Aug 03 2021

The Dead And The Dark by Courtney Gould

I was genuinely creeped out by parts of this horror/mystery tale, which is saying a lot because most horror novels don’t scare me at all! Courtney Gould certainly knows how to build tension, even if I wasn’t 100% convinced by the Big Bad-related world-building. The rest of it, tho, is pretty great, especially in its examination of the realities of being gay in the 21st century.

Logan Ortiz-Woodley is looking forward to turning 18 in a scant few months so she can finally leave her parents behind and go live her best life. It’s not that she doesn’t get along with Dad, as she calls Alejo Ortiz, but after a weird experience filming their reality ghost-hunting show in Tulsa, she’s given up on trying to connect with her other father, whom she just calls by his first name. Brandon Woodley has always been the quieter, more awkward one of her dads, and while the odd couple vibes work well on TV, his detachment from his home life has always deeply hurt Logan, who can’t help feeling unwanted when he constantly pushes her away.

So she’s not really fussed when Brandon’s plan to scout locations in his hometown of Snakebite, Oregon stretches from the original one month timetable to six. She feels bad for Dad, who misses his husband, but she’s secretly glad not to have to endure the painful conversations that are all Brandon seems to know how to use to interact with her. It’s worse because he’s always so easy and happy with Dad, making her feel like even more of a pariah in her own family.

When Brandon finally tells them he’s ready for them to come to Snakebite, Logan is far more reluctant than Dad to leave their life in cosmopolitan, queer-friendly Los Angeles. Even so, she’s astonished to find that Snakebite is even worse than she’d imagined. Brandon and Alejo both came from there but left after the homophobia became too much for them. Things haven’t changed very much in the decade plus they’ve been away, but there has been one horrifying new development. Shortly after Brandon arrived in town, a local boy named Tristan went missing.

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Aug 02 2021

Lola’s Super Club #2: My Substitute Teacher Is A Witch by Christine Beigel & Pierre Foiullet

I liked Volume 2 of Lola’s Super Club a bit more than Vol 1, tho I think that’s due in large part to being more prepared for the absurdist humor of this title, which may or may not be to everyone’s taste. Overall, I think the quality of both art and gags were better here, perhaps due to the topics each of the two stories included chose to focus on.

In the first story of the volume, Lola Darkhair is on her way to school in Friendly Falls, with a backpack full of the other members of her Super Club. Her classmates are excited to meet her little friends, but disaster strikes: a mean substitute teacher takes over and has extremely unrealistic expectations of the students. Odder still, she introduces a new student to the class, who happens to be her son, supervillain Max Imum. Lola, the Super Club and her classmates will have to join forces to defeat the wicked Mini Mum and her monstrous allies.

The second story, in timely fashion, revolves around the Evilympics, an event dreamed up by Mini Mum to pit the Super Club of Friendly Falls against the Villains of Fiendish Falls. In several creatively mashed up events such as Dodgeboat, Weightlifting Ping Pong, and Rhythmic Equestrian, the two teams must compete for the championship, while Mini Mum does her best to sabotage the scoring. Fortunately, Lola’s sports-loving if presently wheelchair-bound Grampy is there to help save the day.

I think my favorite part of this volume was the lesson Lola learned in villains being made not born, as you can see how Mini Mum’s behavior led her son to his life of crime. It was also nice to see Lola spend time with her grandpa, and for his disability to play a pivotal role in her team’s victory. The wittiness of the mashed up events of the Evilympics were one of the most amusing parts of this book for me, tho I could definitely have done with more of an introduction to the many of Lola’s friends who suddenly appear to help her compete. I was also not the biggest fan of the gross-out humor, and heaven save me from the preview of Astro Mouse And Light Bulb Vol I which amped that up even more. Some kids love this stuff, but I never have at any age.

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Jul 30 2021

What I Like About Me by Jenna Guillaume

I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish this charming, body positive tale of a 16 year-old at an inflection point in her life, trying to figure out what’s going on with her parents, her best friend, her sister, the boy she thinks she loves and the boy she most definitely does not love, over one tumultuous summer vacation.

