Big Breath In by John Straley. Soho Crime, 2024. 9781641296540. 274pp. Delphine has cancer, and she doesn’t have much longer to live. After stepping into the middle of a violent incident involving a man, the woman he’s beating up, and the baby she’s holding, Delphine proves she’s still a bit of a badass (though a weakening, balding badass). A friend asks her to help find a kidnapped child, which leads her back to the woman and makes her determined to save all of the kids involved. She spends some time remembering her husband, who she worked with as an investigator before she stopped doing that and started researching marine life instead. She also spends a lot of time thinking about the lives of whales, mostly sperm whales, and using her knowledge of them to reflect on what she’s experiencing which involves white supremacists, child trafficking, and murder. (There are enough great people in the book to balance out the horrific.) Worth noting: This takes place in Seattle, where I live, but it’s not the city I know. This at first felt strange given how much time I spend wandering around downtown, often near where Delphine is getting treatment in the book. But after a bit I connected with the setting as the dark side of a bleak, near-future Seattle, and it worked for me. I’m curious how my fellow Seattleites will feel about this book. (I hope it doesn’t fan the flames of this “Seattle has fallen” nonsense. It’s still a great city.)

Somna: A Bedtime Story by Beckly Cloon and Tula Lotay. DSTLRY, 2024. 9781962265010. 168pp. Contains #1 – #3. Publisher’s Rating: Mature Roland is the town bailiff in a small English village where he has developed a reputation as a witch hunter. His relationship with his wife, Ingrid, is distant, and he’s often away from her because of his duties. Ingrid has started to have erotic dreams, visions that seem supernatural and that feature a handsome man who is clearly not human. He offers her the sexual pleasure she craves. Is he a demon? Does this make her a witch? As she invites him into her dreams (and her life) she finds out a friend is having an affair. With everyone ready to blame witches for their misfortune, it feels like something disastrous is likely to befall her friend and perhaps Ingrid, too. And then there’s a murder, which raises tensions and suspicions as Ingrid’s husband returns home. Cloonan and Lotay both illustrate the graphic novel; their artistic styles create amazing contrasts between the dreamlike scenes involving Ingrid and her supernatural lover (illustrated by Lotay) and everyday life in the English village (illustrated by Cloonan). This is one of the best historical graphic novels I’ve ever read, it’s easily my favorite graphic paranormal romance, and it’s an example of how amazing comics can be. Pick up a copy even if paranormal romance isn’t your thing — I don’t read much of it, either, but this book is fantastic.

Nights Season One Part One written by Wyatt Kennedy, art by Luigi Formisano. Image, 2024. 9781534397743. Publisher’s Rating: M / Mature. Contains Nights #1 – #5. I was looking at the staff picks shelf in Seattle’s Phoenix Comics & Games, and this was RECOMMENDED BY EVERYONE. Sold. (This graphic novel takes place in an alternate reality where Florida belongs to Spain, there are 31 states, and supernatural creatures are common.) It opens in 1998 when Vincent moves to Florida after his mother’s death to live with Ivory, his “uncle.” Matt, one of Ivory’s housemates, picks Vincent up at the airport. On the way to their apartment they see a ghost out for a jog and the local vampire — she’s a young-looking German woman named Gray — flying through the air to deliver pizza. (minor spoilers ahead) By the end of the first chapter, it’s clear Ivory kills people for a living, Gray is unemployable but has a great sense of humor, and that Vincent has a huge crush on Gray that will complicate things. Oh and after a leap forward in time between chapters one and two, it’s clear something is up with Matt, too. This graphic novel is playful and spooky in the best, unexpected ways. There’s a super awkward YA romance at its heart, and it’s not quite clear who the real monsters are. I loved every page!

Woe: A Housecat’s Story of Despair by Lucy Knisley. RH Graphic, 2024. 9780593177631. 208pp. Knisley and her family adopted the apricot-hued Linney when she was an adult, and it feels like she was already full of personality, which Knisley’s drawings express perfectly. The words she puts in Linney’s mouth include many over-articulations of sadness and despair only a cat could feel — after pooping, chiding her owners for their bad behavior, when being placed into a cat carrier. She hides her sweetness with loud vocalizations, and it’s unclear which she despises more, bad haircuts or her excited puppy friend Flora. This is my favorite book of cat comics; it’s right up there with Trondheim’s Bludzee, Jeffrey Brown’s Cat’s Are Weird And More Observations, and the first time I read a Garfield collection when I was a kid. Well before the end of Woe, I absolutely loved Linney. My friend and librarian Sarah, who used to post on Book Threat with me, said the book is being marketed as YA. We both agree it’s really not YA though. It’s for everyone — Lucy and her husband and their young son are big presences in the book, and it would be a great read-aloud for younger kids — and it is the perfect gift for families missing departed cats that were big presences in their lives.

