This is one of those books that periodically overtake the collective consciousness of my fellow Glassers, so I had to read it. It’s a story about anxiety and confronting one’s fears, told through the struggles of a sentient humanoid bulb of garlic to defend her fellow sentient humanoid vegetables and the witch who created them from a vampire who has arrived at the castle overlooking their garden. If you take the time to ask any questions at all, it gets very weird, but if you accept the book’s scanty explanations at face value and just roll with it and enjoy the beautiful art, then you’re in for a very cute and enjoyable read for all ages.

Agatha is a character you either love or hate, and luckily I love her, because here we have her at her cattiest and most self-loathing. At least some of the cattiness is justified this time… You just don’t insult Bill Wong! (Bill is a cinnamon roll and I want all the best for him.)

Look, I know that I’m supposed to hate the bitchy, bisexual, communist hiker who is the bane of landowners’ lives, but she was kind of great in spite of the author.

Rough and voicey and punk and queer in ways that I can see why it’s not everyone’s shot of whiskey, but it’s mine. It reads like a manifesto, a historical document of a lost Internet, a fictional companion to Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, a trans femme Michelle Tea. Binnie distills a lot of trans thought in ways that feel relevant (and show up on Twitter and Discord and meme accounts) almost a decade after Nevada’s original publication, which makes me glad it’s been reissued. It’s a book that some would call dangerous but which I believe has probably saved lives and will hopefully go on to save more.

3.5 stars. I had more trouble staying engaged with the mystery in When the Crow's Away than I did with the series debut, but I still enjoyed learning more about the community and the characters. Looking forward to the third.

Convenience Store Woman is one of those books, like The Maid or Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, with a protagonist who isn't diagnosed with autism but is obviously autistic to readers who know anything about autism, and who struggles to navigate neurotypical society.

I don't think that I enjoy these books in the ways that neurotypical readers do. I often see reviews that describe the protagonists as quirky, refreshing, and unique if the reader liked them, and describe them as weird or mentally deficient if the reader didn't. There's a sense of the autistic protagonist being uniquely situated to reveal some truth about society that neurotypical people just don't notice or have too much decorum to say out loud. There's an implication that these autistic characters are inspirational, which is no disabled person's favorite thing to be seen as, I can assure you.

Maybe that's why these books are being written, but it's not why I read them. As an autistic woman, I read them because I want to see characters that I can relate to, and I want to see how we're represented. It's kind of like eavesdropping on something that might not be meant for me to hear, but I want to know if lies and rumors are being spread about people like me. And my hope is always that the answer is no, and I get a good story out of the experience.

And that was pretty much the case with Convenience Store Woman. I could relate a lot to Furukura's sense of belonging and comfort in a role that organized her life and helped her to make sense of her place in the world. And I like that the novel didn't become some big journey of discovery for her. There's a sense here that Murata understands that disability is socially constructed, and that Furukura's failure to live up to her society's expectations in regard to her career and her relationships are not really Furukura's problem. To me, this book seems less about conformity, as a lot of people say, and more about the need to find one's place.

I'm glad that I finally got around to reading this, and I liked it enough that I'm going to give Murata's Earthlings a try, too.

Lore Olympus serves up drama in a very pretty package. Reading it feels like listening to Taylor Swift. I do not mean this as an insult.

This one didn’t quite work for me. Part of it had to do with expectation management, because the synopsis appended to this book is misleading. What I had read about it made it seem like an Agatha Christie with a contemporary setting, but this is not so. It took me quite a while to get oriented and at all invested in the dual narratives, and by the time I was expecting the tension to ramp up further, it fizzled into a lackluster ending. I felt like I was reading at a great remove from both stories, unable to really feel involved. And as a matter of personal preference, the references to the pandemic and summer 2020 protests felt jarring and just did not sit well.

Okay, as I type this review, which started as a 3-star, I keep coming up with things I disliked and have talked myself down to 2 stars. So I’m going to stop.

I like the story and art, but the relationship is moving a bit quickly for my taste. I like a slow burn! But that’s hard to do in a three-volume series, so… Eager for more drama in volume 2.