A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

That amazing cover is an extremely accurate drawing of an actual photograph which is reproduced in the book, of a performance piece by Claude Cahun.

Liberated is a graphic novel telling the true story of Claude Cahun, a French Jewish writer and artist born in 1894. Cahun, along with their lover, the photographer and artist Marcel Moore, was active in the Parisian surrealist movement. Later, they resisted the Nazis via a stealth propaganda campaign aimed at occupying Nazi soldiers. They created pamphlets and fliers, and smuggled them into the soldiers' cigarette packs and even pockets! And they did all this while Cahun was chronically ill. Eventually, they were ratted out, arrested, tried, and sentenced to death, but the war ended before the sentence was carried out.

Assigned female at birth, Cahun's life and art interrogated gender, persona, and identity, writing, Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me. Marcel Moore was also assigned female at birth, but I'm not sure how Moore identified in terms of gender, or whether the name Marcel Moore was a preferred name or a pseudonym/artist's persona. I think the graphic novel probably doesn't pin this down on purpose, and my guess is that either it wasn't clear at this remove, or it seemed more true to Moore to leave it ambiguous/fluid.

The two of them met at school, fell in love, and traveled Europe together. And just when it started getting socially dicey for them to stay together, social cover fell into their lap when - I am not making this up - Moore's mother married Cahun's father! When they moved to the island of Jersey to escape the Nazis (this only worked for so long) they represented themselves as sisters living together.

The graphic novel is largely told in Cahun's words, with lovely graphic art plus a few of Cahun and Moore's own photographs. It's a quick, moving, inspiring, thought-provoking read, more relevant now than ever.

After a weird apocalypse called The Storm that seems to have killed most people on Earth, 17-year-old Liz lives alone in the bookshop where she used to work, occasionally trading books for useful items. But when the more hardbitten Maeve shows up, the two girls fall in love. But is the world about to end all over again?

This book sounded so up my alley. Alas, it was not good. In fact it was kind of the bad lesbian version of Erik J. Brown's All That's Left in the World.

Given the title, you'd think the story would involve books and reading and how they matter even after the apocalypse - a kind of bookstore version of Station Eleven. It's not that at all. A lot of books are mentioned in passing, but "books are important" is not a theme, and reading isn't important to the characters. Liz is living in the bookshop out of trauma and inertia, not because it's her passion or a community center or it feels like home.

Liz is so incredibly helpless and useless, it's hard to believe she survived normal life let alone a post-apocalypse setting. When the tap water stops running, she's unsurprised but also has only one day's worth left stored up in bottles - and it's been running for months, with her expecting it would stop running any moment the whole time! She doesn't bother to lock the front door of the bookshop, even when she goes to sleep. There's all sorts of dangerous damage to the shop that she doesn't know how to or doesn't bother to try to repair, AND doesn't ever ask for help with even though a fair number of friendly people come to her shop. I get that she's supposed to be paralyzed by trauma but she also comes off as a passive nitwit.

Even apart from Liz herself, a lot of stuff in the story makes no sense. Liz literally hasn't left the bookstore in months, she only gets a customer every couple days if that, and the customers only give her small items like a couple batteries for a book. How is she getting enough food to stay alive?

When Maeve turns on a small generator and it doesn't come on immediately, Liz leaves it switched on and tries to manually start it by sticking her hand inside it and giving the fan a spin. (Amazingly, she does not precede this by saying, "Hold my beer.") It promptly turns on and starts sucking her entire body into it, like it's a jet engine.

This gives Liz an extremely severe injury - the skin is ripped off her hand, bones and tendons are visible, and she can't move her fingers at all - but she's basically fine two days later after some extremely vaguely described first aid.

Liz realizes Maeve might be dangerous because she has a prized and valuable knife whose blade is caked with blood. If it's that valuable, YOU'D CLEAN IT.

People mostly use knives as weapons instead of guns for no reason. When someone does have a gun, it's not loaded. I guess guns and bullets are super rare in America!

The apocalypse is a one-time rain of acid that melts everyone who was outside at the time. No one ever mentions that this is fucking bizarre, or speculates on why it happened. The set-up in the pre-apocalypse flashbacks is that a climate change catastrophe is ongoing, but that does not include LITERAL ACID RAIN.

Also, the world is way too depopulated for a one-time event that happened at night, when not many people would be outside, and spared everyone who was inside. There's barely anyone left in Liz's entire town, and we meet something like ten survivors max in the entire book.

It also makes no sense that an acid strong enough to completely dissolve a human in 20 minutes did so little apparent damage to anything else. All the structural damage that's described is what you'd expect from a tornado, not a 20 minute downpour of extremely strong acid.

