Sometimes all you need is a spoonful of sugar

Nightvision

dorothy looking both too old and a ton like princess aurora oops

Drink coffee

Read books

our dog taking a nap 

REVIEW Title: I Am the Messenger Author: Markus Zusak Genre: Young adult, humor, mystery My rating: ★★★★★

___

Ed Kennedy’s CV isn’t at all impressive. All that’s in there are underage cabdriver, hopeless friendzone-dweller, and professional nobody.  He lets most of his time trickle by in his shabby shack, playing cards with his friends and drinking coffee with his smelly dog. At nineteen he has come to accept that his life is headed nowhere…until he inadvertently foils a bank robbery. For a time he is hailed a hero by the local media, and just when he thinks the hype is dying, he receives an ace in the mail that details his next “missions.” Ed is chosen to care—he is chosen to be “the messenger.”

The messages, which Ed himself should ‘decode’ first, are eclectic. Some are larger than life and some are seemingly trivial, but all of them are guaranteed to mark a change in the lives of their recipients. Ed reluctantly embarks on a journey to “protect the diamonds, survive the clubs, dig deep through the spades, and feel the hearts.” A spark in him eventually grows and he begins to believe that after all of this, he will be able to move on from being a ‘nobody’ to being a ‘somebody.’

When I picked up I Am the Messenger, I lowered my expectations because I know that The Book Thief will always be my favorite Zusak gem. The latter set the bar at an incredible height. The former, however, proved to be a completely different beast; it doesn’t hold the beautifully quiet albeit intense tone of The Book Thief, but it gets wrapped in the raw voice of youth—the kind that easily resonates with its target audience and doesn’t need to bask in embellished words to elicit gasps from its readers. It may not land on the same tier as The Book Thief but it definitely will on a different ladder, more or less on the same level.

One of the things I really loved about I Am the Messenger is, of course, Zusak’s writing. All 357 pages of this book only vindicated that his wordplay will always be my personal kryptonite. It’s as if his prose contains magic that can leap off the page and touch you in ways no other book can: they stick onto your memory like a good mind barnacle and clutch to your heart like a much-needed emotional drug. How he does that, I will never know. All I know is that I’ve been under his writing spell and enjoyed every minute of it. Who can’t get addicted to a style like this? -

“I know that all of this will stay with me forever…  things just keep going as long as memory can wield its ax, always finding a soft part in your mind to cut through and enter.”

If you think every sentence curls all poetic-like, you’re mistaken. I commend how the book manages to be largely lyrical and inspirational despite being a rather raunchy treat. It rounds up an average of three expletives per page and presents a wide array of lust-charged sections. Oh, and Ed, being the sarcasm-on-two-legs that he is, narrates his story in a tone edged with a cynical sense of humor. If you combine all those and plaster the word “motivational” across its bull’s eye, what you may imagine as an end product is one chaos of a novel that doesn’t know what it wants to be. But this book successfully presents a seamless blend of its clashing elements. It is both laugh-out-loud funny and heartwarming, both serious and hilarious. You don’t get a lot of that nowadays.

I love Ed as a character. His charm radiates from the fact that he has cataloged himself as a “nobody heading nowhere” and “just another stupid human” where in fact he is as extraordinary as one could get without donning capes or superhero spandex. His self-deprecation makes him all the more appealing. He may be a self-proclaimed Mr. Insufferable with a penchant for brooding about his stinking life, but he is not empty. His spirit isn’t drained out by the kicks life has given him prior to the beginning of the novel; he still has dreams, even if they are in a slumber inside him.

Even though the only “all access” pass we have is for inside Ed’s head, most of the other characters also appear to be well-molded. They are as multi-layered as real humans, dealing with their problems in the only way they can. But the thing here is, Zusak doesn’t try hard to make everyone pop out of the pages. Instead, he writes a realistic portrayal of other people from the limited perspective of a flawed human like Ed. We don’t get to know all their problems or thoughts or what drives them in life, but we do get to feel them the way Ed felt them.

Ironically, I find it odd that Audrey, the very person whom Ed has the strongest feelings for, is the one character that seems to be a little underdeveloped. Depicted as the girl who makes love to everybody but is afraid to love anybody, Audrey’s character almost has no concrete back-up to make the portrayal realistic enough. Maybe that’s why I’m not really satisfied with the fluffy contribution she had at the ending. For me, it’s a chink in this book’s armor.

