While a sapphic werewolf romance comic is totally my wheelhouse, my impetus to pick up Squad was that our sapphic book club wanted to read it. This Mean Girls meets Ginger Snaps feminist roar of a tale was much lauded last year, even snagging a nomination for a GoodReads Choice Award. I was prepared to be impressed. And I was! 

When Becca transfers to an elite, mostly white high school in Northern California, she dreads the usual new-kid struggles. But on her first day, she catches the eye of the beautiful blonde Marley. Their first interaction is Becca giving Marley a tampon, which I thought was a great detail. Marley introduces Becca to the Plastics the it girl crowd, who, turns out, are werewolves. Every month on the full moon, they must consume flesh, or they’ll frenzy from hunger and/or lose “luster” (think Jennifer’s Body lore). They have rules to keep their murder rationalized, such as be pretty, be smart, no personal boyfriends, only devour would-be rapists, and leave alive anyone from their school. When these rules are snapped, the true horror begins.

The art is stunning. Color splashes and floats across the page. Sterle’s work easily keeps up with the vacillation between pink-tinged charm and blood-drenched gore. A lot of reviews mention different comparative titles. All are helpful and true, because Squad pays dark, touching homage to many a horror story. Squad’s plot is a gorgeous, barbaric scream against rape culture and patriarchy—and a reminder that we cannot only scream. The ending reminded me of second wave feminism receding and returning as third wave feminism. While it’s cathartic as all get out to viciously dismember the future Brett Kavanaugh’s of the world, to cry and call for leaving men behind altogether, that’s not realistic. Such movements leave behind people at other intersections of identity. For example, Becca doesn’t feel safe coming out to her “sisters,” and Amanda is belittled and not called her preferred name.

If I had to nitpick, my book club’s suspension of disbelief didn’t stretch quite far enough at times. We wondered at the logistics of a devouring a whole teenage boy, clothes and all. We wondered how a fuss hadn’t been kicked up yet. In real life, my college campus was basically shut down after a death, with massive protests, calls for reform, and investigations. It was hard to imagine these repeated, semi-localized deaths/disappearances would remain under the radar for so long. 

Overall, Squad is a bloody good comic. Read it to sharpen your fangs.

DNF around ~130 pages

In my continuing quest to follow Beckett through White Wolf Publishing, I read the Year of the Scarab Trilogy. The Trilogy served as part of a year-long introduction to the Mummy: the Resurrection game line. In addition to Mummy, the story incorporates lore from Wraith: the Oblivion, Hunter: the Reckoning, Vampire: the Masquerade, and smidgen of Mage: the Awakening. I gotta be honest, folks: this trilogy was my second worst White Wolf reading experience ever. Since I bought these books as a bundle on DriveThruRPG and therefore only have one review slot, I’m going to review the series as a whole here. The other books' Storygraph entries have the same review pasted in.

In broadstroke, and cutting out a lot of filler, Year of the Scarab Trilogy chronicles a comedy of terrible errors performed by terrible people as they seek the Heart of Osiris, the book’s McGuffin. We have Thea Ghandour and the Chicago hunters, who represent the worst of America in their blind hatred and stockpile of guns. It’s fine to not know things—unlike me, the hunters can’t look things up on the White Wolf Wiki—but it was total disinterest in learning (even about their own powers!) that got me. Compassion for anyone besides themselves isn’t just rejected, but totally alien. One hunter, Jake Washington, pipes up that “hey, maybe we shouldn’t commit genocide?” but it’s a token protest. 

Next, we have Maxwell Carpenter, a former leg-breaker for the Chicago mob, who is now a Wraith. His initial mission is to murder the entire Sforza bloodline. These plans are complicated when it turns out the last Sforza heir, Nicholas, is a Mummy. Nicholas, meanwhile, wants to repatriate the Heart of Osiris to Egypt to prove his Mummy-ness. This desire seems laudable until you remember he’s a pasty white man who basically wants to be brown. Beckett also appears, for marketing reasons I guess? His actions have little to no impact on the actual plot. His zero impact has the weird bonus of at least he’s not as involved in all the racism. The later books have a higher star rating because Beckett's sections were halfway enjoyable.

