psocoptera

Young Hag and the Witches' Quest, Isabel Greenberg, 2024 YA graphic fantasy, or possibly I mean middlegrade. Arthurian, but mostly centered on an original character and taking place after Arthur's death, with flashbacks being told as stories within the story that mostly focus on the female characters. I enjoy seeing people find new directions to take the Matter of Britain and I thought this was a good one. Also it was funny and made me laugh out loud a couple of times, and Greenberg has a really interesting art style, kind of intentionally childlike and sometimes scribbly, but really expressive. (And nice use of a limited color palate, and some neat scenery stuff with standing stones and a river, and a cute and funny baby.) I had Hugo-nominated this on the chance that I would end up wanting to have done that, and, yay, I did, good call past me.

Also I ended up reading this book partly on Hoopla and partly on paper (with reading glasses! they work!) which meant I could do a direct comparison of which felt like a smoother/easier reading experience. Digital comics interfaces have come a long way - Hoopla will show you the page, then each panel so you can read it, then the page again, and only got confused about panel order on a couple of two-page spreads - but I tried timing myself reading 20 pages each way and it was still faster for me to read on paper. (With reading glasses, because the lettering here is small.) It's useful to know that the Hoopla interface is a workable way for me to read comics, though!

I packed a bag of books for the drive home from the eclipse, including several graphic novels I've been meaning to start/finish/post about, of which I ended up reading two:

Bunt!, by Ngozi Ukazu and Mad Rupert, about an art student who forms a softball team for financial-aid reasons. Cute, fun ensemble cast. I never managed to make Avant Guards happen as a Yuletide fandom but this could totally be a Yuletide fandom in exactly the same way.

Artie and the Wolf Moon, Olivia Stephens. Werewolf middlegrade (or maybe young YA). Nicely done - well paced, well drawn, good balance of flashbacks/backstory and present day.

Illuminations, T Kingfisher, 2022 middlegrade novel. This was cute and clever and fun. Definitely younger than some of her stuff where she was like "this is middlegrade, right?". Spoiler: ( Read more... )

Aster and the Mixed-Up Magic, sequel to Aster and the Accidental Magic, Thom Pico and Karensac. Like the first one, cute middlegrade graphic novel fantasy, very Hilda-esque; Q feels that there has to be another one but I thought they were doing an "adventures will continue!" open ending.

A bunch of things have been happening but I am still also reading things.

A Deadly Education, Naomi Novik, 2020. I have already talked about this book a bunch with actual live people (!!) which has somewhat disincentivized me to write a review. But I will try, if only for my own records when I read the next one next year and have to remember what the hell I thought about this one. So, hey, future self, I liked it a lot - fast-paced, super page-turney, clever in a bunch of ways - and I can't wait to read the rest of the trilogy. It's pretty impressive how Novik has managed to write a book that is so clearly and overtly Harry Potter fanfic that it distracts from it secretly being Transformers fanfic - I didn't think about Transformers at all while reading it, despite having read all her relevant fic, and yet once it was pointed out to me it was like *oh*. That's some excellent authorial slight of hand. Sorry if that is spoilers. While I'm sharing spoilers, btw, I had somewhere picked up the false impression that this book was supposed to center a f/f romance, and was thrown by het developments - I mention this only in case anyone else has somehow gotten that bad intel (which I cannot for the life of me find again, so for all I know this happened in a dream or something); I think it would have been more fun if I hadn't wrongfooted myself, so, free spoiler. (If anyone is upset by my spoiler choices here, please let me know for future reference.)

Peasprout Chen: Battle of Champions, Henry Lien, 2019. Sequel to the first Peasprout Chen book discussed here. I think the idea of what Lien is doing with these is really neat and yet I was not all that into this book. I felt like he dropped the ball on the interesting relationship dynamics he'd set up at the end of the last one, and I just wasn't invested enough in the characters. The action is so cool though! So inventive! It would make the best anime! The end of this book seems to set up a third book, but I don't know if there's actually going to be one.

