![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spindizzy posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
ladybusinessIt's incredibly weird to think that the last time I posted Eight Book Minimum – and when I wrote most of these reviews, and when I set my reading goals for the year – we weren't in lockdown. I don't have any profound interpretation to add to that, I just needed to acknowledge for myself that I read these books in 2020, even though it doesn't feel like it because March was a long decade. I hope that all of you and yours are safe out there!
1. These Savage Shores by by Ram V and Sumit Kumar [Top]
The framing of These Savage Shores in its marketing materials is interesting; it tries to portray the vampire sailing to India as the protagonist, a colonising force that thinks he's an untouchable predator. Spoilers: the point of view vampire dies in the first chapter, because These Savage Shores is an anti-colonial historical fantasy, where a prince and his supernatural guardian take on the literally vampiric East India Company.
The art reminds me of the art style was popular for graphic novel adaptations of classic literature when I was a kid, only with a much more vibrant colour palette and a dynamic sense of motion. (I couldn't tell you which graphic novel of Dracula it reminds me of, but the font and the particularly jowly faces on the white dudes are really familiar!) The monsters are properly monstrous, and the action scenes are generally easy to follow. People's facial expressions don't always match up with the scene they're in, and I find it weird that a vampire POC has the same skin tone as the white vampires, but on the whole, I like it!
As for the story: it is not happy. There are betrayals and vengeance and people failing as protectors, and funnily enough colonialism isn't completely overthrown on page. But honestly things ended more happily than I expected, for all the tragedy and monsters going on; Kori is a dancer, and I knew her fate was inevitable from the moment she was introduced – but she doesn't end up completely fridged. I know that's a low bar, but my expectations were low. Having her be the narrative's recurring beat – the repetition of "How were you made?" with its different answers, and the way the final answer is turned inside out – works really well. I would have liked more time with the prince and Bishan and Kori, rather than the introduction of new narrators, and I had trouble following some of the battle scenes, but for the most part I enjoyed it. I'd get it out of the library rather than buying it, for myself, but it's pretty solid!
[Caution warnings: gore, colonialism, racism, off-screen suicide] [This review is based on an ARC from Netgalley]
2. Stanislaw Lem's The Seventh Voyage: Star Diaries by Jon J. Muth [Top]
The Seventh Voyage is a graphic novel adaptation of a Stanislaw Lem short story by the same name; the protagonist is alone on his damaged space ship, unable to repair it – until suddenly he's not alone, and has to try to get out of his own way to solve the problem.
Pro-tip, the entire book is him being completely unwilling to learn. The art is fine – the style reminds me of a watercolour version of the Bif and Chip books, and the cozy shapes and domesticity of the space ship are very visually pleasing, and the deadpan humour of him inevitably not realising what the problem is... Fine? The story as a whole though isn't my cup of tea, because there's only so long I'm willing to deal with men making the same mistake over and over again, and I reached that point before the book was ready to give up on the joke.
3. Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood by Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey [Top]
Driven to Distraction is one of those books that always came up when I started researching ADHD; the author is a psychiatrist with ADHD, who specialised in diagnosing and treating ADHD before it was quite as well known as it is now. So I read it as part of my "not neurotypical" homework, and... Well.
It has the problem that a lot of books about mental illness have, in that it's aimed at a very middle-class heteronormative American audience. There are a lot of example narratives, most of which are married white-collar workers or their children, and the recurring theme is parents getting diagnosed as a result of their child getting diagnosed. It felt less practical than ADD-Friendly Ways to Organise Your Life – it's a lot of different ways that ADHD can manifest or be masked, or what ADHD looks like with different mental illnesses. As an explanation that ADHD is a thing that can affect adults, it's mostly fine, but if you already know that then it's less helpful.
The thing that bothers me the most out of this entire book was his explanation for why ADHD has a higher diagnosis rate in the US:
I think with one paragraph he managed to erase Native communities, anyone brought to America unwillingly, obliterate any good will I'd been extending, and stress that his target audience was white middle-class Americans and no one else! It's breathtaking the amount of assumptions he's making about the reader there. I'm not gonna recommend it.
4. Wasted Space Volume 1 by Michael Moreci and Hayden Sherman [Top]
The art for Wasted Space is bad. Like, "bad enough that I'm opening my review with it" levels of bad. Everyone's body shapes and silhouettes vary wildly, and there are scenes where I'm pretty much reduced to trying to distinguish between characters based on the colour of their skin or clothing. Cool aliens, cool spaceships, terrible basic anatomy.
