Mini movie review: Jennifer's Body

I am soooo clever, following up my teenage-girl-as-werewolf flick with a teenage-girl-as-succubus flick!  If only Jennifer's Body was that clever.  No, no, don't get me wrong - I liked it.  It was funny in spots, and gory and jumpy in spots, and Megan Fox sending up her barely-legal man-eater image as a ... barely-legal man-eater was great, and I loved seeing the Veronica Mars reunion (Amanda Seyfried and Kyle Gallner - who was a supercute little Gothboy), and having Seth Cohen from The O.C. as the villain was fantastic.  But I think I expected more somehow - at the very least better dialogue coming from ol' Diablo Cody, or maybe just dialogue that fit the characters better because a couple of times Needy said something that just didn't click. 

The thing is, expecting more out of Jennifer's Body and not getting it, while not expecting anything out of Ginger Snaps and enjoying it immensely, leads me to this conclusion: if you can only choose one teenage girl monster movie, go with the indie Canadian werewolf.  Unless you're looking for some pretty hot girl on girl smoochies (just smoochies, don't get all het up), in which case go with JB.

Book review: How to Ditch Your Fairy by Justine Larbalestier

Fourteen year old Charlie is in a bit of a spot. She goes to the greatest sports school in the world, even though she’s not quite tall enough to make the basketball streams and despises her Statistics class. She’s got a decent family, great friends, and a burgeoning crush on the doos new neighbor boy. It’s her fairy that’s the problem, you see. Instead of an excellent one like a shopping fairy or a great tennis serve fairy or even a good hair fairy, she’s got a parking fairy which does no good for a sporty girl who doesn’t drive, doesn’t like cars and is fed up with being used by people who do want good parking spots.

How to Ditch Your Fairy, the bright and bubbly YA novel by Justine Larbalestier, takes us through Charlie’s quest to ditch her fairy for a better one. It’s not as easy as you think. These personal fairies are invisible to the human eye and super-tenacious once they’ve latched onto you. She tries thwarting her fairy by walking everywhere for months at a time which weakens the little critter a bit but also brings her oodles of demerits at school for being late and disheveled. Finally, Charlie joins forces with her arch-nemesis, Fiorenze Burnham-Stone, who is also saddled with an unwanted fairy – an “all the boys like you” fairy. When the girls end up swapping fairies, it all seems great at first but ends up more and more unpleasant until they have to take drastic measures to get out of their predicament.

This is a fun YA novel, written in first-person with Charlie as narrator (and judging from the author’s blog, Charlie is in no small part a stand in for Larbalestier herself, a self-proclaimed sports nut and car-hater). Larbalestier’s voice as Charlie is great, funny and awkward, a true teenager trying to figure things out as she goes along and hilariously frustrated when her grand plans don’t quite come true. (Any BtVS devotees will recognize echoes of the Xander-centric episode, “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” (S2E16); the author is a Buffy fan and scholar herself and the storyline may be part unconscious homage.) In any event, while you may not be able to pick your fairy, you can certainly pick your friends and in the long run, that’s what How to Ditch Your Fairy is all about.

Movie review: Ginger Snaps

I'm not sure what horror movie blog I was reading that led me to Ginger Snaps (2000) but whomever it was, thank you!  What a fun little movie!  Mr. Mouse was in the other room reading the interwebs and snorting that "This movie sounds terrible!" and "Isn't that awfully loud?" but he doesn't know from horror movies. 

Set in some nowhere suburban hell in Canada, Ginger and Bridgette Fitzgerald are your typical disenchanted goth teenaged sisters, bored with their lives and disgusted by their plebian parents.  Their classmates think they are complete freaks.  To keep themselves amused, they stage complicated death scenes a la Harold from Harold and Maude.  They have made a blood pact to get out of this town or kill themselves trying by age 16; Ginger, the prettier and older sister, is about to turn 16 while plain Bridgette, a year younger, is devoted to her older sibling.  Also, there is a mysterious and vicious animal that is terrorizing the town, killing all the domestic dogs.

After some altercations at school when Ginger defends her meeker sister against the cool kids, the Fitz sisters are attacked by a werewolf.  Ginger is badly injured but heals quickly, and it is not long before other changes begin to manifest themselves.  Bridgette maintains her devotion to her older sister even when Ginger sheds her bulky black clothing, revealing a rockin' nubile body, and starts hooking up with boys, and soon joins up with the local hottie drug dealer to find a cure for lycanthropy.  But Ginger's changes are happening in sync with her menstrual cycle, not the moon, and Bridgette is soon in a race against time to try to save her sister.  Who doesn't seem to want to be saved.

