sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: ya

First thing I've read for my Hugos homework! yes I feel like I'm behind already. I only have 2 months left!! Anyway this is the sort of book I wouldn't have chosen to read without external reason, and no it still isn't my thing but it's a really excellent version of that thing.

It's a modern YA urban fantasy written in first-person present-tense about a special girl with special secret magical powers experiencing a love triangle and trying to save the world. Which is great if that's your jam, we all have our well-used premises we like to read and this just doesn't happen to be mine! But it does some good stuff with it that makes me admire it at least, and definitely want to rec it to people for whom this type of book IS their jam.

I appreciate that it's drawing on Arthurian legend while also being anti-monarchy, for one thing. And has a black girl in the Arthur role!

Also it's about a girl having a complicated experience of her connection with her history and her family's traditions - there's both good and bad in such things, and the book is firmly on the side of having a choice about what to value in it.

I also appreciate that it's a book that understands that it's not actually GOOD to make teens be the only people who are able to access the secret special magic powers and in fact it's probably because there are adults who want to be able to manipulate them. Secret orders are a problem actually!

There's lots of good themes overall in fact.

And it seems promising about how it's going to handle the love triangle - a polyamorous answer does not seem out of the question, which is fun.

However it is the second book in a series and it ends on a cliffhanger so there's that.

I would call it a 4 or even 5 star book for people who enjoy the modern YA genre. I'm almost certainly going to rank it either first or second on my Hugo voting form in the YA category, because I do think it deserves recognition! But I'm tagging it 3 stars because that's the degree to which I personally enjoyed it.

We Ride Upon Sticks is a historical fantasy/magic realism novel set in the long-ago era of 1989, and it fully embraces what it means to be set in the 80's in the eastern United States. (is it weird to be reading historical fiction set in the decade of my birth? it sure is! but also I adore how firmly it embodies the 80's.)

The Danvers High School field hockey team has a long history of losing their games by embarrassingly large amounts, but this year is different. This year the 11 players have a PLAN, have made a magically binding pact, and are ready to do what it takes to win for a change.

The book is told from the pov of the team. Yes, the whole team, it's written in first-person plural. You would think this would be weird? But it super isn't, it feels remarkably natural to read!

None of the team members are the main character; the whole team is, equally. Over the course of the narrative, you spend time examining the realities of what it means to be each of them, what's going on in their families and relationships, what their inner lives are like, and so forth. You would think that this is too many characters to focus on, but again, it super isn't! I really felt like I knew all eleven of them.

One of the things I loved about this book is its prose; it's distinctive and confident and fun. And I love the way reveals are constructed, circling around the information so that you see what the result is and then come back around to see what actually happened – you get these kind of reveals both within the space of a paragraph, or a chapter, or a whole arc, and I love the way it carries you forward. And the author has a real knack for similes too, and the story is full of the kind of extremely specific and weird details that make something come alive. I saw in the author's bio that she's also a published poet and that doesn't surprise me!

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But overall I thoroughly enjoyed the read, and it was definitely doing a bunch of really cool things!

This is the first ever magical girl story that I've read, as far as I can remember! though of course I've heard a lot about the genre.

In this comic, Max is a trans teen boy who comes from a long tradition of magical girls on his mother's side of the family. His mom is delighted to see the powers of the goddess Aurora being awakened in the next generation; meanwhile Max is horrified by the frilly dress and the expectation of ladylike grace.

But he can't ignore his magical powers because there's a threat he has to face! With the power of friendship, and of learning to stand up for who he is, Max is able to become the MAGICAL BOY!

It's a charming and delightful story and I enjoyed all the characters. The art is great at communicating feeling and motion, and at keeping all the characters distinct, though sometimes the speech bubbles were arranged in ways where I found it difficult to navigate what order to read them.

It is unfortunately not a story that's complete in one volume, but I had fun reading it, and maybe at some point my library will get the next volume and I'll stumble across it, the way I did this one!

I've been holding on to this review since last November since it's for a book published by a HarperCollins imprint, but the HarperCollins Union finally has a contract with their employer (yay!!!!! go union go!) and has said to feel free to post reviews again! So here we go.

