The Ushers are a family in decline. Mother Biddy’s having an affair, William’s just been kicked out of Oxford, Amy’s waging a battle with their father over his refusal to invest in her architecture firm, Sam, the adopted son is never allowed to forget that he’s not “one of them,” and then there’s Grandma Martha.

As they settle in for Christmas dinner, the Ushers listen as their downstairs neighbors beat each other to death. Literally. However, this doesn’t deter the Ushers from their petty family bickering over the Christmas pudding. Only Sam is moved enough by the screams emanating from the downstairs apartment to investigate. By that time, however, he’s too late.

Ted, the patriarch of the Usher family, uses the neighbor’s untimely demise to reclaim that basement apartment and promptly knocks a giant hole in the floor to make way for a grand staircase. It’s that hole in the floor that leads to the fall of the house of Usher (control your eye roll).

One by one the Ushers start to have brushes with death and eventually begin to die off. As the family unravels their darkest secrets are revealed.

Yeah. This graphic novel, A Sickness in the Family, by Denise Mina with art by Antonio Fuso just didn’t work for me at all. I can’t tell if it was a failing for the book or the reader. I’m not a fan of the mystery genre and some of the mystery tropes used in the book left me cold.

All the family secrets are revealed suddenly and felt very Deus Ex Machina-y. Like all this bad stuff was going on and then it was all, “Surprise, didn’t you realize X had a serious drug problem?” Duh. “Oh yeah, did we forget to mention that Y is a maneater?”

I suspect these kinds of revelations are a common trope of the mystery genre, which explains why I don’t read a lot of mysteries. To learn these kinds of things late in a book made me feel duped and mislead. Had I known these depths lurked in the characters, I might have enjoyed reading this a little more.

As it is, I did not like A Sickness in the Family at all. When the Ushers start dropping like flies, it’s hard to muster up any sympathy or fear or anything remotely close to caring for them. Why’s it so hard? Because the book opens with the family idly listening as their neighbor is beaten and murdered. Not a single member of the family can be bothered to come to the help of a woman who is screaming for her life.

Yuck.

The art here didn’t help matters. While I can appreciate that it was going for a sort of noir-esque feel, it just felt muddy to me and made it hard to discern different characters.

This is one of those book that if you’re into the mystery thing you might really dig, probably because you are comfortable or enjoy many of the conventions of the genre. If you aren’t a mystery fan, I’d skip it.

The post A Sickness in the Family appeared first on I Will Dare.

It’s hard to talk about the first twelve volumes of the Fables series for two reasons. First, it’s fraught with spoilers. To mention what happens in, say, volume 6 might spoil the shit out of what happened in volume 4. Second, talking about Fables with the uninitiated makes you sound a little, well, stoned.

I tried to review the first three volumes and failed miserably. So why am I even trying again? Because this series is so good. SO GOOD!

When it comes to comicbooks or graphic novels, I’m not a huge fan of the superhero genre. It’s not to say that I don’t enjoy a good Superman yarn once in awhile, or a nice tale about the Dark Knight, but as a whole, it’s just not for me. There’s just so much backstory in superheroes that whenever I read them I always feel like I’m a little bit out of the loop.

But with Fables, I’m familiar enough with the backstory of Snow White and Cinderella and the Frog Prince and the Big Bad Wolf that I was comfortable right from the start. Plus, there’s just something intriguing about fairy tales living among us. So instead of a proper review, I’m just going to list a few of the reasons I am loving the Fables series.

