Feb 22 2022

The Nightmare Brigade #1: The Case Of The Girl From Deja Vu by Frank Thilliez, Yomgui Dumont & Drac

Back when I had far more free time than I do now, I kept a dream diary and tried to practice lucid dreaming, in order to better understand my day-to-day existence and how my subconscious dealt with my issues (and, I’ll admit, to pinpoint when I had those weird prophetic dreams that often come across as deja vu in waking life.) As such, tales of dream exploration are always a draw for me, with The Nightmare Brigade series sounding right up my alley from the start.

Esteban and Tristan are the children of dream scientist Professor Albert Angus, who is a therapist of last resort for people whose nightmares interfere with their waking lives. In order to help these patients, he sends Esteban and Tristan into their dreams while himself monitoring the situation from the outside. Once inside the patients’ dreamscapes, our teenage heroes attempt to figure out the psychological puzzle that underpins the dreamers’ trauma, while trying to stay out of the life-threatening situations that often spring up during the course of these nightmares. It’s dangerous work, but both kids enjoy helping people get better. Plus Tristan is no longer confined to his wheelchair in dreams, which is almost as much a bonus for him as solving the mysteries of dreamers’ troubled psyches.

Their latest case involves another teenager named Sarah, whom Esteban thinks he recognizes, or who at least evokes in him a strong feeling of deja vu. Esteban actually has very little recollection of his life from before he was adopted by Professor Angus, and wonders if Sarah might hold the key to his past. Before they have a chance to find out tho, Professor Angus reveals several devastating secrets about his own past that could very well change the course of all the kids’ lives for good… if they can survive the latest nightmare realm they’ve been sent into.

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Feb 20 2022

Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch

Jazzmen dropping dead in circumstances that are unusual even by their standards. Incontrovertible, if circumstantial, evidence of a real-life vagina dentata. These two sets of mysteries set the stage for the events of Moon Over Soho, events that will show readers more about Constable Peter Grant, much more about his mentor in magical policing Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, and leave slightly less property damage across greater London than Grant’s previous adventure. But only slightly less.

Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch

Moon Over Soho has the three things that I said made Rivers of London terrific fun to read — humor both line-by-line and over longer stretches, unrestrained love for twenty-first century London (The opening sentence is “It’s a sad fact of life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind.”), and good balance of magic and mundane — and deepens them over the course of its heroes’ capers. By the end of it, readers know and appreciate Grant and Nightingale better. They can see how London itself is starting to change because of the events of which the police pair are just a part. The supporting cast are taking on greater depth, and readers can see how they might be the protagonists of their own stories. Molly, for example, who is presented in the first book as an unknowable and fearsome automaton, practically an extension of the house, might be someone comprehensible after all. Which of course leaves Grant, a Black Londoner, with unsettling questions about her apparent unending servitude.

Like any good mystery writer, Aaronovitch gives readers crucial information right up front, even though they may not realize its importance until much later.

Vestigia is the imprint magic leaves on physical objects. It’s a lot like a sense impression, like the memory of a smell or a sound you once heard. You’ve probably felt it a hundred times a day, but it all gets mixed up with memories, daydreams and even smells you’re smelling and sounds you’re hearing. Some things, stones, for example, sop up everything that happens around them even when it’s barely magical at all — that’s what gives an old house its character. Other things, like the human body, are terrible at retaining any vestigia at all — it takes the magical equivalent of a grenade going off to imprint anything on a corpse. (p. 12)

Which is why Grant is surprised to hear a saxophone solo emanating from an expired jazzman.

“How did you spot this?” I asked.
“I check all the sudden deaths,” said Dr Walid. “Just on the off-chance. I thought it sounded like jazz.”
“Did you recognise the tune?”
“Not me. I’m strictly prog rock and the nineteenth-century romantics,” said Dr Walid. “Did you?”
“It’s ‘Body and Soul’,” I said. “It’s from the 1930s.”
“Who played it?”
“Just about everybody. It’s one of the great jazz classics.
“You can’t die of jazz,” said Dr Walid. “Can you?”
I thought of Fats Navarro, Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker who, when he died, was mistaken by the coroner for a man twice his actual age.
“You know,” I said, “I think you’ll find you can.” (p. 13)

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Feb 11 2022

The Passover Guest by Susan Kusel & Sean Rubin

It’s 1933 and America is in the grip of the fourth year of the Great Depression. Little Muriel is enjoying the springtime cherry blossoms in the Tidal Basin, a free activity that keeps her mind off of how little food her family has even on ordinary days, much less as Passover draws near. Spying an entertainer on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, she gives him her last penny in appreciation of his dazzling efforts.

