Review - Sex Criminals, Volume Two: Two Worlds, One Cop by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky

Short Review: Despite getting away from the Sex Police, Jon and Suzie's problems are only beginning. Then they discover that there are more people with sex-related powers than they ever thought possible.

Haiku
Jon can feel nothing
Suzie really needs a friend
Ana's a sex ghost

Full Review: The second volume of Sex Criminals picks up immediately after the events of the first. Sort of. As per the established pattern of this series, Sex Criminals, Volume Two plays with the format as part of its means of telling the story, and in this volume the story jumps around in time, and shifts points of view between characters, self-consciously using the fact that this is a graphic story in creative ways to connect with the reader.

To sum up the background of Sex Criminals, Suzie and Jon can both stop time when they orgasm. Growing up with this odd power, they both felt alone and isolated until they found one another and realized they shared the same gift. To save the library where Suzie works from foreclosure, they started using their powers to rob banks, but ran afoul of a trio of similarly empowered people who call themselves the sex police. In the climax of Volume One, the sex police caught up with the miscreant pair at a bank robbery, and Suzie and Jon were barely able to make their escape. At the start of volume two, Suzie explains to the reader that everything from volume one worked out okay, and apologizes for not wrapping all of that up in the first book. Except she's wrong, everything is not okay, and they didn't wrap everything up in the last volume - what isn't immediately apparent in her speech is that it takes place some time after the events in volume one, and there is some intervening material that the story needs to flash back to cover.

One of the most critical elements of this volume is that while Jon and Suzie must deal with the fallout from their near escape, they must also figure out if they have a relationship that consists of more than a weird quirk involving sex. While Suzie has some body image issues and rather understandable doubts relating to how quickly her relationship with Jon became so intense, the real problems mostly seem to stem from the fact that Jon is an emotional basket case. Jon spends a fair amount of his portion of the book talking directly to the reader as a sexless ghost, drained of all emotion by the medications he takes for his mental health issues. Jon's various mental ailments were touched on briefly in the first volume, mostly manifesting as a moderately humorous recurring bit where Jon would defecate into his boss' plant after he had stopped time, but in this volume they come to the fore, and they are anything but humorous. Jon struggles with mental illness in this volume, and it is anything but humorous, as his personal demons threaten to consume him entirely.

Jon's struggles serve to alienate him from Suzie, which drives him to make some rather foolhardy decisions that cause the pair more problems, but also expand the universe they inhabit. While Jon deals with his personal issues, and while Suzie explores whether she wants to continue to be in a relationship with Jon or perhaps have a fling with her rather attractive gynecologist, events continue to move along without them, and the Sex Police haven't been simply sitting around waiting for the pair to make their next move. But what Jon discovers with a moderately ill-advised foray into the stronghold of the Sex Police is that he and Suzie (and the three Sex Police) are not only not alone with respect to their particular power, but that there is an entire filing cabinet full of folders about people who share their power. This raises interesting questions - as Suzie asks at one point, how did the Sex Police figure out who had this particular power - and opens up new possibilities: It turns out that one of the people with the ability to stop time with their orgasms is Jon's favorite adult performer Jazmine St. Cocaine, also known as Rae Anne Toots and Dr. Ana Kincaid.

The book then goes on to do what this series does best - rewinding Ana's life and then following her as she navigates her way through her sexual education, starting with a childhood injury, moving through her teen years where she had lots of unsatisfying sex but became a popular party girl, and then finally watching as she finds herself on an adult film set after she entered the industry to try to pay for an education her family could not afford. And it is at this point that Ana discovers her unusual power, because this is apparently the first time she had an orgasm. One would think that telling the story of a person's sexual awakening into a time-stopping superpower would become stale over three different accounts, but Fraction and Zdarsky have managed to find a way to tell three completely different stories about sex and relationships that are all equally compelling. For Ana, teen sex was an empty experience which eventually became a means to an end, in contrast to the stories told by Suzie and Jon, both of whom had their own confusing and sometimes harrowing experiences. By the time Ana found the time-stopped post-orgasm place that Suzie calls "the Quiet" and Jon calls "Cumworld", she was an experienced adult, and so found this new ability exhilarating and empowering, as opposed to finding it disorienting as Suzie had, or finding it to be an opportunity for mischief as Jon had. Ana's power also manifests in a completely different way than that of Jon, Suzie, or the Sex Police, raising the questions of how many different forms of time-stopping sex powers there might be, and exactly how Ana might shift the balance of power in the sex-powered world.

Throughout the book, the creators use the graphic novel format in interesting ways to help tell the story. In addition to Jon's ghostly narration, Suzie often breaks the fourth wall to address the reader directly. During an argument between the couple, mostly blank panels are interjected by the authors to offer commentary and admonish the pair not to say things that they will regret later. When Suzie has an appointment with her attractive OBGYN Doctor Robert Rainbow, she watches him go through an entire imaginary striptease as he explains her birth control options. When Ana's powers manifest, she becomes a sex ghost, the result of her desperation to feel something; she is in a very real sense a thematic opposite to Jon's sexless and emotionally empty ghost who feels nothing and doesn't care that he feels nothing. Many graphic novels merely use the pictures to illustrate the story, but Sex Criminals uses the fact that it is a graphic novel as an active part of the way the story is told, setting it apart from many other examples of the format.

As good as this volume is, it isn't perfect. It suffers to a certain extent from "middle book syndrome". There isn't really a beginning to the story in the volume, and just as things get interesting between Jon, Suzie, and Ana, the volume ends without really resolving much of anything. The strength of the book is in the character development as even the secondary characters such as Robert Rainbow, Suzie's friend Rachel, and Jon's therapist all feel very real, in their individually screwed up ways. In fact, the only characters who don't seem particularly well realized are the Sex Police, who remain shadowy and mysterious, only revealing tantalizing snippets of there agenda here and there. Despite having a plot that doesn't really pay off in this volume, and a set of villains who are, thus far, mostly wooden, the way the story presents the characters, the way it handles their often befuddled attempts to deal with sexual issues, and the way it uses the fact that it is a graphic story to full effect serves to overcome those deficiencies. Overall, this book is a well-made continuation to the first volume in the series, and a strong set-up for the next, providing plenty of character development, a lot of exploration of how people deal with sexual issues and hang-ups, and a little bit of wrestling with sex-related super-powers.

Previous volume in the series: Sex Criminals, Volume One: One Weird Trick
Subsequent volume in the series: Sex Criminals, Volume Three: Three the Hard Way

Potential 2016 Hugo Nominees

Matt Fraction     Chip Zdarsky     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Musical Monday - Grandma Cooked the Dog by Paul & Storm

For the record, neither of my grandmothers ever cooked a dog. Or a cat. That I know of.

