Tag Archives: Romance

Review | Mangaman, Barry Lyga (writer) and Colleen Doran (illustrator)

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What a fantastic concept! A boy from the world of manga (Japanese comics) lands int he real world and falls in love with the prettiest girl at his high school. Only thing is, in true manga fashion, his eyes literally turn into hearts when he sees her. His classmates find this rather… odd. There’s that added sly wink at the reader because, to us, Marissa and her classmates are as much characters in a comic book as Ryoko is to them, and writer Barry Lyga and illustration Colleen Doran certainly make the most of this metafictive aspect. I love Mangaman for its hilarious and surprisingly touching love story, and I especially love its fantastic mash-up of two completely different comic book styles — American realism working with Japanese fantasy. Ranma in Riverdale. Love it. Check out the book’s site for a preview: http://mangamanlives.com/.

I expected to be delighted by Mangaman; I did not expect to be moved by it. Ryoko’s manga-style special effects are involuntary and therefore hilarious, but there’s also an element of tragedy to them, because all he really wants is to fit in, and he never can. I love Ryoko and Marissa’s first encounter: It’s a party and Ryoko is introducing himself to his classmates and asking them not to be afraid of him when he catches sight of Marissa. Immediately, flowers and excitement lines burst from him, and his entire body transforms into a drooling, flappy-armed beanie doll with bulging heart eyes and fiery hair. “I’m sorry,” he says, squishing his cheeks back to ordinary proportions, and poking a heart back into an eye socket. “I’m not going to hurt anyone.” Marissa stares in shock, flowers still fluttering down around her. Hilarious image, yes, yet Ryoko’s humiliation is palpable, and the image of him so desperately, so physically, trying to mould his features back to normal touched me. I just wanted to hug him and tell him there’s nothing wrong with literally exploding out of your skin when you see the one you love.

Cultural misunderstandings arise as well. When Marissa’s ex-boyfriend tells Ryoko to stay away from her, Ryoko exclaims “I know this part!” He strikes a fight pose and says “Big-time high school challenge! Awesome karate fight!” Special effect-filled battles may be fairly common in manga, where characters never really stay hurt, but they have real consequences in Marissa’s world, and Ryoko’s certainty that he’s finally found a familiar custom dissolves into the realization that he’s just set himself apart as more alien than ever.

I was cheering on the love story all the way. While Marissa’s classmates are turned off by Ryoko’s strangeness, she is drawn to him. He offers her something different from a life she finds bland and restrictive. Her choice of a Japanese outfit for the party at the beginning of the book is a bit kitschy, but her desire to reinvent herself without a clear idea of what she wants to become is something many will relate to. In their own ways, neither Ryoko nor Marissa fits in, and their romance works because their relationship allows them to view their standing out as something to celebrate.

Mangaman can be as much of a lark or as deep and textured of a tome as you choose. Ryoko is the ultimate visual metaphor of children and teens who feel they don’t fit in, and can never help but stand out, for whatever reason. The story encourages new perspectives — you need to look beyond the frame (literally for comic book characters) to discover the more exciting world beyond your own experiences. I also enjoyed the metafictive aspects — a comic book character in the “real world” of another comic book within our real world and what are the boundaries of reality, etc. I like the cross-cultural angle — West meets East, comic book style. At its heart, however, Mangaman to me is ultimately a funny, sweet story, told in beautiful, genre blending illustrations, and I hope it will touch and delight you as it did me.

Review | The Very Picture of You, Isabel Wolff

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Isabel Wolff’s The Very Picture of You is a light, feel-good read with likable characters. The novel has some beautiful, deeply emotional moments, and also has some scenes where the narrator tries a bit too hard to tell us about the emotion, and thus lessens the scene’s impact. Ella is a portrait painter who is hired by her half-sister Chloe to paint her fiance Nate. Ella had taken an instant dislike to Nate, but as she paints him, grows to fall in love with him.

