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You may or may not remember the news story of the birder in central park who was confronted by a white woman and threatened with police because he was black, in May 2020. This book is that black birder's memoir.

Overall, a good book, and one I'm glad I read. Christian Cooper is much more than "just" a black man and a birder. He's gay, he's a nerd, he's an activist, he's pagan, he loves travelling, et cetera, et cetera. All of these things are a part of his life and shape who he is and how he reacted in that viral moment.

I really appreciated how he put that central park story near the end of the narrative, contextualising it in the rest of his life -- and then following it with a story about a similar confrontation in the same place just one year later contextualizes it even further. And also, that's not the end of his story. And I love how it ends! Tn the delight of always being able to see something new and learn something more about birds, no matter how long you've been a birder, and always being ready to throw yourself into the moment for it!

I do think the momentum in the book dragged a bit in the middle, plus I found it awkward how he made multiple references earlier in the book to the central park incident that made him famous; it makes the book feel too much of-the-moment, when a lot of what he's saying in this book is that that moment wasn't actually a bizarre outlier in his life as a whole.

But Cooper has led an interesting life, and I enjoyed hearing about it, and learnint about his time working for Marvel comics especially. He was part of the team working on Alpha Flight when the superhero Northstar came out as gay!

I listened to to this book as an audiobook, and Cooper narrates it himself. I like how his enthusiasm comes through in his reading, though whenever he tries put on a voice when doing dialogue for other people, it often comes out sounding loudly exasperated when he's aiming for high energy or high emotion, which is irritating.

One fun thing that the audiobook format allows is that at the beginning of each section of the book, there's an audio clip of birdsong, for a bird species that will be featured in that section of text! I really enjoyed trying to ID the bird from the song and then listening for when it would come up in one of his stories.

Overall, though it's not a perfect book, I am glad I read it and I think it's worth reading.
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I listened to this nonfiction book as an audiobook, which was a great way to spend time with the history of silk as I went about working on various fibre arts crafts myself! (no silk in my crafting stash, though. not in my budget!)

There was a lot to enjoy about the book - engaging writing, that covers many interesting stories from the history of silk. And it talks about much more than just the silk of the classic silkworm, too. People have gotten silk from other related types of moth cocoons, from certain shellfish (which use long silken strands to anchor themselves into sand), and from spiders, who create many different kinds of silk for different purposes. I particularly enjoyed learning about the many species of wild silk moths in India which have a long history of being harvested for their silks.

However, the further I listened in the book, the more striking it became that nearly all of the stories were told from a European perspective, about European priorities, even though most of the silks discussed are not European in origin. Read more... )

So as a whole I'm a lot less enthusiastic about this book now than I was when I was just starting it, which is really too bad. Read for the fun stories it does tell, but be aware going in that you are not actually getting the full world history of silk.
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This month I read two non-fiction books by Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World and Salt: A World History.

Both books are excellent at providing lots of historical details to give the reader a good sense of how vital each of these commodities was, and the scope of their effects on human cultures and industry. I particularly loved the book on cod, and it really made me want to try eating salt cod sometime to see what it's like!

I felt that the salt book was somewhat weaker, though. Sometimes the book was presenting information generally chronologically, sometimes it was focused on a particular location, sometimes it was following a particular product or trade over time or over space. It made it feel a bit jumbled and disorganized, going back and forward in time and hopping around the world. The cod book had a bit of that as well, but by the nature of the subject the issues were more limited so it wasn't as big a deal.

The salt book also had multiple particular details that got my back up.

One was the old chestnut about x species having not evolved for x number of millions of years, when talking about sturgeons. No, that's not how evolution works? like, yes sturgeons have maintained the same basic form for about 100 million years, because it's an extremely successful strategy for their context and continues to be so, but genetic changes will still happen in a population over so much time! probably if you took a modern sturgeon and a sturgeon from the cretaceous they would not even be able to interbreed!

