Book Reviews
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Someone should send a copy of this book to Stephenie Meyer, with a card saying, "This is how you write a vampire novel." Dracula is a lot scarier and more interesting than any Meyerpire could ever hope to be. And he doesn't sparkle. (I'll leave theTwilight-jokes for the rest of the review, since it's not unlikely that I'll be reviewing the offending piece soon anyway, at which point I can bitch about it as much as I want.)
The story starts when Jonathan Harker, apprentice at a law firm, arrives in Transylvania to meet with Count Dracula, who is preparing to move to England. The atmosphere is ominous from the first chapter when a peasant woman gives Jonathan a crucifix, along with a warning, but gets creepier with each page as Jonathan finds himself trapped in the the castle and slowly realises that something isn't quite right about the Count. At risk to his life, he seeks to uncover Count Dracula's terrible secret.
...Yeah, the secret is that he's a blood-sucking undead. It's not a huge plot twist, though, unlike the fact that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are the same person (I bet you didn't even know that was originally a twist). Most of the story takes place after Dracula has already moved to England, and deals with a group of people trying to track him down and kill him. The investigation and chase is very cool and never stops being exciting for a second, but I think my favourite part of the book is still with Jonathan Harker trapped in the castle. It just gives you the wonderfully scary and claustrophobic feeling of being locked in a dark building with a monster. In fact, one scene made me contemplate starting to wear a crucifix. You know, just in case.
Another thing that's really great about the novel is that the story is told entirely through diary entries, letters and newspaper articles. This makes it much more immediate, feeling like the chase is going on RIGHT NOW. Also, you get the intimate look into the various narrators' heads without the surety that they'll survive the story that you normally get in 1st person narratives (I have read stories where the 1st person narrator died, but they are rare). Apparently this kind of storytelling led some people back in the day to believe that it was a true story. Yeah, Some People are stupid.
In the interest of giving a well-rounded review, I should name the book's faults. There are only two that I can think of and neither are the author's fault, really.
The first one is that the story is so well known by now that we all know that Dracula is a vampire. No, not a vampire, but the vampire! It's hard to think of vampires without thinking of Count Dracula. So to modern eyes Jonathan seems like a retard for not running away screaming as soon as he hears the name Dracula. You kind of want to shout, "Why are you sitting there, drinking tea with him?! He's a bloody vampire! ...Uh, pun not intended." But like I said, this isn't the author's fault and the fact that the character became so iconic is only a compliment to Stoker's writing skills. Also, it doesn't really distract that much from the story.
The other flaw is greater and that is the hints of sexism. I was very annoyed when the men decided to stop including Mina Murray in their vampire hunter meetings, so as not to worry her pretty, little head. Luckily this only lasted a few chapters before they discovered that the saying "What you don't know can't hurt you" is completely untrue, and Mina was made a proper part of the team again. Again, it's not really Stoker's fault; this was pretty much the way women were viewed at the time. And he deserves major credit for actually making Mina a really useful character, rather than just a damsel in distress. Okay, she didn't actually participate in any vampire hunting action, but she did work quietly behind the scenes, making some of the most important discoveries and deductions in the chase. This leads another character to remark that she has "the brains of a man and the heart of a woman" (I don't have the book right now, so the quote might not be quite right). ...Yeeeeaaaaah, I'll let that comment pass, Mr Stoker, seeing as you live in Victorian times. Meyer, on the other hand, has no excuse. Sorry, it slipped!
Final Verdict
Absolutely chilling. A must-read for anyone who loves horror, vampires or classic literature.
9/10 on the Miriam-o-meter
The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot
From vampires to princesses. Quite a shift, I know. I didn't really expect this book to be my cup of tea. The only reason I bought it in the first place was because I read a pretty kick-ass quote by Meg Cabot on the internet. Unfortunately I can't seem to be able to find it, or I'd share it with you.
