Cosmoknights by Hannah Templer. Top Shelf, 2019. 9781603094542. 216pp. Pan dreams of living in space and working on spaceships, but her friend Tara is a princess, and Tara is never going to get to leave Viridian and explore the galaxy. Next week there’s a cosmoknights tournament (think people in cool robot suits), and Tara’s family is going to marry her off to the winner. She asks Pan to help her run away. Cut to years later, and another tournament where cosmoknights are battling for the right (for their sponsors to) marry a different princess. It’s a kinetic, tech heavy version of jousting complete with robot suits. Pan, working at her dad’s garage, doesn’t want to watch. Afterwards, one of the competitors and her partner end up at Pan’s house for a bit of anonymous medical care. Pan is confused by why a woman warrior would compete in such games, and finds out they don’t believe in them, either. In fact they’re gaming the system. Soon Pan is running for the spaceport to join them. Lots of action and bright colors make this an incredibly compelling start to what feels like it may become an epic story.

Let’s Make Ramen! A Comic Book Cookbook by Hugh Amano and Sarah Becan. Ten Speed Press, 2019. 9780399581991. 184pp including an index! This book has pretty much everything I would have ever thought to ask about ramen. My favorite parts from the introduction: the history of ramen, including the invention of the method of flash-frying ramen noodles in 1948, and the “Some Of Our Favorite Bowls” spread which serves as a great overview to ramen and the rest of the book. Making stock from scratch still seems like a lot of work, but the “Homemade Instant Ramen Cubes” sound like something I might try. (“Fast Weeknight Ramen Broth” is even more my speed.) “A Noodle Primer” with Kenshiro Uki of Sun Noodle and Ramen Lab (he’s not the book’s only guest star) made me hungry, and reminded me of my ex-stepfather rolling out his own pasta when I was a kid. There’s a section on meat along with lots of vegetarian options throughout including “Pickled Shitake Mushrooms” which sound amazing. This book is pretty much guaranteed to make anyone hungry, and may have gadget-oriented folks like me shopping for pasta rollers and pressure cookers.

Lily the Thief by Janne Kukkonen. English translation by Lola Rogers. First Second, 2019. 9781250196972. Lily, an ambitious young thief, is tired of getting easy jobs. She wants the thieves’ guildmaster to assign her real burglaries, and she’s annoyed that the other, more experienced thieves don’t think much of her. After she overhears the guildmaster telling her mentor that she’ll never get any of the tough jobs, she helps herself to one of the guild scrolls (and the job it contains). Her mission: to steal a bit of treasure from a coffin in the Earl’s castle. The problem: it’s heavily guarded, The Brotherhood of Fire wants it, and what’s she’s done has angered her guildmaster as well. The job doesn’t go well, and Lily is soon doing even more dangerous work to try to save herself and her mentor. This is a fairly lighthearted, beautifully drawn graphic novel with a bit of magic, spookiness, and violence. I’d have read it to my kid when she was in grade school, and I think young readers are really going to love it.

Paradigm Shifts: Typewritten Tales of Digital Collapse, Edited by Richard Polt, Frederic S. Durbin, and Andrew V. McFeaters, Loose Dog Press, 2019. 9781097972630. Escapements: Typewritten Tales from Post-Digital Worlds, edited by Richard Polt, Frederic S. Durbin, and Andrew V. McFeaters, Loose Dog Press, 2019. 9781097991105. Guest review by Robert in Silicon Valley. My high school’s literary annual was typeset on expensive, rationed mimeograph masters. Only our most accurate typists were entrusted with the work. In college, a fiction writing class focusing on building a science fiction world, then populating it with characters and their stories. Our final project was a compilation produced at a nearby copy shop via photocopier, and the modes of its master copy ranged from highly legible to sketchy dot matrix printers. Paradigm Shifts and Escapements take me back. The editors, prominent figures in the online typewriter community — “The Typosphere” — solicited stories and poems in which these 20th (and in one notable case, 19th) century machines save the day, or are of use when the day can’t be saved. The machines each author used for the final, correct copies of their work are credited at the end of each selection. The wide range of typestyles and spacing are reproduced, just like the reader made for my college class anthology. It’s not quite the same as the 1880’s newspaper clippings I’ve seen in which the pigeon who’d carried the dispatch got part of the byline, but it’s close. In only one notable case does the scribe resort to the conceit that the typewriter itself authors the story: “Eat Cake” by Jos LeGrand, in Paradigm Shifts, is written as if by a crotchety, protesting 1876 Sholes & Glidden, with rickety ALL CAPS included. This short contribution was actually typed ON a 1876 Sholes & Glidden, the machine that helped make the QWERTY keyboard the standard. Other authors use two or more typewriters to perform a few typographical trick, including using different typewriters to indicate different narrators. One author’s end of story typewriter credit even thanks his local library for letting him borrow an IBM Wheelwriter while his own typewriter was being repaired! The subtitles accurately reflect the focus of each volume: Paradigm Shifts is full of tales of just-post-digital collapse: electric power grid woes, electromagnetic pulses,  dread disease, climate disaster, and combinations the aforementioned problems. Escapements offers views of the post collapse world in recovery, or at least in some form of equilibrium, usually without digital tools coming back: rebuilding communications and transportation, exorcising typewriter demons, a young and pregnant typewriter repairer faced with racial intolerance. Across both books there are thrillers, science fantasies, hardboiled crime stories, and even a a tale of indescribable weirdness that could have come from the typewriter of William S. Burroughs (“not the falling” by Jim Pennington, in Escapements). Both volumes also feature stories with cats! If you don’t mind idiosyncratic and shifting typesetting, you might want to give Paradigm Shifts and Escapements a try. Guest review by Robert in Silicon Valley.

