#alys arden

Don’t want to throw anything at particular creators, so I’ll leave out any titles, but I’m just recently learning just how much it hurts to have a comics run you really enjoy get a new creative team that just immediately derails the experience of a title.

Growing up, I never really got into comics and preferred reading novels (which is why when I started writing my own superhero stories they were in prose), and when I started reading comics a couple years ago, I either a) had mixed feelings on runs from the jump or b) found limited runs or stand-alones that I really liked (s/o the Kami Garcia/Gabriel Picolo Teen Titans, Alys Arden/Jacquelin De Leon Zatanna: Jewel of Gravesend, the Becky Cloonan Batgirls, and the absolute perfection of the Mark Waid/Dan Mora World’s Finest).

My favorite characters that I wanted to start with were Superman, Flash, and my beloved Nightwing. Superman has been mostly fine. I’ve enjoyed both the Bendis and Williamson runs. I’ve read some of the other comics with mixed feelings, usually wrapped up in poor portrayals of the Clark side of the character. The Flash comics I’ve read have mostly felt meh, but that’s been pretty consistent.

Then there’s Nightwing. I fell in love with Dick Grayson in the Young Justice show and that’s one of my favorite pieces of superhero content ever created so it’s a tough bar to be held against. Then when I started reading comics, I wanted to start in the rebirth era to get at least somewhat of a clean slate to start with. So I got Rick Grayson pretty early and my opinion of that run is maybe slightly more generous than consensus but it wasn’t a great start. Then Tom Taylor’s Nightwing came and it was like someone pulled the Dick Grayson I adored in Young Justice and gave him more depth. Taylor took my budding interest in comics and showed me that it was a format I could genuinely love and I’ve read so many more comics because of that run.

This post is not about Nightwing. While I miss the Taylor/Redondo run, I read the first Dan Watters/Dexter Soy collected volume On with the Show, and it was totally fine. I will probably not buy copies to fill my library, but I’ll continue reading the character unless it gets considerably worse.

The Nightwing talk was just to give context to how it wasn’t until recently that I really started to fall in love with comics and get connected to certain titles. I’ve read other heroes I have a real affinity for where I’ve disliked the comics, but I while I already wanted more content of the character, I wasn’t already invested in that comic run. I could just write that off as me not loving the medium. But this is the first time since I’ve really started appreciating what comics can be that I’ve had a title I love immediately turn bad and it’s just a really awful feeling. Is this what comic book readers have always had to deal with? Am I a real comic fan now? Time to find some new runs to read and maybe start working on the back catalog as well. And more than anything it’s time for a Young Justice rewatch.

Book Review: Zatanna: The Jewel Of Gravesend

New Young Adult Releases Coming Out Today! (January 19th, 2021)

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Have I missed any new Young Adult releases? Have you added any of these books to your TBR? Let me know! ___

New Standalones/First in a Series:

Wider than the Sky by Katherine Field Rothschild

Cast in Firelight by Dana Swift 

If I Tell You the Truth by Jasmin Kaur

This Will Be Funny Someday by Katie Henry

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

A Complicated Love Story Set in Space by Shaun David Hutchinson

Your Corner Dark by Desmond Hall

Playing with Fire by April Henry

Girl On the Line by Faith Gardner 

Rise of the Red Hand by Olivia Chadha

Wench by Maxine Kaplan

New Sequels: 

Get a Clue (Bookish Boyfriends #4) by Tiffany Schmidt

We Free the Stars (Sands of Arawiya #2) by Hafsah Faizal

Winterkeep (Graceling Realm #4) by Kristin Cashore  

The Gates of Guinée (The Casquette Girls #4) by Alys Arden   

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ZATANNA: THE JEWEL OF GRAVESEND

​by Alys Arden & Jacquelin de Leon (Illustrator)

(DC Comics, 4/13/21)

9781401296384

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Author: Alys Arden.

Publication Date: 2013.

Genre: YA horror/paranormal romance.

