Bathe the Cat

 
Bathe the Cat

by Alice McGinty

art by David Roberts

Chronicle Books
2022

 

 

One of my coworkers has an interest in children's lit, and the other day she basically put Bathe the Cat into my hands and told me to read it. This is a cute rhyming story about a family trying to clean the house before Grandma comes, only to be repeatedly thwarted by the cat rearranging the chore list to avoid a bath, creating chaos as the family attempts to faithfully follow the now nonsensical instructions.
 
As my coworker observed, this is a book with a queer family, but it isn't about them being queer. I think the playful spirit of the book is a pretty good personality match for some gay men I've known, but really David Roberts could probably have drawn any family to go along with Alice McGinty's words, and the story still would've worked. We have two dads, both Black, with the narrator doling out instructions a bit fatter, possibly more femme, and more into African fashions, and the other dad a bit slimmer and more clean cut. There's an older White daughter who wears a dinosaur costume throughout the entire book, a younger Black son, and a Black baby, who gets to be the beneficiary of the chores, rather than having to chip in.
 
The structure of the book is built on playful repetitions. First one dad doles out 8 sensible rhyming chores to himself the others by making a list on the fridge using alphabet magnets.The cat doesn't want to be bathed, so we get a closeup of a paw rearranging letters. We go through the list again, but everything's wrong, suddenly we're mopping the dog and feeding the lawn. But the cat doesn't want to get vacuumed or mowed either, so... We get another variation of equal silliness, and then one very mixed-up one where we need to like, bathe the mop and Dad the Sarah. Finally the narrator realizes what's been happening, reasserts control, and since the cat likes this new chore list, everything gets done in time for Grandma's visit.
 
Mixed-up chores are a real kid's book classic, at least since the Amelia Bedelia stories and maybe longer, but Bathe the Cat puts a fun twist on an old theme. The rhymes are fun, as are the illustrations of everyone diligently attempting their nonsense tasks. I think kids might think a bit about grammar and how word-order can change the meaning of a sentence, especially after the last, silliest rearrangement. And if you know a kid who'd like to see a queer or blended family, in a setting where their identity is incidental to the story rather than central, this could be a good pick. 

The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn 1

 
 
The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn

by Tri Vuong

Ten Speed Books

2024 

 

  

The first volume of The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn collects eight chapters of Tri Vuong's webcomic. Like the green yuri, Strange Tales was originally published online a few pages at a time, giving Vuong a bit more flexibility with chapter length than he'd've gotten with a print comic. The first and last chapters are stand alone stories, the rest are divided into a pair of three-part narratives.
 
Oscar is a ghost. He looks like a person with a skull floating where his head should be. He investigates other ghosts, and tries to help them achieve peace. He's quite chipper and amiable! Also, there's a giant ghostly octopus that lives shrunk down inside his skull that emerges at full size at inopportune moments to wreak chaos.
 
In the first story, Oscar helps an old woman living in a haunted house. In the second tale, he finds a ghost soldier still reliving WWI. In the third, rather complex story, Oscar tries to help an old sailor deal with his guilt for a shipwrecked crew he was unable to rescue, personified by a radio that continuously plays their final distress call. He gets help from a crew of ghosts that inhabit diving suits and try to preserve abandoned treasure, like a trove of Betamax tapes. The octopus really gets out of hand in this one. The final story is even shorter than the first; the old woman has trouble with her house again and moves into Oscar's apartment.
 
The structure of these stories is a quite similar to a lot of the Hellboy comics, where the title character mostly serves as an observer, giving the ghosts the audience they need for their dramas to finally finish playing out and achieve resolution. Vuong's art is sometimes pretty similar to Mike Mignola's, and the color pallet is a close match. Oscar has a different personality than Hellboy, but his adventures aren't that different; he even holds a cursed entity inside him. 
 
