Black Water Lilies

 
Black Water Lilies
by Frederick Duval
art by Didier Cassegrain
translated by Edward Gauvin

adapted from the novel by Michel Bussi
Magnetic Press
2011, adapted 2022

 

 

Black Water Lilies is a graphic novel retelling of a 2011 novel by the same name. Bussi wrote the original, Duval adapted the text, Cassegrain supplied the beautiful watercolor imagery that makes the whole book look like a Monet painting come to life.

 
Black Water Lilies is also a murder mystery that takes place in Giverny, the village where Monet settled, built his gardens, and did a lot of his most famous paintings. The story focuses on an 11 year-old girl, the beautiful village school teacher who instructs the 11 year-olds, and an old woman in black, who narrates the story. A man has been killed inside the famous gardens, and police from Paris are called in to investigate. The woman in black begins the story by locating it very precisely in time, during an annual Monet festival in 2010, when the gardens are open to the public. She tells us from the start that the story begins with one murder and will end with another.

 
The old woman mostly wanders the village and observes. She is newly widowed, and secretly owns the 'Black Water Lilies,' the apocryphal last painting Monet made, all in black, just before he died. I spent nearly the entire book wondering if she was the murderer, and if so, why?

 
The little girl, Fannette, has a talent for painting and hopes to win an annual worldwide children's art contest, so she can go study abroad. Several of her classmates have crushes on her - one she loves back, another grows increasingly jealous. She also has a secret tutor, an old man who helps her improve her technique, until he is murdered too, and his body vanishes, with Fannette seemingly the only one who knows.

 
The teacher, Stephanie, has a jealous husband who is suspected of the murder. One of the Paris police officers is obviously smitten with her, which compromises the investigation. But Stephanie loves him back, and wants to leave her husband for him.

 
The dead man was known to have several affairs, and someone sends the police photos of him with other women, including Stephanie. Some of the photos are explicit, others seem benign except for the context. He had a note on his body that seems to imply he secretly had an 11-year old child with one of his mistresses. So who is the child, and who is the mother? Is this why he was killed? The dead man also dreamed of owning an original Monet, something he could never afford at a fair price, so could that be the reason instead?

 
For two weeks, the police bumble around without fully solving anything. In the end, the old woman explains who committed the murders, and in doing so, reveals several truths that lingered just out of focus at the periphery of the story the entire time. 

 
The whole book was excitingly tense, both because you knew another death was coming, and even moreso because you cared what would happen to the girl, the teacher, and the crone. The ending is incredibly well-executed and makes the entire book better in retrospect. I immediately began flipping back through to consider things anew. I highly recommend this one! It was an excellent choice for the last book I'll finish this year.

The Best American Comics 2012

 
The Best American Comics 2012

edited by Francoise Mouly
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2012

 

 

The 2012 edition of Best American Comics was edited by Francoise Mouly, the art director of The New Yorker. She 'decoupaged' an introduction by assembling panels from other cartoonists into a kind of sequence and then writing new text. (I believe all the panels came from works that were finalists for this book but didn't make it in.) 

 
New this year are one-page author bios to introduce each selection, and a section of kids comics, including an excerpt from Zita the Spacegirl, although the selections from 60 Ways to Leave Your Mother (Alone) were my favorite from the kids section.

 
By this point, I think Chris Ware and Love & Rockets are the only ones who've made it into every volume to date. There were a few others I recognized - Charles Burns's X'ed Out, Gary Painter's Jimbo, Jim Woodring's Frank. And I spotted Jesse Jacobs' distinctive art style on the endpapers. (I've read his Safari Honeymoon, although that's not the work included here.)

 
Almost all the graphic non-fiction was about war - the Battle of Buron, the biography of a failed Kamikaze pilot, a history of the Golan Heights. (I think some form of graphic journalism about Israel might be in every year of BAC by now too.)

 
The graphic memoirs had more variety - planning a wedding, hiring a prostitute, caring for aging parents, cheating on one's wife at a Hollywood party, attending Basic Training in one's 40s and immediately destroying one's knee, the discomforts of a long plane ride, plus quick comics of daily observations from The Believer, and excerpts from someone's watercolor-sketch-a-day diary that had been published in The New York Times.

 
My sister's favorite, Sergio Argones, had a couple one-page comics included too!

 
The new thing I found that I'd like to read more of is Dakota McFadzean's Leave Luck to Heaven. It has a lot of trade dress in the style of old Nintendo instruction manuals, and the excerpt here shows us an older nerd teaching a younger nerd how to appreciate the details of Super Mario Bros 2.

The Missing of Clairdelune

 
The Missing of Clairdelune
by Christelle Dabos
translated by Hildegard Serle
Europa Editions

2019
 

 

The Missing of Clairdelune is the second book in Christelle Dabos's Mirror Visitor quartet, following A Winter's Promise, which I read earlier in the year. I preferred reading this one right before bed to accentuate its dreamlike qualities. The combination of familiar names and tropes remixed in unexpected ways, the omnipresence of magic, and the nightmarish quality to the various tasks and deadlines the characters are given all contribute to a sense that this story emerges from the sleeping unconscious.

 
In the first book, Ophelia, who can learn the history of an object by touching it, and can travel by passing between mirrors, was put into an arranged engagement with Thorn, the austere young treasurer of a foreign land that resembles Tsarist Russia. Neither of the pair feels romantically interested in the other. Ophelia spent a lot of the last book wearing an illusion to disguise her as a mute servant, to hide her from courtly intrigue until the official announcement of the engagement. (And, if I recall, the simultaneous announcement that Thorn's aunt, Berenilde, was pregnant with a royal baby.)

 
The world in these books is broken - each country is an Ark, a walled off bit of land floating in space where the Earth used to be. Each Ark is ruled by a Family Spirit, and all the nobles are descended from their Family Spirit, and have inherited some of their magic. Thorn is from the Pole, where the spirit is Farouk, a giant with alabaster features and almost no memory.

 
So, at the start of this book, Berenilde is Farouk's favored consort, and Ophelia is the subject of intense gossip and curiosity. The illusionist child who had a crush on Berenilde, and killed her and Thorn's entire family out of spite, has been arrested. And Thorn wants to try to have a slightly less mutually-hostile relationship with Ophelia. So things are going ... okay?

 
But then! People start mysteriously disappearing. Ophelia is made a Storyteller to entertain Lord Farouk, but almost immediately angers him with her story. Ophelia learns that she and Thorn will gain each others' magic powers after marriage, and that Thorn arranged to marry her just so he could gain her power and use it to 'read' the history of Farouk's magic Book and win favor in the court, which angers her. And, like 20 of Ophelia's family members are visiting the Pole, and plan to stay for the month leading up to the wedding! In fact, Thorn invited them, and plans to send Ophelia home with them forever as soon as he has her power.

