Category: Book Review
The Accidental Hero by Matt Myklusch
(Cover picture courtesy of Munro’s Books.)
All Jack Blank knows is his bleak, dreary life at St. Barnaby’s Home for the Hopeless, Abandoned, Forgotten, and Lost, an orphanage that sinks more and more into the swampland of New Jersey with each passing year. His aptitude tests project him as spending a long, unhappy career as a toilet brush cleaner. His only chance at escape comes through the comic books donated years ago to the orphanage that he secretly reads in the dark corners of the library.
Everything changes one icy gray morning when Jack receives two visitors that alter his life forever. The first is a deadly robot straight out of one of his comic books that tries its best to blow him up. The second is an emissary from a secret country called the Imagine Nation, an astonishing place where all the fantastic and unbelievable things in our world originate – including Jack. Jack soon discovers that he has an amazing ability–one that could make him the savior of the Imagine Nation and the world beyond, or the biggest threat they’ve ever faced.
I had my doubts about this book when my friend lent it to me. The way she described it…well it made me less than enthusiastic, I have to admit. Yet I decided to give The Accidental Hero (first published under the title Jack Blank and the Imagine Nation) a chance. After all, I had been skeptical when the same friend lent me Cinder and it turned out to be amazing.
Matt Myklusch’s novel pokes tongue-in-cheek fun at old superhero tropes while at the same time putting a new spin on them so that young boys (and girls too!) will love it. I’ve only read one comic book in my entire life, but as with most people, I’m familiar with superheroes. I’m a closet fan of the new Batman movies, used to watch the Spiderman cartoons and actually didn’t mind Thor. The Accidental Hero focuses on the adventures of an orphan, Jack Blank, who accidentally discovers his superpowers and is taken away to the Imagine Nation, a constantly moving island of superheroes. Yet from the moment he arrives, things start to go wrong.
I considered Jack a cardboard cutout for the first third of the book, but then I realized the author was poking a bit of fun at old superhero clichés while slowly building a three dimensional character with a great character arc. Jack is a character readers of all ages will love, especially boys, who seem to be woefully neglected in the YA genre.
With a fast-paced plot and amazing world-building, this is the kind of new spin on old clichés I love. Personally, I’m glad I read it and look forward to reading about Jack’s future adventures.
I give this book 5/5 stars.
My Classic Collection
This isn’t the best of all pictures, I know. However, it does reveal my pitiful classic collection. So far I’m reading Dante’s Divine Comedy aloud to my little sister, I finished The Prince and I’m working on Paradise Lost. Next on my list to tackle is Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and then Homer’s Iliad.
This is my personal collection and is rather misleading seeing as we have a lot of classic books in the family collection. I haven’t really read many of them, mostly because the bulk of the reading I do now is YA for my blog, but I have been slowly working my way through all the classics everyone says you have to read.
I’m rather enjoying reading Dante aloud because right now we’re on the first book in The Divine Comedy, The Inferno, which is obviously the most famous one. When read aloud, it is quite powerful poetry with a lot of heavy imagery. The only problem is trying to explain to my little sister what the carnal sinners did… Continue reading
The Bar Code Tattoo by Suzanne Weyn
(Cover picture courtesy of Random Buzzers.)
The bar code tattoo. Everybody’s getting it. It will make your life easier, they say. It will hook you in. It will become your identity.
But what if you say no? What if you don’t want to become a code? For Kayla, this one choice changes everything. She becomes an outcast in her high school. Dangerous things happen to her family. There’s no option but to run…for her life.
I’ve heard a lot of great and terrible things about this book in the YA community. Again, this prompts the question: Is it worth the hype?
Well, not really.
Much like Matched, it is an average book, but nothing more. It’s not fantastic and it’s not terrible, but it falls somewhere in between. An interesting dystopian society, a decently paced plot and an okay cast of characters…yet there is nothing really exceptional about The Bar Code Tattoo. Some aspects of it are Orwellian, others remind me of that documentary Food Inc. and still others remind me of The Giver. Suzanne Weyn is a competent enough writer, but she doesn’t really stand out for me.
The Bar Code Tattoo is set in a dystopian future where the fears of right-wringers, left-wingers and centrists come to pass. For the right, it is the scary amount of government overreach and a complete lack of respect for the Constitution. For the left, it is the fact that the poor are pretty much left to fend for themselves while corporations take over America. As for the centrists, all this will scare the crap out of them. This is why I admire Suzanne Weyn’s dystopia in an odd sort of way: it combines the fears of all political spectrums into one decently built future.
