7th Time Loop 2

 
 

7th Time Loop 2

The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy!

by Tuoko Amekawa

art by Hinoki Kino

Seven Seas

2022

 

 

Before we dive into the second volume of 7th Time Loop, let's quickly review the premise. On the night of her 15th birthday, minor royal Rishe was dumped by her price boyfriend and exiled from the country. At 20, she died and was reborn at the moment of being dumped. She's on her seventh life now, and is subjectively 45 years old. In each previous life she's had a different job and learned a different skill ... and died at 20, always due to a war of conquest started by Emperor Arnold Hein.

In her seventh life, Rishe is engaged to Arnold and determined to prevent his war. The Arnold Rishe knows is thoughtful, seems sympathetic to her attempts to treat others fairly, and doesn't appear to have a bad temper. She's not sure what will happen to change him.

In this volume, Rishe recruits the maid-staff for her manor, tries to reconnect with the merchant company she worked for in a past life, and meets Arnold's enigmatic younger brother Theodore.

Having worked as a maid in one previous life, Rishi goes undercover among the maid candidates. She ends up hiring the youngest and least experienced, plus the one maid who came from a rich but bankrupted family, who'd been bullying the other girls, to tutor them and teach them to read instead. This mostly seems to be about Rishe valuing education and second chances due to her unusual life, but she may also hope to use the maids who are loyal to her as spies in the main palace in the future.

Next Rishe tries to hire the merchants she was so close with in a previous life to supply her upcoming wedding to Arnold. They can tell she's keeping secrets and refuse. She disguises herself, sneaks out, and approaches them again. They still won't accept her as a customer, but will be her business partners if she can impress them in the near future. I guess this will get resolved in volume 3, presumably with Rishe enacting an ingenious stratagem.

When Rishe sneaks back home, Arnold is waiting for her. But he's not jealous, just curious about her hidden depths. He does warn her to stay away from his younger brother Theodore. Naturally, Theodore shows up napping in Rishe's herb garden the next morning.

He tries to warn her off marrying Arnold, and when that doesn't work, sends her an invitation (seemingly from Arnold) to a secret nighttime rendezvous. Rishe goes undercover as a maid in the main palace to learn more, then attends the night meeting (while sneakily alerting Arnold to it as well.) She wants to know more about the family dynamic, but I didn't feel like much was revealed. After sending Theodore away, Arnold is once again intrigued by Rishe's mysterious behavior.

The series continues to have a lightly comedic tone. Due to her many experiences, Rishe is hyper-competent, and due to her knowledge of likely future events, she's goal-driven and secretive about her motives. All of which seems strange for a 15 year-old royal fiancee with no major life experiences. I'm hopeful that in a future volume, we'll learn more about how and why the seemingly-kind Arnold Hein becomes a warmonger and mass-murderer. In the meantime, we've got Rishe's subterfuges and antics to entertain us. I'm especially curious to see what comes of her attempts to create a network of literate maids, employed other places, who are loyal to her as a result of how she treated them when they worked directly under her.

Since I borrowed this from a coworker and the series is still coming out, I'm going to wait until a couple more volumes are available before continuing with the series.

Six Angry Girls

 
 

Six Angry Girls

by Adrienne Kisner

Feiwel & Friends

2020 

 

 

I don't actually know Adrienne Kisner, but her husband is in my regular Friday night gaming group, and we've been playing together for about a decade now. So Adrienne is the friend of a friend, at the very minimum. Six Angry Girls is her most recent YA novel, about a group of scorned high school girls who form a Mock Trial team in the spring of their senior year.

 

We follow the alternating perspectives of Raina and Millie. The heading of each chapter is stylized as a court case, showing one or the other viewpoint character v. someone or something, in the Court of Public Opinion or the like, with a meaningful docket number.

