All These Things...

This is the first post of the last month of the world! It's also the first post that I compose under the light of my Socialist Christmas tree, which is decorated with lights that I bought from Wal-Mart in the year 2000 (still working, I've never had to repair them!), and tinsel that I *think* came from BCA's trash bin in 2002, but I don't really remember. It is socialist because it leaned to the left until Thanksgiving 2010.

It's about a tweenage romance novel called All These Things I've Done. It was a good book up until the end, when it just...ended. It was as if someone called Gabrielle Zevin and said, "Finish the book now. It was due a while ago, and if you want to get it in the gradebook before the quarter ends, you'll have it on my desk tomorrow morning." Of course, if you followed the link you know that it's one of a series, the next book in which is called Because It Is My Blood. Yeah, I don't know. If I have $10 leftover after Christmas shopping, maybe I'll get it. Probably not.

There wasn't much that was instructive as to the apocalypse, but the setting was interesting. It was in a future three generations hence (the currently-rising generation would be the dying grandparents of the novel) where New York's museums had been converted into nightclubs. The lakes and fountains had been drained, and the Statue of Liberty had been disassembled. Things that are perfectly legal now are illegal in the future the novel imagines, and the heroine is a daughter of the New York branch of organized crime that controls the supply of an illegal substance. So. That's what it's about, and the setting is worth reading it for.

What bothered me was the fact that all the way through, the heroine keeps hinting that the neo-Prohibition will be lifted. Then it ends so abruptly that you get the impression you were supposed to forget about the whole, "back-in-those-days" tone in which the book had been written. See? During these past two paragraphs of review, I've gotten all confused as to verb tenses and subject pronouns. I blame the book. This is what happens when a teacher of teenagers gets to reading a novel that is marketed to her students' age group! (Funny, that didn't happen with certain other favorite novels whose titles shall not be repeated because by now you should have read about them all over this blog and other blogs and goodreads.com.)

Now that I look more closely, I see that Jen warned on the now-archived Book Envy blog that fans of the apocalypse would not be satisfied. Her much more revealing review is archived here.

Sometimes, we know our time is running out, and we still waste it reading tweenage fiction! Astounding.

Lucky for us, we have people looking out for us, sending us ads for ammo like this one, which comes from my dad and I have no idea where he got it:

Note that *this is not a toy*. Ammo, kids, not books. Ammo. And a plan. I have one. For 12/21, and another one for the day after. Do you?