teeny weeny things

This is the second Maggie Stiefvater book I’ve listened to and they’ve both been magical.  I’m even tempted to listen to Shiver.  

Blue has two rules for herself: Stay away from boys, because they’re trouble and stay away from Aglionby boys because they’re bastards.  Up until now, she has followed those two rules faithfully.  Up until she meets the spirit of one, faceless and rain soaked on the Corpse Road.  Blue and her psychic mother know that this means he will die within the next year, as it has been their duty to warn each spirit’s loved ones to prepare for the worst.  For Blue, this vision is especially meaningful, as she is the only one in her rag-tag home who isn’t psychic.  The only thing she gets from the spirit is a profound feeling of sorrow and his name.  Gansey.

*SPOILER ALERT*

I love Stiefvater’s characters - so flawed, so real.  I love the world-building that Stiefvater does here as well.  I can picture Henrietta - middling sized town, sharply divided between townies and Aglionby boys.  And the hunt for the ley line and hidden king reminds me of my teen years - only, you know, I was never that organized or researched or monied.  I honestly could have listened to ten more discs of this story (which is probably the point, since this is just the first book in a triology), and when I found out that I was on the last disc, I was slightly baffled as to how this story could end.  My one complaint is that there were SO MANY STORYLINLES left unfinished.  How do Blue and Gansey fall in love?  Will Gansey and Adam still remain friends?  What happened to Blue’s father?  What happened to Neeve?  Where is Glendower (SP?)?  What was the secret that killed Ronan’s father?  I’m sure there are more that I can’t think of right now.  

I was initially hesitant about the male narrator - the synopsis makes it appear that the story is really focused on Blue and her quest, but the story is shared (albeit a little unevenly) between Blue and Gansey and Adam - but Will Patton was perfect.  I was annoyed about Noah initially as well - I wasn’t sure why  he was included in the story considering that he wasn’t a consistent member of the “gang.”  The revelation of his backstory explains his in and out presence.  Orla was the other character who struck me to be that way.  She was only incidental, only ever mentioned, never really a full part of the story.  Not like Calla or Persephone.  Beyond those details, the book was delightful and dark, a perfectly intriguing listen for the commute.

I had mediocre hopes for this movie.  The trailers were fast and shiny and it’s been so long since I’ve seen a really good sci fi movie.  Tom Cruise (who cannot transform his voice and actions enough to make me think that he actually is someone other than Tom Cruise) is a maintenance worker on the abandoned planet of Earth.  He and his handler (also his lover) are the last two people on the planet.  They are two weeks away from finishing up a five year rotation ensuring that the mammoth hydration generators do not get damaged or destroyed by the aliens, Scavs, who made the planet mostly uninhabitable.  Character dialogue and a brief action scene show us that Cruise’s character, Jack, is good at what he does, but recklessly curious.  When he sees an ancient human ship shot down by the Scavs, he rushes off to investigate.  What he finds changes everything.

*SPOILER ALERT*

About twenty minutes into the movie, I leaned over to my viewing partner and whispered, “If this is all about clones, I’m going to be so disappointed.”  And I was.  For what it’s worth, I didn’t find Cruise to be that unendurable.  He was lovable and earnest – mostly because his facial expressions rarely varied from smiling or wide-eyed panic.   The plot development was uneven and choppy.  We quickly find out that the Scavs aren’t aliens; they are humans in disguise, but it unclear why they are hiding and why they are sabotaging Jack’s work.  It takes us another twenty minutes plus to find out that the Tet, Jack and Vicka’s mission control, is actually some sort of alien consciousness raping the planet for its own (unexplained) ends.  The love scenes are excruciatingly painful.  Julia and Jack have no chemistry (not that I think that Tom Cruise has chemistry with anyone – please watch him interact with Katie Holmes when they first started dating if you doubt me) and the love scenes drag on and on.  The big reveal of the Jack clones and #52’s return really wasn’t all that big once the idea of clones was in my head.  Honestly, Duncan Jones did nearly the same story ten times better in Moon.  If you want to see a GOOD sci fi flick about hidden clones, watch Moon instead.

June Elbus has just lost her uncle.  To AIDS.  It’s the 1980s and no one quite knows much about AIDS besides the fact that it’s somehow contagious and it mostly afflicts gay men.  June’s uncle Finn is her godfather, both in the literal sense and a bit in the fairy tale sense.  He takes her on grand adventures and lets her be a child for longer than most teenagers.  When he dies, she feels alone and discontent with the world.  When a package shows up in the mail containing her uncle’s prized tea pot and a note from a mysterious stranger who claims he knows her uncle extremely well and wants to give her some of his things, she reluctantly takes up his offer, hoping that she will be able to reclaim a little bit more of her uncle.

This was a magical book for me.  I know it’s not really fantastical or anything like that, but I love the way that Brunt tied the story of the relationships of a family and all whom their lives touch together.  I could connect with all of the family members - Greta, the older sister who misses a connection with her younger sister, Danni, who can’t forgive her brother for leaving her, Toby, who was confused and sick and alone, and June, who was trapped between curiosity and jealousy.  It was artful how she developed and revealed the character/noncharacter of Finn.  He was present, but ghostly, the only traces left of him were the stories of June and Toby’s.  Tell the Wolves I’m Home will stick with me for quite a while.

I have been a total slacker.  I have changed my displays twice, but not posted any pictures.  Last month I did a March Madness display (which was okay) and a Women’s Rights display (which was pretty awesome, in my opinion).  This month it’s National Poetry Month, which pretty much put itself together.  I took the poster out of the April English Journal and found an assortment of poetry books.

The other display was on Earth Day.  I found a slideshow of pictures from the first Earth Day on National Geographic and printed them along with their captions.  The globe is usually behind an unabridged dictionary, but I thought it would only be fitting if it were a little closer to the books.

The QR code links back to the original National Geographic site.