Dec 18 2024

Scary Godmother Compendium: This Was Your Childhood by Jill Thompson

What a charm- and value-packed compendium of virtually all the Scary Godmother material published to date!

I knew of Jill Thompson from her work on Neil Gaiman’s Death and Endless properties for DC Comics, but hadn’t realized the extent of her oeuvre otherwise. In particular, I had no idea that her own original creation, Scary Godmother, had been made into a TV movie series! This compendium swiftly brought me up to speed, and provided hours of delight to someone who hadn’t been aware of how rich Ms Thompson’s body of work is before I started reading this hefty volume.

And there is a lot here, from the stories that inspired the movies, to multi-issue arcs, to short comics written both before and after that television heyday. Sprinkled throughout are recipes for kid-friendly Treats, and towards the end are bonus art and text, including a full-on slate of fun Halloween-themed activities for kids of all ages.

The stories themselves revolve around young Hannah Marie, who starts out in these pages as a little girl who’s just gotten old enough to go trick or treating with the big kids, including her selfish cousin Jimmy. While his friends help her keep up with them, Jimmy feels that her shorter legs and earlier curfew are preventing them from getting as much candy as he’d prefer. He thus decides to prank her by having her go into a haunted house alone, in hopes that it will cause her to go home early so that he and the rest of his friends can go trick or treating without her. Little does he know, however, that Hannah has a Scary Godmother who helps her see that the things that go bump in the night are a whole lot less frightful than a bunch of mean kids. Perhaps even more satisfyingly, Scary Godmother is ready to help Hannah turn the tables on said mean kids, and help everyone learn the true meaning of Halloween.

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Dec 17 2024

Shadow Work For Hot Messes by Mandi Em

subtitled Transform From Chaos To Clarity By Embracing Your Authentic Self.

This book took me forever to read, and that’s a good thing. Despite being slender, with plenty of white space for readers to fill in with their own thoughts and responses to the prompts, it’s a very meaty volume for anyone genuinely interested in doing the work on making themself a better person.

Ofc the next question most people will ask is what is this work, and specifically what is shadow work? Mandi Em explains it much better than I do, but you know that weird kneejerk reaction you sometimes get that is definitely not you being your best self? Maybe it comes out in jealousy or anger or some other destructive — and often self-destructive — way, overwhelming your rational processes so that later you go, “whoa, I can’t believe I did that, and I’m not saying that in a good way, either.” That’s essentially your shadow self taking over, usually as a coping mechanism once learned in reaction to deep-seated trauma.

This workbook helps you take a look at yourself and figure out your own shadows, then walks you through the process of engaging with them, understanding what they’re rooted in and learning how to integrate them in a healthy manner. It is, thusly, A Lot. Ms Em approaches it all with humor and love, however, and strongly recommends getting professional help as well if possible. But if that help is not easily accessible or available, then this book is a spectacular way to get started on unlearning bad behavior via addressing what causes us to act in those manners. Perhaps most importantly, it teaches us how to be kinder to others by first of all learning to be kind to ourselves.

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Dec 16 2024

The Secrets Of Still Waters Chasm by Patricia Crisafulli (EXCERPT)

Hello, readers! Today we have an excerpt for you from a cozy mystery novel that’s been described as a blend of The Da Vinci Code and Murder She Wrote. The second book of the Ohnita Harbor mystery series finds our heroine once again compelled to help those who need it most, even if it puts her in mortal danger.

One beautiful September afternoon, a hike through the pristine wilderness of Still Waters Chasm becomes a path of mystery and deadly danger for librarian Gabriela Domenici and her boyfriend, Daniel Red Deer. After taking a side trail, they discover an inexplicable construction site in the middle of the woods, where every tree has been cut down and a huge truck bearing strange-looking equipment is parked in the middle. As they continue their hike to the lake, they come across a series of even more startling discoveries.

While conducting a library outreach program in the rural town of Livery, near Still Waters Chasm, shortly after, Gabriela discovers a community that is both curious and suspicious. There she meets Lucinda Nanz, an herbalist whose encyclopedic knowledge of plants for help and harm is both fascinating and troubling, as well as Wendy Haughton, a young woman who desperately wants to sell an old drawing of unknown origin so that she can escape her abusive husband. Despite both the state police’s warnings to stay out of the investigation and Daniel’s urging to not get involved, Gabriela cannot stay away from Livery and Still Waters Chasm — putting her on a collision course with yet another murder and people who will stop at nothing to prevent her from getting too close to the truth.

Read on for an excerpt from Gabriela and Daniel’s eventful hike!

