Softies

July 6, 2020
After surviving the destruction of Earth in an industrial terrarium, 13-year-old Kay puts on a brave face as she traverses the galaxy with new friends: queer, salmon-scaled space waste collector Arizona, and cyborg cat Euclid. Maintaining a steady pace, Smeallie keeps Kay bouncing through the cosmos, visiting a cosmic library, selling Earth wares to aliens, and picking up a hitchhiker while navigating their feelings about Earth’s end. The wide array of side characters that Kay and Arizona meet across their travels, including a salamanderesque librarian and raccoonlike barterers, make the intergalactic setting feel fully realized. Using variously sized panels and weaving in jokes, including amusing alien commentary about Earth items, Smeallie evokes quick comic beats to amplify humorous images and witty banter throughout. Episodic scenes can feel lengthy in this space fantasy (originally a webcomic), and some references, such as to Jimmy Neutron, may go over young readers’ heads, but the story builds to an emotionally satisfying climax as Kay and Arizona at long last confront the trauma of losing Earth and empathize with each other’s tendency to self-isolate. Ages 10–14. (Oct.)■

July 1, 2020
Grades 5-8 Earth just exploded, and Kay floats through space in a vacuum-sealed terrarium. Luckily, she's picked up by a waste-collecting starship, but no sooner do they dodge the speeding carcass of the Eiffel Tower than they're off, apparently leaving any sign of Kay's heartache well behind. Through episodes combining the visual verve and pacing of an old-fashioned comic strip with the droll irony of a modern cartoon, Kay and her erudite extraterrestrial pals Arizona and Euclid foul up an intergalactic library, meet a stand-up comedian, and escape a hungry nocturnal beast in an all-night space restaurant. Smeallie's ear for snappy dialogue and lively characters that look like descendants of the Schoolhouse Rock! cast don't quite cover up Kay's subtly building loneliness and sorrow. Finally, with a little emotional support, she reveals a vast, existential grief that, whether familiar or foreign to your average 11-year-old, offers unexpected weight and meaning. It's a grief so consuming that the only way through it is by connecting with other people, even if those people happen to be orange space lizards.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

December 15, 2019
Planet Earth has exploded, and 13-year-old Kay seems to be the sole survivor. Floating in space, Kay finds herself salvaged by a pink, reptilian extraterrestrial named Arizona, who helms a spaceship that collects space debris. Kay seems to quickly adapt to her new life as a passenger aboard the waste-collection vessel while Arizona and crew search the galaxy to find out what happened to Earth. In between and with plenty of banter among the characters, Arizona makes stops at different planets to sell the collected junk pile of space debris to buyers of all sorts. Over the course of planet-hopping through these bizarre experiences, Arizona starts to feel responsible for Kay and begins to worry about the impact of Kay's loss of her home planet even as the acerbic Kay deflects whenever asked about the catastrophic event that has left her orphaned and stranded in space. Arizona is casually revealed to be gay and male; brown-skinned Kay's ethnicity and heritage are unexplored. Though the plot is episodic, it's tied together thematically with a critique of overconsumption, including how Earth's waste pollutes beyond terra firma. The consistent ignorance of Earth on the part of the ETs Kay encounters is simultaneously a running joke and a wry comment on anthropocentrism. A light space comedy laced with witty dialogue. (Graphic science fiction. 10-14)

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