Nessa's Thoughts

In the late 2000s, the entertainment media sphere was rocked by the story of ‘The Bling Ring’, a gang of rich Californian teens who would burglarise the homes of the rich and the famous, using modern day technology to assist them. This gang of privileged, troubled teens managed to steal from celebrities such as Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Audrina Partridge, Orlando Bloom and Rachel Bilson whilst living the high life in the Californian valleys.

 

As the investigation progressed, it was discovered that the Bling Ring were only partially motivated by the monetary value of the items they stole. They would flaunt the celebrities’ clothing and jewellery whilst out and about, and even brag about their loot on social media websites. They were seemingly more interested in owning a ‘piece’ of the celebrities they admired. The celebrities who were famous for not much at all. Whereas old Hollywood celebrities had proven themselves in the rings of acting (Judy Garland), music (Frank Sinatra), dance (Fred Astaire), and other kinds of performance media, the new celebrities were simply famous for being in glitzy reality shows.

 

Nancy Jo Sales was among the first people to run an article about this odd criminal gang, in Vanity Fair. This book is an extension of that article, pulled out to over 250 pages to accompany the upcoming Sofia Coppola film. Many of Sofia Coppola’s films focus on the vacuity of fame, from Lost in Translation to Marie Antoinette, and now The Bling Ring. As Sales notes in the first part of this book, this was a perfect project for Coppola.

 

Unfortunately, the article being extended into a book is where it falls rather flat. Sales really has to reach for the stars in order to get some of its points to connect with each other. The author also has a habit of using pop culture references where they don’t really belong, such as comparing the teenagers opening Paris Hilton’s walk-in closet as ‘that scene where the dwarves discover the dragon’s treasure-laden lair in The Hobbit.’ It sounds apt, but really doesn’t fit. Orlando Bloom supposedly lives in a forested, ranch-style home that resembles ‘a Bat Cave.’ You mean the Bat Cave, I’m presuming? Oh, and let’s not forget Sales ludicrously comparing the fame bubble to ‘the force field thrown out by Violet, the “super” girl from The Incredibles.’

 

There’s also a lot of stupidly obvious observations, wherein Sales repeats herself as if talking to complete plebeians. I mean, I may not work for a prestigious magazine like Vanity Fair, but I’m quite sure I can glean what Lady Gaga is trying to say in her song ‘Paparazzi’ (page 17), or that Disney’sHigh School Musical movies are about ‘high school kids vying for roles in a high school musical.’ (Page 29.) This whole part about High School Musical doesn’t really make sense, as the previous paragraph builds up the idea that throughout the 2000s, there were many American movies and TV shows which showed how one could be rewarded with instant notoriety simply by showing off a certain skill, or even by just making an arse of yourself on camera. High School Musical isn’t really centred around fame, though. The plot revolves around exactly what it says on the label, a high school musical. It’s got nothing to do with the fame analogy, except for perhaps the character Sharpay (portrayed by Ashley Tisdale) clearly being written with Paris Hilton in mind. (Yes, I’ve watched those movies. Shush.)

 

Shortly after this, Sales even tries to divine meaning out of the lyrics of the theme song to the Disney sitcom Hannah Montana, which, granted, does revolve around being a famous pop idol, with Miley Cyrus as the face of a huge tween merchandising empire. I’d be fine with Sales explaining the premise of Hannah Montana, and relating its enormous popularity to the cultural obsession with overnight fame, but the lyrics of the theme song simply do not back up the point she is trying to make.

 

The main problem with Sales’ writing is that she trundles along with the points she is trying to make, using anecdotes and some research taken from sociological, anthropological and psychological studies. Then, she plops this one interesting point right at the end of the paragraph, like “Ta-da! There it is. Anyway, moving on!”

 

While Sales does have a salient point in that Western culture did become obsessed with the reality show (and still is, to some extent), she too often goes off on complete tangents. Demi Lovato was once quoted as saying that X Factor contestants are put into luxury hotels to give them a taste of the celebrity lifestyle. Sales follows that up with a completely irrelevant sentence about how Lovato and her co-judge, Britney Spears, were also in rehab, which is part of the ‘celebrity lifestyle.’ Right…

 

Sales also has a problem with making some very sweeping generalisations. The subjects up for debate are the rise in narcissism, the rate at which boys leave education or are diagnosed with ADHD, the fracturing of the family unit, female conditioning, teenagers over time, and even hip-hop music. Apparently, even a little girl in a Disney princess ball gown and a plastic tiara is a narcissist in the same vein as Paris Hilton or one of the Kardashian sisters, as are the parents who buy those jokey ‘I’m Spoiled Rotten’ or ‘I’m A Little Princess’ shirts for infants. Parents who fed into their children’s egos by being less strict than their own ‘Depression-era’ parents are blamed for causing ‘Failure to Launch’ syndrome, in which young adults don’t feel they are able to live independently of their parents. Pfft, the lousy economy, high rate of student debt and unemployment doesn’t exist, what are you talking about?

 

Let’s not forget that teenagers have shaped the United States throughout its history, as Sales reminds us that ‘sixteen of the 116 known participants at the Boston Tea Party were teenagers.’ My gosh, woman, slow down, that’s almost fourteen per cent! Plus, the concept of the ‘teenager‘ wasn’t thought up until the 1950s. Back then, they were just ‘young people.’

 

Oh, how about hip-hop? It’s fairly ignorant for Sales to say that hip-hop music was once a method of communicating social and political inequalities, and is now all about wealth and ‘gangsterism’, as if politically-charged hip hop was completely swallowed up by the gangsta rap of Jay Z, 50 Cent and P. Diddy, and doesn’t exist any more. But Sales does just that, after telling us about how two of the perps would drive around these moneyed areas of California listening to club hits by Lil Wayne.

 

Our writer also harks back to the days of Old Hollywood, before shows like Dynasty and Dallas offered a dramatic look into the modern world of the super rich. On page 72, Sales wonders why the people living in Hollywood aren’t constantly being burgled, since ‘ironically, the movies specialise in glamourising thieves.’ She gives three examples: The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), The Italian Job(1969), and How to Steal a Million (1966). All three films come from a different time in Hollywood, and with the point Sales is trying to make about modern reality, you wonder why she didn’t go for the remake of The Italian Job, or even the Ocean’s Eleven movies.

 

However, looking aside from all the inconsistencies, generalisations, arguments and points which don’t hold much water, stupidly obvious observations and baffling pop culture references, does Sales manage to tell the story of this brat pack, how they lived the high life, and how the perpetrators eventually got too cocky and were caught out?

 

Yes. Yes she does. The Bling Ring is hardly a bad read, and with the use of Sales’ anecdotes and some research sketchily tossed into the bag, The Bling Ring did achieve its goal of presenting a readable account of Hollywood’s most famous ring of teenage burglars, perfectly in time for the movie, and also in time for the summer, I suppose, if the book shelf at my local supermarket is to be believed.

 

Sales thankfully ceases using so many pop culture references, generalisations and points that would perhaps be salient if she developed them a little bit more rather than just throwing out the reference. When the book finally gets into gear and stops relating fame to some kid playing with a Bratz doll and deciding to be a snotty little madam obsessed with the celebrity lifestyle, it’s a fairly compelling, if at times blathering account of an unusual criminal case.

 

The Bling Ring is not a badly-researched account. Sales is the journalistic authority on the case, having seriously done her work beforehand, and trying to score interviews with all the perpetrators and everybody even tangentially involved. However, even with a long bibliography at the end of the book, the way the references are written brings to mind somebody desperately grasping at straws. 2/5.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book by its two authors – Wayne Williams and Darren Allan – in exchange for an honest review.So, here’s a question: how do you make the reader feel for the Biblical figure whose name has become synonymous with the term ‘betrayer’? I’m not a Bible scholar by any means, but I’d imagine Judas Iscariot would be a pretty irredeemable character.Just doing a bit of background research on Judas (and hefting out the stupidly expensive Bible I had to buy for my English Literature course even though we only studied the Book of Genesis [/rant]), there’s a few conflicting accounts on what happened to him after he betrayed Christ. Some accounts posit that he committed suicide, and others have Judas dying via some form of disembowelment. I won’t spoil which account IKWYDLS follows, but it is suitably horrid, following the tone of this book.Williams and Allan, however, go for the 1990s horror solution – Judas gets threatening notes and trophies sent to him after Jesus’ death. The film that the title of this book is based on (I Know What You Did Last Summer) isn’t particularly great, and is rather cheesy. I do appreciate the pun, though. The combination of Biblical story plus ridiculous, over the top horror movie elements works quite well, oddly enough. The authors really go all out in depicting the gore – I was in the bathtub whilst reading the chapter in which some characters are brutally slaughtered (drowned, dismembered, boiled alive) in a bath house, and I could feel my skin crawling. Needless to say, I hopped out of the tub posthaste.I’m also particularly squeamish about eyes and teeth, so when some other characters had them, uh, removed… it was time for me to put the book down for a moment. (This is the girl who has no problem watching Hannibal whilst eating her dinner.) I shan’t bore you with more times in which I was freaked out and had to put the book down for a moment, but needless to say, it happened a lot.I have two particular qualms with I Know What You Did Last Supper, and while they weren’t deal breakers for me, they did impact on my enjoyment somewhat. Firstly, Judas isn’t exactly… very interesting to read. I mean, I get that he’s supposed to be suffering horribly from guilt, and walking around day to day in a stupor, but I could never quite sense anything more than that. His reactions aren’t quite what you’d expect from somebody who’s been sent such grisly messages and has also been told that he’s going to be bumped off very soon if he doesn’t watch his back. Sure, he may be nursing a huge guilty complex, but Judas’ fear and paranoia in regards to the murders are so understated that he just seems to shrug them off.The second qualm I have is with the writing. Fine, I’m not the most brilliant wordsmith in the world, but the writing just doesn’t really do much. The prose is very simple and just winds up being ‘Judas did this, went there, reacted to this…’ It’s not a bad thing; not every author should aspire to writing great character pieces, sweeping landscapes, or quotable, but I feel that more could have been done with the description and flow of the story.Something else I wasn’t a hundred per cent was the climax being a little bit rushed. The pacing is done well, and everything hurtles to this huge climax and then… just peters out. When Judas has to sneak around Caiaphas’ house a second time to try and get back the silver, and/or blackmail him, it’s actually really tense. As is the scene where Judas is creeping through Lazarus’ house and is suddenly discovered, so has to get out of there sharpish. However, between these and other key scenes, it can be a bit of a slog to get through, and I will admit to skim reading some portions.It’s just a shame that the third act didn’t keep my attention as much, but I did really enjoy the twist ending. I had my theories about who the killer would actually be, and when it was revealed – about twenty pages towards the end – it was pretty plausible. An “ohhh!” moment, one could say.I also loved how Caiaphas – the main antagonist – gets his dues at the end of the book. That was pretty funny. “In exchange for me keeping my mouth shut about your crimes, I’m going to knock you off your high perch and put you where you belong; on a farm, with like-minded animals.” Oh snap. That was a great way to end the book. Speaking of the end of the book, the epilogue! I laughed at that pretty hard. Matthew is busy writing the Gospel, and asks one of the characters about more details pertaining to Judas and his sudden, mysterious death. Since Matthew can’t get a straight answer from her, he just sighs and goes: “Fine, I’ll just put he went off and did it. Sometimes I wonder why I bother. It’s not like anyone will read this anyway, is it?” “I’m not so sure.” Hah.The novel itself is engaging, and while it wasn’t as immersive or as exploratory of Judas’ character as I had hoped for, and had some dull moments, it was a great read, filled with toe-curling horror scenes and could be very entertaining. 4/5.(This review is also available on my blog: http://nessasky.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/i-know-what-you-did-last-supper-by-wayne-williams-and-darren-allan/)

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book by its two authors – Wayne Williams and Darren Allan – in exchange for an honest review.

