I’ve visited YouNeek YouNiverse before with Okupe’s WindMaker. It’s sort of like Wakanda expanded and trying to be Marvel for African-centric stories and African superheroes. So from a purely representational perspective, it’s an awesome concept.
But just as comics, it leaves a lot to be desired. Unless you’re really into this sort of thing and by this sort of thing one means: cheap video game like graphics and plots that read like superhero cartoons with pages that look like stills from superhero cartoons. To be fair, Okupe tried here with Wale Williams – from the conventionally alliterative name to borrowing heavily from such heavies of the Marvel Universe as Iron Man and The Cyborg. But mostly that just made the final product seem unoriginal and kind of inferior as a pastiche. I don’t mean to be ripping this, not really, it’s fine, has a kind of blandly slick or slickly bland entertaining quality to it. And I’m not really a reader or fan of traditional superhero fare, so there’s that to consider. This book was way longer than anticipated, but had the decency to read quickly enough – oh so many fight scenes. Overall, indifferent, may or may not read more. Library seems to be getting them and sometimes there is a place and time for a mindless read.
0 Comments
The strikingly titled Vertical Sea is a story of panic attacks and one woman’s struggle to cope with them in her daily life.
It sounds simple because it is quite simple, primarily complicated by the geography, because as it turns out or at least according to this book, while Italy has some gorgeous art and spectacular food, their attitudes toward mental disorders are still somewhat medieval. That’s actually a good way to judge if the country is first, second, or third world – just check out the way they treat mental disorders. If they propose exorcism or just shun and stone the old-fashioned way – third tier. If they kinda understand what’s going on but still shun it and victimized the person, like they do in this book, - second. You get the idea. Anyway, so the lovely willowy protagonist of this book has to deal with loads of crap because of her panic disorder, crap that primarily streams from her teaching position (one she loves) and the kids’ parents, etc. The other way to know this is a European comic is to take in all of the casual nudity. Now that they are good with. So that’s something. Overall, though, nothing special outside of some pretty art and the message that Italy’s kinda backwards in some way. Ta-da. Survivalists (colloquially referred to as preppers) as a concept fascinate me the same way cults to. And why not? They are at least cult adjacent: the mentality, the ethics, the ideologies.
This is a tale of an ordinary woman, a young lawyer who idea of preparedness mostly involves spending most of her life working to make partner, who falls in with a small group of survivalists. Well, that’s an oversimplified description of the plot, anyway. When you get really into it, this is a novel about race and class and privilege and a society that puts its citizens through such an obstacle course on the way to what it seems success that it leaves people floundering and grasping at the most unlikely straws. And also, like so many stories, this is about love. Love is how it begins, anyway. Our protagonist, Aretha, is searching for it, finding dud after dud, until Aaron comes along and checks every box. Aaron is handsome, kind, considerate, self-employed, self-sufficient AND owns a brownstone. Well, some of it, anyway. For a New Yorker whose idea of being well housed is maybe not having a flatmate, this is a dream come true. But there’s a but. Aaron shares the brownstone with two other people who are less that friendly to others and more than friendly with guns. All Aaron wants to do is brew coffee and love Aretha and so she is sold, against her bff’s cautionary advice. All in, Aretha moves in, and proximity breeds strange bedfellows out of them all. Just as Aretha’s professional life is unraveling, her personal life turns into a very peculiar rollercoaster, a well-armed and dangerous one. In a way, this novel is about the unmaking of the American dream. Aretha, who followed the premise to the tee, finds herself unmooring and spiraling with such a velocity because the world around her, the world she’d worked herself to the bone to fit into, doesn’t reward her for her sacrifices, but in fact, alternates between indifference and menace. If love isn’t lovely and friendship isn’t friendly and employment isn’t enjoyable, then what is there left? Guns. Survivalists is, thus, ultimately a tale of disenfranchisement. With race thrown in just right, which is to say cleverly and observationally (like Jordan Peele did in his comedy), not overpoweringly (like Jordan Peele does in his scary movies). There’s also a great metaphor with the brownstone itself, but you’ll just have tor ead to find out what that is. Overall, a very good read, one of those things where the narrative and the writing are so strong that you don’t even need to particularly like or emotionally engage with the characters to enjoy. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley. I love Lemire’s work so much that choosing his books doesn’t even require a plot summary. Or I should say I love Lemire’s original work so much, because I’ve recently read his Moon Knight trilogy and was pretty underwhelmed. Only so much one can do with a stock superhero character and Lemire, to his credit, did that, but still…limitations.
