jodiwilldare's reviews
1523 reviews

I’ve grown leery of the essay anthology after the horrible experience I had reading Things I Would Have Learned in English 101 if I Hadn’t Skipped Class to Have Sex, I mean, Things I Learned from the Women Who Dumped Me. The book was so awful and cliched that I feared I had be scarred for life.

Then I kept reading about Love is a Four-Letter Word, subtitled True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts, edited by Michael Taeckens. It worried me and then I saw that the introduction was by Neal Pollack, and made me even more worried. But ultimately I was won over by the author list — Junot Diaz, Kate Christensen, Dan Kennedy, and Said Saytafiezadeh.

Thank god I put my fears aside and dove in. This was fun.

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The problem with building a book around a big reveal in the latter third of a novel is that inevitably readers are going to be disappointed. When a character refuses to discuss what is bugging them the most you begin to think it’s something heinous, when it turns out to be not so heinous it’s a let down.

This is the only problem with Lauren Grodstein’s A Friend of the Family, the big reveal is a big dud. Thankfully, the journey to the reveal is entertaining enough that the disappointment is more of an “eh, who cares?” rather than an “are you fucking kidding me?”

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When I finished reading all 368 pages of Charles Burns’ graphic novel Black Hole the first thing I thought was, well that three hours would have been better spent listening to Black Hole Sun on repeat.

One again one of the High Holies of the graphic novel realm has left me disappointed. The High Holies, at least in my mind, are the canon of the graphic novel world. The books everyone points to as the best, most influential of the medium. This is a list that I mostly keep in my head and includes the likes of Jimmy Corrigan the Smartest Kid on Earth, Sandman, Watchmen, Maus, Black Hole, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Persepolis, and Ghost World. So far I’ve read six of them and only two of them have lived up to the accolades heaped upon them (Persepolis and Maus).

I’m convinced the only read Black Hole receives any acclaim at all is because of the amazing art and the boobies, because the story is crap. That’s right, I said crap.

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Laura van den Berg writes beautifully. Her sentences and paragraphs feel like gauzy, ethereal dreams. It’s the kind of writing that seems effortless which means it probably took great amounts of effort. She populates the stories of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us with people on quests for mythical creatures — bigfoot, Nessie the Loch Ness monster, Mishegenabeg (a monster said to inhabit Lake Michigan) –which adds to this dreamlike quality. But make no mistake these people live in the same world we live in and face the same kinds of problems we face. They’re all dealing with some kind of loss — parents, career aspirations, husbands or boyfriends — and are searching for something to fill the hole that loss has left in them.

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When Catherine Madison falls in love with a boy named Thomas, the love is so complete and all encompassing that when he nicknames her Moonie it sticks so well that everyone takes to calling her Moonie. As is often the case in small midwestern towns, this one located in Nebraska, Moonie and Thomas marry soon after high school. However, the couple doesn’t get the happily ever after teenagers often dream they’ll get. Of course, because if they did why would there be a novel?

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I approached Ariel Schrag’s Awkward and Definition with a little bit of trepidation. Earlier this year I made the proclamation that I was going to read one graphic novel a week, and since I’m an equally-opportunity reader I went in search of female authors. Since, I’ve already read Persepolis and Fun Home I had to do a little digging. It seems that whenever people mention female graphic novelists, those are the two that get mentioned the most.

In my research I stumbled upon Ariel Schrag’s high school chronicles, the first of which is Awkward and Definition which are sort of a visual journal of Schrag’s freshman and sophomore years in high school. I approached the first book with a bit of trepidation. I’ve read Jeffrey Brown’s autobiographical stuff and found it kind of a drag. I’m happy to report Schrag’s book is not draggy at all. In fact, it’s a lot of fun and kind of charming in the way winsome teenage girls can be when you least expect it.
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