Manga Monday: Drug and Drop

If the name of this series sounds a little familiar it should, it's Clamp's long awaited sequel to Legal Drug (which went on hiatus after three volumes because all of the magazines it was running in kept getting canceled, seriously it went through two or three different magazines) although while it's been running for about a year at this point I don't know if there's been enough material for one full tankubon of this yet (currently it and Gate 7 aren't running in their respective magazines since one of Clamp's members has either an illness or an injury, not surprising considering how much they've been churning out for the last few years). Despite that there has been enough of it for me to get a feel for it and talk about the series, it does seem a little weird that I'm talking about two light BL series in a row though.....


Drug and Drop by Clamp

A year has passed since Kazehaya and Rikuo came to live above and work for the Green Drugstore. They both continue to take odd job, side jobs for it both for the money and hoping that these jobs will help them find the people that they're looking for.

A year has passed in series since the beginning of Legal Drug (and, according to people who have somehow been able to keep track of this, proves that Clamp can't keep track of their own timelines since the series crosses over with xxxHolic Rou when it should've been closer to ten years later from that cast's perspective) and not a lot has changed from the last volume. Same characters, same kinds of stories, same pacing, what is different is that the story has stopped dropping mere hints about Kazehaya and Rikuo's pasts and has started exploring them. Some of Kazehaya's past and why he ran away from home has been explained (his sister is, ahem, unstable it seems) and more details about Rikuo's life are emerging. For a series that barely has enough material for a printed volume and considering how long some Clamp series take to get going that's fantastic! The individual stories have ranged from being "meh" to alright which is what I expected but right now I think this story plays to Clamp's strengths, they can have a lot of mostly unconnected stories to set things up and I think those were the strongest parts of Holic/TRC and a lot of Kobato/Cardcaptor Sakura/Angelic Layer were that way as well. So for now I'm crossing my fingers that it stays strong and that someone in the US license rescues Legal Drug and releases Drug and Drop (IMO Dark Horse is the most likely candidate, considering how many other Clamp works they currently have, and hopefully Clamp's penchant for crossovers won't create confusing legal issues over here).  

Book Review: Clockwork Prince

I think by now I am enjoying  the ID series more than TMI (even though I never quite like either as much as I want to, they're just missing some spark to draw me in completely and feel a bit flat without it) although judging how long the hold list was for both of them at my local library I think it's the opposite way around for most people. Regardless, I got a hold of both this summer (I was really doubting at one point that City of Lost Souls would come in before I went back to school) and I'll be talking about CoLS next week which is interesting since I think that had the first deliberate cross-over between the two series (aside from Magnus anyway), but more on that next week and that's only a theory of mine anyway.

Clockwork Princes by Cassandra Clare

Summary: After the fight with the Magister in the previous book Tessa feels closer to her new Shadowhunter friends but her position of safety is threatened since if they don't catch him soon all of them will be out of a place to live and more vulnerable than ever. Tessa, Will, and Jem all pitch in to help find out more about the Magister's past (and Tessa's on the side since they seem to be connected) but the more they find out the less makes sense.

The Good: The whole novel ends up being build-up and it's not as terrible as that sounds. Yes it's true that Will got the most character development out of everyone but many of the side characters got some development, if anything Tessa got the least probably so whatever is going on with her will be revealed during the climax in Clockwork Princess. I do remember complaining in Clockwork Angel that Magnus had a lot less page time than I expected and that was rectified here. He was one of the more prominent side characters and it was interesting to compare how much he's changed in the roughly hundred years between series and I do hope that he has a large role in the final book as well.

The Bad: As I mentioned in the intro, despite really trying to like these books they all still lack some "spark" that I need to get really invested in them. This series has everything that should interest me, slightly older characters than TMI, a setting which (while not new) isn't as cliched as expected, the fantasy/magic part of the setting is well thought out and has a lot of ideas in there and Clare makes good use of them (a pet peeve of mine is when there is a really interesting background detail and then the author doesn't utilize it at all, not a problem here). And despite all of that, I'm still not hooked on the series, it's just one where I'm more than content to put my name on the list at the library and read something else instead of agonizing over the wait. Another weird thing which I also can't pin down why I don't like it is how the romantic triangle is going. Tessa has ended up with the guy I wanted her to but there are hints that she doesn't like it/that it will end badly/it will just be complicated for the sake of plot* which is practically the epitome of why I don't like love triangles.


