This is a book that I was really hoping to have a chance to read (futuristic Brazil sci-fi? I'm in!) and I was surprised that I found it so quickly at my not-so-local library, although I feel like they either do a better job at getting YA books faster or at least make their new books more visible. And even without already knowing about this book I think I would have picked it up anyway because of how gorgeous the cover is, normally I'm a little leary of putting green and yellow right next to each other (it can make things look sickly really easy) but, if the cover here doesn't fully convey it, it makes the cover just pop and I hope a lot of other people pick it up for either of those reasons.
The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson
Summary: 400 years ago the world became a nuclear wasteland and while humanity still survives most of the world does so in the ruins of it’s former glory. One of the few exceptions to this is the city-state of Palmares Tres, a giant city in modern day Brazil which has thrived because of it's isolation and rules made by all of its ruling ladies. While they resist much technology being created by the outside world they have embraced some of it and become extraordinarily long lived and because of that few young people have any say in anything about their world. Many want their world to change but few succeed in the way that June and Enki manage, her by being a modern artist whose work is compelling and different and him by becoming the Summer King, the highest position any man in the city can hold which occurs once every five years and after a year of power will be ritually killed in order to reaffirm the authority of Palmares Tres' queen.
The Good: Johnson creates a futuristic setting that is neither dystopian or utopian (that’s actually a dystopia) which helps make it one of the most realistic science-fiction settings I’ve ever come across. This isn’t a little detail either, the struggles and conflicts of the city are the center and heart of this story, it's Enki's reason for becoming the Summer King in the first place, and Johnson succeeds wildly in portraying a city where ordinary people live and are unsure of what future they should follow and where politicians have a mix of their own and everyone else's wishes as their goal. As for all the other parts of the setting, I’m a sucker for a story with strong settings and the way that the technology is integrated into everything and is explained so casually is what really makes the story for me. Johnson creates a setting that is mostly foreign to me but does it with such confidence and vivid descriptions that I had no trouble accepting it* and, once I figured out how the city was laid out, visualizing it. I also loved the kind of art June did, in real life I'm not a big fan of modern art (or post-modern, I'm not completely sure which one hers is) but two things made it work here. One is that I'm simply of tired that nearly every time there's a character in any story whose an artist that they normally sketch or paint, it just gets a bit tedious. And secondly because June's art makes so much sense in this setting, it's wild, it's thought provoking, it makes use of the materials in and around her city. It ends up being a perfect fit with her character, Palmares Tres, and with the entire story.
The Bad: There was a lot of unfamiliar slang used in the book (I don’t know if it’s real, Brazilian slang or made up for the sake of the book) and I wish that there had been a small glossary in the back since I was never able to pick up on what some of the words meant when they were only used once or twice. I also wish the ending had been a slight bit clearer, I had a few questions which I don't I was supposed to have and just a paragraph or two could have cleared them up (unless I was supposed to have these specific questions in which case obviously the story succeeded). Finally, by the end I had a few problems with how Enki grew and developed. Some people might consider this a spoiler so I shall try to be as vague as possible, Enki does A Thing which ultimately results in a change in character, I'm not exactly sure it can even be called development since he doesn't have full control or choice over changing, and I felt like this short-changed the story in some ways. I'm entirely sure that this was all deliberately done, Enki is supposed to be a tragic character after all, when I remember where he started and the goals he had then, versus what he was like by the very end well, I wish that had been pulled off a little differently.
So for a story with an amazing setting, interesting characters (all of whom are non-white I should note, both due to the gene mods and from growing up in a culture which has more than just American or European influences), and two prominent gay relationships (plus a take on a love triangle which is a bit different than usual) I'm giving this book four out of five stars, plan on buying it someday and plan on checking out Johnson's other works. And while recommending this I'd also like to mention some books that I was reminded of while reading, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu's Zarah the Windseeker which also has a great, vivid setting whose inspiration was completely foreign to me yet I fell in love with due to how confidently Okorafor-Mbachu described it and Karen Healey's The Shattering but for slightly spoilery reasons, it and The Summer Prince have one rather large plot element in common but it's done completely differently.
*well, except for the one detail of people having children after they turn 50 and much later than that. But, given the passing mention of gene mods and that people’s skin tones must fit into a certain range of colors I can easily hand wave that and say that they just do something either to the uterus or eggs to make this viable. And really, I have just one problem with the technology out of a story which is chock-full of it and is one of the main plot drivers? That’s amazing!
