jodiwilldare's reviews
1523 reviews

Recently I had the extreme misfortune of reading two fabulous books back to back (Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles) and I’ve been in a crappy, cranky reading slump ever since.

Because I love reading and needed something to cleanse my brain’s palate I turned to my old friend the graphic novel. It’s been awhile since I’ve read a graphic novel and this weekend I ripped through three of them.

I started with Level Up by Gene Luen Yang & Thien Pham.

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There’s a reason I don’t often read actual issues of comicbooks, especially of the superhero genre. Reading comicbooks you have to have a high-tolerance for ambiguity. You seems to spend a lot of pages wondering WTF and most of the time if you stick with it, the WTF comes clear and you can go about your way enjoying (or not) the story and the pictures.

Sometimes the WTF never comes clear and it completely ruins a story that has all the elements of awesome. This is the case with Phonogram: Rue Britannia by Kieron Gillen and Jamie Mckelvie.

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After the dizzying, glorious ride of Gone Girl, it was imperative to dive right into Gillian Flynn’s back catalog to see if I was missing out on more of the best mysteries ever.

As logic would dictate, I started at the beginning with her debut novel Sharp Objects, about a mediocre reporter for a mediocre Chicago daily who is sent back to her podunk Missouri hometown to report on a serial killer.

Camille Preaker is not thrilled at all to be back in Wind Gap which has more to do with her cold, distant, rich mother and creepy little sister than it does with the serial killer who is killing young girls and pulling out all their teeth before dumping their bodies.

Though Camille left Wind Gap over a decade ago, she carries the scars of the town with her. Literally. Camille is a cutter and though everyone remarks on her physical beauty, nobody knows that underneath her long sleeves and skirts are raised scars, where Camille has carved words into her skin — wicked, girl, love, whore. Her body is a journal of all her woes. And she’s got some woes.

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Wade Salem is a drifty, drug-dealing, storytelling, sometime musician. He’s fascinating, if you can experience him from a distance. He’s not the man you’d want as your father-figure, which is the case for the unnamed narrator in Dylan Hicks’ novel Boarded Windows.

Our poor unnamed narrator is slogging through life. He’s got a job as an assistant manager at a near-by corporate music chain. He’s got a live-in girlfriend, Wanda, he seems to dig. Things ain’t too shabby. They ain’t so good either. Then Wade Salem lands back in his life on a few months before Narrator’s twenty-first birthday. Narrator hasn’t seen Wade since his childhood in North Dakota where Wade up and left on Bolling Greene’s tour bus one night and never returned.

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I mentioned recently on Book Riot that I’m a sucker for epistolary novels. You write a novel in book/journal form and I’m gonna read it. It’s kind of how I cannot resist anything featuring an image of a casette tape on it.

Even if Bernadette Fox’s story weren’t told in emails, articles, and letters gathered together by her teenage daughter after Bernadette disappears, I’d have loved Where’d You Go Bernadette? by Maria Semple.

See, Bernadette’s a prickly, snooty, artsy-type who doesn’t play well with others. She loves her fifteen-year-old daughter, Bee, and her genius husband, Mircosoft VIP, Elgin. Most everything else annoys the hell out of her, especially the meddling parents at Bee’s neo-Hippie Galer Street School and everything to do with Seattle.

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The best thing about Gillian Flynn’s Dark Objects is that it allowed me to wax nostalgically about the Satanic Panic of the 80s, a phenomenon I had completely forgotten until this book.

I don’t know how it slipped my mind. Heavy metal and satan-worshipping was as much a part of the 80s as side-ponytails and Cyndi Lauper. But this is beside the point. The point here is that I read Flynn’s second-novel Dark Objects and for the first time in my Flynn-reading spree I was actively annoyed by her storytelling.

In this mystery we have Libby Day, the only survivor of The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas back in the 80s. Today finds Libby a thirty-something laze-about who has spent the twentyish years since her brother, Ben, killed her mother and two sisters living off the donations of strangers. But the money’s running out and Libby gets mixed up with the ridiculously named Kill Club, a club devoted to famous murders and murderers.

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Benjamin Benjamin is not a likable guy. Even when you factor in the pity you feel for him over the loss of his house, wife, and children, he doesn’t come across very well. Ben’s kind of a self-involved, misogynistic jerk.

After his life went kablooey, stay-at-home-dad Ben took a class called The Fundamentals of Caregiving and becomes a home health aide for nineteen-year-old Trevor, who is suffering from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a disease that leaves him twisted like a pretzel, wheelchair bound, and kind of a jerk too.

These two unlikable jerks form an unlikely friendship in Jonathan Evison’s The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving and somehow create a story that is funny and, damn the cliche, heartwarming.

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The older I get the more I truly believe ignorance is bliss, especially if you’re the type to put heroes on a pedestal. I am that type and while the crumbling of the pedestal is a painful process, the knowledge that your heroes are really people with actual human failures is oddly comforting, after you get over the disappointment.

Reading D.T. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace turned me into a twenty-year-old with a crush.

At first I was eagerly eating up every detail Max dished out in his very matter-of-fact completely devoid of emotion way. I would celebrate every connection I could find between me and DFW. He likes gin & tonics! I love gin & tonics! He likes to eat Nutter Butters. I love Nutter Butters!

It was ridiculous. And then like a twentysomething with a crush who finds her affection not returned things started to rot.
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The less you think about Megan Abbott’s Dare Me the more you’ll enjoy it. When you’re knee-deep in cheerleader on cheerleader aggression and glitter and backtucks you’re totally captivated. You will find yourself breathing a little shallower and your brain feeling a little muddled because you feel like you’re subsisting on nothing but adrenaline, hairspray fumes, and green tea.

It’s only when you’ve closed the cover, taken the ride, and your brain begins to engage again that you start to wonder about the plot holes so large you could drive a truck straight through them.

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One of my favorite things about being a reader is having a physical reaction to a book. Whether it’s tears or goosebumps or laughter, or in the case of Joshua Henkin’s The World Without You an audible gasp, reacting that strongly to written words is the best thing ever.

It’s even more delightful, because I didn’t expect to be moved by Henkin’s novel that way. It’s not that the book isn’t good and engaging, it is, it just didn’t strike me as a gasper. But there I was in the final third of the book gasping.

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