V for Vendetta - Alan Moore

I slotted in V for Vendetta as my "book set around a holiday other than Christmas" for the 2017 Popsugar Reading Challenge, with the holiday here being Guy Fawkes Day aka Bonfire Night aka the 5th of November.  Most of the book does not take place on November 5th; however, the pivotal parts of the story do, and the characters' actions draw their influence and strength from that day.

I'm not a big graphic novel person, finding that they lack some of the depth and substance of prose books; a picture is not, necessarily, worth a thousand words.  And, following in this vein, I was not a huge fan of V.  Not necessarily because it was a graphic novel, though I wasn't terribly impressed by its art or flow in that respect, but because V is a pivotal character who just doesn't make sense.

The story is about Britain, following a war, which has become a totalitarian state under the control of a far-right party whose policies have included killing homosexuals, non-whites, and other groups that don't match their perfect idea.  There's an early panel which contains the words "Make Britain Great Again."  Hm...  In this world, Evey is a teenage girl who, desperately in need of money, tries to turn to prostitution, only to find herself caught by a sting targeted at sex workers.  On the verge of being raped and killed, she's rescued by the mysterious, masked, preternaturally strong and fast caped crusader, V, who takes her back to his home in "the Shadow Gallery" and begins to tell her of his plans to free Britain, and eventually to integrate her into them.

But V as a character never made sense to me.  He is an anarchist, wanting people to be able to live in "the land of do-as-you-please," but with an order instilled by the masses.  He evidently became this person after being the subject of a medical experiment in a "resettlement," aka concentration, camp, where he received an injection that damaged his mind.  This part was one that made me go, "What?"  Because the injection apparently killed everyone else who received it in horrible ways, and yet it just makes V into an anarchist with superhuman strength and computer skills...?  What?  And apparently a criminal mastermind to boot.  I think Moore was going for some sort of superhero origin story here (and V's mysterious identity contributes to this, too, and that worked) but I'm not convinced he truly pulled it off.  He's also a brutal, unnecessarily cruel character; what he did to Evey is absolutely unforgivable, unconscionable, and it was certainly not the only way to persuade Evey to his way of thinking.  She was halfway there already.  Yes, V is supposed to be an anti-hero instead of your typical mainstream hero...but I was never convinced of his heroism in any regard.

As for the art, I found it very bland, very washed out--which I at first thought might be an artistic choice, maybe saving splashes of color for particular points that would need emphasizing, but not--and with some of the characters being very hard to distinguish from each other.  There's also a shift in it at one point, probably because the original serialization of V was paused, and then resumed for the compilation later, but it means that some of the characters look quite different in later parts of the book than they did in the earlier parts, despite only about a year passing in the course of the book.

The end of the story is striking, and I commend Moore for going the way he did with it--however, Evey is not V, and I remain skeptical that she could pull off many of the things that V wanted her to, considering she didn't have any of the "abilities" that his background apparently gave him.  The strength of this book is clearly in its nature as a cautionary tale, and that is more important now than ever; its clear demonstration of the "slippery slope" is particularly noteworthy.  But I'm not sure that its message and ending can carry a story that was, ultimately, only so-so.  Overall, an okay read, but nothing I would go back to in the future.

2 stars out of 5.

Bone, Vol 1: Out From Boneville - Jeff Smith (Bone #1)

This was the final book for my 2016 reading challenge!  To fulfill the category of a graphic novel, I was originally planning to read a Sandman volume, but my boyfriend said it wouldn't be worth it if I wasn't going to read the entire series (I wasn't planning on it, graphic novels not being my thing) and directed me to the Bone series instead.  He's the graphic novel expert in our house, so I took his advice.

Out from Boneville is the first installment in a series about some creatures called Bone.  Fone Bone, the main character, is fleeing Boneville with his cousins Smiley Bone and Phoney Bone--the latter of whom is the crook who got them run out of town.  They're lost, wandering in the desert, when they find a strange piece of a map, and then are promptly separated by a swarm of locusts.  Eventually the three, through different routes, end up in a valley where they're stuck for the winter.  Fone Bone is being followed around by a red dragon who's keeping an eye out for him, defending him against rat-creatures who are looking for Phoney Bone and aren't opposed to eating anyone who gets in the way.  And he's helped throughout the winter by the animals that live in the valley, and is eventually connected with the human girl Thorn.

This is a charming story--the dragon is awesome--with a lot of comedic elements.  One rat-monster refuses to start a fire to cook Fone Bone because another rat-monster called it fat.  Fone Bone questions a bug's threats against him until the bug's giant older brother shows up.  And then of course there's Fone Bone's silly crush on Thorn.  The art is detailed without being overly complex; you don't need to spend a lot of time examining each page or panel to see what you need to see.  And the story is one that can apply to a lot of different age groups; this is just as appropriate for middle-grade readers as it is for adults looking for something light.  I don't feel any great need to continue this series--that's something that is missing here, a sense of urgency--but I also don't feel like I wasted my time on it.  Overall it was a good quick read to round out my final challenge category.

