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katje 's review for:
Lumberjanes, Vol. 1: Beware the Kitten Holy
by Grace Ellis, ND Stevenson, Shannon Watters
I'd wanted to read this book for a while because I saw a lot of people talk about how feminist and awesome it was.
The story was pretty good, and the artwork was nice, but there were parts that felt really heavy-handed to me -- like the author wasn't sure if I was *getting* the message that girl power=good and toxic masculinity=bad so they had to beat me in the face with a shovel to get it across to me. And the only reason I saw the part that lambasted toxic masculinity as a rejection of that specifically and not, like, men as a whole -- or at least men who look the part, with muscles and facial hair and a missing eye -- was because I'm intimately familiar with toxic masculinity and parodies of it. If I were reading it without knowing the difference between that and *all* masculinity? It would probably come across as "men are bad, unless they like baking cookies and are small enough to be non-threatening -- ie, are femme-coded".
It's the same sort of attitude that labels my husband a threat simply because he's big and has facial hair and likes "guy things", when he's pretty much the gentlest person on the face of the planet. (Like, literal Hagrid here.) These days it seems like facial hair is only acceptable for men if their size makes them non-threatening and they're into more femme-coded activities.
So, ok, Lumberjanes, I get it -- women are hardcore badasses and men are not to be trusted, because if they're not big hairy monsters, they're being controlled by a big hairy monster (which I guess is patriarchy?) and they're basically brainwashed and need us to rescue them. Thank you for beating that into my head in a way that says you don't know what 'subtle' means.
Aside from the story being heavy-handed, there was also a huge problem with the layout of the book. Each chapter heading happens above what I guess is supposed to be a page from a scout handbook for the Lumberjanes. There are two columns of text below the title of the chapter (titles of chapters being badge names) explaining how a Lumberjane gets the badge in question.
These bits of text not only ended mid sentence, which on the first page cause me to spend a few minutes looking for wherever it continued in the book instead of just reading the story, but they have obviously not been touched by an editor. Words missing from sentences, fragments, awkward phrasing, egregious typos, and wrong use of its/it's. I'm honestly surprised it was allowed to go to print in that condition.
I was excited to read this, and while I enjoyed the story overall (even if it ended on a cliffhanger, because graphic novel) and I will probably eventually read the rest of it at a later date, I ended up disappointed with the heavy-handedness of it and the chapter starts being so awful. 3 stars.
Read for the 2016 FABClub reading challenge, 15. A graphic novel, manga or comic book.
The story was pretty good, and the artwork was nice, but there were parts that felt really heavy-handed to me -- like the author wasn't sure if I was *getting* the message that girl power=good and toxic masculinity=bad so they had to beat me in the face with a shovel to get it across to me. And the only reason I saw the part that lambasted toxic masculinity as a rejection of that specifically and not, like, men as a whole -- or at least men who look the part, with muscles and facial hair and a missing eye -- was because I'm intimately familiar with toxic masculinity and parodies of it. If I were reading it without knowing the difference between that and *all* masculinity? It would probably come across as "men are bad, unless they like baking cookies and are small enough to be non-threatening -- ie, are femme-coded".
It's the same sort of attitude that labels my husband a threat simply because he's big and has facial hair and likes "guy things", when he's pretty much the gentlest person on the face of the planet. (Like, literal Hagrid here.) These days it seems like facial hair is only acceptable for men if their size makes them non-threatening and they're into more femme-coded activities.
So, ok, Lumberjanes, I get it -- women are hardcore badasses and men are not to be trusted, because if they're not big hairy monsters, they're being controlled by a big hairy monster (which I guess is patriarchy?) and they're basically brainwashed and need us to rescue them. Thank you for beating that into my head in a way that says you don't know what 'subtle' means.
Aside from the story being heavy-handed, there was also a huge problem with the layout of the book. Each chapter heading happens above what I guess is supposed to be a page from a scout handbook for the Lumberjanes. There are two columns of text below the title of the chapter (titles of chapters being badge names) explaining how a Lumberjane gets the badge in question.
These bits of text not only ended mid sentence, which on the first page cause me to spend a few minutes looking for wherever it continued in the book instead of just reading the story, but they have obviously not been touched by an editor. Words missing from sentences, fragments, awkward phrasing, egregious typos, and wrong use of its/it's. I'm honestly surprised it was allowed to go to print in that condition.
I was excited to read this, and while I enjoyed the story overall (even if it ended on a cliffhanger, because graphic novel) and I will probably eventually read the rest of it at a later date, I ended up disappointed with the heavy-handedness of it and the chapter starts being so awful. 3 stars.
Read for the 2016 FABClub reading challenge, 15. A graphic novel, manga or comic book.