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ladybusinessIT IS DONE, this is the last of my 2019 reading! Or at least, it's the stuff that's been hardest for me to review. Not because I didn't like it, but because it's hard to have feelings about things when *gestures at globals politics* But after this, it's all of the shiny new things that I've been reading in 2020, so that'll be fun!
This is also the post where I realised that my maths didn't add up with what I'd tracked with goodreads and had minor panics until I remembered that short fiction exists!
1. The Six Skills of Madame Lumiere by Marissa Lingen [Top]
Lucy Brown is Madame Lumiere's ruthless concierge, gatekeeper, and heavy, and ngl I kinda love her. She is incredibly practical and competent, even when what starts off as a simple problem – helping a young woman stay out of sight for four days so she isn't kidnapped – escalates in ways that she couldn't have forseen. It talks about power – the skills Madame Lumiere has, the power that Josine has, the abilities that the fae have – and how even the most benign powers could have terrible consequences in the wrong hands, or be used for the wrong things. Yes, I was very invested in Lucy's constant reassessing of Josine, how did you guess? And the worldbuilding is really cool! I am very invested in the fae nonsense that is happening, and knowing more about Madame Lumiere's establishment and the doors from and to it.
I just really love the voice this story is told in. Lucy talks about things as though the reader knows exactly who these people are and what happens after the story, and it works. It might be the confidence – "Of course you know the rest," – and the way that it gives you just enough detail to fill in some of that space. I would gladly read more in this setting, if anyone knows if there is any!
2. Fireside Quarterly July 2018 edited by Julia Rios and Elsa Sjunneson-Henry [Top]
I subscribed to Fireside Quarterly a million years ago, and finally got around to reading their first issue! I'll be doing a more in-depth review in the future, but it was generally good; I loved all of the art, and the fact that it does clearly and explicitly put all of the caution warnings on the story. I think my favourite one was "To This You Cling, With Jagged Fingernails" by Beth Cato, about grieving and growing up, and choosing whether to keep hold of magic or whether to let it go. The most memorable was "CARBORUNDORUM > /DEV/NULL" by Annalee Flower Horne, which has female friendships in the face of controlling parents and abusive men, and a weird combo of a twenty-minutes into the future approach to the technology and a twenty-minutes into the past approach to the fandoms it references. It's a solid collection! I just need to get around to reading the others.
[Caution warnings: death, grieving, death of children, death of animals, rape and attempted rape]
3. Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku Volumes 2 and 3 by Fujita [Top]
I reviewed the first volume of Wotakoi here, and I’m pleased to report back that the second and third volumes are just as silly. The second volume is told non-linearly (one of my MANY weaknesses), bouncing between the protagonists on their first date and their everyday shenanigans as gamers and fans! I liked the story arc about how Kabakura and Koyanagi got together, and I quite enjoyed Ko and Naoya's friendship. The characters bounce off each other really well, and I'm very invested in their relationships. Narumi and Hirotaka on their first real date, trying to do "normal" couple things is really cute! But does lead to some oddly specific pop-culture memes that I would have loved to see proper translation notes on. (I appreciate that memes and references don’t translate well, but I DO want to know what the "keikakku means plan" joke was in Japanese.)
There were some things that left me squinting suspiciously at it though. If you are tired of the top/bottom pairing discourse (It’s like the 00s never ended, I swear we all did our time on this) then there are some jokes here that are gonna bug you. Ditto for discourse on whether BL manga fetishises gay men, because it turns out the female leads ship their partners. ... On the flip side of this, I do appreciate them representing the true fandom experience, which is that one person who likes all of the things you like, but in a way that is the COMPLETE OPPOSITE of how you like them. The author's note of "lol tricked you about this character's gender, bet you thought this was gonna be a BL!" felt quite mean-spirited. But on the whole, I'm enjoying these nerds and how they're somehow keeping a mutual pining storyline going despite the fact that everyone's been dating since the first chapter.
4. Flying Witch Volumes 4-6 by Chihiro Ishizuka, translated by Melissa Tanaka [Top]
Flying Witch continues to be cute in volumes 4-6! It's very domestic and full of the joy of discovery as everyone learns more magic! But volume 5 brings in Makoto investigating things as part of her witch duties, and I'm pretty sure I've mentioned how into magic-flavoured investigations I am, right?
I just love how domestic and small-scale the problems seem to be, and how sweet and joyful Flying Witch is. I continue to side-eye bits of it (... Maybe don't feed people magic sweets without telling them what they do. Y'know. Maybe.), but on the whole it's fun and it makes me happy, and that's good enough!
5. The Girl From The Other Side: Siúil, A Rún Volumes 1-7 by Nagabe, translated by Adrienne Beck [Top]
I've talked about The Girl From the Other Side before, but I binged it to get up-to-date and oh no. It's really good, I love it, but oh no.
The art continues to be excellent. The faces are sometimes weird – Shiva is sometimes a smudge, and it's hard to tell what's going on with Teacher's face at any point, but the body language is so good! There are transformations in The Girl From the Other Side and they're fascinating to see, especially for how different each one is. It's beautiful and graceful work, and the art and panel layout mean that small emotional moments get their full weight, and the big ones are dramatic.
