Invisible Kingdom has been on my To Read list for awhile, because G. Willow Wilson is one of my favorite authors. When I saw it on the library shelves, I snatched the series up. My thoughts maintained the same “squee!” noise throughout the series, so this review is for the whole shebang. This same review is pasted into the other volumes Storygraph entries.

Invisible Kingdom is a fast-paced space adventure to punch not-Amazon Amazon in the face. In galaxy basically ruled by not-Amazon, Captain Grix and her crew are delivery people flying paycheck to paycheck. Vess is a “none” (a fun wordplay on nun) who seeks to escape the corrupt system by joining a convent. When Vess and Grix discover the “alternate” religious lifestyle is actually in cahoots with Amazon, shit hits the fan.

My whole brain was like “YESSSSSSSSSSSS!” on reading this book. Vess provides the bone-deep, quiet spirituality I’ve come to expect in Wilson’s works and I loved her talk of the path, her pursuit of truth, and her slow journey to realizing the body is to be as honored as the spirit. Perhaps unsurprisingly since they share hair color, personality, and love for muscles, Grix reminded me of Gideon from The Locked Tomb series in the best way. Ward’s art is truly incredible use of color: dizzy, dream-like, epic. I wish for posters.

All in all, Invisible Kingdom is a fantastic space adventure for our times. I recommend to everyone.

Invisible Kingdom has been on my To Read list for awhile, because G. Willow Wilson is one of my favorite authors. When I saw it on the library shelves, I snatched the series up. My thoughts maintained the same “squee!” noise throughout the series, so this review is for the whole shebang. This same review is pasted into the other volumes Storygraph entries.

Invisible Kingdom is a fast-paced space adventure to punch not-Amazon Amazon in the face. In galaxy basically ruled by not-Amazon, Captain Grix and her crew are delivery people flying paycheck to paycheck. Vess is a “none” (a fun wordplay on nun) who seeks to escape the corrupt system by joining a convent. When Vess and Grix discover the “alternate” religious lifestyle is actually in cahoots with Amazon, shit hits the fan.

My whole brain was like “YESSSSSSSSSSSS!” on reading this book. Vess provides the bone-deep, quiet spirituality I’ve come to expect in Wilson’s works and I loved her talk of the path, her pursuit of truth, and her slow journey to realizing the body is to be as honored as the spirit. Perhaps unsurprisingly since they share hair color, personality, and love for muscles, Grix reminded me of Gideon from The Locked Tomb series in the best way. Ward’s art is truly incredible use of color: dizzy, dream-like, epic. I wish for posters.

All in all, Invisible Kingdom is a fantastic space adventure for our times. I recommend to everyone.

Run For It: Stories of Slaves Who Fought For Freedom was an impulse borrow from my local library’s nonfiction graphic novels section. I’m constantly surprised what springs up on those shelves, and Run For It is a beauty of a find.

From the 1500s, to 1800s, slavery was legal in colonized Brazil. Along with many others, the Bantu peoples (the indigenous people from regions that are today parts of Angola and the Congo) were forcibly transported to Brazil to work the sugar plantations. Obviously, many Bantu rebelled in big and small ways. A sizable contingent escaped into Brazil’s hinterlands to form what came to be called mocambos, or village settlements. Run For It contains four stories of rebellion, which tread the line of historical record, Bantu folklore, and d’Salete’s vivid imagination.

Run For It is a conversation d’Salete is having with his own people. It’s written for and by the Bantu. I’m a lucky bystander. The introduction, Forward by Angolan writer Allan da Rosa, and back matter Glossary helped immensely orienting me to the culture, its language, and its symbology. The art is stark and bold, with limited color palette. Even without words, I could feel the anger, desperation, pain, and grief. These aren’t happy, bedtime tales, but characters using the last of their strength to crawl away and enact revenge.

Overall, Run For It handily earned its 5 stars. Read it in a quiet moment.

After enjoying Dykes to Watch Out For, Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, Bechdel’s latest The Secret to Superhuman Strength was an instant borrow from the library. In her latest memoir, Bechdel chronicles her relationship to her body, from age 0 onwards. 

Like with her other works, she twines her relationship with something else: in this case, the USA’s fitness fads, Buddhism, and transcendentalism/romanticism/the Beat generation (especially Margaret Fuller). Unlike her previous works, The Secret to Superhuman Strength is in full color, and wow! The pop! I enjoyed the added depth to Bechdel’s tender, forceful line work. This book is more tactile than Are You My Mother?, and Bechdel’s more earthly themes meant my reading experience didn’t feel like a dream. I also skipped the martinis, haha. The sections on literary figures and movements brought a nostalgic smile to my face.