I have come to the conclusion that just about every family has some recipe that they have at the holidays that isn't really anything special to anyone else, but they simply can't live without. The redhead's sister has a recipe for sausage balls that her family absolutely has to have for holiday celebrations. I've had them, and they are okay, but since I came into the family as an adult, they don't really excite me all that much.

When my grandmother was alive, she used to make homemade noodles with turkey and gravy. After she died, my aunt took over making this holiday food. After she died, the recipe kind of got lost. A few weeks ago my uncle called me to ask if I knew how to make the noodles. For him, the holiday apparently just isn't complete without some noodles in turkey gravy. For my mother, the holidays are synonymous with her mother's recipe for Swedish sugar cookies. And so on. Food traditions are sometimes weird, and always idiosyncratic.

So while I'm not going to guarantee that there is a family for whom the holiday food traditions include a cocker spaniel stuffed with yams and served with chestnut stuffing, I wouldn't rule it out either.

Previous Musical Monday: Chanukah Honey by Rachel Bloom

Subsequent Musical Monday: Things to Believe In by Sarah Donner

Christmas Songs     Musical Monday Playlists

Paul & Storm     Musical Monday     Home

Book Blogger Hop December 11th - December 17th: Kosmos 133 Was the First Unmanned Test Flight of the Soyuz Spacecraft

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: Are you a blogger that only has reviews on your blog or do you feature giveaways and attention-attracting posts such as personal and bookish posts?

Leaving aside the regular Follow Friday and Book Blogger Hop posts, most of the posts on this blog are reviews. I do post a Musical Monday post every week, and for a while I wrote posts in response to the 30 Days of Genre meme, but the primary focus for this blog is reviews. I mostly write book reviews, but I also review issues of genre fiction magazines, television episodes, and movies. I also write about events I've attended, such as science fiction and gaming conventions, or nerdy concerts I've been to. For the most part, the focus of this blog is "writing about science fiction and fantasy related things".

I do sometimes post just general commentary without it being tied to a particular fictional work or even an ongoing meme, but it is fairly rare. I have cataloged these sorts of posts as either Biased Opinions or Random Thoughts based upon my purely personal and probably quite idiosyncratic evaluation of the tenor of the post in question. Given that over the last seven years there have been roughly sixty posts between the two categories combined, these sorts of posts are fairly obviously not really the focus of the blog.

Previous Book Blogger Hop: 132 Is the Smallest Minimal Osiris Number in Base 10

Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: Article 134 of the UCMJ Is the General Article

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Follow Friday - The Saint Petersburg Lyceum 239 Is a Famous School Specialized in Math and Physics

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - BookLoverCircumspect4 and Billbrarian.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: What’s your favorite non-bookish website hangout?

I suppose that the non-bookish site I visit most often would be Shamus Young's Twenty Sided, which is mostly focused on video games. I originally found the site by coming across Young's DM of the Rings webcomic, a series that used stills from the Peter Jackson adaptations of The Lord of the Rings to imagine what the story would have been like if it was a role-playing campaign with a fairly stereotypical array of troublesome players, but I stayed after that series ended. The site isn't entirely video game related: Shamus has written a novel and a memoir, so there is a little bit of bookishness on the site, but it is mostly about video games, a little bit about the internet and technology, and a tiny corner dedicated to other things.

Oddly, I don't play all that many of the video games that are featured in the content on the site. I've played the first Mass Effect, and I've played Fallout III and Fallout: New Vegas, as well as a pile of strategy oriented (and mostly older) games such as Starcraft and Civilization, but most of the games featured on the sites regular let's play series Spoiler Warning are not only games I have not played, but are games that I am unlikely to ever play. Most of the games talked about on the podcast the Diecast are games that I will never play, and in some cases, never see.

But I keep coming back, in part because Shamus is an insightful writer, and because the voices he has surrounded himself with for projects like Spoiler Warning provide commentary that is interesting enough that they make watching videos of games that you will never play fun to do. I think the main reason for this is that the commentary generally doesn't focus on mechanics or game play issues, but instead deals with character development and characterization, how to put together a plot, and other issues related to how to make a story work. Those are interesting even if one isn't actually familiar with the game itself, because how stories are structured is almost a universal concern.

Even though Twenty Sided isn't really about books, it is about stories, and taking stories apart to see how they work (as well as taking games apart to see how they work), so while it isn't bookish per se, it is about the things that books are built out of, which is why I like it.

Previous Follow Friday: Uranium-238 Is the Most Common Isotope of Uranium

Subsequent Follow Friday: There Were 240 Pence in a British Pound Until 1971

Follow Friday     Home

Review - Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons by Michael Witwer

Short review: Gary Gygax was an avid wargamer who launched Dungeons & Dragons into the world. There's not really that much else that was really all that interesting about him.

Haiku
From Lake Geneva
A man named Gary Gygax
Dungeons and Dragons

Full review: There is no question but that Gary Gygax was one of the pivotal figures in gaming development during the last quarter of the twentieth century. As the prime force behind getting Dungeons & Dragons launched as the first commercial role-playing game, he was instrumental in bringing a new form of gaming to the public eye and launching an entire industry. Given these facts, one might think that Gygax would make a fitting subject for a biography. Surely the man who changed tabletop gaming forever would have a life story worth recounting. Sadly, the answer one can glean from this book is "not really".

The book opens by describing a fictionalized version of the aftermath of one of the key turning points in both Gary's life and the history of the role-playing game industry: His ouster from TSR engineered by Lorraine Williams and the Blume brothers. The book imagines Gygax eschewing a ride home in his Cadillac Seville in favor of a walk through Lake Geneva, whereupon he muses over the events that led him to this point in his life when he could be betrayed by people in whom he had previously placed large amounts of trust. This scene is told more or less as an internal monologue, and highlights the two of the main problems with this biography.

The first problem is the dramatized account of the story,relating Gygax's life events as if they were scenes from a work of fiction, including the internal thoughts of various actors. This serves to give the book an immediacy that many biographies lack, figuratively putting the reader in the middle of the action as it happens. Unfortunately, many of the people who show up in the scenes - including the principle subject - are no longer living, and were not when the author conducted his research for the book. As a result, it is hard to take the text seriously when it purports to tell the reader about the thoughts and feelings of various people concerning events. In some cases, the book gives fictionalized renditions of scenes in which every participant and witness had passed away, which makes one wonder exactly how the information concerning the scene itself was gathered, let alone the information concerning what the participants were thinking at the time. Further, the book veers at times away from biography, and takes a turn to hagiography, as the author's enthusiasm for his subject bubbles over almost uncontrollably.

