Review: Help Us, Great Warrior!

Help Us! Great Warrior
by Madéleine Flores

★★★½☆

2016 • 160 pages • BOOM! Box

How great is Great Warrior? SO GREAT.

I love Madéleine Flores’ little femme warrior green nugget, probably because she’s cut from the same cloth as one Usagi Tsukino: ferocious, childish, good-hearted, and always up for pizza, cute boys, and fancy clothes. Great Warrior catsits for cosmic deities. She slices sea monsters in half just to get her chips back. She eats an entire “cursed” pizza to save her village. (So brave.) All of Flores’ Great Warrior comics are funny little one-off gags featuring Great Warrior going about her unique lifestyle, with occasional recurring characters like Great Warrior’s other little green nugget buddies and cute warrior girl Leo.

So for Great Warrior’s print comics debut for BOOM! Box, BOOM!’s “gleeful” imprint, it was time to tell an ongoing story with Great Warrior and her buddies. So enter Hadiyah, the High Chancellor, who tasks Great Warrior with dealing with the sudden influx of demons in their world. Unfortunately, Great Warrior does not want to go a demon-hunting, especially when there’s a party in her village. But eventually, Hadiyah convinces (or just straight up tricks) Great Warrior and her best warrior buddy Leo to help. Which is how they discover a big secret about Great Warrior…

Page to Screen: Captain America — Civil War (2016)

Captain America: Civil War
Based on Captain America
by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby

★★★★☆

2016 • 147 minutes • Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Are we ever going to be able to get back to Captain America: The Winter Soldier?

Don’t get me wrong: I heartily enjoyed Captain America: Civil War. It is no less ideologically chewy, as one review delightfully put it, than The Winter Soldier. The difference is that The Winter Soldier is a Captain America movie and Captain America: Civil War is an Avengers movie. I often wonder when the wheels are going to come off the Marvel Cinematic Universe, because we’re getting to a point where a Marvel film must do two things: be a good enough film and set up the board for the next film or films, depending on how many players are on this particular board. In my experience as a reader and viewer, serial plot structure is one of the most challenging things to do right. And Marvel, with the exception of Iron Man 2, has mostly been handling it well. But it’s difficult to serve two masters at once, and we know which one takes precedent.

The Russos, to their eternal credit, pull that delicate balancing act off elegantly, but I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to get a wholly singular genre riff like Captain America: The Winter Soldier again in the Marvel universe.

Review: The Girl of Fire and Thorns

The Girl of Fire and Thorns
by Rae Carson

★★★★☆

2011 • 423 pages • Greenwillow Books

Previously, on the Literary Omnivore, I asked where God and organized religion was in speculative fiction. (Okay, I asked “Where is the God in fantasy”, but tomato, tohmato.) When speculative fiction deals with gods and goddesses, it often does so in objective terms—one cannot dispute the existence of the Valar, for instance, in Middle-Earth. But Throne of the Crescent Moon shows characters actively struggling with and practicing their faith in a world where the divine is not objective, and it gave me a taste for more. But where to start?

Book blogger Samantha of A Musical Feast came to my rescue with a recommendation of The Girl of Fire and Thorns. I’ve known of Rae Carson’s The Girl of Fire and Thorns trilogy for a while, in that I used to spend many a shift at the bookstore in the young adult nook and they were in there. They looked like young adult fantasy (which is no slam, but just rarely distinctive enough to grab me), which is why it took Samantha mentioning that it’s actively based on medieval Spain and Spanish Catholicism for me to put it on hold at the library.

Page To Screen: The Huntsman — Winter’s War (2016)

The Huntsman: Winter’s War
based on characters by Evan Daugherty based on “Snow White” by the Brothers Grimm

★★★½☆

2016 • 114 minutes • Universal Pictures

The last movie I saw in theaters was Batman V. Superman: Grimdark Grimdark Grimdark, a movie that will make you lose your faith in humanity, let alone cinema. (And, I might add, actively seeks to do so.) I had to go home, eat cake, and watch Star Wars: The Force Awakens to recover. I couldn’t walk past a comic book store for days without repressing the urge to flail screaming through it like my own personal marketplace scene. I’m starting to wonder if my neutral response to the fact that Captain America: Civil War is coming out in just a few weeks, a movie I already have a ticket to see, might not be a side effect of that experience.

After that, any cinema experience looks miles better in comparison. I left The Huntsman: Winter’s War practically glowing. Movies can be just mediocre! Oh happy day!

Review: Throne of Glass

Throne of Glass
by Sarah J. Maas

★★★☆☆

2013 (originally published 2012) • 406 pages • Bloomsbury

When Sarah J. Maas mentions that she got the idea for Throne of Glass in high school, inspired by dark music in Disney’s Cinderella, in the supplemental material in the paperback edition of said book, I thought—well, that makes perfect sense.

I do not say this to be shady, or, more correctly, needlessly shady. (Shade is being cast, is what I’m trying to say.) But it made sense to me that Maas has spent years and years with these characters. The overall effect of reading Throne of Glass is a bit like wandering into somebody else’s high school reunion and finding yourself bewildered, simply because you don’t have access to the connective tissue between in-jokes, knowing looks, and old stories told in laughter and dropped phrases.

