Paper Airplane, Vol. 1 (edited by Nick Norlen, Paper Airplane Publishing, 2025)

    Any time I try to get the attention of a group of kids by hand-whistling, I’m surprised by how well it works. I can make a shrill enough sound to interrupt their brain waves. Once they pay attention again, they ask “How do you do that?” and I think about how I just learned it from friends or classmates when I was growing up. It’s as second-nature to me as learning how to play tag, make a fortune teller, draw the MASH grid, or look for all the letters of the alphabet (in sequence) on signs and license plates while on a road trip. I don’t have specific memories of the first time I engaged with those activities—they are simply a part of my childhood and the lore of the playground or campground.

    If for some reason I couldn’t have figured out how to hand-whistle through being socialized into it by my peers, I would have learned about it in the Klutz, Inc. book Kids Shenanigans eventually. A glance at that book’s table of contents reminds me of the time-killing activities and tricks that I had either already learned or had yet to put into practice as a youth. I still never got the hang of snapping someone’s belt loops… Regardless, Nick Norlen, the editor behind Paper Airplane has achieved a similar sense of wonder and learning by bringing together a group of authors, artists, puzzlers, and researchers who share a wide variety of highly engaging articles, activities, and assignments for the first volume of what I hope is a long-running concern. The table of contents of Paper Airplane made me think about how we learn those childhood and young adolescent tricks and games in the absence of formal schooling on them. In a Bluesky post, contributor Kory Stamper positioned Paper Airplane as being kind of like Highlights magazine, but for adults. This first volume succeeded in drawing me in for a quick read with the promise of a deeper perusal still to come.

    You can read all about the magazine online, so I will spare you from a dry run-down of its contents. (Purchase it here.) It is designed to be read on a tablet or laptop or desktop screen (i.e., not a phone) and it honestly deserves a print edition. I thought about going to the local library to print a one-off version of it for myself, but stopped when I realized its page count is not divisible by four, so it would not come out as an even number of signatures. I bet Norlen did that on purpose just to foil folks like me from making bootlegs. For real, though, the pages look great on my screen and some of the incredibly detailed images would lose something if run through a laser or inkjet printing process. The problem with a PDF is that it’s not going to show signs of wear and tear over the years as proof of my repeated readings of the text. It’s always going to be as pristine as the day I downloaded it. At least I can print out some of the puzzle pages to solve with pen or pencil if I’m so inclined.

    OK, so I will highlight some particulars just because I think the contributors deserve to hear specific praise. The question that kicks off the first feature is “What's the most memorable thing you've ever cut from a piece of your writing?” and is full of interesting, brief excerpts that would have been on the cutting-room floor or been subject to the file-drawer problem if not for Paper Airplane. Kory Stamper’s “The Shape of Color” is an excerpt from her upcoming book, True Color: The Strange and Spectacular History of Defining Color–from Azure to Zinc Pink and looks to be as engrossing as her first one, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. Another excerpt appears in the form of Phenomena: An Infographic Guide to Almost Everything by Camille Juneau and The Shelf Studio. It makes me think of technical engineering blueprints for parts of the natural world (and some from the human-made one). So that’s two books I’ve already added to my reading list for next year. The wordplay section by editor Norlen is a fun twist on the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game and Dave Shay’s "Venmo Nanofiction" recalls 1932’s Vanity Fair piece, “Ordeal by Cheque” by Wuther Crue. I haven’t mentioned the puzzles, artwork, photos, or comics, either. There are even black-and-white reproducible pages for some of the artwork if you want to color them in yourself! Just know that there is not a single dull moment in the 74 full-color pages of Paper Airplane, Vol. 1. Here’s to many more volumes in the future!

