My Boyfriend is a Bear by Pamela Ribon, Cat Farris

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the third Pamela Ribon Graphic novel I've read and I've been entertained by all of them. Besides, how could you not want to read a graphic novel with a title like that? Especially since it's quite literal! I admire a writer who can take an absurd concept and treat it as though it's an everyday thing and get an entertaining story out of it. I found this especially refreshing after reading and negatively reviewing a rather poor children's book about a bear. This was the perfect counterpoint to that.

If you have some feelings of eeww over a girl dating a bear, you might want to reserve them instead for the girl's old boyfriend, who is a complete creep and thinks he owns her. He's way more eeww than the bear could ever be, trust me - I am not a bear-faced liar..... You might want to consider, too, that this is a commentary - a metaphor - as is exemplified if not outright spelled out, by the awful guys she lists as previous dates. If a bear makes a better partner than these guys, what does it say about male attitudes towards women? In this day and age, this is a seriously important topic and any way of getting that across is to be welcomed, because too few men are getting the massage.

The story begins with a history of bad relationships, and this woman (no, her name isn't Ursula unfortunately, it's Nora) isn't really in the market for anything new, when a forest fire pushes a bear out of the forest and into her back yard. The bear and Nora make a connection, and she realizes he's a lot sweeter than any guy she's been involved with recently, but how will he be accepted by her friends and the world at large? Well, he's perfectly integrated, apparently. The Japanese sushi bar staff love him! As does one of her two closest girlfriends. The other? Not so much. It's interesting that the most accepting one was a woman of color and the least accepting, a white girl who, I'm guessing, inexplicably voted for President Lowlife. Her parents are a bit skeptical too. Curiously, Nora's father is more onboard than her mother.

Of course, not everything is smooth sailing. Sometimes life is as rough as a bear's fur. There are breakages, and bear claw marks are worse than cat claw marks (unless they're the marks of Cat Farris, the artist, who did a great job. We'll always have Farris...), but the bear finds work and helps out around the house, and Nora learns to interpret bear speak, so it's cool. Even when winter approaches and the bear is feeding heavily trying to pack on the pounds for the upcoming hibernation, they manage to make their budget work. But when he leaves for his cave, can she expect him to return in the spring? Only time will tell. Either Time or Newsweek. One of them has to have the story, right? So bear with the author and enjoy. I commend this story.

Slam by Pamela Ribon, Veronica Fish, Brittany Peer, Laura Langston

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a so-so read. I didn't feel let down, but I certainly didn't feel elevated by it either, so while I rate this one a worthy read for light entertainment and a quick story, I won't be following this series because it really didn't invest me in any of the characters. The writer is an ex-Los Angeles Derby roller girl by the name of Pamela Ribon, so 'ribon fish peer' isn't some kind of fishing advice! It's the writer artist, and colorers (including Langston) and the writer definitely knows what she's talking about, which was one of the things which appealed to me.

The artwork was good, but used a very blue palette which didn't always please my palate. It was pretty decent, but not great. The story moved too fast and was a bit disconencted in places, so I wasn't quite sure what was happening some of the time. It concerns the so-called 'Fresh Meat' girls who want to become roller derby players. Jennifer and Maisie try out for the Eastside Roller Girls and both are accepted, but they're put on different teams, and while one of them flourishes, the other is despondent because she can't seem to quite make the cut.

Their now separate lives seem to be pulling them apart and they have a fight and aren't speaking, but when one of them is injured, the other immediately rallies round, so the story was a bit trite, predictable, and offered nothing new beyond the roller rink, but it wasn't too bad, so I'd commend it, particularly if you're interested in this kind of sporting life. Frankly it's a bit too brutal for my taste, so it's not something I'd choose to follow, but the story about those who do was an entertaining read for a while. If it had been a tad better I would have wanted to read more. As it is I'm satisfied with reading this far and I'm done with this series.

Why Girls Are Weird by Pamela Ribon

Title: Why Girls Are Weird
Author: Pamela Ribon
Pages: 306
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: Worthy

Why Girls Are Weird is itself weird. It’s not the usual kind of thing that I'm interested in reading, and it's organized in a rather quaint fashion. It’s pretty much like something Nora Ephron might have written, very much chick-lit. So having said that, this review is going to be rather different from my more obsessive ones, because this novel is harder to review in that way. I've vacillated (yes, vacillated - deal with it!) between enthusiasm about reading it, disdain for it, and repulsion from it, but the reading goes quickly, and I skipped some parts that were too boring even when I was at my most sanguine. Once I found that I was getting through it pretty quickly, I decided that I may as well finish it.

