Leina and the Lord of the Toadstools

 

Leina and the Lord of the Toadstools 

by Myriam Dahman and Nicolas Digard
art by Julia Sarda
Orchard Books
2022

 

I really love Julia Sarda's art, and I'm hoping to read a couple more books she's illustrated this year. First up is Leina and the Lord of the Toadstools, an children's book that blends aspects of European fairy tale and American tall tale to tell a new story that has an uncanny feeling of being familiar and old.
 
Leina is the ferry woman for a small town on the bank of a river 'out west.' Every morning, Leina boats people across the river to the forest to chop wood and forage, and every evening she boats them home. Leina has a crush on Oren, who is kind to her, but she's too shy to talk when she's around him.
 
One evening, Oren isn't there to catch the ferry home, and doesn't return the next day either. This isn't the first time someone's disappeared this way. There's a storm, and Leina goes across to look for him, but instead meets a man-sized toad wearing a suit. He introduces himself as Mr Spadefoot, the Lord of the Toadstools. Leina takes him to town to do business, but the townspeople drive him off. Leina boats him back to the forest, and he invites her to his house for dinner.
 
At Mr Spadefoot's house, Leina discovers that he's been turning townspeople into animals and keeping them in cages. She realizes he means to do the same to her. If she wants to save Oren, and herself, she'll have to find a way to get the better of him...
 
Mr Spadefoot is a pretty good villain! In a few short pages, he reminds me of Bluebeard, Rumpelstiltskin, even the Devil making trades over fiddle contests at the crossroads. There are also themes of hospitality, and a sense that while the townspeople don't deserve exactly what's happening to them, they do need to do better, both to the forest and to any visitors they receive. We don't learn a lot about Leina, but she gathers her courage when she needs to, and remains curious and clever, even in the face of a monster who scares her.
 
Sarda's art is delightful. The forest scenes are full of detail, Mr Spadefoot's house appropriately strange and maze-like. Some of the smaller pictures are framed in boxes where Sarda has used repeating patterns on the edges, which gives those images an older, storybook feel.

Star Well

 
 

Star Well

by Alexei Panshin

Ace

1968

 

 

Star Well is a short space opera from 1968. At just over 150 pages, it straddles the line between novella and novel. It's not exactly YA, but probably what scifi authors at the time would've called a 'juvenile.' It's also the first book in a trilogy. A friend I like talking about scifi with read it recently, so I decided to give it a go too.

 
Star Well is an asteroid with a space station inside. Villiers is a nobleman seemingly just hanging out there, enjoying a bit of casino gambling and fine dining during an extended layover between legs of an interstellar voyage. Villiers meets a naive young Naval officer who's trying to investigate Star Well for evidence of smuggling. By chance, the two criminals who run the place and are smuggling suspect Villiers of investigating them, rather than the young officer. (Probably because Villiers is the one who seems remotely competent...)

 
A new ship arrives in port, carrying some teenage girls en route to a noblewomen's finishing school, the Navy investigator in charge of figuring out what's going on in Star Well, who's undercover disguised as a priest, and a fur-covered alien frog who seems to be friends with Villiers. One of the finishing school girls comes from a family of con artists, and since Villiers is a friend of her family, she gets him to buy her dinner. While they're out, one of criminal station managers challenges Villiers to a duel.

 
This is the real set piece of the book, and Panshin has fun drawing it out. First we see, from the girl's perspective, Villiers getting rushed off to the fight, her being unable to keep up or get herself let in, then thinking that Villiers has been killed, and then getting in trouble by stumbling upon some smuggling in action. Then we see the actual duel from the perspective of the criminal, and credit to Panshin, he writes action well, not trying to choreograph every move, but giving a real sense of the shape of the action and the mood of the fight. And then we see the perspective of someone who secretly intervened, which lends new meaning to what we saw in the duel itself. All this manages to be exciting, and at times suspenseful.

 
After that, there's the only small matters of the kidnapped girl and the two Naval officers trying to catch the smugglers in the act and arrest them left to take care of.