(Also: just draw the genitalia you cowards. Slapping smiley faces down wherever there might be a hint of cock feels immature, especially considering that Saga gets away with balls the size of a person on page.)
So, dicks to one side: the story. Billy Bane had a great life as the mouthpiece for the Creator, leading an evangelical-style church while preaching what his god/hallucination told him to – including that the public should support and vote for a space!Trump analogue. Fast forward to: Billy Bane, depressed space hobo, subsidised by his sex-worker android companion, until the new mouthpiece for the Creator shows up and demands his help.
... The dicks were not very far to one side, 97% of the cast are horrible people, and not even in interesting ways to read about. It is 2020, turns out that any interest and sympathy that I had for stories about supporting the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party and then self-destructing to avoid dealing with that is an all-time low. If your tolerance for that is higher than mine, or you're in the mood for terrorist threats and men making consistently the worst choices available and refusing to listen to anyone: maybe you will enjoy this! I don't recommend it though.
[Caution warnings: Trump analogues, abuse, terrorism, threat of nuclear war] [This review is based on a freebie from the distributor.]
5. Hell's Paradise: Jigokurako Volume 1 by by Yuji Kaku [Top]
Hell's Paradise: Jigokuraku wasn't what I expected, and every time I thought I had a handle on what it was going to be it changed again. The initial premise gave me hope for "Suicide Squad, but in the forest from Annihilation"; the emperor has assembled a group of prisoners who have a choice between being executed or searching for the elixir of life on a mysterious island that will either kill them or turn them into living flower beds. Cool, sure, that could be interesting. Except that they also need to kill each other because only one person can win a royal pardon (and the emperor likes watching people die!). Cool, so it's gonna be the fantasy version of Battle Royale then? No, because all but maybe five characters get killed off-screen.
What I'm saying is that it feels a little disjointed. Each individual part of the set-up could lead to something cool, whether it's the ninja whose wife is slowly convincing him to be a human being, or the executioner who wants to learn how to kill without regrets, or the body horror island! They just didn't seem to gel together into a coherent whole for me. A lot of the dramatic moments that I would have expected to take a volume on their own – alliances being made and broken, for example – happen off-page. It's weird. The art is mostly fine, although there are some panels that I had to squint at to parse – yes, that butterfly does have a human face, and yes it's exactly as nope as that sounds! – and I have Questions about the choice to manifest the executioner's guilt as skeletons latching onto her naked body. I assume it's an ero-guro thing, which would make sense with the amount of body horror and gore here, but it still pings weirdly.
I might keep reading Hell's Paradise: Jigokuraku, but honestly all of my emotional investment is in the two female characters, and I'm pretty sure that this isn't going to end well for either of them.
[Caution warning: gore, murder, abuse, mutilation, body horror] [This review is based on an ARC from Netgalley]
6. The Promised Neverland Volume 1 by by Kaiu Shirai and Posuka Demizu [Top]
Stop me if you've heard this one: in The Promised Neverland, children live a happy life in an orphanage in the countryside, where they're cared for by Mother until they're adopted! ... Yeah, you know that's not how this goes, the house is absolutely a trap, and the children are being raised as food.
I can't say that I like the art; it's good at motion, but all of the proportions feel a bit off in a way I can't put my finger on, especially for the faces. But I'm so invested in the story! The children have believable plans and concerns for each other, and their reactions are fairly smart, but because they're actually written as children, it's very easy to believe that they're going to be outplanned or give themselves away. It's tense! I wasn't expecting it to be! And for all the characters are familiar tropes, I'm still invested!
The worldbuilding so far is fairly scant; what the characters believe is true is explained, but we've only got hints for what actually is true. Like, extrapolating what we know about Mother raises some horrible suggestions for the fate of any children that don't get eaten, and that's all we've got.
Basically, I don't know that it's doing anything new and interesting yet, but I found myself getting impatient that I was writing this review instead of reading the next volume, so it's doing something right!
[Caution warning: death of children] [This review is based on an ARC from Netgalley]
7.Kokkoku: Moment by Moment Volume 1 by Seita Horio [Top]
I was hopeful about Kokkoku: Moment by Moment because I find time-stopping a much more interesting power than time-travel. (Did I watch too much Bernard's Watch as a child? Probably!) And the set-up was so promising! Juri's brother and nephew have been kidnapped and the ransom demands money delivered in an impossible timeframe – so her grandfather stops time.
