CBR11 #6-8: Saga Volumes 2 to 4 by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Let me be clear -- I read these ages ago. And I'm writing a review for them months after the fact. So this will not be the best/clearest/most coherent reviews for a truly awesome series, but I'll do the best I can.

Sage Volume Two introduces Marko's parents, who drop into the fleeing couple's ship unannounced. Marko and his mother immediately take off to a different planet to retrieve their "babysitter", the ghoul Isabel, while Alana is left with his dad -- her now-father-in-law.

It also introduces Gwendolyn, Marko's ex-fiance who gifted him with the translation engagement rings that Marko and Alana use to communicate. She drops in on The Will, a freelance bounty hunter/contract killer who is despondent now that his ex was killed by the Prince. She is eager for him to finish the job he started -- hunting down Marko and Alana, but first The Will insists on rescuing Slave Girl, a young child he saw on a sex planet.

There are many things to love about Saga -- the art, the humor, the absurdity of some of the space creatures -- but the plotting is really amazing. Weaved in between the present narrative is how Marko's parents raised him, and how he and Alana met and fell in love. The authors use an omniscient voice -- Hazel, the daughter -- to set the stage, and her wry voice is used to set the tone. It is also ominous at times, piquing our worries on what's to befall our heroes and their accidental family.

There are also great moments of reality snuck in. Like how The Will wants to return Slave Girl to her planet after she's rescued, but Gwendolyn hits back at him with some common sense. "Home? To the same people that handed her over to those assholes?"

"Then to a shelter or something," he says lamely.

"Those are just recruitment centers for the other side's cannon fodder," she says, before urging him to think about counseling for Slave Girl's abuse.

That's what I like -- a world where not everything is definitely good or definitely bad, and where the supposed heroes are as befuddled as we are about what steps we should take next. All we can hope for is to do the "best" thing, and that completely depends on whose point of views we're aligned with.

And whooooo boy, things really fucking take off in Volume Three. 

The fugitive couple arrive in Quietus, the home of the author Oswald who wrote a subversive book that enabled them to fall in love.

There's honestly so much to love about this issue -- the introduction of the writer and the wink-wink-nudge-nudge meta content about creatives, the hiatus the runaway family gets before Prince IV drops in on the planet, and the introduction of journalists chasing down the truth of the story.

But I think perhaps the single best page in the entire issue is when Slave Girl -- now renamed by The Will as Sophie -- chats with Lying Cat (who is one of my favorites).

She also calls him "Honest Cat" which is just perfect.

The journalists -- who are like teal-coloured water creatures -- are getting closer to the truth that Marko and Alana might have fallen in love, but the Power that Be don't want this coming out, so a contract is put out to kill them. But the freelancer sent after them is The Brand, The Will's sister it turns out, and she decides not to kill the journalists because she felt they were "pretty fair to the union during our last strike".

Instead, she poisons them with a spell that kills them if they tell a single soul about the story.

"That makes no sense," said one of them "We've covered way worse crap done by both sides."

"Exactly," she says. "It's the stories with no sides that worry them."

This volume ends in tragedy -- and it's quietly foretold in the deepening relationship between Oswald and Klara, Marko's mother. Why can't these people ever have anything nice?

Side note: I wish I could pull of Gwendolyn's all-white tube top/shorts/blazer look in real life. I mean, look at it.


Volume Four drops us in Gardenia, a planet where the family has decided to stay for a while so that Alana can join the Circuit, which is a little bit like an acting troupe that everyone in the galaxy can plug into. This might have been one of my least favorite issues, probably because there are less interactions between Marko and Alana, who's slowly getting warped by the long hours of her job.

She also starts taking drugs to get by, and it's sort of strangely the most "normal" part about the series so far. Woman has shitty job she needs to keep, woman takes uppers to make it bearable.

It also shows Hazel becoming a super cute toddler, and Marko being a full-time stay-at-home dad who's slowly getting enamoured by a fellow parent.

