New Arrival: Picture Book Biography: Solving the Puzzle Under the Sea, Robert Burleigh & Raúl Colón

Solving the Puzzle Under the Sea: Marie Tharp Maps the Ocean Floor
Robert Burleigh, illustrated by Raúl Colón
ISBN: 9781481416009
Read April 28, 2016

This is another lovely biography of an early scientist who happens to be a woman.  Marie Tharp gets very little recognition now, but her passion to map out the ocean floor using sonar soundings and depth markers played a key part in forcing scientists to accept the theory of continental drift, by using the ridges and valleys on the ocean floors to prove that there really are continental plates bumping up against each other.Not bad for someone who got told there weren't any openings for file clerks (she was applying for the position as staff scientist) and got left behind on ocean voyages because women were bad luck on ships.Colón's illustrations are consistently gorgeous, and his depictions of Marie at different times throughout her life are lovely to see progress.

Graphic Novel: Collected Run; Black Widow, Nathan Edmondson, Phil Noto, et al.

Black Widow: The Finely Woven Thread (Vol 1) 
Collecting Black Widow #1-6, and selections from All-New Marvel Now! Point One #1
Writing, Nathan Edmondson
Artist and Covers, Phil Noto
Letterer, VC's Clayton Cowles
ISBN: 9780785188193

Black Widow: The Tightly Tangled Web (Vol 2)
Collecting Black Widow #7-12, and Punisher #9
Writing, Nathan Edmondson
Artist and Covers, Phil Noto
Letterer, VC's Clayton Cowles
Punisher Artist and Covers, Mitch Gerads
Punisher Letterer, VC's Cory Petit
ISBN: 9780785188209

Black Widow: Last Days (Vol 3) 
Collecting Black Widow #13-20
Writing, Nathan Edmondson
Artist and Covers, Phil Noto
Letterer, VC's Clayton Cowles
ISBN: 9780785192534

This is a hard one to review because I REAALLLLY WANTED TO LIKE IT SO MUCH!!! Black Widow deserves some good stories, and truly can be an engaging character, and OH MY GOD Phil Noto's artwork is freaking gorgeous with everyone's pale glassy eyes and slightly washed-out palette with sharp slices of black holding everything together. But the story just didn't hold up. I mean - it wasn't BAD, but it was just... eh?

Inspired by the riotous success of Fraction's "off-duty" Hawkeye run, Marvel tried to re-spark the lightning with Edmondson and Noto.  And they knocked it out of the park with the artwork, but Edmondson is not quite Fraction, and the story and dialogue and character development just weren't there. Again, nothing objectionable, but it's very slim pickings. Nat is working for SHIELD now, and whenever she's not spying and assassinating (and also doing commando work, or running gun battles, or taking down helicopters... ?) for SHIELD, she's doing it on her own under false names, making money as a merc taking down "bad guys" (by a very tenuous definition of bad guy) for guilt money to send to the families and friends of the people she killed during her Red Room years.  Why she doesn't feel the same about the people she ganks for SHIELD, or for herself while doing these "penance money" missions is frankly beyond me, because we never get to see enough of her character to wonder about it. Edmondson takes the "I'm alone and lonely and I WALK ALONE" vibe a bit too seriously, even to the point of including a feral cat slowly being adopted as a through-plot.  A bit tooooo on the nose for me.

The over-arching plotline is supposed to be about this dread organization Chaos, but it's incoherent and muddled and the capstone issue that's supposed to clear everything up didn't do anything of the sort.  A final set of codas - a flashback to an early hit in Cuba under the auspices of the Red Room, interspersed with scenes from a fill-in-the-blanks SHIELD  (?) rescue op, does even less to satisfy - if we'd seen more flashes of that sort of cold-blooded past throughout, perhaps things might have acquired some depth?

Ah well.  The art is bloody freaking gorgeous, and the story isn't painful so much as paint-by-numbers, so if you like Nat and like looking at beautiful scenes and people, definitely check it out.

New Arrival: Picture Book Biography: Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine, Laurie Wallmark & April Chu

Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine

Laurie Wallmark, illustrated by April Chu

ISBN: 9781939547200

Classically-inspired artwork and a concise and inspiring biography.

This lovely biography showcases Ada Byron Lovelace and her passion for numbers and calculations (and flying machines, which I didn't know before).  In this book we follow her from childhood to her development of the first computer program for Babbage's theoretical analytical engine.  Simply beautiful and elegant, and focused exclusively on her devotion to learning as much as possible about math and calculating.  

    

Graphic Novel: Collected Run: Hawkeye, Fraction, Aja, et al.

This review covers the entire run of Matt Fraction's Hawkeye: Issues 1-22, plus Young Avengers Presents 6, and Annual 1.

Volume 1 (the hardcover) was also our Graphic Novel Book Club book for March 2016

Hawkeye, Volume 1
Collecting Hawkeye #1-11, and Young Avengers Presents #6
Matt Fraction, writer
David Aja, main artist
Matt Hollingsworth, main colorist
Chris Eliopoulos. letters
Javier Pulido, artist for #4 & 5
Steve Lieber & Jesse Hamm, artists for #7
Francesco Francavilla, art & color for #10
Annie Wu, "romance covers" for #8
ISBN: 9780785184874

(Hawkeye, Volume 1 is a hardcover containing the issues collected in the softback Vol. 1 and 2.)

