50.
Title: [Extraordinary X-Men: X-Haven]
Author: Lemire and Ramos
Genre: Comics
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: Purchased
Date Completed: May 2016
Rating: **

The subject of "Punk Storm," as I know her (or "mohawk Storm," as the comic shop clerk called her) first came to my attention when I was researching Storm cosplay and crossplay for a PhD course. At the time my object of study was the cosplay itself, and not the comic, so I spent my time researching backstories and reading images of fan productions. Now, with a few weeks of actual leisure time before me, I decided to seek out the stories in their original forms, and walked into the comic store saying (literally), "I need her in my life."  This time, though, the store recommendation did not meet my expectations. In X-Haven, Ororo is the headmistress of the famous school, and is facing down a series of exterior threats to mutant kind, as per the conflict that is familiar to any X-text. Given my limited experience with X-Canon, I had a very difficult time putting things in place; luckily my past research into narrative arcs prepared me for, for example, "Old Man Logan and young Jean Grey," but the story itself would have made next to no sense without that research. The excessive use of dimension transcendence and time travel leads to a sloppy story full of holes and an excess of expressive emotion over character development - what takes the whole book to establish could have been much more deftly done, and with greater interest, if layered with (forgive the pun) a sense of humanity and interiority.

ComicVine.com is quoted on the cover as saying, "A good place for new readers to jump on..." which is grossly inaccurate - those who have a passing understanding of these characters from other popular media (i.e. films and cartoons) will have no clear idea what is going on, and will struggle to put the pieces together as they race through the melodrama. If one is familiar with the larger narrative this book may be more satisfying; however, this is not a "place ... to jump on" for anyone who really wishes to engage with the characters.


50.
Title: [A Discovery of Witches]
Author: Deborah Harkness
Genre: Fantasy
Medium: Hardcover
Acquisition: Library Book
Date Completed: 352 pages read
Rating: **

A Discovery of Witches is the first novel in a trilogy which follows a plain, grounded young woman who magically captures the interest of a stunning and elusive ancient vampire who finds himself powerlessly drawn to protect her, despite over a thousand years of control and autonomy. He frequently threatens her with the aggressive poetry of his vampiric existence, and she stubbornly refutes all who stand in the way of what she claims can be nothing other than love.

Sound familiar?*

Unlike Twilight, which is in one sense a guide for accepting emotionally-abusive relationships, the protagonist Diana Bishop (of the Salem line) truly has a mind of her own (academically, at least), which she exercises enthusiastically through her research into the history of science and medieval alchemical texts.  A brilliant PhD with accolades to spare, Diana finds herself in Oxford conducting research, when she calls a text which seems to have a mind of its own - especially to her (largely suppressed) witch's instincts. Determined to stand by a resolution to avoid magic, a theme that is painstakingly detailed int he book itself, Diana send the book back, unintentionally bringing down the attention of a horde of supernatural creatures who have sought the text for decades, believing it was lost forever. Matthew is one such creature, and shoe-horns his way into her life and trust in search of the book, which he believes holds the secret to their supernatural existence, a question that has informed his genetic research since the nineteenth-century (at least. Perhaps longer? I can no longer remember).

Though I have a deep love of both history and vampires, I had much less for this book, which I found to be poorly paced and overly developed. Though threats, movements, and action are named, most of the 300+ pages I read took place in Diana's thoughts, with only the suggestion of things happening over there. In trying to be both a fantasy novel and an historical novel the book became neither, plodding through historical trivial and assertions of intelligence, stepping once in awhile to vaguely supernatural territory.  As I have two dear friends who devoured the trilogy, I'm willing to wager that I'm too much of a "fantasy" (horror) and historical (rather than historical fiction) reader to enjoy what Harkness has done.  Having read a short novel's worth and maintaining next to no interest I decided it was best for me to move on.


* Twilight is first published in 2005, and A Discovery of Witches is published in 2011. Although Wikipedia sites a newspaper article in which the authors claims to have never read Twilight (or other popular vampire texts), the resemblance in character dynamics can easily have come from a general awareness of the media franchise. Likewise, given her role as a female academic, I think it's probable she's familiar with at least the feminist critique of the romantic relationship of the series, which may have, at least subconsciously, informed her own writing.


51.
Title: [The Bullet-Catcher's Daughter]
Author: Rod Duncan
Genre: Fantasy
Medium: paperback
Acquisition: Library Book
Date Completed: June 9, 2016
Rating: **

The most creative and engaging aspect of this novel was the cover, over which the author likely had no control nor influence. Elizabeth Barnabas, having fled The Kingdom under the threat of sexual slavery, comes to operate as a private intelligencer in The Republic, utilizing her skills as a transvestite from a youth spent in a travelling show to secure the confidence of customers and the social freedoms of a man in a purportedly nineteenth-century influenced puritanical society. When a creditor threatens to repossess her beloved houseboat, Elizabeth is forced to accept a suspicious assignment to track down a Kingdom aristocrat who fled with a circus with the officials of the all-powerful Patent Office on his, and a mysterious contraption's, tail. Seeing not just the possibility of a mortgage, but the potential to return to the Kingdom a free woman, Elizabeth bullishly follows every lead, and finds herself in frequent hot water.

Elizabeth Barnabas has all the charisma of her traveling case. That is to say, her one distinguishing characteristic, and skill, is her life as a frequent transvestite and her assertion that she transforms into a twin brother in only two minutes (clearly the author has little technical experience with corset busks, breast bindings, or nineteenth-century clothes in general). Though there may be some use in creating an Everywoman protagonist, allowing for the reader's projection of self, there is so little personality in Elizabeth that she becomes a cardboard waif, generating just as much care. The false Victoriana is a drudgery, without the charm and nuance of the real thing, and lacking the fantastical delights of steampunk and alternative history. Given the rich potential of these genres, the author seems almost lazy in both world and character creation, moving the Berlin wall to the UK, and essentially placing a fantastic ahistoric France on once side, and a Puritanical US on the other. There is much to criticize, too, of the casual use of sexual indenture, but even this seems like an afterthought - after all, Duncan had to give his female protagonist something to fear in her homeland. Ultimately, there is too little for suspension of disbelief, and it was a real chore to complete.