Premise: Months after a historically bad hurricane ravages New Orleans, sixteen-year-old Adele Le Moyne returns to the French Quarter with her artist father. Food supplies are low, the curfew is strict, and the closure of Adele’s artsy magnet school means that she’ll have to attend snooty Sacred Heart Prep, but those are the least of her worries. She also has to deal with emerging psychic powers, a centuries-old curse, a posse of evil vampires, a mysterious eighteenth-century diary, and a love polygon that requires a flowchart. 

Thoughts: I’ve always been baffled by the idea that reading YA is beneath adults. YA is an incredibly broad category; the only defining traits that apply across all the sub-genres are “written for young adults” and “has protagonists who are eighteen or younger,” and even those are up for debate. It’s absurd to assume that all of these books are inferior even to well-regarded literature for adults. YA books aren’t always easier reads than books for adults and, even if they were, that wouldn’t indicate a lack of quality or sophistication. (Sometimes a book is hard to read because it’s complex or unfamiliar; other times, it’s hard to read because it’s boring, more complicated than it needs to be, or just plain bad.) I also don’t understand the idea that, because a book appeals to young adults, it can’t appeal to mature adults; surely there is some overlap in taste. And yet...occasionally I read a YA book that makes me ask, “Am I too old for this shit?” 

The Casquette Girls isn’t egregiously bad, but it’s guilty of many excesses of YA that people mock. Did you hate the love triangles in Twilight and/or The Hunger Games? Bad news! Adele has sexual tension with two or three ancient vampires (I genuinely lost count) and an age-appropriate boy who can transform into a bird. Do you roll your eyes when the narrator describes her physical appearance, apropos of nothing? You will not enjoy Adele’s description of her “espresso-colored hair.” There are plenty of interesting things happening in the novel--the details of recovering post-disaster New Orleans are great, and the origins of the curse as described in the eighteenth-century diary are a lot of fun--but the author tries to do too much, and the focus is rarely on the juicy stuff. Everything also feels a little synthetic, from the decision to make the hurricane a fictional one to the relatively small role played by the historical casquette girls to the fact that Adele spends the worst part of the hurricane aftermath in a Parisian boarding school.  

It’s less offensive than Twilight, an obvious influence. Adele chooses the innocuous bird-boy over the violent vampires, and she has a fairly realistic mix of positive and negative relationships with other female characters. Its treatment of the black characters is...mediocre, I guess? I’m white, so big grain of salt here. Adele forms an important alliance with Desiree, a standoffish but fundamentally kind Sacred Heart queen bee whose family has a history with Adele’s, and there are a handful of more minor black characters that I remember. There should’ve been more, given the setting and the surplus of interchangeable white vampires. Arden makes an effort to portray the practice of voodoo respectfully and non-sensationally, although the results aren’t particularly deep. (Neither is the treatment of racism and the legacy of slavery; the eighteenth-century characters agree that it’s bad, but it’s not discussed much beyond that.) The setting is the most successful part of the novel; Arden’s love for New Orleans and knowledge of post-disaster life come through clearly. 

Anyway, I gave away my copy to the passel of tween and teen girls who live in my apartment complex (from a distance, of course). I hope they enjoy it more than I did. The very best YA literature might find fans of all ages, but there’s no sin in a book  appealing chiefly to its target audience.

Is blood thicker than magic in La Nouvelle-Orléans?

Reluctant Reader Wednesday: Zatanna: The Jewel of Gravesend by Alys Arden & Jacquelin De Leon 

Zatanna is an unusual girl for many different reasons. She lives in a building called the Golden Elephant in Luna Park, her father is a famous magician, and she has a huge pet rabbit that she walks on a leash down the Coney Island boardwalk. While her family makes her crazy sometimes, she has her friends and her boyfriend to help keep her sane. But sometimes they’re not enough to stop her life from going in unexpected directions. 

When a strange new magic show has a weird effect on Zatanna, it’s just the beginning of the roller-coaster of her life. Soon she’s involved in a dangerous magical rivalry that threatens to tear apart her world, and make her question everything she knows about herself and her family.