#27. The Education of Hopey Glass (The Complete Love & Rockets, Vol. 24), by Jaime Hernandez

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#27. The Education of Hopey Glass (The Complete Love & Rockets, Vol. 24), Jaime Hernandez

2008 (material originally published 2005-'08), Fantagraphics Books

 

Okay, here I go about Love & Rockets again.  I feel a little dumb writing in so much detail about each new volume of the series I devour (being on a ten-year catch-up binge as I am), since I'm not sure anyone else is interested.  But at the same time, it's hard for me to resist it.  Half of the books -- the ones by Jaime Hernandez, about his post-punk ambisexual working-class Latina chicks in L.A. -- I've been following for so many years and love so much that I can't help gushing on and on.  And the ones by Gilbert Hernandez, about his ever-more-convoluted Lynchian psychosexual post-magic-realism Mexican American and Central American émigrés in L.A. -- the ones who all seem to sport big breasts, huge butts, impressive penis sizes, and an increasingly complicated array of fetishes... well, those are so involuted that I can't really follow the story line unless I break it all down for myself.

 

So here we have  Volume 24, all about Maggie's best friend and one-time lover Hopey Glass.  The overarching narrativethrust comes from the fact that Hopey has a new job.  It's a real job, which is really strange for her!  As long as we've known her, Hopey was living either with or on other people; or playing bass with a band; or off a small inheritance; or, more recently, bartending and working odd jobs.  But apparently she recently took up temping, and now she has -- of all things -- studied for, taken, and passed an exam to become certified as a teaching assistant in the state of California.  It's a new school year now, and her job is about to begin.

( What this volume's all about... )

 

#28. Skim, by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki

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 #28.  Skim, Mariko Tamaki (writing) and Jillian Tamaki (art)
2008, Groundwood Books

Another book that I found through reviews on this comm.   (Thanks again to all of you: you keep leading me to wonderful books.)

I enjoyed the book for many of the same reasons others did, especially those mentioned by kyuuketsukirui, sanguinity and [Bad username or unknown identity: puritybrown .]   As regards the art style, I also loved, as someone else mentioned, that it clearly evokes Japanese aesthetics and the Japanese artistic tradition... but the influences it draws on are not manga.  There's something about that, especially given the often troubling aspects of gender representation in mainstream manga (I'm thinking of exaggerated gender dimorphism, neoteny, and hypersexualization), that I found profoundly refreshing and even kind of inspiring.

Very highly recommended.  I'm putting Mariko Tamaki's other graphic work, Emiko Superstar, on my to-read list, and I'd love to see other work from Jillian Tamaki.  (Actually... let's see.  Her website is here, there's an interesting illustrated interview with her here, and I see mention of a 2006 book called Gilded Lilies.  Has anyone read it?)

[Tags I would add if I could: spirituality (or: religion/spirituality), high school]

Hey, by the way: [Bad username or unknown identity: puritybrown , ]did you ever send the Tamakis that fan letter?

Jupiter Williams by S.I. Martin

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Title: Jupiter Williams
Author: S.I. Martin
Number of Pages: 218 pages
My Rating: 5/5

Fourteen-year-old Jupiter is a rather spoiled rich boy at the African Academy in Clapham, England in 1800, ignorant of the reality outside his comfortable bubble. But then his younger brother get kidnapped by slavers and everything changes.

I really enjoyed this a lot. The writing is great and didn't have that typical YA feel to it at all, and Jupiter is a great (if not very likable) character. In many ways it's a typical "riches to rags" sort of adventure story, but it's made unique by the fact that the hero and most of the other main characters are black (while still being historically accurate; the African Academy really did exist).

I'm looking forward to reading the sequel.

Mooch from BookMooch.

Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

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I didn't check, but I imagine this has been reviewed here before ...

I've been a Gladwell fan for a long time, and I think this is his best book. He has found a new way of framing (among other things) class discrimination, a way that stands some chance of making headway with the "we all start equal" crowd.

His basic thesis is that the people who look like stars in any field, from hockey to computer science to the law invariably turn out to be part of cohorts that had unexamined special advantages: these might be sociocultural, or they might be pure coincidence (sports success, he proves, correlates astonishingly well to birth month). He also examines situations where a set of unexamined special circumstances can be disadvantages (cultural issues that limit pilot safety, for example, or that increase honor killing).

Being Gladwell, he is scrupulously careful to point out that cultural differences are, in fact, differences, and confer advantages and disadvantages based on situation and context. He also does the brave thing of using his own life story in the book's last chapter, showing how the points he made throughout the book made it possible for him to be a middle-class Caribbean-Canadian man with a very successful writing career (and it made me want to find and read his mother's books).

Highly recommended.

Girl Overboard and Lucy the Giant

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19. Girl Overboard by Justina Chen Headley

I didn't expect to like this, as normally I can't stand 'poor little rich girl' stories. I think the difference here is that I couldn't help liking Syrah, the main character. She wasn't self-pitying, and didn't sit around waiting for someone else to come and fix her life. Her problems were the type that I think most could relate to - family, weight, boyfriend, friends, and the loss of something she loved (snowboarding, after an accident).

I liked that all the characters ended up quite complex, even if some of them started out seeming stereotypical. I also very much liked the ending, although I don't want to spoil it! And finally, I liked how Headley handled issues like gender and weight - Syrah wasn't made happy by succeeding in losing weight, she became happy when she gave up dieting and started to enjoy food.

20. Lucy the Giant by Sherri L. Smith

Another book about a teenage girl with family problems :). But very, very different. Lucy's father is an alcoholic, and she is driven to run away. Her height (over 6 foot) means she is taken as an adult - something she takes advantage of by joining a crabbing boat.

I loved this. It was very emotional, reading as Lucy learnt what normal life was like for most people - from the big things, like having someone care for them, to little things, like learning that most people don't leave money lying out in the open. Of course, in the end the boat crew she's joined discover her real age. They reacted the way you'd imagine, but even so, this has a happy (or at least hopeful) ending. It made me cry, so if you feel like a depressing but hopeful read, I recommend this!