Tag: bookses precious

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 is one of history’s canonical disasters for a reason. I myself have stood and looked at a place where the fence line was dislocated several feet from where it had been, because the fault line had moved by that much; the city was in flames and rubble for days afterward, and it took much longer than that to clean up. Scott and Robinson have used this as the inspiration for their children’s fantasy comic: what if that natural disaster was not natural at all, but the result of a rift in the fairy kingdoms? What if the Seelie and Unseelie courts were warring and caused the quake?

That’s the backstory here, not a spoiler for this volume. This volume is a kids’ graphic novel about the fallout. It’s about a wealthy Latinx human girl, Isabel, ignored by her separated (divorced?) parents, who stumbles into the fairy war still raging after the earthquake, picks up a talisman, and finds she can use it when no one expects her to be able to. She crosses between the human and magical worlds and forms friendships and alliances with people of various shapes and species. They are chased back and forth across the worlds, and Isabel has to help find a lasting peace for both worlds, for humans, Seelie, and Unseelie.

It’s reasonably pretty, but if the plot sounds kind of generic to an experienced reader, that’s because it is. There’s a lot of “oh yes, one of those” going on here, and the San Francisco setting feels more phoned in around the edges to me than vivid–there’s not a lot of vivid “definitely San Francisco/Carmel/Northern California” art here. There is an attempt to show the diversity of the city even as of the early twentieth century, both on the human side and on the magical side, but that’s entirely visual. The plot and characterization are just…fine. They’re fine. And once again I’m reminded that the audience for this is kids, so this may be where they learn how the shape of this plot goes. This may be their first trip through this plot. And yet on the other hand…there are other kids’ books that still manage to do something that isn’t cookie-cutter, so…this one is fine. Not likely to offend, but not likely to stick with you long either.

Please consider using our link to buy The City on the Other Side from Amazon.

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

Picture book readers vary. There are the ones who read every word faithfully, the ones who wander off on each page going, “do you see the flippers on the nice tetrapod, Moo?”, the ones who make things up that bear only glancing resemblance to the author’s original text. Then there are the footnoters.

I am a mix of all of the above, but oh, am I ever a footnoter.

Because…mostly picture books that are trying to inform kids are aiming for simple, and once upon a time I was given a superhero name by an ex-boyfriend, and that superhero name was The Great Complicator. (He was wrong. My superhero name is The Non Sequitess. But I digress.) And I know all the arguments that kids need simple, and that picture books need simple. I get that.

But part of simplicity is choosing which simplicity. And choosing carefully.

Which brings us to One Day a Dot.

One Day a Dot is telling a very simple, very small child oriented creation story. It is telling the story of how the universe got from nothingness to you, tiny child. It starts with the Big Bang and goes through planetary formation (in the blink of an eye) and evolution and all the way to your current family, where you live as the end product of evolution.

Did you wince at that phrase, “end product of evolution”? I winced typing it, but this is a very, very linear narrative. It is a directed narrative. It is a narrative in which the self-centeredness natural to a tiny human child is not the least bit disturbed: you, tiny human child, are not only the most important thing in your own life, not only the most important thing in your parents’ lives for a few years yet (as indeed you must be to survive), but the most important thing. The. Most important thing.

For example, when a comet falls, tiny human child is told, “When the big dot hit the blue dot…the explosion turned the whole sky red. The world was on fire…and all the land-fish burned. But one thing survived.” BZZZZT sorry wrong! It will be quite important to you, tiny human child, that more than one thing survived. You are a mammal; quite a few other creatures you like will probably be mammals; but guess what? It turns out that many, many other species that are *not* proto-mammals survived the Cretaceous-Palogene Extinction Event, and it will be important to the entire world and to you particularly–especially if you are the sort of tiny human child who is interested in these things–that they did.

