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Graphic Novel Review: Monstress, Volume 4 by Marjorie Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda

Monstress, Volume 4: The Chosen by Marjorie Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda

Image Comics, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1534313361

Available: Paperback, Kindle, comiXology

 

Maika Halfwolf and Corvin D’Oro of the Dusk Court travel in search of the young Arcanic Kippa, who was kidnapped at the end of the third volume. Meanwhile, a forced marriage between the Dawn and Dusk Courts is being conducted, with Maika’s childhood friend Tuya marrying  Moriko Halfwolf’s ruthless twin sister and Maika’s aunt.

During their search, Maika and Corvin are abducted by Yvette Lo Lim and a mysterious man bearing the same eye symbol on his chest as Maika’s,  claiming to be her father. They are members of the newly formed Blood Court, a group led by Maika’s father, who is also known as the Lord Doctor. Maika wakes up in unfamiliar surroundings, with a prosthetic arm the Lord Doctor attached to Maika without Maika’s consent. He and the rest of the Blood Court try to convince Maika to join their cause. The Lord Doctor offers to tell her more about her childhood, as well as about Zinn, the Monstrum sharing Maika’s body, and his experience as Zinn’s former host. However, after learning of his terrible experimentations and the cannibal murders he committed that earned him the nickname “The Ghoul Killer”, she isn’t sure that she wants the answers she has been searching for after all.

Meanwhile, Kippa escapes her captors and discovers some of her own past. Her own Arcanic abilities are emerging. When she jumps into a pit running away from the abductors who are taking her to the Lord Doctor, she comes face to face with creatures that emerge from the shadows. Before they can attack her, a Dracul that resembles a giant three-eyed dragon stops them, recognizing her abilities and has conversation with Kippa about loss, slavery, and of the nature of the Monstrum.

Volume 4 collects issues 19 through 24.

Monstress is one of the few comics where I collect individual issues, and one where I find something new when I have gone back to revisit the series. The story is deep and intriguing, and it is easy to miss something in the first reading. Liu is a great storyteller, and this is one of the most intricate plots in a comic series I have ever read. Takeda’s intricate artwork is gorgeous, with character designs and creatures that are both beautiful and terrifying. There are plenty of reasons why Monstress won multiple Eisner Awards and nominated for this year’s Stoker Award Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel category.

Contains: forced marriage, sexual content

Highly recommended

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

Posted on April 18, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: The Tenth Girl by Sara Faring

The Tenth Girl by Sara Faring

Imprint, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1250304506

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

Teenage Mavi, living in Argentina under the military dictatiorship of Jorge Videla in 1978, is barely scraping by in the streets of Buenos Aires after her parents have “disappeared”.  Desperate to evade the police herself, Mavi uses forged credentials to get a job as an English teacher at the Vaccaro School, an exclusive boarding school in a huge Gothic mansion located in isolated Patagonia. Angel is a disembodied visitant from 2020 to Mavi’s time and place.

The Vaccaro School was built by the wealthy De Vaccaro family in the nineteenth century on land seized by the fictional indigenous Zapuche tribe. Mavi’s uncle explains that the Zapuche enacted bloody rituals when their land was seized. Sixty years ago, a mysterious illness reputed to have sprung from a Zapuche curse killed nearly all the residents of the Vaccaro School, and a girl had to be sacrificed to stop it. It is just now reopening. I think the author was trying to make a commentary on the damage colonialism has done to Argentina and its indigenous people, but the “Indian curse” and “savage bloody sacrifice” tropes really need to be set aside. The Zapuche being a fictional tribe means that the author lost an opportunity to bring attention to the existing problems of Argentina’s indigenous peoples.

The Tenth Girl was promoted as a Gothic psychological thriller with a twist, and for about 350 pages it hits pretty much every trope in the toolbox for a Gothic thriller, without actually having a story that goes much of anywhere. One thing that I did find interesting was the way the house seemed impossibly larger and space more disorganized on the inside than on the outside,  reminding me of the Winchester Mansion or Hill House. Sara Faring is an Argentine-American, so maybe that’s why she set the book in a remote part of Argentina, but the majority of this could have taken place in any isolated location. Faring’s descriptions of Patagonia are lovingly written, but there are too few of them, as for the majority of the book, the school’s inhabitants are trapped inside by the terrible weather. The sudden twist turned the events and characters in a completely different direction, leading to the raising of some interesting philosophical questions. However, I also felt that it cheapened the historical events chronicled in the book. I felt that the twist ending undercut the harsh realities of  Argentina’s “desaparecidos”. The twist also explained in part why the depiction of indigenous people is so problematic, but I think it was just unneccessary in the first place.  I’d love to say more about why, but that would spoil the book for potential readers.

