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maiakobabe's reviews
3842 reviews
The Deep Dark by Molly Knox Ostertag
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
5.0
This was exceptional. Mags, a recent high school graduate, lives a carefully controlled life. She cares for her aging grandmother, she works her restaurant shifts, she doesn't party, she doesn't let anyone get too close, even the girl she's sleeping with, who has a boyfriend. Also, she's feeding a dangerous secret, something fanged and strange that lives in the dark. Then Mags' careful routine is disrupted when a friend from childhood, Nessa, turns to the little town outside Joshua Tree where they both grew up. Nessa is being chased by a darkness of her own, and wants answers about a confusing childhood memory. The storytelling, the page layouts, the mixed use of color and black and white, all combined to build such delicious tension in this queer horror tale. Highly recommend!
The Pale Queen by Ethan M. Aldridge
hopeful
mysterious
medium-paced
3.0
A beautifully illustrated original queer fairy tale. Agatha, the daughter of a miner, dreams of a university education but it seems out of reach to a country girl. Then she encounters a pale magical woman from the forest, who tricks Agatha into owing her a favor. This turns into a series of tasks with increasingly dangerous consequences. I loved the watercolors, especially during scenes set at night. The story is aimed at fairly young readers, but still engaging for an adult.
Ash's Cabin by Jen Wang
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
fast-paced
5.0
High schooler Ash feels misunderstood by their family and the world, their need for quiet, their passion for the environment, and their developing identity all overlooked in the loud busyness of life. While the rest of the family plans a summer vacation to Disneyland, Ash plans their own escape: heading up into the hills of the family ranch near Mount Shasta to find the cabin where their late grandfather lived close to the land. This story is so elegantly told and elegantly drawn, with large amounts of white space on the pages balancing the delicate warm-toned watercolor panels. I've been a fan of Jen Wang's comics for over a decade and I'm so impressed how each one is so different from, but equally as rich and wonderful, as the last!
Tove Jansson: Work and Love by Tuula Karjalainen
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
3.75
A wonderful deep dive into the long, creative life of Tove Jansson, the Finnish-Swedish artist behind the Moomintrolls. Tove was also a painter, a cartoonist, involved in theater, sculpture, and a writer of several prose novels and short story collections. She was born during the period of WW1 and WW2 overshadowed her twenties and early thirties, but she spent those years drawing cutting political cartoons against fascism and violence, as well as developing her gallery career, setting up her first studio, and falling in and out of several impactful love affairs. She seems to have accepted her own queerness or bisexuality without much internal struggle and lived as openly as was possible as the time. She turned down several proposals of marriage but happily in mid-life met an artist who became her life-long partner and sometime inspiration and collaborator. The two of them built a little cabin on a very small and barren island in the Finnish archipelago and spent summers there for nearly thirty years- partly to avoid the fame Tove received because of the global love of the Moomins. This book was translated and I do think at times it wander a bit or retreads some material, but I loved how rich it was in color illustrations. Always a pleasure to read about an artist's path.
Tokyo These Days, Vol. 1 by Taiyo Matsumoto
emotional
funny
hopeful
medium-paced
4.0
Manga editor Shiozawa decides to quit his job after a magazine he founded folds. He plans to find some hobbies and start a new life. But manga won't let go of him so easily. Editor colleagues continue to ask him for help, especially with their more difficult artist clients. He has to pay last visits to artists he worked with in the past, which often turn into emotional conversations. He tries to sell his entire manga collection to a used bookstore, but at the last minute has a change of heart and keeps it. Then he decides he wants to work on one more story. But who to ask to write and draw it? This is an elegant, understated book about how deep the comics industry gets under your skin, and the very wide variety of people who fall for manga and can't let it go, even after it's broken their hearts.
No Rules Tonight by Ryan Estrada
emotional
hopeful
informative
medium-paced
3.75
Set in South Korea in the early 1980s, this comic follows up Banned Book Club in which college student Hyun Sook discovered a friend group of students reading books deemed illegal and dangerous by the government. During South Korea's Fifth Republic, a military regime, students could be beaten or jailed for owning banned books. But even under an authoritarian government, college students are still college students: learning, growing, questioning their identities, looking for trouble, romance, and ways to subvert the rules. Set on a camping trip during winter break, this book follows a group of students, including Hyun Sook, with conflicting motivations and interests as they decide who to trust and who they want to become. A timely story about the power of art, literature, theater, and community to resist fascism. Despite the real danger, it's full of humor and deeply human moments. I had the chance to read this book ahead of its release- look for it on shelves in early October!
A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers
reflective
medium-paced
2.75
Dex, the traveling tea-monk who befriended a robot in the wilds, now brings their friend Mosscap back down to the human-inhabited parts of the world. Like the first book, this is a gentle story, told more in a series of linked vignettes than an over-arching plot. I enjoyed the exploration whether essence of self is rooted in the body, and to what extent consciousness and personality transcend the body while still being undeniable linked. However, like the first book in this series, there just isn't quite enough plot to satisfy me. I read this because I've decided I'm a Becky Chambers completest, but I don't personally recommend this series as the best place to start with her work- I point readers instead towards the standalone To Be Taught If Fortunate.
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown
adventurous
informative
medium-paced
3.5
I picked this up after watching the film of the same name. It's a very well researched history of the University of Washington men's eight rowing team, a bunch of boys raised during the worst of the Great Depression, working their assess off to represent the US at the 1936 Olympics. The book follows Joe Rantz most closely, in huge part because he was one of the few members of the team still alive and available to interview when the author began the book. However, several of the others kept diaries or wrote letters which the author also had access to. There's a lot of background on the era, both the economic hardships of the Depression and Dust Bowl in the US, and also the way Joseph Goebbels planned the entire Berlin Olympics as a massive propaganda project to fool the West into thinking that Germany wasn't planning war. I thought the book was a little longer than it needed to be, but overall enjoyed it as a good audiobook to keep me company during work hours. As always, the truth of the story is even stranger and more dramatic than the version of this story that made it to film!
Who Was Her Own Work of Art?: Frida Kahlo: An Official Who HQ Graphic Novel by Terry Blas, Who HQ
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
fast-paced
4.0
A short but sweet glimpse into the period of Frida Kahlo's life when she was beginning to mount solo shows of her paintings in New York and Paris. I loved the bright colors, tender character designs, and the reconstructions of conversations she may have overheard at her gallery openings. In no way a complete biography, but instead a little window into the life of a passionate artist.