Dec 06 2021

The Last Witch: Fear & Fire (The Last Witch #1-5) by Conor McCreery, V.V. Glass & Natalia Nesterenko

Gosh, ’tis the season for some truly affecting graphic novels!

The Last Witch is the story of Saoirse, a young Irish girl who just wants to beat her best friend Padraig to the witch’s tower on the outskirts of town one Imbolc, never mind the superstitions about witches coming out to prey on children that very day. Her father totally busts her for venturing into forbidden territory, and while Padraig slips away, she gets sent back to the village to mind her younger brother Brahm. He isn’t feeling very well, and their dad wants her to fix some soothing tea for him. Resentfully, she does so, but once she thinks Brahm is asleep, she sets out to find Padraig and prove that she’s just as brave as he is, if not more.

Alas, Brahm only pretended to be sleeping and demands she take him with her. Saoirse reluctantly accedes, but while walking through the forest, they run into their wise grandmother, Nan, who promises to keep their secret: every kid needs a little adventure in their life, after all. After another long walk, Saoirse and Brahm reach the hedge that’s meant to block off the forbidden area, and think they hear Padraig calling for them. It’s not a spoiler to say that it isn’t Padraig, or to say that what the siblings encounter will turn their lives upside down. Soon, they’re on the run with their Nan as Saoirse must learn to control her powers in order to stop a great evil from destroying the entire world.

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Dec 05 2021

A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher

“There was a dead girl in my aunt’s bakery.” There’s the first problem right away. Worst of all for the dead girl, of course, but a horrifying start to the day for Mona, the fourteen-year-old first-person narrator of A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking. Then things get worse.

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher

Not right away, of course; Mona partly distracts herself from the horror of the body in the kitchen (“the red stuff oozing out from under her head definitely wasn’t raspberry filling”) by thinking of worse things that have been in the kitchen, like a zombie frog that had crawled in from the canals.

Poor thing had been downstream of the cathedral, and sometimes they dump the holy water a little recklessly, and you get a plague of undead frogs and newts and whatnot. (The crawfish are the worst. You can get the frogs with a broom, but you have to call a priest in for a zombie crawfish.) (Ch. 1)

Like a sensible young teen, Mona knows when she’s out of her depth. She decides to wake her Aunt Tabitha. “Not that Aunt Tabitha had bodies in her bakery on a regular basis, but she’s one of those competent people who always know what to do. If a herd of ravenous centaurs descended on the city and went galloping through the streets, devouring small children and cats, Aunt Tabitha would calmly go about setting up barricades and manning crossbows as if she did it twice a week.” (Ch. 1) It will turn out that Mona is one of those people too, though she does not know it at the outset. She discovers how much she can do by seeing what needs to be done and setting to it, even when the adults around her are scared or unable.

The setting is a standard fantasy city — one of many in the lands, ruled by a Duchess, defined by a river and numerous canals, tolerant of magic users — because Kingfisher (a pen name of Ursula Vernon) is far more interested in exploring the nuances of people than the details of places. What happens when, say, a murder victim turns up in their bakery? Or indeed in the local bakery where they get their favorites? Though of course Mona and her aunt don’t say “murder” at first because even though two constables had come out and one had gone to fetch the coroner, they were still a respectable bakery.

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Dec 04 2021

Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

Because I had enjoyed Sumi so much as a character in Come Tumbling Down, I picked up Beneath the Sugar Sky, which I had somehow missed when it was a Hugo finalist in 2019, expecting to find more of her and of Confection, the Nonsense world where she found her proper home. That turned out to be an error along the lines of watching “The Search for Spock” because you wanted to see more of Spock.

Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

Sumi was dead, to begin with. Then her daughter Rini fell from a door in the sky into the turtle pond at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. Rini was born in Confection to Sumi and a candy-corn farmer in the years after Sumi defeated the Queen of Cake and ended her despotic reign. None of those events could come to pass now that Sumi was killed in Down Among the Sticks and Bones. Causality runs a bit differently in Confection, or Rini wouldn’t exist at all, but it is catching up to her. Having a mother who died before she could be born is gradually causing Rini to come undone. In the time that it has taken her to make her way to the Home, part of her hand has disappeared into the nothingness that will be her fate if Sumi can’t be returned to the living. Can Eleanor and her students help?