Ginger Snaps is a hoot of a werewolf indie flick, brought low only in the lameness of the werewolf special effects (all practical effects, no CGI).  It's funny and yet touching, gory - there is a LOT of blood - but not overly violent.  Above all else Bridgette wants to save Ginger, not just because they are sisters but also because Bridgette is terrified of being left alone in this suburban life without her.  The actors are all unknowns (at least to me) - except for Mimi Rodgers as the girls' hilarious mother who unexpectedly stands up for her daughters only to be abandoned by the movie - and they do a decent job, with much better acting than, say, Shredder. 

I would absolutely recommend Ginger Snaps to classic horror fans.  It's a fun, smart, little monster flick that holds its own far better than I expected it would.

Heroes episode recap – “The Art of Deception” S4E16 (airdate 01/25/10)

We're going all short and sweet recap-wise again since it worked so well last week.  And really, it's not like I'm skipping over any compelling or eloquent dialogue.  This is Heroes, after all.  Enjoy!

Samuel is persona non grata in the wake of his swallowing the town. He’s a little cranky about it and vows to win his people back.

WHY WON’T PETER CUT HIS HAIR? I miss last season’s Peter-haircut. He wants to find Emma in the wake of a vision-nightmare (from the power he took from his mom) about her.

Sylar poses as an ex-partner of Parkman’s in order to make Janice let him into the house. When Parkman comes home from running errands, they sit down for a bit of a catch-up. (“Are you in my head again?” gasps Parkman. Sylar: “Oh, that was so two months ago.”  Okay, heh.)

Gretchen drives Claire to Benet’s apartment so the two of them can talk but her feelings are hurt when Claire doesn’t want/need her to come with her. Claire is dismayed to find that Benet is still investigating Samuel until Kate (Lauren) shows her footage of the buried town.

Parkman’s all, WTF, Sylar? Sylar wants the other man to go inside his head again and take away all his powers so he can live like a normal person. “How’m I supposed to do that?” squeals Parkman.

Peter goes to see his mother, who is upset, missing Nathan and worried about Peter. She warns him to be wary of Sylar despite the vision-dream that shows him [Sylar] saving Emma and stopping her from killing all those people.

When Claire asks to borrow Gretchen’s car, wanting to head her dad off before he confronts Samuel, Gretchen demurs at first, saying that Benet should handle it – and Claire should try to retake her normal life. Then she caves, telling her indestructible roommate to bring it back with a full gas tank.

At Benet’s apartment, he berates Lauren for letting Claire go off all-hotheaded. Then, rather hotheaded himself, he loads his gun (not a euphemism) and tells her that they’re going to the Carnival.

Here’s the thing: they’re making motions like we’re heading towards a Big Showdown with Samuel and Emma and all our good guys, but there’s no tension or building suspense. It just seems hurried and forced.  And you KNOW they're setting up Sylar to be the big hero.  Again, forced much?

Multiple-Eli overhears Claire try to convince Lydia to get Samuel to turn himself in to Benet when he comes and rats them out to his boss-man. My gawd, does Samuel ever say a line without speechifying? Claire promises that if he turns himself in, Benet won’t harm him.

Meanwhile, Benet and Lauren have high-powered sniper rifles trained on Samuel from the hillside. When Claire calls to offer Samuel’s surrender, Benet is willing to deal. Lauren heads off through the woods to meet Samuel and bring him out. As Samuel makes his goodbye speech, however, shots ring out, hitting Samuel and Claire and sending all the Carnies running for cover. My bet is on Eli, instructed by Samuel to turn the Carnies against Benet.

Parkman has difficulty removing Sylar's powers and Sylar gets pissed, threatening that if Parkman doesn’t get rid of them, he’ll use them all. On Janice and the baby.

Benet finally catches sight of Eli, shooting down into the Carnival but then the multiplier winks out of existence. Another Eli appears behind him and cracks him in the head, knocking him out.

Lauren is shot, and hides in the woods, in too much pain to get a clear shot when Eli walks by carrying Benet back to the Carnival. Lydia is gut-shot and it’s bad: she dies in Samuel’s arms, but not before she learns from his touch that he arranged all this to create a villain worse than him.