Hawkeye, Volume 3: L.A. Woman
Collecting Hawkeye #14, #16, #18, #20, and Annual #1
Matt Fraction, writer
Anne Wu, main artist
Matt Hollingsworth, colorist
Javier Pulido, art and cover for Annual
ISBN: 9780785183907

Hawkeye, Volume 4: Rio Bravo
Collecting Hawkeye #12 & 13, #15, #17, #19, and #21 & 22
Matt Fraction, writer
David Aja, main artist
Matt Hollingsworth, colorist
Francesco Francavilla, artist, covers, colors for #12
Chris Eliopoulos, art for # 17
Jordie Bellaire, colors for #17
ISBN: 9780785185314

Short review: It's amazing. It's everything perfect about comic books. Go read it.

Longer review.  What we have here is a perfect look at heroes off-duty - this run gives us Hawkeye when he's not off "Avengering" with the other heroes.  He goes home to his apartment, has cookouts with his neighbors on the roof, deals with tracksuit mafia (Bro) and tries to do the right thing and help out his friends.

This being Hawkeye, he screws things up on the regular.  He also gets the everloving snot stomped out of him on the regular.  He starts the run in traction, and ends it temporarily deafened. I love that we see the consequences of his choices here - he's not Cap, he's not got armor, and it shows. Poor Clint.  

We also get to see the other Hawkeye: Kate Bishop of the Young Avengers.  She pops in and out of Hawkeye's life for the first dozen or so issues, but then there's a bit of a mess that sends her off to Los Angeles to try her hand at solo heroics. Which is really an excuse to get her into the clutches of Madame Masque and her creepy shenanignans over there, and also to get Clint on his own.

What I like about the collected issues is that they've decided to make Volume 3 into the Kate Hawkeye book, and Volume 4 into the Clint Hawkeye book - so Volumes 3 and 4 alternate comic issues and give you a full story of one Hawkeye or the other, whereas if you read them during the actual run, you'd be alternating between the coasts every month or so until the finale.

The run is pretty fantastic. It's internally cohesive, has stakes that range from the mundane to the global conspiracy, has roots in the real world (there's an issue about Hurricane Sandy) and ties back into the Marvel universe (shout-out to Moon Knight!) all while keeping the focus sharply on the Hawkeyes and their attempts to be heroic and good, and to beat the bad guys without lowering themselves to the level of the bad guys. Truly excellent writing.

Now for the art. I can't enjoy a comic unless the art appeals to me, and boy howdy does this appeal.  Aja (pronounced A-ha) is a genius, and Hollingsworth's colors are like an intensive study course on color theory and how to color block without making people's eyes bleed, or boring them to death.  Annie Wu's exuberant work shines through in the retro covers of My Doomed Love and in the wild excess of Hollywood with Kate (although I felt the chibi "internal voice" was a peculiar choice).  The scenes are fresh and powerful and flow beautifully - I rarely felt lost (I always feel lost in the thicket of panels) even when we're being led around by Pizza Dog, or in an issue where everything's narrated in sign language and lip-reading.  Massive appreciation for stellar work by everyone involved.

I have to say, I know all good things come to an end, and runs often don't make it quite to their full potential, but I really do feel like this one rose to the challenge, smote it to death, and strutted on into the sunset.  I'm truly sorry that it's over.

Tuesday Storytime: Spring, Part 2

Second set of fun spring books: these are more loosely "springtime" than the first set, but this set were all rhyming in a subtle nod to April as Poetry Month.

Spring's Sprung
Lynn Plourde, illustrated by Greg Couch
ISBN: 0689842295
Anthropomorphized sister seasons and a Mother Earth are strangely haunting, despite light verse.

The illustrations here are peculiar.  I suppose it's difficult to make anthropomorphized seasons into a set of sisters while still keeping them individual and differentiated, but they and their Mother Earth occasionally look haunting or straight-up creepy.  Despite this intermittent odd tonal shift, the illustrations are mostly beautiful and remind me of the Pastoral section of the original Disney Fantasia.  Mother Earth is waking her three daughters: March, April, and May, and setting them to begin the new day (the new year).  But like siblings often do, these three are competing among themselves to be Mother's favorite at everything.  By the end, they're in tears, and Mother has to reassure them that she doesn't have a favorite; they're all equally loved and equally a favorite.  Less focus on spring, and more on sibling rivalry, but it's sweet and fun.

A Leaf Can Be...
Laura Purdie Salas, illustrated by Violeta Dabija
ISBN: 9780761362036
Previously reviewed here

This one covers all the seasons, but enough of it is spent on green-leaf illustrations that I felt it fit well enough.  All the beautiful and interesting things leaves do or can become or provide for various creatures.  Delightful and so pretty.

Flowers are Calling
Rita Gray, illustrated by Kenaro Pak
ISBN: 9780544340121
Digital/watercolor art is FANTASTIC, and the book is naturalistic and accurate.

This was a bit long for our age-group, but the pictures are just amazing, and the information is accurate and presented in a cute way.  I just can't get over how beautiful and delicate and intricate and busy (in a good way) the illustrations are in this book.  The spreads are beautiful and detailed, the flowers are vibrant and natural, and the whole is rendered in a way that almost makes me think of pop-ups or wood-cuts because of the heavily-layered feel of the scenes.  Just incredibly beautiful,  We read through spreads of flowers and a local animal and the flower's pollinator, and the hook for the narration is that the flower is calling to the small unobtrusive pollinator, not to the big or notable local animal.  After three of these, we see a spread with all the flowers together with a nonfiction blurb (which I truncated enormously) about how each flower needs or relates to a specific pollinator.  I really loved seeing the spreads on the night-time flowers.  Not only were they beautiful, but it's nice to see moths and bats getting a bit of attention as pollinators.  Absolutely stunning.  

