Do Not Tamper With

Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This review WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS and CAPSLOCK because I have so much to rant about.






The first 100 or so pages of this book are good. Not particularly well written but the story is intriguing and there is some genuine emotion. I was moved when Rachel was re-apprehended by the Nazis because she fought so hard and became so ill, all for nothing, that it was tragic. More tragic than the situation with Michel if you ask me. I liked Sarah’s chapters.

Where this book fell absolutely flat to me was Julia and her ‘plight’. But a few things I’d like to mention about the people around Julia first.

Bertrand. I didn’t understand why Julia claimed to love her husband and find him so charming but all she seemed to feel toward him was contempt and annoyance. And rightly so because he was an arrogant jerk!

Julia’s daughter Zoe was …not a child. At all. I’m so sick of the wise-beyond-her-years kids. Sarah had a reason to be mature, Zoe was just badly characterized and a tired trope.

Finally there’s Julia herself. I really, really didn’t like her. At first I just found her boring in a “Bleh, get back to the tragedy of human suffering!” way but as the story progressed and Sarah’s chapters were dropped I began to find Julia, her problems, and her goals insufferable.

So, ok, you’re pregnant after 2 or 3 miscarriages and your husband doesn’t want the kid. Yes, that’s a problem and I was mildly curious how it would turn out. But then you decide not to go through with an abortion because this baby is the most important thing in your life.
So you randomly fly from Paris to the USA.
Then USA to Italy.
In the matter of days.
And then you feel a little annoying ‘tug’ and think nothing of it.
WOMAN YOU HAVE HAD 3 MISCARRIAGES, YOU ARE IN YOUR MID 40′S AND ARE RANDOMLY GALLIVANTING ACROSS THE GLOBE GHOSTCHASEING BUT YOU CLAIM THIS BABY IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU ARE A HORRIBLE, IRRESPONSIBLE, SELFISH PERSON AND A BAD MOTHER!

Seriously?!

Even all that aside, the amount of arrogant rich white woman hubris Julia has is revolting. Why should she dig up the past? What right had she? Obviously Sarah wanted to keep it behind her. Obviously she didn’t want to burden her family with it, nor the Tezac’s wish to remember the burden of it either.

And then of course there was all this eternal monologue about how Julia “would always remember the tragic day they rounded up those Jews” and “She knew what it was like” because she wrote an article about it. That is just as bad as “I know what it’s like to be in a wheelchair/blind/raped because I played one on TV”.

Finally, the writing. While the writing wasn’t strong, I never really seemed to notice a problem with it until near the end. The word “Ironic” 4 times in 4 pages? Really?
And it was “ironic” that you missed Paris after moving back to New York? No it wasn’t! Remember near the beginning of the book Julia, where you said you had always loved Paris, more than in the romantic cliche way, but in all the other ways? You had always felt a tug and longing from and for Paris! You met your husband there, you had friends there, you had your daughter there, you had a good career there. Of COURSE you would miss it! There is nothing ironic about that!

There was an awful lot of telling, not showing. One of the most blatant examples occurs after she almost has a miscarriage and is told to lie down and work from home. We’re told that. And the time just zooms by! We don’t get Julia’s frustration at being bed-ridden, at her lingering pain or guilt that she almost caused the loss of a third or fourth child, or anything like that. Nope! “I remained horizontal while my 11 year old made me breakfast in bed for X amount of days.”

Am I supposed to be getting some sort of parallel from all this? How humanity hasn’t change much since the Holocaust? That the problems of the upper-class are just as valid as the tragedy of thousands rounded up then carted off to death camps?

You know what? I was going to give this book 2 stars but no. One. One star for Sarah and Rachel and Michel. No stars for the rest of this book.

Now I’m off to watch the movie adaptation.



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Ghost World by Daniel Clowes

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I can see how this comic would have massive cult appeal to the ‘disenfranchised youth’ of the 90′s. However, this book is the bastard child of Strangers in Paradise and Johnny the Homicidal Maniac with a dash of Clerks. It has all the negativity of both books (Plus Daria and Roseanne) but none of the wit, charm or cleverness.

Don’t get me wrong, I love negativity. Negativity is awesome if delivered with some class. This book has no class.

Like mommy Strangers in Paradise it features two young woman who are just trying to find their way in the world but like Daddy JtHM, it hates everyone and swears up a storm.

Enid and Rebecca are not fun people, they are not interesting people. They are everything they hate and there is nothing endearing about them.

The passage of time in the book is…hard to follow, with scenes suddenly ending for new ones. Are these flashbacks? And then suddenly Enid goes off to college then…comes back to visit and Rebecca stays in stupid-head nowhere with the guy? What am I supposed to take away from this? The more things change?

The writing wasn’t witty or new, it was all the cliche stuff we expect ‘nihilistic’, misanthropic teenagers say.

I will at least give credit where it’s due in the sake that they did feel like real people.

Real people I’d never hang out with.

If you liked this book, I’d recommend Strangers in Paradise for some quality “Who am I and what’s my purpose?” story.



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I’m not arrogant enough to believe that anyone reading this has actually been actively following me from blog-space to blog-space, fandom to fandom in my time on the internet (Except for that House of Fail guy, what is up with him?). So I don’t expect anyone to know about, let alone remember, my review of DooM – Knee Deep In the Dead back when I was with the Splurd Crew. Long story short: I enjoyed not liking the book. I liked it the way people like Battlefield Earth.

For Christmas, Kippurbird of The Eragon Sporkings got me book two, Hell on Earth and I have to say I actually enjoyed this one.

The characters actually became a little more in depth, particularly Arlene who was a one dimentional Mary-Sue Ripley Knock-off in the first book.

We also delve into cults and religion and a whole whack of stuff and to be honest I think one of the strong points in this book was the fact that there were very few monsters and it was mostly character development. It made me feel a little dirty to come to that realization because it’s a DooM book, it’s all about the one note wanton violence! I’m not supposed to want character development.

Having said that, we do get appearances from more familiar monsters. Revenant and Mancubus show up, as does my beloved Arch-Vile.

We also get two new side-kicks. One is Jill the tom-boy hacker. I like Jill, which probably means she’s going to get killed by the end of the series. The other is Albert, a former Marine turned Mormon with the hots for Arlene. Lucky for them Talking is a Free Action and discuss glory holes and marriage while trying to un-couple a train car from a speeding locomotive. Yes, really.

Unfortunately the writer still had an annoying habit of making characters stupid for plot reasons. For example, Fly says they need ‘tech’ to build a ship. Arlene replies with “Tech?”. Of course you need tech to build a freaking rocket ship! She could have said “What sort of tech?” or something, but no, Arlene was clueless.

Also continued was the out of place vocabulary. If you’ve taken the time to read my other review, or This FRIENDS 4 EVER!!!! strip, you know that one of my biggest problems with the book was that the character Fly had a vocabulary bigger than his education should allow for. One word that caught my attention in Knee Deep… was nomenclature. They use that word again in this book no less than twice. Also, I counted at least eight punctuation and spelling errors in the book. Eight. They miss-typed “The” as “eht”. Almost every page had at least two exclamation points.

Finally, just like at the end of the last novel, Fly and Arlene are confronted with a huge problem and the last sentence is basically Arlene saying “Fly! I know how to _______ us to _______!”

At any rate I found it much more enjoyable for what it was then the first book and really want to finish the series but I can’t find the other two books anywhere but online. My life is hard.