 
I like Panshin's narration in this book. He's really chatty at the start of each chapter, cynical about the operation of Imperial power, the vapidity of hereditary nobility and jealousy of those who have money but can't buy status, cynical but not pessimistic. The narrative voice reminds me of other old books for children. The young Naval officer and one of the criminal henchmen are also both very unworldly and childlike, which I also associate with media meant for kids.

 
The fake priest is follower of Mithra; the same religion as in the show Raised by Wolves. In both cases it's used as a futuristic substitute for Christianity. The frog alien also has an interesting a-causal philosophy, a view that every person is traveling along a line that coincidentally brings them close to others. But things happen because that's the shape of the line, not because one thing caused another. What Panshin's describing here is a kind of determinism that depends on the idea of time as a spatial dimension - kind of secretly sophisticated for a YA book!

A Field Guide to the North American Family

 
 

A Field Guide to the North American Family

by Garth Risk Hallberg

Knopf

2007, reprinted in 2017

 

 

A Field Guide to the North American Family is a novella-length collection of literary short stories that narrate a turbulent year in the lives of two neighboring suburban families. Field Guide also employs a number of gimmicks that only partially work together.
 
The Hungates and Harrisons are neighbors on Long Island. Oldest son Gabe Hungate and oldest daughter Lacey Harrison were born about the same time, and the two families have been close ever since. Over the course of the year, Mr Harrison dies, Mr and Mrs Hungate get divorced, Gabe and Lacey date then break up, and Gabe gets in an accident that leaves him covered in severe burns.
 
The stories present all this in a roughly chronological order, and from a variety of perspectives - accounts from all 8 family members (Gabe and Lacey each have a younger sibling), from friends at school, and from an omniscient narrator, presented in a mix of first and third person. As you read each story (typically vignette length, less than a page), you have to figure out who it's about and when it happens in order to add it to your understanding of the overall narrative.
 
Each story has a title like "Divorce" or "Sibling Rivalry," and they're arranged alphabetically, as though Field Guide really was an encyclopedia of family topics. The stories are sometimes closely, sometimes only barely related to the titles. Adding to this gimmick, each story is cross-referenced with a number of others, like social scientific encyclopedia entries would be. Supposedly, these references provide an alternate, non-alphabetical reading order, although since there are like 4-6 per story, I wasn't sure how to actually use them in that way.
 
The last gimmick is that each of the 60-something stories has an accompanying photograph and caption. Each photo was taken by a different artist, and their connections to either the title or story tends to be oblique. The captions are only a sentence or two long, and are written more like natural science, as though the title topic was an animal species. So they'll say things like 'Due to a growth curve similar to that of Depression, a robust Divorce population has become common wherever Love dwells in large numbers.' The captions have no relation to the stories at all. If Hallberg had leaned into that style, he would've ended up with something much weirder, and possibly more interesting, akin to Ben Marcus's The Age of Wire and String.
 
As it stands, I'm not sure the payoff is worth all the effort, or more importantly, if the story is even worth telling, or the gimmicks do anything to enrich it. I don't think I would have been interested in this narrative if it had been told conventionally, and I can't help but feel that the format is wasted, reduced to little more than a recurring page layout, used in a way that doesn't take advantage of its unique storytelling possibilities.

Wonder Woman: Dead Earth

 
 
Wonder Woman: Dead Earth

by Daniel Warren Johnson

DC Comics

2020

 

 

Wonder Woman: Dead Earth collects a 4-issue miniseries about Wonder Woman waking up from a medically-induced coma into a world that has been ravaged by nuclear war. She discovers a world without heroes, where humanity is on the brink of extinction, where giant monsters haunt the devastated landscape and periodically harry the last surviving remnants of our species.
 
Wonder Woman is discovered in the Bat Cave by some fortunate scavengers. She joins their tribe, and after being forced into a gladiatorial fight with a horribly mutated Cheetah, offers the tribes-people a new hope if they'll follow her and relocate to Themyscira, the hidden Amazon island, where she's certain that conditions will be better.
 
Wonder Woman espouses a philosophy of unconditional love, of using her godlike power to offer forgiveness and second chances to anyone who'll accept them, regardless of their past crimes. Cheetah, for example, resents being held in gladiatorial slavery, but Wonder Woman urges her to choose mutual survival over vengeance. In the aftermath of a war, her philosophy reminds me of Truth and Reconciliation.
 