As for the story, I'm still sceptical about everyone's motives, but watching Teacher slowly breaking as the series goes on and everything gets worse is heartrending. He's trying so hard to protect Shiva, even as he's losing everything else, and Shiva's reactions are so believable for a tiny child! Some of the story beats were inevitable (the fall!), but by the end of volume 7 I was reading it with my hands over my face going "Teacher no, stop, no one wants this!"
It's very good! It's just that everything is going incredibly wrong for the characters.
6. Módào Zǔshī by Mòxiāng Tóngxiù [Top]
So my corner of twitter slightly exploded about The Untamed, a cdrama adaptation of Módào Zǔshī, and when I settled in to join the screaming, I... Accidentally got distracted by reading the entire webnovel and forgot to watch the show? Which turns out to have been an excellent life decision, because Módào Zǔshī is exactly my kind of nonsense! It's 114 (long) chapters of slowburn! Wèi Wúxiàn, the protagonist, has been Literally Dead for over a decade! The love interest has been stoically pining and willing to turn against the world to protect Wèi Wúxiàn for literal decades. There are sibling antics and complicated family ties! The politics are convoluted and incisive about people in power being fickle and willing to turn on someone they deemed a hero only days before!
Oh yeah, speaking of, there's also teenagers taken as hostages, mutilation, betrayal, monster and undead attacks, and attempted genocide. Like, parts of the story are funny and parts of it are sweet, but there's so much where what's happening is genuinely horrific. Fair warning to anyone who's seen the fandom yelling about the pining and not known the context.
I'm not gonna lie: Módào Zǔshī is the sort of stuff I read and loved as a teenager, and it's the sort of thing that in my heart of hearts I want to be writing now. (... Probably with more lubrication and less taking advantage of drunks. Just saying.) It has all of the tropes that I love, and it has a great awareness of its tropes and how they're used. The levels of drama and reveals are great; every happy moment in a character's backstory had me whispering "Noooooooooooooo" at my phone, because I knew it wouldn't last. It's compelling, and it managed to keep me caught up through all of its loops between the present and Wèi Wúxiàn's past, and through all of its deviations into the lives of its antagonists. It's not perfect; I would have liked less drunken nonsense and more time on the female characters, I'm pretty sure all of our protagonists have committed at least one war crime apiece, and some things (like the stygian tiger seal) felt like they weren't introduced far enough in advance, but on the whole? I really enjoyed it and kinda want to read it again.
... I'm still not sure my heart is ready for the tv show though.
[Caution warning: abuse, torture, suicide, murder, mutilation, attempted genocide]
7. Artificial Condition and Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells [Top]
I, like most of the Lady Business editors, really love Murderbot, and I finally got around to reading the next two installments! In Artificial Condition, Murderbot makes a friend (thanks, it hates that) and goes looking for answers about its past; in Rogue Protocol, Murderbot gets a new job, and it goes about as well as any of its other jobs.
The different ways that AI interact with humans and Murderbot, and the different ways they are capable of interacting, are fascinating. Robots who hate humans, robots who love humans and are loved in return, robots who don't understand humans at all – I like the variety, and the distinct differences between how they react when there are humans around and where there aren't! And I like how incredibly uncomfortable Murderbot is with not just existing around humans, but being perceived as human. The explanation of what happened in Murderbot's backstory in Artificial Condition was really well done – the perfect mix of anticlimactic and horrifying. And Murderbot protecting people and going up against bigger, badder robots in Rogue Protocol was fantastically choreographed, although the ending left me rolling my eyes a bit for its predictability.
... I still love Murderbot is what I'm saying, and I'm looking forward to reading the next ones!
8. Fate/Strange Fake Volumes 1 and 2 by Ryogho Narita [Top]
I love the origin story of Fate/Strange Fake. Narita Ryohgo, creator of Baccano!, posted Fate fanfic on his site as an April fool's joke – and then Type-Moon, the company that produces all the Fate series, ask him if he wants his fanfic to be canon. Ta-da! One light novel series that is currently heading for twice the length anyone expected it to be!
I don't think Fate/Strange Fake is going to make sense if you're not familiar with the basic workings of the Fate franchise. (I described it torenay as "Imagine having a Pokémon battle for the holy grail, but you choose Gilgamesh instead of Pikachu," and that's still the best one sentence summary I've got.) But if you are familiar, it is wild. In this timeline, the method of starting a grail war has been "borrowed," modified, and taken to America, where a representative of the American government attempt to start a fake grail war and things immediately go sideways. Assassinations! Substitutions! ... Vampires?
Narita Ryohgo is one of the best writers of truly ensemble casts I've ever encountered, so this is exactly his skill set. He manages to take an enormous cast and give them all enough weight and life that most of them could be plausible protagonists, and they have arcs that weave together well even if nothing is linear or straight-forward.
