Small Press Expo

by Anna

Rebecca and I look forward to the Small Press Expo all year, where independently published artists and writers sell their comic books and graphic novels. Each year, we assure each other that we are going to post a review on the blog about all of our excellent purchases, but each year, we get home exhausted, and stretch the reading out over several months, and never quite get around to putting together a cohesive review. But this year will be different!

…Okay, so SPX was a few weeks months ago, but we’ve still got a couple of great finds to share with you!

The Shadow Hero

By Gene Luen Yang (author) and Sonny Liew (artist)

Shadow_HeroI picked up this graphic novel almost immediately upon entering the floor, and it turned out to be my favorite purchase. The author and artist are both Asian Americans, who had discovered a very short run of what was likely the first Asian American superhero, the Green Turtle. They elaborate more on the source material in the back of the book, but the short version is that it was written by a Chinese American author during World War II, showing allied China defending American against Japanese agents. The Green Turtle himself is kept very mysterious in the original books, and is never given any sort of backstory, which Yang and Liew decide to correct in their update.

The update works brilliantly! The plot is very clever, characters are all so wonderful, and the dialogue is laugh-out-loud funny. I was giggling through the whole thing, much to Rebecca’s amusement and exasperation. (When she read it, she laughed, too, but also said that it might hit her second-hand-embarrassment squick a bit much for her to fully enjoy.)

Innsmouth

By Megan James

InnsmouthInnsmouth was a close second, though only the first three issues were available (the fourth one has come out in the time it took me to actually post this review), of what will hopefully be a long-running series. (The only drawback to the independent publishing is, who knows how long there will be funding for any given project. If only I were a millionaire!)

It takes place in the fictional town of Innsmouth, MA, made famous by Lovecraft in his stories. In this narrative, Innsmouth is a fairly normal New England town, with a small university, and a religious cult that worships Cthulhu, which pretty much everyone tries to tolerate by ignoring.

You can read the first issue online, introducing Randolph Higgle, who is a junior acolyte of the cult, basically doing door-to-door evangelizing, until he is forced into more responsibility than he can handle and he goes to outside help for advice. The author comments that she always loved the Lovecraft stories, while pretty much despising the man himself, so it is her ambition to capture as much of a the gloomy fun as possible without any of the racism and other bigotry.

All Rights Reserved by Gregory Scott Katsoulis

by Rebecca

allrightsreservedAll Rights Reserved
by Gregory Scott Katsoulis
2017

This book is terrifying. It’s good and I recommend it, but like many such YA novels, it’s set in a dystopian future and it’s a particular dystopian future that I am deeply concerned with.

For some background:

US copyright law was first established in 1790, allowing authors to register their books for a seven-year monopoly on publication, to allow the authors that long to make as much profit as they could before they had to shift their focus to a new creation.

Ever since then, the copyright protections have been creeping to allow creators longer monopolies and pushing back any content going into the public domain to help and assist other creators or just be available to the public for free.

The Copyright Term Extension Act (colloquially known as the “Mickey Mouse protection act” because Disney was so scared of Mickey Mouse entering the public domain) was made law in 1998, and that degrees that all content is automatically copyrighted (no registration or even intent required) and content remains under copyright for 70 years after the original author has died. Great grandchildren can now hold monopolies of their ancestors’ creations… no need to make new content at all.

Meanwhile, what exactly copyright covers has also been expanding: originally it literally just covered the text itself. Translations were not infringing copyright because they were literally changing the language. Characters and settings were free to use. Now sequels and spinoffs are all infringements. Organization for Transformative Works is currently battling just to allow people to freely write fanfiction for purely recreational purposes.

The “fair use” exception was added to copyright law allowing some leeway for people to use excerpts except that one of the ramifications is that it shifts the burden of proof. Historically, a copyright holder had to show that someone had been infringing on their copyright, or they couldn’t sue: innocent until proven guilty. Now, the copyright holder can sue based on any use at all, and the person using it has to prove that their use fits the exception: guilty until proven innocent.

