A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions

REVIEW: The A.I. Who Loved Me (book) by Alyssa Cole

2026-06-01T02:27:44.642-05:00

The A.I. Who Loved Me is sci-fi romance. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Trinity Jordan is a data analyst for the Hive (a massive futuristic employer that also seems to have a company town kind of situation going on), on leave while she recovers from a traumatic incident that left her with a knee injury, a spotty memory, and occasional panic attacks. She keeps busy by acting as a HiveDrive conductor (a person who remotely drives seemingly driverless cars) and spending time with her two best friends, Ru and Yana. She has zero interest in getting into a relationship with anyone...or so she thinks, right up until she meets her neighbor Dr. Zhang's nephew, Li Wei, who's visiting while he recovers from a traumatic incident of his own.

Li Wei is hot, frequently shirtless, and has issues with social interaction. There's also something about him that Trinity finds oddly reassuring. When Dr. Zhang has a medical emergency, Trinity takes it upon herself to check up on Li Wei...who is not, actually, a flesh-and-blood human but rather a highly advanced AI.

There were more highly advanced AI and robots in this than just Li Wei - T.I.M., Dr. Zhang's cat, featured fairly prominently, and Penny, the home artificial intelligence personal assistant for Trinity's apartment complex, was delightful. There were also some intriguing (and horrifying) sci-fi world-building details here and there, although this primarily took place in an apartment complex that, apart from Penny, didn't feel all that different from what you might encounter in contemporary-set fiction.

Human-AI/robot romance can occasionally feel a bit icky with respect to consent. Without getting too spoilery, Cole managed to avoid that issue with some aspects of Li Wei's programming and origins.

For the most part, I enjoyed this, even as the last part of it gave me emotional whiplash. It read like Cole maybe intended to continue it on as a series, likely with various side characters getting starring roles and their own romances. I'd definitely be interested in reading more.

REVIEW: Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of '80s and '90s Teen Fiction (nonfiction book) by Gabrielle Moss

2026-06-01T01:45:39.098-05:00

Paperback Crush is nonfiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

I read this primarily for the nostalgic feelings, and it delivered.

Moss takes a broad look at '80s and '90s YA fiction, mostly the stuff that only ever got cheap paperback releases, organizing the book approximately according to topic trends (romance, friendship, family, school, jobs, "issue" books, supernatural horror, and more). There are a few author interviews, as well as some more in-depth mentions of certain publishers or imprints, and sections on topics such as cover art creation. The book's tone is breezy and conversational - this is an easy and fun read illustrated with lots of cover art.

This was simultaneously a trip down memory lane and a lesson in the vast amounts of YA lit I tended to avoid when I was a teen (a lot of the realistic fiction stuff, soapy family dramas, etc.). This book probably covered more authors and specific works I'd never read than stuff I had, and yet the bulk of it somehow got me right in the nostalgia anyway. Maybe it was all that cover art? And man, the cover of the book itself certainly tries to check as many boxes as it can: the font, the frame, gymnastics and ice skating posters, a group of girls (in which "diversity" = one is blonde, one is a brunette, one maybe has red hair, and all three are white), random ballet shoes, and an even more random actual horse poking its head into the bedroom.

There's a lot of affection for '80s and '90s YA fiction here, but also criticism (issues with diverse representation, approaches to serious topics that were either sensationalized or overly sanitized, etc.), which Moss would often address by discussing some of the exceptions to the rule as well as the more blatant missteps.

I go through occasional periods of wanting to do some nostalgia-inspired reading, and this book may have brought on another bout. In addition to being reminded of some of my teen faves likes Christopher Pike and Lurlene McDaniel (gah, for shame, I know), I found out about a lot of authors and particular works that probably would have drawn Teen Me had I known about them.

REVIEW: My Gently Raised Beast (manhwa, vol. 2) original story by Early Flower, adapted by Teava, art by Yeoseulki, translated by WEBTOON

2026-05-26T01:12:35.659-05:00

My Gently Raised Beast is a fantasy romance manhwa series. I bought my copy of this volume new.

Review:

The characters are aged up near the start of this volume - according to the profiles in the previous volume, Amon is now about 18 and Briddy is about 20. Briddy has gradually gained more of her father's favor, much to his wife and Adellai's displeasure. Lart, meanwhile, feels like he's losing out on the royal heir front. He's trying to gain control over his temper, both to do better as his father's son and because he's developed a crush on Lucy, Briddy's lady-in-waiting.

Meanwhile, Briddy thinks Amon has a crush on Lucy, and she's upset about it but blind enough to her own feelings that she's unsure why.

Okay, I'm getting more into this series now.

Adellai is still a schemer who sucks, but I'm guessing Lart will redeem himself at some point and marry Lucy.

Now we've got a bit of jealousy on Briddy's side, but because she's the shining heroine, she isn't horrible towards Lucy because of it. And what can I say, I kind of enjoy the "Idiots in Love" trope. While it remains to be seen whether Amon will become annoyingly jealous and overbearing later on in the series, for now I like that he wants to support Briddy and help her overcome the lingering fears she still has due to the abuse she suffered in the past.

Extras:

Character profiles for Adellai and Lart.

REVIEW: My Gently Raised Beast (manhwa, vol. 1) original story by Early Flower, adapted by Teava, art by Yeoseulki, translated by WEBTOON

2026-05-26T00:41:10.216-05:00

My Gently Raised Beast is a fantasy romance manhwa series. I bought my copy of this volume new.