I personally found the subplots more interesting. Behind Ella’s dislike of Nate is her hurt at her father’s abandoning the family when she was a child. In an especially poignant scene, Ella confesses that when her mother said she’d lost all photos of her father, Ella as a child

drew and painted him, obsessively […] And I believed that if I did a really good picture of him — so that it was the very picture of him — then that would somehow make him come back.

It’s a beautiful, child-like, innocent wish, one that stands in marked contrast against the adult Ella’s immediate distaste when her father emails her asking to meet up. The adult Ella is scarred, and her desire to refuse all contact with her father, warring with her lifelong desire to connect with him is a very emotional struggle, with which I can completely sympathize.

In some ways however, Wolff ends up overemphasizing the emotions. For example, when Ella reads her father’s first email, Wolff intersperses the letter with Ella’s reactions to each line. I felt like I was watching a TV sitcom with the laugh track telling me when something was funny.

There’s a passage I love where Ella describes the portraits she paints:

…a competent portrait just catches a likeness, and a good portrait reveals aspects of the sitter’s character. But a great portrait will show something about the sitter that they didn’t even know themselves.

It’s a beautiful description of Ella’s artistic process and gives added significance to the scenes with Ella’s subjects. With each one, she ends up discovering something the subject originally tried to keep secret. I found these side stories interesting and the characters sympathetic, though sometimes the parallels with Ella’s own life felt forced.

The main plot, Ella’s struggle not to fall in love with her sister’s fiance, felt a bit more cookie cutter and therefore less compelling. Ella forms a snap judgment against Nate, based on something she overhears. I found that conflict shallow and contrived, especially since it could easily have been resolved by a simple conversation. Later on, when she realizes she’s misjudged him and is actually attracted to him, it felt too sudden for me, and I think that’s partly because I found her gripe against him too easily resolved.

At times, Wolff injects so much symbolism that some scenes felt like a Katherine Heigl romantic comedy or a Nicholas Sparks melodrama that took itself far too seriously. For example, Chloe is most drawn to the “Giselle” wedding dress, inspired by the ballet of the same name. As the novel takes pains to explain to us, Giselle kills herself after being two-timed by her lover Albrecht. (I think she actually dies of a broken heart, but the general theme remains.) I love the reference to a ballet; I hate the ham-fisted symbolism.

The novel’s ending also felt too convenient, and the pun in the last couple of paragraphs just made me wince. It reminded me of puns or one-liners that sometimes end Harlequin novels, but the romance in this book just took itself too seriously to make that fit.

Still, like I said, the parts about Ella’s art and her relationship with her parents were interesting. I really like the loving stepfather, and I absolutely love the complexity of Ella’s mother. Ella’s portrait of her reveals pain:

On the surface it was the pose of a ballerina taking a curtain call, her left hand spread elegantly across her chest. But it was also a defensive gesture […] shielding her heart.

This image of vulnerability is coupled with a contrasting image of the woman’s being

every inch the prima ballerina. She didn’t just ‘sit’ in a chair — she folded herself into it, ensuring that there was a graceful ‘line’ to her body, that her limbs were positioned harmoniously and that her head was at an elegant angle to her neck.

With these images, we see what Ella meant about her portrait revealing the subject. Here is a proud woman, who always wants to maintain the illusion of control by disguising her pain. She is a controlling, manipulative figure who drives Chloe crazy with her iron control over the wedding plans, yet she is also scarred and sympathetic. She is probably my favourite character in the novel, and Ella’s relationship with her one of the plot points I found most interesting.

Picture falters in the romance department and could have used more subtlety in its presentation, but it also depicts an interesting family dynamic and I love the idea of art revealing things even the subject may not realize about himself.

Review | The Far Side of the Sky, Daniel Kalla

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Kristallnacht. Crystal Night. Such a beautiful name for such a horrific event. Daniel Kalla’s The Far Side of the Sky begins right in the middle of this Nazi attack on Jews in Austria, and the pace never lets up. Surgeon Franz Adler is a secular Austrian Jew who just wants to stay under the radar. Unfortunately, as the “incriminating large red J” stamped on his passport proves, his very ancestry already puts him in the Nazi crosshairs, no matter what he does or doesn’t do.

