chantaal's Reviews (2.32k)

Wish I loved this as much as I did volume 1, but it was still a good time. Good art, decent character work, shoddy world building, found family and queer joy.

This is a fantastic and wonderful graphic memoir about Sara Soler and her partner Diana, following their journey after Diana comes out as trans. It's a successful blend of personal and informative, giving a strong emotional heart to the more informative sections. 

The art is very cute, and very much NOT like the cover. Sara's artwork is much more stylized, in cute comic form that is round and bouncy and dynamic. The color palette is also great, using only the trans flag colors to bring everything to life, and it works. 

I much preferred the personal story of Sara and Diana's relationship to the mini lectures, mostly because I'm already aware of the explanations and ideas being brought up in them. However, this is written in Spanish by a Spanish native, and I have no idea what transgender life is like in Spain - it may be the case that the simple lecture style married with the personal memoir style is exactly what some people may need to understand the broader picture, or to empathize more deeply. 

Overall, this is a fun and emotional and lovely graphic novel. It's a great memoir of a relationship, it's educational, and I think would work for any age group from young teen and up. 

This is book is so much fun, LET'S TALK ABOUT IT.

If you don't know what Bury Your Gays is referring to, here's the TVTropes page about it. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuryYourGays

The book itself does well to explain the trope that is at the heart of it all, but I think having a background idea of just how prevalent the trope has been is good for going into this.

This story focuses on Misha Byrne, a Hollywood writer who came up writing horror movies and is currently wrapping up a season of a TV show where he's ready for his two main female leads to profess their love for each other. However, The Studio wants him to kill them off in the name of Ratings.  Thus kicks off a weird, meta-filled, horrifying, gory odyssey as Misha grapples with his own identity in the face of absolute, all-encompassing, all-powerful capitalism. Oh, and it tackles the struggle of AI "art" as well. No big deal.

As a book that is full of meta-textual references to gay culture, there are references galore that are fun to pick out if you get them. There were also a few things I didn't totally get, and some sections of the story itself that I think were a little too meta for me and lost me for short periods of time. I feel like my husband, who loves horror films and writes screenplays, will probably get a lot more out of some parts of the meta horror & screenwriter elements when he finally reads this. 

The character work of Misha was pretty great. We get flashbacks to some big parts of his past that inform the decisions he makes in the present, and he has two important relationships - a best friend and his boyfriend - that also ground him. I could have used a little bit more development of Tara and Zeke, though; I didn't feel deeply for them despite Misha's relationships and how those drive some of his actions later on.

I wish I could talk about more elements, but anything else I say would fall into the spoiler zone - or, at least, ruining some fun surprises zone. Misha is a compelling character to follow, and the journey he takes is fun and funny and horrifying all at once. The book satirizes so much about Hollywood while also exposing just how insanely awful it is at the same time. 

Chuck Tingle has always had a lot to say about society through his work (YES, that includes his erotica). Camp Damascus explored one aspect of queer life in our world, and Bury Your Gays explores another. It feels like he's doing a lot of self-reflecting and expunging of his thoughts and feelings onto the page, and honestly I'm all here for it. 

LOVE IS REAL, FRIENDS! HAPPY PRIDE MONTH!

Generation Ship got its hooks into me and dragged me along for a wild ride, read in two sittings. Or is it layings, when you're in bed reading on your Kindle, desperately ignoring how tired you are as you thumb just one more page...

It's a pretty solid premise: a generation ship, hundreds of years after it left Earth, is finally reaching its destination: a planet they can possibly colonize. As the ship approaches, political unrest churns and erupts thanks to the actions of our five main characters. We follow a scientist, a hacker, a police officer, a governor, and a reluctant union leader. Everyone is a mess, acting and reacting and reacting again, decisions pinging off each other until the ship is ready for an entire class revolution. It's great, that way.

Where the book failed for me was in the fact that I did not for one moment believe any of our main characters were <i>real people.</i> They all felt like puppets being moved around by the author to make his story move forward. Like I could see every decision the author was making so it could lead to the next, so it could lead to another, so that this outcome could happen. The constant forward momentum was great and obviously kept me reading, but I felt so dissatisfied with the whole journey by the end, mainly because of the characters.

It also did not need to be nearly 600 pages long.

Issues aside, this was still an incredibly compelling read. It's pure political drama set in space, like John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Stacy Abrams, and Lois McMaster Bujold were all set in a blender and this was the result. 

Would I recommend it? Maybe, if you're looking for something easy to read and need to scratch a political drama, space opera itch. 

The Necessity of Stars is a lush, quiet novella that explores decline in big and small ways. Set in the future, our main character Breone is an elderly UN diplomat who lives in France in a nice house with a nice garden that somehow still flourishes even as the climate crisis has ravaged the world at large. Her best friend Delphine lives next door. She is starting to forget things. And then an alien, a creature, shows up in her garden.

That is about all I can say for a plot. This is a character study at heart, weaving together themes that explore loss of self, loss of the world, how we see the world around us and how or when we choose to look away. 

Tobler's writing is beautiful, but at times I felt that the writing overpowered the story a little. I would get a slightly lost in the scene going on, but then remember Breone is also a little lost and maybe it's all on purpose and things felt right again. 

It's a lovely little novella, one I would recommend for anyone looking for something a little quieter yet still impactful in the themes its exploring.

DNF @ 61% because I got to a point last night while reading where I just laughed and threw my Kindle down onto the bed and decided to finally put it down and go to sleep.

The pacing in this is fucking insane. It's made up of tons of random scenes of full throttle action, juxtaposed with the slowest overall plot momentum. The general plot happens because the main character has to lie to her found family crew, a trope I generally hate. Nothing happened with the psychic cats. The time jumps are wild. 

And it's straight up Mass Effect fanfiction. THE ELEVATORS LMAO.

Honestly, I think this could have been more successful for me if it had been tightened up - a few less side questy hijinks, a bit more of a focus on each side character that Eva is close with. If it's really Mass Effect fanfic, then why were there only two characters who ever did off-ship missions with her? And one of them didn't get anywhere near the character development that the love interest does.

Too many hijinks, not enough heart.

DNF @ 52%. Unfortunately, while this started out as a charming and interesting character study, it completely lost me to boredom as the story progressed. 

It's really hard to rate this novel simply because of where it stands in the grand scheme of Japanese mysteries. Hard, because it has to stand alone as an entertaining novel. Hard, because it has to stand against other locked room mysteries. Hard, because it has to stand as a translated mystery.

As a novel that stands on its own and as a mystery, this was a solid read. It's the type of story where we're alongside the characters as they talk to each other to solve the mystery, and that typically isn't my favorite style of mystery. It leads to tons and tons of info dumping, dropping clues here and there as the story moves forward and my brain doesn't really enjoy that style. 

While I was intrigued and super into the mystery itself, the reveal was...lackluster. The book dares you to solve the mystery before its revealed, and there are even two interludes from the author teasing you by saying you have all the clues. LOL as if. The puzzle of the mystery was so weird and gruesome, how the hell is someone supposed to have solved it in that particular way? 

Anyway, this was a decent read. I liked it for what it was doing, but felt a little like I had the rug pulled out from underneath me as a reader by the end.

I have to give Dan Slott a lot of credit for having the Fantastic Four feel like an adventuring family again. Yeah there are some big stakes, and yeah it feels a bit heavy handed, but I love this family and I love them the most when they’re being adventurers and saving the day. 

The whole Fantastix side story was incredibly lame, but I enjoyed where this volume ended.