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A review by lizshayne
Hurricane Heels by Isabel Yap
3.0
(Kindle copy needs better copy editing and you can tell it's bad if *I* noticed.)
That out of the way, I'm really enjoying the upsurge of superhero narratives in book form that ask all these interesting questions about saving the world and what it means to be chosen and to fight. Yap's book is less interrogative than some of the others that have come out the Book Smugglers' initiative: she's not interested in the moral complexity of super powers or in the way that good and evil are handled, she cares more about what being a girl battling the forces of darkness does to a person. Well, a team of people. In schoolgirl outfits and heels. But she's explicit about taking her cues from the magical girls who populate manga and anime. Yap is another example of using fun and fluffy ideas--magical girls and one of them is getting married!--to write fun and fluffy books that also add depth to these larger narratives of superheros and saviors that populate (in particular) visual media. Prose invites a certain kind of interiority and Yap takes advantage of that approach to give the characters more time and space to worry and struggle with who they are.
The downside is that magical girls fighting monsters does not translate perfectly to prose and some of the action scenes would work much better in another medium. Basically, someone make this into a graphic novel while preserving the inner thoughts and illustrating the fight scenes. Win/win.
That out of the way, I'm really enjoying the upsurge of superhero narratives in book form that ask all these interesting questions about saving the world and what it means to be chosen and to fight. Yap's book is less interrogative than some of the others that have come out the Book Smugglers' initiative: she's not interested in the moral complexity of super powers or in the way that good and evil are handled, she cares more about what being a girl battling the forces of darkness does to a person. Well, a team of people. In schoolgirl outfits and heels. But she's explicit about taking her cues from the magical girls who populate manga and anime. Yap is another example of using fun and fluffy ideas--magical girls and one of them is getting married!--to write fun and fluffy books that also add depth to these larger narratives of superheros and saviors that populate (in particular) visual media. Prose invites a certain kind of interiority and Yap takes advantage of that approach to give the characters more time and space to worry and struggle with who they are.
The downside is that magical girls fighting monsters does not translate perfectly to prose and some of the action scenes would work much better in another medium. Basically, someone make this into a graphic novel while preserving the inner thoughts and illustrating the fight scenes. Win/win.