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Graphic Novel Roundup

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A Flight of Angels by Rebecca Guay and others
This graphic novel is absolutely packed with talent. It’s conceptualized and illustrated by Rebecca Guay, with stories by Holly Black, Bill Willingham, Louise Hawes, Alisa Kwitney, and Todd Mitchell. Even casual fantasy or graphic novel readers will likely recognize one or two of those names.

I love the idea beyond the book. It’s a frame story: a group of fairies and other creatures (fair and foul) discover an injured, unconscious angel in the forest. They each take turns telling a tale that describes how the angel may have gotten there, and the youngest among them will decide the angel’s fate based upon these tales. Each story explores some facet of angel mythology. I particularly enjoyed the first, written by Louise Hawes, which gives us a different version of Adam and Eve, though I think all are pretty strong.

What stands out particularly well, though, is the art. Each story is illustrated in a different style, which led me to initially think they were illustrated by different artists. This is not the case. Rebecca Guay illustrates the whole thing, and each story – including the frame story – looks like it came from a different hand. I’m pretty blown away by that, especially when I consider that the art is top-notch all the way through.

This is a beautiful book, beautifully thought-out and executed. It was selected as one of YALSA’s top 10 graphic novels of 2012, and I’m surprised I hadn’t even heard of it until I came across it in the comics shop. It’s written for an adult audience but could easily cross over to more mature teens, and I highly recommend it.

Fairest vol. 1: Wide Awake by Bill Willingham and Phil Jimenez
Fables’ popularity has brought us a few spinoffs, and this is the latest I’ve discovered. It focuses on the women of Fables. This first volume tells Sleeping Beauty/Briar Rose and the Snow Queen’s stories, which intertwine. Regular Fables readers will recall that Briar Rose was left in a rather precarious position in the main storyline; this volume gives readers an opportunity to find out what happened to her and continue her tale.

Right off the bat it was obvious to me that this was written by Willingham (as opposed to the Cinderella spinoff, reviewed below). The characterization is closer to that in the main Fables story, the humor flows better, and the story is just more interesting. Of the spinoffs I’ve tried (Cinderella, Jack of Fables, and Fairest), this is my favorite. Phil Jimenez gets primary credit for the art, and he does a terrific job. I’m such a sucker for Adam Hughes’ cover illustrations, too, which are phenomenal.

The bonus story at the end is wild. It’s a noir-ish detective story featuring Beast. I can’t say more than that. It kind of blew my mind. I still don’t know if I liked it.

Cinderella vol. 2: Fables are Forever by Chris Roberson and Shawn McManus
I guess the cover on this one should have been a giveaway, but I liked the first volume well enough, I figured I’d enjoy this one equally. It was…just OK. It features Cinderella hunting down Dorothy Gale, an assassin who worked for the shadow Fabletown and has some history with Cindy. That’s basically the extent of the story, aside from an unpleasant twist near the end which made me extremely uncomfortable.

There was a lot of Cinderella and Dorothy fighting in bikinis. As I said, the cover should have clued me in on that. It may sound like I didn’t care for this one much, but I did enjoy it. I just expected more. The idea of Cinderella as a spy is a great one. The first volume played with the traditional Cinderella story in new ways, but I felt like Roberson just phoned it in on this one. Not the best.

The Undertaking of Lily Chen by Danica Novgodoroff
This is a case of “It’s not you, it’s me.” I recognize the technical quality of the book. The art is certainly good. The story is unique and well-developed. I found the premise of ghost brides fascinating. The whole thing just left a bad taste in my mouth.

Deshi’s older brother, the pride of the family, dies, and Deshi’s parents send him out to find a ghost bride for him, so he doesn’t have to be buried and go into the next world alone. A ghost bride is a corpse of a woman – the fresher the better. Deshi lives in modern-day rural China where this very old tradition is still sometimes practiced. He falls in with a young woman named Lily, on the run from problems of her own. Female corpses, especially fresh ones good enough for Deshi’s brother, are in short supply. You see where this is going.

