I Am Completely Serious

The Adoration of Jenna Fox, by Mary E. Pearson

Jenna Fox awakens in a house with three people she doesn't remember - two frightened parents, who seem to have videotaped every important moment in her life, and want her to watch all of them in order; and one distant grandmother, Lily, who talks about her granddaughter as if she's dead, and tells Jenna to skip to the end. They tell her that she has been in an accident. Her body does not always move the way she wants it to, she seems to have forgotten words and feelings as well as people, and she has no sense of taste. At first, these things don't worry her.

The gist of what happened to Jenna is clear from early on, but the book is a thoughtful and often vivid take on an old idea. The prose is sparse, sometimes evocative and sometimes awkward, but it's in the first person, and suits Jenna's character well. It reminds me a little of a Hagio Moto story, with Jenna as the ever-present lost, otherworldly character who needs saving, and her grandmother as the coarse, reality-based one who goes grudgingly to work on it. (Actually, now that I think of it, the plot is basically the same as my beloved A, A', which is probably part of why I liked it so much.)

For science fiction, a genre in which it is not uncommon for a protagonist to save the world twice in one book, not a lot really happens - though politics are visibly taking place in the background, Jenna's activities consist of meeting people, going to school, dealing with her medical problems, and disagreeing with her family. The first half of the book is nonetheless very suspenseful. Beyond that point, though, the tension falls - it's difficult to convince readers that your character is torn between good and evil when she's never yet shown any sign of having evil in her.

A very good book. I've... actually already read it twice, and I only got it last week.

Tactics volume 7, by Sakura Kinoshita and Kazuko Higashiyama

(See my post on volumes 1-6 for the series' premise.)

I suspect that Kinoshita and Higashiyama are allowing their joint id to take over at this point. There are angst-ridden declarations of loyalty, followed immediately by hurt feelings, and Haruka and Kantarou are humiliated extra-special amounts. With bonus Hasumi humiliation! Also, adorable animal sidekicks show up, and Youko and Sugino get some hilarious dialog. So, something for everyone!

The plot still doesn't make sense.

Non-value-laden observations:

1) Is it a rule that, when a manga has a short, childish-looking hero with a tall, dark guardian figure, there's got to be a secret society that exists entirely to bother them? (See: Cain Saga, Black Butler, Pandora Hearts, Mythical Detective Loki.) I mean, has this ever not happened? Because I want a manga where where Riff doesn't have anything to protect Cain from, and they just end up getting really into novelty soap collecting.

(Hikaru no Go doesn't count - Hikaru is actually the guardian figure.)

2) Kantarou is albino, which I did not realize. So that means there's a manga where the albino isn't evil or locked in a box! That's nice. Though I guess we still have time for him to turn out to be a doomed genetic experiment.

I think this means that dark hair is a racial signifier in this manga - the only other light-haired characters have been foreigners and Shoukiku, who is a demon. I wonder why they chose to go that route - just to emphasize Kantarou's outsider nature? Exoticization of the past, by way of attaching racial markers to Showa-era people? Kinoshita's Japanese characters in Loki had a variety of hair colors, so this isn't her default mode. Or do they feel they need a differentiating trait because they're actually going to try to talk about race later? ...that's kind of an alarming thought, I don't know if I want them to do that.