All reviews copyright 1984-2008 Evelyn C. Leeper.
THE LAST COLONY by John Scalzi:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/25/2008]
THE LAST COLONY by John Scalzi (ISBN-13 978-0-765-31697-4, ISBN-10 0-765-31697-8) is a classic science fiction novel. It doesn't need a six-page glossary. It doesn't have an impenetrable style. It just tells the story of a group of colonists caught in a mess: militarily, politically, sociologically, and environmentally. Whether the resolution is entirely plausible, I am not sure, but I'm willing to suspend disbelief. For all those who yearn for "science fiction like they used to write," this is recommended.
To order The Last Colony from amazon.com, click here.
OLD MAN'S WAR by John Scalzi:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/05/2006]
In 1959 was STARSHIP TROOPERS by Robert A. Heinlein. In 1975 was THE FOREVER WAR by Joe Haldeman. And now in 2005 we have OLD MAN'S WAR by John Scalzi (ISBN 0-765-30940-8). Heinlein postulated a world in which military service was a prerequisite for a life of citizenship. Scalzi postulates a world in which a life of citizenship was a prerequisite for military service. Heinlein (a veteran of World War II, but not of combat) presents the war in STARSHIP TROOPERS as being the right thing to do--in fact, he does not even seem to consider that war might be a bad thing. Haldeman (a combat veteran of Vietnam) presents the war in THE FOREVER WAR as a bad thing. According to Matthew Appleton's review in "The New York Review of Science Fiction", Scalzi has not read THE FOREVER WAR. However, he presents a view somewhere between the two: wars may be bad, but they may be necessary. (The romance in OLD MAN'S WAR is more reminiscent of Haldeman than of Heinlein, though.) The writing style is straightforward (the phrase "workmanlike Campbellian prose" comes to mind), and in general that is a classic military science fiction novel that--except for the 2005 sensibilities--could have been written fifty years ago. (I mean this as a compliment.) I'm not telling you any of the details of the book, because how the military works, or how the war goes, is something best left to Scalzi to unfold. But it is certainly a worthy Hugo nominee.
To order Old Man's War from amazon.com, click here.
PAST LIVES, PRESENT TENSE edited by Elizabeth Scarborough (Ace, ISBN 0-441-00649-3, 1999, 336pp, trade paperback):
This is a "shared-world anthology," for which Scarborough has provided the premise (in "Soulmates"): Tsering manages to implant the personality of his dead mate, Chime, into himself without destroying his own, creating "Dr. Chimera." The other authors then develop this idea independently of each other, each choosing a different past life to "resurrect," with Dr. Chimera and his technique running as a thread throughout.
My main problem with this book is that I have difficulty with the premise that all our personality and memories are stored in our DNA. (Jerry Oltion's story says MRNA, but Scarborough specifically says DNA, so Oltion must have gotten it wrong.) First of all, there is a bandwidth problem. Second of all, this smacks too much of Lamarckian genetics.
Given that, some of the stories are mildly entertaining. "A Rose with All Its Thorns" by Lillian Stewart Carl puts the personality of Anne Boleyn in a (female) Tudor historian at an academic conference which reminds one of Connie Willis's academic settings and characters--and performs admirably in that genre.
Not surprisingly, Nina Kiriki Hoffman produces a very strong story in "Voyage of Discovery," in which the personality of Meriwether Lewis is implanted in a young woman who has become completely uncommunicative after an accident. And Carole Nelson Douglas's "Night Owl" treats the idea a bit differently than the others.
There are, naturally, a couple of stories dealing with holy relics. And depending on your interests, you might like the Civil War themed story, or the sports one, or the author one, or one of the others. But on the whole, most of the stories seemed merely repetitive. This, of course, is a problem with commissioned anthologies, but this topic is even more restrictive than most. The best stories would stand alone, and even most of the weaker stories might pass muster if it were the only one of its premise. But putting them all together takes away any claim of originality, and just emphasizes their weaknesses.
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ANDROIDS, HUMANOIDS, AND OTHER SCIENCE FICTION MONSTERS by Per Schelde:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/05/2003]
Per Schelde's ANDROIDS, HUMANOIDS, AND OTHER SCIENCE FICTION MONSTERS is the sort of book one wants to fling against the wall-- often. Schelde sees himself as a pioneer in studying science fiction film, but he gets so much wrong that one cannot really trust the rest.
