This book was so much fun! Read the whole thing in one day, which is perhaps my favorite way to consume a novel. New Jersey native Candance Park is 15 years old, a model Korean American daughter, with a passionate love of music. She plays viola resentfully and guitar enthusiastically, and has started writing her own songs. Her best friends (both Kpop and Ru Paul's Drag Race fans) convince Candance to enter a global Kpop audition, and incredibly, she is offered a place as a trainee at a top Kpop company in Seoul. Then comes the hard part: convincing her parents that she can go. She tells them that even if she only lasts a few months at the company it will make for a great college essay. Think of how much her Korean will improve! Finally it's decided her mom will fly to Korea with Candance to help care for her ailing grandpa while Candance trains. So starts the most intense, exhausting, emotionally draining, and exhilarating summer of Candance's life. She quickly makes both friends and enemies in her dorm roommates, struggles against the controlling diets and punishing rehearsal schedules. She has a killer voice, but does she have what it takes to debut as a idol?

Trinidad Escobar's gorgeous and moving graphic memoir weaves together memories and myths. She grew up knowing that her American family had adopted her as an infant from the Philippines. She was not the first baby her second parents had tried to adopt- an earlier baby had passed away and Trinidad was given that girl's birthday and name, Nicole, to speed the adoption process. Nicole was contacted by her first family as a teenager, which lead to her first visit to the Philippines at 18. This book takes place primarily during a second visit in which she is finally able to visit her first family's home, to learn stories from and cook meals with her brothers and sisters. There is exquisite beauty and deep trauma in this emotionally charged reunion. The second half of the story will be coming in book 2.

A soft, sweet, single volume love story. Yutaka is a young office worker who eats store bought food alone in a park every day- until Tane, a boisterous little boy, runs up and cutely talks him out of half his lunch. His much older brother Minoru scolds Tane, but the pair end up inviting Yukata over to teach them how to make onigiri. This connection ending up being exactly the kind of nourishment all of these lonely boys desperately needed.

I absolutely loved this brightly colored, charming Halloween-themed story! Beetle in a teen goblin who's being home schooled by her Gran in magic, but spends most of her free time hanging out at the mall with her new friend Blob Ghost. Then Beetle's old best friend, Kat Hollowbone, comes back from magic boarding school. She's earned her sorcery stone and has over 2,000 followers on Swarm! They used to write fanfiction together, but how can Beetle possibly talk to her now? Then it turns out Kat's bitchy rich aunt is planning to buy the mall and knock it down. Can Beetle reconnect with her old friend and save her new one? Every single page in this book is a delight, full of fun spooky character designs (lots of cobwebs, pumpkins, bats) and also lively, loose line art. Every time someone's eyes filled with anime sparkles my heart swelled.

I had read several of the stories in this book online back when they were first posted, but had somehow never read the full book. I picked it up in preparation for reading the second one. The parts I love I really love. The parts that don't speak to me I skipped! Which works just fine, since each chapter is pretty much a self-contained narrative. Looking forward to the new one.

I got to read this book early to give it a back cover blurb! I really liked the book, I had already read portions of on insta but the new material really fleshes out the story and brings it all together. The lives of ten characters in the same city intertwine as each grapples with living in an otherized body. Their physical differences are fetishized, marketed to, discriminated against, and misunderstood, as bodies are in our own world. What to do when people see your single eye but not yourself? Rage about it, laugh about it, make art about it and work to change the world for the better. Dhaliwal is such a deft and clever storyteller! This book made me giggle and made me think, and it fueled my own determination to continue pushing for real social change.

This is a complicated and intriguing sci-fi novel, with a lot of original elements I haven't encountered before. Cheris is a military Captain in the Kel, one of six branches of an interplanetary ruling government. This government draws its power from its citizen's observance of a ritual calendar- their days of fasting, meditation and celebration all rigidly controlled. The power of these beliefs feeds exotic weapons, which the Hexarch uses to subdue heretics (people who follow alternate calendars). When a key fortress falls under heretic control, Cheris is put on a short list of potential commanders to win it back. She asks for one weapon: the revived ghost of the most infamous general of the empire, Shuos Jedao. Jedao won every single battle he ever fought... until he went mad and killed over a million people. When Cheris is chosen, this undead tactician is implanted directly into her brain, and the two of them have to come to enough of an understanding to win the war- or Cheris is in danger of going insane as well. Cheris is queer, though her sexuality doesn't play much of a role in this book. My solo complaint is that some of the operations of the calendar and the exotic weapons are slightly too complicated to easily follow, but the book moves at a fast pace and I am extremely interested to see where the story in the sequel goes after the tense, semi-cliff hanger ending.