THE GIRL from the SEA (graphic novel) (kindle) by Molly Knox Ostertag

 

Illustrated by the author.
Published in 2021 by Graphix.
Winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Comic/Graphic Novel (2022)

Synopsis:

Morgan Kwon's parents have recently divorced. 15 year old Morgan, her annoying little brother and her mom have moved away from the city to an island just off of mainland Canada.

Morgan seems to be doing pretty well. After all, she has a great group of friends. But, there are struggles. Her little brother has become extra annoying, she misses her dad and she can't wait to get off of this island and go to college and be her true self. 

You see, Morgan has a secret that she is afraid to share with anyone - she's gay and she's afraid her friends and family will reject her if they find out.

It all comes to a head when she meets a very cute girl while swimming one day. There is a more than a spark of romance, but it turns out that this new girl has a secret that dwarfs Morgan's secret!

My review:

This is an absolutely enjoyable coming-of-age story. The publisher recommends grade 7 and higher and I agree with that recommendation. The book has two main plots - Morgan's secret and the new girl's even bigger secret. But, it also has an environmental subplot, a strong family message and a tiny sweet subplot that is sort of hidden throughout. This book contains no nudity and nothing sexual beyond a few kisses.

I rate this graphic novel 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE GIRL from the SEA (graphic novel) (kindle) by Molly Knox Ostertag.

NOTE: I only heard of this book because it was listed in an article about a MAGA parent who is challenging 3,600 books in a county school district in Florida in an effort to, as he describes it, "overwhelm" their challenge procedures. The parent was particularly unhappy about The Girl from the Sea and is quite vocal about it.

MY NAME IS SALLY LITTLE SONG (audiobook) by Brenda Woods

 

Book edition originally published in 2006.
Audiobook published in 2019 by Listening Library.
Read by Asmeret Ghebremichael.
Duration: 3 hours, 0 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

This short piece of historical fiction focuses on a slave family in Georgia in the 1790s. The main character is Sally. She has a brother, a mother and a father. The one thing that this family has going for them is that their owners have a policy of not breaking apart families.

That is the policy until relatives of the owners find themselves struggling financially. In a couple of days, Sally and her brother and 3 other slaves are going to be sent to the other plantation to help it get back on its feet again. 

The family decides to run away together rather than be split apart.

After some discussion with a friendly house slave who has done some traveling with the family, they decide not to head north. They haven't seen a map but they know that the trip across northern Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Maryland to get to Pennsylvania is just too far.

However, rumor has it that if they can make it to Florida (at the time, Florida was owned by Spain), they would be welcome to live with the Seminoles...

My Review:

The author, Brenda Woods

This short book would be an excellent addition to any history classroom or school library. It has compelling characters, provides details but does not wallow in them, and is very honest about early American history from the point of view of slaves and Native Americans. 

There are a variety of characters and they don't all hit the stereotypes. For example, not all of the slaves are sympathetic characters. 

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: MY NAME IS SALLY LITTLE SONG by Brenda Woods.

Note: I reviewed this book because I read about it an article about Florida book bans in schools. I checked it out and this teacher doesn't find anything objectionable about this book. Here is a link to another article with a list of 176 books that were banned by a Florida county. 

RIOT (audiobook) by Walter Dean Myers

 

Published in 2009 by Listening Library.
Performed by multiple actors.
Duration: 2 hours, 36 minutes.
Unabridged.

July of 1863 was the height of the American Civil War. The month contained the Battle of Gettysburg, the end of the long siege of Vicksburg, and the battle at Battery Wagner where the 54th Massachusetts demonstrated that African American soldiers would be an effective and important addition to the Union Army.

It also featured one of the worst riots in American history - the New York City Draft Riot.

The riot was ostensibly a violent reaction to the imposition of a draft to fulfill state military quotas, but it was more than that and this short audiobook does a very good job of looking at those reasons.

The draft was unpopular for more than just the fact that the men who were drafted did not want to join the army. Rich people could afford to pay $300 to avoid military service if they were drafted. It took most workers more than 6 months or more to earn this sort of money. This encouraged that common refrain that happens in many wars - It was a rich man's war but a poor man's fight.

About 25% of New York City was made up of immigrants from Ireland. Those immigrants were at the bottom of the social and economic heap, but they were afraid that newly freed slaves would work their way to New York City and be willing to work for less, meaning that their wages would have to drop just to compete. 

Those factors combined to make this riot an ugly mix of economic, racial and anti-governmental violence that lasted for 4 days until Union troops arrived fresh from the Battle of Gettysburg to help New York State Militia restore order with gunfire.

This audiobook reads like a television script, including directions for camera cuts and the like. The actors who read the audiobook read it like an old-fashioned radio play. A narrator read the direction for the cameras and introduced the characters as they came into the drama.

This drama explores the complicated reasons for the riots and gives the listener a surprisingly nuanced view of the riots. This is especially noteworthy considering that the drama is so short.

The last half hour or so of the audiobook is a podcast-type discussion of the drama and the riots between the author and a history professor. This was especially well-done. 

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: RIOT by Walter Dean Myers.

PROHIBITION in the UNITED STATES: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

 

Published in 2019 by Hourly History.

Hourly History publishes histories and biographies that you can read in about an hour. That can be a tough job for larger topics in history like "The Industrial Revolution" or "The Roman Empire" but it works out about right for this topic.

This history goes all of the way back to the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620. Turns out the Puritans brought hundreds of gallons of alcoholic beverages with them to the New World and immediately set up the means to produce even more.

The book then goes on to show the ups and down of America's relationship with alcohol. When the reader gets to the temperance movement, there is a solid context to understand why the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed in 1919 and why it was eventually abolished by the 21st Amendment a mere 14 years later.