So far, I'm not sure that I actually fully understand what's going on – I keep having to put the book down and go "WHAT IS THIS??????" at my spousal unit, but it's fast and dramatic, and I am invested in so many characters. Especially because a lot of this fits into the wider Fate multiverse! ... That said, there are some characters where I'm going "... I can't tell if you're being gross for effect, or if this is actually based on something, but ew."
It's very clever, is what I'm trying to say here, and it's bonkers. I love it, I love all of the dramatic twists. I love it even though we're two volumes in and still not out of the prologues.
[Caution warnings: references to child abuse and murder]
9. Widdershins by Jordan L. Hawk [Top]
My original review is here, but I've just accepted the fact that Widdershins is my go-to comfort read for when I feel like crap and need something that's full of pulp drama and mysteries. The thing I will say though is that I'm still not 100% sold on the audiobook, (some of the accents ping me weirdly), but it does do the job of smoothing out some of the clunky parts of the dialogue, which was a problem that I had reading it in prose.
10. Hex Vet Volume 1: Witches in Training and Volume 2: The Flying Surgery by Sam Davies [Top]
Hex Vet is an all-ages comic about Nan and Clarion, two trainee witches working in a magical vet's office. As an adult who has had a job, I'm low-key appalled by the management style of this vet's surgery ("Nan, you're terrible at people and everyone in town hates your family, you work the front desk!" and "Nurse Ariel, you're anxious and hate interacting with humans in general, you be in charge of dealing with all of our angry customers!" are both SURE DECISIONS THAT VET MADE), but as someone who likes comics with magic domesticity, I'm quite fond of it.
First off: I am confused by the proportions of the humans in this comic, because something about the ratio of limb to body strikes me as wrong. The art is expressive and I love the designs of the magical beasties, but the humans ping oddly.
Secondly: it's a comic about young women trying their best and working a mundane job in a magic setting! Yes, delicious, more of this please. The problems that they have and the solutions that they find to them are cool and fun, even if some of the misunderstandings get a bit close to my embarrassment squick. And the world building makes me happy, because it does have things like "Here is how we look after flying creatures!" and world-building that the art is allowed to carry on its own. It's a bit light on carrying plot, and everyone's backstory is still only expressed in hints, but I do enjoy it a lot, and if you're looking for mild peril and magic vets, this is the series for you.
[Caution warnings: off-screen animal cruelty]
11. Not For Use in Navigation: Thirteen Stories by Iona Datt Sharma [Top]
I'm pretty sure that I asked for this as an xmas present afterforestofglory recced it, so thank you! Yes, perfect, I love it, I want to write like this when I grow up and I want every other collection they wrote as well.
The most timely story for me was "Death Comes to Elisha", which is a story about hope and doing the work and makes me cry, but the rest of the collection is equally good. There's weddings, teaching, city planning, language, AIs, mages, discovering something new – something hopeful – in whatever mess came before and building on it. I love the mix of cultures, how the stories manage to talk about huge things by picking out the small ones. Take "Light, Like a Candle Flame, for example; it's one thatbookgazing has talked about before, and it's a story that looks at sustainability, environmentalism, not repeating the mistakes of the people came before, but does it through the bureaucracy of whether a new colony should build a waste processing plant. Huge things, scary things, made small and bearable.
Not For Use in Navigation made me cry and gave me hope. If you only take one rec from me, take this one.
12. Red River Volumes 1-6 by Chie Shinohara [Top]
I recently remembered that I haven't read Red River, despite my using it as a counter-argument in a conversation about isekai/portal fantasies (DO NOT GET ME STARTED) and my sister owning at least twenty volumes of it, and set out to fix this obvious error. Our Heroine is a normal schoolgirl, right until the moment when an ancient Babylonian queen has her kidnapped to serve as a human sacrifice. (I know, I thought it was going to be a pure fantasy setting too, but clearly I was wrong!) She's rescued by one of the crown princes, and now has to survive war, intrigues, and a very determined queen long enough for her to escape back to her own home and time.
Red River was originally published in the mid-90s and it shows in the art. That's not a complaint! It just has the very fluffy hair and sparkly eyes that I remember from older manga, and proportions that mean the male characters sometimes look twice the size of the female characters, regardless of respective ages. A lot of the story beats are familiar as well, if you've read any shoujo manga from back then, from the love interest who's basically an emotionally distant harasser until he Finally Realises His Feelings, to Yuri winning over almost everyone who tries to kill her with her bravery, kindness, and willingness to learn and protect others, to almost everyone deciding that she is the most important girl in their lives and needs to be their hostage, goddess, and/or "concubine."
