Impulse by Steven Gould

Please do not judge this book by its cover, which is dour and subdued and drab. (Only one cover in a thousand ever quite looks like anyone involved really wanted it to look, anyway -- most of the time, it just hints at what it could have been.) Impulse is the third novel in a loose series about teleporters in the modern world -- following Gould's excellent first novel Jumper, nearly twenty years old now, and Reflex, but not the side-novel Jumper: Griffin's Story, which was related to the movie made from Jumper rather than the very separate world of the novels -- and Gould is just as colloquially readable a writer and engagingly compelling a plotter as he has ever been.

(The way I'd describe Gould to someone my age or older: remember how it was easier to just keep reading a Heinlein juvenile novel than to stop and do anything else? Gould has that same matter-of-fact, unflashy ability to roll out a story where putting it down is harder than reading just one more page.)

As Jumper was the story of Davey Rice, abused teen of an alcoholic father (and inadvertent discoverer of a very Bester-esque form of teleportation), and Reflex was the story of Davey's love Millie and how she saved him from the shadowy organization that wanted to break him to serve them, Impulse is the story of their daughter Milicent "Cent" Rice, born in hiding and kept secret from the world her entire life.

But Cent is fifteen when Impulse begins and even the best-behaved, most parents-loving teenager is going to want some space from her parents -- and some friends outside of them. So, once Cent learns how to "jump" herself -- as in Bester's Stars My Destination, at least some subset of humanity can learn to teleport, given the right life-or-death situation -- her parents eventually give in to her pleas and move from their secret isolated Arctic lodge to a typical house in a typical American suburb to give Cent the chance to live a typical life as a highschooler.

It doesn't work out that simply, of course -- that suburb has its own problems, and Cent isn't the type not to stick her nose in and try to make things better -- but Impulse never descends into melodrama. Gould instead manages the tricky feat of telling a story that includes dramatic events but isn't defined by them, and, which is possibly even trickier, creates real tension in a story about a family of teleporters without resorting to the usual genre trappings.

So: look past that drab cover, and this is a swell book -- suitable for older teens, as well as most skiffy-friendly readers above those years -- that has a certain flavor of Classic SF while still being modern and telling a great story mostly from the point of view of an up-to-date, contemporary young woman. I can't say that Gould did Cent's voice "right" -- I'm not a girl, and haven't been a teenager for two decades -- but he gave her a great voice, and a great story to tell in that voice, so I'm pretty confident that even readers with a much more immediate knowledge of the inside of teenage girls' heads would really enjoy it.

"Who Could That Be at This Hour?" by Lemony Snicket

"Lemony Snicket" -- both the pseudonym Daniel Handler has used when writing for pre-adults and the narrator of the thirteen-book "Series of Unfortunate Events" series -- has been mostly missing since that series ended in 2006, with only a few minor picture books and similar ephemera in the six years following. But Snicket came back in late 2012 with "Who Could That Be at This Hour?", the first in a series of four telling the story of the young Snicket and his first mission for a mysterious organization, at the age of not-quite-thirteen, in the broken-down town of Stain'd-by-the-Sea.

The four books collectively will be called "All the Wrong Questions," and they take their tone and style from Raymond Chandler and classic hardboiled fiction as "Unfortunate Events" took its cues from penny dreadfuls and The Perils of Pauline. The narrative voice, though, is very similar -- Handler, once again speaking as Snicket, here looking back on Snicket's life and failures from a viewpoint much farther in the future.

I can't detail the intricacies of the plot to you now; I read it too long ago. But I can remember the tone and the style and the amazingly assured voice -- and, in case I'm making it sound too dour and dull, also the humor and sheer reading pleasure of At This Hour. Handler has been a compellingly readable writer since The Basic Eight, his first novel, and no matter what else he does, he never loses track of the power of his writing to grab a reader and compel her to just keep reading. At This Hour is smart and melancholy and funny and wry and masterful, and I'm thrilled to know that there will be four more books to follow it.

