Reviews

It sucks to be a fundamentalist Mormon if you’re not a future God of your own universe (i.e. a man with multiple wives and children, preferably with some prominence in the community). It sucks especially bad if you’re a pretty girl about to be married off to the highest bidder. This angry and compelling, if not especially sophisticated, novel takes on the injustice and cruelty of polygamy as practiced by fundamentalist Mormons. You know what you’re in for with the dedication, “To all the victims of polygamy.”

Twilight meets The Historian. The protagonist is a witch, but vampires figure prominently. Diana Bishop is a renowned scholar on alchemy doing research at the Bodleian Library at Oxford. She pages an enchanted book and all hell breaks loose in the creature community (which includes daemons as well as witches and vampires). The research part is interesting, but the story devolves into the overprotective male vamp, gendered power struggle, and abstinence porn that drove some feminists crazy about the Twilight series.

As you can imagine, this zine pretty much had me at the title. The contents are 20+ pages of colored-in stick-figure old women engaged in nefarious activities. Some of them are mild: “When I am an old woman I will throw things out of trees at people.” Some are gratuitous: “When I am an old woman I will use impractical implements of destruction for everyday purposes.” (Accompanied by an illustration of a crazy-haired lady taking a hatchet to a lone mushroom on a counter top. Some are what you might expect from an eccentric elderly lady: “When I am an old woman I will cheat rampantly at Bingo.” (I’m looking at you, Sister Loud Melissa.) And others are quite illegal: “When I am an old woman I will take vacations soley for the purposes of gambling and drug-smuggling.”

No one’s conscience escapes unscathed from war, not even a loving mother and shelterer of freedom fighters. I found Rehana’s story hard to get into at first, and I recommend other readers brief themselves on Bangladesh’s fight for liberation before digging in. With a little patience I did grow to care about Rehana, her son and daughter, and her various friends and neighbors.

Why is historical fiction looked down upon in publishing? Because women like it? I like it. I think it’s a great way to get a taste of important events and eras. This retelling of the U.S. woman suffrage movement is told in three voices: Lucy Burns, Mary Daly, and Kate Brennan. Brennan, a recent Bryn Mawr grad who somewhat accidentally gets arrested at a White House protests and spends two weeks in prison as a result carries most of the book.

I was on the fence about the first installment of this cheerleaders undercover series, and I’m indifferent about the second one. Well, maybe a teeny bit anti.

Joey's gender transition stories are everything that you could want in a minicomic. They're honest, well-drawn, compelling, and at least once an issue, LOL funny. I don't say LOL casually, I actually mean it. The strip that got me in issue one is the 4th installment of Joey's conversation with herself, "Am I a bitch now?" about whether her now passing and openly identifying as female--and taking hormones--has, you know. If that scares you, know that this isn't an attack on assertive womanhood. Check out the first installment, and you'll understand:

C's full-color handwritten and illustrated mini- 24-hourish perzine depicts her winter solstice day-in-the-life. She does a holiday craft project, but is unsuccessful at luring her son to participate--no Norman Rockwell memories for Emiliano! The next page is colored in saffron to match some Buddhist monks Celia saw waiting on the el train platform with her. She goes on to list and draw things she saw and heard in her travels that day and the contents of the single bag of stuff she bought at Whole Foods that set her back more than $80. There are also little anecdotes, music-inspired memories, and train haiku (morning meal is a / half gallon of Kemp's milk and / a "shut the fuck up").

And Then They Were Nuns is different from other lesbian separatist utopia novels because the utopia is a monastery, and the lesbians are nuns--except for the one who serves as the priest. I'm sorry; it's hard not to tease such a set-up. And Then They Were Nuns actually is more or less like other lesbian separatist utopia novels, not that that's a bad thing.