I htink that one of my problems with this is that it's done in such a way as to confuse the author of it with the main charactrer in it! I understand, after some reading around (yes, I read around and I'm not ashamed of it!), including an interview with the author, that there are things in this story which really happened to the author, and/or which happened to the author, but were changed a bit to fit in with the story. One of my favorite bits, the Tae Bo bit, almost got clipped.

The story is of a young woman, Anna Koval, nominally an actress, but who works in a (university?) library, is slightly overweight (so we’re led to believe, unless she's all-too-sadly been deluded about her weight by the world of fashion and make-up, and daytime - and nighttime - TV). She feels somewhat less than content with her life, and she starts a blog almost accidentally out of boredom, and discovers a readership. She finds she has plenty of time to write in the library, and if she's busy whacking the keyboard, people think she's being productive. Her first blog is hilarious about playing with Barbie dolls and other such toys when she was a kid. Later she does one about how a girl can survive watching sports with the guys, and another about her experience with Tae Bo, both of which are funny, but the blogging rapidly devolves into wailing and railing about her life, and her life devolves into commiserating with her gay friend Dale, and that was not that interesting to me, but there turned out to be enough interesting stuff between the maudlin and the boring that it didn’t make me want to toss the book in the trash.

She blogs under the name Anna K, which sounds remarkably like 'anarchy', but we see no such thing in this novel. Anna is very much a normal, ordinary person with no great problems and no great excitements, and who definitely needs to get over her ex, Ian. She smokes, and she drinks perhaps too much, but other than that, there's nothing findamentally wrong with her, yet she feels there is.

In between the blogging portions, she adds in some responses from her readership (which gets up to 5,000 - very respectable, but about which she's clueless) and in between the blogs and the responses is the real story of her life. I say real story because she's lying a lot in the blog. She claims she has a relationship with a guy, but Ian is actually an ex of hers who is dating a woman she was once friends with. A year on, Anna still can’t let him go, nor can she decide what to do about him when she learns he's broken up with the other woman. The blog is a rather sick way of pretending she's still dating him. Anna has a lot of issues, especially when her father dies (this really happens; it’s not something she makes up). She also gets inveigled (there it is again) into being the sponsor for a group of girls led by one young girl called Smith (just Smith) who wanted to start a group meeting but don't have any idea what their group should be about.

Anna ends up meeting two of the people who respond to her blog. Tess is younger than Anna and they have a falling out, but then hook up again and become friends, after a fashion, and then fall out again. Lloyd Dobler (not his real name which is Kurt) is an older guy who sounds downright scary to begin with, which makes me wonder what is wrong with Anna when she encourages him, but in the end he turns out to be okay as far as I can tell so far, if a bit weird, too. He seems at first to be good for her, but then becomes a problem because she begins to fantasize about him. When she's invited to an Internet conference in Pittsburgh by Tess, she notifes Kurt, who lives there, and arranges to meet him. He chickens out of their first "date" with a crisis of confidence, but later he calls her and they arrange to meet her for lunch the next day, which turns into them spending the day and then the night together.

Anna is determined to tell him the real truth about her life, especially since she spent the previous day telling Tess the truth (no, that wasn't why they had a second falling out), but she ends up leaving without making the requisite effort to get the truth out to him. It's then that it becomes overwhelmingly apparent what Anna's only failing is: Anna Koval is an invertebrate! She didn't have the spine to tell the truth on her blog. She didn't have the spine to stand up to Ian and take her full fifty percent of the relationship into her own hands, and finally, when it counts most of all, she doesn't have the spine to tell the love of her life, Kurt, the truth - she lets people walk all over her. But that's seems about to change.

After letting Smith down by not being there for the really she organized, Anna urges her to organize another and she attends this one, which takes off like a jetliner, with a lot of the girls shaving their heads so they'll be easily recognized and encouraging others to come up to them and talk to them if they see them out in the street, about whatever they want to talk about. Anna steps up and gets her head shaved, too.

She coems home to find Ian sleeping on her futon (he still has her key a year later), abd he either doesn't even notice her shaved head or he doesn't care to comment on it. She has to wear a blond wig to her friend's wedding because she's a bridesmaid. When she goes to her annual Gyno exam, she has a new doctor who asks about her family history which leads to her dead dad which leads her to finally grieve for him. She starts deleting whole monthly folders from her blog, and she decides to call Kurt again - having been unable to reach him since they parted.

After an awkward conversation, they agree to meet. Since she has lost her job at the library, and can afford no trips (but can still smoke and buy expensive coffee!), he will come to Austin for a visit, and they will see how it goes. It ends with an offer from a local newspaper to transfer her blog to their web site.