Science Fiction: Area X, Jeff Vandermeer

Area X (collected volume of short novels Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance)
Jeff Vandermeer
ISBN: 9780374261177
Read April 15, 2016

Weird book. The first of the trilogy was divisive: either it was the future of American sci-fi (weird fiction) or it was a self-congratulatory writing exercise by someone with an overactive imagination but no discipline.  The furor died down a bit as the other volumes arrived on schedule, and then built back up a bit with the release of the collected volume.

Plot summary time: (attempting to be spoiler-free)

There is a government research facility called the Southern Reach that is investigating a strange disaster that occurred along a portion of the southern coastline of the country, forming an impermeable border around that section with only a few mysterious terrifying portals.  The area inside the border is called Area X.  These three books are concerned with the people who either work for or are guinea pigs sent on "expeditions" inside Area X.  The government is attempting to understand and control whatever mysterious force is maintaining the border, the portals, and the facility (Southern Reach) is trying to figure out and stop it from doing horrific and unexplained things to all of the truly unfortunate expedition teams that are repeatedly shoved inside the place.

Thoughts on the collected edition:
The first book is absolutely the best, by a notable margin.  We are introduced to a peculiar character beginning a new expedition, with a curious background and emotional hooks to the expedition concept and to the oddly horrible and mundane natural setting of Area X.  The plot goes quickly, the horrible things are interesting and haunting and cleverly written to be evocative rather than overly helpfully descriptive.

The middle book lagged badly.  I wasn't enamored with the new characters we follow there, and thought that the slow progression towards madness was less inevitable and looming and more simply interminable and plodding.  It was also the most "obvious" of the three books, with heavy-handed symbolism and events that were painfully obvious to the reader, while the characters labor on unsuspecting.  Oddly enough, except for sections about two previously minor characters, not necessary to the progression of the story, and one could almost read only the first and last books and not miss too much substance.  In the middle book, we shadow a new director who has been sent out to run the Southern Reach facility after the previous directer was lost to Area X.  He's got problems of his own, and the Reach begins to really impact his sanity as he tries to figure out what is going on (and mostly fails, frustratingly).

The last book is the one that really ended up lighting people on fire.  We follow a set of characters (alternating sections) this time, most from the second book. They return to the actual Area X, and things get promptly weird and a lot more metaphysical and philosophical.  It has been compared to the TV series LOST, where the series appealed to two different types of audiences: the ones who like a good mystery to be solved and "figured out" and completed and put away into little tidy boxes, and the ones who like weird mysterious conspiracy-theory ideas and don't mind the world (or their fiction) to be messy and unexplained in the end.  Like LOST, this book pissed off roughly half the readership - the ones who like things to be tidy and explained.  I read it fairly quickly in a few big chunks, and so was less unhappy with the very open ending, but even I was confused by the massive shifts in tone and focus right at the end.

So.. I don't know if I recommend it or not.  If you like creepity haunting descriptions, and don't mind a meandering plot and unresolved endings, then read the first book by itself and see if it intrigues you.  If you've read Lovecraft or Hodgson's ancient The Night Land, and thought that they were a bit too linear, but nicely desciptive, you're likely going to like this.  If you really want things to be explained and "finished" in any sort of tidy way, don't even bother - you'll just frustrate yourself.

New Arrival: Picture Book: The Night Gardener, by the Fan Brothers

The Night Gardener
The Fan Brothers (Terry Fan & Eric Fan)
ISBN: 9781481439787
Haunting beautiful pencil-shaded textured pages and spreads of a full detailed world.

This book is just so pretty.  I saw the cover and was hooked instantly, and the progression of sepia-toned drawings (with flashes of bright colors as highlights or grace notes) only served to keep me entranced and delighted until the end.  It's just so pretty.  The story is simple but mythic: a grim and depressing lane is changed by the mysterious development of topiary sculptures, made from all of their trees over the course of a spring and summer.  The topiary begins with an owl (the cover image) outside the orphanage, slowly moves down the street, and by the time it reaches the park, our boy protagonist notices the old gardener, who kindly "needs" the boy's untrained help to complete the trees in the park.  The next morning the park is transformed, the boy is hooked, and the gardener is gone, but he's left a pair of pruning shears as a gift.

Did I mention how beautiful this whole thing was?  The story is so sweet that in the wrong hands it could be saccharine and nauseating, but the solemn and proud drawings keep it grounded.  The flat-out gorgeous spreads and pages could overwhelm a lot of stories, but by keeping this story mythic and a little haunting, a little mysterious, it holds up because of the tone and the pacing.

A beautiful collaboration, and a brilliant first picture book for this talented duo.

New Arrival: Picture Book: Interstellar Cinderella, Deborah Underwood & Meg Hunt

Interstellar Cinderella
Deborah Underwood, illustrated by Meg Hunt
ISBN: 9781452125329
Read April 15, 2016

This is SOOOO Cute!  Cinderella in space, told in rhyme (only occasionally forced).  Cinders is a crackerjack mechanic this time around, and she really wants to see the Prince's ship parade, but the evil family steals her toolbox and leaves her behind.  Fairy god-robot steps in to save the day, and Cinders fixes the Prince's ship before zooming off at midnight.  Instead of a shoe, the crystal is a special socket wrench (shades of sonic screwdrivers here) and the stepsisters are set to trying to fix the Prince's ship instead of cutting off their feet.  Happy ending is skewed too, in just the right way: Cinders isn't interested in marriage, but she will take a job offer as the Royal Mechanic!