I’m not kidding when I say that Bates put in so much racism and sexism in the novels, both with and without intent. Incredibly tedious and boring to read. There’s an attempt to make Mummies not racist wet dream fodder, but the story, and Nicholas in particular, never quite overcome the feeling of white guys playing Egyptian dress-up.

But! Those aren't the only elements that made me want to pull my hair out! The plot’s a mess! There’s a rumor floating around online that the White Wolf novels are, in reality, novelizations of the original staff’s game chronicles. After reading Year of the Scarab, I believe it. These books have an incredible amount of just…logistics. A subplot about Beckett getting a cell phone. Two pages of intricate details about Carpenter’s digestive system and sexual biology. The hunters navigating bus/train schedules and schlepping their guns. These sections read like game notes, or perhaps an outline that Bates barely filled in. 

Some genres—heist novels come to mind—thrive on logistics. Details of how something’s done are part of the fun. Here, however, logistics don’t reveal character, are irreverent to the work's themes, fail to evoke mood, atmosphere, or setting, and slow the novel down to a snail's pace. I read soooo many boring pages about people getting places. Bates must have had city maps and enjoyed tracing paths for the characters to travel. Some of his only details about the cities are bus schedules and driving directions. I don't feel like I know Cairo, Las Vegas, or Chicago any better after reading. The descriptions are generic, without sensory details. He doesn’t bring them to life. All that, AND the minutiae often leads nowhere in the grand scheme of the series. Entire arcs are closed loops: the character travels to a place and nothing with lasting consequences happens. Those chapters feel like busywork.

My final note is on the Beckett-ness. If my research is correct, Lay Down with Lions is his first long-form appearance. And my goodness, has this guy changed over the years. Year of the Scarab’s Beckett is a Low Humanity moron. He’s bumbling, arrogant, and scatter-brained. I guess I know where some of the “off beats” in the Diary come from now. Over the course of Lay Down with Lions and Land of the Dead, Beckett makes many of the same mistakes my friends and I made when we were first playing Vampire. He forgets to feed, what powers he has, how to avoid frenzy; what quest he’s on. To extend one iota of an olive branch to Bates, he had a tough gig. Not only was he introducing newly minted Mummy: the Resurrection lore, he juggled Wraith and Hunter characters. Lay Down with Lions adds Vampire: the Masquerade. But, goodness gracious, sometimes it’s painful how unfamiliar Bates is with Kindred, Gangrel, and Beckett in particular. 

It left me wondering. Did Bates not read the Book of Nod's footnotes? Was Beckett's initial character concept to be an idiot and it later changed to be the One Sane Man, the Single Good Dude? There are some moments where I recognized Cuthbert amongst the mess. Should I be thankful that the VTMB writers drew more from his Victorian Trilogy self than this one? What happened here?

Mostly, I mourn what this trilogy could have been. We could have had a meditation on monstrosity and redemption. Who/what is a monster? Can the monster be redeemed? What does redemption look like? Who grants absolution? When is it ever enough? Unfortunately, this nice feast of questions had to go through the Andrew Bates’ digestive tract and it came out of his ass a pile of shit.

From plot to character, the Year of the Scarab Trilogy has a lot of problems. Reading it was the epitome of White Wolf Publishing for me. It stunk, yet something compelled me to go on. I wanted to read mediocre vampire fiction. I wanted to be blown away by how bad it was, to witness the depths it could sink; to believe there was some point to critiquing bad art. We could have had a horrific, thrilling adventure and mediation on the makings of a monster. Bates’ work is a car so determined to launch itself off the freeway and into the ocean.

 And with this library book, I’ve read all of Tara Sim’s novels. Which. Feels weird, honestly. After the Scavenge the Stars Duology, I’m definitely interested in where Sim goes next. 