(It's also well illustrated by Seth, cartoonist of It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, and his cartoony and cleanly illustrative style is perfect for Snicket.)

Peanut by Ayun Halliday and Paul Hoppe

Teenagers are trying to invent themselves, more than anything else: to become who they want to be, just as soon as they can figure out what that is. And how better to do that then to just announce who and what you are? Sadie decided that's what she'd do, when she started her sophomore year at a new high school: she'd start off by telling all of her new classmates about her life-threatening peanut allergy.

There was just one catch: Sadie didn't really have a peanut allergy. It was just something to make her more interesting at the new school, a way to attract attention and new friends. But a peanut allergy doesn't go away, so she was stuck with living her lie -- as long as she could.

Peanut is a graphic novel for teens, written by indy cartoonist Ayun Halliday (East Village Inky) and drawn by illustrator/cartoonist Paul Hoppe -- and, although Halliday's previous comics work (and a lot of her other books) were autobiographical, this one is purely fiction, as far as I can tell. (So many comics aimed outside of the long-underwear ghetto are memoirs these days that I won't be the only one wondering about this.)

Hoppe uses a crisp, entirely realistic style to tell this story -- mostly thin blue lines, with a splash of red for Sadie -- and Halliday's first-person narration lets Sadie tell her story in a similarly clear, direct way. Sadie finds attention -- and a new boyfriend -- with her new peanut allergy, but of course she doesn't know if she'd have those friends, and that quirky boyfriend (he sends her notes in origami and refuses to use a cellphone) without the big fake revelation.

Peanut is a closely observed story of modern suburban teens, with nasty queen bees, friends as devoted as only fifteen-year-olds can be, and one very conflicted teen girl at the middle of it all. It's heavily narrated by Sadie, as focused through her point of view as a traditional first-person novel would be, so the reader stays in her head (and, presumably, on her side) the whole time. The stakes aren't particularly high here -- just Sadie's honesty and happiness, though that's not nothing -- unlike so much of the popular current teen fiction. It's a bit conventional -- it doesn't go in any of the interesting directions that a more fantastical book about a lying teen girl like Justine Larbalestier's Liar does -- but it has a good heart, it tells a good story, and it looks good along the way.

Poseidon: Earth Shaker by George O'Connor

I've said it several times and several ways, so I might as well be blunt this time: George O'Connor, with this series, could and should be to the current generation of young readers what Edith Hamilton was to mine and the generation or two before that. He's in the middle of a series of graphic novels about the Greek gods -- so far there have been Zeus, Athena, Hera, and Hades, with Aphrodite promised and, with luck, another half-dozen or so to follow that -- that combine deep scholarship, a thoughtful attention to the core elements of stories, a master draftsman's eye and hand for pages that tell those stories brilliantly, and a narrative voice that speaks straight to younger readers without ever talking down to them.

This time, with Poseidon, he takes on one of the least relatable of the Olympians -- sure, Hades seems cold and distant, but his story is all about wanting some human contact. Poseidon, on the other hand, is a figure of power and distant wrath in the myths, but rarely if ever descends to the human level -- he doesn't chase mortal women like Zeus, or bless a chosen city like Athena. O'Connor turns that around by letting Poseidon tell his own story...and we still don't get that close to him, but that's on purpose.

So Poseidon tells us how he, Hades, and Zeus split the world three ways -- the earth would be common to them all, but Hades had the underworld, Zeus the sky, and Poseidon the seas, as it must be. And then he tells the stories of some of his children -- as he says, "my children have tended to be monstrous" -- from the cyclopes Polyphemos to Theseus, and other stories, of how he contended with Athena for the patronage of the city that would become Athens, of how he and others rebelled against Zeus, of his dream of being free of his father Kronos's belly. And through it all, Poseidon is distant, mercurial, changing -- like the deep sea itself.