Eli drags Benet back into the Carnival and the bespectacled one comes to long enough to tell his daughter that he didn’t do this. She believes him because when the Carnies begin to turn on them, she defends her father ferociously – until Doyle takes control of her body, immobilizing her. "Take her to my trailer," growls Samuel.

To protect his family, Parkman grows a pair and goes back inside Sylar’s head again: this time he pulls a trick like his dad did a couple of seasons ago and traps Sylar in a mind loop, alone. And then he gets all Cask of Amontillado on him and walls the comatose Sylar up in the basement (which is TOTALLY icky if you think it all the way through). Until Peter comes knocking on the door, interrupting him.

Emma wanders through the Carnival, disturbed by all the carnage. She patches Samuel up. He tells her that she’ll help him create a great new world.

Peter shakes Parkman’s hand, copying his power and reading his mind (since when does Angela have that power?) and rushing downstairs to bring Sylar back since his visions tell him he needs the multi-empowered psycho to save Emma and the folks at the Carnival. Parkman warns him that if he goes into Sylar's mind, he might not come back out. Peter forges on ahead and finds himself wandering a deserted NYC.  He flickers in and out, which is how you know it's in Sylar's head.

Lauren, panicked and bleeding, makes a call: to Tracy, as Benet told her to do if anything went wrong. Apparently he did not tell her to give Tracy their location or any details of what just happened which seems inefficient.  Then she staggers to her feet.

Samuel gathers the Carnival around and makes a speech: "The outside world has proven once again that people like us will never be accepted ... [i]t’s time we showed the world what we truly are."

See? Practically painless!

Previously on Heroes / next time on Heroes

Graphic novel review: Black Hole by Charles Burns

This was another recommendation by Eli from work. But while I thought Stiff was wonderful, Black Hole sort of left me with an icky feeling.

Set in Seattle in the mid-1970s, Black Hole, the 2005 graphic novel by Charles Burns, follows a group of teenagers as they are plagued not only by the horrors of high school but also by a sexually transmitted disease that transforms its victims into grotesque monsters. They don’t try to protect themselves from this debilitating disease, nor do they fight against it or try to discover its source or a cure. They simply contract it and try to find a way to deal with it while withdrawing from their families and healthy friends.

If Black Hole sounds bleak, that’s because it is. Unrelieved by much humor, drawn in stark black and white – the artwork is kind of cool and looks like woodcuts – this isn’t a happy story. And it isn’t much of a story either: if you’ve read book reviews by me before, you know that I prefer books that are heavy on plot, where the story goes somewhere, does something, has a beginning and a middle and an end. In this hefty graphic novel (there were no page numbers in the hardcover version I read, but the book is well over an inch thick), the story just stops, leaving one of the main characters floating in a dark sea under a dark sky, not knowing what will happen next.

Perhaps I’ve missed the point of the book. Maybe it’s more about feeling alienated in high school by whatever means possible. But that’s what Buffy was about, with the horrors of teenagerdom being represented by actual monsters, and I figured all that out. I think I just didn’t like this one.

Book review: The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly

This book review comes in honor of my story-telling aunt Terry, who wanted to know what I thought about The Book of Lost Things by Irish author John Connolly. (It is also thanks to her that I even read this book, as I’d never heard of it.) What did I think? Nutshell: AWESOME.

The Book of Lost Things tells the story of the boy David who, once upon a time, had his world collapse around him. His beloved mother withered, sickened and died, and his father – a good man, but lonely – remarried shortly thereafter. David, feeling angry and sorry for himself, retreats to his books of fairytales. When he finds himself thrust into a different world, populated by twisted variations on the old tales, he is not even that surprised – a child accepting this strange reality where an adult would have curled into the fetal position and screamed.

Instead, David accepts a quest. He meets the Woodsman (not tin, but rather grim) who tells him that this land is ruled by a dying king whose magic book, the titular Book of Lost Things, may be able to show the boy the way back home. David sets off to see the king, suffering horrific adventures along the way: an assembling army of wolves, led by a werewolf who would be king, trolls, harpies, a Beast like something out of Stephen King’s imagination. More disturbingly, David is being followed by the Crooked Man (by the old stories, if you can learn his name he’ll leave you alone, but David doesn’t know this nasty creature’s name) who has nefarious plans for the boy.