 
We decamp to a seaside resort, the warmest place in the Pole, where in the summer, it's only a little colder than the winters Ophelia's family is used to. More people disappear, including Achibald, who always flirts with Ophelia, and has a reputation as the guy women go to to cheat on their husbands with, but who is also sort of her friend. With only a couple days before the wedding, Ophelia is given a one-day deadline to solve the mystery and find the missing people, or else Archibald will be cut off from his family's psychic connection, which might kill him. (Farouk wants the other psychics in top form, not drowsy because captive Archibald is magically asleep.) The urgency feels like the dream where you're rushing to take a test in a class you never attended.

 
The disappearances are obviously magic, but what kind? And why? Without giving too much away, let me say that in rapid succession, Ophelia solves the mystery, Thorn saves Ophelia from the kidnapper, Berenilde gives birth, Thorn and Ophelia get married, Farouk's special book gets 'read' and he doesn't like what he learns, Thorn is forced to become a fugitive, and Ophelia goes back home with her family. Except none of it happens in quite the way (or the order) you'd expect, and we are drawn into a deeper mystery - who is the 'God' who blew up the world and created the Family Spirits to run what's left of it, what is 'God's' plan for everything, and who is the mysterious 'Other' that Ophelia supposedly freed the first time she traveled between mirrors as a child?

 
I'm really drawn in to this series at this point, and eager to keep going. Early on, I thought there might be a simply YA-style love triangle between Thorn, Ophelia, and Archibald, but whatever happens, nothing about Ophelia's marriage or love life will be simple. Thorn is missing, Archibald is humbled, and Ophelia officially Knows Too Much about the secret history of the world. Next book, I think, we'll be headed back to Anima, Ophelia's home Ark, and home to Athena, Farouk's childhood friend / sister? / first crush.

Field Glass

 
 
Field Glass

by Joanna Howard and Joanna Ruocco

Sidebrow Books

2017

 

 

Field Glass is a very strange, unsettling novella. It is told in the first person by an unnamed primary narrator - a soldier sheltering among civilians in a country estate that is near the front line of a war in the deep of winter. It successfully achieves the effect that I think both Kathryn Davis's Silk Road and Jeff Vandermeer's Dead Astronauts were aiming for but, in my opinion, missed.

 
The narrator is writing (or dictating?) messages to a love back home. Intermixed are much shorter dispatches by other soldiers, identified only by serial number and blood type. There is no plot really. The style is almost all description, no exposition. All sensation, no explanation. It's a style that I hardly have the vocabulary to describe, except to say that it feels very distant, the opposite of books that try to make you feel close to the characters or to imaginatively identify yourself with them.

 
We don't know where we are, or when, or what war is being fought, or what sides there might be, or which side the narrator is on. Just that it is cold, the landscape is ruined, most of the other soldiers are dead, and the narrator is trapped by an enclosing siege. I imagine a place something like the great house from Downton Abbey, and all the talk of prosthetics and artificial blood makes me think of either an alternate WWI or perhaps a not too-distant future.

 
The pleasure of reading this one comes from enjoying the use of language, which I'm tempted to call prose poetry. There's no rhyme or meter, but the sentences are dense with meaning, and the word choice is unusual enough that you have to read slowly and carefully to take it in. It's only 96 pages, but it feels like a complete experience, even though nothing is answered or resolved.

The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine

 
The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine
or The Hithering Thithering Djinn
by Donald Barthelme

Amulet Books

1971, reprinted 2006
 

 

The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, or The Hithering Thithering Djinn is written in the form of a children's book, although I wonder how much any actual children would like it. Barthelme is somewhat famous as a postmodern author (supposedly his version of Snow White is very good), but this is the first work of his I've read.

 
The illustrations in the book are all lithographs, taken either from other books or maybe newspapers. Barthelme has done a bit of collage, by cutting out individual images from their context and placing them against blank but colorful backgrounds. By repeating some images, he creates recurring characters. So the protagonist, Mathilde, might have come from an advertisement for hoop toys. The djinn appears to be a racist caricature of a Chinese man, possibly from a political cartoon.

 
So Barthelme has a sequence of repurposed images, and he's combined them with text to create a children's story, or maybe a story for grown-ups that imitates the kid's book style.

 
Mathilde wakes up one morning wishing she could have a fire engine. Instead, there's a 'Chinese house' in her yard. At first it's too small to go in, but as soon as she notices that, it grows larger to accommodate.
 

Inside the house, Mathilde meets a couple guards, a rain dancer, a knitting pirate who tells her his story of being captured, the djinn, and an elephant who rolls down a hill. The djinn offers her lunch, or to change her into an adult with an interesting job, but all Mathilde wants is a fire engine. The djinn gets frustrated with her for asking so much, but the next day, when Mathilde goes outside, the house is gone, and there's a green-painted fire engine on her lawn.

 
The cover of the edition I read informs me that this won a National Book Award, but I don't understand why. I deliberately try to find books that are unusual or odd, and one of the most common ways books like that disappoint me is if they sort of seem to come to nothing at the end. I had a real that's it? there's nothing more? moment when I turned the last page. It was sort of fun, but clearly not what Barthelme's reputation is built on.

 
I think Dadaist Max Ernst did a similar exercise, creating a book by writing new text for collages made of cut-up lithographs and woodcuts, which I might try to read next year.

Clue: Candlestick

 
 
Clue: Candlestick

by Dash Shaw

IDW

2020

 

 

Clue: Candlestick is a graphic novels that collects the three issues of Shaw's comic miniseries. It's based on the boardgame, and Shaw incorporates imagery from the game (as well as mazes and other puzzles) throughout.

 
The first issue is told mostly from Prof Plum's perspective. Plum is very attentive to details, and so we get a lot of arrow notations pointing out little things in Shaw's drawings. Plum gets a letter from his friend Mr Boddy, saying that he wants to start giving away parts of his collection of infamous objects - a rope, a knife, a wrench, a revolver, a lead pipe, and of course, a candlestick. 

 
Plum shows up to Boddy's mansion on a dark and stormy night, along with Boddy's other friends - Col Mustard, Miss Scarlet, Mr Green, Mrs Peacock, and Boddy's maid, Miss White. Everyone is suspicious, there's a crack of thunder, and next thing you know, Col Mustard has been shot. Who could have done such a thing? Everyone splits up in pairs to go search the house.

 
The second, and I think best issue, is mostly from Miss Scarlet's perspective. Boddy has a huge collection of art depicting her. In flashback, we learn that Scarlet is an artists' muse who keeps killing her artists for vaguely feminist sounding reasons. During her search, Scarlet learns that Boddy knew what she was doing, and had been secretly helping her by partially cleaning the crime scenes.  By the end of the issue, Boddy is dead from the lead pipe, and Scarlet has been stabbed.

