Ambulance Idiot

Never have I disagreed so throughly with both Booklist and the general reading public in my assessment of a book. Ambulance Girl is the "heartwarming" "inspirational" and "honest" tale of a fat, middle aged, phobic, depressed woman (all her words, not mine) who decides, along with her therapist, that a job as a small town volunteer EMT will be lift her out of her slump. She proceeds to sign on to the local firehouse (in the states, municipal fire stations=EMS services for small towns) and drags her whining ass through the minimal required training. Upon "graduation", she recounts tales of such astounding ineptitude that i'm shocked she wasn't fired immediately on publication, or at least sued. Although her unprofessional bumbling improves marginally by the end of the book, it is made up for through a sharp increase in self importance and woe-is-meing over the emotional stress and strange hours that are (hello!?!) part of the job.

There are so many things I hate about this book, I am having trouble organizing them. Perhaps point form will help.

1. If you have serious emotional and mental illnesses, coupled with a physical disability that prevents you from moving with agility, you are NOT a good candidate for an emergency services job. Even if the service is starving for people and willing to accept you while holding its nose, you should probably do your hapless patients a favour and donate some money to the service instead. People's lives are depending on you being fit, alert, and competent.
2. If you work in the medical field, you should be aware of something called confidentiality. The author, Jane Stern, has a professional reputation as a writer. People know her work. They can find out where she lives. Therefore, they can figure out who the people are that she writes about. This presents a problem. Either she is flagrantly and outrageously violating the privacy of her patients for financial gain, or she has lied lied lied about her exploits for financial gain. Neither option really promotes a professional view of EMT's.
3. A professional complaint. Some of the stories in this book are, shall we say, padded for effect. But hey, in the words of James Frey, it could have happened. I prefer my non-fiction to be, well, non-fiction. Is that so wrong?

Anyhow, the upshot is that this strange and misguided woman has done everyone but herself a disservice by elbowing into Emergency Medical Services. To read a book filled with self aggrandizing drek about her misuse of the job was annoying in the extreme. Being a paramedic is a tough and rewarding job. It demands commitment and a tenacious will to work without glory. And in the end, the thing that really sunk this book for me was her astonishing lack of professionalism.

I love you, Nanas!

Ok, this is my first stab at Manga review, so please bear with me as I stumble through it. Nana is a Shojo Beat serial that reads like a soap opera for young adults. No! Wait! I mean that in a good way! Since Shojo Beat is VIZ media's "manga from the heart", it's really no surprise that the 2 stories contained separately in this publication are all about the loves and losses of Nana Komatsu and Nana Osaki. Both young women are hovering on the brink of adulthood, and both end up moving to Tokyo for love. But there, the similarities end. I read Nana 1 tonight, and despite the utter silliness of Nana K and the posturing bad-assedness of Nana O, I ended up rooting for both. The girls are just so perfectly teenaged; they do stupid things, waffle and whine and take ridiculous moral stands, throw love away and date the wrong men...but every once in a while, they both display an inner strength and determination that makes it all worthwhile. They make the same mistakes as I did, or could have, and they recover from them with a fragility and fortitude that I hope I recognize.

Reading this installment was literally like watching the Nanas grow up, and I can't believe it, but I'm now addicted. I *MUST* read the next installment, as soon as possible. This first book is really just a prologue, telling you about how Nana K gets dumped by an older slimeball and mends her broken heart, and how Nana O gets left behind in a small town by her rock star boyfriend. Both Nana's end the installment by moving to Tokyo, and the forthcoming books will tell about how they meet and become best friends.

Audrey, these books are so good that next time I come over I'm going to bring them for you to read. You can return them at any Victoria public library, because BC just instituted a program where libraries have to ship returned books all over the province for borrowers. Nice, huh?

In which our heroine rants again

I might still have time to review something else more Halloween-themed, but I did just read Howl's Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones, recently, and I thought at the very least I could perform the dual function of plugging an ever-so-fantastic author, and talking about an issue I have with fiction, which is the idea of the Strong Female Character.

Diana Wynne Jones does this right.