The similarities are enough to invite comparison. You might see more of what you already like here, but unless you are invested in the mystery of where the octopus came from, why it's haunting Oscar, and why he keeps trying to solve mysteries when the creature comes out every time and endangers everyone he interacts with, I think the individual stories themselves are not quite as strong as Mignola's.

What We are Seeking

 
 
What We are Seeking

by Cameron Reed

Tor

2026 

 

 

What We are Seeking is a scifi novel set in a distant future when humans have colonies on a number of other planets, despite being limited to sub-light speed. The colony worlds are few, and are theoretically connected by a network of generation ships that travel between them, though in practice the visits are few, and each established world has suffered a collapse and long rebuilding, when their original Earth tech ran out, but before they could build anything comparable themselves. 
 
We follow one young man as he arrives in a new place, learns about the existing community, and tries to find a place and make a life there. Author Cameron Reed has given us an impressive feat of world-building. The young colony, Scythia, is vividly imagined, both in terms of the alien wildlife native to the planet, and in terms of the colony's culture, which is just starting to blend the traditions of the two host planets. Every other society that a character hails from is still seen in realistic glimpses when relevant, starting on the first page with the culture of the ships, which alternate between a relaxed 'summer' when coasting at near light-speed and a stricter 'winter' when accelerating or decelerating.
 
The audience viewpoint character is John Maraintha, who comes from the verdant world of Essius, a forest world full of alien plants that are by turns medicinal and deadly poisonous. Essius is matriarchal and polyamorous, with children raised by the mother and her brothers. Men 'visit' other families for sex, but remain part of their mother's family for life. John is a doctor, and was orphaned by a wildfire while he was in med school, his whole family gone, which is how he ended up on a ship, and why he was chosen when Scythia messaged the ships to ask for another doctor for the colony. John's sexuality is seen as fascinating and threatening on Scythia, where both host cultures practice monogamy and patriarchy. Because of his own home culture, John finds it easier to get along with women, but now all his new friendships are viewed as suspect because he's assumed to be trying to visit everyone he becomes close to. For his part, John struggles to see marriage as anything other than oppression.
 
The native lifeforms of the planet Scythia are called 'dryads' by the colonists, because they alternate each generation between plant and animal bodies. So a bush might bloom with flowers that, when mature, fly off like butterflies that will egg-seeds in the soil, that will grow into more bushes. Some dryads beget insects (or rather, insect-like forms), some reptiles, some mammals. On Earth, ferns, mosses, and some parasites have alternating reproductive cycles, but nothing this extreme. The dryad ecosystem is robust, hostile to Earth plants, and dangerous to humans, which is why the colony is based in the desert, where dryads are sparse, instead of the forest. One species, called 'basket-men', might be a large, curious animal, or might be fully sentient.
 
The need to find out which is the reason for the other off-world visitor who arrived the same time as John. Subharma comes from a colony world where humans have formed a peaceful relationship with intelligent natives. He's come as a translator; he'll try to communicate with the basket-men, including eventually having high-tech brain surgery to make himself into someone capable of learning their native speech. John has a crush on Subharma and enjoys having him for a roommate. Subharma is super ascetic, follows a very strict diet, spends hours a day meditating, and seemingly has no interest in making friends, only in studying the basket-men.
 
The two host cultures that are starting to blend on Scythia are the Ishnurans and the Zandeheans. Ishnurna is only habitable at its two poles. Ishnurnans are very pale, and they have a culturally-recognized third gender. 'Jesses' use they/them pronouns, and we eventually learn that people we might think of as trans men, trans women, and nonbinary people all become jesses. Iren is currently the only Jess on Scythia, although a teen Zandahean wants to take the vows, which is controversial. Zandahea was colonized by Catholics, but during their collapse, the line of apostolic succession was broken (not a big deal for Protestants, but devastating to them). None of these groups is a monolith; Reed shows that they're internally diverse. We meet people with different perspectives on the basket-men, on jesses, on religion (the Zandaheans include some Renouncers), and despite the importance of marriage, we meet people having affairs, even closeted gay people in marriages of convenience. There are a couple people who are explicitly asexual, even though that term is never used, and in the same way that the others can't fully understand visiting, John is never fully able to wrap his head around that.
 