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Dec 14 2024

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

For most of my time reading Mrs Dalloway, I wrestled with the eight deadly words: I don’t care what happens to those people. The novel begins with a relatively famous opening line, “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” It tells stories of numerous people on one day in midsummer London of 1923, interspersed with their memories from many different periods of their lives. Woolf uses a stream of consciousness technique to chronicle what happens to the characters, along with their reactions, their states of mind, and the associations that objects or events bring to mind. Her approach was a considerable formal innovation when the book was published in 1925. Woolf’s close observation broke ground in terms of storytelling and in the topics that novels saw fit to address.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Clarissa Dalloway is an upper-crust Englishwoman determined to throw a good party on the night of the day when the book is set. Her husband Richard works in the government, won’t make it into the Cabinet, and at lunchtime helps an establishment lady write a letter to The Times with a public-spirited suggestion, or at least what Lady Bruton thinks is public spirited. Naturally, it is about what other people should do to advance her notions. Peter Walsh surprises Clarissa with an unannounced visit at a scandalously early hour. He has returned from India, hoping to engage lawyers to get his latest love a divorce, hoping also that his friends, such as Richard Dalloway, can get him a job appropriate to his station and interests. Peter had been in love with Clarissa when they were young adults, and she had rather returned the sentiments, but she had also spurned his offer of marriage in favor of the more solid and ambitious Richard.

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Dec 13 2024

Tantalizing Tales — December 2024 — Part One

Happy December, readers! This is our only December pre-Christmas book roundup this year, so hopefully you’ll find some amazing reads in this list to gift to your nearest and dearest (which definitely includes yourself!)

First up, we have the latest book from one of my favorite lawyers turned crime writers, Marcia Clark. Her non-fiction tome Trial By Ambush is subtitled Murder, Injustice, And The Truth About The Case Of Barbara Graham.

Unwanted and neglected from birth, Barbara had to overcome the odds just to survive. Her beauty was both a blessing and a curse, offering her too many options of all the wrong kind. Her innate sensitivity left her vulnerable to the harsh realities of the street, where she was left to fend for herself before she even reached double digits. Her record of petty crimes spoke to a life that constantly teetered on the brink of disaster.

In 1953, a catastrophic twist of fate would catapult her out of obscurity and into the headlines. When a robbery spiraled out of control and escalated into a brutal murder, Barbara became the centerpiece of a media circus. Her beauty enraptured the press, who were quick to portray her as a villainous femme fatale despite abundant evidence to the contrary — a fiction that the prosecution eagerly promoted.

The frenzy of public interest and willful distortion paved a treacherous path for her. In this dramatic true account of the power of sensationalized crime, Ms Clark — who knows a thing or two about the subject — investigates the case and exposes the fallacies in the demonizing picture they painted as well as the critical evidence that was never revealed. In the process, she exposes sexism, a flagrant disregard for the truth and ultimately the dangers posed by an unbridled prosecution.

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Dec 12 2024

The Kennedy Girl by Julia Bryan Thomas (EXCERPT)

As the year winds down, let’s look ahead at one of the most anticipated releases of 2025!

In 1961 New York, a modeling scout appears seemingly out of nowhere, complimenting twenty-one-year-old Mia’s Jacqueline Kennedy look and offering her a one-way ticket to Paris. All she can think is: why not?

Even so, she’s a bit surprised to arrive and find that she does indeed have legitimate employment at a famous fashion house, strutting down runways, attending glamourous galas… and passing cryptic messages to unsettling strangers. Apparently, Jackie Kennedy is no longer the only woman for whom fashion and politics will dramatically collide.

From the far-reaching impact of the Cold War to the surprising relevance of fashion across societies to the significance of Paris in both history and fiction, Julia Bryan Thomas’ The Kennedy Girl expertly blends its themes in a refreshing and surprising way. It follows newly orphaned Mia, who abandons her ordinary American life in favor of the alluring Parisian fashion scene, where she finds herself embroiled in global espionage.

Read on for an excerpt from one of Mia’s covert operations…

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Dec 11 2024

Terraria Volume 1 by Grant Alter, Brendan J. Vogel, Matt Clingempeel & Iwan Nazif

with colors by Digikore and letters by the talented Dave Lanphear.

So let’s be honest: I found this book entirely confusing. It doesn’t help that the entirety of the second chapter was presented not backwards but bizarrely out of order. It was about Vale and Levi going to look for answers in other people’s homes, maybe? That lack of attention to detail doesn’t inspire confidence in the final product, which has apparently had its actual publication date pushed back several times. Or it might be out already! Details online are very confusing still.

What I can gather from the digital edition I read is that the book is based on a video game of the same name (which I’d never heard of despite being part of a family of gamers.) It seems to be a pretty open sandbox where you get to decide how you play, whether as a village sim, a quest RPG or a hack and slash. The main character Vale is clearly a stand in for the average player, as he’s been adopted by a small village and has a cute pet rabbit named Alma. When a battered teenager falls on his adopted family’s doorstep one day, claiming to be the only survivor of a neighboring zombie-ravaged village, Vale and various other family members go on a quest to find out what’s going on. Bloodshed and heroics inevitably ensue.

