Almost done with NaNoWriMo!

I'm almost done with National Novel Writing Month. In T-minus 11 hours, I will be done with my first attempt to write a 50,000 novel in 30 days. It's been pretty crazy! I started the month off great but hit some bumps as November dragged on. Thankfully, I've been able to get back on track to some degree, and now I'm only 6,000 +/- words away from finishing. I think I'll be able to pull that off. 

And since this is a book review blog, I thought I should put up a review. I haven't done any new reviews yet, although I'm seriously overdue for reviewing some---namely Rot & Ruin by Jonathan Maberry and My Dangerous Pleasure by Carolyn Jewel. But until I get time to work on those, here is an older book review from earlier this year. Enjoy!

Originally written March 5, 2011

Since I work at a bookstore, I have access to fun book stuff the normal public does not. One of those such things is called ARCs, or Advanced Reader Copies, of books. These are sent from the publisher to bookstores to garner interest and hype about the book before it's officially released for mass purchasing. My bookstore is one such places that receives ARCs and I have taken part of reading them, because, hey, it's a free book.

Some such books I have read in ARC form are: Patient Zero (Jonathan Maberry), The Emperor of All Maladies (Siddhartha Mukherjee), Soulless (Gail Carriger), 13 Bullets and 99 Coffins (David Wellington). And now I can add a new one to that list. After I got off my shift today at work, I was tired and just needed some time to sit. So I did, chatted with other coworkers, and for some reason I decided to check out our ARC shelf in the break room. I saw an ARC I hadn't seen before, and immediately grabbed it. It was Go, Mutants! by Larry Doyle. I had seen the book out on the book floor a few times, when it first came out in hardcover, and I had been drawn to it, and it sounded interesting, but I never bought it because it was still in hardcover (and I just checked bn.com, it's still in hardcover); I don't do hardcover for books. I have purposely bought only 3 books in hardcover, because I absolutely had to have them.

Anyhoo, back to Go, Mutants! I started reading it, because I figured it was a sign finding the ARC. I started reading it at 600pm. I had to force myself to leave work at 700pm because I had to go home (eventually). Once I got home, I started reading it again. I am now half way through the book, and I had to stop at 1130pm to write a review about a book I've half read. And really, I don't want to go to sleep because I don't want to stop. But I need to sleep because I have to work.

It's an amazing book. Imagine, if you will, an alternate universe where aliens invaded earth in the 1950s, and after a war to stop an alien from taking over the world, the world is now stuck in a world that looks much like Grease and every beach-blanket-bikini movie ever to star Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon. Our story follows J!m (naviely pronounced "Jim" by Earthlings), the son of the very alien that allegedly tried to take over the world. He's in high school, and very much the "rebel without a cause", loner, outcast, misunderstood alien who is in love with a human girl, and just trying to figure out life as a teenager, let alone an alien with a big brain-looking cranium and blue skin. Oh, and he's also going through some bodily changes that he doesn't understand, and neither does his mother because his father isn't there to figure out what his race does in puberty. (Oh, and his mom is a humaniod feline hottie, so J!m inherited a tail from her).

The writing is full of wit, a dangerously dry sense of humor, and emotional poignancy that truly makes me feel for J!m's plight. I am very glad I picked up this ARC, and it might turn out to be a buy-worthy book after I'm done... since we're not supposed to keep the ARCs after we read them, per the store's rules... not publisher rules, just our store, so others can read them... but the ARC shelves are spilling over with ARCs, so I doubt people are really reading them anyhoo... *ahem*

So yeah. If you like your sci-fi with a dry, snappy wit, delicious humor and heart to boot, then I definitely recommend Go, Mutants!, and I'm not even done with it yet. Oh, yeah, and it's written by the guy who wrote I Love You, Beth Cooper: Larry Doyle; who also used to write for The Simpsons, or, still does. I dunno. All I know is that Go, Mutants! is amazing and funny. Read it.