Oh man, I hate when this happens. My wife, so eager to see how the story turns out that she snatched the whole set from my grasp and stayed up late reading all three, turned to me in horror when she realized that the story doesn't end here. I, reading quickly in her wake, was struck by the same reaction, particularly when I checked the helpful Internet and discovered the fourth volume is at least a few months away. Aargh!

Girls, a series by brothers Joshua and Jonathan Luna, is good. It's intense. It's left my wife and I dying to know what happens next. And it's making us wait to find out. Aaarrgh!

OK, let's settle down and work with what we have. This review is, after all, for volume 3, Survival, the penultimate book in the four-book series (originally printed as 24 comic-book issues). And there's a lot going on.

There are the prisoners, for one thing, and one of them starts laying eggs. OK, which of these guys was in the shed, eh?? There's the pregnant woman who seems to be safe from the attacks for the simple fact that she's carrying a son. So she gets to go shopping, while the rest of the women huddle in the McCallister house in fear. There's the unexpected flight of the henpecked husband. There's the sudden, bloody revolt of the women who are tired of trusting their men in this crisis. There's Kenny's sexual awakening, overprotective Ted's sudden abusiveness and Kenna's discovery of her inner wildcat. Oh, and a bear attacks a party of men in the woods, but lucky for them, she's female. And then there's the dramatic last stand at the McCallisters', which is rapidly becoming the Pennystown Alamo.

It speaks to the puritan mindset of these people that, after taking three of the girls prisoner, their first thoughts are of getting clothes to cover them. I'm not sure that would have been my highest priority.

This is certainly a quirky book, beginning with the basic plot in which a host of egg-laying naked ladies are sacking a small American town -- to say nothing of their "mothership," if that term even applies, which looks like nothing so much as a giant glowing sperm. But, while that sentence might convince many potential readers to avoid Girls like the plague, it's not at all hokey or crude. This is fine storytelling, suspenseful and dramatic, bolstered by excellent, imaginative art.

OK, Luna Brothers, I've said really nice things about your work. Any chance you'll send me a copy of the fourth book early? Please?!

by Tom Knapp
Rambles.NET
10 March 2007

[ visit the Luna Brothers' website ]