Day 3 What have you read and loved because of a fellow blogger?

What haven’t I read and loved because of a fellow blogger? Before blogging, my reading life was on its way to becoming a tragic wasteland. I had exhausted the recommendations of my friends and relations and was reduced to — this is not a joke — examining college syllabi for various English classes, under the assumption that they would contain recommendations for New Classics.

Since then, all my newly acquired favorite authors have been by way of fellow book bloggers, and I am basically dead from gratitude. Perhaps I would one day have discovered Helen Oyeyemi, because she wins the prizes and is a literary darling (in a minor way); but who can say if ever I would have discovered some of the, for instance, YA authors that I now cherish? Maggie Stiefvater, Kekla Magoon, Patrick Ness? Would I only have discovered them when movie adaptations of their books were made?

Not to mention (but oh, I shall mention it) the curating of comic books done for me by my fellow book bloggers! Where would I have learned which Marvel comics to read? Would Paper Girls be on my TBR list now? (Doubtful.) Would I know about the Tamakis? Princeless? WOULD I?

Stop by the Estella Society to see what else people have been reading because of other book bloggers! And as usual, I love you all. Kisses!

The post #BBAW: Book Recommendations appeared first on Reading the End.

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 the fact that Hazel’s narration is drawn in real handwriting. Similarly:

Love it. Next I would like Emily Carroll to write some retellings of underloved fairy tales. If she could start with my beloved favorite “The Six Swans,” that would be absolutely swell. Her color choices and creepy little writings are so good it’s hard for me to deal with them.

This One Summer, Jillian and Mariko Tamaki

Remember when I said that the Tamakis’ book Skim captured perfectly what it was like to be a teenager? Well, their 2014 book This One Summer also captures perfectly what it is like to be a teenager, while depicting almost none of the same aspects of teenagerhood we saw in Skim. Here it’s two girls who have been coming to the same vacation area every summer for years. But this one is different, because Rose’s parents can’t stop fighting, and Rose finds herself angrier and angrier.

Everyone in the blogosphere who ever recommended This One Summer was right. I loved it. It’s a little more focused than Skim plotwise, and although there are elements of the Problem Novel to it, it saves itself with absolutely lovely visual storytelling and a wonderful depiction of the fifteen-year-old best friends, Rose and Windy. Highly, highly recommended.

(There’s a character called Jenny. Guess what happens to her, oh I will just give you a hint, the answer is nothing good. But at least she’s not a servant or a prostitute, I guess.)

Sweet Tooth, Jeff Lemire

The news that Jeff Lemire will be taking over writing Hawkeye when Matt Fraction (sniffle, sob) finishes gave me the push I needed to finally read something by Lemire. The library had the full run of Sweet Tooth when I visited, so it was Sweet Tooth by default. I had the notion that it was a story about a person who could sense things about objects by ingesting them — and I am still pretty sure there exists a comic book with that premise — but actually it’s a dystopian story about a half-deer-half-human kid trying to find safety in a dangerous world. So…pretty different from what I was imagining.

If I step back to evaluate Sweet Tooth, I have some problems with it. I’d have liked to see more depth and complexity to these characters: Sweet Tooth is your standard-issue hero kid, and Mr. Jepperd is your standard-issue tough guy tormented by his wife’s death, and a lot of the secondary characters are fairly bland as well. And there’s more than a whiff of fridging around the wife’s death in terms of the motivation it provides Mr. Jepperd, and I’m as far over that as it is possible for a woman to be, and Jeff Lemire is a teeny weeny bit on notice as regards tropes about women.

BUT: I couldn’t put this series down. I limited myself to one trade paperback a day and tore through the whole thing in a week. I’ll forgive a lot in a good yarn, and Sweet Tooth definitely is that.

What comics have y’all been reading?

The post Rounding up some more comics appeared first on Reading the End.

The ex-boyfriend of a classmate, Katie Matthews, kills himself. Not long after, Katie herself falls off a roof (on accident?), breaking both her arms. The school goes into mourning overdrive, requiring counseling for all students, releasing white balloons in honor of the dead, discussing what makes them all sad and happy. Skim is disgusted with the show of mourning for someone that most of them never knew, and the false enthusiasm with which many of her classmates embrace the idea of being Suicide Preventers to their peers.

The painful thing about Skim is that Kim truly just needs to find her people. Like high-schoolers everywhere, she’s trying on identities: perhaps she’s a Wiccan, with a bedroom altar where she burns sage to calm herself down; perhaps she’s an arty cool girl lesbian like the teacher she develops a crush on. But none of these identities settles into her, because she cannot find her people.

Ugh, y’all. Not knowing who your people are is just the absolute worst. I am feeling glum now because I’m remembering past versions of myself when I was struggling to find my people (college more than high school) and how miserable that was. I’m glad I’m an adult. Props to the Tamaki cousins for portraying so vividly how much it sucks not to be an adult.

What period of your life was the worst? I was happy as a clam in middle and high school, and then much of my college career was terrible. You?

The post Review: Skim, by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki appeared first on Reading the End.