A Jungle of Tales

               As the title suggests, this is a collection primarily of creation myths told by the Miwok – a linguistic and cultural group of Indigenous people whose traditional territory stretches from San Francisco Bay and Sonoma to the central Sierra Nevada - compiled in the late 19 th century. Merriam was a biologist by training but became interested in Native cultures and concerned about the way they were being eroded by loss of land and language. I’ve tagged these tales as having Native authors, because they do appear to have been written down exactly as told. I do wish Merriam had noted down the name and something about the background of the person who told him the story, rather than just their sub-group affiliations, though, because there are a lot of variations and sometimes comments on recent events. I suspect that, as in many folklore traditions, every teller tended to add and subtract details around the core poi...

              I have a soft spot for stories about magical libraries and also am a total sucker for demons that are nicer or more helpful than one would expect. So how could I resist this blurb?: “Many years ago, Claire was named head librarian of the Unwritten Wing – a neutral space in Hell where all the stories unfinished by their authors reside…When a hero escapes from his book and goes in search of its author, Claire must track and capture him with the help of former muse and current assistant Brevity and the nervous and sweet demon Leto. But what should have been a simple retrieval goes horrifyingly wrong…” This book definitely delivers on the first point – the library and librarian shenanigans are delightful – but not so much on the latter. The book wasn’t actually trying to do that trope, though, so it isn’t exactly a fault. I’m not sure how much I can explain without spoilers, but I’ll give it a s...

              It’s been a while since I read this book, and I forgot how much good stuff is in it! The story starts when Billy Harrow, a curator at the London Natural History Museum’s Darwin Center finds its centerpiece specimen – a giant squid that he had preserved himself – missing. He gets questioned by a very odd set of cops who turn out to be the Met’s cult squad. They are interested in the squid because suddenly all the prophets in the city have been seeing visions of the same end-times…and the squid, which had to have been stolen by magical means, appears to be at the center of it.             I would bet good money that this book drew inspiration from ‘Neverwhere’ . Like that Neil Gaiman book, it features a main character who gets pulled into a grubby magical London underworld and is seriously out of his depth for at least the first half of the s...

              I heard about this book shortly after finishing Moreno-Garcia’s excellent and genuinely horrific  ‘Mexican Gothic’ and my thought was: A neo-noir urban fantasy set in Mexico with multiple vampire types, including bird-like Aztec ones? Yes, please!   But I had a hard time tracking the book down until recently and wasn’t sure why. Apparently, it was originally published in 2016 but then went out of print because the publisher folded. It existed as used copies and internet rumors until 2021 when it was resurrected – so, very appropriate for a vampire story! I was pleased to find that it does indeed deliver a fresh take on what remains, despite oversaturation, one of my favorite mythical creatures.             We begin the story with Domingo, a seventeen-year-old trash picker. Despite his clearly rough life he is by nature a rather ...

            I actually read this other witches-and-werewolves book before ‘Mooncakes’, but it took longer to decide what to say about it. It was recommended to me by my best friend from college. She loved it, I mostly liked it, and we both had some critiques of it – agreeing that the love interest is frustratingly useless and the romance didn't even deserve tagging in the description, for instance. But we had a very intense debate about how to interpret the relationships between three of the female characters (probably greatly annoying a third friend on on that text stream who had no idea what we were ranting about). Therefore, this review is going to end up reflecting that conversation as much or more than my initial impression.             One of my favorite things about this book is the way it drops you into the middle of a story and a world without eithe...

          I was going through a really rough week when my Powell’s Books order containing this graphic novel arrived on my doorstep. This adorable tale of a witch and a werewolf who had been childhood friends reuniting, fighting a demon-summoning cult, and falling in love was exactly what I needed. It is a relatively simple story that doesn’t delve super deeply into the characters’ traumas like many adult graphic novels do, particularly those involving supernatural creatures…but that isn’t what it is meant to do. What it DOES do is create a whimsical, magical atmosphere and a family setting that feels welcoming and affirming to those of any age who might find themselves feeling a bit weird or different.             Nova Huang is a young witch working in her grandmother’s secretly-magical bookshop. She hears a rumor from her friend Tatyana (Tat) that a white wolf ( “Huge! Like Jon Snow’s” ) has been se...

              This historical fiction follows Lily Hu, growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s and realizing she is in love with her classmate, Kathleen Miller. But it also has flashbacks to earlier episodes in the life of her parents and aunt that give more depth and variety to the depiction of Chinese-American life in the mid-twentieth-century. The titular Telegraph Club 1 that is both a welcoming and affirming place for Lily and Kath and a danger, given the frequency of raids and how association with leftists or homosexuals could be used as an excuse for deportation in this time period, not to mention general social ostracism. However, although there are some scary moments, this is overall a really sweet, uplifting, hopeful story.   1. Fictional, but based on several real San Francisco lesbian clubs that featured ‘male impersonators’.         ...