However, for the first time ever, I was frustrated with Bechdel. As like, a fellow person. Early in the memoir, she comments that people often don’t want what they say they do. That is to say, even when they have the time and means, people don’t take actions towards their stated goals. My mind kept returning to that phrase, because Bechdel’s living it. In her 20s, Bechdel takes some magic mushrooms and experiences an intense, overwhelming connectedness with the world. She states she loves this feeling and wants to experience it again. Until the last page of the book, she desires this “high” and, when it doesn’t happen, wails, laments, moans etc. Despite repeatedly saying she wants this experience, she doesn’t ever like…go for it?

I wanted to shake her. Girl. The answer is obvious. If you interpret that connectedness as the result of chemical reactions in the brain, take some more magic mushrooms. You’re white and live in the woods. The cops won’t get you. If you interpret that connectedness as a spiritual experience, commit to a spiritual practice. Bechdel references Buddhism and other Eastern religions multiple times in the book. She seems to have a great respect for these ways of thinking. Yet, when she meets believers, she disparages them. Though some “Buddhists” are racist cultural appropriators, others are legit. If I squinted, I guess the tone indicates she regrets her actions. These sections made me uncomfortable. The memoir’s conclusion goes so far as to say that Buddhism is wrong: there’s no nirvana, only the physical world. This assertion seems incredibly rude. She went to them for solace. And then she has the gall to insult them? Geez.

My other concern was about the exercise itself. Bizarrely, I think Bechdel needs new doctors? I know other readers were concerned about fatphobia in a book about physical fitness. Bechdel’s writing isn’t fatphobic in my opinion. However, I think she’s suffering from fatphobic care. Obviously, I’m not privy to her doctor visits or full healthcare regimen. Her mental health isn’t a focus of the memoir. What rung my alarms was Bechdel mentioning she can’t sleep if she fails to exercise intensely during the day. My friend has a similar problem. Her anxiety is so bad that she has to run twelve miles a day so she can sleep at night. She’s skinny as a stick from the running, so when she visits fatphobic doctors, they tell her to keep up the running and refuse to prescribe her anxiety medication. The potential parallels to Bechdel’s life bothered me greatly. That, and her tendency to throw herself into these intense regimens. She goes from no karate to karate every day. She ditches running to cycle for far and so fast her body runs out of glycogen. She sets out to climb a mountain without proper training, licensing, or equipment. Nature seems more an outdoor gym to her than, yanno. Nature. 

As stated above, I’m not an exercise fanatic. I wouldn’t describe myself as an outdoorswoman, though I do enjoy the occasional hike and was on a sports team in high school. I don’t know all the details of Bechdel’s health, so what I felt as creeping horror may be totally normal. Generally I find it poor form to speculate on an author’s mental health with any seriousness. The reason I included my thoughts on the topic is my friend asked me to evaluate the book for fatphobia. Maybe Bechdel and I are just too different of people? She had to work through her fear of death. If I die, I die. Maybe I wasn’t in the right mindset to read this memoir because I’d just finished Erin Williams’ Commute: An Illustrated Memoir of Female Shame, which left me low-key exasperated.

Listen. The Secret to Superhuman Strength is by Alison Bechdel. Obviously, you should read it. Looking at the other reviews, my uneven experience is an outlier. Despite all the weirdness, this book more than earns its four stars.

For reference, here are my reviews of the other titles I mentioned: 

Review of Commute: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/2174041b-9687-4215-b60a-b7074740e30f

Review of Dykes to Watch Out For: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/f33a620e-242c-4c24-83b8-7e596d7ba780

Review of Fun Home: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/e14f2cb6-d409-44ee-8d1c-9411dd442ecd

Review of Are You My Mother?: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/c55cfd20-464d-4e7e-bada-28d3c388e031

My local library has a teeny tiny nonfiction graphic novel section, and, for whatever reason, my brain decided it wanted to shove all of it into its mouth and find out what it is. Thus, lots of impulse borrows of books I may or may not have heard of before and lots of bookish weightlifting added to my exercise routine. Commute was one such impulse borrow.

Illustrator Erin Williams’ memoir chronicles her typical work day, with special emphasis on travel to and from. As she walks and rides the train, various people and objects remind her of her past struggles with self-destruction and self-sabotage. The book uses the misogynistic reality women must navigate to get to work as a spring off point to discuss Williams’ specific struggle within our rape-positive society. 

