Mirkat Always Reading

It took me some time to warm up to this book, but I got there.  This was almost a four-star read for me, except I found the end too open.  Yes, I was aware that there is a sequel (which I've started to read), but it's still possible to have some internal closure while still leaving more story to tell.  Okay, I guess in some ways there were, but the end was quite cliffhangery.

"Fanboy" is the name our narrator gets from the "Goth Girl," Kyra.  He's 15 years old, and convinced he's got one of the worst lives ever because he's nerdy, the jocks tend to enjoy tormenting him, and his parents are divorced.  But he's secretly working on a graphic novel* called Schemata, and he's sure that once he shows his sample pages to Brian Michael Bendis** at a nearby comic convention, he'll be on his way to a brilliant future taking the comics world by storm.

Without going into spoilers, I will just say that our Fanboy is more than a little naive about how one breaks into the world of graphic-novel success.  Oddly, we never learn his name.  Early on, I found myself annoyed by his unrelenting negativity, and lovely things like referring to his stepfather as "the stepfascist" and the obvious disgust he felt about the fact that his mother is pregnant.  He carries a bullet that he lifted from his "stepfascist," and I swear it's like this book's equivalent of the stupid unlit cigarette Gus from The Fault in Our Stars insists on having.  But there is growth and change!  Yay.

*Memo to Fanboy:  a graphic novel is a comic book, but not all comic books are graphic novels.  (He will "correct" anyone who refers to his graphic novel as a comic book.)

**I didn't realize until after I was done and looking at the author's webpage that Bendis is a real-life comics guy.  D'oh.