The Planet in a Pickle Jar

 

The Planet in a Pickle Jar

by Martin Stanev

Flying Eye Books

2022

 

 

The Planet in a Pickle Jar is a children's picture book about a couple kids staying with their grandmother. Initially they're bored, but then warm up to her. The book is playful about the space between what the words say and what the pictures show. And while the title image is obviously a metaphor, it's not one with a straightforward interpretation.
 
The text in this book adopts the kids' perspective; the art, I think, shows their grandmother's. So we're told that her house is boring, her stories are too long, and she spends all her time sewing and making pickles. What we see is a tableau that rewards a closer look.
 
The house is full of interesting-looking knickknacks and tchotchkes. The word-bubble showing the grandmother's story appears to illustrate the big bang and formation of the solar system. And her pickle jars aren't full of pickles, but of tiny images representing sights and memories from her travels. Kids who like to stop and spot all the details on the page will have a lot to look at here.
 
The grandmother tells another story, (again shown as an illustrated word bubble,) about how we are wrecking the environment and it won't still be there to enjoy if we do. Then, in the night, the kids wake up and discover she's missing. They search the whole house, then find a secret passage that leads to a tunnel that leads to a secret second basement where the grandmother keeps all her pickle jars, lots more than we saw earlier. She'd gotten tangled up in her own knitting, so the kids 'rescue' her pretty easily. But they are awestruck by the sight, and decide to get off their phones, touch grass, and join her in filling pickle jars.
 
I feel like I would've liked this book as a kid. Even today, I dream all the time of a giant version of my childhood home, with extra high ceilings, bookshelves like libraries, an attic like an airplane hanger, a basement like a dungeon, and everywhere cardboard boxes of interesting stuff, and tunnels or secret staircases connecting it all. It's part of why I like the film Inception, and playing D&D. And while the art isn't Where's Waldo or Find Freddie level detailed, there's still a lot going on that, when I was younger especially, I'd have liked poring over, admiring, and noticing new things.
 
As an adult, the one thing I find confusing is the grandmother's story about pollution and deforestation. Because the pickle jars seem like they represent photos or memories. One has a tiny sun in it, another a tree, another a leopard. So is her advice basically 'gather ye rosebuds while ye may?' Like, get out there and enjoy this stuff now, kids, cause it won't still be here when you're older? That seems a little bleak!
 
Or is this intended as an environmentalist message? But if so, 'saving' the memory of something is very different than saving the thing itself. Whatever essence of leopard you're preserving in whatever thing the glass jar is a metaphor for won't do anything to help the real live leopard itself. So while I know my kid self would've liked this, my adult brain kind of gets hung up on the logic of it.

Mystik U

 
 

Mystik U 

by Alisa Kwitney

art by Mike Norton

DC Comics

2018

 

 

Mystik U collects a 3-issue miniseries from DC comics that tries to cash in on the popularity of magical boarding schools. Teenage Zatanna gets recruited to a secret college run by Rose Psychic and a bunch of other older-generation DC occult characters, who are trying to prevent the future emergence of some world-ending catastrophe called The Malevolence.
 
Mystik U came out in 2018, a couple years before JK Rowling came out as a raging transphobe. It kind of mashes up a Harry Potter setting with CW-style teen superhero drama with a kind of whodunit mystery, since the teachers are trying to figure out which of their students is destined to transform into The Malevolence in a few years.
 
I was not especially impressed with this one. To me, it kind of feels like a cheap knockoff, or an attempt to cash in on the popularity of HP and JKR without investing much effort into making something with any appeal of its own, beyond just reminding you of the other thing. I sort of wished I could've read a better comic with the same characters, like the excellent miniseries that started DC's The Books of Magic in the 90s.
 
Zatanna is pretty famous for her showgirl costume and the way she uses magic by talking backwards. Her personality here is pretty much just feeling inferior to the other students and frustrated that she can't control her magic yet. We also get underdeveloped teen versions of June Moon / Enchantress and Sargon the Sorcerer, plus a son of supervillain Felix Faust, and healer Pia Morales, who I think is a new character. Mostly they just argue and get crushes on each other - it hardly matters which characters got used in these generic teen drama roles. You could pretty much swap in anyone else and it wouldn't matter.
 