When the street magician reminds her that the sun is setting and she ought to hurry home for seder, she admits that her family doesn’t have any food for her to hurry home to. With a kind twinkle, he asks whether she’s sure, prompting her to rush home past the Washington Monument and the White House. But back at home, the dining table is still empty, her parents merely waiting for her so that they might visit the homes of friends who may but probably don’t have any food either. Just as they’re heading out tho, a miracle occurs that will save Passover for their entire Jewish community.

This was a heartwarming retelling of I. L. Peretz’s classic Yiddish tale The Magician, originally set in Poland but transplanted here for young American audiences. As with any good fable, it survives transplantation well, thriving especially in its use of that very specific Washington DC milieu. Tho, as someone who’s literally run around DC a lot, I do find myself more boggled at the idea that little Muriel would run from the Lincoln Monument all the way up to, as I’m deducing from the book since she goes by the White House, 7th St near I than at any of the other fantastic elements of the story. That’s a 40+ minute walk even for an adult! Having Elijah show up to Passover is more realistic to me than that! I guess kids were allowed to roam further by themselves back in the day (she says, dubiously.)

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Feb 10 2022

Carta SRD; Apex Predator, and Into The Glacier by Peach Garden Games

After reading Cleo Coyle’s absorbing Honey Roasted for work the other day, I was seized with the desire to write a game revolving around different kinds of single flower honey. I knew I wanted it to be connected to my Six Elements Universe, but I very specifically wanted it also to be an exploration game where you could use the different kinds of honey you were transporting with you to boost your travels through potentially dangerous terrain.

My mind thus turned to the Carta system by Peach Garden Games. PGG released Carta’s System Resource Document last year for free, and I’d been interested since first learning of the system in developing a game for it. I never quite had the right idea, I felt, till the honey game, so was excited to finally be able to sit down with the SRD to give it a proper read through and make sure.

Carta is essentially a tabletop exploration game where players traverse a grid of playing cards, with each card providing a different sort of prompt for your story. You can theme it quite freely, as quite a number of developers already have. The SRD is cleanly written, giving you clear instructions without a lot of extraneous clutter: a perfect scaffolding from which to build more complex delights. It seemed a great fit for the game I had in mind, but in order to make sure that I knew what I was in for, I decided I wanted to check out examples of other games created using this system.

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Feb 09 2022

Watercress by Andrea Wang & Jason Chin

I feel like a bad Asian for not leading with this book for February, so Happy Year Of The Tiger, all! Hope your Lunar New Year celebrations have been aces, marking the start of a prosperous year!

Watercress is an autobiographical chapter from author Andrea Wang’s life, detailing the time when her Chinese immigrant parents spotted the titular vegetable growing in a roadside Ohio ditch when her family were all out in the car one day. Her parents immediately pull over to harvest the bounty, and press gang Andrea and her older brother to help as well. Andrea is mortified by the entire experience, later going so far as to refuse to eat any of the watercress her parents prepare for dinner. This prompts Mom to tell her a story about growing up in China, an experience Mom doesn’t often discuss. The memory, like the watercress, is both delicate and bitter. Ultimately, however, it is nourishing, regardless of how eager or reluctant you are to experience it.

Gosh, this was just such an outstanding book about generational divides and feeling like you don’t fit in and not wanting to be seen as poor. The immigrant experience is well-trodden territory but Ms Wang uses this unusual and highly effective watercress metaphor to communicate in just a few short pages a story of both alienation and reconciliation. Jason Chin’s watercolor illustrations are a marvel, dead-on depicting both Ohio and China in beautiful blues and yellows and greens.