I think my main issue arose when Deshi and Lily started developing romantic feelings for each other. Deshi was romantically involved with Lily even while he was still considering killing her to bring home as a ghost bride. I think Novgodoroff was trying to show how tough parental pressure can be – and Deshi’s parents are certainly awful. But it didn’t work for me. I suppose as a woman, I automatically place myself in the girl’s shoes, which made me consider how I’d feel if a boy was considering killing me while he was kissing me. This is mainly Deshi’s story (despite the title!), but Novgodoroff does tell a good portion of it from Lily’s point of view, so sympathizing with her seems to be intended as much as sympathizing with Deshi is. It just made me feel icky, and not in a nice way.

A Flight of Angels and Cinderella purchased, Fairest borrowed from the library, Undertaking of Lily Chen provided by the publisher. All titles are available now.

Days of Blood and Starlight by Laini Taylor

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I’ve had this book for a while, but it took me a long time to actually get around to reading it. It’s not because I didn’t think I’d enjoy it. On the contrary, I enjoyed it quite a lot. I just loved the first book so much, and it ended so painfully for its characters, I knew the second installment would do cruel things to my heart. Despite my love for dystopias, I don’t have a huge capacity for reading about awful things happening to fictional people. Often I’ll have to repeat in my head over and over “These people are not real. This did not really happen.”

Needless to say, I had to tell myself that often while reading Days of Blood and Starlight.

It feels like a “middle of the series” book. Often that’s a negative thing, but Taylor’s writing is so good, I doubt many readers will mind. There’s not a whole lot of plot movement initially. Much of the novel focuses on Karou and Akiva coming to terms with what happened in Daughter of Smoke and Bone – namely, the rekindling of the war between the chimaera and the angels. The chimaera have been defeated, for all intents and purposes, but they’ve mounted a small resistance that is growing, thanks to the efforts of Thiago, the brutal son of the legendary chimaera warlord, and Karou, the chimaera’s new resurrectionist. Meanwhile, Akiva tries to (secretly) mitigate the effects of the angels’ actions upon chimaera civilians, to mixed results. They act separately and independently with very little knowledge of the other, but when they do meet on rare occasions, it’s painful – and I mean that in a good way.

So there’s a lot of misery going on here. Taylor does bring a bit of lightness with the arrival of Zuzana and Mik, who get to interact with a whole host of chimaera. Their presence is dangerous but funny at the same time. Their visit doesn’t serve much purpose other than bringing some levity to the story, but the levity is much needed and prevents the story from seeming to wallow in misery. Things do really start to move in the second half, where we go beyond the (admittedly well-written) scenes of skirmishes and slaughters. The ending sets up the third book nicely, setting the stage for a potentially much larger conflict, which is exciting to think about.

Days of Blood and Starlight focuses a lot on the awfulness of war, which isn’t exactly revelatory. But it goes beyond that rather obvious theme to ruminate on questions like: How do two groups who don’t even remember why they started fighting end the violence? What is justice and what is revenge, and does the distinction matter? Is forgiving people who have done awful things possible? How much can a person compromise herself to achieve a good end before the ends are not good anymore?

Where the first book was a story about transformation and discovering one’s true self, this book is a full-on war novel. Sometimes it’s exhausting, but it’s always well-executed.

I actually finally hunkered down and read this book since Laini Taylor was visiting my area. I wanted to have the book done so I could get it signed and attend the event without worrying about someone spilling the beans about its contents. Again, I find myself holding off on reading the third book because I know Taylor will put her characters through even more misery. I need to be in a particular mood to read a book that will devastate me. Don’t worry – I’ll be sure and review it many months after everyone else has already read it, just like this one.

Personal copy.

Laini Taylor and I are having a Very Important Discussion. Also, bonus top of Margaret Stohl’s head.

In the Shadows by Kiersten White and Jim Di Bartolo

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I’m a sucker for beautiful books, and In the Shadows is nothing if not beautiful. The cover tells you that the text story is by Kiersten White and the art story by Jim Di Bartolo, letting you know right away that the art is not just a series of pretty illustrations – they tell a story that intertwines with the text in important ways, if inscrutable at first.

The story is set (mostly) in Maine, in 1900, in a boardinghouse run by a widowed woman, Mrs. Johnson. She has two teenage daughters, Cora and Minnie. Arthur, a rather brooding teenager, has been sent to stay at the boardinghouse for mysterious reasons; ditto for teen brothers Charles and Thomas. Charles, the elder brother, is dying from an unspecified disease. Together, the five teens become caught up in a dark conspiracy that goes back many years. I won’t share much more (that would ruin some of the fun of discovery), but I will say that the conspiracy is supernatural in origin.

