Some key panels, like the one where we see Johnson’s deity Noir for the first time, stories-in-flasks sprouting off her like limbs, resemble the silent comics of the 1930s woodcut era (present day for the book’s internal chronology); white lines emerging from a jet black background, as if etched out with a chisel, à la Lynd Ward.
But the most interesting, most exhilarating, part of this whole adventure is the fact that it’s serious, that it’s real—that this feeling of uncovering something strange and important about the world applies to magic just as much as it applies to being an adult.
Like elements of it though I do, there's something about the current House Style and its pervasive sepia-tinted nostalgia that permits or even encourages the envisioning of a past without its historically present multiculturalism.
I crossed my fingers and hoped that the book was going to deal actively with overturning racist tropes. Up until the point where I gave up reading because I couldn’t stand any more, it had not.
The differences between Steeplejack and its prequel, Chains are striking, because they attest to how much fiction (ostensibly) for adults and fiction (ostensibly) for teens can diverge in matters of thematic depth and structural nuance.
That we can now see this planet as our garden, rather than a wilderness beyond our control, is in part because we have imagined other ways on other worlds.
In the first book of the Thessaly trilogy, The Just City, the goddess of knowledge, Athene, decided to experiment with setting up Plato’s ideal city. Necessity is less philosophical, although it continues to explore interesting ideas.
Despite the implications of the title Crazyhead, the central premise of the show is that neither Raquel nor Amy have a history of mental health issues requiring the treatment they’ve been given (though both present as neuroatypical); both have been misdiagnosed. There are complications with this manner of navigating histories of mental health issues, especially for a show called Crazyhead.
