Month: March 2018

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

I suppose there’s some kind of outside chance that not every comics artist wants to draw Argus Panoptes. But really, this is one of the characters that has the cool visuals, and O’Connor plays it to the max. Argus is part of the ongoing framing device in this volume, so he has plenty of chance to do a lot of different poses as O’Connor cycles through different aspects of Hermes–his infancy, his son Pan, his assistance with the fight against Typhon.

This is the tenth in a long series of comics about the Greek gods, with recurring style and references, treating the entire family of Olympians as a cast to be worked with and re-deployed. A series without arc plot is a great trick if you can manage to keep reader interest: no one has to have read anything else to enjoy a comic about Hermes if that’s the one they happen to be interested in first, but one volume easily does lead to another. The gods of Egypt make an appearance in this volume, in a weird moment of syncretism that is not entirely to my taste, but it’s an entertaining enough work and a reasonable introduction to the subject matter. My godkids love to page through these, and I don’t feel bad about leaving them around on an end-table when they’re visiting, giving them a quick introduction to Baucis and Philemon before they’re hip-deep in Haydn and need to know what’s up.

Please consider using our link to buy Olympians: Hermes: Tales of the Trickster from Amazon.

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

Claudette, her brother Gaston, and their pal Marie have been chosen to be their village’s representatives in the Warrior Games. Gaston would rather be making gelato (as indeed who among us would not, in real life), and Marie is more concerned with diplomacy than its failed endgames. But someone has to represent them against all the other kingdoms, and Claudette would really like to win. Really. Really really.

Meanwhile Marie and Gaston are pretty sure that some of the other competitors are not what they seem, and that there are more important things than winning.

And the Warrior Games…keep getting less warlike with every stage of the competition. Except for the unofficial parts, which keep getting more and more alarmingly violent (in cartoon terms of course).

This is a kids’ graphic novel. It’s not a deep one. It’s a lot like an average episode of kids’ TV–not Steven Universe or Gravity Falls or Avatar: the Last Airbender, not one of the really good ones. Just something mildly entertaining I guess. These two authors know how to hit beats that make it story. And yet. And yet.

These are two male authors who are once again doing the thing that the male reviewer says on the front is “the strong female character every book-loving child needs to read about!”…by making sure that she *hates dresses* and *hates girly stuff*. Oh. So that again. Also…this is a “syndicated episode of mediocre kids’ TV” level of consequence-free plot. If you’re looking for emotional heft, maybe look somewhere else.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some reasonably entertaining moments here. But this is pretty standard fare with cute art, not by any stretch groundbreaking work for feminism, fantasy adventure, or really much of anything else. Even fairly little kids will feel cozy and familiar in this plot line, not startled and challenged.

Penelope Bagieu, Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World. Discussed elsewhere.

Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing. Radiation. Elephants. Anger, rebellion, community. There is a lot in not very much space in this novella. It’s an alternate history, but…perhaps not as far alternate as it could be.

Thekla Clark, Wystan and Chester: A Personal Memoir of W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman. I am deeply fond of Auden, and this is a friend of his writing about their friendship, more or less. The shape of Wystan and Chester’s partnership, and their friendship with Clark and her family, is described lovingly but not inattentively; she does not need her friends to be perfect to love them. And there were moments that made me feel so very fond of one of my favorite poets, and I have always had moments that made me feel so very exasperated by him, so that wasn’t really a surprise. Also this is a very short book–Clark is not trying to do a comprehensive biography, she’s doing what it says on the tin–so there’s really no time to get tired of it before it’s over.

Grace L. Dillon, ed., Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. This is the kind of anthology that is substantially excerpts from longer works rather than the kind that is largely stand-alone works, although there are a few of those. So I felt like it gave me ideas for things to pursue and read rather than complete reading experiences. (I am far to the end of the “does not read serials” end of the spectrum; this may not be the same for everyone.) Given how little-promoted indigenous SF is, this still has value. The other caveat I would give is that this was somewhat difficult to read right now given how heavily influenced it is by Sherman Alexie. He is cited/quoted widely in the introductions to other authors’ work; he is treated as the guy for this field, and…that’s not an easy thing right now, and the shift away from it seems like it will be healthy for everybody.

Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road. A harrowing and somewhat difficult read but well worth it. Deep earth dragons, double standards, family expectations, friendships over time, boots…I feel like most of what I can say about this book will spoil the way it unfolds. It goes well with Seraphina, but it is doing quite different things; it is a companion volume rather than a copy or an attempt to cash in. I was glad of this even when it was hard on me.

