On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden

I heard about On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden on the good and great podcast Books Unbound. 

This is a sapphic romance/coming of age graphic novel set in a futuristic space setting where people travel around using spaceships shaped like fish. We follow Mia, a young woman who begins working with on a ship with other women who restore old buildings around the universe. But we also go back into time when Mia was at a boarding school and falling in love. 

Starts great with a cat on page 5!

And I'd like to tell you that I loved this book because I certainly liked the premise. But, to be honest, I am not much of a visual reader and I don't understand what's happening in the panels without text. And there are entire pages of that in this book. I cannot for the life of me figure out what is happening and I find the entire thing confusing. I found myself literally reading the Wikipedia summary of the book while I was reading it, so this was not my favorite reading experience. 

But, hey, if this is a book for you, it will hit. The storyline between Mia and her girlfriend is adorable. I love the found family plotline of the women on the ship. There's a cat! There are adorable spaceships. I mean, if this calls for you, read it! Don't let my orneriness re: graphic books be your guide.  3/5 stars

Hat mentions (why hats?): 

page 38

page 201

page 319

page 402

How do you feel about graphic novels? 

Help me with a conundrum. This book is over 500 pages, but it's a graphic novel with relatively few words per page. Does this count as Big Book for the purposes of my reading goal of reading a book over 500 pages every month?

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton

Ducks by Kate Beaton is a beloved graphic memoir. Beaton was a young college graduate from Nova Scotia when she decided to head out west to Alberta to earn some quick money in the oil sands to pay off her student loans. Once there, she discovers the loneliness of being one of the few women in the  camps and she suffers sexual harassment and sexual assault at the hands of her co-workers, while her other, mostly male co-workers, refuse to acknowledge there is a problem, or, worse, minimize it. 

The oil fields are also controversial because of the environmental impact - the title refers to ducks who get caught in the run-off and die - and because they are on stolen First Nations land and make many indigenous people sick. 

I read this just days after the election in the United States and I felt this is my soul. Many pundits are saying that the economy is responsible for the election results (do people really think a man whose businesses have declared bankruptcy half a dozen times is going to make grocery prices cheaper?) and this panel from the book (this character is based on Celina Harpe, a Cree woman) really resonated at that moment. 

But, as much as I admired this participant observation ethnography, and Beaton's bravery in telling her story, I didn't love this. I sometimes didn't know what happened/didn't know what the art was trying to tell me. I wish that this had been a narrative memoir. I know Kate Beaton is a cartoonist and this was used as a showcase for her art, but I legitimately couldn't tell a lot of the characters apart and I wanted more of an explanation of things. In the end, I am not as good at reading visuals as I am at just reading. 

I hesitate to tell you how long it took me to figure out what was going on here. 

But I think this is a me problem. Outside of Wake by Rebecca Hall, I have consistently rated graphic books as "meh." 

This one is meh, too. 3.5/5 stars

Hat mentions (why hats?):

Four hard hats, one "Needs a hat" (page 345), two white hats, and one white hard hat for a total of eight. 

*********************

Do you enjoy reading graphic books?

Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall, Illustrated by Hugo Martinez

On a recent Pop Culture Happy Hour, PCHH guest Joelle Monique recommended Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall and illustrated Hugo Martinez on one of their regular What's Making Me Happy segments. 

I tend to shy away from books about slavery because I feel like the tendency is to get a bit inured to the pain in each of the stories, as they all sort of blend into one.  So I pick and choose carefully what to read and I was so impressed when I was reading and came across this that echoed those feelings so carefully.

Chapter 7, page 15

This book is a mishmash of genres because on one hand, it's the tale of women's participation in slave revolts, an untapped story.  On the other hand, it's also the story of the author's work process and research methods, so Hall herself is a character in the story. It's filled with beautiful illustrations from Martinez, including this amazing two-page spread of past and current New York City separated by water.  

Chapter 2, pages 10-11

There's just so much in this book. From stories of women who are tried for their role in slave revolts, but there's no documentation of what happened to them to stories of how enslaved women were placed on the deck with no irons (!) which is why slave revolts happened more frequently on ships with larger percentages of women to stories of how Hall herself was repeatedly kicked out of locations while trying to do research.

Things of Note:

Barracoon - The name for the cage/barracks that held enslaved people as they waited for transportation across the Atlantic. 