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Feb 08 2022

No Filter And Other Lies by Crystal Maldonado

Happy Book Birthday to a truly thoughtful tale of coming of age in a social-media-obsessed world!

Kat Sanchez hates the fact that everyone she knows seems to have more Instagram followers than she does. As a budding photographer, and founder with her three best friends of her high school’s Photography Club, she wants the whole world to appreciate the art and craft she puts into carefully taking and presenting her photography. Marcus, the club president and the most together of their bunch, is already planning on heading to a Historically Black College/University once he graduates, and views the club as a stepping stone to that end. He wants Kat to compete with him for the transcript-enhancing position of their school paper’s Photo Editor, but since she’s not really sure what she wants to do after high school herself, her heart isn’t really in it.

Nor is her heart really in the occasional make-out sessions she has with her best best friend Hari. Hari is a babe magnet, whose confidence is somewhat hampered by the fact that his twin brother is the pampered golden boy in their family. He’s been indicating that he wants his relationship with Kat to get more serious, but she doesn’t want to risk their friendship. More importantly, she’s starting to think that she likes girls, too.

One of those girls is Becca, Kat’s gorgeous college-aged co-worker at the local no-kill shelter. Becca is model-pretty and readily agrees to pose for Kat’s growing portfolio. But she herself loathes social media, having had a really bad experience that caused her to dump it all for good.

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Feb 07 2022

Fat Chance, Charlie Vega by Crystal Maldonado

This effortlessly sweet debut YA novel touches on several very common insecurities in young people worldwide, and gently guides readers through how to cope with them via its smart, if sometimes reactive, heroine Charlie Vega.

Charlie is a sixteen year-old who’s never been kissed, tho she often imagines what it might be like in the fiction and fan fiction she writes so much of in her spare time. She worries that she’s never had a boyfriend because she’s fat, a fear that’s constantly underlined by her mother Jeanne. Since the death of Charlie’s dad, Jeanne has lost a lot of weight and now pressures Charlie to do the same, foisting weight loss shakes (bad) and joint exercise classes (actually healthy) on her. Charlie often feels that Jeanne would rather have Amelia, her gorgeous track star best friend, as a daughter instead.

After a crushing humiliation at the hands of her biggest crush, Charlie is ready to give up on love. She’s thus caught unawares by the strength of her attraction to Brian Park, a classmate whom she’s never really noticed till they start working together at their after-school job. He’s sweet and funny and cute, and their relationship slowly but surely develops… until Amelia mentions that he’d asked her out first. Unwilling to be second-best in yet another aspect of her life, Charlie decides to break up with Brian despite the strength of their mutual affection. But is this just another one of the ways she self-sabotages in order to cope with the overwhelming messages society sends her about never being good enough because she isn’t model-thin and pretty?

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Feb 06 2022

The Haw Lantern by Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney followed his longest collection, Station Island, with one of his shortest, The Haw Lantern. Like several of his other collections, The Haw Lantern has a tripartite structure; unlike the others that I have read so far, its sections are not explicitly marked. Nevertheless, the ten sonnets that Heaney wrote in memory of his mother, who passed in 1984, form a middle section for the book, with the groupings of poems before and after forming distinct sections as well.

The Haw Lantern by Seamus Heaney

Poets construct their collections as carefully as they construct their poems — here Amanda Gorman shows pages arranged in a possible order for Call Us What We Carry — with a particular kind of experience in mind for their readers. And yet, when I came to “Clearances” in the middle of The Haw Lantern, I was not in a frame of mind to read a sonnet sequence dedicated to a deceased mother. I walked on by, and returned to “Clearances” as the last bits of The Haw Lantern that I read. Try as the poets might, readers will stubbornly insist on having their own experiences, being struck by different things upon reading the poems.

The first of “Two Quick Notes” struck me with particular force.

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Feb 04 2022

I Hop by Joe Cepeda

This book is such a breath of fresh air for early readers and, especially, for the people who love them.

