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!!)

Chris Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut who got more into the public eye than most astronauts these days due to an active twitter presence during his half-year on the ISS in 2012-2013. This is his memoir!

It's an interesting read, though it doesn't get super personal really. It's mostly just reading a reasonable guy chatting thoughtfully about helpful ways to approach living one's life. Who happens to be a highly-decorated and skilled astronaut, giving anecdotes about spaceflight and stuff.

And it means that my number one take-away from the book is.....what is it LIKE to be that mentally and emotionally stable and healthy????

This is absolutely a trait they select for in astronauts (for good reason!!) and then astronaut training puts a lot of effort into improving these skills too. So it makes sense that Hadfield would exude an aura of "chill competent with-it dude with a brain that doesn't act up." But my gosh. Wouldn't it be NICE.

Now, I'm not saying the guy's perfect or anything, like, you clearly need to have a lot of drive and ambition to become an astronaut, and if you read around the edges of the book you can see that all that drive focused towards reaching his goal put a lot of strain and pressure on his wife and kids. But you get the sense he's aware of the trade-offs he's made and made his choices with full knowledge, and did his best to mitigate the issues wherever he could, and truly listen when people told him there was a problem. And he also comes across as a guy who...would have been genuinely at peace with it if he'd put all this effort into living out his greatest dream and it didn't work out.

WEIRD.

(He's also the kind of person who, at 9 years old, realized he wanted to be an astronaut, realized it was a really really far-fetched goal, and decided that what made the most sense was to approach all of his choices in life based on what someone who would become an astronaut would be doing in that moment, figuring that it would be helpful if it ever became possible for him to reach his goal, but would still be useful to him even if he never became an astronaut. What the fuck.)

Historical fantasy set in late 19th century New York, featuring a Golem woman and a Jinni man, and their experiences as immigrants and trying to find their place and who they are and what they want from life.

There were aspects of this book that I really enjoyed, and I loved reading all the Golem's sections, but overall I was frustrated with the kind of book it was, I guess? My biggest frustration is that I didn't particularly care about the Jinni, and he's one of the two main characters of the book! My other big frustration was with the plot choices made. The through-line of the semi-immortal evil wizard as the antagonist mastermind was just...idk, it didn't feel right for this book, to me. It didn't add anything to the themes the author was trying to develop, and in fact felt like a redirect of the reader's attention away from the more important and interesting aspects of the story

So although I appreciate the things the author was doing in this book (eg the depictions of community, identity, belonging, and making choices), the execution didn't work for me overall.

I am beginning to emerge from the post-surgery haze of exhaustion enough to...okay, not to actually read any entire novels (I am instead mainlining Great British Bake Off which doesn't require too much of my engagement), but to POST about books I read before? I think I can do that.

The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo is a fascinating book which I mostly really liked! Set in 1890's colonial Malaysia amongst the Chinese population there, Li Lan is a young woman who has led a very circumscribed life, until it is proposed that she become a "ghost bride", the wife of a dead man.

It was a little slow at the start to capture my attention, and I think the ending isn't quite its best self in terms of accomplishing what it's trying to do, but the whole middle part of the book, where Li Lan is discovering what it's like to be a spirit, is great.

But here's what I don't like about the ending.

( yes okay discussion of the ending is probably spoilers )

On the other hand there's lots of other great stuff in this book! And I could see what the ending was going for and appreciate the intent, I just wish it had stuck the landing a bit better.

WELL I am now finished the Rivers of London series so I suppose I will post about the last four books all at once here since it feels weird to keep posting one at a time as if I'm not already done. Here we go!

( Whispers Under Ground, by Ben Aaronovitch )

( Broken Homes, by Ben Aaronovitch )

( Foxglove Summer, by Ben Aaronovitch )

( The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch )

First: shoutout to china_shop for recommending Courtney Milan's historicals to me last year and giving me spoilers for Duchess War and Heiress Effect - it was helpful to have a sense of what to expect from these books before I'd read enough to get a handle on Courtney Milan's trustworthiness as an author!

