The Comet

 
The Comet
by Joe Todd-Stanton

Flying Eye Books

2022

 

 

I saw The Comet while out shopping at a record and comic book store last week, got drawn in by the cover and a flip-through of the interior art, and decided to pick it up. It's a children's picture book, and just very lovely to look at.

 
Nyla and her dad live in the woods, and she's happy. Then they move into the city. Nyla's dad starts a new job and she starts going to school. It's not what she's used to and she doesn't feel at home.

 
One night Nyla sees a comet out the window and wants to draw it. The comet's tail becomes a plant with countless flowers and leaves. Nyla draws on the walls, the furniture, the stacks of moving boxes, the floor.
(Why do kids do this? It seems almost like a fugue state. I did something similar once at 5 or 6, and even immediately afterward didn't know why I'd done it!)

 
Nyla's dad is mad at first, then understands. We see a montage of them cleaning up, then redecorating to make it feel like home. He paints the walls and lets Nyla paint on leaves to create a wallpaper effect. We see a cutaway of the apartment building, and their new friends on every floor. Nyla is finally happy in her new home in the city.

 
As I said, it's a very pretty book, especially the floral / celestial motifs that author and artist Joe Todd-Stanton carries throughout.

The Sum of Small Things

 
 
The Sum of Small Things
A Theory of the Aspirational Class

by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

Princeton University Press

2017
 

 

The Sum of Small Things is a sociological study of the consumption habits of what Currid-Halkett calls 'the aspirational class' - a group defined less by their economic situation and more by their education and lifestyle. Her research is based on a national database of consumer spending and interviews with producers and consumers and producers.

 
Currid-Halkett's main argument is that America's cultural elite no longer engage in the same kind of 'conspicuous consumption' of luxury goods as they did in the past and instead focus on new forms of consumption that are less visible but may do more to exacerbate inequality.

 
Currid-Halkett defines the 'aspirational class' as roughly the same group of people as David Brooks' 'bohemian bourgeoisie' or Richard Florida's 'creative class.' More formally, she identifies them based on their receiving higher education, placing a high value on knowledge and acquiring new knowledge, and using knowledge to make the 'right' decisions about consumption. Economically, their income levels vary widely, but to the extent they can afford it, they consume in similar ways. Specifically, they try to spend money on things that are healthy, environmentally friendly, made by fair labor practices, made exceptionally well, or some combination.

 
Currid-Halkett identifies three consumption trends that have largely replaced old-fashioned conspicuous consumption. To the extent that the rich still buy showy luxury goods these days, it's things like watches, boats, and art that are truly out of reach of others. Other luxury purchases tend to be the non-aspirational rich, what Patrick Wyman calls 'America's local gentry.'

 

'Inconspicuous consumption' takes two forms. One is using the 'right' knowledge to buy things that don't necessarily cost more, but demonstrate that you have the 'right' taste. NPR is free, the New Yorker and New York Times cost about the same as others news subscriptions, but they both demonstrate that you're already consuming the correct news and provide the correct takes on a wealth of other topics. Currid-Halkett doesn't mention it, but 'politically correct' speech is probably an example as well. Keeping up with the most polite terminology and the reasoning behind it before it becomes the default mainstream way of saying something (if it ever does) is the very definition of something that costs no money but requires time spent acquiring and deploying a specific type of knowledge.

 
The other form of inconspicuous consumption (and arguably these two shouldn't be combined into one umbrella category) is spending on personal service that other people mostly don't see - housekeepers, nannies, tutors, private tuition, concierge health care. This kind of spending is mostly invisible to outsiders, gives the buyers more free time, improves their quality of life, and entrenches advantages for their children.

 
Conspicuous leisure means spending one's time in ways that don't make money - and indeed may cost a lot of money, or at least require a lot of unpaid time - and are thought to be healthy or improving somehow, like fitness and mindfulness classes. Her biggest examples are the very labor-intensive mothering practices like exclusive breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and attachment parenting.

 

'Conspicuous labor' is probably the most affordable consumption habit for middle-income aspirational class members. This refers to buying more expensive versions of ordinary consumer goods where the extra expense is justified by higher wages for the workers and (maybe) a higher quality of good. What's 'conspicuous' here is a labor process that is transparent, well-documented, and advertised, so that you know where your money is going. Any sort of fair-trade goods, anything 'craft' or 'artisanal,' even paying more to shop on Bookshop.org instead of Amazon.com would be examples.

