I'm going to start this post in an unusual way: with a personal injury.

See, almost three years ago my sweet, kind-hearted, good, beautiful, wonderful daughter climbed up on my lap, looked at me with a depth of love and affection I cannot describe...and then cruelly and with malice aforethought (I'm sure of this) put her sweet, kind-hearted, good, beautiful, wonderful, and with-a-nail-as-sharp-as-a-razor-blade finger in my eye.  This was followed by my immediately saying "Ow," which itself was immediately followed by "OW!" which was in turn succeeded by a number of words that I won't say here.

I spent two days in a dark room on serious pain meds.  Turned out she had basically shredded the crap out of my cornea.  The good eye doctor took care of my injury with something called "micropunctures."  What's that? you ask.  Well, you know how if you a piece of paper on top of another piece of paper, then stab through both of them with a pencil, they'll kinda sorta stick together?  It turns out that if you stab someone's mangled cornea with a tiny (by "tiny" I mean gi-normous) diamond-tipped pencil thingy, it will have more or less the same effect and (hopefully) re-attach your cornea to the rest of your eye, where it should have stayed in the first place.  So enter me, getting stabbed by the aforementioned diamond-tipped thingy about three dozen times.

You have not lived until you've had your eye stabbed.  Even though he numbs you up, just the fact that you can actually see your vision distort as the doc pokes you in the eyeball with his gargantuan diamond pencil is nauseating enough to make a Navy SEAL go a bit woozy.

So now, two years later, after much adventuring in the martial arts and other death-defying activities, my most long-lasting injury is this stupid eye, which still hits me with an intense shot of pain every few weeks.

Flash forward to yesterday.  I'm helping my daughter get her pants on.  She needs this sort of help from time to time, and I don't usually begrudge her.  Besides, she's older, her nails are trimmed, she hasn't tried anything in the eye-stabby vein for quite some time, and (most important) I have glasses on.

I underestimated her skill.  I felt like Vader getting his arm chopped off by that Skywalker whippersnapper (who was also his offspring) as the dear fruit of my OWN loins managed to insert her finger up under my glasses and with surgical accuracy swipe said digit across my eyeball again.

Me back at doctor.  Me with eye patch on.  Me in fairly severe pain.

And here's where the part about hating James Dashner comes in.

For those who don't know, the guy's a writer.  He has written a number of novels, and through one of those friend-of-a-friend things, he was kind enough to review and provide a very nice cover blurb for my own novel, Billy: Messenger of Powers (get yours today!).  So I figured I should at least read one of his books in return.  Actually I wasn't really trying to be nice; he came highly recommended so it was purely out of a selfish desire for good reading stuff that I picked up a copy of one of his books.

Enter The 13th Reality: The Journal of Curious Letters.  Which I have.  And which is so goll-darn-flippidy-jibbety good that I am reading it WITH A TORN UP CORNEA.  It is like I am addicted to crack which comes in the form of an incredibly charming novel and which I have to inject through my one remaining eyeball.  That one remaining eyeball is already all angry about having to do double duty (the eye doctor patched up the other one), and keeps going on strike by turning off for a minute or two every couple of hours.  And the covered-up and twice-mangled eye is still moving under the bandages meaning if I do something that requires eye tracking, like, say, I don't know, READ A BOOK, it KILLS ME.

Look, I don't want to get all weak in the knees, but this was a seriously great book!  For those of you who like LOST, remember how you felt during the first season?  Like you couldn't stop yourself?  Like seven days was far too long to wait between installments?  And then at the season's end you were satisfied that you'd just seen something amazing but incredibly peeved because now you had to wait for the next season before getting more answers?

That's how I felt reading The 13th Reality: The Journal of Curious Letters.  It was a GREAT book.  I don't want to give too much away, but I will say a few things that I especially loved.  First and foremost was that every name in the book was wonderful.  I hate coming up with names.  Come on, MY most famous protagonist is "Billy Jones."  Blah.  Granted, it was a purposeful blah to set up some situational irony that someone so unimportant-sounding is actually the key to saving the world.  But still.

Contrast that to the hero of 13th Reality: Atticus "Tick" Higgenbottom.  Jaw-droppingly awesome.

Which brings me to the next thing I loved: Tick, unlike EVERY OTHER YA (that's Young Adult for those who aren't in The Know) HERO IN HISTORY, ACTUALLY BRINGS HIS DAD INTO THE SITUATION.  I mean, here's a kid who receives a strange letter in the mail that says either he can a) burn it and have a normal life or b) hang onto it and have the chance to save others' lives...at the cost of his own safety.  And the kid ACTUALLY BRINGS A GROWN-UP INTO THE ACTION.  And the grown-up (the dad) doesn't discount his kid's concerns or go "Well, we'll just shut you up under the stairs until you come to your senses" (you know who I'm talking about).  No, the dad actually HELPS THE KID OUT.  A real family, whose members really believe in each other and who really help one another in a pinch.  No evil step-parents or abusive uncles or aunts, just good-hearted folks.  I love that (I also love that about the also loads of fun Fablehaven series by another neat-o guy, Brandon Mull, but that's another story for another time).

And, lest I forget, the plot, the characters, the dialogue, the settings, and everything else (did I leave anything out?) is all wonderful.  I loved this book.  I am lucky because at least I don't have to wait several months to start the next one: it's already out and I'm on my way to my local bookstore asap to pick up the next installment of this series.

So why do I hate James Dashner?  Because, on top of the fact that I spent about six hours yesterday reading in incredible pain because I couldn't tear my eye away from the great book, now I have yet another thing on my already overfull plate of things to do: purchase and read everything this Dashner guy has ever written.

Because if the rest of it is half as good as The 13th Reality: The Journal of Curious Letters, I will have to spend the next few days hooked up to an IV, a catheter, and a steady drip of pain meds for my eye while I read it all...and I won't feel overburdened at all.

Rarely do I enjoy a book as much as I enjoyed this one.  If you don't have it, I recommend you fix that problem immediately.  You'll be glad you did.

 

 

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