At one point, the Faust boy accidentally kills Zatanna, but she's resurrected, and literally everyone involved treats this as a totally unremarkable incident, which for me was sort of a breaking point in my ability to take this story at all seriously or invest any concern for the outcome in it. If no one making it cares, why should I?
 
I had initially hoped for a showcase for the character Rose Psychic, but that got dashed too. She's an older character - she and Dr Richard Occult somehow share one body in the physical world, with the one who's not present appearing as a reflection in the mirror. Usually Dr Occult is the dominant personality, but he can trade places with Rose when needed. (So Dr Occult is not trans, but does kind of feel like a magical analogy for it.) Aside from Rose and Richard squabbling about whether to nurture the kids to be good or kill them all preemptively, neither actually gets much time on-page, and again, they seemed pretty generic. I might be better off trying to track down some of their original comics.
 
Anyway, if you're really insatiable for magic schools or supernatural teen dramas, you might like this, but otherwise, I don't think it has much to offer.

Sasha Masha

 
 

Sasha Masha

by Agnes Borinsky

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

2020

 

 

Sasha Masha is a short YA, possibly even middle-grade novel about a teenager who appears to be on the cusp of a transgender identity. Alex is a high school junior, the same age I was when I started having the feelings that I initially understood as 'wanting to be a girl,' and eventually, later as actually being a girl, as being transgender. I think Sasha Masha is meant to be accessible to, and perhaps helpful to, other young people who feel similarly.
 

Throughout the book, Alex thinks of himself as a boy, but at the end you can see that perhaps he is about to start thinking differently. (He's asked his pronouns twice, in situations where it would be safe to answer differently, and says he/him both times.) Alex's specific flavors of social anxiety and identity confusion look a lot like mine did at that age. I don't think there's any one universal 'transgender experience,' but what author Agnes Borinsky has written here felt like a very accurate representation of my own path, and if Alex is at all autobiographical, then I guess Borinsky and I must have felt very similarly when we were first starting to understand ourselves.
 
Alex starts his junior year of high school in Baltimore missing his lesbian best friend Mabel, whose family moved for a new job, and kind of getting set up to date a girl in his class who thinks he's cute by a few of their mutual friends. Going on dates, having a girlfriend, those are nice, and briefly help Alex think he can overcome his feelings of always putting on an act to please others, of being somehow not-real in a way that other people seem to be effortlessly real. But instead, he keeps thinking of a time he and Mabel dressed up in thrifted clothes and made up new names as a game, and he wore a dress and called himself Sasha Masha.
 
Alex's girlfriend notices his distance, and when he tries to explain, she thinks he's mocking her. He briefly tries to tell his parents, but they think it's a joke. And Alex can't stop thinking about Sasha Masha and what it would be like if that were his name. He goes back to a LGBT center he used to visit with Mabel, and makes friends with Andre, who introduces him to an other friends and takes him to a teen dance night. Alex would kind of like Andre to be a boyfriend, but he's more like a mentor.
 
It's sort of astonishing, by the end of the book, all of Alex's relationships are in shambles, with his parents, with friends new and old, everything is a mess. But Alex can finally see a new possibility, even if he's not completely sure if he wants it, of stopping being Alex, and starting to be Sasha Masha. On paper, it doesn't seem like it should feel like a satisfactory resolution, but somehow it does.
 
Compared to other queer coming-of-age stories, there's virtually no misbehaving here - no drinking or drugs, no sex. The only real rulebreaking is Alex staying out past curfew a couple times, and not telling his parents who he's hanging out with. The prose is initially very simple, with short, direct sentences, but as Alex opens up, his narration also becomes more fluid and expressive.
 

In one autumn, Alex sort of speedruns a process that took me from spring of my junior year in high school to the fall of my sophomore year of college. I spent most of my life feeling different from other people without understanding how. When I was a kid, my classmates teased me by calling me a girl, until we became tweens, when they switched to calling me gay. I might've agreed with them, except I knew all my celebrity crushes were on women, none were on men.
 