Ack, sorry this wasn't up last night, a combination of a sudden cold (with no real meds to speak of) and midterm paper/test/project stress kept me from finishing this review. Although, now that I have finished it, this is going to be a bit of a short review regardless since I don't need to get into much detail for why I liked and disliked it.
Accel World
Summary: The year is 2046 and virtual reality is now everywhere in Tokyo and the technology has become so advanced that people can interact with it thanks to little computers worn around the neck. These neurolinkers have another use not intended by the manufactures however, if you've had one since birth and have a high reaction speed then it's possible to download Brain Burst, an illegal fighting game program where if you lose all your points then the game permantely uninstalls and you lose all memory of the game as well. Haruyuki is a bullied middle schooler who when given the chance by his upperclassman Kuroyukihime (no seriously, apparently no one knows her real name) to install Brain Burst takes it and finds his life changing for the better (even if it's gotten a bit more complicated in the process).
The Good: The premise here is a bit of a fun one, even if it's more than a tad unbelievable, and honestly if we did have super-advanced technology like a neurolinker today I would completely expect illegal games/hacks for it. And, even though Brain Burst flies in the face of a lot of science, that part about the show never bothered me and I think it's because the show presented it like magic (ie, "it exists, we're not going to tell you the reasons why but as you and the characters can see it clearly exists and works so let's get on with the story"), although some parts of the story later on required a bit more suspension of disbelief.
The Bad: The second half of the show was centered around one arc with one villain which makes sense when you consider that that particular arc took up two light novel volumes. So my problem lies more with the source material, there's no reason that arc should have been that long. The villain wasn't a good villain at all, their only motivation was "for teh evluz!", was it was implied that there was something bigger going on behind the scenes it wasn't explained, and that arc simply took too long. I have issues with Haruyuki as well, namely that his character seems to be written to act like however the arc requires him to act, not based on what character development he's had. Since he really regressed at the beginning of that arc, got a bit better, regressed again, and seems to be back to where he was before by the end of it which was really quite frustrating.
The Audio: Both opening and closing themes were fun and I have no complaints about either the background music or the voice acting, although I think it's sad yet amusing that the original author voiced one of the burst linker avatars (one based on how he appears in the back of his books) and fans complained that they didn't like how he sounded so he was replaced in the DVD version by a real actor.
The Visuals: This was a fun, colorful show to look at and I'm told that it had pretty good animation underneath all the special effects used in the fight scenes (seriously, pause during a random moment during some of the later fight scenes and see if you can even tell what you're looking at). One of the earlier fight scenes however (I think around episode 11) isn't buried under special effects and I remember thinking that it was pretty great looking, even compared to all the fights in Fate/Zero and The Legend of Korra which were airing at the same time. I also really liked the designs of the avatars, looking at the designs in the original novels I think that they've improved on the designs quite nicely.
All in all Accel World and Sword Art Online are rather alike in the respect that, while the settings are cool and the concept is interesting enough, I just don't find any of the characters likable/sympathetic enough to root for them and the storylines just aren't always that interesting. So I'm torn, do I want to buy this show? I'm not sure, although if there was a second season I'd watch it (partially because I read some spoilers for it and holy, now THAT'S got some interesting bits, although I bet that it's probably not as well executed as I'd hope). And just to weigh in on the "are SAO and AW connected?" debate, I'm not sure. I'm VERY sure that the main couple of SAO aren't KYH's parents despite physical similarties (KYH seems to have rather distant parents, plus there are some spoilers I've read that indicate that she has really terrible parents), although I'm not ruling it out that they could be the parents of another character (who hasn't exactly appeared in the books except in flashbacks? Slightly confused about that part). Funny enough while the books seem to be more ambiguous about the subject (there was even a crossover short story which implies that they're alternate universes) the anime seems to be saying that yes, these two are in the same world which has left me more confused than ever.
For those who do wish to check out the show however it is being streamed on hulu by Viz Media (so only Americans and people with proxies can view this one legally, sorry).
And here is the final installment in Robin Wasserman's trilogy, whew, only took me a month and a half to read and then review all of them which I suppose isn't too bad. So there's not much more to say at this point to introduce the book, onto the review!