For a short read, this book provides a lot of good, basic information. 

I rate this e-book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: PROHIBITION in the UNITED STATES: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History.

TEAR IT DOWN (Peter Ash #4)(audiobook) by Nick Petrie

 

Published in 2019 by Penguin Audio.
Read by Stephen Mendel.
Duration: 11 hours.
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

Peter Ash served multiple tours of duty with the Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. When he left the service, he wandered the roads of America - partly because he could not find a place to settle down and partly because he suffers from claustrophobia as a form of PTSD. He can't sleep indoors. He has a very tough team being inside unless it's a spacious room or has lots and lots of windows. 

The author, Nick Petrie.

Peter has been living with his very serious (and very rich) girlfriend helping maintain her compound and recuperating from the misadventures of the last book. But...he's getting bored.

His girlfriend gets word from a friend named Wanda in Memphis that people are threatening her in her new house that she bought in a tax auction. They are throwing bricks through windows and the like. Peter drives across the country in his restored work truck to help keep an eye out. When he arrives he discovers that things have gotten a lot worse.

They're not just throwing bricks any longer - they've driven a dump truck right into her house...

My review:

This owes a lot to Lee Child's Jack Reacher series (lone drifter who is retired from the military who works very well with smart, talented, independent women) and to Robert B. Parker's Spenser series (man with a moral code, a girlfriend and an African American friend with a brother-like bond of questionable background that comes in with things get tough) but it has a distinct voice of its own.

The series also has a formula that I happen to like. It would be wise of Petrie to shake it up a bit, but it is a formula that is working for me.

Petrie's descriptions of a musician in the grove approached poetry. Nicely done. It more than makes up for the touch of the paranormal that was throw in.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: TEAR IT DOWN (Peter Ash #4)(audiobook) by Nick Petrie.

CAT'S CRADLE by Kurt Vonnegut

 

Originally published in 1963.

Synopsis:

Cat's Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut's fourth novel. The narrator is a writer who wants to tell the story of the first atomic bombing by telling what various people did that day. One of the people he is interested in is one of the creators of the bomb, a researcher named Felix Hoennikker. 

Hoennikker has already passed away so the author reaches out to his three children and finds two of them. They describe a man with no real emotions. He is not a cruel man, he is utterly detached from everything except research. 

During his interviews with a colleagues at the laboratory he worked at in Ilium, New York (also the setting for his first novel Player Piano, but these books are clearly not in the same time line) the narrator discovers that Hoennikker may have invented a more dangerous weapon than the atomic bomb - a substance called "ice-nine."

Ice-nine was created as a simple thought experiment that came from an offhand comment from a general who had complained about how the U.S. Army kept getting bogged down in the mud. Ice-nine solidifies all of the water it contacts - freezes it at room temperature. And, it keeps spreading. Ice-nine creates more ice-nine as it freezes. Theoretically, if someone dropped it into a body of water it would just keep on going until it runs out of water to freeze. If you dropped it into a river it would just keep going until it got to an ocean and then keep going around the world.

That's when the narrator figures out that each of the three children possesses a chunk of ice-nine and one of them who was missing has just become the head of the military of a very backward third world country in the Caribbean...

My Review: 

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)

This book, unlike the previously mentioned Player Piano, has the complete feel of a Vonnegut novel. There is a lot of dark humor that is barely trying to hide Vonnegut's commentary about the insanity of the Cold War and the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction. It fits in nicely with the 1964 movie Doctor Strangelove.

I found the first part of the book to be fairly slow and tedious (the part described in my synopsis), but the second half zips along pretty well and gets better and better as it gets more ridiculous, including the creation of an original religion.

Vonnegut has a habit of mentioning his native Indiana and/or Indianapolis in his books and this book features plenty of those mentions. 

At one point, Vonnegut gave all of his books a letter grade. He gave Cat's Cradle an A+. I think it was good, but not that good. I will give it a B.

I rate this book 4 out of 5 stars. It can be found on Amazon.com here: CAT'S CRADLE by Kurt Vonnegut.

THE AMERICAN DREAM? A JOURNEY on ROUTE 66 DISCOVERING DINOSAUR STATUES, MUFFLER MEN, and the PERFECT BURRITO: A GRAPHIC MEMOIR by Shing Yin Khor

 

Published in 2019 by Zest Books.
Illustrated by the author, Shing Yin Khor.

In another recent review I wrote this:

I have a real weakness for oddball travel books. I have read a memoir about a man that hitchhiked throughout Europe and North Africa, a book about a man's bicycle trip from the UK to India, a book about a man who walked across Afghanistan, a book about a man who rode a motorcycle around the edges of Afghanistan, a book about two women who biked from Turkey to China, a book about a man who walked the length of the Nile, a man who walked the Appalachian Trail with his deeply irresponsible friend from high school...and more. And more. And more.

This book continues that tradition with a twist - it is done in comic book style. Usually, this is called a graphic novel, but this book is not a novel because it is not fiction. The author calls it a "graphic memoir."

Illustration from the back cover

The author/illustrator is an immigrant from Malaysia. She came over as a child and is very familiar with southern California. She realizes that she doesn't really know a lot about the rest of her adopted country so she decides to travel the old Route 66.

The author travels with only her little dog as a companion. She is on a tight budget so she often sleeps in her car.

Along the way she sees a lot of interesting Americana, Americans of all types and ponders her relationship with the country and its people. Plus, her dog makes friends everywhere.

I rate this graphic memoir 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE AMERICAN DREAM? A JOURNEY on ROUTE 66 DISCOVERING DINOSAUR STATUES, MUFFLER MEN, and the PERFECT BURRITO: A GRAPHIC MEMOIR by Shing Yin Khor.