Bingeworthy TV: iZombie

iZombie, a zombie series for people who do not really like the zombie genre.  I am not a fan of The Walking Dead and I do not generally appreciate zombie guts and gore, but if you can make me laugh its all good.  My daughters recommended iZombie to me and after about 3 episodes I was hooked.

The premise is that there are zombies among us but if they are well fed, spray tanned and properly coifed you would never recognize them as the un-dead.  The main character is Liv, a newly minted doctor who had her life all figured out. Surgeon, check; hot fiance, check; awesome best friend, check.  Perfect life, not so fast.  One night at a yacht party there were some funky drugs being passed around and before you know the ship is blowing up and zombies are making a mess of things.  Liv gets scratched and when she wakes up on the beach she is deathly pale, has a white streak in her hair and is oddly starving for brains.  So her saga begins.

She ends up getting a job in the coroner's office because of the steady supply of brains and her co-worker quickly catches her having a snack.  But he's on board in keeping her secret and even begins trying to come up with a cure for zombism.  Liv discovers that she takes on the personality of the person whose brain she has eaten and suddenly she's a magician, a gambler or a dominatrix. Whoever she is channeling is usually very different than her true self.  With the visions she has while on each brain she is spurred to  begin helping a local detective solve crimes.  

The dialog is clever and often funny.  Watching Liv come up with new brain recipes is one of my favorite little bits of each show.  The show isn't all fun and games and there are some tense moments but overall this is more Zombieland than Night Of The Living Dead. I must say I have binged the whole series and am anxiously awaiting the new season!

~Michelle, Circulation

Staff Review: A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles is approaching its one-year anniversary on the New York Times bestseller list. Having just finished it, I can attest that it deserves every week it has spent there.

For the crime of being an aristocrat after the 1917 Russian Revolution, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is placed under life-long house arrest. The "house" to which he is confined, however, is vast: Moscow's majestic Metropol Hotel, where he is sentenced to a 100-foot attic room though he's free to move about the hotel.

Rostov is in his early thirties as the novel opens and through the course of its 480 pages we inhabit thirty-plus years of house arrest with him. And what a time we have of it. Within the space of one building Towles has created a very full world, peopling it with an extensive cast that pivots around the appealing Count and includes international hotel guests, an unctuously evil hotel manager, a beautiful actress, a former Red Army colonel, a prodigious young child, a temperamental chef, a revolutionary friend, an orphan, and many others. The cast is delightful, with most characters assisting the Count in providing this enchanting book with its large heart.

The Count himself is the epitome of grace under pressure. Without ever surrendering his gentility or his humor, he accommodates himself to his newly restricted life, which he manages to lead to the fullest, even embracing a new career as headwaiter at the hotel's premiere restaurant (the Bolsheviks allow the hotel to function in its grand old style to impress foreign visitors who stay there).

The novel often reminded me of a fable or tale and as such it's very much in the Russian tradition. There are table legs filled with gold coins, a clock that tolls but two times a day, a key that opens all doors, a shadowy cat, fine wines by the hundreds, brandy snifters by the score, sumptuous meals and exquisite pastries galore. Yet amidst all these trappings of the old aristocratic life, we are also given a clear view of the new Soviet regime with its endless bureaucracies and Siberian gulags, its negation of the individual in favor of the collective, its privations and Orwellian turns of phrase.

The novel concludes very satisfactorily in 1954 and about that I will say nothing more. From start to finish this book is an impressive piece of architecture; many years of planning went into its construction.To my mind, the novel's two greatest pleasures are the sublime delight Rostov takes in literature, from Montaigne to Russia's great literary masters, and the consistent intelligence and civility of the prose (Towles's debut novel, by the way, published in 2011, was titled Rules of Civility). No small part of this new book's success may be due to its timing. With public discourse these days tending to the divisive and vulgar, A Gentleman in Moscow transports us to a far more charming world.

Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: "Love, Hate & Other Filters" by Samira Ahmed

What do librarians do all day? Well, it depends on the day, but one of my favorite tasks is picking out new books for the library's collection. A side benefit to buying books for the library is that publishers offer us advance access to review books that they hope will be popular. Which is how I recently had the chance to review Love, Hate & Other Filters by Samira Ahmed, a book that will be published on January 16.

This is Ahmed's first, or debut, novel, and like the publisher, I hope that it will be popular. The book is written for a teen audience, but I imagine many adult readers will enjoy it as much as I did. One element that Dubuque readers might find particularly appealing is the book's Illinois setting.

Maya Aziz is a high school senior who dreams of going to school in New York to become a documentary filmmaker. Her parents left India for America for a chance at a better life for themselves and their daughter, a life they've found in their rural suburb of Chicago where they have built a successful dental practice. However their dreams for Maya's success are more along the lines of attending college close to home, a career as a doctor or a lawyer, and a marriage with a nice Muslim boy.

Maya wants to be a good daughter and make her parents happy, but part of growing up is learning what is important to you. The tension between parents, especially immigrant parents, and their children as they become adults is a common story in literature, and it's handled very well here. Readers who read and loved When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon are likely to also enjoy Love, Hate & Other Filters.

What sets Ahmed's book apart, however, is a larger focus on the Aziz family's identity as Muslim Americans and how that shapes their experience. Ahmed doesn't shy away from the impacts of racism and Islamophobia, both subtle and overt, that exist in our country.

MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW

Maya is the narrator for most of the  novel, but in between chapters there are short pieces, a page or two at most, from other people's perspectives. Readers will quickly come to suspect that the people in these short pieces are tied to some terrible event. An event that, even though Maya will never have met any of the people involved, will have a profound effect on her life.

Many readers are likely to quickly share my suspicion that the story being told in these short pieces is a tragedy, specifically a terrorist attack. The tension that Ahmed created by interjecting these hints of something awful in a story that is otherwise charming kept me reading late into the night. The joy of watching Maya learn to stand up for her dreams and the warmth of first love paired with the seasick dread and tension of a coming tragedy created a book more impactful and human than either story might have been on its own.

~Sarah, Adult Services