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Redemptor, Jordan Ifueko. Sequel/conclusion to Raybearer (which I wrote about here). I liked this less well than Raybearer - some awkward/slow pacing around the beginning and middle - but I did like it. Some good stuff about guilt vs conviction, and some neat scenes; I felt like a bunch of stuff at the end kind of came out of nowhere, but was *cool*, so, hey, why not. People who dislike a certain YA fantasy trope will continue to dislike it here, but overall I continue to recommend these as high-quality YA fantasy.
Chaos on Catnet
Oct. 7th, 2021 10:51 pmChaos on Catnet, Naomi Kritzer, sequel to Catfishing on Catnet, which I wrote about here. Less gripping than its predecessor, but I enjoyed it, although (spoiler)( Read more... ). I did not reread the first one and felt that Kritzer did a good job reminding me of who everyone was and the important bits of what had happened, always nice.
The Last Graduate
Oct. 1st, 2021 10:17 pmThe Last Graduate, Naomi Novik, sequel to A Deadly Education. Everything behind a cut for MAJOR SPOILERS.
( Read more... )
( Read more... )
Raybearer, Jordan Ifueko. This was terrific. Perfectly paced, interesting worldbuilding, there's a bunch of world info and backstory to convey but it's always really smoothly fit into the narrative, the main character has a compelling arc, Stuff Happens including a heck of a climax that makes me eager to read the next one - the only reason I'm not instantly giving it my first place vote for the Lodestar is that I also really liked Cemetery Boys and Elatsoe and now there will be the pain of unavoidable ranking. But anyways if you like YA fantasy this is the good stuff. The cover is also *gorgeous*; I ended up reading it on my phone despite having a friend's paper copy because that way I had it in my pocket at random times, but if you like the-book-as-object this is a nice object.
Legendborn
Jul. 3rd, 2021 01:24 amLegendborn, Tracy Deonn. Lodestar nominee. I finished this book almost two weeks ago but I'm having some trouble doing stuff lately so here's a post I wrote most of awhile ago.
I thought this book did some really cool stuff! I also felt like I was reading it for approximately forever (something like two weeks, according to when I got the ebook from the library), so either it was in fact enormously long, or it had pacing issues. (Let's take the rest of this behind a cut, for MAJOR SPOILERS.) ( Read more... )
I thought this book did some really cool stuff! I also felt like I was reading it for approximately forever (something like two weeks, according to when I got the ebook from the library), so either it was in fact enormously long, or it had pacing issues. (Let's take the rest of this behind a cut, for MAJOR SPOILERS.) ( Read more... )
The Legend of Auntie Po
Jun. 24th, 2021 11:27 pmThe Legend of Auntie Po, Shing Yin Khor. YA graphic novel set in a California logging camp in 1885, where a 13-year-old Chinese girl, Mei, helps her father cook for the loggers. It's about family and friendship and immigration and history and folktales and it made me tear up and there are maps and labeled logging tools and it's SO GOOD. Mei had moments where she reminded me of Amy from Amy Unbounded, as a character, and in how she's drawn and moves on the page, and in how her POV is a window into a world realized in detail, so, highly recommended if you were a fan. Or if you liked Queen of the Sea, or The Magic Fish. (Probably not enough of a supernatural element to count as SFF, which I mostly mention as a note to my future self going back through my comics tag looking for Hugo noms...)
Winterkeep
Apr. 22nd, 2021 10:11 pmWinterkeep, Kristin Cashore, fourth in the Graceling series. I wrote about Bitterblue, the third one, here. Winterkeep was fine, I mean, I enjoyed it. Some things paid off less than I thought they might but it all hung together more or less. It's possible that I would have enjoyed it more as a standalone rather than being set in the Graceling world - I mean, we wouldn't have had Bitterblue's backstory to lean on for her character development, but I continue to have the problem that I love Katsa best (who is not in this book at all) and so in a story world with Katsa, no matter what was going on part of me was always thinking "but what would Katsa do, if she was there". "Oh, it would be cool if Katsa - ". I accept that not every Graceling book needs to be a Katsa book in the same way that not every DC movie needs to be about Wonder Woman, but on the other hand that one was so much better than the rest of them! (Huh, which reminds me that there was another one of those I still haven't seen...) Anyways, I thought it had some nice moments and was pleasantly readable once I got going. I still hope Cashore's next book is another weird one-off like Jane Unlimited though.