This book has a palette filled with deep greens and blues, as it must -- and O'Connor's art is both supple and muscular to show the battles and confrontations of this most contentious of gods. These books are really good -- O'Connor provides extensive annotations to his pages, plus thoughtful afterwords on the sources and stories, plus lists of further reading, plus discussion questions (suitable for book club or classroom), so you really couldn't ask for more. These are some of the deepest, best stories the human race has, and O'Connor is doing a magnificent job of bringing them to new life.

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M. Valente

Catherynne M. Valente's first book for teens, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, came about almost by accident, sparked by Valente's adult novels, financial need, and a swell of fan support. Circumnavigated was also written in public, 19th-century-style, and was inevitably episodic because of that.

But the resulting product won the Andre Norton award for 2010, and (as far as I can tell) has been by far her bestselling book to date, so Valente returned to September and to Fairyland with a second novel, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, written and published all at once in physical form, like most books. Fell Beneath has a clearer arc than Circumnavigated, but it's still a novel of episodes -- Valente has a joy in discovery and storytelling, and sends her heroine through another series of strange situations and characters in the tradition of Alice in Wonderland and a thousand other books of wonders.

This time, the title doesn't really refer to September herself -- or not necessarily so. When September returns to Fairyland, after a year away and countless wishes to go back, she finds that her shadow, so roughly taken from her in the first book, has become Halloween, the Queen of Fairyland-Below -- the dark image of regular Fairyland, as Fairyland is of our world (and, as Valente implies, so on and so on). Halloween has conjured a creature, the Alleyman, to steal the shadows of Fairyland's inhabitants to bolster her own kingdom's population and magic and energy and power, making her revels ever bigger and fancier and wilder.

It's a situation that can't go on -- Fairyland-Below's depredation will soon deracinate Fairyland so much that the latter will become just another bland district of the real world -- and Fairyland-Below, no matter what Halloween thinks, can't survive after that for very long itself. Clearly, someone needs to fix things -- some smart, determined girl, a little older and wiser than last time, and, most importantly, having grown up just enough that she is no longer quite heartless, as children are. [1]

So September goes beneath, to find and confront her shadow-self and to make things right again. Along the way, she is joined by the shadows of two of her old compatriots from the first book -- and she welcomes them as anyone welcomes seeing old friends in a dangerous new place. But these shadows are not her old friends -- or, to be more precise, are not exactly her old friends, but the hidden and unexpressed parts of them set free -- and Halloween doesn't want to become September's shadow again, and the problems of Fairyland-Below will not be solved that easily. September must undertake a new quest, to go to the bottom of the bottom of the world beneath to find a mythical sleeping prince and wake him up.

Valente's vision of Fairy is focused on women -- quietly, in a way that girls might not notice but some boys and older readers will, used to fairy worlds populated primarily by male creatures -- and on the lives and choices of women. Valente's narrative voice is not dismissive of Halloween's desires and concerns; it knows that being someone else's shadow forever is nothing to look forward to. So there's a tension in September's quest -- it needs to be done; this land needs to be saved -- to do with the cost of the saving and the free choices of the people being saved. What do the shadows want -- what does the sleeping prince want? Will they act out the roles of the old story, or can they be what they really want to be -- the way September could be free in Fairyland and Halloween could create a realm of shadows to live and rule and revel in? What kind of Fairyland will September create or save?

So Fell Beneath is not deep and thoughtful and fraught with moral consequences for a young-readers novel; it's deep and thoughtful and fraught with moral consequences because it's a young-readers novel; it's a story about what is right and possible and true for readers who are dealing with that day by day themselves. And it's at least as deep and sharp-eyed as Circumnavigated is, with an added sense of growing up and taken on responsibilities that will not go away, no matter how much one wants to run away to Fairyland. Fell Beneath is a great fantasy novel, rich and witty and full of wonders, told by a master storyteller with some important things to say.


