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REVIEW: Gosick vol. 1 by Kazuki Sakuraba

Posted by Anastasia on April 22, 2011 5 Responses »

Apr 222011

31. Gosick vol. 1 by Kazuki Sakuraba
Publication: TokyoPop (April 8, 2008), Paperback, 229pp / ISBN 1427805695
Genre: Light novel, Mystery

Rating: Bin it
Read: March 28, 2011

Source: Bought

Summary from Amazon:

The year is 1924, the place, Sauville, a small European country neatly tucked beside the Alps… Kazuya Kujo has been studying abroad at the prestigious Saint Marguerite Academy, where urban legends and horror stories are all the rage. Most Kazuya ignores–but the story of the Queen Berry, a mysterious ghost ship, really gets to him. Of course, his brainy friend Victorique is much more intrigued by true stories, and she uses her unrivaled logic to solve mysteries even the town’s famous detective can’t. Ironically, it’s Victorique’s inquisitive nature that leads the duo to board a ship that matches the Queen Berry’s description to a tee, a ship that might just hold the key to solving a sinister mystery… Kazuki Sakuraba’s modern twist on Holmes and Watson–pairing Victorique, a wizened young girl with doll-like looks and her eager-to-please sidekick Kazuya–make this international bestseller a must-read murder mystery.

Review

Man, I so wanted to like this book. I’ve been lusting after it ever since I started (in theory) reading more translated novels and found it listed under “mystery” and “Sherlock Holmes-related” labels. I love Sherlock Holmes! I love things that are even vaguely related to Sherlock Holmes! Sometimes this means I read really awesome stuff and sometimes, as in the case of Gosick volume 1, it means I read really crappy stuff.

So: basically, Gosick is Sherlock Holmes if Sherlock Holmes was set in an alterna-world that’s sort of steampunk/idealized Victorian (yet set in the 1920s) and if everything that was ever good about Sherlock Holmes was sucked out and replaced by moldy Jello. So you’ve got cliched character tropes, a boring mystery, and pretty terrible writing.

Like most light novels, Gosick is not the paragon of modern Japanese writing. I went into it expecting it to be a little bit bad, but I definitely didn’t expect it to be this bad. I expected to at least be entertained, to enjoy the plot if nothing else– but really, it’s pretty bad.

Maybe I’m being too hard on the mystery part of the story. It’s not as bad as some other mysteries I’ve read, and the solution was pretty cool. But does it compare to the Sherlock Holmes standards it’s trying to emulate? No. And it’s not like the Holmes mysteries are rooted in logic or believability, anyway!

But the worst thing about Gosick was the characters. I hated them! It’s interesting that the Holmes-equivalent character is female, but only barely had any sort of personality, and even that was trope-tastic. Also, it seriously creeped me out how often she was referred to looking like a doll, acting like a doll, or just generally described as being un-humanlike. Sometimes she was even mistaken for a doll, which is just– ugh.

Perhaps the author was trying to portray some of Holmes’ coldness in a way that would translate to the pseudo-anime world that light novels exist in, but it read more like Victorique-as-an-object-with-no-personhood (something be obtained/constrained/owned) rather than Victorique-as-an-emotionless-person. Doll-like female characters are pretty prevalent in anime shows, I think– it gives the male protagonists something to “break down” or “overcome” or whatever– so I suppose it’s setting up some sort of romantic theme for later on in the series. But still: ugh.

I think I’ve gone on a tangent. Er, yes– so Victorique was pretty bad, and so was Kazuya, the Watson character. I know, I know: they’re just anime character archetypes that aren’t supposed to be really deep or unique or even particularly interesting. And I can sometimes stand that in an anime, but mostly I just get annoyed and move on to another show. With a book? It’s even more annoying.

To pound another nail into the coffin, the actual text of the book was like reading a novelization of an anime, which I find really boring. Gosick actually is an anime, but it started out as a book series, so shouldn’t it read more like an actual book than a summarization of an episode?

Light novels are, I know, rather hit or miss with these sorts of things, by which I mean plot, writing ability, and decent characters. Sometimes I can look past certain flaws and enjoy other aspects of the book, and sometimes, if I’m lucky, it’s actually a decent book altogether. But Gosick barely kept my interest and if I didn’t already have the second volume in my possession I definitely wouldn’t continue onward in the series. I’ve heard that the second volume is better but, well…I’m not excited about it.

