Jason Rekulak

I liked the picture book versions of Friends and The Karate Kid I recently read, but this take on Buffy the Vampire Slayer didn't work for me because it violated the canon too much, being a Buffy Babies reboot instead of a nostalgic callback

A teenaged Buffy Summers reflects back to when she was eight and scared of the dark. But she already know Rupert Giles, an elementary school librarian who offers advice, and she has a sleepover with Willow Rosenberg and Xander Harris, who are suddenly show more childhood friends, to help confront her fears. A dozen or more recognizable creatures and monsters from the show appear, but they all act drastically out of character.

Even if I grant that this is an entirely new version of Buffy, I don't think it really works for kids because of the scary monster elements and a poor moral about befriending strangers who are stalking you. show less

This is the "ghost story junkie's" kind of story in spades! A disturbing secret that has far-reaching consequences comprises this dark and unusual ghost story. Mallory Quinn is just recently out of rehab and is recovering from a tragedy. She has taken a job as the nanny for a well to do couple living in the ritzy suburb of Spring Brook, New Jersey. A series of strange events start to make her...as well as her employers, begin to question their own sanity. Teddy is her precocious and shy show more 5-year-old boy that she's in charge of. The child seems to be haunted by a ghost who uses his body to draw pictures. These pictures are far too complex and well-drawn to have been the work of any child this young. At first, the drawings are rather typical...rabbits, hot air balloons, trees.... then the illustrations take a sinister, dark turn, showing the grime, gory details of gruesome murders. The drawings start out as stick figures but soon grow increasingly more disturbing and much more sophisticated. By now the reader is so into the story that you can't stop. With the help of an attractive young gardener and a psychic neighbor and using only the drawings as clues, Mallory feels that she must solve the mystery of the house's grizzly past before it's too late. Jason Rekulak does a fantastic job defining all these characters and giving them believable personalities: The story is mostly told by Mallory in the first person. The Maxwells' slightly overbearing parenting style and passive-aggressive quips feel and sound, very familiar; and Teddy is so three-dimensional that he sometimes feels like a real child that you could reach out and touch. The is almost enough to make you believe in ghosts. As my grandmother used to tell us as children..."I don't believe in ghost but I'm very much afraid of them". You will be very much afraid of them. show less

Heck no to the plot twist.

(Full disclosure: I received a free electronic ARC for review through NetGalley. This review contains spoilers.)

The nostalgia factor is strong with this one, and the cheeky caper premise channels '80s movies like whoah (think: The Goonies meets Can't Buy Me Love). Unfortunately, Rekulak doesn't do right by his kickass female lead, Mary - and, by extension, girls and women everywhere.

Mary is a little chubby, you see, and so courting her to gain the code to show more Zelinsky's alarm system is not a job for the faint of heart. Cue the fat jokes: “She’s so fat, she shows up on radar.” “For real [...] She’s so fat, her blood type is Ragu!”; etc., etc., etc. x infinity. They're so prolific, in fact, that I came to expect an epic comeuppance for the main offenders, Billy's BFFs Alf and Clark. But the plot twist robs us of this: Mary's not fat, she's just hiding her secret teen pregnancy! Once she's given birth (and lost the baby weight, natch), it's a-okay for Billy to date her. The fat shaming wasn't wrong, just misplaced. Yuck.

While misogyny and fat shaming abound, homophobia and ableism also make appearances. Thanks to "a freakish birth defect," the fingers of Clark's left hand are fused together to form a "pincer" that's affectionately (?) known as "The Claw." While the guys just can't seem to let it go, by story's end Clark has found love in the form of Video City clerk Lynn Scott, which kinda-sorta challenges at least some of the prejudice he was forced to deal with throughout the book. In stark contrast to Mary, I should add.

As for the gay slurs, I guess we're supposed to let those slide since they come straight from the mouth of the story's baddie? Yet the language feels so randomly harsh that it seems to demand a stronger condemnation than it receives.

Idk, I really wanted to like The Impossible Fortress, but there was just so much about it that rubbed me the wrong way.

http://www.easyvegan.info/2017/02/27/the-impossible-fortress-by-jason-rekulak/ show less

It’s 1987. 14-year old Billy Marvin has two good friends. He has a particular interest in computers and programming games on his Commodore 64. When he learns from Mary, the daughter of the man who runs the store he and his friends want to steal Playboy magazines from (the issue with Vanna White!), that there is a competition for high school kids to enter a contest with a new game, Billy and Mary sit down to start working together on it. But Billy’s friends have another motive: they want show more Billy to get the code for the store from Mary, so they can break in for those magazines. (They don’t actually plan to steal them… they plan to leave money behind, but they know the man won’t sell them the magazines because they are too young.)

This was really fun. As and “80s child” myself, all the 80s references are so much fun: the music, movies and tv. And I liked Billy and Mary, both. Extra bonus I learned at the end of the book – you can go to the author’s website to play the game that Billy and Mary created. show less