It isn’t all terror and grue, however. David meets stalwart companions as well: the Woodsman, who feeds him, clothes him and sets him on his path; seven communist dwarves; and the soldier Roland and his trusty steed, Scylla, in whose company David learns the true meaning of loyalty, courage and love. In the company of these good men, the boy takes steps to become a man, something that will help him in his fight against the crooked man.

What is so cool about The Book of Lost Things is that it’s not just a fantasy quest story; it’s also an homage to and re-telling of the old stories – the dark, unabridged fairy tales before Disney got its mitts on ‘em. In his real world, David clung to the fairy tales because his mother loved the stories and believed in their power to transform:

Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination, and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read.

And in his real world, classic fairy tale tropes abound: the beautiful beloved parent dies; the decent widowed parent remarries wicked stepmother; the family goes to live in a big, mysterious house; there is the introduction of new stepsiblings and the subsequent peripheralizing of main character.

Once David makes the transition to the story-world, he finds that here, all the things he read about are real and true, but different. His new friends tell him stories, tales that seem familiar at first: how Red Riding Hood’s relationship with the Big Bad Wolf was in fact rather more complicated; how Hansel was a putz; how the Prince and the Swineherd is a story of vengeance and could have been of forgiveness; what Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are really like. There are very few happy endings in this world, it seems. As the seven dwarves tell David:

"They ate [Goldilocks] … That’s what ‘ran away and was never seen again’ means in these parts. It means ‘eaten.’” “Um, and what about ‘happily ever after? … What does that mean?” “Eaten quickly.”

My library classifies The Book of Lost Things as “fantasy” fiction, and the book jacket says it is a novel “for adults.” While there are some adult themes and quite a bit of violence – although certainly no more so than in the Grimms’ original, unsanitized fairy tales* – this is about on the level of the later Harry Potter books, so mature young adults could enjoy it. The prose reads like a fairy tale, with simple sentences and clear phrasing; the sentences have a rhythm to them that would lend themselves nicely to reading aloud. This story wants to be read. People should want to read it.

* I have a volume of the unabridged Grimms' fairy tales, and they are bloody, bloody stories.  When I get my stuff out of storage, I should probably read them again.
 

All of my favorite things

My dear friend Blonde Ambition knows me too well.  She sent me a Christmas present (even tho' she shouldn't have because we were cutting back and not sending Christmas presents this year) that combined all of my favorite things:  chocolate, beer and bacon.  Let me repeat that for you: chocolate and beer and bacon, all together.

From the charming chocolatier, Socola Chocolates (just look at their website without drooling, I dare you), came a gorgeous box of twelve truffles entitled the Beer and Bacon collection: six Guinness-infused dark chocolate tidbits, and six "Notorious H.O.G." nibbles.  The bacon truffles were also dark chocolate, embedded with bits of applewood-smoked bacon and garnished with black Hawaiian sea salt.  The Guinness truffles were just ravishing, smooth and creamy with just a bit of bitterness from the beer.  The bacon truffles had the best mouth-feel when allowed to melt whole in your mouth - as opposed to taking a bite out of the candy - as that way the little bacon bits didn't get lost.  The Hawaiian sea salt is a miraculous addition - an excellent counterpoint to the richness of the chocolate.

I opened the box a couple of days before Christmas and finished the last truffle last night, taking my time to savor each individual morsel.  These are really good chocolates.  And Socola (which uses the most adorable mascot: Harriet the flying alpaca!) has a whole bunch of other truffle varieties that sound just as amazing: Calmyrna fig, Earl Grey tea, burnt caramel, guava, Vietnamese espresso, jasmine tea, green tea, dark chocolate champagne ... now I'm drooling!

The company is run by two sisters, Wendy and Susan Lieu, and can be bought in person in several locations in San Francisco/Oakland.  Or order some online - I promise you won't regret it.

Heroes episode recap – “Pass/Fail” S4E15 (airdate 01/18/10)

Let’s try an experiment, shall we? I think we shall, partly because I’m feeling a little under the weather (just a head cold coming on, nothing horrific) and partly because no one is reading these stupid Heroes recaps anymore … not because my recaps are stupid but because Heroes is. So we’re going to go all pared-down this time as I attempt to distill each scene to its absolute essence. Obviously, if there are a lot of Mohinder scenes, I’ll just be screaming “Aaaaarrrrrggggghhhh!!!!!!!”