Raina is one of her Pennsylvania high school's two lead actresses. At the start of the spring term in January, she gets dumped by her boyfriend, gets outmanuevered by her theatrical rival Claire, and starts questioning whether she even wants to act, or if she was only doing it because her boyfriend used to encorage her. She quits the Drama Club and starts knitting at the local yarn store, where the regulars are starting yarn-based activism against a misogynistic local judge.

Millie is thethe hardest working member (and the only girl) on the Mock Trial team, but the boys plan a coup via open tryouts, and kick her off entirely. A chance meeting with Raina when they're both crying in the bathroom convinces Millie to start an all-girl rival Mock Trial team. It's interesting to see some of the same characters from a different perspective - Raina's ex-boyfriend is one of the boys who ousts Millie, and Raina's nemesis Claire is Millie's best friend.

With Raina and Millie teaned up, we're off to the races! Sort of. Raina meets new student Grace at the yarn store. She becomes part of the team, and starts dating Millie. Veronica usually rock-climbs but she has a broken foot, so she joins in. Izzy is trans and a nonbinary demigirl; like Grace, she's new, after just transfering over from an all-boy's school. They recruit the school librarian to be their faculty advisor, and Nikita, who is on punishment for overdue library books is their reluctant sixth.

Meanwhile, Raina is getting more and more involved with activism, while trying to figure out who she is without her ex and what she wants to do with her adult life. Millie is also trying to figure out her plans, especially as her dad and his conservative new girlfriend keep trying to derail her from trial, friends, and even college next year, in favor of housekeeping and taking care of the girlfriend's kids from a previous marriage.

But the girls' Mock Trial team is on a winning streak! They advance past the district level to states, where they face off against the boy's team from their own school for a chance at nationals.

The bigger challenge though is the new case everyone is assigned for the tournaments - a free speech case that pits a fictional queer feminist club against their school's fictional religious conservatives. It's a case that hits too close to home, a case where the girls don't feel comfortable arguing the anti-gay side. Millie wants to win, but at what cost? Will the others support her  over their own objections? Does she actually want them to?

I feel like in some other version of this book, Raina would learn that the hated judge is really a very nice person once you get to know him, or Millie would realize that the Mock Trial boys had been doing more than she gave them credit for, or she'd be forced to abandon college to babysit her new step-siblings but later decide it was for the best. 

Kisner isn't writing that kind of book though. She's not ashamed of her characters' feminism; their legitimate grievances are not treated as character flaws to be overcome. The judge, for example, might indeed be a nice man off the bench, but his rulings still disfavor women, and they're still an appropriate target for public protest. Not everyone needs to 'learn a lesson' - the closest anyone comes is Raina re-evaluating Claire once they have a mutual friend and aren't competing for the same roles anymore.

Kisner gives her characters problems at home, at school, and as burgeoning political adults. Raina and Millie are definitely the best developed characers. The others aren't flat, but they're not given as much detail or as much agency. Grace and Claire, who both know both the mains in different ways, emerge as the second tier. Kisner's depiction of feisty craft-store feminists felt authentic to the women like that I've known before. 

The girls are coming of age, but not everything is going their way. Whenever their first choice is blocked, they have to do some soul searching and decide who they want to be instead, and what to do to become that. So it's less about a smooth path, and more about self-knowledge, resilience, getting appropriately angry at the correct parties, and figuring out the best alternative. Oh, and yarn-bombing,  activism, community, and politics. Probably a good book for a real life angry high school girl.

Whistle

 

Whistle

A New Gotham City Hero

by E Lockhart

art by Manuel Preitano

DC Comics

2021

 

 

A few years ago, one of my coworkers showed me some new Raven and Beast Boy graphic novels she was excited about, that had been announced by DC. Sometime after that, I read the truly excellent Superman Smashes the Klan without realizing it was part of the same series. Between then and now, it seems like DC has put out with about a thousand of these standalone YA comics! I decided to check out a few of them. First up is Whistle.

 

This one has a pretty good set-up, but I think it sacrifices a proper ending for the chance to imagine the lead character maybe having ongoing adventures. It confronts her with a difficult moral choice, but then seems to let her eat her cake and still have it too. And honestly, it might've been more satisfying without her getting powers or putting on a costume.