All of that, I was very interested in! I was intrigued by the world-building, even if we've only had brief snatches and suppositions so far. As for the characters, Juri squabbles with her family and has completely believable "Oh god I shouldn't have made that joke" reactions and I enjoy her as a character with no training or powers who is prepared to pick up a kitchen knife and wrangle kidnappers. I don't actually like half of her other family members though because they're mostly defined by their passivity. The art is very expressive of that – her brother and father look convincingly uncomfortable in their own skins – although generally it didn't strike me right. I'm not going to say that a series that's explicitly about time being frozen looked a bit lifeless, but the faces did feel off to me.
All that said, I'm very tired of rape threats and sexual harassment being how we establish that villains are bad. I appreciate that at least half of the point is to make sure we're not upset when villains get horribly murdered, but also I seriously don't need a viewpoint character on the villain's side to talk about his rape fantasies. It's a little disappointing, because I could be interested in the brother learning how to care about his nephew, or Juri trying to save her family, or finding out exactly what the Handler is, but I'm not enjoying Kokkoku: Moment by Moment enough to wade through disgusting people to get there.
[Caution warning: dying animals, kidnapping, child endangerment, threat of rape, sexual harassment]
8. Ascendance of the Bookworm Volume 1 by Miya Kazuki, Suzuka, and You Shiina; translated by Carter Collins [Top]
Listen, I can't get over the fridge-horror at the beginning of Ascendance of the Bookwork. The protagonist is a college student who is obsessed with reading, and after she's killed in a book-related accident, she wakes up in the body of a five-year-old girl in a fantasy land that doesn't have books.
SHE STRAIGHT UP BODYJACKS A FIVE-YEAR-OLD, OKAY. I WAS WARNED ABOUT THE COMPLETE LACK OF WRITTEN WORD, BUT NOT ABOUT THE DYING FIVE-YEAR-OLD SHE ACCIDENTALLY TAKES OVER.
But apart from that, Ascendance of the Bookworm is kinda cool! The fantasy world is quasi-medieval European; houses are dirty, people have insufficient resources, and reading is the purview of the rich. The protagonist's attempts to change this are fascinating to read, because at the heart of it she is trying to make very practical, individual-level changes with no concern for how they might affect others. It reads as an intersection of childishness and self-centredness that makes perfect sense for a five year old, and possibly sense for a very sheltered teen/young adult. She doesn't care about the effort that goes into getting water and foraged goods, she just cares that her hair is greasy. She doesn't care that she's in a world with very low literacy – she cares that there aren't any books for her. I love all of her attempts to solve the problems that she has without access to modern conveniences, and the way that she has to adapt and change her ideas as she discovers more about the world she lives in! I like that her new family explicitly are just rolling with this change in her behaviour, because they're just happy that she's feeling better, even though that scene really highlights the bodyjacking thing!
I could see this getting very frustrating depending on how the series goes forward. So far, the things that the protagonist doesn't know aren't brought up in a way that sets off my embarrassment squick, and the gaps in what she knows about the world she's in are a fair excuse for her being selfish now, but that obliviousness could start to grate. As it is, this volume is interesting, but I'm stuck up Overthinking It Mountain on the bodyjacking thing so I might need to take a break before I read any more of it.
[Caution warning: strongly implied child death, child neglect, squalor]
Reading goal: 16/80 (8 new this post) Prose: 4/20 Nonfiction: 1/12
Netgalley: 9/50 (3 new this post)
#ReadMyOwnDamnBooks: 8/40 (3 read this post)
#unofficialqueerafbookclub: 3/20 (0 new this post. ... Who am I?!)
- These Savage Shores by by Ram V and Sumit Kumar [Jump]
- Stanislaw Lem's The Seventh Voyage: Star Diaries by Jon J. Muth [Jump]
- Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood by Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey [Jump]
- Wasted Space Volume 1 by Michael Moreci and Hayden Sherman [Jump]
- Hell's Paradise: Jigokurako Volume 1 by by Yuji Kaku [Jump]
- The Promised Neverland Volume 1 by by Kaiu Shirai and Posuka Demizu [Jump]
- Kokkoku: Moment by Moment Volume 1 by Seita Horio [Jump]
- Ascendance of the Bookworm Volume 1 by Miya Kazuki, Suzuka, and You Shiina; translated by Carter Collins [Jump]
1. These Savage Shores by by Ram V and Sumit Kumar [Top]
The framing of These Savage Shores in its marketing materials is interesting; it tries to portray the vampire sailing to India as the protagonist, a colonising force that thinks he's an untouchable predator. Spoilers: the point of view vampire dies in the first chapter, because These Savage Shores is an anti-colonial historical fantasy, where a prince and his supernatural guardian take on the literally vampiric East India Company.