Maisie Martin is worried that her parents are headed for a divorce as Mom takes her and her best friend Anna to Cobbers Bay for their traditional long Christmas break, leaving Dad at home. Dad claims to be absolutely swamped at work, but the fights and the silences and the ignored phone calls indicate a far deeper problem than just a busy newspaper season. Maisie tries to push her parents’ relationship out of the foreground of her mind by focusing on helping cheer up Anna, whose boyfriend Dan just cheated on her. But when Anna develops a connection with Sebastian, the childhood friend Maisie has loved for years but whom she can barely talk to for nerves nowadays, Maisie is left questioning everything she knows about relationships.

Luckily, she has her Discovery Journal to help her sort through this mess. Initially reluctant to do what’s essentially a homework assignment, she finds that writing about her day is surprisingly therapeutic, and confides in the journal things she doesn’t even want to say out loud. This is especially helpful when she ends up joining the Cobbers Bay Miss Teen Queen Beauty Pageant, the same one her beautiful, slender older sister won three years ago, right about when the girls stopped talking to one another. Maisie has felt fat and unlovely for years — not helped by her image-conscious mother — but will this summer and a beauty pageant, of all things, help her learn to love herself?

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Jul 29 2021

The Follower by Nicholas Bowling

As the parent of twins, I can attest to the fact that twins can be as sweetly devoted yet as deeply strange as the siblings depicted in this novel. After the death of his father, the already rather odd Jesse Owens (yes, really) starts looking for meaning in all the most metaphysical places. His search leads him across an ocean and a continent to the Northern California town of Mount Hookey, where the inhabitants are devoted to the idea of a Crystal City in the mountain, as promised to them by John of Telos, a messianic figure from the 1970s who was enlightened by beings from a place? a race? a state of mind? called, unsurprisingly, Telos.

Since the 70s, any number of schools have sprung up around The Violet Path to Telos, and it’s to these that Jesse has applied his considerable mind and inherited fortune. His twin, Vivian, is used to his strangeness, to his inability to function well in mainstream society. When he goes missing, Vivian knows that it’s up to her to find him and bring him home.

Unfortunately, hippie NorCal is way out of her comfort zone, even before she’s violently mugged in the neighboring town of Lewiston while journeying to Jesse’s last known location. She enters Mount Hookey almost as a drifter, and soon finds herself trying to untangle a bewildering web of New Age offshoots and practitioners in her search for her twin. People are either overly helpful or shy away from her for no reason she can discern, but the one thing most of the residents agree on is that she shouldn’t go up the frigid, forested mountain, and certainly not by herself. But if that’s where Jesse went, Vivian will have no choice but to follow, even if it leads her straight to danger.

For all its brooding weirdness, The Follower is at its heart a satirical examination of New Age cults and the brutally cynical thinking behind them, threaded through with ideas on reaching your potential and what that means in our modern world. Tonally, it feels a lot like The X-Files, with a skeptical Vivian trying to find her much more believing brother in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, with a little bit of The Simpsons in both the appearance of a mysterious glowing figure and in the absurd, often oblivious humor of the townsfolk. The most touching part, to me, was the examination of family, the bond between siblings as well as the bond between parent and child. Parents don’t mean to ruin their children, mostly. The comparison of Vivian and Jesse’s relationship with their dysfunctional parents to the mindsets of the followers of Telos is thought-provoking, especially as a parent myself.

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Jul 27 2021

The Smurfs Tales #1: The Smurfs And The Bratty Kid by Peyo

I grew up with The Smurfs as a child, tho in all honesty, I was one of those children who barely absorbed the “mythology” of the overarching story vs enjoying the gags of each standalone episode. And while I certainly gobbled up my fair share of Asterix and Tintin comics, I never got into the Smurfs books, or the Johan And Peewit comics from which our little blue heroes originally came.

So I leapt at the opportunity to remedy that oversight in my childhood reading with the repackaging of several of Peyo’s tales, translated by the Papercutz team, here in this inaugural volume published to coincide with the relaunch of the cartoon on Nickelodeon. Comprising a long story about the Smurfs; another long tale starring the Smurfs, Johan and Peewit; a shorter tale about just the humans, and several pages of Smurf gag panels, this was very much a volume out of the Belgian cartooning tradition, with clever, accessible art and a surprisingly wordy narrative that feels geared towards a slightly older audience than the popular TV adaptations.