John Locke - Influential philosopher, whose thoughts were integral to the development of the philosophy that underpins the U.S. Constitution. Investor in one of the British Empire's largest organizations that profited because of slavery, the Royal Africa Company. Hall writes "a luminary of the Enlightenment and perhaps the central theorist of American democracy" (Chapter 7, page 9). This sparked a debate in my house as my husband, he who holds a doctorate in political theory, strongly suggests that this does not give enough credit to "Hume, Montesquieu, and the rest." I am not enough of an expert to say one way or another, but it was fun to rile up my husband.

Brookes diagram - This is a relatively famous diagram of a ship called the Brookes that illustrates how the enslaved folks were allocated space onboard.  I had seen this diagram before, but was unaware that it was based on a real ship and that it had a name. 

By Plymouth Chapter of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade 

I think this book is beautifully done. It's just over two hundred pages long (the book doesn't have page numbers, which is why I've cited by chapter and page number), but because there are entire pages of illustrations, it's not a huge time intensive commitment. It's heavy subject matter, but it's also readable and fascinating. 

5/5 stars. Highly recommend for everyone.

Woman World by Aminder Dhaliwal

Woman World by Aminder Dhaliwal is a humorous graphic novel based on the supposition that male humans have gone extinct and only women are left on the planet. It's 250 pages that you can get through in 45 minutes, so you really feel like you're making progress on something in the world!

The Good:

Dhaliwal pulls off something really challenging to do here. She manages to write a humorous post-apocalyptical world. Nearly every page has a joke on it, but there's also a message about the fact that a lot of problems women have are exacerbated by men, but wouldn't just go away without men around. 

The art is beautiful. It's a strangely realistic version of living in a small town, where your lives intersect with everyone else's. I do regular (Zoom) fitness classes through our local healthcare consortium and the woman who does most of those classes is named Tiffany. The same 12-15 of us regularly attend these classes, so you get to know your fellow students pretty well.  I'm also on the board of directors for our local community center and a woman named Rachel used to be on this board and she recruited me (I still text her questions about once a month - ha! - she's never really going to "leave" the board).  Rachel was at one of our Zoom classes yesterday and I'd never seen her before, so in the minute or two before class started, I took myself off mute and said hi to her. Tiffany was so EXCITED that someone knew Rachel. But it became clear within thirty seconds that EVERYONE who was on the call knew Rachel from one thing or another except Tiffany. Small town life, yo. 

It starts off serious... (page 253)

...and then there's the joke. (page 254)

The Bad:

It's still quite a binary-based book. Trans-women are accepted as women in this world, but non-binary people are not really present. It wasn't a dealbreaker for me, but if I had someone in my life who was sensitive to these types of things, this probably wouldn't be the book for them.

Despite the humor and the art and the absolute charm of this book, I closed the book feeling slightly unsatisfied.  I think there were deeper themes to be realized from this topic, but those themes were shied away from in the service of humor. I guess that's fine and not everything needs to be a meditation on life and the meaning of it all, but it's not the kind of thing you'll be thinking about once you return the book to the library.  

Overall:

It was a fun diversion for a bit on the couch. I thought it was funny and touching at times and I deeply admire Dhaliwal's art and vision.  3/5 stars

Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Fiona Staples is a much beloved fantasy/science-fiction comic book series. I'm going to do my best to get through all them, but the wait times to get them through my library are a bit insane. It might be a years long project. I originally wanted to read them because Binge Mode did an episode on Saga and I wanted to listen to it, but I just listened to it before I read any.

Volume One (I read in June 2020): Alana and Marko are on opposite sides of a never-ending galactic war when they fall in love. They become hunted by both sides of the fight as they try to keep their daughter, Hazel, safe.  In this volume, we're introduced to a whole cascade of characters, a world of utter devastation and war, and a ghost nanny.  I'll definitely keep reading more.

Volume Two (July 2020): Marko's parents find our trio and some fun in-law shenanigans ensue. Meanwhile, many others are attempting to find the trio since Marko and Alana are fugitives in both of their home worlds.  There are a couple of bounty hunters, notably The Will and his sidekick Lying Cat who can tell if someone is telling the truth, and Prince Robot IV, the heir to the Landfall throne.  We get a bit more backstory in this volume, seeing more about how Alana and Marko met and fell in love (a book! she read him a book!).  

Volume Three (July 2020): Marko and Alana head to Quietus, a planet where their author hero, D. Oswald Heist, lives. They are pursued there by The Will (along with his sidekicks, Gwendolyn and Sophie) and Prince Robot IV.  Meanwhile, there are two journalists trying to track down the story.  The Will's sister, The Brand, tracks down the journalists and injects them with a poison that will kill the journalists if they tell the story of Alana and Marko, but will otherwise leave them able to live their lives.  The Will is seriously injured. The Brand has an awesome dog as a sidekick.

