Where Wednesday Faces Darkness and Light

Wednesday: A Novelization of Season One by Tehlor Kay Mejia
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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Where Nobody's a Good Person

The Cloisters by Katy Hays
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was pretty entertaining in parts. A little intrigue, maybe some supernatural hints. A bit of Da Vinci Code.

But it apparently aimed at literary significance, though it landed on melodrama instead. Not just that, but the last page literally made me roll my eyes.

That's not what I was looking for.

It sounds better on paper: an intelligent young woman, chancing into a great summer job after college and before getting her doctorate, working on the history of tarot at a museum in New York. Could have been a cool beach read (I love beach reads) with Ann discovering some exciting things about a tarot deck that maybe reveals some true insights, all while hanging with a fun assortment of people. Besides Ann, the smart girl with a history, there's the brilliant and handsome head of the place, the gorgeous and manipulative rich girl, the cool stoner gardener who knows some stuff, and the various art dealers and college acquaintances, etc.

But it wants to turn literary, so soon everybody is warning Ann about everyone else, and things that just don't seem that important are treated as Deeply Significant. Everyone has a dark side and secrets, and there's the obligatory affair between the young woman and the older academic man, and the MC is entranced by the bad boy on one hand and her Machiavellian rich friend on the other. As far as the prose, I was okay with the somewhat elevated language and attempts at philosophy and psychology. It at least warned me early on that the plot was not the central aspect of the book.

But anyway, I dunno. It didn't work for me. I especially disliked the dark turn at the end, most of all the pair of revelations at the very, very end. This was a gift, and it's a pretty edition, so I was inclined to love it; I almost would have given this a 4 and thumbs-up if it weren't for the last 10 pages or so.

Recommended most for readers who lean toward literary fiction and don't mind if every character is a little shitty.

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