 
Issue three follows Mrs Peacock and Mr Green, who are secretly a couple. Peacock likes Before & After photos, so a lot of the panels in this issue come in pairs like that. Throughout the series, Shaw draws everyone except the main characters very cartoony. In flashback, we see that Peacock had a rich husband - the Monopoly man! Green killed the old guy with the candlestick, and Boddy added it to his collection. Plum and White accuse Green and Peacock of the recent murders just in time for the police to arrive and arrest them. But is that really what happened? (Spoiler - no, of course not.) We get the real solution right after, explained by the killer, while Green and Peacock are trapped in prison. But then the candlestick tips over at just the right moment, and exacts inanimate revenge.

 
This wasn't amazing, but it was kind of interesting. I liked how Shaw incorporated both bits of the original game, plus some codes, a nonogram with a clue, a memory quiz, and other fun details like that into the comic art. The mystery itself isn't all that interesting, but those metafictional art techniques make the whole enterprise more fun.

The Girl from the Other Side 6

 
 
The Girl from the Other Side 6
Siuil, a Run
by Nagabe
Seven Seas

2019

 

 

In the sixth volume of The Girl from the Other Side, we get some clarity on some issues, a new mystery, and a worrisome cliffhanger.

 
Teacher and Shiva have followed the map Shiva's aunt left them, and made it to a village that's further away and was abandoned longer ago. They think they'll be safe from human search parties there.
 

We see the two cursed soldiers searching for them, thinking they've found the pair, and preparing an ambush right outside their front door, and we see Teacher hearing a noise at the door and going to investigate. But it's kind of a trick! The cursed soldiers turn out to be at the old house Teacher and Shiva left behind. And the noise at the door is an Outsider who just wants to talk.

 
The Outsider confirms some things we sort of understood by now, but have never been laid out quite this clearly. The native Outsiders are all born from the Mother who lives in the lake who we met back in book 2. They're also cursed to lose their memories and succumb to injury, but their bodies, even just parts, can be returned to the lake, and reincorporated into the next generation of Outsiders. They all want to steal the souls of the human Insiders to take the souls to the lake, but it never works - the humans end up Cursed, looking like Outsiders, and doomed to turn into trees like Shiva's aunt did. Shiva is somehow different, a 'pure soul' who can't be cursed, and they really want to take her to Mother.

 
The visiting Outsider thinks that Teacher isn't really a Cursed human, but rather a native Outsider who has totally forgotten his origins. It points out that Teacher can't even remember his old name. Teacher thinks he remembers being Cursed, but I admit, the memory is ambiguous. Plus, as the Outsider notes, Teacher hasn't turned into a tree, for much longer than any other human lasts. Back in the old cabin, the two cursed soldiers search through what Teacher and Shiva left behind, and one thinks he knows that Teacher was the town doctor of a specific village, and thinks he therefore knows Teacher's human name. Mystery! Which theory will turn out to be right?

 
At the new cabin, Shiva accidentally falls out a window while cleaning, and Teacher catches her. So he's finally touched her, and after being confronted with so much evidence that she can't be cursed, he can't reinstate the no-contact rule. Shiva finally gets to give him a hug, and hold his hand when they walk. Shiva's just a little kid and needs human contact. She cries with happiness.

 
Then it snows, and they go for a long walk in the snow, and have a snowball fight. Teacher loses his locket, with the photo he thinks shows his human family, and Shiva insists he go look for it. He does, but then an ominous shadow looms over him... Shiva thinks he's come home, and opens the door for him, but instead it's one of the cursed soldiers, who found them after all!

 
I learned that there's an anime of this story that came out this year. (I think it's a movie or a short miniseries?) I'm going to wait until I finish reading it all before I watch though. At this rate, I'll be done by next summer!

Mushroom Rain

 
Mushroom Rain

by Laura Zimmermann
art by Jamie Green
Sleeping Bear Press

2022

 

 

Mushroom Rain is another children's picture book, this time non-fiction. I first saw it at a bookshop on a trip to Asheville, and I've been wanting to see it again ever since.

 
The majority of the book is written very simply for young readers, and serves as a showcase for Green's beautiful art. The last couple pages provide more information about every mushroom fact stated earlier, maybe for slightly older kids who want to know more, or maybe for parents, to help them answer questions that might come up along the way.

 
It rains, and mushrooms appear, painted simply, and depicted larger than life-size. We learn a bit about the staggering variety of mushrooms, about what eats them, about how the fungal mycelium works and how it persists when no part of it is visible above ground. We learn how mushrooms spread reproductive spores to spread the mycelium. We learn something I didn't know yet, that mushroom spores, lile other particulate, can help to seed clouds, and then we end where we began, the cycle complete, with a mushroom rain.

 
The primary attraction of this book is the art, but Zimmermann's writing is clear and informative, and should help kids understand the basics about an often mysterious branch on the tree of life.

Murder is Bad Manners

 
Murder is Bad Manners

by Robin Stevens
Simon & Schuster

2014, reprinted 2015

 

 

Murder is Bad Manners is a YA mystery and the first book of a series following 1930s British boarding school students Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong. It was originally published in England under the title Murder Most Unladylike.

 
Daisy is the daughter of a lord, allegedly the niece of a spy, the most popular girl in school, and someone whose public persona is very much a performance to please others. Hazel is the daughter of a businessman living in Hong Kong who gets shipped off to bolster her father's status, Daisy's more shy and less spectacular tag-along best friend, and the narrator of the book. They are secretly members of the two-person 'Wells & Wong Detective Society,' and they have an explicit Holmes and Watson style relationship, which is why Hazel keeps the case notes and tells us the story.

 
We get thrown straight into the deep end - the first chapter tells us about Hazel finding the dead body of Miss Bell, which then vanishes before she can show anyone, and introduces us to a veritable cavalcade of teachers (suspects) and fellow students (unwitting informants.) 

 
Daisy believes Hazel about the body, and the two of them are the only ones who know that Miss Bell has been murdered and that her resignation letter is a phony. A lot of the initial investigation has Daisy getting ideas for what to do next, and quite literally dragging Hazel along with her as she runs about the school - which seems to be pretty typical of their friendship generally.

 
Partway through, Daisy is convinced she knows what happened, while Hazel thinks they don't know the full story, and they fight when Hazel stands up for herself. Then their lead suspect dies too, meaning that Hazel was right ... and Daisy admits it. She still runs about tugging Hazel by her side, but also tries to be more humble about her ideas, and to treat Hazel more as a friend and less as a sidekick after that.
 

Eventually they figure out the full truth, and alert the police who are looking into the 'accidental death' of the second teacher. The police confront the killer using Daisy and Hazel's evidence while the two girls peek through a door. They get the satisfaction of being right, and justice is served.

 
This was fun and well-paced, with most chapters running only a few pages, and a division into parts providing a bit more structure. Daisy is an absolute dynamo, like Finny or Gatsby, while Hazel is someone I suspect more readers can see a bit of themselves in. I liked how much of the investigation happened via Daisy questioning her classmates under the guise of various popular girl activities. And I liked that 'Holmes' isn't right initially, and 'Watson' saves the day by finding the strength to stand up to her friend as an equal.

