The Macklinator!

It's nice to see all my imaginary friends still waiting for me.
Eeeeenyways, I haven't read a heck of a lot lately, but in the last couple of weeks I've seemed to have gotten my groove back. At least literature-ily. Book-ily? I haven't been reading a lot of what snobs would call "Literature".
One of the books I gathered at a library haul was Guyaholic by Carolyn Mackler, who has written books like Vegan Virgin Valentine and The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things. She is cool. There is no other way to put it.
The story of the Valentine family is started in Vegan Virgin Valentine, which I haven't read in a while, but was awesome. Mara is a straight-A senior, focussed and straightforward... until V, her pot-smoking, promiscous, sixteen-year-old niece (YES! her NIECE! I love this book) comes to stay.
In Guyaholic, the Valentine saga is continued with V, who has quit the MJ (I sound so hip... so urban... *crickets*) and embraced both school and the drama program. She's graduating high school with pretty good grades, and in a relationship with Sam, who she met during a "demon puck" incident (a hockey puck, guys. Nothing fairy/fantasy here). But when her mom bails on her yet again, V drunkenly makes a mistake that sends Sam running.
V decides, on a spur of the moment, to spend the first part of summer driving cross-country to Texas and visit her mom on her own terms.
The rest of the book is just pure awesomeness. Why? Why, you ask?
Um, it's a roadtrip. Is there truly anything better than a road-trip to give a story plot and purpose? I don't think so.
What I enjoyed about Guyaholic was both the road-trip format and the characters. V's a really fun character, and I enjoyed going cross-country with her. I really enjoyed that she was traveling alone, just messing things up on her own and then sorting them out independently - but getting help when she needed it. She's a fun character, a little wild, but ultimately just looking for what will make her happy. While suffering from a classic case of Denial, it was Palatable Denial, a conscious suppression of things she didn't want to deal with - and conscious decisions to try to deal with them later.

Overall, definitely worth reading. A fun book with a good ending and spunky heroine.
Also, it's a road-trip book.
I mean, seriously.
RR

PS: There may be grammar/writing errors in this, and trust that they will be edited out. But in the meantime, I am just DESPERATE to get something fresh up. -RR

Review: How I Live Now

How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff, is a lovely little British novel by a lovely little British lady. Despite all that lovely little Britiness, it's solidly a part of the genre we like to call War Stories.

How I Live Now (HILN) is the story of an anorexic girl named Daisy, who is punted to England to live with her aunt and cousins when her stepmother becomes too awful to bear. While there, she becomes very close with her younger cousin Piper, marvels over the strange abilities of her cousin Isaac, is largely indifferent to Oswald, her oldest cousin, and falls In Love with her cousin Edmond.

That's right.

Cousin Love.

In England.

For some reason, though, it never becomes Truly Creepy. It just hovers at Slightly Disturbing If You Actually Think About It.

Then, in the midst of all this Cousin Bonding and Non-Creepy Cousin Love, a war explodes. Basically, Britain's main army has been lured out of the country for various reasons, and now another country or organization (who is carefully never named or identified, besides as being Not British) is not letting them back in.

!!!

WHO KNEW WAR WAS THAT SIMPLE!

Not me, that's for sure.

After brushing off that stunning tactical achievement, we are presented with the Splitting Up of the cousins: Girls with girls, boys with boys.

After various physically and emotionally harrowing adventures, the book does end fairly happy, but I will warn you:

This is not exactly a feel good read.

There are mass murders. They are gory, and awful, and heartbreaking.

There is a LOT of emotional damage, also, and the book does make a pretty good case for how hard it is for people to heal after wars.

My biggest problem with the book was that it was written very freely, without a lot of grammar. So there are run-on sentences that go on FOREVER. Even when the writing is really gorgeously (or gorily) descriptive, sometimes the odd structure can make your head a little grumbly. If you could relax, it flowed very nicely, but when just reading for a couple of minutes, it was kind of distracting.

In short, it was good. Bit of a hard read, due to Murder and Bad Sentence Structure (oops, meant Free, Loose, Poetic, Blah Blah Blah).

Avoid if even the slightest whiff of incest is really disgusting to you.

Sending kissing cousins your way,

Yours truly,

Radical