Skip to content

Tag: Mariko Tamaki

The Best Books of 2019

Well, 2019 is over, and I say good riddance to bad rubbish, overall. So many trash things happened this year that when I discovered Notre Dame burned down this year, I had to fact-check it thrice. (It did though.) (Not over it.) On the positive side, I read a lot of terrific books, and there are many more awesome books in the offing for 2020 — which will be a separate post, of course! Here’s a list of my favorite reads of the year, listed in the order in which I read them. There are thirteen of them, which I…

Leave a Comment

The Best Tweet on Twitter: A Links Round-Up

Once again we have made it through another week, and this time the weary week has done us a solid by leading us into October. The best of months! Welcome, October, we have been wishing for you. If you measure this week by hours, it has been the normal length, but if you measure it (and this is the trick) by presidential crimes openly committed, it has been ten thousand eons. I did get to play Untitled Goose Game this week, though. So at least there’s that. Anyway, here are some links for you! Call off the dogs; the best…

Leave a Comment

Review: Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero O’Connell

tl;dr, this is the sweetest book I’ve read all year, and I see no prospect of any book knocking it out of that spot in the back half of the year, and you absolutely must read it After numerous sightings of Mariko Tamaki’s latest, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, I broke down and bought it from an indie bookstore near the beach. Endcaps work! Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me is about a girl called Freddy whose extremely cool sort-of girlfriend, Laura Dean, keeps breaking up with her. No matter how many times Laura Dean proves herself to…

Leave a Comment

Saving Montgomery Sole, Mariko Tamaki

Y’all, I love Mariko Tamaki. If I were in charge of the universe, I’d request that Mariko Tamaki subsequently do like romance authors and write one book for each of the notable minor characters in Saving Montgomery Sole.1 Saving Montgomery Sole is about a girl with two moms who struggles to fit in to her glossy, carb-hating California high school; and then a Jerry Falwell-type preacher comes to town, and Montgomery is certain that her family will be a target for his hostility. Mariko Tamaki hated high school and has said in interviews that she always struggled to fit in. In…

7 Comments

Rounding up some more comics

It’s time again for a round-up of my comics reading! So many recommendations on this earth! Through the Woods, Emily Carroll Yeah, I can only assume that Emily Carroll knows me personally and designed Through the Woods to cater to my interests. It is a collection of some hella creepy stories about living near a forest. Girls go into the forest, and they come out different, or they don’t come out at all. This may be very shallow of me, but I love graphic novels where the lettering looks like proper handwriting. Though Saga has many charms, an early and prominent draw for me was…

23 Comments

Review: Skim, by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki

“Being sixteen is officially the worst thing I’ve ever been,” says Kimberly Keiko Cameron at one point in the comic Skim. And the book certainly reminds you of all the things about being sixteen that were garbage — if not Kim’s particular problems, then certainly the general experience of being sixteen. Called “Skim” as an unkind joke — she isn’t slender, white, and blonde like the popular girls — Kim is an outsider at her private high school. She’s not an outsider in a Carrie way, but more in the sense that high school makes so many people outsiders: that…

20 Comments