4 stars out of 5.

Sharaz-De: Tales from the Arabian Nights - Sergio Toppi

Let me start by saying this: Scheherazade is one of my favorite fairytales.  For those of you who don't know (and many don't; this one isn't as popular as the likes of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty) Scheherazade is the teller of the 1,001 Arabian Nights.  The term "1,001 Arabian Nights" itself comes from her story.  Here is (briefly) how it goes: One upon a time, the king of a middle-eastern kingdom found out his wife had been unfaithful to him.  He had her killed, and then decided to marry a new virgin every day and have her beheaded the next morning.  He did this to 1,000 women before Scheherazade, his vizier's daughter, volunteers to be the next bride.  Now, Scheherazade was a bit of a bookworm and an excellent storyteller.  The night of her marriage, she asked the king to let her say goodbye to her sister.  He agreed, and Scheherazade went into the next room to say her farewells.  But instead of saying goodbye, she began to tell her sister a story.  She didn't finish the story, but instead stopped partway through as dawn approached, leaving a cliffhanger.  The king, who'd been listening in on this conversation, decided to let Scheherazade live another day so that she could finish the story the next night, and he could know the ending.  The next night, she finished the first story and began a second, which she also left unfinished, and the king repeated his delaying of Scheherazade's execution.  This went on for a total of 1,0001 nights and 1,001 stories, at the end of which the king had fallen so madly in love with Scheherazade that he decided not to have her beheaded at all, and she gets to live on as his queen.

Sharaz-de doesn't follow this story.  The title obviously refers to Scheherazade, but she's only a minor character in this and the other stories don't even bolster her own.  The backstory is the same: king finds out wife is cheating, kills her, decides to do the same to a bunch of other women.  But in this version, Sharaz-de is from another country entirely.  She tells a story at night, finishes it, and then tells a second one--and finishes that one, too.  The king lets her live because he wants to hear more stories, so she goes on.  And the book just ends this way.  She tells a bunch of stories, but the resolution of him falling in love with her and letting her live is never actually reached.  It just, apparently, goes on forever.  The stories themselves are beautifully depicted, and full of people who do bad things getting what's coming to them from supernatural sources, but ultimately I felt jipped out of the story I thought I was getting.  The Scheherazade structure doesn't work in this book because the story isn't actually there; I feel like Toppi would have done better to nix that storyline all together and just depict the stories themselves, without revealing Scheherazade/Sharaz-de as the narrator, and simply titling it "Tales from the Arabian Nights."  It is tales, but the larger narrative structure is missing, which leaves the book somewhat lacking.

The art is beautiful and complex, whether it's in black-and-white or in color, but I'm not a huge fan of graphic novels in general, so finding that the story I'd hoped for and been led to expect by the title and initial set-up was just abandoned was highly disappointing.  At least I got my Popsugar Reading Challenge category of "A graphic novel" out of the way.

2.5 stars out of 5.

The Undertaking of Lily Chen - Danica Novgorodoff

This book isn't what I was expecting.  I was expecting some sort of magical realism, I think, with lots of ghosts and specters and cool shit like that, and some really complex moral dilemmas, and some intense character development, and I just didn't get that.  Maybe it's because I'm just not a graphic novel person.  I try and I try and I try to enjoy them, but I really just don't get as complex of a story out of a graphic novel as I do out of a prose novel.  Anyway, let's get down to it.

I liked the art in this.  It's a pretty unique style in regards to how the people are drawn, but the scenery is what really got to me.  There are some absolutely stunning full-page scenery pictures in here that I would love to be able to purchase as full-size posters.  The story had really great potential.  It revolves around a man named Deshi, whose brother Wei dies in an accident.  Deshi's parents want him to find a dead girl to serve as a "corpse bride" for Wei so he won't be alone in the afterlife.  Deshi sets out to complete his mission, but it turns out dead young women are few and far between in his neck of the woods.  In fact, the only young woman to be found at all is Lily Chen, and she is still very much alive...

But no matter how much potential the story had, I think it just fell flat.  I didn't get a ton of character development out of this, and some of the stuff, from the romance to the ending, just seemed to come out of nowhere.  This book is also Lord of the Rings-esque, and not in a good way; there is a lot of walking, without anything else much happening for much of the book.

Overall, I was disappointed.  I think I might have loved this if it had been written as a prose book, but as a graphic novel it just didn't capture me the way I thought it would.

2 stars out of 5.