See what I mean about "normal"? Spouse misses partner, spouse decides to emotionally cheat.

Meanwhile on the Robot planet, there's turmoil afoot. So far, we've only encountered the royalty robots, but there is also a "commoner" class, and one of them is itching for a revolution. His young son who cannot be treated because he has no insurance dies from diarrhea, so he kidnaps the son of the Prince Robot IV, kills the wife, and makes off with the baby TV screen. His aim is to broadcast a message of the plight of the commoner to all the galaxies, so he heads to Gardenia to jump on the Circuit's broadcast.

Sophie and Gwendolyn are still trying to track down a cure for The Will, and they run into his sister, The Brand, who's intrigued by their "quest".

And there you have it! Three reviews in one! I can't wait to read the rest of Saga -- just gotta get my hands on the issues.

CBR11 #4: Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli

CBR11bingo: The Collection

My first experience with Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli was her evocative, heart-wrenching run-down of a questionnaire she had to translate when interviewing children seeking asylum in the US for the New York court system. I still think of Tell Me How It Ends frequently, which is what pushed me to seek out more of her writing.

Sidewalks is a collection of her essays (heyo, first Bingo square!!), translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. Much of Luiselli's writing feels very nostalgic, almost like she's constantly looking back at a different time period, a late author who inspired her, a past make-out of a city that she loves. In my head, I see her as almost a painstakingly thoughtful individual who would always be ruminating on what an impact of a slight change in the map would mean -- maybe annoying and exasperating in person, but in essay-form she gives you an "ah ha! I do that too!" moment, which always feels comforting.

It is for this reason that I liked the essay "Relingos: The cartography of empty spaces" the best. Basically, a relingo -- far as I can tell -- is a patch of small space all over major cities that happen when urban spaces are built around it. "Nowadays these residual spaces on and around certain corners of Reforma...are abandoned to the perpetual comings and goings of ambulant street vendors, tourists, delivery men, petty thieves, the homeless, people taking strolls, dust and debris." You know what these spaces, and so do I, even if I don't quite know what English word we would use for it.

But she somehow transposed this concept of "empty spaces" into something greater, as a sort of a freedom for our minds to wander into. "A relingo... is a sort of depository for possibilities.... Cities need those vacant lots, those silent gaps where the mind can wander freely."

Also in this essay, Luiselli pins down how I feel when writing, that itchy feeling I get when I'm searching for a way to say something and coming up empty. And then repeating something that feels familiar... and it being actually completely wrong and unoriginal and bad, because I'm really unintentionally plagiarizing myself or some idea previously read.

I know that the times I feel most excited about what I'm writing are when I should be most suspicious, because more often than not I'm repeating something I either said or read elsewhere, something that has been lingering in my mind... 

In contrast, the worst moment to stop writing is when I no longer feel like going on. On those occasions, it's always better to keep rapping thoughts into the keyboard, like drilling holes in the ground, until the exact word emerges. 

If you like sort of a quiet, meandering drum of nostalgia, I would highly recommend this slim collection of essays. There were times when I felt like it was just a bit too much navel-gazing -- for example, there is immense privilege in being able to travel to Venice just to search for the tombstone of her favorite author like she did in the first essay "Joseph Brodsky's Room and a Half" -- but it more than made up for it with little passages that felt so intimately recognizable.

Oh, and by the way, Cannonballers would probably love her whole bit on the agony of arranging books on a bookshelf in "Return Ticket". It begins with the simple sentence, "I've spent weeks putting off the inevitable ordering of my bookshelves", before going into how she describes every single book found in a home.

The book on the bed is a generous and undemanding lover; that other one, on the bedside table, an infallible oracle I consult from time to time, or a talisman against midnight crises; the one on the couch, a pillow for long, dreamless naps. Some books get forgotten for months. They're left in the bathroom or on top of the fridge in the kitchen for a while and are replaced by others when our indifference eventually wears them away. The few we really do read are places we always return to. 

