A Fan's Playground

A children's graphic novel, an Anishinaabe retelling of the story of Alice in Wonderland featuring a nonbinary kid as the Alice character. It's fine, but the story is too disconnected and random to develop much interest for me - though that might just be that I have no particular attachment to or familiarity with Alice in Wonderland, which I gather is also pretty disconnected and random. But the art is nice, and it's never bad to have more Indigenous and queer representation for kids, in stories they recognize!

I've been in a bit of a reading slump, so I pulled out T. Kingfisher's latest, because you can't go wrong with a Kingfisher.

This one, Illuminations, is a children's book about rival magic families in an alternate universe Italian city-state, which of course gave me inescapable dwj vibes, but this one is doing its own thing!

It's a very good and charming book, with solid themes, but I found the first lengthy part of the book very stressful since it involved everyone thinking badly of the main character with her unable to defend herself because of secrets she has to keep. And people spend a good while not trusting each other and not talking to each other. But thankfully the book recognizes that this is a problem, and sets out rectifying it much more promptly than it would have in another book, which I appreciate! Still meant though that I spent more of the book than I like being stressed rather than enjoying myself.

One of the things it's doing is the classic children's book thing of depicting important lessons about friendship, and you know, this is one of the things I love about children's books, that they DO highlight the value of friendships and the work needed to be a good friend to someone, and how worthwhile that is. Learning how to navigate jealousy in a vital yet platonic relationship in your life is key actually!

Overall: maybe not my fave Kingfisher, but a quick read and a solid book.

A perfectly respectable secondary-world fantasy middle grade book, about a girl who's an apprentice mapmaker who has to keep her low-born background secret, and sets out on a shipboard journey to discover a fabled lost continent. Pretty predictable, and didn't really speak to me, but overall well done and I think it would be very good for people who are in the actual age category it's meant for.

I still endlessly love Rosemary Sutcliff's writing. And this is a book by her that I THOUGHT I hadn't read, but the further I got into it the more I was like.... this is weirdly very familiar. So maybe I have read it before? Either in the last 14 years I read it but forgot to write it down, or I read it prior to starting to keep lists? At any rate it was great to revisit!

This one features a boy named Beric, whose birth parents were Romans who died in a shipwreck and resulted in Beric being raised in a British family. But because of his origins he's always just a little bit an outsider to others in his village, and eventually when he's 15 he's cast out due to fears that his presence is causing bad luck.

The rest of the book is his attempts to find a place for himself in Roman society, given that the British people he felt he belonged with no longer want him, ( cut for thematic spoilers but not the specifics of what happens )

Anyway Sutcliff continues to be great at the nature descriptions as always, and it was a pleasure to read a Sutcliff for the first time since getting into birds and being able to appreciate how she approaches birds with far more care and attention than most authors I read! Specific bird species are mentioned, of a wide variety of types, that are suitable to the time and place they are found! And also a particular species of bird is thematically relevant! It's great.

Wow this book is incredible. It's a middle grade novel about a kid in the summer before starting middle school, with a newly-dead uncle who was an important parent-figure, trying to navigate shifting friendships and figuring out identity and what it means to be yourself, and also figure out what the ghost haunting the family home is trying to say. The book does an amazing job of capturing a pervasive sense of unease as Bug tries to navigate all these uncertainties and changes. But despite that unease it's such a good-hearted book, deeply moving and beautifully queer, and with a wonderful ending. I loved Bug, and Uncle Roderick, and Bug's mom, and Bug's best friend Moira. It's a book with no antagonist, but it's gripping the whole way through!

A middle grade graphic novel about a girl learning magic, and the dragon boy who she accidentally becomes bound with. And idk.....a lot of the stuff happening in it felt so abrupt, I guess? Not enough space in the story around the Important Plot Bits and Life Lessons to make it all feel actually connected and flowing and cohesive. I liked the bones of the story, but the execution of it just didn't work for me.

I discovered the graphic novel tag on Libby a few days ago and have just been motoring through a whole pile of random ebook graphic novels that looked interesting to me, mostly not even pausing long enough between reading them to write down any thoughts. So here's a collection of very haphazard short reviews of a bunch of graphic novels! Yes most of these ARE middle grade, I love middle grade fiction and I super gravitated towards those when wandering through the options.

Witches of Brooklyn, and Witches of Brooklyn: What the Hex?!, by Sophie Escabasse

These are cute middle grade graphic novels about an orphan girl who lives with her aunts, discovers she's a witch, and learns about friendship and magic and being who you are. Quick and charming reads!

