i can't ugly cry the way i really want to, because i finished this in public in a very nice tea shop

I thought I was mentally prepared going into this memoir, but I absolutely was not. Bui wrote this memoir with unflinching honesty, even when that honesty showed parts of her life and her parents lives that most would try to gloss over or touch only superficially. 

The Best We Could Do works as a light history of the Vietnam conflict(s), along with being a family history. Bui writes from a place of being a mother reflecting on what her parents had to do to survive and ultimately get their kids to America. It's raw and real and doesn't always paint the best light on her parents (she doesn't shy away from describing emotional and sometimes physical abuse from her parents), but it also goes through their lives in Vietnam as a way to explain (not excuse) how they came to be the way they are. Her parents did the absolute best they could do under constantly terrible circumstances, and Bui explores that thoroughly.

As a bonus, this book made me realize that I really don't know much about Vietnam or the conflicts there at all, beyond glossing over what America's part in it was in my history classes growing up.

I hesitate to judge the art, because Bui admits that she only began to take art classes in order to draw this graphic novel, even though she did study for years. The art itself feels amateurish, but somehow that works in the book's favor. The color choices were great, as the wash of mainly reds and oranges created a hazy feeling that persisted throughout the whole book, keeping things cohesive.

This is a fantastic memoir and minor history of a short period of Vietnamese history, but I recommend it with caution. It's not graphic in its depiction, but it doesn't shy away from hard truths and rough topics. 

Uhhhh this really upped the stakes in a bonkers kind of way??

It's wild how much more powerful and intense the villain and the stakes in this one are, and it feels weird to have it be that huge by only the second book in a series. A lot of this felt like it could have trimmed and kept the story more streamlined, because even with all the extraneous scenes and fights and side quests, the climax and emotional resolutions still felt like they were approached at a ridiculously fast pace.

One thing I hope is addressed or changed a little in this series is how much guilt Kate takes on for anyone who happens to be hurt or dies around her. It's character flaw that makes sense in some regards, but in others it's just infuriating. When a certain character died in this, I could NOT believe her reaction to the death. Not one moment of it. It felt so over the top and ridiculous, even for the guilt complex she has. I get that Kate is lonely and her father was the reason she has so many of these emotional complexes, but to make that person's death - and the choices THAT PERSON made (yes, because of what she inspired in them, but THEY MADE THEIR OWN CHOICES) - all about herself and her feelings and how she always gets people hurt and killed and blah blah blah? Come onnn.

Still, this was a solid, fun ride in urban fantasy. I love the slow reveals of what Kate's power/bloodline could be, and the tension with Curran is SO good. Just absolutely hilarious at times, these two. 

One thing I have to add that I'm liking about this series as a whole is how GROSS it is. These shapeshifters and vampires aren't romanticized at ALL. They're all about body horror and Kate still fears them on an instinctual level, and it's fucking fantastic. 

Billie = Joan Allen
Mary Alice = Jamie Lee Curtis
Helen = Diane Lane
Natalie = Jennifer Coolidge or Gina Gershon depending on the energy you want

GIVE ME THIS MOVIE PLEASE AND THANK YOU

(this was fun and basically read like a movie and sometimes that's all i need out of book, JUST LET ME HAVE FUN)

Palimpsest is the type of memoir that I'm not always comfortable assigning a rating, because it's such a deeply personal accounting of someone's life. I will go with a 4 star simply because I had some issues with the art. At its heart, this is the story of Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom's search for the truth behind her adoption, and the depth of emotion and confusion that comes with that search.

I grabbed this from the library on a whim, and I had no real idea what to expect. I suppose I thought it would just be a memoir about an adoptee's life story, but it ended up being SO much more than that. Surprisingly, Lisa's search began to unearth the somewhat shady practices of international adoption, focusing heavily on the fact that she can never find any documents or truth to support anything she's told about it. She and her husband hit brick wall after brick wall of poorly maintained files, and even agencies hiding documents from her to protect themselves. Because "things were done differently back then," don't you know. 

The art is very simple, the color palette an almost off-putting drab brown. But in the end the simplicity worked for me. I do wonder if graphic novel format was the best for this...there is so much text, that I think the information could have been given just as easily and just as emotionally in a written memoir. The art itself didn't do much to support the emotion or action taking place, as it is very simple.

Sjöblom does much to try to balance her own emotional journey with the journey of her adoption, and despite there being a ton of text to work though, I think it comes together nicely.

I certainly had no idea of adoption stories like this beyond horror stories that seem so disconnected from my own day to day life that they could be ripped from movie or TV storylines. Palimpsest does great work as an emotional anecdotal story, while also being educational at the same time.

This had promise, but it honestly felt like a muddled, confusing mess of world building and story telling. The narrative focuses on one character, but bounces back and forth between two timelines rapidly, with no real reason why the timeline switches are made when they are. I'd hoped the confusion would lift as I read more, but at almost half way through the novella, I just couldn't be bothered to figure things out anymore.

Okay, so. Wow?! I'm genuinely surprised at how much I enjoyed this. I truly did not remember a single thing about this despite having read it 8 years ago, and I'm happy to say this is a very solid opening for an urban fantasy series, and I can see why Kate Daniels is so popular. 