It's like she got a peek at my home! And just for fun, here is how I arrange my home bookshelf, after having moved several times and having to constantly cull my collection:

Top level (which is visible for everyone) -- my favorite books, my to-be-read pile that I am excited about.
Second level (which is not visible) -- my occasional favorites, like when I'm itching to reread a familiar sentence. And a to-be-read pile that I am NOT excited about but feel a duty to keep because these are books I should read.
Third level (not visible also) -- Travel guides, history books, books I was gifted but know I'll very likely never, ever read.

All fiction, nonfiction, poetry, graphic novels are mixed together; I don't order them alphabetically, more like by feel. Like, "East of Eden must go next to Black Swan Green."

If anyone has read down this far, how do you guys organize your shelves?

CBR11 #2-3: Year One and Of Blood and Bone by Nora Roberts

CBR11 #2: Year One by Nora Roberts

My first Nora Roberts! The two books were a gift from my friend who's a huge Nora Roberts fan, and she thought Year One could be a good entry point because I'm a real sucker for dystopia fiction.

It starts out with a family vacation in Scotland, when a peasant is shot and falls right in the middle of a stone circle, and its blood seeps into the frosted ground. What appears to be a regular hunting expedition turns deadly days later when the shooter is afflicted by an incurable disease that spreads like wildfire across the globe. It wipes out the majority of the population, but it also sparks an awakening in folks with magic in their blood -- strengthening their powers, which will either help them survive or make them targets.

My favourite parts were in the beginning, when the world was going to shit and people were getting rushed to the hospital. I find being able to picture the boring logistics of trying to get people to emergency rooms, doctors struggling to cope with the onslaught of sick people and their desperate families to be somewhat comforting. This is what we will see when an epidemic happens.

Year One moves fairly quickly, jumping from various important characters to the next, and that was kind of my biggest issue with it. I felt like more time could have been spent in exploring the group dynamics of the people hiding out in the forest, or in how the town of New Hope was actually set up. Like I said, I want to know the boring logistics of how to get a small town functioning again, or how to break up arguments between longtime friends under constant stress... and I wanted to know how all these various important characters were able to establish trust and friendship with each other.

I understand that shared experiences under stressful circumstances can build relationships quickly, but I felt like Roberts really skimmed a lot of that. And honestly, by the end of the first book, my biggest complaint was that I was expecting *some* sexual tension from the Queen of Romance, and Year One really did not deliver on that.

Still, I kept on reading, which brings me to the next review...

CBR11 #3: Of Blood and Bone by Nora Roberts

In book two, we are focusing more on The Chosen One. Her name is Fallon, and she is the daughter of the now-deceased Max and Lana. Raised by Lana and Simon -- who is such a steady, trustworthy character that he might as well have "THIS IS A GOOD MAN" stamped on his forehead -- Fallon's grown up knowing she was essentially born to save the world from its current darkness.

And boy is there a lot of it: There are truckloads of really terrible scavengers roving the streets, picking off people they think are magical or just weak; there is the dark magic contingent, who sort of work with these anti-magic people to kill the good magic people; and then there are pockets of people just trying to fend off those who take advantage of the chaos, trying to live their lives.

Fallon and her family are in the third camp, except her parents have been trying to teach her and her brothers how to be good, how to learn from right and wrong, how to farm, and how to use her powers in a responsible manner. But when she turns 13, she has to go off with her Merrick (OG BtVS, anyone? Anyone?) who then basically puts her through Hogwarts, except his school is a cottage in a forest where elves live nearby.

I was quite a fan of the training montage section of the book -- it's what comes after that annoys me a bit, and this came up in the first book as well. Roberts is very good at setting up premises, yea? Like, she gets you somewhat invested in the characters in the beginning and shows you their growth -- and then bam! It's years later, and that character has grown up so much they are basically unrecognisable, but it's hard to get the connecting tendrils to understand how they've changed so drastically. We are able to infer from what's happening in the book that, "She grew up. Fast." but it can be quite jarring if it's not expanded upon.