Despite the Home’s rule against quests (the other two are “No solicitations. No visitors.”), that is precisely what four of them do. Kade, the only student who does not want to return to the world behind his personal door, is Eleanor’s second in command. Christopher longs for his Skeleton Girl and the happy bones of Mariposa; if any of the current students know enough about Underworlds and returning someone from death, it’s Christopher. Cora is a new student and until recently a mermaid. She’s one of the two that Rini nearly lands on at the turtle pond. Nadya is the other, and she’s also looking for a way back to a water world. Rini has a bracelet from a wizard on Confection that can open doorways between the worlds, something that is usually nearly impossible, and soon the five of them are off to try to reassemble Sumi’s body and reunite it with both her spirit and a spark of life that will bring her back and let Rini be born. They will have to hurry, though. Rini is losing herself at an alarming rate.

Rini is fun to have around. What makes perfect sense to her strikes the students as very odd, and she has a direct way of putting things that still leaves the other characters perplexed. She was, for example, naked when she fell from the sky. Which she characterizes thus: “‘A cake’s a cake, whether or not it’s been frosted,’ said [Rini] primly.” (Ch. 3)

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Dec 03 2021

Amazing Ash & Superhero Ah Ma by Melanie Lee and Arif Rafhan

Y’all, I did not expect this book to make me cry but it sure did.

Ash Tan is a young Singaporean girl stressed out from having the National Exams looming over next year’s horizon, particularly since she isn’t very good at math. When she gets her latest bad grade, her mom takes away her handphone (that’s cellphone to those of you outside of Southeast Asia,) resulting in a strained relationship between Ash and her mom, Grace, who works full time to support them and Grace’s own mom, whom Ash calls Ah Ma, a traditional name for Grandmother. Ah Ma is Ash’s caretaker while Grace is at work, but with age, her mental health is deteriorating.

When Ash sees Ah Ma slip outside for a walk one night, she’s torn as to whether to follow. Ash is supposed to accompany Ah Ma whenever her grandmother goes out nowadays, but she’s also supposed to be studying hard and proving to her mother that she’s worthy of getting her handphone back. When Ah Ma suddenly vanishes from sight, a terrified Ash runs down to find her, and discovers a secret that could change her ordinary life forever.

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Dec 02 2021

The Mermaid, the Witch, And The Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

I honestly think it does a great disservice to this book to consider/market it as YA. For starters, I very nearly bounced off it in the first few pages when a main character, who we’re clearly meant to feel sympathy for, brutally kills an unarmed man. Had I gone in thinking this was a regular fantasy novel, I would’ve probably been okay, but as a YA novel, that seemed like way too much too soon.

I’m glad I persevered tho, even if, in the end, I strongly stand by my opinion that this book is far too mature to be labeled YA. Said MC, Flora, has adopted the male persona of Florian in order to help her survive life on the Dove, a slaving ship that pretends to be a passenger vessel in order to lure in victims before shackling and selling them off. Florian hates it here, but stays because it’s still a safer place for her to live with her brother Alfie than the cold streets of the Imperial city they fled as homeless orphans.

Lady Evelyn Hasegawa is not much loved by her noble parents, who seem relieved more than anything else to ship her off to wed a new money Imperial commander several months’ sea travel away. Remanded to the care of the pious Lady Ayer, she embarks on the Dove with little optimism. When Florian is set by the Dove’s first mate to guard Evelyn’s honor from the rest of the leering crew (as a high-born virgin commands a higher price from the slavers of the Red Coast,) Evelyn is drawn to the young sailor and decides to teach him how to read. Their growing friendship causes Florian to second-guess her own role in what will inevitably happen to Evelyn and the other passengers. And that’s even before the sailors capture a mermaid and bring it aboard.

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Dec 01 2021

The Math Kids: An Incorrect Solution (The Math Kids #5) by David Cole

with illustrations by Shannon O’Toole.