The art reminds me of the art style was popular for graphic novel adaptations of classic literature when I was a kid, only with a much more vibrant colour palette and a dynamic sense of motion. (I couldn't tell you which graphic novel of Dracula it reminds me of, but the font and the particularly jowly faces on the white dudes are really familiar!) The monsters are properly monstrous, and the action scenes are generally easy to follow. People's facial expressions don't always match up with the scene they're in, and I find it weird that a vampire POC has the same skin tone as the white vampires, but on the whole, I like it!
As for the story: it is not happy. There are betrayals and vengeance and people failing as protectors, and funnily enough colonialism isn't completely overthrown on page. But honestly things ended more happily than I expected, for all the tragedy and monsters going on; Kori is a dancer, and I knew her fate was inevitable from the moment she was introduced – but she doesn't end up completely fridged. I know that's a low bar, but my expectations were low. Having her be the narrative's recurring beat – the repetition of "How were you made?" with its different answers, and the way the final answer is turned inside out – works really well. I would have liked more time with the prince and Bishan and Kori, rather than the introduction of new narrators, and I had trouble following some of the battle scenes, but for the most part I enjoyed it. I'd get it out of the library rather than buying it, for myself, but it's pretty solid!
[Caution warnings: gore, colonialism, racism, off-screen suicide] [This review is based on an ARC from Netgalley]
2. Stanislaw Lem's The Seventh Voyage: Star Diaries by Jon J. Muth [Top]
The Seventh Voyage is a graphic novel adaptation of a Stanislaw Lem short story by the same name; the protagonist is alone on his damaged space ship, unable to repair it – until suddenly he's not alone, and has to try to get out of his own way to solve the problem.
Pro-tip, the entire book is him being completely unwilling to learn. The art is fine – the style reminds me of a watercolour version of the Bif and Chip books, and the cozy shapes and domesticity of the space ship are very visually pleasing, and the deadpan humour of him inevitably not realising what the problem is... Fine? The story as a whole though isn't my cup of tea, because there's only so long I'm willing to deal with men making the same mistake over and over again, and I reached that point before the book was ready to give up on the joke.
3. Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood by Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey [Top]
Driven to Distraction is one of those books that always came up when I started researching ADHD; the author is a psychiatrist with ADHD, who specialised in diagnosing and treating ADHD before it was quite as well known as it is now. So I read it as part of my "not neurotypical" homework, and... Well.
It has the problem that a lot of books about mental illness have, in that it's aimed at a very middle-class heteronormative American audience. There are a lot of example narratives, most of which are married white-collar workers or their children, and the recurring theme is parents getting diagnosed as a result of their child getting diagnosed. It felt less practical than ADD-Friendly Ways to Organise Your Life – it's a lot of different ways that ADHD can manifest or be masked, or what ADHD looks like with different mental illnesses. As an explanation that ADHD is a thing that can affect adults, it's mostly fine, but if you already know that then it's less helpful.
The thing that bothers me the most out of this entire book was his explanation for why ADHD has a higher diagnosis rate in the US:
One possible explanation for this is that our gene pool is heavily loaded for ADD. The people who founded our country and continued to populate it over time, were just the types of people who might have had ADD. They did not like to sit still. They had to be willing to take an enormous risk in boarding a ship and crossing the ocean, leaving their homes behind; they were action-oriented, independent, wanting to get away from the old ways and strike out on their own, ready to lose everything in search of a better life. The higher prevalence of ADD in our current society might be due to its higher prevalence among those who settled America. [Photo of the page here]
I think with one paragraph he managed to erase Native communities, anyone brought to America unwillingly, obliterate any good will I'd been extending, and stress that his target audience was white middle-class Americans and no one else! It's breathtaking the amount of assumptions he's making about the reader there. I'm not gonna recommend it.
4. Wasted Space Volume 1 by Michael Moreci and Hayden Sherman [Top]
The art for Wasted Space is bad. Like, "bad enough that I'm opening my review with it" levels of bad. Everyone's body shapes and silhouettes vary wildly, and there are scenes where I'm pretty much reduced to trying to distinguish between characters based on the colour of their skin or clothing. Cool aliens, cool spaceships, terrible basic anatomy.
