13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
I was not mystically thrilled., November 27, 2008
This review is from: Gothic Lolita: A Mystical Thriller (Hardcover)
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So, okay, I hate giving bad reviews so I am really trying hard to find a way to sugarcoat this one.
I think what the author was going for was to express this emotion of longing... longing for what? I guess... a soulmate? A friend that knows you so well that the two of you are almost like the same person?
Here is a quote from the first page of the book (which is written in FIRST PERSON PRESENT TENSE):
"do you ever wish you had someone (not the sky someone, but a real person) who could share in your reality?
there would be nowhere you couldn't go, down to the details of your last strange dream. you'd be in this game together, just you and the other person creating the entire world."
(Also, there are no capitalizations in the entire book...)
So the two main characters, Miya and Chelsea find each other through livejournal.com... oops I mean girlbloggers.com (which just happens to be the author's webpage.) Chelsea thinks Gothic Lolitas are awesome and Miya happens to be one (or pretends to be one on the internet anyways...)
But it doesn't really matter she's from Japan desu!!! So they bond... sort of... they never actually speak to each other they just lurk each others journals... And they both love this manga/comic book called Sailor Moon... oops I mean Shounen Rainbow Warriors.
AAAANYWAY....
the first several chapters are pretty incomprehensible it's almost like reading gibberish. you finally get the sense that you are reading the thoughts of two girls, Chelsea, a 15 year old half-Japanese girl from Los Angeles and Miya, a 15 year old girl from Japan. problem is, both girls write exactly the same way so that sometimes you have to keep going back just to make sure you're reading Miya or Chelsea. The writing is so disjointed that I really had trouble figuring out what was going on and even more trouble caring. (I am 29 years old, read a lot and have been to law school so I like to think I'm not an idiot, maybe I'm wrong.)
It seemed to me like Miya's father dumped Miya and her little brother in an orphanage and then died, I couldn't figure out whether the death scene happened in the orphanage or not. Then there was this creepy American woman living at the orphanage slobbering over all the little Japanese babies and there was this ominous tension like OH NO! DON'T LET HER TAKE AWAY MIYA'S KID BROTHER!! and then... you realize what's gonna happen at the end of the book even though you're only a few chapters in and you just cringe and go 'No way, it can't really be that obvious... can it?'
On the other side, Chelsea's whole thing was *~*~*~something happened to my brother 3 years ago and i cant tell you about it because this is a mystical thriller so i have to keep mentioning it and not telling you about it for the whole entire book...oh yeah and...elephant.~*~*~*
AND THEN!!!!
I'm not going to spoiler the ending. I just want to say how disappointed I was. Dakota Lane's other books have really high ratings and though I've never read them I expected this book to be good. I like looking at pictures of Gothic Lolita girls on the internet sometimes and I was really expecting this to be a book about them not some incomprehensible emo whinings of a grown woman trying to emulate the spirit of 15 year old girls.
She researched for three years but the book feels like she has never been to Japan. I really feel like she just sat in front of her computer and stared at pictures for 3 years.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Looking forward to seeing the film version, December 28, 2008
This review is from: Gothic Lolita: A Mystical Thriller (Hardcover)
Dakota Lane continues to create characters that draw her audiences into their dark and poignant worlds with awe and respect for their braveness in the face of tragic loss in her newest young adult novel Gothic Lolita. Understanding how the lives of the two young protagonists connect keeps the reader's suspense, and in Lane's poetic writing, the experience is haunting and magical. As a New York City public school teacher, I would recommend use of this work for literacy curriculum, in particular for multicultural literature, as this type is sorely underrepresented.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Half a World Away and Unrelated, but Sisters Just the Same, July 8, 2010
This review is from: Gothic Lolita: A Mystical Thriller (Hardcover)
This is a story about two young American Japanese girls, one lives in Los Angeles, the other in Tokyo. They both blog and they read each others words, but they don't post on each other's blogs. Neither girl knows the other is reading her stuff. Both girls love the same Manga (Japanese type serialized comic novel) and they're both into the Gothic Lolita fashion, though this book isn't about that.
Miya lives in an orphanage with her little brother and she is worried they might be separated. Chelsea's brother went missing three years ago and she stopped blogging and Miya misses reading her words. She had a twin who died in utero and her grandmother told her her soul was immediately born into someone else. Chelsea?
There wasn't a lot of suspense for me in this dreamy like story, but I enjoyed it very much. This is a short novel, very easily read in one sitting. I did it with two glasses of chardonnay and soft music in the background and I felt pretty darned good afterwards. The writing is in the style that some people blog and e-mail in (no caps), but that wasn't hard to get used to as Ms. Lane writes with a sincere and fresh voice.
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