The Grave Doug Freshley by Josh Hechinger YP FIC HECHINGE

Doug Freshley keeps his promises.  When the Delancey gang attacks he promises his friend and employer Shane McNally to keep his son Bat McNally safe.  And he certainly isn’t going to let something like being dead stop him.  After a bullet in the head kills him he gets right back up and uses his new found power of not dying to hunt down every last rotten Delancey and bring them to justice, but when he’s done he has a duel with Death to deal with…literally.

This book does a wonderful job upending the conventions of both westerns and zombie stories.  Sure, there’s the good guy getting the bad gang element of the western, but it’s handled with humor and irreverence.  And Doug is far from the normal zombie or undead.  He looks and acts normal; he just can’t die without keeping a promise.  The kooky and oft kilter plot is well matched by the art, which has simple and exaggerated artwork that is a mix of classic western comics and cartoon design.  Best yet, Hechinger tells a story with a beginning, a middle, and GASP an actual end without stringing it out interminably.  He leaves room for further adventures, but rewards readers with a very satisfying story.  Check it out.  It’ll be the best zombie western comic you read this year!

Check our catalog for The Grave Doug Freshley here.

The Hidden by Richard Sala YP FIC SALA

In the blink of an eye the whole world changed:  Monsters stride the sky, ghouls run the streets, humanity is doomed.  One man knows why, but finding the secret may destroy the remnants of humankind.  

This is a delightfully bizarre reworking of the classic Frankenstein mythos that has a fiendish and almost gleeful look at how hard humanity works at its own destruction.  Part send up of horror movies, part classic Gothic horror, part brutally violent murder fest, The Hidden is a completely off the wall graphic novel that looks like a simply drawn demented picture book about the gates of Hell opening on earth.  It’s superbly and refreshing in its unsentimental look at total annihilation.  Richard Sala has a totally inimitable style and this is maybe his best and oddest work yet.  It is a weirdly fun and almost upbeat apocalyptic tale, because the forces of darkness are having such gleeful fun at our demise. One of the most twisted and enjoyable looks at the basic darkness behind the pursuit to master life and death you’ll read this year in comic book form!

Check our catalog for The Hidden here.

Any Empire by Nate Powell YP FIC POWELL

Stuck in a small town, a group of kids look anywhere for escape.  Sometimes this escape is the hyper violent fantasy of daydreams of war and conquest and sometimes it is casual cruelty.  When this leads to the a series of turtles being tortured, one girl vows to find the culprits leading to a spiraling series of events that will tear apart siblings, bring together friends, and lead to a final confrontation years later that could save or doom them all.  

This is a bizarre and brutally accurate look at the horrors of the average adolescence.  Boredom, apathy, cruelty, isolation, loneliness, confusion, and sadness are all commonplace and unchanging.  Powell is an amazing artist and storyteller.  His Swallow Me Whole is an equally frightening look at the dark side of adolescence and his artwork on The Silence of Our Friends is equally stunning.  For the first 90% of this book I was thinking it might just be his masterpiece.  It’s powerful, honest, and raw and pushes the story slowly, but very well.  Unfortunately, the last pages introduce an inexplicable twist from realism to a science fiction parable that ends without a resolution and left me looking back many times to see if I lost some pages that would make any sense of it.  And then the story sort of just ends.  It’s all very avant garde and surreal and very confusing.  I found the sudden surreal ending of Swallow Me Whole much more fitting and actually understandable, so this one does disappoint a bit with the ending.  However, there is a lot that does work with Any Empire and some readers may like the pure weirdness of the ending.  I definitely recommend it for fans of comics as a true artistic medium, just not as enthusiastically as I recommended Swallow Me Whole.

Check out my reviews of Swallow Me Whole here, The Silence of Our Friends here, and check our catalog for Any Empire here.

Run: A Subject Seven Novel by James A. Moore YP FIC MOORE

The Failures are top secret mutant soldiers.  They’re unbelievably fast, strong, and vicious.  And they’re hiding inside the bodies of normal teenagers.  Now the Failures are on the run and running out of time.  The Successes (all the strengths of the Failures, none of the weaknesses, and trained to kill) are on their trail, their mutant other selves are weakening and may eventually destroy their human sides, and their one Hope is evelyn hope: the woman that made them and wants them captured, dissected, and erased from all human memory.  

Like, Subject Seven before it, this book is a fun twist on the Jekyll and Hyde dynamic. Run is a gritty, grimy, pulpy, fun time for older teens looking for a great cheesy action movie in book form.  It’s faster paced than Subject Seven, but anyone who hasn’t read the first book will have a tough time telling all the characters apart and relating at all to them.    The characters still don’t have a lot of depth or feel very ‘real’, but they work very well for the book.  The use of constantly shifting perspective works well as a way to keep you guessing who knows what and who’s really calling the shots.  It reminds me of a more rated R Maximum Ride series, which is a pretty awesome thing for teens that like gritty action and fast reads.  It may not change the way you look at the fragile humanity of humankind in a hostile universe, but it will entertain and have you looking forward to the next ride.

