The Book Pirate

I was given a copy of The Return of King Doug and burned through it so fast I almost wondered how.

I think the idea behind this book is incredibly funny and something that has never been done before. The idea of “The Chosen One” has been done so many times (Frodo, Buffy, Neo, etc.) that someone was bound to put a good twist on it, and they did.

Doug Peterson is a young boy who discovers the fantasy kingdom of Valdonia. It’s at the bottom of a well that sits in the backyard of his parent’s summer cabin. Being human, the creatures revere him as The Chosen one, their commander, who will lead them into battle against the wicked Queen who has taken over their lands. Together with the magic amulet, the Heart of Agnon, they will defeat her and crown Doug their King.

Sounds great, and even Doug is in, until he realizes that he is a little boy and this isn’t a game. It’s a real battle. There’s a chance he could get ripped apart.

So he goes back home.

25 years later Doug is a lazy good for nothing that can’t keep a job. He has since fathered a boy and we pick back up when it’s his weekend with his son. They end up at the cabin, his son goes off to play and well…I think you see what’s coming.

The Centaurs and the Tum Tums are in an even worse place. If it was bad before, now it’s REALLY bad and Doug must confront his fears and his bad habits to save his son and take back Valdonia from the evil Queen.

This may sound all epic but it’s very funny as well. I have been waiting for a fantasy/comedy that’s actually good and this one satisfied me. Aside from the story, the linework by Wook-Jin Clark is fluid and beautiful and he does a terrific job of really bringing Valdonia and it’s people to life.

It seems that I might be getting what I asked for. The other day I purchased a copy of Empire magazine which told me that Natalie Portman, James Franco and Danny McBride would be starring in a fantasy/comedy called Your Highness, and just today, when I googled “The Return of King Doug” all these images of Ben Stiller popped up. Apparently, he has signed on to produce and possibly star in….you guessed it…The Return of King Doug.

The Return of King Doug is written by Greg Erb and Jason Oremland

It is illustrated by Wook-Jin Clark

It’s published by Oni Press

I came across Kate Kae Myers web site a few days ago and read up a little on her. Having been raised in Boise I noticed that she was from there and decided to check out some of her writing.

In the book section of her blog, I came across a chapter from one of her novels entitled, The Third Freak. I liked the title, so I read the summary.

The idea sounds great. The basic plot seems to revolve around a young woman who while dealing with the death of her twin brother, receives what she believes to be an envelope from him with an coded return address and a newspaper clipping inside. Believing him to be alive she decides to track him down. This leads her back to Canada and the foster home the two of them shared when they were children. Apparently, this was a place she swore never to return to because of strange events that occurred there. Along the way, she seeks out Noah, the third in the friends group of self-dubbed “freaks,” a young man she cared for when she was little. She needs his help, but he is not the same person she remembers.

I decided to read the chapter that the author posted below her synopsis and I’m very glad I did.

The chapter seems to not be the first chapter in the book, although if it is, it would make for a great narrative hook, putting you right in the middle of the story and then demanding that some things be explained. I hesitate to explain or tell you what happens in this chapter because really, I would much rather you go to her site, click on the link and read it yourself.

Here, I’ll make it easy for you.

I got the same feeling reading this short chapter, that I had when reading Dean Koontz’s Intensity. There is an urgency that comes through with the main character, a desperation and determination that is wonderful to have when reading a novel. It kept me going and had me more than interested in what would happen to Jocelyn.

I can’t wait to read the whole book. Also, there is a fun book trailer on the site as well.

Check it out.

I became interested in this because I read a blurb that talked about how in the first portion of the book, when the cricket appears to Pinocchio and tells him to be good, he smashes it with a hammer.

Now, it’s not that I have a morbid thing going, I am merely interested in fairy tales and their original versions so when I heard this was coming out I was more than excited.

The original tale is quite interesting and VERY different than the version most are familiar with, the Disney film. While I enjoy the Disney movie I was really taken by the things in the original version that I never knew. Like, the Blue Fairy being a little girl with sky blue hair, or Pinocchio speaking while he was being carved.

Also, some central characters are different. Like I said, The cricket, who has no name, is a ghost after the hammer incident, The infamous whale is a shark and there is even a gorilla judge.

As for plot, well, a lot of the familiar things are there but it is apparent that this was a tale written as many fairy tales are, as a cautionary tale to children. Pinocchio finds himself in many a situation. He never learns, until the end of course.

The book clocks in at 160 pages. It’s like a full fledged novel. This version also comes with a great informative introduction by Umberto Eco and an incredible afterward by Rebecca West regarding Pinocchio and the way the story has affected our culture. The new English translation is by Geoffrey Brock. Eco in his forward, sings his praises regarding his translation.