I picked this up because it made the preliminary ballot for the 2020 Stokers in the YA category. It was a real struggle for me to stick with the book for the first 350 pages, but I’m glad I persisted. Faring’s twist ending really changed my perspective on the events and characters. I have trouble imagining many teens picking up this doorstopper and working their way through the whole thing, though.

Contains: pedophilia, self-harm, mentions of suicide, violence, gore.

Posted on February 11, 2020 by , 2 comments

Musings: Stephen King Gets Schooled on Diversity in the Media

Awards are not the end-all and be-all, but they do have meaning: libraries make purchases based on lists of award winners and recommended titles, and so do readers. When a well-regarded organization hands out an award, there is a ripple where often that book, or movie, or theater production, will also be held in high regard and rise to the top. It might even stay there decades later, after it has become dated or recognized as problematic (true of a number of early Newbery and Caldecott winners).

Many award-granting institutions have undergone upheavals in the past dozen years or so: debate over the World Fantasy Award Fantasy Award, the Sad Puppies fiasco that attempted to taint the Hugo Awards, the renaming of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, the recent cancelling of the RITA Awards. There has also been a more obvious scrutiny of the Oscars, starting with the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag. Any hope that public criticism of the Oscars’ lack of diversity would have an impact on judges’ considerations was dashed this year  as the Oscars failed to nominate any woman for Best Director, just three nominations for artists of color, and, despite acclaim for both Us and Midsommar, zero nominations from the horror genre (I’m also baffled that Frozen 2 didn’t get a nomination for Best Animated Feature: it is a gorgeous film).

I haven’t felt like the Oscars were worth my attention for years, but with Joker, The Irishman, 1917, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood racking up the nominations even I couldn’t escape the blinding whiteness and maleness of the slate. It has to make you question, are Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino really the only directors capable of making an Oscar-worthy movie? I know  women and people of color are making great movies, and that there are outstanding horror movies that deserve a look. There are stories out there being told from a fresh point of view that deserve to be seen and heard.

Author Stephen King is a judge, and decided this was the time to put himself out there and tell us:

 

I guess now that he’s won the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, he’s become on authority on what makes quality art. Which is apparently not diversity?  Twitter does not seem to agree.

He later backtracked a little, saying everyone deserves “a fair shot”, whatever that means (marginalized people start with less than a fair shot so..?). Here we’ve got an old white guy (he comes within a day of sharing a birthday with my mom, who is in her seventies) who has locked down the bestseller lists for decades.  There can’t be too many people who haven’t heard of Stephen King, read one of his books, or watched a movie adaptation. At this point in his life, could he identify a fair shot if it walked up to him and tapped him on the nose? How many promising writers could have “New York Bestselling Author” on the cover of their books if King didn’t have a permanent place there?

Stephen King is positioned in publishing in a way that he could make a big difference in making available quality work from diverse and #OwnVoices creators, maybe not so much in the movies, but definitely in fiction. My background is mostly as a K-12 librarian, and maybe you aren’t familiar with the authors for that age group, but one of the big names is Rick Riordan, who gained his recognition writing contemporary fantasy with kids who discover they are demigods from various world mythologies. Riordan was able to use his privilege as a popular, bestselling, writer to start a publishing imprint with the specific mission of finding #OwnVoices authors who have stories to tell grounded in their own mythologies and legends. Riordan is a name, but he certainly isn’t in Stephen King’s league when it comes to name recognition, number of books written, or number of copies sold. For King to say he would never consider diversity, but only quality, is a blind spot I hope is rectified by the reaction to his tweet. Because he has the ability to find and promote #OwnVoices creators in a way that most writers do not. And it would be wonderful if he did.

Posted on January 15, 2020 by , Reply
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