Asian-American Graphic Novels

Posted on May 10, 2014 by Katy K.

Every other month or so, I put together an end panel display for my Adult Graphic Novel Collection, with a little bibliography on a bookmark for people to take – things like zombie graphic novels, or books by Will Eisner. This month, I thought I’d do a display of Asian-Pacific American Graphic Novels since May is Asian-Pacific American Month. And then I found that while I could easily find graphic novels from Asia, it was a whole lot harder to find books by or about Asian-Americans. I scanned my whole collection; I Googled. The only list I found was buried in a course syllabus.

I figure that it shouldn’t be so hard to find a list of Asian-American graphic novels, so I emailed the professor, Dr. Stephen Sohn of Standford University, and asked if it would be OK to publish my list, which owes most of his titles to his. (I found a few on my own, and left a few hard-to-find ones off.) He very kindly gave his permission, and asked if I would share this link with you: Standford Provost Petition

I noticed a complete lack of any graphic novels about Pacific Islanders (maybe not surprising given how tiny they are). I also could find only two kids series – if any readers have any titles to fill in these holes, please let me know! Continue reading →

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Cruel Beauty

Posted on May 7, 2014 by Katy K.

A story that falls somewhere between Beauty and Beast and Cupid and Psyche? How could I resist?

Cruel BeautyCruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge. Balzer & Bray, 2014.
Nyx has been raised her whole life to kill her fiancé as soon as she marries him, not expecting to survive.
The world feels something like a 19th century England, where Greek is the predominant culture. But the parchment-colored sky above makes it clear that the island is no longer part of the rest of the world. They blame the demon carefully called the Gentle Lord for ripping them out of the world. He still lives in the castle at the top of the hill. Desperate people go to him there to make their bargains, knowing they’ll pay with their souls or worse. One such bargain was the one Nyx’s father made before she was born, offering one of his two daughters in payment to the Gentle Lord, even though their mother died in childbirth. He’s a member of the secret organization known as the Resurgandi, dedicated to bringing down the Gentle Lord, and their weapon is Nyx.

Nyx has grown up knowing that her father still resents her for her mother’s death, and has worked hard to learn the magical Hermetic signs as well assassination techniques as the only way to gain his approval. Her sister, Astraia, is left to be the happy, ignorant child. When Nyx arrives at the Gentle Lord’s palace, she is startled that he is pleased to find her different from the sweet and terrified bride he was expecting, so different from the eight dead brides she finds laid out. She never expected to feel anything but loathing towards her husband – so why does she feel like her attraction to Shade, shadow servant by day, handsome man by night, is a betrayal? Of course the Resurgandi didn’t know the whole story – but Nyx must find out the truth before she makes things much, much worse than they already are.

This is not a perfect book for everyone – it was a little too high on the melodrama for my taste, and the solution was a twist that came out of the blue – I think Liviana at In Bed with Books (in a review that shows in Feedly but seems no longer to be on her site) put her finger on the problem, in that it hinges on us believing that Nyx and her sister Astraia have a close, trusting relationship, even though Astraia is in the book only at the very beginning and end, and is at odds with Nyx for most of that time. Still, this is a creative reworking of Greek myths. The atmospheric Beautiful Mansion with Creepy Secrets was a wonderful setting meant for the kind of romance that Hodges creates. Even though neither the Gentle Lord nor Nyx are as bad as they believe themselves to be, they are refreshingly different from the usual “pure girl finds the hidden heart of gold in the bad boy” stereotype, and fans of teen fantasy with lots of swoony romance should enjoy it greatly.

It’s been very popular among the bloggers I read – here are a couple more reviews, and I failed to re-find some I read earlier: at Angieville , Random Musings of a Bibliophile If you’ve read this as well, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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Frog Trouble

Posted on May 6, 2014 by Katy K.

Frog TroubleFrog Trouble: and Eleven Other Pretty Serious Songs for Ages One to Older Than Dirt by Sandra Boynton. Workman, 2013.
I’ve been enjoying Sandra Boynton’s illustrated albums for children since Philadelphia Chickens – her clever humor combined with Michael Ford’s catchy tunes are a brand of musical fun we all enjoy. Most of the albums seem to have a musical theme – Broadway with Philadelphia Chickens, classic rock with Dog Train, 50s and 60s music with Blue Moo. This album is clearly country, and sung by a wide variety of familiar names, including Alison Krauss, Darius Rucker, Fountains of Wayne, Kacey Musgraves and more. I have enjoyed all of them, but I have found in general that many people only really enjoy the Boynton album written in a style they already like.

