Manga Monday: Yotsuba's on TV! She must be famous!

Between running a house, going to the park and entertaining Jumbo, it's no wonder Yotsuba's worn out in Yotsuba&! Volume 10.

Note: Yotsuba&! Volume 10 is part of an ongoing series. Check out the review of Volume 1 here, and Volume 9 here. Otherwise, read on!

Who's to say a lady in trousers would be a bad influence?

Betrayal, human cargo and the Chinese underworld all converge on Black Heath Manor in Cindy Spencer Pape's Dragons & Dirigibles.

Note: Dragons & Dirigibles is the seventh story of the Gaslight Chronicles series. While the stories work well as stand-alones, there are inherent spoilers, especially where the romances are involved.

Why let a little something like death slow you down?

Gwen Dylan isn't your normal gal. She works as a grave-digger at an all-natural cemetery, for one, which automatically brands her as 'one of the guys.' She's recently cut ties with her past, so she only has a few people that she can truly call her friends.

Oh, and she's a zombie.

In iZombie Volume 1: Dead to the World, Gwen isn't exactly your standard shambling undead. As long as she maintains a steady diet of a brain a month, she keeps her focus and her memory. And so, being the moral sort, she's found herself employment that lets her be around plenty of brains that no one is using anymore.

Honestly, her life is actually pretty normal for being a living dead girl. She lives in a crypt in the cemetery she works at, and has a slightly 'airheaded' ghost for a roommate. Her other friend, Scotty, is a 'thrope' of the terrier variety.

But she still has a couple problems. When she eats a brain, which is by far the most disgusting thing she's ever had to choke down, she is flooded with the fragmented memories of that person's life. Sometimes it includes a bit of unfinished business that the decedent has left behind. Often it includes his final moments, and whether he died under...mysterious circumstances.

It turns out, Gwen isn't the only undead in town either. A pack of vampires has taken up residence at a local paintball course, and while their leader is bright enough not to leave a trail of bodies behind, not all of them are.

And there might be another, less ethical zombie in town as well.

Chris Robertson does a good job setting up a world full of creatures of the night, while still giving us some rules to go by. The characters each have their own personality quirks already, with plenty of room to go. Gwen even has a love interest, of a sort.

It's amazing how full a life a gal can have, even when she's dead.

Highs: Gwen's friends are hilarious, and their antics are sometimes even more fun than the main story.

Lows: The artwork isn't quite what I expect from a Vertigo title, and there's a lot of backstory still missing.

Verdict: iZombie Volume 1: Dead to the World is a fun, quick read with lots of potential for future volumes.

Further Reading: iZombie Volume 2: uVampire, V Wars, World War Z, Soulless: The Manga, The Unwritten

As the world ends, families come together.

It's amazing how life can change in an instant. Forgetting to check your blind spot while driving, or carelessly mowing the yard, can have consequences that last forever. Lightning strikes cause forest fires that decimate hundreds of acres, and tornadoes can flatten towns in a matter of minutes.

In Susan Beth Pfeffer's Life as We Knew It, Miranda is an eyewitness as one of these events happens. It's been the most talked about astronomical event in a generation: an asteroid is about to hit the moon, and it's large enough to be seen with just a normal pair of binoculars. All the new stations have been bringing astronomers on to talk about it, and Miranda's teachers have been trying to elbow moon-related topics into their lesson plans.

But no one could have expected that the astronomers would be so wrong. No one knew that the asteroid would be orders of magnitude more dense than anything they'd ever seen before. So when that huge piece of space debris hit the moon, it didn't just put on a show for the amateur stargazer. The asteroid hit with such tremendous force, in fact, that it moved the moon visibly closer.

With the increased gravitational pull of the moon on the Earth, the planet is thrown into chaos. The tides rise higher than even the worst tsunamis, literally wiping island nations off the map. Earthquakes strike areas that have weak fault lines, but haven't shaken in centuries. Satellites are disabled, and the worldwide information grid is shut down.

Underneath all of those worldwide crises, there are the day to day problems of living in a world turned on its head. Miranda is a high school girl, who lives with her mother and younger brother in northern Pennsylvania. She has most of the normal high school girl problems: a mother who pushes the schoolwork, friends who are drifting away, an ankle injury that cut short her dreams of figure skating. Like most girls, she was pretty unremarkable, and the journal that she kept only reinforced it.

