superheroes and comics, but separately
Feb. 25th, 2018 09:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraFinished Dreadnought! Liked it a lot, enough that I think I will Hugo-nominate it for the YA/Lodestar and now I have four solid nominees and can abandon my marginal maybes.
The premise: one of the world's most powerful supers passes on his powers to a 15yo trans girl, giving her, as a side effect, her ideal body. She has to decide whether she really wants to be a costumed hero while dealing with her abusive family's reaction to her sudden physical transition and also dealing with the supervillain who killed her predecessor. I really liked April Daniels' writing, from the way she wrote about how the powers worked and what it felt like to use them, to her handling of backstory and world info, to the pacing of the emotional arcs and fight scenes. And I loved the TERF secondary villain from the local superteam* - it's such a perfect ideology for hyperbolic scenery-chewing comic book villain ranting. (And she was genuinely scary, making me definitely want to read the next one to make sure our young heroine is okay!) The primary villain also managed some genuine creepiness. All in all it was both a good superhero story and a good use of superhero tropes, recommended if you like supers. Content note for homophobic/transphobic abusive family and for graphic superbattle violence (and as always feel free to ask if you'd like more specific content info about anything).
*ETA: now I'm worried that this sentence makes it sound like I love TERFs. I only mean that I feel like TERFs are relatively unexplored as comic book badguys compared with Nazis, Soviets, and corporations and it worked *really well*. ETA2: Dreadnought is not a graphic novel, it's a prose novel. Sorry for the ambiguous use of "comic book".
Also read Shannon Hale and LeUyen Pham's Real Friends, a middlegrade graphic novel about the misery of late-elementary social dynamics. I had this on my own to-read list because I like Shannon Hale but it's also right within Junie's reading interests (she's enjoyed Smile and El Deafo) and, I dunno, I maybe also have some vague fantasy that if I get her to read enough books about relational aggression (see also a recent read of Patricia Polacco's Bully about cyberbullying) she won't end up as the mean girl herself? (I bet someone reading this is like "you don't really think your sweet little kiddo could be the mean girl do you??" and, like, I absolutely do. And I don't think it's just me being baffled by/scared of extroverts, either, although Junie is obviously muuuuuch more social/sociable/socially oriented/socially ept than I ever was. I think it's really easy for any kid to temporarily lose track of things like compassion and generosity during the brutal social experimentation of preadolescence/adolescence, or to underestimate their own power to hurt. I don't know if reading books can help but it probably doesn't hurt.)
The premise: one of the world's most powerful supers passes on his powers to a 15yo trans girl, giving her, as a side effect, her ideal body. She has to decide whether she really wants to be a costumed hero while dealing with her abusive family's reaction to her sudden physical transition and also dealing with the supervillain who killed her predecessor. I really liked April Daniels' writing, from the way she wrote about how the powers worked and what it felt like to use them, to her handling of backstory and world info, to the pacing of the emotional arcs and fight scenes. And I loved the TERF secondary villain from the local superteam* - it's such a perfect ideology for hyperbolic scenery-chewing comic book villain ranting. (And she was genuinely scary, making me definitely want to read the next one to make sure our young heroine is okay!) The primary villain also managed some genuine creepiness. All in all it was both a good superhero story and a good use of superhero tropes, recommended if you like supers. Content note for homophobic/transphobic abusive family and for graphic superbattle violence (and as always feel free to ask if you'd like more specific content info about anything).
*ETA: now I'm worried that this sentence makes it sound like I love TERFs. I only mean that I feel like TERFs are relatively unexplored as comic book badguys compared with Nazis, Soviets, and corporations and it worked *really well*. ETA2: Dreadnought is not a graphic novel, it's a prose novel. Sorry for the ambiguous use of "comic book".
Also read Shannon Hale and LeUyen Pham's Real Friends, a middlegrade graphic novel about the misery of late-elementary social dynamics. I had this on my own to-read list because I like Shannon Hale but it's also right within Junie's reading interests (she's enjoyed Smile and El Deafo) and, I dunno, I maybe also have some vague fantasy that if I get her to read enough books about relational aggression (see also a recent read of Patricia Polacco's Bully about cyberbullying) she won't end up as the mean girl herself? (I bet someone reading this is like "you don't really think your sweet little kiddo could be the mean girl do you??" and, like, I absolutely do. And I don't think it's just me being baffled by/scared of extroverts, either, although Junie is obviously muuuuuch more social/sociable/socially oriented/socially ept than I ever was. I think it's really easy for any kid to temporarily lose track of things like compassion and generosity during the brutal social experimentation of preadolescence/adolescence, or to underestimate their own power to hurt. I don't know if reading books can help but it probably doesn't hurt.)
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Date: 2018-02-26 03:38 am (UTC)that said: I thought Real Friends was quite good but the handling of the sister and her aggression was... not bad, exactly, but in terms of sheer plotting it didn't work for me, in that the emphasis on the sister's trouble handling her aggression and the fallout therefrom was so effective that the end pivot was less so. I'm tempering my criticism because I read the afterword, so I know Shannon Hale was actually describing her real-life sister and some real-life problems, and so it makes sense that in real life the move from "aggressive to the point of abusive" to "acceptable" would be shaky (and maybe to some degree willed into existence?), but as fiction it felt forced.
Sheena also liked Smile but it left her vowing no braces, ever, which we can't guarantee her.
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Date: 2018-02-26 03:57 am (UTC)Definitely agree that the handling of the sibling violence stuff was less well done than the elementary school part. Challenges of memoir maybe, yeah.
We haven't read any other LeUyen Pham except for the Princess in Black books, now I have more things to look for, thank you!
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Date: 2018-02-26 03:45 pm (UTC)