 

So, here’s a question: how do you make the reader feel for the Biblical figure whose name has become synonymous with the term ‘betrayer’? I’m not a Bible scholar by any means, but I’d imagine Judas Iscariot would be a pretty irredeemable character.

 

Just doing a bit of background research on Judas (and hefting out the stupidly expensive Bible I had to buy for my English Literature course even though we only studied the Book of Genesis [/rant]), there’s a few conflicting accounts on what happened to him after he betrayed Christ. Some accounts posit that he committed suicide, and others have Judas dying via some form of disembowelment. I won’t spoil which account IKWYDLS follows, but it is suitably horrid, following the tone of this book.

 

Williams and Allan, however, go for the 1990s horror solution – Judas gets threatening notes and trophies sent to him after Jesus’ death. The film that the title of this book is based on (I Know What You Did Last Summer) isn’t particularly great, and is rather cheesy. I do appreciate the pun, though. The combination of Biblical story plus ridiculous, over the top horror movie elements works quite well, oddly enough. The authors really go all out in depicting the gore – I was in the bathtub whilst reading the chapter in which some characters are brutally slaughtered (drowned, dismembered, boiled alive) in a bath house, and I could feel my skin crawling. Needless to say, I hopped out of the tub posthaste.

 

I’m also particularly squeamish about eyes and teeth, so when some other characters had them, uh, removed… it was time for me to put the book down for a moment. (This is the girl who has no problem watching Hannibal whilst eating her dinner.) I shan’t bore you with more times in which I was freaked out and had to put the book down for a moment, but needless to say, it happened a lot.

 

I have two particular qualms with I Know What You Did Last Supper, and while they weren’t deal breakers for me, they did impact on my enjoyment somewhat. Firstly, Judas isn’t exactly… very interesting to read. I mean, I get that he’s supposed to be suffering horribly from guilt, and walking around day to day in a stupor, but I could never quite sense anything more than that. His reactions aren’t quite what you’d expect from somebody who’s been sent such grisly messages and has also been told that he’s going to be bumped off very soon if he doesn’t watch his back. Sure, he may be nursing a huge guilty complex, but Judas’ fear and paranoia in regards to the murders are so understated that he just seems to shrug them off.

 

The second qualm I have is with the writing. Fine, I’m not the most brilliant wordsmith in the world, but the writing just doesn’t really do much. The prose is very simple and just winds up being ‘Judas did this, went there, reacted to this…’ It’s not a bad thing; not every author should aspire to writing great character pieces, sweeping landscapes, or quotable, but I feel that more could have been done with the description and flow of the story.

 

Something else I wasn’t a hundred per cent was the climax being a little bit rushed. The pacing is done well, and everything hurtles to this huge climax and then… just peters out. When Judas has to sneak around Caiaphas’ house a second time to try and get back the silver, and/or blackmail him, it’s actually really tense. As is the scene where Judas is creeping through Lazarus’ house and is suddenly discovered, so has to get out of there sharpish. However, between these and other key scenes, it can be a bit of a slog to get through, and I will admit to skim reading some portions.

 

It’s just a shame that the third act didn’t keep my attention as much, but I did really enjoy the twist ending. I had my theories about who the killer would actually be, and when it was revealed – about twenty pages towards the end – it was pretty plausible. An “ohhh!” moment, one could say.

 

I also loved how Caiaphas – the main antagonist – gets his dues at the end of the book. That was pretty funny. “In exchange for me keeping my mouth shut about your crimes, I’m going to knock you off your high perch and put you where you belong; on a farm, with like-minded animals.” Oh snap. That was a great way to end the book.

 

 Speaking of the end of the book, the epilogue! I laughed at that pretty hard. Matthew is busy writing the Gospel, and asks one of the characters about more details pertaining to Judas and his sudden, mysterious death. Since Matthew can’t get a straight answer from her, he just sighs and goes: “Fine, I’ll just put he went off and did it. Sometimes I wonder why I bother. It’s not like anyone will read this anyway, is it?” “I’m not so sure.” Hah.

 

The novel itself is engaging, and while it wasn’t as immersive or as exploratory of Judas’ character as I had hoped for, and had some dull moments, it was a great read, filled with toe-curling horror scenes and could be very entertaining. 4/5.

This is going to be a double whammy, since I got both Black Butler volumes XII and XIII at the same time, and want to make up for the huge amount of time I missed. University kind of does that to you. Whoops.So without further ado, here's my thoughts on volume XIII of Black Butler....I didn't like it. Unfortunately, both of these volumes took a turn for the mediocre, and I was noticing quite a few problems in storyline, characterisation, and heck, even some problems in artwork. Normally when I read Black Butler, I find myself drawn in and enjoying myself enough to acknowledge the problems, but not find them hugely detrimental to my reading experience. Volume XIII, though? Has them in abundance, I'm sad to say.First of all, I really detest how little time is given to Elizabeth's transformation in character. It's about a chapter and a half. She's put into a perilous situation by Ciel either breaking or twisting his leg, and zombies surrounding her. So, Lizzie pulls out two swords from a conveniently-placed ornament (similar to Elizabeth Swan in Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl), and starts kicking some zombie backside. While it was nice to see Elizabeth being able to take care of herself and not squealing in fright, it's such a fleeting moment, and almost completely ruined by Elizabeth reverting to shrieking and crying shortly after.That chapter has this backstory about Elizabeth being subject to two different expectations, from two different people. Her aunt Angelina (Madam Red) tells her this: 'Favour poetry over philosophy, embroidery over cooking, dancing over chess. Be an innocent little angel.' Meanwhile, Elizabeth's mother wants her to carry on the family tradition of swordsmanship, even though Lizzie hates training for it. Even if her mother does push her a bit too hard, it's so that she can protect herself and her husband, apparently.As I said in my review of volume XII, Ciel remarks that he'd be scared to have a wife like Elizabeth's mother (his fencing instructor), due to her stern personality. Elizabeth takes that to heart as meaning he's frightened of women who are capable of proficiently using swords, I guess. It's a bit stupid, but Elizabeth is very young and naïve at the time. In fact, Elizabeth wears low-heeled shoes so that she won't appear taller than Ciel, even if she's just turned 15 and low-heeled pumps are a bit childish for her to be wearing. What.This kind of revelation ought to carry a lot more weight to it, and it really doesn't. It's laughed off when Elizabeth tearfully asks Ciel if he still likes her, and Ciel gets all flustered and replies that it doesn't matter. Oh, and when Elizabeth is carried out to the rescue boats, rather than utilising her skills against the zombies, Sebastian karate-chops her in the neck to induce a fainting spell. Since, you know... women can only handle that much excitement in one day.I'd be happier with this character revelation if it actually meant anything. It really doesn't. It's here today, gone tomorrow. Elizabeth hasn't changed, she's still reverted back to squealing and crowing on about how cute things are. Seriously, read the Easter chapter between the Campania and Weston College arcs. You'd expect this revelation to make her a little more confident, to realise Ciel likes her just the way she is, and to not be afraid of letting her true personality shine through. But nope! It's almost as if this whole thing never happened.Right, right, enough ranting about the bad character writing in regards to Lizzie. Now to bad character writing in regard to another character: Viscount Druitt. He's a fairly sinister, if incredibly dim villain early on in the manga, and he's used in the anime and manga simply for comic relief. Here, he's a member of the Aurora Society, a group who have this incredibly silly catchphrase and pose that they have to do in order to prove they're true members, sort of like a Masonic handshake. So long as you don't mind looking like a prat, you can get all the information you want! It's a gag that gets old extremely quickly. It was mildly amusing the first time, and now it's just excruciatingly jarring for the tone that's trying to be set.No, seriously. Ciel et al do the pose, and Viscount Druitt lets them in on his evil plan. Like any good villain, his speech on why the Aurora Society were involved in creating these zombies comes with with a delusion of grandeur and plans for world domination. This happens in two seconds flat. However, Druitt is just a pawn in the master plan thought up by... Undertaker, of all people. While Druitt wants to get rich selling the zombies to world militaries, Undertaker simply wanted to experiment and observe what happens when you reanimate the dead. But... for what reason? Just for curiosity's sake? That's it? Oh great. I don't think we are going to get any answers, since the manga then devolves into this big shounen fight scene, with Grell and Ronald in one corner, and Sebastian in the other. Both sides want to take in Undertaker for questioning, and both sides are determined not to lose. Yawn. Wake me up when it's over.Sebastian fights off Ronald, and whilst Grell is engaged in combat with Undertaker, she notices that he still has his scythe from the days when he was a Reaper. (This reveal was supposed to be a big surprise in the manga, but unfortunately it was ruined by the last few episodes of the anime.) Undertaker grabs Ciel, then stabs Sebastian to reveal his Cinematic Record, because he's always been curious as to why a demon like Sebastian would pretend to be a butler. (Reapers in Black Butler judge who goes to heaven or hell by taking a look at a film strip of the dead's life, after all.)This poses quite a few questions. Think back to volume 3, when Grell eviscerates Sebastian, because she's curious as to why a 'noxious beast' would pretend to be a butler. All she sees in Sebastian's Cinematic Record is a gag reel of two years' worth of Sebastian having to deal with the incompetent staff in the Phantomhive Manor. If Grell was only able to see the past two years, quite why Undertaker was able to go back even further is a bit confusing. Sure, he's powerful, but that powerful?What follows next are a series of chapters on Ciel and Sebastian's first few weeks together. Ciel is rescued, is reunited with his aunt, who reinstates him into society, and Sebastian uses his powers to fix up the burned-down Phantomhive manor and help get Ciel back on the right track to exacting his revenge.However, these flashbacks feel so unnecessary to me. Okay, one could argue that they are relevant, since I did complain about Black Butler's storyline completely veering off course in my previous review, but these flashbacks just feel... lumped in. It's as if Yana and her team (of artists, editors, etc.) were completely bored with writing and drawing the Campania arc, and then went: “Yeah, we're going to shove in some backstory, even though it doesn't quite fit right.” I suppose it was either now or never, since we only ever see tidbits of backstory every once in a blue moon throughout the other arcs, but it just wasn't the time.I will concede that the flashback chapters do have a few funny moments, though. In Volume XIII alone, we find out that the dog-hating Sebastian was indeed named after Ciel's old dog. Since he's bound by contract to be faithful, he can't exactly complain and ask for a new one. Also, Ciel gives him no end of sass, even though this butlering business is completely new to him. The food he serves is too greasy, he can't draw a bath properly, and he's not allowed to use his powers anymore. “Why, that bloody little knave.”Okay, I think that's enough rambling for now, so let's conclude, shall we? Even though this volume did keep me reading, and had some good comedy at points, it's really bogged down by the same problems as Volume XII – a clumsily put together story, along with characters whose motivations are confused. 2/5.(This review is also available on my blog: http://nessasky.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/manga-review-black-butler-kuroshitsuji-volume-xiii-by-yana-toboso/)