So, is The Princess Diaries the kind of girly fluff you all expect it to be? Well... yeah, it is pretty girly. But it's actually really, really funny. Here are a few excerpts:
"I don't know if you've ever been to the Ladies' Room at the Plaza, but it's like totally the nicest one in Manhattan. It's all pink and there are little mirrors and couches everywhere, in case you look at yourself and feel the urge to faint from your beauty or something." (p. 30)
"But my dad's another story. He is totally rigid in the discipline department. My mom says that's because Grandmere used to punish him when he was a little boy by locking him into this one really scary room in their house."Now that I think about it, the house my dad grew up in was probably the castle, and that scary room was probably the dungeon."Geez, no wonder my dad does every single thing Grandmere says." (p. 61)
"Oh no! What if Grandmere comes to the loft? She's never seen the loft before. She's never been below Fifty-Seventh Street before. She's going to hate it here in the Village, I'm telling you right now. People of the same sex kiss and hold hands in our neighbourhood all the time. Grandmere has a fit when she sees people of the opposite sex holding hands." (p. 81)
"And unlike Lilly, I do NOT believe that Joan was suffering from adolescent onset schizophrenia. I think angels really DID talk to her. None of the schizophrenics in our school have ever had their voices tell them to do something cool like lead their country into battle. All Bradon Hertzenbaum's voices told him to do was go into the Boys' Room and carve Satan in the bathroom stall with a protractor. So there you go." (p. 96)
"Mr G says Principal Gupta finally had to call the police, because Albert Einstein's is private property and the reporters were trespassing all over, dropping cigarette butts on the steps and blocking the sidewalk and leaning on Joe and stuff."Which, if you think about it, is exactly what all the popular kids do when they hang around the school grounds after the last bell rings, and Principal Gupta never calls the cops on them... but then again, I guess their parents are paying tuition." (p.162)
Besides the dry humour, the main strength of the novel are the characters. Even side characters like the bodyguards are fleshed out and feel like real people. Mia herself is a very likeable character and is actually pretty cool for a 14-year-old. I mean, wearing Doc Martens to princess training classes is pretty darn awesome. She has strong opinions on things like animal rights and gender equality. Some of these opinions are pretty naive, but, hey, she's 14.
If you've seen the Disney movie, you probably remember the makeover scene that transformed Mia from ugly duckling to beautiful swan, to her classmates' amazement and awe. While she does get a makeover in the book, I am pleased to report that it does not have the same effect as in the film. Mia's first reaction upon looking into a mirror and seeing her change is:"I am not a bit happy. Grandmere's happy. Grandmere's head-over-heels happy about how I look. Because I don't look a thing like Mia Thermopolis. Mia Thermopolis never had fingernails. Mia Thermopolis never had blonde highlights. Mia Thermopolis never wore make-up or Gucci shoes or Chanel skirts or Christian Dor bras which, by the way, don't even come in 32A, which is my size. I don't even know who I am any more. It certainly isn't Mia Thermopolis.
"She's turning me into someone else." (p. 104)
Again, major coolness points for that.
There were some bits that made me roll my eyes, mainly when Mia was thinking or doing something stupid. But when I thought about it, I realised that those were exactly the kind of stupid things that I did and thought when I was a teenager. Did I think that I knew and understood a guy I had a crush on, even though I'd never talked to him? Yep. Did I constantly complain about how no boy was ever going to like me? Hell yes.
So Meg Cabot has managed to create a realistic teenage girl who is actually relatable and not totally obnoxious. That's quite an achievement. In fact, Mia is so relatable to my younger self that I'm pretty sure I would have adored this book when I was her age. As I am 22 already, I only like it. But that's still pretty good for a teen book, since I usually hate them.
Final Verdict
One of the cleverest teen books I've ever read. While the target audience is adolescent girls, the humour and the characterisations can be appreciated by other people as well.
7/10 on the Miriam-o-meter
The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse by Robert Rankin
I had high hopes of Robert Rankin before I read Armageddon: The Musical, as he's touted to be a humourist of Terry Pratchett's caliber. However, I was very disappointed by that book. While it had some cool ideas, it just didn't really work. So I wasn't expecting much when I approached The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse. But a few pages in I had to admit to myself that the jokes in this book were actually pretty funny. And a few chapters later I found myself enthralled by the plot and really wanting to know what would happen next.
The story is... strange. The protagonist is a country boy named Jack who goes to seek his fortune in the big city, only to find out that the city is mostly inhabitated by toys and nursery rhyme characters (or Pre-adolescent Poetry Personalities, as they prefer to be called). Jack teams up with a decidedly uncuddly teddy bear named Eddie who used to belong to a private inspector, and together they attempt to capture a serial killer. And believe me, it only gets stranger from here. But in this story it works. Even as the weirdness was unfolded to give way to more weirdness, I didn't feel like the author was pulling random plot points from his arse. It felt like a natural progression. Well, usually. There was one scene near the end when I thought, "Okay, now you're just making things up as you go along!" And I got pretty angry at the book. But it didn't last long, because it turned out that the scene did actually work within the story and, like other plot points, had been foreshadowed. So the ending was satisfying enough after all.
