All the (More) Books! October 10, 2025

You're listening to All The More Books, a weekly show about... more books. Some are new, some are old, but as always, I can promise you that all of them are books. Certainly both of the ones today are. I am your host for the week, Trisha Brown, and this episode is airing on October 10th, 1010, 2025.

I'm not going to keep you in suspense this month. I'm just going to tell you right up front, we're going with graphic memoirs this week. Specifically, we're going to be talking about a couple of them that put a deeply personal lens on major events. tragic major events so be warned about that i did uh whimsy last month and this is not that um but there is hope and definitely beauty in both of these stories so i promise this is not a complete downer of an episode

And there is some incredible storytelling told both through words and illustration, as of course tends to be the case with graphic anything, including memoir. But yeah, we're going to talk about a couple of very powerful books in just a minute.

Today's episode is brought to you by Sourcebooks Fire, publisher of The Crimson Throne by Sarah Roche and Beth Revis. Powerless meets Holly Black in a new historical YA romanticity set against the glittering intrigue of the Scottish and Elizabethan courts, but with a supernatural twist. Experience the dazzling thrill of magic, fairies, royal intrigue.

and enemies-to-lovers romance, perfect for fans of Outlander and Holly Black. This new series starter comes from New York Times bestselling duo Sarah Roche and Beth Rivas, authors of the beloved Night of the Witch and Fate of Magic. The Crimson Throne follows in the same vein, full of lush landscapes, crackling chemistry, and powerful action. It follows a fae guardian of the realm who falls in love with a charming Elizabethan spy.

who could also be the key to her world's undoing. Make sure to check out The Crimson Throne by Sarah Roche and Beth Rivas. And thanks again to Sourcebooks Fire for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Underlined, publisher of The Glass Girl by Kathleen Glasgow. Let's talk about life's jagged edges.

From the critically acclaimed author of Girl in Pieces comes a raw, heart-wrenching novel about a teenager facing down her struggles with grief, anxiety, and alcohol, and the journey she must take to heal. Kathleen Glasgow's The Glass Girl is a candid exploration of the forces pushing young women.

toward addiction and self-harm and what it really takes to help them get better. This novel includes a deep exploration of alcoholism, anxiety, and grief, which is applicable to adults as well as teens. It's also Kathleen's first novel, which focuses on rehab. a topic which Kathleen's readers continue to ask her about. This book is for teens and adults who are compelled to read deeply emotional contemporary novels like You've Reached Sam, All the Bright Places, and 13 Reasons Why.

Make sure to pick up The Glass Girl by Kathleen Glasgow. And thanks again to Underline for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Harlequin, a leading publisher of romantic fiction, delivering feel-good high stakes and heart-pounding stories across every kind of love.

No matter what kind of romance you love to read, Harlequin has it for you. And in one of their latest books, Accidentally Wedded to a Werewolf by Isabel Taylor, we've got some snowed in goodness. We've got some small towns and... some unusual residents. So. When a snowstorm hits during her travels, Luna's stack finds herself stranded in Claw Haven, Alaska, a cozy small town with more than a few unusual residents. Well, things go from bad to complicated. When Luna accidentally drinks a potion,

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Let's just jump right in and start with The Best We Could Do by T. Bui. I think the goal of many, probably, or at least maybe most, memoirs is to tell a story that's both specific to a person and their life, but also more broadly. relatable or even just understandable to a bigger audience. That's definitely what Bowie is doing here. Part of what makes The Best We Could Do successful is that Bowie is telling a variety of stories and asking a bunch of different questions about relatable themes.

So her graphic memoir, drawn essentially entirely in black, white, and shades of orange, is about Bui's experience as a refugee from Vietnam who moved to the United States as a child with her parents and siblings following the fall.

of Saigon in 1975. She also tells her parents' stories in part to add context, but also to explore how their past experience shaped um who they are which in turn shaped their relationship with her her relationship with them it's a refugee story it's a family story but, and it's also a story about generational trauma, about what parents owe their children, vice versa.

It's about home and security and how our relationships shape us and what they tell us about who we are. Like I said, tackling just a lot of really broad but also very personal questions. The book that kept coming to mind as I was reading The Best We Could Do was Persepolis by Marjan Satrapi, also a graphic memoir that I talked about on this podcast at some point.