I recommend this to everyone. It’s a super fun read and you’ll feel like you know more about the story than anyone else.

Also, afterward, I drew this.

I discovered Gone one day when I was surfing the web and looking for books that were similar to The Girl Who Owned a City. I stumbled across a web site that pointed me to this book and I instantly went out and bought it.

You know aside from the fact that this book is about a world populated by kids and that sides are drawn and chosen, that’s really all that you can compare to The Girl Who Owned a City.

Imagine being 14 and sitting in class, you’re bored, nothing new and suddenly your teacher vanishes, right before your eyes. And not just your teacher, but several students as well. No one really knows what is happening so eventually you wander into the hallway. Other students are peeking out of the rooms, confused by the fact that their teachers and apparently, anyone over 15 is gone too.

That’s how Gone begins. It’s another difference. Other books where the world is populated by kids begin by putting you in the situation already. I appreciated how Gone began with you seeing what happens and how characters react to experiencing the adults disappear.

This event causes mass chaos. You can imagine, if an adult was lighting up a cigarette or something and they disappeared, something could catch on fire, and something does. Sam Temple, a young man who saved a bus full of children a few years back when the driver had a heart attack, begins to investigate and in the process attempts to save a little girl from a burning building. During the fight, the little girl suddenly shoots flames from her arms and in turn Sam reacts with a power of his own somewhat involuntarily. Green light shoots out of his hands and in the confusion, the little girl dies in the process.

Sam is probably the main character of the book, or one of the main characters. He, together with his friends Quinn and Edilio start trying to figure out what is going on in their little town of Perdido Beach, California. (Perdido means Lost for all you non-Spanish speakers out there.) Soon, a “nerd” girl named Astrid begins to help them despite the fact that she is more concerned with caring for her autistic little brother who everyone calls Little Pete. The three boys decide to help her find him considering he was most likely with her father at the towns nuclear power plant when the incident occured.

When they return to town they discover that some kids have begun calling Perdido Beach: The FAYZ. Fallout Alley Youth Zone. Some have discovered just how far out their problem goes and others are forming gangs and stealing. A select few have decided to set up a daycare for the babies and toddlers.

Enter Caine Sorren and a select group of students from the expensive private academy on the hill and things begin to get rough. Caine is manipulative and charming and has a plan of his own.

The book overall is exciting and fun and a terrific read. At 558 pages, it really only feels like 200. I read it so fast. Not to mention, when I was done, I went out and bought the sequel right away. Each chapter begins with a clock counting down, and it’s effective. It kept pushing me, wondering what exactly it was counting down to, although I must admit, halfway through the book I guessed but I don’t think that’s the point. When you guess you want to know even more.

The book includes s o many great things. It’s been described as Stephen King re-writing Lord of the Flies with a little X-Men dashed in. It’s pretty accurate. In the FAYZ, animals begin mutating. Kids begin to get powers and as X-Men shows us, when some people have visible powers and others don’t, well…things never go very well.

I recommend this to everyone who like YA fiction, superhero stories and stories about societies rules  breaking down due to catastrophic events.

Gone is written by Michael Grant.

Hi. The Book Parrot here with my second review.

I recently re-read this and I’m not gonna lie. The Girl Who Owned a City is one of my favorite books of all time. I love young adult literature and I especially love stories about carving society down to just a select group of people and seeing what happens. It’s what makes Lord of the Flies one of the books I used to read every year.

And The Girl Who Owned a City has been described as Lord of the Flies for girls, but it’s so much more than that. And not just for girls either.

The basic plot: A deadly virus has swept the world, killing everyone over the age of 12. -Hey, it was written in the seventies. That was so in.- The only person who really seems to have it together is Lisa, a twelve year old girl who is surviving by using her brain. She can’t afford not to considering she has a younger brother, Todd to look out for. She begins to do things that twelve year olds either don’t do today, or used to know how to do a long time ago.

With no electricity, she learns how to grill, and make a fire. She goes out to a farm and finds a surviving chicken, learns to care for it and harvests the eggs. She begins searching for where grocery stores get their food and teaches herself how to drive.

All of this would be fine if it weren’t for street gangs of kids who have gathered together to steal food and beat other kids up. When Todd, Lisa’s little brother gets beaten for the food that they have found, Lisa takes matters into her own hands. She decides to rally the kids together on her street, Grand Avenue and convinces them that they need to band together to protect themselves. What follows is a master plan of training attack dogs, learning to fire guns, and creating booby traps for trespassers.

The Chidester gang isn’t having any of it though, and through a series of events force the citizens of Grand to leave their homes. I won’t ruin that plot piece for you. It’s good. But this forces Lisa to come up with an even better plan, a plan to create a fortress city, one that would be nearly impenetrable and one that she and the other citizens would defend with their lives.

