A Few Graphic Novels

I got the second Jane Foster: Valkyrie graphic novel, At the End of All Things, and the third Aquaman graphic novel, Manta Vs. Machine, from the library the other day.  I don't really have much to say about them, but I did like them better than the previous graphic novels in both series.  

At the End of All Things felt a lot more like the type of story I wanted from the Jane Foster: Valkyrie series. First there was a story where Death herself was sick.  So Jane and Stephen Strange assemble a team of doctors to go and try to cure death.  After that, shadow demons start popping up and attacking Midgard, so Jane rushes to the rescue, along with a few other Avengers.  While most of them agree to stay on Midgard and hold the demons back, Jane and Thor go to find the source of the trouble.  Unfortunately that was all part of the plan - Tyr wanted to lure Jane there in order to get Undrjarn, the All-Weapon, from her because it is the only thing that can (somewhat) control RØkkva, an ancient evil that has been sealed away for millennia, which Tyr plans on using to take control of Asgard and assume his place as All-Father.

This was fun, and if the series keeps giving stories like this, I'm definitely up for reading more!

Manta Vs. Machine was a bit all over the place.  Using the mech Lex Luthor gave him (which is programed to have the personality of his father), Black Manta assaults Amnesty Bay, wanting to get revenge against Arthur (as always).  But he attacked an Atlantean peace garden, which brought a pregnant Queen Mera into the fight.  They defeat Manta but she overtaxed herself too much and has now slipped into a coma.  I thought she was going to lose the baby, but that story ends with the princess being born albeit 4 months premature.  There are also a few other stories shoved in here, including a random one where Arthur and Mera announced their engagement (and talk about having kids or not), and another one where Arthur tries to raise the spirits of Amnesty Bay (while also getting stressed out himself? I don't know, this story was the most all over the place).

After reading this one, I'm kind of on the fence about wanting to read more in the Aquaman series right now.  I'm interested to see what happens with Mera (although with her in a coma she's going to be sidelined now, which sucks) and the new Princess, but the stuff going on in Amnesty Bay really isn't holding my attention (also, I'm sad that Tula has very much been relegated to a background role in Amnesty Bay).  The random sea gods and goddesses that Arthur brought with him to Amnesty Bay are also just kind of there right now, and I'm not really connecting with them (although the incident where the one goddess went to the supermarket and flipped out because people weren't respecting her was pretty funny).  I guess I'll see how I feel once the fourth volume comes out.

Architects of Memory

I've been waiting to read Karen Osborne's Architects of Memory, the first book in the Memory War duology, for quite some time now.  I was excited to finally get my hands on it.  I started it over the weekend and would have finished it sooner but I had to put it aside for a few days while I was doing some training for work.  Once that was finished though, I immediately picked it back up and finished it. :)

Architects of Memory follows Ashlan Jackson, a salvage pilot who is terminally ill.  She lives in a world where you sell yourself to a company in order to eventually earn citizenship with that company; unfortunately some are much worse than others, charging you for every little thing (and extending indefinitely the terms of your indenture).  For someone with a terminal illness, it's much worse because if the company finds out about it, they can cancel your contract and leave you to die.  So Ash does everything in her power to hide her illness to buy her time to finish her contract and hopefully pay for treatments.

Her salvage crew is sent to clean up the wreckage of another ship from an inter-company war; while going through her routine salvage operations, Ash discovers that there was an alien weapon on board, one powerful enough to destabilize the tenuous peace among the companies.  And for some reason, she is able to handle it...

Overall I really enjoyed Architects of Memory.  Michael R. Underwood's endorsement on the back of the book said it was for fans of Firefly and I really got that.  This was a quirky crew that overall I really enjoyed hanging out with (although I admit I would have liked to have read a bit more of them just hanging out doing their things; they get separated from each other pretty quickly). 

The world of Architects of Memory was interesting, and unfortunately could very much become reality if corporations control the means of getting into space, I could see people basically going into slavery to them to get themselves into space as well. While Ash's crew didn't seem to have hard boundaries between the indentures and citizens, it was really interesting to see how that played out on some of the other ships.  I should also mention that I liked Osborne's aliens, the Vai, as well (although I admit to some confusion on how they could have come to be...)