[1] Valente has a sharp-eyed take on that old saw -- I know it from Peter Pan, where Barrie used it to broadly similar ends -- that children are free and happy and heartless, mixing it into an implicit theory of adolescence that she allows to bubble up in the narrative voice several times in Fell Beneath. Children are indeed heartless, but September is beginning to become a young woman, and so she has a heart -- a not-entirely-formed, rough, raw thing, but one that has started to beat and feel and affect her actions. The plot of Fell Beneath could not happen without that heart, and without September having grown up that much -- the whole book is, along with so much else, a quiet rebuke there to the Problem of Susan.

Bushman Lives! by Daniel Pinkwater

For more than two generations now, weird, quirky kids have been peering out at the world, sure that there must be some hidden reason behind it all. They've looked around for those explanations, to religion and science and superstition and gut instinct, with varied levels of success. But the smartest and luckiest ones are the kids who found the novels of Daniel Pinkwater, and realized that the world is both unknowable and wonderful, that explanations are absurd but still worth chasing, and that the possibilities are even wider and more amazing than they have dreamed.

Pinkwater's books are all odd, all a lovely mixture of sweet and goofball, smart and nutty. They're all deeply pleasurable to sink into, especially if you are -- or were -- one of those weird, quirky kids. But some of them are more than that -- some books, like the sublimely Dada Young Adult Novel, or the two "Snarkout Boys" stories, or the pseudo-autobiographical The Education of Robert Nifkin, see Pinkwater integrate all of his themes and obsessions, from Yiddishkeit to '50s Chicago, from smart outsiders to his own kind of magical realism, and create great, moving novels even more impressive than his usual work. Pinkwater's usual books are a wonder and a lifeline, but his best books are world treasures. And Bushman Lives! is one of the strongest novels of Pinkwater's long career.

Pinkwater's deepest and most resonant novels usually draw from his own life, and Bushman  continues that tradition, following the story of teenager Harold Knishke, a smart, fat kid in the Chicago of the 1950s. But Bushman isn't a tightly focused book; it's as much about Harold's friend, the budding sailor Geets Hildebrand, as it is about Harold himself, and even more so, it's a book about being that kind of kid in that time and place, in a Pinkwaterian world full of wonders and oddities. Bushman also slots into the recent sequence of loosely linked Pinkwater novels, from The Neddiad to The Ygyssey to The Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl, with Molly the Dwerg and her friend the Wolluf showing up here as important secondary characters.

As usual with Pinkwater, the plot isn't the point -- that plot, loosely, is "Harold wanders around Chicago, one hot summer, learning about people and starting to get serious about art." It's probably as close to an autobiographical novel as Pinkwater will ever come, but it's not that close; Harold's adventures could only take place in a Pinkwater book, not in the real world. Everything that happens in Bushman is one turn away from the real world, a click or two more heightened than actual reality, in that brighter, more vibrant world we all know from our imaginations.

And Bushman himself? He's a famous gorilla, who lived in Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo from 1930 to his death in 1951. In our world, his skin is stuffed and on display at the Field Museum. But Harold and Geets, in a Pinkwater world just a few years after his "death," insist that he never died, that he escaped from men and their zoos to a better place. And in the world of a Daniel Pinkwater novel, that's not just the answer we want to be true, it's the way to bet.

Bushman Lives! is a wonderful, kaleidoscopic, lovely, deep, thoughtful, silly novel about growing up and figuring out what to do with your life. It will be immeasurably helpful to uncountable young people, as earlier Pinkwater novels have been. And it's also a window into Pinkwater's world, one of the clearest and best-positioned windows yet, to give the rest of us a view of a world more interesting and purposeful and meaningful than our own. To put it more simply: it's one of the best books of one of our best writers.

Cardboard by Doug TenNapel

TenNapel is a successful and accomplished maker of cartoon images -- he created Earthworm Jim, and has spent the last decade or so making excellent graphic novels like Ghostopolis (see my review) and Bad Island (also see my review) -- who I never see discussed among the usual comics circles. This is, as far as I can tell, because his books are all for younger readers and mostly published by companies like Scholastic (which has an impressive getting-comics-into-the-hands-of-kids operation, benefiting Kazu Kibuishi and Raina Telgemeier as well as TenNapel), and because they are very slightly formulaic and young-adult-ish in the best way: they're about kids old enough to take responsibility and do serious things who start to do just that. They're also very energetic and full of wild inventive energy -- so far, Ghostopolis is the best of the ones I've read, but Cardboard, which has the wonderful McGuffin of magical cardboard which can be worked into any object, person, or thing, is coming up close behind it. Like Fat Albert, if you're not careful, you just might learn something -- but TenNapel's enthusiasm for his characters and stories is worth that risk.