There are so many memorable characters in this book. Craig, a young boy who becomes interested in farming and gardening as a way to live. Lisa may or may not have a crush on him. Jill Jansen is another memorable little girl, one who is taking stray kids into her home as a sort of foster mother.

The events that occur in the book are well paced and really make you consider what part you would have played had you been a child forced into this world. Any good story where civilization is dwindling does that in my opinion.

What’s more interesting to me about the book is the way the author makes you consider that most of society’s rules have been thrown out. What does it matter that Lisa is a girl? She can do anything anyone else can, in fact she is the leader of this new world and as the title tells us, the owner of a new city.

Upon google mapping the area the children lived in, it was drawn to my attention that the gang that fights them only lived one street over. This added so much to the story for me, realizing that it was basically the tale of this little section of this little suburb. Towards the end of the book there is mention of a king from a nearby city which made me wish desperately for a sequel. It just goes to show the audience the scope that is possible in the world created by O.T. Nelson.

The Girl Who Owned a City by O.T. Nelson

I post that cover because it is the cover of the copy that I own. Also, it inspired me so much that I did a painting of the main character.

I was given a copy of The Hunger Games by my sister and she demanded I read it at once. While I am a huge fan of young adult fiction I had never heard of this book but I chalked it up to the fact that I had recently been busy with school.

The basic plot: In the future there is a country called Panem, this country exists in a place that used to be something known as the United States. Within Panem lies a huge Capital City that went to war several decades past with those who live in 13 run-down districts. Each district specializes in something different. Those in District 11 specialize in farming and orchards, those in District 12 with coal mining.

As punishment and a reminder of how the districts were beaten by the Capital, the government in the Capital hosts an event each year called The Hunger Games. Two tributes, one boy and one girl from each district are chosen to compete and be thrown into an expansive arena. Basically, kill your competitors and be the last left standing-and you win. You are showered with money and glory for the rest of your life…and oh yeah…you get to live.

We see the games through the eyes of Katniss Everdeen, the girl tribute from District 12 who has been illegally hunting animals to survive with a bow and arrow. She is a great and interesting hero for the story and hearing what goes on in her head is interesting and moves the story forward in an exciting way.

I really enjoyed this book. I haven’t read many books this fast and I had to slow myself down sometimes because I just wanted to keep going and find out what happened. The other characters that are introduced make the story exciting and expand the world quite a bit. Characters like Haymitch, who is a sort of mentor to Katniss and Rue, another tribute, were among my favorites. Also, Cinna, a stylist assigned to Katniss was quite a surprise.

Yeah, a stylist. One interesting aspect to this book was how much it mirrored the world we are living in. The Hunger Games is a sort of Reality show style competition, being televised with everyone in the districts forced to watch and those in the Capital enjoying the show. The tributes are given stylists, are forced to do interviews, and the better they perform in the arena, the more corporate sponsors they receive. This means gifts, things that literally fall out of the sky to help the competitor. It was exciting seeing what Katniss does to play up to the cameras in order to receive some help. She really knows how to play the game.

But speaking of the cameras, that’s really my only complaint. The author doesn’t really explain where cameras are, how they are attached or how they even work in the future. In one scene when Katniss and another tribute are holed up in a cave, she knows the cameras can still see her. How does she know this? I wish there had been a little more clarification. Gifts from sponsors fall out of the sky and we are left to assume that they are dropped in by hover craft. If that were the case, wouldn’t it alert other tributes as to where someone was, therefore making it easier to perform a kill? Who knows. Perhaps those questions are answered in Collin’s second book in the series, Catching Fire, which I will be reading as well.

More than anything this book examines what it is like for young adults to be affected by war. Katniss hates that she is a toy of the Capital and the book does a great job, not only through her but also other characters, at attempting to maintain a sense of individuality and morality when against all odds you are being forced not to. Honestly, put down all those vampire books and read this. It’s much more interesting, and while not wholey original (I’m thinking of Battle Royale) still kept me interested and satisfied.

Gregory Maguire. You might know him from such Broadway plays such as Wicked. If you’re a fan a books, you might have read his two follow-up OZ books or his take on fairy tales (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister or Mirror Mirror). I’m not well versed in the works of Maguire. What I do know is that I would categorize all of his stories as fantasy stories and generally not my cup of tea. However, The Next Queen of Heaven appears to be a vast departure from his typical work and is set in modern times (well, if you still consider 1999 to be “modern”) and centers around a dysfunctional family.

The novel centers around the dysfunctional Scales family after the highly-religious mother, Leonitina, gets bumped in the head with a Catholic statuette and starts speaking in tongues and it’s up to the rebellious daughter, Tabitha, to hold the family together and survive the Christmas season. Along the way there are elderly nuns, rival churches, gay choir leaders, pregnancies, and a flying baby Jesus.