Moira's Pen is a book of short stories (and poetry, and anecdotes, and descriptions of relevant archeological objects) from the Queen's Thief universe. And ehhh, it's fine? But at the end of the main series, my increased understanding of the actual themes and priorities the overarching series narrative was engaging with meant I have lost much of my enamourment with it, and the stories and content in Moira's Pen are mostly pretty slight and meant to just be fun little additions to the novels. I did enjoy the new Immakuk and Ennikar content!

Ohhhhh wow I was really captivated by this book! I loooooooved all the characters, and it did such an amazing job of being situated in a very specific place at a very specific time. San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1950's is so integral to the main character Lily's experiences, and it feels so lived-in to the reader - as does the Telegraph Club, the lesbian bar Lily sneaks away to.

And Lily's interest in and attraction to women (and especially to Kath!) feels so lived-in and grounded and alive too.

And there's so many other people in Lily's life too, and I love the complexities of all the other characters and their relationships with her! Her contentious best-friendship with Shirley, how much of a staple it's been for her all her life, and how she can barely bring herself to admit the ways in which that friendship stifles her and holds her back. Her aunt Judy, who's so supportive of her career dreams and her interest in science and space, but does not react well to Lily being a homosexual. All the other lesbians she meets at the Telegraph Club - Tommy, who first represents to her what she's been longing for but is kind of alarming in person, and Lana, who doesn't know Lily hardly at all but is still so welcoming and supportive of her when she most needs it even though it's not a good time for Lana either, and Paula, who's friendly at the club but acts as if they're strangers when they meet in regular life, and so many more. The lesbians are so good!

And of course Lily's identity as a Chinese American is just as vital to her experience as being a lesbian. She's constantly being othered and exoticised by the white people she meets, and her family is in real danger of deportation due to trumped-up accusations of communism, and her deep connection to her community in Chinatown is both overbearing and life-giving to her, and Chinese food is clearly hugely important to her.

Everything is connected, and everything is a part of Lily discovering who she is and what's important to her and how she wants to live her life. And I loved her so much!

My one and only frustration with the book is the pacing of the ending. I think it's the right ending to the book! But the pacing was all off, and the end felt so abrupt that it kind of left me feeling like I'd stumbled over the curb at the edge of a sidewalk instead of guided smoothly to the emotional resolution. I get it, endings are VERY hard to write, and I don't know what I'd tell the author to do differently, but I do wish the ending had been smoother.

But honestly that's a pretty small complaint given how wonderful the rest of the book was. And also the book as a whole is so clearly written by a more skilled author than the only other book I've read by Malinda Lo, her debut Ash, and I'm always delighted to see that kind of real growth in an author.

All in all: I loved it!!!

This is a very good YA graphic novel about the seductive lies of empire, of the complexities of belonging to a marginalized people group, of wanting to be able to DO something, of friendship and teamwork and girls with swords. I loved the art and the story both!

After a slow start, this turns into an excellent book within the genre of modern YA. It is unfortunate that I'm not personally into the current trends of the genre, but inside that set of tropes and expectations this book is doing wonderful things and I recommend it to any YA fan!

This book is loosely inspired by The Little Mermaid, but drawing instead on West African religions and folk traditions, and featuring a black girl as the little mermaid. The author does a reasonably good job of taking only what works for this new story from the original Little Mermaid instead of trying too hard to follow it beat for beat. And I love that the antagonist of the story, Esu, is made clear in the narrative to be a being with importance and value within the balance of powers, despite occupying a narrative role that in a more westernized story would be played by an unambiguously evil character.

I liked the main character, and I liked the world-building, and I liked the overall tone of the book, that things may suck but people try hard to do good things and there are powers in the world that love you.

I think my two biggest frustrations would be these:

First, why does there need to be an external element keeping our main character and her love interest apart? We're told she cannot love a human or she'll stop existing, because she's a being of the sea, but honestly this barrier wasn't actually needed to allow the relationship and story to progress and to end as they did, so it just felt like an artificial barrier put into the story for no reason.

