
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was very fun.
I'm not naturally a fan of dark-themed shows or the macabre, and I didn't really watch the show back in the day. (A little. The Munsters, too, a little. Wasn't a big thing for me.) But I felt like the TV did a good job of threading the needle between humor, macabre, camp, and mystery, creating a solid, entertaining show that honored its roots. I enjoyed the whole first season. And I think the novelization is, in some ways, even better.
Tehlor Kay Mejia does an excellent job of turning the shows and scripts into punchy prose with great pacing, and some of that can be attributed to the source material, for sure. But he also gives us Wednesday's interior monologue as the narrator, and her voice is perfectly captured, IMO. She's dark and funny and sardonic and brutal and just just barely caring. We get a perfect dead black rose with just a sprig of green, and I thought it was [chef's kiss]. The only thing I miss much is the cello and the dancing, which are hard to do in prose, but I think it was well-balanced by the revelations in Wednesday's own voice, page by page.
If you haven't seen the show, it's about Wednesday getting sent to Nevermore Academy, home to outcasts of all kinds, the school her parents attended. She doesn't care about fitting in, and makes friends and enemies without really trying--or allies and enemies, probably. There is a monster in the woods, randomly killing people in the area, and Wednesday gets involved, trying to solve the murders. She has to do this while navigating school, gossiping classmates, strange people in town, teachers and administrators who are split between helping her and controlling her, and Nevermore's own strange secrets. It's still a bit like a 60's sitcom, but it's a little more like modern dark academia.
The writer (adapter?) is primarily a YA author, and I would say that the book is aimed at a YA audience the most, but I'm an old, and I really enjoyed it. Highly recommended for fun people.
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