Persephone-Hades & Lesbian Horror Story | Short Reviews

Here’s other graphic novel reviews.

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  Artemis

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  A young Hades

Lore Olympus s1 by Rachel Smythe

Link to the webtoon/web-comic. Funny enough the illustrations I included isn’t very representative of the style, more so the comedic elements. S1 consists of 115 episodes; absolutely worth your time if you want characters with a lot of personality, a good romance and greek gods dealing with the everyday shit in life. I was truly excited going in, less so when I realized the main focus was on Hades & Persephone as it’s a romance done so many times. It felt a bit slow and boring in the beginning. But overall the writer really managed to showcase aspects I hadn’t seen before, as well as giving Persephone a really different personality without making it too “quirky”. She’s clumsy, but smart and means well trying to prove herself and the writer did not shy away from the aspect of her being a “young” goddess, but playing into it by making it almost a college/first-job story where you need to fight for independence and then re-realize that it’s okay to need and ask for help. The office aspect of every coworker hating on her special treatment – it’s all great. It did also use the greek gods aspect to deal with heavier issues like sexual assault, with specific trigger warnings in front of every chapter that focuses on that. All in all just a great romance/rom-com/every-day type of stories, but had surprising depth as well. And the web comic format really plays into showcasing both the main and minor character’s differences and backstories. Loved it, very binge-able. Five out of five stars.

When I Arrived at the Castle by emily carroll

I really admire the illustrations of emily carroll, I mean look at it-

I’ve already read & loved Through the Woods and she also has one called Beneath the Dead Oak Tree. This graphic novel tells the somewhat lesbian of a story of a castle, a cat-girl, some fairytale sprinkled in and a very attractive femme fatale vampire countess. And not to forget the blood colouring the pages. It’s not very straight-forward, but I liked it. For some reason I expected more though? It has little of a plot and lot of vibes, which is not the right way to phrase that, but I’m sticking with it. It’s very much like a fever-dream. Three out of five stars.

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Five Star Predictions pt. 2 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I really love these posts personally because it makes me so excited for other’s & my TBR. But – latst time I did this it took closer to ten months for me to get around to reading all the books. It will hopefully be a lot sooner this time, as I made the list shorter. I already have a lot of these books on my shelf as well, so they’ll stare at me as a constant reminder.

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The Hidden Girl & Other Stories by Ken Liu: I loved “The Paper Menagerie & other stories” by the same author, but it’s been years since I read the collection of short stories for the first time. It’s just stories that live in my head now. Just the day I remembered so I found this new release and then happened to walk right past it by accident in the (norwegian) library – my luck! I snatched it so fast. This collection is of sixteen fantasy & sci-fi short stories and a novelette.

Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas: The cover is awesome, but so is the description of “a trans boy determined to prove his gender to his traditional Latinx family summons a ghost who refuses to leave”. Trying to find a murderer, queer & trans people, cool ghosts! Brujos! I’ve seen both very positive and slighly let-down reviews, so I’m still a bit nervous because I’m so ready to love it.

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Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality by Edward Frenkel: I’ve somewhat started reading this already, on a very scenic train-ride, before forgetting it in my pile of physics textbooks. So I already know that it’s such a good writing and narrative about how we think about math, and felt very approchable to both the math student (young and older) and the ones that are just interested. I rally loved the points on reconfiguring how kids learn about math, like introducing category theory eariler, because it’s just boxes we put math things in, but gives the first step to the why’s that seem to rarely get answered in learning kids math.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong: Ocean Vuong’s writing is already stunning and gets deep under your skin, that I know. I can’t imagine this debut novel – about being an immigrant, trauma, queer, family dynamics and love – being any less than his poetry.

Lore Olympus by Rachel Smythe (web comic link): I’ve always loved mythology and gods being modernized or otherwise rewritten, and I just got back into web comics so this very much loved web comic on greek gods seem like the perfect next one for me.

all the book hauls | Bi-Weekly Update

So, I’ve started buying more physical books (in comparison to none) and then I never do book hauls, so here they all are gathered up. Honestly, a few of these books are from a year ago, but too nice-looking to not include.