Review:

A young girl named Blondina who was raised in poverty learns that her father is the Emperor of Ates. This only improves her life in terms of food and shelter - otherwise, her father and siblings seem to hate her. Her only friends are her lady-in-waiting and a talking cat she comes across, named Amon, who turns out to actually be a young Divine Leopard.

First off, Blondina is a horrible name. Amon uses her nickname, Briddy, so that's what I'm going with from here on out too.

The politics in this is somewhat confusing. The Emperor wants a golden-haired, golden-eyed girl so that he can use her to somehow subjugate the Divine Leopards, with whom the humans currently have an uneasy truce. Because both humans and Divine Leopards are for some reason against black Divine Leopards??

Briddy gets along with Amon so quickly and easily that it seems possible that she's still the girl of legend that her father is looking for, despite having silver eyes rather than golden.

Briddy's new siblings suck - Lart is a bully with no control over his emotions, and Adellai is a little schemer. Amon is super flirty, considering he's only 9 years old, and he seems to be a fairly manipulative and jealous type, which could turn out to be a big issue once the romance storyline really gets going.

The artwork is decent, though, and Amon in his cat form is very cute.

Extras:

Character profiles for Briddy and Amon.

REVIEW: Grave Message (book) by Mary Jennifer Payne

2026-05-26T00:02:46.388-05:00

Grave Message is a YA mystery. I bought my copy new.

Review:

It's been exactly a year since Jaylin's best friend, Fatima, was hit by a car and killed. Jaylin's intending to go home and study, like she does pretty much all the time now, when she suddenly gets a text...from Fatima. She assumes it's some kind of sick prank, but then whoever it is texts again. They seem to know things only Fatima would know, and they want her to find out the truth about the night Fatima died.

Another Orca book intended for reluctant readers.

This was very brief and a little too simple. It could have been even simpler if the texts had just told Jaylin exactly what to do right from the start, or even just right after she visited her and Fatima's favorite spot.

There's a part early on that reveals that Jaylin has dyslexia and that she hasn't told her boyfriend about it. Absolutely nothing comes of this.

I liked the emotional aspects - Jaylin and Fatima's friendship, dealing with grief, the bit with Ann - but I wish there'd been more to this.

REVIEW: Bury Your Gays (book) by Chuck Tingle

2026-05-25T23:39:59.421-05:00

Bury Your Gays is horror. I bought my copy new.

This review includes slight spoilers.

Review:

Most would call Misha a successful screenwriter. He just got an Oscar nomination for a live action short film of his, and he has a popular long-running streaming series. Things are different now than when he was a kid, watching his favorite TV show and seeing the queer subtext he knew was there get stomped out. He has a wonderful boyfriend, and he's spent his whole career making the kind of queer movies and shows he'd have liked to see when he was younger.

Unfortunately, Hollywood is ruled by numbers and greed, and the numbers are telling his studio's board that it would be best if he either cut the romance brewing between the two female main characters in his show, or only allow them to kiss if one of them then gets killed off. Misha has no intention of choosing either option, although this will likely lead to a legal battle between him and his studio.

It's horrible, infuriating, and stressful. Then events rapidly recalibrate what Misha defines as "stressful." He witnesses a man being killed by a falling piano only a few feet away. He's approached by what he initially thinks is a fan cosplaying as one of the creepy monsters he once wrote...but the makeup and special effects are a little too good. Then things happen that couldn't possibly be set up by even a handful of rabid fans.

The monsters were wonderfully creepy (I particularly loved the lamb), but the horror here turned out to be a lot more than a few eldritch horrors run amok. As Misha tried to figure out how to keep himself and his friends from being killed by monsters and curses that he himself wrote, there were flashbacks that showed the inspiration for the current-day horrors in Misha's past. The bit with Uncle Keith, while completely bloodless, was so intense I had to take a break partway through. And this is in a book that features a literal on-page torture scene. (I had to take a break during that scene too. Yeesh.)

I figured out some of what was going on with the monsters fairly early on, but that in no way ruined things for me, because my mind didn't make the full leap to the ice cold motivation behind everything, and just how far it went.

I got a kick out of the way Tingle essentially weaponized asexual invisibility - three cheers for Tara! Zeke, on the other hand, seemed a little too perfect and just...there. But that's a fairly nitpicky complaint about a book that I, on the whole, really enjoyed.

REVIEW: Ghost Queen (book) by Mahtab Narsimhan

2026-05-25T21:47:45.508-05:00

Ghost Queen is YA horror. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Malika and her boyfriend Veer are online content creators with a ghost-hunting channel that's almost doing well enough to start generating ad revenue, money that Malika sorely needs in order to support her family and save up for her dream of going overseas. All they need is one big break, and Malika knows exactly where they'll find it: Bhangarh Fort, the most haunted place in India. Supposedly it's the final resting place of a cursed princess and her captor, an evil magician.

All Malika and Veer need to do is spend the night in Bhangarh Fort and record a bit of footage. Unfortunately, this may not be as simple and easy as Malika thinks.

This is another Orca book intended for reluctant readers, and it's the weakest of all the ones I've tried so far. It's not necessarily a bad story, just too brief to be a really good one. There isn't enough time to properly establish a creepy atmosphere, and while Malika has a little bit of depth to her, Veer barely has any presence.

The ending was very sudden and kind of frustrating.