I know less about Patent and Trademark law (the other two main branches of law concerning intellectual property) than I do about Copyright law, but I expect they’ve gone through similar slow transformations.

And I’ve certainly become increasingly aware of how often my purchases aren’t actual purchases, but are legally “lease agreements”. You don’t buy Kindle books or iTunes songs or Microsoft software anymore: you lease the use of them, with restrictions in place. There are definitely rights reserved on those things.

Back to the book:

So in this novel, we’re presented by an America™ that has continued to change intellectual property laws to such a point that words and phrases and gestures are each individually copyrighted and royalties are due for any use of them.

Everyone is tracked and their words and actions monitored to ensure they are paid for. Going into debt means being taken away to work short lives as field labor or indentured indefinitely to anyone interested in buying that debt. Everyone makes some money by being sponsored by various companies to advertise for them. (Rich and/or pretty people get better sponsors.)

Our main character Speth Jime (her first name is a discount name that doesn’t cost too much to say, her last name was probably originally Jimenez except it was too expensive and shortened generations back) turns 15 at the beginning of the book, the last day on which she can speak freely. After that, when a friend commits suicide, she can’t even afford to scream. Rather than make her first speech as an adult (full of product advertisements) she goes completely silent.

The narration shows Speth’s thoughts, but she has no way to communicate with those around her, even as they talk to and at her.

Plot-wise, it feels a bit like The Hunger Games, really, as people try to either ally with her or take her down and giver her suggestions that she has to figure out whether or not to follow. There’s a happy ending (with more than enough loose ends to warrant a sequel), but it’s a nerve-wracking and heart-breaking trip. The cast of characters are interesting and well-developed and diverse in a variety of ways, and Speth is amazingly relatable in the way she’s just become this icon of rebellion that she never intended as anything other than a reaction to personal trauma. The book wouldn’t have held together without the characters being so relatable, but where the book truly shines is the world building. The dystopian world is terrifying as it shows how difficult systematic oppression is to fight, and how easily rights can be worn away and the lack of those rights then normalized.

So very good, and packs a serious punch.

It will definitely make you think the next time you mindlessly click “agree” on a terms of service contract.

Humans Wanted, ed. by Vivian Caethe

by Rebecca

humanswantedHumans Wanted
edited by Vivian Caethe
authors: Jody Lynn Nye, A. Merc Rustard, Alex Acks, Marie DesJardin, Eneasz Brodski, J.A. Campbell, Sydney Seay, Richard A. Becker, Gwendolynn Thomas, Mariah Southworth, Alex Pearl, & Amelia Kibbie
2017

I was very excited to discover this book existed and bought it for my kindle as soon as I realized it was a thing. Sadly, I think I went in to it with my expectations a bit too high. It’s not that they’re bad, it’s just that these stories read like classic silver age scifi stories. I can certainly enjoy classic science fiction, but the premise of the book is that it was inspired by a tumblr post that I’d actually run across before this book was ever published.

And that tumblr post is hilarious. It’s also just one part of a whole tumblr conversation / meme that is also hilarious and joyful, asking the questions: what if humans are the weird ones? Like just not the galactic norm at all in really weird ways? what if we’re space orcs? What if we’re the hold-my-beer species? What if our weirdness is that we form bonds with everything (family, friends, aliens, space ships, weapons, etc.)?

There’s just a spirit of joyful insanity in the online discussion that didn’t come through in the stories in this book which tend more towards the nostalgic melancholy. These stories are definitely doing interesting things and well-worth the read, but are missing a lot of the millennial-era absurdist humor that I’d expected given the premise.