In high school, one day, I complimented a girl's hair bow, and she said if I liked it, I should wear one, then laughed, and said she shouldn't say that to me because I probably would. I don't really know why she said that, but I also kind of took it as a dare, and wore one, as a 'joke,' on April Fool's Day. I got stared at, bullied; I spent the whole day feeling miserable, but also like there was some new possibility for me, a future where I wasn't just trying and failing to be a guy. I don't feel like the slang of 'cracking your egg' describes how I felt particularly accurately, but that one stupid offhand comment, and all the time I spent thinking about it, and that first day I tried it - for me, that was when everything changed.
 
I tried crossdressing some more my senior year, mostly without telling anyone what it meant. I told my high school girlfriend; I felt like it wrecked our relationship, and I was afraid that would keep happening. So I stopped all of it, and went all the way back in the closet during my first year of college (except for winning a Halloween costume contest as in a dress.) After that year, I realized trying to live like that was making me miserable. I couldn't imagine, and didn't want, a lifetime of feeling like that. My sophomore year I started attending the LGBT club on campus, and slowly stated coming out.
 
For the longest time throughout this process, I felt totally alone. At first I thought I might be the only person in the world to want to change genders. I became aware of the existence if other trans people, of the word 'transsexual,' only gradually. I found the memoir of someone who was institutionalized for being trans, a couple novels that treated it as a life-destroying tragedy, and learned about the psychiatric diagnosis of 'gender identity disorder.' I went from thinking I was alone to thinking I had something I absolutely had to keep secret. A lifetime of gender-based bullying seemed to confirm it.
 
Obviously, so much is different for queer teens today, but I think it would've been nice, when I was desperately, furtively searching for information to make sense of the unfathomable emotions I was feeling, if I'd found a hopeful, empathetic, teen-appropriate book like Sasha Masha. Borinksy doesn't prescribe any answers; what she does is tell the kids asking these questions about themselves, you're not alone. Someone else understands how you feel well enough to write about it. This doesn't have to be a secret, or something you feel but never act on. If you want it to be, this can be your life.

The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint

 

 

The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint

by Philipp Deines

translated by Renata Stein and Ruth Bittorf

adapted from the biography by Julia Voss

David Zwirner Books

2022

 

 

I think it's fair to say that Hilma af Klint is having a moment. She was Swedish, a spiritualist, a painter, and possibly a lesbian, whose life and work spanned the late 1800s and early 1900s. She was one of the first abstract painters, predating several much better known names, and she was arguably underappreciated by other artists during her life.
 
af Klint was featured in a few European galleries in the 2010s, notably the 2013 Venice Biennale, and then she was given a solo exhibition in the Guggenheim in 2019, which had record-setting attendance. In addition to an exhibit book Paintings for the Future, there's also a recent biography by Julia Voss, a biopic called Hilma, and a novel, Sofia Lundberg's Friday Night Club.

The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint, which is what I just read, is a graphic nonfiction biography of af Klint by Philipp Deines, who is Julia Voss's husband. If I understand correctly, this is a kind of simplified companion to or adaptation of his wife's book.
 

Deines tells af Klint's life story in five chapters, hence the title, and definitely hits all the high points. Hilma af Klint lost a beloved younger sister just as she herself was becoming an adult, and felt haunted by her sister's ghostly presence for the rest of her life. She was in a spiritualist club that did seances and  automatic writing and drawing, which might be where she first developed certain abstract symbols and motifs. She studied painting and initially produced portraits and landscapes in a more-or-less traditional style. She was the very close friend, and maybe lover, of another woman artist. She got work as a medical illustrator for a veterinary college.
 
Guided by her spiritualist beliefs and visions, af Klint developed an abstract style, trying to depict spiritual concepts in like, instructional diagrams. She exhibited more often to other spiritualists than to other artists, but felt unappreciated by both. A significant portion of her works were never shown during her life, and she included a stipulation in her will that they not be shown for at least 20 years after her death.
 
Deines's art style is kind of cartoony, but I appreciate that his goal seems to have been to show as many of af Klint's potential influences as he could. We see what the af Klint family estate looked like, we see Stockholm, we see af Klint's early realist art and the paintings of her contemporaries, and of course, we see examples of her groundbreaking abstract works. Taken together, all this gives you something valuable that text alone wouldn't be able to.
 