1. Reading it makes me feel like a kid again where I don’t want to do anything but read. I drape myself over furniture with book in had and don’t budge until the growling of my stomach is too distracting. It made me eschew as many responsibilities as possible (and probably too many for being, you know, a grown up) until I had finished a book.
2. There was a good chunk of Fables Vol. 10: The Good Prince where I was afraid to turn the page. I feared what I thought was coming but wanted so desperately to find out what happened. It was amazing to be that wrapped up in a book.
3. The princesses are not delicate, Disneyfied, weak women sitting around simpering and awaiting rescue by a handsome prince (they did that once and it didn’t work out so well for them). Instead, they are ass-kicking leaders, organizers, spies, and masterminds.
4. The characters are so intriguing that when I stumble upon one I didn’t know enough about I was compelled to google it up (see: Weyland Smith and Baba Yaga).
5. I have a serious crush on the Frog Prince. While I can see the appeal of Bigby Wolf, digging on a werewolf just makes me feel too Twilighty. Plus, I’ve always had a penchant for redheads.
6. Fables Vol. 4: March of the Wooden Soldiers was so damn clever the way it came together, it might be my favorite volume (after Volume 10).
7. Fables Vol. 14: Witches comes out on Tuesday, December 7th and I’m anticipating it about 76% as much as I anticipated Scott Pilgrim 6, which is a lot, because I anticipated SP6 so much I bought it twice.

The post A list about Fables appeared first on I Will Dare.

For most of the summer and fall, I was pretty sure Scott Pilgrim had wrecked me for good. I had picked up and abandoned a ton of graphic novels. None of them had the right mix of whimsy and humor and kickassedness I was looking for. My friend Wolfdogg, who really got me into graphic novels, asked me month after month if I had finished the handful of books he’d loaned to me.

I whined to him how I just couldn’t seem to get into anything, anything that wasn’t Scott Pilgrim. “GET OVER IT,” he shouted. Yes, he shouted. I’m not even exaggerating. I guess it’s the comicbooknerd version of tough love.

Personally, I kind of wanted to yell at him for hooking me on the Y the Last Man series before Scott Pilgrim, because Y would have been the perfect. I needed something a little outside reality, engrossing, imaginative, and, well, long.

Enter the Fables series by Bill Willingham. I am saved!

Before you Scott Pilgrim addicts get all trigger happy, you should know that if Scott is HoHos then Fables is like some sort of molecular gastronomy experiment involving liquid nitrogen and the essence of HoHo. You know?

The series opens with Fables Vol. 1: Legends in Exile, which finds many of the heroines and heroes of fairy and folk tales living in an enchanted apartment building in New York. It seems the Fables have been chased out of their magic kingdoms, which they call The Homelands, by something called The Adversary. This first volume seems to be about getting the reader comfortable with the personalities we’ll be dealing with in the series.

We’ve got Snow White as the deputy mayor of Fabletown, serving under Old King Cole. She oversees the daily operations of the community with Bigby Wolf (get it?) as her sheriff. Ol’ Bigby has atoned from his crimes against little piggies and the likes and has been allowed to take on human form.

Volume 1 opens with a murder mystery. It seems Rose Red, Snow’s rebellious and estranged twin sister, has been murdered. The book follows Bigby and Snow as they try to solve the mystery and along the way introduces us to the citizens of Fabletown and the fortunes that befell some of those favorite characters.

Things really get cooking in Fables Vol. 2: Animal Farm, when a few of the Fables venture up to the land in upstate New York where the non-human fables have been living. Here’s where you find the pigs and the giants and those kinds of beings. When Snow gets up the farm she’s forced to try and quell an uprising. Seems Goldilocks is stirring up trouble and trying to get the animals to invade The Homelands and fight The Adversary in hopes of regaining control of their homes.

Things don’t got as planned for anyone.

Finally, Fables Vol. 3: Storybook Love finds the Fables being blackmailed by a reporter who is sure he’s discovered their secret. . . they’re vampires. With the help of Jack (of Beanstalk fame), Prince Charming, Briar Rose, and Bluebeard, Bigby sets out to take care of the problem. Along the way we find out what some of the characters have been up to since we last heard from them in the fairy tales and how deep the Animal Farm rebellion has infiltrated Fabletown.

So far, I’m totally digging the series. It’s clever and mysterious. Since it uses characters so many of us grew up with, reading it makes you feel a little bit like an insider. Plus, there’s a level of satisfaction, curiosity sated to find out what happened after happily ever after.

The post So glad they didn’t live happily ever after appeared first on I Will Dare.

First of all, I read 15,775 pages (at least in the books I finished, I read a lot of pages in books I didn’t finish too) in 70 different books. I’m a little amazed by that number. It seems like a ridiculous amount. I’m not one of those people who just tries to cram in as many books as I can in attempt to show that my brain is bigger than someone else’s brain. I like to retain what I read. I savor the words and the stories. If I’m not savoring the book, I stop reading it (which is why I probably read way more pages than the number show).

