August 2021 Update

This month has been anything but summery.

Sorry, I'm miserable for personal reasons. Failure is crushing, a stab in the chest and stomach. I've been upset before, deprived before, but this is a whole new blow to my self-esteem. But remember that there are people, your family, who love and support you through the worst times.

Well, here's what I've watched and reread in August - my escape from reality, again:

Films:

The Matrix trilogy, bad animated sequels to bad animated films on Netflix (you know the ones, and I don't know why I watched them), Monty Python's Life of Brian (The Holy Grail is still my favourite), Help! I'm a Fish (surprisingly touching and deep, no pun intended), We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story (yeah, no, that's a less good 2D animated classic), Jennifer's Body (a rewatch, and I appreciate it more now - we all owe Megan Fox [she's so good!] and Diablo Cody an apology), Mean Girls, Vivo (brilliant - Netflix bringing in the best, and it's Lin-Manuel Miranda, what are you waiting for!), The Little Prince (another great animated film on Netflix, and a fine adaptation), The Spy Who Dumped Me (hated it; what an unfunny, sexist, racist, xenophobic waste of time, and Mila Kunis looks so tired and fed up at this point, and I don't blame her one bit), Luca, Last Holiday (love it! Highly underrated), Speed Racer, A Knight's Tale (now there's an overrated and trite film that's not as funny as it thinks it is), Gladiator (ditto, except not funny, just boring), Khoobsurat (2014) (ehhhh...), and Bride Wars (its universal hate is justified. Kill it with fire.)

TV:

I am finished with Harley Quinn. On Netflix I watched Centaurworld (a new favourite, and I binged it in one night - what an adorable delight), Bridgerton (hmm, no; it's cute and witty, for the most part, and the male actors are gorgeous, but I really didn't like the ending of the season), and the first season of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (one of the worst things I've ever seen, and the last nail in the coffin for me ever watching American comedy shows again, or any live action American shows; I now officially hate Tina Fey, and the number of racist jokes in every single episode should be a world record - only that's not an accomplishment, of course. What cheap, easy, lazy, stupid, infuriating bullshit.)

Book rereads:

Our Own Private Universe - Read review here.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Read review here.

The Female of the Species - Read review here.

I Love You So Mochi - Read review here.

The Count of Monte Cristo - Read review here.

I will try to stay positive, and look on the happy side of things, no matter how hard that is. But that's life, isn't it? You've got to move forward, and keep trying.

Stay safe.

Graphic Novel Review - 'The Magic Fish' by Trung Le Nguyen

A lovely mother-and-son story, about generational trauma, language and communication - through the only universal language besides mathematics: fairy tales.

Though unlike maths, fairy tales and stories are for everyone. They have worldwide appeal. They can last and endure for all time; they can entertain and be enjoyed by families throughout anything and every era. Most importantly, they can be changed with the times when it's necessary. Breaking traditions, altering outcomes and how the happily ever after turns out - all great when it's done for selfless reasons. Reasons like trying, attempting, to understand children and what they really need nowadays. To make a better life for them, with families that love and support them.

To make a better world.

'The Magic Fish' is set in the nineties in the US. It is about the duel lives of twelve-year-old Tiến, and his Vietnamese immigrant mother Helen (plus his Vietnamese immigrant father), from the Vietnam War. To understand each other better, for Helen to improve her English and Tiến his Vietnamese, they have story times together, through library fairy tale books.

A huge problem is that Tiến doesn't know how to tell a secret to his parents in Vietnamese, and none of the storybooks he reads show any way for him to communicate it - his coming out. Nothing around him helps him to find the right words to express his true self to his beloved parents (his close friend at school, Claire, knows, and his other close friend and crush, Julien, may know as well). Worse, it seems to never be the right time to tell them: Helen, a young woman caught between two worlds in an ocean she's on the verge of drowning in, has a family back in Vietnam who she hasn't seen in years but stays in contact with, and when she finally revisits, with or without her son Tiến, it may be too late to make any amends. Helen may be struggling and suffering enough...

But maybe fairy tales - mainly ones from Vietnam - can help bring the family closer together, make them understand each other more. With a few changes here and there.

Sometimes mothers can be the real fairy godmothers...