So Franz takes his family (daughter Hannah and sister-in-law Esther) to Shanghai, a major refugee base for European Jews because visas aren’t required to enter. Thing is, Shanghai at that time was occupied by Japan, so it really wasn’t so much of an escape as it was a movement to a different atmosphere of fear. In Shanghai, Franz meets a Chinese-American nurse, Soon Yi “Sunny” Mah, who works with him at the Jewish refugee hospital and who is prevented from becoming a doctor only by her gender. Far Side is about people who want only to live a simple life, and yet are prevented from doing so by circumstances and their heritage. It’s tragic, yet made somewhat more bearable by their relationships with people around them.

A lot of books have been written about World War II and the years before and after it, yet most of the ones I’ve seen are about either the West or the East. Far Side stands out to me because it shows how Europe and Asia connected during this period, and how the situation in Asia was just as horrific as the one in Europe.

I love that Franz isn’t really a hero — all he wants to do is to live as normal a life as possible — and yet circumstances force him to do heroic things. I also love that both Franz and Sunny have complex backgrounds — Sunny, for example, is Chinese-American, so she faces discrimination both from the Japanese soldiers who look down on the Chinese and the Chinese who look down on those who aren’t full-blooded Chinese. In Franz’s case, his being a non-practicing Jew makes his troubles with the Nazis even more tragic; he is ostracized for a belief system to which he doesn’t even subscribe and for a race he has himself rejected.

The supporting characters are just as fascinating. The American Simon Lehrer, for example, is delightful, almost relentlessly cheerful and a welcome respite from the darkness of the material. Ernst Muhler, who wages war through his art, is a charismatic, engaging figure. Ernst is the most defiant, political figure in Franz’s community, and his fear at the realization of what he might have to sacrifice on a personal level makes him an absolutely sympathetic character. Like the victims whose unjust deaths he depicts in his art, I cheer Ernst on in his crusade; yet like Franz and other friends in Ernst’s life, I also want him to stop, and perhaps find some measure of happiness and peace.

In war, it’s far too easy to see different factions as either all good or all evil. So I love how Kalla portrays Hermann Schwartzmann and Colonel Kubota. A senior attache with the German High Commission, Hermann has no ill will towards Jews and even tries to befriend Franz. He chooses to compartmentalize, to not speak out against the Nazis so that he and his wife can have a stable life. I can understand why Franz finds Hermann’s silent complicity cowardly, even reprehensible, yet I can’t help but feel sorry for Hermann. Like Franz, Hermann also just wants to live as normal a life as possible; only difference is, Hermann is better placed to benefit from compliance. With Hermann, Kalla presents the other side of the story, the moral difficulties faced by non-Jew Germans and Austrians.

Colonel Kubota, head of the Japanese contingent in Shanghai, acts with honour and compassion. Kubota’s admiration of Ernst’s work and Ernst’s refusal to have Kubota own his art provides a kind of tension that I love. Kubota and Ernst are figures from opposite sides of two different wars, and their desire to connect or repel through art is just beautifully portrayed.

One thing I really did not like happened near the end, where Sunny does something that has a dramatic impact on a historical figure’s actions. In a novel that focuses on the struggle to live an ordinary life, that explores mundane human relationships to evince emotion, Sunny’s dramatic act rings false. It made me question, “Since this is based on history, and this character doesn’t exist in real life, then what really happened?” That part disconnected me from the story, which is a shame because of the major emotional impact already created by all the smaller scale heroic actions in the story.

Also, we are told several times that Franz’s daughter, Hannah, is handicapped. This is significant because Franz worries about how she’ll survive if he is killed or arrested. However, I see no symptoms from descriptions of Hannah herself and her actions, and so have to keep turning back to be reminded of the cerebral palsy that has other characters so worried. A small detail that shows Hannah’s “spastic weakness of left arm and leg” would have helped me picture her and better understand why Franz is especially concerned about how she would adjust in a foreign country.

Overall, Far Side is a wonderful, emotional book. Highly recommended for fans of historical fiction, romance, and David Mitchell’s Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.