For those who haven't seen the post below this, I'm going to start putting as on NI (provided that Google approves me, just hoping that I don't have to code them all in myself) so if anyone sees anything inappropriate, makes noise, etc, take a screenshot and let me know please!
I didn't realize it until I picked up the book from my pile to read but I looked at the cover and went "hmm, that animal looks like Totoro" was was relieved to see someone else (I believe on the back cover) mention Totoro as well. I felt like it was too big a visual similarity for anime/manga fans at least to not notice but still didn't want to be the first person to bring it up, as if I was accusing it of copying and truly this story has nothing in common with that film other than that one character design.
August Moon by Diana Thung
Summary: Fi and her dad live just outside the town of Calico and when they stay there for a bit while her father tries to identify a strange new creature found in the town she gets caught up in both the local legend of Soul Fires and a plot by an outside organization to bulldoze the town's beloved forest.
The Good: The story plays out at a good pace and despite a few scenes of violence and death I think it's more than fine to let the middle school crowd read (it's funny since even though it's listed as grades 9 and up I feel like it was written more to a 6-8th grade audience, especially since Fi at least is 11). And, well, there's certainly nothing terrible with it, I'm sure plenty of people will like it but I just didn't find anything about it amazing.
The Bad: I just didn't see anything special about this story, none of the character's grabbed me, the plot wasn't anything new or anything old done extraordinarily well, and I just didn't feel a sense of whimsy that I had expected when I read the synopsis and saw the cover. I didn't like Fi or Jaden as much as the story wanted me to (in retrospect, Jaden reminds me a lot of Hajime from the currently airing anime Gatchaman Crowds, an eccentric who really does know what's going on and what to do about it but is terrible at communicating, he's even worse than Hajime is) and since I didn't like any of those individual aspects of the story it's no wonder that the whole thing didn't gel for me.
The Art: It feels odd to say this about an English comic book instead of a manga but the character designs were just simple enough that I read a bit into the book, stopped, flipped back, and then realized there were two point of view characters instead of just one. I can't remember why now I initially got them confused, it could have been that I expected one POV character instead of two and that's how I started reading it, but I think that does mean that the designs should have been a tad more distinct. Or perhaps it just needed to use some shading, this is yet another comic that goes for the just black and white approach which I'm starting to dislike a bit, I just feel like it makes everything look a bit too simple and scenes which are supposed to look stunning to the character, and therefore create an emotional response in the reader, just don't accomplish that at all.
So, two out of five stars here for being a bit bland and unimaginative, even though I say that a middle schooler could read it I don't think I'll be recommending it anytime soon.
Hey guys! So to keep this brief, I'm moving this week and while this shouldn't effect the posts this week I'm moving in order to find work and once I get settled into the working world routine (which could take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months) updates are going to get a little more haphazard again just because of work schedules. This is a pretty big move for me and one thing that does have me nervous (well, one among many) is that I might not have access to a library for the foreseeable future, the last few times I've gotten a library card in North Carolina I've had to bring my state driver's license and I might not be getting a new one soon since I won't be driving much. I did read quite a few books this summer and am bringing some as well, currently I've got things planned out until almost the November Month of Manga, but that still leaves December at the very least and here's my plan: I'm going to enable ads on the sight so that by the time late November rolls around I might have enough ad revenue to purchase an e-book or two (or possibly a digital comic instead) and help keep the blog going that way. I'm enabling them now since I suspect it's going to take a while to accrue even a dollar and if anyone sees any weird ads (graphic, sexual, demeaning, those that come with noise) try and take a screenshot and send it to me, in the comments if you have to, so that I can deal with it. Hopefully that won't happen but you never know!
To recap for people who haven't read anything on my blog, during the summer I usually take advantage of the DVD collection at the university where my mother works but for some bizarre reason they only let you check out two DVDs at a time and often times someone else in my family wants to check out DVDs as well. Far enough and earlier this summer I spent a lot of time checking out the DVDs for the final season of Veronica Mars and some classic Doctor Who and didn't give the animation section even a glance. I did check around the end of July and realized my mistake since there were actually a few things I wanted to watch a little time to achieve it so I buckled down and got to work, first with a noitaminA series I hadn't seen before and one which I feel like is a little less known.