Reading this book was a bit like playing the computer game Myst. Those of you who have played it, or any of its sequels, will know that there’s a storyline, often featuring strange secrets and faraway places, that the player must discover along the way. There are the stunning graphics that tell part of the story, but then there’s also journals, letters, and voiceover – text, really – that tells the rest. Figuring out how everything goes together is the main puzzle of Myst, and I felt like this book was a similar sort of puzzle. The book alternates between art chapters and text chapters. The art chapters have no captions and no dialogue. There are a few letters to characters, but they’re partly obscured so you can’t make out them entirely. They’re clues. The fun, the discovery, is learning how the art story and text story coalesce. It’s not readily apparent at first; stick with it. The rewards are worth it.

I loved Jim Di Bartolo’s work on Lips Touch: Three Times, so it’s unsurprising that I loved it here as well. Here, his art is equal in significance to the text, inviting multiple re-reads and long moments spent poring over the panels. His work is very moody, fitting the tone of the story. His colors are bold, and he uses a liberal amount of black, often casting his characters in shadow. I encourage you to check out a few samples at his website. His art is entirely my style.

White’s no slouch here either. She chooses to tell her part of the story by varying the points of view, though everything remains third person. I think she does a fine job of developing the characters in this way. She doesn’t get a whole lot of space to do it, considering the book is 384 pages and many of those pages belong to the art. At first I had a hard time remembering who was whom (which one is the sick one? Which ones are related?), but this didn’t last long. She gets across quite nicely Charles’ cheerfulness as well as his desperation, Thom’s feelings of helplessness, Cora’s fear, Minnie’s desire to help Cora past that fear – often in unwise ways. The only other book of hers I’ve read is Mind Games, and I think the writing of In the Shadows is much stronger.

Even these text pages are works of art – everything is on glossy paper with lovely, subdued splashes of color around the borders. The whole book has the weight of a graphic novel. In many ways, the stories told by the text and art are not completely original, but the way they’re told is, and that’s what makes this book stand out.

This is a book that needs to be read twice. The first time, read it straight through as presented; the second, go back and re-read just the art. You’ll pick up on more details, and most of your lingering questions will be answered. In the Shadows is unique among current YA offerings (though I’m not wild about its generic title) and will satisfy fantasy readers looking for something different.

Review copy provided by the publisher at TLA. In the Shadows will be published April 29.

On Expectations for Girls in YA Fiction, Misleading Reviews, and Sexuality

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A few weeks ago, I picked up and devoured Julie Halpern’s The F-It List. It’s a story about two girls who are best friends and how their relationship weathers everything. It starts with Becca sleeping with Alex’s boyfriend the day of Alex’s father’s funeral. The summer immediately following, the girls aren’t hanging out as much as they used to. Sure, Alex is angry and upset about what Becca did, but their reason for not hanging out has much more to do with Alex’s need to grieve losing her father than it does what Becca did or losing that boyfriend.

When the school year begins, Alex learns via another girl that something awful happened to Becca over the summer: she was diagnosed with cancer. Alex immediately runs to Becca’s side, and their friendship, while not perfectly patched up, is allowed to continue, and it’s through this agreement of continuing their relationship that Becca asks Alex for a favor. She needs to complete her f-word-rhymes-with-bucket list. Since Becca’s sick and worried a bit about what her future may hold, she wants Alex to do and experience a number of things that she’s always wanted to do but wonders if she’ll ever have the chance to do.

A number of items on the list have to do with sex. Becca wants Alex to masturbate, and she wants Alex to have sex with someone she can say I love you to and mean it. Other items on the list range from doing some silly prank-like stuff to more relationship-driven items. But it is those sexually-related items that Alex homes in on most and those are the items that come to signify not just a lot of what the relationship between the two girls is — blunt, honest, and unashamed — but also points where readers may either bristle or dig in for something deeper. In many ways, I thought the ways that both the sexually-related items and the friendship more broadly played out in the story were what made The F-It List knock out. It’s rare to see such positive portrayals of sex for girls. Both Becca and Alex enjoyed sex and both were very open and honest about liking it and sharing those positive experiences with one another.