The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea
Mar. 31st, 2021 08:27 pmI mentioned this a couple of weeks ago for its amazing Victo Ngai cover and now I have finally finished the book. The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea, Maggie Tokuda-Hall, 2020 YA fantasy, although perhaps more on the "fantasy that happens to have YA protagonists" end of that genre. (But I think it is marketing as YA, so.) I really liked this in some ways: some nifty interweaving of characters and motivations, the queer romance, my endless appetite for stories that do interesting things with the "girl dressing as a boy" trope, in this case going in a nice genderfluid direction. It also had some pacing unevenness, and there were things that I thought might pay off more than they did. I'm going to rec it, but with a note that it's pretty significantly dark; this is more on the "if you liked Chaos Walking" end of YA SFF.
(God, which, I guess the Knife of Never Letting Go movie finally came out? In... theaters, which I guess are open?? I don't even know.)
(God, which, I guess the Knife of Never Letting Go movie finally came out? In... theaters, which I guess are open?? I don't even know.)
Girl, Serpent, Thorn
Mar. 19th, 2021 02:50 pmGirl, Serpent, Thorn, Melissa Bashardoust. Was going to be called "She Was and She Was Not" but presumably somebody realized that was going to lead to frustrating searches and bookstore conversations. (Although I like it better, myself.) Fairytale-esque YA about a girl cursed from birth to be deadly poisonous to the touch. I thought the concept had a lot of potential but the book didn't lean into what I found compelling about it, and what it was doing didn't really work for me. There was a point when the protag was like "everything was a tangle", and I do see the appeal of trying to write that kind of story - sometimes in real life everything is a tangle too - but as a narrative it felt like more of a muddle. Or at least I am the sort of reader who likes characters with clear goals and plots with momentum. I kept reading it to see if it was going to be gay (SPOILERS: yes) but I also didn't entirely love the (SPOILERS) bi love triangle, in which her attraction to the dude is more intense, but her attraction to the girl gets words like "gradual" and "delicate", which, again, sure! fine! but made me feel like she had more chemistry with the "wrong" one. ONE MORE SPOILER: ( Read more... )
Cemetery Boys
Mar. 10th, 2021 08:28 pmCemetery Boys, Aiden Thomas. This was awesome! YA about a trans witch boy who summons a dead boy and then can't get rid of him. Excellent pacing and really nice construction - without getting too spoilery about it, this is the story of two people trapped in transitional states who are able to help each other out of them. (Spoilers: PLUS KISSING.) This is exactly why I can't quit YA. Strong visuals and a nice tight timeline - it would make a terrific movie, and I would love to sit in a theater (or, you know, in front of Netflix) and have these feelings again for two hours. I have immediately added it to my Lodestar noms and would recommend it to anyone willing to read dude-centric YA who likes YA.
ETA: I forgot to talk about the Spanish! So, there was occasional dialogue in Spanish in this, for flavor I guess, or to make the point that they were sometimes speaking Spanish, or because English wouldn't have exactly the same weight, some of which got directly translated and some of which didn't. I always thought it was entirely clear from context what was going on, but I could also more or less read the Spanish*; I remember being really frustrated by untranslated French in books when I was younger (I don't remember what I was reading, as a teen, that just assumed everyone read a little French, but I recall it coming up more than once and I hated it), so I really can't say how it would read to someone else. The reason I actually wanted to mention it though was that I was thinking about what you would do with the Spanish if you wanted to translate this book *into* Spanish, and what I decided was that just as the Spanish mostly shows up in dialogue between certain people, what you would do is keep some English in the conversations between certain *other* people, to indicate in the other direction that those conversations were in English. Sort of fun to think about which words would get the "this is a word of cultural significance that we don't translate" treatment. (I am not *nearly* fluent enough to actually do this work, just to think about it, to be clear.)
*Funny story about my semiliteracy: I recently tried reading a couple of the Strange Horizons stories in Spanish, in their annual bilingual issue, and was just like, fuck, I understand many of these words but what the fuck is going on here. But then I tried reading them in English and was like okay I understand all of these words but what the fuck is going on here, so I guess my Spanish reading experience was not as far off as I thought. (Also one of them seemed like a less direct translation, like there was some stuff that was just left out of the English, which may have been part of the point but I'm *really* not fluent enough to get if something clever was happening with that, alas.)
