A Jungle of Tales

  The premise of this manga and anime series is basically: “What if ‘Jeeves and Wooster’ but the butler was a demon, and the young master was a 13-year-old crime-solver?” Once a carefree young aristocrat, Ciel Phantomhive’s world came crashing down when, on his 10 th birthday, his parents were killed and their mansion burned. He was sold to a cult who tried to sacrifice him to summon a demon. But the demon made a deal with Ciel instead: to aid and protect him until he can carry out his revenge. Once free, Ciel took up not only the leadership of the family business interests but the Phantomhive role as the queen’s ‘guard dog’, both investigating and hushing up crimes emerging from London’s literal and figurative underworlds. Sebastian proves to be a demon of many talents, to all appearances an impeccably polite and efficient butler – who just so happens to be able catch bullets or skewer a dozen thugs with silverware.    The resulting story is sim...

  I wrote recently about 'Paradises Lost' ; this is a very different, and much darker, generation ship story, but equally creative and unique. In LeGuin’s story the world of the ship improves on current society so much that a large faction of the passengers deny they are ever meant to leave. Here, the HSS Matilda resembles the antebellum South – a racially stratified, highly patriarchal society. We see this world mainly through the eyes of Aster, a low-deck healer/physician, as she and her closest companions struggle to survive and eventually to change their world.   ** BTW, ALL the trigger warnings for this book, and to a certain extent for the rest of this review, as I’ll be alluding to instances of racism, sexual assault, and queerphobia slightly more specifically than usual**     Aster is fascinating character. She is a self-taught scientist who breeds plants and invents things in her cobbled together “botanarium” and is po...

  Far beneath the surface of the earth, hidden from the sun and the moon, upon the shores of the Starless Sea, there is a labyrinthine collection of tunnels and rooms filled with stories. Stories written in books and sealed in jars and painted on walls. Odes inscribed onto skin and pressed into rose petals…Old stories preserved while new stories spring up around them. This tale has very much the same dream-like, richly descriptive qualities as Morgenstern’s first book ‘The Night Circus’ , but the structure is very different. Where that was closer to magical realism, this is a “hidden world” fantasy. Zachary Ezra Rawlings is an introverted master’s student who studies video games as a story-telling medium. He found a painted door in an alleyway when he was eleven, which he did not try to open. Then he stumbles on a book called ‘Sweet Sorrows’ that contains that very episode that has long haunted him, and in investigating it he finds his adventure. ‘The Starless ...

      While I mostly talk about books here, I need to make an exception for this anime series because it is brilliant. We desperately need more stories for young girls that are like this! The series, created in 1996 by director Kunihiko Ikuhara based on the manga by Chiho Saito, can be watched in full on YouTube in either subtitled or dubbed versions. It follows Utena Tenjou, a girl who challenges the gender norms of her school (despite her flowing pink hair) because she insists on wearing a boyish uniform 1 that symbolizes her desire to be a prince. To her, being a prince means being noble and brave, standing up for the underdog – the full chivalric ideal. In the first episode, she tells off an upperclassman, Saionji, who humiliated her friend Wakaba (and also slapped around Anthy Himemiya, who she presumes is his girlfriend), and challenges him to a duel. Stuff starts getting weird when Saionji starts monologuing about how the duel will decide control of the Rose Bride...