fantasy

“Witches of Brooklyn: What the Hex?!” by Sophie Escabasse

December 5, 2021 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Soph

A playful graphic novel about witches in Brooklyn with an underlying message about building friendship through patience and conversation. The cast of characters is delightfully multi-racial, as is fitting for New York, and young Effie’s grandmothers are more notable for being witches than for being a couple. In fact their relationship is left a little vague, but they’re probably not just housemates.

The drawings of people are expressive and funny and the backgrounds are full of Brooklyn details.

I was just going to look at the first few pages, and got pulled into reading the whole thing. Recommended!

Available at Amazon.

“The Magic Fish” by Trung Le Nguyen

December 5, 2021 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Soph

What a lovely, powerful graphic novel. Tien is growing up in the US with Vietnamese immigrant parents. He speaks mostly English, and they speak mostly Vietnamese. It’s a close, loving family and they read fairy tales together when they have time. The graphic novel interweaves slant-wise takes on three familiar fairy tales with Tien’s adventures in high school and as he struggles to communicate important truths about himself to his parents.

The art is gorgeous. Fairy tale dresses are especially elaborate, and the end of the book contains notes on the time periods the dresses are drawn from. The one thing I found confusing is that something about the proportions of the characters made them look younger to me. Tien looked like a much younger child, and his mom looked like his teen older sister, even though the story communicates that Tien is in high school and his mom is in her 30s.

The love in the book makes me cry, along with the difficult times around immigration and grief, conveyed with kindness. Highly recommended!

Content notes: brief homophobia, not endorsed by the author, and fairy tale violence.

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Wood Wife” by Terri Windling

October 26, 2021 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Tor.com

I read this book many years ago, and remember being disappointed, because it wasn’t the kind of lyrical fantasy I was used to. Reading it again now that I’m older than the protagonist, I can see how skillfully relationships between the characters are portrayed. It’s beautifully written and lovingly portrays the Sonoran desert.

And it’s still not my type of book. It uses death and domestic violence as intensifiers, and the mystery is tied up neatly at the end, along with the characters’ lives. While I agree with the author’s message about the need to protect the natural world from endless cookie cutter suburban development, the lectures fall heavily from the characters’ mouths.

This book is part of a four-book series inspired by Brian Froud faery paintings. “Something Rich and Strange” by Patricia McKillip also had an author’s message that weighed heavily on the book. I’ve read the third book, “The Wild Wood” by Charles de Lint, but hadn’t heard of the fourth book from the series, “Hannah’s Garden” by Midori Snyder.

Available at bookshop.org.