Fact or fantasy, Lee's first book entertains
Reviewed by Alyce Karsten, Cornet-Scientifer book critic

Wolverine Ripped My Flesh: A Year on the Road with Canada's Greatest Super-Hero

by Jubilation Lee

CLAREMONT PRESS; 418 PAGES; cr19.95

You probably don't know where Canada is. Don't feel embarrassed; I didn't either. I had to look it up. Turns out it's one of the nations of Old Earth. It still exists, in that quaint way that a lot of the old countries do, at least nominally, within the Earth Alliance.

But that's all right, because the introduction to newcomer Jubilation Lee's first book makes it plain that she's not talking about our Canada in the title anyway. Lee makes the claim straight away that she's a dimensional displacee - a castaway from a parallel universe where, when she left, it was 1994. That's five years before First Contact between Earth and Salusia happened in our world, if you're keeping score at home.

That claim, like so many of the others that Lee makes with a straight narrative face throughout Wolverine Ripped My Flesh, is a little hard to swallow. Dimensional displacees aren't unheard-of; the Wedge Defense Force encountered so many of them back in the old days that their documentation officer wrote a book for them, So You've Just Arrived from a Parallel Universe, which made the So You've... line of help manuals and their creator, Derek Bacon, galactically famous.

All the same, Lee's blithe announcement that she's a super-powered mutant from a parallel universe, and so is her traveling companion, seems somehow too pat to be true. Her matter-of-fact, your-problem-if-you-don't-believe-me tone is refreshing, though, and the fact that the book bills itself as non-fiction shouldn't stop you from enjoying it for what it is - which is a damn good read.

Wolverine Ripped My Flesh is the supposedly-true story of a year Lee spent traveling around the galaxy with a fellow displacee, a short-statured, short-tempered man known only as Logan. Logan's friends and enemies sometimes call him "Wolverine" in reference to both his stature and his temper. (I looked that up, too. A wolverine was a small, vicious predator native to Canada. It became extinct during the Third World War in 2018.)

The story is both a peppy travelogue and a character study; despite being narrated from Lee's first-person perspective, the book's star is unquestionably Logan, who emerges as the book goes on as a much more complex character than his early impressions would have you believe. He and Lee have a deep and powerful relationship which is hard to describe, and the book spends a good bit of its time trying to do just that and never quite succeeding.

The attempts take place against a backdrop of sometimes poignant, often hilarious, and frequently action-packed travel anecdotes covering some of the oddest, least intuitive locales ever touched on in a Standard-language travel book. Lee's observations on these strange and often unsavory places and the individuals who populate them have a delightfully satiric flavor to them. If Mark Twain were brought to life today with super-powers and roamed around the Outer Rim, he would write a book like this.

There's plenty to be snarky about, too, because Lee and Logan seem to have a sixth sense that leads them to the most dubious destinations imaginable. In the most memorable (and, perhaps not coincidentally, improbable) anecdote in the book, the two of them wind up prisoners in the palace of the infamous Jabba the Hutt following a misunderstanding over 75 tons of dakharra spice.

They always get out of these predicaments the same way they got into them - with a combination of skill, luck, abilities that can only be described as unique (I don't want to give it away, but there's another good reason why Logan is called "Wolverine"), and the most incredible levels of chutzpah ever seen in the heroes of galactic travelogues.

Lee's writing style is as free as her traveling style, and has a distinct, well-researched 20th-century flavor, which really helps to sell the backstory, though it does require the occasional pause to flip through the thoughtfully-provided glossary at the back. Among the entertaining 20th-century linguistic tidbits you'll pick up are the proper definition of "grody" and the correct usage of the phrase "Weapon X in the hizzouse."

Wolverine Ripped My Flesh is a book that is by turns exciting, suspenseful, riotously funny, and occasionally deeply moving. Its nonfiction billing is, perhaps, a trifle disingenuous, but it does help the reader get into the spirit of things. By the end of Chapter 2, you'll be laughing too hard to care if it's true or not anyway.

(Oh, and the title is a reference to 20th-century pop culture too. At no point in the book does Wolverine attack his traveling companion.)

Alyce Karsten is the Cornet-Scientifer's senior book critic. You can visit her website at mttp://akarsten.cornet-scientifer.co.na.zc/.

>mttp://akarsten.cornet-scientifer.co.na.zc/.

mttp - MetaText Transfer Protocol?

Zack Seaholm - Anime fan, weathernut, worshipper of the goddess Belldandy.

Today's global thermonuclear war tactic: Taiwan Mis-Direction
Winner: None

This is too shockingly funny to evade notice.

She occasionally pretends to blackmail Gryphon by threatening to write 25th-Century Sultan: An Insider's Look at the Chief's Women, but she'll probably never actually do that. Probably. It's hard to tell with Jubilee.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, Netadmin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Poor Jabba. Hope to hear the full story some day. Heh.

Blessed be.
-n

DrOsborn