book review: freshman: tales of 9th grade obsessions, revelations, and other nonsense

Corinne Mucha’s comic Freshman was a lot of fun. It did the whole Grade 9 experience in short stories (usually 2-5 pages) following four friends. There are crushes and a band is formed, all the regular high school kind of stuff. The only weird aspect was that they used the word hockey to mean field hockey, but I guess not everyone can be Canadian. I guess.

The short story aspect made it feel much more like regular school, rather than some epic tale. It’s broken into three seasons with the first chunk being about getting used to high school, then the winter section is taken up with stories around the big musical, and then in spring everyone is getting ready for dances and other relationshippy things. This is a book about being in school, but isn’t about classes by any means.

I found Mucha’s art very ziney & charming. This felt like the kind of thing a 15 year old could have been making, but with more perspective than being right in the middle of things.

Anyway, I’m completely bringing it the next time I go booktalking at the middle school. It’s a good peek into their futures.

books review: the revolution business, the trade of queens

It’s weird that a science fiction series that ends with a huge American nuclear attack on a fantasy world feels like it petered out, rather than built up to a grand huge climax, but that’s how the final couple of books (The Revolution Business and The Trade of Queens in Charles Stross’ Merchant Princes series felt to me. I’ve talked before about how each book felt like it was only a small part of a bigger story and the thing as a whole is probably what should be judged. But well, now that I’m done I have to say I can’t really recommend this series. Charles Stross has way better stuff out there.

What I did like about these books was the use of actual American politics in dealing with the revelation of other worlds. The books were set in the mid 2000s and the American administration at the time is used to full effect. There are stolen nukes and terrorist attacks and not creating fictional politicians to deal with that, but using the real characters helped.

Sadly, the story just kind of flops along. Miriam was pregnant with the heir to the throne in Gruinmarkt and then she has a convenient miscarriage and the nobles hide in a refugee camp in the other world, and everything is generally unsatisfying. Stross seems to have had a good time planning out the nuclear bomber wave, and that chunk of the final book was my favourite since the economic thinking from the first two books.

That’s what really got me about this series. The cool concept of these parallel worlds and the realistic way characters reacted to it by figuring out how to make a better living, well that gets lost along the way. Maybe it would have worked better if the books had jumped bigger timeline gaps so the economic stuff had more time to develop. I don’t know.

So my advice is to read the first two books of the series (The Family Trade and The Hidden Family) and stop there.