Category Archives: Book Review Blog

My book reviews and fun bookish news as a book blogger. All about other people’s books, and not my own. :-)

Review | The Dead Kid Detective Agency, Evan Munday

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Okay, this book is just awesome. Granted, when the alternative is working on a Sunday, it doesn’t take much to  keep me engrossed. That being said, Evan Munday’s The Dead Kid Detective Agency kept me giggling all afternoon. I kept promising to read “just one more chapter” before getting back to work, then picking the book back up. It was just so much fun to read!

From the book jacket: Thirteen year old October Schwartz is new in town, short on friends, and the child of a clinically depressed science teacher. Naturally, she spends most of her time in the Sticksville Cemetery. While writing her novel Two Knives, One Thousand Demons, of which she admits the title is “the single best thing about the book so far,” October accidentally raises the spirits of five dead teenagers. When October’s French teacher dies in suspicious circumstances, she teams up with the dead kids to form the Dead Kid Detective Agency and solve the case. It’s Nancy Drew with ghosts, and these ghosts happen to love board games and musical theatre — how could I resist?

The mystery is more Scooby Doo than Agatha Christie — there are suspects galore, and the victim has some serious skeletons in his past, but Munday seems more concerned with creating an amusing caper than writing a truly perplexing whodunnit. The big reveal does come as a surprise, but the plot twist that leads to it feels more convenient than “aha”-inducing. That being said Dead Kid works for the same reason Scooby Doo does — it’s wild, it’s an adventure, and you can’t help but turn the page to see what Munday has planned next.

I don’t usually like narrators who provide commentary — I figure, give us the story, and let us make up our own minds. In the case of Dead Kid, however, the narrator’s personality is as much a character as October and the dead kids, and I love his snappy asides and geeky references. From page 6: “But even if her classmates didn’t know, October was sure they could smell the tween on her — the stench of Sour Keys and Saturday morning cartoons.” Not sure if it was the phrase “smell the tween on her” or the stench of Saturday morning cartoons, but with that line, I was hooked.

I love the dead kids, but just as entertaining are October’s live friends Stacey (a boy with a Walkman) and Yumi. In one scene, Stacey tells off a popular girl/bully in such a fitting way that I cheered out loud reading it. The standout, however, in terms of secondary characters, is October’s father. With a book so filled with wisecracks and pop culture references, I expected to be entertained, but I didn’t expect to be touched. Yet the subplot about October and her clinically depressed father is heartwarming. His awkward attempts to connect with his daughter, and October’s desire to learn more about her mother, make you want to just hug them both. Take this passage:

I had always imagined […] all would be revealed on my thirteenth birthday, ten years after the fact. The anniversary was like some kind of mythic event; it would mark a new era of understanding. Mom would have this ultra compelling reason for ditching us, it would be obvious.

October admits this is “like some kind of tragic TV movie,” yet her offhandedness belies deep pain. And when her father “looked like someone had sprinkled broken glass inside his slippers” when October asks about her mother, such that October decides to rephrase her question as a joke, there is just so much going on beneath the humour. I cared for these characters — I wanted to hug them both, and to find out exactly what happened to October’s mother.

A couple of quick bonuses to this book: each of the dead kids has died under mysterious circumstances, so they’ll each then get a book dedicated to their mystery. Next up is the story of Morna MacIsaac, whose body had been found frozen in a snowy alley. Then there is the appendix of pop culture references in Dead Kid. Entries include Darth Vader (“Carries a lightsaber and (spoiler alert) is the dad of that Luke Skywalker kid”), Johnny Depp (“Do you really need to be told who the sexiest man alive is?”), and my personal favourite, Jackie Chan (“if you don’t know who Jackie Chan is, drop this book immediately and go rent Police Story 2 or Project A 2 or something. Forget The Karate Kid and Rush Hour. Go for the Hong Kong stuff. You’ll thank me later.”) This appendix is subtitled “Important Cultural History!” and all I can say is — it is indeed.

Hilarious, geeky pop culture fun and surprisingly touching, Dead Kid Detective Agency was an absolute joy to read. And any writer who says about Jackie Chan that readers should drop his book and watch Chan’s “Hong Kong stuff” makes an immediate fan of me. I finished this book on a Sunday afternoon and already look forward to Book 2.