Picking up soon after Scavenge the Stars ended, Ravage the Dark follows our queer crew’s investigation into counterfeits coins and the plague they carry. Cayo struggles to support Soria as being alive costs so much money. Reeling from Boon’s betrayal, Amaya needs new flesh in which to stab her knife, and Liesl, Deadshot, Avi, and newcomer Jasper are more than happy to provide targets. Remy threatens to tear his hair out when the crew consistently has the worst ideas. Nevertheless, this motley group is determined to bring justice to the land—and make the more difficult decision of what form that justice will take. 

Strengths of the first book carry over to this one. The plot is exemplary. Twist after twist, layer after layer: all delivered with an intoxicating swiftness. I took a brief break from the book, but when I came back, I was sucked right back in like no time had passed at all. I was utterly engrossed. Sim mentions in the Acknowledgements that she planned the plague plot before COVID-19, but God, did she nail the plague year experience on the head. The future is written on the subway walls. 

One plot point that keeps bugging me was why the group doesn’t pay for Soria’s medicine. Experiencing manual labor is necessary for Cayo’s character growth, but there’s a weird contrast. The group has no money problems, and the investigation doesn’t take all day every day. Amaya has hours of staring out the window angsting. Liesel doesn’t mention needing to take odd jobs for food. Yet Cayo takes up two jobs during the day and helps the group, and no one wants to help save his dying sister? There might have been a one-liner explanation of why, but I missed it. The decision seemed pretty cold-hearted for an otherwise compassionate friend group. 

Outside of that plot point, the characters become more themselves, if that makes sense. They grapple with the world and themes, and I rooted for them all the way. One critique I had of the later books in the Timekeeper Trilogy was the cast became too unwieldy—Sim took too obvious of pains to introduce everyone, provide a reason for them to be present, and give the reader a reason to care. Here, our heroes are kept to a minimum, so I got to love each one. And, for the record, there are no cishets in this universe, which makes me colon capital D. 

And whoa!!! The romance is so good y’all. Cayo and Amaya are OTP material. It’s an absolute treat to watch them grow into one another, to fit their messes together and find healing. I really want the Scavenge the Stars Duology to be a mini-series or Netflix movie because gaaaHHHH, what I wouldn’t give to externalize the vision that is Amaya/Cayo. 

Until then, I’ll enjoy the books. I’m super excited to read Sim’s upcoming The City of Dusk. 

 After enjoying de Bodard’s two novellas, I am READY for the Dominion of the Fallen. Though we own the book, I checked out the House of Shattered Wings audiobook from the library so I could get those words in my brain that much faster. 

In a fantastical alternate history, magic is real and angels fall from the sky—facts that compounded the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars. In this Gothic Belle Époque, Paris lies in ruin, and noble magic houses and gangs fight over scraps. Is it livable? Technically. Will you have a good time? Absolutely not. 

Enter Philippe, against his will. If you’re into wuxia and have read Heaven Official’s Blessing, his situation matches Xiè Lián’s: a Taoist who cultivated his way to immortality and godhood, but the Jade Emperor kicked him out of the Heavens. The French colonials forcibly conscripted him and now he’s stuck in Paris with no way out. His struggle for survival changes when he encounters a newly fallen angel—and the head of House Silverspires who has come to collect her. Suddenly, he’s tossed into the one thing in Paris possibly older than he is: court intrigue, house politics, and void-slick murder. 

My summary focuses on Phillippe because his POV is a good starting point, but other characters hold equal protagonist weight. Phillippe accidentally(?) drinks the fallen angel Isabelle’s blood. I shrieked, “Don’t put that Westerner’s blood in your mouth! You don’t know where it’s been!” and promptly became fascinated by the strange connection it formed between them. A favorite is the elderly alchemist Madeline who uses drugs to escape the horrors of her past. Fallen angel Selene heads House Silverspires and her wife Emmanuel acts as the House’s librarian. And of course, Asmodeus, the bloodthirsty head of House Hawthorne. I’m most looking forward to getting to know him because de Bodard’s been tweeting such awesome tidbits of his marriage to a dragon prince. 

