jmovie: Kamikaze Girls

Briefly:

You may recall that I read and adored the book this movie is based on not long ago.  (Read it!  Readitreaditreadit!)  The movie changes some things up, but leaves the base intact.  Unfortunately, a large part of the book's appeal is how incredibly strong and engaging Momoko's voice is, and that doesn't carry over as well to a visual medium, though the strange outlook on life and jaded Lolita-ness are still there.

( brief comments on the changes )

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1.  HA!  LJ did give me more icons!  Yay!  It just took them a few hours...

2.  I have 5 invite codes for Dreamwidth and 2 for Drama Fever.  Drama Fever is a site that legally streams subtitled kdramas.  So far, the selection seems limited to really popular dramas from the last couple years (as recent a the Korean Hana Yori Dango, I believe) and a few classics, like Dae Jang Geum and My Name is Kim Sam-Soon.  I haven't used my account yet except to check the quality, which seems pretty decent in the little I've seen.  Unfortunately, it's only available to people in the US.  First come, first serve for both Dreamwidth and Drama Fever.

3.  I'm not crossposting to Dreamwidth yet because...uhm...I haven't actually figured crossposting out yet.  Instead, I'm importing my LJ about once a week or so.  But as a reminder, I'm meganbmoore there, too, as I haven't done a good job of adding people as they announcetheir usernames.

4. Has anyone read Evermore by Alyson Noel or Darkborn by Alison Sinclair?  I saw both at Hastings today, and they sounded like they could be interesting, though the former sounds like it could be too emo goth teen romantic wangst for me.

5.  Does anyone use fragrance sticks?  The wooden sticks you put in what looks like little jars of scented oil, that apparently work similar to incense or candles?  I've seen them around and almost bought some at Hallmark today (when I was buying a Mother's Day card and half-price Yankee candles) but decided to wait as I haven't heard much about them that i can recall.

ETA:  DW users, please check the entry at LJ to see if invite codes are left.

Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr

Keenan is the Summer King of the Fae court, but has been unable to take his throne for centuries thanks to the curse of his mother, Beira, the Winter Queen. The curse can only be broken if a potential summer queen is able to withstand Beira’s cold, knowing that trying and failing will mean living alone in the endless cold with only a wolf for companion until someone else tries, and that she’ll have to try to dissuade the new candidate. Most potential queens choose not to risk years and years of endless cold and solitude. The last one to attempt the challenge was Donia, five hundred years ago, who still loves (and is loved by) Keenan. The newest candidate for summer queen is Aislinn, who has seen the fae all her life.

For the first half of the book, I was pretty much totally disinterested in Aislinn and her best friend, Seth, and didn’t care for Keenan, though I loved Donia and was very intrigued by Beira. I did, however, love the core mythology and the mythic framework of Aislinn’s story (my favorite fairy tales are “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” and “The Snow Queen,” and you’ll notice certain similarities.) about midway through, though, it got a lot better for me, as Marr started writing deliberately against “can’t escape fate” tropes and “angsty immortal hottie finds love with pure young mortal,” and did an excellent job of showing why appeal isn’t always good, or something you want, nor does it have to be irresistible.

( more with spoilers )

Anyway, stronger sexual themes than I expected. Very interesting story and mythology. A bit a slow in places, but nifty overall.

Silver Phoenix by Cindy Pon

I’ve heard that when Cindy Pon first submitted this book to a publisher, she was told that Asian fantasy didn’t sell. Thankfully, another publisher realized that there was an audience out there for wuxia books focusing on a heroine’s coming of age.

Admittedly, I’m not sure just how big that audience is. Hopefully big enough to secure at least a second book. I should also note that I spent the entire book very distracted by Ai Ling’s remarkable resemblance to Liu Yi Fei on the cover.

Ai Ling is the only child of a former government official. When her father disappears on a trip and a local merchant attempts to trick her mother into making Ai Ling his fourth wife due to a fake debt, Ai Ling runs away to try to find her father. Along the way she meets Chen Yong, the half-foreign (apparently European) son of one of the Emperor’s concubines (this is revealed in the prologue) who is searching for the truth of his origins, and they start travelling together.

A friend has described the early stages of the book as such:

I'm about 65 pages in and thus far, Ai Ling has encountered three-breasted women who suck the life of men through sex, been dragged into a lake filled with skulls by a serpentine thing that tried scare her into turning back, inadvertently called wasps down upon a drunkard who accosted her in an alleyway, slept in a shed filled with pigs & chickens (I love how unglamorous Ai Ling's journey is), and at the moment seems to be inadvertently sending an aspiring rapist flying into walls and ceilings without the benefit of hands--

And it’s true! And that was only the beginning! By the end we also have reincarnation, magic pendants, secret identities, immortals, a goddess, a dragon, ancient curses, talking fountains that spew acid, and plenty of other things I’ve already forgotten about! I think Pon may have been trying to get as much Chinese mythology and fantasy into 341 pages as was humanly possible.

Which could get overwhelming, save that the journey itself is as unglamorous and unmagical as possible. People get grimy and dirty. Nonstop travel makes Ai Ling so tired that she sleeps for two days. Cozy inns and comfy caves aren’t conveniently distributed throughout the countryside. At one point, there’s four people and one horse to go around. In one of the more memorable passages, Ai Ling meets a woman who looks as perfectly put together as wuxia heroines on journeys tend to, and contemplates how, unlike the woman, she’s sweaty and redfaced and travelling has made her own hair come out of its braid and form a frizzy halo around her head. (I sympathize with the braid problem on every possible level.) And really, the book is full of amazing descriptions, both mundane and fantastic.

While I think the very end was a little forced, I very much enjoyed the book, and hope Pon writes more.