Books

Book 682: Camp Cutlery – Robin Carnilius

If you’re a fan of McTucky Fried High, Carnilius’ hilariously poignant YouTube series about anthropomorphized food surviving high school, you’ll definitely appreciate this one. (If you’re not familiar with McTucky, I included the teaser for Season 1 below.) When they reached out with a review copy of the book, I recognized the name and my response was “definitely!” to reviewing this one.*

Camp Cutlery: A Hunger for Justice picks up not long after the McTucky Fried High series ends and it follows Peanut, a transgender social justice warrior, through their journey at a correctional facility. The biggest challenge by far of reading a work that is a continuation of another work is the pre-set expectations and frankly, no author, can do anything about those. This being said, this story definitely works on most levels, but for me a good portion of the charm was lost from the animated series.

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Books

Book 679: Our Dining Table – Mita Ori

This is another great introduction into manga in that it’s easy to follow the reverse (for western readers) style of reading any type of book. The lack of explicit sex and (often internalized) homophobia also make this more appealing to western audiences that might not necessarily want to read/see something that explicit.

I think I’m narrowing in on a type of yaoi that I enjoy reading. This is a lot like Go for it, Nakamura!, in that there’s a purity around 95% of it. It’s so stinking adorable and this is definitely one of those books where you read a page/panel and put the book to your chest and sigh with a goofy grin on your face.

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ARC, Books

Book 674: Am I Ugly? – Siobhan Hill

What a fun quirky read! When the author reached out about reviewing the book* I had some hesitations as it’s self published and I haven’t had great luck with that in the past, but I realized as a graphic artist I could check out her site and get a taste of her style to see if I’d like it. I took a look liked what I saw and said sure, and that was definitely the right decision.

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Books

Book 672: Go for it, Nakamura! – Syundei

Adorable.

I could probably leave it at that, but since this is a blog and not just Twitter, I won’t.

Go for it, Nakamura! is a Japanese manga that’s on quite a few Best LGBT+ manga lists, so I thought I’d give it a try. I honestly wasn’t sure if it was going to be closer to My Brother’s Husband, Vol. 1 and My Brother’s Husband, Vol. 2 or more like Don’t Be Cruel #1 and #2 or #3 and #4. Thankfully, it was more like the latter, with no sex scenes (these are high school kids after all).

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Books

Book 668: Charlotte Brontë Before Jane Eyre – Glynnis Fawkes

I stumbled across this illustrated biography of Charlotte Brontë after one of my google alerts (“Boston” and “Brontë”) alerted me to this article in Seven Days, Vermont’s Independent Voice publication. I’ve been meaning to read an actual Brontë biography forever really, but specifically since the 2017 release of To Walk Invisible on PBS and my visit to the Parsonage in 2018.

I read The Mother of the Brontës last year which covered a good portion of this and some of the inspired works cover similar time periods because they were all so young. The downside of the Brontës and Austen are how short their lives were and we can only glean so much from the few letters and drafts of their works that exist, but there are instances where a little creative license and ingenuity can make these well known facts and situations seem new again. And that is the case with this Fawkes work.

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