In his original work, though, Lemire does fascinating and dark, very dark, things. This one is no exception. The name is something of a pun for this is indeed a tale of a family tree but in a direct, strange, and strangely literal way. Is this tale of a bizarrely treed family worth checking out? Absolutely. The plot is interesting and just the right kind of odd and the art in all of its angularity really works to compliment the story. Suck a quick read too. Really hope library gets further volumes. Recommended. Finck is an interesting author. This is my third read by her but a completely different experience. The other two were narratives, this one is a collection of cartoons.
Makes perfect sense – Finck is, after all, a cartoonist, but oddly enough, her cartoons didn’t do that much for me wherein her other books showcase an undeniable gift for narrative. The cartoons were ok, fine, but mostly nothing special, nothing to distinguish it from oh so many other clever cartoons out there. The plots and ideas are mostly observational and mostly profoundly personal, almost confessional in nature. So presumably you’ll enjoy them in direct proportion to how relatable you’ll find them, which is to say how much you can relate to a fairly stereotypical 30-year-old or so NYC millennial. I prefer my cartoons with more of the worldview or more out there, less personal and definitely with more art to them. Gimme clever talking animals any day over someone’s whine about their singledom. Anyway, this was still kinda fun and had its random abstract moments. Finck’s art consists of squiggles so minimal they take time getting used to, but it works decently enough for the format. The book is long, over 400 pages, but goes by quickly. Like cartoons do. A randomly selected anthology made up of authors I’ve mostly never heard of and what an awesome read this turned out to be.
Reader, beware: behind this fairy generic title madness lies. Madness in form of well-written, atmospheric, literary frights. Dark, dark as the night itself. Such an impressive quality, one after another. This book is a product of something like a literary collective, Wily Writers. I was misremembering it as Wily Women until just checking it to make sure, because majority of the authors featured are female. In fact, when you get to the first (one of the only two maybe?) male-authored stories, you might notice it doesn’t really work at all with anthology’s overall tone and ambiance. But either way, this was a very good read and an absolute genre fan’s delight. A slender volume that manages quite a punch to the psyche, this one might indeed induce nightmares as designed. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley. I’ve been very selective with my mystery thrillers lately. I blame the genre. It’s long ago done away with quality control in the name of quantity and thus too many mediocrities are floating out there, promising but failing to thrill. But this one…this one seemed different.
Was it the comparisons to Riley Sager? No, not as much as the combination of genres or more like a combination of media formats in the same genre – doing its best to scare you with literary and cinematic at once. So yeah, impossible to resist a good story set amid the movie making world. Or possible, but why would you? Florida Keys (playing the setting as a character here) is a place my fiancé raves about but in books I’d read it always seems to be on the verge of obliteration. And here, once again, it’s being hurricaned into oblivion while one devoted mother is desperately trying to get her daughter out of the clutches of her evil/maybe evil grandpa (the woman’s father-in-law) who is just about the most famous director of scary movies there is making a sequel to the most famous movie he’s made. Something sinister is going on at the movie set, but is it the director, well-known for pranking and terrifying his actors into their best frightened performances or something more? Natural or supernatural, but there’s something spooky in a decidedly haunted estate on the Keys. So there you go, a fun premise done right. An exciting, well-written and well-paced thriller that competently mingles the wordly with the otherworldly, while sustaining the claustrophobic suspense throughout. The genre prerequisite twist ending, to be fair, was something of a letdown. Perfectly decent but might leave you wanting more. The plot had so much more than that, it seems, to merely devolve into yet another family situation (can’t say more than that, you’ll just have to read to find out). But other than that, a fun ride through and through. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley. I’m not really all that into the Marvel Universe, ubiquitous as it is. I believe this might be one of their latest cinematic characters, but really it wasn’t the draw here – the draw was Lemire himself, a terrific comic writer.
