sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: comics/graphic novel/manga

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.

I decided to read Dungeon Meshi because I kept seeing people on tumblr posting about the new anime adaptation, and it looked fun and cute. And although I don't watch much tv, there was an entire manga I could read instead! So I did.

The basic premise: in a world where adventuring parties going on dungeon crawls is a thing that happens, one guy has a dream: to be able to cook and eat all the different kinds of monsters in the dungeon, to be able to find out how they taste!

And because his party needs to be able to head deep into the dungeon to rescue a party member who was left behind, and they don't have the funds or the time to collect supplies, all of a sudden they have REASON to need to eat monsters. They're going to forage and hunt for all their meals as they make their way down.

So using that as the basis, the manga goes on to explore the worldbuilding, the interrelationships of the characters in the party, everyone's backstories and reasons for being there, a developing plot, and of course, the ingredients and nutritional composition and flavour of every meal they eat.

I absolutely adored every bit of this!!! The main characters are all a delight, and it's the kind of story where the author sees and shows you the inherent personness of all characters, including antagonists. And the world created to make sense of the dungeon's existence is fascinating, as are all the ways the ecosystems within the dungeon are expanded upon to make sense of the creatures living within it.

And it's a story that knows what its themes are, too, and is able to tie them all together in extremely satisfying ways in the climax of the narrative!

I had this moment leading up towards the ending where I was like:

cut for thematic spoilers I guess

ohhhh it's about....everyone being part of a balanced ecosystem of life and death where everything sustains everything else! the various human species included! and I was filled through my very soul with this feeling of connectedness myself.

Anyway it was amazing and I had a lot of feels.

And as well as enjoying all of that, I also just really loved our main characters! We start out seeing them all fairly shallowly but over the course of the story as more aspects of them are revealed they're all just.....I love every one of them.

I did struggle with a few aspects of the manga, but none of it significantly affected my ability to enjoy the read:

1. It kept adding more and more characters, and I got rather lost occasionally trying to keep track of them all. But ultimately it's not vital to remember every tertiary character to get a good read out of this, so it's not as bad as it could be.

2. In the mid to later parts, it became a lot more plot focused and actiony than I'd really been expecting, in a way that made it harder for me to follow, since fight scenes in sequential art are challenging for me. And occasionally it drew back more than I wanted from its focus on food. But it refocused eventually!

3. It turned out to be pro monarchy in the end, which isn't my fave, but it's not like a major theme of the manga or anything so I could overlook it.

4. I kept expecting it to have at least a little bit of textual queerness, and there wasn't any as far as I could see! Even various background relationships or depictions of people's attraction was m/f. But uh. Falin/Marcille, anyone? There are some powerful vibes there. (I'll also accept Laios/Kabru)

In conclusion, I highly recommend it, and if you want to read it, you can read the whole thing online for free in English translation here: https://dungeonmeshi.com/manga/dungeon-meshi-chapter-1/

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.

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.

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!

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!

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!

This is a graphic novel memoir written by a person of my generation about eir relationship with gender over the course of eir life. Kobabe is genderqueer and seems to be somewhere on the ace spectrum and grew up in fandom, just like me, and grew up with similar cultural references and touchpoints. I've spent so much of my life reading books written in bygone eras (whether a decade or two centuries out of date!) that seeing a book where the author's life seems familiar is honestly odd, lol! But eir relationship with eir body and gender and sexuality is all ultimately very different than mine, as is eir family and the context in which e grew up. And e mostly hung out in different fandoms than me, too!

Anyway Kobabe is clearly skilled at comics and I enjoyed reading this journey through eir experiences, and it's clearly brave of em to put this out into the world, and it's just nice to have more narratives of the ways that queer experiences can look!

The book does feel like it ends a little abruptly, but the author was 30 or so at the time of publishing and that's still honestly early in one's journey through life, so it's perhaps not surprising that there isn't a satisfying conclusion to wrap it all up with, and it's still a good ending.

Oof. The kind of book where you finish and have to just kind of sit in a daze for a while as you let it settle.

This is a graphic memoir by Kate Beaton of Hark! A Vagrant fame, about her two years working in the oil sands of Alberta when she was a fresh university graduate - a very young woman working in an isolated environment that was mostly men separated from their communities. It's a wonderful, nuanced look at a complicated and difficult place, and Kate's writing and art and impeccable sense of pacing do an amazing job of carrying you with her into the emotions of the moment, in everything she depicts.

Not sure what else to say about it, really. Book good. Very recommend. Content notes for sexual harassment and sexual assault.

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!

