In this YA novel published in 1990, six fourteen-year-olds face their inner dragons while they're in an accelerated academic program which includes a class on Beowulf.

I read this when it first came out, so when I saw a copy at a library book sale, I grabbed it to re-read. It largely holds up, though I'd completely forgotten the main plot and only recalled the theme and the subplot.

My recollection of the book was that the six teenagers are inspired by class discussions on Beowulf to face their personal fears. This is correct. I also recalled that one of the girls was a gymnast with an eating disorder and one of the boys was an athlete partially paralyzed in an accident, and those two bonded over their love of sports and current conflicted/damaging relationship to sports and their bodies, and ended up dating. This is also correct.

What I'd completely forgotten was the main plot, which was about the narrator, Eric, who idolized his best friend, Paul, and had an idealized crush on one of the girls in the class, who he was correctly convinced had a crush on Paul, and incorrectly convinced Paul was mutually attracted to. Paul, who is charming and outgoing, convinces Eric, who is shy, to do a speech class with him, where Eric surprisingly excels. The main plot is about the Eric/Paul relationship, how Eric's jealousy nearly wrecks it, and how the boys both end up facing their dragons and fixing their friendship.

Paul's dragon is that he's secretly gay. The speech teacher takes a dislike to him, promotes Eric to the debate team when Paul deserves it more (and tells Eric this in private), and finally tries to destroy Paul in front of the whole class by accusing him of being gay! Eric defends Paul, Paul confesses his secret to him, and the boys repair their friendship.

While a bit dated/historical, especially in terms of both boys knowing literally nothing about what being gay actually means in terms of living your life, it's a very nicely done novel with lots of good character sketches. The teachers are all real characters, as are the six kids - all of whom have their own journeys. The crush object, for instance, is a pretty rich girl who's been crammed into a narrow box of traditional femininity, and her journey is to destroy the idealized image that Eric is in love with and her parents have imposed on her - and part of Eric's journey is to accept the role of being her supportive friend who helps her do it.

I was surprised and pleased to discover that this and other Sweeney books are currently available as ebooks. I will check some out.

That amazing cover is an extremely accurate drawing of an actual photograph which is reproduced in the book, of a performance piece by Claude Cahun.

Liberated is a graphic novel telling the true story of Claude Cahun, a French Jewish writer and artist born in 1894. Cahun, along with their lover, the photographer and artist Marcel Moore, was active in the Parisian surrealist movement. Later, they resisted the Nazis via a stealth propaganda campaign aimed at occupying Nazi soldiers. They created pamphlets and fliers, and smuggled them into the soldiers' cigarette packs and even pockets! And they did all this while Cahun was chronically ill. Eventually, they were ratted out, arrested, tried, and sentenced to death, but the war ended before the sentence was carried out.

Assigned female at birth, Cahun's life and art interrogated gender, persona, and identity, writing, Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me. Marcel Moore was also assigned female at birth, but I'm not sure how Moore identified in terms of gender, or whether the name Marcel Moore was a preferred name or a pseudonym/artist's persona. I think the graphic novel probably doesn't pin this down on purpose, and my guess is that either it wasn't clear at this remove, or it seemed more true to Moore to leave it ambiguous/fluid.

The two of them met at school, fell in love, and traveled Europe together. And just when it started getting socially dicey for them to stay together, social cover fell into their lap when - I am not making this up - Moore's mother married Cahun's father! When they moved to the island of Jersey to escape the Nazis (this only worked for so long) they represented themselves as sisters living together.

The graphic novel is largely told in Cahun's words, with lovely graphic art plus a few of Cahun and Moore's own photographs. It's a quick, moving, inspiring, thought-provoking read, more relevant now than ever.

Finally, a book that lives up to its premise!

The Tainted Cup's plot is a murder mystery, complex but playing fair, in the tradition of Agatha Christie. Its main characters are Ana, a spectacularly eccentric reclusive genius, and Din, her young assistant who does the legwork, in the tradition of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin or Sherlock Holmes and Watson.

...and the setting is a world that has been regularly ravaged by leviathans the size of mountains that emerge from the sea every "wet season" and rampage around, not only stomping everything in sight but also creating zones like Annihilation's Area X due to their magical, mutagenic bodies!

This has led to the Roman Empire continuing as it's the only force that can (barely) keep them in check, and also to it evolving a sophisticated scientific/magical biological technology which can perform many forensic, military, and technical functions including augmenting people and animals. So you have legionnaires augmented to be short-lived but massively strong and with extra bones that crunch when they move, called cracklers, using giant sloths called "slothics" to haul around artillery to shoot at kaiju!!!

I fucking love this sort of setting. All I want is to roll around in its weird biological decadence, ideally with guides in the form of interesting and/or likable characters. A good plot is just gravy. But! I love the characters AND the plot is excellent!

The opening scene is a masterclass in how to introduce a very unusual and complex setting by making your viewpoint character someone who 1) must navigate aspects of the setting that are new to them too, 2) has a compelling personal problem that's emotionally engaging, 3) and introduces a mystery to keep us hooked.

Din, the viewpoint character, is the new probationary assistant to the investigator, showing up alone to his very first murder scene. He immediately tangles with the guard on site, who is clearly richer and more experienced and correctly sizes him up as a newbie, and is also suspicious that the investigator herself isn't there. This neatly introduces us to the military and investigatory structure, and makes us wonder about Din's boss. As Din is introduced to a very wealthy household, we get to see the biological magitech of the world while also encountering the bizarre murder he's investigating. And while all this is going on, Din is trying to hide the fact that he's dyslexic, which he thinks could get him fired.

It's an instantly compelling opening.

Ana and Din are great characters, Din immediately likable, Ana immediately intriguing. The supporting cast is neatly sketched in. The plot is a very solid murder mystery, the setting is fantastic, and everything is perfectly integrated. The mystery could only unfold as it does in that setting, and the characters are all shaped by it. As a nice little bonus, there's also good disability rep in the context of a world where many people are augmented to boost them in some ways while also having major side effects. Good queer rep, too. And though a lot of the content was dark/horrifying, the overall reading experience was really fun.

I loved this book and instantly dove into the next one. I hope Bennett writes as many Ana & Din books as Christie wrote Poirots.

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