Anime Review: Ashita no Nadja

Over on Star-Crossed Anime Blog, Psgels (I believe this is where I first heard about the series) dubbed this one of the "50 episode Shojo Series of Awesome" and while awesome may be a bit of a strong word I will back him up and say that this is a really great show. I'm more familiar with the shojo demographic of manga than I am with shonen/senien/josei and for me this series was a fun throwback that felt like a mixture of 80s/90s adventure shojo and a number of turn of the century books for girls that I read when I was about ten (The Secret Garden, Heidi, Betsy, Tacy and Tibb, Anna of Green Gables). Those two kinds of stories might not sound that similar at first but they really are, they're almost slice of life stories focusing on the main character as she grows up and her relationships with her friends, her crushes, and the world in general (and the western novels often focus on the girls for years and years which is something you don't really see replicated in any kind of YA fiction these days). And that description fits Nadja to a T, the story starts out with a very small goal but gradually grows in scope until it becomes not quite a coming of age story (merely because Nadja is only 12) but something rather close.

Ashita no Nadja

Book Review: The Boneshaker

A couple of years ago I read The Broken Lands and found myself regretting that it had taken so much time to get to the book since I whole heartedly adored it and yet never got around to reading the book it was a prequel to. My to-read list is so long I had nearly forgotten about it until I saw the author talking about the kickstarter she was doing (I believe it was either a companion novella to this or for another, unconnected novella she had written) that prompted me to check my new library systems to see if they had a copy and to reserve it. And so, here are my thoughts on it, and I am also so glad the library seems to have found their copy again, this is the second book in four months they've said I lost after I turned it in and I had to find the first one on the shelves myself.....

The Boneshaker by Kate Milford

Book Review: Aftershocks

There was no extra-special reason why I grabbed this book to read, just a few little ones. I had seen it for years sitting on the library's shelves and thought it might be interesting because it was historical fiction but something about how the summary was written just sounded so dull that I had no interest in it. But after reading Fire Horse Girl (which is set a few decades later) I came back to it, interested because of the fact that it had Chinese characters from San Francisco's Chinatown in it and it sounded as if there was an multi-racial relationship in there which is unusual even today in fiction (I think, if I'm wrong please correct me, I don't see it that often). Although, I already mentioned that the summary was misleading by making the story sound boring and that wasn't the only way it was misleading....

Aftershocks by William Lavender

Summary: While Jessie might want to be a doctor her parents are trying to raise her as a proper young lady, after all it's the Edwardian era and women of the upper class simply do not work outside the house. She persists in studying books smuggled out of her father's library and defies the family in other ways she she sneaks out to try and find their dismissed maid in San Francisco's Chinatown where she discovers that she has an even more important reason to care about what happens to it's inhabitants during the 1904 earthquake.

The Good: This book was distinctly different from what the summary led me to believe and most of the time I liked that. It had a lot of different subplots which gave it some added realism and while I constantly waffle on my feelings of progressive characters in historical fiction (on the one hand, it's hard to write a believable character in a historical setting who is more progressive than they should be because of their setting, on the other hand these people did exist so why can't the main character be one of them) in the end I did like Jessi and thought it was appropriate here.

The Bad: As alluded to earlier, the multi-racial romance I was hoping to find did not actually occur in the book and that made me sad, sad that it wasn't here and sad that it doesn't happen much at all in young adult even though we live in such a diverse world. As for the actual book, it's a book that's rather hard to describe since while the main even is certainly the earthquake it's not actually the trigger for a lot of the events in the book and only happens about halfway through and I'm afraid my summary doesn't do the book justice either. Also, despite everything she does Jessie still came off as a bit too flat for me (while she does disobey her parents he doesn't have any major failings, perhaps that's why, after all fiction dictates that if someone doesn't have major failings that they can't be a "real" character, even if you meet people who appear to be just that in real life all the time), the other characters did too but they weren't the main character so that was less important. 


Overall I'm going to give the book a three out of five for being interesting while I was reading it but not something I'll remember for very long, given how much trouble I had finding the cover image for it I suspect I'm not the only one with that feeling.

Comic Review: Market Day

This was a bit of a short book I grabbed from the not-so-local library and when I started reading it I was worried that it would prove too short to write a review about, too short to even tell a story. But after reading this I'm sure that there was enough in that story to write a review after all, abet a short one.

Market Day by James Sturm

Summary: Mendleman is a simple Jewish rug-maker whose least favorite day of the week is going to the market to sell his wares. This week he's even without his wife and that one day shows just how much your day can change, from the joyful to the sorrowful, and how much a person can change with them.

The Good: This book may be short but it's the perfect length to tell it's story and for the first time in a while I found myself truly connecting with a character. Mendleman won me over with him describing how he creates his rugs, where his inspiration flows from and how he always pushes himself to make better and more beautiful art and that made even my heart ache when he finds that he needs to find a new buyer for his rugs. And then my heart kept aching and slowly breaking for him as the story continued on and on. 

The Bad: I do wonder what happened next, what happened after Mendleman woke up that morning and had to continue on with his life, although I think that the story ended at the perfect place as is. I don't have much to criticize, maybe it should have moved faster in one or two paces or held a moment longer in others, in the end this was a very well constructed story which also had as much emotional impact as you could from such a short book.

The Art: The art wasn't exactly plain or simple, it didn't overwhelm the page and the rest of the story which I felt like was a good move and I also felt like it was a good match for the rest of the story. I felt like the feeling it gave off, this wide illusion of space in so many of it's panels, felt very well with Mendleman's thoughts, both his great hopes and fears just being engulfed by the world he lived in.


I'm giving this book 4.5 out of 5 stars, partially because I'm not sure I would ever give a story five, perfect stars, but I connected more with this story than I have with most stories I've read lately and I feel like this book was able to portray a feeling that so many of the books I had to read tried to do but in a way that I could finally understand (or perhaps it's that I'm not also at an age to understand, while a teen could certainly read it I feel like an adult or older teen is going to get the most out of this story).