{"id":312,"date":"2011-05-22T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-22T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/booksyalove.com\/?p=312"},"modified":"2013-06-25T12:03:51","modified_gmt":"2013-06-25T17:03:51","slug":"i-love-him-to-pieces-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/?p=312","title":{"rendered":"I Love Him to Pieces, by Evonne Tsang (book review) – Baseball and zombies! My Boyfriend is a Monster series begins"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"book<\/div>\n

Romance, baseball, zombies… a typical high school day, right? This is such a great comic! Its subtitles – “My Date is a Dead Weight, or He Only Loves Me For my Brains” – hint at the tone of the whole book – really funny, a little creepy, a touch slapstick.<\/p>\n

The writer and artist together have crafted a very plausible way for the “mutated Cordyceps<\/a> fungus” to infect people and, uh, dissolve their brains. And it doesn’t take long for the “zombie fungus” to do its work… Hey, the CDC<\/a> just released Emergency Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse<\/a> on 5\/16\/11 – life imitates art?!<\/p>\n

Tsang’s writing is humorous and serious in all the right places, while Gorrissen’s drawings make every character distinctive and real – both cartoonish and lifelike at the same time (except thoroughly dead, in the zombies’ cases).<\/p>\n

Dicey is a hoot, playing baseball on the varsity team and giving the guys back what they dish out, while Jack is super-brainy, getting totally flustered when Dicey agrees to a date = you can just see him blush, even though the whole book is in black and white.<\/p>\n

I was excited to see that I Love Him to Pieces<\/i> was nominated for YALSA<\/a>‘s 2012 “Great Graphic Novels for Teens<\/a>” list. So nice that they confirmed my enthusiasm!
\n**kmm<\/p>\n

Book info<\/b>: I Love Him to Pieces (My Boyfriend is a Monster #1) \/ by Evonne Tsang; art by Janina Gorrissen. Graphic Universe\/Lerner, 2011. [author interview<\/a>] [artist’s website<\/a>] [series site<\/a>] [publisher site<\/a>]<\/p>\n

My Book Talk<\/b>: Who knew that being \u201cegg parents\u201d together for a school project would lead to making a stand against the undead on a senior skip day?<\/p>\n

The \u201czombie fungus\u201d should never have reached Florida. But suddenly varsity baseball star Dicey and her super-scientific boyfriend Jack are in the middle of it, as zombies begin to take over their city.<\/p>\n

Are Jack\u2019s researcher parents safe in Mexico, at the meteorite crash site where the fungus was first discovered? Are Dicey\u2019s dad and little brother safe across the bay? What about their fantasy-gaming friends and the baseball team at St. Petersburg High School? Just one bite from a zombie, and it\u2019s all over\u2026<\/p>\n

Somehow, the stunningly detailed art in black and white makes the zombies scarier than a blood-and-guts palette would – fantastic! First in the graphic novel series \u201cMy Boyfriend is a Monster<\/a>,\u201d each book featuring a different writer\/artist pairup and a different variety of monstrous boyfriend. (one of 5,000 books recommended on www.abookandahug.com<\/a>)\u00a0 Review copy\u00a0 and cover art courtesy of the publisher through NetGalley.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Romance, baseball, zombies… a typical high school day, right? This is such a great comic! Its subtitles – “My Date is a Dead Weight, or He Only Loves Me For my Brains” – hint at the tone of the whole book – really funny, a little creepy, a touch slapstick. The writer and artist together […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,80,62],"tags":[22,7,5,16,18,44,46,43,39,111,15,35,33,3,8,59,101],"class_list":["post-312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-graphic-novel","category-science-fiction","tag-behavior","tag-beliefs","tag-coping","tag-determination","tag-family","tag-friendship","tag-funny","tag-growing-up","tag-love","tag-non-us-artist","tag-relationships","tag-surprises","tag-survival","tag-teens","tag-us-author","tag-war","tag-zombies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=312"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1844,"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions\/1844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}