(Antick Musings notes the generosity of the Thing 2 Foundation in lending its own precious copy of Cardboard to Antick Musings for the purpose of this review.)

Read in September

Before I get into the list, let me backtrack. When I started Antick Musings, I edited SFF professionally, and so didn't write much about genre fiction -- certainly not in a critical way. And I insisted that I didn't do reviews or criticism; I did write about books I read, but not in a systematic way.

Well, that SFF-editing job ended abruptly, and my subsequent job was in a different part of publishing entirely. (Though I still try to keep to the same general rule: I don't shit where I eat, so I only talk briefly and mostly positively about business books, except for occasional potshots at those evil, money-grubbing bastards, the consultants.)

Gradually -- in the manner of a frog being boiled -- Antick Musings moved from being a general blog by someone who worked in book publishing into a book blog, and then into almost exclusively a book-review blog, in which I covered every last book I read in an essay-like post. (The year-long Book-A-Day stretch of 2010 and early 2011 mostly accomplished this.) This isn't what I intended, and -- though it's taken a while to realize it -- isn't what I want, either.

So I'm going to try to go back to something I've said several times and never quite lived up to: covering all of the books I read in a given month by (approximately) the end of that month, and tossing them quickly into a month-end post if need be. Yes, it's more elegant to have an essay, each with its own post, for every book I read, but I don't think many of you care about most of these books and it's a huge commitment of time and energy when my day-job is sucking ever more of both out of me every day.

(I'm happy to write essay-like posts on occasion when someone else wants to pay me for them -- and I'm open to offers of egoboo, traffic, and other non-convertible currencies -- but doing them for everything here strikes me as overkill.)

Those quick takes might still end up being separate posts, if they're long enough (I have a vague longer-than-the-book-cover metric that I use), and they have for a lot of the books below. Even when I proclaim I've got a new, specific, organized way of doing things, I still manage to overcomplicate things; I've sat on this post for a week, trying to get the missing reviews "done" before I posted it. Finally, with enough sleep and free time on a Saturday, I'm closing it up and backdating it to where it belongs -- there will be some edits for links (and maybe to add short reviews here) later, but there always is, anyway.

Kazu Kibuishi, Explorer: The Mystery Boxes (9/4)

Laura Lee Gulledge, Paige by Paige (9/4)

Seymour Chwast, Dante's Divine Comedy (9/6)

William Carlos Williams, Paterson (9/6) -- It's one of the great long poems in the English language, and (I think) one of the most purely American great poems. It's also about the closest large city to me -- but, mostly, it's about how a man is a city, or a city is a man, or a river is a life, or how poetry can encompass absolutely everything in a life or a mind. It's difficult to describe, though I've never found it difficult to read. And I've now read it once a decade for the last three, getting a new copy each time, though not on purpose. If you only know Williams from the wheelbarrow or the plums in the icebox, you're missing a lot. No ideas but in things!

(The cover above is the prior edition -- the one I read 5 or 7 or 10 years ago -- not the current one, which doesn't seem to exist anywhere online.)

Mark Kalasniko, Freeway (9/7)

Daniel Pinkwater, Bushman Lives! (9/10) -- This one deserves a real essay, and will get one. The short form: Pinkwater's novels are all good, but some are magnificent. This is one of the magnificent ones.

