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It was amazing?

Admittedly I love sarcastic female leads with devastating one-liners, but I really liked this book. It's a fictional take on an episode in Patricia Highsmith's life, when she was anonymously writing low-grade comics while penning what would become Strangers on a Train, followed The Price of Salt, later renamed Carol.

The muted color palette works really well here: it conveys the grayness of Patricia's life very well, between her boring jobs and the rest of the world telling her she should stop being a lesbian. An occasional pop of orange signals a rare moment of excitement, and I love how Hannah Templer renders shadows in the thriller scenes, or how she mimics old comic books style to illustrate Highsmith's stories.

There's also a little mise en abyme here, that makes us realize just how far we've come since then: the story shows a lesbian writer in the 1950s, struggling to sell a novel with lesbian main characters that get a happy end at a time when putting your name on a comic book would be career suicide. And now in 2023 we get to read about it in a comic book crafted by two queer women, that features a problematic queer lead and won an Eisner award this year.

It was as enjoyable as the first two volumes of the Saint of Steel series, but at the same time I had mixed feelings about it.

On one hand, I really like the author's sense of humor, I enjoy following the relationships between characters in their late thirties (i.e. my age), and mixing romance with investigations on gruesome murders works really well apparently? I technically finished Paladin's Hope 10 days ago and haven't started a new fiction book since. I just... don't feel like immersing myself in another one for the moment.

On the other hand, I'm afraid that the series could get a little repetitive at some point. Until now, each of them followed a similar pattern. There are berserker paladins whose god died a few years ago, they feel broken, not worthy of love and/or dangerous for the people around them that are not fellow paladins. Until they meet someone and mutually fall in love, after having spent a very long time thinking about how unworthy they are of the other person's affection and vice versa (and there are also corpses that must be investigated). The paladins' love interests are well-rounded, interesting characters (especially the women of the first 2 volumes), but I wish I could say the same about the paladins. Their god died and it's, like, their whole deal. Stephen knits socks, Istvhan is large and Galen mustn't be touched when he's having a nightmare and... that's pretty much it? Their respective personalities aren't literally the same, but the whole "ugh how could they love me?" sort of evens them out I think.

The very end of Paladin's Hope hints at more development of one important plot point, and having a gnole as one of its main characters brought a breath of fresh air, so fingers crossed for more variety in upcoming volumes.

At first I was low-key disappointed: Mosscap's candid questions slightly annoyed me, and I was dreading the answer. The moment where the story would answer its central question: when all your basic needs are met, what else do you need?

In other stories about the meaning of life (or adjacent themes), I could always relate to the part with the questions, and end up disappointed by the answer that the characters find, because the answer specifically works for them, and not for me. It's probably impossible to answer this kind of question in a way that will satisfy every reader, so why even try in the first place?

And... well, I like the direction that the book took, especially in its last chapter. It made me think of How to do nothing, except that Jenny Odell explains you what Becky Chambers makes you experience.

Also, I just read it at home, with closed blinds due to the heat, while preparing for the heat wave that will occur during the next two days and reading about fires, drought and our general inability to address climate change fast enough. Even though the utopian aspects of the book's world didn't always work for me, it made me emotional to read a story when things actually improved and the world turned out fine.

What do you need? Well, today specifically, I needed a story like that.

What I like about this book is its practical approach: it is clearly aimed at professional farmers, and the author is not saying "do this because it's ✨ good for the planet ✨" but "with these techniques, you will save energy while continuing to earn a living; by the way, let's meet professionals who have been doing this for years/decades now".

I learned several things:

• Using cover crops requires careful timing: if you cut them before they bloom, they may regrow, and if you cut them after they bloom, you basically reseed them. The book also recommends using them before transplanting crops with large leaves (such as squash) because cutting cover crops prevents weed regrowth for about 6 weeks only (but much longer if a layer of mulch is put on top).
• For transplanting plants, cardboard is very good (this fall, I'm going to advocate for cardboard SO MUCH in our community garden, we spent way too much time and energy weeding/mulching the beds last year, with a mulch that had almost completely degraded when spring came 😭).
• The need for soil fertility should not be underestimated. As in the Manuel Pratique de la Culture Maraîchère de Paris, farmers add compost season after season, until it is no longer needed (before reading these books I think I went a little to far into the "do nothing" direction, which quickly turned into "don't harvest much" :P)
• You can... actually get rid of weeds? As long as they're removed via various techniques (stale bedding etc.) and by being careful not to let them reseed. I thought we were condemned to remove them forever from the beds.

There are, however, some limitations to the author's very practical approach: how do farmers deal with slugs, for example, which are often a concern when you cover the ground? Most of them don't mention it, and the last ones talk about a commercial anti-slug product, but if you read this book because you're looking for more respectful farming practices, you probably don't want to use this kind of products. This is the limit of the author's practical approach: it's mostly about cultivating more efficiently.

Also, interviews with professional farmers, which make up the majority of the book, could probably have been shortened: they read like transcripts of conversations "as is". I read them all so as not to miss any tips or information but I didn't get that much out of them.