So a lot of it feels familiar, is what I'm saying here; these are beats that I know. I think I might have let the art style fool me though, because I wasn't expecting the first couple of volumes to include quite as much attempted murder, actual murder, and skinning of human beings as they did! In retrospect, more fool me, shoujo manga goes hard and we all know it, but seriously. ... It probably says a lot about the older manga I've read that I'm not surprised by the sexual harassment, just the war. But full points to Red River as a narrative, because I was so invested in Yuri forcing the world around her to be better one person at a time. I have reservations about a Japanese teenager being revered as a Mesopotamian goddess, and I have issues with the fact that anyone who isn't her or Kail (the crown prince/love interest) is fairly two-dimensional, but... It gets me where I live. Right in the inner teenager who wants to read about girls who are the most special and beloved and willing to sacrifice everything to save people. Some of it made me shake the book in frustration – anything to do with the ~Prince of Darkness~ for example, because ugggggggggggggggggggggggh – but for the most part it's a teenage girl discovering that she can be a warrior and a spy and a hero, and that's what I cared about.
I think the most interesting thing about Red River to me so far is that I can almost draw out a web of things that share its DNA. Like, Yona of the Dawn has its character growth and royal politics, while The Water Dragon's Bride has the same being stolen away and sacrificed aspect, and on and on from there. If anyone has any recs for things that they think might be part of this family tree, please share because I'm all ears!
[Caution warning: attempted rape, sexual harrassment, kidnapping, drugging, attempted human sacrifice, off-screen torture and mutilation]
13. Love in Focus Volume 1 by Yoko Nogiri [Top]
Love in Focus is a somewhat standard romcom manga; the protagonist has moved into a dorm to attend her childhood friend's high school, where she accidentally falls foul of the dorm's resident camera-hating grump. Cue photographs and love triangles! I like the art and the way that the characters talk about art – the protagonist's fixation on one of her photographs being displayed "wrong" instead of that this display was it winning an award felt very familiar to me from many conversations with fellow obsessive creatives. So far it's incredibly generic, and I'm somewhat side-eyeing the childhood friend for being a bit too possessive, but honestly generic romcom is about where my attention level's at these days so it works.
14. Behind the Scenes Volume 6 by Bisco Hatori [Top]
In this volume: anxious beans finally express their feelings to people! I like that even though Behind the Scenes is comedic, it does still let the characters have serious emotions and express them! But genuinely, whatever else happened in this volume that wasn't connected to them talking to their respective crushes, I don't remember it. Maybe there was a puppet show! Maybe other characters learned important lessons about passivity! If so, it is gone. This is probably more of a slight on my brain than on Bisco Hatori's work.
15. Waves by Ingrid Chabbert and Carole Maurel [Top]
Waves is the memoir of the author's miscarriage after multiple attempts to conceive, and it's beautiful and heartwrenching. The emotions are all shown so clearly, with the colour fading out and back into the world with the author's mental state, and with how her hopes are built and dashed. I have the same problem reviewing it as I did with Rosalie Lightning, which is that it feels weird to talk about someone's grief – someone finding their way back from grief – in terms of its artistic merit, but it's solidly done.
[Caution warning: miscarriage]
16. Moonstruck Volume 1 by Grace Ellis, Shae Beagle, Kate Leth, Caitlin Quirk, Clayton Cowles [Top]
Moonstruck is basically a magic coffee shop story; our heroine, Julie, is a queer Latina werewolf who goes to a magic show with her new girlfriend (also a werewolf, although more out-and-proud about it than she is) and her best friend (Chet, a gregarious genderqueer centaur), which promptly goes to hell when the magician turns Chet into a human.
NO ONE is happy.
The art is super cute. Everything is soft and textured and warm, and it makes me happy to look at it. There are some intercut bits of the children's books that Jule and her girlfriend are reading that are in a different style, but the contrast is intentional and works pretty well! Especially once it starts to bring in the elements that match the book that they're reading on page.
There were points in the book that left me feeling wrong-footed. The solution to the mystery felt less like a resolution, because I had no idea what was going on and barely any idea of why the characters were reacting in those ways. But as a queer supernatural soap opera, it did work for me, and I was excited for Julie being happy, even I didn't understand all of the conflict.
It's not bad, just better drama than mystery!
Reading goal: 202/180 (33 new this post) Prose: 51/100 (Short fiction: 33/51)
Nonfiction: 13/12
#ReadMyOwnDamnBooks: 74/100 (13 read this post)
#unofficialqueerafbookclub: 75/75 (6 new this post; Fireside Quarterly, Módào Zǔshī, Widdershins, Not For Use in Navigation, Waves, Moonstruck)
This is also the post where I realised that my maths didn't add up with what I'd tracked with goodreads and had minor panics until I remembered that short fiction exists!
