Zen Sarcasm Reviews

Smells Like Genetically-Modified Teen Spirit

(Originally posted here)

I recently finished reading Maximum Ride 3: Saving The World And Other Extreme Sports as a part of Mother-Talk's Blog Tour of the book.

I must take an aside right now and say that if at any time during your blogging career you're offered free books, that you should go ahead and take that offer because it is incredibly thrilling to come back from vacation and find your shiny new book waiting for you with a whole bunch of official-looking paraphernalia that insured it arrived in your house.  Very.  Cool.

I must also say that reading a book because you must feels like all the book assignments I avoided until the last possible moment. Confession time:  I did not read, nor did I at any point show any true interest in reading, Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck.  I am really sorry about that, Mrs. Harray, and I owe a debt of gratitude to my friend Max P for even managing to get a B on a book report for a book I never read.  I'm sure it's great, however, and I think I'll read it soon-- if only to see what I missed fourteen years ago.

So Max (that's the main character in the Maximum Ride series) and her gang of winged buddies lingered for a little bit on my nightstand, eyeing me scornfully and filled with teenage angst.

(It's a good thing I used to work with teenagers, because while those stares are compelling, they are also reeeeeally easy to ignore.)

But then I was intrigued: some people have been hailing this series (of which there are three books now) "the next Harry Potter" and other grandiose claims.  For the record, this is no Harry Potter: the voice in which the HP books is written is a voice that at once summons and hushes the little ones into listening and also winks and nudges the adults in the audience.  It's not so much a young adult book, but a book with young adult themes but suitable for all crowds.

I would say that this series is neatly contained within the young adult category only-- and that is a good thing too.

______

The book, which is the third of the series and which starts by guilt-tripping the first-timer about having to catch us up --in a très teenager way-- switches between Max's sardonic, self-assured and jaded first-person narrative and third-person limited omniscient, which follows Fang's point of view.  Fang is the tall-dark-handsome-brooding counterpart to Max's fiery teen persona, and Fang and Max luuuuuuurve each other.  Fang is also extra cool because he, ahem, blogs.  He keeps a blog --which you can actually see here, sort of-- and it is thanks to his blog, which Max dismisses, that Fang pretty much saves the day.

No, not a spoiler.  Just a matter of fact, because blogs are awesome. (not that I have a bias here or anything)

Max, Fang, Nudge, Angel, Gazzy and Iggy are six children --well, okay... three teenagers and three children, because I know how touchy teens are about being called children-- who have grown up as genetically-enhanced wards of a monstrous and evil research company. They also carry around a little talking dog, whose name is Total, and which Angel --a six-year-old who can not only fly but also control minds-- adopted in an earlier installment of the series.  Their mission is to save the world from the certain destruction that will come about from messing too much with human beings and from polluting the earth-- both crimes of which the evil research company that begat them is guilty.  Sounds lofty and a teensy bit improbable, apart from the flying-kids bit, but it's a sweet and worthwhile premise that forces you to listen to some sermonizing along with your action-adventure.

The book reads very quickly and it's quite a bit of butt-kicking, edge-of-your-seat suspense bit of goodness.  It will have you laughing out loud and shrieking; however, it also -- and I blame this on either the overly-simplistic prose for young adults or on the fact that there is most likely a fourth book in the works-- has some Mack-truck-ready plot holes.

I don't like plot holes, and especially not toward the end of the book.  So this was, at best, a bit of a nuisance.  At worst, it left me wondering about things and feeling unfulfilled and wondering if it was just all a plot to keep me tuned for when book number four comes out. 

Honestly, though,I think I enjoyed this book enough to

a) read books one and two
and
b) read book four and see what the rest of the series brings forth

So, if you have a teenager in your life or are looking for a fun and light series to attempt to fill your Harry Potter void, or you just happen to like stories about genetically enhanced kids with wings, I heartily recommend Saving The World and Other Extreme Sports. You'll have a good time remembering those halcyon days when saying "whatever" and rolling your eyes was your most poignant mode of communication.

You'll be remembering last Thursday, if you're me.

Love, Irony-Free

(originally posted here)

I just saw "Becoming Jane" and I think that you should see it.  Seriously.  You should.

I'm just a big geek, really.  A geek who worships Miss Jane Austen, specifically (I have a couple of seriously highlighted copies of P&P, for instance).  But enough about me, because this is for you, dear reader.

Especially if you're a Jane Austen fan, and if you have two X chromosomes, and if you like a movie that will make you swoon and period costumes and Regency-dress balls all that good stuff, you should DEFINITELY go see this movie.  Gentlemen, you will like it too, as it features boxing.  Also, if you --unprompted-- decide to take your lady love to see this movie, I can almost guarantee you will be very happy by the end of the date. 
No thanks necessary, friend.

Contraindications: You should not see it if you have problems with little details such as the suspension of disbelief or badly-applied aging makeup (that's all I'll say because I'm trying to keep this spoiler-free).

_____

Let me backtrack: the buzz that is surrounding this movie, while it seems quite positive, is that it's too fictional.  Austen scholars (a.k.a. Geeks For Pay) claim that the plot deviates from Austen's real life in some pivotal places such as whether Jane Austen had read Tom Jones before or after meeting the man who presumably was the love of her life --the consensus here is that she'd read it before they met; and whether he really was, in fact, the love of her life or just someone with whom she had a brief flirtation. 

I feel I should add the following notes:  Yes, children.  Tom Jones isn't just a Welshman with a large panty collection.  Oh, and also that those geeks are always ruining everything: bear in mind that there are very few documents in existence that tell us very much about what kind of person Jane Austen was, or how she thought or what she did or about her daily life.  Certainly, there were no tabloids following her around to document how bad a driver she was.

_____

Back to the movie: the reason the movie is 95% wonderful (the 5% being that odd bit with the aging makeup that I shall no longer bring up) is that you can pretend that this happened.  You can suspend your disbelief and watch as the lovely Anne Hathaway --who looks milky-white and just-bitten honest-to-goodness lovely-- plays Jane Austen and goes from a girl who is "accomplished at writing" to a true writer with the heavy weight of heartache inside of her.  And it's just wooooooooonderful to swoon along with her and pine away for Tom Lefoy (played by the easy-on-the-eyes and thoroughly purrable James McAvoy).

Close your eyes and think of pining away for Darcy-- c'monnnnn..... Colin Firth!-- and it's kinda like that only that, you know, different.   Don't make me overexplain and reveal possible spoilers here, okay?

Yeah.  You'll have fun.

But seriously, it's a true delight to see snippets and bits of scenes from her books --most notably the awesome Pride and Prejudice--and imagine that they came about as bits of conversations or direct quotes from those who surrounded Jane in her life.  And it's crushing to see how the story unfolds, but at the same time you know it must unfold as it does because this is a verisimilitude of her real life --critics notwithstanding-- and you know that despite what your yearnings, or those of Jane or Tom are she died relatively young and unmarried.

And I guess that's what makes this movie wonderful: the crux of the premise is that we do know more than we think about Jane Austen: she wrote of what she was, what she saw, and the society she kept and that which she imagined from reading others' novels.  Her novels and her heroines are facets of herself and keys to what she might have lived-- though they were stories with the happy ending that eluded her in her own life.

______

Thank you for getting this far and thank you to Mother Talk for including this blog in their "Becoming Jane" blog tour.

What are you still doing sitting here?  You have a movie to watch!

Pee Ess: Bring a hanky.