BOOK REVIEW: Kai by Derek Vasconi

Review of Kai by Derek Vasconi (2016)

I was hesitant to begin this book based on the description.
Coming of age stories about young girls are usually not my area of interest.
But the author was persistent in their inquiries and willing to send me a paperback advance review copy.
Usually if anyone is determined enough to actually send me a paperback, once I get it in my hands I’m fairly consistent about getting the book read.
I warned the author that if I couldn’t think of anything nice to say about the book, I wouldn’t post a review, which is my general policy.
If you can’t think of anything nice to say, don’t say anything.
I’d rather promote the things I like instead of wasting time trashing things I don’t like.
I still do a fair amount of trash talking about things I don’t like, but I try to maintain a higher caliber of critical standards for this little book review blog.
Before I started reading the book, I flipped through it and was pleased to find that there were a few splash page intermissions tucked in between the text.
I like it when a book designer makes the extra effort to use design to make the experience of reading a book a little more immersive when done well, and I think this book does it well.
The use of title/author headers, icons as paragraph breaks, and watermarking is reserved and tasteful and does not distract from the main text.

I admit that I’m a bit of a Japanophile, having read a few manga series and watched several dozen anime.  I’m also a big fan of Japanese directors of samurai movies and Japanese horror movies.
Not so much of a fan that I would consider myself an expert, but more interested than your average consumer of modern media.
My interest has never been serious enough that I studied the language so that I could understand the media without translation or subtitles, but I can usually understand what’s happening and know a few words when I hear them.
The author uses two or three Japanese terms a page in the first fifty or so pages, but is kind enough to provide footnotes providing short definitions of the terms which is not as intrusive as it might sound and I appreciated as a reader that is not as familiar with Japanese terms as they would like to be.

As for the main story, I admit that my initial suspicion was correct.
I am not the target audience for a novel about two Asian girls a world apart with some sort of supernatural connection.
Although I admit that I enjoyed playing both of the Fatal Frame video games, in which you play as a young Japanese girl trying to survive solving a mystery with a magic ghost-capturing camera, the experience of playing as a young girl didn’t imprint itself upon me so much that I followed the Japanese Lolita/schoolgirl fetish further down the rabbit hole and started getting into Sailor Moon.
I do admit that I watched a couple of the Eko Eko Azarak movies, but I think that’s different enough to excuse without admitting to a Japanese schoolgirl fetish.
Despite being able to acknowledge that I am not the ideal target audience for this book, I can objectively recognize the quality of the writing and editing.
A fair amount of time and effort was put into writing this book and it shows.
Aside from some minor usage errors and awkward if grammatically correct sentence structure choices, the book is well-written and if you happen to be the target audience for an Asia-centric paranormal infused coming of age story I can recommend that you give this book a chance.
There is fairly liberal use of the words “fuck” and “motherfucker” and references to adult sexuality which, although not explicit, might discourage some parents from purchasing the book for young or impressionable readers.
I admit that my reading in contemporary Asian paranormal literature is limited and makes my ability to compare this book to other similar books likewise limited.
My only real comparison is Koji Suzuki’s collection of short stories Dark Water (originally published as Honogurai mizu no soko kara) but that’s stiff competition to compare an author’s first novel against.

If you want to know more about the author, you can read an interview with the author here.

BOOK REVIEWS: A Song Of Ice And Fire by George R. R. Martin

First off, *SPOILERS*.  Duh.
I won’t ruin your ability to enjoy reading the books but writing a review of the books without talking about what happens in them is hard to do.