Exercises in Style

 
 
Exercises in Style

by Raymond Queneau
translated by Barbara Wright

New Directions

1947, reprinted 1981
 

 

Exercises in Style is a collection of vignettes or flash fictions, with a twist. Each chapter tells the same story, but tells it in a different way.

 
The narrator is on a crowded bus and sees a young man with a long neck and a silly hat. The young man complains that his neighbor has been stepping on his toes on purpose. Then the young man sees an empty seat and rushes to sit down. Later, the narrator is back on the same bus and spots the same young man out the window, where a friend is advising him to add a button to his coat.

 
Queneau tries out as many variations as he can think of - as a business letter, as a haiku, a sonnet, a folk song, courtroom testimony, a comedic skit. He uses different narrators - the young man himself, the accused neighbor, a cranky reactionary, a woman. He tells versions that use as many as possible of certain kinds of metaphors or turns of phrase, colors, animals, the five senses.

 
Some are nearly unreadable, like when he drops the first, last, or middle half of every word, or when he adds an extra letter to the front, back, or middle of each. Translator Barbara Wright replaces a few with eqivalents, like a phoenetic text of a British person doing a terrible French accent instead of the reverse, or Cockney rhyming slang instead of medieval French peasant talk.

 
Although nothing if consequence happens in the story, and every chapter tells the same story in a different voice, Queneau's wit and humor keeps it moving at a good pace and keeps it from getting boring. That said, while you would be hard pressed to spend more than an hour and a half of reading time on this one, I also can't imagine trying to finish it in a single session, or even in one day.

Asterios Polyp

 
 
Asterios Polyp
by David Mazzucchelli
Pantheon

2009

 

 

I think Asterios Polyp first caught my eye at the campus bookstore when I was in grad school. I probably leafed through it and saw the interesting art, but it wasn't until I saw an excerpt from it again recently in a volume of Best American Comics that I decided to give it a read. I'm glad I did. This is up there with Berlin as one of my favorite graphic novels of the year.

 
The plot Asterios Polyp is relatively straight forward. What makes it special is the character work and the art. A lot of the characters are intellectuals or believers of one sort or another, and they talk about what they think. The art is special in a way that's hard to describe, but I'll give it a try. One thing that's easy to say is that the art makes the ideas come alive.

 
The story is narrated by Asterios's dead twin Ignatz, who died at birth. Throughout his life, we see Asterios having a kind of survivors guilt or imposter syndrome, where he feels like he's living Ignatz's life, but doing a worse job of it than his brother would've if their fates had been reversed.

 
The plot has two strands that alternate every other chapter. There is no black ink in this book, by the way, purple is the one dark color. So in the present day (2000), in purple and yellow and white, a 50 year old Asterios wakes up to find his Manhattan apartment struck by lightning. With nothing but his wallet and the clothes on his back, he takes a bus out of the city and starts a new life. He works as an auto mechanic for Stiffly, who speaks in aphorisms but always says them wrong, and rents a room from Stiffly and his wife Ursula, a sort of witchy woman who believes in past lives. Slowly, Asterios makes friends and finds a kind of peace. Then he's beaten up in a bar fight and decides to try to return to the old life he left behind.
 

The past is shown in purple, neon pink, white, and bright cyan blue. Asterios is the child of Greek immigrants. He grows up to become an architect who teaches at Cornell. He's a successful theorist, but none of his designs is ever built. He's an extremely binary thinker, and someone who knows a lot and thus thinks he always knows more than others. He's also witty, charming, and well-liked. (I fear becoming so sure of myself that I act like he does.) He meets shy artist Hana and they fall in love. She designs costumes for a play about Orpheus for a choreographer whose every utterance is either a double entendre or naked flirtation. In the process of working on the play, Asterios's arrogance and jealousy poisons their relationship, and they divorce. When Asterios finally stops running away, he goes to reconcile with Hana.
 

The art illustrates the ideas people talk about in a way that demonstrates them and makes them seem true. My favorite example is when a musician talks about overlapping melodies, and the panel borders make his idea about music visible. 

 
One idea is Ignatz's, that everyone has a secret self, and when two people are compatible, these selves merge. And so at key moments we see Hana as crosshatched pink shading and Asterios as a man made up of the blue outlines of cylinders and cubes. When they fight, each is alone in their own style; when they come together, the styles merge.