The fairy tales told in 'The Magic Fish', in parallel with the lives of Tiến and Helen, are the original, darker versions of 'Cinderella' (two retellings, one mixed with 'Tattercoats' or 'Catskin') and 'The Little Mermaid'. The dresses drawn on each of the intrepid heroines in those stories are absolutely gorgeous and stunning. The author, Trung Le Nguyen, explains the reasoning for his artistic choices behind the period piece costumes, as well as other aspects in his art, in the comic's afterword, so I won't repeat his words here. He lays it all out better and smarter than I could.

And while the artwork is amazing, something negative I feel I have to point out is that often, Helen is drawn looking far too young. I was almost put out at the beginning when I realised she is not, in fact, Tiến's older sister, nor his school friend. They look the same age in most panels! Perhaps this was done purposefully, to highlight how young and inexperienced Helen truly is, in spite of her being in her thirties and what she went through during the conflicts in Vietnam. This is commented on, in a moment when Helen is on the phone to her Vietnamese relatives, telling them that Tiến looks a lot like her. The two are, in a way, similar, and not just in their shared love of fairy tales; protagonists who are two sides of the same coin.

Helen is a mother, but also a woman losing her roots and her place in the world, caught between what she knew in her old life and what she has to do to readjust in her new life. She wishes to progress, to learn, for her son's sake, without forgetting her country of birth, her childhood home. If she could survive and escape a war-torn country - for love - then she can adapt to any setback in her new existence - again, for love. And again, for her son's sake, and her own.

Only, Tiến's father, who went through the exact same hardships, still looks like an adult, so...

Tiến himself is a very passive main character, as well. However, he is very emotional and sensitive, and the reader readily understands his motives and passivity, given his circumstances.

I also love how supportive his friends are. It's the older, out-of-touch generation, the adults, who are the horrible, bigoted people.

Except, maybe, for Tiến's parents. Tiến is a wonderful, bespectacled, book-loving little gay boy, unfortunately closeted. But I think that, because of her brilliant development, of how her duality and grief are handled, and her uncertainty with herself and how her life turned out despite it being filled with unconditional love, Helen is my favourite character in the whole tale.

'The Magic Fish' is an original, unique, magical graphic novel. So much work went into making it as complex yet heartwarmingly simple as it is. It stays with you, long after you finish it, and it never forgets what the heart of the story is meant to be, beyond the "fairy tales are not real life" theme: the mother-and-son relationship. The mother-and-son multi-layered communication is a story that has almost never been told before, and it is beautiful. A patchwork jacket (Helen works as a tailor), fish, birds and peaches are other metaphors in this exquisite dream, containing stories within stories.

This is what comics - all stories - are supposed to do: Transcend. Transform. Keep changing. Keep evolving, to teach empathy and compassion. Keep loving - the craft, and the chaotic, magnificent and awe-inspiring diversity and lives of humanity.

Final Score: 4/5

Graphic Novel Review - 'Cheer Up! Love and Pompoms' by Crystal Frasier (Writer), Val Wise (Artist)

Book content warning: transphobia, sexism.

'Cheer Up! Love and Pompoms' - what a cute and lovely little graphic novel about cheerleading and transgender rep.

It's a high school coming-of-age LBGTQ love story, between the cisgender, white, fat, snarky, antisocial overachiever Annie Ginter, and the shy, pressured, sensitive, constantly-on-edge, half-Hispanic trans girl Beatrice "Bebe" Diaz.

As sweetness and light as the comic is, there is as much terrible realism as well. It doesn't sugarcoat the rampant transphobia, both micro and macro aggressive, that Bebe faces on a daily basis. In fact, it overshadows the cheerleading aspect of the story on an ecliptic radius.

Bebe's close friends from the cheerleading squad, who try to be supportive, treat her as more of a mascot and a charity case than a person with her own agency and feelings, and they whisper snide comments to each other when she does show that agency and passion, aka when she "acts like a man". "Making a scene" - doing anything at all to reveal the shocking truth that she is only human, and a child - is Bebe's greatest fear.

She is referred to as "it", right in front of her and her squad, by some woman coach, who didn't even bother to look up her name and what she looks like before confronting her, as at first the coach mistakes one of the more "masculine"-looking cheerleaders for the trans girl whose existence enrages her for no reason. That Karen's breathing privileges should be revoked.

Bebe's parents are also awful, putting a whole lot of pressure on her to be perfect with perfect grades in order to downplay her transitioning, telling her she is "not a normal girl" (what a horrible thing to say to your own child) and so she can't have any free time and go out and have fun and be with friends, and they threaten to make her dress like a boy if she doesn't get those stellar grades.

