good reading recently

more Last Stop on Market Street

I’ve been reading posts about Last Stop on Market Street when I run across them– today’s was at Latin@s in Kid Lit. I was caught by this spread:
streetscape from Last Stop on Market Street
I really like how the curve of the page coming out of the gutter on the right side makes the building look more 3-D, while the rainbow stretching across both pages keeps the gutter from breaking up the spread. Having it both ways.

Shadow Hero

I let Gene Luen Yang’s The Shadow Hero (art by Sonny Liew) languish on my library-book shelf for ages, until the library insisted I bring it back. (Maybe more people are reading his books since he was named National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.) I think it was the antique-looking palette of the cover, greens and browns, that made me slide by it whenever I was in the mood for a shiny superhero comic.
cover of Shadow Hero

But in fact the art is perfect for the 1930s California Chinatown setting, and once I started reading I was completely drawn in. I laughed out loud at least twice: when Hank’s mom meets a superhero while driving, and when she tries to reverse-engineer some superpowers for Hank. Later on, things get serious.

Shadow Hero is an origin story for Green Turtle, created in Blazing Comics for just five issues in 1944, by Chinese American artist Chu F. King. (This context, along with a sample from the original comic, is provided in the author’s note at the back, but I think it would also be fine to read it before the comic.)

The Rest of Us Just Live Here

I dropped Patrick Ness’ The Knife of Never Letting Go because it was too grim for me, a la Cormac McCarthy. But this one, as noted by many bewildered and disappointed Goodreads reviewers, is totally different! Each chapter has a little synopsis of what’s happening in the ongoing Buffy-like plot… and then the chapter is about the lives of the regular kids we’re following, who are only intermittently aware of and affected by the “indie kids” fighting the supernatural. They have stuff in their own lives going on to worry about.

Brilliant. And, you know, true to the experience of being on the periphery, at most, of newsworthy events, as most of us are most of the time. The regular-kid characters were written with a lot of warmth and sympathy.

I wish I could quote out a couple of the funniest passages, but alas, that one had to go back to the library too. Anyway, he nailed what he said in this interview was the hardest part of writing the book:

I loved the challenge of writing a wild, hopefully funny, hopefully warmly satirical book about all the YA tropes while still hopefully having a serious, moving story at the centre of it.

Current read:

Kinda Like Brothers, by Coe Booth. I like kid characters who are good at playing with and caring for younger kids–maybe it’s my Baby-Sitter’s Club roots showing.