From the prologue:

I can look at this page, this news about the trial and all the background noise around it, and I can say that this is my life, and also the life of a lot of other young and old and church-going and non-church-going and hard-working and not-so-hard-working people who live in Tillmon County and places just like it.  It's my life, but it's their life too.  We're in this together, however we might feel about each other at any particular moment.  And remembering that makes me think, at least for a little while, that maybe I've found the point.

Tillmon County Fire is a collection of connected stories that describe, one after the other and in many voices, the lead up to and the aftermath of a fire in the community. 

The narrators of each story -- a young man who finds God at summer camp; a 17-year-old who doesn't think much of his non-interest in his girlfriend until he sets eyes on the new guy from New York; the girlfriend, who has troubles and dreams she's never shared with her distracted boyfriend; the new guy from New York; a trumpet player; his autistic twin brother; a pregnant girl who works in the hardware store, among others -- speak in clear, distinct voices (and different fonts) that, while separate and individual, form a chorus, even though they don't realize it themselves.

I loved the format, and I felt that the different fonts worked -- in some cases, it would have felt gimmicky, but not here.  The writing was too strong for that.  I always enjoy seeing the same setting and the same event from different perspectives, and Tillmon County Fire not only achieved that, but made it feel real. 

I did think that the Postscript detracted from the book.  It felt tacked-on and unnecessary.  I didn't feel that I needed the story of Aiden's early life, as his story and his actions during the trial made it very clear that, like everyone else, he's a complicated person:  not evil, not perfect.  The Postscript made it feel too easy, too pat -- that suddenly every bad decision he made could be somehow traced back to that event.  I felt like it lessened him somehow.

Overall, though, I enjoyed it very much -- I'll be looking for more from Pamela Ehrenberg, and I hope specifically that there's more short fiction in her writing future.

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Book source:  Cybils nominee; review copy from the publisher.

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Crossposted at Guys Lit Wire.

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I'm part of the Amazon Affiliate program.  Which I'd assume would be apparent by the ad in the sidebar, but assuming that you're bright enough to understand that is not enough for the FTC.  So, I will spell it out:  if you click through to Amazon and buy something, I get money.  Why, you ask?  Well, gosh.  How else will I ever buy an Oompa-Loompa?

...to anyone who had to put up with my Twitter freakout last night, which consisted of many tweets along these lines:

I blame Courtney Summers for recommending the Scariest Movie EVER:

Just so you know how completely pathetic I am:  I watched the trailer through my fingers.

Just so you know what a total jerkface my husband is:  after the movie was over, he went outside and tiptoed around to different windows, tap-tap-tapping them until I hid in the middle of the house where there are no windows.

Just so you know how I really felt about the movie:  I called my father to tell him that he HAD to go out and buy it, because it was utterly awesome and had great effects, good acting and a great storyline and because even though it made me so scared I thought I was going to barf, I adored it.  (Then I stayed on the phone with him until Josh got tired of waiting for me to walk by another window and came back inside.)

I hate the cover art on this one.  I've been sitting here, looking at it, trying to come up with a less harsh way of saying that, but... no.  There isn't a less harsh way of saying it.  I.  Hate.  The.  Cover.  It looks to me like someone slapped it together in seven minutes, and I don't understand if the kid on the front is angry or dancing.  Or doing an angry dance. 

Not that an angry dance is a bad thing.

Anyway.  Don't judge a book, etc., etc.

Angry Management is a trio of novellas about characters from Chris Crutcher's previous books.  Some you'll remember (Sarah Byrnes), and some you very likely won't (Matt Miller, who literally got one line in Deadline). 

The stories are tied together loosely -- all of the characters are in Mr. Nak's (from Ironman) Anger Management group.  Each story begins with Mr. Nak's first impressions of the students:  Sarah Byrnes and Angus Bethune; Montana West and Trey Chase; Matt Miller and Marcus James.

I love Chris Crutcher.  I love Chris Crutcher's books.

I did not love Angry Management.

And I was surprised and disappointed at just how much I did not love Angry Management.

