The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen

Last month my grandpa died. He was one of the most important people in my family, as my dad's from the Philippines and my mom's family mostly live here. My grandpa has been here for almost every birthday, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, and the random weekends in between for my family. He and my grandma were married in 1948 and celebrated their sixtieth anniversary this past October. While it wasn't a shock that he died (he had a stroke practically on my sixth birthday), we all still went through the grieving process.

It seemed appropriate, then, that I read The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen. In it, the protagonist Macy is still grieving over her own father's death that occurred about a year before the start of the book. When I read about her reaction to seeing her father's belongings, I realized that that was what the pangs I felt going into my grandmother's house were, seeing his armchair empty and the TV on at a reasonable level. I miss him a lot.

My summer started off with such a fabulous beginning, what with my grandpa dying about two weeks after I got out of school. Then with the job hunt and boyfriendlessness hanging over me, I try my hardest to find books that I can escape into. I've always had a thing for fantasy books - magic, monsters, heroes, and true love don't always have a place in my real life, so finding them in books ensured a small detour from my crazy schedule.

I borrowed The Truth About Forever from my best friend. I spent the night at her house a weekend or so ago and we sat around reading books - believe me, this is actually normal for us. I was delving into The City of Glass when she leaned over and told me I should read this other book, because, well, it was really Jada's, but it's really good. So I took it home and a few days ago I finally got around to reading it. And let me tell you, if I find it anywhere, I'm buying it.

It's a good summer read for girls who have had a terrible job, have been a dependent in a relationship, who have lost someone they love. My love life has been rather unsatisfactory, but being in Macy's head when she thinks about being perfect and missing someone, I could relate. I'm an almost-perfectionist myself, what with a crazy school schedule and a lot of extracurricular activities scattered across the year. The stress can really do some scary things to a girl, and this novel gave me some frightening flashbacks to my sophomore year.

But no matter what, one thing this book teaches is that opportunities will present themselves at the oddest times, and sometimes we just have to roll with them. A job might suddenly open up, and while it's not something we're familiar with, we'll take the leap of faith and try to enjoy the ride. New people walk into our lives, sometimes helping to fill the void left by people who have left our lives, whether in death or in moving away from us in the literal or figurative sense.

xxxHolic: AnotherHolic by Nisioisin

CLAMP has got to be one of my favorite manga groups that ever existed. Not that I've ever read any other manga that a group did; usually I read those single-artist jobs. But I'm a pretty decent CLAMP fan: I loved Cardcaptor Sakura, and my favorite manga of all time is Tsubasa RESERvoiR CHRoNiCLE. So when my boyfriend and I were at the anime store the other day and saw xxxHoLic: AnotherHoLic sitting on the shelv, I practically fainted.

xxxHoLic is CLAMP's companion series to Tsubasa RESERvoiR CHRoNiCLE, set during the same time and parallel to TRC. The two main characters - Watanuki and Yuuko - both appear in TRC, though xxxHoLic is at once less serious and more philosophical than TRC.

I'm rambling. Regardless of its background, xxxHoLic: AnotherHoLic isn't another manga or graphic novel: it's a novel written by pop author Nisioisin, who wrote and released Death Note: Another Note around the same time as xxxHoLic: AnotherHolic. He's done some other stuff, but nothing I recognize in particular.

The novel is split up into three parts: OuterHoLic, InnerHoLic, and OtherHoLic. The first short story is about teenage Kimihiro Watanuki (that's in Western-style, with his given name first), who works for the Dimension Witch Yuuko in order to rid himself of his supernatural ability to see spirits. Watanuki is assigned to purchase a cheap pair of fake glasses. He thought it was just something weird that Yuuko wanted - she often asks ridiculous things of him - until he sees a young woman throw herself in front of a moving scooter.

The second part, InnerHoLic, revolves around the mysterious case of a woman receiving text messages from her dead friend. This part of the book was, by far, my favorite. While all of the parts made me think, this one made me think the most. It brought this to mind: when a friend dies, do we mourn for their sake, or for our own? Is our mourning simply something selfish? Or is it something more?

The third part, OtherHoLic, brings another young man into play, one searching for Watanuki and trying to recruit his "awesome eyes." Watanuki finds something about him very repellant, but there's much more to him than meets the eye.

Final Say: Overall, I think I'd give the book a good rating. It wasn't as good as the original manga series - though its story line was different than any of the manga - but for a stand-alone book, it was pretty good. My only issue was the loss in translation: there's a lot of wordplay in xxxHoLic that simply can't be translated into English. I'd recommend xxxHoLic: AnotherHoLic to all CLAMP fans and those interested in Japanese lore. If you're not into that kind of thing, though, this might be a good book to skip.