The other was
palestine that in a chapter about salt in Israel from ancient times to today, Palestinians weren't mentioned at all?! wtf, author!
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An f/f fantasy romance graphic novel, with lovely art in limited palettes. I found it difficult to follow in places, especially in the parts where it's light on words and dialogue. Its ending is also pretty didactic; it's definitely something along the lines of a parable, with an intended meaning to take from it. But there were parts that were definitely touching and powerful nonetheless. I think for people who have stronger abilities than me at reading visuals, this could be a worthwhile read.
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Yes a third book review in one day, all of books I read ages ago. Can't believe I didn't post about any of them when I read them! In fact I'd actually managed to forget about this one entirely in the interim. Good thing I wrote this up back then.

This is a fun, silly danmei webnovel with a translation that seems stalled out at chapter 79 of 112.

The main character Chi Muyao is a transmigrator but honestly it never really feels like he is one, it's just like for plot reasons or whatever. A bit of a baffling choice to me, since it never seems to actually make much difference! But oh well.

I like Chi Muyao's friendship with his shijie and with the second male lead, and I really enjoy how much his poorly-regarded sect just genuinely loves spirit animals and doesn't care about anything else. He's not as interested in spirit animals as them but he dedicates himself to what his sect needs nonetheless, and they appreciate what he does. it's all very wholesome.

And I do genuinely enjoy the romance arc as well, as silly as it is.

The book is overall very full of details about spiritual roots, and the stages of cultivation, and the various pills and objects and techniques and places that can bolster or hinder one's growth. Feels a bit silly to me also tbh but not a big deal to read past it!

At the point the extant English translation ends, we're in a plot arc about getting backstory on the main villain. Prior to this I was like, why does this story even need a villain, Chi Muyao and Xi Huai are doing great at thwarting their happy ending on their own. But I found myself enjoying this backstory too!

It would be nice to get the end of this story sometime, but I think I started reading this one because it felt low pressure for me to have opinions on it, because it's not done yet. So like. I enjoyed myself in the reading of it, but I'm also not feeling heartbroken about being denied the ending tbh!

If you're interested you can read it yourself here: https://peachblossomcodex.com/novel/tdvswd/
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I thought I had taken more detailed notes on these books to be able to write up a proper book review! These are three volumes in an ongoing manga series which I think is based on a webnovel? but I might be wrong about that. Many things are confusing to me.

Anyway! I saw this recced as a fun transmigration story that had similar vibes to moshang from svsss, and I was like, sold.

The premise:

Our main character, Kondou, gets accidentally sucked from our world into another realm along with a teen girl who is the special chosen one with amazing powers who's the only one who can save the world. Kondou, who isn't supposed to be there, is meanwhile like: "Welp. Better find some way to keep myself busy if I'm here." And volunteers to join the palace accountancy department.

The love interest, Aresh, is a handsome but taciturn captain who takes it on himself to save Kondou from his own self-destructive tendencies.

The first volume felt to me like it was mostly set-up, and it had promise but I didn't really feel like I had a good handle on the characters or their relationships.

The second volume started getting into the good stuff! However this is where my notes oh so helpfully stop, and I read the these multiple months ago so I remember approximately nothing of substance, lol. The relationship vibes are cute, I enjoy that Kondou and the chosen one do still feel a sort of friendship connection with each other since they transmigrated together even though they're very different and end up in very different spheres in this world, iirc the plot/worldbuilding development started to go somewhere in book 3, etc.

I like it and I'll be interested to keep reading! assuming I remember to keep on top of it as it comes out, lol. Which like. it's me. no guarantees.
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This is a science fiction novel from the 1960's, featuring a cast of odd characters wandering their way through interactions with each other In Space. It's mildly sexist in that 1960's way, it's hard to keep track of all the characters, and honestly I'm still not sure what the plot was -- but I still mostly enjoyed the process of reading the book.

I just really enjoyed the writing style! I wish I could articulate what it's doing that I like so much. The prose is pretty pared-down yet expressive, and it does things via odd juxtapositions of ideas and events. It's fun and engaging and it made me want to pick it apart to figure out just what it was doing!