Lucas K. Law and Derwin Mak, eds., Where the Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy. I was particularly glad to see that Law and Mak actually meant it when they said Asian (rather than one area of Asia or only large ethnicities) and that there were writers I had never read before as well as more familiar names I was glad to see in this volume. There’s also a really large range of genres/subgenres here.

Deb Perelman, Smitten Kitchen Every Day. I love Perelman’s blog. This cookbook had me nodding along; I copied out a couple of things, but a lot of it will be more useful to people who are not as instinctive about cooking as I am. Which is fine too.

Marta Randall, Dangerous Games. Kindle. Oh this book. Oh where has this book been all my life? Answer: around, and underpromoted. It has multiple kinds of aliens, it has indictments of respectability politics and the practice of pitting minorities against each other, it has a system where killing other sentients always matters even when you thought you could think of them as faceless dots on a spaceship screen, it has disabled people, old people, and children with agency, it has intergenerational respect and understanding AND its grave difficulties, it has…a lot. It has a lot. This is a sequel, so you’re going to want to read Journey first. Luckily that is possible. Also…this starts slow while she’s setting up the pieces. But DAMN does it come together.

Mariko Tamaki, Lumberjanes: Unicorn Power! This is the first Lumberjanes prose novel–a kids’ book. It is great fun. It is full of exclamation points. The title is not playing around. I love all the Lumberjanes completely and unironically. I love them even more together. I love prose more than I love comics. This is for meeeeee.

Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies. How much you like this book will depend on which portions of the subtitle set you are most interested in. Taylor is at his strongest when he is considering the American citizen/British subject axis; he does very well with treating the British presence in North America at the time seriously, not just among what eventually became Canadians but along a continuum. However. The coverage of Irish issues was somewhat slight, and Native/First Nations issues were almost completely absent, and they were treated as almost completely without agency when they did appear. So that was far less interesting than I hoped it would be, alas.

Lynne Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, eds., Uncanny Magazine Issue 20. Kindle. I make a policy of not reviewing things I have stories in. I have a story in this.

Shannon Watters, Kat Leyh, Carey Pietsch, et al, Lumberjanes: Stone Cold and Lumberjanes: A Bird’s Eye View. Okay, I know I said I love prose more than I love comics, but…I will take Lumberjanes stories however I can get them, and this is the main mode of getting them, fine, yes, good. Lots of mythology, lots of adventure, friendship to the max. Sure, yes, on board.

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

I’m not entirely sure who the audience for this book was, even though I enjoyed it. It’s a series of brief biographical sketches in graphic novel format–four to seven pages about each woman or women, talking about their accomplishments, their obstacles, their context. The subjects are diverse as to race, religion, milieu.

They are diverse enough, in fact, that their main unifying factor seems to be that Bagieu liked them and found them interesting to draw. Why Margaret Hamilton the actress for pages and Margaret Hamilton the programmer for only one disambiguating panel? Because that’s what Bagieu felt like.

Which: sure, great, it is her book. She’s allowed to turn from Wu Zetian to Temple Grandin if she wants to. But the content includes levels of violence that I think a lot of people who restrict younger readers will want to restrict, in addition to honesty about things like Tove Jansson’s passion for smoking, so I expect this is not a My First Intersectional Feminism For The Single Digit Set. So…inspiration for teens who are feeling battered by the slings and arrows of high school life? A coffee table book for a particular quirky kind of coffee table?

It’s beautifully done, with the personal style and clear sight that Bagieu brought to her biography of Cass Elliot. It’s just a fairly weird object to place in the world. So…recommended to people who like weird objects of this sort, I guess.

Please consider using our link to buy Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World from Amazon.

Lily Anderson, The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You. I’m really glad this was not my first Lily Anderson novel, frankly, because this is in the same vein of mainstream YA as Not Now, Not Ever, with strong friendships among highly nerdy teenagers, and yet I would have been completely put off by the fact that one of its central plots is a very, very combative love story. You know the kind: I hate you I hate you let’s smooch. This is not a spoiler really–you can see it coming a mile off, you can see it in the title for heaven’s sake. And Anderson does it well, and there are other things going on. But–I really like having talked about romance/love stories enough to have the vocabulary to say that I prefer mine collaborative rather than combative, and I really like that I read her second book first so that I didn’t have a more general idea of this as Her Thing when in fact it’s just one facet.

S.A. Chakraborty, The City of Brass. Fantasy with djinn and various related entities, ranging from Egypt to South Asia. This book started off with a very firm historical setting and wandered off from there into fantasical fireworks, and it is very clearly a first novel with miles to go before the series sleeps.

Barbara Hambly, Murder in July. An entry in the Benjamin January series. Not a great starting point for that as its emotional heft depends on you caring about the supporting cast and knowing a fair amount about them, but if you’re invested in this series–which I really like, New Orleans area free people of color as the main family–then, hey, here’s another.

