Tootfinder

Just finished "Kirby's Lessons for Falling (In Love)" by Laura Gao. I'd previously read her autobiographical graphic novel "Messy Roots" which was excellent, and this book continues that trend. Yet another complicated look at a Chinese-American immigrant experience, wrapped into a queer romance with a dose of spirituality in there as well. I think the background metaphor of falling is really strong, and gets used in so many senses it's beautiful.
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Indirect CW for teen pregnancy, rape, death.
Just finished "Girls Like Us" by Randi Pink. Pink has a knack for telling stories that capture the grim but also vibrant nuances of African-American history. I previously read "Under the Heron's Light" which has more elements of magical realism and connects more directly to the history of enslavement; "Girls Like Us" is more historical fiction, with a bridge at the end to contemporary times (circa 2019, when the book was published). It tells the story of a disparate group of mostly-Black teens who are pregnant in 1972, and shows a range of different outcomes as varied as the backstories of the different girls. Rather than just separate vignettes, the girls' stories are women together into a single plot, and Pink is a expert at pulling us in to deeply contemplate all the complexities of these girls' lives, showing rather than telling us truths about the politics of teen pregnancy and abortion, and how even though the choices involved don't have simple answers, taking those choices out of the hands of the people they most intimately affect is cruel and deadly.
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That's a good question. #amreading #WritingCommunity
https://comicskingdom.com/macanudo/202

Macanudo Comic Strip 2025-11-15 | Comics Kingdom
Read the Macanudo comic strip from November 15, 2025, and check out other Macanudo comics by Liniers.

Just finished "Class Act" by Jerry Craft. An excellent follow-up to "New Kid", and it deepens the exploration of racism in "New Kid" in a lot of different directions. I think the aspect I liked most was the handling of class/race dynamics but also the different explorations of fitting back into neighborhood communities.
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Just finished "I'm Awful, Thanks" by Lara Pickle. A good story that serves as a guide to managing emotions, although it's actually a cute story too, not just framing for the mental health discussion.
That said, I feel like it doesn't get far enough into the details of accepting self-control as our only form of real control vs. understanding that some events outside our control aren't fair or are others' attacks, and trying to manage our own emotions as our only response is a disservice to ourselves and others. Even further, I suspect that the HR resolution depicted here, while not impossible, is less frequent than much worse outcomes, which is part of a larger pattern of systemic assaults on our mental health that aren't totally solvable with individual emotional regulation.
Sure, leveling up one's control of ones own emotions and learning to accept and manage a range of emotions is super useful and it's a good thing overall, but the systemic problems of late stage capitalism are real, and making it seem like everyone is responsible for managing their own mental health in the face of these problems helps avoid confronting them.
Still, it's a good book overall, with vibrant art and a well-structured plot.
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Great idea. #amreading