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Dec 10 2024

The Christmas Snow Globe by Sibylle Delacroix

translated by Polly Lawson from the original French.

It’s Christmas Eve, and young Lucy and Noah are disappointed that there isn’t any snow on the ground outside. In an effort to distract them, Papa offers Lucy one present to open before bed. Lucy is pleased to unwrap a Christmas snow globe, especially since the house inside looks rather like their own. The difference, ofc, is that the house inside the globe has plenty of snow, whereas theirs does not.

Off Lucy and Noah go to bed. She gives the snow globe just one last shake before turning in. Imagine her surprise, then, to feel a cold, featherlight touch on her cheek. Somehow it is snowing inside her house! She wakes Noah, and the two embark on a delightful winter adventure, made all the more comical for being entirely indoors.

I will never not appreciate when publishers like Floris make it plain that all the art inside a book is done by real people. In this case, Sibylle Delacroix has worked with graphite pencil and colored pencils on watercolor paper to create the charming illustrations that accompany her delightful story. Of particular note is the expressiveness of the characters: Noah is depicted as being quite a cheerful little boy throughout, whereas Lucy is subtly but clearly fighting disappointment in the first few pages of the book. The pictures quietly but perfectly illustrate her journey towards pure glee, making for a surprisingly cathartic picture book, even for a reader like myself who is far less enthused about snow than these characters are.

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Dec 09 2024

Houseplants And Their F*cked-Up Thoughts by Carlyle Christoff & Elisabeth Saake

Spoiler alert in the subtitle: P.S., They Hate You.

Honestly, I’m not sure what to make of this book! It’s definitely in the vein of those cute coffee table humor books that are perfect for putting out and letting guests flip through, that I’ve previously lauded on the topics of art and birds. This volume turns its gimlet eye on houseplants, imagining what each would be thinking about its owner, while ascribing the plants with personality traits, down to astrological signs. Potentially more useful — and certainly less fanciful — is the small portion on each plant’s edibility. That said, I wouldn’t necessarily use this book as an authority, given that aloe vera is listed as being not edible despite the fact that it very much is.

The book covers 42 plants, divided roughly into three groups based on vibe: the popular crowd, the drama queens and the bitches. As with much of the rest of the book, this categorization feels particularly idiosyncratic to the authors. I am willing to accept that my knowledge of houseplants is very minimal tho, and that other readers might flip through this and go, “oh, absolutely!” I did try to keep some houseplants alive during and around the time of the pandemic lockdowns but have since given up, and greatly enjoy the little fake plant my best friend gave me instead. Hilariously, fake plants get the very first entry in this volume!

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Dec 06 2024

My UnderSlumberBumbleBeast by Zoje Stage & J E Larson

I missed the initial surge of excitement around Zoje Stage’s bestselling debut novel Baby Teeth, but was more than happy to take on the sequel, Dear Hanna, for the day job. In the latter novel, Hanna has grown up and gotten married to an older man with a teenage daughter. This pleases her: she doesn’t have any interest in having kids herself, so she’s glad to have found a mostly loving, supportive husband who’s on the same page as she is. An unexpected pregnancy, however, sets off a chain reaction of events that could have Hanna reverting to her old psychopathic ways.

I came out of that book with a huge amount of sympathy for Hanna, and an absolute loathing of her mother. But it also made me very much want to read more of Ms Stage’s work, especially this children’s book referenced in its pages. My UnderSlumberBumbleBeast is a book much loved by young Hanna and her little brother Goose, to the point where they made little UnderSlumberBumbleBeasts of their own. Now Ms Stage has partnered with illustrator J E Larson to bring that tome from fiction to reality.

My UnderSlumberBumbleBeast is the tale of Pru, an inventive young girl who doesn’t like to clean her room. When her Mumbley insists that she cleans up regardless, Pru shoves a bunch of stuff under her bed, little knowing what will result. For the noises that she’s been hearing at night from below her aren’t just from the house settling, as Mumbley and Papier (her very cute names for her parents) insist. She’ll soon find out that something actually is living under her bed, something for which she’s very much responsible.

As this is a children’s book, it is not, I repeat, not a scary novel like the rest of Ms Stage’s fiction has been so far. It’s actually a very cute, offbeat chapter book that’s appropriate for kids, tho it still does convey a frisson of suspense from Pru peering into dark spaces for the things that go bump in the night. It’s still wholly age-appropriate, especially with the glossary of potentially tricky words included in the back for younger readers by the word-loving and -collecting Pru.

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