Marlys and Maybonne's little brother gets in trouble a lot, and like his sisters has a rotten home life. Who's better than Lynda Barry at depicting the misery and shame of childhood, but with enough love for her characters that you don't totally want to kill yourself while reading about them?
A biracial Manhattan School of the Arts comics geek does the Metamorphosis thing, and in the body of a fly gets an eyeful in the boys' locker room. Sounds great, right? Which is why it's a little disappointing--high expectations. It's a smart romance novel, and ends on an activist note, so what am I complaining about?
Last year the 50something unemployed school librarian took off on a European grand tour, starting with three months in Brest, studying French. This is my favorite issue so far of E-Zine. Elaine's narrative has more of a thru-line than in the past (my hang-up, not hers!), which contrast nicely with her collage-y visual style. There are photos and little handwritten notes and handstamped stamps throughout. I love the purple pen nib on the back, especially.
I've mostly indulged my love of celebrity autobiographies without guilt, but this one made me feel just a teeny bit dirty. It is a lot dishier than the others, for one thing. Melissa Gilbert knows everyone, and was a bit of a strumpet in her day. Did you know she was once engaged to Rob Lowe? She's also a sober alcoholic, so good for her. She strikes me as a doer (she was president of SAG) and a perfectionist, so writing a book isn't out of the realm of what one might expect, but even so, I wouldn't be surprised if she wrote it at least partially for the money. How is it that so many celebrities seem to feel as cash-strapped as the rest of us? More so, really. I don't feel poor at all, and I doubt any movie star could make it a month on my yearly salary, much less could they survive a week in my one-bedroom rental apartment!
Apparently life in North Korea is pretty grim. Most people don't even have electricity for more than a few hours a day, as you can see from this image that opens Nothing to Envy.
You'd think that would lead to a lot of teenage pregnancy, but according to the North Korean defectors Demick interviewed in South Korea, there's not a lot of premarital sex in the dark nation. Two of her subjects dated from their teens through early twenties without doing more than kissing, and it took them nine years to get to that point. It's just as well that the culture is so straight-laced, since the country can't feed the citizens it has. According to Demick, "Even in the best of times North Korea can produce only about 60 percent of the food needed for its population, and it currently cannot afford to import the rest." And these are not the best of times for North Korea.
The second installment of Briggs's Mercy Thompson series is as compelling as the first. Or maybe it isn't, because it's not new. And the multiple love interests are starting to show themselves. Not only is Mercy about to find herself caught between a werewolf and a vampire (yawn!), she's also torn between two werewolves. The other thing I found a little annoying this time around is the introduction of one of Mercy's other skills: talking to ghosts. It seems totally inorganic, both to the plot and to the universe Briggs has created.
It's weird to me that Carrie Pilby seems to be marketed as a romance novel. Check out the Harlequin Teen edition cover. Although there is some dating, Carrie Pilby is not boy crazy. What she is, is crazy crazy, and seeing a shrink. A 19-year-old Harvard grad, Carrie is a little socially maladjusted, probably from skipping three grades. Her brilliant mind is inflexible, and she really can't make small talk. When we meet her, motherless Carrie has no friends and a frequently-traveling father. Her therapist gives her a to-do list and through completing the tasks on it (e.g., join something, go on a date, do things you love, etc.), she gets over some of her rigidity, superiority, and loneliness. It's surprisingly believable.
The graphic novel told story of a corporate thug turned hero of the working man after he gets fired from his job shilling feel good ultimatums is full of clever political puns and...cleverisms. Seriously, you'll marvel at the authors' wit on nearly every page. They provide data (in the form of clever satirical ads) to back up their anti-capitalist point-of-view. The art seems (to my ignorant text-biased self) to be right in tune with comic book superherolands. My chief complaint, if you can view it as one, is the denseness of the clever. I can see this working better as a daily comic strip where stopping to marvel at the wit doesn't pile up all at once to give you a repetitive smirk injury.
America is what's supposed to be a step from heaven for the Park family, when they emigrate there from Korea. Young Ju's family makes its way to the US when she is about four, if I remember correctly. The early parts of the novel, which chronicles her life until just before she leaves for college, are impressionistic, conveying how one's memory of childhood comes in flashes, not narratives. The telling remains episodic, though of course it gets clearer as Young Ju matures. Sometimes I don't like that kind of writing, but in A Step from Heaven it's just how she tells a sometimes painful story. Even the reader needs a little literary distance from Young Ju's abusive father, and from seeing the abuse turn Young Ju's American-born brother Joon Ho into a monster, as well.
I delighted at the idea of this book, recommended to me by fellow Library Underground denizen Amy Mullin. I mean, who doesn't love a juicy tv child star memoir? What I didn't realize is that while Prairie Bitch, written by the actor who played the bad guy on Little House on the Prairie, does have some salacious details (What was up with Melissa Sue Anderson?!?), it's also a moving and funny account of the AIDS activist and incest survivor's life. Plus, she's huge in France.
Why is it I can never do my favorite books justice when it comes to reviews? I've been telling everyone to read this book about a young woman teaching ESL after having left Columbia University for St. Luke's psych ward for treatment for bipolar disorder. She somewhat inexplicably falls in love with one of her students, a Chinese dissident. The story is told half in Morningside Heights just post-Tiananmen and St. Luke's and half in Beijing at the turn of the 21st century. I loved reading it, but why? The writing is really good. Want some quotations...
