I just finished Cecil Castellucci's graphic novel Janes in Love and enjoyed it a lot - it is better than the first book (The P.L.A.I.N. Janes) but continues the story quite nicely. (Meaning you pretty much pick things up with the characters a few days after the first book's big finale.) Originally I was thinking this book would go in a high school type column but Cecil pushes a political message about the importance of art pretty strongly here so I'm going to include it in my August feature. I do have a few questions for her though on making a political statement versus vandalism and hopefully will be able to include her comments in the final piece.

Also just finished two mysteries for the summer issue of Eclectica: Reasonable Doubts by Gianrico Configlio and The Streets of Babylon by Carina Burman. The first is a courtroom type drama - the protagonist, Guido Guerrieri, is a lawyer who takes a case concerning a man who was arrested smuggling drugs across the border. It turns out the guy was on vacation with his family and claims to have had no clue about the drugs - and his car was parked at the hotel lot for several days so there was time for someone to hide them inside it. The larger story here is a personal one though as Guido is attracted to his client's wife and begins to wonder just how hard he should try to get this man free. Lots of drama, fascinating legal and criminal bits; overall very well done. I'm a fan of Configlio's work as well as several other titles from Bitter Lemon Press.

The Streets of Babylon is very much an "Amelia Peabody if she was a Swedish novelist visiting London" type of mystery. Euthanasia Bondeson supports herself as a well known novelist, is very smart and personally fearless (and very unorthodox for her time) and enjoying the London Exhibition until her niece/companion Agnes disappears. This draws Euthanasia into the dirty underbelly of London crime where she visits Whitechapel, discovers a "molly" house (where men dressed as women meet) and uncovers all sorts of discrepancies between the classes.

I really liked Euthanasia, her intrepid attitude, the fact that she keeps working on her latest novel throughout the search for her niece, smokes cigars, wears men's clothing when necessary and never lets up on her conviction that Agnes will survive (it becomes clear why Agnes is capable of this in the face of all sorts of unsavory circumstance by the end). She's a very cool customer and excellent protagonist for those seeking strong female characters.

I am reading The Future of Nature, a collection of essays from Orion Magazine, and came across a 2006 piece by Ginger Strand about the control of Niagara Falls: "Faux Falls". (The Future of Nature will be reviewed in my August column.) Shortly after reading that essay (which really surprised me and not in a good way) I found a review in Newsweek of Strand's new book, Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies. From the Newsweek piece:

Ginger Strand, who writes for Harper's and The Believer, is obsessed with this strange and contradictory place—so badly, she says, that her boyfriend "did a search for Niagara Falls on the Internet Movie Database and banned any resulting films from our Netflix queue." In her new book, "Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies," she admits that she first considered the falls "no more than a kitschy spectacle, a chance to soak in a heart-shaped Jacuzzi"—the falls long predates the Poconos as a honeymoon destination—"and get some really awful souvenirs for my irony-adoring pals." She now sees Niagara as "a monument to the ways America falsifies its relationship to nature, reshaping its contours, redirecting its force, claiming to submit to its will while imposing our own upon it." Strand sometimes sounds like an environmental scold—spending time in the city of Niagara Falls with its 10 active Superfund sites can do that to you—but she's actually a hybrid of cultural historian and indefatigable roving reporter, who can't help taking quirky pleasure sometimes in what ought to be an utterly grim story.

My official dream job is now "cultural historian".

From the essay and the Newsweek review this sounds like an amazing book - both as a history of a particularly significant place in American mythology and also as an environmental disaster (two words - "Love Canal"). The essay has certainly made me curious to see what else Strand has written.

New awesome picture book for kids interested in animals: Animals Robert Scott Saw. This is a great way to get kids interested in history through a sideways type approach. The author, Sandra Markle, also has another title in this series: Animals Christopher Columbus Saw. Future titles include Animals Charles Darwin Saw and Animals Marco Polo Saw. This is a total no-brainer for homeschoolers or any kid interested in animals. (And note: Scott brought dogs down to Antarctica. They included "Samoyeds and "Greenland Dogs" - they average 65-70 pounds today.)

Finally, I am also reading Andrea Barrett's The Air We Breathe. It is startling in its quiet analysis of who we are as humans and how we act together. She never ceases to amaze me.