The second problem with the book is that aside from his role in launching Dungeons & Dragons and TSR, Gygax led a fairly ordinary, mostly uninteresting life. He had a fairly ordinary childhood, got up to a fairly ordinary array of hijinks as a teenager, married a women he had been friends with since childhood, got a job as an insurance underwriter, and had several children, all while living in Lake Geneva, which appears to be a reasonably ordinary Midwestern town. Gygax loved games, and took to them at an early, becoming almost obsessed with them as an adult, but that isn't any different from a lot of other nerdy guys of his era. The book makes the mistake that many biographies make, starting with the subject's childhood and trying to make the mundane events of childhood seem exciting and interesting. In Empire of Imagination, one can almost feel the author's desperation to make Gygax's early life interesting: There's a chapter about how Gygax heard strange noises in the attic. There's a chapter about Gygax getting scared as he walked home in the dark from a movie. There's a chapter about Gygax playing chess with his grandfather. And so on. Witwer tries to tie these relatively common experiences to Gygax's development of classic Dungeons & Dragons scenarios such as the Tomb of Horrors or the Temple of Elemental Evil, but that doesn't make the actual events themselves any more intrinsically interesting to read about. There's a chapter about Gygax and his best friend Don Kaye exploring an abandoned insane asylum, which seems kind of unusual at first, but it mostly amounts to two kids and a mostly generic empty building, so even that falls kind of flat.

The meat of the book involves Gygax's obsession with gaming and the relationships he forged with various other hard core gamers that led to the synthesis resulting in Dungeons & Dragons. Witwer tries very hard to present Gygax as a creative genius, highlighting his work as an amateur painter, his development of a couple of wargames and variants on established wargames, and so on. But what really comes through in the biography is that Gygax's most critical personal attribute was his industriousness. At several points the book highlights just how many articles Gygax wrote for various game-related fanzines and magazines, staying up to all hours of the night tapping away at his typewriter. The book shows Gygax's organizational skills Even when the book details the sequence that led to the creation of Dungeons & Dragons itself, Gygax's role seems to have been more of that of an organizer: The hard-working force that transformed the creativity of Arneson, Weseley, and Megarry from piles of disheveled notes into a working draft that could be beat into publishable form.

Once the biography moves on to the topic of how Gygax pulled Dungeons & Dragons together and scrambled to found TSR to publish it, everything picks up somewhat. This is kind of a mixed blessing, because while the story of how Gygax built the company, the unforeseen tragedies that threw its future into doubt, the disputes that alienated some of the creative forces behind the company, and ultimately, and the boardroom machinations that maneuvered Gygax out of his position as CEO of TSR, and eventually, out of the company altogether, is interesting, but it just shows in stark relief how tedious most of the rest of the book is. The excitement provided by this portion of the book might even be driven in large part by the fact that the rest is so dull: When Arneson sues TSR over unpaid royalties, Witwer tries to make the event a big deal, as an outraged Gygax fumes over the ungratefulness of his former close friend. But TSR did fail to pay royalties to Arneson, and in the end, the company settled the matter by agreeing to pay a substantial sum of money - because they owed it to Arneson. This is not the stuff of great drama.

Even though the office politics of TSR seem reasonably ordinary for a small business, they have the effect of making the reader wish they were reading a book about them rather than a book about Gygax's life. For much of the portion of the book where Gygax is involved with TSR, most of the events that are most interesting take place entirely out of sight. For much of his tenure at TSR, Gygax was exiled to the west coast as the head of Dungeons & Dragons Entertainment (where his efforts resulted in the short-lived Dungeons & Dragons cartoon), and shortly after he returned to take the helm of TSR again following mismanagement by the Blumes, Lorraine Williams forcibly wrested control of the company away from him. At this point the biography follows Gygax rather than the company he created, and as a result, the fascinating chain of events that led to TSR's near demise and acquisition by industry rival Wizards of the Coast is mentioned only in passing. When the book moves on to discussing Gygax's work creating Cyborg Commando and Dangerous Journeys, the reader is left wondering why they aren't reading a corporate biography of TSR instead.

Overall, Empire of Imagination is something of a disappointment. Partly this is the result of the fact that Gygax isn't an incredibly interesting subject to begin with, and partly this is because the biographer tries to make the mundane events of Gygax's life more significant than they were, taking an almost worshipful tone at times. Even the title of the book seems almost overly bombastic for the subject being covered. When the book turns to matters related to TSR and Dungeons & Dragons it gains traction and speed, but whenever it turns to Gygax's own life it simply founders. Witwer wonders why no comprehensive biography of Gygax had been written before he set his mind to doing so. To a certain extent, this book is the answer to that question.

Potential 2016 Hugo Nominees

Michael Witwer     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Review - You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) by Felicia Day

Short review: Felicia Day had a very strange, isolating, and often lonely childhood, but it was the perfect childhood to create the quirky internet star that she is today.

Haiku
A home-schooled child
A violin prodigy
An internet star

Full review: The world is divided into two sets of people. The first consists of people who have never heard of Felicia Day. The second consists of people who have spent a lot of time on the internet. This memoir is mostly for people in the second group. Or at least the people in the second group who enjoy Felicia Day's online presence, because the best description for this book is "Felicia Day's public-facing personality in book form". If you like the projects that she has been instrumental in creating and bringing to life like The Guild, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, of The Flog, then you are likely to love this book. If you are one of the people who left nasty comments on the Gamer Girl, Country Boy video, or tried to intimidate her by publishing her personal information online, you're likely going to love this book, because we all know that you're secretly obsessed with Felicia.

You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) is described on the cover as a memoir, and not an autobiography, which seems to mean that it is an autobiographical book that doesn't really worry about making sure it covers absolutely everything about the author's life. What this means is that the book can concentrate on the highlights, recounting the cute, the funny, the awkward, and the weird events that led her to the quirky niche of celebrity that she now occupies. The book is also written in an extremely informal style, using a personal tone that makes the entire volume feel almost as if one were sitting in a room listening to Felicia tell her life story to you over some nice cups of tea. Day's story is told in a breezy, conversational style that reads almost exactly like she talks, so if you enjoy watching her interviews or video blog entries, you will almost certainly enjoy reading the book.