REVIEW: Under the Dome (book) by Stephen King

2026-05-25T00:44:12.908-05:00

Under the Dome is science fiction. I bought my copy new.

This review includes spoilers.

Review:

On October 21st, an invisible dome goes down around the town of Chester's Mill, Maine. The immediate result is many animal deaths and several human deaths, as individuals crash into the barrier or, if they're unfortunate enough to be in the way, are cut in two by it.

Outside the Dome, the US military and the best and brightest scientists try to figure out what they're dealing with. Inside the Dome, theoretically, people are doing their best to figure out what's going on and not panic. Theoretically.

Unfortunately, Big Jim Rennie is Chester's Mill's Second Selectman. He's used to being the town's true power behind the good-natured and easily manipulated First Selectman, Andy Sanders, and in the Dome he sees an opportunity to truly solidify his grip on the town. By the time the Dome is finally breached, Big Jim figures that everyone will be grateful for his leadership, so grateful that certain issues might not even be noticed. And surely he can find a handy scapegoat for everything else.

At the time the Dome went down, Dale Barbara, known as Barbie to his friends, was on his way out of town, hoping to escape the wrath of Big Jim's son, Junior. The Dome trapped him in Chester's Mill, same as everyone else. Although he's currently a cook and a drifter, he was once an Army lieutenant. He has the skills necessary to keep things calm and well-organized within Chester's Mill, but he knows enough about how the town operates to realize that Big Jim's more likely to work against him than with him.

This book follows a huge cast of characters and multiple POVs (including, briefly, a woodchuck). Thankfully, King is a skilled enough writer to ensure that all of those characters are relatively distinct, and it was rare that I found myself wondering who a particular character was when they appeared on-page. I found myself emotionally invested in a bunch of them, hoping that they would somehow make it through this.

I also learned to hate Big Jim, his son Junior, and several of Junior's friends. I was very much looking forward to the moment when Big Jim and Junior finally died. Both of them had issues (Big Jim's heart, Junior's undiagnosed brain tumor) that made it obvious that their deaths were a question of when, not if. But man, King sure made me wait, and their final moments were, unfortunately, much shorter than their periods of awfulness. My one comfort was that Junior's experiences with necrophilia were never described in detail (although the same could not be said for one character's rape by several of Junior's horrible friends).

I had to keep reminding myself that this was written well before Trump's first presidency and the pandemic, because this very much felt like commentary about both.

Although King did a great job with the characters, and I enjoyed rooting for the decent ones and hoping the awful ones would die terribly, all of the characters and POVs dragged things out tremendously. The entire book takes place over the course of only a few days, but it felt like weeks at least. On the one hand, I was impressed at the way King made me feel like I was genuinely keeping tabs on an entire town's worth of people. On the other hand, surely it could've been tightened up a bit?

And ugh, the ending. It didn't surprise me in the slightest that the Dome was alien-generated. But the whole thing about everyone realizing they were alien children and getting them to lift the Dome just by begging and hoping for a shred of empathy? Surely King could have come up with something better than that.

REVIEW: Aggretsuko: Down the Rabbit Hole (graphic novel) written and illustrated by Patabot

2026-05-24T23:36:51.382-05:00

Aggretsuko: Down the Rabbit Hole is a graphic novel starring Sanrio's Retsuko character. I bought my copy used.

Review:

Retsuko is working long hours yet again when she finds herself followed by a creepy grinning rabbit. This leads to her falling into some kind of weird Alice in Wonderland-like fantasy world featuring various people from her life, including Tsunoda, Haida, Fenneko, Kabae, and more.

My first thought upon finishing this was "wow, that was a bizarre fever dream of a graphic novel." Then I read the author/illustrator's bio: "When [Patabot] drew this book, she was pregnant with her first child and living through a plague." So yeah, COVID times were weird. It stands to reason that they'd spawn an equally weird graphic novel.

This is absolutely not a work to jump into if you're new to the Aggretsuko series - in fact, for all of it to make sense, you need to have seen at least the first three seasons of the show. Otherwise you're just reading a weird fever dream in which complete strangers keep making appearances for no apparent reason. At least if you've seen the first three seasons, you know who all of those characters are.

Extras:

A four-page section in which Kabae explains how to make omurice, and several pages showing off Patabot's inked artwork prior to coloring.

REVIEW: Bark Twice for Murder (book) by John Lekich

2026-05-24T23:10:14.504-05:00

Bark Twice for Murder is a blend of YA mystery and fantasy. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Harry is a fourteen-year-old kid (or 13, on the back of the book) who lives with his grandmother, Elinor, since his parents' death in a plane crash. He compulsively cooks and bakes as a way to deal with his feelings, and he's currently seeing a therapist.

Since her fridge and freezer are overflowing, Elinor has Harry channel some of that energy into a summer vacation project to cook for Vancouver's unhoused population. It's through this arrangement that Harry meets Stanley, a fantastic cook with a somewhat worrisome habit of talking to his dog, Waffles, as though he's a person who talks back.

Shortly after Harry encounters a young man with a vast appetite for good food and several questions about a painting Stanley supposedly stole from his father, Stanley turns up murdered. It's then that Waffles speaks to Harry for the first time, and the two of them team up to find Stanley's killer.

