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The Complete ElfQuest, Volume One by Wendy Pini

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


My volume was printed so long ago I couldn't even find it on GR. This story ushered me into my first shared fandom experience back in the early 1980s and I just reread for the first time in decades to fulfill a reading challenge. I was nervous because how often do we reread something from childhood only to wonder what was I thinking?

Happily this is not the case with EQ. Yes a few things hit different in my 50s than it did in my tween years but I'll get into that later. This has been part of my life for so long and there aren't many fandoms that can manage this. Wendy Pini's art is outstanding. Sure I have no idea why Cutter only got a fur vest when others got actual clothing (we'll assume 'superhero clothing') but the details in this work are amazing.

Cutter and the Wolfriders get run out of their woodland home by hostile humans and end up losing hope underground until the cave system leads them to a desert town filled with elves who have knowledge the shorter lived, more violent by circumstances Wolfriders have about their own people..

The drama comes from Cutter recognizing Leetah, the village healer and daughter of the chief. Recognizing means the joining of the two souls. Cutter is all for it. Leetah on the other hand wants a choice in who she mates with not to mention Cutter has a rival in Rayek, who ironically is closer to the Wolfrider mentality than anyone else.

So the remainder of the story is how do the Wolfriders fit in and will Cutter win Leetah's heart. It's a good story. It has good pacing. It has good characters and I still love it after all these years.

The things that hit differently... actually both of these things hit me wrong back in my teens but even worse now. I don't like recognition all that much. If you don't obey it, you get sick and potentially die. But it also means you have zero choice in who you're having kids with (and make no mistake this was 100% hetero cis normative but it was also done for teens in the 1970s so that isn't a surprise). Yes some couples do live and have kids together without it but if it happens there's no choice. I found it creepy back then and creepier now.

And then there's Strongbow. I didn't much like him as a kid and I really dislike him now. It might have sailed over my head back then (but probably not). When Leetah doesn't want to immediately accept Cutter, Strongbow's solution is 'just take her to heck with what she wants.' Yeah, thanks for advising sexual assault to your leader. But that's the only sour note (however, it's a big one)

I should go back and reread my other bound volumes. I didn't get all the way to the end of the series back in the day but I do have a good chunk of it.




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The Queen of Blood by Sarah Beth Durst

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This one got lost for a long time in my vast TBR pile which is a shame because I really ended up enjoying it with one world building issue in my head. renthia is a world where humans and spirits must share the land. In theory the spirits refuse to work with humans but if spirits are destroyed trees, water, fire etc die or just don't work because the spirits control it (can you see my world building issue? that's not how water and fire work) However, the spirits hate humans and will try to kill them (so I am curious if this is addressed in other books)

Daleina (one of three point of view characters, the others being the disgraced champion Ven and the current queen Fara) was one of the only people to survive a spirit attack on her home thanks to her power. Her family encourages her to go to the academy that trains women to take over as queen some day (so it has dark academia vibes).

Daleina quickly realizes she's no where near as strong as the other possible heirs but she keeps on training, making friends until one day Ven sees in her something the other champions didn't as they passed on making her their potential heir. He takes her on, training her physically and magically, playing into her strength: she can convince the spirits to do something they want to do (which usually is to build)

But at the heart of it all is Fara, the queen, one of the most powerful ever seen but nothing about her is what it seems.

I liked the story but I liked the ending a bit less, seemed too...easy in a way. I liked that when Daleina is injured there are consequences. Nothing comes free. I liked that it was a female forward fantasy which we are finally starting to see more often.



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The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor by Shaenon K. Garrity

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was super cute. Haley is a book nerd, specifically gothic romance, to the point her English teacher is in the process of forbidding her from doing another paper on gothic romance when we drop into the story. A disappointed Haley is cycling home wondering what to do about this when she spots a man in the river and jumps in to save him.

Only to find herself through the portal into a pocket universe which is entirely the titular Willowweep Manor and its surroundings. Everyone here is locked into their gothic romance tropes including Laurence the surly eldest son, Montague (the one she tried to rescue) as the hotheaded middle son and Cuthbert as the feckless fool.

Haley is over the moon to live inside her favorite genre until she realizes how annoying life before plumbing is or how danger is more fun to read than to live through (relatable) The brothers' job is to keep this pocket universe intact as it's the wall between Haley's reality (i.e. our world) and a universe of evil. So naturally we have an evil entity inside of Willowweep trying to end it and the brothers and Haley have to save it.