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0
Summary: Unlike her name, Mirari has no idea what she wants to do in her future and no interest in seriously thinking about it beyond what she wants to do for vacation this summer. What she doesn't want to do is take her little brother Yuki to a robot exhibit across Tokyo but soon Tokyo rumbles and everything in her life seems trivial compared to it. Now the two of them, plus a motorcycle courtier they had met earlier in the day, Mari, must trek the miles back across Tokyo to get home and find out what, if anything, and who (if anyone they fear) still awaits them.
The Good: Few shows make me cry since, while I do cry more than I like in real life I just find it hard to get emotionally invested enough in characters to find something worth crying over. But this series did it, I think it was because it tried so hard to be faithful to what would really happen in Tokyo, how people would die, how buildings would keep crashing down in the aftershocks, and the kindness and joy that you can still find despite it, that it just did it. So, if you plan to watch make sure to either keep tissues around (this show made me tear up about once every two episodes which is a record) or prepare yourself emotionally for a lot of very nature feeling tugging on your emotions*. Except in one instance, which I'll be addressing below, very little felt melodramatic as well, the story let it's events speak for itself without having the characters add on commentary about how it's A Very Sad Thing and I think that really helped the story to work (not to mention it would have felt completely out of place for any of the characters to say that, while it's sad all three of them would rather spend their time moving forward instead of staying trapped in the present).
The Bad: There is An Event which happens in the show which is rather important, in some ways even more important than the earthquake itself, and the show takes entirely too long to fully address it. Think of a romantic shojo story where two characters clearly have crushes on each other yet take forever to confess and apply that pacing to a non-romantic setting. After double checking the episode numbers I've realized that this felt like it took even longer than it had and, since I had heard something about it (but I half-dismissed since it was so, odd, sounding) that my have contributed but I felt like in a show which succeeded in evoking real human drama and development yet felt like it needed this element that maybe it shouldn't have been a tv series after all, maybe it should have just been a movie and slimmed down the story just a bit to fit.
The Production Values: There really wasn't anything about the art, the music, or even the voice acting that really stood out to me. The character designs remind me a tiny bit of Eden of the East (which is ironic since that was the show right before this one so the two were most likely designed without ever having seen what the other looked like) and neither the opening or ending songs grabbed me which in a way sums up the entire show, it was perfectly fine but didn't grab me the way I had hoped, perhaps this is why I rarely see people talk about it.
So for having its heart in the right place but not quite succedding in execution (first I don't like Mirai and then I have issues with that Event) I'm giving this one three out of five stars and I don't see myself buying it anytime soon. As far as I know Sentai hasn't put this up for streaming outside of their own site (which is all dubbed and you have to be a paying subscriber to see past the first episode) so if anyone does want to check this out they'll either have to do that, get a hold of the DVD, or just sit tight for a bit. Lately Sentai has been adding more of their catalog onto hulu where it's free for all to watch (so expect more of their titles soon), although a lot of those have been recently aired shows and so far I haven't noticed a pattern to figure out when shows will go up. But I think there's a decent chance this one will pop up on hulu by the end of the year and if not I'm sure Netflix will have the DVDs by that point if they don't already.
*and keep tissues nearby anyway
As odd as it sounds, not all recommendations I see in the YA community are for books, plenty of authors and fans/reviewers love to talk about what else they love and that includes movies, tv shows, and even music at times. A lot of times my tastes don't quite match up as far as tv series go, a bit too much romance for me and there is that terrible problem that half the time by the time I get around to trying a tv series is has gone from good to ugh which always brings up the point if it's still worth watching. As far as I know this series is still worth watching, the show started it's third season in Australia earlier in the year (and I'm fairly sure it will be the last, otherwise the characters won't be in school anymore and they'll have to change the title) and since I can't seem to read anymore of Swan legally I thought that maybe this would give me the ballet fix I wanted.
