Reviews: Itsumo Misora, Wallflower at the Orgy, and Blood Engines

Reminder: I have a poll running over here about pen names and gender, and would love your input, especially if you came here from Twitter or Facebook (in which case just leave an anon comment).

Anyway! More of last year’s reviews: Two books and a 5-volume comic series.

Mitsuru Adachi – Itsumo Misora (in scanlation)

Nov. 24

Years and years ago, I actually bought all five volumes of this in Japanese just because I liked the art, and was able to follow the story up through most of vol. 4. But then I hit the wall when it suddenly changed from a psychic kids sports comic into a pop-stars-and-actors/apocalypse-prevention-squad comic.

That’s still a weird transition, and it didn’t really work for me. I get the feeling this isn’t Adachi’s best work; it certainly wasn’t as good as the stuff in Short Program, and the volume of Cross Game I was poking at was vastly more coherent and engrossing. I think the art was pulling a lot of weight that should have been spread out among the dialogue, plotting, and pace. And I’d forgotten how jarring Adachi’s random (and often creepily underage) cheesecake can get.

Still, though, some fantastic cartooning in there. Wish it’d been attached to a story that worked better. (Yes, okay, fine, I’ll read Cross Game.)

Nora Ephron – Wallflower at the Orgy

Nov. 30

Some of these were really quite wonderful essays, notwithstanding the author’s comments about her former self in the more recent of the two forwards. (She refers to past-Nora as “dippy,” lol. I definitely need to start using that word.) The pieces are… of their time, let’s say, but they remain interesting.

In particular, the Helen Gurley Brown piece is — I don’t even have words for it. (…“mouseburger???”) And it was super weird to read a profile of Ayn Rand from back before her creepy-ass followers took over the government and demolished the economy.

T.A. Pratt – Blood Engines

Dec. 24

I read the prequel to this one back in 2009 and still feel that it was basically useless. But then rushthatspeaks gave the whole series a really glowing review, and since they have generally fantastic taste, I decided to eventually give the series another chance.

Thus, when I went digging through my old files* and discovered an old promo copy of Marla Mason: book one, I went ahead and started reading.

Lo and behold, it totally didn’t suck!

Mind you, it was trashy and infodumpy. And the characters all kind of talk the same. But it had a fully functional plot that surprised me at least once! And it embraced the fact that Cool Badass protagonists are generally murderous asshole criminals and ran with it, without making Marla totally unlikable. And it kept the level of destruction high enough to actually justify everyone’s OMG WE’RE SO HOSED attitude about the proceedings. And things didn’t all turn out inappropriately OK. There were non-traditional solutions. It was fun.

I’m still not convinced we need more than a handful of folk writing this kind of urban fantasy, but this was a decent argument for why Pratt may as well be one of that handful, so ok, cool. Rush claims the second book is an order of magnitude better; I have it showing up at Powell’s in a few days,** and plan to read it someday when I’m brain-fried and want to watch some things go boom.

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* Spurred by discovering that someone had finally made device on which it wasn’t painful to read a PDF. That’s what, only 15 years or so after the format became fucking inescapable? Great job, team.

** This post is laggy; I actually already read it.