Armed with the brothers, the ghost of willow weep (only she can see/hear) and Wilhemina the maid, Haley is over her head, especially since she's locked into the role of Maiden. Not content with needing rescues as The Maiden, Haley asks, what if we break the rules?

The art is very cute and Haley is especially fun. There is a lot of deadpan humor in this and while I'm fairly over portal fantasies this one worked so very well. I know there is more to the series and I will definitely be tracking it down.



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Anima Rising by Christopher Moore

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I won this one from Goodreads. I'll admit it I have a love/hate relationship with what is essentially professional real person fanfic and it's usually hate. This was somewhere in between and a 3.5 read for me but I rounded up. Honestly had I gotten this from the library I might have DNFed it not that it's bad in any way but it's not really my sort of story (though I thought it would have been).

CW - murder, domestic violence/rape (basically the Bride of Frankenstein is depicted as a sexual assault survivor)

It's as weird as I've come to expect from Moore and the tag line Klimt, Freud and Jung meet the Bride of Frankenstein is what sold it for me in requesting this arc.. And it's more than just those three real people in this. There is also Egon Schiele, Wally Neuzil, Emilie Floge and Alma Mahler to name a few. The problem for me in any real person fictional story about them is how well do I know them and how well do I think the author did. But outside of Freud and Jung, I knew very little. I know Gustav Klimt's art (and love it) and some about Alma. Never heard of the others including Schiele (after looking at his art I can see why. Not my thing).

The story opens with Klimt finding Judith as she comes to be called in the canal, naked and apparently dead and he takes her home. Judith (Adam's bride) revives and is more or less insane. Klimt puts his model Wally in charge of watching over her. That same day a Dutch policeman is also found in that same canal, headless.

As Judith is slowly recovering her sanity, we get interspersed chapters of the captain's log of the ship that took Victor Frankenstein to the arctic and Adam (the monster) finding them. It also details how Judith was created via Frankenstein's serum/blood and it heals any injury).

Once Judith can communicate, insisting she's been murdered four times, Klimt takes her to Freud (who eventually consults with Jung) and in his sessions we get Judith's history about being created as a sex slave for Adam (since she hadn't chosen to be a wife which seems like a valid take on the situation) She details his abuse (he's angry she's pretty when he isn't) and how they survived at the top of the world)

In the meantime, someone is tracking Judith with the intent of kidnapping her. This is actually the main threat in the novel and shaped the entire ending in a way that worked very well.

Those three subplots are why I went as high as four stars and here is why I almost didn't. It's overly long. A lot of the scenes started to feel repetitive and the scenes with Wally Klimt and Egon were all nothing but sex talk. I'm not a prude by any means and if these scenes had advanced the plot more I would complain less. On the other hand if I had to hear about Egon's sister's snatch one more time (or anyone's snatches because they talked about them ALL so much) I was ready to hurl the book across the room. This included talking about them/showing the erotic art to children which did actually happen in real life.

One of the things I liked a lot was after the epilogue, Moore gave us the real history (briefly of course) of all the real people in this novel and where he took liberties with the time line). I enjoyed that.

Overall it's a well written book and I loved that the art work of these artists made it into this book (which seems fitting because the Nazis destroyed so much of Klimt's art)



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The Mushroom Knight Vol. 1 by Oliver Bly

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The art in this is a hardcore 4 star. Bly knocks it out of the park artistically. It's the storyline where this graphic novel falters. (also CW, on-page death of an animal and on-page bullying of a young girl)

Gowlirot is a sentient mushroom knight riding into the human (giant) realm on his beloved steed, Hopalong the frog. They were tracking a missing faerie only to come up against dark magic, death and betrayal. During the course of this, Gowlirot sees a young girl Leumelle looking for her lost dog, Bean, in the woods. He is forced to borrow something.

Barely surviving his mission, he has to go back to find this girl again and return what he borrowed from her (which was weird and didn't make a whole lot of sense). Meanwhile she's putting up posters all over town in her attempt to find Bean and we see her withdrawing from things she loves as bullying over her weight and glasses ramps up with her peers.

The problem is, Gowlirot hasn't met a sentence he wants to complete. I think Bly tried a little too hard to make him non-human with non-human speech but ended up with a lot of nonsense sentences (not to mention misspelling grisly as grizzly on the first few panels...) So it ends up disjointed, hard to follow and we're not sure what his mission fully is or what it going on in the worldbuilding side of things.. It got a bit better at the end but I'm not sure if that's because it's more with Lem than it is with Gowlirot or is the story finally becoming cohesive.