One of the main reasons I didn't like Armageddon: The Musical was because the main character just wasn't very likeable. He was also rather bland and uninteresting, so I really didn't feel compelled to care about his fate. There were several other characters, none of them likeable. The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies gets around this by having two main characters act as a team. So even if they care about no-one else, they care about each other, and that automatically makes them a lot more sympathetic. I wanted Eddie to survive, because I knew that Jack would be sad to lose him, and vice versa.
Don't get me wrong; this novel is by no means flawless. The exposition is very clunky at times. I think it happened at other points too, but it was particularly notable in the final scene in which Rankin attempts to tie up all the loose ends by having the characters say things like, "Gee, it sure was nice of the mayor to buy us a new car after we lost ours while trying to save the orphanage!" (This isn't actual dialogue from the book, as I didn't want to give away the ending, but you catch my drift.) Maybe this bad delivery of exposition was supposed to be a joke, but if that's the case, then it wasn't lampshaded enough to be funny, and it just felt grating.
A bigger problem is the presentation of female characters. To be fair, Rankin has got better at this since Armageddon: The Musical in which there wasn't a single woman who existed for any other purpose than being sexy. And the male characters saw nothing wrong with treating them like objects, which only added to their unlikeableness. The women in The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies have a bit more personality. But not very much. And they still tend to be described by how hawt they are.
On a related note, the romantic subplot in this novel is stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. It made me want to knock my head into a wall and yell at the characters every time it was mentioned, which wasn't that often, luckily.
Despite all this, the book was very entertaining. It's obvious that Rankin had made progress in his writing, and I really hope he keeps it up, because maybe someday he'll deliver something at Pratchett's level. Maybe.
Final Verdict
An imaginative and intruiging storyline that would deserve a higher mark if it wasn't for the stupid, stupid, stupid romantic subplot.
7/10 on the Miriam-o-meter
Someone should send a copy of this book to Stephenie Meyer, with a card saying, "This is how you write a vampire novel." Dracula is a lot scarier and more interesting than any Meyerpire could ever hope to be. And he doesn't sparkle. (I'll leave theTwilight-jokes for the rest of the review, since it's not unlikely that I'll be reviewing the offending piece soon anyway, at which point I can bitch about it as much as I want.)
The story starts when Jonathan Harker, apprentice at a law firm, arrives in Transylvania to meet with Count Dracula, who is preparing to move to England. The atmosphere is ominous from the first chapter when a peasant woman gives Jonathan a crucifix, along with a warning, but gets creepier with each page as Jonathan finds himself trapped in the the castle and slowly realises that something isn't quite right about the Count. At risk to his life, he seeks to uncover Count Dracula's terrible secret.
...Yeah, the secret is that he's a blood-sucking undead. It's not a huge plot twist, though, unlike the fact that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are the same person (I bet you didn't even know that was originally a twist). Most of the story takes place after Dracula has already moved to England, and deals with a group of people trying to track him down and kill him. The investigation and chase is very cool and never stops being exciting for a second, but I think my favourite part of the book is still with Jonathan Harker trapped in the castle. It just gives you the wonderfully scary and claustrophobic feeling of being locked in a dark building with a monster. In fact, one scene made me contemplate starting to wear a crucifix. You know, just in case.
Another thing that's really great about the novel is that the story is told entirely through diary entries, letters and newspaper articles. This makes it much more immediate, feeling like the chase is going on RIGHT NOW. Also, you get the intimate look into the various narrators' heads without the surety that they'll survive the story that you normally get in 1st person narratives (I have read stories where the 1st person narrator died, but they are rare). Apparently this kind of storytelling led some people back in the day to believe that it was a true story. Yeah, Some People are stupid.
In the interest of giving a well-rounded review, I should name the book's faults. There are only two that I can think of and neither are the author's fault, really.