So cute, and a great updated take on the classic.

Graphic Novel: Delilah Dirk and the King's Shilling, by Tony Cliff

Delilah Dirk and the King's Shilling
Tony Cliff
ISBN: 9781626721555
Sequel to Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant (reviewed here and here)
Delilah and Selim's adventures on the continent are cut short by a megalomaniacal officer, landing them in England's high society.

So in the first book, poor Selim was the one who didn't fit in.  This time around, Delilah is back home, and she's fundamentally unsuited for English country squire life.  I read this with the first season of Downton Abbey fresh in my mind (even though the time-periods are different, the society is very much the same) and I cringed at her continual flouting of social norms, and the diffident but pointed tactful comments by all the other members of society trying to nudge her gently back into an accustomed set of behaviors.

The duo has been performing good deeds on the continent, but they're interrupted by the escalating war between England and France, and when they're forcibly picked up (and then framed for spying) by an over-ambitious redcoat, they find it expeditious to return to England for some damage control.  Delilah tries, she really does, but her direct methods don't fit in at all in England, and while Selim's natural diffidence and propriety make him a better fit socially, his utter unfamiliarity with his surroundings (and Delilah's continued inability to explain what is even going on) make him nearly as ineffectual as she is, although slightly less socially problematic.

The whole thing ends with a wild chase and an explosive finale, and ends up with Delilah having made peace with her mother, but also leaving her with her first real long-term enemy.

It JUUUUST came out, and already I want the next one so badly.  Uggghhh.  Patience is not my virtue.

Fairy Tales: Proud Knight, Fair Lady: The Twelve Lais of Marie de France

Proud Knight, Fair Lady: The Twelve Lais of Marie de France
Marie de France, translated by Naomi Lewis, illustrated by Angela Barrett
ISBN: 0670826561
Twelve early-medieval "fairy tales" about knights and maidens and courtly love.
Read April 12, 2016

So these are some of our earliest western fantasy/romance books, y'all.  Marie lived and wrote somewhere in the 1160s-1220s, and she wrote (possibly) quite a lot, most likely under the protection and encouragement of the otherwise unlamented Henry (Plantagenet) the Second.  We don't know who she was, but these Lais reveal a quick mind, good understanding of narrative convention and of interesting subject matters, and a fairly sharp humor.

So what we've got mainly are stories about courtly love.  Usually this is between people who are not married, and what I find interesting here is the utter lack of time spent on moralizing about why and how and when they're wrong and bad for their actions.  The affairs are often described to the audience as wrong, and the lovers often endure horrible suffering for their pains, but the people themselves (unless they are villainous) are held up as good ladies and gentlemen throughout, and in many more of the stories than I would have expected, the love affair itself is considered a courtly and acceptable thing: so long as the lovers remained in the bonds of considerate behavior and didn't flout their love in public or try to have their spouses killed off.  

I'm also interested in the very mundane and realistic portrayals of life which are interspersed with the obviously fantasical and what we would consider fairy-tale.  A good half of the stories have some touch of the fantastic. In Guigemar, we've got a magic boat, a knot and a belt that can only be unfastened by true love's touch, and a magic white hind with antlers (the male deer is the hart, and usually the one with antlers, making this even more interesting).  In Bisclavret we've got a werewolf who is a devoted and loyal knight who is the one betrayed, which is all sorts of unusual.  Lanval is a Galahad figure who feels no urge to love until he sees (what isn't explicitly stated to be, but cannot be anything but) an elven/faery maiden in the forest.  Les Deus Amanz is more like a folktale, but does have a purported magic potion: made by a wise and learned old Duchess no less! Yonec tells of a hostage wife succored (and seduced) by a hawk-knight shapeshifter. And Eliduc has a miraculous Juliet-like death swoon lasting days reversed by the judicious application of magical restorative berries (and the most forgiving and understanding wife EVER).      

The stories themselves are very short, and I think they're shorter still in the original verse format.  This translation puts them into a more modern "short story" narrative format that makes them feel much like the carefully-constructed "stand-alone" stories that are made from ancient myths and religious narratives; the ones that don't actually stand alone, but were often looked at originally in light of the entire cosmology and literary/religious/cultural tradition that the audiences were familiar with.  Likewise here I often get the impression that at least part of the clever commentary is lost to me because I don't know what exactly Marie is skewering, although her skills (and that of the translator) mean that I do know something's up.

It's interesting to read stories that are so good, but from a time when "good stories" required very different things than they do now.  It's odd to me that the characters are mainly nonexistent, or are archetypes: the virtuous young girl, the brave and true knight, the good king, the jealous wife... The plots are likewise fundamentally archetypical: the courtly affair, the doomed love (several of those), the restoration of the fortunes of the virtuous, the rewards of constancy in love.  Active plotting is likewise off the menu: characters don't often set out to do things, but have things either happen to them, or they're presented as dragged along by the hands of fate - especially in the falling-in-love arena, which is presented as an unstoppable and utterly expected and totally unavoidable progression based on being in the same space as the lovely representative of the opposite gender.