My one complaint about this book is that all the text is typed instead of being hand-lettered. And the font is like, Calibri, and it usually seems too small for the word bubbles its filling. The mechanical and low-effort look of the text was a jarring contrast with Deines's fluid and very human linework.

Titanium Noir

 
 

Titanium Noir

by Nick Harkaway

Knopf

2023

 

 

Titanium Noir is probably Nick Harkaway's most accessible book to date. At under 250 pages, it's less than half as long his others; compared to the rest of his output, it's practically a novella. It still has Harkaway's usual blend of genres, this time mixing dystopian scifi with a noir detective mystery.
 
The future tech that drives this one is the T7 injection, a miracle drug that biologically de-ages a person's cells to pre-pubescent, then rapidly reruns a decade of puberty in a month. The result is that any injuries are healed (even lost limbs and cancer,) the patient is perhaps 20% taller and heavier, with denser bones and another 60-80 years of natural life to look forward to. They have become a titan. After one dose, someone who started very short or thin might pass as a very tall unaltered human - though few would want to.
 
Titans are the elite. The first dose is unthinkably expensive, but the reward, beyond near immortality, is the kind celebrity and license to misbehave that today we associate with rock stars, football players, royalty. The future world is one or two hundred years past our own, yet in many ways scarcely changed from our own. Our society's uppermost class has been supplanted by the titans, the oldest of whom would be alive today. The city where the book takes place has a sparkling neighborhood of skyscrapers that accommodate the titans' homes and offices that must've taken decades to build. But aside from things like that, it feels more like the world of 2050 than 2250, because the titans can be conservative to a degree our own elites, many of whom are old, but not like 'born before the Civil War' old, cannot possibly match.
 
It's maybe not a mysterious why Harkaway was thinking about near-magical medical technology. In the acknowledgments at the end, Harkaway thanks a hospital employee who was very understanding on a particular date in December 2020. Harkaway's father was John le Carre, who died then, of complications from a fall, only a few days apart from my own father, of covid. Out of a terrible couple years, that December still managed to be one of a handful of notably awful months. A lot of people lost someone then.
 

I don't know, but I do wonder if that's part of why this book lacks some of Harkaway's usual manic exuberance. I missed his signature style of abundance and excess, of digressions and diversions and flashbacks and philosophy. Compared to his other offerings, this one seems trim and streamlined. There are minor characters who I thought we'd see more of, who could've gotten whole unnecessary chapters just because he liked them, who show up just once, or get mentioned again only in passing. We don't learn the history of the city, or find out much about our narrator's life before this particular case.
 

And a couple plot threads seem ill-proportioned to the shorter length. There's a red herring clue about the Marx Brothers that carries on far too long and has almost no payoff; encounters with a titan crime boss and repeated listenings to multiple versions of the same rumor likewise feel too big for the book they're in. In a 500-pager they'd fit in fine alongside the other extravagances. Here they're like a man too big for his suit coat, tearing stitches from all the seams. Maybe that structure is intended to remind us of how the titans take up too much room compared to the normal humans around them? Or maybe Harkaway was sad and his heart wasn't quite in it.
 

The protagonist this time around, Cal Sounder, is the sort of fellow who maybe Humphrey Bogart would've played in the film version if the timing had worked out right. He's a consulting detective, but I think he's also Harkaway's thought experiment about what good police would look like. Cal is kind, deeply empathetic, smart, and he fights dirty enough to win even when he's physically outmatched. Cal cares about humanity, and he tries to help the little people when he can. I liked his cadence, especially his way of recounting what a witness said in response, without needing to state his own questions.
 

Cal is kind of a fixer in titan-related cases. Sometimes, I think, he helps clean up their mess and protects them from bad press. This time, he's investigating a dead, possibly murdered titan, and he's there to protect the cops from retaliation if someone upstairs doesn't like the answers they come up with. Cal's ex-girlfriend is now a titan, and the daughter of the man who invented the injections. She was dosed after she was badly injured, which makes Cal kind of a friend of the family. I badly wanted to know more about her, and about their life together before her injury.
 