Dance Academy (season one)
Summary: Tara Webster is from the Australian countryside and remarks that in her tiny town everyone is known for something and for her it's for doing ballet. She applies and successfully gets into the National Academy of Dance in Sydney and begins her first of hopefully three years preparing to enter the world as a professional ballet dancer.
The Good: I went in hoping that the show would have regular ballet scenes and there is in fact at least a short dance scene in every episode! Sometimes it's hip-hop not ballet but it turns out that hip-hop dancing is rather cool so I was completely fine with that. I'm obviously no expert in either styles of dancing but I thought a lot of that looked rather well done , I could believe (outside of the fact that Tara is somehow both the best and worst student in her class it seems) that these were actual dancers in training and it was a nice change from all the series I've seen which are set in a school yet ignore the school aspect as much as they can.
The Bad: On the one hand I can't knock all of DA's more melodramatic moments, after all Swan shared some of the same ones (a main character who has great talent but terrible fundamentals yet still attracts the attention of the teachers in a good way) but there was way more romantic drama than I bargined on. There are six main characters, three girls and three guys, and in 26 episodes there are about eight and a half hook-ups between them and other side characters (also, they apparently have no idea that bisexuality exists which really threw me, I'll note that all of the hook-ups were straight for the moment). That's just a lot of romance and since a lot of it is short lived, everyone in the relationship is dumb because they're a teenager, romance I didn't find a lot of it very compelling either and hope (probably in vain considering where this recommendation comes from) that it gets toned down a bit next season.
The Production Values: As mentioned earlier, I thought all the dance scenes looked really great with good actors and good choreography which was the biggest draw for me. Not much else stood out to me however, nothing about the setting or the music (actually I believe the show uses the same music for both the opening and closing credits) really grabbed me but in a modern day, realistic fiction setting that's to be expected, there is a limit to how creative you can get with those things.
So in the end I give this season 3 out of 5 stars for nice dancing but entirely too much romance. I'll be checking out the second season soon, they're both streaming on Netflix and we'll see what I think of that I guess!
I picked this one up at the library since I remembered it was a title on my to-read list and I've actually been in the mood lately for something with a more historical bent to it.
Mare's War by Tanita S. Davis
Summary: Octavia and her sister Tali are less than thrilled that they have to spend a large part of their summer vacation with their rather unconventional grandmother Mare. She smokes, drives fast cars, and wears high heels which throughly embarrasses her two granddaughters but she wants to take this summer and tell them her story and how as a young black woman, just a girl really, she joined the women's army in World War II and was even more unconventional than they had thought.
The Good: Mare's story was just as engaging and interesting as I had hoped, I liked how the story covered not only her time in the Women's Army but also her life before and a bit about her time after the war (and it was nice to see that just because the war was over doesn't mean her group was disbanded immediately since you still need to start with the reconstruction after the war). I liked the characters, although at times I wondered if Octavia and Tali were included in this story so that the author could get a little soapbox-y about inequality (it was how the lines were set up just a little too perfectly to lead into those bits) and felt like everything was also well paced. Since Mare isn't one of the key players in World War II this story is more character focused than plot focused and I thought it was really well pulled off.
The Bad: I'm in two minds about Octavia's half of the story, on the one hand I can see how Davis wanted to use this summer as a way to get Octavia (and Tali) to grow but on the other hand it was a bit boring. I think the story could have stood perfectly fine on it's own if it was just about Mare, although obviously then it wouldn't have been able to include the very end of the story in the present day, and I might have preferred it that way. Again, there was nothing wrong with the characters of Octavia and Tali or the plot, setting, pacing, any of that, it was just a bit dull and I don't feel like it was really needed in the end.
I'm giving this book a 3.5 out of 5 for having an interesting historical story yet a duller half with the present day story. And of course I need to also plug both Flygirl (black girl passes as white to enter the WASP) and Code Name: Verity (British spy recounts to her diary, which is then read to her captors, how she and a friend, also a pilot, ended up working in the British military up to the point of her capture in German-held France). All three of these are great works of historical fiction although Verity is the most likely of the three to make you cry, just a warning about that (and I have no clue what it's sequel, due out this year, is supposed to be about or how that's even going to work).