Wired (now titled Torn) by Robin Wasserman
As before, this is the UK paperback cover, the kind I have, and again I prefer it to both the old US cover and the new set of covers as well. It's not the greatest cover, I just think that it's really hard to pull off a rainbow color scheme well and this cover isn't doing it, but the lighting on the old US covers bugs me and I feel like the new covers are too non-indicative of the story.
Summary: Lia is back living at home as repayment to her father for the events in the last book and things continue to get more and more dangerous for mechs. Despite her and Biomax's best efforts to change the public's mind there is more and more violence against mechs but then the unthinkable happens, the mechs actually begin to die and Lia and Jude, with a few unlikely allies, are in for their most dangerous fight yet.
The Good: I was happily surprised to see a theory I had thought of reading the first book confirmed, slightly different but it did provide a bit more backstory to the series. I also liked how Lia's sister, Zo, got more character development since she was overdue for it and there have been hints for the past two books that she's more than she appears, the same goes for their mother and Lia's tune-up expert.
The Bad: This book confirmed a nagging feeling I had had for the past two books, this really should have been one, huge, book instead of a trilogy. None of the books have the right balance of thinking and action and there are large parts where nothing happens. Turning this into one book possibly isn't the best solution, even paring down the books it would make for a 600-800 tome, but I feel like the pacing would have worked better and would've made for a more satisfying story. That aside, I should have been it coming but I disliked the ending (it's the exact same trope I disliked way back in Brain Jack) since I'm not fond of those kinds of tropes and it just makes me roll my eyes and drags me out of the story.
Bit of a short review but really that's it, I feel like the story had some good parts but that this story shouldn't have been a trilogy and that really hurt it pacing wise overall. Would I have liked it more as a single book? I think so, I'd still have problems with some of the subplots (I couldn't bring them up since they started getting more spoilery than I like to in reviews, not that I have any trouble with spoilers in the comments below) but it would avoid one problem I had with the series as a whole, characters appearing one book but not being important until later and feeling rather static until they became important.
Earlier this summer I came across this book at the local Barnes & Noble and thought the premise for the book rounded really cool and a bit unique so when I came across it again at the local library I picked it up without a second thought. From the summary on the jacket flap, it sounded like it was set in a future so advanced that people simply plugged in their minds to use the internet but other people took advantage of holes in the firewalls to steal their minds, something I've never seen before. I did read a webcomic earlier this summer (Anatta which died in 2010 sadly) that involved people using technology to sell/switch bodies, which isn't the newest concept but it was the most thematically similar idea to the jacket description. Of course the book wasn't like that at all so in the end it doesn't really matter.
Brain Jack by Brian Falkner
A nice snazzy cover, even though I have no idea why they choose the color green (usually when I think of technology I think more of silvers and blues, maybe purple but certainly not green). The cover is also shiny in real life so it does an excellent job at attracting the viewers eye, no problems here!
Summary: In the near future, a near future where terrorism appears to be even more rampart, Sam is a teenager who fancies himself to be a great hacker and pulls off one of the greatest hacks in American history. When the government catches wind of what he did he's given two choices, work for us or go to prison for life and it turns out there is even more exciting stuff to come, stuff that only Sam has a shot at preventing.
The Good: Some people lately have been complaining that not enough teenaged boys are reading because "there are no books for them" (among various other reasons) and this is a book I would recommend to a teenaged boy without a second thought. It's got action, a girl who inexplicably ends up liking the main character, a chance to save the world or die trying, guys like this kind of stuff right?* The government/military in this story is more competent than they are in many stories which was rather nice (they were also pretty nice people) and the character that was the "villain" was an interesting choice (I've seen that kind of character used before, such as in Code Geass R2 but it's a less common kind of character).
The Bad: The book comes off so differently from the way it's described, basically it's a summer blockbuster movie in book form which isn't so bad in and of itself but I did not want to read an action film when I checked this out. Some of the earlier bits, such as Sam escaping from the kiddie prison reminded me heavily of the Alex Rider spy books (another series that will certainly appeal to male readers) but, while I thought those books were okay, the events here felt horribly contrived and simplified. Those two words also describe the hacking which plays a huge role in the book, hacking is something that's a lot easier to show than to describe (unless you want to put in a ton of technobabble) and Falkner tried to describe how the hacking would look in a Hollywood film, meaning that the way Sam interacted with the computer sounded nothing like the way people really use them. This book honestly would have worked much better as a made-for-tv Disney movie than a book and don't want to read the author's other books now in case they have the same problems.
