Book Recs/Movie Recs, 4/11/09
Saturday, April 11th, 2009 03:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
retsukoIn Books:
The Whore's Child and Other Stories, by Richard Russo: Russo's prose is deceptively simple and welcoming; one moment, you're reading along, thinking, yes, here we go, it's a good story, and then suddenly--bam!--you know the characters so well that it's scary. For example, in the title story of the volume, Russo introduces two characters: Sister Ursula and a college writing professor, who is grading the story that Sister Ursula submits to his advanced fiction writing class:
"In the convent, Sister Ursula's first submission began, I was known as the whore's child.
Nice opening, I wrote in the margin, as if to imply her choice had been a purely artistic one. It wasn't, of course. She was simply starting with what was for her the beginning of her torment. She was writing--and would continue to write--a memoir. By mid-semester I would give up asking her to invent things."
I am always envious of authors who work like painters, using swathes of color and patches of texture to draw entire pictures with their words; Russo is one of these authors. He never details exactly the name of the college where the unnamed professor teaches, or what Sister Ursula looks like, yet with small and masterful bits of color and language here and there, I have a complete picture of the setting and characters in my mind as I read. Short stories are often hit or miss: the writer only has so much time establish character, motivation, setting, and still put together a conflict that's engrossing. So far, Russo's batting home runs every time.
Gilda Joyce: Psychic Investigator, by Jennifer Allison: I've been waiting to pick this up in paperback for quite some time, and I was well-rewarded for my patience. This is a well-written book that's part tribute to the childhood classic Harriet the Spy (a great favorite of mine), and part mystery/satire/fond postcard to the city of San Francisco during the summer. But the mystery is really second fiddle to the characters in the story coming to terms with loss in their lives (in one character's case, her father, from cancer; in another's, her aunt's suicide). Definitely worth picking up, especially if you have tween reader who's hungering for another strong female protagonist to share it with.
In Manga:
Beauty Pop, Vol. 10, by Kiyoko Arai: The final volume?! Say it ain't so! Except that it is so, and the whole plot is tied up neatly, with great drama, and a requisitely tidy epilogue which hints at the fact that the love triangle never really got resolved at all, just played on and on into the characters' adult lives. Not that I mind--I always thought that the main character of the story would end up with the character she ended up with; I just didn't think the chips would fall exactly the way they did.
I am unrepentant in writing so seriously about this manga which is targeted at 10-15 year-olds, because my inner 10 year-old has been so thoroughly entertained by the whole narrative. My inner 10 year-old was also incredibly pleased with the free stickers included in this final volume.
Anyway, the All-Japan Beauty Competition ends in the most dramatic and over-the-top way possible, with our heroine nearly falling ill with pneumonia, a last-minute substitution of hair-cutting models (yay, Kanako!), and a double hair-cut job by Kiri and Narumi, clinching them the prize, just as Kiri keels over in exhaustion from the pneumonia thing. And then! A sick-bed confession of love! Yay, Narumi, you grew up! (Well, a little, anyway!) And then an epilogue where everyone is still friends, and almost everyone's been paired off... and it's so perfect and unreal that I can't help but love it. But the most wonderful thing about the conclusion of this story is seeing Kiri realize that she's OK with her vocation and her talent for it, things she denied at the beginning of the story. I also found it very touching that while she had a fancy salon at her disposal, she chose to keep her father's beauty salon going instead. I was also very pleased that Kanako and Seki got married.
Really, why did I read this silly series? It was incredibly diverting and pointless; it hits all the buttons of the types of manga that I like (slice-of-life story, overly dramatic characters, etc.). But there was such genuine affection for the characters at the story's heart, and I think that was what got me most of all. Also pleasant was the fact that Arai didn't denigrate her writing so terribly the way so many shoujo manga-ka tend to do.
My only annoyance with the translation popped up on the next to last page of the manga, where bento was translated as "tv dinner". Seriously, translators?! Really? It is so obviously not a TV dinner! Couldn't they have gone with "box lunch" if they had to translate it at all? Up until this point, the translation was pretty damn good. However, a minor annoyance! I still highly recommend the series! And am somewhat sorry it's over. :S
In Movies:
Adventureland: It's an incredibly strange sensation to watch a movie character and think, "Wow, that would be me if I were a man." Despite that strange feeling, the movie was highly entertaining, and the details of the characters' lives pitch perfect. We did see it for free (long story), but I wouldn't have minded paying to see it, either, if I had known it was going to be this good.