 

Willow is a poor Jewish kid in an underserved neighborhood in Gotham. She's kind of an activist, showing up at demonstrations with signs to demand better funding for her school. She's very motivated, very hard working, maybe not very popular - a Tracy Flick or Rory Gilmore type character. She makes friends with the new kid at school, an African immigrant, who seems to be a version of Beast Boy, although without any powers (yet?) 

 

Willow's single mom is sick with cancer - and she can't work, doesn't have insurance, can't afford her treatment, and is falling behind on her rent. Willow takes a part-time overnight job cleaning an animal shelter to help out, but you can't imagine it pays enough.

 

Also the neighborhood has a problem of someone making plants grow to cover up buildings and make them unusable, especially churches and community centers.

 

Willow gets a message from her mom's old friend (or boyfriend?), the Riddler. I mean, Willow doesn't know that, but the audience does. He hosts biweekly underground poker games, needs a new event planner because Killer Croc murdered the old one, and he heard Willow's mom was sick, and thought he could help out his old friend who cut off all contact with him by offering her daughter a secret, high-paying, illegal, possibly dangerous job...

 

Willow takes the job, makes friends with Poison Ivy who is a regular at the games, gets a glamorous new wardrobe, gets enough money to pay the rent and cover her mom's hospital bills, starts ignoring her friends and schoolwork, stops having time for activism, starts to feel enchanted by her connection to this cool rich secret poker club. 

 

Willow's mom and friend Garfield (aka Beast Boy) tell her that she's changing and they're worried about her. She slowly realizes that Riddler and Poison Ivy are the ones behind the plant attacks. They're trying to buy up cheap real-estate and gentrify it. It will be good for "the neighborhood," but most people living there now will have to move away.

 

And then Willow gets mauled by Killer Croc. She's with a shelter dog when she's attacked, and for unclear reasons, gains dog-like hearing and sense of smell, the ability to talk to dogs generally, and the ability to understand the one shelter dog. 

 

More importantly, while she's healing, she gets some time to think about what she's doing and who she wants to be. She needs the money her illegal job gives her, but doesn't want to let Riddler and Poison Ivy succeed at their plan. 

 

So this is the important moral choice Willow faces. She wants to be a good person, to protect her neighborhood, but also to keep taking care of her mother. I feel like she tries to have it both ways, and that the book lets her, while acting as though she's made a wholly righteous decision.

 

Willow gets herself in shape and makes a very CW-ready costume, and shows up to stop Poison Ivy from making plants take over the next building on her hit list. They fight, neither Ivy nor Riddler recognize her, Ivy nearly kills Willow with her poison kiss, but then some shelter dogs come to her rescue. Riddler gets away, Ivy gets arrested and released, and Willow congratulates herself for saving the building without doing more than throwing a few punches.

 

She does not however, like, tell anyone the Riddler's plan. Or stop working for him. Or tell him that she thinks what he's doing is wrong. Or stop being friends with him and Ivy. I think she sees herself as a spy in his organization? But she also helps her mom start reconciling with the guy, so like, that's a very deep cover. It's implied that Willow will continue being both a costumed crime fighter ... and a paid member of the Riddler's criminal gang.

 

As I said, I think that trying to single-handedly thwart gentrification by becoming a superhero is the wrong ending for the story Lockhart set up. I recognize this is a superhero comic, so the genre more or less requires it, but Lockhart wrote a character and built up a scenario where it's kind of disappointing that that's how Willow decides to take action.

 

I'd have rather seen Willow stand up to Riddler as herself, and try to get journalists and other activists to oppose him in the press and on the streets. The Willow we saw early on appeared to have real moral courage, enough to do what's right even at some cost to herself. 