A friend of mine made me watch an episode of the TV series.
It was the episode where the wildlings are attacking the wall.
I was definitely interested in watching the rest of the series, but I’m one of those “I have to read the book before I watch the film/show that is based on it.” kind of people.
I had downloaded a torrent with the 100 best Sci-Fi and Fantasy books and George R. R. Martin’s Song Of Ice And Fire series was in that torrent so I already had the books.
I work security third shift and it’s only a little bit busy the first and last hours of my shift so I get about six hours a night that I can do pretty much whatever I want as long as I’m where I’m supposed to be and in uniform.
I burned through the books at about 200-300 pages a night, which, due to the length of the books in this series is about a book a week.
I’ve read other books at work that have taken me longer to get through but the books in this series are captivating.
Usually I just read at work because there are a lot of other things I can do in my free time that I can do that don’t require me to be in one place for eight hours, although I usually just spend my time sitting in front of my laptop or TV anyway, but that’s not the point.
The point is that I’d be able to go home and do whatever I wanted to and I’d end up firing up my laptop and continuing reading whatever book in the series I was reading in bed until I fell asleep, because you have to sleep sometime.  But if I didn’t have to sleep I would have probably spent my time between work shifts voraciously consuming the contents of the books.
The books are easy to read.
I’m not qualified to determine what reading level a book is, but I’d say that the books are written at about a thirteen year old’s reading level.
I say this because aside from a few period specific vocabulary words like cuirass, G.R.R.M. uses plain words to weave his stories and that’s part of the beauty of reading his work.  He doesn’t try to over-verb and over-adjective his work into what most people think a literary book should look like.  Instead he describes scenes simply and beautifully.  There is a bit of stylistic wandering, but that’s integral to describing the world that the characters inhabit.  Sometimes you have to describe the mountains and the weather.
I remember trying to read the Lord Of The Rings books as a thirteen year old into playing Dungeons & Dragons and being unable to get into them.  The books were so dense with descriptions and legacy and lore that I had trouble figuring out what was happening to who and when.
I’d also say that the books are written at about a thirteen year old’s reading level because of the content.  There’s a lot of sex and violence.  There’s none of the chaste yearning impossibly chivalrous love between Aragorn and Arwen in Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings.  Martin’s characters are three-dimensional.  They are lusty, smelly, hungry, greedy, horny, brave, cowardly characters.  There is also real language.  Martin isn’t afraid to season his sentences with the occasional “fuck” and “cunt” which, as an adult, I appreciate.  I probably would have appreciated it as a thirteen year old too.  And if you’re a parent and the idea of your thirteen year old reading “dirty” words makes you feel faint with righteous indignation, just know that if your kids haven’t heard all of the dirty words and know what they mean by the time they’re thirteen they’re probably too sheltered and are going to get the shit bullied out of them in school and rightfully so.
Martin is famous for creating believable characters.  Creating characters that you come to know and love and care about what happens to them… then killing them.  The more graphically the better.
And he does.  Reading his books is like reading the comic book series The Walking Dead.  Better not get too attached to any of the characters because the world is a dangerous place and something bad has to happen to someone to move the plot forward and there’s only so many major characters so you should know better than to get upset when something horrible happens to one that you care about, but you get mad anyway because the author created their characters well enough that you care what happens to them.
The way that Martin writes the books, each one is, by necessity, a cliff-hanger.  Because if you tried to carry around the entire series in one big book, it would fuck up your spinal alignment.  Clocking in at over a thousand pages each and being five books in, reading the books as digital files is a small advantage.  You don’t have the sensory experience of reading a traditional book, but you also don’t have to carry around a brick of paper and just imagine the trees you’re saving.  Before reading the books I didn’t understand the memes I’d see about pushing Martin to write the next book in the series.  Now, like everyone else that has read his books I fantasize about him being ankle-chained to his writing desk with someone poking him with something sharp yelling “WRITE, MOTHERFUCKER, WRITE!” because at the end of the fifth book, which the TV show recently caught up with, one of the two best characters in the books ends up on the receiving end of the Julius Caesar routine and then the book JUST FUCKING ENDS.  Is he alive?  Is he dead?  Will he become a wight and descend upon the realm with a wight army?  We’ll just have to wait until Martin decides to finish and publish the next book to find out like everyone else sharpening the points of something to poke Martin with while ankle-chained to his writing desk.