So instead of the professionally written, edited, and formatted stories in this book, I recommend reading some of the amateur-written, spontaneously collaborative, mini stories that you can find posted online, of which I have included a handful of links below:

Unnamed ficlet(s) about the human desire to bond

The Gentlemen of Fortune club stories 

Story 215: Cultural Exchange

Unnamed ficlet(s) about terraforming (but keeping the fun bits of the location)

Thee absurd scenarios

The Story of Drake McDougal

Altruism Defines Us

Penric & Desdemona by Bujold (more stories!)

by Rebecca

I wrote a review of the first three stories in Bujold’s Penric & Desdemona series back in November 2016 and then Anna wrote a review of the fourth one in July 2017, but I am here to tell you that the fifth and sixth ones have both come out and they are both awesome!

PenricFoxPenric’s Fox (story #5) is essentially a sequel to Penric and the Shaman (story #3). Although it’s set some years later, it’s the same cast of characters and is set decidedly before the events of story #4. One of the things I really enjoy about Bujold is that she plays around with her genres even in the same series and thus this is a detective story, with a discovered corpse and police investigation and all. It was also kind of heart-wrenching and made me tear up a bit but just so very good.

 

prisonerlimnosPrisoner of Limnos (story #6) is a direct sequel to Mira’s Last Dance (story #4) with barely a few weeks having passed for the characters between the two books and dealing directly with some of the uncertainty left at the end of #4. I was also all geared up for some raciness to it, too, but Anna can be reassured that events stay relatively chaste (even as my mind is in the gutter giving me occasional wink-wink nudge-nudges.) This is something of a heist storyline and also introduces a whole swathe of new secondary characters that seem very interesting and open up all sorts of possibilities for future story lines. While this one doesn’t end in quite the almost-cliff-hanger (emotionally at least) of #4, it does leave me just craving more. I just really need to know more about those new characters and their stories and what they do next. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Bujold continues to write these stories at the amazing pace she’s had so far.

 

This Book is Overdue by Marilyn Johnson

by Rebecca

thisbookisoverdueThis Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All
by Marilyn Johnson
2010

I enjoyed this book but it also left me feeling kind of weird and antsy in a way that took a while for me to figure out. It’s made up of twelve chapters that are essentially stand alone non-fiction stories about some pretty amazing things that different librarians and groups of librarians are doing in the world right now. This is a direct counter to all those (generally upper/upper-middle class) people who write articles about how no one uses the library anymore. People are absolutely still using libraries, both in traditional ways and in new and innovative ways.

This book looks at twelve ways that librarians have done some pretty amazing things from innovations:

  • Having a real working library offering real world information and services staffed and resourced in an MMO RPG (massive multi-player online role playing game
  • Having mobile librarians working with mobile devices and hooked into real-time databases offering fact-checking and up-to-date information to protestors, counter-protestors and locals alike during massive protests.

to protecting traditional values:

  • Taking on the United States federal government in a massive silenced court case about reporting on the reading habits of their customers
  • Providing computer literacy training around the world to ensure people can access books in whatever form the library happens to have it in, physical or digital.

It’s fascinating and (as a library science grad) personally inspiring.

That said, it also made me feel just a bit antsy with the way the author put librarians on this pedestal of being amazingly altruistic in all ways. She is surprised by their human foibles and shocked when there’s a case of a librarian doing something wrong.

Like any career, librarians include some truly heroic people and some truly awful people, and a lot of people who are generally in-between. There is a strong culture of altruism in the career path, yes, but we’re not saints.

So definitely read this book and read about some extremely cool people who are doing or have done some amazing things. But also take a moment to read a more low-key blog post about your every day librarians as well.

 

The Hanover Square Affair

by Anna

By Ashley Gardner

Hanover_Square_AffaireAnother good British mystery for free on Kindle (courtesy of BookBub, of course), though not set in Brighton this time. Captain Gabriel Lacey has returned to London from fighting in the Napoleonic wars, with military honors but very little else. At loose ends, he runs across a tragedy and alleged murder, and through a strong sense of honor and nothing much else to do, he throws himself into investigating and trying to right wrongs. (As a quick aside, I often don’t even see the covers on my kindle, so I saw it for the first time when pulling the photo for this review, and I don’t recognize a connection to any of the characters, plot, or mood, so truly do not base this book on the cover.)