Perhaps I just haven’t been reading the right books with my kids, but most of the books written for this market tend to feature either really smarmy or really annoying characters, often repeating things (as they need to in order to strengthen reading recognition) in ways that feel artificial. I Hop does not have any of these problems, leaning perfectly into its verbally minimalist vibe to get the story across while managing to be charming through and through.

The book begins with a boy and his dad coming across a pogo stick at a garage sale. After putting on a helmet and learning how to use his new contraption, the boy hops all over town, ending with a heartwarming scene of intergenerational affection. In fairness, I did have one tiny criticism of the book: I really wanted pancakes from about the middle of the volume onward. I thought that was a me-problem until my eldest glanced over while I was reading this with his younger brothers, and immediately asked if there were any pancakes in this book. Maybe it’s just in our genetics, ha.

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Feb 03 2022

To the Land of Long Lost Friends by Alexander McCall Smith

To the Land of Long Lost Friends begins with a wedding and moves quickly to a funereal subject.

To the Land of Long Lost Friends by Alexander McCall Smith

And it was on the way [to the catering tent] that Mma Ramotswe suddenly gripped Mr J.L.B. Matekon’s arm.
“I have seen a ghost, Rra,” she said, her voice filled with alarm.
He looked at her in astonishment, uncertain whether to laugh.
“There,” hissed Mma Ramotswe. “There, Rra — right over there.”
He looked where she was pointing. There was a group of four women and two men, each dressed in their wedding best. …
“Those are people, Mma,” he said. “They are not ghosts, as far as I can see.”
She shook her head. Lowering her voice, she said, “One of them is late, Rra. That one over there — she is late.” …
“That’s definitely her, Rra,”she said, her voice still uneven with shock. “That woman over there. That’s Calviniah. And she’s late. She’s definitely late.”
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni frowned. “Who is this Calviniah, Mma Ramotswe? I really don’t know what you’re talking about. There are no late people here, Mma.” He shrugged helplessly. …
“I have seen a very old friend — somebody I knew a long time ago, from schooldays. She went off to live up in Francistown and I lost touch with her, and with her family too. Then …” she trailed off. The woman was coming towards them now, still talking to the group around her.
“Then?” asked Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.
“Then I read in the papers that she had been killed in a road accident. There was a picture of her in the press. I couldn’t get to the funeral because it was up north…”
Mma Ramotswe put a hand to her mouth, in a gesture of profound shock. The woman in the hat had suddenly stopped, and was staring at her. Then, very quickly, she ran forwards towards Mma Ramotswe, stopping just short of her. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni stood quite still. Things had happened so quickly, and he was uncertain what to do.
“Precious Ramotswe?” The woman spoke loudly.
Mma Ramotswe nodded. “Calviniah…”
Calviniah took a step forward, her arms wide. “I thought it was you” she said. “And it is you, isn’t it?” …
Calviniah turned back to Mma Ramotswe and embraced her friend. “It is so long,” she said. “It is so very long.”
“I thought you were late,” Mma Ramotswe struggled to say. “I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
Calviniah drew back and laughed. “Oh, that? That was very unfortunate.”
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s eyes widened. That was one way of putting it, he thought.
Calviniah let out an amused shriek. “No! I am definitely not late, as I hope you can see. No, that was a big mistake by the newspaper. There was another Calviniah Ramoroka, you see.” (pp. 13–17)

Twenty books into the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, McCall Smith can not only pull off lovely and hilarious set pieces like this one — the explanation gets even better — but he can remind readers that despite their long acquaintance with the characters there is still much more to learn about them.

The book, like the others in the series, follows several strands. A few days after the wedding, Mma Ramotswe and Calviniah meet to catch up on each other’s lives, since Calviniah, news reports to the contrary, is actually having one. During the conversation it comes out that Calviniah’s daughter has recently become distant, leaving her sad and puzzled. Mma Ramotswe does not promise to take this question on as an official case, but over the course of the book she takes an interest and begins to follow some threads. One official case concerns a wife who thinks her husband is having an affair when he claims he is learning more mathematics. There is also a matter (though not a case) of another friend who seems to have given all of her considerable money, plus a very nice Mercedes Benz, to a new reverend who is making waves in Gabarone.

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