Book-A-Day 2010 # 357 (1/26) -- Zombies Calling by Faith Erin Hicks

New creators often make up for a looseness of purpose and control with vast reserves of enthusiasm and energy -- they might not know exactly what it is they want to do, or precisely how to do it, but they're going to do that, whatever it ends up being, as strongly as they can. It's endearing and often contagious, and one of the best reason to seek out new creators.

Zombies Calling wasn't Faith Erin Hicks's first comics story -- she'd worked on long-form webcomics before that -- but this was her first do-it-all-at-once, published-all-together story, where she could control all of the pieces and fix all of the pages before putting it out for the public to see. (And I doubt prose novelists realize what a luxury that is; Dickens didn't have it, most of the time, even though nearly all novelists have it now.)

Zombies has a heroine who is as energetic and enthusiastic as they come: Joss, a Canadian college student with massive loans, two semi-slacker roommates and an encyclopedic knowledge of zombie movies. And, of course, if a modern story references zombies, you know that they're going to appear. (This is precisely the opposite of the rule Joss cites -- Joss has codified all of the knowledge to be found in zombie movies into a series of rules, though Hicks missed the opportunity to beat the movie Zombieland to the punch and organize her story around those rules -- but it seems to me much more common these days. Every single zombie story starts out with people who deeply know zombie mythology, since those are the obvious audience-identification characters after forty-plus years of zombie movies.)

So the plot from there is pretty obvious: zombies attack -- well, shamble around, mostly, but they'll eat your brains if they can manage to get their hands on you -- and Joss leads her two friends to safety using the rules. Except, as I said, Hicks doesn't really organize the story around the rules, so Joss's knowledge is more theoretical than explored. And she doesn't really lead them to safety, either -- I won't give away the ending, but most of the things she says always happen in zombie movies (like the miraculously appearing cache of weapons) don't actually come true. That may have been Hicks's point, but it's so subtle as to be buried, and so it's difficult to say if she meant it.

But Zombies is tremendously enthusiastic and likable, just like Joss, and Hicks does a great version of the slightly grungy pseudo-Oni-house-style. It's a light, breezy zombie story, about some college kids who just want to live their lives without having their brains eaten. Sure, Hicks's metaphor is spelled out a bit too precisely near the end, but this is a book with a lot of heart and an infectious power. (Like zombies themselves, I suppose.)


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Friends With Boys by Faith Erin Hicks

Friends with Boys, the new graphic novel by Faith Erin Hicks (whose The War at Ellsmere I reviewed in a huge round-up month), has an oddly ill-fitting title; it's the story of a teenager, Maggie, who is starting in a public highschool after her mother (who home-schooled her and her three older brothers -- all of whom oddly seem to still be in the same school though there seems to be a few years in between her and her twin brothers and then the oldest one) ran away mysteriously. Maggie has trouble making friends with anyone, since she's been so wrapped up in her family, but she's a tomboy, and has been closer to boys (her brothers) her entire life. So being "Friends With Boys" isn't really the big thing here -- it's that she's in the company of people who aren't family, or without her mother, or something along those lines. The title also makes her homeschooling sound more controlling or sinister, as if it were based on some controlling-young-women religion, and it isn't like that at all.

But there's nothing to stop Maggie from becoming friends with boys, or more than that -- her brothers are friendly and supportive (if awfully rough-and-tumble) rather than over-protective, and even her father (the chief of police of their small town) is a support rather than an authority figure. Friends With Boys is somewhat the story of potential friendships for Maggie, but those friendships are with a brother and sister (Lucy and Alistair) that she meets at school, her brothers (as they work out their own conflicts), and a ghost that she's been seeing in the local graveyard for the past seven years.

The ghost and the Alistair/Lucy friendship together drive much of the plot -- Alistair, a mohawked punk, has a feud with the blond captain of the volleyball team (though, luckily, it's not otherwise as cliched as that may sound), and Maggie is sure she knows what she has to do to put that ghost at rest. But, if Hicks has a message in Friends With Boys, it's that things are more complicated than they look. There are several plot or thematic strands that are raised but never resolved -- primarily among them the disappearance of Maggie's mother just before the book starts -- and the answers we do learn aren't the ones we expected.

