Half World

Goto, Hiromi. Half World. New York: Viking, 2010. Illustrated by Jillian Tamaki.

Another book I read because I liked the sound of it according to coffeeandink. And then the author very kindly signed my copy for me at the Sign Out at WisCon 34.

This is a short book, but it packs quite a lot of punch. Teenage Melanie Tamaki is fat, poor, Japanese and generally out of place in her presumably-eastern-Canada city; she and her mother, who is continually ill, just barely manage to scrape by in their lives, and when Melanie comes home from school one day to find her mother missing, she is forced to confront the fact that she is doubly an immigrant: her parents came from Half World, the realm in which people who have left the Realm of Flesh are supposed to do penance in order to enter the Realm of Spirit. But the balance between the Realms has been shattered for millennia, and as a girl who was conceived in Half World but born in Life, who has Life, it falls to Melanie, unwilling and unprepared, to save her mother from the venomous Mr. Glueskin and to perhaps redress the wrongs of the cosmos itself. Along the way, she has a lot of help from a jade pendant-turned-rat, flocks of crows, a magic 8 ball with upgrades, and two old Chinese women, both scholars and one grocery store owner.

( Realms out of joint )

right now, another please

# I remembered what I forgot in my last personal post: on June 5 I ran an 8K for the first time, in 58:32. Given that it was 81º F when I got in my car at 07:50 to drive to the town where the race was, I am quite happy with my performance. Luckily there was a surfeit of water stations; by the end I was just dumping the water on my head, which was a good decision. Loved it, though (really pretty course through a nice town I know well); would run again!

# I have a line on a possible housing situation in California that sounds like it's just about perfect. I am having a phone interview/chat with the house's point person tomorrow evening and am already slightly nervous. I have lived on my own before, but all my housing-hunting experience took place on another continent in a different language. Relatedly, I really want my senior year roommate to tell me whether I can put her down as a reference/recommender or not. (Voice of reason says: She's probably just busy; she has a significant other and a job and a life after all. Nervousness says: Augh!)

# Two months until I move to California. The list of things I have to do before then is…quite long.

# Nearly finished my Holmes big bang story, yay! Just in time, coincidentally, for major racist fail in another fandom's big bang (link goes to torachan's roundup). This sort of thing inspires in me personally anything but complacency. That is not what I want to do or the person I want to be in my writing and in the world, but I don't ever want to think that I don't have to think carefully about the stories I choose to tell, and how. Blech.