 
I also like that Hazel doesn't really romanticize the British boarding school life. Like the reader, she's an outsider to it, and is both appalled by some aspects and maybe more sympathetic to other parts than the girls who are 'from' that world. One suspect is an unfashionable short-haired woman who used to be roommates with Miss Bell until Miss Bell started dating the handsome new male teacher - I think Hazel understands what's up there and doesn't judge. 

 
Hazel also observes how many girls have 'pashes' (TOTALLY platonic, no-homo friend crushes) on Daisy, and again, I think Hazel gets that at least sometimes, a pash involves feelings that are only socially acceptable because everyone involved treats those feelings as less than serious and less than real.

The Little Wooden Robot and the Log Princess

 
 
The Little Wooden Robot and the Log Princess

by Tom Gauld

Neal Porter Books

2021
 

 

There was a time when I only saw either of their comics occasionally, and I couldn't distinguish between Grant Snider and Tom Gauld, especially since they both often write about books. But after reading a couple of each of their books last year, I've realized I like Gauld much better. He's witty, and his art is a bit more precise and stylized. Snider is more sentimental, and at times I find him saccharine or maudlin.

 
So I was excited to see Gauld's new children's book, The Little Wooden Robot and the Log Princess.
 

The King and Queen want children but are infertile. On the same night, they both sneak off to find help. One goes to the Inventor, who builds them a little Wooden Robot, and one goes to the Witch who enchants a log to become a little Log Princess. She turns back into a log when she sleeps, and so can't wake up on her own. The two children are siblings and best friends, and the Wooden Robot wakes up his sister every morning.

One morning, the Log Princess accidentally gets mixed up with some other logs and shipped off to be sold in the Frozen North. The Wooden Robot follows along and finds her, but decides not to wake her up yet so she won't be scared. He starts carrying her back home in a wagon, but eventually gets tired out. He wakes her up and explains, then shuts down. Now the Log Princess carries her brother partway home in a wagon, but eventually she gets tired too and falls asleep.

 
Disaster? No, because they're pretty close to their home, and also this is a fairy tale, so some friendly forest animals find them and bring them to the Witch. The Witch restores them, and they are happily reunited with their worried parents.

 
It's a cute story, and I like that Gauld wove a whole story around the idea of 'sleeping like a log' (a phrase he has the good sense to never include anywhere in the book!)

 
The standout art pieces are the detailed interiors of the Inventor's and Witch's houses, the landscape views of the boat trip north and the two kids asleep in the forest, and a couple of montage sequences. Both the Robot and the Princess get a page during their respective travels where they 'have too many adventures to recount here,' and we get a page of panels showing snapshots of their little side adventures, like getting kidnapped by Mischievous Pixies or meeting The Queen of the Mushrooms. These pages are inventive, and let Gauld hint at a typical fairy tale structure without losing momentum on his main narrative.

The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday

 
The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday
by Saad Hossain
TorDotCom

2019

 

 

In The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, we start the story with the deposed djinn monarch Melek Ahmar waking up waking up inside a coffin after something like 4000-5000 years of imprisonment and slumber. At the height of his prehistoric power, he had a lot of honorifics, including the titular Lord of Tuesday, but no one remembers him or particularly believes in djinn any more.

 
The first person Ahmar meets is Bhan Gurung, a former gukha soldier, now living as a hermit in a cave outside Kathmandu. Gurung bring Ahmar up to date. It's some time in the future, the Earth is polluted and depopulated, the atmosphere is full of toxic nano-robots, and all humans have cybernetic implants that connect them to the internet and generate good nanites every time they exhale. (This whole set-up seems unduly complicated for a 100ish page novella, but whatever, the implants also give people constant instantaneous medical care.) 

 
Kathmandu is run by a supposedly non-sentient, non-conscious AI named Karma. Karma gives out free food and housing, and runs the economy by setting a fair price for all transactions, and paying people for deeds that benefit the public good. (The only currency left is karma points.) Ahmar wants to be a king again, and Gurung wants revenge on one of the richest men in the city, so they set off to make trouble.

 
The duo briefly try raising an army of malcontents, only to discover there basically are no malcontents - Karma's version of UBI includes free beer, so even the gamblers and layabouts are basically happy to not rock the boat. Next they set up in a garden and start granting wishes. People can already get almost anything they want, so all the wishes are for very anti-social stuff. (Or so Hossain tells us, the only example actually we get to see is a woman wishing for an earthquake to destroy her neighbor's house.) 

 
Ahmar can in fact grant wishes, because he is literally made of magic, doesn't show up on camera, can't be predicted by algorithms, and breaks all the tech around him. Karma is understandably worried, and brings in a human investigator to figure out how to make the djinn go away. The investigator figures out who Gurung wants revenge on and why - the guy got rich kidnapping people and selling them to cities with too low a population to ward of the bad nanites, Gurung's family was among the victims.

 
So the gurkha and the djinn go to confront the rich guy, and the investigator 'betrays' Karma by helping the outcasts get justice / revenge. The pair set off on a road trip, and in the aftermath of the rich guy's death, Karma and Kathmandu are both transformed, setting up two possible sequels. 

 
This thing definitely feels like a small part of a larger project. There's just way too much worldbuilding, and it's way too complex for a book of this size otherwise. There's a second teenage djinn who doesn't serve much purpose in the story, and the whole wish-granting interlude doesn't actually seem to advance anyone's plans; it just kills time for those characters while the investigator figures out the truth about the evil rich guy.

 
The depiction of the Karma AI was the most interesting part of the book for me. Hossain's depiction feels like it's in conversation with Westworld and Person of Interest about what an AI-run society would look like. Despite the way the initial set-up of Karma is implicated in the evil rich guy's human trafficking scheme, it Hossain's version seems considerably more utopian than the others. (I can't tell which, but Karma's behavior in the last section is either a failure at consistent characterization on Hossain's part, or a hint that Karma IS sentient and has been keeping that secret from the humans.)

Goldilocks

 
 
Goldilocks

by Laura Lam

Orbit

2020

 

 

The briefest possible description for Laura Lam's Goldilocks, though not entirely accurate, might be Interstellar meets Handmaid's Tale.

 
Set maybe 15-20 years in the future, Goldilocks presents us with a hot, crowded Earth, a planet of rising sea levels and mass migrations of climate refugees, and an America with a redpill misogynist president, and women's life chances restricted in a way that's more like the 1950s than like Gilead. But Lam's realism is effective. Her story benefits from her insights about how small the changes would need to be to make life nearly intolerable.

 
Billionaire tech girlboss Valerie Black and her adopted daughter Naomi (orphaned by a California wildfire), along with three other women who also trained to go to space but had their careers thwarted by a NASA that increasingly reserves its best jobs for men, launch a private rocket into orbit, where they steal a long-range NASA ship, and set off for Mars. Valerie has been a decades-long advocate for human migration to an exoplanet, and this is her attempt to make her dream a reality.