David Malki!, Dapper Caps and Pedal-Copters (9/17)

Doug TenNapel, Cardboard (9/18)

Kazu Kibuishi, Amulet, Book 5: Prince of the Elves (bound galleys) (9/19) -- I've covered all four previous books in reasonable depth: one, two, three, four. And this volume is more middle, like the last book but even more so. It's an entertaining graphic novel series for tweens, but not much more than that -- any comparisons with Jeff Smith's Bone are quite strained. Still, Kibuishi tells a good story, and I still have hopes that he'll hit a point when he stops complicating it and starts knitting it back together for a big finish. But, for now, it's enough to note that it exists, it's very popular, and it's pretty good for what it is.

Susan Cain, Quiet (9/20)

Raina Telgemeier, Drama (bound galleys) (9/21)

Garth Mueller, Frommer's Los Angeles Day by Day (9/22) -- I'm holding this one to review it with a similar book from the Lonely Planet folks. Honestly, I should probably wait until after my big vacation to review all of the travel books, since only then will I be able to really say how useful they were. But I won't.

Thomas Frank, Pity the Billionaire (9/25)

Andi Watson & Tommy Ohtuska, 15-Love (9/26)

William Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor (9/27)

Darwyn Cooke, Richard Stark's Parker: Book Three: The Score (9/28)


I do plan to keep writing essay-like posts for books that I think deserve them, or that will be of greater interest to the people I think are reading this blog. (I look at traffic figures every so often, and continue to be amazed that people actually are reading this blog.) That probably means SFF, most of the time, but I've learned by this point not to make promises.

Teen Boat! by Dave Roman and John Green

Not every book comes with a fool-proof litmus test, but this one certainly does. Just read the tag-line on the cover:

The angst of being a teen! The thrill of being a boat!

Now, having read that, you will have had one of two reactions: either you smiled, laughed, or otherwise enjoyed it, or you scowled and found it silly. If you were one of the latter, leave now: the joys of Teen Boat! are not for you.

Written by Dave Roman, drawn by John Green, Teen Boat! is the story of one boy with an unusual condition: he can transform into a small yacht (unless he gets water in his inner ear, which causes him to lose control over his changes). It's no secret: his name is Teen Boat, and everyone in his school knows about what he can do, from top jock Harry Cobbs to alluring exchange student Nina Pinta Santa Maria to his boyhood friend Joey Steinberg (who clearly hides some transformative secret of her own).

The Teen Boat stories were originally published in mincomics, so they tend to be short -- some multi-parters, but mostly 8-10 pages long. They're all tongue-in-cheek -- as the names may have already tipped you off -- with an amusing and only slightly juvenile sense of humor. Teen Boat battles pirates, struggles with love (both as a teen and as a boat!), takes his driving test, and works at a restaurant -- just the right mix of every-teen and completely wacky.

Teen Boat is utterly awesome, and, if you don't get that, you must have barnacles on your hull. Teen Boat! Long may he sail!

Salt Water Taffy: Caldera's Revenge, Part 2 by Matthew Loux

Rubber-hose animation will never be dead as long as Matthew Loux is still cartooning (and I hope that will be for a long, long time). His figures have a looping, rubbery energy, defined by utterly precise black lines that always feel quickly dashed off. No matter what stories he's telling, his pictures have a deep energy and verve, as if his figures can only barely be contained by the page.

For the last few years, we've mostly seen Loux with his Salt Water Taffy series for younger readers, telling the adventures of two boys one summer in one of those towns where strange things just keep happening -- in this case, it's Chowder Bay, on the Maine coast. (I reviewed the first two books together, and then the third separately, with the fourth ending up in a stories-about-kids roundup.) Caldera's Revenge! Part 2 is the fifth book in the series and -- as that title hints -- the second part of the story that began in the last book.

It picks up right after the cliffhanger of the first part of Caldera's Revenge -- in which the nasty sperm whale of the title has attacked a boat in which our heroes are riding and hurtled one of them, Jack, into the sea. Jack is rescued, which is good -- but by a ship of two-hundred-year-old ghost whalers chasing Caldera, which is not as good. Most of this fifth volume follows Jack on board that ship, with a secondary plot following his brother, Benny, trying to figure out how to stop Caldera while their friend Angus fixes up the boat to go find Jack.

