SarahJanet's Books

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

I'd had this book out for ages and kept meaning to read it, but it wasn't until last week that I finally picked it up one night when I couldn't sleep. I had a weird mix of expectations for it - part of me was not really expecting to like it due to my extreme disinterest in comic books, but it was hyped up by enough people that I was expecting it to overcome the whole comic book factor.

It did. It was a great book, full of interesting characters and well-spun plot concepts that overlapped and interwove and were generally just complex enough. Joe was just tragic enough without crossing the invisible line into ridiculously miserable, and Sammy's struggles with his identity were subtle enough not to be irritating. It was a book that could have easily gotten very annoying, very quickly, and it avoided a lot of pitfalls and easy answers that would have made it predictable and cutesy.

But the ending just didn't live up to the rest of the book. It wasn't exciting enough, didn't have enough of that superhero flair that it felt like the characters deserved. It left me feeling kind of disappointed, simply because a book like that feels like it needs a bit of a razmatazz ending so you feel like it was ok that the book ended, because it ended so well. This one just kind of...ended. And I know that was the point, but I couldn't help but be kind of disappointed.

Overall, though, the book was great, and I'm a lot more interested in comic books than I was before I read it. Not to say that I'm going to start reading them with any sort of enthusiasm (sorry, Dev), but I can understand the appeal a lot more than before I read this book.

Except Archie. I just do not get Archie. And this is coming from someone who read a billion of them as a kid. What the hell is the appeal of those stupid things? They're so BAD! They're nothing but recycled sexist stories from the 1950s! Boo to Archie!

posted by SarahJanet @ 1:33 PM