Interspersed through all this are flashbacks to Wonder Woman's childhood that help to inform how she became the version of the character whom we see here.
 
On Themyscira, Wonder Woman learns the truth about the nuclear war that ended the world, about what happened to Batman and Superman, about how she ended up in her coma, about the origin of the monsters, about who is responsible - who needs forgiveness, or vengeance.
 
Johnson's art style is very different from the usual beautiful and statuesque way that Wonder Woman is usually drawn. Here, she looks like a cave woman. But the style suits the end-of-the-world setting. And with their scars, messy hair, muddy ripped clothes, and decidedly un-made-up faces, the characters in this book look, in their own way, maybe more realistic than most comic characters. Johnson's inks look more like marker than pen, and while I don't know his process, if you told me that he inked freehand without a pencil drawing underneath, I would believe you.

Pricing the Priceless Child

 
 
Pricing the Priceless Child

The Changing Social Value of Children

by Viviana Zelizer

Basic Books

1985

 

 

Pricing the Priceless Child is something of a classic in sociology. It's an important look at the social construction of childhood, and Zelizer is also important for her studies, including this one, that show how cultural, non-economic factors influence how people think about money, markets, and other topics that professional economists try to lay exclusive claim to.
 
Zelizer looks at a series of inter-related changes that took place in the US between the 1870s and the 1930s, when American children went from 'useful' - contributing economically to their families by performing either significant housework or farmwork or wage labor outside the home - to 'useless' - contributing only love and affection. In Zelizer's words, by the 1930s, children had become sacred, economically worthless, and emotionally priceless.
 
The backstory to all this is declining childhood mortality in the 19th century, due in part to medical improvements like the discovery of antibiotics and invention of vaccines. When every parent expected about half their kids to die before reaching adulthood, often in infancy, I think there must have been a certain degree of emotional distancing that was almost universal. As children become more likely to live, it becomes safer to love them more, and with that love comes a new concept of childhood as a sacred time that deserves to be protected from adult realities.
 
One thing people (eventually) decided their children needed to be protected from was child labor. Middle class reformers decided this first, and child labor remained more common among the working class for longer, in part because those families truly needed the extra money.
 
What followed was a clash of class-based cultures, as reformers accused working-class parents of exploiting their kids and failing to love them, and poorer parents, who'd grown up learning trades in childhood themselves, argued that it was important for kids to learn industry and a work ethic and avoid the vice of idleness. But after decades of controversy, obviously, the movement against child labor won definitively. Children would work in order to learn how to, and receive an allowance to learn how to spend and save money.
 
Throughout this period, people came increasingly to believe that the economic value and the emotional value of children were in conflict, that any price attached to kids in the market somehow subtracted from their worth as members of their families. Zelizer argues that a lot of what was happening here was people figuring out how to think about money differently, so that it no longer seemed to profane the sacredness of childhood.
 
Also during this time, insurance companies began offering child insurance, not to replace a kid's lost wages if they died, but to pay for a funeral and headstone- instead of the anonymous mass graves that were poor kids' previous burying places.
 
As kids stopped being wage earners, the theory of damages in wrongful death lawsuits had to change too. Parents could no longer sue for lost future income; instead, they asked for compensation for what they'd already invested, and for the emotional pain of the loss.
 
Foster care and adoption changed too. Working teens used to routinely live with another family, earn room and board, and learn a trade by working for them. Parents who couldn't take care of younger kids had to pay someone - often a 'baby farmer' - to take over the childcare. Essentially these children were sold. Kids too young to work often died.
 
But as children became expected to provide only love and affection, adoptive parents stopped wanting teens and started wanting infants, and became willing to pay to take them, a total reversal of the earlier situation. But also, by this time, the public was no longer comfortable with the idea of parents 'buying' a child. In the same way that allowance is not supposed to be pay for housework, adoption fees became a way to pay for the work done to transfer custody of a child without actually paying for the child.