The Math Kids are starting fifth grade in a pretty glum mood. Not only are they not all in the same class any longer, but the boys, Justin and Jordan, have been stuck with a teacher known as Miller the Killer, who has no love for math and barely teaches it. When Justin and Jordan try to inject a little more of their favorite subject into the rest of their classes, Mr Miller gets punishment-happy, and poor Jordan gets saddled with both bad grades and two weeks of detention. Justin hatches a grand plan to make Mr Miller start liking math, even as the girls stand up to the bullies in their own classroom. But it’s another bully who catches Justin’s eye, and leads him to a crisis of conscience. Can our four heroes use their math skills to solve these seemingly impossible problems? After all, not even the Millennium Prizes problems could remain unsolved forever.

This was a charming middle-grade novel that deftly incorporates math into everyday life, not only providing brain teasers for young (and older) readers to enjoy, but also teaching brand new techniques for solving math problems. I wasn’t familiar with the lattice method of multiplication before this book and while I’m old enough to be more comfortable continuing to use the old-fashioned form of multiplication for large digit numbers, I will absolutely use the mind-bending percentage tricks explained here in future! I really need to hand a copy of this book to my fifth-grader who also loves math and brain teasers, which is about the highest compliment I can hand out to any book for younger readers I come across nowadays.

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Nov 30 2021

Madly Marvelous: The Costumes Of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel by Donna Zakowska

The Marvelous Mrs Maisel has long been on the list of shows I’d watch if I had more time in my life, so I was immensely grateful to receive this book so I could make the time to watch at least the pilot episode.

Even as someone unfamiliar with the show, I’ve long been a fan of the costuming: when Bergdorf Goodman had the coat sale inspired by the show, I was sorely tempted, even though my signature winter coat is Arsene Wenger’s full-length puffy Arsenal jacket, lol. And while I do tend to the practical when it comes to dressing, I do have a weakness for materials that flow and for bright colors and patterns: 100% a result of my Malaysian upbringing and my very elegant mother. Who, like the titular Mrs Maisel’s mother, is also named Rose!

So what an absolute joy this book was for me, especially once I’d familiarized myself with the basics of the show by watching the pilot and getting a feel for not only the characters but also the general aesthetic. Even before delving into the nitty gritty of this lovely volume, I was dead impressed by the care taken in the show to stick to the 1950s’ New York vibe. The costuming plays a HUGE part in this, and Donna Zakowska has rightfully won (tho, in my opinion, not enough) awards for her work making sure everyone looks period-appropriate.

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Nov 29 2021

From Page To Screen: Dune by Frank Herbert

I’ve read Frank Herbert’s Dune once, when I was 8 and it was the only other English-language book in my grandparents’ house, after Robert Louis Stevenson’s far more age-appropriate Kidnapped. Dune left an indelible mark: I thought in terms of worm sign and the Weirding Way for years, even as I knew uneasily that there was stuff in that book that I was uncomfortable with but couldn’t quite elucidate. Since, you know, I was 8. It took my husband listening to the audiobook in the car several decades later for me to realize how weirdly misogynistic the book was; the overt white savior/noble savage tropes were, ofc, a nauseating given.

But it wasn’t until watching Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 movie adaptation that I realized one of my biggest problems with the book even as an 8 year-old. Pretty much the first thing out of my mouth as soon as the credits rolled to a close was, “Wow, they really did a good job of making Paul less of an insufferable brat!” I hadn’t even realized how much I’d subconsciously hated Paul till I said that! And the best thing? This is the first version of the story that has made me actually NOT hate him! Even the David Lynch version (that I watched as a tween) couldn’t salvage his character for me, and I LOVE Kyle MacLachlan. It didn’t help that Mr MacLachlan looked older at 24, when he filmed the Lynch version, than Timothee Chalamet, star of the latest film, does at the same age. Mr MacLachlan looked like the grown ass man he was, which made his angst tedious at best. Mr Chalamet, on the other hand, believably looks like a teenager who, as Mr Villeneuve cleverly positions him, is Going Through Some Things.