All of that makes Friends With Boys an excellent graphic novel for teens, its expected audience -- it's a story about walking out into a wider world, not entirely understanding it, making plans based on what you see -- and then still not entirely understanding that world. So much fiction for teens tries to wrap everything up in one ball or another -- that everything is horrible because adults, or that they can be perfect special snowflakes if they want, or some other pat explanation -- that Hicks' messy complications (and that's without any kind of love-plot, too; how complicated will Maggie's life get what that gets into the mix?) are a breath of cool air, like the dizzying view from a mountaintop. As this book ends, Maggie still hasn't learned how to be friends with boys, but maybe she has learned how to be friends with her brothers, which is one step forward.

The Nameless City by Faith Erin Hicks

In a country that is not China -- but, if it were actually in our world, might be -- there is an important city that has been fought over by three great nations for hundreds of years, with control going back and forth repeatedly. Each of those nations has its own name for the city, but the inhabitants prefer not to give it a name -- since that will only change with the next conquest.

(This is a book aimed for teen readers, or perhaps set in a world slightly more rational than ours, so the inhabitants of that city can have a policy to stand aside and let the three nations fight it out each time. In this world, that means that they survive and continue their lives under different rulers, not that they are sacked and raped and murdered with each change of overlord.)

Faith Erin Hicks tells a story in that city: The Nameless City. That story doesn't end here; there will be at least one more volume. (And what writer can resist a trilogy? Or an expanded trilogy? We'll have to see if Hicks can resist, or wants to.) But the action of this book ends by its last page; this is not a cliff-hanger.

Kaidu is a young man -- say twelve or thirteen, right at the age to begin seriously training for his manhood -- of the Dao nation, the latest conquerors of the city they call DanDao. He grew up with his mother in the homelands, but has been sent to train as a warrior in the city where his never-seen father is an advisor to the Dao general who conquered it thirty years ago and has ruled it since.

Rat is a girl of the streets of the Nameless City, a fearless orphan racing across rooftops, contemptuous of the Dao as her people have been contemptuous of each invader in turn. (So...there's never been any intermarriage among any of these four people, for hundreds of years of turn-and-turn-again conquest? That seems implausible. The people of this city should be utter mutts by this point -- and much stronger for it.)

Kaidu and Rat meet cute, and don't entirely hate each other. They each have no other friends, and so become something like friends when they're not being enemies. Because this is a book for younger people, you may guess that their story is positive and has something like a moral -- don't worry, it's a good moral. If you squint, it might even be a moral about the best government requiring the consent of the governed, rather than that the good overlords will make good decisions because they are good.

This isn't my favorite Hicks book -- there a lot of unexamined neo-feudalism here, and the world is just a hair more cartoonish than I'd prefer -- but it's vibrant and exciting and full of action and has two great characters at its center. Even better, the girl is the more accomplished and level-headed of the two, besides being better at physical derring-do. But, since it's supposed to be for people a third of my age, I can't fault it -- it's very good at doing what it sets out to do, and is a lot of fun as it goes along that path.

The Divided Earth by Faith Erin Hicks

I somehow spaced out on even knowing this book existed. It was published in 2018, a year after the second book in the trilogy (The Stone Heart) and two years after the first (The Nameless City), exactly when I should have expected it and likely at the center of an impressive promotional campaign. 

I even knew the title, and mentioned it near the end of my post on Stone Heart. So I don't know why it took me five years to remember that The Divided Earth existed, and to finally read it. I can say that my memories of the first two books are a bit thin almost a decade later, so I may largely point you readers (assuming you exist, which you may not) to those earlier posts.

Faith Erin Hicks is an accomplished and supple maker of comics, and she finishes up her trilogy well here. It's in vaguely-fantasy territory, that disputed land where there's no obvious magic, clearly a secondary world that resembles medieval China but isn't. I mean that whether a book like this counts as "fantasy" is disputed, but the series is about a disputed land more centrally: the Nameless City itself - actually a city with more names than it would like, as it has been conquered in turn over and over again by the three major nations it lies at the borders of - is both strategically important and a major hub for trade, and is currently in the mitts of the Dao people.

There was a push to make this city semi-independent, ruled by a council with representatives of all of the local powers, to stop the cycle of conquest and death, in the last book. It moved forward a bit, but is the kind of thing that obviously needs all of the major powers to be on board for...and that's going to be difficult at best.

Divided still mostly focused on the two young protagonists - Dao military scion Kaidu and Nameless street kid Rat - and, since this is a series for young readers, what they do has to be not just important but defining for this city. (And who doesn't like a story about fearless young people running along rooftops, battling evil forces, and pleading for peace? Especially when we know they will be successful in the end?) The city comes briefly under siege here, and there's also some sneaking through tunnels to go along with the rooftop parkour we've had in all three volumes. It's fun and adventurous and somewhat inventive - definitely a genre exercise whose broad outlines are visible from space, but solidly constructed, telling a good story well and keeping its moral mostly implied.

