Adventures And Nightmares

I finished a book right before vacation that had been in my TBR pile for ages.  I finally purchased a beautiful hard back version of it (for cheap at the used bookstore woohoo) and then it sat on my shelf.  It was a completely different read then I thought it would be.  The book is Abarat by Clive Barker.  As always SPOILERS AHEAD!

As with most of the books I have been reading lately this book is a bit convoluted so I will do my best.  The book centers around Candy Quackenbush (I love that name!) a teenage girl who is feeling stuck in her tiny Midwestern town of Chickentown.  Her home life, school life and what passes for a social life are all difficult, dull and pointless.  All of this changes when she runs into a strange creature by the name of John Mischief.  John has 7 brothers who are all represented by heads on antlers above his head.  The John's are being perused by a creature named Mendelson Shape who is trying to prevent John from completing his mission.  Candy assists John and the result is a sea rolling over the plains and sweeping everybody away to Abarat.  Abarat is a land made up of islands that are all in a fixed hour of the clock..for example, the island of Yebba Dim Day (an island in the shape of a giant head) it is always 8:00pm.  There are 24 large islands and multiple tiny islands making up this land.  Candy gets seperated from her companions and embarks on what can only be described as a cross between a nightmare and a dream of an adventure.  We meet Christopher Carrion, a man (I guess we can call him a man) who is cruel and scary and wants to plunge the world into darkness.  He rules the island of Gorgossium, which is always fixed at the midnight hour and controls some very hideous creatures.  He plans to unlock a vault deep in the ocean and release a hoard of pure evil on the land.  We also meet a fellow by the name of Rojo Pixler who wants to get rid of all the magic and replace it with technology and his way of doing things.  Candy is chased through all the islands, learning bits and pieces of the history and workings of this new land.  Oddly enough Candy feels completely at home in this strange place that would through most people off their game.  Candy discovers that there is a good chance that she has been to Abarat at some point before, even if she can't remember it.  We end the book with nothing really resolved other then Candy's resolve to stay in Abarat and do what she can to protect it.

To me this book is mostly about imagery, the story is very very secondary to the visuals and world in this book.  The book is full of insane (and very) cool illustrations done in oils in a style that is like a creepy Van Gogh.  I found the world to be pretty cool, with all kinds of impossible characters, buildings and landscapes and the illustrations did a good job in keeping me in the world.  Unfortunatly the story did not seem very developed and seemed to hop all over the place.  Usually I really enjoy the crazy insane worlds, but this one seemed a bit...scattered for my taste.  The characters were ok, with John Mischief being my favorite.  I'm not sure why this book didn't do it for me.  I think it was the story, which seemed to try and go somewhere and say something...but it just didn't get anywhere.  I also was a bit hesitant to call this a book for anybody under the age of 14 or so 'cause the imagery and cruelty was pretty pronounced.  I know a lot of people love this book, and that is awesome and I hope others read it and love it...but I am not one of them.  I give this book 6 out of 10 and recommend it to anybody who loves some great imagery with a bit of a dark twist.

A Twist Of Grimm

Picked up a book on impulse the other day (shocking I know).  It was just to pretty not to and I figured even if the book sucked, it would at least look super cool on my shelf.  Lucky for me the book did not suck.  The book is called Grim, a collection of short stories edited by Christine Johnson. According to the blurb on the back they are supposed to be a dark twist on some of the classic fairy tales, which it accomplishes with varying degrees of success.  Here are the stories that really stood out in this collection.

Figment by Jeri Smith-Ready - This was one of my favorites, a fabulous modern twist on The Puss In Boots that keeps all the feel of the original and adds the perfect bit more.  I like the characters in this story, especially the main guy who is a fun mix of angsty musician and weird kid.  This kind of story is the type of retold fairy tale I particularly enjoy because it retains the essence of the original, but feels like a new story all at the same time.

