Author Archives: Anna

Disappointing Girl-Power Graphic Novels

by Anna

I’ve recently decided that it is my duty to introduce all my friends’ kids to comic books, so I’ve been on the lookout for good quality introductory graphic novels for children, especially for young girls, which can be a bit tricky. These two were strong possibilities but were ultimately disappointing, to varying degrees.

Princeless: Save Yourself

By Jeremy Whitley

Book CoverI’ve had my eye on  Princeless for a while. The first collected publication is selling for upwards of $200, which seemed very promising in terms of popularity, so I was pleased when a reissue trade paperback was released. I was feeling confident enough in it to just buy it outright, but my extended library system had a copy, so I held off. And now I don’t know.

Princeless has a lot going for it. It starts with the common trope of a princess locked in a tower guarded by a dragon, waiting for a prince to come rescue her. After several failed rescue attempts by clueless princes, Princess Adrienne gets bored of waiting and convinces the dragon to fly her away from the tower and rescue her sisters, also locked away in towers. In addition to being admirably spunky and willful, Adrienne is also a princess of color, which is even rarer.

It is a lot of fun, definitely turning a lot of the fairy tale tropes on their heads, and the lead character gets some great lines. It just seemed a little ham-handed with all the girl power, in a winky, self-congratulatory way. The book was so focused on emphasizing girl power that it lacked more nuanced characters, motivations, and plot developments. In the end I wanted it to show, not tell: if you have a strong female protagonist doing heroic deeds, all the side jokes seem to junk it up. If you believe in what you are doing, just do it well, and don’t hedge your bets with irony.

However, when I was browsing online for the cover photo, I found the comic’s official tumblr page, and it is so dedicated to addressing sexism and racism that I started to feel bad. This is a comic for young readers, so it shouldn’t be surprising that I find the plot and characters a little simplistic, and even somewhat clunky girl power is way better than none. I think I’ll keep this in consideration as a future gift.

Spera

By Josh Tierney

Book CoverAfter having browsed multiple female-centric comics, Amazon recommended Spera to me, among others. It looked similarly interesting, so I checked it out from the library, and once again, it started out strong. The probably too-brief summary: an orphaned princess escapes her besieged kingdom with the help of one of her advisors who can shape-change into large fire dog and the daughter of the queen leading the siege. The three of them go on a series of adventures with a rotating roster of illustrators.

The Pros:

  • The first issue had my favorite illustrations, a very fun, retro style that reminded me of children’s books from the 60s and 70s.
  • Both princesses are immediately likable and admirable, and clearly distinctive from each other, as well.
  • The fire dog is just as precious as you imagine him to be, and pretty much all the illustrators did an excellent job with him (everyone loves a fire dog). Many of the illustrators, too, included some lovely gestural work that was especially apparent in the dog’s movements.
  • The minor characters met along the adventures are reliably interesting in their own right, even those that only get a couple squares (e.g. the young boy standing guard outside one of the towns is completely daunted by the task in general and the princesses in particular in just a few expressive illustrations).

The Cons:

  • My primary complaint is a bit difficult to put into words. I love the subversion of tropes, but there are some good versus evil characteristics that it does no benefit to transpose, in my opinion. Good characters do not own swords that absorb the souls of their opponents, for instance. At least, not without some serious soul searching of their own.
  • The issues collected in this volume follow a storyline of sorts, but are not always cohesive. Part of this was due to the different artwork, but that makes it even more important for the writing to tie everything together, and it didn’t always pick up the slack.
  • Some of the artwork was really stunningly ugly, and that is one of my particular biases when it comes to comic books. I primarily read them for the art, and bad art ruins the entire thing for me.

So, my search for good comics for young readers continues, and I’m sure I will enjoy it! I have several more on my roster that I will review as I get a chance to read them.

—Anna

Queen and Country

by Anna

By Greg Rucka

Book CoverQueen and Country has been on my radar for several years, but, honestly, comic books can get expensive really fast, so I like to basically read at least one entire issue before committing to actually buying anything. I’ve been waiting for a version to show up at my library, and was quite pleased when I ran across the collected first volume of the definitive edition! I was then additionally pleased that I hadn’t actually purchased it.

A kick-ass British female spy illustrated by Tim Sale, my very favorite artist, should have been a no-brainer, but for a couple unfortunate bait-and-switches. Tim Sale only draws the covers of each issue, a practice that makes me almost apoplectic. All adages aside, you really do need to be able to judge a book, at least somewhat, by the cover, especially in a primarily visual media like comic books. Hiring a better artist to draw the cover than the inside is truly the definition of bait-and-switch (although I am grudgingly pleased that Tim Sale has earned the status he deserves, I suppose).