Shout out to all my fellow #academic hedge witches!
#amreading

Just finished "New Kid" by Jerry Craft. An excellent graphic novel about navigating middle school as one of only a few Black kids at a rich private school. I love how clear Jordan (the main character) is about the racism he encounters and how it affects him and his friends. Even though his parents have done a good job of preparing him for the realities he'll face, getting through them isn't easy. Still, rather than a book about "learning how racist the world is" this is a book about "navigating the expected racism" and it's a refreshing difference.
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Just finished "On Starlit Shores" by Bex Glendining. It's a really excellent graphic novel about grief, memory, and a bit of magic. I love the way that it isn't an adventure, and how completely usual the queer relationships in it are. The art is stunning, and the palette is especially excellent and truly harmonizes with the narrative.
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Just finished "Endgames" by Ru Xu, sequel to "Newsprints." I was happy to see the characters from the first book get their endings, but Xu feels incredibly out of her depth writing about the politics of empire and the power/complicity of the press, which completely dampened my enjoyment.
As just one example, there's a ton of interesting nuance to explore behind the idea of a disabled imperial ruler and how disadvantage/persecution (from which you have been effectively shielded) does not justify harming others. This book explores none of that.
I think it does serve as a great example of how severely one limits one's own imagination when one buys into the myth of nationhood as natural/inevitable/good. It's not that Xu's politics are especially authoritarian, I think, but that she's just (been kept?) resoundingly naïve, and so her plot resolution feels childish (or perhaps that's an insult to children).
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Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
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I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
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Just read "Little Witch Hazel: A Year in the Forest" by Phoebe Wahl (to my kids but also for myself). It's a delightfully cozy and whimsical book, full of magical forest creatures and gentle community. What an excellent book.
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Just finished "The Raven Boys," a graphic novel adaptation of a novel by Maggie Stiefvater (adaptation written by Stephanie Williams and illustrated by Sas Milledge).
I haven't read the original novel, and because of that, this version felt way too dense, having to fit huge amounts of important details into not enough pages. The illustrations are gorgeous and the writing is fine; the setting and plot have some pretty interesting aspects... It's just too hard to follow a lot of the threads, or things we're supposed to care about aren't given the time/space to feel important.
The other thing that I didn't like: one of the central characters is rich, and we see this reflected in several ways, but we're clearly expected to ignore/excuse the class differences within the cast because he's a good guy. At this point in my life, I'm simply no longer interested in stories about good rich guys very much. It's become clear to me how in real life, we constantly get the perspectives of the rich, and rarely if ever hear the perspectives of the poor (same applies across racial and gender gradients, among others). Why then in fiction should I get more of the same, spending my mental bandwidth building empathy for yet another dilettante who somehow has a heart of gold? I'm tired of that.
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Just finished "The Deep Dark" by Molly Knox Ostertag. An absolutely excellent graphic novel about monsters, childhood secrets, and how self-love refracts through romance.
I've liked other stuff by Ostertag, but this is definitely my favorite of hers so far.
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Never good for a bookstore to close. #Oklahoma #bookstore #amreading

Losing a place for community: Fulton Street Books & Coffee announces closure
Tulsa’s only Black-owned bookstore opened in 2020 amid protests against police brutality. Now, Oklahoma politics are causing it to close.

Finished "Lobizona" by Romina Garber. I have extremely mixed feelings about this book. It's a powerful depiction of the fear of living as an undocumented child/teen and it has interesting things to say about rejection, belonging, and the choice between seeking to be recognized for who you are and wanting you blend in enough to be accepted as normal. However, it's also an explicit homage to Harry Potter, and while it doesn't include antisemitic tropes or glorify slavery or even have any anti-trans sentiments I can detect, to me the magical school setup felt forced and I thought it would have been a better book had it not tried to fit that mould. Also, it would have been a super interesting situation to explore trans issues, and while it's definitely fine for it not to do that, the author's praise of Rowling's work has me wondering...
There's a sequel that I think could in theory be amazing, but given the execution of the first book, I think I'll wait a bit before checking it out. By putting her main character in opposition to both ICE in the human world and the magical authorities in the other world, Garber explicitly sets the stage for a revolution standing between her protagonist and any kind of lasting peace. But I'm not confident she's capable of writing that story without relying on some kind of supernatural deus ex machina, which would be disappointing to me, since "a better world if only possible through divine intervention" is an inherently regressive message.
Overall, #OwnVoices fantasy centering an undocumented immigrant is an excellent thing, and I've certainly got a lot of privilege that surely influences my criticism. However, #OwnVoices stuff has a range of levels of craft and political stances, and it can be excellent for some reasons and mediocre for others.
On that point, if anyone reading this has suggestions for fiction books grappling with borders and the carceral state, Is be happy to hear them.
#AmReading

