LeMire, Jeff. Underwater Welder.

Atlanta: Top Shelf Productions, 2012.

Damon Lindlof compares this graphic novel by one of the most thoughtful and highly original writer/artists in the field to a Twilight Zone story, and there’s a lot of truth in that. It’s a deeply layered exploration of relationships, not a galloping fantasy adventure. In fact, I found it reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s short stories, which is kind of appropriate, since LeMire is one of the most highly regarded graphic novelists working these days, and his fellow Canadians have good reason to be proud of him.

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Crombie, Deborah. A Killing of Innocents.

NY: HarperCollins, 2023.

This popular detective series has been around for thirty years now (the author takes her time, so this is only #19) and it’s somewhat different in tone than most crime series told from the cops’ POV. You can think of it as a sort of a “police procedural cozy.” The protagonists are Detective Superintendent Duncan Kinkaid and his wife Detective Inspector Gemma James of the London Met. (He was only a DI when the series started, and she was his sergeant.) They each had a child by a previous m,marriage, and more recently they’ve adopted a little girl both whose parents were murdered, so it’s a complex family (not even counting the numerous dogs and cats, all of them rescues) and the author seems on occasion to spend more time on domestic issues than on the current murder mystery. This tendency became especially problematic a few episodes back and I wondered whether the series was about to die out, but Crombie snapped out of it and both the previous volume and this one have returned to the classic “Let’s solve this case!” approach, and they’re far better for it.

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Heinlein, Robert. Time for the Stars.

NY: Scribner, 1956.

I got hooked on science fiction about 1952, when the school librarian handed me one of Robert Heinlein’s juveniles. This is one of his more thoughtful novels for the teenage reader (most of which we would now call "Young Adult"), heavy on speculative physics and the convolutions of psychology. If fact, it grew directly from the problem in special relativity called the “twin paradox.” The narrator is young Thomas Paine Bartlett, and he and his twin brother, Patrick Henry, are discovered (after much testing) to have a telepathic bond.

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LeMire, Jeff. Trillium.

Np: Vertigo, 2014.

Lemire does pretty good work and he understands how to make sure a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, like a proper novel. (Something too many graphic literature artists don’t really grasp.) Like much of his work, this one is science fiction, and it’s quite an original idea. It’s thousands of years in the future, on a far distant world, and the human race is nearing extinction (only a few thousand of us left), thanks to The Caul, an alien force that’s out to exterminate us. But the trilium flowers that grow near an ancient temple on a remote planet might possibly be the means for humans to survive, so harvesting them is crucial. And if that means steamrollering the natives whose temple it is, tough. Nika, a scientist on the team, object to all this — to her, the ends don’t justify the means — but the Commander will brook no objections. One thing leads to another, and Nika ends up inside the temple. And there something unexpected happens.

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Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Sympathizer.

NY: Grove Press, 2015.

This beautifully written novel got numerous rave reviews when it came out, and also won a Pulitzer. It immediately went on my TBR list, but I confess I’m just now getting around to it. I found it particularly interesting for several reasons. First, I’m pushing eighty, so I remember the Vietnam War very well, especially the fall of Saigon. It’s not ancient history to me, as it would be for many younger readers. Many of my my high school and college friends served in-country, and not all of them came home. Moreover, one of my daughters-in-law is Vietnamese (born in Saigon, daughter of an ARVN officer), and I’m very familiar with her take on that whole period of her life.

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Visaggio, Magdalene & Claudia Aguirre. Lost on Planet Earth.

np: Death Rattle, 2020.

Ever notice how, in the future of Star Trek, it seems like everyone’s ambition is to join Star Fleet and wear a uniform? That observation is kind of the jumping-off point in this story of a young woman many centuries in our future who has been preparing herself since she was five to join the Fleet, as both her parents did when they were young. But they both did their service, retired, and got on with their lives, where Basilisa Miranda, now twenty-one and about the take the entrance exam, has ambitions to stay in and reach the rank of ship’s captain, like her heroes.

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Lippman, Laura. Prom Mom.

NY: Morrow, Jun 2023.

For the first few chapters, I thought this would turn out to be some version of a bunny-boiler story, but I should have known better. Lippman has made a career of being unpredictable. She leads you along the path to complacency and then suddenly shoves you off a narrative cliff. I learned some time ago to buckle up before I started one of her books. A guy getting a girl pregnant when they’re both still in high school is the sort of unplanned, completely unexpected event that has the potential to derail their whole lives. And that’s pretty much what happened to honor student Amber Glass of Baltimore, back in 1997 — only it was much worse than merely getting knocked up. She was either very naive, or deep in denial, or perhaps both (it’s never made clear, really) but Amber had her baby very prematurely on the bathroom floor of a hotel room on the night of Joe Simpson’s senior prom. Amber cleaned up the mess, wrapped the (now) dead newborn in a towel, and went home. Joe knew nothing about any of this until the next day, when the cops came to see him.

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