The first story, the titular The Smurfs And The Bratty Kid, was my favorite of the bunch. Papa Smurf gets lost traveling back to Smurf Village because his stork has no sense of direction, but encounters a kindly old man looking forward to a visit from his nephew Awsum. Unfortunately, Awsum is a holy terror who not only wreaks havoc on Smurf Village but also teams up with Gargamel to capture his would-be benefactors! Papa Smurf will have to use every ounce of his patience, kindness and know-how in order to help guide Awsum to becoming a better person.

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Jul 25 2021

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

I loved “The City Born Great,” the 2016 short story (and 2017 Hugo finalist) that was the seed of this novel. “The conceit of the story is that great human cities have a life of their own. Maybe that life awakens quickly, maybe it takes centuries or millennia, but at some point the genius loci becomes a thing in itself. Birth is never easy, not every potential new life makes it into the world, and Jemisin’s story tells the tale of New York’s attempt…”

In its short form, I found the story irresistible: “What makes this story great is the sheer exuberance with which it’s told. It’s fast, it’s furious, but it’s also tremendous fun. And sure, it’s a power fantasy, too, but if that gives readers sentences like ‘I backhand its ass with Hoboken, raining the drunk rage of ten thousand dudebros down on it like the hammer of God. Port Authority makes it honorary New York, motherfucker; you just got Jerseyed.’ then let a thousand fantasies bloom. It’s a story about life, and living, and that’s what it’s most full of: the very stuff of life.”

The City We Became extends and deepens “The City Born Great,” while keeping the essential story: New York wants to live, to become its most vibrant, most colorful self; something else wants to stop that from happening. A slightly revised form of the short story becomes the novel’s prologue. Instead of the battle it depicts marking the birth of the living city, it’s just the opening scene, an incomplete start, leaving the avatar of New York in unknown circumstances and its enemies still active. Each of the boroughs also has an avatar, and together they must complete the tale, though they do not know that from the start. Manny, newly arrived in the city, his past forgotten already, sharp, fast, not averse to controlled violence. Bronca, oldest of the five, daughter of the Lenape who were around when the Dutch came calling, harried administrator of an arts center. Brooklyn Thomason aka MC Free, in her younger days a rapper, now a city councilwoman, Black, formidable, and worried about her family. Padmini Prakash, Queen of Mathematics, immigrant living with her auntie, thrilled to have a chance in New York to use her abilities to their fullest, not so thrilled about all that entails. And then there’s Aislyn Houlihan, teenage daughter of an Irish cop on Staten Island, too afraid to go into the city, wanting more than anything to be left alone in the world she knows.

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Jul 24 2021

Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow

Isn’t Eastern Standard Tribe a neat title? It sounds so nifty, so cool, so exciting, there must be a lot happening behind it. Doctorow has Art, the first-person narrator of roughly half the chapters, spell things out about halfway through the book.

