Jun 16 2023

The Nightmare Brigade #3: Finding Alice by Franck Thilliez, Yomgui Dumont & Drac

I really admire how well each of the books in this engrossing urban fantasy series lead in to one another. In this volume, Esteban, Tristan and Sarah, a.k.a the intrepid explorers of the Nightmare Brigade, are finally ready to plunge into the sleeping mind of Leonard, one of the Clinic’s most difficult patients. They’re going to search for Alice, the researcher who is also Tristan’s mother, and hopefully bring her home. Trouble is, Leonard has been so warped by what’s happened to him that he won’t let her go without a fight.

As the Brigade attempts to sort through his nightmares and find Alice, a greater problem hits the Clinic, with the shadowy military group that’s been on their tail finally homing in on them. The soldiers have surprisingly sophisticated tech and are completely ruthless, as they show in these pages, resorting to wanton destruction no matter the cost to either the Brigade… or themselves.

In the final chapter of this volume, the Brigade is rebuilding in a beautiful lighthouse. The structure and the land it’s on gives them new opportunities for research and discovery, especially with the hard pivot they’ve made from exploring dreams to exploring memories. But the new power structure that comes with the move sees our lead scientists arguing over the ethics and methods used. Each of their concerns are heightened by the dangers the kids of the Brigade are exposed to in the course of enacting their experimental therapy. Will the tenuous happiness and sense of purpose the Brigade has found in the aftermath of rebuilding be able to survive this schism in their leadership?

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Jun 15 2023

Gay Poems For Red States by Willie Carver

or Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr as he’s credited on the cover of this volume.

In 2022, Willie Carver was named Kentucky Teacher of the Year. A homophobic vendetta led by just one woman caused him to decide, only months later, to leave the public school system, but not before testifying before Congress about the targeted harassment both he and his students received as a result of him living as an openly gay man.

Despite fleeing a system that couldn’t, or wouldn’t, protect him and his kids, he found that he couldn’t just turn his back on the ones he left behind. Thus was Gay Poems For Red States born, as he channels his hard-earned wisdom into a collection of poems meant to speak to queer Appalachians, telling them that they matter and are seen and loved more than they know.

And this is an extremely powerful collection of verse, as Mr Carver talks about his own upbringing, what it felt like to be a queer kid himself and how difficult it was for him growing up. Through his poetry, he details both the mortifying moments (as in the powerful opener Minnie Mouse Toy) and the moments of grace that helped him survive. It helps so, so much that he had supportive parents who were ready to accept him even when he wasn’t ready to accept himself, as he describes in both that first poem and in the equally moving Someday Child.

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Jun 13 2023

Constellations by Kate Glasheen

My only regret is that the ARC I received of this wasn’t completely in color. This is understandable — graphic novels ain’t cheap! — but I was so in love in with the illustrations on the few pages that were full-color glossy that I know I lost a little bit of the story’s impact by only reading the rest on a cheaper b&w paper (plus it was harder to differentiate between some of the characters in grayscale.)

But oh, that full-color art that I did have! Kate Glasheen works in watercolor and ink, and the effect is magnificent. I mean, I appreciate digital art as much as the next person, but I adored the manual paint effects achieved here. The spills of color felt exceptionally well-suited to telling a story set in the pre-Internet era, before the digital world gave us a greater expectation of precision. Even more subtly, watercolor’s tendency to resist definition really suits a book about a protagonist who feels very much the same way.

Claire is a teenager in 1980s upstate New York, growing up in the struggling industrial town of Troy. They dress like a boy and don’t feel comfortable thinking of themself as a girl, which raises a lot of eyebrows from both strangers and people closer to them. Some people are awesome, like their best friends Greg and Josh, and their Mom and older brother Owen. Some are less great. Into that latter category fall, unfortunately, Claire’s dad and other brother Brad.

Claire just wants to have a normal life, but society keeps insisting on slapping a label on them and being really fucking awful when they do anything perceived as stepping out of the box they’re allowed to exist in. To cope, Claire turns to that mainstay of small town American life: alcohol. After they drunkenly run someone over on their bicycle, they’re court-ordered to rehab.