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, Alison Bechdel

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I’ve heard great things about Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home, about her relationship with her father. While I haven’t had a chance to read it myself, when I heard about her upcoming Are You My Mother? I decided to check it out.

Thomas Allen (Canadian distributor for Bechdel’s publisher HMH Books) was kind enough to send me the advanced uncorrected proof of Are You My Mother? to review. It contained only the first chapter of the book, and so while I cannot give a full review, I can certainly tell you my reaction to that excerpt. Here it is: I want to read more.

I looked up the book online, and saw this article that says HMH has planned a first printing of 100,000 copies for Mother, which is “a pretty daring number for a sophomore literary writer, and one of the biggest ever for a [graphic novel].” Great news, especially if you loved Fun Home and can’t wait to read more. Mother is on sale today!

From the blurb: Mother takes a look at the life of Bechdel’s mother,

voracious reader; music lover; passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man […] [Mother] leads readers from the life and work of iconic 20th-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life.

Personally, I can’t wait to see the “explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration.” In the first chapter alone, Bechdel begins by wondering how best to tell her mother about Fun Home to reflecting on Virginia Woolf, symbolic dreams and psychotherapy. There is a touching glimpse of Bechdel as a child, dictating the events of her day to her mother who wrote them in a journal. Bechdel’s recitation was, she admits, “obsessive-compulsive” in the amount of mundane details, yet still her mother “was listening to me. Whatever I said, she wrote down.” In stark contrast to this is her confession to her therapist that she is drawn to the work of Donald Winnicott because “I want him to be my mother.”

Bechdel’s mother as she appears in the first chapter is a complex figure — loving yet critical, eager to give constructive criticism on Mother yet at other points also seeming to distance herself from the work. I am already fascinated by this woman, and am eager to read more about her. The excerpt ends with a powerful montage, a cluster of photographs Bechdel discovers and arranges “according to my own narrative.” Apparently taken as a continuous series of shots, the images of Bechdel as a baby in her mother’s arms reveal the mom making funny faces and the baby getting progressively more delighted. In the second to the last photo, the baby is practically screaming with laughter, only to end with the baby’s wary glance at the man behind the camera in the last photo. So much is said in two pages. The juxtaposition of her mother’s chatter about Lady Gaga in the present day (in jagged boxes) with Bechdel’s narration about the photographs (in regular rectangles) heightens the poignancy of the moment. You can almost feel the past and the present merging, and you are pulled right into this family’s tale.

Bonus: the proof I received also included a peek at Alison Bechdel’s process of creating this memoir. I had no idea how much work went into creating a graphic memoir. I always just assumed the cartoonist drew the page by hand and then scanned it onto the computer and then somehow ink and colour it digitally. Okay, to be honest, I was more than a little blurry on the details after the drawing by hand part.

For Bechdel, I learned it is a twelve-step process using practically the entire Adobe Creative Suite. I was most fascinated by the fact that her first step is writing the story on Adobe Illustrator: “even though I’m on the computer and not holding a pencil, I’m conceiving of the page in terms of images and design at the same time that I’m writing the narration and dialogue.” Confession, in case you haven’t figured it out by now – my only experience in cartooning is doodling comic strips, usually when bored at school. My process consists of drawing stick figures (or if I’m especially creative, peanut figures) and then having talk bubbles beside their heads. So I find it utterly fascinating that Bechdel (and, for all I know, perhaps lots of other graphic novel writers) designs the layout of the panels first, before drawing anything.

I don’t know if that glimpse into Bechdel’s creative process will be in the published book, but I certainly hope so. I’ve always respected writers and artists of graphic novels. Seeing Mother under step-by-step construction fascinated me, and made me respect them even more.

Great news, by the way, for Bechdel fans — she’ll be at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival on Saturday, May 5th! Tip: show up early. She’ll be at TCAF for only a day, and I bet there’ll be a huge line.

UPDATE: I’ve just received a review copy of the entire book from Thomas Allen Ltd. Thanks Thomas Allen! My review of the finished book will be posted later this month.