Pumpkinheads by Rainbow Rowell and Faith Erin Hicks

Every story that takes place in a short period of time ends up cheating a bit. (Except, maybe, a movie that's filmed in one take, real time: there's no cheating that.) The creators want to squeeze in their whole story in a weekend or evening or lunch-hour, and if that deforms the timeline, well, that's what it takes.

Pumkinheads is pretty good on those grounds, though. It does all take place in one long evening, and could more-or-less fit into the four or five hours available. The cheating is more about what happens, so the reader just has to assume the management of DeKnock's World Famous Pumpkin Patch & Autumn Jamboree either somehow failed to noticed our two protagonists walked off the job at the beginning of the night or just couldn't find them amid all of the other hijinks.

But I seem to have gotten ahead of myself.

Josiah and Deja are friends and co-workers at the Pumpkin Patch, seniors in their last fall working there. They've worked as a team at the Succotash Hut for four years, and Josiah has been MVPPP (Most Valuable Pumpkin Patch Person) four of the last five possible months. But today is the very last night of this season. Josiah has been mooning over someone he calls The Fudge Girl -- she works at the Fudge Shoppe -- so Deja has switched them to work in the Pie Palace, right across the way, and is pushing Josiah to finally walk over and actually talk to this girl he's been obsessing about for much longer than could ever be healthy.

Deja is the outgoing, friendly, pushy one -- I don't know if every friendship has a person like that, but fictional friendship stories need someone like that, or there's not much of a story.

So Deja pushes Josiah, and he runs over on their dinner break (pretty early in the evening) to say hi to Marcy (Fudge Girl's name is Marcy), but finds that she got moved elsewhere in the Patch that evening.

Josiah would be willing to drop it, and spend the rest of this last evening selling pies, but Deja definitely will not. So they're off on an odyssey across almost all of the locations mapped out on the endpapers. (They, sadly, never make it into the Haunted Hacienda, and that's the only spoiler I'll give.)

This does mean dodging what seems to be at least the back half of their shift, but you only have one last night at the patch, right?

Do they find The Fudge Girl? Does Josiah pledge his undying love to a person he's never actually talked to? Well, maybe.

Do they spend a lot of time together, and talk more than they probably did while working? Definitely. Does that lead to interesting places? Of course it does.

And do I mean "interesting places" like the Freeto Pie Stop and the Corn Maze, or "interesting places" in their relationship? Well, can't it be both?

Pumpkinheads is sweet and fun and bouncy, propelled by punchy, teenager-appropriate dialogue and Deja's boundless energy and drive. Writer Rainbow Rowell clearly knows teenagers -- she's a noted YA writer, but this is the first time I've ever read her work. Artist Faith Erin Hicks -- whose work I'm more familiar with -- keeps it all real and grounded and gives a great sense of the physical layout of this place.

This is one of those books that's primarily for teenagers, but at least as much for anyone who can remember being a teenager. It's real and funny and frothy, not quite a romance but a little more than a story about friends. We all need stories like that once in a while, so grab this one of those days.

Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy by Faith Erin Hicks

Sometimes working titles survive everything the book-production process can throw at them. The new project comes in with a title everyone assumes will be replaced, eventually, by something better, but then the whole team gets used to it, every new option is shot down for various reasons, and the placeholder title seems OK by comparison.

Maybe not just OK - it's the way everyone is thinking about the book.

And, eventually, the cover has to be designed and the placeholder title is put in type, and, gosh! it looks just fine there, so whaddayaknow: that's the actual title.

I don't know that happened with Faith Erin Hicks' 2023 graphic novel Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy. But it's the style of title that makes me very suspicious.

This is a teen romance drama, heavier on the teen drama than the romance, which is mostly light and casual. Our central character, as implied in the title, is Alix, the star player on her teen hockey team on Vancouver Island.

Alix is a loner and not good at social interactions. She also seems to be about six feet tall and pretty muscular; we think that has a lot to do with it. (She's big even on her hockey team.) But probably more pertinently, she's been bullied by her team captain Lindsay, for what seems like years - and the other players quietly let it happen, so Lindsay doesn't focus on them.