The Whore's Child and Other Stories, by Richard Russo: Russo's prose is deceptively simple and welcoming; one moment, you're reading along, thinking, yes, here we go, it's a good story, and then suddenly--bam!--you know the characters so well that it's scary. For example, in the title story of the volume, Russo introduces two characters: Sister Ursula and a college writing professor, who is grading the story that Sister Ursula submits to his advanced fiction writing class:
"In the convent, Sister Ursula's first submission began, I was known as the whore's child.
Nice opening, I wrote in the margin, as if to imply her choice had been a purely artistic one. It wasn't, of course. She was simply starting with what was for her the beginning of her torment. She was writing--and would continue to write--a memoir. By mid-semester I would give up asking her to invent things."
I am always envious of authors who work like painters, using swathes of color and patches of texture to draw entire pictures with their words; Russo is one of these authors. He never details exactly the name of the college where the unnamed professor teaches, or what Sister Ursula looks like, yet with small and masterful bits of color and language here and there, I have a complete picture of the setting and characters in my mind as I read. Short stories are often hit or miss: the writer only has so much time establish character, motivation, setting, and still put together a conflict that's engrossing. So far, Russo's batting home runs every time.
Gilda Joyce: Psychic Investigator, by Jennifer Allison: I've been waiting to pick this up in paperback for quite some time, and I was well-rewarded for my patience. This is a well-written book that's part tribute to the childhood classic Harriet the Spy (a great favorite of mine), and part mystery/satire/fond postcard to the city of San Francisco during the summer. But the mystery is really second fiddle to the characters in the story coming to terms with loss in their lives (in one character's case, her father, from cancer; in another's, her aunt's suicide). Definitely worth picking up, especially if you have tween reader who's hungering for another strong female protagonist to share it with.
In Manga:
Beauty Pop, Vol. 10, by Kiyoko Arai: The final volume?! Say it ain't so! Except that it is so, and the whole plot is tied up neatly, with great drama, and a requisitely tidy epilogue which hints at the fact that the love triangle never really got resolved at all, just played on and on into the characters' adult lives. Not that I mind--I always thought that the main character of the story would end up with the character she ended up with; I just didn't think the chips would fall exactly the way they did.
I am unrepentant in writing so seriously about this manga which is targeted at 10-15 year-olds, because my inner 10 year-old has been so thoroughly entertained by the whole narrative. My inner 10 year-old was also incredibly pleased with the free stickers included in this final volume.
Anyway, the All-Japan Beauty Competition ends in the most dramatic and over-the-top way possible, with our heroine nearly falling ill with pneumonia, a last-minute substitution of hair-cutting models (yay, Kanako!), and a double hair-cut job by Kiri and Narumi, clinching them the prize, just as Kiri keels over in exhaustion from the pneumonia thing. And then! A sick-bed confession of love! Yay, Narumi, you grew up! (Well, a little, anyway!) And then an epilogue where everyone is still friends, and almost everyone's been paired off... and it's so perfect and unreal that I can't help but love it. But the most wonderful thing about the conclusion of this story is seeing Kiri realize that she's OK with her vocation and her talent for it, things she denied at the beginning of the story. I also found it very touching that while she had a fancy salon at her disposal, she chose to keep her father's beauty salon going instead. I was also very pleased that Kanako and Seki got married.
Really, why did I read this silly series? It was incredibly diverting and pointless; it hits all the buttons of the types of manga that I like (slice-of-life story, overly dramatic characters, etc.). But there was such genuine affection for the characters at the story's heart, and I think that was what got me most of all. Also pleasant was the fact that Arai didn't denigrate her writing so terribly the way so many shoujo manga-ka tend to do.
My only annoyance with the translation popped up on the next to last page of the manga, where bento was translated as "tv dinner". Seriously, translators?! Really? It is so obviously not a TV dinner! Couldn't they have gone with "box lunch" if they had to translate it at all? Up until this point, the translation was pretty damn good. However, a minor annoyance! I still highly recommend the series! And am somewhat sorry it's over. :S
In Movies:
Adventureland: It's an incredibly strange sensation to watch a movie character and think, "Wow, that would be me if I were a man." Despite that strange feeling, the movie was highly entertaining, and the details of the characters' lives pitch perfect. We did see it for free (long story), but I wouldn't have minded paying to see it, either, if I had known it was going to be this good.