One of the things I enjoyed about the books was that no one is safe from being taken out at any point.  Martin sets the precedent early on.  You start off the series with Ned Stark out at Winterfell and Ned doesn’t even make it to the end of the first book.  You start off with six direwolf pups and before the end of the first book you’re down to five.  Most of the castles don’t even make it to the end of the series as it stands so how safe do you think any of the people are?  The answer is “not safe at all”.  Despite figuring that out when Sir Ilyn Paine takes off Ned’s head, despite the fact that he had been promised he would be pardoned and sent to the wall, Martin sets you up and knocks you down over and over again.  I think Ned’s decapitation was my first “jaw-drop” moment, but Martin tricked me again and again into thinking that there’s no way that he would kill off certain characters at certain points in the book, but then he does and you keep reading.  It’s like being in an abusive relationship.  Not literally.  Well, yeah “literally” as in “literature” as in books, but not “literally” as in exactly.  But Martin tricks you into caring about his characters and then kills them over and over again so that you feel cautious about caring about what happens to any of them and then you read a few hundred pages and forget and then he does it again.
Anyone who has read the books or watched the show far in enough that they have gotten to the “red wedding” knows what I mean.
Who are my favorite characters?  Tyrion Lannister and Jon Snow.  Obviously.
Who are my least favorite characters? Daenerys and Davos.
They both spend countless pages wandering around in circles accomplishing much of nothing.
I also don’t care about princesses and pirates or what happens to them.
Your boat sunk?  Good.  Now I won’t have to read any more chapters about you and the ocean and storms on the ocean and water and dark clouds on the horizon and wind and waves and rain.  You survived your boat sinking?  Fuck.  Fuck you and your missing fingers.
I do like dragons, in theory, but Daenerys’ dragons don’t really do much of anything for the better part of five books aside from exist and breathe fire, and every now and then they breathe fire onto someone to move the plot along.  I know it’s kind of hard to imagine dragons as boring but Daenerys’ dragons are boring.
I’m also not really into the whole knight thing with the jousting and swordplay and chivalry and coats of arms and all that.
I know that the whole series is a “Sword & Sorcery” kind of fantasy book, so whenever Martin burns a page describing coats of arms or family lineages or who is next in line to rule which castle because of who married who hundreds of years before the continuity of the book I just pushed through that stuff to get to the next part.
Would I recommend reading the Song Of Ice And Fire?
Definitely.
Would I recommend reading the books before watching the show?
Yeah.
When you’re reading the books, you get a different mental image of what the characters look like.  I don’t know about you, but when I watch the movie before I read the book, I imagine the characters look like the actors that played the characters and that really annoys me, especially when the descriptions of the characters are different than the actors.
In the books, Tyrion is supposed to be ugly, and Brienne is supposed to be a “plain” manly woman.
In the show, Tyrion is a handsome little man, and Brienne, aside from being taller than everyone else, is a tree I would happily climb.
Since I’ve finished reading the books, and a new book is not forthcoming and the show has caught up with the books, I’ve started to watch the show.
I did the same thing with The Walking Dead and find the experiences similar in that the source material and the television show are different and enjoyable in different ways.
It’s taking me a while to reconcile the characters as I imagined them in my head while reading the books with the actors playing those characters but I’m sure that after a season or two the show will irrevocably taint the way I imagined the characters and I will always think of Peter Dinklage as Tyrion the way I thought of Kit Harrington as Jon Snow because I had watched an episode that revolved around that actor/character before starting to read the books.
Will I stick to reading the books before watching the show?  I don’t know.
The books only come out one every three or five years and the show is a bit different from the books and looks like it’s planning on forging on past the books, so I think that once I get caught up on watching the show I might just carry on with that form of following the story and get caught up on the books as they come out, even though it will be a bit like reading the source material for a film after having already watched it, but I guess that’s what I’ll have to settle for since there’s no one poking Martin with something sharp to make him keep up with the expectations of the fans of the books.