(The unwritten story here is how horrible their coach is: she sees and allows this behavior from the team captain because, apparently, the team wins consistently. I don't know about legal requirements in Canada, but, where I live, the coach would be a mandated reporter and could - wait, I mean should - lose her job for turning a blind eye to such toxic behavior.)

Anyway, after one game at the very beginning of this book, Lindsay goes off on a tirade against Alix - how she's no good at anything except hockey, will never have a boyfriend, is the worst person ever, that kind of thing - and Alix just hauls off and socks her.

Now, I have never been a teenage girl. But in my years as a teenage boy, when similar things happened, - and they happened quite a lot - both participants would be disciplined, for slightly different reasons, and told nothing like that could ever happen again.

But in Canada, in the year 2023, among young women, in this book at least, it's all Alix's fault, and the coach pulls her into an office to ask seriously why this happened and "where this violence came from." Um, one - hockey, and two - sustained endemic bullying from an authority figure! This is not actually difficult for a coach who has any idea what she is doing...which this one clearly does not.

This is our plot. Alix, who had one completely understandable and long-overdue moment of rage, needs to learn to control her anger. And her coach, having no professional skills in this as in everything else in her purview, leaves Alix to figure out something on her own as a seventeen-year-old, instead of referring her to a counselor or booking her into the league anger-management group or anything else serious and constructive that a coach with actual resources would have done.

Alix instead goes to school the next day, where she sees a classmate, Ezra, facing down his own bully, Greg - who, in the overdetermined world of high-school drama, is also Lindsay's boyfriend, though this plot point doesn't really become important - through words. So she, in her clumsy-galoot way, asks Ezra to teach her not to hit people when they bully her, which, again, she apparently has only done once in her life in the first place.

Ezra, one of the Drama People who are eternally at war with the Jocks, as told in legends and '80s movies since time immemorial, agrees to this random weird request from a gigantic girl he's never really interacted with. And they start hanging out, since Ezra doesn't have an anger-management course or specific lessons he can just tell her to begin with.

Ezra's friends run the gamut of mildly supportive to strongly opposed: how dare he spend any time with someone who is regularly in physical vicinity to bullies like Lindsay and Greg?

Oh! And also, everyone at school thinks Ezra is gay, since he's only dated boys in high school. (He's actually one of these modern "I don't want to put labels on it" kind of person who is not "bisexual" even though he admits he's attracted to both boys and girls - and, we the readers think, any other kind of person he meets, probably.)

Alix starts developing a crush on Ezra, thinking it's impossible. Ezra is the kind of bisexual totally unique unlabel-able teenage sex-god-thing who wants everyone to like and/or love him. They are both dramatic in their own ways, because they are teenagers and it comes with the territory.

There's also an undercurrent of "what do you want to do with your life, and do your parents approve?" Both Alix and Ezra have been raised by single mothers with dramatic backstories - Alix's mom is a "Canadian-famous" sculptor who went strongly against her own parents' wishes to go into the arts and whose husband ran away sometime after Alix's birth to play hockey in the States and apparently has had no contact since; Ezra's mom was abused by his father until ten-year-old Ezra stood up to him with a knife and drove him out of the house.

Consequently, Alix's mom is strongly anti-hockey, and doesn't see the flashing, direct, incredibly obvious parallels between her parents' "it would be crazy for my teen daughter to work so hard on this thing with a very low chance of career success!" arguments and hers. And Ezra is cold to his mother's boyfriend, a perfectly nice guy who seems to have been around for a while and plans to stick around permanently.

Like I said: more drama than romance. Alix and Ezra do eventually work out the "he'd be more than happy to kiss her, too" thing, and they do kiss and hold hands. But the plot-driven Dramatic Stuff takes up most of the book.

I found it a bit overstuffed: there's too many bits of drama, which proliferate as the book goes on, and there's not quite enough space to let it all breathe naturally. A number of things are suspiciously convenient - such as Alix's father's location and the ease of contacting him - when they need to be, and adult reactions also seem to be carefully calibrated to keep the drama running on the right track to the ending Hicks wants.

So my sense is that Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy wanted to be bigger than it was - maybe two books, one mostly Hockey Girl to start and a concluding volume mostly Drama Boy. It all works as it is - Hicks is an old hand at this, and tells stories well - but there's more material here than quite fits comfortably into the package.