What's really most fascinating is that all those things we're told are necessary for a good story, but here are twelve interesting ones (some admittedly moreso than others, but still) that don't have any of that. What do they have instead?  Details in situations, personal grace notes, odd moralistic touches or olive branches towards human nature.  Focus on specific core ideals and motivations: love, jealousy, pique, greed, fear.  A flair for the dramatic: the procession of ever-more-beautiful pairs of girls to the court as Arthur fumes and the council dithers and poor Lanval suffers in self-inflicted silence.  A sense of humor: a wife's bitchy jealous commentary ends her up in a bind of her own making when she talks shit she knows isn't true about twins and adultery.  (And perhaps a not so subtle mockery of readers who might also believe that old canard?  The barb is pointed enough to withstand the additional targets.)  

Anyway; the stories aren't earth-shattering, and for most fairy-tale lovers or romance readers (or anyone who has read the Once and Future King waaaay too many times, these will seem quite familar and enjoyable.  Several of them are interesting and niggling enough that I wonder if anyone has taken them as the germ of an actual novel or fantasy.  It would be a fitting tribute, I think, to a passionate and talented author from so long ago.

Tuesday Storytime: Spring!

Now that we're solidly into warm weather, I wanted to do some traditional "season" books, and I found a nice set of them: two weeks of spring books, and then a week about rain and mud!

It's Spring!
Linda Glaser, illustrated by Susan Swan
ISBN: 0761313451
Cut-paper dioramas in bright but naturalistic colors.  Amazingly intricate illustrations.

The rhyme scheme in this book is a little clunky at times, or perhaps I just wasn't feeling the rhythm properly, because it made me stutter a few times in storytime despite pre-reading and practicing beforehand.  Glaser has put together a perfect intro to how spring progresses, with straightforward but lyrical descriptions of natural processes and how the season progresses.  Swan's intricate and colorful dioramas and scenes enhance the immediacy of what is being narrated, and helps to ground the info in the real world.  It's not even that long!  Very good season book - probably one of the best I've read, despite the bad fit of the rhymes to my speaking cadence.


When Spring Comes
Kevin Henkes,illustrated by Laura Dronzek
ISBN: 9780062331397
Pastels and fluffy indistinct borders make everything seem fuzzy and soft and new.

This is a much more fanciful approach to spring, but still in the realm of the naturalistic.  The drawings are a lot more loose, and take a few liberties, but overall remain true to life and focused on nature.  This book's theme is waiting: if you wait, spring will do this, and that, and that other thing.  It also directly addresses the reader "I hope you like umbrellas" & etc, which I always like when that happens.  Makes the storytime seem more directly interactive and attentive to the focus of the children listening/watching.  Sweet and short.  A good length here: long enough to be a final book on it's own, and short enough that it can fit in the middle with a set of other shorter books.


And then it's spring
Julie Fogliano, illustrated by Erin E. Stead
ISBN: 9781596436244
Colored pencils and scraggly people and environments focus on the wait for spring to green up the landscape.

I don't like this one quite as much as the others, because the illustrations, while interesting, aren't as visually stimulating for little ones (there's a lot of detailed info and cute little grace notes for older or individual readers to pick up).  The narrative is entirely about the long wait for spring to come through and change the brown of the landscape to green. The only thing I don't like about this one is that the focus through the book is on seeds that were planted (presumably a garden plot from the illustrations) and the very end has the green flooding over the landscape, but doesn't show the garden plot we've been concerned about throughout the book.  It's a bit jarring to end without seeing whether the seeds have come up or not!

 

Nonfiction: From Hardtack to Home Fries, Barbara Haber

From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks & Meals
Barbara Haber
ISBN: 0142002976
Micro-history of American foods and cookery.
Read April 8, 2016

This was a cute little book rescued from a recent weed at a branch location - (don't worry, it's been sent off to keep living at the central library) that looked so interesting (and nicely short) that I just couldn't resist picking it up.

Basically, Haber's been fascinated with cookbooks and history her whole life, and she's parlayed that into a job keeping and furthering a collection of historic cook books and cooking-related books at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute.  Pretty nifty.  Haber has a moderate, readable, likeable tone that wanders between just slightly professorial (when something interestingly historical or consistently overlooked is under consideration) to happily chatty and casual.  The read feels like nothing so much as an afternoon porch visit or an evening out drinking with someone who is knowledgeable and secure enough in their knowledge that they enjoy discussing it, but don't feel that they need to convince anyone or prove themselves.  A very enjoyable tone for a nonfiction, especially a micro-history of something as interesting and overlooked as cooking and women's experiences with food and culture.

The whole book was fascinating, but I especially enjoyed learning more about:

Chapter Three: They Dieted for Our Sins: America's Food Reformers
Chapter Four: The Harvey Girls: Good Women and Good Food Civilize the American West
Chapter Five: Home Cooking in the FDR White House: The Indomitable Mrs. Nesbitt

The bits about the Irish immigrants and the potato famine, and about African American women re-claiming their heritage as cooks and creators of good food with American and African roots were also very interesting, but not as new or unexpected.

I could have done without the chapters on wartime deprivation and starvation (American Civil War nurses and Japanese POW nurses) and I didn't find the chapter on the interesting social-activism shop in Boston as compelling as I think I ought to.

Overall a cute little foray into American experiences and cookery.  A fun, enjoyable little microhistory that I didn't even know to look for.  I love when books come to me like that - so nice to have a fun unexpected discovery.

