Lonely Werewolf Girl by Martin Millar

Remember how I said the other day that I can't read a bad book lately? Well I'm starting to believe that that's honestly the truth. Neil Gaiman is quoted on the back of Lonely Werewolf Girl as saying "I [don't] understand why Martin Millar isn't as celebrated as Kurt Vonnegut, as rich as Terry Pratchett, as famous as Douglas Adams..." and I totally agree. Damn this man is talented. I can't put into words how much I love almost all of the characters that he created for this novel. They're so amazing and so three dimensional and they're freaking werewolves. Well not all of them, I also came to love a couple of humans and a couple of fire elementals. Millar writes books that has such sentiment behind them. And I'm saying that after reading just two of them. The other book I've read by him is The Good Fairies of New York, which I also loved, but not as much as I adored Lonely Werewolf Girl. His books are full of humor, but the type of humor that embodies every day life...not just humor for humor's sake. It's not there just to be funny, it's something that we might all experience. No, we may not all be battling our werewolf families and we may not all be baffled at the seeming idiocy of our fire elemental princess niece, and we may not all have to put up with werewolf princesses sipping laudanum and cutting themselves in our guest bedroom, but we can relate in one way or another to the emotions attached to these things and we often respond to these situations with humor...the easiest way to deal with things. Either that, or with sadness, another emotion that Millar captures perfectly in his writing. This story centers around Kalix, a seventeen year old werewolf who has been ostracized from her family clan after injuring her father, the head of the clan...the Thane as he is called. He is near death because of his injuries. Kalix is a depressed girl now wandering the streets of London until two humans, a goth girl named Moonglow and her roomate Daniel, intercede against their will and take her in. What they end up with is a moody, teenage werewolf who cuts herself, sips laudanum to deal with her emotional pain and loves Sabrina the Teenage Witch. But oh there's so much more. In the same town is Kalix's sister, Thrix who is a fashion designer aiding a Hiyasta (a fire elemental) named Malveria in getting her wardrobe together for the hottest underground fashion event of the year. Malveria had to be one of my favorite characters in this book as she has a VERY short fuse but a heart of gold when it comes down to it. In the midst of all of this, there is a battle about to erupt in the werewolf community for who will take over as the leader of the werewolf clan when the current Thane dies. And everyone wants Kalix to pay for her past injury on her father. Kalix's story was just so tragic to me. She just kept falling and falling. At least that's how I saw it at first. But then I started to see that Kalix is anyone who has had depression...anyone who's had some type of trauma. It's hard to open your eyes to anything good that's there when you've had so much bad. It's hard to accept something good when everything good has turned bad in the past. She truly was a Lonely Werewolf Girl and it made me so sad. Until I could see her small improvements. And like I said, I could just spend days talking about all of the other wonderful characters in this book. All of the different connections, all of the different storylines being told. There are quite a few different storylines throughout the novel, but it's never confusing....and they all tie together, it's not like a whole bunch of different stories. They all have to do with one another. But I found that I enjoyed each and every one of them. You know how with some books you just dread when the author returns to one particular storyline? I never felt that way with this book. I got excited everytime Millar would change storylines. Needless to say, I loved this. And I'd eagerly recommend it to everyone! What makes me even MORE excited is that I have the ARC of the next book, Curse of the Wolf Girl waiting for me!! It's not due out until August, but I'm fighting just jumping into it right now. Hmmm...I could always just do that and schedule the review to go up closer to the release date ;) We'll see what happens. But for now....READ LONELY WEREWOLF GIRL!! Other Views and Opinions: You Can Never Have Too Many Books Things Mean A Lot Jenny's Books