Review | Magnified World, Grace O’Connell

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I received and read the ARC of Grace O’Connell’s Magnified World a few weeks after having read Patrick Ness’ A Monster Calls. World was nowhere near the tearjerker for me as Monster was (thank god — Monster was intense!), but  World is striking in a different way. World is a lovely exploration of grief. When World begins, O’Connell’s narration doesn’t dive into grief so much as brush against it, little glancing touches that depict the intensity of emotion with metaphor and suggestion. The narrative becomes more openly emotional as the novel progresses, and I love how that reflects Maggie’s changing ways to express grief.

Maggie’s mother drowns herself in the Don River with zircon stones from her New Age shop. Maggie tries to cope by removing zircon stones from the shop’s inventory and taking over as shopkeeper. But then the blackouts begin, and they soon become dangerous — Maggie once regains consciousness after having been knocked off a bike she didn’t even realize she’d been riding.

Having dealt with grief, I definitely understand the desire to forget things. I can understand how the pain of losing someone can feel so unbearable you just want to shut off, at least temporarily. However, I can only begin to imagine the horror if your conscious mind really does shut off, and you can’t control when or where it happens. After a loss, touchstones become so much more important — items or places usually associated with the person lost can serve as anchors in a way, reassurances that there still is and will always be something solid to which you can cling.

Some of my favourite parts in the book are when O’Connell shows Maggie trying to cling to these touchstones. For example, Maggie finds herself glaring at customers who are touching the items in the shop because her mother may have touched this or that item last. Irrational, definitely, yet I can definitely empathize with Maggie’s need to preserve even the faintest hint of warmth her mother’s touch may have left behind. I can imagine myself in her shoes, glaring at the strangers who dare to add their own fingerprints to these objects. In other, particularly poignant observation, Maggie realizes that she no longer has to get her mother’s approval on a shop display, and so it can never be perfect. Even if to an outsider’s eye, the display looks absolutely perfect, I can understand how Maggie feels her mother’s approval is a requisite final step — after all, it’s her mother’s shop. I love how O’Connell mentions these minor details — each gets only a few lines in early chapters — that convey so much. I can also appreciate how, given the importance of these semblances of stability, Maggie’s blackouts must have been especially frightening.

Maggie then meets a mysterious customer named Gil, who promises to help her with her blackouts if she talks to him about her mother, for a book he’s writing. Gil’s significance becomes clearer later on when we find out who he is, but even from the beginning, he offers Maggie hope that her life may return to normal. To be honest, Gil creeped me out. I couldn’t understand why Maggie trusted him so easily, and I understood even less why she was sexually attracted to him. A quick re-reading of his first appearance reminded me he was a youngish, attractive man, yet for some reason (maybe his name? his Master Caine-type promise?) I kept imagining him as an elderly grandfather figure. Even without the age factor, however, he’s definitely creepy, showing up at random moments and demanding to know more about Maggie’s mother. That being said, his obsessive tendencies are explained, and we do see his significance.

At the very least, Gil’s demands force Maggie to work out her complex relationship with her mother. She certainly loves her mother, and in a way, relates to her mother much more than to her father, a professor who thought his wife was wasting her intellect at a New Age shop. I love how our perception of Maggie’s mother evolves, as Maggie delves deeper into her memories, and becomes more willing to acknowledge her mother’s flaws. Our perception of Maggie’s entire family changes as well, and from fairly sympathetic yet vague figures, Maggie and her parents are each fleshed out into complex individuals. The tragedy, of course, as Maggie realizes, is that she can no longer continue to get to know her mother. In an especially moving passage, she says

In five minutes I could have asked my mother a dozen questions. I had years and years and I hadn’t asked her. I hadn’t wanted to pry… [I figured] that she would tell me, sometime, everything I needed to know.

Finally, I love how concrete the details of the Toronto setting are. O’Connell uses street names and landmarks a lot, such that reading World sometimes felt like taking a walk/bike ride/drive around the city. I especially love that O’Connell even gives Mississauga a shout-out. Maggie spends some time in Port Credit (in southern Mississauga), and her description, making it sound so different from the city, almost like a quaint little town. Grace O’Connell is already Random House of Canada’s New Face of Fiction; I can imagine Magnified World entering the canon of Toronto literature because it gives such a sense of place.