billyjepma's reviews
628 reviews

It feels trite to call this book a warm cup of tea, considering tea is an essential part of the story, but that’s just what it is—warm, comfortable, and lingering, like the way your skin holds the sun. As a story, it’s maybe a little slighter than I expected, but as a travelogue through another type of world and a fable on what it means to just exist, it’s pretty damn lovely.

I technically read this in two sittings, but only because I didn’t want it to end. But I’m glad I saved the last 40ish pages for tonight because they gave me the flicker of peace I needed and something that might’ve resembled hope that a better future can be possible. I’ll definitely be reading the follow-up novella before the year is over. 

I've never actually picked up an Arthur Conan Doyle story before, but this one—with its adventure-heavy focus and occasional dinosaur—is so up my alley that it seemed like a great place to start. And it was! As dated as this is (and believe me, it's dated), I'm surprised by how much fun I had with it. I can't say it's a riveting story, as the pace and general plotting prioritize steady build-ups over thrills. But there are the occasional thrills, and the sense of discovery, while muted than our modern expectations would lead us to expect, still carries enough genuine excitement to make the journey worth taking. Professor Challenger is a fantastically hatable character, too, and is so far up his own ass that his unceasing arrogance becomes a farcical delight instead of a total annoyance. He feels like the antithesis of Sherlock Holmes, with his burly physique and fiery temper giving his untapped ego and intellect a wholly different vibe than the one Holmes is famous for. He's definitely a character I loved to hate and hated to love. 

The characters are a mixed bag overall, but the core adventurers have enough variety in their quirks that I never disliked anyone (well, not more than intended, anyway). It's too bad the POV character is the weakest link, as his empty personality and iffy-at-best opinion of women tested my patience more than once. There are other areas of friction, though, as the book is a relic of the era and, as can be expected, is littered with unsubtle racism, sexism, and a general air of Western Exceptionalism that's so pervasive it feels almost parodic. I knew to expect all that going in and had my guard up and ready for those less-than-pleasant aspects, which helped me power through to get to the parts I liked. I can't say it's a book I can heartily recommend, but I enjoyed my time with it (although I wish my audiobook had a better narrator) and am glad I took the time to give it a go.

A very solid series continues to be a very, very solid series. Despite being one of the less "big push" books that Tynion has/is putting out, I think it's becoming his best ongoing work. The plotting is so strong, the worldbuilding is growing at the perfect tempo, and I'm surprisingly into Erica Slaughter as a character despite starting the series ambivalent toward her. This particular arc having a slightly larger ensemble also works for me, especially since it gives an intentionally obtuse character like Erica some other personalities to play off of. I know Tynion likes his large casts, but I think he's at his best when they're on a smaller scale like this. My one gripe is how abruptly each volume ends—the 15-issue story arc structure works narratively, but as a release strategy, it chops up the pacing. I'm not sure what the solution is, but right now, I usually wait over a year for all the issues in an arc to come out before I read any of them. 

But hey, I'm not opposed to the series being a yearly treat I can look forward to because it really is a fun, pulpy, exciting book to pick up. Dell'Edera's art is only getting better, too. He's doing some of my favorite layouts in an ongoing series right now, and I love how cinematic he frames each scene. Everything from action to horror to dialogue has a visual tempo that makes the pages fly by. I feel similarly about Muerto's colors, which have received a major boost from the daytime setting of these last several volumes. The darker pages are good, but I love some sunlit horror, and this book has the goods in that category. 

If you can imagine something that combines the vibes of drinking Mountain Dew at a sleepover with the feeling of starting a new grade at school, you'll have a pretty solid idea of what to expect from Paper Girls.

It's as messy as any time travel story, and like most of them, it doesn't have the most satisfying ending to tie up all the timey-wimey threads that crisscross the millenniums. However, it is a vibrant, wonderfully realized coming-of-age adventure filled with just as much pulpy genre shenanigans as it is heartfelt interpersonal drama around self-actualization and all the anxieties associated with it. Big feelings, sensational colors, rich relationships—yeah, of course I loved it.

I still don't love Vaughan's writing quite as much as I want to, but this might be some of the better plotting I've seen from him. Every issue has a great hook, whether a new twist, bit of characterization, or amazing artwork (Chiang is so good, it's unreal), and the zippy pacing helps each escalation go down smoothly, no matter how ambitious it is. Even Vaughan's penchant for shock-and-awe pays off since the time travel aspects let him loop back around the timeline and give early twists more depth after the fact. 

And most importantly, I really love the characters. You can raise an eyebrow at the entire creative team being men—and you'd be valid in doing so—but the characterizations feel rich and lived-in. Their various quirks and bouts of irreverence (which any reader of Vaughan's will recognize) come off as authentic to adolescents dealing with shit they don't understand, and I appreciate how Vaughan doesn't shy away from giving the story a sappy heart of gold underneath its exciting antics. Chiang's expressive art carries it all across the finish line, with colors and reactions that make every page a joy to read. He kills it with the spectacle, but it's his subtler character work that ultimately made me fall in love with the book's punk-rock nostalgia and neon-colored sentimentalities.

