I am a longtime fan but haphazard reader of the Hellboy series. I believe I have now read around 7 out of the first 12 books, but not in chronological or sequential order. I've always really enjoyed that after reading books 1 and 2 for introduction, a reader can really jump in anywhere with this character since the majority of the books are short story collections. This is no exception. It collections six tales from 1956, when Hellboy went on a short mission to Mexico that ended up lasting months and involving many monster fights. As always these stories are spooky and gorgeously drawn. My only hesitation with this volume was over seeing the Aztec gods Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca thrown into an 8 page story. I'm not the right person to say whether Aztec gods should be handled differently than Greek, Norse, Egyptian or other gods in comics. But I've been trying to practice being a culturally-aware reader, and this story left me with mixed feelings.

Lucy Knisley has a way of capturing the day to day moments of life that build an engaging, vivid story even when the subject (as often seen on her blog) is to-do lists and cat behaviors. In this book she has taken on bigger topics: sexual education, miscarriage, pregnancy, and a near fatal experience of bringing a new life into the world. I have know since I was quite young that I never wanted to have children and find most aspects of procreation, frankly, horrifying. Several friends had warned me that there might be parts of this book I'd want to skip. But I read every page, and was grateful for this raw, honest look into a human experience that I will never have. The art is simple but beautifully effective, the writing at times very funny, at times informative or matter of fact, in others deeply emotional.

This book took me longer to get through than the previous three of the series. The dragons of England have caught a plague, which is wasting them away and killing them one by one. In a desperate attempt to find a cure, Laurence, Temeraire and a few of their squadron sail to Capetown, the Dutch colony beginning to establish itself in South Africa. There they search for a cure, a rare mushroom that grows only in the deepest forests. Novik has clearly done a lot of research and her portrait of this alternate version of Africa in 1805 is given equal thought, care, and fantasy dragon culture as the other countries that the series has visited. I still found myself very nervous, reading a white author working in a fantasy version of such a painful historical period. The horrors of the slave trade are not ignored, nor is the hypocrisy and greed of those who continually vote to maintain its legality in England. I don't think that authors should avoid writing about this period, but I couldn't read it without anxieties about misrepresentation, and on whether this book (only 12 years old) would show its age. I will definitely be picking up the next one, because this one ends on a dreadful cliffhanger. I might take a little break before I jump into it though.

This book cleverly weaves together five different story lines, all centered around the town of Newport, Rhode Island, and especially the mansion of Windermere on the cliffs above the sea. In 2011, Sandy Allison, a former top 50 tennis pro whose career is fading takes a job teaching tennis lessons at the local casino and falls into the circle of three different women who all live part time at Windermere, and all of whom want to sleep with him. In 1896, a closeted gay Gilded Age social climber woos the widow of Windermere. In 1863, a fictionalized version of the novelist Henry James is a 20 year old novice writer who spies on the wealthy seasonal visitors to get ideas for stories. In 1778, a manic depressive, almost psychotic young aristocrat serves in the British Army, fighting the colonial rebels and fixating on the daughter of a Jewish merchant. And in 1692, a 15 year old Quaker girl is orphaned and must try to support and maintain her tiny household of one younger sister and one slave, Ashes. Themes ripple across time to touch each of their stories: about whether life can be lived as a work of art; about love versus obsession; about the privileges and pitfalls of wealth. All of these Newport inhabitants walk down to the breakwater to gaze upon the waves, watch the impenetrable wall of fog roll up from the sea, delight in the summer days, make love, propose marriage, plot murder. I was impressed by the variety and diversity of the tone and voice of each story, which in the audiobook are each read by a different narrator. If you liked Cloud Atlas, you will probably also like this book- however, if you are not a David Mitchell fan, perhaps stay away.

Finally finished this audio book I've been working on since early December! There were parts I really liked about it, but also sections that really dragged and certain facts/phases that got really repetitive. Schiff doesn't go so hard on explaining WHY citizens of Salem claimed to see and experience witchcraft. She lays out the historical factors that went into making up a very strict and unrelenting court which sentenced more people to death (all of them people who claimed innocence) than any other known witchcraft outbreak. The majority of the book is taken up by a day-by-day breakdown of the incidents of Salem and the surround effected towns, based on every known source. These include diaries, court records and many accounts published after the fact. She admits when things are unknown or lost to history, but that still leaves a lot of blow by blow ravings, accusations, arrests, trials, quotes, and injustices. My least favorite part of the book was her discussion of Native Americans. She essentially quotes the colonial views of the time without examining them, or giving facts that might tell other sides to the story, when talking about "Indian raids" on settlers. It's undisputed that there was violence. This account alone might leave the mistaken impression that settlers were always the victims. However, if you want a very through accounting of the major players of the Salem trials, and the stresses and influences they were under, this does give that.

This was the first of Lucy Knisley's books I read, and after a second pass it remains my favorite. However, I want to add that I like it EVEN MORE now, after having read most of her other works as well. So read them all, preferably in chronological order, and enjoy this one as a particularly yummy treat in the middle!

Lucy has had an extraordinarily interesting life- as the only child of divorced foodies, she was raised in the kitchen, working in farmer's market stalls, in gardens, as a food server and in a cheese shop. She is also very well traveled, and in this book alone accounts stories from Rome, Tokyo, Mexico, Chicago and New York (her home city). But she also has a joyful talent of imbuing even ordinary experiences with wonderful insight and compassion. I highly recommend her works, and also her instagram, which is these days full of sweet doodles of her family and her cat.

Beginning in 1937, this book is written in a first-person journal narration from the point of view of a romantic but practical girl named Sophie who lives with her sister, her cousin, a mad uncle and a few others on a tiny fictional island in the Bay of Biscay. Her uncle happens to be the King of Montmaray, but the island has been all but abandoned after the first World War and the second War is now threatening to destroy all that is left.

Sophia's conversational, witty journal entries are delightful. I fell in love with the island of Montmaray, its empty village and crumbling castle, and worried about it's future just as the characters did. This book shows the full range of what a YA novel can be: light, funny, charming, scary, suspenseful and full of real danger. I highly recommend it.

I loved the beginning and end of this book, but got bogged down in the middle. I think this is as much do to my own interests as to the book's quality. I am not and never plan to be married, so the minutia of wedding planning was a bit repetitive and not for me. However! I loved the beginning which fills in the gap of Lucy and John's relationship which I knew I was missing after skipping from An Age of Licence directly to Kid Gloves. I was delighted by Lucy's thoughts on being a bisexual woman marrying a man, and how that can lead to an erasure of queer identity. I also enjoyed the last chunk of the book which details her wedding day itself. It made me more enthusiastic to attend weddings of my family and loved ones in the future. And the book is gorgeously drawn and colored, as is all her work.