Man, this has been a long time coming. It's been about six months since I reviewed a volume of Black Butler, and I swear both volume XII and XIII had lower print runs or something. The comic shop I order them in from had trouble getting their hands on them, and I could never find them in big bookshops like Waterstone's and W.H. Smith's.However, I eventually got them, so on with the show. Here's the review for volume XII.Volume XII, as a continuation from volume XI is just... okay. I mean, it's a bit of a patchwork mess, to be honest. This is around about the time where I started reading the manga every month as it came out in Japan, and reading something monthly means you tend to forget the little things that detract from the story. At least, I do. I was like: “Yay, Grell's back! Oh my god, now they're going to get the ball rolling in terms of story, and the arc is going to be awesome!”...Except the Campania arc isn't so awesome, in hindsight. It just stuffs our characters onto the Titanic, and everything devolves into bland shounen fight scenes. Even in the slower scenes, where the characters are hiding from the zombies, or just interrogating the mad scientist who created them, it's not exactly paced very well. Things just... happen. I know that's a terrible description, but honestly, that's just the way it feels. There's no real cohesion between events in the story. I mean, Sebastian disappears for half a chapter. We last see him activating the watertight doors in order to delay the ship sinking, then we see him climb up out of the ocean and muse on how the water is so cold, that Ciel would be very ill if he were to fall in. He's there one moment and there the next, and it's more than a wee bit jarring.The Grim Reapers make their return in this volume (sans Will), and sure, it's fun to see them back again. Some of their gags are somewhat amusing too, like Grell demanding that she and Ronald copy the famous 'King of the world' pose from Titanic, and Grell's flirtations with Sebastian. I did also laugh at Ciel just leaving Sebastian behind as he was trying to hold back Ronald from slicing his face off with the world's most unwieldy scythe. Which is a gas-powered lawnmower. In 1890s England. Or on the Atlantic, if you prefer.Perhaps the biggest event in the manga is Elizabeth's transformation from screechy little girl obsessed with cute things, to a capable swordswoman who can hold her own against a group of zombies. Still, though, Ciel is 14 and Elizabeth is 15. For Elizabeth to still act like a little girl, and have her existence orbit totally around whether or not her betrothed thinks she's cute or not, at that age... seriously. She even sobs that she never wanted Ciel to see this 'ugly' side of her. Sure, in volume XIII it's revealed that Ciel once remarked on Elizabeth's mother – his fencing instructor – as being scary due to her strict teaching methods, and Elizabeth took it as meaning 'he thinks she's scary because she's a woman who can use a sword', but come on.All the characters are very disjointed from each other in this volume too. Yes, that's partly due to them being scattered – Ciel runs off to protect Lizzie, the Reapers go off to collect their souls, Lady Midford and her family are fighting zombies in the first class lounge, Sebastian spends the time ascertaining that ocean water on a cold night on spring is going to be cold enough to induce hypothermia, and Snake tries to keep mad scientist Ryan Stoker under his watch but fails spectacularly. (Also, I see what you did there, with Mr. Stoker's name – he creates undead beings who require sustenance from live humans, after all.)Ultimately, this volume just feels completely bolted together, and not at all cohesive in terms of characters and their motivations. Black Butler is one of those manga where the main, overarching plot takes a backseat in favour of what's currently going on in the arc, and only sparingly peppers hints of what went on before throughout the narrative, but it's starting to get really meandering and pointless now. Sure, the Curry Arc could be complete drivel at times, but at least it kept my interest throughout. I really liked the Circus Arc, and I actually did like the Phantomhive Mansion Murder Mystery arc, even if it got off to a shaky start. However, the Campania arc falls completely flat. Sure, there's zombies aboard a sinking ship with people dying left, right and centre, and there's not really much reason to get invested in the plot at all. While it does have its moments, I can't really give this more than 2/5.(This review is also available on my blog: http://nessasky.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/manga-review-black-butler-volume-xii-by-yana-toboso/)

Disclaimer: DNF’d at 72%.

 

Man, YA has been in a huge slump recently, hasn’t it? Plots are recycled more often than tin cans, and if it’s not some kind of paranormal (or otherwise) romance, it’s to do with a character joining some kind of secret society, or some harrowing view of a dystopian future in which zombies, vampires or rabid pro-lifers (see Neal Shusterman’s Unwholly) have invaded. You get the idea.

 

So, I was naturally very excited for Rick Yancey’s The 5th Wave. Wendy Darling and Ashleigh Paige’s reviews convinced me right off the bat, and I even heard that this book had a $750,000 campaign behind it. Publishers are banking on it becoming huge, and have used all kinds of social media to help get its name out there.

 

The 5th Wave takes place in a world similar to our own. Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation the aliens attacked. Their invasion takes place in four waves, each of which are fairly clever and would pretty much destroy society. (Let’s hope any potential alien invaders are from the planet Irk, eh?) The 1st wave destroys any form of electrical communication, to divide humanity. The 2nd wave triggers enormous tsunamis, wiping out cities and settlements all around the world. The 3rd wave is a manufactured disease spread by birds, that is said to be an even more aggressive strain of ebola. Now, with humanity completely on its knees, the aliens are coming down amongst us to pick off any survivors, and they’re in disguise as humans. Nowhere is safe, and you can’t trust anybody. The 5th Wave is coming, but just when or what it will be is anyone’s guess.

 

Now that is a great story premise. There’s panic, there’s mistrust, there’s losing your entire friends, family, and having to radically adjust to a new world in order to survive. In fact, our heroine Cassie has to go through all of that. She’s a regular schoolgirl when her mobile phone and the school computers stop working. She watches news reports in horror as major cities are swept away. She and her family watch their mother succumb to the ‘Red Plague’. Now, having been pulled apart from her family at a refugee camp, she has to try and stay alive as the mysterious invaders try to snuff out any remaining humans. That’s one hell of a crash course in survival skills.

 

In fact, Cassie is a great character to begin with. She doesn’t moan about her situation too much, she just gets out there are does what needs to be done. The only real link she has left to her family after she’s separated is her baby brother’s teddy bear, and her most prized possession becomes a rifle she learned to use at the refugee camp.

 

My biggest qualm with the novel, however, has to be the multiple viewpoints. We have a viewpoint from Cassie, then a viewpoint from an alien soldier, then a teenage boy, then Cassie again, and then back to teenage boy going through boot camp. I don’t normally take this long to read books (especially when it’s a highly-anticipated ARC such as this), but owing to various things which have kept me reading and limited my leisure reading time, I was often confused as hell as to whose head I was currently inhabiting. I had to keep flipping pages and back and forth, because the shifting viewpoints just do not transition well at all.

 

The alien’s viewpoint was quite interesting, though. I liked how his prime initiative was to kill Cassie, and yet his human host had affected his mindset so that he didn’t just take the shot and get rid of her whilst she was injured and hiding underneath a car. I was getting slight vibes of The Host, funnily enough, but now that’s left a bad taste in my mouth.

 

After the alien soldier lets Cassie go, she wanders through a blizzard and is saved by a boy named Evan, who watched his entire family die of the Red Plague. Naturally, Evan has devoted himself ever since to hunting, and keeping himself in a routine so his mind doesn’t snap. However, if Yancey wanted to portray Evan as this romantic sweetheart who took in Cassie out of kindness, it might have been better to tone down some of the creepier aspects of his personality. I get that he sees Cassie as being like his little sister, but really – Evan snoops through her diary, strips an unconscious Cassie naked and puts her in his sister’s bed, and hardly gives her any privacy. In fact, he watches her while she bathes. He also washes and rinses her hair for her. Even if it was sweet of him to pick up on Cassie mentioning that she hadn’t had chocolate in ages and leaving a Hershey’s Kiss on her bedside table in the morning, all that sweetness is instantly negated by his rather off-putting behaviour.

 

The teenage soldier going through bootcamp was uh… well, I don’t really want to spoil anything, but Rick Yancey seems to have had the famous bootcamp scene from Full Metal Jacket on repeat whilst writing this part of the story, since R. Lee Ermey’s dialogue made it into this novel, almost completely plagiarised. Okay, sure, one could say it’s paying homage, but one or two little throwbacks should be enough. Drill instructor Reznik’s personality is very close to Gunnery Sergeant Hartman’s. Arguably, so are most drill instructors depicted in media, but come on.

 

In fact, these boot camp and army scenes were excruciatingly boring for me. I just couldn’t gel with any of the characters, and I could see the ‘twist’ coming a mile off. They actually served to bring down the quality of the rest of the book for me. The characters all began to feel so disconnected. Even Cassie, the heroine who started out so well, became a complete bore.

 

Perhaps I’m allergic to the romance angle that The 5th Wave began to take, but honestly, the peril of the alien invasion really wore off after a while when Yancey decided that laboriously detailing boot camp and a budding romance was more important.

 

The twist towards the end (what the 5th Wave really is), was admittedly clever. However, by now I was wondering why on Earth the aliens had gone to such ridiculous lengths to take over our planet. Rather than take out the native species in five distinctive waves, why did they not simply go for one all-out invasion, if not to just needlessly antagonise humanity?

 

I know, I know, it would have been best for me to just stick with the book until the end, but ultimately, I didn’t care enough to find out the answer, because I had to be trapped in the minds of some of the dullest characters imaginable. The panic and peril of the alien invasion seems to just be swept under the rug, as our characters have to do nothing but twiddle their thumbs or just go through their day to day lives.

 

I’m sorry, The 5th Wave. It’s not you, it’s me. It was my fault for falling for the hype. I liked you to begin with, and you’re not a particularly bad read, but I found myself increasingly detached from any of the characters, and I wasn’t invested in the storyline at all after a certain point. 2/5.

