Chen, Jennifer. Artifacts of an Ex.

NY: St. Martin’s Press, Nov 2023.

The author is an Angeleno with a couple of writing degrees from NYU, now married to a TV writer, and this Young Adult rom-com is her first published work. It suffers from some of the usual sort of freshman novel woes, but overall it’s pretty good. At sixteen, Chloe Chang (who apparently is Taiwanese-American, but maybe shares some other Asian backgrounds, too) is not an artist but she knows artists and she she understands their art and how their minds work. What she wants is to be a curator, the person who creates an exhibit of someone’s art — who puts together a show, which is an art in itself. She was beginning to make a mark in her native New York (though she messed up her boyfriend’s first solo show), but then her grandmother, who runs a coffee and shop and bakery in LA begins having memory problems and wandering around in the street — and suddenly she and her parents have uprooted themselves and sped off to California to help.

LeMire, Jeff. Collected Essex County.

Atlanta: Top Shelf Productions, 2009.

LeMire is one of the very, very best graphic fiction writers and artists working today. I’ve said that before, but if you’re at all interested in this stuff, it bears repeating. And one of his best works (and the winner of numerous awards) is Essex County, originally published in parts but collected here in as single 500-page volume. And that’s especially useful, because all four of the principal stories are closely interrelated. A supporting character in one will be the protagonist in another, and you won’t always even realize that at first, because the storytelling is very subtle. No superheroes here, just ordinary people in a rural county not far from Windsor, Ontario. The two most important things in Essex County (as in most of Canada) are farming and hockey, and both play a large role in all the stories.

Blake, Ashley Herring. Astrid Parker Doesn’t Fail.

NY: Berkley, 2022.

This is the second volume in a sort-of trilogy, following Delilah Green Doesn’t Care, and it focuses on Delilah’s tightly-wound stepsister, Astrid, who had made her life hell back in high school — but mostly because Astrid was trying to please her mother, Isabel, who apparently had not much use for Delilah. The two women, now nearly thirty, had a few insights and epiphanies, and have since been working to try to understand each other and reach an accommodation, if not not a close friendship. Astrid is an interior designer in their little town of Bright Falls, Oregon, and is also trying to reinvent her life after breaking off her engagement to a controlling, gaslighting, privileged asshole in the first book, but she’s getting very tired of redoing dentists’ offices and ugly split-level homes.

Gaiman, Neil. The Books of Magic.

NY: DC Comics, 1994.

Like much of Gaiman’s graphic work, this one has become a classic and (as Roger Zelazny describes in some detail in the Introduction) it follows closely the universal schema of fantasy described by Joseph Campbell in Hero with a Thousand Faces (also, of course, a classic). The protagonist is Timothy Hunter, an adolescent London skateboarder, with the potential to become the most powerful magician of his age. Not he knows that, or believes it when he’s taken in hand and told so by “the trenchcoat brigade,” the four not-quite-men whose mission it is to educate Timothy about the history of magic and his possible future if he chooses it, and to steer him onto the path where he can safely make an informed decision.

Taylor, Jodi. About Time.

London: Headline Publishing, 2022.

Jodi Taylor acquired a sizable and enthusiastic fan base for her series of novels about the time-traveling historians of St. Mary’s Institute. Those books have a large cast, which has changed a bit over the years, with deaths and new additions, but always preeminent was Dr. “Max” Maxwell, sometime head of the History Department (though she has also been a bounty hunter, among various other occupations). Max married Leon Farrell, Chief Technical Officer at St. Mary’s (he’s responsible for the pods by which one may travel through time) and they had a son, Matthew. And the lad’s early life was horrific, not to say tragic, but he recovered with assistance from the Time Police, and now that he’s grown up, Matthew has become a TP officer himself (about which his mum is less than happy).

Holt, Jeremy & Kat Vendetti. Virtually Yours.

NY: Jeremy Holt Books, 2020.

This graphic novel about a guy and a girl is less about a potential romance and more about a relationship, and it’s pretty good. The title refers to a new dating app for your phone that provides (fake) evidence for the consumption of one’s friends and family that the user is in a relationship with a member of the opposite sex. It’s intended for those who are either too busy with their lives to bother with dating or who are simply too hopeless at ever finding someone.

Yee, Lisa. Maizy Chen’s Last Chance.

NY: Random House, 2022.

This is a children’s book, but it was also a finalist for the National Book Award, so its actual audience is larger than that (or should be). As the title says, the protagonist is 11-year-old Chinese-American Angeleno Maizy Chen, who has been hauled off by her single-parent mother to spend the summer with Mom’s own parents in the small town of Last Chance, Minnesota, not far from Minneapolis. Maizy’s Opa and Oma run the Golden Palace Restaurant, a fixture in Last Chance for more than 130 years. Her grandfather is really sick and Mom has come to help, though she spends much of her time arguing with Oma.

Rivera, Michele L. The Follow Through.

Np: The Author, 1923.

The deliberately YA novel hadn’t really become a thing yet when I was an adolescent, but I began reading them when I was doing my graduate degree in library science more than fifty years ago, and I never stopped, even after they were no longer relevant to my career as a history specialist and archivist. “Gay” didn’t carry it’s present meaning when I was young, either, but there are quite a few YA romances on the market today with a queer slant, and this is one of the better written and more deeply thoughtful ones — and also one of the more straightforwardly erotic.