I do plan on reading Clockwork Princess next year but I'm not holding my breath for it. Well, and considering how long the line will probably be for it at whatever library I get it from that's probably a smart idea. And I am also curious how the movie for City of Bones will turn out and, barring reviews that say it's absolutely terrible, I'll try to catch that as well (although that's not until next August so that's even farther in the future).  



*normally this is the part where I make a snarky comment about how everything could be solved with an OT3 but there is an actual reason why that wouldn't work here, well, two considering that I don't expect Jem to live through the last book at this rate.  

Book Review: Ballad

So last summer I got a copy of Lament (which I had read three years earlier) and didn't read it until January. So in hindsight it's not that surprising that it took me another four or five months to read Ballad even though I really liked Lament, clearly that's just how things go for me with this series. And apologies is this review is slightly more incoherent than usual it's for the usual reasons (school, stress, more school)

Ballad by Maggie Stiefvater

Summary: Following the crazy events of the previous summer, James and Dee are now both enrolled in a school for exceptionally talented young musicians, the kind who are most likely to be stolen away by the fey and exactly the reason school was founded. But James feels a little out of place since there's not much more he can learn with his bagpipes and Dee seems distant. But James has problems of his own now, a strange fairy named Nuula has taken an interest in him and wants his soul in exchange for power, something that James isn't really interested in. But as time goes by he and Nuula start to become close to each other and it becomes obvious that there are some major events happening in the background that threaten to engulf them whether they want to be involved or not. 

The Good: There are many words to describe The Most Important Person in a Novel; protagonist, lead, main character, hero/anti-hero, narrator, etc. All of these words have slightly diffrent meanings however and this is the first time in a long time, if ever, I've read a book where the lead character is not the Main Character or The Protagonist. To make sure I'm clear, a MC or Protag is important because they are the ones who make things happen and that's clearly what Dee is doing in the background, a lead character is simply someone is there and important, like Jamie (and to a slightly lesser extent Nuula) is. We can only see what is going on with Dee through short text messages and honestly I have been waiting for a story like this forever, a story that features a side character as the lead just because I always wondered how well it would work. And it worked great here, Jamie is more balanced and interesting than Dee, Nuula was a great character as well (and she was a bit of an interesting take on a fairy, I haven't seen one quite like her in my years of reading too many fantasy books) and I wouldn't have liked this book if Dee had been the narrator I think. 

The Bad: I really do wish we had gotten more information about what Dee was doing since it was apparently rather important and, while the climax didn't feel like it came out of nowhere, without that information it did mess up the flow towards the end a bit. Also, these are two books in a series, not companion novels, and I'm trying to figure out what the overall theme/larger plot of the series is. I've got a few guesses but for a trilogy (which, IIRC, was what this was originally planned to be, although at this point I'm not sure the last book will ever be written since it's been quite a while. Really that's my biggest problem with the book, I'm just worried that such a great book won't get the follow-up it deserves.


I think I liked this even better than Lament actually and will have to make sure to pick up a copy for myself sometime. Overall I give the book four out of five stars for doing something different with it's structure, a few different thing with the mythology it used, and for just being a fun book to read. 

Manga Monday: 07 Ghost

Whelp, might as well get the most embarrassing one out of the way first. Normally when people talk about guilty pleasures I say that I don't have many, I already don't have enough time to watch or read all the great things out there I want do so why should I read something that I know is bad? This is as close as I come to a guilty pleasure since, while I do feel a bit guilty reading this series (it took me a few weeks back in high school to work up to buying the first manga volume because of the cover, which is probably tame to some but considering that the manga didn't have anything quite like that in there and I just really didn't want to have to try and explain it to the cashier) I don't think it's bad. I might feel too guilty to say it's good but it's at least solid. It's published in Monthly Comic Zero Sum which is either a shojo or josei magazine (I've seen people say both?) which is quite aware of what it's readers like to see, pretty men. I'm familiar with some of the other stories that run in the magazine and they aren't exactly BL buuuut yeah, see above cover. 

07-Ghost by Yuki Amemiya and Yukino Ichihara

(Yes the art is from the anime but it's surprisingly hard to find a good group shot of the characters from the manga so just deal with it)

So, the plot has gotten a bit confusing as of late (pretty much right after the anime ended actually) so in a nutshell, Teito was a slave of the military, trained and raised as a solider During his final exam things don't go as planned and Teito is forced to flee or risk being killed and ends up taking shelter in a nearby church (which has enough power to oppose the military). He, or rather the people around him in the church, make a startling discovery that explains why the military is so desperate to get him back. He unknowingly possesses one of the two greatest weapons in the world, the Eye of Raphel, which belonged to the Kingdom of Raggs that was destroyed ten years earlier yet almost as far back as he can remember Teito has been owned by someone who belonged to the Barsburg military, the opposing side. But the military isn't the only one hiding secrets, the Church has plenty to spare and Teito ends up in the thick of those as well involving malevolent spirits and death gods. But the more is revealed the more it's made clear that all these current events are connected to the events ten years prior and Teito plays a bigger role in them than anyone (except a genre-savvy reader) could've guessed.