In the end, they all do something -- ghost pirates, both boys, their lost kid talking-quid friend from the last volume (just trying to get home to his pod, and terrorized by Caldera), and even that big ol' nasty whale -- to fix the situation and get everything back the way it's supposed to be. This volume has more action and adventure than the previous books, though it's not as funny and kid-sized as the others -- that's the trade-off, I suppose. And Loux's art -- I haven't even mentioned his detailed backgrounds; he's got a fantastic range to go with his energy and style -- make every page a joy to look at and a bolt of pure movement. It may well be true that there's nothing better in life than being a kid during summer, and the Salt Water Taffy books evoke that feeling of freedom and possibility like nothing else in the world.

Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler, Illustrated by Maira Kalman

Handler has written for younger readers before: under his pen-name Lemony Snicket, he's written one long, excellent middle-grade series (A Series of Unfortunate Events; see my review of the last book) and several one-offs, mostly of those ostensibly for even younger readers than that. But Why We Broke Up is a novel aimed at teenagers, a YA novel rather than a middle-grade, and it appears under Handler's own name, both of which feel important. Why We Broke Up is also told in first person by a character in the story -- the novel itself is a long letter that she writes to her ex-boyfriend to accompany a box full of the detritus of their relationship -- and in an emotionally colored, immediate voice much more like Handler's adult novels (particularly his first book, the similarly teenager-focused The Basic Eight) than like the cool, detached, almost nihilistic voice of Lemony Snicket.

Minerva aims Why We Broke Up directly at that ex-boyfriend, Ed, in the way that angry ex-lovers always do. She's young and unsteady and intensely wounded by what Ed did -- what that was, we don't learn until late in the novel -- and digging through the wreckage of their lives to grab each memento and stab it back at him, hoping to hurt him the way he hurt her.

Min suspects, though -- as we readers do -- that he won't be hurt the way she was; that he doesn't have that capacity. Min and Ed were at opposite ends of high-school life: she was a foreign-movie-loving, semi-outcast underachiever, while he was a thoughtless, beloved basketball star. How could they have anything in common to begin with? How could they ever get together?

Why We Broke Up tells that story -- what they found in common, how they spent their time, how they fell in love. And, then, how Ed screwed it all up. Handler seamlessly creates the voice of a real young woman -- as he did in Basic Eighty, though Min isn't nearly as screwed up as Flannery -- and tells his story entirely through what she tells Ed (and, through him, us).

Why We Broke Up is also heavily illustrated -- there's a full-page painting by Kalman to begin each chapter, plus some smaller pieces as well -- but those are entirely illustrations; they show the things that Min is writing about (and throwing into that box) rather than telling the story in a direct way. Kalman's art has a loose, quick quality about it that fits well with Min's headlong letter-writing; they both feel like things done immediately to express immediate emotion.

Why We Broke Up has the immediacy and emotion of a broken heart; it's a thoughtful and heartfelt story of two people who just didn't connect the way they should have, and what that meant for one of them. Even if you're no longer a teenager, you might well appreciate Why We Broke Up if your heart was ever broken. (Also, it has a great back-cover line-up of quotes from fine writers talking about their own heartbreaks -- my favorite is from Brian Selznick: "I knew I had to break up with Ann Rosenberg after she chose a teal dress for the prom. I had never heard of teal. Also, I was gay.")

I Have No Idea At All Where This Comes From

But I am stealing it anyway, because it is awesome:

(It also reminds me of some psuedo-Impressionist watercolors -- also with tasteful A.A. Milne characters -- in the hallway at the hospital pediatrics ward last weekend, where I walked Thing 2 around and around for much of the day. No picture reference for those, and I'd be quite happy never to see them again, given the circumstances.)

The Perils of a Star Wars-Themed Nursery

Your little munchkin could get attacked by a wampa.

(Classy & fun nursery for this particular cute li'l peanut from Apartment Therapy, via Tor.com.)