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Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Liz Pelly, One Signal Publishers / Atria, 2025)

    This book is excellent at helping to explain how music became content and how we became discontent with that transition. Liz Pelly has roots in DIY music booking / promotion (a thankless task if there ever was one) and brings that lens to the immense corporate flattening that streaming music represents. It’s Spotify that specifically catches her attention in this analysis, which makes her critique unique to that platform; however, you will likely recognize in its specifics some aspects that apply in general to Apple Music or Amazon Music. I was a bit weary of reading another book about streaming music, given that I’d read Nick Seaver’s Computing Taste not too long ago and the texts seemed similar at first blush. They’re less similar than they are complementary, so I’d recommend reading both.

    It’s deeply clarifying to understand that Spotify began not as a music concern, but as a way to get ads in front of eyeballs. Ads are annoying, and they are the reason the platform exists. It’s not because Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon were diehard music lovers. As Pelly writes, “that’s what music was to Spotify in its early days: a traffic source for its advertising product” (p. 13). Ek and Lorentzon were part of Sweden’s software and media piracy scene, so they had familiarity with file-sharing of different kinds of media. It’s almost incidental to their story that Spotify features music. I had a different idea when I first used the service in 2012 or so. I knew of iTunes and Amazon Music, which were existing companies that pivoted to include music. Pandora and Rhapsody, among other “radio” based options weren’t interesting to me because I wanted more control over what I was listening to. With Spotify, I thought I’d found it, and in so doing, found a way to enjoy music digitally that didn’t involve MediaFire / YouSendIt / MegaUpload links or cryptic blog posts. (The days of Napster, Audiogalaxy, and Kazaa being long gone.) Little did I know that the original source for much of the earliest songs on the platform was via piracy itself, as proven by the presence of music by a band of Rasmus Fleischer’s. His band’s music had only ever been distributed via PirateBay, though it ended up on Spotify (p. 15). With a beginning like that, it’s no surprise that Spotify would later be so uncompromising in its mistreatment of the artists that use its platform.

    Pelly argues early in the book that the Spotify employees in charge of creating and maintaining playlists are a large part of what made the foregrounding of ad revenue over music listening so successful. Essentially, the listening preferences of individuals, when taken en masse, reveal something about what is popular on the platform. If you’re like me, you think that these data would be useful in learning what kind of music is popular to whom and where. Pelly notes that the number of streams a song has are not the same thing as a firm assent for the song above any other. She clarifies that “streams are, in fact, not votes. Especially not when the streams are most earned by music just inoffensive enough to not get shut off” (p. 33). So it’s not the gripping hook of a song you can’t stop playing on repeat that is the measure of success for Spotify. It’s the idea that you will have the app running in the background to give some texture to your day as you go about living your life. (This “lean-back” listening [ch.3] is contrasted elsewhere in the text with “lean-in” listening, which is something I didn’t know I had been doing forever.) For a user who just taps on a colorful tile for a playlist and then lets the algorithm do its work, the gravest sin is to skip a song on a playlist. This action gives the playlist editors information about what doesn’t engage users on a certain list. They want there to be no reason to engage with the app again once you’ve opened it for the day. Pelly explains how this process turns music listening on its head by relating how “Over time, though, the quest for a frictionless user experience resulted in a deluge of frictionless music: an ease of use that, in turn, facilitated easy listening” (p. 40). Music that is just worthy enough to keep on in the background, but isn’t worth investigating or “leaning into” for additional engagement. It’s a painting on your wall that’s there just because you had a blank space and not because you liked how it looked. I do see the benefit of listening to certain artists or albums as I read or write, but the idea of doing some kind of set-it-and-forget-it maneuver with music just seems icky to me. I deserve better; the artists deserve better.

