heelturn2's reviews
84 reviews

Everything Is Flammable by Gabrielle Bell

emotional funny reflective tense slow-paced

4.25

I wish all autobio comics were this good - Gabrielle Bell gets the dark humour of bad shit and the satisfaction of detailing the small things.

Blood of the Virgin by Sammy Harkham

challenging dark emotional funny reflective tense medium-paced

4.0

good characters who feel like real people who are unhappy and suck a little. great tense atmosphere. uses the medium soo well - lots of cool panel layouts and full page spreads and the first thought bubbles (!) I’ve seen in a while! I think some of this was lost on me bc I don’t really know much about Hollywood & movie guys so this will maybe get a reread with Wikipedia open for 1-2 sections

The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984: A Graphic Memoir by Riad Sattouf
Did not finish book. Stopped at 55%.

left at my mom’s house in ontario :-/

The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake
Did not finish book. Stopped at 23%.

Boring excruciating thought it was cleverer than it really was

Mimosa by Archie Bongiovanni

emotional funny lighthearted reflective fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I thought I’d like this more! I love Grease Bats and the premise of this one is very appealing so I was surprised to find this comic felt… rushed & underdeveloped? 

some things I liked: 

• fun background details in many scenes (ie a character’s blog “Parenting Beyond the Binary” receiving an award for Best Mommy Blog 2017, lol) 
• focus on grown people who already know they’re queer with no angst about coming out or whatever. thank god!!

some things I didn’t: 

• the characters didn’t feel super distinct from one another - I regularly confused 2 of them and could not retain their names! they felt very defined by their jobs, and less by their personalities.
• on the same note, I wanted each character to get more time in the spotlight! each character has a lot going on (at least work-wise) & not all the developments in their stories get time to build up and have weight when they happen. like, I really wanted to see more about queer punk rock kids camp and the difficulties of working with kids as a trans woman while trying to hide your sex work career?!? this is hinted at but never expanded on (the stress of it is enough to make the character run from a party in tears) so when the camp gets a second winter session it’s just kind of a small detail, rather than the progression of this storyline. 
• the weird sudden reveal that
  one character has had a trust fund this whole time
  & how everyone just abruptly stops being his friend after 1 fight. there’s one character thar rang true for (she’d spent a lot of the book being hurt & irritated with him) but for everyone else I was like, hm, this could happen I guess but this feels Quite Sudden. 
• not enough development + no real resolution = unsatisfying :-(

Roaming by Jillian Tamaki, Mariko Tamaki

emotional funny hopeful lighthearted reflective tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

things this comic is about & really gets: being extremely 19 years old, outgrowing childhood friends, still loving childhood friends, the allure of intimidating femmes and cool girls, being annoying in a hostel

Pastoral by André Alexis

lighthearted mysterious reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes

3.0

fsr I thought this was a horror novel before starting it. it was not! whoops!

slow, thoughtful meditation on place/faith/love/nature. made me actually feel nostalgia, fondness and love for southern Ontario! a difficult feat!!! but slow, thoughtful meditations are not really my thing… alas………….

Art on My Mind: Visual Politics by bell hooks
Did not finish book. Stopped at 44%.

started while on vacation & then lost the thread & it’s months later & it’s my roommate’s book anyways. art writing a little too technical for my brain but interesting where I could fully follow. 

Fayne by Ann-Marie MacDonald

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

what a genuinely weird book. 

if you have the patience and the time, finish the whole thing. but I wouldn’t blame you for stopping halfway through. I think saying anything more if you haven’t read it is saying too much!

I knew exactly what my review was going to be through the first 80%. and then this book became something else, and something else again. 

I spent most of the book enjoying it, but asking what the point of a gothic novel was at this point in time. like, gothic novels themselves are weird and sexy and salacious and tense and scary and fundamentally about the ☠️female condition👻 — like if you’re reading this giant fucking CanLit tome you’ve probably taken an english lit course and you probably Know About Feminism already. so you don’t need Ann-Marie MacDonald to tell you that women had it bad at the turn of the 20th century. and yet so much of this book is detailed suffering - Mae’s story is just awful, paced very slowly, just awful lies and torture and misery at a snail’s pace. as the reader you’re cursed with dramatic irony and you know that none of this will turn out well; it becomes excruciating in the third or fourth act when you realize Mae’s child is almost definitely going to the same fate unless things REALLY turn around. at this point I was like, why are you torturing me and these characters? why don’t you think your reader is already on the same page about this stuff? like what in the second wave feminism makes you think I want to read 700 pages of the saddest most devastating shit in intricate detail, when the historical genre you are writing in already does this, but faster and way horny-er? so that was my review: “intriguing, but thinks it’s elevating gothic when gothic is already about women going debatably insane because their husbands are evil.” 

but then it kind of transforms at the 11th hour? and suddenly the book is full of happiness and justice and good people? there are suddenly queers everywhere, and proto-feminists, and Good Men? (also sorry, an aside, this book has a great description of the way in which gay middle aged dudes are sometimes just SO endearing for no reason, you’re just like, ugh I love this gay guy… his gay little Comportment….) and all is made right. the villains meet bad ends. it’s like, gothic fix-it fic! suddenly! what is happening! 

and many things happen. and it becomes more magical than it has been, mostly, but in a way I found enjoyable and satisfying. and it gets quite weird at the end, and becomes an eco-novel-thing. but I won’t begrudge it that. I think most novels could probably become climate fiction very suddenly these days and I’d be like, oh, for sure. 

anyways I liked this much more the weirder it got and it made me cry a lot in the last 150 pages (lol!) which were worth the other 600 or so. even the sluggish first 600 pages were very solid and good. what a book!!!

Translation State by Ann Leckie

adventurous dark emotional funny hopeful mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

Hmm I love… Maybe not strong if you haven’t read the Ancillary books but I have read them so I don’t really care! Lots of interesting world bits in this one - interesting to learn a bit about the Presger translators and satisfyingly clears up some very confusing aspects of translator characters in past books without giving so much detail that the Presger lose all mystery and creepiness. Does its sentimental bits very effectively. Love all these characters and ngl the fact that multiple characters use the same set of neopronouns (in fact multiple characters use the same TWO different sets of pronouns!!) DID make me cry. I don’t think I’ve read many things at all where multiple characters even use they/them pronouns and I’m not a ✨representation✨ Guy but this did actually feel meaningful to me!! Also love human characters attempting to explain gender (& basically going “uhh. I don’t know. Sorry”) and also characters trying a new gender on simply because they saw a cool TV character and thought that it would be awesome to be like em. that is actually exactly how gender works. The distinction between cultures with a third gender and cultures with no genders… yes… and the way everyone’s cultural norms and language intersect and overlap and people attempt to gender/misgender each other culturally, rather than maliciously? (But then it becomes sort of neglectful malice when characters don’t bother to figure it out properly - so good lol!) It’s all a vessel for compelling world building that visibly affects the characters’ lives and outlooks!!! Wow!!! idk this space opera world continues to really do it for me. 👨🏻‍🍳👌 a more successful step outside of the Ancillary books than Provenance was, too, imo. Seems to be setting the stage for a return to Breq & co. in the nearish future (or at least a story in which they are present as characters, if not the focus?) which is very exciting to me. I love… sciance fiction……..