Witch Hat Atelier 3

 

Witch Hat Atelier 3

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2019 

 

 

At the end of the previous volume of Witch Hat Atelier, new student Coco and best student Agott had just finished saving the merchant's son who was trapped under a boulder by the river, while the other witches were looking for other accidents up- and downstream. Somehow when Coco disintegrate the boulder, the whole shoreline there washed away. The Knights Moralis arrived to investigate, accused Coco of using forbidden magic, and prepared to erase her memory.
 
Fortunately, master witch Qifrey and the other students arrive back just in time. The knights are super inflexible, but Qifrey is able to get them to see reason - Coco is a kid, and a new apprentice who only knows a few spell symbols, and struggles to draw them well. As a final test, one of the knights gives her his own pen-wand and has her draw the disintegration sigil again, and sees that it's simply not powerful enough to cause the out-of-control effect we saw.
 
Qifrey notices that the bottle of ink he gave Coco has been replaced by another, and wonders if the disaster was caused by her spell being amplified by special ink. He keeps this revelation to himself though. (The audience sees that yes, this is special ink made with blood by the masked witch who seems to be using Coco to reintroduce forbidden magic back into the world.)
 
Qifrey and Coco make a special trip back to the wand shop. Qifrey and the wandmaker investigate the ink, including drawing a tiny light spell with it, which produces an enormous blinding flash. The wandmaker wants to call in the Knights Moralis, so Qifrey does what he's protected Coco from all this time and erases the old man's memory of that event. Meanwhile Coco learns from wandmaker's grandson Tartah that different ink ingredients can add or amplify various spell effects. She also learns Tartah's secret - he's colorblind, and so despite knowing so much about the ingredients and effects, he can only tell the inks apart by their labels once they're mixed.
 
We go back to the Atelier for more practice. Agott has master Qifrey's permission to take the second test, which will give her permission to cast spells in public. Still secretly though, so that the public doesn't learn that magic is drawn, and a skill that anyone could learn. That secret is one of the things the Knights Moralis use memory erasure to protect. They also forbid casting spells directly on a body - which forbids stuff like shapeshifting, but also any healing magic.
 
Qifrey tries to use the special ink bottle to track the masked witch, but she gets the better of him, nearly drowning him in his tower, then teleporting in to steal the bottle back.
 
Coco's been having nightmares about how she accidentally turned her mom to stone the first time she drew magic. So she's been getting up in the night to practice her drawing skills. She ends up fainting in front of Agott, and Qifrey takes her to the hospital, after stopping to get directions from Tartah. Then Qifrey and a bunch of doctors are called away to deal with a fire in town.
 
Tartah stays with Coco, and tries to get her medicine. The vials are unlabeled though. Tartah can magically dehydrate the potions to see the ingredients, but if it's powder, he can't see the color to tell them apart. In her fevered delirium, Coco reverses the disintegration sigil to make, I don't know, a reintegration spell. When Tartah holds the sigil up to a powder, it stays powder, but like, temporarily reassembles into its original shape. With the help of this spell, Tartah finds the right medicine, and later gets scolded by a nurse, who is nonetheless impressed by his apothecary knowledge.
 
Coco thinks she can draw a reverse sigil of the spell that turned her mom to stone to save her, although I'm like super certain that's not going to work, just based on the limitations of the reintegration spell. Also, elsewhere, the masked witch is joined by an ally who is either invisible, or somehow is literally just a magic hat and cloak, and the two plot to do something attention-getting at Agott's exam.

Time Salvager

 
 

Time Salvager

by Wesley Chu

Tor

2015 

 

 

I think I actually started this project with a time travel novel I was reading over New Year's. But while The Tourist was more of a satire and puzzle, set primarily among time traveling tourists in the present day, Time Salvager is a bit harder scifi. 

 
In the solar system of the 2500s, there is no central government, and a handful of mega-corporations hold almost all the power. The last golden age ended by 2100, and it's been downhill ever since, with a series of ruinous interplanetary wars decimating the population and the environment. The ability to build any of the wonders of the past is gone. Humanity only survives because the 'ChronMen' use time travel to secretly visit the past and steal resources from right before major disasters where they'd be destroyed anyway.

