2005

Christie isn't sure what to think at her first comic convention in Dramacon Vol. 1 (2005) by Svetlana Chmakova. She's excited for a chance to exhibit the comic that she writes and her boyfriend illustrates. But when they get to the comic-con, it turns out nothing is what Christie expected.

Her boyfriend is a jerk. He says he's flirting so that more girls will buy their comic buy Christie isn't so sure--especially with the way he keeps leaving her alone for long periods at a time. Then there's the mysterious cosplayer who keeps popping up when Christie needs him and seems to understand her better than her boyfriend ever will. Christie tries to make sense of her mixed feelings about the con and her love life in the foreground of a story that offers a tantalizing behind-the-scenes look at an convention no one is likely to forget!  read more »

Alice MacLeod, Realist at Last (2005) is the stunning conclusion to Susan Juby's debut trilogy (preceeded by Alice, I Think and its sequel Miss Smithers). You might recognize Juby's name from the 2009 Edgar Awards where Getting the Girl was a nominee.

This installment opens with the first scene from Alice's screenplay "Of Moose and Men"--a creative work loosely based on her own life. Excerpts of the screenplay are sprinkled throughout the novel. The writing is overwrought, exaggerated, and provides hysterical insight into Alice's psyche throughout the story. In addition to being Alice's latest career of choice, writing her screenplay also helps this sixteen-year-old heroine make sense of the chaos that has become her life.  read more »

I’ve only seen one episode of The Twilight Zone. In this episode, a woman undergoes a battery of surgeries to look normal. At the end of the episode, viewers learn that this latest surgery has failed: the woman is still hideous. Except that to the audience she is beautiful. Online research led me to another episode where teenagers are surgically altered to live longer and conform to a unified standard of beauty (based on a limited number of acceptable “models”). Uglies (2005), Scott Westerfeld’s dystopic novel, plays similar games of perception.

The novel starts with Tally Youngblood a fifteen-year-old girl desperately waiting for her sixteenth birthday when she will be reunited with her best friend and, more importantly, when she will finally be pretty.  read more »

"Annette Berowne had a sweet, heart-shaped face. She had honey-blond hair and wide brown eyes. She was not beautiful, and certainly not glamorous, but only Phillip Bethancourt noticed that."

So begins Cassandra Chan's debut novel, The Young Widow (2005), in her debut mystery series of Phillip Bethancourt and Jack Gibbons mysteries. But before discussing Annette Berowne, it is important to know about Gibbons and Bethancourt.

Bethancourt and Gibbons could not be more different. Everything comes easily to Phillip Bethancourt, a young and wealthy Englishman with a model girlfriend and posh apartment to match his high standard of living. Jack Gibbons, on the other hand, is more of an everyman--an ambitious detective sergeant at Scotland Yard, Gibbons has his eye on more important things than parties and women: he's watching for a career-making case. Despite their differences the two men strike an easy friendship, largely because of Bethancourt's interest in all things criminal and his knack for helping Gibbons with his more, shall we say, complex cases.  read more »