Just finished "Roller Girl" by Victoria Jamieson, a graphic novel about navigating preteen social changes, dyeing your hair, and of course, roller derby! It's got a great subplot about dealing with complicated feelings, and I like that it doesn't tie things up neatly with a bow at the end.
I actually know the rules of roller derby now.
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Just finished "Maybe an Artist" by Liz Montague. A really nice graphic memoir that centers in identity and the choices we make growing up about careers faced with so much pressure about "succeess" in society.
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Just finished "Age 16" by Rosena Fung. It's an excellent semi-autobiographical graphic novel about beauty standards, being fat, and how these things echo down generations, connecting 1954 Guangdong, 1972 Hong Kong, and 2000 Toronto.
The art is lovely, as is the message of accepting your body and standing up to your family when necessary.
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Just finished "Check, Please" volume 2 by Ngozi Ukazu. I had read volume 1 earlier and enjoyed it; as I said at the time I'm a bit uncomfortable with such an uncomplicated portrayal of a subculture that's usually quite toxic, and even though it gets addressed a little bit in volume 2, it's not really unpacked very much. I do see the value in aspirational contemporary fiction here though, so I'm definitely happier about this angle than I was after volume 1. In any case, hockey, baking, and gay romance continues to be a very entertaining combination from Ukazu's pen, and overall I enjoyed the series quite a lot!
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Just finished "Fitting Indian" by Jyoti Chand and Tara Anand.
Indirect CW: alcohol, self-harm, and suicide.
A graphic novel about mental health issues, being a second-generation Indian immigrant in America, international trauma, and both peer and family bullying. Beautifully illustrated and of course gripping given the subjects.
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Just finished "Hunger's Bite" by Taylor Robin. A pretty great graphic novel bringing paranormal horror elements to a Titanic-era transatlantic voyage. I loved the characters and I had quite good plotting, which is not always a strength of graphic novels...
I think one of my favorite threads was how the villain's heteronormative assumptions became a small part of their downfall.
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I'm reading "Lab Girl" by Hope Jahren and it's both fascinating and beautifully written. Usually I wait until I'm done to post a review, but I wanted to share this excellent excerpt as a teaser:
"So how to combine a liter of fluid with active agents, customized according to the patient's weight and status, while keeping everything sterile? If this is for the ER or the ICU, we have about ten minutes to make it happen. Fortunately for the patient, there is a sleep-starved teenager apprenticed to a chain-smoking barmaid in the basement who is ready for action."
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Just finished "Look on the Bright Side" by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann. Sequel to "Go With the Flow" about a group of highschool friends who become activists to get their school to stock free mensuration products. I really enjoyed the first book, and this one was also great, with some discussion of LGBTQI issues and a but more focus on romance. As with the first book, there's a layer of explicit pedagogical material included that makes summer scenes a but less natural, but that's fine and useful. As with the first book, it models making & growing past mistakes, which is great.
I find myself drawing a comparison to "Does my Body Offend You?" by Mayra Cuevas. Both deal with highschool friends doing feminist activism to change their schools, by where Cuevas deals more directly with topics like sex, sexual assault, and racism, Williams & Schneemann avoid those topics while still including a lot of the same friendship struggles.
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Just finished "Tall Water" written by SJ Sindu and illustrated by Dion MBD. An excellent semi-autobiographical graphic novel about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the Sri Lankan civil war, and parental estrangement.
Absolutely beautiful illustrations and a gripping plot had me tear through it in just an hour or so, though it's by no means short for a graphic novel. If my list of authors I deeply respect grows too fast, I'll just have to keep posting in my other thread indefinitely.
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Just finished "Valor", edited by Isabelle Melançon and Megan Lavey-Heaton. It's a collection of re-told fairy tales with female protagonists and includes a mix of comics and written stories. Lots of great stuff, even if my distaste for monarchy soured it a bit for me (not all of the heroines are princesses, at least). Has a lot of cool queer romance in it.
I think I liked "The Steadfast Tin Automation", "Black Bull", and "Eggchild" best overall.
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Just finished "Thief of the Heights" written by Son M. and illustrated by Robin Yao. It's a very cool graphic novel about the illusions of meritocracy and loyalty to one's roots, with an interesting setting and better politics than most stuff out there, even if the plotting is a little rough and perhaps a bit too straightforward. The neat ending and reliance on heroism are themes I don't love in these kinds of tales, but I'm grateful for more stories in this category to exist in the first place, so I can't complain too much.
It's got disability, queer, and POC representation and some of that is #OwnVoices, which is cool, although those dimensions of the work aren't its focus.