So this is the first half or so of the Brothers Sinister series, read slightly out of order because my hold on the Heiress Effect took too long to come in. (The Heiress Effect will be in my next post about the Brothers Sinister, which will be after the Turner trilogy and also some more Tamora Pierce.)


( The Duchess War )

( A Kiss for Midwinter )

( The Governess Affair )

( The Countess Conspiracy )

I am reminded that there is a difference between finding a book compelling and actually LIKING it. The whole thing feels extremely Gaiman to me, in a way I can't quite put my finger on. And Gaiman tends as a whole to just not quite work for me. Oh, he's certainly a talented writer, but I just can't love the guy's books the way so many people do. And I don't hate them either, as many other people apparently do. He's just kind of eternally in a place of "I see what you're doing but ehhhh."

( Read more... )

Thoroughly enjoyed! I have been reading a number of 19th century women's travel memoirs of late (Thank you librivox!) and I love the genre. And this is that genre WITH ADDED DRAGONS. So great. Though this book doesn't quite have the right tone. Oh well - it IS an alternate universe that among other things does dates differently so it's not technically 19th century....

( Read more... )

For a while there I was doing pretty well at giving each book thought its own post, buuuut I have a backlog again so here have a bunch.

( Journey to the River Sea, by Eva Ibbotson )

( The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, by Tom Reiss )

( Handbook for Dragon Slayers, by Merrie Haskell )

( Growing Pains, by Emily Carr )

Wooo it's the latest Susan Palwick! Last time I reviewed a Susan Palwick novel I accidentally talked for like 1500 words whiiiich is possibly overkill? I don't have 1500 words in me this time, in part because this one is a less ambitious novel than the last. But this one was overall more successful than Shelter, I think.

It's...a literary fiction novel, I suppose you could say. It takes place entirely in our current real world and is about the reactions of various people to a terrible personal tragedy (tw for rape and murder and suicide in the book) that occurs. Except that I genuinely like the characters, and they feel like real people, and I care about them. And yes I cried.

It's a very Susan Palwick book, being about grief and loss and hard things and about how family (by blood or by choice) is important. And all that is great!

But what's really special about it is the other part - the stuff about the Comrade Cosmos comic book series and the Comrade Cosmos fandom. A number of the main characters are into CCverse, and the novel spends a fair amount of time talking about CCverse and oh dear god I love everything about this. It reads like Palwick GENUINELY GETS IT about fandom and it makes me SO HAPPY. And the book acknowledges that slash exists without getting weird or judgy about it! (and is also one hundred percent correct about what slash fans would ship because wow yes CC/EE practically writes itself)

(Also I have to say that I dearly want there to be fanart of the Emperor of Entropy at a birthday party. Lots of it. All the fanart. Also all the other CCverse fanworks.) (HELL YEAH I am requesting CCverse for yuletide this year!) (yes I already checked tumblr and AO3 and there's absolutely nothing about Comrade Cosmos and I am sad)

But the way that a fandom is a) fun for the people involved and b) also can be helpful and meaningful to people going through hard times is just... yeah.

And I love CCverse and its fandom as described in the book. I got genuinely squeeful reading each section about CCverse. And I love that the CCverse canon is explicitly imperfect - so Palwick didn't intend CCverse to be a shining paragon of a canon that does everything right. Which makes me feel better about things like the way that CC's backstory involves a fridged woman whose continued disabled existence is only to cause CC angst instead of her getting to be a person in her own right. And the only major female characters are the love interest(s) and the fridged/tragically-disabled family member. It's like...yeah. That's too often what comic books DO, unfortunately. CCverse is interesting and groundbreaking in other ways, but it also retreads some very familiar ground.

At any rate, I don't have any grand sweeping statements to end my thoughts with. But I really liked this book and I'm glad I read it. AWW YEAH SUSAN PALWICK.