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Dinghai Fusheng Records Vol. 1 by Fei Tian Ye Xiang

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


So many of my friends have gotten into danmei and the books sitting there on the shelves being all chunky and pretty that I reluctantly bought one. I say reluctantly because as much as I love LGBT stories I find Japanese Boys Love subgenre to be not to my tastes and I feared the Chinese version would be the same. I was unfortunately right. I prefer my LGBT stories to feel more authentic and respectful and not some female gaze driven fantasy. This is a hundred percent the latter.

Don't get me wrong, the art is beautiful and the story isn't bad. It's just not to my tastes in LGBT literature. It has an interesting premise. Chen Xing a 16 year old boy is one of the last exorcists in the land and he knows he's predestined to die at age 20 (thanks for nothing, fates) His task is to find his preordained protector which might just be Xiang Shu, currently incarcerated for crimes he might not have committed (and I wish both men were as exciting as the blurb made them sound. Hint: they're not. Shu being engimatic means he hardly has a speaking role and he's an absolute Alphahole).

Chen is following the only magic he has a heart lamp which glows and....that's it. In theory it glows when his protector is near and some of the demons fear the light. And that's the whole plot. If Chen and Xiang don't do their thing (whatever that is, it's not clear) demons will reenter the world and Chen obviously doesn't want this. He finds Xiang and frees him but since this historical period of China is all about the warring warlords Xiang easily runs off and we spend the entire book trying to catch back up to him.

Chen would have been lost except for Feng Qianjun a supposed assassin pretty boy who helps Chen find Xiang for....reasons I guess. He also just disappears at one point so subtly I had to go back looking to see what happened.

The whole thing is mostly Chen throwing info dumps like they're confetti. It has a good idea but it's bogged down in repetition and Xiang being a black hole of a character. And as pretty as the art is all the important characters have very similar pretty boy looks making it hard to tell them apart and the soldier grunts are just as interchangeable.

I don't think this will be a bad series but I know it's not for me and at the cost of the paperbacks (I prefer paper for sequential art stories) I don't think I'll be continuing.



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In Hell We Fight! Volume 1 by John Layman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The title grabbed me from the library's graphic novel shelf. My local comic book shop is light on Image comics so I missed this because it is right up my alley. As the title suggests we're in hell, following the afterlives of a handful of young adults. They're lead by Midori who was raised by a Yakuza leader who was also demon possessed until she stood up to him and died. She's the group's bad ass and demon hater. Xander was, based on the art, a young man of color in the southern swamps later 1800s/early 1900s who hated frogs, killed them until a frog demon drowned him and now he barfs up the water he drowned in plus stuff discarded in said water, sometimes even useful stuff. Ernie I feel sorry for who is only in hell because he was murdered by a cursed axe which sticks out of his head (and they can pull it free as many times as they need to arm themselves as another ax takes its place) and Balphie the group's dumb friend, son of a powerful demon.

They're just roaming around hell when they decide to steal an ice cream truck (for the ice cream) but inside is someone far more interesting than ice cream. With their new friend, they decide they might just storm the gates of heaven. Unfortunately for them everyone else wants that truck and the person inside it for their own power.

As expected there's plenty of fighting and mild/moderate gore. The art style fits the story (even if it's a bit gritty for my tastes.) The characters and adventures are interesting enough. The end of this volume was packed with mini stories from various anthologies. I enjoyed it enough that I'm looking forward to the next volume.



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The Sacrificers, Vol. 1 by Rick Remender

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I struggled to rate this one a 3.5 for me but I rounded down but maybe I shouldn't have. It's a grimdark setting and I've been losing my taste for this. The back cover is covered with accolades so it's a me thing I'm sure. I didn't find it beautiful. I didn't find the art that beautiful either, intriguing yes, beautiful, not really.

The titular Sacrificers are children so there's your content warning: child abuse, child sacrifice, kidnapping, gore.

Families of the realm have to give up a child, their Sacrificer to keep the gods happy. THe story opens with Pigeon (if he has a name I don't remember, but his race look like humanoid pigeons) being beat by his father the day before he's taken away for sacrifice and the point of view bounces between three main contingents, Pigeon, Soluna who is the daughter of the Sun and Moon gods and all pov of all the gods.