Juvenile Fantasy: The Girl, The Dragon, and the Wild Magic, Dave Luckett

The Girl, The Dragon, and the Wild Magic (Rhianna trilogy)
Dave Luckett
ISBN: 0439411874
Scholastic paperback (originally published in Australia)
Read April 12, 2016


This is a cute little standalone juvenile fantasy, perfect for a reluctant reading young lady, or perhaps as a stepping stone to the Alanna books (Song of the Lioness series, Tamora Pierce) or The Hero and the Crown/The Blue Sword (Robin McKinley).

Rhianna is really bad at magic.  The rules are inconsistent and the logic is fuzzy, and all of her attempts at spellcasting end in catastrophic failure.  Makes sense, because for most people, too little magic is the problem, and for Rhianna, a rare Wild Magic talent means that her problems stem from too much magic - and therefore not enough control.  Her talent is pulling the raw power from the entire countryside, and until she can learn control herself, the court wizard works out a catch-and-release mechanism - which unfortunately a covetous local wizard and his nasty son turn against both Rhianna and the locals.  Comeuppance is swift and karmic, when his foolhardy and greedy nature calls a dragon to town, giving Rhianna a chance to show off how well she can do in a situation where more magic is a help rather than a hindrance.

Cute, sweet, innocent, and easily readable.  There are two sequels:
The Girl, the Apprentice, and the Dogs of Iron
The Girl, the Queen, and the Castle

Urban Fantasy/Horror: Rolling in the Deep, Mira Grant

Short and shivery.  Lovecraftian in the good way (creepy and atmospheric, not racist and sexist).

Rolling in the Deep
Mira Grant
ISBN: 9781596067080
Novella: documentary-style horror story featuring creepy mermaids.
Read April 11, 2016

This was SOOOO GOOD!  This is another that I had been sitting on all winter, waiting to feel better and for the weather to brighten up.  I'm so glad I saved it and read it now.  The only better time would have been actually on summer vacation, when you can start worrying about what might be peeking through the ocean murk at your delectable toes in the surf.

Our book is all serious and set in the future (post 2017) and recording a documentary about 'ghost ships' and the great modern mystery of ghost ships is the 2015 vanishing of the good ship Atargatis with all hands (plus a film crew, a slew of desperate/broke scientists, a team of "professional mermaid performers," and our Felicia Day stand-in internet blogging personality) in the waters above the Mariana Trench (the official name is singular - I had to go look it up).  Since we know from the start that something killed all of them, and because the book is billed as a horror on the back, I don't feel like I'm spoiling anything to say that they're all dead by the end.

However, it's the voyage that counts, and we get a lot of mileage from just a few pages as our colorful cast assert themselves and work themselves ever deeper into the mire.  What I found interesting is that save two particularly nasty pieces of work, every character is more or less sympathetic, from the worry-wart captain to the den-mother troupe-leader, even to our dynamic if not particularly bright duo of cameraman and blogger personality.  Unlike a lot of horror, you never really get the sense that this poor crew of people deserves it (again, save two specific exceptions), but at the same time, the novella is so short that the slight glimmers of personality don't do much to quench the heady satisfaction of a good blood-bath.  Grace-notes abound, from the unfortunate attempts at communication via ASL, to the sweet morbid scene between the elder-statesman scientist and the creeping death advancing on him, to the fine line between the natural curiosity and camera-ready smile of our personality.

Really quite fun, in the most creepy way.    

Graphic Novels: Hinges (Books 1&2). Meredith McClaren

Hinges Book 1: Clockwork City
Meredith McClaren
ISBN: 9781632152534

Hinges Book II: Paper Tigers
Meredith McClaren
ISBN: 9781632155245

Read April 11, 2016

I wish I had known that book two ended on a cliffhanger.  I would have stopped with Book One until there was an actual ending.  Personal niggles aside, this is an interesting series with good potential for young adult or tween reading programs.  Orio is an independently-animated puppet (?) clockwork (?) mechanical person (?) who is suddenly integrated into a small society of similar people in a small isolated city bounded by a great wall.  Each person has an assigned mechanical companion in the form of an animal called an "odd" (shades of daemons and Golden Compass) but the reader notices what Orio does not - that her chosen "odd" is in fact an interloper.  Before the first slim book is over, this mistake will cost Orio her whole world.  The second book takes place in the great wild outside the city, and reminded me greatly (in a good way, I swear) of the very bad, and very short-lived TV show that built on the premise of the movie Logan's Run. (which I feel obligated to inform readers, has nearly nothing to do with the premise of the BOOK Logan's Run, or the many sequelae).  The "villains" of the two books remind me of yet another foe: the chalklings of Brandon Sanderson's Rithmatist.  In Book Two, Orio and her odd (named Bauble) quickly find a companion - a feckless runaway from yet another city that claimed to be the only civilized place in the world.  The two (three?) explore an underground city that seems to have been abandoned or destroyed, and Book Two leaves the reader (viewer?) on a literal cliffhanger.  The author/artist's blog estimates that Book Three will be out in February/March 2017.  

It's beautiful and wild and atmospheric, and a very slight story.  Very mythical and fairy-tale-ish.  Lots of questions raised and not directly answered.

Science Fiction: Last First Snow, Max Gladstone (Craft Sequence)

So far I've read Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise, and I'm planning to get to Full Fathom Five this summer as my beach read.  I wanted to hit up Last First Snow because we get to go back in time to Dresediel Lex and Temoc and see Caleb as a child, and of course Elayne in her prime standing up to The King in Red.

Last First Snow (Craft Sequence)
Max Gladstone
ISBN: 9780765379405
Read April 10, 2016
Direct prequel to Two Serpents Rise, featuring Elayne, Temoc (& Caleb), and the King in Red.