Oh and there's a creepy guy who won't stop hitting on her, because in his own twisted logic he is doing her a favour, because "nobody else with ever touch her". And she is a girl who "makes an effort" in being extra girly. She's a checkbox to him. Dickhead.

Things turn out fine in the end, of course. Bebe gains in confidence, and Annie and her friends do better by her (though they are not called out for certain remarks made from earlier, disappointingly). Bebe stands up for herself, without other people White Knight-ing her. Her parents learn to accept her and love her, not just tolerate her.

Although at the end of his arc her dad says to her, "You're so pretty when you smile". I'm sure this is meant to be seen as him being happy that she is smiling at all (that's been a part of her character development), but seriously, what does pretty have to do with anything? There is so much sexism to unpack there, not least the presence of drawing dangerously close to the line of the long-dead "Smile, you'll look pretty" bullshit. Not to mention the transphobic dig that suggests that only trans women who look pretty - meaning, who are "feminine" enough - will be "accepted" by society, because of those sexist standards upheld by the patriarchy, that places a woman's looks above everything else about her. The comic even made it a point in an earlier scene that Bebe is pressured to look pretty so that "she doesn't gross people out". The dad is not called out on his little line that exposes so much. WTF?

Annie remains hilarious, but also kinder and more polite to others, especially the cheerleaders she unfairly judged before. Her gives-no-shit attitude is great, and her relationship with Bebe - wherein they were friends before Bebe transitioned, and they manage to rebuild from there through cheerleading - is well developed and totally sweet.

Huge props to the author for integrating the harsh reality of transphobia in this otherwise luscious and cordial comic - culminating in an inclusive prom scene finale - AND without once deadnaming Bebe. Kudos.

In addition, one of the cheerleaders comes out as nonbinary at the end (admittedly they didn't get nearly as much panel time as the other cheerleaders beforehand, but still).

Rainbows and love and pompoms all around!



'ANNIE: I thought you wanted to study! Why didn't you tell her no?

BEBE: Oh, I couldn't say no. I don't want people to get upset with me.

ANNIE: I say no to people all the time and people love me!

BEBE: Annie, you're literally hanging out with me because everyone else hates you.

ANNIE: Well, I love me, and that's what's important!'


'BEBE: I can't just turn everything into a fight every time someone is insensitive or rude. So sometimes, if people are trying, that's enough for me. I can swallow some hurt feelings for the sake of not having to fight every moment I'm awake! And I never want to be the center of attention!'


'BEBE: I know I shouldn't apologize all the time... I just feel like I have to apologize for being around. [...] My transitioning put so many people out... [...] And even the people who are nice get so much angrier when I get upset than they did before. Like they're all just waiting for proof that I'm "one of the bad ones". And no matter what I do, everyone is always looking at me. I'm always the center of attention. And they think if I screw up or freak out, it's because I'm a trans girl... Never because I'm just not perfect.'


'BEBE: Sometimes it makes me so mad at all the other girls in school that they can just change in the locker rooms... Or go out without makeup.'



Prejudice, bigotry - it is all hateful, deadly, suffocating, zero sense shit. I wouldn't recommend it.

Unlike this comic. I would recommend that.

Final Score: 4/5

Book Review - 'Princess Daisy and the Dragon and the Nincompoop Knights' by Steven Lenton

What a cute little feminist fairy tale picture book for kids. Very sweet and funny, and it rhymes. It's like 'Brave' meets 'The Worst Princess' meets 'Princess Smartypants'.

Princess Daisy ("HI I'M DAISY!" - sorry, couldn't resist), a sweet and booksmart brunette princess after my own heart, has to prove that she is capable of solving any problems, through deduction, research, kindness and compassion. She doesn't exist to be stuck in a tower, waiting to be rescued/courted by a prince; she is far too proactive and pragmatic for that conventional nonsense.

'Princess Daisy and the Dragon and the Nincompoop Knights' also breaks convention in that it does show the princess become a queen - a happy and single queen at that. A princess doesn't remain so, and she has loads of responsibilities to her people.

I can't recommend this colourful treat enough to little girls and boys (moreover, the art is lovely and cartoony). Read 'Princess Daisy' to them; they'll thank you.

Final Score: 4/5

P.S. Holy smokes is this really my 750th review? What a milestone! A brimstone milestone! To think I've been writing book reviews for eight years now!