ETA: I forgot to talk about the Spanish! So, there was occasional dialogue in Spanish in this, for flavor I guess, or to make the point that they were sometimes speaking Spanish, or because English wouldn't have exactly the same weight, some of which got directly translated and some of which didn't. I always thought it was entirely clear from context what was going on, but I could also more or less read the Spanish*; I remember being really frustrated by untranslated French in books when I was younger (I don't remember what I was reading, as a teen, that just assumed everyone read a little French, but I recall it coming up more than once and I hated it), so I really can't say how it would read to someone else. The reason I actually wanted to mention it though was that I was thinking about what you would do with the Spanish if you wanted to translate this book *into* Spanish, and what I decided was that just as the Spanish mostly shows up in dialogue between certain people, what you would do is keep some English in the conversations between certain *other* people, to indicate in the other direction that those conversations were in English. Sort of fun to think about which words would get the "this is a word of cultural significance that we don't translate" treatment. (I am not *nearly* fluent enough to actually do this work, just to think about it, to be clear.)
*Funny story about my semiliteracy: I recently tried reading a couple of the Strange Horizons stories in Spanish, in their annual bilingual issue, and was just like, fuck, I understand many of these words but what the fuck is going on here. But then I tried reading them in English and was like okay I understand all of these words but what the fuck is going on here, so I guess my Spanish reading experience was not as far off as I thought. (Also one of them seemed like a less direct translation, like there was some stuff that was just left out of the English, which may have been part of the point but I'm *really* not fluent enough to get if something clever was happening with that, alas.)
Storm the Earth
Nov. 19th, 2020 01:31 pmStorm the Earth, Rebecca Kim Wells, 2020. Conclusion of the duology that started with Shatter the Sky. This was interesting to read after having just read Unravel the Dusk, another YA fantasy duology conclusion. I thought Storm did a much better job of remembering what the reader came for (dragons) and continuing to serve it up - every time I started to get a little restless, there was another dragon encounter or event of some sort. All I want is to be constantly pandered to, is that really so much to ask. :) Nothing here was hugely memorable, but it was solid and a decent read.
Spoilery thoughts about the *other* thing the reader came for behind the cut: ( Read more... )
Spoilery thoughts about the *other* thing the reader came for behind the cut: ( Read more... )
The Magic Fish
Nov. 13th, 2020 07:16 pmThe Magic Fish, Trung Le Nguyen, 2020. Gorgeously-drawn YA graphic novel about a Vietnamese-American boy and his mom reading each other fairy tales, interweaving the fairy tales, his real life, and occasionally scenes from her past deciding to leave Vietnam. If I have one complaint, it's that I wish we could have gotten to see a little bit more of that thread, although, the story isn't really about that, beyond what we already get to see, so, I think it was probably the right choice, I'm just greedy. It was really good... really neat stuff about immigrant experiences and the ways people connect with and through stories and all kinds of stuff. And the art is so pretty.
I did make one mistake, and told Q, who'd been asking about it since I brought it home, that he could read it - yeah, somebody probably just made a face there. For what it's worth, I *think* he stopped reading before the most grisly part, but was significantly upset by an earlier upsetting part, whoops. Honestly, I was mostly focused on my fear that he would take certain homophobic comments made by a minor-character authority figure at face value (and so I told him not to - I pointed that guy out and said he was a bad guy), and was not really thinking about the fact that my 8yo has vastly less exposure to the sometimes gruesome details of traditional fairy tales than I do. To me, as a middle-aged mom, the idea of my kid thinking I would be sad if he came out to me is way scarier than fantasy violence in fairy tales... not so much the 8yo. Anyways, as far as I can tell he did a good job of stopping and self-regulating, like, not continuing to read something that was upsetting him, which is an important reading skill, and I have recalibrated my sense of what he's probably okay with.
