Tootfinder

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 "The Songbird and the Rambutan Tree" by Lucille Abendanon. It's a pretty good and engaging work of historical fiction set in Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies) during World War II, with a 12-year-old Dutch girl who grew up locally as the protagonist.
It's written to be accessible to a pre-teen audience, despite the fairly grim backdrop. I think it does an okay if not stellar job dealing with the complicated colonial situation for a young audience. Overall, I like it.
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It's not complicated or difficult, either. #amreading

Shout out to all my fellow #academic hedge witches!
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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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Need to add this book to my TBR list. #amreading #amwriting

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 "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 "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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Finished "Blankets" by Craig Thompson, yet another riveting graphic memoir dealing with child abuse and Christianity (mostly separately). It's got pain but also beauty, and (somewhat obviously for a memoir) a non-tragic ending.
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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 "Hungry Ghost" by Victoria Ying. A beautiful graphic novel dealing with disordered eating via an unintentionally abusive parent, plus loss of a parent. It's #OwnVoices and has a gentle ending. I enjoyed the body- and food-positive takeaways.
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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 "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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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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Everything is better at the #library. #amreading #books

Just finished "Check Please" book 1 by Ngozi Ukazu. I had some complaints about "Barda" by Ukazu, but this was great! It's a graphic novel about a college hockey team (and some other thing I won't spoil). I loved the character design, pacing, and overall comfy vibes with a dose of heartwarming threaded through and bits of drama that are clearly going to come into play in further books which I'll be grabbing on my next trip to the library.
The one thing I wish had been present was a more honest struggle with rape culture in college sports & frats / frat-adjacent spaces. I'm not saying every book about such spaces has to have these things happen, but I think there's a thin line between writing a more perfect present as a good example and papering over serious problems for the sake of reader/author comfort in a way that ends up helping diminish and this perpetuate the issue. With all of the social media stuff in the book, it could easily (in terms of space, not writing difficulty) have had a subplot about events at another college or in an adjacent social group to show the teammates' reactions and perhaps even let some of them work through some patriarchal attitudes about things. We'll see it it comes up in later books.
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Just finished "Concrete Rose" by Angie Thomas (I haven't yet read "The Hate U Give" but that's now high on my list of things to find). It's excellent, and in particular, an excellent treatise on positive masculinity in fiction form. It's not a super easy book to read emotionally, but is excellently written and deeply immersive. I don't have the perspective to know how it might land among teens like those it portrays, but I have a feeling it's true enough to life, and it held a lot of great wisdom for me.
CW for the book include murder, hard drugs, and parental abandonment.
I caught myself in a racist/classist habit of thought while reading that others night appreciate hearing about: early on I was mentally comparing it to "All my Rage" by Sabaa Tahir and wondering if/when we'd see the human cost of the drug dealing to the junkies, thinking that it would weaken the book not to include that angle. Why is that racist/classist? Because I'm always expecting books with hard drug dealers in them to show the ugly side of their business since it's been drilled into me that they're evil for the harm they cause, yet I never expect the same of characters who are bankers, financial analysts, health insurance claims adjudicators, police officers, etc. (Okay, maybe I do now look for that in police narratives). The point is, our society includes many people who as part of their jobs directly immiserate others, so why and I only concerned about that misery being brought up when it's drug dealers?
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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 finished reading "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. It's a departure from a lot of the other stuff I've read lately (mostly unchallenging fiction), but it's really great, and hits hard in this specific political moment. It's an Indigenous anarchist theory book, published this year, and unsurprisingly holds a lot of truths I found valuable to hear. Highly recommend it if you're feeling nihilistic.
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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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Indirect CW: religious abuse, divorce
Just finished "Visitations" by Corey Egbert, a really powerful fictionalized graphic autobiography about a kid growing up in a cult-adjacent situation. It's more about his specific parent than the Mormon Church, but of course his mom's problems are symbiotic with and amplified through faith.
Spoilers:
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Has a positive ending, thank goodness.
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Just finished "Captivated, by You" by Yama Wayama. An excellent "funny off-beat highschool vignettes" manga with a focus on social interactions between weird boys. Thought I'd be getting a romance from the cover, but couldn't be more satisfied with the unexpected actuality. Great examples of non-toxic masculinity.
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Just finished "Barda" by Ngozu Ukadi. I don't normally grab classic comics or their modern successors from the library, and this exception to that rule has reminded me why I prefer to stick with other stuff, especially indie graphic novels: the stories are just so blocky & uninspired. I don't say "childish" since there are plenty of great books in the kids graphic novel section that I've enjoyed. It's also true that *some* of the classic stuff is deeper than the rest. But the average "comic" is not going to be very high on my list of stuff I enjoy, and this, while passable, was no exception to that generalization.
Still might look for other stuff by this author, since I'm pretty sure a lot of the issues with mainline comics can be publisher-dictated.
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Just finished "The Courageous Princess" by Rod Espinosa. It's... bad. I was really looking forward to it because I recently read "Castle Waiting" by Linda Medley, and it seemed from the cover like it might be from a similar epoch in comics and/or have similar vibes, but it's both a very bland story, and extremely into royalty apologetics, which is the opposite of Castle Waiting and which galls me immensely. It breaks exactly one genre convention (the princess gets fed up with waiting for a prince and rescues herself) but doesn't systematize that into even an ounce of feminism.
