that the only books I've found myself able to read are ones that I've already read.

My brain's so fried this week that the only books I've found myself able to read are ones that I've already read that are about vampires going to high school.

AND IT IS ONLY TUESDAY
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.
Teenaged Nick and his older brother Alan have been on the run for years from magicians, who want the charm that is the only thing keeping their mentally disturbed mother Olivia alive. Their mother has always hated Nick. Nick, in turn, would happily hand her over to the magicians to keep Alan out of danger. Things come to a head when Alan puts his own life in deadly danger saving a boy marked by demons. Nick would just as soon have let the boy die.

An interesting fact about this book is that Hiromu Arakawa, the artist of Fullmetal Alchemist, did the Japanese cover art. That's almost alarmingly appropriate! Please think of Nick and Alan as being Ed and Al, except Al/Alan's veneer of sweetness hides a sneaky Machiavellian schemer, and Ed/Nick is dangerously bitter and messed up.

Alan is the only person Nick cares about, and Nick shows his devotion mainly by offering to murder people. In addition to their mother and the demon-marked boy Jamie, Nick also considers killing the girl Alan likes, another girl he thinks Alan used to like, and several dozen other people of no particular acquaintance to them. I think at one point the idea of destroying London is broached. But you will notice that Nick seems to have a particular thing about killing girls to whom Alan is attached. Seeing no need for other relationships himself, he resents the less-obsessive Alan's habit of forming bonds with anyone other than him. Nick is the viewpoint character, and because Brennan pays such close attention to his obsessions, the book has an intense, often claustrophobic emotional drive.

There's one thing that throws the story off its stride, though, and it's kind of a big thing. It's emphasized throughout the book that Nick makes his charming offers of murder because he has trouble with words - he's dyslexic, and he often refers to himself as being inarticulate. He hates talking, he says, because he considers conversations fights, and feels that he's got a handicap.

The problem is that this book is by Brennan, and if you've ever read her blog or her fic, you know that she's... kind of the opposite sort of person. It goes against the grain for her to create a protagonist like that, and she doesn't succeed in doing it here. Nick's very good at threatening people, and given that that's most of what he does, the scenes where Alan and other characters drive him to silence and incoherency by dumping Icky Feelings Stuff all over him seem forced.

The book's not in the first person, but it's a very tight third, and the narration also has Brennan's characteristic sharpness and humor, giving Nick a busy inner monologue that's at odds with what he keeps telling us about himself. The jokes seem odd, too - if he's really as alienated from people as he thinks he is, he shouldn't able to be so incisively snarky about them. I actually thought for most of the book that this was leading up to some kind of plot twist, but no; things said in the finale make it canonical, apparently, that Nick is not a talky person. There's a definite mismatch between style and content here.

That aside, though, this is an extremely strong first novel (if it's appropriate to say "first novel" about someone who's written several novel-length works of fic), and I'm definitely picking up the sequel.

(Amazon link.)

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