book reports
NOVEMBER 2016

 

PANTHER
Brecht Evens

Brecht Evens made THE WRONG PLACE, a comic I have read and stared at multiple times, and when I heard he had a new one, I immediately got the public library to order it. After a little girl's cat dies, she is visited every night by a dashing shape-shifting panther who tells her stories of the mysterious Pantherland where he is a prince. Evens' art is gorgeous and insane, but the story goes from being delightfully odd at the beginning to genuinely disturbing by the end.

 

MY LIFE WITH THE SAINTS
James Martin

James Martin is a wise and likeable guy, but these are sentimental stories about safe saints. Saint Francis is easy to love and Dorothy Day is a badass and a hero, but does anyone really need to hear more nice thoughts about Mother Theresa and Therese of Lisieux? As someone who can only love and relate to religious figures if they are rebels or heretics or iconoclasts, these are not the saints I want to spend my life trying to be like. Give me the radicals and the liberationists, the people living on the edges of authority and orthodoxy, not the ones ensconced inside of it.

 

AT THE BAY
Katherine Mansfield

The cover of this book is lovely and lazy and yellow and most of the short chapters in this short book are lovely and lazy and yellow and I often wish my whole life was lovely and lazy and yellow.