Commute is…an odd duck of a memoir. I keep thinking back on the title and its mention of “Female Shame.” The dangers of simply being a woman in public are addressed—there’s an especially chilling section where Williams is left with two men alone on the train. What she thinks in this scene is exactly what I’ve thought before. However, travel isn’t the focus of the book. She doesn’t explicitly talk about rape culture, or how it’s a public health crisis, or how men are the #1 health threat to women. Hell, she doesn’t mention the contradiction in how women fear violence from strangers when, statistically, violence comes from people we know. Reading Commute felt like a missed opportunity to me in this regard. Maybe because it’s wisdom I seek. Maybe these are better topics for an essay collection than a memoir.

For every page of train riding, there’s many more pages of Williams’ past attempts at self-annihilation. These parts are where the female shame comes in. Yet, there didn’t seem to be a lot of shame or anything specifically female about it. In the deepest throws of her alcoholism, Williams exhibits a lot of risk-taking behaviors. Is that shame? Is it shameful to have a lot of sex? Is it shameful to have bad things happen to oneself? Obviously not, and it was unclear if Williams thought so. Even in the moment, Williams didn’t want to be doing what she was doing. She wanted to be better. As someone who has tried to yank out any anti-sex sentiment by the roots, these segments felt like they were in a foreign language. I felt like…idk. Yeah, it sucks that happened. But you were really sick and had no family or friends to help you. You were literally insane. Does Williams feel bad all that happened? Is she ashamed? No idea. She definitely feels sad. Understandably.

This potential shame didn’t feel tied to gender either. Anyone would feel embarrassed by nightly blackouts. Left unsupervised, the body does all sorts of goofy things. Once I wouldn’t shut up about how to operate a DVD player. Obviously, what Williams’ unsupervised body did was more dangerous than boring people. Her actions veered into sticky situations of dubious consent, consensual non-consent, or rape. But again, those situations are sticky no matter people’s gender, and nothing to be ashamed of. She was sick! If anything, her male sexual partners should be ashamed for initiating intimacy with someone not in control of her faculties. 

There’s an unaddressed, interesting mental knot Williams wraps herself in. She wants to be “seen” by men (as like, a viable sexual partner, I think?), but men have hurt her more deeply than anything else on the planet. If memory serves, she doesn’t have one positive interaction with a man in the whole memoir. Why would anyone want to be casually acknowledged by people who hurt them? Wouldn’t it be better to be invisible? This bizarre paradox is something many women-who-love-men (wlm) face, but Williams doesn’t delve deeper. These desires and anti-desires are what prompted second wave feminists to write all those separatist treatises and islands full of exclusively women. It’s a whole quandary that I completely side-stepped by marrying not-at-man. Meanwhile, my single wlm friends struggle to find “one of the good ones.”

By the end of the book, I was frustrated. What was the point of sharing she had sex with all these men? What am I learning here? Is this book actually meant for men, so they can learn the effect they have on women? So they can learn the importance of explicit, continuing consent? Or is this sharing story for story’s sake? A “hey guys, check out my cool emotional and physical scars” story? Or a triumphant “you were ill and eventually you got help” tale? Or is it a moral fable for her infant daughter? Reviewer holladazzle summed it up nicely: “I had a hard time reading this and was left wondering why we went a mile wide and an inch deep rather than an inch wide and a mile deep.”

Read Holladazzle’s full review: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/67a1eb56-490c-4e81-bbec-5acbd26d84d5

For years Rainbow Rowell’s name has haunted me. According to second-, third- and fourth-hand accounts, Rowell was touted as a great popularizer of Young Adult as a genre. Her novels Fangirl, Landline, and Eleanor and Park simmered in the push for not only non-white, disabled, and non-cishet characters, but also these characters penned by authors of the same minority status. In 2020, Rowell announced a movie adaptation of Eleanor and Park. This announcement re-ignited discussions of anti-Asian racism in the book, and the complicated history of “I’m glad there was a biracial Korean character in 2012” VS “I wish the author treated him more like a human being.” In any case, Rainbow Rowell’s back on my radar. My sapphic book club needed assignments for April, and we decided to shift focus temporarily onto the achillean romance in Carry On.

