There can be only one.

Cat icon, that is. Because Squeaker demanded iconning.

Options:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

[Poll #1365743]

P.S.-Dear people on the other side of the building: It's 1:20 A.M. Your party should be dying down, not consistently getting louder. You're probably the same people who had their radio going until at least 3 A.M. the other night when it was raining, aren't you?

The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

I wasn’t as impressed with this book as I was the first. Primarily because the first book was about a ruthless little girl who survived through manipulations and lies and had every orphan’s dream of finding her parents, only to learn that they were almost literally the parents from Hell. This book made her narrative secondary to that of a goody-goody boy with daddy angst who gets an all-powerful knife. One is fun and fresh and original. The other is a prime example not only of why I get suspicious of any genre fiction with a young male lead, but also of why I get leery of anything that starts out focused on a girl, and then shifts the focus to a boy when he shows up.

There are times when I wish my expectations would let me down. Also, I thought Will was something of a little prig.

( spoilers )

manhwa: Very! Very! Sweet Vol 1

Tsuyoshi is the heir to a wealthy Japanese family who runs wild. Determined to bring him under control, his grandfather tells him that they’re of Korean descent, and that his choices are to go to Korea and get back in touch with his roots, or to be kicked out of the family. So with rudimentary Korean and his relative/guardian, Ito, Tsuyoshi moves to Korea. There, his neighbor is Kang Be-Ri, a penny-pinching girl who reworks scraps and discards into “new” things that she can sell. Naturally, they immediately hate each other.

The eventual outcome seems fairly obvious, but there are setups for all kinds of romantic misadventures, though no worse than the average kdrama. It’s rather cute and fun, though, and the characters are likable. There are also a lot of cultural jokes playing on Tsuyoshi and Ito’s unfamiliarity with the language, as well as their translated names (Dan Mu-Ji and Dan Sam-Shik) somehow being comical in Korea. Dan Mu-Ji, I think, because of a song, and Dan Sam-Shik because of a popular kdrama character. (Played by Hyun-Bin, apparently.) I’m not sure how long the language jokes can be pulled off, but it works well for now.

This is by the same manhwagas as Chocolat, which I haven’t read, but have heard is good.