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Jun 09 2023

Owl And Penguin: Best Day Ever by Vikram Madan

Do y’all have any books that you immediately whip out when you want to soothe your young readers? Maybe your kid is having a bad day and just needs some cheerful illustrations and easy text to take their mind off things. Or maybe you want to sneakily show them how sometimes the best way to fix a problem is to come at it from outside the box. Either way, this is one of my go-to books for reading with my own youngsters when they need a way to turn their own bad days into best days.

Owl and Penguin are two friends who often have a different perspective on life when it comes to abilities and activities. Over the course of these five short chapters, readers get to see how they negotiate wanting to play different games, swimming in the ocean, scary movies, performing music, and flying a kite. While they each have different outlooks on these issues, they genuinely strive to see things from the other’s point of view and care about each other’s feelings and the outcome. It’s a book about the many different ways you can compromise without sacrificing your own individuality.

Which is quite astonishing given how relatively sparse the text is, with easy vocabulary strategically placed amidst the illustrated panels. This is a testament to Vikram Madan’s excellent artwork, which is expressive, adorable and gorgeously colored. The colors in Making Music especially are a visual feast, putting the truth to the saying that a picture, at least in the hands of a really good artist, is worth a thousand words. And the pacing is exquisite throughout, building the perfect level of suspense for each short vignette before the resolution of its conflict.

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Jun 07 2023

The Ultimate RPG Tarot Deck by Jef Aldrich & Jon Taylor

Well, hello there, intersection of two of my favorite gaming interests! I mean, how much do I love the intersection of roleplaying games and Tarot? I wrote an entire book incorporating Tarot cards and interpretation into an original RPG!

So I was really pleased when this came across my reviewing desk. Not only did I want to take a look at this deck as a divination tool, I wanted to see how it would inspire a session of my own game Equinox, substituting the prompts in the included 140+ page guidebook for the ones I’d originally created. The first step, ofc, was to take a look-see at the cards themselves. I brought them to my regular D&D group’s very last Odyssey Of The Dragonlords session — it’s the first D&D campaign I’ve ever finished in its entirety! — and we all oohed and aahed over the product. The box itself is fairly simple, and the cards are a little longer than the average Tarot card, which makes them feel a little weird on first shuffle. The cards are also a bit hard, but regular use will soon soften them up.

The art on the cards is done by Zachary Bacus, with colors by Angueria “Hank” Jones. The Rider-Waite influence is strong, but for the most part the artistic team does a great job of adding (arguably more) fantasy details into each image, encouraging adventure hooks and storytelling. The guide book expands on this further, adding very Dungeons & Dragons-influenced details to each card description. I did appreciate that while D&D was clearly the touchstone for this project, the deck is freely adaptable to any fantasy setting. Some of the choices are a little odder than others — honestly, who uses a Warlord outside of the much-maligned 4E? I had a Tiefling Warlord who was impossible to play (I soon switched over with relief to a Dwarf Avenger) so seeing the class referenced twice here is a bit jarring — but overall you get the archetypes the authors are going for, even if some of them do skew a little more masculine than anticipated. Like, I get why the archetype associated with The Emperor is the Game Master, but having the image on the card look an awful lot like Gary Gygax reinforces the idea that only dudes GM, which is definitely not the case, IME as both player and (female) GM. Sure it’s a nod to the game’s history, and in the larger scheme of things this is a very minor quibble. It’s just hard enough to get people who aren’t cishet white guys into the game, much less running games themselves, without reinforcing a power structure that puts said white guys on the pinnacle.

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Jun 06 2023

The Good Asian — Deluxe Edition Vol. 1: 1936 by Pornsak Pichetshote & Alexandre Tefengki

with colors by Lee Loughridge and letters by Jeff Powell.

