"The Daybreakers" and "High Lonesome" by Louis L'Amour

IMPORTANT NOTE that I'm reviewing TWO books here, because I don't have much to say about either.

Finally and at long last, we're to the Sackett books that are actually set (mostly) in the Old West. This one is about two guys who were in "the Sackett-Higgins feud", and the Sackett side won it. Because of course they did, the Sackett family is like the Chuck Norris of Louis L'Amour.

Buuuuuuuuut our main character's brother, Orrin, got shot at during his wedding, and the bullet killed his bride-to-be instead. So he and his brother Tyrel (the main character) go West.

They team up with other cool people and go have a bunch of adventures, most of which have something to do with Orrin's marriage to the daughter of a really annoying guy. And/or Tyrel's extended crush on the daughter of a not-annoying guy.

 

This book is more serious than the previous Sackett books, but not as serious as High Lonesome (see below).

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T to T15+, erring on the T side, for violence.

4 stars.

 

 

This isn't a Sackett book at all; it's about a serial bank robber named Considine. And also his sharked-up list of lawless resolutes, his crush Lennie, and her dad Dave. 

He attempts to rob the absurdly well-defended bank in a town sheriff-ed by a guy named Pete Runyon, who was Considine's BFF until they had a falling-out over a woman. |Considine succeeds in robbing the bank|. (Yeah, spoiler tags are dark grey now because it looks less dumb than the giant blank spaces.)

Then Considine and his sharked-up list of lawless resolutes |nope out of there, heading for the proverbial and literal hills|. Due to mild plot shenanigans and a bunch of murderous Apaches (not the helicopters), all the characters I mentioned at the beginning of the High Lonesome review end up in a defensible place: the titular High Lonesome.

They |hold off the attacking Apaches for a while, but Hardy, Dutch, and "the Kiowa"--Considine's lawless resolutes--all die. The Kiowa gets to have his moment to shine, though, stalking and killing a bunch of the enemy|.

|Then the posse, formed to catch Considine and take the gold back, shows up and rescues Dave and Lennie. They think Considine's dead. He's not. The end has him riding off into the sunset after Lennie, because they started being in looooooove|.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for violence. 

4 stars.

(Endnote: High Lonesome would make a decently fun wave-defense videogame. The Daybreakers would be more of a Fallout-like sandbox-game-with-a-story, I think.)

"Howl's Moving Castle" (2004)

That's young Howl with the blue hair, btw.

Ayep, this is Howl's Moving Castle: the anime. This is the second anime I've ever watched, after My Neighbor Totoro (which I didn't review because this is a book blog, not a movie blog, and My Neighbor Totoro isn't based on a book.)

Just warning that I will spoil a truckload of things here, and I can't redact pictures.

The iconic picture.

So yeah, the plot goes off the rails fairly quickly; this never happened in the book. Actually, a lot of the stuff in this movie never happened in the book. That doesn't mean I didn't like it, but if you're some sort of purist... don't watch this. Both the book and the movie are good in their own ways, but they aren't the same.

The Witch of the Waste, voiced by Lauren Bacall.

 

But the basic premise is there: Sophie Hatter (voiced by Emily Mortimer when young, Jean Simmons when old) gets turned into an old lady by THE WITCH OF THE WASTE!!!, then goes to find Howl's moving castle because, as I said in my review of the book, "I'm an old lady anyway, YOLO". And she meets a turnip-headed scarecrow. (He hops along on his pole like he's using a pogo stick; also, his glove-hands flap up and down when he does it. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a gif of that.)

The fire demon, Calcifer, is still here; in the English dub, he's voiced by none other than Billy Crystal. It's hilarious.

The plot goes further off the rails from there; two nations (I'm guessing they're Ingary and High Norland, from the original book) declare war on each other. They seem to have WWI-era-ish technology, but with giant bird-shaped metal things replacing the zeppelins. Also they have flying kayak things.

Howl's Titular Moving Castle.

The king of Maybe-Ingary wants Howl (voiced in English by Christian Bale) to fight on his side in the war. The king of Maybe-High-Norland also wants Howl to fight on his side in the war. Howl thinks this is completely stupid and that the war shouldn't be going on at all.

Now I'm going to skip until we hit this bit, where:

TFW you accidentally dye your hair orange.

 

Howl accidentally dyes his hair orange, and freaks out about it.

