Review: "Zombies vs Unicorns"

Zombies vs Unicorns edited by Justine Larbalestier & Holly Black
3 out of 5 stars (for the whole book)

This book has been around for ages and I'm sure you've seen or heard about it before now. I've almost bought it many times, but for one reason or another never did. Until I was at Half Price Books and they had a big stack of them at the front and boyfriend was super intrigued by it. (Not that I think/expect he'll read it, it's not his style at all.) So I finally gave in and bought it. I can't say that it was completely worth it; I can see why they had so many and why it was on clearance.

Apparently there's a lifelong battle of which is better: zombies or unicorns. I've never heard of this battle and I don't think anyone else had either until the 2 authors/editors/friends made it up. So they decided to gather up some of their fellow author friends and have them write a short story that will supposedly convince us which is better. Unfortunately, the stories are very up and down. I almost gave up after the first story, it was so bad. And the intros Larbalestier & Black did before each story really just annoyed the crap out of me. They were trying way too hard to be edgy and controversial, or something, but it just came across as obnoxious. I'm glad I kept going though, as I did find some gems and even a series that I'm interested in reading now.

Since there's 12 stories and I don't want this review to be excessively long (like it isn't already), I'm just going to do a one liner-ish describing each story and what I liked/didn't like about it. And consider this review full of spoilers, because I had some questions on some of the stories and would love some answers if anyone has them! I will say I started out Team Unicorn but by the end was firmly Team Zombie.

(I love Snapchat lol)

1. (unicorn) The Highest Justice by Garth Nix: 1 star
A princess gets justice for the murder/zombifying of her mother, the Queen. Felt like something I would have written in the 5th grade.

2. (zombie) Love Will Tear Us Apart by Alaya Dawn Johnson: 4 stars
A boy with a brain-devouring prion (zombie) tries not to eat the guy he's crushing on. Enjoyed it, especially the boys' relationship. Was left with more questions at the end though: had Jack been bitten before? Was he or his dad already a zombie?

3. (unicorn) Purity Test by Naomi Novik: 2 stars
A unicorn needs to find a virgin in New York City to save some baby unicorns from an evil wizard (Harry Potter reference). Gave it an extra star for baby unicorns that drink chocolate milk. I was quickly becoming Team Zombie after this story.

4. (zombie) Bougainvillea by Carrie Ryan: 4 stars
Izza's father takes over an island after the Return and protects it from the mudo (mute, zombies) and pirates. Until he can't. Best story so far, loved the before and after parts, and Izza taking charge in the end. Plus, I totally knew the pirate guy was the kid from before.

5. (unicorn) A Thousand Flowers by Margo Lanagan: 2 stars
A unicorn leads a young man in medieval times to a girl that has been attacked. The guy is accused of attacking her, the princess. The second half of the story focuses on the princess, who is banished for being pregnant and unmarried. Turns out the unicorn is the baby daddy. Yeah. It started out decent but then got really weird. The switch of characters in the middle completely threw me and I lost track of the first guy for awhile. Guessing he was the head in the bag. And the ending was ew.

6. (zombie) The Children of the Revolution by Maureen Johnson: 5 stars
A girl is hired to be a nanny for a famous actress in England. The children are a little...odd. Loved it, perfect short story. All I could picture for the actress was Angelina Jolie; pretty sure it was intentional. Who is taking care of them all at the end though? I guess the actress called in some people before she turned completely.

7. (unicorn) The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn by Diana Peterfreund: 5 stars
Teenage girl realizes she can tame and train unicorns, who are usually evil killers in this version. She raises a baby unicorn that she had saved from a travelling freak show but things start unravelling when the baby's killer instincts start kicking in. Finally a truly excellent unicorn story. I had knocked this down a star at first because the ending was so abrupt and I needed MORE BABY KILLER UNICORN but then I saw it was part of a series so I bumped it back up. (And added the series to my to-buy list)

8. (zombie) Inoculata by Scott Westerfeld:3 stars
A small group of humans try to stay safe in a small camp surrounded by zombies. The teens infect themselves on purpose and don't turn completely Zee and run away from the camp. The real zombies follow, because they're bored. That's where the story stops, which is super frustrating. I like Westerfeld's books a lot and this feels like just the beginning of a series for him.

9. (unicorn) Princess Prettypants by Meg Cabot: 3 stars
A girl gets a unicorn for her 17th birthday from her wacky aunt. She thinks it's totally lame and considers selling it on eBay, until the unicorn helps her get revenge on her ex-boyfriend. I would never sell my unicorn on eBay. A decent story. Probably more like 4 stars, compared to the other unicorn stories.