World-building is handled well. The town Ed has known as his whole world emerges like a separate entity. Its restrictions, its inexplicable pull that seems to tuck everybody in, and the gamut of opportunities lying just outside its borders all seem to be real. If anything, the place contributes a lot to the character’s growth:

“It’s the person, not the place. If you left here, you’d have been the same anywhere else. If I ever leave this place—I’ll make sure I’m better here first.”

The build-up of the plot is a tad unconventional. Throughout the novel we are in constant search for Ed’s assignment sender but we are made to focus on Ed’s missions, reveling in how each of them is solved differently. The answer to the Big Q is revealed as a major twist in the end, and I have to say it’s one of the most unique turns I’ve seen to cap off a novel. I can’t say it’s the best twist ever, but I expected something else entirely—something that stays within the four walls of the story. I liked it, though. I think it made the impact of the message a hundredfold greater.

All technicalities aside, I want to say that the best thing in my reading experience with I am the Messenger is how the “messages” shot straight to my heart. It’s no news that apathy could rival oxygen in terms of its abundance in the air nowadays. We often fall victim to the “I have loads of problems of my own, why should I take care of his?” mentality that often shadows the “what’s in it for me?” question, but what if you’re a stranger’s only hope? You don’t need to be a superhero to save a life; a hope can be a simple smile, a genuine greeting, or a small conversation between passenger seats. I still believe in the power of small things because once upon a time in my life, I’ve been saved by them too.

This novel also reminded me that we shouldn’t be afraid to connect with other people. I know that trust is too precious a thing to invest in someone we don’t know well, but what we seldom realize is that we get a lot more when we build new relationships. Ed has realized this too. He repeatedly muses about how he gets nothing in exchange of all the good things he’s doing for other people, but he finds out in the end that he—in his own words—“the privileged one.” His dormant life compass functions well again after he touched other people’s lives.

The other message that struck a chord with me is that we can all be somebody…but for that to happen, each of us has to be nobody first. :)

Title: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making Author: Catherynne M. Valente Genre: Fantasy, Young Adult,  My Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5 stars) 

__

I’m the kind of person whose inner kid never gets dead-beat when it comes to marveling at new things with unadulterated delight, even if the shell cradling her is already twenty one years old. While this means finding extraordinary things in the most mundane of situations (sans, of course, the maturity diminishment), it also extends to the kind of media I consume. I don’t want to become one of those people who turn away from what they think are kid’s stuff and say, “Comic books? Cartoons? What are you, eight? I’ve outgrown all of those a long, long time ago.” I’m all for the good story, whatever form or medium it comes in.

This is why my fascination for fairytales still flares up vibrantly. There’s a wonderful concoction of revisionist tales and fantasy stories to this day that I’ll never tag as “just for kids.” And this is also why my attention was readily arrested by Catherynne M. Valente’s Victorian-esque The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making when I heard of it for the first time.

Blurbs and back-cover synopses can be a tad misleading and may inflate a memory balloon of a girl who fell into a rabbit hole, but this book’s more than just an Alice in Wonderland adventure. It’s a story that doesn’t only have the ability to bubble out a laugh from your inner kid’s throat—it also has the capacity to revive that inner kid, had it been sleeping under mattresses of off-kilter judgments and prejudices acquired through adulthood.

At the surface, the story follows a rather generic blueprint. Twelve-year-old September gets invited by a creature called the Green Wind to the magical realm of Fairyland. Being stuck in a bland, adventure-less pothole of a house, she accepts in a flash. But she finds out that Fairyland is in chaos and crisis under the iron rule of the Marquess, and she is the only one who can put everything in order. How can an ordinary girl like her do it?

Expect a splash of colorful imagination that burst at the seams: cities unspooled from vivid threads and every textile imaginable, towns baked from the warmest and tastiest of pastries, all of them changing positions in the map. From the pen that spun out such multihued setting, you wouldn’t expect a cast of characters that would pale in comparison. There’s Lye, the rather forlorn soap golem; A-through-L, the humorously bright Wyverary (wyveryn + library? I join September’s doubt about this suspicious parentage); Saturday, a taciturn, wish-granting Marid; a flock of angry tsukomugami; grease-drinking and tire-gnawing fairies; and an untamed herd of bicycles.