- The Six Skills of Madame Lumiere by Marissa Lingen [Jump]
- Fireside Quarterly July 2018 edited by Julia Rios and Elsa Sjunneson-Henry [Jump]
- Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku Volumes 2 and 3 by Fujita [Jump]
- Flying Witch Volumes 4-6 by Chihiro Ishizuka, translated by Melissa Tanaka [Jump]
- The Girl From The Other Side: Siúil, A Rún Volumes 1-7 by Nagabe, translated by Adrienne Beck [Jump]
- Módào Zǔshī by Mòxiāng Tóngxiù [Jump]
- Artificial Condition and Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells [Jump]
- Fate/Strange Fake Volumes 1 and 2 by Ryogho Narita [Jump]
- Widdershins by Jordan L. Hawk [Jump]
- Hex Vet Volume 1: Witches in Training and Volume 2: The Flying Surgery by Sam Davies [Jump]
- Not For Use in Navigation: Thirteen Stories by Iona Datt Sharma [Jump]
- Red River Volumes 1-6 by Chie Shinohara [Jump]
- Love in Focus Volume 1 by Yoko Nogiri [Jump]
- Behind the Scenes Volume 6 by Bisco Hatori [Jump]
- Waves by Ingrid Chabbert and Carole Maurel [Jump]
- Moonstruck Volume 1 by Grace Ellis, Shae Beagle, Kate Leth, Caitlin Quirk, Clayton Cowles [Jump]
1. The Six Skills of Madame Lumiere by Marissa Lingen [Top]
Lucy Brown is Madame Lumiere's ruthless concierge, gatekeeper, and heavy, and ngl I kinda love her. She is incredibly practical and competent, even when what starts off as a simple problem – helping a young woman stay out of sight for four days so she isn't kidnapped – escalates in ways that she couldn't have forseen. It talks about power – the skills Madame Lumiere has, the power that Josine has, the abilities that the fae have – and how even the most benign powers could have terrible consequences in the wrong hands, or be used for the wrong things. Yes, I was very invested in Lucy's constant reassessing of Josine, how did you guess? And the worldbuilding is really cool! I am very invested in the fae nonsense that is happening, and knowing more about Madame Lumiere's establishment and the doors from and to it.
I just really love the voice this story is told in. Lucy talks about things as though the reader knows exactly who these people are and what happens after the story, and it works. It might be the confidence – "Of course you know the rest," – and the way that it gives you just enough detail to fill in some of that space. I would gladly read more in this setting, if anyone knows if there is any!
2. Fireside Quarterly July 2018 edited by Julia Rios and Elsa Sjunneson-Henry [Top]
I subscribed to Fireside Quarterly a million years ago, and finally got around to reading their first issue! I'll be doing a more in-depth review in the future, but it was generally good; I loved all of the art, and the fact that it does clearly and explicitly put all of the caution warnings on the story. I think my favourite one was "To This You Cling, With Jagged Fingernails" by Beth Cato, about grieving and growing up, and choosing whether to keep hold of magic or whether to let it go. The most memorable was "CARBORUNDORUM > /DEV/NULL" by Annalee Flower Horne, which has female friendships in the face of controlling parents and abusive men, and a weird combo of a twenty-minutes into the future approach to the technology and a twenty-minutes into the past approach to the fandoms it references. It's a solid collection! I just need to get around to reading the others.
[Caution warnings: death, grieving, death of children, death of animals, rape and attempted rape]
3. Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku Volumes 2 and 3 by Fujita [Top]
I reviewed the first volume of Wotakoi here, and I’m pleased to report back that the second and third volumes are just as silly. The second volume is told non-linearly (one of my MANY weaknesses), bouncing between the protagonists on their first date and their everyday shenanigans as gamers and fans! I liked the story arc about how Kabakura and Koyanagi got together, and I quite enjoyed Ko and Naoya's friendship. The characters bounce off each other really well, and I'm very invested in their relationships. Narumi and Hirotaka on their first real date, trying to do "normal" couple things is really cute! But does lead to some oddly specific pop-culture memes that I would have loved to see proper translation notes on. (I appreciate that memes and references don’t translate well, but I DO want to know what the "keikakku means plan" joke was in Japanese.)
There were some things that left me squinting suspiciously at it though. If you are tired of the top/bottom pairing discourse (It’s like the 00s never ended, I swear we all did our time on this) then there are some jokes here that are gonna bug you. Ditto for discourse on whether BL manga fetishises gay men, because it turns out the female leads ship their partners. ... On the flip side of this, I do appreciate them representing the true fandom experience, which is that one person who likes all of the things you like, but in a way that is the COMPLETE OPPOSITE of how you like them. The author's note of "lol tricked you about this character's gender, bet you thought this was gonna be a BL!" felt quite mean-spirited. But on the whole, I'm enjoying these nerds and how they're somehow keeping a mutual pining storyline going despite the fact that everyone's been dating since the first chapter.
4. Flying Witch Volumes 4-6 by Chihiro Ishizuka, translated by Melissa Tanaka [Top]
Flying Witch continues to be cute in volumes 4-6! It's very domestic and full of the joy of discovery as everyone learns more magic! But volume 5 brings in Makoto investigating things as part of her witch duties, and I'm pretty sure I've mentioned how into magic-flavoured investigations I am, right?
I just love how domestic and small-scale the problems seem to be, and how sweet and joyful Flying Witch is. I continue to side-eye bits of it (... Maybe don't feed people magic sweets without telling them what they do. Y'know. Maybe.), but on the whole it's fun and it makes me happy, and that's good enough!
5. The Girl From The Other Side: Siúil, A Rún Volumes 1-7 by Nagabe, translated by Adrienne Beck [Top]
I've talked about The Girl From the Other Side before, but I binged it to get up-to-date and oh no. It's really good, I love it, but oh no.