So like....I don't think I particularly enjoyed this book as a book, but I'm still going to hang on to my cheap second-hand copy and maybe refer back to it in the future.
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Lud-in-the-Mist is a fantasy novel published in the 1920's, well before the modern genre of fantasy was really established. It's so interesting to read a fantasy novel from that time before Tolkien dropped like a meteor into the genre landscape, affecting everything from thereafter; everything post-tolkien was either written with inspiration from Tolkien, or in reaction against how much everything was written with inspiration from Tolkien, I feel like. But this one is doing its own thing, but in a way that feels to me maturely developed, as if it came out of a long tradition of fantasy novels just like it, even though it definitely didn't.

I've previously heard Lud-in-the-Mist being praised as a perfect gem of a novel, but although I enjoyed it, I would definitely not go that far. I've also heard it be called things like sweet, and lovely, which led me to certain expectations of the tone of the book which ended up to be rather inaccurate!

The novel takes place in a prosaic town in a vaguely British-feeling secondary world, in the country of Dorimare. The town is close, however, to a boundary with Faerie, and fairy fruit keeps getting smuggled in, with great effect on those who eat of it. The book opens slowly, with an exploration of the setting and context of the story, which I found very interesting, but eventually the major characters and plot are introduced. The long and short of it is: how to keep the fairy influence out of their town?

The book is very good at setting and place and atmosphere, at creating a sense of the liminal space between Faerie and Dorimare. The characters all feel fairly realistic and believable also. But I just couldn't bring myself to care much about most of the major characters, which was a real problem! They're mostly fairly unpleasant people, but I don't think that's what was keeping me at a distance. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I think is a book very much in the tradition of Lud-in-the-Mist, is also a novel about a collection of mostly-unpleasant characters, but I find all of them compelling. I'm not sure what JS&MN is doing differently on it than LitM!

Anyway I'm glad I read it, and I would love to read more books like it...but preferably with characters I like better lol.
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Any book by Ursula Vernon (the author behind the Kingfisher penname) will have certain features, and those inherent features are ones that keep me coming back book after book to everything she writes. I love how she does worldbuilding, and I love her practical get-things-done heroines, and I love how everything's always grounded in the odd specific annoyances of what it would actually be like to be in the fantastical circumstances she writes about. And she does SUCH good road trips! So many opportunities to run into fun NPCs and cool regional worldbuilding!

I'm not quite the right audience for her paladin romances, unfortunately -- I think because I just get too irritated by the depth and breadth of their ability to feel guilty about absolutely everything. But I keep reading them because I'm having fun with everything else anyway, and because the wider arc of the business with the dead god fascinates me, and we get a bit more about it every book!

This book, though, feels to me a little less successful than the previous paladin romances in the series. It feels a bit too much to me like several different books squished into one, I think, instead of like multiple strands of the same book, and I just don't love all of those books.

click here for spoilery thoughtsThere's the one where Marguerite is trying to get herself free of the Red Sail by finding the missing artificer and leaking the plans for the salt-making mechanism and thereby destabilizing the economy of the whole region, and there's the one with the Dreaming God's paladins and the Saint of Steel's soul-scarred ex-paladins dealing with the demon who wants to be a god, and there's the one about the romance between Marguerite and Shane.

The first one is a perfectly good spy plot, not really my go-to genre of book but fun enough, and I do enjoy the temple of the white rat being willing to meddle in these things.

The second one is FASCINATING to me and I want to think about the implications forever and I want more details!!!

The third one is....yet another guilt-ridden paladin romance.........also featuring a spy who doesn't trust anyone but just KNOWS in her HEART that she can trust HIM and he's the exception to everything about how she's conducted her life. It's just really really not my kind of romance story. Also both of them are extremely allosexual and are continually having their higher brain functions disabled by how attractive the other person is and it just seems comically over-the-top to me, an ace person who Doesn't Get It. (okay I AM charmed by the type of kinky not-quite-bondage that Shane turns out to be really into when Marguerite is like, ok I gotta find SOME way of achieving good sex with this guy who can't get out of his own head about anything.)

