Tootfinder

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...
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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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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 "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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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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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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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 "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 "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 "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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