When John first arrives, he's annoyed to be sidelined by the doctor who made the original distress call, but has plenty more trainees now. He spends his time keeping house for Sudharma, learning about dryads, and becoming part of the local community. A key turning point comes when a basket-man arrives, then leaves, and John and Subharma follow it into the desert. This becomes like a descent into Hell when their van is damaged by wild dryads and their rations and water are ruined. Later John returns to the desert with Iren to catalog new species. He learns a lot more about them, and they become a much larger part of the story after that. This is mostly not an adventure story though, just people trying to shape their society into one that matches their values.
 
There are echoes of other scifi stories here. Human civilization being split between planets and ships is part of Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. John's harrowing trip to the desert is a little similar to a trip to Mercury in Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312. But most of what's here is either a unique feat of imagination, like the dryads, or else an extrapolation of how aspects of contemporary society might change over a long future. The breadth and inventiveness of Reed's world-building is really something special here. I enjoyed Reed's previous book, a cyberpunk novel called The Fortunate Fall, and I'm glad she was able to publish this one too.

Paper Girls 5

 
 
Paper Girls 5
by Brian Vaughan
art by Cliff Chiang

Image Comics

2018 

 

 
In the fifth volume of Paper Girls, the girls have arrived in the future, to the time where the Old Timers, the older generation in a temporal conflict with their own descendants, are operating from. There's only one volume left after this, and the shape of the time war has become a knot.
 
From the girls' perspective, which is the order the comics take place in, the girls started out in the 1980s, where the Old Timers, led by the Grand Father, showed up and took over their neighborhood in the Cleveland suburbs by putting everyone else in suspended animation and erasing their memories of the intrusion. The Grand Father seems to be very long-lived; he still speaks contemporary English, while everyone below him speaks a dialect that has diverged so far it borders on gibberish. We didn't know the reason for this, but it seemed the Old Timers did it to capture a few far-future teens, who speak a language so different it's represented with alien script; they can only be understood with the help of translator machines. They also met a silent alien, a green sphere with many eyestalks that seemed to watch them.
 
Then the girls were accidentally transported to the 2010s. They met Erin's middle-aged self, and learned that she had no memory of time traveling as a teen ... and that Mac died of leukemia while she was still in high school. They found a message carved on KJ's field hockey stick that helped them navigate the invisible time portals around the city. They met another far-future teen, a clone of Erin, who accidentally brought some giant tardigrades with her. The tardigrades started wrecking up downtown, and the Old Timers showed up again en masse and middle-aged Erin risked her life (maybe even died) to help the girls escape through a time portal.
 
That portal led the girls all the way back to the Stone Age. They met the first time traveler, born in the 2010s, who was shocked to already find evidence of other time trips on her maiden voyage. They also met a cavegirl their own age, Wadi, and agreed to help her rescue her son Japoh from the three cavemen who took him. Tiffany carved the message they saw earlier into the field hockey stick, and stuck it through a fold in time for her past self to find. KJ encountered the spherical green alien again and touched it; she got fragmentary visions of future events, including her and Mac kissing. The girls helped with the rescue, but then time traveled again by accident.
 
This time they arrived on New Year's Day in the year 2000. Giant robots piloted by the Old Timers and the far-future teens were fighting openly in Cleveland, although they were invisible to almost everyone except time travelers. The girls met Tiffany's post-college self. She's a goth! The far-future mechas were clearly superior to the ones piloted by the Old Timers. The newly appointed Grand Father, a relatively young man was piloting one; a bad hit killed his girlfriend, who used her dying words to beg him to abide by their principles of preserving history, rather than using time travel to save her. He tearfully agreed, and managed to kill the other mech pilot. For safety amidst the ongoing battle, the girls and college-age Tiffany clambered up into the broken mecha shell. The young Grand Father saw them and assumed they were the ones who killed his girlfriend, and then the mech sent itself forward in time.
 