I do think my biggest complaint was the ending though.  It didn't really feel satisfying; I honestly thought Ash would make more of an attempt to get out to the White Line, possibly dying in the process (I also admit to not really understanding what the White Line was exactly, beyond being the border the Vai retreated to).  But as I said, overall I did enjoy the book; it's a fast paced read and I would definitely like to read the second part when I get the chance! :)

The Alice Network

After reading both The Huntress by Kate Quinn and D-Day Girls by Sarah Rose, I decided I wanted to read The Alice Network (also by Quinn).  I didn't know much about it except that it involved female spies in the World Wars, so I figured it would be an interesting read after the non-fiction D-Day Girls (plus my dad, who has read both books, kept comparing D-Day Girls to this book).  And I really enjoyed The Huntress, and was just looking forward to an all-around good read.

The Alice Network is the story of two women: Eve Gardiner, who, as a young woman, was recruited to spy on the Germans in France during WWI, and Charlotte "Charlie" St. Clare, a young pregnant American who wants to find her French cousin after WWII.  The only clue Charlie has is the name Evelyn Gardiner.  Hence the two women's worlds collide as they come to realize they may be searching for the same thing.

The Alice Network was an interesting read.  I loved the story that took place in post-WWII Europe (mostly France).  Eve and Charlie were great foils for each other (and I loved the addition of Eve's Scottish driver Finn Kilgore).  The trio are unlikely allies who slowly discover they are more alike than they thought.  I also really enjoyed Charlie coming into her own and figuring out both what she wants and how to work the system as an unmarried pregnant woman during that time (and the difficulties she encountered were eye-opening: she wasn't able to access her OWN savings without the say-so of her father, even though the money was her's).

But I had a much harder time reading Eve Gardiner's spy adventures during WWI.  The slow back and forth between her and Rene Bordelon as she attempted to keep her cover while Bordelon kept drawing her in closer never really held my interest.  And then the scene where Gardiner's hands were destroyed, while I knew that would be coming at some point, was super graphic; I had a really hard time with that.  I was much happier when Eve's story kind of caught up with Charlie's narrative in 1947.

Like in The Huntress, Quinn's characters were interesting.  I also liked how she blended fact with fiction (and I appreciated the extras included at the end of the book, like the letter from Louise de Bettignies).

Overall, I enjoyed this book, but I thought The Huntress was better.

Ukrainian Folk Stories

After reading (and getting depressed from) D-Day Girls, I decided I wanted something totally different. So I decided to give Ukrainian Folk Stories a try.  These stories were written by Marko Vovchuk in the mid 1800's, and translated into English by N. Pedan-Popil in 1983. Unfortunately, Pedan-Popil decided not to translate Vovchuk's stories for children and fables; what's left are the stories on serfdom and family live, which are overwhelmingly depressing!

Most of the stories are relatively short (the longest one, "Instytutka," was about 30 pages).  Many are about the hard life of Ukrainian serfs in the 1800's.  If they were lucky, they had a good master who rarely beat them; unfortunately the majority of these serfs had terrible masters, who beat them and verbally abused them.  There were a few stories about serfs who got their freedom, but even these often had terrible endings (I'm thinking of "The Slacker," where two women of Kozak lineage who shouldn't have been serfs get their freedom, but the daughter, who obtained their freedom, became a drunk in the process and passed away not long after becoming free; "Redemption" talked of the greed involved with masters, but thankfully has a happy ending, with a serf getting his freedom and being able to marry the Kozak woman he loved). Many of the other stories dealt with love, but often in terrible ways.  Take "Mismatched," where a woman's husband falls out of love with her, or "The Spell" (the only supernatural tale of the collection), where a woman who loves someone who does not love her back changes his betrothed into a bird so she can marry him instead (this story, which is pictured on the cover, in ways reminded me of Shadows of the Forgotten Ancestors, at least in terms of how the man marries someone he doesn't love because his true love is gone).

While depressing, these stories give an interesting look at life in 19th century Ukraine. I just wish the fables and children's stories had been translated, too (especially if they weren't as depressing as these tales were)!

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Beyond the Grid

 

I bought Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Beyond the Grid along with Shattered Grid.  I didn't know anything at all about this story (except that people who bought Shattered Grid often bought this as well). 