Book-A-Day 2014 #27: Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong by Shen and Hicks

This is a fun graphic novel, but the story of how it came to be is possibly more interesting than the book itself: Prudence Shen wrote a YA novel called Voted Most Likely, which she'd submitted to an arm of the Macmillan publishing octopus. Somehow -- I don't know if I've seen the details on that anywhere -- an editor thought Voted Most Likely had a good story, but wanted to turn it into a graphic novel instead. And so that editor brought in Faith Erin Hicks, since First Second (the graphic novel line at Macmillan) had recently published Hicks's Friends With Boys.

(This story could feed into the paranoid writer's idea that "they're going to steal my ideas," except that Shen had to approve the whole thing and was happy about it the whole way.)

Anyway, along the development path the title turned into Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong. And the entire graphic novel was posted for free on the Internet -- that link is to the first page, which also includes a long blog post from Hicks about how the collaboration came to be; Hicks has also written about that process a couple of other places. So you've got an unexpected collaboration, a freemium model for outreach, and a first-time novelist working with an established cartoonist, just to begin with. (And that's not even getting into the oddball take this book has on the great jocks-versus-nerds divide in high school.)

You can still read the whole book for free at that first link above, if you want, so it might be easier to just do that than to read what I have to say. But, if not: Go Wrong is the story of a school election that spirals out of control, driven by the competing financial desires of the robotics club (to go to a major competition) and the cheerleading squad (to get new uniforms).

So, immediately, the jocks are cheerleaders -- but no less scary because of it. And the central character is torn between the two groups: Charlie, captain of the basketball team, best friend of the head of the robotics club, and ex-boyfriend of the cheerleading captain. The story starts out as expected -- old friends competing for the presidency of the school and the budgetary control that goes with it, an escalating set of pranks against the other group -- but then begins a series of swerves, because Shen and Hicks aren't interested in telling a story you've seen a dozen times before.

The high concept here might be jocks vs. nerds, but it gets muddier than that on the very first page, and turns into a story about how we all have to live in a world with many different people -- some of them jerks, some of them scary, some of them blocking things we want -- and how we can all do that together. Charlie and his friends don't always make the right decisions -- do any of us, whatever our ages? -- but they do pretty well, and they work it out in the end. I'm hoping my own teenagers read Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong; I'm going to leave it out casually and see what happens....

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/12

{self-indulgent blathering deleted}

This week, I have one book that arrived by surprise in the mail -- just as I was thinking I should see if the library had it, or maybe even pay money for it. (That's the most wonderful moment for a blogger -- getting something you really wanted unexpectedly.) I also have three books I paid for, which I'll throw in here, because what the hell. So all four of these are books I want to read and am happy to see; I hope some of you will say the same.

The book sent to me by an actual publicist was the new graphic novel by Faith Erin Hicks, The Nameless City. Hicks has done a lot of books over the past decade or so, mostly with fantasy tropes, from Zombies Calling to The War at Ellsmere, and has also worked with other writers, as with Prudence Shen on Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong. I've always liked her stuff, but the last big book I saw of hers -- the eventually Eisner-winning The Adventures of Superhero Girl -- was even better and truer than her previous work, a real gem of a webcomic turned into a great book. So I'm happy to see new work from her: this is the story of two teens in a mysterious often-conquered city somewhere unspecified but vaguely Chinese. Apparently, they're going to save that city, because that's what happens in YA fiction, but I have faith (little pun there) that Hicks can tell that story without lapsing into cliche. This is a trade paperback from First Second, coming in April.

And then for the books I paid for myself, while getting presents from that hegemonic internet store for my older son's (gulp!) eighteenth birthday later this week. The first two are books I've tried to buy from my usual comic shop several times, but they've been repeatedly "coming soon" even when they had been published for months. I'm willing to support small businesses, but there are limits.

Guy Delisle seems to find a groove and do several books in it -- he had a bunch of travelogues (for example, Jerusalem and Shenzhen), and two odd wordless books of stories about men and women (Albert and the Others and Aline and the Others), and now he's on his third book of amusingly badly parenting advice -- the first one was A User's Guide to Neglectful Parenting. All of those various things have been interesting and thoughtful, and Delisle's animation-influenced line is a joy to read as well. So I'm back for this one. (Which, I realize, I should actually name -- it's The Owner's Manual to Terrible Parenting.)

Rick Geary is a busy cartoonist; besides the book he Kickstarted last year and his regular yearly graphic novel about some old interesting murder, he also brought out a quirkier book last year: Louise Brooks, Detective. It's a made-up story -- we in the biz call that "fiction" -- about the once-popular movie actress returning to her childhood home in Wichita (a place Geary also has a long history with) to solve a murder.