Until now, I’d only read his original fiction and I must say I strongly prefer that. What Lemire does with characters, superheroes or not, is awesome. What he does with a stock character is considerably less awesome. Is Moon Knight an inherently interesting character? Well, sure, Marvel tries. It gave him a multiple personality disorder, for one. That can be very exciting. M. Night Shyamalan’ Split was very exciting. Moon Knight doesn’t have the same appeal. Which is sad. Because it’s different enough and there’s even Greek mythology mixed in as a bonus and all that, but ultimately it kind of falls flat and you’re just left wondering what sort of a person goes crime fighting wearing all white? So freaking impractical. Completist by nature, I ended up continuing this trilogy without being impressed by book one. I found this one even less impressive. Stylistically, it was interesting in that there was a different artist for every personality, but a. I didn’t especially care for the guest artists, preferring the main style of the book ,and b. it made for such a mess. The story is already inherently messy with a classic unreliable narrator struggling to juggle realities and personalities. The style of this volume just spotlighted it. And then they included an original Moon Knight story at the end all the way back from Stan Lee’s Marvel days, with those stupid bangs and those garish colors and those tediously overwritten and overexplained scripts. Which is…you know, nifty. For comparison’s sake. And it is interesting to see how much comics evolved as a genre, but other than that…more mess. Ok, let’s finish this. One more volume. Ok, good enough. A solid finish to a mess of a story about a messed-up character. Considering the entire trilogy now, I can appreciate what Lemire tried to do with the story. It is, in fact, a sloid story about coherency of self, coherency of purpose in spite of the odds. There were some exciting moment, the teetering and the triumph. And yes, I’m sure, eventually I’ll watch the cinematic reincarnation of the white-clad Moon Knight because a. you can’t avoid Marvel and b. I love, love, love the lead actor. But overall, this was something of a disappointment. Not in the Marvel Universe – that never really wowed me, but in Lemire who always does. It kind of made me think of all the actors, talented, terrific actors who end up steamrolled into the Marvel machine and don’t always do their best, competing with CGI, the way they might in their other ventures. Lemire, it seems, is best as doing his own thing. Though this must have been an interesting, commercially viable, experiment for the author. Ok, done. Moving on. Ah, my reward for getting through this very heavy (in every sense of the word) tome is to be the first to review it. Ok, so…
This was meant to me my smart book of the month and sure enough…combining two things I enjoy: historical nonfiction and my beloved fictional genre, the author explores the not inconsiderable connection between the two, specifically the way the latter reflects the former. If you somehow expected an encomium of the great again country and the fun scary stories it inspires, this isn’t a book for you. Oh, no. Poole, who is - based on his previous published work - an expert on both subjects, presents a much more terrifying picture of a country gone mad with power and a genre that has done so well to reflect this madness. In this book, unjust wars lead to dancing with chainsaws and ever-increasing social inequality results in purges, one greater than the next. Poole’s America is an empire more so than a democracy. The amount of effort taken lately to undermine that democracy makes it difficult to argue this posit, but Poole goes further saying that it wasn’t much of a democracy to begin with. Much more of an empire. Built on war, conquest, genocide, power, blood. Like many empires - evil. And no greater reflection of that than the genre that thrives on evil. And so, to support this thesis, Poole takes the readers on a harrowing journey through American past with heavy focus on US meddling in other countries by flexing its sizable military muscles. With dictators installed and supported, wars waged and assisted, money and power applied precisely and strategically, USA has been a major player on the global arena. It is Poole’s assertion that the role has been that of an antagonist. Albeit one who doesn’t think of themselves that way, one that categorically thinks themselves and their actions heroic. This book isn’t merely critical, it’s pretty much a vicious incisive opprobrium. And, unlike most such things seen in media, it’s loaded with supporting facts. Well, the historical aspect of it, anyway. Although the media (books and movies both) criticism is quite clever too. Like most people with a hammerlike aim and determination, Poole does view most things he comes across as nails, but it’s difficult to fault him for the overall presentation is well written, well researched, coherent, intelligent, and very strong. A powerhouse, really. It took me a while to get through but was very well worth a read. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley. This is somewhat outside of my genre range, but the thing is I was so charmed by book one in this series, I continue expecting the author to repeat the trick. So far, he hasn’t. And sure, it’s smart – draw the readers in and then milk the formula out for the entire series. Many writers are doing it, Green is just one of them. But it does leave a lot to be desired.
Maybe it’s impossible to recreate the whimsy and cleverness of the original, since the characters are already established. Maybe it’s simply too much work to be that god every single time. Either way, this book, the third Gideon Sable adventure, was perfectly fine, and possibly even a step up from its predecessor, but a far cry from the original. This time around Gideon Sable is trying to do the happily-in-the-relationship thing, the magic-store-owner-thing, but, of course, something comes up. Something as unignorable as a stone purported to contain the famed song of the sirens. And of course, a thing like that has many greedy eyes on it, so Gideon gets involved with yet another job that’ll test his skills and his bag of tricks. So yeah, time to get the gang back together and do their thing. And sure enough it’s fun enough and a quick read. And every so often there’s a glimpse of that original cleverness and charm too. Thanks Netgalley. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2023
Categories |