A Ceiling Made of Eggshells, Gail Carson Levine, 2020. Historical fiction middlegrade from the author of Ella Enchanted and other fantasy novels. This is about a Jewish girl in Spain in the years leading up to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, combining historical events with glimpses into the daily life of a wealthy Jewish family. As I think I mentioned back when I read The Bird King, I studied the Reconquista every year in Spanish class but always from the Catholic-Spanish perspective, so it's pretty interesting to look at that time period from other angles. And then, also, I have a longstanding disproportionate fascination with the Jewish branch of my ancestry, and so there's a temptation to read the historical parts of this as possibly representing some my own family history - expulsion from Spain to Portugal to the Netherlands is totally a path by which Jews came to the Netherlands. (Or my much more recent Spanish ancestors could be descended from conversos...) Not a huge amount of story here as a novel - the protag is torn between her desire to get married and have children and her role supporting her aging grandfather - but some of the episodes with Christians trying to force their conversion were pretty tense. Recommended if this is the kind of thing that interests you. I'm thinking of buying a copy for Junie, so that even if she isn't interested enough to read it right now, it can be sitting there on her bookshelf as an option when she's bored someday. (Or, that matter, for Q. Huh, I wonder if he would let me read him All Of A Kind Family...) Content notes for child death, animal death, plague, and historical anti-Semitism.

Riverland, Fran Wilde, middlegrade. I haven't historically been a Wilde fan but it's on the Lodestar and Norton ballots. There are certain books that I think of as life preservers, written and thrown out into the water in hopes that they'll make their way to someone who's struggling and could use them. I definitely hope this book finds some people and they find it useful! But, as my invocation of this category always goes, Not Me. I found the real-life parts suitably tense and awful but the climax didn't land and the resolution mostly happened off-page; the fantasy parts felt flat and I never cared. Was at least a fast read. And I have now finished another category! Ballot stuff behind the cut.

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The Midwinter Witch, Molly Knox Ostertag, strong conclusion to the Witch Boy trilogy, previously discussed here and here. Some really good character beats. Also it was neat to get this from the library and spend the afternoon with my kids and I all reading it one after another.

Interference, Sue Burke. I thought Semiosis was outstanding - one of the best things I read last year - but unfortunately this wasn't as strong a followup. Still interesting SF, and builds to a Vernor Vingean climax I couldn't not appreciate, but I thought Semiosis was doing some really powerful stuff with literary allusions and historical parallels (here's my post about it) and Interference was simpler and less ambitious in that way. (Or maybe I just wasn't catching it.) People who were less enthusiastic about Semiosis than I was (which is basically everyone) can feel okay about skipping this one unless you were already sold at "Vingean". (I mean, you can also feel okay about reading it even if you weren't, it's not *bad*.)

I watched two movies on the plane on the way back from Scotland. Men In Black: International was fun; Tessa Thompson plays a brilliant ultra-competent hero and Chris Hemsworth plays an idiot who's been getting by on his Charisma and Constitution scores, which seemed about right, except for some pathetic attempts to "balance" this equation with some pretty bad "but Thompson's character has never known luuuv" dialogue, which, ugh. Still a fine fun thing to watch on an airplane.

Aquaman on the other hand was not even redeemed by being watching it on an airplane, being an incoherent mess possibly assembled by one of those machine learning algorithms that watched a bunch of other movies and knew which parts were audience favorites, or a writers room without any actual story in mind to tell, same difference. Maybe the worst bit was where we were supposed to enjoy the destruction and slaughter of the army of the people he was trying to become king of, like, those are *your people*, jackass, maybe don't murder quite so many of em? I guess I shouldn't be surprised it was that bad given how bad Justice League was, but Wonder Woman was so good! Bah.

Read Becky Chambers' new standalone novella To Be Taught, If Fortunate, which was fantastic, possibly my favorite thing she's written, although it also couldn't have been targeted more precisely at me if she'd tried. Hard SF about the missions of a four-person interstellar exploration crew (ok, I usually try not to say "hard" sf, but I mean it's more focused on science and technology than her Wayfarers books, and also more limitedly extrapolated from present-day science) and what they find, and what it's like. Spoilers: ( Read more... ) Will get one of my novella slots when Hugo nominations come around again. [Have realized very belatedly (29Sept) that this should have had a content note on it for suicidality and animal harm, sorry to anyone who got ambushed by that.]

