How to Talk to Girls at Parties

by Neil Gaiman

Other authorsGabriel Ba (Illustrator), Fábio Moon (Illustrator)
Hardcover, 2016

Status

Available

Publication

Dark Horse Books, (2016)

Description

"Enn is a fifteen-year-old boy who just doesn't understand girls, while his friend Vic seems to have them all figured out. Both teenagers are in for the shock of their young lives, however, when they crash a local party only to discover that the girls there are far, far more than they appear!"--

User reviews

LibraryThing member avanders
Love it. Quirky, a little confusing, weird, and great. I also just found out a movie was made based on this? I will definitely be checking that out!
LibraryThing member jnwelch
How to Talk to Girls at Parties originally was a Hugo-nominated short story by Neil Gaiman. A decade later he's joined up with Brazilian brothers Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon to create a delightful and slightly ominous graphic novel version. The brothers illustrated one of my favorite GNs, Daytripper,
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and obviously have had fun with this tale of two friends who end up at the wrong party. Apparently a film will be released next year.

Two 15-year-old boys, Enn and Vic, gatecrash a party Vic has heard about. Confident Vic wants to kiss the most mesmerizing girl there, while self-doubting Enn expects to end up "in the kitchen listening to somebody's mum going on about politics or poetry or something." There are only young women at the party, and they, along with the unusual pulsating music, draw the boys in.

The scenes are well-drawn, many with a celebratory wildness like a bacchanal. The girls are preternaturally pretty, with large light-filled eyes, and they may not be all that they seem.

Gaiman's writing is always a cut above others in this genre, and the combination with the Brazilian brothers makes for a winning, albeit pretty brief, read.
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LibraryThing member questbird
A short story about a shy teenager and a party of supernatural women.
LibraryThing member ecataldi
I'm not sure what I think of this graphic novel but I think I like it. It's classic Neil Gaiman with weird twists, lyrical pose, and a plot that you never know where it will take you. Two teenage boys head to a party in South London to meet some girls. One is a cocky, confident, young man who can
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have any girl in the room, and the other is a shy, awkward boy who doesn't really know how to talk to girls. His friend ditches him at the party almost immediately so he tries his hand at talking to three different girls, each one odder than the next. He can't really understand what gibberish they're saying, but they sure are pretty to look at it. A quick read by a master of modern day fantasy and horror. Not bad, not great, but worth a read since it will be in theaters next year!
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LibraryThing member AnnieMod
I had not read the story this graphic novel is based on but even without Gaiman's name on it, I would have probably recognized it as one of his.

Two boys decide to go to a party, the address of which they do not exactly have. So when they find a party, they go in. One of the boys is a ladies man,
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the other one is shy and cannot speak to girls. And the girls he meets at the party do not exactly help - telling stories of impossible places.

There is more than one way to read the story - you can choose to see it as a fantasy story (which I prefer) or you can think of it as the way a boy sees women. Or something in between.

It is a short and sweet story about that age when everyone wishes to be just a bit older. And if you read it as a fantasy story, it is also a story about universes, changes and longing.
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LibraryThing member lissabeth21
Completely amazing...conceptually masterful....dazzlingly beautiful. Intergalactic tourism...The description of "world" from that perspective, the hint of Atlantians, the spiritual/angel/demon inferences.... I'll be thinking about this gem for a long time.
LibraryThing member Pepperwings
A whimsical take on a nerve-wracking time/experience.

A young man goes to a party with a friend, and is encouraged to just talk to girls, and listen to them. He seems to nervous to actually listen most of the time. It seemed like all the girls he spoke to were completely alien, some may have been
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foreign, but his experience seems as though they were actually from another planet.

I appreciate that there are metaphors happening, but it lent a very surreal quality to the story, and one that doesn't really resolve with understanding.

There are several unexplained moments, but I think it encapsulates the experience of a teen in a situation that feels foreign and uncertain, and abruptly changes tone.

I think I would have liked a little more understanding of what happened, but the tone of the story was excellent, and resonates with a lot of experiences people have had growing up.
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LibraryThing member villemezbrown
This was a middling short story by Gaiman and the graphic adaptation really doesn't improve upon his prose. I'm shocked to see this is slated for a movie adaptation in 2017. How will something so slight possibly be stretched out for a movie?
LibraryThing member Ron18
Neil's prose works better as prose. This is likely a lovely piece to read, but the visual narrative doesn't work well. The interpretation/adaptation is a... unique vision - whatever the intention, it does not translate.
The first half translates alright - and does this goofy thing, which is the
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crux of the premise, suggesting that a young man's fear of being unable to communicate with young women is fully founded on the possibility that they aren't even fellow human beings. The joke aspect is clever for a few pages, then I started wondering if anyone needs to keep extending that concept out to such a drastic extent - - truly preaching this notion that men and women are incalculably separated by such a gulf of misunderstanding. What a depressing concept that joke became.
The ending leaves you with a lot of uninteresting intentional questions.
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LibraryThing member tapestry100
I've never read the short story that this graphic novel is based on, but I think I'm going to have to rectify that soon. This was a beautifully told coming of age story unlike any you may have read before, as two young lads stumble into the wrong party and find themselves discovering more than they
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bargained for from the girls there. Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá art is vibrant and stunning and really brings the story to life. Highly recommended for both fans of Neil Gaiman and anyone who loves the graphic novel form.
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LibraryThing member lostinalibrary
Fifteen-year-old Enn is not nearly as cool or confident as his best friend, Vic, especially where girls are concerned. So when Vic suggests they attend a party with ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’, Enn only reluctantly agrees. Vic, unfortunately, left the invitation with the address at home but that’s
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okay because he sure he can find it – just follow the party sounds. And they do find a party only they don’t recognize any of the people or the music. And there are lots of girls but these girls definitely aren’t like the ones they know at school.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties written by Neil Gaiman was originally released as one of the short stories in Fragile Things in 2006. It is now being released as a graphic novel by Dark Horse. Neil Gaiman has adapted it to the genre and it is illustrated by Brazilian brothers and award winning artists, Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba.