And

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Other reviews:
Anime News Network: “The first volume of Gosick is a solid mystery-thriller that brings in many elements and gets them right: a period setting, a closed-room scenario, an intricate but compelling plotline, and a tsundere goth-loli girl detective (okay, that one’s strictly for the otaku, but anyway). What makes this novel particularly impressive is how it balances beginning (introduce the charaters), middle (dig into the mystery) and end (explain what happened) without getting too bogged down or skimping on details.”

Otaku, No Video: “It’s also a bit strange to read a light novel that feels like it’s being written for animation. There are several bits–particularly the police assistants who hold hands and talk in unison while skipping together–that made absolutely no sense and felt like sight gags.”

Beta-Waffle: “Ultimately, though, it’s just a massively fun and oddly gripping book that I really can’t recommend enough to anyone who enjoys these light novels. It’s not anything bigger or grander than any of these other novels are, but it’s an exemplary example of what these books are all about.”

I think partly why I hated this book so much is precisely because I’m not exactly the target audience. I might have enjoyed it more when I was younger and still fond of really crappy shoujo/shonen anime shows, but now I’m sick of all that and prefer things that actually have some character depth in them. So, you know. Bah.

Thursday Tea (Apr. 7) & REVIEW: No Wind of Blame (again)

Posted by Anastasia on April 7, 2011 3 Responses »

Apr 072011

The book: So I’ve finally forced myself to finish No Wind of Blame. It’s taken me so very long to finish what is, essentially, a very short book quite simply because it was actually kind of boring. Normally I wouldn’t force myself to finish any book if I didn’t want to, but with books that are under 300 pages I almost feel obligated to do so anyway just because it doesn’t seem like it should be a big deal. But it inevitably turns out to be one, and I can’t help but write this TT/review with a sense of relief.

It’s not that No Wind of Blame is a bad book, necessarily. I’ve certainly read some worse mysteries, anyway. But No Wind of Blame is sadly lacking in excitement, and it takes so long to get to the actual murder/mystery part that I nearly died from waiting. The first third of the book is spent following around some very irritating people while the last two-thirds are the mystery part, albeit you STILL have to follow the irritating people around but now with added Stereotypical Policemen. It just makes for a dull story, and even the solution at the end, while satisfying in a way, was boring.

The best part about No Wind of Blame was the humor. The characters were all annoying but they were also very funny in their absurdness, and if No Wind of Blame was a TV movie I’d no doubt have been very entertained by the actors.

Still, a bit of humor can’t make up for lackluster everything else, and while I’ll still try reading more of Georgette Heyer’s novels I’m definitely going to double-check and make sure I only read the really good ones.

The tea: Today I’m drinking Christmas Eve, one of Stash’s holiday teas. I feel completely awkward and a bit annoyed at drinking holiday tea outside of winter and with no holidays nearby, but it’s got to be done. So.

Do they go together? Well, I felt annoyed with both the book and the tea, but the tea was a better experience overall. Still, it’s somewhere in summer in the book, I think, and Christmas tea definitely doesn’t go with summer. So, no, they don’t go together.

MINI-REVIEWS: Walt Disney’s Way, The Boxcar Children’s Mysteries #1, Scrapped Princess: A Tale of Destiny

Posted by Anastasia on January 31, 2011 4 Responses »

Jan 312011

04. Walt Disney’s Way by New Word City
Publication: FT Press (February 1, 2010), ebook, 139kb / ISBN
Genre: Non-Fiction, Biography

Rating: Bin it
Read: January 14, 2011

Source: Downloaded (when it was free)

Review

So, yeah: this isn’t really a “book,” it’s more like a short pamphlet or something. Also, it’s boring as hell. Good primer for Walt Disney’s life, and if you’re a business person you might be interested by the end where it details how to emulate the good bits of Disney’s business sense, but if you’re looking for an actual biography or, like, anything more detailed than a Wikipedia page, look elsewhere.

05. The Boxcar Children’s Mysteries #1 by Gertrude Chandler Warner
Publication: Albert Whitman & Company (December 14, 2010), ebook, 1552kb / ISBN
Genre: Children’s Fiction

Rating: Borrow it
Read: January 14-15, 2011

Source: Bought

Review

Hey, it’s a reread! Yay! On the other hand, I probably could have picked a better book to reread. My favorite thing about the Boxcar books when I was younger– the last time I read this– was that it’s about kids who live on their own in a boxcar, and they’re all self-sufficient and stuff. That’s good stuff! It’s exciting, and when you’re a kid you might not notice the…er…other stuff. The stuff where all the girls are super happy to do household stuff, know how to make fabulous dinners, and can sew whatever the hell they get their hands on. And the boys (well, the oldest boy, at least), are the providers who get jobs and bring home the bacon and stuff.