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Just finished "Juliet Takes a Breath" by Gabby Rivera. A truly amazing novel about queer Latina feminist self-discovery which shows off a vibrant range of feminisms and their contradictions. Reminded me of "Does my Body Offend You?" in terms of how it uses fictional but realistic situations to really grapple deeply with feminist and queer theory while making everything very accessible and direct.
The plotting, pacing, and characters are great, and Juliet serves as a vibrant and active main character rather than just a lens through which to explore theory.
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Just finished "Two Tribes" by Emily Bowen Cohen. It's a bit didactic and I didn't love the art, but if was interesting as a discussion of mixed heritage and out got into a lot of good details; I feel like it might be super interesting to a pre-teen audience. It reminded me a lot of "Twin Cities" by Jose Pimenta as well as some of Pimenta's other work, but IMO Pimenta is the superior artist and storyteller.
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Finished "Espada - The Will of the Blade" by Anabel Cozalo.
The art is lovely, but I found the plotting/story to be a bit weak. Perhaps more pointedly, I felt like the plot setup was great but the landing was a bit off, and the telling of the story didn't nicely convey all the nuances I expect the author had in mind. Felt like a lot was left in the gutters.
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So... My college has a zine section in the library, which is already amazing, but this week I decided to check some of them out, and there are a few in a section for fictional and/or true stories. The one I grabbed was "Funwater Awesome" by Zach Mandeville, which turned out to be, indeed, awesome. It contains both real and fictional accounts of small-town Washington state, with both the mysteries of death and the happiness of small absurdities being big themes. Seems like there's at least a #2 and a #3 that were published, so I'll think about trying to get my hands on them. Maybe as instructed I'll mail $3 to Zach's address and see if he's still got any copies kicking around (or if he even still lives there since #1 was published in 2006).
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I finished "Dear Wendy" by Ann Zhao a few days ago. It's a lovely platonic "romance" that deals explicitly with aro/ace identity, post-coming-out identity work as opposed to the initial realization journey, and Wellesley College student culture (although if unlike me that's not relevant to you, it's not like you need to be interested in this to enjoy the book).
It felt slightly weird to be reading a book by someone who I'm pretty sure could have been in one of my classes (but as far as I am remember wasn't). Probably would not have read it were it a normal romance, because that would have made character empathy super awkward. In any case, it feels useful to get an inside perspective on almost-contemporary student culture, especially the part that's a reminder of how many students love the liberal and progressive aspects of said culture, despite its flaws.
Super enjoyable and honestly pretty cozy book.
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Just finished "It's Lonely at the Center of the Earth" by Zoe Thorogood.
CW: Frank/graphic discussion of suicide and depression (not in this post but in the book).
It feels a bit wrong to simply give it my review here as I would another graphic memoir, because it's much more personal and less consensual than the usual. It feels less like Thorogood has invited us into her life than like she was forced to put her life on display in order to survive, and while I selfishly like to read into the book that she benefited in some way from the process, she's honest about how tenuous and sometimes false that claim can be. Knowing what I've learned from this book about Thorogood's life and demons, I don't want her to feel the mortification of being perceived by me, and so perhaps the best thing I could do is to simply unread the book and pull it back out of my memories.
I did not find Thorogood's life relatable, nor pitiable (although my instinct bends in that direction), but instead sacred and unknowable. I suspect that her writing and drawing has helped others in similar circumstances, but she leaves me with no illusion that this fact brings her any form of peace or joy. I wonder what she would feel reading "Lab Girl" or "The Deep Dark," but she has been honest enough to convey that such speculation on my part is a bit intrusive.
I guess the one other thing I have to say: Zoe Thorogood has through artistic perseverance developed an awe-inspiring mastery of the comic medium, from panel composition, through to page layout and writing. This book wields both Truth and Beauty.
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Just finished "Low Orbit" by Kazimir Lee.
It's an excellent graphic novel about a queer Malaysian immigrant kid in small-town Maine, the unexpected friends she makes, and the science fiction author who happens to be her landlord. It reminded me a bit of the also excellent "Navigating With You" because of its interwoven fictional sci-fi novel (with really good writing!). CW as predictable for queer family trauma, although it doesn't get too bad and has a happy ending.
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Just checked out some truly excellent books from the library to read to my 4-year-old:
Adèle & Simon by Barbara McClintock (things to find), The Marvelous Now by Angela DiTerlizzi and Lorena Alvarez Gómez (rhyming & positive encouragement about mood regulation), and Forts by Katie Venit & Kenard Pak (lovely ode to children's forts).
I had a wonderful reverse-Magritte moment reading Adèle & Simon where Simon loses his drawing of a cat and my kid pointed out one of the actual cats in the image. I said "No, that's a cat, we're looking for a drawing of a cat," before realizing that technically we were looking for a drawing of a drawing of a cat, and the thing my kid pointed to was indeed a drawing of a cat, just not in that category relative to Simon's frame of reference...
#AmReading #ReadingNow #ChildrensBooks