Disclaimer: DNF'd at 72%.Man, YA has been in a huge slump recently, hasn't it? Plots are recycled more often than tin cans, and if it's not some kind of paranormal (or otherwise) romance, it's to do with a character joining some kind of secret society, or some harrowing view of a dystopian future in which zombies, vampires or rabid pro-lifers (see Neal Shusterman's Unwholly) have invaded. You get the idea.So, I was naturally very excited for Rick Yancey's The 5th Wave. Wendy Darling and Ashleigh Paige's reviews convinced me right off the bat, and I even heard that this book had a $750,000 campaign behind it. Publishers are banking on it becoming huge, and have used all kinds of social media to help get its name out there.The 5th Wave takes place in a world similar to our own. Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation the aliens attacked. Their invasion takes place in four waves, each of which are fairly clever and would pretty much destroy society. (Let's hope any potential alien invaders are from the planet Irk, eh?) The 1st wave destroys any form of electrical communication, to divide humanity. The 2nd wave triggers enormous tsunamis, wiping out cities and settlements all around the world. The 3rd wave is a manufactured disease spread by birds, that is said to be an even more aggressive strain of ebola. Now, with humanity completely on its knees, the aliens are coming down amongst us to pick off any survivors, and they're in disguise as humans. Nowhere is safe, and you can't trust anybody. The 5th Wave is coming, but just when or what it will be is anyone's guess.Now that is a great story premise. There's panic, there's mistrust, there's losing your entire friends, family, and having to radically adjust to a new world in order to survive. In fact, our heroine Cassie has to go through all of that. She's a regular schoolgirl when her mobile phone and the school computers stop working. She watches news reports in horror as major cities are swept away. She and her family watch their mother succumb to the 'Red Plague'. Now, having been pulled apart from her family at a refugee camp, she has to try and stay alive as the mysterious invaders try to snuff out any remaining humans. That's one hell of a crash course in survival skills.In fact, Cassie is a great character to begin with. She doesn't moan about her situation too much, she just gets out there are does what needs to be done. The only real link she has left to her family after she's separated is her baby brother's teddy bear, and her most prized possession becomes a rifle she learned to use at the refugee camp.My biggest qualm with the novel, however, has to be the multiple viewpoints. We have a viewpoint from Cassie, then a viewpoint from an alien soldier, then a teenage boy, then Cassie again, and then back to teenage boy going through boot camp. I don't normally take this long to read books (especially when it's a highly-anticipated ARC such as this), but owing to various things which have kept me reading and limited my leisure reading time, I was often confused as hell as to whose head I was currently inhabiting. I had to keep flipping pages and back and forth, because the shifting viewpoints just do not transition well at all.The alien's viewpoint was quite interesting, though. I liked how his prime initiative was to kill Cassie, and yet his human host had affected his mindset so that he didn't just take the shot and get rid of her whilst she was injured and hiding underneath a car. I was getting slight vibes of The Host, funnily enough, but now that's left a bad taste in my mouth.After the alien soldier lets Cassie go, she wanders through a blizzard and is saved by a boy named Evan, who watched his entire family die of the Red Plague. Naturally, Evan has devoted himself ever since to hunting, and keeping himself in a routine so his mind doesn't snap. However, if Yancey wanted to portray Evan as this romantic sweetheart who took in Cassie out of kindness, it might have been better to tone down some of the creepier aspects of his personality. I get that he sees Cassie as being like his little sister, but really – Evan snoops through her diary, strips an unconscious Cassie naked and puts her in his sister's bed, and hardly gives her any privacy. In fact, he watches her while she bathes. He also washes and rinses her hair for her. Even if it was sweet of him to pick up on Cassie mentioning that she hadn't had chocolate in ages and leaving a Hershey's Kiss on her bedside table in the morning, all that sweetness is instantly negated by his rather off-putting behaviour. The teenage soldier going through bootcamp was uh... well, I don't really want to spoil anything, but Rick Yancey seems to have had the famous bootcamp scene from Full Metal Jacket on repeat whilst writing this part of the story, since R. Lee Ermey's dialogue made it into this novel, almost completely plagiarised. Okay, sure, one could say it's paying homage, but one or two little throwbacks should be enough. Drill instructor Reznik's personality is very close to Gunnery Sergeant Hartman's. Arguably, so are most drill instructors depicted in media, but come on:T5W: “Are you a killer, private?” (47%)FMJ: [talking to a private] “So you're a killer?”T5W: "Private, did your mother have any children who lived? I bet when you were born she took one look at you and tried to shove you back in!" (48%)FMJ: “Did your parents have any children that lived? I bet they regret that!” And also: “It looks to me like the best part of you ran down your mama's ass and ended up as a brown stain on the mattress!” T5W: “Who said that!? Which one of you scum-sucking maggots just signed his own death warrant?” “Nobody, huh?” Followed by: “Sir, I said it, sir!” (48%)FMJ: “Who said that!? WHO THE FUCK SAID THAT!? Who's the slimy little Communist shit twinkle-toed cocksucker down here who just signed his own death warrant!? Nobody, huh?” Followed by: “Sir, I said it, sir!”In fact, these boot camp and army scenes were excruciatingly boring for me. I just couldn't gel with any of the characters, and I could see the 'twist' coming a mile off. They actually served to bring down the quality of the rest of the book for me. The characters all began to feel so disconnected. Even Cassie, the heroine who started out so well, became a complete bore. Perhaps I'm allergic to the romance angle that The 5th Wave began to take, but honestly, the peril of the alien invasion really wore off after a while when Yancey decided that laboriously detailing boot camp and a budding romance was more important. The twist towards the end (what the 5th Wave really is), was admittedly clever. However, by now I was wondering why on Earth the aliens had gone to such ridiculous lengths to take over our planet. Rather than take out the native species in five distinctive waves, why did they not simply go for one all-out invasion, if not to just needlessly antagonise humanity? I know, I know, it would have been best for me to just stick with the book until the end, but ultimately, I didn't care enough to find out the answer, because I had to be trapped in the minds of some of the dullest characters imaginable. The panic and peril of the alien invasion seems to just be swept under the rug, as our characters have to do nothing but twiddle their thumbs or just go through their day to day lives. I'm sorry, The 5th Wave. It's not you, it's me. It was my fault for falling for the hype. I liked you to begin with, and you're not a particularly bad read, but I found myself increasingly detached from any of the characters, and I wasn't invested in the storyline at all after a certain point. 2/5.(This review is also available on my blog: http://nessasky.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/book-review-the-5th-wave-by-rick-yancey/)

One of my favourite anime/manga series of all time is Full Metal Alchemist. I've read all of the manga (and kept up with it while it was still being released online), and watched both series of the anime multiple times.While I had heard about Hiromu Arakawa's latest manga series, I hadn't thought to check it out until a little while before the anime premiered. Before reading, however, I had to repeat to myself: “Look, Silver Spoon may be big in Japan. However, FMA just has to be Hiromu Arakawa's magnum opus. So, dear self, don't be too crushed if Silver Spoon is a bit of a disappointment.”Here's the point where I might go: 'However, this exceeded all of my expectations! Silver Spoon is actually better!”...Except that Silver Spoon isn't really better or worse than its more popular elder brother. It's just okay. It's a safe, sweet little comedy that doesn't really reach outside of its boundaries.I remember the comedy in FMA being hilarious on both of my rereads, because it's some relief from all the drama and tragedy that takes place throughout the story. For example, when Scar hunts down Ed and Al, and is about to kill Ed in front of a powerless Alphonse. Tra-la-la! In bursts Major Alexander Armstrong to save the day, flex his muscles and wax lyrical about the technique that has been passed down through his family for generations! Oh, and later we get the cool and collected Colonel Roy Mustang almost getting killed for being so sure that his flame alchemy would work in a downpour of rain. All while Al is extremely upset with Ed for just giving up and saying he'd allow Scar to kill him so long as Alphonse would be spared.Alright, alright. I sound a little bit unfair here, since Full-Metal Alchemist and Silver Spoon are in completely different genres to each other. However, the comedy utilised in Full-Metal Alchemist is leagues above Silver Spoon, which is quite a feat considering this is supposed to primarily be a comedy manga.Silver Spoon plays out a bit like one of those formulaic Hollywood sitcoms, where they just violently toss a fish out of water and expect its agitated flopping around to be absolutely hilarious. In this case, we have our main character Hachiken, a high school freshman from the city who inexplicably decides to attend an agricultural college. Apparently this school will take on people from non-farming backgrounds based on their grades, and because Hachiken finds schoolwork to be a breeze, he thinks it'll be an easy ride. Those dumb hicks and their lack of a proper academic education, right?As you can imagine, the majority of the comedy in Silver Spoon comes from Hachiken realising he's completely wrong about farming life, and overreacting to things that the animals do, or where his food actually comes from. In chapter two, there's a running gag about Hachiken being utterly horrified to discover the way in which chickens lay their eggs. (Hint: freshly-laid eggs often have flecks of poop on them.) It's funny one time, but by the end of the chapter when Hachiken is still freaking out about eating eggs, and one of his classmates has to reassure him that chickens actually lay eggs out of a different part of their anatomy, it's old.When Hachiken attends class in the school building only to overheard his supposedly ignorant classmates conversing in agricultural science jargon that is almost impossible to decipher, sure, that's funny once. But seeing him getting flummoxed over Tamako or Ichiro or Aikawa railing off like they swallowed down a veterinary biology textbook, complemented by several back issues of Modern Farmer just doesn't work so well any more. Once you've seen it repeated three or four times, t's no longer funny to see a city boy getting all flustered and nervous around animals that are likely going to sense his fear and bite or lash out at him.Thankfully, Hiromu Arakawa does stop these gags from running too long, and manages to set a pace for herself over the course of the first volume. Still, though, the main comedic outline of this manga is: “I'm on a FARM and I'm not used to the agricultural lifestyle!”One has to wonder, though – why on Earth did Hachiken choose to go to a specialist technical school like Oezo High? Why does he show a complete lack of understanding for what he's getting into? Honestly, the latter question makes me think of somebody signing up for catering college and finding themselves out of their depth because, surprise, surprise, you're more likely to be marked on how well you can make a soufflé as opposed to passing a science exam. Surely Oezo has a brochure and an open day. Surely Hachiken knew what he was getting himself into. Right? Right?In fact, the reason why Hachiken is attending Oezo is never really made clear. It may just be because he thinks it'll be easier than going to a competitive private high school in the city, or just as an act of rebellion. Also, where are his parents? Did they not see him filling out the application for Oezo and put their feet down? I mean, what's the point of attending a school that teaches a discipline you don't have the first bloody clue about? It's right in the name of the school – Oezo Agricultural High School. It's not going to be a regular high school with some subjects tweaked to make them accessible to aspiring farmers.Hiromu Arakawa does have a farming background, so at least every agricultural detail is authentic. Having never been to an agricultural school, I can't vouch for the types of people you'd have in your class, but I guess they're true to some extent. One of Hachiken's classmates wants to be a livestock vet, one wants to take over the family poultry farm, and another wants to learn how to run her parents' farm as a successful business.However, it's a shame that the manga ultimately turns into a big exercise in: “I'm on a farm! It's SO STRANGE! The animals are unpredictable, people from farming backgrounds are alien to me, and it turns out you have to get up at five in the morning and keep yourself in peak physical condition!”It's not like this manga is a complete loss, though. As much as the comedy is predictable straight man overreacting to things that the people around him just shrug and accept, at least the characters aren't the staid stereotypes they so easily could have been.As much as I love Hiromu Arakawa's artwork, there are some times where her character designs from Full-Metal Alchemist are ever so slightly recycled. Some may see this as a cute throwback to the series that made her famous; I see it as kind of jarring. There's the Expy PE coach who looks almost exactly like Major Alexander Armstrong, the upperclassman who looks like Greed, or even Hachiken's classmate Nishikawa, who looks to me a little like the bastard lovechild of Ling Yao and Yoki. Hachiken's friend Aikawa looks a bit like an eternally blissful Sergeant Denny Brosh with a haircut. And so on and so forth. Thankfully, it isn't like every character looks like somebody from Full-Metal Alchemist, or even Hero Tales.The main cast all have some depth to them, which I'm quite glad for. I'm still very curious about why Hachiken is attending Oezo. Arakawa drops these little hints that something isn't quite right with our main character. He's a full-time boarder at Oezo, and even though he has the opportunity to go home for a week's holiday, he doesn't take it. He seems to skirt around any details of his home life, just focusing on what he's currently going through now. Just what is going on in his home life that he'd rather run away from home and take up a completely foreign field of study just to be away from his family? Curiouser and curiouser.3/5.(This review is also available on my blog: http://nessasky.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/manga-review-silver-spoon-gin-no-saji-volume-1-by-hiromu-arakawa/)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irD6Xbm4Xz4I NEED THIS LIKE BURNING