MILD QUIBBLE:  Gillikers is that cover atrocious!  They don't even use the SAME poorly-shaded-in-Photoshop models as the last terrible cover.

Check out Run in our catalog here and read my Subject Seven review here.

What's the next Hunger Games?

It could be the Chaos Walking trilogy.  It has just been announced that the very offbeat screenwriter and director, Charlie Kaufman writer of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation(DVD ADAPTATION) , and Being John Malkovich (DVD BEING) has signed on to write the first screenplay in the Chaos Walking Trilogy.  The Knife of Never Letting Go is the story of a planet where all the thoughts of men and animals can be head as the Noise.  After a young man named Todd discovers a girl named Viola, his decision to save her leads to the discovery of terrible secrets.  The trilogy eventually leads to all out warfare with the after of a planet in the balance.  You can read my reviews of the third book here.  This series has all the makings of a new Hunger Games.  Love, violence, dystopia, questions about the inhumanity of war and all that other great stuff! 

So check out the trilogy before the movie gets made and everyone and their Aunt Mildred is in line to read it!  And let us know in the comments what YOU think the next YA book series big movie should be based on.

The Ink-Keeper's Apprentice by Allen Say

Not a lot of kids can say they were living on their own by age 13.

As a boy, author Allen Say found himself navigating the urban jungle of Tokyo by himself. His parents had divorced and sent him to live with his grandmother. But that relationship, too, proved flammable, and it was decided what was best for everyone involved was to allow Say to live by himself. He took residence in a shabby 12 by 12-foot room with little more than a light bulb and a toilet in the way of amenities.

I lit a candle and turned on the overhead light, and thought about the day. Often I read the books I liked by candlelight. Grandmother would never have allowed it. Also she never let me stay up late. It was good to live alone.

Say decided to take his extraordinary circumstances one step further by seeking out the famous cartoonist Noro Shinpei as his mentor. In The Ink-Keeper's Apprentice, he shares the autobiographical story of that apprenticeship, which paved the way for his later career as an author and illustrator.

Shinpei proceeds to train Say in art and illustration. But more than that, the cartoonist serves as a father figure for the boy over the next three years, serving as a grounding influence as the boy navigates the vicissitudes of friends, female classmates, family tensions and the real world without the protective buffer that parents typically provide.

We learn that his mother was disowned by her family when she married Say's father, a Korean. But war has changed everything. Say comes from an old samurai family but World War II left his grandparents impoverished; his mother, who owns a small cosmetic shop in nearby Yokohama, must now support his grandmother.

Say paints his life in clear, undiluted strokes. He doesn't soften his experiences — such as an almost casual act of self-mutilation by Say's friend and fellow apprentice, the fiery Tokida, or the sad, remote relationship that Say has with his parents — nor does he thrust them upon us. He simply lays them out for us to absorb with his thoughtful, measured writing style.

In the process, we, as readers, get a glimpse of what life was like in post-World War II-Japan: the bombed out building scattered throughout the city, the encroaching influence of Western culture, the constant smoking, the bustling train stations.

This is a lovely, understated story of a Say's early experiences, many of which have gone on to greatly influence him as a person and artist. In one interview, Say said:

I was incredibly lucky, because Noro Shinpei recognized I was searching for a father and he adopted me. To this day, I am still his child. He is still living and is eighty-five years old. We continue to communicate. I send him all the books I do and he still critiques my work. He was only thirty-five years old when I met him.

Say speaks more on the topic in this video:

Top Ten Most Challenged Library Books of 2011: No Surprises

And it is sadder than sad that this list isn't surprising to me, but I certainly hope it shocks readers that aren't familiar with the world of book censorship.  A 'challenged' book is any book that is asked to be removed from a library or class reading list. 

To kick off National Library Week the American Library Association has issued their 2011 State of America's Libraries Report.  Included is a list of the top ten most challenged library books of the year. Read more about the challenges here. Here are the top ten books and the reasons they were challenged.

1)      ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
Offensive language; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

2)      The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa
Nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

3)      The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins
Anti-ethnic; anti-family; insensitivity; offensive language; occult/satanic; violence

Occult/satanic:  Where?  Magic doesn't even get mentioned once in the entire series, much less Old Nick himself.

4)      My Mom’s Having A Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler
Nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

5)      The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
Offensive language; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

6)      Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Nudity; offensive language; religious viewpoint

 I don't know why so many books have 'nudity' that are totally without pictures.  Is a description of a naked body really

7)      Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Insensitivity; nudity; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit

8)      What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones
Nudity; offensive language; sexually explicit

9)      Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar
Drugs; offensive language; sexually explicit

10)  To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
Offensive language; racism

 

I am especially struck by accusations of racism in To Kill a Mockingbird, since it is a beautiful novel about how terrible racism is. Also, it is surprising to see accusation of occult/satanism in The Hunger Games.  There isn't a drop of magic in the series. I could easily go through each book here and argue it's worth and the reason they should be in libraries, but I'll leave that to you. Let us know in the comments if these books are truly dangerous for the impressionable youth of our nation.