SO COLD!: “Call me Freezeman!”

SO COLD!
JOHN COY (illus. Chris Park)
Minnesota Historical Society Press (bookshop.org link)
$17.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Embrace the cold with this engaging children's book about a father and son who practice science experiments using household objects outside on a snowy day!

When the temperature drops far below freezing, many people plan to stay warm and cozy inside. But when it’s “so cold” that everyday things behave in unusual ways, it is worth the effort to get outside and play! In this vibrantly illustrated children's story, a boy and his father dress in layer after layer before braving the cold, and the youngster declares: “Call me Freezeman!”

Together the two experiment: What happens when boiling water is flung into the air? Or when maple syrup is poured on clean snow? The night before they left a banana outside: now it’s frozen solid. Can they can use it like a hammer? A helium balloon that floats inside the house changes dramatically in the freezing air.

These and other discoveries await explorers bold enough to venture out on a bright and chilly day. Back inside at the end of the day, no wonder Freezeman declares: “so cold is so fun!” This playful narrative by John Coy celebrates curiosity and exploration, while Chris Park’s brilliant artwork illuminates a winter landscape that is anything but bleak. An author’s note explains the science behind the various experiments, leaving just one question: with all these amazing activities to undertake with your favorite adult when it’s “so cold,” why would anyone prefer to stay inside?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Cold! Glorious cold! Delicious, delightful absence of humidity, sweat, blasting battering sunshine that inescapably sears your skin in a human version of the Maillard Reaction. I'm pink like a pig, it's true, but I don't want to be treated like articulated chops! Heat rots, literally; cold preserves. You don't go to the stove to get last week's groceries...unless you're a fly larva, anyway.

So when your kidlet, nibling, or grand shows signs of hibernation to escape winter's gorgeous gift of escape from the horror that is heat, present them with this adorable little exploration of the reason for, and fun of, the cold.
Particularly pleased props for the story featuring Dad, not Mom, doing stuff with the kidlet. Text is suitable for independent reading, fine for lap-reading as well. I found the art suitably cold of pallette and suitably kinetic of image. It conveyed, to my eyes anyway, the desired image of activity enhanced by the cold.

I don't know how much longer this will be relevant but it is now. I recommend it.

FEMINIST COMIC BOOK MEMOIRS: SHRINK: Story of a Fat Girl & BALD

SHRINK: Story of a Fat Girl
RACHEL M. THOMAS
Graphic Mundi
$24.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Derided by her high-school peers for being overweight, Rachel finally found a sense of purpose and belonging in a promising career as an EMT—that is, until her body got in the way.

Shrink is a work of graphic medicine that depicts the emotional and physical realities of inhabiting a large body in a world that is constantly warning about the medical and social dangers of being “too fat.” This smart and candid book challenges the idea that weight loss is the only path for a fat person and encourages the reader to question the prevailing cultural and medical discourse about fat bodies.

Seamlessly weaving the most current research on the fatness debate with her own experiences of living in a fat body, Thomas lays bare society’s obsession with size and advocates for each of us to push back on body weight bias and determine what’s right for our own health and well-being, both physical and mental.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I spent a lot of my life "fat" and had to endure much verbal abuse for it.

The struggles in this graphic memoir were all too familiar to me, and I do not mean the ones about dieting.

I mean the comments...whether well-intentioned or just meant to be slyly insulting in that un-call-out-able way so many passive-aggressive or simply unpleasant people enjoy so much...that freely pepper even the simplest conversations. I mean the looks of horror or disgust aimed one's way by strangers. I mean the earnest, ill-informed "advice" about eating from medical professionals, or goddesses please protect us from such malevolence, dietitians *shudder* with their irrelevant portion-control mantra.

I mean the perpetrators of The Whale. I mean you, every time you've said something off-handedly about how big a celebrity has gotten, and what a shame it is because they were so hot before. Or how funny it was that time Courteney Cox put on a fat suit to be young, fat, unattractive Monica on Friends.

Stop it. If you need a reason (other than not being a jerk), read Rachel's story. She lived it, and came out of the experience with a fine education, a clear eye, and an academic career about social issues like this. If a young giftee of yours, especially but not exclusively a girl of a vulnerable age, is struggling with weight as a social issue, this is a good resource to offer; not a gift, unless specifically requested, though.