I've really got to stop reading graphic novel comics (and tween novels) when more often than not my review starts with a disclaimer that it's not my genre. I was drawn to read the Batwoman story because the Twitterdome was full of "DC's first gay superhero" buzz. It's true that comics don't speak to me the way I think they should, but sometimes they really really do--like if they're written/drawn by Lynda Barry or Alison Bechdel, so I keep trying. However, lesbian though she may be, Batwoman Kate Kane is no dyke to watch out for, not that she isn't scary. She's a soldier manquée (DADT) with a vicious grudge. Speaking of DADT, I should mention here that Dan Choi served as a consultant for the book. You also might want to know that Rachel Maddow wrote the intro.
This is a graphic novel prequel to Briggs's Mercy Thompson series. Mercy is drawn with some powerful gams! It's helpful to get a visual on the other creatures in Mercy's universe, especially Stefan. His grungy/rock-y/punky style is described in Moon Called, but I didn't really buy it until I saw the drawing in the gallery at the end of Homecoming. I'm not sure I'm really down with Adam's and Bran's depictions, though. The story didn't grab me so much, but I'm already so sucked into the series that I couldn't resist reading it. It's pretty slim and goes down fast.
To me one of the most important things about this book is that it's from a small press, GemmaMedia. From their about page, "Gemma features cultural memoir from around the world, Irish fiction and fine journalism, the Open Door adult literacy series and current affairs publishing with diversity at the heart of the story." Dragon Chica is a pretty great book. It's not a memoir, but it reads like one. It tells the story of a Cambodian-Chinese refugee coming of age in Nebraska. She, her mother, her older sister Sourdi, younger twin sisters and younger brother move there to help their aunt and uncle run a Chinese restaurant.
Oh, Katie. I love your zines so much and the latest issue of White Elephants possibly even the most of all, because it's your most personal. Like much personal writing, zines can be full of complaints, insecurity, and calling people out on their evil ways, and while there's nothing wrong with that, it's rather nice to read a mostly happy zine. The framework of WE4 is Katie's descriptions of her yard sale & flea market shopping, but as she asks near the end "Is this zine even about yard sales anymore?" It once was, and probably will be again, but for issue 4, something happens that eclipses Katie's joy over finding weird textbooks to repurpose into stationery, knickknacks with the previous owners' history attached or imagined, and vintage clothing items whose worth or potential can be ferreted out only by artisan shoppers such as herself. What Katie finds in this zine is love, revealing a little bit more about it with each section.
Lesbian pulp always seems like a better idea than it actually is. This stuff might have been great in the 50s, but I think nowadays it's probably best read aloud or performed as camp/melodrama.
It was different when I could say it wasn't this way, that I was bisexual and all that rot. Bisexual--that's sort of like succotash, isn't it? Only this succotash hasn't got any corn in it. It's straight beans!"
I'm possibly being insensitive to the bravery of this "story once told in whispers now frankly, honestly written," (not to mention to bisexuals by including the above quote) but it just didn't grab me.
I so needed a new-to-me paranormal fiction series! The protagonist is a coyote shapeshifter. So far there don't seem to be others of her kind, and having been raised by werewolves, most of her friends are of that persuasion. There is also the odd gremlin or vampire in her social circle--and someone really dangerous, an undercover cop.
I've read a fair amount of Cultural Revolution memoirs and novels. Like the others this story of Jiang's experiences in her early teens is pretty grisly: old folks humiliated and physically abused, children asked to turn against their parents, and a mob mentality ruling everything from the highest reaches of the government to the smallest minds of the neighborhood and school enforcers. The only different is that just a little bit I felt like Jiang doesn't truly get that her privilege (prior to the madness) was a bad thing. That she wasn't a star student because she was inherently good, and that the kids who ended up being red bullies hadn't previously been poor students because they were just stupid. She bemoans the negative effects of her family's wealth and history, but doesn't acknowledge that her family name and fortune had once been just as beneficial as they were now burdensome.
Extraordinary, Ordinary People is a great title, but inapt for this book. Toward the end Rice quotes the Greatest American Hero theme song "Believe or not, I'm walking on air." (YouTube link) I think a more accurate title in the same vein, would have been "Believe it or not, it's just me." Whether you love or hate her (and I'm in the latter camp, though I'd probably say "fear/revile," rather than "hate"), you have to acknowledge that Rice is in no way ordinary. Most people know she excelled in piano, but did you know she was also a competitive figure skater in her adolescence? Ignoring her political accomplishments (or crimes, if that's how you see them), she is a superstar solely as an academic, having achieved the rank of full professor and provost at Stanford University before she was 40. Also, although Rice clearly loves and appreciates her deceased parents and extended family, this is not a memoir of family; it's an autobiography from birth (preceded with a little family history) to the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in favor of W. To me it's also interesting as a memoir of the Birmingham Black middle class.
Jesse Bennett is an incidentally queer teen with a whack job mom and social status anxiety. I like that the lesbian storyline, while important is only one of the three major themes of this adult, but suitable-for-young-adults novel. Jesse is a likable and believable character in a likable and believable novel. It's a pity I don't have anything brilliant to say about the book because it's a likely candidate for next year's favorites list.
