Deadline by Chris Crutcher

I love the author, Chris Crutcher. He is honest and unflinching when he writes about teens. In Deadline, he continues this. I thought this would be a good book to read after reading John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, and after finishing it, I feel so even more strongly.

Ben Wolf is an 18 year old young man who is about to start his senior year of high school. He lives in a small Idaho town and has some big dreams: getting a track scholarship and getting out of that small town are chief among them. His plans change drastically when he is told by his doctor that he has a terminal illness and about one year left to live. 

His first decision is to keep this a secret. He does not want everyone in town to treat him differently. He wants to live as normal a life as possible. His second decision, based on the whole life remaining normal idea, is to refuse treatment. The chance of him surviving with treatment is minuscule. Rather than end his life that way, he decides that if this year is all he has left, he is going to live it to the fullest. 

This success of this book is due to the excellent, in-depth characters that Crutcher has created. They are richly detailed and multilayered. There are no caricatures in his writing. These people came alive for me. There was character-based surprise after surprise. The exploration of the power and problems involved in all levels of secrecy made me stop and think more than a few times. Hard to look at secrets the same way after reading this.

I might not put this on my middle school bookshelf, but in a high school classroom, definitely. I urge you to read it.  

Justice League: Gods And Monsters by Bruce Timm and J.M. DeMatteis

Back in the day, Marvel had a comic titled "What if...?" and DC answered with its own version: "Elseworlds." Each title would explore alternate possibilities for characters and story lines.  Like what if Aunt May had been bitten by the radioactive spider? What if Batman had become our sector's Green Lantern? This graphic novel, a collection of three different origin tales and a combined adventure, has that sort of feel to it.

In this graphic novel DC explores a different version of "The Trinity": Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. It starts with Superman. In this version he is the son of Zod, not Jor-El, and is brought up by a family of migrant workers.  He experiences a very different upbringing than Clark Kent did. He is not so much a hero for a great deal of the story. It is disconcerting to see Superman as arrogant and uncaring as he is portrayed. Although in the context of the story, it makes sense.

Batman is also very different. Kirk Langstrom is a brilliant doctor. When it is discovered that he has terminal cancer, he creates a cure for himself. The unanticipated side effect was that he became a vampirelike creature who needed blood to survive. In order to try and assuage his guilt, he vowed only to prey on evil men. And he found this was not as easy as it seemed.

Bekka of New Genesis is this reality’s Wonder Woman. Having come to Earth through a random boom tube fleeing Darkseid, she is rescued by a kind couple. She learns that while there is real goodness here, there is also evil and she is driven to protect her new home. Often her adventures end rather badly.

The three come together to to investigate a man who is offering “upgrades” to those who can afford them. These new “Forever People” are endowed with godlike powers. But, if they do not continue to pay for upgrades, they soon die. It doesn’t take them long to decide that the Earth is theirs to rule.

There are some epic battle scenes. Many the moral conundrum is considered and puzzled over. Does might make right? Who are these “heroes” who so casually take the lives of those they see as wrong-doers? Are they any better than the Forever People? What is to stop them from declaring themselves rulers of the world?

These fears are stoked by a Lois Lane who adamantly hates these three. She is suspicious and belligerent. So different from the many iterations of this character that have come before. Only Lex Luthor seems to be himself. And doesn’t that just sound like grand news?

I liked the feel of this graphic novel. The limited nature of the series gave the authors the freedom to really push a few boundaries that they may not have been able to if this was to be an ongoing series. I especially enjoyed the character development. I deeply enjoyed seeing variations of these iconic heroes. It was a fun read and worth my time.

I recommend this. All my comic book geeks out there, give it a shot.

Dark Night: A True Batman Story by Paul Dini

I was not sure what to expect when I first looked at this graphic novel. What I didn't expect, but most certainly got, was a riveting true story. Paul Dini, the author, uses the graphic novel format to write a stirring autobiography. He is not gentle with himself. I was intrigued by the story and impressed by the level of honesty Mr. Dini showed.

In writing about the tragic event where he was severely beaten, the author uses the cartoon and comic book characters he worked with to help portray his inner landscape. This psychological play is a powerful metaphor. The villains from Batman,chosen with great care, were there trying to sabotage him, and the Dark Knight was there with encouragement, insight, and tough love.

I would recommend this book highly. If you are not a graphic novel fan, I encourage you to give it a try. It is worth the read.

