A Jungle of Tales

              This 1958 novel paints a funny yet also sensually evocative portrait of a Brazilian town in 1925. Ilhéus is a cacao town, settled by immigrants from across the country and the world, that has grown large and prosperous enough to have dreams of modernity and sophistication – if the old guard will let it! “Many thing still reminded one of the Ilhéus of former days. Not the days of the sugar mills…of the Negro slaves…but the more recent past…after the Jesuit priests had brought the first cacao seedlings, the period when men in search of fortune invaded the forests and with rifle and pistol disputed every foot of soil…when the forests were felled and cacao was planted over corpses and blood…But little by little these vestiges were disappearing…not without resistance, however, especially from customs that time had virtually transformed into laws of conduct.” The book has two main story-lines/theme...

            I was just having a conversation with someone about how I don’t tend to like YA novels and also tend to get bored by books in contemporary settings, especially if they are romance-focused. So how in the heck did I get so sucked into this manga that is about the complicated love lives of a set of high schoolers? Well, for one thing, despite what you might guess from the cover, showing two boys and a girl, it isn’t a love triangle. Nor – despite unconscionably leaving out my girl Masumi - is it a love quadrangle. No, the (possible) relationships explored in this story are best depicted like this: What can I say? My little bisexual heart was alternating between warm fuzzies and anxious palpitations the entire time. BUT – and here’s another key point - not really anxious because of any of the main characters (although Tai is a little oblivious in ways that could potentially cause problems). Despite...

  “I want to know how things work. I want to know why they work, and what happens if you alter the variables. Sometimes it’s not the variables that alter on you, however. Sometimes it’s the constants.”             This story feels like something I might have commissioned. A realistic depiction of a middle-aged sushi-loving female scientist who goes down a rabbit hole after taking one of those boxed DNA tests and discovers she has Lovecraftian alien ancestors…and instead of the “auugh, horrors man was not meant to know!” reaction of most Lovecraft protagonists, just keeps gathering more data? Kind of like my beloved ‘Annihilation’ but funny? Yes, please!             I often get annoyed at how science and scientists get portrayed in media, but with this one I kept laughing or wincing at relatable line after relatable line. For example: “I’m a physicis...

  The author of this graphic novel describes its genesis like this: “I had this image in my head of a battered girl standing alone, absolutely furious, and behind her a battlefield that stretched for miles…the root of my desire, I finally realized, was to tell a story about what it means to be a survivor. A survivor, not just of a cataclysmic war, but of racial conflict and its antecedent: hatred. And to confront the question: how does one whom history has made a monster escape her monstrosity?” Well, with this volume, I believe Ms. Liu and the illustrator, Ms. Takeda, have made a brilliant beginning! When we meet Maika Halfwolf, a one-armed arcanic 1 girl, she is naked at a slave auction, a strange eye-shaped brand on her chest. But we quickly learn that she put herself there, hoping to gain access to someone within the fortress of the Cumaea – an order of witches that are a major enemy to arcanics – who knew her mother and who therefore might also have the i...

  “A vampire, a demon, and a wizard walk into a bar,” Anders said. “If that’s a joke,” Curtis said, “please tell me the punchline is ‘and they lived happily ever after, okay?” “That wouldn’t be very funny.”   I was looking forward to reading this book because I like stories about vampires, demons, and wizards individually and this combines them with a unique premise: All magical beings have to form groups of 3 or more in order to maximize their powers - loners have a rough time. However, the main characters have done something unheard of, forming a “triad” made up of Luc the vampire, Anders the incubus, and Curtis the wizard. Neat! As the presence of an incubus would suggest, this bond has a sexual component to it…and since I’d been resolving to include more books with gay relationships that are actually written by men 1 , this ticked that box too. And it didn’t disappoint – ‘Triad Blood’ is a really entertaining read, with cool worldbuilding, an exciti...

  I had heard amazing things about this author and book series for some time, and I’m glad to say it is very much deserved. This is technically fantasy but has aspects of science fiction, since the magical abilities are linked to a person’s brain structure and can interface with various technologies. Either way, Jemisin creates a unique dystopian world unlike anything I’d read before, and her characters are very compelling.             The world of these novels is a very tectonically active one. The continent ironically known as “the Stillness” is subject to regular earthquakes and volcanoes. In extreme cases, these can lead to a “fifth season” -   a time when ash-clouds fill the air and disrupt the climate or other earth processes for years at a time. This has clearly been going on for a long time, as flora and fauna have partly adapted to it: otter-like creatures that can switch from eating leaves to...

  Another pair of stories, available for free at the links below, this time focusing on weird occurrences in a “normal” suburban environment.   ‘Little Free Library’ is about a girl who puts up a free library box to share books with neighbors. The books start disappearing, so she leaves a note that something should be left in exchange. The “book thief” starts leaving things that are not books: a snake sculpture, an odd leaf, a drawing of a cat. Meigan figures she’s just found the neighborhood eccentric, until a copy of ‘Defending Your Castle’ disappears, replaced with a tiny gold coin note that says: To the librarian, I do not know what I did to deserve the favor of the Gods, but I am grateful, so grateful, for your kindness to me. I believed our cause to be lost; I believed that I would never have the opportunity to avenge what was done to my family; now, suddenly, I have been gifted with a way forward. Blessings on you. If you can bring me more such books, I will...

  These two short stories (free on Tor.com) both feature men who think love and the desire for possession - or the desire for someone to love them - are the same thing. Both pay some kind of a price, though whether they’ve learned anything is up for debate.   ‘The Wonderful Stag, or the Courtship of Red Elsie’ is set in a remote village in the woods. In those woods lives a stag that carries many gold rings on its antlers. If you can coax it close and get one of those rings, the villagers believe, your relationship will be blessed and happy. If you don’t…well, it probably wasn’t meant to be! But one man is obsessed with obtaining a ring, thinking it – or the gold he thinks the deer carries inside it – will finally earn the hand of Red Elsie, the girl who wants nothing to do with him. In order to get it, he carries out a heinous act. And when the villagers decide to punish him, Red Elsie knows just what he deserves.   ‘L’Esprit de L’Escalier’ i...

                 I picked up this graphic novel because it reminded me of my nephew. I had recommended ‘Mooncakes’ to my mom as a birthday gift for his sister, and he was eager to read it as well. This has a similar art style, a similarly diverse cast of characters, and a story that is just as heartwarming – so I hope he will like it, too!             The story follows Aster, a young boy from a magical family who has a knack for witchcraft. Everyone tells him that witch-magic is for girls, and that he is destined to be a demon-fighting shape-shifter like all the men in his family...but Aster has no talent for shifting at all. The only person who seems to understand this dilemma is a sporty non-magical girl who happens to spot him making blackberries ripen one day on the borders of her town. Then the other boys start disappearing, taken by some mysterious force. ...

            Wow, this book! The idea of having a main character who is the ghost of a woman who disappeared during the Cuban Revolution and who is haunting her nephew to get him to investigate what happened to her immediately grabbed my attention. I was definitely expecting some feelings, given my own family’s connection to those events, but I was cautious given that the version of the narrative given by many “Miami Cubans” is kind of one-sided and conservative. This book doesn’t do that – it is quite nuanced – and the level of relatable emotion this evoked was more than I expected. That included not just one’s desire to pass on or learn stories being hampered by the pain of those who experienced them, but also a sense of mourning for the new free Cuba that could have been and wasn’t. Also, though I predicted the answer to one of the first mysteries – why Marisol is so angry at her sister – the story then kept go...