 
In Lam's telling, humans have discovered a habitable world 10 light years away, dubbed 'Cavendish,' and haven proven and tested space-warp flight to make the journey possible. There have been unmanned probes to Cavendish, bringing back seeds that botanist Naomi has figured out how to grow under simulated exoplanet conditions. But humans still haven't used the warp drive themselves, and no human has visited Cavendish. Valerie, Naomi, and the others aim to change that.

 
The prologue to the book depicts Naomi returning to Earth without ever having left the solar system, so we know from the beginning that the plan will fail. The question will be how. An accident? What kind? Sabotage? Who and why? The first half of the book is concerned with realistic problems that might confront a small crew trying to pilot an unproven ship on a pioneering mission. There's a growing sense that Valerie is keeping secrets, which comes to a head, and then drives the action of the second half.
Also, Naomi finds out she's pregnant.

 
Valerie initially seems like a 'good billionaire,' until Lam systematically attacks the idea that there could be any such thing. But my one qualm about the book is that some of Valerie's secrets come off as almost cartoon villainy that seems at odds with the restraint of the rest of her worldbuilding. Then again, have I seen our actual billionaires? 

 
Anyway, Naomi is pregnant, tensions among the crew are high, truths are revealed, and then there's a devastating pandemic back on Earth. Goldilocks was published in May 2020, so Lam must have finished it in 2019. I won't spoil exactly what happens, but as we know from page 1, the ship returns to Earth instead of going onward to Cavendish.

 
With the exceptions of Interstellar, and maybe the fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson, I think most recent works about human migration to another planet is subversive or deconstructive. It accepts the premise that we might try, but also treats those attempts as naive. Goldilocks ends with an epilogue set 30 years later, sometime in the 2060s or 70s, that is slightly more hopeful than the rest of the book, but overall, I'd count Lam among the pessimists who doubt the very premise of outrunning our problems on Earth by moving to another planet.

Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told 2

 
 
Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told 2
DC Comics

2007

 

 

Reading the second volume of Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told finishes off that DC series for me. As in volume 1, we get at least one more retelling of the origin story, and one more story about Robin (almost) dying. 

 

This volume is more focused on Batman stories that expand his fictional world though. The origin story is for the Batman of Earth-2. Robin appears to die because a villain puts a bunch of Robin mannequins into death traps just to mess with Batman psychologically.

 
We get a golden age story where Batman mows down monsters with a gatling gun. In another featuring Kathy Kane Batwoman and Bette Kane Batgirl, the heroes all get teleported to alien planets, and Batwoman kisses Batman and Batgirl kisses Robin. Huntress (Earth-2 Batman's daughter) shows up to help Earth-1 Batman solve a cold case about his dad funding the mob. We get a retelling of a chapter of Barbara Gordon Batgirl's origin story where Batman brings her into the Batcave for training. 

 
And while most of the stories in all these collections tend to be shorter, they found room to include a 56-page double issue where a whole lot of Batman's enemies team up to kill him, and where Jason Todd Robin first dons his mask.

The Plastic Magician

 
The Plastic Magician

by Charlie Holmberg
47 North

2018

 

 

I read Charlie Holmberg's first magician book, The Paper Magician, back in grad school. It turned into a trilogy, although I never read the second or third entries. Now Holmberg has started a new trilogy with new characters, set in the same world. Holmberg was mentored by Brandon Sanderson when she first started out writing, and it shows in the way she treats magic in these series - as a rational system with knowable rules that can be studied and applied much like science.

 
The Plastic Magician tells the story of Alvie, an American magician who just graduated from magician college, and gets accepted to a prestigious apprenticeship in England. Alvie and her supervisor, Magician Praff, are 'polymakers,' or plastic magicians. In Holmberg's world, magicians can each bond with a single man-made substance, and then imprint spells on things made from that substance. There are magicians who work with paper, glass, metal alloys, rubber, fire, and plastic is the newest man-made material to get a branch of magic. It's the late 19th century, and there's a Magical Industrial Revolution underway. Praff is an inventive Edison- or Tesla-like figure, and so Alvie's story is all about the thrill and competition of new discovery.

 
In short order after arriving in England, Alvie meets Magician Ezzell, Praff's biggest rival, the handsome young Bennett, a fellow apprentice studying paper magic, and Ethel, Bennett's sister who recently lost an arm in a factory accident. She also learns that someone has been burglarizing plastic magicians around London. Praff wowed the world a couple years ago with a plastic dome that projects images inside, but is in a bit of a creative rut. Alvie suggests making a plastic prosthesis for Ethel, and we're off to the races.

 
Praff wants to show off the prosthesis at the annual Discovery Convention, but first they have to figure out how to make a prosthesis that works, which includes studying anatomy, hydraulics, and inventing a new spell. Alvie also very tentatively starts dating Bennett, although they both keep getting interrupted by work, and the whole crime mystery ... which isn't really that mysterious, since there's only one suspect, and Alive, at least, suspects him immediately.

 
So, they invent a working prosthetic arm, Alvie and Bennett successfully confirm their feelings for each other, and it's time for the Discovery Convention. The final major bit of plot involves the mysterious criminal sabotaging Praff's car to stop him from getting to the convention, and stealing his trailer of inventions to present as his own. The criminal accidentally kidnaps Alvie because she was checking on the trailer, and locks her up in a basement. Alvie escapes, makes it to the convention, alerts the police, the police handle things competently and correctly, and the day is saved! Alvie also does a bit of magic that's supposed to be impossible while escaping, and so the fire of discovery is lit within her. I'd guess she'll finally figure it out in the eventual third book in this series.

 
Alvie is a fun character. She wants to wear pants instead of skirts, which Holmberg talks about somewhat too often. Alvie is good at focusing, good at mental math, and bad at 'turning it off' to interact socially. She's also really interested in discovery in a way that's easy to root for.

 
Holmberg treats the world of her stories as a basically just world. There's no reexamination of real historical inequalities associated with industrialization, and despite the wonders that magic can produce (including some paper magic that works like texting) the technology level is basically the same there as in the real Victorian England. It's light reading in that sense. An eventual third trilogy about "The Atomic Magician" would probably be too dark to fit in with the others, though perhaps "The Silicon Magician" about magic computers is an eventual possibility.

A Quick and Easy Guide to Asexuality

 
A Quick and Easy Guide to Asexuality

by Molly Muldoon and Will Hernandez
Limerence Press

2022

 

A Quick and Easy Guide to Asexuality belongs to the same series of short graphic nonfiction as the guide to they/them pronouns I read a couple months ago.

 
Muldoon and Hernandez define asexuality, explain the 'gray ace' spectrum and the 'split attraction model,' discuss growing up asexual and having adult romantic relationships, and delve into cultural representations of asexuality and (mostly online?) anti-ace discourse.

 
Muldoon and Hernandez define asexuality as not feeling sexual attraction or desire. They acknowledge that the amount of attraction people feel varies from individual to individual with some experiencing a lot, some none, and everyone else somewhere in the middle. 'Gray aces' experience some attraction, but still identify as asexual. Given the spectrum, what makes someone ace? M and H don't exactly say, but I would suggest that if someone feels enough less sexual desire than their peers that they feel excluded or isolated by the difference, then an asexual identity might help them understand themselves.