It's the End of the World as We Know It by Saci Lloyd

This was a whirlwind of a book! It took off fast and kept accelerating. The author's view of the wacky parallel universe was fun and not what I expected. For me, that's always a plus. The twists and turns kept me reading.

 I especially enjoyed the way the author handled the dialog. It gave me a good verbal image of each character.

 If you are looking for a lot of logic and a book that makes total sense, this may not be for you. If you're just looking for a good time, I say give it a shot.

Staked by Kevin Hearne

I really love this series. For the past several books the original main character, Atticus O'Sullivan, has been fighting a war with the world's vampires. A war that the vampires thought they won almost 2,000 years before. A war he aims to finish. But, as with the last book, O'Sullivan is no longer the only narrator. There are now two other druids besides him. Granuaile, his former apprentice, and Owen Kennedy, trapped on an island of slow time for the past two thousand years (and the druid who trained Atticus), are also rotating narrators in this volume. And each of his fellow druids also has agendas of their own.

It is a fast-moving, funny, and often violent book. The rotating narrations worked well for me. The weaving together of these stories made for an interesting ride. Hearne has an impressive knowledge of world mythologies and makes them understandable even to those who are not well-versed. I know a lot about a couple of ancient pantheons and little about a few others, but Hearne blows me away. The writing is confident and a lot of fun.

I listened to the audiobook; Luke Daniels does an excellent job of bringing each character, even the two hounds, to life. He vocally becomes each character and that enhances my enjoyment of this series.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who has read the previous volumes. This is part of a continuing story and could be a bit confusing to those who start the series here. If you haven't read this series, you should. It has entertained me for many, many hours.

The Imitation Game: Alan Turing Decoded by Jim Ottaviani

This was an absorbing graphic novel. It is a rarity for me in this format—nonfiction. The subject of the biography, Alan Turing, was an inherently intriguing man. As a science fiction nerd I knew some things about him: he was English, he was a genius, he broke the Nazi's Enigma code, he created the test for artificial intelligence, and he was convicted of the "crime" of homosexuality in the 1950's. What I did not know, filled the rest of the book.

The book unfolds in an unusual way, alternating between Turing narrating his own life and "interviews" with people from his life. I'm not sure about these. They seem to interview people from different periods of his life. Who is questioning them is not made clear. I wonder if it was meant to be a representation of the imitation game that Turing himself created. Who is telling the truth? Who is lying? To what degree is it a lie or a different interpretation of events? Those being questioned are represented in shades of black and white. Turing, narrating the story, seems to be able to interact with them.

He was a genius. This was made clear. His grasp of mathematics was phenomenal. He made created of the foundational principles of modern computer science. He used his mathematical skills to decipher the Nazi's Enigma codes. This was fiendishly difficult to do. And he was in "competition" with another there who believed that people were superior to machines when it came to code breaking. The codebreaking project so impressed Winston Churchill that he instructed the military to provide them with whatever they asked for.

The topic of his homosexuality is handled tactfully. It was apparently an open secret during his time working for the government during World War II. He himself never seemed to understand that it was literally a crime. The laws have since changed, but that did no good for him. It was especially a tragic irony that his war service was still classified and his character witnesses could not tell the court what it was he had done for the country. Rather shabby treatment.

The math in the book was sometimes hard for me to follow. I am an English teacher, though, and used to math being hard to follow. I think I will be rereading this. I want to go back and try to better understand more of the details. Get to know Turing’s ideas better. Get to know Turing better.

I would definitely recommend this. It is well worth the reading.

Robert A. Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy as adapted by Robert Lazaro

I have always been a big fan of Robert A.Heinlein. Citizen of the Galaxy was one of the first books of his that I read. I remember well meeting and getting to know the main character, Thorby Baslim. I must have reread his adventures 10 or 12 times. So I was predisposed to like the graphic novel.

The basic story starts with Thorby being bought at a slave market as a child by what seems to be a beggar. As he grows older, Thorby realizes there is more to his "father" than just a beggar. Eventually Thorby winds up on a Free Trader ship, adopted into their family as a way to repay a debt. Then he joins the military and sooner rather than later winds up on Earth, in a way that he could never have imagined. There he realizes that his troubles are far from over.

While this was a reasonably good adaptation of the story, I felt it could have been better served as a multivolume edition. There were some important subplots that had to be removed in order for the book to fit into a single edition graphic novel. I was sorry to see them gone.

As far as that goes, however, it was a good introduction to Heinlein's story that could entice new readers, younger readers, to read the book after finishing the graphic novel. I will look for a copy to put in my classroom library. It is worth a read.