So, a few days ago I started watching the Flowers of Evil anime on a whim, and decided to check out the manga. First things first, I don't particularly care for the massive outcry there has been online for the anime taking on a jerky rotoscoping style of animation. In fact, if you go on Amazon Japan, there's been a whole deluge of people giving the anime one star ratings and reviews. This may not be true of every Japanese review on Amazon, but the majority seem to really have taken umbrage with the change in art style, even if the creator said they approved of it.I see both sides of the argument. I see that the series should be all cutesy - the way the manga is - in order to really carry over the creepiness in the story. Giving it a slightly more realistic, rotoscoped look is just being too overt with the creepy aspect. On the other hand, if it had retained its manga style, people may not be giving it the time of day, or even discussing it so much. Whatever the case, I like both styles and don't really see the need for the huge debate.Anyway, back onto the manga.Flowers of Evil is about Takao Kasuga, a lonely teenager who devours classical literature and has a sense of self-importance about him because of course, nobody else in his class could ever understand these masterworks because they're so close-minded. Or, you know, just not particularly interested in Baudelaire or Philip K. Dick. I know I wasn't at that age.After school one day, Takao steals the gym uniform of his crush Saeki, in a fit of lust. The creepy girl in class, Sawa Nakamura, saw him do it, and threatens to expose his secret unless he becomes her friend and she lets him 'peel away the layers and show him what a rotten fucking pervert he is.' Charming. Takao, being the weak-willed sort, accepts this contract.As Saeki is the most popular girl in the class, when news gets out that her gym uniform was stolen, the class instantly start whispering about what sort of pervert would do such a thing. Rather than do the logical thing, of oh, Kasuga going to Saeki in private on the same day and telling her he picked up her uniform instead of his by complete accident, he just stays quiet, and so the rumour mill goes into overdrive. Cripes, dude, just tell her! That way you don't have to have Nakamura breathing down your neck or screaming in your face or threatening you.At first, Nakamura really interested me. I actually had this theory about her not actually being real, to begin with. Well, she was real - she was just the oddball sitting behind Kasuga in class, and not really much of a threat besides her propensity to swear at teachers and those around her. Nakamura forcing Kasuga to do all this blackmail was just his way of excusing himself for say, wearing Saeki's gym uniform underneath his clothes on his first date with her. I don't subscribe to that theory any more, but it could have been interesting if that were the case.I don't quite get Kasuga, to be honest. He has a group of friends, yet some of the kids in his class are really mean to him. There's this one part where one of Saeki's friends discovers that her lunch money has been taken out of her locker, and the class instantly turns on Nakamura without any proof. (Haha, what next - turn it into a classroom trial and give little Phoenix Wright his first taste of law being used to help the defence out of sticky situations?) Kasuga basically speaks up and says that there's no evidence to convict Nakamura, so everyone should stop picking on her. At first some of his classmates tell him to shut up and sit in the corner with his book, but then it turns into this whole: "Nakamura and Kasuga, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!" bullcrap. And Kasuga just never speaks up! Dude, they're accusing you really harshly, just say something! The same thing you should have said to Saeki to get yourself out of this mess in the first place! It reminds me of Yahtzee's review of the game Catherine: 'If the dude could take five seconds to just explain things without stammering out more lies whilst sweating like James Murdoch at a government hearing, then he could probably sort everything out!' Granted, Kasuga doesn't lie (much), but he does keep so quiet that the rumours just keep on accumulating until he's in a somewhat similar position to Vincent Brooks.That being said, the manga is stupidly addictive. Manga that contains high stakes emotional drama does tend to be addictive (see Keiko Suenobu's LIFE), and Flowers of Evil did a very good job in keeping this member of its audience captive. I burned through volumes 1-4 over the course of two nights before realising it was getting worse with every volume. Worse as in ratings, not worse as in drama. Yes, unfortunately, the drama just crashes into a brick wall over the next few volumes. While I won't spoil it here, it's just shilled out more and more to the point of eye-rolling whenever Nakamura makes Kasuga do something, or Kasuga has to go out of his comfort zone, or... argh. Such a shame, because I was really loath to go from a three star to a two star.I wanted to love this manga, but Kasuga is just completely whiny and irksome, and with all the drama that's pushed on him, it just becomes over the top after a while. He constantly moans that nobody understands him or his love of books, but come on, man. That's no way to live your life. I get that this rural isolation is a key thing in the series - Kasuga feels like nobody understands him, like he's on an alien planet where people speak completely unintelligible nonsense, and so does Nakamura. Well... Just move to the city when you get to university. That's all you have to do! It might be a far-off dream, but just work hard and you'll be there before you know it. I'm sure there's someone in a student union bar in Tokyo or Osaka who understands the intrinsic meaning behind Baudelaire.I also was pretty annoyed with Kasuga's dad just hand-waving everything away. I mean, Kasuga gets into a lot of trouble later in the series and yet his dad just goes: "Oh, don't worry, he's just going through puberty," or "He's a teenage boy, we should let him have some free rein," etc.While I do quite like this manga and found it fascinating to delve into, the drama really does become overbearing after a while. Nakamura's character schtick really wears off after a while. "Oh, look, she's got Kasuga alone. Oh, oh, she's going to swear at him and burst out a crazy expression! Yep, that's it, there she goes!" Kasuga, unfortunately, just isn't a character you want to support. He's the kind of person you want to kick up the backside and tell him to do something. This kind of character can be done well - see Shinji from Evangelion - but here it's just tedious.So, like I said before, Flowers of Evil volume 1 gets a 3 star rating from me. The characters aren't great, the drama just snowballs until you can't really bring yourself to care about it any more... and yet it is incredibly addictive, and there are some parts where it's well-written and gets across its message perfectly with clever motifs and symbols. It's just a shame all the good stuff is overshadowed by the crappy drama angle. (This review is available on my blog: http://book-wyrm.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/manga-review-flowers-of-evil-aku-no.html)

"On that day, mankind received a grim reminder: we lived in fear of the Titans and were disgraced to live in these cages we called walls."Young Eren Jaeger and his foster sister Mikasa Ackerman live behind 50 feet tall walls alongside the other remnants of humanity. A little over 100 years ago, mankind finally found itself ousted from the top of the food chain; replacing them were the Titans, enormous man-eating giants who live solely to feast on humans. Those who survived their first onslaught built enormous 50 feet tall walls designed to keep them out, and it's worked so far. That is, until an even bigger Titan shows up and kicks down the wall, allowing his smaller brethren to come through and happily devour the poor townsfolk.This is a manga that has won awards in Japan, has a fairly big fandom and was already making waves with the scanlations. It speaks to some of mankind's most primal fears, and it's absolutely bloody brilliant.I love the designs of the Titans, for one thing. The Colossal Titan who shows up right at the beginning and towards the end is freaky as all hell, with no skin and far too many teeth fixed in a permanent grin, and the smaller Titans are just as unsettling, with sunburned skin, blissful expressions and again, permanent grins all the better to eat you with. I read Junji Ito's The Enigma of Amigara Fault shortly after this manga, and you know, I think I'm more scared of being eaten alive by giants than I am sliding down into a cave hole my exact shape and having my limbs contort within the rock whilst I'm still alive and unable to turn around and get out. The sense of panic is really well done in this manga, as is the sense of complete hopelessness. During a military parade to welcome home the remnants of the last Scouting platoon, it's clear to see that their numbers have severely dwindled and the majority of them are heavily injured. The mother of one of the soldiers runs up to the commanding officer, and after learning her son has died in battle against the Titans, tearfully asks if his death helped humanity in any way. The commanding officer stammers a bit, and then bursts into tears himself as he has to admit that nothing the platoon did helped humanity in the least.When Eren and Mikasa's family friend Hannes, a member of the Stationary Guard jumps in to help the kids after they witness their house being crushed by a stray boulder, and a Titan lumbering into view. Hannes draws his sword and runs up to face it. The Titan leering down at him is enough for Hannes to put his sword away, turn tail and run away with Eren and Mikasa in tow. Okay, fine, so it was a bit silly to run up to these Titans (who can regenerate any part of their bodies, but die immediately if you cut into the nape of their neck) as if you could just hack at their ankles, but the man has a 3D Manoeuvre Gear strapped to his thighs, which fires out cables you can use to fling yourself in any direction. For Hannes to just completely forget his training and give up is a great touch. Believe me, I'd probably have done the same.I'm also really invested into the little plot threads this manga has left hanging. The first volume has this great cliffhanger, and there's also the matter of Eren's dad disappearing, how the Colossal Titan is able to just appear out of nowhere outside the wall and then disappear, and what the hell Eren's father was doing when he was injecting him. I know there was some kind of plague in the city a few years ago, but it could always be a red herring. Hm. (If I'm conflating the events of volume 2 with volume 1, I'm sorry. I read them one after the other.) I also really like how much thought has been put into the manga – the walls, the 3D Manoeuvre Gear, how humanity has studied the Titans over the years, et cetera.The story does skip around a bit, though. Rather than letting the dust settle on the Colossal Titan's attack and what it did to this fraught population, we're thrown five years into the future, with Eren graduating from the military as one of its top ten candidates. It was rather jarring at first, but I got used to the story skipping around as I read more of the manga.The artwork takes on a more realistic look (for manga, anyway), and it works really well in capturing expressions and fluid movement. It can be jerky at times, but I found it worked superbly.5/5.(This review is also available on my blog: http://book-wyrm.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/on-that-day-mankind-received-grim.html)