• Astrobiology: a very short introduction by David C. Catling
• Kant: a very short introduction by Roger Scruton
• The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

• Robin Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (penguin english library edition)
• A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle (penguin english library edition)
• The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (penguin english library edition)

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• To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (penguin vintage classics)
• By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart (bught used, panther granada publishing edition from 1978)
• how to: absurd scientific advice for common real-world problems by randall munroe
• A Separate Peace by John Knowles (simon and schuester edition)

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• Harry Potter and the Philosopher`s Stone (scottish edition)
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (slytherin edition)
• Dune by Frank Herbert (penguin edition)

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• Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat
• Winterkeep by Kristin Cashore

• Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow
• War on Peace by Ronan Farrow
• The Iliad by Homer (penguin classics edition)

• Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson
• The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman (david fickling edition)
• Maya by Josten Gaarder (found for free)

The Library Book Haul (aka books I promised to return a month ago, but have not read yet)

• Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett
• The Story of More by Hope Jahren
• Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee
• The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu
• The City We Became by N. K. Jemish

The Notebook Haul (mostly gifts)

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• Floral (green) notebook from Paperblank (called poetry in bloom)
• Flowers (dark) notebook from Paperchase
• Edinburgh illustration notebook by Libby Walker

New book posts:

• none.

Other books I’ve been reading:

• Currently reading Winter Hours by Mary Oliver (poetry/prose/essays)
• The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson (fantasy, lgbt; lesbian mc)
• World Without Fish by (graphic novel, nonfiction, enviromental science) by Mark Kurlansky

Added to TBR:

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• A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design by Frank Wilczek (science)
• Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality by Frank Wilczek (science)
• The Queen`s Gambit by Walter Tevis (chess, fiction)

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• Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots (fantasy, superheros, lgbt; bi mc, nonbinary)
• The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade #2) by Seth Dickinson (fantasy, lgbt; lesbian mc)
• The Summer of Everything by Julian Winters (contemporary YA, lgbt; m/m)

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• Tell Me by Kim Addonizio (poetry)
• Bound by Claire Schwartz (poetry)
• Hours Inside Out by Isabella Presiz (poetry)

Three things on my mind:

• About physical books; it’s funny how much taking photos of books is would boost my book posts more than anything. My short review of graffiti by Savannah Brown is a perfect example, it gets too many views each day solely from google image searches. I’m using the library more this year and in general have bought more physical books, so I hope to also take more photos, because I do love that aspect as well. I definitely did a lot when living at home, to the point where we would rarely get good natural light in winter and it annoyed me because book photos were worse, hahha. Physical books are just more expensive and less convenient. You’re talking about the girl who at the age of 10 years old chose to learn books in english instead of the translated norwegian copies because they cost so much. But I do prefer having physical copies of science and poetry books a lot over digital ones, because it’s so much easier to refer to and really sit down and take time with reading the book. I would love to have a copy of all my favourite books on hand in case friends are looking for recommendations, but I just don’t have the money for all the fantasy series that would include, as the student I am.

• I started writing a short thing about how I’ve been thinking about gender for a while, as I did put off an imminent gender crisis during the first season of covid-19 lockdown. But then it turned into its own whole thing, and I think it will just be a post on its own because it fits nowhere else. Not that it has any conclusion, it’s more of an on-going discussion with myself.

• I’ve listened to & loved the podcast Reply All from Gimlet Media for years. To the point that when company after company was revealed to have racist practices and similiar recently, I actually thought about if these (until now seemingly empathic) white guys behind Gimlet Media would disappoint me to. But instead they’ve hired and otherwise given platform to producers of color with a purpose to cover a more diverse range of topics. And it’s really brought things to my feed that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise, I think. A very recent addition to this is a series on the Bon Apetit test kitchen which had a “online reckoning” last summer with being exposed for being racist. Told by reporter Sruthi Pinnamaneni, she goes hard in the first episode by calling a huge number of past and current employees over a period of twenty years and highlights the many people of color that has quit already way back because they were devalued in different ways because of the color of their skin and them not coming from the same background or looking the same as every other white person in the kitchen. She does an expert job by pointing out other possible causes for situation as well, many of these people struggled at the time to understand it themselves, but overall it shows a pattern. Especially in comparison to the newest known scandals that made so many very-much-loved-by-the-audience cast members quit. Absolutely worth listening to, I’m sure the next episodes are going to be great as well.
• Resistance is another new podcast by Gimlet Media hosted by Saidu Tejan-Thomas Jr. all about the front lines of the Black Lives Matter movement. The third episode “Shake the Room” was the first I listened to, and the story of how american police targeted protesters months later, and this example of how they showed up at the house of the Warriors in the Garden protestor Derrick Ingram in particular, really shook me to my core in its injustice and the potential and threat of violence.