Liz and Maeve's relationship was boring and barely there. Actually, the whole book was boring. I ended up skimming heavily.

There's some interstitial bits where people write one-page first-person accounts of their survival in a notebook Liz keeps. This sort of thing is almost always so much fun, people recall it as their favorite part of the book. All but one of these bits are boring! How do you even do that?! (The one that I liked was a woman whose dogs saved her from the acid rain by refusing to go on their regular night time walk.)

Spoilers for the end. ( Read more... )

A time travel story that's also a murder mystery, starting with the murder and working backward.

Jen is shocked to witness her 18-year-old son Todd murder someone who's a total stranger to her, though apparently not to him. Todd is immediately arrested, but won't say anything about it. The next day - well, the next time Jen wakes up - it's the day before the murder. Jen manages to confiscate the murder weapon before it can be used and goes to sleep, thinking she's fixed things. But when she next wakes up, it's two days before the murder...

Jen keeps going backward in time, trying to figure out why Todd committed the murder as everything she does to fix it gets erased every time she falls asleep... or does it? As time unreels itself under her feet, she scrambles to find out what was really going on with her son, and what the purpose of her travel is. Is she supposed to stop the murder? Find out why it happened? Figure out all the things she didn't know about her family? Save her dead-in-the-present father's life? Fix her relationship with Todd? Is the whole thing her fault, for being an insufficiently perfect mother? Is there any purpose at all?

This is a pretty good book that doesn't make it to excellent. It feels too long, not because there's not enough happening but because there's a lot of verbal fluff. It probably could have been cut by 20-30K words without losing any of the plot or characterization. But the conceit really is clever, and I liked her relationships with her son, a friend at work, and a scientist she drops in on periodically to quiz about time travel. There's also some nice plot twists that are unexpected but make sense - no "actually, Jen was secretly a psycho killer all along" nonsense, thank goodness.

The Trail, by Meika Hashimoto



After a tragedy, 13-year-old Toby runs away to hike the Appalachian trail solo. This is a nice solid middle-grade novel with plenty of adventure and a satisfying conclusion. The revelation of exactly what happened to Toby's best friend made me giggle inappropriately because I visualized it with the sound effect "BONK." ( Read more... )

Content notes: Tragic death of friend, attempted suicide (Toby rescues the guy), dog abuse (Toby rescues the dog).


The Glamour, by Christopher Priest



Beautifully written literary novel, probably but not definitely fantasy, about people who can become invisible to the point where they cannot be perceived - ever - by anyone who can't also become invisible. Or maybe that's just a lie, or a shared delusion, or a metaphor; the ending is possibly the least resolved one ever written, very deliberately so. I enjoyed reading it while I was reading it, but the whole thing feels like a magician's trick. It may be relevant that Priest also wrote The Prestige.

Content notes: extremely graphic rape scene that seems to be written as a technical exercise in writing a rape scene where the man having consensual sex with the woman has no idea she's simultaneously being raped by a man he can't perceive. Kudos on the execution, ugh to the content.



Black River Orchard, by Chuck Wendig



Extremely enjoyable horror novel about evil apples. Likable good guys, awful villains, a good premise, excellent apple-related body horror, fun apple lore, and a whole lot of really good descriptions of what it feels like to bite into an apple, plus an unexpected amount of queer/ace rep.

Content notes: horror-typical violence, control-style relationship abuse.

A sort of long-form picture book for children and adults, about a shipwrecked father and son who wash up on a lost island, Dinotopia, where humans live in harmony with intelligent dinosaurs. The story is about how father and son integrate into the culture, with the father exploring while the son trains to become a quetzalcoatlus rider.

I'd seen art from Dinotopia but I never actually read the book. The book is great! The story is solid, the world is really well thought out, and the art is spectacular. All together, it takes you on a marvelous journey that you never want to end, and makes you feel like you're really there. The anniversary edition has an afterword by Gurney where he talks about wanting to write a narrative that isn't based on conflict, and a utopia that isn't sentimental or preachy. Though the art is what makes it sing, the writing is good too and he succeeds in his aims.

I was so happy to read this book, which I have sold repeatedly in my shop. And! There's three more books! I have ordered them and look forward to exploring Dinotopia some more.

A musician driving to visit his dying grandmother stops at a gas station in the middle of the night, and makes the unwise decision to use its restroom. Next thing he knows, he's trapped inside it by someone who's come up with a lot of inventive ways to fuck with someone inside a locked room, from the outside of the room.

This was a very mixed bag.

A+ for the parts that are "I'm trapped in a gas station bathroom by a psycho:" it feels just like a nightmare, and is riveting.

B+ for Abe being Jewish, and how his bad relationship with his awful grandmother, a genocide survivor, comes into play in the story. I like that it's there but it could have gone deeper.

