Strong Female Protagonist by Brennan Lee Mulligan

Title: Strong Female Protagonist
Author: Brennan Lee Mulligan
Publisher: Top Shelf
Rating: WORTHY!

Gorgeously illustrated by Molly Ostertag.

With all I've been saying about strong female protagonists, how could I not want to read this?! It turned out to be everything I hoped for. This is what I'm talking about when I say I want a strong female protagonist. Alison is freaking awesome and it has nothing to do with the fact that she can pretty much kick anyone's ass whom she wants to. Here we have a superhero comic that simultaneously parodies superhero comics and tells an amazingly good superhero story of its own.

Alison Elizabeth Green is MegaGirl in a world where young teens have become superheroes and supervillains. Alison's power is super strength and invulnerability, but she's not even remotely invulnerable to self-doubt and to questioning the whole superhero-supervillain trope, and fretting over her place and power in such a world, nor is she to questioning whether, in the final analysis she, as a hero is really any better or even any different to a villain.

The satire and comedy meld perfectly with the harsh reality of the story told here, and it all combines to make a remarkably good superhero story. I particularly liked the sly comments at bottom of each page which have some trenchant or amusing observation to impart. It’s like the writer is reviewing his own work! On page 52, for example, there's an amusing aside about trashcans. On page 111, there's one about two side characters who appear in just the one panel. Later there's a bizarre one about a soldier trying to get his commanding officer to read his poetry. It goes on for every page and they're hilarious.

We follow Alison through her life - mostly her regular life, but with heroic interludes sprinkled in. Alison came out as a super hero, so she has no secret identity. Everything is out in the open, even her past, which frequently comes back to haunt her. Her relationship with the villains is unusual, too. She's actually friends with one who has given-up his villainy, and with another who has found a rather scary way to make up for her past. That character is known as Feral, and I loved her almost as much as I loved Ali.

I was a bit sorry that they didn’t develop an intimate relationship, but that was another strong point of this novel: she didn't need a relationship precisely because she was a strong character who didn't have to have some partner around to validate her.

And that was another amazing thing about his comic: it didn’t present women as objects to be ogled. All of the characters were ordinary people. There were no pneumatic breasts, no improbably toy-like legs. There was no ridiculously juvenile smart-mouthing and clunky one-liners during fights. The whole thing seemed perfectly real, even as it was obviously fictional.

Little bits here and there didn’t work. For example, the reversed text (white lettering on black background on page 127) doesn't function at all well. It's all but illegible. Curiously, the comment typeface used in this way on page 142 works fine. I think it’s that the 'hand-written' font used for the panels just doesn’t work well in the negative.

Also I don’t get that the coach is talking about a 4th quarter in a soccer game on page 181. Soccer doesn't have quarters unless they really wimp out in high school girls soccer. Who knows, maybe they do. I never played high school girls soccer. I found this - if true - to be a truly sad commentary, though. Here I'm reading about a strong female protagonist and learning that girls might be considered such wimps that they can’t play for 30 or even the regular 45 minutes of soccer each half without taking a break! How ironic is that?

I've recently begin reading a sci-fi novel which features, at one point, a planet which is still undergoing a meteorite bombardment similar to that which Earth underwent in its early history (known as the late heavy bombardment - something for which the young-Earth creationists cannot account!). This is why I think that when I read on page 198 of a meteorological forecast, my brain immediately went to meteors instead of weather! That was a weird moment. I began wondering if the meteor bombardment was what caused the superpowers. Very confusing - and totally wrong!

That weirdness aside, I loved this comic from start to finish in its entirety. It was beautifully written, refreshingly illustrated (props to Molly Ostertag), it was realistic within its framework, even as it poked fun at not only superhero conventions, but also at itself. I highly recommend this comic. You can get a look at some of this story on the website: strongfemaleprotagonist.com.

Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier

Title: Magic or Madness
Author: Justine Larbalestier
Publisher: Razorbill
Rating: WORTHY!

I fell in love with this novel right from the off, which is always a good sign as long as nothing goes south later, and it did not in this case. This is the second of Larbalestier's novels that I've read. The first was How to Ditch Your Fairy, and I rated that one a worthy read also. Is this the start of a relationship?! I have to say that this one was a bit annoying at first because the author/publisher chose to start each chapter with four or five words in a different and largely unintelligible font. There's no reason to annoy your readers like that, especially when you have so many other ways available to annoy and irritate them, but that's Big Publishing™ for you: a law unto itself.

The other thing is that there's this text divider symbol - like a sun with a smiley face in its center - employed in the text which is fine, except that it seems to appear randomly. Normally you'd use something like this to separate text in the same chapter which takes place at a somewhat later time, but in this case, these things seem to appear inexplicably at some indecipherable whim of the author's. Larbalestier seems intent in this novel upon randomly split text with these symbols, and with new chapters without much regard for the flow of what she's writing. I didn't experience this in How to Ditch Your Fairy. So this is slightly odd and somewhat frustrating, but it's not a deal buster for me.

This novel, which is the first in a trilogy (Magic or Madness, Magic Lessons, Magic’s Child), is set in Australia, so some of the lingo might be obscure. If you're a Brit, especially one like me with an interest in the Land of Oz, you can understand the bulk of it, but there's a glossary at the end of the novel for anything which proves too odd to guess at. Why the glossary is there rather than at the start is a bit of a mystery, but on to the story. Reason ("Ree") is a young Caucasian/aboriginal girl who has spent nearly all her life on the run with her mother Sarafina.

This precipitates the start of this story where Ree is forced to live with her actual legal guardian (her grandmother) because Sarafina is confined to a psychiatric facility. For her entire life, Ree's had it inculcated in her that her grandmother is an evil witch (not figuratively, but quite literally) who sacrifices animals. Ree is fearful of even talking to or looking at her grandmother Esmeralda (Mere) much less accepting anything from her in the way of food or drink. I didn't buy into this characterization at all. It seemed pretty obvious from the outset that Mere is not the "bad guy" here, and that Sarafina has been less than completely honest with her daughter. Plus: nut-job! (And there's a good reason for that, as Larbalestier reveals towards the end).

As Ree is planning escape routes from the house, much in the same way her mother did at an early age many years before, she encounters her next door neighbor, Tom, who has dreams of becoming a dress designer. Kudos to Larbalestier for not only breaking molds here, but for also not making Tom gay. The two bond quickly, because much in the same way that Ree can read people and situations, and has amazing counting skills, Tom is also gifted in evaluating his surroundings and picturing where people are in them. Whereas Ree sees things in numbers, particularly the Fibonacci numbers (a sequence you may recall from its use in The Da Vinci Code) or even your math class, Tom sees them in geometric shapes, pretty much like the designers of video games do. He pretty much tracks Ree climbing his favorite tree without even opening his eyes. He's really surprised to discover that Ree is much like himself. Yes, it would seem that Tom and Ree are going to be an item, but Larbalestier is smarter than that. At least I think she is!

Larbalestier dug herself into somewhat of a slippery hole by writing this in standard trope YA girl novel format. What’s up with that? Is it illegal to write a novel about a young girl unless it's told from first person PoV? I know it pretty much is in the US, but in Australia, too, they will clap you in irons and put you in the public stocks if you try to tell your story from third person?! No wonder they exported so many convicts to Australia from England. I’ll bet every one of them was a first person perspective novelist! Seriously, because she did this, Larbalestier has to awkwardly step out from that mode of narration into third person to describe Tom's perspective.