I felt, in the first story, that Angus and Sarah were defined by their pasts.  While I understand that to a great extent, Who You Are is something that is Formed By Your Past, I felt that I never got a sense of either of them OTHER THAN what was in their past.  A good amount of their dialogue felt stilted and unreal -- something very unusual in a Crutcher book -- and the getting-to-know-you portion of their conversation felt like a big infodump.  Because of all that, they both -- Sarah especially -- felt two-dimensional.  The story as a whole felt hurried and like a shallow treatment of characters who deserved better.

The second story felt like a retread of material in other books.  When I wrote about Deadline, I said that readers would recognize themes and character types, but that it felt right and comfortable and like a revisit.  And I said that while the author had previously written about those themes, he still found new ways of looking at them and new aspects to explore.  There is a difference between a retread and a revisit.  Chris Crutcher has told this story before, and he's told it better.  Again, the characters felt two-dimensional and the dialogue didn't feel real.  The antagonist wasn't just two-dimensional, he was one-dimensional.  And it felt preachy.  Which is a hard thing for me to take, even when I agree with what is being preached.

In the third story, pretty much everything I've already said applies, except, in addition, I never saw Marcus James as a person.  I saw him as a symbol.  And that didn't sit right with me.  Even more than in the previous story, I felt that this one came off as extremely preachy:  by the end of the story, I felt that none of the narrators were speaking in their own voices -- they were speaking in Chris Crutcher's.

I very much appreciate the idea that, as in real life, the stories and the realities of these characters haven't ended.  I just didn't feel that these stories did the characters, the author -- or that idea -- justice.

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Book source:  My local library.

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I read this book for the 2009 Cybils.  (Though, of course, I would have gotten to it eventually anyway.)

Because I want nothing to do with this FTC nonsense.

Quentin Coldwater isn't a very happy person.  He's brilliant and well-off, his parents are nice enough, though vague and mostly absent.  His two best friends, James and Julia, are happily dating, though Quentin wishes he was the one dating Julia.   

The world is grey and cold and boring and predictable.  Secretly, he dreams of magic.  He daydreams about Fillory, wishes it was real.

Fillory is a Narnia-ish (very, very Narnia-ish) fantasy world described in a series of children's books originally published in the 1930s.  Most people Quentin's age left them behind years and years ago, but he didn't.  He still returns to them -- when he's bored (which is often), when he's upset (ditto), when he wants to escape (again, ditto).

Then, after a death at his Princeton interview leads to an encounter with a strange paramedic leads to an invitation to apply to Brakebills, a school in upstate New York that specializes in, you guessed, magic:

This was everything he'd always wanted, the break he'd given up on years ago.  It was right in front of him.  He was finally on the other side, down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass.  He was going to sign the papers and he was going to be a motherfucking magician.  Or what the hell else was he going to do with his life?

There was much chatter about The Magicians when it came out this summer.  It was touted as "fantasy for grown-ups", Harry Potter in the real world, Harry Potter in college.  It was described as original and epic and ground-breaking.

That's a whole lot of hype to live up to.

Is the hype accurate?  Well, as always, it depends on who you talk to.  The people doing the hyping, obviously, would say yes.  The people giving it one-star reviews at Amazon, obviously, would say no.

My opinion lands somewhere in the middle.  It was, for sure, a book that kept me reading -- I happily read all 400 pages in an afternoon.  As in any other fantasy novel set in a secret corner of our world, I enjoyed discovering it with Quentin:

Quentin was pretty sure that if he stood very still for a few seconds everything would snap back to normal.  He wondered if he was undergoing some dire neurological event.

I enjoyed most of the nods to previous works -- I didn't, as some readers have, see it as derivative -- because Quentin is such a fan, much of the book read like a tribute to fantasy-that-came-before.  And I loved the fact that the students took ideas for their offensive spells from D&D.