The art continues to be excellent. The faces are sometimes weird – Shiva is sometimes a smudge, and it's hard to tell what's going on with Teacher's face at any point, but the body language is so good! There are transformations in The Girl From the Other Side and they're fascinating to see, especially for how different each one is. It's beautiful and graceful work, and the art and panel layout mean that small emotional moments get their full weight, and the big ones are dramatic.
As for the story, I'm still sceptical about everyone's motives, but watching Teacher slowly breaking as the series goes on and everything gets worse is heartrending. He's trying so hard to protect Shiva, even as he's losing everything else, and Shiva's reactions are so believable for a tiny child! Some of the story beats were inevitable (the fall!), but by the end of volume 7 I was reading it with my hands over my face going "Teacher no, stop, no one wants this!"
It's very good! It's just that everything is going incredibly wrong for the characters.
6. Módào Zǔshī by Mòxiāng Tóngxiù [Top]
So my corner of twitter slightly exploded about The Untamed, a cdrama adaptation of Módào Zǔshī, and when I settled in to join the screaming, I... Accidentally got distracted by reading the entire webnovel and forgot to watch the show? Which turns out to have been an excellent life decision, because Módào Zǔshī is exactly my kind of nonsense! It's 114 (long) chapters of slowburn! Wèi Wúxiàn, the protagonist, has been Literally Dead for over a decade! The love interest has been stoically pining and willing to turn against the world to protect Wèi Wúxiàn for literal decades. There are sibling antics and complicated family ties! The politics are convoluted and incisive about people in power being fickle and willing to turn on someone they deemed a hero only days before!
Oh yeah, speaking of, there's also teenagers taken as hostages, mutilation, betrayal, monster and undead attacks, and attempted genocide. Like, parts of the story are funny and parts of it are sweet, but there's so much where what's happening is genuinely horrific. Fair warning to anyone who's seen the fandom yelling about the pining and not known the context.
I'm not gonna lie: Módào Zǔshī is the sort of stuff I read and loved as a teenager, and it's the sort of thing that in my heart of hearts I want to be writing now. (... Probably with more lubrication and less taking advantage of drunks. Just saying.) It has all of the tropes that I love, and it has a great awareness of its tropes and how they're used. The levels of drama and reveals are great; every happy moment in a character's backstory had me whispering "Noooooooooooooo" at my phone, because I knew it wouldn't last. It's compelling, and it managed to keep me caught up through all of its loops between the present and Wèi Wúxiàn's past, and through all of its deviations into the lives of its antagonists. It's not perfect; I would have liked less drunken nonsense and more time on the female characters, I'm pretty sure all of our protagonists have committed at least one war crime apiece, and some things (like the stygian tiger seal) felt like they weren't introduced far enough in advance, but on the whole? I really enjoyed it and kinda want to read it again.
... I'm still not sure my heart is ready for the tv show though.
[Caution warning: abuse, torture, suicide, murder, mutilation, attempted genocide]
7. Artificial Condition and Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells [Top]
I, like most of the Lady Business editors, really love Murderbot, and I finally got around to reading the next two installments! In Artificial Condition, Murderbot makes a friend (thanks, it hates that) and goes looking for answers about its past; in Rogue Protocol, Murderbot gets a new job, and it goes about as well as any of its other jobs.
The different ways that AI interact with humans and Murderbot, and the different ways they are capable of interacting, are fascinating. Robots who hate humans, robots who love humans and are loved in return, robots who don't understand humans at all – I like the variety, and the distinct differences between how they react when there are humans around and where there aren't! And I like how incredibly uncomfortable Murderbot is with not just existing around humans, but being perceived as human. The explanation of what happened in Murderbot's backstory in Artificial Condition was really well done – the perfect mix of anticlimactic and horrifying. And Murderbot protecting people and going up against bigger, badder robots in Rogue Protocol was fantastically choreographed, although the ending left me rolling my eyes a bit for its predictability.
... I still love Murderbot is what I'm saying, and I'm looking forward to reading the next ones!
8. Fate/Strange Fake Volumes 1 and 2 by Ryogho Narita [Top]
I love the origin story of Fate/Strange Fake. Narita Ryohgo, creator of Baccano!, posted Fate fanfic on his site as an April fool's joke – and then Type-Moon, the company that produces all the Fate series, ask him if he wants his fanfic to be canon. Ta-da! One light novel series that is currently heading for twice the length anyone expected it to be!
I don't think Fate/Strange Fake is going to make sense if you're not familiar with the basic workings of the Fate franchise. (I described it to
renay as "Imagine having a Pokémon battle for the holy grail, but you choose Gilgamesh instead of Pikachu," and that's still the best one sentence summary I've got.) But if you are familiar, it is wild. In this timeline, the method of starting a grail war has been "borrowed," modified, and taken to America, where a representative of the American government attempt to start a fake grail war and things immediately go sideways. Assassinations! Substitutions! ... Vampires?Narita Ryohgo is one of the best writers of truly ensemble casts I've ever encountered, so this is exactly his skill set. He manages to take an enormous cast and give them all enough weight and life that most of them could be plausible protagonists, and they have arcs that weave together well even if nothing is linear or straight-forward.