The other unpleasant surprise was in the character of Tara Chase, kick-ass British female spy, herself. I don’t know why I let myself be suckered into thinking this was going to be different from every other comic book in existence, so I guess I am sort of to blame, as well, but Tara Chase spends an inordinate amount of time lounging around in her underwear. The issues rotate artists so the first few were just mildly disappointing, but I was completely over it by the time her outfit for a siege operation (black bra under fishnet tank top) highlighted her approximately 12” waist and 40” chest (while her male compatriot is in full combat gear, of course). Same old, same old, I guess, but I was hoping for better.

—Anna

Coal to Diamonds

by Anna

By Beth Ditto with Michelle Tea

Book CoverSigh. One would think that I would eventually learn my lesson, and not go off completely half-cocked, but I never do learn and I actually do this far more often than one would think.

So, when I first saw the Dior perfume commercial with Charlize Theron juxtaposed with Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly, and Marilyn Monroe, I was promptly hugely offended because I vaguely remembered that Theron had once said something derogatory about Monroe’s size years ago, and didn’t think that she should then profit by the juxtaposition. But, of course, once I actually double-checked before writing this review (at the very least, I have learned to do that, on occasion), it was actually Elizabeth Hurley who said that (in my defense, I had forgotten that Elizabeth Hurley was even a thing).

Anyway, in this one case, my own misinformation actually worked in my favor, because it made me pay more attention to the commercial, which made me realize how very catchy the song is. I downloaded* the song and added it to my current mix of music, and then didn’t think much more about it.

A couple months later, I read Buzzfeed’s Best YA Books of 2013, and decided that I wanted to read Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea. My library system doesn’t have that book (I requested that they buy it), but they did have a memoir she helped Ditto write. I wasn’t sold right away because I don’t really like memoirs to begin with, and Ditto seems awfully young to have one anyway, but my curiosity got the best of me.

It is quite short, only about 150 pages, which makes sense given that Ditto is only now in her early 30s. But, what I was kind of banking on, her life has been chock full of crazy. Her childhood in rural Arkansas is so retrograde that I have trouble wrapping my mind around it. It was a truly terrible place to grow up and truly terrible things happened to her, but Ditto (and Tea) has such an incorrigibly upbeat voice that the story never gets bogged down in the grimness.

So, that was pretty much the first half, and I was quite pleased with both Ditto and Tea as authors, feeling that this was a surprisingly lighthearted memoir about an upbringing of poverty, neglect and abuse. However, the second half surprised me by being quite educational. I like listening to music a lot, but I don’t really know anything about it, and I don’t really like punk music at all. I have always been a little in awe of the punk movement, though: I would have loved to be a punk sort of person, but I’m really not, and I don’t even really understand the movement. Ditto does understand it, however, or at the very least, has her own strong interpretation of what punk means. She does an excellent job of describing what drew her to the late-90s punk scene coming out of Washington in the aftermath of the grunge movement.

I was fascinated and also a little embarrassed at my ignorance. Ditto and the band Gossip had a fairly meteoric rise for an indie punk group, and I only hear about them from a television commercial. One doesn’t get much less punk than that, I think. They even toured with Sleater-Kinney, which I had heard of, but only through an interview with Carrie Brownstein about Portlandia.

The vast majority of the short book takes place before Ditto’s big success, with the last few pages zipping through her gold, and then platinum, records, her television appearances, and her clothing line. The pacing seems to reflect her own experience of everything suddenly coming together at once, but after reading so much about the titular “coal,” I would have liked to spend some more time on the “diamonds.”

—Anna

* Downloaded legally, though I also didn’t pay anything. Rebecca introduced me to Freegal Music, a music downloading service through a network of libraries. They have a kind of random selection of music, but someone there is a apparently a big Gossip fan.

Between Shades of Gray

by Anna

By Ruta Sepetys

Book CoverI enjoyed Out of the Easy so much that I quickly checked out Sepetys’ first novel, Between Shades of Gray. By a horrible coincidence, it was actually released on the very same day as Fifty Shades of Grey, and so a wonderful and very worthwhile read got buried in the ensuing mania. They couldn’t be more different, either. Seriously.

Between Shades of Gray is a fictional but historically-based story of a Lithuanian family arrested by the Russian police under Stalin’s occupation of the Baltic countries and deported to work camps in the Arctic. Russia’s treatment of these political prisoners (artists and academics charged with “anti-Soviet” activity, among others) was only marginally better than the German’s treatment of theirs, and ultimately resulted in the death of about a third of the populations of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as the disappearance of the countries themselves for decades.