Hooray for essays! Ever since I started university, the way I do essays has been kicked into the ground, stomped on, and born anew from the ashes like a phoenix. Harvard referencing? HAH. We use numeric referencing here! Double space it! Never ever print on two sides of the paper! “Do these styles of argument, and don't just parrot the plot back at us. We're English Literature professors, don't you dare hand in an essay where you halfheartedly point out the connection between one thing and the other! Have conviction in what you're saying!” Draw a table of comparative and contrasting elements to structure your essay. Show us your essay plan at least two weeks in advance. Et cetera.Improving on this has gotten me from middling 2:2s to high 2:1s. Go me. (That's going from 54% to 68%, because in the UK at least, 80% is the cut-off point for grading most assignments, even though essays are supposedly graded out of 100. Go figure.)So, with exams coming up, I was excited to read Smart Pop 2012: Standalone Essays on the Hunger Games, Robert B. Parker's Spenser, George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, Ender's Game, and More. It may just be a preview to the real Smart Pop 2012, but it's made me interested in checking out its annual releases.Smart Pop's mouthful of a title aside, pop culture essays are usually the most fun to read, since there's no lofty, academic syntax that may seem unapproachable to your average pleb. These essays are much more personal, and written in a friendly discourse by people who genuinely love what they're talking about.So, let's go one by one, shall we?The first essay is on Spenser, a character created by crime novelist Robert B. Parker. This essay is unfortunately, one of the weakest. Whatever the author has to say about Spenser gets washed away by his constant navel gazing. It's so heavily biographical that it might just be called: “Ace Atkins: A Life.” In fact, I learned more about the strong allegiances the people of Alabama have with university football teams than I did about Spenser or Robert B. Parker. Or how Atkins' mother once stood in line for an hour to get her son a signed copy of Parker's book, which is a first edition, and one of Atkins' prized possessions. “I collect rare books too,” as Atkins reminds pointlessly reminds us in an aside. Anyone hoping for something with substance about Parker's creation will get nothing but 'Spenser is a cool guy and he's inspired me throughout my life and uh... I'm in my forties now and I don't think I'll ever be as awesome as him, but he'll always have a special place in my heart.'The second essay is on George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. While I am nowhere near caught up with the books, I am caught up with the TV series, and I was somewhat baffled to learn from this essay that HBO once held a focus group for the series, asking their participants who were the most romantic couple in the series. The result was Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark. Huh. (I have far too many ships in Game of Thrones, so please don't ask me to elaborate or we'll be here all day.) While this is a great essay for both fans and newbies to Westeros, it came across as rather unbalanced. I was excited to read about romanticism in A Game of Thrones, but this essay presented only minute aspects – the beautiful yearned-after female and nostalgia for the past. Yes, I get it. A lot of the characters hark back to life being better before the bloody wars 15 years ago. Lyanna Stark was the greatest thing since sliced bread and everybody from Robert Baraetheon to Daenerys Targaryen love to think back on her fondly. The Night's Watch was a better place in the previous generation, back when it was populated with more noblemen than cutpurses. But it just goes on, rather awkwardly seguing into a short piece on the Byronic heroes within the series, such as Tyrion and Jaime Lannister. I did like the inclusion of the historical Great Man theory, since that weaved nicely among the points Antonsson and Garcia were making about the Lannister brothers. The essay also concludes satisfyingly, with a brief look into George R.R. Martin's reasons for writing fantasy, and how the past events highlight the 'decay' of the present events in ASOIAF. Bravo. Somewhat problematic, but a genuinely engaging and interesting piece.We then shift to an essay on the geography and ecology of Panem, the hellish alternate North America envisioned in Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. 'Armed with frosting, ice cream, and an overflowing love for Finnick Odair – as well as a mountain of research – a fellow Hunger Games enthusiast and research geek friend of mine, Meg, and I started mapping Panem.' The geography and ecology presented is pretty sound. California sinks into the sea. What is now the United States winds up squishing in from the sides and spreading northwards over the Canadian border, and more people from Central America came to this new country. According to what Arrow and her friend have worked out, The Hunger Games probably takes place in the year 2488, accounting for all the time it would take for a new country and a new culture to develop, based on geographical events possibly exacerbated by global warming and oil depletion. I'd probably add on a hundred years or so, but the logic is sound. Arrow then goes on to describe Panem and its Districts – most of which seem to form their own nation state – as a Phi spiral. The Capitol is smack bang in the middle of Colorado, and the more technologically-advanced Districts cluster around it. Larger areas such as District 4, 10, and 11 are such a huge size due to their need for extra room to fish, grow crops, and farm livestock.One of the biggest bugbears for me reading The Hunger Games was how Panem actually came to be, since details about its formation were pretty sparse. Also, what happened to the other continents, and does Panem not know the existence of the world outside of its borders? Ms. Arrow presents a compelling argument for how Panem came to exist, but I suppose my latter question will be left hanging in the air. (Unless there is a link somewhere I have missed out on.)With The Hunger Games out of the way, we now have an essay on Ender's Game. Oof. I am not a fan of this book, and neither am I a fan of the author. But I did think Ender's Game had quite a few clever ideas in its narrative and I'm sure it's the subject of many fascinating essays, but it's just not my cup of tea. So, let's see what Hilari Bell has to say in Winning and Losing in Ender's Game.Unfortunately, this essay, like the book, fell pretty flat to me. I liked how Bell went into the Frankenstein parable of a mad scientist creating a new life form,or mutating an existing life form into a super soldier, and how they always seem to forget that they have in fact bred humans with superior intelligence in every way who can and will utterly decimate them. (As a fan of Final Fantasy VII, one need look no further than the fairly pleasant army general Sephiroth going absolutely berserk and murdering a whole town of innocent people after discovering his whole life was a lie and he was born of an experiment to create super soldiers. Ahem.)However, while I admire Bell for going through the plot with a fine-tooth comb and picking the best elements with which to argue her case, it isn't presented as well as it could be. It's mostly a regurgitation of Ender's Game, mostly going over chronological events and presenting it as just a mere run-through of key details of the story rather than a compelling essay on the futility and hopelessness in the world of Ender's Game.I liked her conclusion, in which she detailed how the organisation responsible for twisting Ender into a 'monster' who merely got away with a slap on the wrist, whilst Ender had to pick up the pieces of his shattered world and atone for his sins. The ending of that book was rather bleak, which makes the subject of winning and losing a rather fertile ground for coming up with ideas to build an essay around. It's just a shame that most of it was spent retelling the story.We then go into BenBella's pop culture essay excerpts. These are the last two essays, and both are pretty good!I really enjoyed Harrison Cheung's memoir on starting up the online fandom for Christian Bale, back in the days when he wasn't known for being Batman or Patrick Bateman. He was the cute teenage boy in Newsies, Swing Kids, Empire of the Sun, and Prince of Jutland. Anyway, back in the mid-90s, AOL forums were the place to go if you wanted to discuss movies. Cheung wrote to Bale to see if he'd put his backing behind an official online fan club, and much to his surprise, Bale's father wrote back to him and phoned him. After the first few conversations, Harrison was invited to the Bales' residence in Los Angeles, to essentially explain how the Internet would work in terms of marketing Christian Bale to both his fanbase and other interested parties.Christian Bale's father sounds hilarious. You'll have to read the essay itself to find out, but he's essentially the stereotypical, jovial fellow, who brought Christian into acting. Everything he says just sounds like he'd be a lot of fun to get on with. Cheung notes that it is in stark contrast to Christian himself, who appears to have had the same angry disposition he displayed on the set of Terminator: Salvation as a youngster. His father says it's to do with his mother leaving the family, in a rather sobering moment. While Cheung doesn't get to have much of a conversation with Christian, he does put his blessing behind the fan-site after he has the mechanics of becoming more popular over the Internet explained to him. Clearly, it's worked, because Newsies still has its huge cult fanbase, if the 7,000 or so fan-fictions online are anything to go by – it's the #8 spot on the top fan-fiction fandoms in the movie category.Soon after is the essay about Babylon 5, with Claudia Christian and Morgan Grant Buchanan. I have never seen this show, but it sounds pretty good. I was probably only 7 or 8 years old when it ended, but I suppose there's always time to catch up. Anyway, Claudia Christian presents a fun memoir of her days acting as the badass Commander Ivanova on the Babylon 5 space station. Christian comes across as somebody who would be a great laugh to interview, reminiscing fondly on some of her colleagues' eccentricities. The late Michael O'Hare would walk onto set with a domineering swagger and 'unashamedly shuffle his junk' and talk about the size of his balls, Jerry Doyle would do Looney Toons impersonations, and both he and Christian would be 'taking the piss out of each other' when the cameras weren't rolling. The cast and crew always had a 'positive energy', and it sounds like Babylon 5 would have been an amazing show to work on. Claudia Christian embraced her character and really got into her head, befriending the new actors Bruce Boxleitner and Andrea Thompson, and speaks of them in very fond terms. She then recalls the fame this part gave her, and how much she enjoyed it – heck, if SFX Magazine had named me as one of the greatest female icons in science fiction, I think I'd be quite proud of myself too. I liked Christian's vignette about how she'd sometimes be told to be more 'sexy' for Babylon 5 promotional material, yet she always responded: '“Have you ever watched the show? Ivanova doesn't do sexy.”' The readers of SFX still voted her as the sexiest female sci-fi star during the initial run of the show, though.The essay (and the Smart Pop preview itself) ends with Christian recalling a time with her close friend the late Dodi Fayed. While I know absolutely nothing about Babylon 5, it is a nicely-written memoir that I may pick up and flick through once I dive through all five seasons.All in all, this was a rather unbalanced collection of essays, starting off very weakly and then picking up, before somewhat losing my interest. While I really liked Harrison Cheung and Claudia Christian/Morgan Grant Buchanan's memoirs, they didn't seem to fit as well into the collection, but this is possibly due to them belonging to another catalogue or publisher? I'm not too sure.This really is one of those books where if I still did half-marks, I'd give it perhaps 3.5 stars. However, I'm going to be straightforward and give it 4/5, since it is a very decent collection of essays. There are two essays which you may or may not want to skip, but I really enjoyed the majority of them, with my favourites being the research conducted into building the world of The Hunger Games from the sparse details Suzanne Collins originally provided, and also Harrison Cheung's memoir on Christian Bale. I'll definitely try to check out the published book when it's released.(This review is also available on my blog: http://book-wyrm.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/smart-pop-preview-2012-by-ace-atkins-et.html)

I knew that Dee Joy single cover looked extremely familiar.

Roughly fifteen or ten years ago, an entire generation of youngsters discovered that cartoons and comics from Japan were the new thing to go crazy over, thanks to various TV networks running anime throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and the Pokémon boom in 1997 certainly didn’t hinder it any. I know. I was there.

That generation has now grown up, and with it, I suppose we can expect to see some of these super fans of anime and manga growing up into writers. We’re already seeing P2P fan-fiction, after all! (Mostly Twilight fan-fiction, but I’m sure some publisher somewhere is desperately poring through the anime/manga fan-fiction archives.)

Thankfully, Amanda Sun isn’t one of these, from what I can find. She cosplays and speaks Japanese, but she isn’t quite the out and out weeaboo you might expect to be writing the story of an American girl living in Japan who falls in love with a mysterious boy, with supernatural powers thrown in here and there. Mercifully, the premise for the novel comes from experience as opposed to an obsession with anime and manga – Amanda Sun lived and travelled in Japan for a while, so it’s hardly just some dumb teenage wish fulfilment written in-between washing down Pocky with some Ramune whilst waiting for the latest episode of BLEACH to finish buffering.

Unfortunately, this was a DNF for me, which I seem to be having a streak of lately. I’m sorry, but I can’t bring myself read a bad book anymore if there’s no signs of improvement. This book started off okay, and then just got dull and I couldn’t care about any of the characters. At all.

The story begins with Katie Greene, who has just lost her single mother and cannot stay with her grandparents any more due to their poor health. So, she is sent off to Japan with her next of kin, her Aunt Diane who moved to Shizuoka to ‘find herself.’ 

Katie finds living in Japan tough at first – she only had five months of rudimentary tuition in the language and yet her aunt insists on her going to a monolingual high school. While she does write about her improvement in reading kanji, and hiragana and katakana, it did confuse me at first how, since this novel is in first person narration, Katie was understanding entire conversations in the first few chapters. To put that in perspective, I’ve been studying French since I was six, and the last time I went to France, I could only understand 30% of people’s conversations because listening and speaking to someone in real life is nothing compared to learning words out of a dictionary or grammar workbook. 

It’s not like the other students are saying easy things to comprehend, either. Plus, these conversations would be going by so quickly that you’d quickly get lost in the different expressions you’d have to untangle from Japanese into English to make sense of any of them. I mean, there’s a Japanese expression about ‘finding a rice cake on a shelf’, which means ‘getting something good from an unexpected place.’ We don’t really have an equivalent in English (not off the top of my head, anyway), and you’d have to be pretty fluent in Japanese to understand that your friend isn’t literally telling you they found a rice cake on a shelf, but that they were talking about finding fortune unexpectedly. It just baffled me.

I didn’t keep track of too many quotes from this book, but I’m quite sure that Katie shouldn’t be able to keep track of and provide translations for every conversation without any mistake. Need I remind you, this is in first person narration. 