Kat Howard, An Unkindness of Magicians. Very few contemporary fantasies are as honest about power and complicity in modern systems as this one is–and very few want to actually do something about that rather than saying oh woe the world is grim and dark, look how grim and dark, gosh that sucks. Rather than: look how grim and dark, better fix it, ya big jerk. The magic system Howard postulates here is pretty nasty. But she actually wants to talk about friendship and family and figuring out a way to do better. Which is more than a lot of authors can say when they think about power dynamics. So yes, this book has a lot of unkindness; it says so on the tin. This is one of those where some of us in the gutter actually are looking at the stars.

Barbara Jensen, Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America. This book was startling, staggering, amazing. Jensen is my own people, to a startling degree my own people; she is from the north of the Twin Cities, some of the suburbs where I have great-aunts and -uncles. So when she used her own family examples to contrast working-class and middle-class cultural differences, she was talking about Minnesota Scandinavian Lutherans in both cases; she was talking about different parts of my family. There were a couple of places where I actually cried because I had never seen both class branches represented with respect and even affection, things that were good and valid about both, places where she could speak clearly and coherently about there being a difference rather than an absence. So that was amazing. It’s a really fascinating book. I think there are a couple of flaws. One of them is that it’s so very very generational. A great many middle-class assumptions she was talking about did not continue past the Baby Boomers, and I would be fascinated to see an analysis of what it means to be middle-class without them. Another is that I think in her rush not to throw working-class culture under the bus as has been done so many, many times before, she took several accounts of ideals as accounts of actuality. But it’s still a really thought-provoking, discussion-provoking book.

Sujata Massey, The Sleeping Dictionary. I am perpetually short on historical fiction, and Massey delivers with this one. It gets harrowing in several spots in several directions, child endangerment and sexual violence and relationship threat, just to flag that for readers, but I think that the story is interesting and has enough context to be sensitive and worth the emotional ups and downs if you’re ever up for them in any book. (Obviously if you just never want that, it’s a different calculation.) The setting is eastern India leading up to the time of independence from the UK, with independence a constantly intertwined theme for the heroine. It’s listed as the first in a series, but I don’t see that a sequel has come out yet.

Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe, eds., Robots Vs. Fairies. Sometimes you have a solid anthology where one story just completely blows you away and steals your heart, and this is one of those for me. Madeline Ashby’s “Work Shadow/Shadow Work” is the sort of story that I already know in February will be one of my favorites of the year. It deals with eldercare and traditional belief and robots and Iceland and I love this story to bits, worth the price of admission even if it wasn’t a well-constructed anthology otherwise. Which it is, it absolutely is, I just…am completely making heart-eyes at this one story.

Shel Silverstein, The Missing Piece and The Missing Piece Meets the Big O. Okay, so really, Uncle Shelby, this stuff is…you didn’t really. You did? And people bought it for their kids? oh golly. There are all sorts of relationship things that he’s talking about with shapes here, and…welp. There it all is then. Learn to be happy on your own and sing your own songs and…yep, Shel Silverstein is exactly who he told us all he was. Repeatedly.

F.C. Yee, The Epic Crush of Genie Lo. This book actually made me laugh out loud in spots. It’s a teen fantasy adventure about the Monkey King showing up to fight a demon infestation in a Silicon Valley suburb, and Yee has totally nailed the reality of that type of suburb being a great deal more influenced by strip malls and highways than redwoods at the moment. I loved Genie and her relationship with her parents and friends and legends and asskickery.

This half-month’s book post was written, and then WordPress decided that “Save Draft” and “Destroy Draft” were somehow the same thing. So it is not only going to be late but also a trifle terse. Sigh.

Lily Anderson, Not Now, Not Ever. I liked this book now, but when I was twelve to fourteen, you would not have been able to pry me off it. A girl. Runs away. To Academic Decathlon camp. It is as though Lily Anderson said, hello, yes, Marissa, I would like to write you a book please, even though I have never met you, this is for you, okay thank you. There are also other fun elements of it–military family culture, teen relationships not only with love interest but with pals and cousins, intersectionality assumed as a default setting–but really, she had me at AcaDec.

Chaz Brenchley, Dust-Up at the Crater School, Chapters 8-12. Kindle. We edge the plot along with British boarding school assumptions…I am really bad at reading serials and also really bad at leaving them alone when I have the files piled up on my Kindle and am traveling….

Box Brown, Is This Guy For Real? The Unbelievable Andy Kaufman. Discussed elsewhere.

