Book reviews 4-7-26
4 Janes by Marian Yee. 5/5
This is an utterly brilliant book that takes Jane Eyre as its point of inspiration and blossoms into an astonishing set of variations on the novel’s theme: love, yearning, unrequited love, marriage, parenthood, orphanhood, and teaching. The resulting four interlinked stories are each a masterpiece of writing and storytelling, moving from England to Vietnam to the United States, moving through time both forwards and backwards, creating moments of intense joy and suffering. I recommend this for anyone who’s thought “what if?” about Jane Eyre, anyone interested in fiction about Vietnam and especially the war, and who has thought about what family is, what it obligates, what it can and can’t do. It’s a fantastic book to read after readying/studying Jane Eyre, appropriate for high school students on up. This should be a huge success with book groups.
The Dragon Has Some Complaints by John Wiswell. 4/5
I really liked Wiswell’s Someone You Can Build a Nest In and intensely disliked Wearing the Lion; The Dragon Has Some Complaints falls somewhere in the middle. The beginning was slow and irritating, but it got better. At its core, it’s a novel about C-PTSD, disability, and war, using a 3- (formerly 4-) headed dragon as its protagonist. Injured, the dragon goes through rehabilitation of its body while its surroundings and caregivers contribute, unknowingly, to its emotional and psychological treatment as well. It’s all a bit obvious, but if you can deal with that, it’s a fine read.
Ghoul by Kasey Iris. 5/5
CW for suicide. Ghoul is a manic, head-spinning ride of a supernatural mystery that ends with redemption and forgiveness. A high school student moves into a new building with her parents and is overwhelmed by the chatty, gossipy neighbors. Bewildered by their claims and her own recent emotional trauma, she accuses one of them of killing his wife and son. But then she’s befriended by a strange supernatural creature who offers to help investigate the deaths, and makes a bond with it, resulting in a bittersweet resolution. In the end, the building comes together as a community to help its own. There’s excellent multicultural representation, including text in Tagalog, and the art captures the protagonist’s feelings of chaos and uncertainty as well as her panic and anxiety.
Lonely Deaths Lie Thick as Snow 1 by Hajime Inoryu. 5/5
Give me more! This (very) gritty seinen (meaning it’s marketed towards young adult men; this book is not porn, in case you’re worried) about a young detective and an highly disturbing case is terrific. The characters are well-developed and interesting, and show change; the plot is fast-paced and compelling; the art, a blend of different manga styles, is very effective; and I want to know what happens next!
The Witches of Cambridge by Alice Hoffman. 4/5
As with all of Alice Hoffman’s books about witches and New England, this is a lovely tale about witchcraft, love, sisterhood, and change. Following ancestors and descendants, readers are treated to the histories of the first witches in Massachusetts, those who seek to help them and thwart them, and how time changes some, but not all, of the ways they live. Hoffman’s witches live a bit outside of time, which makes it interesting when she is trying to conjure the past in two different eras here, Cambridge in the late 1600s and again in the 1950s-60s. The greater point of the book is about love, and allowing it in your life, and struggling with how to handle it when it’s difficult, and that is well-done throughout. There are high-tension points, but they’re easily resolved, and I think readers will read this not to know what happens, but to float along the beautiful writing and for the many strong women of the book.
Gigs by Mark Mosedale. 5/5
Gigs is a book I want to buy for everyone! In a dystopian Britain where everyone gets a Basic Income but has to do often-meaningless or unneeded “gigs” in order to get it, a group of very disparate people cross paths, leading to change. Each main character gets their own cliffhanger-ish arc, and then they all come together at the end. Secrets are revealed, ideas are shared, ideologies are shattered, minds are changed, and we see that change really is incremental and dependent on individuals making contributions and creating community. The characters are all awesome and diverse, and the art is wonderful and evocative, and the music referenced in the stories sent me to put on old vinyl while I read. Highly recommend, especially for reading groups, teens, and everyone who needs a booster shot of optimism,
Massif by Garth Nix. 1/5
Where to begin? Well, Massif is a massive disappointment. There’s tons of dull info-dumping. The characters are utterly banal and two-dimensional and all feel like they’re the same. The world-building is clumsy and lacking any charm or mystery or interest. The use of mostly analog tech because new stuff doesn’t work in important places is a very, very tired way of getting around having to actually make up new, original tech or even use current tech with which readers would be familiar. Too much of the book feels like Expanse fanfic. I love Nix’s Old Kingdom books, and Shade’s Children, and others, but recently his books just haven’t been working well–this holds for Massif as well as the Booksellers series. It makes me wonder if he lost his previous editor, or has become uneditable, as some successful writers do. Anyway, this book made me very sad.
The Unicorn Hunters by Katherine Arden. 5/5
In this gorgeous and beautifully-realized alternate world fantasy, Anne of Brittany must do everything she can to save her kingdom from being swallowed up by France. And to that end, she puts herself in very real danger, encounters a unicorn, travels in the Lost Lands and the world of the korriganed (Breton fae), and learns to control magic herself. The characters are brilliantly full and real, the pace is perfect, allowing for lingering over beauty as well as hurrying through escapes, and the mix of historical detail with fantasy is terrific.
Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition by Maia Kobabe. 5/5
This is fantastic! This special annotated edition of Genderqueer reproduces every page of the original memoir and loads of sketches and drafts or each page, along with comments in the margins from creators Maia and Phoebe Kobabe, their mentors and teachers, friends, comic book experts, and many, many more. It’s an education in reading graphic books and getting every nuance and detail in addition to a wonderful story about how the Kobabes collaborated, how eir friends and family supported em–or were confused, awkward, or didn’t fully understand at first. Brave/bravx to everyone involved in this edition. Even if you already have the original, go get this one too. It’s 100% worth it.