(Page numbers are in brackets.)
As for his being a pioneer, Schelde claims, "There still is not a book-length study of sf movies that is not a picture book or a picture-book history." [1] (As of 1993, the date of this book, one presumes.) This just isn't so: a quick scan of our shelves shows Michael Benson's VINTAGE SF FILMS, 1896-1949; Carlos Clarens's AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE HORROR FILM, Donald Glut's CLASSIC MOVIE MONSTERS and THE FRANKENSTEIN LEGEND, Douglas Menville's THE HISTORY OF THE SCIENCE FICTION FILM, and Bill Warren's KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES. (In spite of the title, Clarens is not a picture-book history, and covers many of the same films that Schelde covers as science fiction.) While it's true that most such books have focuses on subsets of science fiction, one can fairly claim the Schelde does the same.
When Schelde attempts to define "sf" ("Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!"), he says, "Movies about the future are by definition sf because they more often than not focus on science and technology." [27] "More often than not" does not justify including the entire range as science fiction.
He also gets movie plot details wrong--or in the case when he claims ON THE BEACH has a tidal wave [58], more than just a detail wrong. He seems to think that the Creature in Frankenstein rapes the little girl [46] when it's clear from the uncut version--and much discussed in the literature--that he does not. He calls the town where INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS takes place "Santa Mara" instead of "Santa Mira" [98]; he calls the character "Harry Jekyll" instead of "Henry Jekyll" [47]. He refers to THE THING as being directed by "Christian Nyby, alias Howard Hawks" [92] but Howard Hawks was not an alias for Christian Nyby. (Maybe this was intended flippantly, but it didn't come across that way. and he repeats the claim in the index.) He quotes Zellerby in VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED as saying, "They are one mind to the 12th pi." [108] It should be "They are one mind to the 12th power."
Schelde notes that "sf science is almost invariably disastrous" [43]. Well, if it weren't, there wouldn't be much of a plot, would there? That's the inherent problem with all fictional portrayals--there must be conflict. So there are no films about happy families in suburbia without problems, inventors whose inventions work perfectly and cause no distress, or explorers who climb a lost plateau and find nothing special.
To order Androids, Humanoids, and Other Science Fiction Monsters from amazon.com, click here.
THIS JUST IN: WHAT I COULDN'T TELL YOU ON TV by Bob Schieffer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/17/2004]
The most fascinating part of Bob Schieffer's THIS JUST IN: WHAT I COULDN'T TELL YOU ON TV (ISBN 0-399-14971-6) are his stories of how the Nixon White House brought pressure on the news media (especially television) to present a more favorable view. His comments on the evolution of party conventions is also particularly timely, but a lot is autobiographical information that is not of general interest.
To order This Just In from amazon.com, click here.
CHEATS, CHARLATANS, AND CHICANERY by Andreas Schroeder:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/18/2006]
Along similar lines is CHEATS, CHARLATANS, AND CHICANERY by Andreas Schroeder (ISBN 0-7710-7953-2), a sequel to SCAMS, SCANDALS, AND SKULDUGGERY. I have not seen the first book, but CHEATS, CHARLATANS, AND CHICANERY covers such capers as the "discovery" of the Tasaday tribe in Philippines, the question of just who actually got to the North Pole first, a nineteenth century plan to rotate Manhattan Island to keep it from sinking, and the writing of NAKED CAME THE STRANGER. (Whether you remember the latter scam will definitely give people a clue as to your age. I do.) This is a much more light-hearted look at scams than such books as Charles Mackay's EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSIONS & THE MADNESS OF CROWDS (see below). It is true that much of what Mackay covers, such as the Great Tulip Craze, could not be considered a scam, but there is a similar psychology between that and many of the scams in CHEATS, CHARLATANS, AND CHICANERY. I would recommend either of Schroeder's books, but also Mackay's.
(As proof that hoaxes are notoriously difficult to pin down, For example, Boese claims that the story of the "Manhattan Island rotation hoax" is itself a hoax, and that someone who investigated it found no mention of it until over forty years after it supposedly happened. Both he and Schroeder agree that the Tasady were a hoax, but the Columbia Encyclopedia and Wikipedia seem to think they were real.)
To order Cheats, Charlatans, and Chicanery from amazon.com, click here.
IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME and SAM SAMURAI by Jon Scieszka:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/04/2005]
While I was looked for MATH CURSE, I ran across the "Time Warp Trio" books by the same duo. Most of them have the trio traveling into the past or future, but IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME by Jon Scieszka, illustrated by Lane Smith (ISBN 0-670-88596-7, eighth in the series) has them ending up in Greek mythology. (They do realize it's not history, at least.) SAM SAMURAI (ISBN 0-670-89915-1, tenth in the series) goes back to the Japanese Shogunate. All this is accomplished with "The Book", which is somewhat explained in SAM SAMURAI, but not very much in IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME. I assume it was explained in the first book (KNIGHTS OF THE KITCHEN TABLE, I think), so start with that one. While the "Auto-Translator" solves the language problems, the trio also has the good luck not to get killed by any of their faux pas. I was surprised at the amount of time spent explaining and giving examples of Japanese poetry, which means these books are not just lightweight adventures a la "Time Tunnel". A lot of time is spent on riddles and puzzles. but these are still a way to give children some knowledge of history and mythology.
To order It's All Greek to Me from amazon.com, click here.
To order Sam Samurai from amazon.com, click here.
MATH CURSE by Jon Scieszka:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/04/2005]
I saw a poster for MATH CURSE by Jon Scieszka, illustrated by Lane Smith (ISBN 0-670-86194-4) in a room at the Monmouth County Library. I decided I had to read it, if only to see if it was yet another attack on mathematics, a la Barbie's "Math class is hard." It's not; the "curse" is that the narrator suddenly sees everything as a math problem. For example, one page says that even physical education has math: In 1919, Babe Ruth hit 29 home runs, batted .322, and made $40,000. In 1991, the average major league baseball player hit 15 home runs, batted .275, and made $840,000. Then it asks whether Babe Ruth is <, >, or = the average modern baseball player. It even includes a variation of Russell's Paradox. Described on the cover flap as "For ages > 6 and < 99", it is probably aimed more at the lower end of that range, although not the very lowest. It doesn't strike me as a book a child would read over and over, so at $16.99, it seems more like a book one would check out of the library rather than purchase for a child, but it is a painless way to introduce math concepts.
To order Math Curse from amazon.com, click here.
POEMS OF NEW YORK by Elizabeth Schmidt:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/30/2004]
Elizabeth Schmidt's POEMS OF NEW YORK sounded appealing, but suffered from a couple of problems. One, the poems' connections with New York were at times tenuous, as some seemed more about people who just happened to be in New York than about New York itself. The other problem was a bit stranger--the poems were arranged chronologically, but by the author's birth date, rather than by the date of the poem. The result is that when one reads them, one is jerked back and forward in time. (This is particularly notable when one reads a poem written in response to 9/11, and then the next one takes place years earlier.) Still, I have no complaint with the poems per se.
To order Poems of New York from amazon.com, click here.
BLACK NO MORE by George S. Schuyler:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/26/2008]
BLACK NO MORE by George S. Schuyler (ISBN-13 978-0-375-75380-0, ISBN-10 0-375-75380-X) is a 1931 science fiction novel. In his introduction, Schuyler says his work is based on the researches of Dr. Yusoburo Noguchi and Bela Cati (fictitious characters, I should note). And the premise? That someone has invented a process to turn black people into white people. For some reason, the cataloging data provided does not label it science fiction, but just "Afro-Americans--Fiction" and "Human skin color--Fiction". (I never even realized that there was a separate category for "Human skin color--Fiction"!) (Schuyler was apparently a fan of science fiction--if not a science fiction fan in the "fannish" sense--and particularly liked the work of H. G. Wells. One can certainly see similarities to THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, but even more perhaps to THE INVISIBLE MAN.)
There is no little irony, I think, that in the novel Dr. Junius Crookman develops his technique in Berlin, or that Crookman explains that the (supposedly) thick lips and broad noses of Africans are merely figments of our imagination brought about by cartoonists and minstrel shows, and "on the other hand, many so- called Caucasians, particularly the Latins, Jews and South Irish, and frequently the most Nordic of peoples like the Swedes, show almost Negroid lips and noses." The novel was written a couple of years before Hitler took power, and four years before the Nuremberg Racial Laws, but one suspects that the groundwork for them was already being laid.