Now the girls arrive in a future Cleveland, a time when everyone talks in the near-unintelligible dialect of the other Old Timers we've met so far, and the Grand Father is the old man we first saw him as. He has the green alien in his office! We also learn something I maybe should've noticed sooner - the Grand Father is Japoh, the baby born in the Stone Age, who the girls helped to reunite with his mother. I'll talk more about what the girls get up to in the future in a moment, but first, let's review events from the Old Timers' perspective.
 
The lab that invented time travel rescued the stranded first time traveler. She brought back the cavepeople Wadi and Japoh, claiming they were her children. The Old Timer faction formed, and eventually Japoh was made its leader. Among his fights with the future teens, his girlfriend died, and he thought the paper girls were responsible. When the killer mecha finally reappeared, after years of waiting, he thought he had a chance for revenge. At the same time, reports came in of the tardigrades in the 2010s. The Grand Father decided to launch the all-out offensive we saw earlier (which his staff viewed as a major over-reaction), and then to intercept the girls in the 1980s.
 
The Old Timers say their goal is to preserve the first draft of history, as unchanged by time travel as possible, but what does that even mean here? Japoh doesn't know it, but he was only brought to the future to become a leader because the girls saved him as an infant. They were only in the Stone Age to save him because he invaded their neighborhood, which he did in response to events the girls got entangled in after they got lost in time during the invasion. Plus he only thinks he's mad at them because of mistaken identity! Cause and effect aren't just reversed here, they're completely intertwined and entangled. There doesn't seem to be any pre-intervention state! Every major event in this sequence has a cause happened after its effect, and that, in turn, could only have happened because the effect came first.
 
In the future Cleveland, KJ tries to talk to Mac about her vision of them kissing, but Mac doesn't want to hear it. KJ has been coming to accept that she might be a lesbian, while Mac seems more homophobic than ever. The two go to find a doctor, while Erin and the two Tiffanys go look for Wadi, who is an old woman despite whatever anti-aging drugs she and Japoh have been taking. The good news for Mac is that the future has a cure for leukemia; the bad news is that she doesn't really have it, she has a rare disease caused by time travel. The doctor tries to turn Mac over to the Old Timers, but KJ beats the guy up and rescues her friend. After briefly thinking she could change something, Mac accepts that she'll die, accepts that KJ's visions will come true, and kisses her, surprising them both. 
 
Wadi agrees to help the girls sneak past her son and get back to the 1980s. They get joined en route to the departure point by the future-teen clone of Erin. Once again, they're cornered and only make it out because someone sacrifices their life; this time it's college-age Tiffany. The girls are paying a terrible price for getting caught up in this mess. Mac is going to die of time travel sickness in high school, Tiffany will be killed in her mid-20s, Erin will die in her early 40s. 
 
There's one volume left, and I fear KJ win't make it out alive either. What started as a mystery and then maybe a fun adventure (even if they weren't in control of how they were time traveling) has become the reason three of the four will die young, seemingly with nothing gained, nothing to show for it. Future Erin and future Tiffany have already revealed they won't even remember all this afterward! I don't know if the last volume will salvage anything positive, or if it's going to be a total downer, but I guess I'll find out soon.

Witch Hat Atelier 13

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 13

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2025

 

 

In Witch Hat Atelier 13, the annual Silver Eye Festival is still besieged by a monstrous leech that appears like a circulatory system, lowering over the fairgrounds like a cage. But in the previous volume, master witch Qifrey was able to defeat the disgraced former magical ambassador who created the monster, and most of the festival-goers have been evacuated to a safe distance. There's still great danger, but some of the most urgent issues have been addressed.
 