I know Katie is a blank slate and she doesn’t know much Japanese – the same way your average person could write what they knew about Japan on a postage stamp. However, I can’t help but feel that Katie’s unexplained fluency might have been described better simply by adding in somewhere that she took Japanese for a few years at high school, perhaps. I wouldn’t have built her up to be a complete stranger to Japanese language and customs when she seems to be getting along just fine.

Anyway, Katie is aided by her friend Yuki, a gossip who somehow understands more English than the rest of her class because she goes to cram school.

Yuki’s heard rumours about school bad boy Tomohiro, who has been going out with several girls from different high schools, one of whom is now pregnant and unable to bear the consequences. In fact, Katie first meets Tomohiro whilst he’s breaking up with his girlfriend at school, and he’s just completely nasty to both of them.

If I were in a YA novel, I’d take a guy’s rudeness to mean that he doesn’t like me very much and to probably stay away. Katie, however, continually follows him, and has to make a fool out of herself. She climbs up a tree in the park, forgets she’s wearing a skirt, and winds up flying the proud flag of Panties. That’s pretty much the set-up for a gag in a particularly painful high school anime. It also reminded me immediately of Fifty Shades of Grey, in which our heroine starts the story by doing a clumsy roly-poly into a high-ranking CEO’s office. 

Clearly, when it comes to grabbing the attention of bad boys in YA, it’s either making yourself look like a complete idiot, or stalking him and rifling through his school records and/or performing online web searches to learn about him, or even the paranormal species you think he might belong to. Katie does the baka gaijin thing as well as feeling this urge to constantly follow Tomohiro, even though she knows he’s got an aura of danger about him. Hey, writers? Knock that last thing off, please. That former thing, too.

Yes, Tomohiro is basically Edward Cullen. He has a mysterious backstory – check, he has strange powers – check, he pushes people away from him in order to keep them safe – check. The list goes on and on. 

Tomohiro doesn’t suck blood, though. He has a special power for ink and paper, in particular, making his drawings come to life. Tomohiro used to be in a calligraphy club, but had to quit after his masterpiece (the 10 stroke kanji for ‘sword’) was ruined by a huge squirt of blood. He passes it off as getting a cut from a staple in the canvas, but of course, it remains a mystery until we learn about this rumour of him stabbing his childhood friend Koji multiple times in the eye and the arm. Since Tomohiro has these powers with ink and what have you, the logical answer is that both of their injuries were something to do with these special powers Tomohiro has.

Of course, he never quite comes out and tells Katie about his powers, he just avoids the question and tells her to stay away from him. Oh, the very same way a certain vampire did to his plain Jane love interest?

There’s another boy in Katie’s life, though! Oh, woe is me. I’m a stranger in a strange land and all the boys like me!! What do I do?? Anyway, this other guy is called Jun, and he and Tomohiro look damn similar. Both of them have the blond highlights in their hair, and the same mysterious attitude. I was expecting some kind of shocking twist – maybe Jun is actually Koji, or he knows about the incident at the calligraphy club. But nope, he’s barely around, almost as if he’s constantly being forgotten about by the writer.

I don’t quite understand why Katie’s character metamorphosed from headstrong and capable in the first chapter (even if she did make a prat of herself), to the simpering little thing she becomes towards the 50 page mark. Oh yeah, I forgot. Omnia vincit amor. Especially the brains of naïve teenage girls.

When Katie and Tomohiro finally get together and do the whole Bella and Edward: “What are you?” “I can’t tell you,” “How old are you?” “Seventeen.” “How long have you been seventeen?” “…A while.”, they’re hanging out in an old archaeological dig. Tomohiro tells Katie that he lost his mother as well, and because they have that in common, Katie sinks to her knees and is rendered speechless. (Page 66-7 or so.) Yeah, I think I’ll do that the next time I meet somebody with whom I share a dead relative. It’d go down a treat.

115 pages in, Katie translates an old Japanese news article about the incident between Tomohiro and Koji: ‘My Tomohiro would never do that.’ No, seriously. In the next chapter, Tomohiro has to go to his uncle’s funeral, and Katie goes:

I felt his absence more strongly than I’d expected. I felt off balance when he wasn’t there, and while Eto-sensei droned on about world history, I thought about Tomohiro. (Page 117)

But it was frightening to fight with Tomohiro. When he shouted and brought the shinai toward me, all I could think about was Koji, even though I’d mostly figured out the truth. It still frightened me, what Tomohiro might be capable of. (Page 118)

Girls – attracted to dangerous guys like a moth to a flame. Isn’t that right? Said nobody, ever.

I don’t care if Katie is even slightly self-aware that she’s falling head over heels and ‘against all common sense’, it’s still perpetuating this crap that girls will automatically go for men who are ‘dangerous’ and ‘beguiling’ because they’re too flighty and emotional to step back and rationalise that being with their ideal bad boy is a terrible idea.

Anyway. Some time after this, Katie decides to join the kendo club. I used to do kendo, so my interest was piqued by how it would be handled.  

Tomohiro and his friend (who has a tattoo, thus he’s in the yakuza – no, actually, Katie, you should probably check to see if he’s had part of a finger chopped off) attend this kendo club, so naturally Katie sort of blabs her way into the club. Katie doesn’t like contact sports, however, telling us she chickened out of karate because she doesn’t want to hurt people. Her aunt even reacts as if Katie has joined an illegal boxing ring when Katie tells her she’s started doing kendo. “It’s dangerous! You’ll get hurt!”

Excuse me while I get my shinai. 

Now, imagine I just reached out of the computer screen and thwacked you over the head with it.

If you aren’t feeling any pain, that’s because shinai are so light and hollow that you can have a direct blow to the cranium and not feel much pain at all. The majority of the shock is absorbed through the hollow chamber in the ‘blade’, so to speak. When you are hit on top of the helmet (the ‘men’), it’s just like a little bop on the head. It’s more distracting than it is painful. In fact, you aren’t allowed to learn any dangerous swordplay (like ‘tsuki’ – a strike to the throat) until you’re at least fifth or sixth dan.

It seems to me like the kendo was researched via YouTube videos rather than personal experience of the sport, because there’s quite a few mistakes here and there. For instance, at one point Tomohiro just slips the men helmet on his head. There’s no mention at all of anybody wearing a tenugui, a small towel used as a bandanna and as padding so hits to the helmet don’t affect you as much, and also so the helmet doesn’t shift about. Tomohiro’s friend is referred to as ‘flattening his mop of hair underneath a headband’ (page 118) and again as a ‘headband’ on page 121, but that’s not really the right choice of word. That’s just basic stuff! As is knowing that a kendo helmet does not have ‘screen mesh’ like a fencing mask. Ahem.

There’s also a lot of ritual etiquette involved in kendo. To begin with, you bow when entering and exiting the dojo, whether it’s an actual dojo or just a rented gymnasium. After changing into your gi and hakama, you position your ‘armour’ (bogu) neatly around you, and sit down on your knees (‘seiza’). Your sensei will then lead a call to meditate (‘mokuso’) for a minute or two. You then bow down to your sensei and the dojo, and slowly get up, holding your shinai in a very specific way. After warming up and putting on their bogu, kendo practitioners who are sparring against each other will bow, turn and step back ten paces, then turn again and walk back those ten paces until they are arm’s length from each other. Again, basic stuff that just wasn’t covered at all. Research, people! Research!

The author goes into great detail about sparring within kendo, describing it as like a ‘dance between old samurai’ and the description is rather filmic, but it’s pretty much gone in an instant. Katie is just there to gawp at Tomohiro and his friend fighting, and that’s it. 

Sure, Sun gets a lot of details right about kendo, like the correct striking places on the body and some of the technical terms, but overall it just comes across as sloppy.

In fact, the writing is very sloppy from time to time. I mean, sure, it’s a YA novel so we aren’t expecting it to be groundbreaking prose, but… come on.

He had a black wristband around his wrist. (Page 113)

Thank you for that, I would have never known.

It came up, finally, a single old article about the incident. Of course, it was also written using hundreds of kanji I was still learning. It might as well have been in hieroglyphic. (Page 115)

Ah yes, that well known pictorial language, ‘Hieroglyphic’.

The wagtails’ songs turned erratic and I looked up, trying to figure out what happened. They jumped around and chirped high-pitched warnings to each other. Were they that worried about me?

No. They’re birds.

Oh, and of course Katie gets to compete in the school district tournament even though she’s only been practicing kendo for a month. Of course. No, I don’t care for her sensei’s explanation that they need another girl on the team (out of 40 students), or that a completely inexperienced gaijin being on their team would be great PR.

Okay, enough about kendo and bad writing choices. Tomohiro’s friend who appears to be in the Yakuza sneers at Katie and tells her Tomohiro will never truly care for her, that he’s got a destiny to fulfil, and that she would be much better off without Tomohiro. Katie rushes home in the rain, and feels like passing out on the bus home. Because Tomohiro isn’t there and can’t prop her up when she’s feeling insecure. Good. Grief. It reminded me of a scene in Alexandra Adornetto’s book Halo, in which the super special Mary Sue angel Bethany has this reaction to her one true love no longer being by her side:

When I realized Xavier was absent from school the following day, my eyes burned and I felt hot and dizzy. I wanted to crumple to the ground and just wait for someone to carry me away. I couldn’t make it through another day without him; I could hardly make it through another minute. Where was he? What was he trying to do to me? (Page 184 of Halo)

In all, this wasn’t a very good book, and I had to bail out early on. I’m sure it’s okay if you’re 14 and heavily into anime and manga, and want to read some prose rather than comic panels, but I just found the story so trite and poorly done. Like I said earlier, it follows the Twilight formula to a T, and the characters are just bland. 

Tomohiro has all this mystery surrounding him, but there’s no intrigue at all. I don’t find him that interesting enough to be invested in solving the puzzle. In fact, he just keeps refusing to tell Katie what the deal is with his powers and why she seems to be able to see these powers and why drawings are coming to life… That’s not intrigue. That’s just a lazy carrot and stick device. I certainly don’t care to find out about Tomohiro’s powers, or the mystery surrounding him. Or even Katie’s connection to him.

2/5.