Second, why does there need to be world-ending stakes? The reasons why the two of them want to find their respective macguffins are already compelling enough, we didn't need to add "oh and the world as you know it will end if you fail," because the personal stakes were already high for both of them, and personal stakes honestly often feel more pressing (both to reader and to character) anyway!

But overall, though the book is only a 3 star book for me as a reader, for someone who likes YA I'd bump it up to a 4 star rating. Lots to be impressed with, especially as the author's debut.

I've read The Magnolia Sword once before, when it first came out, and I loved it at the time. But on rereading, I've unfortunately discovered that I don't love it nearly so well anymore.

The first time I read it, I was racing through it because it was so exciting and I couldn't wait to find out what would happen next, and I didn't have a lot of brainspace left to spare for really paying attention to everything the narrative was doing. This time, the way I read it was via me and a friend (M) taking turns to read it aloud to each other chapter by chapter over the course of 5 or so days while we were on vacation -- a much slower, more meditative way to read a book. And it turns out that I don't think it's actually particularly deftly written.

There are a number of quirks of the prose that are actively irritating to me, to the degree that I started editing on the fly as I read aloud to make it flow better, plus nearly EVERY chapter ends in some sort of cliffhanger. M and I started laughingly going "dun dun dunnnnnn" at the end of every chapter because it was such a thing.

I also felt like various aspects of the story and characters were handled in a too-simplistic way.

And there are some choices that I feel work against the themes the story is going for! For example, the book is going for "war is bad and destabilising, and anything that can create greater stability under the circumstances is worth chasing after in order to avoid widespread death, even if it's an imperfect solution" which is a great theme to go with the time period in China that the book is set in. But then when Mulan meets the emperor at the end she's like "ah yes but he's a GOOD emperor because I can tell he really cares, so I'm glad he's the emperor" when I think it would have made more sense to reinforce the theme by having the emperor be like, mediocre at best, but supporting his reign is still the right choice because toppling the current dynasty will lead to further instability and death for the common people. (okay I might also have preferred this vision of the emperor because I am the opposite of a monarchist lol but I STILL THINK IT WOULD BE BETTER FOR THIS PARTICULAR STORY TOO)

And I haaaaaaated that there are multiple really big decisions in Mulan's life that are taken out of her hands at the end and the narrative doesn't seem to notice it or see a single thing wrong with it: someone else reveals her true gender to the rest of her comrades without even asking her if she is okay with that, and Kai invites her father to the capital without telling her when Mulan is still in turmoil over the things she's learned about her father and isn't sure she's ready to meet him again.

I do still appreciate the casual queerness of background characters, and the friendship between Mulan and the other soldiers in their little band, and the connection between Mulan and Kai, and all that. Though I'm a little more uncomfortable now with exactly how Kai's anxiety is handled, even if I'm still glad a lead character gets to be shown as both anxious and heroic.

But one thing I actually like better this time around than my first read is the crossdressing and gender identity! I actually really like that Mulan has a very clear sense of her gender identity and doesn't like being seen as a man or having to dress like a man through so much of her life. She's cis, but cis in a way where she kind of had to interrogate her own gender, and has come to a solid answer about what gender that is. Do I still eternally want more "crossdressing" narratives that lead to the character coming to some trans realisations about themself? Absolutely! But I like this too.

It was also fun to read this wuxia-inspired novel with more of a grounding in wuxia/xianxia now; I could see the ways in which it was following those tropes, when last time I had no idea how to recognize what it was doing in that respect.

At any rate, despite my various frustrations this time around, I still very much enjoyed sharing this book with M; reading it aloud to each other was a great deal of fun, and such a good way to experience a story together.

....huh, I did not expect to be as compelled by this book as I ended up being! I had seen a bunch of hype for it and deliberately decided not to read it because it didn't sound like my kind of thing, but then it ended up on the Hugos list for this year so I read it after all, and. It isn't exactly my thing? But I really liked it regardless!

It's a YA fantasy historical-futuristic reimagining of the story of the chinese empress Wu Zetian, with giant mecha battles.

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This book is very good at being the kind of book it is, and I'm very happy for it, but unfortunately it's not my kind of book. Yes, another book read for the hugos! Yes, I somehow find it rewarding to read books I don't like in service of a greater cause!

