Teen Review: Lumberjanes vol 1

Lumberjanes vol. 1
by Noelle Stevenson

Overall Rating: 4/5
Plot: 5/5
Characters: 4/5
Writing: 4/5

Nothing like a rousing summer spent out of doors! Especially when you're being attacked by three-eyed foxes, exploring secret caves, and discovering all the wild wackiness of Miss Qiunzilla Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet's camp for hard-core lady-types. The LumberJanes are a diverse group of girls who can't seem to stay out of trouble. And what trouble they get into!

I think I'm in love with Stevenson's art style. Her characters are ethnically, physically, sexually, and personally diverse people who live in a world that doesn't make sense, even when the supernatural elements are coming out of the woodwork. She has a fantastic, subtle style to coloring those characters and it's obvious that they care about each other in ways that none of them can fully explain. Except they're friends and friends do for each other.

I can barely wait for the next volume. I'm on pins and needles.

Non-fiction Review: White Girls

White Girls
by Hilton Als

Overall Rating: 4/5
Plot: n/a
Characters: 4/5
Writing: 4/5

White Girls is a collection of essays by Hilton Als on such subjects as gender identity, representation, intersectionality, and pop culture. As such, there really is no plot to rate, but the characterization of the people he talks about and the way in which he writes are what I'm basing my rating on. I particularly enjoyed his essay on Truman Capote.

I feel like I did this book a disservice by not reading it as deeply or as carefully as it deserved. This needs to be held up with other writers of his era, like James Baldwin and Truman Capote. This is an important book and should be given the attention it deserves. I really didn't do that and I blame the manner in which I read it: there was a hold behind me, so I rushed through the essays and didn't spent much time meditating on their meaning and place in the scheme of life. This is not a light read, but it definitely one that needs to be read to be appreciated.

Adult Review: Trowchester Blues

Based on a promotional eBook received from NetGalley in exchange for a review.

Trowchester Blues
Written by Alex Beecroft

Overall Rating: 5/5
Plot: 5/5
Characters: 5/5
Writing: 5/5

Michael May, police investigator for the London Metropolitan Police, has a meltdown of epic proportions after seeing the crime scene of yet another young woman he failed to save. In response to this meltdown, he turns in his badge and retires to his family home, the site of his own troubled childhood. Bisexual and divorced after years of living straight, he discovers an incredibly attractive and eccentric bookstore owner, Finn, and they strike up a relationship. What Michael doesn't know is Finn's history with his own Metro Police department as a former fence...

I could go on and on and on about this book. The relationships between Michael and Finn, Michael and his former partner, Finn and his flamboyant book club, Finn and his Ghost, Michael and the homeless girl who takes up residence nearby, Michael and his childhood demons... This book bursts at the seams with relationships and they are all fantastic. They are developed and interesting and any one of them could have been a novel on its own. Beecroft weaves them all together into a whole that is fast-paced, sexy, and an utter delight to read.

I really appreciate the author's attention to representation of sexuality, since the main character is bisexual and clear about this. He isn't gay and closeted. He defines himself as bisexual and the difference is important to him. Beecroft also highlights some major issues in the LGBT community: teen homelessness in the form of the teenaged lesbian kicked out of her home because she had a girlfriend. And there is a gender-neutral teen who is accepted fully by their parents. In general, this book made me smile, made me blush, made me cheer, and made me contact my branch manager, begging to have the series added to our library's collection. I want to recommend this to everyone who's open to reading about same-sex characters.

This means you: go read it. Right now. Shoo.

 

Adult Review: Omari and the People

Based on a promotional eBook received from NetGalley in exchange for a review.



Omari and the People
Written by Stephen Whitfield

Overall Rating: 3/5
Plot: 4
Characters: 3
Writing: 2

Omari and the People is a sweeping, epic quest story of a thief so successful that he becomes bored with his life. In a whirlwind decision, he burns his city to the ground, stranding thousands of people of varying classes without homes in the desert. With the backing of an elderly drifter who appears to have semi-magical powers, he becomes the leader of the city's middle and lower classes and takes them on a journey through the desert to seek a new home.

I felt like I was missing something profound in this story. It has excellent reviews on GoodReads and it feels to me that I was reading an entirely different book from those other reviewers. I wonder if there is a cultural framework that I'm missing. While the story is compelling, the characters interesting and the world immersive, the writing does not appeal to me. It has a storytelling quality which works for short stories or children's books, but doesn't seem to work for longer fiction. In particular, the narrator frequently explains the feelings of a character and then the character speaks about those feelings, giving a sense of redundancy to the exposition. Also, there are several places where the author says via narration that a character has a feeling, in spite of something that will happen later but hasn't happened yet. It works for face-to-face storytelling especially in groups where the story is a well-known folk tale or part of local mythology, but falls flat in new text.

I enjoyed the relationships between Omari and the various women in his life, as well as the development of trust among the men. Unfortunately, I don't find the characters to be well-developed. While Omari has a personal emotional journey, the rest of the cast of characters are only cardboard cut-outs in support of that journey. This greatly reduces the importance of the women, who had potential to be strong, vibrant female figures and are instead reduced to the love interest, the witch, and the lost mother-figure.

While the material is decent, I suspect it was not written for me. This distance from the target audience made the story hard for me to relate to and in the end, I didn't enjoy it very much. I wanted to know more about the world and the culture, but feel that the author expected me to already have that information instead of providing it in an accessible way.