Bound Up With Books: Tales of MU

Well, it’s been awhile, oh my brothers and sisters, but Tales of MU isn’t exactly easy to review…On the one hand, it’s one of the more popular tropes of the YA genre – young girl from a small town and a repressive upbringing has her eyes poppingly opened when she attends one of the top colleges in her field. There is one hell of a lot more to it than that, however. It’s a fantasy novel, for one – the top college is for magic users of various stripes. And Mackenzie Blaise (Mack to her friends, despite the fact that she hates the nickname) isn’t just a young girl, she’s also a half-demon; the first the campus has ever allowed. Raised by her fanatical, fundamentalist, exorcist grandmother, Mack doesn’t have the healthiest self-image, nor does she have the most stable personality now that she’s out from under her grandmother’s repressive (and protective) thumb.

There’s a *lot* of sex and violence in this story, and more often than not the two go hand-in-hand. Despite the fact that it is (generally) consensual (sometimes over-the-top, almost slobberingly so), I confess I find it more disturbing than arousing – mainly for the attitudes of the characters involved than anything else. There’s such a serious lack of self-awareness – and more often than not, a sense of self-worth. I find myself wondering if Mack will survive the year. Despite her professed interest in self-preservation, it is all too easy to see Mack bringing about her own destruction ‘accidentally on purpose’.

But wait! There’s more! As a half-demon, Mack is thrown together with the non-human minority and must deal with the discrimination and misconceptions applied both universally and particularly by the human majority who sees her (and her friends) as either a freak or a threat, or both. There are some really interesting explorations (in both the main story and the occasional bonus stories) dealing with issues and perceptions of issues around race and culture, and in a fairly open, non-dogmatic manner.

How does Alexandra Erin pack all of this into one story? Easy – Tales of MU is actually a serial web novel (check out others at Pages Unbound, and Alexandra is exploiting the medium to full effect with MU. Updating Tuesday to Friday (with bonus stories published on Monday), it’s up to chapter 277 and it’s still only the first month of class. This allows the characters to be fully fleshed out and all the messiness of day-to-day living on a extremely racially and culturally diverse, but not fully integrated, campus to be detailed, unfolding organically as Mack lives her life, and interacts with other students, to the best of her ability.

There’s plenty of drama, and humor, and everything else that goes into a story, and into Life. It is occasionally clumsy or heavy-handed, true – but I’ve most definitely read worse books vetted by professional publishing houses (*cough*danbrown*cough*). If you have some extra time, I highly recommend you spend it reading Tales of MU – but be warned…it’s highly addicting.

Excuse me please – it’s time for me to check if the lastest chapter has posted…

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