Walden's third book is a narrative of beautiful fragments. Two day-dreaming high school girls navigate love and friendship, in a world in which they sometimes appear as giants- lounging over whole mountains, resting laptops on top of multistory buildings, standing with heads literally in the clouds. As their closeness fades, their worlds shrink.

This book is gorgeous. The first issue introduces a world of bi-pedal, finely dressed animals of all species living together in floating wicker cities in the sky. Dusty is a young terrier, son of a wizard tradesman who barters with the bison clans who live on the plans below. Dusty's sky-city home is held up by magic, but the magic of this world is dwindling. A set of wizards form a bold plan: to reach back in time with magic and summon the Great Champion, who saved magic at the dawn of history. The plan works, in a fashion, but at a terrible price. Someone is summoned, but where and when he came from is unclear. During the summoning Dusty's city plummets to the ground, leaving he stranded with a group of vain wizards and an alien in dangerous territory, surrounded by angry planes tribes.

One of the best non-fiction comics I've ever read. Brown's main story is the invention of Tetris, which was born in 1984 in Soviet Russia. The inventor was Alexey Pajitnov, a software developer, and his creation was too addictive to be kept behind the Iron Curtain for long. As soon as Tetris was released into the world every game company- Nintendo, Atari, Sega- wanted it. Brown takes some side detours in the development of games over time and the early maneuvering of the foundational game companies as they each vied for the bulk of the market. This book is a fascinating page-turner, a masterpiece.

I picked up this book at the recommendation of friend, expecting a factual but straightforward account of how unmarried women as a voter block have influenced politics in America. This book has that, but so much more. It was conversational, personal, and affirmational in a way I had not predicted. Traister expertly weaves together an enormous amount of studies with her own primary source research- interviews of women from all over the country. These stories are laid side by side with stories of women from history who either never married, or married later than was conventionally expected in their era, and how those choices effected their own lives and the world. I would highly recommend this book to everyone. This is the kind of book I would have loved to read for school and discussed in a classroom, but was just as enjoyable as a pleasure read. I can't praise it enough.

A very light, quick supernatural mystery. Honestly you could probably read the whole book in a day if you had the afternoon free. Abigail Rook is a young woman with keen observation skills and a yearning for adventure. She arrives in the New England town of New Fiddleham in the winter of 1892 and within less than 24 hours meets R. F. Jackaby, an eccentric detective of crimes involving the supernatural. Jackaby is essentially a mirror-version of Sherlock Holmes. He converses regularly with magical creatures whom only he can see, and is terrible at noticing mundane details. This makes Abigail Rook the perfect assistant. And Jackaby is desperately in need of assistance- a gory murder has just been committed in the center of town, and more will soon follow unless Rook and Jackaby can find the killer.

Someone is setting empty barns on fire in the fields around Tackleford, and Linton and Sunny think this could be their next case. It's not nearly as fun to solve mysteries without Jack though, who has hardly been seen all summer now that he's dating Shauna. Charlotte and Mildred as similarly left to their own devices and in Shauna's absence they decide to domesticate the weird troll they found living under a bridge. He seems like a perfect man to set up with their new French teacher... if he's not the one setting all the fires, that is. Another pitch-perfect John Allison caper.

Helen Oyeyemi's writing is beautifully mysterious. I normally avoid books with even a touch of horror, let alone actually horrific elements, like the plague. This book constantly danced around the line of my comfort zone, which is I think exactly what the author intended.

White is for Witching opens with statements by three characters on the whereabouts of Miranda Silver. Ore says, Miranda is buried beneath her mother's house, throat blocked by a poison apple. Elliot says, Miranda went missing but she might come back. And the house says, Miranda is right here. These three voices lay out different versions of what happened to Miranda and in the end the reader is left to decide what or whom they want to believe.

A collection of nineteen short comics which each contain queer characters and elements of both romance and the paranormal. I sometimes find short stories like these overcrowded trying to include all of the themes required, but this book has managed to find a good balance. Some stand out tales include: Fyodor Pavlov's "Black Dog", about a hunter followed by a dog who might be death;
Leth and O'Neil's "Yes No Maybe" about a haunted Ouija board; and "Shadow's Bae" by Prager and Gillman about an unusually sweet monster from under the bed.

This is more a collection of short stories than a direct follow up to the first two Hellboy volumes but boy does it have some good ones! "The Corpse" is an action-packed run through of a number of Irish myths. "The Baba Yaga" recounts Hellboy's first run in with the best known Russian witch. Kate Corrigan makes appearances in two different stories and in both of them the floor of an old monastery collapses under Hellboy. The final story in the book and one of the longest is about Liz Sherman, and what happened after she tried to give her pyro gift away in Hellboy vol 2. Good stuff, as always.

A second fun, lightweight fantasy/historical fiction/murder mystery from William Ritter. Abigail Rook, the heroine, is an assistant to RF Jackaby, an absent minded supernatural investigator. But her true passion is for archaeology, so when an unusual dinosaur skeleton is discovered in on a farmer's hillside just outside New Fiddleham, Abigail can't wait to get her hands in the dirt.