The novel is narrated by Lina, a fifteen-year-old girl, who is arrested, with her mother and younger brother, on the first page of the book. For the rest of the book, and for over a year, they are driven across the entire Asian continent to a work camp in the North Pole. It is a very personal look through the eyes of a single girl, and is both heart-breaking and inspiring all at once, and impossible to put down. Lina and her story feel very real, which is a testament to the amount of research Sepetys put into it.

Sepetys dedicates the book to her father, a Lithuanian refugee who escaped the gulags with his family as a child, but left many family members behind to be imprisoned and deported. She traveled to Lithuania to interview family members and many other survivors and composites their stories in this novel. In the afterward, she writes that she wanted to bring awareness to the horrors that got overshadowed by even worse atrocities committed in World War II, and it just kills me that this book promptly got overshadowed by escapist erotica. (Although, actually, the author herself kind of appreciates the confusion because it is introducing new, initially confused readers to the issues of the Baltic genocides.)

On a brief personal note, this week has been a bit trying. We got 7 inches of snow, and I had to shovel my driveway three different days, and load and unload firewood. I hated every minute of it, and then felt especially spoiled since this was exactly the kind of “lighter” work given to the children in the work camps for days in sub-zero conditions on food rations of 3 grams of stale bread a day.

—Anna

Nonfiction Graphic Novels: Serial Killers

by Anna

Uh, these are not really in my normal reading sphere. I don’t like true crime stories—they scare me like no supernatural stories do. However, I’d run across raving reviews of both of these, and I guess my curiosity just got the best of me. I agree that the idea of graphic novels about real serial killers sounds just awful since graphic novels  often seem to celebrate over-the-top violence, but these both had personal approaches that caught my attention.

My Friend Dahmer

By Derf Backderf

Book CoverAuthor Derf Backderf actually grew up and went to school with Jeffrey Dahmer, and while Dahmer wasn’t his closest friend, he was one of Dahmer’s very few friends. I can’t even imagine what a strange feeling that must be, looking back in hindsight, though Backderf does a very good job of putting it into words and pictures. It is thoughtful, and sad, and calm; pretty much exactly the opposite of what I would have expected from a graphic novel about Jeffrey Dahmer.

As the story got closer to the end, though, I started getting increasingly nervous. The first half is set in junior high, far before any of the gruesome murders, but I’m not actually all that familiar with the case, so I wasn’t completely sure when the murders started, and Dahmer’s unraveling throughout high school amid all the oblivious authority figures is agonizing to even just read. It is one thing to enjoy a violent thriller, but it is very much another thing when it is nonfiction. The author turns out to be extremely sensitive to this, one might even say surprisingly sensitive, given that he grew up in the same environment that produced Dahmer. He alludes to Dahmer’s increasing perversions but does not illustrate or describe them outright.

In fact, that’s not what this book is about. As Backderf writes in the intro:

This is a tragic tale, one that has lost none of its emotional power after two decades. It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent. Once Dahmer kills, however—and I can’t stress this enough—my sympathy for him ends. He could have turned himself in after that first murder. He could have put a gun to his head. Instead he, and he alone, chose to become a serial killer and spread misery to countless people. There are a surprising number out there who view Jeffrey Dahmer as some kind of anti-hero, a bullied kid who lashed back at the society that rejected him. This is nonsense. Dahmer was a twisted wretch whose depravity was almost beyond comprehension. Pity him, but don’t empathize with him.

It is an extremely insightful look at the society that created Dahmer, from an insider’s point of view. It took Backderf years and several different tries to write this book, and he did an enormous amount of research to fact-check his own recollections. He writes that he has accepted that he has no responsibility in Dahmer’s fate, and I would bet that this book probably helped him find that acceptance.

A quick word of caution: when reading the book itself, I was quite impressed with the author’s restraint and sensitivity with the subject matter, so I was perhaps a little too blasé as a reader. I had trouble afterwards getting it out of my head, and it wasn’t nightmare-causing, exactly, but it wasn’t comfortable, either.

Green River Killer: A True Detective Story

By Jeff Jensen

Book CoverI was a little nervous about this one, since the prologue illustrates the killer’s first murder right off the bat, and that of a child to boot, but I have to say that after My Friend Dahmer, and after the shocking intro, Green River Killer was a bit of a cake walk.

I first heard about this graphic novel on NPR’s RadioLab in an interview with the author, the son of the main detective in charge of this case. As a quick aside, can I say how much I enjoy RadioLab? It feels a bit like This American Life, but doesn’t leave me crying in my driveway nearly as much. The interview is particularly interesting because they actually play snippets of the police interviews with Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, responsible for the death of over 40 and possibly over 75 women throughout the 1980s in Seattle. (It’s also very possible that having already heard some of the details in the killer’s own voice made the graphic novel less disturbing in the end.)