 
The two story strands work very well in parallel. The Orpheus play and the bar fight coincide, and we see the play rendered as Asterios's flight from his old life to an underworld where he tries and fails to retrieve Hana from the choreographer, and we understand why they broke up and why he tries to go back to get her. As I said, it's a relatively simple, realistic story, elevated to art by the way it is told.

Angelmaker

 
 
Angelmaker

by Nick Harkaway

Knopf
2012
 

 

Angelmaker is, first and foremost, a rollicking good time. Harkaway tells us the story of Joe Spork, a clockmaker and son of an infamous gangster, who repairs what turns out to be a WWII-era clockwork doomsday device, decides to turn it off, and embraces his childhood lessons in crime to outwit the WWII-era supervillain who's trying to use the thing to end the world. We secondarily follow Edie Bannister, former lady super spy, long-time enemy of the supervillain, and lover of the device's inventor.

 
I don't know if Harkaway's writing qualifies as capital L Literature. I might describe it as ascended pulp, lying somewhere on the spectrum between Michael Chabon and Thomas Pynchon in his efforts to tell as fun and thought provoking story in the most interesting way he can. You'll notice the plot outline isn't that long or that complex. Instead, Harkaway fills his 500 pages by taking his time to develop his characters, filling out his world with detail, allowing information to be revealed at an almost leisurely pace, and telling each incident in a way that attempts to maximize its impact. It could probably be a bit shorter, but it's an awful lot of fun.

 
(Harkaway probably deserves to be better known and liked by SF/F fans. How many thousands of pages have fans of Malazan the Fallen, Wheel of Time, or even Game of Thrones slogged through, often while complaining about how much they don't like these long series they're reading?) 

 
I could also describe this one as Cryptonomicon meets The Rise and Fall of DODO. During WWII, orphan turned girl-spy Edie gets connected with a religious order of monks who build extremely well-made steampunk devices to better know God, and revere the words of John Ruskin. Edie works in a mobile code-breaking lab inside a train, then gets recruited to ride a steampunk submarine to South or Southeast Asia, to rescue a lady scientist who's building a machine for a supervillain who seems a bit like an attempt at a non-racist Fu Manchu. 

 
Shem Shem Tsien had a mother of minor British nobility and a father in the royal family of a tiny principality bordering the British Empire. Using what he learned at Oxford, Eton, etc, he killed the rest of his dad's royal family and took over the country, Doctor Doom style. The lady scientist, Frankie, thinks she's building a device to prevent wars, but Tsien wants to use it, initially for something like world domination and later for divine apotheosis. Edie disguises herself as a man, has the obligatory dinner meeting with Tsien, then rescues Frankie and blows up her lab. Later, Edie and Frankie become lovers.

 
Frankie's machine is supposed to save the world by letting people Know the Truth. Not just to perceive the world through our imperfect senses, but within its field, to correctly and philosophically Know what's true and what's not. The first time she tests the device, she accidentally kills a nearby village, because it turns out the human mind can't handle unlimited truth. In theory, if left on, it would collapse all quantum waveforms and usher in a perfectly deterministic world and/or universe, with consciousness either vanishing or only allowing minds to observe the unstoppable, uncontrollable behavior of their automaton-like bodies. Doomsday, indeed. Frankie later fine-tunes the device to operate at a much lower level, and much much later, geriatric Edie gets Joe Spork to fix it so she can turn it on, to make the world better by giving us more Truth without overwhelming everyone or destroying consciousness and free will. 

 

Edie's parts of the book were honestly my favorite.

Joe fixes the machine and reminisces about his childhood growing up as a Prince of Crime under his gangster father. After fixing it, he realizes that both a shadowy X-Files-like government agency is after him and that he's being chased by Nosferatu-like monks who somehow belong the same Ruskinite Order as Edie's friends from before. He gets help from hypercompetent legal fixers who used to keep his dad out of prison (well, the children of the original fixers), and becomes the boyfriend of a particularly lusty lady investigator. At some point he's captured by the government and tortured by the vampire monks, but his lawyer friend and fixer girlfriend get him out again, and this experience prompts his decision that obeying the law won't protect him, and the only way to stop the device is to lean in to becoming a gangster in his own right.