WOW. I mean, yes– it’s an old book. It was written originally in 1924, before women’s lib and before people generally started wanting their kids to be kids instead of little versions of adults. But still. How could I not have noticed that when I was younger? I guess I was too busy thinking about how much I wanted to live in a boxcar to worry about the job I’d be stuck with if I actually did live in one with my stupid brother.

Ms Chandler Warner did seem like a sweet lady, though, just one that was stuck in the so-called standard roles for women and men. This bit from the Boxcar Children Wikipedia page is so sweet and cute, I can’t feel overly angry towards her:

As she wrote the story, Warner read it to her classes and rewrote it many times so the words were easy to understand. Some of her pupils spoke other languages at home and were just learning English, so The Boxcar Children gave them a fun story that was easy to read. Warner once wrote that the original book “raised a storm of protest from librarians who thought the children were having too good a time without any parental control! That is exactly why children like it!”

10. Scrapped Princess: A Tale of Destiny by Ichiro Sakaki (translated by Paul Kotta)
Publication: TokyoPop (October 3, 2006), Paperback, 200pp / ISBN 1595329846
Genre: Light Novel, Fantasy/Sci-fi

Rating: Borrow it
Read: January 23, 2011

Source: Bought

Review

This book has a PRINCESS in it, and it’s so awesome. Don’t take too much heart into the fact that I rated it “borrow,” because I’m pretty much going to rate all light novels “borrow.” They’re fun to read and very enjoyable (for the most part) but they aren’t the best written things out there.

Anyway, what I really liked about Scrapped Princess is that though it’s got the “hidden princess who is secretly the thing upon which the future of the world resides” trope in it, it does some unusual things in the actual story. For instance, Pacifica (that’s the princess) was adopted by some ex-soldiers and raised as there own. When she finds out she’s a princess? She does not immediately abandon her adopted family, nor do they abandon her! In fact, one of the main themes is how even if you’re adopted your adopted family is still your FAMILY, your family who loves you and wants to protect you from insane assassins and the king who wants you dead! I thought that was really wonderful, and pretty unusual in a story where the more standard thing would have been for Pacifica to wander off alone somewhere.

I also liked the blending of fake historical past with almost steampunkish technology– a thing that’s not overly unusual in anime– and I liked the characters, and the action was great! It was a lot of fun, for real.

Unfortunately, there’s 13 volumes in the series (plus some short stories), and TokyoPop only licensed the first three. I’m going to Google around and see if anybody else has licensed (or translated) the rest– but I’m very annoyed by this! Just FYI.

Mini-Reviews: The Amazing Maurice & His Educated Rodents, The Romance Readers’ Book Club, Psmith in the City

Posted by Anastasia on December 30, 2010 3 Responses »

Dec 302010

222. The Amazing Maurice & His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett
Publication: HarperCollins (April 29, 2003), Paperback, 368pp / ISBN 0060012358
Genre: YA Fantasy
Rating: Buy it
Read: November 23, 2010
Source: Bought (used)
Summary from Amazon:

The Amazing Maurice runs the perfect Pied Piper scam. This streetwise alley cat knows the value of cold, hard cash and can talk his way into and out of anything. But when Maurice and his cohorts decide to con the town of Bad Blinitz, it will take more than fast talking to survive the danger that awaits. For this is a town where food is scarce and rats are hated, where cellars are lined with deadly traps, and where a terrifying evil lurks beneath the hunger-stricken streets….

Review

I actually love this book so much I had a hard time thinking up something to say about it besides “omg read it now.” My favorite Pterry books are the ones that have a bit of oomph to them, the ones that say something about humanity and life and how we should approach things with both excitement and respect. This one has that! Maybe not as much as Nation, but then it’s really hard to top Nation. Continue reading »

Mini-Reviews: Chutes & Adders, The Spellman Files, Caliban’s Hour

Posted by Anastasia on December 20, 2010 No Responses »

Dec 202010

226. Chutes and Adders by Barbara Block
Publication: Kensington Publishing Corp. (August 1, 1994), Hardcover, 296pp / ISBN 0821745336
Genre: Mystery
Rating: Bin it
Read: November 25-26, 2010
Source: Paperback Swap
Summary from Amazon:

Running a small pet shop that sells a variety of small animals, widow Robin Light becomes the chief suspect in a murder case when her partner is killed by a poisonous saw-backed viper that arrived in an unmarked package.