Volume Four (August 2020): Prince Robot IV's wife has a child while Robot IV is off doing very naughty things and then his child is kidnapped. Meanwhile, Alana is working as an actress and becomes hooked on drugs which leads to Marko and Alana's separation.  Gwendolyn and Sophie are on a quest to find a cure for The Will.  I am always a bit squeamish about reading about marriages in peril and it's not my favorite trope, but this seems oddly realistic in a fantasy world.  Money and legal troubles combined with a toddler will definitely cause stress to a marriage.

Volume Five (September 2020): In this addition to the world of Saga, Alana and Marko are reunited, but now Hazel the Wonder Baby has been separated from them. Prince Robot IV kills his son's kidnapper, but is wounded in battle. Meanwhile, Gwendolyn and Sophie have found the cure for The Will, but at the cost of The Brand's life.  I know that this series is beloved and I want to love it as much as the Binge Mode people do, but I find myself putting off reading it because it's dark and, honestly, a bit too crude for me. There's a panel in this edition in which a male dragon is doing something only a male dragon could do (to himself) and...it's just not my style. I'm more than halfway through, so I'm going to continue, but this isn't exactly endearing me to graphic novels as an art form.

Volume Six (November 2020): Several years have gone by since Alana and Marko were separated from Hazel and she's been in a Landfall re-education center with her grandmother.  Alana and Marko try to find her. Prince Robot has been cut off from his royal family, but does his best to protect his son.  The Will has gained a ton of weight and is completely drug-addled, but that doesn't stop him from hounding the reporters who have put in a lot of work on this Hazel as an abomination story.  There are some good moments in these books, but they are maybe a bit too adult for me.  Eh.  I'm a prude, I guess.

And, honestly, that's as far as I got. I took out Volume Seven from the library, but I never wanted to read it and I ran out of renewals and so I returned it, knowing that I would probably never finish the remaining story.  I think it's just not the story for me.  

The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is Satrapi's memoir of growing up in Iran, leaving her family for Europe during the Iranian Revolution, returning to Iran as a westernized woman, and then her eventual self-exile.   And it's all done as a graphic novel.

It's a very honest telling of her story and the artistry of the panels is amazing. She tells stories of her own life that definitely put her in a poor light (becoming homeless, getting a guy arrested falsely) and I struggle to imagine if I would be as willing to put my own mistakes on the page in such an open fashion.  It also does a great job of humanizing the people of Iran - something that we don't always do a good job of in the United States. The stories of day to day life in Iran, through all of the political turmoil, were really some of the most remarkable pages.  The perspective of a young Iranian woman is one that I don't think we get much of and it's an important one to listen to, I think.

I didn't much like Marjane, though. I thought she was self-absorbed and indulgent. And, I mean, yes, of course she is - she's a child and an adolescent through much of the book.  But not wanting to be with this character meant that I would read five pages and put the book down for days on end, read another five pages and then put it down for another couple of days. I didn't want to read it and only managed to read it when I puposefully took it as the only book on a car trip.

So, yes, it's good.  And I think it's an important book.

But I would probably only give it 3.5 out of 5 stars. It's just not a book that speaks to me.

In Real Life by Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang

In Real Life by Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang is a graphic novel that tells the story of Anda, a chubby girl who begins playing a role-playing game online as part of an all-female guild after someone comes into her school's computer class to suggest girls start playing games as girls.  Anda meets another girl in the game who convinces her to kill "gold farmers" within the game because gold farming is technically against the rules of the game. Anda ends up meeting one of the gold farmers, Raymond, who speaks a little English and she learns that he is actually from China and he hurt his back in a factory and now his job is to farm gold in this online game for money. Anda eventually convinces him to attempt to unionize so he can get health insurance for his job(!), but his boss finds out and he gets fired. But don't worry - he's fine in the end.

I'm so torn by this book.

On one hand, the whole thing has a pro-feminist slant and it's nice to see a female character who is not super thin with perfect blonde hair. It's also refreshing to see someone address economic differences and quality of life issues from a global perspective.

But.

Why is someone being allowed to come into a school to tell girls to play video games? Is this what's happening in 2018? 

More importantly, the whole idea that a teenager can just solve this person's problem from across an ocean is ridiculous and the entire ending got me really hepped up. There's a weird white savior issue, but more than that, everything dealing with Raymond is really a way for us to see Anda's personal growth. Which, I'm sure would happen, but it's sort of marginalizing of non-white characters to be used only as a way to build up your white hero. 

Anyway.

I found the whole thing problematic.

Someone please tell me what to think.