And then there's Giant Days, Vol. 1, the third story of that name by John Allison, who is so good that we'll forgive him for confusing us. This iteration is, I think, not connected with his solo webcomics and the fictional town of Tackleford, though I suppose it could be tucked away in another bit of the same universe. Giant Days is an ongoing floppy comic book, and it's drawn by Lissa Treiman, whose work I haven't seen before. Like a lot of Allison's work, it focuses on a group of young women -- in this case, three first-year students at what I assume is a British university.

That's the pile of books I had next to me -- what's up with you folks?

The Stone Heart by Faith Erin Hicks

The trilogy begun in The Nameless City continues here in The Stone Heart -- and, as we all know about trilogies, that means that this book will be darker than the first and have less of an ending. Both of those things are true, and I'll also note that some of the things I grumped about in the world-building of the first book are muted or explained otherwise here -- I don't think Hicks even knew my post existed; just that those are obvious questions that she either already had in mind or had raised to her by librarians or readers or her editors.

So: we're still in not-13th century China, in the city that is officially Nameless in this book (I don't think anyone calls it DanDao, the official name under the current conquerors). Our heroes Kaidu (teen son of a conquering general) and Rat (orphan teen daughter of locals killed by those conquerors and raised by the local monks) saved the life of the General of All Blades in the previous book, making them moderately important and influential. That General, in fact, has come around to the idea that Nameless should be governed by an independent council, made up of representatives of the great warring nations and the locals. It hasn't happened yet, but the current set of conquerors are moving forward to make it happen -- if one of the other major warring nations can be brought on board.

Not everyone agrees with that utopian dream, of course -- particularly not young Dao lordlings who currently expect to grow up to rule this great city and who would be exiled from it under the proposed plan. And lordlings in a feudal society have violent options to stop changes they don't like.

Things get dark -- again, this is the middle book of a trilogy, so that's to be expected. Our heroes can't save the day if the day doesn't need to be saved. There is a lot of age-appropriate death and destruction before the end of The Stone Heart, and there is a day that is definitely endangered. It will probably be another year before the concluding third book, The Divided Earth, which may test the patience of some younger readers (and, who knows? older ones as well). But, from the evidence here, Hicks will reward that wait -- she's been telling great comics stories for a while now, and this trilogy shows her stretching to a larger canvas and doing a great job of it.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/24

I'm writing this the evening of Christmas day, after a hectic few days of last-minute shopping and basement renovations and holiday frivolity, and I'm happy to report that this is the first "Reviewing the Mail" post to emanate from my deeply traditional blogger's basement since late August and the flooding from hurricane Irene. I'm not entirely moved in down here -- I still have books stacked in heaps across three rooms upstairs, waiting for a trip tomorrow to buy new bookcases -- but it's definitely getting there.

However, even in the midst of turmoil and holiday fervor, the mail goes on. And so I have four books to tell you about this week, all of which reached my mailbox over the past few days, which may be just what you're looking for. I usually point out here that I haven't read any of these books yet, but my lead-off title this week is a reprint of one of the best fantasy books of this year (or the past decade, actually), so I'll instead just dive into...

Among Others by Jo Walton, a luminous, deeply felt and masterfully written story of growing up odd and SFnally oriented, combined with a deep but understated fantasy story of perception and possibility. I reviewed it back in the spring, when it was published in hardcover, and I said then "Among Others is a great fantasy novel, a great novel, a great love letter to the power of books and science fiction, and a great picture of a young person so many of us were like, in our own ways." If you read SF and fantasy -- if you've ever read SF and fantasy, or were ever a socially awkward teenager who preferred books to people -- Among Others will be like coming home. The trade paperback edition is coming out on January 3rd from Tor, and I can't recommend it more highly.

Faith Erin Hicks's graphic novel Friends with Boys is coming as a book from First Second in March of 2012 -- but First Second has also been serializing that graphic novel on line, for absolutely free. Hicks has previously created the graphic novels Zombies Calling (my review) and The War at Ellsmere (my short review is buried in the middle of this epic monthly roundup, since I read it during my Eisner-award-judging weekend), and was the artist on Brain Camp (my review), written by other hands. Friends is a teen-friendly story of one girl -- who has certain similarities with her creator -- dropped into a public high school after a childhood spent being homeschooled with her three rambunctious older brothers, and finding her way there. Like Hicks's other books, there's also an element of the supernatural. It looks like a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to reading it all at once -- I've been avoiding the webcomic version because I hate reading long comics stories a page at a time, and because I knew the book was coming.