The Brothers Piggett by Julie Kagawa - Three Little Pigs with a truly dark twist!  The story starts out fun and a bit humorous and it took me a few minutes to figure out what story it was.  Then as your reading, smiling BAM!  The wolf comes in a most unexpected form.  I would have never guessed in a million years that reading The Three Little Pigs would ever be more then a funny simple story...I was wrong.

Untethered by Sonia Gensler - If we are going off of the idea that most of these stories are rewrites of Grimm Fairytales then the closet story I could find was The Shroud to base this one off of.  I don't want to say to much about this story as it will ruin it for you, but I loved it.  The twist was actually surprising, but that was only one small part of its appeal.

Better by Shaun David Hutchison - I am still trying to decide if this story was based on Pinocchio or Frankenstein.  This story about a man trying to save his son and all the other children by experimenting on a bio cyborg goes horribly wrong when the boy and girl fall in love and use some pretty controversial techniques to keep him alive.  All of this and a scene with proverbial pitchforks makes me think the author had more then the classic fairytale in mind when he wrote this.

Light It Up by Kimberly - AWESOME twist on the Hansel and Gretel story.  It is the perfect reminder that while it may have been a children's story, it is still about a homicidal guardian and a cannabalistic baddie.  Seriously even the original story was dark and scary, and this one has even more of the elements that make this such a dark story.

I found this collection to be hit or miss in a lot of the stories.  The ones I like, I loved, the ones that didn't do for me were not worth reading again.  There were a couple instances where the story was kept almost exactly the same, which seems to negate the idea that they were supposed to have been rewritten.  The book itself is beautiful with a gorgeous cover, old school font, creepy trees, and even a bookmark!  I recommend it for anybody who likes a re-written fairy tale and does not mind some darkness, violence, or cannibalism (seriously so much cannibalism).  Definitely one you do no read to your kid before they go to bed at night :-)  I give it 7 out of 10 Brothers Grimm
How hard do you think it is to make some of these tales darker then they already are?  Do you like your tales to have a happy ending?  Do I need to quit buying books based solely on their looks?

Sins Of The Father

Time to review Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore.  It has taken me a while to put the review for this one together, because I am still trying to figure out the best way to review it.  I don't think I will go overboard with the synopsis in this one, because there is so much to it that I would just muddle it all up.  So let's start with a bare bones summation.

As always some Spoilers for all three books ahead.
Bitterblue has been the official Queen of Monsea one of the Seven Kingdoms for 8 years now.  At present her biggest struggle is to find a way to break free from the oppressive council of her advisers.  Bitterblue was thrust into the ruling of her country at the tender age of 10, when her mother was murdered by her father Leck, who had been using his Graceling power of mind control to keep a horrifying grip on the country.  Leck was killed during events in Graceling and Bitterblue assumed leadership of the broken country. While the people helping her run her country while she was still a child mean well, they have forgotten that children grow up, and Bitterblue is now an adult.  To try and learn more about her own kingdom, Bitterblue decides to go out at night in disguise among the people of her city.  Here she meets up with a clever thief, a Graceling with unknown talents and his printer friend.  Through these two Bitterblue learns that the reports she has been getting from her advisers have been falsified for some reason.  Bitterblue also starts to learn just how much havoc her father wrought upon the country.  The majority of the book is a mix of Bitterblue trying to find out who is trying to squash information from the past from being reveled, trying to become an