Roughly fifteen or ten years ago, an entire generation of youngsters discovered that cartoons and comics from Japan were the new thing to go crazy over, thanks to various TV networks running anime throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and the Pokémon boom in 1997 certainly didn't hinder it any. I know. I was there.That generation has now grown up, and with it, I suppose we can expect to see some of these super fans of anime and manga growing up into writers. We're already seeing P2P fan-fiction, after all! (Mostly Twilight fan-fiction, but I'm sure some publisher somewhere is desperately poring through the anime/manga fan-fiction archives.)Thankfully, Amanda Sun isn't one of these, from what I can find. She cosplays and speaks Japanese, but she isn't quite the out and out weeaboo you might expect to be writing the story of an American girl living in Japan who falls in love with a mysterious boy, with supernatural powers thrown in here and there. Mercifully, the premise for the novel comes from experience as opposed to an obsession with anime and manga – Amanda Sun lived and travelled in Japan for a while, so it's hardly just some dumb teenage wish fulfilment written in-between washing down Pocky with some Ramune whilst waiting for the latest episode of BLEACH to finish buffering.Unfortunately, this was a DNF for me, which I seem to be having a streak of lately. I'm sorry, but I can't bring myself read a bad book anymore if there's no signs of improvement. This book started off okay, and then just got dull and I couldn't care about any of the characters. At all.The story begins with Katie Greene, who has just lost her single mother and cannot stay with her grandparents any more due to their poor health. So, she is sent off to Japan with her next of kin, her Aunt Diane who moved to Shizuoka to 'find herself.' Katie finds living in Japan tough at first – she only had five months of rudimentary tuition in the language and yet her aunt insists on her going to a monolingual high school. While she does write about her improvement in reading kanji, and hiragana and katakana, it did confuse me at first how, since this novel is in first person narration, Katie was understanding entire conversations in the first few chapters. To put that in perspective, I've been studying French since I was six, and the last time I went to France, I could only understand 30% of people's conversations because listening and speaking to someone in real life is nothing compared to learning words out of a dictionary or grammar workbook. It's not like the other students are saying easy things to comprehend, either. Plus, these conversations would be going by so quickly that you'd quickly get lost in the different expressions you'd have to untangle from Japanese into English to make sense of any of them. I mean, there's a Japanese expression about 'finding a rice cake on a shelf', which means 'getting something good from an unexpected place.' We don't really have an equivalent in English (not off the top of my head, anyway), and you'd have to be pretty fluent in Japanese to understand that your friend isn't literally telling you they found a rice cake on a shelf, but that they were talking about finding fortune unexpectedly. It just baffled me.I didn't keep track of too many quotes from this book, but I'm quite sure that Katie shouldn't be able to keep track of and provide translations for every conversation without any mistake. Need I remind you, this is in first person narration. I know Katie is a blank slate and she doesn't know much Japanese – the same way your average person could write what they knew about Japan on a postage stamp. However, I can't help but feel that Katie's unexplained fluency might have been described better simply by adding in somewhere that she took Japanese for a few years at high school, perhaps. I wouldn't have built her up to be a complete stranger to Japanese language and customs when she seems to be getting along just fine.Anyway, Katie is aided by her friend Yuki, a gossip who somehow understands more English than the rest of her class because she goes to cram school.Yuki's heard rumours about school bad boy Tomohiro, who has been going out with several girls from different high schools, one of whom is now pregnant and unable to bear the consequences. In fact, Katie first meets Tomohiro whilst he's breaking up with his girlfriend at school, and he's just completely nasty to both of them.If I were in a YA novel, I'd take a guy's rudeness to mean that he doesn't like me very much and to probably stay away. Katie, however, continually follows him, and has to make a fool out of herself. She climbs up a tree in the park, forgets she's wearing a skirt, and winds up flying the proud flag of Panties. That's pretty much the set-up for a gag in a particularly painful high school anime. It also reminded me immediately of Fifty Shades of Grey, in which our heroine starts the story by doing a clumsy roly-poly into a high-ranking CEO's office. Clearly, when it comes to grabbing the attention of bad boys in YA, it's either making yourself look like a complete idiot, or stalking him and rifling through his school records and/or performing online web searches to learn about him, or even the paranormal species you think he might belong to. Katie does the baka gaijin thing as well as feeling this urge to constantly follow Tomohiro, even though she knows he's got an aura of danger about him. Hey, writers? Knock that last thing off, please. That former thing, too.Yes, Tomohiro is basically Edward Cullen. He has a mysterious backstory – check, he has strange powers – check, he pushes people away from him in order to keep them safe – check. The list goes on and on. Tomohiro doesn't suck blood, though. He has a special power for ink and paper, in particular, making his drawings come to life. Tomohiro used to be in a calligraphy club, but had to quit after his masterpiece (the 10 stroke kanji for 'sword') was ruined by a huge squirt of blood. He passes it off as getting a cut from a staple in the canvas, but of course, it remains a mystery until we learn about this rumour of him stabbing his childhood friend Koji multiple times in the eye and the arm. Since Tomohiro has these powers with ink and what have you, the logical answer is that both of their injuries were something to do with these special powers Tomohiro has.Of course, he never quite comes out and tells Katie about his powers, he just avoids the question and tells her to stay away from him. Oh, the very same way a certain vampire did to his plain Jane love interest?There's another boy in Katie's life, though! Oh, woe is me. I'm a stranger in a strange land and all the boys like me!! What do I do?? Anyway, this other guy is called Jun, and he and Tomohiro look damn similar. Both of them have the blond highlights in their hair, and the same mysterious attitude. I was expecting some kind of shocking twist – maybe Jun is actually Koji, or he knows about the incident at the calligraphy club. But nope, he's barely around, almost as if he's constantly being forgotten about by the writer.I don't quite understand why Katie's character metamorphosed from headstrong and capable in the first chapter (even if she did make a prat of herself), to the simpering little thing she becomes towards the 50 page mark. Oh yeah, I forgot. Omnia vincit amor. Especially the brains of naïve teenage girls.When Katie and Tomohiro finally get together and do the whole Bella and Edward: “What are you?” “I can't tell you,” “How old are you?” “Seventeen.” “How long have you been seventeen?” “...A while.”, they're hanging out in an old archaeological dig. Tomohiro tells Katie that he lost his mother as well, and because they have that in common, Katie sinks to her knees and is rendered speechless. (Page 66-7 or so.) Yeah, I think I'll do that the next time I meet somebody with whom I share a dead relative. It'd go down a treat.115 pages in, Katie translates an old Japanese news article about the incident between Tomohiro and Koji: 'My Tomohiro would never do that.' No, seriously. In the next chapter, Tomohiro has to go to his uncle's funeral, and Katie goes:I felt his absence more strongly than I'd expected. I felt off balance when he wasn't there, and while Eto-sensei droned on about world history, I thought about Tomohiro. (Page 117)But it was frightening to fight with Tomohiro. When he shouted and brought the shinai toward me, all I could think about was Koji, even though I'd mostly figured out the truth. It still frightened me, what Tomohiro might be capable of. (Page 118)Girls – attracted to dangerous guys like a moth to a flame. Isn't that right? Said nobody, ever.I don't care if Katie is even slightly self-aware that she's falling head over heels and 'against all common sense', it's still perpetuating this crap that girls will automatically go for men who are 'dangerous' and 'beguiling' because they're too flighty and emotional to step back and rationalise that being with their ideal bad boy is a terrible idea.Anyway. Some time after this, Katie decides to join the kendo club. I used to do kendo, so my interest was piqued by how it would be handled. Tomohiro and his friend (who has a tattoo, thus he's in the yakuza – no, actually, Katie, you should probably check to see if he's had part of a finger chopped off) attend this kendo club, so naturally Katie sort of blabs her way into the club. Katie doesn't like contact sports, however, telling us she chickened out of karate because she doesn't want to hurt people. Her aunt even reacts as if Katie has joined an illegal boxing ring when Katie tells her she's started doing kendo. “It's dangerous! You'll get hurt!”Excuse me while I get my shinai. Now, imagine I just reached out of the computer screen and thwacked you over the head with it.If you aren't feeling any pain, that's because shinai are so light and hollow that you can have a direct blow to the cranium and not feel much pain at all. The majority of the shock is absorbed through the hollow chamber in the 'blade', so to speak. When you are hit on top of the helmet (the 'men'), it's just like a little bop on the head. It's more distracting than it is painful. In fact, you aren't allowed to learn any dangerous swordplay (like 'tsuki' – a strike to the throat) until you're at least fifth or sixth dan.It seems to me like the kendo was researched via YouTube videos rather than personal experience of the sport, because there's quite a few mistakes here and there. For instance, at one point Tomohiro just slips the men helmet on his head. There's no mention at all of anybody wearing a tenugui, a small towel used as a bandanna and as padding so hits to the helmet don't affect you as much, and also so the helmet doesn't shift about. Tomohiro's friend is referred to as 'flattening his mop of hair underneath a headband' (page 118) and again as a 'headband' on page 121, but that's not really the right choice of word. That's just basic stuff! As is knowing that a kendo helmet does not have 'screen mesh' like a fencing mask. Ahem.There's also a lot of ritual etiquette involved in kendo. To begin with, you bow when entering and exiting the dojo, whether it's an actual dojo or just a rented gymnasium. After changing into your gi and hakama, you position your 'armour' (bogu) neatly around you, and sit down on your knees ('seiza'). Your sensei will then lead a call to meditate ('mokuso') for a minute or two. You then bow down to your sensei and the dojo, and slowly get up, holding your shinai in a very specific way. After warming up and putting on their bogu, kendo practitioners who are sparring against each other will bow, turn and step back ten paces, then turn again and walk back those ten paces until they are arm's length from each other. Again, basic stuff that just wasn't covered at all. Research, people! Research!The author goes into great detail about sparring within kendo, describing it as like a 'dance between old samurai' and the description is rather filmic, but it's pretty much gone in an instant. Katie is just there to gawp at Tomohiro and his friend fighting, and that's it. Sure, Sun gets a lot of details right about kendo, like the correct striking places on the body and some of the technical terms, but overall it just comes across as sloppy.In fact, the writing is very sloppy from time to time. I mean, sure, it's a YA novel so we aren't expecting it to be groundbreaking prose, but... come on.He had a black wristband around his wrist. (Page 113)Thank you for that, I would have never known.It came up, finally, a single old article about the incident. Of course, it was also written using hundreds of kanji I was still learning. It might as well have been in hieroglyphic. (Page 115)Ah yes, that well known pictorial language, 'Hieroglyphic'.The wagtails' songs turned erratic and I looked up, trying to figure out what happened. They jumped around and chirped high-pitched warnings to each other. Were they that worried about me?No. They're birds.Oh, and of course Katie gets to compete in the school district tournament even though she's only been practicing kendo for a month. Of course. No, I don't care for her sensei's explanation that they need another girl on the team (out of 40 students), or that a completely inexperienced gaijin being on their team would be great PR.Okay, enough about kendo and bad writing choices. Tomohiro's friend who appears to be in the Yakuza sneers at Katie and tells her Tomohiro will never truly care for her, that he's got a destiny to fulfil, and that she would be much better off without Tomohiro. Katie rushes home in the rain, and feels like passing out on the bus home. Because Tomohiro isn't there and can't prop her up when she's feeling insecure. Good. Grief. It reminded me of a scene in Alexandra Adornetto's book Halo, in which the super special Mary Sue angel Bethany has this reaction to her one true love no longer being by her side:When I realized Xavier was absent from school the following day, my eyes burned and I felt hot and dizzy. I wanted to crumple to the ground and just wait for someone to carry me away. I couldn’t make it through another day without him; I could hardly make it through another minute. Where was he? What was he trying to do to me? (Page 184 of Halo)In all, this wasn't a very good book, and I had to bail out early on. I'm sure it's okay if you're 14 and heavily into anime and manga, and want to read some prose rather than comic panels, but I just found the story so trite and poorly done. Like I said earlier, it follows the Twilight formula to a T, and the characters are just bland. Tomohiro has all this mystery surrounding him, but there's no intrigue at all. I don't find him that interesting enough to be invested in solving the puzzle. In fact, he just keeps refusing to tell Katie what the deal is with his powers and why she seems to be able to see these powers and why drawings are coming to life... That's not intrigue. That's just a lazy carrot and stick device. I certainly don't care to find out about Tomohiro's powers, or the mystery surrounding him. Or even Katie's connection to him.2/5.(This review is also available on my blog: http://book-wyrm.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/book-review-ink-paper-gods-1-by-amanda.html)

I read this all in one sitting at the hairdresser's. And I laughed a lot.Love you always, Mr. Wilde.