Book Review: Clariel

As a heads up, there will be no posts next week since Katuscon is next weekend and I am still swamped with things to do for it! And one of those things is to finishing putting together the panel I'm running, first ever panel and it's called "Notable noitaminA" and it will be 10 am Sunday morning. I'll do an overview of the types of shows in the time slot, how it's changed, and try to highlight some of the cooler shows that have come out it, hoping that some people turn out for it since that is certainly not an ideal time slot.


I was rather confused when I heard about this book a couple of years back, did the Abhorsen series (first book in 1995 and then the second and third in the early 2000s) really need another book to tell the story? I was interested in it, especially once I saw a dragon on the cover of the book, although now I'm wondering if the title was a misnomer (also, Amazon, you cannot have the fourth book in a trilogy, calling it that on the page just makes you look silly).

Clariel: The Lost Abhorsen by Garth Nix

Anime Review: Sunday Without God

This past year (so, 2013) I made a real effort to listen to the anime-bloggersphere and see what series that I didn't try in a given season (usually because I was too busy or just too cynical to give another show a shot) were worth picking up later and I did a pretty good job at getting them them sooner rather than later. There are still a few shows I didn't get to, I'm waiting until all of the OVAs for Yozakura Quartet are out before I tackle that, might get around to trying stuff like Majestic Prince and Attack on Titan if they ever announce second seasons, twitter is convincing me to try out a few things like Meganebu but that's mostly it, it just wasn't that big a year for me. And it's funny, I finished the summer out with just four shows and given that I could have easily made room for this one but when I tried out the manga adaptation (the series was originally a light novel I later learned) I was turned off by it. The pacing felt a bit weird and the character designs didn't quite work for me either. Funny enough I could say the same thing about this anime version but in a different sort of way. 

Sunday Without God (Kamisama no Inai Nichiyobi)

Book Review: Zombies vs Unicorns

Considering my overall impression of the Mars anthology was only lukewarm at best it may seem a bit odd that I decided to read another anthology immediately afterwords, the only explanation I can offer is that I'd been meaning to read this book for years (I followed Justine's blog back when she was still able to update and might have been around for the original blog post). So, knowing full well that just because an anthology is hyped well and has a lot of authors in it that I like doesn't mean that it's going to be good (I'm looking at you Geektastic) I decided to give this one a shot anyway.

Zombies vs Unicorns edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier

 

I'm curious how the paperback cover works since the hardcover book here has the black dust jacket with cut-outs of a zombie and a unicorn which can be removed to show a mural of unicorns and zombies fighting each other printed onto the book cover itself. I think the dust jacket idea is clever although I'm not that fond of the art style used for the images themselves, it's a neat idea regardless however.

 

Summary: Originating from a debate in the comments of author Justin Larbalestier's blog, she and Holly Black head up this anthology which compare zombies and unicorns with 12 stories from well known young adult authors who try to prove why their side is better.

 

The Good: I was quite pleasantly surprised to see that not every story in the anthology involved romance, I simply like a break from it sometimes, and that there were two LGTB romances in the anthology as well (oddly enough both zombies, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Alaya Dawn Johnson and "Inoculata" by Scott Westerfeld), a very nice change of pace overall. There are some stories in here which I’m confused if they were written to be parodies (all unicorn stories, Meg Cabot’s "Princess Prettypants" and Naomi Novik's "Purity Test")*  but they ended up being so genuinely hilarious that in the end I ended up not caring, I had fun reading them. Fun actually sums up a lot of the anthology, given my bad track record with anthologies I really wasn’t expecting much out of this one yet I enjoyed it and can see why so many other people have as well.

 

The Bad: I’m simply not a big fan of dystopias, for reasons that deserve their own post someday, and since a number of the zombie stories were set in dystopias I didn’t like them as much (which may sound harsh but as I’ve said before, it’s not plot but setting that’s the most important part of a story for me and that’s extra true with such stories like these). None of the stories were bad however, there were just some not to my taste and only about half of them stuck in my mind only a month after I read them which speaks volumes on it's own.

Probably the best anthology I've tried in the past few years but since it had been at least six months between whatever my last anthology was an the Mars one that's not as grand a statement as it sounds. Not sure if I would want a copy of my own for rereading but I'd certainly recommend this to many of my friends, it's a fun book with variety that I can see appealing to a lot of people.

 

  

*so zombies do romance and unicorns do comedy? No wonder I like unicorns better