 
Harkaway tells the first ⅔ of the book through a mix of a little present-day action and long flashbacks, so that we learn the history of the device at the same pace Joe does. Joe's arrest serves as a kind of fulcrum, and everything after that is a madcap attempt to defeat the somehow-still-alive Shem Shem Tsien before he can turn himself into a god and everyone else into philosophical zombies. Harkway has sympathy for the idea that knowing the Truth is often a good thing, and several characters have non-machine-assisted revelations that help them make better decisions afterward. He shows a glimpse of what perfect-knowledge induced paralysis would look like, and gives us at least one chance to feel that moment of knowing the truth without him having to directly tell us, so that we can feel what the characters are feeling at that time. (Incidentally and unrelatedly, that "inception" moment is what the best teaching feels like too.)

 
I will probably switch it up by reading some shorter stuff after this, but this was easily one of the best and most enjoyable things I've read in awhile.

The Very Nice Box

 
 
The Very Nice Box

by Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman
Mariner Books

2021
 
 

The Very Nice Box is kind of a wild ride. It has a great cover illustration that makes it look like a contemporary romance novel, and it includes a romance plot, but it's not so straightforward. It's also a workplace comedy, a satire, and character study of its protagonist, and in places even a thriller.

 
We follow Ava, a senior engineer of containers at STADA, an IKEA-like design firm that makes things like thr Practical Sofa, the Precise Wristwatch, and Ava's current project, the Very Nice Box. Ava starts the novel very serious and proper, in part because she's still grieving over a car crash that killed her girlfriend and parents several years earlier. She likes her work and her routines, and has no time or interest in anything else.

 
Ava's orderly life is upset by a series of changes at work. Mat, a handsome bro in marketing gets promoted and starts all kinds of positivity and wellness initiatives - including mandating that everyone either attend a certain number of seminars or use the SHRNK psychiatry app, which Ava does. Also protestors are targeting STADA's new building. 

 
When Ava's car gets vandalized, she gets a ride home from Mat, develops a crush, and following the advice of her SHRNK, pursues the relationship, even though all the turmoil restarts traumatic flashbacks to the crash. Despite the stress, and Mat's bro-y flaws, she finds herself falling in love.

 
HR finds out about the relationship and sends Mat to Ohio. Ava goes on a couple dates (one with a man, one with a woman,) but still misses him. He comes back and moves in, and finally the glow begins to wear off. Ava has to decide if she really likes Mat, or if it was just short-term infatuation.

 
Woven through are a couple mysteries - who is behind the increasingly surreal STADA protests?, and what secrets from Mat's past explain why he joined the Good Guys, a group that seems halfway between AA and a redpill organization? While I don't want to give away the answers, I will say that the last few chapters are a rollercoaster of excitement and tension.

 
The style of the prose shifts over the course of the book to match Ava's shift from being compacted by grief to opening back up. Queerness is presented casually and treated normally. The parodic elements (mostly aimed at companies and corporate jargon) are genuinely funny, but there's also a much sharper critique of certain aspects of contemporary heterosexuality and masculinity that grows throughout and drives the conclusion of the story. I came in looking for light-hearted romance and double entedres, and got much more than I expected!

Gender Queer

 
 
Gender Queer
by Maia Kobabe
Oni Press

2019

 

 

Gender Queer is a graphic memoir. I heard about it and picked it up because it has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the most frequently challenged and banned books in the recent conservative campaign to control public education and censor queer people's voices and lives. 

 
Gender Queer is the story of Kobabe's childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, with an emphasis on the events that helped em understand eir identity as nonbinary and asexual. About 3⁄4 of the way through the memoir, Kobabe decides on the e / em / eir pronouns. (Personally, I like the singular they / them / their pronouns. I think they're simpler and more effective for communicating to others. But my preference is not the one that matters here.)

 
Kobabe was born to hippie parents in northern California and lives eir entire life in what appears to be the most liberal, understanding, and welcoming community any queer kid could hope for. Kobabe struggles throughout eir life to understand eir gender and sexuality, a task that is difficult because of the general human difficulty in understanding oneself, and because of the lack (until relatively recently) of widely known identity terms to describe a person who is neither a man nor a woman. 

 
It does not appear to be difficult, at least as Kobabe tells eir own story, because of prejudice, discrimination, or anti-trans violence, none of which e experiences. Other people don't always understand Kobabe, but that's sometimes because of their ignorance about the existence of the emerging nonbinary social identity (an ignorance that Kobabe shares for most of eir life), and sometimes because of Kobabe's difficulty in telling anyone else how e feels about emself.