But as the world crumbles around her, the journal that she's keeping becomes more and more compelling. Public utilities stop working, school is cancelled, and their well runs dry. With the lack of satellites the television quickly becomes channel after channel of emergency signals, and the radio stations soon fade out.As winter begins months early, and both food and fuel begin to run out, it will be all that the family can do to stay together and stay alive.

Unlike so many of the young adult books I've read lately, I truly like Miranda. She's far from perfect, and since it's her journal everything we see is through her eyes, but she is absolutely the most relatable character I've come across in YA in a long time. She fights with her mother over silly things, she resents both the freedoms that her older brother receives and the special treatment of her younger brother. She's a fairly capable, independent young lady, but still mourns the loss of her friends, whether physical or emotional. She worries about her father and his new family, and her sister or brother-to-be. She does the best she can in the situation that she's found herself, and few readers could honestly say they would do better.

Life as We Knew It is a refreshing take on the young adult dystopian novel, without the tired love triangles and created drama that have become hallmarks of the genre. 

Highs: Watching a family try to pull together in a crisis, even when it's hard, is always uplifting.

Lows: I never like books with unreliable narrators, and a few scene might not have happened quite as Miranda writes them, but for the most part it's minimal.

Verdict: Different enough to stand out in a field flooded with dystopian fiction, LIfe as We Knew It is a wonderful, realistic look at a family in crisis.

Further Reading: The Dead and Gone, The Book Thief, Shades of Grey, Under a Graveyard Sky

Finding the truth of a story can be dangerous, indeed.

Growing up as a trouper gives a kid a very useful skillset. By being onstage from a young age, he learns to show his audience only what he wants them to see. Part of his chores necessarily includes the tasks of travel: keeping the animals cared for and healthy; setting up a campsite; preparing for bad weather. Book learning might be limited to that of the group he's in but there's often the wandering scholar who travels with the troupe for safety, and that type is always too eager to share his knowledge with an eager listener.

All in all, young Kvothe was very well prepared for the life ahead of him in Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind.

Kote runs an inn along the road. Life as an innkeeper can be interesting, but of course it depends on who happens to wander by. The nights that no one stays, though, can be quiet. A solid sort of quiet that pervades the building and smothers the spirits of Kote and Bast, the two who live there and run the place.

Recently, though, there has been a bit more action in the area than usual. The stuff of fairy tales - spider-like creatures that can't be killed, campfires burning blue - have been spotted in the area. It's gotten so bad that the innkeeper himself goes out in the night, and ends up rescuing a man known as Chronicler.

But of course, Chronicler has a good nose for a story, and the humble innkeeper looks quite a lot like the legendary Kvothe. Forgoing an important meeting, Chronicler settles in to record the life story of one of the realm's most storied adventurers.

The bulk of the novel takes place over one evening of tales. Kvothe begins with his childhood as a trouper, travelling with his parents. Along the way, they end up taking on an arcanist named Abenthy, who is the first to truly realize Kvothe's potential. With Ben, Kvothe's love of learning turns towards entering the Arcanum at the University, where scholars learn to control the magic known as Sympathy, as well as the location of the grandest library in the land, the Archives.

But even the most charmed childhood has to end sometime, and for Kvothe it ends at the hands of the Chandrian. Thought to be a story told to scare youngsters, Kvothe learns all too well just how real he is. And his mission slowly turns to learning all he can of the Chadrian, and, perhaps someday, how to defeat him.

On the first night of storytelling, we follow Kvothe from his origins in the troupe through his first year at University. Along the way, he experiences joys and sorrows, first love and great loss. his trouper skills serve him well time and time again, and his whip-sharp intelligence gets him into just as many scrapes as it gets him out of.

The Name of the Wind is epic fantasy of the highest caliber. From bards to demons to even a tree-munching dragon, this book has something for just about every fantasy fan.

Highs: The scene where Kvothe is at the tavern 'earning his talent' plays on the heartstrings of anyone who has been on stage.

Lows: The rivalry between Kvothe and Ambrose should have handled much better by the University.

Verdict: The Name of the Wind is an instant classic fantasy novel that's not to be missed.

Further Reading: Wise Man's Fear, The Lies of Locke Lamora, Alif the Unseen

The deep web has never been so deep.

