I Am Completely Serious

Ooku, volume 1, by Yoshinaga Fumi

This is so good. Yoshinaga Fumi is actually kinda engaging in social criticism this time, instead of gently skating around it like she usually does. And there are hard-ass female protagonists! This is exactly the manga I have wanted from her.

Viz's adaptation, however, is awful. I haven't read the original, and so can't comment on the accuracy of the translation, but the adaptor for some reason decided to use a kind of opaque, ultra-formal archaic English that's very inappropriate to the subject matter. It surprises me that the manga won its Tiptree in this kind of condition.

I'm assuming that the original was in mildly archaic language, but I've skimmed the first few pages of the Amazon.co.jp reviews, and I don't see any of the complaints you'd expect if it had been as self-conscious and poorly-done as this. (Not that I'd expect them, given that Yoshinaga is a good writer.) The Amazon.com reviews, on the other hand, all complain about the adaptation - as they should. I'm really disappointed that this sort of stuff is happening even in the Signature line, which I'm assuming Viz would like us to think of as having a high level of quality control.

Eternal, by Cynthia Leitich Smith

Despite her adoring guardian angel Zachary's attempts to prevent it, a shy teenage girl named Miranda becomes a vampire. To punish Zachary, the archangel Michael turns him into a human. Miranda, getting on with the usual vampire business of dressing fabulously and throwing parties, is instructed by her "Father," the vampire who turned her, to hire a personal assistant - she ends up hiring Zachary, who is determined to save her soul.

This would be fairly normal paranormal romance stuff, except that Miranda's response to becoming a vampire is to murder several million people. It's what you'd expect of a classic vampire, but a little different from what you normally get in a paranormal romance. Miranda is slightly brainwashed at the time, but in most ways still recognizably herself, so that a lot of the book is from the point of view of an insecure serial killer who worries a lot about clothes. Which is, at first, mostly funny:

My coffin is a demure complement to Father's. His is king-size and made from black marble, customized with brass fittings and a NASCAR emblem. It could be fairly characterized as the black-velvet Elvis painting of coffins.

Eternals have no right to speak, to assemble, to anything that I learned about in Government, though everybody seems enthusiastic about bearing arms.

Until it turns around and does something like this:

Annoyed, I mutter, "Why do they need tongues, anyway?"

With his chopsticks, Father stirs wasabi into his soy sauce. "Why, indeed?"

He excuses himself, leaving the room without an explanation.

There's a disturbing scene in which Zachary, still convinced that Miranda can't possibly be a murderer, visits the dungeon full of humans Miranda's servants are keeping for her to eat.

This is a weird book, simultaneously lighter than you'd expect from the genre, because it has a sense of proportion about what it's doing, and darker, for the same reason. Being a vampire is not a good thing here - it's both absurd, because Smith knows the genre conventions and has a lot of fun tearing them to shreds, and horrifying, because, you know, vampires eat people. The ambition required to question all these genre assumptions makes the book interesting, but I'm not sure it gets where it was going. For a book written in first-person, it's oddly distant in places - it's hard to tell exactly what Miranda's thinking a lot of the time, which feels lazy to me. Similarly, it's hard to tell how deep Zachary's denial runs. I enjoyed the book, but it's not quite all there.

Dark Enchantment, by Karen Harbough

In 16th century Paris, an English nobleman named Jack Marstone meets an amnesiac young woman named Catherine de la Fer, who has been living on the streets in a half-deranged state, occasionally murdering people when they do evil things. Catherine has stigmata, and her hands bleed when she is in the presence of evil, something which is very convenient for her vigilante career. Jack worries that she may be a sorceress; Catherine worries that she may be cursed; somewhere, an evil wizard worries that the demons he has been raising to send after Catherine are not smelly enough. Catherine blackmails Jack into teaching her swordsmanship, feeling correctly that it might come in handy.

The plot is very silly and erratically-paced, and I don't think it actually makes sense in the end, but whatever. The book is about Catherine and Jack bickering, slaying demons, experiencing UST, and then taking those actions which excise the U from the acronym. As such, it is a cute book, but kind of forgettable. The villain is a little short on clear motivations - despite having some fairly extensive first-person sections - and Catherine and Jack have no common sense. A pair of comic-relief innkeepers who serve as dei ex machina are nearly the only thing keeping the plot on the rails, leaving me with the impression that the world would be better off if whimsical innkeepers, rather than dashing foreign rogues and magical amnesiac swordswomen, were the typical first point-of-contact for evil wizards.

Does looking up the plural form of deus ex machina make you a total jerk? Because I just did that.