"Dealing With Dragon"s by Patricia Wrede is the actually amazing version of this story, although it's not a graphic novel.
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Just finished "Get a Life, Chloe Brown" by Talia Hibbert. It's... much less chaste than most of the other romances I've been reading, but also incredibly sweet and positive, so I enjoyed it a lot.
My one reservation is that it does the thing a lot of romance novels do where they equate physical desire with romantic desire, and physical flirtations/advances with actual communication, and yes people equate those things in the real world all the time, by it's often really harmful when they do that.
This novel does better with consent than 99% of the field probably, and legitimately deserves props for that, so this isn't the harsh criticism I'd level if it seriously broke the "would this be okay if we didn't have access to interior monologues" test, but it skirts the edges of that a bit.
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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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Just finished "Go With the Flow" by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann. It's a great graphic novel about period equity and teen activism, with a lot of depth through a variety of intertwined sub-plots.
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Just finished "The Melancholy of Summer" by Louisa Onomé. It's an excellent book about parental abandonment, rejecting and accepting help, and friendship, set in Toronto. There were a few threads that didn't quite get wrapped up by the end, but the ending wasn't dissatisfying, and the writing is excellent, particularly TV gee dialogue and the narration of Summer's thoughts. I felt like the strategic use of stutters both gave the main character extra vulnerability, but also helped subtly clue the reader into moments where Summer's perception of her interlocutors doesn't match their real feelings. Between this and "Like Home", I feel like Onomé's novels are a bit rough around the edges, yet they're still some of the most enjoyable books I've been reading, probably because she's pours so much humanity into her characters and lets their honest desire for something better rub off on the audience.
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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 "Once For Yes" by Allie Millington. A phenomenal book dealing with tragedy, gentrification, grief, and community, it's preposterously poetic, but unfortunately has a twisted neoliberal politics lurking behind the scenes that makes me hesitate to recommend it. I enjoyed it greatly, especially the tightly choreographed prose, and the plot was both very well-paced and touching. It's fun for adults but also written for kids, which makes it all the more frustrating that despite touching on gentrification, it valorizes someone who is objectively a pretty scummy landlord, and fails to interrogate land ownership or rent in the slightest. It wouldn't be nearly the same story without the way things wrap up, but that doesn't make me comfortable with the larger messages it's sending, even if I think its messaging about grief is good, including for children.
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Just finished "Forest Hills Bootleg Society" by Dave Baker and Nicole Goux. It's a very interesting queer teen graphic novel that's got a complicated plot. It also does some excellent things with the comic medium that I haven't seen elsewhere, letting us get glimpses of the inner lives of dozens of background characters.
I'm definitely interested in reading more from these authors.
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Just finished "Donuts and Doom" by Balazs Lorinczi. A lovely queer romance graphic novel featuring a witch and a rock star.
I like the way the book builds their romance through different stages, even if the plot is fairly basic. The world building is also fun.
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Indirect content warning for parental abuse, conversion "therapy," and homelessness.
Just finished "A World Worth Saving" by Kyle Lukoff. It's a gripping teen contemporary fantasy that has a Jewish trans protagonist, deals firmly with some dark stuff, and does an excellent job not only avoiding but confronting the problems with heroism as a literary theme. A truly excellent book, even if it doesn't transcend its YA genre as completely as something like Le Guin's Earthsea series IMO.
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Just finished "Freshman Year" by Sarah Mai. It's a pretty good autobiographical fiction graphic novel about the first year of college, and instead of trying to make things fit into a plot, it lets them float apart and remain unresolved, which is nice. Not so much explicit wisdom, but in offering a realistic picture of the personal struggles & emotional moments of the college transition, I feel like it's pretty valuable.
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Just finished "Be That Way" by Hope Larson. An excellent semi-graphic-novel about highschool friendships & romances, written as a diary including many illustrations but also a lot of prose. Has a pretty open ending just like "Freshman Year" did, and it's interesting how they both hit a lot of the same themes, despite their differences. Despite being from a slightly younger age group, and having had a totally different highschool experience, a lot of the '90s elements resonated with me.
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Just finished "Decelerate Blue" written by Adam Rapp and illustrated by Mike Cavallaro. It's a dystopian graphic novel that I found... not that great. Maybe the best thing about it was the world-building around the propaganda language everyone is forced to speak, but overall I found the plot construction and characters to be underwhelming.
Despite being a book about resistance to fascist oppression, it doesn't meaningfully engage with any major axes of oppression like patriarchy, racism, capitalism, or colonialism, and it doesn't offer an interesting lessons on how to conduct resistance or what long-term outcomes one might hope for.
First graphic novel I've checked out in a while that I didn't really like that much.
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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 finished "Punk Rock Karaoke" by Bianca Xunise. It's a really cool graphic novel about a high school punk band's journey as they graduate and try to juggle shifting responsibilities. It's #OwnVoices with a Black queer protagonist and has a relentless optimism and no-nonsense vibe, plus great facts about racism in music history, and probably if you are into punk music, a cool discography woven throughout (I hasn't rally heard of any of the songs mentioned to set the mood, but then again I'm not exactly a punk aficionado).
#AmReading #Punk

Just finished "Lulu and Milagro's Search for Clarity" by Angela Velez. It's an excellent #OwnVoices Latinx teen drama about big questions like dating and college, and it's very well plotted, with lots of balls in the air that get caught and thrown again beautifully and which all come down nicely at the end. Reminded me of "Far From the Tree" by Robin Benway, which also had three siblings and which also juggled dramatic irony beautifully across multiple perspectives. A less skilled author could have told a similar story with more straightforward perspective trading, but Velez manages to create a lovely relay race of tensions that pass their batons to each other so neatly you're always eagerly awaiting the next development.
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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.
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