Also read Vonda McIntyre's Starfarers, which is also about interstellar explorers (and poly, and genetic engineering to adapt to an environment, and science as a priority competing with other personal, political, and humanitarian goals - did not plan this, but it was a very thematic pairing of books to read back to back), but also more of a television pilot for a series with a big cast and a lot of built-in conflict. I definitely plan to read the other three since stuff gets set up in this one that hasn't played out by the end of it.

Henry Lien's Peasprout Chen: Future Legend of Skate and Sword was not an easy read for me, although I do recommend it. My social anxiety/embarrassment squick has a hard time with overconfident-but-naive characters, and I was so busy being braced for comeuppance and humiliation that I missed a lot of what was actually going on in the novel. Which, I mean, was fun, in a way - sometimes it's fun to get to be surprised instead of spotting things - but getting there was kind of grueling, because I had no idea what Lien's emotional agenda was here. And so I want to say, not behind a spoiler cut, that I think you can trust Lien to *not* be doing a shitty "girls with egos need to be taken down a peg" plot, and you'll enjoy the book more. (I seem to have a vague memory of not liking the emotional dynamics but thinking the kung fu ice skating premise was neat in "Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters", a story set in the same world from a few years ago, and I wonder if that added to my nervousness.) Anyways, I may reread this one, if I have time before it's due back at the library, to see how it reads with less anxiety, and I do plan to read the sequel. I think these are marketing as middlegrade but I would call this one YA.

Aaand Chronin! I got my copy of Volume 2: The Sword In Your Hand the afternoon that I was packing for my flight to Scotland that night, and first I was like "I'm not going to read this until I get back!" which was bullshit, and then I was like "I'm just going to read *part* of this now" which was even more bullshit, and then obviously I read the whole thing immediately and was still ridiculously early to my flight but have not been able to squee about it until now. So! Chronin! I loved the first one and this is such a good conclusion and everything else goes behind the spoiler cuts. Oh, except that I've heard that since they both came out in the same year we can just nominate the whole thing for the graphic Hugo and don't have to have which-volume angst. I would love to see this be this year's My Favorite Thing Is Monsters/On A Sunbeam, like, the indie not-a-serial comic I love that gets on the ballot and loses to Monstress. Anyways, spoilers: ( Read more... )

Queen of the Sea, Dylan Meconis, 2019. I've been anticipating this for *years* (although weirdly, it never made it onto my to-read list) and it's *so good*. So so so good. I got it from the library but have been hiding it from my children so I can give it to Junie for Christmas. (And then I'll be predictably sad when she's lukewarm about it, but what can you do.) Graphic novel alternate history coming of age story - alternate history in the sense of "these characters are loosely inspired by real historical people, but have different names and details". The real historical people are Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Mary I, and the Elizabeth analogue is a major character, although not the POV character. The main character is a girl who has grown up on a very small island with a very small convent of nuns, and the main throughline of the book is her curiosity about her origins and exploration of her place in the world. It reminded me a *lot* of Amy Unbounded, particularly Belondweg Blossoming, where there are complicated adult things going on that we get to see from Amy's child perspective, and also really cool historical details in the art. (Or like Hild, only middlegrade and comics.) The art in Queen of the Sea is gorgeous - the character designs are outstanding (the six identically-dressed nuns are all instantly recognizable), the (mostly) muted colors and limited palette are perfect for the setting, and she does some really cool stuff with motifs and imagery and structure that I will not spoil the fun of. (Also every once in a while the Elizabeth character made a face that reminded me of Claire from Bite Me and my heart just swelled with affection.) Definitely an exciting comic of 2019 - I'm not sure whether I would call it sff or not, being squarely in the muddled territory of historical fantasy/historical fiction. There's even less hint of the supernatural here than there was in Hild, and I never quite decided about Hild either. Anyways, it's outstanding, however you want to classify it.