Bryan Lee O'Malley

After some mixed reactions (mostly during book one) I can officially say that by the end of the sixth volume I enjoyed the Scott Pilgrim series. I found them to be charming and sweet and romantic. Surprisingly, I found them to very rarely be cheesy, an impresseive feat given the genre of literature: Teen Romance Manga??

At the same time, reading the books I understood that I am a little too old for them. Don't get me wrong, I devoured these books with gusto. But I can't help but feel that if show more I had come across them when I was 17 years old, they would have affected me on a much deeper level. I would have been fanatic about them, rather than amused and charmed by them.

At first glance, the Scott Pilgrim series seems vaguely fucked up. The premise, after all, is that the main character must fight and defeat the seven evil ex-boyfriends in order to win the love of his girlfriend Ramona. On the surface, this is some misogynist bullshit, only men in comic books (or, perhaps, rams) need to defeat other men in battle in order to woo their women, and this is a tired cliche. But perhaps a deeper reading is in order here.

It's true that the title of the book is Scott Pilgrim, and that the storyline most often follows Scott. However, Scott barely exists. From the moment she appears, Ramona is a three dimensional character with a past, a background, depth, hobbies, interests, a job, a place to live, friends, etc. Scott, on the other hand, is almost a cardboard cutout. We learn he is in a band. He doesn't really have a place to live (he's crashing at a friend's house (since...?), he has no apparent job (it's revealed later he doesn't have one), he has no direction, no past, and no real future. We don't know very much about him because he doesn't know very much about himself! Scott has only one dimension, and it takes Ramona to bring him any semblance of depth.

So perhaps the story is really about Ramona. She has demons that she needs to work out with regard to her past boyfriends. And she uses Scott to get to a place where she can love herself and, eventually, when he develops into a human being for her and for us, she can love him as well. Read like this, the book is not nearly so misogynist. It's almost refreshing!

Anyhow, perhaps I'm just trying to justify why I would totally recommend this book to anyone with a couple of hours to burn (it goes really quickly). I can't necessarily tell you why you should read it (I never quite figured out why I was reading it myself), but I can tell you that it's fun. show less

Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Seconds focuses on Katie, the executive chef and creator of the eponymous restaurant who’s planning to open a new space, named Lucknow, in a different part of her city. While balancing her responsibilities to renovate the new space, saving money by living above her current restaurant, and slowly transitioning out of her role as the head of Seconds, she begins to see a strange elf-like creature. After a terrible accident she blames on her lost focus from balancing show more too many responsibilities, Katie discovers that the creature is the house spirit, Lis, who grows mushrooms that allow a person to undo a mistake. Despite the house spirit’s warnings, Katie begins to use the mushrooms to undo any mistake, big or small. Soon, she learns that meddling with reality has its price and she cannot keep up with all the changes to reality she causes. Worse, her actions put Lis and reality in danger.

O’Malley’s story has the tone of a fable transplanted to the modern day. Despite the presence of cars and cell phones, there’s something about it that feels entirely gothic. His depiction of the new restaurant tucked away under a bridge or Katie’s original restaurant as akin to an inn or public house evokes an earlier time when magic could inhabit an urban space. The story further has a moral about accepting life’s changes rather than brooding on what could have been. O’Malley brings his sense of humor with Katie breaking the fourth wall to react to and engage with the narration, adding a metatextuality to this modern fable. Great for fans of fantasy and an excellent work demonstrating O’Malley’s storytelling talent! show less

I just have to get this out of my system: hardly anything like the movie.

This book made me feel old. Old, old, old. So much of the non-ninja-fighting plot was so much like how life happened in my early twenties. But even as I was reading it and recognizing how familiar it was, I kept thinking, "How are they so feckless? Changing apartments and roommates and boyfriends? Hey, hey you! Get off my lawn, you damn punks!"

Despite the dissonance, in this volume I loved those moments of familiarity. show more I also loved the "contents of Scott's pockets" and "contents of Scott and Wallace's shopping cart" frames, all of Scott's XP moments, and I continue to love Knives.

Fun. show less

Scott Pilgrim's life had been gaining ground in the first four books. He'd found a job, fallen in love, conquered his fears of his ex, and his band seemed to be going places. In book 5, this all fell apart. (What is it with books five? See also: Harry Potter.) His band was "recording", his friends were all angry and having their own problems, Ramona was acting even weirder than normal, and finally she left. Everything fell apart and Scott fell back into the almost catatonic state he'd fallen show more into when NV left him (not quite as bad, though, which shows some important personal growth). So where does that leave us to start book 6? There's no reason for Scott to fight Gideon (which leads to a hilarious moment in the book), there's not much for Scott to do, but we see the moving-on or at least trudging-along process.

And now I'm going to include spoilers for this book, so you are warned. I realized I can't review this book without talking about how I feel about the ending, as much as I've tried, so don't read further if you don't want spoilers. HERE WE GO!

On the one hand, we totally expect some epic battle showdown royale between Scott and Gideon. Fighting! Seven evil exes! What it says on the box! On the other hand, this end was totally presaged in the earlier books - not just by the off-panel battles in Book 5, but more importantly when in Book 3 Ramona shows Scott how stupid the whole conceit is by saying "why go spend an afternoon doing things made up by people who hate us?" and, well, exactly. Why indeed, but the end of Book 6 is all about Ramona turning that in on herself and realizing she has been doing this all along. She's been acting in stupid ways because she felt like she had to, because she did once or twice and no one thought she'd ever change and because she believed them. That sick Gideon-chain-Ramona-whatever fantasy from the earlier book wasn't about Gideon at all, it was all about Ramona and what was left in her head. And come on, which of us hasn't done that? Which of us hasn't internalized stupid shit and then acted in even stupider ways? Who hasn't let someone else live in your head and tell you you're worthless, you can't change, you can't be who you want to be?

If you say it hasn't happened to you, you just haven't realized it yet.

And that is why this end is so, so lovely. Fuck epic battles and fuck exes who come around or never leave who tell you who you are. Fuck the parts of ourselves that tell us we're not good enough. Learning how to live your own life IS the epic battle of the 20s, and it's nice to see that shown. show less