Even if it's just a sensitization exercise for you, or another person in your young soul's ambit, it's a very worthwhile gift to share with them.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


BALD
TEREZA ČECHOVÁ (illus. Štepánka Jislová; tr. Martha Kuhlman with the author)
Graphic Mundi
$21.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Tereza never thought she would go bald before her boyfriend did. She couldn’t imagine being unable to sweep her hair up in a ponytail or to style it in other ways. But when she lost all her hair in just a couple of months due to alopecia, her perspective on relationships and work—and above all, herself—radically changed.

Navigating the particular trauma of female hair loss, Tereza comes to terms with her new reality with humor and self-reflection in this prize-winning graphic memoir featuring eye-catching art by Štěpánka Jislová.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Generations ago, I knew a young woman from Puerto Rico who, during the year we were acquainted, steadily lost her hair to alopecia. It was the first time I'd every heard of the condition. As the weeks went by, I'd stop in the bodega and chat while buying the little thises and thatses one always needs but aren't important enough to trek to the biffer, cheaper store to get...plus it was a chance to catch up on the happenings.


Mostly to get an earful from my young friend about how the people in the neighborhood were horrible to her, accusing her of having ringworm, mange, and...given the time, this made some sense...AIDS. Those were mean and awful things to say. They made her angry.

What hurt her was her family calling her "pelón"..."hairy guy"...and laughing about it. I was appalled, but felt unable to do anything but be blandly comforting of tone, and listen to her. In the end, she bought a wig and got a new job, and we lost contact.

I will never, ever stop regretting I didn't say to her then what I say on a daily basis to my male-pattern baldness: "It's just hair."

It's only a big emotional deal because people around you make it one. Tereza takes us on a very, very pink-tinted trip with her as she learns the realities of hair loss from alopecia, which are interesring to me; what will mostly interest others, I suspect, is the shocking amount of emphasis placed by others on women's hair.

Want to radicalize your young feminist? Hand over this startling deep meditation on how effectively women are indoctrinated into their value being that of face. And hair. No ruse is more effective than drilling into a young woman that her role is to be beautiful, and woe betide her if she falls short. The stupidity of this offends me, but it should infuriate all of us.

DREAM CITY: A Novel, sharp-eyed skewering of a culture of excess

DREAM CITY: A Novel
DOUGLAS UNGER
University of Nevada Press
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this unconventional tale of Las Vegas during the two delirious boom decades before the bust of the Great Recession, failed actor “C. D.” Reinhart, who has launched a new career in hotel marketing, is gradually losing his moral and existential compass. Working on The Strip during an era when Sin City’s population growth was outpacing any other place in America, C. D. climbs the industry ladder while modeling himself after a Pyramid Resorts top executive, Lance Sheperd. C. D.’s professional choices lead him down a tumultuous road, as Sheperd, a complex and, at times, visionary figure, pilots his ventures through the tangled wheeling and dealing of finance and corporate politics straight into catastrophe.

As the story progresses, C. D. comes to understand how his personal losses and the losses of his cohort of hard driving executives on the make—especially the tragic life of his work partner, Greta Olsson, the only woman to break through into their male dominated world—are a result of the make-believe environment he has helped to create, a world where representation replaces reality. Hoping to piece together his faltering marriage and family relationships, C. D. must find a new path as he struggles to hold onto his dreams.

In this fictionalized version of the city of glittering lights, author Douglas Unger pits the ideologies of marketing and consumerism in the casino economy of America against the erosion of individual and humane values that success in that world demands. Unger reveals the hard truth that Las Vegas, a blue-collar town considered by many to be “the most honest city,” can be a temple for self-deceptions, emblematic of a service economy that knows the price of everything and too often the value of little else. Dream City becomes both a love song and an elegy for Las Vegas that sets it apart from any other literary novel previously written about this global entertainment attraction that in so many ways represents postmodern America. Sooner or later, the challenge that faces everyone is to discover what matters most, and to learn how to bet on the better angels of our natures.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Deserts frighten me. I live in a beach town for a reason. My trips to Las Vegas weren't numerous, but are very memorable—for good and ill. Here's a story, then, that's set in a place I do not love or admire, featuring a man in Act Three of his life having failed at his other lives, and failing again.

Paging Updike and Cheever, your territory's being encroached.

