(One of those reviews where I spend more time ruminating on my own mind than on the book in question.)

If the goal of F-Bomb was self-reflection, than hurrah! It succeeded. Because I sit here and think and think and think and think about what I want to say about this book, about what didn’t really work for me with it, and then I end up thinking about my twenties and then that day in my thirties where I just decided to take all the liberal feminism blogs off my RSS feed (yes, this was a while ago), mainly because there had been a whole string of ewww breastfeeding is gross and yay I’m not pregnant statements in articles* and it really hit me then that the feminism that these blogs was in very narrow focus, and me, non-USian, non-single, non-childfree, was not what they were ever going to focus on. F-Bomb doesn’t have that same teensy focus, but it has the same feel of trying to appeal to someone who isn’t me. That’s fine for me to not be in the audience — I don’t expect every book on every issue to cater to me (although I am awesome, so if you are looking for someone for your book to cater to, I do suggest me), but F-Bomb does have a bit of an echo-chamber feel to it. Who is going to pick up this book? Middle (and up) class twenty somethings with an interest in liberal feminism. Who is going to say hell yeah! to the message in this book? Middle (and up) class twenty somethings with an interest in liberal feminism. Who is the audience for this book? Middle (and up) class twenty somethings with an interest in liberal feminism. Did it teach me (middle class and thirty something more aligned with non-liberal-feminism) anything I didn’t already know? No.

Am I done posing questions? About F-Bomb, no. Plus I have more to say.

Sometimes the book had snide quips for people, places, or things that McKeon holds in contempt. When it comes right down to it, that was what really annoyed me most about this book. But why? I know ridicule is a time-honoured tradition for revealing the sheer idiocy of idiotic movements. So why did this grate so much in F-Bomb? Because it was unnecessary, in which case I can blame McKeon, or because I found it catty — which is such a loaded, gendered term — in which case I have no one to blame but myself for falling prey to my own internalized misogyny. Am I mad at McKeon or am I mad at myself? If I am angry at myself, is that what is colouring my reaction to F-Bomb? I just can’t get past the feeling that F-Bomb made me angry at the wrong things.

F-Bomb by Lauren McKeon went on sale March 6, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

* I actually emailed a complaint to the blog (I can’t rightly remember which one it was now, but it was a relatively major one in terms of liberal feminist blogs) in question about how for some women pregnancy was a radical act (W/POC, people with disabilities, or any other people for whom body autonomy had been denied to them by governmental and/or social forces). The article in question disappeared, but there was no acknowledgement, not even an insincere mea-culpa, they didn’t even email me back. Just whoosh, gone, no interest in engaging. It’s shitty to be called out, yes, but these blogs had no problem calling out others, and I’d like to think I was polite about it. Didn’t matter. No engagement back. Oh well.
Google Reader shuttered a few years later, so the golden age of RSS was coming to an end in any case.

So I can’t tell whether I found this book tedious and overly lengthy and boring because it was tedious and overly lengthy and boring or because the structure of being tedious and lengthy and boring is supposed to mimic the tedium, length, and boredom the characters themselves feel, being trapped inside a closed-bubble ecosystem off in the Arizona desert for two years. It felt like it took me two years to read the book (really, it took a week), but was that the point? I don’t know. We’re given three annoying POV characters and two dull years of their lives and it just draaaaaaaaaggggs on. Then we get to the end and everyone is exactly the same as at the beginning so what was the point of this week I spent reading this book? I kept at it because I thought something, anything, meaningful would happen.

Nope.

Nothing.

Terranauts are boring. I guess that’s what I took away from this.

The Terranauts by T.C. Boyle went on sale October 20, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Overall, it’s a pretty even anthology of little comic stories, each with a sort of twist at the end (where I guess the SHOCK in the title comes from). There are some aliens (not particularly clever ones who try to hypnotize a scarecrow), there’s a retelling of Red Riding Hood where she is a hood in the more colloquial sense of the term (i.e. hoodlum), there are fighting transformer buildings, etc. But again, like I find with so many comics, it’s like a whole smorgasbord of amuse-bouches but then I want to eat something more filling than a bit of bacon wrapped in watercress, except there’s not the option. Why is it that word-based short-stories can fill me up (good ones, at least, like Goodbye to Berlin or Just Pretending, or even non-traditional ones without true endings, like let’s say If on a winter’s night a traveler), yet I’ve never been satisfied completely with any comic anthology? Is it a fault of the medium or a fault of the reader?

So I liked SHOCK Anthology more than I expected to, but I still, as always, have my reservations about the effectiveness of comics for short stories.

SHOCK Anthology by Neil Gaiman, Paul Jenkins, Brian Azzarello, Cullen Bunn, Marguerite Bennett, Frank Tieri, and more went on sale April 24, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.