Like Memento, the solution here hinges on something forgotten due to the terrible pain and trauma of growing a foot and aging a decade in a month. I was very glad that Harkaway didn't make Cal a secret titan who'd forgotten the truth about himself! But I think the point of the book is the tour through the dystopia that is very rich people having too much power, moreso than it is the solution to the mystery itself.

Lent

 
 
Lent

A Novel of Many Returns

by Jo Walton

Tor

2019

 

 

The first time I watched the movie Life is Beautiful, I thought it was simply an Italian rom-com. When my partner - who recommended Jo Walton's Lent to me - first read the book, she only knew that it was about Italian monks during the Renaissance, and that based on the author's reputation, it probably had some kind of speculative component. I took a little more convincing than that, and so I went into it knowing something that caught her totally by surprise. If you keep reading, you'll know it too, because I hardly know how to talk about Lent, let alone recommend it, without saying what it's really about.

I haven't read that many historical fantasies, but I have read at least two set during the Renaissance - Umberto Eco's Baudolino and Catherynne Valente's Habitation of the Blessed, both of which feature blymmes and skiapods and other humanoids the ancient Greeks believed lived in foreign lands. For the first half, Lent is essentially straight historical fiction, a retelling of the last 6 years in the life of Girolamo Savonarola, an ascetic monk who lived in Florence, preached a strict Christianity, organized a bonfire of the vanities, and was himself hanged and burned in 1498 for opposing both the Medicis and the pope.

Girolamo can see demons and banish them (Walton describes them like the monsters that show up in the margins of illuminated manuscripts,) and he believes he receives prophetic knowledge from God. This is only barely fantastic though, since mysticism was common enough at the time, and the events in Florence are basically a this-worldly contest between factions in an early democracy to determine whether Florence will be a city of commerce and splendor, as the merchants want, or a New Jerusalem that is ruled by God's laws as much as it is secular authority. Walton uses plain language that makes these debates feel contemporary, and the spread of ideas via sermons and other public speeches reminds me a bit of social media. She even makes Girolamo's opposition to the power of wealth sympathetic to a reader like me, someone who the real Savonarola would have likely condemned.

What makes this book science fiction is what happens halfway through, when Girolamo dies and then relives his same life, the story resetting to the events of 1492. At this point, we're in the realm of alt history, as Girolamo tries to get a different outcome, even as he remains committed to preaching the gospel and saving men's souls. The first half of the book is fine, but this is where Walton puts her foot on the accelerator and the plot really starts racing. Because Girolamo isn't just reincarnated once, but several times, with each life getting about half the pages of the one before. I guess this is technically a time-loop story, but those usually just repeat a day or so, while Girolamo is operating on the scale of years, and because he's a Great Man, operating at a crux of history, both he and Florence travel some wildly different trajectories across the iterations.

Each life is still portrayed realistically. Walton is thoughtful about how history might change - and stubbornly, might not - based on the actions of one very charismatic man living in one city at a time of unrest across Europe. The structure reminds me less of other time-loop stories, and more of something like Rachel Swirsky's "The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers from Beneath the Queen's Window" or Walter John Williams' "Daddy's World" - stories that start out in one genre, but become increasingly philosophical and science fictional simply because they refuse to end where we expect them to, and keep going and getting stranger due to the long passage of time.

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth

 
 

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth

An Auto-Bio-Graphical Novel

by Zoe Thorogood

Image Comics

2022

 

 

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth is a graphic memoir documenting half a year in 2021. Thorogood is a young cartoonist, and her first book came out near the start of the covid pandemic. It was well-received, but the normal promotional process was disrupted before it could start. Thorogood also has severe, uncontrolled depression, which is the single dominating focus of It's Lonely.

I haven't made a secret of own depression, which was quite bad when I was younger, but which is now mostly mild and well-managed, even if it's never truly gone away. If my depression is like an old cut that has never fully healed, but at least is clean and has a scab, Thorogood's, by comparison, is like a ghastly open wound that weeps blood and lymph and stinks of sepsis and gangrene. It is shocking how much she hates herself and how much pain she feels. It feels indecent to witness it. I hope, sincerely, for her to manage to get older, and to succeed at taming and tempering her depression some as she does.

