Sylvie has been a twelve-year-old princess for more than eighty years, ever since the book she lives in was first printed. She's the heroine, and her story is exciting -- but that's the trouble. Her story is always exciting in the same way. Sylvie longs to get away and explore the world outside the confines of her book.
When she breaks the ardinal rule of all storybook characters and looks up the Reader, Sylvie beings a journey that not even she could have anticipated. And what she accomplishes goes beyond any great good thing she could have imagined....
Eh. I think it would've been more enjoyable at a younger age -- which, admittedly, is the target audience -- or had I not been as aware of metafictional writings. The various existences presented in the book -- the stagelike bookverse, the imaginations/brains of the Readers -- are my favorite thing about the book and are very well played out. I wish I could say the same for the characters, who feel a bit flat. Ricky, the brother, particularly suffers from being underdeveloped and it's quite frustrating to be aware that he's being presented as slightly villainous but not having all that much motivation for it.
(from wikipedia)Watchmen is set in 1985, in an alternative history United States where costumed adventurers are real and the country is edging closer to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union (the Doomsday Clock is at five minutes to midnight). It tells the story of a group of past and present superheroes and the events surrounding the mysterious murder of one of their own. Watchmen depicts superheroes as real people who must confront ethical and personal issues, who struggle with neuroses and failings, and who - with one notable exception - lack anything recognizable as super powers.
Holy WOW. This is definitely a must-read for anyone who's at all interested in comics, superheroes, the development of either or both or anyone who's looking for an engaging summer read. There's also something quite awesome about reading a comic book that's quite literally changed the history of comics and be able to pick up on things that have been used in later works.
Comparisons between Watchmen and 'Heroes' are often made and they're not entirely wrong, in terms of having similar stakes and superheroes, but 'Heroes' is about people developing superpowers and the fallout thereof, whereas Watchmen is about established (and mostly retired) heroes (mostly without superpowers) and is explicitly political (while Nathan's political aspirations direct his storyline, there isn't anything close to the omnipresence of the Cold War or the fallout from JFK's assassination or.... anything).
After five years buried like a mole amid the decaying maps and manuscripts of an historical institute, Lou is given a welcome field assignment: to catalogue a nineteenth-century library, improbably located in an octagonal house on a remote island in northern Ontario. Eager to reconstruct the estate's curious history, she is unprepared for her discovery that the island has one other inhabitant: a bear.
Lou's imagination is soon overtaken by the estate's historical occupants, whose fascination with bear lore becomes her own. Irresistibly, Lou is led along a path of emotional and sexual self-discovery, as she explores the limits of her own animal nature through her bizarre and healing relationship with the bear.
Another weird, beatifully-written (see below) book. It feels very Canadian, given what I know of Canadian fiction by female writers (Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro-- they're contemporaneous so that might have something to do with it)-- they all have the same ugly-but-true side of life dryness which is both immensely appealing and incredibly depressing (not good in large quantities).
And yes, there is bear sex. It is, as you might expect, more than a little weird, but 'Bear' is a strange book and it doesn't come out of the blue-- there's a slow burn to the relationship between the Bear and Lou.
passages:
"Yet, when the weather turned and the sun filtered into even her basement windows, when the sunbeams were laden with spring dust and the old tin ashtrays began to stink of a winter of nicotine and contemplation, the flaws in her plodding private world were made public, even to her, for although she loved old shabby things, things that had already been loved and suffered, objects with a past, when she saw that her arms were slug-pale and her fingerprints grained with old, old ink, that the detritus with which she bedizened her bulletin boards was curled and value-less, when she found that her eyes would no longer focus in the light, she was always ashamed, for the image of the Good Life long ago stamped on her soul was quite different than this, and she suffered in contrast." (12)
"It was as if men knew her soul was gangrenous. Ideas were all very well, and she could hide in her work, forgetting for a while the real meaning of the Institute, where the Director fucked her weekly on her desk while both of them pretended they were shocking the Government and she knew in her heart that what she wanted was not her waning flesh but elegant eighteenth-century keyholes, of which there is a shortage in Ontario." (92-93)
"Fish wives give us all a bad name, she thought.
Fishwives. Fishwidows. And we all set out to be mermaids." (104)