I mean, Fallon went from a sulky teenage girl, wondering if she should take the mantle of destiny... to straight up commanding a whole host of seasoned fighters, and not feeling any sort of nervousness about it. She no longer questioned whether she can save the world -- instead now, she's thinking of how she can save the world. At the end of the day, Fallon is a 16-year-old, and we all know we were notoriously inclined to self-doubt and angst when we are 16.

I don't know if I'll seek out the third book when it's out. I guess if my friend gifts it to me, I'll read it, because I do find it to be a relaxing read, overall.

CBR11 #1: No Good Men Among the Living by Anand Gopal

Man, I've been terrible at this reviewing thing, hey? No better way to get back into it than to just jump in.

Close to a decade ago, when I was agitating to start a "real career" in journalism I was semi-obsessed with reading books about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I was more concerned about the writers' inner lives, and yearned to understand how they handled these stressful situations -- against the backdrop of devastating American-backed wars.

And now, I have little patience for such naval-gazing (Jeffrey Gettleman's saccharine-titled "Love, Africa" comes to mind), likely due to a niggling sense of discomfort when reading about accounts where the humanness of locals are flattened, rendered two-dimensional, to prop up the rich, layered experiences of roving journalists -- many of whom have moved on to plump positions.

Anand Gopal does not do this with his book, "No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eyes". It's actually quite amazing how little he's been able to insert himself in, choosing only to show up when talking about traveling around the country to interview former Taliban members.

He attempts to piece through the omnishambolic mess left by American forces in Afghanistan, a ever-changing country made murkier by the criss-crossing loyalties of ethnic groups and political factions. Looking back at the pages I marked in preparation for this review, I realised I had dog-eared all the books in which he just made a line-by-line detailing of how the US government completely fucked up trying to stamp out the Taliban, choosing to listen to power brokers who made use of rumours to eliminate their political competition or sort out private grievances.

This could all have made for confusing reading, but Gopal does a great job of navigating through the morass by choosing to focus on three main characters --  politician-turned-strongman Jan Muhammad; Mullah Cable, a reluctant former Taliban commander whose switching alliances show how tenuous loyalties can be post-war Afghanistan; and Heela, a schoolteacher turned intrepid renegade -- arguably the heart of the book.

Watching Kabul -- her hometown where she was university-educated before meeting and marrying her husband -- devolve under Taliban rule, it is easy to feel Heela's fear and horror when her husband handed her a burqa for the first time so that they may escape to his home province Uruzgan.

Musqinyar handed Heela the bag and she opened it and stared. She could not believe it had come to this. Folded inside was something she'd never handled in her life: a soft, sky-blue burqa.
... 

She held up the embroidered garment and inspected it. The head-to-toe wrapping had no openings except a thick mesh-like covering for the eyes. As she put it on, the rock dire road, the brilliant mountain peaks, the rumbling motor were all snuffed out. Heela's world went black. 

Heela's story is seriously incredible, just the sheer will to exercise her desire to be a productive person, and it seriously just keeps evolving. Once she got to Uruzgan, she was determined to keep working despite living in a cloistered village where spies could literally get her killed, especially since Heela was engaging in subterfuges with her husband to try and corral Afghan women to vote in the country's first ever elections.

The title is taken from an Afghan proverb -- "There is no good men among the living and no bad ones among the dead." -- and it is reflected in Gopal's decision to portray no true villains or true heroes in his story.

By the book's finale, Heela may stand out with her "happy hero's ending" painted by Gopal -- but it's important to keep in mind that her story is not yet over. She will continue to evolve, as will the rest of the country as they pick up the pieces and I hope writers like Gopal will continue to chronicle it.