SHOCKTOBER You Know What You Have to Do by Bonnie Shimko YP FIC SHIMKO

Mary-Magdalene (Maggie to her friends) Feigenbaum seems like your average 15 year old.  Sure she has a weird name and her step-dad is the local mortician. Sure her mom dresses like a trashy teenager from the 80s (coincidentally when she had Maggie) and acts more like her sister, but relatively normal. Except for the voice.  The one that tells her she has to kill and how to get away with it.  The one that's already had her kill once and wants her to kill again. 

This is an engrossing thriller that will garb ahold of you and keep you reading as fast as you can to the very end.  It's a sick sort of thrill to be in the mind of a teenage serial killer.    Since we get the entire story from her perspective, we share in her fear of getting caught instead of rooting for it.  It's also really creepy that she spends so much time worrying about her relatively mundane boy problems and issues with her once-dorky friend joining the Cool Kids Table. The focus of this, distracts from the fact that we're being told the story from a cold blooded killer until the voice comes back and brings us back to sobering reality. Maggie's drive for murder is just one aspect of her life.  It's normality to her is genuinely unnerving and way more unsettling then if she was more conflicted outwardly. Maggie is also genuinely funny, with a dry sense of humor she shares with the reader and hides form the rest of the world.  This makes her both weirdly likable and made me feel complicit, like I was keeping her secrets. 

Unfortunately, the book has some notable flaws that keep it from being as good as it could have been.  Most the characters seem sort of thinly fleshed out, without much deep personality.  However, we are getting the viewpoint of a cold blooded murderer, so that could be partially why we don't get to know them very well.  Also, there's some occasional clunky dialogue and the book sometimes feels sanitized for your protection.  This is clearly a deliberate choice to make the book less graphic and bleak, but it will seem unrealistic to some readers.  however, it really worked for me.  Maggie is a bit shy and her best friend is woefully naive, so that fit their characters relatively well.  Also, keeping a lot of cursing and gory details made the book more medium dark than out and out bleak.  It reminded em of Lois Duncan, R L Stine, and Christopher Pike.  Always creepy and dark but usually not very explicit, but I think Shimko has the potential to out-write them all.  However, I think many readers will dislike the ending.  Without spoiling anything the book ends pretty abruptly and some people you expect to get the bloody justice they deserve don't.  Personally, I found the ending sort of ambiguous.  It definitely did end a bit too quickly and neatly for my tastes, but Maggie isn't the most reliable of narrators, so I'm not convinced as she is that her troubles are really over. Instead of feeling cheated by an anticlimax, I found it clever.  It made me realize that I was looking for more violence!  I was getting as bad as Maggie! I will admit that not getting more real answers about Maggie's condition was galling, but the faults are never enough to keep the book from being seriously gripping.  I highly recommend it to thriller fans. 

You can find You Know What You Have to Do in our catalog here.

Crap Kingdom by D.C. Pierson YP FIC PIERSON

Tom Parking has a boring normal life.  Nothing horrible or tragic had ever happened to him and that's part of the problem.  Chosen Ones always have tragic lives!  Tom knows thinking about being plucked from his world and brought to another is a ridiculous dorky fantasy and has the good sense not to mention it to his one friend or the girl he likes and is terrified of, but then he is magically transported to another world after all!  Okay, so the messenger, Gark seems weird and it is kind of lame that the portal is a donation box in a Kmart parking lot, but he's the Chosen One, this is going to be awesome, right?  Unfortunately, he's the chosen one of a kingdom so lame they didn't even bother naming it.  Their philosophy is based around the idea that being miserable and expecting more misery to come is the best thing, because you'll never be disappointed, the King despises Tom, and every one lives in filth.  Tom decides ruining and risking his life is not worth being Chosen One and chooses not to be Chosen.  However, when they choose his best friend to be Chosen One, Tom is torn.  He's really great at it and Tom is left feeling like more of a loser than ever.  Tom has to find a way to reclaim his stolen destiny, but in doing so he may doom Grrjhrhh (they just use any random noise) and Earth and a bunch of worlds he doesn't even know about!