Character, in fact, is where de Bodard shines in this book. There’s a big cast. Each one is locked in the prism of their experience. The POV switches weren’t just fun, but needed. It made me wonder what my glass walls are and how I could expand them. Even when a character did something that I personally thought a little foolish, I knew why they were doing it. In lesser hands, Selene would have run into the Green Principle—stupidity so deep I stopped caring about her—but to the end I wanted her to survive and have a little victory, as a treat. When the angelic characters were first introduced, I despaired I would remember everyone’s name. By the last page, I remembered each one because their personalities, occupations, and priorities were so distinct. 

I don’t know if it’s because I’ve read so many Asian-authored fantasies this year or what, but I didn’t struggle with the world or the plot as much as other reviewers mention. I’m vibin’. The only difficulty I had was due to the audiobook. I couldn’t see the section breaks, so sometimes I was slow on the POV switch uptake. But overall, my enthusiasm for the work remained undiminished from start to finish. 

And yes! It’s very queer! Platonic and romantic bonds hold equal importance in the heart! Hooray! House of Shattered Wings is excellent from primaries to scapulars. Make yourself a cup of tea and get lost in the dark. 

 I remember waking up one lazy Sunday morning and 0.5 seconds into consciousness my wife asked if The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in the Water is any good. It was a Kindle Daily Deal. I blearily squinted at her phone screen, noted Zen Cho’s name on the byline, and mumbled, “Oh, yeah, for sure.” 

And I may not have been awake enough for pants but I was right on the money with this book recommendation! This novella follows the (mis)adventures of a bandit group in a mythical Malaysia. When a waitress is accused of witchcraft after rebuffing the advances of a handsy customer, two bandits intervene and accidentally cause the waitress to lose her job. Later, back at camp, they discover she’s not just a waitress, but Guet Imm, a nun escaped from her burned temple, and she’s coming with them whether they like it or not. 

This was my first time reading Zen Cho, but her work has been lauded up and down fantasy Twitter for awhile. The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in the Water was nominated for a Locus Award! And for good reason. Cho perfectly balances comedy and commentary about gender, colonization, faith, and class. Her characters, especially Guet Imm and the bandit second-in-command Tet Sang, are fully realized and compelling. I loved the inclusion of Malay words—while a non-Malay reader could use context clues, I happily pulled out my phone to search “jampi,” “tokong,” “pahala,” and more. Ever since we watched The Untamed on Netflix, we’re reading and watching wuxia and Chinese Boy Love dramas pretty much nonstop in this household. I’m listening to SCI Mystery music as I write this review. I'm very much in the practice of searching the Internet for terms I'm unfamiliar with.

As far as the queer rep, Tet Sang is a trans man. I’m not marking that as a spoiler because TERFs have been annoying me lately about revealing a character’s “true” gender, like it’s some sort of mystery. Tet Sang says he’s a man, so he’s a man. The end. Anyway, I thought Zen Cho struck an interesting middle ground with queerness and transness that I don’t see so often. Recently, I’ve read stories with trans characters where their transness is a one-off line. He mentions using a binder, or she mentions being mistaken as a boy in her youth. Or it’s the other end of the spectrum: the whole book is about being trans. 

In Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in the Water, Tet Sang’s transness is explicitly discussed, and his transness informs his perspective. He knows the bandits’ aren’t the most observant folks since he has little trouble hiding his menstrual cramps from them. When he goes to negotiate with noble woman, there’s some moments of awkwardness since he last saw her pre-transition. That’s not to say Tet Sang’s queerness is tokenized or obscures all other parts of his self. Tet Sang’s thoughts are more often occupied with if he can trust Guet Imm, the latest antics of the bandits, and survival. This one facet of his personhood is brought up at organic narrative moments. His transness is integral to the character, the plot, and the themes of the novel. But it’s not the only theme, the main plot, and the most emphasized part of his character. 