Jensen’s father had dedicated the majority of his career to this one case, but tried to shelter his family from it as much as possible. When the recordings of the interviews were made public, his son, a writer for Entertainment Weekly, used them to help recreate his father’s career. It is a very loving look at his father’s dedication to a truly grim job. And, I think that’s what made it relatively easier to read: the focus is on the father and the police work rather than the psyche of the killer. Which makes sense, because in both the interviews and the graphic novel, there’s really not much of a reveal into Ridgway’s psyche, nothing like Backderf is able to do for Dahmer. While they were able to get enough facts for a solid conviction, they were never able to satisfactorily get a motive or really any sort of explanation.

This is actually the biggest frustration for Detective Jensen, but he is also so professional that even his moment of emotional crisis is quite contained, which is both understandable and admirable, but is difficult to communicate on paper. Jensen successfully focuses instead on the contrast of the loving relationship between his mother and father and both of them toward their children with the cypher of Gary Ridgway. The subtitle, “A True Detective Story,” is quite accurate: this is very much more about the lead detective and the toll police work can take on a person than the perpetrator.

—Anna

Out of the Easy

by Anna

By Ruta Sepetys

Book CoverThis book is so good, you guys! You know when you read a string of pretty good books, and you’re happy enough with them, but then you read a really good book and all of a sudden those other books really pale in comparison? That’s how I feel right now: I don’t redact anything I said about Girl of Nightmares and Being Henry David, but I maybe don’t recommend them quite so highly anymore. I definitely recommend Out of the Easy, though.

It starts out fairly light but very engaging, introducing Josie, the daughter of a prostitute in 1950s New Orleans trying to escape the lifestyle she was born into. A wealthy man that she meets in the bookstore she helps run is found dead later than night, and the book is ostensibly about the investigation into the suspicious circumstances. As the book progresses, though, the mystery takes the backseat while it focuses more on Josie’s desperate attempts to improve her circumstances. This is not a criticism at all, though, because Josie, the world around her, the people in her life (including madams, prostitutes, johns, and gangsters) are fascinating, and her struggles are heartbreaking and gripping.

—Anna

Being Henry David

by Anna

By Cal Armistead

Book CoverI ran across BuzzFeed’s list of The 21 Best YA Books of 2013, and had only read two (both courtesy of Kinsey). So, I read through all of the descriptions and a bunch of them held no interest for me (there is nothing for me in a story about an outcast teenage girl who finds herself through DJ-ing), but several promptly got added to my to-read list. Being Henry David was the only one immediately available at my library, so it has come first.

The premise is extremely basic, which I like: a teenaged boy wakes up in New York City’s Penn Station with no knowledge of who he is or how he got there or anything about his past. His only possession is a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and for lack of any better clues, he decides to go to Walden Pond and see if anything there can bring back his memories. Since he doesn’t know his real name, he gives his name as Henry David whenever asked. “Hank” is very engaging, and the various characters he meets are equally interesting.

The mystery is quite enthralling and kept me guessing for the majority of the book: Is he a government super-soldier a la Bourne? Is he running away from the massacre of his family a la Dark Places? Could he possibly be Thoreau himself brought forward in time?! The ending wasn’t quite as interesting as some of my admittedly farfetched imaginings, but was still quite satisfying. It occasionally got a little too teenage-angst for me, but I have a lower-than-average tolerance for that, so that criticism is more due to that I am not really the intended audience for this type of book than any sort of flaw in the story. I was overall quite pleased.

I additionally enjoyed the occasional discussions about Thoreau and Walden Pond because I read Walden in high school and did not relate to it at all (I am really very much not an outdoorsy person). So, I liked reading about how other people, even fictional characters, took inspiration from it. (I had also initially thought that that I was getting a somewhat unusual, for me, story about a male character by a male author, since I primarily read female characters and authors, but then I double-checked and author Cal Armistead is a woman, so not too off the beaten path – haha, Walden!)

Alternate Book CoverCan I also indulge in a quick graphic design exercise? I thought the cover to the book sucked – it was generic, discordant, and missed several different opportunities. I mulled over this throughout the several days of reading it, and so threw together a quick fan-art cover instead, courtesy of the great M.C. Escher.

The other books I’m waiting on from the list are Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea (#9), Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell (#15), and Out of the Easy by Ruta Sepetys (#21), so hopefully those reviews will be coming up, too, though I’m interspersing my YA reading with graphic novels, so those will be sprinkled throughout, as well.

