A Fan's Playground

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 can finally breathe a sigh of relief with today's news from the US, and move on to having feelings about books again instead of just worrying about the election full time. Here's Marie Kondo's book!

I watched Kondo's tv show back in January and found it highly inspiring, and Kondo herself a delight. Finally got round to her famous book! It's also great. When I finished it I promptly got up and started tidying again.

I have never done Kondo's full method, where you pull out every single one of your possessions by category and go through them to decide what to keep, but I find her insights about whether something "sparks joy" to be a really useful metric for deciding what I actually need in my life. And thanking something for what it taught me/did for me before getting rid of it does seem to help me let go of things I don't want anymore but couldn't previously bring myself to get rid of. And the related idea that sometimes what an item has taught you is that you don't want items like that - so instead of hanging onto it out of guilt for never using it, you can let it go with gratitude for what you've learned.

She also has some useful tips about how to fold things, and how to arrange drawers and closets and so forth. She's right, my dresser drawers DO make me happier to look in when they're sorted by colour with lightest colours at the front and darkest at the back!

And her enthusiasm for tidying is infectious. She just cares so much!

A nice solid enjoyable romance novel. Doesn't reach the heights of delight of some romance novels I've read have in the past (such as Rose Lerner's True Pretenses) but I also have no major complaints which honestly is doing great.

Nev is a titled young man who's never applied himself to anything serious in his life but suddenly has to apply himself because his father died and he has inherited a massive pile of debt and and a failing estate, and needs to turn things around. Penny is practical, smart, and a very rich heiress to a manufacturing fortune, and finds herself charmed by Nev even though she has no reason to trust he'd be a good match. They marry for practical reasons and then have to a) figure out their feelings for each other, b) deal with poverty and resulting violent unrest among the labourers on their estate, c) thwart the other local landowner who is a total asshole, d) fix Nev's friendships. Among other things.

There was...a lot going on. It all more or less tied in to each other so it all worked together, but it was still a lot!

( Read more... )

WELL this is a book that gave me a lot of feelings. I read the first half the book, had to set it down because I didn't have the time to finish it in one sitting, and then it took a while to convince myself to pick it back up again to finish it because it was so HARROWING and I didn't know if I could take it.

And it did indeed continue to be harrowing, and I cried a bunch at the end, but it was also really really good.

It's a book about dealing with grief and also about dealing with being seen as strange/other/outcast/dangerous. Set in an alternate world, it's the story of a girl named Plain Kate who is a woodcarver but not guild-sanctioned, whose father died recently, and who is considered to be probably a witch by other people who see her as dangerous as a result.

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I decided to reread the whole series so I could then do a reread of the newest book! ( cut for spoilers, mostly for King of Attolia and Thick as Thieves )

Fifth in the Confederation series. My main problem with this book is that I just don't care about Craig, Torin's love interest. I'm so bored by him! And his role in this book is the biggest it's been so far, since this book is about Torin having left behind her military career to join Craig as a civilian salvage operator. SIGH.

( Read more... )

A fun book, but the main character is the sort to get into scrapes often enough that I found it kind of stressful. I definitely had to skip to the end and read the last 50 pages or so when I was halfway into the book, or I don't know if I could have made it. It's a kid's book set in, idk, probably approximately the Regency era except with magic. I liked the magic, and I liked how the three sisters were very much sisters, and I liked that the stepmother was not in fact a terrible stepmother. But it was largely an extremely light read with lots of implausible happenings and I just never really actually cared about it.

As evidence of the way my brain's been taken over by the Queen's Thief series over the last few days: last night I dreamed that the next book in the series (book #5) had been released in August and somehow the entirety of the fandom had managed to miss this fact. The book was called "King" and I was super excited that I would actually get to read it. (Too bad the internet is giving NO HINTS as to when we might expect the next one. And Megan Whalen Turner has a tumblr, but it's all photos of her daily coffee, inspirational photos of Greece, and reblogs of fanart. Super cute but less than actually helpful on this point.)

At any rate. In the last few days I reread all four extant Queen's Thief books. FOLLOWING ARE MY (SPOILERY) THOUGHTS. I will note first though for people who have not read this series and are possibly interested: this is a series that the vast majority of people seem to agree is best enjoyed unspoiled. So if you tend to be on the fence about whether to spoiler yourself for things or not, that might be a useful data point to keep in mind.

I will just begin by saying I SUPER LOVE THESE BOOKS. As I told twitter the other night: books about fantasyworld politics plus a sneaky trickster of a main character = THE TRUE WAY TO MY HEART. What a great series. Despite the bits below where I'm complaining about various aspects, I really love these books.


( The Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner )

( The Queen of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner )

( The King of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner )

( A Conspiracy of Kings, by Megan Whalen Turner )

YOU GUYS I WENT TO THE LIBRARY AND GOT OUT BOOKS. This...should not be as unusual as it is. For the past I don't even want to know how long, I've been almost exclusively reading either a) books off my bookshelf, b) books off my sister's bookshelf, c) books my sister got out of the library for herself, or d) books I borrowed from other people. NO MORE. I HAVE THE POWER TO SEEK OUT NEW BOOKS ON MY OWN. Once upon a time I was at the library every single week......... those days are long past but maybe a new era is dawning? Where I go to the library maybe once every couple months? That seems reasonable.

Here are some of the books I got out and proceeded to read!

( Darkbeast, by Morgan Keyes )

( Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, by Mary Roach )

( Klee Wyck, by Emily Carr )

So I finished reading A Conspiracy of Kings by Megan Whalen Turner on Friday night and haven't posted about it yet because I keep on NOT BEING SURE WHAT TO SAY.

So here's the thing, I read The Thief and was like, pretty good book, but nothing special. And then I read The Queen of Attolia and I was like REALLY EXCELLENT BOOK minus a couple quibbles, and then I read The King of Attolia and I was like PERFECT BOOK????? (my thoughts about the three from when I read them last September)

So it was really hard not going into A Conspiracy of Kings expecting it to be EVEN BETTER THAN PERFECT because Megan Whalen Turner had been doing an amazing job of leveling up after every book. And then I read this book and it WASN'T better than The King of Attolia, and in fact I didn't like it nearly so well, and that was really disappointing!

But the thing is, unlike The Queen of Attolia and The Thief where I could easily point out where my frustrations were, with this one I have NO IDEA how to even begin. It's largely a very good book and I DO like it! It's just........AUGH. WORDS ARE NOT WORDING WELL FOR ME. MY THOUGHTS ARE INCOHERENT. I give up. Those of you who have read this book, please talk to me about your opinions so I can try to get a handle on mine!