No Ivy League by Hazel Newlevant. Lion Forge / Roar, 2019. 9781549303050. 205pp plus a few pages about their process at the end. Newlevant’s fictionalized memoir “about a pivotal summer in [their] life…It was a multi-car pileup of race, class, gender, and teen hormones.” Her originals, done in black watercolor paint, are reproduced with a dark green ink in the book, which look super good. Seventeen-year-old Hazel is homeschooled. They, their fifteen-year-old boyfriend, and another friend are making pro-homeschooling videos as part of a contest, hoping to win money to see a band they all like in Washington, DC, in the fall. Then Hazel’s dad tells them about a summer job removing ivy from Forest Park. They’re hired, but then Hazel gets off to an awkward start with the other high school kids there — they think Hazel is a bit weird and that the food they eats is bougie. Work gets more awkward when Hazel starts obviously crushing on a supervisor, and a few games of Fuck, Marry, Kill seem to indicate things are getting better with the other workers (though then everything gets much worse again for a bit). All in all this is feels like one of the most realistic graphic novels about teens that I’ve read, which probably makes it a bit too realistic for some high schools.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Tor, 2019. 9781250313195. 448pp. This book is hard to describe. Interstellar travel, a crumbling civilization, necromancers from nine Houses competing, along with their cavaliers, to become immortal. There’s magic, gore, sword fights, monsters, a mystery, puzzles, and oh so many skeletons. At its center is the smart-assed, plain spoken, sweary cavalier Gideon from the Ninth House. She hates the necromancer she’s supposed to protect (with good reason), she’d rather abandon her house to become a soldier, she’s in lust with a very weak but wildly attractive necromancer, and she’s trying to fit the role that she’s been forced into. I cannot tell you how much fun this book was. It was a nonstop, death-obsessed, no-idea-what-was-going-to-happen-next novel that reminded me why I loved all the goth kids in my high school. (I’ve just finished the next book in the series, Harrow the Ninth, too, which will be out in a few months. Great sequel. It will make absolutely no sense if you don’t read this one first, and it will help to totally trust Muir as a writer, too (which you will after you read this book). It was as unpredictable and hard to classify a ride as Gideon the Ninth, which I thought impossible.)

Suee and the Shadow by Ginger Ly, Illustrated by Molly Park. Translated b Keo Lee and Jane Lee. Amulet, 2017. 9781419725630. 236pp. Suee Lee dresses differently from her classmates and doesn’t seem to worry about getting perfect grades. She lives alone with her father. (She tells people her mom died when she was little, but that’s not true — she just wants a little privacy.) Her father has just been demoted, so they’ve moved to Outskirtsville from Big City, and she’s starting at a new elementary school. She should make a few friends, but she has no interest in talking to most of the girls she sees, particularly the class bullies and popular kids. One day a voice calls to her, telling her it will be her friend. When she wakes up the next day her shadow is talking to her. It’s mostly annoying, and she can’t let the other students find out, so she sticks to well-lit areas when she can to keep it quiet. The Vice Principal starts an after school class for the school zeroes, zombified kids who drop the class average. Suee notices they don’t have shadows, which seems to have some relationship to being bullied, the voice she heard, and perhaps to her shadow as well. To investigate she forms the Zero Detective Club with two other students. This is the first Korean graphic novel for kids I’ve seen that doesn’t use the typical manhwa style. The slick art and glossy paper really work well together. It’s got a bit of a lesson about bullying and friendship without being too lesson-heavy.

For the Love of God, Marie! by Jade Sarson. Myriad Editions, 2018. 9781908434777. 240pp. The book opens with a few pages in which young Marie is confused about messages at church. Why does her mother say two women loving each other is blasphemy if what’s most important is loving those around you? Flash forward a bit. Marie, in year eleven of school, wakes up with Colin. Her mission is now simple: “…we should love everyone as God has loved us — by making love to them!” Her parents are less than pleased. In year thirteen she meets William, who reveals his secret to her — he’s a cross-dresser. She tells him he’s beautiful, and they start to have sex in one of the PE changing rooms. The nun who catches them suspends them both, but Marie inspires William to be who he is, which forms the basis for their lifelong friendship (that is sometimes more). Then Marie meets Agnes outside the school office — Agnes is being abused, and thinks she needs to beg God for his forgiveness. Marie convinces her otherwise and they fall in love. Agnes eventually gets help, though after telling a teacher about the abuse at home she’s sent to London. There’s another significant relationship, too, after which Marie gives birth to Annie. The second half of the book is her and Will raising Annie together she is eleven, and ends with Marie falling in love again. This graphic novel has a fast pace and some very graphic scenes that add to the romance. My favorite thing about it is the way Sarson uses colors, especially the purples Marie’s orange hair.

Letters to a Prisoner by Jacques Goldstyn, translated by Angela Keenlyside. (Traslated by Le Prisonneir sans Frontiers). Owlkids Books, 2018. 9781771472517. In this nearly wordless picture book, a man is thrown into prison for political activity, right before the eyes of his young daughter. Then he’s held in a solitary cell in a remote prison. Even the guards give him as little human contact as possible. And then the letters start to come, from people around the world. From workers, children, academics, and even aristrocrats. The guards try to dispose of the first big batch by burning them, but this just lets the words in a variety of languages drift free.  It’s beautiful visual effect — the primary illustrations are pen and ink, colored by washes, so the letters to the prisoner match the illustration style. This is charming picture book about the power of written letters to effect change. Guest Book review by Robert in Silicon Valley