Love in the Time of Global Warming by Francesca Lia Block YP FIC BLOCK

Pen has a story to tell.  Stories have power and hers may just save the world. At least what's rest of it.  The Earth Shaker ripped the world apart and the sea reclaimed the land.  all Pen wanted was to find her family, a home, but she'll have to make a journey first. An odyssey.  She'll make a new family, face down giants, and fight the man that destroyed the world. 

This is the best posy-apocalyptic reimagining of the Odyssey I've ever read! Sure, it's the ONLY one I've ever read, but that's just another point in it's favor.  Francesca Lia Block always writes beautiful stories with amazing descriptive prose that can pull you into any world or person she imagines, so it is no surprise she can make something as odd as a post-apocalypse Odyssey come to life. Like the Odyssey before it this book is really about the power of stories and storytellers.  It also goes deeper into what gives the stories power.  Things like hope, faith, loyalty, love, hate, death, and more.  It is also about how we make our own family's but are also tied forever by the family that made us.  If this all sounds pretty philosophical and heady, well, yes it is.  It's also beautiful and magical and filled with an unashamed wonder of words and magic.  It's a love letter to the power of belief and fantasy.  It's also a look at what happens when the good things in life are betrayed and twisted.  This won't be a story for everyone. It tosses and turns and gets twisted inside and out before it all comes back together.  For me that was a frustrating, but ultimately rewarding experience.  I realized I was taken on a journey, too.  Like Pen it was not the one I wanted, but it was the right journey.  If you want a very strange trip, I can't recommend this book enough.

You can find Love in the Time of Global Warming in our catalog here.

RASL by Jeff Smith SF SMITH

Rasl is a thief.  He can break into almost anywhere, steal priceless works of art, and disappear without a trace.  It's easy. He just has to jump between parallel worlds!  He used to be Robert Johnson, the military physicist that found the lost journals of Nikola Tesla and used them to develop the technology to jump between worlds, but after horrible betrayal and irrevocable loss he is a thief on the run with little left to live for. Then he finds that he isn't the only one jumping between worlds.  The government has found him and will do anything and kill anyone to get Tesla's secret diaries.  If Rasl can't stop them then they'll rip a whole big enough to destroy all parallel worlds.

This is the best work Jeff Smith has done since his masterpiece Bone.  It uses the unique language of visual storytelling to be much more than just an  amazing noir science-fiction adventure. It is a dark and sad look at fate, love, loss, and the drive to know what makes the very universe run.  Smith doesn't do very much to make Rasl very likeable.  He's fairly down and almost all the way out when we meet him, and its only revenge that drives him through a lot of the story.  Its through revealing his past piece by piece and having Rasl face it piece by piece that he becomes the story's hero. It also helps that eh gives us a truly repellant and malevolent villain to root against in the lizard faced Agent Crow. Crow is gleefully willing to murder again and again, because he sees parallel worlds as a sick perversion of reality that he has to exterminate.  it makes for a more driven and interesting foil than a simple 'company man'.  I called it noir science fiction, because it is clearly inspired by two-fisted hardboiled crime fiction and a good dose of classic sci-fi.  It is not the first to mix the two by a long shot, but it is definitely the best graphic novel to do so.  My only gripe is that the idea of Tesla as the genius that discovered secret science powers and lost them to history becoming a pretty tired cliche.  Fortunately, the use if Tesla is very thoughtful and has deep thematic resonance to the story in RASL. This is not just a must read for older serious comic fans, but a must obsess over.  it has all the propulsive drive that Bone had that makes you rush through your first reading, and like Bone it has so much texture and detail to make it worth revisiting again and again.  Now that Smith has the best all ages fantasy comic epic ever and the best dark and gritty science fiction comic, there's no telling what is next.  

You can find RASLin our catalog here.

More Than This by Patrick Ness YP FIC NESS

"Here is the boy, drowning.
In these last moments, it's not the water that's finally done for him; it's the cold.
It is too late for him.
He will die.
And he will die alone.

He dies."

He wakes up.  He's covered in weird bandages. Well, partially covered.  He's in a strange, desolate, dried up town that seems totally empty and totally dead.  Then he finds something that cannot be. His childhood home.  The one in England. The one an ocean away from where he died. The one he left years ago after the tragedy that no one in his family will talk about.  The tragedy that is all. his. fault.  It is a dusty dead, burnt out world. A world in which he doesn't dream, so much as relive his past life in painful, frustrating detail. Since he can't really be alive and he can't really be in England. He realizes that he must be in his own personal, private Hell.  But even in Hell, there has to be more than this!  Doesn't there?

