The cover of Jillian Tamaki's Boundless, which features a person with long, dark hair pulling it up into a ponytail.

Boundless: A Review

BoundlessTo 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

A photograph of a poppy next to the Yezidi Shrine of Khiz Rahman in Baadre, Iraqi Kurdistan, taken by Levi Clancy in 2017.

Poppies of Iraq: A Review

Poppies of IraqIn 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

A photograph by Andrea Reiman of the moon setting over a plateau.

The Stone Sky: A Review

The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3)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