It's a weird series, it's fantasy but not in a really low or high fantasy setting, it has a lot of European influences in it (it's yet another series that has decided to base it's church on the Roman Catholic one, at least unlike some it doesn't pretend to be very close to the real one) yet some of the things like the Ghosts are obviously based on Japanese stories. It's gotten complicated (I really avoided as many spoilers as I could in that summary) and partially probably because the scans I was reading for a while were out of order, missing pages, and missing a few chapters (which is why I dropped it and didn't pick it up again until last winter) I do have to think some to figure out where the latest reveal fits into the overall scheme but things are making sense and the story is moving quite determinedly towards it's goal. Of course, I've read Clamp's Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles and xxxHolic, I now have a very high tolerance for crazy, don't explain the plot until later on, storytelling, probably higher than most (and certainly higher than it should be) so I can follow what's going on if I spend a little bit of time making sure I have all the characters, their relationships, and the time right. And I don't mind the implied BL either, if you're someone who doesn't like BL, or who finds themselves whining when all these crazy fangirls watch your show and ship the characters, distracting everyone from what the show is really about, or someone who innocently(?) asks why a show had to have these kinds of relationships, just don't try this one out. Hell, avoid all of Zero Sum, that's my advice. If you are at least okay with (under?)tones of BL in a series and like fantasy, check this out. There was an anime adaptation a few years ago by Studio Deen which covered fairly faithfully the first two arcs of the story, if you've seen it recently enough you could probably dive straight into the manga (around volume 5 according to wikipedia) but since Viz has recently relicensed the manga and the first volume is due out in a week or two you might as well wait and start from the beginning. 

Book Review: Cinder

I heard about this book around the beginning of the year when Tor published a short story that worked as a prologue to the story and I was hooked. It was a subtle retelling of Cinderella and the setting was neat too. I entered more giveaways than I can remember trying to get an ARC of the book but sadly didn't win any of them and had to wait until the summer when I could snag it at my local library. So how did the actual book hold up to my (by that point) very high expectations?


Cinder by Marissa Meyer

Summary: Cinder is a cyborg which makes her a second class citizen in New Beijing and she's already detested by her step-mother and one step-sister, even though since she's a gifted mechanic she's the only one who can earn money for the family. But her life becomes more confusing when she's drafted as a test subject to find a cure that's sweeping the world, has to avoid the mysterious, visiting dignitaries from the moon, and may have caught the prince's eye as well.

The Good: The setting is interesting and I really hope that the moon colony is explored more in the future books (even though I do read a good bit of sci-fi I don't find many YA books that feature colonies on other planets so at the moment it's still rather novel to me). The technology was often quite cool as well, everything managed to feel realistic enough (and, considering it turns out that there is outright magic, that's really impressive) which makes me a little sad that Cinder won't be the protagonist of the next book, having her be a mechanic was the perfect way to explain and flesh out that part of the setting and I can only hope the next book manages to do the same in an equally natural fashion.

The Bad: I don't know exactly why but I felt a little underwhelmed by the end of the book. I think part of it was that the story ended up following the Cinderella formula more strictly than I thought it would and another part was because there was a large plot twist revealed in the last few pages, a twist that I figured out by the halfway point of the book if not a third of the way in. A good twist will have enough foreshadowing in there that the reader can figure it out or at least go "ah yeah, that makes sense" which the book did in a way ("hmm, the book mentioned this thing and since everything mentioned must be related to the plot then this character must actually be this character"). However, I believe that you also need to reveal the twist quickly as well, not leave it dangling or else the readers will get bored. Finally, this is a bit of an odd one, but I'm really glad that I read that prequel before I read the book since it provided some nice background. I'm sure there were plenty of people out there who didn't read it at all and understood everything just fine but I'd still recommend people read it first (link in the top, plus it introduces you to the story so you can at least see if you want to read the rest). 


So in the end, meh. I do plan on reading the next books in the series, and I'll probably enter a ton of contests for an ARC again (wait, I do that for nearly every book I can) but I won't be as excited. In the end I give this book 3.5 stars out of 5.