for every 1 book i finish off my TBR, i somehow add 5 more ??? 

you’re in his DMs. i’m fighting him at knife-point. we are not the same.

y’all, forget found family, it’s zumra from now on

if i had a nickel for every time a guy with a tail had an enemies-to-lovers arc, i’d have two nickels. which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice, right?

Short version: Maggie makes the difficult transition from home school to public high school, made more difficult by the fact that up until that point her friends had only been her three brothers.  At school she discovers that her brothers have history she knew nothing about.  All the while she is haunted by a silent ghost from the town’s maritime urban legend.

What I thought: There’s a lot going on in Maggie’s story, everything from a recent divorce to a sort-of new crush to new friends to local history.  It feels like it could make for a more interesting text novel than a graphic one.  I liked that Maggie herself does grow up a little over the course of the story, but not in any profound way like the old genre of buildingsroman usually does.  Yes she does eventually make a stand and take responsibility for certain things in her life, but it’s done very easily and she doesn’t learn a thing about consequences.
I guess what bugged me is that it has such a great setup, and such cute art (the same lady who brought us Adventures of Superhero Girl), but after more than half the volume, the plot hasn’t really taken off, and once it does, it falls back again fairly quickly and benignly.  They spend a lot of time puzzling on what’s the Big Secret that made her oldest brother and new crush such hostile enemies, and the reason for it ends up being so boring I read that part over to make certain I hadn’t missed some subtext, but nope, just garden-variety conflict.  I thought it would be something actually worth their reactions and glares, maybe something humiliating or the crush mistreated someone in a truly unforgivable fashion, but turns out he was just kind of rude a couple times.
The ghost.  Why was there a ghost at all?  They never find out what the ghost wanted, and she mostly served to represent Maggie’s absent mother, without being actually connected to her.  Maggie does try to help the ghost find peace, but the only thing she could think of didn’t work, and the ghost never says anything or offers closure.  Frustrating for everyone. 
Also frustrating was the fact that Maggie blames herself for her parents’ divorce, and the only people who know that she does either don’t care about the pain that misconception causes her, or actually agree with her.  That’s never touched on either, and we’re left with no more closure than with the ghost.
Overall it was okay, I like Hicks as an artist and I like her understanding of the everyday struggle, but this one felt like it needed to be either longer or a different medium.

Read it if you liked: Mercuryby Hope Larson, Adventures of Superhero Girl, also by Faith Erin Hicks, Scott Pilgrim vs the World by Brian Lee O’Malley, anything by John Green.

Short version: Anda is invited to join an all-girls guild in an MMORPG very like World of Warcraft.  While there she and another member of the guild take it upon themselves to “clean out” the gold farmers– players who do nothing but sell game resources for real world cash.  Anda accidentally befriends one of the gold farmers she had meant to kill, only to discover that the player behind the avatar is a teen like herself, working the gold farm in China under harsh conditions.  She is left with the ethical decision to help him and the others in his “office,” which risks alienating herself and losing him his job.

What I thought:  I have quite a positive opinion here, but a few details nipped at me.  In the very beginning of the story, the guild recruiter calls herself “one of the first girl gamers”–I strongly doubt that.  The stereotype of the male gamer who has nothing but contempt for female gamers is there for a reason, but women and girls have been defying that stigma ever since there have been games, of any sort, not just online.  Now that’s out of the way, I can gush.
What a great story!  I loved that the plot really addresses the global aspect of online gaming, how it puts players in touch who would otherwise never have met, makes friends across continental borders, and opens eyes to other ways of living.  Anda has sympathy for her Chinese friend’s predicament, and unthinkingly gives him the advice that she would give to an American in the same position, unaware that things are very different in China, with very different consequences for failure.  In addition to that, she slowly comes to grasp the notion that bullying is not always obvious, and that it’s possible to take part in it without knowing.
What I liked most had to do with Doctrow taking the absolute best part of online game philosophy and running with it, namely the fact that the person you play in the game is a perfect version of yourself.  On the surface that means Anda’s avatar has a beautiful body and dresses well, she’s agile and skilled, she is good at her job and is under nobody’s control.  In the real world, she lives by her mother’s rules, she wears the same frumpy sweater every day, she’s shy and doesn’t have the courage to stand up for others.
But then something wonderful happens: her avatar starts doing the right thing, she helps the Chinese players and accepts the blame when it goes badly, then fixes what she messed up even though it means going to a lot of trouble.  Slowly, her avatar becomes a better version of Anda herself, and the two start to blend, first with Anda dying her hair to match her avatar’s, then with an attitude adjustment that makes her a better person in real life.
So this is a great story for girls, especially the ones who spend a lot of time online or could be classified as “millennials” by people who use the word distastefully.  It’s a good one for anyone who games online, male or female, as a how-to guide on the right way to behave towards your fellow humans, even if you never see their face.

Read if you liked: Lumberjanesby Noelle Stevenson, Fangirlby Rainbow Rowell, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, .hack (Dot Hack) by Koichi Mashimo

Book recommendation: Metaltown by Kristen Simmons

It’s such a good book, with so many good things about it. There are real life allegories, tales of family, love, and betrayal, and a compelling story surely worth 370+ pages of your time. So many parts of it feel eerily familiar in today’s world, especially in the last few years. I laughed, cried, cheered, got mad, amongst other emotions as I turned the pages.

I first discovered it through a friend in a Hadestown Discord server who sent it and said “Hey look this is also about a factory town type of situation, with some love involved, similar to Hadestown (in a good way), and the author got inspired by other musicals of a similar genre” so I immediately ordered it, despite the shipping fee being slightly expensive.

It took me a while to finish it because life got in the way for some time, but I did it! I fell so in love with the three main characters, and I hope more people do, too.

Ultimately, all I can say is it’s definitely worth the read, and especially poignant in today’s era of pandemic and war. I hope y’all go check it out.

Hey lovelies!

Here is my September TBR. This month I have decided to try and get back into graphic novels, and I’m also determined to carry on with some series that I have started and never gotten around to finishing along with some others that have been on my TBR for too long.

Have you read any of these? If so let me know your thoughts and let me know which one I should start with!

**** (4/5 Stars)

Maggie Stiefvater has done it again!  Blue Lily, Lily Blue may be the weakest of the Raven Cycle so far, but that is not saying much.  It’s still miles better than anything else I’ve read recently!  

Stiefvater really develops her magic systems in this book.  Previously we’ve heard something about the psychics, we’ve heard quite a bit about the Greywaren, and we know something about Blue’s abilities, but not much.  Blue Lily, Lily Blue focuses more heavily on Adam and his strong but uncertain bond with the ley line, and on Blue as she figures out a bit of how to control her magical battery status.  We also learn a lot more about mirrors.  I’m a big sucker for cool magic systems, so this was totally awesome for me.

We lost a bit of the search for Glendower in The Dream Thieves, but that plot picked up seamlessly and then really careened along.  This was a plot-heavy book that sets up for what promises to be a spectacular finale.   It did suffer somewhat from middle book syndrome - it very obviously cannot stand alone.  The first two are obviously the beginning of a series, but they stay self-contained in a way Blue Lily, Lily Blue does not.  It’s a bridge between books rather than a book in and of itself.  It is wonderful and necessary, but exists mostly to catapult you toward the end with a lot more information than you had before.

My favourite detail: the revelation that Blue and her family has a list of the people who will die in Henrietta in the next year, and the general reaction.  They’re all so low-key macabre that when they get called out it’s really funny.