Unlike most memoirs and biographies, this one doesn't start with Felicia's childhood, but rather launches into an anecdote about meeting some teenage fans at a Build-a-Bear store. As she goes through the encounter, Felicia sums up the unusual nature of her celebrity, as the girls lavish adoration upon Day while their very confused mother (and other people in the store) try to figure out who she is, and why she is famous. After running through the usual options: Is Felicia in movies? (No). Is she on television? (No). Is she Emily Blunt? (No). She appears in internet videos. But my son is on the internet all the time and he's never heard of her. And so on. as she says in this section, people reading the book are likely to be either overjoyed that Felicia Day wrote a book they can buy, or they are very confused. And that is more or less everything about Felicia's status in the world right now encapsulated into one anecdote - either you are one of those people who know and love her, or you're completely oblivious to her existence.

For the most part, the whole book is told in this manner: Felicia gets onto a topic, picks a perfect anecdote to illustrate it, tells it in an endearing, adorably hilarious way, and then moves on. Many memoirs and biographies bog down when they discuss the subject's childhood, in large part because most people have fairly ordinary and uninteresting childhoods. For Felicia, on the other hand, her weird and at times wacky childhood is a large part of what made the actress who she is. Home-schooled for what Felicia calls "hippie reasons", the child of a free spirit in the very religious American South, the weird intellectual kid in a sea of mostly incurious peers, these are all parts of the story, and they are told with a self-deprecating wit and humor that allows Day to talk about her days as a child-prodigy with the violin without coming off as either obnoxious or pretentious. Day is also able to pull off the quite difficult feat of talking openly and honestly about her personal insecurities without seeming self-involved or self-indulgent.

Mixed in among the brief stop to discuss the awkwardness of being and overachieving, precociously talented sixteen year old whose mother drives them to school every day at the University of Texas at Austin, Felicia offers some fairly good insights on the perils of being a perfectionist and an overachiever. Obsessed with maintaining a 4.0 GPA while double majoring in music and math, Day sacrificed any semblance of a social life to reach this goal, which, in retrospect, was an almost pointless exercise that cost her far more than it was worth. This is not to say that getting a 4.0 GPA isn't worthwhile, but it was a goal without a purpose, and this tendency on Day's part, to single-mindedly pursue a chosen goal, proves to be one of her great strengths, and one of her great weaknesses.

Day's accomplishment of earning perfect grades in college was somewhat less than valuable because Day never intended to actually do anything for which this mattered. Day never intended to pursue a career in music. She never intended to apply to graduate school, or do any of the things that would require putting her college transcript in front of people who would care what the number attached to it was. Day always intended to move to California and pursue her dream of becoming an actress, and in an account that is both beautiful and depressing, she tells the tale of her struggles to make it in film. From sleazy casting calls for low-budget movies, to acting classes taught by sexist troglodytes, to the laundry list of physical imperfections that casting directors and agents provided (each, of course, offering different, and often contradictory advice about what the already adorably cute Day needed to do to herself to be attractive). Although this part of the book is told with Day's usual biting and satirical wit, it is also wearing and depressing.

Despite carving out a reasonably successful career being cast as the quirky best friend and appearing in numerous commercials, Day found the life almost soul destroying. Woven through the narrative is Day's relationship with the online world, starting in the very earliest days of the public internet. As a socially awkward home-schooled child, computers and the internet were the almost natural environment for Felicia, and she wandered from playing lots of Ultima to computer bulletin boards about Ultima, and eventually to places like GeoCities, AltaVista, and finally, many years later, World of Warcraft. Eventually that urge to be an overachieving perfectionist led to Warcraft virtually consuming all of Day's life, as she became addicted to crafting just the right items to allow her group to complete all of the most difficult "raids" in the game. The odd thing about the book is that it even makes Day's slow transformation into a shut-in who spent virtually all of her waking hours playing an online computer game into an interesting story.

The ability to make the story of a somewhat neurotic, socially awkward, insecure woman who spends countless hours playing computer games into an interesting tale should come as little surprise to most readers, as that is essentially the plot of The Guild. As usual, Day was an early adopter when it came to online video projects. It doesn't seem that long ago, but The Guild first aired in 2007, less than two years after the creation of YouTube itself. Originally written as a television pilot that served as a project to pull Day out of her Warcraft-induced lethargy, The Guild was, like its creator, quirky and off-beat, and impossible to neatly categorize. This is part of what makes this memoir so compelling: Day could have carved out a career playing cute secretaries and funny best friends, perhaps hoping one day to land a regular part on a sitcom as the oddball but still attractive girl who tags along with the ingenue, but instead she took hold of her own future and veered into a form of fame that essentially didn't exist before she jumped into it. This is the story of how an odd little introvert became a star in a manner that was uniquely her own.

The word "adorable" is often used to describe Felicia Day. This word also seems apropos as a description for her memoir. But "adorable" isn't sufficient to describe this book. It is funny, silly, insightful, lovely, and uncompromising. It is also honest and raw, with Day opening up at times to bravely reveal her vulnerabilities and insecurities, as well as the dangers she often faces as a result of her weird celebrity, including her brush with GamerGate and other parts of the misogynistic sewers of the internet. Through it all, Day's personality shines through, with all of her crippling self-doubt, nerdy optimism, and creative brilliance. If you like Felicia Day, you'll love this book. Even if you don't like Felicia Day, you'll probably love this book. It is simply that much fun to read.

Potential 2016 Hugo Nominees

Felicia Day     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Musical Monday - Chanukah Honey by Rachel Bloom

As I did in October, I'm temporarily setting aside the Five Year Mission set list, and putting up some seasonal music for the next few weeks.

Did you ever wonder what it would be like for a sweet young Jewish girl to long wistfully for you to propose marriage to her? Have you ever wondered what it would be like for Rachel Bloom to try to seduce you? Well, wonder no more, because on this the first day of Chanukah, here is Rachel singing her enticing paean to a nice Jewish boy, impressed with his MBA from Penn and puns like her Dad, offering latkes with both sour cream and applesauce. The only thing she really wants to know is if you want kids.

There aren't really all that many good songs about Chanukah, but Rachel seems to have done her best to make sure that another classic is added to the list. Just a note: Listen to the song all the way through before you decide to send it to your mother. Or your grandmother.

Previous Musical Monday: Arena by Five Year Mission

Subsequent Musical Monday: Grandma Cooked the Dog by Paul & Storm

Other Holiday Songs     Musical Monday Playlists

Rachel Bloom     Musical Monday     Home

Book Blogger Hop December 4th - December 10th: 132 Is the Smallest Minimal Osiris Number in Base 10

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: Which character in a book do you most likely see yourself? If none, who would you think would be your bff in real life?

