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Brenna Thummler has created a perfect rendering of Anne and Avonlea from the classic novel. Her art is brimming with a sense of place and expressive characters. Mariah Marsden's script kept all the core events and personalities of the characters intact. This is a genuinely masterful collaboration that only adds to the original while remaining failthful to it and Anne.

Qudan packs a lot of speculation about language, meaning, and time into this novel, but from the beginning it struck me as having a particularly conservative perspective. There's a lot to like in the skepticism about AI, but the takes on prisoner welfare and UBI were decidedly off-putting. Learning later that the author admired far-right figure Mishima Yukio re-enforced my uneasiness with the book.

This low-stakes slice of life novel is centred around a convenience store and the characters orbiting it are intriguing and sometimes strange. I enjoyed being immersed in this little community, basking in the feeling of being in the place.

This reinterpretation of Anne of Green Gables gets so much right about Anne. The other characters in her life don't always match well with the source, but the elements of the original story are refracted and reused in a wonderful way. This makes Anne feel fresh and brought into the contemporary world so richly.