There are two things about my depression that can make it hard for me to read about someone else's though. The first is that it's always there in the background of my emotions, usually far back, like a figure who shows up in the crowd in every photograph. But because it's never gone, there's always a chance it come forward again. The second is that, because both the pain and the memory-of-the-pain of depression come from the same place, they feel the same. The muted echo of pain you hear when you think about a bad memory sounds exactly the same as the quiet early notes of orchestra warming up to play a full new symphony. And so I don't know if it's really true, but it feels like thinking too much about my own depression will cause it to come all the way back. So I try to be careful not to think too much about it. It's Lonely kind of ambushed me because I only knew that it was a critically-acclaimed graphic memoir.

Thorogood makes the decision to start her memoir after a particularly bad day when she feels suicidal. She keeps it for another six months or so. During that time, she also works on illustrating a comic series that someone else wrote. She plans a trip to America to attend a comics convention, but the trip gets canceled due to covid. She visits her parents. She attends a convention near home in England. She makes a new plan to visit another artist in America, hoping to hook up and maybe fall in love with him. She does visit, but it's disappointing. She decides to stop the memoir and start her next project.

I will say this for Thorogood. She's a very good artist. She clearly has mastery over a range of styles and is able to blend them freely, in a way that reminds me of collage. She has like 4 different avatars for herself in different cartoon styles, plus the looming black-cloaked, monstrous avatar of her depression. She interchanges which one is 'really her' from panel to panel. Her compositions are dynamic and interesting. Most pages are riots of emotion and information, even when her avatar is simply sitting still.

The closest visual (and I guess topical) comparison I can think of is the Eternity Girl comic book by Magdalene Visaggio and Sonny Liew, which uses a variety of art styles from the Golden and Silver ages of comics up to the present day to show its depressed, suicidal-but-immortal heroine grappling with a life whose purpose has already ended.

Thorogood's surreal techniques also remind me of one trend in women's writing, both fiction and non, that prizes this kind of kaleidoscopic viewpoint over straightforward or consistent narration. It's a style that feels, I suppose, like browsing the internet, jumping from voice to voice and thought to thought. It's like if the film Everything Everywhere All At Once was a style guide. Writing on Literary Hub, Dayla Benor describes it this way:

"Writers like Gertrude Stein, Susan Sontag and Maggie Nelson have all experimented with the use of fragmented, free-flowing text. But underneath the seeming disorganization, their books have strong organizing principles - the fragments have an accumulative effect for the reader, so that by the end, the parts amount to a whole. These books, part non-fiction, part memoir, part criticism, stop and start like a sputtering engine. They require a certain dedication to see them through, requiring the reader to maintain focus when the narrator prefers not to."

"It's a style of writing that seems to be gaining traction, if less for the content and more for the 'idea' of what it represents - an aesthetic of artisticism, intellectual superiority, and a refusal to abide by the rules. In the beginning, fragmentation found its home in feminist literature as a way to reject patriarchal order. Historically, the style is a form of protest. But now, a rebranding of 'stream of consciousness' writing has the next generation in a chokehold."

I don't recommend this book to anyone else with depression. In fact, I'd like to warn you away from it. I sort of wish I hadn't heard of this book or read it. Not because it rings false, but because it's too true - too raw, too unprocessed, too accurate, too real. Reading it hurts - and in a way, and a time, that I had no real need to subject myself to.

Witch Hat Atelier 5

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 5

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2020

 

 

In the previous volume of Witch Hat Atelier, student witches Agott and Richeh went to take the test that would let them use magic in public, where they can't allow anyone to see how spells are cast. The test involved wearing magic disguises and ushering the annual migration of adorable little penguin griffins though a cursed maze. They were joined by Euini, a student witch from another atelier who has series self-esteem problems. The test was interrupted by the witches who use forbidden magic (identifiable by their brimmed caps, in contrast to the brimless conical hats everyone else wears.) The test proctor was injured, and Euini got tattooed with a sigil that turned him into a wolf creature!
 