    The more I read the book, the more the inability of Spotify’s executives to actually enjoy music became clearer and clearer. When art is flattened to the metadata that describe it, that’s what happens. A song file has descriptors such as length, volume, pitch, tempo, timbre, rhythm, and melody, among other factors. These are elements that computers can (more or less) identify accurately for the purpose of adding to a playlist by throwing together similar sounding songs. There are times, though, when the songs that go together make no sense or are jarring. Pelly shares the example of ANOHNI’s track “Why Am I Alive Now?” being on a “Chill Vibes” playlist (p. 54). Turns out the unchill, depressing mood of the song escaped the algorithm’s and playlisters’ detection. Rather than stopping there, Pelly uses this instance to interview ANOHNI about the importance of putting music in context without an algorithm. For her, it’s true that “Sometimes a record only needed to be listened to five times in order for a profound transaction to have taken place” (p. 54). So, the “lean-back” listening of many Spotify listeners, which involves just keeping music on as part of the ambience, results in a clear disconnection between the artist and their craft. There’s no real transaction happening except for the the financial one.

    The importance of context isn’t limited to artists thinking their songs have been misappropriated either. Pelly interviewed a Spotify engineer, who had similar thoughts to ANOHNI’s about the high power of an album having no correlation to an equally high number of listening sessions. He tells her how “records that I would consider really life-changing…  in terms of listening time, wouldn’t even show up in my top 100… There is a lot of music that listeners find important but it’s not what you want to listen to all day” (p. 101). There are definitely records that can be exhausting to get through, not because of their low quality. They are an experience and it is necessary to give your full attention to them. You might feel drained or enlightened after hearing them; either way, you might not rush to play them again. These comments about the importance of the context of listening to a certain record or song reminded me of an email exchange I had with a friend I’d traded music zines with over the years. He wanted to write about a band from the city where I lived at the time, so I excitedly sent him multiple MP3s of their music, figuring that would be the easiest way for someone in the U.S. to share music with someone in Australia in 2009. I was a little surprised at his response, which read “I won't download that stuff as I don’t have the time to listen to them attentively at the moment. I only really want to listen to music when I can pay it attention, and not in between school and home or while I'm stuffing packages. I'm finding more and more that my brain is adjusting to music and not listening to it, just *accepting* it. This bothers me.”

    If it’s not the physical environment of listening to music that matters, then maybe the social aspect of sharing music is what makes it click. Anyone lucky enough to have received a mixtape from a friend, acquaintance, or sibling knows the power of music as an influence. That power is integral to its format. Pelly notes the distinction between mixtape intimacy and corporate surveillance (pp. 29-30) in a way that recalls Marc Masters’ argument in High Bias. The playlist that Spotify generates for you based on your own listening preferences is not going to push your tastes or challenge you the way a mixtape might. Even Spotify’s “Discover” feature is less about finding new sounds as it is getting to the core of what you already like. As Pelly puts it, there are more important aspects of music than engagement: the product was becoming blatantly less about connecting users to the world of music, and more about treating your own taste as a world of its own to be studied and sorted, packaged and sold (p. 99). This reversal of what discovery should mean recalls Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which argues that “free” online services have not the user, but the user’s behavior as their product. In other words, it is worth a lot of money to corporations to predict what you are likely to do in the future. If they can get you to keep navel-gazing in your playlist of choice, they’ve won. You are trapped in their algorithm.

    Coincidentally, a podcast I was listening to around the time I was reading the book featured drummer Nick Jett of TERROR (more importantly, he is the guy who recorded the first two KNIFE FIGHT records) The episode included a discussion of streaming and how it influenced his band’s song choices for their setlist. He mentioned how TERROR started playing a certain song because “it’s like number five on our Spotify or something like that.” The host agrees and says he thinks more bands should “play the songs people are clearly listening to” by consulting streaming info. Jett understands that, but also thinks it’s “crazy” that some bands write their setlists based on their Spotify plays. It would have never occurred to me for a band to cater to their audience that much. What a perverse incentive to consider.