In this world, magic ebbs and flows. When it's up, there's magic and no technology. When it's down, there's technology but no magic. There are all sorts of supernatural creatures, and the focus in this one is mainly on shifters (all types of animals) and vampires. Ilona Andrews have come up with a creative world here, playing on some urban fantasy tropes in fun ways. Kate Daniels is a magic user in this world, a mercenary for hire, and she is drawn into a murder mystery when her mentor and guardian is killed. 

I can see why 2014 me was bugged by Kate Daniels and her badassery. It felt very much like she was being written as a Strong Female Character, but I can see now that there's a bit more nuance to her characterization. She's hard and sarcastic and keeps people at arms length because of trauma in her past and how she was raised (which we don't know the specifics of yet), and we get enough tidbits to show that. I understood her a lot more this time around, and I found myself way more sympathetic to her and I liked her a LOT. 

I assume Curran is going to be the long term slow burn romance here, judging by the fact that every single cover in this series has a lion on it, and he's a lion shifter. I liked how much he and Kate butted heads, but also still had a mutual respect for each other in the end without sacrificing their sniping and chemistry. He's alpha without being so over the top as many other paranormal romances write alpha males (*coughNaliniSinghcough*), and I like him and Kate together so far. 

The reveal of the killer didn't quite work for me, nor did most of the actual detective work or mystery solving, but I didn't mind that. The mystery served more as a vehicle to introduce us to the world at large, and I enjoyed that aspect of it.

Hopefully on to book 2 soon, the audiobook narrator is great and I'd like my library copy to be available NOW please!!

It's really hard to put my thoughts together on this one because it's such an odd, dark sci-fi novel. 

Ymir is one of those novels that delights me and makes me wonder how some authors create worlds like this. Worlds that are wildly fun to learn about, and allow me to suspend all disbelief and just roll along with whatever I'm given. Rich Larson comes up with a lot of fun sci-fi ideas on this far flung planet Ymir, from ruling corporations to alien robot monsters to the body horror of being de-bodied as punishment. 

Yorick as a main character is...well, Yorick is a fucking mess. The man is beyond a mess. He's the mess that a mess makes when it's being its messiest. He's got trauma and drinks and does drugs and lives with so much emotional pain that he almost craves physical pain as he's processing the trauma that being back on Ymir brings him. He's hard to swallow, but Rich Larson's writing puts you so squarely in Yorick's mind, frames the entire story so completely through Yorick, that there is no novel without him and everything he's going through. 

I think the thing that really docked a star for me here was the pacing, though I think I understand why the pacing is the way that it is. As I've said, this book is SO thoroughly about Yorick that it slows down when he slows down, and speeds up to almost manic pacing when he's going through action scenes. It made me feel off kilter, and at times the slower scenes were very morose and maudlin and I wanted to be out and past them and back to the greater storyline. Except the plot is Yorick, Yorick is the plot and you don't get a second away from him. The book is masterful at that, I have to say. 

I would NOT recommend this to anyone coming here for a straight Beowulf retelling; while that has provided the basis for some theme work, it's not a one to one retelling and the world is so wildly different that I understood this without having read Beowulf. I just know the basic story plot beats and this doesn't follow them beyond hunting a grendel.

I'd instead recommend this to sci-fi fans who want something new and interesting and can handle super dark themes. Like, SUPER dark. There is no light in this book, but it IS good.

Overall, this was a really good, immersive sci-fi novel.

This is just super cute? 

A garden sprite wants to help a gardener, mostly because she loves seeing how happy the gardener is when her flowers bloom with the help of the sprite's magic. From there, a sweet story about friendship and working together blossoms, and it's just. Quite wholesome and low stakes and very cute. 

The character design for the sprites is really lovely - I'm especially fond Wisteria's massive hair - and the art is as well. 

This was a lovely short graphic novel to spend some cozy time with.

Servant Mage does all the heavy lifting of an epic fantasy story in the short length of a novella, and I think the length did this world a disservice. Kate Elliott has come up with some really neat ideas here, and this is a world with some politics I could be interested in.

However, I think this being a novella forces a lot of world building shorthand in the way I like least. Everyone asks questions and gives long answers to those questions that give the reader all the information we need about snippets of the world...but in a lot of instances it made no sense for the characters to be speaking as they did. They very much felt like characters running around in a fantasy novel, instead of characters inhabiting a world that I'm getting a peek into. 

I still think there is so, so much promise here, and if you want a quick interesting fantasy read, then I say try out this novella. Kate Elliott certainly has some great stories and ideas within her. 

Congrats to the Harper Collins Union workers for getting Harper Collins to come to the table with a tentative agreement! Happy to finally get this review back up! https://twitter.com/hcpunion/status/1623850750815117312 

*******

I always enjoy graphic novel memoirs where the author is also the artist, because their personality often comes through in the art, making for a personal and interesting story. Gao's art is pretty sketchy here, a bit simple at times, but the color work is lovely, and at times she does some really great pieces to show some more emotionally complex themes.

As for the writing, I enjoyed Gao's storytelling. She's very open about the racism she experienced growing up, but doesn't shy away from showing that she had internalized some of that herself. The pacing felt a bit too fast, but with Gao covering basically her entire life in one graphic novel, it's understandable.

I thought the inclusion of COVID-19 would be a turn off for me because I am definitely personally not in a place where I can face that in what I read, but it was actually pretty minimal here. Enough to show how Gao was affected by it, but not much more than that.

Overall, this was another to add to the list of great graphic memoirs.