I should mention that the book also takes a long time to get going, I think it takes about a hundred pages to cover everything I posted in the summary (which I hate to do but that you do need to give a basic set-up of the plot to summarize a story). It also had an incredibly pretentious opening** and managed to pull a "character becomes Jesus, uses deus ex machina and tells us a moral" while doing the exact same thing the story's "villain" did all in the last chapter which is actually a bit impressive. So, one of my least favorite books I've read this summer, partially because it was nothing like I was hoping for and partially because it just wasn't that interesting as a book, good thing the book I read after it was much more awesome.
*yes I'm being sarcastic, I know sarcasm doesn't come across in print as well but I'm being very snarky about all of this, here's a great rebuttal to the earlier article.
**paraphrasing: I know who you are, when you bought this book, look I got it from the library, I used your credit card number to hack into your computer and found those files that you don't want anyone knowing about .....are you telling me there's porn on my computer I don't know about? Don't worry, I won't actually use any of it so it's blackmail, not pr0nz? None of this was very hard, the security on your PC is a joke ....dude, I use a Mac, at least get that right! You can actually read the first few pages on Amazon, if you want a good laugh go do it.
Recently Nozomi has been putting up some of their older titles on their youtube channel for streaming (dubbed only sadly) so I've been trying out a few things but the only show I've finished so far is this one, partially because of said dubs. I've seen this series for sale on TRSI's site a few times (the box art is rather pretty, although it looks like it uses art from the original novel instead of the anime) and was wondering if the show was as good as it's packaging.
The Third: Girl With The Blue Eye
Summary: Honoka is a jack of all trades who lives and works by a great desert in Earth's future, a future where much of the planet was destroyed by war and advanced technology is strictly controlled by The Third. Most of the time this doesn't affect her life but sometimes her odd jobs take her to some very interesting people and places.
The Good: While it's easy to see that the series is based off a light novel series (with how separate each adventure feels) and none of the individual stories were something so original I hadn't seen them before a lot of them were alright or even good. The series isn't a drag to watch either one a weekly basis or when marathoning the episodes and the desert setting is less common in anime than it is in say Western science-fiction* so that makes for a nice change.
The Bad: It seems that this story tried to create a myth arc in the end to connect a lot of the other stories in the series but it just doesn't quite work. For one reason or another it just feels silly and didn't logically work for me and it was frustrating to see the show not end on it's highest note. There's nothing really bad about this show per-say but in the end it just doesn't do anything that I haven't seen before and would recommend people to watch it for. Perhaps there was something in the original books that made this a really special series but here it just doesn't really stand out.
The Audio: For some reason this show decided that it needed a voice over to explain what Honoka is thinking IN EVERY SCENE and every time this happened I had the urge to throw something at my screen. Thankfully this mysterious narrator shows up less as the show goes on but it's still an utterly bizarre and pointless choice, internal narration works well in the printed word and plays but almost never in television. As mentioned earlier, I saw the dub and it seems to be one of Nozomi's better dubs, possibly their best one, but it's not a great dub. To their credit, the voice actors do better as the show goes on but the early episodes sound just so awkward. I really can't recommend watching the dub at all and, from a quick look around, it seems like the sub was fine. One final note is that while the show uses the same openers and closers as the Japanese version did, the ending songs play over the image up top (with the credits scrolling in English) instead of the more sketchy pictures of the characters used in the Japanese version. It's an odd change (maybe they couldn't get a clean version of the closers?) but since the songs are subtitled it's not really a problem.
The Visuals: As Erin Finnegan said on Shelf Life once, the character designs in this show just aren't that interesting most of the time and sometimes are downright strange (such as one characters huge breasts and a wolf with tentacles). The designs aren't bad per-say, it's just obvious that this is from a light novel instead of a manga where the outfits would have more detail and the art style would look less generic. There is at least one, possibly two episodes where everyone is drawn off model (for the entire episode, not just a few scenes) and there just weren't any really high-budget fight scenes elsewhere in the series to justify why those episodes looked so crappy.
In short, this series just felt average and, well, why watch something average when you could be watching something great? Maybe someone who hasn't spent their entire summer watching/reading science fiction *cough* would like this more, or maybe someone who just hasn't seen as much anime would also enjoy this a lot but I don't feel the need to buy this or rewatch the series, guess the box art really was better than the show itself.
*although at times it did remind me of one of Yen Press's light novel/manga series, Kieli.