10.(zombie) Cold Hands by Cassandra Clare: 3 stars
In Zombietown, the dead come back and get menial jobs, like street sweeper. Adele's boyfriend, James, is killed by his uncle, the current Duke, so that James won't become his successor. Of course, James comes back to "life", with Adele's help and accuses his murderer. Enjoyed it but was missing a little something; not sure what though. I liked all the zombies coming to James' side. Why could James talk but the other zombies didn't? And Adele seemed totally snobby after she became the Duke's wife-to-be.

11.(unicorn) The Third Virgin by Kathleen Duey: 1 star
A unicorn wanders the earth, over hundreds (thousands?) of years, the only one of his kind (supposedly). He has healing powers that work on humans, but if he takes too much, he can kill them. This gives him a super high, so he starts doing it more and more. Guess what gives him the best high? Killing babies. Yeah. He goes thru a cycle of doing this and despising himself for it and wanting to die. Of course, his healing powers stop that. Until he finds a girl willing to help him, in a most grotesque fashion. I hated this story. HATED IT. Every single page of it.

12.(zombie) Prom Night by Libba Bray: 3 stars
The zombie virus starts with the adults in this story, forcing the kids to step up and take control. (Similar to Michael Grant's Gone series) A pretty good story but needed a little more, like a lot of the others. I read in someone else's review that the girl at the end, hugging everyone at prom and saying "sorry" over and over, was actually infected by her boyfriend and so she was bringing the virus to the small town. Is this true? I never would have seen that on my own. Also, who was coming in the tunnels? I need to knooow!!

Review: "The Pastures of Heaven"

The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck
4 out of 5 stars

Steinbeck can do no wrong in my opinion. (Even The Pearl and The Red Pony, which I had to mark down for killing so much, are still literary masterpieces.) He has unequivocally become my favorite author. This little book of short stories is no different. The passion and love that Steinbeck has for his home town of Salinas, California shines thru on the pages of many of these books.

The layout is similar to that of Cannery Row, short chapters on various people in the small town and the escapades they get up to. But all of these stories center around one family, the Munroes, who move into the old cursed Battle farm. They manage to remake the farm into something prosperous and are good people but somehow they manage to bring bad luck to their neighbors and friends without even knowing it. Jobs become tedious, love affairs go awry, homes catch fire, and people even die.

“Maybe your curse and the farm's curse mated and gone into a gopher hole like a pair of snakes. Maybe they'll be a lot of baby curses crawling around in Pastures of Heaven.”

Unlike Cannery Row, there is not an optimism to these stories. These people get worn down and broken and it's sad to read about. *spoilers ahead* My favorite story (and the saddest in my opinion) was about Pat Humbert, a 30-something year old man who lives with his elderly parents until they die. He inherits their family home but cannot bring himself to make any changes or even enter the sitting room that his parents inhabited each day. He closes it up and ignores the ghosts that haunt him at night, by going out to town and joining all the groups he can find. Even though he joins these groups and participates, he is still on the sidelines, rarely interacting with others unless they do so first. One day, he overhears the young and lovely Mae Munroe (of the cursed Munroes) mention how beautiful the outside of his home is and this sparks an energy in him to remake his home and himself, so that he may eventually court the girl. He starts with the sitting room and tears it apart, freeing the ghosts inside. He becomes obsessed with redecorating, even looking at magazines at the library. He finally finishes and declares himself ready to greet Mae. But when he goes over to her home, he discovers the family celebrating her engagement to another young man in town. And he is heartbroken. He returns home and is repulsed by all his effort, claims the home is dark and unutterably dreary, and refuses to step foot into the house again, sleeping in the barn instead. That is where his story ends.

After the bare requisites to living and reproducing, man wants most to leave some record of himself, a proof, perhaps, that he has really existed. He leaves his proof on wood, on stone or on the lives of other people. 

This deep desire exists in everyone, from the boy who writes dirty words in a public toilet to the Buddha who etches his image in the race mind. 

Life is so unreal. I think that we seriously doubt that we exist and go about trying to prove that we do.

Review: "Demo: The Collected Edition"

Demo: The Collected Edition by Brian Wood & Becky Cloonan
3 out of 5 stars

I think I should have liked this more than I did. Brian Wood did New York Four & Five, which I enjoyed a lot, and Demo has a similar feel to that. All the stories are connected to New York City and center around young people (late teens/early twenties) going thru identity crises in some way or another. So it has all the right ingredients for me to love it...but. But, I just didn't connect to the stories. I've never had a problem reading an anthology or trade paperback edition of graphic novels, in fact I prefer it so I don't have to wait. Demo is the first one that I've come across where that is a negative thing. The stories are not connected to each other, which I was expecting, so reading them one after the other didn't let them sink in. I would have done much better reading one a night, so that is my advice to you! And now let's look at a few of my favorite stories in particular.