These are always available either as a plain CD or as a CD inside a picture book, which includes big pictures with most of the lyrics in the front, and all the lyrics with the music in the back. Frog Trouble also includes performer pictures and bios in the very back. In keeping with the country theme, there are perhaps a few more serious tunes than usual, with songs like “When Pigs Fly”, “End of a Summer Storm” and “Beautiful Baby”. Here’s a beautiful line from “End of a Summer Storm”, sung by Alison Krauss:

“There’s a rising wind and a falling rain
beautiful patterns on the windowpane.
Fast and free, then it’s quiet again
at the end of a summer storm.”

Fans of Boynton’s particular brand of humor will be pleased to know that the classic silliness is still there in songs like “Alligator Stroll”, “Broken Piano” and “Frog Trouble”:

“I’ve known about heartache and what it can do
since the Great Frog Rush of Forty-Two
when brave folks traveled from far and wide.
And all of them dreamed. And all of them sighed,
Frog Trouble.”

Her ability to channel kids in a pure country vein shows in “Trucks”, “Heartache Song”, “I’ve Got a Dog” and “Copycat”. We spent several weeks with this playing nonstop in the car, while being asked to perform from the songbook at home.

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Jaran

Posted on May 5, 2014 by Katy K.

I note with some shame that this was the Book Smuggler’s Old School Wednesday Readalong from February, which I did not finish it in time.

JaranJaran. Jaran Book 1. by Kate Elliott. DAW Books, 1992.
From the cover copy:

The first book of Kate Elliott’s epic Novels of the Jaran, set in an alien-controlled galaxy where a young woman seeks to find her own life and love, but is tied to her brother’s revolutionary fate

In the future, Earth is just one of the planets ruled by the vast Chapalii empire. The volatility of these alien overlords is something with which Tess Soerensen is all too familiar. Her brother, Charles, rebelled against them at one time and was rewarded by being elevated into their interstellar system—yet there is reason to believe they murdered his and Tess’s parents.

Struggling to find her place in the world and still mending a broken heart, Tess sneaks aboard a shuttle bound for Rhui, one of her brother’s planets. On the ground, she joins up with the native jaran people, becoming immersed in their nomadic society and customs while also attempting to get to the bottom of a smuggling scheme she encountered on her journey there. As she grows ever closer to the charismatic jaran ruler, Ilya—who is inflamed by an urgent mission of his own—Tess must choose between her feelings for him and her loyalty to her brother.

Jaran is the first volume of the Novels of the Jaran, which continues with An Earthly Crown, His Conquering Sword,and The Law of Becoming.

I’m very fond of Kate Elliott, and her Spiritwalker books are some of the most heavily borrowed in my home library. This includes some of the Elliott trademarks that I love, including a mix of politics of very different levels, strong characters, romance, and playing with ideas of gender and race. Here, race is looked at both through Tess’s relationship with the Jaran, the human-like people she meets on the planet Rhui, as well as the much more alien Chapalii. There’s even more focus on the role of gender, as Tess is dropped into a culture where women are the decided head of clan, with the sole power to initiate love affairs, while the men are left in charge of hunting, war, embroidery, and deciding whom to marry. Tess herself has an affinity for languages, picking up the utterly foreign language of the Jaran in a week, that I was able to accept only as a necessity for her exploration of the Jaran culture, where the difference in languages and what you can say in them plays a key role.

We go camping in a the Mongolian-style yurt my love made every summer, so it’s always an extra pleasure to read about similar nomadic cultures – though their physical culture and looks sounded more Russian than Mongolian. Elliott says in the introduction that she was aiming not for a matriarchy but for an equality different from that we’ve imagined. I loved how the culture felt like a traditional culture – one where people did things because that was the way they had always been done, rather than making decisions out of a sense of justice or equality. The balancing act that women have been expected to perform in Earth culture for centuries, making themselves pretty for men and showing just the right level of flirtation while staying modest enough, seems as ridiculous as it is when done by men. I just wasn’t quite sure I could buy that having men marry women by cutting their faces made for any kind of equality – it just didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of their culture. Likewise, the clan matriarchs shrugging their shoulders over men deciding to ride off to war – really? Surely the male contribution to the hard life of the steppes is important enough that they would be expected to consult with the women before risking their lives on something nonessential. However, not necessarily agreeing with her conclusions doesn’t mean failure – I still noticed the things she was bringing up and thought about them, inside the context of a good story.

On the body count level, this book fell in between the Crossroads books (of which I’ve read Spirit Gate and Shadow Gate and the Spiritwalker books, with some battles and some very significant characters killed off.The only things holding me back from reading more of this series is the need to interloan them, their heft, and my feeling that I really ought to read Traitors’ Gate (which I had been planning to read in February) first. As always, though, Kate Elliott provides a satisfying, thought-provoking adventure.