Anyway this is a YA sci-fi adventure novel, with spaceships and daring rescues and attempts to save the universe and all that, and a group of ragtag misfits working together to fight evil against all odds. Also it's interrogating the idea of being a Special Chosen One. It does all these things well! But it's just not my thing.

I found it tedious, and the characters a bit one note, and I don't enjoy action scenes, and I just don't care about Chosen One narratives even when the point being made is that it's your actions and choices that define you, rather than what you were intended to be. Also it ends with a Big New Bad Thing being discovered to make you want to read the sequel. I hate when a Big New Bad Thing is introduced in the last pages of a book!

But you know what, I'm pretty sure that if this kind of book is your thing, you'll find it a fun read. It is very earnest about the things it's doing, which is charming, and Anders is a generally good writer! (I mean, I have yet to actively like a single novel she's written, but they're always good even if not my thing.)

I was introduced to Harrow's writing in a previous Hugo year with her debut novel, Ten Thousand Doors of January, which was making a stylistic statement that REALLY didn't land for me. So I was a bit trepidatious heading into this book, which is on the hugo novella nominee list this year. But, although I don't love everything this book is doing, I actually really liked it, I'm glad to say!

A Spindle Splintered is a fractured fairy tale, and exactly the kind of thing I would have devoured as a kid. Characters from multiple versions of the Sleeping Beauty tale end up interacting and able to affect each other's stories! It's very fun, and I loved how clear it was that the author ALSO loves fairy tales and loves the inherent nature of mutability within them. And I loved the main character Zinnia and her various coping mechanisms for dealing with knowing she's a dying girl with a time limit on her life

However, I did not love the way that the book leaned so hard into the cliches for various of these stories, most especially the story of Primrose, the second-most-important Sleeping Beauty of the book. It felt like it was simultaneously trying to poke fun at the ridiculousness of the story and the setting AND ALSO take the difficulties of Primrose's life seriously, and the clash between those two modes made it feel really off-balance to me. It was basically fine for the various other Sleeping Beauties who show up at the very end to help save the day, because they're ultimately minor characters so it feels more okay for them to be avatars of cliche. But for Primrose....her story was central to the whole thing, as it's the story the main character Zinnia escapes into, and it just didn't work for me.

Also the author has fun putting in little easter eggs for the reader, like a "Harold, they're lesbians" joke, and you know what, memes like that stuck into books continue to be jarring imo.

BUT there are some things the book gets really right, and my favourite thing it does is the best friendship between Zinnia and Charm, where it's like, straddling the line between platonic and romantic, and the exact nature of it might be complicated, but the depth of love between them is NOT complicated and they just love and care for each other SO MUCH. Anyway, love that for canon, but for fanfic: post-canon (post Zinnia's finding-herself adventures) Primrose/Zinnia/Charm, am I right?

With the evil ex out of the picture, the rest of the characters in these graphic novels have distinct enough character designs that I no longer had trouble following things, and I had an enjoyable time reading volumes 2 & 3. Volume 4 turns out to be a Very Special Episode about eating disorders, and also the pacing is all over the place, so I didn't like it quite as well -- but I'm enjoying watching all these teens doing their best and caring about people!

Sometimes I finish a book and groan a bit at the thought of writing it up, because I don't know how to organize my thoughts into coherence, but I know I'll be happier if I do because then I'll have a better handle on my own understanding of the book!

So this is a sequel to Catfishing on Catnet, and after the exciting events of that book Steph and her mom are trying to settle down and live a "normal" life, now that the threat of her dad is gone. But because of a number of reasons, including her friendship with the AI CheshireCat, Steph gets drawn into trying to save the world from another AI. Among other things.

There's a lot that's good about the book, and I really enjoyed it a lot, when I wasn't totally stressed out with worry about what was going to happen to these kids. I felt so much for Nell, doing her best to escape the fundamentalist religious cult she was raised in but not yet sure how to feel confident in who she is outside of it. And Steph and her mom are doing their best after the chaos and trauma of the last many years but still struggling to learn healthy ways of relating to each other and to the world. And they're all in SO MUCH DANGER! As well as Nell and Steph's respective girlfriends, and their various other friends, and tbh most humans??