I'm sure the romance part of the book is good for some people! but that's um. not what I read Kingfisher romances for, surprise surprise.

So let's go back to the demon who wants to be a god, shall we? I was FASCINATED by Wisdom and by what demons are. And by the implications of what a god is, too, tbh.

Wisdom seems to genuinely care about its followers to some degree, has figured out how to live as a part of the world, has thoughts and feelings and motivations and relationships and goals. It's definitely been doing some worrying stuff, but is it any more evil than a really powerful human can be? What ARE demons, and what makes them appreciably different from gods, in the end, in this world? They clearly CAN have comparable types of bonds with humans if they so choose, and some gods are definitely terrible if I'm remembering stuff from previous books, so why couldn't demons have the possibility of being basically okay.

And what is Hell? It's the place where demons are from, and it's the place where paladins can bind a demon to never be able to leave (if they're powerful enough to manage the binding), and from what little we hear from Wisdom about it, it seems like an undesirable place to be. Wouldn't most folks kind of suck in some respect if their entire prior existence was in a place like Hell?

I really hope this series is going in a direction of non-evil demons tbh! maybe even....some of the major gods today having previously been demons? Maybe the saint of steel was a demon and someone murdered him because of that!

anyway my increasing pro let-demons-be-people agenda means I feel weird at the end of this book about Shane taking up with the Dreaming God in the end, the god who is well known to be virulently anti-demon. Is this god unambiguously a good guy and nothing else?

I'll be very curious to see where this whole plot continues!
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A short novella attempting to tread the line between mythic storytelling and a closer more personal story, and in my opinion not quite getting the balance right.

The mythic elements felt good, well constructed and each part of the story following naturally from what had come before it to tell the kind of story that myths are made to tell. It had the logic of stories that come from the folk tradition. But it also tried to include more psychological reality for its characters than really felt like it fit the myth logic, and it left me feeling like I never quite got to know any of the major characters as people and yet they didn't embody a Type the way characters in folk traditions often do either.

Also there are a number of extended, violent fight sequences. And yes I'm not the right audience for such things, I'm usually just not that interested, but I also felt like those diluted the focus on the Story and the Themes, like, yes the results of the fights are important to those things but we don't need a blow-by-blow to get what's needed out of those. it felt to me more like those were included because the author enjoys fight scenes tbh.

Idk. Overall there's a lot about it that's very promising, in an early book by a new author, and the story it's telling will I think be sticking with me for a while, but ultimately the way the book's put together just doesn't quite work for me
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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.
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I read this as Frankenstein Weekly, a book club email list that was set up after the popularity of Dracula Daily last year. I'm glad, because I’ve been meaning to read this book for years but never got round to it, and having it show up in my inbox by chapter was very convenient.

And certainly the book is an interesting read. But one I enjoyed more as a historical artifact than as a novel to my tastes, honestly.

I genuinely enjoyed the part from the Creature’s pov; he was sympathetic, even if he made bad choices in the end. But the vast majority of the narrative is from Frankenstein's pov and I find him just irritating tbh. He has no drive to take responsibility for his actions ever, and not even in an interesting way! And yet Walton is entirely admiring of Frankenstein, and Frankenstein seems to be presented to the reader as a guy you’re supposed to sympathize with.

BUT. Despite all the pro-Frankenstein content, the Creature gets the last word in the book, in the end! I love that.

It strikes me that in the context this book was written, when sff didn’t exist as a genre yet, expecting the reader to sympathize with a monstrous and unnatural being was likely a big ask, and so what the book is doing is trying to show that even when people with many admirable virtues hate a being they see as a monster, that monster can still have virtues of its own and a reasonable perspective worth listening to, and shouldn’t be shunned without question. Which, hey, a moral that continues to be relevant!
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It's a graphic novel memoir of growing up trans, and like, eh, it's perfectly fine, competently done, no complaints about it, but it just....idk, didn't have enough there to really engage me deeply? I guess it's more for an audience of either nervous baby trans people or of cis people Trying To Understand. Which is fine and good! But I'm not either of those things.
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This is a fascinating novel about first contact with aliens in the relatively near future, that's doing great things around ideas of what we owe to the Earth in terms of mitigating the environmental harm we've caused through climate change and other destructive actions. Not everything about the book worked for me, but I think it is still overall very worth reading.