The first one is that the story is so well known by now that we all know that Dracula is a vampire. No, not a vampire, but the vampire! It's hard to think of vampires without thinking of Count Dracula. So to modern eyes Jonathan seems like a retard for not running away screaming as soon as he hears the name Dracula. You kind of want to shout, "Why are you sitting there, drinking tea with him?! He's a bloody vampire! ...Uh, pun not intended." But like I said, this isn't the author's fault and the fact that the character became so iconic is only a compliment to Stoker's writing skills. Also, it doesn't really distract that much from the story.
The other flaw is greater and that is the hints of sexism. I was very annoyed when the men decided to stop including Mina Murray in their vampire hunter meetings, so as not to worry her pretty, little head. Luckily this only lasted a few chapters before they discovered that the saying "What you don't know can't hurt you" is completely untrue, and Mina was made a proper part of the team again. Again, it's not really Stoker's fault; this was pretty much the way women were viewed at the time. And he deserves major credit for actually making Mina a really useful character, rather than just a damsel in distress. Okay, she didn't actually participate in any vampire hunting action, but she did work quietly behind the scenes, making some of the most important discoveries and deductions in the chase. This leads another character to remark that she has "the brains of a man and the heart of a woman" (I don't have the book right now, so the quote might not be quite right). ...Yeeeeaaaaah, I'll let that comment pass, Mr Stoker, seeing as you live in Victorian times. Meyer, on the other hand, has no excuse. Sorry, it slipped!
Final Verdict
Absolutely chilling. A must-read for anyone who loves horror, vampires or classic literature.
9/10 on the Miriam-o-meter
The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot
From vampires to princesses. Quite a shift, I know. I didn't really expect this book to be my cup of tea. The only reason I bought it in the first place was because I read a pretty kick-ass quote by Meg Cabot on the internet. Unfortunately I can't seem to be able to find it, or I'd share it with you.
So, is The Princess Diaries the kind of girly fluff you all expect it to be? Well... yeah, it is pretty girly. But it's actually really, really funny. Here are a few excerpts:
"I don't know if you've ever been to the Ladies' Room at the Plaza, but it's like totally the nicest one in Manhattan. It's all pink and there are little mirrors and couches everywhere, in case you look at yourself and feel the urge to faint from your beauty or something." (p. 30)
"But my dad's another story. He is totally rigid in the discipline department. My mom says that's because Grandmere used to punish him when he was a little boy by locking him into this one really scary room in their house."Now that I think about it, the house my dad grew up in was probably the castle, and that scary room was probably the dungeon."Geez, no wonder my dad does every single thing Grandmere says." (p. 61)
"Oh no! What if Grandmere comes to the loft? She's never seen the loft before. She's never been below Fifty-Seventh Street before. She's going to hate it here in the Village, I'm telling you right now. People of the same sex kiss and hold hands in our neighbourhood all the time. Grandmere has a fit when she sees people of the opposite sex holding hands." (p. 81)
"And unlike Lilly, I do NOT believe that Joan was suffering from adolescent onset schizophrenia. I think angels really DID talk to her. None of the schizophrenics in our school have ever had their voices tell them to do something cool like lead their country into battle. All Bradon Hertzenbaum's voices told him to do was go into the Boys' Room and carve Satan in the bathroom stall with a protractor. So there you go." (p. 96)
"Mr G says Principal Gupta finally had to call the police, because Albert Einstein's is private property and the reporters were trespassing all over, dropping cigarette butts on the steps and blocking the sidewalk and leaning on Joe and stuff."Which, if you think about it, is exactly what all the popular kids do when they hang around the school grounds after the last bell rings, and Principal Gupta never calls the cops on them... but then again, I guess their parents are paying tuition." (p.162)
Besides the dry humour, the main strength of the novel are the characters. Even side characters like the bodyguards are fleshed out and feel like real people. Mia herself is a very likeable character and is actually pretty cool for a 14-year-old. I mean, wearing Doc Martens to princess training classes is pretty darn awesome. She has strong opinions on things like animal rights and gender equality. Some of these opinions are pretty naive, but, hey, she's 14.
If you've seen the Disney movie, you probably remember the makeover scene that transformed Mia from ugly duckling to beautiful swan, to her classmates' amazement and awe. While she does get a makeover in the book, I am pleased to report that it does not have the same effect as in the film. Mia's first reaction upon looking into a mirror and seeing her change is:"I am not a bit happy. Grandmere's happy. Grandmere's head-over-heels happy about how I look. Because I don't look a thing like Mia Thermopolis. Mia Thermopolis never had fingernails. Mia Thermopolis never had blonde highlights. Mia Thermopolis never wore make-up or Gucci shoes or Chanel skirts or Christian Dor bras which, by the way, don't even come in 32A, which is my size. I don't even know who I am any more. It certainly isn't Mia Thermopolis.
