the fun and letting in the dark when it fits.
 
Civil War manages to make it mostly work in reverse, by starting with a very serious storyline, but still taking the time to show us some of the lighthearted, banter-filled friendships that stand to be destroyed by said storyline, making the darkness mean something.


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Plus a lighter new heart.

Different people have different tastes when it comes to ideal level of darkness, and an argument can be made that certain existing characters, like Superman, aren’t compatible with the dark end of the spectrum without losing their inherent spirit. That’s a valid criticism, but it doesn’t come anywhere near covering what’s wrong with the new big screen Superman. Take any pre-existing attachment to any particular ideas of Superman or Batman or comics in general out of the equation, and these still aren’t good movies.
 
Darkness does not equal substance. Absence of darkness does not guarantee fun. Darkness does not correlate or inversely correlate with quality. Darkness is one dimension among many that make up storytelling, and when it’s the only dimension your formula accounts for, guess what? You get one-dimensional stories.
 
So that’s your answer, DC movie makers. Your problem isn’t that you need to make your movies darker or lighter. Your problem is that you need to stop fixating on that dimmer switch and make them better.

Rant complete.


Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!


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Book Review: Eleanor & Park

6/13/2016

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Book Review:
Eleanor & Park
By Rainbow Rowell
 
St. Martin’s Griffin, 2013
 
A+

The Basics:
 
Eleanor is an instant outcast in a new school, overweight, frizzy-haired, poor, and cornered into covering for her criminal stepfather. Park is an art-loving half-Korean boy in a Nebraska small town, with a family that expects boys to be tough and girls to be pretty. Once they discover each other on the school bus, when Eleanor begins reading Park’s comic books over his shoulder, well, then all they have to worry about is being two sixteen-year-olds in love, in a world that can separate them at the drop of a hat. So no smooth sailing here.
 
The Downside:
 
There are a few character turnarounds that feel a bit abrupt and underexplained, from the school mean kids and from Park’s parents. Also underexplained is Eleanor’s bizarre fashion sense. One of the first things Park notices about Eleanor is the way the ornaments she wears in her hair and the men’s neckties she attaches to herself in various unusual places draw extra attention to her. From Eleanor’s perspective, she’s extremely socially guarded and averse to both attention and artifice, put off by even the idea of wearing makeup. It would have been nice to get to understand from her side what thought and intent went into the strange choices of eye-catching self-decoration that Park finds so baffling.
 
The Upside:
 
Everything about Eleanor and Park’s relationships with each other and with their respective families is rendered with extraordinary care. In spite of their mutual desperation for understanding, Eleanor and Park’s love for each other grows with a careful slowness that demands to be taken seriously. Eleanor’s abusive stepfather is not the tasteless and cartoonish plot device that so many fictional characters suffer from at home, but a chillingly grounded reality, made all the worse by the cowed and forever excuse-making, rationalizing mother that Eleanor loves but can no longer trust. Park’s family life is less nightmarish but even more complicated, a crushing maelstrom of gender expectations passed down to him from the flawed but well-intentioned people who genuinely love him.
 
Eleanor and Park themselves are not the kinds of fictional teen outcasts who just need contact lenses and a little confidence to make the world notice their obvious hotness either, but the true to life and sincerely underrepresented kind -- they’re a significantly overweight girl and a self-stated unmasculine Asian guy for starters -- whose existence most fiction would prefer to ignore. Even the ’80s period backdrop adds to the general feeling of authenticity, freeing the book from the scramble to give every detail that transient of-the-moment quality and instead relaxing it into a flavor of its own.
 
The ultimate question of Eleanor and Park, whether or not it’s possible for two teens to find stability and comfort in each other, in spite of the instability of their still-forming lives, is explored with optimism but without sentimentality, and with a hauntingly open end.



Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Guest Post + Sneak Peek at Skin, by Brenda Corey Dunne

6/6/2016

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Welcoming back author Brenda Corey Dunne to celebrate the release of her YA paranormal new release, Skin! The book is already out and available...
Here!
She's already answered my favorite question, "What frightens you, and how does it influence your writing?" So for the release of Skin, I'm asking,

What made you want to write about Selkies, and what makes Skin different from other Selkie stories?


I’d love to have a deep, intensely personal story to answer this question, but sadly my answer is far from it. I’m really not sure where the selkies came from. Prince Edward Island is incredibly beautiful—windswept and lonely red sand beaches with absolutely nothing beyond for thousands of miles, quaint villages, lobster suppers in old wooden churches…I could envision a story set there, and I wanted to write a magical creature story…and well, vampires, werewolves and angels were all taken. Selkies are a relatively unexplored magical creature—half-human, half-seal creatures that lure unsuspecting humans to a watery grave—and what better place to plop them down than a beautiful beach in eastern Canada?
 
Plus, seals are really cute.
 
As for how Skin differs from other selkie books…I actually have never read another selkie story. Have you? I watched a movie once about selkies, but it was very vague, and nothing like Skin. I did do a few searches as I was writing, but when I went searching all I found were books with covers featuring half-naked women that didn’t look anything like what I imagined as a selkie. I envisioned a strong, mysterious, dark-eyed guy with curly hair, and a confused dark-eyed girl in an average North American high school. I thought they’d look like everyone else when they took off their skins, except for being attractive. (Really, if you’re going to be a magical creature, attraction is pretty important.) I envisioned that they’d take off their skins in a transformation that boggled the mind but looked natural.
 
I guess if you’ve read one, you’ll have to read Skin to make your own comparisons. :)


And what's that? Why yes, we do get a sneak peek...

 
The moon is so bright outside it’s casting shadows in my room, bathing everything in grey, dim light. I walk to the window, touch the photo still pinned to the wall, and look out at the beach. My hand falls, and my thumb slides to Dad’s ring, twisting it around and around and around.

It’s as if there’s a huge, lunar spotlight in the night sky, shining on the waves and blowing grasses. I have an urge to go out and walk in the waves. I can almost hear voices in the crash of the water—comforting voices—but Mom would have a hissy-fit if she found out I’d gone to the ocean alone. I sit down and sip my water, watching.

There’s someone walking along the beach, and I’m sure it’s Sam. His hair and the smooth way he walks—that lithe, almost animal stalk could only be him. Whether it’s real or a trick of the light, I think he might be naked. He’s carrying something in his arms— maybe it’s his clothes—but he walks into the waves with whatever it is like he’s going for a moonlight swim. He goes deeper and deeper until I only see the blink of his head. That too disappears beneath the waves.

I don’t see him resurface.


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About Skin:


With a name like Ocean, you’d think moving to Prince Edward Island would be simple. But since seventeen year old Ocean crossed that huge bridge to the land of red sand, her life has been far from normal—it’s been downright dangerous. Trouble seems to follow her everywhere, and she’s got the bruises to prove it. 
 
And then there’s her mysterious neighbour, Sam...who seems to know more about her history than she does herself. When Ocean finally steps into the salty waves with Sam, she realizes that her life has been based on a lie, and that she is missing something...something she never knew existed. 
 
Her skin.


Click here to order your copy!
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About Brenda Corey Dunne:


Brenda Corey Dunne grew up in rural New Brunswick, Canada. She originally trained as a physiotherapist and worked several years as an officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force before meeting her Air Force pilot husband and taking her release. She has two other published novels, Dependent (2014) and Treasure in the Flame (2012).

Brenda is represented by Frances Black of Literary Counsel. She currently resides on the Pacific Coast of Canada, but home is wherever the RCAF sends her hubby, and she’ll be moving to the Washington, DC area in the summer of 2016. When not writing, working or taxiing her three children she can be found either in the garden or on the beach with a book in one hand and a very, very large coffee in the other.

You can find her on her blog, on Facebook, on Twitter, and on Instagram.


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