Review: Burn

Burn
by Elissa Sussman

★★★½☆

2016 • 272 pages • Greenwillow Books

I am very weirdly proud of my local library for carrying both Elissa Sussman’s Stray and Burn. I may have mentioned that my local library has the lackadaisical policy of never really circulating books back to their libraries of origin when holds crisscross this fair island, which means that I get to see what my neighbors are reading. (This is how I know that I managed to get somebody else hooked on Ōoku, because they are way ahead of me!) While I’m not as familiar with their young adult selection as I was of the public library I volunteered for in my teens, I am nonetheless very happy to see some feminist-minded fantasy young adult novels mixed in with more traditional fare. The teenagers of Brooklyn deserve Elissa Sussman’s books!

Review: The King’s Peace

The King’s Peace
Jo Walton

★★★★☆

2002, originally 2000 • 544 pages • Tor Fantasy

Now this was how I wanted to kick off my 2016 reading—with a gloriously chunky fantasy novel by an author that I both trust and trust to treat me like a human being. And, specifically, I wanted to start with this book, this specific mass market paperback edition copy of this book.

This was one of the last books I bought from the used bookstore in my hometown before it closed—not because of poor sales (another one, albeit part of a local chain, popped up instantly across town), but because the lady who ran it retired. The immediate response, from both myself and a friend who grew up the town over, was “Damn, I still had used book credit there!” But it still felt odd to drive past the floral shop in its place when I was picking up baguettes for Christmas dinner. I find something very odd and poetic about the fact that I have managed to, through no fault of my own, lose both of the two-story bookstores that played major roles in my life. (The other one, at least, is still standing, just a bit closer to the ground.)

The fact that this copy also passed through my favorite used bookstore in college, which is happily very still open and, I assume, still trying to get the cursed cardboard standee of the Tenth Doctor I sold to them last month off their hands, just completes the circle. With the fiercely curated remains of my library finally coming to join me sometime soon, my literary universe feels much more immediate and contained.

The King’s Peace just seemed like a very fitting way to kiss the contours of what my literary universe used to be like goodbye.

At The Movies: Masters of the Universe (1987)

Masters of the Universe

★★★★☆

1987 • 106 minutes • Cannon Films

As a connoisseur of bad movies, I am also a connoisseur of bad movie podcasts. (I am, at some point, going to do a podcast roundup, now that I listen to even more of them. I just need to blast through one or two backlogs first.) The best and popular two are The Flop House and How Did This Get Made? I prefer The Flop House (sample episode: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Live!), due to its charming hosts, focus on studio movies, and some kind of East Coast allegiance. Or it could just be that blasting through their backlog got me through the first few months of my current day job. I look forward to every episode. But I do listen to its West Coast sibling/rival, How Did This Get Made? on occasion, if they cover a movie I’ve seen (sample episode: Xanadu, with a great riff on how it could possibly be as over budget as it was). I like it, but I haven’t ever been so excited for an episode that I went out and watched the film in question.

Until How Did This Get Made? covered Masters of the Universe with guest host Tatiana Maslany. Swoon. I’ve been meaning to watch Masters of the Universe since forever—because have you met me?—and this was just the swift kick in the rear I needed to finally sit down and watch it.

Review: Kushiel’s Chosen

Kushiel’s Chosen
by Jacqueline Carey
★★★★½
2015 (originally published 2002) • 496 pages • Tor Books

Can Jacqueline Carey structure a trilogy or what?

I have a lot of opinions on how book series should be structured. I don’t think it’s beyond the pale to ask that a novel in a series be a novel unto itself—not that it needs to completely standalone, just that it needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end while setting up the board for the next installment. And yet, this seems to be a tall order, especially when it comes to speculative fiction. I have encountered plenty of trilogies whose structure seem based on The Lord of the Rings—which is a terrible idea, because The Lord of the Rings is a single novel, not a series.

But, mercifully, Carey understands this and avoids it by both structuring her books enjoyably and cramming them so full of incident that you cannot help but be satisfied by the time you’re finished. It’s astonishing to me that The Sundering is a very successful duet, despite duets being harder to pull off than trilogies, which at least can have the traditional three act structure mapped onto them. Reading a Carey novel is knowing you are in good hands.

Page to Screen: Ella Enchanted (2004)

Ella Enchanted
based on the novel by Gail Carson Levine

★★☆☆☆

2004 • 96 minutes • Buena Vista Pictures

I was two-thirds of the way through Ella Enchanted when I realized I’d never seen Ella Enchanted before. I mean, it seemed so obvious! In 2004, I was a preteen mourning the loss of The Lord of the Rings who had, in fact, actually read Ella Enchanted and liked it. I even distinctly remember reading about Cary Elwes playing the villain in this film and taking a moment to think about what he would even look like with darker hair. (I am always fascinated by what natural blondes look like with darker hair, for reasons presumably related to my lifelong adventures in hair color.)

And yet, when Heidi Klum turned up as the giantess Brumhilda, I realized that I was on deeply unfamiliar ground. I must have been stitching something together out of The Princess Diaries and A Knight’s Tale to heal over the mental wound this film inflicted on my generation of lady geeks. It’s a wound so deep that, when I proposed this film to my erstwhile Valkyries as a bad film to skewer, even those mighty mavens balked. Surely, though, with a decade between both me and the film and me and my culturally bloodthirsty preteen self, I could take a gentler and wider view on this much reviled film.

(Also Hannibal’s seeped into my bloodstream enough that I am compelled to seek out the filmography of both Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelsen, so expect King Arthur to be covered in these pages soon enough. Moving on…)

Ella Enchanted has precious little to do with the novel it’s based on, besides its basic premise. A girl named Ella is given the “gift” of obedience by a fairy, she goes to a giant’s wedding, and she falls in love with a prince named Char(mont). Other than that, they largely have nothing to do with one another, which makes Ella Enchanted, essentially, Shrek for teenage girls.