It's a testament to good writing when I enjoy a book despite not caring for its main characters. Identical twins Kate and Violet are an anxious stay-at-home-mom and a thoughtless free spirit, respectively. In addition to looking alike, they also share what they call "senses" or ESP. Married sister Kate has renounced hers, but Violet has gone pro with her gift and publicly predicts an earthquake will hit St. Louis (where they live).
Though it starts off a little slowly, I eventually became entranced in this story of adolescence. There's magic and a love of literature, especially science fiction, but mostly what compels is the lonely, isolated, grief-stricken narrator. Mori has recently lost her twin sister in some sort of battle with their witchy mother.
Twins Ysabel and Justin feel like a bomb has been dropped on their family when they learn that their father is transgender.
A 14-year-old Edward R. Murrow enthusiast takes on a private school secret society. Iris is a sad person, as are the other two narrators, but reading the book doesn't make you feel totally blue the way some stories about depressed people do.
To my memory I’d never read a SVH book before, nor really desired to. While on zine tour my concentration was quite poor, so I took Celia up on her offer to lend me the first in the SVH series. It was about all I could take--both reading concentration wise and SVH wise. I can’t entirely decide if it’s good-bad or bad-bad, but my lack of interest in number two leads me to believe it’s the latter.
“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” Todd yelled. “We’re going to stage a sit-in right on the football field.”
I've really got to stop reading graphic novel comics (and tween novels) when more often than not my review starts with a disclaimer that it's not my genre. I was drawn to read the Batwoman story because the Twitterdome was full of "DC's first gay superhero" buzz. It's true that comics don't speak to me the way I think they should, but sometimes they really really do--like if they're written/drawn by Lynda Barry or Alison Bechdel, so I keep trying. However, lesbian though she may be, Batwoman Kate Kane is no dyke to watch out for, not that she isn't scary. She's a soldier manquée (DADT) with a vicious grudge. Speaking of DADT, I should mention here that Dan Choi served as a consultant for the book. You also might want to know that Rachel Maddow wrote the intro.
I'll tell you off the bat that if you're looking for another Time Traveler's Wife, this ain't it. I'm not referring to the quality of the writing. You know what, actually I'm mystified by this book. It's the story of two sets of twins, one estranged and one symbiotic; and the residents of the building where three of the four twins lived or live. Pretty much no one in the story is sympathetic, and at least one of them is downright horrible. There's sort of a side story about a guy with debilitating OCD. Because I'm so baffled by a writer I previously so enjoyed, I'm choosing to believe that there are deeper meanings to everything that I'm just not getting. Otherwise, I just didn't care for this book. A fair amount.
A lonely girl who moves a lot and has a wacky mom meets a lonely boy with a distant dad and a missing twin. But refreshingly, this isn't a teen romance novel. There is some romantic tension and jealousy, but really this book is about the friendship between the two of them.
