Review:
I hesitated to get this, since I'm not a birder (although Mosco would argue otherwise, lol). I figured the humor would probably work best for birders, and I was correct - this is probably my least favorite of Mosco's works that I've read.
That said, it still had some good moments, and I particularly liked the glimpses into birding drama.
Mosco's illustrations, as usual, were great. The LBJ was cute, and I snickered at the illustration for "seabird."
Review:
This is a collection of 11 horror stories.
"Me and Evangeline at the Farm":
Initially, this reminded me a bit of Channel Zero's first season, Candle Cove, although it soon became clear that this story was very different. It was a little creepy, but the ending seemed to open up an annoying number of plot holes, unfortunately.
"Milk Door":
Person moves into a new place and accidentally uncovers a freaky "feature." Creepy, especially if you've ever lived in an older building.
Review:
It doesn't matter which issue of Character Design Quarterly you pick up, you're always going to end up with quality artwork and character design advice and tutorials. This issue features:
- An interview with Ben Eblen, the cover artist, about his art and career
- A step-by-step look at Eblen's process for creating the cover art
- A step-by-step look at Sarah-Lisa Hleb's process for creating a "shy sheep" character
- A step-by-step look at Corah Louise's process for creating four members of a Victorian family
- An interview with John Loren
- Paul Joseph Nicholson's tutorial for expressing personality in your character designs, using a hare and tortoise as examples
- A step-by-step look at Iz Ptica's process for creating a character using the prompts nature, party, and tiny
- Andy Na's tutorial for using color to amplify emotions and draw the eye
- An interview with Poopikat (Kate Pellerin) about her art and career
- A gallery of artwork by artists Dan Sprogis, Kenny Leoncito, and Haiyang Sun
- Laura Dumitriu's tutorial for creating different looks (sporty, casual, elegant) for characters, using a couple different characters as examples
- Erica Hodne's step-by-step process for designing a Robin Hood character
- (Inside the cover flaps) Lorenzo Etherington's tips for drawing rabbits and hares (which, thinking back to a needle felted rabbit I created, also contains helpful information for 3D work)
As always, a really nice publication with lots of tutorials and tips and fantastic artwork.
Review:
When Roman architect Lucius is criticized for his thermae (ancient Roman public bath) designs, he goes to a local public bath himself to collect his thoughts...and ends up in an onsen (Japanese public bath) in modern Japan. He doesn't immediately realize that's what happened, however, and thinks he's surrounded by slaves or foreigners. He's absolutely awestruck by what he sees at the onsen. When he is somehow transported back to ancient Rome, he tries to make some of the features of the onsen a reality in his own thermae designs. It's all an instant hit, catapulting Lucius into thermae architectural fame.
As the series progresses, Lucius is repeatedly transported back and forth between modern Japan and ancient Rome. Each instance gives him more ideas, but also leaves him feeling conflicted about his pride as a Roman.
Review:
My only complaint is that the volume was very short. The humor (awkwardness, anxiety, stress, cats, general nerdiness, etc.) was super relatable and funny. I particularly love the facial expressions and Andersen's use of blur effects.
The last 20 or so pages of the volume is devoted to Andersen's advice for young creatives, illustrated with some of her comics and art. There's stuff about dealing with harassment, being kind to yourself, etc.
Review:
Diana Parker puts every spare penny she has into trying to help her sister with her medical bills. Her sister, Alice, is on dialysis and needs a kidney transplant. Diana is willing and able to be her donor, but issues with Alice's soon-to-be-ex-husband have resulted in her currently having no health insurance coverage for herself and her kids. Diana needs $40,000 ASAP.
She has a plan, albeit not one that makes her or Alice very comfortable. Diana and Alice's mother was a notorious conwoman, and Diana learned a lot of her mother's tricks before she was eventually caught and sent to prison. Diana doesn't want to be like her mother - in fact, she has spent her adult life trying to be as honest as possible. But she's just come across an incredible job ad posted by a wealthy couple looking for a live-in nanny to accompany them to Aspen for three months, for which they'll pay $40,000. They want someone who can teach their five-year-old son math, French, and how to ski. The sum total of Diana's matching qualifications? She has babysat before.
When she's somehow hired for the job, Diana is both thrilled and overwhelmed with guilt. She decides to do her absolute best and hopes that her lies about her qualifications aren't immediately uncovered. Putting her all into this job doesn't exactly leave much room anything else, and yet Diana somehow repeatedly finds herself in the orbit of Griffin Windsor, a charming and handsome earl.
Review:
Oghi wakes up from a coma after a car accident that took his wife's life and left him paralyzed and disfigured. The only person left in his life to care for him, since he has no other family, is his mother-in-law. She hires an additional caretaker for him, and he also has a physical therapist, although he doesn't see them as often as he maybe should.