Specifics of fairy tale violence, animal harm, and a few more spoilery content notes relating to parents behind the cut here: ( Read more... )
I did make one mistake, and told Q, who'd been asking about it since I brought it home, that he could read it - yeah, somebody probably just made a face there. For what it's worth, I *think* he stopped reading before the most grisly part, but was significantly upset by an earlier upsetting part, whoops. Honestly, I was mostly focused on my fear that he would take certain homophobic comments made by a minor-character authority figure at face value (and so I told him not to - I pointed that guy out and said he was a bad guy), and was not really thinking about the fact that my 8yo has vastly less exposure to the sometimes gruesome details of traditional fairy tales than I do. To me, as a middle-aged mom, the idea of my kid thinking I would be sad if he came out to me is way scarier than fantasy violence in fairy tales... not so much the 8yo. Anyways, as far as I can tell he did a good job of stopping and self-regulating, like, not continuing to read something that was upsetting him, which is an important reading skill, and I have recalibrated my sense of what he's probably okay with.
Specifics of fairy tale violence, animal harm, and a few more spoilery content notes relating to parents behind the cut here: ( Read more... )
Unravel the Dusk
Nov. 12th, 2020 09:34 pmUnravel the Dusk, Elizabeth Lim, 2020. Sequel to Spin the Dawn (and conclusion of the duology). You know how some sequels are really good at refreshing your memory on what happened in the previous one? This... wasn't. I don't know if that's because the assumption in YA is that your readers are still young enough to actually remember most of what they read, or what, but I definitely found myself struggling to pick up the threads of all the oaths and curses and whatnot that never actually got recapped. Unfortunately, a lot of what made the first one charming also failed to carry over... instead of all the neat inventive fantasy-sewing bits, this felt much more run-of-the-mill with battles and the aforementioned curses. The central conflict felt belabored, and the eventual resolution felt unearned. I think there is definitely an art to writing a story that pays off on-theme... like, the recent Space Battle Lunchtime is a great example of this, at heart it's cooking-themed and so the day is saved through cooking. On MLP all problems are friendship problems. Etc. I wanted Dusk to be more about creativity and less about Generic Fantasy Final Battle. I still think the first one is very enjoyable, but my recommendation would be to skim this one heavily if you absolutely must know how it all turns out.
graphic novels
Nov. 12th, 2020 08:07 pmOne of the interesting side effects of Q's insatiable desire for more reading material is that my house is now full of graphic novels I don't have time to read. Actually this already started with J, who has several on her shelves I'd love to get to someday. These days, though, J has moved on to mostly obtaining her own books by requesting ebooks on her own library card, meaning that I have no idea what she's reading (which, to be clear, is great - I was going to the library by myself at a younger age than she is now, and I think privacy in book-selection is important for kids as they get older, and we were actively working towards this by getting her her own card), whereas I am still the book obtainer for Q, so I have a much better idea what he's reading.
Anyways, I finally made the time to read a couple of them before they go back to the library! Aster and the Accidental Magic, Thom Pico and Karensac, is a compendium translation of two Belgian volumes (which explains why it felt disjointed - it was two standalone stories). Cute middlegrade with some original if slightly random-feeling twists; Q really liked this one, especially the Chestnut Knights in the second story. He wanted the sequel immediately.
Witchlight, Jessi Zabarsky, is about a witch, and the girl who she meets/kidnaps who becomes her traveling companion and swordfighting teacher (and, SPOILERS, girlfriend, and how cool is it that there's this whole genre now of queer/queer-friendly fantasy comics meant for kids, like this and the Witch Boy trilogy and Mooncakes and Tea Dragon Society??). There's definitely a lot more going on here, emotional-arc-wise, than in Aster - YA vs middlegrade, I guess - and I correspondingly liked it more, being, you know, not actually a kid reader myself. But Q also liked it, so, hey.
Anyways, I finally made the time to read a couple of them before they go back to the library! Aster and the Accidental Magic, Thom Pico and Karensac, is a compendium translation of two Belgian volumes (which explains why it felt disjointed - it was two standalone stories). Cute middlegrade with some original if slightly random-feeling twists; Q really liked this one, especially the Chestnut Knights in the second story. He wanted the sequel immediately.
