Assorted Picture Books and Graphic Novels

[sanguinity]

Some of the 2011 books what I never got around to posting about. (There will likely be several of these posts.) Feel free to ask more about any of these.

26. Richard van Camp (Dogrib), A Man Called Raven, illus George Littlechild (Plains Cree).

Story-within-a-story about the Raven who watches over his people, and two contemporary boys who have forgotten things they should know, and consequently try to torment it. Nicely done.

(And for those who worry about these things, no great harm comes to the boys. Nor the Raven, either.)


27. Thomas King (Cherokee), Coyote Solstice Tale.

I had high expectations for this, based on Coyote Columbus Story (which I adore beyond measure) and other work of King's. Unfortunately, this one didn't live up to those (perhaps unreasonably high) expectations. I like the meta about commercial Christmas intruding on everything, and of course Coyote would be very, very susceptible to Christmas consumer mania (and unrepentantly so!), but I expected more layers, more snark, more slyness. Either it wasn't here, or it went right past me whoosh.


28. Cynthia Leitich Smith (Muscogee), Tantalize: Keirnen's Story.

Another book where my expectations got the better of me. I thought I was gonna get a new story about Kiernen (and I really really want a story about Kieren!), but instead got Tantalize told from Kieren's pov. What's more, Kiernen's pov here tracks very tightly against Quincie's pov in the original: the change in narrator doesn't open up the story or reveal new things. Mostly, this just felt like Tantalize repackaged for boys in graphic novel format, and doesn't bring much new for existing fans of Tantalize.


29. Lance Tooks, The Devil on Fever Street.

Graphic novel about Black Lily, a devout and much beloved community worker, who goes head-to-head with the Devil. There was quite a lot that was nicely done about this -- the premise had an interesting twist, the Prince of Lies is very fond of telling the truth, and I spent a goodly while trying to suss whether the Devil was straight up or running a gambit (and whether those two things are different, in the end) -- but ultimately, this was written for a Christian audience, which is not me.

The Other Wes Moore; My Life as a Furry Red Monster

[sanguinity]

30. Wes Moore, The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates

( Comparative case study of two Baltimore kids, both named Wes Moore. )

31. Kevin Clash, My Life as a Furry Red Monster.

( He wanted to make puppets. Then he grew up to be Elmo's puppeteer. )

Blood Brothers by Steven Barnes

[dorothean]

Thanks to torachan for sending me this one!

This time I'll just repost my Goodreads review, which is here. I've tried to avoid spoilers below.

It's hard to decide how to rate this book. For the first 50 pages or so I was constantly about to put it down for good. But I knew I couldn't, because if I did, I'd never find out what happened next! And then I got into it and couldn't put it down.

I kept being jolted out of the story by little details I couldn't believe. Egg cartons don't work like that! Eight-year-olds don't work like that! The moon doesn't work like that! etc. Also by some larger details -- Computer programming never worked like that (right?)! Men and women don't work like that!

Also jolting: there are many offensive things in this book! There are several villains. The major white villain has a name. The major black villain mostly goes by "The African." There is a minor villain thought of by all of the viewpoint characters as "The Indian." The African and the Indian have pretty interesting backstories, but none that really explain why they don't have, you know, names. (I think the African doesn't have a more specific national identity because it would be too slanderous to associate him with an actual group of people.) There are plenty of racial and ethnic slurs.

There's a blurb on the back cover that says the book is "nicely plotted, wonderfully paced, and has characters the reader cares about. What else do you need?" and for the first third of the book I kept thinking that the answer to this question was Respect for Women.

The main female characters later get a lot more personality and/or responsibility for the plot, but it's true that while we meet the two main male characters by finding out what they're good at in addition to what they look like, all the female characters (including the little girls -- urgh) are introduced in terms of how extremely physically attractive they are.

Given all of this, I was astonished by how much I got sucked into the story. I even ended up liking Waites and Tucker, the two main characters, although not as much as I was probably supposed to.

We're introduced, first, to Tucker, a white man with a history of violence and alcohol abuse, who is separated from his wife. He's visiting her and their two children on Thanksgiving, trying to get a second chance at being part of the family. The next thing anyone in the outside world knows, the wife and daughter are brutally murdered, the son is missing and later found dead, and Tucker is blaming the whole thing on some mysterious black men. If I'd been reading about this in the paper, I'd have very little doubt that Tucker was lying and that he committed the murders himself. This is what everyone else thinks too, and Tucker's sent to prison for life.

But this part of the story is told from Tucker's point of view, and it turns out he's right about his innocence -- his family were attacked by members of a conspiracy involving both black and white men.

We then meet Waites, a nerdy (but of course handsome) computer programmer who's also estranged from his wife and two children (the same age as Tucker's were). When inexplicable and terrifying things begin happening to his family, Waites resorts to his shady haxx0r past to figure out what's going on, and his research leads him to Tucker.

I started off at once intrigued by the situation, delighted by the reversal of stereotypes (the white man is the athletic, violent one and the black man is the brains) but kind of put off by one of the apparent themes (Ladies, your man might seem no-good and you might be making a perfectly good life for yourself without him, but really you should give him one more chance!). The intrigue and delight kept getting better (there's a bit where a white supremacist survivalist group suddenly becomes important to the plot and I said right out loud "Did you really do that?" and laughed for ages) and the themes that I didn't agree with at least stayed sort of in the background, and became somewhat interestingly complicated.

I can't really discuss what I loved any more without spoiling the plot, but I will say (1) there is a great deal of potential for Waites/Tucker slash (in fact I am off to check the AO3 archives immediately after posting this), (2) the story is set during and immediately after the riots in Los Angeles triggered by the verdict in the Rodney King trial, and comments on them, (3) the day is saved in part by people doing family history, which I adored, (4) the story is even more awesome than suggested by the back cover description (which contains some inaccuracies).

And some warnings: There are some graphic descriptions of rape, told by the woman who experienced them. Also, a major part of the story depends on abortion being murder, and, relatedly, there's a scene that I can imagine being really horrible to read for a person who has had a miscarriage of a wanted pregnancy. Lastly, there is a lot of extremely gruesome description of non-sexual violence.

I ended up enjoying this book very, very much, and I'll be reading more of Steven Barnes' novels, but Blood Brothers is hard to recommend without the above caveats!

Silver Phoenix; Fury of the Phoenix

[sanguinity]

32. Cindy Pon, Silver Phoenix.

( Re-read, nothing but spoilers under here. )

That last bullet point turns out to be highly relevant, because…


33. Cindy Pon, Fury of the Phoenix.

…exists mostly to explain what Zhong Ye and Ai Ling were talking about at the end of Silver Phoenix. In structure, Fury alternates between the backstory between Silver Phoenix and Zhong Ye, and the further adventures of Ai Ling and Chen Yong (which turn out to be heavily intertwined with that backstory).

I enjoyed the backstory. It was nice to get the explanation of what Ai Ling had been on about at the end of Silver Phoenix; it was satisfying to finally get the rest of the scoop on the prologue to Silver Phoenix; and I always enjoy a good "and this was the path by which he turned to evil" story. (Although I found this one too simple to be truly satisfying.)

The Ai Ling and Chen Yong portions of the novel, on the other hand…( very general spoilers )

Eh. Overall, one of those not-terribly-satisfying-but-at-least-I-know-how-it-came-out-now kinds of things. And yes, the weakness of the sequel makes it harder to recommend the first, especially since the ending of the first doesn't make proper sense until after you've read the sequel.