But not everyone felt this to be the case. Here’s the review Halpern’s novel got in School Library Journal (you can click to make it larger):

I’ve read and reread this review many times, and every time, something new feels off in it. Keep in mind many trade reviewers review from advanced reader copies of books, meaning that not all of the kinks have been entirely worked out.

I note, too, that I also read The F-It List from an advanced reader copy.

Although I could dive into the notion that Alex performs the items on the f-it list out of guilt — an idea I disagree with entirely, as Alex begins to really embrace this as a commitment to her relationship with Becca — what I find fascinating is this line: “Both girls have casual, unprotected sex with all of their boyfriends without any thoughts of taking precautions.”

This line presumes a few things in it. The first is that it’s the responsibility of the girls to think about and carry out the actions necessary for protection during sex. While print space is limited and words have to be carefully selected in a trade review, the way this particular line is phrased, in conjunction with the line before it, casts a judgment upon the female characters in the story. They’re crass, with limited vocabulary, and they’re not taking responsibility for their own actions. These are the kinds of girls you don’t want to be role models for readers, since they’re not being “good girls.” They don’t arouse sympathy because what happens to them is all a matter of consequences and choices they make. They weren’t smart enough or thinking through things enough to protect themselves.

But what is worse in this line is that it’s factually incorrect.

Early in the book, Alex talks about the first time she’s had sex, as a means of thinking through Becca’s request that she have sex with someone she loves and cares about. The first person — and only person at that point — she’d slept with was a boy named Aleks, who was a foreign exchange student. Starting at page 76 in the advanced reader copy, Alex lays out the story as follows:

Becca was disappointed I hadn’t seen his penis yet and handed me a condom the next time I saw her. Two days later, armed with the Trojan, I followed Aleks back to his house again. […] Me in my underwear, him in blue boxers, we moved over to the bed. “Wait–” I told him, the first work spoken that afternoon. I found Becca’s condom in my backpack and brought it up to the bed. […] He slapped on the condom.


It’s pretty evident immediately that condoms play a role in not just Alex’s sex life, but in the discussions she and Becca have had as best friends about being sexually active. Alex got the condom from Becca, and Alex insisted that Aleks wear it when they slept together. Seems straightforward enough.

But there’s more.

Later on in the story, when Alex begins a relationship with Leo, the issue of the condom isn’t the only one that comes up before they take the plunge and have sex (they had a few intimate moments, but in each case, Leo stopped when Alex asked him to). She talks about why she wants to make sure there is protection. Starting on page 141 of the advanced reader copy:

His hands were gentler than I wanted, and I grabbed one and wrapped it around my breast. I let out a sigh, and Leo reciprocated with a sound of his own. “So you have a condom?” I asked. Life had been too cruel in the last year not to get me pregnant or diseased if I wasn’t careful. I couldn’t trust my body to do the right thing, and I didn’t want to have a conversation with Leo in the middle of this to talk past sexual partners. I didn’t want to know. I just needed it to happen. 


Immediately after, Leo puts on a condom.

In both instances, Alex takes precaution. In both instances, it is Alex — the girl — who insists on using a condom before engaging in intercourse and in the second section, Alex lays out why it is she finds taking this precaution important. With everything going on in her life right now, she recognizes that not being careful would only lead to further problems. She didn’t want to saddler herself with that, nor did she want to get into it with Leo, either. It’s clear and evident that Alex thought about precautions prior to intercourse, and she’s not shy in laying that out there for readers, just as she’s not shy in laying out there what and how she comes to enjoy her budding sexuality.

I’m struck by that review line again because it seems to me the reviewer missed these things (reading too quickly? Not paying close enough attention to the details yet still bringing them up in the review?). But I’m further struck in thinking about whether or not we as readers need to be hit over the head with how careful our protagonists — females especially — need to express how they’re protecting themselves when they choose to engage in sex.

Did the reviewer find fault in the fact that Alex doesn’t tell us about condom use in subsequent sexual situations, despite the fact she’s made it clear she wouldn’t be crazy enough to have sex without a condom? Is it necessary for every instance of sex, whether on the page or fade to black, be explicit in its depiction of protection use? And if that’s the case, where is there a line drawn between telling the story and being faithful to how the characters are and positing an over-the-head message about safe sex? Do readers believe that if Alex doesn’t explain in every sexual moment that she’s making sure there’s a condom in place that she’s chosen instead to not protect herself? Because as a reader, I assume when it’s laid out there for me as openly as it is, that there will be a condom. That I don’t need to be reminded again and again.