Witchlight, Jessi Zabarsky, is about a witch, and the girl who she meets/kidnaps who becomes her traveling companion and swordfighting teacher (and, SPOILERS, girlfriend, and how cool is it that there's this whole genre now of queer/queer-friendly fantasy comics meant for kids, like this and the Witch Boy trilogy and Mooncakes and Tea Dragon Society??). There's definitely a lot more going on here, emotional-arc-wise, than in Aster - YA vs middlegrade, I guess - and I correspondingly liked it more, being, you know, not actually a kid reader myself. But Q also liked it, so, hey.
books? I guess I have read things?
Nov. 10th, 2020 10:30 pmA 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 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.
Fence: Striking Distance
Nov. 4th, 2020 12:53 pmFence: Striking Distance, Sarah Rees Brennan, tie-in to CS Pacat's comic series. I was very excited about this, and it was definitely a fun read, although also occasionally a little jarring - character traits that worked in the comic felt a little "turned up to 11" here, and there were a few moments when obliviousness/spacetoasterness crossed the line into "too dumb to live". But, I mean, I continue to love all of them and their various dumbnesses, and I like Brennan's takes on the characters, too. (Although it was also jarring that I had just reread Drop Dead Gorgeous recently, and some of the character voices and quirks were really strongly reminiscent of that, which I'm sure SRB would hate for anyone to talk about, but, sorry SRB, there it was.)
Elatsoe, Darcie Little Badger, 2020 YA. I've enjoyed her short fiction and was excited to read her debut novel and was not disappointed. In broadest outline this is A Teen Solves A Mystery but that does not capture how good the character work and worldbuilding details are. I don't want to spoil anything but there is one thing in particular that was so brilliant it made the book for me right there. I enjoyed reading a YA protag who had a good relationship with their parents, and I liked the handling of her asexuality (and, hey, as a bonus, if you get annoyed by YA romance plots, guess what there isn't). I guess it's premature to claim it will win at least one of the Lodestar and Norton without having read much other 2020 YA, but it's going to be on all the ballots. BTW if you find yourself needing to talk about it out loud, Elatsoe is "eh-lat-so-ay" (eh-LAT-so-ay, specifically, I found a video, although the text makes sure to tell us it's four syllables, which I always appreciate.)
Spoilers about details: ( Read more... )
(Animal harm content: there's a ghost dog, which has already died by the start of the story.)
Spoilers about details: ( Read more... )
(Animal harm content: there's a ghost dog, which has already died by the start of the story.)
Destroy All Monsters
Oct. 12th, 2020 09:53 pmDestroy All Monsters, Sam J. Miller. This was definitely much more like Art of Starving than Blackfish City - I'll be curious about his next book, whether he's alternating or Blackfish was an exception. (An awesome exception and I hope he writes more like that.) Unfortunately this one didn't work for me as well as Art of Starving did (which I talked about here). The two-worlds "is this schizophrenia or is it a sane connection to a real alternate world" thing just felt sad to me. The ways that the two versions of people were different in the two worlds never felt like it added up to anything, and the "leaking" of magic into the mundane world felt like cheating. Miller says he is writing for kids in high school who are dealing with mental illness, which I applaud him doing, and I hope it finds its right audience among them. I wasn't it.
(Because I am me though, I of course want to read the minor character who draws with fire as Miller having read and been inspired by my Zuko story - I know I did not invent that idea and this is like one step away from thinking the people on the TV are sending secret coded messages to me personally, but Miller talks about his love for ATLA in his acknowledgments again, and a bunch of people actually have read that story, so it's not outside the realm of possibility that he could have been one of them and it could have entered his mental neat-ideas bank from there. As with the bit in Dragon Republic earlier this year, I was delighted to see it and get to ask myself this question, even if the real answer is probably "come on, dude, get over yourself.")
(Because I am me though, I of course want to read the minor character who draws with fire as Miller having read and been inspired by my Zuko story - I know I did not invent that idea and this is like one step away from thinking the people on the TV are sending secret coded messages to me personally, but Miller talks about his love for ATLA in his acknowledgments again, and a bunch of people actually have read that story, so it's not outside the realm of possibility that he could have been one of them and it could have entered his mental neat-ideas bank from there. As with the bit in Dragon Republic earlier this year, I was delighted to see it and get to ask myself this question, even if the real answer is probably "come on, dude, get over yourself.")
