sucreslibrary's reviews
1109 reviews

did a reread of the first volume so I could go into this one with everything I needed to remember. I had been excitedly waiting for this release for YEARS as the date kept getting pushed back further and further. I honestly still didn't believe the confirmed release date until the package showed up on my doorstep.

And after all that waiting... I'm disappointed :( the art is gorgeous, but the paneling could be even more confusing than in the first volume. I often read things out of order because of how the speech bubbles were laid out. it also felt like there were waaaaay more "chapter breaks" in this volume, most of which didn't make sense. we'd get the covers for various horror comics/magazines that signal a new chapter, but it would lead to a continuation of the previous page rather than something that felt like a new section. but then sometimes, you get a bigger time jump and total scenery change. there was one much later in the volume that deeply confused me and I wondered if some pages had been printed out of order or were missing, but I think it was just a really confusing scene change.

the story also slows to such a crawl for much of the first half, then rushes to an unsatisfying "conclusion" in the last thirty pages. while you kinda get answers for a lot of the mysteries in the first volume, there's very big developments in this one that felt hamfisted and just a way to reach a specific conclusion that isn't natural for the characters. it really turns into such a jumble in the last several chapters that I'm still reeling from what I read, and not in a good way. I was also getting so frustrated by the amount of times Karen, the main character, refers to an event or conversation then says "I'll talk about that more later" because later never comes. it was just a way to handwave a lot of events. Anka's storyline felt very incomplete, which is a shame because those portions were some of the strongest in the first volume. there's also some reveals about Karen's father that make little sense, and I'm not sure if some of them were even true? it was a very strange way to go about Karen learning more about her dad. 

I dunno! I'm sad this wasn't as much of a hit for me as the first one was! even though the first one has some plotting and pacing issues, it was still easily a favorite comic of mine. it feels Ike this volume, instead of working on those problems and fixing them, only deepened them and made the story worse for it. there were still some wonderful sections, mainly anything with Francoise and her journey, but I wish we got a bit more with that instead a lot of the meandering that happened in the first part of this volume. 

i wish this had been a little bit longer to flesh out the characters and their relationship more, but overall it's a sweet comic and I really appreciate getting to once again see Gillman's soft coloring and loving depiction of trans women 

some really hard hitting essays in here while some others are a bit flat. i thought this would touch more on growing up fat but it's really only one essay, though that essay is very informative and eye-opening. I quite liked the anti-carceral angle a few of the essays took and how it explored that in many cases, the people themselves can operate as an arm of the surveillance state. reading the author grappling with her own knee-jerk reactions ingrained in her from her upbringing was relatable and well-written. 

there's also a lot of great stuff on growing up queer, but I did cringe a little at an earlier essay where she claims "gay" is too reductive a term. i'm glad she feels comfortable and happy with using queer as a label, but i dislike when terms like "gay" or "lesbian" or even "bisexual" are deemed too limiting despite a vast history of that being far from the truth. i think there's a way to identify with queer w/out unnecessarily dragging down other terms that are liberating and expansive for many.

i also didn't enjoy a lot of the movie summaries, especially for the mike flanagan film 'doctor sleep'. i understand where she's drawing parallels to her own life, but as a mike flanagan hater who couldn't make it through that movie it wasn't exactly a pleasant reading experience for me. while i enjoyed the essay on Ringu and Sadako, i wish she had dug a little deeper into her analysis. i think that's just me having consumed too much horror analysis in my lifetime so the ideas presented weren't exactly new or groundbreaking. they don't always have to be! but that just means the horror essays often fell a bit flat for me.

it was mainly her essays on Singapore that made the collection for me. she depicts her complicated relationship with her home country so well, as well as her frayed family connections. the complexity of her situation, of loving her home when it doesn't necessarily love her back, is one I've seen from other authors but felt Rozario did an excellent job examining from multiple angles. 

I liked a lot of the stories included in here and felt like I got a really good grasp on the variety of lesbian writing from this time period and earlier. A lot of the "short stories" are actually excerpts pulled from books, not stand-alone stories, but most of the selections were done expertly enough that I didn't feel like I was lost when reading them. I was really impressed with how this collection pulled from many countries outside of Europe and included a good number of South Asian and African authors, and the blurbs before each selection were great at providing background on the author as well as the environments in which they were publishing stories. So many of the authors were completely new to me, and I'm excited to seek out more work from them. Stars were docked for including a story by an Israeli author.

fave stories/selections: 'Caribbean Chameleon' by Makeda Silvera, 'Looking for Petronilla' by Emma Donoghue (one of the only fantastical stories), 'They Came At Dawn' by Karen Williams, 'The Civil War' by Yasmin V. Tambiah, 'Red Azalea' by Anchee Min, 'The Child Manuela' by Christa Winsloe, 'Waters' by Achy Obejas, 'The Microcosm' by Maureen Duffy (lots of great stuff w/ butch/femme dynamics in this one), and 'Aphrodite' s Vision' by Elena Georgiou 

the issues i had at the end of the last volume were mostly handled well and I do appreciate this manga's effort to look at a lot of different angles on disability topics. what i don't appreciate is that the two leads refuse to communicate in a way that's satisfying to read! i'm fine with miscommunication to an extent in romance manga, it's a part of the genre, but it has reached absolutely ridiculous levels in this series and has become so frustrating. let's hope the next volume they actually attempt to speak to each other instead of going days or weeks without saying a word to the other (not even texts?????).

i wish the gay aspect of the relationship was handled with even 1/3 of the same interest the disability parts were - there's a lack of introspection on the part of the characters to the point they haven't even named what they are to each other. they exist in a bubble of their own making and neither seem to even be interested in reaching out to gay community or speaking to other gay people. it hasn't even been brought up! i know the original intent of this series wasn't for it to be BL and I feel you can really tell as the series goes on. the mangaka seems incapable of thinking of the gay relationship in a societal way as she does the disability aspects. these two might as well be the only gay men to ever exist in all of japan with the way they act. and i know this is also a convention of the genre, but i feel there have been real strides in a lot of modern manga to talk about these things in a more interesting and thoughtful way (i've seen it mostly in yuri where the two main characters aren't adrift in a sea of straight friends but rather have other gay/bi/etc friends + are aware of how society views their gayness and have thoughts and feelings on it!). with how thoughtful this series can be, it feels like a huge miss for that not to extend to the sexuality of the main characters.