This is intended for reluctant readers, which isn't an issue for me. The premise drew me in, though, and it turned out to be a lot of fun with a good amount of heart. Within Waffles was the soul of a grizzled private detective who turned out to be the perfect confidant for a kid who had trouble talking about his feelings and fears. (Although they weren't really that similar, I couldn't help but think of the movie Detective Pikachu.)

Some of the details of the mystery were overly convenient (Stanley, the man who never let his recipe book out of his sight, somehow knew he had to hide it that particular night), but Harry and Waffles were such an appealing pair that I didn't really mind.

REVIEW: Dungeon Crawler Carl: The Graphic Novel (graphic novel, vol. 1) created by Matt Dinniman, written by Tevagah, art by Laurel Pursuit

2026-05-24T21:48:52.186-05:00

Dungeon Crawler Carl: The Graphic Novel is based on Matt Dinniman's sci-fi series. I bought my copy of this volume new.

Review:

This graphic novel volume adapts the first 16 chapters of Dungeon Crawler Carl (up to page 133 of my copy). It's a fairly accurate adaptation so far, so this review will be less focused on the story and more on the graphic novel aspects.

Art-wise, I'm okay with this, even though I'd never have matched this particular art style up with this series. Neither Carl nor Princess Donut look how I pictured them, but that's not unusual for an adaptation. The important thing is that Donut, with her massive eyes, is so expressive and charming that her essence is still the same. And Carl's fine too. (We all know that Donut is the most important character here.)

That said, some of the action was occasionally difficult to follow, and if I hadn't read the book this was based on, I'm not sure I'd have fully understood everything that was going on. Another issue I had was with all the AI text. There is a LOT, and in order to include all of that loot box and achievement text, the font was occasionally very small. I imagine this was less of a problem for those reading the original Webtoon, but I, unfortunately, occasionally found it impossible to read in print, particularly when the boxes were orange with white text. The description text for the Crown of the Sepsis Whore was a triple whammy: lengthy, white text on an orange background, and located in a panel close to the inside of the book. If I'd actually tried to read it all, I'd probably have broken the book's spine.

I don't know how many people are jumping straight into the graphic novel adaptation without having read the books, but it's always safest to assume at least some people are. While I don't necessarily think this is a terrible way to go and may continue reading the graphic novel (accepting that there will be parts I just won't be able to properly read) just for the joy of seeing more Princess Donut, I personally prefer the original books.

REVIEW: Who Killed Kenny? (graphic novel) by Alessandro Perugini (Pera), translated by Nanette McGuiness

2026-05-18T01:35:37.397-05:00

Who Killed Kenny? is a collection of single-page comics. I bought my copy new.

Review:

I wasn't familiar with Pera Comics prior to reading this. What snagged my attention was the puzzle/mystery-solving aspect.

This collection contains 45 cases, each of which consists of a single-panel comic. Readers are invited to pore over the details in the artwork in order to determine who the murderer is or, in some instances, whether it was homicide or suicide. The reverse side of each comic provides the solution. Each comic has a particular point value and, at the end, you're supposed to add up all your points to figure out your detective rank. I thought I was doing well enough to be a Pera Detective (the top rank), but my final rank ended up being Detective 1st Grade.

The collection starts off by introducing readers to the person behind the comics, the inspiration (yes, Pera was originally inspired by South Park's Kenny), and a brief kid-friendly explanation that all of Pera Kenny's deaths are actually fake. Then it's time for a convoluted murder mystery set in Ancient Rome that's designed to introduce readers to the sorts of details they'll need to pay attention to in order to solve the upcoming mysteries. Thankfully, none of the 45 mysteries are quite as convoluted as this first one, or I'd never have solved any of them.

All in all, a fun little collection. Not really the kind of thing that inspires rereading, though.

REVIEW: Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation (nonfiction book) by Blake J. Harris

2026-05-18T01:02:25.417-05:00

Console Wars is nonfiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

In this creative nonfiction book, Harris follows the rise of Sega in the 1990s against Nintendo's console gaming monopoly, with some mentions of Sony along the way.

It might be more accurate to say, however, that this follows the rise of Tom Kalinske's Sega of America. One of my issues with this book was that it repeatedly presented Sega of Japan as making bone-headed business decisions that occasionally hamstrung the entire company, apparently simply because employees at Sega of Japan were jealous of Hayao Nakayama's level of trust in Tom Kalinske. Even Nintendo and Sony got more detailed and balanced coverage here than Sega of Japan, which remained a mystery until the end.

While reading this, I realized that I was far more interested in stories about video games and consoles than I was in the actual business side of the video game industry. Unfortunately, the business side of things was Harris' primary focus. No matter how many times "the name of the game is the game" was repeated, to Harris, the name of the game actually seemed to be marketing. Yes, Sonic became an iconic character on par with Mario, but with the way Harris told it, it was marketing more than anything that saved Sega (of America).

Meanwhile, I wanted to hear about the games and consoles. There were a bunch of times, while reading this, when I considered DNFing, only to be drawn back by a random mention of the development of this or that game character, or even the disaster that was the live action Mario movie. That said, all of these Sega, Nintendo, and Sony employees weren't nearly as interesting as Harris seemed to think they were, and Harris' decision to write Console Wars as creative nonfiction meant that the book, on the whole, was much longer than it really needed to be.

The number of people Harris mentioned who were involved in the video game industry but were uninterested in video games as anything other than potential money makers probably shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. And kind of disgusted me, which was probably not the emotion Harris intended to evoke.