So far, I'm not sure that I actually fully understand what's going on – I keep having to put the book down and go "WHAT IS THIS??????" at my spousal unit, but it's fast and dramatic, and I am invested in so many characters. Especially because a lot of this fits into the wider Fate multiverse! ... That said, there are some characters where I'm going "... I can't tell if you're being gross for effect, or if this is actually based on something, but ew."
It's very clever, is what I'm trying to say here, and it's bonkers. I love it, I love all of the dramatic twists. I love it even though we're two volumes in and still not out of the prologues.
[Caution warnings: references to child abuse and murder]
9. Widdershins by Jordan L. Hawk [Top]
My original review is here, but I've just accepted the fact that Widdershins is my go-to comfort read for when I feel like crap and need something that's full of pulp drama and mysteries. The thing I will say though is that I'm still not 100% sold on the audiobook, (some of the accents ping me weirdly), but it does do the job of smoothing out some of the clunky parts of the dialogue, which was a problem that I had reading it in prose.
10. Hex Vet Volume 1: Witches in Training and Volume 2: The Flying Surgery by Sam Davies [Top]
Hex Vet is an all-ages comic about Nan and Clarion, two trainee witches working in a magical vet's office. As an adult who has had a job, I'm low-key appalled by the management style of this vet's surgery ("Nan, you're terrible at people and everyone in town hates your family, you work the front desk!" and "Nurse Ariel, you're anxious and hate interacting with humans in general, you be in charge of dealing with all of our angry customers!" are both SURE DECISIONS THAT VET MADE), but as someone who likes comics with magic domesticity, I'm quite fond of it.
First off: I am confused by the proportions of the humans in this comic, because something about the ratio of limb to body strikes me as wrong. The art is expressive and I love the designs of the magical beasties, but the humans ping oddly.
Secondly: it's a comic about young women trying their best and working a mundane job in a magic setting! Yes, delicious, more of this please. The problems that they have and the solutions that they find to them are cool and fun, even if some of the misunderstandings get a bit close to my embarrassment squick. And the world building makes me happy, because it does have things like "Here is how we look after flying creatures!" and world-building that the art is allowed to carry on its own. It's a bit light on carrying plot, and everyone's backstory is still only expressed in hints, but I do enjoy it a lot, and if you're looking for mild peril and magic vets, this is the series for you.
[Caution warnings: off-screen animal cruelty]
11. Not For Use in Navigation: Thirteen Stories by Iona Datt Sharma [Top]
I'm pretty sure that I asked for this as an xmas present after
forestofglory recced it, so thank you! Yes, perfect, I love it, I want to write like this when I grow up and I want every other collection they wrote as well.The most timely story for me was "Death Comes to Elisha", which is a story about hope and doing the work and makes me cry, but the rest of the collection is equally good. There's weddings, teaching, city planning, language, AIs, mages, discovering something new – something hopeful – in whatever mess came before and building on it. I love the mix of cultures, how the stories manage to talk about huge things by picking out the small ones. Take "Light, Like a Candle Flame, for example; it's one that
bookgazing has talked about before, and it's a story that looks at sustainability, environmentalism, not repeating the mistakes of the people came before, but does it through the bureaucracy of whether a new colony should build a waste processing plant. Huge things, scary things, made small and bearable.Not For Use in Navigation made me cry and gave me hope. If you only take one rec from me, take this one.
12. Red River Volumes 1-6 by Chie Shinohara [Top]
I recently remembered that I haven't read Red River, despite my using it as a counter-argument in a conversation about isekai/portal fantasies (DO NOT GET ME STARTED) and my sister owning at least twenty volumes of it, and set out to fix this obvious error. Our Heroine is a normal schoolgirl, right until the moment when an ancient Babylonian queen has her kidnapped to serve as a human sacrifice. (I know, I thought it was going to be a pure fantasy setting too, but clearly I was wrong!) She's rescued by one of the crown princes, and now has to survive war, intrigues, and a very determined queen long enough for her to escape back to her own home and time.
Red River was originally published in the mid-90s and it shows in the art. That's not a complaint! It just has the very fluffy hair and sparkly eyes that I remember from older manga, and proportions that mean the male characters sometimes look twice the size of the female characters, regardless of respective ages. A lot of the story beats are familiar as well, if you've read any shoujo manga from back then, from the love interest who's basically an emotionally distant harasser until he Finally Realises His Feelings, to Yuri winning over almost everyone who tries to kill her with her bravery, kindness, and willingness to learn and protect others, to almost everyone deciding that she is the most important girl in their lives and needs to be their hostage, goddess, and/or "concubine."