Schuyler is very clear on what he believes the issues are. The first questions the reporters ask Max Disher/Matthew Fisher (the first "converso") are what is his name, how did he feel, what was he going to do, and would he marry a white woman? I use the term "converso" because it seems particularly apt--the "conversos" were those Jews who converted to Christianity after the Reconquest of Spain in 1492. Even though they converted, the other Catholics decided they did not trust them or consider them true Catholics, so the concept of "Limpieza de Sangre" was invented, where everyone's genealogy was carefully examined for any trace of Jewish blood, especially when a marriage was contemplated. And in BLACK NO MORE, this idea of tracing one's ancestry also appears (although with somewhat different results).
Schuyler has his own set of prejudices, of course. (Or he is using other people's prejudices for ironic effect? But I am somewhat skeptical of this latter explanation because of the casual way they appear, as opposed to the fairly overt way he expresses white prejudices about blacks.)
For example, "He was not finding life as a white man the rosy existence he had anticipated. He was forced to conclude that it was pretty dull and that he was bored. As a boy he had been taught to look up to white folks as just a little less than gods; now he found them little different from the Negroes, except that they were uniformly less courteous and less interesting. ... There was nothing left for him except the hard, materialistic, grasping, inbred society of the whites." (pages 42-43)
And while decrying the economic loss to Negro businesses, he says regarding those providing hair straighteners or skin whiteners that while some were Negro-owned, "[they] were largely controlled by canny Hebrews." (page 62)
Schuyler is very clear on his opinion of the "separate but equal" doctrine expressed in the 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v Ferguson: "The economic loss to the south by the ethnic migration was considerable. Hundreds of wooden railroad coaches, long since condemned as death traps in all other parts of the country, had to be scrapped by the railroads when there were no longer any Negroes to jim crow. Thousands of railroad waiting rooms remained unused because, having been set aside for the use of Negroes, they were generally too dingy and unattractive for white folk or were no longer necessary. Thousands of miles of streets located in the former Black Belts, and thus without sewers or pavement, were having to be improved at the insistent behest of the rapidly increased white population, real and imitation. Real-estate owners who had never dreamed of making repairs on their tumble-down property when it was occupied by the docile Negroes, were having to tear down, re build and alter to suit white tenants. Shacks and drygoods boxes that had once sufficed as schools for Negro children, had now to be condemned and abandoned as unsuitable for occupation by white youth. Whereas thousands of school teachers had received thirty or forty dollars a month because of their Negro ancestry, the various cities and countries of the Southland were now forced to pay the standard salaries prevailing elsewhere." (pages 102-103)
At times, one has to remember when BLACK NO MORE was written. When a characters says that something would happen "before you could say Jack Robinson," I found myself thinking that this was also really a word play on Jackie Robinson--until I remembered that Jackie Robinson was still sixteen years in the future!
However, some lines seem prophetic. When the narrator says of Max/Matthew's thoughts, "At last he felt like an American citizen," this sounded a lot like what many blacks were saying after Barack Obama's election as President.
This novel is similar in some ways to Ray Bradbury's "Way in the Middle of the Air" from 1950 (collected as part of THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES) or Douglas Turner Ward's 1960 play "Day of Absence", in which one day all the blacks disappear from a Southern town. Maybe there should be a category for "Ethnic group disappearances?- Fiction"!
To order Black No More from amazon.com, click here.
THE LOVELY BONES by Alice Sebold:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/25/2008]
THE LOVELY BONES by Alice Sebold (ISBN-13 978-0-316-16668-3, ISBN-10 0-316-16668-5) is a fantasy, but one of those fantasies that shows up on book club and high school reading lists. The narrator is a girl who has been murdered by a serial killer; because she is dead and in heaven (?), she is an omniscient narrator. It has a sort of New Age feel to it--if the narrator is in heaven, there is no sense of God (or Jesus) in it, and the various contacts between the living and the dead are more spiritualism than religion. I wouldn't have read this had it not been picked for our book discussion group (*not* the science fiction one), and I cannot recommend it. (Oh, and whoever copy-edited it did not catch that the name of the Confederate diarist is "Mary Chesnut", not "Mary Chestnut".)
To order The Lovely Bones from amazon.com, click here.