But one thing that made me laugh was how much I enjoyed all the adults in this YA novel......signs you've gotten old, I guess. (other signs you've gotten old: I just realized I referred to the main characters as kids in the previous paragraph.) But hot damn, Nell's dad's polycule! Steph's grandmother! the random lesbian activist in whose house they take refuge at one point!

I appreciated that there were understandable explanations for why a lot of these kids would not feel comfortable going to the adults in their lives for help, and also about interference in communication when they DID try, so that various excellent adults could be present and part of the story while still allowing for the usual YA thing of making sure the teens are the ones to save the day. Nicely done.

However. A lot of the plot in this book is kicked off because of all these people using what are honestly EXTREMELY sketchy apps, and it takes people forever to be like "hmm maybe there's something concerning about this app" EVEN AFTER it's convinced them to do all sorts of things that any reasonable person would be suspicious of. The cult's app, sure, it's a cult, that checks out. But the other apps???

Anyway as long as I turned up my dial in suspension-of-disbelief alllllll the way up, I think it was a good book. But that was a heck of a lot of belief to suspend, tbh.

Okay was this review helpful to me? might it be helpful to you? idk on either point but here we are.

This is Bayron's second book, and I think she's definitely grown as an author since her first, which is always nice to see. This book isn't exactly to my taste (contemporary setting, and does a lot of the stuff that has become a standard part of the modern YA genre which doesn't speak to me), but it's overall a good one for people who DO like those things, I think!

I do have some specific complaints though, beyond just "not my thing."

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Look! I read a book! I loved Darcie Little Badger's first novel, Elatsoe, so I was super pumped to give her second book a try. Unfortunately I didn't like this one quite so well.

A Snake Falls To Earth follows two characters: Nina, a Lipan Apache girl who has inherited a love of storytelling from her great-grandmother and wants to understand more of her family's history, and Oli, a cottonmouth person living in the land of spirits who has finally left his mother's home and must make his own way in the world.

Both characters are great, and both characters' stories are great, but the book switches back and forth between them at great speed, and for most of the book there is no connection between the two stories. For me, this resulted in a very frustrating experience where I felt constantly tossed back out of my immersion in the book every time the pov switched. And given how often the pov switched, that meant that it was actually very hard for me to read this book.

I loved Nina's efforts to translate and understand the last story her great-grandmother told her, and I loved Oli's developing friendships with the various people around him (Ami, a toad person; Brightest, a hawk person; and the coyote sisters whose names I never kept straight). And there are various good themes that the book is exploring! But the structure meant that I just couldn't connect as deeply as I wanted to.

I think this book would have really worked for me if it were actually two completely separate novellas, one about Nina and one about Oli. And if it had to be one book, I still think it could have worked for me if a) the sections were longer so there was more time between pov swaps, and b) the stories had more obvious connections between them from earlier so it would feel to me from the beginning like there is a reason these stories are paired.

I know at least one person for whom the structure as it exists actually really did work though, so it seems to be very much personal taste on this matter. I just wish it had worked 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!!)

Well....I liked it better than the first book in this trilogy. Unfortunately still not my thing though! Like, is it doing lots of things that SHOULD be my thing? It is!

It contains:
- really competent people
- people trying their best to do what they think is the right thing
- a belief in the importance of community to help each other out, even if they don't like each other personally
- someone who hasn't had a lot of experience in friendships learning how to have friends
- weirdo outsiders finding a place
- fighting against what seems like fate/destiny or inevitability
- a nonhuman inanimate entity that is its own person with its own priorities

HOWEVER. Even with all these elements, in a book written by a very competent writer who knows how to put a story together, I just.... wasn't there.

I wonder if it is that I just cannot make myself take the premise seriously. The level of danger posed to all magical children in this world is so outrageously over the top (outside of the magic boarding school, 95% of magical children die! inside, your chance of survival goes up to 1 in 4!) that it just feels silly to me. I can't believe in the danger. It felt obvious at all times that I was reading a made up story about a made up world and made up people, instead of being able to sink into the reality that the narrative was attempting to create. And that kept me from emotionally connecting with things, beyond a few moments here and there.

