Books: The Broken Earth & Diana's Electric Tongue

Carolyn Nowak — Diana's Electric Tongue (comics)

Aug 26

This is a really good comic about being heartbroken, right up there at the top of its genre (along with the Octopus Pie arc "The Witch Lives"). It's also basically everything I want from a character-driven "mundane SF" story. I recommend this to anyone.

Aside from the pure and wonderful writing, this has some amazing character and environment art. Good lord, the wedding venue? Sabine? Owen? So good. And I love that Diana's prosthetic tongue is offensively lime green, that little tidbit does so much hidden heavy lifting to establish her character and the world she inhabits.

This is longer than a normal floppy, but smaller than what most people would call a graphic novel; I guess you could call it a "graphic novella" if you didn't mind being a 🔪TERMINOLOGY CRIMINAL🔪 (and lol, I don't). As far as I know the only place to get it is at the author's Etsy, although I wouldn't be shocked if Floating World or BWP had a copy or two hanging around. For all that it seems to be at a zine-ish level of commerciality (blank spine, no ISBN), the physical and print quality is superb. (That critical "I feel fine about spending $10 on this" quality level.)

Here's a shorter online comic by Nowak, which I also loved tremendously. This is a cartoonist to keep a very close eye on.

N.K. Jemisin — The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky

Aug 7, Aug 7, Aug 20

I recommend this whole trilogy with no reservations. It deserved both of the Hugos it's gotten so far, and I wouldn't be shocked to see it collect a third.

This is basically the book/series I was waiting for Jemisin to write. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The Broken Kingdoms were good, but to be honest they weren't quite for me — 100k had the cosmic mythos of an epic fantasy, but at its core it was actually a Gothic (no, seriously), which is a genre I respect but can't really jam on. And Broken Kingdoms was super interesting and weird, but I couldn't quite get wholly into it. And I still plan to read the Dreamblood at some point, but the first few chapters didn't quite grab me. This one grabbed me, and I blew through it at one or two days per book. Like, I could replace this paragraph with that panel from Enigma of Amigara Fault where they're like "this is my hole!!! It was made for me!!!"

So, uh... that's my review, bye!!! I guess I'll just go into some tangents for a while.

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