Then he is completely melodramatic about it and covers everything in green slime. This is in the book, by the way. He's usually less melodramatic in the movie than the book, though.

 

Sophie has the most completely hilarious reaction to all of this.

THE CREEPY MANDALA FIGURINES!!!

 

That part when Madam Suliman depowers the Witch of the Waste via creepy mandala figurines.

I read the art book; it named the creepy mandala figurines, not me.

She was a guy in the book.

Behold, Madam Suliman, voiced by Blythe Danner. (They always pronounced her name like "Sullivan", but with an "M" and not a "V". It bothered me.) Yes, Madam Suliman is a possibly-wheelchair-bound (her chair does have wheels) woman, but she's also a very powerful witch.

More creepy mandala figurines.

Case in point. Also yeah, Howl showed up.

They nope out of there on a flying kayak. For some reason, they take the Witch of the Waste with them, as well as Madam Suliman's errand dog Heen.

More plot shenanigans ensue. This leads to Sophie accidentally destroying Howl's castle by removing Calcifer, then making her own castle by feeding Calcifer a bunch of her hair.

The day after I watched this, I was musing about the 4-H pledge, but couldn't remember it, and my mind came up with this:

"I pledge my HEAD to clearer thinking, my HEART to greater loyalty, my HANDS to larger service, and my HAIR to Calcifer so he can fix the moving castle." (I couldn't remember HEALTH.)

Unfortunately, an offhand comment of Calcifer's ("Imagine what I could have done with your eyes! Or your heart!") leads to the Witch of the Waste locating and stealing Howl's disembodied heart. This promptely causes the castle to go to pieces again. It breaks in half, and Sophie's half falls off a mountain and smashes.

 

Sophie breaks down crying, which is understandable. The front door sorta survived, though, and for want of a better idea she walks through it.

The other iconic picture.

And ends up in Howl's childhood, when he first finds Calcifer. This leads to the other iconic picture. That's Kid!Howl, btw.

Sophie yells to Howl that she knows how to help him now, then falls through a hole in the floor. 

(An interesting note from the art book: The hole in time is the only thing in the movie that's entirely computer-animated. Everything else is either pure drawing or drawings pasted over computer animation. The reason they gave was that they wanted the hole in time to look "alien" with respect to the rest of the movie, basically.)

 

When she finds the door and walks out of it with Heen (the door promptly implodes), Howl in the form of a giant bird is there. They have a touching reunion, and then Howl flies Sophie back to the broken remnants of the moving castle.

Yeah. That. It shortly breaks completely, and would fall off a cliff except that the turnip scarecrow saved it by sticking himself into the ground in front of it and acting as a brake.

 

Sophie impulsively kisses him on the cheek, which turns him back into a human because the curse on him could be broken with true love's kiss.

 

The human who got turned into the scarecrow.

Fortunately for him, it only had to be someone you love truly, not someone who truly loves you, as the Witch of the Waste explains (her explanation is, "It looks like your true love is in love with someone else".) Sophie and Howl are irrevocably an item by this point.

Nice picture, except Howl's shirt is kind of a dumb color. Maybe it'd be better in greyscale.

And now for a bunch of random pictures I couldn't fit anywhere else.

 

That looks like a still from an old movie. His shirt is better, though. (I don't hate the color of his shirt now as much as I did when I was writing this review. Huh.)

Normal Markl (Howl's Apprentice).

Markl in the beard disguise.

 

Markl gets this awesome beard disguise.

 

The Witch of the Waste (and, later, Madam Suliman) has these blob men as henchmen.

Howl turns into a bird at various points. This is the coolest-looking of his iterations.

 

This is Calcifer being grumpy when Sophie first makes him let her use him as a cooking fire. It's so funny I couldn't not include it.

Edit: Forgot to give this a videogame rating and a star rating. E10+, 4 stars.

"Goodbye, Mr. Terupt" by Rob Buyea

I'm glad this is the last one. Pretty sure the content level in a fifth would exceed sane levels. 

As it is, Jessica's the only safe one anymore. About which I'm glad, because I like Jessica, but Luke being Unsafe wasn't fun.

Mr. Terupt moves away at the end of the book. Given the cover blurb and the book's literal name, this isn't really a spoiler.