A middle grade graphic novel about a Black girl moving to a new school and learning to swim, which addresses friendship and teamwork and how the history of racism in the US affects rates of swimming among Black americans. It's a quick read and a good story, but some of the interpersonal aspects were dealt with way too simplistically (eg Tinsley from the antagonist swim team who's been mean all along somehow turns friendly after Tinsley's team loses????). Overall not top of the middle grade graphic novels I've read, but still pretty solid.

(but also, side note, how much do I love it that my library these days buys so many middle grade graphic novel ebooks that I can have opinions about them as a genre! amazing. And they seem to be popular, pretty much every time a new one catches my attention I need to put a hold on it if I want to read it)

Thank you to

chestnut_pod for having drawn this book to my attention, because it is GREAT.

A graphic novel about a Chinese teenager in the late 19th century working at a logging camp in the USA with her dad, the head cook. The chinese workers have an uneasy relationship with the white leadership with rising racial tensions in the area, and the ways in which those tensions exist alongside the fact that these are people with long-standing relationships with each other that they need. Mei and the other Chinese people in the logging camp are outsiders and experience plenty of racism, but at the same time Mei's best friend is the white daughter of the logging camp's big boss. And also, the white working-class people in the logging camp also don't necessarily have easy lives, in this dangerous and potentially deadly career, and that's ALSO not okay.

Mei processes a lot of the complexities she experiences through the stories she tells -- inspired by the Paul Bunyan stories, but interpreted through a Chinese lens, replacing Bunyan with Auntie Po. Auntie Po turns out to be a great source of comfort and strength for Mei as she deals with stressful and unpleasant life events. Stories you can relate to are so important!

The relationship between Mei and her dad is strong and positive and wonderful, and....pretty much every other relationship in the story has layers of complexity to it even if they're important relationships in the characters lives, which is ALSO wonderful. For example, I like how clear it is that Mei is queer and super into her friend, but also how that's tbh one of the least difficult parts of her life and not one of the things she spends a lot of time having to process. It's much MORE challenging that her best friend is the daughter of the guy who fires Mei's dad for being chinese!

I loved this book and all the different things it manages to do without losing control of its scope. What a good.

A graphic novel memoir by a Korean-American woman about her experiences moving to the USA with her mom as a teenager. Really well done and moving - did an amazing job of circling back around and through the past to recontextualize the things she experiences, but without ever feeling jumbled or out of order. The clear view of her mother's strengths and weaknesses as a parent were wonderful - it's obvious how much Ha loves and respects her mother, despite the way that some of her mother's choices make life harder for her. And the complicated feelings about identity and outsiderhood that she experiences, both in Korea and in the USA, are also conveyed well.

The one weakness of the book, in my opinion, is the somewhat jarring time jump near the end. After she makes friends with other Korean-American girls in her first year of high school, the story jumps ahead to her as a young adult visiting Korea for the first time since she left as a middle-schooler. The part of the story where she was finally able to settle and find a place for herself in a stable way is skipped over, and that part is, I think, relevant to the way she experiences Korea as an adult.

Still truly excellent though, and worth the read!

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

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!

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!!)

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.

A graphic novel aimed at approximately a middle-grade crowd, this book tells the story of a Jewish teenager in WWII France who was a "hidden child" kept safe by being sheltered by various people. It's inspired in part by the author's mother's experiences as a hidden child herself.

Rachel Cohen is a thriving student at a really interesting and unusual school just outside of Paris. But when the teachers realise that she and other Jewish students are unsafe in occupied France, the students take on false, un-Jewish-sounding names (like the titular Catherine), and are sent elsewhere to go into hiding. Rachel loves photography, and the photography teacher at school lets her take a good-quality camera with her when she goes. She then spends the rest of the war documenting her experiences with her camera, as she moves from place to place and meets many people.

Apparently this book is based on a full-length novel the author wrote, but as far as I can tell only this graphic novel has been translated into English, so doing a comparison-read is not an option for me, alas. But it's an excellent book, and one that's well suited to the medium of graphic novel; the art really adds to the experience, especially since it's a story about a character who specifically is interested in documenting the visuals of the experiences she has. So I can see why this is the version of the story that was chosen to be translated!

A middle grade graphic novel about a Taiwanese girl whose family immigrates to the USA, but has to leave her A-ma behind. She decides to enter a cooking contest to make money to fly her A-ma over for a visit!

It's a book about the complexities of cultural identity, about the disconnect between what your parents want for you vs what you want for yourself, about American racism towards Asian people and Asian food, about the importance of food that speaks to you, and about friendship and family and love. A very heartfelt and lovely little book.