Beauties

author: Marguerite Bennett

Beauties is a one-shot comic by Marguerite Bennett, with art by Trungles and lettering by Rachel Deering. It’s a simply gorgeous art nouveau inspired fairytale that turns the Beauty and the Beast story into a completely fresh parable about love.

In this story, instead of the Beast capturing Beauty, Beauty’s father, who has three daughters, captures The Beast. The first daughter makes him a pet. The second daughter makes him a slave. But the third daughter asks him what his name is. This launches Beauty and The Beast on a quest to find freedom and to learn how to exist together, for Beauty “would not flinch from scathing claws, nor would she let him turn his claws on her.” She’s no pushover.

The art is both delicate and lavishly sensual. The story is preachy but poetic – it is a parable, after all. The messages about unconditional love (and healthy boundaries) are moving. It keeps the original morals of the old fairytale and adds to them the importance of respecting yourself and your lover, accepting each other’s best and worst qualities, and letting go of bitterness.

This is a very short one-shot (22 pages) so you can read it quickly – but try to take your time. The comic is like a beautiful poem (and it has song lyrics running throughout it, which reinforces the poetic feeling). It’s a beautiful melding of art and words, just as comics should be, and the romance is stunning. Fairytale fans and of course Beauty and the Beast fans will adore this.

– Carrie S

Comic, Romance

The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper

author: Phaedra Patrick

The Mysterious Charms of Arthur Pepper is a fast read, and the characters in the story move through grief and the process of beginning life again. The titular hero – and “titular” is one of my favorite words btw – also learns to become who he wants to be now, instead of existing in a sort of holding pattern following the sum of his habits and obeying the expectations of those around him.

Arthur Pepper’s wife died unexpectedly of pneumonia. On the first anniversary of her death, he goes to clean out her clothing and finds a gold charm bracelet that he couldn’t remember seeing before. The charms form the path of the story: an Indian elephant with an emerald on its back, a paint palette, a book, a thimble, and a heart. Beginning with the elephant, which inexplicably has a name and phone number engraved on it, Arthur traces the story of his wife’s life before she married him some forty years earlier.

Arthur’s journey is emotional and difficult. He has to break habits and routines that had once been comfortable and now seemed like a restrictive prison built of times and expectations. He learns to appreciate the neighbors who ask after him and the friend who brought pies and cakes to his home in the year after his wife died, likely keeping him alive. He learns that his relationships are his responsibility, and he has to change in order to thrive in the time he has now as a widower.

A lot of the evolution Arthur struggles through reminded me of the epic MetaFilter thread on emotional labor, and the PDF summary of the comments therein. Many widowers wither and die shortly after their spouses, in part because their spouse did the labor of maintaining friendships and emotional ties.

The story isn’t surprising, and there are moments that seem too twee to be real. There’s a shocking revelation that was built up as a major turning point, but it didn’t shock me all that much. The story of the charms themselves wasn’t as compelling as Arthur learning to move on with his life, figuring out who he was and who he wants to be, and walking through the hardest parts of grief to get to the next charm, the next location, the next piece of the story of his wife. He mourns her by learning who she was before she was in his life.

The part that got to me most was the ending, which I won’t spoil. I was teary eyed at the ending scenes because he learned how to be a better parent when his daughter needed him most. He learned how much his wife loved him, when all along his journey he had reason to doubt their relationship now that he was the only one remembering it while confronting so much contradictory  information about her past before she met him. He learned how much he was loved, and that he had value, that his life was a contribution and was worth remembering. Arthur questions his own legacy, if anyone would remember him with fond grief after he died the way he mourned his wife. In the end, his realization that his life mattered, that he was loved, and that he had more to give the world before he died, too, was terribly poignant and made me sniffle for quite awhile after I closed the book.

– SB Sarah

Literary Fiction

Paris is Always a Good Idea

author: Nicolas Barreau

This book is a very fast read. I finished it in a matter of hours. It has a fairly simple plot, and I found I was reading it more for the setting and atmosphere than the characters.

Rosalie is an illustrator and owner of a postcard shop in Paris where she sells paper goods and gifts and hand-painted cards for every occasion. She’s the sort of often-twee heroine who knows Something Momentous is about to happen, and then it does. She’s also the type for whom starting her own business with a somewhat unique product line does not produce too many obstacles.

She meets an older man who comes in and knocks over the stand of her cards in the doorway. He changes her life. Another, much younger man comes in, also knocking over the postcard stand, and he changes her life, too. Things Happen. They’re all happy in the end, but they’re usually foretold moments before by someone making the postcard stand crash to the floor. I think if she wanted a day off of Things Happening, she’d move it away from the door.

The story is ferociously indulgent with the heroine. Pages are spent on how much Rosalie likes blue, and how she knew what she wanted and stubbornly went after it. Every year on her birthday, she paints a wish for herself on a card and lets it fly from the second level of the Eiffel Tower. Slowly her wishes come true, mostly through coincidence or because it was time in the plot for those Things to Happen.

I wasn’t deeply invested in any of the characters – Rosalie, Max, Robert, Rosalie’s mother – as they were often more than halfway made of stereotypes: the distant, elegant, uppity mother; the disheveled American out of step with the rhythm of a new country; the cranky, curmudgeon who mourns his wife and doesn’t like change.

They also operate in isolation for the most part. Rosalie doesn’t have any friends she speaks with outside of the main characters and her landlord, who exist to cause a minor wrinkly when he raises her rent. Robert only has a frosty girlfriend who is waiting for him to give up literature and go back to law, and speaks with no one else.

I liked the setting, the touches of Paris that the characters wandered through, though those too were stereotypes – the Pont Neuf bridge covered with locks, the croissants each morning from the boulangerie, the waiters in long aprons who aren’t interested in serving anyone. The portrayal of Paris is like a postcard, too. Major highlights, not a lot of intimate depth.

I appreciated that it was easy reading, that it didn’t challenge my sleepy morning airport brain. I appreciated the simplicity of the story, as it was exactly what I wanted while I read while waiting for a plane at 6am. It didn’t blow me away or give me much to say about it, but it distracted me when I wanted to be distracted. Paris is Always a Good Idea didn’t surround me with the vividness that I like in contemporary fiction, but it told a simple, neat, easy story exactly when I needed one.

– SB Sarah

Literary Fiction, Women's Fiction