    The social element of music is also present in the fact that other humans are making the tunes. Well, there’s some AI-generated music out there, but Spotify’s structure has also ushered in “ghost artists,” who exist to mimic certain sounds. Imagine session musicians hired to write songs that are pastiches or replicas of music in a specific genre. Regarding these artists, one of Pelly’s sources explained how “there was a problematic racial dimension to the unfairness of the program, when stock music tracks started commonly being used in playlists historically dominated by artists of color” (pp. 66-67). So, there’s a racially gentrifying homogenization to the recommendations of the algorithms. There’s no need to pay licensing fees for actual music made by real people who are racial minorities when you can get a white dude in Sweden or the U.S. to sound like them and pay the royalties that way. It’s a rip off, such a rip off.

    That’s the overall message here. Streaming services, especially Spotify, are a rip-off all around. Aside from all the issues I’ve discussed already, Spotify continues to pay its artists penny-fractions for their thousands of streams, even as it increased its monthly fee for its premium service in late 2023. That fact, and Ek’s support of AI for military purposes via investment in German company Helsing, was enough for me to drop Spotify at the end of that year. I’m not going to pretend Apple Music is better. I am glad to support artists that make their music available on Bandcamp and I still occasionally browse the bins at Reckless Records when I’m in the city. You should find a way to more directly support the artists and labels you enjoy, especially as genre meanings get blurred on streaming services to the point that the bright line between independent and major labels is fading. Pelly shares the words of “an independent label owner” who indicated that Spotify’s “All New Indie” playlist is missing the guitar-forward music that is typically associated with the phrase indie rock. They claim “now it’s just this watered down pop sound that has taken over” (p. 182). What better time to recommend you listen to The INMATES' “You’re Not a Part of Us”?

Watered down pop — WE DON’T NEED YOU!

Corporate shit rock — WE DON’T NEED YOU!

Trendy fashion plates — WE DON’T NEED YOU!

Bandwagon fakes — WE DON’T NEED YOU!

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Technocrat Tales: The Real-life Horror of Silicon Valley! (Johnny Damm, self-published, 2025)

    Slapping together the words of the freaks who want the moon on a stick with horrifying comics from 70-80 years ago is the mash-up you didn’t know you needed. If you’ve read Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, seen Peter Thiel nervously sweat through a televised interview, or heard anything Sam Altman or Elon Musk have ever said, you know these guys (yes, they are all white men) have a loose grip on reality. Thankfully there are people like Johnny Damm out there to make art out of the words of the weird. I first heard of Damm from his I’m a Cop comic, which took the words of actual officers or heads of police unions and put them over images from similarly old comics as though they were the narration or dialogue. With Technocrat Tales, he’s done the same thing with the poisonously aspirational delusions of the worst of the worst of the tech bros. You need this book on your shelf.

    All told, there is not much text in the 80 pages of this book. It features 18 sections, each with a different quote from a different bro paired with an apt image from an old comic, interspersed with a few ads from these same old comics (but with modern visages strategically added, and even some words changed as well; the one with Zuck that advertises a 'health supporter belt' is excellent). So you can “read” it quickly, but that’s beside the point. I’ll spare you the academic treatise, but the reading of comics, graphic novels, graphic text, comix, narrative sequential art, or whatever you want to call it, takes plenty of interpretive skill. Basically, all reading is inferencing. When you read a chapter book that splits a sentence across a page turn, you have to keep the beginning of the sentence or paragraph in mind as you flip the page to continue reading. David Low argued in a 2012 article in Children’s Literature in Education that the same level of inferential task demand occurs each time a reader moves from panel to panel in a comic. So, a six-panel page on a comic requires the mental effort of six consecutive page-turns with split sentences. There is a lot of interpretive work that goes into grasping the meaning that the writer, illustrator, colorist, and inker put into each page of a graphic text so that you can enjoy a narrative that coheres.

