July 2018

RHC 2018: Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry Mildred D. Taylor

This post is part of a series in which I describe the twenty-four books I read in 2018 for Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge. 

Task: Read a children’s classic published before 1980.

This is such a damned good book, and it was every bit as gripping this time around as it was the last time I read it a quarter of a century or so ago.

I’m usually bothered by nostalgia when it comes to libraries (just stick with this train of thought for a minute). I work in a busy public library, and I know the value of what I do. However, I’m not sure that people with fond library memories who don’t actually use the library today quite get what my actual profession entails.

Don’t get me wrong, any children’s librarian worth his or her salt should give a child an impression that our days are spent being kindly and putting exactly the right book in young people’s hands at exactly the right moment. And we do that, for all ages. It’s one of most of my colleagues’ favorite types of library interaction. Buuuuuut there’s more to it. A LOT more to it.

First of all, we’re not all children’s librarians. Over on the adult side, the job involves anything from providing community tech support to helping schedule visitations with incarcerated family members to genealogy research to legal and medical self-help and research to handling mental health and substance abuse issues professionally and compassionately. The truth is, most of us love books as much as you’d expect, but at its heart this is an information profession, and our razor sharp book recommendation game is only one blade in the Swiss army knife of our skill set.

RHC 2018: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris

This post is part of a series in which I describe the twenty-four books I read in 2018 for Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge. 

Task: Read a comic written and drawn by the same person.

Just stop what you’re doing and go read this comic right now.

 

Okay, great, now that you’ve called in sick to work or whatever other obligations you may have and devoured this enormous and gloriously messy jewel of a book in close to one sitting, let’s continue. Comics make up a decent percentage of my reading diet, and this is one of the best if not the best I’ve read in a really long time (I read the first two volumes of Monstress recently, too, so there’s fierce competition).

Plenty of comics get lots of energy from being produced by a creative team, and I don’t mean to suggest that single writer-artist-produced work is intrinsically superior, but this is definitely a book that I think is stronger for being entirely housed in one person’s brain. The writing and the art both feel incredibly personal, and it’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before.

I don’t really know where to start here. Karen Reyes is growing up in 1960s Chicago, she is obsessed with monsters (specifically, transforming into one), and is trying to solve the murder of the Holocaust survivor who lives upstairs. The book takes the form of Karen’s sketch book, complete with notebook paper lines and doodles in the margins. It’s staggeringly gorgeous colored pencil art (I particularly admire the chapter breaks, which take the form of splendidly rendered pulp magazine covers), and it’s more or less panel-less. It doesn’t follow many of the conventions one expects from a comic book, and it’s so so so damn good as a result.

There is a lot going on here. Karen is gay, with Mexican, Irish, and Cherokee branches in her family tree. She loves her single mother and worships her older brother Deeze. She has trouble at school, mostly because she is an intensely odd little kid (to drive the point home, she draws herself as a furry little monster wearing a trench coat, complete with an adorable underbite revealing her tusks). The book is part murder mystery, part coming of age story, part character exploration of her Uptown Chicago neighborhood, part flashback to murdered Anka’s past. It’s full of monsters and magic and all the heartbreak and senselessness of the world that even monsters and magic can’t completely distract Karen from.

It’s not precisely a horror comic, but it’s also not not-a-horror-comic, if that makes sense. It is absolutely worth your time, even if you don’t have a special place in your heart for B-movie monsters, comics, and weirdos. If you do have that heart space reserved, though, this is one for your permanent collection.

RHC 2018: Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin

This post is part of a series in which I describe the twenty-four books I read in 2018 for Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge. 

Task: The first book in a new-to-you YA or middle grade series.

I adore middle grade books. These are the books that come to mind when I imagine my happiest reading moments and that I’m probably the most excited to share with my daughter once she gets old enough. For starters, The Trumpet of the Swan (Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web too, but TotS doesn’t get nearly enough love), The Borrowers, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Julie of the Wolves, The Giver, The Yearling, all of the horse books, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Little Women, Madeleine L’Engle, all the books where the dog dies horribly, etc.

These are the books that I think about when I think about peak childhood summer afternoons. Before puberty complicated everything, it was hard to beat the pleasure of stretching out on the couch in the living room with a good book and a bag of Lays sour cream and onion potato chips, occasionally tipping my head back to watch benign cumulus clouds float overhead and occasionally get between me and the sun, making the room go comfortably dark for a few minutes.