juushika

Title: Entangled with You: The Garden of 100 Grasses
Author: Aki Aoi
Published: Seven Seas, 2022
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 185
Total Page Count: 529,725
Text Number: 1941
Read Because: browsing graphic novels shelf at..., hardback borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: 2.5 stars, bumped up for my favorite. One novella-equivalent with a Beauty & the Beast vibe and a few short story-equivalents, all gentle BL. Very gentle: tender, sexless dynamics, that, without either heat or friction, are a little bland. The exception is "Corrosion," which is weird and embodied and much more memorable. The art is beautiful, especially (and somewhat ironically) the loving, detailed backgrounds against which vaguely undifferentiated pretty boys wander. All told, I'm not wild about this.

Title: My Darling Dreadful Thing
Author: Johanna van Veen
Published: Poisoned Pen Press, 2024
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 380
Total Page Count: 529,380
Text Number: 1939
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Our protagonist performs false séances, but she has a true spirit companion that only she can see. The vibes here are earnest and appealing: gothic abundances set in 1950s Netherlands, with spirit companions that look distinctly dead and nibble the blood & tears of their human partners; a Rebecca inversion with seductive sapphic tendencies. Unfortunately, this is a debut, so the "but" is predictable: lackluster writing. There are exceptions, namely the loving, precise descriptions of physical injury, but both in plot structure and on sentence-level, this feels raw, clumsy, killing much of the atmosphere and pushing the mystery/thriller narrative frame (the protagonist accused of a crime she attributes to her companion) to a tedious breaking point.

Title: The Starving Saints
Author: Caitlin Starling
Published: Harper Voyager, May 20, 2025
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 350
Total Page Count: 528,960
Text Number: 1937
Read Because: fan if the author, ebook ARC from NetGalley
Review: A castle under siege is saved from starvation by dangerous figures in the form of the Lady and her Saints. This is one of the weirder books I've read in recent memory, and I love weird, but I'm not sure that this weird works. The world is stylized, and the developing plot and magic system lean in hard: medieval vibes, a knight and bee-keeping nuns and an apostate madwoman; monsters masquerading as divine and fey bargains. The cast is very Starling, prickly women negotiating codependent murder/love desires, featuring sexy choking and revenge-lust, what's not to like.

But, structurally... Weird, I say again, but here that means: a hot mess. The narration rotates between the three characters, and they rarely come together or stay long in one place. It's a lot of traveling from one end of the grounds to the other, passing connections and deferred confrontations, and the result is something more gestural than inhabited. I think I appreciate the attempt; I prefer a strange read to an easy one, and this strange is viscous and hungry. But it's also a borderline slog.

Title: Library
Author: Michael Dumontier, Neil Farber
Published: Drawn and Quarterly, 2021
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 110
Total Page Count: 528,450
Text Number: 1935
Read Because: browsing graphic novels shelf at..., hardback borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: A collection of book covers that aren't, not in any particular arrangement. Some are "honest book covers" pastiche, and many have contemporary literature vibes, preoccupied with loneliness, social prestige, and death. I could see myself liking this if this were structured, if it had an internal narrative; if this were more fantastical, if the titles inspired wonder or curiosity. As is: tedious, pointless; at best, cute.

Title: Monster Blood (Goosebumps Book 3)
Author: R.L. Stine
Narrator: Kirby Heyborne
Published: Scholastic Audio, 2015 (1992)
Rating: 1.5 of 5
Page Count: 135
Total Page Count: 527,830
Text Number: 1932
Read Because: browsing available now horror on audio, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Stranded with his strange great aunt for a few days, our protagonist buys a slime toy ... with dire results. I didn't like this as much as The Werewolf of Fever Swamp. Multiple factors, I think: the initial delight of nostalgia has worn off; this is less atmospheric, although the monster blood's varying qualities are evocative and gross; there's a lot of animal imperilment with a side of soft ableism, which saps my fun. Consensus seems to be that this is one of the weaker Goosebumps books; seems likely, but I think I've exhausted my interest in rereading.

Title: Jay's Journal
Author: Beatrice Sparks
Published: Simon Pulse, 2010 (1979)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 230
Total Page Count: 527,165
Text Number: 1929
Read Because: read Unmask Alice and got curious, paperback borrowed from the Deschutes Public Library c/o Timberland Regional library via interlibrary loan (haven't done an ILL in over a decade & wow it feels fancy to point at a far-away library book and have it delivered onto you, although reading real paper isn't something I can do often so I'll have to restrain my newfound powers)
Review: A troubled teen boy is seduced by the occult. This is impossible to separate from its genesis, especially as I picked it up immediately after reading Emerson's Unmask Alice. So: shaking my head to show I disapprove of Sparks/the harm done by Jay's Journal, while also saying:

Boy, what a ride. Is it good? Absolutely not. It feels more unhinged than Go Ask Alice, like Sparks had to do more inventing than exaggerating and it shows; the core of authenticity is lost. But when pushed to vomit up an imagining of what the occult (Satanic Panic version) looks like in practice, Sparks is insightfully incoherent. There's a lot of the quaint: we levitated objects again, it was cool I guess; we had occult-fueled Deep Insights into the Universe, none of which I'll record here. And then there's the picturesque, the ridiculous and, like most id writing, the weirdly compelling: seduced by a counselor at my residential treatment center, possessed by a demon named Raul who wants me for my hot bod; bloody orgies and cattle mutilation given long, loving descriptions to break up one-paragraph entries about debate tournaments. The pacing is horrible, the writing worse, Debbie/Tina are interchangeable, but in many ways this is just what I was hoping for. The YA problem novel succeeds because it's titillating; because I'm being told, no, don't, while watching with undisguised fascination the evolving grotesque. And the shape of that grotesque exposes the things that compel and scare us, that are 'problems,' like queer desire and sex and the furor of adolescence. Sparks deserves none of that as praise. This is bad, full stop, and its context unforgivable. But! It was worth the interlibrary loan.

Finally caught up with (most of) my backlog. Finally, theoretically, will stop flooding reading lists with old book reviews. I'd like to endeavor to stay on top of crossposting these, post per book instead of in roundups (with exceptions) for tagging reasons, and also a dozen other resolutions I'm sure, but those two at least seem reasonable.


Title: Daughters of Snow and Cinders (La louve boréale)
Author: Núria Tamarit
Translator: Jenna Allen
Published: Fantagraphics Books, 2023 (2022)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 215
Total Page Count: 526,815
Text Number: 1928
Read Because: browsing graphic novels shelf at..., paperback borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: A young woman follows a goldrush expedition after they leave without her, journeying into distant woods. This is breathtaking: rich colors with such depth, vibrant royal purples and blues, textured shadows and pale snows and the vivid warm tones of blood and fire. It's one of the most beautiful graphic novels I've ever read. Tamarit gives her characters distinguishing injuries and birthmarks that combat same face syndrome and introduce a lot of, well, character.

It's narrative that struggles, here. The overland journey is slow and contemplative and shadowed by danger; it's a compelling tone. But the themes of environmentalism and anticolonialism, however well-intended, have no nuance, offering only repetitive, unproductive messaging: all men are dangerous, humans are a blight on the land, etc. Such a letdown in such a gorgeous work.

Title: The Black Lord
Author: Colin Hinckley
Published: Tenebrous Press, 2023
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 125
Total Page Count: 526,550
Text Number: 1926
Read Because: reading the publisher, ebook borrowed from Multnomah County Library
Review: The disappearance of an infant presages the return of an entity that has haunted his family for three generations. This opens strong with its horror, no slow build from mundane to speculative, and I admire that; and then the narrative loops back, an unusual, risky structure, introducing new PoVs to explore the backstory of folk horror meeting cosmic horror. Hinckley leans into kinesthetic descriptions, into precise unsettling moments, which I find refreshingly effective (as an aphantasic reader who bounces off of most horror monsters as a result). But the titular Black Lord is too late introduced to a narrative otherwise so exhaustive in developing its lore, and while parts of the family dynamic feel true, family history isn't an anxiety that speaks to me; this most me a little as it went on.

Included is a short story: another spooky tree, another remarkably evocative moment, interestingly oblique Noodle Incident treatment of the inciting events, another climax that doesn't quite sell me. Hinckley is doing cool things with narrative structure and has an eye for horror, but his meeting of themes to horror is a little staid for me.

Title: Totem
Author: Laura Pérez
Translator: Andrea Rosenberg
Published: Fantagraphics Books, 2023 (2021)
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 145
Total Page Count: 526,255
Text Number: 1924
Read Because: browsing graphic novels shelf at..., hardback borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: In interlocking narratives and flashbacks, a recent murder case frames the protagonist's memories of her girlfriend's disappearance. The art is exceptionally clean, airy, with a minor (if intentional) case of same face syndrome which makes the abstruse plot a little too hard to follow, especially in the middle sections. But that floaty style, the cultivated inaccessibility, also invites interpretation, without which the vague spiritual/interconnectedness plot might be a little too hand-wavey. I read this twice, seeking more depth and coherency on reread; and it reads fast, its atmosphere is captivating, but I didn't find that payoff.

Title: House of Hollow
Author: Krystal Sutherland
Illustrator: Eleanor Bennett
Published: Books on Tape, 2021
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 315
Total Page Count: 525,735
Text Number: 1922
Read Because: reviewed by rachelmanija, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County library
Review: As children, the Hollow sisters disappeared for two weeks and then came back changed; now, the eldest has disappeared again, and her sisters must uncover their past to find her. I struggle with YA, so that I don't hate this is backhanded compliment but compliment nonetheless. It retains YA markers that bug me: Snark's hard to write, Sutherland does a mediocre job, so instead of balancing out the dark fantasy aesthetic it just exaggerates an already exaggerated tone; predictably, a bevy of neat explanations undermines the very intentional liminality.

But this is willing to get dark & fantastic, and I appreciate that. It's a slow, overly-broadcasted journey into the speculative, but it has payoff, big spooky fairyland vibes, good; every reveal and consequence is generally as awful as it could possibly be, even better. Grey's character and her stranglehold over her sisters is seductive and empowered and ruthless and toxic, and that messy, compelling heart of the story doubles down on its own weirdness even when the plot resolves too neatly around it.