 
Muldoon and Hernandez also include 'demisexuality' as a kind of asexual identity. Demisexuals are people who only feel sexual attraction to someone after they already have emotional attraction or intimacy first. I would guess that this is actually very common, and might be true of a majority of people - but that's just a guess, and I might be wrong.

 
M and H distinguish between sexual attraction and sexual behavior to explain that asexual people sometimes (often?) voluntarily have sex, and that being in a sexual relationship doesn't mean you have to give up your ace identity.

 
One of the key experiences of growing up asexual seems to be feeling different or worrying about being 'broken' because you feel less sexual attraction than your peers. Muldoon and Hernandez say this is very common, and I wonder if it might be the defining experience that makes someone feel like as ace identity 'makes sense' for them. (I think almost everyone who hits puberty later than their peers experiences this feeling for awhile, but for asexuals, it's not temporary.)

 
M and H also seem to suggest that aces are very attuned to depictions of sexuality in the media, because they feel alienated by their own difference from those depictions. Indeed, it seems that some ace people may feel that our media are pushing a pro-sex agenda that is hostile to asexuals. Ironically, I am also aware of a number of voices claiming there is too little sexuality in the media, and that our culture is hostile to realistic depictions of sex and desire.

 
The 'ace stereotypes' M and H discuss include the 'asexual male genius' character in movies and on tv, very vocal hostility to the idea of asexuality in various comment sections online (which often threaten rape as a 'cure'), and ambivalence from some queer people about whether or not aces should be considered part of the queer community. They don't mention it, but I suppose that aces might feel especially bothered by the same 'when are you getting married? when are you having children?' pressure that a lot of people hate being on the receiving end of.

 
Muldoon and Hernandez also spend a lot of the book reassuring other aces that their identity is real and valid. While I do feel like I learned something from reading this, I think other aces are the primary audience for this book.

The Pterodactyl Hunters in the Gilded City

 
The Pterodactyl Hunters in the Gilded City

by Brandon Leach
Secret Acres
2016
 

 

After enjoying an excerpt in Best American Comics, I decided to seek out the complete Pterodactyl Hunters in the Gilded City. I enjoyed reading it, but also found it disappointing, because it's too short.
 

The story is set in New York, 1905, in a world where the city is besieged by pterodactyls that eat people. We follow Declan, an apprentice hunter, who spends his nights in a watchtower, while his older brother Eamon patrols the skies in a hot air balloon.

 
In the opening scene, Eamon kills the next-to-last pterodactyl in the city. Then he and his increasingly unreliable balloonmate Alfie spend the next night unsuccessfully hunting the last one. Declan spends the book wishing he could get a chance to hunt, wondering what he'll do for a job after all the pterodactyls are dead, and pining after Bridget, who has become a nun ... but maybe likes him too.

 
Declan prepares Eamon's harpoon guns, and when one misfires and blinds Eamon, he feels guilty. Alfie seems to think it was deliberate sabotage. Declan gets to take his brother's place in the balloon, he and Alfie find the last pterodactyl, and the book ends abruptly on a question - can Declan get over his nerves to take the shot and kill the monster, or will he hesitate or miss and let it get away? And either way, what will happen next?

 
While I guess technically the story is complete, I found this ending unsatisfying, and I also felt like Leach did too much set-up to have the story end there. Alfie and Bridget in particular seem to have their own stories in motion that are cut short.

 
I really like Leach's art. It's sketchy and loose, but full of life. None of the buildings he draws stand up straight or have any right angles, but he covers them in period details, and his backgrounds look like a neighborhood of tenements in turn-of-the-century New York. The pterodactyls seethe with anger. And the style really fits the story. Declan is kind of mopey and uncertain, feels like he hasn't accomplished anything, and doesn't know what to do next. The neighborhood is poor and has suffered from years of predation. The slightly shabby quality of the art suits that.

 
I just wish the thing was longer! The story can end there, but I don't think it should.

The Medieval Machine

 
The Medieval Machine
The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages

by Jean Gimpel

Penguin

1977
 

 

My introduction to the central idea of The Medieval Machine arrived via the television series Connections, which I loved when I was a kid. Connections talked about the productivity increase achieved by replacing human and animal power with waterwheels to mill grain, process cloth, saw wood, pump bellows, and hammer iron. Gimpel makes it all sound more interesting than I do, and it turns out, this is just the first chapter.

 
Gimpel also covers innovations in agriculture (using horses instead of oxen and 3-field instead of 2-field crop rotation), mining, and labor conditions. He notes the accidental over-use of wood and various forms of industrial pollution. And he talks about the rise of reason and science from around 1100 to around 1300, including the translation of Greek and Arabic texts into Latin. The pinnacle of Medieval science was the mechanical clock to replace the water clock. Invented to track the movements of the sun, moon, and planets, it accidentally produced uniform hours as a byproduct.

 
Gimpel notes that this period of growth and progress ended in the 1300s when famines, Black Death, and wars reduced the European population and turned both the Church and the general public toward mysticism (with anti-witch violence representing official mysticism using torture and murder to suppress popular mysticism.) Some of the perception of the Renaissance as such a contrast against the so-called 'Dark Ages' is because of the poor conditions in the 1300s, which were much worse than in the preceding 200-300 years.

 
I wish that, in his epilogue, Gimpel hadn't chosen to claim that 1975, when he finished his text, was at or near the 'end of an era' for the West that would be similar to the end of the Medieval industrial revolution. Let's start with the obvious reason first - computers. At the same time that Gimpel was claiming that the inventiveness of Western minds was spent and no new important inventions would be coming along to significantly change things for perhaps hundreds of years, computers were already transforming the operations of business, and home computers and the internet were only a few years away.

 
My second reason is that Gimpel's claim is based on the idea of historical cycles of what we'd currently call 'vibes.' Maybe it's my sociological training in grad school, or maybe I'm just 'vibe-blind,' but I'm deeply distrustful of predictions made on the basis of moods or cycles. 

 
Yes, anything that rises or falls must eventually peak, and either plateau or reverse. But societies aren't just one thing. Every society has its progressives and traditionalists, rationalists and mystics, authoritarians and liberals. Their numbers may change, and the balance of power, but they are all always present and always pushing for their preferred vision. They are all always winning in some respects and losing in others. I don't believe in the inevitable rise or decline of anything. The future will be determined by people competing to make their ideals win out, not by impersonal historical cycles. And whatever happens next won't be the end of anything, because there will always be another 'next' after that.

Fantastic Four: Grand Design

 
Fantastic Four: Grand Design

by Tom Scioli

Marvel Comics

2020

 

 

I've read a lot of good graphic novels this year, but I haven't had the best luck with my superhero picks. Fantastic Four: Grand Design is Tom Scioli's attempt to do for the F4 what his colleague Ed Piskor did for the X-Men. In my opinion, he's not nearly as successful, either at creating a sense of overarching narrative, or at telling a comprehensible story on a panel-by-panel basis.