Coco was injured by the leeches, so Qifrey has brought her to the royal Healing Tower to receive medical attention. Master Beldaruit, Qifrey's old teacher and one of the three highest ranked witches, is there too. He creates a portable illusion of Coco, looking like a tiny little fairy with her face, to fly alongside Qifrey as he searches the evacuated capital city for Custas, the injured boy who learned forbidden magic in order to save his father.
 
Of all the things you might do with magic that are forbidden by the Pact, healing is by far the most tempting to try and the most difficult to understand restriction. The witches who use forbidden magic have used that possibility to draw in Custas, and may be trying to appeal to Coco along the same line. (Though Coco and her friend Tartah have both realized this on their own anyway, and are actively questioning why healing is forbidden, and if they might be willing to break the Pact to try it.) 
 
The forbidden witches hope that once someone tries one form of forbidden magic, they'll readily throw out all the rules and try the others too (and the Knights Moralis, who enforce the Pact, fear the same), but I wonder if the slope is really so slippery.
 
The Knights Moralis routinely use the one form of magic that directly affects people's bodies that the Pact allows - magic to erase memories. This lets them keep the secrets the Pact requires. Non-witches who learn how magic works can be made to forget it; witches who use forbidden spells can forget how to cast them. I suppose these spells are only allowed when they're defending the Pact, that you can't just erase someone's memory for your personal benefit and have it be okay, but there's an obvious contradiction here. Memory erasure is a much worse thing to do to somebody than healing them, and it does affect their body, so that the usual objection to healing sounds silly in this context.
 
That contradiction comes to a crisis point in this volume, because when Qifrey finds Custas, he's used more counterclock tattoos to save dozens of people from the poorest neighborhood from their injuries. Draw a counterclock spell on a shattered water jug, and its existence will rewind to a time before it broke, giving you a chance to pour the water into another container, or set down a cloth to catch the fragments, before it catches up to itself and shatters again, exactly as before. Draw it on an injured person and their body AND MIND will return to an earlier time before they were hurt. Custas saved his dying father and has kept him in a kind of half-life for weeks by drawing and redrawing the tattoo each day. For his father, it is perpetually the day before he died - he has no memory of being hurt, or anything else that's happened since then. He doesn't know and can't understand that his son is using forbidden magic.
 
While this is happening, the royal prince meets Riceh's timid older brother. (This is our first time meeting him too.) We learn that he was physically abused by a cruel teacher, who also tried to crush Riceh's creative spirit, which is why she reacts so badly against any compulsory or rote parts of her education. Shirahama has shown us over and over how bad teachers can basically destroy the students trusted to them. With the brother's help, the prince finds Riceh, Tetia, and Agott, and they use Tetia's sand-tents to provide temporary shelter to all the evacuees. We also briefly meet Agott's mother, who is pleased to see her daughter looking happy to be helping people in need.

The Blacktongue Thief

 
 
The Blacktongue Thief

by Christopher Buehlman
Tor
2021 
 
 
The Blacktongue Thief is an inventive, humorous, and very dark fantasy by Christopher Buehlman. It's the first book in a series (although the next entry is a prequel set a decade earlier), which becomes clear somewhere in the long middle section of cross-continental travel, when you realize that there isn't enough time left for the cast to complete their 'there and back again' in this book, and will probably only make it 'there'. The mission is to go into a land ruled by giants and ... well, there's some disagreement about what to do there.
 
Thief is set in a fantasy Europe that hues fairly closely to reality (and stereotype). Spain on the Iberian peninsula becomes Ispanthia, home to the Spanth, known for their fiery tempers and love of horses. Gaelic Ireland becomes Galt, a conquered region of English-analog Holt, home to people with literal black tongues who are known for being short, musical, and good at thieving and lying. The biggest difference from reality (aside from Manreach being a mirror image of Europe's geography) is an alt-historical element that's a classic of science fiction: most of the adult men died in a catastrophic war against the goblins, leaving women as the numerical majority and as the elites across the now matriarchal human civilization.
 