This is not a particularly easy question for me to answer. While there are many characters in fiction that I like, there are almost none that I would like to be, and precious few that I would desire to have as friends. For the most part, I view characters in books as being creatures within their imagined mythos, and taking them out of it (or inserting someone from the outside like myself into it) would fundamentally change them. For example, I might imagine myself as Éomer, from The Lord of the Rings, but as I'm manifestly not Éomer, I wouldn't be doing the same things he does, which would mean that if you inserted me into his body, I wouldn't be him, but rather me dressed up in an Éomer suit.

I suppose I could say instead that I'd want to be buddies with Éomer, (or more likely, I'd want to be close friends with the somewhat more approachable Éowyn), but I'm not sure how I could be inserted into his world, or he into mine. If such a change was wrought, would the character still be the same character I wanted to be friends with? It seems to me that there are too many variables to comfortably answer that question, and as a result, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to run the risk of finding out that I could be paired up with someone who I liked when they were in their book, but couldn't stand when they were set free from it.

Previous Book Blogger Hop: You Can Use United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Form I-131 to Apply for a Reentry Permit, Refugee Travel Document or Advance Parole Travel Document

Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: Kosmos 133 Was the First Unmanned Test Flight of the Soyuz Spacecraft

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Follow Friday - Uranium-238 Is the Most Common Isotope of Uranium

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - 125 Pages and Cindy @ Da Readaholic Book Blog.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: What's your favorite ice cream flavor?

My favorite ice cream flavor isn't made any more. Well, as far as I can tell it is not. My favorite flavor is, and probably always will be, Ben & Jerry's White Russian flavored ice cream. The odd thing about this is that I don't actually like coffee ice cream, but apparently when you add Kahlua flavor that changes it enough that it becomes delicious.

The company hasn't packed the flavor in pints since 1996, and it is listed in their "flavor graveyard" as having been officially retired. Although they claim that it can be found in their scoop shops, I've never seen it.

I guess I will just have to be content with drinking the occasional actual White Russian.

Previous Follow Friday: The Two-Hundred and Thirty-Seventh Square Pyramidal Number Is the Sum of Two Other Square Pyramidal Numbers

Subsequent Follow Friday: The Saint Petersburg Lyceum 239 Is a Famous School Specialized in Math and Physics

Follow Friday     Home

Review - Lumberjanes: Friendship to the Max by Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis, and Brooke Allen

Short review: Jo, April, Molly, Mal, and Ripley set about solving all of the mysteries raised in the previous book, and this time Jen decides to come along for the ride. There may be a few mythological beings involved.

Haiku
Five lady campers
Two mythological twins
And cosmic power

Full review: Lumberjanes: Friendship to the Max picks up right where the previous volume, Beware the Kitten Holy, left off. This volume isn't so much a sequel to the first one, as it is the second half of a complete story. My understanding is that the series was originally conceived of as an eight-part limited series, and as the first volume had four parts, and this one has the last four, the fact that they make up a single unified story arc is unsurprising. In large part, this volume is very much like the first: The five campers of Roanoke cabin at Miss Quinzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet's Camp for Hardcore Lady Types continue their summer sojourn in the woods, punctuated by odd paranormal incidents and enigmatic mysteries.

As with the previous volume, each segment of Friendship to the Max starts off with a section of text from the fictional guide book titled the Lumberjanes Field Manual detailing the skills needed and the specific requirements that must be accomplished to earn a particular Lumberjanes badge. Inevitably, the badge discussed on this opening page proves to be related to the story that follows, although in ways that are pretty much unexpected, as nothing every seems to proceed "normally" for Jo, April, Molly, Mal, and Ripley. The four badges in this volume are "Friendship to the Craft", "Jail Break", "Friendship to the Max", and "Space Jamborie", and the stories contained in them are as varied and enjoyable as they sound. One wrinkle in this volume is that Roanoke cabin's scout-leader Jen eventually decides that rather than trying to keep her charges from adventure, she wants to join in. Before that, however, she is unexpectedly handed more responsibility as the camp director Rosie heads off on a mysterious errand and Jen responds by trying to come up with the safest possible camp activity she can think of. This effort, of course, goes horribly wrong, and the camp is overrun by velociraptors in short order, leading to chaos and the appearance of the bear woman who was the object of the girls' quarry back on the very first pages of the story in Beware the Kitten Holy.

The interesting development when the bear woman does appear is that she immediately corrals Jo and begins accusing her of hiding a secret while warning of ancient evil and impending doom. Of course, because their slogan is "Friendship to the Max!", Jo's friends rally to her side, as does Rosie when she returns, warning the bear lady to stay away from her girls. The critical element in this sequence is that Jo kind of is hiding some information, and Rosie's firm commitment to including her as one of her girls is a statement that has a fair amount of significance, although that significance may not be readily apparent to the reader at this juncture.

The primary difference between this installment of Lumberjanes and the previous one is that this volume is mostly about solving mysteries as opposed to setting them up. In Beware the Kitten Holy, the campers of Roanoke cabin spent most of the story encountering odd events and trying to figure out what they meant, with several plot threads left open at the close of the book. In Friendship to the Max, our intrepid gang spends most of its pages solving the riddles posed by the first book. There are certainly some new puzzles posed in this volume, mostly relating to the girls' somewhat quirky fellow camper Diana, but those are resolved fairly shortly after they crop up. The dominant theme in this volume is resolution, and by the end of the book, all of the notable plot threads raised in both the previous book and this one have been tied up quite nicely.

And the girls make solving the various mysteries presented by the collection of supernatural events that have taken place seem like quite a bit of fun. They still adorably use a collection of historical references as exclamations, such as "For the love of Sister Rosetta Tharpe." or "What in the Annie Smith Peck happened?" Camp director Rosie still gets Jen's name wrong almost every time they talk, to Jen's continual frustration. And a lot of the humor grows out of the bizarre situations, such as when Jen jumps in between a velociraptor and Jo, intended to protect her camper, she is almost immediately at a loss. When Jo asks Jen if she had a plan, Jen replies "I THOUGHT ADRENALINE WOULD TAKE OVER BUT IT DID NOT". Or when Ripley unleashes a swarm of giant insect, and everyone is running away from them, when Jo complains that Diana didn't warn them about a security system, Diana replies "NOW IS HARDLY THE TIME FOR THE BLAME GAME". These sorts of asides are the fabric on which the story is built, and they are woven into the journey organically, making it silly and funny without slowing down the pace of the action. When the adventure leads the girls back to the cavern they encountered in the first volume of the series, Diana seems quite surprised and a little bit annoyed that almost all of the puzzles have been solved and virtually all of the traps have been disarmed. And of course, when Ripley winds up with cosmic levels of power, she uses it to wish for silly hats for a raccoon and kittens for everyone, as well as making what can only be described as a surprising and absolutely correct choice.