Beyond the Grid tells the story of various Rangers (both with and without their Morphin powers) getting pulled into another universe while aboard the Promethea ship. This universe has no access to the Morphin Grid, and so shouldn't exist.  At first they believe the dying universe is empty of life. But then they intercept a distress call.  Sending the last of those who can still Morph to investigate, the Rangers walk into a trap set by a mysterious Purple Ranger living in the Universe, who steals the power from them and their ship.  Who is this mysterious Ranger and how will our Rangers survive (and get home)?

Beyond the Grid is a tough read, particularly in the beginning.  The way the story is laid out, I had a really hard time figuring out what exactly was happening, particularly in the first few chapters (eventually I got the hang of reading it and was able to follow along a bit better).   By the end though, I found myself enjoying the story and quite invested in what was happening; everything came together really well (and pretty much everything that happened eventually made sense, which was another plus). I did have a hard time connecting with the characters though because there were so many of them (and it doesn't help that I didn't follow Power Rangers beyond the initial series on TV years ago, so I couldn't call on prior knowledge of most of the characters to help me here).

All in all, this is a very different story that followed Shattered Grid.  I didn't like it as much, but by the end I found that I did enjoy reading it.

D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II

I remember my brother mentioning to me a year or two ago that he tries to make a point of reading historical nonfiction about the World Wars for Remembrance Day.  I thought that was a great idea, and so made a point of doing the same this year.  I picked out D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II by Sarah Rose, which tells the story of some of the female spies recruited by Britain to help prepare France for the coming Allied Invasion (D-Day).

D-Day Girls mainly follows three women (as well as a few others), detailing what their lives were like, first in training, and then behind enemy lines.  The book also details the larger historical context, mainly showing the games the British agency (back in London) and the German anti-spy and terrorism agency were engaged in over the years.  I found this quite interesting, as I had no idea women were sent as saboteurs to France while the country was under Nazi control.  The book is also an interesting look at how women were treated at that time: first there was a debate about whether to send them at all (which was hindered by the fact that the women didn't do well in training, which also wasn't surprising as they received less training than their male counterparts), then there were points when men in the field refused to acknowledge their leadership (the particular instance I'm thinking of had the men, who refused to take orders from a woman, leaking information directly to the Nazis, putting everyone in danger), and finally, there was the aftermath where the women's contributions were deemed lesser than the men's even though they all did the same work (because the women weren't deemed military, and so were ineligible for military honours or full military pensions).  But it also celebrates some important firsts, such as the fact that some of these women were the first women paratroopers who dropped into enemy lines.

While interesting, D-Day Girls is unfortunately also a bit of a tough read.  For one thing, the book is largely told, with very little shown; that makes for some very tedious reading (and also made it very hard to connect with any of the people within the book).  It also goes into some detail on torture and the like; I had to stop reading after one torture description (and the ending of one of the ladies, while sparse in detail, was sufficiently disturbing that I actually considered not writing about the book because I didn't want to think about that anymore).

All in all, I am very glad to have read D-Day Girls, especially for Remembrance Day. 

The Prince and the Dressmaker

A friend at work recommended Jen Wang's The Prince and the Dressmaker to me. In it, Frances, a dressmaker working under someone (lol it reminded me a lot of The Gown in that way) makes someone exactly the sort of dress they want, to the consternation of her boss.  When he's reprimanding her, a man comes looking to hire her for a mysterious client, who Frances discovers is the Crown Prince Sebastian of Belgium. Prince Sebastian enjoys dressing in women's dresses and wants Frances to design dresses that everyone will notice and remember. Prince Sebastian starts going out on the town dressed as the Lady Crystallia, and Frances' dresses are indeed getting noticed, to the point where the pair worry people will put two and two together and figure out just who Lady Crystallia really is.

I loved this book.  Wang's art style is perfect (and I'm glad she decided to make them teenagers - she included a sample page of the pair as adults and the art just didn't have the same charm that the final version has).  I also loved how Sebastian's parents supported him in the end, especially his father; I wish that everyone could be as lucky as Sebastian was in this regard.

All in all, The Prince and the Dressmaker is a delightful story about being true to yourself and your friends. I very much recommend it!