    The funny thing about the thinking that goes into reading anything is that the act of reading the words these guys have said is mind-numbing. It makes me want to turn off my brain. It’s actually great to have some visual elements to consider with regard to the words you’re reading because—just as in a superhero, fantasy, or sci-fi comic—you think to yourself, there’s no WAY that could happen, no WAY someone could be so foolish. But, flip to the final page of the book and you’ll see that Damm has cited all of his sources. All but three of them are from 2023 to 2025, so you’re getting a collection of current thinking on these topics from all of these men. It’s a time capsule that, in a just world, would be easily thrown back in the faces of these dorks when their predictions fail to materialize. In lieu of that imagined moment of triumphant vindication for us, the NPCs, we can at least laugh our collective asses off at the utter absurdity of their ideas. What else are we supposed to think when Andreessen claims that “deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder”?

    It’s like no one ever told these guys how to construct an argument. They are great at disputing, mind you. It’s arguing—making a cogent point supported by evidence and reasoning—that they can’t seem to master. They’ve got a handle on some rhetorical moves but can’t do much with them because they don’t actually seem to know anything. I’m reminded of a guy on my club water polo team in college who was trying to talk me out of doing homework on a team trip. He wanted me to watch TV or whatever with everyone else in the other hotel room. I was reading an article for a philosophy class and he asked how we could be sure that what Plato, Aristotle, or Socrates said was true because they lived so long ago and no one was there to record it directly in real time. I told him I guess I didn’t know because a) I wanted to end the conversation and b) I actually didn’t know. The point is, there are people out there who think that deft rhetorical moves and a certain amount of sass are a replacement for coming to an understanding of an idea through engaging with it in reading or writing. Or, in Damm’s case, by adding villainous or grotesque images from past eras to the words of modern and (supposedly) futuristic thinkers. It highlights just how trapped in the 1950s' vision of the future these guys are and how dangerous it is to leave their ideas unchecked. Good thing we have Damm here to recontextualize their words so we don’t make ourselves insane trying to parse their meaning on our own. Let’s be honest: these freaks have nothing interesting to say.

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I’m With PULP, Are You? (Mark Webber, Hat & Beard Press, 2024)

    What a strange experience it must be to join a band that you have been obsessing over as a fan for years. Stranger still to have the time that you are in the band be the most critically and commercially successful era. That unlikely progression from PULP fan to PULP member is what guitarist Mark Webber covers in this book. Similar to vocalist Jarvis Cocker’s Good Pop, Bad Pop: An Inventory, this text is not simply an autobiography. It’s a form of artifact-mediated recall involving various bit of PULP ephemera that Webber has collected or kept throughout the years. Along with Cocker’s book, it makes for a solid history of the band, with a particular focus on their most popular era. It even includes a short coda about their 2023 reunion tour. Cocker’s book notably leaves off just as the band is about to release “His N Hers” and get the attention of the general public.

    The dimensions of the book are also larger than Cocker’s text. This size difference is key because of the focus on images and objects that have been part of PULP’s history. Many of the trinkets in Cocker’s book were important to him as he formed his identity, which played a large part in the trajectory of PULP as a band. But they are not unusual items. What Webber has here are unique bits of PULP that have been collected and organized chronologically and analyzed personally. Because he started as a fan, it’s interesting to see what he deemed important enough to include in his collection. A similar book by Candida Doyle or Russell Senior would have yielded different items, or possibly nothing at all. (Notably, Russell Senior also began as an observer to PULP, reviewing an early gig of theirs in his zine.) In other words, who in a band decides when the band is worth documenting outside of its own recordings or flyers or reviews? It surely seems arrogant for every band to think from the start that whatever they will be doing must be worthy of inclusion in the history of human creativity.

    In that regard, this book makes me think of the David Bowie Is exhibit that traveled the world from 2013 to 2018. Mrs. Tall Rob and I saw it in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art. One of the earliest items in the collection was a kerchief that Bowie had used to wipe off his makeup after a set in the “Space Oddity” era (or maybe even before). This object struck me as a prescient inclusion. Someone had to have thought that Bowie was already important enough to document for posterity by obtaining and saving this kerchief. Contrast that item with the records and news broadcasts and newspaper clippings that were on the wall in that room and it really stands out. He was hardly yet a thing and still someone backstage thought “ah, I better hold on to it” once he’d removed his stage makeup. The other media that documented him would have existed anyway—it’s just that he happened to be featured in them. The intentional choice to keep a discarded garment with some smears on it reflects a high level of devotion.