—Anna

Girl of Nightmares

by Anna

By Kendare Blake

Book Cover: Girl of NightmaresGirl of Nightmares is the sequel to Anna Dressed in Blood, which I enjoyed as my palette cleanser after a brutal few months with Atlas Shrugged. Anna Dressed in Blood was an awesome way to recover from Ayn Rand, but wasn’t so engaging that I was intending to read the sequel. However, I was looking for casual reading over the holidays, so I picked it up on a whim at the library, figuring it would be a fun distraction.

And it was! It was actually even better than the first book! My one complaint about Anna Dressed in Blood was awfully vague, just that the pace of the plotting seemed odd to me in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Well, I’ve figured out what the plotting issue was because Girl of Nightmares doesn’t have it at all. So, here’s the thing, I like a very linear storyline: protagonist has a problem, works towards a solutions, and finally succeeds. It is a little simple, perhaps, but that’s how I like it. Anna Dressed in Blood had a lot of red herrings as the protagonist and supporting characters tried to figure out what challenge they were facing and then how to solve it, but this book is more straight-forward.

Girl of Nightmares starts just a couple of months after the end of Anna Dressed in Blood, and picks up the same story, so is definitely not a standalone. I can’t really describe the plot at all without spoiling Anna Dressed in Blood, so I’m not going to do that, beyond saying that the other thing I really like is that this book is sort of the flipside of the first book. The first book follows the protagonist Cas as he hunts murderous ghosts and sends them to the afterlife; in Girl of Nightmares, Cas is trying to bring a ghost back from the afterlife. I just love that kind of mirror-image reversal treatment in sequels!

Cas also travels to London to meet with a group that sounds very similar to the Watcher Council, and any similarity to Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a-okay with me!

—Anna

Hyperbole and a Half

by Anna

By Allie Brosh

Book Cover: Hyperbole and a HalfI received the Hyperbole and a Half book for Christmas and it was awesome! I tried to portion it out so it would last longer, but was only able to stretch it out over four days. A lot of her fans say this, but author Allie Brosh seems to live, at least part of the time, inside my head.

If you’ve never heard of Allie Brosh or Hyperbole and a Half, the book is a selection of stories, both new and from her blog by the same name, which you have to go visit right now. You should read my two favorite stories, which are also in the book, “The Simple Dog” and “The Party.” And read Wolves, too, because that one is also really funny. Oh, and Sneaky Hate Spriral is great. Basically, just start at the top and read until you hit the end. And buy the book, especially to read “Motivation,” one of the new stories, because I’ve been quoting it all week: “I don’t want to do anything more than I don’t want to hate myself.”

It was actually a perfect gift for me because although I’m a big fan of hers, I’d mostly stopped reading her blog for the last year, for a reason that shames me a little. She stopped posting for several months, during which I checked back regularly, but when she came back, she discussed how she was recovering from a serious bout of depression, and I couldn’t bring myself to read about that, and I got too anxious to check back in afterwards. So, basically, I’m pretty much as unsupportive as can be, and was seriously ashamed of myself, but luckily her book actually addressed her own coming-to-terms with her selfishness and egotism, so once again, I felt very like she was talking from my own head.

—Anna

The Reason I Jump

by Anna

By Naoki Higashida

Book Cover: The Reason I JumpJon Stewart interviewed the translator for this book, and then continued to rave about this book in subsequent shows, so I figured I’d give it a shot. That the book itself exists is amazing: the thirteen-year-old author with autism answers questions that he frequently hears. It is a fascinating look into a viewpoint that is usually inaccessible, and I imagine it is an immeasurable benefit to those who interact with people with autism. For myself, I found it very interesting—it is a short book, but not a quick read, since I kept putting it down so I could think more about what Higashida was saying—but occasionally a bit repetitive, which makes me sound like the worst person ever, since that is clearly one of the traits of autism. I try to justify my criticism by saying that Higashida is so mature and perceptive that it is easy to forget that he is working with quite a severe handicap.

My only previous insight into autism was the sporadic postings by one of my favorite bloggers, Matthew Baldwin, aka Defective Yeti, on raising his autistic son. He hadn’t posted in several months, so I’d gotten out of the habit of checking, but this book reminded me to check back in, and it turned out he spent all of October posting each day about his son. His love and delight in his son are evident in each post and make the posts such a pleasure to read.

And, finally, while I’m bringing up blogs about interesting parenting situations, I ran across Gender Mom just about a month ago, and have been completely caught up in it ever since. Gender Mom’s five-year-old daughter was born male, but announced she was female at age three, and a year later they decided to raise her female. It is a truly fascinating look at a mother trying her best in fairly new territory.

—Anna