This problem is encountered repeatedly throughout this novel, and it's both really annoying and somewhat confusing. It's testimony to how much I liked the novel and especially Ree's strong character that I was willing to put up with this really ham-fisted way of telling this story. It screeched (yes, screeched) at me that I was reading a novel. Buh-bye suspension of disbelief; I think I can see it waving to me from that last bus out of town. Why can authors not divorce themselves from 1PoV for goodness sakes? Every novel does not have to be written that way, not even if it’s a YA novel about a girl, and not even if it’s dystopian! No, honestly! Get a grip authors for goodness sakes! Having got that out of my system, Larbalestier writes pretty well in general, if you can ignore the clunky changes in voice, and there's a lot of much-appreciated humor.

Tom's observation that "Reason did not climb like a girl" is a rather insulting and condescending claim - especially coming via a female writer. I've never know girls to be any different from boys in that regard, especially when they're Ree's age and younger. OTOH, it was Tom observing this, so perhaps we can excuse Larbalestier this time. Again, this is a problem with changing the narration voice repeatedly. That aside, Ree continues to defy not only expectations, but also her grandmother by hardly saying a word to her and by refusing to eat anything in the house. She also builds on her relationship with Tom. They visit a cemetery nearby and she discovers a disturbing trend in her family - the graves are mostly for women, and nearly all of them died young. Those who didn’t die young died in their early forties. Whatever she has, magical or not, it’s apparently some sort of curse! This is important for the ending of the novel.

Ree visits her mom in the hospital, and acting on her rather drugged-addled description finds what appears to be some confirmation, under the floor in the basement, that maybe her mom wasn't telling stretchers about grandma's witching activities and her evil mien. Pursuing her plan to escape, Ree finds a strange-looking key which apparently unlocks the back door, thereby opening up alternate escape routes. Not that she's exactly a prisoner! The problem with this key is that when she finally opens the door, she's not in Kansas, er Sydney, any more. Nope. Inside, looking out the window, it’s a hot Australian day, but using the key to pass through the doorway turns that into a freezing night in New York City! Ree has never seen snow and is at first oblivious to the chilling effect, finding everything odd and fascinating, particularly the snowflakes. It's nothing like the now familiar surroundings of Sydney.

The problem is that very soon, Ree realizes that she's wandered so far from the back door that she can no longer identify her grandmother's house amongst the cookie-cutter residences here. One would think her footprints in the snow would lead her right back there, especially if she's as smart as I’d been led to hope she is, but just as she realizes she's lost, we learn that there's someone in this new world watching her. Someone who's been waiting for Ree, expecting her to show up any time now….

The new character is Julietta, who goes by Jay-Tee, and who "works for" another person with the same abilities as Esmeralda. Even though Jay-Tee isn;t honest with Ree, the two bond, and when Jay-Tee's brother Danny shows up with some interesting news, it looks like Ree has found someone else to bond with, and maybe Tom has, in Jay-Tee. Just when you think this novel is over, with Ree safely home, she discovers something in her bedroom that shakes the delicate foundation she mistakenly thought she had under her feet at last.

I loved this story. I loved finding a resourceful, realistic, interesting, and strong female main character, and especially one who wasn't restricted to being white! I loved that naiveté is not confused with stupidity here. I loved that the novel was not forcibly set in the USA, because you know we can't possibly have an entertaining novel which isn't! I recommend this novel and I look forward to reading the two sequels.

Tiernay West, Professional Adventurer by Janni Lee Simner

Title: Tiernay West, Professional Adventurer
Author: Janni Lee Simner
Publisher: Cholla Bear Press (website unavaiable)
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

This review will be shorter than my usual ones because this is a very short novel, and it's new, so I don't want to give out too many spoilers here. Let's talk about the importance of names and titles! This novel is a classical example of picking the right name for your novel in my opinion. It was originally titled Secret of the Three Treasures, which is very tame. It's almost hard to believe what a quick switcheroo can do, but now we have the magnificent title Tiernay West, Professional Adventurer - can you believe that? I think that's leagues ahead of the original and really catchy. I probably never would have read this had it retained its original name. I'm not one for going on much about covers (unless they really tick me off), because authors typically have little to do with their cover (and all-too-often little to do with their title!), but this cover is also wonderful. It amplifies the title perfectly.