Among the surprise dinosaurs, the teleporting camp denizens, the strange glowing artifacts, the intramural game of capture the flag, or the sneaking out of camp in the middle of the night, the core of the story is the tight knit and nigh-unbreakable friendship between the girls of Roanoke cabin. Time and again they pull together to help one of their number out of a jam or solve a problem that confronts them. In contrast, both Diana and her brother, who turns out to have been enmeshed in the events at the Mr. Theodore Tarquin Reginald Lancelot Herman Crumpo Camp for Boys, pursue solitary goals. Although Diana is willing to work alongside Jo, April, Molly, Mal, and Ripley so long as it suits her purposes, she is clearly playing a game in which she envisions herself as the sole victor. The girls, on the other hand, are in their adventure together, refusing to even consider abandoning one of their own, standing up against even the most formidable foe to protect their friends, and generally doing the sorts of things that friends do for one another. The line "Friendship to the Max" is not merely a slogan to these women, it is a way of life.

Lumberjanes: Friendship to the Max is a lovely follow-on to Beware the Kitten Holy. The volume takes all of the plot threads opened up in the previous one, adds a couple more to the mix to spice things up, and then wraps all of the action up with a humorous, very satisfying, and very Lumberjanes-like finish (followed by a rather unusual, but not entirely unexpected parental visit). Full of fun adventure, cute and witty banter, and wonderful characters the entire book is simply delightful to read and caps off the first Lumberjanes story in an absolutely brilliant fashion.

Previous volume in the series: Lumberjanes: Beware the Kitten Holy

Potential 2016 Hugo Nominees

Noelle Stevenson     Grace Ellis    Brooke Allen     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Review - Saga, Volume Five by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Short review: Alana and Klara are still prisoners of a vengeful robot, Marko and Prince Robot IV are still hot on their trail, and Gwendolyn and Sophie go dragon hunting. Pretty soon people start dying and everything just gets worse.

Haiku
A robot needs help
The Last Revolution
Is not who to call

Full review: In Volume Four of Saga, the story of Alana and Marko became fractured as their relationship splintered apart under the stress of living on the run. Their romantic whirlwind courtship turned into a crushing obligation as the realities of raising a child while the entire universe turned against you began to truly sink in. In the other story line, the futility of trying to heal The Brand was made clear to Gwendolyn and Sophie, their desire to help their friend crushed by the extreme nature of his injuries. One would think that in Volume Five, the fact that Marko and Alana fight across the depths of space against almost impossible odds to reunite and with the help of The Brand a cure is found for The Will, this would result in a brighter, happier story. One would be wrong.

The opening pages of Volume Five of Saga serve to bring the reader up to speed on the ongoing conflict, providing an outline of how the war between Wreath and Landfall consumed both world and moon, and then moved on as each side outsourced their conflict to others, and eventually set the dispute on autopilot, to consume and destroy other worlds. The stage set, we move to see Alana and Klara chafing at their imprisonment by the Robot Dengo, who had previously kidnapped the heir to the throne of the Robot Empire and Hazel in an attempt to gain revenge for the death of his own son. Next the story brings the reader up to speed on what The Brand, Gwendolyn, and Sophie are up to, showing them hunting dragons in an attempt to acquire the needed ingredient to work the enchantment to cure The Will. And finally the story moves to the strained alliance between Prince Robot IV and Marko, along with their somewhat less than happy crew mates Ghüs and Yuma as they try to track down their kidnapped family members.

The volume proceeds along these three broad strokes: One story line following Alana and Klara as they deals with her captivity by Dengo, the second following Gwendolyn, Sophie, and the Brand on their dragon hunt, and the third following Marko and Prince Robot IV as they pursue Dengo in an attempt to recover their loved ones. In a somewhat interesting twist, the three stories present a study in contrasts, as the putative "villains" attempting to revive the contract killer The Will behave in generally honorable and upstanding manner, while the other groups prove to be somewhat less admirable, notably Prince Robot IV and Marko, who spend much of their journey together at each other's throats, and in Marko's case, seem prone to fits of rage and a little bit of experimentation with drugs. Although hinted at in earlier volumes, Marko's true affinity for making war has never been made as clear as it is in this one, prompting Ghüs to tell Prince Robot IV that the prince doesn't scare him, but he's terrified of Marko.

Alana and Marko spend much of this volume involuntarily separated from one another, after having spent much of Volume Four more or less emotionally distant from one another, and it soon becomes clear that neither of them do well on their own. Even though their marriage may have been impetuous and foolish, they seem to rely on one another to deal with their shared experience of war. What has become painfully apparent by this point in the series is that both Alana and Marko are haunted by their experiences in the war, and are slowly being destroyed by the pressure of being hunted by the two most powerful nations in the galaxy. Marko's struggles to deal with this larger concern are compounded by his feelings of inadequacy, blaming himself for losing his family, even blaming himself for violent actions he took as a small child. His response, paradoxical as it may seem, is to lash out violently, brutally intervening in the middle of an attempted convenience story robbery. Of course, as violent as Marko is, Prince Robot IV desires to take things to an even more lethal level. Marko also dabbles in drug use, which seems somewhat ironic since his primary criticism of Alana from the previous volume was her addiction to drugs. Being lonely, desperate, and depressed, it seems, can cause someone to take actions they might otherwise never have contemplated. Marko's drug-induced hallucinations show the stark reality of why he chose to give up war: He was simply too frighteningly good at it, and that truth scared him to the core.

Alana, on the other hand, spends much of this novel dealing directly with the problem of being Dengo's captive, and also trying to handle Klara as a disapproving mother-in-law. Dengo compounds Alana's problems by calling in the "Last Revolution", a band of terrorists (or freedom fighters, depending on who you ask) who are dedicated to stopping the war between Wreath and Landfall. In some ways, this group is the ideological opposite of Oswald Heist, and to a lesser extent the putatively pacificistic Marko and Alana, seeking to stop the violence of the war by unleashing even more violence, although their is apparently primarily targeted at civilians (a distinction that doesn't seem to matter much given how careless the primary combatants have been shown to be with regard to collateral damage). This eclectic collection of aliens appears to be at least figuratively the ultimate expression of rage at the futility and pointlessness of the war. The only trouble is that their rage is almost entirely destructive, seemingly quite short-sighted, and, as Dengo discovers when their deal making goes bad, unpredictable.

