To fans of Black Mirror, Jillian Tamaki‘s new graphic novel Boundless provides an earnest, but less foreboding, look at the ways in which technology and modern living can go awry. In each story, This One Summer co-author Tamaki draws from all-too-real anxieties about life in the social media age, mashing them up with a Kafkaesque sense of magical realism that leaves the reader feeling refreshed, instead of weighed down. Continue reading
In an age of dystopian over-saturation, it’s rare that a bleak, near-future novel comes along with a fully functional capacity to unnerve. Swedish author Karin Tidbeck accomplishes the near-impossible feat of composing such a book with Amatka, the tale of a lowly government worker with too much curiosity and too little experience. Continue reading
In their new graphic memoir about her life growing up in Iraq, Brigitte Findakly and her husband Lewis Trondheim shed light on the interior lives of middle-class Iraqis under Saddam Hussein’s rule in the mid-20th century. Poppies of Iraq does for 1970s Iraq what Persepolis did for 1970s Iran, putting a human face to stories tainted in the West by orientalism. And eventually, like Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi, Findakly moves to France to escape the political upheaval of her home country. Continue reading
If you enjoy warmhearted, but bittersweet, pieces of historical fiction with sweeping narratives spread out across decades, you will adore Leslie Shimotakahara‘s After the Bloom. Following two Japanese-Canadian women who hail originally from the United States, Shimotakahara’s novel is a thought-provoking examination of war’s impact on civilian casualties. Continue reading
The Broken Earth trilogy concludes with The Stone Sky, an unputdownable final installment in author N.K. Jemisin‘s latest SFF series. Separated by the most recent Fifth Season, Essun and Nassun find themselves on a collision course as they race to end their planet’s seismic flux, once and for all. As you might have guessed, the following may spoil the events of The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate, my reviews of which you can read here and here. Continue reading