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State of the Book Basket

Posted on May 4, 2014 by Katy K.

Once again, here’s what’s going on with my reading at the moment.
I have eighteen books waiting to be reviewed, including 4 picture books, 6 middle grade, 4 teen, and 4 adult. I’m still reading much faster than I’m writing, it seems, even though I’m reading much slower than I’d like to keep up with all the books I want to read!

For myself, I am currently reading The Mark of the Dragonfly by Jaleigh Johnson, The True Blue Scouts of Sugarman Swamp by Kathi Appelt, and A Tale of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones in print and listening to Mastiff by Tamora Pierce and Velveteen vs. the Multiverse by Seanan McGuire.

The boy and I just finished reading The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald, and made the unhappy discovery that my library doesn’t own the next one, so I need to borrow it from my parents instead, I think. We’re halfway through The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis in the car. He’s almost done with Sam Silver: Undercover Pirate: The Deadly Plot, having taken breaks for a new Big Nate book, Rapunzel’s Revenge by Shannon Hale and Zeus: King of the Gods by George O’Connor. He’s now distracted by the large pile of comic books we brought home from Free Comic Book Day this year. Last year, he felt too old to dress up, but this year, he happily put on a too-small Star Wars costume to get an extra free comic.

The girl and I have been slowly working our way through Rapunzel’s Revenge as well, which she likes, but she’s still having trouble staying focused on the longer format. She’s still only wanting books in the car over music every few days, but we’ve worked our way up to Night of the Ninjas, book 5 in the Magic Tree House Series (and had A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond sadly rejected.) We bought her I am a Frog by Mo Willems, which she’s loving, and a Frozen spin-off picture book, which was more exciting initially but, not surprisingly, doesn’t have the re-read value of the Willems. As far as library picture books, we have Louise: the Adventures of a Chicken by Kate DiCamillo (so far rejected), The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes by DuBose Heyward, Red Knit Cap Girl and Red Knit Cap Girl to the Rescue by Naoko Stoop, Cinderella retold by Max Eisenberg and Cendrillon illustrated by Jerry Pinkney, and Joseph Had a Little Overcoat by Simms Taback. She’d asked for more Cinderella books, so we’ll see if she wants to go through as many versions of that as she did Rapunzel – there are certainly a lot more Cinderella retellings out there.

I still have The Shadow Garden and Nightfall Gardens by Allen Houston and The Thickety: a Path Begins by J.A. White waiting to be read from last month, and made it just partway through one of the Spellbound magazines before getting distracted, though I was very much enjoying it. I also have Please Don’t Tell My Parent’s I’m a Super Villain by Richard Roberts newly sent from the author. I had to return The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison unread to the library, as I just couldn’t get to it, and put my name back on the hold list for it. Also home from the library waiting for me to read are Starling by Sage Stossel and The Cracks in the Kingdom by Jaclyn Moriarty, and I’d like to read Rapunzel’s Revenge and Zeus: King of the Gods myself before taking them back.

Also, I checked out a couple of books for my love at his request: Brick Shakespeare: the Tragedies by Jack Hollan, The Whole-Brain Child by Daniel J. Siegel, and (on CD) All Joy and No Fun by Jennifer Senior, which I am also hoping to listen to when he’s done. Brick Shakespeare: the Tragedies

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Billy the Kid Is Not Crazy

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Katy K.

I was planning on doing a whole post about why we need diverse books, because there’s this whole campaign going on right now that you might have heard about.
Then I actually looked at the We Need Diverse Books tumblr and I don’t know that I have a lot to add in words, though we set up a couple of displays at the library. Everyone needs windows into themselves and into other people. Nobody is served if everyone thinks that stories of white, straight people are the only ones that matter – neither the people at the center of those stories, nor those who stories are silenced. As one person aptly put it, no kid ever asked for a box of 64 white crayons. You can also check out the Lee and Low Buzzfeed list of highlights from the Tumbler.

I’m coming in halfway through a three-day event – May 1 devoted to posting pictures, May 2 to a twitter chat on the topic, and May 3 to encouraging people to buy diverse books and/or request them from their library, because book publishing is a business.