Woven throughout these dark and depressing plot lines is the tale of Gwendolyn, Sophia, and The Brand as they go on a dragon hunt. This part of the story seems almost light-hearted in comparison, even though it involves getting peed on by giant lizards, and eventually finding an enormous creature with an over sized phallus. Things take a turn for the worse, however, when one of the trio sacrifices their own life to save another, a theme that ties all three of the stories together. In each plot thread on character engages in a heroic act of self-sacrifice to save others. One might think that in a story about war and the rage that goes along with it, there would be some thematic unity among those who, instead of killing, choose to sacrifice themselves so others can live. However, as with so many elements of Saga, the story offers no easy answers. Those who sacrifice themselves are widely varied characters, and do so for widely varied reasons. One sacrifices herself out of guilt. Another to save a loved one. A third does so almost reflexively and without thinking about it. On the one hand, it seems that those who would sacrifice themselves for others are marginally better people than many of the others in the story, especially those who are the quickest to resort to murder, but on the other hand, most of the characters in this particular segment of the story are fairly awful people.

In the end, the story ends on what might almost be considered to be a worse note than the previous volume did, and that seems like quite a morbid accomplishment. Marko and Alana are reunited, but Hazel winds up in the hands of capricious terrorists. Prince Robot IV finds his son, but may not have any home to return to with him. The Brand is healed, but when he learns the price that was paid to accomplish that it seems to drive an unbridgeable wedge between him and his companions who fought so hard for his recovery. And these are the best outcomes for any character in the volume - many of the others wind up either dead or with their plans irretrievably broken. In one small element of hope, Marko and Alana not only find one another again, but after drifting in pain for the last two volumes, they also seem to find their moral center as well. In a slightly more ominous turn, The Stalk's brother shows up and presents a gift to Gwendolyn intended to help her hunt down the deceased freelancer's killer. At this point in Saga, small victories seem precious.

Volume Five of Saga continues the story, delving yet deeper into the characters of Marko and Alana, as well as many of the supporting cast. Unlike most of the previous volumes, this one doesn't introduce very many characters that survive past its pages, and it wraps up several ongoing story lines. As happened at the end of Volume Three, this book seems like it signals a slight pause in the story, even though there are several points that are decidedly unsettled. Plot lines that were set up in previous volumes pay off, and everyone comes to a brief resting point before heading off into the maelstrom of their lives again. But it is an uneasy rest, with lives still torn apart, and terrible wounds and losses to recover from. At this point, Saga is cold and cruel, tearing into the reader at almost every turn, but still compelling and with a core of beauty that makes all of the heartbreak worthwhile.

Previous book in the series: Saga, Volume Four
Subsequent book in the series: Saga, Volume Six

Potential 2016 Hugo Nominees

Brian K. Vaughan     Fiona Staples     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Musical Monday - Arena by Five Year Mission

Bearing a striking similarity to, although perhaps not directly influenced by, Fredric Brown's story Arena, this episode of Star Trek has Kirk shanghaied by a race of incredibly powerful aliens and forced to fight the captain of a rival alien ship with the lives of everyone on their respective ships as the stakes while his crew watches it all on video.

This episode is the only appearance of the Gorn in the original series, which is somewhat disappointing, because this story sets up a scenario that seems like it would have been interesting to explore. On the other hand, 1960s episodic television wasn't really prepared to handle ongoing story lines, so it may have been just as well that they never tried to pick up the threads from the episode in subsequent installments. Be that as it may, it seems like the Gorn could have been at least a semi-regular adversary for the Federation in the series, as they seem to have been at least as interesting when they were introduced as either the Klingons or the Romulans. Alas, despite this moderately promising beginning, the Gorn were mostly cast aside and have been treated as almost an afterthought by Star Trek writers in the years since.

Taking up where the writers of Star Trek left off, Five Year Mission shows us the true face of the Gorn, who is just a hard-working guy who only wants to get through his difficult day. After being ripped off by guitar thieves, dealing with stores prejudiced against dogs and Gorn, and having his dog stolen, is it any wonder that the Gorn is just a little bit testy?

And no, I don't know what magic keeps Andy Fark's glasses from falling off.

Previous Musical Monday: Wolf in the Fold by Five Year Mission

Subsequent Musical Monday: Chanukah Honey by Rachel Bloom

Dream Five Year Mission Set

Musical Monday Playlists     Five Year Mission     Musical Monday     Home

Book Blogger Hop November 27th - December 3rd: You Can Use United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Form I-131 to Apply for a Reentry Permit, Refugee Travel Document or Advance Parole Travel Document

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: How reliable can you say you are in terms of having promised reviews completed for blog tours or publisher and author requests?

I am completely unreliable. I also don't like missing deadlines. To prevent this from becoming a problem, I almost never participate in blog tours or promise to have reviews completed by a particular deadline. I don't miss deadlines for material related to my blog by the simple expedient of pretty much never agreeing to deadlines in the first place. If I accept a book for review, I promise that I will review it, but I make no assurances as to when. If a publisher or author needs a book reviewed by or on a particular date, then I simply decline the offer of the book. I have a sufficient number of deadlines in my life that I don't need to add any more in exchange for books - after all, I already have enough books that if I were to manage to read and review a book a day, I wouldn't need to buy a new book for about twenty years.

Previous Book Blogger Hop: Rome Banned the Execution of Slaves Without Trial in 130 A.D.

Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: 132 Is the Smallest Minimal Osiris Number in Base 10

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Follow Friday - The Two-Hundred and Thirty-Seventh Square Pyramidal Number Is the Sum of Two Other Square Pyramidal Numbers

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the Featured Blogger of the week - This Girl Reads a Lot.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: Black Friday Eve! You have $100 (or pounds or whatever your currency is) to spend on books. What are you going to buy?


This is actually fairly easy for me. I have a list:

The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
Golden Son by Pierce Brown
The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu
Lagoon by Nnedi Okrafor
Planetfall by Emma Newman
Radiance by Catherynne Valente
Uprooted by Naomi Novik
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
Zeroes by Chuck Wendig

I probably would not be able to get all of them with $100, but I'd get as many of them as I could.

Previous Follow Friday: Eratosthenes Became the Head Librarian of the Library of Alexandria in 236 B.C.

Subsequent Follow Friday: Uranium-238 Is the Most Common isotope of Uranium

Follow Friday     Home

Review - Bitch Planet, Book One: Extraordinary Machine by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine de Landro

Short review: The Fathers try to break non-compliant women by rigging the world against them and sending them to prison. The women remain unbroken.