The mystery is very well plotted, with complex twists and turns, and the mood is nice and noire, with a cynical protagonist battling against an uncaring world. It is that protagonist that really makes the book, though. Captain Lacey is a complex character; from a poor but genteel family, he found patronage in the army that allowed him to rise in ranks. At the time of this first novel, though, he has been injured and discharged, severed from his patron, and has no money and no real way of making it.

The mixture of circumstances has given him access to a wide cross-section of society. He rents a room in a dilapidated boarding house surrounded by prostitutes and thieves, but receives invites to society events feting any returning war heroes of note that the hostesses can get their hands on.

Additionally, he describes himself as suffering from ‘melancholia,’ and it is fascinating, though somewhat agonizing, seeing the Victorian perspective on depression. Lacey is generally thoughtful and considerate of others, until he suddenly isn’t, and is either washed away in mindless rage, or completely debilitated, pushing all friends away from him.

The thing is, I tend to avoid books that give any more than a cursory description of depression. As someone with mild depression myself, reading about other people’s struggles can bring my own to the forefront. To some degree, it sucks because I miss out on finding familiarity and understanding, but it just isn’t worth it to me.*

All of this to say I probably won’t continue with this series, though I do still highly recommend it.

*As a solid GenX-er, I’m not always as open to the new concepts coming from the millennial generation as I’d like to be. It’s also clear that I’m not alone in struggling with the concept of “triggering.” Conservative pundits love to drag out being triggered as synonymous with being offended or insulted. I myself had thought of it in terms of veterans with PTSD panicking at fireworks, and that using the term in lesser circumstances was a bit overblown. However, the truth is that I don’t like to read about depression because of the likelihood that it will trigger my depression. It isn’t catastrophic if it does happen, but it makes my life a little harder, so I avoid it, and I have greater understanding now of others trying to do the same.

The Undertaking

by Anna

By Thomas Lynch

UndertakingThomas Lynch describes himself as an internationally unknown poet, though my impression is that is fake modestly for the sake of the mild joke, since from his own accounts he seems relatively well-regarded in poetry circles. More importantly to this memoir-of-sorts, he is a third-generation undertaker in a small Michigan town. I was looking for some insight into how undertakers view death when they deal with it daily and in such a practical way. Lynch kicks the book off with a treatise on funerals that can be summed up with his repeated phrase, “the dead do not care.” It is occasional humorous, but more often, uh, bracing, like cold water or a slap in the face. It isn’t really a pleasant read, but it is an interesting one.

That is, until he goes off on tangents on wider subjects, and his old-white-maleness starts showing. Sympathizing with a friend’s divorce, he bemoans how the ex-wife seemed to just callously stop appreciating poetry idolizing her body. I started side-eyeing the author a bit there, but he really gets going at the end of the book. A lengthy screed against assisted suicide, stemming from a more interesting description of his brother’s post-mortem cleanup service, veers way off course into anti-abortion territory with a wide variety of willfully ignorant arguments that made me dislike the author quite heartily. The glib snarkiness that had seemed darkly funny at the beginning became pretty nasty towards the end.

The Zig Zag Girl

by Anna

By Elly Griffiths

Zig_Zag_GirlAnother mystery series set in Brighton! I don’t know English geography nearly well enough to know why Brighton would be a popular setting for murder mysteries, but the Magic Men series has quite a different tone than Brighton’s #1 Private Detective.

For one, it is set in the early 1950s, during the recovery from World World II. Our main protagonist, Edgar Stephens was part of an undercover unit called The Magic Men during the war, where a group of stage performers create illusions to trick the Germans. (As crazy as this sounds, it is actually historically accurate, and the author gives some good background into it in the afterward.) It is a fascinating subject, and I wish the book had given a little bit more focus to it.

