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juushikaTitle: Twelfth Night
Author: William Shakespeare
Published: 1602
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 100
Total Page Count: 324,325
Text Number: 1143
Read Because: Shakespeare reading project
Review: As You Like It's improved successor, and one of my favorite plays. The A-plot grows better with each scene, increasingly playful but building a tension which is never resolved—I love that "Viola" is never present in the final act, that "Cesario" remains, persistently queer. And Viola/Cesario is a delight: great dialog, even better rapport with the audience, pulling us into the textual and metatextual layering of wordplay, identity, desire, and queerness. The Malvolio B-plot I've come to appreciate more over time (and thanks to amazing stage productions); again as in As You Like It, it's a dark mirror to the A-plot themes of the foolishness of love, funny but deceptively, profoundly cruel. I love this play down to its every detail (including Antonio, whose direct parallel to Cesario—without the social pardon provided by Viola—explores the play's boundaries), and yet it reads so trippingly. Immediately after Hamlet it feels like a reprieve, but it's still so accomplished, so complex.
Title: Sweet Blue Flowers Volumes 1-8
Author: Takako Shimura
Translator: John Werry
Published: VIZ Media, 2017-2018 (2004-2013)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 1555 (382+400+400+372)
Total Page Count: 325,880
Text Number: 1143-1151
Read Because: listed on the NYLP's A Beginner's Guide to LGBTQ+ Manga, paperbacks borrowed from the Wilsonville Public Library
Review: Review & rating stand for the series entire. Childhood friends are reunited when they begin high school, and this follows the social lives and romances of a cast across two high schools, structured loosely around interschool drama productions. Almost everything that can go wrong with this structure does: the cast is difficult to keep track of, sideplots peter out, and the plays take up too many valuable panels. The real culprit is the transitions, which are incredibly abrupt, particularly in the first few volumes and in the timeskip resolution, and which make everything more confusing and therefore distant. But when it clicks, it's subtle and profound and real—this is one of the first realistic depictions of the queer experience that I've encountered in manga, rather than metaphorical or subtextual or tropey or erotic, and that realism is valuable and nuanced: self-interrogative, bittersweet, validating; still funny and sweet, not so navel-gazey as to be irritating, with likable leads. Those aspects grew on me; I just wish the overall narrative were better. The art is beautiful, clean, and consistent, but the simple backgrounds and evolving character designs only exacerbate story issues.
Title: Jane, Unlimited
Author: Kristin Cashore
Published: Penguin Young Readers Group, 2017
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 470
Total Page Count: 326,350
Text Number: 1152
Read Because: fan of the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review:While in mourning for her aunt, Jane is invited to a friend's deeply unusual family home. Her adventures then diverge into branching paths explored through varying genres, from mystery to gothic horror to scifi. It's a creative and experimental effort, and I appreciate it for that and for the places where it succeeds: the effective experiments in tone; the times where the multifaceted approach to identity and grief build something greater than a single narrative could achieve. But I wish it were weirder and bigger. The quirky tone threatens to overwhelm, particularly in the first and last narratives, and such a weird premise shouldn't feel boring. Too many connections between narratives are repetitive or subtextual, and Ivy—Jane's recurring touchstone—isn't rendered deeper than her first iteration; is in fact rarely present, and so Jane's attachment feel fixed, unaffected by the branching paths. I wonder if rearranging the narratives would help, to start somewhere stranger than a sedate mystery; putting the parallel-universe scifi story last would probably be a mistake—too easy, even trite—but I still wish the final narrative were more substantial.
Author: William Shakespeare
Published: 1602
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 100
Total Page Count: 324,325
Text Number: 1143
Read Because: Shakespeare reading project
Review: As You Like It's improved successor, and one of my favorite plays. The A-plot grows better with each scene, increasingly playful but building a tension which is never resolved—I love that "Viola" is never present in the final act, that "Cesario" remains, persistently queer. And Viola/Cesario is a delight: great dialog, even better rapport with the audience, pulling us into the textual and metatextual layering of wordplay, identity, desire, and queerness. The Malvolio B-plot I've come to appreciate more over time (and thanks to amazing stage productions); again as in As You Like It, it's a dark mirror to the A-plot themes of the foolishness of love, funny but deceptively, profoundly cruel. I love this play down to its every detail (including Antonio, whose direct parallel to Cesario—without the social pardon provided by Viola—explores the play's boundaries), and yet it reads so trippingly. Immediately after Hamlet it feels like a reprieve, but it's still so accomplished, so complex.
Title: Sweet Blue Flowers Volumes 1-8
Author: Takako Shimura
Translator: John Werry
Published: VIZ Media, 2017-2018 (2004-2013)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 1555 (382+400+400+372)
Total Page Count: 325,880
Text Number: 1143-1151
Read Because: listed on the NYLP's A Beginner's Guide to LGBTQ+ Manga, paperbacks borrowed from the Wilsonville Public Library
Review: Review & rating stand for the series entire. Childhood friends are reunited when they begin high school, and this follows the social lives and romances of a cast across two high schools, structured loosely around interschool drama productions. Almost everything that can go wrong with this structure does: the cast is difficult to keep track of, sideplots peter out, and the plays take up too many valuable panels. The real culprit is the transitions, which are incredibly abrupt, particularly in the first few volumes and in the timeskip resolution, and which make everything more confusing and therefore distant. But when it clicks, it's subtle and profound and real—this is one of the first realistic depictions of the queer experience that I've encountered in manga, rather than metaphorical or subtextual or tropey or erotic, and that realism is valuable and nuanced: self-interrogative, bittersweet, validating; still funny and sweet, not so navel-gazey as to be irritating, with likable leads. Those aspects grew on me; I just wish the overall narrative were better. The art is beautiful, clean, and consistent, but the simple backgrounds and evolving character designs only exacerbate story issues.
Title: Jane, Unlimited
Author: Kristin Cashore
Published: Penguin Young Readers Group, 2017
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 470
Total Page Count: 326,350
Text Number: 1152
Read Because: fan of the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review:While in mourning for her aunt, Jane is invited to a friend's deeply unusual family home. Her adventures then diverge into branching paths explored through varying genres, from mystery to gothic horror to scifi. It's a creative and experimental effort, and I appreciate it for that and for the places where it succeeds: the effective experiments in tone; the times where the multifaceted approach to identity and grief build something greater than a single narrative could achieve. But I wish it were weirder and bigger. The quirky tone threatens to overwhelm, particularly in the first and last narratives, and such a weird premise shouldn't feel boring. Too many connections between narratives are repetitive or subtextual, and Ivy—Jane's recurring touchstone—isn't rendered deeper than her first iteration; is in fact rarely present, and so Jane's attachment feel fixed, unaffected by the branching paths. I wonder if rearranging the narratives would help, to start somewhere stranger than a sedate mystery; putting the parallel-universe scifi story last would probably be a mistake—too easy, even trite—but I still wish the final narrative were more substantial.
