REVIEW: CDQ: Character Design Quarterly, 29 (magazine issue)

Character Design Quarterly is a magazine, although each issue has its own ISBN and it's possible to purchase individual issues, which is how I ended up with this one.

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: Thermae Romae: The Complete Omnibus (manga) by Mari Yamazaki, translated by Stephen Paul

Thermae Romae is historical comedy with fantasy/time travel elements. I bought my copy new.

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: Herding Cats: A "Sarah's Scribbles" Collection (graphic novel) by Sarah Andersen

Herding Cats is technically a collection of comics rather than a graphic novel, but eh. I bought my copy new.

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: Cinder-Nanny (book) by Sariah Wilson

Cinder-Nanny is contemporary romance. I bought my copy new.

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: The Hole (book) by Hye-young Pyun, translated by Sora Kim-Russell

The Hole is a Korean psychological horror/thriller novel. I bought my copy new.

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: An Heir to Thorns and Steel (book) by M.C.A. Hogarth

An Heir to Thorns and Steel is the first book in Hogarth's Blood Ladders trilogy. I bought my copy new.

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: Doggie Language: A Dog Lover's Guide to Understanding Your Best Friend (nonfiction book) by Lili Chin

Doggie Language is nonfiction. I bought my copy new.

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: Dear Edward (book) by Ann Napolitano

Dear Edward is contemporary fiction. I bought my copy new.

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: Local Woman Missing (book) by Mary Kubica

Local Woman Missing is a thriller. I bought my copy new.

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: Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive (nonfiction book) by Philipp Dettmer

Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive is nonfiction. I bought my copy new.

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: Black Blood (manga) by Hayate Kuku, translated by Kat Skarbinec

Black Blood is a BL sci-fi one-shot manga. I bought my copy new.

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?

REVIEW: Strange Pictures (book) by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion

Strange Pictures is more mystery than horror, although I've seen it tagged as both. I bought my copy new.

Review:

This book features three different stories centered around eerie drawings. The stories initially appear unconnected, although the aspects tying them together are revealed by the end.

In the first story, a student who's a member of his college Paranormal Club is introduced to a strange blog featuring a series of drawings. The blog appears ordinary enough, initially, focused on the daily life of a guy whose artist wife ends up pregnant. However, it ends with a chilling final post that hints at a message hidden in his wife's various drawings.

In the second story, a child draws a picture of his home and family that is uncharacteristically eerie. His mother worries that she and her son are being watched and followed. Then her son disappears, leaving her frantic. And yet for some reason she's reluctant to contact the police. Was her son's drawing a hint of some sort of dark family secret?

In the third and final story, a young man who wants to become a freelance reporter decides to investigate his former art teacher's murder during a hike three years prior. His current boss still has the investigation materials from that case, so he decides to talk to any people related to the case that he can still find and recreate his former teacher's final hike as best he can. He also has one additional clue, the drawing found on his teacher's body.

REVIEW: Dinosaurs: New Visions of a Lost World (nonfiction book) by Michael J. Benton, with illustrations by Bob Nicholls

Dinosaurs: New Visions of a Lost World is nonfiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Technically, a few of the 15 animals covered in this book aren't dinosaurs. However, all of them are creatures we only know about through the fossil remains they left behind. Each of them gets one entire chapter devoted to them, which starts with a description of what a moment in their lives might have looked like and then moves on to the science behind how the details of that scene, and Bob Nicholls' fabulous illustrations, were reconstructed.

I got this primarily for the illustrations (I think maybe this book was mentioned in Thor Hanson's Feathers?), and I was not disappointed. The illustrations were gorgeous, and I ended up with several favorites. It was easy to imagine all of them as living, breathing beings.

I was a little worried about the text itself, but it was thankfully both readable and informative.  

All in all, this was a delightful read that made my dinosaur-loving heart happy. I only wish it had ended a little less abruptly. Instead of finishing with a concluding chapter that tied everything together, it just stopped. I knew I was getting close to the end of the book, but it was still a shock when I turned the page only to find nothing more than a "further reading" section. 

REVIEW: A Man & His Cat Picture Book: Fukumaru and the Spaceship of Happiness (book) by Umi Sakurai, translation by Taylor Engel

Fukumaru and the Spaceship of Happiness is a picture book spinoff of the A Man & His Cat manga series. I bought my copy of this volume new.

Review:

Fukumaru, a cat who is much loved by "Daddy," the man who adopted him, learns about wishing on a shooting star and wants to wish on one of his own. However, the star he wishes upon crashes and turns out to be a spaceship crewed by alien cats. They need Fukumaru to provide them with Happy, the thing that powers their ship.

Oh, the sound I made when I learned that the adorable A Man & His Cat series had a related picture book, and that it was available in English. Anyway, this was just as cute and sweet as I expected it to be. Fukumaru and Mr. Kanda's love for each other gives me all kind of warm fuzzy feelings.

Although there's a flashback to the time when Mr. Kanda adopted Fukumaru, this book will probably work best for fans of the manga series. 

REVIEW: A Soul to Keep (book) by Opal Reyne

A Soul to Keep fantasy romance (ok, specifically monster romance). I bought my copy new.

Review:

Since the day her family members were slaughtered by demons when she was a child, Reia has been viewed as unlucky and shunned by others in her village. Years later, Reia reluctantly allows herself to be prepared as an offering to the Duskwalker that will be arriving soon. Duskwalkers have the power to cast a spell that can protect a village for a whole ten years. This particular Duskwalker always asks for a pure and willing human companion in exchange for the spell. No one knows what happens to all its previous companions, but it probably isn't anything good. Duskwalkers may not be demons, but they aren't human either.

Reia is initially more angry than afraid, feeling like she has no choice but to act as one of her village's offerings. She hopes for an opportunity to escape and live her own life somewhere else, but as the Duskwalker, whose name turns out to be Orpheus, takes her to his home, it becomes clear that escaping will be difficult. Orpheus doesn't want to kill Reia - didn't want to kill any of his prior companions - but he can't stop the instinctual bloodlust that overwhelms him if his companions run from him or fear him like prey.

Thankfully, Reia continues to be less fearful than most. As the two of them come up with a daily routine and get to know each other, they both struggle with their emotions - Orpheus, with his hope that he might finally have found a truly willing companion, if not the bride he has always wanted, and Reia, with her warring desires to either run away or stay with this surprisingly caring and lonely being.