Sarah Gailey

The First Resort is a state-of-the-art refuge for the 1%, a space station that allows them to live the comfortable lives they feel they deserve while the rest of us are left to deal with Earth and the effects climate change have had on it. The best the rest of us can hope for is to be employees on the First Resort, making the 1% feel secure and better about themselves while they nickel and dime us for every aspect of our existence. But hey, it's still better than being back on Earth.

Station show more Security Liaison Elise is one of First Resort's employees, and she has a problem. Well, many problems, but her biggest one right now is that someone has gruesomely killed CFO Alberto Fairmilk and she has approximately zero training in figuring out who did it. Also, she has a drug problem - she'd really like to get clean, but she absolutely does not have time for withdrawal symptoms right now. Granted, she also doesn't have time to be blissed out on Blue.

The dark humor was part of what drew me to this graphic novel. The back-and-forth between Elise and St. Brigid, the station AI, was great - Elise was a disaster doing her best to push her horror under the surface so that her employers wouldn't realize how useless she was in this situation, and it wasn't always easy to tell whether St. Brigid was being serious or wryly humorous, but either way, I loved their conversations.

The killer was pretty obvious - I'm not sure anyone would have been able to commit some of the murders that happened in this volume (how was that scene with the lungs and the talking even possible??), but if anyone was going to be able to manage it, it was clear who it was. However, this wasn't just about whodunnit, but also about the world in which these characters lived.

The artwork wasn't really to my taste, and the shifts from one scene to the next could be extremely choppy, to the point that I had to reread the page to figure out what happened and whether we were in a new scene. I was still mostly able to follow along with the story, but it did detract slightly from my enjoyment.

Overall, I enjoyed this, although I'm still not sure how I feel about the ending. Warning: it's extremely dark. (I mean, probably not surprising in a graphic novel that starts with murder victim whose skin was removed in two whole pieces, but still.) At the same time...we currently have billionaires happily taking trips into space while the people who work for their companies can't find affordable housing or healthcare, so...

Extras:

An afterword by Sarah Gailey and Liana Kangas, a cover art gallery, character designs, and a few sketches.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less

The State rules with an iron fist in this Old West style dystopia. It features horses, cowboys, sheriffs, posses, six shooters and hangings when someone goes against the rules of the State – which believes in only heterosexual relationships and mind control by allowing only Approved Reading Matter.

Esther’s special friend Beatriz runs afoul of this last law and Ester’s sheriff father hangs Beatriz for having unapproved reading material. Ester had previously been frightened by her show more growing affection for Beatriz.

Now in order to escape her father and the marriage he has arranged for her, Ester flees to join a traveling group of State Authorized librarians who supposedly travel from town to town distributing approved reading from their horse drawn wagons.

Ester is a booklover who hopes to find a place with them. What she finds is quite different: a band of women living their forbidden loves freely, secretly distributing unauthorized material and helping fugitives working to further a rebellion. Although Ester had no idea that women could think about- much less live - loving other women and rebelling against the Laws of the State, she aspires to become one of them.

It’s a fun, slightly absurd story (they are heading to Utah where there is freedom and tolerance of the LGBTQ lifestyle). It’s thought-provoking at the same time (are we also embracing a society that devalues diversity?).

I hope there is a sequel. I’d like to find out what happens next. show less

"In the early twentieth century, the Congress of our great nation debated a glorious plan to resolve a meat shortage in America. The idea was this: import hippos and raise them in Louisiana's bayous. The hippos would eat the ruinously invasive water hyacinth; the American people would eat the hippos; everyone would go home happy. Well, except the hippos. They'd go home eaten. ...

"Reader, this is an actual, literal thing that almost happened."

That's from Gailey's prologue, and from this show more actual, literal thing, she has spun an alternate history story that's half Western, half heist/caper movie.

Gailey has pushed the events back in time by about half a century; her timeline appendix explains that President Buchanan signed the Hippo Bill in 1857, and the first ranches were opened later that year. Alas, in 1858, about 90 hippos escaped from a ranch, and for years after that, the area surrounding the lower Mississipi River was plagued by feral killer hippos.

The events of these two linked novellas aren't precisely dated, but it's long enough after the hippo escape that the government is ready to take drastic action to solve the feral hippo problem. The action they take is to hire Winslow Remington Houndstooth (yes, really -- Winslow Remington Houndstooth!) to assemble a team -- in modern heist parlance, we could even call it a crew -- to rid the Mississippi of its feral hippos. "River of Teeth" (a 2018 Hugo-nominated novella) tells the story of that mission; "Taste of Marrow" follows the characters through its aftermath.

Taken strictly as a goofy Western heist, this isn't bad. The action set pieces are effective, and the feral hippos are a sufficiently menacing threat; Winslow's crew are a lively bunch, and they deliver reasonably well on the banter. But the social milieu in which this book takes place is so very much NOT late 19th-century Louisiana that it's hard to focus on the actual story.

It's never entirely clear, for instance, whether the Civil War took place in this version of the US; Gailey suggests that it did in her timeline, sort of. She mentions that Lincoln's 1861 inaugural includes a promise to solve the hippo problem, but "unfortunately, some things came up."

The lack of racial tension from every character in the book would argue otherwise. Winslow's crew is multiracial and multi-gender, and no one -- even the obvious villains -- bats an eye at the Black and Latina members of the group.

Even more glaring, everyone is completely comfortable with the sexual diversity of the team. Winslow is bisexual. Con artist Archie is a woman who occasionally dresses and makes herself up as a man -- not only when it's necessary for a con, but sometimes just for the sheer recreational pleasure of it. Explosives expert Hero is Black and non-binary, and everyone refers to them using they/them pronouns as if that were a routine thing. In the late 19th century. In the deep South.

Certainly, bisexual and cross-dressing and non-binary people existed in that era, as they always have. But they weren't so casually visible, because being visible would have meant violence, ostracism, and in most cases, death. And if you're going to give me a version of America that's close enough to ours to have Presidents Buchanan, Lincoln, and Johnson, then you are obliged to explain a difference of this magnitude.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of an American society that's completely over its sexual/racial hysteria. But we don't have that society now, and we certainly didn't have it 150 years ago. And Gailey's choice to write as if we did is incredibly distracting, constantly pulling the reader out of her historical era. Maybe these characters would be able to have these relationships, with this level of openness and comfort, in 2170. They couldn't have in 1870, and the la-di-dah glibness with which Gailey ignores that fact ruined the story for me. show less

Esther has run away from her small Arizona town after witnessing the hanging of her girlfriend for possession of Unapproved Materials. She wants to join the traveling Librarians, whom she thinks will put her on a more moral path. Surprise! They’re queer too and are secretly distributing supplies to anti-fascist rebels and ferrying fugitives across the southwest. Esther grew up in relative safety, so it will take quite a lot for her to prove her worth and be accepted as a Librarian.

I really show more loved this one! The worldbuilding is very entertaining - a mix of the future and a classic western, with some people just riding around the desert on horses and wagons, talking about drones. I should have expected that in a Sarah Gailey book about fascism all of the rebels would be queer, but it was a delightful surprise. Its only flaw is that it’s too short! I would read a whole series. show less