This is a tough book to review, because so much of what I love about it would reveal plot twists that should go unspoiled!  I can say that Ness has hit it out of the park once again with his deft use of realistic reaction and emotion in fantastic and seemingly impossible situations. The boy, Seth is a scared and scarred teen trying to survive and looking for a reason to survive. His doubts and frustration in the dead world he wakes up in and in his reliving his past are so well conveyed they feel universal.  I found myself rooting for Seth whether he was gripped by loneliness and despair or searching anywhere for a glimmer of hope.  Ness is able to wring drama and action aplenty with Seth just wandering around his new wasteland home, before he ever begins to reveal any of the books mysteries. For the price of one book (free because we are a library) you get a weird sci-fi (maybe) apocalytpic adventure, a devastating and harrowing look at living (and dying) with grief, a TOTAL brain twisting look at the very nature of reality itself, a beautiful and painful contemporary romance (as told in flashback), and several other wonderful surprises I won't spoil!

Young Adult fiction definitely has a lot of books where the main character has a painful past that is revealed bit by bit every few chapters until the final cathartic reveal. What makes More Than This stand apart is that the structure isn't just used to string the plot out, it becomes a part of the plot and the deeper themes of the book itself. Also, unlike some books that use this device, you never want to yell "HURRY UP ALREADY!!!", because BOTH worlds Seth is living in are fascinating in their own way.  I highly recommend this to anyone taht wants to read something truly unique.  It is going SUPER high on my Best Of list this year, and I think it will top yours too.

Check our catalog for More Than This here.

Hellboy: The Bride of Hell and Others by Mike Mignola Illustrated by Rixhard Corben, Kevin Nowlan, and Scott Hampton YP FIC MIGNOLA

He was summoned from hell, but fights on the side of the angels. Hellboy continues his unending quest to fight all forms of evil in this collection of short comics.  He faces a carnivorous house, vampire Mexican wrestlers, space aliens that dabble in the occult, vengeful mummies, ghost cows, and even more!

The various anthology collections of Hellboy are always some of his most fun, weird adventures, and this is definitely towards the very top of his best shorts collection.  Mignola very rarely draws anymore, but he is so well respected in comics that he can get the best illustrators in all of comics to work with him.  Both Richard Corben and Kevin Nowlan were all but retired, and Mignola was able to convince them to draw full comics.  This makes for some of the most richly drawn, inventive horror comics being drawn today.  The stories are all short and pack a lot of great twists, gags, and sublime weirdness in as few panels as possible.  My personal favorites have to be the vampire ghost story and the story about the house that eats people. However all the other stories are just as perfectly bizarre. All in all this is a must read for fans of comics of all stripes, and might make a great stepping in point for people looking to get into comics.

You can check our catalog for The Bride of Hell and Others here.

BZRK by Michael Grant YP FIC GRANT

The future war is fought on the nano and the battleground is the human mind.  This new war is played like a videogame but the stakes are life and death. The Thompson twins are building the perfect utopia.  No pain, crime, war, sadness, poverty or want. And all for the low, low price of the eradication of humanity’s free will.  That’s if the hackers known only as BZRK can’t stop them. But when you fight a war in a human mind, any mistake leads to irreparable madness.

This is a fast paced thriller with a fascinating premise, killer action, and wonderful twists and turns.  I loved the video game style and the fight to the death battles. All this is to be expected from the author of the megahit Gone series, but unfortunately Grant’s gift for building fascinating characters with substance and depth are not at their peak in BZRK.  I did really like the books “villains”, Grant does a commendable job of making them have motivations beyond loving evilness. However, the books main protagonists Noah and Sadie are sort of bland and never really grow in an interesting way.  On the other hand, this book has awesome bloody warfare inside human bodies and that is always great! Really, the book works so well in its strengths that its weaknesses never keep it from being immensely readable. The idea that there could be a secret war along my skin and in my very innards made me feel itchy and very creeped out.  The book ends with a huge climax and loads of loose ends, because of course this is a new series.  I do hope that Sadie and Noah get a bit more fleshed out as characters in the sequels, but this is still an absolutely original and high on the can’t-stop-reading-it-into-the-very-wee-hours-of-the-morning scale.

You can check our catalog for BZRK here.

Feed by M.T. Anderson YP FIC ANDERSON

“We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.”

Titus and his friends live on and for the Feed, a computer in their brains that from birth feeds them information and connects them to everyone, everything, and nothing. They can chat with their brains, watch video, look up any fact or figure in an instant, malfunction their brains for fun, and be fed ads tailored to their very thoughts. So why then are they all so bored?  Why does Titus feel so mal when he should feel meg? Who is this Violet chick coming off like she’s all brag and everyone else is so null?  And then when they all get hacked and Titus can’t access his feed for actual whole DAYS, what will he do? When he actual has for real feelings for Violet what will he do with them? What will he buy next?  