Review

I feel sort of weird for not liking this one more than I do, because it seems like it’d be right up my alley. Strong female protagonist, little to no romance, decent mystery, thrills and chills, and a theme that isn’t too stupid. However, while Robin herself was fully fleshed out and reasonably functional as a character, none of the other characters were. Robin had depth and layers, but all the rest of them acted like they were playing a role. Even the villain was playing a role, and the big “reveal” at the end with the true killer showing up and explaining their motivation for being a killer read like it was checking stuff off a list. Like, “captured protagonist and tied her to a chair.” Check! “Taunting her and throwing my cleverness in her face.” Check! “Setting up her death in such a way that she can escape at the last moment, a la James Bond.” Check!

Plus the dialogue really fell apart at the end. Continue reading »

Review: Voltaire's Calligrapher by Pablo de Santis

Posted by Anastasia on October 5, 2010 No Responses »

Oct 052010

193. Voltaire’s Calligrapher by Pablo de Santis
Publication: Harper Perennial (October 5, 2010) originally published 2001, Paperback ARC
Genre: Historical Fiction, Mystery, Dark Fantasy (according to Kirkus)
Rating: Bin it
Read: September 26-28, 2010
Source: Publisher
Summary from Amazon:

Dalessius is twenty when he comes to work for one of the Enlightenment’s most famous minds, the author and philosopher Voltaire. As the great man’s calligrapher, Dalessius becomes witness to many wonders—and finds himself in the middle of a secret battle between the malevolent remnants of the all-but-dead Dark Ages and the progressive elements of the modern age. The calligrapher’s role in this shadowy conflict will carry him to many perilous places— through the gates of sinister castles and to the doors of a bizarre bordello; toward life-and death confrontations with inventive henchmen, ingenious mechanical execution devices, poisonous fish, and murderous automatons. As the conspiracy to halt the Enlightenment’s astonishing progress intensifies, young Dalessius’s courage—as well as Voltaire’s unique cunning and wit—are put to the ultimate test as they strive to ensure the survival of the future.

Review

You know how sometimes a book just doesn’t work for you, but you don’t know why and everyone else seems to like it and so you try to make excuses explaining why you didn’t like it? That’s what I’ve been doing every since I finished reading Voltaire’s Calligrapher, because I don’t know why I wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as everyone else the world seemed to be.

Here’s the thing. This book’s narrative depends heavily on telling, not showing, and that drives me up the WALL. It just made the book drag on and on, when it’s really only a novella-sized book and not the 300-page clunker it seemed to be when I was reading it!

There were other things I didn’t like. Characters info dump on each other nearly every chapter. There’s a lackluster “romance” between Dalessius and Clarissa, a shut-in who likes pretending she’s an automaton. I’m not even sure you could CALL it a romance between it seemed entirely one-sided to me, almost to a farcical degree. What dialogue there was was boring as hell. I don’t get the point of having Voltaire in there except to attach the book to a specific time period because he doesn’t seem to do anything except give Dalessius a reason to stick his nose into the mystery.

The author

For all that I had problems with the book, I did like parts of it. I liked the calligraphy aspect, especially when Dalessius explained how calligraphers worked and why it was a dying art (because of the printing press, of course) but still an important one. I like how Dalessius’ philosophy about calligraphy changed as he grew older and learned more about himself. I liked how he experimented with different inks, including invisible ones. And I liked the bookish aspect about it!

I also liked the mystery…sort of. I suppose I’m not as up on my history as I should be, because I honestly didn’t know what was going on most of the time. I knew who Voltaire was, I knew about the French Revolution (something that was hinted at in the book), and I knew a bit about the Jesuits and the Catholics and whatnot. But the bishop that was so central to the mystery? Who was that? Was he ever named? No idea.

The sci-fi aspects– the automatons, basically– were fun but I didn’t see how they fit in with the rest of the world. It seemed like a world that was remarkably like ours, and yet I don’t think we ever had automatons that could be mistaken for alive human beings. I think this is something that I didn’t get; I was expecting a straight up historical mystery, and the inclusion of robots threw me off a little. So…maybe it threw off my enjoyment of the book, as well? Possible.

I REALLY wanted to like Voltaire’s Calligrapher. It seemed like it had everything I enjoy in a book: mystery, romance, historical thingies, a bit of science fiction, conspiracies and evil priests and theaters and mad Frenchmen. But the way it was written was so…boring. Would it really have been so terrible to stick a few interesting conversations in there, a few more details about the world Dalessius was living in?

Maybe I just wanted it to be another A Conspiracy of Paper, but set in France. Oh well.

Have you ever disliked a book that everyone else seemed to love? I’m talking ones that are universally liked, like The Hunger Games maybe. Twilight and Dan Brown don’t count!