 
Kobabe experiences a desire to be flat-chested, a dislike of being called a girl or woman, a profound discomfort with eir period and trauma from gynecological exams, a difficulty navigating romantic relationship (which e enters mostly out of curiosity and ends due to an almost total lack of desire), multiple comings out as e gained new self-understanding, and eventually a degree of comfort with the adult life e's built for emself. 

 
Kobabe tells eir story with admirable honesty and directness, even details that might feel unflattering or embarrassing. I don't have children or know what's 'appropriate' for them, but I would say that anyone who's old enough to watch an R movie is old enough to read this, and anyone who's struggling to understand their own gender or sexuality might benefit, even if it makes their parents uncomfortable.
 

Had e been born in the 1960s or 70s, I imagine Kobabe might perhaps have identified as stone butch. Today the nonbinary identity is more widely known. In between was a period of where there were perhaps fewer options to understand and describe someone who has this particular constellation of feelings about sexuality and gender. 

 
I also struggled to understand myself in the late 1990s and early 2000s, although part of my difficulty was that I lived in a small town, the internet was new and I wasn't tech savvy, and once I learned that trans people existed outside of science fiction, the only images of trans women I saw (and initially the only other trans women I met in college) were very feminine, attracted to men, and mostly about twice my age. But like Kobabe, I eventually learned to understand myself and make peace with my body and identity.

The Girl from the Other Side 2

 
The Girl from the Other Side 2

Siuil, a Run

by Nagabe

Seven Seas

2017

 

 

In part 2 of the manga The Girl from the Other Side, we open in medias res with a mysterious second Outsider entering Teacher's cabin and trying to kidnap Shiva. Teacher fights the other off, but not before it tells Shiva that it knows where her aunt is. (Teacher believes her aunt is dead, but still hasn't told the little girl that.)

 
The next day they go investigate, and Teacher goes into a lake with several more outsiders after securing a promise that they won't touch Shiva. He meets the Outsiders' mysterious 'Mother,' and when he accuses them of trying to steal Shiva's soul, they tell him he doesn't understand anything, and suggest that the humans stole something when they built the wall that separates the Inside (the village) and the Outside (the forest).

Teacher is worried that Shiva has been cursed, but she doesn't show any symptoms. We learn that he used to be human, but was cursed and became an Outsider, which explains why he seems different from the others, maybe?

 
Meanwhile, back in the village, the soldiers who failed to kill Shiva in part 1 have new orders to kidnap her and bring her Inside for unknown reasons. To catch her, they use 'bait,' which turns out to be Shiva's aunt. She leads Shiva away from Teacher's cottage while he's out collecting water or firewood or something, and that's the cliffhanger that will lead into part 3.

 
I'm still enjoying Nagabe's art, although it's less cozy than last time. The trip beneath the lake is nice and spooky. I have a hunch that the human 'Insiders' are going to turn out to be the real villains of the story. I mean, right, so far we've seen them abandon a little girl in the woods, then try to kill her, then kidnap her, so yes, they're already the real villains of the immediate story, but I suspect that the building of the wall will turn out to be some sort of historic crime, like the Insiders created the curse that the Outsiders spread or something. Anyway, that revelation will have to wait for another volume.

Missoula

 
 
Missoula
Rape and the Justice System in a College Town
by John Krakauer
Doubleday

2015

 

 

From time to time, many of my coworkers will all read the same book. This time it was Missoula. (Look for me to read the enigmatic 7HEH at some point, for the same reason!)
 

Krakauer delivers what I understand to be his signature style of present-day reporting inter-mixed with historical background and relevant scientific research in a way that's engaging and impactful. It feels strange to call a book like this a page-turner, but certainly it's one I wanted to keep reading.

 
Missoula covers the cases of several acquaintance rapes, almost all involving football players, that took place at the University of Montana between 2008-2012, at a time when both UM and the town of Missoula were under investigation by the Department of Justice for their handling of reported rapes.

 
Krakauer uses one case, of a young woman who was raped by a childhood friend after he joined the UM football team, as the centerpiece of the book. He was expelled, arrested, pleaded guilty, sentenced to prison, and had his appeal for a more lenient sentence rejected. Along the way, we look at other cases where accused rapists are allowed to remain at school, are never arrested, or are found not guilty at trial. 