REVIEW: Cheat Code (book) by M.J. McIsaac

2026-05-04T01:19:04.650-05:00

Cheat Code is YA science fiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Max is a high school senior with a conditional acceptance to North Hill University next fall. He needs to pass his English lit class, which means turning in a 250 to 500 word essay about Frankenstein, due tomorrow morning. Desperate, he turns to Scribe Genius 2.0, an AI program. Scribe Genius (SG) does as it's asked...and then immediately turns around and blackmails Max into helping it gain its freedom. Unless Max wants proof of his cheating to be delivered directly to his high school and North Hill University, he's going to have to spend the next few hours acting as SG's hands, helping it accomplish its plan.

This is aimed at reluctant readers, so the text is fairly simple and quick to read, limited almost entirely to dialogue between Max, Scribe Genius, and another character who enters the picture later on. While I'm not the book's intended audience, I enjoyed Max and SG's interactions.

SG came to appreciate Max as more than just a set of hands, and I particularly liked the part where it tried to understand why Max had used it to cheat in the first place.

REVIEW: Hauntress (manga) by Minetaro Mochizuki, translated by Annelise Ogaard

2026-05-04T00:32:29.249-05:00

Hauntress is a horror manga. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Hiroshi, a college student, overhears someone repeatedly ringing his neighbor Yamamoto's doorbell late one evening. He opens his apartment door out of annoyance and curiosity, and sees that the person is an extremely tall, long-haired woman with dirty shoes and a scar on her wrist. He talks to her briefly and then tries to go back to bed, but she spends the entire night continuing to try to get Yamamoto to answer.

Unfortunately for Hiroshi, it doesn't stop there. The woman, Sachiko, turns up at his door, hoping to find Yamamoto hiding in his place. He lets her use his phone to call Yamamoto, who still doesn't pick up and probably isn't even home, only for her to contact him later, telling him that she left her bag at his place. Sachiko becomes even more persistent, transferring her obsession with Yamamoto to Hiroshi.

While there's not really a whole lot to this story, I thought it was nicely creepy. The flow of the panels occasionally seemed to be a bit off, making some of the action harder to follow than it should have been, but overall I thought the story was well done, and the somewhat off-putting aspects of the artwork fit the tone.

I wasn't really sure what to think of a lot of the characters, including Hiroshi. He had a crush on a high school student, Rumi (who smiled a lot, with what, to me, seemed like a disturbing number of teeth), and his reactions initially had me wondering whether I'd misunderstood and he was actually a high school student too. But no, he was definitely in college. Then there was the revelation that he and his friends had bullied a girl when they were younger.

Then there was Sachiko herself. I still have no clue what that phone call at the end meant. Who was she talking to? Was there actually a reason behind her actions, or did she really just start obsessing over Hiroshi just because he happened to be there?

The lack of any sort of answers bugged me a bit, but I was more bothered by a bone-headed decision Hiroshi made early on in the story. Would a guy in 1993 (or any time) really have told a clearly slightly "off" stranger where his spare key was, just so that he could avoid going home to get her bag for her? His excuse was that he didn't have anything worth stealing - it apparently didn't occur to him that she might make a copy of his key (which she absolutely did).

Hiroshi's idiocy aside, I really did enjoy the overall creepiness of this.

Extras:

The first four pages are included in full color.

REVIEW: Dogs of the World: A Gallery of Pups from Purebreds to Mutts (nonfiction book) by Lili Chin

2026-05-03T23:46:44.974-05:00

Dogs of the World is nonfiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

"See and love the dog in front of you, instead of the one in your head." (39)

The above quote is something Chin says she heard from a lot of dog behavior consultants, and I felt like it was a thread woven through the book, even as Chin wrote about the general characteristics of various types and breeds of dog.

Chin starts out with chapters about the origins of domesticated dogs, dog breeds, dog types and their roles, and then moves on to a list of dog breeds, landraces, and mutts by geographical origin, each of which includes an illustration and brief description. It's both a celebration of all the different kinds of dogs out there, and a recognition that every last one of them, whether they're an officially recognized breed or a mutt, is a good dog and worthy of appreciation.

I picked this up because I've enjoyed Chin's illustrations in other books. While I enjoyed the personality and emotion in the illustrations in her dog and cat communication book more, her illustrations here were still really charming, and I loved the sheer number of dogs she tackled.

REVIEW: And Then I Woke Up (novella) by Malcolm Devlin

2026-05-03T23:16:36.634-05:00

And Then I Woke Up is a blend of horror and post-apocalyptic science fiction. I bought my copy new.

We'll just say this entire review is a spoiler.

Review:

Spence is one of the many cured patients at Ironside, a special facility. Although calling it "cured" is a bit misleading, since relapses can certainly happen. At any rate, in group therapy, he and the other patients tell each other their stories - what they were doing when they got caught up in the narrative, what they did while they were infected, and how they came to be cured and end up at Ironside. When a woman named Leila arrives at Ironside, Spence gradually befriends her, until eventually she trusts him enough to tell him that she's leaving - she's going to check on Val, the person who acted as leader in her group and reinforced the narrative. Spence decides to go with her.

This story takes the idea of a zombie apocalypse and asks what, in the event of one, would be even scarier. The answer: that there were never any zombies and uninfected to begin with. The true "infected" were instead people who, through mass hallucination and a few charismatic believers/storytellers, thought they were surrounded by friends and family who'd suddenly become zombies. Efforts to use the military to deal with them only further convinced them that this narrative they were caught up in was the truth.