 
In addition to the story of the Fantastic Four, spanning roughly from their 'creation' in the ill-fated space flight to the birth of Reed and Sue's son, Franklin. We also see the Watcher, the Inhumans, Galactus and the Silver Surfer, Black Panther, Namor, and of course, Doctor Doom. There are a lot of other characters, mostly villains, who show up for a single panel here and there. 

 
Because I watched reruns the F4 cartoon as a kid, I at least recognize some of them, but the effect is less like a summary than like watching something on fast forward and just catching glimpses of key frames as you speed through. I don't think this is solely the fault of the Grand Design format; I had a similar experience reading Scioli's Transformers vs GI Joe a few years ago.

 
The book collects both issues of Scioli's miniseries, and the art is notably worse in the second issue. Scioli also does the same thing as Piskor with his colors, where everything is muddy and fuzzy to imitate the look of opening a decades old comic today. But Scioli's colors are muddier, and he never takes advantage of the off-white background to have 'special effects' visually pop in real pure white. This seems like a missed opportunity in general, and especially considering the nature of the Invisible Girl's powers, plus all the various cosmic energies getting invoked. 

 
Scioli's one really big change to the original art is to draw Sue, whenever she's invisible, as having her eyes, skeleton, and internal organs visible to the audience (but not the other characters), like one of those old Visible Woman anatomical models.

 
Even Fantastic Four fans are probably better off skipping this one.

Giantess

 
Giantess
The Story of a Girl Who Traveled the World in Search of Freedom
by JC Deveney
art by Nuria Tamarit
Magnetic Press

2022

 

 

I purchased Giantess from Kickstarter. It's a recent French graphic novel that tells a fairy-tale-like fantasy story about Celeste, a giantess who goes on a long adventure trying to learn about the world, find a place in it, and live in a gender-egalitarian community.

 
The story opens with a family of farmers with six sons finding a giant infant and adopting her. As they grow up, the sons all go off to take their place in the world. Celeste wants to see things too, but her parents want to protect her. As a young woman she's already 20 or 30 feet tall, and I think she may keep growing throughout the book.

 
So, Celeste sneaks off with a traveling peddler to see a festival. She damages a building and runs away. She meets a knight sent to arrest her, who takes her to his castle. During the months of her pre-trial imprisonment, he falls in love with her. She decides to go home, and repels a foreign invasion along the way. She's rearrested, and placed in a dungeon with other woman, who are all being punished by a cruel inquisitor, who believes they all serve a witch. The inquisitor tries to burn them all at the stake, when they are saved ... by the witch!

 
The witch leads the women to the swamp, where she teaches them medicine and encourages them to teach others. Eventually Celeste leaves with an actress and joins her troupe. She falls in love with the tightrope walker. The troupe is invited to perform in a Venice-like city, then to stay. Celeste falls in love with the prince, and marries him, but cannot give birth to an heir. To save the royal face, she's sent to a convent, where she temporarily loses herself to religious fervor.

 
Eventually she escapes again, and goes to live on Greek-like island. She hears of a shipwreck, and goes to investigate the rumors of mermaids. She finds an island of women, but eventually learns it's as unequal as the wider world, in its own way. She escapes with the men and children, and they go to make their new home in an inaccessible valley near her original home.

 
Throughout the book, Celeste is portrayed as curious about the world, fond of books, and profoundly respectful to the tiny people around her. She learns medicine and uses her knowledge to help the poor. She observes the ways men and women are treated differently in traditional society, and longs for equality. In each of the places she stops, it's easy to imagine her becoming legendary, because she disrupts the local customs and forces them to do something new.

 
Celeste's movements through tbe world are often prompted, not just by her curiosity, but by love and her family. In each place she goes, she eventually re-meets one of her brothers, and their familial loyalty to each other is part of what prompts the changes she sets in motion in each place.

 
The art is very pretty, and the story feels at once classic and contemporary. Perhaps 'timeless' would be the right word. There are a lot of details that make Celeste's world feel like a playful reimagining of the real one, like almost Venice, or the mention of 'The Ulyssiad' as a source of mermaid stories right before Celeste sets of for the Themyscira-like island of women. Buying this one was probably the only way I was going to get to read it, and I'm glad I did.

Duckworth, the Difficult Child

 
Duckworth, the Difficult Child
by Michael Sussman
art by Julia Sarda
Atheneum Books

2019

 

 

There's a bookstore near-ish where I live that specials in children's books and YA, and their restrooms are wallpapered with decoupage made of illustrated pages. One page really caught my eye, and thanks to some internet sleuthing, I managed to track it down.

 
Duckworth, the Difficult Child is about a little boy who (from his perspective) gets swallowed whole by a giant snake, or (from his parents' perspective) insists on wearing a Halloween snake costume around the house, pretending he's been swallowed. The artwork in the book is firmly on Duckworth's side.

 
I really Julia Sarda's art in this. She uses a lot of bold colors and patterns against a white background, and while she uses lines for internal details within each figure, she doesn't draw visible outlines around any of them. It's quite distinctive, and I love it. The giant orange snake dominates every page it's on, and manages to look neither threatening nor goofy.

 
I was probably a 'difficult child' the way Duckworth's parents mean it, so it was fun to read about a kid with a big imagination, who is oblivious to social cues, who still muddles through okay by the end.

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me

 
 
Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me
by Mariko Tamaki
art by Rosemary Valero-O'Connell
First Second
2019

 

 

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me  is a graphic novel about a teenage lesbian's emotional journey to finally be the one to break up with her pretty but inconsistent girlfriend.

 
Freddy is Asian-American and has a White father. She lives in present-day California, and has a racially diverse, all-queer friend group. In addition to watching the story unfold, we also get a kind of voice-over narration as Freddy writes several emails to an online advice columnist, and at the end, as the columnist writes back.

 
The story opens at a high school Valentine's Day dance. Freddy is there with her friends. Laura Dean shows up late, sweeps Freddy off her feet for a few dances, then disappears, until Freddy finds her making out with another girl in an empty classroom. Later, Laura breaks up with Freddy by text. They stay broken up for a week, until Laura suggests they get back together, and Freddy agrees. This is the third time this has happened, hence the title.

 
While they're broken up, Freddy is miserable, despite her friends' attempts to help her, but when they get back together, she becomes a bad friend in other ways, skipping out on her friends on short notice whenever Laura texts. The person who suffers the most from this is Doodle, who obviously has a crush on Freddy, and is also going through something difficult in secret, and really needs her friend's support. Eventually Freddy learns the self-respect she needs to break up with Laura, and at prom, we see her and Doodle dancing together.