Lucille Clifton, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010. This is the sort of collection that shows why reading the entirety of a poet’s work in order can be so intense and worthwhile. You can watch her feeling more able to talk about certain things, more expansive, as time goes by, as well as watching the progression of a human life. Clifton’s work is very grounded, very rooted, in community, in family, in person, and it’s wonderful to watch that grow as she grows as a person, even as it’s sometimes harrowing to watch that happen too. Highly, highly recommended.

Tessa Gratton, The Lost Sun. A North America shaped by Aesir visibly present in the world, a Baldur who does not behave as he had before, and some young people who have to sort out what’s going on before Ragnarok is upon them. This could have gone strongly either way for me, and I turned out to like it a lot and have fun with the Norse syncretist road trip aspects of it. I’ll look for the rest of the series.

Bernd Heinrich, One Wild Bird at a Time: Portraits of Individual Lives. Heinrich talks about wanting to observe individual bird personalities, and he does that, but there’s a bit of an oversell about what conclusions he can draw about them. There’s a lot more trolling of birds and his wife than I might ideally want, so I rolled my eyes a lot. If you’re going to start with a Heinrich, probably don’t make it this one, even though there’s some interesting naturalist observation here.

Justina Ireland and Troy L. Wiggins, eds., Fiyah Issue 5. Kindle. Fiyah continues to come up with themes that inspire their authors to diverse stories. My favorite in this issue was Monique Desir’s “Bondye Bon,” but I didn’t find any of it a bad read. I’m also glad to see them including some related nonfiction. I enjoy that.

Robin Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. The subtitle sounded like it was biting off an awfully lot of material, but Kimmerer is a botanist and a Native person, and the two combine to set her nature writing apart. I really enjoyed this.

Seanan McGuire, Beneath the Sugar Sky. The third in its series of portal fantasy novellas. I found the second one structurally a bit frustrating, but this is back to full form, doing interesting things with the nature of longing and desire in portal fantasy while giving vivid details of character and world in the specific fantasy settings along the way.

Malka Older, Null States. I found the characters more compelling in the first one, but this is idea science fiction around microdemocracy and its difficulties, and that’s a set of ideas I’m pretty much always going to find interesting, so I was definitely here for this.

Kimberly Reid, #Prettyboy Must Die. Discussed elsewhere.

Shel Silverstein, Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back. Wow, did Uncle Shelby sneak a lot of stuff past as kids’ books. Marshmallows, sure, but–the ending, what even was that. Okay. (I read this because it came up at a writers’ meetup and I’d never read it. More on this in the next fortnight’s book post.)

Robin Sloan, Sourdough. Literary contemporary fantasy about bread baking and the tech startup culture of the Bay Area. It’s a fast, smoothly written read…that starts to leave a bad taste the more you think about what he’s actually saying. Ethnically pretty gross. Interpersonally…also pretty gross honestly. It’s a surface critique of tech startup culture that actually embraces most of what’s toxic about tech startup culture, so…well, enjoy the bits about bread baking if you can get there through the hipster one-upsmanship.

Rebecca Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art. I’m really enjoying reading through Solnit’s back catalog, and this is no exception. It does what it says on the tin, with illustrations.

Nic Stone, Dear Martin. Passionate and heartfelt young adult novel in which a young Black man tries to process his proximity to police shootings. He uses letters to Martin Luther King Jr. as one of his methods of figuring out his own modern world, but sparingly, thoughtfully. The characters are all complex and human, and there’s a lot packed into this short book. Recommended.

Louisa Thomas, Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams. She did indeed live an extraordinary life, doing a great deal of the work of being an ambassador to various nations early in the American Republic, so there’s a lot of “what an interesting life” here even aside from being First Lady. (That part was not that fascinating honestly.) But there’s also a heaping helping of: John Quincy Adams: which boots would you wear to kick him in the shins? discuss. I think one of the greatest strengths of this biography, though, was that the biographer was able to talk about the ways in which Louisa Adams was and was not ahead of her time on various issues like race, where she left extensive writings–places where Thomas could give the reader context and say, you know what, nope, she was really not a heroine here, or hey, she was trying on this question of gender but just didn’t get there. It’s a perspective I think more biographers could use, because going head-down into one person often makes you a partisan for them even when you think you’re recognizing their foibles. Thomas did very well with understanding that flaws don’t just mean the sort of things that would make them annoying to share a bathroom with.

P.G. Wodehouse, Mike and Psmith. Kindle. Lighthearted boarding school book, silly, full of cricket and who gets which study. If you want this sort of thing, here it is.

J.Y. Yang, The Red Threads of Fortune. I was so glad I read The Black Tide of Heaven first, because I felt like the characterization and worldbuilding both unfolded really well in this order. I really enjoy the Tensorate universe and am glad we’ll be getting more.