D for the irrelevant, annoying flashback storyline about Abe crushing on a woman who ends up dating another guy in the band.

D for story logic. Major elements of the story are just nonsensical.

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C- for the ending. ( Read more... )

I very rarely say this, but this was a novella that should have been a novelette. The last chapter and the entire annoying subplot with the woman he failed to ask out should have been cut.

Also, I cannot believe I'm suggesting adding anti-Semitism, but an anti-Semitic psycho would have been really thematically on-point.

This was a lot of fun to read in paperback because of excellent graphic design elements.

Content warnings: Extreme gore, insects/spiders/snakes, insect/spider/snake harm, generational trauma.

A famously strange Japanese novel about a woman obsessed with convenience stores. I read this largely because I love Japanese convenience stores, forgetting that it's famous for being strange, not famous for being an ode to convenience stores. It is, indeed, quite strange.

Keiko Furukura was always odd. She doesn't see the world the way other people do, and this was extremely noticeable from when she was a child. Adrift in a world she didn't understand and which didn't understand her, she found her niche when she started working at a convenience store. There she found that she could fit in by imitating other employees in a way carefully calculated to make her seem normal and likable, and has a rather regimented but happy life. She eats all her meals from the shop, and ponders how her entire body now consists of the shop.

Despite disapproval and side-eyeing from her family and childhood friends, who think she should get married and be normal, she's basically content with her life until a horrible incel starts working at the store at the same time that social pressures on her reach a peak.

Keiko seems very obviously autistic, but also, well, odd. Or possibly it's just the author writing an odd book. Keiko has a unique way of describing ordinary things in a defamiliarizing manner, so they seem creepy or gross; I was uncertain whether I was supposed to think that was just Keiko being Keiko, or if I was supposed to think that actually, modern life is bleak and horrifying. I liked Keiko and rooted for her to get rid of the incel and spend the rest of her life unmarried and working at the convenience store, but I'm not sure if her staying at the convenience store was supposed to be good (she defies social pressure to conform and instead lives in a way that suits her) or bad (she's still masking and possibly the convenience store is a symbol of modern consumerist emptiness and her wanting to merge with it shows how inhuman society is?)

There's something about the way the book is written that makes a reader feel on uncertain ground, and wonder if they're either missing something or interrogating the text from the wrong perspective. I went on Goodreads to see how other people interpreted it, and found an interesting split between people who enjoyed the dark comedy aspects and people who thought it was bleak and depressing and that anyone who found it funny was mocking autistic people. I did often find it funny. Keiko dissing the mango-chocolate buns and making the incel sleep in the shower with his feet sticking out was hilarious.

I gather that Murata's other books are exponentially weirder.

After a covid-informed pandemic, two teenage boys - one gay, one who hasn't yet figured out that he's bisexual - meet, slowly get to know each other, and go on a post-apocalyptic road trip.

I LOVED this book. There's so much about this story that I've seen done badly so many times, and it not only did all those things well, it did all sorts of other things well that I wasn't even looking for.

The romance is the slowest of slow burns, full of pining but very understandably so - they both have extremely good reasons for not talking about their feelings. Andrew thinks Jamie is straight because Jamie thinks he's straight, so he doesn't want to make Jamie uncomfortable or mess up their friendship by confessing a crush, especially given that they desperately need to stick together for their own safety. Jamie's feelings develop slowly, and he's uncertain what they mean and if Andrew feels the same way. I ended up incredibly invested in their relationship. So, no stupid misunderstandings or inexplicable refusals to just fucking talk to each other.

They both have dark secrets that are actually dark, and so it makes sense that they worry that the other might dump them or feel differently about them if they confess them. (I'm often annoyed by supposedly dark secrets that turn out to be something like "I like light bondage" or "I got in argument with my mom and then she got hit by a cement truck.")

Andrew is pretty funny and enjoys joking with friends, and he and Jamie initially bond by joking. But they both sound like teenage boys who enjoy joking with each other, and Andrew is funny like a teenage boy can be funny. There's no incessant quipping that sounds like each joke was carefully crafted by a professional writer. In a related matter that is often done badly, they each take turns narrating, and they sound like two different people.

And! The pandemic and the pandemic landscape are unexpectedly interesting. They wander through a series of post-apocalyptic tropes - looters, the nice on the surface but actually terrible community, dark tunnels, lone psychopaths - and every single one is well-done and plausible.

Very interestingly, the pandemic itself is different from any I've ever seen in fiction. It's basically a superflu, but one which spread fairly slowly, so things were slowly falling apart long before the whole landscape got depopulated. Also, the response was distinctly covid-like in terms of government denial and uselessness. As a result, though the world is extremely depopulated, there are very slim pickings at shops because supply lines fell apart quite some time before the plague burned itself out.