And most effectively. Author Unger is working in a long tradition of male-centered stories, prioritizing an idea of success that capitalism likes to valorize and that relegates anything other than work to peripheral significance...only to flip the script and show the hollowness and lack of fulfillment and connection inherent in this cultutally approved rat race.

Critiques are most effective when they come from within. This detailed, almost obsessive, chronicling of one man's descent from the pinnacle he dreamed of reaching into the real-world uses of the talents he never had the luck to exploit to their fullest, is inside the house. The astonishing world of wealth is detailed, excess by excess, without a trace of overt judgment. Like the eternal anticapitalist novel Babbitt, it uses a steady unblinking gaze to do what polemics fail to do: Indict the system that rewards conformist capitulation with material comforts. The problem with this reward system is, and always has been, it is conditional. It can all be taken away from the recipient at any time, either through anonymous "market forces" or malevolent, targeted manipulations of law and economics.

In personalizing the details of one man, in one city, as he rises and falls, Author Unger joins the crew of midcentury modern men in quietly unpicking the system's built-in failures. He uses the main man's wife as a sort of moral Cassandra, constantly questioning—while continuing to enjoy—the fruits of his enviable rise from the ashes of ruined ambition. It's here that I lost a star. Women as Moral Centers, however compromised, irk the snot out of me. Like she condescended to hitch herself to this sad, lost little boy (who's given her a life of comfort) to Guide and Sustain him...gross. She's complicit, she's also culpable for not doing it her damnself. The trope of the little woman who stays home is really the relams of fantasy in this day and time. It's unusual enough that it's now fodder for highly-rated prurient TV shows about the wealthiest capitalists in the hypercapitalist world we exist in.

Why I recommend it to you is simple: Updike, Cheever, Sloan Wilson, and company are dreadfully old-fashioned. Their row still needs hoeing in the world we live in. Author Unger is uniquely placed to tell this generation about its golden calfs. Seen in this light even the repugnant gender politics are a sharp critique of the aspirations that Las Vegas, glittering gambling capital, represents.

Castles built in the air always fall. Gravity, it pays every one of us to foreground in our awareness, is a law that can not be repealed. Flouting it temporarily carries costs that accrue terrible interest surcharges.

Author Unger, without beating you up, reminds you of this.

SINOPHAGIA: A Celebration of Chinese Horror, fourteen unsettling tales chosen and translated by Xueting Christine Ni

SINOPHAGIA: A Celebration of Chinese Horror
XUETING CHRISTINE NI, editor and translator
Solaris Books
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An anthology of unsettling tales from contemporary China, translated into English for the very first time.

Fourteen dazzling horror stories delve deep into the psyche of modern China in this new anthology curated by acclaimed writer and essayist Xueting C. Ni, editor and translator of the British Fantasy Award-winning Sinopticon.

From the menacing vision of a red umbrella, to the ominous atmosphere of the Laughing Mountain; from the waking dream of virtual working to the sinister games of the locked room… this is a fascinating insight into the spine-chilling voices working within China today—a long way from the traditional expectations of hopping vampires and hanging ghosts.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE AUTHOR. THANK YOU.

My Review: These fourteen tales of eerie events, unnerving occurrences, and dreadful doings all work as a unit to dispel the expectations of Western readers that there is one Chinese way to "do" horror. We're accustomed to thinking of China in monolithic terms, as a single unitary entity with a single (incomprehensible) culture and language.

So here comes Xueting Christine Ni, one-person wrecking crew, to show us in the monolithic, culturally incurious West, what we're slowly coming to realize: There's a lot of great storytelling in the rest of the world, and it's hella fun to discover what creeps other folks out...and how often it creeps us out too. Which leads me to one of the oddest modern phenomena ever to make me snort: The content warning. These are horror stories. If you are not triggered by them all, at some level, they are not doing their collective job! I am not including them because, well, horror. The translator/editor is kinder than I am and includes a story-by-story list of them.

As is the custom of this country here (aka my blog), we'll go story-by-story with a note and rating, then a summation, or the Bryce Method as it's better known around here.

The Girl in the Rain by Hong Niangzi has the most eerie vibe...anything that smacks of perception manipulation gives me serious shuddering horrors.

As a way to start the collection, it's got a serious punch. It gets 4.5*.

The Waking Dream by Fan Zhou moves the perception manipulation up a notch, and uses it to fuel the more-expected among Western readers bodily pains and restraints. Is any of this real? Or is there a deep disturbance in the psyche? Is the disturbance in the psyche causing victimhood, or perpetration?