    Webber’s book title comes from the BOWIE sticker “I’m with David Bowie, Aren’t You?” so the above digression isn’t really all that much of a step away from the text. He tells us right from the jump “I have always been a hoarder” and we are better off (as readers and as listeners) for that idiosyncrasy of his. If it wasn’t him collecting this stuff, then he maybe knew someone who had it. Take for example, a lascivious calling card from a London phone booth with a giant pair lips covered in deep red lipstick. This tiny promo image was a cropped version of a larger image that would eventually make its way to the cover of the “Lipgloss” single. A friend of the band had a copy of that calling card to share with Webber for the book, sure, but the bigger story is not just the documentation happening here. What is interesting to me is how bands take found images, whether innocuous or sexualized, and make them into their own art. No ideas spring forth fully formed from the mind of an artist. Every creative endeavor is a reaction or response to an earlier one, and images such as the lips on this calling card are evidence of that.

    Truly, that is one of the important lessons you can take away from this book. The number of wild ideas Cocker & Co. had about how to do the band are well covered in this book’s pages. Some gigs were just gigs, but others were meant to be events. Not “record release” shows or NME showcases or package tours, but strange takes on what live music could be. Photos of PULP on stage with streamers or deflated balloons or various lighting rigs prove this out. They also gave away small pieces of an old pair of Jarvis’ plaid trousers to 500 members of their fan club. (Speaking of which, anyone have a lead on copies of Pulp People zine?) And, as important as a band’s visual identity can be, it’s cool to see them constantly experiment with different logos and fonts and other design choices on their flyers and album artwork. They had their inspirations but they were not wholly devoted to them. They took what was there and made something new or different out of it. That DIY spirit pervades these pages, even as the band becomes more well known. They’d be the last to tell you that “making it” was the goal of the band to begin with, or a goal that you should have for your creative outlets. All the same, Webber has shown us that you can make your mark by looking for ideas or inspiration in unusual places and by not limiting your vision to commercial success. Anything goes!

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Roll for Love (M.K. England, Running Press Kids, 2025)

    In high school, a friend of mine pointed out that most people don’t like a certain season over another. He argued that what people mostly like is the change of seasons. We like those transitional moments where you think of what clothes to wear, what activities to do, what foods to eat, what friends to see, and all of that. As a person who had and has a favorite season (it’s winter), I felt attacked and was immediately on the defensive. No, I just like winter more, thank you very much! You don’t understand! But I digress. There’s a great deal of truth in my friend’s observation. As much as themed months and Hallmark holidays can seem formulaic or cringe or trite, they are useful ways for orienting and shaping our behavior.

    I bring up this comment from my buddy because I am writing this on the final day of Pride Month. Being that I am a married cishet white suburban dad, I feel unqualified to comment on the corporatization or commercialization, if not mere popularization, of Pride over the decades. Still, I attend Pride parades or other functions to show embodied and financial support during the month, as well as at other times of year. In that sense, I was ready for the list of books the teen librarian at my local library compiled in celebration of Pride Month this year. One of those books was Roll for Love by M.K. England. I would have not checked out this book if not for this curated list. For that fact alone, I am grateful that my local library is willing to provide this service for teens and also adults in the community who can engage with the literature.

    This support is all the more necessary given the decision SCOTUS handed down in the Skrmetti case as well as the shut-off of the “Press 3 option” for LGTBQ+ support on the national Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Local, diffuse, and sporadic forms of support are meager compared to the institutional security offered from blanket legal protections, but they are still undeniably necessary. Signals to queer youth that that they are not alone matter. Given all these legal changes, I don’t take for granted that my family and I can easily access these books.