This look back in time shows the traumatic events that shaped Caleb's young life and his estrangement with his father Temoc, which forms a huge part of Two Serpents Rise.  As part of a deal to revitalize the inner city, Elayne attempts to broker a deal that would slowly "improve" the warrenlike slums that form the Skittersill through investments and gentrification.  The locals heartily disapprove, and mysterious forces collude to skuttle the deal.  Furthermore, Temoc, the last of the old priests, is attempting to revitalize the worship of the old gods (whichever ones of them hadn't gotten outright killed off in the very recent God Wars) through spiritual rituals instead of human sacrifices.  The King in Red is brash and young (well, newer?  fresher?) and more easily led by spite and pique.  All of this is going to collide in an awful conflict that no one really wants, and no one quite knows who started, or who will gain.

Each of these books marries a weird spiritual or philosophical question with a banking issue, and this one is (no spoilers) concerned with gentrification and ownership of property and insurance fraud, twined around by questions of destiny, of legacy, of loyalty (between people, and between gods, and to ideals or philosophical goals), and of the peculiar responsibility that comes from being a public servant.

The story veers wildly between spiritual banking and physical mayhem, and the ending (even though you know what's coming, having presumably read Two Serpents Rise) is brutal and scouring.  I started this book way back in the fall last year, and put it down right before the finale due to ill health, and I'm glad that I did.  I'm much happier reading about terrible and horrible events in the bright light of a new spring than in the faded dead light of November.  I'm also glad to have had a while to disconnect from the characters, or the torment and anguish they face (especially Temoc) would have been too much for me to enjoy the story.

I was reminded again how much I like this conceit of soul-stuff as the basis of commerce, and of gods and magic as fundamentally financial and transactional in nature.  It's such a weird perfect system and the world is so like our own but skewed in so many little weird ways.  In this book, a character expends their entire stock of personal soul in a wild taxi ride, then pops up to an ATM in a hotel lobby and withdraws a fresh stock from a personal bank account to refill their soul and stay alive.  It's so wild and exotic, but so mundane and familiar.    

Tuesday Storytime: Counting Concepts

One Giant Splash:  A counting book about the ocean
Michael Dahl, illustrated by Todd Ouren
ISBN: 9781404805774
Textured collages and hidden images in bright saturated colors.

All of these are on the short side, to be totally honest - it's hard to get a long sustaining narrative going in counting or math-concept form.  I'm impressed with books like One White Wishing Stone or Molly Bang's Ten Nine Eight because they manage a narrative flow so deftly, but even then it's hard to sustain.  So, despite being short, I like this one for quite a few reasons: 1) it's a counting-down book (starting from 12) instead of counting up.  2) so colorful and vibrant.  3) the language is STELLAR.  I love it.  There are slant-rhymes and wordplay and alliteration and consonance and it's just fabulous to read.  Delightful.  4) there's a decided mystery at play, because our first page is the Giant Splash, but we don't see who it is until the very end.  5) the pace of the "mystery" picks up as we move from languid spreads to hurried frantic pages to the last reveal page.  Absolutely a winner.


Ten Little Ladybugs
Melanie Gerth, illustrated by Laura Huliska-Beith
ISBN: 9781581170917
Concept book with textured plastic ladybugs on board-book pages

Our rhyme counts inexorably down to zero as our ladybugs vanish after various encounters, but what's happening to the missing bugs?  Surely they can't be getting eaten, but as the encounters range from big grasshoppers to even more dangerous frogs and birds, the kids start looking more and more concerned.  Of course they're all safe at the end (this is a toddler storytime after all) drawn traditionally on the last page to preserve the happy surprise.


One, Two, Cockatoo!
Sarah Garson
ISBN: 9781842709443
Lovely orange and yellows suffuse this bright cheery book with rainstorms and happy birds.

Again with the unavoidable shortness, but we had a distracted and young-skewing group today, so it worked out nicely.  This one starts off as a combined counting and math-concept book at the beginning, but it quickly drops that to move to just counting upwards to ten as the birds frolic in the trees before, during, and after a rainstorm (with a bonus bird at the end!).  I like this book mainly for the colors and the brightness of the cheery friendly birds dancing and playing with each other.  Something about the illustrations just makes me feel quite happy and content, and I hope that feeling gets transferred to the kids.  

Manga (Book Club Read) Wolf Children, Mamoru Hosoda & Yu

Wolf Children: Ame and Yuki

Mamoru Hosoda, illustrated by Yu (Original character designs by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto)

Translation by Jocelyne Allen, lettering by Tania Biswas & Lys Blakeslee

ISBN: 9780316401654

Hardcover Manga compilation of the original manga series companion to the Wolf Children film.

Read April 3, 2016

Our April read was also our first manga for the book club.  Attendance was slight, and I wonder if people either didn't want to try a different format, or if there is just not much overlap between traditional comics/graphic novels and with manga.  (or more likely, it was still the tail end of Spring Break, so people could have been out enjoying the lovely weather.)  

Regardless, it was a cute story, and another nice light read after February's War Story, and the upcoming Civil War (the comic, not the movie - I'm honestly not looking forward to slogging through the comic series again, but it is what it is.)  March's Hawkeye Vol. 1 was likewise beautiful, and the full review is upcoming, although I did a short teaser review in September.

Back to Wolf Children. The story is simple and bittersweet (as are most shoujo anime/manga) and focuses on the very brief childhood of two siblings raised by a very young, but determined widowed mother.  The children's father is a brief and mythological figure in the very beginning of the story, who dies tragically trying to provide for his infant children.  