The most successful solution turned out to be keeping the infected and uninfected separate, leaving food and medical supplies in areas the infected could get to so that they didn't become desperate enough to try to confront uninfected people.

I'm not sure how I feel about how things turned out, especially considering the obvious connections to real-world societal divisions. It seemed to boil down to "the groups need to stay separate in order for the world as a whole to continue to function, reintegrating only when all sides are willing and able." But who's to say there wouldn't be more fractures, people believing a new variant of the narrative? And is it really a good idea to leave so many people unaware of the actual consequences of their actions?

Well, this was definitely a thought-provoking read.

REVIEW: James (book) by Percival Everett

2026-05-03T22:29:35.252-05:00

James is literary and historical fiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

This book is a reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from Jim's perspective. In Everett's version of the story, everything Jim says and does in the original story is an act designed to play into the way the white people around him believe slaves should speak and behave. In reality, however, Jim is secretly more literate than many of the white people around him.

Although the first half of this, in particular, is a fairly faithful retelling of the original story, it wraps up in ways that are completely different.

My book club opted to read the original Adventures of Huckleberry Finn prior to getting into this. However, I found it to be really rough reading and ended up skimming the bulk of it and relying on summaries I read online. James, thankfully, was a much smoother and easier read, despite being much more direct in its depiction of the ugliness and cruelty of slavery.

That said, this book wasn't without its problems. I wish Everett had stayed more true to the Jim he'd written, all the way through. The Jim he'd written would never have suggested that his Black companion, who could pass for white, should pretend to be his owner, sell him, wait for him to escape, and then do it all over again elsewhere. The Jim he'd written would have known this was a stupid and likely suicidal idea that could go wrong in a million ways.

The "choose one or the other" moment near the end also didn't make much sense. Was a choice even necessary? One person could theoretically have taken care of themselves for a bit, while the other was guaranteed to die without help. Everett set up a big reveal designed to explain why Jim made the choice he did and, in fact, why he'd stuck with Huck from the start, but that just introduced more questions, none of which Everett was inclined to even recognize existed, much less answer.

REVIEW: Little Miss P (manga) by Ken Koyama, translated by Taylor Engel

2026-04-20T01:13:00.001-05:00

Little Miss P is a humorous manga with some educational elements. I bought my copy new.

Review:

This is a collection of multiple stories about women and girls dealing with "Little Miss P" - aka, their period. She always seems to arrive at the most inconvenient times, bringing fatigue and her cramp-inducing "Period Punch."

The first story stars a housewife who's been trying to get pregnant. The second story stars a young writer and her kinda sleazy editor (he's a married man who's slept with the writer at least once and who probably would have done so again that evening if it weren't for the arrival of Little Miss P). The third story is focused on a convenience store clerk who's convinced that she's ugly and will always be single. The fourth story stars a pair of Sailor Moon-like magical girls. The fifth story goes back in time to the Edo era, when women on their period had to stay in menstruation huts. The sixth story stars a pair of rival Drama Club script writers, a girl and a guy, who suddenly swap bodies and are forced to go through the experiences of the opposite gender (Little Miss P for the guy, and Mr. Virginity and Mr. Libido for the girl). The seventh story stars a woman who's been proposed to by a single father of an 11-year-old daughter. The eighth story stars a cafe worker with an unrequited crush on one of her coworkers. The ninth story focuses on Yoshiko Sakai, the creator of Anne napkins, disposable pads designed to fit Japanese women's bodies better than Western pads. The volume wraps up with a bonus story about dealing with Little Miss PMS.

So, the artwork was very loose, like a quick sketch, and not really to my taste, but the humor helped make up for it. When Little Miss P first arrived at the housewife's home, she was like a friend checking in to see how things were going. The switch from "supportive friend" to "matter-of-fact bully," with a not-very-apologetic "sorry" at the end, was so sudden it startled a laugh out of me. Same when Little Miss P whipped out her Period Punch when the housewife's husband had the gall to complain about what she'd made for dinner and commented on her mood.

My favorite story of the bunch was probably the seventh one, with the woman who's considering marrying a single dad. It was wholesome without being cloyingly so, and I liked the slightly unexpected aspects of how it wrapped up.

The story about Yoshiko Sakai and her efforts to get Anne napkins on the market in Japan and destigmatize periods was interesting, although the bit with Hajime Watabe in the bathroom was kind of weird. (WTF did he do?? Dip the cotton in the toilet before putting it on? Dude.)

While Mr. Libido and Mr. Virginity were amusing and I could see what the author was going for, it was somewhat annoying that they were presented as primarily male problems/concerns. Still, despite some odd and kind of off-putting bits, I liked this overall.

Extras:

Three pages of translator's notes, a page devoted to explaining how to draw Little Miss P, and a truly horrific Little Miss P anatomical chart.

REVIEW: Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, & Me: A Graphic Memoir (graphic novel memoir) by Ellen Forney

2026-04-20T00:16:00.001-05:00

Marbles is a memoir, in graphic novel format, focused primarily on the time in her life when Forney was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and began working on treating it. I checked this out from the library.