Also: I just don't care about monster-fighting? and there are a lot of fight scenes of people fighting monsters. It really bogged me down in the middle of the book and made it slow reading for me.

It's really too bad! Because the themes the book's exploring ARE good ones! Sigh.

(also the book ends on a cliffhanger gdi, I hate when books do this)

I found the first book in this duology to be a bit uneven but mostly enjoyable and with a lot of promise; I hoped the sequel would see the author grow, but it felt to me like it was still at the same level as the first book. Still uneven pacing and with some heavy-handed elements, and the revolutionary aspects are definitely over-simplified. But I do still care about the main character, Tarisai, and enjoy the worldbuilding. I love getting to read secondary world fantasies that are inspired by cultures other than medieval europe! And Tarisai is very believably a teen in over her head in a difficult situation and making some bad choices but doing her best, and I really felt for her. So overall a worthwhile read, even if it didn't live up to everything I was hoping.

And this duology also does a good job of exploring important themes, like the unhelpful nature of an over-focus on guilt in inspiring a person to actually work to do better, and that there are many kinds of love that are all important, whether romantic or platonic, and that it's bad for power to be concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy families.

I think that if I had read these books as a teen I would have uncritically adored them, and I'm glad they're out there for today's teens to fall in love with!

I like to browse the recent books section of the libby app, to see what recent ebooks my library has acquired, and sometimes it really pays off! I hadn't even heard of this comic series before, but I saw it and was immediately intrigued, and when my holds came in on the four volumes collecting the whole series, I read them INSTANTLY and was totally drawn in.

The premise: a sports anime, but make it explicitly queer. High-school aged boys on a boarding school fencing team! Nicholas is the lead character, a scholarship student whose good instincts in fencing are held back by inferior technique. He has placed himself as a rival to Seiji, a dedicated and consistent fencer with years of training who doesn't know how to be anything but serious, and Nicholas is determined to beat him -- and also be friends with him.

I love both of them, but I also love all the other characters. They're all individuals, with their strengths and weaknesses (both on the fencing piste and off), and their own relationships with the other characters. And I was going to mention here which of the other characters I was most interested in but uh it may be basically all of them? I was riveted through the whole of the story.

The four extant volumes take us through team tryouts and to the end of the team's first practice match, and now that I've finished them I'm desperate to read more. Unfortunately that's all there is!

It looks like there are also some novels by Sarah Rees Brennan continuing the story, but I've found Rees Brennan's writing pretty hit-or-miss for me, so I'm feeling a bit skeptical about giving these a try. I want to read more of this story as written by CS Pacat! SIGH. Has anyone else read the Rees Brennan Fence novels, and can tell me more about how they are?

Hellooooo, I return with another book review after a too-long silence, I was away on vacation and spent all my downtime reading fanfiction instead of any of the books I brought with me, oops!

Also, welcome to my new followers who found me through

superborb's "interesting people to subscribe to" post!

Anyway today I finally read another book! Maybe I'll do some more of that again! The Girl from the Sea is a graphic novel featuring a teen girl, Morgan, who wants to keep the various parts of her life separate: her family, her friends, the fact that she's a lesbian. She's unhappy but she has a plan for when she can be happy, some vague time in the future. Then she meets a selkie girl and all her plans are upended.

Keltie, the selkie, doesn't quite understand Morgan (or humans!) but she loves Morgan, and also has a very important goal while on land: to save Keltie's family.

It's a sweet and touching story, and I like how important Morgan's friends and family are in her life as well as her new romance, but I feel ultimately that the ending wasn't satisfying. It felt a little abrupt and like it hadn't done a sufficient job of creating space for the emotions of all three threads of things that are important to Morgan. I also felt like I wasn't shown enough of what Morgan found appealing about Keltie -- or about her friends, tbh, who she keeps herself so distant from for most of the story. And the issue with the threat to Keltie's family feels like it's dealt with way too easily!

Idk. Overall a good book for teens to have available, as I think the issues it's focusing on are ones that are important to the teen experience, but not quite as much a book for me as I was hoping.