The Fire Never Goes Out, by Noelle Stevenson

A collection of Stevenson's biographical comics they wrote each year since 2011, along with other art and notes. It's a glimpse into a young person growing up and discovering who they are and how to live with mental illness and trying to figure out their identity, but all written in a very distancing and non-specific way (understandable, as much of this was written while the author was actively struggling with these things), so although it was interesting, it didn't fully capture me.

Be Prepared, by Vera Brosgol

A story about a girl with Russian immigrant parents who always feels like an outsider among her peers, and then learns about RUSSIAN SUMMER CAMP! Unfortunately, camp is not everything she dreamed. I loved this book, the art and the writing work so well together to capture the main character's experiences, and I loved that it was a book about camp where the conclusion actually was "hey it turns out camp's not for everyone and that's okay."

They Called Us Enemy, by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, and Harmony Becker

A memoir of Takei's experiences as a child in Japanese internment camps in WWII. Really powerfully done. I loved the way the book manages to show both how genuinely hard it was, and also how much child-him was oblivious to the real seriousness of what was happening to him and his family.

Snapdragon, by Kat Leyh

Delightfully queer story about a girl who feels like an outsider, an old butch lesbian witch who lives in the woods and articulates roadkill skeletons, and a lot of ghosts. I loved it!

Heartstopper (volume 1), by Alice Oseman

This is really just the first part of a multi-part story, but volumes 2 and 3 are checked out and I have to wait for my holds to come in to be able to actually finish! Alas. Anyway this is a gay high school love story between two boys, and I enjoyed it, but the art made it really hard for me to tell the new love interest Nick apart from the mean ex Ben, which was an ongoing problem.

The Magic Fish, by Trung Le Nguyen

Wow, this was incredible! The weaving together of the stories of a young Vietnamese teen trying to come to terms with his gay identity and how to tell his parents, and his mother's experience of being a Vietnamese immigrant who left her family behind and being caught between the world of her mother and the world of her son, and the fairy tales they read to each other that allow them to connect and communicate with each other. The three elements dip in and out of each other constantly, but each is monochromatic in a different colour, allowing you to easily follow how everything's connected without feeling lost. It also does a good job of making the art speak without words, which is something I don't always do a good job of following, but it really works for me here. The whole book is about different ways of communicating, and it uses its own form to enhance that theme. SUPER good.

Operatic, by Kyo Maclear

I see what it was going for, and I liked the bones of it, but it didn't quite all gel together for me, unfortunately.

How Mirka Got Her Sword, by Barry Deutsch

A perfectly fine story about a Jewish girl who wants to fight monsters. Nothing wrong with it, but it didn't excite me either.

Jane, the Fox and Me, by Fanny Britt & Isabelle Arsenault

The main theme of the book appears to be fatphobia -- but the art depicts the main character as being just as skinny as anyone else in the book, and nobody is in fact noticeably fat? So the theme of the art and the theme of the story end up being in tension with each other in a way that really detracted from what it was trying to say. Also the fatphobia the main character experiences doesn't actually ever really....get dealt with or addressed much. She finds a friend and then she feels better about everything, including her weight. (And, in a much pettier complaint, the fox of the title hardly shows up at all!!)

A middle grade novel about two Indigenous foster kids who find a portal into another world! Morgan, the older kid, has been in foster care for as long as she can remember, bounced between a whole series of foster homes of varying quality, and she's really struggling. Eli is a year younger and has just entered foster care for the first time after losing his family, and is having a very different kind of tough time.

There are definite Narnia vibes to the story -- the kids go through a portal into a land of endless winter, meet talking animals, and end up trying to help them fix the winter problem. In this respect it kind of reminds me of the Birchbark House series (by Louse Erdrich), which is specifically written to tell an Indigenous focused story in response to the Little House series. If this is a trend then I am all for it!

Anyway I was barely into The Barren Grounds before I was extremely invested in Morgan being okay, she is so clearly a good kid trying her best but fucked up by her life experiences and acting out as a result, and so I was THERE for the rest of this book.

Eli and Morgan react to the land beyond the portal very differently, due to their very different experiences of their Indigenous identity, but it allows both of them a chance to explore that identity. It also gives them space to figure out how to get to know each other better and to bond with each other!

There are some awkward turns of phrase in this book that occasionally threw me off, but overall I think it's a really excellent book, and I just zoomed through it.

A childhood nostalgia reread. Gail Carson Levine is known for her fairy tale retellings, and this book is definitely fairy-tale-inspired, but not based on any particular story. It tells its own story instead, and I am deeply fond of many of the things it does!

It's the story of two teen sisters, one who's brave and forthright and eager for adventure, and one who's a quiet and anxious homebody. When the brave sister (Meryl) is struck down by a magical illness that has beset the country of Bamarre for centuries, the anxious sister (Addie) goes on a quest to find the cure to save her sister.