The basic set-up: in the near-ish future, much of the earth is now organized not around countries and nationalism, but around "dandelion networks" where you belong to the network of whatever river you live in the drainage basin for. Within that network everyone has a voice – all humans, but also their communication technology is set up to provide voices for the natural environment as well, so that any decisions properly take into account the needs of the ecosystems around them. The dandelion networks are closely entwined with their local environment and feel a great deal of pride for the way they're managing to turn things around and make human life on earth sustainable long-term. However, not everyone is part of a dandelion network; there's still some nation-states hanging on to existence, though with much less control, and also corporations have been stripped of their power but are not gone and have become basically their own little nation-states as well.

In this context, an alien ship arrives, landing in the Chesapeake network, who want to save all humans from what they see as an urgently dying planet! Who gets to decide who is communicating with the aliens on behalf of all humans? What will the various groups do to make sure their voice is heard? What values should direct everyone's actions in this fraught first contact? Judy, our viewpoint character, happens to be first on the scene when the aliens land, and ends up being the main liaison from the dandelion networks to the aliens as a result, but Judy and her priorities don't get to stand alone for long.

I love this set-up, and I love the themes the book is exploring. All the nature imagery, and the conscious hard work going into keeping the earth thriving as much as possible, and the history of activism that underlies all the dandelion networks' current work.

And the way that creating relationships is depicted as something requiring work and attention to grow them into something full of trust and understanding. Judy's relationship with her wife, Carol, is shown to be already strong and deep and loving and supportive, but Judy and Carol's relationship with their co-parents, Dinar and Athëo, is still new and fragile. But there's also the humans' relationships with their planet, and the dandelion networks' relationships with their local governments, and with the corporations, and with the aliens – and the aliens relationships within themselves as well. I love all of this! And the smaller-scale and larger-scale relationships are like, thematically resonant with each other in a very effective way.

But I think to talk about this book in further detail I'm going to need to go behind a spoiler cut!

Read more... )

And okay yes this was a whole enormous pile of words analysing my not entirely positive feelings towards this book, but overall I think what I want to say about it is that it's interesting and thoughtful enough to be WORTH arguing with! I enjoyed thinking about it, I enjoyed spending time with these characters, there were some moments I found genuinely touching and emotional, and I argue because me and the book are both united in caring about things. So I do recommend it! And please come argue with me about this book!
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ughghghg this is...ok like. This is a romance novel that combines a) things I really like and think are well done, b) things that aren't really my thing but are common for romance novels so I can overlook them, c) things that are like, fine I guess, d) things that aren't handled super smoothly, and e) things that I hate SO SO MUCH.

As you might guess, this combination leaves me feeling a bit conflicted!

The novel is about a biracial woman named Gracie who happens to look a great deal like a famous Chinese actor (Fangli), who because of reasons needs someone to pretend to be her for a few months. Gracie then gets thrown into a world of what it's like to be rich and famous, and spending time with Fangli and her best friend Sam, and learning how to pretend to be someone else.

The premise of the book is pretty inherently silly, but that's fine, implausible set-ups are normal for romance novels and I can have fun with it. The voice is a breezy first-person-present-tense, which is probably my least favourite variety of narrative voice out of all the options, but that's becoming super common as well so here we are.

It was set in Canada, in Toronto, which is hypothetically a plus for me – I enjoy when I get to read a book that is actually set in the country I live in. But it felt in this book like Toronto was just a series of famous set-pieces, rather than being a real city, so that was a disappointment.

I liked the way the book handled Gracie's complexities of emotions over her relationship with her mother and the way it's affected her, and I appreciated the way Gracie and Fangli became friends so easily, and the stuff about Gracie's biracial identity seemed well-handled too. Also the mental health content. And overall I just liked all of the major characters, which takes me a great deal of a way into enjoying a book! Though the romance itself (between Gracie and Sam) was just like. Fine.