The Employees: a workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn. Translated by Martin Aitken. New Directions, 2023. 9780811234825. 144pp. I love short novels by poets, and I saw this one on many Staff Picks shelves in independent bookstores before finally picking it up. The cover is striking, the book is unapologetically full of white space, and every statement in it made me feel like I was working to solve a well-thought-out puzzle. The book is a series of numbered statements, most a page or shorter, that are not always presented in order. Some are missing. Each is one side of an interview with unnamed human and humanoid (manufactured human) crew members of a spacecraft named Six Thousand Ship, which has arrived at another planet, New Discovery. The crew brought aboard several objects that have strange properties, which have become the center of attention of many of the crew. Tensions rise between the humans and non-humans, and it feels like conflict is coming. It’s hard to accept that all of the statements are factual, or that they’re intended to be taken as such; as a whole, they create a sense of what’s happening on the ship and to the crew. It’s a brilliant way to put together the story. I found I wasn’t able to read more than six pages a night because I had to sit with them and think about their implications; the book took much longer to read than it otherwise would have based on its relatively short page count.

Several people told me I had to visit The Vault of Midnight when I was in Ann Arbor giving a staff day keynote in October, and I’m super glad I stopped by. This is one of my favorite comic book stores — it’s right up there with Portland’s Cosmic Monkey and Austin Books & Comics. The King’s Warrior by Huahua Zhu. Bulgilhan Press, 2024. 9781737130161. 74pp. https://bulgilhanpress.com/ A king sends his lionsteed warrior on a final mission, to kill an evil alchemist. The warrior’s backstory is told in flashbacks inked in blue, while the current story is told in pages with bolder colors and black inks. The whole book is beautiful and it feels like a fairy tale. I picked up this book because of the amazing cover and the fact that it was the last copy on a shelf loaded with great books; I figured if everyone else liked it, I would, too. A clerk saw me do that, and then we had a conversation during which he asked what sorts of books I was looking for. After a discussion about comics creators during which I said I was looking for graphic novels that I’d never heard of, he recommended the next two books on the list, plus gave me a list of five others the store didn’t have in stock but that he was sure I would like. (So far he’s been absolutely correct. As far as I’m concerned he’s the best graphic novel readers advisor ever.)   Grog the Frog: The Book of Taurus written and illustrated by Alba BG and Davilorium. Silver Sprocket, 2023. 9798886200232. https://www.silversprocket.net/ The bright cover made me think of Adventure Time and I mean, come on, I’m up for reading any book about a frog wizard with a bad attitude. There’s a lot going on in this book — it’s kind of a romp, and at times felt like a stoned video game. The coloring is something to behold, and the battle scenes shine.       Gnomicide: A Rust Kingdom Tale by Spugna. Hollow Press, 2018. No ISBN. www.hollow-press.net This wordless book is full of tentacles, mushrooms, and gore. Giant fanged mollusks face the last survivors of a gnome village. As the title suggests, things do not go well for the gnomes. I love the look of this book — it’s black and white, and it feels like Jeff Smith of Bone-fame inked a gnome-centric issue of Jordan and Strahm’s Image Comics series Spread. I immediately tried to buy a few other books by Spugna from Hollow Press. This one is sold out but it’s one of the three stories in Rusted Tales by Spugna (2022, also no ISBN) which is still in print. I picked up a copy at Floating World Comics in Portland, which sells them on their website at https://floatingworldcomics.com/shop/comic-books/rusted-tales-by-spugna

First Test (Protector of the Small Book 1) by Tamora Pierce, graphic novel adaptation by Devin Grayson and Becca Farrow. RH Graphic, 2024. 9780307931566. 160pp. It’s been over 20 years since I read one of Pierce’s YA fantasy novels, but I continue to recommend her books to kids and their parents. I’m happy to say this graphic novel adaptation captures the spirit of the original, particularly the friendships. Keladry is the only girl accepted into training as a knight. Despite Alanna’s martial prowess — she’s a female knight — Lord Wyldon, who is in charge of the new pages, puts Kel on probation for a year. If she can’t convince him she belongs with the boys in her class, he’ll send her home. But from the way Kel handles herself at home in Mindelan — she takes on several boys trying to drown a bag of cats, and then a giant spider creature — it’s clear there’s no reason to worry about how well Kel can fight. The bullies she has to deal with are awful, it’s clear she’s had more martial arts training than the other pages, and she’s forced to work harder than everyone else. (I never doubted for a moment that she’d find a way to hang on.) This book takes place after Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series, which is about Alanna. A graphic novel adaptation of Page, the first book in that series, will be released in 2025.