 
Rosemary Valero-O'Connell's art is pretty. It's black outlines on white, with a couple shades of grey and one shade of pink used as accent colors. This style of having a single accent color, used artistically rather than for symbolic meaning, is something I've now seen a few times in recent comics.

 
I think this one would actually be appropriate for teenagers. It also won an ALA award for excellent YA literature. We see some kissing, and a few panels of Freddy and Laura lying on top of a bed in tshirts and boxer shorts, but this is a story about emotions, mostly. We also hear a reference to the existence of heterosexual sex, that there are such things as condoms, that they can break, and pregnancy can result.
 

Although all the characters are queer, what we see them struggle with is not understanding what their identities or sexualities are, but rather, what to do with them, with universal questions about what you deserve from a relationship, or how to balance your partner and your friends.

Nonsense Novels

 
Nonsense Novels
by Stephen Leacock
NYRB

1911, reprinted 2004

 

 

More than anything else, reading the short stories in Stephen Leacock's Nonsense Novels reminds me of an afternoon spent watching Looney Tunes. Each story parodies one of the popular genre fiction styles of its day. 

 
Leacock published the collection in 1911, so they were written a good 20-30 years before the cartoons they resemble, but it would be easy, for example, to envision Daffy Duck as Doorlock Holmes acting out the role of the detective in Leacock's mystery story. (Robert Coover's short story "Hat Act" feels like a Tex Avery cartoon in much the same way.)

 
There's also a ghost story, a Gothic romance with an orphaned governess, a Horatio Alger style rags-to-riches story, a story of piracy and shipwrecks, a sentimental Christmas story, and a utopian future history scifi story, along with others belonging to genres that have died out, or at least I'm unfamiliar with.

 
Leacock relies on dramatic irony for a lot of his humor. Although he writes ridiculous variations on classic stories, and the characters are all idiots, the narration is always 'straight.' Leacock trusts his audience to know enough about the genres to get the joke. 

 
The Great Detective spends his whole story deducing that the kidnapping victim he's searching for is a dog, never finds the poor thing, uses his mastery of disguise to imitate the victim and win the dog show, and then gets put down by the city dogcatcher. A man communicates with the ghost haunting his neighbor's house exclusively by leaving cash on his neighbor's coffee table - when the cash vanishes, that's the ghost talking back, right? 

 
I loved the rags-to-riches story. Everyone in the big city (even the police) punches the plucky young man when he announces his intention to do honest work. But when he takes up a life of crime, they treat him like a celebrity. In the house he burgles, he can't set any of the wooden furniture or even the books on fire, because 'they've been fireproofed,' but the iron elevator and its steel cables catch fire instantly...

 
Apparently Leacock was a student of Thornstein Veblen, and I feel like it shows a bit in his attention to class inequality, and the thoroughness of his 'boring, safe future' utopia. I think one's enjoyment of these stories depends on familiarity with the styles being parodied, but the ones where I was fully in on the joke, I enjoyed a lot.

The Girl from the Other Side 5

 
 
The Girl from the Other Side 5

Siuil, a Run

by Nagabe
Seven Seas

2018

 

 

In the previous volume of The Girl from the Other Side, Shiva was reunited with her aunt, Shiva's aunt turned into an Outsider, Shiva and her aunt briefly lived together with Teacher, and then one of the Outsiders from the forest brought Shiva and Teacher the aunt's severed head.

 
In volume 5, the first thing we learn is that Shiva's aunt isn't dead exactly, she's turned into a living tree, and shed her Outsider skin during the transformation. Apparently this happens to everyone who is Cursed, sometime after they lose all their memories, which also always happens. Teacher wonders why he's lasted so much longer than the aunt did. The forest outsider also says some more cryptic things about how Shiva is a soul and how the other Outsiders want to retrieve souls and bring them to their Mother.

 
Shiva gets mad at teacher and they have a fight. He knew the aunt was losing her memories and didn't warn Shiva.

 
After the fight, Teacher goes off into the woods alone. He meets another soldier from Inside who's trying to retrieve Shiva. The soldier has become an Outsider, and nearly succeeds in chopping up Teacher with his sword. The soldier says the king wants to get Shiva back so she can be sacrificed and her soul can be consecrated to their god. (The imagery showing the soldier's plan is particularly grotesque.) Some Outsiders from the forest intervene and Teacher escapes.

 
He rushes back to the abandoned house he and Shiva have been living in. They fight again, then talk, then kind of make up. They also find a map Shiva's aunt left that shows another village further out. Teacher thinks they should walk there to get away from the soldier. On the walk, he tries to understand all the things he's heard about Shiva and souls and the Curse, but he can't. (I don't understand it yet either!) This book ends with Shiva and Teacher arriving at a new village.

 
By this point, unanswered questions and cryptic, incomplete answers are both starting to pile up. One of the Outsiders seems to have implied that the Curse came from Inside, somehow, and maybe that all Insiders (that is, the humans living in towns and villages inside the wall that separates them from the forest) have souls stolen from the Mother of the Outsiders. The Insiders' god is also called a Father, so I feel like this is all related to some original divine couple, but I can't quite make out what happened in the past or how all the pieces fit together. Hopefully volume 6 will provide a few more answers!

Fear of Fighting

 
 
Fear of Fighting
by Stacey May Fowles

art by Marlena Zubar
Invisible Publishing

2008

 

 

Fear of Fighting is another book I've had on a to-read list forever, and can no longer remember what prompted me to seek it out. It's a novella or short novel narrated in the first-person by Marnie. She recently got dumped by Ben, her boyfriend of two years, and we watch her slide into depression.
 

Marnie pines for Ben, feels alone and lonely, feels invisible. She quits her office job, drifts apart from her friends and family, lets her cellphone lapse, stops leaving her apartment entirely. She spends the winter inside, getting everything delivered. She reminisces about her relationship, and cyberstalks Ben and his new girlfriend on social media. Ben is in a band, has a dog, and honestly doesn't sound that great.

 
Then, unexpectedly, spring arrives, and Marnie starts feeling better. She goes outside again and reconnects with people. Ben's new girlfriend comes over in tears because she's sure he's cheating on her. The two women get drunk, make out, and steal Ben's dog. As summer approaches, Marnie moves into a new apartment and a new phase of her life.

 

Fear of Fighting came out in 2008, and it's a lot like Radio Iris except with first-person narration. If I'd tried to write a literary novel in my early 20s, it might have looked a lot like these two. There are real limits to 'writing what you know.'

 
In fact, one of my main experiences reading Fear of Fighting was an acute awareness of how different I am now than I was then, and how books like this speak to me differently now. There was a different experience I could've had if I'd read it when it first came out, but it's no longer available to me.

 
I did appreciate following the narrator through her depression and out the other side. Sometimes in stories like this, the Sad Girl's life just gets worse and worse and then the story ends on that lowest point.

 
The book is illustrated by Marlena Zubar, whose art here reminds me somewhat of Carson Ellis. Each of the 40ish short chapters gets its own illustration, which slightly surreally depicts an object or mood mentioned in the narration