So…this is a book with very cute illustrations, and it gives very cute My First Bible kinds of answers to not at all Biblical narratives. And if you are the sort of person who wants a simple narrative to footnote–if you find it useful to be able to say, “okay, but not quite like that”–then you can bounce around this book with a tiny human and say, look, yes, but also no. The Great Chain of Being was not fundamentally right, evolution is not a line, and resulting in you does not mean that you were its goal, any more than echidnas or the current coloration on the moths that have been peppery in various shades, but yes, One Day a Dot, and so on for billions of years.

Please consider using our link to buy One Day a Dot from Amazon.

Graham Annable, Peter and Ernesto: A Tale of Two Sloths. Discussed elsewhere.

Deborah Cadbury, Princes at War: The Bitter Battle Inside Britain’s Royal Family in the Darkest Days of WWII. I think one of the things that people who are from a non-royalist country find a little difficult to wrap their heads around sometimes is which kinds of influence royal families have in which cases, in a modern situation. This book was valuable for that alone: lots of very specific instances of what the royal family could and could not do, what was expected of it, how it influenced the government and how the government influenced it. Not a staggering, world-altering book, but does what it says on the tin.

Jonathan I. Israel, The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775-1848. Jonathan Israel is my go-to author for things about Radical Enlightenment, and what he’s doing here is tracing threads of that going into and coming out of the American Revolution: how it influenced other countries and how those influences came back into America. He goes into places this kind of discussion often misses but shouldn’t: Haiti, Latin America, South Africa, Greece, the Netherlands. He is often trenchant and fascinating. He also has a very particular focus/fixation, and he wants his terms to keep meaning the things he wants them to mean, so “radical” is supposed to mean “Spinozist,” dammit, and round about 1848 it stops meaning that, dammit, and they did not ask Jonathan Israel. But it is generally, like his other doorstops, worth the read. He remembers that Gouverneur Morris existed and was important! He remembers Olympe de Gouges! It’s at very useful right-angles with a lot of other history of this period.

Leena Krohn, Collected Fiction. This is also a doorstop. It’s a rare opportunity in two ways: one, to read Krohn’s work in English (she is a Finnish author), and two, to read a prose writer’s work all at once, in sequence, the way one can do with the collected works of a poet. This isn’t quite everything. But it’s a substantial fraction of Krohn’s work, and it allows the reader to watch her style and ideas evolve. She does a lot of episodic/fragmentary style, which makes it easier to read such a large volume in small bites and still take it all in, the strange cities and their stranger denizens looping back around each other, insect people, plants, pelicans living among humans. I am so glad and so grateful that we have more translated strange works than we did when I was a teenager, so that I can have this.

Yoon Ha Lee, Raven Stratagem. I have always been a middle book person, and the end of this middle book particularly was very satisfying to me. I found how he handled the mathy/calendrical nature of the worldbuilding really fine. A lot of spoilers would lead up to that, so…yep, as of the end of this twisty volume I am glad to still be going with this series.

Anna Meriano, Love Sugar Magic: A Dash of Trouble. This is a warm and loving book about a Tejanx Latinx family that runs a magical bakery and misadventures of the youngest member of that family trying to claim–and understand–her magical birthright. I found it so charming, cozy without being cloying, highly recommended for kids on up. (Although it made me hungry for cinnamon rolls.)

Tochi Onyebuchi, Beasts Made of Night. For some reason I had gotten the impression that this was a very different kind of book than it is, but it was still fun. YA fantasy with lots of action and intriguing worldbuilding, young people struggling with the strictures of power and social bonds none of which fit quite right, but not using usual fantasy genre-furniture, building with very different blocks.

V.E. Schwab, A Conjuring of Light. The conclusion of a series, and wow were there a lot of ends to tie up in the parallel worlds here. Schwab had to just keep tying, and there were sections, set pieces, callbacks from previous themes…it wasn’t entirely tidy, but it did all fit together. I wouldn’t recommend starting here. This is definitely an ending. On the other hand: this series is now complete, so if you wait for that, here you go.

Michael Sedgwick and Thomas Taylor, Scarlett Hart, Monster Hunter. Discussed elsewhere.

Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South. This is a rambling and personal account that touches on all sorts of interesting points in Southern cooking, and in the foodways of America in general. Twitty relies a bit heavily on DNA testing sites for my tastes, but he takes a long look inward and connects it outward in ways that end up being really interesting, and he’s done very concrete research into what things taste and feel like. I’m very glad I read this.

Jennifer Wright, Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them. I am not the target audience for this book. The target audience for this book does not read monographs about specific instances of yellow fever. The target audience for this book is looking for a breezy, humorously written book with a chapter each about different historical diseases. That…is probably a lot more people than a lot of what I read, honestly. Wright brushes past some issues in historiography (why, for example, some biographers decline to state for certain whether their subjects had syphilis: hint, it is usually because they do not know), but in general if you want an overview, this is probably an entertaining way to get one.

Review copy provided by First Second Books

This is a picture book story of two sloths who go on adventures separately and find each other again at the end. It’s graphic novel length but picture book age, so…long picture book? If a kid talks you into reading this for their “one more book” before bedtime, I hope they’re a pretty big kid, or you got conned.

The two sloths enjoy watching clouds, but one of them, Ernesto, wants to see more of the sky, different kinds of sky. Peter is more worried, less daring, but when Ernesto leaves on his adventure, Peter wants him home safe. So he goes out after him and meets his own new friends, sees his own new habitats…less enthusiastically, and in more detail.

There’s not really any kind of acknowledgment that their differences could be good, here, just: here are two personalities seeing the world, seeing the world is great, here is a cranky tapir, here is a flock of lackadaisical crabs. The illustrations have their own very specific character, minimalist without being sparse, and somebody will probably attach hard to Murphy the parrot or some other character in particular. I think this is probably more of a little kids’ picture book than an all ages’ picture book, but it’s reasonably charming, not going to be offensive to big people for the first forty-leven reads.

Please consider using our link to buy Peter and Ernesto: A Tale of Two Sloths from Amazon.

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

Scarlett Hart lives in an Edwardian-esque world filled with monsters and horrors. Ghosts, mummies, tentacle beasts, it’s all there. Underage people aren’t supposed to be monster hunters, but since the death of her parents, she and her butler Napoleon White have been carrying on the family business, with Napoleon delivering their catches/kills to the Academy. (The acronym for the monster hunting academy convolutes itself to be TRAPEZE, which tells you a lot about the convolutions in this book and which ones the author considers clever.)

This is a graphic novel aimed at young readers. It’s adventure fantasy. There are gadgets, there is loyalty and frustration at the establishment, there are conveniently absent parents to be avenged. There are a lot of stock elements, which is not wrong, just…not a lot that is new here. Which perhaps its young audience won’t mind, and it goes quickly.

Please consider using our link to buy Scarlett Hart, Monster Hunter from Amazon.

Chaz Brenchley, Dust-Up At the Crater School, Chapters 13-15. Kindle. This is quite episodic, but the episodes are fun, they’re literally kids having fun in a boarding school setting but also Mars. And on it goes. Don’t start in the middle, there’s literally no reason to.

Tobias Buckell, Necahual. Kindle. The way I report what I read is a little weird, but short stories that are individual ebooks get listed in my booklog as individual ebooks, so here this one is: colonialism on an alien planet, a soldier who learns unexpected things about empire.

C.J. Cherryh, Emergence. The latest Atevi book, the latest chunk of story carved off the giant story that is this series. This is really no longer a set of individual books, it’s ongoing story the way soap opera is ongoing story, except about alien-human politics. I love it and am fond of reading the latest installment even though I don’t usually like serials, and I have friends I gossip with about the characters. I’d love to have more friends like that if you want to join that number, but…it’s a lot of investment, I do admit. And I get frustrated with some threads submerged, but they do come around again, and…more great-grandmother! more Kyo!…okay, okay.