 

Keeping her new job and her new friends, avoiding any financial sacrifices or uncomfortable conversations, then getting to feel good about herself by inconveniencing the bad guys without doing more to really stop them - that just feels like wish fulfillment rather than Willow actually doing what's right. I wish she'd been allowed to do better.

Trapped on Zarkass

 
 

Trapped on Zarkass

by Yann

art by Didier Cassegrain

translated by Dan Christensen

adapted from the novel by Stefan Wul

Magnetic Press

1958, adapted 2022

 

 

Trapped on Zarkass is a graphic novel adaptation of a 1958 French scifi book by Stefan Wul, who's best known for another of his books that was adapted as the animated film Fantastic Planet. Reading a less-known work by a famous author can sometimes feel like discovering a hidden treasure ... or it can confirm that the better-known work is just better, full stop.

 

Zarkass is set on an alien world, where human colonizers dominate the local population of cockroach people who ride giant caterpillars. Humans believe the natives are stupid, lazy, and docile ... but their leaders might be secretly working with the unknown third-party aliens who have been terrorizing the human settlements with their indestructible triangle-shaped spaceships.

 

Marcel and Louis are human agents posing as butterfly hunters, who are secretly on a mission to inspect and recover debris from the only triangle ship the humans have been able to shoot down. Both are women - Yann and Cassegrain's primary artistic liberty was to gender-swap the original protagonists, and to recast the human colonists as a matriarchy. The triangle ship crashed in the jungle, so this recasting means that Cassegrain draws both women in skimpy hot-weather outfits, with occasional scenes of full nudity. I might be wrong, but I kind of don't think Cassegrain would have drawn male protagonists looking sexy in distress, with their dicks out while shooting guns at drooling alien carnivores, in quite the same way he draws them when they're women.

 

Marcel is a blue-collar type, press-ganged into service straight from prison, and she has an earthy appreciation for roughing it in the jungle, and she swears continuously. Louis is persnickety and proper, and is only doing this so she can try to steal some local medicine for her sick daughter back on Earth. I think this book is supposed to be comedic, with about half the humor coming from the friction between Marcel and Louis, and half coming from toilet humor about the giant caterpillars' shit, farts, and other secretions, all of which are important to the roach people. Their alcohol is fermented from caterpillar shit; the medicine Louis needs is essentially pus. Marcel takes this all in stride and Louis is disgusted by all of it.

 

While these two are in the jungle, the triangle-ship aliens succeed in provoking a full-scale native rebellion against the humans, who rush to evacuate. Louis keeps hallucinating a dead roach-person king, and eventually becomes the king's reincarnation, and the roach's new post-rebellion leader.

 

I'm fairly sure Wul was writing a satire about the First Indochina War, the conflict that preceded what Americans call the Vietnam War, although the scenes of people crowding onto overloaded evacuation shuttles are drawn to look like scenes from the American military's withdrawal from Vietnam. I say satire, but I'm not sure I really understand Wul's point or target, or at least not as interpreted by Yann and Cassegrain.

 

The natives appear, by human standards, to be gullible and unintelligent. They have no empathy for others' suffering, and nearly everything they do seems to be a joke whose punchline is '...and Louis is grossed out by that!' That isn't actually an argument that they don't deserve political freedom, but they do seem like exaggerated versions of the colonial excuse that the people being colonized are childlike and uncivilized and need the education and firm discipline the colonizers will bring. And they are easily manipulated, first by the humans, then by the triangle aliens, and finally by Louis-as-king who brokers peace with the humans again.

 

The human matriarchy is portrayed as being almost completely amoral, with every official we see being crass, ruthless, and needlessly abusive toward her subordinates. And Marcel's personality most consists of her using racial slurs against the roach people, being joyously unfazed by alien grossness, and exclaiming a steady stream of gender-swapped profanity, complaining that a long caterpillar ride hurt her vag, for example, where a man would presumably complain about the pain in his ass.