MASTERS OF DECEPTION by Al Seckel:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/05/2007]
I cannot call MASTERS OF DECEPTION by Al Seckel (ISBN-13 978-1-402-70577-9, ISBN-10 1-402-70577-8) a "must-read"--it is more of a "must-see". (Well, what else would you expect of an art book?) Seckel covers all sorts of deceptive art. There are the optical illusions (e.g. the patterns that make straight lines appear to be curved). There is anamorphic art, in which the picture can only be seen from an angle or with a curved mirror. There are metamorphoses (e.g. a long row of birds which gradually change into lizards). There are impossible objects, such as the Penrose triangle. M. C. Escher is often thought of when discussing the latter, but in fact did only three drawings along those lines: "Ascending/Descending", "Belvedere", and "Waterfall". And there are other forms, too complicated to describe. Many are three-dimensional and there is a web site < http://www.illusionworks.com/mod/> which has videos of them viewed from various angles. But while the art is the heart of the book, the text describing and discussing them is very informative and well worth the time as well.
I will say that some of Shigeo Fukuda's work is based on a principle that we would see in our mechanical drawing class in high school: that just seeing the three "elevations" of an object (front, side, top) did not mean it was instantly understandable. For example, one can have a solid that is a circle from the front, a triangle from the side, and a square from the top. Fukuda uses this principle to create, for example, a sculpture that is a pianist when seen from the front, but a violinist when seen from the side.
(As an aside, I have often thought that this could be used as a way to make the Trinity seem less incomprehensible: three different appearances depending on one's position/situation. Somehow the Vatican has not picked up on this. Or maybe it is three different representations because they are the intersection of a single four-dimensional entity with our three-space in three different ways.)
To order Masters of Deception from amazon.com, click here.
SNOW FLOWER AND THE SECRET FAN by Linda See:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/14/2008]
SNOW FLOWER AND THE SECRET FAN by Linda See (ISBN-13 978-0-812-96806-4, ISBN-10 0-812-96806-9) is yet another book that is provided with discussion questions at the back (in the trade paperback edition, anyway). It is a story told in the first person of a Chinese girl (and later woman) in the 1850s (based on the occurrence of the Taiping Rebellion as a plot element). The narrator, Lily, is joined with another girl as "old sames", a bond in some ways closer than marriage. The book follows their relationship over the years and all the changes in their lives. Not surprisingly, a lot of the book is devoted to how badly women were treated in traditional Chinese society.
There is also a lot of discussion of nu shu, an actual written Chinese language that was a secret women's language. And oddly, it was this aspect that annoyed me the most. First, See has her character say that "many nu shu characters are only italicized versions of men's characters." This is like having Julius Caesar say something was as red as a tomato. Just as Caesar never saw a tomato, the narrator of this book never saw an italic letter, or would know what the word "italicized" means.
And second, the attitude of many of the women in the book that I think we are meant to admire is anti-intellectual and anti- rational:
"Snow Flower and I had often asked how Yuziu's mother and sisters had been able to read the secret code.... Perhaps a sympathetic eunuch slipped out a letter from Yuxiu that explained everything. Or perhaps her sisters didn't know what the note said, and tossed it aside, and in its skewed state they saw and interpreted the italicized characters. ... But these are the kinds of particulars that men should care about. ... What we should carry away from Yuxiu's life is that she found a way to share what was happening beneath her happy surface life and that the gift has been passed down through countless generations to us."
One can argue that the narrator was a product of her times and all that, but I still find this attitude of "facts don't matter; what matters is how we feel about them" is a bad one to encourage. There is far too much of this today (in my opinion). Everything is subjective. What matters (we are told) is how we feel about things.
And unfortunately, this sort of thing seems to suffuse the books frequently chosen for book discussion groups. Our science fiction group avoids this, because this is not a theme that goes well with science fiction. And our general group's selections are broad enough that only a small percent are this sort of modern fiction. One hates to generalize on the basis of gender, but I will observe that the vast majority of book discussion groups are all-female, and these books seem aimed at that audience. For example, they have female narrators, female protagonists, and so on. If you did get one of these groups to do classic nineteenth century British fiction, they would choose MIDDLEMARCH over DANIEL DERONDA.
To order Snow Flower and the Secret Fan from amazon.com, click here.