My major personal difficulty with the book boiled down to this:  Quentin Coldwater is not very likable.  He's selfish and apathetic, never happy with what he has, even when what he has is exactly what he originally thought he wanted.  He's the personification of the-grass-is-always-greener.  I never doubted him as a character -- he seemed very real to me -- but I didn't like him.  But I'm not sure if I was supposedto like him.  If this was a book about Magic in the Real World, it stands to reason that the hero wouldn't just not be heroic -- he wouldn't be a hero.  And, ultimately, I didn't see him as one.  He was just a protagonist.  Which, really, made sense.

Oddly, I seem to have talked myself into liking it more than I did originally.  Actually, maybe appreciating it is a better description. 

I think that many readers who pick this one up expecting a Grown-Up Version of Harry Potter will be disappointed.  The similarities pretty much begin and end with: Unhappy kid gets accepted into School of Magic.  The Magiciansisn't about the plotting (which, especially towards the end, was pretty weak) or about the world-building.  It's a coming-of-age story (though I don't know if I really believe that Quentin has actually come of age by the end) about a self-absorbed, not-very-impressive, extremely angsty young man.

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Book source:  An ARC given to me by a library patron.

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Cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire.

I have developed a (possibly unhealthy) addiction to the D&D Online game.

I CANNOT STOP PLAYING.

On the one hand, my Paladin is cutting a swath through the kobold ranks (who, depending on how the day has gone, may or may not look a whole lot like certain library patrons and it's doing wonders for my mood)... but on the other, the game has seriously cut into my reading and blogging time.

So.  As with all of my little addictions, the early freakout will last for a little while and then I'll calm down and settle into a more reasonable schedule.

Until then, BRING ON THE *($()#&%#* KOBOLDS!

Wow.  Occasionally the truth hits home:  I am a huge, huge geek.

The two mothers who so disliked The Bermudez Triangle and the Gossip Girl series have found many, many more books to be concerned about.

Due to the uproar over titles like John Green's Looking for Alaska and Louise Rennison's Startled by His Furry Shorts, Garret Freymann-Weyr's My Heartbeat and Sonya Sones' One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies, the city commissioners of Leesburg voted 4-1 to (if I'm understanding the article correctly) split the young adult collection into a "high school"  young adult collection and an-unnamed-but-again-I-assume "younger" young adult collection.

John Green = Not Pleased.

I think it's odd that this is all going on during Banned Books Week and yet the story doesn't seem to have made it into the more mainstream news -- especially when it seems that there are some who are calling for the books in question to not just be moved, but pulled from the library altogether:

But Art Ayris, executive pastor at First Baptist Church of Leesburg, and Fechtel contend that moving all the high-school books is overkill and doesn't address the problem.

"If they move all the books, the indecent ones are still in with the decent ones and that's not accomplishing anything," Fechtel said.

So MOVING the books in question is overkill, but REMOVING the books in question is not?  I guess not, because the books that would be removed are indecent, at least according to the standards of the people raising the challenge.  So obviously everyone else in town must have those same standards.

I think that's what is being suggested here. 

[A few minutes later: 

But then this article makes it all even more complicated:  It sounds like the group isn't asking for the books to be removed altogether, but for them to be marked with a "Mature Audiences" sticker.  While the library seems comfortable enough with the Two YA Sections Compromise, they are not comfortable with a "MA" section:  because a split by age range wouldn't pass judgment on the content, while a "MA" section would. 

Conversely, the group of challengers wants a "MA" section for exactly that reason (I think), so that everything they deem to be vulgar would be found in one place*, and they also want to create a committee which would, going forward, decide what books would be relegated to the "MA" section.  WHEW.  I think I have it straight now.]

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*Which, one assumes (judging by my father's stories about using his childhood church's LIST OF MOVIES GOOD CATHOLICS MUST NEVER, EVER WATCH as a list of recommended viewing), would quickly become THE MOST POPULAR SECTION EVER.

I give you:

handpainted sneakers at Etsy!

(I've got to hand it to the artist -- she goes all out on these, decorating the boxes and including sparkly shoelaces and everything.  Holy cow.)

(via Beth)