So a lot of it feels familiar, is what I'm saying here; these are beats that I know. I think I might have let the art style fool me though, because I wasn't expecting the first couple of volumes to include quite as much attempted murder, actual murder, and skinning of human beings as they did! In retrospect, more fool me, shoujo manga goes hard and we all know it, but seriously. ... It probably says a lot about the older manga I've read that I'm not surprised by the sexual harassment, just the war. But full points to Red River as a narrative, because I was so invested in Yuri forcing the world around her to be better one person at a time. I have reservations about a Japanese teenager being revered as a Mesopotamian goddess, and I have issues with the fact that anyone who isn't her or Kail (the crown prince/love interest) is fairly two-dimensional, but... It gets me where I live. Right in the inner teenager who wants to read about girls who are the most special and beloved and willing to sacrifice everything to save people. Some of it made me shake the book in frustration – anything to do with the ~Prince of Darkness~ for example, because ugggggggggggggggggggggggh – but for the most part it's a teenage girl discovering that she can be a warrior and a spy and a hero, and that's what I cared about.
I think the most interesting thing about Red River to me so far is that I can almost draw out a web of things that share its DNA. Like, Yona of the Dawn has its character growth and royal politics, while The Water Dragon's Bride has the same being stolen away and sacrificed aspect, and on and on from there. If anyone has any recs for things that they think might be part of this family tree, please share because I'm all ears!
[Caution warning: attempted rape, sexual harrassment, kidnapping, drugging, attempted human sacrifice, off-screen torture and mutilation]
13. Love in Focus Volume 1 by Yoko Nogiri [Top]
Love in Focus is a somewhat standard romcom manga; the protagonist has moved into a dorm to attend her childhood friend's high school, where she accidentally falls foul of the dorm's resident camera-hating grump. Cue photographs and love triangles! I like the art and the way that the characters talk about art – the protagonist's fixation on one of her photographs being displayed "wrong" instead of that this display was it winning an award felt very familiar to me from many conversations with fellow obsessive creatives. So far it's incredibly generic, and I'm somewhat side-eyeing the childhood friend for being a bit too possessive, but honestly generic romcom is about where my attention level's at these days so it works.
14. Behind the Scenes Volume 6 by Bisco Hatori [Top]
In this volume: anxious beans finally express their feelings to people! I like that even though Behind the Scenes is comedic, it does still let the characters have serious emotions and express them! But genuinely, whatever else happened in this volume that wasn't connected to them talking to their respective crushes, I don't remember it. Maybe there was a puppet show! Maybe other characters learned important lessons about passivity! If so, it is gone. This is probably more of a slight on my brain than on Bisco Hatori's work.
15. Waves by Ingrid Chabbert and Carole Maurel [Top]
Waves is the memoir of the author's miscarriage after multiple attempts to conceive, and it's beautiful and heartwrenching. The emotions are all shown so clearly, with the colour fading out and back into the world with the author's mental state, and with how her hopes are built and dashed. I have the same problem reviewing it as I did with Rosalie Lightning, which is that it feels weird to talk about someone's grief – someone finding their way back from grief – in terms of its artistic merit, but it's solidly done.
[Caution warning: miscarriage]
16. Moonstruck Volume 1 by Grace Ellis, Shae Beagle, Kate Leth, Caitlin Quirk, Clayton Cowles [Top]
Moonstruck is basically a magic coffee shop story; our heroine, Julie, is a queer Latina werewolf who goes to a magic show with her new girlfriend (also a werewolf, although more out-and-proud about it than she is) and her best friend (Chet, a gregarious genderqueer centaur), which promptly goes to hell when the magician turns Chet into a human.
NO ONE is happy.
The art is super cute. Everything is soft and textured and warm, and it makes me happy to look at it. There are some intercut bits of the children's books that Jule and her girlfriend are reading that are in a different style, but the contrast is intentional and works pretty well! Especially once it starts to bring in the elements that match the book that they're reading on page.
There were points in the book that left me feeling wrong-footed. The solution to the mystery felt less like a resolution, because I had no idea what was going on and barely any idea of why the characters were reacting in those ways. But as a queer supernatural soap opera, it did work for me, and I was excited for Julie being happy, even I didn't understand all of the conflict.
It's not bad, just better drama than mystery!
Currently Reading
- Magus of the Library Volume 1 by Mitsu Izumi — I am incredibly invested in the magic librarians, okay, and I've had to take a break to recover because they're not the POV characters anymore.
- Driven to Distraction by Edward Hallowell — I'm back on my researching ADHD nonsense! Or at least I was until I got distracted by...
- Love Lettering by Kate Clayborn — The protagonist is an overworked stationery nerd who's struggling to find motivation, and I LOVE HER. SHE IS SO GOOD. And her love interest is bad at feelings but has them very strongly! Seriously, this is pretty much a checklist of things that I love, and I couldn't be happier.
Reading Goals
Reading goal: 202/180 (33 new this post) Prose: 51/100 (Short fiction: 33/51)
Nonfiction: 13/12
#ReadMyOwnDamnBooks: 74/100 (13 read this post)
#unofficialqueerafbookclub: 75/75 (6 new this post; Fireside Quarterly, Módào Zǔshī, Widdershins, Not For Use in Navigation, Waves, Moonstruck)