This is a very good book that frustratingly shies away from greatness.  On the very good side the book is funny and has an amazing premise.  It skewers the Chosen One cliche incredibly well and the first visit to Ghhghast is hilarious.  Unfortunately the book sort of lags between visits to Frhasaghafs and Earth.  Also, the book introduces very few characters overall and misses an opportunity by using the characters it has pretty sparingly.  Basically it's a real Tomfest.  Fortunately, Tom is funny and Pierson really draws on his inner nerd to really nail the feelings of resentment, awkwardness, and confusion that come with high school nerdom (So I've been told. I mean, I wasn't a big huge nerdo. REALLY!). The central arc of Tom becoming a better person and facing his insecurities works pretty darn well, but the final third of the book is rushed and there isn't enough world building of the world Tom travels to or the enemy that wants to control it.  This sounds like it would be a pretty serious dealbreaker, but Pierson really nails the humor and brings a lot of heart and feeling to the book, so much like Tom it succeeds in the end. If you like fantasy, but enjoy a good satire of it OR if you hate fantasy and wish to see it mocked OR if you're on the fence about fantasy and just like laughing in general, give this one a chance.

You can look in our catalog for Crap Kingdom here.

The Boy Recession by Flynn Meaney YP FIC MEANEY

The recession is just plain bad for business, but now it’s downsizing Whitefish Bay’s chances for love sweet love.  With a faltering economy a mass exodus of people has left the town’s high school with a 4 to 1 female to male ratio.  That means that any ambulatory male can be on the school team and prize relationship material.  Smart slacker Hunter Fahrenbach has made a school career of just getting by without being noticed, now he’s pursued on all sides.  Kelly Robbins has always been Hunter’s friend but just as things MIGHT be happening with them, he’s become a much desired commodity.  Will the forces of supply and demand trump the power of love?

Wait, Luke is reviewing a book with no zombies, dystopias, death, or horrible bleakness!? I know!  For Valentine’s Day I decided to review a light, funny romance and I’m glad I did.  Told form both Hunter’s and Kelly’s perspectives, this is a laugh filled trifle that goes down easy and doesn’t leave a bitter aftertaste.  Sure, the characters aren’t incredibly nuanced and it has absolutely no action sequences or deep looks at the darkest parts of the human experience, but that doesn’t keep it from being a witty read that I found myself flying through.  Even I found myself rooting for the two kids to find a way to make it work, because I ended up genuinely liking them. The banter is fast and moves at a great clip, which isn’t always realistic, but it sure makes for snappy reading. So, if you want something fun, funny, light-hearted, romantic, and cute then give this one a spin.

You can check our catalog for The Boy Recession here.

Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life: Color Edition by Bryan Lee O’Malley YP FIC OMALLEY

Scott Pilgrim is dating a highschooler! And he’s totally 23 (and unemployed)!  (Don’t worry, they’ve only held hands.) Just when things feel nice and simple he meets the girl of his dreams, (Literally.  She rollerblades through his dreams to deliver packaged for amazon.com), and decides to fall head over heels.  Unfortunately, he doesn’t tell his high school girlfriend and even more unfortunately his new girlfriend has Seven Evil Exes that he must defeat to continue dating her.  NOW IN COLOR!

Okay, I know I already gave a rave review to the Scott Pilgrim series, so it may seem silly to re-review a book just because it’s in color.  Who do I even think I am, Ted Turner!?  Well, I understand your skepticism and must admit that I too was skeptical of a Colorized Scott Pilgrim, cynical even.  However, the superb job Nathan Fairbarn (the ONLY colorist I’ve yet to praise by name) did on this book really makes it worth a second look even if you have already read the series. I rarely find a series that changes so much with the addition of color as this one. It adds a new depth to the art and the new larger pages are dynamite.  Maybe even best of all is the extra content at the back.  There’s character design sheets and stories about how O’Malley came up with all the names and designs and ideas in the book!  Scott Pilgrim fans simply HAVE to read this and Soon-to-Be-Scott-Pilgrim-Fans should read it too.  I think anyone with an even passing interest in comics or manga should give this one a try.  

You can check our catalog for Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life: Color Edition here.