For the first 50-100 pages, I was assuredly in this book's corner. The writing was snappy, the setting sharp, and the looming threat of something sinister palpable. It had me in the palm of its hand, and then only intermittently, and then not at all. Some of that degradation is due to the rises and falls of the suspense, which could be tiresome to wade through since Hendrix doesn't give his reader any space to second-guess the facts of what's happening in the story, lessening the suspense somewhat. It's a narrative decision I want to admire, and I did initially since it firmly places the women driving the story in the right. But after that story humiliated or tortured them for the umpteenth time, I struggled to see the point. 

There are hints of promise, specifically in the strength of female friendship and solidarity, but Hendrix's writing is so rooted in a shallow faux-feminism that it sabotages the book at every turn. For one thing, he can't help but describe women's bodies in detail, even when the context would make such specificity frivolous at best. It's a symptom of a larger problem, though, and only gets worse as the story approaches the climax, where Hendrix resorts to the threat of sexual violence or the act itself to ramp up the tension in ways I found to be distasteful. The book wants to paint a picture of how men have historically abused women, treating them like objects or tools for their pleasure or pursuit of power. I'm all for that, especially in a "vampire" period piece like this. But when that book also has a habit of treating its women the same way as the men it condemns, any semblance of commentary quickly deteriorates.

It doesn't help that the characters are predominantly defined by their genders and the traits stereotypically associated with them. Those aren't bad traits for a character to have, mind you, but I struggle to believe that women in the era were exclusively defined by their roles as wives and mothers. The insistence on defining all these characters by different shades of those characteristics was disappointing, especially since Hendrix failed to give the women any interior lives or depth beyond the basest impulses projected onto them. At the very least, though, he knows his way around the genre, and his fast-paced, zippy writing makes this an easy page-turner. He also has a knack for setting up nail-biting scenarios that gross you out just as much as they keep you flipping pages. Granted, some of those scenarios end up falling into the same problems I had with the rest of the book, but the build-up was there, at least. If Hendrix had more self-awareness about his limits and strengths, this could've been a pulpy banger of a book, but alas.

None of these problems are unique to this book, though—I recognize many of his worst impulses from some of Stephen King's earlier works, alongside plenty of other male horror writers. But we (meaning white men like myself) can do better than this, and it's frustrating when I find books that seem to tell me otherwise.

we should normalize reading bedtime stories with your spouse before going to sleep. bedtime stories (this one in particular, which I would’ve been obsessed with as a kiddo and am still kind of obsessed with today) are great.

Like many, I wanted to be a zoologist or paleontologist as a kid. While that drive went away (somewhat) when I later realized I might not be wired for those careers, that love and curiosity for the natural world (past and present) never left. And after reading Yong’s book, I’ve started to wonder if maybe I should try rewiring my brain so it can live in the world of science, discovery, and mystery that he writes about in this book because I didn’t want to leave it. 

This is a dense book, with lots of vocabulary words and heady scientific concepts and theories—some I recognized from my school days, many were new to me—that I usually had to limit myself to a chapter at a time or else run the risk of not fully absorbing the material. But don’t get me wrong; Yong’s writing is very readable, even lovely, at times. My occasional forays into books of this ilk usually satisfy whatever curiosity brought me to them but don’t often satisfy the reader who values compelling writing. Yong’s book did both. This being a broader exploration of fields of study and creatures certainly helps with the approachability, but I never felt shorted by any of the sections. Yong eases you into the science, provides plenty of notes and asides for additional context, and leaves you with enough takeaways to feel like you’ve learned something important while also knowing how much more there is to know. And, most importantly, he’s just a good writer with something to share and say. I’ll be recommending this book to anyone who will listen for the foreseeable future. 

As much as the setting awakens the archeologist I imagined myself growing up to be as a kid, the writing and plotting are too familiar, too reliant on tropes and drawn-out tensions to fully capture my attention. Admittedly, I'm not the target demographic for this, as it's far more of a YA-read than I expected going in, so feel free to take my opinion with a grain of salt. That said, I read and love quite a bit of YA, and I still struggled to connect with Inez as a protagonist. I found her consistent aloofness more frustrating than endearing, and the characterizations as a whole rely so heavily on well-trodden tropes that they never quite find a personality of their own. It doesn't help that the biggest "twist" of the story is incredibly obvious and painfully belabored. I have no problem with a predictable twist—many of the best ones are!—but this one is especially easy to see coming and takes so long to reveal itself that it plays out with little fanfare or impact.

There is some solid commentary around Inez's class affording her certain privileges, and I appreciate how Ibañez leans into the sexist rules society was forced to abide by at the time. Ultimately, the book's historical accuracy (or inaccuracy, when appropriate) is one of its greatest assets. In its best moments, the book is almost immersive because it thoroughly places you in the setting, encouraging you to see the world as Inez does—big, mysterious, and full of promise. And once the book finds its momentum in the final stretch, it really starts coming alive. The archeological-adventure elements finally show themselves, and perhaps most importantly, the romance begins to generate some genuine heat. Both characters still come off as thinly sketched fantasies, but they find enough of a spark that I want to see where their dynamic goes next, especially if it revels in the pulpy melodrama of it more, which the tease at the end seems to suggest it will.

It's too bad that this nearly 400-page book amounts to 2/3s of a story, but credit where credit is due: I'm absolutely picking up the sequel later this year. There's quite a bit of charm here, and with the more genre-heavy elements seemingly primed to take more of the spotlight in the next chapter, I'm excited to see where it could go. I hope Ibañez leans into the fantasy angle because it's one of the most interesting ideas she plays with here, and I want to see more of it.