“It’s like this,” I said. “It used to be that the way you chose your friends was by finding the lost like-minded people you could out of the pool of people who lived near you. If you were lucky, you lived near a bunch of people you could get along with. … Chances were that you’d grow up so immersed in the local doctrine that you’d never even think to question it. …
“Now, once ideas could travel more freely, the chances of you finding out about a group of people somewhere else that you might get along with increased. …
“People immigrated here and picked where they wanted to live based on what sort of people they wanted to be with, which ideas they liked best. A lot of it was religious, but that was just on the surface—underneath it all was aesthetics. You wanted to go somewhere where the girls were pretty in the way you understood prettiness, where the food smelled like food and not garbage, where shops sold goods you could recognize. … [T]he tug of finding people like you is like gravity. Lots of things work against gravity, but gravity always wins in the end—in the end, everything collapses. In the end, everyone ends up with the people that are most like them that they can find.” …
“Fast-forward to the age of email. Slowly but surely we begin to mediate almost all of our communications over networks.
“So you’re a fish out of water. You live in Arizona, but you’re sixteen years old and all your neighbors are eighty-five, and you get ten billion channels of media on your desktop. All the good stuff—everything that tickles you—comes out of some clique of hyperurban club-kids in South Philly. They’re making cool art, music, clothes. You read their mailing lists and you can tell that they’re exactly the kind of people who’d really appreciate you for who you are. In the old days, you’d pack your bags and hitchhike across the country and move to your community. But you’re sixteen and that’s a pretty scary step.
“Why move? These kids live online. … Online you can be a peer. You can hop into these discussions, play the games, chord with one hand while chatting up some hottie a couple thousand miles away.
“Only you can’t. You can’t, because they chat at seven AM while they’re getting ready for school. … Their late nights end at three AM. But those are their local times, not yours. If you get up at seven, they’re already at school, ’cause it’s ten there.
“So you start to eff with your sleep schedule. You get up at four AM so you can chat with your friends. You go to bed at nine. ’cause that’s when they go to bed. Used to be that it was stockbrokers and journos and factory who did that kind of thing, but now it’s anyone who doesn’t fit in.
“So you get the Tribes. People all over the world who are really secret agents for some other time zone, some other way of looking at the world, some other zeitgeist. … Like any tribe, they are primarily loyal to each other, and anyone outside of the tribe is only mostly human. That may sound extreme, but this is what it comes down to.
“Tribes are agendas. Aesthetics. Ethos. Traditions. Ways of getting things done. … I know that my Tribesman’s taxi will conduct its way through traffic in a way that I’m comfortable with, whether I’m in San Francisco, Boston, London or Calcutta. I know that the food will be palatable in a Tribal restaurant, that a book by a Tribalist will be a good read, that a gross of widgets will be manufactured to the exacting standards of my Tribe.” (pp. 108–13)

It’s a good rant.
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Jul 22 2021

Assassin’s Orbit by John Appel

Gosh, I’m at the point in my life where I really wish we had a better comparison for books featuring older female heroes than The Golden Girls. Nothing against the classic sitcom, but literally the only similarity Assassin’s Orbit has with TGG is that the main characters are feisty older women. That’s definitely a draw for readers like me, but if you’re coming here expecting laughs and feel-good sitcom moments, oh boy, are you in for a surprise.

Which isn’t at all a knock on this book: it’s just that hilarity isn’t what AO is about. Tonally, it feels a lot more like The Expanse, as various players are drawn together to uncover a deadly conspiracy against the backdrop of interplanetary political maneuvering. Our main protagonist is Noo Okoreke, the sixty-ish head of Ileri Station’s premiere security consulting firm. When Saed Tahir, the grandson of her business partner Fathya Shariff, is killed while serving as bodyguard to the Minister of External Trade in the lead up to unity talks with the powerful Commonwealth, Noo and Saed’s sister Fari offer their services to Constabulary Commissioner Nnenna Toiwa in tracking down the clearly well-trained killers. With anti-Commonwealth riots instigated by the One World party a constant concern, the Constabulary is already spread pretty thin, especially since Nnenna has only recently overseen a purge of corrupt officers from within their ranks. Nnenna is too practical to refuse the help, especially since the Shariff Security firm has contacts with valuable information who would prefer to stay well off the Constabulary’s radar.

Noo and Fari’s investigations bring them to the rescue of Meiko Ogawa, a Commonwealth spy currently facing enforced retirement after being burned to both Ileri and Saljuan forces. She’s set on finishing one last task, however, and teams up with Noo and Fari as they chase their common quarry planetside and into certain danger. But greater trouble is brewing on the Station than any of our heroes expect, as a Saljuan destroyer enters Ileri space and the One Worlders make their ultimate play.

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Jul 19 2021

Disney’s Beauty And The Beast by Teddy Slater, Ron Dias & Ric González

When my middle child brought me this book to read aloud, no doubt gifted to my kids in a grab bag of books from my mother-in-law, I was pretty excited to do it. I grew up obsessed with my hardcover copy of Disney’s Cinderella, and Beauty And The Beast was one of my favorite Disney movies. So Joseph and his older brother Jms cuddled up to me while I read them the Golden Book Disney version of the classic fairy tale.