(Also: just draw the genitalia you cowards. Slapping smiley faces down wherever there might be a hint of cock feels immature, especially considering that Saga gets away with balls the size of a person on page.)
So, dicks to one side: the story. Billy Bane had a great life as the mouthpiece for the Creator, leading an evangelical-style church while preaching what his god/hallucination told him to – including that the public should support and vote for a space!Trump analogue. Fast forward to: Billy Bane, depressed space hobo, subsidised by his sex-worker android companion, until the new mouthpiece for the Creator shows up and demands his help.
... The dicks were not very far to one side, 97% of the cast are horrible people, and not even in interesting ways to read about. It is 2020, turns out that any interest and sympathy that I had for stories about supporting the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party and then self-destructing to avoid dealing with that is an all-time low. If your tolerance for that is higher than mine, or you're in the mood for terrorist threats and men making consistently the worst choices available and refusing to listen to anyone: maybe you will enjoy this! I don't recommend it though.
[Caution warnings: Trump analogues, abuse, terrorism, threat of nuclear war] [This review is based on a freebie from the distributor.]
5. Hell's Paradise: Jigokurako Volume 1 by by Yuji Kaku [Top]
Hell's Paradise: Jigokuraku wasn't what I expected, and every time I thought I had a handle on what it was going to be it changed again. The initial premise gave me hope for "Suicide Squad, but in the forest from Annihilation"; the emperor has assembled a group of prisoners who have a choice between being executed or searching for the elixir of life on a mysterious island that will either kill them or turn them into living flower beds. Cool, sure, that could be interesting. Except that they also need to kill each other because only one person can win a royal pardon (and the emperor likes watching people die!). Cool, so it's gonna be the fantasy version of Battle Royale then? No, because all but maybe five characters get killed off-screen.
What I'm saying is that it feels a little disjointed. Each individual part of the set-up could lead to something cool, whether it's the ninja whose wife is slowly convincing him to be a human being, or the executioner who wants to learn how to kill without regrets, or the body horror island! They just didn't seem to gel together into a coherent whole for me. A lot of the dramatic moments that I would have expected to take a volume on their own – alliances being made and broken, for example – happen off-page. It's weird. The art is mostly fine, although there are some panels that I had to squint at to parse – yes, that butterfly does have a human face, and yes it's exactly as nope as that sounds! – and I have Questions about the choice to manifest the executioner's guilt as skeletons latching onto her naked body. I assume it's an ero-guro thing, which would make sense with the amount of body horror and gore here, but it still pings weirdly.
I might keep reading Hell's Paradise: Jigokuraku, but honestly all of my emotional investment is in the two female characters, and I'm pretty sure that this isn't going to end well for either of them.
[Caution warning: gore, murder, abuse, mutilation, body horror] [This review is based on an ARC from Netgalley]
6. The Promised Neverland Volume 1 by by Kaiu Shirai and Posuka Demizu [Top]
Stop me if you've heard this one: in The Promised Neverland, children live a happy life in an orphanage in the countryside, where they're cared for by Mother until they're adopted! ... Yeah, you know that's not how this goes, the house is absolutely a trap, and the children are being raised as food.
I can't say that I like the art; it's good at motion, but all of the proportions feel a bit off in a way I can't put my finger on, especially for the faces. But I'm so invested in the story! The children have believable plans and concerns for each other, and their reactions are fairly smart, but because they're actually written as children, it's very easy to believe that they're going to be outplanned or give themselves away. It's tense! I wasn't expecting it to be! And for all the characters are familiar tropes, I'm still invested!
The worldbuilding so far is fairly scant; what the characters believe is true is explained, but we've only got hints for what actually is true. Like, extrapolating what we know about Mother raises some horrible suggestions for the fate of any children that don't get eaten, and that's all we've got.
Basically, I don't know that it's doing anything new and interesting yet, but I found myself getting impatient that I was writing this review instead of reading the next volume, so it's doing something right!
[Caution warning: death of children] [This review is based on an ARC from Netgalley]
7.Kokkoku: Moment by Moment Volume 1 by Seita Horio [Top]
I was hopeful about Kokkoku: Moment by Moment because I find time-stopping a much more interesting power than time-travel. (Did I watch too much Bernard's Watch as a child? Probably!) And the set-up was so promising! Juri's brother and nephew have been kidnapped and the ransom demands money delivered in an impossible timeframe – so her grandfather stops time.