Most forewords don’t do a whole lot to adequately contextualize the books they’re introducing, but David Choe absolutely hits it out of the park with his no-holds-barred examination of what it meant to be a Good Asian in the West in the 20th century. In short: when you have nothing, you keep your head down, work hard and accept whatever abuse you must take until you’re rich and powerful and can fuck up all those people who tried to hold you down. The opening scene of worldwide phenomenon Crazy Rich Asians tells you the exact same thing, but plunges forward into a beautiful present day where that wealth and power has been achieved, for some of the protagonists at least. This graphic novel, on the other hand, is squarely situated in an era where equality, never mind anything more, was still a distant dream.

Peppered with the historical anecdotes that inspired the series, this stylish noir comic follows the travails of the fictional Edison Hark, perhaps the only Chinese police detective in America as the story opens. In San Diego as a favor to the rich white family who brought him up after the death of his mother, Edison is on the trail of a missing maid whom the Carroway family patriarch has tender feelings for. Ivy Chen abruptly disappeared after going to meet her mother one evening, and Edison has been flown in from Hawai’i to help find her. Unfortunately for Mason Carroway, Edison’s investigations are revealing an Ivy who seems far from the innocent maidservant the older man knew and adored. As Edison delves deeper into Chinatown’s seedier side, aided by his appearance as a local instead of an “American” (and boy did that hurt to read every time this historically accurate if no less racist assumption that “American = a certain kind of white person” was brought up in the text,) he discovers that little is as it seems, and that the Carroways are even more deeply involved in what happened to Ivy than he’d ever thought possible.

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Jun 04 2023

The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes

It’s not difficult to guess Orlando Figes’ brief for The Story of Russia: write a history of Russia, accessible to the interested and educated public, acceptable to specialists; keep it under 300 pages; emphasize links between Russia’s deeper past and the government of Vladimir Putin. There is value in the book’s relative brevity, though I wonder how well someone completely new to Russian history would be able to follow the parade of names and places through the centuries, even with the aid of several well-executed maps. Maybe the intended audience is people with a passing familiarity with European and Russian history, but who would like to deepen that knowledge. Figes obliges with what feels to me like a relatively standard division of Russian history into periods: origins, Mongol conquest, the rise of Muscovy through the death of Ivan the Terrible, reforms under Peter the Great, war with Napoleon, imperial crises in the nineteenth century, revolutions and the end of the empire, and Soviet futurism versus Old Russia.

The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes

He closes with two chapters that I found odd. “Motherland” begins at the end of the Great Terror, takes in World War II, and runs all the way through the end of the Soviet Union, including the Khrushchev thaw, Brezhnev stagnation, and Gorbachev’s reforms. That’s a lot of contradictions to cover in 34 pages, and the title fits less and less as the years go on. Because so much of this period is still within living memory — indeed, within Figes’ own adult lifetime — and because so much of today’s Russia is shaped in reaction to the choices of these eras, they deserve longer consideration, even if that means the book would run to 320 pages or so.

The final chapter, “Ends,” covers the thirty-plus years since the end of the Soviet Union, and I found it even odder. Figes asks, “How does the story of Russia end?” (p. 268) Well, it doesn’t. Vanishingly few important European powers have stories that end; Prussia is the only one I can think of. The European empires that were tsarist Russia’s peers are gone, but their legacies live on, from splinters of Austria-Hungary throughout Central Europe to the ongoing wars of Ottoman succession in the Middle East. Fortunately, Figes follows with more sensible questions about how far Russia’s past will shape its future (or more accurately, which parts of Russia’s past will shape its future) and why, in his view, Russia returned to autocracy in the twenty-first century. Less fortunately, Figes completed the book in the early months of Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine. He felt compelled to offer some views, and while they are not as bad as his 2014 assessment that “Russia is no longer an aggressive state. Russia does not start foreign wars.” they are also not very good.

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Jun 03 2023

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

Well, I was charmed.

