Category: Book Reviews

V for Vendetta

News of the recent events in London sent shivers down my spine — I read Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta a few months back, and while one is fact and the other fiction, I couldn’t help imagining a figure in a Guy Fawkes mask standing atop the Tower of London, cape billowing in the wind.

I only started reading graphic novels in the last few years, and I knew Alan Moore’s works are requisite for any graphic novel reader. And since I don’t read the superhero kind, and there’s only one unread Art Spiegelman on my shelf (Breakdowns — I  should read that soon!), I mean to make my way through Allan Moore’s work, starting with V for Vendetta.

 

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George R.R. Martin’s The Ice Dragon

Before I got the lovely George R.R. Martin surprise, I’d actually begun preparing to read Game of Thrones by reading another work of his, the children’s novel, The Ice Dragon. Over the years, I’ve picked up the habit from a book club friend (hello, Marie!) — reading a shorter, lesser known work of an author before plunging into his/her definitive work. Sort of an appetizer to the main course, and I find it works for me; I get eased into the author’s writing style and tone, and it’s easier to adjust to a more complex work.

Another Flipper friend (thanks Iya!) found this book for me while she was coasting through bargain bins. She highly recommended it, and knowing I was going to read Game of Thrones sooner or later, I asked her to get the book for me.

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What I Saw and How I Lied

I’ve always wanted to read Judy Blundell’s What I Saw and How I Lied, not just because it won the (US) National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2008, but also because I was familiar with the author’s work.

Writing as Jude Watson, she penned Beyond the Grave (#4), In Too Deep (#6), and part of Vespers Rising (#11). I always appreciated how she brought out a more personal side to Dan and Amy — and even the baddies! — and I was eager to read her most notable work.

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Detour from Ever After

(As promised yesterday, here’s the review of Before Ever After, first published in Manila Bulletin, Students and Campuses section)

Not all fairy tales have a happy ending — this is what Shelley Gallus discovers in “Before Ever After,” the debut novel of Filipino author Samantha Sotto.

After her idyllic marriage is cut short by the untimely death of her husband in a terrorist bombing, Shelley has a difficult time moving on, overcome by grief and memories of their life together. One fateful day, her doorbell rings, and she finds the story isn’t over just yet – standing on her doorstep is a man who looks exactly like her husband.

The stranger introduces himself as Paolo, claims her husband Max is his grandfather, and that Max is halfway across the world, alive and apparently well, and Paolo has pictures to prove it. Bewildered, and yet desperate for the truth, Shelley agrees to accompany Paolo to find the husband she believed dead. Along the way they exchange memories of the man they thought they knew, and Max’s identity is gradually revealed.

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No food, no water, no signal, and no… eyeliner?!?

(first published in Manila Bulletin, Students and Campuses section)

The stage is set for the Forty-first Annual Miss Teen Dream Pageant. Fifty Teen Dreamers board the plane to Paradise Cove to film some fun-in-the-sun pieces and rehearse their performance numbers for the pageant. But the beauty queens never get to their destination, as the plane crashes, and the survivors find themselves marooned on a desert island — no food, no water, no signal, and no eyeliner.

Thus begins Scholastic Press’ Beauty Queens by NY Times bestselling author Libba Bray (A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, The Sweet Far Thing, and Going Bovine). Beauty Queens is a young adult novel that has the spirit of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies fused with Sandra Bullock’s Ms. Congeniality movies, or more accurately, that of the iconic 80’s Pinoy film, Temptation Island.

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