All of that, I was very interested in! I was intrigued by the world-building, even if we've only had brief snatches and suppositions so far. As for the characters, Juri squabbles with her family and has completely believable "Oh god I shouldn't have made that joke" reactions and I enjoy her as a character with no training or powers who is prepared to pick up a kitchen knife and wrangle kidnappers. I don't actually like half of her other family members though because they're mostly defined by their passivity. The art is very expressive of that – her brother and father look convincingly uncomfortable in their own skins – although generally it didn't strike me right. I'm not going to say that a series that's explicitly about time being frozen looked a bit lifeless, but the faces did feel off to me.
All that said, I'm very tired of rape threats and sexual harassment being how we establish that villains are bad. I appreciate that at least half of the point is to make sure we're not upset when villains get horribly murdered, but also I seriously don't need a viewpoint character on the villain's side to talk about his rape fantasies. It's a little disappointing, because I could be interested in the brother learning how to care about his nephew, or Juri trying to save her family, or finding out exactly what the Handler is, but I'm not enjoying Kokkoku: Moment by Moment enough to wade through disgusting people to get there.
[Caution warning: dying animals, kidnapping, child endangerment, threat of rape, sexual harassment]
8. Ascendance of the Bookworm Volume 1 by Miya Kazuki, Suzuka, and You Shiina; translated by Carter Collins [Top]
Listen, I can't get over the fridge-horror at the beginning of Ascendance of the Bookwork. The protagonist is a college student who is obsessed with reading, and after she's killed in a book-related accident, she wakes up in the body of a five-year-old girl in a fantasy land that doesn't have books.
SHE STRAIGHT UP BODYJACKS A FIVE-YEAR-OLD, OKAY. I WAS WARNED ABOUT THE COMPLETE LACK OF WRITTEN WORD, BUT NOT ABOUT THE DYING FIVE-YEAR-OLD SHE ACCIDENTALLY TAKES OVER.
But apart from that, Ascendance of the Bookworm is kinda cool! The fantasy world is quasi-medieval European; houses are dirty, people have insufficient resources, and reading is the purview of the rich. The protagonist's attempts to change this are fascinating to read, because at the heart of it she is trying to make very practical, individual-level changes with no concern for how they might affect others. It reads as an intersection of childishness and self-centredness that makes perfect sense for a five year old, and possibly sense for a very sheltered teen/young adult. She doesn't care about the effort that goes into getting water and foraged goods, she just cares that her hair is greasy. She doesn't care that she's in a world with very low literacy – she cares that there aren't any books for her. I love all of her attempts to solve the problems that she has without access to modern conveniences, and the way that she has to adapt and change her ideas as she discovers more about the world she lives in! I like that her new family explicitly are just rolling with this change in her behaviour, because they're just happy that she's feeling better, even though that scene really highlights the bodyjacking thing!
I could see this getting very frustrating depending on how the series goes forward. So far, the things that the protagonist doesn't know aren't brought up in a way that sets off my embarrassment squick, and the gaps in what she knows about the world she's in are a fair excuse for her being selfish now, but that obliviousness could start to grate. As it is, this volume is interesting, but I'm stuck up Overthinking It Mountain on the bodyjacking thing so I might need to take a break before I read any more of it.
[Caution warning: strongly implied child death, child neglect, squalor]
Currently Reading
- The Twisted One by T. Kingfisher — I'm only like 20% in and so far things are unnerving, but not actually scary! Weirdly I'm more wigged by the idea of people not believing what she says than I am the actual spooky stuff. A+ dog content though.
- What Did You Eat Yesterday? Volume 7 by Fumi Yoshinaga — Fumi Yoshinaga has written a manga recipe book with a slice of live manga wrapped around it and I respect that immensely.
- The Adventure of the Purloined Letter by Alexis Hall — Cosmic horror Sherlock Holmes pastiche where everyone is queer? Yes, perfect, I am missing about 80% of the references but I love it.
Reading Goals
Reading goal: 16/80 (8 new this post) Prose: 4/20 Nonfiction: 1/12
Netgalley: 9/50 (3 new this post)
#ReadMyOwnDamnBooks: 8/40 (3 read this post)
#unofficialqueerafbookclub: 3/20 (0 new this post. ... Who am I?!)