I think about diversity in books a lot, though I know my reading isn’t as diverse as I’d like it to be. Most often, I’ve focused on racial differences, but this campaign has clearly been looking representation of diversity in sexual orientation and mental health as well. And by good chance, today I have book for you featuring mental diversity.

billy the kid is not crazyBilly the Kid Is Not Crazy by S.F. Guerra. Illustrations by James Davies. Amazon Children’s Publishing, 2013.
Billy is a nice, well-meaning kid, but his overactive imagination is always getting him into trouble. He means well, he promises to be better – but by the time he realizes he’s getting carried away again, he’s already done something like writing in pen in a school text book that turns out not to be a secret coded message. When playing Clone Wars with shopping carts – aka droids – in a parking lot ends up with a car getting damaged, his parents decide to take him to a shrink. He is horrified! His active imagination amplifies the worries: Will the doctor put him on “drugs”? Will his father get tired enough of him to send him away and look for a better son? And will Billy ever get his dream – a cell phone of his very own? The story is told in the popular text-comic strip hybrid format, with Billy’s imaginary adventures, worries, and the occasional video message to his parents shown in comic form, an excellent choice.

This is clearly an “issue book”, and I was worried about it feeling preachy. But Billy came to life so believably, so full of fun and good intentions gone awry, that I couldn’t help being sucked in. As a mother, I was really distressed at his parents’ failure to reassure him along the way, but even though that aspect felt somewhat overdone, the ending still made me teary. I found myself arguing with his diagnoses and treatment plan – it looked like he had a serious impulse control issue that wasn’t labeled as such. Would labeling it help? If that was the problem, is just finding a really good reward the right solution? But these are technical quibbles that I don’t think would affect the book being enjoyed by the target audience. I also sighed just a little bit because Billy, while on the one hand illustrating mental/behavior issues much more commonly found in real life than in books, on the other hand sticks very closely to the limits of deviations from neutral that Shannon Hale discusses so well : he is white and male (though I know the author is female and am guessing by her name that she’s Latina) and mainstream Christian, and 10 – a good average age for a middle grade book. Though I don’t know that I’m going to argue with the author on her decisions with that, while we’re talking about diversity, I do notice that the issues that the book is about are the only deviations from neutral that our lead is allowed. On the whole, this is a very fun book that’s great for normalizing the idea of people needing mental help from time to time without being over-the-edge crazy, and that will appeal to fans of books like Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Dork Diaries.

This book was kindly sent to me by the author, and has been passed on to the library where I work.

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Dawn

Posted on April 30, 2014 by Katy K.

It’s the Old School Wednesday Readalong at the Book Smugglers today.
OldSchool8_Final-450x349
dawnDawn by Octavia Butler. Warner: Aspect Science Fiction, 1987.
Octavia Butler has been on my want-to-read list for about a decade now. When this book was selected as the Old School Wednesday Readalong, I decided to take it as a Sign and finally get around to reading this award-winning African-American science fiction author, whom I’d been recommending to patrons for years.

Here’s the cover blurb on this book:

Lilith lyapo awoke from a centuries-long sleep to find herself aboard the vast spaceship of the Oankali. Creatures covered in writhing tentacles, the Oankali had saved every surviving human from a dying, ruined Earth. They healed the planet, cured cancer, increased strength, and were now ready to help Lilith lead her people back to Earth–but for a price.

Wow. I had such a love-hate relationship with this book. On the one hand, it’s amazing. The characters, the world-building, the many issues Butler is able to look at within the framework of the story – just astounding. On the other hand, this is a book for grown-ups that reminds me why I usually prefer to read books for younger readers. There is so much darkness shown, both in the humans that Lilith awakens to repopulate the Earth, and in the casual force the Oankali use, “trading” genetic material with the humans even against their explicit rejection. Maybe I am just too exhausted to deal with reading a book that makes me think this hard about so many issues – though that makes me sound lazy, and it’s not like the book I was alternating reading this with (Merrie Haskell’s The Castle Behind Thorns) has what you would call a cheerful premise. I will try to be kind to myself and remind myself that I preferred more optimistic books even before I had children and became chronically sleep-deprived. My librarian brain is telling me that this is a classic case of just a bad fit for me at this time, and that’s OK. Continue reading →

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The Interrupted Tale

Posted on April 29, 2014 by Katy K.

The boy and I came a little bit late listening to this one, as we were in the middle of other series when it came out – but worth the wait. I’m linking this to the April Sound Bytes Link-Up over at Devourer of Books.

The Interrupted TaleThe Interrupted Tale. The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place Book 4. by Maryrose Wood. Read by Katherine Kellgren. HarperCollins Audio, 2013.
It’s Miss Penelope Lumley’s sixteenth birthday, and she is blue about the complete lack of birthday attention now that she’s a governess. Instead, she’s flooded with written requests from the headmistress and lots of the girls at the Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females to give the keynote speech at their upcoming Celebrate Alumnae Knowledge Exposition, or CAKE Day. It seems that the shifty Judge Quinzy, whom Penelope suspects of being the supposedly deceased elder Lord Ashton, is attempting a nefarious takeover of the Swanburne Academy Board. Much of the book is taken up with Penelope’s preparations for going to the event with the children, including trying to find new clothes and the difficulty of writing her speech. Meanwhile, the children are obsessed with the Fall of Rome, while Penelope works to uncover the secrets of the “Cannibal Book.”