I also hated that the Lynch version made Jessica look annoyingly passive compared to how kick-ass she was in the book, a trait that Mr Villeneuve thankfully restores in his movie. The Lynch version only doubled down on the text’s inherent misogyny by erasing the heroics of its main female character. And in fairness, Mr Lynch disavows his film, which was heavily edited by Dino de Laurentiis anyway. I’m not accusing Mr Lynch of misogyny, but the choice to erase so much of Jessica’s story so they could fit everything into one movie was not a great one. Which is partly why I’m so glad they’ve broken this adaptation into two parts. Some of my friends may grumble, but it’s really the best choice for this sprawling epic story.

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Nov 28 2021

Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

Like Doreen, I initially thought that Riot Baby was an imperative phrase, not a descriptive one. Instead of getting his characters to riot, Onyebuchi has them bide their time and keep absorbing the hits that life, in this particular instance life as working-class Black Americans, gives them.

Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

Those hits start early, and keep coming. Riot Baby opens with Ella on a school bus in South Central Los Angeles when teenage gang members, offended by gestures a school kid made through a bus window, burst into the bus with guns drawn and put the barrels up against the kid’s head. They don’t shoot him on the spot, but “Ella can see in the gangbanger’s eyes that he’s got no compunctions about it, that this is only half an act, it’s only half meant to scare the kid away from the corner, that if it came to it, the guy would meet disrespect with murder.” (Pt. I) Ella lives with her mama, and a woman she calls Grandma (but who isn’t her grandmother) plays a big role in her upbringing in California. Mama is a nurse and works various shifts, and hasn’t stopped enjoying her young life yet either.

Ella gets headaches, and nosebleeds, and panic attacks. And also precognition. “[S]he sees an older Kaylen, filled out and all man, working in a hospital as an orderly, and all his patients are old, way older than him, and over and over, the old patients, when they get slow and know it’s not going to be too long now, ask him to sit with them.” (Pt. I) Many of the other fates she sees for the people around her are much worse, especially the kids she sees not making it out of childhood. Her brother Kevin is born in Los Angeles during the 1992 riots that follow the acquittal of the policemen who badly beat Rodney King the previous year. When Ella and Mama and Kev come out of the hospital a couple of days later, they find that everything has been burned down.

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Nov 27 2021

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

Sarah Gailey gets to have all the fun of writing a Western while avoiding all the cultural baggage of writing one in the twenty-first century by moving the story into a dystopian future in which the United States has broken down enough that towns are isolated and most travel is by horse or by foot, but not broken down so much that there aren’t ample guns, bullets and powder for the characters to use in a scrape. Gailey has made the remaining polity something of a ramshackle Gilead, with patriotism and patriarchy enforced by vigorous application of hanging, alongside less formal means of keeping some men in power and nearly all women oppressed.

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

There’s resistance, of course, because the setting and story would be a lot less fun if the dystopia were run like a real one in which the opposition is just ground down through the relentless actions of people with power. With noticeable irony, Gailey sets up Utah as the center of the opposition. That only comes out further into Upright Women Wanted because it begins in the middle of nowhere with a young woman desperate to escape her home town so she stows away on a traveling wagon.

In the first pages of Upright Women Wanted Esther’s girlfriend is hanged for deviance while her father, the boss of Valor, Arizona, makes a pious speech. Esther runs away to join the Librarians, travelers who journey from settlement to poor settlement bringing Approved Materials to the populace and conducting small trade on the side. They Librarians play an important role in knitting communities together, and they are well regarded by both the people and the authorities. Their recruiting slogan provides the novella’s title. Esther sees them as a way out, an escape from the harrowing events she has just been a part of, and the arranged marriage that awaits her in the near future.

The Head Librarian didn’t find Esther Augustus until they were two whole days outside of Valor, Arizona. She swore so loud and colorful that it snapped Esther right out of the Beatriz-dream she’d been having, and by the time Esther was sitting upright, the Head Librarian’s revolver was pointed right at her face.
“Don’t shoot me,” Esther said, her voice raspy. Her mouth tasted foul from two days with only the bottle of water she’d brought, two days without a toothbrush and without food. “Please,” she added, because her mother had raised her right and because manners seemed like a good idea when a gun was involved. (Ch. 1)

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