Anyway, this was great. It had a perfect balance between a very slow-burn friendship-to-romance, character development, and post-apocalypse action. Very suitable for teenagers, but I adored it as an adult. A sequel came out recently that I haven't read yet.

A dark fantasy about a group of teenagers who are kidnapped from their homes and forced to participate in wilderness therapy, only to encounter actual monsters in the woods. GREAT premise!

Devin is a lesbian teenager who's been processed through a series of often abusive foster families. After she steals some money from her current foster parents, they have her kidnapped by a wilderness program supposed to straighten her out. She's dragged into the middle of the woods with four other teenagers whose parents have enrolled them because they did drugs, stole money, or were generally rebellious or sad. A pair of guidance counselors lead them on a very long hike through the woods, during which Devin gets in an intense love/hate relationship with one of the other girls. Then their counselors disappear...

For-profit wilderness therapy/survival camp for "troubled teenagers" is a real thing in America, and they really do kidnap teenagers with their parents' permission - and payment. It's abusive and unregulated, and a number of kids have been killed at those camps.

The book begins with an author's note similar to my paragraph above. But once the teenagers are violently kidnapped, their forced hike through the woods proceeds with surprisingly little abuse beyond the fact that they're forced to be there. There's genuine wilderness training and self-esteem-building activities. I don't want to sound like "just" being kidnapped and held against your will isn't abusive by itself, but these programs are typically very abusive in other ways too. I felt like the awfulness of these programs was inexplicably downplayed despite the author apparently writing the book specifically to expose them!

The beginning part, before the counselors vanish, is fine but feels a bit slow. The two boys in particular are not very differentiated, and I kept mixing them up. Surprisingly, the best part of the book is the monsters themselves. What they turn out to be is unexpected and SO COOL, and I wish there was more of it. The book overall is about 70% teenagers interacting, 30% monsters/teenagers vs monsters. That would be fine if I was more into the teenagers, and it wasn't like I wasn't into the teenagers. They're fine. But for me, not more than fine.

Overall I would say this was a perfectly fine book that I didn't love. Except for the part that really focused on the monsters. That, I loved. But that's only about 10% of the whole.

So what are the monsters? ( SPOILERS! )

Isn't that a gorgeous cover?

The book is an odd, dreamy work of epistolatory science fiction/fantasy, mostly in the form of unsent letters written by Lumi to her nonbinary spouse Sol. She's in the habit of writing a journal of letters to Sol, as they both often travel separately throughout the solar system for work, and giving them to Sol when they reunite. But this time, their reunion keeps getting delayed, and she keeps arriving at places just after Sol has left. Is Sol evading their own spouse, and if so, why?

The plot sounds like a mystery, but it's structured as a quest and feels like an unusually detailed dream. Beautiful images swim in and out, and moments feel fraught with a meaning just out of grasp. At one point Lumi visits Europa, whose cities are under the sea and where everyone speaks only in whispers, and even those only when absolutely necessary, because loud noises could crack the ice. In true dream fashion, that doesn't really make sense, but it's vivid and compelling.

Lumi follows in Sol's footsteps, occasionally gaining clues, while thinking back on their relationship and realizing that maybe she doesn't know Sol as well as she thought. She's from an Earth which has been radically restructured and is largely a playground for wealthy visitors, while the people actually live there are poor and often desperate to get difficult-to-obtain passports out; she apprentices with a woman who does magical soul healing with a spirit animal, gets her own spirit animal, and also a passport to Mars; many years later, she's still uneasily conscious of her status as an immigrant.

Lumi travels often within the solar system as a soul healer, always accompanied by her cat Ziggy; the difficulties of traveling with a cat are realistically detailed, and Ziggy is very present in the story without ever affecting the plot. We eventually learn that she had another cat who was euthanized when the space station she and Sol lived on was shut down due to a plague, and only humans were allowed off. Is that why Lumi is so determined to never leave Ziggy behind? She doesn't say. Is Lumi's soul healing real? Sol doesn't believe in it, but Lumi's spirit animal feels as present, when it appears, as Ziggy. (Ziggy survives. Lumi's spirit animal may or may not, it's complicated.)

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I'm not sure if some of the book's oddities - Lumi's extreme calm, Sol's unknowability, the emotionally distanced feeling in a story whose action is entirely driven by a marriage, the very open ending - are flaws or exactly what the author intended. I enjoyed reading it a lot, because it's so atmospheric and I will forgive a lot for atmosphere, and it feels so different from most books.

Itäranta is Finnish and wrote her first two books in Finnish and English simultaneously! Not sure if she did the same for this one.