Penelope is busily trying to solve bunches of intertwined mysteries over the course of the series, including why she’s so firmly instructed to keep her hair dyed a dull black; why the Incorrigible children were left to be raised by wolves; what has happened to her own parents; and of course, why Lord Ashton has howling fits. If you were to go into this book looking for lots more answers to these questions, you would be gravely disappointed – there were only a couple of smallish revelations in this entry. Read instead for the pure enjoyment of the character interactions, the ridiculous situations that arise, and the terribly funny language use. We have listened to this series the whole way, and Katherine Kellgren does a fantastic job with the range of accents and voices that this calls for. This time, the children would come in from the car marching and chanting, “Cake Day, Cake Day, the Best Day of the Year!” (This led naturally to trying the cake-in-a-mug recipe from the One Bowl Baking book I got for Christmas, as the fastest cake recipe I had to hand.) In any case, while I’ll hope for more Revelations in future books, this is a series we all enjoy and will keep on reading.

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Rick Riordan Read Alikes

Posted on April 28, 2014 by Katy K.

Back in February, I celebrated my tenth blogiversary with a giveaway of a custom reading list. My long-time reader Kim won, and what she wanted was a list of books similar to Percy Jackson for her nine-year-old son, who was just about finished with the series. She’d specifically asked for books with a contemporary boy lead involving mythology.

Finding read alikes (to use the librarian term) for Rick Riordan’s books is a perennial problem – that blend of a modern hero with mythology and lots of action is unique. Instead of looking for that nonexistant series that matches exactly, I’ve split this into parts – great retellings of Greek mythology, good series involving other mythologies (most with a historical setting), and other really popular action-adventure fantasy series. I included some with girl leads despite Kim’s request, especially if my son enjoyed them, because they are good stories and I think it’s important for boys to know that there are good stories about girls and that they don’t have to limit themselves to reading only books about boys. Most of these are linked to my own reviews, though there are a couple linked to reviews on other blogs, and some I have yet to read. These might not be exactly the same as Rick Riordan’s books, but they are still very good, adventure-filled books! Continue reading →

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The Golden City

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Katy K.

This is historical fantasy set in Portugal, a rare enough setting that I couldn’t resist it.

The Golden CityThe Golden City by J. Kathleen Cheney. ROC Penguin Group, 2013.
Oriana Paredes is a sereia, a sea person, undercover in the Golden City, where all magical beings are illegal. She’s there as a spy, and her cover is working as a companion to the high-born Isabel Amaral. But Isabel’s romantic plans of elopement turn to tragedy when she and Oriana, dressed in servants’ clothes, are kidnapped. Both are chained under water and left to drown, but Oriana is unable to break free in time to get Isabel to the surface. Desperate for vengeance, she turns to police consultant Duilio Ferrera, who has his own secrets to keep and his own mystery to solve: finding his selkie mother’s stolen pelt. Duilio has been looking into pairs of missing servants from the great houses; Oriana knows first-hand that there are corpses inside the much-admired City under the Sea art installation with replicas of famous houses floating in the water. Together, they must try to uncover the necromancy behind the art, a dark corruption reaching to the highest levels of government. They do so fighting their growing attraction to each other, with class differences, magical race conflicts, and the duty at hand all keeping the action to a lot of smolder and very little action.

I’d really put my name on the list once I saw mermaids and Portugal (late 19th to early 20th century by feel), but now this put together with my reading of Beka Cooper is starting to look like a fantasy mystery trend. My mother got to it before me, and also enjoyed it, but was a little concerned about the content until I told her that it is an adult novel. I don’t think most teens would have an issue with the content, though: some nudity, discussions of sexuality and several violent incidents. My only real issue is a scene where Duilio deliberately breaks in on Oriana in the bathtub, unacceptable by both modern standards and the much stricter standards of modesty in the time period in the book. Though Oriana does call him out on it, and sereia aren’t as modest as humans, this reinforces uncomfortable gender patterns, and he got off with it much too easily. Epic Quests for Vengeance rarely work well for me, but while Oriana says she’s looking for vengeance, her efforts are important to prevent future deaths as well. Here, the lovingly described setting, magical elements, mystery, and buried passion all work together to make a captivating story. I’ll definitely be looking for the sequel coming out in July.

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