Maybe a year ago, maybe two years ago, maybe more, maybe less. I don't know. I will confess this is not a particularly insightful comparison. Persepolis is also the story of a family trying to survive political upheaval and war, trying to decide whether to stay or go. It's also drawn with very limited color, literally, if I'm remembering right. Persepolis is all black and white. But I also think that in both cases, the authors...

are able to very clearly and wrenchingly show the ways that major global and historical phenomena are made up of the lives and stories of actual people. We may learn in school about the fall of Saigon or the Islamic Revolution, but we can't. I don't think fully understand the ways that these events shape the world without seeing and considering what they meant to people in this case, like Bowie and her parents and grandparents.

So the book was published in 2017, but I believe we started working on it about 2005. She interviewed her parents with mixed success. She talks about the experience of trying to draw out their stories.

and how that went um and she really focuses the story on their personal experience which just creates a very human raw desperate feel to the book it's heavy but it's meaningful and it's really a beautiful read The other book that I wanted to talk about also tells a story, as promised earlier, of a massive scale through a human lens.

But the speed with which this one came together, I think, is something that makes it unique and also an interesting companion to The Best We Could Do, which came together over more than a decade. The other book is A Fire Story by Brian Fies. It's a graphic memoir. his experience and the experiences of a few other people with the Northern California wildfires that burned in October of 2017.

In fact, as I am recording this, this week is the eight-year anniversary of the beginning of the worst of those fires. They burned most of the month, but many of them broke out overnight from October 8th into the morning of October 9th, which is also when... the home that Fies shared with his wife burned. The graphic memoir starts out with the experience of them realizing that the fires were coming during the night, then trying to figure out how to evacuate and make heart-wrenching.

split second decisions about what to save. These are the kinds of decisions that you have to make in a second, but have to live with for the rest of your life, which is certainly part of Fi's story. Goes on to further explore the aftermath and offer vignettes of the experience. experiences of a few other folks.

I mentioned the timing of this book and the story because it's based off of a 20-page webcomic that Fees, who is an author and illustrator and certainly was before this fire and this book came together. But he created this 20-page web comic less than a week and published it. Like I said, less than a week after the fire destroyed his home. So it...

The original webcomic is published as a part of the book that makes up the full memoir. I know that's a weird way to say it, but they publish the webcomic independently after the full memoir. you see where there are similar or even the same frames throughout the early pages in particular. Given that, you can see how much of the full book is based on the initial pieces of that story. And although the full book was written and illustrated over the course of a year, you can still feel that shock.

and grief in the way that he writes and draws the story. In my day job, I worked very tangentially with major disasters in the US. And at least in my work, we talk about... the response phase, like that immediate aftermath, but also the recovery phase that takes longer and goes on for weeks and months and years. And it felt to me like reading this book, those original pages from the webcomic were that immediately.

immediate response. And the parts of the stories that he added in over the year or so building that out were illustrating the recovery. both incredibly powerful aspects of the story but in different ways. You get that immediate reaction like I mentioned. That extra year also offers a little bit more space for fees to reflect on the experience and the loss.

Plus the rebuilding that is also a huge part of the story. I think I just really appreciated in cases of both of these books that both memoirs are able to convey the rawness of feeling, even though they draw it out. very differently. Bowie does it by digging into and analyzing her history and relationships over the course of many years. And these does it by immediately putting pen to paper as a way of

processing that urgent and immediate aftermath of a tragedy. Very different methods, but as I said, very powerful in both cases. Heavy, as I confessed early on, but very beautiful. All right.

We will stop there for today. Thanks as always to our sponsor. Huge thanks as well to our wonderful audio editor, Caitlin Brame. And thank you, of course, for listening. Fun fact, All The More Books is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. For more recs or general bookishness, as always, you can check out bookriot.com. Don't forget to check out our full stable of podcasts at bookriot.com slash listen, or just search Book Riot on your website.

your podcast player of choice you can find the books i mentioned today in the show notes uh by looking right now at your podcatcher or by visiting bookriot.com slash all the books remember if you're a fan of all the books and or all the backlist oh all the more books Sorry. You want to show a little love, please leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We genuinely appreciate it. Your views help other book lovers find us.

If you want to find me mostly on Instagram or Blue Sky, you can find me at Tricia Healy Brow. And until we talk again, please take good care. Happy reading. Hi, listeners. It's Jack Bishop. I'm the ingredients guy on America's Test Kitchen's public television show and the host of our award-winning podcast, Proof.

Proof combines history, science, and culture to tell unexpected stories about food. Every episode is filled with aha moments that you'll want to share at your next dinner party. New episodes drop every Thursday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and you might never look at food the same way again.