 
Ever since watching First Contact, I've been a fan of scenarios where someone from the far future visits the near future. William Gibson's The Peripheral does it too. Every version of La Jetee and 12 Monkeys have envisioned time travel being used on scavenging and salvaging missions. And the tv show Loki is the most recent example I can think of where time travelers jump very close to cataclysmic events because they know their presence will have no effect. Also the ChronMen all have forcefield devices that work kind of like Green Lantern rings, or I guess like Lensman lenses.

 
So I like the setup for Time Salvager, although I kind of think it might make a better roleplaying game than it does a novel.

 
James is one of the best ChronMen, but lately he's been suffering from more time travel sickness, he's haunted by his sister who disappeared when they were children, and he's wracked with guilt over all the people he's watched die instead of saving them. (He's very literally haunted, by overly lifelike hallucinations and dreams where they scold him for letting them die.) 

 
James is getting close to quitting or killing himself when the nonprofit, quasi-governmental organization he works for gets an offer from a megacorp to steal some parts from a golden age arctic science facility right before it exploded. Some of the details seem fishy, but the pay is so good James could practically retire, so he accepts. 

 
During his two days of pre-explosion scouting, James has a meet cute with a scientist named Elise, and goes on a date with her so he can copy her keycard access. Then the giant explosion happens and he steals the parts, but he can't leave immediately because there's a rip in time caused by somebody else having time traveled to this same location before him. He waits, and ends up protecting Elise with his force field while they watch everyone else dying of radiation poisoning around them. When he can finally jump home, James breaks the rules and brings Elise with him.

 
James and Elise are very quickly forced to become fugitives on the environmentally devastated 'present day' Earth of the 2500s. The sun gives you radiation burns, the air reeks of greasy smoke that sticks to everything, the oceans are covered with thick layers of brown scum. While camping in the ruins of Boston, they find and are adopted by a tribe of wasteland dwellers who are essentially non-people as far as the megacorps are concerned. 

 
James uses his time travel equipment to benefit the tribe, and Elise continues searching for the cure for the 'earth virus' that had just been discovered in her time and is partially responsible for the awful state of the planet in James's. And of course the megacorp funder and the time travel agency are hunting for them, since James is a traitor and Elise is a time anomaly, setting up a big climactic forcefield fight at the end. 

 
We also learn that the corp paid a previous time traveler to set the bomb that destroyed the research station. This probably didn't change history much because WWIII breaks out so soon afterward and would've killed all those people anyway, but it's an ugly use of a supposedly beneficial technology to advance one company's interests. The corp is also incredibly brutal and heavy-handed toward the various Earth tribes while they search for James and Elise.

 
My favorite parts of the book were the glimpses at all the future wars and disasters that James could jump into, including a time during the AI Wars when Mountain Hulks flattened cities like glaciers. Early on, we see a rogue time agent jump to the Ming Dynasty and start a martial arts legend that changes history, and James steals the famous missing Amber Room from a Nazi castle before it's bombed. I kind of hate things like that, that purport to explain some real world phenomenon with fictional time travel. Those also both felt like misses opportunities to go somewhere cooler in the imagined future.

 
James's hardboiled cynicism and Elise's initial naivety both seemed kind of cliched and overstated, but I think Chu came into his strength when the pair were joining the tribe. Chu seemed to have a realistic view of what survival in that environment would require, and by putting both characters to work on a greater good (even though they both ostensibly had altruistic careers before that) he was able to show a side of them that he could render more humanely. The various side characters, most of them from the time travel agency, remained more one-dimensional throughout the book.

 
This one sort of ends on a cliffhanger, since the corporation is sure to make another try at coming after James and Elise after their first attempt fails. And we need to see what happens with the 'cure the virus' plot, and the whole 'corporation using its money to corrupt a supposedly neutral government agency' plot. There is a sequel. But based on where this one ends, I kind of feel like I know the basic outlines of what will happen next. I also fear Chu might give in to the temptation to make the entire crapsack future be the fault of corporate-sponsored time travelers repeatedly sabotaging humanity; this wouldn't really make any sense, and if he goes that route, I'd rather not see it.