Those people who crank through a book or two a day make me roll my eyes. I just find it hard to believe they can retain that much information. Besides, what’s the hurry? It’s not a race. There is no winner.

I can attest that the only reason I made it to 70 books this year is because I eschewed almost all responsibility for an entire week and did nothing but binge on Fables novels — that’s 12 books right there. Then there was the Scott Pilgrim problem, another 6.

Of course, after all that preaching my goal for 2011 is to read 77 books. I only want to read 77 books so that I can claim to have read 500 books in the past ten years. This will, of course, impress nobody and possibly annoy everyone, but you can bet your sweet bippy I’ll be dropping that factoid whenever I have the chance in 2012.

So here’s how my reading year broke down. Now with pie charts thanks to Daytum!

Those 70 books included Graphic Novels, Novels, Short Story Collections, and Novellas (two, oddly).

Getting hooked on Scott Pilgrim and Fables really skewed my numbers for both book form and for gender, as you can see here.

This year I hope to balance that out by reading more graphic novels my women, or not getting hooked on graphic series by men. Either solution works for me.

Incidentally, if you care, my favorite novel of 2011 was probably. . . The House of Tomorrow (though on certain days it flip flops around with Bad Marie and A Visit From the Goon Squad and the worst books I read (and finished) were Bound and Ball Peen Hammer.

The post 2010 in the books — now with pie charts! appeared first on I Will Dare.

There’s a certain kind of glee that comes in discovering that the new writer you’ve recently fallen in love with has another book you can read. We need a work for this. When I was eighteen and first read John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany I nearly crapped my pants with joy when I realized he had six other books I could read. Wahoo!

I was pretty close to pants-crapping-excited when Marcy Dermansky’s Twins landed in my hot little hands. I loved Bad Marie (so did Christa), and to have another book she’d written to read so quickly made me ecstatic.

Anyway, I’m happy to report that Twins does not disappoint. I’m also happy to report that Dermanksy (along with Gina Frangello) is one book away from making it to my favorite authors’ list (remember you need three books to make the list).

Here’s why Dermansky’s books are so damn good: She has the ability to create real, flawed characters you care about and then puts them in imminent peril. It’s so awesome.

In this book we’ve got Chloe and Sue a set of beautiful, blond, identical twins. Sue’s a little bit, erm, obsessed with the twiness of twins and longs to be the only person in Chloe’s life. She’s also a little bitter because Chloe was born first, got the good name and is an eighth of an inch taller.

Chloe resents the hell out of Sue and her possessiveness. On their thirteenth birthday Sue cons Chloe (and the local tattoo shop) into getting tattoos. Sue gets Chloe’s name and Chloe gets Sue’s name. This is only the beginning of Sue’s emotional manipulation. The harder she clings the more Chloe longs to escape, counting down the days until she goes to college and can get away from her weirdo sister.

Sue’s got some issues. She’s violent with Chloe’s one friend, develops an eating disorder because she’s afraid of getting bigger than Chloe and making them different, and well there’s the strange obsession with her sister.

Chloe’s no bag of sunshine either. She tries so hard to normalize Sue’s oddness that she seems to lose her personality. Trying so hard to appeal to everyone she becomes a sort of bland, boring, bag of neurosis. That is until she flits off to Hawaii with her one friend, Lisa, and Lisa’s family. There Chloe strikes up a friendship with Lisa’s father a former pro-basketball player.

Things get worse for the twins from there. Matters aren’t helped at all by their flaky, but rich parents.

Just like in Bad Marie, Dermansky has imbued the twins with flaws that alternately make you love or hate them, depending on the situation. Throughout the book I was constantly changing my twin-allegiance, but what never changed was how much I wanted things to get better for the girls. Why? Because I actually cared about them. I cared about them so much that when the book finally drew to a close I turned into a blubbering mess.

This is a good’un. You can get it on Amazon right now for $8. It’ll be one of the best eight bucks you’ve ever spent.

The post This ain’t no Sweet Valley appeared first on I Will Dare.