I love that this is a story where the most important relationship in it is a sibling relationship; and that although the sisters are extremely different from each other, they both love each other and value each other deeply. It's wonderful!

I also love that an extended portion of Addie's questing time is taken up with her being the captive of a dragon, Vollys. Addie may not be a fighter like Meryl is, but the way she handles the situation with Vollys shows her strengths and abilities, and honestly the whole thing is really interesting. I love Vollys as a character! She may be terrible, but also she's genuinely understandable as a person with her own priorities and sense of appropriate behaviours, even if that conflicts pretty directly with those of her "guest"!

My other favourite thing about the book is the constant poetic references. Bamarre is a country with a founding myth written in epic poetry, and the characters are constantly thinking about and referencing that founding myth. There's extensive sections of poetry quoted within the text, even, because it's so deeply important to the characters. Not all of the poetry is...amazing.... But some of it really manages to capture something, and there are sections of poetry from this book that have stuck with me decades later because it's just right. (and then we get a snippet of dragon poetry at one point too, to contrast with the heroism of Drualt the killer of dragons, and I LOVE that we get to see that alternate perspective!)

The book does have a Compulsory Heterosexuality ending for both sisters, which is a bit of a yawn; Meryl's is particularly bad because she and her partner in heterosexuality meet and get together in a fairly permanent-seeming way in like....a day or two. All off-screen. The romances feel Very Tacked On is what I'm saying. So that's annoying!

But overall I still have an immense fondness for this book. I love it.

To talk about this book I need to start by talking about a different author altogether!

Jean Little was a famous Canadian children's author, and she was blind. When she was a young adult (this would have been in the late 50's/early 60's), she had a job for a while as a teacher to a class of disabled children, and as you do as a teacher, she would read books to her students. But she and her students started noticing that in every book with a disabled character, that character ended the story either cured or dead. Little and her students thought this was unacceptable, and so Little started writing a story for her students, a book that eventually became her first published novel, Mine For Keeps, about a girl with cerebral palsy.

But there was ONE extant book that Little had been able to find to read to her students which featured a disabled protagonist who remained alive and disabled, and that book was Warrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliff. Her students initially struggled with the prose style of the book (fair, it takes some getting used to), but soon were totally captivated, and loved it. The book's hero, Drem, was like them! And he ended the book triumphant, despite all the challenges he faced!

Little talks about this in one of her autobiographies. When I was a kid I loved her autobiographies, and reread them over and over again. But somehow, despite this story having an impact on me, I never considered at the time that I could seek out and read for myself that book that Little talked about!!

Anyway then I eventually fell into Sutcliff fandom, and then (uh, years later) made the connection that Rosemary Sutcliff was that author Jean Little admired, and finally I have gotten round to reading this book.

It's interesting to read with this context, the knowledge that Warrior Scarlet was actually pretty dang unique for its time in its portrayal of disability, and something that disabled kids really connected to. Is it perfect about its representation, looking at it from 63 years on? Of course not. But it does a lot of things really right nonetheless, and it was there for kids who desperately needed to see themselves reflected in the books they read.

Warrior Scarlet is historical fiction, set in bronze-age Britain, and tells the story of a boy who was born with one non-functioning arm but nonetheless wants to be a warrior of his people. Drem is a great character, and believably written. You get to see him grow and mature over the course of the book while still remaining himself, in both his strengths and his flaws.

I also love the mentorship Drem gets from an older disabled man; he's not alone, and although their disabilities are not the same it means Drem gets to see a way of living a fulfilling life in his future, and be encouraged in that, when there are so many voices telling him he can't.

As usual in her fiction, Sutcliff does a good job of place-setting, with lots of nature descriptions, and making clear how the culture she's depicting influences the characters. I love her writing a lot.

Of course, she's inventing some things about this bronze-age culture whole-cloth, since we have less information about that era than about the Roman-era Britain she more usually writes about. She also draws upon some theories that are now outdated and discredited; the Little Dark People as the indigenous inhabitants of Britain who got outcompeted by the incoming Celts, and lived as a dwindling and separate population, is a major theme, and I feel weird about it.

( small spoiler for the ending )

The way women/girls get handled in this book is not great, as is fairly common for Sutcliff. Her lead characters are always male, and are generally dismissive of women's work and women's lives, which tend to exist totally separate from the masculine world the lead characters live in.

The one female character in this book who gets some narrative attention, Blai, is actually really interesting and I wish we'd gotten more of a look at her interiority! ( spoiler for a different aspect of the ending )

Anyway, I'm not sure if the above all comes together into a coherent review, but I guess the long and short of it is that this is an excellent book that I thoroughly enjoyed reading, which is doing some important things, and also it's a product of its time and its imperfect creator.