Mike Resnick's new novel is the second in his "Weird West Tales," a steampunky series about Doc Holliday in the 1880s. Following up on The Buntline Special, this one is The Doctor and the Kid, which finds Doc trying to provide for this continued care in a TB clinic by doing a few quick bounty hunter jobs -- and the biggest bounty out there is for a hotshot named Billy the Kid. Pyr published Doctor and the Kid as a trade paperback earlier in December; you should be able to get it from anyone who sells books by this point.

And last this time around is the most recent Man Booker winner, Julian Barnes's short novel The Sense of an Ending, which was published in hardcover by Knopf in October. It's not the kind of thing people come to me for a review of, but Barnes is a fabulous writer -- and several of his books, such as A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, England, England, Staring at the Sun, and Flaubert's Parrot, either have fantastic elements or otherwise are the kind of books that readers of imaginative literature are likely to love. (I've reviewed both his book of stories The Lemon Table and his meditation on death Nothing To Be Frightened Of here.) So I hope to read this quickly, and then inflict my thoughts on you folks -- and I do recommend Barnes in general, for those of you who can stand fine writing arrayed in interesting ways.

Incoming Books: February 16

Yesterday, my two sons -- almost-15 Thing 1 and newly-12 Thing 2 -- and I went into NYC, primarily to catch a show at the New Victory Theater [1]. As usual, we also ate lunch [2] when we got in, and I also pulled them over to Midtown Comics, which was having a big 30% off nearly all book-like objects sale for the Presidents' Day weekend.

The ostensible reason for going there was to replenish my manga drawer (I'm still running the tell-me-the-story-of-the-prose-book-you-just-read, get-a-manga offer to both boys, though Thing 1 doesn't take advantage of it very often), but of course I got a bunch of things for myself, since I was there and there was a sale on and I'm not made of stone:

The Shadow: Blood and Judgment which collects the '80s DC miniseries by Howard Chaykin, which I remember fondly. But I'm also buying this in hopes it leads to reprints of the ongoing series that followed -- written by Andy Helfer with art by Bill Sienkiewicz and then by Kyle Baker -- because that was utterly insane and wonderful, something completely different and unexpected. (And, also, I had copies of the original comics and of the old DC trade paperback, both lost in the flood of '11.)

A book that seems to be titled Attitude Featuring Andy Singer "No Exit", which is a collection of Singer's mostly single-panel No Exit strips, published in 2004. It was on the sale shelves at a truly bargain-basement price, and I love collections of newspaper cartoons.

The Adventures of Superhero Girl, the new graphic novel by Faith Erin Hicks, creator of Friends With Boys, The War at Elsmere, Zombies Calling and others. The concept of this one looked interesting -- very down-to-earth, slice-of-life superheroics -- and Hicks feels like a creator who keeps getting better with each project.

Grandville Bete Noire, the third of Bryan Talbot's "Detective Inspector LeBrock of Scotland Yard Scientific-Romance Thriller" stories, set in an alternate world where steampunk England only just freed itself from the Napoleonic empire after two hundred years, oh, and everyone is anthropomorphic talking animals. (See my reviews of the first two: Grandville and Grandville Mon Amour.)

Delphine, the new book from Richard Sala, which I hadn't realized existed until two days ago (even though it came out in late 2012).

And Nelson, a giant theme anthology of British comics creators edited by Rob Davis and Woodrow Phoenix -- it all tells the story of one woman's life in modern London, from 1968 to 2011, with each of the 54 stories covering one day in that life. I heard about this a while ago, but this was the first time I'd seen a copy.



[1] The Mark of Zorro, a very swashbuckling show by the Scottish company Visible Fictions. My sons really liked it, but I found it a bit old-fashioned (the story of Zorro, presented straight, is inevitably very pulpy and predictable in a very just-post-Victorian way, and it particularly annoyed me that Isabella, the heroine, gets to do exactly nothing but be right, be ignored, and be rescued), particularly compared to the same company's Jason and the Argonauts, which we saw a few years back. Zorro is a particularly great show for boys a bit younger than mine, I think -- if you're in the New York area, have sons/nephews/wards aged 7-12 and want an outing in the next week, this is a great choice.