There were three human-goblin wars in the recent past. Humans won the Knight's War with the help of our war horses. Then goblins created a plague called the Stumbles that killed all the stallions and most of the mares and invaded again. Goblins won the Thresher's War, so-called because so many men were conscripted even the farmhands had to go fight. This was the route that wiped out a generation of men. Most recent was the Daughter's War (the subject of the prequel I mentioned) where humans trained and fielded an army of women, supported by magical, horse-sized war corvids, driving the goblins off the mainland and back to their island. 
 
You can see how Buehlman has taken some of the real world consequences of the Black Death, the invasions by Attila the Hun, intra-European fighting like the Thirty Years War, and more recent memories of women adopting new roles during WWII, and transformed them into elements of fantasy. His alt-historical worldbuilding is pretty impressive, and I hope to see more of his medieval women's world later on. As we travel the continent, we encounter everyday words in a half-dozen invented languages, verses of poems and songs, and see a number of ways women have taken charge. I would say Buehlman is relatively pessimistic - we mostly see women stepping into men's old jobs and titles and continuing them, rather than the roles themselves changing much.
 
Blacktongue Thief is narrated in the first person by Kinch, a low-ranking member of the Thieves' Guild, a continent-spanning mafia that seems stronger than most of the formal governments. He's a Galt, and thus the titular character. Kinch has a good voice; he's funny, profane, and basically good natured, he gives everyone nicknames, and Buehlman gets a lot of use of his many invented swears that all mean variations on "pussy" and "shit", and he mostly manages to make them seem humorous without just sounding silly. Kinch owes crippling student loan debts to the guild for training him (yes really), which is how he gets conscripted to go on a mission to travel to the mountains at the western edge of Manreach, where giants have recently started invading human lands, and to aid the guild in its goals once he gets there.
 
Kinch is assigned to accompany Galva, a Spanth corvid knight, who has her own reasons for going to the giant lands. She wants to rescue a princess and return her to the throne of Ispantha. Galva is brave, noble, serious, a demon on the battlefield, basically everything Kinch, the lovable loser, is not. The downside of having him as a narrator is that we don't get access to the interiority of any other character. You very quickly begin to suspect that the guild wants Kinch to sabotage Galva. Kinch suspects it too, and that they'll kill him and his family back home if he betrays the guild by not betraying Galva, but he might be willing to take the risk...
 
The pair get up to a fair number of other adventures along the way to the far west, despite the urgency of their goal. I found the book most engaging as they prepared to leave and once they arrived. The middle half of this 400 pager are taken up by the journey, and I wish that part had been shorter or more engaging, because it seemed to lack the energy and purpose of the first and last hundred pages. There's a hunt for a minotaur, a voyage at sea, a shipwreck, two separate encounters with goblins, a (cringe) comedy of errors when Kinch realizes they're being followed by an assassin from the Guild but can't tell anyone she's there... It's a lot. 
 
An early standout is a visit to the inverted tower of the witch Deadlegs, which also gives us the witch's apprentice Norrigal as a traveling companion. Kinch is instantly smitten with her, and watching their tentative romance shows us one place where women's equality has truly changed things. There's kind of a lot of magic in the book, especially magical tattoos, but some of Buehlman's best writing is when the magic is at its strongest and most mysterious.
 
This is definitely a fantasy world that's compatible with Dungeons & Dragons. Thieves have named levels within the guild. Adventuring types have clear roles and are basically fantasy superheroes. Magic is abundant, and even though we're told most of it is 'weak', it enables all sorts of cinematic combat and action. There are goblins and giants. Religion is polytheistic and the gods are interventionists, though mostly in minor ways. Kinch is aware of his 'luck' and knows if he's likely to succeed or fail at whatever he does next. This felt like he could see a pre-rolled dice at all times, and was probably the D&D-ism I liked least.
 
Overall though, there's a lot to like here, and I will probably try to continue the series.