It is time for the yearly sacrifice which renews the gods and ensures a good year for the people. Pigeon is resigned to his fate, assuming he'll die. He meets another sacrificer, a young woman who believes in her role, relishes it and tries to assure the rest of them that it will be all right. Soluna on the other hand is entirely affluent and spoiled, saying often that she always gets what she wants.

And she forces that at the festival of the gods, putting her on a collision course with the sacrifices and what is really going on with the gods. It's creepy. I don't particularly like seeing young people gas lighted and harmed.

The story, however is well paced and well told. Would I read more? Well I got this from the library so if they had more then yes. If I had to buy it, then probably not.



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Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A solid 3.5 read but rounded up thanks to the absolutely gorgeous illustrations throughout. I thought this story had potential and it has a definite fairytale feel to it, however the end especially had some odd choices I didn't care for.

C.W. straight up couple of on-page murders and one of the pets doesn't make it (not a dog but still)

Christopher has been sent to his grandfather's in Scotland for the summer by his overprotective father (his mother has passed) and when he saves a baby griffin, he learned that his family are the gatekeepers for The Archipelago, the islands where all the magic in the world has retreated to.

Mal is a young orphan girl who has a flying coat and she lives with an elderly relative until The Murderer shows up.

When Christopher crosses over into Mal's world as she's on the run from the Murderer, she becomes his guide to this magical place. It's choked full of creatures from various mythologies and it's dying as a world. The Immortal - the caretaker of magic - hasn't been reborn in a century and the magic is fading or being taken. THe more vicious of folklore being are getting a foot hold.

As Christopher tries to help Mal keep one step ahead of being killed they are aided by a scientist who no one listens to (sort of a stab at the climate change deniers) and she's starting to fall for the sea captain berserker who becomes the kids' main way of transport.

Once the Murderer's motives are revealed which up ends Mal's world, she has her own spiral of denial that Christopher helps her through. They have become good friends and honestly it's an interesting take on the chosen one trope up to the last quarter.

Mal loses her agency to Christopher until the very last minute and I was rather annoyed by that. Over all however, Christopher and Mal are interesting characters and the art really is lovely.



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Seeker by Samuel Griffin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I struggled to rate this. It's a solid 3.5 and I was going to go with three stars but I had a death in the family during my reading of this and thought maybe that's coloring my impression so I rounded up. I very much enjoyed the beginning of the story and the world Griffin built through Shay Bluefaltlow's eyes (she's our pov character). On the other hand right at the 50% mark things go sideways and the contrivance in order to make that happen annoyed me to the point of almost not finishing it.

Shay is a young lady growing up in an orphanage when she is selected for a form of indentured servitude by an older surgeon who also has a young deaf boy in his employ. He treats her well and spends a lot of time and energy into educating her, even indulging her curiosity about the theater and this serves to show us Shay's biggest character flaw.

She is very impetuous and thinks she knows better than everyone around her. This first time it brings her to meet the Archivist, a woman who is now a few hundred years old and documents The Sentinels, these ancient arcane creatures who we do not get to know as well as we should have so that was a disappointment. However, how the archivist tracks and records them is super cool. The Archivist is behind her selection and Shay is off to a new adventure and a good life.

At the 50% mark we have three very stupid mistakes by Shay. Had it just been one of them it might have been easier for the rest of the story to go down (and it doesn't help that I can think of other ways for this to have happened without Shay being dumber than a sack of hammers and there is only so much I can write off as 'she's young') One is Shay is poor and has a large portwine stain birthmark on her face so she's not going to fit in to the high society crowd well and wanting to allows someone to use that against her and betray the Archivist (which is necessary for the plot)

That I could forgive. Without being spoilery the one that bothered me was this potion the Archivist (and Shay as her apprentice) need and when Shay finds a different concoction to do it rather than tell her mentor she just uses herself and her mentor as guinea pigs. This was nearly a deal breaker.

The middle of this book is problematic. We have the betrayal and Shay's reaction to it but the time line becomes very muddy. How long before it's known? How long does she stay drunk? How long between the betrayal and the climax? It's mysterious and repetitive and honestly needed edited tighter. This is where I nearly DNFed.

The ending is much better. I do wish that The Sentinels were better defined but the ending was satisfying. GR has this as book one. It is complete as a one shot which is also nice however there is obviously room for more storytelling in this world.

I liked Shay but I did want to like her better. Her I know better than anyone attitude bugged me and her refusal to talk to anyone about stuff most people would have also annoyed (that is a trope that is really getting on my last nerve, that refusal to communicate in order to create drama trope)



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