However, at the time of the novel, Stephens has become a detective in the Brighton Police Force. When the body of a showgirl is discovered, cut up and stored in three trunks, it brings to his mind the magic trick called the titular zig zag girl. He calls up his old friends from the Magic Men to consult, and the storyline becomes a confluence of the current mystery and their experiences during the war, which led up to this point.

While the mystery is engaging, the real strength lies in the characters and the period setting, which almost seems like its own character. It is a time of transition, and everyone is trying to make sense of the past and face the future in their own way. It’s not comedic, though it has funny scenes, and it is not grim, though the murder(s) are pretty brutal – The Zig Zag Girl just has a very thoughtful tone that really pulled me in as a reader.

I immediately picked up the sequel, Smoke and Mirrors, and it is even better – the characters have continued to grow from their experiences in the previous book, and face new challenges based on that growth. Also, for what it’s worth, the first book sets up a romance for Stephens that I don’t altogether approve of, and the second book introduces a competing romantic interest that I much prefer.

As I Descended

by Kinsey

517Jbn75RULThis isn’t a full review, but I wanted to pop in and say that readers who enjoyed Anna’s post in the spring about seeing Sleep No More, the immersive theater take on Macbeth, might like As I Descended by Robin Talley. It’s a YA version of the story, set in a Virginia boarding school, with two teenage girls positioned as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. I really enjoyed seeing how the grand story of kings and battles scaled down to the stakes of high school–theoretically smaller, but still life and death to the characters. And if every version of this story has to decide which of the more fantastical elements are happening in the characters’ heads versus which are real, this one leans heavily towards the spirits and ghosts side of things. Which makes it a great, creepy read for this time of year, as we edge into the dark of fall and winter.

Strange Practice

by Kinsey
61KZB80mVgLAnyone who spends ten minutes reading this blog would be able to tell pretty quickly that Strange Practice was going to be right up my alley. This initial entry in a series of magical mystery stories by Vivian Shaw follows Greta Helsing (yes, yes, her family dropped the van some time ago), a London physician dedicated to treating the city’s magical inhabitants. Mummies with feet problems? Vampire anemia? Ghouls who need psychiatric assistance? She herself may be human, but she has a calling to provide health care for mystical creatures likely to have issues accessing the NHS. There is an actual mystery here (crazy monks are murdering people, there’s a sort of nameless power from the dawn of time, etc.) but the real draw of this book is the assortment of characters that end up surrounding Greta. Some of the magical creatures she knows fit better into the modern world than others, but they all have to work together to save London and protect the secrets of its less-well known inhabitants.

This is Shaw’s first novel and the writing isn’t always effortless–there were definitely times when it felt like she was trying too hard to be clever and was getting in her own way. And I found that the point of view switched around too much for me to ever really feel settled into the story. Greta is nominally the main character and she is definitely the reader’s entry point into this world, but other characters (vampires, humans, demons, the villains of the story) also get so many chapters told from their perspectives that the ratio felt off to me. I’m hopeful that Shaw was trying to cram as many cool ideas and cool characters as she could into this first book, but that as she goes along she’ll start letting things breathe a little more.

But despite those quibbles about some elements of execution, I really enjoyed the book. The overall world created here was fascinating and very specific. I was left with the impression that this version of London has many more creatures with complex lives ad backstories that need Greta’s help, and that the group of vampires, demons, and humans that circles around her is well on the way to be becoming an odd little family. My Kindle version of this book included a teaser for the next one in the series, so it looks like I’ll have the chance to see what Greta and her team are up to next.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Entertaining urban fantasy

You might also like: Anything by Patricia Briggs or Ilona Andrews–I think the official Biblio-therapy position is that we are strongly in favor of those series. But Ben Aaronovitch’s supernatural mysteries, also set in London, would be good companions to this.