 

So the overall effect seems to be less of a critique of colonialism, and more a scenario where everyone is awful, but where Louis merging with the soul of the king and ruling the natives is shown as justified and almost universally beneficial. The triangle aliens don't benefit, but their exploitation of the roach people is depicted as unambiguously wrong, while the humans' self-serving justifications for colonial occupation appear to be literally true within the text.

 

The Vietnam War inspired a lot of American scifi authors to try to grapple with the morality of what their country was doing. It seems like it should be easy for the interested reader to find another book that does it better.

Easy Tiki

 
 

Easy Tiki

A Modern Revival with 60 Recipes

by Chloe Frechette

photographs by Lizzie Munro

Ten Speed Press

2020

 

 

Easy Tiki is a cookbook that does more than it promises, but also maybe doesn't do the thing it promises to do quite as well as I'd like. 

 

Author Chloe Frechette offers a menu of simplified tiki cocktails, each with 6 ingredients or less. But she also introduces them with a succinct history of the original tiki phenomenon and the modern tiki revival, and she suggests other elements of stage-dressing, from glasses and garnishes to music and ambience, to help complete the tiki mood. Each cocktail has the promised short ingredient list ... but collectively there must still be a hundred or more bottles of recommended ingredients.

 

Tiki started in southern California during the 1930s, when Don the Beachcomber opened a bar to celebrate the end of Prohibition with elaborate, complex drinks shrouded in mystique and lots and lots of Caribbean and Polynesian decorations. Don was beloved, but secretive and protective of his recipes. In northern California, Trader Vic imitated Don's style while adding his own twist, and of the two of them, probably did the most to spread, popularize, and commercialize tiki. After WWII, soldiers returning from the Pacific theater brought home a fascination with Asian and Polynesian culture, and tiki benefitted from this broader interest.

 

The original tiki trend mostly died out by 1970. In the early 2000s, revivalists like Beachbum Berry began learning the history of tiki, interviewing the surviving original participants, and reconstructing the original secret recipes. Alongside the general craft cocktail boom, tiki is also experiencing a modern resurgence.

 

Tiki drinks are mostly based on rum and fresh fruit juices. They blend strong, sweet, sour, and spice. Traditionally, they're complex and multilayered - rather than using one rum, one juice, one liqueur, each element of the cocktail will be multiplied, while retaining the original ratios. These combinations make it hard to identify the individual ingredients by taste, and give tiki drinks part of their mystery. This is traditionally heightened and played up with opaque glasses, large garnishes, windowless bars, and an emphasis on exoticism in the decor.

 

I liked Frechette's concise overview of tiki style. She provides enough references to musicians, artists, and books by other tiki historians that it would be easy for an interested newcomer to decide on their next step after reading this.

 

The thing I wish Frechette had done better would have been to organize her recipes a bit more so that the interested home bartender could get just a small core stable of ingredients, with additions that are usable in more than just one drink. Part of what makes tiki 'hard' or intimidating or just expensive isn't only that one drink has 8-12 ingredients, it's that that drink is recommended side-by side with another that needs 6-10 more if you want to make them both. Frechette addresses the first problem, but not the second.

 

I know I'm being a little unfair here. First, Frechette didn't write her own recipes. As an editor of Punch magazine, she sourced them, drawing on advice from bartenders around the country who are recognized by their peers for their excellence. Trusting the experts puts some factors beyond her control. Second, yes, she's right, a 6-ingredient cocktail is easier to make than a 10-bottle drink. And third, it's never really fair to the author to judge them based on the book you wish they'd written instead.

 

But a lot of times the simplification was to reduce from a blend of 3 rums to just 1, or to hold the falernum or orgeat. But those are exactly the sort of common ingredients that would be in every home tiki bar. Leaving one of those out in favor of a homemade syrup that's only used in a single recipe doesn't necessarily make anything easier. Nor does recommending only one rum, when maybe all 60 recipes in the book have a different 'only one' recommendation - whereas I suspect smart blends of a few reusable staples could serve as well. If you the reader select only a few drinks to try though, then you'll be able to get by with just enough bottles to serve your picks.