The Cutting Garden by Darcy Van Poelgeest. 2/5
In New Orleans, a young woman visits a florist late at night. Asking for a funeral arrangement, the young woman tells the story of how she befriended another woman in the same city years and years before, convinced the woman to take her in as a “daughter,” and how they lived together for many years. That’s a little weird, you might think–an adult taking in a teen (?) she doesn’t know, and living with her. But it’s not so strange, really, because the young woman is a vampire, and has beguiled the older woman in the past the way she is beguiling the florist in the frame story. The New Orleans and then rural Louisiana settings and the idea of a very young vampire are too redolent of Anne Rice for this story to feel original, although the art is pretty.
Memories of Giselle by Katia Vecchio. 2/5
Giselle’s memories of her recently deceased grandmother are pleasant at first, but as she thinks and grows, she recovers memories of her grandmother’s sexual abuse of her–and possibly of her brother as well, and is eventually able to get help. This is an important topic, but the author’s approach is underwhelming, despite the solid art. While the narrative builds in tension, it does so in a plodding manner and key elements will pass some readers right by. The characters are flat and dull, without much personality or development and serve only as set decorations for Giselle to interact with as the story moves from (somewhat obvious) hint to hint about the source of her depression and physical pain.
Black Film by David F. Walker. 1/5
At the beginning of this book, the author writes, “At the end of the nineteenth century, the film industry was just starting to take shape in the United States and parts of Europe, with motion pictures emerging as a form of entertainment. Trains in motion. Horses in motion. People in motion. There was little by way of craft or intellectual engagement–no sound, no story, and no editing.” This entire sentence is wrong. Every part of it is wrong. And the author’s ignorance doesn’t end there. The book is riddled with factual errors, interpretations made without context, and a lack of engagement with current scholarship on Black film. As a film scholar, I am horrified by this book, and am going to have to do so much work to correct all of the people who read it and think it a good source of information about Black film. It’s truly appalling. 0 stars deserved
Woodstake by Darin S. Cape. 1/5
This is an unmitigated disaster of a book. The story is cliched, disjointed, and terrible, the characters are flat and undeveloped, the dialogue is banal, and the art is atrocious. In fact, I’d like to see some kind of statement from the creators and publisher that the art isn’t AI, because a lot of it was what I’ve come to expect from AI-generated slop. I’d give it 0 stars if I could.
The Last Day of H.P. Lovecraft by Romuald Giulivo. 5/5
This beautiful and evocative graphic novel confronts Lovecraft’s beliefs and actions, calling out his racism and antisemitism and exploring the relationships he had with other authors, readers, his wife, and others while exploring the traumas of his life and his legacy. Highly recommend.
House of Margins by Tlotlo Tsamaase. 5/5
An outstanding work of surrealism grappling with colonization, race, femicide, generational trauma, the enforced competition of women, bodily autonomy, and family. A group of young African women writers are given fellowships to work on new projects, but the residence where they must stay is haunted, and its ghosts are determined to make others listen to their stories, as they seek to nest in the bodies of the writers in order to experience life once more. Told through essays, news articles, a podcast, and other frames, the story of one woman who goes missing soon becomes the story of all of the wome nwho have been connected with the house and its history. Superb psychological horror and an important book.
The Night Pool by Lauren Lee Smith. 4/5
As colonists move into what is now California, they trample sacred land and wake protective spirits, who after years of quietly guarding are suddenly hungry. In this landscape, Smith places a native settlement, a growing town of Chinese and white miners, and a small clutch of young women–white, indigenous, and Chinese–who are lured to the night pool, a place of eldritch power. What happens next is solid but also fairly well-trod impregnation and body horror operating under the aegis of feminist gore and horror, as the women of the different communities residing in the area learn to trust one another in fighting the machinations of the men who seek to control them. However. It would make me vastly more comfortable in recommending this book to know that it has been through a sensitivity read by Native American and Chinese American consultants, particularly for the indigenous character, who is the granddaughter of a shaman and engages with shamanic practices. Nothing in the book, the writers’ website, or publisher’s website indicates that this was done,
The Fallen by Louise Brangan. 5/5
In this new study that seeks to delineate Ireland’s Magdalen(e) Laundries from its Mother & Baby homes, Branagan follows the stories of girls and women who were sent to work in the Laundries mostly because they were deemed as having the potential to become unwed mothers, unhoused, or criminals. In the repressive and brutal environment of Ireland and the Catholic Church in the post-war era, girls and women could be put into slave labor at the Laundries for smoking, wearing clothing an adult found objectionable, being abused, or other “sins.” Institutionalized for years, many inmates had no methods of escape and were permanently scarred physically, psychologically, and emotionally. Some found they could not function in the wider world when they were released; others struggled mightily to have “normal” lives after youths spent in terror. Branagan chronicles the Laundries and their abuses by treating their victims with utmost empathy and care, helping them speak after having been forced into silence. As a scholar, I wanted a little more context for some of the work the author done, but for general readers, this is an outstanding book on Ireland and its desire to control itself by controlling its women in the early days of the Republic.
The Sourdough Compendium by A.G. Slatter. 5/5
This compilation–three full-length collections of short stories and novellas set in the author’s Sourdough world—is utterly delicious. It was good it was so long, because I didn’t want to stop reading it for days. Regardless of whether you’ve read any of the other books or stories set in Slatter’s dark fairy-tale world, these tales are utterly compelling, captivating, horrifying, and delightful. Everything and everyone in them is intertwined, and putting the pieces together as you read is part of the fun–coming to the realization that “Oh! Those people are related/betrayed one another/saved each other/are connected through this event….” is excellent. You’ll encounter well-developed and wrought characters, twisty plots, and outstanding world-building as you traverse more than 300 years of Sourdough world history. Savor it.