What do D&D adventurers do when they’ve decided that they’ve quested their last quest and crawled their last dungeon? In the case of Viv, the orc barbarian who’s ready to hang up her greatsword Blackblood, her heart’s desire is to bring to the city of Thune the wonders of a fabled drink she encountered among gnomes in a faraway city: coffee. “I told you I came across it in Azimuth, and I remember following the smell to the shop. They called it a café. People just sat around drinking it from these little ceramic cups, and I had to try it, and … it was like drinking the feeling of being peaceful. Being peaceful in your mind. Well, not if you have too much, then it’s something else.” (p. 33)

Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree

Before the beginning of Legends & Lattes, Viv has researched what’s needed to open one of these cafés in a city that has none, that has never in fact heard of coffee. Or at least she thinks she has. She even sets up her party’s last adventure to secure a magic item that she believes will bring good fortune to her new venture. That acquisition is dispatched in the introduction, along with the item’s previous owner. She forgoes any other loot from the expedition, leaving her fellow adventurers somewhere between bemused and suspicious, depending on their character. But she soon forgets that detail in her relief at retiring from the melees and in her excitement at her new tasks.

Other details are more in her line. She has a keen eye for talent, scoping out a potential carpenter for the repairs to the building that will house her café by going down to the waterfront and watching who’s handy with tools and economical with the motions of his work. That turns out to be Calamity — “call me Cal” — who’s half her height and a hob, definitely not a hobbit. He’s taciturn but friendly, knows his business and knows the city. He’s the first of a new kind of party she assembles, one dedicated to building rather than looting.

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Jun 01 2023

Kids Ask About: Bears by Christopher Nicholas

with terrific wildlife illustrations by Pedro Julio Gonzalez.

If your kid ever goes through a hyperfixation stage on bears, then this is absolutely the book to get them. Chock-full of fun facts and interesting data, this slender volume is the perfect gift for any kid who wants to know more about the omnivorous mammal. Presented in an easy to read question-and-answer format, this nonfiction tome will enrapture any reader who loves the natural world, and might very well beguile readers who have yet to discover its joys.

Christopher Nicholas’ writing covers each of the major species of bears, briefly describing why they’re called what they are. I hadn’t even realized why grizzly, sun and moon bears had those names! The book even tells you what species aren’t bears, so pandas: yes, red pandas and koalas: no. Kids Ask About Bears gives an overview of where each bear lives, what differentiates them from one another, and just what’s so special about each kind. It’s a very thorough survey given the relatively scant number of pages.

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May 31 2023

Witch And Famous by Angela M. Sanders

I do so love how this mystery series goes from strength to strength, as our librarian heroine Josie Way learns how to control her witchy powers while helping out the citizens of the small town of Wilfred, Oregon. Bibliomancy isn’t just about recommending the right books to the right people at the right time, but it certainly is a large part of the duties that she gladly embraces as a truth-telling witch.

Her library is actually in a bit of a tizzy as Witch And Famous opens. The owner of the local watering hole has taken off for a tour of the South, leaving Wilfredians with few options for congregating. As Patty, owner of the This-N-That store, has decided to specialize in home appliances this season, she’s happy to host the occasional cookout on her store lawn, where her enterprising grandchildren Thor and Buffy squeeze as many dollars and cents from the adults stopping by as possible. But the hot weather also spurs the townsfolk to spend time in Josie’s library, which was converted from a manor house after a generous bequest. Josie doesn’t mind lively conversation and light refreshments during open hours, but draws the line at gambling tables and hard alcohol in the library’s kitchen fridge, no matter how many attempts at both are made in contravention of her rules.

Things get even more calamitous when a movie star and her entourage roll into town. Hollywood actress Daphne Morris has selected a romance novel pseudonymously written by Roz, Josie’s assistant librarian, as her next book club pick, a selection that is sure to boost Roz’s sales. Daphne is even more gorgeous in person than on-screen, and soon has Wilfred’s men swooning at her feet. To Roz’s chagrin, this includes her taciturn boyfriend Lyndon. Even Sam, the local sheriff — as well as Josie’s neighbor and long-time crush — seems to have had his head turned by the superstar’s arrival.

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