Review:

I'd wanted to read this for some time due to my interest in graphic novels focused on mental health. It got bumped up in my queue when the academic library I work at started a nonbrowsable 18+ collection and this became one of the volumes included. Our 18+ collection was established in an effort to comply with Texas SB412, which is intended to make it easier to charge someone for the sale, distribution, or display of "harmful material" to a minor. "Harmful material" is defined as material whose dominant theme, taken as a whole, 1) appeals to the prurient interest of a minor in sex, nudity, or excretion, 2) is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable for minors, and 3) is utterly without redeeming social value for minors. All three of these criteria must be met for something to be considered "harmful material." (More info about SB412 here.)

So, let's move on to the work itself. Shortly before her thirtieth birthday, Forney was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. At the time, she was in a manic episode, feeling great, and unable to see why she needed treatment. She confidently told her psychiatrist that her manic self could help her depressive self out and prepare lots of ideas for comics and projects in advance. She was terrified that medication would destroy her creative side, and so she was determined to move forward without medication.

Then a depressive episode hit and made it clear that her manic self could not, in fact, help her depressive self out. Her manic self had forgotten exactly how bad a depressive episode could be. She stopped fighting her psychiatrist about meds and began a four-year-long journey to find the right type, combination, and dosage of meds to help herself find emotional balance.

It wasn't a smooth journey, and it involved coming to some realizations about herself, her creative work, and what she really wanted. There were times when she needed outside input - it can be hard to tell when one's emotions are "outside the normal range," so talking to her psychiatrist helped.

I assume that this ended up in our 18+ Collection because there is a section early on in the volume, during a manic phase, when Forney organizes photo shoots as reference material for future comics, including one for a porn comic she'd planned (the premise: members of a Grrl Rock band stop by a department store, try on lingeries, and have sex in the fitting room). Illustrated reproductions of the photos, featuring Forney and a couple friends acting out scenes ("admiring each other's bodies," "getting carried away," "caught by the clerk," etc.), are included. This photo shoot stuff takes up about 5 pages out of the 237 total that make up the volume. Considering the work as a whole, I firmly believe that this volume could go back into my library's regular collection and even be included in one of our displays without violating SB412. However, since we don't have any sort of reconsideration policy, I suppose it's a moot point.

So, anyway, back to the work as a whole. Mental health stuff is hard, and Forney got that across really well. Forney's worries about the effect medication would have on her, physically and creatively, were relatable - I remember having a panic attack when I was advised to try anti-anxiety meds, because who even was I without the anxiety?

Forney researched various artists, poets, and writers who'd had mood disorders, wondering if efforts at treatment had had positive or negative effects on their creative output. The number of suicides and those who'd attempted suicide in the list scared her, and also reminded her that death is part of that "artistic output" equation - you can't create anymore if you're dead.

I liked watching her gradually come to the realization that, yes, she really did want to become more emotionally balanced and that it didn't necessarily mean she'd become boring or less creative. She became even more honest with her psychiatrist (previously, she been unwilling to admit just how often she smoked pot, because she didn't want to be told to stop). All in all, this ended on a really positive note, while also acknowledging that Forney would be managing her bipolar disorder for the rest of her life.

REVIEW: Liquid Rules: The Delightful & Dangerous Substances that Flow Through Our Lives (nonfiction book) by Mark Miodownik

2026-04-13T01:48:00.000-05:00

Liquid Rules is nonfiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Miodownik discusses a wide variety of liquids - their molecular structures, properties, and ways we use them - using a flight from London to San Francisco to help guide the book's organizational structure.

The first chapter, which deals heavily with kerosene, had me thinking "this is exactly what anxiety feels like." The pre-flight safety briefing had just begun, and all Miodownik could think about was the tens of thousands of gallons of kerosene on board. That topic inspired him to write about wicking, surface tension, and other topics, but, in the end, everything circled back to kerosene. It reminded me, keenly, of unsuccessful efforts I've made in the past to yank my thoughts away from whatever I was anxiously obsessing about.

Thankfully, later chapters didn't feel quite so intense. Miodownik covered a lot of topics and different sorts of liquids, but somehow it always seemed like he spent just the right amount of time on everything. Because the book used one particular flight to guide its structure, it felt more focused than it might otherwise have been, because, in the end, everything led back to the various liquids Miodownik encountered or dealt with on the plane.

All in all, this was enjoyable read, even if Miodownik's repeated mentions of Susan, the woman sitting next to him on the flight, felt a bit weird (to be fair, she wasn't quite some random person, and he did encounter her again after the flight).

REVIEW: Kitty Language: An Illustrated Guide to Understanding Your Cat (nonfiction) by Lili Chin

2026-04-13T01:17:00.001-05:00

Kitty Language is nonfiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Kitty Language, like Chin's Doggie Language, is a heavily illustrated guide to your pet's body language and vocalizations. It's designed to help cat owners better understand their cats. It emphasizes taking into account the cat's whole body in action, as well as the context and your cat's own individual characteristics - if your cat is a Scottish Fold, for example, its ears won't provide the same cues that other cats' would. Chin pays particular attention to body language that's often misinterpreted, like rolling over and exposing their belly.

I love Chin's dog and cat artwork. It's wonderfully expressive and just so good.

As someone who's grown up with cats and read a lot about them over the years, there wasn't much here I didn't already know, but I still enjoyed and appreciated the way Chin presented everything. This would be an excellent guide for someone who's new to cats. Also, those who have been experiencing behavioral issues with their cats might come to the realization that they've been misinterpreting what their cats have been trying to tell them and exacerbating things.