This is yet another novel where I fell so in love with the title that I couldn't not read it! Of course, as I've discovered with other novels, a great title doesn’t guarantee a great read, but I'm always optimistic that a writer who can come up with a title like that can also write a novel like that, and unlike my previous experience with such a title, this novel kept me on-board to the very end.

I did get tripped up by the very first sentence. The author amusingly writes a short paragraph at the start of each chapter in italics, as though Tiernay truly is an adventurer. I loved this, but the very first one confused me. At first I thought it was written badly, but after I’d run it through my mind about four times employing different emphasis, pauses, and speeds, I realized it’s perfectly fine. Maybe it was just me, but I’d be a wee bit worried having a novel, even one with a brilliant title, starting out with a sentence that it takes a reader three or four passes through it before he gets it! Here's the sentence in case you're interested in seeing if you're sharper than I am!

Tiernay west stalked through the forest, silent as the great cats of the African plains, deadly as the fabled Royal Assassins of Arakistan.

Now when I read it, it seems perfectly fine to me. I think it was the juxtaposition of 'forest' and 'plains' which tripped me up initially; then my mind was so focused on that, that I couldn’t grasp the rest of the sentence!

I am so in love with Tiernay Markowitz (from which you know it’s only a short hop to 'West'). She's an admirably feisty and determined young woman. She wants to be an adventurer, and to take after the hero in the novels her dad writes. Not that she sees dad much these days, since he and mom have split up. Now she has to deal with the new man in her mom's life, Greg, who seems like a nice guy, but who doesn’t seem even remotely interested in adventuring; nor does his young son Kevin - at least, not at first. I loved Tiernay's long-suffering mom, too. She was the perfect combination of feistiness herself, and of face-palming patience in the face of her daughter's aggressive self-confidence

Acting on information received (by eavesdropping on a nearby table at the restaurant where they ate lunch), Tiernay learns of treasure! This treasure could even be in her home town. Admirably, she heads to the library and discovers a really interesting book about her ancestors, and what should drop out of the book but a short, handwritten note, which mentions not one, but three treasures! Tiernay is on the job, and next she does some Internet research. Yes! She uses the library and the Internet! She researches. She doesn't have things miraculously drop into her lap (apart from that one note!). She doesn't have magical powers. She isn't 'the chosen one'. She's not part angel, part demon or whatever, she's just a regular ordinary child who refuses to be hobbled by others' perceptions of her age and gender and so becomes extraordinary. In short, she's how every main female character should be. How hard is that? Why can more authors - especially female ones who write about females - not get what Jannie Lee Simner has grasped so firmly in both hands?

Tiernay is the kind of daughter I would have chosen, had I had one to choose. She's smart, fearless, indomitable, and completely adorable. She's not afraid to go out on a limb, even under the derision of others. She's always optimistic, she sticks to her guns (even though she carries none!), and she selflessly plays it out to the end. There's rather more than a handful of YA novelists I could name who could learn how to craft a strong female main character by reading this novel, let me tell you! I recommend this novel without reservation not just for the appropriate age group reader but for anyone who likes a good yarn, and for any writer who wants to know how it should be done.

I'm not a big fan of series, but once in a while there comes along a character who has earned the right to be in a trilogy or series, and Tiernay "West" is definitely such a character. I'd like to see more of her. I'd also like to see an adult fiction about the grown-up Tiernay, perhaps where her life didn't quite turn out to be the adventuring existence she had envisioned as a child, where she's in an interesting but relatively mundane job (maybe she's a tour guide, so at least she gets to travel) and then, quite by chance, something pops up on her radar and leads to a rollicking adventure. Yeah. I want to be a beta reader for those stories!