But the book spent a great deal of time putting me in positions of feeling like I had to cringe on behalf of the characters, which is NOT my jam, and then near the end, it went all in on a trope that I haaaaate whenever I come across it, which is cut for spoilers )

I don't know. It's good representation to exist in the genre, it's a quick and easy read, I can absolutely see it appealing to lots of people, but ultimately it did not live up to what I personally want out of a romance novel. (or a novel, period.) Ah well.
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A novella about the Matter of Britain, featuring Percival the Grail Knight as a young woman. Griffith's prose is beautiful, and she's doing some interesting things with this interpretation, and I found the beginning of the book compelling, but ultimately....idk, I finished the book feeling oddly dissatisfied. I'm not sure what I wanted done differently, I'm not sure what wasn't working for me.

some spoilers for the ending, as I try to talk through what didn't work for me )

Dangit I wanted to like this book!!
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Sequel to last year's A Marvellous Light, a book I enjoyed but felt rather like it wasn't focusing on the story I wanted it to focus on. This one.... unfortunately continues the trend, though in a slightly different way.

Maud and Violet are two young women on a trans-atlantic ship voyage, who get caught up in a mystery surrounding a murder and a missing magical object. Together, they work to solve the mystery, accomplish their various goals, and navigate their growing relationship with each other.

There are many things to like about this, and honestly it is executed very well. There's good stuff between Maud and Violet, and the amount of trust and vulnerability they're a) interested in sharing with each other or b) capable of; and there's a fun cast of secondary characters in the restricted environment of a ship at sea. Some of the food descriptions really stuck with me, and I don't usually notice food in books! And we get to find out more about the Forsythia Club, the group of old lady magicians who had fascinated me so much in the last book.

But the story being told here is really a lot more hijinks-heavy a story than I usually prefer, featuring two main characters who are both hijinks-generators in their own ways, so I just wasn't really into the vibe for the first, like.... at least half the book.

And then I was teased with an AMAZING idea that then didn't go anywhere near what I was hoping and expecting for such an idea!

cut for spoilers )

At any rate, highly recommended for anyone more into hijinks than me. I really did like the characters and their relationship!

And the next book is going to feature my favourite secondary character from this book, apparently: Ross, the class-conscious pornography-smuggling reporter. I'll be interested to see where that goes! And I hope there'll be more of Mrs Vaughn in the next book.
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A graphic novel telling a story in a series of character vignettes about the points of tension and points of connection in a small Mennonite community in southern Manitoba.

It's....hmm. It does a great job of giving an accurate and nuanced portrayal of the current state of the Mennonite community and the conversations of the current time in Canada (including: relationships with indigenous people and the history of residential schools; queer people's degree of welcome in churches; relationships with war and the military; dynamics between modern megachurches and more traditional churches; voluntourism; and more). I 100% believed in the realness of every single character in this book. And it left me unsettled at the end, but in a good way? idk the whole thing is somehow both melancholy and hopeful.

I do wish though that the book was saying something more though than just holding up a mirror to go "this is who we are." I mean there's value in that! But it wasn't quite enough for me. But maybe that's just, like, where we're at with fiction that actually explores Mennonite identity: there's so little Mennonite fiction out there that we can't get beyond just going for representation through depiction.

I also struggled in places to follow the story — although the art is great, it is not quite distinctive enough in how it depicts all the many different characters, and I had a huge amount of trouble following who was who as they interwove throughout each other's stories. And checking the character cheat sheet at the front didn't always help as much as I wanted it to.

I did love that the book is clearly by someone who at the very least knows birders, and might be a bird enjoyer himself. (but it doesn't go overboard on the bird content, just makes choices of what birds to include that aren't birds the average non-birder would have thought much about!)

Overall.... I'm glad I read it. I'm curious how it would read to someone who isn't intimately familiar with the things it's depicting, though!
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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!
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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!

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