Just a bunch of scrappy kids fighting for their lives and trying to make it big. This is exactly what YA fantasy should be; high stakes and high energy. No punches pulled just because the main characters are 18 or younger. Speaking of the main characters, while the pov switches around every chapter, I had no problem remembering which character was which. They're all so fully realized and individualistic that I felt like I knew them. I can't wait to see what happens next.

Shout out to Hoopla for putting this in my recommendations, because 🥵🥵🥵🥵

I am a simple woman. I saw this cover art and was captivated. When I saw that this was a queer comic written by a woman, my soulthe deal was sealed. I couldn’t click “borrow” fast enough.

Lilith is a gory, sexy, supernatural good time. It’s a little bit campy and it’s a lot delicious. The art is absolutely stunning, and so effective. Every panel is lush. I’m interested in all of the characters and I’m so curious about the world. Lilith also has a demon/monster cat that I am obsessed with.

While I am interested in all of the characters, I did feel that they were missing some depth. Hopefully they are more fleshed out in the next volume. (More Lilith is coming this October!) I also want to see a bit more from the worldbuilding. There was a lot of action in this volume and while I did find it captivating and fun to read, I was more interested in the other elements just for my personal preference.

I cannot wait to see what Howell has in store for Lilith next!!! If you love gory horror and supernatural sapphics, you’ll love Lilith!

The wife of a 16th century Dutch merchant leads a bleak existence and dreams of inventing a flying machine. When her husband brings home an Oriental slave (sic) from his travels, her life is upended. As she grows closer to this woman and begins to build prototypes, the miserable truths her life was built on begin to completely unravel.

This one was a difficult one, folks. It would be easy to write off Yudori’s vision here and reduce its ideas to problematic tropes. The blatant racism is expressed by the point-of-view character from the get-go, the imagery that takes an unflinching look at the material gains of Dutch colonialist expansion and the art and attitudes it enabled, the misogyny, the religious trauma, are all handled more or less as-is, without further editorializing. Some modern readers tend to struggle with problematic content that is presented this way, and frankly, the apparent lack of internal life of a sex worker woman of color doesn’t do the story many favors. If one views everything only in the language of harmful tropes and views those tropes as taboo that should never once be engaged with, this will be an easy story to dismiss as simply ugly and racist. To be clear, I am not the racism decider or anything, but I do think this work means to engage with troubling subjects with a lighter touch and trust toward its audience.

I actually think the biggest hurdle for a lot of readers will simply be that the main character is a very unlikable woman that readers are meant to sympathize with, especially given that she is just as guilty of objectifying the secondary character as anyone else is. Moreso, even. However, Yudori’s academic background is in the study of colonialism and sex work. Given the setting and the story, I think it is meant as a push against what it even means to be empowered through a historical fiction narrative. Is it more realistic to show a woman who has been trafficked away from everything she knows and loves as a secret girl boss capable of feats beyond an average woman, or will does she find her strength and happiness elsewhere? Would the white woman forced to share space with her always treat her with kindness or sympathy, or would she participate in kicking her, infantilizing her, romanticizing her? And when that white woman, Amelie, finally fights back in the most blatant way, because of threats to her own freedom and pride, does the story end well for her? Will anyone ever ask a slave’s real name, or are we forced to accept her only as “Sahara,” an innacurate name granted by her enslaver. Will anyoe ever ask “Sahara” what she wants, or believe her when she does say what she wants because it isn’t what anyone else might imagine for her?

It’s a lot to swallow. As an Indo (Dutch/Indonesian) who has tried to pry into their own background many times over the years, the history on display here was not particularly surprising, but I do believe its direct portrayal will shock many readers who think this is a more fantastical tale. I found this igniting anxieties and anger in my body that I often put away, and, frankly, this story does not offer much payoff and catharsis regarding those feelings at all. However, white artists (and to an extent, Japanese mangaka – more on that in a moment) are allowed to play on the playground of historical revisionism without offering any particular message beyond the personal story they are telling. Raging Clouds is the opposite of an empowering, transformative fantasy. It is beautiful, heartbreaking, and stifling.

Yudori’s illustrative style lends beauty to the story. It is one of unspoken yearning, clearly in conversation with the legacy of the Year 24 group and 1970s shoujo, its homoerotic inclinations, and its preoccupation with European settings. I quite enjoyed the methodology of using this style and its inherent fairy tale romanticism to push back on colonial and anti-feminist narrations.

Apparently Yudori has encountered some criticism over the subtleness of the queer content in Raging Clouds and its unhappy ending, but, as a genre piece I think it follows its conceits to the letter and actually has a far more uplifting ending than I would’ve expected, even if it is ultimately quite bittersweet. Decisions about the cover art and marketing were not solely up to Yudori, and I also think that we are hardly owed happy and uplifting endings from our art. I also think that Raging Clouds has bigger problems than that.

I wish that “Sahara” has been from part of what would have then been the Dutch East Indies rather than a Korean (or possibly an Okinawan?) suffering from Japanese expansion. I think I understand the motivation for the choice, given that Yudori is Korean, but, it was, frankly, painful to see these locations and colonist words for places and feel absent from this narrative as an Indo. We see casual, pervasive and historical antiblackness and Orientalism, yet in making its biggest victim in the narrative someone who seems to be a victim of circumstance it undercuts the seriousness of these things. While I understand no artist is under the strict obligation to serve as an educator, it brought to mind to me how often I’ve had to serve as my own educator on the matter. Even other Asian Americans rarely know or understand much about my ethnic background or situation. It is not even real in this story about the Netherlands, where the city my mother was born in is name-dropped by the name the Dutch gave it.

I try my very best to take works as-is and engage with the decisions an artist and writer make as presented, and Yudori is not responsible for the West’s complete ignorance on the matter. While “Sahara’s” origins may be somewhat selfsame to the Dutch gaze that observes her, I’m sure we can all agree that where someone comes from does make a difference. The decision rubs me the wrong way. Perhaps I don’t know enough about the relationship between the Netherlands and Korea compared to elsewhere. Perhaps there is some point in making “Sahara” a character so completely outside of more complicated legacies. Or perhaps this is just a somewhat incoherent narrative decision that brings the whole story down.

I like a lot of what I think this story was trying to say, particularly from a feminist perspective, but I’m just not sure it pushed the boat out far enough. It reminds me a bit too much of how indulgently I’ll say that my white friends who grew up in conservative Christian households in ethnically homogeneous places have it worse than me in so many respects. I am, perhaps, sympathizing too much with the suffering of others, too aware of the limitations of the culture that harms everything it touches. There’s a strength in doing that, but, I often catch myself glossing my own pain by comparison, that I am open-minded and flexible and capable of difficult questions because there was never any moment in my life that I could have stopped being those things. It’s a given that I’ll endure that, for I’m simply built differently. But was I built differently or was I made to be different? This is a question I think is trying to be answered in “Sahara,” but I’m not sure the work ever truly contends with this, as she is constantly only seen through Amelie’s eyes.

In the end, I think that this is a visually beautiful work with some interesting cultural critiques that might have done better to dig more even more deeply into the history it presents.