[2] At Schnipper's, which has rapidly become our second-favorite place in the city. (After only A Salt & Battery, which is way down in the Village, so we've only gotten there a couple of times.) Schnipper's has an excellent mac and cheese -- Thing 2 and I share an order of it -- good burgers, fine shakes, and (we've just discovered) quite good cheese fries as well. I am so glad that I've been able to replace McD's -- which used to be our default place to eat before a show when the boys were smaller -- with something better and tastier and right across from the bus terminal.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/9/20

A bunch of books from the library (which I'd hoped to get to during my vacation) didn't come in until the first week of the year. And that means that I wasn't the only person taking time off and relaxing around the holidays, which I should have realized.

But then, we're always thinking of ourselves first, even when we shouldn't, aren't we?

So these are the books that arrived this week, and that I expect I'll be reading next:

Dreyer's English is a book about writing style, I think mostly along the lines of Strunk & White, from Benjamin Dryer, head managing editor and copy chief for Random House. I haven't been an editor for a decade now, but the editor brain still lurks, so I expect I will Have Opinions on it. This has been pretty much universally lauded, so those opinions may be mostly positive, but I can never predict just how contrarian I will be, so no promises.

Pumpkinheads is a graphic novel written by noted teen novelist Rainbow Rowell and drawn by Faith Erin Hicks. My guess is that Rowell is the bigger draw here -- though their names are the same size on the book, so I could be wrong -- but I've never read her books. (My vague sense is that they are modern-teen relationship books, so the kids are gay or trans or different races rather than the similar books I read as a teen, which were all about broken homes and sad rich kids and rebellion against parents. Every generation gets the books their elders think they deserve, I guess.) I'm a low-key Hicks fan, though -- especially her wonderful The Adventures of Superhero Girl -- so that's why I'm here for what looks like a sweet on-the-verge-of-growing-up story about one night between two friends.

Superman Smashes the Klan by Gene Luen Yang and Gurihuru -- I'd put in a request for this book well before the felonious activities of this week, but, if I hadn't, I'm sure I would be searching it out anyway. We all need to pay attention to stories of how to stop fascists, especially those marching in our streets and threatening violence. And in our world, we won't have a superpowered alien boy scout to save us. This also is supposed to be very good, and is loosely based on a famous old radio series that supposedly had a marked negative effect on the Klan, so that's good stuff all around.

Dragon Hoops is also by Gene Luen Yang, and he's solo this time -- this is his big graphic novel follow-up to the two-book Boxers and Saints, from almost a decade ago. (Comics take a while, a lot of the time -- especially big comics that tell one story all by one person.) This looks to go back closer to the model of American Born Chinese, Yang's big book before B&S, which was a (slightly fictionalized? I haven't read it in years) story about his own life, and concerned with representation and assimilation, with how to grow up into a world that was made for people who are different from you and still say essentially yourself individually and culturally. Hoops seems to be narrated by Yang himself, though I'm not sure if it's all his story, or a wider look at basketball, sports, and representation in America.

Maggy Garrison is a graphic novel about the title character, a youngish (I think) woman in London who falls into a criminal underworld but (also I think) comes out well all the time. It's written by Lewis Trondheim -- whose work I haven't seen as much the past few years; I'm not clear if he's been focusing more on editorial work or his stuff is not getting translated like it was a decade ago or if I'm just missing it -- and drawn by Stephane Oiry, who's work I haven't seen before. So this looks like something different from Trondheim: my sense is that he did SFF (either silly and for younger readers or Donjon dark for adults), artsy autobio and conceptual comics, and some general adventure, but it all was in an essentially French millieu before Maggy. (As opposed to someone like Tardi, who's done a lot of stories set in various noir versions of the USA.)

Giant Days, Volume 10 is written as usual by John Allison, though the art is divided between Max Sarin (the regular artists, possibly taking a break for two of the issues collected here) and Julia Madrigal (who has a style that's similar enough to Sarin's to slot in nicely, though she has a fussy thing about drawing noses with an extra line across the bridge that kept drawing me up short). Whitney Cogar does the colors as usual. And here I might just have to give up: if you're reading this on a full-size screen it might look wonky before the next book image, since I don't have anything more to say. I've already read this; I'm hoping to write more about it (and volumes 8+9) later today. So: there it is.

Last is Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye, Vol. 2: Every Me, Every You, which was written by Jon Rivera and Gerard Way and drawn by Michael Avon Oeming, with colors by Nick Filardi. Again, I read the first book, realized the library system had the second (and concluding volume) and decided sticking both into one post would be a better thing. I have, as of right this second, read one of the issues collected here, and have a bookmark stuck into it. But that's as far as I've gotten. But this will probably run under my eyes later today, and we'll see what flows out from that through my fingers in the next few days.