To sum up this book: Fantastic.

I love how outrageous Maguire made this story. It reminds me a little of Christopher Moore’s The Stupidest Angel (you know, without the zombies). The story is set up that it follows many different, distinctive characters that have their own stories that all end up coming together at the end. I love stories that do that. I thought that the story was perfectly paced and balanced and most of all hilarious. It you have the opportunity, you should definitely check out this book.

Note: This book is distributed by Concord Free Press who believe in the Haley Joel Osment method of paying-it-forward. They give away books if you promise to donated something to someone. You pay with karma. Awesome?

Patrick Wensink’s Sex Dungeon For Sale! is his collection of eleven short stories that are not your traditional short story. These stories have titles like “Chicken Soup for the Kidnapper’s Soul” and “The Many Lives of James Brown’s Capes”. One of the main draw of this collection is that the stories could be considered a little odd. In “Wash, Rinse, Repeat”, dishwashers are killing their operators with it’s new Kill setting and slowly transforming in to a Romeo and Juliet-esq tale.

My favorite story of the bunch is “Pandemic Jones” which also happens to be the longest story in the book coming in at a lengthy 18 pages. It’s a heartwarming love story about two people who met at pharmaceuticals company and work together to spread viruses all over the world. What I liked about this one is that the added length gives the reader time to get to know the characters while the other stories are brief and the characters do not really stand out. With some of the other stories characters play second fiddle to the oddity of the story. “Sex Dungeon For Sale!”, the book’s title story, is only 2 pages long and that kills me. I love the title of the book, and the idea of a real estate agent trying to sell a house with a built in sex dungeon seems really, really funny to me.

In the end, the stories were either hit-or-miss. I really liked some of them but the shorter ones didn’t leave any room for character development and could have benefited from being expanded upon. This is an odd collection of stories and if that is your thing then be sure to check out Sex Dungeon For Sale!. You can check out a sampling of his book on his web site.

Somewhere at some point, someone recommended this book to me. It was written down in my moleskin notebook and at some point transferred to my iPhone list. Whoever it was I’d like to say thanks.

Swish is the memoir-type book about the author, Joel, and his experiences with things that may be considered “rather gay”. Things like knitting, musical theater, and go-go dancing are covered in Joel’s passive quest to live up to his self-imposed title of “gayest person ever”. As he points out in the introduction, these stories may appear on the surface to the topic at hand but as I read through them, he digressed away from the topic and ended up telling a story that was much deeper. Knitting for example is about knitting, but it is also about his relationship with his mother. This was not what I was expecting. Based on the title I was anticipating something, how shall I put it, shallow. I expected stories about gay cheerleaders and go-go dancing but instead I was treated to stories about self-identification and go-go dancing.

At this point Swish may sound sappy. But did I mention that it is hilarious? Truly it is a good that I should not read in public because people will stare and wonder what is wrong with that giggling boy in the corner. Just reading the introduction along provides enough giggles to justify the purchase. Oh look! The you can read the introduction here! Go read it. Then go purchase this book.

Also, the paperback edition includes an introduction by Elton John while the hardcover, the version I purchased, lacks this. If you care about what Elton John has to say about Joel Derfner, then pick up that version. I, however, have an addiction to hardbound first editions.

One of my literature weak spots is the pulp fiction/noir genre which is why I am a big fan of the Hard Case Crime series. When HCC debuted back in 2004 I immediately scooped up their initial offerings and submerged myself in their gritty world of dames, gumshoes, and murder. It was a welcome change from the CSI crime solving style that I fear is slowly taking over mystery novels. When Portland Noir was released back in June, I had to have it simply because I love Portland and I love Noir. Really this is just basic math. Put two good things together and you get something even greater. This book seemed perfect.

Portland Noir spans 16 stories that each take place in a different Portland neighborhood. From the pretentious, dog filled Montgomery Park area to the shady 82nd Avenue where the women walk the streets. Each story has a distinct feel to it and none of them feel as if they are telling the same story.

One of the defining characteristics of Portland Noir is that it features all local authors/illustrator. Some of these authors I am familiar with, some are new to me but I now I want to check out in the near future.

I worry that this book will only appeal to Portlanders. Luckily, the publisher (Akashic Books) has put out many books in the Noir series that take place in other big cites like Las Vegas or Seattle. But those books don’t interest me because Portland Noir was filled with so many little references to the city that I call my home. The authors don’t spend much time going in to detail about the locations but because I am familiar with them, I can picture them in my mind. It’s pretty much a given that Portlanders will get the most out of this book while readers who have never been visited this fine city wont know what a Burnside is.

On that note, I now feel compelled to read Portland Confidential.

Second Opinions:
Feminist Review