A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking
Oct. 8th, 2020 05:19 pmI apparently never reviewed A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking, which I read back in... September? As with much Ursula Vernon, it was very Ursula Vernon, which if you like will delight you and if you don't then I suppose you would not. I am always happy to get to read a new Vernon. This one is more like Minor Mage or Summer in Orcus in having a middlegrade-aged protagonist who is having to deal with darker and heavier stuff than your typical middlegrade, as opposed to the Clockwork/Sword/Paladin books with adult protags who have romance. (I like both.)
half the graphics
Jun. 24th, 2020 10:57 pmA nice batch this year but I still don't like any of them as much as I liked Chronin, hmph.
Monstress 4 - always gorgeous, always a little confusing, although I think I did a decent job letting go of my need to remember where we saw all these characters last and just rolling with it. I don't think I liked this one quite as much as 3 (which got my second-place vote last year) and I would really like to see something else win this year; Monstress is great but this doesn't have to be the Monstress Award for Best Monstress.
La Guardia - oh, this was neat. I guess it's actually set in Okorafor's Lagoon universe, but you don't need to have read that, and the tone is pretty different. Good story, good stuff about travel bans and racism and the richness of different people coming together, and I really liked the art.
Mooncakes - super sweet YA. A nonbinary werewolf and a witch with hearing aids, childhood friends/sweethearts, reunite to fight a demon, with help from the witch's badass gay grandmas. Felt like it would definitely appeal to fans of Witch Boy even though the protags here are more like young adults; I might get a paper copy for my kids, actually. I'm always glad to see disability rep in sff; there was a great panel early on visually showing deafness with distorted and shrunken letters in a speech bubble that was really nice comicsing.
Oh, and I guess I've already read Paper Girls 6 (spoilery comments here), so I'm actually more than halfway done! (Although if we're measuring by reading time, nine volumes of WicDiv is going to take like twice as long as everything else. Shh.)
(Also, wow, when we got the finalists list, I was so busy being sad about no Chronin that it didn't even hit me that there's also no Saga. I used to be so into Saga (the breastfeeding cover!!) and now my reaction is "yay I didn't have to read Saga this year" which, uh, suggests that maybe that series has not done a great job not squandering my goodwill. Anyways apparently Saga has been on hiatus since the issues that got collected into volume 9, so we don't have Saga this year because there is no Saga, and it's on indefinite hiatus so we may not have Saga again next year either, or, one has to wonder, possibly ever, if Vaughan has run out of kitchen sinks to throw in there. Welp.)
Monstress 4 - always gorgeous, always a little confusing, although I think I did a decent job letting go of my need to remember where we saw all these characters last and just rolling with it. I don't think I liked this one quite as much as 3 (which got my second-place vote last year) and I would really like to see something else win this year; Monstress is great but this doesn't have to be the Monstress Award for Best Monstress.
La Guardia - oh, this was neat. I guess it's actually set in Okorafor's Lagoon universe, but you don't need to have read that, and the tone is pretty different. Good story, good stuff about travel bans and racism and the richness of different people coming together, and I really liked the art.
Mooncakes - super sweet YA. A nonbinary werewolf and a witch with hearing aids, childhood friends/sweethearts, reunite to fight a demon, with help from the witch's badass gay grandmas. Felt like it would definitely appeal to fans of Witch Boy even though the protags here are more like young adults; I might get a paper copy for my kids, actually. I'm always glad to see disability rep in sff; there was a great panel early on visually showing deafness with distorted and shrunken letters in a speech bubble that was really nice comicsing.
Oh, and I guess I've already read Paper Girls 6 (spoilery comments here), so I'm actually more than halfway done! (Although if we're measuring by reading time, nine volumes of WicDiv is going to take like twice as long as everything else. Shh.)
(Also, wow, when we got the finalists list, I was so busy being sad about no Chronin that it didn't even hit me that there's also no Saga. I used to be so into Saga (the breastfeeding cover!!) and now my reaction is "yay I didn't have to read Saga this year" which, uh, suggests that maybe that series has not done a great job not squandering my goodwill. Anyways apparently Saga has been on hiatus since the issues that got collected into volume 9, so we don't have Saga this year because there is no Saga, and it's on indefinite hiatus so we may not have Saga again next year either, or, one has to wonder, possibly ever, if Vaughan has run out of kitchen sinks to throw in there. Welp.)