Haiku
She's non-compliant
Send her off to Bitch Planet
Still non-compliant

Full review: Bitch Planet is a dark, grim dystopian story about a future that bears some resemblance to that of The Handmaid's Tale combined with Rollerball and a small dash of The Hunger Games thrown in. In its brutal and graphic pages, Bitch Planet reveals that oppression often comes with a smiling face and soft comforting words, while freedom can feel harsh and ugly. But for all its cruelty, the story is also about standing up for oneself, refusing to yield to those who would break you, and that in the face of overwhelming odds, a woman can still be defiantly non-compliant.

At the outset, one should be clear that this is definitely a book that should be limited to mature audiences. The society depicted in its pages is a misogynistic dystopia run by a group who call themselves the Fathers, and who regulate almost every aspect of the lives of the citizens they rule over. They certainly control the lives of the men who live in this future world, but they are exceptionally interested in making sure the women who inhabit this nightmarish existence are subdued, controlled, and compliant. This is not a pretty or sugar-coated depiction of a dystopia. No, it is a brutal and harsh vision that is expressed in a stark and uncompromising manner. There is brutality and nudity in this graphic novel, and its unrelenting gaze never leaves the ugliness.

Much of the story takes place at the Auxiliary Compliance Outpost, an off-world facility where "non-compliant" women are sent, colloquially called "Bitch Planet". Women end up at the facility for any number of crimes, ranging from assault and murder, to aesthetic offenses and wanton obesity, or merely because their husbands tired of them. In an early sequence that sets the tone for much of the volume, a man named Collins approaches an official claiming that his wife has been mistakenly arrested and is due to be shipped to Bitch Planet. As he tells his tale about how he had an affair with a woman named Dawn and his wife refused to accept her responsibility for it despite counseling and other steps, he says that he paid off the authorities to have his wife shipped away, but that he loves his wife and wants her back, offering his remaining funds to grease the wheels. Intercut with Marion Collins, freshly admitted inmate at the ACO telling her side of the story and begging to be released, as she is sure she doesn't belong there.

The twist is that when Collins' wife is returned to him, it isn't Marion, but rather Dawn, who was mistakenly picked up because the only information the arresting officers were given was to arrest "Mrs. Collins", and they thought  she was the woman they were meant to bring in. Marion, on the other hand, finds herself in the middle of a prison brawl and is murdered by one of the guards with her murder being pinned on another inmate, the protagonist of the story Kamau Kogo. Because Kamau was a professional athlete before she arrived on Bitch Planet, the prison uses the murder charge as leverage to get her to agree to form a team of prisoners for the sport of megaton, to participate in the professional league against the established teams of men. This sport is something like a combination of rugby and American football, with less regard for petty concerns such as safety, and is so dangerous that when star player Rickey Fontenot dies on the field during a match, no one is particularly surprised, or even concerned.

The demand to assemble a megaton team sets the main plot of the book in motion, as it combines the machinations of the Fathers - who are interested in good television ratings and in making an ideological point about their dominance over women - and the anger and rage of the women cast out by a society that is rigged against them. Of course, the game is rigged against the inmates too, and they know this. But what women like Violet, Meiko, and especially Penelope know is that winning is not nearly as important as taking a stand. Even more significantly, they show that the critical decision is to remain yourself while you are standing defiantly. Even when the Fathers try to use technology to show Penelope her "ideal self" so that they can try to "fix" her, they discover that she is what she wants to be, and cannot be broken so easily. They key to the story is that it isn't the victory or loss, but rather the fact that one is still in the game that is the most critical element, and the women of Bitch Planet most certainly want to play the game, no matter if it is unfair, or if they risk their lives doing so. Some things, it seems, are worth such risks.

One might think that this story would be told with all the subtlety of a sledge hammer, and yet large portions of the character development and world building are handled in a sneaky manner, presented almost by subterfuge. In many cases, the material in the background of a panel is just as important as the scene taking place front and center, and if the reader rushes past it, they will miss substantial elements of the story. As this volume is a compilation of several individually published monthly comic books, the story is told in segments, and at the end of each is a page of ads reminiscent of those that appeared in comic books in the 1960s and 1970s, advertising a collection of products akin to the "x-ray vision goggles" and "sea monkeys" that graced those old issues. These ads, however, are part of the story of Bitch Planet, many of which are written to sell products that would exist in that dystopian world, while others are political ads that provide the reader with admonishments or directions concerning proper behavior. One, for example, instructs the reader that voters are required to only vote for those candidates for office from the list of those that are approved by the Fathers, and voting is mandatory for all citizens. The implication is clear: The Fathers want the appearance of consent, but don't want to run the risk of having someone make an unapproved choice. This sort of atmospheric storytelling runs through the entire volume of Bitch Planet, and makes the world that much deeper and the nightmare presented that much more chilling.

The book builds to a climax involving a practice match between Kamau's team and a team comprised of guards from the ACO, and it is here that the story hits its only discordant note. Although it is clear that the Fathers intend to rig the matches against the women of Bitch Planet to the extent necessary to ensure they lose and lose badly, with many injuries and even some deaths, it seems odd that they would engage in such shenanigans in a match that is both meaningless and non-public. Making an example of these women in a situation in which no one is watching seems like a pointless and even counterproductive exercise. Should the players refuse to continue, then the public spectacle that the Fathers desire is lost, all so that they can win a pissing match that doesn't matter. In fact, if the Fathers truly wish to break the spirit of Kamau's team, then engaging in such blatant cheating at this stage is unlikely to accomplish their objective. Instead, giving them false hope and then pulling the rug out from under them would seem to be a more effective strategy. Despite the false ring that this sequence provides, it does end the volume with a dark (and tragically ironic) event, closing the volume on a note appropriately bleak for a dystopian work.

Bitch Planet is, quite simply, absolutely brilliant. It is frightening, horrifying, and devastating, while at the same time being brutally beautiful and inspiring. The compelling and varied female residents of Bitch Planet draw the reader in, engaging the reader in their struggles and what small victories they can call triumphs. On the other hand, their opposition in the form of the prison guards and the Fathers, although often terrifying, seem to be bland and mostly uninteresting as characters. This book walks a fine line between futile despair and heroic defiance, and mostly lands on the "heroic defiance" side of the ledger, resulting in a book that is dark, grim, and yet still possessed of a kernel of hope.

Subsequent Book in the Series: Bitch Planet, Book Two: President Bitch

Potential 2016 Hugo Nominees

Kelly Sue DeConnick     Valentine de Landro     Book Reviews A-Z     Home