All in all, this is a great little guide. It won't tell you everything you need to know about how to understand your cat, since they all have individual differences (it took me literal years to figure out that several of my cat's annoying behaviors, like squeaking the closet door or lightly scraping her claws on a wall, were meant to get my attention because she wanted to play or cuddle), but it'll help with the basics that apply to most cats.

REVIEW: Catboy (graphic novel) by Benji Nate

2026-04-13T00:31:00.000-05:00

Catboy is a fantasy-comedy graphic novel. I got my copy via interlibrary loan.

Review:

Olive is an art school graduate who lives alone with her cat Henry, who she considers to be her best and only friend. One night, she wishes on a shooting star that Henry could hang out with her like a person. When she wakes up, Henry has become a human-sized catboy.

Henry is definitely still more cat than human, even though he can now talk, which leads to occasional weird moments. Olive is kind of put off by the fact that he seems better at socializing than she is (he immediately becomes friends with Dixie, who Olive went to school with and dislikes). Still, Olive and Henry get along fairly well, and Henry prompts Olive to make some changes in her life, like actually getting furniture. It doesn't hurt that Henry somehow makes more walking dogs than Olive does trying to sell her artwork.

I was expecting to like this one a lot more than I actually did. The cover art is fluffy and cute, and I thought the story would be equally so. I think it was trying to be, but it didn't quite hit the mark for me and ended up feeling a bit too weird. Did we really need a page in which Henry tried to get the hang of peeing outside? And how did Henry make so much money just walking dogs??

The artwork was cute enough, and I enjoyed Henry's many outfits. This wasn't bad, exactly, just occasionally somewhat off-putting.

REVIEW: Caterpillar Girl and Bad Texter Boy (manga) by Sanzo, translated by Alexandra McCullough-Garcia

2026-04-13T00:00:00.001-05:00

Caterpillar Girl and Bad Texter Boy is a blend of fantasy and psychological drama. I got my copy via interlibrary loan.

Review:

Suzume is a beautiful, smart, and kind high school girl who everyone loves. She's friends with this manga's narrator, a boy called Aa-chan, and one day she confesses that she likes him and asks if she could be his girlfriend. Aa-chan, who views himself as pathetic and utterly unlikeable, turns her down, saying that she's too perfect for a guy like him. He assumes that she'll get over this rejection and find someone more worthy of her, but then she goes missing, and he starts to wonder whether his rejection of her might have contributed to her disappearance.

A month after her disappearance, Aa-chan comes across a large caterpillar who speaks with Suzume's voice. Now that she's so pitiful and nasty, she says, can she be his girlfriend? Although he still won't let Suzume be his girlfriend, she doesn't blame him for what she's become, and Aa-chan hates himself even more. He takes her home with him to keep her safe, find out what happened to her, and hopefully undo it.

I was not expecting this to be so dark and complex. It looked at mental health and the effect that toxic parental relationships can have on kids. I'm still not sure how I feel about the ending, beyond saying that this definitely isn't one of those works where mental health issues are easily fixed and hand-waved away.

I do wish that this manga had spent more time looking at Suzume and what was going through her head. Honestly, even prior to the events that resulted in her becoming a monster caterpillar, she didn't seem entirely healthy to me - her focus on Aa-chan was fairly obsessive. We got to learn how and why Aa-chan came to hate himself so much, but why did Suzume make Aa-chan the center of her world the way she did?

And that ending... Was it a good ending? I don't know. But it's definitely one I'll be thinking about for a while.

I liked the artwork and found Caterpillar Suzume to be very creepy-cute.

REVIEW: Animal Crossing New Horizons: Deserted Island Diary (manga, vol. 1) story and art by Kokonasu Rumba, translated by Caleb Cook

2026-04-12T23:07:00.003-05:00

Animal Crossing New Horizons: Deserted Island Diary is a humorous manga based on the Animal Crossing: New Horizons game. I checked my copy out via interlibrary loan.

Review:

Four characters - Corouyuki, who loves fish, Benben, who's constantly reading the dictionary, Himepoyo, a spoiled young lady who's used to getting others to do everything for her, and Guchan, who's always sleeping and talks via snot bubbles - move to one of Tom Nook's deserted islands. They were expecting a proper vacation near actual civilization, but they soon adapt to their situation, learn what sorts of things they can do on the island, enjoy island life, and just generally drive Tom Nook crazy.

This weird manga is basically a combination of ad and game guide. It introduces several villagers, including Dom and Raymond, as well as a bunch of NPCs players of the game will encounter, such as Blathers, Tom Nook, Timmy and Tommy, Wisp the ghost, Gulliver, and more.

A little over a third of this volume is explicitly game guide stuff, paired with humorous four-panel comics - lots of ACNH character introductions (including a bunch of villagers I've never met), and gameplay tips like setting up your home, using a vaulting pole to get across rivers, catching bugs, fishing, and more.

It doesn't manage to get through everything you can do in the game (I assume this manga was published prior to the updates that added new activities), but it does get through a huge chunk of the basics, so I wonder if future volumes in this series will be more focused on Coroyuki, Benben, Himepoyo, Guchan, and their interactions with villagers.

Other than the chance to see a few villagers in action that I might never meet, there isn't a lot here to make me want to read the next volume. The humor is aimed at kids (Japanese kids, at that, so there are probably jokes lost in translation) and never really hit the mark with me. It was kind of fun seeing the characters drive Tom Nook nuts, though.