altlovesbooks

"Constantly and futilely, the earth’s atmosphere seeks to achieve equilibrium. Weather is the turbulent means to this perfect, hopeless end."

This book is an account of the big blizzard that struck the plains states in 1888, called the Children’s Blizzard because of the unfortunately high proportion of children who died during it. The day of the blizzard was unseasonably warm, kids left home to walk to school without appropriate weather gear, and then the inevitable tragedy struck. It’s an incredibly sad tale, one recounted in fairly gruesome detail here, both during the blizzard and the frostbite-y aftermath of some of the victims.

I just wish it clicked with me more. The beginning of the book was fairly slow. We get a lot of backstory behind some of the families, immigrants called from overseas with the promise of better lives for the most part. They arrived in the plains without being prepared for the incredibly wild weather swings and the feast or famine nature of farming there. But there’s just so much backstory for the families that I found myself checking out a bit. Then we get a detailed chapter about weather forecasting of the period and all the major players there, which again had me checked out a bit while the author talked about how (understandably) hard forecasting was back then. I just found it a bit dull.

Then during the actual blizzard, it felt like the author played it a bit fast and loose with some of the victims. Chapter 8 especially felt a lot like disaster fanfiction, where we’re treated to entire sections of what victims of the blizzard went through during their final minutes but without anyone being there, there’s no way to know any of it was accurate. It’s not like they made it home to write journal entries, and the dead by and large died alone or together so nobody was there to carry the tale home. It felt a little gratuitous and contrived.

But the blizzard itself is an incredibly sad story that I’m glad to have (finally) read about when I got to those segments of the book. Those parts that were factual, pulled from accounts, were very compelling and should have made up the bulk of the book.

Well I thought this was absolutely delightful.

It’s a fairly straightforward retelling of the Inch High Samurai folktale from Japan, but where this one shines best is in its artwork and in its dialogue. The art is rather one-note (kind of like an old samurai film), but also beautiful at the same time. There’s some full page spreads that are incredibly striking and emotional at the same time. The dialogue too was something special, rather like if this traditional folktale were being told by the creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender where he banters with his friends in one scene, bookended with serious dialogue about his purpose in life with his father and his teacher that really stirs the emotions in another.

I think this was a really well done telling of this particular tale. Give it a go if you’re interested in Japanese folklore, because you won’t be disappointed.

Hmm.... I think I wanted to like this book more than I did, so I think this warranted 3.5 stars more than 4 stars. I loved the kinda-retro-kinda-not art style, and the cover was especially striking. There's lots of playing with panel layouts, particularly later in the book, which I like to see.

Where it kind of fell a little flat for me was in the story. It's a fairly straightforward haves-exploiting-the-have-nots tale, with the narrative twist being that they're literal children being exploited to maintain the way of life for the adults who built the ship. They're forever dangling the 'when we get to Eden, everything will be paradise' carrot in front of the workers who maintain the ship, glossing over the fact that the graduates are never seen again and that they never seem to get to Eden. I thought the pacing of the story was a bit weak, things take a while to get going, and then towards the end some of the important plot points get glossed over or downplayed. One example of this specifically (story spoilers here) is when Effie and friends break their way into where the graduates are, and we're treated to the horror that they're being impregnated to bear the children to continue the cycle, and all we really get is a window scene looking in on them and some vague threatening dialogue and that's it. I feel like that moment could've been expounded on a bit more to make it hit home a bit harder. There are other smaller examples of reveals and such that I feel like would've had a bit more emotional impact if they were expanded out a bit more.

It's still a decent read, just one I expected to get more out of in the end.

Actually..... not a bad book at all. It's very high level, so if you're looking for minutiae in how to protect your hyper specific use case of a library, you won't find that here, but if you're just looking for something to get you in the right ballpark with your mindset, this did its job well. My library is not a traditional public library so I wasn't able to map some of the advice perfectly to my experiences, but it did get me thinking a lot about the role my library plays in a disaster and the position we're in to assist afterwards.

I thought Chapter 2 was the most useful for me in terms of information and mindset, but I also appreciated the author touching on the aftercare of employees following a disaster in Chapter 3. There's a lot of really great information and links to further assistance all throughout this book, and it was helpful in giving me a jumping off point for planning our own disaster recovery plan.

Like literally every other child in the United States (maybe elsewhere?), I had to read this for school and I don't think I really appreciated it or understood a lot of what was going on behind the scenes when I did so. I remember liking the book a lot when I read it, but before revisiting it I'm not sure I could point to exactly why that was. I read the chapters, checked the boxes, took the quiz, and apparently walked away with a memory of really enjoying the book.

I'm incredibly glad I revisited it as an adult, because there was just so much I didn't pick up on as a kid, I'm sure. I really appreciated reading about the complex racial issues here through the literal eyes of a child, especially as we got to follow them growing up in years and in maturity. I liked that the writing was simultaneously easy to follow and also hiding a lot between the lines and left unsaid.I'm glad I revisited this as an adult with my book club, and would be open to tackling other notable books I read for school in order to give them a fair shake. Except for Ethan Frome, I won't go back to that one willingly.

I picked this one up because it reminded me of the premise to another series I read ages ago (The Acts of Caine by Matthew Woodring Stover, highly highly suggest it), and I wanted to see another take on the idea. Essentially, there’s a world within a world—a destination where anyone (with money) can live out the story of their dreams in a fantasy world crewed by employees of a mega corp. Stella takes a PI job offered by Jericho, CEO of this company, in order to pay her family’s bills, and gets sent on a trip through all four quarters of this fantasy world chasing down a fugitive who is there for his own reasons. She gets caught up in the investigation, discovers there’s way more going on here than she anticipated, and gets stuck having to play both sides of the story in order to bring the real criminals to justice.

The story setting is unique and is mostly successful at what it sets out to do. Each quarter of this fantasy world has a different setting, to provide varied stories and backdrops for paying customers. I felt like the first two were depicted the best, but towards the end the story started feeling a little rushed and immersive detail started to be left behind. I do feel like it didn't seem very sci-fi despite the year being far into the future, which was a bit of a disappointment.

The cast of characters is unique and fairly well fleshed out, though again in the later parts of the book some of the late-introduced characters felt a little flat. Stella also felt a bit inconsistent in how she approached/reacted to situations. She’s clearly meant to be a badass female lead, but several scenes had her seem pretty helpless and reliant on the men around her.

I was aso a bit skeeved out by the choice of love interest(s?) for the main character. Relationship/story spoilers here: Corso’s constant Honey-ing (with a capital H in my ebook) grated on my nerves, and there was vague harem-esque tones here with how Henry was set up in the beginning, and Jericho’s introduction as well. Idk, maybe I’m reading too much into it.

It was fine, but I’m not sure I’ll read book two. Seriously though, if the idea of a world created just for entertainment value appeals to you, give The Acts of Caine by Matthew Woodring Stover a go. Much (much much) darker, but very satisfying.