Book-A-Day 2010 # 288 (11/18) -- Miki Falls, Vol. 4: Winter by Mark Crilley

Eight days beats three years, I can tell you. I read the first half of Mark Crilley's 2007-2008 series "Miki Falls" around the time it was published, and then stopped (because that's where my local library had). I finally found a copy of Autumn earlier this month [1] -- a nearby library had it, and was willing to lend -- and so I got to Winter as well, finishing up the series.

This is the big finish, and to write about that at any length would be to give away all of the secrets of Summer and Autumn, which I don't want to do. So, as I was eight days ago, I expect I'll be vague and roundabout. Miki and Hiro are still trying to avoid their Bad Destiny, which is couched in the very most dramatic and controlling fashion possible, as is most appropriate for a series for teenagers about love. (Teenagers have no distance on anything, least of all themselves, and so what they want most of all in their entertainment are stories that collapse that distance completely as well -- every teenager is both the center of the world and the entire world at the same time.)

If the Secret Society of Antagonists find Miki and Hiro, they will be separated forever, their True Love utterly thwarted for reasons that seem righteous and true to the SS of A. So they're trying to get away, once and for all, so that they can live together forever. (And if the slightly older reader -- yours truly, for example -- begins to suspect that their undying passion for each other would start seriously limping after just a couple of months living in a dumpy apartment somewhere, scraping by at menial jobs to keep food on the table, well, then, it just proves that we're utterly unromantic grumps.) There is a confrontation, as there must be, and all seems lost -- not once, but twice -- before Crilley reaches into his back pocket for the happy ending we were all sure must be there.

Miki Falls can make the reader feel a thousand years old, though I presume that it has the opposite effect on readers closer to Miki's age. I can't entirely recommend it to readers of my age, particularly those anywhere near as cynical as I am, but it's a sweet, energetic love story in a semi-manga style focusing on a smart, self-willed young woman who won't let other people make her decisions for her, and there need to be more True Love stories for teenage girls with heroines like that.


[1] And reviewed it last week as Book-A-Day # 280.

Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index