This is a relatively short book at just 67 pages and, on the surface, it is a fairly simple albeit smart story. But this is Gaiman and his stories are never quite what they seem and there are layers here. It can be read as straightforward scifi or as a story about how teenaged boys perceive girls – as a completely different universe, beautiful like poetry but, when you get too close, as terrifying and dangerous as the sun. However you read it, it is a beautifully written and drawn tale, witty, humorous in places, creepy in others but always a compelling and fascinating read.

Thanks to Edelweiss and Dark Horse for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review
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LibraryThing member ritaer
The boy who ends up in the kitchen at parties, talking with someone's mom, meets strange girls at a party he crashes with his friend, who is the boy who ends up with the prettiest girl. But neither girls nor party are what they seem.
LibraryThing member TheEllieMo
This was my first experience of Nick Gaiman'a fiction, and I probably would not have downloaded it had I not read about its availability on the Kindle on the same day is tweeted Gaiman'a comments on the 12th Doctor.

I'm glad I took the time to read this short story, which is a nicely-written tale of
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teenage self-consciousness; the ending felt annoyingly abrupt, but I would assume that it was the author's intention to leave us to imagine our own conclusions.

I read the taster for the new novel, and found myself being drawn in. I may be about to experience my first full Nick Gaiman novel
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LibraryThing member livingtech
This was a fun little story.
LibraryThing member pivic
Simple, sweet and short: a story of a 15-year-old boy who reminisces 30 years later, of a party he attended with a - seemingly - more attractive friend and what happened there. From the short story:

She stood out of the way, letting us enter. “There’s a kitchen in the back,” she said. “Put
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it on the table there, with the other bottles.” She had golden, wavy hair, and she was very beautiful. The hall was dim in the twilight, but I could see that she was beautiful. “What’s your name, then?” said Vic. She told him it was Stella, and he grinned his crooked white grin and told her that that had to be the prettiest name he had ever heard. Smooth bastard. And what was worse was that he said it like he meant it. Vic headed back to drop off the wine in the kitchen, and I looked into the front room, where the music was coming from. There were people dancing in there. Stella walked in, and she started to dance, swaying to the music all alone, and I watched her.

This was during the early days of punk. On our own record players we would play the Adverts and the Jam, the Stranglers and the Clash and the Sex Pistols. At other people’s parties you’d hear ELO or 10cc or even Roxy Music. Maybe some Bowie, if you were lucky. During the German exchange, the only LP that we had all been able to agree on was Neil Young’s Harvest, and his song “Heart of Gold” had threaded through the trip like a refrain: I crossed the ocean for a heart of gold. . . .

The music playing in that front room wasn’t anything I recognized. It sounded a bit like a German electronic pop group called Kraftwerk, and a bit like an LP I’d been given for my last birthday, of strange sounds made by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The music had a beat, though, and the half-dozen girls in that room were moving gently to it, although I only looked at Stella. She shone. Vic pushed past me, into the room. He was holding a can of lager. “There’s booze back in the kitchen,” he told me. He wandered over to Stella and he began to talk to her. I couldn’t hear what they were saying over the music, but I knew that there was no room for me in that conversation.


Worth the short read. It's nostalgic without being sappy.
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LibraryThing member Linyarai
I enjoyed the story and the artwork, but wish it had been a bit longer.
LibraryThing member SarahFromAmerica
Vic and Enn are two friends looking for Vic's friend's party. They both attend an all-boys school in South London, England; as a result, they are obsessed with picking up girls at parties. Vic has consistent luck with this, while Enn is quiet and doesn't approach girls at parties as much. Vic and
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Enn find the party, but it turns out to be the wrong one - oops! This party has a lot of tourists from very different places.
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LibraryThing member DarthDeverell
Neil Gaiman, Fábio Moon, and Gabriel Bá’s How to Talk to Girls at Parties adapts Gaiman’s 2006 short story about Enn and Vic, who go to a party and discover that the girls in attendance are entirely otherworldly. The story follows Enn, who envy’s Vic’s experience with women, but who
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gradually learns that the exchange students are from different universes. Wain’s Wain is from an alien race sent to learn about Earth, but was imperfectly formed. Another girl claims to have visited the Sun and the bottom of the sea. Finally, Triolet tells Enn of a dying civilization’s creation of a poem to keep the memory of their world alive forever. Meanwhile, Vic spends time with Stella, but his experience goes rather differently than that of Enn. Gaiman’s text features rich metaphors and beautiful images that Moon and Bá bring to vivid life with their watercolor art. A great addition to any Gaiman fan’s collection and a stunning graphic novel. John Cameron Mitchell later adapted Gaiman’s story for film in 2017.
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LibraryThing member Glennis.LeBlanc
This is a comic version of a short story that was collected in Fragile Things. The setting is in London with two friends looking for a party one had heard about. Vic keeps telling Enn that he just needs to talk to a girl and then things will go fine but Enn doesn’t have the confidence that Vic
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seems to have in spades. They find a party but it isn’t the one they were planning on attending and they stay anyway. And with being at the wrong party things start getting a bit weird when Enn does start talking to girls.

The art works really well with the story and really gives it a nice touch of magic and depth to the plot. I’m interested in seeing how the movie will add extra meat to the story.

Digital review copy provided by the publisher through Edelweiss
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LibraryThing member zot79
Typical Gaiman-esque allegory

Language

Original language

English

Barcode

10478
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