Alif is a cypher. The first letter of the Arabic alphabet, it is a single vertical line. A simple name for a person whose life takes place in the shadows between computers.

In G. Willow Wilson's Alif the Unseen, Alif's life is turned upside-down, in more ways than one.

Alif lives in a pre-Arab Spring country somewhere in the Middle East. The censors have become more and more a part of the online life of the country, and Alif and his online comrades do their best to provide free movement of information to their clients. It means that The Hand could come down on him at any time, but with the confidence of youth he doesn't really believe that it would happen to him.

As it often does, Alif's problems start with a girl. Intisar is Alif's first love, a Muslim girl from a good family. He meets her online, on some of the message boards that the educated, free-thinkers tend to inhabit. Hardly a radical, she's as likely to defend the government as she is to question it. The computer world gives her the freedom to speak her mind in a way that her birth and culture do not, and Alif is absolutely smitten. They even go so far as to draw up a their own marriage contract, and while Alif's mother is away visiting her family he is able to have her over unchaperoned.

But a woman of her standing is hardly going to have the future she expects with the poor son of a second wife. When the reality of doing her own laundry settles in, she takes the easy route and accepts the husband that her father has found for her.

"Make it so I never see your name again." -Intisar

Heartbroken, Alif decides to disappear from Intisar's life. So he proceeds to do so. Since the majority of his life is spent online, he creates a program to track her, and make sure that whatever she does, she will never see his online presence again. Whether she changes usernames, or computers, or uses a VPN, this program will track her by her word usage and typing styles, and remove Alif's presence.

Such a program has never been created before. There are so many variables, and the program would have to be so complex, that it would almost have to be...alive...

Such a complex program would, by its very existence, draw the attention of a few very influential people. And when Alif finds himself in the possession of  The Thousand and One Days, he ends up with more problems than just The Hand.

G. Willow Wilson shines in her first long-form novel, masterfully weaving together the modern day with the ancient, religion with mythology, and love with loss.

Highs: The character of Dina is perhaps the most three-dimensional, honest females in recent fantasy fiction.

Lows: As with much fiction set in the middle east, as current events unfold the story may show its age quickly.

Verdict: Winner of the 2013 World Fantasy Award, Alif the Unseen is a must-read for fans of fantasy and world fiction alike.

Further Reading: Throne of the Crescent Moon, Kabu Kabu, The Midnight Palace

Manga Monday: A sunny girl with an overcast life

Alongside magical girls and androids named Chi, CLAMP told the story of a lonely girl with a cheerful disposition in Suki: A Like Story Volume 1

On the outside, Hinata Asahi's life seems happy enough. She does well at school and has friends that care about her. She sees the sunny side of every situation and is always trying to cheer up the melancholy people that she's around. Nothing seems to faze this girl.

But a closer look reveals that perhaps her life isn't as perfect as it could be. Every night, Hina goes home to an empty house, with only her teddy bears waiting at the door for her. It's alluded to that she's moved out of her father's home because she wants him to be happy, but how could such a wonderful girl be bringing him sadness?

Early on in the volume, Hina gets a next-door neighbor. The house has been standing empty for awhile, so Hina is curious to see who might be living there. Shiro Asou is a young man who has just moved into the area, and as a matter of fact, is taking over for Hina's homeroom teacher. Hina is elated to have found a new friend, and promptly starts inviting him over for meals and the like. But a few side conversations we overhear Shiro having leaves us wondering if there's more to him than meets the eye.


Suki: A Like Story Volume 1 follows a lot of what has become traditional manga tropes. You have the perpetually cheerful girl, her retinue of friends, the older man to have a crush on, and the mystery of their backstory. The art is very 1990s shojo, and has many of the expected traits of a CLAMP title. In many ways, it's exactly what one would expect.


What you have to remember, though, is there's nothing wrong with that. The reason that titles like Dragon Ball and Yotsuba&! come back again and again is that they are the comfort food of manga. You know what to expect when you start it, and it's a welcome break from titles like Attack on Titan and Berserk. CLAMP consistently delivers a certain level of excellence in each title they do, and Suki is no exception.


Highs: Hina getting excited about her favorite author's new book is a feeling we're all very familiar with.


Lows: The mystery around why she lives by herself is going to get old quickly.


Verdict: A traditional shojo romance that is very well done.


Further Reading: Bunny Drop, Yotsuba&!, Chi's Sweet Home