In volume 5, we start out with almost everyone separated. Richeh is completing the test because witch-kind owes it to the penguins to help with their migration, since witches are the ones who put a giant cursed maze in the path of their migration route. Richeh seems to complete her emotional revelation from last time, and figures out a way to reconcile her longstanding desire to be true to herself with the reality that she needs to learn more spells if she wants to be successful.
 
Coco, Tetia, and their teacher, master witch Qifrey and up in a cavern full of what remains of the society that built the maze. Specifically, what remains is all the people who were turned to gold as punishment for being old, disabled, immigrants, or just opposed to their community's policy of magical punishment. Ironically, they're all that's left, because they're effectively immortal. They want to kill all witches, and manage to injure Qifrey before Coco and Tetia convince them to stop. 

 

The gold people ask the girls a riddle, regarding the one thing they don't have down here in the cavern. I'm pretty sure the answer is 'death,' but Coco guesses comfort, because she is heavily invested in the idea that people who've been transformed by magic (like her mom) can be saved. She offers them a simple warming spell as a form of comfort, but the people who've been turned to gold find a way to use her spell that's more in line with my thought about the riddle.
 
Agott tries to avoid getting killed by the brimmed-cap witch who is just a cloak and hat, and manages to get herself and the injured test proctor back to Coco, Tetia, and Qifrey. Agott spied the cloak witch talking to the masked witch who's caused so many problems so far, and learns that they consider Coco to be their best ambassador for reintroducing forbidden magic to witch-kind. Qifrey fights the cloak-and-hat witch, and manages to learn his secret. He also poses an interesting question - do you know a brimmed-cap witch who looks just like me? The cloaked witch says no. My guess is that it's the masked witch. Whether they are twins or clones or what is my next question!
 
While Qifrey is distracted, the masked witch and Euini in his wolf form arrive at the girls' location. Coco tries drawing a reversing sigil onto Euini's skin atop the tattoo that transformed him. The girls are all a little worried this skirts the line of being forbidden, but normal sigils are usually beneficial and can be disrupted by breaking the surface of the drawing - there's no rule about this reversal technique because no one's needed it before, and thus no one else has thought of it. Coco is an inventor! So there's no rule - yet - against using her invented technique. 

 

Unfortunately, although this restores Euini's human consciousness, it leaves his body unaffected. The masked witch taunts them with a necklace that will reverse the spell if only Coco will agree to come learn more forbidden magic. The girls manage to steal the necklace, and the test proctor saves the day by offering to adopt and hide Euini so that he won't have his mind erased (or worse!) by the Knights Moralis now that he's a living forbidden spell.
 
The two brimmed hat witches decide to escape while they have the chance. Euini and the test proctor sneak away to begin a new life in hiding. Qifrey and his students emerge from the cursed maze to find the leader of the Knights Moralis waiting for them. He knows that the brimmed hat witches were there, and he wants Qifrey's whole atelier to accompany him to the witches' central government building now. This is dangerous for everyone, especially Coco, since if the Knights knew the truth, they'd rather erase her memory and send her back to being a tailor than allow her to continue learning magic to try to save her mom.

Witch Hat Atelier is obviously a a very adventurous, plot-driven narrative, but I remain impressed by two aspects of Shirahama's storytelling. First, this is comic intended to be accessible to kids and teenagers, and in the foreground, both the art, and the life-philosophies espoused by the main characters tend to be optimistic and, for lack of a better word, 'cozy.' But at the same time, Shirahama doesn't shy away from depicting real emotions of fear and sadness. Coco's optimism is a conscious choice about how to respond to trauma, not the naive expression of a young life that's been free from trouble. 

 

Second, while the broad strokes of the plot follow traditional schoolyard tropes - studying and tests, trips to town, troubles with poor mentors or self-doubt - but each character's actions reflect both her own approach to life, and her journey to becoming a better, more mature person. Agott is proud of her skill, but slowly learns to appreciate others' abilities; Richeh wants to create everything anew, but realizes she has to understand tradition before she can build on it. The characters are dynamic, and their actions are specific to themselves, not generic to the needs of the plot, which I really appreciate.