Liz Prince started drawing one comic every day at the beginning of 2016. This book collects 356 little strips and builds, piece by piece, a picture of her life. It was a tumultuous year- she got married, moved to a new state, bought a house, witnessed the election. It was also a mundane year- she took naps, petted her cats, drew comics, ate lunch with friends, watched TV. This mix of macro and micro events, plus the changing of the seasons, the ongoing attempts at better self-care and better work habits, create a story much greater than the sum of its parts. I love reading daily comics. I think they are one of the most interesting types of creative challenge for a cartoonist to take on. I've never kept up dailies longer than about six weeks, but every time I read someone else's I am inspired to try it again!

This book was released after The Secret Loves of Geek Girls but before The Secret Loves of Geeks to whet the appetite of fans anxious for more intimate tales of love and relationships from fannish women. It delivers.

Rigo lives on the space station California, a self-sufficient community that has lost all contact with the planet still visible below. The older generation is nostalgic for life on Earth, but Rigo is fully immersed in the norms of the station. Her generation freely explore queer, polyamorous relationships in which the biggest challenges are fitting in quality time with multiple partners around everyone's busy work schedules. Short and sweet, this book presents a hopeful view of a new civilization born after the end of the world.

This book was not has good as the first one, but I haven't given up on the series. I liked the first one SO MUCH that it set a very, very high bar. This second installment suffered from a shocking start followed by a very slow, almost sluggish, middle section in which a lot of quiet scenes failed to convey (at least to me) a vast emotional shift between two key characters. The end picked up, with a few sharp twists, some intrigue and some excitement but that didn't entirely erase how I felt in the middle. I will take a little break before starting in on book three, and we'll see where this story goes!

This is a gorgeous but confusing book. The nameless nonbinary main character becomes sleep deprived to the point of hallucination, and on a little-planned and ill-advised trip to a strange city becomes lost in a landscape of ruins and ghosts. The art knocked my socks off, but the tale had little hope and no resolution for the vulnerable protagonist.

Unfortunately, I didn't end up liking this book as much as I wanted to. It starts out SO STRONG- I immediately liked the main character, Zelie, who lives in a world which has violently banished magic and continues to punish those who have the DNA for magic use and the white hair that comes with it. Zelie's maji mother was murdered in front of her eyes and the pain and emotional scars have barely faded from her family. In the first scene we learn that Zelie has been training with a staff for years and longs to fight back, but to do so would risk even worse punishment. By chance she meets Amari, daughter of a cruel king, who flees from the palace with a power artifact that might be able to return magic to the world. The two girls and Zelie's brother embark on a breakneck secret mission to take the artifact to someone who can tell them how to use it. They are immediately pursued by Amari's older brother, the crown prince Inan, and the King's most trusted general. Pursuers and the pursued are rarely more than a day apart, and piles of bodies are left in the wake of both as they chase their bloody way across the damaged country.

The world building is very strong and the magic, magical creatures, and the gods are engaging and original. But the predicable romance was underdeveloped and boring. The book is a page-turner, which I really enjoyed for about the first 1/3, after which I started to feel a kind of adrenaline-fatigue. I kept hoping the characters would get just a minute or two to rest, but they really never did. I almost just set it down about 1/3 of the way from the end, but decided to finish it since it's such a quick read. I don't think this is necessarily a bad book, just a book that didn't work for me. I still think other people should give it a try if the description sounds good, and I am interested in the movie version that I hear is in production. I imagine it will have the same relentless pace as the book, but that might work better for me on screen than it did on the page.

A visually beautiful myth, which draws on themes of Native art from the Pacific Northwest, Scandinavia and possibly also Maya or Inca hieroglyphs. A small boy, adopted into a tribe of people who live in a harsh snowy land, struggles to fit in. He makes regular mistakes which are serious enough to disqualify him from participating in a right of passage. He decides to run away into the forest where he finds a powerful weapon and a powerful enemy. This comic is still being run (very slowly) online as a webcomic. I haven't been able to find out much about the author, but I wondered about the decision to draw the protagonist as a blond white boy in a setting so obviously influences by Native people. Maybe the second volume will explain more about where he came from!