And oh wow, were there lots of things here that I remembered quite differently! Granted, it’s been decades since I’ve watched the movie, and I certainly did not bother to watch the live-action version, cute as Dan Stevens is. And media novelizations, as it were, always have a habit of flattening the nuance of the stories they’re retelling. Not having the terrific tunes to sing along to certainly doesn’t help either! So I was surprised by how little I remembered of the animated movie’s actual plot, even as I questioned whether the things the book was choosing to emphasize were as egregiously told in the movie. Perhaps my hazy recollection softened the bad parts, but had I truly swallowed down misogyny so easily as a child?

Only one way to solve this conundrum: by putting on the movie once more. Even from watching the opening bit explaining the curse on the Prince who became a Beast, it’s clear that a lot of nuance has been removed from the book adaptation. The words mean the same thing but they carry different inflections. In the book, it seems that the Prince is cursed because he’s shallow, but in the movie, it’s clear that he is being cursed for the cruelty that comes from his shallowness. And omg, the book’s insistence that Belle is “not like other girls” made me question my entire liking for this movie: fortunately, my re-watch makes it clear that in the movie, she’s not like anyone else in their small provincial town. It’s weirdly reductive to limit the uniqueness of Belle’s personality to a phrase that reeks of internalized misogyny, and frankly a bad lesson to teach young readers.

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Jul 13 2021

Sweet Tea by Piper Huguley

This is a sheer delight of a clean romance novel, one that touches on getting comfortable with your roots but still being open to love when it shows up to surprise you. Althea Dailey has finally made partner at her intellectual property law firm in New York City but, now that she’s achieved her life goal at the ripe old age of thirty-two, is starting to wonder whether there’s more to life than money and career success. Being sent south to North Carolina on her first big case as partner also has her feeling guilty about not doing more to stay in touch with her beloved Granda down in Milford, Georgia. But when Granda starts enthusing over the young man who’s been such a help to her with her cooking, who wants to make a documentary and cookbook of her recipes, Althea finally has an excuse to overcome her reluctance to head home, booking the first plane back to make sure her Granda isn’t being scammed by some crook.

Jack Darwent is a trust fund baby who found himself chafing at the life that his father, a civil rights lawyer, had mapped out for him. Eschewing law school for culinary school, he now travels the country gathering material for a documentary he wants to make celebrating the too-swiftly vanishing art of authentic Southern cooking. One of his subjects is the legendary Ada Dailey, whose endearing manner is at stark odds with the attitude of her high-powered attorney granddaughter who suddenly shows up in Milford with an entirely skeptical view of Jack’s efforts and intentions.

The way that Althea and Jack eventually come to understand and fall for each other while making peace with their own pasts and present is charmingly depicted in this low-heat, almost-Christian romance. I say almost-Christian because while the AME church plays a significant part in the proceedings, it’s clear that religion is seen as an intensely personal matter — while Piper Huguley clearly has a lot of Christian faith, she’s not about to force it on her readers. As a Muslim, I felt very comfortable reading this book, which gives a joyful impression of a Christianity that accepts and heals, but also makes it clear that you don’t have to go to church every Sunday to be considered a good person. I do wish that the book had been a little less heteronormative but that is an extremely minor quibble in an otherwise affirming, modern tale of interracial romance.

What I do really wish this book had done better was put the same amount of care it had used in the first three-quarters or so into building out the last quarter of the story. Things went by way too quickly after the May dinner. How exactly had Althea discerned the connection between Sherri’s grandma and Cassie? What is she planning to do to rescue Milford College beyond funding one scholarship? What’s up with Jack showing up at her office? I also didn’t really understand what was happening on Decoration Day — I get the basics, but the attitude of the other ladies is still unclear to me. I felt that there was so much story still to build out there in the last quarter, instead of the brief series of sketches that it felt like the narrative had dwindled down to post-May-dinner. I know that Ms Huguley is capable of telling a terrific tale, so it was mystifying why the last part felt so rushed and underdone.

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