Kayla is a decent enough protagonist, but is nothing really special. To me she’s pretty much your stock dystopian protagonist: she sees nothing wrong with the society until something happens (like falling in love or someone close to her dying) to make her into a rebel. Highly predictable. The plot is decently paced, but I could predict every plot ‘twist’.
Overall: meh.
I give this book 3/5 stars.
Rape Girl by Alina Klein
(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)
Valerie always wanted to be the smart girl. The pretty girl. The popular girl.
But not the rape girl..
That’s who she is now. Rape Girl. Because everyone seems to think they know the truth about what happened with Adam that day, and they don’t think Valerie’s telling it..
Before, she had a best friend, a crush, and a close-knit family. After, she has a court case, a support group, and a house full of strangers..
The real truth is, nothing will ever be the same..
Rape Girl is the compelling story of a survivor who does the right thing and suffers for it. It is also the story of a young woman’s struggle to find the strength to fight back.
[Full disclosure: I received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]
With a title like this, obviously young readers and sensitive people should stop reading right now. Consider yourself warned.
Rape is an issue that is all too-familiar for people today; it’s not exactly a new issue. But finally, we are beginning to talk about it and hopefully it’s books like this that will help people understand that blaming the victim is counter-productive. And since Rape Girl is written by a rape survivor, it is tastefully handled while at the same time tackling the emotional and psychological consequences of rape, not to mention the social ones.
This is a rather short book, only a little over 120 pages, but it is very powerful. Valerie is a powerful main character who does “the right thing” by reporting her rape and goes through hell because of it. We really feel her guilt, anger, sadness and her struggle to regain her old, normal life. Her friends turn against her, her family acts weird around her and even the teachers at school turn against her, blaming her for her rapists’ reputation! It’s an emotional roller coaster that readers won’t soon forget.
This is not a book you should read if you like fast-paced plots. Rape Girl is a book you read for the message and the characters. And if you read it with an open mind, you may find yourself a much better person for it.
I give this book 4.5/5 stars.
Fly Away Home by Maggie Myklebust
(Cover picture courtesy of Maggie Myklebust’s blog.)
Clean freak’ [sic] Maggie tries so hard to keep her life in order but is foiled at every turn. The descendent of second generation Norwegian immigrants to America, she grows up in New Jersey, spending her summer vacations on an idyllic island in Norway.Later, in the wake of an abusive marriage, she and her three young children leave America and return to the Nordic Island of her ancestors, where she rekindles a relationship with her childhood sweetheart. Pulled between two worlds, her life continues as she seeks meaning, identity and happiness.
With her true love by her side and three more children to care for, Maggie discovers her traveling days are far from over. Life’s unexpected twists see her return to America before being catapulted to the Netherlands. At last she can begin to make sense of her experiences until, that is, she is on the move again. In the process she learns that life comes full circle, from the hopes and dreams of her forebears to the place where she can finally find peace and come to terms with her past.
Follow this Jersey girl as she flies back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean looking for love and a place to call home.
Blurb courtesy of Maggie Myklebust’s blog.
I have to admit that I had an excruciatingly hard time getting into Fly Away Home. I’ve read memoirs before, and they often do start off with an explanation about the writer’s family, but the introduction was overly detailed for my liking, especially since most of the people mentioned it in do not really appear in the narrative. Yes, it gives us important background information, but there are better ways to give information than such an enormous info dump in the beginning before we even care about the writer’s life story. However, once I finally got past the introduction, I began enjoying the memoir itself.
Maggie Myklebust’s life was certainly not an easy one or a boring one. Her memoir chronicles her imperfect and unhappy first marriage, the struggles after the divorce and during her subsequent marriage to Harry Myklebust, which eventually turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to her. Readers will feel the sorrow and stress she went through and will cheer for her at her triumphs. The way she wraps up the story brings her memoir full circle and gives readers the sense that it was definitely a happy ending after so much pain.
What I don’t like is that there are grammar errors, especially in comma usage where there should be semicolons. I caught an apostrophe that was pointing the wrong way and on page 34, I even caught this error: “…with the fowl smelling cream…” You would think that even with a small publishing house, the editors would be more careful than that, seeing as how catching mistakes is how they make their living. Despite these small errors and the info dump at the beginning, Fly Away Home is a pretty enjoyable memoir. However, when Ms. Myklebust contacted me to review her book she said that teens would enjoy it because ‘The most predominant part of my book is my teenage years…’ This is not true. I feel that it really is more suited to adults because most teens would end up supremely bored after the first few pages.
I give this book 3/5 stars.