Gretchen would be more attractive without that severe middle part. Claire really doesn’t want to talk about the Carnies or Nathan’s death, although she appreciates (sort of) Gretchen’s support. Also: Sylar is on campus.

Mohinder goes off to do something “heroic” (where I hope that “heroic” means “and is never heard or seen from again”) and Hiro faints, coming to his “senses” in the middle of a wonky trial in Charlie’s diner. It’s the World vs. Hiro Nakamura, where his father is the judge and Adam/Kensei is the blond and snarky prosecutor. It’s quite possible that everyone at the trial is dead, which makes me wish that Mohinder had gone there.

Vanessa is still cranky about Samuel having kidnapped her, despite his attempts to be charming.

Now, I’m super-happy to see Adam again but it pisses me off that we’re spending time on this dream world bullshit. Could we possibly move this damn show forward? No? Anyway, Hiro is on trial for bending space and time and stuff and crimes against nature or something. Whatever.

Sylar wants Claire to help him get his mojo back. She’s still angry about Nathan, if you can imagine that. However, Sylar has kidnapped Gretchen to encourage Claire to play along. If Claire doesn’t stop making that frowny face so much, she’s going to get wrinkles.

Sylar wants to figure out how he and Claire turned out so differently when they have so much in common: being adopted and abandoned; being raised by parents who didn’t understand them; having adoptive fathers who were killers; currently being indestructible. Claire’s like: you’re a damn psychopath. So Sylar thinks he’ll try pulling the answers out of her head using Lydia’s technique of touch (rather than slice) and he kisses Claire. It’s yucky.

Samuel starts to melt Vanessa’s frosty heart by buying her a strawberry milkshake. It’s a yummy looking shake, for sure.

Diner dream trial: Sylar is going to be the prosecution’s star witness.

Sylar tells Claire that she uses her power to build walls around herself, and she might end up being alone all her life, just like him. There’s quite a bit of “gosh, aren’t you closeted” too. So Claire stabs him in the eye with a pencil she had up her sleeve and runs off to rescue Gretchen. And because this show is SO LAME, Sylar writhing on the floor, screaming, with a pencil sticking out of his eye is actually FUNNY.

Diner dream trial: Sylar testifies that Hiro told him he could kill anyone he wanted if he spared Charlie. He lists a whole bunch of them, including Atomic Ted. Aw – I miss Atomic Ted. The prosecution rests.

Samuel has worn Vanessa down: they reminisce about the cottage they imagined together as children. Then he takes her to the gorgeous meadow he had his Heroes grow where he has … built the dream cottage. She says this is a fantasy, his fantasy, and while it’s very beautiful, she can’t live here with him. Samuel is crushed and very upset. This won’t end well, I suspect.

Claire finds Gretchen tied up but unharmed in their room. Then the lights fizzle out and all the windows implode. At this point, doesn’t Gretchen really wish she’d never met Claire? I mean, really?

The girls hide in a utility closet (like, SUBTLE, writers) and Claire stutters her way through apologizing for shutting herself off, and maybe the way for Sylar to regain his humanity is to lose all his powers. So then Gretchen morphs back into Sylar who pretty much says thanks for the insight and takes off. Claire finds the real Gretchen, alive and well, in the student center, and they hold hands, deciding to give being together a shot. This is so forced.

Diner dream trial: Hiro takes the stand in his own defense, stating that when he got powers, he vowed to only ever use them for good. Despite this, his father finds him guilty. And back at the hospital, in the real world, Hiro’s heart is failing.

After the commercial, another dream sequence: Hiro and Adam fight with samurai swords as Hiro fights for his life on the hospital table. Adam eventually gets a sword in the gut and then the sound cuts out on my stupid Comcast cable. But still, Hiro’s mom shows up to heal him, and then he recovers in real life.

Sad Samuel goes back for another milkshake and yells at the poor waitress. I don’t know what he’s saying but he gets angrier and angrier and finally swallows the whole town. The Carnies watch from a distance and are fearful.

Montage of Claire and Gretchen, Ando and Hiro … and then Sylar has shown up on Parkman’s doorstep to chat up Parkman’s wife. Don’t know why – still can’t hear anything – not sure I actually care.

There.  I captured everything pertinent and it was much less painful for all involved.  Especially since Mohinder left in the first scene and never came back.
 