Because when real people have sex and are resolute in their wanting to be protected against pregnancy and disease, it becomes a routine, rather than a point of conscious decision making. You always have that box of condoms or you’re faithful in taking birth control (or both or neither). The story isn’t in the routine; it’s in the break from the routine. In Alex’s case, the routine is protecting herself, and I think any more insertion of the condom lines through the story would have turned this from a book where Alex (and Becca) really come to embrace their ability to be sexual beings to a story where they become pawns for the Message of “make sure you use protection.”

Part of me wonders, too, whether the fact this is such a positive portrayal of girls embracing sex and doing so without apology and without holding back on being crude and, at times, obscene, is what will hold some readers back from seeing these smaller moments when Alex is very keen on keeping herself and Leo safe. Halpern hasn’t written an easy story here in any capacity. But I think it’s this complexity which makes The F-It List such a great, memorable read. Because it’s not about Becca’s diagnosis. It’s not about death or the fear of that. It’s about embracing life and relationships — friendly and romantic — to their fullest in whatever way you need to. It’s unfortunate, though, that a trade review in one of the largest, most well-respected library journals could be factually incorrect about the story. In doing so, this book might not end up in the hands of those readers — girls particularly — who would get so much out of it. Who would see themselves in Alex or in Becca. Who would see it’s perfectly okay to enjoy sex alone or with a partner.

And that yes, it’s important to take precautions for yourself and have solid reasons behind why.

I can’t help wonder, too, whether books that do similar things as Halpern’s but feature a male main character undergo the same scrutiny and character judgment.

New This Spring: Two Snappy Reviews

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The Falconer by Elizabeth May
May brings us
savage, murderous faeries in her debut featuring a teenage girl with the
unique ability to hunt them down. A faery killed Aileana’s mother and
since then, she’s vowed to exact revenge upon it – as well as any other
faeries she can get her hands on, with the exception of a sympathetic
faery who trains her and a tiny pixie who keeps her company and mends
her clothing. The story, set in 1844, is notable for its exploration of
faery lore, which is (according to an author note) based on actual
Scottish mythology. May’s faeries are sometimes beautiful, sometimes
hideous, but always deadly, hearkening back to a time when all
supernatural beings were referred to as faeries by the Scots.

There’s
some romantic tension between Aileana and her trainer, the faery
Kiaran, who sometimes seems human and at other times is definitely,
absolutely not. It kind of works, if you can get past the fact that he’s
thousands of years old and she is a teenager. The writing is mostly
good, though not uniformly so. May is able to communicate quite clearly
how devastated Aileana is by her mother’s death. In many ways, this is a
very dark book, full of violence and despair. I wish the plot had been a
bit more complex – it mostly involves Aileana hunting faeries, then
strategizing with Kiaran once they learn that a whole horde of the most
dangerous kinds of faeries are about to be released upon the world. The
pseudo-twist ending may be the most interesting part of the book – too
bad we couldn’t get there sooner. Nevertheless, this should please fans of fairies and books heavy on action.

Sekret by Lindsay Smith
I was intrigued by the premise of this debut, which is set in Soviet Russia in 1963 and involves teenage psychics recruited (read: blackmailed) by the KGB into serving as spies. Protagonist Yulia is one of these spies. The KGB is threatening her family and coercing her into sabotaging the American space program.

Much of the book focuses on Yulia’s training as she struggles to discover who among the other recruits she can trust (none of them). She learns how to put up mental walls to fend off psychic attacks as well as how best to attack others, gleaning the information her captors require. Above all, she wants to escape and rescue her family.

What this book does well is portray Yulia’s internal struggles – her mind under attack from others, her desperation over her situation, her struggle to hone her skills. I wished the plot were a bit more exciting, though. For a story about spies, it’s pretty slow and the missions they’re sent on aren’t terribly exciting. I have trouble remembering much of them at all. As with The Falconer, there’s some interesting stuff right at the end, but up to that point, there’s just not a lot going on. But psychics and spies are both trendy now, so I expect a book featuring them working for the KGB will go over well.

Review copies provided by the publishers. The Falconer will be available May 6. Sekret is available now.