independent ruler, juggling her feelings for her Graceling thief, and missing her friends.  After much searching, Bitterblue finally discovers some truths about her fathers past. At some point in time Leck and his father had lost their way in the mountains that cut off Monsea from an unknown country and ended up in the Dells (which is the setting for Fire) which is more advanced then the Seven Kingdoms.  Leck spent most of his childhood in this country of Monsters and medical advancement, honing his Grace of mind control.  In a fight with Fire, the human monster, he was sent tumbling back down the mountain into Monsea where he used his powers to get adopted into the royal family.  Missing the Dells, Leck tried to recreate what he could, building his castle in the glass roofed style of the Dells, commissioning sculptures and artwork incorporating the landscape and Monsters, and terribly trying to bring about scientific advancement through experimentation on humans.  It is this last thing in particular that made Leck so horrifying and perverse.  He would use his mind powers to not only torture and kill his people, but he would compel his own advisers to do the actual harm to people.  It is the memory of what they were forced to do under the kingship of Leck that has made Bitterblues advisers (who were all around when Leck was king) to try and bury any breath of what happened during his reign. Rembering what they had done, drove most of them mad.  This cover-up was wide spread and included arson, and even murder as a way to keep the heinous past hidden.  Eventually Bitterblues friends find a tunnel that leads from Monsea to the Dells and Fire from the previous novel comes to visit Bitterblue.  The young Queen realizes what it was her father was doing and decides to spend the rest of her reign trying to heal her country through revealing the history and then addressing the problems.  There are side plots, and love stories, and all that good stuff scattered throughout the novel as well, but this is essentially the gist of it.

This is not a happy, fun-filled story by any means.  It is fairly dark and I have heard many people complain about the brutality featured in certain parts.  I understand that some people are more affected by this then others, and certain experiences may make this a painful book to read.  I did not find any of the descriptions gratuitous  I thought any mention of violence, rape and torture where done only when the story needed it to point out certain aspects of Leck's mentality.  There is also the after effects to deal with, and Bitterblue herself is border line depressive on occasion.  All this together makes it a bit of a difficult book to get through.  This book is also much less action packed then the other two book were.  The whole of the story takes place in one city, and most of it is driven by discovery and conversation   There is a heavy dose of politics and enough hemming and hawing to drive a person crazy. It seemed that most of the characters had forgotten to take their happy pills and were constantly snipping at each other in very childish ways.  The level of the arguments usually amounted to "nyah nyah nyah" which did get a tad tedious after a while.  All this being said it is not a bad book.  I actually liked that the author was willing to take us to a bit of a darker place.  The realistic after math of such a twisted leader would be pretty bleak.  The idea that some people

would just like to bury the past and try to move on, versus the people who need to have answers before any healing can properly take place is one that rings true.  The notion that people would go very far, even to the extent of murder to try and cover up a shameful past is also something we know happens in real life.  I also really enjoyed getting some insight into Leck's head.  He was a monster of epic proportions  he used his powers to hurt everybody else, and even worse took great pleasure in it.  His true talant lay not so much in mind control, but in his ability to know what would utterly break a person.  You see where even with this power Leck was unhappy, you see glimpses of a person trying desperately to get back to a time and place where he thought he was happy.  This does not give even the slightest excuse to the atrocities he perpetrated, but it makes his character that much better and gives him a motive for his cruelty.  Bitterblue herself was a decent character.  I wanted to shake her sometimes and say "You are the Queen you dummy, just do what needs to be done, you don't have to ask permission!", but when you have had guardians watching over you your whole life, it is not as easy as that.  She retained some of her sassyness from previous books, and is of a different cloth then either Katsa or Fire, so it is nice to see an author not reusing the same hero mold.  The author tries to bring in a lot of politics from the real world into the books (gay rights, education, ruling styles, etc.) to varying
degrees of success  a few of them seemed forced into the plot.  Some of the plot got muddled and confusing, I'm not 100% sure I actually understood everything I was supposed to, and the ending came on fast and disjointed. Over all I would say it was a decent book and fit into the world the author created in the previous two books very well.  It was a nice link between Graceling and Fire, which when first read do not seem to have a lot in common. This book also has some cool illustrations and maps, and a fun tongue in cheek type of glossary included, which I really enjoyed.  I give the book 6 out of 10 monster statues.
What did you think of this book?  Did it help tie the first two together?  Do you prefer action or intrigue?  Do these darker books make you think, or just cringe? How awesome was the cover of this book!?!