After his death the story has roughly two parts - the first section focuses on the mother, Hana, as she tries to keep her children's changeable natures hidden from society while living in the middle of a big city, and navigating health scares and poverty.  

Once she realizes she can no longer keep the children hidden and protected in the city, the story moves to a property in the countryside and the focus shifts to the two children and their developing personalities and natures.  Yuki, the eldest, begins by being fierce and adventuresome, but after an incident at school, she begins to despise and fear her wolf nature.  Her younger brother Ame starts life as a weak and sickly boy, but after an accident in the woods, he associates nature with strength and challenge, and becomes enamored of the wilderness and of his own innate wildness.

The story finishes as the children reach the wolf equivalent of adulthood - still very young by modern American standards.  As to be expected by shoujo manga, there are no real inversions of tropes, and the plot is predictable and minor - the real focus is the beautiful line-work of the art, and of the focus on individual moments in character interactions: the harried and frantic mother with a sick child that she can't take to the hospital, two wolf-toddlers tussling in an apartment, feelings of alienation at school and in the woods, interactions with neighbors and friends.  All these are sweetly and truly drawn, and make the slight story worthwhile and lovely.  

While I haven't seen the movie yet, if it covers the same ground as the manga, it would be a delightful way to introduce very young or very sensitive children to anime - before they're old enough to enjoy Ponyo or Kiki's Delivery Service for example.    

Urban Fantasy (sequel) Marked in Flesh, Anne Bishop

This is the fourth in the Others Series by Anne Bishop.  I've read and reviewed the first three:
Written in Red
Murder of Crows
Vision in Silver

Marked in Flesh
Anne Bishop
ISBN: 9780451474476
Read April 5, 2016

Book four won't make much sense if you haven't read the first ones, so don't think you can just jump in.  We've lost focus on the Courtyard a bit, and shuffle between there, the Intuit (not a spelling error) /Other village where one of the "sweet bloods" has settled (our young artist from the previous book), and a new pair of western prairie towns that are introduced in this book for the specific purpose of having people to kill off (the entire continent of Europe is likewise introduced).

The jumps around are still present, but they're executed much more competently, and the shifts in perspective are more pronounced, so it's easier to keep track of who is where, even with a whole new place thrown in.  Characters are still very much archetypes, and we're never in any confusion about who is on the good guy side and who is on the bad guy side, but eh - again, I'm not expecting Shakespeare here.

I will say that as the series goes on, there is a distinct "second-class citizen" vibe going on, especially at the end of this book.  I'm not going to get into spoilers, but I will say that the specifics referenced, and the actions committed (and then excused or explained away) are starting to make me want to step away from this series before it goes any further down that path.  That of course is the trouble with making one side of the conflict into utterly bad monstrous people - that makes it ok to do terrible things to them in retribution.  Except it doesn't really. So that's starting to be an unfortunate and growing sour note.  I felt that way slightly after the third book, and it was much stronger and more direct this time around.  I may not read the next at all - if there is another one.

Tuesday Storytime: Wild Animals

From the domestic to the dangerous!

Tiny Little Fly
Michael Rosen, illustrated by Kevin Waldron
ISBN: 9780763646813
Lush loose paintings of oversized wild animals, including a double-fold-out page.

Waldron really knocks it out of the park with these illustrations, which give us a fly-eye view of these massive wild animals: elephant, hippo, and tiger (a SHE tiger!) which all try to catch that pesky fly, but of course fail.  Rosen's story is short and pithy, and it would be quite short enough for a middle read in a pinch.  Lovely package, great fun story.  Now I only need one more short "fly" book, and I can do a trio of pesky bug stories with this one and Old Black Fly (Aylesworth, ISBN: 9780805039245).


Monkey and Me
Emily Gravett
ISBN: 9781416954576
Very rhythmic and repetitive, with great options for call-and-response.

Gravett is a lovely picture book artist, and I really enjoy her work, from the tongue-in-cheek (Dogs, The Odd Egg) to the unexpectedly poignant (Again!, The Blue Chameleon).  This one is firmly in the silly category, and is so slight as to almost not have a storyline.  Our spunky girl and her floppy-limbed stuffed monkey imitate various animals, and then on the following spread (after eliciting guesses from the audience), a gorgeous rendition of those animals appears. Perfect for the middle spot, but not for storytellers who shy away from sing-song or outright singing, because that's the only way I can think to get through the repetitive wording.


I Spy with My Little Eye
Edward Gibbs
ISBN: 9780763652845
Die-cut book showing various beautifully-painted animal eyes along with clues as to what they are.

This is quite probably the most beautifully-painted die-cut conceit book I've ever seen.  I adore reading it, and the idea is so simple and so clever and so pretty, I wish there were more of them.  Gibbs has taken a large central cut-out and painted an eye there, with a set of clues about the animal who might be lurking behind the page: so "I spy with my little eye..." on one page with the eye painted, and on the other, the cut-out showing rich blue, and the following clues: "... something that is blue" and "I am the biggest animal in the whole world."  Obviously we have a blue whale, followed by polar bears, orangutans, lions, and one cheeky frog who has the temerity to end the book by looking back out and spying "YOU" and offering the now-empty die-cut hole to peer through for effect.  In a lot of treatments, it could have been cute and slight, but the paintings are so rich and so beautiful that it really adds a lot of weight and fun to the progression.