A combination I wasn't expecting, and that didn't really land in either direction, so 4*

Immortal Beauty by Chu Xidao is remorselessly, grindingly physical...abuse is horrifying, though not horror in my personal taste. I felt this was more a report of awful events than a story.

Least successful to me. 3*

Those Who Walk at Night, Walk With Ghosts by She Cong Ge adds bugs to the psychoterror, and does so in a way I was genuinely dreading. The disability angle caused my horripilation to become visible from across the room.

Affecting, upsetting, dark, and just plain nasty. 4*

The Yin Yang Pot by Chuan Ge was more or less a take on "The Girl in the Rain"'s themes...I was still very, very unsettled by the physical restraint aspect, as I always will be, but the perception manipulation in this story was what Did. Me. In.

I want to rate it "zero stars, do not recommend", so that means it did a 4.5* job of creeping me out.

The Shanxiao by Goodnight, Xiaoqing gets my CW because animals are abused. Do what you want to adults, but never harm an animal.

Two stars, because there's some very memorable, lurid non-animal-harm imagery.

Have You Heard of Ancient Glory? by Zhou Dedong did its level best to make my axniety circuits fry. Adding to perception manipulation the scourges of addiction, deliberate and intentional triggering of CPTSD, and mental illness issues galore, gave me a jolt that caused me to put the book down for a week. But I could not stop thinking about it during that week. Read the story again, and *click* on came the light: I am in this same headspace—but I can leave it!

That is a giant success. It's the story I'd call the most successful at what horror fiction does. 5*

Records of Xiang Xi by Nanpai Sanshu was unpleasant on every axis: Animal abuse, use of slurs and a kind of contemptuous belittling attitude, a sense of horrifyingly real entitlement, that repulsed me without the cathartic benefit of other stories. A grudging 2*

The Ghost Wedding by Yimei Tangguo did all of that, and more...but did not project the nauseating sense of entitlement, of an absolute right to inflict these horrors, which in my mind made this story (while unpleasant to me) less inexcusable and intolerable.

Evil exists. We must look at it to poultice away some of its toxic power and its appalling fascination. 3* because it was absolutely no fun at all to read, but does something I value.

Night Climb by Chi Hui felt like a Crimean vacation after a Moscow blizzard! Atmospheric and eerie, dread in place of horror, and a slammin' command of imagery.

Never so glad to give something I finished in shivers 4* in my life.

Forbidden Rooms by Zhou Haohui places too much of its harms on children. It doesn't do so gratuitously, and this isn't The Focus like in earlier stories, but...well...ew. I was interested, not repelled, by the slurs used in this story...honestly, human inventiveness is marvelous even when used for scumbaggery. Because this story's ending is what it is, I felt able to get to 4*

Tian'nang by Su Min trads the territories above, and really stomps the floorboards with it...felt like a tale meant to push you outside its narrative to compel you to look, really look, at what you're reading as an entertainment, not merely a story.

I could totally be projecting with this and it has no bearing whatever to the author's intent. But that's how I found it, and it worked well on that level. 3.5*

Huangcun by Cai Jun leans into the slur-use...for my taste, this is just plain ol' abuse meant to disgust. This, plus a hafty dose of graphic violence, could've led to a poor rating. The trick, when selling horror stories to an ambivalent consumer like me, is to bring the goods...this does...but to offer a level of reflection on, or assessment of, the goods in a differently slanted frame.

It's down to the prose in this story. In less adept hands, this would've sent me on my way for good. As it is, 4*

The Death of Nala by Gu Shi is the last story, and would've been no matter what because the animal harm was just too much for me. 3*

All in all the seasoned horror-reader will get the desired chills and thrills from these stories, and from some unexpected directions. I'm always sure that my horror reading is bog-standard until I get a horror title to read! I'm a complete wuss...animals and kids should be left alone. You can talk hauntings and demons all nigh, won't bother me a whit because I don't care, but hurt a creature that can't fight back and I am very angry.

So why did I rate this collection so highly? Because I learned a lot about what scares the Sinophone world. Because I am, like most in that world, stirred into fear and rage by the same sorts of things.

Because Xueting Ni has annotated this collection, you can go learn a lot if you like. If you don't care to do that, you can get your scary-story needs (whatever they may be) met here unbothered. I think it's a fine emotional investment.