Entries tagged with transformative

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

3/5. Lovecraft transformative work about the professor at a women's college who sets out to retrieve a young student who has left with a man for the waking world.

I read a fair amount of fanfic for source texts with which I am unfamiliar. It's a fun brain exercise for me, filling in a (probably wrong) conception based on negative spaces and shadows. This novella convinced me yet again that I don't want to read Lovecraft; it's particular brand of embittered but enduring feminism suggests . . . unpleasant things. And standing on its own, without consideration of the source, this is a strange, twisty tale of a quest across dreamland and into the waking world, in which the odd setting illuminates character. Enjoyable, though as previously with Johnson's work, I don't quite get what all the fuss was about.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: Squirrel Meets World

4/5. Middle grade novel prequel to the popular comic. My wife loves the comic but hasn't read this. Below is a rough transcript of my commentary to her:

Ahaha, Squirrel Girl has just happened to a bunch of LARPers. . . . Aw, her parents are adorable. So supportive! They remind me of your parents when you came out*. . . . Aw, her deaf new best friend is crabby and adorable. . . . For the record, the villain's name is The Micromanager, just so you know. . . . Aw, she is adorable. . . . Oh now she's chatting with a bad guy about his poor life choices and how he really should be wearing a seatbelt when he's driving like that. . . . Ahahaha, she is texting with The Winter Soldier. Oh, now she's texting with Tony Stark about how she needs help from someone smart and resourceful, and she asked him for Bruce Banner's number, I'm dying, I'm dead. Ahaha she is trash-talking and her trash talk is that the villain "is going downtown without a bus pass."

There was also a longer conversation in there about how it seems that Squirrel Girl exists in a different genre than most of the other people around her. It's actually really interesting – the closer a person gets to her like her parents or her bestie, the more they become realized in Squirrel Girl's genre. That is, aggressively, unstoppably cheerful with a streak of zany. Whereas people in the background – like the mean girls at school – exist in a more typical high school novel whose rules Squirrel Girl doesn't so much ignore as just never notice. My wife says the comic has a similar function in the wider comics universe – Squirrel Girl is a streak of off-beat color in a grimdark sea. And that's the joke. And the not joke.

I loved this.

*She came out when she went home over her first winter break in college and when she got back to her dorm there were congratulations flowers waiting for her. How cute is that?