This is a viscously dark satire of the extremes of consumer culture and the vapidity of modern communication. It’s a dystopia as chilling and relevant as anything by George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. And it isn’t just a technophobic screed about “Those Darn Kids With Their Texting and the Whatnot” either. Adult society is also skewered well and full. The world of Feed is one where the planet is polluted beyond repair, war is ever-present and completely ignored, and mass violence is just another software glitch.  What makes this world so frightening is how little any of the characters in it care about anything that isn’t Fun and on the Feed.  Things like peoples skin falling off is just an everyday occurrence and they just buy more stuff to ignore it. Anderson shows a lot of the dark sides of a consumer culture.  There always has to be more stuff to buy to keep the machines of industry going, and when what we buy becomes who we are then a world like Feed becomes possible.

However, the characters aren’t all mindless drones to serve a big message for the author.  Anderson makes the major characters feel very real with believable limitations and drives, this makes the world he creates more real and more terrifying.  I also love that the character of Violet isn’t just there to Wake People Up and there isn’t a global conspiracy to unmask and no one successfully fights the feed and starts a global movement.  Violet’s just a girl that wants more out of life, but she has flaws and just wants to be happy like anybody else. Honestly, I think everyone should give Feed a chance. It’s not always fun, but it’s always darned interesting.  It tackles so many big ideas that it can be dizzying, but it never tells you what to think about it. I honestly think that it’s way more relevant than Brave New World or 1984 to most young people today and should definitely be on more High School reading lists.  Check it out for yourself.

You can check our catalog for Feed here.

The Rising: A Department 19 novel by Will Hill YP FIC HILL

Jamie is now an official member of Department 19, the secret monster hunting wing of the government, and is starting to settle into the non-stop grind of hunting monsters.  Paired with his vampire-turned-vampire-hunter girlfriend Larissa and friend Kate, they’ve been given the toughest assignment imaginable: find and destroy the resurrected Dracula before he regains his strength and takes over the world.

This is one of my favorite action series on the shelves.  Will Hill is a maestro of hard hitting action scenes.  He does a great job of making his purer than pure evil villains fun to hate and root against and is great at switching POV and timelines.  We get chapters form the viewpoint of Dracula, Kate, Larissa (she's my favorite because she's tormented), our hero Jamie, and a couple of others thrown in.  This keeps twists and turns coming aplenty and the book moving relatively briskly (parts of the middle section gets a tad slow, but picks up again with a vengeance).  It’s crazy how fast I tore through this brick of a book.  It’s nearly 600 pages but reads so quickly with a just-one-more-chapter-and-then-I’ll-sleep appeal that’s hard to resist.  My only gripe is that the characters aren’t all that interesting when they aren’t killing bad guys and that our hero is way too perfect. When the bullets and stakes start flying and the blood is pouring I oddly seem to forget all about it.  A must read for any fan of action, fast paced horror thrillers, or action horror.  Darren Shan fans might even have a new favorite author. I would read the first book before grabbing this one though, but that's just TWO awesome books you get to read.

You can check our catalog for The Rising here.

Cardboard by Doug TenNapel YP FIC TENNAPEL

Mike’s out of work, out of money, and fast becoming out of hope.  With his wife gone and life seeming to slip out of control he’s forced to give the World’s Worst Birthday Present to his son Cam: a cardboard box.  When they realize that the cardboard is magic and anything they make with it comes to life, they break the cardboard magic rules and make a magic cardboard maker out of cardboard to make endless cardboard creations.  Mike learns the folly of disobeying Cardboard Rules when the snooty rich kid Marcus steals the cardboard maker and begins making an evil cardboard army.  

This is a very close to great (and often great) graphic novel form TenNapel.  I quite enjoyed his previous book Bad Island but complained that it was too short (right here).  Cardboard feels much bigger both in its page count, but also in scope.  It has amazing designs, loads of twists, suspense, action, laughs, and pitch perfect cartoony style art.  Then why would I say it isn’t a capital ‘G’ Great Graphic Novel?  Unfortunately in several important scenes TenNapel commits the sin of telling us exactly what the characters think through a speech.  Mike does it. Cam does it. Marcus does it.  Even the evil cardboard monster does it.  I often look to Jeff Smith’s magnum opus Bone when I read TenNapel’s work.  Both are fantasy/humor hybrids with a cartoony style, but Smith allows much more subtlety in the dialogue and lets his excellent facial work tell a lot of the story.  What is a bit galling is that TenNapel’s drawing skills exceeds Smith’s in many ways.  He really doesn’t need clunky speeches for us to get emotion or spell out the book’s themes.  However, with all the wit in ingenuity in this title readers will truly enjoy the book anyways.  It’s just that this book is so close to being a perfect graphic novel gem, the (very) minor flaws do standout. 

Fortunately, the strengths standout too.  The book keeps new ideas and developments coming fast and is endlessly visually inventive.  The huge array of cardboard creatures keeps getting better and better, and the final action packed chapters have loads of grisly cardboard carnage.  The humor is really strong throughout as well.  It’s really the best book of its kind since the Bone series and is a must read for any graphic novel fan.

You can check our catalog for Cardboard here.