"She's turning me into someone else." (p. 104)
Again, major coolness points for that.
There were some bits that made me roll my eyes, mainly when Mia was thinking or doing something stupid. But when I thought about it, I realised that those were exactly the kind of stupid things that I did and thought when I was a teenager. Did I think that I knew and understood a guy I had a crush on, even though I'd never talked to him? Yep. Did I constantly complain about how no boy was ever going to like me? Hell yes.
So Meg Cabot has managed to create a realistic teenage girl who is actually relatable and not totally obnoxious. That's quite an achievement. In fact, Mia is so relatable to my younger self that I'm pretty sure I would have adored this book when I was her age. As I am 22 already, I only like it. But that's still pretty good for a teen book, since I usually hate them.
Final Verdict
One of the cleverest teen books I've ever read. While the target audience is adolescent girls, the humour and the characterisations can be appreciated by other people as well.
7/10 on the Miriam-o-meter
The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse by Robert Rankin
I had high hopes of Robert Rankin before I read Armageddon: The Musical, as he's touted to be a humourist of Terry Pratchett's caliber. However, I was very disappointed by that book. While it had some cool ideas, it just didn't really work. So I wasn't expecting much when I approached The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse. But a few pages in I had to admit to myself that the jokes in this book were actually pretty funny. And a few chapters later I found myself enthralled by the plot and really wanting to know what would happen next.
The story is... strange. The protagonist is a country boy named Jack who goes to seek his fortune in the big city, only to find out that the city is mostly inhabitated by toys and nursery rhyme characters (or Pre-adolescent Poetry Personalities, as they prefer to be called). Jack teams up with a decidedly uncuddly teddy bear named Eddie who used to belong to a private inspector, and together they attempt to capture a serial killer. And believe me, it only gets stranger from here. But in this story it works. Even as the weirdness was unfolded to give way to more weirdness, I didn't feel like the author was pulling random plot points from his arse. It felt like a natural progression. Well, usually. There was one scene near the end when I thought, "Okay, now you're just making things up as you go along!" And I got pretty angry at the book. But it didn't last long, because it turned out that the scene did actually work within the story and, like other plot points, had been foreshadowed. So the ending was satisfying enough after all.
One of the main reasons I didn't like Armageddon: The Musical was because the main character just wasn't very likeable. He was also rather bland and uninteresting, so I really didn't feel compelled to care about his fate. There were several other characters, none of them likeable. The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies gets around this by having two main characters act as a team. So even if they care about no-one else, they care about each other, and that automatically makes them a lot more sympathetic. I wanted Eddie to survive, because I knew that Jack would be sad to lose him, and vice versa.
Don't get me wrong; this novel is by no means flawless. The exposition is very clunky at times. I think it happened at other points too, but it was particularly notable in the final scene in which Rankin attempts to tie up all the loose ends by having the characters say things like, "Gee, it sure was nice of the mayor to buy us a new car after we lost ours while trying to save the orphanage!" (This isn't actual dialogue from the book, as I didn't want to give away the ending, but you catch my drift.) Maybe this bad delivery of exposition was supposed to be a joke, but if that's the case, then it wasn't lampshaded enough to be funny, and it just felt grating.
A bigger problem is the presentation of female characters. To be fair, Rankin has got better at this since Armageddon: The Musical in which there wasn't a single woman who existed for any other purpose than being sexy. And the male characters saw nothing wrong with treating them like objects, which only added to their unlikeableness. The women in The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies have a bit more personality. But not very much. And they still tend to be described by how hawt they are.
On a related note, the romantic subplot in this novel is stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. It made me want to knock my head into a wall and yell at the characters every time it was mentioned, which wasn't that often, luckily.
Despite all this, the book was very entertaining. It's obvious that Rankin had made progress in his writing, and I really hope he keeps it up, because maybe someday he'll deliver something at Pratchett's level. Maybe.
Final Verdict
An imaginative and intruiging storyline that would deserve a higher mark if it wasn't for the stupid, stupid, stupid romantic subplot.
7/10 on the Miriam-o-meter