Book Review – Geektastic by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci

Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd
Edited by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci
Hardback
2009

What happens when you put two nerds in a food line at Comic-Con? They start to talk about what would happen if “you were a Jedi and you woke up with a Klingon in your bed?”
So they pulled together their friends (hello, their friends include people like Scott Westerfield and Garth Nix), and did an anthology of geektastic stories.

The format is pretty simple; after the prologue, there’s a format of story followed by one page comic, then story, one page comic, etc.

And right away, in the very first story, we have the best line ever written, (even though it’s by a Klingon):
No. I couldn’t have. Not with an Ewok-cuddling, Force-feeling, Padawan-braid-wearing, lightsaber-rammed-up-his-ass Jedi.

And because no line could ever be that awesome… every story I read had a line that great.

So, I was going to tell something about all the stories, but I noticed something as I read the book. After a while I sort of didn’t care about the stories themselves, but I just was happy that there was a collection of stories about people who could very well be my friends…

Yes, some stories were better than others – I particularly liked Once You’re a Jedi, You’re a Jedi All the Way, by Black and Castellucci and Quiz Bowl Antichrist by David Levithan were really good, but Definitional Chaos by Scott Westerfield just left me with a headache and a couple others fell a little flat. And the comics weren’t exactly breathtaking, although they were cute.

But the thing is that even though I’d give most stories 3/5 ratings, the overall of the book left me with an overwhelming warm and happy feeling – like the kind you get when you get a new video game or the leather-bound copy of the Hobbit or a new Avengers movie is announced.

And for that, I’ll give it a 4/5 pages.