Anyway, near the beginning, Alexia |shoplifts a DNA test kit. Her justification for this is "I'm not gonna buy it, it costs like 200 dollars!". Alexia, that just makes it worse. I have headcanoned it to make it to where her mom paid for it, because... Alexia never gets in trouble for it. Like at all. I'm not sure why; maybe the author forgot or something? Here, let's continue the second book's running gag of| potato soup.

Now we've got the obligatory dunking on Alexia out of our system, how are the others doing? Well, Jeffrey and Anna finally decided to officially be boyfriend and girlfriend. Except then Jeff (I decided to call him Jeff when he started doing this) got seeeeerious about wrestling (sorry, did I forget to mention he does that? He's been doing that since like book 2) and started neglecting his friendship with everyone around him.

(By the way, I like Anna as well. Due to her frequent proximity to Alexia, however, I had to put her on the Unsafe list.)

Luke and Danielle discover that they liiiiiiiiiike each other. This, combined with Danielle's frequent proximity to Alexia and Luke's insistence on his science project (which is about pregnant cows) puts them both at Unsafe.

So... who do we have left that we haven't classified? It's Alexia, Peter, and Jeff(rey). Peter liiiiiikes Alexia, putting him as Unsafe by definition, but I'm actually classing him and Alexia as Critical instead. They get into... situations far more often than the others, and are the leading cause of said situations.

(One situation that Peter did not instigate, however: some unnamed rando decides to photocopy his rear end and then sneak a copy into all the teachers' mailboxes. It isn't Peter, but the principal thinks it is. It's not a great scene, but it made me laugh so hard because I remembered a certain scene in The Lego Movie while reading it.

Metalbeard: "First law of the sea. Never place your rear end on a pirate's face." Metalbeard had turned into a copier to hide from the bad guys.

Yeah.)

Oh, I forgot Jeffrey. Unsafe. Nothing untoward, really, he just got annoying.

 

I just realized right before publishing that I haven't actually told you what I think of this book, just what it's about. Well... as per my endnote, 90% of the book's problems are evitable, which annoyed me. As I said in my review of the previous one, I know teenagers are supposed to be dumb and impulsive, but I don't think we're this dumb and impulsive. 

Overall, as I said before, the only one I liked and felt safe around was Jessica; she's also had one of the best character arcs of the series. She was very shy and hid a lot during book 1, and matured through the series into someone who... isn't shy and doesn't hide a lot? More outgoing? Can't think of a word here.

 

(I said "one of the best" because the other one is indubitably Jeffrey. He was honestly kind of a jerk in the beginning and completely hated everything due to |the death of his older brother, which didn't involve| potato soup, and he also couldn't put a G on the end of any of his words. By this one, he's also more mature, and a lot less of a jerk, except when he's making me call him Jeff. And he learns to put G's on the ends of his words.)

(Also, Alexia quits using "Like" as, like, a comma. So that's good.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: Solid T15+ territory. Yeeeeeeesh.

This thing gets two stars. It had enough redeeming moments that I don't just give it one, but...

(Endnote: While talking to someone about this, I realized that ninety percent of the problems in the book could be solved by following the main characters around and casting Calm Emotions whenever anything happened. This might explain why I didn't like it much.)

"Ride the River" by Louis L'Amour

Well, that was a good adventure story.

Basically, Echo Sackett (the main character) receives word that she's to inherit some money. How much money she doesn't know.

It turns out to be quite a lot of money, but the guy who's handling the inheritance wants to keep it for himself, so he keeps sending randos to try to steal it from her.

But there's this (completely awesome) old dude who is on Echo's side in all of this, so he sends his son to help her out. Adventures ensue. The rest of this post is not going to be talking about the adventures, but instead talking about the old dude, Finian Chantry. He will enter my hall of fame... when I create one.

He became a high-powered lawyer such that everyone in Philadelphia kinda respects him and is like "don't mess with that guy". He also just calmly wanders through bad neighborhoods like they're normal neighborhoods. (When some guy was like "Dude, you can't just wander into there, you're like 86!" his response was basically "Irrelevant.") Aaaaaaand... *drumroll please* he's got a sword-cane.

Also, Echo brought him along to help her with the guy who's handling the inheritance. He proceeded to go "dude, stop being a jerk already" so hard on the guy that Echo got the entire thing in about a minute.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence.

Aaaaand it gets four stars, for being a solid but not stellar book.