Hidden among us are magicians, vampires, and all sorts of magical creatures. After a childhood of foster homes, Simon Snow found out he’s the magical chosen one. From age eleven, he’s been protecting magical communities from all sorts of threats. Now in his final year at Hogwarts Watford, Snow knows his final battle is on the horizon. And it’s not the dragon on the front lawn, the ghosts loose in the halls, or his missing vampire roommate. It’s himself—and his mysterious past.

One quippy way to describe Carry On, and the Simon Snow Trilogy in general, is “Harry Potter but Okayer.” From the first page, the reader can tell this is Harry Potter fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off. And that’s not a bad thing. Carry On began as a media playground for Fangirl to orbit around. Rowell literally states that Carry On is a chosen one story about chosen one stories, with Harry Potter as a touchstone. Her art is clear on this intent. I enjoyed the derivative aspects—the boarding school, the intricate magic; the teasing “what if” scenarios. Overall, I was swept away by the epic romance, the fascinating magic system, and playing with tropes. I felt compelled to read the sequels.

However, Carry On has tons of unaddressed problems: some inherited from Rowling; others entirely Rowell’s creation. Rowell would have these obvious, little remarks that seemed to be a “wink wink nudge nudge” that she knew what racism is. Then, the natural consequence of the racist tableaux would be pushed aside, glossed over, or otherwise not played out. For example, Simon makes a couple racist micro-aggressions against Penny, who is British Indian. There is on-page acknowledgement that what he said is terrible. During their first meeting, Simon says a micro-aggression, and Penny…decides to be best friends? That’s not what happens when someone says a micro-aggression. If you say something racist to a brown person’s face, you get told to fuck off.

Speaking of racism, there’s soooo much fantasy blood quotient and white supremacy in this book. The Mage (aka Dumbledore) runs a police state, but is also anti-blood purity. I have no idea how he double-thinks his way out of that conundrum. Our romantic lead, Baz, is from a “pure” family, and he parrots their harmful ideology in his narration and to low-magic people’s faces. His racism is never addressed, or fixed, and he still believes in white supremacist nonsense by the end of the Trilogy. Which is a true shame, because he’s a compelling character and romantic lead otherwise. I really empathized with his struggle with homophobia. His utter lack of familial support yet the burning way his family needs him—that’s some good, relatable queer story stuff.

The queerness, of course, is the main draw of Carry On. Drarry—in the form of Simon and Baz—is canon. Yet Rowell stumbles here too. If she did any research into the queer community, it was minimal. A lesbian character dies. I didn’t need to read that awful cliché for the nth time. In narration, Baz describes himself as queer, but others verbally call him gay—which is it? Was his narration referencing the queer community, or himself? If queer is the identity descriptor he likes, then the other characters are being seriously rude to him. After seeing Baz as an intense rival for seven years, Simon realizes what he really wants is to kiss him—and we have the dreaded absence of word “bisexual.” I assumed Simon would realize he’s bi in later books. I’ll save you the time: he doesn’t. Instead, we get the awkward “maybe I like women and Baz, like Baz-sexual,” type of line. Incredibly disappointing to read in what is marketed as a queer-positive book. Like with racism, societal homophobia has an odd vagueness surrounding it. My partner noted that it’s never stated if general magical society hates queer people, or if it’s only Baz’s family. Does Simon’s internalized biphobia trace its lineage to regular homophobic society, or the magical community? Over three books, we never find out.

Taking all this in, what gave Carry On its three stars? The magic system tickles me pink. Rowell manages to cram seven years of world-building and character history in one book and in an engaging manner. No mean feat! There’s no house elves. There are goblins, but they’re described as both beautiful and green, and I didn’t know what to do with that. Hermione’s replacement, Penny, is very charming and badass, with realistic flaws. Once Part 1 finishes, the book’s pace is relentlessly fast, and it worked in, again, a lore-heavy story. Remarkable. Agatha’s journey was a multi-faceted discussion of the damsel archetype. The Mage as a character, and a creator of his own problems, is riveting. To her credit, Rowell does what she promised to do: dissect chosen one stories and characters.

And that’s how I got to the phrase “Harry Potter but Okayer.” Carry On is fine. If I squint, I can see why people find it a palatable replacement for Harry Potter. “Comforting” seems a strong word. I’ve read worse. I’ve read better. I read the sequels, which I suppose is all that matters to publishers.

Review of Wayward Son: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/f9975b76-637f-44ff-878e-471c2e63ebdf

Review of Any Way the Wind Blows: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/98e43c19-ad87-4d1a-846b-65d48667c627