All the teens have super powers of some sort or another. Some of them are very subtle or never fully explained. In my opinion, several of the stories would have done great as full length graphic novels. For example, Emmy is a young girl who stops speaking after she realizes her words have power...real power. People listen when she speaks and sometimes there are deadly consequences. And in "Bad Blood", Samantha not only has to deal with her estranged dad's sudden death, but she finds herself strangely attracted to her half-brother and must deal with a surprising family secret.

"Girl You Want" confronts the stereotypical images that people (mainly men in the story) see in a youngish, seemingly single girl. The heart of this story, that people see what they want to see, really gets to you when you start thinking about it. As does "Mixtape", about a man who must come to terms with his girlfriend's suicide thru a mixtape last note she made him.

And finally there's my personal favorite, "Midnight to Six", or better named "The Slacker Pledge". Who hasn't had that feeling of utter slacker-dom in their twenties (thirties...) where they just want to do enough of their job to squeak by and get it over with? Three teens sign a pledge to always do the bare minimum, so as to live life to its fullest. Ten years later, they're still doing the exact same thing, but for two of the friends, that's not enough anymore.  

"If wanting a better life for myself makes me a fascist, whatever. I'll accept that."

Review: "Complete Tales & Poems" Classic a Month #10

Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
2 out of 5 stars

I was excited to read some Poe for my October classic, but I didn't really get into it as much as I thought I would. I think I started out with the wrong stories and that kind of set me back for the whole month. I know of a lot of his stories (from The Simpsons lol) but I've never actually read much. I did not read this entire collection, but picked out several that I was familiar with and a few I wasn't. I kind of wish I had read something else for October, but I'm not sure what.

I started out with The Purloined Letter, which is more of a detective story than mystery. It was very confusing to me and after I'd read it, I realized it was because it was meant to be the 3rd in a story line about one detective. Duh. So, then I decided to read The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which is the 1st story of that line. I think I liked it? It was very gross in parts, describing the gruesome murders and such (highlight if not squeamish: "Their roots (a hideous sight!) were clotted with fragments of the flesh of the scalp."). The writing is very formal and stiff, it felt like work to me, if that makes sense? And, I hate to say this, but it made me feel stupid lol. I couldn't figure out the ending and that was irritating. So I decided to skip the middle story and move on to something I was more familiar with.

The Raven is such a lilting, flowing poem, you can't help but read it in that kind of sing-song voice. When I think of poems, I think of something like this, where the words slide over you and thru your heart and brain. I actually read this twice, first to just enjoy the rhythm and second for the meaning and story. For me, this is where Poe shines.

Leave my loneliness unbroken!-quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take they form from off my door!
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

The problem I have with most short stories is that I usually want them to go longer lol. And such is the case with The Tell-Tale Heart. I think I could have enjoyed a full story about this person going mad over an old man's filmy blue eye. Or rather, not mad, because as the narrator tells us, "you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs." There's a kind of humor to this story, a dry sarcasm at times, that I enjoyed very much.

The last story I read was The Black Cat, which I had heard was Poe's most terrifying piece. Well, it was. It was horrible! I'm basically going to give the whole story here, so if you want to read it on your own, I'd stop here! If you love animals, I would recommend NOT reading this one.

This quiet boy grows into a man with a great fondness for animals. He gets a bunch of pets, including a black cat, with his wife and loves the cat more than anything, until the man grows older and in a rage one day, injures the cat. (I really don't want to repeat the details, because it's honestly sickening.) The cat survives but flees from the man now, which makes him angry, and he finally kills the cat, hanging him in the garden. That night, the house catches fire and the man and woman barely escape. Months pass and the man decides (for some stupid reason) that he wants a new cat. He finds one at a bar one night that looks exactly like his old cat, including the "injury" his first cat received, except for a strange white marking around its neck.

The new cat loves him and follows him home and the guy likes him...at first. Soon he feels like the cat is mocking him with his love and wants to hurt this cat too, but can't bring himself to, out of guilt from the first. One day, the man and his wife go down to the cellar for something and the cat accidently trips the man on the stairs. This enrages him and he raises the ax (I have no idea why he had an ax) in anger at the cat, but his wife stops him. You'd think that would be the end right? Nope. The man turns on his wife and buries the ax in her head. Yeah. What's with this story?

He decides to put her in one of the walls of the cellar and plaster her up. After that, he goes in search of the cat to "take care of it" too, but it ran off so the man is happy at last. A few days later, the police show up and take a look around, looking for the woman, but don't find anything. The guy is totally calm and a little over-confident: when they are leaving the cellar, he is babbling and says something about "check out these well-constructed walls" and knocks the one where his wife is hidden. Suddenly, there's a horrible yowling and crying. The police pull the wall down and there, sitting on the dead woman's head, is the cat. WTH?? Why did I read this story? Why didn't the wife do something when her husband killed the first cat? What's with Edgar Allan Poe? I've read some things that he was seriously damaged, but this is jacked.


(Picture courtesy of RedRibbonRoses)