All Oghi can do is lay there, try to communicate his needs (he can't speak intelligibly, although he's eventually able to write a bit), and think about the past. Initially, his mother-in-law cares for him reasonably well, but as time goes on, something changes. Oghi notices that she's digging holes in the backyard, uprooting his wife's beloved garden. He also finds himself more and more neglected.
Review:
Morgan Locke, a university student studying folklore, has been hiding a mysterious, debilitating illness from everyone but his family his whole life. He's been reasonably successful about it thus far, but his seizures and nausea are becoming more frequent and ill-timed. It isn't contagious, but he's still worried it will cost him his friends, including Ivy, a fellow student on whom he has a bit of a crush.
Then two little creatures called genets, Kelu and Almond, show up at his home and tell him that he's a long-lost elven prince. To Morgan, elves are beings of folklore, but then again the genets shouldn't be real either, and there they are. In the hope of finding a cure for his illness, Morgan goes with Kelu and Almond and finds himself in a dangerous world of elves who see everyone else as beneath them and little more than slaves.
Review:
This book is primarily illustrations of dog body language, accompanied by short paragraphs or bulleted lists highlighting the important aspects of what you'll see a dog doing and what their body language likely indicates, along with additional details to note (context, what's going on with the rest of their body, etc.).
I'm pretty sure my first exposure to Chin's work was her dog and cat body language posters, both of which are freely available to download and print on her website (along with lots of other really helpful graphics, many but not all of which animal-related). You can probably get a lot of the same information found in this book via Chin's free downloads, but this book has it all in one place, in a format small enough to be tucked away in a bag. I'd have appreciated something like this back when my parents got their first dog. I'd grown up around cats but not dogs - dogs seemed loud and aggressive in comparison, and while I ended up loving my parents' dog, I'm still not always comfortable around dogs in general.
As Chin notes, dogs can have very different body types (curly tails, stubby tails, floppy ears, etc.), which can affect what certain body language details look like. Where possible, she illustrates what certain behaviors might look like in different dogs - for example, relaxed vs. alert ears in a Boston Terrier (upright ears) vs. a Dachshund (floppy ears).
All in all, this is a nice little book, and the illustrations are, as expected, great.
Review:
This alternates between the past and present. In the present, 12-year-old Edward is the sole survivor of a plane crash that kills 183 other passengers, including his mother, father, and older brother. He's sent to live with his aunt (his mother's sister) and her husband, who'd been unsuccessfully trying to have a child of their own. In the past, we get glimpses of the POVs of several passengers of the doomed flight, right up to the moment it crashes.
The book covers several years of Edward's life with his aunt and uncle, as he tries to process what he went through and the grief over the deaths of his family members.
Review:
Shelby Tebow is the first person to go missing. Then Meredith Dickey and her young daughter, Delilah, also disappear not far from where Shelby was last seen. The case goes cold, until, 11 years later, Delilah is found. She was apparently kept in someone's basement all that time.
This follows several POVs. In the past, there's Meredith, who it turns out was Shelby's doula, and Kate, a neighbor of Meredith's. In the present, there's Delilah (her escape) and Leo, Meredith's son. We learned that someone was following Meredith and sending her threatening texts. She was also increasingly involved with one of her clients, Shelby, and her less-than-rosy situation.
This was twisty in a way that wasn't too over-the-top. That said, the situation and characters weren't really that memorable to me and didn't grab me as much as they could have. I'm still looking forward to trying Kubica's other books, though.
Review:
I got this book a while ago, while looking for well-reviewed illustrated nonfiction. I remembered I had it after finishing John Rhodes' How to Make a Vaccine - it would have been really helpful to have read this book before that one. I know I learned a bit about the immune system in school, but Dettmer's book was the most thorough education in the immune system I've ever had. It covered things I vaguely remembered from school, added new information that's been discovered since then, and also covered some of the things that can go wrong (allergies, cancer, parasites, autoimmune disease, HIV and AIDS, COVID-19) while at the same time noting areas where we still don't fully understand why things happen the way they do.
Review:
The year is 3020 C.E. Ethan is a cyborg soldier who has traveled to the planet Peridot in order to take a break from the battlefield. He'll be working security - on Peridot, whose only inhabitants are a few human scientists, their family members, and some weird native plant-like things, that should be a piece of cake.
Since Ethan can handle the high oxygen content of the planet a bit better than most of the other members of Peridot's security, he's assigned to help Mihail, an enthusiastic botanist who's finally been given permission to go out and do some fieldwork. As Ethan gets to know Mihail, he starts feeling things he hasn't felt since before he became a cyborg. His emotions were dialed down so that he could handle battle better, and there's very little of him left that's still organic tissue...but maybe even he can still feel love?