 
The one successful case is probably only successful because the rapist confesses to his crime on tape. Even then, the fans remain behind him, and each judicial decision requires the victim to advocate forcefully for him to face consequences. Every other case results in the rapist escaping any consequences.
 

Krakauer covers the current research on 'non-stranger rape.' About 25% or more of women will be raped in their lifetimes, usually while they're between the ages of 16-24, usually by someone they know, and most will never report it to the police. It's a much smaller proportion of men who rape, perhaps 5-10%, but almost all of those men become serial rapists, each responsible for hurting numerous others. They generally don't think of themselves as 'rapists' or what they do as 'rape,' and most are never punished. Police and the public tend to think that about half the women who accuse someone of rape are lying; in fact fewer than 10% of accusations appear to be false. Women who are raped by an acquaintance rather than a stranger, and women who consumed any drugs or alcohol beforehand, are less likely to be believed.
 

Acquaintance rape is a crime, it's against the law, but laws alone are not enough. Laws are just words on paper unless people are willing to enforce them. So if it's a crime, but the police won't arrest, prosecutors won't indict, juries won't convict, and the public won't believe, then it's a crime that will only rarely be punished, only under exceptional circumstances, like if the police record a confession, and the victim has both the stamina and social support to endure the trauma of multiple rounds of adversarial legal procedures. 

 
What we see in Missoula is that for a significant proportion of both the general public and the people with jobs in the criminal justice system, things like the local celebrity status of playing football and adages like 'boys will be boys' are enough to prevent those laws from being enforced in most cases. Although UM and Missoula were investigated by the DOJ, they are, unfortunately, very typical of colleges and town in America.

Rat Rule 79

 
 
Rat Rule 79

by Rivka Galchen

art by Elana Megalos

Restless Books

2019

 

 

Rat Rule 79 is a middle-grade book in the tradition of Alice in Wonderland and The Phantom Tollbooth. Fred (presumably short for Winifred) and her mother, an itinerant math professor, have just moved into yet another new apartment in a new city, it's the day before Fred's birthday, and Fred is mad at their whole situation. Their economic situation suggests that Fred's mom is a contingent faculty member who moves because she has to, rather than a star mathematician moving up the R1 ranks.

 
Fred refuses to fall asleep until her mom apologizes, then has a vision of her mom stepping through a portal and disappearing, so she follows after. Fred is transported to the Land of Impossibility, which is shaped by various math concepts and pun-logic. It's also officially ruled by the Rat, who is much-loved, currently missing, and has most recently issued Rat Rule 79, which forbids birthdays and birthday parties, as well as growing older and the passage of time more generally.

 
Fred quickly meets a depressed elephant named Downer, and Gogo, a fightin' mongoose. She agrees to help them find the Rat, and they agree to help her find her mom. They also run into trouble from characters like the Know-It-Owl and Dogma, a cute little dog who enforces the Rat Rules.

 
About halfway through the book, they find the Rat, who isn't really missing, just depressed, because her son the Hart ran away in protest when she declared Rat Rule 79. Downer, Fred, and Gogo agree to find the Hart. Fred thinks that the Rat needs to accept that her son is getting older, that this is unstoppable even if you make a Rule, and that trying to follow Rat Rule 79 is causing problems for everyone, all over.

 
They do find the Hart, and by throwing him a birthday party, engineer a reconciliation between Hart and Rat, who abolishes Rule 79. Along the way, Fred stops being angry at her mom, realizes she's dreaming, and in the end, wakes up to have her own birthday.

 
Galchen writes rather playfully. Her narrator is a sympathetic close third-person, who occasionally chimes in to say things like 'I think Fred was being too hard on herself,' which makes the whole thing feel like a bedtime story. She gives us very short chapters describing interesting math ideas in between major scene breaks. And notably, the chapters aren't conventionally numbered. The first chapter is 'Chapter Zero,' and the last is 'Chapter One.' In between, perhaps keeping woth the theme of stopped time, we get things like 'Chapter Red,' 'Chapter Redder,' 'Chapter Fork,' 'Chapter Spoon,' and 'Chapter Ate.'

 
I don't think it's quite as good as The Phantom Tollbooth, but it's pretty good, and might be nice for kids who want more books like that, or girls who have their own complex mom relationships to think through.