THE BOOKSELLER OF KABUL by Asne Seierstad:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/28/2005]
If you think that democracy and equality has come to Afghanistan, THE BOOKSELLER OF KABUL by Asne Seierstad (ISBN 0-316-73450-0) may convince you otherwise. Asne Seierstad is a journalist who spent time with an Afghani family, and in this book tells of what she saw. While the head of the family, Sultan Khan ("Sultan" is a name, not a title), is finally able to sell all sorts of books without fear of the Communists, the Taliban, or any other government group, he still rules his house as a despot. His first wife is relegated to maintaining his house in Pakistan while Khan spends his time with his young second wife--when he's not badgering the rest of his family. And he is not atypical. Afghani women may officially be freed of the burkha, but whether or not a woman wears one is still the decision of her father or husband rather than her own. They can not work as teachers or nurses--but again, only when their male "controller" allows it. (The book is copyright 2002, so presumably the experiences are from shortly before that.)
To order The Bookseller of Kabul from amazon.com, click here.
A MOVEABLE FEAST by Ernest Hemingway:
HEMINGWAY FOR BEGINNERS by Errol Selkirk:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/08/2006]
A MOVEABLE FEAST by Ernest Hemingway (ISBN 0-02-051960-5) is Hemingway's reminiscence of Paris in the 1920s. However, as Errol Selkirk noted in HEMINGWAY FOR BEGINNERS (ISBN 0-863-16128-6), it was not written until shortly before his death in 1961, and indeed the final editing was after his death. (The book was finally published in 1964.) So a lot of the memories are colored by intervening events: fallings-out with friends, literary successes or failures, and so on. Still, it does give a picture of what Paris was like in that era, and unlike George Orwell in DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON, Hemingway was not stuck in a restaurant kitchen washing dishes, but was hob-nobbing with the literary lights of that time. (HEMINGWAY FOR BEGINNERS gives a good summary of his life, but the artwork in it does not do as much to amplify the contents as the artwork in the books in the "Introducing" series.)
To order A Moveable Feast from amazon.com, click here.
To order Hemingway for Beginners from amazon.com, click here.
GOLDEN VINE by Jai Sen:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/17/2003]
Jai Sen's THE GOLDEN VINE is a graphic novel that assumes that Alexander the Great didn't die in trying to conquer India, but spent some time consolidating and securing his empire before heading that way. This isn't a premise that has been over-used, but there isn't enough development here for my tastes. Many people have remarked on how beautiful the gold ink is that was used, but I found it more of a distraction--between that and the shiny black, I had to keep shifting the book to avoid glare.
To order Golden Vine from amazon.com, click here.
KLEZMER: BOOK ONE--TALES FROM THE WILD EAST by Joann Sfar:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/22/2008]
KLEZMER: BOOK ONE--TALES FROM THE WILD EAST by Joann Sfar (ISBN-13 978-1-59643-198-0, ISBN-10 1-59643-198-9) has the same problem (for me) that Sfar's previous book, THE RABBI'S CAT, did. Of that, I wrote, "I am beginning to think that the audience for graphic novels must be people with good eyesight--I found the cursive font large enough, but a bit ornate, and the sans-serif font a bit small." In this one, I also found that the artwork did not add much to the story for me. It appears to be done in water colors, and in a style reminiscent of Chagall. I'm not saying I dislike Chagall--I think the problem is that Chagall's style works in a full-sized painting, but not in a one-inch by three-inch panel with a speech balloon.
There is also the problem that when the characters are singing klezmer songs it only works if you know the song. (Even having enough Yiddish to understand what is being said is not enough-- you need the tune as well.) In this regard, KLEZMER is similar to Azar Nafisi's READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN--if you don't have the background, you lose a lot.
What I did like about the book was the fifteen pages of notes about the book, klezmer, Israel, Judaism, and Jewishness. Some of Sfar's ideas come through in the graphic novel, but his straightforward writing about them conveys them much better.
To order Klezmer: Book One from amazon.com, click here.
THE RABBI'S CAT by Joann Sfar:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/01/2006]
THE RABBI'S CAT by Joann Sfar (ISBN 0-375-42281-1) is a graphic novel about Jews in Algeria in the 1930s, told from the point of view of the rabbi's cat. I am beginning to think that the audience for graphic novels must be people with good eyesight--I found the cursive font large enough, but a bit ornate, and the sans-serif font a bit small. I am not sure who the target audience is for this, though I suspect that my library's apparent decision to file all graphic novels as "YA" is not necessarily always the right choice. This has a fair amount of religious philosophy, and also what are often referred to as "adult themes and language". In any case, I certainly would expect that its target audience would be mostly Jewish. (Joann Sfar, by the way, is a man--it is probably pronounced something like "yo-han".)
To order The Rabbi's Cat from amazon.com, click here.