    I wouldn’t be writing about all of these issues if I didn’t also enjoy the book! You might be able to tell from the title and cover that it will involve tabletop role-playing games, specifically in the form of Dungeons and Dragons. I haven’t ever played a session of D&D but I am familiar enough with adjacent concepts through my enjoyment of console-based role-playing games. That was enough of a hook to get me pulled into the story, which soon had its own momentum.

    As many young adult or teen books do in a post-Wonder world, there are chapters told from the perspectives of different characters. Thankfully, it’s just the two teenage girls that are central to the story who handle most of the narration. Both Harper and Ollie are from a small town in Virginia. Harper lived in Portland for the past six or so years and it is now the senior year for Harper and Ollie and their friend group. So, you’ll get the usual sturm und drang of adolescent decision making and identity formation that students this age face when they are on the threshold of adult living. That’s expected and handled well. In particular, Harper’s struggle to get her mother to accept a life after high school that does not involve tertiary education deeply resonated with me. (Even though I ended up pursuing that path, I have a distinct memory of an emotional dispute with my parents during February of my senior year of high school where I said I would rather be a mail carrier or a firefighter than keep going to school.) Harper's situation is more complicated than my privileged whining, but I admire that England was able to get me to access that long-buried memory. They know the thought processes of children this age well!

    In the early chapters, Harper and Ollie hold each other at a distance, both unsure of whether the other is interested in something more than a friendship with another girl. Their awkward chemistry as they explore that boundary is endearing and believable in the same way that England’s treatment of post-high school planning is. I’ll spare you any more personal connections to the text, but suffice it to say that the will-they-or-won’t-they aspects of the book are enjoyable to read and to experience through the windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors that metaphorically help us to recognize ourselves in literature.

    The unique aspect of this text is that the characters are part of a five-person D&D group that meets in Harper's barn for regular game nights. The way England handles this part of the narrative is to describe the events of the game as a narrative unto itself. So, instead of getting a play-by-play of what happens during each turn of the game, which would be excruciatingly tedious to read, you get a narrative within the narrative about the plot of the game they are playing. Better still, it advances even without our reading it. That is, the D&D campaign is divided into chapters, which you will notice are numbered sequentially but not consecutively. I can’t be the only one who flipped back and forth through the pages to confirm that I didn’t miss anything. It’s a clever way of letting that fantasy narrative breathe while the kids in the book go through their own changes.

    Their dungeon master cautions at a few points that there might be some “emotional bleeding” between the game and real life because of how Harper and Ollie are using their characters as proxies for an interpersonal conflict they are having in real life. It shouldn’t be a spoiler for me to say that there is a massive misunderstanding and fraught fallout between Harper and Ollie that comes at precisely the wrong time. Again, how England has that conflict play out through real-life and role-play actions is what makes this book unique and allows for an exploration of multiple angles of analysis of the issue. When the resolution comes, you’ll feel that the characters (and their characters) and England have earned it.

    Despite this book being classed into the teen section of the library, there’s really not much here in the way of sexual or even sexualized content. It would likely rate PG if not PG-13 if it were a movie. Well, maybe it would have to be R because of all the fucks and shits that spice up the narrative. Still, that’s got nothing to do with the sexual preferences or identities of the characters in the book; many teen books have profanity. I can’t wait to see this book make a banned reading list for all the wrong reasons. That concerned conservatives would want to prevent kids in small towns (like those depicted in the book) from learning about themselves or their world is just disgusting. This book has power, to be sure, but it also excels in showing the ups and downs of friendships and relationships involving lesbian, bi, trans, gay, and het teens as just another piece of their lives. Sexual identity and preferences are central to the story, but they are not all-encompassing. They are both hypervisible and invisible, which is part of what makes the book powerful, if subversively so.

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