Overall, Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in the Water is such a fun book. I giggled and ooh-ed and aw-ed. If you love Asian fantasy, you owe it to yourself to buy this book. I’m already reading Black Water Sister, Zen Cho’s latest masterpiece. 

 My notes for this graphic novel adaptation are “Art pretty story good existential screaming survival,” which sums up nicely. 

John Jennings and Damian Duffy’s adaptation of Parable of the Sower is my first encounter with the story. And Jesus Christ on the cross is it harrowing. Lauren’s journey runs parallel to ours, about fifteen minutes to the left. In a USA devastated by climate change, gun violence, and wealth inequality (sound familiar?), Lauren’s family huddles in a gated community. Billionaires explore Mars (sound familiar??). Lauren realizes that no one around her wants to face the truth—something’s gotta give, change is inevitable, and they must prepare. Her premonition bears fruit, and the fragile peace is shattered when drug-addled pyromaniacs burn the neighborhood down. Lauren and the two other survivors walk the empty highways northward, and Lauren shares her new philosophy that God is Change, and, by changing, we can shape God. She calls it Earthseed. 

Reading the comics was a RIDE. The only thing missing was sourcing the constant fires to climate change, electrical companies, and gender reveal parties. While Butler’s other heroines deal in survival, this theme was ever-present here. Especially since Lauren is so young. The novel will let the reader forget her mere eighteen years for a bit before slamming Lauren’s youth into the narrative and reminding you of the colossal unfairness of it all: how no young person should deal with this; how the older generation is failing their children. 

Duffy and Jennings’ art brought the story to visceral light. The harshness of the world translated to harsh lines on characters’ faces. The fires were eye-searingly bright. I could hear the crackling. While the art lasered directly into my tender face, the story missed a couple beats. Thankfully, my wife has read Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, so I could ask her why the stepmom was like that or if we’re really supposed to not know Lauren’s father’s fate. 

All in all, Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation is a solid piece of art. If you want a crash course on Butler’s novel, I do recommended. I’ll reserve my five stars for the book, where all my questions are answered satisfactorily. 

 When I saw a copy of this graphic novel on the library shelf, I almost couldn’t believe it. Like Muslimah authors’ works, The Handmaid’s Tale rarely spends long on the shelves. I felt like I was snatching away something when I checked it out. Now that I’ve finished reading, I’m going to return it asap. 

It’s been a few years since I’ve read the novel. So, as far as I remember, I can say the graphic adaptation hits all the same plot beats. Atwood’s words remain largely untouched. Offred—or June, if you’ve watched the Hulu adaptation—is still a Handmaid in the new totalitarian Republic of Gilead. Created by the rich, white patriarchy, Gilead’s militaristic oligarchy launched to “solve” the fertility crisis. Said crisis was brought on by the same rich, white men polluting the planet and hindering any attempts to control the spread of a super-form of syphilis. It all sounds blood-freezing familiar, especially the part about the homegrown terrorists gunning down Congress and the President. I first read The Handmaid’s Tale in 2015, and it’s a gut-punch how much closer we are to Gilead. 

Nault’s art is beautiful. Her linework’s thin delicacy is complimented perfectly by the deep watercolors. Reading the book, I hadn’t realized how colorful Atwood’s work was. Or it’s one thing to read that a cloth is red as blood; another, to see it. I noticed more how visually labeled the women are: June’s red, Serena Joy’s blue, Aunt Lydia’s muddy green. Nault brushes the architecture a dull earthy gray, which forms as gasping contrast to June’s vibrant flashbacks. I found myself noting hair a lot more—who is allowed to have it, how much of it, when is it shown. Though a lot of the female characters wear similar form-hiding outfits, I could always tell who was who, which speaks to Nault’s sense of expression and shape. 

Overall, the graphic adaptation is as beautiful and heart-rending as the novel. I’m wondering how much the United States will have changed by the time I get to watching the Hulu series or reading The Testaments.