Clementine Book Two by Tillie Walden. Image / Skybound, 2023. 978153325197. 296pp. I’m always reluctant to read a sequel to a great zombie story as I’m afraid they’re going to go over the same ground again. So, despite being a huge fan of Walden’s work, I didn’t quite start reading this even though my wife picked up a copy at ALA last year. I should have picked it up immediately. At the center is Clementine again — that’s her on the cover — and the other survivors of Book One, whom I’m not going to say much about in case you haven’t read it. This does what great YA books do — it makes you care about the central character as she figures out who she is. The ongoing zombie apocalypse complicates everything; this is set on an island that seems safe (but of course isn’t). There’s just a bit of romance, a whole lot more love and friendship, and the characters new to the book add to Clementine’s story in perfect, often intense ways. Make sure your library has the first two books in the series, and get the third when it’s published in 2025.

Ash’s Cabin by Jen Wang. First Second, 2024. 9781250754059. 320pp. I read Wang’s Koko Be Good to my daughter when they were, arguably, way too young for it, but they loved it anyway so I read everything Wang writes. I was at the American Library Association convention last summer when I ran into First Second’s Calista Brill, who told me this book is super special and not to be missed, and she was right. Ash recently changed their name and cut their hair short but their parents think it’s just a phase. It’s not. Ash wants to be a writer. Chase, their dog, seems to be Ash’s only friend. Ash is looking forward to the yearly family vacation at Grandpa Edwin’s ranch. (He’s the only person who understood Ash, and he died a few years ago.) When their family decides to go to Disneyland instead, Ash explodes. No one understands them. But their parents give them permission to go to the ranch and stay with their cousin, Reese, who will be there. But Ash secretly wants to do more than just take a trip to the ranch. Ash wants to go into the woods, find their grandpa’s secret cabin, and stay there forever. (Their planning starts with a bit of research and a trip to the public library. Woo!) I don’t want to say much more about what happens, but I think it’s worth noting Ash spends time in the woods with Chase (the story has an informed Hatchet vibe) and by the end, Ash doesn’t feel as alone as at the beginning. Worth noting: parts of the book were harrowing, both as a father and as someone lacking wilderness survival skills.

These are the “new” books I finished during my trip. Comedy Book by Jesse David Fox. My favorite book on standup comedy ever. Go listen to past episodes of Jesse David Fox’s podcast Good One — if you enjoy those (he mostly talks to comedians about a single joke of theirs) you’ll likely love this. No one thinks about comedy as much as or as thoughtfully as Fox.           Dog Days by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim A nonfiction graphic novel in which Gendry-Kim moves to the country and adopts multiple dogs, plus helps take care of a few others. It’s personal but less heavy than Grass and The Waiting, though it still has cultural significance and may help folks understand South Korea a little better. Gendry-Kim made me love her dogs Potato and Carrot, as well as others who appear in the book. (sample page below)         Jimmy’s Elbow by James Kochalka I needed a dose of silliness, and young Jimmy’s adventures with the talking spirit of his elbow — it comes to life after he whacks it on something — fit the bill. Gloriously ridiculous. (sample page below)           Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. And three of its sequels: Carl’s Doomsday Scenario, The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, and The Gate of the Feral Gods. These books are also ridiculous, and light reading in the best way. Aliens destroy human civilization and open doors into an underground dungeon across the globe. Those who enter become contestants in a deadly RPG-like reality show that involves magic, combat, leveling-up, convoluted storylines, sponsors, off-world royalty, and a lot of Earth culture that has been appropriated and adapted in the name of making a buck (for our new alien overlords). At the center of it all are Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Donut, whom you’ll love if you hate dogs (or just like cats who aren’t afraid to shit-talk them to their faces). So much fun. I’ve kept reading the series since returning home, and I’ve finished the 5th book. I plan to read book six and the newly released book seven soon. (Thanks for the recommendation, Mike!)