April Reading and Reviews by Maia Kobabe
I post my reviews throughout the month on Storygraph and Goodreads, and do roundups here and on patreon. Full reviews below the cut.
The Breaks by Julietta Singh
A short, powerful essay written in the form of a letter to the author's six year old daughter. Following in the footsteps of James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Julietta Singh writes to a young person of color growing up in America, with all of its racist and colonial history. This book weaves Singh's memories of a painful childhood injury into thoughts on body trauma and recovery, harassment by TSA into surviving political and ecological disasters, attending protests in her home city of Richmond, Virginia with an anti-racist counter-education for her child. Singh lives her feminist politics every day in a queer family experimenting with communal living, folding ethics into pedagogy, building human connection under extractive capitalism. I loved this book. Reading it expanded my thoughts in a similar way as some of my favorite podcasts Secret Feminist Agenda and Witch, Please. It made me think about how I'd like to live in relation to others in the future, it gave me hope, it confronted me with new ideas and underlined others I had already encountered. I soaked in the 150 pages in just two days and was left wanting more.
Robber Girl by S.T. Gibson read by Abby Craden
Helvig, the teenage daughter of a Swedish robber king, haunts the frozen winter roads hoping a rich merchant will fall into her grasp. Instead, she captures someone more intriguing: a beautiful young woman traveling alone who claims to be a witch. Helvig brings her back to the robber hideout and begs her father to be allowed to host her for a while. Gerda, the witch, seems driven by an urgent, foolish, and dangerous errand- she wants to keep traveling North in the dead of winter in search of a brother who went missing years ago. Helvig convinces her to stay with the robbers until she's regained some strength. And so the two begin a winter of uneasy cohabitation, building a friendship and sharing a bed at night, but both keeping back secrets of their pasts and fears. A delightful, Sapphic retelling of "The Snow Queen" fairytale by Hans Christian Anderson as a young adult novel. This is a story I heard several times in my childhood, so I was familiar with all of the elements and it was a real pleasure to see how they had been reworked and transformed. Beginning the story with the meeting of Gerda and the Robber's daughter (an event that takes place in the middle of the original story) was a smart choice, and the amount of deeply queer yearning woven through kept me on the edge of my seat.
Kisses for Jet by Joris Bas Backer
Set in 1999, this book focuses on gender-questioning teen Jet. They cultivate a long-haired, Kurt Cobain-esque grunge look that is still read as female by most of society. Jet attempts to explore various aspects of their gender in the cramped environment of a Danish boarding school for international students; they try binding and steal boys' underwear from the laundry room but have to hide their experiments from nosy teen neighbors. Luckily, Jet has a friend, Sasha, who shares their love of music and mild rebellion. Sasha seems able to see Jet for who they are when no one else can. Drawn in a scratchy, lively art style, this book really pushes into questioning aspect of queer and trans identities; nothing here is clear cut, and even at the end of the story Jet doesn't know where transition will fully take them. I had the pleasure of reading an advanced reader copy of this book; look forward to it's release in May!
Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke
This is Radtke's second long, melancholic graphic novel mixing nonfiction and memoir. This one is an examination of loneliness and it's damaging and isolating effects. The author bares her own loneliness, which seems inherited from her reserved Midwestern family; she also weaves in quotes and research from scholars and scientists who have studied the topic, most prominently Harry Harlow, an American phycologist who bred rhesus monkeys and raised them in horrifying conditions. I remember reading an article about his research in a National Geographic magazine as a teen, so I was vaguely familiar with his work, but not the sadist extent of it. Radtke lays out the griefs and traumas of Harlow's personal life, which might have been what pushed him to raise animals in solitary confinement and watch it destroy them. Radtke does not attempt to excuse this behavior, noting instead what it says about human beings who are similarly separated from society. There was an opportunity here to talk about the damaging nature of prisons, but that does not come up in this book. It is a very solid and well-researched essay, thematically cohesive, and with poignant illustrations colored in a range of muted, moody tones. It's also very sad, which will probably land with some readers as cathartic and others as upsetting.
Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo
The follow up to Six of Crows, a fast paced fantasy heist novel I really enjoyed despite having to age up the characters from mid-teens to mid-twenties in my head for their level of expertise and motivation to feel at all plausible. This one picks up right after the cliff-hanger ending and takes place entirely within the city of Ketterdam (fantasy Amsterdam). My love for my favorite character from book 1, Inej, only grew, and I remained the most invested in her story line, relationships, and future goals. The middle of this book dragged a little for me. There were so many plots, double-crossings, double-double-crossings and last-minute reveals that I basically started to assume they were coming and they no longer surprised me. However I did really like how the final act played out- once I got into the last 200 pages the book went really quickly. I think I will probably set the series down here though. I'd rather end on a high note than wade into another overly-long sequel that I might loose steam on.
Circe by Madeline Miller
What a powerful story of a woman coming into her own power, making her own choices, and rejecting the toxic family and society she was born into! Circe is the daughter of a Titan and a nymph, the oldest but least loved of four siblings. She has immortality, but seemingly none of the power, beauty or grace of other gods and goddesses. Until she realizes that she can use plants, both earthly and divine, in potions to work some of her will upon the world. She irrevocably changes a mortal into a lesser god, and a nymph into a monster, confesses her actions, and is banished to a remote island for the rest of eternity. Here, where some stories might end, Circe's begins. Her life touches on so many other myths: King Minos and the Minotaur, Jason and Medea, and of course Odysseus. I was completely drawn in by the prose which is lyrical and rich without being distracting, and by the glimpses here and there of the Olympian gods who studied, drew, and daydreamed about as a child. I can see why this book gets so much attention; it deserves it.
Hani and Ishu's Guide to Fake Dating by Adiba Jaigirdar
Hani and Ishu are fifth years at an all-girls school in Ireland. As the only two students of Bengali descent, people naturally tended to group them together, but they are extremely different people and have never been particularly friendly. But when Hani comes out to her white best friends as bisexual, and they don't believe her, she panics and lies, saying that she and Ishu are a couple. They regularly see each other at Bengali dawats, but Hani is still extremely hesitant to contact Ishu and ask if, maybe, she'd like to pretend to be girlfriends for a while... but Ishu surprises Hani by saying yes. Ishu has her own agenda: run for head girl at school, a position that will fill out her already accomplished resume for college applications, and she things Hani can help. I enjoyed many aspects of this cute teen romance, and think the leads had good chemistry, but overall the book was a little over-long for my taste. I wish the mean white friends had gotten less time on the page, because it was the family dynamics that interested me more. The audiobook narrators are very good, but I was listening at 1.5 speed by the end.
Too Bright to See by Kyle Lukof
A very short middle grade book which still manages to deliver a very successful ghost story and a sweet trans coming out narrative. The book opens at the beginning of the summer, when 11 year old Bug's beloved queer uncle has just died. Bug's house was already haunted before this death, but it's even more so after his passing. Bug struggles to process grief as well as pressures from friends to prepare for the transition to middle school- an opportunity some kids take to reinvent themselves. But Bug is haunted by both uncertainty about the future and literal ghosts.
Galaxy: The Prettiest Star by Jadzia Axelrod, drawn by Jess Taylor
Taylor looks like an ordinary teen boy (two siblings, single father, member of the high school basketball team) but she is actually a princess from an alien planet, hiding in disguise on Earth. She's feeling increasingly trapped in the gender and human body that confine her, but when she meets a sexy and confident girl from Metropolis she finally gets the courage to start letting her real self show. The story is simple, but it's cool to see an explicitly trans book come out from DC Comics from a trans writer and nonbinary artist.
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