Let’s take a quick look to see what’s arrived at the Geek Compound.
Lucille
by Ludovic Debeurme
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Winner of the René Goscinny Prize and the Angoulême Essential Award.
After years of acclaim in Europe, graphic novelist Ludovic Debeurme makes his English-language debut with a book of quiet grace and staggering emotional power.
This rich and intimate story follows two teenagers, Lucille and Arthur, as they struggle with the complex legacies inherited from their families: legacies of illness and pride, of despair and hope. Somehow two lonely misfits form an instant connection, and with the intoxicating boldness of youth, they journey together across Europe, discovering each other, discovering themselves, and hoping against all odds to make their own destiny.
Lucille is more than a story about anorexia, alcoholism, and adolescence. It’s a story of love amidst tragedy, full of the halting awkwardness of life and the operatic grandeur of teenage emotion.
The War That Came Early: The Big Switch
by Harry Turtledove
Cover by Carlos Beltran*
*I assume this is NOT the Mets outfielder.
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In this extraordinary World War II alternate history, master storyteller Harry Turtledove begins with a big switch: what if Neville Chamberlain, instead of appeasing Hitler, had stood up to him in 1938? Enraged, Hitler reacts by lashing out at the West, promising his soldiers that they will reach Paris by the new year. They don’t. Three years later, his genocidal apparatus not fully in place, Hitler has barely survived a coup, while Jews cling to survival. But England and France wonder whether the war is still worthwhile.
Weaving together a cast of characters that ranges from a brawling American fighter in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain to a woman who has seen Hitler’s evil face-to-face, Harry Turtledove takes us into a world shaping up very differently in 1941. The Germans and their Polish allies have slammed into the gut of the Soviet Union in the west, while Japan pummels away in the east. In trench warfare in France, French and Czech fighters are outmanned but not outfought by their Nazi enemy. Then the stalemate is shattered. In England, Winston Churchill dies in an apparent accident, and the gray men who walk behind his funeral cortege wonder who their real enemy is. The USSR, fighting for its life, makes peace with Japan—and Japan’s war with America is about to begin.
A sweeping saga of human passions, foolishness, and courage, of families and lovers and soldiers by choice and by chance, The Big Switch is a provocative, gripping, and utterly convincing work of alternate history at its best. For history buffs and fans of big, blood-and-guts fiction, Harry Turtledove delivers a panoramic clash of ideals as powerful as armies themselves.
Conan the Adventurer: Season One
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Produced by Sunbow, the 1980s animation giant behind Hasbro’s Transformers and G.I. JOE: A Real American Hero, Conan The Adventurer focuses on the titular hero and his frends Jezmine, Snagg, Needle, Greywolf and Zula and their quest to rescue Conan’s family from an evil spell cast by the Serpent Man wizard Wrath-Amon. Armed with a powerful sword forged from Star Metal and faith in his god Crom, Conan will not stop until his family is safe and the evil wizard is reimprisoned in the mystical Abyss.
Stuff received 7/7/11 was originally published on The Geek Curmudgeon