Many many authors (and TV/movie writers) do this all wrong. I think a lot of people somehow think that a strong female character has to have everything. Everything! She has to be thin and beautiful (and if you're Heinlein, at least a 36C bra size), brilliant (if I had a nickel for every heroine with a photographic memory...), possibly some kind of spectacular fighting ability even though the author has gone to great pains to describe how slight and willowy her build is, and you're fairly certain she can't weigh more than 100 lbs (and I say this is ridiculous, as a small-ish woman with non-trivial martial arts ability, knowing full well that it is damn hard to fight someone a lot bigger than you, even if you do know what you're doing, which is a whole other rant for me), and assorted other perfections associated with the storyline.

Probably magical powers. She might be an elf. Or at least, she has elfin features, which is pretty much the same thing, right?

It's as though they're afraid that if they don't give their heroine all possible perfections, nobody will recognise her as the heroine.

Diana Wynne Jones knows that those who wear A cups and weigh more than 100 lbs, without photographic memories, or surprising physical ability, can still make excellent heroines, because there's just more to it than that. It gives the rest of us hope.

Sophie Hatter, who never thought she was all that pretty or special anyway, is turned into a 90 year old woman by a witch's curse. So for the majority of the book, the heroine is not especially beautiful (except, you know, inside, which doesn't manifest itself in any paeans), gets aches and pains all the time, and never kicks anyone's ass, except possibly through the magic of cleaning supplies. And she is a fantastic and wonderful character in a really excellent story. There's a Miyazaki movie now (which I also love) based on the book, but with some fairly significant differences. But in both, Sophie is still a wonderful character, and a perfect example of a female heroine who doesn't just feel like a blow-up doll, or something out of Weird Science.

Thanks, Diana Wynne Jones, for being generally great.

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro's new book, Never Let Me Go, is an undercover masterpiece of horror. Kathy H. is a 31 year old caregiver living in England, and this book follows the nostalgic reminisces of her childhood spent in an English boarding school. Slowly, we come to realize that Kathy's comfortable life is not at all what we assumed from the first half of the book; our initial assumptions are terribly wrong. By the middle of the book, I wanted to shout a warning to Kathy the child, and to shake Kathy the adult out of her inculcated apathy. The complete shocking horror of this book lies in the characters' inaction when faced with a fate worse (although including) certain death. Reading Never Let Me Go is rather like watching a lobster boil to death in a pot of water, hardly noticing as you turn up the heat. I'm trying not to give too much away, because really, you should read this book and give yourself the worst halloween nightmares ever.

La pipi della zebra

oh, the things you discover when you travel to foreign lands. Being a librarian, i discovered this book. Actually, rob discovered it, as he was transfixed by the sight of a cartoon zebra with a rubber-hose-like penis, peeing all over the cover of this hardcover children's reader. For the uninitiated, readers would cover ages 6-8, roughly.

Anyhow, we found this book in Rome, in a tiny bookshop near the pantheon, and although it is entirely in italian, the gist is fairly easy to get. In translation, the first page says...this zebra is a zebra with a little problem. He pisses all the time. Psssssssssssss.... (the accompanying pictures portray a gleeful zebra urinating happily in a piazza).

First the unfortunate zebra pees in a restaraunt, into his friends duck and pig's soup and dessert, respectively. Next, he pees out the window onto their heads, to their dismay. Repulsively, he pees into his bath, and overflows it, and the apartments below. The lovely pen and ink illustrations of these events invariably show zebra with a beatific smile on his face as he contemplates his spouting nether regions. I especially liked the well drawn and substantial ball sack that the illustrator added. Nothing like anatomical correctness in a reader.

Anyhow, by now you also get the gist. The story progresses to pig and duck banishing zebra for fear he will overflow the whole town; a fire breaks out; only zebra's unending stream of urine can save the day! Zebra returns in triumph and is made the fire chief, and everyone is issued regulation umbrellas.

A happy ending? yes, except for the poor librarian who accidentally orders this title on spec from a publisher, and gets fired due to patron complaints when little johnny tries to pee on his sister's head. My favourite part of all is the tiny illustration on the endpaper of the bakc page, where zebra, wearing his new fire hat, pees out the sun. Good job zebra.

i'm too tired to connect a link, so the isbn for interested parties is 9788880331841. Do see if you can find a cover illustration! Sadly this book will never be release