Previously on Heroes / next time on Heroes

Movie review: Funny People

In Funny People, Adam Sandler plays against type (ha ha, just kidding), as George Simmons, a 40-something former standup comedian who has hit it really big with a string of dumb comedies but has lost touch with family and friends while doing so. When he develops a life-threatening blood disease, he is desperate to recapture his life, going back to the small comedy clubs where he got his start. But his current standup is very dark and not that funny, so he hires struggling young comic Ira Wright (Seth Rogen, not stretching very much here either) to write some new material for him and also to be his personal assistant. George gets some funny new jokes; Ira gets some life experiences hitherto unavailable to him; and both men get to be friends, sort of. Until George decides to reconnect with Laura, the one girl who got away, the one he’s always been in love with. The problem is, Laura (Leslie Mann) is married with two children and Ira has issues with this, even if George and Laura don’t seem to mind.

Is Funny People meant to be an ironic title? Because most of the main characters in here aren’t that funny. Ira isn’t very funny until he learns from George; George isn’t funny because his movies are exponentially stupid and his post-illness standup is too morbid; Laura isn’t funny even though she thinks she is. The supporting cast is actually stronger than the leads: Jason Schwartzman is fantastic as a vain sitcom actor, banging chicks left and right because he’s a little bit famous and “looks like Jackson Brown.” Eric Bana, as Laura’s Australian husband, is hilarious: I loved getting to hear his actual accent, which I’d never heard before, as well as watching him play broad and over the top as opposed to his smoldering Hollywood drama roles. Aubrey Plaza, from Parks and Recreation, is funny too, understated as a plain-Jane, Janeane Garofalo-esque standup comic on whom Ira has a crush. Also funny: the video clips of a young Adam Sandler, taped from his days as Judd Apatow’s roommate in real life.

But in general, Funny People is uneven, fully predictable and way too long at 146 minutes. The funny bits would be funnier if they weren’t buried under the length of the movie. Mr. Mouse started out watching with me but got restless several time, getting up to make dinner and then coming back, getting up to check his emails and then coming back again; he thought Knocked Up was too long and Funny People is seven minutes longer still.

Also: Judd Apatow needs to stop putting his daughters in his movies. They’re cute, Judd, but we’re over it. Run them through in a try-to-find-them Hitchcock-esque cameo if you must, but enough’s enough.

Book review: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

It just occurred to me that there’s been an awful lot of dead people here on FMS lately. I mean, I guess that’s always been the case what with the BtVS and the zombies and the vampires and the True Blood (when is S2 coming out on DVD???!!!???) and the Sandman comics and the slasher movies. But also I just gave up on Bringing Out the Dead by Joe Connolly because I couldn’t get into it (ambulance driver in Hell’s Kitchen who’s haunted by those he didn’t save). And I just devoured Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach – which is nonfiction and also about dead people. Mr. Mouse thinks I have a problem.

That may be so, but what is definitely so is that Stiff is a very excellent book. Chapter by chapter the author explores all that the human dead have gone through in the last 2,000 or so years, what they’ve given to the living and what the living have taken from them. From surgeons practicing their technique on cadavers to how body snatching supported the birth of human dissection; from how knowledge of the decay of human remains helps law enforcement solve murders to the role cadavers play in studying impact tolerance for car manufacturers and sports medicine; from medicinal cannibalism and reanimation of body parts to embalming and burial vs. cremation vs. composting, Roach leaves no headstone unturned.

But she does so wonderfully, in articulate, funny and sensitive words, not shying away from the gruesome side of her subject. She states baldly that many people whom she met during the course of writing this book thought she was a ghoul, but also says that many of the people she interviewed, those who work with the dead on a daily basis, did so reluctantly, worried that those of us reading the book would think them ghouls as well. Of utmost importance to her was to maintain the dignity of the cadavers. While Roach uses humor to keep the morbidity of her subject from becoming overwhelming (“The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens and nothing is expected of you.”), she is matter-of-factly respectful.

This book is not about dying and the accompanying pain and sadness for the dying person and their loved ones; there is no laughing at that here. But as we follow the bodies around, observing them in all their different situations, we are able to meet these people “long forgotten for their contributions while alive, but immortalized in the pages of books and journals” and realize there’s far more to being dead than just lying there.

Thanks very much to Eli from work for suggesting this book to me!