Jellyn’s Collection of Curiosities

There are moderate spoilers within. Read at your peril.

I generally like Bujold’s books, the Vorkosigan ones in particular of course, so it was inevitable I’d read this series. She’s also an author I will definitely buy the books of, despite the ready availability at the library. Annoyingly, Borders had book 1 available, but not book 2. So I don’t yet have that in my hand. I did borrow 3 and 4 from the library. The fourth because it’s just out in hardcover, the third because I happened to see it. Hey, it boosts the circulation stats. I do intend to buy them all at some point.

But enough about that, how about about the book itself? The premise is, simply: Farmer girl gets into a bit a trouble, runs away, comes across a patrol of demon-hunters. Love ensues.

The story started off all right, from the girl’s point of view, though it was hard to know how old she was, which was annoying. I wouldn’t have cared, except she seemed to mind. But then we jump to the patrollers and there was a boring scene about tracking down a demony thing and arrows and whatnot. Action scenes don’t do it for me unless I already have something invested. I did not at that point. I didn’t care to learn how neat it was that a one-armed man could fire a bow. Did I mention “snooze”? No, I didn’t. Snoozzzzze.

Then we get to the eye-rolling bit, as one-armed heroic patroller dude saves farmer girl from a rape. Gee, thanks. That’s original. And after that, it’s sort of downhill, or at least not uphill. She’s all innocent and naive and near-as-to-virginal-as-to-not-matter-except-we-get-a-gory-miscarriage. So the kindly, older, angst-ridden, widowed, worldwise, awesome lover patroller gets to show her what sex is like and junk.

But! Once the inevitable sex scene is eye-rollingly over, the story does get better. Now the farmer girl’s smartened up a bit, I can see it as a more even relationship. Though when he breaks his other arm, to give her an excuse to be more dominant…

Then we get some supposedly comical scenes that I could picture very well. But that wasn’t a good thing, because I was picturing bad comedy movies. Someone hoisted out the door and thrown in the dirt with his hindquarters in the air just being one example. The other examples are in pretty much the climax of this part of the story (as this novel is only part of a story), and I’ve already spoiled enough. But they’re even sillier.

And yea, well.. if it wasn’t Bujold, I would probably stop at this point. But I did recall that the first book or two of the Vorkosigan Saga weren’t my cup of tea really either. So maybe she’s just warming up. Maybe they’ll have kids and their kids will be interesting?

Well, one can hope.

I have to say the cover of this graphic novel really does nothing for me. The color is a drab sort of olive brown, black, and white. And the artwork makes it look like an adult manga. Not that there’s anything wrong with adult manga in general, but I do prefer manga that’s aimed more for a younger crowd. So just looking at the cover, it looks like a book that’ll bore me.

I didn’t really remember what this graphic novel was supposed to be about before I started reading it, so I was pretty much going in blind. K had warned me I should read the short little bios on the title page before I started reading. Which is good, because I’m about 50% likely to skip those. They’re usually irrelevant, useless data, or contain spoilers.

The bios do give you a hint as to the story, as well as clue you in as to who’s who. Most of the characters were born in the US, a large majority are Asian, and the names make them not uniformly Japanese. What a weird manga! :) Though it does become clear that this isn’t really a manga. The author is Asian American, as are most of the characters, and really, the art style is rather a mix of Japanese and American as well.

At first, I thought the story was really heavy on the Asian American experience thing. It sounded like the characters were preaching about it and going on and on about it. It didn’t even sound like natural dialogue to me, and I was pondering the review I’d write would include a rant on comics that just don’t get the concept of realistic dialogue. But then I read further into the story, and parts of it and some of the characters started to amuse me.

It’s still heavily about Asian American experiences, prejudices, and problems, but I came to realize that that was pretty much the point of the story. And a source of real angst for the main character. He has hangups. His largest one being that he fantasizes about white women and has trouble admitting that that’s his preference. Other characters tell him to just accept it, but it’s in conflict with the idea that American culture has indoctrinated him into believing white women to be superior and sexier.

He is, by the way, a total jerk. I don’t know why the smart and funny lesbian chick has him as a best friend. He even sucks as a beard, being Japanese in ancestry to her family’s Korean!

The story was nice to read in a ‘this is different from what I usually read’ sort of way, and you don’t hear nearly enough about Asian Americans in mainstream media, especially from the inside out. And I did find parts of it amusing, and I did rather like the lesbian character. But I didn’t like the main character at all, and I’m rather glad it was relatively short. It made its point, and then it stopped.

So, good story, and maybe I’ll read more by Adrian Tomine. I just hope he doesn’t have more books about this character. I’m not reading those.