April Gutierrez -- Best Literature Picks of 2007
Continuing in the same vein as my top book of 2007, 12 Kingdoms from Tokyopop's YA Popfiction line, I also immensely enjoyed another novel from that imprint, Hiroshi Ishizaki's Chain Mail. Chain Mail revolves around a mysterious online role-playing game played by several junior high girls where the lines between the virtual world and the real one blur in sometimes dangerous ways. The writing is taut and suspenseful, the characters well-fleshed out and the central mystery clever. Ishizaki sets the bar high for other YA novels.
Another favourite was Bill Willingham's graphic novel Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall , a return to form for the author and this series. This time out, Willingham tackled 1001 Nights, with Snow White in the Scheherazade role, prisoner to a Sultan, telling stories that reveal significant details about several of the Fables' pasts. Both art and writing are sharp and a pleasure to read.
Dark Horse's re-release of Harlan Ellison's Spider Kiss brings this fable of music industry evil into the 21st century. This evil incarnate, rocker Stag Preston, may seem quaint by today's standards, but Ellison's morality play is still topical and a gripping read and good reminder of why I treasure Ellison's writing.
Emma Bull's Territory , a retelling of the events leading up to the fight at the O.K. Corral was a marvelous blend of factual events, fantastic elements, real people and fictional characters. Bull's touch is deft, subtly rendering the magic underlying the events and creating two superb leads to interact with the cast of real people. I will never think of Wyatt Earp in quite the same way ever again.
Book nine in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, White Night, came out in early 2007 and proved to be as entertaining a read as any of the others in the series. Butcher continues to pull together the disparate threads of the on-going series into a cohesive over-arching plot, while infusing new elements that will no doubt bear fruit in later volumes. Harry Dresden remains an affable, put upon protagonist that you can't help but root for . . . especially when up against an entire court of vampires.
Perhaps my sentimental favourite of the year is a book I'd put off reading for some time, because to do so would be to admit the series was finished, over...The final volume of Stephen King's epic _Dark Tower_ series, the eponymously named Dark Tower , vastly improved upon the two book that preceded it, and while others may quibble about the ending, I think it was absolutely perfect, the icing on the cake for what remains my most beloved fantasy series. And now that I'm done, I really do need to go back and reread it from the beginning.
Of the books I didn't review, but GMR did, I definitely enjoyed Rob Thurman's sequel to last year's Nightlife, Moonshine, which was more fast-paced urban fantasy set in a fictional New York where trolls really do live under bridges, the werewolves have their own Mafia and the main character, Cal _really_ knows the drawbacks of being a half-breed. I look forward to a third book!
And, as has happened before, one of my favourites of the year was a book I should have reviewed for GMR, Haruki Murakami's novella, After Dark. Nothing much happens in this slow moving, elegiac telling of a few hours in the life of a teenaged girl (whose perfectly beautiful sister is literally sleeping her life away, captive to the gaze of a mysterious man), a musician who kows both sisters and the employees and patrons of a brothel, but as always, just being along for the ride with Murakami is a treat. Some day I'll actually get around to reviewing the bulk of his works for B MR...