Rupert Christensen, Paris Babylon: The Story of the Paris Commune. You know how I often say “does what it says on the tin”? This spends about 3/4 of the book talking about lead-up to the Paris Commune, doing only sort of what it says on the tin. And I see why, and it’s sort of interesting, but…Paris Commune. Really interesting. Not just in its surrounding and more-imperial bits. Lots of decadence here. I have gotten past the point of thinking that if I learn more about post-Revolutionary French government it will make sense. Now I just keep learning more about the fractal nonsense, and this is another piece of that.

George Eliot, The Lifted Veil. Kindle. This is definitely not the first George Eliot you should read. (Middlemarch, you should read Middlemarch, in fact if you do read Middlemarch there is a serious chance that you will become permanently slightly wistful that you are not reading Middlemarch again AT ANY GIVEN MOMENT OF YOUR LIFE.) This is a very weird little novella that has sort of the…Lydgate family dynamics without the balance of the rest of Middlemarch…plus a weird Victorian run at a speculative element. It fascinates me when the Victorians do that, but not necessarily in a good way, unless you discovered that you loved George Eliot, which…I did when reading…yes…Middlemarch. But I was on a plane and did not want to commit, so…gosh, what an odd novella this is.

Andrea Hairston, Will Do Magic for Small Change. Two-layered historical novel, interesting angles of history and characterization and relationship, related to her other novel Redwood and Wildfire but it’s not necessary to read that one to get this one. Satisfying and fun with poignant parts.

Matthew Kressel, The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye. Kindle. Another short one in ebook format, a far-far future thing where everyone is learning something, just not necessarily what they thought. (And currently free. -ed)

Kei Miller, The Last Warner Woman. A Jamaican novel about foresight and caregiving and how we tell stories. I liked the beginning of it, but I am really kind of exhausted with books that collapse into violent misogyny even if the tone is not violently misogynist, so…be forewarned, I guess. Sigh.

George O’Connor, Olympians: Hermes: Tales of the Trickster. Discussed elsewhere.

Sofi Oksanen, Norma. Deeply weird book about hair and trafficking and magic. The American cover makes it look very sweet and dreamy, and…Lord, is it not that. It is noir magic with hair salons and a great many of you probably need that weirdness who would not have seen it in the pastels of the cover art. It looks princessy. It is very, very not princessy.

Rafael Rosado and Jorge Aguirre, Monsters Beware!. Discussed elsewhere.

Timothy Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine. This is a bizarre and interesting book. I think one of the things I loved about it was the sense of feeling of interwar Poland it gave. What was it actually like to be in Poland between the two world wars. (“Interwar” is probably a misnomer, because Poland was not really interconflict at any point, at least not emotionally reliably so.) I get very defensive of how historians write about Poland in that period, because some of them act like Poland could have…somehow magically not been on plains between Germany and Russia? And this gets into Poland: trying to deal with Ukraine having some sense of what on earth was going on in Ukraine during the Ukrainian Famine. Which is horrific, and this is a very difficult book. And yet also gonzo-weird, because Poland: they were basically like your group of friends, they had a bunch of mathematicians, some modern artists, a few classically trained musicians but not enough to make an ensemble coherently, a couple of people with horses, and they were like, right, this is who we’ve got, we’ve got to deal with authoritarians now from several angles, who’s gonna do it, I guess we’ll send the Cubist dude in? okay? because it’s not like any of us has commando training or something? And some historians are like, Poles, haha so stupid why did they send a Cubist to try to deal with the authoritarians, hahaha! But look, when you’ve got a hammer, you hammer in the morning, and when you’ve got a Cubist and the Ukrainian Famine, you don’t shrug and say sorry Ukrainians I guess, you try with the bloody Cubist, it’s not like it would have been better if he’d been representational by inclination, and this is that book, in all its very weird and incredibly upsetting glory. (This has been your Marissa Feels Strongly About Interwar Poland Report Of The Day. Tune in later. There will be another. Who knows when. Used bookstores spit these things out for me.)

Jonathan Strahan, ed., Infinity Wars. An anthology of far-future hard SF, at varying degrees of emotional remove, and you can basically map how the story will work for me by how far the emotional remove is.

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.