Book about eating insects
Just finished "Meal" by Blue Delliquanti and Soleil Ho. It's a graphic novel about insect cuisine, with a cute storyline and a nice reminder that these are traditional cuisines from around the world, not some exotic fad that's mainly about shock value.
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Just finished "Twice as Perfect" by Louise Onomé. This is now the third novel I've read by her about a teenage Nigerian-Canadian second-generation immigrant, two of whom deal with some form of family estrangement ("Like Home" and "The Melancholy of Summer" are the other two). I checked it out because I liked her other novels and was not disappointed; in fact I feel like this is her best novel of the three. Dealing with cultural appropriation, both implicitly and explicitly, along with deep family trauma and a bit of romance, "Twice as Perfect" is suspenseful, wise, and heartfelt. It's got a thread of Nigerian Pidgin in it, which I thoroughly enjoyed although I didn't 100% understand, similar in some ways to the sprinkling of Spanish in "Each of Us a Desert", but with even less of an attempt to subtly explain each instance in English, which I don't mind at all.
The 2nd generation immigrant authors writing YA ~romances I've read recently have all been great, including Adiba Jaigirdar, Samira Ahmed, Sabina Khan, and Randa Abdel-Fattah (a slightly different era), and to a lesser extent Romina Garber (I didn't like "Lobizona" quite as much as stuff by these others). It's been super interesting to contrast their stories with those of people like Mark Oshiro, Angie Thomas, Randi Pink, and Angela Velez who talk about American racism from a non-immigrant perspective (perhaps Ahmed is in between the two groups).
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Just finished "Dreams from Many Rivers" by Margarita Engle. It's a Latin-American history of the United States, written in poems that take on the points of view of a number of both fictional and actual people. It starts with the arrival of Spanish colonists in Puerto Rico, which was in fact the first part of the present-day States to experience European colonialism.
Its super informative and a great read to appreciate the complexities of history that ICE and the US white supremacist movement are trying to sweep under the rug. Like how the fuck do you deport a person whose indigenous and then Mexican ancestors lived in Arizona for centuries but now that it's claimed by the US since they speak Spanish they're "foreign."
It's a pretty quick read since it's a lot of short poems, and it's got lovely illustrations by Beatriz Gutierrez Hernandez.
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