Book Review: Hole In My Life by Jack Gantos

Jack Gantos tells the story of his high school days, living in a cheap hotel, going to high school and working in Florida while his family moved to the Virgin Islands. Upon graduation he headed down to St. Croix to meet them and arrived in the midst of a Revolution. He ended up smuggling hash up to New York, where he was caught and served several years in federal prison. Throughout this time Gantos struggled to try to become a writer and it was only while he was in prison that he really learned what was important and why he was struggling so much as a writer.

This was a great read. Gantos' narration style is first person friendly. It feels like someone is telling you their story and it works well for the message he is trying to convey. The text is never preachy or didactic even though there are clearly lessons to be learned from the author's story. 

Gantos also doesn't pull any punches. His story is very violent and terrifying at times and he could have glossed those things over but he didn't. He's honest about his mistakes and how long it really took him to figure things out.

However I don't want anyone thinking this book is all gloom and doom. It does have it's funny moments, both funny ha ha and funny awkward. All in all it feels like a well rounded book that is short (which many of the teens I know love) with a lot of great discussion points.

Book Review: Small and Tall Tales of Extinct Animals by Hélène Rajcak, Damien Laverdunt

This book divides the world into the Americas, Eurasia, Africa and Oceania and discusses animals that have gone extinct in each locale. Some such as the Woolly Mammoth and the Irish Elk became extinct due to climate change and others such as the Dodo Bird and the Passenger Pigeon were hunted to extinction by humans. 

Each animal gets a comic strip that shares either a myth about them or something concerning their territory or the people that have studied/found them. Then an illustration in the style of the old fashioned images that naturalists made a hundred years ago with a couple of interesting facts. Many of the animals selected are very strange by today's standards and there are also many animals that are larger cousins of animals that are still somewhat common. There is also a small illustration in the upper right hand corner with a human next to it to illustrate the scale of the animal which I found very helpful. At the end there is frieze with a time line of the vanishing animals and a glossary.

I found this book really interesting and I thought that the comic strips were a great way to present all different kinds of information. I also found this book a little sad. More than half of the animals were made extinct due to human involvement. That being said I didn't feel like the authors were trying to beat you over the head with a point. This book is really about the animals which I found refreshing.

Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell

I wasn't really sure how I was going to feel about this book. Other reviews I read seemed to be split down the middle, either they loved it or hated it. And the movie probably didn't help any. Julie was portrayed in a less then flattering light in the movie as inconsiderate and annoying. After reading the book I can honestly say that she is actually pretty inconsiderate particularly of her husband and she is also extremely whiney, but somehow I did find it less irritating in print. Although I did wonder if after she saw it in print maybe she started treating Eric a little bit better or at least bought him something nice with her royalties.

However when she talks about the food it's great. Shopping for the food, making the food and eating the food all sound great. She's very descriptive about the whole process and it all sounds great. I just wish there was more of it, and sometimes she will interrupt herself with another story about food or something else and it kind of takes you a minute to get back on track.

Her intermitent vignetes about Julia and Paul were okay. I actually think she may have been better of trying to get excerpts from Julia's biography or someone else's writings because after reading Julia's biography I felt like it didn't ring true.

Stitches by David Small

Stitches is a memoir of David Small's life revolving around his cancer and his family's extreme dysfunction. This was such a great graphic novel and I really want to do it justice in a review but I don't know if I know enough to describe what I liked about it, but here I go.

The main body of the memoir starts when David is young and goes until high school with periodic skips in time, and a brief period of his adulthood. The slightly messy art style fits the tone of the story; almost like you can feel how the craziness he was experiencing was affecting his mentality through the illustrations. I also felt that the expressiveness of the illustrations and the dialogue selections helped me understand his feelings, without needing him to spell them out with thought bubbles. He also gives the reader brief sections at the end so you can find out what happened to various members of his family and how he straightened his life out. While this was all obviously a very painful time in his life and generally a dark memoir I really think it's a worthwhile read.

I hope I gave this book justice and other people give it a try.

The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines by Mike Madrid

My post earlier this week on what famous person I would want to be made me think of this book which I read last week, so here's the review.

I really loved this book. It gave a great overview of the place that women have held in comics over the last 70 years. The author writes in a very personable style that makes the book easy to read and enjoy. For each decade since comics have been popular, the author addresses the changes occurring for women in the society and how these changes were reflected or not reflected in comic books. There are also chapters devoted to specific characters or even arch-types within the comic book industry.

My biggest problem now is that I want to go out and read all of these comics he talks about and some of them just aren't available. The only negative thing I will say is while it would be completely inappropriate to have a book on female superheros without devoting a chapter to Wonder Woman; the author also covers parts of Wonder Woman's background in other chapters so by the time you get to that chapter, you do kind of feel like "okay I read alot of this already." But stick it out because it's totally worth it to get to the chapters on the superheroes of today. Otherwise this is a great read for any girl that's into comics and graphic novels or anyone who want's to see how womens issues are reflected in different types of media.

This post will eventually be cross-posted at Reviews for You

Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation by Elissa Stein and Susan Kim

This book was such a brilliant idea, and the authors did a great job. I read Presenting Lenore's blog post about Flow and she just had such a strong reaction to it, not positive or negative really just strong, that I thought it was definitely worth reading. Flow tells the cultural history of the period and how woman's status and health care have changed over time. It's written in a friendly, personable style. While many reviewers feel like this means the book was geared at the younger set, I think what the authors were really going for was making the book readable, and to try and make a topic that makes many people uncomfortable a little bit friendlier. The book isn't couched in a bunch of scientific jargon that most of us will never understand. Everything is in language that is respectful and completely understandable.

Some of the information in this book is definitely scary. It is absolutely terrifying to see how woman's bodies have been mistreated over the years due to lack of scientific study and information. While there is a lot of good explanation in this book regarding fertility and how a woman's cycle really works, the most important thing I think a woman can take away from this book is too make sure that you are well informed about exactly what it is you are doing to your body when you use medications or how you handle your period.