Couple that with the cute sketched chapter openers, and there’s no reason why you should not consider this an amazing lit-treat.

September’s journey could have been all but one caucus race, but Valente stitched everything together to form a superbly coherent masterpiece. It has the potential to carve its own space in the classics shelf. Beneath all the marvelous elements that could steal gasps from a child, there’s a storyline that can pinch the heart and tickle the brains of all ages. In creating September, Valente has molded a new heroine that’s a clear portrait of all of us. She represents courage emanating from innocence, the fear that sprouts out upon knowing how the world can inflict pain unto us, and then the newborn courage to banish the aforementioned fear, the kind of bravery we acquire when we knew we’d rather be hurt than the ones we love. It’s the classic chronicle of growth, only wrapped in magic and sprinkled with genuine tears.

The story also touches on escapism, issues on authority, the power of stories, and ala-Symposium nudges on finding one’s soulmate.  Valente’s prose was also breathtaking in its beauty; the wordplay carries a hint of campfire narrating, shadowed by an almost musical quality to it. The whole book sings. Every sentence was lyrically whimsical. There’s no page where I couldn’t pull out a magnificent quote, but I’m taking this paragraph in the book (at random, take note):

“You see, the future is a kind of stew, a soup, a vichyssoise of the present and the past. That’s how you get the future: You mix up everything you did today with everything you did yesterday and all the days before and everything everyone you ever met did and anyone they ever met, too… Magic is funny like that. It’s not a linear thinker. The point is if you mash it all up together and you have a big enough pot and you’re very good at witchcraft, you can wind up with a cauldron full of tomorrow.”

Those who hungered for more when closing the book would be satisfied because Valente has spawned a prequel and a sequel. The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland—For a Little While follows the story of Mallow who appears in Circumnavigated as the “late queen” before the Marquess takes the throne from her. The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There follows Circumnavigated, centering on September’s abandoned shadow, Halloween, who becomes the ruler of Fairyland Below.

And there goes one of the most heartbreaking scenes that the kid me, from more than 10 years ago, have ever read. I think it’s actually the first character death I’ve became so emotional over when I was little. 

The Whereabouts of Happy Ending An Anna Leemann-Abel Tannatek fanmix [8tracks] [sharebeast]

When I’m having a [severely enjoyable] book hangover, I tend to lurk in my iTunes library and click at random tracks that may remind me of my favorite scenes in a novel. Not counting my non-lit fandoms, I’ve never really pulled a full music-chemist stunt up until last weekend. That was when, with my head still reeling with the bleak beauty of Antonia Michaelis’ The Storyteller, I decided to take my book-and-music marriage to the next level.

Somehow, my plan to make a fanmix/playlist turned into the creation of an actual mix-CD! :p More ramblings here.

Track listing:

Waking Dream (Natalie Walker)  

The Story (30 Seconds to Mars) 

A Sorta Fairytale (Tori Amos) 

Poison & Wine (The Civil Wars) 

If I Had a Gun… (Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds) 

The Killing Moon (Nouvelle Vague) 

Trouble Sleeping (The Perishers) 

Tiny Heart (Flyleaf) 

Open Your Eyes (Andrew Belle) 

Fade Away (Automatic Loveletter) 

The Ice is Getting Thinner (Death Cab for Cutie) 

And in a flash, we reached the epilogue of the 366-page tome of 2012. That year sure had some of its pages dog-eared (and rightfully so)! But before I get past 2013’s flyleaf, let me give you a list of the stories that commenced a mayhem both in my cranium and in my ribcage. Here are the stories that moved me in inexplicable ways, drove me to retreat into my cocoon of blankets to cry, teased out tickled laughter from my throat, or just plainly pinched my heart. Here are my top 12 books of 2012 (in random order):

The Storyteller by Antonia Michaelis

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake

Every Day by David Levithan

Black Heart by Holly Black

Divergent by Veronica Roth

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Cinder by Marissa Meyer

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente (review to follow)

The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson

The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson

Runners-up: Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli, Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler, and Missed Connections: Love, Lost and Found by Sophie Blackall